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Replagegos Omnifurian Directory 08
Page 03
This is a wonderful age in many respects. In none, however, more wonderful than in the wide-spread diffusion of knowledge. The ordinary people now understand more of nature's secrets than the wise men of old. They are to-day interested in researches that a former generation would have relegated to the scholar and the man of leisure. No department of knowledge is retained for the researches of a favored few. The farmer, the mechanic, and the man of business are alike interested in a knowledge of prehistoric times. The rude implements of the past appeal to the curiosity of all. We arise from a study of the past with clearer ideas of man's destiny. Impressed with the great advancement in man's condition from the rude savagery of the drift, to the enlightened civilization of to-day, what may we not hope the advancement will be during the countless ages we believe a beneficent Providence has in store for his creature, man?
Nor is it at all certain that there ought to have been. The difficulties of really, truly, and honestly laying the national sovereignty in the hands of the whole population of such a realm as England, and of so organizing the population that its decisions shall actually control the legislation of the country and the public administration of its affairs, are all but insuperable. The English people found the tyranny and oppression of royalty intolerable. They arose and set royalty aside. It devolved, then, on the next strongest power in the state to assume the authority thus divested; this was the Parliament, who governed, just as the king had done, by the exercise of their own superior power, keeping the mass of the community just where they were before. It is true that many individuals of very low rank rose to positions of great power; but they represented only a party, and the power they wielded was monarchical power usurped, not Republican power fairly conferred upon them. Thus, though in the time of the Commonwealth there were plenty of Republicans, there was never a republic. It has always been so in all European revolutions. In America, Legislatures and executive officers of state are only _agents_, through whom the great population itself quietly executes its will, the two millions of votes in the great elections being the real power by which every thing is controlled. But Cromwell, Napoleon, Lamartine, Cavaignac, and all the others, whatever formalities of voting may have attended their induction into office, have always really held their power by force of bayonets, not of ballots. There is great danger that it will continue so in Europe for a long time to come.
Then too Walt Whitman claims to be the poet, not of the past or even only of the present, but the singer of the future. He says in The Backward Glance, which I have already quoted, and which must be carefully read by anyone who wishes to understand his work--at least in so far as he understood it himself,--"Isolated advantages in any rank or grace or fortune--the direct or indirect threads of all the poetry of the past--are in my opinion distasteful to the republican genius. . . . Established poems, I know, have the very great advantage of chanting the already performed, so full of glories, reminiscences dear to the minds of men." And he says too that, "The educated world seems to have been growing more and more ennuied for ages, leaving to our time the inheritance of it all." And he further says: "The ranges of heroism and loftiness with which Greek and feudal poets endow'd their godlike or lordly born characters, I was to endow the democratic averages of America. I was to show that we, here and to-day, are eligible to the grandest and the best--more eligible now than any times of old were."
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