ODEON HALL AND THE LOWELL INSTITUTE,

AT THE CORNER OF

FEDERAL AND FRANKLIN STREETS IN BOSTON

“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project The Lowell Institute HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1838

March 12, Monday: Waldo Emerson presented “War” to the American Peace Society in the Odeon Hall of Boston. Here is the lecture, as it was later reprocessed for printing in ÆSTHETIC PAPERS: It has been a favorite study of modern philosophy, to indicate the steps of human progress, to watch the rising of a thought in one man’s mind, the communication of it to a few, to a small minority, its expansion and general reception, until it publishes itself to the world by destroying the existing laws and institutions, and the generation of new. Looked at in this general and historical way, many things wear a very different face from that they show near by, and one at a time, — and, particularly, war. War, which, to sane men at the present day, begins to look like an epidemic insanity, breaking out here and there like the cholera or influenza, infecting men’s brains instead of their bowels, — when seen in the remote past, in the infancy of society, appears a part of the connection of events, and, in its place, necessary. As far as history has preserved to us the slow unfoldings of any savage tribe, it is not easy to see how war could be avoided by such wild, passionate, needy, ungoverned, strong-bodied creatures. For in the infancy of society, when a thin population and improvidence make the supply of food and of shelter insufficient and very precarious, and when hunger, thirst, ague, and frozen limbs universally take precedence of the wants of the mind and the heart, the necessities of the strong will certainly be satisfied at the cost of the weak, at whatever peril of future revenge. It is plain, too, that, in the first dawnings of the religious sentiment, that blends itself with their passions, and is oil to the fire. Not only every tribe has war-gods, religious festivals in victory, but religious wars. The student of history acquiesces the more readily in this copious bloodshed of the early annals, bloodshed in God’s name too, when be learns that it is a temporary and preparatory state, and does actively forward the culture of man. War educates the senses, calls into action the will, perfects the physical constitution, brings men into such swift and close collision in critical moments that man measures man. On its own scale, on the virtues it loves, it endures no counterfeit, but shakes the whole society, until every atom falls into the place its specific gravity assigns it. It presently finds the value of good sense and of foresight, and Ulysses takes rank next to Achilles. The leaders, picked men of a courage and vigor tried and augmented in fifty battles, are emulous to distinguish themselves above each other by new merits, as clemency, hospitality, splendor of living. The people imitate the chiefs. The strong tribe, in which war has become an art, attack and conquer their neighbours, and teach them their arts and virtues. New territory, augmented numbers, and extended interests call HDT WHAT? INDEX

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out new virtues and abilities, and the tribe makes long strides. And, finally, when much progress has been made, all its secrets of wisdom and art are disseminated by its invasions. Plutarch, in his essay “On the Fortune of Alexander,” considers the invasion and conquest of the East by Alexander as one of the most bright and pleasing pages in history; and it must be owned, he gives sound reason for his opinion. It had the effect of uniting into one great interest the divided commonwealths of Greece, and infusing a new and more enlarged public spirit into the councils of their statesmen. It carried the arts and language and philosophy of the Greeks into the sluggish and barbarous nations of Persia, Assyria, and India. It introduced the arts of husbandry among tribes of hunters and shepherds. It weaned the Scythians and Persians from some cruel and licentious practices, to a more civil way of life. It introduced the sacredness of marriage among them. It built seventy cities, and sowed the Greek customs and humane laws over Asia, and united hostile nations under one code. It brought different families of the human race together,—to blows at first, but afterwards to truce, to trade, and to intermarriage. It would be very easy to show analogous benefits that have resulted from military movements of later ages. Considerations of this kind lead us to a true view of the nature and office of war. We see, it is the subject of all history; that it has been the principal employment of the most conspicuous men; that it is at this moment the delight of half the world, of almost all young and ignorant persons; that it is exhibited to us continually in the dumb show of brute nature, where war between tribes, and between individuals of the same tribe, perpetually rages. The microscope reveals miniature butchery in atomies and infinitely small biters, that swim and fight in an illuminated drop of water; and the little globe is HDT WHAT? INDEX

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but a too faithful miniature of the large.

What does all this war, beginning from the lowest races and reaching up to man, signify? Is it not manifest that it covers a great and beneficent principle, which nature had deeply at heart? What is that principle?—It is self-help. Nature implants with life the instinct of self-help, perpetual struggle to be, to resist opposition, to attain to freedom, to attain to a mastery, and the security of a permanent, self-defended being; and to each creature these objects are made so dear, that it risks its life continually in the struggle for these ends. But whilst this principle, necessarily, is inwrought into the fabric of every creature, yet it is but one instinct; and though a primary one, or we may say the very first, yet the appearance of the other instincts immediately modifies and controls this; turns its energies into harmless, useful, and high courses, showing thereby what was its ultimate design; and, finally, takes out its fangs. The instinct of self-help is very early HDT WHAT? INDEX

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unfolded in the coarse and merely brute form of war, only in the childhood and imbecility of the other instincts, and remains in that form, only until their development. It is the ignorant and childish part of mankind that is the fighting part. Idle and vacant minds want excitement, as all boys kill cats. Bull- baiting, cockpits, and the boxer’s ring, are the enjoyment of the part of society whose animal nature alone has been developed. In some parts of this country, where the intellectual and moral faculties have as yet scarcely any culture, the absorbing topic of all conversation is whipping; who fought, and which whipped? Of man, boy, or beast, the only trait that much interests the speakers is the pugnacity. And why? Because the speaker has as yet no other image of manly activity and virtue, none of endurance, none of perseverance, none of charity, none of the attainment of truth. Put him into a circle of cultivated men, where the conversation broaches the great questions that besiege the human reason, and he would be dumb and unhappy, as an Indian in church. To men of a sedate and mature spirit, in whom is any know. ledge or mental activity, the detail of battle becomes insupportably tedious and revolting. It is like the talk of one of those monomaniacs, whom we sometimes meet in society, — who converse on horses; and Fontenelle expressed a volume of meaning, when he said, “I hate war, for it spoils conversation.” Nothing is plainer than that the sympathy with war is a juvenile and temporary state. Not only the moral sentiment, but trade, learning, and whatever makes intercourse, conspire to put it down. Trade, as all men know, is the antagonist of war. Wherever there is no property, the people will put on the knapsack for bread; but trade is instantly endangered and destroyed. And, moreover, trade brings men to look each other in the face, and gives the parties the knowledge that these enemies over sea or over the mountain are such men as we; who laugh and grieve, who love and fear, as we do. And learning and art, and especially religion, weave ties that make war look like fratricide, as it is. And as all history is the picture of war, as we have said, so it is no less true that it is the record of the mitigation and decline of war. Early in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Italian cities had grown so populous and strong, that they forced the rural nobility to dismantle their castles, which were dens of cruelty, and come and reside in the towns. The Popes, to their eternal honor, declared religious jubilees, during which all hostilities were suspended throughout Christendom, and man had a breathing space. The increase of civility has abolished the use of poison and of torture, once supposed as necessary as navies now. And, finally, the art of war—what with gunpowder and tactics—has made, as all men know, battles less frequent and less murderous. By all these means, war has been steadily on the decline; and we read with astonishment of the beastly fighting of the old times. Only in Elizabeth’s time, out of the European waters, piracy was all but universal. The proverb was, — “No peace beyond HDT WHAT? INDEX

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the line;” and the seamen shipped on the buccaneer’s bargain, “No prey, no pay.” In 1588, the celebrated Cavendish, who was thought in his times a good Christian man, wrote thus to Lord Hunsdon, on his return from a voyage round the world: — “Sept. 1588. It hath pleased Almighty God to suffer me to circumpass the whole globe of the world, entering in at the Strait of Magellan, and returning by the Cape of Buena Esperanca; in which voyage, I have either discovered or brought certain intelligence of all the rich places of the world, which were ever discovered by any Christian. I navigated along the coast of Chili, Peru, and New Spain, where I made great spoils. I burnt and sunk nineteen sail of ships, small and great. All the villages and towns that ever I landed at, I burned and spoiled. And had I not been discovered upon the coast, I had taken great quantity of treasure. The matter of most profit to me was a great ship of the king’s, which I took at California,” &c. and the good Cavendish piously begins this statement, — “It hath pleased Almighty God.” Indeed, our American annals have preserved the vestiges of barbarous warfare down to more recent times. I read in Williams’s History of Maine, that “Assacombuit, the Sagamore of the Anagunticook tribe, was remarkable for his turpitude and ferocity above all other known Indians; that, in 1705, Vaudreuil sent him to France, where he was introduced to the king, When he appeared at court, he lifted up his hand, and said, ’This hand has slain a hundred and fifty of your majesty’s enemies within the territories of New England.’ This so pleased the king, that he knighted him, and ordered a pension of eight livres a day to be paid him during life.” This valuable person, on his return to America, took to killing his own neighbors and kindred with such appetite, that his tribe combined against him, and would have killed him, had he not fled his country for ever. The scandal which we feel in such facts certainly shows, that we have got on a little. All history is the decline of war, though the slow decline. All that society has yet gained is mitigation: the doctrine of the right of war still remains. For ages (for ideas work in ages, and animate vast societies of men) the human race has gone on under the tyranny—shall I so call it?—of this first brutish form of their effort to be men; that is, for ages they have shared so much of the nature of the lower animals, the tiger and the shark, and the savages of the water-drop. They have nearly exhausted all the good and all the evil of this form: they have held as fast to this degradation, as their worst enemy could desire; but all things have an end, and so has this. The eternal germination of the better has unfolded new powers, new instincts, which were really concealed under this rough and base rind. The sublime question has startled one and another happy soul in different quarters of the globe. Cannot love be, as well as hate? Would not love answer the same end, or even a better? Cannot peace be, as well as war? This thought is no man’s invention, neither St. Pierre’s nor Rousseau’s, but the rising of the general tide in the human HDT WHAT? INDEX

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soul,—and rising highest, and first made visible, in the most simple and pure souls, who have therefore announced it to us beforehand; but presently we all see it. It has now become so distinct as to be a social thought: societies can be formed on it. It is expounded, illustrated, defined, with different degrees of clearness; and its actualization, or the measures it should inspire, predicted according to the light of each seer. The idea itself is the epoch; the fact that it has become so distinct to any small number of persons as to become a subject of prayer and hope, of concert and discussion,—that is the commanding fact. This having come, much more will follow. Revolutions go not backward. The star once risen, though only one man in the hemisphere has yet seen its upper limb in the horizon, will mount and mount, until it becomes visible to other men, to multitudes, and climbs the zenith of all eyes. And so, it is not a great matter how long men refuse to believe the advent of peace: war is on its last legs; and a universal peace is as sure as is the prevalence of civilization over barbarism, of liberal governments over feudal forms. The question for us is only, How soon? That the project of peace should appear visionary to great numbers of sensible men; should appear laughable, even, to numbers; should appear to the grave and good-natured to be embarrassed with extreme practical difficulties, — is very natural. “This is a poor, tedious society of yours,” they say: “we do not see what good can come of it. Peace! why, we are all at peace now. But if a foreign nation should wantonly insult or plunder our commerce, or, worse yet, should land on our shores to rob and kill, you would not have us sit, and be robbed and killed? You mistake the times; you overestimate the virtue of men. You forget, that the quiet which now sleeps in cities and in farms, which lets the wagon go unguarded and the farm-house unbolted, rests on the perfect understanding of all men; that the musket, the halter, and the jail stand behind there, perfectly ready to punish any disturber of it. All admit, that this would be the best policy, if the world were all a church, if all men were the best men, if all would agree to accept this rule. But it is absurd for one nation to attempt it alone.” In the first place, we answer, that we never make much account of objections which merely respect the actual state of the world at this moment, but which admit the general expediency and permanent excellence of the project. What is the best must be the true; and what is true –that is, what is at bottom fit and agreeable to the constitution of man– must at last prevail over all obstruction and all opposition. There is no good now enjoyed by society, that was not once as problematical and visionary as this. It is the tendency of the true interest of man to become his desire and steadfast aim. But, farther, it is a lesson, which all history teaches wise men, to put trust in ideas, and not in circumstances. We have all grown up in the sight of frigates and navy yards, of armed forts and islands, of arsenals and militia. The reference to any HDT WHAT? INDEX

