revealed life abundant in the full consciousness and
control of its powers. "He is the prophet of man-
kind under new conditions and new circumstances,
the appointed teacher of ages yet to come."



SEVENTEENTH CONTEST (1904)
OLIVER CROMWELL

(JAMES E. CROWTHER. DAKOTA WESLEYAN
UNIVERSITY)



The beginning of the seventeenth century
marked the decline and fall of true kingship in
England. When the House of Tudor, strong, proud,
imperious, closed its eventful history, the insignia
of royalty passed to the Stuarts. Strength, pomp,
and pageantry lay buried in the sepulchre; weak-
ness, mediocrity, and pedantry sat upon the throne.
How great and sad a change! For nearly two cen-
turies England had been governed by powerful
rulers, who, whether loved or hated, were always
feared. But the Stuarts were neither loved, hated,
nor feared; they were despised, loathed even by
steadfast loyalty. Incompetence was their heritage;
it characterized their reign from first to last. They
were egotists, ignorant of the temper of their people,
unobservant of the times. Recklessly would they
open the flood gates of national wrath, then strive
with puny hands to stem the whelming torrent, or
retreat with ridiculous haste. A nation's pride was
wounded, her honor outraged, her most sacred
rights trampled in the mire. A people's welfare
was bartered in the shambles of alien powers, and
their treasure forged into fetters to bind the limbs
of Liberty. At last came the inevitable rupture,
when King and Parliament made their appeal to the
sword and plunged England into civil strife.

The demand for reform materialized in the
Puritan standard of government, whose fundamental
principle was man's freedom and God's sovereignty.
The theory of the "Divine right of Kings" was a
challenge to Puritanism, and a trespass upon the in-



134 WINNING ORATIONS

alienable rights of the people. The question to be
decided was, "Shall the King have arbitrary power?"
It was a battle for liberty, the cause of our common
humanity. The two armies were representative of
democracy and autocracy; beasts of burden were ar-
rayed against beasts of prey. Such times demand
and generate greatness. In response to the call of
freedom, Oliver Cromwell stepped into the arena of
stirring action, full panoplied in the maturity of his
manhood. He came as a knight errant, heralding
the fall of tyranny and the rise of democracy. He
was the product of revolution, the embodiment of
Puritanism, the "Grand Remonstrance" personified.
His martial genius, his statesmanship, and his per-
sonal character eminently fitted him for a task to
which God had joined great issues the saving of the
nation and of Puritanism. Like a mighty oak en-
dued with strength for storm and turbulence, he
stood militant, brawny, majestic.

The revolution called forth the martial great-
ness of the nation; it was a conflict of giants.
Towering above all in Royalist or Roundhead camp
stood Cromwell, the commander of the Parliamentary
forces. The blood of Achilles was in his veins; the
omnipotence of a mighty purpose possessed his soul.
He was built on the Old Testament plan, his warfare
savoring of the battlefields of Joshua and Gideon.
How striking the contrast between this genius of
Puritanism and Napoleon Bonaparte. "God is on
the side of the big battalions," said the French
despot. He relied on military strategy and power-
ful artillery; Cromwell relied on the Lord Omnipo-
tent. The secret of his invincibility was his pray-
ing cavalry. He knew that the power of an army
consisted not in numbers and armaments, but in
giant souls impelled by noble purpose. Cromwell's
Puritan character was manifest in the "massive



SOUTH DAKOTA 135

directness" of his attack. Welding his Ironsides
into a thunderbolt, he would hurl them against the
enemy's center, breaking through the stoutest regi-
ments, and scattering them like autumn leaves. See
him at the battle of Dunbar. Never was a general
in more hopeless plight; the sea behind him, twenty-
three thousand jubilant foes on the hills before him,
his own force reduced by disease and death to less
than half that number. On the morrow, the decisive
battle of the Revolution was to be fought. All night
long through the drizzling rain these Puritans
prayed to the Lord of Hosts; they prayed and
kept their powder dry. Before the break of day the
trumpets pealed forth and the battle began. For
an hour the conflict raged furiously on the right;
the two armies now advancing, now retreating,
swayed and grappled as in the throes of death.
Suddenly fell on the ears of the enemy the measured
thud of galloping steeds, and above the din of battle
was heard the chanting of Psalms. Like an over-
whelming avalanche, Cromwell's Ironsides swept
round the hill, and with mighty battle cry, rode
proudly toward the center of the enemy, while the
sun, breaking through the morning mist, cast its
radiance over the sea and hills, and flashed along the
glittering lines of steel. Then Cromwell rising in
his saddle with uplifted sword cried, "Let God arise
and let His enemies be scattered." Horse and foot
now charged resistlessly on every side; the Scottish
ranks fell back wrecked and shattered in tumultuous
flight. Before nine o'clock, three thousand of the
enemy were slain, and ten thousand prisoners with
all their baggage and train were in the hands of
Cromwell, who lost not thirty men. Such was Oliver
Cromwell, the invincible warrior! Pride of the na-
tion! Born to be a king!



