Bureau County, Illinois - Chapter 1: Introductory, 1885

TLLINOIS has passed through its pio- -L neer period of development, and from a raw state of savagery and wild waste to one of the foremost States in the Union - already the first State, indeed, in many of those standard articles of agriculture that are contributing so much to make the Upper Mississippi Valley the garden and granary of the world; a State but sixty-six years old (1818-1884) and already in the lead in the number of miles of operated railroads, as well as leading in many of the best agricultural products; the third State in the number of persons engaged in the various occupations of life ; a greater population engaged in agriculture than any other State in the Union, and this industry extended during the past decade beyond anything before known in history; her mining and manufacturing industries lagging only behind her agricultural growth, and yet keeping pace well with perhaps any other similar sized community in the world. In ajl the elements of present wealth and future promise, the State, young as it is, bids well at no distant day to stand peerless and alone. And phenomenal as has been the growth of population and wealth, the increase bears the evidences that it is not sporadic, but regular

Some measure of the mental and commercial activity of a people may be gained perhaps as well or better through the postoffice reports than from any other easily accessible source. The total postoffice expenditures for the State in 1882 in Illinois were second to that of the State of New York, although in population we are the fourth State in the Union. In illiterates - those ten years of age and over - Illinois is the fourteenth State. In newspapers, she stands next to New York; in the average daily attendance in the public schools, Illinois is the fourth State ; in colleges she is second, leading New York by one. [Railroads, in mileage, Illinois by far exceeds any State in the Union, nearly doubling the mileage of New York] But with a much smaller mileage, the railroads of Pennsylvania have larger annual earnings than the Illinois roads.

The prosperity of a new State, especially when it is marked, is as a rule ephemeral. At first all industries flourish, but soon competition is felt, and the wave of prosperity is followed usually by a marked decadence of all these, or a relaxation of the active energies that seem to wait for the new growth of an increased demand that will come in time and revive trade and traffic to renewed energy and effort. This general experience of new and rapidly growing communities has never come to Illinois. Flush times and hard times have come and gone here as well as elsewhere, but they were the same in their visits, and at the same time that they made their appearance all over the land. The permanency of her growth, and the solidity and glory of her marvelous greatness has consisted chiefly in her farmers - those whose prudent foresight discovered here a wealth of soil and climate unequaled in the world.

For more than a century after the discovery and first small settlements of what is now Illinois by Joliet, La Salle, and the Jesuits - Marquette and Hennepin - the feeble but daring little colonies were isolated in the heart of our great continent, and more remotely separated from the civilized world than could any people now be upon any portion of the globe; their growth was only the natural increase, as their isolation from mankind was almost complete. Religious enthusiasts, bearing aloft the cross of the church and the lilies of France, penetrated the wilderness and carried to the untutored savage the sublime message of "peace on earth and good will to man." And following in the long course of time these children of the church, came the "war-whoop that oft woke the steep of the cradle," the massacres, the assassinations and the wars, and the last were the means in every instance of bringing here the first streams of immigrants, who were the base upon which has grown the present greatness of the State. It was the sons of Mars who were the fathers of our State builders. First, the war of 1776 and of 1812-15 brought the Virginians and Carolinians, and made them acquainted with Southern Illinois, and then the war of 1832 extended the acquaintance of the Northern and Southern States to the northern limits of Illinois; and the wonderful stories of the beauties and natural wealth of the new country were told to their friends in their old homes, and thus again and again were the streams of immigrants started afresh. The first fruits of discovery and occupation were from the church ; the final great results came of war and marching armies.

