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Title: Counter-currents
Author: Agnes Repplier
Release date: August 7, 2023 [eBook #71362]
Language: English
Original publication: Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1916
Credits: 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 COUNTER-CURRENTS ***
By Agnes Repplier
COUNTER-CURRENTS.
AMERICANS AND OTHERS.
A HAPPY HALF-CENTURY AND OTHER ESSAYS.
IN OUR CONVENT DAYS.
COMPROMISES.
THE FIRESIDE SPHINX. With 4 full-page and 17 text Illustrations by
Miss E. BONSALL.
BOOKS AND MEN.
POINTS OF VIEW.
ESSAYS IN IDLENESS.
IN THE DOZY HOURS, AND OTHER PAPERS.
ESSAYS IN MINIATURE.
A BOOK OF FAMOUS VERSE. Selected by Agnes Repplier. In Riverside
Library for Young People.
THE SAME. _Holiday Edition._
VARIA.
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
COUNTER-CURRENTS
BY
AGNES REPPLIER, LITT.D.
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1916
COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY AGNES REPPLIER
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Published April 1916_
THIRD IMPRESSION, AUGUST 1916
Note
These nine essays, in their original form, were published in the
_Atlantic Monthly_ during the past three years.
Contents
The Cost of Modern Sentiment 1
Our Loss of Nerve 33
Christianity and War 63
Women and War 98
The Repeal of Reticence 136
Popular Education 165
The Modest Immigrant 197
Waiting 233
Americanism 260
COUNTER-CURRENTS
The Cost of Modern Sentiment
We are rising dizzily and fearlessly on the crest of a great wave of
sentiment. When the wave breaks, we may find ourselves submerged, and
in danger of drowning; but for the present we are full of hope and
high resolve. Forty years ago we stood in shallow water, and mocked
at the mid-Victorian sentiment, then ebbing slowly with the tide. We
have nothing now in common with that fine, thin, tenacious conception
of life and its responsibilities. We do not prate about valour for
men, and domesticity for women. A vague humanity is our theme. We do
not feel the fastidious distaste for repulsive details which made our
grandparents culpably negligent. All knowledge, apart from its quality,
and apart from our requirements, now seems to us desirable. Taste is no
longer a controlling force. We do not, if we can help it, look “that
jade, Duty,”--I use Sir Walter Scott’s phrase, and he knew the lady in
question better than do most men,--squarely in the face; but we speak
well of her behind her back, which is more than Sir Walter did. To hear
us talk, one would imagine that she never cost a pang.
The sentiment of to-day is social and philanthropic. It has no
affiliations with art, which stands aloof from it,--a new experience
for the world. It dominates periodical literature, minor fiction, and
serious verse; but it has so far given nothing of permanent value to
letters. It is in high favour with politicians, and is echoed loudly
from all party platforms. It has unduly influenced our attitude toward
the war in Europe, and toward our defences at home. It is a force
to be reckoned with, and to be controlled. It is capable of raising
us to a better and clearer vision, or of weakening our judgment and
shattering our common sense. If we value our safety, we must forever
bear in mind that sentiment is subjective, and a personal thing.
However exalted and however ardent, it cannot be accepted as a scale
for justice, or as a test for truth.
The issues with which our modern sentiment chiefly concerns itself
are the conditions of labour, the progress of women, the social evil,
and--for the past two years--the overwhelming question of peace and
war. Sometimes these issues are commingled. Always they have a bearing
upon one another. There is also a distinct and perilous tendency
toward sentiment in matters political and judicial; while an excess of
emotionalism is the stumbling-block of those noble associations which
work for the protection of animals. It is profoundly discouraging to
read in the accredited organ of an American humane society an angry
protest against Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s being permitted the use of
Eskimo dogs on his Arctic explorations, because, forsooth, when he went
hungry, the dogs went hungry too, and because their feet were hurt by
the ice. The writer (a woman) reminds us that these dogs (like all
other animals) are not “free agents”; and she calls upon public opinion
and law to rescue them. We hear about the “long arm of the law,” but it
would be a giant stretch that could reach Stefansson in his ice-fields.
“Men who do such things,” she affirms, “are not heroes of the highest
type; and, anyway, when you have found or explored the North Pole or
the South Pole, what can you do with it?”
This query is hard to answer. Perhaps no explorer wants to do anything
with the Poles; but just leave them as they are, uncolonized for the
present. They are not the only things in the world which have no
commercial value. But if Stefansson is not a hero, of what stuff are
heroes made, and where shall we look to find one? And with all Europe
crying out in its agony of pain, is it worth our while to worry over
a few dogs, who are doing, under hard conditions, the work they are
fitted to do?
The same journal insults the intelligence of its readers by printing
a wild rhapsody of Mrs. Annie Besant’s, apparently under the illusion
that it can be accepted as an argument for vegetarianism. I venture
to quote one particularly mad paragraph as an illustration of the
unplumbed depths to which emotional humanitarianism can descend:--
“The killing of animals in order to devour their flesh is so obviously
an outrage on all humane feelings, that one is almost ashamed to
mention it in a paper that is regarding man as a director of evolution.
If any one who eats flesh could be taken to the shambles, to watch the
agonized struggles of the terrified victims as they are dragged to the
spot where knife or mallet slays them; if he could be made to stand
with the odours of the blood reeking in his nostrils; if there his
astral vision could be opened so that he might see the filthy creatures
that flock round to feast on the loathsome exhalations, and see also
the fear and horror of the slaughtered beasts as they arrive in the
astral world, and send back thence currents of dread and hatred that
flow between men and animals in constantly re-fed streams; if a man
could pass through these experiences, he would be cured of meat-eating
forever.”
Now, when one has belonged for many years to the society which printed
this precious paragraph, when one has believed all one’s life that to
be sentient is to possess rights, and that, not kindness only, but
justice to the brute creation is an essential element of decent living,
it is hard to be confronted with unutterable nonsense about astral
currents and astral visions. It is harder still to be held indirectly
responsible for the publication of such nonsense, and to entertain for
the thousandth time the weary conviction that common sense is not a
determining factor in humanity.
Mr. Chesterton, upon whom the delight of startling his readers never
seems to pall, has declared that men are more sentimental than
women, “whose only fault is their excessive sense.” Also that the
apparent absorption of the modern world in social service is not
the comprehensive thing it seems. The general public still remains
indifferent. This may or may not be true. It is as hard for Mr.
Chesterton as for the rest of us to know much about that remnant of
the public which is not writing, or lecturing, or collecting data, or
collecting funds, or working for clubs and societies. But no one can
say that the social reformer is the slighted creature that he was a
half-century ago. He meets with the most distinguished consideration,
and he is always accorded the first hearing in print and on the
platform. He commands our respect when he deals soberly with sober
facts in sober language, when his conclusions are just, his statements
irrefutable. He is less praiseworthy when he flies to fiction,
an agreeable but unconvincing medium; or to verse, which, as the
theologian said of “Paradise Lost,” “proves nothing.” It is very good
verse sometimes, and its grace of sentiment, its note of appeal, find
an easy echo in the reader’s heart.
A little poem called “The Factories,” published in “McClure’s Magazine”
for September, 1912, gives an almost perfect example of the modern
point of view, of the emotional treatment of an economic question, and
of the mental confusion which arises from the substitution of sympathy
for exactness.
“I have shut my little sister in from life and light
(For a rose, for a ribbon, for a wreath across my hair),
I have made her restless feet still until the night,
Locked from sweets of summer, and from wild spring air:
I who ranged the meadow-lands, free from sun to sun,
Free to sing, and pull the buds, and watch the far wings fly,
I have bound my sister till her playing-time is done,--
Oh, my little sister, was it I?--was it I?
“I have robbed my sister of her day of maidenhood
(For a robe, for a feather, for a trinket’s restless spark),
Shut from Love till dusk shall fall, how shall she know good,
How shall she pass scatheless through the sin-lit dark?
I who could be innocent, I who could be gay,
I who could have love and mirth before the light went by,
I have put my sister in her mating-time away,--
Sister, my young sister, was it I?--was it I?
“I have robbed my sister of the lips against her breast
(For a coin, for the weaving of my children’s lace and lawn),
Feet that pace beside the loom, hands that cannot rest:
How can she know motherhood, whose strength is gone?
I who took no heed of her, starved and labor worn,
I against whose placid heart my sleepy gold-heads lie,
Round my path they cry to me, little souls unborn,--
God of Life--Creator! It was I! It was I.”
Now if by “I” is meant the average woman who wears the “robe,” the
“ribbon,” the “feather,” and possibly--though rarely--the “wreath
across my hair,” “I” must protest distinctly against assuming a
guilt which is none of mine. I have not shut my little sister in a
factory, any more than I have ranged the meadow-lands, “free from sun
to sun.” What I probably am doing is trying to persuade my sister to
cook my dinner, and sweep my house, and help me to take care of my
“gold-heads,” who are not always so sleepy as I could desire. If my
sister declines to do this at a wage equal to her factory earnings, and
with board and lodging included, she is well within her rights, and I
have no business, as is sometimes my habit, weakly to complain of her
decision. If I made my household arrangements acceptable to her, she
would come. As this is difficult or distasteful to me, she goes to a
factory instead. The right of every man and woman to do the work he or
she chooses to do, and can do, at what wages, and under what conditions
he or she can command, is the fruit of centuries of struggle. It is now
so well established that only the trade unions venture to deny it.
In that vivid and sad study of New York factory life, published some
years ago by the Century Company, under the title of “The Long Day,”
a girl who is out of work, and who has lost her few possessions in
a lodging-house fire, seeks counsel of a wealthy stranger who has
befriended her.
“The lady looked at me a moment out of fine, clear eyes.
“‘You would not go into service, I suppose?’ she asked slowly.
“I had never thought of such an alternative before, but I met it
without a moment’s hesitation. ‘No, I would not care to go into
service,’ I replied; and, as I did so, the lady’s face showed mingled
disappointment and disgust.
“‘That is too bad,’ she answered, ‘for, in that case, I’m afraid I can
do nothing for you.’ And she went out of the room, leaving me, I must
confess, not sorry for having thus bluntly decided against wearing the
definite badge of servitude.”
Here at least is a refreshingly plain statement of facts. The girl
in question bore the servitude imposed upon her by the foremen of
half a dozen factories; she slept for many months in quarters which
no domestic servant would consent to occupy; she ate food which no
servant would be asked to eat; she associated with young women whom
no servant would accept as equals and companions. But, as she had
voluntarily relinquished comfort, protection, and the grace of human
relations between employer and employed, she accepted her chosen
conditions, and tried successfully to better them along her chosen
lines. The reader is made to understand that it was as unreasonable
for the benevolent lady--who had visions of a trim and white-capped
parlor-maid dancing before her eyes--to show “disappointment and
disgust” because her overtures were rejected, as it would have been to
charge the same lady with robbing the girl of her “day of maidenhood,”
and her “little souls unborn,” by shutting her up in a factory. If we
will blow our minds clear of generous illusions, we shall understand
that an emotional verdict has no validity when offered as a criterion
of facts.
The excess of sentiment, which is misleading in philanthropy and
economics, grows acutely dangerous when it interferes with legislation,
or with the ordinary rulings of morality. The substitution of a
sentimental principle of authority for the impersonal processes of law
confuses our understanding, and undermines our sense of justice. It
is a painful truth that most laws have had their origin in a profound
mistrust of human nature (even Mr. Olney admits that the Constitution,
although framed in the interests of freedom, is not strictly
altruistic); but the time is hardly ripe for brushing aside this
ungenerous mistrust, and establishing the social order on a basis of
pure enthusiasm. The reformers who light-heartedly announce that people
are “tired of the old Constitution anyway,” voice the buoyant creed of
ignorance. I once heard a popular lecturer say of a popular idol that
he “preferred making precedents to following them,” and the remark
evoked a storm of applause. It was plain that the audience considered
following a precedent to be a timorous and unworthy thing for a strong
man to do; and it was equally plain that nobody had given the matter
the benefit of a serious thought. Believers in political faith-healing
enjoy a supreme immunity from doubt.
This growing contempt for paltry but not unuseful restrictions, this
excess of sentiment, combined with paucity of humour and a melodramatic
attitude toward crime, has had some discouraging results. It is ill
putting the strong man, or the avenging angel, or the sinned-against
woman above the law, which is a sacred trust for the preservation
of life and liberty. It is ill so to soften our hearts with a
psychological interest in the lawbreaker that no criminal is safe
from popularity. The “Nation” performed a well-timed duty when it
commented grimly on the message sent to the public by a murderer, and
a singularly cold-blooded murderer, through the minister who attended
him on the scaffold: “Mr. Beattie desired to thank his many friends for
kind letters and expressions of interest, and the public for whatever
sympathy was felt or expressed.”
It sounds like a cabinet minister who has lost an honoured and beloved
wife; not like an assassin who has lured _his_ wife to a lonely
spot, and there pitilessly killed her. One fails to see why “kind
letters” and “expressions of interest” should have poured in upon this
malefactor, just as one fails to see why a young woman who shot her
lover a few months later in Columbus, Ohio, should have received an
ovation in the court-room. It was not even her first lover (it seldom
is); but when a gallant jury had acquitted her of all blame in the
trifling matter of manslaughter, “the crowd shouted its approval”;
“scores of women rushed up to her, and insisted upon kissing her”;
and an intrepid suitor, stimulated by circumstances which might have
daunted a less mettlesome man, announced his intention of marrying the
heroine on the spot.
In New York a woman murdered her lover because he refused his aid--a
dastardly refusal--when her husband had cast her off. She was not
only acquitted by a jury,--which was to be expected; but the husband,
pleased with the turn affairs had taken, restored her to his home and
his affections; and a sympathetic newspaper offered this explanation to
a highly gratified public: “They are Sicilians, and in Sicily a woman
may retrieve her own honour and avenge her husband’s, only by doing as
this woman had done.”
Perhaps. But New York is not Sicily, our civilization is not Sicilian
civilization, and our courts of law are not modelled on a Sicilian
vendetta. The reporter described with all the eloquence of his craft
the young wife reconciled and joyous in her husband’s arms, laughing
and singing to her baby, happier than she had been at any time since
her honeymoon. A pretty picture, if the shadow of a murdered man did
not intrude upon it.
Our revolt from the old callous cruelty--the heart-sickening cruelty of
the eighteenth century--has made us tender to criminals, and strangely
lenient to their derelictions. It inspires genial visitors at Sing Sing
to write about the “fine type” of men, sentenced for the foulest of
crimes. It fills us all with concern lest detention prove irksome to
the detained, lest baseball and well-appointed vaudeville should not
sufficiently beguile the tedium of their leisure hours.
“Imprisonment alone is not
A thing of which we would complain,
And ill-conwenience is our lot,
But do not give the convick pain.”
Sentiment has been defined as a revolt from the despotism of facts.
It is often a revolt from authority, which, to the sentimentalist,
seems forever despotic; and this revolt, or rather this easy disregard
of authority, is fatal to the noblest efforts of the humanitarian.
The women of wealth and position who from time to time fling
themselves with ardour into the cause of striking shirt-waist-makers
and garment-makers are always well intentioned, but not always well
advised. In so far as they uphold the strikers in what are often just
and reasonable demands, they do good work; and the substantial aid they
give is sweetened by the spirit in which it is given,--the sense of
fellow feeling with their kind. But there is no doubt that one of the
lessons taught at such times to our foreign-born population is that the
laws of our country may be disregarded with impunity. The picketers who
attack the “scab” workers, and are arrested for disorderly conduct,
are swiftly released, to become the heroines of the hour. I once
remonstrated with a friend who had given bail for a dozen of these
young lawbreakers, and she answered reproachfully: “But they are so
ignorant and helpless. There were two poor bewildered girls in court
yesterday who did not know enough English to understand the charge made
against them. You could not conceive of anything more pathetic.”
I said that a young woman who bowled over another young woman into the
gutter understood perfectly the charge made against her, whether she
spoke English or not. One does not have to study French or Spanish
to know that one may not knock down a Frenchman or a Spaniard. No
civilized country permits this robust line of argument. But reason
is powerless when sentiment takes the helm. It would be as easy to
argue with a conflagration as with unbalanced zeal. The vision of a
good cause debauched by intemperance is familiar to all students of
sociology; but it is no less melancholy for being both recognizable and
ridiculous.
A moderate knowledge of history--which, though discouraging, is also
enlightening--might prove serviceable to all the enthusiasts who are
engaged in making over the world. Many of them (in this country, at
least) talk and write as if nothing in particular had happened between
the Deluge and the Civil War. That they sometimes know as little of the
Civil War as of the Deluge is proven by the lament of an ardent and
oratorical pacifist that this great struggle should be spoken of in
school histories as a war for the preservation of the Union, instead of
a war for the abolishment of slavery. A lady lecturer, very prominent
in social work, has made the gratifying announcement that “the greatest
discovery of the nineteenth century is woman’s discovery of herself.
It is only within the last fifty years that it has come to be realized
that a woman is human, and has a right to think and act for herself.”
Now, after all, the past cannot be a closed page, even to one so
exclusively concerned with the present. A little less talking, a little
more reading, and such baseless generalizations would be impossible,
even on that stronghold of ignorance, the platform. If women failed
to discover themselves a hundred, or five hundred years ago, it was
because they had never been lost; it was because their important
activities left them no leisure for self-contemplation. Yet Miss Jane
Addams, who has toiled so long and so nobly for the bettering of social
conditions, and whose work lends weight to her words, displays in “A
New Conscience and an Ancient Evil” the same placid indifference to all
that history has to tell. What can we say or think when confronted by
such an astounding passage as this?
“Formerly all that the best woman possessed was a negative chastity,
which had been carefully guarded by her parents and duennas. The
chastity of the modern woman of self-directed activity and of a
varied circle of interests, which give her an acquaintance with many
men as well as women, has therefore a new value and importance in the
establishment of social standards.”
“Negative chastity!” “Parents and duennas!” Was there ever such a
maiden outlook upon life! It was the chastity of the married woman
upon which rested the security of the civilized world;--that chastity
which all men prized, and most men assailed, which was preserved in the
midst of temptations unknown in our decorous age, and held inviolate by
women whose “acquaintance with many men” was at least as intimate and
potent as anything experienced to-day. Committees and congresses are
not the only meeting-grounds for the sexes. “Remember,” says M. Taine,
writing of a time which was not so long ago that it need be forgotten,
“remember that during all these years women were paramount. They set
the social tone, led society, and thereby guided public opinion. When
they appeared in the vanguard of political progress, we may be sure
that the men were following.”
We might be sure of the same thing to-day, were it not for the tendency
of the modern woman to sever her rights and wrongs from the rights and
wrongs of men; thereby resembling the disputant who, being content to
receive half the severed baby, was adjudged by the wise Solomon to be
unworthy of any baby at all. Half a baby is every whit as valuable
as the half-measure of reform which fails to take into impartial
consideration the inseparable claims of men and women. Even in that
most vital of all reforms, the crusade against social evils, the
welfare of both sexes unifies the subject. Here again we are swayed by
our anger at the indifference of an earlier generation, at the hard and
healthy attitude of men like Huxley, who had not imagination enough to
identify the possible saint with the certain sinner, and who habitually
confined their labours to fields which promised sure results. “In my
judgment,” wrote Huxley, “a domestic servant, who is perhaps giving
half her wages to support her old parents, is more worthy of help than
half a dozen Magdalens.”
If we are forced to choose between them,--yes. But our esteem for
the servant’s self-respecting life, with its decent restraints and
its purely normal activities, need not necessarily harden our hearts
against the women whom Mr. Huxley called “Magdalens,” nor against those
whom we luridly designate as “white slaves.” No work under Heaven is
more imperative than the rescue of young and innocent girls; no crime
is more dastardly than the sale of their youth and innocence; no
charity is greater than that which lifts the sinner from her sin. But
the fact that we habitually apply the term “white slave” to the wilful
prostitute as well as to the entrapped child shows that a powerful and
popular sentiment is absolved from the shackles of accuracy. Also that
this absolution confuses the minds of men. The sentimentalist pities
the prostitute as a victim; the sociologist abhors her as a menace.
The sentimentalist conceives that men prey, and women are preyed upon;
the sociologist, aware that evil men and women prey upon one another
ceaselessly and ravenously, has no measure of mercy for sin. The
sentimentalist clings tenaciously to the association of youth with
innocence; the sociologist knows that even the age-limit which the law
fixes as a boundary-line of innocence has no corresponding restriction
in fact. It is inconceivable that so many books and pamphlets dealing
with this subject--books and pamphlets now to be found on every library
shelf, and in the hands of young and old--should dare to ignore the
balance of depravity, the swaying of the pendulum of vice.