136 WINNING ORATIONS

As an organizer and leader of men, he ranks
among the world's greatest statesmen. At the close
of the Revolutionary War, England was a house
divided against itself; religious and political factions
were quarreling over principles of government and
clamoring for supremacy. The people, trained in a
school of tyranny, were unprepared for self-govern-
ment; they could dethrone their king, but they could
not crown themselves. Chaos reigned supreme;
anarchy or a return of tyranny seemed inevitable.
There was but one alternative; some strong man
must unify the dissevered and discordant elements,
and guide the nation to safety, prosperity, and
peace. That man was Oliver Cromwell; the exigen-
cies of the hour pronounced his name. We need
invoke neither craft nor ambition to explain his
political supremacy; it was the triumph of capacity.
His leadership, his discernment, and his compre-
hension of vast problems mark him as a great
statesman. He saw through the seventeenth century
glass, darkly it is true, but he saw. He was a man
in advance of his time, a pioneer of Anglo-Saxon
democracy fighting his battles on the outposts of
civilization. The glorious thunders of Naseby and
Marston Moor were to be heard again at Valley
Forge and Gettysburg. In his warfare, he had
drawn the sword against crime as a crowned and
gilded institution. The jewels in the Stuarts' crown
were crystallized from peasants' tears; their royal
robes were crimson-dyed with plebeian blood. Crom-
well cut the despots' shattered sceptre through, and
wrote as in eternal brass the thing that should not
be in England. But after the battle of Worcester
he sheathed the sword forever, and addressed him-
self to the work of reform. His rule as Protector
of the Commonwealth, though arbitrary, was benefi-
cent. His despotism was not the mountain tor-



SOUTH DAKOTA 137

rent, covering fruitful fields with worthless drift,
but the overflowing Nile, making deserts to blossom
as the garden of the Lord. National prosperity,
religious freedom, and higher education attended his
administration. He staunched the bleeding wounds
of Protestantism and dried her tears. Kings and
prelates made restitution for wrongs inflicted;
pirates cowered in their caves. He befriended the
American colonies by freeing them from rapacious
governors; he seized Gibraltar, the foundation of
England's world-wide expansion, and became the
father of her maritime greatness. "Never was any
man so conspicuously born for sovereignty." He
saved a nation from anarchy and bankruptcy, and
gave to her name imperishable glory.

But superior to all achievement is the man
himself. Character is nobler than intellect; integ-
rity than genius. Cromwell's richest legacy to the
world is the moral force of personal virtue. His
life, unsullied by private vice, is a standing rebuke
to all iniquity. He could say with another, "You
may write my life across the sky, I have naught to
hide." He stands forth amid the corruption of his
day, like a sun-crowned mountain peak, regal with
dignity beyond that of kings. His appreciation of
the magnitude of his task often made him moody,
silent, melancholy. To him, every moment trembled
with possibility; every hour was big with destiny.
He lived as one who should give an account to the
Sovereign of the Universe; his whole life was
crowded with sacrificial service. Few men have
been so misinterpreted as Cromwell. His early bio-
graphers, being royalists, wrote with malicious pen
and spake with venomed tongue, picturing him as
an unmitigated hypocrite, the embodiment of in-
satiable ambition; as an outlaw, who stirred up in-
surrection against the king, and then usurped the



