WHAT HUXLEY SAID OF AMERICA.
In an address given in Baltimore in 1876, after speaking in high terms of his admiration and of the greatness of this country, Professor Huxley said:— “Do not suppose that I am pandering to what is commonly understood by national pride. I can not say that I am in the slightest degree impressed by your figures, or your material resources, as such. Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation. The great issue, about which hangs a true sublimity, and the terror of overhanging fate, is what are you going to do with all of these things? What is to be the end to which these are to be the means? You are making a novel experiment in politics on the greatest scale which the world has yet seen. Forty millions at your first century, it is reasonably to be expected that, at the second, these States will be occupied by two hundred millions of English-speaking people, spread over an area as large as that of Europe, and with climates and interests as diverse as those of Spain and Scandinavia, England and Russia. “You and your descendants have to ascertain whether this great mass will hold together under the forms of a republic, and the despotic reality of universal suffrage; whether State rights will hold out against centralization without separation; whether centralization will get the better, without actual or disguised monarchy; whether shifting corruption is better than a permanent bureaucracy; and as population thickens in your great cities, and the pressure of want is felt, the gaunt specter of pauperism will stalk among you, and communism and socialism will claim to be heard. “Truly, America has a great future before her; great in toil, in care, and in responsibility; great in true glory if she can be guided in wisdom and righteousness; great in shame if she fail. I can not understand why other nations should envy you, or be blind to the fact that it is for the highest interest of mankind that you should succeed; but the one condition of success, your sole safeguard, is the moral worth and intellectual clearness of the individual citizen.” But the problem is still unsolved, and at the rate the country has “progressed” the last few years, especially in the matters of division in classes on the basis of wealth, religious legislation, centralization of government, and rebellion against the central government, how long will it be ere failure is written in revolution all over the land? “Righteousness exalteth a nation,” but it does not come through multiplication of law, nor can it be brought about by religious legislation. It is possible only by having righteousness dwell in individual hearts, and this can only come by faith in Jesus Christ.