USA > Indiana > The Indiana centennial, 1916; a record of the celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of Indiana's admission to statehood > Part 29
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So my first plea tonight is a plea for our history, that we may know and care to preserve the ideals of our past. Of that history of Indiana I cannot even cite the landmarks to- night, but we think with gratitude and with some degree of satisfaction of what has been done for our history. Travel- ers and transient dwellers in the land, like Professor Baynard R. Hall, have described pioneer conditions, and the State will ever owe a debt of honor to men like John B. Dillon and Judge Howe, John H. Holliday, Jacob P. Dunn, William H. English, Charles W. Moores, Colonel William M. Cockrum, William Dudley Foulke, Mrs. Julia Henderson Levering, and in these late years to Mr. Logan Esarey, for what they have done in making known and available the story of our past. These worthy Hoosiers, by essays and volumes in Indiana biography and history, have rendered a service, not for selfish gain, but for love of the past and the honor of the State. Has not the State an obligation to recognize and promote such service to her history? The celebrations of the Centennial Year will have been in vain if they do not awaken within us a stronger purpose to preserve the records of the past in order that those who have it in their hearts so to serve the State may tell to the children the sacrifices and achievements of the fathers.
Walter Savage Landor in his "Pericles and Aspasia" speaks in praise of the Muse of History. He calls upon the Muse to claim her rightful place among the arts of life. He insists that the gentle Clio, with stylus in hand, shall be al- lowed to tell the story of the past; that her functions shall not be set aside or confused by disquisitions on morals, science,
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literature nor art. He would leave Philosophy on one side amid her groves and shades, and let History proceed to tell our grandchildren the story of our lives. Let sermons and philosophy follow, if they will, but let us in history see and hear the men of the past as they really appeared upon the scene of action.
To this literary critic, history is a pageant, not a philos- ophy, a drama upon the stage of life, not a theory of society or a discussion or comment upon the motives and morals of men. "We might as well in a drama," says Landor, "place the actors behind the scenes and listen to the dialogue there, as in history to push valiant men back and protrude ourselves with husky disputations. Show me rather how great projects were executed, great advantages gained, and great calamities averted. Show me the generals and the statesmen who stood foremost, that I may bend to them in reverence; tell me their names that I may repeat them to my children. Teach me whence laws were introduced, upon what foundations laid, by what custody guarded, in what inner keep preserved. Let the books of the Treasury lie closed as religiously as the Sibyls ; leave weights and measures in the market place, com- merce in the harbor, the Arts in the light they love, Philosophy in the shade; place History on her rightful throne and, at the side of her, eloquence and war."
It is this law in our members, in our social being, that lies at the foundation of the Commonwealth, the law which de- crees that those who forget the past shall in their turn be for- gotten. We are here tonight in vain if we cannot be led to realize that what we have and what we are as a Common- wealth, with liberty under law, have their roots deep in the past. The shallowness and artificiality and lack of efficiency and thin fads and fancies in our public life are almost al- ways a sign of our having lost connection with the ages.
Indiana has now come to the close of a year in which she has been celebrating her history. The subject of our cele- bration has been not so much the birth of the State as the life of the State, the growth and the development of the Com- monwealth for a hundred years. A hundred years ago today President Madison signed a joint resolution of Congress rec- ognizing Indiana as the 19th State of the American Union. This was the last of a series of steps which introduced In-
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diana to the sisterhood of States. Within itself it was not a notable event. It was but an incident coming as a matter of course; but it is the date, or landmark, at which the life of the State legally and officially begins. It merely marks an hour in the passage of time, merely a formal act by which Indiana passed from a lower to a higher form of local self- government. It was but a step which had been foreordained when government first came into these parts twenty years be- fore.
It is not this purely formal event, this mere incident, that we have met to celebrate. That may have appointed the hour, but the cause we celebrate is statehood, its foundations and its achievements. How men build their states is one of the greatest themes of human history. "History is past politics and politics is present history." This is not a definition but an emphasis. By this famous utterance Professor Freeman meant that to him, at least, the chief end of history is to study and magnify the State. The historical physiocrats, like Buckle, would direct the attention of history to the physical world, the climates and elements under which men live, their food, their clothing, their houses, their manners and customs and bodies by which they live. This may be good. The eco- nomic interpretation of history has its uses but it has been overdone. When we wish to deal in history with the things among men which are transcendant and permanent we begin to dig about the foundations of the State, its origin, its rise, its organization. History in its noblest aspect is but the biography of States and of the men and women who have made these States, or whom these States have made.
