USA > Illinois > The centennial of the state of Illinois. Report of the Centennial Commission > Part 13
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* the allowing them to vote for legislators is an impropriety." Alexander Hamilton voiced a still stronger feeling when he contended that those who held no property could not properly be regarded as having wills of their own.
I do not know how I can better illustrate the tenacity of these political ideas of the Fathers than by alluding to a memor- able constitutional convention held in the State of New York in the year 1821. Constitutional conventions are milestones on the road to American democracy. In the deliberations of these bodies are reflected the notions that flit through the minds of ordinary citizens. Progress and reaction meet on the floors of these con- ventions.
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It is the 22d of September, 1821. The subject under dis- enssion is the elective franchise.It is proposed that the old prop- erty qualifications shall still hold in elections to the State Senate. James Kent, Chancellor of the State of New York, is speaking-a learned jurist and an admirable character. There is deep emotion in his voice. The proposal to annihilate all these property qualifi- cations at one stroke, and to bow before the idol of universal suffrage, strikes him with dismay. "That extreme democratie prin- ciple wherever tried has terminated disastrously. Dare we flatter ourselves that we are a peculiar people, exempt from the passions which have disturbed and corrupted the rest of mankind? The notion that every man who works a day on the road or serves an idle hour in the militia is entitled of right to an equal participa- tion in the government is most unreasonable and has no founda- tion in justice. Society is an association for the protection of property as well as life, and the individual who contributes only one cent to the common stock ought not to have the same power and influence in directing the property concerns of the partner- ship as he who contributes his thousands."
Of this notable speech, another member of the convention remarked that it would serve admirably as an elegant epitaph for the old Constitution when it should be no more. He was riglit. Chancellor Kent was facing backwards-addressing a van- ishing age. And yet he was no mere querulous renetionary but fairly representative of a large class of men whose reverence for tradition was stronger than their faith in democracy. At this very time in another constitutional convention, young Daniel Webster was defending the property qualification in the Massa- chusetts Constitution of 1780.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the constitution which your fathers drafted one hundred years ago is a significant milestone in our march toward democracy. On this frontier of the Old Northwest was born that spirit of self-confidence and self-help which has made the people of the great Middle West an incalculable power in the national life. It was as inevitable as breathing that these pioneer farmers should express this spirit in political institutions.
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With firm boll characters they wrote unhesitatingly into the Con- stitution of 1818 these words:
"In all elections, all white male inhabitants above the age of twenty-one years. having resided in the State six months next preceding the election shall enjoy the right of an elector."
I shall not pause here to question the wisdom of permitting even alien inhabitants to vote, nor to point out in detail why the convention of 1818 withdrew the privilege. It may well have been certain experiences in the old Third Congressional District which tempered the democratic ardor of the constitution-makers. When an aspirant for congressional honors could vote en bloc hun- dreds of stalwart canal-diggere, fresh from Erin's Isle, it was well, perhaps, to call a halt. These laborers had in them, no doubt, the making of good citizens; but a residence of a few weeks even in Illinois could not educate an untutored mind to the point where he could make the necessary distinction between an elec- tion and a Donnybrook Fair.
It is quite unnecessary, too, to remind this audience that suffrage has long since ceased to be restricted to whites. It is certainly the part of discretion, if not of valor, at this time, to ' refrain also from discussing the latest extension of the suffrage. I hazard only the prediction that the same democratic forces will ultimately give women the ballot when they demand it. There is an insistent force in this movement of the century which sweeps away all considerations of prudence and expediency. But I have no desire to handle live wires.
Let me eonfine my remarks to the far-reaching historical im- portance of the adoption of male adult suffrage by Illinois and her sister States of the Northwest. The reaction of West upon East has too often been overlooked by American historians. Not all good things follow the sun in his course. Political reactions are subtle and can often be felt more easily than they can be demonstrated. Yet there can be no doubt that it was the theory and practice of manhood suffrage in the new states which led the older Eastern States one by one to abandon their restrictions.
