History of Bureau County, Illinois, Part 2

Author: Bradsby, Henry C., [from old catalog] ed
Publication date: 1885
Publisher: Chicago, World publishing company
Number of Pages: 776

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ful stories of the beauties and natural wealth of the new country were told to their friends in their old homes, and thus again and again were the streams of immigrants started afresh. The first fruits of discovery and oc- cupation were from the church; the final great results came of war and marching armies.

III

The controlling, the supreme human forces upon this continent are the Anglo-Americans, the commanding and master-spirits among men. And it is their restless and wandering activities, and the fact that, except the Jew, they are the most cosmopolitan people in history, ancient and modern, that has been one of the distinguishing marks of this race, and has contributed much to maintain their matchless superiority. The earliest history of the Anglo-Saxon people presents them as pirates upon the high seas and roving and dauntless invaders and robbers upon land. And when they attached themselves to the soil in the British Isles, their roving habits and knowledge of the waters resulted in making them the greatest commercial people in the world, and to this fact is due much of those characteristics that to-day so distin- guish them from all other people. They traded, trafficked and warred all over the known world, and in one way or another they came in contact with every variety of peoples, and thus, in the race of life, distanced all. They are a remarkable demonstration of the fact that man's best schoolmaster is his fellow-man, in his endless varieties; and that a people that attaches itself to the soil becomes stationary, as it were, and if not visited by those of different ideas, manners and bias of mind they are never a progressive people.

IV.

The early settlers upon our continent were

HISTORY OF BUREAU COUNTY.

the Cavaliers and the Puritans-the latter locating in New England, and the former in the South; the Cavaliers just entering upon a career of refinement and luxurious indo- lence, and the Puritans emerging from the severe religious ordeals that had filled his blood with iron and had prepared him well for entering upon the race for thrift, energy, power and wealth. His sufferings had taught him the severest economy, and the people of the South were learning their lessons in indo- lent ease, while their New England brothers were practicing a rigid frugality and learn- ing well the fact that money is a "direct power that gratifies the ambition; and, com- mands a certain respect that need not be despised. The Cavalier grew haughty and domineering, as was natural from the position of master and slave, and the Puritan de- spised these vain pretensions and soon learned to meddle in the affairs of his distant and slave-proud neighbors. And in the long- distant years ago were planted the seeds of the " irrepressible conflict " whose fat harvest was war.

The misfortune to both and the whole was that our country was so large that both had taken up their abodes in the dis- tant portions of the land, and in time they nearly ceased to mingle and associate together in the every-day business and social affairs of life; and in the end the war was something of a necessity to bring the two ex- tremes once more together, even if it was upon the field of blood; for amid the wrecks and woe and desolation, the dead, the wounded, the sick, the dying, the hospitals, the prisons, the flying skirmishes and the great red gaps of battle, the Northerner and the Southerner met, and here and there and everywhere was that " touch of human nature that makes all the world akin." And of the many results flowing out from the war, this

one of making the people of the different sections better acquainted with each other can be contemplated by all with unmixed satisfaction.

In the exultation of victors (this admoni- tion will never be needed by the vanquished) the North should not forget that a society cannot permanently prosper that is founded only on the pursuit of wealth, pleasure and power. A profound respect for liberty and justice are the first essentials to real national greatness and glory. Splendid cities, costly cathedrals, vast and numerous churches, many and magnificent schoolhouses, the col- ossal fortunes of millionaires, and immense factories and their many hundreds of em- ployes, are not the absolutely necessary finger- boards pointing always to the greatest welfare and happiness of the people. The cottages vastly outnumber the palaces, as do the labor- ers far exceed the idle and the rich. The real people live in humble homes; their toil is the world's wealth; and their health, hap- piness, comforts and their education and content are the true measure of a nation's greatness and glory.