A new and painful instance of the cost of modern sentiment is afforded
by the statement of Miss Addams and other pacifists that middle-aged
men are in favour of strengthened defences, and that young men oppose
them, as savouring of militarism; that middle-aged men cling to the
belief that war may be just and righteous, and that young men reject
it, as unreservedly and inevitably evil. I am loath to accept this
statement, as I am loath to accept all unpleasant statements; but if it
be--as I presume it is--based upon data, or upon careful observation,
it fits closely with my argument. The men under thirty are the men who
have done their thinking in an era of undiluted sentiment. The men
over forty were trained in a simpler, sterner creed. The call to duty
embraced for them the call to arms.
“A country’s a thing men should die for at need.”
Some of them remember the days when Americans died for their country,
and it is a recollection good for the soul. Again, the men over forty
were taught by men; the men under thirty were taught by women; and
the most dangerous economy practised by our extravagant Republic is
the eliminating of the male teacher from our public schools. It is no
insult to femininity to say that the feminization of boys is not a
desirable development.
It was thought and said a few years ago that the substitution of
organized charities for the somewhat haphazard benevolence of our
youth would exclude sentiment, just as it excluded human and personal
relations with the poor. It was thought and said that the steady
advance of women in commercial and civic life would correct the
sentimental bias which only Mr. Chesterton has failed to observe
in the sex. No one who reads books and newspapers, or listens to
speeches, or indulges in the pleasures of conversation can any longer
cherish these illusions. No one can fail to see that sentiment is
the motor power which drives us to intemperate words and actions;
which weakens our judgment, and destroys our sense of proportion. The
current phraseology, the current criticisms, the current enthusiasms
of the day, all betray an excess of emotionalism. I pick up a table
of statistics, furnishing economic data, and this is what I read:
“Case 3. Two children under five. Mother shortly expecting the supreme
trial of womanhood.” That is the way to write stories, and, possibly,
sermons; but it is not the way to write reports. I pick up a newspaper,
and learn that an Englishman visiting the United States has made the
interesting announcement that he is a reincarnation of one of the
Pharaohs, and that an attentive and credulous band of disciples are
gathering wisdom from his lips. I pick up a very serious and very
well-written book on the Brontë sisters, and am told that if I would
“touch the very heart of the mystery that was Charlotte Brontë” (I had
never been aware that there was anything mysterious about this famous
lady), I will find it--save the mark!--in her passionate love for
children.
“We are face to face here, not with a want, but with an abyss, depth
beyond depth of tenderness, and longing, and frustration; with a
passion that found no clear voice in her works because it was one with
the elemental nature in her, undefined, unuttered, unutterable!”
It was certainly unuttered. It was not even hinted at in Miss Brontë’s
novels, nor in her voluminous correspondence. Her attitude toward
children--so far as it found expression--was the arid but pardonable
attitude of one who had been their reluctant caretaker and teacher. If,
as we are now told, “there were moments when it was pain for Charlotte
to see the children born of and possessed by other women,” there were
certainly hours--so much she makes clear to us--in which the business
of looking after them wearied her beyond her powers of endurance. It
is true that Miss Brontë said a few, a very few friendly words about
these little people. She did not, like Swift, propose that babies
should be cooked and eaten. But this temperate regard, this restricted
benevolence, gives us no excuse for wallowing in sentiment at her
expense.
“If some virtues are new, all vices are old.” We can reckon the cost
of misdirected emotions by the price which the past has paid for them.
We know the full significance of that irresponsible sympathy which
grows hysterical over animals it should soberly protect; which accuses
the consumer of strange cruelties to the producer; which condones
lawbreaking and vindicates the lawbreaker; which admits no difference
between attack and resistance, between a war of aggression and a
war of defence; which confuses moral issues, ignores experience, and
insults the intelligence of mankind.
The reformer whose heart is in the right place, but whose head is
elsewhere, represents a waste of force; and we cannot afford any waste
in the conservation of honour and goodness. We cannot afford errors of
judgment, or errors of taste. The business of leading lives morally
worthy of men is neither simple nor easy. And there are moments when,
with the ageing Fontenelle, we sigh and say, “I am beginning to see
things as they are. It is surely time for me to die.”
Our Loss of Nerve
If any lover of Hogarth will look at the series of pictures which tell
the story of the Idle and the Industrious Apprentice, he will feel
that while the industrious apprentice fitted admirably into his time
and place, the idle apprentice had the misfortune to be born out of
date. In what a different spirit would his tragic tale be told to-day,
and what different emotions it would awaken. A poor tired boy, who
ought to be at school or at play, sleeping for very exhaustion at
his loom. A cruel boss daring to strike the worn-out lad. No better
playground given him in the scant leisure which Sunday brings than a
loathsome grave-yard. No healthier sport provided for him than gaming.
And, in the end, a lack of living wage forcing him to steal. Unhappy
apprentice, to have lived and sinned nearly two centuries too soon!
And as if this were not a fate bitter enough for tears, he must needs
have contrasted with him at every step an industrious companion, whom
that unenlightened age permitted to work as hard as he pleased, even
for the benefit of a master, and to build up his own fortunes on the
foundation of his own worth. Hogarth’s simple conception of personal
responsibility and of personal equation is as obsolete as the clumsy
looms at which his apprentices sit, and the full-skirted coats they
wear.
Yet the softening of the hard old rules, the rigid old standards, has
not tended to strengthen the fibre of our race. Nobody supposes that
the industrious apprentice had an enjoyable boyhood. As far as we
can see, going to church was his sole recreation, as it was probably
the principal recreation of his master’s daughter, whose hymn-book
he shares, and whom he duly marries. _Her_ home-life doubtless bore
a strong resemblance to the home-life of the tumultuous heroine of
“Fanny’s First Play,” who tells us with a heaving breast that she
never knew what a glorious thing life was until she had knocked out
a policeman’s tooth. Hogarth’s young lady would probably have cared
little for this form of exercise, even had the London policemen of 1748
been the chivalrous sufferers they were in 1911. She is a buxom, demure
damsel; and in her, as in the lad by her side, there is a suggestion
of reserve power. They are citizens in the making, prepared to accept
soberly the restrictions and responsibilities of citizenship, and to
follow with relish the star of their own destinies.
And all things considered, what can be better than to make a good
job out of a given piece of work? “That intricate web of normal
expectation,” which Mr. Gilbert Murray tells us is the very essence
of human society, provides incentives for reasonable men and women,
and provides also compensations for courage. What Mr. Murray calls
a “failure of nerve” in Greek philosophy and Greek religion is the
relaxing of effort, the letting down of obligation. With the asceticism
imposed, or at least induced, by Christianity, “the sacrifice of one
part of human nature to another, that it may live in what survives the
more completely,” he has but scant and narrow sympathy; but he explains
with characteristic clearness that the ideals of Greek citizenship
withered and died, because of a weakening of faith in normal human
resistance. “All the last manifestations of Hellenistic religion betray
a lack of nerve.”
It is with the best intentions in the world that we Americans are now
engaged in letting down the walls of human resistance, in lessening
personal obligation; and already the failure of nerve is apparent
on every side. We begin our kindly ministrations with the little
kindergarten scholar, to whom work is presented as play, and who is
expected to absorb the elements of education without conscious effort,
and certainly without compulsion. We encourage him to feel that the
business of his teacher is to keep him interested in his task, and that
he is justified in stopping short as soon as any mental process becomes
irksome or difficult. Indeed, I do not know why I permit myself the
use of the word “task,” since by common consent it is banished from
the vocabulary of school. Professor Gilman said it was a word which
should never be spoken by teacher, never heard by pupil, and no doubt a
kind-hearted public cordially agreed with him.
The firm old belief that the task is a valuable asset in education,
that the making of a good job out of a given piece of work is about
the highest thing on earth, has lost its hold upon the world. The firm
old disbelief in a royal road to learning has vanished long ago. All
knowledge, we are told, can be made so attractive that school-children
will absorb it with delight. If they are not absorbing it, the teacher
is to blame. Professor Wiener tells us that when his precocious little
son failed to acquire the multiplication tables, he took him away
from school, and let him study advanced mathematics. Whereupon the
child discovered the tables for himself. Mrs. John Macy, well known to
the community as the friend and instructor of Miss Helen Keller, has
informed a listening world that she does not see why a child should
study _anything_ in which he is not interested. “It is a waste of
energy.”
Naturally, it is hard to convince parents--who have the illusions
common to their estate--that while exceptional methods may answer for
exceptional cases (little William Pitt, for instance, was trained from
early boyhood to be a prime minister), common methods have their value
for the rank and file. It is harder still to make them understand
that enjoyment cannot with safety be accepted as a determining factor
in education, and that the mental and moral discipline which comes of
hard and perhaps unwilling study is worth a mine of pleasantly acquired
information. It is not, after all, a smattering of chemistry, or an
acquaintance with the habits of bees, which will carry our children
through life; but a capacity for doing what they do not want to do,
if it be a thing which needs to be done. They will have to do many
things they do not want to do later on, if their lives are going to be
worth the living, and the sooner they learn to stand to their guns,
the better for them, and for all those whose welfare will lie in their
hands.
The assumption that children should never be coerced into self-control,
and never confronted with difficulties, makes for failure of nerve.
The assumption that young people should never be burdened with
responsibilities, and never, under any stress of circumstances,
be deprived of the pleasures which are no longer a privilege, but
their sacred and inalienable right, makes for failure of nerve. The
assumption that married women are justified in abandoning their
domestic duties, because they cannot stand the strain of home-life
and housekeeping, makes for failure of nerve. The assumption that
invalids must yield to invalidism, must isolate themselves from common
currents of life, and from strong and stern incentives to recovery,
makes for failure of nerve. The assumption that religion should content
itself with persuasiveness, and that morality should be sparing in its
demands, makes for failure of nerve. The assumption that a denial of
civic rights constitutes a release from moral obligations makes for
such a shattering failure of nerve that it brings insanity in its wake.
And the assumption that poverty justifies prostitution, or exonerates
the prostitute, lets down the last walls of human resistance. It
is easier to find a royal road to learning than a royal road to
self-mastery and self-respect.
A student of Mr. Whistler’s once said to him that she did not want to
paint in the low tones he recommended; she wanted to keep her colours
clear and bright. “Then,” replied Mr. Whistler, “you must keep them
in your tubes. It is the only way.” If we want bright colours and
easy methods, we must stay in our tubes, and avoid the inevitable
complications of life by careful and consistent uselessness. We may
nurse our nerves in comfortable seclusion at home, or we may brace
them with travel and change of scene. It does not matter; we are
tube-dwellers under any skies. We may be so dependent upon amusements
that we never call them anything but duties; or we may be as devout as
La Fontaine’s rat, which piously retired from the society of other rats
into the heart of a Dutch cheese. We may be so rich that the world
forgives us, or so poor that the world exonerates us. In each and every
case we destroy life at the roots by a denial of its obligations, a
fear of its difficulties, an indifference to its common rewards.
The seriousness of our age expresses itself in eloquent demands for
gayety. The gospel of cheerfulness, I had almost said the gospel of
amusement, is preached by people who lack experience to people who
lack vitality. There is a vague impression that the world would be
a good world if it were only happy, that it would be happy if it
were amused, and that it would be amused if plenty of artificial
recreation--that recreation for which we are now told every community
stands responsible--were provided for its entertainment.
A few years ago an English clergyman made an eloquent appeal to
the public, affirming that London’s crying need was a score of
“Pleasure-Palaces,” supported by taxpayers, and free as the Roman
games. Gladiators being, indeed, out of date, lions costly, and martyrs
very scarce, some milder and simpler form of diversion was to be
substituted for the vigorous sports of Rome. Comic songs and acrobats
were, in the reverend gentleman’s opinion, the appointed agents for the
regeneration of the London poor. It is worthy of note that the drama
did not occur to him as a bigger and broader pastime. It is worthy of
note that the drama is fast losing ground with the proletariat, once
its staunch upholders. A very hard-thinking English writer, Mr. J. G.
Leigh, sees in the substitution of cheap vaudeville for cheap melodrama
an indication of what he calls loss of stamina, and of what Mr. Murray
calls loss of nerve. “When the sturdy melodrama, with its foiled
villainy and triumphant virtue, ceases to allure, and people want in
its place the vulgar vapidities of the vaudeville, we may be sure
there is a spirit of sluggish impotence in the air.”
To-day the moving pictures present the most triumphant form of cheap
entertainment. They are good of their kind, and there is a visible
effort to make them better; but the “special features” by which they
are accompanied in the ten-and fifteen-cent shows,--the shrill songs,
the dull jokes, the clumsy clog-dances,--are all of an incredible
badness. Compared with them, the worst of plays seems good, and the
ill-paid actors who storm and sob through “Alone in a Great City,” or
“No Wedding Bells for Her,” assume heroic proportions, as ministering
to the emotions of the heart.
The question of amusement is one with which all classes are deeply
concerned. _Le Monde où l’on s’amuse_ is no longer the narrow world
of fashion. It has extended its border lines to embrace humanity.
It is no longer an exclusively adult world. The pleasures of youth
have become something too important for interference, too sacred for
denial. Whatever may be happening to parents, whatever their cares and
anxieties, the sons and daughters must lose none of the gayeties now
held essential to their happiness. They are trained to a selfishness
which is foreign to their natures, and which does them grievous wrong.
A few years ago I asked an acquaintance about her mother, with whom she
lived, and who was, I knew, incurably ill. “She is no better,” said the
lady disconsolately, “and I must say it is very hard on my children.
They cannot have any of their young friends in the house. They cannot
entertain. They have been cut off from all social pleasures this
winter.”
I said it was a matter of regret, and I forbore to add that the poor
invalid would probably have been glad to die a little sooner, had she
been given the chance. It was not the mere selfishness of old age which
kept her so long about it. Yet neither was my acquaintance the callous
creature that she seemed. Left to herself, she would not have begrudged
her mother the time to die; but she had been deeply imbued with the
conviction that young people in general, and her own children in
particular, should never be saddened, or depressed, or asked to assume
responsibilities, or be called upon for self-denial. She was preparing
them carefully for that failure of nerve which would make them impotent
in the stress of life.
The desire of the modern philanthropist to provide amusement for the
working-classes is based upon the determination of the working classes
to be amused. He is as keen that the poor shall have their fill of
dancing, as Dickens, in his less enlightened age, was keen that the
poor should have their fill of beer. He knows that it is natural for
young men and women to crave diversion, and that it is right for them
to have it. What he does not clearly understand, what Dickens did
not clearly understand, is that to crave either amusement or drink so
weakly that we cannot conquer our craving, is to be worthless in a
work-a-day world.
And worse than worthless in a world which is called upon for heroism
and high resolve. A cruel lesson taught by the war is the degeneracy
of the British workman, who, in the hour of his country’s need, has
clung basely to his ease and his sottishness. What does it avail that
English gentlemen fling away their lives with unshrinking courage,
when the common people, from whose sturdy spirit England was wont to
draw her strength, have shrivelled into a craven apathy. The contempt
of the British soldier for the British artisan is not the contempt of
the fighting man for the man of peace. It is the loathing of the man
who has accepted his trust for the man who can do and bear nothing;
who cries out if his drink is touched, who cries out if his work is
heavy, who cries out if his hours are lengthened, who has parted with
his manhood, and does not want it back. Whatever England has needed for
the regeneration of her sons, it was certainly not “pleasure-palaces”
and cheap amusements. The “sluggish impotence” which Mr. Leigh observed
four years ago, did not call, and does not call, for relaxation. The
only cure will be so stern that no one cares to prophesy its coming.
And Americans! Well, thousands of people bearing that name assembled
in New York on the 13th of November, 1915, under the auspices of
the Woman’s Peace Party, and amused themselves by denouncing the
Administration, howling down all mention of national defence, and
jeering every time the word patriotism (which we used to think a noble
word) was spoken in their hearing. Men endeared themselves to the
audience by declaring that they would not risk their all too precious
lives to fight for any cause, and women intelligently asked why a
foreign rule would not be just as good as a home one. They did not seem
aware that Brussels was having a less enviable time than Boston or
Milwaukee. Profound foolishness swayed the audience, abysmal ignorance
soothed it. There was an abundant showing of childish irrationality;
there was the apathy which befits old age; but of intelligence or of
virility there was nothing.
This loss of nerve, this “weakening of faith in normal human
resistance,” means the disintegration of citizenship. It is the sudden
call to manhood which shows us where manhood is not to be found. We
Americans, begirt by sentiment, mindful of our ease, and spared for
more than half-a-century from ennobling self-sacrifice, have been
seeking smooth and facile methods of reform. The world, grown old
in ill-doing, responds nimbly to our offers of amusement, but balks
at the austere virtues which no cajolery can disguise. The more it
is amused, the more it assumes amusement to be its due; and this
assumption receives the support and encouragement of those whose
experience must have taught them its perils.
Miss Jane Addams, in her careful study of the Chicago streets, speaks
of the “pleasure-loving girl who demands that each evening shall bring
her some measure of recreation.” Miss Addams admits that such a girl is
beset by nightly dangers, but does not appear to think her attitude an
unnatural or an unreasonable one. A very able and intelligent woman who
has worked hard for the establishment of decently conducted dance-halls
in New York,--dance-halls sorely needed to supplant the vicious places
of entertainment where drink and degradation walk hand in hand,--was
asked at a public meeting whether the girls for whose welfare she was
pleading never stayed at home. “Never,” was the firm reply, “and
will you pardon me for saying, Neither do you.” The retort provoked
laughter, because the young married woman who had put the question
probably never did spend a night at home, unless she were entertaining.
She represented a social summit,--a combination of health, wealth,
beauty, charm and high spirits. But there were scores of girls and
women in the audience who spent many nights at home. There are hundreds
of girls and women in what are called fashionable circles who spend
many nights at home. There are thousands of girls and women in more
modest circumstances who spend many nights at home. If this were not
the case, our cities would soon present a spectacle of demoralization.
They would be chaotic on the surface, and rotten at the core.
It is claimed that the nervous exhaustion produced by hours of
sustained and monotonous labour sends the factory girl into the
streets at night. She is too unstrung for rest. That this is in
a measure true, no experienced worker will deny, because every
experienced worker is familiar with the sensation. Every woman who
has toiled for hours, whether with a sewing machine or a typewriter,
whether with a needle or a pen, whether in an office or at home, has
felt the nervous fatigue which does not crave rest but distraction,
which makes her want to “go.” Every woman worth her salt has overcome
this weakness, has mastered this desire. It is probable that many men
suffer and struggle in the same fashion. Dr. Johnson certainly did.
With inspired directness, he speaks of people who are “afraid to go
home and think.” He knew that fear. Many a night it drove him through
the London streets till daybreak. He conquered it, conquered the sick
nerves so at variance with his sound mind and sound principles, and
his example is a beacon light to strugglers in the gloom.
Naturally, the working girl knows nothing about Dr. Johnson. Unhappily,
she knows little of any beacon light or guide. But, if she be a
reasonable human being, she _does_ know that to expect every evening
to “bring her some measure of recreation” is an utterly unreasonable
demand, and that it can be gratified only at the risk of her physical
and moral undoing. She has been taught to read in our public schools;
she is provided with countless novels and story-books by our public
libraries; the lightest of light literature is at her command. Is
this not enough to tide her over a night or two in the week? If her
clothes never need mending or renovating, she is unlike any other woman
the world has got to show. If there is never any washing, ironing,
or housework for her to do, her position is at once unusual and
regrettable. If she will not sometimes read, or work, or, because she
is tired, go early to bed; if her craving for amusement has reached
that acute stage when only the streets, or the moving pictures, or the
dance-hall will satisfy it, she has so completely lost nerve that she
has no moral stamina left. She may be virtuous, but she is an incapable
weakling, and the working man who marries her ruins his life. Such
girls swell the army of deserted wives which is the despair of all
organized charities.
The sincere effort to regenerate the world by amusing it is to be
respected; but it is not the final word of reform. The sincere effort
to regenerate the world by a legal regulation of wages is a new version
of an old story,--the shifting of personal obligation, the search for
somebody’s door at which to lay the burden of blame. It is also a
denial of human experience, inherited and acquired, and a rejection of
the only doctrine which stands for self-respect: “Temptations do not
make the man, but they show him for what he is.” Qualities nourished by
this stern and sane doctrine die with the withering of faith.
So much well-meant, but not harmless nonsense--nonsense is never
harmless--has been preached concerning women and their wages, that we
are in the predicament of Sydney Smith when Macaulay flooded him with
talk. We positively “stand in the slops.” A professor of economics
in an American college offers out of the fulness of his heart the
following specific and original remedy for existing ills: “My idea is
that one of the best ways to get an increased remuneration for women is
to make them worth it.”
“My idea!” This is what it means to have the scientific mind at work.