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foreign register will inform us of the number of thousand or million men that are now under arms in the vast colonial system of the British empire, of Russia, Austria, and France; and one is scared to find at what a cost the peace of the globe is kept. This vast apparatus of artillery, of fleets, of stone bastions and trenches and embankments; this incessant patrolling of sentinels; this waving of national flags; this reveillée and evening gun; this martial music, and endless playing of marches, and singing of military and naval songs, seem to us to constitute an imposing actual, which will not yield, in centuries, to the feeble, deprecatory voices of a handful of friends of peace. Thus always we are daunted by the appearances; not seeing that their whole value lies at bottom in the state of mind. It is really a thought that built this portentous war-establishment, and a thought shall also melt it away. Every nation and every man instantly surround themselves with a material apparatus which exactly corresponds to their moral state, or their state of thought. Observe how every truth and every error, each a thought of some man’s mind, clothes itself with societies, houses, cities, language, ceremonies, newspapers. Observe how every truth and every error, each a thought of some man’s mind, clothes itself with societies, houses, cities, language, ceremonies, newspapers. Observe the ideas of the present day,— orthodoxy, skepticism, missions, popular education, temperance, anti-masonry, anti-slavery; see how each of these abstractions has embodied itself in an imposing apparatus in the community; and how timber, brick, lime, and stone have flown into convenient shape, obedient to the master-idea reigning in the minds of many persons. You shall hear, some day, of a wild fancy, which some man has in his brain, of the mischief of secret oaths. Come again, one or two years afterwards, and you shall see it has built great houses of solid wood and brick and mortar. You shall see an hundred presses printing a million sheets; you shall see men and horses and wheels made to walk, run, and roll for it: this great body of matter thus executing that one man’s wild thought. This happens daily, yearly about us, with half thoughts, often with flimsy lies, pieces of policy and speculation. With good nursing, they will last three or four years, before they will come to nothing. But when a truth appears,—as, for instance, a perception in the wit of one Columbus, that there is land in the Western Sea; though he alone of all men has that thought, and they all jeer,—it will build ships; it will build fleets; it will carry over half Spain and half England; it will plant a colony, a state, nations, and half a globe full of men. We surround ourselves always, according to our freedom and ability, with true images of ourselves in things, whether it be ships or books, or cannons or churches. The standing army, the arsenal, the camp, and the gibbet do not appertain to man. They only serve as an index to show where man is now; what a bad, ungoverned temper he has; what an ugly neighbor he is; how his affections halt; how low his hope lies. He who loves the bristle HDT WHAT? INDEX

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of bayonets, only sees in their glitter what beforehand he feels in his heart. It is avarice and hatred; it is that quivering lip, that cold, hating eye, which builded magazines and powder- houses. It follows, of course, that the least change in the man will change his circumstances; the least enlargement of his ideas, the least mitigation of his feelings, in respect to other men; if, for example, he could be inspired with a tender kindness to the souls of men, and should come to feel that every man was another self, with whom he might come to join, as left hand works with right. Every degree of the ascendancy of this feeling would cause the most striking changes of external things: the tents would be struck; the men-of-war would rot ashore; the arms rust; the cannon would become street-posts; the pikes, a fisher’s harpoon; the marching regiment would be a caravan of emigrants, peaceful pioneers at the fountains of the Wabash and the Missouri. And so it must and will be: bayonet and sword must first retreat a little from their present ostentatious prominence; then quite hide themselves, as the sheriff’s halter does now, inviting the attendance only of relations and friends; and then, lastly, will be transferred to the museums of the curious, as poisoning and torturing tools are at this day. War and peace thus resolve themselves into a mercury of the state of cultivation. At a certain stage of his progress, the man fights, if he be of a sound body and mind. At a certain higher stage, he makes no offensive demonstration, but is alert to repel injury, and of an unconquerable heart. At a still higher stage, he comes into the region of holiness; passion has passed away from him; his warlike nature is all converted into an active medicinal principle; he sacrifices himself, and accepts with alacrity wearisome tasks of denial and charity; but, being attacked, he bears it, and turns the other cheek, as one engaged, throughout his being, no longer to the service of an individual, but to the common soul of all men. Since the peace question has been before the public mind, those who affirm its right and expediency have naturally been met with objections more or less weighty. There are cases frequently put by the curious,—moral problems, like those problems in arithmetic, which in long winter evenings the rustics try the hardness of their heads in ciphering out. And chiefly it is said, — Either accept this principle for better, for worse, carry it out to the end, and meet its absurd consequences; or else, if you pretend to set an arbitrary limit, a “Thus far, no farther,” then give up the principle, and take that limit which the common sense of all mankind has set, and which distinguishes offensive war as criminal, defensive war as just. Otherwise, if you go for no way, then be consistent, and give up self-defence in the highway, in your own house. Will you push it thus far? Will you stick to your principle of non-resistance, when your strong-box is broken open, when your wife and babes are insulted and slaughtered in your sight? If you say yes, you only invite the robber and assassin; and a few bloody-minded desperadoes would HDT WHAT? INDEX

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soon butcher the good. In reply to this charge of absurdity on the extreme peace doctrine, as shown in the supposed consequences, I wish to say, that such deductions consider only one half of the fact. They look only at the passive side of the friend of peace, only at his passivity; they quite omit to consider his activity. But no man, it may be presumed, ever embraced the cause of peace and philanthropy, for the sole end and satisfaction of being plundered and slain. A man does not come the length of the spirit of martyrdom, without some active purpose, some equal motive, some flaming love. If you have a nation of men who have risen to that height of moral cultivation that they will not declare war or carry arms, for they have not so much madness left in their brains, you have a nation of lovers, of benefactors, of true, great, and able, men. Let me know more of that nation; I shall not find them defenceless, with idle hands springing at their sides. I shall find them men of love, honor, and truth; men of an immense industry; men whose influence is felt to the end of the earth; men whose very look and voice carry the sentence of honor and shame; and all forces yield to their energy and persuasion. Whenever we see the doctrine of peace embraced by a nation, we may be assured it will not be one that invites injury; but one, on the contrary, which has a friend in the bottom of the heart of every man, even of the violent and the base; one against which no weapon can prosper; one which is looked upon as the asylum of the human race, and has the tears and the blessings of mankind. In the second place, as far as it respects individual action in difficult and extreme cases, I will say, such cases seldom or never occur to the good and just man; nor are we careful to say, or even to know, what in such crises is to be done. A wise man will never impawn his future being and action, and decide beforehand what he shall do in a given extreme event. Nature and God will instruct him in that hour. The question naturally arises, How is this new aspiration of the human mind to be made visible and real? How is it to pass out of thoughts into things? Not, certainly, in the first place, in the way of routine and mere forms, — the universal specific of modern politics; not by organizing a society, and going through a course of resolutions and public manifestoes, and being thus formally accredited to the public, and to the civility of the newspapers. We have played this game to tediousness. In some of our cities, they choose noted duellists as presidents and officers of antiduelling societies. Men who love that bloated vanity called public opinion, think all is well if they have once got their bantling through a sufficient course of speeches and cheerings, of one, two, or three public meetings, as if they could do any thing: they vote and vote, cry hurrah on both sides, no man responsible, no man caring a pin. The next season, an Indian war, or an aggression on our commerce by Malays; or the party this man votes with, have an appropriation to carry through Congress: instantly HDT WHAT? INDEX

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he wags his head the other way, and cries, Havoc and war! This is not to be carried by public opinion, but by private opinion, by private conviction, by private, dear, and earnest love. For the only hope of this cause is in the increased insight, and it is to be accomplished by the spontaneous teaching, of the cultivated soul, in its secret experience and meditation, — that it is now time that it should pass out of the state of beast into the state of man; it is to hear the voice of God, which bids the devils, that have rended and torn him, come out of him, and let him now be clothed and walk forth in his right mind. Nor, in the next place, is the peace principle to be carried into effect by fear. It can never be defended, it can never be executed, by cowards. Every thing great must be done in the spirit of greatness. The manhood that has been in wax must be transferred to the cause of peace, before war can lose its charm, and peace be venerable to men. The attractiveness of war shows one thing through all the throats of artillery, the thunders of so many sieges, the sack of towns, the jousts of chivalry, the shock of hosts, — this namely, the conviction of man universally, that a man should be himself responsible, with goods, health, and life, for his behaviour; that he should not ask of the State, protection; should ask nothing of the State; should be himself a kingdom and a state; fearing no man; quite willing to use the opportunities and advantages that good government throw in his way, but nothing daunted, and not really the poorer if government, law, and order went by the board; because in himself reside infinite resources; because he is sure of himself, and never needs to ask another what in any crisis it behoves him to do. What makes to us the attractiveness of the Greek heroes? of the Roman? What makes the attractiveness of that romantic style of living, which is the material of ten thousand plays and romances, from Shakspeare to Scott; the feudal baron, the French, the English nobility, the Warwicks, Plantagenets? It is their absolute self-dependence. I do not wonder at the dislike some of the friends of peace have expressed at Shakspeare. The veriest churl and Jacobin cannot resist the influence of the style and manners of these haughty lords. We are affected, as boys and barbarians are, by the appearance of a few rich and wilful gentlemen, who take their honor into their own keeping, defy the world, so confident are they of their courage and strength, and whose appearance is the arrival of so much life and virtue. In dangerous times, they are presently tried, and therefore their name is a flourish of trumpets. They, at least, affect us as a reality. They are not shams, but the substance of which that age and world is made. They are true heroes for their time. They make what is in their minds the greatest sacrifice. They will, for an injurious word, peril all their state and wealth, and go to the field. Take away that principle of responsibleness, and they become pirates and ruffians. This self-subsistency is the charm of war; for this self- HDT WHAT? INDEX

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subsistency is essential to our idea of man. But another age comes, a truer religion and ethics open, and a man puts himself under the dominion of principles. I see him to be the servant of truth, of love, and of freedom, and immoveable in the waves of the crowd. The man of principle, that is, the man who, without any flourish of trumpets, titles of lordship, or train of guards, without any notice of his action abroad, expecting none, takes in solitude the right step uniformly, on his private choice, and disdaining consequences, — does not yield, in my imagination, to any man. He is willing to be hanged at his own gate, rather than consent to any compromise of his freedom, or the suppression of his conviction. I regard no longer those names that so tingled in my ear. This is a baron of a better nobility and a stouter stomach. The cause of peace is not the cause of cowardice. If peace is sought to be defended or preserved for the safety of the luxurious and the timid, it is a sham, and the peace will be base. War is better, and the peace will be broken. If peace is to be maintained, it must be by brave men, who have come up to the same height as the hero, namely, the will to carry their life in their hand, and stake it at any instant for their principle, but who have gone one step beyond the hero, and will not seek another man’s life; — men who have, by their intellectual insight, or else by their moral elevation, attained such a perception of their own intrinsic worth, that they do not think property or their own body a sufficient good to be saved by such dereliction of principle as treating a man like a sheep. If the universal cry for reform of so many inveterate abuses, with which society rings, — if the desire of a large class of young men for a faith and hope, intellectual and religious, such as they have not yet found, be an omen to be trusted; if the disposition to rely more in study, and in action on the unexplored riches of the human constitution, — if the search of the sublime laws of morals and the sources of hope and trust in man, and not in books, — in the present, and not in the past, — proceed; if the rising generation can be provoked to think it unworthy to nestle into every abomination of the past, and shall feel the generous darings of austerity and virtue; then war has a short day, and human blood will cease to flow. It is of little consequence in what manner, through what organs, this purpose of mercy and holiness is effected. The proposition of the Congress of Nations is undoubtedly that at which the present fabric of our society and the present course of events do point. But the mind, once prepared for the reign of principles, will easily find modes of expressing its will. There is the highest fitness in the place and time in which this enterprise is begun. Not in an obscure corner, not in a feudal Europe, not in an antiquated appanage where no onward step can be taken without rebellion, is this seed of benevolence laid in the furrow, with tears of hope; but in this broad America of God and man, where the forest is only now falling, or yet to fall, and the green earth opened to the inundation of emigrant men HDT WHAT? INDEX

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from all quarters of oppression and guilt; here, where not a family, not a few men, but mankind, shall say what shall be; here, we ask, Shall it be War, or shall it be Peace?

