Part 10

We all regard the association of any object with great events or with those in which we have great interest as making it precious. We endow ships with a kind of personality, regard them affectionately, and often speak of them fondly, as if they were real living beings in whom we had an interest. Such feelings we might legitimately entertain with regard to the Beagle, so closely associated with the history we have referred to. Few associations deserve, in fact, to be more highly valued than that of this brig, the Beagle, with Mr. Darwin’s books and his theory. It is therefore a matter of legitimate concern to inquire into what was the fate of the famous vessel.

The inquiry has been made, and is answered by the Rev. V. Marshall Law, of Oakland, Cal., whose account follows:

“I was lying in my room, in Tsukiji, as I had been day after day, in 1890, watching the lazy roll of the school-ship in the Imperial Naval Academy, just a little to the south, when a caller and an old resident, Mr. Arthur Morris, said to me, ‘I see you have Darwin’s old ship, the Beagle, in plain sight out there.’

“‘Is that the Beagle?’ I asked in great surprise.

“He assured me that it was, and somehow after he had gone it impressed itself more strongly on my mind the more I thought of it. I lay ill, and part of the time in delirium, for ten days. When I at last got up, the Beagle was gone. I sent inquiries to the Naval Academy, but no one seemed to know anything about her. As soon as I was able to go out, I lost no time in setting on foot inquiries of the whereabouts of the missing ship. I finally learned that she had probably gone to the Imperial Navy Yard in Yokosuka, about thirty miles from Tokio. As soon as I was able to travel we started to go to Yokosuka in search of the missing vessel. Before this, however, I had taken the precaution to put on the track the Englishman, Mr. F. W. Hammond, who taught the young Japanese gunnery in the Imperial Naval Academy at Tokio, and he promised to do all in his power--which in this instance was very great--to help me in my search for the Beagle. To aid him, I gave him the following list of questions, to which he sent me the answers given below months afterward. My questions had gone through the regular naval channels. The answers show how methodical the Japanese are, even if they are slow. In these answers I use their language:

“‘Question. How did the Japanese Government happen to get the Beagle?’

“‘Answer. The details of getting are not plainly known, but the Prince of Kagoshima procured it on seventy-five thousand dollars, at the 23d of July, first year of Genzi (1860), afterward he offered it to the Government at the June of the third year of Genzi.’

“‘Q. Are there any good photographs of her as she was when a war ship?’

“‘A. No, we have no one.’

“‘Q. Where is the Beagle now?’

“‘A. After out of use, she was applied as a Chastising Place for seamen at the Yokosuka station, and then was auctioned at the March, twenty-second year of Genzi.’

“‘Q. What was the date of her arrival in Japan?’

“‘A. She was received by the Prince of Kagoshima, at Nagasaki, July, the first year of Genzi.’

“‘Q. What is her present name? When was her name changed?’

“‘A. At the present this ship has no name in the consequence of out of use, but after procured by the Kagoshima Prince the name of Beagle was changed into Kenko Kan.’

“‘Q. Do you know how old this ship is, and what she was used for by the British Government before the Japanese got her?’

“‘A. She was actually used during twenty-three years, after which she was put out of use, having been constructed at Liverpool, and we can not know what she was applied for before got by Japan, but she remained more or less than one year in England.’ (Darwin made his famous voyage in her from 1831 to 1836.)

“‘Q. What is the name of the captain who had charge of her after she became the property of the Japanese Government?’

“‘A. Commander Sadakumi Shiba was appointed the acting captain February, 2d year of Genzi; Commander S. Hamataki, from December, 5th year of Genzi; Commander M. Omura, from November, 10th year of Genzi; Commander Sadakumi Shiba, from December, 11th year of Genzi; then the last was dismissed on the September, in the 14th year of Genzi.’

“‘Q. In what capacity did the Japanese Government use her from the time she arrived up to the time she was dismantled?’

“‘A. She was rated as the fifth class at the November, 4th year of Genzi, then the fourth class May the 8th year.’

“We found Yokosuka, and our party were shown every courtesy by the Japanese naval officials; so at last we ran down the Beagle, lying on the shore and showing not a vestige of her proud, historic self. She was being torn to pieces, and the parts were sold for ‘old junk.’

“I reflected, as I stood among her spars and chains, her anchors and her capstan, of the significance of the career of the famous vessel, and of her associations with the man whose investigations revolutionized scientific thought and spread consternation for a time in the pulpits of the world. The attitude of these pulpits has been modified by reason of those researches, and the blessings of the world and of the Church now follow the author of them for having shown the way to a juster and more rational conception of the power and purposes of the Creator.”

SCIENCE STUDY AND NATIONAL CHARACTER.

BY ALBERT B. CROWE.

Until very recently it had come to be a commonly accepted view in America that the civilization of a nation is directly proportional to the amount it expends for education, and inversely proportional to the amount it expends for war. The budgets of European countries have given Americans good reason to accept this standard, since its application gave the most gratifying evidence of our great intellectual and moral advancement. Less than three years ago the President of the National Educational Association proudly exclaimed: “England, six to one for war; Russia, thirty-eight to one for war; America, four to one for education!”

Since that time our country has become involved in war projects, from which we can hardly hope it will withdraw, that have increased our expenditure for war four times, and a policy has been inaugurated which, if persisted in, will certainly almost at once reverse our boasted ratio, making it “four to one for war”! This course has been supported by a great body of our people. Even our Christian ministers have committed “The White Man’s Burden” to memory, and breathe never a whisper of the sixth commandment. If, as has been held by all wise and good men, the victories of peace are more worthy to be sung than those of war; if the ability to avoid quarrels or to settle them without force of arms is nobler than that which achieves military success; if true enlightenment and education make for peace and not for war, then our law of direct and inverse proportion has lately been scandalously dishonored.

If we have expended so much for education and at the same time have lowered our ideal of national greatness, something must be wrong with that education. If the sharpening and quickening of the intellect are accompanied by a blunting and atrophy of the moral sense, the best and the worst thing that can be said of our school system is that it gives daily rations to hundreds of thousands of teachers. Evidence of disease of the national conscience must raise in the minds of thoughtful men grave doubts as to the sufficiency of our education to “insure national progress, prosperity, and honor,” whether because of inherent weakness of the system or because of the strength of the forces opposed to it.

Has our system of education, then, failed to elevate our national character? He who would answer this question in the affirmative would be a pessimist indeed. Incalculable “general good” has come to us, we think, by the agency of our schools. Without them our civilization could not be so far advanced as it is; our national life might have ended long since. In every crisis, however black has been the storm, however fierce and ominous the lightning flash, there has followed in good time the gentle rain, soothing and allaying our fear, and giving renewed promise of prosperity and peace. It is the sober second thought, we are in the habit of saying, which saves us, which takes the helm and sheers us away from the half-hidden reefs in our first mad course. It is not. It is the sober first thought which has redeemed us from destruction time after time--the sober first thought of the few who are truly educated, who have looked below the surface of things and considered the hidden and obscure results, who have weighed the right and wrong and stood immovable for the right. It is the counsel of such men which has fallen like the rain that follows the first bursting of the storm, and has given us courage and power to restrain ourselves and to face our hardest duty. For such men in our national affairs we may reverently offer thanks, and for an educational system which is partly, at least, responsible for them we may have sincere praise. But our safety must always depend upon the presence of such men, strong enough in numbers and in influence to control each difficult and dangerous situation which may threaten us. Our work as teachers is not faithful if we do not increase this number and strengthen this influence. And if such men have been overpowered in the important events of the past two years, if they have been entirely ignored, or if they have been taunted and ridiculed, we have reached a dangerous crisis, and our sacred duty is to stop and take our bearings. If we have manifested certain national traits hitherto scarcely suspected, and now unwillingly confessed, every motive of patriotism and of prudence should impel us to study our case, that we may effectively prescribe for it.

Are there not, then, certain signs which we may all agree are discernible? Have not the waves of powerful feeling which have swept over us, the storms of acrimonious debate which have raged in our papers and forums, the pæans of praise which we have chanted at our “peace jubilees” and hero parties, revealed the prevalence and rapid growth of certain sentiments which we may all, without regard to political belief, clearly recognize? I do not in this place raise the question of the political wisdom or simple justice of the course which the country has taken in its international relations. I do not now challenge any belief as to these matters which has been formed thoughtfully, honestly, manfully; but I do maintain that the past few months have left lessons for thoughtful, honest men to unite in studying.

Probably the most striking phenomenon which we have witnessed has been the tremendous display of excited feeling. However careful our national leaders may have been, however honest in basing their actions on what they considered sufficient information, or however careless and dishonest, no man who has read any considerable number of our papers, who has listened to the clamor of the crowds, can doubt that the force of blind passion has been in hundreds of thousands of men the dominant force. If during the war with Spain you stood in the cheering, surging crowds before the bulletin boards, if you heard storms of hisses greet the name of the innocent boy-King of Spain, or noted the cheer of triumph which applauded the capture of a lumber scow by an armored cruiser, you will have no difficulty in agreeing with me. You will smile at the idea of imputing to such men the credit of serious thought. On the birthday of the greatest American, whose life was a message of liberty--“who,” said a great Spanish orator, “laid down his life at the foot of his finished work”--our papers printed jokes about the mistake of the Filipinos in trying to fight Uncle Sam, and in our cities, at least, the report of their slaughter was received with exultation. Whether they were civilized or not, whether they were misled or not, whether they were ignorant of America’s carefully concealed intention or not, the killing of thousands of men who thought they were fighting for their freedom, who faced machine guns, and who crawled away into the bushes to die for the cause for which they had fought, is hardly a subject for jokes or for exultation, when people are governed by reason and not by feeling alone. When the Maine was sunk in Havana Harbor her captain, in a notable dispatch telling of the disaster, urged a suspension of judgment until the facts should be known. Facts! In an hour our battle-cry was, “Remember the Maine!” Under that motto, within a few days, one of the great Chicago dailies (the Inter-Ocean) hung out the pennant of the wrecked battle ship and enlistment signs. Who was right--the Maine’s captain or the paper? Which appeal meant safety, and which danger? Our own commission investigated the wreck. After an examination, which was kept entirely within our own hands, the commission reported that the ship had been destroyed from the outside, but that there was no evidence to fix the responsibility. Did we fix the responsibility? Though the investigation board could find no evidence, though reason said that the destroyer of the Maine, were he Spain’s own king, was Spain’s worst enemy, we forgot the cause of deliverance, and went into battle with the cry of vengeance on our lips. This is not a statement of sentiment but of fact. Your motives, or the President’s, or mine may have been pure--your opinion may have been unprejudiced--but these things around us we all saw and all heard. We know that many men were carried away by their feelings, and did not think. We know that their feelings grew into a prejudice which was absolutely certain to distort the facts and to drive them far from the truth if they ever came to the point of thinking. The ears of the multitude have been closed to all counsels, however wise; their eyes to all consequences, however fatal; their minds to all logic, however clear and simple.

We may consider more briefly, but not less carefully, other tendencies which have been shown, seeing many of them in the facts which have already been referred to.

From the fact that passion has so largely supplanted reason in moving many of our people we have developed some wonderful instances of credulity. The sequence is most natural. When men become unwilling, or uncaring, to ascertain the truth for themselves they inevitably display a great willingness to swallow any statement which may obligingly be offered them by some one else. So, with half of the Spanish navy sunk and the other half accounted for, we spent hours of glorious, wild conjecture, in the dear dead days beyond recall, listening to the awful sound of cannonading in the Windward Passage, which reached us by the way of Mole St. Nicholas. We believe what is sufficiently exciting to be true.

Related to the phenomena we have noticed is another--the evident loss of individuality--of moral and mental independence. How striking is it to compare some of our newspaper editorials of to-day with those of two years ago in the same papers, and to see how their writers have been dragged, step by step, into line with those whom they formerly opposed! They have not changed their faith; they have deserted it. For them there is the defense of business necessity; but if you will to-day talk to many men who gave you their opinions a few months ago, you will find that they have broken down and given up--surrendered to superior numbers. In our bulletin crowds we have all seen the spirit of the mob, which meets the newcomer indifferent or doubtful, thrills him with the mysterious influence of the men packed around and against him, and sends him away an irresponsible monomaniac.

With such forces at work, it is inevitable that we should act, or be ready to act, quickly. Why not? Reflection takes time. To learn the facts fully and certainly takes time. To feel--how long? To take another man’s word--how long? To give way to a thousand other men--how long? We have all seen men cheering our war with Spain only yesterday. To-day Austria seems friendly to the queen regent. We’ll whip Austria, too. To-morrow Germany is impudent to Dewey. We shall be ready by night to whip Germany. If Europe combines against us, how long shall we consider the cost of such a war as that? Write it on the bulletin board--the crowd will be ready before the writing is done.

Near to this is the spirit of fickleness, of inconstancy, which has been frequently manifested. We have not only made up our minds on insufficient evidence, but we have unmade them in a hurry on no evidence at all, showing a startling lack of confidence in our own judgments and of respect for them. Attention might well have been called, in a former paragraph, to the small amount of our real knowledge of the character of Aguinaldo. On what petty and inconsequential evidence have we first called him a great liberator, and now a scheming politician! Men who could hardly read his most remarkable appeal to this country do not hesitate to call him an unprincipled, conceited, ignorant barbarian: what reliable information have they received with reference to his motives? They have found no trouble in changing their opinions. In the past few months we have been mercurial almost beyond mercurial Frenchmen. Think of the revulsion of feeling that followed Hobson across the continent; and, more recently, of our sad lack of self-restraint shown by the vicious and ungrounded attack upon Admiral Dewey, only a few days after he had been the object of the greatest display of hero worship America has ever seen. And how many important changes may we count, if we carry back our comparison to the time before the war?

But by so doing we uncover another significant fact. We find that many of the ideas so quickly thrown aside are those which have been the foundation principles, and bear the prestige of great names. We have held it our special mission to show to warlike nations that a power which stands for peace may be greater than theirs; and, alas! many of our leaders, and our people, too, are crying that the time has come--has _now_ come--for us to take our place among the great nations of the earth. We have pitied the war-taxed peoples of Europe, and offered them a home where they would not have to buy powder and guns. And now we are eagerly rushing to take up the burden from which they have been fleeing to us. We have held that great standing armies are unnecessary and dangerous, and already we have quadrupled ours. We have declared our determination to avoid foreign entanglements, and now we are in the very heart of the sputtering coil in the far East. With those who have thoughtfully decided that these changes have been necessary or wise I have no wish to debate now, but we must all unite in recognizing the spirit which has been shown, and is now shown, in speaking of our past positions. The principles which for years have been our rules of national conduct have been thrown aside in a day, scoffed at, mocked. And we smile at the names of the great men who have announced those principles and defended them, or we flatly declare they are out of date. We once listened with reverent and full hearts when our wise men spoke to us of freedom, and recalled our national traditions and taught national righteousness. Now we laugh at swaddling clothes outgrown, outused, and smile at the innocent simplicity of our fathers. We lift our brows at the name of Washington: we say he was a fine old gentleman, and his Farewell Address, considering everything, was a very creditable paper, and well adapted to the exigencies of the time in which it was written. And this carnival of irreverence is holding not only in our streets, but in our newspaper offices, in our pulpits, and in some of our higher institutions of learning.

These are the phenomena of our recent national experience which I desire you to consider. There may be other unfavorable indications. There may be others, and many more, which are hopeful and encouraging. But these clearly warn us of danger. Furthermore, I insist that whatever may have been your sympathy with the Administration, or your opposition to it; however numerous the men of your acquaintance who have been free from such influences, you must have seen them at work in a dangerously large part of our population. Even if that part has, in your judgment, reached the right position, you must recognize the ominous character of their method of reaching it.

Now, what has this to do with us? What connection has it with our work? If science teaching has any educational value, the most definite and direct connection. I shall not do you the injustice of supposing that any tendency I have named did not at once bear to you its proper suggestion. If it has failed, the fault has been in the presentation of a very simple matter. For every perilous tendency I have mentioned has its life in direct violation of the essential principles of science study, and may be restrained by extending the knowledge and habitual use of those principles.

I do not wish to claim for science work an unwarranted value in this respect, nor to deny the influence of other subjects in bringing about a moral evolution. It is true that history warns us by examples, that it points us to the failure of free governments in whose steps to destruction many of us seem only too willing to follow. It is true that we can learn from Rome the results of imperialism; from France, of irreverence; from Spain, of tyranny. In other fields of learning we may find other lessons of present value. But to meet the dangers that just now assail us, the national weaknesses that I have enumerated, the scientific studies seem especially fitted.

“The great peculiarity of scientific training,” says Huxley, “that in virtue of which it can not be replaced by any other discipline whatsoever, is the bringing of the mind directly into contact with fact, and practicing the intellect in the completest form of induction--that is to say, in drawing conclusions from particular facts made known by immediate observation of Nature.” “The bringing of the mind into contact with fact.” This means the recognition of the existence of incontrovertible truth. The dawning knowledge of such truth must bring with it the consciousness that much that we have always accepted as truth is open to question. Thus every belief, no matter what its nature, is in time subjected to examination. If it stand, it stands because it is able to bear this searching scrutiny and to answer fairly the questions of honest doubt. Honest doubt may be the result of honest reasoning; it must absolutely demand honest reasoning to satisfy it. This exercise of the rational faculty, then, depends upon and results from an awakened love of truth. How directly do these most obvious principles of scientific investigation bear upon the facts we have been considering! How flatly do they forbid us to be carried away into excesses! Let us apply them briefly, point by point.

If love of truth and appeal to reason mean anything at all, they mean, first of all, eternal opposition to the power of unthinking passion--of blind feeling. They mean that every sentiment should have a rational cause and a reasonable object. They do not forbid feeling, but they require thinking.

Secondly, they defy prejudice. They call for the open court, the fair trial, the impartial judge. They say “No” to worthless witnesses and to packed juries.