Liberty and Mammon.
By the searchlight which the present throws back upon the past, he who wills to look may see, that they were not narrow, but wide visioned and far-sighted who foresaw what is to-day the paradoxical combine of liberty and mammon; who saw in this the likeness of another paradoxical joinder, spoken of as that of God and Mammon; and, in the partisans of paradox, another kind of strict construction; the strict construction of God and latitudinous construction of Mammon.
It was the part of statemanship to strike at the root of that which is to-day so resoundingly denounced as ‘predatory wealth;’ to strike at the source of malefaction rather than while leaving that in full force and effect, to blast with spiritual thunder the lineal malefactors; to strike fearlessly the cause, rather to seek to condone it by Ernulphus rhapsodies of Billingsgate—vociferous and vain-hurled upon the inevitable consequence.
Generosity with trust funds is parent of a multitude of evils; among the evils—Havemeyer being judge-parent of the predatory trusts, it is just now courtly to condemn.
True, by others the
Mother State was taunted with retrogression.
True, the
State which gave to the
Union not only the
Northwest territory, but the pastures of
Kentucky, was reduced thereby in territory and in wealth.
The rewards of sacrifice and cupidity are not the same.
When sacrifice grows lucrative it ceases to be sacrifice.
Virginia stood with all her power to prevent that spoilation by government which is twice cursed—cursing the spoiler and spoilee.
The contagion of free government was sought to be spread by example by intrinsic merit, not by corruption; not by subjugation.
There she stood, as afterwards
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at
Manassas stood her immortal son, ‘like a stone wall.’
How rich the moral return was shown in the day of her distress, when.
from the four corners of the earth her sons came trooping to her to lay all they had on earth upon the altar of sacrifice for—a mother!
In the high old Roman sense she could say: ‘These are my jewels.’
There came a day when
Virginia walked bejeweled from sacrifice to sacrifice—like the
Roman mother with her resplendent boys,
Washington at the beginning,
Lee at the end, of Federal Union, attest the ideal of a Commonwealth.
It was a simple and a grand old day when, in this city,
John Marshall might have been seen each morning wending his way to the
Old market, accompanied by the negro slave, who carried his basket for him. The line, dark and dangerous, between power and poverty had not then been drawn.
If it be replied ‘the relation between white master and black slave was just that line,’ I answer, it was no such dark and dangerous line as exists to-day between the extremes of wealth and poverty; between capital and labor.
The interval between
Marshall and
Marshall's Jack;
Wickham and
Wickham's Bob, was spanned by a bridge resting on the two great pillars of reverence and sympathy.
On these two is laid that structure of law and prophets which binds the
State together.
When the discussion was transferred to the forum of force, the proof was made conclusive that this government of honor, by honor, and for honor, was also the government of love, by love and for love.
They who had not shrunk from sacrifice, did not shrink from danger.
In language which cannot be obliterated, they said: ‘Our bosoms are one.’
The Virginia which had known how to live greatly knew also how to die greatly.
Death for country was ‘sweet and beautiful’ once more.
It is all a dreamland of the past; that garden of fragrance and bloom; of beauty and peace.
The dying landscape of that ‘First Garden’ of free government now wears the quaintness of a vanished age, haunting reminscence with a beautiful regret.
It is a memory and a mist.
When this Dominion ended,
Virginia could say, like the last of the
Judges—‘Whose ox have I taken: of whose hands have I received any bribe to blind my eyes therewith?’
With war's revolution the
Book of Judges closed, the
Book of
Kings was opened.