On the floor of the US Senate, Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts delivered a speech on “The Credit System and the Labor of the United States.”1 Now, Mr. President, what I understand by the credit system is, that which thus connects labor and capital, by giving to labor the use of capital. In other words, intelligence, good character, and good morals bestow on those who have not capital a power, a trust, a confidence, which enables them to obtain it, and to employ it usefully for themselves and others. These active men of business build their hopes of success on their attentiveness, their economy, and their integrity. A wider theatre for useful activity is under their feet, and around them, than was ever open to the young and enterprising generations of men, on any other spot enlightened by the sun. Before them is the ocean. Every thing in that direction invites them to efforts of enterprise and industry in the pursuits of commerce and the fisheries. Around them, on all hands, are thriving and prosperous manufactures, an improving agriculture, and the daily presentation of new objects of internal improvement; while behind them is almost half a continent of the richest land, at the cheapest prices, under healthful climates, and washed by the most magnificent rivers that on any part of the globe pay their homage to the sea. In the midst of all these glowing and glorious prospects, they are neither restrained by ignorance, nor smitten down by the penury of personal circumstances. They are not compelled to contemplate, in hopelessness and despair, all the advantages thus bestowed on their condition by Providence. Capital they may have little or none, but CREDIT supplies its place; not as the refuge of the prodigal and the reckless; not as gratifying present wants with the certainty of future absolute ruin; but as the genius of honorable trust and confidence; as the blessing voluntarily offered to good character and to good conduct as the beneficent agent, which assists honesty and enterprise in obtaining comfort and independence. Mr. President, take away this credit, and what remains? I do not ask what remains to the few, but to the many? Take away this system of credit, and then tell me what is left for labor and industry, but mere manual toil and daily drudgery? If we adopt a system that withdraws capital from active employment, do we not diminish the rate of wages? If we curtail the general business of society, does not every laboring man find his condition grow daily worse? In the politics of the day, Sir, we hear much said about divorcing the government from the banks; but when we abolish credit, we shall divorce labor from capital; and depend upon it, Sir, when we divorce labor from capital,

1. Edwin P. Whipple’s THE GREAT SPEECHES AND ORATIONS OF DANIEL WEBSTER WITH AN ESSAY ON DANIEL WEBSTER AS A MASTER OF ENGLISH STYLE (Boston: Little, Brown, 1879). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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capital is hoarded, and labor starves. The declaration so often quoted, that “all who trade on borrowed capital ought to break,” is the most aristocratic sentiment ever uttered in this country. It is a sentiment which, if carried out by political arrangement, would condemn the great majority of mankind to the perpetual condition of mere day-laborers. It tends to take away from them all that solace and hope which arise from possessing something which they can call their own. A man loves his own; it is fit and natural that he should do so; and he will love his country and its institutions, if he have some stake in that country, although it be but a very small part of the general mass of property. If it be but a cottage, an acre, a garden, its possession raises him, gives him self-respect, and strengthens his attachment to his native land. It is our happy condition, by the blessing of Providence, that almost every man of sound health, industrious habits, and good morals, can ordinarily attain, at least, to this degree of comfort and respectability; and it is a result devoutly to be wished, both for its individual and its general consequences. But even to this degree of acquisition that credit of which I have already said so much is highly important, since its general effect is to raise the price of wages, and render industry productive. There is no condition so low, if it be attended with industry and economy, that it is not benefited by credit, as any one will find, if he will examine and follow out its operations. Sir, if there be any aristocrats in Massachusetts, the people are all aristocrats; because I do not believe there is on earth, in a highly civilized society, a greater equality in the condition of men than exists there. If there be a man in the State who maintains what is called an equipage, has servants in livery, or drives four horses in his coach, I am not acquainted with him. On the other hand, there are few who are not able to carry their wives and daughters to church in some decent conveyance. It is no matter of regret or sorrow to us that few are very rich; but it is our pride and glory that few are very poor. It is our still higher pride, and our just boast, as I think, that all her citizens possess means of intelligence and education, and that, of all her productions, she reckons among the very chiefest those which spring from the culture of the mind and the heart. Mr. President, one of the most striking characteristics of this age in the extraordinary progress which it has witnessed in popular knowledge. A new and powerful impulse has been acting in the social system of late, producing this effect in a most remarkable degree. In morals, in politics, in art, in literature, there is a vast accession to the number of readers and to the number of proficients. The present state of popular knowledge is not the result of a slow and uniform progress, proceeding through a lapse of years, with the same regular degree of motion. It is evidently the result of some new causes, brought into powerful action, and producing their consequences rapidly and strikingly. What, Sir, are these causes? HDT WHAT? INDEX

ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE

This is not an occasion, Sir, for discussing such a question at length; allow me to say, however, that the improved state of popular knowledge is but the necessary result of the improved condition of the great mass of the people. Knowledge is not one of our merely physical wants. Life may be sustained without it. But, in order to live, men must be fed and clothed and sheltered; and in a state of things in which one’s whole labor can do no more than procure clothes, food, and shelter, he can have no time nor means for mental improvement. Knowledge, therefore, is not attained, and cannot be attained, till there is some degree of respite from daily manual toil and never-ending drudgery. Whenever a less degree of labor will produce the absolute necessaries of life, then there come leisure and means both to teach and to learn. If this great and wonderful extension of popular knowledge be the result of an improved condition, it may, in the next place, well be asked, What are the causes which have thus suddenly produced that great improvement? How is it that the means of food, clothing, and shelter are now so much more cheaply and abundantly procured than formerly? Sir, the main cause I take to be the progress of scientific art, or a new extension of the application of science to art. This it is which has so much distinguished the last half-century in Europe and in America, and its effects are everywhere visible, and especially among us. Man has found new allies and auxiliaries in the powers of nature and in the inventions of mechanism. The general doctrine of political economy is, that wealth consists in whatever is useful or convenient to man, and that labor is the producing cause of all this wealth. This is very true. But, then, what is labor? In the sense of political writers, and in common language, it means human industry; in a philosophical view, it may receive a much more comprehensive meaning. It is not, in that view, human toil only, the mere action of thews and muscles; but it is any active agency which, working upon the materials with which the world is supplied, brings forth products useful or convenient to man. The materials of wealth are in the earth, in the seas, and in their natural and unaided productions. Labor obtains these materials, works upon them, and fashions them to human use. Now it has been the object of scientific art, or of the application of science to art, to increase this active agency, to augment its power, by creating millions of laborers in the form of machines all but automatic, all to be diligently employed and kept at work by the force of natural powers. To this end these natural powers, principally those of steam and falling water, are subsidized and taken into human employment. Spinning-machines, power-looms, and all the mechanical devices, acting, among other operatives, in the factories and workshops, are but so many laborers. They are usually denominated labor-saving machines, but it would be more just to call them labor-doing machines. They are made to be active agents; to have motion, and to produce effect; and though without intelligence, they are guided by laws of science, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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which are exact and perfect, and they produce results, therefore, in general, more accurate than the human hand is capable of producing. When we look upon one of these, we behold a mute fellow-laborer, of immense power, of mathematical exactness, and of ever-during and unwearied effort. And while he is thus a most skilful and productive laborer, he is a non- consumer, at least beyond the wants of his mechanical being. He is not clamorous for food, raiment, or shelter, and makes no demands for the expenses of education. The eating and drinking, the reading and writing, and the clothes-wearing world, are benefited by the labors of these co-operatives, in the same way as if Providence had provided for their service millions of beings, like ourselves in external appearance, able to labor and to toil, and yet requiring little or nothing for their own consumption or subsistence; or rather, as if Providence had created a race of giants, each of whom, demanding no more for his support and consumption than a common laborer, should yet be able to perform the work of a hundred. Now, Sir, turn back to the Massachusetts tables of production, and you will see that it is these automatic allies and co- operators, and these powers of nature, thus employed and placed under human direction, which have come, with such prodigious effect, to man’s aid, in the great business of procuring the means of living, of comfort, and of wealth, and which have so swollen the products of her skilful industry. Look at these tables once more, Sir, and you will see the effects of labor, united with and acting upon capital. Look yet again, and you will see that credit, mutual trust, prompt and punctual dealings, and commercial confidence, are all mixed up as indispensable elements in the general system. I will ask you to look yet once more, Sir, and you will perceive that general competence, great equality in human condition, a degree of popular knowledge and intelligence nowhere surpassed, if anywhere equalled, the prevalence of good moral sentiment, and extraordinary general prosperity, are the result of the whole. Sir, I have done with Massachusetts. I do not praise the old “Bay State” of the Revolution; I only present her as she is. Mr. President, such is the state of things actually existing in the country, and of which I have now given you a sample. And yet there are persons who constantly clamor against this state of things. They call it aristocracy. They excite the poor to make war upon the rich, while in truth they know not who are either rich or poor. They complain of oppression, speculation, and the pernicious influence of accumulated wealth. They cry out loudly against all banks and corporations, and all the means by which small capitals become united, in order to produce important and beneficial results. They carry on a mad hostility against all established institutions. They would choke up the fountains of industry, and dry all its streams. In a country of unbounded liberty, they clamor against oppression. In a country of perfect equality, they would move heaven and earth against privilege and monopoly. In a country HDT WHAT? INDEX

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where property is more equally divided than anywhere else, they rend the air with the shouting of agrarian doctrines. In a country where the wages of labor are high beyond all parallel, and where lands are cheap, and the means of living low, they would teach the laborer that he is but an oppressed slave. Sir, what can such men want? What do they mean? They can want nothing, Sir, but to enjoy the fruits of other men’s labor. They can mean nothing but disturbance and disorder, the diffusion of corrupt principles, and the destruction of the moral sentiments and moral habits of society. A licentiousness of feeling and of action is sometimes produced by prosperity itself. Men cannot always resist the temptation to which they are exposed by the very abundance of the bounties of Providence, and the very happiness of their own condition; as the steed, full of the pasture, will sometimes throw himself against its enclosures, break away from its confinement, and, feeling now free from needless restraint, betake himself to the moors and barrens, where want, erelong, brings him to his senses, and starvation and death close his career.