This means that the chief function of the State is to culti- vate the political spirit of man. "Man is a political animal." Aristotle, the sage who used that expression, knew the spirit that is universal among civilized men, and his recognition of man's political nature and political estate made him the father of political science. Indianians have sometimes perverted and polluted this noble science in its practice and applications, but it is still true that a spirit of noble politics lives and thrives among us. It lies at the foundation of the State. It is the highest function of this Centennial Year, the noblest part of such memorial days as this, to cultivate that spirit; that all citizens of whatever professions may be touched by its
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power and be imbued with love and honor and devotion to the State.
There is not in all the range of human endeavor a field whose proper cultivation is more essential to the temporal happiness of mankind than that of service and devotion to the State-and as I speak of the State here, I mean our Nation of which Indiana is a part. Here is a field which the great Thomas Arnold has called the most important for the ripened human mind-that one may become a factor in the greatest problem of human history-the problem of governing men.
It is said of Hegel, the German philosopher, that when he brought the manuscript of his great work to his publisher in Jena on the day of the great battle in which Napoleon wrought the humiliation of Germany, he was surprised to find French soldiers in the streets; the great author and philosopher had been so wrapt and lost in his study and speculations as not to know that war was in progress and his country in danger. It is a great, perhaps the highest, function of the State to produce and foster the scholar and the man who thinks. These are they who are to give birth to thoughts, or who lay the foundations of enterprises which are destined to bless gener- ations that are yet unborn. But as has been suggested, in order that such may have time to think, that they may have time and opportunity to meditate and pause, to pause and meditate again, that they may have time to work out their creations and get them in order, they must be protected from turbulence and excitement and interference and left undis- turbed by distractions and disorders. To that end they must have spread over them as a canopy the aegis of beneficent in- stitutions, of capable administrations of righteous laws. This is the work of the statesman in the science and art of poli- tics. Upon him all classes and degrees in the State depend, and in a democracy the citizen as well as the statesman must be imbued with that marvelous and dominant spirit, deep, wide, and persistent, which has given such distinction to Eng- lish and American history.
Hegel, the great thinker to whom I have referred, who was working away with his books without knowing what changes and ruin were being wrought to the institutions of his State, lived in a time of uneasiness and uncertainty for his Fatherland. He might have waked up some fine morning
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to find his libraries carried to a foreign land and himself and his contemporaries, and therefore his posterity reduced to a disordered condition, such as could never have harbored or rec- ognized a genius, who, if he is not the product, has never in all the history of the world been produced beyond the pale and influence of political institutions. Hegel's was the age, too, of Goethe and Schiller, those great names in German literature. Now, it is very true that no one can tell in what places or from what causes such genius is to be "provoked from the silent dust." In this regard "the wind bloweth where it listeth," as Mr. Bryce says in speaking of the Ameri- can democracy; but it is noticeable that these great master minds in German literature followed hard after the construct- ive statesmanship of Frederick the Great, and they were upon the very scene of action while the greater Stein was laying the foundations in political structure for the unification of Ger- many.
Athens was preeminent in literature and art and science. But Athens was also the home of Themistocles, of Thucidydes, of Demosthenes and Aristotle, those great creative political minds whose names add such lustre to human history. There is a relation between these two facts. "The preëminence of Athens in literature, philosophy and art," says Professor Free- man, "was simply the natural result of her preeminence in freedom and good government. Yet the literary glory of Athens has been allowed to overshadow her political great- ness." It is plain that the great historian would have us see that to Athens' political greatness her literary glory was chiefly due.
Not only is this true of modern Germany and of ancient Greece, it is also true of England. Sir James MacIntosh in speaking of Magna Charta says:
"To have produced it, to have preserved it, to have matured it, constitute the immortal claim of England upon the esteem of mankind. Her Bacons and Shakespeares, her Miltons and Newtons, with all the truth which they have revealed and all the generous virtue which they have inspired are of inferior value when compared with the subjection of men and their rulers to the principles of this great document, if indeed, it be not true, that these mighty spirits could not have been formed except under equal laws, nor roused to full activity
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without the influence of that spirit (that is, the political spirit) which the Great Charter breathed over the spirit of our forefathers." The history of Magna Charta and its prin- ciple is but the history of Anglo-Saxon politics.
The ideals of this Charter are imbedded in the foundations of Indiana. They are written in our first fundamental law. I do not refer to the first Constitution of 1816, but back of that to the immortal Ordinance of 1787, whose consequences we see here at this hour and, as Daniel Webster has said, "we shall never cease to see them while the Ohio River shall flow." Within the principles of this Ordinance, which are as old as the struggle for human rights, we find the title deed to gov- ernment and liberty in Indiana. This New Charter of the Northwest forever devoted this State to equality, to education, to religion, to freedom.
Recall for a moment its great articles of compact. It was solemnly ordained that the new States of the Northwest were to find their foundations on certain principles :
1. Free Soil. "Neither slavery nor involuntary servi- tude, except in punishment of crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted shall ever exist in said Territory."
2. Free Religion. "No person demeaning himself in an orderly manner shall ever be molested or disturbed on account of his mode of worship or religious belief."