138 WINNING ORATIONS

throne. The greatness of his genius was an object
of envy to jealous inferiority. His supreme confi-
dence in himself and in his cause, they ascribed to
egotism; but it was the same quality which made
Savonarola, Luther, and Paul molders of world
thought and world destinies. Cromwell was a
"practical mystic," the most potent of all combina-
tions. He was endowed with a power of reticence
which was sometimes to pass for hypocrisy, with an
adaptability for adjusting means to ends often taken
for craft, and with a high-hearted insistence on de-
termined ends which some called ambition. Nor do
we blush to eulogize him as an outlaw. As the
avowed foe of crowned presumption, he stands side
by side with that "immortal rebel," George
Washington. With these two stands another in-
surrectionist who went to Heaven from a scaffold,
and ascending bore with him the fetters of four
million slaves, which by Heaven's strange alchemy
became his diadem of glory, and John Brown demon-
strates to the world that a man may be a rebel and
yet a patriot. When Cromwell died he was buried
in Westminster Abbey, "the temple of silence and
reconciliation." But on the return of Charles the
Second with his retinue of lewdness, the royalists
disinterred his bones and buried them beneath the
gallows. Look we for justice among such men? If
we would know Washington, Hamilton, Jay, or
Adams, shall we look to sneering cavaliers who
drank the health of good King George? Yearning
to interpret the Christ life, shall we sit at the feet
of Pharisee and Sadducee? See the travesty which
they nail to His cross, the record of His life and
work, "He made Himself the King of the Jews."
Such was Cromwell's epitaph; but it has been
erased and revised by our later seers whose ver-
dict is based not on prejudice and acrimony, but



SOUTH DAKOTA 139

on equity and truth. Today we laud him as a saint,
a patriot, an uncrowned king. Kingly indeed was
his life. Leisure, comfort, fortune, home, were ex-
changed for anxiety, hardship, peril, and calumny.
Yea, he counted not his life dear, but laid it un-
grudgingly on the nation's altar that she might know
the truth which made her free.

At last, worn out in the service of his country,
he lies down to die. It is September the third, six-
teen hundred and fifty-eight, the anniversary of Dun-
bar and Worcester. A terrific storm sweeps over the
land, beclouding all nature with darkness and
gloom; a funeral pall enshrouds the nation. The
angry tempest calls with brazen trumpet as if to
battle aye, to the last battle. But to Cromwell it
is the echo of Heavenly bugles, calling him to the
presence of his King. Borne in the chariot of the
tempest, his mighty soul, storm-tossed these many,
many years, mounts upward to the plains of light,
there to be crowned with more than royal splendor,
his eulogy pronounced by lips divine.

Like Moses, Wycliffe, and Savonarola, he sleeps
in an unknown grave; but his "spirit with theirs
lives to exalt mankind." Fajn would we turn our
footsteps to his shrine, for it is hallowed ground
where heroes rest. But this can never be. No
cathedral or mausoleum shall ever receive him; he
belongs to all the world. Cromwell is enshrined in
the heart of humanity.



EIGHTEENTH CONTEST (1905)
ROBERT BURNS

(BURTON F. TANNER. DAKOTA UNIVERSITY)



By the middle of the eighteenth century, true
patriotism in Scotland had passed away. The people
were no longer thrilled with the heroic spirit of
Wallace and Bruce. The inspiration of the olden
time was gone from their life. Scotia's sons were
stern and rigid as her crags and cliffs. Cold and
indifferent, they followed grimly a line of conduct,
caring little for the woes of men. Theirs was a
world of fact, not of feeling. They closed their
hearts to all beauty and tenderness; and before the
grandeur of nature or amid the sorrows of men,
they were alike unmoved. A cloud, thick and heavy
as night, floating just above the earth, shut out
from their vision the true God. They thought him
a tyrant Calvary shed no light of love to illumine
the heart and inspire the soul. In the life of the
rugged Scotchman, emotion had no place. Duty,
"Stern daughter of the voice of God," ruled su-
preme. Into such environment came the plowman
poet, Robert Burns.

Men differ in their estimates of the character
and motives of this man; but they agree that he
was a genius. We pause before judging him, lest
we condemn where we know not. But he is our-
selves cast in larger mould. His good is only better
than ours; his evil worse. It is not our purpose to
discuss the morals of Burns except to say that
judged by the French, his morality would not be
questioned, but thrown against a Scottish back-
ground, he is a black spot on white canvas. Believ-
ing in the great law of summation, we shall not rant



142 WINNING ORATIONS

or rail against the detailed evil of this erratic child
of Scotland, nor flaunt his faults before the world.
We shall judge him by his struggles, and by his
achievements.