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It was the new State of Maine, itself the frontier of Massa- chusetts, that led the way. It is no mere accident, I think, that Maine is also the fust of the New England States to try out the initiative and referendum. This democratization of the East was a slow process. The nineteenth century was nearly spent before the conservatives abandoned their last stronghold.
Meantime revolution had broken out for the third time in central and western Europe. The system of Metternich had been shattered; the repose of Europe rudely shaken. For a time it seemed as though even Germany would yield to the assaults of liberals and nationals. Unification and constitutional govern- ment seemed within reach in 1818. I may not dwell upon these days of storm and stress, of shattered illusions and futile dreams. Sullice it to say that reactionary forces triumphed, and forced many a stalwart soul to turn his back upon the Fatherland. It was these exiled liberals, these "Forty-eighters" who came to the prairies of Illinois and the Middle West and made common cause with their brethren in the struggle for human liberty. In these times of storm and stress we do well to remember that these Ger- man exiles became bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh-laying down their lives for their adopted land when the hour of destiny struck.
Slavery had already driven a sharp wedge into American democracy. Something besides the freedom of the negroes was at stake. Men were asking searching questions. Could a society that harbored slaves be truly democratic? Could a nation which permitted a minority to dietate foreign and domestic policies be termed democratic? Could a people consent to refrain from talking about a moral issue at the dictation of slave-interests and still remain true to democratic traditions? Must a democratic people refrain from putting barriers in the way of the extension of slavery because a minority held slavery a necessary and blessed institution ?
Two stalwart sons of Illinois returned answers to these ques- tions-answers that were heard and pondered throughout the length and breadth of the continent. Men then found these answers contradictory and debated them with partisanship and
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passion but we may rise above the immediate issue and discern the essential agreement between these two great adversaries. When Stephen A. Douglas asserted that no matter how the Supreme Court should decide, the people of a territory could still permit or forbid slavery by local legislation, he was enunciating bad law, it is true, but a principle thoroughly in accord with American practice nevertheless. His great opponent never challenged the general democratic right of a people to self-determination; nor did he deny that, irrespective of law, the people of a territory would in fact obey American traditions and decide questions of local concern through a public opinion that has more than once in frontier history ignored distant law-makers.
When Abraham Lincoln stated the nature of the irrepressible conflict within the Republie by declaring that the Union could not exist half-slave and half-free, he registered his conviction as a great democrat, that no minority can be suffered indefinitely to force its will on the majority when a question of moral right is involved.
And finally, when Lincoln declared that the decision of the Supreme Court in the case of Dred Scott could not stand as law, he was speaking as a prophet, not as a lawyer. In effect, he was asserting that no minority may scek shelter behind the dead hand of legal formalism when the moral sense of the living majority is outraged thereby. Even courts and legal precedents must even- tually yield to an enlightened publie will.
These passionate days of the late fifties followed by four tragie years of civil war stripped the halo from democracy. It was seen that it was no panacea for all human woes; and that existing American democracy was not the perfect goal of political develop- ment. During reconstruction our eyes were opened to the perver- sions of democracy. We saw erimes perpetrated in the name of democracy. We saw stealthy hands thrust into our public treas- uries ; we saw mysterious interests interposed between the people and their goverment : we saw-in a word-government shipping away from the people either through the ignorance or incompetence or connivance of their chosen representatives. Democracy has
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come to seem to many men less an achievement than a hope, a dream, a promise to be fulfilled.
Dante compared the restless Italian cities of his day, with their incessant party struggles and changing governments, to siek men tossing with fever on their beds of pain. There is a similar instability in our American life which seems to many learned doctors a symptom of disease in the body politic. The state of Oregon experiments with dircet legislation; Arizona with the re- call; Illinois has had some experience with proportional represen- tation; every state has tried its hand at reform of nominating machinery and regulation of party organization; municipalities have set up governments by commission only to abandon them for city managers; Kansas hos even considered commission government for the state.