Senator Webster also made remarks on the political course of Senator Calhoun: Having had occasion, Mr. President, to speak of nullification and the nullifiers, I beg leave to say that I have not done so for any purpose of reproach. Certainly, Sir, I see no possible connection, myself, between their principles or opinions, and the support of this measure [The Sub-Treasury]. They, however, must speak for themselves. They may have intrusted the bearing of their standard, for aught I know, to the hands of the honorable member from South Carolina; and I perceived last session what I perceive now, that in his opinion there is a connection between these projects of government and the doctrines of nullification. I can only say, Sir, that it will be marvellous to me, if that banner, though it be said to be tattered and torn, shall yet be lowered in obeisance, and laid at the footstool of executive power. To the sustaining of that power, the passage of this bill is of the utmost importance. The administration will regard its success as being to them, what Cromwell said the battle of Worcester was to him, “a crowning mercy.” Whether gentlemen, who have distinguished themselves so much by their extreme jealousy of this government, shall now find it consistent with their principles to give their aid in effecting this consummation, remains to be seen. The next exposition of the honorable gentleman’s sentiments and opinions is in his letter of the 3d of November. This letter, Sir, is a curiosity. As a paper describing political operations, and exhibiting political opinions, it is without a parallel. Its phrase is altogether military. It reads like a despatch, or a bulletin from head-quarters. It is full of attacks, assaults, and repulses. It recounts movements and counter-movements; speaks of occupying one position, falling back upon another, and advancing to a third; it has positions HDT WHAT? INDEX

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to cover enemies, and positions to hold allies in check. Meantime, the celerity of all these operations reminds one of the rapidity of the military actions of the king of Prussia, in the Seven Years’ war. Yesterday, he was in the South, giving battle to the Austrian; to-day he is in Saxony, or Silesia. Instantly he is found to have traversed the Electorate, and is facing the Russian and the Swede on his northern frontier. If you look for his place on the map, before you find it he has quitted it. He is always marching, flying, falling back, wheeling, attacking, defending, surprising; fighting everywhere, and fighting all the time. In one particular, however, the campaigns described in this letter are conducted in a different manner from those of the great Frederick. I think we nowhere read, in the narrative of Frederick’s achievements, of his taking a position to cover an enemy, or a position to hold an ally in check. These refinements in the science of tactics and of war are of more recent discovery. Mr. President, public men must certainly be allowed to change their opinions, and their associations, whenever they see fit. No one doubts this. Men may have grown wiser; they may have attained to better and more correct views of great public subjects. It would be unfortunate, if there were any code which should oblige men, in public or private life, to adhere to opinions once entertained, in spite of experience and better knowledge, and against their own convictions of their erroneous character. Nevertheless, Sir, it must be acknowledged, that what appears to be a sudden, as well as a great change, naturally produces a shock. I confess that, for one, I was shocked when the honorable gentleman, at the last session, espoused this bill of the administration. And when I first read this letter of November, and, in the short space of a column and a half, ran through such a succession of political movements, all terminating in placing the honorable member in the ranks of our opponents, and entitling him to take his seat, as he has done, among them, if not at their head, I confess I felt still greater surprise. All this seemed a good deal too abrupt. Sudden movements of the affections, whether personal or political, are a little out of nature. Several years ago, Sir, some of the wits of England wrote a mock play, intended to ridicule the unnatural and false feeling, the sentimentality of a certain German school of literature. In this play, two strangers are brought together at an inn. While they are warming themselves at the fire, and before their acquaintance is yet five minutes old, one springs up and exclaims to the other, “A sudden thought strikes me! Let us swear an eternal friendship!” This affectionate offer was instantly accepted, and the friendship duly sworn, unchangeable and eternal! Now, Sir, how long this eternal friendship lasted, or in what manner it ended, those who wish to know may learn by referring to the play. But it seems to me, Sir, that the honorable member has carried his political sentimentality a good deal higher than the flight HDT WHAT? INDEX

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of the German school: for he appears to have fallen suddenly in love, not with strangers, but with opponents. Here we all had been, Sir, contending against the progress of executive power, and more particularly, and most strenuously, against the projects and experiments of the administration upon the currency. The honorable member stood among us, not only as an associate, but as a leader. We thought we were making some headway. The people appeared to be coming to our support and our assistance. The country had been roused, every successive election weakening the strength of the adversary, and increasing our own. We were in this career of success carried strongly forward by the current of public opinion, and only needed to hear the cheering voice of the honorable member, “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!” and we should have prostrated for ever this anti-constitutional, anti-commercial, anti-republican, and anti-American policy of the administration. But instead of these encouraging and animating accents, behold! in the very crisis of our affairs, on the very eve of victory, the honorable member cries out to the enemy,—not to us, his allies, but to the enemy: “Hollo! A sudden thought strikes me! I abandon my allies! Now I think of it, they have always been my oppressors! I abandon them, and now let you and me swear an eternal friendship!” Such a proposition, from such a quarter, Sir, was not likely to be long withstood. The other party was a little coy, but, upon the whole, nothing loath. After proper hesitation, and a little decorous blushing, it owned the soft impeachment, admitted an equally sudden sympathetic impulse on its own side; and, since few words are wanted where hearts are already known, the honorable gentleman takes his place among his new friends amidst greetings and caresses, and is already enjoying the sweets of an eternal friendship. In this letter, Mr. President, the writer says, in substance, that he saw, at the commencement of the last session, that affairs had reached the point when he and his friends, according to the course they should take, would reap the full harvest of their long and arduous struggle against the encroachments and abuses of the general government, or lose the fruits of all their labors. At that time, he says, State interposition (viz. Nullification) had overthrown the protective tariff and the American system, and put a stop to Congressional usurpation; that he had previously been united with the National Republicans; but that, in joining such allies, he was not insensible to the embarrassment of his position; that with them victory itself was dangerous, and that therefore he had been waiting for events; that now (that is to say, in September last) the joint attacks of the allies had brought down executive power; that the administration had become divested of power and influence, and that it was now clear that the combined attacks of the allied forces would utterly overthrow and demolish it. All this he saw. But he saw, too, as he says, that in that case HDT WHAT? INDEX

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the victory would inure, not to him or his cause, but to his allies and their cause. I do not mean to say that he spoke of personal victories, or alluded to personal objects, at all. He spoke of his cause. He proceeds to say, then, that never was there before, and never, probably, will there be again, so fair an opportunity for himself and his friends to carry out their own principles and policy, and to reap the fruits of their long and arduous struggle. These principles and this policy, Sir, be it remembered, he represents, all along, as identified with the principles and policy of nullification. And he makes use of this glorious opportunity by refusing to join his late allies in any further attack on those in power, and rallying anew the old State-rights party to hold in check their old opponents, the National Republican party. This, he says, would enable him to prevent the complete ascendency of his allies, and to compel the Southern division of the administration party to occupy the ground of which he proposes to take possession, to wit, the ground of the old State-rights party. They will have, he says, no other alternative. Mr. President, stripped of its military language, what is the amount of all this, but that, finding the administration weak, and likely to be overthrown, if the opposition continued with undiminished force, he went over to it, he joined it; intending to act, himself, upon nullification principles, and to compel the Southern members of the administration to meet him on those principles?—in other words, to make a nullification administration, and to take such part in it as should belong to him and his friends. He confesses, Sir, that in thus abandoning his allies, and taking a position to cover those in power, he perceived a shock would be created which would require some degree of resolution and firmness. In this he was right. A shock, Sir, has been created; yet there he is. This administration, Sir, is represented as succeeding to the last, by an inheritance of principle. It professes to tread in the footsteps of its illustrious predecessor. It adopts, generally, the sentiments, principles, and opinions of General Jackson, proclamation and all; and yet, though he be the very prince of nullifiers, and but lately regarded as the chiefest of sinners, it receives the honorable gentleman with the utmost complacency. To all appearance, the delight is mutual; they find him an able leader, he finds them complying followers. But, Sir, in all this movement he understands himself. He means to go ahead, and to take them along. He is in the engine-car; he controls the locomotive. His hand regulates the steam, to increase or retard the speed at his discretion. And as to the occupants of the passenger-cars, Sir, they are as happy a set of gentlemen as one might desire to see of a summer’s day. They feel that they are in progress; they hope they shall not be run off the track; and when they reach the end of their journey, they desire to be thankful! The arduous struggle is now all over. Its richest fruits are all HDT WHAT? INDEX

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reaped; nullification embraces the sub-treasuries, and oppression and usurpation will be heard of no more. On the broad surface of the country, Sir, there is a spot called “the Hermitage.” In that residence is an occupant very well known, and not a little remarkable both in person and character. Suppose, Sir, the occupant of the Hermitage were now to open that door, enter the Senate, walk forward, and look over the chamber to the seats on the other side. Be not frightened, gentlemen; it is but fancy’s sketch. Suppose he should thus come in among us, Sir, and see into whose hands has fallen the chief support of that administration, which was, in so great a degree, appointed by himself, and which he fondly relied on to maintain the principles of his own. If gentlemen were now to see his steady military step, his erect posture, his compressed lips, his firmly-knitted brow, and his eye full of fire, I cannot help thinking, Sir, they would all feel somewhat queer. There would be, I imagine, not a little awkward moving and shifting in their seats. They would expect soon to hear the roar of the lion, even if they did not feel his paw. Sir, the spirit of union is particularly liable to temptation and seduction in moments of peace and prosperity. In war, this spirit is strengthened by a sense of common danger, and by a thousand recollections of ancient efforts and ancient glory in a common cause. But in the calms of a long peace, and in the absence of all apparent causes of alarm, things near gain an ascendency over things remote. Local interests and feelings overshadow national sentiments. Our attention, our regard, and our attachment are every moment solicited to what touches us closest, and we feel less and less the attraction of a distant orb. Such tendencies we are bound by true patriotism and by our love of union to resist. This is our duty; and the moment, in my judgment, has arrived when that duty should be performed. We hear, every day, sentiments and arguments which would become a meeting of envoys, employed by separate governments, more than they become the common legislature of a united country. Constant appeals are made to local interests, to geographical distinctions, and to the policy and the pride of particular States. It would sometimes appear as if it were a settled purpose to convince the people that our Union is nothing but a jumble of different and discordant interests, which must, erelong, be all resolved into their original state of separate existence; as if, therefore, it was of no great value while it should last, and was not likely to last long. The process of disintegration begins by urging as a fact the existence of different interests. Sir, is not the end to which all this leads us obvious? Who does not see that, if convictions of this kind take possession of the public mind, our Union can hereafter be nothing, while it remains, but a connection without harmony; a bond without affection; a theatre for the angry contests of local feelings, local objects, and local jealousies? Even while it continues to exist in name, it may by these means become nothing but the mere form of a united government. My children, and the children of HDT WHAT? INDEX

