Part 3

Henry Ward Beecher, on the New Puritanism 70

John Marshall, on Liberty and the League (second message) 74

Abraham Lincoln, on the Future of Mexico 79

Robert Ingersoll, on Our Great Women 82

Stephen A. Douglass, on War Between England and America 83

General B. H. Grierson, on Japan and California 85

Alexander Hamilton, on the Forces that Precede Revolution 89

Phillips Brooks, on The Coming Ordeals 93

Psycho-phone Messages

THOMAS B. REED

(Late Speaker of the House)

Recorded September seventh, 1920.

The formidable imbecility of the Senate rivaled the fantastic irritability of the President.

Born with a Utopian temperament, Mr. Wilson has a Herculean passion for generalities and a Lilliputian penchant for details.

You scratched the Teutons at Versailles and found a new species of Tartar; you scratched the Japanese and found a Pacifist camouflage; you scratched the Poles and found a pianist with his hair uncut; you scratched the French and found a tiger with his claws unclipped. Your mania for scratching other nations will keep your nails manicured without the aid of scissors.

Never since the Declaration of Independence and the first peal of the Liberty Bell did a chief executive walk up a winding stair into so pretty a parlor as when Mr. Wilson, with the naivete of a Princeton president, faced that cacophony of sectional jazz bands to witness the cryptic hand-writing on the wall at the peace table. Who was his adviser? Was it a gentleman with owl spectacles from the oil fields of Texas? And was there no one who could have cautioned him against the finesse of Clemenceau who spent sixty years sharpening his wits on the political grindstone of Europe? Was no one in America aware that the French Premier is a fluent speaker in English?

Mr. Wilson could speak no French, which reminds me that Jack Spratt could eat no fat and his wife could eat no lean, and so betwixt them both they licked the platter clean. But a clean plate does not mean a clean slate, and the President brought one home filled with the riddle of the Sphinx. Yet the Peace Conference revealed the secret of perpetual motion and conferred a timely service, for the hubbub created by the Wilson-Lansing-House-Party at Versailles kept the Senate from passing into a trance.

A blind man can tell the difference between pepper pods and apple dumplings, but who can tell where tweedle-dee ends and tweedle-dum begins? No one. Then how can your statesmen distinguish between the psychological characteristics of the Hungarians and the Bohemians, the Bavarians and the Saxons, the difference between a polka and a polonaise, a pig in a stye and a pig in a slaughter house?

Patriotism often depends on an influence too subtle for analysis, and yet they would enact drastic laws to bind all Europe in one bond. They will hardly succeed in a thousand years.

Some pay through the nose, some through the pocket and some through the stomach. Americans are paying through all three. Danton declared the secret of the French Revolution was audacity, and audacity, and again audacity, but what you need today is vigilance repeated ad infinitum.

I am placing you in communication with some of the most far-reaching minds of the past hundred and fifty years. The psycho-phone is new and we are using it for the first time.

THE LATE GENERAL U. S. GRANT

Recorded September Ninth, 1920

The imbroglio started by President Carranza is beginning to influence the politicians of Buenos Ayres and other centers in South America. They have secretly repudiated the Monroe Doctrine. Their next maneuver will be a public repudiation.

I would say to Congress, stop juggling with phrases and attend to the business of the hour. The majority have been chasing shadows in a sphere of politics illumined by moonshine bottled in the Blue Ridge. I was more careful of my brand. When President Lincoln asked for the label, so he could recommend it to other generals, he was not far wrong in his surmises. It is not so much the thing as the quality that counts. Most of you at Washington will have to learn the difference between inhibition and prohibition.

The United States will be isolated within three years from this date if the blowhards from the woolly constituencies are not suppressed. You need a broncho buster in the Senate and a donkey muzzler in the House.

When a boycott is started by the countries south of the Union your enemies in Europe will begin to act. It is not a question of commerce but of common sense. I repeat what Lincoln said in 1862: "The times are dark and the spirits of ruin are abroad in all their power."

My message to Congress is: See that fifty thousand troops are stationed permanently near the District of Columbia.