Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (120 page)

The essence of his original philosophic idea was that economics determined politics, that public rather than private ownership of the means of production was the best economics, and that “class struggle” was inevitable when the class in charge was no longer benefiting the mass of the people. Though his central prediction of the collapse of capitalism was mistaken, and tens of millions suffered and died as a result of the application of his philosophy, the idea of class struggle had validity: after the “new class” of Communist apparatchiks took control of the economy of the Soviet empire, the lower class felt the unrelenting pinch of permanent depression as well as political oppression and swept out its class enemy.

When the founding of the
People’s Paper
was celebrated with a London banquet in 1856, Karl Marx was asked to speak. Invited to give the first toast, he knew that he was “to speak for the sovereignty of the proletariat in all countries.”

Throughout this after-dinner speech, Marx sounds themes familiar to his social thought: the needed revolution of workingmen for “the emancipation of their own class,” the universal domination of “capital rule and wages slavery,” and the historical imperative for the inevitable success of
the proletariat. That imperative is made most forceful in the parallel structure of the speech’s closing sentence.

***

THE SO-CALLED
revolutions of 1848 were but poor incidents—small fractures and fissures in the dry crust of European society. However, they announced the abyss.

Beneath the apparently solid surface, they betrayed oceans of liquid matter, only needing expansion to rend into fragments continents of hard rock. Noisedly and confusedly they proclaimed the emancipation of the proletarian, i.e., the secret of the nineteenth century, and of the revolution of that century.

That social revolution, it is true, was no novelty invented in 1848. Steam, electricity, and the self-acting mule were revolutionists of a rather more dangerous character than even citizens Barbès, Raspail, and Blanqui. But, although the atmosphere in which we live weighs upon everyone with a twenty-thousand-pound force, do you feel it? No more than European society before 1848 felt the revolutionary atmosphere enveloping and pressing it from all sides.

There is one great fact, characteristic of this, our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of the former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman Empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary; machinery gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labor, we behold starving and overworking it. The newfangled sources of wealth, by some strange, weird spell, are turned into sources of want. The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character.

At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force.

This antagonism between modern industry and science on the one hand, modern misery and dissolution on the other hand; this antagonism between the productive powers and the social relations of our epoch is a fact, palpable, overwhelming, and not to be controverted. Some parties may wail over it; others may wish to get rid of modern arts in order to get
rid of modern conflicts. Or they may imagine that so signal a progress in industry wants to be completed by as signal a regress in politics.

On our part, we do not mistake the shape of the shrewd spirit that continues to mark all these contradictions. We know that to work well the newfangled forces of society, they only want to be mastered by newfangled men—and such are the workingmen. They are as much the invention of modern time as machinery itself. In the signs that bewilder the middle class, the aristocracy, and the poor prophets of regression, we do recognize our brave friend Robin Goodfellow, the old mole, that can work in the earth so fast, that worthy pioneer—the revolution.

The English workingmen are the firstborn sons of modern industry. They will then, certainly, not be the last in aiding the social revolution produced by that industry, a revolution which means the emancipation of their own class all over the world, which is as universal as capital rule and wages slavery.

I know the heroic struggles the English working class have gone through since the middle of the last century—struggles less glorious because they are shrouded in obscurity and burked by the middle-class historians to revenge the misdeeds of the ruling class. There existed in the Middle Ages in Germany a secret tribunal called the
Vehmgericht
. If a red cross was seen marked on a house, people knew that its owner was doomed by the
Vehm
. All the houses of Europe are now marked with the mysterious red cross. History is the judge—its executioner, the proletarian.

Elected, from a field of four, by less than 40 percent of the popular vote; faced with the secession of seven states in the weeks before his inauguration as the sixteenth president; burdened by a weak and divided army unready to take the field—Abraham Lincoln made the theme of his first speech as chief magistrate (as the job was then called) that he was prepared to fight a war to maintain the Union.

The address on March 4, 1861, is a lawyerly and logical explication of the need for the acceptance of majority rule in the business of democracy: “If the minority will not acquiesce, the majority must, or the government must cease…. If a minority in such case will secede rather than acquiesce, they make a precedent which in turn will divide and ruin them, for a minority of their own will secede….”

The southern states were hoping to leave in peace, preserving their “peculiar institution” of slavery—specifically condoned by the nation’s founders—from feared abolition by the North. Lincoln, who opposed the extension of slavery into western territories but did not favor abolition in those states where it already existed, felt called upon to make absolutely clear that there could be no peaceful secession, no easy way out. “Plainly the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy,” he insisted; the American experiment in democracy permitted no minority to refuse acquiescence to majority rule.

At the same time, Lincoln wanted the onus for warmaking to fall upon the seceders: “In
your
hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in
mine
, is the momentous issue of civil war….
You
have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the government, while
I
shall have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect, and defend it.’” Here was the legal mind at work: the Constitution contained no prohibition of secession, or enforcement language to preserve the Union, except perhaps in the specified
oath of office, and that was “to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution”—not, as Lincoln implied, to preserve the government, or a union consisting of all states that had adopted that document.