3. The Free School. "Religion, Morality and Knowledge being essential to good government and the happiness of man- kind, schools and the means of education shall be forever en- couraged."
I need not attempt to indicate how that promise has been made good in the life of Indiana. Education has been re- garded as an interest very near and dear to the heart of the State and there has been no cause to which the people have been more ready to devote themselves in sacrifice and to pay of their substance. In their first Constitution of 1816 the people made it the duty of the General Assembly "to provide by law for a general system of education, ascending in regular gradation from township schools to a State University." The growth of her educational system in keeping with that primal guarantee has been one of the chief glories of Indiana.
4. Free Men. The great muniments of civil liberty came with the Ordinance of 1787-right of trial by jury, the habeas
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corpus, no arbitrary imprisonments, no cruel punishments, free speech, free press, free assembly-all the privileges by which free men were accustomed to live. These were our original heritage.
On these foundations the State has been established-on them the superstructure has been reared. By these moral and political principles we have lived and grown for a hundred years. In this century of statehood Indiana has written a worthy history-a history that should be told and taught to our children. From a population of 60,000 we have grown to 3,000,000. From a simple agricultural life when the pioneer families largely supplied their own needs, we have developed a highly complex industrial life, with an economic pressure that is going to test our ability to produce and dis- tribute with equity the clothing and food of the people. From remote settlements hard of access, our country towns have grown into quick and easy connections with the outside world. This "capital in the wilderness" has risen from its primitive country settlement on Fall Creek to one of the foremost inland cities of America, with unsurpassed facilities of transporta- tion by electricity and steam.
Indiana has but shared with her sister States in this ma- terial progress which will always be a marvel to those who observe the contrasts between the beginning and the end of our first hundred years. In wealth and industry, in comfort and modes of living, in conveniences of travel, in country or town, in methods of business, in education, literature or art- in everything that goes to make up civilized life, the progress of the century has been so remarkable it seems almost im- possible for the human mind to conceive the contrast.
Gov. Ralston, the changes in the life of mankind and among the American people since Jonathan Jennings sat in the seat in which you have so well served the people of In- diana, have been so many and so marvelous that it may, in- deed, with truth be said that Jennings lived in an entirely different world from what you and I have known. Do I run much risk of being rebuked by the truth of History when I . say, that judged by the circumstances of his life and the progress of the world, Jonathan Jennings lived more nearly in the times of Abraham than in the times of Woodrow Wil- son and of Samuel M. Ralston? Jennings never saw an auto-
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mobile, or a trolley car, or a railroad, or a telephone, or a telegraph, or a writing machine, or an adding machine, or a dictagraph, or a mowing machine, or a threshing machine, or a sewing machine, or a voting machine, or a great city, or a great factory, or a steam printing press, or an elevator, or an asphalt street, or a macadamized road, or a public school, or an electric light, or a lucifer match, or a gas jet, or a gas range, or a two-cent stamp-not to mention the Zeppelin and the submarine. But these useful things that I have named- let us cast out of mind the hideous instruments of destruc- tion-these useful things have entirely changed and bettered the face of the world and the way men live.
In 1787, when the first Constitution of our Territory was written, the thirteen little Commonwealths that fringed the Atlantic Ocean east of the Alleghanies had about four million people, and most men seriously doubted whether a single re- public could endure for any length of time over so vast a. stretch of territory as from Massachusetts to Georgia. In 1916, as we face the next century, a united Republic of 48 States from the Atlantic to the Pacific governs over 100,000,000 of people. The railroad, the telegraph, the telephone, the penny postage, unite them in business interests and enable one government to bind them together as a nation. Wash- ington hoped and worked for a firm and lasting Union, but he looked forward to nothing like this. Then nearly all the peo- ple lived in the country without good roads or good schools, or adequate means of travel and communication. Now nearly half of the people live in cities, with quick communication and highly organized trade and industry, under "sky scrapers" and amid great mills and factories and stores. The country is big, business is big, enterprises are big, our problems are big -the great problems of poverty, crime, disease and their relief -and these problems of society and government loom so large upon the horizon that the outlook sometimes seems appalling. I think your four years' experience in the Governor's chair, your excellency, will corroborate that statement. We must meet problems and conditions that the men of 1787 and 1816 could not have imagined. Then, with our land reaching only to the Mississippi, Jefferson thought there would be enough for the people for a thousand years to come; and Fisher Ames
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said that it would take ages to settle the western lands and only the Lord knew how it could ever be governed.
