USA > New York > Wyoming County > Warsaw > History of the centennial celebration : Warsaw, Wyoming County, New York, June 28-July 2, 1903 : 1803-1903 > Part 7
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When a young person first feels the zest of living, he is profoundly impressed by the importance of his own life to a man. His own needs, his own desires, the develop- ment of his own powers to the full in every direction- these seem to him enough.
But a few years, bringing him on toward middle life, change all this. Scarcely has he seen clearly the ends which he wishes to attain-scarcely has he nerved his heart and braced his soul for the contest-when there falls on him like a shadow the consciousness of the brevity of his own life here. If he has fixed his eye on anything really worth attaining, when life takes him in hand with its interposed obstacles, its checks and counter- cheeks, its absolute denials, and ruthless and wrenching losses, he soon comes to feel keenly the frailty of his own unaided grasp upon affairs, the slender import of any one man's life, if lived and regarded as a thing by itself. He feels the need of allying his life and its work with the life and work of others whose aims and efforts coin- cide with his own. He feels the wish to make his span of life attain to permanence-endure-by allying it with the lives of others-with the life of the town which he helps to build up and administer-with the life of an in- stitution that abides; that others may carry on when he
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shall have passed away. the work which he helped to begin. Through an alliance with social institutions in one form or another, every earnest and aspiring sont seeks to escape its body's doom of but a few days' existence here, and to perpetuate its influence when the right arm is palsied and the valid eye has lost its compelling power. There is reason, then, in the very nature of mankind, for such love of our native place-of the town where many of ns have spent years of our life-which binds ns together as sons and danghters, residents and friends of Warsaw. All ages unite in such a celebration. Memory, realization in the present, anticipation, all have their share here, as aged men and women recall the experience of their childhood, and children and ardent youth delight in the evidence of wide-spread interest in their village home.
The deeper the love of home, the stronger the love of country. The greater the depth of soil in which love of home roots itself, the stronger the growth of personality. A common interest in the anniversary of their native town, drawing together men and women from all parts of our broad land, makes us all better citizens of the town where we now dwell. For local ties build up strong per- sonality. And the interest which has drawn us all to this place and binds us together, is our consciousness of the shaping effect which our early life has had in determin- ing the personality of every man and woman of us. We come from different scenes and from various places. But the difference in onr surroundings in later life, the dif- ferences which mark off one from another in personal appearance, are as nothing compared with the differences which mark the intellectual, the emotional and the spir- itual experiences of the men and women who make up this audience. Every person differs in mind and soul from every other, in a far more marked degree than he differs in face and features. The latest results of bio- logical research lead ns to understand that in your phys- ical organization and in your mind there are stored np, organized under one principle of life and presided over by one will, tendencies to feeling and action, and stores of acquired experience, which represent the life of thousands of your ancestors through countless years of time and numberless generations. The general figure and the out-
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line of features of any one man, are so like those of another, that one would think it impossible to devise so many dif- fering faces as are shown in a great crowd of people. Yet, while the same general type marks all mankind, the physical differences in form and face and feature are marvellons, and we are filled with wonder if we see two persons so much alike that for a moment we hesitate in distinguishing their personality. Yet these outward dif- ferences in form and feature are as nothing compared to the differences of mind and spirit which set off one indi- viduality from another. That remote star in the awful, dark spaces of the heavens, is not so far removed from its neighbors, as is a human spirit in its isolation of in- dividuality, from all other spirits. This is the very essence of personality. If we had power to see the internal rec- ord made by one human spirit through all the years of its life, we should see as we look into each other's faces that every soul differs from every other soul more widely than one face can differ from another face.