To my mind this experimentation is a sign of health not disease. It is of the very essence of progress that human institu- tions should change. Distrust that state which rests content with its achievements. Dry rot has already set in. These restless movements in American states and cities are attempts to adjust democratic political institutions to new economic conditions. The machinery of government was perfectly adapted to society in Illi- nois when it entered upon Statehood one hundred years ago, because society was almost Areadian in its simplicity. Substantial social equality prevailed under rural conditions. Government was in- evitably democratie. But this great Commonwealth has long since lost its Areadian simplicity. It is a highly organized industrial community. Society is classified and stratified. Governmental institutions designed for another and different society must be readjusted to the needs of modern life. Yet the essential basis of democracy need not be changed and will not be changed.
In these days of carnage and unutterable human woe, when democracy suffers by comparison with autocracy in efficient ways of waging war, I detect here and there, as I am sure you do, a note of distrust, even covert sneers at the words of our chosen leader that the world must be made safe for democracy. Ladies and gentlemen, there are other tests of democracy than mere effi- cieney. I am prepared to concede-though the statement has been
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challenged-that German municipalities are better administered than American cities; that their streets are cleaner; that their police regulations are more efficient; that their conservation of natural resources is more far-sighted. What I cannot concede is that an autocratic government, however efficient, ean in the long run serve the best interests of the people. Autocratic government does not develop self-help in its subjects. It enslaves. It robs inanhood of its power of self-assertion. It denies opportunity to struggling talent. It makes subjects; it does not make citizens of a commonwealth. The impotency of the German minority which hates Prussian Junkerdom is the price which the German nation is now paying for efficient but autocratic government.
There are two tests which every government must sustain, if it is not to perish from the earth. It must not only serve the material and moral welfare of its citizenry; it must also enlist their active support. It is not enough that democratic govern- ment should promote public contentment. It must also cultivate those moral virtues of self-restraint and self-sacrifice without which enduring progress cannot be made. Citizenship in a democracy cannot remain a negative and passive privilege to be enjoyed ; it must be an active force for righteousness. And the ultimate test of the quality of citizenship in a democracy is the leaders which it produces. A brilliant Trenchman has applied this test. Surveying democracies the world over with a somewhat jaundiced eye, he has found everywhere only the cult of incompetence. 1 do not so read the history of American democracy. I do not find "Right forever on the scaffold and Wrong forever on the throne." Incompetence has often been enthroned it is true; mediocrity has often been rewarded; but in great crises the choice of the people has been unerring. Should we not judge democracy by its most exalted moments as well as by its most shameful? Our famous warriors have been idolized for a time; our merchant princes and captains of industry have been admired for their cleverness; our orators and politicians have had their little day. We put them in our Halls of Fame: but we withhold our reverence to bestow it upon our Washington and Lincoln. There is something chal-
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lenging, thought-arresting, awe-inspiring, in the emergence of Abraham Lincoln as a national hero. Here was a man who de- scribed his early life in the words of the poet Gray -- "the short and simple annals of the poor;" who grew up in your midst, a man among men; who entered the White House misunderstood, and derided as a "Simple Susan;" yet who became the leader of the nation in its greatest crisis. You do not honor him because of his intellectual qualities alone. You reverence his memory be- cause he embodied the moral aspirations of American democracy. Abraham Lincoln was the greatest contribution of Illinois to the democratic movement of the century.
INDIANA'S INTEREST IN THE HISTORY OF ILLINOIS CHARLES W. MOORES
The chief event in human history was when the Creator "caused a deep sloup to fall upon Adam and took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh instead thereof, and the rib which the Lord had taken from man" while he was still asleep "made he a woman." We are commemorating a similar event a hundred and nine years ago, for when Illinois was taken out of the side of Indiana, some reluctance might have been shown but for the "deep sleep" that made the operation possible. Indiana gave to America, as was given to humanity in that primeval creative act, what has proved to be gentle and sweet and strong, the queenly guardian of the Great Lakes and of the Father of Waters.
