USA > New York > Suffolk County > Riverhead > Celebration of the 100th anniversary of the organization of the town of Riverhead, Suffolk County, N.Y. at Riverhead, July 4, 1892 > Part 4
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And whether we study the civilization of Greeks or Aztecs, of Persians or Indians, of English or French, we find the law of their development always the same. The reason why one nation attains a higher point of civilization than another is not that it had a different law of development, but that the same law had a freer scope and a wider range. And along broad lines these laws are very distinct. Every one, for example, recognizes that there is a necessary relation between the char- acter of a people and their external surroundings. The student of history isn't surprised to find the Greek mind and tempera- . ment one thing, and the Asiatic mind and temperament quite another thing. The conditions of their life make this impera- tive. It isn't a matter of accident, it's the outworking of a fixed law. Every one of us is familiar with the law of supply and demand ; the law of ratio between the wages of labor and the cost of food. These are things that we can't escape. They inhere in the very constitution of society. Have you ever re- flected that there is a fixed ratio between the number of mar- riages that occur in any given year and the price of corn in . that year-the higher the price of corn the fewer marriages, the lower the price of corn the more numerous the marriages? So
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that if the young men of Riverhead Town seriously. wish to multiply their chances in this direction, let them set about lowering the price of corn.
But, seriously, when once this idea of law has possessed us, when we can see everywhere the silent, resistless play of unseen forces, working their way on and through and over all obstructions, to the final destiny which God has marked out for nature and man, "that one far-off divine event to which the whole creation moves," not only will we come to study the facts with a deepening interest, but with a deepening reverence as well, and we will come to see that history is something more than a mere catalogue of events, something more than a record of sieges and battles and crusades. We
will see in it all and through it all the Divine purpose with re- gard to man, ever unfolding, ever ripening, through shadow and through sunshine, through the inky darkness of mediæval ignorance and the meridian splendor of Nineteenth Century knowledge, ever approaching the splendid fulfillment of which the law of development-which is stamped upon all that God has made -- gives us certain assurance.
It is this conception of history that brings order out of chaos. The scientific student assures us that in the whole realm of natural phenomena there is no such thing as catas- trophe : that what we are accustomed to look upon as sudden upheavals or violent cataclysms in nature, are in reality only the necessary and orderly giving way of old to new conditions under the direction of law. So, too, the historical student, from this higher standpoint of observation, assures us that there are no catastrophes in history ; that amid all those social and political upheavals which threaten to disrupt society, through- out all the conventions or congresses or parliaments with their fury of debate, amid all the battle fields with their clangor of arms and their groans of the dying, always, always there has been an imperative law higher than all; these things and regulating them all and evolving from them new, and higher social conditions and possibilities.
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Now, so much for the way in which we ought to study history. And if we are to hope for any higher or larger de- velopment in the future it must come from just such thought- ful study of the past, of the causes which contribute to its growth, of the law underlying its development. For law, my friends, can never change; it's the same for all times, all sea- sons, all conditions; the same for the falling apple and the blazing meteor; the same for the dew-drop and the ocean; the same. for the dust molecule that noiselessly settles on your parlor mirror and the cruel avalanche thundering down the sides of the mountains; law everywhere and always the same. Conditions change, phenomena change, environment changes, but law never. So that under whatever law of life and de- velopment your ancestors lived one hundred years ago you live to-day, and you can hope for no change or advantage in this regard. It's true, the conditions of your life are widely differ- ent ; it's true that your environment has been much enlarged, but be convinced of one thing, that if there was any law of rela- tion between the means at your ancestors' command and the use they made of those means you live under the same law, and you can neither escape nor modify its operation.
