the problem of national life, and now spread its solution before his
readers. 'Our cause,' said he, 'is to honor labor and elevate the
laborer.' Here we have the kernel of the whole matter; the spirit, if
not the letter, of the whole republican system of government. The secret
that philosophers have elaborated from the unconquerable facts of
physics, ethics, and psychology, that men of genius have evolved with
infinite difficulty from the mass of crude aesthetic associations that
cluster around every object of nature or of art, Lyon, working and
thinking alone as a citizen, has discovered, with the sole aid of common
sense and the habit of practical observation. Carey and Godwin have
proved by statistics for unbelievers the reasonableness of the doctrine
enunciated by Lyon. Now, thanks to the untiring efforts of a few
stout-hearted patriots, it is no new one to the North; but in the late
presidential contest it was a strange weapon glittering in strong hands.
Our society, diluted and weakened by the Southern element, revolted at
first from the creed that is to prove its salvation. Not alone in our
border States had the dragon crept, searing our fair institutions with
his hot breath, but even upon the sturdy old Puritan stock were
engrafted many of the petty notions that pass for 'principles' in Dixie.
True, we were educated, all of us, into a sort of decent regard for the
good old element of labor,--we call it industry,--more antique, since
antiquity is a virtue, than aristocracy, for it began in Paradise. But
this was a feature of our Northern character that was to be hurried out
of sight, ignominiously buried without candle or bell, when the giant of
Southern chivalry stalked across our borders. The bravado and
gentlemanly ruffianism of youthful F.F.V-ism at college, and the
supercilious condescension of incipient Southern belledom in the
seminary, impressed young North America with a respect that was indeed
unacknowledged, but that grew with its growth and strengthened with its
strength. But this mock romance of ancestry, this arrogant assumption by
the South of all the social virtues and courtesies of which the nation,
or indeed the universe, could boast, was like the flash of an expiring
candle to Lyon. He had little to do with first families North or South;
his mission was to the _people_. His practical mind gathered in, sheaf
after sheaf, a whole harvest of political facts. He saw that the
government of the United