Article March 27, 1909 Issue

We know but little of the source of real power

From an address before the National House of Representatives by Congressman Nye—Minnesota.

We know but little of the source of real power. We associate it with external pomp and parade. We think of gathering armies, of magnificent navies, of gleaming swords and clashing steel, of roaring artillery, of waving banners and beating drums; but these are not the sources of real power. Human judgment is often swept from its throne by the spectacular and by transitory appeals to the mere passions of men. But these are only bubbles and foam on the ever-flowing sea of time in which great actions and great events follow in succession. We are prone to look out upon the world and to think that the outer phenomenon of things is the real. We confuse substance with show. Not long ago I read an admirable lecture on the subject of substance and show. We think all substance is bulk, is that which is subject to measurement; but after all, as the great teacher Paul says, "the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal." This man whose lecture I read spoke of the outer phenomenon of things, the scholastic as distinguished from that reverence of thought which leads men intuitively to that which inspires, rather than mere scholasticism.

The tree, the oak that has stood for a hundred years and dared the tempest and the storm, we think of as it appears outwardly, mere bulk or form, but substance really is that which creates and produces and classifies. The real substance of the tree is unseen. It is that which winds its rings about it year by year, glues the bark to the stem, sends its living leaves to the heavens and its roots far into the earth. It is unseen. The scholars tell us that in the whole vegetable world there are but three or four elements or gases—I think the oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and carbon. The catalogue is not so important; but there is a reverence of thought which might lead us to wonder and adore the infinite intelligence and love which takes this common stuff and works it up into all the manifold manifestations of beauty and life, which makes it an orange here, an olive there, a pine here and an oak there, a dahlia here and a violet there. This is the real substance, the intelligence and power that is, after all, the real. This is the substance; all else is but a part of the show of things, only the outer phenomenon. In human society the same great law is true, whether it be the church, the fraternal organization, or whatever it be; it is not its number, not its form or ceremony or ritual, but its spirit and its life, expressing itself in the daily lives of men. This is substance. And what is a nation? Not the outer phenomenon, not wealth or commerce or mines or fields. There is back of it all a spirit which is the real nation and which constitutes the enduring republic. "The things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal." I present to you today what I believe to be a type of that better, interior, and unseen life and spirit of this Republic, and I find it personified in the life and character of that great man whose love for his fellow-men made him the wonder of his day and the wonder of all coming centuries.

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We know but little of the source of real power

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