V. "Genuine history," says Taine, "is brought into existence only when the histo- rian begins to unravel, across the lapse of time, the living man, toiling, impassioned, entrenched in his customs, with his voice and features, his gestures and dress, distinct and complete as he from whom we have just part ed in the street." A history of a people which has passed away is the effort to make the past the present; to revivify the dead and present every phase of actual life as it once existed, with all its bad and good, its bless- ings and its sufferings; the home life, the pub- lic highway, the street, the field, men and women privately, collectively, at work and at

HISTORY OF BUREAU COUNTY.

play, socially and morally, as they once were here in the struggle for life. A picture most difficult, perhaps about impossible to draw. Hence, to approach this perfection in any respect, will make a valuable book, and one whose lessons will remain perpetually to the coming generations.

VI.

The people of a State, or any separate civil government of laws and police powers, must be considered in reference to their local laws and government, as well as estimated morally and socially, in order to fathom the causes when the facts are once understood. This is unquestionably the freest government established among men, and it may possibly have the " finest civil service on the planet," yet one fact is patent, namely: that it is already complex and is growing in these in- tricacies, and from this is and long has been coming some of that confusion among men's ideas of what are the true boundary lines where the people should cry out to the law- makers, "hands off here." We have a gen- eral government and laws, applicable to all the people of the country, then State laws and institutions that are local; then county, town and city governments, laws, police and courts; and the constant tendency is to in- crease these-enlarge their complexity, and the genius of our law-makers is exhausted in the scramble for new laws. From the earliest childhood, from ancient times, when civiliza- tion was emerging from darkness, all were taught to respect the law and to pray regu- larly for the rulers and law-makers. And to worship the flag and condone the crimes of those in power is the common measure of your neighbor's patriotism. A rather stupid judgment, truly, but the very best the average man of this age could be expected to form. The tendency of all this is to run to those

most glaring evils of all governments, over- legislation, and thus what was intended for a protection, may become the heaviest oppres- sion. In so far as laws and governments are concerned, they are a necessary evil-some- thing not needed by the good -- their only purpose or excuse for existence being to restrain the bad, and to protect all from the evil, the ignorant and the perverse. The evils of overmuch law and government med- dling in the affairs of men, affairs that every one should shape and control for himself, have been too little considered by the people, those who suffer as the result of their own ignorance. The world is full of men who think a vote will make them wise, virtuous, rich and happy, and when these mistaken men are clothed with the ballot, and find themselves far from complete happiness, they are very apt to turn their eyes ever toward some new law. some commission or new office, created to relieve them of all their woes. When all these panaceas have run the gamut of experience and dismal failures, he may then wail at the demagogues, and fairly bray in a mortar, this meek and ever patient long eared animal.

"The fault, dear Brutus, is in ourselves

And not in our stars that we are underlings."

The right of universal suffrage, in fact, all right of voting, implies and compels for the voter either the intelligence to select the proper representative to make and exe- cute the laws, or he must abide the cruel con- sequences of the inevitable mistakes of ignor- ance. In your law-maker's hands are en- trusted the great questions of not only your happiness, but of life and death itself. As new and strange as these propositions may seem to many readers, they are not new to those who think best about the great problems of life. They are open secrets, and which are yet so open that they ought not to remain

HISTORY OF BUREAU COUNTY.

secrets to those who take upon themselves the awful responsibility of self-government, or of electing those who are to make and execute the laws, those men who undertake the vast and terrible responsibility of dealing with millions of human beings by measures which, if they do not conduce to their happiness, will increase their miseries and accelerate their deaths.

Speaking on this subject, and especially in reference to the plainest requirements that should be possessed by every law-maker, Herbert Spencer says: "There is first of all the undeniable truth, conspicuous and yet absolutely ignored, that there are no pheno- mena which a society presents but what have their origins in the phenomena of individual human life, which again have their roots in vital phenomena at large. And there is the inevitable implication that unless these vital phenomena, bodily and mentally, are chaotic , in their relations (a supposition excluded by the very maintenance of life) the resulting phenomena can not be wholly chaotic; there must be some kind of order in the phenom- ena which grow out of them when associ- ated human beings have to co-operate. Evi- dently, then, when one who has not studied such resulting phenomena of social order undertakes to regulate society he is pretty certain to work mischiefs.