In his penetrating, high-pitched voice, Lincoln claimed further that he had no choice but to resist secession, because the president “derives all his authority from the people”—a concept rooted primarily in the radical Declaration of Independence, which had also proclaimed all men to be created equal—and not from the ratifying states, as southerners and others held who relied more on the conservative Constitution. In Lincoln’s interpretation of sovereign power, the people had not vested the president with the authority to fix the terms of separation. Thus, he made war the inevitable consequence of secession and declared himself constitutionally unable to stop it.

Rather than close on that inflexible and almost truculent note, Lincoln accepted a suggested peroration from the New York governor whom he had defeated for the Republican nomination and had chosen to be secretary of state. William Seward’s draft closing, using the metaphor of the celestial harp and playing on the meaning of the homophones “chord” and “cord,” has been preserved: “I close. We are not, and must not be, aliens or enemies, but fellow countrymen and brethren. Although passion has strained our bonds of affection too hardly, they must not, I am sure they will not, be broken. The mystic chords which, proceeding from so many battlefields and so many patriot graves, pass through all the hearts and all hearths in this broad continent of ours, will yet again harmonize in their ancient music when breathed upon by the guardian angel of the nation.”

For a vivid example of Lincoln’s ability to transform fine oratory into great oratory, compare Seward’s suggested language with the Lincoln revision at the close.

***

…APPREHENSION SEEMS TO
exist among the people of the southern states that by the accession of a Republican administration their property and their peace and personal security are to be endangered. There has never been any reasonable cause for such apprehension. Indeed, the most ample evidence to the contrary has all the while existed and been open to their inspection. It is found in nearly all the published speeches of him who now addresses you. I do but quote from one of those speeches when I declare that I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it
exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so….

It is seventy-two years since the first inauguration of a president under our national Constitution. During that period fifteen different and greatly distinguished citizens have in succession administered the executive branch of the government. They have conducted it through many perils, and generally with great success. Yet, with all this scope of precedent, I now enter upon the same task for the brief constitutional term of four years under great and peculiar difficulty. A disruption of the federal Union, heretofore only menaced, is now formidably attempted.

I hold that in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution the Union of these states is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments. It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination. Continue to execute all the express provisions of our national Constitution, and the Union will endure forever, it being impossible to destroy it except by some action not provided for in the instrument itself.

Again: If the United States be not a government proper, but an association of states in the nature of contract merely, can it, as a contract, be peaceably unmade by less than all the parties who made it? One party to a contract may violate it—break it, so to speak—but does it not require all to lawfully rescind it?

Descending from these general principles, we find the proposition that in legal contemplation the Union is perpetual confirmed by the history of the Union itself. The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed, in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further matured, and the faith of all the then thirteen states expressly plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And finally, in 1787, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was “
to form a more perfect Union
.”

But if destruction of the Union by one or by a part only of the states be lawfully possible, the Union is
less
perfect than before the Constitution, having lost the vital element of perpetuity.

It follows from these views that no state upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union; that
resolves
and
ordinances
to that effect are legally void; and that acts of violence within any state or states against the authority of the United States are insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circumstances.

I therefore consider that in view of the Constitution and the laws the Union is unbroken, and to the extent of my ability, I shall take care, as
the Constitution itself expressly enjoins upon me, that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all the states….

That there are persons in one section or another who seek to destroy the Union at all events and are glad of any pretext to do it I will neither affirm nor deny; but if there be such, I need address no word to them. To those, however, who really love the Union may I not speak?

Before entering upon so grave a matter as the destruction of our national fabric, with all its benefits, its memories, and its hopes, would it not be wise to ascertain precisely why we do it? Will you hazard so desperate a step while there is any possibility that any portion of the ills you fly from have no real existence? Will you, while the certain ills you fly to are greater than all the real ones you fly from; will you risk the commission of so fearful a mistake?

All profess to be content in the Union if all constitutional rights can be maintained. Is it true, then, that any right plainly written in the Constitution has been denied? I think not. Happily, the human mind is so constituted that no party can reach to the audacity of doing this. Think, if you can, of a single instance in which a plainly written provision of the Constitution has ever been denied. If by the mere force of numbers a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might in a moral point of view justify revolution—certainly would if such right were a vital one. But such is not our case. All the vital rights of minorities and of individuals are so plainly assured to them by affirmations and negations, guaranties and prohibitions, in the Constitution that controversies never arise concerning them. But no organic law can ever be framed with a provision specifically applicable to every question, which may occur in practical administration. No foresight can anticipate nor any document of reasonable length contain express provisions for all possible questions. Shall fugitives from labor be surrendered by national or by state authority? The Constitution does not expressly say,
May
Congress prohibit slavery in the territories? The Constitution does not expressly say,
Must
Congress protect slavery in the territories? The Constitution does not expressly say.