Jamestown High School - Red and Green Yearbook (Jamestown, NY)

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ple of No taxation without representation . Likewise in those sacred provisions,- To no man will we sell, deny or delay right of justice, and No free man shall he taken, imprisoned, destroyed or preeeeded against save hy the legal judgment of his peers or hy the laws of the land, they saw embodied the fundamentals of habeas corpus, trial hy jury and those basic rights of all-life, liberty and property, ln the same school, our fathers learned how, four centuries after the Magna Charta, growing despotism had been beheaded and how, from its clutches, those ancient principles, as enlarged upon in the Petition of Rights, had been set free. They learned how half a century later, when the late King james did endeavor to subvert and extripate the laws and liberties of the land. despotism had been effectually overthrown and liherty and justice firmly established and recorded in the Bill of Rights, No question whatever was left in the minds of our colonial fathers as to what constitute the inviolable rights of mankind. American thought upon the principles underlying liberty and justice had been graduated from the Anglo- Saxon school. Against the arbitrary power of the French system in America, we gladly joined hands with our English brothers. The more we invested in the cause of liberty and justice, the more sacred they he- came and the more determined we were to preserve them. When again, as over our linglish brothers, arbitrary restraint in the person of a German anxious to be King began to assert itself over us too, we could do nothing' else but follow the dictates of our training. Like our lingflish brothers in 1215, 1628, and l689, we struggled with despotism for ten years to secure liberty aml justice as Englishmen. When however by 1776, we found George lll and his cohorts still very uneonipromising, we proceeded to obtain our rights as men-rights which we wrote in blood to form the Great American Charter-rights which we had learned to lc.-ve when linglislnnen in the old Anglo-Saxon school-rights which, under such great liherators as Gladstone, Balfour, .-Xsquith, and l.loyd George, have now firmly anchored themselves in the minds and hearts of our linglish brothers. The French revolution was not a sudden eruption of an unthinking populace. The fall of the Bastile only resounded the audible clash of a struggle long existing between arbitrary power and a people he- coming trained in the spirit and philosophy of liberty and free institu- tions. The French peasant, fighting under his despotie king against the English, had long since come in contact with .Xnglo-Saxon representa- tive government and Anglo-Saxon conception of individual rights. Montesquieu had been horn for a century and two generations of his French brothers had read with great interest his unstinted praise of the English system in his treatise on The Spirit of Laws. Likewise Rous- seau in his Contract Social had firmly planted in the minds of French youth, then grown to manhood, such seeds of liberty as the right of the majority to rule and the sovereignty of the people. The American revo- lution had been fought and the heroic French soldiers, who had struggled 29

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NN'erc Thales, thc grcat Greek thinker. living in this age of revolution, he would feel doubly certain that mind and not matter Mind and rules the universe, Yet so easy is it to comprehend the Revolution visible, the tangible that we often fail to sense the existence of that quite invisible mental force back of all phenomena. While Revolution and War are children of the same parents, the former is not synonynins with the clash of saber, the throw- ing of bombs and the boom of cannon. These are but evidences of revolution-mere testimony of a movement full grown from seeds planted deep in the minds and hearts of mankind. Every normal individual is the rightful possessor of certain inherent tendencies, which he intuitively knows he should have the right to de- velop and express, and the nature of the forces trained upon l1is mind, particularly in youth, will determine in a large way what tendencies hc will be most desirous of expressing and developing when grown to man- hood. Individuals when grouped into communities and states, from common training, develop connnon tendencies and consequent common desires. If this development takes place within the bounds of arbitrary restraint, there is an inevitable struggle-a revolution. The more spo- radic the training, the more scattered and ineffective the struggle. The more constant, the longer and the more universal the training, within persistent arbitrary restraint, the more noble, the-more spectacular and effective the revolution. Under continued training the revolutionary forces gradually compel successive compromises on the part of .the re- straining power and such victories often continue over a long period of time. Then, if the arbitrary power dies hard and its final overthrow is illumined by the rocket's red glare, we become suddenly awakened and are conscious only of the last struggle of what has been a long revolution. The state with its individuals left free-free to develop and give expression to their innate qualities becomes republican. The three great revolutions now most vivid to us Americans were all born in the mind-results of particular training. The American revolution had its origin in the minds of our fore- fathers trained in the school, centuries old, of Anglo-Saxon principles of liberty and justice. In that school, from the ancient laws collected from Kent and Mercia, Alfred the Great had taught the principle of justice and the right of individual development. The witan, the hundred, the shiremoot, and the tumnoot, embodying the principles of representation and power emanating from the people. had all been grounded as funda- mental in the minds of our sturdy New England fathers. Their desire and determination to safeguard their inherent rights were nurtured as they saw in imagery, upon the green meadow of Runnymead, that historic gathering forcing despotism in the person of John Lackland to sign the Magna Charta. ln that article,-UNO scntage shall be levied with- out the consent of the common council of the realm, they read the princi- 28

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and bled for American democracy, had returned to France with minds capable of thinking only in terms of liberty. XVise old Benjamin Frank- lin, radiant with democracy, had had translated and spread broadcast among the French the written constitution of America's republic. French thinking everywhere was experiencing a reformation. The mere men- tion of I..aFayette's name sent hurling in the air the cap of the French- man whether a soldier or a mere hanger-on of the saloon. Long be- fore 1789, the French had begun to think in terms of liberty and justice. During the struggle thus precipitated, Louis XVI had been compelled to compromise again and again even to the extent of summoning the old States General at LaFayette's command. XVhen the revolution had con- tinued until 1789, the hurling of bombs and the booming of cannon opened the world's eyes to the warfare despotism had long been waging against those mighty forces mobilizing for years in French minds- forces too great for even a Bonaparte or a Napoleon III to effectually destroy. XVhile -the Russian revolution is only just beginning in its more audible stage and has hardly yet started on its career of violence and bloodshed, its real birth date was red-lettered many years ago. Des- potism, still vigorous, for years has been compromising in fierce struggle with the forces of liberty and justice as they have been gradually mobi- lizing under the orders of trained thought. The sacrifice, by this uu- scrupulous monster, of the Romanoffs is only the last in a long series of compromises. The training of the Russian mind to think in terms of liberty began long ago. Nearly a century and a quarter have passed since Kosciusko, who had breathed with Washington and Laliayette tl1e same American air of liberty and democracy, carried the seeds of discontent home to Russia in his revolt of Poland. In less than another quarter of a century, in spite of all Metternich could do, the seeds of democracy had taken such deep root in the world that despotic Russia felt compelled to become a part to the Holy Alliance to wage everlasting warfare on so great a foe. As a result, the soldiers of Nicholas I were sent to crush the liberty-loving Kossuth in Hungary only to return to their homes in Russia to think more and more loudly in terms of liberty. In the nineteenth century, this thinking became nourished as never before. Face to face with unscrupulous and despotic Prussianism, Russia became the ally of Europe's two great republican nations-l2ng- land and France. Unwittingly, despotism, in thus drawing' more tightly the bonds of association about the Russian people and the Anglo-Saxon. dealt itself an effective blow. Such apostles of liberty as Leo Tolstoi now began writing:- Everything that savors of compulsion is harmful- Freedom is the only criterion. Depotism struggled hard against the onslaughts of freedom by such means as wholesale exiling, imprisonment and strict censorship of dangerous writings such as Green's English I-Iistory, Bryce's American Commonwealth, and the works of 'I'olstoi- but its struggle was in vain. Russians were reading Tolstoi by candle 30