The Dominion. SATURDAY, AUGUST 6, 1910. ARE WE LOSING OUR STANDARDS?

Dominion, Volume 3, Issue 888, 6 August 1910, Page 4

The Dominion. SATURDAY, AUGUST 6, 1910. ARE WE LOSING OUR STANDARDS?

There was printed in the papers this week a cable message from New York which the majority of the public probably found merely interests ing, but which must have caught a thoughtful eye here and there ashaving very great significance. u " It. read as follows:—"Despite the opposition of Congress, the United States Attorney-General (Mr. 0. W. Wickeesham) has decided that a statue to Genebal Robert Lee, of the Confederates in the Civil War, was entitled to'a place in .the StatuaryHall at the Capitol. The President approves of the decision." ■ It is several months since the placing of General Lee's statue in the 'Hall precipitated a controversy in which the balance of opinion appeared to be hostile to what was regarded as in some sort an admission of the ethical virtue of the cause that sent the Confederacy into bloody opposition to the North and moral opposition to ' the friends of liberty throughout the globe. The first heat of the controversy had hardly paused away when the same issue was raised by a proposal, put forward by the Harvard Bulletin last February, that there should be inscribed m the Memorial Hall of Harvard the names of those graduates who served in the Confederate' Army. 'To a great many Americans the ardency of the feeling that revealed itself cannot but have been surprising. They' remembered that many years ago a great assemblage gathered to place flowers upon the graves of the Federals and Confederates who fell in one of_ the fiercest battles of the War—an incident that gave birth to that saddest and most intensely emotional of the poems of America, "The Blue and the Gray." Only a heart of stone could resist the momentary of that little dirge, but it is evidently not quite in tune with the deeper harmonies of the American heart. For tho proposal to render a national homage to Lee, like the other proposal to do honour to Harvard's Confederate dead, inspired many good Americans to issue, with howe/er much pain and reluctant, the sternest of protests. Colonel Norwood Hallowell, for example, a leading Boston personage, declared that the Memorial Hall was erected to honour the men who died for freedom, not for slavery, and tq preserve the Union. It would be a sacriloge, he maintained, to record in the Hall the names of men who fought for an unrighteous cause and sought to destroy the unity of the nation.

The question involved is only one aspect of one of the biggest questions lying under the surfaco of modern civilisation—arc we losing our standards ? Are we, in our zeal for that softness which wo label tolerance, that "harmony" that Mil. Chesterton has well called a "lapsing into a baso equality and an evil peace," that optimism and goodfellowship and "humanity" which we are so glad is the reverse of Nietzsohe's "Be hard!" but which is really a symptom of intellectual slackness and moral laziness— are we moving upward and onward, or are we sacrificing for the cowardly comfort of our tomporary society the simple old standards which have guided the race out of the darkness and which we cannot do without in the long clay's march? "Wo think our civilisation near its meridian," says Emerson, "but wo are yet only at the cock-crowing and the morning star." And so in our pride we arc ready to condone great crimes, to forget great wrongs, to "whitewash" and applaud. The uprising of Congress against the proposal to remember a brave soldier by an act that indubitably means tus forglvcntts

and the honouring of a cause that' was a sin against the nation, whatever any man may say, is therefore a cheering reminder that the old standards have not utterly gone. If it does nothing else, the protest will serve to disturb the easy goodnature of the Amorican public by reminding it that it is drifting into the position of believing that there never really were any vital points of difference between the North and South, "no question," as one comment put it, "of right or wrong, no question of human liberty or serfdom"—nothing but a quite academic point, like land tenure.or the tariff, involving no moral issue at all. The action of Congress will naturally suggest to the citizens of the British Empire a i comparison between modern America's view of the Civil War and the attitude which the Empire now adopts towards the war in South Africa There is really no likeness between the two cases. It was the duty of every .Boer to fight for his country's independence; in so fighting he did no wrong to Britain, and in granting constitutions to the two conquered Republics Britain committed no sin against the old standards. In honouring General Botha the Empire is condoning nothing and forgiving nothing, since there is nothing to condone or forgive. But in Britain, as in New Zealand, and indeed in most countries, the old standards show signs of weakening. This is not a new subject with us: we have dealt with it before in these columns To the old rule, de mortuis nil nisi bonum, there have been added supplementary prohibitions: exemption is now commanded for the criminal as a "mental invalid," and for the greatly triumphant rogue as one who has "lived it down." The comment of the grave and thoughtful New York Post upon the Harvard Hall controversy already mentioned is exactly applicable to this country: We meet the same lack of olear-cut thought in many a contemporary political matter. There is a successful order of journalism in which everything is for the best. Bod-hot indignation at any wrone, or in behalf of any principle,' is strictly bad form. The other fellows have their good points. Is there'a misoarriage of justice? Then remember that thero were miscarriages of'justice in the Holy Land; Does a President abuse his appointing power ? • Well, so have all his predecessors. Why should we worry about that? Are upheavals threatening? Well, be sure that somehow ail will be for the best. Whoever wins in any election or on any issue, it marks a triumph for optimism. The best policy is not. to ruffle anybody's feelings. We are not going to succumb to the temptation to give here the practical political; conclusions to which this reasoning leads., Mr.'Massey, for example, must work out for himself "the urgency and also the ultimate wisdom of continuing his temporarily unpopular task of disturbing the happy dovecots of a fatted tolerance of national wrongs But we do insist that there must be no slackening in the fight for the old standards or the defence of the old boundary between what is right and what is wrong, To say that Lee, aftor all deserves honour at. the hands of the American nation, that the criminal is merely "a product of environment, " that roguery does, not stain a 'scutcheon, that whitewashing is the noblest of occupations, that, , in. short, "all's right with'the world,", is to say that nothing matters, that -iV'there is nothing "steady in our political firmament, ho fixed stars of morality by which humanbeings must-steer."