Our loss would not have been so grave if we would have had the benefit of the first survey which is said to have run the State line west of Chicago instead of to its eastern borders, and Illinois would have been but little better than any other interior state if your northern boundary hed remained at the south end of Lake Michigan. It is too late now for either Michigan territory or Wis- consin or Indiana to claim Chicago, for most of Wisconsin's and Michigan's business men, and many of Indiana's authors and artists have become loyal citizens of the Windy City, and we can not call them back.
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You centenarians of Illinois may not claim all the credit for your hundred years of Statehood, for Indiana has a right to be proud that it gave Illinois to the world and we are proud with that same splendid pride which in this year of war hangs its star upon the outer wall to attest that a million homes in America are ready to lay "their costly sacrifier upon the altar of Freedom." And so Indiana has the pride of parenthood. When a boy does a thing well, he may not boast, but no one can blame the mother who glorifies him. As will appear before Indiana's greeting to Illinois is over, our claim does not end with having brought Illinois into being, but we shall hope to prove that much of what your State has done for civilization must be credited to the neighbor state upon your eastern border.
Only an expert could distinguish between Arizona and New Mexico, or between North Dakota and South Dakota. "It is hard to draw the line" as the boy said when he found he had a whale on the book. Discriminating observers can not tell one Chinaman from another. A new state, just emancipated from the chrysalis period, whose leaders have come from beyond her borders, and, who, because she has had no great experiences in sacrifee and service, no crisis to face, and no sorrow to bear or to recall, has not yet developed personality.
Three thousand miles away is a little state whose Gethsemane and Calvary have given her an immortal soul -- a personality -- in whose presence the nations of earth stand with head bared. Within her borders, for a season, are encamped an infidel horde who dony the god Terminus to whom all civilized people bow down, a horde who can not respect a nation's personality because, in their gross materialism, they deny the existence of whatever is born of the imagination or of the spirit.
The essential differences between Illinois and Indiana are not superficially evident. You recall the discussion of this ques- tion between the heroes of Mississippi Valley fiction, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. They were journeying by balloon from Mis- souri to the Atlantic seaboard and Huckleberry Finn was not coll- vinced that they had crossed the boundary between your State and mine. As they looked down upon your prairies they had seen the
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same rich green that their geography maps had given to the State of Illinois, but beyond the banks of the Wabash the wooded hills and rich bottom lands of Indiana were just as green, and Huckle- berry Finn, who remembered that on his map Indiana was pink, lost his faith in all geographers and mapmakers and became a sceptic. Iluckleberry Finn was only a superficial observer or in- tuition would have told him when he crossed the line.
Indiana's Centennial Year, 1916, was a year of self-dedication to patriotisin. As we looked baek over a hundred years of serene growth we neighbors on your eastern border came into a new state consciousness. We learned the inadequacy of Chief Justice Chase's definition of a state, for we knew that Indiana had come to be more than "a political community of individuals inhabiting the same country," more than "the country or region thus inhabited," more than " the government under which the people lived," more even than "the combined idea of people, territory, and govern- ment." We were not merely a bit of land staked out for separate sovereignty, not a political fraction-one forty-eighth of a great nation-holding its attributes in common with forty-seven other varieties of political or territorial entities, nor as Huckleberry Finn viewed it, an irregular splotch of pink on some great map.
It was a year that marked our emergence into soul-conscious- ness, when we came to know by insight that Indiana had person- ality, and that its people read their books, thought their thoughts, and worked out their destiny along distinctive lines, and was different because her pioneers and her later leaders had given to the slowly developing state a character "with a difference"-a personality.
