PIONEERS OF PROGRESS
BYT. A. BLAND
Author of Farming as a Profession, Life of Benjamin F. Butler, Esau,
How to Get Well and How to Keep Well, In the
World Celestial, etc., etc.
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CHICAGO T. A. Bland & CO. 1906
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Copyright, 1906, by T. A. Bland
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THE BLAKELY PRINTING COMPANY
CHICAGO
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page: 3[View Page 3]PREFATORY.
Biography is the life of history. Without it the chronicles of a nation would be of small value. It teaches both by precept and example. If the example is good the lesson is uplifting. The lives of good men and women are practical object lessons; and the history of such lives is a rich inheritance to the world. It constitutes the chief part of a nation's wealth.
The nineteenth century was a record-breaking period, in the way of producing great men and women. Men and women who have distinguished themselves by their wise words and noble deeds.
It was the author's good fortune to be born in the early part of that century, and to live his manhood life during the last half of it, and to enjoy the personal acquaintance of some of those great souls who have been prominent actors in the drama of progress.
In this book the author gives his impressions of those headlights of humanity, in the form of brief biographical sketches and personal reminiscences. He has tried to be just to his subject and to his readers, that his page: 4[View Page 4] book may be a worthy contribution to the biographical literature of his age; he has striven to divest his mind of prejudice, while showing active sympathy with the views of, and strong personal regard for, some of those whose lives were, in his opinion, of especial value to humanity.
That his book may prove interesting to the general reader, and an inspiration to the
youth of the country, is the sincere hope of
THE AUTHOR.
CONTENTS
- Page.
- Abraham Lincoln 17
- Ulysses S. Grant 25
- Wendell Phillips 34
- Lucretia Mott 46
- Gerald Massey 54
- William Lloyd Garrison 62
- Matthew Simpson 69
- Henry Ward Beecher 74
- Thomas K. Beecher 81
- Lew Wallace 86
- Benjamin F. Butler 98
- John Clark Ridpath 109
- Horace Greeley 120
- Susan B. Anthony 127
- Andrew Jackson Davis 134
- Ryland T. Brown 140
- Fred P. Stanton 147
- Peter Cooper 152
- William Byrd Powell 155
- Hiram W. Thomas 161
- David MacDonald 168
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- Ralph Waldo Emerson 176
- Julia Ward Howe 184
- Alfred B. Meachan 189
- Alva Curtis 198
- Robert G. Ingersoll 203
- Lydia Maria Child 209
- Francis A. Walker 216
- Henry George 221
- Alfred Russell Wallace 232
- John Boyle O'Reilly 242
- Richard T. Ely 246
INTRODUCTION.
BY REV. H. W. THOMAS , D. D.
Crystals enlarge by accretion; cells multiply and grow. From the moneron and mollusk the life-work went forward and up to the body and mind of man.
A most wonderful fact, is the self-consciousness of the individual. The self, the I, that affirrrs the self, and the other; that discriminates between the I and the me; that says, this is my body, my house; that draws the line between being and existence. The material world is objective; is perceived through the outward reading senses. It has to do with properties. The spiritual world is subjective; lies within, and has to do with qualities, or the principles of the moral order of the good.
The tremendous meaning of the life of man is found in this fact of the self-conscious individuality and volitional power to think and do. It is not possible for all these individuals to live in separateness; the needs of each compel some form of association; hence the family, the state, the church, and the relations of industry and commerce. And in the progressive forms of civilization the facts of the one and the many; or individualism page: 8[View Page 8] and socialism must always be present; and both must be recognized and conserved; for each has its place in the one and larger social whole.
In this world-process of larger and better becoming, there have been in all the long years the "Pioneers of Progress." Despotisms in government and religion, aristocracies of learning, wealth and the self-enforced authority of kings and ecclesiastics, have sought to enslave the millions. Even in Athens Socrates had to drink the poison; and two thousand years later Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome. The blood of martyrs has marked the slow, hard way of religious liberty through the long centuries; and countless millions have died in the battles of contending despots.
But Galileo came with his telescope; the old astronomy gave place to the new; the Reformation lifted up the rights of reason and conscience in religion; the infallibility of the Pope has been declared; but the temporal sovereignty is forever gone. Under Louis XIV the authority of the church was supreme; and it owned one-third the wealth of France. The revolution wrought the secularization of the social order; and now that brilliant nation is a Republic; civil authority is supreme.
With the ever changing order of progressive becoming, is the vast commercialism of page: 9[View Page 9] these great years; made possible by the mighty forces of machinery. With this have come the possibilities and dangers of new forms of the abuses of wealth and power. The trusts and the fabulous fortunes of the few are a growing menace to the rights and liberties of the many. The old slavery of the colored race came to an end with the War of the Rebellion; a new form of white slavery is arising in the oppressive power of moneyed aristocracy, that not only seeks to control labor and commerce, but to corpt legislatures and courts of justice.
The work of the "Pioneers of Progress" is never done; some of the old questions of disspute may be settled, but with new condions others arise. There are always the two parties--the Conservatives and the Radicals; the one balancing the other. Man self-transcending; the limits of the subscious and the supra-conscious powers of his own being have not yet been reached. Prof. James, of Harvard, says psychology is only where science was before Galileo and Bacon. Sociology has just come into the foreground; the problems of wealth and poverty, of war and peace, and the equalities of justice are coming into the great world-court of the higher humanity. In the larger light of the universal, religion will be less a matter of intellectual differences and disputations, and more and more a glad trust and page: 10[View Page 10] hope in the Infinite Goodness and a life of love to man and God. And, meantime, the work of discovery and invention will go forward in the world of material forces, and may far transcend the wonders of the present. The rays of the Sun may soon turn all the wheels of labor and commerce, and light and warm the homes of the world.
