RESPONSIBILITY AFFECTS JUDGMENT
Judge Collamore, who for many years was a distinguished United States Senator from Vermont, used to illustrate his troubles by this story:
He was sitting on the porch of his law
office during a recess of Congress, when a
farmer drove by and said, "Judge, my conscience
troubles me so I can not sleep, about
keeping four millions of fellow human beings
with the same souls and the same Creator
as ourselves in slavery. With all this wealth,
I am sure that we, as a nation and as a
people individually, will be curst unless
slavery is abolished. Now, it is hardly fair
to destroy the property of the South, who are
not directly responsible, and so I think we
ought to all bear our share and buy them
out."
Senator Collamore replied: "Well, in part I think you are right. Now, let's see practically how it works out. The estimated price is four thousand millions of dollars. It would have to be raised by a direct tax proportioned among the States. Vermont's share would be so many millions. This county, so many hundreds of thousands, this town so many tens of thousands." Sitting in the same place the next afternoon, and greeting friends as they passed to and from the market, the old Puritan farmer reappeared. Reining up his horses, he shouted: "Judge, I have been thinking over that question. Crops are poor, taxes are high; I don't think we need bother just at present about them infernal niggers."
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RESPONSIBILITY EVADED
When the Massachusetts Sixth was there
in Baltimore and being mobbed, and stood
for a long time perfectly patient till their officers
commanded them to fire, a long Yankee—who
had stood watching this crowd and
saw that the poor ruffians round about were
merely the tools of the respectable scoundrels
standing away across the square on boxes
and barrels—stept out from the ranks and
drew his bead and sent a bullet through one
scoundrel's heart, and knocked him like a
pigeon off a branch. In Baltimore I heard
the other side of that story, when a clergyman
of that city told me, "We lost a good
deal out of our church that day." "Ah?"
said I, "how was that?" "Well, one of the
class-leaders of our church was down there
looking-on. He stood on a box on the other
side of the square; he was not among the
crowd at all, but a stray bullet came across
the end of the square and shot him!" He
was one of those broadclothed scoundrels,
with a gold-headed cane, surrounding those
poor fellows, and ought to have been shot.—Henry
Ward Beecher.
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Responsibility for Others—See Mutualism.
RESPONSIBILITY OF GREATNESS
Does some Napoleon "wade through
slaughter to a throne, and shut the gates of
mercy on mankind," and break the hearts
of a million peasant women, and handicap
the careers of ten millions of orphan children?
Recently when I used Napoleon in
an address as an illustration of unbridled
and selfish ambition, and spoke of him as a
man raised up to correct the abuses of the
French Revolution, who ought to have imitated
Washington and Jefferson, and as a
man of patriotism all compact concluded his
career without a mixture of meanness and
sin, a score of people wrote protesting against
judging Napoleon by the ordinary standards
of morality. Does Goethe forget the law
of marriage? For thirty years cast the reins
loose on the neck of passion? Use a score
of women as material and dynamic for literary
work? It is said Goethe was too great
to be held down to the ordinary petty rules
that control the limited career of peasant
souls. Does Byron forget the law of sobriety,
and fling himself into wild excesses
and lift the cup of flame to his lips?
It is said that Byron is a child of genius,
quite beyond the pale of convention. Does
some Crœsus with the money-making gift
get his hands on the reins of power use his
secret knowledge to secure exemption from
taxes and enjoy special privileges, freeing
himself from economic duties that his competitors
must bear, not only for themselves
alone but for him? The excuse is that the
moral laws that hold for those that buy and
sell a few pounds of groceries are to be laid
on the table and abrogated in the presence
of the merchant princes owning uncounted
millions.
The biographies of great men are filled with excuses for great generals who have been selfish, of poets who have been wild and lawless, apologies for statesmen who have been drunken, merchants who have been false. And the whole world has suffered through this misconception. As men go toward greatness they go toward respon-
