JUL 8 1891

LIBRARY.

THE

UNIVERSITY

MAGAZINE.

A special publication, issued on the first of each month, identified with the general interests of all higher seats of learning. Contributions, suitable for the columns of THE UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE will always receive careful attention. Manuscripts, when not accepted, will be returned,

BY HON. ANDREW DICKSON WHITE, A.M., LL.D.

In the large sense, the first term of this subject includes the second, for all revolutions are doubtless parts of the great evolution of humanity; but you will allow me to restrict the meaning of the words and distinguish between them in accordance with common usage, so that my subject might perhaps be paraphrased as Progress by Growth and Progress by Catastrophe.

Few realize what a fearful price has been paid hitherto for the simplest advances of our race. Take a few examples out of many :

Before England could learn what are to-day the plainest things in the proper adjustment of legislative and executive powers, the nation was dragged through a fearful civil war, and through a long period of consequent demoralization: one king losing his head, another his crown. Before France, in the 17th century, could understand the simplest relations between her industrial policy and that of neighboring states; before she could realize that workmen on one side of a frontier are not necessarily the enemies of those on the other side, but rather helpers and co-workers, she was dragged through a series of wars which brought her to utter ruin; before, in the 18th century, she could learn what are now the axioms of political science applied to taxation, she had to go through a period of revolution, a period of anarchy, two periods of bankruptcy, two periods of despotism, with endless shedding of blood upon scaffolds and battle-fields and street-pavements. Before the world learned to accept the simplest axioms of toleration at the treaties of Passau and Westphalia, rivers of blood flowed through every great nation in Europe. Before the Prussian State could learn to allow political thinkers to work

out the problem of her adjustment to modern ideas, she had to be crushed in battle, humbled in the dust by diplomacy, and to go through ten years of waste and war. Before the Austrian Empire could learn the principal relations of education to public policy, several generations had to be taught by humiliating catastrophes, and, among these, Austerlitz, Magenta and Sadowa. Before Italy could work out the problem of political unity, there came three hundred years of internal suffering; and before our own nation could learn that the Declaration of Independence is made up of something other than glittering generalities, she had to go through the most fearful civil war in human history.

Thus far, then, the progress of humanity, as regards political, social, and religious questions, seems to have been largely, if not mainly, by revolution. Among the many examples, let us look more especially at some which come near to us.

Take first, the process by which the British Colonies on this continent were finally separated from the mother country. Two ways were before those entrusted with leadership in great Britain during the last half of the last century; the first was that chosen by Burke and Pitt; it was large, just, statesmanlike. Both these men labored for the supremacy of right reason in American affairs; Burke's speech on "Conciliation with America" is probably the foremost piece of forensic reasoning in the English language, and possibly the foremost in any language. Could these men of right reason have had their way, the American Colonies would have remained for many years longer attached to the mother country; the sturdy, vigorous English and Scotch emigration, instead of being diverted into other channels, to Canada, the Pacific Islands, India, and South Africa, would have continued to enrich and strengthen the civilization of this Republic; the separation, when it did come, would have been natural and peaceful; the population of these States would thus have had a far greater proportion of that Anglo-Saxon element which would have enabled it to assimilate the masses of less promising elements now flooding us, and which are possibly the new barbarian invasion fated to end this empire, as the old barbarian invasions ended the Roman Empire.

But evolution by right reason was not to be; if Pitt and Burke were apostles of evolution, George III., doggedly conservative, and sundry Americans, fiercely radical, were apostles of revolution, and the revolutionary method prevailed. The result was the immediate loss of much. precious Anglo-Saxon blood, for large numbers of the best and truest men and women, who were loyal to the mother country as a matter of conscience, were driven beyond our borders; still worse, the inflow of Anglo-Saxon blood from abroad was stopped almost completely. Though men like Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, Adams, and Marshall, built mostly upon the foundations already laid, and did their best. to prevent bitterness between the two nations becoming chronic, every thinking man will now at least suspect that the evolutionary process— the peaceful development of constitutional liberty in the colonies-their

gradual assumption of State and national dignity, would have saved great suffering to mankind, and probably in the long run would have produced a stronger republic and a sounder democracy.

