466. Despotism of Politics

Despotism of Politics

Act_22:28 : ’93I was free born.’94

So, seventeen hundred years before Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of American Independence, Paul wrote his declaration of independence. Some official brag has been telling how that, by eminent services or through large compensation, he had purchased his liberty, when Paul, bethinking himself of the fact that Tarsus, the place of his nativity, had been manumitted by Antonius, responds to the braggadocio in these words, practically: ’93My freedom dates farther back than yours; I am not a liberated slave; my cradle had no shackle on the rockers; my mother was not a serf; I was free-born.’94

That is descriptive of all the population born in this country during the last seventeen years, and is true of all the white population ever born in this country. And yet the attempt constantly is being made to manacle the people. Chains are being forged for our slavery. I speak to you on the despotism of American politics, and how we are to break that despotism. We are on the eve of the great Presidential nominations. The troops are gathering for Chicago and Cincinnati. The air is hot with political imprecation. We are all being whipped into line as far as is possible. One of three or four pairs of spectacles we are to wear, or suffer for it. The political guillotine is rolled out, and the recalcitrants are shown the knife for their neck and the basket into which their head will probably roll. The managers of the political ’93machine’94 are tightening the screws and making more firm the cranks. Delegates are having a stout rope of ’93instructions’94 put around their neck, and have intimated to them that if they vote contrary to the behests of their party the rope will tighten until their facilities for respiration may be seriously interfered with. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are commanded to bow down to the images set up, or be roasted in the furnaces seven times heated. Every town and village and city and neighborhood has what is called, in old-fashioned English parlance, its ’93boss,’94 and every State its larger ’93boss,’94 and then all these ’93bosses’94 meet together and elect a great national ’93boss.’94 Against this despotism of American politics I utter a protest, and demand that at convention and at ballot-box and everywhere, without hindrance and without malediction, men shall vote as they think best, God their only judge.

First, if we would resist this despotism of American politics we must refuse to believe every four years that everything is at stake. If our institutions are so rickety that every four years they are in danger of smash-up, the sooner they go to pieces the better, and we have a government substituted which has in it some of the elements of durability. I remember fourteen Presidential elections, and each election the leaders of parties told us, with vehemence ghastly and terrific, that everything was in danger of ruin. As near as I could calculate, we were about a quarter of an inch from the eternal precipice. Men went to the ballot-box tremulous with omens. Carriages were sent to bring aged voters and invalids. At party expense they were brought, and patriots who by strange coincidence at the same time were candidates for office, lifted these invalids out of bed into wagons with pillows and mattresses, and supported them to the ballot-box, while they dropped, for the very life of the country, their precious vote. I admit there have been pivotal elections on which everything turned; but more than half the time there has been nothing at stake but official patronage. This disposition to magnify peril and work before the eyes of the nation, on wires, the skeleton of danger every four years halts our American commerce and demoralizes everything. What do Western merchants want to come to buy goods for in New York if next autumn the land is going to be a howling wilderness? Merchants in all styles of business will tell you that every Presidential year is a dull year. Everything is unsettled. What do men want to buy plows and harrows for, if before they get their crops in, according to the intimation of some, we are to have a bloody C’e6sar on the throne who shall have vultures and buzzards caged as ordinary pets; and, as these men intimate, may turn the Senate Chamber into a Colosseum, where shall be thrown to the lions all those who are opposed to the third term? Or, on the other hand, a paralytic President who will pension the Confederate generals and reinstate American slavery and let the South miserably eat up the North. Why, the political orators are getting out their old speeches that they made in the Fremont campaign and in the Lincoln campaign and in all the campaigns since; for the speeches do just as well for the one campaign as for the other, for we are always in imminent peril and always just going to ruin, and, therefore, they do just as well now as they did forty years ago. When I was a lad eight years of age I heard the first political speech of my life. I stood barefooted in the broiling sun, at Somerville, New Jersey, and heard a Western orator show me conclusively that if William Henry Harrison instead of Martin Van Buren was elected President of the United States, there would be no use of my living to grow up, for there would be no country to live in! Many years afterward I went to Boston to lecture in the Music Hall, and I heard in the ante-room that night that a celebrated orator from the West was to speak in Faneuil Hall; so I hurried through my work and hastened down to Faneuil Hall, the cradle of liberty, and I found the cradle that night was rocked by the very same speech that I had heard in the days of my boyhood, and that the country was in the same imminent peril as forty years ago; and the only difference I could observe was that in the one speech it was William Henry Harrison, and in the other it was Benjamin F. Butler.