" When a man dies," says Schopenhauer, "a world per- ishes-the world which he bore in his head." If a man's individuality was marked and strong, if he had skill to work with head or hand, if his technical knowledge was special and peculiar, we feel that the world is poorer by just so much subtracted from its working force. For knowledge to which he could turn at once, others must grope, in darkness or in half-light. The whole co-ordi- nated world of matter and mind that lay orderly and clear before his eyes, as far as our communication with him is concerned, has been resolved into its elements and dis- sipated. It is lost to us. So profoundly does nature teach us the value of a single well-directed life, the im- portance of each man's own personality, that we are ready to say emphatically, "When a man dies, a world perishes -the world he carried in his brain."
If the ceasing of a life among us is so serious a loss, the beginning of a conscious soul life is surely a matter of the gravest importance. a world of knowledge perishes when a man's eyes close in death, it is no less true that a world of knowledge begins to be, when a little child's soul opens to consciousness with
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the dawning of intelligence in its eyes. And when the eyes of little children begin to look out upon the world, character is plastic. The life is rapidly taking shape from its surroundings. It is this which gives to the years of early childhood their predominant influence in shaping the future life.
All we who were born in Warsaw, or who passed here the first years of our lives, have taken into the essence of our very being the physical surroundings of this village in the valley, and the intellectual standards and moral principles which through the personalities about us gave shape to our earliest impressions and eon- eeptions of life.
Recall your earliest memories. See how the whole world as you now know it, was held for you in the small circle of home and friends which surrounded you as a little child! Each type of man and woman you have sinee known, was there! The face of this or that one, known in the little eirele of your earliest childhood here has always sinee stood for you as a type. Take that self-sacrifieing, strong and helpful woman whom you best know-your mother, perhaps. Her face presents itself to you whether you will or not, when your thought turns to the class of characters to which you have sinee learned to know that she belonged. In those early days when your life was taking color from its surround- ings and shape from every touch given it, your mother was the incarnate class-the type and the individual in one.
Even the points of the compass as you first learned them in your father's home, here in Warsaw-how un- changeably the look of the landscape, North and East, is printed on your memory ! Is it not the experience of many of us, to this day, that when in strange surround- ings we wish to "orient" ourselves as the French phrase it, to "make our East and North come right," we go back involuntarily to the early home? Do you not get your North and East in strange places by placing your- self in thought among the old surroundings of your earlier home here in the happy valley?
So in your standards of taste, of social intercourse,
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and above all, of morals, however much we may think we have changed, the earliest standards of our home in childhood, again and again present themselves with the feeling that here is after all the true form,-the real, fixed standard. These things and these persons were about us when there was in process of creation that little ordered universe, that world, that microcosm of conscious existence which each one of us carries with us through life. The elements of all our subsequent ex- perience were there. It sometimes seems as if, since those early years, we had been always standing at the eenter of a sphere which has widened and enlarged as the walls of the bubble you blow grow away from its eenter, always reflecting the same world, but in an ever larger sphere, on a constantly broadening seale? We who were born in Warsaw, if we would, ean never es- cape from the effect of this early environment. The world as we then knew it, the strong personalities which were then nearest to us, must always be con- ditioning elements in our life. This permanence of early impressions is never lost. You cannot get away from the associations of early youth. The skilled natur- alist ean tell by careful analysis of a section from the bone of an animal something of the territory and the soil where that animal was bred. And we are all our life of Warsaw. Warsaw is in the very marrow of your bones !
We never cease to feel the influence of those early days. The ideals and the friendships of childhood and youth, go with us through life! At unexpected times and in unlooked for ways they come back to us. I was in the gallery in the dome of St. Paul's Church in Lon- don, some years ago, and the guide had stationed us at one focus of the "Whispering Gallery," and said to us, "Now, whisper into the wall. I see a party of visitors on the other side of the focus, and undoubtedly they will answer." You know how the power of language for- sakes you when brought face to face with a blank wall. " What shall I say?" I asked. "Anything," was the answer. After a moment of stupid silence, the reeollee- tion of the cadenees of a dearly loved Greek professor came to me, and I recited a couplet from Byron's verses,
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"The Isles of Greece, the Isles of Greece," as he used to recite them to us.