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those who sit around me, may meet, perhaps, in this chamber, in the next generation; but if tendencies now but too obvious be not checked, they will meet as strangers and aliens. They will feel no sense of common interest or common country; they will cherish no common object of patriotic love. If the same Saxon language shall fall from their lips, it may be the chief proof that they belong to the same nation. Its vital principle exhausted and gone, its power of doing good terminated, the Union itself, become productive only of strife and contention, must ultimately fall, dishonored and unlamented. The honorable member from Carolina himself habitually indulges in charges of usurpation and oppression against the government of his country. He daily denounces its important measures, in the language in which our Revolutionary fathers spoke of the oppressions of the mother country. Not merely against executive usurpation, either real or supposed, does he utter these sentiments, but against laws of Congress, laws passed by large majorities, laws sanctioned for a course of years by the people. These laws he proclaims, every hour, to be but a series of acts of oppression. He speaks of them as if it were an admitted fact, that such is their true character. This is the language he utters, these are the sentiments he expresses, to the rising generation around him. Are they sentiments and language which are likely to inspire our children with the love of union, to enlarge their patriotism, or to teach them, and to make them feel, that their destiny has made them common citizens of one great and glorious republic? A principal object in his late political movements, the gentleman himself tells us, was to unite the entire South; and against whom, or against what, does he wish to unite the entire South? Is not this the very essence of local feeling and local regard? Is it not the acknowledgment of a wish and object to create political strength by uniting political opinions geographically? While the gentleman thus wishes to unite the entire South, I pray to know, Sir, if he expects me to turn toward the polar star, and, acting on the same principle, to utter a cry of Rally! to the whole North? Heaven forbid! To the day of my death, neither he nor others shall hear such a cry from me. Finally, the honorable member declares that he shall now march off, under the banner of State rights! March off from whom? March off from what? We have been contending for great principles. We have been struggling to maintain the liberty and to restore the prosperity of the country; we have made these struggles here, in the national councils, with the old flag, the true American flag, the Eagle, and the Stars and Stripes, waving over the chamber in which we sit. He now tells us, however, that he marches off under the State-rights banner! Let him go. I remain. I am where I ever have been, and ever mean to be. Here, standing on the platform of the general Constitution, a platform broad enough and firm enough to uphold every interest of the whole country, I shall still be found. Intrusted with some part in the administration of that HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Constitution, I intend to act in its spirit, and in the spirit of those who framed it. Yes, Sir, I would act as if our fathers, who formed it for us and who bequeathed it to us, were looking on me; as if I could see their venerable forms bending down to behold us from the abodes above. I would act, too, as if the eye of posterity was gazing on me. Standing thus, as in the full gaze of our ancestors and our posterity, having received this inheritance from the former, to be transmitted to the latter, and feeling that, if I am born for any good, in my day and generation, it is for the good of the whole country, no local policy or local feeling, no temporary impulse, shall induce me to yield my foothold on the Constitution of the Union. I move off under no banner not known to the whole American people, and to their Constitution and laws. No, Sir; these walls, these columns, “shall fly From their firm base as soon as I.” I came into public life, Sir, in the service of the United States. On that broad altar, my earliest, and all my public vows, have been made. I propose to serve no other master. So far as depends on any agency of mine, they shall continue united States; united in interest and in affection; united in every thing in regard to which the Constitution has decreed their union; united in war, for the common defence, the common renown, and the common glory; and united, compacted, knit firmly together in peace, for the common prosperity and happiness of ourselves and our children.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 3 M 12 1838 / It is now about 25 days that I have been confined mostly to the house & much of the time to my bed with a fever attended with a stopage of Water & an affection of the Piles which has been very serious upon me with much weakness & pain — It has been much the most severe illness I ever had & of far the longest continuance — I find by being weighed today that I have lost about 20 lbs of flesh, my usual weight being a little rising 200 & I find by being weighed today that I now weigh about 191 Pounds - this change may be favourable as my flesh has allways been greater & my habit fuller than was even safe. During my confinement I have taken a full survey of myself my affairs &c While I have to ackowledge that Merit does not belong to me - I was thankful to find my mind so tranquil & settled in contemplating the event of Death — I was fully confirmed that in Religion I had followed no cunningly devised fable, but that Quakerism as professed by our Ancient friends was the Truth as it stands in Jesus Christ our Lord & those who follow his leadings & teachings by his Holy spirit will find something as an Anchor sure & steadfast to depend upon — My outward affairs being generally snug I found nothing but what HDT WHAT? INDEX

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might be easily settled & perhaps enough left to make my dear wife comfortable — I have been up to Father Rodmans today the first time since my confinement - tho I have been twice out a little way before RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

The Lowell Institute “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE

1839

December 31, Tuesday: William Cranch Bond made his first astronomical observations in Cambridge. Pending funds for construction, the cupola of the existing Dana house2 would have to serve until 1844 as the Harvard Observatory. ASTRONOMY

A bequest of $250,000 having been left at the death of John Lowell, Jr. in 1836, on this day the Honorable Edward Everett, LL.D. delivered the inaugural lecture crediting the wisdom of the founder of “The Lowell Institute.”

2. At that time the Dana house was located where Lamont Library is now located — not on Quincy Street where it is now. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL Lecture Season: The 11th course of lectures offered by the Salem Lyceum consisted of:

The Salem Lyceum — 11th Season Boston Musical Institute of Boston The Oratorio of Joseph and His Brethren Orville Dewey Human Progress Andrew P. Peabody Influence of the BIBLE on the Sciences, Poetry, and the Fine Arts Leonard Withington Phariseeism Convers Francis The Huguenots or French Protestants in America George E. Ellis The Persecution of the Quakers J.S.C. Abbott Russia John L. Hayes Volcanic Activity J. Francis Tuckerman of Salem Life and Genius of Ludwig van Beethoven Oliver Wendell Holmes National Prejudices J.S.C. Abbott Louis Philippe B.B. Thatcher A Reading of the lecture by Governor Everett introductory to the course before the “Lowell Institute” of Boston James W. Thompson of Salem The Conditions of a Healthful Literature Thomas B. Fox Education of the Eye Charles Francis Adams, Sr. The Influence of Domestic Manners on the American Revolution Waldo Emerson of Concord Analysis, the Characteristic of the Present Age Henry Ware, Jr. The Biography of the Globe Henry W. Kinsman The Institution of Chivalry and its Influence on Society Edward Hitchcock The Wonders of Science Compared with the Wonders of Romance Reverend John G. Palfrey The Siege and Capture of Louisburg

As lectures began, the endowment of The Lowell Institute had reached to nearly $250,000.00. Fees provided HDT WHAT? INDEX

ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE to its lecturers would often exceed the salaries of the most highly paid professors in America.

1st Season of the Lowell Institute Honorable Edward Everett, LL.D. Introductory. Memoir of John Lowell, Jr. 2 lectures Professor Benjamin Silliman, LL.D. Geology 24 lectures Reverend John G. Palfrey, D.D. Evidences of Christianity lectures Professor Thomas Nuttall, A.M. Botany 18 lectures

In those early days, the lecture serieses were quite popular: 8,000 to 10,000 people might apply for tickets to a course. For, as the Lowell Institute’s historian would later boast:

Crude theories and plans for moral and political reforms are not to be found in the Lowell lectures. The selection of lectures and lecturers is made from a broad and comprehensive knowledge of the safe thought and intelligent study of the time.

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1840

As the lectures of The Lowell Institute began, its endowment had reached to nearly $250,000.00. Fees provided to its lecturers would often exceed the salaries of the most highly paid professors in America. In those early days, the lecture serieses were quite popular: 8,000 to 10,000 people might apply for tickets to a course. In its second season, the lines of the hopeful waiting outside the Old Corner Bookshop for ticket distribution for

Professor Benjamin Silliman, Sr.’s chemistry series crushed in the windows of the shop. For, as the Lowell Institute’s historian later boasted,

Crude theories and plans for moral and political reforms are not to be found in the Lowell lectures. The selection of lectures and lecturers is made from a broad and comprehensive knowledge of the safe thought and intelligent study of the time.

LYCEUM THE LOWELL INSTITUTE HDT WHAT? INDEX

ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE January 2, Thursday: The Honorable Edward Everett, LL.D. re-delivered the inaugural lecture of “The Lowell Institute” honoring the quarter-million dollars of its benefactor the deceased John Lowell, Jr.

Subsequently, subscribers would fill Odeon Hall at the corner of Federal Street and Franklin Street in Boston to its capacity of 2,000 seats twice a week to hear a series of lectures on natural theology, by the Reverend James Walker, D.D.. The relation between the dual sources of knowledge –reason and revelation, the world and the book– that was indeed one hot topic!

In New Haven, Connecticut, The U.S. v. The Libelants, etc., of the Schooner Amistad case resumed, while in the Richmond VA Inquirer the declaration was being made that what the case meant was that white Americans might become the victims of “black masters” to whom they would owe –the horror– “compassion” and “sympathy.” In the current issue of the American Phrenological Journal and Miscellany, the phrenologist L.N. Fowler was announcing that examination of the head of Joseph Cinqué had enabled him to verify that this specimen was “superior to the majority of negroes.” The base of this one’s brain was smaller, indicating that his personality was not being dominated by the “lower animal propensities.” LA AMISTAD HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL

WINTER 1840/1841

Lecture Season: In the 2d season of The Lowell Institute in Boston, the lines of the hopeful waiting outside the Old Corner Bookshop for ticket distribution for Professor Benjamin Silliman, Sr.’s chemistry series crushed in the windows of the shop:

2d Season of The Lowell Institute Professor Joseph Lovering, A.M. Electricity and Electro-magnetism 24 lectures Jeffries Wyman, M.D. Comparative Anatomy 24 lectures Reverend James Walker, D.D. Natural Religion 12 lectures Professor Benjamin Silliman, Sr., LL.D. Chemistry 24 lectures Reverend John Gorham Palfrey, D.D. Evidences of Christianity 8 lectures

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE HDT WHAT? INDEX

ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE

The 12th course of lectures offered by the Salem Lyceum consisted of:

The Salem Lyceum — 12th Season John Quincy Adams Faith William H. Simmons Hamlet George H. Devereux of Salem Public Opinion John L. Hayes Life of Cuvier William H. Simmons Macbeth Convers Francis Lessons of the Past William M. Rogers A Business Life Heman Humphrey Mental Philosophy Henry K. Oliver of Salem The Druids (1st lecture) Henry K. Oliver of Salem The Druids (2nd lecture) Samuel M. Worcester of Salem Reasoning James T. Austin Siege of Boston William G. Swett Reading Samuel Osgood State and Prospects of the Jews Andrew P. Peabody The Poor Man John C. Clark THe Law of Marriage Richard Henry Dana, Jr. Importance of Cultivating the Affections J.V.C. Smith Ancient and Modern History of the Coinage of Metals Ezra S. Gannett Excitability of the American Character HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL

WINTER 1841/1842 HDT WHAT? INDEX

ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE

Lecture Season: The Winter Lecture Season of ’41/42 at Odeon Hall in Boston consisted of:

3d Season of The Lowell Institute Charles Lyell, F.R.S. 12 lectures on Geology (then repeated, total 24) Reverend John Gorham Palfrey, D.D. 8 lectures on Evidences of Christianity Professor Joseph Lovering, A.M. 12 lectures on Mechanical Laws of Matter (then repeated, total 24) Reverend James Walker, D.D. 12 lectures on Natural Religion Professor Benjamin Silliman, Sr., LL.D. 12 lectures on Chemistry (then repeated, total 24)

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL

WINTER 1842/1843

Lecture Season: The Winter Lecture Season at the Odeon Theatre at the corner of Federal and Franklin streets in HDT WHAT? INDEX

ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE Boston:

4th Season of The Lowell Institute Prof. J. Lovering, A.M., Astronomy 12 lectures (then repeated, total 24) Prof. Jared Sparks, LL.D., American History 12 lectures Prof. J. Walker, D.D., Natural Religion 12 lectures Prof. B. Silliman, LL.D., Chemistry 12 lectures (then repeated, total 24)

The 14th course of lectures offered by the Salem Lyceum may be viewed on the following screen. (click here) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL

The Salem Lyceum — 14th Season John Quincy Adams Government William Mitchell Astronomy, Comets (1st lecture) William Mitchell Astronomy, Comets (2nd lecture) Humphrey Moore March of Mind Reverend George B. Cheever of Salem Gothic Architecture L.F. Tasistro Master Spirits of English Poetry Benjamin Sears Germany Charles Francis Adams, Sr. Shakspeare (1st lecture) Charles Francis Adams, Sr. Shakspeare (2nd lecture) Dr. Fitch Music as a Fine Art Henry Giles Byron (1st lecture) Henry Giles Byron (2nd lecture) George Bancroft Spirit of the Age Richard Henry Dana, Jr. Woman James E. Murdock Human Voice, with Illustrations Edwin Jocyln of Salem Spirit of Teaching Richard Henry Dana, Jr. Desdemona John C. Park Character of the Pilgrims George H. Colton American Indians James E. Murdock The Passions Henry Giles Elliott, the Corn Law Rhymer HDT WHAT? INDEX

ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE

WINTER 1843/1844

Lecture Season: Lecture Season of ’43/44, at the Odeon Hall in Boston:

5th Season of The Lowell Institute George R. Glidden, Esq., Ancient Egypt 12 lectures (then repeated, total 24) Professor J. Lovering, A.M., Optics 12 lectures (then repeated, total 24) President Mark Hopkins, D.D., Evidences of Christianity 12 lectures Professor Asa Gray, M.D., Botany 12 lectures (then repeated, total 24) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL The 15th course of lectures offered by the Salem Lyceum consisted of:

