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Page 44
Perhaps I should record also, as a curious experience, that I was required
to appear as one of the guests of honor at a large reception. This meant
that I had to stand in line, with certain other marionettes, and shake
hands with an apparently endless procession of people who were themselves
as bored as were the guests of honor. I determined then and there that I
should never run for President,--not even in response to an irresistible
appeal from the populace. I had never suspected before that there could be
so many hands without the touch of nature in them. I shook hands
mechanically, chatting all the while with a humorous and human woman who
stood next to me in the line of the attacked--until suddenly I felt the
sensitive and tender grasp of a sure-enough hand, reminding me of friends
and one or two women it has been a holiness to know. My attention was
attracted by the thrill. I turned swiftly--and I looked upon a little bent
old woman who was blind. She had a voice, too, for she spoke to me ...
and,--well, I was very glad that I went to that reception.
And many other matters I remember fondly,--a certain lonely hill at
sunset, whence you looked over wide water to distant dream-enchanted
shores; the urbanity and humor of the wise directors of the Institution;
the manner of many young students who discerned an unadmitted sanctity
beneath the smiling conversations of those summer hours; my own last
lecture, on "The Importance of Enjoying Life"; the people who walked with
me to the station and whom I was sorry to leave; and the oddly-minded
student behind the desk of the hotel; and an old man from Kentucky who
cared about Walt Whitman after I had talked about his ministrations in the
army hospitals; and the trees, and the reverberating organ, and, beneath a
benison of midnight peace, the hushed moon-silvery surface of the lake. It
is, indeed, a memorable experience to have lectured at Chautauqua.
ACADEMIC LEADERSHIP
Any one who has traveled much about the country of recent years must have
been impressed by the growing uneasiness of mind among thoughtful men.
Whether in the smoking car, or the hotel corridor, or the college hall,
everywhere, if you meet them off their guard and stripped of the optimism
which we wear as a public convention, you will hear them saying in a kind
of sad amazement, "What is to be the end of it all?" They are alarmed at
the unsettlement of property and the difficulties that harass the man of
moderate means in making provision for the future; they are uneasy over
the breaking up of the old laws of decorum, if not of decency, and over
the unrestrained pursuit of excitement at any cost; they feel vaguely that
in the decay of religion the bases of society have been somehow weakened.
Now, much of this sort of talk is as old as history, and has no special
significance. We are prone to forget that civilization has always been a
_tour de force_, so to speak, a little hard-won area of order and
self-subordination amidst a vast wilderness of anarchy and barbarism that
are with difficulty held in check and are continually threatening to
overrun their bounds. But that is equally no reason for over-confidence.
Civilization is like a ship traversing an untamed sea. It is a more
complex machine in our day, with command of greater forces, and might seem
correspondingly safer than in the era of sails. But fresh catastrophes
have shown that the ancient perils of navigation still confront the
largest vessel, when the crew loses its discipline or the officers neglect
their duty; and the analogy is not without its warning.
Only a year after the sinking of the _Titanic_ I was crossing the ocean,
and it befell by chance that on the anniversary of that disaster we passed
not very far from the spot where the proud ship lay buried beneath the
waves. The evening was calm, and on the lee deck a dance had been hastily
organized to take advantage of the benign weather. Almost alone I stood
for hours at the railing on the windward side, looking out over the
rippling water where the moon had laid upon it a broad street of gold.
Nothing could have been more peaceful; it was as if Nature were smiling
upon earth in sympathy with the strains of music and the sound of laughter
that reached me at intervals from the revelling on the other deck. Yet I
could not put out of my heart an apprehension of some luring treachery in
this scene of beauty--and certainly the world can offer nothing more
wonderfully beautiful than the moon shining from the far East over a
smooth expanse of water. Was it not in such a calm as this that the
unsuspecting vessel, with its gay freight of human lives, had shuddered,
and gone down, forever? I seemed to behold a symbol; and there came into
my mind the words we used to repeat at school, but are, I do not know just
why, a little ashamed of to-day:
Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all its hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!...
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