352. The Great Editor

The Great Editor

Zec_11:2 : ’93Howl, fir-tree, for the cedar is fallen.’94

When the smaller growths of the forest topple, there is but little excitement in the wood. The stork does not so much as flutter a wing, nor does the hart lifts its mouth dripping from the water-brooks. But when a cedar that has been standing for centuries, the glory of the forest, touched with decay, or under the swoop of the hurricane begins to weigh its anchorage of root, and falls, the crash startles the eagle from its aerie, and sends the stag in wild plunge from the rock, and shakes the very foundation of the mountains.

A few hours ago a black and swarthy axman went into the forest of men. He had hewn down many a tall and out-branching growth; he has been swinging his ax for six thousand years, and he knows how to cut. He aimed the sharp and fatal edge at one whom we all knew’97stroke after stroke, stroke after stroke, until the cedar which had stood the blasts of trouble and trial, and abuse and toil, drops into the dust, two hemispheres resounding with the fall. ’93Howl, fir-tree, for the cedar is fallen!’94

Horace Greeley is dead! and the caricaturist drops his pencil, the author his pen, the merchant his yardstick, the laborer his pickax, the child its toy, and the world its eulogium. Taking it all in all, I think it is one of the saddest deaths of any public man in our whole history. Let neither pen nor tongue, by useless review or unbrotherly criticism, add one drop to the nation’92s cup of grief; it is brimful already. Be it ours the Christian duty of learning the lessons of this man, living and dead.

I think the life of this man ought to kindle hope and enthusiasm in all the struggling. There are a great many young men who tell me that they have no chance. They say, ’93Yonder is a young man who started with a large fortune, and here is a young man who married a fine estate, and here is another who has been through our best universities, and has finished his education in Edinburgh or Germany, but I have no education, I have no money, I have no chance.’94 You have as good a chance as Horace Greeley the boy. See him in Vermont, in homespun, dyed with butternut-bark, helping his father get a living for the family out of very poor soil. I tell you that one who has, with bare feet and in tow shirt, helped a father to get out of poor soil a living for mother and sisters, has a right to publish fifty books concerning ’93What he knows about farming.’94 See the lad stepping up from the Albany boat on the New York Battery, and then coming and sitting down on the steps of a printing-house, waiting for the boss to come in the morning. Then look at him sitting in one of the foremost editorial chairs of the world, and then tell me again you have no chance. If a young man starts from a good, honest, industrious Christian mother, he graduates from a university better for his moral being than if he came unblest from that of Berlin or Edinburgh, with a diploma in each hand. Every sound man starts life with a capital of at least one hundred thousand dollars’97I say every man. You tell me to prove it. I will prove it. Your right arm’97will you take five thousand dollars and have it cut off? ’93No,’94 you say. Then certainly it is worth five thousand dollars, and your left arm is worth as much and your right foot as much and your left foot as much. Twenty thousand dollars of capital to start with. Your mind; for how much would you go up and spend your life in Bloomingdale Asylum? Twenty thousand dollars for your intellect? You would refuse it. It is worth that, anyhow’97forty thousand dollars of equipment. Then you have an immortal soul; for how much would you sell it? For sixty thousand dollars? No! you say, with indignation. Then certainly it is worth that much. And there are your one hundred thousand dollars’97the magnificent outfit with which the Lord God Almighty started every one of you. And yet there are young men who are waiting for others to come and start them’97to make them; waiting for institutions to make them; waiting for circumstances to make them. Fool! go and make yourself. Columbus was a weaver; Halley a soap-boiler; Arkwright a barber; ‘c6sop a slave; the learned Bloomfield was a shoemaker; Hogarth was an engraver of pewter-plate; Sixtus V was a swine-herdsman; Homer was a beggar; and Horace Greeley started life in New York with ten dollars and seventy-five cents in his pocket, as well off as if he had the eleven full round dollars. But there are a great many young men who are waiting for the other twenty-five cents before they begin. ’93Oh!’94 you say, ’93it was his eccentricities that got him success.’94 A great many men have supposed that, and they have aped him, and they got so far as the bad penmanship and the slouched hat, but they never got to be Horace Greeleys. So it was in the days of Lord Byron. Excessively admired he was, and there were many people in England who resolved that they would be Lord Byrons, and they got to be, so far as a very large shirt-collar went, but no nearer. It was not eccentricity that made Horace Greeley; it was hard work. Pro_22:29 : ’93Seest thou a man diligent in his business? he shall stand before kings.’94

