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Title: The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 11

Author: Ambrose Bierce

Release date: December 8, 2021 [eBook #66905]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: The Neale Publishing Company

Credits: Emmanuel Ackerman, Robert Tonsing and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COLLECTED WORKS OF AMBROSE BIERCE, VOLUME 11 ***





                          THE COLLECTED WORKS
                           OF AMBROSE BIERCE

                               VOLUME XI

                           [Illustration: N]




                             THE COLLECTED
                               WORKS OF
                            AMBROSE BIERCE

                               VOLUME XI

                            ANTEPENULTIMATA

                            [Illustration]

                         NEW YORK & WASHINGTON
                     THE NEALE PUBLISHING COMPANY
                                 1912

                       _FREDERICK_      _POLLEY_

                          COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY
                     The Neale Publishing Company




                           PUBLISHERS’ NOTE


The greater part of the contents of this volume is published in
admirable form by A. M. Robertson, of San Francisco, with the title
_The Shadow on the Dial and Other Essays_. When the prospectus of Mr.
Bierce’s _Collected Works_ was issued by our house in 1908 no allowance
was made for this matter, but through the generosity of Mr. Robertson,
and of Mr. S. O. Howes, the book’s compiler and editor, we are now
able to include it in our scheme, with revisions and additions by the
author. For this courtesy we are greatly indebted to Messrs. Robertson
and Howes.

                                        THE NEALE PUBLISHING COMPANY.

April, 1912.




                               CONTENTS

  THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL
  CIVILIZATION
  THE GAME OF POLITICS
  A POSSIBLE BENEFACTOR
  WARLIKE AMERICA
  SOME FEATURES OF THE LAW
  ARBITRATION
  THE GIFT O’ GAB
  NATURA BENIGNA
  INDUSTRIAL DISCONTENT
  WRITERS OF DIALECT
  CRIME AND ITS CORRECTIVES
  ON KNOWING ONE’S BUSINESS
  A TRADE OF REFUGE
  THE DEATH PENALTY
  RELIGION
  IMMORTALITY
  A ROLLING CONTINENT
  CHARITY
  EMANCIPATED WOMAN
  THE OPPOSING SEX
  A MAD WORLD
  THE AMERICAN SYCOPHANT
  DOG
  THE ANCESTRAL BOND
  THE RIGHT TO WORK
  TAKING ONESELF OFF
  A MONUMENT TO ADAM
  HYPNOTISM
  AT THE DRAIN OF THE WASH-BASIN
  GODS IN CHICAGO
  FOR LAST WORDS
  THE CHAIR OF LITTLE EASE
  A GHOST IN THE UNMAKING
  THE TURN OF THE TIDE
  FAT BABIES AND FATE
  CERTAIN AREAS OF OUR SEAMY SIDE
  FOR BREVITY AND CLARITY
  GENIUS AS A PROVOCATION
  A BIVOUAC OF THE DEAD




                            ANTEPENULTIMATA




                        THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL


                                   I

There is a deal of confusion and uncertainty in the use of the words
“socialist,” “anarchist,” and “nihilist.” Even the ’ist himself
commonly knows with as little accuracy what he is as the rest of
us know why he is. The socialist believes that most human affairs
should be regulated and managed by the state—the government—that is
to say, the majority. Our own system has many socialist features and
the trend of republican government is all that way. The anarchist
favors abolition of all law and frequently belongs to an organization
that secures his allegiance by solemn oaths and dreadful penalties.
“Nihilism” is a name given by Turgenieff to the general body of Russian
discontent which finds expression in antagonizing authority and killing
authorities. Constructive politics would seem, as yet, to be a cut
above the nihilist’s intelligence; he is essentially a destructionary.
He is so diligently engaged in unweeding the soil that he has not given
a thought to what he will grow there. Nihilism may be defined as a
policy of assassination tempered by reflections on Siberia. American
sympathy with it is the offspring of an unholy union between the tongue
of a liar and the ear of a dupe.

Upon examination it will be seen that political dissent, when it
takes any form more coherent than the mere brute dissatisfaction of
a mind that does not know what it wants to want, finds expression in
one of but two ways—in Socialism or in Anarchism. Whatever methods
one may think will best replace a system gradually evolved from our
needs and our natures with a system existing only in the minds of
dreamers, one is bound to choose between these two dreams. Yet such
is the intellectual delinquency of many who most strenuously denounce
the system that we have that we not infrequently find the same man
advocating in one breath, Socialism, in the next, Anarchism. Indeed,
few of these sons of darkness know that even as coherent dreams the
two are incompatible. With Anarchy triumphant the socialist would be a
thousand years further from realization of his hope than he is to-day.
Set up Socialism on a Monday and on Tuesday the country would be _en
fête_, gaily hunting down anarchists. There would be little difficulty
in trailing them, for they have not so much sense as a deer, which,
running down the wind, sends its tell-tale fragrance on before.

Socialism and Anarchism are parts of the same thing, in the sense that
the terminal points of a road are parts of the same road. Between them,
about midway, lies the system that we have the happiness to endure.
It is a “blend” of Socialism and Anarchism in about equal parts: all
that is not one is the other. Coöperation is Socialism; competition is
Anarchism. Competition carried to its logical conclusion (which only
coöperation prevents or can prevent) would leave no law in force, no
property possible, no life secure.

Of course the words “coöperation” and “competition” are not here used
in a merely industrial and commercial sense; they are intended to cover
the whole field of human activity. Two voices singing a duet—that is
coöperation—Socialism. Two voices singing each a different tune and
trying to drown each other—that is competition—Anarchism: each is a
law unto itself—that is to say, it is lawless. Everything that ought to
be done the socialist hopes to do by associated endeavor, as an army
wins battles; Anarchism is socialist in its means only: by coöperation
it tries to render coöperation impossible—combines to kill combination.
Its method says to its purpose: “Thou fool!”


                                  II

Everything foretells the doom of authority. The killing of kings is
no new industry; it is as ancient as the race. Always and everywhere
persons in high place have been the assassin’s prey. We have ourselves
lost three presidents by murder, and shall doubtless lose many another
before the book of American history is closed. If anything is new in
this activity of the regicide it is found in the choice of victims. The
contemporary “avenger” slays, not the merely “exalted,” but the good
and the inoffensive—an American president who had struck the chains
from millions of slaves; a Russian czar who against the will and work
of his own powerful nobles had freed their serfs; a French president
from whom the French people had received nothing but good; a powerless
Austrian empress, whose weight of sorrows had touched the world to
tears; a blameless Italian king beloved of his people; such is a part
of the recent record of the regicide, whose every entry is a tale of
infamy unrelieved by one circumstance of justice, decency or good
intention.

This recent uniformity of malevolence in the choice of victims is not
without significance. It points unmistakably to two facts: first, that
the selections are made, not by the assassins themselves, but by some
central control inaccessible to individual preference and unaffected
by the fortunes of its instruments; second, that there is a constant
purpose to manifest an antagonism, not to any individual ruler, but to
rulers; not to any system of government, but to government. The issue
is defined, the alignment made, the battle set: Chaos against Order,
Anarchy against Law.


                                  III

M. Vaillant, the French gentleman who lacked a “good opinion of the
law,” but was singularly rich in the faith that by means of gunpowder
and flying nails humanity could be brought into a nearer relation
with reason, righteousness and the will of God, is said to have been
nearly devoid of nose. Of this privation M. Vaillant made but slight
account, as was natural, seeing that for but a brief season did he need
even so much of nose as remained to him. Yet before its effacement by
premature disruption of his own petard it must have had a certain value
to him—he would not wantonly have renounced it; and had he foreseen
its extinction by the bomb the iron views of that controversial
device would probably have been denied expression. Albeit (so say the
scientists) doomed to eventual elimination from the scheme of being,
and to the anarchist even now something of an accusing conscience, the
nose is indubitably an excellent thing on man.

We have grown so accustomed to the presence of this feature that we
take it as a matter of course; its absence is one of the most notable
phenomena of our observation—“an occasion long to be remembered,” as
the society reporter hath it. Yet “abundant testimony sheweth” that
but a few centuries ago noseless men and women were so common all
over Europe as to provoke but little comment when seen and (in their
disagreeable way) heard. They abounded in all the various walks of
life: there were honored burgomasters without noses; wealthy merchants,
great scholars, artists, teachers. Amongst the humbler classes nasal
destitution was almost as frequent as pecuniary—in the humblest of all,
the most common of all. Writing in the thirteenth century, a chronicler
mentions the retainers and servants of certain Suabian noblemen as
having hardly a whole ear among them—for until a comparatively recent
period man’s tenure of his ears was even more precarious than that
of his nose. In 1436, when a Bavarian woman, Agnes Bernaurian, wife
of Duke Albert the Pious, was dropped off the bridge at Prague, she
persisted in rising to the surface and trying to escape; so the
executioner gave himself the trouble to put a long pole into her hair
and hold her under. A contemporary account of the matter hints that her
disorderly behavior at so solemn a moment was due to the pain caused
by removal of her nose; but as her execution was by order of her own
father it seems more probable that this “extreme penalty of the law”
was not imposed. Without a doubt, though, possession of a nose was an
uncommon (and rather barren) distinction in those days among “persons
designated to assist the executioner,” as the condemned were civilly
called. Nor, as already said, was it any too common among persons not
as yet consecrated to that service: “Few,” says the chronicler, “have
two noses, and many have none.”

Man’s firmer grasp upon his nose in this our day and generation is
not altogether due to invention of the handkerchief. The genesis and
development of his right to his own nose have been accompanied with a
corresponding advance in possessory rights all along the line of his
belongings—his ears, his fingers and toes, his skin, his bones, his
wife and her young, his clothes and his labor—everything that is (and
that once was not) his. In Europe and America to-day these things can
not be taken away from even the humblest and poorest without somebody
wanting to “know the reason why.” In every decade the nation that is
most powerful upon the seas incurs voluntarily a vast expense of blood
and treasure in suppressing a slave trade which in no way is injurious
to her interests, nor to the interests of any but the slaves.

To-day even the lowliest incapable of all Nature’s aborted has a nose
that he dares to call his own and bite off at his own sweet will.
Unfortunately, with an unthinkable fatuity we permit him to be told
that but for the very agencies that have put him in possession he could
successfully assert a God-given and world-old right to the noses of
others. At present the honest fellow is mainly engaged in refreshing
himself upon his own nose, consuming that comestible with avidity
and precision; but the Vaillants, Ravechols, Mosts and Hearsts are
pointing his appetite to other snouts than his, and inspiring him with
rhinophagic ambition. Meantime the rest of us are using these imperiled
organs to snore with.

’Tis a fine, resonant and melodious snore, but it is not going to last:
there is to be a rude awakening. We shall one day get our eyes open to
the fact that scoundrels like Vaillant are neither few nor distant.
We shall learn that our blind dependence upon the magic of words is a
fatuous error; that the fortuitous arrangement of consonants and vowels
which we worship as Liberty is of slight efficacy in disarming the
lunatic brandishing a bomb. Liberty, indeed! The murderous wretch loves
it a deal better than we, and wants more of it. Liberty! one almost
sickens of the word, so quick and glib it is on every lip—so destitute
of meaning.

There is no such thing as abstract liberty; it is not even thinkable.
If you ask me, “Do you favor liberty?” I reply, “Liberty for whom to
do what?” Just now I distinctly favor the liberty of the law to cut
off the noses of anarchists caught red-handed or red-tongued. If they
go in for mutilation let them feel what it is like. If they are not
satisfied with the way that things have been going on since the wife of
Duke Albert the Pious was held under water with a pole, and since the
servitors of the Suabian nobleman cherished their vestigial ears, it is
to be presumed that they favor reversion to that happy state. There is
grave objection, but if we must we will. Let us begin (with moderation)
by reverting _them_.

I favor mutilation for anarchists convicted of killing or inciting to
kill—mutilation followed by death; for those who merely deny the right
and expediency of law, plain mutilation—which might advantageously take
the form of removal of the tongue. Why not? Where is the injustice?
Surely he who denies men’s right to make laws will not invoke the laws
that they have wickedly made! That were to say that they must not
protect themselves, yet are bound to protect him. What! if I beat him
will he call the useless and mischievous constabulary? If I draw out
his tongue shall he (in the sign-language) demand it back, and failing
of restitution (for surely I should cut it clean away) shall he have
the law on me—the naughty law, instrument of the oppressor? Why, that
“goes neare to be fonny!”


                                  IV

Two human beings can not live together in peace without laws—many
laws. Everything that either, in consideration of the other’s wish or
welfare, abstains from is inhibited by law, tacit or expressed. If
there were in all the world none but they—if neither had come with any
sense of obligation toward the other, both clean from creation, with
nothing but brains to direct their conduct—every hour would evolve an
understanding, that is to say, a law; every act would suggest one. They
would have to agree not to kill nor harm each other. They must arrange
their work and all their activities to secure the best advantage. These
arrangements, agreements, understandings—what are they but laws? To
live without law is to live alone. Every family is a miniature state
with a complicate system of laws, a supreme authority and subordinate
authorities down to the latest babe. And as he who is loudest in
demanding liberty for himself is sternest in denying it to others,
you may confidently go to the Maison Vaillant, or the Mosthaus, for a
flawless example of the iron hand.

Laws of the state are as faulty and as faultily administered as
those of the family. Most of them have to be speedily and repeatedly
“amended,” many repealed, and of those permitted to stand, the greater
number fall into disuse and are forgotten. Those who have to be
entrusted with the duty of administering them have all the limitations
of intelligence and defects of character by which the rest of us also
are distinguished from the angels. In the wise governor, the just
judge, the honest sheriff or the patient constable we have as rare a
phenomenon as the faultless father. The good God has not given us a
special kind of men upon whom to devolve the duty of seeing to the
observance of the understandings that we call laws. Like all else
that men do, this work is badly done. The best that we can hope for
through all the failures, the injustice, the disheartening damage to
individual rights and interests, is a fairly good general result,
enabling us to walk abroad among our fellows unafraid, to meet even the
tribesmen from another valley without too imminent a peril of braining
and evisceration. Of that small security the anarchist would deprive
us. But without that nothing is of value and we shall be willing to
renounce the anarchist.

Our system of civilization, being the natural outgrowth of our moral
and intellectual natures, is open to criticism and subject to revision.
Our laws, being of human origin, are faulty and their application
is disappointing. Dissent, dissatisfaction, deprecation, proposals
for a better system fortified with better laws more intelligently
administered—these are permissible and should be welcome. The decent
socialist (when he is not carried away by zeal to pool issues with the
anarchist) may have that in him which it does us good to hear. Wrong in
all else, he may be right in showing us wherein we ourselves are wrong.
Anyhow, his desire is amendment, and so long as his paths are peace
he has the right to walk therein, exhorting as he goes. The French
communist who does not preach Petroleum and It Rectified is to be
regarded with more than amusement, more than compassion. There is room
for him and his fad; there are hospitable ears for his boast that Jesus
Christ would have been a communist if there had been communes. They
really “did not know everything down in Judee.” But for the anarchist,
whose aim is not amendment, but destruction—not welfare to the race,
but mischief to a part of it—not happiness for the future, but revenge
for the past—for that animal there should be no close season, for that
savage no reservation. Society has not the right to grant life to
one who denies the right to live. The proponent of reversion to the
_régime_ of lacking noses should lack a nose.


                                   V

Of all the wild asses that roam the plain, the wildest wild ass that
roams the plain is indubitably the one that lifts his voice and heel
against that Socialism known as “public ownership of public utilities,”
on the ground of “principle.” There may be honest, and in some degree
intelligent, opposition on the ground of expediency. Many persons
whom it is a pleasure to respect believe that a government railway,
for example, would be less efficiently managed than the same railway
in private hands, and that political dangers lurk in the proposal so
enormously to increase the number of Federal employees as government
ownership of railways would entail. They think, in other words, that
the policy is inexpedient. It is a duty to reason with them, which,
as a rule, one can do without being insulted. But he who greets the
proposal with a howl of derision as “Socialism!” is not a respectable
opponent. Eyes he has, but he sees not; ears—O, very abundant ears—but
he hears not the still, small voice of history, nor the still smaller
voice of common sense.

Obviously to those who, having eyes, do see, public ownership of
anything is a step in the direction of Socialism, for perfect Socialism
means public ownership of everything. But “principle” has nothing to
do with it. The principle of public ownership is already accepted and
established. It has no visible opponents except in the camp of the
anarchists, and fewer of them are visible there than soap and water
would reveal. Antagonists of the principle of Socialism lost their
fight when the first human government held the dedicatory exercises of
a cave of legislation. Since then the only question about the matter
has been how far the extension of Socialism is expedient. Some would
draw the limiting line at one place, some at another; but only a fool
thinks there can be government without it, or good government without a
great deal of it. (The fact that we have always had a great deal of it,
yet never had good government, affirms nothing that it is worth while
to consider.) The word-worn example of our postal department is only
one of a thousand instances of pure Socialism. If it did not exist,
how bitter an opposition a proposal to establish it would evoke from
adversaries of the Red Rag! The government builds and operates bridges
with general assent; but, as the late General Walker pointed out, it
may under some circumstances be more economical, or better otherwise,
to build and operate a ferry boat, which is a floating bridge. But that
is opposed as rank Socialism.

The truth is that the men of “principle” are a pretty dangerous class,
generally speaking—and they are generally speaking. It is they that
hamper us in every war. It is they who, preventing concentration and
regulation of unabolishable evils, promote their distribution and
liberty. Moral principles are pretty good things—for the young and
those not well grounded in goodness. If one have an impediment in
his thought, or is otherwise unequal to emergencies as they arise,
it is safest to be provided beforehand with something to refer to in
order that a right decision may be made without taking thought. But
spirits of a purer fire prefer to decide each question as it comes up,
and to act upon the merits of the case, unbound and unpledged. With a
quick intelligence, a capable conscience and a habit of doing right
automatically, one has little need to burden one’s mind and memory with
a set of solemn principles formulated by owlish philosophers who do not
happen to know that what is right is merely what, in the long run and
with regard to the greater number of cases, is expedient. Principle
is not always an infallible guide. For illustration, it is not always
expedient—that is, for the good of all concerned—to tell the truth,
to be entirely just or merciful, to pay a debt. I can conceive a case
in which it would be right to assassinate one’s neighbor. Suppose him
to be a desperate scoundrel of a chemist who has devised a means of
setting the atmosphere afire. The man who should go through life on
an inflexible line of principle would border his path with a havoc of
human happiness.

What one may think perfect one may not always think desirable. By
“perfect” one may mean merely complete, and the word was so used in
my reference to Socialism. I am not myself an advocate of “perfect
Socialism,” but as to government ownership of railways, there is
doubtless a good deal to be said on both sides. One argument in its
favor appears decisive; under a system subject to popular control the
law of gravitation would be shorn of its preëminence as a means of
removing personal property from the baggage car.


                                  VI

When M. Casimir-Perier resigned the French presidency there were
those who regarded the act as weak, cowardly, undutiful and otherwise
censurable. It seems to me the act, not of a feeble man, but of a
strong one—not that of a coward, but that of a gentleman. Indeed,
I hardly know where to look in history for an act more entirely
gratifying to my sense of the “fitness of things” than this dignified
notification to mankind that in consenting to serve one’s country one
does not relinquish the right to decent treatment—to immunity from
factious opposition and abuse—to at least as much civil consideration
as is due from the church to the devil.

M. Casimir-Perier did not seek the presidency of the French republic;
it was thrust upon him against his protestations by an apparently
unanimous mandate of the French people in an emergency which it was
thought that he was the best man to meet. That he met it with modesty
and courage was testified without dissent. That he afterward did
anything to forfeit the confidence and respect that he then inspired is
not true, and nobody believes it true. Yet in his letter of resignation
he said, and said truly:

“For the last six months a campaign of slander and insult has been
going on against the army, magistrates, Parliament and the hierarchical
Chief of State, and this license to disseminate social hatred continues
to be called ‘liberty of thought.’”

And with a dignity to which it seems strange that any one could be
insensible, he added:

“The respect and ambition which I entertain for my country will not
allow me to acknowledge that the servants of the country, and he who
represents it in the presence of foreign nations, may be insulted every
day.”

These are manly words. Have we any warrant for demanding or expecting
that men of clean life and character will devote themselves to the good
of ingrates who pay, and ingrates who permit them to pay, in flung mud?
It is hardly credible that among even those persons most infatuated
by contemplation of their own merit as pointed out by their thrifty
sycophants “liberty of thought” has been carried to that extreme. The
right of the State to demand the sacrifice of the citizen’s life is a
doctrine as old as the patriotism that concedes it, but the right to
require him to forego his good name—that is something new under the sun.

“Perhaps in laying down my functions,” said M. Casimir-Perier, “I shall
have marked out a path of duty to those who are solicitous for the
dignity, power and good name of France in the world.”

We may be permitted to hope that the lesson is wider than France and
more lasting than the French republic. It is well that not only France
but all other countries with “popular institutions” should learn that
if they wish to command the services of men of honor they must accord
them honorable treatment; the rule now is for the party to which they
belong to give them a half-hearted support while suffering all other
parties to slander and insult them. The action of the president of
the French republic in these disgusting circumstances is exceptional
and unusual only in respect of his courage in expressly resenting his
wrong. Everywhere the unreasonable complaint is heard that good men
will not “go into politics;” everywhere the ignorant and malignant
masses and their no less malignant and hardly less ignorant leaders
and spokesmen, having sown the wind of reasonless obstruction and
partisan vilification, are reaping the whirlwind of misrule. So far as
concerns the public service, gentlemen are mostly on a strike against
introduction of the mud-machine. This high-minded political workman,
Casimir-Perier, never showed to so noble advantage as in gathering up
his tools and walking out.

It may be, and a thousand times has been, urged that abstention from
activity in public affairs by men of brains and character leaves the
business of government in the hands of the incapable and the vicious.
In whose hands, pray, in a republic, does it logically belong? What
does the theory of “representative government” affirm? What is the
lesson of every netherward extension of the suffrage? What do we
mean by permitting it to “broaden slowly down” to lower and lower
intelligences and moralities?—what but that stupidity and vice, equally
with virtue and wisdom, are entitled to a voice in political affairs?

A person that is fit to vote is fit to be voted for. He who is
competent for the high and difficult function of choosing an officer
of the state is competent to serve the state as an officer. To deny
him the right is illogical and unjust. Participation in government
can not be at the same time a privilege and a duty, and he who claims
it as a privilege must not speak of another’s renunciation (whereby
himself is more highly privileged) as “shirking.” With every retirement
from politics increased power passes to those who remain. Shall they
protest? Who else is to protest? The complaint of “incivism” would be
more reasonable if there were some one by whom it could reasonably be
made.

The public officials of this favored country, Heaven be thanked, are
infrequently slandered: they are, as a rule, so bad that calumniation
is a compliment. Our best men, with here and there an exception, have
been driven out of public life, or made afraid to enter it. Even our
spasmodic efforts at reform fail ludicrously for lack of leaders
unaffiliated with “the thing to be reformed.” Unless attracted by the
salary, why should a gentleman “aspire” to the presidency of the United
States? During his canvass (and he is expected to “run,” not merely to
“stand”) he will have from his own party a support that should make
him blush, and from all the others an opposition that will stick at
nothing to accomplish his satisfactory defamation. After his election
his partition and allotment of the loaves and fishes will estrange an
important and thenceforth implacable faction of his following without
appeasing the animosity of any one else. At the finish of his term the
utmost that he can expect in the way of reward not expressible in terms
of the national currency is that not much more than one-half of his
countrymen will believe him a scoundrel to the end of their days.


                                  VII

The trend of political thought and action in all civilized countries
toward absolute Socialism is so conspicuous a phenomenon that it not
only impresses that rare and execrated intelligence, the impartial
observer, “the looker-on at the game,” but is seen with greater or
less distinctness by the innumerable company of players. A political
faith is a kind of mental disability; the patient dimly discerns some
of the more salient of the “opposing facts,” but those grateful to
his disorder loom large indeed. The proposition that the established
order of things is in peril, has, therefore, both a stammering and a
stentorian assent and needs no proof. Whether that is for better or for
worse is not to be answered in an epigram, nor in a paragraph, but from
the viewpoint of the looker-on with no more than an observer’s interest
in the matter, little is seen to encourage the optimist—little even of
the little that he requires.

Down to date the world never has had good government. For forms of
government fools have contested from the dawn of history, but no form
has given good and wise administration. Government is like medicine;
those who administer it are, as a rule, wiser than those to whom it is
administered, though not much. In point of conscience there is little
to choose between them.

There are two forms of real government; absolute Monarchy and absolute
Democracy; all others are bastard forms attesting the failure of these,
and themselves doomed to fail. The cause of failure lies in the
essential folly and badness of human nature. From a stupid and selfish
people there is no certainty of getting a wise and conscientious
sovereign. Even when that miracle has been wrought, good government has
not resulted, for the sovereign, however absolute in theory, however
good and wise in fact, is compelled to work through shallow and selfish
officials. Democracy suffers the same disability, with the added
disadvantage of a sovereign that is never wise and never just.

As to limited Monarchies and constitutional Democracies, they
are similarly and equally futile. Divided authority is divided
responsibility. Restraint of the power to do evil is restraint of
the power to do good. Under the “one-man power” (a name, by the way,
that our good forefathers singularly chose to give to the rule of the
British ministry and parliament) it is at least known who is to blame
for sins of administration, and to whom is due the credit for what is
creditable. The autocrat can not hide behind his own back.

In all the various and vain experiments in government the one cause
of failure is eternally manifest; the general moral and intellectual
delinquency that makes government necessary—the folly and depravity of
human nature.

Do the socialists think that they can alter that?—do they believe that
after all these centuries of thought and experiment in government in
all possible conditions, it has remained for them to devise a system
powerful to chain or persuasive to charm the hitherto indomitable and
vigilant selfishness to which, despite its ghastly perversions, the
race owes its continued existence? Do they believe that under Socialism
the laws will execute themselves without human agency; that less than
to-day the state will require a vast and complex administration, with
the same and greater temptations and opportunities to ambition and
cupidity?

Under any conceivable system the cleverest, most enterprising and least
scrupulous men will be at the head of affairs, and they will not be
there “for their health.” You cannot keep them down, and you cannot
keep the others up. If the socialist thinks that can be done, he must
hold in hope a better kind of ballot than the kind that works him
present woe, or a brand-new infallibility for its casting.


                                 VIII

A government that does not protect life is a flat failure, no matter
what else it may do. Life being almost universally regarded as the
most precious possession, its security is the first and highest
essential—not the life of him who takes life, but the life which
is exposed defenceless to his hateful hand. In no country in the
world, civilized or savage, is life so insecure as in this. In no
country in the world is murder held in so light reprobation. In no
battle of modern times have so many lives been taken as are lost
annually in the United States through public indifference to the
crime of homicide—through disregard of law, through bad government.
If American self-government with its ten thousand homicides a year
is good government there is no such thing as bad. Self-government?
What monstrous nonsense! Who governs himself needs no government,
has no governor, is not governed. If government has any meaning it
means the restraint of the many by the few—the subordination of
numbers to brains. It means denial to the masses of the right to cut
their own throats and ours. It means grasp and control of all social
forces and material enginery—a vigilant censorship of the press, a
firm hand upon the churches, keen supervision of public meetings and
public amusements, command of the railroads, telegraph and all means
of communication. It means, in short, ability to make use of all
beneficent influences of enlightenment for the general good, and to
array all the powers of civilization against civilization’s natural
enemies—“the masses.” Government like this has a thousand defects, but
it has one merit: it is government.

Despotism? Yes. It is the despotisms of the world that have been the
conservators of civilization. It is the despot who, most powerful for
mischief, is alone powerful for good. It is conceded that government is
necessary—even by the “fierce democracies” that madly renounce it. But
in so far as government is not despotic it is not government. In Europe
for the last one hundred years, the trend of government has been toward
liberalization. Sovereign after sovereign has surrendered prerogative
after prerogative; the nobility, privilege after privilege. Mark
the result: society honeycombed with treason; property menaced with
partition; assassination studied as a science and practiced as an art;
everywhere powerful secret organizations sworn to demolish the social
fabric that the slow centuries have but just erected, and unmindful
that themselves will perish in the wreck. No heart can beat tranquilly
under clean linen. Such is the gratitude, such is the wisdom, such the
virtue of “The Masses.”

That ancient and various device, “a republican form of government,”
appears to be too good for all the peoples of the earth excepting
one. It is partly successful in Switzerland; in France and America,
where the majority is composed of persons having dark understandings
and criminal instincts, it has broken down. In our case, as in every
case, the momentum of successful revolution carried us too far. We
rebelled against tyranny and having overthrown it, overthrew also the
governmental form in which it had happened to be manifest. In their
anger and their triumph our good grandfathers acted somewhat in the
spirit of the Irishman who cudgeled the dead snake until nothing of
it was left, in order to make it “sinsible of its desthruction.” They
meant it all, too, honest souls! For a long time after the setting up
of the republic the republic meant active hatred to kings, nobles,
aristocracies. It was held, and rightly held, that a nobleman could
not breathe in America—that he left his title and his privileges on
the ship that brought him over. Do we observe anything of that in this
generation? On the landing of a foreign king, prince or nobleman—even
a miserable “knight”—do we not execute sycophantic genuflexions?
Are not our newspapers full of flamboyant descriptions and qualming
adulation? Nay, does not our president himself—successor to Washington
and Jefferson!—greet and entertain the “nation’s guest”? Is not the
American young woman crazy to mate with a male of title? Does all
this represent no retrogression?—is it not the backward movement of
the shadow on the dial? Doubtless the republican idea has struck
strong roots into the soil of the two Americas, but he who rightly
considers the tendencies of events, the causes that bring them about
and the consequences that flow from them, will not be hot to affirm
the perpetuity of republican institutions in the Western Hemisphere.
Between their inception and their present stage of development there
is scarcely the beat of a pendulum; and already, by corruption and
lawlessness, the people of both continents, with all their diversities
of race and character, have shown themselves about equally unfit.
To become a nation of scoundrels all that any people needs is
opportunity; and what we are pleased to call by the impossible name of
“self-government” supplies it.

The capital defect of republican government is inability to repress
internal forces tending to disintegration. It does not take long for a
“self-governed” people to learn that it is not really governed—that an
agreement enforcible by nobody but the parties to it is not binding.
We are learning this very rapidly: we set aside our laws whenever we
please. The sovereign power—the tribunal of ultimate jurisdiction—is
a mob. If the mob is large enough (it need not be very large), even
if composed of vicious tramps, it may do as it will. It may destroy
property and life. It may without proof of guilt inflict upon
individuals torments unthinkable by fire and flaying, mutilations
that are nameless. It may call men, women and children from their
beds and beat them to death with cudgels. In the light of day it may
assail the very strongholds of law in the heart of a populous city,
and assassinate prisoners of whose guilt it knows nothing. And these
things—observe, O victims of kings—are habitually done. One would as
well be at the mercy of one’s sovereign as of one’s neighbor.

The anarchist himself is persuaded of the superiority of our plan of
dealing with him; he likes it and “comes over” in quantity, impesting
the political atmosphere with the “sweltered venom” engendered by
centuries of “oppression”—comes over here, where he is not oppressed,
and sets up as oppressor. His preferred field of malefaction is the
country that is most nearly anarchical. He comes here, partly to better
himself under our milder institutions, partly to secure immunity
while conspiring to destroy them. There is thunder in Europe, but if
the storm ever break it is in America that the lightning will first
fall. Here is a great vortex into which the decivilizing agencies are
pouring without obstruction. Here gather the eagles to the feast,
for the quarry is defenceless. Here is no power in government,
no government. Here an enemy of order is thought to be the least
dangerous when most free. And here is nothing between him and his
task of subversion—no pampered soldiery to repress his rising, no
iron authority to lay him by the heels. The militia is fraternal, the
magistracy elective. Europe may hold out a little longer. The great
powers may make what stage-play they will, but they are not maintaining
their incalculable armaments solely for aggression upon one another
and protection from one another, nor for fun. These vast forces are
mainly constabular—creatures and creators of discontent—phenomena of
decivilization. Eventually they will fraternize with Disorder or become
themselves Praetorian Guards more dangerous than the perils that have
called them into existence.

It is easy to forecast the first stages of the End’s approach: Rioting.
Disaffection of constabulary and troops. Subversion of the Government.
A policy of decapitation. Parliament of the people. Divided counsels.
Pandemonium. The man on horseback. Gusts of grape. ——?

The gods kept their secrets by telling them to Cassandra, whom nobody
believed. I am entrusted with the secret that the shadow on the dial
of civilization is moving backward. Believe or disbelieve—what matter?
Revelers with wine-dipped wreaths upon their heads do not care to know
the hour. Yet there are signs and portents—whispers and cries in the
air; stealthy tread of invisible feet along the ground; sudden clamor
of startled fowls at dead o’ the night; crimson dew-drops on the
roadside grass of a morning. But pray do not disturb yourselves: eat,
drink and be merry, for to-morrow comes Logical Democracy.




                             CIVILIZATION


                                   I

The question “Does civilization civilize?” is a fine example of
_petitio principii_, and decides itself in the affirmative; for
civilization must needs do that from the doing of which it has its
name. But it is not necessary to suppose that he who propounds is
either unconscious of his lapse in logic or desirous of digging a
pitfall for the feet of those who discuss; I take it he simply wishes
to put the matter in an impressive way, and relies upon a certain
degree of intelligence in the interpretation.

Concerning uncivilized peoples we know but little except what we are
told by travelers—who, speaking generally, can know very little but
the fact of uncivilization, as shown in externals and irrelevances,
and are moreover, greatly given to lying. From the savages we hear
very little. Judging them in all things by our own standards in
default of a knowledge of theirs, we necessarily condemn, disparage
and belittle. One thing that civilization certainly has not done is
to make us intelligent enough to understand that the contrary of a
virtue is not necessarily a vice. Because, as a rule, we have but one
wife and several mistresses each it is not certain that polygamy is
everywhere—nor, for that matter, anywhere—either wrong or inexpedient.
Because the brutality of the civilized slave owners and dealers
created a conquering sentiment against slavery it is not intelligent
to assume that slavery is a maleficent thing amongst Oriental peoples
(for example) where the slave is not oppressed. Some of these same
Orientals whom we are pleased to term half-civilized have no regard
for truth. “Takest thou me for a Christian dog,” said one of them,
“that I should be the slave of my word?” So far as I can perceive,
the “Christian dog” is no more the slave of his word than the True
Believer, and I think the savage—allowing for the fact that his
inveracity has dominion over fewer things—as great a liar as either of
them. For my part, I do not know what, in all circumstances, is right
or wrong; but I know that, if right, it is at least stupid, to judge an
uncivilized people by the standards of morality and intelligence set
up by civilized ones. Life in civilized countries is so complex that
men there have more ways to be good than savages have, and more to be
bad; more to be happy, and more to be miserable. And in each way to be
good or bad, their generally superior knowledge—their knowledge of more
things—enables them to commit greater excesses than the savage can. The
civilized philanthropist wreaks upon his fellows a ranker philanthropy,
the civilized rascal a sturdier rascality. And—splendid triumph of
enlightenment!—the two characters are, in civilization, frequently
combined in one person.

I know of no savage custom or habit of thought which has not its mate
in civilized countries. For every mischievous or absurd practice of the
natural man I can name you one of ours that is essentially the same.
And nearly every custom of our barbarian ancestors in historic times
persists in some form to-day. We make ourselves look formidable in
battle—for that matter, we fight. Our women paint their faces. We feel
it obligatory to dress more or less alike, inventing the most ingenious
reasons for doing so and actually despising and persecuting those who
do not care to conform. Almost within the memory of living persons
bearded men were stoned in the streets; and a clergyman in New York
who wore his beard as Christ wore his, was put into jail and variously
persecuted till he died.

Civilization does not, I think, make the race any better. It makes
men know more: and if knowledge makes them happy it is useful and
desirable. The one purpose of every sane human being is to be happy.
No one can have any other motive than that. There is no such thing as
unselfishness. We perform the most “generous” and “self-sacrificing”
acts because we should be unhappy if we did not. We move on lines of
least reluctance. Whatever tends to increase the beggarly sum of human
happiness is worth having; nothing else has any value.

The cant of civilization fatigues. Civilization is a fine and beautiful
structure. It is as picturesque as a Gothic cathedral, but it is
built upon the bones and cemented with the blood of those whose part
in all its pomp is that and nothing more. It cannot be reared in the
ungenerous tropics, for there the people will not contribute their
blood and bones. The proposition that the average American workingman
or European peasant is “better off” than the South Sea islander,
lolling under a palm and drunk with overeating, will not bear a
moment’s examination. It is we scholars and gentlemen that are better
off.

It is admitted that the South Sea islander in a state of nature is
overmuch addicted to the practice of eating human flesh; but concerning
that I submit: first, that he likes it; second, that those who
supply it are mostly dead. It is upon his enemies that he feeds, and
these he would kill anyhow, as we do ours. In civilized, enlightened
and Christian countries, where cannibalism has not yet established
itself, wars are as frequent and destructive as among the maneaters.
The untitled savage knows at least why he goes killing, whereas our
private soldier is commonly in black ignorance of the apparent cause
of quarrel—of the actual cause, always. Their shares in the fruits of
victory are about equal, for the chief takes all the dead, the general
all the glory.


                                  II

Transplanted institutions grow slowly; civilization can not be put into
a ship and carried across an ocean. The history of this country is a
sequence of illustrations of these truths. It was settled by civilized
men and women from civilized countries, yet after two and a half
centuries, with unbroken communication with the mother systems, it is
still imperfectly civilized. In learning and letters, in art and the
science of government, America is but a faint and stammering echo of
Europe.

For nearly all that is good in our American civilization we are
indebted to the Old World; the errors and mischiefs are of our own
creation. We have originated little, because there is little to
originate, but we have unconsciously reproduced many of the discredited
systems of former ages and other countries—receiving them at second
hand, but making them ours by the sheer strength and immobility of the
national belief in their novelty. Novelty! Why, it is not possible to
make an experiment in government, in art, in literature, in sociology,
or in morals, that has not been made over, and over, and over again.

The glories of England are our glories. She can achieve nothing that
our fathers did not help to make possible to her. The learning, the
power, the refinement of a great nation, are not the growth of a
century, but of many centuries; each generation builds upon the work
of the preceding. For untold ages our ancestors wrought to rear that
“reverend pile,” the civilization of England. And shall we now try to
belittle the mighty structure because other though kindred hands are
laying the top courses while we have elected to found a new tower in
another land? The American eulogist of civilization who is not proud
of his heritage in England’s glory is unworthy to enjoy his lesser
heritage in the lesser glory of his own country.

The English are undoubtedly our intellectual superiors; and as the
virtues are solely the product of intelligence and cultivation—a
rogue being only a dunce considered from another point of view—they
are our moral superiors likewise. Why should they not be? Theirs is a
land, not of ugly schoolhouses grudgingly erected, containing schools
supported by such niggardly tax levies as a sparse and hard-handed
population will consent to pay, but of ancient institutions splendidly
endowed by the state and by centuries of private benefaction. As a
means of dispensing formulated ignorance our boasted public school
system is not without merit; it spreads out education sufficiently thin
to give everyone enough to make him a more competent fool than he
would have been without it; but to compare it with that which is not
the creature of legislation acting with malice aforethought, but the
unnoted outgrowth of ages, is to be ridiculous. It is like comparing
the laid-out town of a western prairie, its right-angled streets, prim
cottages, and wooden a-b-c shops, with the grand old town of Oxford,
topped with the clustered domes and towers of its twenty-odd great
colleges, the very names of many of whose founders have perished from
human record, as have the chronicles of the times in which they lived.

It is not only that we have had to “subdue the wilderness;” our
educational conditions are adverse otherwise. Our political system is
unfavorable. Our fortunes, accumulated in one generation, are dispersed
in the next. If it takes three generations to make a gentleman one
will not make a thinker. Instruction is acquired, but capacity for
instruction is transmitted. The brain that is to contain a trained
intellect is not the result of a haphazard marriage between a clown
and a wench, nor does it get its tractable tissues from a hard-headed
farmer and a soft-headed milliner. If you confess the importance of
race and pedigree in a horse and a dog how dare you deny it in a man?

I do not hold that the political and social system that creates an
aristocracy of leisure is the best possible kind of human organization;
I perceive its disadvantages clearly enough. But I do hold that
a system under which most important public trusts, political and
professional, civil and military, ecclesiastical and secular, are held
by educated men—that is, men of trained faculties and disciplined
judgment—is not an altogether faulty system.

It is a universal human weakness to disparage the knowledge that we do
not ourselves possess, but it is only my own beloved country that can
justly boast herself the last refuge and asylum of the impotents and
incapables who deny the advantage of all knowledge whatsoever. It was
an American senator who declared that he had devoted a couple of weeks
to the study of finance, and found the accepted authorities all wrong.
It was another American senator who, confronted with certain hostile
facts in the history of another country, proposed “to brush away all
facts, and argue the question on considerations of plain common sense.”

Republican institutions have this disadvantage: by incessant changes in
the _personnel_ of government—to say nothing of the manner of men that
ignorant constituencies elect; and all constituencies are ignorant—we
attain to no fixed principles and standards. There is no such thing
here as a science of politics, because it is not to any one’s interest
to make politics the study of his life. Nothing is settled; no truth
finds general acceptance. What we do one year we undo the next, and
do over again the year following. Our energy is wasted in, and our
prosperity suffers from, experiments endlessly repeated.

Every patriot believes his country better than any other country. Now,
they cannot all be the best; indeed, only one can be the best, and it
follows that the patriots of all the others have suffered themselves
to be misled by a mere sentiment into blind unreason. In its active
manifestation—it is fond of killing—patriotism would be well enough
if it were simply defensive; but it is also aggressive, and the same
feeling that prompts us to strike for our altars and our fires impels
us over the border to quench the fires and overturn the altars of our
neighbors. It is all very pretty and spirited, what the poets tell us
about Thermopylæ, but there was as much patriotism at one end of that
pass as there was at the other.

Patriotism deliberately and with folly aforethought subordinates the
interests of a whole to the interests of a part. Worse still, the
fraction so favored is determined by an accident of birth or residence.
The Western hoodlum who cuts the tail from a Chinaman’s nowl, and would
cut the nowl from the body if he dared, is simply a patriot with a
logical mind, having the courage of his opinions. Patriotism is fierce
as a fever, pitiless as the grave and blind as a stone.