The controlling, the supreme human forces upon this continent are the Anglo-Americans, the commanding and master-spirits among men. And it is their restless and wandering activities, and the fact that, except the Jew, they are the most cosmopolitan people in history, ancient and modern, that has been one of the distinguishing marks of this race, and has contributed much to maintain their matchless superiority. The earliest history of the Anglo-Saxon people presents them as pirates upon the high seas and roving and dauntless invaders and robbers upon land. And when they attached themselves to the soil in the British Isles, their roving habits and knowledge of the waters resulted in making them the greatest commercial people in the world, and to this fact is due much of those characteristics that to-day so distinguish them from all other people. They traded, trafficked and warred all over the known world, and in one way or another they came in contact with every variety of peoples, and thus, in the race of life, distanced all. They are a remarkable demonstration of the fact that man's best schoolmaster is his fellow-man, in his endless varieties; and that a people that attaches itself to the soil becomes stationary, as it were, and if not visited by those of different ideas, manners and bias of mind they are never a progressive the Cavaliers and the Puritans - the latter locating in New England, and the former in the South; the Cavaliers just entering upon a career of refinement and luxurious indolence, and the Puritans emerging from the severe religious ordeals that had filled his blood with iron and had prepared him well for entering upon the race for thrift, energy, power and wealth. His sufferings had taught him the severest economy, and the people of the South were learning their lessons in indolent ease, while their New England brothers were practicing a rigid frugality and learning well the fact that money is a "direct power that gratifies the ambition ^ and commands a certain respect that need not be despised. The Cavalier grew haughty and domineering, as was natural from the position of master and slave, and the Puritan despised these vain pretensions and soon learned to meddle in the affairs of his distant and slave-proud neighbors. And in the longdistant years ago were planted the seeds of the " irrepressible conflict" whose fat harvest was war.

The misfortune to both and the whole was that our country was so large that both had taken up their abodes in the distant portions of the land, and in time they nearly ceased to mingle and associate together in the every-day business and social affairs of life; and in the end the war was something of a necessity to bring the two extremes once more together, even if it was upon the field of blood; for amid the wrecks and woe and desolation, the dead, the wounded, the sick, the dying, the hospitals, the prisons, the flying skirmishes and the great red gaps of battle, the Northerner and the Southerner met, and here and there and everywhere was that " touch of human nature that makes all the world akin." And of the many results flowing out from the war, this

In the exultation of victors (this admonition will never be needed by the vanquished) the North should not forget that a society cannot permanently prosper that is founded only on the pursuit of wealth, pleasure and power. A profound respect for liberty and justice are the first essentials to real national greatness and glory. Splendid cities, costly cathedrals, vast and numerous churches, many and magnificent schoolhouses, the colossal fortunes of millionaires, and immense factories and their many hundreds of employes, are not the absolutely necessary fingerboards pointing always to the greatest welfare and happiness of the people. The cottages vastly outnumber the palaces, as do the laborers far exceed the idle and the rich. The real people live in humble homes; their toil is the world's wealth; and their health, happiness, comforts and their education and content are the true measure of a nation's greatness and glory.

"Genuine history," says Taine, "is brought into existence only when the historian begins to unravel, across the lapse of time, the living man, toiling, impassioned, entrenched in his customs, with his voice and features, his gestures and dress, distinct and complete as he from whom we have just part ed in the street. " A history of a people which has passed away is the effort to make the past the present; to revivify the dead and present every phase of actual life as it once existed, with all its bad and good, its blessings and its sufferings; the home life, the public highway, the street, the field, men and women privately, collectively, at work and at play, socially and morally, as they once were here in the struggle for life. A picture most difficult, perhaps about impossible to draw. Hence, to approach this perfection in any respect, will make a valuable book, and one whose lessons will remain perpetually to the coming generations.

