The Tenth Generation
By Harry Stillwell Edwards
Macon, Georgia

The old lawyer hung up his telephone receiver and turned slowly back to his deep seated leather chair. His appearance and every motion betokened the Southerner of type almost extinct. The message he had received disturbed him not a little. A prominent capitalist and bank officer had asked permission to call and discuss a personal matter with him. For privacy, as he had explained, and to avoid interruption, he preferred to come to the lawyer’s residence. Their names are not important in this record.

Seated again, the old practitioner crossed his long, thin legs, leaned back and matched his fingers in thought; a characteristic habit. He had granted personal interviews in his home on other occasions and always with serious aftermaths. The gentleman who had just phoned him was, by common consent, a man of vast wealth. But you can’t always tell. There had been serious disturbances in financial circles lately, far-reaching in their results. And there was always speculation and dishonest employees. And divorce. He wondered what there was in the air of importance sufficient to send this busy man across the city for an interview with one but slightly known to him, and not at all professionally. Presently, he arose, drew an easy chair into the strong light of his hooded lamp, and resumed his own in the twilight, which half concealed the luxuriousness of the spacious Colonial room. Fifteen minutes later a car door slammed outside and an aged Negro butler ushered in his visitor. 

The capitalist was a man of about fifty, short, strong of frame, vigorous, quick of motion and alert; the opposite, in all, of his host. But he had the face and eyes of the dreamer. Or so the lawyer decided after the customary courtesies of speech had been exchanged, and the visitor was seated. 

“First, I wish to thank you,” began the latter with perceptible embarrassment, “for giving me some of your leisure, and permitting this invasion of your home. Perhaps, in a business way later, I may be enabled to show my appreciation.”

The lawyer smiled, lifted a hand slightly and shook his head.

“Let us proceed without regard to business. You spoke of some personal matter. I am glad, sir, for this opportunity of meeting you socially. Our paths had not crossed often. How may I serve you, sir? Will you smoke?” His hand fell on a box of cigars.

The visitor declined with a gesture. 

I am at a loss, Colonel,” he began, looking into the shadow and hesitating, “just how to introduce my subject; but for an opening I might say that I have an heir coming, ten generations away, and I’d like to devise some plan to protect him financially; toget6her with his forebears back to my six-year-old son. Can it be done?” A playful but appealing smile, accompanied the odd question. “Sounds a little foolish, I am afraid.”

The old Southerner, round-eyed with surprise for a moment, flashed him a message of appreciation.

“On the contrary, sir, the issue is of tremendous import. And I have never heard it better framed.” The other hastened to add:
“I should have said in advance that while I come to you as a lawyer deservedly noted, I come, mainly, because I have read with full appreciation and deep interest your recent articles on sociology. I have derived much from them.” Again the face of the lawyer wore its slow, friendly smile. He nodded, but did not speak at once. After a moment or two he said:

“Before I answer your question, do you mind telling me, briefly, something of your family and of yourself? Not to gratify mere curiosity; I have a reason.”

“I think I understand. Well, I’ll make it as brief as possible, under the circumstances. I am the product of eight Colonial families that figured more or less actively in the Indian and Revolutionary Wars.”-

“Eight?” The shaggy eyebrows of the host went up.

“Yes. There are quite a number of names on the record, as I learned through some newly discovered relatives in the North. I have had them looked up, too, by a genealogist - my wife aspires to the Colonial Dames. They came over from England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales in the latter half of the Seventeenth Century.”-

“Say about two hundred and fifty years ago; two hundred and fifty before your boy was born.”

“Yes, about. By the way, counting twenty-five years a generation, that was just ten generations back, wasn’t it? Funny that we should have started to figure that distance ahead and have landed back there.”

“It is, indeed!” The Southerner was smiling broadly. “Perhaps you now understand my request better. You, yourself, are the boy of the tenth generation, one of your Colonial ancestors may have wished to provide for Well, one of them, maybe, did, but unknowingly. Proceed.”

“Between then and now I don’t know much of what happened to my family. As far as I have been informed, I am the only one that ever amassed any considerable fortune. They were mostly improvident and spenders, I suppose.”

“And now, about yourself.”

“Why, and how, I succeeded is still a mystery to me. We were desperately poor and ignorant; mill people, usually, I understand. The fact does not disturb me, but there is no use to spread it. My wife cares very much. Of my sisters we won’t speak. They were servants, and lived according to their light, I suppose; but the lights went out, here and there. The boys took any job that offered when they worked at all; and mated without marriage. Our father was -well, just a sot, spending on drink what he could take away from the family. One brother died in a penitentiary out West; one in a bar-room fight. Another just vanished. But my mother was good. I was the youngest and she clung to me until death ended the unequal struggle. Her people were good people, she said. She was fond of telling me traditions of what they did in America’s three wars. I was proud of them. Possibly, I was, in reality, her only son. When she died I ran away from the others - a boy of nine - and lived a hard life for years, selling papers, shining shoes, doing whatever offered if there was a dime in slight. But always I carried a hope and ambition. With a steady job at last, I took on night study and got a start. There were helping hands, of course. Years after, I was prosperous - highly so. I had made a character for myself and was a trusted bank officer. Then came the Great War. I had a chance at contracts and low priced stocks that advanced five or six hundred per cent. And I struck it rich in Florida. And then my oil stocks proved good. Before I realized it the millions had come.

“And now sir, perhaps you, too, understand my question better. God helping me, my boy, and the boys and girls who are to follow him, shall never travel the hard road my little feet trod, the way by which I came. It is though that money can do anything. Can it protect the boy two hundred and fifty years away? And those between him and me? Can it? Can it? If so, how? The matter has become almost an obsession with me. I lie awake at night and dream of those unborn children. I see them starving, stealing, slouching in the shadows, haunted by fear, hunted by the police - the boys, the girls disease, in the gutter, object of charity - Good God! It is not imagination with me, it is a picture from memory - it is real. Show me the way out, my friend.” He arose and began to pace the room.

The Southerner, his hands matched before his face, but shaking a little, sat rigid, otherwise, until the burst of emotion had spent itself, and, with a muttered apology, his guest had resumed his seat. Then, suddenly, without reference to what had been said, the old lawyer straightened in his chair and began to talk:

“There is in the death chamber of our penitentiary tonight, awaiting electrocution, a young man. The picture of his unshaven, animal face pressed against the bars, his staring eyes, is before me as I speak. His name does not matter. In fact, the courts do not know him. He was convicted as ‘Billy, the Rat,’ and is known to the underworld as such. He illustrates some theories of mine, and I have taken pains to investigate his history and, in fact, to seek leniency for him. I have his real name under a pledge of secrecy, as he is an escape from another prison. The Rat is still a young man; a hopeless degenerate; an overgrown boy with a mind so utterly untrained as to incapable of lofty purpose or ideal. Without education, this man zig-zagged through society seeking food and the gratification of other physical cravings; engaging in every sort of crime that promised drink or dope, until, in a moment of desperation, cornered by the law, he slew one of its officers. I have made quiet search into his heredity and find that he is the natural product of ignorance and vice. The generation ahead of him held several criminals; and beyond them his people were of bad repute. One of his kinsmen in this generation, however, is a preacher; a fine type. 

“It seems strange that out of the same soil, apparently, two such different men should have come. The explanation is, they came by different routes. Back of this preacher, somewhere, were education and morality and trained minds. Back of the other weakness and crime; absence of rightful environment. One was to be lifted, the other cast down. In the case of the latter bad blood, freighted with error, had trickled through the centuries, following the lines of least resistance; ignorance mating with ignorance; crime with crime. But both preacher and prisoner are natural products of pre-existing causes and environment. Whether Bill, the Rat, should be electrocuted is at least open to debate. Personally, I am not in favor of electrocuting any natural product.”

He had arisen and was slowly making his way back into the shadow as he laconically delivered himself of his conclusion. Without apology or explanation the old man seated himself before a desk over in a corner, turned on a light, and for ten minutes or more busied himself over a large sheet of paper. Finally, he turned off the light and came back to his guest. Drawing a chair beside him, he seated himself and held up the paper on which were two triangles, one above the other, both composed of lines, and each posed on its apex. At each apex was a star, the upper star being in the middle of the longest space of the lower triangle.

Generations: 
                  1
1               -2-
2             -- 4 --
3            --- 8 ---
4          ---- 16 ----
5         ----- 32 -----
6        ------ 64 ------
7       ------- 128 -------
8      -------- 256 --------
9     --------- 512 --------- 
10 ---------- 1024 ---------- 
 Number of Parents and Great.., ., ., Grandparents

“I am going to ask you,” he said, “to imagine that the star between the two triangles is your six-year-old son; you and is mother the line above it; his four grandparents the line above that; and his eight great-grandparents the next line up. And so on to the top line, which is the tenth and longest, and represents all the boy’s ancestors in the generation of two hundred and fifty years ago; that is, in 1677. Each line in the triangle represents a generation, and on each I have written the number of the boy’s ancestors in that generation. They are ascertained by simply doubling the number from him up. I am holding the star that represents the boy on a level with your eyes to assist your imagination to climb the ladder, for we always speak of ourselves as descended from, though in the scale of life we really ascend. Assuming that you have scaled the ladder, your are now at the top, and in the generation of 1677 two hundred and fifty years ago. Are you satisfied that every individual on that top line is a Colonial ancestor of your six-year-old boy?”

“Undoubtedly.” But the capitalist spoke with hesitation, frowning in bewilderment.

“You spoke of being the product of eight Colonial families. Remember? Well, in that top generation you had a thousand and twenty-four ancestors. You were descended from five hundred and twelve families then in existence. Or, to be exact, from five hundred and twelve couples then or afterwards mated. 
“Now, let’s travel the other way, down to that boy two hundred and fifty years off through the generation of other children you dream of at night. The second triangle, or diagram, is a copy of the first, differing only in the years named. The first thing that will strike you is that in the generation of your six-year-old son there are a thousand and twenty-three other boys and girls who are going to mate and produce that remote heir of yours. On the principle that the oak is in the acorn, he already exists in them, if they are living. These thousand and twenty-four youngsters are going to grow up, and each will contribute something to that boy coming in 2177. Because of some of them, maybe, he is going to succeed nobly; or, because of some, he is going to fail miserably, perhaps. You say this is admitting too much for heredity. We shall not stop to argue it. Our prize stock - chickens, dogs, race horses-answer the objection. But for heredity, races of men could not have been built up. Let us just recognize that a man is inevitably the sum of all his ancestors and pass on.

“It is impossible to deny that in this generation of boys and girls, to which your six-year-old belongs, are a thousand and twenty-three more whose blood with mingle with his, about two hundred and fifty years from now, just as certainly as the sun will rise tomorrow; provided your son’s line extends that far, and we have assumed that it will.

“I see you are startled; and well you may be. You will hardly pass a child on the street from now on without seeing in him or her, possibilities of blood-union at some removed time, if not during your life. The boy of 2177 is going to number you amount his ancestors with pride, perhaps, if someone keep the record; but he is going to have in him the blood of more than two thousand children; the sum of the generations between him and you. They will represent a cross-section of society; descendants of lawyers, doctors, engineers, firemen, merchants, laborers in mines and workshops and mills; sailors, soldiers, farmers, preachers, tramps and crooks.

“Now, my friend,” and the old man wiped his glasses and smiled into the troubled face by his side, “I ask you, as one sensible human being of another, why, looking only to the little lad of 2177, you should be more concerned with your six-year-old and his direct heirs than with the thousand and twenty three around him, whose blood is going to mingle with his, and who are today playing around somewhere? One thousand and twenty-four who are to be the direct ancestors of the boy of 2177.

“And I am going to ask you further wouldn’t you say, knowing as you do, that it takes more genius, more fine qualities to conserve wealth than it does to amass it, that the chances for doing anything for that far away boy with your money, kept as money are rather infinitesimal? You speak of that boy of 2177 as yours; why, there is to be less than a thousand and twenty-fourth of you in him; and every one of this ancestors in the generation of your six-year-old will be closer kin.”

“I think,” said the hearer, gently, “I am beginning to see light. But go on, if you please.”

“You will see the sunrise if you face the East, presently. There is only one inevitable conclusion. You can only endow that far away boy, that tenth generation and those heirs between him and you, by endowing the whole generation to which your living son belongs. Only in this way may you stand a chance to benefit the thousand and twenty-four who are to produce the boy of 2177 and the generations of your blood and his blood to precede him. Dismiss the ideas that you can tie your money to the line of little lives that will run straight down from you to him. You would have no guarantee of good if you could. The value of money is not an inherent element; the value lies in the handling of it. Specialized education, in fact, without something added. Money is but a tool, a weapon, and an agent. Neither money, sword, nor wrench is effective in untrained hands. You cannot transmit your skill. It is the history of money that one generation assembles it, the next separates it, and the next dissipates it. The Spanish say, ‘Butcher, caballero, don, butcher!’ we say: ‘Three generations from shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves.”

“Place your reliance and your money on education. It is your one chance to endow your descendants with happiness. You cannot, by any possible means, know the thousand and twenty-three boys and girls to the right and left of your six-year-old, who are to share with him the honor of bringing into being that little chap ten generations away, and another thousand of his ancestors. You must work for their whole generation, and thereby for the generations that follow to avoid missing the life vital to that boy. You can only defeat the human law against entail by endowments of institutions of learning and of uplift, whose charters are renewable indefinitely. Yale, I understand, has funds more than two hundred year old. A Colonial was, maybe, looking forward to his remote descendants when he gave it. Colleges, hospitals, churches, laboratories of scientific intent, conservatories of art and music, these are the channels through which your wealth my flow to complete entail, and give wealthy of mind, body and soul to the unborn.

“I have spoken of those thousand and twenty-four living ancestors of your far-away boy, the boy of 2177. Let us picture them playing now around the parks and waste places; or working in fields, mills, shops and streets; child of the rich and poor, of the righteous and the erring. When your six-year old reaches young manhood one of these may shine his shoes, another shave him, another drive his car, another serve his meals, another take his dictation. He will dance and flirt with other. Then one day, out of the mystery will come a girl with shining eyes to lay her hand in his. It may be the little waitress, the stenographer of the daughter of a millionaire. She may be of the slums. You can’t tell. You, yourself, illustrate how quickly changes occur in this great country. Whoever she may be he will see her with new vision as the gift of the centuries. This little girl, possibly not yet born, is as inevitable as the tide. She, with your son, will stand at the head of the ladder, nearer of kin to the boy of 2177 than you will be. And she will provide little feet for the second round; at least, she will provide two of them.

“Here is your field, the workshop of your dollars. If you have the new vision look around you and reflect. Your great interest are, to a large extent, here in Georgia; your hundred thousand dollar home, your shares in mills, factories, public utilities, banks. This is the growing end of the Union. People are coming in much faster than they are going out. Georgia has gained 500,000 citizens since 1900, a twenty per cent increase in one generation. It is certain that hereabouts will be the home of generations of those whose blood will unite with yours; it is more than likely that most of the thousand and twenty-four I have been talking about are within this and adjoining States. Your millions are as yet idle to their education, but not the money, the labor, the sacrifice of others, thank God! For those thousand and twenty-three children, sons and daughters of God, are working while you calculate interest to benefit a thin line of direct heirs. Martha Berry in North Georgia, with her great school, it may be, has endowed your boy of 2177, through gifts of education and Christian training, while you waited; that already he is indebted to philanthropy, to charity. Make it positive that he is so indebted for his full chance in life; for stretching down through the Virginias, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas and the Carolinas are now great schools, born of philanthropy and Christian charity, lifting the virile mountain people to a higher plane of usefulness through education, free of charge. It does not seem possible, or at least likely, that the descendants of these, spreading out as a fan through ten generations and aggregating hundreds of thousands will miss all the lines leading into your distant grandson.

“You may take it as certain that some of the two thousand of his ancestors between you and that boy will be crowned in the great colleges of the South. If they were all there now, in these colleges, the boy of 2177 would be amongst them, brain of their brain, blood of their blood, bone of their bone, the inevitable heir! Figure it out - other have - a North Carolinian had the vision. He divided his great wealth between a little daughter and the boys and girls around her, whose blood is to mingle with hers in the unborn centuries the usage to pass into countless lives as education. This was James B. Duke. He backed his love for his unborn descendants and their ancestors’ collateral with his daughter with forty millions of dollars - possibly more.

“But if no inheritance born of charity is traveling toward that little grandson of yours, the general proposition is not disturbed. The underlying principle is general and unescapable. What is true as to yourself is true of and to every individual of means in New England, in the North Central States, the Middle West, the West, The Southwest and the whole of the South. None can hope to make his money a blessing to his descendants except through Christian education that will elevate each generation as it arises. ‘E pluribus Unum’ fits the family as it fits the Union. The one of 2177 will represent the many as a product. You cannot slight any one of them without risk to that one, and your care of the many may not wait on a day, for half of them are here now, around you, some, perhaps, hungry, some stumbling in the dark. And it may be, as your dreams foretold, already in the gutter or heading toward a prison.

“My friend, we are builders, all of us, without realizing it. We are building such a nation here in America as the world has never before seen, nor any man dreamed, except here and there a poet. Our wealth aggregates four hundred billions of dollars and increased by fifteen billion annually. We have over one-third the wealth of the world, and of the great industries based on coal, iron, oil. We have more than fifty per cent of the world’s output from these sources, and are consuming more than fifty per cent of what the world is consuming of these things, cotton the exception. We are top heavy with wealth. Philosophers predict a fall. They tell us every country of antiquity has come a cropper, and that our turn must come. I disagree with them. 

Absolutely! Positively! Eternally! I denounce the lie!” The old Lawyer’s fist smote the table thrice, till the windows rattled. “We are not here to fail, because we are building for eternity, for God. And our tools are the hearts and souls of good men and saintly women. The prophets of evil have never heard of a nation where Christian education extended to every individual. No such nation ever before risen. If you should object that Christian education is not a guarantee against crime, the answer is, that through it, the world has advanced thus far toward the salvation of the human race. And back of every ruined nation that history records was always one irresistible, ever-present cause of failure-ignorance.

The ideal to which we work in this country and which we approach steadily every day is universal education of the highest possible character. A vast majority capable of understanding and valuing the laws of life, of healthy, or reproduction, of nature, or psychology, or morality, of government, of finance, of exchange. No such nation has ever flourished on earth; but around you is one in the making, a nation whose members are bound to each other by the principles of justice and religion and by love. It is within the power of every man of wealthy to speed it perfection; and if one needs anything more of stimulus than the thought that he is building for God, for posterity, for eternity, let him consider that hoarding wealth is dangerous and endangered, and use a generous part to insure the rest. The best insurance at least for wealth, personal and national, is Christian education. For wealth can exist only by sufferance of the majority. When that majority is swayed by knowledge and righteousness the holdings of the individual are safe, the wealth of the nation is safe. Then, and then only.

“There, sir; if you will pardon my earnestness and the personal application, there is your field, your mission; the mission of your dollars. Perfection in one, or even ten, generations is not humanly possible. Too many ancestors’ ghosts have to be laid. But we may, we must work at it and to it-to the ideal. Give and give and give to the cause of education; hundreds, thousands, millions, as you may. Do not let the converging lines of heredity that are to unite in that far-away boy of yours, and the children ahead of him, flow to him, to them, through ignorance and the crimes born of it.”

The guest, fascinated, had hung on the words of the speaker, expressed with the fervor of soul and music of voice that made the Old South famous for its oratory. The pictures summoned up flashed before him vividly. So vivid, so real were some of them that, awed and shaken, he touched the table for support. For the speaker had unconsciously risen and he, himself, had been almost literally lifted to his feet. The two men stood facing each other in silence for the moment. They seemed to have just returned from far scenes, to have met for the first time. The capitalist broke the silence, his voice almost a whisper:

“That ideal, that perfection of mind, body and soul of all in the generation of my little son; those thousand and twenty-four who are to meet two hundred and fifty years sway; and the other thousand between; that ideal-suppose it were humanly possible, what then?” The eyes of the old man in answer shone with a sudden light, as though somewhere behind them in the depths, home of his soul, abiding place of immortality, a flame had kindled.

“Ten generations of God-loving beings, sound of mind, body and soul, and full of the beauty of holiness would give us back Jesus Christ on earth. And that is just the way he will come-the product of his own laws. Any other way would be illogical.”

“At least,” said the visitor gently, reverently, and with a singular, new-born humility, his face aglow with spiritual light, “at least I have my problem reduced to simple terms; it is Billy, the Rat, or Jesus Christ!”

Harry Stillwell Edwards

(1855-1938)
Georgia 
"Author and journalist Harry Stillwell Edwards was born in Macon, Georgia. His formal education cut short by the Civil War, but he read extensively in the Library of Congress while working as a clerk in the U.S. Treasury. He returned home to Macon in 1874, studied law and was admitted to the bar, but never actively practiced because of his desire to write. His first short story, 'Elder Brown's Backslide,' appeared in Harper's Monthly in 1886. Numerous other stories followed; these stories were eventually collected and published in book form. His first novel, Sons and Fathers (a mystery), was written in 1895. Another popular mystery, Marbeau Cousins, was published soon afterwards. Meanwhile, Edwards had become owner and editor of the Macon Telegraph, where he published a regular column called 'What Comes Down My Creek.' This column was very popular and he continued publishing it for the rest of his life. But Edwards' most popular work was a story called 'Eneas Africanus,' which first appeared in the Macon Evening News (of which he was also part owner and co-editor). Eneas Africanus was subsequently published as a book and has sold over three million copies. Edwards remained a well-liked public figure both at home and on the lecture circuit. He died in Macon October 22, 1938. His rustic home, Kingfisher Cabin, was later restored and placed on the grounds of Museum of Arts and Sciences in Macon." 
[This extended quotation was prepared by and appears with the gracious permission of Ed Jackson, Carl Vinson Institute of Government, University of Georgia and is reprinted here from the Institute's This Day in Georgia History] [Book titles and periodicals have been italicized]

<http://www.wvu.edu/~lawfac/jelkins/lp-2001/edwards.html>