This peasant was born on a wild night in
January, 1759, in a clay cottage on the banks of the
Boon. He came amid the turmoil of nature, and
soon gave evidence that the unrest of the tempest
was in his soul. The first hours of the babe were
portentious; they seemed to foretell the gloom and
sorrow of the future. The Ayrshire boy was out
of harmony with his environment. His was a re-
sponsive nature, longing for sympathy and inspira-
tion; but the barren social life of the age had little
to give. Men about him saw fact farthest from
fancy, and thought a show of tenderness and emo-
tion was weakness. The dull, prosaic life of the
Scotchman gave him no impulse for upward climb-
ing. In that cold world his fiery heart was ill at
ease. He was a stranger in a strange land with
nothing but the hills and valleys to inspire him. His
whole life was a battle with the social condition
without and his native moral tendencies within.

The mental endowment of Burns made his life
a tragedy. He was a man of brilliant intellect,
strong passion and weak will a disastrous com-
bination, Good and Evil met giant-size in his heart,
and a battle ensued. Like Byron and Poe his life
was a conflict because passion was stronger than
will. In his perplexity he became moody and
melancholy; each moment right and wrong fought
for supremacy; each day saw a crisis. Only the
innate principles of his soul, the principles of "The
Sermon on the Mount" could save him. But he did
not listen to the voice from heaven. He was alone,
sorely smitten by the unrest of sin. Unable to
withstand the buffets of an unsympathetic world,



SOUTH DAKOTA 143

worn by contending passions, he begins his descent
into Avernus. Oh, that he might meet some strong,
noble character, great enough to overpower evil with
good. His actions are no longer tragic but pathetic.
In his pitiable weakness, Burns loses the virtue
dearest to every Scotchman his sobriety; and with
each step he sinks lower. With what pity do we
look upon the suffering of this genius. How he
struggles to rise only to fall again. With what
bitter anguish he recalls his days of innocence. With
what determination he resolves, come what may,
to be strong, but he cannot, his will is gone. Leav-
ing God out of his life he strives to walk alone, but
unaided he cannot walk aright. Yet Burns was an
honest soul. He could look men squarely in the
eye. When conscience was seared and conviction
trampled upon, he would not cringe nor would he
pretend to be what he was not. Hypocrisy was
never his companion. Too truthful to deny his
guilt, he took refuge in a haughty independence, the
rock upon which many a soul has been wrecked for
eternity. We pity, and pitying, love him. The tears
come unbidden as we think of the last months of
his life. Oh, the sorrow of it all! Oppressed by
poverty, deserted by friends, weary and sick from
struggle, he passes to that "bourne whence no
traveler returns." But in death the wanderer finds
the way to his maker, who, tempering justice with
mercy, will judge him as he is, not as he appears
to the world.

Burns stands forth a great though tragic hero
in literature. With Byron and Poe, he thought
nobly but lived ignobly. Do not say that evil tri-
umphed. If we should write above his grave, "He
failed, his life ended with the tomb," we should be
guilty of gross injustice. From the turmoil of his
life did he give no treasure to the world? Hear the



144 WINNING ORATIONS

verdict of the centuries: The fire of his contending
passions burned out the evil, and left the good to
bless mankind. When Burns died, he gave his best
self to the world that scorned him, and today we
judge him by his gift.

In all his conflict with evil Burns sang of truths
to which the world now gladly listens. His message
to the twentieth century is a message of simplicity
and kindness. He comes to us as an embodiment
of simple things, as a child of nature, teaching men
to see life as it is. He pours out his love for the
true and the lowly in lyrics of surpassing beauty.
He sees deep into the heart of the humble cottager
and reads his longings, as from an open book. He
listens to the "still, sad music" of the poor and in
words pulsing with tenderness sings of their simple
life. As the shell of the sea imprisons the murmur
of many waters and gives it out again to the ear
of the inland traveler, so Burns gathers up in
trembling lyrics the joys and woes of the weary
cottager, and gives them out to the world. Listen-
ing, we hear the throbbing life of Scotland's peas-
antry, in dreary march over the moorlands. His
passionate words are read wherever the warmth of
love is found. His heart goes out in universal sym-
pathy to all nature. No subject is too insignificant
for his use; the hare, the sheep and the shivering
cattle suggest to him the most subtle thoughts and
tenderest solicitude. Nature to him is prophetic.
In the hapless fate of the daisy he sees his own
"no distant fate." From the suffering of the "wee,
sleekit, cow'rn, tim'rous beastie," he draws a hu-
man parallel:

"The best laid schemes o'mice an' men

Gang aft a-gley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an* pain.

For promis'd joy."



SOUTH DAKOTA 145

To him there is an answering grief in the howl
of the tempest, and the leafless tree reminds him of
a fate that resembles his. His delicate nature is an
Aeolian harp, responsive to each passing breeze.
If the chord is a minor, we listen with quivering
lips; if a major, we spring exultant on the wings of
morning.