A unique proposition (what have we been thinking about with our free
schools for the past hundred years?), unclogged by detail, unhampered
by ways and means. And if we do not see salvation in truisms, if we
are daunted by the gulf between people who are theorizing and people
who are merely living, we can take refuge with the reformers who
demand “increased remuneration for women” whether they are worth it
or not; who would make the need of the worker, and not the quality of
the work, the determining factor in wages. We may “protect women from
themselves,” by prohibiting them from accepting less than their legal
hire.
The only real peril of a minimum wage-law is that it has a tendency
to relegate the incompetent to beggary. It cannot, as some economists
claim, discourage efficiency. Nothing can discourage efficiency, which
scorns help and defies hindrance. But, by the same ruling, nothing
can command more than it is worth in the markets of the world. We do
wrong when we release the worker from any incentive to good work. We
do wrong when we release her from a sense of personal responsibility.
We do wrong when we give her a plausible excuse for following the line
of least resistance, when we blight her courage by permitting her
to think that her moral welfare lies in any hands but her own. The
choice between poverty and dishonesty, the choice between poverty and
prostitution is not an “open question.” It is closed, if human reason
and human experience can speak authoritatively upon any subject in the
world.
The injury done by loose thinking and loose talking is irremediable.
When the State Senate Vice Investigating Committee of Illinois
permitted and encouraged an expression of what it was pleased to call
the “shop-girl’s philosophy,” it sowed the seeds of mischief deep
enough to insure a heavy crop of evil. I quote a single episode, as it
was reported in the newspapers of March 8th, 1913,--a report which, if
inaccurate in detail, must be correct in substance. A young woman who
had been in the employ of Sears, Roebuck & Co. was on the stand. She
was questioned by Lieutenant-Governor O’Hara.
“‘If a girl were getting $8 a week, and had to support a widowed
mother, would you blame that girl if she committed a crime?’
“The witness looked up frankly, and replied, ‘No, I wouldn’t.’
“‘Would you blame her if she killed herself?’
“‘No, I wouldn’t,’ came the emphatic reply.
“‘And would you blame her, if she committed a greater crime?’
“The young Lieutenant-Governor’s meaning was in his embarrassed tones
and in his heightened colour. The girl was the more composed of
the two. She paused a moment, and then repeated distinctly, ‘No, I
wouldn’t.’
“The room had been painfully quiet, but at this there was a round
of applause, led by the women spectators. It was the first general
spontaneous outburst of the session. ‘Emily’ was then dismissed.”
Dismissed with the “round of applause” ringing in her ears, and in her
mind the comfortable assurance that her theory of life was a sound
one. Also that a warm-hearted public was prepared to exonerate her,
should she find a virtuous life too onerous for endurance. Is it likely
that this girl, and hundreds of other Emilys, thus encouraged to let
down the walls of resistance, can be saved from the hopeless failure
of nerve which will relegate them to the ranks of the defeated? Is it
likely that the emotional hysteria of the applauding audience, and
of hundreds of similar audiences, can be reduced to reason by such
sober statistics as those furnished by the Bureau of Social Hygiene in
New York, or by the New York State Reformatory for Women at Bedford
Hills? Less than three per cent of seven hundred girls examined at
the Bedford Hills reformatory pleaded poverty, as a reason for their
fall; and, of this three per cent, more than half had been temporarily
out of work. On the other hand, twenty per cent were feeble-minded,
were mentally incapacitated for self-control, and as much at the
mercy of their instincts as so many animals. These are the blame-less
unfortunates whom vice commissioners seem somewhat disposed to ignore.
These are the women who should be protected from themselves, and from
whose progeny the public should be protected.
It is evident that triumphant virtue must have strong foundations.
Income and recreation are but slender props. Becky Sharp was of the
opinion that, given five thousand pounds a year, she could be as
respectable as her neighbours; but, in our hearts, we have always
doubted Becky. “Where virtue is well rooted,” said the watchful Saint
Theresa, “provocations matter little.” All results are in proportion
to the greatness of the spirit which has nourished them. When Cromwell
made the discomforting discovery that “tapsters and town apprentices”
could not stand in battle against the Cavaliers, he said to his cousin,
John Hampden, that he must have men of religion to fight with men of
honour. He summoned these men of religion, fired them with enthusiasm,
hardened them into consistency, and within fourteen years the nations
which had mocked learned to fear, and the name of England was “made
terrible” to the world.
For big issues we must have strong incentives and compelling measures.
“Where the religious emotions surge up,” says Mr. Gilbert Murray, “the
moral emotions are not far away.” Perhaps the mighty forces which have
winnowed the world for centuries may still prove efficacious. Perhaps
the illuminating principles of religion, the ennobling spirit of
patriotism, the uncompromising standards of morality, may do more to
stiffen our powers of resistance than lectures on “Life as a Fine Art,”
or papers on “The Significance of Play,” and “Amusement as a Factor in
Man’s Spiritual Uplift.” Perhaps the stable government which ensures
to the Industrious Apprentice the reward of his own diligence is more
bracing to citizenship than the zealous humanity which protects the
Idle Apprentice from the consequences of his own ill-doing.
Christianity and War
There are two disheartening features in the attitude of Americans
toward the ruthless war which has been waged in Europe for the past
two years. One is the materialism of pacifists who ignore, and have
steadily ignored, the crucial question of right and wrong, justice
and injustice. The other is the materialism of pious Christians who
lament the failure of Christianity to reconcile the irreconcilable, to
preserve the long-threatened security of nations.
When, at the request of President Wilson, the first Sunday of October,
1914, was set aside as a day of prayer for peace,--a day of many
sermons and of many speeches,--prayers and sermons and speeches all
alluded to the war as though it were the cholera or the plague,
something simple of issue, the abatement of which would mean people
getting better, the cure of which would mean people getting well.
The possibility of a peace shameful to justice and disastrous to
civilization was carefully ignored. The truth that death is better than
a surrender of all that makes life morally worth the living, was never
spoken. This may be what neutrality implies. We addressed the Almighty
in guarded language lest He should misunderstand our position. We
listened respectfully when Secretary Bryan told us that our first duty
was to use what influence we might have to hasten the return of peace,
without asking him to be more explicit, to say what on earth he would
have had us do, and how--without moving hand or foot--he would have had
us do it.
Since then, men of little faith have kept dinning in our ears that
religion is eclipsed, that Gospel law lacks the substance of a dream,
that Christian principles are bankrupt in the hour of need, that the
only God now worshipped in Europe is the tribal God who fights for
his own people, and that the structure of love and duty, reared by
centuries of Christianity, has toppled into ruin. To quote Professor
Cramb’s classic phrase, “Corsica has conquered Galilee.” Some of
these sad-minded prophets had fathers and grandfathers who fought in
the Civil War, and they seem in no wise troubled by this distressful
fact. Some of them had great-great-grandfathers who fought in the
Revolutionary War, and _they_ join high-sounding societies out of
illogical pride. Yet the colonists who defended their freedom and their
new-born national life were not more justified in shedding blood, than
were the French and Belgians and Serbians who heroically defended their
invaded countries and their shattered homes.
When Mr. Carnegie thanked God (through the medium of the newspapers)
that he lived in a brotherhood of nations,--“forty-eight nations in
one Union,”--he forgot that these forty-eight nations, or at least
thirty-eight of them, were not always a brotherhood. Nor was the family
tie preserved by moral suasion. What we of the North did was to beat
our brothers over the head until they consented to be brotherly. And
some three hundred thousand of them died of grievous wounds and fevers
rather than love us as they should.
This was termed preserving the Union. The abiding gain is visible to
all men, and it is not our habit to question the methods employed
for its preservation. No one called or calls the “Battle Hymn of the
Republic” a cry to a tribal God, although it very plainly tells the
Lord that his place is with the Federal, and not with the Confederate
lines. And when the unhappy Belgians crowded the Cathedral of St.
Gudule, asking Heaven’s help for defenceless Brussels, imploring
the intercession of our Lady of Deliverance (pitiful words that
wring the heart!), was this a cry to a tribal God, or the natural
appeal of humanity to a power higher and more merciful than man?
Americans returning from war-stricken Europe in the autumn of 1914
spoke unctuously of their country as “God’s own land,” by which they
meant a land where their luggage was unmolested. But it is possible
that nations fighting with their backs to the wall for all they hold
sacred and dear are as justified in the sight of God as a nation smugly
content with its own safety, living its round of pleasures, giving
freely of its superfluity, and growing rich with the vast increase of
its industries and trade.
What influence has been at work since the close of the Franco-Prussian
War, shutting our eyes to the certainty of that war’s final issue,
and debauching our minds with sentiment which had no truth to rest
on? We knew that the taxes of Europe were spent on armaments, and
we talked about International Arbitration. We knew that science was
devotedly creating ruthless instruments of destruction, and we turned
our pleased attention to the beautiful ceremonies with which the Peace
Palace at The Hague was dedicated. We knew, or we might have known,
that the strategic railway built by Germany to carry troops to the
Belgian frontier was begun in 1904, and that the memorandum of General
Schlieffen was sanctioned by the Emperor (there was no pretence of
secrecy) in 1909. Yet we thought--in common with the rest of the
world--that a “scrap of paper” and a plighted word would constitute
protection. We knew that Germany’s answer to England’s proposals for
a mutual reduction of navies was an increase of estimates, and a
double number of dreadnoughts. Did we suppose these dreadnoughts were
playthings for the Imperial nurseries?
“A pretty toy,” quoth she, “the Thunderer’s bolt!
My urchins play with it.”
When in 1911 President Taft’s “message” was hailed as a prophecy of
peace, Germany’s reply was spoken by Bethmann-Hollweg: “The vital
strength of a nation is the only measure of a nation’s armaments.”
And now the good people who for years have been saying that war is
archaic, are reproaching Christianity for not making it impossible.
Did not the “American Association for International Conciliation”
issue comforting pamphlets, entitled “The Irrationality of War,” and
“War Practically Preventable”? That ought to have settled the matter
forever. Did we not appoint a “Peace Day” for our schools, and a “Peace
Sunday” for churches and Sunday schools? Did not Mr. Carnegie pay ten
millions down for international peace,--and get a very poor article for
his money? There were some beautiful papers read to the Peace Congress
at The Hague, just twelve months before Europe was in flames; and
there is the report of a commission of inquiry which the “World Peace
Foundation,” formerly the “International School of Peace,” informed us
three years ago was “a great advance toward assured peaceful relations
between nations.”
With this sea of sentiment billowing about us, and with Nobel prizes
dropping like gentle rain from Heaven upon thirsty peace-lovers, how
should we read the signs of war, written in the language of artillery?
It is true that President Nicholas Murray Butler, speaking in behalf
of the Carnegie Peace Foundation, observed musingly in November, 1913,
that there was no visible interest displayed by any foreign government,
or by any responsible foreign statesman, in the preparations for the
Third Hague Conference, scheduled for 1915; but this was not a matter
for concern. It was more interesting to read about the photographs
of “educated and humane men and women,” which the “World Conference
for Promoting Concord between all Divisions of Mankind” (a title that
leaves nothing, save grammar, to be desired) proposed collecting in a
vast and honoured album for the edification of the peaceful earth.
And all this time England--England, with her life at stake--shared our
serene composure. Lord Salisbury, indeed, and Lord Roberts cherished no
illusions concerning Germany’s growing power and ultimate intentions.
But then Lord Roberts was a soldier; and Lord Salisbury, though
outwitted in the matter of Heligoland, had that quality of mistrust
which is always so painful in a statesman. The English press preferred,
on the whole, to reflect the opinions of Lord Haldane. They were
amiable and soothing. Lord Haldane knew the Kaiser, and deemed him
a friendly man. Had he not cried harder than anybody else at Queen
Victoria’s funeral? Lord Haldane had translated Schopenhauer, and could
afford to ignore Treitschke. None of the German professors with whom
he was on familiar terms were of the Treitschke mind. They were all
friendly men. It is true that Germany, far from talking platitudes
about peace, has for years past defined with amazing lucidity and
candour her doctrine that might is right. She is strong, brave,
covetous, she has what is called in urbane language “the instinct for
empire,” and she follows implicitly
“The good old rule, ... the simple plan,
That they should take who have the power,
And they should keep who can.”
It was forlornly amusing to see, three months after the declaration of
war, our book-shops filled with cheap copies of General von Bernhardi’s
bellicose volume; to open our newspapers, and find column after column
of quotation from it; to pick up our magazines, and discover that
all the critics were busy discussing it. That book was published in
1911, and the world (outside of Germany which took its text to heart)
remained “more than usual calm.” Its forcible and closely knit argument
is defined and condensed in one pregnant sentence: “The notion that
a weak nation has the same right to live as a powerful nation is a
presumptuous encroachment on the natural law of development.”
This is something different from the suavities of peace-day orators.
It is also vastly different from the sentiments so gently expressed by
General von Bernhardi in his more recent volume, dictated by German
diplomacy, and designed as a tract for the United States and other
neutral nations. Soothing syrup is not sweeter than this second book;
but its laboured explanations, its amiable denials, even the pretty
compliment paid us by a quotation from “A Psalm of Life” (why ignore
“Mary had a little lamb”?), have failed to obliterate the sharp,
clear outlines of his pitiless policy. Being now on the safe side of
prophecy, we wag our heads over the amazing exactitude with which
Bernhardi forecast Germany’s impending war. But there was at least one
English student and observer, Professor J. A. Cramb of Queen’s College,
London, who gave plain and unheeded warning of the fast-deepening
peril, and of the life-or-death struggle which England would be
compelled to face. Step by step he traced the expansion of German
nationalism, which since 1870 has never swerved from its stern military
ideals. A reading people, the Germans. Yes, and in a single year they
published seven hundred books dealing with war as a science,--not one
of them written for a prize! If the weakness of Germany lies in her
assumption that there is no such thing as honour or integrity in
international relations, her strength lies in her reliance on her own
carefully measured efficiency. Her contempt for other nations has kept
pace with the distrust she inspires.
The graceful remark of a Prussian official to Matthew Arnold, “It
is not so much that we dislike England, as that we think little of
her,” was the expression of a genuine Teutonic sentiment. So, too,
was General von Bernhardi’s characteristic sneer at the “childlike”
confidence reposed by Mr. Elihu Root and his friends in the Hague High
Court of International Justice, with public opinion at its back. Of
what worth, he asked, is law that cannot be converted by force into
government? What is the weight of opinion, unsupported by the glint of
arms? Professor Cramb, seeing in Bernhardi, and in his great master,
Treitschke, the inspiration of their country’s high ambition, told
England in the plainest words he could command that just as the old
German Imperialism began with the destruction of Rome, so would the
new German Imperialism begin with the destruction of England; and that
if Englishmen dreamed of security from attack, they were destined to a
terrible and bloody awakening. Happily for himself,--since he was a man
too old and ill to fight,--he died nine months before the fulfilment of
his prophecy.
Now that the inevitable has come to pass, now that the armaments
have been put to the use for which they were always intended, and
the tale of battle is too terrible to be told, press and pulpit are
calling Christianity to account for its failure to preserve peace.
Ethical societies are reminding us, with something which sounds like
elation, that they have long pointed out “the relaxed hold of doctrine
on the minds of the educated classes.” How they love that phrase,
“educated classes,” and what, one wonders, do they mean by it? A
Jewish rabbi, speaking in Carnegie hall, laments, or rejoices--it is
hard to tell which--that Christian Churches are not taken, and do not
take themselves, seriously. Able editors comment in military language
upon the inability of religious forces to “mobilize” rapidly and
effectively in the interests of peace, and turn out neat phrases like
“anti-Christian Christendom,” which are very effective in editorials.
Popular preachers, too broad-minded to submit to clerical authority,
deliver “syndicated sermons,” denouncing the “creeds of the Dark Ages,”
which still, in these electricity-lighted days, pander to war. Worse
than all, troubled men, seeing the world suddenly bereft of justice and
of mercy, lose courage, and whisper in the silence of their own sad
hearts, “There is no God.”
Meanwhile, the assaulted churches take, as is natural, somewhat
conflicting views of the situation. Roman Catholics have been disposed
to think that the persecutions of the Church in France are bearing
bitter fruit; and at least one American Cardinal has spoken of the war
as God’s punishment for this offence. But if the Almighty appointed
Belgium to be the whipping boy for the sins of France, we shall have
to revise our notions of divine justice and beneficence. Belgium is
the most Catholic country in Europe. Hundreds of the priests and nuns
expelled from France found shelter within its frontiers. But if it
were as stoutly Lutheran or Calvinistic, it would be none the less
innocent of France’s misdemeanours. Moreover, it is worthy of note
that French priests, far from moralizing over the situation, have
rallied to their country’s call. The bugbear, “clerical peril,” has
dropped out of sight. In its place are confidence on the one side, and
unstinted devotion on the other. Exiled monks have returned to fight
in the French army. Students of theological seminaries have been no
less keen than other students to take up arms for France. Abbés have
served as sergeants and ensigns, dying as cheerfully as other men in
the monotonous carnage on the Aisne. Wounded priests have shrived
their wounded comrades on the battlefield. Everywhere the clergy are
playing manly and patriotic parts, forgetting what wrong was done them,
remembering what name they bear.
England, with more precision, outlined her views in the manifesto
issued September 29, 1914, and designed as a reply to those German
theologians who had asked English “Evangelical Christians” to hold back
their hands from blood-shed. The manifesto was signed by Bishops and
Archbishops of the Church of England, and by leading Nonconformists,
all of whom found themselves for once in heartfelt amity. It is a
plain-spoken document, declaring that truth and honour (it might have
added safety) are better things than peace; and that Christian England
endorses without reservation the rightness of the war. One of the
signers, the Bishop of London, is chaplain to the London Rifle Brigade.
No doubt about _his_ sentiments. The words of another, the Archbishop
of York, are simple, sincere, and pleasantly free from patronage of the
Almighty. “I dare to say that we can carry this cause without shame or
misgiving into the presence of Him who is the Judge of the whole earth,
and ask Him to bless it.”
As for Germany, it may be, as some enthusiasts assert, that her
“creative power in religion,” keeping pace with her “genius for
empire,” will turn her out a brand-new faith, the “world-faith”
foreseen by Treitschke, a religion of valour and of unceasing effort.
Or it may be that the God of her fathers will content her, seeing that
she leaves Him so little to do. Like Cromwell, who was a religious man
(his thanksgiving for the massacre at Drogheda was as heartfelt as any
offered by the Kaiser, or by the Kaiser’s grandfather), Germany keeps
her powder dry.
Christianity and war have walked together down the centuries. How could
it be otherwise? We have to reckon with humanity, and humanity is not
made over every hundred years. Science has multiplied instruments
of destruction, but the heart of the soldier is the same. It is an
anachronism, this human heart, just as war is an anachronism, but it
still beats. Nothing sacred and dear could have survived upon the earth
had men not fought for their women, their homes, their individual
honour, and their national life. And while men stay men, they must give
up their lives when the hour strikes. How shall they believe that,
dying on the frontiers of their invaded countries, or at the gates of
their besieged towns, they sin against the law of Christ?
Heroism is good for the soul, and it bears as much practical fruit as
lawmaking. It goes further in moulding and developing the stuff of
which a great nation is made. “There is a flower of honour, there is
a flower of chivalry, there is a flower of religion.” So Sainte-Beuve
equips the spirit of man; and the soldier, no less than the civilian,
cherishes this threefold bloom. Because he “lives dangerously,” he
feels the need of God. Because his life is forfeit, there is about him
the dignity of sacrifice. Anna Robeson Burr, in her volume on “The
Autobiography,” quotes an illustrative passage from the Commentaries of
that magnificent fighter and lucid writer, Blaise de Monluc, maréchal
de France: “Que je me trouve, en voyant les ennemis, en telle peur
que je sentois le cœur et les membres s’affoiblir et trembler. Puis,
ayant dit mes petites prières latines, je sentois tout-à-coup venir un
chaleur au cœur et aux membres.”
“Petites prières latines!” A monkish patter. And this was a man
belonging to the “educated classes,” and a citizen of the world.
Sully, in his memoirs, tells us that, at the siege of Montmélian, a
cannon-shot struck the ground close to the spot where he and the king
were standing, showering upon them earth and little flint stones;
whereupon Henry swiftly and unconsciously made the sign of the cross.
“Now I know,” said the delighted Sully,--himself an unswerving
Protestant,--“now I know that you are a good Catholic.”
We must always reckon with humanity, unless, indeed, we are orators,
living in a world of words, and marshalling unconquerable theories
against unconquered facts. The French priest at Soissons who
distributed to the Turcos little medals of the Blessed Virgin may not
have been an advanced thinker, but he displayed a pleasant acquaintance
with mankind. There was no time to explain to these unbelievers the
peculiar efficacy of the medals; for that he trusted to Our Lady; but
their presentation was a link between the Catholic soldier and the
Moslem, who were fighting side by side for France. Perhaps this priest
remembered that close at hand, in the hamlet of Saint-Médard, lie the
relics of Saint Sebastian, Christian gentleman and martyr, who was an
officer in the imperial bodyguard of Diocletian, rendering to Cæsar the
service that was Cæsar’s, until the hour came for him to render to God
the life that was always God’s.