                                  III

There are two ways of clarifying liquids—ebullition and precipitation;
one forces the impurities to the surface as scum, the other sends them
to the bottom as dregs. The former is the more offensive, and that
seems to be our way; but neither is useful if the impurities are merely
separated but not removed. We are told with tiresome iteration that our
social and political systems are clarifying; but when is the skimmer to
appear? If the purpose of free institutions is good government where
is the good government?—when may it be expected to begin?—how is it to
come about? Systems of government have no sanctity; they are practical
means to a simple end—the public welfare; worthy of no respect if they
fail of its accomplishment. The tree is known by its fruit. Ours is
bearing crab-apples. If the body politic is constitutionally diseased,
as I verily believe; if the disorder inheres in the system; there is
no remedy. The fever must burn itself out, and then Nature will do
the rest. One does not prescribe what time alone can administer. We
have put our criminals and dunces into power; do we suppose they will
efface themselves? Will they restore to _us_ the power of governing
_them_? They must have their way and go their length. The natural
and immemorial sequence is: tyranny, insurrection, combat. In combat
everything that wears a sword has a chance—even the right. History
does not forbid us to hope. But it forbids us to rely upon numbers;
they will be against us. If history teaches anything worth learning
it teaches that the majority of mankind is neither good nor wise.
When government is founded upon the public conscience and the public
intelligence the stability of states is a dream.

In that moment of time that is covered by historical records we have
abundant evidence that each generation has believed itself wiser and
better than any of its predecessors; that each people has believed
itself to have the secret of national perpetuity. In support of this
universal delusion there is nothing to be said; the desolate places of
the earth cry out against it. Vestiges of obliterated civilizations
cover the earth; no savage but has camped upon the sites of proud and
populous cities; no desert but has heard the statesman’s boast of
national stability. Our nation, our laws, our history—all shall go down
to everlasting oblivion with the others, and by the same road. But I
submit that we are traveling it with needless haste.

It can be spared—this Jonah’s-gourd civilization of ours. We have
hardly the rudiments of a true one; compared with the splendors
of which we catch dim glimpses in the fading past, ours are as an
illumination of tallow candles. We know no more than the ancients;
we only know other things, but nothing in which is an assurance of
perpetuity, and little that is truly wisdom. Our vaunted _elixir vitæ_
is the art of printing. What good will that do when posterity, struck
by the inevitable intellectual blight, shall have ceased to read what
is printed? Our libraries will become its stables, our books its fuel.

Ours is a civilization that might be heard from afar in space as
a scolding and a riot; a civilization in which the race has so
differentiated as to have no longer a community of interest and
feeling; which shows as a ripe result of the principles underlying it
a reasonless and rascally feud between rich and poor; in which one is
offered a choice (if one have the means to take it) between American
plutocracy and European militocracy, with an imminent chance of
renouncing either for a stultocratic republic with a headsman in the
presidential chair and every laundress in exile.

I have not a “solution” to the “labor problem.” I have only a story.
Many and many years ago lived a man who was so good and wise that none
in all the world was so good and wise as he. He was one of those few
whose goodness and wisdom are such that after some time has passed
their foolish fellowmen begin to think them gods and treasure their
words as divine law; and by millions they are worshiped through
centuries of time. Amongst the utterances of this man was one
command—not a new nor perfect one—which has seemed to his adorers so
preëminently wise that they have given it a name by which it is known
over half the world. One of the sovereign virtues of this famous law
is its simplicity, which is such that all hearing must understand; and
obedience is so easy that any nation refusing is unfit to exist except
in the turbulence and adversity that will surely come to it. When a
people would avert want and strife, or, having them, would restore
plenty and peace, this noble commandment offers the only means—all
other plans for safety or relief are as vain as dreams, as empty as the
crooning of hags. And behold, here it is: “All things whatsoever ye
would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.”

What! you unappeasable rich, coining the sweat and blood of your
workmen into drachmas, understanding the law of supply and demand as
mandatory and justifying your cruel greed by the senseless dictum that
“business is business;” you lazy workmen, railing at the capitalist
by whose desertion, when you have frightened away his capital, you
starve—rioting and shedding blood and torturing and poisoning by way
of answer to exaction and by way of exaction; you foul anarchists,
applauding with untidy palms when one of your coward kind hurls a
bomb amongst powerless and helpless women and children; you imbecile
politicians with a plague of remedial legislation for the irremediable;
you writers and thinkers unread in history, with as many “solutions
to the labor problem” as there are among you those who can not
coherently define it—do you really think yourselves wiser than Jesus
of Nazareth? Do you seriously suppose yourselves competent to amend
his plan for dealing with evils besetting nations and souls? Have you
the effrontery to believe that those who spurn his Golden Rule you can
bind to obedience of an act entitled an act to amend an act? Bah! you
fatigue the spirit. Go get ye to your scoundrel lockouts, your villain
strikes, your blacklisting, your boycotting, your speeching, marching
and maundering; but if ye do not to others as ye would that they do to
you it shall occur, and that right soon, that ye be drowned in your own
blood and your pickpocket civilization quenched as a star that falls
into the sea.




                         THE GAME OF POLITICS


                                   I

If one were to declare himself a Democrat or a Republican and the claim
should be contested he would find it a difficult one to prove. The
missing link in his chain of evidence would be the major premise in
the syllogism necessary to the establishment of his political status—a
definition of “Democrat” or “Republican.” Most of the statesmen in
public and private life who are poll-parroting these words, do so with
entire unconsciousness of their meaning, or rather without knowledge
that they have lost whatever meaning they once had. The words are mere
“survivals,” marking dead issues and covering present allegiances of
the loosest character. On any question of importance each party is
divided against itself and dares not formulate a preference. There is
no question before the country upon which one may not think and vote as
he likes without seriously affecting his standing in the denomination
of political saints of which he professes himself a member. “Party
lines” are as terribly confused as parallels of latitude and longitude
after a twisting earthquake, or those aimless lines representing
competing railroads on a map published by a company operating “the
only direct route.” It is not probable that this state of things can
last; if there is to be “government by party”—and we should be sad to
think that so inestimable a boon were soon to return to Him who gave
it—men must begin to let their angry passions rise and take sides. “Ill
fares the land to hastening ills a prey,” where the people are too wise
to dispute and too good to fight. Let us have the good old political
currency of bloody noses and cracked crowns; let the yawp of the
demagogue be heard in the land; let ears be pestered with the spargent
cheers of the masses. Give us a whoop-up that shall rouse us like a
rattling peal of thunder! Will nobody be our Moses—there should be two
Moseses—to lead us through this detestable wilderness of political
stagnation?


                                  II

Nowhere is so much insufferable stuff talked in a given period of
time as in an American political convention. It is there that all
those objectionable elements of the national character which evoke
the laughter of Europe and are the despair of our friends find freest
expression, unhampered by fear of any censorship more exacting than
that of “the opposing party”—which takes no account of intellectual
delinquencies, but only of moral. The “organs” of the “opposing
party” will not take the trouble to point out—even to observe—that
the “debasing sentiments” and “criminal views” uttered in speech and
platform are expressed in sickening syntax and offensive rhetoric.
Doubtless an American politician, statesman, what you will, could
go into a political convention and signify his views with simple,
unpretentious common sense, but doubtless he never does.

Every community is cursed with a number of “orators”—men regarded as
“eloquent”—“silver tongued” men—fellows who to the common American
knack at brandishing the tongue add an exceptional felicity of
platitude, a captivating mastery of dog’s-eared sentiment, a copious
and obedient vocabulary of eulogium, an iron insensibility to the
ridiculous and an infinite affinity to fools. These afflicting
Chrysostoms are always lying in wait for an “occasion.” It matters
not what it is: a “reception” to some great man from abroad, a popular
ceremony like the laying of a corner-stone, the opening of a fair, the
dedication of a public building, an anniversary banquet of an ancient
and honorable order (they all belong to ancient and honorable orders)
or a club dinner—they all belong to clubs and owe dues. But it is in a
political convention that they come out particularly strong. By some
imperious tradition having the force of unwritten law it is decreed
that in these absurd bodies of our fellow citizens no word of sense
shall be uttered from the platform; whatever is uttered in set speeches
shall be addressed to the meanest capacity present. As a chain can be
no stronger than its weakest link, so nothing said by the speakers at a
political convention must be above the intellectual reach of the most
pernicious idiot having a seat and a vote. I don’t know why it is so.
It seems to be thought that if he is not suitably entertained he will
not attend the next convention.

Here are the opening sentences of the speech in which a man was
recently nominated for governor:

“Two years ago the Republican party in state and nation marched to
imperial triumph. On every hilltop and mountain peak our beacons
blazed and we awakened the echoes of every valley with songs of our
rejoicings.”

And so forth. Now, if I were asked to recast these sentences so that
they should conform to the simple truth and be inoffensive to good
taste I should say something like this:

“Two years ago the Republican party won a general election.”

If there is any thing in this inflated rigmarole that is not adequately
expressed in my amended statement, what is it? As to eloquence, it will
hardly be argued that nonsense, falsehood and metaphors which were old
when Rome was young are essential to that. The first man (in early
Greece) who spoke of awakening an echo did a felicitous thing. Was it
felicitous in the second? Is it felicitous now? As to that military
metaphor—the “marching” and so forth—its inventor was as great a fool
as any one of the incalculable multitude of his plagiarists.

In withdrawing his own name from before a convention, a Californian
politician once made a purely military speech of which a single sample
passage is all that I shall allow myself the happiness to quote:

“I come before you to-day as a Republican of the Republican banner
county of this great state of ours. From snowy Shasta on the north
to sunny San Diego on the south; from the west, where the waves of
the Pacific look upon our shores, to where the barriers of the great
Sierras stand clad in eternal snow, there is no more loyal county to
the Republican party in this state than the county from which I hail.
Its loyalty to the party has been tested on many fields of battle and
it has never wavered in the contest. Wherever the fate of battle was
trembling in the balance Alameda county stepped into the breach and
rescued the Republican party from defeat.”

Translated into English, this military mouthing would read somewhat
like this:

“I live in Alameda county, where the Republicans have uniformly
outvoted the Democrats.”

The orators at the Democratic convention a week earlier had been no
better and no different. Their rhetorical stock-in-trade was the same
old shop-worn figures of speech in which their predecessors have
dealt for ages, and in which their successors will traffic to the
end of—well, to the end of that imitative quality in the national
character, which, by its superior intensity, serves to distinguish us
from the apes that perish.


                                  III

“What we most need, to secure honest elections,” says a well-meaning
reformer, “is the voting machine.” Why, truly, here is a hopeful
spirit—a rare and radiant intelligence suffused with the conviction
that men can be made honest by machinery—that human character is a
matter of gearing, ratchets and dials! One would give something to
know how it feels to be like that. A mind so constituted must be happy
in its hope. It lives in rapturous contemplation of a world of its
own creation—a world where public morality and political good order
are to be had by purchase at the machine-shop. In that delectable
world, religion is superfluous; the true high priest is the mechanical
engineer; the minor clergy are the village blacksmiths. It is rather a
pity that so fine and fair a sphere should swim only in the attenuated
ether of a simpleton’s misunderstanding.

The voting-machines are doubtless well enough; they save labor and
enable the statesmen of the street to know the result within a few
minutes of the closing of the polls—whereby many are spared to their
country who would otherwise incur fatal disorders by exposure to the
night air while assisting in awaiting the returns. But a voting-machine
that human ingenuity can not pervert, human ingenuity can not invent.
Honesty has no monopoly of inspiration.

That is true, too, of laws. Your statesman of a mental stature
somewhat overtopping that of the machine-person puts his faith in law.
Providence has deigned to permit him to be persuaded of the efficacy of
statutes—good, stringent, carefully drawn statutes annulling all the
laws of nature in conflict with any of their provisions. So the poor
devil (I am writing of Mr. Legion) turns for relief from law to law,
ever on the rocks of repentance, yet ever unfouling the anchor of hope.
By no power on earth can his indurated understanding be penetrated by
the truth that his woful state is due, not to any laws of his own, nor
to any lack of them, but to his rascally refusal to obey the Golden
Rule. How long is it since we were all clamoring for the Australian
ballot law, which was to make a new Heaven and a new earth? We have the
Australian ballot law and the same old earth smelling to the same old
Heaven. Writhe upon the triangle as we may, groan out what new laws
we will, the pitiless thong will fall upon our bleeding backs as long
as we deserve it. If our sins, which are scarlet, are to be washed as
white as wool it must be in the tears of a genuine contrition: our
crocodile deliverances will profit us nothing. We must stop chasing
dollars, stop lying, stop cheating, stop ignoring art, literature
and all the refining agencies and instrumentalities of civilization.
We must subdue our detestable habit of shaking hands with prosperous
rascals and fawning upon the merely rich. It is not permitted to our
employers to plead in justification of low wages the law of supply
and demand when it is giving them high profits. It is not permitted
to discontented employees to break the bones of contented ones and
destroy the foundations of social order. It is dishonest to look upon
public office with the lust of possession; it is disgraceful to solicit
political preferment, to strive and compete for “honors” that are
sullied and tarnished by the touch of the reaching hand. Until we amend
our personal characters we shall amend our laws in vain. Though Paul
plant and Apollos water, the field of reform will grow nothing but the
figless thistle and the grapeless thorn.

The state is an aggregation of individuals. Its public character is the
expression of their personal ones. By no political prestidigitation can
it be made better and wiser than the sum of their goodness and wisdom.
To expect that men who do not honorably and intelligently conduct their
private affairs will honorably and intelligently conduct the affairs
of the community is to be a fool. We are told that out of nothing God
made the heavens and the earth; but out of nothing God never did, and
man never can, make a public sense of honor and a public conscience.
Miracles are now performed on only one day of the year—the twenty-ninth
of February; and in leap years God is forbidden to perform them.


                                  IV

Ye who hold that the power of eloquence is a thing of the past and
the orator an anachronism; who believe that the trend of political
events and the results of parliamentary action are determined by
committees in cold consultation and the machinations of programmers
in holes and corners, consider the ascension of Bryan and be wise. A
week before the convention of 1896 William J. Bryan had never heard
of himself; upon his natural obscurity was superposed the opacity of
a congressional service that effaced him from the memory of even his
faithful dog, and made him immune to dunning. A week afterward he
was pinnacled upon the summit of the tallest political distinction,
gasping in the thin atmosphere of his unfamiliar environment and fitly
astonished by the mischance. To the dizzy elevation of his candidacy
he was hoisted out of the shadow by his own tongue, the longest and
liveliest in Christendom. Had he held it—which he could not have done
with a blacksmith’s tongs—there had been no Bryan. His creation was the
unstudied act of his own larynx; it said, “Let there be Bryan,” and
there was Bryan. Even in these degenerate days there is a hope for the
orators when one can make himself a presidential peril by merely waving
the red flag in the cave of the winds and tormenting the circumjacence
with a brandish of abundant hands.

To be quite honest, I do not entirely believe that Orator Bryan’s
tongue had everything to do with it. I have long been convinced that
personal persuasion is a matter of animal magnetism—what in its more
obvious manifestation we now call hypnotism. At the back of the words
and the postures, and independent of them, is that secret, mysterious
power, addressing, not the ear, not the eye, nor, through them, the
understanding, but, through its kindred quality in the auditor,
captivating the will and enslaving it. That is how persuasion is
effected; the spoken words merely supply a pretext for surrender. They
enable us to yield without loss of our self-esteem, in the delusion
that we are conceding to reason what is really extorted by control.
The words are necessary, too, to point out what the orator wishes us
to think, if we are not already apprised of it. When the nature of
his power is better understood and frankly recognized, he can spare
himself the toil of talking. The parliamentary debate of the future
will probably be conducted in silence, and with only such gestures as
go by the name of “passes.” The chairman will state the question before
the house and the side, affirmative or negative, to be taken by the
honorable member entitled to the floor. That gentleman will rise, train
his compelling orbs upon the miscreants in opposition, execute a few
passes and exhaust his alloted time in looking at them. He will then
yield to an honorable member of dissenting views. The preponderance in
magnetic power and hypnotic skill will be manifest in the voting.

The advantages of the method are as plain as the nose on an elephant’s
face. The “arena” will no longer “ring” with anybody’s “rousing
speech,” to the irritating abridgment of the unalienable right to the
pursuit of sleep. Honorable members will lack provocation to hurl
allegations and cuspidors. Pitchforking statesmen and tosspot reformers
will be unable to play at pitch-and-toss with reputations not submitted
for the performance. In short, the congenial asperities of debate
will be so mitigated that the honorable member from Hades will retire
permanently from the hauls of legislation.


                                   V

“Public opinion,” says Buckle, “being the voice of the average man, is
the voice of mediocrity.” Is it therefore so very wise and infallible
a guide as to be accepted without other credentials than its name and
fame? Ought we to follow its light and leading with no better assurance
of the character of its authority than a count of noses of those
following it already, and with no inquiry as to whether it has not on
many former occasions led them and their several sets of predecessors
into bogs of error and over precipices to “eternal mock?” Surely “the
average man,” as every one knows him, is not very wise, not very
learned, not very good; how is it that his views of so intricate and
difficult matters as those on which public opinion makes pronouncement
through him are entitled to so great respect? It seems to me that the
average man is very much a fool, and something of a rogue as well.
He has only a smattering of education, knows virtually nothing of
political history, nor history of any kind, is incapable of logical,
that is to say clear, thinking, is subject to the suasion of base and
silly prejudices, and selfish beyond expression. That such a person’s
opinions should be so obviously better than my own that I should accept
them instead, and assist in enacting them into laws, appears to me most
improbable. I may “bow to the will of the people” as gracefully as a
defeated candidate, and for the same reason, namely, that I can not
help myself; but to admit that I was wrong in my belief and flatter
the power that subdues me—no, that I will not do. If nobody would do
so the average man would not be so cock-sure of his infallibility, and
might sometimes consent to be counseled by his betters.

In any matter of which the public has imperfect knowledge, public
opinion is as likely to be erroneous as is the opinion of an individual
equally uninformed. To hold otherwise is to hold that wisdom can be got
by combining many ignorances. A man who knows nothing of algebra can
not be assisted in the solution of an algebraic problem by calling in
a neighbor who knows no more than himself, and the solution approved
by the unanimous vote of a million such men would count for nothing
against that of a competent mathematician. To be entirely consistent,
gentlemen enamored of public opinion should insist that the text books
of our common schools should be the creation of a mass meeting, and all
disagreements arising in the course of the work settled by a majority
vote. That is how all difficulties incident to the popular translation
of the Hebrew Scriptures were composed. It should be admitted, however,
that most of those voting knew a little Hebrew, though not much. A
problem in mathematics is a very simple thing compared with many of
those upon which the people are called to pronounce by resolution and
ballot—for example, a question of finance.

“The voice of the people is the voice of God”—the saying is so
respectably old that it comes to us in the Latin. He is a strange,
an unearthly, politician who has not a score of times publicly and
solemnly signified his faith in it. But does anyone really believe
it? Let us see. In the period between 1859 and 1885, the national
Democratic party was defeated six times in succession. The voice of
the people pronounced it in error and unfit to govern. Yet after each
overthrow it came back into the field gravely reaffirming its faith in
the principles that God had condemned. Then God twice reversed Himself,
and the Republicans set about beating Him with as firm a confidence
of success (justified by the event) as they had known in the years of
their prosperity. Doubtless in every instance of a political party’s
defeat there are defections, but doubtless not all are due to the voice
that spoke out of the great white light that fell about Saul of Tarsus.
By the way, it is worth observing that that clever gentleman was
under no illusion regarding the origin of the voice that wrought his
celebrated “flop;” he did not confound it with the _vox populi_. The
people of his time and place had no objection to the persecution that
he was conducting, and could persecute a trifle themselves on occasion.

Majorities rule, when they do rule, not because they ought, but because
they can. We vote in order to learn without fighting which party is
the stronger; it is less disagreeable to learn it that way than the
other way. Sometimes the party that is numerically the weaker is by
possession of the government actually the stronger, and could maintain
itself in power by an appeal to arms, but the habit of submitting when
outvoted is hard to break. Moreover, we all recognize in a subconscious
way, the reasonableness of the habit as a practical method of getting
on; and there is always the confident hope of success in the next
canvass. That one’s cause will succeed because it ought to succeed
is perhaps the most general and invincible folly affecting the human
judgment. Observation can not shake it, nor experience destroy. Though
you bray a partisan in the mortar of adversity till he numbers the
strokes of the pestle by the hairs of his head, yet will not this
foolish notion depart from him. He is always going to win the next
time, however frequently and disastrously he has lost before. And
he can always give you the most cogent reasons for the faith that
is in him. His chief reliance is on the “fatal mistakes” made by
the other party since the last election. There never was a year in
which the party in power and the party out of power did not make bad
mistakes—mistakes which, unlike eggs and fish, seem always worst when
freshest. If idiotic errors of policy were always fatal, no party would
ever win an election and there would be a hope of better government
under the benign sway of the domestic cow.


                                  VI

Each political party accuses the “opposing candidate” of refusing to
answer certain questions which somebody has chosen to ask him. I think
myself it is discreditable for a candidate to answer any questions at
all, to make speeches, declare his policy, or do anything whatever to
get himself elected. If a political party choose to nominate a man
so obscure that his character and his views on all public questions
are not known or inferable he ought to have the dignity to refuse to
expound them. As to the strife for office being a pursuit worthy of
a noble ambition, I do not think so; nor shall I believe that many do
think so, until the term “office seeker” carries a less opprobrious
meaning and the dictum that “the office should seek the man, not the
man the office,” has a narrower currency among all manner of persons.
That by acts and words generally felt to be discreditable a man may
evoke great popular enthusiasm is not at all surprising. The late
Mr. Barnum was not the first nor the last to observe that the people
love to be humbugged. They love an impostor and a scamp, and the best
service that you can do for a candidate for high political preferment
is to prove him a little better than a thief, but not quite so good as
a thug.


                                  VII

The view is often taken that a representative is the same thing
as a delegate; that he is to have, and can honestly entertain, no
opinion that is at variance with the whims and the caprices of his
constituents. This is the very _reductio ad absurdum_ of representative
government. That it is the dominant theory of the future there can be
little doubt, for it is of a piece with the progress downward which is
the invariable and unbroken tendency of republican institutions. It
fits in well with manhood suffrage, rotation in office, unrestricted
patronage, assessment of subordinates, an elective judiciary, the
initiative, the referendum, the recall, and the rest of it. This
theory of representative institutions is the last and lowest stage in
our pleasant performance of “shooting Niagara.” When it shall have
universal recognition and assent we shall have been fairly engulfed in
the whirlpool, and the buzzard of anarchy may hopefully whet his beak
for the national carcass.

A man holding office from and for the people is in conscience and
honor bound to do what seems to his judgment best for the general
welfare, respectfully regardless of any and all other considerations.
This is especially true of legislators, to whom such specific
“instructions” as constituents sometimes send are an impertinence and
an insult. Pushed to its logical conclusion, the “delegate” policy
would remove all necessity of electing men of brains and judgment;
one man properly connected with his constituents by telegraph would
make as good a legislator as another. Indeed, as a matter of economy,
one representative could act for many constituencies, receiving his
instructions how to vote from mass meetings in each. This, besides
being logical, would have the added advantage of widening and hardening
the power of the local “bosses,” who, by properly managing the show
of hands could have the same beneficent influence in national affairs
that they now enjoy in municipal. The plan would be a pretty good one
if there were not so many other ways for the nation to go to the devil
that it appears needless.


                                 VIII

The purpose of the legislative custom of “eulogizing” dead members of
congress is not apparent unless it is to add a terror to death and make
honorable and self-respecting members rather bear the ills they have
than escape through the gates of death to others that they profess to
know a good deal about. If a member of that kind, who has had the bad
luck to “go before,” could be consulted he would indubitably say that
he is sorry to be dead; and that is not a natural frame of mind in one
who is exempt from the necessity of himself “delivering a eulogy.”

It may be urged that the congressional “eulogy” expresses in a general
way the eulogist’s notion of what he would like to have somebody say
of himself when he is by death elected to the Lower House. If so, then
Heaven help him to a better taste; but meanwhile it is a patriotic
duty to prevent him from indulging at the public expense the taste
that he has. There have been a few men in congress who could speak
of the character and services of a departed member with truth and
even eloquence. Of many others, the most charitable thing that one
can conscientiously say is that one would a little rather hear a
“eulogy” by them than of them. Considering that there are many kinds
of brains and only one kind of no brains, their diversity of gifts is
remarkable, but one characteristic they have in common: they are all
poets. Their efforts in the way of eulogium illustrate and illuminate
Pascal’s obscure saying that poetry is a particular sadness. If not sad
themselves, they are at least the cause of sadness in others, for no
sooner do they take to their legs to remind us that life is fleeting,
and to make us glad that it is, than they burst into bloom as poets
all! Some one has said that in the contemplation of death there is
something that belittles. Perhaps that explains the transformation.
Anyhow the congressional eulogist takes to verse as naturally as a moth
to a candle, and with about the same result to his reputation for sense.

The poetry is commonly not his own; when it violates every law of
sense, fitness, metre, rhyme and taste it is. But nine times in ten it
is some dog’s-eared, shop-worn quotation from one of the “standard”
bards, usually Shakspeare. There are familiar passages from that poet
which have been so often heard in “the halls of legislation” that they
have acquired an infamy which unfits them for publication in a decent
family newspaper; and Shakspeare himself, reposing in Elysium on his
bed of asphodel, omits them when reading his complete works to the
shades of Kit Marlowe and Ben Jonson, for their sins.

This whole “business” ought to be “cut out.” It is not only a waste
of time and a trial to the patience of the country; it is immoral. It
is not true that a member of congress, who while living was a most
ordinary mortal, becomes by the accident of death a hero, a saint,
“an example to American youth.” Nobody believes these “eulogies,”
and nobody should be permitted to utter them in the time and place
designated for another purpose. A “tribute” that is exacted by custom
and has not the fire and light of spontaneity is without sincerity
or sense. A simple resolution of regret and respect is all that the
occasion requires and would not inhibit any further utterance that
friends and admirers of the deceased might be moved to make elsewhere.
If any bereaved gentlemen, feeling his heart getting into his head,
wishes to tickle his ear with his tongue by way of standardizing his
emotion let him rent a hall and do so. But he should not be permitted
to make the capitol a Place of Wailing and the _Congressional Record_ a
book of bathos.




                         A POSSIBLE BENEFACTOR


From Paris comes the terrible news that M. Verneuil, a chemist, has
succeeded in making rubies at no considerable cost. This will doubtless
prove a sharp affliction to many persons addicted to display of rubies
on their surfaces, as well as to some who have them under lock and key
for sale to the others; for of course the value of the natural stones
must eventually fall to that of the artificial, if the two kinds are
identical in composition, hardness and color. Rubies will perhaps go
out of use altogether, for gems accessible to the poor are worthless to
the rich, and gems worthless to the rich are not wanted by the poor.
The beauty of the ruby will remain, but so will human nature.

Having few rubies and, I trust, not much human nature, I am disposed
to regard M. Verneuil’s crime as a public benefaction. If he will
pursue his experimentation to its “logical conclusion,” giving us cheap
diamonds, pearls, emeralds, turquoises and the rest, many of us will
rise up (from our seats away back) and call him blest.

Victims of the habit of wearing pretty pebbles have always accounted
for their affliction by affirming the beauty of the pebbles. If that
is why they wear them they will continue to wear them when they are
common and cheap—when M. Verneuil and his anarchist co-workers in
the laboratory have put them “within the reach of all.” Does any one
believe that they will? Why do they not now wear (and confess it) the
paste jewels that are every bit as beautiful as the genuine? Why would
the “society woman” consider herself dishonored if caught red-handed in
a necklace of wax beads distinguishable from pearls by the microscope
only?

The “preciousness” of these things is their cost. A woman “ablaze with
diamonds” is a woman silently shouting: “I am rich!” If her jewels did
not say this, and say it plainly, she would throw them into the nearest
gutter—nay, her contempt of them might receive such avowal as giving
them to the poor.

Lo, the poor Indian whose untutored taste persuades him to personal
adornment with porcupine quills, eagle feathers, bear-claws and the
tail of a wildcat! They are lovely—no doubt of that—but if porcupines,
eagles, bears and wildcats were abundant, accessible and amiable he
would make himself a thing of glory and consequence with something less
easily acquired. Please to consider the peculiar significance lurking
in the good old word “bravery” applied to the fine attire and ornaments
of the lowly. Does it not distinctly point to a primitive state when
personal adornment was the prize of courage in the chase? “Bravery” is
the finery of persons not far removed from a state of nature; our own
finery we do not call so, not even in poetry. A fairly good name for it
is “pursery.”

In the progress of the race away from primitive conditions and barbaric
modes of thought and feeling, the female contingent does not walk at
the head of the procession. Women are more “conservative” than men:
they are last to renounce the habits and customs of the ancestral
savage. Witness their addiction to powder and paint. We have all
inherited the tendency to daub our faces, a once useful custom, for
by differing designs tribes and families were distinguished from one
another at a glance. Attentive to other matters, mostly nonsense and
mischief, men have suffered the practice to fall into disuse, but
women—whom God bless!—continue it as when frighthood was in flower,
accounting for it by hardily affirming its service to the complexion.
Let it go at that; that is a better reason than can be urged for
defacing the female periphery with pebbles, candidly inutile and in
open apostasy to the gospel of Beauty Unadorned. Wherefore, that we may
have surcease of the pretty-pebble habit in the otherwise supportable
female of our species as she has been handed down to us from her noisy
sessions in primeval tree-tops, let us pray for success of M. Verneuil
and his accomplices in their hardy effort to discredit and vulgarize
the product of gem farm and pearl pool.

1902.




                            WARLIKE AMERICA


                                   I

In a speech at Huntsville, Alabama, President McKinley said:

“We are not a military people. We are not dedicated to arms. We love
peace, and the United States never goes to war except for peace, and
only where it can have it in no other way. We have never gone to war
for conquest, for exploitation or for territory, but always for liberty
and humanity, and in our recent war with Spain the people of the whole
United States as one man marched with the flag for the honor of the
nation, to relieve the oppressed people in Cuba.”

The American people are a singularly “cantankerous” people. True we are
not “military,” but that was not what the president meant to affirm;
he meant that we are not “warlike,” which is a very different thing.
The Germans are military, the North American Indians are warlike. To be
warlike is to be fond of war; to be military is to cultivate the arts
and sciences of war, to make the arts of peace subservient to them, to
maintain a powerful standing army, with armaments of high efficiency.
A people may be both warlike and military, or it may be either and not
the other. The distinction was evidently not in the president’s mind,
for he said that we love peace, that we go to war only to assure it,
and so forth. What are the facts?

There have been four generations of politically independent Americans.
Each of the four fought a war of magnitude, not counting the small
affairs and the “continuous performance” against the Indians. There
were the war of 1812 against Great Britain, the war against Mexico, the
war among ourselves, the war against Spain. We may say that all these
were fought to assure peace, and that is true—peace on our terms. No
war is undertaken for any other purpose. It was for that that Alexander
invaded Asia and Hannibal Italy. It was for that that the Turks laid
siege to Vienna. It was for that that Napoleon overran Europe.


                                  II

It seems that “we have never gone to war for conquest, for
exploitation, nor for territory;” we have the word of a president for
that. Observe, now, how Providence overrules the intentions of the
truly good for their advantage. We went to war with Mexico for peace,
humanity and honor, yet emerged from the contest with an extension
of territory beyond the dreams of political avarice. We went to war
with Spain for relief of an oppressed people, and at the close found
ourselves in possession of vast and rich insular dependencies and with
a pretty tight grasp upon the country for relief of whose oppressed
people we took up arms. We could hardly have profited more had
“territorial aggrandizement” been the spirit of our purpose and the
heart of our hope.

The slightest acquaintance with history shows that powerful republics
are the most warlike and unscrupulous of nations. They insist upon
having their own way, and in dealing with vanquished enemies are
without conscience. If it were not for the restraints that powerful
European sovereigns are able to put upon their subjects, Europe would
be a theater of continuous war. We lack that element of restraint.
Happily we lack, also, many of the hereditary animosities that inflame
the jealous peoples of the Old World; but when the fire is kindled it
burns; there is nobody to quench it. We have always a hand upon the
sword, and if we do not more frequently strike, it is because, in the
first place, it is not much of a sword, and, in the second, the enemy
is commonly out of reach. In our navy we have now a sword that is a
trifle longer and stronger, but our army is still a dull and clumsy
weapon.

In the future, as in the past, we shall have wars and enough of
them—wars of honor, wars of conquest, wars of hatred and revenge. War
has never found us ready. War has never found any modern nation ready,
excepting Prussia, and her only once. If we will learn nothing by
experience, let us try observation. Let us cease our hypocritical cant,
rise from our dreams of peace and of the love of it, confess ourselves
the warlike people that we are, and become the military people that we
are not.


                                  III

The notion that a standing army of whatever strength could be a “menace
to American liberty” is one of the crudest and most discreditable
of errors. It is an outgrowth of ignorance, and rooted in a false
analogy. It assumes that the “common people” of the Old World
monarchies are oppressed, discontented, ripe for revolt and republican
government; that they are held in subjection by the powerful armies
that serve their tyrants. Of course all this is mere moonshine, but if
true it would hold no such lesson for us as we think we read in it,
namely, that all armies are serviceable tools to tyrants and usurpers.
A European army, recruited by conscription and officered by noblemen
and the sons of relatives of noblemen, is an entirely different thing
from what we have, and very different indeed from what we may have if
we choose. The monarchical army sustains the monarchy, not because an
army is naturally and necessarily monarchist, but because monarchy is
the constitutional government; and armies, more generally than other
human organizations, are faithful to duty and obedient to law. For
the same reasons an American army will sustain the republic. Whenever
a monarchical army has _not_ sustained the monarchy—has assisted to
overthrow it and set up a republic—then, indeed, have we been given a
reason to distrust “the military”—of a monarchy.

An army of raw volunteers springing to the colors to meet some
unforeseen emergency is an inspiring spectacle, but that kind of army
is good for nothing when pitted against trained and seasoned troops.
Every military man knows this, although there are no large recent
instances free from obscuring elements, like “the war of 1812.”

In European countries that have universal conscription the years that
the young men pass in the army are the best spent years of their lives.
Those who enter the service as ignorant peasant lads, brutally stupid,
leave it well set up in body and mind—with better health, better morals
and better intelligence. The American peasant is of course perfect
in respect of all that, but perhaps his refining society would be of
advantage to his officers.




                       SOME FEATURES OF THE LAW


                                   I

There is a difference between religion and the amazing circumstructure
which, under the name of theology, the priesthoods have builded round
about it, which for centuries they made the world believe was the true
temple, and which, after incalculable mischiefs wrought, immeasurable
blood spilled in its extension and consolidation, is only now beginning
to crumble at the touch of reason. There is the same difference between
the laws and the law,—the naked statutes (bad enough, God knows) and
the incomputable additions made to them by lawyers. This immense body
of superingenious writings it is that we all are responsible to in
person and property. In it is unquestionable authority for setting
aside any statute that any legislative body ever passed or can pass. In
it are dictates of recognized validity for turning topsy-turvy every
principle of justice and reversing every decree of reason. There is
no fallacy so monstrous, no deduction so hideously unrelated to common
sense, as not to receive, somewhere in the myriad pages of this awful
compilation, a support that any judge in the land would be proud to
recognize with a decision if ably persuaded. I do not say that the
lawyers are altogether accountable for the existence of this mass of
disastrous rubbish, nor for its domination of the laws. They only
create and thrust it down our throats; we are guilty of contributory
negligence in not biting the spoon.


                                  II

As long as there exists the right of appeal there is a chance of
acquittal. Otherwise the right of appeal would be a sham and an insult
more intolerable, even, than, to the man convicted of murder, the right
to say why he should not receive the sentence which nothing he may say
will avert. So long as acquittal may ensue guilt is not established.
Why, then, are men sentenced before they are proved guilty? Why are
they punished in the middle of proceedings against them? A lawyer can
reply to these questions in a thousand ingenious ways; but there is
no answer. Let the “legal fraternity” reflect that a lawyer is one
whose profession it is to circumvent the law; that it is a part of his
business to mislead and befog the court of which he is an officer; that
it is considered right and reasonable for him to live by a division of
the spoils of crime and misdemeanor; that the utmost atonement he ever
makes for acquitting a man whom he knows to be guilty is to convict
a man whom he knows to be innocent. The methods of our courts, the
traditions of bench and bar, exist and are perpetuated, altered and
improved, for the purpose of enabling lawyers as a class to exact the
greatest amount of money from the rest of mankind. The laws are mostly
made by lawyers, and so made as to encourage and compel litigation.
By lawyers they are interpreted and by lawyers enforced for their own
profit and advantage. The over-intricate and interminable machinery
of precedent, overrulings, writs of error, motions for new trials,
appeals, reversals, affirmations and the rest of it, is mostly a
transparent and iniquitous system of exaction. What remedy would I
propose? None. There is none to propose. The lawyers have us and mean
to keep us.

The villainy of making men suffer for crimes of which they may
eventually be acquitted is consistent with our entire system of laws—a
system so complicated and contradictory that a judge simply does as he
pleases, subject only to the custom of giving for his action reasons
which at his option may or may not be derived from the statutes. He may
sternly affirm that he sits there to interpret the law as he finds it,
not to make it accord with his personal notions of right and justice.
Or he may declare that it could never have been the legislature’s
intention to do wrong, and so, shielded by the useful phrase _contra
bonos mores_, pronounce that illegal which he chooses to consider
inexpedient. Or he may be guided by either of any two inconsistent
precedents, as the better suits his purpose. Or he may throw aside both
statute and precedent, disregard good morals, and justify the judgment
that he wishes to deliver by what other lawyers have written in books,
and still others, without anybody’s authority, have chosen to accept
as a part of the law. I have in mind judges whom I have observed to
do all these things in a single term of court, and could mention one
who has done most of them in a single decision. The amazing feature
of the matter is that all these methods are lawful—made so, not by
legislative enactment, but by the judges. Language can not be used with
sufficient lucidity and positiveness to bind them.


                                  III

The legal purpose of a preliminary examination is not the discovery of
a criminal; it is the ascertaining of the probable guilt or innocence
of the person already charged. To permit that person’s counsel to
insult and madden the various assisting witnesses in the hope of making
them seem to incriminate themselves instead of him by statements that
may afterward be used to confuse a jury—that is perversion of law
to defeat justice. The character of the practice is seen to better
advantage contrasted with the tender consideration enjoyed by the
person actually accused and presumably guilty—the presumption of
his innocence being as futile a fiction as that a sheep’s tail is a
leg when called so. Actually, the prisoner in a criminal trial is
the only person supposed to have full knowledge of the facts who is
not compelled to testify. And this exemption is given him by way of
immunity from the snares and pitfalls with which the paths of all
witnesses are wantonly beset. To a visiting Lunarian it would seem
strange indeed that in a Terrestrial court of justice it is not deemed
desirable for an accused person to incriminate himself, and that it is
deemed desirable for a subpœna to be more dreaded than a warrant.

When a child, a wife, a servant, a student—any one under personal
authority—is accused or suspected an explanation is demanded, and
refusal to testify is held, and rightly held, a confession of guilt.
To question the accused—rigorously and sharply to examine him on all
matters relating to the offense, and even trap him if he seem to be
lying—that is Nature’s method of criminal procedure; why in our public
trials do we forego its advantages? It may annoy; a person arrested for
crime must expect annoyance. It can not make an innocent man, even a
mere witness, incriminate himself, but it can make a rogue do so, and
therein lies its value.

This ancient and efficient safeguard to rascality, the right of a
witness to refuse to testify when his testimony would tend to convict
him of crime, has been strengthened by a recent decision of the United
States Supreme Court. That will probably add another century or two to
its mischievous existence, and possibly prove the first act in such
an extension of it that eventually a witness can not be compelled to
testify at all. In fact it is difficult to see how he can be compelled
to now if he has the hardihood to exercise his constitutional right
without shame and with an intelligent consciousness of its limitless
application.

The case in which the Supreme Court made the decision was one in which
a witness refused to say whether he had received from a defendant
railway company a rate on grain shipments lower than the rate open to
all shippers. The trial was in the United States District Court for the
Northern District of Illinois, and Judge Gresham chucked the scoundrel
into jail. He naturally applied to the Supreme Court for relief, and
that high tribunal gave joy to every known or secret malefactor in the
country by deciding—according to law, no doubt—that witnesses in a
criminal case can not be compelled to testify to anything that “_might
tend_ to criminate them _in any way_, or subject them to _possible_
prosecution.” The italics are my own and indicate about as clearly
as extended comment could the boundless immunity that the decision
confirms or confers. It is to be hoped that some public-spirited
gentleman called to the stand in some celebrated case may point the
country’s attention to the state of the law by refusing to tell his
name, age or occupation, or answer any question whatever. And it would
be a fitting _finale_ to the farce if he would threaten the too curious
attorney with an action for damages for compelling a disclosure of
character.


                                  IV

Most lawyers have made so profound a study of human nature as to
think that if they have shown a man to be of loose life with regard
to women they have shown him to be one that would tell needless lies
to a jury—a conviction unsupported by the familiar facts of life and
character. Different men have different vices, and addiction to one
kind of “upsetting sin” does not imply addiction to an unrelated kind.
Doubtless a rake is a liar in so far as is needful to concealment, but
it does not follow that he will commit perjury to save a horsethief
from the penitentiary or send a good man to the gallows. As to lying,
generally, he is not conspicuously worse than the mere lover, male
or female; for lovers have been liars from the beginning of time.
They deceive when it is necessary and when it is not. Schopenhauer
would say that it is because of a sense of guilt—they contemplate the
commission of a crime and, like other criminals, cover their tracks.
I am not prepared to say if that is the true explanation, but to the
fact to be explained I am ready to testify with lifted arms. Yet no
cross-examining attorney tries to break the credibility of a witness by
showing that he is in love.

An habitual liar, if disinterested, makes about as good a witness
as anybody. There is really no such thing as “the lust of lying:”
falsehoods are told for advantage—commonly a shadowy and illusory
advantage, but one distinctly enough had in mind. Discerning no
opportunity to promote his interest, tickle his vanity or feed a
grudge, the habitual liar will tell the truth. If lawyers would study
human nature with half the assiduity that they give to resolution of
hairs into their longitudinal elements they would be better fitted for
service of the devil than they have now the usefulness to be.


                                   V

I affirm the right and expediency of cross-examining attorneys in
court, with a view to testing their credibility. An attorney’s relation
to the trial is closer and more important than that of a witness. He
has more to say and more opportunities to deceive the jury, not only
by naked lying, but by both _suppressio veri_ and _suggestio falsi_.
Why is it not important to ascertain his credibility; and if an inquiry
into his private life and public reputation will assist, as himself
avers, why should he not be put upon the grill and compelled to sweat
out the desired incrimination? I should think it might give good
results, for example, to compel him to answer a few questions touching
his professional career. Somewhat like this:

“Did you ever defend a client, knowing him to be guilty?”

“What, precisely, was your motive in doing so?”

“But in addition to your love of fair play had you not also the hope
and assurance of a fee?”

“In defending a client known to you to be guilty did you declare your
belief in his innocence?”

“Yes, I understand, but necessary as it may have been (in that it
helped to defeat justice and earn your fee) was not your declaration a
lie?”

“Do you believe it right to lie for the purpose of circumventing
justice?—yes or no?”

“Do you believe it right to lie for personal gain—yes or no?”

“Then why did you do both?”

“A man who lies to beat the laws and fill his purse is—what?”

“In defending a murderer did you ever misrepresent the character, acts,
motives and intentions of the man that he murdered—never mind the
purpose and effect of such misrepresentation—yes or no?”

“That is what we call slander of the dead, is it not?”

“What is the most accurate name you can think of for one who slanders
the dead to defeat justice and promote his own fortune?”

“Yes, I know—such practices are allowed by the ‘ethics’ of your
profession, but can you point to any evidence that they are allowed by
Jesus Christ?”

“If in former trials you have obstructed justice by slander of the
dead, by falsely affirming the innocence of the guilty, by cheating
in argument, by deceiving the court whom you are sworn to serve and
assist, and have done all this for personal gain, do you expect, and
is it reasonable for you to expect, the jury in this case to believe
you?”

“One moment more, please. Did you ever accept an annual or other
fee conditioned on your not taking any action against a certain
corporation?”

“While in receipt of such refrainer—I beg your pardon, retainer—did you
ever prosecute a blackmailer?”

It will be seen that in testing the credibility of a lawyer it is
needless to go into his private life and his character as a man and
a citizen: his professional practices are an ample field in which to
search for offenses against man and God.

The moral sense of the laymen is dimly conscious of something wrong in
the ethics of the “noble profession;” the lawyers affirming, rightly
enough, a public necessity for them and their mercenary services,
permit their thrift to construe it vaguely as personal justification.
But nobody has blown away from the matter its brumous encompassment and
let in the light upon it. It is very simple.

Is it honorable for a lawyer to try to clear a man that he knows
deserves conviction? That is not the entire question by much. Is
it honorable to pretend to believe what you do not believe? Is it
honorable to lie? I submit that these questions are not answered
affirmatively by showing the disadvantage to the public and to
civilization of a lawyer refusing to serve a known offender. The
popular interest, like any other good cause, can be and commonly is,
served by foul means when served at all. Justice itself may be promoted
by acts essentially unjust. In serving a sordid ambition a powerful
scoundrel may by acts in themselves wicked augment the prosperity of
a whole nation. I have not the right to deceive and lie in order to
advantage my fellow men, any more than I have the right to steal or
murder to advantage them; nor have my fellow men the power to grant me
that indulgence.

The question of a lawyer’s right to clear a known criminal (with the
several questions involved) is not answered affirmatively by showing
that the law forbids him to decline a case for reasons personal
to himself—not even if we admit the statute’s moral authority.
Preservation of conscience and character is a civic duty, as well as
a personal; one’s fellowmen have a distinct interest in it. That, I
admit, is an argument rather in the manner of an attorney; clearly
enough the effect of this statute is to compel an attorney to cheat
and lie for any rascal that wants him to. In that sense it may be
regarded as a law softening the rigor of all laws; it does not mitigate
punishments, but mitigates the chance of incurring them. The infamy
of it lies in forbidding an attorney to be a gentleman. Like all laws
it falls something short of its intent: many attorneys, even some who
defend the law, are as honorable as is consistent with the practice of
deceit to serve crime.

It will not do to say that an attorney in defending a client is not
compelled to cheat and lie. What kind of defense could be made by any
one who did not profess belief in the innocence of his client?—did
not affirm it in the most serious and impressive way?—did not lie?
How would it profit the defense to be conducted by one who would not
meet the prosecution’s grave asseverations of belief in the prisoner’s
guilt by equally grave assurances of faith in his innocence? And in
point of fact, when was counsel for the defense ever known to forego
the advantage of that solemn falsehood? If I am asked what would
become of accused persons if they had to prove their innocence to the
lawyers before making a defense in court, I reply that it is not for
the public interest that a rogue have the same freedom of defense as
an honest man; it should be a good deal harder for him. His troubles
should begin, not when he seeks acquittal, but when he seeks counsel.
It would be better for the community if he could not obtain the
services of a reputable attorney, or any attorney at all. A defense
that can not be made without his attorney’s knowledge of his guilt
should be impossible to him.


                                  VI

As to the general question of a judge’s right to inflict arbitrary
punishment for words that he may be pleased to hold disrespectful to
himself or another judge, I do not myself believe that any such right
exists; the practice seems to be merely a survival—a heritage from the
dark days of irresponsible power, when the scope of judicial authority
had no other bounds than fear of the king’s gout or indigestion. If in
these modern days the same right is to exist it may be necessary to
revive the old checks upon it by restoring the throne. In freeing us
from the monarchical chain, the coalition of European Powers commonly
known in American history as the valor of our forefathers stripped us
starker than they knew.

Suppose an attorney should find his client’s interests imperiled by a
prejudiced or corrupt judge—what is he to do? Denied the right to make
representations to that effect, supporting them with evidence where
evidence is possible and by inference where it is not, what means of
protection shall he venture to adopt? If it be urged in objection that
judges are never prejudiced nor corrupt I confess that I shall have no
answer: the proposition will deprive me of breath.

If contempt is not a crime it should not be punished; if a crime
it should be punished as other crimes are punished—by indictment
or information, trial by jury if a jury is demanded, with all the
safeguards that secure an accused person against judicial blunders
and judicial bias. The necessity for these safeguards is even greater
in cases of contempt than in others—particularly if the prosecuting
witness is to sit in judgment on his own grievance. That should, of
course, not be permitted: the trial should take place before another
judge.

The public ear is served with rather more than just enough of nonsense
about “attacks upon the dignity of the Bench,” “bringing the judiciary
into disrepute” and the rueful rest of it. I crave leave to remind
the solicitudinarians sounding these loud alarums on their several
larynges that by persons of understanding a man is respected, not for
the office that he holds, but for what he is, and that one public
functionary will stand as high in their esteem as another if as high
in character. The dignity of a wise and righteous judge needs not the
artificial safeguarding which is a heritage of the old days when if
dissent found a tongue the public executioner cut it out. The Bench
will be sufficiently respected when it is no longer a place where
dullards dream and rogues rob—when its _personnel_ is no longer chosen
in the back-rooms of tipple-shops, forced upon yawning conventions and
confirmed by the votes of men who know neither what the candidates
are nor what they should be. With the gang that we have, and under
our system must continue to have, respect is out of the question. The
judges are entitled to just as much of its forms and observances as is
needful to maintenance of order in their courts and fortification of
their lawful power—no more. As to their silence under criticism, that
is as they please. Nobody but themselves is holding their tongues.


                                  VII

A law under which the unsuccessful respondent in a divorce proceeding
may be forbidden to marry again during the life of the successful
complainant, the latter being subject to no such disability, is
unrighteous. If the disability is intended as a punishment it is
exceptional among legal punishments in that it is inflicted without
conviction, trial or arraignment, the divorce proceedings being quite
another and different matter. It is exceptional in that the period
of its continuance, and therefore the degree of its severity, are
indeterminate; they are dependent on no limiting statute, and on
neither the will of the power inflicting nor the conduct of the person
suffering. To sentence a person to a punishment that is to be mild
or severe according to chance or—which is even worse—circumstances
which but one person, and that person not officially connected with
administration of justice, can partly control, is a perversion of the
main principles that are supposed to underlie the laws.

It can be nothing to the woman—possibly herself remarried—whether the
man remarries or not; that is, can affect only her feelings, and only
such of them as are least creditable to her. Yet her self-interest is
enlisted against him to do him incessant disservice. By merely caring
for her health she increases the sharpness of his punishment—for
punishment it is if he feels it such; every hour that she wrests from
death is added to his “term.” The expediency of preventing a man from
marrying, without having the power to prevent him from making his
marriage desirable in the interest of the public and vital to that of
some woman, is not discussable here. If a man is ever justified in
poisoning a woman who was once his wife it is when, by way of making
him miserable, the state has given him a direct and distinct interest
in her death.


                                 VIII

With a view, possibly, to promoting respect for law by making the
statutes so to conform to public sentiment that none will fall into
dis-esteem and disuse, it has been proposed that there be recognition
of sex in the penal code, by making a difference in the punishment of
men and of women for the same crimes and misdemeanors. The argument
is that if women were “provided” with milder punishment juries would
sometimes convict them, whereas they now commonly get off altogether.

The plan is not so new as might be thought. Many of the nations of
antiquity of whose laws we have knowledge, and nearly all the European
nations until within a comparatively recent time, punished women
differently from men for the same offenses. As recently as the period
of the Early Puritan in New England women were punished for some
offenses which men might commit without fear if not without reproach.
The ducking-stool, for example, was an appliance for softening the
female temper only. In England women used to be burned at the stake for
crimes for which men were hanged, roasting being popularly regarded
as the milder punishment. In point of fact, it was not punishment at
all, the victim being carefully strangled before the fire touched her.
Burning was simply a method of disposing of the body so expeditiously
as to give no occasion and opportunity for the unseemly social rites
commonly performed about the scaffold of the erring male by a jocular
populace. As lately as 1763 a woman named Margaret Biddingfield was
burned in Suffolk, England, as an accomplice in the crime of “petty
treason.” She had assisted in the murder of one of the king’s subjects
(her husband), the actual killing being done by a man; and he was
hanged, as no doubt he deserved to be. For “coining,” too (which, also,
was “treason”) men were hanged and women burned. This distinction
between the sexes was maintained until the year of grace 1790, after
which female offenders ceased to have “a stake in the country,” and
like Hood’s martial hero, “enlisted in the line.”

In still earlier days, before the advantages of fire were understood,
our good grandmothers who sinned were admonished by water—they were
drowned; but in the reign of Henry III a woman was hanged—without
strangulation, apparently, for after a whole day of it she was cut
down and pardoned. Sorceresses and unfaithful wives were smothered in
mud, as also were unfaithful wives among the ancient Burgundians. The
punishment of unfaithful husbands is not of record; we only know that
there were no austerely virtuous editors to direct the finger of scorn
to their dark misdeeds and personal unworth.

Among the Anglo-Saxons, women who had the bad luck to be detected in
theft were drowned, while men meeting with the same mischance died a
dry death by hanging. By the early Danish laws female thieves were
buried alive, whether or not from motives of humanity is not now known.
This seems to have been the fashion in France also, for in 1331 a woman
named Duplas was scourged and buried alive at Abbeville, and in 1460
Perotte Mauger, a receiver of stolen goods, was inhumed by order of the
Provost of Paris in front of the public gibbet. In Germany in the good
old days certain kinds of female criminals were “impaled,” a punishment
too grotesquely horrible for description, but likely enough considered
by the simple German of the period conspicuously merciful.

It is, in short, only recently that the civilized nations have placed
the sexes on an equality in the matter of the death penalty for
crime, and the new system is not yet by any means universal. That
it is a better system than the old, or would be if enforced, is a
natural presumption from human progress, out of which it is evolved.
But coincidently with its evolution has developed also a sentiment
adverse to punishment of women at all. This sentiment appears to be
of independent growth; in no way a reaction against that which caused
the change. To mitigate the severity of the death penalty for women to
some pleasant form of euthanasia, such as drowning in rose-water, or
in their case to abolish the death penalty altogether and make their
capital punishment consist in a brief internment in a jail with a
softened name, would probably do no good, for whatever form it might
take, it would be, so far as woman is concerned, the “extreme penalty”
and crowning disgrace, and jurors would be as reluctant to inflict it
as they now are to inflict death.


                                  IX

Testators should not, from the snug security of the grave, be
permitted to utter a perpetual threat of disinheritance, or any other
uncomfortable fate, to deter a living citizen, even one of their own
legatees, from applying to the courts of his country for redress of
any wrong from which he may consider himself as suffering. The courts
of law ought to be open to any one conceiving himself a victim of
injustice, and it should be unlawful to abridge the right of complaint
by making its exercise more hazardous than it naturally is. Doubtless
the contesting of wills is a nuisance, generally speaking, the
contestant devoid of moral worth and the verdict unrighteous; but as
long as some testators really _are_ daft, or subject to interested
suasion, or wantonly sinful, all should be denied the power to stifle
dissent by fining the luckless dissenter. The dead have too much to say
in this world, at the best, and it is tyranny for them to stand at the
door of the temple of justice to drive away the suitors that themselves
have made.

Obedience to the commands of the dead should be conditional upon their
good behavior, and it is not good behavior to set up a censure of
action at law among the living. If our courts are not competent to
say what actions are proper to be brought and what are unfit to be
entertained let us improve them until they are competent, or abolish
them altogether and resort to the mild and humane arbitrament of the
dice; but while courts have the civility to exist they should refuse
to surrender any part of their duties and responsibilities to such
exceedingly private persons as those under six feet of earth, or
sealed up in habitations of hewn stone. Persons no longer affectable
by human events should be denied a voice in determining the character
and trend of them. Respect for the wishes of the dead is a tender
and beautiful sentiment, certainly. Unfortunately, it can not be
ascertained that they have any wishes. What commonly go by that name
are wishes once entertained by living persons who are now dead, and
who in dying renounced them, along with everything else. Like those
who entertained them, the wishes are no longer in existence. “The
wishes of the dead” are not wishes, and are not of the dead. Why they
should have anything more than a sentimental influence upon those still
in the flesh, and be a factor to be reckoned with in the practical
affairs of the supergraminous world, is a question to which the merely
human understanding can find no answer, and it must be referred to the
lawyers. When “from the tombs a doleful sound” is vented, and “thine
ear” is invited to “attend the cry,” an intelligent forethought will
suggest that you inquire if it is anything about property. If so pass
on—that is no sacred spot.


                                   X

Much of the testimony in French courts, civil and martial, appears to
consist of personal impressions and opinions of the witnesses. All
very improper and mischievous, no doubt, if—if what? Why, obviously,
if the judges and jurors are unfit to sit in judgment. By designating
them to sit, the designating power assumes their fitness—assumes that
they know enough to take such things for what they are worth, to make
the necessary allowances; if needful, to disregard a witness’s opinion
altogether. I do not know that they are fit. I do not know that they
do make the needful allowances. It is by no means clear to me that
any judge or juror, French, American or Patagonian, is competent to
ascertain the truth when lying witnesses are trying to conceal it under
the direction of skilled and conscienceless attorneys licensed to
deceive. But his competence is a basic assumption of the law vesting
him with the duty of deciding. Having chosen him for that duty, the
French law very logically lets him alone to decide for himself what
is evidence and what is not. It does not trust him a little, but
altogether. It puts him under conditions familiar to him—makes him
accessible to just such influences as he is accustomed to when making
conscious and unconscious decisions in his personal affairs.

There may be a distinct gain to justice in permitting a witness to
say whatever he wants to say. If he is telling the truth he will not
contradict himself; if he is lying, the more rope he is given the more
surely he will entangle himself.

In giving hearsay evidence, for example, he may suggest a new and
important witness of whom the counsel for the other side would not
otherwise have heard, and who can then be brought into court. By some
unguarded and apparently irrelevant statement he may open an entirely
new line of inquiry, or throw upon the case a flood of light. Everyone
knows what revelations are sometimes evoked by apparently the most
insignificant remarks. Why should justice be denied a chance to profit
that way?

There is a still greater advantage in “the French method.” By giving a
witness free rein in expression of his personal opinions and feelings
we should be able to calculate his frame of mind, his good or ill will
to the prosecution or defense and, therefore, to a certain extent his
credibility. In our courts he is able by a little solemn perjury to
conceal all this, even from himself, and pose as an impartial witness,
when in truth, with regard to the accused he is full of rancor or
reeking with compassion.

In theory our system is perfect. The accused is prosecuted by a public
officer, who having no interest in his conviction, will serve the
state without mischievous zeal and perform his disagreeable task with
fairness and consideration. He is permitted to entrust his defense
to another officer, whose duty it is to make a rigidly truthful and
candid presentment of his case in order to assist the court to a just
decision. The jurors, if there are jurors, are neither friendly nor
hostile, are open-minded, intelligent and conscientious. As to the
witnesses, are they not sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth (in
so far as they are permitted) and nothing but the truth? What could
be finer and better than all this?—what could more certainly assure
justice?

How close the resemblance is between this ideal picture and what
actually occurs all know, or should know. The judge is frequently
an ignoramus incapable of logical thought and with little sense of
the dread and awful nature of his responsibility. The prosecuting
attorney thinks it due to his reputation to “make a record” and tries
to convict by hook or crook, even when he is himself persuaded of the
defendant’s innocence. Counsel for the defense is equally unscrupulous
for acquittal, and, both having industriously coached their witnesses,
they contend against each other in deceiving the court by every art
of which they are masters. Witnesses on both sides perjure themselves
freely and with almost perfect impunity if detected. At the close
of it all the poor weary jurors, hopelessly bewildered and dumbly
resentful of their duping, render a random or compromise verdict, or
one which best expresses their secret animosity to the lawyer they like
least, or their faith in the newspapers which they have diligently and
disobediently read every night. Commenting upon Rabelais’ old judge
who, when impeached for an outrageous decision, pleaded his defective
eyesight which made him miscount the spots on the dice, the most
distinguished lawyer of my acquaintance seriously assured me that if
all the cases with which he had been connected had been decided with
the dice substantial justice would have been done more frequently than
it was done. If that is true, or nearly true, and I believe it, the
American’s right to sneer at the Frenchman’s “judicial methods” is an
open question.


                                  XI

It is urged that the corrupt practices in our courts of law be
uncovered to public view, whenever that is possible, by that impeccable
censor, the press. Exposure of rascality is good—better, apparently
for rascals than for anybody else, for it usually suggests something
rascally which they had overlooked, and so familiarizes the public
with crime that crime no longer begets loathing. If the newspapers of
the country are really concerned about corrupter practices than their
own and willing to bring our courts up to the English standard there
is something better than exposure—which fatigues. Let the newspapers
set about creating a public opinion favorable to non-elective judges,
well paid, powerful to command respect and holding office for life or
good behavior. That is the only way to get good men and great lawyers
on the Bench. As matters are, we stand and cry for what the English
have, and rail at the way they get it. Our boss-made, press-ridden and
mob-fearing judges give us as good a quality of justice as we merit. A
better quality awaits us whenever the will to have is attended by the
sense to take.




                              ARBITRATION


The universal cry for industrial arbitration is either dishonest or
unwise. For every evil there are quack remedies galore—especially
for every evil that is irremediable. Of this order of remedies is
arbitration, for of this order of evils is the inadequate wage of
manual labor. Since the beginning of authentic history everything has
been tried in the hope of divorcing poverty and labor, but nothing has
parted them. It is not conceivable that anything ever will; success
of arbitration, antecedently improbable, is demonstrably impossible.
Most of the work of the world is hard, disagreeable, requiring little
intelligence. Most of the people of the world are unfit to do any
other work. If it were not done by them it would not be done, and it
is the basic work. Withdraw them from it and the whole superstructure
would topple and fall. Yet there is so little of the work, and so many
incapable of doing anything else, that adequate return is out of the
question. For the laboring _class_ there is no hope of an existence
that is comfortable in comparison with that of the other class; the
hope of an individual laborer lies in the possibility of fitting
himself for higher employment—employment of the head; not manual but
cerebral labor. While selfishness remains the main ingredient of human
nature (and a survey of the centuries accessible to examination shows
but a slow and intermittent decrease) the cerebral workers, being the
wiser and not much better, will manage to take the greater profit. In
justice it must be said of them that they extend a warm and sincere
invitation to their ranks, and take “apprentices;” every opportunity
for education that the other class enjoys is proof of that.

Let us, then, look at arbitration more nearly; in our time it is, in
form at least, something new. It began as “international arbitration,”
which already, in settling a few disputes of no great importance,
has shown itself a dangerous remedy. In the necessary negotiation to
determine exactly what points to submit, to whom, and how, and where,
and when to submit them, scores of questions are raised, upon each of
which it is as easy to disagree and fight as upon the original issue.
International arbitration may be defined as the substitution of many
burning questions for a smouldering one; for disputes that have reached
a really acute stage are not submitted. Nor, despite all “treaties,”
will a powerful nation arbitrate anything that it considers vital to
its honor or welfare.

Industrial arbitration is no better; it is manifestly worse, and any
law enforcing it, and enforcing compliance with its decisions, is
absurd and mischievous. “Compulsory arbitration” is not arbitration;
the essence of which is voluntary submission of differences and
voluntary submission to judgment. If reference or obedience is enforced
the arbitrators are simply a court with no powers to do anything but
apply the law. Proponents of the fad would do well to consider this:
If a party to a labor dispute is _compelled_ to invoke and obey a
decision of arbitrators, that decision must follow strictly the line
of law; the smallest invasion of any constitutional, statutory or
common-law right will enable him to upset the judgment. No legislative
body can establish a tribunal empowered to make and enforce illegal
or extra-legal decisions; for making and enforcing legal ones the
tribunals that we already have are sufficient. This talk of “compulsory
arbitration” is the maddest nonsense that the industrial situation has
yet evolved. Doubtless it is sent upon us for our sins; but had we not
already a plague of strikes?

Arbitration of labor disputes means compromise with the unions. It
can, in this country, mean nothing else, for the law would not survive
a half-dozen failures to concede some part of the workmen’s demands,
however reasonless. By repeated strikes they would eventually get all
their original demand and as much more as on second thought they might
choose to ask for. Each concession would be, as it is now, followed by
a new importunity and the first arbitrators might as well allow them
all that they demand and all that they mean to demand hereafter.

Would not employers be equally unscrupulous? They would not. They
could not afford the disturbance, the stoppage of the business, the
risk of unfair decisions in a country where it is “popular” to favor
and encourage, not the just, but the poor. The labor leaders have
nothing to lose, not even their employment, for their work is labor
leading. Their dupes, by the way, would not be dupes forever, for with
enforced arbitration the game of “follow my leader” would pay only
until there should be nothing to follow him to but empty treasuries of
dead industries in an extinct civilization. If there must be compulsory
arbitration it should at least not apply to that sum of all impudent
rascalities, the “sympathy strike.”

As to the men who have set up the claim asserted by the “sympathy
strike,” I shall refer to the affair of 1904. If it was creditable in
them to feel so much concern about a few hundred aliens in Illinois,
how about the grievances of the whole body of their countrymen in
California? When their employers, who they confessed were good to them,
were plundering the public, they did not strike, sympathetically nor
otherwise. Year after year the railway monopoly picked the pockets
of the Californians; corrupted their courts and legislatures; laid
its Briarean hands in exaction upon every industry and interest;
filled the land with lies and false reasoning; threw honest men into
prisons and locked the gates of them against thieves and assassins;
by open defiance of the tax collector denied to children of the poor
the advantages of education—did all this and more; and these honest
working men stood loyally by it, sharing in wages its dishonest gains,
receivers, in one sense, of stolen goods. The groans of their neighbors
were nothing to them; even the wrongs of themselves, their wives and
their children did not stir them to revolt. On every breeze that blew,
a great chorus of cries and curses was borne past their ears unheeded.
Why did they not strike then? Where then were the fiery altruists and
storm-petrels of industrial disorder? The ingenious gods who have
invented the Debses and Gomperses, and humorously branded them with
names that would make a cat laugh, have never put it into their cold
selfish hearts to order out their followers to redress a public wrong,
but only to inflict one—to avenge a personal humiliation, gratify an
appetite for notoriety, slake a thirst for the intoxicating cup of
power, or punish the crime of prosperity.

It is a practical, an illogical, a turbulent time, yes; it always is.
The age of Jesus Christ was a practical age, yet Jesus Christ was
sweetly impractical. In an illogical period Socrates reasoned clearly,
and logically died for it. Nero’s time was a time of turbulence, yet
Seneca’s mind was not disturbed, nor his conscience perverted. Compare
their fame with the everlasting infamy that time has fixed upon the
names of the Jack Cades, the Robespierres, the Tomaso Nielos—guides
and gods of the “fierce democracies” which rise with a sickening
periodicity to defile the page of history with a quickly fading mark of
blood and fire, their own awful example their sole contribution to the
good of mankind. To be a child of your time, imbued with its spirit and
endowed with its aims—that is to petition Posterity for a niche in the
Temple of Shame.

No strike of any prominence ever takes place in this country without
the concomitants of violence and destruction of property, and
usually murder. These cheerful incidents one who does not personally
suffer them can endure with considerable fortitude, but hypocritical
condemnation of them by the press that has instigated them and the
strikers who have planned and executed them, and who invariably ascribe
them to those whom they most injure; the solemn offers of the leaders
to assist in protecting the imperiled property and avenging the dead,
while openly employing counsel for every incendiary and assassin
arrested in spite of them—these are pretty hard to bear. A strike
means (for it includes as its main method) violence, lawlessness,
destruction of the property of others than the strikers, riot and, if
necessary, bloodshed. Even when the strikers themselves have no hand in
these crimes they are morally liable for the foreknown consequences of
their act. Nay, they are morally liable for _all_ the consequences—all
the inconveniences and losses to the community, all the sufferings
of the poor entailed by interruptions of trade, all the privations
of other workingmen whom a selfish attention to their own supposed
advantage throws out of the closed industries. They are liable in
morals and should be made so in law—only that strikes are needless.
It is not worth while to create a multitude of complex criminal
responsibilities for acts which can, possibly, be prevented by a single
and simple one. How?

First, I should like to point out that we are hearing a deal too much
about a man’s inalienable right to work or play, at his own sovereign
will. In so far as that means—and it is always used to mean—his
right to quit any kind of work at any moment, without notice and
regardless of consequences to others, it is false; there is no such
moral right, and the law should have at least a speaking acquaintance
with morality. What is mischievous should be illegal. The various
interests of civilization are so complex, delicate, intertangled and
interdependent that no man, and no set of men, should have power to
throw the entire scheme into confusion and disorder for promotion of a
trumpery principle or a class advantage. In dealing with corporations
we recognize that. If for any selfish purpose a trade union of railway
managers had done what their sacred brakemen and divine firemen did—had
decreed that “no wheel should turn” until Mr. Pullman’s men should
return to work—they would have found themselves all in jail the second
day. _Their_ right to quit work was not conceded: they lacked that
authenticating credential of moral and legal irresponsibility, an
indurated palm. In a small lockout affecting a mill or two the offender
finds a half-hearted support in the law if he is willing to pay enough
deputy sheriffs; but even then he is mounted by the hobnailed populace,
at its back the daily newspapers, clamoring and spitting like cats.
But let the manager of a great railway discharge all its men without
warning and “kill” its own engines! Then see what you will see. To
commit a wrong so gigantic with impunity a man must wear overalls.

How prevent anybody from committing it? How break up this _régime_ of
strikes and boycotts and lockouts, more disastrous to others than to
those at whom the blows are aimed—than to those, even, who deliver
them? How make all those concerned in the management and operation of
great industries, about which have grown up tangles of related and
dependent interests, conduct them with some regard to the welfare of
others? Before committing ourselves to the dubious and irretraceable
course of “government ownership,” or to the infectious expedient of
“regulation,” is there anything of promise yet untried?—anything of
superior simplicity and easier application?

There are few simple remedies for social or political ills. It is a
familiar truth that no law was ever passed that did not have unforeseen
results; but of these results, by far the greater number are never
recognized as of its creation. The best that can be said of any
“measure” is that the sum of its perceptible benefits seems so to
exceed the sum of its perceptible evils as to constitute a balance of
advantage. Yet the statesman or philosopher to whose understanding
“the whole matter lies in a nutshell”—who thinks he can formulate a
practical political or social policy within the four corners of an
epigram is constantly to the fore with a simple specific for ills whose
causes are complex, constant and obscure.

Nevertheless, it would be wise to make a breach of labor contract by
either party to it a criminal offense punishable by imprisonment. “Fine
or imprisonment” will not do—the employee, unable to pay the fine,
would commonly go to jail, the employer seldom. That would not be fair.

The need of such a law is apparent: labor contracts would then be
drawn for a certain time, securing both employer and employee and
(which is more important) helpless persons in related and dependent
industries—the whole public, in fact—against sudden and disastrous
action by either “capital” or “labor” for accomplishment of a purely
selfish and frankly impudent end. A strike or lockout compelled to
announce itself thirty days in advance would be comparatively innocuous
to the public, whilst securing to the party of initiation all the
advantages that anybody professes to want—all but the advantage of
ruining others and successfully defying the laws.

Under the present _régime_ labor contracts are useless; either party
can violate them with impunity. They offer redress only through a civil
suit for damages, and the employee commonly has nothing with which
to conduct an action or satisfy a judgment. The consequence is seen
in the incessant and increasing industrial disturbances, with their
ever-attendant crimes against property, life and liberty—disturbances
which, by driving capital to investments in which it needs employ no
labor, do more than all the other causes so glibly enumerated by every
newspaper and politician, though by no two alike, to bring about the
“hard times”—which in their turn cause further and worse disturbances.




                            THE GIFT O’ GAB


A book entitled _Forensic Eloquence_, by Mr. John Goss, appears to have
for purpose to teach the young idea how to spout, and that purpose,
I dare say, it will accomplish if something is not done to prevent.
I know nothing of the matter myself, a strong distaste for forensic
eloquence, or eloquence of any kind implying a man mounted on his
legs and doing all the talking, having averted me from its study. The
training of the youth of this country to utterance of themselves after
that fashion I should regard as a disaster of magnitude. So far as I
know it, forensic eloquence is the art of saying things in such a way
as to make them pass for more than they are worth. Employed in matters
of importance (and for other employment it were hardly worth acquiring)
it is mischievous because dishonest and misleading. In the public
service Truth toils best when not clad in cloth-of-gold and bedaubed
with fine lace. If eloquence does not beget action it is valueless; but
action which results from the passions, sentiments and emotions is
less likely to be wise than that which comes of a persuaded judgment.
For that reason I cannot help thinking that the influence of Bismarck
in German politics was more wholesome than is that of Mr. John Temple
Graves.

For eloquence _per se_—considered merely as an art of pleasing—I
entertain something of the respect evoked by success; for it always
pleases at least the speaker. It is to speech what an ornate style
is to writing—good and pleasant enough in its time and place and,
like pie-crust and the evening girl, destitute of any basis in common
sense. Forensic eloquence, on the contrary, has an all too sufficient
foundation in reason and the order of things: it promotes the ambition
of tricksters and advances the fortunes of rogues. For I take it that
the Ciceros, the Mirabeaus, the Burkes, the O’Connells, the Patrick
Henrys and the rest of them—pets of the text-bookers and scourges of
youth—belong in either the one category or the other, or in both.
Anyhow I find it impossible to think of them as high-minded men and
rightforth statesmen—with their actors’ tricks, their devices of the
countenance, inventions of gesture and other cunning expedients having
nothing to do with the matter in hand. Extinction of the orator I hold
to be the most beneficent possibility of evolution. If Mr. Goss has
done anything to retard that blessed time when the Bourke Cockrans
shall cease from troubling and the weary be at rest he is an enemy of
his race.

“What!” exclaims the thoughtless reader—I have but one—“are not the
great forensic speeches by the world’s famous orators good reading?
Considering them merely as literature do you not derive a high and
refining pleasure from them?” I do not: I find them turgid and tumid
no end. They are bad reading, though they may have been good hearing.
In order to enjoy them one must have in memory what, indeed, one is
seldom permitted to forget: that they were addressed to the ear; and
in imagination one must hold some shadowy simulacrum of the orator
himself, uttering his work. These conditions being fulfilled there
remains for application to the matter of the discourse too little
attention to get much good of it, and the total effect is confusion.
Literature by which the reader is compelled to bear in mind the
producer and the circumstances under which it was produced can be
spared.




                            NATURA BENIGNA


It is not always on remote islands peopled with pagans that great
disasters occur, as memory witnesseth. Nor are the forces of nature
inadequate to production of a fiercer throe than any that we have
known. The situation is this: we are tied by the feet to a fragile
shell imperfectly confining a force powerful enough under favoring
conditions, to burst it asunder and set the fragments wallowing and
grinding together in liquid flame, in the blind fury of a readjustment.
Nay, it needs no such stupendous cataclysm to de-people this uneasy
orb. Let but a square mile be blown out of the bottom of the sea, or a
great rift open there. Is it to be supposed that we would be unaffected
in the altered conditions generated by a contest between the ocean and
the earth’s molten core? These fatalities are not only possible but in
the highest degree probable. It is probable, indeed, that they have
occurred over and over again, effacing all the more highly organized
forms of life, and compelling the slow march of evolution to begin
anew. Slow? On the stage of Eternity the passing of races—the entrances
and exits of Life—are incidents in a brisk and lively drama, following
one another with confusing rapidity.

Mankind has not found it practicable to abandon and avoid those
places where the forces of nature have been most malign. The track
of the Western tornado is speedily repeopled. San Francisco is still
populous, despite its earthquake, Galveston despite its storm, and
even the courts of Lisbon are not kept by the lion and the lizard. In
the Peruvian village straight downward into whose streets the crew
of a United States warship once looked from the crest of a wave that
stranded her a half mile inland are heard the tinkle of the guitar and
the voices of children at play. There are people living at Herculaneum
and Pompeii. On the slopes about Catania the goatherd endures with
what courage he may the trembling of the ground beneath his feet as
old Enceladus again turns over on his other side. As the Hoang-Ho goes
back inside its banks after fertilizing its contiguity with hydrate of
Chinaman the living agriculturist follows the receding wave, sets up
his habitation beneath the broken embankment, and again the Valley of
the Gone Away blossoms as the rose, its people dicing with Death.

This matter can not be amended: the race exposes itself to peril
because it can do no otherwise. In all the world there is no city of
refuge—no temple in which to take sanctuary, clinging to the horns of
the altar—no “place apart” where, like hunted deer, we can hope to
elude the baying pack of Nature’s malevolences. The dead-line is drawn
at the gate of life: Man crosses it at birth. His advent is a challenge
to the entire pack—earthquake, storm, fire, flood, drought, heat, cold,
wild beasts, venomous reptiles, noxious insects, bacilli, spectacular
plague and velvet-footed household disease—all are fierce and tireless
in pursuit. Dodge, turn and double how he can, there’s no eluding them;
soon or late some of them have him by the throat and his spirit returns
to the God who gave it—and gave them.

We are told that this earth was made for our inhabiting. Our dearly
beloved brethren in the faith, our spiritual guides, philosophers and
friends of the pulpit, never tire of pointing out the goodness of
God in giving us so excellent a place to live in and commending the
admirable adaptation of all things to our needs.

What a fine world it is, to be sure—a darling little world, “so suited
to the needs of man.” A globe of liquid fire, straining within a shell
relatively no thicker than that of an egg—a shell constantly cracking
and in momentary danger of going all to pieces! Three-fourths of this
delectable field of human activity are covered with an element in which
we can not breathe, and which swallows us by myriads:

    With moldering bones the deep is white
    From the frozen zones to the tropics bright.

Of the other one-fourth more than one-half is uninhabitable by reason
of climate. On the remaining one-eighth we pass a comfortless and
precarious existence in disputed occupancy with countless ministers of
death and pain—pass it in fighting for it, tooth and nail, a hopeless
battle in which we are foredoomed to defeat. Everywhere death, terror,
lamentation and the laughter that is more terrible than tears—the fury
and despair of a race hanging on to life by the tips of its fingers!
And the prize for which we strive, “to have and to hold”—what is it?
A thing that is neither enjoyed while had, nor missed when lost. So
worthless it is, so unsatisfying, so inadequate to purpose, so false to
hope and at its best so brief, that for consolation and compensation we
set up fantastic faiths of an aftertime in a better world from which
no confirming whisper has ever reached us across the void. Heaven is a
prophecy uttered by the lips of despair, but Hell is an inference from
analogy.




                         INDUSTRIAL DISCONTENT


                                   I

The time seems to have come when the two antagonistic elements of
American society should, and could afford to, throw off their disguises
and frankly declare their principles and purposes. But what, it may
be asked, are the two antagonistic elements? Dividing lines parting
the population into two camps more or less hostile may be drawn
variously; for example, one may be run between the law-abiding and
the criminal class. But the elements to which reference is here made
are those immemorial and implacable foes which the slang of modern
economics roughly and loosely distinguishes as “capital” and “labor.”
A more accurate classification—as accurate a one as it is possible to
make—would designate them as those who do muscular labor and those who
do not. The distinction between rich and poor does not serve: to the
laborer, the rich man who works with his hands is not objectionable;
the poor man who does not, is. Consciously or unconsciously, and alike
by those whose necessities compel them to perform it and those whose
better fortune enables them to avoid it, manual labor is considered the
most insufferable of human pursuits. It is a pill that the Tolstois,
the “communities” and the “Knights” of Labor can not sugar-coat. We may
prate of the dignity of labor; emblazon its praise upon banners; set
apart a day on which to stop work and celebrate it; shout our teeth
loose in its glorification—and, God help our foolish souls to better
sense, we think we mean it all!

If labor is so good and great a thing let all be thankful, for all
can have as much of it as may be desired. The eight-hour law is not
mandatory to the laborer, nor does possession of leisure entail
idleness. It is permitted to the clerk, the shopman, the street
peddler—to all who live by the light employment of keeping the wolf
from the door without eating him—to abandon their ignoble callings,
seize the shovel, the axe and the sledge-hammer and lay about them
right sturdily, to the ample gratification of their desire. And those
who are engaged in more profitable vocations will find that with a part
of their incomes they can purchase the right to work as hard as they
like in even the dullest times.

Manual labor has nothing of dignity, nothing of beauty. It is a hard,
imperious and dispiriting necessity. He who is condemned to it feels
that it sets upon his brow the sign of intellectual inferiority. And
that brand of servitude never ceases to burn. In no country and at
no time has the laborer had a kindly feeling for the rest of us, for
everywhere and always he has fancied that he heard in our patronizing
platitudes the note of contempt. In his repression, in the denying him
the opportunity to avenge his real and imaginary wrongs, government
finds its main usefulness, activity and justification. Governments
are evolved out of the necessity of protecting from the hand-worker
the life and property of the brain-worker and the idler. The first
of the trio is the most dangerous because the most numerous and the
least content. Take from the science and the art of government, and
from its methods, whatever has had its origin in the consciousness of
his ill-will and the fear of his power and what have you left? A pure
republic—that is to say, no government.

I should like it understood that, if not absolutely devoid of political
prejudices, I at least believe myself to be; that except as to
result I think no more of one form of government than of another; and
that with reference to results all forms seem to me bad, but bad in
different degrees. If asked my opinion as to the results of our own,
I should point to Homestead, to Wardner, to Buffalo, to Coal Creek,
to the interminable tale of unpunished murders by individuals and by
mobs, to legislatures and courts unspeakably corrupt and executives
of criminal cowardice, to the prevalence and immunity of plundering
trusts and corporations and the multiplication of unhappy millionaires.
I should invite attention to the abuses of the pension roll, to the
similar and incredible extravagance of Republican and Democratic
“Houses”—a plague o’ them both! If addressing Democrats only, I should
mention the protective tariff; if Republicans, the hill-tribe clamor
for free coinage of silver. I should call to mind the existence and
prosperous activity of a thousand lying secret societies having
for their main object mitigation of republican simplicity by means
of pageantry, costumes grotesquely resembling those of kings and
courtiers, and titles of address and courtesy exalted enough to draw
laughter from an ox.

In contemplation of these and a hundred other “results,” no less
shameful in themselves than significant of the deeper shame beneath,
and prophetic of the blacker shame to come, I should say: “Behold the
outcome of hardly more than a century of government by the people!
Behold the superstructure whose foundations our forefathers laid upon
the unstable overgrowth of popular caprice surfacing the unplummeted
abysm of human depravity! Behold the reality behind our dream of the
efficacy of forms, the saving grace of principles, the magic of words!
We have believed in the wisdom of majorities and are fooled; trusted to
the good honor of numbers, and are betrayed. Lo, this is the beginning
of the end of the dream!”

Our no government has broken down at every point, and the two
irreconcilable elements whose suspensions of hostilities are mistaken
for peace are to try their hands at each other’s tempting display of
throats. There is no longer so much as a pretense of amity; apparently
there will not much longer be a pretense of regard for mercy and
morals. Already “industrial discontent” has attained to the magnitude
of war. It is important, then, that there be an understanding of
principles and purposes. As the combatants will not define their
position truthfully by words, let us see if it can be inferred from
the actions which are said to speak more plainly. If one of the men
“directing the destinies” of the labor organizations in this country,
could be enticed into the Palace of Truth and “examined” by a skilful
catechist he would indubitably say something like this:

“Our ultimate purpose is effacement of the distinction between employer
and employee, which is but a modification of that between master and
slave.

“We purpose that the laborer shall be chief owner of all the property
and profits of the enterprise in which he is engaged, and have through
his union a controlling voice in all its affairs.

“We purpose overthrowing the system under which a man can grow richer
by working with his head than with his hands, and preventing the man
who works with neither from having anything at all.

“In the attainment of these ends any means is to be judged, as to its
fitness for our use, with sole regard to its efficacy. We shall punish
the innocent for the sins of the guilty. We shall destroy property and
life under such circumstances and to such an extent as may seem to us
expedient. Falsehood, treachery, arson, assassination, all these we
look upon as legitimate if effective.

“The rules of ‘civilized warfare’ we shall not observe, but shall put
prisoners to death or torture them, as we please.

“We do not recognize a non-union man’s right to labor, nor to live. The
right to strike includes the right to strike _him_.”

Doubtless all that (and the half is not told) sounds to the unobservant
like a harsh exaggeration, an imaginative travesty of the principles
of labor organizations. It is not a travesty; it has no element of
exaggeration. Not in the last twenty-five years has a great strike or
lockout occurred in this country without supplying facts, notorious
and undisputed, upon which some of these confessions of faith are
founded. The war is practically a servile insurrection, and servile
insurrections are to-day what they ever were: the most cruel and
ferocious of all manifestations of human hate. Emancipation is rough
work; when he who would be free, himself strikes the blow, he does
not consider too curiously with what he strikes it nor upon whom it
falls. It will profit you to understand, my fine gentlemen with the
soft hands, the character of that which is confronting you. You are not
threatened with a bombardment of roses.

Let us look into the other camp, where General Hardhead is so engrossed
with his own greatness and power as not clearly to hear the shots on
his picket line. Suppose we hypnotize him and make him open his “shut
soul” to our searching. He will say something like this:

“In the first place, I claim the right to own and enclose for my own
use or disuse as much of the earth’s surface as I am desirous and able
to procure. I and my kind have made laws confirming us in the occupancy
of the entire habitable and arable area as fast as we can get it. To
the objection that this must eventually, here, as it has actually done
elsewhere, deprive the rest of you of places upon which legally to be
born, and exclude you, after surreptitious birth as trespassers, from
all chance to procure directly the fruits of the earth, I reply that
you can be born at sea and eat fish.

“I claim the right to induce you, by offer of employment, to colonize
yourselves and families about my factories, and then arbitrarily, by
withdrawing the employment, break up in a day the homes that you have
been years in acquiring where it is no longer possible for you to
procure work.

“In determining your rate of wages when I employ you, I claim the right
to make your necessities a factor in the problem, thus making your
misfortunes cumulative. By the law of supply and demand (God bless its
expounder!) the less you have and the less chance to get more, the more
I have the right to take from you in labor and the less I am bound to
give you in wages.

“I claim the right to maintain a private army to subdue you when you
rise.

“I claim the right to make you suffer, by creating for my advantage an
artificial scarcity of the necessaries of life.

“As to falsehood, treachery and the other military virtues with which
you threaten me, I shall go, in them, as far as you; but from arson and
assassination I recoil with horror. You see you have very little to
burn, and you are not more than half alive anyhow.”

That, I submit, is a pretty fair definition of the position of the
rich man who works for himself with his head. It seems worth while to
put it on record while he is extant to challenge or verify; for the
probability is that unless he mend his ways he will not much longer be
rich, nor work, nor have a head.


                                  II

In discussion of such murderous misdoings as those at Homestead and
Coeur d’Alene it is amusing to observe all the champions of law and
order gravely prating of “principles” and declaring with all the
solemnity of owls that these sacred things have been violated. On that
ground they have the argument all their own way. Indubitably there is
hardly a fundamental principle of law and morals that rioting laborers
have not footballed out of the field of consideration. Indubitably,
too, in doing so they have forfeited, as they must have expected to
forfeit, all the “moral support” for which they do not care. If there
were any question of their culpability this solemn insistence upon it
would lack something of the humor with which it is now invested, and
which saves the observer from death by dejection.

It is not only in discussions of the “labor situation” that we hear
this eternal babble of “principles.” It is never out of ear, and in
politics is especially clamant. Every success in an election is yawped
of as “a triumph of Republican (or Democratic) principles.” But neither
in politics nor in the quarrels of laborers and their employers have
principles a place as factors in the problem. Their use is to supply
to both combatants a vocabulary of accusation and appeal. All the
fierce talk of an antagonist’s violation of those eternal principles
upon which organized society is founded—and the rest of it—what is it
but the cry of the dog with the chewed ear? The dog that is chewing
foregoes the advantage of song.

Human contests engaging any number of contestants are struggles, not
of principles but of interests; and this is no less true of those
decided by the ballot than of those in which the franker bullet gives
judgment. Nor, but from considerations of prudence and expediency, will
either party hesitate to transgress the limits of the law and outrage
the sense of right. At Homestead and Wardner the laborers committed
robbery, pillage and murder, as striking workmen invariably do when
they dare, and as cowardly newspapers and politicians encourage them
in doing. But what would you have? They conceive it to be to their
interest to do these things. If capitalists conceived it to be to
theirs they too would do them. They do not do them, for their interest
lies in the supremacy of the law—under which they can suffer loss but
do not suffer hunger.

“But they do murder,” say the labor unions; “they bring in gangs of
armed mercenaries who shoot down honest workmen striving for their
rights.” This is the baldest nonsense, as they know very well who utter
it. The “Pinkerton men” are mere mercenaries and have no right place
in our system, but there have been no instances of their attacking
men not engaged in some unlawful prank. In the fight at Homestead the
workmen were actually intrenched on premises belonging to the other
side, where they had not the shadow of a legal right to be. American
working men are not fools; they know well enough when they are rogues.
But confession is not among the military virtues, and the question, Is
roguery expedient? is not so simple that it can be determined by asking
the first preacher that you meet.

It would be fair and fine all around if idle workmen would not riot
nor idle employers meet force with force, but invoke the impossible
sheriff. When the Dragon has been chained in the Bottomless Pit and
we are living under the rule of the saints things will be so ordered,
but in these evil times “revolutions are not made with rosewater,” and
this is a revolution. What is being revolutionized is the relation
between our old friends, Capital and Labor. The relation has already
been altered many times, doubtless; once, we know, within the period
covered by history, at least in the countries that we call civilized.
The relation was formerly a severely simple one—the capitalist owned
the laborer. Of the difficulty and the cost of abolishing that system
it is needless to speak at length. Through centuries of time and with
an appalling sacrifice of life the effort has gone on, a continuous
war characterized by monstrous infractions of law and morals, by
incalculable cruelty and crime. Our own generation has witnessed the
culminating triumphs of this revolution, and now, while still the
clank of the falling chains is echoing through the world, and still a
diminishing multitude of the world’s workers is in bondage under the
old system, the others, for whose liberation was all this “expense of
spirit in a waste of shame,” are sharply challenging the advantage
of the new. The new is, in truth, breaking down at every point.
The relation of employer and employee is giving but little better
satisfaction than that of master and slave. The difference between
the two is, indeed, not nearly so broad as we persuade ourselves to
think it. In many industries there is virtually no difference, and the
tendency is more and more to effacement of the difference where it
exists.


                                  III

The “labor question”—how to get half enough to eat by working for it—is
as old as appetite. It burned in Assyrian bosoms and tormented the soul
of the ancient Egyptian. In his day and country the medium of exchange
was grain. The banks—all except those of the Nile—were granaries, and
a check was an order for so much grain. Taxes were paid in grain,
salaries and bribes of state officials, soldiers’ wages, pensions,
nearly everything. The wages of laborers and other persons improvident
enough to work by the day were commonly paid in loaves of bread, as
is shown by an account-book of the steward of an “Abode of Rameses,”
which was possibly the Ramesseum at Thebes. Among the entries are such
as this: “Phamenoth the 8th day. Paid out the bread to the folk, 40
persons, each 2 loaves, making 80”—which shows, too, that the worthy
steward had a very pretty knack at arithmetic. When paid by the month,
and sometimes when paid by the day, the laborer receiving his wages in
corn got also a certain stated quantity of oil, which, however, was not
considered as money, but as rations. In a _papyrus_ preserved at Turin
one Hanefer imparts some directions to one Hora concerning certain
characteristic work of these old pyramid and temple builders: “Note
that the men be divided into three gangs, each gang under its captain:
six hundred men, making for each gang two hundred. Make them drag the
three great blocks which are before the gate of the temple of Maut, and
not for one single day let it be omitted to give out their portions
of corn and oil.... Also let oil be given to each driver of a pair of
oxen.”

Strikes and other “remedial measures” appear to have been as common
then as they are now. The unions, like those of Rome later, were
turbulent and insurgent.

In the twenty-ninth year of Rameses III a deputation of workmen
employed in the Theban necropolis met the superintendent and the
priests with a statement of their grievances. “Behold,” said the
spokesman, “we are brought to the verge of famine. We have neither
food, nor oil, nor clothing; we have no fish; we have no vegetables.
Already we have sent up a petition to our sovereign lord the Pharaoh,
praying that he will give us these things, and we are going to appeal
to the governor that we may have the wherewithal to live.” The response
to this complaint was one day’s rations of corn. This appears to have
been enough only while it lasted, for a few weeks later the workmen
were in open revolt. Thrice they broke out of their quarter, rioting
like mad and defying the police. Whether they were finally shot full of
arrows by the Pinkerton men of the period the record does not state.

“Organized discontent” in the laboring population is no new thing under
the sun, but in this century and country it has a new opportunity, and
Omniscience alone can forecast the outcome. Of one thing we may be very
sure, and the sooner the “capitalist” can persuade himself to discern
it the sooner will his eyes guard his neck: the relations between those
who are able to live without physical toil and those who are not are a
long way from final adjustment, but are about to undergo a profound
and essential alteration. That this is to come by peaceful evolution
is a hope which has nothing in history to sustain it. There are to
be bloody noses and cracked crowns, and the good persons who suffer
themselves to be shocked by such things in others will have a chance
to try them for themselves. The working man is not troubling himself
greatly about a just allotment of these blessings; so that the greater
part go to those who do not work with their hands, he will not consider
too curiously any one’s claim to exemption. It would perhaps better
harmonize with his sense of the fitness of things if the disadvantages
of the transitional period fell mostly to the share of his benefactors;
but almost any distribution that is sufficiently objectionable as a
whole to the other side will be acceptable to the distributor. In the
meantime it is to be wished that the moralizers and homilizers who
prate of “principles” may have a little damnation dealt out to them on
account. The head that is unable to entertain a philosophical view of
the situation would be notably advantaged by removal.


                                  IV

It is the immigration of “the oppressed of all nations” that has made
this country one of the most lawless on the face of the earth. The
change from good to bad took place within a generation—so quickly that
few of us have had the nimbleness of apprehension to “get it through
our heads.” We go on screaming our eagle in the self-same note of
triumph that we were taught at our father’s knees before the eagle
became a buzzard. America is still “an asylum for the oppressed;” and
still, as always and everywhere, the oppressed are unworthy of asylum,
avenging upon those who give them sanctuary the wrongs from which they
fled. The saddest thing about oppression is that it makes its victims
unfit for anything but to be oppressed—makes them dangerous alike to
their tyrants, their saviors and themselves. In the end they turn
out to be fairly energetic oppressors. The gentleman in the cesspool
invites compassion, certainly, but we may be very well assured,
before undertaking his relief without a pole, that his conception of
a prosperous life is merely to have his head above the surface with
another gentleman underfoot.

All languages are spoken in Hell, but chiefly those of southeastern
Europe. I do not say that a man fresh from the fields or the factories
of Europe—even of southeastern Europe—may not be a good man; I say only
that, as a matter of fact, he commonly is not. Let us not deny him his
grievance: he works—when he works—for men no better than himself. He is
required, in many instances, to take a part of his pay in “truck” at
prices of breathless altitude; and the pay itself is inadequate—hardly
more than double what he could get in his own country. Against all this
his cry is justified; but his rioting and assassination are not—not
even when directed against the property and persons of his employers.
When directed against the persons of other laborers, who choose to
exercise the fundamental human right to work for whom and for what
pay they please—when he denies this right, and with it the right of
organized society to exist, the necessity of shooting him is not only
apparent; it is conspicuous and imperative. That he and his kind, of
whatever nationality, are usually forgiven this just debt of nature and
suffered to execute, like rivers, their annual spring rise constitutes
the most valid of the many indictments that decent Americans by birth
or adoption find against the feeble form of government under which
their country groans. A nation that will not enforce its laws has no
claim to the respect and allegiance of its people.

This “citizen soldiery” business is a ghastly failure. The National
Guard is not worth the price of its uniforms. It is intended to be a
Greater Constabulary: its purpose is to suppress disorders with which
the civil authorities are too feeble to cope. How often does it do so?
Mostly it fraternizes with, or is cowed or beaten by, the savage mobs
which it is called upon to kill. In a country with a competent militia
and competent men to use it there would be crime enough and some to
spare, but no rioting. Rioting in a republic is without excuse. If we
have bad laws, or if our good laws are not enforced; if corporations
and capital are “tyrannous and strong;” if white men murder one another
and black men outrage white women, all this is our own fault—the fault
of those, among others, who seek redress or revenge by rioting and
lynching. The people of a republic have always as good government,
as good industrial conditions, as effective protection of person,
property and liberty, as they merit. They can have whatever they have
the honesty to desire and the sense to set about getting in the right
way. If as citizens of a republic we lack the virtue and intelligence
rightly to use the supreme power of the ballot so that it really

                  executes a freeman’s will
    As lightning does the will of God

we are unfit to be citizens of a republic, undeserving of peace,
prosperity and liberty, and have no right to rise against conditions
due to our moral and intellectual delinquency. There is a simple way,
Messieurs the Masses, to correct public evils: put wise and good men
into power. If you can not do that for you are not yourselves wise, or
will not for you are not yourselves good, you deserve to be oppressed
when you submit and shot when you rise.

To shoot a rioter or lyncher is a high kind of mercy. Suppose that
twenty-five years ago (the longer ago the better) two or three criminal
mobs in succession had been exterminated in that way, “as the law
provides.” Suppose that several scores of lives had been so taken,
including even those of “innocent bystanders”—though that kind of angel
does not abound in the vicinity of mobs. Suppose that no demagogue
judges had permitted officers in command of the “firing lines” to be
persecuted in the courts. Suppose that these events had writ themselves
large and red in the public memory. How many lives would this have
saved? Just as many as since have been taken and lost by rioters,
plus those that for a long time to come will be taken. Make your own
computation from your own data; I insist only that a rioter shot in
time saves the shooting of nine.

You know—you, the People—that all this is true. You know that in a
republic lawlessness is villainy entailing greater evils than it
cures—that it cures none. You know that even the “money power” is
powerful only through your own dishonesty and cowardice. You know that
nobody can bribe nor intimidate a legislator or voter who will not
take a bribe nor suffer himself to be intimidated—that there can be no
“money power” in a nation of honorable and courageous men. You know
that “bosses” and “machines” can not control you if you will not suffer
them to divide you into “parties” by playing upon your credulity and
senseless passions. You know all this, and know it all the time. Yet
not a man has the courage to stand forth and say to your faces what you
know in your hearts. Well, Messieurs the Masses, I don’t consider you
dangerous—not very. I have not observed that you want to tear anybody
to pieces for confessing your sins, even if at the same time he confess
his own. From a considerable experience in that sort of thing I judge
that you rather like it, and that he whom, secretly, you most despise
is he who echoes back to you what he is pleased to think you think,
and flatters you for gain. Anyhow, for some reason, I never hear you
speak well of newspaper men and politicians, though in the shadow of
your dis-esteem they get an occasional gleam of consolation by speaking
fairly well of one another.




                          WRITERS OF DIALECT


                                   I

With regard to dialect, the literary law, I take it, is about this: To
be allowable in either verse or prose it must be the mother-speech,
not only of the characters using it, but of the writer himself, who,
also, must be unable to write equally well in the larger tongue. This
was the case with Burns. Had he not been to the manner born how absurd
it would have been in him to write for the few who, naturally or by
study and with difficulty, can understand, instead of the many who read
and love good English! For my part, I am unable to read Burns with
satisfaction; and I am steadfast in the conviction that, excepting
among his countrymen, few of those who parrot his praise are better
able than I. Of another thing I am tolerably well assured, albeit it is
nothing to the purpose, namely, that Burns was more wit than poet. Upon
that proposition I am ready to do battle with all Caledonia, the pipers
alone excepted.

In humorous and satirical work like, for example, _The Biglow Papers_,
the law is relaxed, even suspended; and in serious prose fiction if the
exigencies of the narrative demand the introduction of an unlettered
hind whose speech would naturally be “racy of the soil” he must needs
come in and sport the tangles of his tongue. But he is to be got rid
of as promptly as possible—preferably by death. The making of an
entire story out of the lives and loves and lingoes of him and his
co-pithecans—that is effrontery. If it be urged in deprecation of this
my view that it is incompatible with relish of and respect for, Miss
Mary Wilkins Freeman, Miss Mary Murfree, Mr. Hamlin Garland and other
curled darlings of the circulating libraries, I candidly confess that
it is open to that objection. Of all such offenders against sweetness
and sense I have long cherished a comfortable conviction that it were
better if instead of writing things “racy of the soil” they would till
it.

The talk of intelligent persons in an unfamiliar language is a
legitimate literary “property,” but the talk of ignorant persons
misusing their own language has value and interest to nobody but other
ignorant persons and, possibly, the philologist. Literature, however,
is not intended for service in advancing the interests of philology.
The “general reader” whose interest in the characters of a tale is
quickened by their faulty speech may reasonably boast that the ties of
affinity connecting him with their intellectual condition have not been
strained by stretching: it is not overfar from where he is to where he
came from.

For several months the booksellers of the principal cities in this
country reported that the book _David Harum_ sold better than any
other. The sales went into the hundreds of thousands. It was reviewed
with acclamation by all the popular newspapers and magazines, stared
at you from every “centre table” and was flung into your ears whenever
you had the hardihood to enter a “parlor.” _David Harum_ is one of the
most candidly vulgar and stupid books ever proffered to the taste and
understanding of “the general reader.” It is of course largely written
in “dialect”—that is, in the loutly locution of an illiterate clown
making a trial at his mother-speech. Its “dialect” is so particularly
offensive that I suppose it to be a “transcript from nature:” persons
from whom it is possible would certainly not deny themselves the
happiness of speaking it; and the book may have some value to the
hardy philologer tracing backward the line of linguistic evolution to
the grunt of the primeval pig. To record the vocal riddances of the
ignorant may be one of the purposes of popular fiction, for anything
that I know, but at least its authors might, in the interest of art,
charge its horrible words with something that one unaffected by
softening of the brain might think to be thoughts; and perhaps they
would if that pandemic infirmity had not marked them for its own.

Male and female created He them. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman furnishes
forth her annual output of New-English antiques and detestables, filing
their teeth with their tongues, to the inexpressible uncomforting
of the auditory nerve. Mary Murfree, in perpetual session on the
Delectable Mountains, with a lapful of little clay-eaters and
snuff-rubbers, sweats great beads of blood to build the lofty crime
and endow it with enough galvanic vitality to stand alone while she
reaches for more mud for a new creation. There follows an interminable
line of imitators and imitatresses, causing two “dialects” to grow
where but one grew before, and rabbiting the literary preserve with a
multiplication of impossibles to speak them. And we forbid them not,
for of such is the kingdom of American letters.

Now, the “dialect” of which these persons are so enamored as to
fill whole volumes with it is not dialect; it is simply English as
spoken by none but uneducated persons and “recorded” by those to whom
ignorance is attractive and seems picturesque. To a sane intelligence
it is neither. Such an intelligence regards it with tolerance or
aversion—that depends on whether in life it is modest or presumptuous;
in letters, subordinate and incidental or dominant and essential. The
writers named—they and their literary co-populists, an innumerable
commonalty—love ignorance for its own sake. They seem to think, and
indubitably do think, that the lives and adventures, the virtues and
vices, joys and sorrows of the illiterate are more interesting than
those prone to grammar and ablution. To those fortuitous collocations
of peasant instincts and pithecan intuitions which these writers call
their understandings a sentiment is deemed to have an added value when
expressed in coarse and faulty speech. So they give us whole books of
it, coddle the resulting popularity as “fame” and prosper abundantly
by their sin.

There are dialects which in literary work are legitimate and
acceptable—to those who understand. That of Burns, for example,
is spoken by thousands of cultivated persons and was his own
mother-tongue. He erred in writing in it, as do all having command of
the better and more spacious speech that assures a wider attention,
but in so doing, he broke no laws of taste nor of sense. The matter
is simple enough. A true dialect is legitimate; the faulty speech of
an educated person in an unfamiliar tongue is legitimate, as is that
of a child; but the lame locution of the merely ignorant—the language
of the letterless—that is not dialect, and in any quantity in excess
of an amount that may be needful in fiction for _vraisemblance_, or
in verse for humor, is reasonless and offensive. As to poetry, our
literature contains no line of that in any such speech. The muse is not
so feasible; she does not submit herself to the embrace of a yokel—not
even to a Tennyson wearing the smock of a northern farmer.

In fiction the limits of dialect that is not dialect are plainly
defined, not by usage of the masters, for none than masters go more
often wrong—as none but they can afford to do—but by reason and the
sense of things. If in evolution of his plot the story teller find
it expedient to seek assistance from the “man o’ the people” as a
subordinate character, that worthy person must needs use the speech
of his tribe; as actors, having to wear something—a regrettable
necessity—may garb themselves in the costume of the time of the play,
however hideous it may be. But beyond this the teller of stories that
are not true is denied the right to go. To take for hero or heroine a
person unable to speak the language of the tale, whose conversations
are turbid swirls in the clear stream of the narrative, is an affront
justifiable only by a moral purpose presumably in equal need of
justification.


                                  II

  One reads Mr. Hay’s earlier poems with a thrill of pride. They open
  glimpses of unselfish courage and sublime devotion compared with
  which the prancing pageantry of Homer afflicts us like the cheap
  tinsel of the melodrama.

Such is the serious judgment of a reputable writer living in the
capital of the nation. It has a particular reference to “Little
Breeches” and “Jim Bludso,” which are not poems at all, but formless
blobs of coarse, rank sentimentality in the speech of snuff-rubbers and
clay-eaters—the so-called “dialect.” They are no better and could not
be worse than the “Hoosier” horrors of Riley and the “barrack-room”
afflictions of Kipling. I do not doubt that Hay’s dislike of them
and his wish that they might be forgotten incited him to literary
silence, whereby we are deprived of the poetry that he might have
given us had he remained in the field. There is not a true poet in
this country who has not experienced the deep disgust of observing
the superior “popularity” of his own worst work. That here and there
a few should give up in despair, taking to politics, to business, to
any coarse pursuit “understanded of the people,” is natural and not to
be condemned. These accept their dreadful fame as a punishment fitting
the crime, and promise atonement by resolving to write no more “dialect
poetry” while stealing is more honorable and indigence more interesting.

John Hay was a true poet; so is Riley; so is Kipling. In addition to
their panderings to peasants all have written well. At their best they
stir the blood and thrill the nerves of all who can be trusted to feel
because taught to think. Yet the late Charles A. Dana, who for years
successfully posed as a judge of poetry, had at last the indiscretion
to disclose himself by a specific utterance of his taste: he pronounced
Kipling’s “Gunga Din” one of the greatest of English poems! After that
there was no more to say about Dana, but Dana had not the reticence
to say it. Poetry, like any other art, is a matter of manner. If the
manner is that of a clown the matter will not redeem it, but, as the
dyer’s hand is “subdued to what it works in,” will itself be smirched
by its environment. English of the cornfield and the slum is suited to
certain kinds of humor and in moderation may itself be amusing, but it
has no place in serious or sentimental composition, either verse or
prose. Persons writing it confess their peasant understandings, and
those who like “dialect poems” like them because they do not know any
better than to like them, and that’s all there is to it.

The prose writer whom I have quoted probably does know better, but
prefers to march with the procession. Since he mentions Homer and
Tennyson (to affirm the greater glory of the author of “Little
Breeches” and “Jim Bludso”), perhaps he will permit himself to be asked
if he sees no “unselfish courage” in Hector?—no “sublime devotion” in
Penelope?—none in Enid?—nothing magnanimous in Arthur’s tenderness
to Guinevere? Does he think these noble qualities would shine with a
diviner light in the character of a corn-fed lout of the stables, a
whiskey-sodden riverman or a slattern of the slums?

The higher virtues are not a discovery of yesterday; they were known as
long ago as last week; and some of us who affect an acquaintance with
antiquity profess to have found traces of them in the poetry of an even
earlier period, before all men began to be born equal. In “the glory
that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome” there were singing
pigs, as there are to-day, and doubtless they had their special wallows
with mud of a particular brew; but they were not permitted to thrust
their untidy muzzles into the sweet water of the Pierian Spring, turn
it into slime and scatter plenty of it o’er a smiling land. It has
remained for the “fierce democracies” of the Brand-New World to impose
upon letters the law of the Dominion of Dirt.

The leader of the New Movement is indubitably Mr. James Whitcomb Riley,
and here is an example of his work. It is called “His Pa’s Romance,”
and these two passages are quoted with effusion by one of the “critics”:

    Elsie lisps so, she can’t say
    Her own name, ist any way
    She says ‘Elthy’—like they wuz
    Feathers on her words, an’ they
    Ist stuck on her tongue like fuzz.

How charming!—it affects the sensibilities like the ripple of a rill
of buttermilk falling into a pig-trough. “Ist,” by the way, means (to
an idiot) “just”—it is not easy to say why. Here followeth the other
inspiring passage:

                            One time
    Elsie start to say the rhyme
      “Thing a thong o’ thixpenth”—whee!
    I ist yell; an’ ma say I’m
      Unpolite as I can be.

If this is not poetry, what kind of an abysmal imbecility has it the
characteristic distinction to be? Mr. Riley turns off this stuff by
the linear mile, it is received with enthusiasm and reviewed with
acclamation by nearly every “literary critic” in America, and the
peasants whose taste they share and ignorance reflect are generous
enough to give him a living. Think not, observer from another land,
whose eye may chance to note these lines, that all these “dialect
poets” wear smocks and toil in the fields; it is the peculiar glory
of this great country that its peasants wear as good clothing, pursue
as high vocations and talk as glibly about art and literature as
anybody. Say not in your lack of light that the American gentleman has
boorish taste; say, rather, that the American boor has visible signs
of the prosperity of a gentleman, and to an alien eye is not readily
distinguishable from his betters.


                                  III

To put a good thought, a tender sentiment, a passionate emotion into
faulty words is to defile it. Does a precious stone acquire an added
value from a setting of brass? Is a rare and excellent wine better when
drunk out of a gourd?

In Herman Scheffauer’s first book, _Of Both Worlds_, are two little
poems of such naturalness, simplicity and beauty that I hardly know
of anything better in their kind. My purpose in quoting them here is,
partly, to bring them to the attention of those who may be unfamiliar
with Mr. Scheffauer’s work, but chiefly to suggest to the “dialect
poets” that they undertake to give them an added charm by rewriting
them in their own manner.


                             THE SLEEPERS

    The winds lie hushed in the hill
    And the waves upon the seas;
    The birds are mute and still,
    Deep in their dreaming trees;
    The earth lies dumb in night,
    And the stars in their degrees
    Sleep with the suns in space,
    With angels, with seraphs bright,
    In the light of God His face.

    Softly lie the heads
    Of the sleepers in their beds;
    But the sleepers in the ground—
    They alone sleep sweet and sound,
    They alone know rest profound.
    Fear not—soon a rest as deep
    Comes to thee—thou, too, shalt sleep.


                               MISERERE

    The last few prayers are done,
      The pall and shroud are spread;
    Seven tapers at thy feet
      And seven at thy head.

    Thy hands are crossed upon
      Thy bosom white where now
    Thy heart is stilled. O Death,
      How beautiful art thou!




                       CRIME AND ITS CORRECTIVES


                                   I

Sociologists have long been debating the theory that the impulse to
commit crime is a disease, and the ayes appear to have it—the disease.
It is gratifying and profitable to have the point settled: we now know
where we are and can take our course accordingly. It has for a number
of years been known to all but a few old physicians—survivals from
an exhausted _régime_—that all disease is caused by bacilli, which
worm themselves into the organs that secrete health and enjoin the
performance. The medical conservatives attempt to whittle away the
value and significance of this theory by affirming its inadequacy to
account for such disorders as broken heads, sunstroke, superfluous
toes, home-sickness, burns and strangulation on the gallows; but
against the testimony of so eminent bacteriologists as Drs. Koch and
Pasteur their carping is as that of the idle angler. The bacillus is
not to be denied; he has brought his bedding and is here to stay until
evicted. Doubtless we may confidently expect his eventual eviction by
a fresher and more ingenious disturber of the physiological peace, but
the bacillus is now chief among ten thousand evils and it is futile to
attempt to “read him out of the party.”

It follows that in order to deal intelligently with the criminal
impulse in our afflicted fellow-citizens we must discover the bacillus
of crime. To that end I think that the bodies of hanged assassins and
such persons of low degree as have been gathered to their fathers by
the cares of public office or consumed by the rust of inactivity in
prison should be handed over to the microscopists for examination. The
bore, too, offers a fine field for research, and might justly enough
be examined alive. Whether there is one general—or as the ancient
and honorable orders prefer to say, “grand”—bacillus, producing a
general (or grand) criminal impulse covering a multitude of sins, or
an infinite number of well-defined and several bacilli, each inciting
to a particular crime, is a question to the determination of which the
most distinguished microscopist might be proud to devote the powers
of his eye. If the latter is the case it will somewhat complicate the
treatment, for clearly the patient afflicted with chronic robbery
will require medicines different from those that might be efficacious
in a gentleman suffering from sporadic theft or a desire to represent
his district in the Assembly. But it is permitted to us to hope that
all crimes, like all arts, are essentially one; that murder, arson and
conservitude are but different symptoms of the same physical disorder,
at the back of which is a microbe vincible to a single medicament,
albeit this awaits discovery.

In the fascinating theory of the unity of crime we may not unreasonably
hope to find another evidence of the brotherhood of man, another
spiritual bond tending to draw the several classes of society more
closely together.


                                  II

By advocating painless removal of incurable idiots and lunatics,
incorrigible criminals and irreclaimable drunkards from this vale of
tears Dr. W. Duncan McKim provoked many a respectable but otherwise
blameless person to convulsions of great complexity and power. Yet
Dr. McKim seemed only to anticipate the trend of public opinion and
forecast its crystalization into law. It is rapidly becoming a
question, not of what we ought to do with these unfortunates, but what
we shall be compelled to do. Study of the statistics of the matter
shows that in all civilized countries mental and moral diseases are
increasing, proportionately to population, at a rate which in the
course of a few generations will make it impossible for the healthy to
care for the afflicted. To do so will require the entire revenue that
it is possible to raise by taxation—will absorb all the profits of
all the industries and professions and make deeper and deeper inroads
upon the capital from which they are derived. When it comes to that
there can be but one result. High and humanizing sentiments are angel
visitants, whom we entertain with pride and pleasure, but when the
entertainment becomes too costly to be borne we “speed the parting
guest” forthwith. And it may happen that in inviting to his vacant
place a less exacting successor—in replacing sentiment with reason—we
shall, in this instance, learn to our joy that we do but entertain
another angel. For nothing is so heavenly as Reason, nothing so sweet
and compassionate as her voice—

    Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose,
    But musical as is Apollo’s lute.

Is it cruel, is it heartless, is it barbarous to use something of the
same care in breeding men and women as in breeding horses and dogs?
Here is a determining question: Knowing yourself doomed to hopeless
idiocy, lunacy, crime or drunkenness, would you, or would you not,
welcome a painless death? Let us assume that you would. Upon what
ground, then, would you deny to another a boon that you would desire
for yourself?


                                  III

The good American is, as a rule, pretty hard upon roguery, but he
atones for his austerity by an amiable toleration of rogues. His
only requirement is that he must personally know the rogues. We all
“denounce” thieves loudly enough if we have not the honor of their
acquaintance. If we have, why, that is different—unless they have
the actual odor of the slum or the prison about them. We may know
them guilty, but we meet them, shake hands with them, drink with them
and, if they happen to be wealthy, or otherwise great, invite them
to our houses, and deem it an honor to frequent theirs. We do not
“approve their methods”—let that be understood; and thereby they are
sufficiently punished. The notion that a knave cares a pin what is
thought of his ways by one who is civil and friendly to himself appears
to have been invented by a humorist. On the vaudeville stage of Mars it
would probably have made his fortune.

I know men standing high in journalism who to-day will “expose”
and bitterly “denounce” a certain rascality and to-morrow will be
hobnobbing with the rascals whom they have named. I know legislators
of renown who habitually raise their voices against the dishonest
schemes of some “trust magnate,” and are habitually seen in familiar
conversation with him. Indubitably these be hypocrites all. Between the
head and the heart of a man of this objectionable kind is a wall of
adamant, and neither knows what the other is doing.

If social recognition were denied to rogues they would be fewer by
many. Some would only the more diligently cover their tracks along the
devious paths of unrighteousness, but others would do so much violence
to their consciences as to renounce the disadvantages of rascality for
those of an honest life. An unworthy person dreads nothing so much as
the withholding of an honest hand, the slow, inevitable stroke of an
ignoring eye.

We have rich rogues because we have “respectable” persons who are not
ashamed to take them by the hand, to be seen with them, to say that
they know them. In such it is treachery to censure them; to cry out
when robbed by them is to turn state’s evidence.

One may smile upon a rascal (most of us do so many times a day) if
one does not know him to be a rascal, and has not said he is; but
knowing him to be, or having said he is, to smile upon him is to be a
hypocrite—just a plain hypocrite or a sycophantic hypocrite, according
to the station in life of the rascal smiled upon. There are more
plain hypocrites than sycophantic ones, for there are more rascals
of no consequence than rich and distinguished ones, though they get
fewer smiles each. The American people will be plundered as long as
the American character is what it is; as long as it is tolerant of
successful knaves; as long as American ingenuity draws an imaginary
distinction between a man’s public character and his private—his
commercial and his personal. In brief, the American people will be
plundered as long as they deserve to be plundered. No human law can
stop it, none ought to stop it, for that would abrogate a higher and
more salutary law: “As ye sow ye shall reap.”

In a sermon by the Rev. Dr. Parkhurst is the passage following:

“The story of all our Lord’s dealings with sinners leaves upon the mind
the invariable impression, if only the story be read sympathetically
and earnestly, that He always felt kindly towards the transgressor,
but could have no tenderness of regard toward the transgression. There
is no safe and successful dealing with sin of any kind save as that
distinction is appreciated and made a continual factor in our feelings
and efforts.”

If Dr. Parkhurst will read his New Testament more understandingly he
will observe that Christ’s kindly feeling to transgressors was not
to be counted on by sinners of every kind, and it was not always in
evidence; for example, when he flogged the moneychangers out of the
temple. Nor is Dr. Parkhurst himself any too amiably disposed toward
the children of darkness. It was not by mild words and gentle means
that he hurled the mighty from their seats and exalted them of low
degree. Such revolutions as he set afoot are not made with spiritual
rosewater; there must be the contagion of a noble indignation fueled
with harder wood than abstractions. The people can not be mustered and
incited to action by the spectacle of a man fighting something that
does not fight back. It was men that Dr. Parkhurst was trouncing—not
their crimes—not Crime. He may fancy himself “dowered with the hate of
hate, the scorn of scorn,” but in reality he does not hate hate but
hates the hateful, and scorns, not scorn but the scornworthy.

It is singular with what tenacity this amusing though mischievous
superstition keeps its hold upon the human mind—this grave, _bona fide_
personification of abstractions and the funny delusion that it is
possible to hate or love them. Sin is not a thing; there is no existing
object corresponding to any of the mere counter-words that are properly
named abstract nouns. One can no more hate sin or love virtue than
one can hate a vacuum (which Nature—itself imaginary—was once by the
scientists of the period solemnly held to do) or love one of the three
dimensions. We may think that while loving a sinner we hate the sin,
but that is not so; if anything is hated it is other sinners of the
same kind, who are not quite so close to us.

The French have a saying to the effect that to know all is to pardon
all; and doubtless with an omniscient insight into the causes of
character we should find the field of moral responsibility pretty
thickly strewn with extenuating circumstances very suitable indeed
for consideration by a god who has had a hand in besetting “with
pitfall and with gin” the road we are to “wander in.” But I submit
that universal forgiveness would hardly do as a working principle.
Even those who are most apt and facile with the incident of the woman
taken in adultery commonly cherish a secret respect for the doctrine of
eternal damnation; and some of them are known to pin their faith to the
penal code of their state. Moreover, there is some reason to believe
that the sinning woman, being “taken,” was penitent—they usually are
when found out.

“But,” says Citizen Goodheart, who thinks with difficulty, “shall I
throw over my friend when he is ‘in trouble’?” Yes, when convinced that
he deserves to be in trouble; throw him all the harder and the further
because he is your friend. In addition to his particular offense
against society he has disgraced _you_. If there are to be lenity and
charity let them go to the criminal who has foreborne to involve you
in his shame. It were a pretty state of affairs if an undetected scamp,
fearing exposure, could make you a co-defendant by so easy a precaution
as securing your acquaintance and regard. Don’t throw the first stone,
of course, but when convinced that your friend is a proper target,
heave away with a right hearty good-will, and let the stone be of
serviceable weight and delivered with a good aim.

I care nothing for principles—they are lumber and rubbish. What
concerns our happiness and welfare, as affectable by our fellowmen, is
conduct. “Principles, not men,” is a rogue’s cry; rascality’s counsel
to stupidity, the noise of the duper duping on his dupe. He shouts
it most loudly and with the keenest sense of its advantage who most
desires inattention to his own conduct, or to that forecast of it,
his character. As to sin, that has an abundance of expounders and is
already universally known to be wicked. What more can be said against
it, and why go on repeating that? The thing is a trifle wordworn,
whereas the sinner cometh up as a flower every day, fresh, ingenuous
and inviting. Sin is not at all dangerous to society; what does all the
mischief is the sinner. Crime has no arms to thrust into the public
treasury and the private; no hands with which to cut a throat; no
tongue to wreck a reputation withal. I would no more attack it than I
would attack an isosceles triangle, or Hume’s “phantasm floating in a
void.” My chosen enemy must be something that has a skin for my switch,
a head for my cudgel—something that can smart and ache. I have no
quarrel with abstractions; so far as I know they are all good citizens.




                 ON KNOWING ONE’S BUSINESS—AN INSTANCE


No series of connected and consecutive military events has been so
closely analyzed by military students as those marking the first
Italian campaign of Napoleon Bonaparte. All expounders of the military
art who have had the good fortune to live since its principles were
so wonderfully illustrated by that campaign have delighted to use its
incidents in exposition. Every student has early learned that he could
not afford to neglect it. Even to the “general reader,” unacquainted
with the mysteries of strategy and tactics, who in the darkness of his
ignorance cherishes the error that war is fortuitous fighting loosely
directed to results by physical courage and the will of God, the
history of these brilliant operations can hardly fail, when lucidly
related, to prove interesting and charming beyond the power of fiction.
As related by the mere “historian,” with his port-fire and blood-fumes
to emotionalize the situation, it is doubtless as dull reading as
the literature of the heart generally. What, in brief, _was_ this
remarkable campaign?

In the month of March, 1796, Bonaparte, a boy of twenty-six, untried in
independent command, was intrusted with an army of some forty thousand
badly clad and inadequately supplied men, with which to invade Italy.
He was opposed by Beaulieu, with a well equipped force, Austrians and
Sardinians, of fifty thousand. The Alps and Apennines were between.
Bonaparte began active operations on the eleventh day of April, 1796.
On the seventh day of April, 1797, at Leoben, near Vienna, he received
the Austrian Emperor’s emissaries, who came to sue for peace, and the
war was at an end. During this period of one year less four days,
with forces averaging forty-six thousand opposed to forces averaging
sixty-one thousand he had in fifteen pitched battles routed one
Sardinian army and the six Austrian armies successively sent to drive
him out of Italy, only to be driven out themselves. His losses during
the campaign in killed, wounded and prisoners were about equal to the
numbers of his army at the outset. The losses that he inflicted upon
the enemy were no fewer than one hundred and twenty thousand men and
vast quantities of _material_.

How were these astonishing feats of arms performed? Not by the superior
courage of his soldiers, for the Austrians then, as they are now,
were a brave and warlike people. Not by the “will of God,” whose
agency is to the military eye nowhere discernible, and whose political
predilections are still unknown. Nor were these admirable results due
to “luck,” the “favors of fortune,” the “magic” of genius. They were
brought about by the very commonplace method of knowing his business
thoroughly and applying the knowledge. There is nothing miraculous in
that. It is an open secret which Napoleon himself has explained:

“In war nothing is accomplished but by calculation. During a campaign,
whatever is not profoundly considered in all its details is without
result. Every enterprise should be systematically conducted; chance
alone can not bring success.”

I should be sorry to be understood as affirming the possibility of such
military success as Napoleon’s to the mere student of military art,
devoid of Napoleon’s genius. On the other hand, Napoleon’s genius would
have been futile without his mastery of the art. Military art is no
exception to art in general; for eminent achievement is required great
natural aptitude, _plus_ a comprehensive and minute knowledge of the
business in hand. Given these two requisites in the commander, and the
army is multiplied by two. For many generations, doubtless, the French
will boast of Montenotte, Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, and Wagram; but
every intelligent soldier’s view is that on all these historic fields
there was but one victor. To quote his words again:

“It was not the Roman army that conquered Gaul, but Cæsar; it was not
the Carthaginian army which, at the gates of Rome, made the Eternal
City tremble, but Hannibal; it was not the Macedonian army that marched
as far as the Indus, but Alexander; it was not the Prussian army that
defended Prussia for seven years against the three most powerful states
of Europe, but Frederick.”

The contrary view—the theory of the insignificance of the individual—so
persistently urged a generation ago by Mill, and so eagerly accepted by
the young philosophers of his period, derives no support from military
history. Tolstoi, it is true, is in full, if somewhat belated,
advocacy of it, and professes to find confirmation in the events that
he relates in his military novels. And it must be confessed that, as
he relates them, they indubitably do seem to justify his view that
leaders do not truly lead. With the splendid irresponsibility of the
fictionist, he shows that the French people having incurred, somehow,
a blind, reasonless impulse to go gadding about Europe, caught up
Napoleon, as a stream bursting out of its banks might catch up a
sheep or a log, and pushed him along before them. A careful study of
the progress through Italy will, I think, show that at least he did
something toward reducing the friction incident to the movement.

Any one really believing in unimportance of the individual must be
prepared to affirm that a chance bullet finding a lodgment in the brain
of the commander of the Army of Italy at Montenotte would have made but
little difference in the conduct of the campaign and the later history
of Europe; and any one prepared to affirm this may justly boast himself
impregnable to argument, through induration of the understanding.

The history of the military operations that we have been considering
has never been better told than in a book entitled _Napoleon
Bonaparte’s First Campaign_—it should be remembered that he was then
simply General Bonaparte. The author of the book is Lieutenant Herbert
H. Sargent,[1] of the Army. Nothing could well exceed the clarity with
which the author has told his story; and nothing that I have seen
in military literature is more admirable than his professional but
untechnical comments on its successive stages. Everything is made so
clear that the benighted civilian of the anti-West Point sort, the
fearfully and wonderfully bepistoled swashbuckler of the frontier, the
gilded whiskey-soldier of the National Guard and even the self-taught
strategist of the press can comprehend it all without a special
revelation from Heaven. Those conscious of a desire, however vague and
formless, to acquire such a knowledge of military science and art as
will give them a keener interest in “war news” that is not “bluggy”
than they ever had in that which reeks with gore and “multiplies the
slain” will find in Lieutenant Sargent a guide, philosopher and friend
for whom they cannot be sufficiently thankful to the God that bestowed
him.

1895.

[1] After distinguished service as colonel of volunteers in the Cuban
    and Philippine wars, this great soldier is now retired as major in
    the regular army. Before retirement he published two other books,
    _The Campaign of Marengo_ and _The Campaign of Santiago de Cuba_,
    both characterized by all the qualities so conspicuous in his
    first book—qualities that are themselves a fine result of “knowing
    one’s business.”

    1912.




                           A TRADE OF REFUGE


There is no security—even the life of a steeple-climber is held by a
precarious tenure. One cannot always be clinging to a spire in “the
intense inane;” one must sometimes descend to “this place of wrath
and tears” in order to eat and write poetry for the newspapers; and
then the manifold perils besetting a surface existence begin their
deadly work, and man that is born of woman is of few days and full of
surprises.

Once upon a time, ’tis said, a foolhardy steeple-jack took his life
in his hands and ventured down among us. Doubtless he wanted but
little here below; certainly he did not want that little long, for he
made acquaintance with a trolley car and passed away forthwith. If
in the moment of disaster “beneath thy wheels, O Juggernath,” it was
granted to him to hear the comforting “I told you so” of some fellow
craftsman in midheaven, how acutely he must have sympathized with us
unfortunates condemned to dwell in the midst of alarms from the cradle
to the grave!

Our hard lot must have touched him nearly; participation in its
disadvantages must have brought it home to his business and bosom with
a more compelling compassion than that of the tempest-tossed mariner
who prays, “God help the poor devils on shore such a night as this!”
In the consciousness of that sympathy—transient though it necessarily
had to be—let us take heart and hope, to confront the perils of our
environment. Let us walk our appointed ways among them with no less
circumspection, but a superior resignation.

We cannot all be steeple-climbers. We cannot all go down to the sea in
ships and know

    The exulting sense, the pulse’s maddening play,
    That thrill the wanderer on the trackless way

as he reflects on his immunity from the insistent vehicle, the stealthy
sewer gas, the subterranean steam boiler, the Conqueror Dog and all the
other maleficent agencies unknown to a life on the ocean wave.

Some there must be to till the soil (mostly malarial), some to hold
the offices, some to feed the dogs, some to tear up the streets,
and many—oh, so many!—to write poetry for the magazines. Ships must
be built for the happy, happy mariner, and steeples to exalt the
prudent climber above the perilous region of industrial discontent.
The timorous aviator, in pursuit of longevity must be supplied
with his apparatus. By rustic and urban industries soldiers must
be maintained in the security of service _in partibus infidelium_
where the devastating open coalhole comes not to execute its prank,
and missionaries outfitted to grasp the longevital advantages of
labor among the cannibals. In the formation of trusts to bring the
producer and consumer together in the poor-house we must toil in
the pestilential atmosphere of Wall Street. The necessity of making
“elevators” to dispose of the surplus population in our congested
cities is imperious.

Most of these needful activities have to be conducted on the surface
of the land, amidst the horrors of peace and the deadly devices of an
advanced civilization. It requires the greater and more courageous
part of the population to carry them on; only a few shrinking souls
can afford to seek safety on the steeples. But the lives of these
have a peculiar value to the millions engaged in the perilous trades
that go on below them. They are survivals of the time that was,
forerunners of the time to be. They serve to remind us of that blessed
barbarism—that golden age when our sylvan forefather gave himself a
chance to live out half his life; and in this dark period of transition
they foreshadow that brighter and better time when the land will be
studded with abundant steeples of refuge for all excepting condemned
criminals and enough ruffian officers of the law to operate, for their
extinction, a few of the more deadly appliances and modern conveniences
of civilization.

The steeple-jack is a precious possession—let him not be cast out. In
order that he may not be compelled to incur the perils of the street,
let him be clothed and fed with a kite.




                           THE DEATH PENALTY


                                   I

“Down with the gallows!” is a cry not unfamiliar in America. There is
always a movement afoot to make odious the just principle of “a life
for a life”—to represent it as “a relic of barbarism,” “a usurpation
of the divine authority,” and the rest of it. The law making murder
punishable by death is as purely a measure of self-defense as is the
display of a pistol to one diligently endeavoring to kill without
provocation. It is in precisely the same sense an admonition, a warning
to abstain from crime. Society says by that law: “If you kill one of us
you die,” just as by display of the pistol the individual whose life
is attacked says: “Desist or be shot.” To be effective the warning in
either case must be more than an idle threat. Even the most unearthly
reasoner among the anti-hanging unfortunates would hardly expect to
frighten away an assassin who knew the pistol to be unloaded. Of
course these queer illogicians can not be made to understand that
their position commits them to absolute non-resistance to any kind
of aggression; and that is fortunate for the rest of us, for if as
Christians they frankly and consistently took that ground we should be
under the miserable necessity of respecting them.

We have good reason to hold that the horrible prevalence of murder in
this country is due to the fact that we do not execute our laws—that
the death penalty is threatened but not inflicted—that the pistol
is not loaded. In civilized countries where there is enough respect
for the laws to administer them, there is enough to obey them. While
man still has as much of the ancestral brute as his skin can hold
without cracking we shall have thieves and demagogues and anarchists
and assassins and persons with a private system of lexicography who
define murder as disease and hanging as murder, but in all this welter
of crime and stupidity are areas where human life is comparatively
secure against the human hand. It is at least a significant coincidence
that in these the death penalty for murder is fairly well enforced by
judges who do not derive any part of their authority from those for
whose restraint and punishment they hold it. Against the life of one
guiltless person the lives of ten thousand murderers count for nothing;
their hanging is a public good, without reference to the crimes that
disclose their deserts. If we could discover them by other signs than
their bloody deeds they should be hanged anyhow. Unfortunately we
must have a death as evidence. The scientist who will tell us how to
recognize the potential assassin, and persuade us to kill him, will be
the greatest benefactor of his century.

What would these enemies of the gibbet have?—these lineal descendants
of the drunken mobs that hooted the hangman at Tyburn Tree; this
progeny of criminals, which has so defiled with the mud of its
animosity the noble office of public executioner that even “in this
enlightened age” he shirks his high duty, entrusting it to a hidden
or unnamed subordinate? If murder is unjust of what importance is it
whether its punishment by death be just or not?—nobody needs to incur
it. Men are not drafted for the death penalty; they volunteer. “Then it
is not deterrent,” mutters the gentleman whose rude forefather hooted
the hangman. Well, as to that, the law which is to accomplish more
than a part of its purpose must be awaited with great patience. Every
murder proves that hanging is not altogether deterrent; every hanging,
that it is somewhat deterrent—it deters the person hanged. A man’s
first murder is his crime, his second is ours.

The socialists, it seems, believe with Alphonse Karr, in the expediency
of abolishing the death penalty; but apparently they do not hold, with
him, that the assassins should begin. They want the state to begin,
believing that the magnanimous example will effect a change of heart
in those about to murder. This, I take it, is the meaning of their
assertion that death penalties have not the deterring influence that
imprisonment for life carries. In this they obviously err: death
deters at least the person who suffers it—he commits no more murder;
whereas the assassin who is imprisoned for life and immune from
further punishment may with impunity kill his keeper or whomsoever he
may be able to get at. Even as matters now are, incessant vigilance
is required to prevent convicts in prison from murdering their
attendants and one another. How would it be if the “life-termer” were
assured against any additional inconvenience for braining a guard
occasionally, or strangling a chaplain now and then? A penitentiary may
be described as a place of punishment and reward; and under the system
proposed, the difference in desirableness between a sentence and an
appointment would be virtually effaced. To overcome this objection a
life sentence would have to mean solitary confinement, and that means
insanity. Is that what these gentlemen propose to substitute for death?

The death penalty, say these amiables and futilitarians, creates
blood-thirstiness in the unthinking masses and defeats its own ends—is
itself a cause of murder, not a check. These gentlemen are themselves
of “the unthinking masses”—they do not know how to think. Let them try
to trace and lucidly expound the chain of motives lying between the
knowledge that a murderer has been hanged and the wish to commit a
murder. How, precisely, does the one beget the other? By what unearthly
process of reasoning does a man turning away from the gallows persuade
himself that it is expedient to incur the danger of hanging? Let us
have pointed out to us the several steps in that remarkable mental
progress. Obviously, the thing is absurd; one might as reasonably say
that contemplation of a pitted face will make a man wish to go and
catch smallpox, or the spectacle of an amputated limb on the scrap-heap
of a hospital tempt him to cut off his arm or renounce his leg.

“An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” say the opponents of
the death penalty, “is not justice; it is revenge and unworthy of
a Christian civilization.” It is exact justice: nobody can think
of anything more accurately just than such punishments would be,
whatever the motive in awarding them. Unfortunately such a system is
not practicable, but he who denies its justice must deny also the
justice of a bushel of corn for a bushel of corn, a dollar for a
dollar, service for service. We can not undertake by such clumsy means
as laws and courts to do to the criminal exactly what he has done to
his victim, but to demand a life for a life is simple, practicable,
expedient and (therefore) right.

“Taking the life of a murderer does not restore the life he took,
therefore it is a most illogical punishment. Two wrongs do not make a
right.”

Here’s richness! Hanging an assassin is illogical because it does not
restore the life of his victim; incarceration is logical; therefore,
incarceration does—_quod erat demonstrandum_.

Two wrongs certainly do not make a right, but the veritable thing in
dispute is whether taking the life of a life-taker is a wrong. So
naked and unashamed an example of _petitio principii_ would disgrace a
debater in a pinafore. And these wonder-mongers have the effrontery to
babble of “logic”! Why, if one of them were to meet a syllogism in a
lonely road he would run away in a hundred and fifty directions as hard
as ever he could hook it. One is almost ashamed to dispute with such
intellectual cloutlings.

Whatever an individual may rightly do to protect himself society may
rightly do to protect him, for he is a part of itself. If he may
rightly take life in defending himself society may rightly take life in
defending him. If society may rightly take life in defending him it may
rightly threaten to take it. Having rightly and mercifully threatened
to take it, it not only rightly may take it, but expediently must.


                                  II

The law of a life for a life does not altogether prevent murder. No
law can altogether prevent any form of crime, nor is it desirable
that it should. Doubtless God could so have created us that our sense
of right and justice could have existed without contemplation of
injustice and wrong; as doubtless he could so have created us that
we could have felt compassion without a knowledge of suffering; but
he did not. Constituted as we are, we can know good only by contrast
with evil. Our sense of sin is what our virtues feed upon; in the thin
air of universal morality the altar-fires of honor and the beacons of
conscience could not be kept alight. A community without crime would be
a community without warm and elevated sentiments—without the sense of
justice, without generosity, without courage, without mercy, without
magnanimity—a community of small, smug souls, uninteresting to God and
uncoveted by the Devil. We can have, and do have, too much of crime,
no doubt; what the wholesome proportion is none can say. Just now we
are running a good deal to murder, but he who can gravely attribute
that phenomenon, or any part of it, to infliction of the death penalty,
instead of to virtual immunity from any penalty at all, is justly
entitled to the innocent satisfaction that comes of being a simpleton.


                                  III

The New Woman is against the death penalty, naturally, for she is
hot and hardy in the conviction that whatever is is wrong. She has
visited this world in order to straighten things about a bit, and is
in distress lest the number of things be insufficient to her need.
The matter is important variously; not least so in its relation to
the new heaven and the new earth that are to be the outcome of woman
suffrage. There can be no doubt that the vast majority of women have
sentimental objections to the death penalty that quite outweigh such
practical considerations in its favor as they can be persuaded to
comprehend. Aided by the minority of men afflicted by the same mental
malady, they will indubitably effect its abolition in the first lustrum
of their political “equality.” The New Woman will scarcely feel the
seat of power warm beneath her before giving to the assassin’s “unhand
me, villain!” the authority of law. So we shall make again the old
experiment, discredited by a thousand failures, of preventing crime by
tenderness to caught criminals. And the criminal uncaught will treat us
to a quantity and quality of crime notably augmented by the Christian
spirit of the new _régime_.


                                  IV

As to painless executions, the simple and practical way to make them
both just and expedient is the adoption by murderers of a system of
painless assassinations. Until this is done there seems to be no
call to renounce the wholesome discomfort of the style of executions
endeared to us by memories and associations of the tenderest character.
There is, I fancy, a shaping notion in the observant mind that the
penologists and their allies have gone about as far as they can safely
be permitted to go in the direction of a softer suasion of the criminal
nature toward good behavior. The modern prison has become a rather more
comfortable habitation than the dangerous classes are accustomed to at
home. Modern prison life has in their eyes something of the charm and
glamor of an ideal existence, like that in the Happy Valley from which
Rasselas had the folly to escape. Whatever advantages to the public may
be secured by abating the rigors of imprisonment and inconveniences
incident to execution, there is this objection: it makes them less
deterrent. Let the penologers and philanthropers have their way and
even hanging might be made so pleasant and withal so interesting a
social distinction that it would deter nobody but the person hanged.
Adopt the euthanasian method of electricity, asphyxia by smothering in
rose-leaves, or slow poisoning with rich food, and the death penalty
may come to be regarded as the object of a noble ambition to the _bon
vivant_, and the rising young suicide may go and kill somebody else
instead of himself, in order to receive from the public executioner a
happier dispatch than his own ’prentice hand can assure him.

But the advocates of agreeable pains and penalties tell us that in the
darker ages, when cruel and degrading punishment was the rule, and was
freely inflicted for every light infraction of the law, crime was more
common than it is now; and in this they appear to be right. But one and
all, they overlook a fact equally obvious and vastly significant: that
the intellectual, moral and social condition of the masses was very
low. Crime was more common because ignorance was more common, poverty
was more common, sins of authority, and therefore hatred of authority,
were more common. The world of even a century ago was a different world
from the world of to-day, and a vastly more uncomfortable one. The
popular adage to the contrary notwithstanding, human nature was not
by a long cut the same then that it is now. In the very ancient time
of that early English king, George III, when women were burned at the
stake in public for various offenses and men were hanged for “coining”
and children for theft, and in the still remoter period, (_circa_ 1530)
when poisoners were boiled in several waters, divers sorts of criminals
were disemboweled and some are thought to have undergone the _peine
forte et dure_ of cold-pressing (an infliction which the pen of Hugo
has since made popular—in literature),—in these wicked old days crime
flourished, not because of the law’s severity, but in spite of it. It
is possible that our lawmaking ancestors understood the situation as it
then was a trifle better than we can understand it on the hither side
of this gulf of years, and that they were not the reasonless barbarians
that we think them to have been. And if they were, what must have been
the unreason and barbarity of the criminal element with which they had
to deal?

I am far from thinking that severity of punishment can have the same
restraining effect as probability of some punishment being inflicted;
but if mildness of penalty is to be superadded to difficulty of
conviction, and both are to be mounted upon laxity in detection, the
pile will be complete indeed. There is a peculiar fitness, perhaps,
in the fact that all these pleas for comfortable punishment should
be urged at a time when there appears to be a general disposition
to inflict no punishment at all. There are, however, still a few
old-fashioned persons who hold it obvious that one who is ambitious to
break the laws of his country will not with so light a heart and so
airy an indifference incur the peril of a harsh penalty as he will the
chance of one more nearly resembling that which he would himself select.


                                   V

After lying for more than a century dead I was revived, dowered with a
new body, and restored to society. The first thing of interest that I
observed was an enormous building, covering a square mile of ground.
It was surrounded on all sides by a high, strong wall of hewn stone
upon which armed sentinels paced to and fro. In one face of the wall
was a single gate of massive iron, strongly guarded. While admiring the
cyclopean architecture of the “reverend pile” I was accosted by a man
in uniform, evidently the warden, with a cheerful salutation.

“Colonel,” I said, “pray tell me what is this building.”

“This,” said he, “is the new state penitentiary. It is one of twelve,
all alike.”

“You surprise me,” I replied. “Surely the criminal element must have
increased enormously.”

“Yes, indeed,” he assented; “under the Reform _régime_, which began
in your day, crime became so powerful, bold and fierce that arrests
were no longer possible and the prisons then in existence were soon
overcrowded. The state was compelled to erect others of greater
capacity.”

“But, Colonel,” I protested, “if the criminals were too bold and
powerful to be taken into custody, of what use are the prisons? And how
are they crowded?”

He fixed upon me a look that I could not fail to interpret as
expressing a doubt of my sanity. “What!” he said, “is it possible that
the modern penology is unknown to you? Do you suppose we practise the
antiquated and ineffective method of shutting up the rascals? Sir, the
growth of the criminal element has, as I said, compelled the erection
of more and larger prisons. We have enough to hold comfortably all the
honest men and women of the state. Within these protecting walls they
carry on all the necessary vocations of life excepting commerce. That
is necessarily in the hands of the rogues, as before.”

“Venerated representative of Reform,” I exclaimed, wringing his hand
with effusion, “you are Knowledge, you are History, you are the Higher
Education! We must talk further. Come, let us enter this benign
edifice; you shall show me your dominion and instruct me in the rules.
You shall propose me as an inmate.”

I walked rapidly to the gate. When challenged by the sentinel, I turned
to summon my instructor. He was nowhere visible. I turned again to look
at the prison. Nothing was there: desolate and forbidding, as about the
broken statue of Ozymandias,

The lone and level sands stretched far away.




                               RELIGION


                                   I

This is my ultimate and determining test of right—“What, in the
circumstances, would Jesus have done?”—the Jesus of the New Testament,
not the Jesus of the commentators, theologians, priests and parsons.
The test is perhaps not infallible, but it is exceedingly simple
and gives as good practical results as any. I am not a Christian,
but so far as I know, the best and truest and sweetest character in
literature, next to Buddha, is Jesus Christ. He taught nothing new
in goodness, for all goodness was ages old before he came; but with
an almost infallible intuition he applied to life and conduct the
entire law of righteousness. He was a moral lightning calculator: to
his luminous intelligence the statement of the problem carried the
solution—he could not hesitate, he seldom erred. That upon his deeds
and words was founded a religion which in a debased form persists
and even spreads to this day is attestation of his marvelous gift:
adoration is merely a primitive form of approval.

It seems a pity that this wonderful man had not a longer life under
more complex conditions—conditions more nearly resembling those of
the modern world and of the future. One would like to be able to see,
through the eyes of his biographers, his genius applied to more and
other difficult questions. Yet one can hardly go wrong in inference
of his thought and act. In many of the complexities and entanglements
of modern affairs it is no easy matter to find an answer off-hand to
the question, “What is it right to do?” But put it in another way:
“What would Christ have done?” and lo! there is light! Doubt spreads
her bat-like wings and is away; the sun of truth springs into the sky,
splendoring the path of right and masking that of wrong with a deeper
shade.


                                  II

Gentlemen of the secular press dealt with the Rev. Mr. Sheldon not
altogether fairly. To some very relevant considerations they gave no
weight. It was not fair, for example, to say, as the distinguished
editor of the _North American Review_ did, that in conducting a daily
newspaper for a week as he conceived that Christ would have conducted
it, Mr. Sheldon acted the part of “a notoriety seeking mountebank.” It
seldom is fair to go into the question of motive, for that is something
upon which one has the least light, even when the motive is one’s own.
The motives that dominate us we think simple and obvious; they are in
most instances exceedingly complex and obscure. Complacently surveying
the wreck and ruin that he has wrought, even that great anarch, the
well-meaning person, can not have entire assurance that he meant as
well as the disastrous results appear to him to show.

The trouble with the editor of the _Review_ was inability to put
himself in another’s place if that happened to be at any considerable
distance from his own place. He made no allowance for the difference
in the point of view—for the difference, that is, between his mind
and the mind of Mr. Sheldon. If the editor had undertaken to conduct
a newspaper as Christ would have done he would indeed have been “a
notoriety seeking mountebank,” or some similarly unenviable thing, for
only a selfish purpose could persuade him to an obviously resultless
work. But Mr. Sheldon was different—his was the religious mind—a mind
having faith in an “overruling” Providence who can, and frequently
does, interfere with the orderly relation of cause and effect,
accomplishing an end by means otherwise inadequate to its production.
Believing himself a faithful servant of that Power, and asking daily
for His interposition in promotion of a highly moral purpose, why
should he not have expected His favor to the enterprise? To expect
this was, in Mr. Sheldon, natural, reasonable, wise; his folly lay in
believing in conditions making it expectable. A person convinced that
the law of gravitation is suspended is no fool for walking into a bog.
His critic may understand, but Mr. Sheldon could not understand, that
Jesus Christ would not edit a newspaper at all.

The religious mind, it should be understood, is not logical. It may
acquire, as Whateley’s did, a certain familiarity with the syllogism
as an abstraction, but of the syllogism’s practical application, its
real relation to the phenomena of thought, the religious mind can know
nothing. That is merely to say that a mind congenitally gifted with the
power of logic and accessible to its light and leading does not take
to religion, which is a matter, not of reason, but of feeling—not of
the head, but of the heart. Religions are conclusions for which the
facts of nature supply no major premises. They are accepted or rejected
according to the original mental make-up of the person to whom they
appeal for recognition. Believers and unbelievers are like two boys
quarreling across a wall. Each got to his place by means of a ladder.
They may fight if they will, but neither can kick away the other’s
support.

Believing the things that he did believe, Mr. Sheldon was right in
thinking that the main purpose of a newspaper should be the salvation
of souls. If his religious belief is true that should be the main
purpose, not only of a newspaper, but of everything that has a purpose,
or can be given one. If we have immortal souls and the consequences of
our deeds in the body reach over into another life in another world,
determining there our eternal state of happiness or pain, this is the
most momentous fact conceivable. A man who, believing this to be a
fact, does not make it the one purpose of his life to save his soul
and the souls of others that are willing to be saved is a rogue. If he
think that any part of this only needful work can be done by turning a
newspaper into a pulpit he ought to do so or (preferably) perish in the
attempt.

The talk of degrading the sacred name, and all that, is mostly
nonsense. If one may not test his conduct in this life by reference to
the highest standard that his religion supplies it is not easy to see
how religion is to be made anything but a mere body of doctrine. I do
not think the Christian religion will ever be seriously discredited
by an attempt to determine, even with too dim a light, what, under
given circumstances, the man miscalled its “founder” would do. What
else is his great example good for? But it is not always enough to ask
oneself, “How would Christ do this?” One should first consider whether
Christ would do it. It is conceivable that certain of his thrifty
contemporaries may have asked him how he would change money in the
Temple.

If Mr. Sheldon’s critics were unfair his defenders were, as a rule, not
much better. They meant to be fair, but they had to be foolish. For
example, there is the Rev. Dr. Parkhurst, whose defense was published
with the _Review’s_ attack. I shall give a single illustration of how
this more celebrated than cerebrated “divine” is pleased to think
that he thinks. He is replying to some one’s application to this
matter of Christ’s injunction, “Lay not up for yourselves treasures
on earth.” This command, he gravely says, “is not against money, nor
against the making of money, but against the loving it for its own
sake and the dedicating of it to self-aggrandizing uses.” I call this
a foolish utterance, because it violates the good old rule of not
telling an obvious falsehood. In no word nor syllable does Christ’s
injunction give the least color of truth to the reverend gentleman’s
“interpretation;” that is the reverend gentleman’s very own, and
doubtless he feels an honest pride in it. It is the product of a
controversial need—a characteristic attempt to creep out of a hole
in an enclosure which he was not invited to enter. The words need no
“interpretation;” are susceptible to none; are as clear and unambiguous
a proposition as language can frame. Moreover, they are consistent
with all that we think we know of their author’s life and character,
for he not only lived in poverty and taught poverty as a blessing, but
commanded it as a duty and a means to salvation. The probable effect
of universal obedience among those who adore him as a god is not at
present an urgent question. I think even so faithful a disciple as
the Rev. Dr. Parkhurst has still a place to lay his head, a little
of the wherewithal to be clothed, and a good deal of the power of
interpretation to excuse it.


                                  III

There are other hypocrites than those of the pulpit. Dr. Gatling, the
ingenious scoundrel who invented the gun that bears his name with
commendable fortitude, says he has given much thought to the task of
bringing the forces of war to such perfection that war will be no
more. Commonly the man who talks of war becoming so destructive as to
be impossible is only a harmless lunatic, but this fellow utters his
cant to conceal his cupidity. If he thought there was any danger of
the nations beating their swords into plowshares we should see him
“take the stump” against agriculture forthwith. The same is true of
all military inventors. They are lions’ parasites; themselves of cold
blood, they fatten upon hot. The sheep-tick’s paler fare is not at all
to their taste.

I sometimes wish that I were a preacher: preachers do so blindly
ignore their shining opportunities. I am indifferently versed in
theology—whereof, so help me Heaven, I do not believe one word—but
know something of religion. I know, for example, that Jesus Christ
was no soldier; that war has two features which did not command his
approval—usually: aggression and defense. He taught not only abstention
from aggression but non-resistance. Now what do we see? Nearly all the
so-called Christian nations of the world sweating and groaning under
their burden of debt contracted in violation of these injunctions which
they believe divine—contracted in perfecting their means of offense and
defense. “We must have the best,” they cry; and if armor plates for
ships were better when alloyed with silver, and guns if banded with
gold, such armor plates would be put upon the ships, such guns would
be freely made. No sooner does one nation adopt some costly device for
taking life or protecting it from the taker (and inventors will as
readily sell the product of their malign ingenuity to one nation as to
another) than all the rest either possess themselves of it, or adopt
something superior and more expensive; and so all pay the penalty for
the sins of each. A hundred million dollars is a moderate estimate
of what it has cost the world to abstain from strangling the infant
Gatling in his cradle.

You may say, if you will, that primitive Christianity—the Christianity
of Christ—is not adapted to these rough-and-tumble times; that it is
not a practical scheme of conduct. As you please; I have not undertaken
to say what it is not, but what it partly is. I am no Christian, though
I think that Christ probably knew what was good for man about as well
as Dr. Gatling or the United States Ordnance Office. It is not for me
to defend Christianity; Christ did not. Nevertheless, I can not forbear
the wish that I were a preacher, in order sincerely to affirm that
the awful burdens borne by modern nations are obvious judgments of
Heaven for disobedience to the Prince of Peace. What a striking theme
to kindle fires upon the heights of imagination—to fill the secret
sources of eloquence—to stir the very stones in the temple of truth!
What a noble subject for the pious gentlemen who serve (with rank, pay
and allowances) as chaplains in the army and the navy, or the civilian
divines who offer prayer at the launching of an ironclad!


                                  IV

A matter of missionaries commonly is to the fore as a cause of quarrel
with nations which have the hardihood to prefer their own religions
to ours. Missionaries constitute, in truth, a perpetual menace to
peace. I dare say the most of them are conscientious men and women
of a certain order of intellect. They believe, and from the way that
they interpret their sacred book have some reason to believe, that in
meddling uninvited with the spiritual affairs of others they perform
a work acceptable to God—their God. They think they discern a moral
difference between “approaching” a man of another religion about the
state of his soul and approaching him on the condition of his linen or
the character of his wife. I think there is a difference; but I have
observed that the person who volunteers an interest in my spiritual
welfare is the same person from whom I must expect an impudent concern
about my temporal affairs.

No ruler nor government of sense would willingly permit foreigners to
sap the foundation of the national religion. No ruler nor government
ever does permit it except under stress of compulsion. It is through
the people’s religion that a wise government governs wisely—even in
our own country we make only a transparent pretense of officially
ignoring Christianity, and a pretense only because we have so many
kinds of Christians, all jealous and inharmonious. Each sect would
make a Theocracy if it could, and would then make short work of any
missionary from abroad. Happily all religions but ours have the sloth
and timidity of error; Christianity alone, drawing vigor from eternal
truth, is courageous enough and energetic enough to make itself a
nuisance to people of every other faith. The Jew not only does not bid
for converts, but discourages them by imposition of hard conditions;
and the Moslem’s simple, forthright method of reducing error is to
cut off the head holding it. I don’t say that this is right; I say
only that, being practical and comprehensible, it commands a certain
respect from the impartial observer not conversant with scriptural
justification of a less natural practice.

It is only where the missionaries have made themselves hated that there
is any molestation of Europeans engaged in the affairs of this world.
Chinese antipathy to Caucasians in China is neither a racial animosity
nor a religious; it is an instinctive dislike of persons who will not
mind their own business. China has been infested with missionaries from
the earliest centuries of our era, and they have rarely been molested
when they have taken the trouble to behave themselves. (In the time of
the Emperor Justinian the fact that the Christian religion was openly
preached throughout China enabled that sovereign to wrest from the
Chinese the jealously-guarded secret of silk-making. He sent two monks
to Pekin, who alternately preached seriousness and studied sericulture,
and brought away silkworms’ eggs concealed in sticks.)

In religious matters the Chinese are more tolerant than we. They let
the religions of others alone, but naturally and rightly demand that
others shall let theirs alone. In China, as in other Oriental countries
where the color line is not drawn and where slavery itself is a light
affliction, the mental attitude of the zealot who finds gratification
in “spreading the light” of which he deems himself custodian, is not
understood. Like most things not understood, it is felt to be bad, and
is indubitably offensive.


                                   V

At a church club meeting a paper was read by a minister, entitled, “Why
the Masses Do Not Attend the Churches.” This good and pious man was
not ashamed to account for it by the fact that there is no Sunday law,
and “the masses” can find recreation elsewhere, even in the drinking
saloons. It is frank of him to admit that he and his professional
brethren have not brains enough to make religious services attractive;
but if it is a fact he must not expect the local government to assist
in spreading the gospel by rounding-up the people and corralling them
in the churches. The truth is, and this gentleman suspects it, that
“the masses” stay out of hearing of his pulpit because there he talks
nonsense of the most fatiguing kind; they would rather do any one of
a thousand other things than go to hear it. These parsons are like
a scolding wife who grieves because her husband will not pass his
evenings with her. The more she grieves the more she scolds, and the
more diligently he stays away from her. Satan is not conspicuously
wise, but he is in the main a good entertainer, with a right pretty
knack at making people come again; but the really reprehensible part
of his performance is not the part that attracts them. The parsons
might study his methods with advantage to religion and morality.

It may be urged that religious services have not entertainment for
their object. But the people, when not engaged in business or labor,
have it for _their_ object. If the clergy do not choose to adapt their
ministrations to the characters of those to whom they wish to minister,
that is their own affair; but let them accept the consequences. “The
masses” do not really enjoy Sunday at all; they try to get through the
day in the manner that is least wearisome to the spirit. Possibly their
taste is not what it ought to be. If the minister were a physician
of bodies instead of souls, and patients who had not called him in
should refuse to take the medicine which he thought his best and they
his nastiest, he should either offer them another, a little less
disagreeable if a little less efficacious, or let them alone. In no
case is he justified in asking the civil authority to hold their noses
while he plies the spoon.

“The masses” have not asked for churches and services; they really
do not care for anything of the kind—whether they ought is another
matter. If the clergy choose to supply them, that is well and
worthy. But they should understand their relation to the impenitent
worldling, which is precisely that of a physician without a mandate
from the patient, who may not be convinced that there is very much the
matter with him. The physician may have a diploma and a certificate
authorizing him to practise, but if the patient do not deem himself
bound to be practised upon has the physician a right to make him
miserable until he will submit? Clearly, he has not. If he can not
persuade him to come to the dispensary and take medicine there is an
end to the matter, and he may justly conclude that he is misfitted to
his vocation.

I am sure that the ministers and the singularly small contingent of
earnest and, on the whole, pretty good persons who cluster about them
do not perceive how alien they are in their convictions, tastes,
sympathies and general mental habitudes to the majority of their fellow
men and women. Their voices are like “the gushing wave” which, to the
ears of the lotus-eaters,

    Far, far away did seem to mourn and rave,

coming to us as from beyond a great gulf, mere ghosts of sound, almost
devoid of meaning. We know that they would have us do something,
but what it is we do not clearly apprehend. We feel that they are
concerned for us, but why, we are imperfectly able to conceive. In an
unintelligible tongue they tell us of unthinkable things. Here and
there in the discourse we catch a word, a phrase, a sentence—something
which, from ancestors whose mother-speech it was, we have inherited the
capacity to understand; but the homily as a whole signifies nothing.
Solemn and sonorous enough it all is, and not unmusical, but it lacks
its natural accompaniment of shawm and sackbut and the wind-swept harp
in the willows by the waters of Babylon. It is, in fact, something of a
survival—the memory of a dream.


                                  VI

The first week of January is by a certain sect set apart as a week
of prayer. It is a custom of more than a half century’s age, and it
seems that “gracious answers have been received in proportion to the
earnestness and unanimity of the petitions.” That is to say, in this
world’s speech, the more Christians that have prayed and the more
they have meant it, the better the result is known to have been. I
don’t believe all that. I don’t believe that when God is asked to do
something that he had not intended to do he counts noses before making
up his mind whether to do it or not. God probably knows the character
of his work, and knowing that he has made this a world of knaves and
dunces, he must know that the more of them that ask for something, and
the more earnestly they ask, the stronger is the presumption that they
ought not to have it. And I think God is perhaps less concerned about
his popularity than some good folk seem to suppose.

Doubtless there are errors in the record of results—some things set
down as “answers” to prayer, which came about through the orderly
operation of natural laws and would have occurred anyhow. I am told
that similar errors have been made, or are believed to have been made,
in the past. In 1730, for example, a good Bishop at Auvergne prayed
for an eclipse of the sun as a warning to unbelievers. The eclipse
ensued and the pious prelate made the most of it; but when it was
shown that the astronomers of the period had foretold it he suffered
irreverent gibes. A monk of Treves prayed that an enemy of the church,
then in Paris, might lose his head, and it fell off; but it transpired
that, unknown (or known) to the monk, the man was under sentence of
decapitation when the prayer was made. This is related by one who
piously explains, however, that but for the prayer the sentence might
have been commuted to service in the galleys. I have myself known a
minister to pray for rain, and the rain came. I fear he knew that the
weather bureau had predicted a fair day.

I do not object to a week of prayer. But why only a week? If prayer
is “answered” Christians ought to pray all the time. That prayer is
“answered” the Scripture affirms as positively and unequivocally as
anything can be affirmed in words: “All things whatsoever ye shall ask
in prayer, believing, that ye shall receive.” Why, then, when for weeks
all the clergy of this country prayed publicly for the recovery of
President Garfield did the man die? Why is it that although two pious
chaplains ask almost daily that goodness and wisdom may descend upon
Congress, Congress remains wicked and unwise? Why is it that although
in all the churches and many dwellings of the land God is continually
asked for good government good government remains what it always
and everywhere has been, a dream? From Earth to Heaven in unceasing
ascension flows a stream of prayer for every blessing that man desires,
yet man remains unblest, the victim of his own folly and passions, the
sport of fire, flood, tempest and earthquake, afflicted with famine
and disease, war, poverty and crime, his world an incredible welter
of evil, his life a curse and his hope a lie. Is it possible that all
this praying is futilized and invalidated by lack of faith?—that the
“asking” is not credentialed by the “believing?” When the anointed
minister of Heaven spreads his palms and uprolls his eyes to beseech
a general blessing or some special advantage is he the celebrant of a
hollow, meaningless rite, or the dupe of a false promise? One does not
know, but if one is not a fool one does know that his every resultless
petition proves him by the inexorable laws of logic to be the one or
the other.


                                  VII

Christ’s Christianity is beautiful exceedingly, and he who admires
not is eyed batly and minded as the mole. “Sell all that thou hast,”
said Christ, “and give to the poor.” All—no less—in order “to be
saved.” The poor were Christ’s peculiar care. Ever for them and their
privations, and not greatly for their spiritual darkness, fell from
his lips the compassionate word, the mandate for their relief and
cherishing. Of foreign missions, of home missions, of mission schools,
of church building, of work among pagans in _partibus infidelium_, of
work among sailors, of communion table, of delegates to councils—of
any of these things he knew no more than the moon man. They are
later inventions, as is the entire florid and flamboyant fabric of
ecclesiasticism that has been reared, stone by stone and century after
century, upon his simple life and works and words. “Founder,” indeed!
He founded nothing, instituted nothing; Paul did all that. Christ
simply went about doing, and being, good—admonishing the rich, whom he
honestly but foolishly regarded as criminals, comforting the luckless
and uttering wisdom with that Oriental indirection wherein our stupid
ingenuity finds imaginary warrant for all our pranks and fads.




                              IMMORTALITY


The desire for life everlasting has commonly been affirmed to be
universal—at least that is the view taken by those unacquainted
with Oriental faiths and with Oriental character. Those of us whose
knowledge is a trifle wider are not prepared to say that the desire is
universal nor even general.

If the devout Buddhist, for example, wishes to “live alway,” he has not
succeeded in very clearly formulating the desire. The sort of thing
that he is pleased to hope for is not what we should call life, and not
what many of us would care for.

When a man says that everybody has “a horror of annihilation,” we may
be very sure that he has not many opportunities for observation, or
that he has not availed himself of all that he has. Most persons go
to sleep rather gladly, yet sleep is virtual annihilation while it
lasts; and if it should last forever the sleeper would be no worse off
after a million years of it than after an hour of it. There are minds
sufficiently logical to think of it that way, and to them annihilation
is not a disagreeable thing to contemplate and expect.

In this matter of immortality, people’s beliefs appear to go along with
their wishes. The man who is content with annihilation thinks he will
get it; those that want immortality are pretty sure they are immortal;
and that is a very comfortable allotment of faiths. The few of us that
are left unprovided for are those who do not bother themselves much
about the matter, one way or another.

The question of human immortality is the most momentous that the mind
is capable of conceiving. If it is a fact that the dead live all other
facts are in comparison trivial and without interest. The prospect of
obtaining certain knowledge with regard to this stupendous matter is
not encouraging. In all countries but those in barbarism the powers
of the profoundest and most penetrating intelligences have been
ceaselessly addressed to the task of glimpsing a life beyond this life;
yet to-day no one can truly say that he knows. It is as much a matter
of faith as ever it was.

Our modern Christian nations profess a passionate hope and belief in
another world, yet the most popular writer and speaker of his time,
the man whose lectures drew the largest audiences, the work of whose
pen brought him the highest rewards, was he who most strenuously strove
to destroy the ground of that hope and unsettle the foundations of that
belief.

The famous and popular Frenchman, Professor of Spectacular Astronomy,
Camille Flammarion, affirms immortality because he has talked with
departed souls who said that it was true. Yes, monsieur, but surely
you know the rule about hearsay evidence. We Anglo-Saxons are very
particular about that.

M. Flammarion says:

“I don’t repudiate the presumptive arguments of schoolmen. I merely
supplement them with something positive. For instance, if you assumed
the existence of God this argument of the scholastics is a good one.
God has implanted in all men the desire of perfect happiness. This
desire can not be satisfied in our lives here. If there were not
another life wherein to satisfy it then God would be a deceiver. _Voila
tout._”

There is more: the desire of perfect happiness does not imply
immortality, even if there is a God, for

(1) God may not have implanted it, but merely suffers it to exist, as
he suffers sin to exist, the desire of wealth, the desire to live
longer than we do in this world. It is not held that God implanted all
the desires of the human heart. Then why hold that he implanted that of
perfect happiness?

(2) Even if he did—even if a divinely implanted desire entail its own
gratification—even if it can not be gratified in this life—that does
not imply immortality. It implies _only_ another life long enough for
its gratification just once. An eternity of gratification is not a
logical inference from it.

(3) Perhaps God _is_ “a deceiver;” who knows that he is not? Assumption
of the existence of a God is one thing; assumption of the existence of
a God who is honorable and candid according to our conception of honor
and candor is another.

(4) There may be an honorable and candid God. He may have implanted
in us the desire of perfect happiness. It may be—it is—impossible to
gratify that desire in this life. Still, another life is not implied,
for God may not have intended us to draw the inference that he is going
to gratify it. If omniscient and omnipotent, God must be held to have
intended whatever occurs, but no such God is assumed in M. Flammarion’s
illustration, and it may be that God’s knowledge and power are
limited, or that one of them is limited.

M. Flammarion is a learned, if somewhat theatrical, astronomer. He
has a tremendous imagination, which naturally is more at home in the
marvelous and catastrophic than in the orderly regions of familiar
phenomena. To him the heavens are an immense pyrotechnicon and he is
the master of the show and sets off the fireworks. But he knows nothing
of logic, which is the science of straight thinking, and his views of
things have therefore no value; they are nebulous.

Nothing is clearer than that our pre-existence is a dream, having
absolutely no basis in anything that we know or can hope to know. Of
after-existence there is said to be evidence, or rather testimony,
in assurances of those who are in present enjoyment of it—if it is
enjoyable. Whether this testimony has actually been given—and it is
the only testimony worth a moment’s consideration—is a disputed point.
Many persons living this life profess to have received it. But nobody
professes, or ever has professed, to have received a communication of
any kind from one in actual experience of the fore-life. “The souls as
yet ungarmented,” if such there are, are dumb to question. The Land
beyond the Grave has been, if not observed, yet often and variously
described: if not explored and surveyed, yet carefully charted. From
among so many accounts of it that we have, he must be fastidious indeed
who can not be suited. But of the Fatherland that spreads before the
cradle—the great Heretofore, wherein we all dwelt if we are to dwell in
the Hereafter, we have no account. Nobody professes knowledge of that.
No testimony reaches our ears of flesh concerning its topographical or
other features; no one has been so enterprising as to wrest from its
actual inhabitants any particulars of their character and appearance.
And among educated experts and professional proponents of worlds to be
there is a general denial of its existence.

I am of their way of thinking about that. The fact that we have no
recollection of a former life is entirely conclusive of the matter.
To have lived an unrecollected life is impossible and unthinkable,
for there would be nothing to connect the new life with the old—no
thread of continuity—nothing that persisted from the one life to the
other. The later birth would be that of another person, an altogether
different being, unrelated to the first—a new John Smith succeeding to
the late Tom Jones.

Let us not be misled here by a false analogy. To-day I may get a
thwack o’ the mazzard which will give me an intervening season of
unconsciousness between yesterday and to-morrow. Thereafter I may live
to a green old age with no recollection of anything that I knew, or
did, or was before the accident; yet I shall be the same person, for
between the old life and the new there will be a _nexus_, a thread
of continuity, something spanning the gulf from the one state to the
other, and the same in both—namely, my body with its habits, capacities
and powers. That is I; that identifies me to others as my former
self—authenticates and credentials me as the person that incurred the
cranial mischance, dislodging memory.

But when death occurs _all_ is dislodged if memory is; for between
two merely mental or spiritual existences memory is the only _nexus_
conceivable; consciousness of identity is the only identity. To live
again without memory of having lived before is to live another.
Re-existence without recollection is absurd; there is nothing to
re-exist.




                          A ROLLING CONTINENT


Like hope, the passion for prophecy springs eternal in the human
breast; man is prone to it, as the sparks fly upward. Stripped of
its several disguises, a considerable part of the world’s writing
and speaking is pure prediction; even the official forecaster of
the weather bureau can not resist the universal urge and maintain a
discreet and dignified silence befitting his office. Eliminate from
politics, for example, all prophecies, expressed or implied—all the
jeremiads based on assumption of the opposite party’s success and all
the assurances of a golden age to ensue from its defeat—and politics
will “look another thing.”

But of all the cloud of witnesses to the kind of mountain which the
mouse of our country’s future is to bring forth, none seems clearly
to discern the adverse conditions environing the American prophet and
foredooming to futility his vision and his dream. None appears to take
account of the annulling fact that this continent is turning over like
a man in bed; yet it ought to be obvious to the meanest understanding
that if this movement continue it will supply conditions suitable
to neither the reign of terror consequent upon the success of one’s
political opponents nor the golden age dependent on the ascendency of
the principles professed by oneself.

It has been shown that the Farallon islands, just off the Pacific
coast, are becoming, as Tennyson would put it, “more and more;” the
lighthouse keeper out there is in progressive achievement of the rôle
of “prominent citizen.” The bar at the mouth of San Francisco harbor is
rising faster in fathoms than those farther inland in public esteem. In
the steady ascension of the bottom of the bay lurks a possibility which
without vanity we may affirm will astonish the astronomers of Mars. In
short, the entire Pacific Coast is insurgent.

On the Atlantic seaboard inundations from marine storms occur every
year. The waves eat farther and farther into the land; the high-water
mark of one decade becomes the low-water mark of the next, and diking
as an agricultural method has a growing importance. It is estimated
that the greater part of Manhattan island will be submerged within
fifty years, and that within an even shorter period the Jersey
mosquito will find no rest for the sole of his foot, and must become a
pelican or quit.

But the steady subsidence of the Atlantic littoral foreshadows changes
more startling than these—more startling, at least, to some who have
not the advantage to be Jersey mosquitoes. Man himself, the man of the
Eastern states, _Homo smugwumpus_, will find himself face to face with
a problem of supreme scientific interest and personal importance. Will
he travel west and go up with the country, or, staying where he is,
develop into a fish and be mighty quick about it? The ordinary process
of evolution, whereby a million years are required to change a red
worm into a rhinoceros or advance a cave-bat one step in biological
preferment and make it a theologian, will not do for _H. smugwumpus_
when the wave is at his armpits and his ancestral acres are falling
away from his webless feet. Even the fittest of his species must travel
with uncommon speed along the line of development in order to survive
in the new environment. They must slide nimbly up the scale of being,
passing every intermediate stage between smugwumphood and fishness
without pausing to enjoy its advantages. Probably, however, most of
them will prefer to ascend the new watercourses up the ever-steepening
slope of the great plains, settling eventually on the summit of the
continent, roundabout San Francisco—where it is to be hoped they will
be welcome if they behave themselves. Doubtless they will miss many of
the blessings of their lowland existence, but they will find in the
superior altitude an immunity from sunstroke and the mad dog, which
will be partial compensation for renouncing the fascinating study of
the long thermometer.

Probably the turning over of the continent will in time be stayed; to
the unscientific mind, at least, its complete subversion is imperfectly
thinkable. But for the next few thousand years, while still the memory
of the purpose and efficacy of Noah’s deluge is fresh and pleasing in
Heaven, the movement will be likely to continue. By the time that it
ceases the Atlantic shore will perhaps be a contour line on the eastern
declivity of the Rocky Mountains, and the Pacific slope comprise all
that region now underlying the “great gulf” between this world and
Hawaii. As a practical settlement of the annexation question on a
staying basis, this unpolitical movement is worthy of the highest
commendation. With the construction of the San Francisco and Honolulu
Pacific Railroad by Government and at the rate of fifty million dollars
a mile in hand paid to the owners of the road, and by them kept for
their honesty, the status of the descendants of Kamehameha and Kalakaua
will be definitely fixed—they will be payers of All That The Traffic
Will Bear.

The upward tendency of the Pacific side of the continent will be
attended, no doubt, with certain inconveniences. Already the relentless
progress of its ascension has laid “effacing fingers” on the _amour
propre_ of several worthy persons who thought themselves heavy enough
to hold it down.

1892.




                                CHARITY


The promoter of organized charity protests against “the wasteful
and mischievous method of undirected relief.” He means, naturally,
relief that is not directed by somebody else than the person giving
it—undirected by him and his kind—professional almoners—philanthropists
who deem it more blessed to allot than to bestow. Indubitably much is
wasted and some mischief done by indiscriminate giving—and individual
givers are addicted to that faulty practice. But there is something to
be said for “undirected relief,” quite the same. It blesses not only
him who receives (when he is worthy; and when he is not, upon his own
head be it) but him who gives. To those uncalculating persons who,
despite the protests of the organized charitable, concede a certain
moral value to the spontaneous impulses of the heart and read in the
word “relief” a double meaning, the office of the mere distributor is
imperfectly sacred. He is even without scriptural authority, and lives
in the perpetual challenge of a moral _quo warranto_. Nevertheless
he is not without his uses. He is a tapper of tills that do not open
automatically. He is almoner to the uncompassionate, who but for
him would give no alms. He negotiates unnatural but not censurable
relations between selfishness and ingratitude. The good that he does is
purely material. He makes two leaves of fat to grow where but one grew
before, lessens the sum of gastric pangs and dorsal chills. All this is
something, certainly, but it generates no warm and elevated sentiments
and does nothing in mitigation of the poor’s animosity to the rich.
Organized charity is an insipid and savorless thing; its place among
moral agencies is no higher than that of root beer.

Christ did not say, “Sell that thou hast and give to the church to
give to the poor.” He did not mention the Associated Charities of the
period. I do not find the words, “The Little Sisters of the Poor ye
have always with you,” nor, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least
of these Dorcas societies ye have done it unto me.” Nowhere do I find
myself commanded to enable others to comfort the afflicted and visit
the sick and those in prison. Nowhere is recorded God’s blessing upon
him who makes himself a part of a charity machine—no, not even if he
be the guiding lever of the whole mechanism.

Organized charity is a delusion and a snare. It enables Munniglut to
think himself a good man for paying annual dues and buying transferable
meal tickets. Munniglut is not thereby a good man. On the Last Great
Day, when he cowers in the Ineffable Presence and is asked for an
accounting it will not profit him to say, “Hearing that A was in want,
I gave money for his need to B.” Nor will it advantage B to say, “When
A was in distress I asked C to relieve him, and myself allotted the
relief according to a resolution of D, E and F.”

There are blessings and benefactions that one would willingly
forego—among them the poor. Quack remedies for poverty amuse; a real
specific would kindle a noble enthusiasm. Yet the world would lose much
by it; human nature would suffer a change for the worse. Happily and
unhappily, poverty is not abolishable: “The poor ye have always with
you” is a sentence that can never become unintelligible. Effect of a
thousand permanent causes, poverty is invincible, eternal. And since we
must have it let us thank God for it and avail ourselves of all its
advantages to mind and character. He who is not good to the deserving
poor; who knows not those of his immediate environment; who goes not
among them making inquiry of their personal needs; who does not wish
with all his heart and strive with both his hands to relieve them—is
wasteful and improvident.




                           EMANCIPATED WOMAN


What I should like to know is, how “the enlargement of woman’s sphere”
by her entrance into various activities of commercial, professional
and industrial life benefits the sex. It may please Helen Gougar and
satisfy her sense of logical accuracy to say, as she does: “We women
must work in order to fill the places left vacant by liquor-drinking
men.” But who filled these places before? Did they remain vacant, or
were there then disappointed applicants, as now? If my memory serves,
there has been no time in the period that it covers when the supply
of workers—abstemious male workers—was not in excess of the demand.
That it has always been so is sufficiently attested by the universally
inadequate wage rate.

Employers seldom fail, and never for long, to get all the workmen they
need. The field into which women have put their sickles was already
overcrowded with reapers. Whatever employment women have obtained
has been got by displacing men—who would otherwise be supporting
women. Where is the general advantage? We may shout “high tariff,”
“combination of capital,” “demonetization of silver,” and what not, but
if searching for the cause of augmented poverty and crime, “industrial
discontent” and the tramp evil, instead of dogmatically expounding it,
we should take some account of this enormous, sudden addition to the
number of workers seeking work. If any one thinks that within the brief
period of a generation the visible supply of labor can be enormously
augmented without profoundly affecting the stability of things and
disastrously touching the interests of wage-workers let no rude
voice dispel his dream of such maleficent agencies as his slumbrous
understanding may joy to affirm. And let our Widows of Ashur unlung
themselves in advocacy of quack remedies for evils of which themselves
are cause; it remains true that when the contention of two lions for
one bone is exacerbated by the accession of a lioness the squabble is
not composable by stirring up some bears in the cage adjacent.

Indubitably a woman is under no obligation to sacrifice herself to
the good of her sex by foregoing needed employment in the hope that
it may fall to a man gifted with dependent women. Nevertheless our
congratulations are more intelligent when bestowed upon her individual
head than when sifted into the hair of all Eve’s daughters. This
is a world of complexities, in which the lines of interest are so
intertangled as frequently to transgress that of sex; and one ambitious
to help but half the race may profitably know that every effort to that
end provokes a counterbalancing mischief. The “enlargement of woman’s
opportunities” has benefited individual women. It has not benefited the
sex as a whole, and has distinctly damaged the race. The mind that can
not discern a score of great and irreparable general evils distinctly
traceable to “emancipation of woman” is as impregnable to the light as
a toad in a rock.

A marked demerit of the new order of things—the _régime_ of female
commercial service—is that its main advantage accrues, not to the
race, not to the sex, not to the class, not to the individual woman,
but to the person of least need and worth—the male employer. (Female
employers in any considerable number there will not be, but those that
we have could give the male ones profitable instruction in grinding
the faces of their employees.) This constant increase of the army
of labor—always and everywhere too large for the work in sight—by
accession of a new contingent of natural oppressibles makes the very
teeth of old Munniglut thrill with a poignant delight. It brings in
that situation known as two laborers seeking one job—and one of them a
person whose bones he can easily grind to make his bread; and Munniglut
is a miller of skill and experience, dusted all over with the evidence
of his useful craft. When Heaven has assisted the Daughters of Hope
to open to women a new “avenue of opportunities” the first to enter
and walk therein, like God in the Garden of Eden, is the good Mr.
Munniglut, contentedly smoothing the folds out of the superior slope of
his paunch, exuding the peculiar aroma of his oleaginous personality
and larding the new roadway with the overflow of a righteousness
stimulated to action by relish of his own identity. And ever thereafter
the subtle suggestion of a fat philistinism lingers along that path of
progress like an assertion of a possessory right.

It is God’s own crystal truth that in dealing with women unfortunate
enough to be compelled to earn their own living and fortunate enough to
have wrested from Fate an opportunity to do so, men of business and
affairs treat them with about the same delicate consideration that they
show to dogs and horses of the inferior breeds. It does not commonly
occur to the wealthy “professional man,” or “prominent merchant,” to
be ashamed to add to his yearly thousands a part of the salary justly
due to his female bookkeeper or typewriter, who sits before him all day
with an empty belly in order to have an habilimented back. He has a
vague, hazy notion that the law of supply and demand is mandatory, and
that in submitting himself to it by paying her a half of what he would
have to pay a man of inferior efficiency he is supplying the world
with a noble example of obedience. I must take the liberty to remind
him that the law of supply and demand is not imperative; it is not a
statute but a phenomenon. He may reply: “It is imperative; the penalty
for disobedience is failure. If I pay more in salaries and wages than
I need to, my competitor will not; and with that advantage he will
drive me from the field.” If his margin of profit is so small that he
must eke it out by coining the sweat of his workwomen into nickels I’ve
nothing to say to him. Let him adopt in peace the motto, “I cheat to
eat.” I do not know why he should eat, but Nature, who has provided
sustenance for the worming sparrow, the sparrowing owl and the owling
eagle, approves the needy man of prey and makes a place for him at
table.

Human nature is pretty well balanced; for every lacking virtue there
is a rough substitute that will serve at a pinch—as cunning is the
wisdom of the unwise, and ferocity the courage of the coward. Nobody is
altogether bad; the scoundrel who has grown rich by underpaying workmen
in his factory will sometimes endow an asylum for indigent seamen. To
oppress one’s own workmen, and provide for the workmen of a neighbor—to
skin those in charge of one’s own interests while cottoning and oiling
the residuary product of another’s skinnery—that is not very good
benevolence, nor very good sense, but it serves in place of both. The
man who eats _pâté de fois gras_ in the sweat of his girl cashier’s
face, or wears purple and fine linen in order that his typewriter may
have an eocene gown and a pliocene hat, seems a tolerably satisfactory
specimen of the genus thief; but let us not forget that in his own
home—a fairly good one—he may enjoy and merit that highest and most
honorable title on the scroll of woman’s favor, “a good provider.” One
having a claim to that glittering distinction should enjoy immunity
from the coarse and troublesome question, “From whose backs and bellies
do you provide?”

So much for the material results to the sex. What are the moral
results? One does not like to speak of them, particularly to those who
do not and can not know—to good women in whose innocent minds female
immorality is inseparable from flashy gowning and the painted face;
to foolish, book-taught men who honestly believe in some protective
sanctity that hedges womanhood. If men of the world with years enough
to have lived out of the old _régime_ into the new would testify
in this matter there would ensue a great rattling of dry bones in
bodices of reform-ladies. Nay, if the young man about town, knowing
nothing of how things were in the “dark backward and absym of time,”
but something of the moral distance between even so free-running a
creature as the society girl and the average working girl of the
factory, the shop and the office, would speak out (under assurance of
immunity from prosecution) his testimony would be a surprise to the
cartilaginous virgins, blowsy matrons, acrid relicts and hairy males
of Emancipation. It would pain, too, some very worthy but unobservant
persons not in sympathy with “the cause.”

Certain significant facts are within the purview of all but the very
young and the comfortably blind. To the woman of to-day the man of
to-day is imperfectly polite. In place of reverence he gives her
“deference;” to the language of compliment has succeeded the language
of raillery. Men have almost forgotten how to bow. Doubtless the
advanced female prefers the new manner, as may some of her less forward
sisters, thinking it more sincere. It is not; our giddy grandfather
talked high-flown nonsense because his heart had tangled his tongue.
He treated his woman more civilly than we ours because he loved her
better. He never had seen her on the “rostrum” and in the lobby, never
had heard her in advocacy of herself, never had read her confessions
of his sins, never had felt the stress of her competition, nor himself
assisted by daily personal contact in rubbing the bloom off her. He did
not know that her virtues were due to her secluded life, but thought,
dear old boy, that they were a gift of God.




                           THE OPPOSING SEX


Emancipation of woman is not of American invention. The “movement,”
like most others that are truly momentous, began in Europe and has
broken through and broken down more formidable barriers of law,
custom and tradition there than here. It is not true, as dogmatically
affirmed by a noted American writer, that the English married woman
is “virtually a bondwoman” to her husband; that “she can hardly go
and come without his consent, and usually he does not consent;” that
“all she has is his.” If there is such a thing as “the bitterness of
the English married woman to the law,” underlying it there is such a
thing as ignorance of what the law is. The “subjection of woman,” as it
exists to-day in England, is customary and traditionary—a social, not
a legal, subjection. Nowhere has law so sharply challenged that male
dominion whose seat is in the harder muscles, the larger brain and the
coarser heart. And the law, it may be worth while to point out, was
not of woman born; nor was it handed down out of Heaven engraved on
tables of stone. Learned English judges have decided that virtually,
even the term “marital rights” has no longer a legal signification. As
one writer puts it, “The law has relaxed the husband’s control over his
wife’s person and fortune, bit by bit, until legally it has left him
nothing but the power to prevent her, if he is so disposed and arrives
in time, from jumping out of the window.” He will find it greatly to
his interest to arrive in time when he conveniently can, and to be so
disposed, for the husband is still liable for the wife’s torts; and if
she make the leap he may have to pay for the telescoping of a subjacent
hat or two.

In England it is Tyrant Man himself who is chafing in his chain. Not
only is a husband still liable for the wrongs committed by the wife
whom he has no longer the power to restrain from committing them, but
in many ways—in one very important way—his obligation to her remains
intact after she has had the self-sacrifice to surrender all obligation
to him. Moreover, if his wife has a separate estate he has to endure
the pain of seeing it hedged about from her creditors (themselves not
altogether happy in the contemplation) with restrictions which do
not hamper the right of recourse against his own. Doubtless all this
is not without a softening effect upon his character, smoothing down
his dispositional asperities and endowing him day by day with fresh
accretions of humility; and that is good for him. I do not say that
woman’s autonomy is not among the most efficacious agencies for man’s
reclamation from the sin of pride; I only say that it is not indigenous
to this country, the sweet, sweet home of the assassiness, the happy
hunting ground of the whiplady, the paradise of the vitrioleuse.

If the protagonists of woman suffrage are frank they are shallow; if
wise, uncandid. Continually they affirm their conviction that political
power in the hands of women will give us better government. To proof of
that proposition they address all the powers that they have and marshal
such facts as can be compelled to serve under their flag. They either
think or profess to think that if they can show that women’s votes will
purify politics they will have proved their case. That is not true;
the strongest objection to woman suffrage would remain untouched. Pure
politics is desirable, certainly, but it is not the chief concern of
the best and most intelligent citizens. Good government is devoutly
to be wished, but more than good government we need good women. If all
our public affairs were to be ordered with the goodness and wisdom
of angels, and this state of perfection were obtained by sacrifice
of any of those qualities which make the best of our women, if not
what they should be, nor what the mindless male thinks them, at least
what they are, we should have purchased the advantage too dearly. The
effect of woman suffrage upon the country is of secondary importance:
the question for profitable consideration is, How will it affect the
character of woman? He who does not see in the goodness and charm
of such women as are good and charming something incalculably more
precious than any degree of political purity or national prosperity may
be a patriot; but also he has the distinction to be a pig.

I should like to ask the gallant gentlemen who vote for removal of
woman’s political disability if they have observed in the minds and
manners of the women in the forefront of the movement nothing “ominous
and drear.” Are not these women different—I don’t say worse, just
different—from the best types of women of peace who are not exhibits
and audibles? If they are different is the difference of such a nature
as to encourage a hope that activity in public affairs will work an
improvement in Woman? Is “the glare of publicity” good for her growth
in grace and winsomeness? Would a sane and sensible husband or lover
willingly forego in wife or sweetheart all that the colonels of her
sex appear to lack, or find in her all that they appear to have and to
value?

A few more questions—addressed more particularly to veteran observers
than to those to whom the world is new and strange. Do you think that
when all women are armed with the ballot they will compel a return to
the old _régime_ of reverence and delicate consideration—extorting
by their power the tribute once voluntarily paid to their weakness?
Is there any known way by which women can at the same time be our
political equals and our social superiors, our competitors in the sharp
and bitter struggle for glory, gain or bread, and the objects of our
unselfish and undiminished devotion? The present predicts the future;
of the foreshadow of the coming event all sensitive female hearts feel
the chill. For whatever advantages, real or illusory, some women enjoy
under this _régime_ of partial “emancipation” all women pay. Of the
coin in which payment is made the shouldering shouters of the sex have
not a groat and can bear the situation with tranquillity. They have
either passed the age of masculine attention or were born without the
means to its accroachment. Dwelling in the open bog, they can afford to
defy eviction.

While men did nearly all the writing and public speaking of the world,
setting so the fashion in thought, women, naturally extolled with
true sexual extravagance, came to be considered, even by themselves,
a very superior order of beings, with something in them of divinity
which was denied to man. Not only were they represented as better,
generally, than men, as indeed anybody could see that they were, but
their goodness was supposed to be a kind of spiritual endowment and
more or less independent of environmental influences. We are changing
all that. Women are beginning to do much of the writing and public
speaking, and they are sure to disclose, even to the unthinking,
certain defects of character in themselves which their silence had
veiled. Their competition, too, in the several kinds of affairs will
slowly but certainly provoke resentment, and moreover expose them to
temptations that will distinctly lower the morality of their sex. All
these changes, and many more having a similar effect and significance,
are occurring with rapidity, and the stated results are already visible
to even the blindest observation. In accurate forecast of the new order
of things conjecture fails, but so much we know: the woman-superstition
has already received its death wound and must soon expire.

Everywhere, and in no reverential spirit, men are questioning the
dear old idolatry; not “sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer,”
but dispassionately applying to its basic doctrine the methods
of scientific criticism. In the various movements—none of them
consciously iconoclastic—engaged in overthrowing this oddest of modern
superstitions there is something to deprecate, and even deplore, but
the superstition can be spared. It never had much in it that was either
creditable or profitable, and all through its rituals ran a note of
insincerity which was partly Nature’s protest against the rites, but
partly, too, hypocrisy. There is no danger that good men will ever
cease to respect and love good women, and if bad men ever cease to
adore them for their sex when not beating them for their virtues the
gain in consistency will partly offset the loss in religious ecstasy.

Let the patriot abandon his fear, his betters their hope, that only
the low class woman will vote—the unlettered wench of the slums, the
raddled hag of the dives, the war-painted _protégée_ of the police.
Into the vortex of politics goes every floating thing that is free to
move. The summons to the polls will be imperative and incessant. Duty
will thunder it from every platform, conscience whisper it into every
ear; pride, interest, the lust of victory—all the motives that impel
men to partisan activity will act with the same power upon women as
upon men; and to all the other forces flowing irresistibly toward the
polls will be added the suasion of men themselves. The price of votes
will not decline because of the increased supply, although it will in
most instances be offered in currencies too subtle to be counted. As
now, the honest and respectable elector will habitually take bribes
in the invisible coin of the realm of Sentiment—a mintage peculiarly
valued by woman. For one reason or another all women will vote, even
those who now view the “right” with aversion. The observer who has
marked the strength and activity of the forces pent in the dark drink
of politics and given off in the act of bibation will not expect
inaction in the victim of the “habit,” be he male or she female. In the
partisan, conviction is compulsion—opinions bear fruit in conduct. The
partisan thinks in deeds, and woman is by nature a partisan—a blessing
for which the Lord has never made her male relatives and friends
sufficiently thankful. Not a mere man of them would have the effrontery
to ask her toleration if she were not.

Depend upon it, the full strength of the female vote will eventually be
cast at every election. And it would be well indeed for civilization
and the interests of the race if woman suffrage meant no more than
going to the polling-place and polling—which clearly is all that it
has been thought out to mean by the headless horsemen spurring their
new hobbies bravely at the tail of the procession. That would be a
very simple matter; the opposition based upon the impropriety of the
female rubbing shoulders at the polls with such scurvy blackguards
as ourselves may with advantage be retired from service. Nor is it
particularly important what men and measures the women will vote for.
By one means or another Tyrant Man will have his way; the Opposing
Sex can merely obstruct him in his way of having it. And should that
obstruction ever be too pronounced, the party line and the sex line
coinciding, woman suffrage will then and thenceforth be no more, and
the “majority” will again rule. In the politics of this bad world
majorities are of several kinds. One of the most “overwhelming” is made
up of these simple elements: (1) a numerical minority; (2) a military
superiority.

If not a single election were ever in any degree affected by it, the
introduction of woman suffrage into our scheme of manners and morals
would nevertheless be one of the most momentous and mischievous events
of modern history. Compared with the action of this destructive
solvent, that of all other disintegrating agencies concerned in our
decivilization is as the languorous indiligence of rosewater to the
mordant fury of nitric acid.

Lively Woman is indeed, as Carlyle would put it, “hell-bent” on
purification of politics by adding herself as an ingredient. It is
unlikely that the injection of her personality into the contention
(and politics is essentially a contention) will allay any animosities,
sweeten any tempers, elevate any motives. The strifes of women are
distinctly meaner than those of men—which are out of all reason mean;
their methods of overcoming opponents distinctly more unscrupulous.
That their participation in politics will notably alter the conditions
of the game is not to be denied; so much, unfortunately, is obvious;
but that it will make the player less malignant and the playing more
honorable is a proposition in support of which one can utter a deal of
gorgeous nonsense with a less insupportable sense of its unfitness than
in the service of almost any other delusion.

The frosty truth is that except in the home the influence of women is
not elevating, but debasing. When they stoop to uplift men who need
uplifting, they are themselves pulled down, and that is all that is
accomplished. Wherever they come into familiar contact with men who
are not their relatives they impart nothing, they receive all; they
do not affect us with their notions of morality; we infect them with
ours. In the last forty years, in this country, they have entered a
hundred avenues of activity from which they were previously debarred
by unwritten law. They are found in the offices, the shops, the
factories; like Charles Lamb’s fugitive pigs, they have run up all
manner of streets. Does any one think that in that time there has
been an advance in professional, commercial and industrial morality?
Are lawyers more scrupulous, tradesmen more honest? When one has been
served by a “saleslady” does one leave the shop with a feebler sense
of injury than was formerly inspired by a transaction at the counter—a
duller consciousness of being oneself the commodity that has changed
hands? Have actresses elevated the stage to a moral altitude congenial
to the colder virtues? In studios of artists is the “sound of revelry
by night” invariably a deep, masculine bass? In literature are the
immoral books—the books dealing with questionable “questions”—always,
or even commonly, written by men?

There is one direction in which “emancipation of woman” and enlargement
of her “sphere” have wrought reform: they have elevated the _personnel_
of the little dinner party in the “private room.” Formerly, as any
veteran man-about-town can testify if he will, the female contingent of
the party was composed of persons altogether unspeakable. That element
now remains upon its reservation; among the superior advantages enjoyed
by the man-about-town of to-day is that of the companionship, at his
dinner _in camera_, of ladies having an honorable vocation. In the
corridors of the “French restaurant” the swish of Pseudonyma’s skirt
is no longer heard; she has been superseded by the Princess Tap-tap
(with Truckle & Cinch), by my lady Snip-snip (from the “emporium” of
Boltwhack & Co.), by Miss Chink-chink, who sits at the receipt of
customs in that severely un-French restaurant, the Maison Hash. That
the man-about-town has been morally elevated by this emancipation of
Girl from the seclusion of home to that of the “private room” is too
obvious for denial. Nothing so uplifts Tyrant Man as the table talk of
good young women who earn their own living.

I do not wish to be altogether ironical about this rather serious
matter—not so much so as to forfeit anything of lucidity. Let me say,
then, in all earnestness and sobriety and simplicity of speech, what
is known to every worldly-wise male dweller in the cities, to every
scamp and scapegrace of the clubs, to every reformed sentimentalist
and every observer with a straight eye—namely, that in all the several
classes of young women in our cities who support, or partly support,
themselves in vocations that bring them into personal contact with
men, female chastity is a vanishing tradition. In the lives of the
“main and general” of these, all those _desiderata_ which have their
origin in personal purity, and cluster about it, and are its signs
and safeguards, have almost ceased to cut a figure. It is needless to
remind me that there are exceptions—I know that. With some of them I
have personal acquaintance, or think I have, and for them a respect
withheld from any woman of the rostrum who points to their misfortune
and calls it emancipation—to their need and calls it a spirit of
independence. It is not from these good girls that you will hear the
flippant boast of an unfettered life, with “freedom to develop;” nor is
it they who will be foremost and furious in denial and resentment of my
statements regarding the morals of their class. They do not know the
whole truth, thank Heaven, but they know enough for a deprecation too
deep to find relief in a cheap affirmation of woman’s purity, which is,
and always has been, the creature of seclusion.

The fitness of women for political activity is not in present question;
I am considering the fitness of political activity for women. For
women as men say they are, wish them to be and try to think them,
it is unfit altogether—as unfit as anything else that “mixes them
up” with us, compelling a communication and association that are not
social. If we wish to have women who are different from ourselves in
knowledge, character, accomplishments, manners; as different mentally
as physically—and in these and in all other expressible differences
reside all the charms that they have for us—we must keep them, or they
must keep themselves, in an environment unlike our own. One would think
this obvious to the meanest capacity, and might even hope that it would
be understood by the Daughters of Thunder. Possibly the Advanced One,
hospitably accepting her karma, is not concerned to be charming to
“the likes o’ we”—would prefer the companionship of her blue gingham
umbrella, her corkscrew curls, her epicene audiences and her name in
the newspapers. Perhaps she is content with the comfort of her raucous
voice. Therein she is unwise, for self-interest is the first law. When
we no longer find women charming we may find a way to make them more
useful—more truly useful, even, than the speech-ladies would have them
make themselves by competition. Really, there is nothing in the world
between them and slavery but their power of interesting us; and that
has its origin in the very differences which the colonels of their sex
are striving to abolish. God has made no law of miracles and none of
his laws is going to be suspended in deference to woman’s desire to
achieve familiarity without contempt. If she wants to please she must
retain some scrap of novelty; if she desires our respect she must not
be always in evidence, disclosing the baser side of her character, as
in competition with us she must do—as we do to one another. Mrs. Edmund
Gosse, like “Ouida,” Mrs. Atherton, and all other women of brains,
thinks that the taking of unfair advantages—the lack of magnanimity—is
a leading characteristic of her sex. Mrs. Gosse adds, with reference to
men’s passive acquiescence in this monstrous folly of “emancipation,”
that possibly our quiet may be the calm before the storm; and she
utters this warning, which, also, more strongly, “Ouida” has uttered:
“How would it be with us if the men should suddenly rise _en masse_ and
throw the whole surging lot of us into convents and harems?”

It is not likely that men will “rise _en masse_” to undo the mischief
wrought by noisy protagonists of woman suffrage working like beavers
to rear their airy fad upon the sandy foundation of masculine tolerance
and inattention. No rising will be needed. All that is required for
the wreck of their hopes is for a wave of reason to slide a little
farther up the sands of time, “loll out its large tongue, lick the
whole labor flat.” The work has prospered so far only because nobody
but its promoters has taken it seriously. It has not engaged attention
from those having the knowledge and the insight to discern beneath its
cap-and-bells and the motley that is its only wear a serious menace to
all that civilized men hold precious in woman. It is of the nature of
men—themselves cheerful polygamists, with no penitent intentions—to set
a high value upon chastity in woman. (We need not point out why they
do so; those to whom the reasons are not clear can profitably remain
in the valley of the shadow of ignorance.) Valuing it, they purpose
having it, or some considerable numerical presumption of it. As they
perceive that in a general way women are virtuous in proportion to the
remoteness of their lives and interests from the lives and interests of
men—their seclusion from the influences of which men’s own vices are
a main part—an easy and peaceful means will doubtless be found for
repression of the shouters.

In the orchestration of mind, woman’s instruments might have kept
silence without injury to the volume and quality of the music; efface
the impress of her touch upon the world, and by those who come later
the blank must be diligently sought. Go to the top of any large city
and look about and below. It is not much that you will see, but it
represents an amazing advance from the conditions of primitive man.
Nowhere in the wide survey will you see the work of woman. It is all
the work of men’s hands, and before it was wrought into form and
substance, existed as conscious creations in men’s brains. Concealed
within the visible forms of buildings and ships—themselves miracles of
thought—lie such wonder-worlds of invention and discovery as no human
life is long enough to explore, no human understanding capacious enough
to hold in knowledge. If, like Asmodeus, we could rive the roofs and
see woman’s part of this prodigious exhibition—the things that she has
actually created with her brain—what kind of display would it be? It is
probable that all the intellectual energy expended by women from first
to last would not have sufficed, if directed into one channel, for the
genesis and evolution of the modern bicycle.

“There is no sex in brain,” says the Female Militant. I beg her pardon:
there is sex in every organ, every tissue, every cell and atom of
the human body; but in nothing do men and women differ so widely, so
conspicuously, so essentially as in mind. They think after altogether
different methods; their mental processes are to a clear and competent
observation without resemblance to ours. So different is the mental
constitution of the two sexes that whereas all see not mainly with the
eye, but with the judgment, the understanding, even the outer aspect of
things is, I am persuaded, not the same to a woman that it is to a man.
I have taken some trouble to test this theory, with results of the most
interesting character, which I purpose giving to the world some day. It
is my conviction that if a man who had lived all his life in New York
were to become a woman while passing along Broadway she would be unable
to find her way home without inquiry.

I once heard a woman who had playfully competed with men in a jumping
match gravely attribute her defeat to the trammeling of her skirt.
Similarly, women are pleased to explain their penury of mental
achievement by repressive education and custom. But even in regions
where they have ever had full freedom of the quarries they have not
builded themselves monuments. Nobody, for example, is holding them from
greatness in poetry, which needs no special education, and music, in
which they have always been specially educated; yet where is the great
poem by a woman? where the great musical composition? In the grammar of
literature what is the feminine of Homer, of Shakspeare, of Goethe, of
Hugo? What female names are the equivalents of the names of Beethoven,
Mozart, Chopin, Wagner? Women are not musicians—they “sing and play.”
In short, if woman had no better claim to respect and affection than
her brain; no sweeter charms than those of her reason; no means of
suasion but her power upon men’s convictions, she would long ago have
been “improved off the face of the earth.” As she is, men accord her
such homage as is compatible with contempt, such immunities as are
consistent with control; but whereas she is not altogether filled with
light, and is, moreover, imperfectly reverent, it is but right that in
obedience to scriptural injunction she keep silence in our churches
while we are worshipping Ourselves.

She will not have it so, the good, good girl; as moral as the best of
us, she will be as intellectual as the rest of us. She will have out
her little taper and set the rivers of thought all ablaze, legging it
over the land from stream to stream till all are fired. She will widen
her sphere, forsooth, herself no wider than before. It is not enough
that we have edified her a pedestal and perform impossible rites in
celebration of her altitude and distinction. It does not suffice that
with never a smile we assure her that she is the superior sex. That she
is indubitably gifted with pulchritude and an unquestionable genius for
its embellishing; that Nature has endowed her with a prodigious knack
at accroachment, whereby the male of her species is lured to a suitable
doom—this does not satisfy her. No; she has taken unto herself in these
evil days that “intelligent discontent” which giveth its beloved fits.
To her flock of graces and virtues she must add our one poor ewe lamb
of brains. Well, I tell her that intellect is a monster which devours
beauty; that the woman of exceptional mind is exceptionally masculine
in face, figure, action. And so, with a reluctant farewell to Lovely
Woman, I humbly withdraw from her presence and hasten to overtake the
receding periphery of her “sphere.”

One moment more, mesdames: I crave leave to estop your disfavor—which
were affliction and calamity—by “defining my position” in the words
of one of yourselves, who has said of me (though with reprehensible
exaggeration, believe me) that I hate woman and love women—have an
acute animosity to your sex, adoring each individual member of it. What
matters my opinion of your understandings so long as I am in bondage to
your charms? Moreover, there is one service of incomparable utility and
dignity for which I esteem you eminently fit—to be mothers of men.




                              A MAD WORLD


Let us suppose that in tracing its cycloidal curves through the
unthinkable reaches of space traversed by the solar system our planet
should pass through a “belt” of attenuated matter having the property
of dementing us! It is a conception easily enough entertained. That
space is full of malign conditions incontinuously distributed; that
we are at one time traversing a zone comparatively innocuous and at
another spinning through a region of infection; that away behind us in
the wake of our swirling flight are fields of plague and pain still
agitated by our passage through them,—all this is as good as known. It
is almost as certain as it is that in our little annual circle round
the sun are points at which we are stoned and brickbatted like a pig
in a potato-patch—pelted with little nodules of meteoric metal flung
like gravel, and bombarded with gigantic masses hurled by God knows
what? What strange adventures await us in those yet untraveled regions
toward which we speed?—into what malign conditions may we not at any
time plunge?—to the strength and stress of what frightful environment
may we not at last succumb? The subject lends itself readily enough to
a jest, but I am not jesting: it is really altogether probable that our
solar system, racing through space with inconceivable velocity, will
one day enter a region charged with something deleterious to the human
brain, minding us all madwise.

By the way, dear reader, did you ever happen to consider the
possibility that you are a lunatic, and perhaps confined in an asylum?
It seems to you that you are not—that you go with freedom where you
will, and use a sweet reasonableness in all your works and ways; but to
many a lunatic it seems that he is Rameses II, or the Holkar of Indore.
Many a plunging maniac, ironed to the floor of a cell, believes himself
the Goddess of Liberty careering gaily through the Ten Commandments in
a chariot of gold. Of your own sanity and identity you have no evidence
that is any better than he has of his. More accurately, I have none of
mine; for anything I know, you do not exist, nor any one of all the
things with which I think myself familiarly conscious. All may be
fictions of my disordered imagination. I really know of but one reason
for doubting that I am an inmate of an asylum for the insane—namely,
the probability that there is nowhere any such thing as an asylum for
the insane.

This kind of speculation has charms that get a good neck-hold upon
attention. For example, if I am really a lunatic, and the persons
and things that I seem to see about me have no objective existence,
what an ingenious though disordered imagination I must have! What a
clever _coup_ it was to invent Mr. Rockefeller and clothe him with the
attribute of permanence! With what amusing qualities I have endowed my
laird of Skibo, philanthropist. What a masterpiece of creative humor
is my Fatty Taft, statesman, taking himself seriously, even solemnly,
and persuading others to do the same! And this city of Washington, with
its motley population of silurians, parvenoodles and scamps pranking
unashamed in the light of day, and its saving contingent of the
forsaken righteous, their seed begging bread,—did Rabelais’ exuberant
fancy ever conceive so—but Rabelais is, perhaps, himself a conception.

Surely he is no common maniac who has wrought out of nothing the
history, the philosophies, sciences, arts, laws, religions, politics
and morals of this imaginary world. Nay, the world itself, tumbling
uneasily through space like a beetle’s ball, is no mean achievement,
and I am proud of it. But the mental feat in which I take most
satisfaction, and which I doubt not is most diverting to my keepers, is
that of creating Mr. W. R. Hearst, pointing his eyes toward the White
House and endowing him with a perilous Jacksonian ambition to defile
it. The Hearst is distinctly a treasure.

On the whole, I have done, I think, tolerably well, and when I
contemplate the fertility and originality of my inventions, the queer
unearthliness and grotesque actions of the characters whom I have
evolved, isolated and am cultivating, I cannot help thinking that if
Heaven had not made me a lunatic my peculiar talent might have made me
an entertaining writer.




                        THE AMERICAN SYCOPHANT


                                   I

An American writer holds this opinion:

“If republican government had done nothing else than give independence
to American character and preserve it from the servility inseparable
from allegiance to kings, it would have accomplished a great work.”

I do not doubt that the writer of that sentence believes that
republican government has actually wrought the change in human nature
that challenges his admiration. He is sure that his countrymen are not
servile; that before rank and power and wealth they stand covered,
maintaining “the godlike attitude of freedom and a man” and exulting in
it. It is not true; it is an immeasurable distance from the truth. We
are as abject toadies as any people on earth—more so than any European
people of similar civilization. When a foreign emperor, king, prince or
nobleman comes among us the rites of servility that we execute in his
honor are baser than any that he ever saw in his own land.

In his blind and brutal scramble for social recognition in Europe, the
traveling American toady and impostor has many chances of success: he
is commonly unknown even to ministers and consuls of his own country,
and these complaisant gentlemen, rather than incur the risk of erring
on the wrong side, take him at his own valuation and push him in
where, his obscurity being again in his favor, he is treated with
kindly toleration and sometimes a genuine hospitality to which he has
no shadow of right nor title, and which, if he were a gentleman, he
would not accept if it were voluntarily proffered. It should be said in
mitigation that all this delirious abasement in no degree tempers his
rancor against the system of which the foreign notable is the flower
and fruit. He keeps his servility sweet by preserving it in the salt of
vilification. In the character of blatant blackguard the American snob
is so happily disguised that he does not know himself.

An American newspaper once printed a portrait of her whom the
irreverent Briton had a reprehensible habit of designating colloquially
as “The Old Lady.” But the editor in question did not so designate
her—his simple American manhood and republican spirit would not admit
that she was a lady. So he contented himself with labeling the portrait
“Her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria.” This incident raises an
important question.

Important Question Raised by This Incident: Is it better to be a
subject and a man, or a citizen and a flunkey?—to own the sway of a
“gory tyrant” and retain one’s self-respect, or dwell, a “sovereign
elector,” in the land of liberty and disgrace it?

However it may be customary for English newspapers to designate the
British sovereign, they are at least not addicted to sycophancy in
designating the rulers of other countries than their own. They would
not say “his Abracadabral Humptidumptiness Emperor William,” nor “his
Pestilency the Speaker of the American House of Representatives.”
They would not think of calling even the most ornately self-bemedaled
American sovereign elector “his Badgesty.” Of a foreign nobleman they
do not say “his lordship;” they will not admit that he is a lord;
nor when speaking of their own noblemen do they spell “lord” with a
capital L, as we do. In brief, when mentioning foreign dignitaries,
of whatever rank in their own countries, the English press is simply
and serviceably descriptive: the king is a king, the queen a queen, the
jack a jack.

At the foundation of our political system lies the denial of hereditary
and artificial rank. Our fathers created this government as a protest
against all that, and all that it implies. They virtually declared that
kings and noblemen could not breathe here, and no American loyal to the
principles of the Revolution which made him one will ever say in his
own country “your majesty” or “your lordship”—the words would choke
him, and they ought.

There are a few of us who keep the faith, who do not bow the knee
to Baäl, who hold fast to what is high and good in the doctrine of
political equality; in whose hearts the altar-fires of rational liberty
are kept aglow, beaconing the darkness of that “illimited inane”
where their countrymen, inaccessible to the light, wander witless in
the bogs of political unreason, alternately adoring and damning the
man-made gods of their own stature. Of that bright band fueling the
bale-fires of political consistency I can not profess myself a member
in good standing. In view of this general recreancy and treason to
the principles that our fathers established by the sword—having in
constant observation this almost universal hospitality to the solemn
nonsense of hereditary rank and unearned distinction, my faith in
practical realization of republican ideals is small, and I falter in
the work of their maintenance in the interest of a people for whom
they are too good. Seeing that we are immune to none of the evils
besetting monarchies, excepting those for which we secretly yearn;
that inequality of fortune and unjust allotment of honors are as
conspicuous among us as elsewhere; that the tyranny of individuals is
as intolerable and that of the public more so; that the law’s majesty
is a dream and its failure a fact—hearing everywhere the footfalls of
disorder and the watchwords of anarchy, I despair of the republic, and
catch in every breeze that blows “a cry prophetic of its fall.”

I have seen a vast crowd of Americans change color like a field of
waving grain, as it uncovered to do such base homage to a petty
foreign princess as in her own country she had never received. I
have seen full-grown, self-respecting American citizens tremble and
go speechless when spoken to by an Emperor of Brazil. I have seen a
half-dozen American gentlemen in evening clothes trying to outdo one
another in the profundity of their bows in the presence of a nigger
King of Hawaii. I have not seen a Chinese “earl” borne in a chair
by four Americans officially detailed for the disgraceful service,
but it was done, and did not evoke a hiss of disapproval. And I did
not—thank Heaven!—observe the mob of American “simple republicans” that
dogged the heels of a disreputable little Frenchman who is a count by
courtesy only, and those of an English duke quietly attending to his
own business of making a living by being a married man. The republican
New World is no less impested with servility than the monarchical Old.
One form of government may be better than another for this purpose,
or for that; all are alike in the futility of their influence upon
human character. None can affect man’s instinctive abasement in the
contemplation of power and rank.

Not only are we no less sycophantic than the people of monarchical
countries; we are more so. We grovel before their exalted personages,
and perform in addition a special prostration at the clay feet of our
own idols—which _they_ do not revere. The typical subject, hat-in-hand
to his sovereign and his nobleman, is a less shameful figure than
the citizen executing his genuflexion before the public of which he
is himself a part. No European court journal, no European courtier,
was ever more abject in subservience to the sovereign than are the
American newspaper and the American politician in flattery of the
people. Between the courtier and the demagogue I see nothing to choose.
They are moved by the same sentiment and fired by the same hope. Their
method is flattery, and their purpose profit. Their adulation is not a
testimony to character, but a tribute to power, or the shadow of power.
If this country were governed by its criminal idiots we should have the
same attestations of their goodness and wisdom, the same competition
for their favor, the same solemn doctrine that their voice is the voice
of God. Our children would be brought up to believe that an Idiotocracy
is the only natural and rational form of government. And for my part
I’m not at all sure that it would not be a pretty good political
system, as political systems go. I have always, however, cherished
a secret faith in Smithocracy, which seems to combine the advantages
of both the monarchical and the republican idea. If all the offices
were held for life by Smiths—the senior John being President—we should
have a settled and orderly succession to allay all fears of a perilous
interregnum and a sufficiently wide eligibility to feed the fires of
patriotic ambition. All could not be Smiths, but many could marry into
the family.


                                  II

The Harrison “progress” (notable as precursor to many another) left
its heritage of shame, whereof each abaser would gladly have washed
the hands of him in his neighbor’s basin. All this was in due order
of nature, and was to have been expected. It was a phenomenon of the
same character as, in the loves of the low, the squabbling consequent
upon satiety and shame. We could not slink out of sight; we could not
deny our sycophancy, albeit we might give it another name; but we
could somewhat medicine our impaired self-esteem by dealing damnation
round on one another. The blush of shame turns easily to the glow
of indignation, and many a hatred is kindled at the rosy flame of
self-contempt. Persons conscious of having dishonored themselves are
doubly sensitive to any indignity put upon them by others. The vices
and follies of human nature are interdependent; they are not singly
roused to activity.

In my judgment, this entire incident of the President’s “tour” was
discreditable to President and people. I do not go into the question
of his motive in making it. Be that what it may, the manner of
it seems to me an outrage upon all the principles and sentiments
underlying republican institutions. In all but the name it was a “royal
progress”—the same costly ostentation, the same civic and military
pomp, the same solemn and senseless adulation, the same abasement of
spirit of the Many before the One. According to republican traditions
ten thousand times a year affirmed in every way in which affirmation
is possible, we fondly persuade ourselves that we hold as a true faith
in the hearts of our hearts that the One is the servant of the Many!
And it is no mere political catchphrase: he _is_ their servant; he _is_
their creature; all that in him to which they grovel (dignifying and
justifying their instinctive and inherited servility by names as false
as anything in ceremonial imposture) they themselves have made, as
truly as the heathen has made the wooden god before which he performs
his unmanly rite. It is precisely this thing—the superiority of the
people to their servants—that constitutes, and was by our fathers
understood to constitute, the essential, fundamental difference between
the system which they uprooted and the one which they planted in its
stead. Deluded men! how little they guessed the length and strength
and vitality of the roots left in the soil of the centuries when the
noxious harvestage had been cast as rubbish to the void!

I am no contestant for forms of government—no believer in either
the excellence or the permanence of any that has yet been devised.
That all men are created equal, in the best and highest sense of
the phrase, I hold, not as I observe it held by others, but as a
living faith. That an officeholder is a servant of the people; that
I am his political superior, owing him no deference, but entitled to
such deference from him as may be serviceable to keep him in mind of
his subordination—these are propositions which command my assent,
which I _feel_ to be true and which determine the character of my
personal relations with those whom they concern. That I should give my
hand, or bend my neck, or uncover my head to any man in mere homage
to, or recognition of, his office, great or small, is to me simply
inconceivable. These tricks of servility with the softened names
are the vestiges of an involuntary allegiance to power extraneous
to the performer. They represent in our American life obedience
and propitiation in their most primitive and odious forms. The man
who speaks of them as manifestations of a proper respect for “the
President’s great office” is either a rogue, a dupe or a journalist.
They come to us out of a fascinating but terrible past as survivals
of servitude. They speak a various language of oppression and the
superstition of man-worship; they carry forward the traditions of the
sceptre and the lash. Through the plaudits of the people may be heard
always the faint, far cry of the beaten slave.

Respect? Respect the good. Respect the wise. Let the President look
to it that he belongs to one of these classes. His going about the
country in gorgeous state and barbaric splendor as the guest of a
thieving corporation, but at our expense—shining and dining and
swining—unsouling himself of clotted nonsense in pickled platitudes
calculated for the meridian of Coon Hollow, Indiana, but ingeniously
adapted to each water tank on the line of his absurd “progress,” does
not prove it, and the presumption of his “great office” is against him.

Can you not see, poor misguided “fellow citizens,” how you permit your
political taskmasters to forge leg-chains of your follies and load you
down with them? Will nothing teach you that all this fuss-and-feathers,
all this ceremony, all this official gorgeousness and brass-banding,
this “manifestation of a proper respect for the nation’s head” has no
decent place in American life and American politics? Will no experience
open your stupid eyes to the fact that these shows are but absurd
imitations of royalty, to hold you silly while you are plundered by the
managers of the performance?—that while you toss your greasy caps in
air and sustain them by the ascending current of your senseless hurrahs
the programmers are going through your blessed pockets and exploiting
your holy dollars? No; you feel secure; power is of the People, and
you can effect a change of robbers every four years. Inestimable
privilege—to pull off the glutted leech and attach the lean one! And
you can not even choose among the lean leeches, but must accept those
designated by the programmers and showmen who have the reptiles in
stock! But then you are not “subjects;” you are “citizens”—there is
much in that. Your tyrant is not a “king;” he is a “president.” He
does not occupy a “throne,” but a “chair.” He does not succeed to it
by inheritance; he is pitchforked into it by the boss. Altogether, you
are distinctly better off than the Russian mujik who wears his shirt
outside his trousers and has never shaken hands with the Czar in all
his life.


                                  III

I hold that kings and noblemen can not breathe in America. When they
set foot upon our soil their royalty and their nobility fall away from
them like the chains of a slave in England. Whatever a man may be in
his own country, here he is only a man. My countrymen may do as they
please, but I make a stand for simple American manhood. I will meet
no man on this soil who expects from me a greater deference than I
could properly accord to a citizen of my own country. My allegiance
to republican institutions is slack through lack of faith in them as
a practical system of governing men as men are; all the same, I will
call no man “your majesty,” nor “your lordship.” For me to meet in my
own country a king or a nobleman would require as much preliminary
negotiation as an official interview between the Mufti of Moosh and
the Ahkoond of Swat. The form of salutation and the style and title of
address would have to be settled definitively and with precision.

With some of my most esteemed and patriotic friends the matter is more
simple; their generosity in concession fills me with admiration and
their forbearance in demand challenges my astonishment as one of the
seven wonders of American hospitality. In fancy I see the ceremony of
their “presentation,” and as examples of simple republican dignity I
commend their posture to the youth of this fair New World, inviting
particular attention to the grand, bold curves of character shown in
the outlines of the human ham.




                                  DOG


                                   I

Of all anachronisms and survivals the love of the dog is the most
reasonless. Because, some thousands of years ago, when we all wore
other skins than our own and sat enthroned upon our haunches, tearing
tangles of tendons from raw bones with our teeth, the dog ministered
purveyorwise to our savage needs, we go on cherishing him to this day,
when his only function is to lie sun-soaken on a door mat and insult
us as we pass in and out enamored of his fat superfluity. One dog in a
thousand earns his bread—and takes beefsteak; the other nine hundred
and ninety-nine we maintain in the style suitable to their state by
cheating the poor.

The trouble with the modern dog is that he is the same old dog. Not
an inch has the rascal advanced along the line of evolution. We have
ceased to squat upon our naked haunches and gnaw raw bones, but this
companion of the childhood of the race, this vestigial remnant of
_juventus mundi_, this dismal anachronism, this veteran inharmony in
the scheme of things, the dog, has abated no jot nor tittle of his
unthinkable objectionableness since the morning stars sang together
and he had sat up all night to deflate a lung at the performance.
Possibly he may some time be improved otherwise than by effacement,
but at present he is still in that early stage of reform that is not
inconsistent with a mouthful of reformer.

The dog is a detestable quadruped. He knows more ways to be
unmentionable than can be named in seven languages. The word “dog” is
a term of contempt the world over, as in the Scriptures. Poets have
sung and prosaists have prosed of the virtues of individual dogs, but
nobody has had the hardihood to eulogize the species. No man loves the
Dog; one loves his own dog, and there stops; the force of perverted
affection can no further go. He loves his own dog partly because that
thrifty creature, ever cadging when not marauding, tickles his vanity
by fawning upon him as the visible source of steaks and bones; and
partly because the graceless beast insults everybody else, harming as
many as he dares.

The dog is an encampment of fleas, and a reservoir of sinful smells.
He is prone to bad manners as the sparks fly upward. He has no
discrimination; his loyalty is given to the person that feeds him,
be the same a blackguard or a murderer. He fights for his master
without regard to the justice of the quarrel—wherein he is no better
than a patriot or a soldier. There are men who are proud of a dog’s
love—and dogs love that kind of men. There are men who, having the
privilege of loving women, insult them by loving dogs; and there are
women who forgive and respect their canine rivals. Women, I am told,
are true cynolaters; they adore not only dogs, but Dog—not only their
own horrible little beasts, but those of others. But women will love
anything; they even love men who love dogs. I sometimes wonder how
it is that of all our women among whom the dog fad is prevalent none
has incurred the husband fad, or the child fad. Possibly there are
exceptions, but it seems to be a rule that the female heart which has
a dog in it is without other lodgers. There is not, probably, a very
wild and importunate demand for accommodation. For my part, I do not
know which is the less desirable, the tenant or the tenement. There
are dogs that submit to be kissed by women base enough to kiss them;
but they have a secret, coarse revenge. For the dog is a joker, withal,
gifted with as much humor as is consistent with biting.

Miss Louise Imogen Guiney has replied to Mrs. Meynell’s proposal to
abolish the dog—a proposal which Miss Guiney has the originality to
call “original.” Divested of its “literature,” Miss Guiney’s plea for
the defendant consists, essentially, of the following assertions: (1)
Dogs are whatever their masters are. (2) They bite only those who fear
them. (3) Really vicious dogs are not found nearer than Constantinople.
(4) Only wronged dogs go mad, and hydrophobia is retaliation. (5)
In actions for damages for dog-bites judicial prejudice is against
the dog. (6) Dogs are continually saving children from death. (7)
Association with dogs begets piety, tenderness, mercy, loyalty, and so
forth; in brief, the dog is an elevating influence: “to walk modestly
at a dog’s heels is a certificate of merit!” As to that last, if
Miss Guiney had ever had the educating good fortune to observe the
dog himself walking modestly at the heels of another dog she would
perhaps have wished that it were not the custom of her sex to seal the
certificate of merit with a kiss.

In all this absurd woman’s statements, thus fairly epitomized, there
is not one that is true—not one of which the essential falsity is not
evident, obvious, conspicuous to even the most delinquent observation.
Yet with the smartness and smirk of a graduating seminary girl refuting
Epicurus she marshals them against the awful truth that every year in
Europe and the United States alone more than one thousand human beings
die of hydrophobia—a fact which her controversial conscience does not
permit her to mention. The names on this needless death-roll are mostly
those of small folk, the sins of whose parents in cherishing their own
hereditary love of dogs is visited upon their children because these
have not the intelligence and agility to get out of the way. Or perhaps
they lack that tranquil courage upon which Miss Guiney relies to avert
the canine tooth from her own inedible shank.

Finally this amusing illogician, this type and example of the female
controversialist, has the hardihood to hope that there may be fathers
who can see their children die the horrible death of hydrophobia
without wishing “to exile man’s best ideal of fidelity from the
hearthstones of civilization.” If we must have an “ideal of fidelity”
why not find it, not in the dog that kills the child, but in the father
that kills the dog? The profit of maintaining a standard and pattern
of the virtues (at considerable expense in the case of this insatiable
canine consumer) may be great, but are we so hard pushed that we must
go to the animals for it? In life and letters are there no men and
women whose names kindle enthusiasm and emulation? Is fidelity, is
devotion, is self-sacrifice unknown among ourselves? As a model of the
higher virtues why will not one’s mother serve at a pinch? And what is
the matter with Miss Guiney herself? She is faithful, at least to dogs,
whatever she may be to the hundreds of American children foredoomed to
a death of unthinkable agony from hydrophobia.

There is perhaps a hope that when the sun’s returning flame shall gild
the hither end of the thirtieth century this savage and filthy brute,
the dog, will have ceased to “banquet on through a whole year” of human
fat and lean; that he will have been gathered to his variously unworthy
fathers to give an account of his deeds done in the body of man. In
the meantime, those of us who have not the enlightened understanding
to be enamored of him may endure with such fortitude as we can command
his feats of tooth among the shins and throats of those who have; we
ourselves are so few that there is a strong numerical presumption of
personal immunity.

It is well to have a clear understanding of such inconveniences as
may be expected to ensue from dog-bites. That inconveniences and even
discomforts do sometimes flow from, or at least follow, the mischance
of being bitten by dogs, even the sturdiest champion of “man’s best
friend” will admit when not heated by controversy. True, he is
indisposed to sympathy for those incurring the inconveniences and
discomforts, but against this apparent incompassion may be offset his
indubitable sympathy with the dog. No one is altogether heartless.

Amongst the several disadvantages of a close personal connection with
the canine tooth, the disorder known as hydrophobia has long held an
undisputed primacy. The existence of this ailment is attested by so
many witnesses, many of whom, belonging to the profession of medicine,
speak with a certain authority, that even the breeders and lovers
of snap-dogs are compelled reluctantly to concede it, though as a
rule they stoutly deny that it is imparted by the dog. In their view,
hydrophobia is a theory, not a condition. The patient, even if he is
a babe, imagines himself to have it, and acting upon that unsupported
assumption or hypothesis, suffers and dies in the attempt to square his
conduct with his opinions. It seems there is firmer ground for their
view of the matter than the rest of us have been willing to admit.
There is such a thing, doubtless, as hydrophobia proper, but also there
is such another thing as pseudo-hydrophobia, or hydrophobia improper.

Pseudo-hydrophobia, the physicians explain, is caused by fear of
hydrophobia. The patient, having been chewed by a healthy and harmless
dog, broods upon his imaginary peril, solicitously watches his
imaginary symptoms and finally persuading himself of their reality,
puts them on exhibition as he understands them. He runs about (when
permitted) on his hands and knees, growls, barks, howls and, in default
of a tail, wags the part of him where it would be if he had it. In a
few days he is gone before, a victim to his lack of confidence in man’s
best friend.

The number of cases of pseudo-hydrophobia, relative to those of true
hydrophobia, is not definitely known, the medical records having been
imperfectly made and never collated; champions of the snap-dog, as
intimated, believe it is many to nothing. That being so (they argue)
the animal is entirely exonerated and leaves the discussion without a
stain upon his reputation.

But that is feeble reasoning; even if we grant their premises we can
not embrace their conclusion. In the first place, it hurts to be bitten
by a dog, as the dog himself audibly confesses when bitten by another
dog. Furthermore, pseudo-hydrophobia is quite as fatal as if it were a
legitimate product of the bite, not a result of the terror which that
mischance inspires.

Human nature being what it is, and well known to the dog to be what
it is, we have a right to expect that the creature will take our
weaknesses into consideration—that he will respect our addiction to
reasonless panic, even as we respect his when, as we commonly do, we
refrain from attaching tinware to his tail. A dog that runs himself
to death to evade a kitchen utensil which could not possibly harm
him, and which if he did not flee would not pursue, is the author
of his own undoing in precisely the same sense as is the victim of
pseudo-hydrophobia. He is slain by a theory. Yet the wicked boy that
set him going is not blameless, and no one would be so zealous and
strenuous in his prosecution as the cynolater, the adorer of dogs, the
person who holds them guiltless of pseudo-hydrophobia.


                                  II

Mr. Nicholas Smith, while United States consul at Liege, wrote, or
caused to be written, an official report, wickedly, wilfully and
maliciously designed to abridge the privileges, augment the ills
and impair the honorable status of the domestic dog. In the very
beginning of this report Mr. Smith manifests his animus by stigmatizing
the domestic dog as an “hereditary loafer;” and having “hurled the
allegation,” affirms “the dawn of a (Belgian) new era” wherein the
pampered menial will loaf no more. There is to be no more sun-soaking
on door mats having a southern exposure, no more usurpation of the
warmest segment of the family semicircle, no more personal solicitation
of cheer at the domestic board. The dog’s place in the social scale
is no longer to be determined by considerations of sentiment, but will
be the result of cold commercial calculation, and so fixed as best to
serve the ends of industrial expediency. All this in Belgium, where
the dog is already in active service as a beast of burden and draught;
doubtless the transition to that humble condition from his present and
immemorial social elevation in less advanced countries will be slow and
characterized by bitter factional strife. America, especially, although
ever accessible to the infection of new and profitable ideas, will be
slow to accept so radical a subversion of a social superstructure that
almost may be said to rest upon the domestic dog as a basic verity.

The dogs are our only true “leisure class” (even our tramps are
sometimes compelled to engage in such simple industries as are possible
in the county jail) and we are justly proud of them. Dogs toil not,
neither spin, yet Solomon in all his glory was not a dog. Instead of
making them hewers of wood and drawers of water, it would be more
consonant with the Anglomaniacal and general Old World spirit, now
so dominant in the councils of the nation, to make them “hereditary
legislators.” And Mr. Smith must permit me to add, with a special
significance, that history records an instance of even a horse making a
fairly good consul.

Mr. Smith avers with obvious satisfaction that in Liege twice as many
draught dogs as horses are seen in the streets, attached to vehicles.
He regards “a gaily painted cart” drawn by “a well fed dog” and driven
by a well fed (and gaily painted) woman as a “pleasing vision.” I do
not; I should prefer to see the dog sitting at the receipt of steaks
and chops and the lady devoting herself to the amelioration of the
condition of the universe and the manufacture of poetry and stories
that are not true. A more pleasing vision, too, one endeared to eye
and heart by immemorial use and wont, is that of stranger and dog
indulging in the pleasures of the chase—stranger a little ahead—while
the woman in the case manifests a characteristically compassionate
solicitude lest the gentleman’s trousers do not match Fido’s mustache.
It is, indeed, impossible to regard with any degree of approval the
degradation to commercial utility of two so noble animals as Dog and
Woman; and if Man had joined them together by driving-reins I should
hope that God would put them asunder, even if the reins were held
by Dog. There would no doubt be a distinct gain as well as a certain
artistic fitness in unyoking the strong-minded female of our species
from the chariot of progress and yoking her to the apple-cart or
fish-wagon, but imminence of the draughtwoman is not foreshadowed in
the report of our consul at Liege.

Mr. Smith’s estimate of the number of dogs in this country at seven
millions is a moderate one, it must be confessed, and can hardly have
been based on observations by moonlight in a suburban village; his
estimate of the effective strength of the average dog at five hundred
pounds is probably about right, as will be attested by any intelligent
boy who in a campaign against an orchard has experienced detention by
the Cerberus of the place. Taking his own figures, Mr. Smith calculates
that we have in this country three-and-a-half billion pounds of “idle
dog power.” But this statement is more ingenious than ingenuous; it
gives, as doubtless it was intended to give, the impression that we
have only idle dogs, whereas of all mundane forces the domestic dog is
most easily stirred to action. His expense of energy in pursuit of the
harmless, necessary flea, for example, is prodigious; and he is not
infrequently seen in chase of his own tail, with an activity scarcely
inferior. If there is anything worth while in accepted theories of the
conversion and conservation of force these gigantic energies are by no
means wasted; they reappear as heat, light and electricity, modifying
climate, reducing gas bills and assisting in propulsion of street cars.
Even in baying the moon and terrifying visitors and bypassers, the dog
releases a certain amount of vibratory force which through various
mutations of its wave-length may do its part in cooking a steak or
gratifying the olfactory nerve by throwing fresh perfume on the violet.
Evidently the commercial advantages of deposing the dog from his
position of Exalted Personage and subduing him to that of Motor would
not be all clear gain. He would no longer have the spirit to send,
Whitmanwise, his barbarous but beneficent yawp over the housetops,
nor the leisure to throw off vast quantities of energy by centrifugal
efforts at the conquest of his tail. As to the fleas, he would accept
them with apathetic satisfaction as preventives of thought upon his
fallen fortunes.

Having observed with attention and considered with seriousness, a
respectable authority declares his conviction that the dog, as we have
the happiness to know him, is dreadfully bored by civilization. This
is one of the gravest accusations that the friends of progress and
light have been called out to meet—a challenge that it is impossible to
ignore and unprofitable to evade; for the dog as we have the happiness
to know him is the only dog that we have the happiness really to know.
The wolf is hardly a dog within the meaning of the law, nor is the
scalp-yielding coyote, whether he howls or merely sings and plays the
piano; moreover, these are beyond the pale of civilization and outside
the scope of our sympathies.

With the dog it is different. His place is among us; he is with us and
of us—a part of our life and love. If we are maintaining and promoting
a condition of things that fatigues him it is befitting that we mend
our ways lest, shaking the carpet dust from his feet and the tenderloin
steaks from his teeth, he depart from our midst and connect himself
with the enchanted life of the thrilling barbarian. We can not afford
to lose him. The cynophobes may call him a “survival” and sneer at his
exhausted mandate—albeit, as Darwin points out, they are indebted for
their sneer to his own habit of uncovering his teeth to bite; they
may seek to cast opprobrium upon the nature of our affection for him
by pronouncing it hereditary—a bequest from our primitive ancestors,
for whom he performed important service in other ways than depriving
visitors of their tendons; but quite the same we should miss him at
his meal time and in the (but for him) silent watches of the night.
We should miss his bark and his bite, the feel of his forefeet upon
our shirt-fronts, the frou-frou of his dusty sides against our nether
habiliments. More than all, we should miss and mourn that visible
yearning for chops and steaks, which he has persuaded us to accept as
the lovelight of his eye and a tribute to our personal worth. We must
keep the dog, and to that end find means to abate his weariness of us
and our ways.

Doubtless much might be done to reclaim our dogs from their uncheerful
state of mind by abstention from debate on the protective tariff;
by excluding them from the churches, at least during the sermons;
by keeping them off the streets and out of hearing when rites of
prostration are in performance before visiting notables; by forbidding
anyone to read aloud in their hearing the more phrenetic articles in
the newspapers, and by educating them to the belief that labor and
capital are illusions. A limitation of the annual output of popular
novels would undoubtedly reduce the dejection, which could be still
further mitigated by abolition of the more successful magazines. If
the dialect story or poem could be prohibited, under severe penalties,
the sum of night-howling (erroneously attributed to lunar influence)
would experience an audible decrement, which, also, would enable the
fire department to augment its own uproar without reproach. There
is, indeed, a considerable number of ways in which we might effect a
double reform—promoting the advantage of Man, as well as medicating the
mental fatigue of Dog. For another example, it would be “a boon and a
blessing to men” if society would put to death, or at least banish, the
millman or manufacturer who persists in apprising the entire community
many times a day by means of a steam whistle that it is time for his
oppressed employees (every one of whom has a gold watch) to go to work
or to leave off. Such things not only make a dog tired, they make a
man mad. They answer with an accented affirmative Truthful James’s
plaintive inquiry,

    Is civilization a failure,
    Or is the Caucasian played out?

Unquestionably, from his advantageous point of view as a looker-on at
the game, the dog is justified in the conviction that they are.




                          THE ANCESTRAL BOND


A well-known citizen of Ohio once discovered another man of the same
name exactly resembling him, and writing a “hand” which, including
the signature, he was unable to distinguish from his own. The two men
were unable to discover any blood relationship between them. It is
nevertheless almost certain that a relationship existed, though it
may have been so remote a degree that the familiar term “forty-second
cousin” would not have exaggerated the slenderness of the tie. The
phenomena of heredity seem to me to have been inattentively noted, its
laws imperfectly understood, even by Herbert Spencer and the prophets.
My own small study in this amazing field convinces me that a man is
the sum of his ancestors; that his character, moral and intellectual,
is determined before his birth. His environment with all its varied
suasions, its agencies of good and evil; breeding, training, interest,
experience and the rest of it—have less to do with the matter and can
not annul the sentence passed upon him at conception, compelling him
to be what he is.

Man is the hither end of an immeasurable line extending back to the
ultimate Adam—or, as we scientists prefer to name him, Protoplasmos.
Man travels, not the mental road that he would, but the one that he
must—is pushed this way and that by the resultant of all the forces
behind him; for each member of the ancestral line, though dead, yet
pusheth. In one of what Dr. Holmes calls his “medicated novels,” _The
Guardian Angel_, this truth is most admirably and lucidly set forth
with abundant instance and copious exposition. Upon another work of
his—in which he erroneously affirms the influence of circumstance and
environment—let us lay a charitable hand and fling it into the fire.

Clearly all a man’s ancestors have not equal power in shaping his
character. Conceiving them, according to our figure, as arranged in
line behind him and influential in the ratio of their individuality,
we shall get the best notion of their method by supposing them to have
taken their places in an order somewhat independent of chronology
and a little different from their arrangement behind his brother.
Immediately at his back, with a controlling hand (a trifle skinny)
upon him, may stand his great-grandmother, while his father may be many
removes arear. Or the place of power may be held by some fine old Asian
gentleman who flourished before the confusion of tongues on the plain
of Shinar; or by some cave-dweller who polished the bone of life in
Bythynia and was perhaps a respectable and honest troglodyte.

Sometimes a whole platoon of ancestors appears to have been moved
backward or forward _en bloc_, not, we may be sure, capriciously, but
in obedience to some law that we do not understand. I know a man to
whose character not an ancestor since the seventeenth century appears
to have contributed an element. Intellectually he is a contemporary of
John Dryden, whom naturally he reveres as the greatest of poets. There
was another who inherited his handwriting from his great-grandfather,
although trained to “the Spencerian system” that he tried vainly to
acquire. Furthermore, his handwriting followed the same order of
progressive development as that of his great-grandfather. At the age
of twenty he wrote exactly as that ancestor did at the same age, and,
although at forty-five his chirography was nothing like what it was
even ten years before, it was accurately like his great-grandfather’s
at forty-five. Discovery of some old letters showed him how his
great-grandfather wrote, and accounted for the dissimilarity of his own
handwriting to that of any known member of his family, or his teachers.

To suppose that such individual traits as the configuration of the
body, the color of the hair and eyes, the shape of hands and feet, the
thousand-and-one subtle characteristics that make family resemblances,
are transmissible, and that the form, texture and capacities of
the brain which fix the kind and degree of natural intellect, are
_not_ transmissible, is illogical. We see that certain actions, such
as gestures, gait, and so forth, resulting from the most complex
concurrences of brain, nerves and muscles, are hereditary. Is it
reasonable to suppose that the brain alone of all the organs performs
its work according to its own sweet will, free from congenital
tendencies? Is it not a familiar fact that racial characteristics
are persistent?—that one race is stupid and indocile, another quick
and intelligent? Does not each generation of a race inherit the
intellectual qualities of the preceding generation? How could this be
true of generations if it were not true of individuals?

As to stirpiculture, the intelligent and systematic breeding of men and
women with a view to improvement of the species—it is a thing of the
far future. It is hardly in sight. Yet, what splendid possibilities
it carries! Two or three generations of as careful breeding as we
bestow on horses, dogs and pigeons would do more good than all the
penal, reformatory and educating agencies of the world accomplish in
a thousand years. It is the one direction in which human effort to
“elevate the race” can be assured of a definitive, speedy and adequate
success. It is hardly better than nonsense to prate of any good coming
to the race through (for example) medical science, which is mainly
concerned in reversing the beneficent operation of natural laws and
saving the inefficient to perpetuate their inefficiency. Our entire
system of charities is open to the same objection; it preserves the
incapables whom Nature is trying to “weed out.” This not only debases
the race physically, intellectually and morally, but constantly
increases the rate of debasement. The proportion of criminals, paupers
and the several kinds of “inmates” augments its horrible percentage
yearly. On the other hand, our wars destroy the capable; so thus we
make inroads upon the vitality of the race from two directions. We
preserve the feeble and extirpate the strong. He who in view of this
amazing folly can believe in a constant, even slow, progress of the
human race toward perfection ought to be happy. He has a mind whose
Olympian heights are inaccessible—the Titans of fact can never scale
them to storm its ancient, solitary reign.




                           THE RIGHT TO WORK


All kinds of relief, charitable or other, doubtless tend to
perpetuation of pauperism, inasmuch as paupers are thereby kept
alive; and living paupers unquestionably propagate their unthrifty
kind more diligently than dead ones. It is not true, though, that
relief interferes with Nature’s beneficent law of the survival of the
fittest, for the power to excite sympathy and obtain relief is a kind
of fitness. I am still a devotee of the homely primitive doctrine
that mischance, disability or even unthrift, is not a capital crime
justly and profitably punishable by starvation. I still regard the Good
Samaritan with a certain toleration and Jesus Christ’s tenderness to
the poor as something more than a policy of obstruction.

Who is more truly “deserving” than an able-bodied man out of work
through no delinquency of will and no default of effort? Is hunger to
him and his less poignant than to the feeble in body and mind whom we
support for nothing in almshouse or asylum? Are cold and exposure less
disagreeable to him than to them? Is not his claim to the right to live
as valid as theirs if backed by the will to pay for life with work?
And in denial of his claim is there not latent a far greater peril to
society than inheres in denial of theirs? So unfortunate and dangerous
a creature as a man able and willing to work, yet having no work to do,
should be unknown outside the literature of satire. Doubtless there
would be enormous difficulties in devising a practicable and beneficent
system, and doubtless the reform, like all permanent and salutary
reforms, will have to grow. The growth, naturally, will be delayed by
opposition of the workingmen themselves—precisely as they oppose prison
labor from ignorance that labor makes opportunity to labor.

It matters not that nine in ten of all our tramps and vagrants are such
from choice, and are irreclaimable degenerates as well; so long as one
worthy man is out of employment and unable to obtain it our duty is to
provide it by law. Nay, so long as industrial conditions are such that
so pathetic a phenomenon is possible we have not the moral right to
disregard that possibility. The right to employment being the right
to life, its denial is, in a sense, homicide. It should be needless
to point out the advantages of its concession. It would preserve the
life and self-respect of him who is needy through misfortune, and
supply an infallible means of detection of his criminal imitator,
who could then be dealt with as he deserves, without the lenity that
finds justification in doubt and compassion. It would diminish crime,
for an empty stomach has no morals. With a wage rate lower than the
commercial, it would disturb no private industries by luring away their
workmen, and with nothing made to sell, there would be no competition
with private products. Properly directed, it would give us much that we
shall not otherwise have.

It is difficult to say if our laws relating to vagrancy and vagrants
are more cruel or more absurd. If not so atrocious they would evoke
laughter; if less ridiculous we should read them with indignation. Here
is an imaginary conversation:

THE LAW: It is forbidden to you to rob. It is forbidden to you to
steal. It is forbidden to you to beg.

THE VAGRANT: Being without money, and denied employment, I am compelled
to obtain food, shelter and clothing in one of these ways, else I
shall be hungry and cold.

THE LAW: That is no affair of mine. Yet I am considerate—you are
permitted to be as hungry as you like and as cold as may suit you.

THE VAGRANT: Hungry and cold, yes, and many thanks to you; but if I
go naked I am arrested for indecent exposure. You require me to wear
clothing.

THE LAW: You’ll admit that you need it.

THE VAGRANT: But not that you provide a way for me to get it. No one
will give me shelter at night; you forbid me to sleep in a straw stack.

THE LAW: Ungrateful man! We provide a cell.

THE VAGRANT: Even when I obey you, starving all day and freezing all
night, and holding my tongue about it, I am liable to arrest for being
“without visible means of support.”

THE LAW: A most reprehensible condition.

THE VAGRANT: One thing has been overlooked—a legal punishment for
soliciting work.

THE LAW: True; I am not perfect.




                          TAKING ONESELF OFF


A person who loses heart and hope through a personal bereavement is
like a grain of sand on the seashore complaining that the tide has
washed a neighboring grain out of sight. He is worse, for the bereaved
grain can not help itself; it has to be a grain of sand and play
the game of tide, win or lose; whereas he can quit—by watching his
opportunity can “quit a winner.” For sometimes we do beat “the man that
keeps the table”—never in the long run, but infrequently and out of
small stakes. But this is no time to “cash in” and go, for you can not
take your little winning with you. The time to quit is when you have
lost a big stake, your foolish hope of eventual success, your fortitude
and your love of the game. If you stay in the game, which you are not
compelled to do, take your losses in good temper and do not whine about
them. They are hard to bear, but that is no reason why you should be.

But we are told with tiresome iteration that we are “put here”
for some purpose (not disclosed) and have no right to retire until
“summoned”—it may be by small-pox, it may be by the bludgeon of a
blackguard, it may be by the kick of a cow; the “summoning” Power (said
to be the same as the “putting” Power) has not a nice taste in the
choice of messengers. That argument is not worth attention, for it is
unsupported by either evidence or anything resembling evidence. “Put
here.” Indeed! And by the keeper of the table! We were put here by
our parents—that is all that anybody knows about it; and they had no
authority and probably no intention.

The notion that we have not the right to take our own lives comes of
our consciousness that we have not the courage. It is the plea of the
coward—his excuse for continuing to live when he has nothing to live
for—or his provision against such a time in the future. If he were not
egotist as well as coward he would need no excuse. To one who does not
regard himself as the center of creation and his sorrows as throes of
the universe, life, if not worth living, is also not worth leaving. The
ancient philosopher who was asked why he did not die if, as he taught,
life was no better than death, replied: “Because death is no better
than life.” We do not know that either proposition is true, but the
matter is not worth considering, for both states are supportable—life
despite its pleasures and death despite its repose.

It was Robert G. Ingersoll’s opinion that there is rather too little
than too much suicide in the world—that people are so cowardly as to
live on long after endurance has ceased to be a virtue. This view
is but a return to the wisdom of the ancients, in whose splendid
civilization suicide had as honorable place as any other courageous,
reasonable and unselfish act. Antony, Brutus, Cato, Seneca—these
were not of the kind of men to do deeds of cowardice and folly. The
smug, self-righteous modern way of looking upon the act as that of a
craven or a lunatic is the creation of priests, philistines and women.
If courage is manifest in endurance of profitless discomfort it is
cowardice to warm oneself when cold, to cure oneself when ill, to drive
away mosquitoes, to go in when it rains. The “pursuit of happiness,”
then, is not an “unalienable right,” for it implies avoidance of pain.

No principle is involved in this matter; suicide is justifiable or
not, according to circumstances; each case is to be considered on its
merits, and he having the act under advisement is sole judge. To his
decision, made with whatever light he may chance to have, all honest
minds will bow. The appellant has no court to which to take his appeal.
Nowhere is a jurisdiction so comprehensive as to embrace the right of
condemning the wretched to life.

Suicide is always courageous. We call it courage in a soldier merely to
face death—say to lead a forlorn hope—although he has a chance of life
and a certainty of “glory.” But the suicide does more than face death;
he incurs it, and with a certainty, not of glory, but of reproach. If
that is not courage we must reform our vocabulary.

True, there may be a higher courage in living than in dying. The
courage of the suicide, like that of the pirate, is not incompatible
with a selfish disregard of the rights of others—a cruel recreancy to
duty and decency. I have been asked: “Do you not think it cowardly
for a man to end his life, thereby leaving his family in want?” No,
I do not; I think it selfish and cruel. Is not that enough to say
of it? Must we distort words from their true meaning in order more
effectually to damn the act and cover its author with a greater infamy?
A word means something; despite the maunderings of the lexicographers,
it does not mean whatever you want it to mean. “Cowardice” means a
shrinking from danger, not a shirking of duty. The writer who allows
himself as much liberty in the use of words as he is allowed by the
dictionary-maker and by popular consent is a bad writer. He can make
no impression on his reader, and would do better service at the
ribbon-counter.

The ethics of suicide is not a simple matter; one can not lay down laws
of universal application, but each case is to be judged, if judged
at all, with a full knowledge of all the circumstances, including
the mental and moral make-up of the person taking his own life—an
impossible qualification for judgment. One’s time, race and religion
have much to do with it. Some peoples, like the ancient Romans and
the modern Japanese, have considered suicide in certain circumstances
honorable and obligatory; among ourselves it is held in disfavor. A
man of sense will not give much attention to considerations of this
kind, excepting in so far as they affect others, but in judging weak
offenders they are to be taken into the account. Speaking generally,
I should say that in our time and country the persons here noted (and
some others) are justified in removing themselves, and that in some of
them it is a duty:

One afflicted with a painful or loathsome and incurable disease.

One who is a heavy burden to his friends, with no prospect of their
relief.

One threatened with permanent insanity.

One irreclaimably addicted to drunkenness or some similarly destructive
or offensive habit.

One without friends, property, employment or hope.

One who has disgraced himself.

Why do we honor the valiant soldier, sailor, fireman? For obedience to
duty? Not at all; that alone—without the peril—seldom elicits remark,
never evokes enthusiasm. It is because he faced without flinching the
risk of that supreme disaster, or what we feel to be such—death. But
look you: the soldier braves the danger of death; the suicide braves
death itself! The leader of the forlorn hope may not be struck. The
sailor who voluntarily goes down with his ship may be picked up
or cast ashore. It is not certain that the wall will topple until
the fireman shall have descended with his precious burden. But the
suicide—his is the foeman that has never missed a mark, his the sea
that gives nothing back; the wall that he mounts bears no man’s weight.
And his, at the end of it all, is the dishonored grave where the wild
ass of public opinion

    Stamps o’er his head but can not break his sleep.




                          A MONUMENT TO ADAM


It is believed that every just-minded and right-feeling American will
experience a glow of gratification in the assurance that after ages
of indifference, neglect, and even contumelious disparagement, Adam
is at last to have a monument. The proposal to erect a “suitable
memorial” to the good forefather is singularly touching; in a tranquil,
business-like way it gets a tolerably firm footing in the sympathies
and sentiments of the human heart, quietly occupying the citadel of
the affections before the unready conservatisms of habit, prejudice,
and unreason can recover from their surprise to repel it. It will be
difficult for even the most impenitent obstructionist to utter himself
cogently in opposition; the promoters of the filial scheme will have
the argument as much their own way as have the promoters of temperance,
chastity, truth, and honor. The comparison is ominous, but not entirely
discouraging, inasmuch as the builders of monuments are less dependent
on “right reason and the will of God” than the builders of character.
Stones are not laid in logic; even the men of the plains of Shinar,
desperately wrong-headed as in the light of Revelation we now perceive
them to have been, and ghastly incapable of adding an inch to their
moral stature, succeeded in piling up a fairish testimonial to their
own worth, and would no doubt have achieved the top course had it not
happened that suddenly each appeared to be of a different mind, so
that in the multitude of counselors there was little wisdom. Dr. Noah
Webster being dead—heaven rest him!—and the reporters of the press
being easily propitiated with libations of news, there is not likely to
be any tampering with the American tongue that will not be a distinct
advantage to it; so we may reasonably expect the stones of the Adamite
monument to be appropriately inscribed. Many reasons occur why this
ought to be so. Of Adam, even more than of Washington it may justly be
said that he was “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts
of his countrymen.” In truth, he was first in everything and all round.

To the patriot the plan of erecting to him a fitting memorial will
especially commend itself: it is an American, and therefore a
superior, plan. Contrast its glossy originality with the threadbare
second-handedness of the project to import Cleopatra’s other needle!
The religious mind will not fail to discover in the proposal a kind of
special providence for the arrest and eventual overthrow of Infidelity,
against whose dark disciples it will lift a finger of permanent
admonition. Can even the most flippant scoffer look up at the reverend
pile and doubt the Mosaic account of creation? If the architect have
only the sagacity to omit the date of erection, and the subscribers
the self-denial to forego the glory of displaying their names on it,
will not posterity naturally come to think that he whose virtues it
commemorates “reposes beneath”? True, the wily scientist, alarmed
for his theory, or touched with a sentiment of filial piety as _he_
understands it, may countercheck by building a similar monument to the
recent Ourang-Outang, the remote Ascidian, or the ultimate Bathybius.
He may even have the prudent audacity to put up a stone to the memory
of that unthinkable, and therefore irrefutable, Missing Link—as the
groping pagan of antiquity with his single gleam of spiritual light
erected an altar “To the Unknown God.” If the hardy Evolutionist
do anything of this kind it will be a clear infringement of the
_leges non scriptæ_ of copyright. Justice, religion, and reason alike
will dictate the upsetting of his profane memorial with as little
compunction as the wave felt for Caliban’s designs in the sea-sand.

