Knoxville daily chronicle. [volume] (Knoxville, Tenn.) 1870-1882, 1881-12-22
Where Great Men are Bern.
New York Times.

Where UEtIt FutH are sbVFus
New York Times.
Who are our leading men if they
are not those whose names lead in
the list of millionaires? 1t is this
mammon worship which stunts
mental growth, dwarfs the noblest
ambition, and makes individuality
impossible In the city, fashion and
the struggle for the possession of
wealth engross the thoughts of the
young. These they drink in with
the imported milk of infancy. FASH
ion reduces all young men and women
to the same dull and uninteresting
level. New York is now an old city.
1t has produced generations of men.
How few of them have ever made
their mark, here or elsewhere!
It cannot be said that they go
into other parts Of the country and
there develop the higher forms of
manhood. They are never heard of
except in the aggregated, concrete
form Of our fellow citizens" How
much OF man IS due to qualities
born in him, and how much to his
early environment, no philosopher
has been able to tell us. But it is
impossible to conceive Of a sagacious
intellect like that of Lincoln, OF
glorious mind Ike Webster's, emerg~
ing from the false glitter and noisy
commotion of the CITY. We think
OF Washington, the ratrician sage,
pacing among the stately oaks of Old
Virginia of Jefferson in his country
seat, and Of John Adams tilling his
farm in Massachusetts. These men,
it is true, Hourished in time when
there were no big cities i'll the United
States. But later on wesee Lincoln,
Grant and Garfield reaching thetop
/ most round Of flames ladder from
the obscurity of country homes. Not
one American President, from first
to last, was born in a city.
It is from the country that the
city draws its best blood Into the
silence. darkness, and moral ignom-
my Of the cruel city how much Of
the country's promise has sunk, we
can only guess. The men and wo-
men whom the temptations of the
city have wrecked, and the fierce
conflicts Of cur city competition have
crushed, are great multitude. But
the men who have moulded public
opinion, the men who have led the
people in great CRISES, and who
have given the city its greatest
honor have come into it from c0un
try homes. From country homes
where mothers, not nurse maids,
rear the young from country homes
where there is opportunity for tran
gull thought, reflection, high resolve
and communion with the subtle in
] fuences and visible forms of nature.
OF the Americans who have exercised
the widest influence upon modern
thought, we may mention Emerson.
A city born Emerson would be an
anomalous impossibility. Hawthorne
was the subtlest of American novel
lists. Born and bred in a city, he
would never have been heard Of.
For the condition of things for
which we speak there is no apparent
remedy. The influences of any city
are not creative: They cannot be
made other than they are nor can
their currents be changed. The
New York boy, whatever may be the
example of his country-born parents,
whatever the counsels that fall from
theirrevered lips, is continually spur
red to emulation Not to the emulation
Of the larger minds that dominate
the whole country, and whose names
will endure when the merely rich are
forgotten, but to the emulation OF
those who build palaces for them
selves, display glittering equipages,
and make great show with the pomps
and vanlties OF fashionable city lite.
Out in the wide spaces of the coun-
try, in the suggestive solitudes OF
forests and feds, where boys and
young men are unconsclously alb
sorbing the influences of nature, do
ing their own thinking, and slowly
forming individual character-there
we must look for the coming men
who will govern the politics, society,
morality, and thought of the city.