The wave of religious emotion which sweeps over a nation warring
for its life is not the mere expression of that nation’s sharpened
needs; it is not only a cry for help where help is sorely needed. It
is part of man’s responsiveness to the call of duty, his sense of
self-sacrifice in giving his body to death in order that his country
may live. “Religion,” says Mr. Stephen Graham, “is never shaken down
by war. The intellectual dominance is shaken and falls; the spiritual
powers are allowed to take possession of men’s beings.” That a truth so
simple and so often illustrated should fail to be understood, proves
the torpor of materialism. A sad-minded American writer, commenting on
the destruction of the Cathedral of Rheims, made the amazing discovery
that the sorrow and indignation evoked by this national crime showed an
utter collapse of Christianity. Every one, he said, bewailed the loss
to the world. No one bewailed the loss to religion. Therefore faith lay
dead.
That religion can lose nothing by the destruction of her monuments
is the solace of Christian souls. Her churches lie in crumbling
ruins. Ypres, Pervyse, Soissons, Revigny, Souain, Maurupt, Étavigny.
Everywhere stand the shattered walls of what was once a church, with
here and there an altar burned or hacked, and a mutilated crucifix. But
the faith that built these churches is as unassailable as the souls of
the men who died for them. There are things beyond the reach of “high
explosives,” and it is not for them we grieve.
It is a common saying that the New Testament affords no vindication of
war, which is natural enough, not being penned as a manual for nations.
But Catholic theology, having been called on very early to pronounce
judgment upon this recurrent incident of life, has defined with
absolute exactitude what, in the eyes of the Church, justifies, and
what necessitates war. From a mass of minute detail,--laws laid down
by Saint Thomas Aquinas and other doctors of the Church,--I venture to
quote two salient points, the first dealing with the nature of a right,
the second with the nature of a title.
“Every perfect right, that is, every right involving in others an
obligation in justice of deference thereto, if it is to be an
efficacious, and not an illusory power, carries with it as a last
appeal the subsidiary right of coercion. A perfect right, then, implies
the right of physical force to defend itself against infringement, to
recover the subject-matter of right unjustly withheld, or to exact its
equivalent, and to inflict damage in the exercise of this coercion,
wherever coercion cannot be exercised without such damage.”
“The primary title of a state to go to war is, first, the fact that the
state’s rights are menaced by foreign aggression not otherwise to be
prevented than by war; second, the fact of actual violation of right
not otherwise reparable; third, the need of punishing the threatening
or invading power, for the security of the future. From the nature of
the proved right, those three facts are necessarily just titles, and
the state whose rights are in jeopardy is itself the judge thereof.”
I am aware that theology is not popular, save with theologians;
but after reading Treitschke and Bernhardi on the one hand, and the
addresses delivered at “peace demonstrations” on the other, it is
inexpressibly refreshing to follow straight thought instead of crooked
thought, or words that hold no thought at all. I am also aware that
Catholic wars have not always been waged along the lines laid down by
Catholic theology; but this is beside the point. The Mosaic law was not
the less binding upon the Jews because they were always breaking it.
Nor are we prepared to say that they would have been as sound morally
without a law so constantly infringed. It is well to know that, even in
the spirit, there is such a thing as justice and admitted right.
To prate about the wickedness of war without drawing a clear line
of demarcation between aggressive and defensive warfare, between
violating a treaty and upholding it, is to lose our mental balance, to
substitute sentiment for truth. The very wrongness of the one implies
logically the rightness of the other. And whatever is morally right is
in accord with Christianity. To speak loosely of war as unchristian is
to ignore not only the Christian right, but the Christian duty, which
rests with every nation and with every man to protect that of which
nation and man are lawful protectors. Even aggressive warfare is not
necessarily a denial of the Christianity it affronts. Crooked thinking
comes naturally to men, and the power of self-deception is without
bounds. God is not deceived; but the instinctive desire of the creature
to hoodwink the Creator, to induce Him--for a consideration--to
compound a felony, is revealed in every page of history, and under
every aspect of civilization. The necessity which man has always felt
of being on speaking terms with his own conscience, built churches
and abbeys in the days of faith, and endows educational institutions
in this day of enlightenment; but it very imperfectly controlled, or
controls, the actions of men or of nations. If our confidence in the
future were not based upon ignorance of the past, we should better
understand, and more courageously face, the harsh realities of life.
Two lessons taught by the war are easily learned. There is no safety
in talk, and there is no assurance that the world’s heritage of
beauty, its triumphs of art and of architecture, will descend to our
children and our grandchildren. We never reckoned on this loss of our
common inheritance. We never thought that the gracious gifts made by
the far past to the dim future could be so speedily destroyed, and
that a single day would suffice to impoverish all coming generations.
What can the pedantry, the “culture,” of the twentieth century give
to compensate us for the loss of Rheims Cathedral? The deficit is too
heavy to be counted. Not France alone, but the civilized world, has
been robbed beyond measure and beyond retrievement. Life is less good
to all of us, and will be less good to those who come after us, because
this great sacrilege has been committed. As for culture,--the careful
destruction of the University of Louvain proves once and forever that
scholarship is no more sacred than art or than religion, when the tide
of invasion breaks upon a doomed and helpless land.
This affords food for thought. Italy, for example, is the
treasure-house of the world. She is the guardian of the beauty she
created, and to her shrine goes all mankind in pilgrimage. How long
would her cathedrals, her palaces, her galleries, survive assault? What
would be left of Venice after a week’s bombardment? What of Florence,
or of Rome? There is no such thing as safety in war. There is no such
thing as safety in neutrality. Italy has more to lose than all the
other nations of Europe, and is there one of us who would not be a
partner in her loss?
And the United States? “God’s own land”? Are we forever secure? True we
have little to fear in the destruction of our public monuments, which
are rather like the public monuments of Prussia, the ornate edifices
and ramping statues of Hamburg and Berlin. It might be a pious duty to
let them go. But we have homes which are as precious to us as were once
the devastated homes of Belgium to happy men and women; and we confide
their safety to treaties, to scraps of paper, like the one which made
Belgium inviolate. If we are in search of life’s ironies, let us note
that a Roman Catholic Peace Conference was to have been convened in
Liège, the very month that Germany struck her blow. A fortnight’s
delay, and delegates might have been making speeches on the concord of
nations, while the streets of Aerschot ran blood, and Wespelaer was
looted and burned.
Yet so deep-rooted is sentiment in our souls, so averse are we to
facing facts, that to-day a “peace meeting” will pack a convention hall
in any town of any state in the Union. We are as pleased to hear that
“the brotherhood of man is the only basis for enduring peace among the
nations” as if this shadowy brotherhood had taken form and substance.
We listen with undiminished trustfulness to Mr. Bryan’s oft-repeated
plans for ending the war by remonstrating soberly with the warriors.
We see hope in conferences, in speeches, in telegrams to Washington,
in appeals “from the mothers of the nation.” How many months have
passed since Mr. La Follette evoked our enthusiastic response to these
well-timed, well-balanced words? “The accumulated and increasing
horrors of the European wars are creating a great tidal wave of public
opinion that sweeps aside all specious reasoning, and admits of but
one simple, common-sense, humane conclusion,--a demand for peace and
disarmament among civilized nations.”
To this we all cried Amen! But as there was nobody to bell the cat, the
war went bloodily on. The question who was to “demand” peace, and of
whom it was to be demanded, was one which Mr. La Follette could not,
or at least did not, answer. “Public opinion” has a weighty sound. All
our lives we have pinned our faith to this bodiless thing, and it has
failed us in our need. Why, if it can work miracles in the future,
should it have been so helpless in these two sad years? The Hague
Conference of 1907 laid down definite rules of warfare,--rules to which
the nations of Europe subscribed with cheerful unanimity. They forbade
pillage, the levying of indemnities, the seizure of funds belonging
to local authorities, collective penalties for individual acts, the
conveying of troops or munitions across the territory of a neutral
power, and all terrorization of a country by harshness to its civilian
population. The object of these rules, every one of which has been
broken in Belgium, was to keep war within the limits set by what Mr.
Henry James calls the “high decency” of Christian civilization. Public
opinion has been as powerless to enforce the least of these rules as it
has been powerless to prevent the sinking of unarmed merchant ships,
the drowning of men, women and children belonging to neutral nations.
How can we hope that a force so feeble to-day will control the world
to-morrow?
If the Allies emerge triumphantly from the war, and England demands the
reduction of armaments, then this good result will have been gained
by desperate fighting, not by noble sentiments. We, whose sentiments
have been of the noblest, shall have had no real share in the work.
If Germany conquers, and stands unassailable, a great military
world-power, fired with a sense of her exalted destiny, rich with the
spoils of Europe, and holding in her mailed hands the power to enforce
her will, is it at all likely that our excellent arguments will prevail
upon her to reverse her policy, and enfeeble herself for our safety? A
successful aggressive warfare does not pave the way to a lasting and
honourable peace. This is one of the truths we may learn, if we will,
from history.
For years we have chosen to believe that arbitration would ensure for
the world a maximum of comfort at a minimum of cost, and that the
religion of humanity would achieve what the religion of Christ has
never achieved,--the mythical brotherhood of man. From this dream we
have been rudely awakened; but, being awake, let us at least recognize
and respect that simple and great quality which makes every man the
defender of his home, the guardian of his rights, the avenger of his
shameful wrongs.
We, too, have fought bravely in our day. We, too, have known what it
is to do all that man can do, and to bear all that man must bear; and
it was not in the hour of our trial that we talked about bankrupt
Christianity. When Serbia made her choice between death and the
uttermost dishonour, she vindicated the sacred right of humanity. When
Belgium with incredible courage defended her own good name and the
safety of France, she stood erect before God and man, and laid down her
life for her friend.
Women and War
The only agreeable thing to be recorded in connection with Europe’s
sudden and disastrous war is the fact that people stopped talking
about women, and began to talk about men. For the past decade, women
have persistently occupied the front of the stage, and men have seemed
a negligible factor; useful in their imperfect way, but hopelessly
unproblematic. Then Austria delivered her ultimatum, Germany marched
her armies across a peaceful earth, and men, plain men, became
supremely important, as defenders of their imperilled homes. In this
swift return to primitive conditions, primitive qualities reasserted
their value. France, Belgium, England called to their sons for succour,
and the arms of these men were strengthened because they had women to
protect.
A casual study of newspapers before and after the proclamation of war
is profoundly instructive. Even the illustrated papers and periodicals
tell their tale, and spare us the printed page. Pictures of recruits in
place of club-women. Pictures of camps in place of convention halls.
Pictures of Red Cross nurses bending over hospital beds, in place
of militants raiding Buckingham Palace. Pictures of peaceful ladies
sewing and knitting for soldiers, in place of formidable committees
baiting Mr. Wilson, or pursuing the more elusive Mr. Asquith. Pictures
of pitying young girls handing cups of broth and the ever-welcome
cigarettes to weary volunteers, in place of suffragists haranguing the
mob of Hyde Park. Never was there such a noteworthy illustration of
Scott’s archaic line,--
“O woman! in our hours of ease.”
Never did the simplicities of life so triumphantly efface its
complexities.
As the war deepened, and the tale of its devastations and brutalities
robbed even the saddened onlooker of all gladness in life, it was
natural that women, while faithful to their rôle of ministering angels,
should mingle blame with pity. It was also natural, though less
pardonable, that their censure should be of that vague order which
holds everybody responsible for what somebody has done. Perhaps it was
even natural that, confident in their own unproved wisdom and untried
efficiency, they should believe and say that, had women shared the
control of civilized governments, the world would now be at peace.
Here we enter the realms of pure conjecture,--realms in which
everything can be asserted and denied, nothing proved or disproved. It
may be that when women become voters, legislators, and officeholders,
they will do the better work for this profound and touching belief in
their own perfectibility. Or it may be that a perilous self-confidence
will--until corrected by experience--lead them astray. These
speculations would be of small concern, were it not that the claim to
moral superiority, which women advance without a blush, disposes many
of them to ignore the hard conditions under which men struggle, and
fail, and struggle again. It narrows their outlook, confuses their
judgment, and cheapens their point of view.
When a prominent American feminist said smartly that war is the
hysteria of men, she betrayed that lamentable lack of perspective
which ignorance can only partly excuse. The heartless shallowness of
such a speech commended it to many hearers; but of all generalizations
it is the least legitimate. There was as little hysteria in the
well-ordered, deeply laid plans of Germany as there was in the heroic
defence of France and Belgium, or in the slow awakening of England, who
took a deal of rousing from her sleep. “Most women,” says Mr. Martin
Chaloner, “regard politics as a kind of foolishness that men play at.”
But the campaign in Belgium is not to be classed as “foolishness” or
“hysteria.” The attack was a crime past all forgiveness; the defence
was one of flawless valour. If it be hysterical to prize home and
country more than life, then we must re-write that temperate old axiom
which has swayed men’s souls for centuries: “Dulce et decorum est pro
patria mori.”
Mrs. Pethick Lawrence, an English-woman and an advanced feminist,
has devoted many busy months to persuading American women that the
incapacity of men to rule the world is abundantly proven by the present
state of Europe, and that the downfall of all that civilization has
held dear is due to their arrogant rejection of feminine advice.
Women, she asserts, are the “natural custodians of the human race”;
they have for years “sought to find entrance into the councils of
the human commonwealth, in order that they might there represent the
supreme issue of race-preservation and development”; now at last
their hands must be free “to build up a surer and safer structure of
humanity.”
“To-day it is for men to stand down, and for the women whom they have
belittled to take the seat of judgment. No picture, however overdrawn,
of woman’s ignorance, error, or folly could exceed in fantastic yet
tragic horror the spectacle which male governments are furnishing
history to-day. The foundation of the structure of civilization which
they have erected in Europe has proved rotten. The edifice, seemingly
so secure, has collapsed. The failure of male statecraft in Europe is
complete.”
This is a bitter indictment, and one not to be lightly disregarded.
But its terms are too general to support an argument. What could
the women of Belgium and the women of France have done to save their
countries from invasion? When we are told that “the woman-movement and
war cannot flourish together,” and that we should never have witnessed
this “campaign of race-suicide,” had women been justly represented, we
have no answer to make, because a denial would be as hypothetical as
is the assertion. But when Mrs. Lawrence ventures to call the war “a
great dog-fight,” caused by an “obsession of materialism,” we recognize
a smallness of vision and coarseness of speech incompatible with clear
thinking, or with that distinction of mind which commands attention
and respect. If this militant pacifist sees in the conduct of England
and in the conduct of France only the greed of two dogs, squabbling
with Germany over a bone, which apparently belongs to none of them,
we can but hope she is not expressing the views, or illustrating the
knowledge of her countrywomen.
Great events, however lamentable, must be looked at greatly. There is
much to be commended in the peace platform endorsed by the suffragists
in Washington, January, 1915. There is everything to be hoped for in
the sane and just settlement of national disputes by an international
tribunal, which might advantageously include women representatives. The
decisions of such a tribunal must, however, be supported by something
stronger than sentiment, which has proved singularly inefficacious
in the past. It is well that men and women should work hand in hand
for peace and for prosperity; but it is not well that women should
invite themselves to “take the seat of judgment”; or that they should
be complacently sure that their arguments would have prevailed, when
similar arguments, advanced by men, have been unheeded.
What, after all, is the line of reasoning which Mrs. Lawrence
sincerely believes would have swayed the councils of the nations? After
assuring us that “the woman’s movement is spiritual and religious,
founded on the belief that human life is sacred,” she continues:
“As mothers, women would have impressed upon men the cost of human
replenishment; as chancellors of the family exchequer, their influence
would have been felt in forcing legislatures to recognize the direct
relation between the plenteousness of the food-supply, endangered and
restricted by war, and the health and growth of the rising generation.”
If this is not “an obsession of materialism,” where shall we look for
such a quality? The world has not waited until now to learn the cost of
war. It was one of the stock arguments urged upon every conference at
The Hague. It was one of the indubitable facts upon which we all relied
to keep the nations at peace. And it has failed us, as materialism
always does fail us in every great national crisis. Germany knows the
cost of war, but she is out for conquest, and the spoils of conquest.
She recalls with pleasure the two hundred million pounds extorted from
France in 1871, she hopes this time to “bleed her white” (Bismarck’s
cruel phrase is a compendium of Prussian policy), she dangles before
German eyes the promise of indemnities which will make good all losses,
and she enjoys a foretaste of bliss by levying ruinous fines upon
French and Flemish towns which have tasted the utmost bitterness of
defeat. France knows the cost of war, and is ill prepared to pay it;
but her alternative is yielding her soil, and all she holds sacred
and dear, to a ruthless invader. Even a nation of Quakers, or, we
hope, a nation with women in “the seat of judgment,” would reject
submission on such terms. England knows the cost of war, but she also
knows the cost of German supremacy. She is at last aware that her
national life is at stake. She must fight to preserve it, or sink into
insignificance,--her glorious past as much a thing of memory as is the
past of Rome.
For all these reasons the nations are spending their money on
armaments, and spilling their blood on the battlefield. The sacredness
of life is being violated; but is it life, or is it the moral worth of
life, which we hold sacred? Life is a thing given us for a few years.
Its only value lies in the use we make of it. Lose it we must, and very
soon. But honour and duty are for all time. Why do we see a “soldiers’
monument” in nearly every town of every state which fought for the
Union? Not because these men lived, but because they died. What must it
have cost Mr. Lincoln, whose heart was big enough for much suffering,
to order from an exhausted country the last draft of half a million
men! And why does an ingenious writer, like Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson,
cudgel his brain to find abstract causes for war? The concrete causes
which have come within the personal experiences of most of us will
answer our rational questionings.
If it were possible that the women of all nations could ever be
brought to think and feel alike,--a miracle of unity never vouchsafed
to men,--then they might run the world harmoniously. If, for example,
a Frau Professor Treitschke, a Frau General von Bernhardi, and the
more august spouse of the Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg had succeeded
in talking down their martial husbands, and persuading Germany that
her duty was to breed in peace within her own frontier, then a Madame
Poincaré, a Madame Joffre, a Mrs. Asquith, a Lady Kitchener would have
had no difficulty in holding back France and England from war. If the
Kaiserin were an autocratic “peace-lady,” ruling her “war-lord” into
submission, then the Queen of England and the Queen of Belgium might
be drinking tea with her to-day. But unless the good Teuton women had
kept their men at home, how could the good French and Belgian women
have warded off attack? And would the good British women have said,
“We are safe for a little while. Let us stand cringing by, and see
injustice done”?
The “Woman’s Journal” wrote a year ago to a number of more or less
distinguished people, and asked them if they thought that woman
suffrage would abolish, or would lessen war. As none of these more or
less distinguished people had any data upon which to build an opinion,
their answers were interesting, only as expressing personal views of
a singularly untrammelled order. There were those who believed that
the Spartan mother stood for an undying type, and there were those
who believed that she had been finally and happily superseded. Miss
Jane Addams wrote that more women than men “recognize the folly and
wickedness of war,”--an easy generalization. Dr. Stephen S. Wise, an
unblinking enthusiast, held that one great gain will follow the tragic
conditions of to-day. We shall see the end of “man-made government.”
“World peace” and “world welfare” will come with woman’s rule. Miss
Mary Johnston was of the opinion that “war has still a fascination for
most men,” but that few women feel its seduction.
Miss Johnston’s view is the only one which invites comment, because
it is shared by a great many women who have not her excuse. “The Long
Roll” and “Cease Firing” are pretty grim pictures of battle, but there
is a heroic quality about both books; while in that jolly, chivalrous,
piratical romance, “To Have and to Hold,” combat follows combat with
dizzy speed and splendour. Miss Johnston’s heroes take so kindly to
fighting that she naturally believes in the impelling power of war;
but, outside the covers of a historical novel, the martial instinct
is not a common one. It exists, and it crops up where we least expect
to find it,--in professors of political economy, in doctors who have
spent their existence keeping people alive, and in clergymen who preach
the religion of the meek. But it is too rare to be a controlling force,
and it had little or no place in the hearts of the thousands of men who
were marched to their deaths on the battlefields of Poland and Flanders.
It was not the fascination of war that brought the Tyrolean and
Bavarian peasants down from their mountain farms. What did these men
know or care about Belgrade, or Prussia’s wide ambitions? What to them
was “the fate-appointed world-task of Germany, under the sacred dynasty
of the Hohenzollern”? They were summoned, and they obeyed the summons.
