The Washington herald., 1907-08-12
Tribute to Confueius.
- u Washington ED /:

Editor The Washington Herald:
John Quincy Adams perhaps the most
remarkable among our men Of action. a
man who sounded deeply almost every
current Of our national life-one time
/ Senator Of the United States, professor
Of bellies lettres and rhetoric at Harvard.
confirmed justice of the Supreme Court
/ of the United States. President OF the
| United States, fifteen years diplomatic
representative Of his country abroad. and
seventeen years q Member Of the House
Of Representatives-said in a farewell
to his classes at Harvard in 1909:
In social converse with the mighty dead Of an
cent days y0u viii never smart under the calling
sensations q dependence upon the mighty living o
the present; and IN your struggles with the world
should crisis ever occur when even friends nay
deem II prudent 70 desert you: when even y0ir
country may seem ready 70 abandon herself and
you; when even pries. and leyite shall come and
look on you. and pass ty on the other side seek
refuge, my unfsiling friends and be assured you
VIII find II In the friendship Of Laeus and Scipio
IN the patriotism Of Cicero. Demosthenes, aud
Burke
Eight years later the impassioned Byron
sang in poem Of Incompatible beauty:
aIy heart runs DER
| With silent worship q the great 0; old!
The dead but sceptred soyereigns. who still rule
Ny spirit from their wns.
To those who have felt the glowing
= armth OF this noblest Of passions there
/ MI at once occur many another name 10
add TO those of Adams citation. To the
thought Of the present writer there is
presented that Of Confucius
Let me here register the opinion that.
me judice, no richer heirloom was ever
bequeathed 10 intellectual man than that
found in the perhaps Oldest authenticated
system of ethics known, that of Confu-
cius. The greatest of a race mighty in
both material achievements and intellec-
tuai prOwess, long before the Occident-
which to-day vaunts itself so superior
had awakened TO even the crudest mental
life. Confucius gave to the human race
natural religion Of conduct which has
outlived almost all the other systems of
the world Born IN poverty. be grew to
manhood, and starting out with the prin-
ciple that man is by nature virtuous.
gathered his disciples about him and
roamed over the land, regeneratipg his
fellow-men, then fallen from their ancient
paths of recttude. Empires have risen
and gone down. people have been born
and have died. the great men OF the hu-
man race have lived their appointed
hour and betaken themselves TO their
rest; and still this majestic legacy of
old has grown and ripened, and to-day
commands the respect of almost all of the
vast millions of his nation.
Once in the fight Of ages past
There lived man.
Confucius it was, who, 800 years before
the Christ ever saw the light, bequeathed
to posterity the so-called Golden Rule.
Perhaps there has been no life lived by
Individual man, in any epoch, more aus
tere and rigorous in its purity. more ra-
uonal in its handling of transcendent
questions. than the life of that lonely
pioneer Of thought, antedating even the
great minds of Greece. In the midst of
the corruption anG vice of q civilization
even then ancient, with courage sublime
this mighty intellectual builder reared
with his own hands, without known prec-
edent, drawing his material from his
inner self, one of the grandess, most
hopeful systems ever known to man. He
lived a life as pure and upright. ac un-
selfish in its devotion TO mankind. as
could be desired by the mos. austere
thinker Of to-day.
OF night and wrong he tauqas
Truths as refined as ever Athens heard.
And, greater still, he pncticed what he preached
Confucius inculcated in his followers a
love Of trutE, simplicity, and purity Of
life, and he succeeded during his own life
by virtue Of his personality and sin
cerity, in commanding the love and wor
ship Of his fellow-man, in handing down
M name to posterity as the very syn