Now, however complex an organization society may seem to be, yet the great principles underlying social growth are simple and obvious, and easy of statement. In the first place, man can never separate himself from nature, and it must be apparent, as I have already hinted, that very largely social development must depend on the character of our relation with the external world. Think what a wondrous storehouse this nature is. It stands for something more than a moving panorama of light and beauty, delighting the eye and feasting the imagination ; something more than a treasury of wealth in precious metals and precious stones. It stands for us too as a wondrous depository of forces, ever present and always potent, from whose play we can never escape, and from a proper utilization of which it is probable there arises more sub- stantial and permanent social development than from any
other cause. I think it is not an extravagant statement to say that civilization is advanced or retarded, suffering di- minishes or increases, according as man dominates or is domin- ated by these forces. We see him go into nature's forest, hew down her trees, transform them into dwellings, multiply these into villages, into cities, utilize her forces to do his work, to light and heat his houses, to propel his machinery, to elevate his grain, to carry his burdens, turning her to a thousand noble uses, and we cry, Behold the wondrous impetus given to the social movement ! See how man is lord and master of nature! But look again. From out the summit of Vesu- vius a little cloud of smoke begins to rise. The scientists watch it with interest as an evidence that other of the internal forces of nature are at work ; the smoke becomes flame, the flame becomes lava and ashes: down the mountain sides it streams, burying houses, burying people; Herculaneum and Pompeii nothing more than a mighty sepulcher, entombed for hundreds of centuries. Look again. This nature denies the fruit of the earth for a season -- famine comes, plague comes, and we hear the cry of anguish from starving millions in Russia or India. No, No! Any philosophy of social de- velopment that would ignore this relation of man to the world in which he lives would be singularly inadequate and incomplete. Out of this relationship spring the most mag- nificent discoveries of science ; and along the line of scientific discovery lie some of the grandest possibilities of civilization. You don't light your houses with pine knots and tallow dips any more. Why? Because the student of nature has been abroad and has caught the lightning from the clouds and has given you it as a means of light. You no longer spend weary days jolting and bumping and exasperating yourself and your neighbor passenger in going from point to point over roads almost impassable. Why? Because scientific discovery has found in nature another mode of motion. Look where you will you find the fruits of this spirit of discovery. And as Henry Thomas Buckle says, "The discoveries of great men
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never leave us. They are immortal. They contain those eternal truths which survive the shock of empires, outlive the struggles of rival creeds and witness the decay of successive faiths. All these have their different measures and different standards, one set of opinions for one age, another set for another. They pass away like a dream ; they are as the fabric of a vision which leave not a rack behind. The discoveries of genius alone remain. They are for all ages and all times; . never young and never old, they bear the seeds of their own life. They flow on in a perennial and undying stream; they are essentially cumulative and giving birth to the additions which they subsequently receive, they thus influence the most distant posterity, and after the lapse of centuries produce more effect than they were able to do even at the moment of their promulgation."
Your ancestors of a hundred years ago hardly felt the im- press of this current of discovery. But we feel it now, we are a part of it. For it is of the essence of scientific discovery that you can't limit its application as to time, or place. We may say that a great deal that is going on in the scientific world is of no immediate interest or concern to us; that it can neither directly or indirectly advance or retard our develop- ment. But we're wrong if we say that. A new scientific truth is the possession of the world. It enlarges by so much. our knowledge of the world in which we live, and our com- mand of the forces by which we are surrounded. Says the same learned writer whom I have already quoted: "In a great and comprehensive view the changes in every civilized people are in their aggregate dependent on three things: First, on the amount of knowledge possessed by their ablest men; second, on the direction which that knowledge takes, that is. to say, the sort of subject to which it refers; thirdly, and above all (mark that), above all on the extent to which the knowledge is diffused and the freedom with which it pervades all classes of society." And in our day, with a telegraph system girdling the earth, no sooner is a fresh scientific discovery made than it
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becomes the possession of every race and every clime. In our age there is no such thing as a monopoly of knowledge. You may effect a corner in wheat, but you can't effect a corner in brain product. That immediately becomes the property of inquiring millions, going by so much to enrich their intel- lectual possessions, and so contribute to their social develop- ment. Now in the next hundred years we are to live right in the flood-tide of this tremendous impulse that has been given to scientific study and discovery. And if you will compare, and I need not make this comparison for you, the multiplied blessings which have followed these discoveries, the beneficent uses to which they have been turned -- if you will compare these things with what you recollect or what you read of the condi- tions of life that confronted your ancestors, you may find some just basis of speculation or prophecy as to what the next hundred years may develop.