If the women who talk so glibly about the pleasure men take in fighting
had seen these conscripts saying good-bye to their wives and children,
and marching off, grave, silent, sad, they might revise their notions
of military enthusiasm. Madame Rosika Schwimmer of Budapest said before
a convention in Nashville that, had her countrywomen been represented
in the government, there would have been no war. The remark was
received with an enthusiasm which indicates some ignorance concerning
Hungary’s position and power. But did Madame Schwimmer’s audience
believe that _all_ her countrywomen hated war, and _all_ her countrymen
desired it? And how many of these countrymen, did Nashville think, had
any choice in the matter?
When we turn from the attack to the defence, from the assailants to
the assailed, we find as little room for “fascination” as for peace.
The war was carried with incredible vigour and speed to the thresholds
of French and Belgian homes. It was not precisely a tournament, in
which battle-loving knights rode prancing and curveting to the fray.
It was the older and simpler story of a land swept by invasion, and of
men fighting and dying for all that belonged to them on earth. Do the
American women who prate about the wrong done to womanhood by war ever
reflect that it is for wife and child, as well as for home and country,
that men are bound to die? What history do they read which does not
teach them this truth, which does not tell it over and over again, to
interpret the story of the nations?
In the town of Lexington, Massachusetts, where was shed the first blood
spilled in the Revolution, there slept peacefully on the morning of
April 19, 1775, a young man named Jonathan Harrington. To him in the
early dawn came his widowed mother, who aroused him, saying, “Jonathan,
Jonathan, wake up! The Regulars are coming, and something must be
done.” The something to be done was plain to this young American, who
had never fought, nor seen fighting, in his life. He rose, dressed,
took his musket, joined the little group of townsmen on the Common,
and fell before the first volley fired by the British soldiers. His
wife (he had been married less than a year) ran to the door. He crawled
across the Common, bleeding heavily, and died on his threshold at her
feet.
It is a very simple incident, and it holds all the elements which make
for national life. A cause to support, a man to support it, a woman to
call for help when the supreme moment comes. Something like it must
have happened over and over again in the blood-soaked land of Belgium.
Yet we find women to-day talking and writing as if none of their sex
had anything at stake in the defence of their violated homes, as if
they had no sacred rights bound up with the sacred rights of men.
The National American Woman Suffrage Association sent an appeal to
organized suffragists all over the world, urging them to “arise in
protest, and show war-crazed men that between the contending armies
there stand thousands of women and children who are the innocent
victims of man’s unbridled ambitions.”
There was no word in this appeal to indicate that any nobler--and
humbler--sentiment than unbridled ambition (which, after all, is for
the very few) animates the soldier’s heart. There was no distinction
drawn between aggressive and defensive warfare. There was no hint
that men bear their full share of the sufferings caused by war. The
assumption that women endure all the pain is in accordance with the
assumption that men enjoy all the pleasure. To write as though battle
were a game, played by men at the expense of women, is childish and
irrational. We Americans are happily spared the sight of mangled
soldiers lying in undreamed-of agony on the frozen field. We do not
see the ghastly ambulance trains jolting along with their load of
broken, tortured men; or the hospitals where these wrecks are nursed
back to some poor remnant of life, or escape through the merciful gates
of death. But we might read of these things; we might visualize them
in moments of comfortable leisure, and take shame to our souls at the
platform eloquence which so readily assumes that the sorrows of war
are hidden in women’s hearts, that the burdens of war are laid upon
women’s shoulders, that women are sacrificed in their helplessness to
the hatred and the ambitions, the greed and the glory of men.
If by any chance a word of regret is expressed for the soldier who dies
for his country, it is always because he is the son of his mother,
or the husband of his wife, or the father of his child. He is never
permitted an entity of his own. It is curious that the same women who
clamour for a recognition of their individual freedom should assume
these property rights in men. Dr. Anna Shaw has commented sarcastically
upon a habit (one of many bad habits) which she has observed in
the unregenerate sex. They speak of their womenkind in terms of
relationship; they use the possessive case. They say, “my wife,” “my
sister,” “my daughter,” “my mother,” “my aunt,” instead of “Jane,”
“Susan,” “Mary Ann,” “Mrs. Smith,” “Miss Jones.” Apparently Dr. Shaw
does not hear women say, “my husband,” “my brother,” “my son,” “my
father,” “my uncle”; or, if she does, this sounds less feudal in her
ears. Advanced feminists have protested against the custom of “branding
a woman at marriage with her husband’s name.” Even the convenience of
such an arrangement fails to excuse its arrogance.
Yet we are bidden to protest against the wickedness of all war, not
because men die, but because wives are widowed; not because men slay,
but because mothers are childless; not because men do evil, or suffer
wrong, but because, in either case, women share the consequences. For
the sake of these women, war must cease, is the cry; as though the vast
majority of men would not be glad enough to be rid of war for their own
sake. They do not covet loss of income and destruction of property.
They do not gladly aspire to an armless or legless future. Not one of
them really wants a shattered thigh, or a bullet in his abdomen. And,
in addition to these (perhaps selfish) considerations, we might do
them the justice to remember that they are not destitute of natural
affection for their wives and children; but that, on the contrary,
the safeguarding of the family is, and has always been, a powerful
factor in war. It lent a desperate courage to the Belgian soldier who
saw his home destroyed; it nerved the arm of the French soldier who
knew his home in peril. The killing of the first women and children at
Scarborough sent a host of tardy volunteers into the British army. Such
indiscriminate slaughter, though it represents a negligible loss to a
nation, is about the only thing on earth which the least valiant men
cannot stomach.
“The Turk, not squeamish as a rule,
No special glee betrayed,
And even Mr. Bernard Shaw
Failed to commend the raid.”
The Lusitania children, lying in pitiful rows to await identification
in Queenstown, little meek and sodden corpses buffeted out of
comeliness by the waves, awoke in the hearts of the men who looked at
them a passion of anger and hate which life is too short to appease.
The brutal shooting of an English nurse was followed by an illogical
rush of young Englishmen to the colours. And the mere fact that scores
of writers, commenting on Edith Cavell’s death, harkened back to the
beheading of Alice Lisle, proves the imperishable nature of the infamy
attached to a deed, which to Judge Jeffreys, as to General Baron von
Bissing, seemed the most reasonable thing in the world.
The outbreak of the war was seized upon as a strong argument for
diametrically opposite views. A small and hardy minority kicked up
its heels and shouted, “Women cannot fight. Why should they control a
land they are powerless to defend?” A large and sentimental majority
lifted up its eyes to Heaven, and answered, “If women had possessed
their rights, all would now be smiling and at peace.” And neither of
these contending factions took any trouble to ascertain and understand
the rights and wrongs of the conflict. People who pin their faith to a
catchword never feel the necessity of understanding anything.
Here, for example, is a violent pacifist in the “Woman’s Journal,”
who, to the oft-repeated assertion that women, when they have the
vote, “will compel governments to settle their disputes before an
international court of arbitration,” adds this unwarranted statement:
“The women of the world have no quarrel with one another. They do not
care whether or not Austria maintains its power over the Balkan States;
whether or not France obtains revenge for the defeats of 1870; whether
Germany or England gains supremacy in the world market.”
This good lady does not seem to know what happened in August, 1914.
France did not proclaim war upon Germany. Germany proclaimed war upon
France. France did not attack,--for revenge, or for any other motive.
She was attacked, and has been fighting ever since with her back to the
wall in defence of her own soil.
It is possible for an American woman to have no quarrel with any one,
no knowledge of what Europe is quarrelling about, and no human concern
as to which nations win. But she should not think, and she certainly
should not say, that the women of the warring lands are equally
ignorant, and equally unconcerned. To the Serbian woman the freedom
of Serbia is a precious thing. The French woman cares with her whole
soul for the preservation of France. The Belgian woman can hardly be
indifferent to the ultimate fate of Belgium. It is even possible that
the English and German women are not prepared to clasp one another’s
hands and say, “We are sisters, and it matters nothing to us whether
England or Germany wins.” The pitfall of the feminist is the belief
that the interests of men and women can ever be severed; that what
brings suffering to the one can leave the other unscathed.
What are the qualities demanded of women in every great national
crisis? First of all, intelligence. They should have some accurate
knowledge of what has happened, some clear understanding of the events
they so glibly discuss. There are documents in plenty to enlighten
them. Those tense summer months in which the war was nursed in secrecy,
are now no longer secret. We know where the bantling was cradled, we
know what ambitions speeded it on its evil way, and we have watched
every step of its progress. To condemn all Europe in terms of easy
reprobation, to clamour for peace without recognition of justice,
is but inconsequent chatter. It leaves vital issues untouched, and
rational minds unmoved. The sternest words uttered since the beginning
of the war were spoken by the London “Tablet,” in reprobation of those
American peace-mongers who could not be brought to understand that
the hope of the Englishwoman’s heart is that the man whom she has
lost,--husband, son, or brother,--should not have died in vain.
Next to intelligence, a woman’s most valuable asset is a reasonable
modesty. She is terribly hampered by a conviction of her own goodness.
It gets in her way at every step, clouding her naturally clear
perceptions, and clogging her naturally keen conscientiousness. She is
wrong in assuming with Miss Addams that she feels a “peculiar moral
passion of revolt against both the cruelty and the waste of war.”
She is wrong in assuming with Madame Schwimmer that she “supplants
physical courage with moral courage,” when she calls noisily for peace.
There are men in plenty who feel the moral passion of revolt quite as
keenly as do the most sensitive of women; but who also feel the moral
responsibility of defending the safety of their country, the sacredness
of their homes. The moral courage demanded of every soldier is fully as
great as the physical courage, at which women dare to sneer. It is not
a light thing to give up life,--“Greater love hath no man than this,
that he lay down his life for his friends;”--yet death is the least of
the horrors which soldiers daily face.
The third and most vital thing asked of women in these dread days
is self-sacrifice. They must give their share of help, they must
bear their share of sorrow. They cannot dignify their reluctance to
do this by calling it moral revolt, or moral courage, or any other
high-sounding name. They cannot claim for themselves a loftier virtue
on the score of their lower hardihood. Civic morality consists in
putting the good of the state above the good of the individual. It
has no other test. If women are, as they say, responsible for the
conservation of human life, they should hold themselves responsible
for the ennobling of human life, for the cherishing of some finer
instinct than that of self-preservation. On the body of a young French
lieutenant who was killed at Vermelles, there was found a letter to his
wife, which contained this pregnant sentence: “Promise not to begrudge
me to France, if she takes me altogether.” These few words are an
epitome of patriotism. Husband and wife gave to their country all they
had to give; the one his life, the other her love; and both knew that
there is something better than human life and love.
In the genial reign of Henry the Eighth, a docile Parliament passed,
at the desire of the King, an “Act to abolish Diversity of Opinion.”
President Wilson, less despotic, has recommended something of the same
order as a mental process, a soul-smothering, harmony-preserving,
intellectual anodyne. It is called neutrality, and if it has failed
to save us from shameful insults and repeated wrongs, it has kept
us fairly quiet under provocation. The only authorized outlet for
our emotions has been a prayer (conditions not mentioned) for
peace. Because we have schooled ourselves to witness injustice--and
occasionally suffer it--without undue resentment, and without reprisal,
our reward in money has been very great; and we have kept on terms with
our own souls by giving back to desolate Europe a little of the wealth
we drew from her. Our position has always been a tenable one, and no
nation has had any ground on which to censure us; but we have found in
it scant encouragement for self-esteem. Even the flowers of domestic
oratory, the oft-repeated assertion that our prudence and our wealth
make us respected on earth, and blessed in the sight of Heaven, fail
to quicken our sad hearts. For, from over the sea, comes a cry which
sounds like the echo of words with which we were once familiar, of
which we were once proud. “With firmness in the right, as God gives us
to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in.”
This is the potent voice of humanity, never to be silenced while men
stay men. The “work” was bloody work; brother slaying brother on the
battlefield. The women of the North and the women of the South bore
their share of sorrow. They did not assert that they were victims of
men’s unbridled ambition, and they never intimated to one another
that the final victory was to them a matter of unconcern. Theirs was
the “solemn pride” of sacrifice; and that fine phrase, dedicated by
Mr. Lincoln to the woman who had sent five sons to the conflict, is
applicable to thousands of mothers to-day. The writer knows a young
Frenchman who, when the war broke out, had lived for some years in this
country, and hoped to make it his permanent home. To him his mother
wrote: “My son, your two brothers are at the front. Are you not coming
back to fight for France?” The lad had not meant to go. Perhaps he
coveted safety. Perhaps he held life (his life) to be a sacred thing.
Perhaps he thought to comfort his mother’s old age. But when that
letter came, he sailed on the next steamer. It was a summons that few
men, and certainly no Frenchman, could deny.
When the women of France refused to participate in the International
Congress of Women at The Hague, they defined their position in a
document so dignified, so lucid, and so logical, that it deserves to
be handed down to future ages as an illustration of inspired common
sense lifted to the heights of heroism. Let no one who reads it ever
deny that women are capable of clear thinking, of sane and balanced
judgment. In contrast to the vague and formless peace-talk which came
floating over to us from Holland, and has been re-echoed ever since;
talk which starting from no definite premises has reached no just
conclusions, the clear utterances of these French women rang with
insistent exactitude. They rejected all sentimental abstractions, and
presented in a concrete form the circumstances which had pushed France
into the conflict, and which held her still at bay. “It were treason
to think of peace, until that peace can consecrate the principles of
right.”
The rationality of the French mind, the essentially practical nature
of the French genius, are responsible for the form of this historic
document; but back of the form lies the spirit, and the spirit is one
of sustained self-sacrifice. “To-day it is with pride we wear our
weeds; it is with gratitude that we perpetuate the memory of our dead.”
At a time when every franc could buy some sorely needed supply, when
every hour could be filled with some sorely needed service, sensible
Frenchwomen refused to spend both money and time in journeying to
The Hague for the dear delights of talking. But deeper than their
reluctance to do a wasteful thing was their reluctance to do a
treasonable thing, to put the comforts of peace above the sacrifices
entailed by war, to refuse by word or deed their share of a common
burden.
It is absurd to suppose that these brave and suffering women do not
feel a moral revolt against the cruelty and the waste of war quite
as sharply as does Miss Addams, or any Hague delegate, or any one of
Mr. Ford’s tourists. The “basic foundation of home and of peaceful
industry” is as dear to them as to the American women who talk so
much about it. As a matter of fact, it is their devotion which holds
together the shattered homes of France, their industry which preserves
economic safety, and gives food and shelter to the destitute. And
through terrible months of pain and privation, we have heard from the
lips of Frenchwomen no wild and weak complaints. Never once have they
assumed that they were better and nobler than their husbands and sons
who died for the needs of France.
When the late Justice Brewer said that “since the beginning of days”
women have been opposed to blood-shed, we wondered--without doubting
the truth of his assertion--how he came to find it out. Certainly not
from the pages of history, which afford little or no evidence on the
subject. This may be one reason why feminists are protesting stoutly
against the way in which history has been written, its indiscreet
revelations, its disconcerting silences. At a meeting of the Women’s
Political Union in New York, October, 1914, it was boldly urged that
history should be re-written on a peace basis; less emphasis placed
upon nationalism, less space devoted to wars. At a meeting of the
National Municipal League in Baltimore the same year, it was urged that
history should be re-written on a feminine basis; less emphasis placed
upon men, less space devoted to their achievements. One revolutionist
complained with exceeding bitterness that President Wilson hardly
makes mention of women in his five volumes of American history. The
“knell” of that kind of narrative, she intimated, had “rung.”
The historian of the future will find his task pleasantly simplified.
He will be a little like two young Americans whom I once met scampering
blithely over southern Europe, and to whom I ventured to say that they
covered their ground quickly. “No trouble about that,” answered one of
them. “We draw the line at churches and galleries, and there’s nothing
left to see.” So, too, the chronicler who eliminates men and war from
his pages can move swiftly down the centuries. Even an earnest effort
to minimize these factors suggests that blight of my girlhood, Miss
Strickland, who forever strove to withdraw her wandering attention from
warrior and statesman, and fix it on the trousseau of a queen.
History is, and has always been trammelled by facts. It may ignore
some and deny others; but it cannot accommodate itself unreservedly
to theories; it cannot be stripped of things evidenced in favour of
things surmised. Perhaps instead of asking to have it remodelled in
our behalf, we women might take the trouble to read it as it is;
dominated by men, disfigured by conflict, but not altogether ignoble
or unprofitable, and always very enlightening. We might learn from it,
for example, that war may be wicked, and war may be justifiable; that
wife and child, far from being unconsidered trifles, have nerved men’s
arms to strike; and that when home, country, freedom and justice are
at stake, “it were treason to think of peace, until that peace can
consecrate the principles of right.”
The Repeal of Reticence
There is nothing new about the Seven Deadly Sins. They are as old as
humanity. There is nothing mysterious about them. They are easier
to understand than the Cardinal Virtues. Nor have they dwelt apart
in secret places; but, on the contrary, have presented themselves,
undisguised and unabashed, in every corner of the world, and in every
epoch of recorded history. Why then do so many men and women talk
and write as if they had just discovered these ancient associates of
mankind? Why do they press upon our reluctant notice the result of
their researches? Why this fresh enthusiasm in dealing with a foul
subject? Why this relentless determination to make us intimately
acquainted with matters of which a casual knowledge would suffice?
Above all, why should our self-appointed instructors assume that
because we do not chatter about a thing, we have never heard of it?
The well-ordered mind knows the value, no less than the charm, of
reticence. The fruit of the tree of knowledge, which is now recommended
as nourishing for childhood, strengthening for youth, and highly
restorative for old age, falls ripe from its stem; but those who have
eaten with sobriety find no need to discuss the processes of digestion.
Human experience is very, very old. It is our surest monitor, our
safest guide. To ignore it crudely is the error of those ardent but
uninstructed missionaries who have lightly undertaken the re-building
of the social world.
Therefore it is that the public is being daily instructed concerning
matters which it was once assumed to know, and which, as a matter of
fact, it has always known. When “The Lure” was played three years
ago at the Maxine Elliott Theatre in New York, the redoubtable Mrs.
Pankhurst arose in Mrs. Belmont’s box, and, unsolicited, informed
the audience that it was the truth which was being nakedly presented
to them, and that as truth it should be taken to heart. Now, it is
probable that the audience--adult men and women--knew as much about
the situations developed in “The Lure” as did Mrs. Pankhurst. It is
possible that some of them knew more, and could have given her points.
But whatever may be the standard of morality, the standard of taste
(and taste is a guardian of morality) must be curiously lowered, when
a woman spectator at an indecent play commends its indecencies to
the careful consideration of the audience. Even the absurdity of the
proceeding fails to win pardon for its grossness.
It is not so much the nature of the advice showered upon us to which
we reasonably object, but the fact that a great deal of it is given
in the wrong way, at the wrong time, by the wrong people. Who made
Mrs. Pankhurst our nursery governess, and put us in _her_ hands for
schooling? We might safely laugh at and ignore these unsolicited
exhortations, were it not that the crude detailing of matters offensive
to modesty is as hurtful to the young as it is wearisome to the old.
Does it never occur to the women, who are now engaged in telling the
world what the world has known since the days of Nineveh, that more
legitimate, and, on the whole, more enlightened avenues exist for the
distribution of such knowledge?
“Are there no clinics at our gates,
Nor any doctors in the land?”
The “Conspiracy of Silence” is broken. Of that no one can doubt. The
phrase may be suffered to lapse into oblivion. In its day it was a
menace, and few of us would now advocate the deliberate ignoring
of things not to be denied. Few of us would care to see the rising
generation as uninstructed in natural laws as we were, as adrift amid
the unintelligible, or partly intelligible things of life. But surely
the breaking of silence need not imply the opening of the floodgates
of speech. It was never meant by those who first cautiously advised
a clearer understanding of sexual relations and hygienic laws that
everybody should chatter freely respecting these grave issues; that
teachers, lecturers, novelists, story-writers, militants, dramatists,
and social workers should copiously impart all they know, or assume
they know, to the world. The lack of restraint, the lack of balance,
the lack of soberness and common sense were never more apparent than
in the obsession of sex, which has set us all a-babbling about matters
once excluded from the amenities of conversation.
Knowledge is the cry. Crude, undigested knowledge, without limit
and without reserve. Give it to boys, give it to girls, give it to
children. No other force is taken into account by the visionaries
who--in defiance, or in ignorance, of history--believe that evil
understood is evil conquered. “The menace of degradation and
destruction can be checked _only_ by the dissemination of knowledge
on the subject of sex-physiology and hygiene,” writes an enthusiast
in the “Forum,” calling our attention to the methods which have been
employed by some public schools, noticeably the Polytechnic High School
of Los Angeles, for the instruction of students; and urging that
similar lectures be given to boys and girls in the grammar schools.
It is noticeable that while a woman doctor was employed to lecture to
the girl students of the Polytechnic, a “science man” was chosen by
preference for the boys. Doctors are proverbially reticent,--except,
indeed, on the stage, where they prattle of all they know; but a
“science man”--as distinct from a man of science--may be trusted, if
he be young and ardent, to conceal little or nothing from his hearers.