To my utter surprise there came whispered back the next few lines of those verses, with the same familiar in- flection, and the question, "Who is over there who knew dear old 'Kai Gar'?" Passing around the circle, I found an old college friend, an Alpha Delta of my own chap- ter and my own time in college,-now President Taylor of Vassar College, and together we went up into the dome of St. Paul's and looking down on the London lying be- low us, we talked over the "long plans " of youth. Each one had thought the other thousands of miles away. Thus the voices and the faces of our earliest friends come back to us at unexpected times and places, through our late life. In the extreme Southwest of our broad land, at Los Angeles, California, three or four years ago, I was the guest of a club of that city at a dinner, where I found next me as a guest on the same occasion, one whom I had not seen since we parted in the school yard near the old stone academy building, on Main street here in Warsaw, nearly forty years before. I remember as if it were yesterday, the day when David Starr Jordan first appeared on the play ground, coming from his home in Gainesville. Sheffield, for many years now the honored missionary president of the Presbyterian College in North China, was lithe, slender and active among the older students of the academy; Jordan was tall, bashful, and a little slow in making acquaintance. I can see Sheffield now as he shouted to him, "Jordan, make a back" and running swiftly toward him, as Jordan turned, placed his hands on Jordan's shoulders and vaulted lightly over his head. The inevitable effort to pun upon his name by declaring that "Sheffield was safe because he had gone over Jordan,'" I remember was promptly seized upon by one of the younger boys. I remember, too, the astonishment in the old school-room when the new boy, JJordan, met a challenging call from Principal O. H. Stevens of the Academy, who had brought before the Botany class a specimen of grass that could not be identified, and had noticed signs of interest on the face of the new student sitting near the back of the study room, who was not a
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member of the class, and had said to him : " No one seems able to identify this grass; Mr. Jordan, I see that you look as if you knew something about it. Can you tell us?" Jordan, a born naturalist, had been silent, but was quivering with interest. At the challeng- ing question, the modest youth arose in his place, as the blade of a jack-knife rises with a straight spring, and began to pour out a flood of information nyon the speci- men of grass in question, giving its species and group and habitat, until he was stopped by the teacher for the very voluminousness of his knowledge. It was evident that we had among us a genius in natural science. Dr. Jordan's brilliant career at Cornell and at the University of Indiana, and now as president of Leland-Stanford University, in California, has not been a surprise to those who knew his interest in Natural Science in his school- boy days here at Warsaw. Nor was it a surprise to me, when at this dinner given by one hundred young college Alumni who were gathered at Los Angeles, after I had referred to this carly incident, to hear the same inevita- ble tendency to pun upon the name perpetuated, and when President Jordan arose to respond, to hear the whole crowd break out into singing the rich refrain of the negro hymn, "I want to go to heaven when I die, to hear old Jordan roll." I need not tell you who watch the work of that strong educator on the Pacific coast, that President Jordan met the chorus in the same good natured spirit, and looking the crowd in the eye, de- manded, "What's the matter with Jordan?" to which came the deafening shout, "He's all right." And then our early friend began his excellent little speech to them.
But it is not simply in a group of college presidents such as Sheffield of North China, Dr. Smith, who has just resigned the Presidency of Trinity College, whose early home was here on the East Hill just above the village, and David Starr Jordan, whose influence in educational matters so largely dominates the California coast; but in other cireles, wherever one travels, the old friendships, the old faces. are to be found, I was traveling by stage from Flagstaff, Arizona, down to that wonderful scenery in the Grand Canon, with Dr. W. T. Harris, United States Commissioner of Education, and President Nicholas Murray
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Butler of Columbia College, three years since, when we were joined by one of the most prominent city superin- tendents of the country and his very agreeable wife, and as we were introduced, her first sentence was, "Fre- member you from the early days, for I was a Miss Small- wood of Warsaw."