"In the second place, apart from a priori reasoning, this conclusion should be forced on the legislator by comparisons of societies. It ought to be sufficiently manifest that, be- fore meddling with the details of social or- ganization, inquiry should be made whether social organization has a natural history; and that, to answer this inquiry, it would be well, setting out with the simplest societies, to see in what respects social structures agree. Such comparative sociology, pursued to a very small extent, shows a substantial uni-

formity of genesis. The habitual existence of chieftainship, and the establishment of chiefly authority by war; the rise everywhere of the medicine-man and priest; the pres- ence of a cult having in all places the fundamental traits; thie traces of division of labor, early displayed, which gradually be- come more marked, and the various complica- tions- political, ecclesiastical, industrial, which arise as groups are compounded and recompounded by war-quickly prove to anyone who compares them that, apart from all their special differences, societies have general resemblances in their modes of origin and development. They present traits of structure showing that social organization has laws which override individual wills, and laws the disregard of which must be fraught with disaster.

"And then, in the third place, there is that mass of guiding information yielded by the records of law-making in our own country and in other countries, which still more ob- viously demands attention. Here and else- where attempts of multitudinous kinds made by kings and statesmen have failed to do the good intended and have worked unexpected evils. Century after century new measures like the old ones, and other measures akin in principle, have again disappointed hopes and again brought disaster. And yet it is thought neither by electors nor by those they elect that there is any need for systematic study of that legislation which in by-gone ages went on working the ill-being of the people when it tried to achieve their well-being. Surely there can be no fitness for legislative func- tions without wide knowledge of those legis- lative experiences which the past has be- queathed."

These are the thoughts of a philosopher, not a politician nor statesman: The conclu- sions of a great man, a man who refused

HISTORY OF BUREAU COUNTY.

recently to accept a seat in the British Parlia- ment because he could not waste his time in trying to benefit the people by giving them a government they were not yet ready to re- ceive or appreciate.

VII.

A history of a people must, therefore, care- fully consider the race, the epoch, and the climate and soil and their combined effects in elneidating the causes, after the facts have been collated. Where the period of time covered by the story is short-only a little more than a generation-as in the history of this county, the effects flowing out from these causes become shadowy and indistinct-more difficult to trace out and fix clearly to the view, in due ratio to the brevity of the period which comes within the purview of the writer.

These conceptions of history were unknown to our forefathers. They wrote of all men, looking always from the same stand-point, and from their abstract conceptions, exactly as though all men. of all ages, climes and surroundings, were exactly the same. Their conceptions and conclusions were abstract, and, like their philosophy. were metaphysi- cal, and whence comes the fact that real his- tory is a modern discovery; not wholly, but mostly so.

The fact is, the so-called lore of the classi- cal ages are the works of those abstruse ine- taphysicians who fairly dazzled the world with their brilliant writings. The genius of these men was attractive and fascinating. and its power is evidenced well by the mas- tery it has wielded over men's minds for cen- turies; in fact, even to the present hour, we find its influence lingering abont our oldest colleges, universities and schools. The wrong bent it gave the mind in many things has been one of the heavy burdens upon the de-

velopment and expansion of the human mind, and the diffusion and growth of knowledge. And the misfortune was that for centuries and centuries the schools of the world were or- ganized and run upon theoretical and not scientific and practical ideas. And the amaz- ing facts are now that we hear only of the classical and scientific schools, the former being generally regarded as the only proper standard of a high grade of education, and when we say a man is a classical scholar, all understand that to be the perfection of learn - ing. And the best ideas of science in the schools is but miserable empiricism gener- ally.

The steps in the advance of civilization- that long and painful contest between truth and ignorance-are thus indicated plainly to us, and in time they, too, will bear their fruits, and men will come to know that there is nothing so practical as real learning. Our forefathers called all scientific knowledge "common sense," and unconscious as they were of the fact, they were truly defining a term that means all real knowledge; al. though they may have labored under the common delusion, that there was hid away in some of the institutions of the world a won- derful Arcana of wisdom and the true knowl- edge. under the name of classical or seientific lore, and that " common sense " was only for common people, while the better article was reserved for the select few.