But it isn't alone in the way of outward material advantages that the spirit of scientific discovery enriches us. It does some- thing more for us than to give us devices for lighting and heat- ing our homes or giving us labor-saving machines. It brings within the reach of every one a literary product of which our ancestors never dreamed. I know that a great many bad books are written. I know that very much that passes under the name of poetry and romance is fit for nothing but for bon- fires, and that it would make uncommonly poor material for that. I know that many of the utterances of the so-called realistic school reek with moral filth and every form of literary abomination. But I know, too, that all over the world there are intellects all aflame with the fire of genius and hearts all aglow with love to God and man, that are pouring out a stream of mental health and moral strength and spiritual beauty that must enrich the age in which they live and form a precious heritage for the future; writers whose sentiment is so pure and whose moral tone is so lofty that it finds its way as a mighty potential force into the hearts and lives of those who are aiming to make the age in which they live a better age,
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whose aspiration is to help on the social movement along the- line of loftier, purer character and an enlarged manhood and womanhood. Don't let me be misunderstood. I have no. purpose to disparage the libraries of one hundred years ago. I fear we are a little too much given to patronizing our fore- fathers. We are apt to institute unfavorable comparisons between their rather limited opportunities and the almost boundless resources of the modern student. We are apt to- think that they didn't have many books, and that we ought not to expect them to know very much. Well, I presume they didn't have very many books; but then I'm not sure that the value of a library is measured by the number of volumes on the shelves. There is another and a higher test than that. A book is valuable not so much for the knowledge it gives as. for the character it develops. And from this higher stand- point possibly their libraries were not so meagre after all. If they had not many books they had good ones. Now and then you found Burns there --- sweet, gentle Robert Burns, who has found a voice for every human sorrow, a cry to the pitying Father for every human need; whose sympathy was aroused alike by the daisy carelessly upturned by his plow and by the sorrows of struggling men and women, toiling on in obscurity under a burden of poverty. And they had their Shakespeare, to whose affluent genius all knowledge and all experience seemed an open secret; who read the human heart and un- folded its workings as astronomers read the stars and tell us their elements. And, above all and grander than all, they had their Bible, not as a text-book for critical study, but as a veri- table fountain of life, drawing from it sustenance and strength, and the amplest equipment for their daily duties. To them the songs of David meant more than the rhythm or cadence of Hebrew poetry ; they meant actual power to uplift and sus- tain. To them they turned when the burden grew too heavy or the sorrow pressed too sorely, and they found in them-not .words, but the Lord God himself, a tower of strength in the hour of need. And before the type of manhood and womanhood that
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they evolved from these elements you and I must stand to-day with uncovered heads in reverent homage. It was a manhood and womanhood that would have graced any time and any civil- ization. Heroic in self-sacrifice, large in charity, lofty in ideal, affluent in all the graces that adorn and dignify the human character, it ought to move you with pride to look back upon such an ancestry. In contemplation of this larger worth we lose sight of oddities of manner or extravagances of dress. These are accidental, adventitious, the creature of the hour, the whim of the moment, liable to constant change and fluc- tuation, but character is an undying possession, and for it we can have nothing but the deepest reverence. We may smile at the bonnet as capacious as a Saratoga trunk, or at the bodice as stiff and as unyielding as the laws of the Medes and Persians, but we don't smile at the large hearts and the generous souls which gave to Riverhead Town such a history as it has had for a hundred years.
Yet granting all this, and not losing sight for a moment of our obligation to the past, what of the future? I find it im- possible to cherish the belief that the past is exhaustive of. high possibilities of life and character. You may say that it is of the essence of lofty character that it be developed by hardships; that it is born in travail, nourished and perfected in suffering, and that an amelioration of the conditions of life naturally tends to an emasculation of the moral fibre, a general lowering of the moral tone. But in so saying don't you neglect another obvious arrangement in the moral economy of the universe, namely, that these very changes create new hardships, and that, however great may be the change in the condition of life, there can never be any change in the law of character? Be sure of this: God never leaves any age without the proper and necessary conditions of development. Nay, more ; all history proves that He provides for an ever loftier standard of character, and places man in the very conditions which make the attainment of that standard possible. A great deal of the apprehension that is expressed for the present and
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for the future has its foundation in a false philosophy, and a neglect of the most obvious teachings of history. We need not fear man nor his work. Whatever obligation the future may lay upon him he will manfully meet. And this brings me to the principal purpose of my address to-day. If we look backward we see the noble line of patient men and women, working out, in the face of discouragement and difficulty, the history which is theirs and ours to-day. Their work is com- pleted, at least so far as their active participation in it is con- cerned. But in the sense of there being in every good and generous deed, and in every noble life, a power of reproduc- tion and perpetuation, that work can never die. It must form an integral part of the future history of the town by whomso- ever that history shall be made. Looking forward, our eyes rest upon the youth to whom is committed the future destiny
of Riverhead Town. All it is ever to become they. must make it. It is an obligation that can neither be eluded nor shifted. It is an obligation that is individual and personal, it is yours and mine, and it cannot be relegated or assigned to other hands. I have hinted at the aids we are to have from the out- side, in the fact that we move right along in this wonderful current of scientific discovery, of the invention of machinery, of the literary products of an age that is singularly prolific of good literary work. All these things will be ours and all will contribute to our growth. But the future history of River- head Town depends not nearly so much on what you receive from the outside, as on what you evolve from the inside; not so much on what the world gives you, as on what you give the world; not so much from the contributions you receive from the busy brain workers in the world, as on the character of the work which you produce. Now, society has a perfectly legitimate expectation of you and me, and by so much as we defect that expectation, by so much do we subtract from the possible growth and development of the town or community . in which we live. The first thing that society has a right to demand of us is that we should produce something, that we
should be producers and not consumers merely. That don't necessarily mean that we must produce a Paradise Lost, or an Atlantic Cable, or a Corliss engine, or a painting like the As- cension of Christ. These are among the products of genius that stand out solitary and eminent, with a yawning gulf between them and the ordinary product of the average mind. Society don't demand that we be Shakespeares, or Bacons, or Raphaels, or Edisons. It only demands, and it has a perfect right to demand, that we produce the very best of honest work of which we are capable in the sphere in which we live, and that we do that all the time. It is your work, your brain, your arm, highly consecrated and conscientiously directed to the noblest ends, that are going to give to River- head Town all of worth that it will develop in the next one hundred years.