Again, my friends, there comes from this providence a warning for all brain-workers. Mr. Greeley, at my own table, ten days before his nomination at Cincinnati, told me that he had not had a sound sleep in fifteen years! I said to him, ’93Why do you sit in your room writing, with your hand up at that elevation, on a board raised to that point?’94 ’93Well,’94 he said, ’93I have so much work to do that I must not have my chest cramped at all. I must keep all my faculties of body and mind in full play, or I cannot get on.’94 During the late war, in connection with his editorial duty, almost every evening you might have seen him on the rail-car going out to meet a lecturing engagement. He was writing articles for other journals besides his own. He was preparing a history of the war, which history might have taken the exclusive time of any other man for two or three years. And now people say it is political disappointment that killed him. I do not believe it, unless it is on the principle that it is the last straw that breaks the camel’92s back. A man with his magnificent cerebral development would not have been overthrown in that way; it was because for twenty years he had been giving his frame the death-blow with his own pen’97extreme work, work which he did conscientiously, but it was overwork. Work is good, as I said in the former part of my discourse; but too much work is death.

Now, brethren of literary toil, you had better hold up. If you are going at the rate of sixty miles an hour, you had better stop and go no more than thirty. The temptations to overwork for literary men are multiplying all the time in newspapers and magazines and lecturing platforms. The temptation to night-work is especially great’97that kind of work which is most exhausting and ruinous. When the sun goes down, God puts his candle out and says to the world, ’93My child, you had better go to sleep; I have put the candle out.’94 The brass-headed nails of coffins are made out of gaslight! The money that a man makes by midnight toil he pays toward the expenses of his own funeral. When the devil cannot stop a good man’92s work by making him lazy, then he comes into the editor’92s room or into the minister’92s study or into the artist’92s studio, and he says, ’93Go it! you ought to be doing five times the work you are doing. You ought to write two books this year. You ought to send out twenty or thirty additional articles. You ought to deliver fifty lectures at two hundred dollars a night.’94 Then, when his health fails, there is satanic congratulation. The devil first tries to stop a useful man by making him lazy. Failing in that, he then puts on the lash and digs in the spurs, and drives him to death. I say, therefore, to the men who are toiling with their brain, you had better ’93slow up,’94 as they say on the railroad lines.

I hear somebody say, ’93You had better take your own advice.’94 I will. I am being converted under my own sermon. God gives to every man a certain amount of work, and he does not want him to do any more than that. ’93Do thyself no harm,’94 is advice no more appropriate to the jailer when the prison is tumbling around his ears, than it is appropriate to those the wards of whose health and the fastnesses of whose strength begin to tremble with the earthquake. Paul was very careful of his body; long before the days of expressage he sends hundreds of miles for his greatcoat to Troas. O ye men of literary toil! you have been careful about keeping the candle snuffed and burning brightly; is it not almost time you began to look after the candlestick? The sharp sword will not make any execution unless you have a handle to it. Through all the editorial rooms, and through all the studies of this country, let the warning reverberate; let it come up to-night from the graves of Kirke White, of Henry J. Raymond and of Horace Greeley.