The lectures were obligatory for the boys, but optional for the girls,
whose inquisitiveness could be relied upon. “The universal eagerness
of under-classmen to reach the serene upper heights” (I quote the
language of the “Forum”) “gave the younger girls increased interest in
the advanced lectures, if, indeed, a girl’s natural curiosity regarding
these vital facts needs any stimulus.”
Perhaps it does not, but I am disposed to think it receives a strong
artificial stimulus from instructors whose minds are unduly engrossed
with sexual problems, and that this artificial stimulus is a menace
rather than a safeguard. We hear too much about the thirst for
knowledge from people keen to quench it. Dr. Edward L. Keyes advocates
the teaching of sex-hygiene to children, because he thinks it is the
kind of information that children are eagerly seeking. “What is this
topic,” he asks, “that all these little ones are questioning over,
mulling over, fidgeting over, imagining over, worrying over? Ask your
own memories.”
I do ask my memory in vain for the answer Dr. Keyes anticipates.
A child’s life is so full, and everything that enters it seems of
supreme importance. I fidgeted over my hair, which would not curl. I
worried over my examples, which never came out right. I mulled (though
unacquainted with the word) over every piece of sewing put into my
incapable fingers, which could not be trained to hold a needle. I
imagined I was stolen by brigands, and became--by virtue of beauty
and intelligence--spouse of a patriotic outlaw in a frontierless
land. I asked artless questions which brought me into discredit with
my teachers, as, for example, who “massacred” St. Bartholomew. But
vital facts, the great laws of propagation, were matters of but casual
concern, crowded out of my life, and out of my companions’ lives (in a
convent boarding-school) by the more stirring happenings of every day.
How could we fidget over obstetrics when we were learning to skate, and
our very dreams were a medley of ice and bumps? How could we worry over
“natural laws” in the face of a tyrannical interdict which lessened our
chances of breaking our necks by forbidding us to coast down a hill
covered with trees? The children to be pitied, the children whose minds
become infected with unwholesome curiosity, are those who lack cheerful
recreation, religious teaching, and the fine corrective of work. A
playground or a swimming-pool will do more to keep them mentally and
morally sound than scores of lectures upon sex-hygiene.
The point of view of the older generation was not altogether the
futile thing it seems to the progressive of to-day. It assumed that
children brought up in honour and goodness, children disciplined into
some measure of self-restraint, and taught very plainly the difference
between right and wrong in matters childish and seasonable, were in
no supreme danger from the gradual and somewhat haphazard expansion
of knowledge. It unconsciously reversed the adage, “Forewarned,
forearmed,” into “Forearmed, forewarned”; paying more heed to the
arming than to the warning. It held that the workingman was able
to rear his children in decency. The word degradation was not so
frequently coupled with poverty as it is now. Nor was it anybody’s
business in those simple days to impress upon the poor the wretchedness
of their estate.
If knowledge alone could save us from sin, the salvation of the world
would be easy work. If by demonstrating the injuriousness of evil,
we could insure the acceptance of good, a little logic would redeem
mankind. But the laying of the foundation of law and order in the mind,
the building up of character which will be strong enough to reject both
folly and vice,--this is no facile task.
The justifiable reliance placed by our fathers upon religion and
discipline has given place to a reliance upon understanding. It is
assumed that youth will abstain from wrong-doing, if only the physical
consequences of wrong-doing are made sufficiently clear. There are
those who believe that a regard for future generations is a powerful
deterrent from immorality, that boys and girls can be so interested
in the quality of the baby to be born in 1990 that they will master
their wayward impulses for its sake. What does not seem to occur to us
is that this deep sense of obligation to ourselves and to our fellow
creatures is the fruit of self-control. A course of lectures will not
instil self-control into the human heart. It is born of childish
virtues acquired in childhood, youthful virtues acquired in youth, and
a wholesome preoccupation with the activities of life which gives young
people something to think about besides the sexual relations which are
pressed so relentlessly upon their attention.
The world is wide, and a great deal is happening in it. I do not plead
for ignorance, but for the gradual and harmonious broadening of the
field of knowledge, and for a more careful consideration of ways and
means. There are subjects which may be taught in class, and subjects
which commend themselves to individual teaching. There are topics which
admit of _plein-air_ handling, and topics which civilized man, as apart
from his artless brother of the jungles, has veiled with reticence.
There are truths which may be, and should be, privately imparted by
a father, a mother, a family doctor, or an experienced teacher; but
which young people cannot advantageously acquire from the platform, the
stage, the moving-picture gallery, the novel, or the ubiquitous monthly
magazine.
Yet all these sources of information are competing with one another as
to which shall tell us most. All of them have missions, and all the
missions are alike. We are gravely assured that the drama has awakened
to a high and holy duty, that it has a “serious call,” in obedience
to which it has turned the stage into a clinic for the diagnosing of
disease, and into a self-authorized commission for the intimate study
of vice. It advertises itself as “battling with the evils of the
age,”--which are the evils of every age,--and its method of warfare is
to exploit the sins of the sensual for the edification of the virtuous,
to rake up the dunghills with the avowed purpose of finding a jewel.
The doors of the brothel have been flung hospitably open, and we have
been invited to peep and peer (always in the interests of morality)
into regions which were formerly closed to the uninitiated. It has
been discovered that situations, once the exclusive property of the
police courts, make valuable third acts, or can be usefully employed
in curtain-lifters, unclean and undramatic, but which claim to “tell
their story so clearly that the daring is lost in the splendid moral
lesson conveyed.” Familiarity with vice (which an old-fashioned but
not inexperienced moralist like Pope held to be a perilous thing)
is advocated as a safeguard, especially for the young and ardent.
The lowering of our standard of taste, the deadening of our finer
sensibilities, are matters of no moment to dramatist or to manager.
They have other interests at stake.
For depravity is a valuable asset when presented to the consideration
of the undepraved. It has coined money for the proprietors of
moving-pictures, who for the past few years have been sending shows
with attractive titles about “White Slaves,” and “Outcasts,” and
“Traffic in Souls,” all over the country. Many of these shows claimed
to be dramatizations of the reports of vice-commissioners, who have
thus entered the arena of sport, and become purveyors of pleasure to
the multitude. “Original,” “Authentic,” “Authorized,” are words used
freely in their advertisements. The public is assured that “care has
been taken to eliminate all suggestiveness,” which is in a measure
true. When everything is told, there is no room left for suggestions.
If you kick a man down stairs and out of the door, you may candidly
say that you never suggested he should leave your house. Now and
then a particularly lurid revelation is commended to us as having
received the endorsement of leading feminists; and again we are driven
to ask why should these ladies assume an intimate knowledge of such
alien matters? Why should they play the part of mentors to such an
experienced Telemachus as the public?
It is hard to estimate the harm done by this persistent and crude
handling of sexual vice. The peculiar childishness inherent in all
moving-picture shows may possibly lessen their hurtfulness. What if the
millionaires and the political bosses so depicted spend their existence
in entrapping innocent young women? A single policeman of tender
years, a single girl, inexperienced but resourceful, can defeat these
fell conspirators, and bring them all to justice. Never were villains
so helpless in a hard and virtuous world. But silliness is no sure
safeguard, and to excite in youth a curiosity concerning brothels and
their inmates can hardly fail of mischief. To demonstrate graphically
and publicly the value of girls in such places is to familiarize them
dangerously with sin. I can but hope that the little children who sit
stolidly by their mothers’ sides, and whom the authorities of every
town should exclude from all shows dealing with prostitution, are
saved from defilement by the invincible ignorance of childhood. As for
the groups of boys and young men who compose the larger part of the
audiences, and who snigger and whisper whenever the situations grow
intense, nobody in his senses could assert that the pictures convey a
“moral lesson” to them.
Nor is it for the conveying of lessons that managers present these
photo-plays to the public. They are out to make money, and they are
making it. Granted that when M. Brieux wrote “Les Avariés,” he purposed
a stern warning to the pleasure-loving world. No one can read the
simple and sober words with which he prefaced the work, and doubt his
absolute sincerity. Granted, though with some misgivings, that the
presentation of “Damaged Goods” in this country--albeit commercialized
and a smart business venture--had still a moral and scientific
significance. It was not primarily designed as an exploitation of vice.
But to tell such a story in moving pictures is to rob it of all excuse
for being told at all. To thrust such a theme grossly and vulgarly
before the general public, stripping it of nobility of thought and
exactitude of speech, and leaving only the dull dregs of indecency, is
an uncondonable offense,--the deeper because it claims to be beneficent.
In one respect all the studies of seduction now presented so urgently
to our regard are curiously alike. They all conspire to lift the burden
of blame from the woman’s shoulders, to free her from any sense of
human responsibility. It is assumed that she plays no part in her own
undoing, that she is as passive as the animal bought for vivisection,
as mute and helpless in the tormentors’ hands. The tissue of false
sentiment woven about her has resulted in an extraordinary confusion
of outlook, a perilous nullification of honesty and honour.
To illustrate this point, I quote some verses which appeared in a
periodical devoted to social work, a periodical with high and serious
aims. I quote them reluctantly (not deeming them fit for publication),
and only because it is impossible to ignore the fact that their
appearance in such a paper makes them doubly and trebly reprehensible.
They are entitled “The Cry to Christ of the Daughters of Shame.”
“Crucified once for the sins of the world,
O fortunate Christ!” they cry:
“With an Easter dawn in thy dying eyes,
O happy death to die!
“But we,--we are crucified daily,
With never an Easter morn;
But only the hell of human lust,
And worse,--of human scorn.
“For the sins of passionless women,
For the sins of passionate men,
Daily we make atonement,
Golgotha again and again.
“O happy Christ, who died for love,
Judge us who die for lust.
For thou wast man, who now art God.
Thou knowest. Thou art just.”
Now apart from the offence against religion in this easy comparison
between the Saviour and the woman of the streets, and apart from the
deplorable offence against good taste, which might repel even the
irreligious, such unqualified acquittal stands forever in the way of
reform, of the judgment and common sense which make for the betterment
of the world. How is it possible to awaken any healthy emotion in the
hearts of sinners so smothered in sentimentality? How is it possible to
make girls and young women (as yet respectable) understand not only the
possibility, but the obligation of a decent life?
There would be less discussion of meretricious subjects, either in
print or in conversation, were it not for the morbid sensibility which
has undermined our judgment, and set our nerves a-quivering. Even
a counsellor so sane and so experienced as the Reverend Honourable
Edward Lyttelton, Headmaster of Eton, who has written an admirable
volume on “Training of the Young in Laws of Sex,” drops his tone of
wholesome austerity as soon as he turns from the safeguarding of lads
to the pensive consideration of women. Boys and men he esteems to be
captains of their souls, but the woman is adrift on the sea of life.
He does not urge her to restraint; he pleads for her to the masters of
her fate. “The unhappy partners of a rich man’s lust,” he writes, “are
beings born with the mighty power to love, and are endowed with deep
and tender instincts of loyalty and motherhood. When these divine and
lovely graces of character are utterly shattered and foully degraded,
the man, on whom all the treasure has been lavished, tries to believe
that he has made ample reparation by an annuity of fifty pounds.”
This kind of sentiment is out of place in everything save
eighteenth-century lyrics, which are not expected to be a guiding force
in morals. A woman with “lovely graces of character” does not usually
become the mistress even of a rich man. After all, there is such a
thing as triumphant virtue. It has an established place in the annals
and traditions, the ballads and stories of every land.
“A mayden of England, sir, never will be
The wench of a monarcke,” quoth Mary Ambree.
It is like a breath of fresh air blowing away mists to hear this gay
and gallant militant assert the possibilities of resistance.
Forty years ago, a writer in “Blackwood’s Magazine” commented upon
the amazing fact that in Hogarth’s day (more than a century earlier)
vignettes representing the “Rake’s Progress,” and the “Harlot’s
Progress,” were painted upon fans carried by young women. “English
girls,” said this sober essayist, “were thus, by way of warning, made
familiar with subjects now wisely withheld from their consideration.”
The pendulum has swung backward since 1876. Even Hogarth, who dealt
for the most part with the robust simplicities of sin, would have
little to teach the rising generation of 1916. Its sources of knowledge
are manifold, and astoundingly explicit. Stories minutely describing
houses of ill-fame, their furniture, their food, their barred windows,
their perfumed air, and the men with melancholy eyes who visit them.
Novels purporting to be candid and valuable studies of degeneracy and
nymphomania. Plays and protests urging stock-farm methods of breeding
the human race. Papers on venereal diseases scattered broadcast through
the land. Comment upon those unnatural vices which have preceded the
ruin of cities and the downfall of nations, and veiled allusions to
which have marked the deepest degradation of the French stage. All
these horrors, which would have made honest old Hogarth turn uneasily
in his grave, are offered for the defence of youth and the purifying of
civilized society.
The lamentable lack of reserve is closely associated with a lamentable
absence of humour. We should be saved from many evils, if we could
laugh at more absurdities. We could clearly estimate the value of
reform, if we were not so befuddled with the sensationalism of
reformers, and so daunted by the amazing irregularity of their methods.
What can be thought of a woman who goes to a household of strangers,
and volunteers to instruct its members in sex-hygiene! In the case
which came under my notice, the visitor chanced upon a family of
spinsters, discreet, retiring, well-conducted gentlewomen, the eldest
of whom was eighty, and the youngest sixty years of age. But while
this circumstance added to the humour of the situation, it in no wise
lessened its insolent impropriety.
The enthusiasm for birth-control has carried its advocates so fast
and so far from the conventions of society that two of them have been
arrested in the State of New York for circulating indecent matter
through the mails, and one has been convicted on this charge. To run
amuck through the formalities of civilization, and then proclaim
yourself a martyr to science and the public good, is one way of
acquiring notoriety. To invite the selfish and the cowardly to follow
the line of least resistance is one way, and a very easy way, of
ensuring popularity. Thirty years ago, Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson
wrote the story of a Spanish girl, born of a decadent and perishing
race, to whom comes the promise of love, and of escape from her dire
surroundings. Both these boons she rejects, knowing that the line
from which she springs is fit for nothing but extinction, and knowing
also that lesson hard to learn,--“that pain is the choice of the
magnanimous, that it is better to suffer all things, and do well.”
Twenty years ago, Miss Elizabeth Robins gave us her solution of a
similar problem. The heroine of her novel, fully aware that she comes
of a stock diseased in mind and body, and that her lover, who is near
of kin, shares this inheritance, forces upon him (he is a quiescent
gentleman, more than willing to be let alone) first marriage, and then
suicide. We must have our hour of happiness, is her initial demand.
We must pay the price, is her ultimate decision. In our day, the
noble austerity commended by Mr. Stevenson, the passionate wilfulness
condoned by Miss Robins, are equally out of date. The International
Neo-Malthusian Bureau has easier methods to propose, and softer ways to
sanction.
It is touching to hear Mr. Percy MacKaye lament that “Mendelism has
as yet hardly begun to influence art or popular feeling”; but he must
not lose hope,--not, at least, so far as popular feeling is concerned.
“Practical eugenics” is a phrase as familiar in our ears as “intensive
farming.” “How can we make the desirable marry one another?” asks Dr.
Alexander Graham Bell, and answers his own question by affirming that
every community should take a hand in the matter, giving the “support
of public opinion,” and the more emphatic support of “important and
well-paid positions” to a choice stock of men, provided always that,
“in the interests of the race,” they marry and have offspring.
This is practical eugenics with a vengeance, but it is not practical
business. Apart from the fact that most men and women regard marriage
as a personal matter, with which their neighbours have no concern,
it does not follow that the admirable and athletic young husband
possesses any peculiar ability. Little runts of men are sometimes the
ablest of citizens. When Nature is in a jesting mood, her best friends
marvel at her blunders.
The connection between Mendelism and art is still a trifle strained.
It is an alliance which Mendel himself--good abbot of Brünn working
patiently in his cloister garden--failed to take into account. The
field of economics is not Art’s chosen playground; the imparting of
scientific truths has never been her mission. Whether she deals with
high and poignant emotions, or with the fears and wreckage of life,
she subdues these human elements into an austere accord with her own
harmonious laws. She is as remote from the crudities of the honest
but uninspired reformer who dabbles in fiction and the drama, as she
is remote from the shameless camp-followers of reform, for whose
base ends, no less than for our instruction and betterment, the
Seven Deadly Sins have acquired their present regrettable popularity.
Liberated from the unsympathetic atmosphere of the catechism, they are
urged upon the weary attention of adults, embodied in the lessons of
youth, and explained in words of one syllable to childhood. Yet Hogarth
never designed his pictures to decorate the fans of women. Suetonius
never related his “pleasant atrocities” to the boys and girls of Rome.
Popular Education
This is so emphatically the children’s age that a good many of us are
beginning to thank God we were not born in it. The little girl who said
she wished she had lived in the time of Charles the Second, because
then “education was much neglected,” wins our sympathy and esteem.
It is a doubtful privilege to have the attention of the civilized
world focussed upon us both before and after birth. At the First
International Eugenics Congress, held in London in the summer of 1912,
an Italian delegate made the somewhat discouraging statement that the
children of very young parents are more prone than others to theft;
that the children of middle-aged parents are apt to be of good conduct,
but of low intelligence; and that the children of elderly parents are,
as a rule, intelligent, but badly behaved. It seems to be a trifle
hard to bring the right kind of a child into the world. Twenty-seven
is, in this eugenist’s opinion, the best age for parentage; but how
bend all the complicated conditions of life to meet an arbitrary date;
and how remain twenty-seven long enough to insure satisfactory results?
The vast majority of babies will have to put up with being born when
their time comes, and make the best of it. This is the first, but by no
means the worst, disadvantage of compulsory birth; and compulsory birth
is the original evil which scientists and philanthropists are equally
powerless to avert.
If parents do not know by this time how to bring up their children, it
is not for lack of instruction. A few generations ago, Solomon was the
only writer on child-study who enjoyed any vogue. Now his precepts, the
acrid fruits of experience, have been superseded by more genial, but
more importunate counsel. Begirt by well-wishers, hemmed in on every
side by experts who speak of “child-material” as if it were raw silk or
wood-pulp, how can a little boy, born in this enlightened age, dodge
the educational influences which surround him? It is hard to be dealt
with as “child-material,” when one is only an ordinary little boy. To
be sure, “child-material” is never thrashed, as little boys were wont
to be, it is not required to do what it is told, it enjoys rights and
privileges of a very sacred and exalted character; but, on the other
hand, it is never let alone, and to be let alone is sometimes worth
all the ministrations of men and angels. The helpless, inarticulate
reticence of a child is not an obstacle to be overcome, but a barrier
which protects the citadel of childhood from assault.
We can break down this barrier in our zeal; and if the child will not
speak, we can at least compel him to listen. He is powerless to evade
any revelations we choose to make, any facts or theories we choose to
elucidate. We can teach him sex-hygiene when he is still young enough
to believe that rabbits lay eggs. We can turn his work into play, and
his play into work, keeping well in mind the educational value of his
unconscious activities, and, by careful oversight, pervert a game of
tag into a preparation for the business of life. We can amuse and
interest him until he is powerless to amuse and interest himself. We
can experiment with him according to the dictates of hundreds of rival
authorities. He is in a measure at our mercy, though nature fights
hard for him, safeguarding him with ignorance of our mode of thought,
and indifference to our point of view. The opinions of twelve-year-old
Bobby Smith are of more moment to ten-year-old Tommy Jones than are
the opinions of Dr. and Mrs. Jones, albeit Dr. Jones is a professor
of psychology, and Mrs. Jones the president of a Parents’ League. The
supreme value of Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson’s much-quoted “Lantern
Bearers” lies in its incisive and sympathetic insistence upon the
aloofness of the child’s world,--an admittedly imperfect world which we
are burning to amend, but which closed its doors upon us forever when
we grew into knowledge and reason.
My own childhood lies very far away. It occurred in what I cannot help
thinking a blissful period of intermission. The educational theories
of the Edgeworths (evolved soberly from the educational excesses of
Rousseau) had been found a trifle onerous. Parents had not the time to
instruct and admonish their children all day long. As a consequence, we
enjoyed a little wholesome neglect, and made the most of it. The new
era of child-study and mothers’ congresses lay darkling in the future.
“Symbolic education,” “symbolic play,” were phrases all unknown. The
“revolutionary discoveries” of Karl Groos had not yet overshadowed the
innocent diversions of infancy. Nobody drew scientific deductions from
jackstones, or balls, or gracehoops, save only when we assailed the
wealth of nations by breaking a window-pane. Nobody was even aware that
the impulses which sent us speeding and kicking up our heels like young
colts were “vestigial organs of the soul.” Dr. G. Stanley Hall had not
yet invented this happy phrase to elucidate the simplicities of play.