The Salem Lyceum — 15th Season Henry Giles Life and Writings of Oliver Goldsmith Orestes Augustus Brownson Dangers of our Present Form of Government Gideon F. Barstow of Salem Poetry and Song W.B.O. Peabody Anglo-Saxon Race Ephraim Peabody Progress of Physical Science since landing of the Pilgrims Warren Burton of Salem Scenery Alonzo Gray The Chemical Forces Alonzo Gray Oxygen, its Agency and Uses Henry Giles Falstaff Henry Giles O’Connell, the Irish Agitator George Putnam What is Light Ralph Waldo Emerson The New England Man Alfred A. Abbott Shelley the Poet Charles Francis Adams, Sr. Milton George E. Ellis What is Known and what is Unknown in the World Jonathan F. Stearns Advantages of a Liberal Education Wendell Phillips The Lost Arts Edwin P. Whipple The Leading Poets, as Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, &c. Henry W. Bellows False Education Ralph Waldo Emerson Want of Distinctive National Character Thomas P. Field Past Prose Writers HDT WHAT? INDEX

ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE

WINTER 1844/1845

Winter: The experiment in communitarianism on the farm of the Hutchinson family in Milford, New Hampshire was brought to a premature end as the Hutchinson Family Singers departed for a singing tour of Britain. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL Lecture Season of ’44/45, at the Odeon Hall in Boston:

6th Season of The Lowell Institute Arthur Gilman, Esq., Architecture 12 lectures (then repeated, total 24) Professor Henry D. Rogers, F.G.S., Geology 12 lectures (then repeated, total 24) Professor ALonzo Potter, D.D., Natural Religion xx lectures Professor Asa Gray, M.D., Botany 12 lectures (then repeated, total 24) HDT WHAT? INDEX

ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE December 11, Thursday: James Russell Lowell, in the Boston Courier as a protest against the war upon Mexico: Once to every man and nation, comes the moment to decide, In the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side; Some great cause, some great decision, offering each the bloom or blight, And the choice goes by forever, 'twixt that darkness and that light. Then to side with truth is noble, when we share her wretched crust, Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 'tis prosperous to be just; Then it is the brave man chooses while the coward stands aside, Till the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied. By the light of burning martyrs, Christ, Thy bleeding feet we track, Toiling up new Calv'ries ever with the cross that turns not back; New occasions teach new duties, ancient values test our youth; They must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of truth.

Though the cause of evil prosper, yet the truth alone is strong; Though her portion be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong; Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above His own. Waldo Emerson lectured at the lyceum in Boston. This was lecture Number 1 of his “Representative Men” series, entitled “The Uses of Great Men.” Longfellow wrote, “The Odeon was full.... Not so much as usual of that ‘sweet rhetoricke’ which usually flows from his lips; and many things to shock the sensitive ear and heart.” Life II, page 26. He would receive $350 for the series. This was the 1845-1846 lecture series of seven lectures that would be published in 1850 as REPRESENTATIVE MEN. [QUESTION: Is this “Odeon Hall” different from the “Melodeon” mentioned in Midgley’s SIGHTS IN BOSTON AND SUBURBS as a small comfortable hall used for religious, panoramic, and other exhibitions, close to the entrance to the Boston Theatre on Washington Street near the corner of Mason Street, at which the Reverend Theodore Parker’s 28th Congregational Society initially met?] HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL HDT WHAT? INDEX

ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE

Lecture Season: The 17th course of lectures offered by the Salem Lyceum consisted of:

The Salem Lyceum — 17th Season H.N. Hudson King Lear, (Shakspeare) The Reverend William Henry Channing The College, the Church, and the State E. Darling Chemistry, including Solidification of Carbonic Acid Gas W.B. Sprague Life of Wilberforce Stephen Pearl Andrews Phonography George H. Devereux of Salem Man Charles T. Brooks Omnipresence of the Poetic James T. Fields Books A.F. Boyle Phonography Caleb Stetson Individuality of Man Lieutenant Halleck The Battle of Waterloo Amory Holbrook of Salem Galileo Samuel Osgood Rousseau Charles B. Haddock Cultivation of a Taste for Letters by Men of Business Fletcher Webster China (1st lecture) China (2d lecture) Edwin P. Whipple Wit and Humor The Reverend Theodore Parker The Progress of Man Professor Asa Gray Geographical Botany (1st lecture) Geographical Botany (2d lecture) Thomas D. Anderson Reverence for our Government and Laws Waldo Emerson of Concord Napoleon Bonaparte HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL

Winter Lecture Season of ’45/46, at the Odeon Hall in Boston:

7th Season of The Lowell Institute Charles Lyell, Esq., F.R.S., Geology 12 lectures (then repeated, total 24) 1. Lieut. H.W. Halleck, United States Army, The Military Art 12 lectures (one repeated, total 13) Professor Asa Gray, M.D., Botany 12 lectures (then repeated, total 24) Professor Joseph Lovering, A.M., Astronomy 12 lectures (then repeated, total 24)

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE HDT WHAT? INDEX

ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL

WINTER 1846/1847 HDT WHAT? INDEX

ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE Winter: Lecture Season of ’46/47, at the Odeon Hall in Boston:

8th Season of The Lowell Institute 12 announced Prof. Henry D. Rogers, F.G.S. Geology ...... 24 given 12 announced Rt. Rev. A. Potter, D.D. Natural Religion ...... 12 given 12 announced Prof. Louis Agassiz, M.D. The Plan of Creation as shown in the Animal Kingdom ...... 25 given (one in French) 12 announced Prof. O.M. Mitchell. Astronomy ...... 24 given 12 announced Geo. S. Hillard, Esq. Life and Writings of Milton ...... 12 given

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL

In LOUIS AGASSIZ: A LIFE IN SCIENCE (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988, Edward Lurie would report in regard to this, on his page 127, that: In an age alive and responsive to the idealism of Emerson, Agassiz gave a scientific demonstration of the spiritual quality underlying all material creation.... The men and women who listened to Agassiz heard that their species was not only the highest form of vertebrate but represented the direction and the purpose to which all creation had moved from the beginning.

(Professor Agassiz would follow up on this series of Lowell lectures in which he provided reassurance to Boston audiences that “their species was not only the highest form of vertebrate but represented the direction and the purpose to which all creation had moved from the beginning,” with another series of such lectures down in the Deep South, in Charleston, in which he would provide reassurance to whites-only audiences that “our race” was not only the highest form of humankind but represented the direction and the purpose to which all creation had moved from the beginning. –What, are you surprised?) Agassiz was less interested in glaciers as a geological agent than as the killing mechanism for the final global extinction that paved the way for Homo sapiens to culminate God’s plan.... It was his knowledge of paleontology –not sedimentary geology or glacial theory– that got him invited to deliver his “Plan of Creation” lectures at Harvard University in 1846, speeches that made Emerson uneasy for their teleology. In fact, Agassiz’s zealous promotion of the –Saussure-Goethe-Perraudin-Venetz- Charpentier-Schimper-Agassiz-Forbes– glacial theory during the 1840s was a decade-long detour from an otherwise zoological career that spanned six decades, and which ended sadly on the wrong side of evolutionary theory. TO his death, Agassiz believed that God invoked serial catastrophes to wipe out previous stages of life; that his Eizeit was the last of these catastrophes; that Darwinian evolution was in error; and that so-called primitive races had their own creations separate from those of European stock. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, WALDEN’S SHORE, pages 95-6

Winter 1846-1847: {Twenty-eight pages missing} grown; –hoary tower –of azure tinted marble.– an acre yielded about 1000 tons. They stacked up in a good day about 1000 tons. INDIA The parched inhabitants of Madras Bombay –Calcutta –Havana –charleston & New Orleans drink at my well– While I incredulous read the vast cosmogonal philosophy of Ancient India –in modern New England CHARLESTON The Brahmen’s Stoic descendant still sits in his native temples and cools his parched lips with the ice of my Walden well. Though incredible ages ages have intervened –I am a denizen of the same earth with their descendants. The descendant of the religious devotee who dwelt at the roots of trees with his crust of bread and water jug cools his water today with ice from my well. If I am not a modern hindoo we are near neighbors –and by the miracle of commerce we quench our thirst and cool our lips at the same well. And concord fixed air is carried in that ice to mingle with the sultry zephyrs of the Indus & the Ganges. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE

WINTER 1847/1848

Winter: Lecture Season of ’47/48, at the Odeon Hall in Boston:

9th Season of The Lowell Institute 12 announced Professor Eben N. Horsford. Chemistry ...... 24 given 12 announced Reverend Alonzo Potter, D.D. Natural Religion ...... 12 given 12 announced Professor Louis Agassiz. Ichthyology ...... 24 given 8 announced Francis Bowen, A.M. Systems of Philosophy as affecting Religion. . . 8 given

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL

WINTER 1848/1849 HDT WHAT? INDEX

ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE

Winter: Lecture Season of ’48/’49, at the Odeon Hall in Boston:

10th Season of The Lowell Institute 12 announced Professor Adolphus L. Kœppen. Ancient and Modern Athens ...... 24 given 12 announced Professor L. Agassiz. Comparative Embryology ...... 24 given 12 announced Professor Jeffries Wyman, M.D. Comparative Physiology ...... 24 given 12 announced Professor Francis Bowen, A.M. Application of Ethical Science to the Evidences of Religion ...... 12 given 12 announced Professor Henry D. Rogers. Application of Science to the Useful Arts . . . . 24 given HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE HDT WHAT? INDEX

ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE

WINTER 1849/1850 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL Winter: Lecture Season of ’49/50, at the Odeon Hall in Boston:

11th Season of The Lowell Institute Professor William Henry Harvey, M.D. Cryptogamia ...... 24 lectures Right Reverend Alonzo Potter, D.D. Natural Religion ...... 12 lectures George T. Curtis, Esq. Constitution of the United States ...... 12 lectures Professor Edward Lasell Physical Forces ...... 24 lectures Professor James F.W. Johnston, F.R.S. Agriculture ...... 24 lectures

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE HDT WHAT? INDEX

ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE

WINTER 1850/1851

Winter: Winter Lecture Season of ’50/51, at the Odeon Hall in Boston:

12th Season of The Lowell Institute 12 announced Professor Francis Bowen, A.M. Political Economy ...... 12 given 12 announced Professor L. Agassiz. Functions of Life in Lower Animals ...... 12 given 12 announced Reverend George W. Blagden, D.D. Evidences of Revealed Religion ...... 12 given 12 announced Professor Arnold Guyot, Ph.D. Physical Geography ...... 12 given

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL

WINTER 1851/1852

Winter: Lecture Season of ’51/52, at the Odeon Hall in Boston:

13th Season of The Lowell Institute Reverend Orville Dewey, D.D. Natural Religion. “Problem of Human Destiny” 12 lectures Professor Cornelius Conway Felton, LL.D. Greek Poetry 12 lectures B.A. Gould, Jr., Ph.D. The Progress of Astronomy in the last Half-century 12 lectures Francis Bowen, A.M. Origin and Development of the English and Am. Constitutions 12 lectures

At the Concord Lyceum, the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson delivered “Mohammed.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE

WINTER 1852/1853

Winter: I have a note to the effect that one morning Bill Wheeler, the Concord town drunk, was found frozen. (I am, however, unable to find anything about anything like this in any Wheeler family genealogy, so perhaps this report is entirely without substance.)

The lecture season of ’52/53, in the Odeon Hall of Boston, amounted to the following:

14th Season of The Lowell Institute Sir Charles Lyell, F.R.S. Geology, etc. 12 lectures Charles Bishop Goodrich, Esq. Science of Government, etc. 12 lectures Right Reverend Alonzo Potter, D.D. Natural Religion 12 lectures Professor C.C. Felton. Life of Greece 12 lectures Doctor O.W. Holmes. English Poetry of the 19th Century 12 lectures

At the Concord Lyceum, Elizabeth Oakes Smith delivered “Womanhood.”

