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One Hundred Thirty-two
THE FRA
lamation to the effect that henceforth they may
be mentally free.
This does not make them free, because freedom
is not a gift, it is an achievement.
Dr. Eliot merely supplies the opportunity to be
rational and yet be respectable.
Robert Ingersoll once said to the Rev. Minot
Savage, “You should be grateful to me, for
my radicalism has made yours respectable.”
Every item in the creed of what Dr. Eliot calls
“The New Religion, ” I have been proclaiming
for twenty-five years. Many of the people who
now accept Dr. Eliot’s New Religion have
dented my shield, and on my corduroys are the
stains of their rheum. Across my nose is the
mark of Torrigiano’s hammer.
I have been a scout of civilization-and I have
been on the picket-line. The main army has
often mistaken me for the enemy. But now the
main column has come up, Dr. Eliot riding ten
paces to the front. And at the head of his Legion
he reads the address which I have been twenty-
Eve years in preparing.
Do I then say that Dr. Eliot has been taught at
the feet of a farmer in East Aurora?
Not at all, although he reads the Warm Stuff.
He probably believed twenty years ago all
that he now states. The truths that Dr. Eliot
now expresses, and which I have been trying to
express by my pen, on the public platform, and
in my life, were first uttered by Pythagoras six
hundred years before Christ; by Socrates; by
Jesus of Nazareth; by Seneca the Aristocrat;
by Epictetus the Slave; by Marcus Aurelius the ‘
Roman Emperor; by Hypatia the first Martyr
to the New Thoughtetorn limb from limb in a
Christian Church; in degree by Cassiodorus, by
St.Benedict, and Francis of Assisi; by Bruno and
Galileo; by David Hume; by Thomas Paine,
Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson; by
Voltaire and Jean Jacques Rousseau; by that
courier of civilization, Robert G. Ingersoll,
All these stood for the grandeur of the human
intellect, and the sweet reasonableness of
allowing men to use their brains. And against
them, the Church, the Army and the State were
in league. For them the hemlock was brewed
the cross erected, the scaffold built; dungeons:
fettefss EYVES: hunger. disgrace, were their
portion, and for them the fagot-fires lighted the
heavens .9 .;t
The few who escaped torture did so only by
veiling their thoughts and saying things in a
language which the many could not understand.
All this down to the days of Robert Ingersoll,
who sacrificed nothing but the Governorship of
Illinois .5‘ .2‘
So to conclude: The marvel is not in what Dr.
Eliot says, but in the fact that he says it, and
that the people listen without resentment-
millions of them having themselves come to
the same conclusions.
As for the rest, if they still hug to their hearts
a savage fetich, a legacy from the brutal and
bloody past, they have the privilege, but they
can not longer apply to us the cheerful thumb-
screw if we fail to do goose-step when their
theological bagpipe plays.
When Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proc-
lamation, only one per cent of the colored
population could read or write. Now, fifty-eight
per cent can read and write. But not all colored
people are yet free. Many are in bonds to
ignorance, superstition, laziness, brute ap-
petites and incompetence.
In these respects the colored contingent is just
like the white population. In other words, the
colored brother is a black, yellow or liver-
colored imitation of a white man.
Dr. Eliot’s Proclamation is a right brave and
manly document. The time was ripe for its
issuance; for freedom stands a-tiptoe, like
jocund day, upon the mountain-top. Will we as
a people receive her?
.98
From the time of Balaam, every ass that is
asked to progress has seen the supernatural
blocking its pathway.
.99
HE futility of the “Higher Edu-
cation” is shown in that the
supremely great orators, writers;
poets, musicians, inventors;
artists and scientists have n0t
been college graduates-save in
a few such cases as, say, Darwin:
who said, “I owe nothing to 111)?
Alma Mater save the stimulus
derived from her disapproval.”
M The colleges produce a fine
mediocrity. The trail-makers,
like Shakespeare, ColumbU5s
Michelangelo, Humboldt, Benjamin Franklin;
Rodin: Herbert Spencer, Robert Burns, Robert
Owen, Richard Wagner, Abraham Lincoln, Of
Robert Ingersoll, were never subjected to the
Smmhering influences of the University.
The influence of the Super-Cad, as you find him
W=f>"’I 151.557‘
era ===
T
September .