Don't make the mistake of setting up a false standard or criterion by which to measure your work. Above all, don't make the mistake of supposing that your sphere of action here in Riverhead Town is necessarily limited or proscribed. It is not always those who have reached distinction in what you feel are wider spheres and by shorter roads that have the most permanently enriched the age in which they lived. And right here and now it is your opportunity to do just as noble and just as lasting work as any the world has ever seen. Do you ask me how you can do this? Now, I can give you no settled or fixed rule by which you may achieve what the world calls success, or by means of which you may be secured against the possibility of what the world calls failure. I can formulate no principles for your guidance which will certainly bring to you fame or distinction. And possibly the very worst service I could render you would be to tabulate these rules, if any such there were. But I can tell you how your life may become a poten- tial force in the social history of Riverhead Town. It is by setting your ideal of life so high that character rather than rep- utation, duty rather than distinction, shall be the aim of your living. It is what weaim to do that exalts or belittles us. He
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who lives out a noble purpose, even in obscurity, so that he lives it out truly, is the benefactor of his race. ,I confess.to you that to me there is no more moving spectacle than to see the noble youth of our town, with a consciousness of the obli- gation they owe to the age in which they live, girding them- selves for the life struggle before them. It partakes of the highest qualities of heroism. They are going to meet unseen dangers. They know that a thousand foes are lurking in the dark to tempt them from the high standard of life and charac4 ter which they have set before them. But they are undaunted by all these things. The blood of Revolutionary sires courses in their veins. As they fought for freedom, so these will sternly strive to lay broad and deep the foundation of strong and enduring character. Like Emerson's hero, "they have not omitted the arming of the man. They have learned in season that they are born into the state of war, and that soci- ety and their own well-being require that they should not go dancing in the weeds of peace, but, warned; self-collected, and neither defying nor dreading the thunder, they take both reputation and life in their hands, and with perfect urbanity they dare the gibbet and the mob by the absolute truth of their speech, and the absolute rectitude of their behaviour." .I am not painting an imaginary struggle. I am not dealing .. . in rhetorical rhapsodies. I am outlining the conditions of the struggle that confronts every strong man and every earnest woman on the threshold of active life ---- conditions from which we can't escape, but from the right use of which the ripest fruits may be garnered and the proudest distinction gained. It is of the essence of all noble work that it carries with it its own compensation. "Work, " says the seer of Concord, " in every hour, paid or unpaid; see only that thou work, and thou canst not escape the reward; whether thy work be fine or coarse, planting corn or writing epics, so only it be honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn a reward to the senses as well as to the thought; no matter how often defeated, you are born to victory. The reward of a thing well
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done. is to have done it." Can you measure the moral power of the young life before me to-day, if it be so aroused and so directed? What method of calculation will you apply to the gross result of the interplay of such energies and forces in the social life of the next century?
Young man and young woman you live in an age . of mag- nificent opportunities. Those who lived and died a hundred years ago or more, have left you a precious heritage. I don't believe the sun shines upon a land where the rewards to honest toil are so swift and so sure as here. You are barred from no honorable calling by the accident of birth or the limitation of social caste. The only coat of arms that wins genuine homage here is the shield of personal honor and personal worth. And though you be born into a state of war, girded with that shield, the issue of the conflict is never doubtful. All that the broadest minds and the stoutest hearts have done, you may do. And the one grand lesson of this day and hour is that we live up to the measure of our opportunities. The Divine purpose with regard to man is moving on, and it will be wrought out with us if we stand in the van-guard, over us if we lag behind. The lessons of the past make the prophecy of the future sure. And we can help on the dawning of this brighter day. Will we do it?
" A sacred burden is the life ye bear; Look on it, lift it, bear it patiently, Stand up and walk beneath it steadfastly, Fail not for sorrow, falter not for sin, But onward, upward, till the goal ye win."
The benediction by Rev. Dr. Whitaker, of Southold, closed the profitable and enjoyable meeting. There were sports of various kinds at the Fair Grounds, and in the evening there was a very creditable display of fireworks set off on the south side of the river, near the water's edge, an excellent place for the purpose. The old lumber yard grounds, and
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vicinity opposite, were filled with a large crowd of village residents and people who had driven in to witness the show, and the expressions on all sides were that the display was one well worth seeing. At intervals, during the exhibition, the Riverhead Brass Band, from a position near Hallett's Mill, furnished inspiring strains of patriotic music, and altogether a successful and satisfactory celebration was thus fittingly brought to a brilliant close.
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