Among the names of the "Pioneers of Progress" that of the author of this work should certainly have a place; and his many friends have so requested and urged, but Dr. Bland has just as positively protested. Somehow, this busy and self-forgetful life cannot bear the thought of being an autobiographer; nor can his friends forego their reasonable request.
As a solution of the problem, I have been asked to write an Introduction to the work, in which the life of the author will naturally call for at least some notice; and to this, being old friends, he has consented.
The parents of our author, Thomas and Sarah Thornton Bland, were members of a colony of North Carolina Quakers, who settled in Orange County, Indiana, in 1817. In 1829 they bought a tract of land in Greene County, near Bloomfield, the newly located capital, and built a log cabin in the thick forest; and there, this now distinguished son was born May 21, 1830; and there he lived the life of a pioneer farmer's boy till he was page: 11[View Page 11] twenty years old. In his seventh year a log school house was built, in which he studied in winters and worked on the farm in the summers, until the age of fifteen, when the father, thinking further education was not necessary for practical purposes, and needing his help all the year on the farm, the school days were ended. He had mastered Webster's spelling book, the Young and the English Readers, Pike's Arithmetic, and had read the Life of Dr. Franklin and the Bible; had almost memorized them.
But changes came to this earnest and aspiring life. When he was twenty years of age the loving mother died; the faithful toiling father, wishing to provide homes for the three sons, and hoping that all would be farmers, sold the old home and moved to page: 12[View Page 12] Illinois. Only the oldest son chose the life of the farmer.
Dr. Bland studied medicine after he was married, and on coming from college began practice in the village of Worthington, Indiana, six miles from where he was born. As a physician his studies were not limited to what is called medicine, but took the wider range of health reforms. He had been a student of phrenology from boyhood. He longed to reach and help the people in a larger way; and hence took the platform as a lecturer on physiology and phrenology in their relations to the health of body and mind; his itinerary covered a number of the page: 13[View Page 13] middle and western states and a few in the East.
In 1864 he accepted a commission from Governor Morton, of Indiana, as special surgeon in the army. Returning from that work he was joined by his wife, who had been for nearly two years studying in Dr. Jackson's Health Institute, Dansville, New York, and they established, at Indianapolis, a literary journal, "The Home Visitor." At the end of a successful year this was sold and the Northwestern, now Indiana Farmer, was founded. In 1868 they established the Ladies' Own Magazine, of which Mrs. Bland was Editor-in-Chief. In 1870 Dr. Bland published his first book, Farming as a Profession, which had a large sale. Having sold the "Farmer" they removed the magazine to Chicago in the spring of 1872, and in 1874 they removed it to New York City, where a year later it was sold and Mrs. Bland entered a medical college, completed her course, and took her degree as a Doctor of Medicine.
In April, 1878, the Drs. Bland located in Washington City, where for eighteen years the wife had a successful career both as a physician and a lecturer on health and related subjects; the husband on occasion assisting as counsel. But his time was fully occupied with his literary work and as Corresponding Secretary of the National Arbitration page: 14[View Page 14] League and, also, of the Indian Defense Association and as President of the Eclectic Medical Society of the District of Columbia. During his residence in Washington Dr. Bland edited, for ten years, the Council Fire; for one year the True Commonwealth. In 1879 Dr. Bland's Life of General Butler was issued by Lee & Shepard, of Boston. In 1880 appeared his Reign of Monopoly; in 1881 How to Grow Rich, an anti-monopoly brochure; in 1882 the Life of A. B. Meacham; in 1892 Esau, a political novel, and in 1894 his medical work was issued.
Dr. and Mrs. Bland spent the three years from 1895 to 1898 in Boston in professional, literary and reformatory work; and then removed to Chicago, where they now reside. In 1899 he was elected Secretary of the American Medical Union, which position he still holds. In 1902 his latest work, "In the World Celestial," appeared and attracted quite wide attention, and its hold upon the public is still undiminished.
In this passing sketch of the life of Dr. Bland one must be surprised at the large amount of work accomplished; and yet not the half appears. His other writings for the magazines and the general press would make more than fifty volumes the size of his books, and in addition to this he has delivered hundreds of lectures upon various page: 15[View Page 15] subjects. He has lived not in the quietude seclusion but in public; with, and a part of the people; sharing in and trying to bear their burdens. Only as a life of love, and in the sharing or mutuality of love in return is such a life possible.
As a reformer the work of Dr. Bland has been large, wise and helpful. Large, in that it has not been limited to any specialty; his wide vision has looked upon the whole field of the needs and sufferings of a world. Wise, because his judgment has been that of a well-balanced mind. Helpful, because sympathies have been with the sufferers; he has not stood as one apart from them, and talked at them; but has been as one with them who has known hard work; what it is to sweat in the field, and live in a cabin, and his life to be comparatively poor.
Looking at this life we can but be impressed with its noble and heroic qualities; its Quaker-like simplicity, purity and integrity; and its moral heroism; and it is beautiful, Divine, to see this husband and wife, who have so long been one in thought and work, growing old in a love that is deeper, Diviner than was possible in the long ago, when together they essayed the task and journey of earth and time. Beautiful as they so joyfully toil on in the brighter hope of the blessed forever.
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