The men of 1816 came here to bear a part of that burden of government. They came because they were daring and enterprising men, ready for progress and change. They adapted their government to their times. They built on old foundations, but they erected a superstructure according to their needs. Government is like the manners and customs of men, like the methods and tools and implements by which they live. It is a changing thing from age to age. Its principles of justice, equity, order, fair policy and equal rights for all do not change; but the methods and means, the instruments and institutions and policies and constitutions of government, by which truth and justice and righteousness are obtained, these forms must change as inventions and progress change the face of society. Men must adapt themselves to the changed and changing circumstances of their lives not only in material things, but in the agencies of government.
Under the conditions of today, so changed from Jennings' day that we are living under a new heaven and on a new earth, how shall we face the future? Are we unafraid? Shall we stand here on this auspicious and historic occasion merely to glorify the past and to take pride to ourselves that we had brave fathers in those days, and mothers, too, who dared to brave the perils of the wilderness to build a State? God forbid! Let the achievements and the failures of the past teach us their lessons. Our failures teach us as much as our successes, and we must confess that this history which we cele- brate has its seamy side. But forbid that we should find con- tentment or self-satisfied pleasure merely in the attainments that our history has recorded. Our obligations to the State are sacred. Let them be fulfilled and let them never be de- nied.
If, by calling attention in my closing words to some un- toward circumstances and unsolved problems in the life of the State today, I seem ungracious to this memorial occasion which is supposed to be one of felicitation and congratulation, I beg to call to mind in apology the words of the ancient sage, "Faithful are the wounds of a friend, but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful." As Hoosiers born and bred, we may talk together of the things of our own household, never fear-
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ing to know and to face the truth. Self-flattery will not help us and pride will lead us to a fall. Only the truth will make us free.
In Indiana today we are standing on the eve of great struggles for betterment in government. There are evils to be uprooted, reforms to be instituted. Our rural schools need reorganization and the whole problem of industrial training is still in its incipiency. Our roads are backward and our system of road building is full of waste and extravagance. Our city governments are in many ways a reproach and a dis- grace, given over to partisanship, to the machines of politics, and contractual graft. Our legal processes are so cumber- some and delayed as to amount in many cases to a denial of justice. We have saloons and dives and gambling places that are like moral cankers in our cities, veritable breeding places of poverty, crime and disease. The criminal class, needing restraint and reform, is a constantly enlarging prob- lem for the State. The pauper, the dependent, the unfortu- nate, the diseased in body and mind, are constantly adding to the concern and expense of the Commonwealth. Committed as we are in theory to democracy we still deny to half the people of Indiana the right to participate in their own govern- ment. Taxes are still levied on them all alike, but with such inequity and corruption and subornation of perjury as to make one almost despair of the virtue and honor of our citizenship. Many of these evils are embedded in, and reforms and changes are prevented by, a constitution, which although it recites justice as its primary object, may fairly be said to make justice unconstitutional within the State.
It may be thought that these words are such as should be heard only in the days of our calamity and not in the day in which we are called to celebrate our honor and our achieve- ments. But if they are indeed the words of truth and sober- ness, as I believe, then whether we lift our heads to the clouds in self-praise, or hide them in the sand to escape unseen, the result is the same.
These problems and evils confront us. They are to be met and solved only as we imbibe the spirit and illustrate the principles of the fathers. The quickening principle of a State is a sense of devotion. The hand which unites us is the spirit of dedication. Its foundation is the sense of obligation strong
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enough to overmaster self-interest. It is with this mind that we should look backward to our history and forward to the future, while we seek to invoke the spirit of one hundred years ago.
If we fail to transmit to our children a better State than that which we have received, we are recreant in our day and generation not only to the heritage but to the spirit of our fathers.
Governor Ralston :- Introducing Mrs. Helen Warrum Chappell. Indiana has long boasted of her men of distinction and of vision; but with equal consistency does she point with pride to her women of learning and of literature, of culture and of song.
What truer lines has any Hoosier written than these from the pen of that pioneer writer, Sarah T. Bolton :
Nothing great is lightly won; Nothing won is lost; Every good deed, nobly done, Will repay the cost. Leave to Heaven in humble trust All you will to do; But if you succeed, you must Paddle your own canoe.
We are honored tonight by having on our program an In- diana woman whose power of voice in song is as effective as was the pen of Mrs. Bolton in literature.
Mrs. Helen Warrum Chappell is one of our country's most charming and talented artists. I take great pleasure in pre- senting her to you.
After Mrs. Chappell's songs, Governor Ralston announced the "Hallelujah Chorus" as the closing number of the evening.
W" e Langdon Hymn to Indiana
Charles D Campbell
To
Heaven
raise
thy star-cre vned head So - perb
In - di - & - na ! Thy
rise
Firm!
True l
Thy
strength
re - - - new!
God
MM J = 75 Broad and with emphasis
fu
- " ture
to
glo - ry wed Through toul Praise God! Ho san nal
A -
pro - - Sper
thy
ges
To
serve the com - ing
- gest
To
Heaven
raise
thy
star-crowned head. Su - perb
In - di - - & - met
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