It was not at all wonderful that I should have met in Africa beneath the shadows of the Pyramids, Warsaw memories incarnate in you, Mr. Chairman; (Judge E. E. Farman, formerly Consul General of the United States at Cairo), for at that time you represented America and home to hundreds of our countrymen who went through Egypt. But memories of our county and village came to me very unexpectedly, in an after echo of those days in Egypt with you. It was twenty years ago, when Presi- dent Arthur was in the White House and I was spend- ing a few days in Washington, when Ex-Senator Freling- huysen, then Secretary of State, brought to my hotel a message that President Arthur would like to see me next morning at the White House. The Secretary of State, who was a Trustee of Rutgers College, kindly suggested to me that he would call with me at the White House in the morning. When we were shown into the waiting room, word came that President Arthur had been detained, and had not completed his breakfast. Mr. Frelinghuysen, as a privileged member of the Cabinet, went through to the next room, and returning in a few moments said that General Grant was in the next room waiting to see Pres- ident Arthur, and would I not like to meet him? It was most natural that I should speak to General Grant of that comparatively reeent journey through Egypt which he had just made under your guidanee, Mr. Chairman, a few months before I had profited by the same kindly guidance in visiting some of the same scenes. 1 asked General Grant if he had not been surprised at the bril- liance of the colors in the Egyptian hieroglyphics. "Yes," said he, "and particularly in those of the tomb of Ti. But there is not a word about that tomb in my book," he added. "I cannot write at all you know: and I took Mr. Young with me to write up the journey; and the day before we visited the tomb of Ti, the Arabs who guided us to the dark chamber in the heart of the Great
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Pyramid blew out the torehes, and demanded "baeksheesh." This so frightened Mr. Young that he would not go next day with me to the tomb of Ti; and so there is not a word about these wonderful hieroglyphs in my book!" This very modest estimate of his ability to write, I give yon as noteworthy in the man who within two or three years showed himself master of that perfect style which has made his military memoirs one of the classies of the language. In a few moments President Arthur entered, tall, perfectly dressed and courtly in manner. To my surprise, he began the conversation by referring to Wyo- ming County and to his early days at Perry, and his boyish admiration for the character of my father, Seth M. Gates. So the friendly associations with Warsaw, through you and General Grant in Egypt, link themselves to memories of Perry Lake and Warsaw picnics; and in the only conversation I ever had with General Grant, it was an especial gratification to have the sterling virtues of one dear to me, whose life was not without its strong influence in shaping the ideals of Warsaw, thus unex- pectedly and affectionately recalled by the President of the United States, who as a boy had felt the influence of my father's character while he was in public life.
But one could multiply such instances of early associa- tions sometimes limiting and often blessing our later life, in countless numbers; as for instance, when you (pointing to Henry Merrill, one of the Editors of the New York World, and who had delivered the previous ad- dress)-Mr. Editor, to all who knew Warsaw in the 60's pre-eminently the Warsaw editor, gave me letters of in- troduction to two youthful editors and friends of yours at Albany, New York, when I went from college and be- gan my work in life as Principal of the Boy's Academy in that fine old Dutch town, our state Capital. I climbed the back stairs of the office of the Albany
scissors in
Journal and found Charles Emory Smith, hand, before the paste-pot, and was cordially received by him upon your friendly introduction. And presenting the other letter in the editorial room of the Albany Ex- press, a life-long acquaintance and friendship with that
:
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inimitable after-dinner raconteur, Will H. MeElroy, was begun by a letter given by one Warsaw boy to another. Fifteen years later, and now quite fifteen years ago, yon and I were of the party of a dozen who tendered a farewell dinner at Delmonico's to the ont-going Minister of the United States to Russia, Charles Emory Smith, now editor of the Philadelphia Press, and recently post- master general, in Mckinley's administration. He was one of the trio of editors with whom these letters brought me into relation; McElroy, another of them, was then writing the leaders in Horace Greeley's New York Tribune; while Mr. Whitelaw Reid was represent- ing our country at Paris; and you yourself had then be- gun to preside over the great editorial forces of the New York World. But there is hardly a Warsaw boy in this audience who could not parallel these incidents from his own experience. Like the remembered tone and peal of the early church-bells here in the valley-a sound that has rung out startlingly clear in memory to many of ns in distant parts of the earth-the friend- slips, the feelings and the standards of our early Warsaw life are with us through all our later years.