How we grasped our “objective relationship” to our mothers without
the help of bird’s-nest games, I do not know. Perhaps, in the general
absence of experimentation, we had more time in which to solve the
artless problems of our lives. Psychologists in those days were frankly
indifferent to us. They had yet to discover our enormous value in the
realms of conjectural thought.
The education of my childhood was embryonic. The education of to-day
is exhaustive. The fact that the school-child of to-day does not seem
to know any more than we knew in the dark ages, is a side issue with
which I have no concern. But as I look back, I can now see plainly that
the few things little girls learned were admirably adapted for one
purpose,--to make us parts of a whole, which whole was the family. I do
not mean that there was any expression to this effect. “Training for
maternity” was not a phrase in vogue; and the short views of life, more
common then than now, would have robbed it of its savour. “Training for
citizenship” had, so far as we were concerned, no meaning whatsoever.
A little girl was a little girl, not the future mother of the race, or
the future saviour of the Republic. One thing at a time. Therefore no
deep significance was attached to our possession of a doll, no concern
was evinced over our future handling of a vote. If we were taught
to read aloud with correctness and expression, to write notes with
propriety and grace, and to play backgammon and whist as well as our
intelligence permitted, it was in order that we should practise these
admirable accomplishments for the benefit of the families of which we
were useful, and occasionally ornamental features.
And what advantage accrued to _us_ from an education so narrowed, so
illiberal, so manifestly unconcerned with great social and national
issues? Well, let us admit that it had at least the qualities of
its defects. It was not called training for character, but it was
admittedly training for behaviour, and the foundations of character are
the acquired habits of youth. “Habit,” said the Duke of Wellington, “is
ten times nature.” There was precision in the simple belief that the
child was strengthened mentally by mastering its lessons, and morally
by mastering its inclinations. Therefore the old-time teacher sought to
spur the pupil on to keen and combative effort, rather than to beguile
him into knowledge with cunning games and lantern slides. Therefore the
old-time parent set a high value on self-discipline and self-control.
A happy childhood did not necessarily mean a childhood free from
proudly accepted responsibility. There are few things in life so dear
to girl or boy as the chance to turn to good account the splendid
self-confidence of youth.
If Saint Augustine, who was punished when he was a little lad because
he loved to play, could see how childish pastimes are dignified in the
pedagogy of the twentieth century, he would no longer say that “playing
is the business of childhood.” He would know that it is the supremely
important business, the crushing responsibility of the pedagogue.
Nothing is too profound, nothing too subtle to be evolved from a
game or a toy. We are gravely told that “the doll with its immense
educational power should be carefully introduced into the schools,”
that “Pussy-in-the-Corner” is “an Ariadne clew to the labyrinth of
experience,” and that a ball, tossed to the accompaniment of a song
insultingly banal, will enable a child “to hold fast one high purpose
amid all the vicissitudes of time and place.” If we would only make
organized play a part of the school curriculum, we should have no need
of camps, or drills, or military training. It is the moulder of men,
the upholder of nations, the character-builder of the world.
Mr. Joseph Lee, who has written a book of five hundred pages on
“Play in Education,” and Mr. Henry S. Curtis, who has written a book
of three hundred and fifty pages on “Education through Play,” have
treated their theme with profound and serious enthusiasm, which, in its
turn, is surpassed by the fervid exaltation of their reviewers. These
counsellors have so much that is good to urge upon us, and we are so
ready to listen to their words, that they could have well afforded to
be more convincingly moderate. There is no real use in saying that it
is play which makes the world go round, because we know it isn’t. If
it were, the world of the savage would go round as efficaciously as
the world of the civilized man. When Mr. Lee tells us that the little
boy who plays baseball “follows the ball each day further into the
unexplored regions of potential character, and comes back each evening
a larger moral being than he set forth,” we merely catch our breath,
and read on. We have known so many boys, and we are disillusioned.
When Mr. Curtis points out to us that English school-boys play more
and play better than any other lads, and that their teachers advocate
and encourage the love of sport because it breeds “good common sense,
and resourcefulness which will enable them to meet the difficulties of
life,” we ask ourselves doubtfully whether Englishmen do meet life’s
difficulties with an intelligence so keen and adjusted as to prove
the potency of play. The work which is demanded of French and German
school-boys would seem to English and American school-boys (to say
nothing of English and American parents) cruel and excessive; yet
Frenchmen and Germans are not destitute of resourcefulness, and they
meet the difficulties of life with a concentration of purpose which is
the wonder of the world.
Even the moderate tax which is now imposed upon the leisure and
freedom of American children has been declared illegal. It is possible
and praiseworthy, we are assured, to spare them all “unnatural
restrictions,” all uncongenial labour. There are pastimes in plenty
which will impart to them information, without demanding any effort
on their part. Folk-songs, and rhythmic dances, and story-telling,
and observation classes, and “wholesome and helpful games,” fill up a
pleasant morning for little pupils; and when they grow bigger, more
stirring sports await them. Listen to Judge Lindsey’s enthusiastic
description of the school-room of the future, where moving pictures
will take the place of books and blackboards, where no free child
will be “chained to a desk” (painful phrase!), and where “progressive
educators” will make merry with their pupils all the happy day.
“Mr. Edison is coming to the rescue of Tony,” says Judge Lindsey. (Tony
is a boy who does not like school as it is at present organized.) “He
will take him away from me, and put him in a school that is not a
school at all, but just one big game;--just one round of joy, of play,
of gladness, of knowledge, of sunshine, warming the cells in Tony’s
head until they all open up as the flowers do. There will be something
moving, something doing at that school all the time, just as there is
when Tony goes down to the tracks to see the engines.
“When I tell him about it, Tony shouts, ‘Hooray for Mr. Edison!’ right
in front of the battery, just as he used to say, ‘To hell wid de cop.’”
Now this is an interesting exposition of the purely sentimental view of
education. We have been leading up to it for years, ever since Froebel
uttered his famous “Come, let us live with our children!” and here it
is set down in black and white by a man who has the welfare of the
young deeply at heart. Judge Lindsey sympathizes with Tony’s distaste
for study. He points out to us that it is hard for a boy who is “the
leader of a gang” to be laughed at by less enterprising children
because he cannot cipher. Yet to some of us it does not seem altogether
amiss that Tony should be brought to understand the existence of other
standards than those of hoodlumism. Ciphering is dull work (so, at
least, I have always found it), and difficult work too; but it is
hardly fair to brand it as ignoble. Compared with stealing rails from
a freight-car, which is Tony’s alternative for school attendance, it
even has a dignity of its own; and the perception of this fact may be
a salutary, if mortifying lesson. Judge Lindsey’s picturesque likening
of our antiquated school system which compels children to sit at desks,
with the antiquated Chinese custom which bound little girls’ feet,
lacks discernment. The underlying motives are, in these instances,
measurably different, the processes are dissimilar, the results have
points of variance.
Nobody doubts that all our Tonys, rich and poor, lawless and
law-abiding, would much prefer a school that is not a school at all,
“but just one big game”; nobody doubts that a great deal of desultory
information may be acquired from films. But desultory information is
not, and never can be, a substitute for education; and habits of play
cannot be trusted to develop habits of work. Our efforts to protect
the child from doing what he does not want to do, because he does
not want to do it, are kind, but unintelligent. Life is not a vapid
thing. “The world,” says Emerson, “is a proud place, peopled with men
of positive quality.” No pleasure it can give, from the time we are
seven until the time we are seventy, is comparable to the pleasure of
achievement.
Dr. Münsterberg, observing with dismay the “pedagogical unrest” which
pervades our communities, expresses a naïve surprise that so much sound
advice, and so much sound instruction, should leave the teacher without
inspiration or enthusiasm. “The pile of interesting facts which the
sciences heap up for the teacher’s use grows larger and larger, but the
teacher seems to stare at it with growing hopelessness.”
I should think so. A pile of heterogeneous facts--segments of segments
of subjects--reduces any sane teacher to hopelessness, because he, at
least, is well aware that his pupils cannot possibly absorb or digest
a tithe of the material pressed upon their acceptance. Experience has
taught him something which his counsellors never learn,--the need of
limit, the “feasibility of performance.” Hear what one teacher, both
sane and experienced, has to say concerning the riot of facts and
theories, of art and nature, of science and sentiment, which the school
is expected to reduce into an orderly, consistent, and practical system
of education.
“It is not enough that the child should be taught to handle skilfully
the tools of all learning,--reading, writing, and arithmetic. His sense
of form and his æsthetic nature must be developed by drawing; his hand
must be trained by manual work; his musical nature must be awakened by
song; he must be brought into harmony with his external environment
by means of nature lessons and the study of science; his patriotic
impulses must be roused by American history and by flag-drills;
temperance must be instilled into him by lessons in physiology, with
special reference to the effects of alcohol on the human system;
his imagination must be cultivated by the help of Greek and Norse
mythology; he must gain some knowledge of the great heroes and events
of general history; he must acquire a love for and an appreciation of
the best literature through the plentiful reading of masterpieces,
while at the same time his mind should be stocked with choice gems of
prose and verse, which will be a solace to him throughout his later
life.
“It might be well if, by displacing a little arithmetic or geography,
he could gain some knowledge of the elements of Latin or of a modern
language; in some manner there must be roused in him a love for trees,
a respect for birds, an antipathy to cigarettes, and an ambition for
clean streets; and somewhere, somewhere in this mad chaos he must learn
to spell! Do you wonder that teachers in progressive schools confide
to us that they fear their pupils are slightly bewildered? Do you
wonder that pupils do not gain the habit and the power of concentrated,
consecutive work?”[1]
[1] _The Existing Relations between School and College_, by Wilson
Farrand.
And this irrational, irrelevant medley, this educational vaudeville,
must be absorbed unconsciously, and without effort, by children roused
to interest by the sustained enthusiasm of their teachers, whom may
Heaven help! If the programme is not full enough, it can be varied
by lectures on sex-hygiene, lessons in woodcraft (with reference to
boy scouts), and pictures illustrating the domestic habits of the
house-fly. These, with plenty of gymnastics, and a little barefoot
dancing for girls, may bring a school measurably near the ideal
proposed by Judge Lindsey,--a place where “there is something moving,
something doing all the time,” and which finds its closest counterpart
in the rushing of engines on their tracks.
The theory that school work must appeal to a child’s fluctuating
tastes, must attract a child’s involuntary attention, does grievous
wrong to the rising generation; yet it is upheld in high places, and
forms the subject-matter of many addresses vouchsafed year after year
to long-suffering educators. They should bring to bear the “energizing
force of interest,” they should magnetize their pupils into work. Even
Dr. Eliot reminds them with just a hint of reproach that, if a child is
interested, he will not be disorderly; and this reiterated statement
appears to be the crux of the whole difficult situation. Let us boldly
suppose that a child is not interested,--and he may conceivably weary
even of films,--is it then optional with him to be, or not to be,
disorderly, and what is the effect of his disorder on other children
whose tastes may differ from his own?
The Right Reverend Mandell Creighton, who appears to have made more
addresses to the teachers of England than any other ecclesiastic of
his day, repeatedly warned them that they should not attempt to teach
any subject without first making clear to children why this subject
should command attention. If they failed to do so, said the bishop
triumphantly, the children would not attend. He was of the opinion that
little pupils must not only be rationally convinced that what they are
asked to do is worth their doing, but that they must enjoy every step
of their progress. A teacher who could not make a child feel that it is
“just as agreeable” to be in school as at play, had not begun his, or
her, pedagogical career.
This is a hard saying and a false one. Every normal child prefers
play to work, and the precise value of work lies in its call for
renunciation. Nor has any knowledge ever been acquired and retained
without endeavour. What heroic pains were taken by Montaigne’s father
to spare his little son the harsh tasks of the school-boy! At what
trouble and cost to the household was the child taught “the pure
Latin tongue” in infancy, “without bookes, rules, or grammar, without
whipping or whining”! Greek was also imparted to him in kindly fashion,
“by way of sporte and recreation.” “We did tosse our declinations and
conjugations to and fro, as they doe, who, by means of a certaine
game at tables, learne both Arithmeticke and Geometrie.” Assuredly
the elder Montaigne was a man born out of date. In our happier age
he would have been a great and honoured upholder of educational
novelties, experimenting with the school-rooms of the world. In the
sixteenth century he was only a country gentleman, experimenting
with his son,--a son who bluntly confesses that, of the Greek thus
pleasantly trifled with, he had “but small understanding,” and that
the Latin which had been his mother tongue was speedily “corrupted by
discontinuance.”
All the boy gained by the most elaborate system ever devised for the
saving of labour was that he “overskipped” the lower forms in school.
What he lost was the habit of mastering his “prescript lessons,” which
he seems to have disliked as heartily as any student of Guienne.
Neither loss nor gain mattered much to a man of original parts. The
principal result of his father’s scheme was the lingering of certain
Latin words among the simple folk of Perigord, who, having painfully
acquired these strange terms in order to rescue their little master
from his schoolbooks, retained and made use of them all their lives.
An emphatic note of protest against our well-meant but enfeebling
educational methods was struck by Professor William James in his
“Talks to Teachers,” published in 1899. The phrase “Economy of Effort,”
so dear to the kindly hearts of Froebel’s followers, had no meaning
for Dr. James. The ingenious system by which the child’s tasks, as
well as the child’s responsibilities, are shifted to the shoulders
of the teacher, made no appeal to his incisive intelligence. He
stoutly asserted that effort is oxygen to the lungs of youth, and
that it is sheer nonsense to suppose that every step of education can
possibly be made interesting. The child, like the man, must meet his
difficulties, and master them. There is no lesson worth learning, no
game worth playing, which does not call for exertion. Rousseau, it
will be remembered, would not permit Émile to know what rivalry meant.
That harassed child never even ran a race, lest the base spirit of
competition should penetrate his nerveless little being. But Professor
James, deaf to social sentimentalities, averred that rivalry is
the spur of action, and the impelling force of civilization. “There
is a noble and generous kind of rivalry as well as a spiteful and
greedy kind,” he wrote truthfully, “and the noble and generous form
is particularly common in childhood. All games owe the zest which
they bring with them to the fact that they are rooted in the emulous
passion, yet they are the chief means of training in fairness and
magnanimity.”
I am aware that it is a dangerous thing to call kindness sentimental;
but our feeling that children have a right to happiness, and our
sincere effort to protect them from any approach to pain, have
led imperceptibly to the elimination from their lives of many
strength-giving influences. A recent volume on “Child Culture” (a
phrase every whit as reprehensible as “child-material”) speaks always
of naughty children as “patients,” implying that their unfortunate
condition is involuntary, and must be cured from without, not from
within. The “rights of children” include the doubtful privilege
of freedom from restraint, and the doubtful boon of shelter from
obligation. It seems sweet and kind to teach a child high principles
and steadfastness of purpose by means of symbolic games rather than by
any open exaction. Unconscious obedience, like indirect taxation, is
supposed to be paid without strain. Our feverish fear lest we offend
against the helplessness of childhood, our feverish concern lest it
should be denied its full measure of content, drive us, burdened as we
are with good intentions, past the border-line of wisdom. If we were
“Less winning soft, less amiably mild,”
we might see more clearly the value of standards.
Two years ago I had sent me several numbers of a Los Angeles newspaper.
They contained a spirited and sympathetic account of a woman who
had been arrested for stealing a child’s outfit, and who pleaded
in court that she wanted the garments for her daughter, the little
girl having refused to go to school, because other children had
laughed at her shabby clothes. The effect of this pathetic disclosure
was instantaneous and overwhelming. The woman was released, and
kind-hearted people hastened to send “nicey” frocks by the “wagon-load”
to the ill-used child. A picture of the heroic mother in a large
plumed hat, and another of little Ellen in curls and hair-ribbons,
occupied prominent places in the paper. The public mind was set at rest
concerning the quality of the goods donated. “Ellen is going to school
to-day,” wrote the jubilant reporter. “She is going to wear a fluffy
new dress with lace, and hair-ribbons to match. And if any rude boy so
far forgets himself as to tear that wondrous creation, there will be
others at home to replace it. Happy, oh, so happy was the little miss,
as she shook her curls over the dainty dress to-day. And the mother?
Well, a faith in the inherent goodness of mankind has been rekindled in
her bosom.”
Now the interesting thing about this journalistic eloquence, and
the public sentiment it represented, is that while shabbiness was
admittedly a burden too heavy for a child to bear, theft carried with
it no shadow of disgrace. Children might jeer at a little girl in a
worn frock, but a little girl in “lace and hair-ribbons” was manifestly
above reproach. Her mother’s transgression had covered her with glory,
not with shame. There seems to be some confusion of standards in such
a verdict, some deviation from the paths of rectitude and honour. It
is hard for a child to be more poorly dressed than her companions; but
to convince her that dishonesty is the best policy and brings its own
reward, is but a dubious kindness. Nor is it impossible to so stiffen
her moral fibre that her poor dress may be worn, if not with pride, at
least with sturdy self-control.
On this point I know whereof I speak, for, when I was a little girl,
my convent school sheltered a number of Southern children, reduced
to poverty by the Civil War, and educated (though of this no one was
aware) by the boundless charity of the nuns. These children were
shabby, with a pathetic shabbiness which fell far below our very
moderate requirements. Their dresses (in my prehistoric days, school
uniforms were worn only on Thursdays and Sundays) were strangely
antiquated, as though cut down from the garments of mothers and
grandmothers, their shoes were scuffed, their hats were hopeless. But
the unquenchable pride with which they bore themselves invested such
hardships with distinction. Their poverty was the honourable outcome of
war; and this fact, added to their simple and sincere conviction that
a girl born below the Mason and Dixon line must necessarily be better
than a girl born above it, carried them unscathed through the valley
of humiliation. Looking back now with an unbiassed mind, I am disposed
to consider their claim to superiority unfounded; but, at the time,
their single-mindedness carried conviction. The standards they imposed
were preeminently false, but they were less ignoble than the standards
imposed by wealth. No little American boy or girl can know to-day what
it means to have the character set in childhood by history, by the
vividness of early years lived under strange and violent conditions, by
the sufferings, the triumphs, the high and sad emotions of war.
There is a story told by Sir Francis Doyle which illustrates, after the
rude fashion of our forebears, the value of endurance as an element of
education. Dr. Keate, the terrible head-master of Eton, encountered one
winter morning a small boy crying miserably, and asked him what was
the matter. The child replied that he was cold. “Cold!” roared Keate.
“You must put up with cold, sir! You are not at a girls’ school.”
It is a horrid anecdote, and I am kind-hearted enough to wish that
Dr. Keate, who was not without his genial moods, had taken the lad to
some generous fire (presuming such a thing was to be found), and had
warmed his frozen hands and feet. But it so chanced that in that little
snivelling boy there lurked a spark of pride and a spark of fun, and
both ignited at the rough touch of the master. He probably stopped
crying, and he certainly remembered the sharp appeal to manhood.
Fifteen years later he charged with the Third Dragoons at the strongly
entrenched Sikhs (thirty thousand of the best fighting men of the
Khalsa) on the curving banks of the Sutlej. When the word was given, he
turned to his superior officer, a fellow Etonian who was scanning the
stout walls and the belching guns. “As old Keate would say, this is no
girls’ school,” he chuckled; and rode to his death on the battlefield
of Sobraon, which gave Lahore to England.
Contemplating which incident, and many like it, we become aware that
ease is not the only good in a world consecrated to the heroic business
of living and of dying.
The Modest Immigrant
It is now nearly fifty years since Mr. Lowell wrote his famous
essay, “On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners”; an essay in which
justifiable irritation prompted the telling of plain truths, and an
irrepressible sense of humour made these truths amusing. It was well
for Mr. Lowell that he was seldom too angry to laugh, and he knew,
as only a man of the world can know, the saving grace of laughter.
Therefore, though confessedly unable to understand why foreigners
should be persuaded that “by doing this country the favour of coming
to it, they have laid every native thereof under an obligation,” he
was willing in certain light-minded moods to acquit himself honourably
of the debt. When a genteel German mendicant presented a letter,
“professedly written by a benevolent American clergyman,” and
certifying that the bearer thereof had long “sofered with rheumatic
paints in his limps,” Mr. Lowell rightly considered that a composition
so rich in the naïveté common to all Teuton mendacities was worth the
money asked. When a French traveller assured him, with delightful
_bon-homie_, that Englishmen became Americanized so rapidly that “they
even begin to talk through their noses, just like you do,” the only
comment of our representative American was that he felt ravished by
this testimony to the assimilating powers of democracy.