The eras of development of the human mind are, first, the age of brute force and cunning and the earliest formation of the fam- ily and tribal relations, for mutual protection from savage neighbors. And secondly there is the age of arts, that culminates in music, poetry, eloquence, painting and the elegant refinements of society, and the pleasures of wealth, luxuries, and the polished and conrt- ly manners that are so beautiful to behold in

HISTORY OF BUREAU COUNTY.

any people. The crown and culmination of the age of art, is in Jenny Lind, Raphael. Shakespeare and the orators and metaphysi- cians of Greece and Rome. And thirdly, the mind progressing still from this grand epoch, enters upon the age of inductive philosophy, the highest type of human perfection possi- ble to reach-the age of discoveries, inven- tions and of true knowledge; the knowledge which betters the conditions of all men, making them healthier, happier and longer lived; dispelling pain of body and suffering of mind; awakening men from the long nightmare of superstitious fears and ignor- ant beliefs, driving from the walks of life the once successful and adored mendicant quacks, shams and imposters, who, for the long ages, so flourished fattened and batteued upon the hard earnings of ignorance and folly, the curse of bigotry and the fatality of empiri- cism.

VIII.

The man who never had occasion in his life for the use of a thought above bread and bacon (and we would not deride such men, for with the great mass, these are the first and only real questions of their whole lives, and ;to answer them well is their noblest mission), we say, many such men are truly amazed when we have asked them for the story of their humble, but sincere and honest lives. And sometimes, like certain rich men who are vain of their ragged and dirty clothes, and who sneer at a clean man, they have gloried in telling us that we did not understand our own business nearly so well as they did, and they knew their own lives were too trifling to tell, and that it was a fraud to attempt to print them. Parading their own pride of ignorance, they give instantaneous judgments upon the philosophy of historical data, thus settling profound questions that have taxed for many years

some of the greatest minds that ever lived. Another will tell us that he is a " new comer " and is not a part, nor has he any interest in the history of the people, either of the past or present. Another will notify us that the history of a county can only be properly written by its living cotemporaries.

There is no blame to attach to these mis- taken people, because history is more an account of men's errors than of their correct judgments-ignorance has largely predom- inated in the world, possibly it always will. We are not excessively concerned on this point, but content to contribute our humble mite to the story as it is, conscious of the fact that that history which fails to give an account of men's errors, as well as their sparse triumphs in behalf of truth, would be no history at all. The history of the insignificant, the ignorant, good and bad, the old and the young, in short, the majority, the mass, exact- ly as they were and are, is the real bulk and important part of the lesson. In the hands of the historian every grade and shade of human life and its conditions, from the idiot to Lord Bacon, are the materials from which he raises the structure, the imperishable records of a people. Do you suppose the birds that made their tracks in the plastic mud, which afterward hardened to stone and became locked in the bowels of the earth for centuries and for geological ages, were any more aware of the immense importance their rude records would be to us than the millions of men, who lived and died and whose chance fossil remains are being unearthed, and are enabling us now to write something of the story of prehistoric man and animals? The lowest and meanest worms have lived and made their imperishable records. Nothing escapes history. The name of Charles Augustus, or Nehemiah, or Praise-God-Bare- bones, will pass away and be soon forgotten;

HISTORY OF BUREAU COUNTY.

it is an impalpable nothing, but the life, the bones and flesh, the blood and tissue are a solid something, which, amid ceaseless changes, will exist for ever. And it need not humiliate the said Charles to learn that this physical fact is equally true of the toad and the mosquito.

Hence, an accurate biography of every man, woman and child that now lives and has lived in the county would be the full and complete materials in the hands of the histo- rian, by which he could write a history of unsurpassed value. To obtain these now is impossible, and we can only do the next best thing, namely, to procure as nearly as possi- ble the life records of those from whom we may strike that average whose beautiful laws are certain and immutable, and which, when correctly interpreted, yield infallible truths.

IX.

A book to be read by the average man, in order to be appreciated or understood, must be addressed to his understanding, and it should steer successfully around his cherished prejudices of faith, and his distorted or total absence of all views on political economy. The successful book-makers, those who jump into sudden fame and reap the golden har- vests, are those who catch the popular breeze and sail with it. They criticise nothing, and with devout hearts they bend the knee and bow the head at the shrine inscribed, " The voice of the people is the voice of God; " or that other and worse maxim, " The people are always right; " " The divine right of Kings," and "The majority are always right and the minority are always wrong "- these are some of the arrant follies that have held their places in men's minds persistently and almost perpetually. From the hustings, the rostrum, the sacred desk, the bench and bar, these fulminations are poured out, and

to question them is to have your own sanity suspected. " Might is right " is just as true as are any of the other time-worn maxims about the majorities-the people as a whole, or that other nonsense, that for all men to vote is the priceless boon of freedom-or " Universal suffrage assures the perfection of a good and free government-so long as you can vote you cannot be enslaved."