The people of a State, or any separate civil government of laws and police powers, must be considered in reference to their local laws and government, as well as estimated morally and socially, in order to fathom the causes when the facts are once understood. This is unquestionably the freest government established among men, and it may possibly have the " finest civil service on the planet," yet one fact is patent, namely: that it is already complex and is growing in these intricacies, and from this is and long has been coming some of that confusion among men's ideas of what are the true boundary lines where the people should cry out to the lawmakers, " hands off here. " We have a general government and laws, applicable to all the people of the country, then State laws and institutions that are local; then county, town and city governments, laws, police and courts; and the constant tendency is to increase these - enlarge their complexity, and the genius of our law-makers is exhausted in the scramble for new laws. From the earliest childhood, from ancient times, when civilization was emerging from darkness, all were taught to respect the law and to pray regularly for the rulers and law-makers. And to worship the flag and condone the crimes of those in power is the common measure of your neighbor's patriotism. A rather stupid judgment, truly, but the very best the average man of this age could be expected to form. The tendency of all this is to run to those most glaring evils of all governments, overlegislation, and thus what was intended for a protection, may become the heaviest oppression. In so far as laws and governments are concerned, they are a necessary evil - something not needed by the good - their only purpose or excuse for existence being to restrain the bad, and to protect all from the evil, the ignorant and the perverse. The evils of overmuch law and government meddling in the affairs of men, affairs that every one should shape and control for himself, have been too little considered by the people, those who suffer as the result of their own ignorance. The world is full of men who think a vote will make them wise, virtuous, rich and happy, and when these mistaken men are clothed with the ballot, and find themselves far from complete happiness, they are very apt to turn their eyes ever toward some new law, some commission or new office, created to relieve them of all their woes. When all these panaceas have run the gamut of experience and dismal failures, he may then wail at the demagogues, and fairly bray in a mortar, this meek and ever patient long eared animal.

The right of universal suffrage, in fact, all right of voting, implies and compels for the voter either the intelligence to select the proper representative to make and execute the laws, or he must abide the cruel consequences of the inevitable mistakes of ignorance. In your law-maker's hands are entrusted the great questions of not only your happiness, but of life and death itself. As new and strange as these propositions may aeem to many readers, they are not new to those who think best about the great problems of life. They are open secrets, and which are yet so open that they ought not to remain secrets to those who take upon themselves the awful responsibility of self-government, or of electing those who are to make and execute the laws, those men who undertake the vast and terrible responsibility of dealing with millions of human beings by measures which, if they do not conduce to their happiness, will increase their miseries and accelerate their deaths.

Speaking on this subject, and especially in reference to the plainest requirements that should be possessed by every law- maker, Herbert Spencer says: "There is first of all the undeniable truth, conspicuous and yet absolutely ignored, that there are no phenomena which a society presents but what have their origins in the phenomena of individual human life, which again have their roots in vital phenomena at large. And there is the inevitable implication that unless these vital phenomena, bodily and mentally, are chaotic in their relations (a supposition excluded by the very maintenance of life) the resulting phenomena can not be wholly chaotic; there must be some kind of order in the phenomena which grow out of them when associated human beings have to co-operate. Evidently, then, when one who has not studied such resulting phenomena of social order undertakes to regulate society he is pretty certain to work mischiefs.

' 'In the second place, apart from a priori reasoning, this conclusion should be forced on the legislator by comparisons of societies. It ought to be sufficiently manifest that, before meddling with the details of social organization, inquiry should be made whether social organization has a natural history; and that, to answer this inquiry, it would be well, setting out with the simplest societies, to see in what respects social structures agree. Such comparative sociology, pursued to a very small extent, shows a substantial uniformity of genesis. The habitual existence of chieftainship, and the establishment of chiefly authority by war; the rise everywhere of the medicine-man and priest; the presence of a cult having in all places the fundamental traits; the traces of division of labor, early displayed, which gradually become more marked, and the variouw complications - political, ecclesiastical, industrial, which arise as groups are compounded and recompounded by war - quickly prove to anyone who compares them that, apart from all their special differences, societies have general resemblances in their modes of origin and development. They present traits of structure showing that social organization has laws which override individual wills, and laws the disregard of which must be fraught with disaster.

"And then, in the third place, there is that mass of guiding information yielded by the records of law-making in our own country and in other countries, which still more obviously demands attention. Here and elsewhere attempts of multitudinous kinds made by kings and statesmen have failed to do the good intended and have worked unexpected evils. Century after century new measures like the old ones, and other measures akin in principle, have again disappointed hopes and again brought disaster. And yet it is thought neither by electors nor by those they elect that there is any need for systematic study of that legislation which in by-gone ages went on working the ill-being of the people when it tried to achieve their well-being. Surely there can be no fitness for legislative functions without wide knowledge of those legislative experiences which the past has bequeathed."

recently to accept a seat in the British Parliament because he could not waste his time in trying to benefit the people by giving them a government they were not yet ready to receive or appreciate.

