Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1905-07-23

III - ~ liberal and tolerant, as
~ AA-2A we'll as practical
S3 Perhaps it might
to be claiming
too much to insist on
certain points of similarity between us and the
Greeks of old. The points of dissimiarity only
too evident most of us and yet there is likeness
as well as an unikeness. Professor Butcher has
recently asserted that mo people ever
less detached from the practical affairs of life"
than the Greeks less nsensble to outward utility;
yet they regarded prosperity as a means,
as end The unquiet spirit of gain did not
take possession of their souls Shrewd traders
and merchants, they yet idealists They
did not lose sight of higher and distinctively
human aims which give life its significance"
1t will be well for us if this can be said of
civilization two thousand years after its
day is done; and it is for to make sure that
the unquiet spirit of gain" shall not take pos
session of our souls 1t is for us also to rise to
the attitude of the Greeks, among whom, as Pro-
fessor Butcher points out, money lavished on
personal enjoyment counted vulgar oriental
inhuman."
There is comfort in the memory of Lincoln and
of those whose death the field of Gettysburg he
commemorated. The men who there gave up their
lives that the country might live had answered to
the call of patriotism, which is of the noblest
images of idealism. There is comfort also in the
recollection of Emerson and in the fact that for
many of the middle years of the nineteenth century
fading attractiveness to the plain people, perhaps
because-in Lowells fine phrase-he kept con-
stantly burning the beacon of ideal life above the
lower region of turmoil" There is comfort again
in the knowledge that idealism is manifestation
of imagination, and that imagination itself is only
a higher form of energy. That we have energy
and to spare, denies; and we may reckon
him near-sghted observer who does not see also
that we have full share of imagination, even
though has not expressed itself fully in the lotier
regions of art and of science.
The foundations of our commonwealth were laid
by the sturdy Elizabethans who bore across the
with them full portion of the imagination
which in England famed up in rugged prose and
in splendid and soaring In two centuries
and half the sons of those stalwart Elizabethans
have lost nothing of their sturdness and nothing of
their ability to visions and to dream Dreams
and to put solid foundations under their castles in
the air. The flame may to die down for a
season, but it springs again from the embers most
Unexpectedly, as it broke forth furiouslv in 1901
There idealis1n at the of the little for
the freeing of Cuba-the very attack SPAIN
which the Partisan journalist cited to Tolstoi
instance of predatory aggressiveness. We
said that going to for the sake of the
ill-used people in the suffering island close to
shores; said that would not Cuba; we
did the fighting that needfu1-and kept
word 1t is hard to see how even the most hostile
of bgots discover in this anything selfish.
There was imagination in the sudden stopping
of all the steamcraft of all the railroads. of all the
streetcars of all the incessant traffic of the whole
nation at the moment when the body of a murdered
chief magistrate was lowered into the grave. This
pause in the work of the world was not only touch
ing, it had a large significance to anyone seeking