Again, I have found since this calamity came to the nation, the great law of brotherhood illustrated. Have you not been surprised to see how every heart thrilled in sympathy with this trial? Take this in consideration of the fact that we are now at the close of the meanest and most dastardly chapter of personality and vituperation and scorn and political calumny that has ever been written. It is most marvelous. If there is any word expressive of contempt and of hatred and of disgust and of defamation that has not been used within the past six months, it is because the dictionaries have made the word obsolete. Why, the cylinders of the printing-presses have hardly cooled off from the fiery assault. But the very moment this death is announced, how everything is hushed! And next Wednesday, when the nation follows Horace Greeley to his grave, in the vast procession you will not be able to tell who were Republicans and who were Liberal Republicans. All the States will vote for him now, and by the electoral college of the whole world he will be proclaimed unanimously, president of the great reformatory movements of the last twenty years. How quickly the nation grounded arms! how quickly the sword clanked back into the scabbard! The drums that were beating the victory of his political opponent deepen now into the grand march for the dead! Oh, is it not beautiful! We are all brothers, after all. The sorrow reveals it. It is just as when two brothers have been fighting about father’92s property, and will not speak to each other. Mother dies, and they go home to the obsequies and John stands on one side of the mother’92s coffin and George on the other side and, for the first time speaking in five years, say, ’93Wasn’92t she a good mother?’94 And then hands clasp, and they say, ’93We can’92t live this way any longer, can we?’94 And so the two great parties, after long and bitter strife, now clasp hands over the sepulcher of the dead, and promise new exertion for the welfare of this country. If there be in all this audience a base heart in which the serpent of bad feeling against the renowned man still lingers, next Wednesday let him take that serpent and fling it under the hoofs of the black-tasseled horses that shall draw out to their last resting place the remains of this great man. But I am lion-hunting to-night, and I have no ammunition to waste on vultures that plunge their beaks into the bosoms of the dead.

I learn from this solemn providence that newspaper men, like all other men, will have to come to an account before God. Nothing could keep this man when the time came for him to go. God called; he went. The doctors could not hold him back; the prayers of a nation could not hold him back; even his own loving daughter, her hand in his, could not hold him back. Surely she had enough trouble. Mother gone, and father gone’97all within a few weeks. God comfort that double anguish, and be to her more than father or mother. I say when God called him to meet his account, he had to go. It is a vast responsibility that rests upon people that write for the press or sit in editorial chairs. The audience is so large, the influence is so great, the results are so eternal, that I believe, in the Day of Judgment, amid all the millions of men who will come up to render their account, the largest account will be rendered by newspaper men; and I will tell you why. Here is a paper that has, for instance, fifty thousand circulation. We will suppose that each of those papers is read by three men. There is an audience of one hundred and fifty thousand people. Now, suppose that in one of the issues of that paper there be a grand truth forcibly put, how magnificent the opportunity! Suppose there be a wrong thing projected in that paper, who can estimate the undoing wrought by that one issue! Oh, if there is any man who needs to be a Christian, it is an editor! He needs more grace, more help, more wisdom than any other man. Now, in the columns, it is by custom that the editor writes ’93we’94 and ’93us’94; in the last Great Day it will be ’93I’94 and ’93me.’94 I congratulate you, newspaper men, on the splendor of your opportunity; but I charge you before God, who will judge the quick and the dead, that you be careful to use your influence in the right direction. How grand will be the result in the last day for the man who has consecrated the printing-press to high and holy objects! God will say to such a one, ’93You broke off a million chains, you opened a million blind eyes, you gave resurrection to a million of the dead.’94 But what shall become of those who have prostituted their press to blackmailing and the advocacy of that which is wrong, multiplying the numbers of their readers by pandering to the tastes of bad men and worse women, poisoning the air with a plague that killed a nation? Why, God will say to such men in the last day, ’93You were destroying angels, smiting the first-born of man and beast; you made the world horribly worse, when you might have made it gloriously better. Go down and suffer with those whom you destroyed. You knew your duty, and you did it not.’94