Some of us remember when Henry Clay and James K. Polk were contestants for the Presidential chair. When Henry Clay was defeated, my father, pale and sick with the news, sat down and said that all was lost. He had felt the magnetism of that splendid Kentuckian, whose name I cannot pronounce without enthusiasm tingling from scalp to heel. But was everything lost? Why, that election gave us the Texan domain, rich beyond all agricultural estimate, and opened the door for annexation after annexation, until now, when the wind blows from the west our national flag dips in the Atlantic, and when the wind blows from the east the flag dips in the Pacific.

We were told that the existence of the country depended upon Mr. Lincoln’92s second election to the Presidency. After his second inauguration he died, and Andrew Johnson put the administration in just the opposite direction, and we still live. We were told the prosperity of the State of New York depended upon the result of the election between Mr. Robinson and Mr. Cornell. We changed officers; but I did not see any very wonderful change in the prosperity of the State. The sun rose about the same time it did in other years. The tides came in with about equal strength.

My Christian fellow-citizens, while an election may have greater or less importance attached to it, let us quit this crisis business, and believe that God built this country to stand. I have made up my mind that the Almighty’92s capacity to keep his nation on the march of prosperity does not entirely depend upon either Chicago or Cincinnati Convention. Between any two of fifty good men named for the Presidential chair there will not be a half per cent. change in your taxes, nor the thousandth part of an inch of variation in your national prosperity. The only difference will be that if the Democrats come into power the Republicans will have to get out, whereas if the Republicans stay in power, then their men will keep their places. But in many cases there may not even be that difference, for professional politicians forecast the result, and they change their political sentiments in time to save their fortunes! A good sailor sets the sails according to the direction of the wind.

A journalist told me that after there had been a change in a certain administration he went into a place where there were many employees of the government, and he expected to find new incumbents; but lo! they were the same old incumbents, and when he asked how it was, they told him that just at the time the administration happened to change they changed their sentiments, and did it ’93conscientiously!’94 The lion of our nation’92s strength is covered all over with greenbottle flies that are sucking the life-blood out of its neck and flanks, and on the first Tuesday in November the old lion may terribly shake himself, and there may be a new set of greenbottle flies, but more hungry, to take their places. Do not stand agape as to what is to come next. Go and attend to your honest business. Do not believe the despotic political bureaus which tell you that the country is in danger of going to ruin. It is no more in danger of going to pieces than the moon is in danger of going to pieces.

Again, if we want to resist the despotism of American politics, we must realize that neither party is immaculate, and we must judge for ourselves as to who is the best man for official position. Do not vote for the man merely because your party nominates him. There is a difference between men; but between the two parties as parties there is just the difference as between fifty and half a hundred. Both parties need radical reformation, and by the time they are fully reformed, perhaps one or both of them will be reformed out of existence. But you say, ’93Is there no test? are we to have no preferences?’94 Ah! so far from saying that, I declare that the man who refuses to vote or neglects to vote is not worthy of American citizenship. But do not be submissive to party wire-pullers; do not go kneeling before demagogic behest.

The question every fourth year with a vast multitude of people, is, who ought to be the next President of the United States? I remark, in the first place, he ought to be a man of established moral character. It is a matter of congratulation that the most of the candidates, city, State, and national, on both sides are moral men. Some of us can look back to the time when for gubernatorial or Presidential position men were named who were libertines and drunkards and gamblers. One of our Vice-Presidents was sworn in drunk. A United States Secretary of State was once carried from his office in a beastly state of intoxication. The American Congress again and again has been disgraced by men who could not walk straight, yet pretending to represent Delaware, Illinois, and New York. I am glad that now the question of morals comes into the political discussion. I care not how much talent a man has if he is bad. Genius is worse than stupidity, if it move in the wrong direction. A nation of homes needs over it a man who has regard for the sanctity of the domestic circle. A nation of young men looking up for example needs over it a man of undisputed integrity. A man who cannot govern himself cannot govern forty-four millions. Our churches, our universities, our schools, and our homesteads must vote for good morals.

Moreover, our President must be a respecter of the Christian religion. I apply no religious test; but a country discovered by a Christian man and settled by the Pilgrim Fathers and the Huguenots and men of other nationalities who, persecuted for their sentiments, came here and took possession of this continent in the name of the God of heaven’97this nation must have over it a respecter of the Christian religion. The foundation of our institutions is not, as has been sometimes stated, the Constitution of the United States, but the Bible. Without that, republican institutions are an everlasting impossibility. Our first President was a Christian, and every coming President must at least be a respecter of religious institutions.

