For greatness, not for money.
The great things of this world have not been done for the money that is in them.
They have been done for the greatness that is in them.
The grandeur of this world, that on which it turns as on a pivot, has been the work of intense natures seeking as a paramount prize the accomplishment of their work.
[
306]
A sense of responsibility in the gifted for the inadequate; compassion for the friendless; sympathy for the wronged, is the fine expression through human agents of the justice and love of the Creator.
It is the purest and most undefiled religion.
The high men of that old day gave to a Commonwealth characters which touched with their own beauty the very humblest who stood near them and looked up to them.
They were made in the image of their State; or, shall we say, their State was the mirror which threw back their image.
We see in them a certain repose in greatness and not the restless impatience of them who are forever agonizing to persuade themselves and others that they are great.
It was a Commonwealth whose binding link was sympathy; great, because of heartfelt sympathy with greatness.
The trouble with this civilization was not that it was too low, but that it was too high; not that it was beneath them who rallied against it, but that it was above.
Because she was true to her own tradition,
Virginia deserved to be called by
James Russell Lowell, ‘Mother of States and unpolluted men.’
Those ‘unpolluted men’ had the self-respect which springs from respect for others, and is rewarded by respect of others.
So grew
Virginia, as grows a high-born tree; spreading by slow degrees in the vital air of sympathy—a sympathy, wide and warm as her own tender sky.
At the first flight of the
Eagle of Union,
John Randolph, of
Roanoke, saw what he called the ‘poison under the wings.’
Through his life he fought with the gift divine of genius to expel it. Few there were who could withstand the power of that piercing eye. He knew how to impale the avowed high motive for the action that was mean; how, with a lash of flame to strip selfishness of all disguises; and they who writhed under his wrath abhorred the terrible truth of his veracious scorn.
The simulation of the ethics of love by the ethics of lust has been the arch mock to procure each recurring downfall of fair hope.
This simulation it was the mission of his fearless wisdom to lay bare with a consuming fury.
The sophisters could not entice him. He was peculiar, they said—too peculiar to be practical.
From of old God's people have been a ‘peculiar people.’
Doubtless, it is true, that in the modern sense no man could have said to him, ‘We are practical men.’
He had looked deep
[
307]
into realities.
For this reason his speech pierced through and through appearances.
To face the cohorts of the cupidities and to tell them to their teeth that their evil is not good is a role which appeals but freely to the opportunist.
The fearless speaker of the truth; the fearless scourger of the false, is not the popular idol.
His message is the great message of all freedom, the restraint of selfish power, the conquest of selfish passion, the conquest of self.
The freeman is he who recognizes the obligation of restraints, to break through which is anarchy.
Like this son of her ardent soul,
Virginia shrank not from ‘the cause of liberty in the
capitol.’
Her battle was to replace ‘the divine right of kings’ by the divine right of justice; to defend the simplicity of truth against the idols of the time.
She stood for that moral order which men may violate, but at their peril and to their ruin.
Can brute force, the law of the jungle, be supplanted by the moral law of justice, is the problem freedom undertakes to satisfy.
It is a struggle for the deep things of freedom; for the divine reality of a State, for living relations to eternal freedom.
Against the ever-recurring selfishness of States, slipping like a snake from skin to skin,
Virginia set her face like a flint.
She gave her challenge to that gross materialism which is the hereditary foe of man. Specious devices to make the welfare of all pay special tribute to the pockets of the few faced at every turn her ‘stern round tower’ of State's rights.
Until overthrown by force in 1865, you will search the statutes in vain for traces of her selfishness.
Everywhere she denied herself with a now forgotten grace.
On the threshhold of independence, her own
Bill of Rights had set forth the inherent rights of freemen.
First and foremost was their right to that government which ‘is most effectually secured against the danger of mal-administration;’ and the correlative of this, that power is held in trust for the people—the magistrates who exercise power being but trustees.
As privilege proceeds liberty recedes, was the doctrine of those ‘strict constructionists.’
The cheerful giver of the money of others did not strike those ‘
Virginia abstractionists,’ (derisively so-called) as a superlative phenomenon.
The ‘protection’ they demanded was protection from power—the protection of which patriotism is the reciprocal; security against a less abstracted
[
308]
class of ‘abstractionists,’ bent upon abstracting the property of others.
At the instance of the ‘corrupt squadron’ (the idiom borrowed from the lexicon of
Jefferson) to despoil the force (the common weal) confided by the whole and for the whole; the trust fund of the commons, was, in their eyes, to lay unhallowed hands on the mark of the covenant.
It was the fateful way to bring to the front what
Mr. Dooley calls, ‘those brave men elected by the taxpayer of
America to defend the hearths of the tax dodger of
America.’