Since early associations thus follow us through life, since a common experience in this beautiful environment of these hills and this valley, has gone into the person- ality of each one of us, it is well for us that those who gave tone and color to the life of Warsaw, were men and women of sterling character, of high principle, of steadfast purpose and tireless will. If the standards of morality in the first half century of the life of this town had not been set high and kept high by men and women of lofty character, our debt to our environment would be far less than we now feel it to be. I need not dwell upon this fact, for none of the older men and women here can fail to recognize it; and the ad- dresses of these last days must have impressed it afresh upon the thought of the youngest who are here. After all, example is the mightiest teacher. To have spent one's boyhood in a community where even a few strong personalities of lofty aim and resolute purpose were liv-
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ing their daily life, is to have received an impulse toward right living and high achievement such as can come from no other source
Not merely local pride, but a true appreciation of the meaning of American life, and intelligent patriotism, re- sult from spending one's early life in that stimulating atmosphere of a community where there is keen interest in social and political reforms and an unselfish regard for the welfare of the whole race. After all, the fireside is the focus of patriotism. Love of country begins at home, and shows itself in love of home and home insti- tutious. And local interest in affairs of local govern- ment and local welfare, underlies all sound patriotism. It was the Greek's intense love of his own city, which gave to the world the word "politics"-a Greek word which means "city affairs." But with the Greek the state was a city state; and "city affairs," "politics," thus came to mean affairs of government, affairs that have to do with the management of the national life, the political state. The habit of Greek thought in thus identifying city and fatherland, the spirit of Greek local patriotism which refused to know any political ties of state or nation beyond his own city, has given definite- ness and intensity to the political thinking of Europe for over twenty-five hundred years. And while the great national states of modern times have a broader and a far truer conception of the state, and have cast aside the uarrow limitations of the Greek view, it remains au unchanging law of human nature-nowhere more clearly recognized or more firmly rooted than in our American system of local self-government as essential to the strong- est national life,-that a true love of one's home is the basis of all sound love of country. The man who is not a good neighbor is not a true patriot. The citizen who truly loves his country, loves, too, his own town, cares for the local interests and the political and social well-being of his village, his township, his own ward and district. If we are truly loyal citizens of the United States, we are truly devoted to the welfare of the com- monwealth, the town, the city where lies our own home.
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And the local feeling which is strengthened by the ob- servance of "home-week " and by such a Centennial celebration as this, should strengthen our love of our American institutions, and render us more keenly alive to the value of high ideals of local self.government in their influence mpon our general government and our national life.
If the tendency of popular government is, as Bryce has told us, "to make the individual count for less, while the mass connts for more, " how absolutely essential it is to the success of our American system of self-goverment, that each community vatne highly its own social and political standards, and that cach citizen hold his own manhood in esteem as a sacred trust, and by active participation in the social and political life of his community and of the nation make the most of himself and of his oppor- thuities. In no way can we serve the State more truly than by doing all that lies in our power to strengthen the personality, to enlighten the conscience, to deveion the will power of every citizen with whom we come into relation.
The charge that I bring against the men of our day, is that we undervalue the force of the individual will. The tendency to organize, to incorporate, leads mien to overlook the worth, the power of one man's personality. But the greater the organization, the greater the demand that arises for strong men of the right spirit, to direct it. In the end, experience with corporations and organ- izations, like every other phase in the history of our American institutions, lays ever increasing emphasis upon the value of a strong personality, upon the worth of one man.
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