The Charlotte News

Monday, March 14, 1938

TWO EDITORIALS

 

Site Ed. Note: In the second editorial of this date, perhaps through deliberate juxtaposition to provide deep contrast between his own education and that of the Fascist leaders in Europe, Cash eulogizes the passing of one of his own early mentors, the President of Wake Forest when Cash attended in the early twenties, W. L. Poteat.

Now the sneaking serpent walks in mild humility.

And the just man rages in the wilds where lions roar.

Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burdened air;

Hungry clouds swag on the deep.

So said Blake in "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell".

Just as those lines surely spoke to Cash, whether in 1922 or in 1938, perhaps, through Cash and through Blake, Professor Poteat still speaks to us eighty years after his brief but obviously memorable stroll across the bucolic little campus with Cash.

Perhaps, more now than even then.

Perhaps, sad comment as it is on the human condition, the lines are timeless. But, as Blake more or less said, without Evil there can be no Good--as surely as without a negative, there can be no positive, both logically and within the physical laws of the universe. And while it is certainly folly not to guard reasonably against evil acts and their practitioners and to discourage them, is it not rashness of all rashness to attempt to eradicate Evil from the face of the earth? And to attempt to reconcile the two forces, to destroy existence? And so what is it to call that a government policy? Armageddon?

Machiavelli's Pupil

Though it looks just now as though Neville Chamberlain was the prize sucker Europe has developed in one hundred years, it is just possible that there may be another greater than himself. He is that assiduous pupil of Machiavelli's "The Prince"--which laid down succinctly for international affairs the rule of "Never give a sucker a break"--Benito Mussolini.

The Signor, in all probability, has the word of Hitler that the German armies will back him up when he sets out finally to seize the mastery of the Mediterranean. But what guarantee has he that it will be kept? None at all. Indeed, the first thing that a pupil of Machiavelli, who was himself a dictator, and so conversant with the value of the dictator's word, ought to have known is that such an agreement would be kept only if Hitler found it to his interest and liking to keep it.

Yet for that word, he has allowed a state immensely valuable to him as a buffer to be destroyed. The German armies stand again at the Brenner Pass. And south of the Brenner Pass is a "German minority" of 300,000 souls in such valleys as that of the Merano--torn from Austria in 1918. And a German minority which Musso has very badly mistreated, a German minority whose culture and language he has sought with determination to destroy, a German minority which hates him roundly.

And south of Austria, too, lies Venezia and Trieste, prior to the last war Austrian territory, off and on, for 300 years. Well, and would Herr Hitler like to have a port on the Mediterranean? or would Herr Hitler like to have a port on the Mediterranean? And what about Tuscany, which was a part of Austria from the seventeenth century down to 1870?

Let Hitler go through with the realization of his Central European ambitions, and Mussolini, the astute pupil of Machiavelli, may find himself fighting for the life of his country against the Frankenstein he has helped to create.

 

Dr. W. L. Poteat

He was of the first importance for education in the South. Until he came back from Berlin along at the beginning of the century, science and particularly biological science had got only the sketchiest treatment in Southern schools. Over at Sewanee and the Universities of Virginia and South Carolina, and in a few other places, the name of Darwin was uttered gingerly; but in general, and particularly in the evangelical church colleges, it was pretty well taboo. It was, men said, a Yankee-izing doctrine which would destroy the Christian faith, and with that the whole pattern of Southern culture. But he put all that aside. At a church college, he faced all that was known and thought and taught it directly and without hedging. And proceeded, in his own life, to demonstrate that the notion that it was incompatible with a high faith, with the best loyalty to the South, was unsound.

But he was not only one of the greatest of Southern educators. He was also one of the largest and gentlest minds Dixie has produced. For what he believed he was prepared to fight and when he fought he was formidable. Few greater masters of essential eloquence, spoken and written, have lived in North Carolina. But there was a great and genuine tolerance in him. Holding fast to Puritan ideal himself, he never forgot that men are human and that they must not be judged too sternly by their fellows. "I have been teaching William Blake's 'Marriage of Heaven and Hell, ' " he told a student once, falling into step beside him on the Wake Forest campus, "and notice particularly the apothegm which runs, 'The way of excess is the road to the palace of wisdom.' But, though it sounds a platitude, I should say that the middle way is the best way in all things." And went on gently pulling at his double chin.


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