That the Adam monument project is seriously entertained there can be no
intelligent doubt: in the list of its founders is publicly mentioned a
name which, for better or for worse, is inseparably linked with that of
the Great Progenitor—the name of Mark Twain, whose sobs at the paternal
tomb have reverberated through the world with an authenticating energy
that makes the erection of the monument a matter of comparatively
trifling importance, after all.

1878.




                               HYPNOTISM


We are all hypnotists. Every human being has in some degree the power
to influence the thought and action of another, or some others, by
what we will consent to call “hypnotic suggestion,” though the term,
while serviceable, is inaccurate. Most of us have the power in varying
degrees of feebleness, but few know how to apply what they have of it;
but some have it so strong as to be able to control an unresisting
will. Assent, however, is not always, nor usually, to be inferred
from consent, even when consent is given in good faith; there is such
a thing as unconscious resistance. In those having no knowledge of
hypnotism, resistance is the natural attitude, for they think that
susceptibility to control implies a weak will or a low intelligence,
which is an error. At least the contrary view is supported by my own
observation; and I accept some things, despite the fact that I have
observed them to be true.

The mysterious force which in its more spectacular manifestations
we call hypnotism, and one form of which is known as “mind-reading,”
is at the back of all kinds and degrees of affection and persuasion.
Why is one person loved better than another person more worthy of
love? Because he has more “personal magnetism.” This term is an old
acquaintance; for many decades we have been using it to signify an
engaging manner. We thought it a figurative expression; that is why it
commended itself to us. But it denotes a fact with literalness; some
persons have a quality, or rather a property, which actually does draw
other persons toward and to them, as a magnet attracts steel; and it
is the same property in magnet and in man, and can be augmented by
the scientific use of apparatus. A favorite “subject” of mine when
blindfolded and turned loose in a room and commanded to find a hidden
object will sometimes fail. But she never fails if the object is a
horse-shoe magnet.

Did you ever, by oral argument, convince anyone that he was wrong and
you right? Not often, of course, but sometimes, you think. If you are a
member of Congress you are very sure about it; that is what you are a
member of Congress for. I venture to believe that you never did. It was
by unconscious hypnotism that you did the trick. Your argument (on the
cogency and eloquence of which I congratulate you) served only to hold
your victim’s attention to the matter in hand. Without it he might have
thought you wanted him to become a horse, and would indubitably have
neighed and pranced.

In the Twenty-first Century, doubtless, a legislator will owe his
election to the confidence of his constituents in his ability to exert
this kind of suasion. The candidate who can not by the power of his
unaided eye compel his opponent to eat shoe-blacking and jump over a
broomstick will not have the ghost of a chance at the polls.

Suppose, madam, that your husband had relied upon argument to convince
you that you ought to marry him. Of course he did have to plead long
and hard—that is conceded; but suppose that while doing so he had
always worn green spectacles. Or suppose that in all his long and
arduous courtship he had never looked you squarely (and impudently) in
the eyes—gloated upon you. I deem it certain, madam, that you would now
be the wife of a wiser man, probably a deaf mute.

In our present stage of controversial progress speech is not without
a certain clumsy utility. It enables you to apprise your opponent of
the views to which you invite his allegiance. But for the purpose of
inducing him to accept them it is destitute of effect—is not at all
superior to the plunk-plunking of a banjo, or that favorite political
argument, the braying of a brass band. Your success in convincing
another person depends upon (1) the degree of your hypnotic power, (2)
your opportunities of exerting it and (3) his susceptibility to it. In
brief, the business of converting the several kinds of heathens is a
thing which, like checking the too rapid increase of population, cannot
be done by talking. I have tried to show you how it can be done if you
have the gift. If you have not, be thankful, for you will escape much
defamation from those who believe hypnotism a kind of sorcery liable
to the basest abuses and practised only for purposes of sin. Is it
possible so to practice it? Why, yes, if I can hypnotize a thief I
can make him steal. If I can hypnotize a bad girl—but that would be
needless. Whatever in one’s normal state one is willing to do, or wants
to do, one can be made to do by hypnotic control. That is as far as the
power can go; it cannot make a sinner out of a saint, a demagogue out
of a gentleman, nor a mute out of Theodore Roosevelt.




                    AT THE DRAIN OF THE WASH-BASIN


The Prohibitionists, good souls, are funny. They are all “down upon”
license—high or low—because it is a legal “recognition” of the liquor
trade. As reasonably they might condemn fines for misdemeanor as legal
recognition of misdemeanor. Until the liquor trade is forbidden it
is legally recognized, whether licensed or not. Why can not militant
aquarians accustom themselves to think of a license fee as an _ante
facto_ fine? I am not loaded down with controversial weapons for the
fray between liquor and water; I love neither the one liquid nor the
other; but I enjoy the quarrels of others, am enamored of effective
means in battle and should be miserable if I had failed to point out to
any combatant in any contention how he could obtain an honest advantage.

Do I not drink water? Yes, a little—when instigated by thirst. Does
any one drink it under any other circumstances? Does any one drink it
because he likes it?—or rather, does any one like it when not suffering
from a disagreeable disorder? We take water as medicine for the disease
thirst. It is to be considered as a remedial agent—but so vilely
compounded in nature’s laboratory and so distasteful to the normal
palate that the world in all ages has been virtually united in avoiding
it. Nothing has so stimulated human ingenuity and invited such constant
investments as the discovery, invention and manufacture of palatable
substitutes for plain water; and nothing could be more unphilosophical
than to attribute this universal movement to perversity or caprice.
Extravagant as are some of its manifestations, deplorable as are some
of its consequences, at the back of it all, as at the back of every
wide and persistent trend of human activity, is some imperious and
unsleeping necessity.

Consider, if you will be so good, what “drinking-water” actually is. It
is the world’s sewage. It is what that dirty boy, the earth, has washed
his face with. The wells, rivers and rills are nature’s slop-buckets,
and the lowland springs are not much better; all soluble substances
on or near the surface of the earth eventually get into them. Melted
mountain snow is pure enough, but by the time it reaches the lip of the
flatlander it is a solution of abomination. It is macerated man. It is
hydrate of dead dog with an infusion of all that is untidy—infested
with germs of nameless plagues, carrying ferocious anthropophagi and
loaded with mordant minerals. By many scientists it is held that age
is simply a disease caused, mainly, by cumulative deposits of lime and
other inorganic matter in the organs of the body, most of them taken in
water. If our drink were free of minerals and depeopled of its little
reptiles it is probable that we might live a thousand years and die of
the minerals and reptiles in our food—those of us who are not shot or
hanged.

The protagonists of water tell us that it is the natural drink of man.
We drink it for economy, from ignorance or inattention, from hereditary
habit bequeathed to us by barbarian ancestors who had nothing else
and knew not the sacred grape. They ate beetles, too, stale fish and
one another. Were these the natural food of man? Man has no natural
food and drink; he takes what he can get. An infant race is like an
infant individual: whatever it can lay its hands on goes into its
dauby mouth. Water, _pure_ water, has one merit—it is cheap; and one
disadvantage—it is not good.

Mr. Prohibitionist would like to deprive me of wine by law; not because
that would make me happier: it would make _him_ happier. As long as
I cannot prevent him from trying, I fancy that I don’t wish to, and
execute a multitude of fine sentiments about the virtue of tolerance
and the advantages of free speech. But give me the power, and the first
time I catch him rolling his rebuking eye at my wineglass I will fill
up his well.




                            GODS IN CHICAGO


In the death of Mr. W. J. Gunning theology incurred a serious loss.
The deceased was an intelligent and painstaking collector of gods, and
at the time of his death was in the service of the Committee on Gods,
of the “World’s Fair” in Chicago. He had already got together about
five hundred deities, some of them exceedingly powerful, and was on
his way around the world on the lookout for more. It is believed that
he would have enriched the pantheon of the fair with some singularly
fine exhibits if he had been spared, for he was a most accomplished
theologian, knew exactly where to lay his hand on any deity that he
needed in his business, and whenever he went godding was blessed (under
Providence) with a large take. He was an honest collector, a kind and
considerate provider, and left behind him a wide circle of Celestial
Powers bewailing their loss.

The advantage of having a first-rate collection of gods at a world’s
fair is obvious. Hitherto the study of comparative theology has been
beset with dispiriting difficulties, many of which will vanish in the
light that such a collection will pour upon the science. In actual
presence of the wood and stone which the heathen in his blindness
bows down to we shall be able to trace resemblances and relationships
hitherto undiscerned and even unsuspected. We shall know, perhaps,
why the religion of the Inquots is somewhat similar to that of the
Abemjees when we see (if such is the fact) that the gods of both these
widely separated tribes have availed themselves of the advantages of
the tail. We shall perhaps find the missing link between the Hindu’s
mild disposition and his adoration of the “idol of hope and slaughter.”
Better than all, we shall by actual scrutiny of the mongrel and measly
gods of other and inferior nations be confirmed in the True Faith, as
in this favored land we have the happiness to know it.

That the goddery will be a point of chief attraction goes without
saying. A temple in which, satisfying the two mightiest needs of his
spiritual nature, one may both scoff and pray will have a powerful
fascination for the truly religious. There the visiting stranger from
the overseas can perform appropriate rites before the deity of his
fathers and execute feats of contumelious disdain—short of actual
demolition—before the hideous and senseless images adored of those not
delivered from error’s chain. Even to the wicked person who has justly
incurred the ancient reproach that he “tears down but does not build
up,” the god-show will have a certain value as displaying everywhere
the kind of things he tears down and nowhere the kind he is expected
to build up—whereby he shall be put into better esteem and kicked and
cuffed with abated assiduity. There is one disquieting possibility—one
haunting thought that grows amain to apprehension: What will be the
effect of setting up a multitude of gods in a city which has not
hitherto tolerated one? It was well, though, to make the experiment,
even as a missionary measure; and if the lakeside pantheon had served
to lure the world’s pious to their financial doom the Chicagonese might
have become a profoundly religious people, attentive to pilgrims and
blandly assuring them that it was no trouble to show gods.

1892.




                            FOR LAST WORDS


The special kind of telephone designed to be affixed to the bedside
of one who may have the bad luck to suffer from some infectious or
contagious disease is a thoughtful provision for a crying need. By
means of the instrument so placed, the patient’s friends are able to
converse to him, read and sing at him, and, in general, give him the
benefit of their society without danger of getting back more than
they bestow. The plan is of admirable simplicity and nothing could
be better—for the friends. There must be a certain satisfaction in
possessing one end of a telephone at the other end of which there is
one who cannot get away—one who has to listen to as many helloes as may
be thought good for him, and to submit to the question, “Is that you?”
when you know that it is he, as frequently as you choose to afflict
him with it. That he is heartily wishing but impotently unable to
transmit his disorder through the wire adds something to the joy of the
situation.

One of the advantages of the sick-bed telephone lies in the fact that
it can be used for preservation of “last words.” Hitherto those only
of men who died surrounded by attentive friends have had a chance of
getting before the public; those of the unfortunate infectionary,
isolated from his race and dying in a pesthouse, assisted by hireling
physicians and unsympathetic nurses, have been lost to the world. No
matter how many years of his life the patient may have been engaged in
their composition and rehearsal; no matter how “neat and opprobrious”
they were, they fell upon unappreciative ears, and were not recorded.
Under the new _régime_ the patient as his fire fails may summon his
friends to the telephone, launch at them his Parthian platitude and
die in the pleasant consciousness that posterity will have profit of
his death. Whether, like Falstaff, he choose to give his remarks a
reminiscent character and “babble o’ green fields;” confine himself
to the historical method, like Daniel Webster with his memorable “I
still live;” assume the benevolent pose, and, like Charles II, urge
the survivors not to let some “poor Nelly” starve; the exclamatory,
like the late President Garfield, who, according to one Swaim, said
“O Swaim!” and let it go at that; or the merely idiotic, like the
great Napoleon with his “_Tête d’armée_,” the faithful telephone will
be there, ready and willing to transmit (and transmute) the sentiment,
admonition, statement or whatever it may be.

To persons intending to make this use of the telephone a word of
counsel may not be impertinent. As no human being, however well-eared,
ever understood the telephone until it had repeated itself a number of
times in response to his demands for more light, and as the moribund
are not commonly in very good voice, it will be wise to begin the “last
words” while there is yet a little reserve fund of life and strength
remaining, for repetition and explanation.




                       THE CHAIR OF LITTLE EASE


Not many years ago, as I remember, a deal of deprecatory talk was in
evolution about a certain Governor of a Persian province, who was
said to have been boiled alive by order of the Shah. Our shouting and
shrilling in this matter were not altogether becoming, considering
whose progeny we are. It is not so very long since all the nations
of Europe practised boiling alive—commonly in oil, which was thought
to impart a fine discomfort to the person so unlucky as to be in the
cauldron. In England boiling was the legal punishment for poisoners for
a long time, beginning in 1531, in the reign of Henry VII. Among those
who suffered this discomfort was a man mentioned in the chronicle of
the Grey Friars, who was let down into the kettle by a chain until he
was done. He, however, was not boiled in oil—just plain. Some of the
items of an expense account relating to the execution of Friar Stone at
Canterbury are interesting in their homely way:

  Paid 2 men that sat by the kettle and parboiled him                1s
  To 3 men that carried his quarters to the gates and set them up    1s
  For a woman that scoured the kettle                                2d

With regard to that last item one cannot repress the flame of a
consuming curiosity to know if the scouring was done before or
afterward. If afterward, the poor woman seems to have been miserably
underpaid.

But call it a long time ago, protesting that the tendency to boil one
another has exhausted its impetus, or, if you please, worked itself
out of our clarifying blood. But the year 1790 is not so far back, and
burning at the stake probably generates an uneasiness to which that of
the oil-boiled gentry of the earlier period was nowise superior. It was
in the year mentioned—in the reign of his most gracious Majesty George,
the third of that name—that burning at the stake ceased to be the legal
penalty for “coining,” which was accounted “treason,” and murder of a
husband, which was “petty treason.” But wife-killers and coiners, male,
were hanged. The last woman burned alive departed this life, I think,
in 1789. Men are living to-day whose fathers were living then and may,
as children, have played in the ashes.

Still (it may be urged) it was not actually we who did it: in our
milder day we have neither the cauldron nor the stake. Ah, but we
have the dynamo. We have the custom of putting a small percentage of
our assassins into an “electrical chair” and doing them to death by
pressing a button—a process to which in defiance of two languages we
have given the name “electrocution.” For encouragement of the rising
young assassin, physicians assure us that this gives a painless death.

The physicians know nothing about it; for anything they know to the
contrary, death by electricity may be the most frightful torment that
it is possible for any of nature’s forces or processes to produce.
The agony may be not only inconceivably great, but to the sufferer it
may seem to endure for a period inconceivably long. That many of the
familiar physical indications of suffering are absent (though “long,
shuddering sighs” and “straining at the straps” are not certainly
symptoms of joy) is very little to the purpose when we know that
electricity paralyzes the muscles by whose action pain is familiarly
manifested. We know that it paralyzes all the seats of sensation, for
that matter, and puts an end to possibilities of pain. That is only to
say that it kills. But by what secret and infernal pang may not all
this be accompanied or accomplished? Through what unnatural exaltation
of the senses may not the moment of its accomplishing be commuted into
unthinkable cycles of time? Of all this the physicians can have no more
knowledge than so many toads under stones.

It is probable, at least it is possible, that a “victim’s” sum of
suffering from his instantaneous pervasion with enough of the fluid
to kill him is no less than if it were leisurely rilled through him
a little faster than he could bear until he should die of it that
way. Theories of the painlessness of sudden death appear to be based
mostly upon the fact that those who undergo it make no entries of their
sensations in their diaries. It is to be wished that they would be more
thoughtful and less selfish. The man smitten by lightning, or widely
distributed by a hitch in the proceedings at a powder mill, owes a duty
to his fellow men of which he commonly appears to have but an imperfect
sense. A careful and analytic record of his sensations at every
stage of his mischance would be a precious contribution to medical
literature. Published under some such title as _A Diary of Sudden
Death; by a Public-Spirited Observer on the Inside_ it would serve many
useful purposes, and also profit the publisher. What we most need—next
to more doctors at executions—is some person having experience of the
matter, to tell us fairly in inoffensive English, interlarded with
“Soche-sorte Latin as physickers doe use,” just how it feels to be dead
all over at once.




                        A GHOST IN THE UNMAKING


Belief in ghosts is natural, general and comforting. In many minds it
is cherished as a good working substitute for religion; in others it
appears to take the place of morality. It is rather more convenient
than either, for it may be disavowed and even reviled without exposing
oneself to suspicion and reproach. As an intellectual conviction it
is, in fact, not a very common phenomenon among people of thought and
education; nevertheless the number of civilized and enlightened human
beings who can pass through a graveyard at midnight without whistling
is not notably greater than the number who are unable to whistle.

It may be noted here as a distinction with a difference that belief
in ghosts is not the same thing as faith in them. Many men believe in
the adversary of souls, but comparatively few, and they not among our
best citizens, have any faith in him. Similarly, the belief in ghosts
has reference only to their existence, not to their virtues. They are,
indeed, commonly thought to harbor the most evil designs against the
continuity of peaceful thoughts and the integrity of sleep. Their
malevolence has in it a random and wanton quality which invests it with
a peculiarly lively interest: there is no calculating upon whom it
will fall: the just and the unjust alike are embraced in its baleful
jurisdiction and subjected to the humiliating indignity of displaying
the white feather. And this leads us directly back to the incident by
which these remarks have the honor to be suggested.

A woman living near Sedalia, Missouri, who had recently been married
alive to a widower, was once passing along a “lonely road” which had
been thoughtfully laid out near her residence. It was late in the
evening, and the lady was, naturally, somewhat apprehensive in a land
known to be infested by Missourians of the deepest dye. She was,
therefore, not in a suitable frame of mind for an interview with an
inhabitant of the other world, and it was with no slight trepidation
that she suddenly discovered in the gloom a tall figure, clad all
in white, standing silent and menacing in the road before her. She
endeavored to run away, but terror fastened her feet to the earth; to
shriek, but her lungs refused their office—the first time that an
office was ever refused in that sovereign commonwealth. In short, to
use a neat and graphic locution of the vicinity, she was utterly “guv
out.” The ghost was tremendously successful. Unluckily it could not
hold its ghost of a tongue, and that spectral organ could accomplish
feats of speech intelligible to ears still in the flesh. The apparition
advanced upon its helpless victim and said in hollow accents: “I am the
spirit of your husband’s first wife: beware, beware!”

Nothing could have been more imprudent. The cowering lady effected a
vertical attitude, grew tall, and expanded. Her terror gave place to
an intrepidity of the most military character, and she moved at once
to the attack. A moment later all that was mortal of that immortal
part, divested of its funeral habiliments, hair, teeth and whatever was
removable—battered, lacerated, gory and unconscious—lay by the roadside
awaiting identification. When the husband arrived upon the scene with
a horrible misgiving and a lantern, his worst fears were not realized;
the grave had bravely held its own; the object by the roadside was what
was left of his deceased wife’s sister. On learning that her victim
was not what she had incautiously represented herself to be, the
victorious lady expressed the deepest regret.

Such incidents as this go far to account for that strong current of
human testimony to the existence of ghosts, which Dr. Johnson found
running through all the ages, and at the same time throw a new and
significant light upon Heine’s suggestion that ghosts are as much
afraid of us as we of them. It would appear that some of the less
judicious of them have pretty good reason.




                         THE TURN OF THE TIDE


In the year 1890 I wrote in the San Francisco _Examiner_, _àpropos_ of
Chinese immigration:

“There is but one remedy—I do not recommend it: to kill the Chinese.
That we shall not do: the minority will not undertake, nor the majority
permit. It would be massacre now; in its own good time (too late) it
will be war. We could kill the Chinese now, as we have killed the
Indians; but fifty years hence—perhaps thirty—the nation that kills
Chinamen will have to answer to China.”

Twenty-one years later a Chinese warship steamed into the port of Vera
Cruz, Mexico, to back up a demand of the Chinese government for an
indemnity for a massacre of Chinese subjects. She was a little warship,
but she bore a momentous mandate, performed it and steamed away, the
world as inattentive to the event as it had been to the prophecy.

Perhaps our national indifference to the portentous phenomenon came of
“use and wont;” already an American president had been made to grovel
at the feet of a Japanese emperor, and had truculently threatened a
state of the union with war if it did not adjust its municipal laws
to the will of that Asian sovereign. Clearly, as the hope was then
expressed, “we have reached the end of Asiatic dictation”—the hither
end, unfortunately.

All Asia is astir, looking East and West. Its incalculable multitudes
are learning war and navigation; and Caucasian powers—“infatuate,
blind, selfsure!”—are their tutors. Their armies are taught by European
officers, their warships are built in European and American ports. All
the military powers unite in maintaining “the integrity of China” and
in awakening her to aggression and dominance.

Even if it were to our immediate interest to preserve the integrity of
the Chinese Empire a long look ahead might disclose a greater one that
would be best subserved by partition. In a single generation Japan has
performed the astonishing feat of changing civilizations. It has been,
for her, retrogression, for the civilization that she has discarded
was superior to that which she has adopted; but in one important
particular she has been the gainer by the exchange; in the matter,
namely, of military power, and therefore political consequence. As by
a leap, she has advanced from nowhere to the position of a first-rate
power. What she has done China is doing, with this difference: China’s
advance will be to a position that will dominate the world and reduce
the foremost nations of to-day to second place. Trained by European
officers to European methods of warfare, such an army as she can
raise and equip from her four hundred millions of population will be
invincible. It may overrun Europe and extinguish Christian civilization
on that continent, which would not be a very good thing for it on this.
It was only yesterday—a little more than two hundred years ago—that
Europe came within a single battle-hazard of being an Islam dependency.
If John Sobieski had been defeated under the walls of Vienna, that
city, Berlin, Paris and London would to-day be Mohammedan capitals.
History has not exhausted its reserve of astounding events, nor have
civilizations learned the secret of stability.

It is easy to affirm, in the case of China, the impossibility of any
such racial transformation as the one supposed, but fifty years ago
it would have been easy to point out its impossibility in the case
of Japan—if any human being had had the imagination and hardihood to
suggest it. Japan has made the impossible possible, the possible a
thing to be feared. As a measure of precaution, the partition of China
merits the profoundest consideration.

Actual forces at the back of a great movement are seldom apparent to
those engaged in directing it. Statesmanship is mostly a matter of
temporary expedients for accomplishment of small purposes, but if
there is to-day a really great statesman of the Caucasian race he
is considering the partition of China among European nations as an
alternative to the partition of European nations among the Chinese.

Meantime we occupy ourselves with laws and treaties to “exclude”
Chinese and other inevitable Asians from our continent. Successive
relays of American statesmen wreck themselves upon the problem and go
down smiling. To some of us it is given to see that the Asian can not
be excluded—that the course of empire, having taken its way westward
until it has reached its point of departure, is turning backward, an
irresistible “tide in the affairs of men.” But what can we do but
propose further and futile measures of “exclusion”? We supplicate our
Government to forbid us to employ our destroyers, to deny us the fruits
of our cupidity and prohibit us from bringing the hateful race here
in our own ships. Our courts, minded madwise, make in good faith the
monstrous assumption that the writ of _habeas corpus_ is a right which
we, having invented it, are bound to share with races that never heard
of it. Our churches, gone clean daft in pursuit of souls never caught
and not worth the catching, pull the strings of their God to a gesture
of injunction and bid us respect the brotherhood of man. Every moment
and at all points we feel the baffling hand thrusting us roughly down
and back, while this awful invasion pours in upon us with augmenting
power.

Not for an instant has the refluent wave been stayed. Every American
city has its “Chinatown,” every American village its scouts and
pioneers of the movement. On the Pacific Coast the Japanese have
a foothold everywhere, monopolizing entire industries in cities
and valleys, owning the lands that once they leased and charitably
employing their former employers. And all along the line of every
growing railway in the west may be seen the turbaned Hindu bending to
his work and biding his time to be a “shipper.”

As it is, it will be: the Oriental races are in motion westward, and
this continent is doomed to their occupancy. A higher, sterner law than
any of man’s devising is in action here. Fate has exercised the right
of eminent domain and condemned this New World to the use of ancient
races. For four hundred years the European has been wresting it from
the Indian; within one-half the time the Asian will have accomplished
its conquest from the European. There is no help for us: as we did unto
others it shall be done unto us, and the Asian shall be master here. It
is comforting to know that we shall have had a hand in our undoing; one
does not like to be a “dead-head” in any enterprise.

No; we shall not kill the Chinese, nor will they “go” without
killing—nor cease to come. As surely as the sun shall rise each day,
so surely each day will his beams gild the ever advancing flag of this
irresistible migration. Beneath the feet of that mighty host the arts
and sciences of the Aryan, his laws and letters, his religions and
languages, the very body and soul of his civilization will be trampled
out of record, out of memory, out of tradition. It is not a sunny
picture; what need to look upon it? I invite to despair; but there
stands the dear American statesman, parchment in hand—a new exclusion
law! His face shines in the dawning of another hope; in his eyes is the
morning of a new era. Between the two of us—him and me—all patriots may
be united: each with a prophet of his choice. It is clear whom ye will
choose, but I hope I don’t intrude.




                          FAT BABIES AND FATE


The modern Baby Show is a fruitful source of mischief—a degenerate
successor to that ancient display whose beneficent purpose was to
ascertain what ailing or deformed or merely puny infants might most
advantageously be flung off a cliff. The object of the modern Baby Show
is not improvement of the race by assisting Nature in “weeding out,”
nor is such the practical result. Prizes, we are told, are commonly
bestowed by a committee of matrons, and necessarily fall to the fattest
exhibit. In the matron’s ideal “scale of being” the pudgiest, the most
orbicular, babe holds the summit place, the first adiposition, so to
speak.

This is not as it should be; no true improvement in the race can be
effected by encouraging our young to bury their noses in their cheeks
and their knuckles under a mass of tissues overlying them like a
boxing-glove. The prize winners do not become better men and women than
their unsuccessful but more deserving competitors; while the latter,
beginning life in the shadow of a great disappointment, retain to the
end of their days a sharp sense of injustice incompatible with warm and
elevated sentiments. The effect on the characters of the beaten mothers
is even more deplorable. Every mother of a defeated babe is convinced
that her exhibit is incomparably superior, physically, intellectually
and morally, to the roly-poly impostors honored by the committee
of matrons. Her wrath at the unjust decision is deep, constant and
lasting; it embitters her life, sours her temper and spoils her beauty.
As to the fathers, the only discernible effect upon them of either
winning or losing is to make them a trifle more ashamed of their
offspring than they were before. “The proud and happy father” had never
the advantage of existing outside the female imagination, but if he
really existed the Baby Show would be fatal to both his pride and his
happiness.

In enumerating the manifold mischiefs that fly from that Pandora’s-box,
the Baby Show, we are perhaps not justified in mentioning the
desolating effect upon the committee of matrons whose action springs
the lid. It is doubtful if the disasters which themselves incur can
rightly be rated as evils in the larger sense of the word; and,
anyhow, the nature of these is imperfectly known; for after making
their award the unhappy arbiters commonly vanish from the busy haunts
of women. The places which knew them know them no more forever, and
their fate is involved in obscurities pervious only to conjecture.
In view of this regrettable but apparently inevitable fact, it is
desirable (if the Baby Show cannot be averted) that the lady judges be
selected early, in order that our citizens may bestow upon them before
they are taken from us some suitable testimonial of public esteem and
gratitude, attesting the popular sense of their heroism in accepting
the fatal distinction.




                    CERTAIN AREAS OF OUR SEAMY SIDE


The thrifty person who attends, uninvited, a wedding reception and,
retiring early from the festivities, leaves the unhappy couple poorer
by a few unconsidered trifles of jewelry has a just claim to the
gratitude of mankind. The interests of justice demand his immunity from
detection: the officer who shall molest him is _hostis humani generis_.
Neither grave rebuke nor ridicule has sufficed to overcome and stamp
out the vulgar custom of ostentatiously displaying wedding presents,
with names of givers attached; perhaps it will yield to the silent
suasion of the sneak-thief. To healthy and honest understandings—that
is to say, to the understandings of this present writer and those
who have the intelligence to think as he does—it is but faintly
conceivable how self-respecting persons can do this thing. Display of
any kind is necessarily repugnant to those tastes which distinguish
the well-bred from those whose worth is of another sort. Among the
latter we are compelled (reluctantly) to reckon those amiable beings
who display coats-of-arms, crests and the like, whether they are theirs
by inheritance, purchase or invention; those, we mean, who blazon
them about in conspicuous places for the obvious purpose of declaring
with emphasis whatever merits and advantages may inhere in their
possession. In this class, also, we must place the excellent ladies
and gentlemen who “boast” their descent from illustrious, or merely
remote, ancestors. (The remoter the ancestor—that is to say, the less
of his blood his descendant has—the greater that funny person’s pride
in the distinction.) A person of sense would be as likely to direct
attention to his own virtues as to those of his forefathers; a woman of
modesty, to her own beauty or grace as to the high social position of
her grandmother.

Nay, we must carry our condemnation to an even greater extreme. The
man who on public occasions covers his breast with decorations, the
insignia of orders, the badges of high service or of mere distinction
such as results from possession of the badge, is guilty of immodesty.
“Why do you not wear your Victoria Cross?” the only recipient of it
who ever failed to wear it was asked. “When I wish people to know how
valiant I am in battle,” was the reply, “I will tell them.”

But below this lowest deep of vanity there is a lower deep of
cupidity—and something more. The custom of displaying wedding presents
duly labeled with the givers’ names and publishing the list in the
newspapers supplies a very “genteel” method of extortion to those who
have conscientious scruples against highway robbery. That extortion is
very often the conscious intent I am far from affirming; but that such
is the practical effect many a reader inadequately provided with this
world’s goods will pause at this point feelingly to aver. But he is
a lofty soul indeed if at the next silent demand he do not stand and
deliver as meekly as heretofore. Looked at how one may please, it is
a bad business, not greatly superior in point of morality to that of
the sneak-thief who is one of its perils, and with whose intelligent
activity its existence may, one hopes, become in time altogether
incompatible.




                        FOR BREVITY AND CLARITY


Mr. George R. Sims once “invited proposals” for a brief and convenient
name for the misdemeanor known in England as “traveling in a class
of railway carriage superior to that for which the defendant had
taken a ticket.” It is a ludicrous fact that the offense has never
had another name, nor is it quite easy to invent a better one
off-hand. I should like to know what it is in Esperanto. We have in
this country certain clumsy phrases which might advantageously be
condensed into single words. For example, to “join in the holy bonds
of wedlock” might become to “jedlock.” The society editor would be
spared much labor if he could say of the unhappy couple that they were
“jedlocked,” or “lemaltared,”—the latter word meaning, of course, “led
to the matrimonial altar.” Many of the ordinary reporter’s favorite
expressions could be treated in the same practical fashion. The
familiar “much-needed rest” would become simply “mest.” The “devouring
element” would be “delement,” and have done with it. When it is, as
so very frequently it is, necessary to say that something “reflects
credit” on somebody, the verb “to refledit” would serve an honorable
and useful purpose. Instead of writing of a man freshly dead that he
was “much esteemed by all who knew him,” we should say that he was
“mestewed.” By such simple and rational devices as these the language
would be notably improved, and in a newspaper report of the birth of a
rich man’s child a few lines could be saved for the death of a poet.

As the words “not either” have been condensed into “neither,” “not
ever” into “never” and “no one” into “none,” why should not the
negative or privative, when followed by a vowel, be always compounded
in the same way? For example, “neven” for “not even,” “nin” and “nout”
for “not in” and “not out.” “Nirish” for “no Irish,” and so forth.
Nay, it is not necessary that a vowel follow the negative: “no Popery”
could be “nopery,” “no matter,” “natter,” and “never-to-be-forgotten,”
“notten,” or “netten.” The principle is pregnant with possibilities.

While reforming the language I crave leave to introduce an improvement
in punctuation—the snigger point, or note of cachinnation. It is
written thus ◡ and represents, as nearly as may be, a smiling mouth.
It is to be appended, with the full stop, to every jocular or ironical
sentence; or, without the stop, to every jocular or ironical clause of
a sentence otherwise serious—thus: “Mr. Edward Bok is the noblest work
of God ◡.” “Our respected and esteemed ◡ contemporary, Mr. Slyvester
Vierick, whom for his virtues we revere and for his success envy ◡, is
going to the devil as fast as his two heels can carry him.” “Deacon
Harvey, a truly good man ◡, is self-made in the largest sense of the
term; for although he was born great, wise and rich, the deflection of
his nose is the work of his own coat-sleeve.”

To many a great writer the new point will be as useful as was the
tail to his unlettered ancestor. By a single stroke of his pen at the
finish, the illustrious humorist who reviews books for _The Nation_ can
give to his dismalist plagiarism from Mulgrub’s _Theory of Quaternions_
all the charm and value of a lively personal anecdote, as he would
relate it. By liberally sprinkling his literary criticism with it, Dr.
Hamilton W. Mabie can give to the work a lilt and vivacity that will
readily distinguish it from a riding-master’s sermon on the mount; the
points will apprise his reader of a humorous intention not otherwise
observable as a factor in the humorous effect. Embellished with this
useful mark, even the writings of that sombre soul, Mr. John Kendrick
Bangs, will have a quality that will at least prevent the parsons from
reading them at the graveside as passages from the burial service.




                        GENIUS AS A PROVOCATION


In his own honorable tongue Mr. Yoni Noguchi is, I dare say, a poet;
in ours he is a trifle unintelligible. His English prose, too, is of
a kind that one does not write if one has a choice in the matter, yet
sometimes Mr. Noguchi thinks in it with clarity and point. Concerning
the late Lafcadio Hearn and the little tempest that was roaring round
that author’s life and character, Mr. Noguchi wrote:

“It is perfectly appalling to observe in the Western countries that
when one dies his friends have to rush to print his private letters,
and even an unexpected person volunteers to speak as his best friend,
and presumes to write his biography.”

No, this is not good prose (barring the “unexpected person,” which is
delicious) but it is obvious truth and righteous judgment. Publication
of letters not written for publication is _prima facie_ evidence of
moral delinquency in the offender. In doing this thing he supplies
the strongest presumption against himself. The burden of proof is
heavy upon him; he is to be held guilty unless he can support it with
positive evidence of a difficult thing to prove—an untainted intention
not related to gain, glory nor gratification of a public appetite
to which there is no honorable purveyance. No evidence less valid
than written permission obviously covering the particular letters
published is acceptable. In all the instances that I have observed this
credential is wanting. True, the scope of my observation is somewhat
narrow, for I would no more read a dead man’s private correspondence
in a book than I would break open his desk to obtain it. From a woman
related to a famous poet and critic then recently deceased I had once a
request for any letters that I might have from him. The lady said that
she wanted them for his biography, already in course of preparation.
The letters related to literary matters only, but as the lady submitted
no authorization from their writer for their publication I civilly
refused and took the consequences—there were consequences. Whether or
not my part of the correspondence appeared in the book I shall not know
unless told.

The family of a man of genius and renown may be pretty confidently
trusted to make him ridiculous in life with their clumsy tongues, and
after death with their thrifty pens. I think there was never a man of
genius whom all his relatives excepting his immediate offspring did
not, while jealous of his fame, secretly regard as a fool. (Even the
brothers of Jesus of Nazareth did not “believe on him,” and to some of
us who are immune to legends of the Church it is given to know that his
mother was of their way of thinking.) Dumbly resenting the distinction
that seems to accentuate their own obscurity, these worthies are
nevertheless keen to shine by the growing light of his posthumous fame,
if he have it, and to profit by it too, as are his more appreciative
children and children’s children, usually dullards and dolts to the
thirteenth and fourteenth generation. His death is the opportunity of
all. Some of them are very sure to crucify the body of him and thrust a
pen into his side to show that his blood is the same as their own.

A most disagreeable instance of this most disagreeable practice is that
of a son of Robert Browning, who has won literary renown and popular
commendation by publishing his parents’ love-letters. Doubtless he is
proud of his work, but in the eyes of his sainted father, I fear,
he is one of Mr. Noguchi’s “unexpected persons,” at least in the
sense that he is not expected in Paradise. Another and more recent
illustration is the book _My Soldier_, the sanguinary work of a wife.
Observe with what celerity the forehanded family of Tennyson “improved
the occasion” of his passing. The poor man was hardly cold before they
thrust a volume of Shakspeare into his dead hand, clove it with his
finger at a significant passage chosen by a domestic council, admitted
a consistent ray of moonshine into the death chamber and invited the
world to witness the edifying show. So the man who wrote

    Sunset and evening star,
    And one clear call for me

was made to seem to “pass out to sea” in an impressive pose,
appropriately spectacular and dramatically ridiculous.

If there is a Better Land it is where a great man can grow up from the
ground like a tree, without human agency, get on without a friend,
write no letters and leave no name at which himself grew pale, to point
a lying anecdote or tale.

To the perils herein pointed out authors are peculiarly exposed. The
world has apparently agreed that he who writes for publication shall
write for nothing else. I have heard men of decent life and social
repute gravely defend the thesis that the public has a _right_ to all
that an author has written; and as his letters are likely to be rather
more interesting than those of one who works at another trade, they are
held to have a value disproportionate to the mere fame of their writer.
We all concede the virtue of abstention from theft of a paste jewel,
but a real diamond!—that is another matter.

The people are not pigs; the author of their favorite personal letters
need not have a great personal renown. If he has uttered a sufficient
body of private correspondence they are willing to forgive him for
their inattention to his public work. Their purveyors are even more
liberal in the matter: they do not insist on an excellent epistolary
style nor anything of that kind. An intimate “human document” in
ailing syntax is quite as available for their purpose as one baring
the heart of a grammarian. _The Filial Correspondence of George Ade_
is foredoomed to as sharp a competition among dealers as _The Love
Letters of Professor Harry Thurston Peck, Stylist._

It may be thought that all this is a cry from the deep and dark of a
great fear. Not so; since I became a public writer I have never engaged
in a correspondence in which it has not been distinctly understood
that my letters were never to be printed. Only through an impossible
treachery can the public ever have the happiness and profit of reading
them. As to love-letters I am clean-handed: all mine have been written
in honorable payment for favors and, as Conscience is my willing
witness, I never meant one word of them.




                         A BIVOUAC OF THE DEAD


Away up in the heart of the Allegheny mountains, in Pocahontas county,
West Virginia, is a beautiful little valley through which flows
the east fork of the Greenbrier river. At a point where the valley
road intersects the old Staunton and Parkersburg turnpike, a famous
thoroughfare in its day, is a post office in a farm house. The name of
the place is Travelers’ Repose, for it was once a tavern. Crowning some
low hills within a stone’s throw of the house are long lines of old
Confederate fortifications, skilfully designed and so well “preserved”
that an hour’s work by a brigade would put them into serviceable shape
for the next civil war. This place had its battle—what was called a
battle in the “green and salad days” of the great rebellion. A brigade
of Federal troops, the writer’s regiment among them, came over Cheat
mountain, fifteen miles to the westward, and, stringing its lines
across the little valley, felt the enemy all day; and the enemy did a
little feeling, too. There was a great cannonading, which killed about
a dozen on each side; then, finding the place too strong for assault,
the Federals called the affair a reconnaissance in force, and burying
their dead withdrew to the more comfortable place whence they had come.
Those dead now lie in a beautiful national cemetery at Grafton, duly
registered, so far as identified, and companioned by other Federal dead
gathered from the several camps and battlefields of West Virginia. The
fallen soldier (the word “hero” appears to be a later invention) has
such humble honors as it is possible to give.

    His part in all the pomp that fills
    The circuit of the Summer hills
      Is that his grave is green.

True, more than a half of the green graves in the Grafton cemetery
are marked “Unknown,” and sometimes it occurs that one thinks of the
contradiction involved in “honoring the memory” of him of whom no
memory remains to honor; but the attempt seems to do no great harm to
the living, even to the logical.

A few hundred yards to the rear of the old Confederate earthworks is a
wooded hill. Years ago it was not wooded. Here, among the trees and
in the undergrowth, are rows of shallow depressions, discoverable by
removing the accumulated forest leaves. From some of them may be taken
(and reverently replaced) small thin slabs of the split stone of the
country, with rude and reticent inscriptions by comrades. I found only
one with a date, only one with full names of man and regiment. The
entire number found was eight.

In these forgotten graves rest the Confederate dead—between eighty and
one hundred, as nearly as can be made out. Some fell in the “battle;”
the majority died of disease. Two, only two, have apparently been
disinterred for reburial at their homes. So neglected and obscure
in this _campo santo_ that only he upon whose farm it is—the aged
postmaster of Travelers’ Repose—appears to know about it. Men living
within a mile have never heard of it. Yet other men must be still
living who assisted to lay these Southern soldiers where they are, and
could identify some of the graves. Is there a man, North or South,
who would begrudge the expense of giving to these fallen brothers the
tribute of green graves? One would rather not think so. True, there
are several hundreds of such places still discoverable in the track of
the great war. All the stronger is the dumb demand—the silent plea of
these fallen brothers to what is “likest God within the soul.”

They were honest and courageous foemen, having little in common with
the political madmen who persuaded them to their doom and the literary
bearers of false witness in the aftertime. They did not live through
the period of honorable strife into the period of vilification—did
not pass from the iron age to the brazen—from the era of the sword to
that of the tongue and pen. Among them is no member of the Southern
Historical Society. Their valor was not the fury of the non-combatant;
they have no voice in the thunder of the civilians and the shouting.
Not by them are impaired the dignity and infinite pathos of the Lost
Cause. Give them, these blameless gentlemen, their rightful part in all
the pomp that fills the circuit of the summer hills.

1903.


                         Transcriber’s Notes:

  - Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
  - Blank pages have been removed.
  - A few obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.



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