Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 3.djvu/24

 4 STATESMEN AND SAGES Imagine what opportune circumstances we may, yet to organize and carry on a movement resulting in the release of a great people from such a soul-subduing tyranny, backed by an army of half a million highly trained soldiers, requires a leadership of most commanding and consummate genius. But this task, surpass- ingly great though it is, is not the measure of the greatness of the leader of the Kxodus. It is not in the deliverance from Egypt, it is in the constructive states- manship that laid the foundations of the Hebrew commonwealth that the super- lative grandeur of that leadership looms up. As we cannot imagine the Exodus without the great leader, neither can we account for the Hebrew polity without the great statesman. Not merely intellectually great, but morally great a statesman aglow with the unselfish patriotism that refuses to grasp a sceptre or found a dynasty. It matters not when or by whom were compiled the books popularly attributed to Moses ; it matters not how much of the code there given may be the survivals of more ancient usage or the amplifications of a later age ; its great features bear the stamp of a mind far in advance of people and time, of a mind that beneath effects sought for causes, of a mind that drifted not with the tide of events, but aimed at a definite purpose. The outlines that the record gives us of the character of Moses the brief re- lations that wherever the Hebrew scriptures are read have hung the chambers of the imagination with vivid pictures are in every way consistent with this idea. What we know of the life illustrates what we know of the work. What we know of the work illumines the life. It was not an empire such "as had reached full development in Egypt or ex- isted in rudimentary patriarchal form in the tribes around, that Moses aimed to found. Nor was it a republic where the freedom of the citizen rested on the ser- vitude of the helot, and the individual was sacrificed to the state. It was a com- monwealth based upon the individual ; a commonwealth whose ideal it was that every man should sit under his own vine and fig-tree, with none to vex him or make him afraid ; a commonwealth in which none should be condemned to cease- less toil ; in which, for even the bond slave, there should be hope ; in which, for even the beast of burden, there should be rest. A commonwealth in which, in the absence of deep poverty, the manly virtues that spring from personal inde- pendence should harden into a national character ; a commonwealth in which the family affections might knit their tendrils around each member, binding with links stronger than steel the various parts into the living whole. It is not the protection of property, but the protection of humanity, that is the aim of the Mosaic code. Its sanctions are not directed to securing the strong in heaping up wealth, so much as to preventing the weak from being crowded to the wall. At every point it interposes its barriers to the selfish greed that, if left unchecked, will surely differentiate men into landlord and serf, capitalist and work- man, millionaire and tramp, ruler and ruled. Its Sabbath day and Sabbath year secure, even to the lowliest, rest and leisure. With the blast of the Jubilee trum- pets the slave goes free, the debt that cannot be paid is cancelled, and a re-divis- ion of the land secures again to the poorest his fair share in the bounty of the