Take next the French Revolution in the time of Louis XVI., one of the greatest statesmen, and possibly the most unsuccessful that humanity has ever produced, strove to develop free institutions by a natural process, and thus to avert a catastrophe. Turgot saw that the old despotism was doomed, that the new era must come; therefore it was, that he proposed a system for the general education of the people; for the gradual development of political practice; for the gradual assumption of the duties of free men, first in the provinces, and finally in the nation at large. By comprehensive measures, he sought to put the people gradually and safely in the possession of their rights, and in the discharge of their duties. He stood at the parting of the ways; could the nation have gone on in the path of peaceful evolution marked out by him, it is, humanely speaking, certain that constitutional liberty would have been reached within a few years, and substantial republicanism not long after. What weary years would have been avoided, -the despotism of the guillotine, of the mob, of the recruiting officer,-twenty years of ferocious war, -millions of violent deaths,-billions of treasure thrown into gulfs of hate or greed!

But on the other side stood against Turgot, the forces which made for progress by catastrophe and revolution;-the ultra conservatives, like poor Marie Antoinette, the leading nobles, the leading churchmen, and hating them, but really their truest allies for evil, the ultra radicals, like Robespierre, Danton, Marat, and their like both sets of fanatics, conservative and radical, working together for revolution ;-conscientiously intriguing, orating, lying, murdering;-creating an atmosphere, first of fanaticism, and finally of hypocrisy, in which all noble thought seemed to perish. In spite of the work of Turgot, and of all those who caught his spirit, men like Bailly, Lafayette, Mirabeau, who exerted themselves in behalf of progress by evolution, there was progress by catastrophe ;-the Paris Massacres, the LaVendée Massacres, the Avignon Massacres, the Red Terror and the White Terror, Revolutionary Wars and Imperial Wars, Jacobin Despotism and Napoleonic Despotism, the First Invasion and the Second Invasion, the First Indemnity and the Second Indemnity, the Bourbon reaction and the Commune, the whole line of sterile revolutions and futile tyrannies each bringing forth new spawn of intriguers, doctrinaires, and declaimers.

Take next our American Civil War. That a contest between Slavery and Freedom was drawing on many years before 1861, all men see now; various American statesmen saw it then, and they tried to avert it. Only one thought out a great, statesmanlike measure: that man was Henry Clay. He proposed to extinguish slavery gradually, naturally, by a national sacrifice not at all severe in fact, by a steady evolution of freedom out of servitude. His plan was to begin at a certain year, and to purchase those newly born into slavery, until gradually, through the ex

tinction of the older members of the African race by death and the enfranchisement of the younger members by purchase, slavery should disappear.* It was a great, statesmanlike plan. It might have been carried out for fifty millions of dollars. Revolutionists on both sides opposed it: revolutionists in the South would have none of it, for it was contrary to their theory that slavery was a blessing, sanctioned by the Bible, and embedded in the Constitution: revolutionists in the North would have none of it, because it was contrary to their theory that one man ought not to buy another. The result we all know slavery was indeed abolished, but instead of being abolished by a peaceful process, involving an outlay of fifty millions of dollars, it was abolished by the most fearful of modern wars, at a cost, when all the loss is reckoned, of ten thousand millions of dollars, and of nearly, if not quite, a million of lives. Thus had we political and social progress by catastrophe rather than by growth,-progress, not by evolution, but by revolution.

History is full of such examples: let me give one finally, beginning further from our time, but ending nearer it. In the latter half of the last century the Empire of Germany was the very seat of unreason and injustice. Its political institutions were a farce in which not one great national purpose could be properly served. Its judicial institutions were a jungle in which lurked every sort of legal and political beast of prey. Its social institutions were based on conventionalism; its religious institutions were imbedded in private disbelief and public intolerance. Then arose a true man, Joseph the Second: he attempted to save the Empire by appealing to right reason; by stimulating thought and diminishing despotism; by infusing humanity into the laws, and simplicity into the administration of justice; by the development of education; in fact, by an evolutionary process. All his efforts were rejected, and he died of a broken heart.

But the progress he sought has been accomplished by wars extending through a whole century, by the sacrifice of innumerable lives and untold amounts of treasure, by the humiliation into the dust of those who opposed the evolutionary method; indeed by the destruction of their rights, of their privileges, of their immunities, nay, of themselves; and finally, by the blotting out of the Old German Empire under Austria, and the establishment of the New German Empire under Prussia. The ruling classes would have none of the kindly reasonableness of Joseph the Second, the apostle of evolution, and they had to bear Napoleon and Bismarck-apostles of revolution-men of blood and iron.

And at this moment, we have, in one of the greatest nations in the world, an example of the same revolutionary process as distinguished from the evolutionary. In the middle years of this century, Russia, having been steadily developed in ways more or less rude by the efforts. of Peter the Great, Catherine the Second, and Nicholas the First, found itself under control of a just and kindly Czar-Alexander the Second.

*See Schurz's Life of Henry Clay. Boston and New York. 1887. Vol. 11., p. 317.