At the Concord Lyceum, Ellery Channing lectured on “Society.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL

WINTER 1853/1854

Winter: Lecture Season of ’53/54, at the Odeon Hall in Boston:

15th Season of The Lowell Institute Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 10 lectures Professor Joseph Lovering. What is Matter! Professor Joseph Lovering. What are Bodies! Charles Jackson, Jr. History of the Useful Arts. Professor H.L. Eustis. The Britannia Bridge. Professor J.P. Cooke, Jr. Light. Professor A. Guyot. Psychological and Physical Characters of the Nations of Europe compared with those of the American People. Professor A. Guyot. The same subject continued. Doctor A.A. Gould. Aquatic Life. Professor Joel Parker. The Science of the Law. Professor H.D. Rogers. The Arctic Regions. Professor L. Agassiz. Natural History ...... 12 lectures Professor J. Lovering. Electricity ...... 12 lectures E.H. Davis. Mounds and Earthworks of the Mississippi Valley . . . . 4 lectures Reverend Orville Dewey. Problem of Human Destiny ...... 12 lectures HDT WHAT? INDEX

ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL

WINTER 1854/1855

Winter: Charles Darwin would later comment, in THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, “I estimate that the winter of 1854-55 destroyed four-fifths of the birds in my own grounds.” It was not this terrible winter, however, that destroyed his hair — even at the tender age of 45, it was already long gone:

This winter was a terrible one for the soldiers of Russia, Turkey, England, and France, fighting in the Crimea north of the Black Sea. During this emergency all opposition was overcome and Florence Nightingale was able for the first time to staff military hospitals with female nurses. In fact, her Reports of the sufferings of the British army in the Crimea, deprived of its supplies in that winter by the Nobel mines in the harbor of Sevastopol in conjunction with the great hurricane of November 14, 1854, would lead not only to a new form of organization under the name of the Red Cross but also to the fall of a British government.

In the absence of Professor of Chemistry John Torrey, Professor Isaac-Farwell Holton was lecturing on the properties of mercury before the medical students of the College of Physicians and Surgeons when he suddenly came to a realization that the name of the white substance “calomel” derived from the Greek , meaning “beautiful,” and mel meaning “black” (this etymology came to his mind as he touched a piece of mercurial chloride with potassa and noticed that it produced a black spot). HDT WHAT? INDEX

ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE

Lecture Season of ’54/55, at the Odeon Hall in Boston:

16th Season of The Lowell Institute Professor C.C. Felton. On the Downfall and Resurrection of Greece 12 lectures Honorable John G. Palfrey. New England History 12 lectures James Russell Lowell. English Poetry 24 lectures Reverend Frederic Henry Hedge. Mediæval History 6 lectures HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL

WINTER 1855/1856

Winter: Lecture Season of ’55/56, at the Odeon Hall in Boston: James Russell Lowell’s series on the English poets was so popular that each lecture was being repeated, for those who had not managed to get inside the hall on the designated night, on the next afternoon. They were appearing verbatim in the newspaper. It was this series for The Lowell Institute which would win Lowell his appointment to succeed Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at HDT WHAT? INDEX

ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE

Harvard College:3

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE 17th Season of The Lowell Institute Reverend Orville Dewey. Education of the Human Race 12 lectures Reverend W.H. Milburn. Early History and Settlement of the Mississippi Valley 12 lectures George William Curtis. Contemporaneous English Fiction 6 lectures Professor J.P. Cooke, Jr. Chemistry of the Non-metallic Elements 12 lectures Professor E. Vitalis Scharb. The Great Religious and Philosophical Poems of Modern Times 12 lectures HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL

WINTER 1856/1857

Winter: Brownson’s Quarterly Review, No. 4

I. Mission in America II. The Council of Trent and its Results CATHOLICISM III. The Church and Modern Civilization IV. E.H. Derby to his Son V. The Presidential Election VI. The Church in the United States VII. Inkerman VIII. Literary Notices and Criticisms

ORESTES AUGUSTUS BROWNSON

3. This was the way Louis Agassiz also got onto the Harvard College faculty, for he had been brought to America to lecture for The Lowell Institute and had initially given over a hundred popular lectures. Yet, as the Lowell Institute’s historian later boasted:

Crude theories and plans for moral and political reforms are not to be found in the Lowell lectures. The selection of lectures and lecturers is made from a broad and comprehensive knowledge of the safe thought and intelligent study of the time.

Thus Louis Agassiz’s lifelong disdain for the development theory of Charles Darwin may not have been motivated solely by his racism, and by an awareness of how his “scientific” posturing could be utilized to bolster the institution of slavery and the financial interests of his slavemaster friends, but may also have been motivated by his desire to be lauded by and followed by the general public — for in fact no paid Lowell lecturer would have been allowed to advocate anything as leveling as the theory of Darwin. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE

Lecture Season of ’56/57, at the Odeon Hall in Boston:

18th Season of The Lowell Institute Dr. George W. Burnap. Anthropology ...... 12 lectures Professor Guglielmo Gajani. Early Italian Reformers ...... 6 lectures Lieutenant M.F. Maury. Wind and Currents of the Sea ...... 6 lectures Reverend Henry Giles. Human Life in Shakespeare ...... 12 lectures Dr. David B. Reid. Ventilation and Acoustics ...... 6 lectures Reverend William R. Alger. The History of the Doctrine of a Future Life ...... 12 lectures Professor William B. Rogers. Elementary Laws of Physics ...... 12 lectures HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL

WINTER 1857/1858

Winter: Early in the winter Henry Thoreau completely filled his 1st COMMONPLACE BOOK and began the 2nd, which is now in the which is in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library and bears on its label the same inscription as the original volume, “Extracts, mostly upon Natural History. Henry D. Thoreau.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE

Lecture Season of ’57/58, at the Odeon Hall in Boston:

19th Season of The Lowell Institute Reverend Henry W. Bellows. Treatment of Social Diseases ...... 12 lectures Reinhold Solger. History of the Reformation ...... 12 lectures Reverend Thomas T. Stone. English Literature ...... 12 lectures Professor Francis Bowen. Practical English Philosophers and Metaphysicians from Bacon to Sir William Hamilton ...... 12 lectures Reverend John Lord. Light of the New Civilization ...... 12 lectures Dr. Isaac Ray. Mental Hygiene ...... 4 lectures HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE Late in the year, appearing in Civiltà Cattolica in two installments, was Isaac Hecker’s “The Present and Future Prospects of the Catholic Faith in North America” promising the demise of American Protestantism and the triumph of American Catholicism. Now, if you had been looking for two pleasant promises more seemly for a Roman pontiff to hear from an American “native” in need of his blessing, you’d have had to look in a whole bunch of closets and you’d have had to look for a long long time. To make his case, Hecker provided an analysis of the democratic political system which, although it had the disadvantage of being preposterously tendentious, had the advantage of alleging something that it would be really nice for the supreme pontiff to be able to believe: that the concept of human nature underlying the system of democracy corresponded to his own doctrines.

The record does not indicate that the Pope was persuaded of the advantages of religious freedom. –Quite to the contrary,

in the United States there exists a too unrestricted freedom; all the refugees and revolutionists gather there.

When Isaac Hecker’s case finally came to the attention of Pius IX, he passed it on by normal channels. After that, there wasn’t a prayer that Hecker would be able to wiggle back into the Redemptorist Order of St. Alphonsus which had expelled him. Well, but on the other hand, Hecker had been playing this game by its rules, and a large number of people in the Eternal City did appreciate that and were looking for a way to bend the system in such manner as to retain such a pliable and productive tool as him. After all is said and done, how about this: why not think big, why not set up your own new congregation devoted entirely to the conversion of the American people, with yourself as the maximum leader? Meanwhile, the ante in this game was being raised considerably because Hecker’s confreres in America were forwarding the necessary paperwork for their separation from the ordered community, so that they would be able to continue their missionary work without all this interference from above. Continuing to handle this as a discipline problem was going to be a tough row for Rome to hoe — because the long-term stakes might involve the loss of the United States of America as a Catholic nation. Stay tuned to this game of hardball. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE

WINTER 1858/1859 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL

Winter: Lecture Season of ’58/59, at the Odeon Hall in Boston:

20th Season of The Lowell Institute Professor F.D. Huntington. On the Structure, Relations, and Offices of Human Society — as illustrating the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of the Creator ...... 12 lectures Professor William B. Rogers. On Water and Air in their Mechanical, Chemical, and Vital Relations ...... 12 lectures Professor S.G. Brown. British Orators ...... 12 lectures Reverend William R. Alger. Poetical Ethics ...... 12 lectures Edwin P. Whipple. The Literature of the Age of Elizabeth ...... 12 lectures HDT WHAT? INDEX

ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE

WINTER 1859/1860 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL

Winter: During the winter lecture season of ’59/60, at the Odeon Hall in Boston:

20th Season of The Lowell Institute Professor C.C. Felton. Constitution and Orators of Greece ...... 12 lectures Dr. Reinhold Solger. Rome, Christianity, and the Rise of Modern Civilization ...... 12 lectures Reverend Thomas Hill. Mutual Relation of the Sciences...... 12 lectures Professor Joseph Lovering. Astronomy...... 12 lectures Reverend Henry Giles. Social Culture and Character...... 12 lectures HDT WHAT? INDEX

ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL

WINTER 1860/1861

Winter: Brownson’s Quarterly Review, No. 4

I. Rationalism and Traditionalism II. Ireland CATHOLICISM III. Rights of the Temporal IV. Vocations to the Priesthood V. Literary Notices and Criticisms

ORESTES AUGUSTUS BROWNSON HDT WHAT? INDEX

ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE

During the winter lecture season of ’60/61, at the Odeon Hall in Boston:

21st Season of The Lowell Institute Reverend James Walker. Philosophy of Religion ...... 12 lectures Honorable George P. Marsh. Origin and History of the English Language ...... 12 lectures Reverend Mark Hopkins. Moral Philosophy ...... 12 lectures Professor Benjamin Peirce. Mathematics in the Cosmos ...... 12 lectures Professor Josiah P. Cooke, Jr. Chemistry of the Atmosphere as illustrating the Wisdom, Power, and Goodness of God ...... 12 lectures HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL HDT WHAT? INDEX

ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE

WINTER 1861/1862 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL

Winter: Lecture Season of ’61/62, at the Odeon Hall in Boston:

21st Season of The Lowell Institute Professor L. Agassiz. Methods of Study in Natural History ...... 12 lectures Reverend George E. Ellis. Natural Religion ...... 12 lectures Reverend Robert C. Waterston. Art in Connection with Civilization ...... 12 lectures Professor William B. Rogers. Application of Science to Art ...... 12 lectures Guglielmo Gajani. Italian Independence ...... 12 lectures

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE HDT WHAT? INDEX

ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE

In LOUIS AGASSIZ: A LIFE IN SCIENCE (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988, Edward Lurie would report in regard to this, on his pages 305-308, that: EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS

Agassiz ... complained to friends that the “philanthropy” of the past had resulted in such “socialistic” schemes as Brook Farm, and he hoped that this same reformist spirit would not now result in a complete eradication of social and intellectual distinctions.... The Negro could never be the physical equal of the white. Moreover, there were permanent barriers to social and economic equality.... Beginning in December of 1861, Agassiz subordinated all his other activities to the cause of bringing about an informed public opinion through the popularization of knowledge ... the American public was at this time exposed to the most dangerous of scientific and philosophical ideas — the concept of evolution.... The progress of science required an informed public opinion capable of resisting error.... “Nature is the work of thought, the production of intelligence, carried out according to plan.... In our study of natural objects we are approaching the thought of the Creator, reading his conceptions, interpreting a system that is not ours.” Lowell Institute audiences were shown, just as they had learned in 1847, that every fact of nature supported this all-inclusive theory of being.... These sentiments reached a wider audience than the Bostonians present at the Lowell lectures, for they were published as a series in the Atlantic Monthly beginning in January of 1862. THE SCIENCE OF 1861 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL

So the truth of the matter is that both Professor Agassiz,4 on the one side, and Henry Thoreau, on the other, had qualms about philanthropy as it was currently practiced. Thoreau’s qualm was that concern for the welfare of others could be used to mask an avoidance of one’s primary responsibility — which is to live to the fullest, most responsibly, the individual life that has been assigned to us. Agassiz’s qualm was that a misplaced concern for the welfare of people inferior to us might lead us to avoid our primary responsibility, which obviously is to the welfare of the superior people, those of our own kind. (The professor was like the mass of men, who are still and always young in respect to the toys of childhood, toys such as contempt for those who can be safely abused. This is the distinction between the moral decency of the Harvard student and the racism of the Harvard professor: Such a one as this might make a good shepherd’s dog but is readily distinguishable from the Good Shepherd.)