I go further and say, each coming President must have a heart large enough to take in all the States and Territories. If he be a Western man, and he despise the seacoast, and is chiefly anxious to change the commercial center; if he be an Eastern man, and he is disposed to denounce all the West as in favor of repudiation; if he be a Southern man, and think only of the North as an ignoble generation; if he be a Northern man and he wants to keep the old grudge up against the South, and wants to fight over again battles that were settled seventeen years ago’97that man must not be backed by convention or by ballot-box. The country needs a bigger President than ever before’97because the country is bigger. When Washington took his seat as charioteer, he had only thirteen coursers to drive. Now there are thirty-eight, and some of them are very skittish! Of course, with the wire bit of the telegraph they can be guided much easier than one might suppose; but still there are increased responsibilities. Three-fourths of this century has been taken up with sectional strife. Now, let us have a few years for something else. Let the political orators get out their old speeches that discussed dead issues, and send them to the paper-mill and have them changed into white sheets, on which they shall write one good rousing speech about the moral or commercial or agricultural, or mining prosperities that are now about to burst upon us. Do not let the despotism of politics make you believe there are only one or two or three or four men that can save this nation. There are a hundred that can save it. In other words, it is saved. The old Ship of State has got out into calm waters, and it does not require any very skilful navigation. The flowers of springtime have covered up the Northern and Southern graves, and let no hoof of contention trample the flowers. In pulpit and on platform and in convention and at ballot-box let us plan amity. Why do we want to fight any longer? Is life so long we are in a hurry to get rid of a surplus of it? Is the sword better than the wheat-cradle? Can we not raise rich pasturage except by moldering human bones and the red rain of human carnage. I pray God there may be no more use for the musket in this country except for holiday turn-out. I pray God that the time may hasten on when your navy-yards will be museums containing ships that were used in barbaric ages, when nations settled their quarrels by slaughter.

I pray the time may come when the eagle shall be taken off our coin, and there shall be substituted the dove, the bird of blood giving way for the bird of the olive-branch. Peace once established, let it be established forever. I give you, my friends, as a panacea for all political ills and a preventive of all national calamity, the Christianization of the people. Get their hearts right and they will vote right.

Have you any idea that the professional politicians of this day will lift our country to its high destiny? They never did anything but get office and make trouble. The masses of the people rose up again and again, and commanded national reformation. Professional politicians got us into the four years’92 war. Did they get us out of it? No. The people came and fought out the fight, and then commanded peace. Professional politicians again and again have ruined our American commerce. Did they ever restore it? No. The people rose, and with hard-handed and be-sweated industry overcame the financial calamities. To the people, then, we look, praying God for their evangelization. Let a practical Christianity take possession of the ballot-box, and that will settle illegal voting. Let practical Christians take possession of the primaries and the caucuses, and that will give us righteous nominees.

Let Christian apology like that which William E. Gladstone once sent to the Austrian government be the keynote for the settlement of all difficulties between men, between States, between nations. I know some denounce that apologetical letter of Mr. Gladstone as weak-minded and as imbecile. I pronounce it sublimely Christian. If men can settle their difficulties by apology, why not nations? Instead of bullets and gun-carriages and cities on fire and national massacre, let us have explanation and treaty and forgiveness and apology. I believe God has grand things for this nation. Never was the prospect so bright as it is now. The churches of God, instead of being a select car for a few passengers with tender feet on soft ottomans to ride to heaven in, will be thronged by the great masses. The Mississippi, the Ohio, the Hudson, rolling on from source to outlet, will not find, after a while, an overtasked workman, or a single waste place. The morning, laughing on the eastern coast, will give glad salutation to evening waving its red banner on the western coast. And agriculture shall bring all its sheaves, and mining all its precious metals, and manufacturing all its adroit fabrics, and art all its pencils and chisels, and literature all its printing-presses, and commerce all its masts, and religion all its altars and towers, and put them down at the feet of him on whose ’93vesture and on whose thigh’94 is written ’93King of kings, and Lord of lords.’94

Most High God of Plymouth Rock and Bunker Hill and Valley Forge and Appomattox Court House, protect this nation! I care not who is President if God is King. When to him from all parts of this land the doxology shall rise, we will give grateful, prolonged, universal, and triumphant ’93Amen!’94

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage