into his calamitous decline the breath of justice.
May the fire of his judgment purify the world of
treason! As the Lord God liveth, every Sodom shall
perish in the flames of its sulphurous brooding cloud.
Can we fathom the punishment? Behold the traitor,
king of a lone, loathsome isle, groaning out eternity
in desertion and remorse: the only sight he sees,
the desolation his own hands have wrought; the only
sound he hears, the taunting echo of his own in-
gratitude his, the desolation of Tyre, the ruin of
Gomorrah!
The sacred writer inspired of God, the historian
thrilled by love of liberty, the author discerning
human danger with united voice proclaim "Anathema
Maranatha" upon the ingrate and the traitor. For
one hundred years profane history has perpetuated
a picture of base betrayal and remorseful exile in
the man who raised an evil hand against a struggling
nation false to country, Benedict Arnold! For two
thousand years, sacred story has breathed its curse
upon him who sent innocence to its crucifixion
false to Master, Judas! And now, fiction with her
facile pen has written on the lasting walls of litera-
ture, never to be erased, never to be dimmed, the
name of the man who sacrificed loyalty for ease,
integrity for fame, manhood for prosperity; a traitor
to friend, father, country, God Tito Melema.
FIFTEENTH CONTEST (1902)
FROM FAME TO INFAMY
CLARION D. HARDY, DAKOTA UNIVERSITY
Also winner of Interstate Contest
Two memorable graves in the cemetery of
Princeton college contain all that is mortal of two
memorable men. Peacefully entombed here lie the
ashes of a father and a grandfather. Imposing
headstones record their deeds of virtue, love and pa-
triotism. At the foot of these two graves is a third.
No epitaph recounts the mighty deeds of its silent
sleeper; no loving hands decorate that obscure sepul-
cher; no friend lingers to drop a tear of fond re-
membrance; that home of death is deserted, un-
marked and desolate. Here rest the remains of
Aaron Burr.
The early life of this remarkable man was
spent amid circumstances the most favorable for
culture and intellectual growth. Naught was lack-
ing that the most ambitious youth could desire. The
refinements of home and nature shed their beneficent
influences about him in childhood; wealth, oppor-
tunity, and the best advantages of school and college
blessed him in young manhood. He possessed a
dignified presence, a fascinating personality, and a
brilliant intellect, that served him well in all his
relations to society. These God-given powers won
him honors at Princeton, glory on the battlefield,
leadership in the senate and national fame as vice-
president of the United States. In this high office
we see him rise to majestic greatness the idol of
an admiring people. From Maine to the Carolinas,
from the Mississippi to the Atlantic, Aaron Bun-
was trusted and honored. But this man of colossal
genius, the organizer and leader of democracy, falls
118 WINNING ORATIONS
from his position of power, the object of universal
hatred and execration.
While yet vice president, he became an inde-
pendent candidate for governor of New York, using
the political methods of an infamous party organ-
izer and an unscrupulous demagogue. Denounced
as such by Hamilton, he quickly revealed his hatred
and enmity by challenging his rival to mortal com-
bat. Hamilton sought to avoid this extremity, but
in vain; Burr would try honor upon the field of
death.
Behold these men on the morning of the eleventh
of July, eighteen hundred and four, standing on the
heights of Weehawken, awaiting the moment for
action. The mind of one longs for home, wife and
happy children; that of the other dwells only on the
present moment and gratification of revenge. In
the heart of one throbs the kingly spirit of a patriot;
in that of the other burns the fiendish desires of an
lago. The countenance of one is calm and serene,
reflecting the thoughts and purposes of a guiltless
soul; that of the other is black with passion, reveal-
ing the hatred of years, the soul of a satan. Here,
upon these heights, under the clear blue of the morn-
ing sky, the evil genius of Burr assaults the holy
spirit of a patriot and wins two victims the soul
of Burr, the life of Hamilton. A man of principle
is slain on the altar of folly, revenge, ambition. The
spirit of passion confronts the spirit of patriotism;
the latter loses a defender that the former may win
an ally. This tragedy was more than a struggle
between man and man, between politician and poli-
tician; it was a mighty combat of passion and prin-
ciple a combat typical of the eternal warfare waged
wherever humanity exists. In the hearts of men,
in political parties, in the great nations of the earth,
the battle is ceaseless.
SOUTH DAKOTA 119
It is inherent in man to respect the rule of law
and abhor the supremacy of passion. Burr violates
this sense of justice, and is rejected by friends, de-
spised by opponents, branded as a murderer.
Henceforth flee whither he will Burr shall not escape
the crushing burden of a nation's righteous wrath.
To the north, to the south, to the east, to the west,
it shall follow him forever and ever.
Driven from his palace on Richmond Hill, he
sought the west, but his evil ambition was ever with
him. Aaron Burr saw pathless forests and un-
tracked prairies stretching toward the sunset;
gleaming lakes studding the landscape and shimmer-
ing rivers winding lazily toward the seas. With all
this wealth of opportunity before him, his active
brain plotted and schemed until the possibility of a
mighty kingdom captivated him. Here, here will
he build an empire; of all this, he shall be the
crowned monarch. On yonder hill shall rise his
capital; upon this crest will he rear his castle.
Aaron Burr must sit upon a throne.
He seeks aid on a beautiful island in the Ohio.
Harman Blennerhassett had here erected a palace.
Wealth and peace reigned supreme, a loving wife
and children blessed him, the charm of books and
the mysteries of nature guided his thoughts. In
the midst of this quiet scene the seducer appears.
Aaron Burr comes, for he needs money. The temp-
ter tells of greater riches and power; calls up
images of royal banquets and noble titles, stirs the
soul with glories of battle and the triumphs of war.
This peaceful life is transformed into one of excite-
ment and disquiet. The unsuspecting heart of the
listener is captive. Blennerhassett is snared in
ambition's toils. Aaron Burr had turned this Heaven
of love in to a Hell of discontent; for what? He
led this man to devote his money to a base and
120 WINNING OEATIONS
ignoble cause, for what? He drove the lovely mis-
tress from that palace to leave her an outcast, at
midnight, upon the desolate ruins of a former home,
for what? To gratify ambition incarnate. Napol-
eon may conquer Europe; Aaron Burr shall rule the
western world. He will forget Quebec and Mon-
mouth, and place upon his own brow the monarch's
crown. From the scene of murder he flees to become
a traitor to country.
The chronicles of Greece or the annals of Rome
record no more tragic example of fallen greatness.
Aaron Burr, heroic, marshals troops, plans battles,
supports Arnold, aids Washington; Aaron Burr,
passionate, rejects principle, kills Hamilton, seduces
innocence, corrupts Blennerhassett. Burr, the poli-
tician, thrills a senate, denounces despotism, in-
spires multitudes, competes for the supreme honor
in democracy; Burr, the traitor, succumbs to lust
of power, deceives friends, plots his country's down-
fall, sinks into ignominy, the victim of selfish am-
bition.
This reign of passion has ever been a foe to
society and a menace to government. Supreme in
the hearts of enemies, it cast John Bunyan into
prison, burned Savonarola at the stake, and nailed
the Son of God to the cross. Supreme in the lives
of men and nations, it engulfs them. Through it
Napoleon seized the throne of France, hurled
Europe into chaos, but reaped an exiles' fate on the
lonely shores of St. Helena; through it Benedict
Arnold turned traitor, betrayed his country for
English gold, but died a castaway in a foreign land;
by it Rome rose, flashed the splendor of her great-
ness across the world, but fell drenched in blood;
by it Venice reigned, sent proud flotillas to the
bounds of the sea, but is now a stalking shadow on
the border ground of history.
SOUTH DAKOTA 121
The evil that ruined Burr was not born in the
prime of manhood but had its inception in the days
of youth, when he rejected the Christians' Bible and
the Christians' God. By this decision Aaron Bun-
discarded the basic element of moral character. He
renounced the controlling force that makes the heart
a symbol of virtue, tempers violent passion, rebukes
lust, and guides ambition. Rejecting the faith of a
Paul, a Luther, he chose the hollow mockeries of a
Judas, a Nero. Casting away all respect for God
and hope of immortality, he reached man's estate
utterly devoid of moral sense. Thus his vicious
spirit was at restless enmity with the ethical; false-
hood fought against truth, usurpation, against jus-
tice, lust against chastity, selfishness against altru-
ism. Without a religious helm to his ruling motive
this man worshipped but one deity self. Wrapping
the mantle of virtue about him, he fascinated the
innocent only to leave them filched and destitute.
He would fight for his country, when it brought him
power and pelf; he would destroy it, when it ceased
to serve him. He was a leader at the bar, not in
behalf of justice, but for sordid gain; he developed
skill in politics, with no thought of enriching his
generation with true principles of government, but
that his arm of power might be felt in every city
and hamlet of the land; he was fascinating in private
life, not to please and entertain, not to instill higher
sentiments of purity and honor, but that he might
broaden his sphere of influence and satisfy his
licentiousness. In public life he was a Talleyrand,
in private life a Mark Antony.
But not all desire for leadership is ignoble or
unjust. The principle of altruism is the ground-
work of all legitimate ambition. It is the spirit of
love working in all the relations of society. It
wages a war, relentless and internecine, upon selfish-
122 WINNING ORATIONS
ness, and abhors passion. It animates the statesman
and scorns the demagogue; respects law and crushes
anarchy. Its setting is virtue, its watchword is ser-
vice, its hope is Eternal life.
The world's heroes have been ambitious, but
their ambition was noble. The aspiration is sublime
that impelled Washington to leave Mt. Vernon for
Valley Forge, which sustained him in that terrible
conflict from Lexington to Yorktown; that aim in
life is glorious which guided Florence Nightingale in-
to the wards of suffering and disease; there to lave
the wounds of strangers, to receive the last message
of dying heroes, to minister even to the weakest and
poorest of earth's creatures; that desire for leader-
ship is exalted that moved William Lloyd Garrison
to brave the threats of Boston mobs that he might
make the chattel a man; that ambition is ever re-
vered that inspired Abraham Lincoln to toil for
years in obscurity, that urged him to guide the
nation through the long and bloody struggle from
Sumter to Appomattox, that made him the savior
of the Union, the emancipator of a race.
Mankind sitting in the high courts of enthroned
justice will ever condemn Aaron Burr to public
execration, but posterity should always grant a sigh
of pity for him in death. With the silver of eighty
years touching his withered brow, with a body
weakened and a mind broken, he gazes upon a dark
eternity. In that silent bed chamber I see him in the
throes of grief and remorse. His defiant soul is
humbled and his proud heart broken by the death of
his beloved Theodosia. This was the greatest loss
in his tragedy of sorrows, and with the death of this
loved one Aaron Burr was forever "severed from
the human race." I see him, joyless and alone, dy-
ing in a lonely garret. No hand is there to smooth
his troubled brow; no whisper of hope reaches his
SOUTH DAKOTA 123
ear, while death hovers over him, eager to grasp its
victim, and the great clock of time is slowly ticking
out the last moments of his wasted life. In that
eye, now glazing in death, there gleams no hope of
immortality, no trust in God. Aaron Burr, forgotten
and perishing, owns not a single friend to weep for
him as he silently enters that dark, endless night
of death.
Oh! Immortal Man! Hear the warning of de-
feated greatness. From the distant gloom thou
mayest hear his blighted spirit uttering this solemn
admonition:
Mortals, hastening through life, architects of
soul eternities, would you leave your impress on a
nation's heart, would you be honored in the halls of
human memory? Put on the armor of Eternal Truth,
live for humanity. Would you ennoble self? For-
get it. Would you assure your soul an Immortality?
Employ it for God.
SIXTEENTH CONTEST (1903)
GOETHE
(MISS ANNA BAGSTAD. YANKTON COLLEGE)
We think of human life today as a thing
planned, whose end and aim is perfection. We are
not willing to believe that any life was intended to
be a partial, a fragmentary thing. We reject the
ascetic ideal because asceticism tends to the limit-
ing and restricting of power. We believe in the
fullest development; we believe in the abundant life.
He whom we, in strictest speech, can call a man
must be a harmony of the physical, intellectual and
spiritual, brought to the highest perfection a being
"clear and universal." Nearest to this ideal is the
poet-philosopher, Goethe.
More than seventy years have rolled away since
Goethe died. Seventy years of progress, of change
so rapid and so radical that one might almost say
a new world has come to replace the old. Horizons
widening, light undreamed of, flashing upon our
vision, life interests and relations bewildering in
their multiplicity, clarion calls to action that will
not be unheeded. The present the today teeming
with possibilities, with problems, with duties; what
time have we for the past? Let it bury its dead!
Yet are we not the "heirs of all the ages?"
Whence comes our inheritance? What is this that
we call the present? Who shall draw for us the
dividing line between that which is and that which
has been? What do we mean when we speak of
the living and of the dead? Lived Christ only in
the first century? If he lives not more vitally in
the twentieth century, then it were better for the
world if he had never lived. Surely it was not
Shakespeare who died on that English April day,
126 WINNING ORATIONS
three hundred years ago. Dare we say that Mc-
Kinley's life was ended by the bullet of the assassin?
Say rather transfigured, exalted into a potency that
shall work for private purity and civic righteous-
ness in all time to come.
"What is excellent," says Emerson, "as God
lives, is permanent." And no artificial boundaries
of time or place can confine the spirit that is truly
great. He bequeaths a heritage unto all lands and
tongues and centuries. He is the world's like the
air and the sunrise and the starry heavens.
It was about the year 1772 Era of paramount
Voltairism, the day of the Infallible Encyclopedia
and the Gospel according to Jean Jacques Rous-
seau. These two Frenchmen, Voltaire and Rous-
seau, had for three decades guided and moulded the
thought of their time. Voltaire stood for ration-
alism, for the supremacy of the intellect; he fought
manfully to enfranchise the understanding. But
he lacked insight into the deepest and sorest needs
of the time. His was the spirit of denial and de-
struction.
Rousseau, on the other hand, "dreamed, brooded,
suffered" to liberate the heart. His ideal was the
natural life, raw, crude, unrestrained, the life of
the emotions. This became the ideal of Romanti-
cism.
The new literary movement, so called, had
come gradually upon Europe. It stood for freedom
for religious freedom from creed and dogma, for
civil freedom from political tyranny, for freedom
from convention and fixed rule in art for the free-
dom of the individual to live and to feel as nature
intended that he should.
It was a beautiful movement in theory at least.
It was effective too, for it broadened men's minds
and deepened their sympathies and kindled life into
SOUTH DAKOTA 127
a new warmth. But the leaders of the movement
lacked clearness, discipline, self-control. Liberty
became synonymous with lawlessness and license.
Vapid sentimentality and sensuousness became not
only tolerated but lauded because, forsooth, they
sprung from the heart. Introspection, brooding
over real or imaginary sorrows, sapped the vital
energies and diseased the mind.
A young man has just returned to his father's
house at Frankfort-on-the-Main, fresh from the
university, a doctor of jurisprudence at twenty-
three. There are wild rumors afloat concerning his
student days. The veneer of the schools has not
affected seriously this lithe-limbed son of nature,
whose great eyes those who looked into them never
forgot, this German Apollo with the tumultuous dark
hair. And he is the compound of the wisdom and
the folly of his age; the "Storm and Stress" of the
conflicting currents of the time, meet and beat in
this youth.
He is passionate, discordant, defiant of all order
and restraint; he is by turns a skeptic and a dev-
otee; he is lawless insurgent, explosive, senti-
mental, vacillating between wild hilarity and tear-
ful meditations on suicide.
This was the Goethe of 1772; the product of
his age with all its agonized aspiration and excess,
the pupil of the self torturing Rousseau, he who
had invested all passion with a halo and "made
even madness beautiful;" this was the author of
Goetz von Berlichingen and the Sorrows of Werther.
Of these romance heroes, Goetz is a free-booter,
Werther a dreaming sentimentalist who shoots him-
self out of love for his friend's wife. Both are but
phases of the character of the young Goethe. They
are such men as Byron might have created and did
create. These discordant appeals to a time out of
128 WINNING ORATIONS
joint became the sensation of the hour. They made
Goethe the literary lion of Germany; his fame
spread over Europe; he was hailed the leader of
Romanticism.
But the mind that produced these works had
already passed beyond the delirium they express.
He had begun to see clearly, to look not at himself,
the picturesque volcano, but at the plain with its
commonplace men, with sordid every day affairs.
He had seen the disease of his age, had portrayed,
had been the disease; he was to become its healer.
But the tide of popularity, the storm of ap-
plause is he able to resist that? This glorious
youth whom it would seem the gods had anointed
to lead men into that fairy realm of absolutely un-
restrained liberty, into that nature state above and
beyond all physical and moral law dared he re-
fuse? Publishers thronged him with demands for
more of Goetz and of Werther. Here was wealth
and a kingdom.
He had been a dreamer, he would be a doer, a
helper. Was this to be attained by the swash-
buckler's sword of Goetz, by the dreams of the mys-
tic? No! he followed the only rational way, he
learned by doing. The poet was silent, Goethe the
man, labored with men; he made their interests his
interests. For ten years in the little grand duchy
of Weimar, he planned and constructed roads, he
organized fire departments. The selfish sorrows of
Werther were forgotten in the joys of a life devoted
to human service.
Did the spirit of the poet die during those ten
years of apprenticeship? Had not the Apollo sunk
into a mere martyred Prometheus chained to the
earth? Farther from all thought of martyrdom man
never was. Those ten years he calls the second
period of his literary activity; and yet he wrote
SOUTH DAKOTA 129
nothing. He had learned what? The lesson that
Rousseau and Shelley and Byron never learned, the
lesson of order. He who had defied all law had
come to know that all life and all activity, to be
effective, to be beautiful must conform to law; that
liberty itself must come, not through violence and
anarchy but through submission to physical and
moral law. He found himself now, as he tells us
for the first time tranquil and happy, resolved to
deal with life no longer by halves, but to live re-
solutely for the Whole, the Good and the Beautiful.
He was thirty-six when he left Weimar for
Italy. There he awoke to the splendors of classic
literature and classic art. Beauty had been the
object of his sensuous love; he saw it now for the
first time in all its holiness. With renewed zeal he
gave himself to literature. In his dramas and in his
matchless lyrics there is all the freedom, ease and
grace of Romanticism and there is all the symmetry
and consummate art of the classics. He had traced
poetry, painting, and sculpture to their source; he
had mastered the laws that govern the beauties of
art.
His interests extended to all life and to all
knowledge. Like another Pericles he drew unto him-
self the best of all lands and times and systems.
The tragedy of Faust, begun in his youth, be-
came the crowning achievement of his old age. It
is the great drama of life woven with masterly skill
upon the framework of an old tradition. It is as
varied and as splendid in its variety as was the life
of its author. Not content with the theatre of
earth Goethe, with more than Milton's daring, made
heaven and hell his stage. He mingles the remote
past with the eternities of the future. God and the
archangels, Satan and his hosts, Helen of Troy and
the heroes of ancient Greece, Grecian art, modern
130 WINNING ORATIONS
poetry all are united in this poem, the greatest of
the century and shall we say of modern times.
But Goethe's life is more wonderful than any-
thing that he has written. It is his noblest work
of art. He stands for the complete development of
the individual. He is himself the clearest example
of that individual most worthy to be called a man.
"He is neither noble nor plebean, nor liberal noi
servile, nor infidel nor devotee, but the best excel-
lence of all these joined in pure union." He, and
he alone of the thoughtful men of the time, lived out
his life, active and hopeful to the end. The English
Byron, the most powerful of his contemporaries, dies
at thirty-six exhausted in body and in spirit. Shel-
ley at thirty-one seeks death in the sea. Words-
worth and Coleridge, when the enthusiasm of youth
had been chilled, when an impossible liberty had
proved a delusion, these men withdrew themselves
into a narrow shell of political and religious con-
servatism because they dared not face the future.
"Goethe, too, had suffered and mourned in bitter
agony over the spiritual perplexities of the time;
but he has also mastered these. He has risen above
them and he has shown others how to rise above
them. And he believes, not by denying his unbelief
but by following it out. Not by stopping short, still
less by turning back in his inquiries, but by re-
solutely prosecuting them. How has this man to
whom the world once offered nothing but blackness,
denial and despair, attained to that better vision
which now shows it to him, not tolerable only but
full of solemnity and loveliness!"
"More light!" were the words which closed the
noble fifth act of the great drama. To the young
nineteenth century, he bequeathed the works and
the example of a man, clear and complete and har-
monious the noblest type the past can give, the
SOUTH DAKOTA 131
fairest inspiration of what the present with all its
large opportunities is able to become.
Let us cease then, to think of this man as mere-
ly the contributor of a few good volumes to the
world's literature, as an eighteenth century Ger-
man who paved the way for a free and united
nation. That is all true and excellent had he done
no more. But he inaugurated a new life. He stands
for a new Renaissance, for the life of the spirit in
the modern world. He first saw its possibilities, he
first revealed the grandeur of its achievements, he
enunciated the laws that must govern those achieve-
ments. His gospel of hope, of cheerful, patient,
unceasing activity, of resolute living for the whole,
the good and the beautiful does not that ring re-
echoing through the best that men think and do
today?
He mingled the passion and enthusiasm of
youth with the sane wisdom of manhood. He has