I remark, further, there ought to be, in consequence of this providence, a great arousal on the part of men engaged in temperance reform. Horace Greeley was the champion of temperance in this country. His pen wrote more and effected more than that of any other man. You remember how he spoke to young men on this subject. He was a hater of all intoxicating drinks, from the rye whiskey that pitches the sot into the ditch, up to the wine glass that makes a fool of the fine lady in the parlor. He had seen so much devastation of drunkenness amidst the brethren of his own occupation; he had heard the snapping of the heart-strings of widowhood and orphanage, robbed by the fiend that squats in the wine-cask and sweats in the brewery, the smoke of its torment ascending up forever and forever. I think that all the gin bottles in the grog-shop rattled with gladness when it was told that Horace Greeley was dead, and that drunkenness, which ’93biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder,’94 hissed for joy. But boast not, O thou demon of the pit! If Horace Greeley is dead, the principles he advocated live. Elisha may be buried, but we will keep his grave open, and let down this inert cause until, touching his bones, it shall spring up with tenfold power, and go forth for the conquest of the world. Because Christ turned water into wine, men turn the pure juice of the grape into swill. Now that the standard-bearer of temperance has fallen, who will grasp the colors and carry them on to victory? I ask these fathers and mothers, before their sons wither under his hot simoom of hell, to come and join the standard. I ask men in all circumstances to deny their palates and save their souls. When the nation gathers around Horace Greeley’92s grave, I would like to have the little children whose fathers he redeemed from the cup, come and throw flowers all over that grave, and the woman whom he lifted up from the squalor of being a drunkard’92s wife come and pour her tears on the resting- place of him who has spoken his last word and written his last line in behalf of the reformation of the inebriate. ’93Howl, howl, fir-tree, for the cedar is fallen.’94

I learn, again, from this providence that the last hours of a man’92s life are a poor time to prepare for eternity. I do not know about Mr. Greeley’92s experience; I do not know whether in life he thought much about the things of eternity. I suppose he did; I hope he did. I read that in his last moments he said, ’93I know that my Redeemer liveth’94; and a man who can with all his heart say that is fit for anything in time or anything in eternity. But it is my belief, it is my hope that, in the days of his life, he thought much upon these great subjects, and did not leave until the last hour consecration to God. The last moments of his life were passed under mental aberration, and it is always true that the last hours of a man’92s life are a poor time in which to prepare for eternity. It is either delirium or some trouble about property, or it is the magnitude of world-changing, or it is bidding good-by to friends’97making it a very poor hour to prepare for heaven. The fact is, that if a man wants to get ready for eternity, he must do it while he is well. I do not suppose there were ten men in the United States with a stronger natural constitution than Horace Greeley; but Death is an old besieger, and he prides himself on the strength of the castle he takes. Be ye also ready. Do not wait until you see the flambeau of the bridegroom coming through the darkness before you begin to trim your lamps. You may wait for your last moment; but when your last moment comes, it will not wait for you. There are a great many doors through which you may get out of this world, but there is only one door in heaven. ’93I am the door,’94 said one who threw out his hands in the gesticulation, showing the sacrificial blood clotted in the palm and dripping from the fingers. I can only with my voice reach those who hear it now; but ye men of the press who take the words I utter, tell all the cities, tell all the world that Jesus died to save men; that the death-bed is a poor place to get ready for eternity; that it is appointed unto all men once to die, but after that’97the Judgment! the Judgment!

Hush, all ye people! Let the nation uncover its head and bow lowly, and carry out the illustrious dead. Along the same streets where he trudged a poor boy, and afterward a weary man, let him be carried. Hang out signals, white and black’97black for the woe, white for the resurrection. Bring him across the river to Brooklyn, where he always loved to come; then out toward Greenwood take him. Toll long and loud the bell at the gate. Put him down under the snow to rest’97the only good rest he has had for thirty years; his right hand closed, for there are no more heroic words for it to write; his lips shut, for there are no more encouraging words for them to speak; his brow cool, for his head has stopped aching now; his heart quiet, for it never will break again. I put upon his grave not a single wreath, not a single daisy or a blossom; but I put upon his grave a scroll, plain and white, a scroll half open, that you may read it from both sides: ’93I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.’94 ’93Howl, howl, fir-tree, for the cedar is fallen.’94

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage