Part 11

Unlike the experience of the most of those who entertain pronounced ideas and proclaim them in the face of established custom. Dr. Clark seems to have retained his popularity. Evidently he was a very tactful man. In 1809, the year following the formation of the temperance society, he was made supervisor of the town of Moreau, and although his activity, constant, wide and diversified, was being powerfully directed against the intemperate habits of the people, he seems to have maintained their confidence and friendship. He was again chosen supervisor in 1821. We may derive a hint of his high standing in the public estimation from the fact that he was chosen in 1848 for the New York Electoral college, whose choice was Taylor and Filmore.

The funeral address of Rev. A. J. Fennel, of the Glens Falls Presbyterian Church, has been preserved and appears as a supplement to Dr. Holden's obituary article. Rev. Mr. Fennel having been Dr. Clark's pastor, his discourse is of great biographical value. His opening remarks were particularly well chosen and impressive. He said:

"I feel, my friends, that Providence calls us to perform no mean office to-day. We are to convey to their final resting place the mortal remains of one who has been a power in the world for great good to the children of men--whose name will enter into history as that of a benefactor of the community; and whose influence, as an element in the temperance reformation, will run on into future generations. It cannot do us any hurt, it ought to do us good, to pause a few moments in this habitation now made sacred as the spot whence the earnest spirit of so devoted and useful a man took its departure to the heavenly rest, and reflect on his life of activity and toil, and observe how Providence used him for our good and the good of our children."

With appropriate public demonstrations, the remains of Dr. Clark were borne to the burying ground of the Union Meeting House, in Moreau, and placed to rest beside the grave of his wife. There, two miles from the historic spot where he unfurled the banner of a world-wide moral movement, his ashes mingled with the soil that his devotion has made of honorable distinction.

Thus, have I attempted to disentangle, gather up and lead in continuous discourse the scattered threads which I have found in my study of this neglected subject. If I have rendered more coherent and tangible the life and achievement of a universally influential philanthropist, I shall be pleased; but I hope, besides that good result, the consideration of the memoirs of a man who had a great mission in the world and who ably and conscientiously discharged it, will serve to impress upon us a sense of the power of elevated ideas when duly championed by even one consecrated soul.

_Acknowledgement._

In expressing my appreciation of the assistance which has been rendered me in the collection of materials for the preparation of this paper, I would particularly mention Mr. James A. Holden, of Glens Falls, who has furnished me, from the library of his father, the late Dr. A. W. Holden, with most valuable matter, some of which could have been obtained from no other source. I also duly acknowledge my indebtedness to Hon. Grenville M. Ingalsbe, of Sandy Hill, who interested himself in my search for data, and feel myself under obligations to the _Schuylerville Standard_ and to the _Glen Falls Times_ for gratuitously publishing my request for information.

_Communications._

From the letters relating to the subject in hand which I have received, I glean the following. I might say that the discrepancy which appears in the descriptions of Dr. Clark's person may be accounted for by the different ages and conditions of health in which he is best remembered by the several Observers:

From Dr. Albert Mott, Cohoes: "The location of the Union Meeting House was at Reynold's Corners, about four or five hundred feet from the corner, directly east. The burying ground was north and across the road from the meeting house."

From Rev. Dr. Jos. E. King, Fort Edward: "In 1858 the old church (Union Meeting House) was filled, to enjoy the commemorative exercises of the 50th year since the origin of the temperance cause, and I heard Hon. Judge McKean, of Saratoga, address the congregation. There was singing, prayer, a poem by Lura Boies, &c."

Statement of Judge Lyman H. Northrup, of Sandy Hill, w<ho remembers Dr. Clark: "He always carried upon his countenance a mild, genial, pleasant expression; dressed with neatness, and appeared to be a good sort of a fellow, and exhibited not at all that asperity which we associate in our minds with the active reformer."

From William Gary, of Gansevoort, who was intimate with Dr. Clark: "He had rather small, black eyes, which would be generally considered rather piercing. His hair was black and very profuse; eye-brows very shaggy. His height I should put at 5 ft. 10 in., and weight about 170 lbs."

From B. F. Lapham, of Glens Falls: "I was well acquainted with Dr. B. J. Clark. He lived on the same street we did for many years, and when he died I helped prepare his body for burial. He was rather eccentric in many things and very resolute. There never was a meeting held but he would suggest some resolution, so they nicknamed him 'Resolution Billy.' Dr. Clark's name will be famous through all time as the originator of the first temperance organization that ever existed. He was an ardent and efficient laborer all his life."

From Miss Anna Mott, of Glens Falls. Miss Mott is a daughter of James Mott, who was a co-laborer in the temperance cause with Dr. Clark, and his neighbor at Clark's Corners: "As I remember Dr. B. J. Clark, he was a cultured, refined man, with fine sensibility. He had a kind word and look for every one that was worthy of it. He was of medium height and size. His hair and eyes were black; his forehead high and broad. His mouth and chin bespoke firmness. His complexion 'was dark. As I saw Dr. Clark, he was a very kind, gentlemanly old man, and appreciated every kindness he received."

From Austin L. Reynolds, of South Glens Falls. Mr. Reynolds knew Dr. Clark for many years, and assisted him in the temperance work: "Dr. Clark's name was Billy, instead of William. He was stocky in form, and weighed about 175 lbs. His height was about 5 ft. 6 in.; complexion fair; dark hair and eyes, and very heavy eyebrows. He was peculiarly successful as a physician and as a business man. Was the owner of several farms and was interested in a paper mill, situated on what is known as Snoot Kill Creek. Later, he moved to Glens Falls and was proprietor of a drug store for a number of years in that village. Then he returned to Clark's Corners with his daughter, Mrs. Alfred C. Farlin (widow), as housekeeper, and remained at his homestead for several years. He lost his eyesight and was entirely blind. Then he returned to Glens Falls, and died in 1866. He left one son and three daughters, all of whom are now dead."

_A Visit to Clark's Corners._

In order that I might obtain a better understanding of the topography of the neighborhood, I visited Clark's Corners on a day in August, 1905. Driving west from Fort Edward, at a distance of three miles I came to Reynolds' (four) Corners. I was very courteously received by Mr. Austin L. Reynolds, who gave me full information as to all the historic spots connected with the Moreau society. Mr. Reynolds is at an advanced age, more than eighty, but he promptly and clearly communicated to me the facts herewith set forth.

The roads at Reynolds' Corners run toward the cardinal points, and the burying ground of the Union Meeting House is at a short distance east of the corners, as already has been stated by Dr. Mott. The remains of Dr. Clark were removed from this, the place of their first burial, and were re-interred at Glens Falls. The site of the Union Meeting House is unoccupied, the present chapel standing on other ground, some distance to the west. The Union Meeting House was Dr. Clark's place of worship, and his pastor, Rev. Lebbeus Armstrong, resided at the parsonage, one-half mile south of the church and on the west side of the highway. The cottage which stands on the site of Armstrong's home is now the residence of Mr. Halsey Chambers. It was here that Dr. Clark came in the night upon his historic errand.

Clark's (four) Corners are directly south of Reynolds' Corners and two miles distant. The north and south road is crossed at right angles by the other. Both of these localities are open country, that of Clark's Corners having the appearance of fertility and thrift; pleasant homes and commodious buildings being numerous. Clark's Corners may be conveniently reached from the village of Gansevoort, on the Delaware and Hudson Railroad, two miles south.

The site of the Mawney house is at Clark's Corners. It stood on the northwest corner. Another building has since been erected upon this ground. Dr. Clark's home stood across the road, on the southwest corner. The house has disappeared, but the cellar walls stand almost intact. About forty rods south of the corners and on the east side of the road is the site of the school-house in which the Moreau society held its meetings. A dwelling house, the home of Mr. George Haviland, now occupies that plot of ground.

The sites of the Union Meeting House, parsonage, Mawney house, Dr. Clark's house, and the school house, should be appropriately marked.

THE DEMOCRATIC IDEAL.

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By Hon. Milton Reed.

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The shrewd saying of the Swedish Chancellor Oxenstiern, _"An nescis, mi fili, quantilla prudentia regitur orbis?"_--"Dost thou not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?" has been substantially true in every epoch in the world's history. Everything human must needs be imperfect, and in nothing is imperfection more plainly exhibited than in the successive schemes of government which men have attempted. Some have been broad-based and have lasted for what we, in our ordinary reckoning, call a long period of time. But most of them have been built on the sand; a few storms, shocks, convulsions, and they have fallen. Men have generally made but sorry work in trying to govern each other. The individual may govern himself after a fashion; but to govern wisely another man, or, still harder, great masses of men, even where there has been community of public interests, of language, religion and custom--aye, there has been the rub! Human history has often been called a great tragedy; but no tragic element is more ghastly or more overwhelming than the catastrophes in which most governments have collapsed. Ambitious attempts at world-power, the most splendid combinations to group nations into a civic unity, have tottered to their fall, as surely as the little systems which have had their day and ceased to be,--shifting, fleeting, impotent.

It is not difficult to see why this has been so. Social life is only one phase of the great organic life of the species; one scene of the human drama of which the earth has been "the wide and universal theatre." Change, transition, development, birth, growth, death, are universal elements in the cosmic order. Of the slow but inevitable changes in the physical history of the earth, Tennyson says:

"There rolls the deep, where stood the tree; O earth, what changes hast thou seen; There where the long street roars, has been The stillness of the central sea. The hills are shadows, and they flow From form to form; and nothing stands; They melt like mists, the solid lands; Like clouds they shape themselves and go."

If this mutation be true of organic changes in the physical earth, working through immeasurable æons, it is even as dramatically true of organized social life.

We are learning to take a new view of history. It is no longer regarded as a collection of isolated facts. Veracious history is a record of the orderly progression of events, developed by evolutionary processes. There is in it no break, no hiatus, excepting such temporary interruptions as come from what Emerson calls "the famous might that lurks in reaction recoil." Thus we learn the _rationale_ of the events transcribed to the historical page. Until science lifted the curtain on "the eternal landscape of the past," man knew little of himself or of his kind. It is only with the enlarged vision that has come to us from the researches of the ethnologist, biologist, anthropologist, sociologist, that we have begun to learn what a creature man really is; to study his inner nature; to get at the deeper meanings of the history of the race.

Once the study of history was thought to be hardly more than learning a catalogue of royal dynasties; the names of famous generals and statesmen; of battles lost and won; of court intrigues; of the vicissitudes of kingdoms; of the prowess of pioneers and adventurers; of "hair-breadth 'scapes i' the imminent deadly breach;" of the pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war! Such incidents have not lost, and never can lose, their interest. They are an integral part of the human document and must always be studied. When draped with myth and legend they minister to "the vision and faculty divine" of the poet; they visualize the possibilities of human courage; stimulate the affections; answer to the eternal cravings of the imagination. But they are only the phenomena of the real history of the race. Life is broader, larger, deeper, richer, fuller, than a mere transcript of happenings--externals, results--important as they are. We must get at the causes, motives, inter-relations, the hidden causes from which events flow, before we can unravel the web in which they are woven, and thus interpret them.

The core of history is the element which the Greeks called _toanthropeion;_ called by a modern poet "the bases of life;" called by us average folk, Human Nature. It is as constant a quality as anything can be in our moving life. We may not be able to agree with Middleton, who says in his life of Cicero, "Human nature has ever been the same in all ages and nations;" but it is probably true that nothing has changed less in primal qualities than the bases of life. Empires have perished, civilizations vanished, governments have rotted, languages, territorial lines, seeming sit-fast institutions, have passed into nothingness; but the human element has stood the shock of ages. "The one remains; the many change and pass," said Shelley. Man-character, man-life, is the one element, the colors of which seem fast. It is, like all other things, subject to evolutionary changes; it may be differentiated into a thousand forms; but the bases of life have never shifted.

Human history is a great tragedy indeed. But, like all tragedies, it has its spiritualizing, sanctifying, ennobling side. When the drama of the ages is unrolled we see much to make us weep; but we also see immeasurably more to make us glory that we are a part of the race. While its history reeks with blood, carnage, oppression, injustice, cruelty, in which sad facts the pessimist hears "the eternal note of sadness," and unwisely rushes into a denial of the moral order--it has its sun-bright triumphs of rectitude, and the illuminating picture of the steady and glorious advance of mankind from brutishness into an orderly, moralized life.

Readers of Matthew Arnold--an author whose intellectual vision was great, and whose style is one of the literary ornaments of the last century--will recall how he was taken with what he called "Mr. Darwin's famous proposition" that "our ancestor was a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in his habits." Mr. Arnold, the apostle of culture, played again and again around this sonorous phrase. Far be it from me to enter upon any discussion of the Darwinian hypothesis of the genesis of the human race. On this large theme the last word has not been said. Knowledge must grow from more to more before we can posit anything definite on a subject veiled at present in inscrutable mystery. But, in its essence, the evolutionary theory has soaked into our modern thought. The literature and the progressive teaching of our latter day are drenched with it. It certainly can be said of it, that it explains many things which have heretofore seemed inexplicable, and marks a great advance in popular intelligence. But the most ambitious generalization is only a temporary expedient. Fact will merge in fact; law will melt into a larger law; one deep of knowledge will call unto another deep; much that the proudest scientist of our day calls knowledge will vanish away; many theories now popular will be dissected and pruned and will be found to be "such stuff as dreams are made on," before the most enlightened humanity of a future age catches any one phase of nature in its snare and compresses it into rigid laws.

Nevertheless, the ancestor of man was brutish, and his descendants are where they are. Whether or not primeval man was the rather unpicturesque creature described by Mr. Arnold, he was the norm from which has come "the heir of all the ages."

From the cave-dweller, the aboriginal savage, have been evolved Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Milton, Dante, Newton, Gladstone, Pascal, La Place, Lincoln, Emerson, Channing, Martineau, Thomas a' Kempis, Phillips Brooks, Darwin and Herbert Spencer. How magnificent the ascent! How glorious the progression!

Man, once the companion of the Dragons of the prime That tare each other in their slime,

has flowered into an intellectual, reasoning, moral being--"how infinite in faculty; in form and moving how express and admirable; in action how like an angel; in apprehension how like a god."

All this progress, however, has cost its price. Step by step has the race advanced from primeval animalism to its present status. It has walked with bleeding feet. The Divine economy works in many ways. One of its ways is to educate, stimulate and spiritualize through antagonism and pain. All faculties, functions and potencies must be worked in order that they may grow. Atrophy, decay, death, are the resultant of non-use. The sullen earth was to be fertilized by man's sweat and blood before it would yield any increase beyond its spontaneous productions. Conflict with the elements, conquest over the lower organisms; ages of toilsome effort, were to come before man was able "to dress the earth and keep it." Out of the iron necessities of his being came initial progress; and progress once begun has never ceased.

The great factor in progress was Co-operation. One man alone can do little. The moment human necessities were recognized, the law of association applied. Man needed man. The family group, the clan, the tribe, the town, the city, the state, the nation, have been stages in the process of closer and closer co-operation.

Confederation, association, combination, require adjustment, compromise, regulation. Hence the germ of government. To live together each man must give way in something to the other. Man is gregarious; he is naturally social; instinctively he availed himself of the companionship of other men. The social status, the _foedera generis humani,_ were slowly evolved from the increasing demands of man upon man; they were not the result of bargaining. What a magnificent drama; the world, the theatre; all mankind, emerging from primitive ignorance, the actors. How many or how long the acts were, we know not; but through "that duration which maketh pyramids pillars of snow, and all that's past a moment," the wonderful scenes moved on. Out of the strong came forth sweetness. From brute selfishness, from animal passion, came love. Slowly the central idea was reached, and, in the sublime language of the Scripture, man became a living soul! and his body became the temple of the Holy Spirit; his consciousness a part of the infinite consciousness; his personality a world-copy of a divine universe. Reason, conscious, love, were his dower.

The curtain has not yet fallen, and will never fall, upon the last act. We live in a world which is always in process. Nature's genesis is unceasing. "Without haste, without rest," her creative and re-creative processes are always operating.

When one undertakes to talk about government he is drawn instinctively to some historic models. As thinking persons realized in every age the insufficiency of contemporaneous governments, there has scarcely been a time when the academic reformer was wanting. Certain ages may have lacked poets--ours is said to be unpoetic and prosaic, and to await its poet-prophet--but the academic idealist who could say, Go to, let us build a government, has been generally at hand. The dreams of the illuminated ones who have sought, by rule and theory, to make the crooked straight, to convert mankind into angels by legal enactment, are among the most pleasing, if abortive, works of genius. Some of the noblest spirits of the race have made this illusory effort.

Plato, that splendid genius, in whose brain was wrapped the subtle essence which gave to Hellenic art and literature their incomparable charm, found a congenial theme in painting his ideal Republic. It was a beautiful attempt to develop a state based upon Socratic thought. He had sat at the feet of the great master of dialectic, and, with the hot enthusiasm of a reformer, painted a picture of the idealized man, living in a community where the supremacy of the intellect was to be recognized as authoritative, where the individual and family were to be absorbed in the state, and where a lofty communism was to be established, and in which Virtue, Truth, Beauty and Goodness were to be sovereign entities. But the Platonic Communism was one where equality and humanity were left out. Plato could not escape the Time-Spirit. The Platonic Republic was his Athens idealized. "The very age and body of the time" gave to the philosopher's dream its form and pressure. The actual Hellenic Republics were not based upon the rights of man; a few ruled over a nation of proletariats and slaves. When they came into rough contact with the vigorous Roman civilization, they were shattered like iridescent bubbles. Even so wise-browed a philosopher as Plato failed to recognize sufficiently the human element. His imaginary republic was air-drawn, fantastic; a philosophic dream, with little grasp on life's realities. It was not broad-based. It did not recognize sufficiently the law of growth. It had no place in our work-a-day world. It interests us now chiefly from the superb literary skill with which it was constructed; a prodigy of intellect and art. But it was not the Democratic Ideal.