A history of a people must, therefore, carefully consider the race, the epoch, and the climate and soil and their combined effects in elucidating the causes, after the facts have been collated. Where the period of time covered by the story is short - only a little more than a generation - as in the history of this county, the effects flowing out from these causes become shadowy and indistinct - more difficult to trace out and fix clearly to the view, in due ratio to the brevity of the period which comes within the purview of the writer.

These conceptions of history were unknown to our forefathers. They wrote of all men, looking always from the same stand-point, and from their abstract conceptions, exactly as though all men, of all ages, climes and surroundings, were exactly the same. Their conceptions and conclusions were abstract, and, like their philosophy, were metaphysical, and whence comes the fact that real history is a modern discovery; not wholly, but mostly so.

The fact is, the so-called lore of the classical ages are the works of those abstruse metaphysicians who fairly dazzled the world with their brilliant writings. The genius of these men was attractive and fascinating, and its power is evidenced well by the mastery it has wielded over men's minds for centuries; in fact, even to the present hour, we find its influence lingering about our oldest colleges, universities and schools. The wrong bent it gave the mind in many things has .been one of the heavy burdens upon the development and expansion of the human mind, and the diffusion and growth of knowledge. And the misfortune was that for centuries and centuries the schools of the world were organized and run upon theoretical and not scientific and practical ideas. And the amazing facts are now that we hear only of the classical and scientific schools, the former being generally regarded as the only proper standard of a high grade of education, and when we say a man is a classical scholar, all understand that to be the perfection of learning. And the best ideas of science in the schools is but miserable empiricism generally.

The steps in the advance of civilization - that long and painful contest between truth and ignorance - are thus indicated plainly to us, and in time they, too, will bear their fruits, and men will come to know that there is nothing so practical as real learning. Our forefathers called all scientific knowledge "common sense," and unconscious as they were of the fact, they were truly defining a term that means all real knowledge; alo » though they may have labored under the common delusion, that there was hid away in some of the institutions of the world a wonderful Arcana of wisdom and the true knowledge, under the name of classical or scientific lore, and that " common sense " was only for common people, while the better article was reserved for the select few.

The eras of development of the human mind are, first, the age of brute force and cimning and the earliest formation of the family and tribal relations, for mutual protection from savage neighbors. And secondly there is the age of arts, that culminates in music, poetry, eloquence, painting and the elegant refinements of society, and the pleasures of wealth, luxuries, and the polished and courtly manners that are so beautiful to behold in any people. The crown and culmination of the age of art, is in Jenny Lind, Raphael, Shakespeare and the orators and metaphysicians of Greece and Rome. And thirdly, the mind progressing still from this grand epoch, enters upon the age of inductive philosophy, the highest type of human perfection possible to reach - -the age of discoveries, inventions and of true knowledge; the knowledge which betters the conditions of all men, making them healthier, happier and longer lived; dispelling pain of body and suffering of mind; awakening men from the long nightmare of superstitious fears and ignorant beliefs, driving from the walks of life the once successful and adored mendicant quacks, shams and imposters, who, for the long ages, so flourished fattened and battened upon the hard earnings of ignorance and folly, the curse of bigotry and the fatality of empiricism.

The man who never had occasion in his life for the use of a thought above bread and bacon (and we would not deride such men, for with the great mass, these are the first and only real questions of their whole lives, and '.to answer them well is their noblest mission), we say, many such men are truly amazed when we have asked them for the story of their humble, but sincere and honest lives. And sometimes, like certain rich men who are vain of their ragged and dirty clothes, and who sneer at a clean man, they have gloried in telling us that we did not understand our own business nearly so well as they did, and they knew their own lives were too trifling to tell, and that it was a fraud to attempt to print them. Parading their own pride of ignorance, they give instantaneous judgments upon the philosophy of historical data, thus settling profound questions that have taxed for many years some of the greatest minds that ever lived. Another will tell us that he is a " new comer " and is not a part, nor has he any interest in the history of the people, either of the past or present. Another will notify us that the history of a county can only be properly written by its living cotemporaries.