For more than a generation, perhaps. after statehood was given us, we, like you of Illinois, were actually only an arbitrary sub-division of that splendid empire which the fathers had dedi- cated to liberty-the old Northwest Territory. It was not until Abraham Lincoln, trained among the Indiana hills and matured on the Illinois prairies, called AAmerica to the colors that the soul of your State and the soul of Indiana awoke to conscious life.
There are those who believe that when the pioneer left New England to find a home in the wilderness of our middle west and
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when the Forty-niner crossed the "great American dessert" in search of gold the last adventure of history was over.
The pioneer who came to this Northwest Territory and pene- trated the wilderness in search of an empire where he must obey the law of the jungle until in time he could make laws of his own, found the great adventure in this heart of America a hundred years ago.
In some far away eternity the great adventurers will get to- gether and talk over their earthly experiences. Hercules, Ulysses, Abraham, Moses, Jonah, Joan of Arc, Columbus, Balboa, Miles Standish, George Rogers Clark, Robert Falcon Scott will each have his story to tell. And a great story hour it will be.
I could be content to sit in the midst of a little group of men no less heroic and listen to the story of the Wabash Valley jungle of a century ago. In that group would be George Rogers Clark, Pierre Gibault, Francis Vigo, Arthur St. Clair, and William Henry Harrison, the great men of our territorial period. But until the history of the people of the Northwest is written, America will not know what heroes we had a hundred years ago.
The pilgrim father who crossed the wintry sea and began his life of religious liberty in the snows of Massachusetts was no braver than his pioneer descendant who came from the civilized East two centuries later to find a home in the wilderness of In- diana, and the measureless prairies of Illinois. Across the Alle- ghany mountains his journey into the West lay along streams where treacherous Indians waited for him all the way. But the savage was the least of the dangers he had to face. When he entered the forest, bears and wildcats were in his way. About his new home wild creatures watched for his stock, and waited to devour his crops. More to be feared than any living animal was the peril of disease that threatened him until the lands could be drained and intelligent physicians be found for every neighbor- hood. Malaria was universal and there were not enough well people to feed and nurse the sick. Fever and ague made steady work impossible and life a torment.
The twentieth century traveler finds it hard to picture that wilderness to himself. As we ride by railway and over paved
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highways we forget that the pioneer had to build his wagon roads and bridle paths through dense woods, and that for forty years land travel was through bottomless prairie mud or among stumps and fallen timber cleared with the ax. And ever in the half-dark- ness of the woods was the unspeakable terror of the savage in hid- ing behind some tree, ready to kill.
There were childlien in the wilderness who shared the father's dangers and comforted the mother's loneliness. Little thumb- nails sketches of the boys and girls appear in the histories of that earlier day. We read of little J. G. Finch going out from Con- nersville with his father's cavalcade to make the first settlement on White River above Indianapolis. He was nine years old. "It was snowing hard and the men of the company made their way very slowly with their ox team, driving stock before them and cutting the road as they went. I got to crying and they came back to see what was the matter. I told them I was so cold that my back was cracked." And there are the children on the way to the log school who were stolen by the savages or killed in cold blood in the somber shadows of the woods.
And there is that other nine-year-old Hoosier, the very men- tion of whose name gives us a grip in the throat and a tightening about the heart; we recall how death entered the lonely cabin and the boy who dreamed, fearing lest the mother's burial should go unremembered of God, sent beyond the Ohio to the Kentucky cir- cuit rider to pray over the grave of Nancy Hanks. There is no story of Indiana that can leave out the tragic picture of the Hoosier boy standing uncomforted beside the grave of a pioneer mother.
Life was as nich of an adventure to the circuit rider who saved the souls of pioneers as if it had been given over to the conquest of the jungle or the killing of the Indian. The arena of the human soul was to him as theatrie a place as the coliseum was when the Christian martyr went down to death. Hell was as genuine a terror as malaria and as near at hand, while the mysteries of faith were as plain as the simplest things of life.
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