These maxims are the droolings of imbe- cility, and it is he who pours ont upou this wicked nonsense his fulsome panegyrics of praise, who reaches best the public heart and pulse and reaps the golden harvests.

When the people act as a body upon any subject, there cannot be any action that is superior to the average man, and the chances are as one in a thousand that it will not be above this measure, but is nearly certain to be below it, for the reason that error is near- ly always more active than intelligence. It is more self-asserting, more confident, and infinitely more satisfied with itself. The whole is admirably stated in formulating the terms which describe the contest between knowledge and ignorance. Knowledge is a saint, ignorance is a criminal. Hence, a people is moral or immoral, good or bad, virtuous or vicious, as the collective body is wise or ignorant. A high or low standard of sobriety, integrity or morality in a people is the exact measure of the knowledge it pos- sesses. This, like the law of averages, may not be demonstrably true of the individual, but is unvarying of the people as a whole in its self-demonstrations.

So far as we can know, everything in all nature-the whole mental and physical world -is a growth, not in a single instance a miraculous bursting into the full bloom of existence. And that growth is governed by omnipotent laws. To know these laws and apply them to man, to the family, to society,

HISTORY OF BUREAU COUNTY.

to the community, to the State, to the race, is the exalted work of the historian.

In a historical point of view, then, " The present is completing the past, and the past is explaining the present." And this becomes plain and its value incalculable in so far as we may from the records and data that come to our hands, be enabled to point out the laws of growth that have led us to where we now are.

CHAPTER II.

WHY HISTORY INTERESTS US-WHAT IS HISTORY ?- LAWS OF DEVEL- OPMENT-THE SOIL AND ITS WONDERS-IMPORTANCE OF TEACH- ING IT TO ALL-NEEDS OF OUR PEOPLE-THE COMING PUBLIC SCHOOLS-LEARNED IGNORANCE SHOULD STOP NOW-EARLY ILLITERACY AND MODERN DEMORALIZATION COMPARED-WHO ARE THE REAL IMMORTALS-TRUE PHILOSOPHY AND KINDLY THOUGHT-TEACHING ERROR A CRIME-HOW TO EDUCATE-AN AGRICULTURAL PEOPLE SHOULD HAVE AN AGRICULTURAL EDU- CATION-INSTANCES GIVEN-EDUCATION THE MOST PRACTICAL THING IN THE WORLD-GEOLOGICAL HISTORY, ITS IMMENSITY AND IMPORTANCE-THE ROCKS, SOIL AND CLIMATE-GEOLOOY OF BUREAU COUNTY-COAL-MEASURES-THE WONDERFUL STORIES OF THE PRAIRIES, ETC., ETC., ETC.

" Where once slow creeping glaciers passed Resistless o'er a frozen waste, Deep rooted in the virgin mould The dower of centuries untold." -JOHN H. BRYANT.

M AN'S nature is such that he is deeply concerned in the movements of those who have gone before him, and this interest intensifies the closer the strain of blood that binds him to the memories of those predeces- sors. If his earliest forefathers had their forerunners, even if they were of an unknown time and race, either savages or enlightened, who lived and struggled and died, passing away and leaving not a wrack behind, their term reaching beyond the gray dawn of earliest history, yet their dimmest marks and fossil remains are deeply interesting, and beckon us on in the eager hunt to unlock the

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History of Bureau County, Illinois, Part 2

Author: Bradsby, Henry C., [from old catalog] ed Publication date: 1885 Publisher: Chicago, World publishing company Number of Pages: 776

Author: Bradsby, Henry C., [from old catalog] ed
Publication date: 1885
Publisher: Chicago, World publishing company
Number of Pages: 776