There is no blame to attach to these mistaken people, because history is more an account of men's errors than of their correct judgments - ignorance has largely predominated in the world, possibly it always will. We are not excessively concerned on this point, but content to contribute our humble inite to the story as it is, conscious of the fact that that history which fails to give an account of men's errors, as well as their sparse triumphs in behalf of truth, would be no history at all. The history of the insignificant, the ignorant, good and bad, the old and the young, in short, the majority, the mass, exactly aa they were and are, is the real bulk and important part of the lesson. In the hands of the historian every grade and shade of human life and its conditions, from the idiot to Lord Bacon, are the materials from which he raises the structure, the imperishable records of a people. Do you suppose the birds that made their tracks in the plastic mud, which afterward hardened to stone and became locked in the bowels of the earth for centuries and for geological ages, were any more aware of the immense importance their rude records would be to us than the millions of men, who lived and died and whose chance fossil remains are being unearthed, and are enabling us now to write something of the story of prehistoric man and animals ? The lowest and meanest worms have lived and made their imperishable records. Nothing escapes history. The name of Charles Augustus, or Neherniah, or Praise- God- Barebones, will pass away and be soon forgotten; it is an impalpable nothing, but the life, the bones and flesh, the blood and tissue are a solid something, which, amid ceaseless changes, will exist for ever. And it need not humiliate the said Charles to learn that this physical fact is equally true of the toad and the mosquito.

Hence, an accurate biography of every man, woman and child that now lives and has lived in the county would be the full and complete materials in the hands of the historian, by which he could write a history of unsurpassed value. To obtain these now is impossible, and we can only do the next best thing, namely, to procure as nearly as possible the life records of those from whom we may strike that average whose beautiful laws are certain and immutable, and which, when correctly interpreted, yield infallible truths.

A book to be read by the average man, in order to be appreciated or understood, must be addressed to his understanding, and it should steer successfully around his cherished prejudices of faith, and his distorted or total absence of all views on political economy. The successful book-makers, those who jump into sudden fame and reap the golden harvests, are those who catch the popular breeze and sail with it. They criticise nothing, and with devout hearts they bend the knee and bow the head at the shrine inscribed. " The voice of the people is the voice of God; " or that other and worse maxim, " The people are always right; " " The divine right of Kings," and " The majority are always right and the minority are always wrong "- these are some of the arrant follies that have held their places in men's minds persistently and almost perpetually. From the hustings, the rostrum, the sacred desk, the bench and bar, these fulminations are poured out, and to question them is to have your own sanity suspected. " Might is right " is just as true as are any of the other time-worn maxims about the majorities - the people as a whole, or that other nonsense, that for all men to vote is the priceless boon of freedom - or " Universal suffrage assures the perfection of a good and free government - so long as you can vote you cannot be enslaved."

These maxims are the droolings of imbecility, and it is he who pours out upon this wicked nonsense his fulsome panegyrics of praise, who reaches best the public heart and pulse and reaps the golden harvests.

When the people act as a body upon any subject, there cannot be any action that is superior to the average man, and the chances are as one in a thousand that it will not be above this measure, but is nearly certain to be below it, for the reason that error is nearly always more active than intelligence. It is more self -asserting, more confident, and infinitely more satisfied with itself. The whole is admirably stated in formulating the terms which describe the contest between knowledge and ignorance. Knowledge is a saint, ignorance is a criminal. Hence, a people is moral or immoral, good or bad, virtuous or vicious, as the collective body is wise or ignorant. A high or low standard of sobriety, integrity or morality in a people is the exact measure of the knowledge it possesses. This, like the law of averages, may not be demonstrably true of the individual, but is unvarying of the people as a whole in its self-demonstrations.

So far as we can know, everything in all nature - the whole mental and physical world - is a growth, not in a single instance a miraculous bursting into the full bloom of existence. And that growth is governed by omnipotent laws. To know these laws and apply them to man, to the family, to society,

In a historical point of view, then, " The present is completing the past, and the past is explaining the present." And this becomes plain and its value incalculable in so far as we may from the records and data that come to our hands, be enabled to point out the laws of growth that have led us to where we now are.