The supreme message of Burns is the freedom
and individual worth of all men. His dominant tone
is humanity and every note is a challenge to tyran-
ny and oppression. The roar of the American
cannon inspired his soul, and the rumbling storm
of the French revolution filled him with hope. He
desired his own country to realize the brotherhood
of man. In this he was Scotland's first prophet of
liberty to the common people. When the peasantry
were dumb and heavy with care, who was it put a
song of freedom on their lips? Who was it revealed
to them their worth, and told them that "Princes
and lords are but the breath of kings?" It was
Robert Burns, the prince of cottagers; Burns who
loved a peasant, but scorned a lord; Burns who put
a gleam of light into the soul of the plowman, and
taught him that he could be happier in a clay cot
than in a palace. Class inequalities did violence
to his spirit of justice. In church as in state he
would have an aristocracy of the common people.
No matter what the station. "A man's a man for
a' that" This is the message of Burns to the
twentieth century hypocrisy: what a man is counts
for more than what he seems. The supremacy of
true worth was the only sovereignty he taught. He
had a passion for truth and honesty in civic life that
would put to shame the political graft of any age.
With him manhood makes all men princes and lords;
kingship comes with a reign of worth. While he be-
longed to a lower class he saw no good reason why



146 WINNING ORATIONS

he should not belong to the highest. In fact, he
saw no lowest. Belted Knight and lowly peasant
were the same; they were men. No fanciful dream
of his ever put a cottager into a palace. "Equality
and Fraternity" in state were no abstract subjects
with him; they were facts in the lives of men.

His life is like a mighty sea. About the shores
are lowland marshes with noxious vapors rising.
But to those who get out into the deep there is
health and beauty; there is wild tumult and calm
sea; there is inspiration and grandeur; aye. "There
is music in all things if men had ears." The Scot
owes his appreciation of nature to the poet, for he
had it not till Burns gave it him. Burns sang the
beauty of Scotland's rills, the grandeur of her crags,
and the stories of her heroes that he might arouse
the slumbering spirit of his countrymen. He caught
from Scotland's past the fire of patriotism. He felt
the warrior spirit of the immortal Bruce at Bannock-
burn, and in an outburst of freedom exclaims:

"What for Scotland's King and law
Freedom's sword will strongly draw,
Free-man stand, or free-man fa' ;
Caledonia ! on wi' me !"

Scotland was called to life again by Robert Burns.
Have you talked with a Scotchman? He may
disagree with you on religion; he may be an oppo-
nent in politics; but mention "Robbie Burns" and
that hard mouth will break into ripply smiles, and
that stern face soften with sympathy and love.
No other word has the magic of it. No Homer in
literature, no Raphael in art, no Bismark in state-
craft, no Napoleon in warfare, has the witchery of
that simple name. England is inspired by her
Shakespeare; Germany is proud of Goethe; and
Italy is fired by the name of Dante; but Scotland



SOUTH DAKOTA 147

Scotland loves her Burns, loves him because he first
loved her; because he immortalized the beauty of
her strong life, and dignified her manhood. Then
all honor to this child of Scotland. Worthy is he
to rest in lona, the burial isle of Scotland's kings;
worthy a statue of bronze in the temple where burn
the altar fires of the lowly. Well may Scotland's
peaks pierce the clouds, and her valleys spread
proudly out, for each cliff and vale and rill sings
some melody of this prince of peasants.



NINETEENTH CONTEST (1906)
MICHAEL ANGELO

(MISS LOU E. MILES. REDFIELD COLLEGE)



Would you know the true meaning of an age
what it stands for in the great history of the world's
progress? Then find it in her greatest man. Read
in him the thoughts and feelings, the hopes and
fears and ideals, the religion of his age. Carlyle
says, "It is a great thing for a nation that it get
an articulate voice; that it produce a man who can
speak forth melodiously what the heart of it means."
Is it not an equally great thing for an age? Dante
came to embody in divine poetry, the religion and
inner life of the Middle Ages. In him ten silent
centuries found voice. In his everlasting music
stand the thoughts they lived by.

With the stilling of his voice there appeared
the first faint light of a new day. The Renaissance
was come, with its intellectual enthusiasm, its out-
burst of culture, and its passion for antiquity. How
may we know the real meaning of that great age?
Is there no voice from the Renaissance no hero to
embody in some enduring art its very soul? Not