( ".fr .r
: PORTLAND,- OREGON. SUNDAY HORNING, JANUARY 24, 1909
A 1
fSi1 V" V?Z?vCr ' 'tlr J'''' '; ' . bine eOnsummata skill with the stead- into the goal of tlieir promised land, devolved J&&&Zi2. '
rrSr' V- -CV - ?f v Jj ' ? ' - t'jllf. - courage necessary to avert dis- - upon men who, as-the years lagged by, developed jj'"' J-
. r - .w. r- "P' IR7 t'fV'J VT!-? V , VivA a8t"r f'OJ what Europe still on- in their age the highest fruit of human con- I " ""tZJZ "I "'"J. -
I I N 7- AlXt ''T.SS. 11 ' . ' , ' V(7,1S aiders the "great experiment" in gov- stancy as well as wiadoni, while it remained to . y .
5 v , ? 1 --TW-' X. mi , sAIn ernm'ent during the crucial years of one of thefm to t'tain, in his advanced age,(''he, t
t ( I ,ifc' I ., - f-Wm t1ACl J: ' " "-" ; , - - . . I. ' the Civil War. " , apogee of' human greatness in that he brotight
''. f . V." : I v"-' - f if f I ' ' ' ' ' ' What grave loss must have he- down to man-the primal principles of law upon . ? , " -n A' , i
si .Vfc. IY J v' iaueii various , cuuses uuu iuicrcis wnicU every subsequent advance 01 civilization ' jl '
J I ICl ," i " 7 1 L , , . , , . , ' th the disappearance, under the has been founded. th "
'll! ' 7r .iLm, rff7 ' seem to await the age of 40 as being the earliest age limitation, of General Grant from the In the Orient srua and upon the plains of j x t , A -
' li'RffSPWt Rl Wt. W at which -the Harrimans and the Hills, the armies of the Union and General Robert Mminrlg .nlv n li(tl wMIa aim u-miA ll ' - il
5; 1
. ' V' -'. i
5s, J t'3
7'
1 -
' . l-.::-;.H-vT:
- ' ' f 1 T" I
THERE HOPE OF
SUCCESS FOR THE
IMOVER FORTY?
HEY .tell it of Michelangelo that,
'in his ninetieth year, tsome friends
"came upon him , seated amid the
ruins of the Coliseum at Rome, gazing with
prof ound attention . at the broken relics of
the ancient' empire's art.
"What do you here, 0 master?" they
asked htm. "You; the splendor of whose
achievements leaves these old" ruins fit only
for neglect.".
V "I?" rejoined the world's most revered
artist, "I am come here to study my pro
fession." y
T-hat surpassing genius, meek in his
humility before the monuments of an earlier
day, may ttrjl serve to typifyf the ceaseless
race with vouth's - superabundant vitality
which life's pitiless Marathon demands of
age so endlessly and so remorselessly.
In this era, when all the nation's activ
ities have declared their need for the ener
gies of the man under 40, and when a Car
negie fosters boys for partnership' at the
beginnings of their manhood, is-there any
hope of great achievement for the man who
is past the twoscorc years that mark his
middle life? Does history, recent and re
mote, afford him any refuge klher than' the
. hopeless euthenasia so bitterly suggested by
Oslerf - .
I
F WE come to review what men over 40
have given to the world, there aeem'to be
bitf few youthful Alexanders and Napo
leons left in history to' claim glories in
'achievement heyond the din of war.
A very little and very empty-world this of
today, if all that has been done by the men past
40 were wiped off the slow slate of history
and the current epoch is no exception to the
rule of the ages aa they have swept onward,
from the dawn, of chronicles among mankind. ;
I ". In Europer both Great Britain and the con
tinent; look with confidence ;upon the king who
attained his throne only, as an old man and has
: been signalizing . his reign ; by triumphs ' of
diplomacy, that shsme the ruinous impetuosities
of his nephew in Germany and leave grotesque
the callow futility in-war and statesmanship of
the' emperor of the KuRsias.- 1. ' '
"j ' ' - In America, the fortunes 'of : th
parties' harer;been inf rusted "to meA whose ripe
maturity nas developed energies seldom equaled
Jby the, youngest of their adherents, while finance
end 3ndsv industry - and the professions, would
seem to await the age of 40 as being tic earliest
at which the Harrimans and the Hills, the
Schwabs and the Roots can be expected to have
constructed the foundations for their greatest
usefulness.
As for America, there would have beenno
Western Hemisphere, for the daring genius of
the great Columbus must have been debarred
from the supreme triumph of adventure which
the flower of chivalry did not dare essay. If
another and a later adventurer had haled the
continent forth from the mists of fablo and the
blackness of prejudiced learning, the great
events that have shaped its destinies must have
been greatly altered in their time and scope, if
not wholly inhibited, by reason of the absence
of the master hands that have rough-hewed
them to their ends.
WHAT HISTORY TELLS
When the spirit of independence was abroad
in the colonies, no Washington could have been
called upon to lend to the desperate revolt the
high distinction and the unflagging constancy
of purpose which alone sufficed to transform it
into the Revolution, even as, later, his pure
patriotism was required to perfect the republic
which might so readily have degenerated into a
monarchy.
Indeed, hat epochal period, forfeiting its
men past 40, might well be conceived as never
having come at all, for Richard Henry Lee could
not have proposed the Continental Congress
. which cradled the Revolution ; Morris, its finan
cier, must have failed to provide the sinews so
desperately needed for the government; Frank
lin, that archdiplomat, could not have dazzled,
in his old age, the French monarchy into the
active alliance which turned the scale of the
war.
Pursuing the years backward.' the eye of
history would discern no trace of the one bright
Spot of honor in the white man's dealings with
the Indian, for William Penn. wh made the
one treaty which was conceived in honesty and
kept in good faith, would have been aged beyond
the limit of all initiative; and without him,
what other white man Jbas history shown who
would have' chosen to thrive by simple honesty?
In the years that lie oh our own side of
the Revolution, it is needful only to recall the
names that stand for the nation's great men to
identify those who. under an age limit of 40,
must have forfeited the opportunities for their
highest life work. For weal or woe, of this na
tion and the world, the deeds these men past 40
did have been the axe blows of our destiny.
President Monroe miit have failed to pro4
claim the doctrine which has ever since been
the bulwark of the hemisphere's liberties, while
a John Hay must have been absent from the
momentous international arena when, a few
years ago, enormous China lay helpless to spolia
tion and the future of the united btates in the
bine eOnsummata skill with the stead
fas courage necessary to avert dis
aster from what Europe still -considers
the "great experiment" in gov
ernment during the crucial years of
the Civil War.
What grave loss must have he-
fallen various , causes and interests
with the disappearance, under the
age limitation, of General Grant from the
armies of the Union and General Robert
E. Lee from the command of the forces of
the Confederacy. Jefferson would not have
founded the Democratic party. John Adams'
"Defense of the Constitution'1 must have ljeeH
lacking among the safeguards of human liberty.
Monroe could not have exercised the prescience
which consummated the Louisiana Purchase.
Dewey would have been missing from Manila
and Schley from Santiago.
In American letters, Emerson's inspiring
work would have scarcely been begun, while
James Russell Lowell's "Fireside Travels" and
the second volume of his "Biglow Papers" must
have remained unseen, with the best known and
best loved poems of Longfellow, much of the
finest work of William Cullen Bryant, and
thirty years of the "Bob Acres" and "Rip. Van
Winkle" that gave happiness to millions in the
finished art of Joseph Jefferson.
There would have been no "Autocrat of the
Breakfast Table." for. there would have been
no Oliver Wendell Holmes to write it. The
greatest paintings of Benjamin West, including
his "Christ Rejected." could not have seen th;
light. Franklin's "Autobiography." so delight
ful to the mind, could have been hardly half
lived, much less written and published.
We must have missed suoh works of Wash
ington Irving as "Wolfert's Roost" and his
"Life of Washington." and must have lost the
inspiration of Audubon, that one man who
alone, during long years of slaughter utterly
cruel and wasteful, preserved alive some thought
of the usefulness, as well as the beauty, in
herent in the wild things that inherit our earth
and air.
Such men touch us nirwt nearly home, for
their names are among our household words,
bound up a Lee with a Grant among our
heritages of national pride. Yet, for all our
present greatness and our past struggles, we are
very new to the makings pf the world, even yet.
GIANTS OF THE RACE
But, for the present, our roll of honor, and
especially those name upon it that, writ large
enough to be descried aeross the seas, cannot
prove very impressive as compared with all the
giants who have lived during the history of the
race. Among those giants men who have made
and moulded man. ourselves hut fractions in
the mighty scheme we shall still find figures
that loom as largely to our eyes as the great
cues we claim for our very own; and we shall
find, for every one our short history can fur
nish, ten and twenty others abroad whose deeds
have been plain destiny's handmaids. And most
of them, if not all, have been the labors of
giants slow of maturity, all the more gigantic
for their slowness. . v
It is curiously enlightening, with an illumi-
nation that searches deeply into the heart of
' this controve.rsv over the ace limit of man'
Pacific was being shuttled between interminable' usefulness, that to, the old men, to, the men well
progress arid humiliating shame. beyond this newly allotted trivial span ofrforty
The statesmanship o"f Daniel Webster must years, are due - the salvation . of two peoples
nave oeen lost io congress auu uie uaiiuu, even wno sua mosi uugumj mvc ma ucnuum ut
' as 'John ' Adams'' and. all 'the ; men who. have
. guided the nation a ar its executives must have
v been missing from the roll of the Presidents.
-. Zhere' would bar been xu Lissola tcc0m-
the raoe; one at" history's dim beginnings, the
other-in-its latest, most portentous unfolding
of the fateful scroll. T - ;
, The exodus of the-Jews, and their guidance
into the goal of tlieir promised land, devolved '
- upon men who, as-the years lagged by, developed .
in their age the highest fruit of human con-
stancy as well as wisdom, wliile it remained to
one of the;m to ttt'tarn, in his advanced agejhe,
apogee of ' human greatness in 'that he brought
down to man- the primal principles of law upon .
which every subsequent advance of civilization
has been founded.
In the Orient srua and upon the plains of
Manchuria, only a little while ago, amid
quaintly different conditions and under strangely
different stress, the elder statesmen of ( Japan
and the veteran, trained leaders of her armies
the generals like Oyania, who could look back
on forty years as the ending of, their imma
turity led another nation, another race, to con
quests that thralled the world with awe.
Seventy years of achievement lay behind
the labors of Gladstone as England's "Grand
Old Man" when he entered upon his final
decade of strength as Great Britain's premier;
as many had prepared Thiers for his splendid
part in the giant's task of laying the founda
tions of' the French Republic; as many were
behiiid Yerdi's f'Otello" and his "Falstaff," his
"Stahut Mater" and other compositions the
world could ill lose ; as many behind Tintoretto's
marvelous painting, "Paradise." Titian's "Christ
Crowned with Thorns," and Victor Hugo's
""93."
AFTER SIXTY YEARS
Sixty years and more of life were past
when Confucius gave to China his remarkable
system of ethics; when the great Bismarck's
genius discerned in colonization the guarantee
of domestic peace in Germany; when the world
ehanging Darwin produced his "Descent of
Man"; when Michelangelo frescoed the Sistine
Chapel arid painted that "Last Judgment"
which represents the most famous achievement
in the painter's art; when Cervantes finished
"Don Quixote" ; and when Ruskin wroto "The
Art of England" and "The Arrows of the
Chase."
To have denied initiative to the man of f0
would have forfeited the protectorate in Eng
land by Cromwell, as it would have lost, here,
Morse's invention of the telegraphic alphabet;
Talleyrand could not have accomplished the
overthrow of Napoleonic rule; some of Herbert
SpencerVmost valuable work must have been
wanting; the best-loved creations of George Du
Maurier would not have been born; Sir Richard
Burton's preliminary work for the monumental
translation of the "Arabian Nights" would have
but begun; Goethe, Lord Beaeonsnekl. Ibsen,
Dickens, Dean Switt, John JtJunyan, agner,
Beethoven a host of the world's benefactors
must have been deprived of opportunities for
usefulness for which the world is now most
grateful.
And after 40 why. the careers of most of -the
leaders of mankind seem to have merely
begun. Such men as Von Moltke in the ne ex- '
treme of war and Max Muller in the other of
philology; Tennyson in the creation of ideal.,
verse and Charles Reade in literature so mili
tant that it swept a nation clear of its chronic' .
eruelties; Wellington in his balking of the am
bitions of Napoleon and Leonardo Da Vinci in ,.
the painting, of the "Last Supper" these are -but
names astray in a list of men.' and their
works that, missing, w'ould leave the world cold V
and gray and desolate, a world ."of the hapless,'
helpless ruck of men who, if they Jare fit to be
discarded after 40, may fairly be said, to have 1
never had any initiative to begin with, A J
There, if any one "were to ask him, would '
probably be found the grain of truth which i t J!T
.underlies ft cynicism of aa Osier,, A -( L i.
i : ft-.
"A
lit'"1 f -r J "5 '-"
f - -I
- -
f
i
.; ' - 1
t '
; . : I
: k
I