An American Ideal.
By CHARLES H. CHAPMAN, Ph. D., President of the University of Oregon.
"IN our childhood we are near to God. The angels still visit and whisper news from the unforgotten realms we have left behind."
So sings the poet of immortality. Fresh from the Creator's hand; nay, trailing after us clouds of glory from the Eternal we come into this world of filth and deformity. It does not take long for the clouds of glory to fade away; but there is a time between childhood and manhood, before God has shut away his face and the everlasting doors turning on their golden hinges have come between us and our home, when life in one great throb of strength and hope. We feel then that no task is too hard for us, that no prize is too high, that all things great and worthy are predestined for our use. It is in that golden prime that the youth reads in his book of one who cut his way upward in a rocky cliff, climbing ever higher while his companions stood below and watched him. There were names on the limestone, cut by hands now feeble in old age or dead and in their graves, and over them all was one name — a name once mighty to charm the soul of youth to high endeavor — it was the name of Washington. "I will climb," said the boy, setting his teeth, "above that name, and I will cut my own higher than his." He reads of that youth, with a swelling heart, and whether it be through starvation and penury, or whether on the gilded rounds of the ladder which his friends have raised for him he feels that he, too, can climb and must climb, and he wills to cut his name high up beside the undying records of the great men gone before.
In the nation, too, there is a springtime when greatness is easier than it can ever be again. Nations grow cynical in their old age, and as grey-beards laugh at the enthusiasms of youth, so in their decrepitude nations smile at the rude zeal of their early heroes. There was a time when we made legends and heroic tales about Washington and Clay and Ethan Allen. We make no more legends and heroic tales; we smile when we hear them and the newspapers turn them to jest in their columns of fun.
"Imperial Caesar dead and turned to clay, might stop a hole to keep the wind away."
In our nation this springtime closed with the war of the rebellion. We still have men of eminence, but they are a very different race from those of the generations before the war. The men now coming into prominence in public life are mostly rich; the conditions which once made it possible for a poor man to reach exalted eminence have almost passed away. Let us hope that their absence is only for a time, and that they will again return. I do not believe that the unscrupulous, selfish man of great wealth who now parades in his brutal pomp upon the stage of our public life is the typical American; or that the conditions which have produced him are to be permanently satisfactory to our people. They are not the conditions which in a former epoch produced our great men — our Washingtons, our Franklins, our Marshalls, our Lincolns.
Let us consider for a few minutes the conditions which could produce such a man as Lincoln and put them side by side with those which are turning out our Tweeds, our Crokers and our Goulds. Let us call the man produced by these conditions the old-fashioned educated American. This man of whom I speak was generally born on a farm, but his parents were not peasants. He had good blood in his veins, his ancestors were free men and they were healthy. The man born with the potentiality of greatness in him does not come from a stock bestialized by tyranny, whether it be the tyranny of an imperious