WALDEN: There is a period in the history of the individual, PEOPLE OF as of the race, when the hunters are the “best men,” WALDEN as the Algonquins called them. We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun; he is no more humane, while his education has been sadly neglected. This was my answer with respect to those youths who were bent on this pursuit, trusting that they would soon outgrow it. No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature, which holds its life by the same tenure that he does. The hare in its extremity cries like a child. I warn you, mothers, that my sympathies do not always make the usual phil-anthropic distinctions. Such is oftenest the young man’s introduction to the forest, and the most original part of himself. He goes thither at first as a hunter and fisher, until at last, if he has the seeds of a better life in him, he distinguishes his proper objects, as a poet or a naturalist it may be, and leaves the gun and fish-pole behind. The mass of men are still and always young in this respect. In some countries a hunting parson is no uncommon sight. Such a one might make a good shepherd’s dog, but is far from being the Good Shepherd.

THE GOOD SHEPHERD

4. You must understand, the scientistic attitudes of Agassiz were very much in tune with those of his lay audience in beautiful downtown Boston. If you had asked around after one of these lectures, whether everyone of course agreed with the professor or whether there might be some solitary individual who agreed instead with Thoreau, you might have heard opinions expressed that would be startling to you. Agassiz was the 2d most frequent lecturer in the Odeon Hall venue, being exceeded only by the total of 168 lectures on such topics as electricity and on astronomy offered by Professor Joseph Lovering, A.M. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE

WINTER 1862/1863 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL

Winter: Lecture Season of ’62/63, at the Odeon Hall in Boston:

22d Season of The Lowell Institute Reverend Henry Giles. Historic Types of Civilized Man ...... 12 lectures Captain William Steffen. Military Organization ...... 6 lectures Charles Eliot Norton. The Thirteenth Century ...... 12 lectures Professor George W. Greene. American Revolution ...... 12 lectures Reverend Dr. A.P. Peabody. Natural Religion ...... 12 lectures Captain E. Lesdakelyi. Field Service ...... 6 lectures

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ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL

WINTER 1863/1864 HDT WHAT? INDEX

ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE

Winter: Lecture Season of ’63/64, at the Odeon Hall in Boston:

23d Season of The Lowell Institute Professor Henry W. Alden. Structure of Paganism ...... 12 lectures Professor. Daniel Wilson. Ethnical Archæology ...... 10 lectures Reverend J.C. Fletcher. Man and Nature in the Tropics ...... 6 lectures William Everett. The University of Cambridge, England ...... 12 lectures Professor Henry James Clark. The Origin of Life ...... 12 lectures Henry Barnard. National Education ...... 12 lectures

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THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL HDT WHAT? INDEX

ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE

WINTER 1864/1865 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL

Winter: Lecture Season of ’64/65, at the Odeon Hall in Boston:

24th Season of The Lowell Institute Reverend Henry Giles. The Divine Element in Human Nature ...... 12 lectures Reverend J.C. Zachos. English Poets ...... 12 lectures Professor William D. Whitney. Language and the Study of Language ...... 12 lectures Colonel Francis J. Lippitt. On Entrenchments ...... 3 lectures Professor Josiah P. Cooke, Jr. The Sunbeam, its Nature and its Power ...... 12 lectures J. Foster Kirk. Life and Manners in the Middle Ages ...... 6 lectures Professor L. Agassiz. Glaciers and the Ice Period ...... 8 lectures

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ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE

In LOUIS AGASSIZ: A LIFE IN SCIENCE (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988, Edward Lurie would report in regard to this, on his pages 305-308, that: Agassiz ... complained to friends that the “philanthropy” of the past had resulted in such “socialistic” schemes as Brook Farm, and he hoped that this same reformist spirit would not now result in a complete eradication of social and intellectual distinctions.... The Negro could never be the physical equal of the white. Moreover, there were permanent barriers to social and economic equality.... Beginning in December of 1861, Agassiz subordinated all his other activities to the cause of bringing about an informed public opinion through the popularization of knowledge ... the American public was at this time exposed to the most dangerous of scientific and philosophical ideas — the concept of evolution.... The progress of science required an informed public opinion capable of resisting error.... “Nature is the work of thought, the production of intelligence, carried out according to plan.... In our study of natural objects we are approaching the thought of the Creator, reading his conceptions, interpreting a system that is not ours.” Lowell Institute audiences were shown, just as they had learned in 1847, that every fact of nature supported this all-inclusive theory of being.... These sentiments reached a wider audience than the Bostonians present at the Lowell lectures, for they were published as a series in the Atlantic Monthly beginning in January of 1862. THE SCIENCE OF 1864 EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL

WINTER 1865/1866 HDT WHAT? INDEX

ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE

Winter: Lecture Season of ’65/66, at the Odeon Hall in Boston:

25th Season of The Lowell Institute Professor Francis Bowen. Finances of the War ...... 12 lectures Reverend E. Burgess. Indian Archæology ...... 6 lectures Richard Frothingham. American History, Union ...... 12 lectures Samuel Eliot, LL.D. Evidences of Christianity ...... 12 lectures Professor J.P. Lesley. Anthropology ...... 12 lectures Reverend J.C. Fletcher. Pompeii ...... 12 lectures Edward A. Samuels. Music and its History ...... 6 lectures Professor Joseph Lovering. Sound and Light ...... 12 lectures Professor P.A. Chadbourne. Natural Religion ...... 12 lectures Dr. Burt G. Wilder. The Silk Spider of South Carolina ...... 4 lectures HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE HDT WHAT? INDEX

ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE

WINTER 1866/1867 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL

Winter: Lecture Season of ’66/67, at the Odeon Hall in Boston:

26th Season of The Lowell Institute Prof. L. Agassiz. Brazil ...... 12 lectures Charles S. Peirce, S.D. The Logic of Science and Induction ...... 12 lectures T. Sterry Hunt, F.R.S. Chemical and Physical Geography ...... 12 lectures Wm. P. Atkinson. English Literature ...... 12 lectures E. Geo. Squier. The Inca Empire ...... 12 lectures Rev. E. Burgess. The Antiquity of Man ...... 12 lectures R.H. Dana, Jr., LL.D. International Law ...... 12 lectures Rev. W.L. Gage. Biblical Geography ...... 12 lectures

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ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL

WINTER 1867/1868 HDT WHAT? INDEX

ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE

Winter: Lecture Season of ’67/68, at the Odeon Hall in Boston:

27th Season of The Lowell Institute William T. Brigham. Volcanic Phenomena ...... 12 lectures Honorable Emory Washburn. Comparative Jurisprudence ...... 12 lectures Mark Hopkins, D.D. Moral Science ...... 12 lectures Robert Morris Copeland. Improved Agriculture and Landscape Gardening . . . . . 12 lectures Captain N.E. Atwood. Fisheries of Massachusetts Bay ...... 12 lectures Professor D’Arcy W. Thompson. Education ...... 12 lectures Reverend A.P. Peabody. Reminiscences of European Travels ...... 12 lectures Howard Payson Arnold. The Great Exposition, Paris, of 1867 ...... 12 lectures

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THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL HDT WHAT? INDEX

ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE

WINTER 1868/1869 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL

Winter: Lecture Season of ’68/69, at the Odeon Hall in Boston:

28th Season of The Lowell Institute Robert von Schlagintweit. Orthography and Physical Geography of High Asia . . . . 12 lectures Alexander Melville Bell. Elocution ...... 6 lectures Reverend A.A. Livermore. The Debt of the World to Christianity ...... 12 lectures Professor J.P. Cooke, Jr. Electricity ...... 12 lectures George W. Greene. The American Revolution ...... 12 lectures Members of Massachusetts Historical Society: The Early History of Massachusetts ...... 13 lectures (a) Robert C. Winthrop. Introductory. (b) Reverend George E. Ellis. Aims and Objects of the Founders. (c) Reverend George E. Ellis. Treatment of Intruders. (d Samuel T. Haven. Grants under the Great Council. (e) William Brigham. The Plymouth Colony. (f) Professor Emory Washburn. Slavery in Massachusetts. (g) Reverend Charles W. Upham. Records of Massachusetts. (h) Professor Oliver Wendell Holmes. The Medical Profession in Massachusetts. (i) Samuel Eliot. Efforts for the Indians. (j) Reverend Chandler Robbins. The Regicides. (k) Professor Joel Parker. Religious Legislation. (l) Reverend Edward Everett Hale. Puritan Politics. (m) George B. Emerson. Education in Massachusetts. Reverend Edward A. Lawrence. Providence in History ...... 12 lectures Alexander Hyde, A.M. Agriculture ...... 12 lectures Dr. F.G. Lemercier. Physiology of Man, Animals, and Plants ...... 12 lectures HDT WHAT? INDEX

ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL

WINTER 1869/1870

Winter: Lecture Season of ’69/70, at the Odeon Hall in Boston:

27th Season of The Lowell Institute Prof. L. Agassiz. Deep Sea Dredging ...... 12 lectures John Bascom. Mental Philosophy ...... 12 lectures Wm. H. Channing. Progress of Civilization ...... 12 lectures W.H. Niles. Geological History, Ancient and Modern ...... 12 lectures Burt G. Wilder. Hands and Feet of Mammalia ...... 12 lectures Rev. E.E. Hale. Divine Method in Human Life ...... 12 lectures

Members of the American Social Science Association ...... 12 lectures (a) C.C. Perkins. Art Education in the United States. (b) F.L. Olmsted. Public Parks. (c) Prof. Francis Bacon. Civilization and Health. (d) Gen. T.A. Duncan. The American System of Patents. (e) Prof. D.C. Gilman. Scientific Technical Instruction. (f) Prof. B. Peirce. The Coast Survey. (g) Prof. Raphael Pumpelly. The Chinese Question. (h) E.L. Godkin. Rationalism in Legislation. (i) William B. Osgood. Material Growth of the Northwest. (j) George Derby, M.D. Material Growth of the Northwest. (k) Pres. T.D. Woolsey. Material Growth of the Northwest. (l) David Dudley Field. Material Growth of the Northwest.

Albert S. Bickmore. China and the Chinese ...... 12 lectures HDT WHAT? INDEX

ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE

John Stuart Mill added material to his autobiography, which had been created by him and his wife Harriet Taylor Mill in 1853-1854 and had then been substantially revised and extended in 1861, after her death. (This would not see publication until 1873, and even then would be published only as reprocessed by at least five other “editorial” hands. The upshot of this is that the Columbia UP edition of 1924, labeled AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JOHN STUART MILL PUBLISHED FOR THE FIRST TIME WITHOUT ALTERATIONS OR OMISSIONS FROM THE ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT IN THE POSSESSION OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, actually contains words placed there by nine separate individuals. Nevertheless, the myth of sole authorship by solitary genius has assiduously been preserved.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL

1885

Late in the year: Alfred Russel Wallace was invited to deliver a series of eight lectures on “Darwinism and some of its Applications” at The Lowell Institute in Massachusetts. For six months in late 1886 and early 1887 he would be in and around Boston, New-York, and Washington DC, meeting any number of Americans and even achieving an audience with President Grover Cleveland. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE

1898

An institutional history of The Lowell Institute was published. THE LOWELL INSTITUTE

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING, HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project The Lowell Institute HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2014. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: August 30, 2014 HDT WHAT? INDEX

ODEON HALL THE LOWELL INSTITUTE

ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE LOWELL INSTITUTE ODEON HALL

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.