Nevertheless, it is well in these years of grace to reread Mr. Lowell’s
essay, partly because of its sturdy and dignified Americanism, and
partly because we can then compare his limited experiences with our
own. We can also speculate pleasantly upon his frame of mind could he
have lived to hear Mrs. Amadeus Grabau (Mary Antin) say, “Lowell would
agree with me,”--the point of agreement being the relative virtues of
the Pilgrim Fathers and the average immigrant of to-day. When the dead
are quoted in this fashion and nothing happens, then we know that,
despite the assurances of Sir Oliver Lodge, the seal of silence is
unbroken. Were the proud souls who have left us, able and willing to
return, it would not be to reveal the whereabouts of a lost penknife,
but to give the lie to the words which are spoken in their name.
The condescension which Mr. Lowell observed and analyzed was in his day
the shining quality of foreigners who visit our shores. Immigrants were
then less aggressive and less profoundly self-conscious than they are
now, and it is the immigrant who counts. It is his arrogance, not the
misapprehension of the tourist, or the innocent pride of the lecturer,
which constitutes a peril to our republic. We can all of us afford
to smile with Mr. Lowell at the men and women who, while accepting
our hospitality, “make no secret of regarding us as the goose bound
to deliver them a golden egg in return for their cackle.” That they
should not hesitate to come without equipment, without experience,
without even a fitness for their task, seems to us perfectly natural.
Perhaps they have written books which none of us have read, or edited
periodicals which none of us have seen. Perhaps they have known
celebrities of whom few of us have heard. It does not matter in the
least. From the days when Miss Rose Kingsley came to tell us the worth
of French art (does not the ocean roll between New York and Paris?),
to the days when Mrs. Pankhurst came to tell us the worth of womanhood
(does not the ocean roll between Boston Common and Hyde Park?), we have
listened patiently, and paid generously, and received scant courtesy
for our pains. “I find it so strange,” said an Englishman to me three
years ago, “to see my wife lecturing over the United States. It is a
thing she would not dream of doing at home. In fact, nobody would go to
hear her, you know.”
But lectures are transient things, forgiven as soon as forgotten.
Even the books which are written about us make no painful bid for
immortality. And though our visitors patronize us, they seldom fail
to throw us a kind word now and then. Sometimes a sweet-tempered and
very hurried traveller, like Mr. Arnold Bennett, is good enough to
praise everything he thinks he has seen. Before August, 1914, it was
not the habit of our guests to scold or threaten us. That privilege had
hitherto been reserved for the alien, who, having done us the honour of
accepting citizenship, wields his vote as a cudgel, bidding us beware
the weapon we have amiably placed in his hands.
Signor Ferrero, an acute and friendly critic, pronounces Americans
to be the mystics of the modern world, because they sacrifice their
welfare to a sentiment; because they believe in the miracle of the
melting-pot, which, like Medea’s magic cauldron, will turn the old and
decrepit races of Europe into a young and vigorous people, new-born in
soul and body. No other nation cherishes this illusion. An Englishman
knows that a Russian Jew cannot in five years, or in twenty-five years,
become English; that his standards and ideals are not convertible into
English standards and ideals. A Frenchman does not see in a Bulgarian
or a Czech the making of another Frenchman. Our immigrants may be as
good as we are. Sometimes we are told they are better, that we might
“learn a lesson” from the least promising among them. But no one
can deny that they are different; in many instances, radically and
permanently different. And to make a sow’s ear out of a silk purse is
just as difficult as the reverse operation. Mr. Horace Kallen has put
the case into a few clear conclusive words when he says, “Only men who
are alike in origin and spirit, and not abstractly, can be truly equal,
and maintain that inward unanimity of action and outlook which makes a
national life.”
To look for “inward unanimity” among the seething mass of immigrants
who have nothing more in common with one another than they have with
us, is to tax credulity too far. The utmost we can hope is that their
mutual antagonisms will neutralize their voting power, and keep our
necks free from an alien yoke. Those of us who have lived more than
half a century have seen strange fluctuations in the fortunes of the
foreign-born. In 1883, when the Brooklyn Bridge was finished, the
Irishmen of New York made a formal protest against its being opened
on Queen Victoria’s birthday, lest this chance occurrence should be
misconstrued into a compliment to England. In 1915, a band in Saint
Patrick’s parade was halted, and forbidden to play “Tipperary” before
Cardinal Farley’s residence, lest these cheerful strains should be
misconstrued into an insult to Germany. The Reverend Thomas Thornton,
speaking to the Knights of Columbus, prophesied mournfully that the
time was at hand when Catholic voters in the United States would be
“reduced to the condition of tribute-paying aliens.” Men smiled when
they heard this, reflecting that the Irish officeholder had not yet
been consigned to oblivion; but the speaker had seen with a clear eye
the marshalling of strange forces, destined to drive the first comer
from authority. Some weeks later, the “Jewish Tribune” boasted that the
angry protest voiced by Catholics against the sending of Signor Ernesto
Nathan as commissioner to the San Francisco Fair had been “checked in
its infancy” by the power of the Jewish press.
It is all very lively and interesting, but where does the American
come in? What place is reserved for him in the commonwealth which his
heroic toil and heroic sacrifices moulded into what Washington proudly
called a “respectable nation”? The truth is contemptuously flung at us
by Mary Antin, when she says that the descendants of the men who made
America are not numerous enough to “swing a presidential election.” And
if a negligible factor now, what depths of insignificance will be their
portion in the future? I heard told with glee--the glee which expresses
pure American unconcern--a story of a public school in one of our
large eastern cities. A visitor of an investigating turn of mind asked
the pupils of various nationalities, Germans, Polacks, Russian Jews,
Italians, Armenians and Greeks, to stand up in turn. When the long
list was seemingly exhausted, he bethought himself of a nation he had
overlooked, and said, “Now let the American children arise!” Whereupon
one lone, lorn little black boy stood up to represent the native-born.
It is hardly surprising that these foreign children, recognizing
the strength of numbers, should take exception to our time-honoured
methods of education. Little boys of a socialistic turn of mind refuse
to salute the flag, because it is a military emblem. Little boys of
a rationalistic turn of mind refuse to read the Bible,--any portion
of the Bible,--because its assertions are unscientific. Little Jewish
boys and girls refuse to sing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,”
because of its unguarded allusions to Bethlehem and Calvary. Indeed,
any official recognition of the Deity offends the susceptibilities of
some of our future citizens; and their perplexed teachers are bidden to
eliminate from their programme “any exercises which the pupils consider
objectionable.”
A few years ago I was asked to speak to a large class of immigrant
working-girls, for whose benefit philanthropic women had planned
evening classes, dexterously enlivened by a variety of entertainments.
I was not sure whether I ranked as useful or amusing, and the number
of topics I was bidden to tactfully avoid, added to my misgivings;
when suddenly all doubts were dispelled by the superintendent saying
sweetly, “Oh, Miss Repplier, you were asked to speak for forty minutes;
but I think your address had better be cut down to twenty-five. The
girls are eager for their ice-cream.”
I said I sympathized with so reasonable an impatience. Even at my
advanced age, I prefer ice-cream to lectures.
“Moi, je dis que les bonbons
Valent mieux que la raison.”
But what did not flatter me was the clear understanding that my
audience listened to me, or at least sat tolerantly for twenty minutes
(I curtailed my already cur-tail’d cur), because their reward, in
the shape of ice-cream, was near at hand. Just as some manufacturers
provide baths for their employees, and then, recognizing the prejudices
of the foreign-born, pay the men for taking the baths provided, so the
good ladies who had served me up as a mental refreshment for their
protégées, paid the girls for being so obliging as to listen to me.
Miss Addams has reproached us most unjustly for our contemptuous
disregard of the immigrant; and Mrs. Percy Pennybacker, president
of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, has been wrought to
such a pitch of indignation over what she considers our unwarranted
superciliousness, that she writes fervidly in the “Ladies’ Home
Journal,” “I love my country; I adore her; but at times I hope that
some great shock may cause us to drop the mantle of conceit that we so
proudly wrap about us.”
This well-wisher is in a fair way to see her desires realized. We
may be left naked and shivering sooner than she anticipates. If
concessions to the Irish vote failed to teach us humility,--perhaps
because the Irish have a winning way of overriding barriers (“What’s
the Constitution between friends?”),--other immigrants are less urbane
in stripping us of our pride. “A German,” said Mr. Lowell feelingly,
“is not always nice in concealing his contempt”; and if this was his
attitude in 1868, to what superb heights of disdain has he risen
by 1916! A German ambassador has derided diplomatic conventions,
and has addressed his official communication, over the head of the
Administration, to German voters in the United States, sparing no
pains to make his words offensive. German officials have sought to
undermine our neutrality and imperil our safety. In the opening
months of the war, a German professor at Harvard, who for years has
received courteous and honourable treatment at the hands of Americans,
threatened us insolently with the “crushing power” of the German vote;
and bade us beware of the punishment which twenty-five millions of
citizens, “in whose homes lives the memory of German ancestors,” would
inflict upon their fellow citizens of less august and martial stock.
The “Frankfurter Zeitung” published a cheering letter from an American
Congressman, assuring a German correspondent that his countrymen know
how to make themselves heard, and expressing hearty hopes that Germany
would triumph over her “perfidious” rival.
Is it any wonder that, stimulated by these brilliant examples, the
average “German-American” should wax scornful, and despise his
unhyphenated fellow citizens? Is it any wonder that he should turn
bully, and threaten us with his vote,--the vote which was confided to
his sacred honour for the preservation of our country’s liberty? A
circular distributed before the Chicago elections in 1915 stated in
the plainest possible words that the German’s first allegiance was to
imperial Germany, and not to the Republic he had sworn to serve:--
“Chicago has a larger German population than any city in the world,
excepting Berlin and Vienna; and the German-, Austrian-, and
Hungarian-Americans should, at this coming election, _set aside every
other consideration_, and vote as a unit for Robert M. Sweitzer.
Stand shoulder to shoulder in this election, as our countrymen in the
trenches and on the high seas are fighting for the preservation of our
dear Fatherland. The election of a German-American would be a fitting
answer to the defamers of the Fatherland, would cause a tremendous
moral effect throughout the United States, and would reëcho in Germany,
Austria, and Hungary.”
The “moral effect” of this appeal was not precisely what its authors
had anticipated. Men asked themselves in bewilderment and wrath what
the dear Fatherland, any more than dear Dahomey or the beloved Congo,
had to do with the Chicago elections? They have been putting similar
questions ever since.
Some months later, the German-American Central Society of Passaic,
uniting itself with the German-American National Alliance, called for
assistance in these glowing words:--
“Come all of you German societies, German men, and German women, so
that united offensively and defensively [_zum Schutz und Trutz verein_]
with weapons of the spirit, we may help our beloved Germany onward.”
“Weapons of the spirit!” If this means prayer and supplication,
the matter lies between the petitioner and his God. If it means
exhortations, pamphlets, and platform oratory, the champion of Germany
stands well within his rights. But the next paragraph drops all
figures of speech, and states the real issue with abrupt and startling
distinctness:--
“We ask for your speedy decision with respect to your acquiescence, in
order to permit of an effective participation and lead in the spring
campaign of 1915.”
In plain words, the spiritual weapon with which the German-American
proposes to fight the battle of Germany is the American ballot.
When the franchise was granted to him, or to his father, or to his
grandfather (whichever did this country the honour of first accepting
citizenship), a solemn oath was sworn. Allegiance to a foreign
government was forever disowned; fealty to the government of the United
States was vowed. He who uses his vote to further the interests of a
European state is a perjured man, and that he should dare to threaten
us with the power of his perjury is the height of arrogant ill-doing.
That such a question as “What is the proportion of votes which the
Germans of your section control?” should be asked by German agents, and
answered by German newspapers, affronts our nation’s honour, soils a
sacred trust by ill-usage, and tears our neutrality to rags.
When the Lusitania was sunk, and the horror of the deed shamed
all Christendom, save only those strange residents of Berlin who
received the news with “enthusiasm,” and “joyful pride,” the first
word tactfully whispered in our ear was that, while we might regret
the drowning of Americans, we were impotent to resent it. And this
impotence was to be a concession to the foreign vote. God only knows of
what material Germany thought we were made,--putty, or gutta-percha,
or sun-baked mud? Certainly not of flesh and blood. Certainly not with
hearts to bleed, or souls to burn. Every comment vouchsafed by the
German press placed us in the catalogue of worms warranted not to turn.
The contempt which the German “is not always nice in concealing” shines
with a chastened lustre in the words and deeds of other foreign-born
citizens. They accept the vote which we enthusiastically press upon
them, regarding it as an asset, sometimes of marketable value,
sometimes serving a stronger and more enduring purpose, always as an
esteemed protection against the military service exacted by their own
governments. They do not come to us “with gifts in their hands,”--to
quote Mr. Lowell. They are for the most part destitute, not only of
money, but of knowledge, of useful attainments, of any serviceable
mental equipment. Mr. Edward Alsworth Ross, who is not without
experience, confesses ruefully that the immigrant seldom brings in his
intellectual baggage anything of use to us; and that the admission into
our electorate of “backward men”--men whose mental, moral, and physical
standards are lower than our own--must inevitably retard our social
progress, and thrust us behind the more uniformly civilized nations of
the world.
Meditating on these disagreeable facts, we find ourselves confronted by
sentimentalists who say that if we would only be kind and brotherly,
the sloping foreheads would grow high, the narrow shoulders broad,
the Pole would become peaceable, the Greek honest, the Slav clean,
the Sicilian would give up murder as a pastime, the Jew would lose
his “monstrous love of gain.” Enthusiastic promoters of the “National
Americanization Committee”--a crusade full of promise for the
future--have talked to us so much and so sternly about our duty to the
immigrant, our neglect of the immigrant, our debt to the immigrant,
our need of the immigrant, that we have been no less humiliated than
bewildered by their eloquence. Mr. Roosevelt alone, of all their
orators, has had the hardihood to say bluntly that citizenship implies
service as well as protection; that the debt contracted by the citizen
to the state is as binding as that contracted by the state to the
citizen; that a voter who cannot speak English is an absurdity no less
than a peril; and that all who seek the franchise should be compelled
to accept without demur our laws, our language, our national policy,
our requisitions civil and military. This is what naturalization
implies.
That saving phrase, “It is the law,” which made possible the
civilization of Rome, and which has been the foundation of all great
civilizations before and since, has little weight or sanctity for our
immigrants. They resent legal interference, especially the punishment
of crime, in a very spirited fashion. When Mr. Samuel Gompers defended
the McNamaras and their “social war” murders before a subcommittee
of the United States Senate, he said with feeling that the mere fact
that these men should have come to look upon dynamite as the only
defence left them against the tyranny of capital, was a “terrible
charge against society.” It was an appeal very pleasantly suggestive
of the highwayman, who, having attacked and robbed Lord Derby and Mr.
Grenville, said reproachfully to his victims, “What scoundrels you must
be to fire at a gentleman who risks his life upon the road!”
If Cicero lowered his voice when he spoke of the Jews, fearing the
enmity of this strong and clannish people, the American, who is far
from enjoying Cicero’s prestige, must be doubly cautious lest he give
offence. Yet surely, if there is an immigrant who owes us everything,
it is the Jew. Even our spasmodic and utterly futile efforts to
restrict immigration always leave him a loophole of escape, because he
controls the National Liberal Immigration League.
It is our custom to assume that the Russian Jew is invariably a
fugitive from religious persecution, and we liken him in this regard
to the best and noblest of our early settlers. But the Puritan, the
Quaker, and the Huguenot sacrificed temporal well-being for liberty
of conscience. They left conditions of comfort, and the benefits of
a high civilization, to develop the resources of a virgin land, and
build for themselves homes in the wilderness. They practised the stern
virtues of courage, fortitude, and a most splendid industry. Had the
Pilgrim Fathers been met on Plymouth Rock by immigration officials; had
their children been placed immediately in good free schools, and given
the care of doctors, dentists, and nurses; had they found themselves
in infinitely better circumstances than they had ever enjoyed in
England, indulging in undreamed-of luxuries, and taught by kind-hearted
philanthropists,--what pioneer virtues would they have developed, what
sons would they have bred, what honours would history have accorded
them? If our early settlers were masterful, they earned the right
to mastery, and the price they paid for it was endurance. To the
sacrifices which they made, to their high courage and heroic labours,
we owe law, liberty, and well-being.
It is because the Jew has received from us so much, and given us so
little, that his masterfulness affronts our sense of decency. When the
Jewish Anti-Defamation League boasts--perhaps without warranty--that it
has taken “the first and most important step in excluding the ‘Merchant
of Venice’ from the curriculum of the grammar and high schools of this
country, by having the play removed from the list of requirements laid
down by the Collegiate Entrance Requirement Board,” we feel that a joke
has been carried too far. Nobody can seriously associate the “Merchant
of Venice” with a defamation of the Jewish character. Heaven knows, the
part played by Christians in that immortal drama has never left us
puffed up with pride. Nevertheless, being less thin-skinned, or perhaps
more sure of ourselves, we have grown attached to the play, and should
not relish its banishment by the decree of aliens.
And what if our Italian immigrants should take exception to the
character of Iago, and demand that “Othello” should be excluded from
the schools? What if the Sicilians should find themselves wounded in
spirit by the behaviour of Leontes (compared with whom Shylock and Iago
are gentlemen), and deny us the “Winter’s Tale”? What if the Bohemians
(a fast-increasing body of voters) should complain that their peddlers
are honest men, shamefully slandered by the rogueries of Autolycus? If
all our foreign citizens become in turn as sensitive as Hebrews, we may
find ourselves reduced to the fairy scenes from the “Tempest” and the
“Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
Another victory claimed by the “Jewish Tribune” is that the Associated
Press has been made to feel that the words “Jew” and “Hebrew” should be
avoided in connection with criminals. “The religious denomination of
malefactors should not be referred to. It is now generally understood
by newspapers that it is just as improper to describe a malefactor by
stating that he is a Jew, as it would be to describe such a person as a
Catholic or a Methodist.”
Does this mean that the Jew no longer claims any racial distinction,
that he has no genealogy, no pedigree, no place in history, nothing
by which he may be classified but church membership? Is the simple
dictionary definition, “Jew. An Israelite; a person of the Hebrew
race,” without any significance? We may call a Greek pickpocket a
Greek, or a Polish rioter a Pole, or an Italian murderer an Italian;
but we may not call a Jewish procurer a Jew, because that word refers
only to his attendance at the synagogue. May we then speak of a
scholar, a musician, a scientist, a philanthropist, as a Jew? Only--by
this ruling--as we might speak of one as a Catholic or a Methodist,
only in reference to his “religious denomination.” If he chances to be
unsectarian, then, as he is also raceless, he cannot be called anything
at all. If the word “Jew” be out of place in the police courts, it is
equally out of place in colleges, learned societies, and encyclopædias.
It will be remembered that, after the publication of “Oliver Twist,”
a bitter protest was raised by English Jews against the character
of Fagin, or rather against the fact that the merry old gentleman
is alluded to frequently as a Jew. The complainants said--what the
“Jewish Tribune” now says--that the use of the word as an indicatory
substantive was an insult to their creed. Dickens, who had never
thought of Fagin as having any creed, who had never associated him
with religious observances of any kind, was puzzled and pained at
having unwittingly given offence; and strove to make clear that, when
he said “Jew,” he meant an Israelite, and not a frequenter of the
synagogue. Years afterward he made a peace-offering in the person of
Riah, who plays the part of a good Samaritan in “Our Mutual Friend,”
and who is to Fagin as skimmed milk to brandy.
It is worthy of note that whenever any strong and noble emotion grips
our Jewish citizens, they speedily forget their antipathy to the word
“Jew.” For years past they have objected to the use of the word by
charitable associations, even when there was no hint of criminality
to shame it. They have asked that visiting nurses should not report
service to Jewish homes, or Jewish patients. Homes and patients should
be placed upon record as Russian or Polish,--whichever the case might
be. The race was specifically denied. The Semite was sunk in the
Slav. But when there came a cry for help from the war-stricken Jews
of Europe, the Jews of America responded with exalted enthusiasm. Jew
called to Jew, and the great tie of kindred asserted itself supremely.
It was not as co-religionists, but as brothers-in-blood, that New
York millionaires, who had never entered a synagogue, stretched out
their hands in aid. Women stripped off their jewels, and offered this
glittering tribute, as they might have done in the fighting days of
Israel. Young and old, rich and poor, gave with unstinted compassion.
Gentiles contributed generously to the fund, and Christian churches
asked the coöperation of Christian congregations. To some Jews the
thought must have occurred that America had not dealt harshly by her
immigrants, when they could command millions for their impoverished
brethren in Europe.
Therefore it behooves the men and women who have been well received,
and who have responded ably to the opportunities offered them by
our country’s superb liberality, to be a little more lenient to our
shortcomings. We confess them readily enough; but we feel that those
whom we have befriended should not be the ones to dwell upon them with
too much gusto. There are situations in the world which imperiously
dictate urbanity. “Steadily as I worked to win America,” writes Mary
Antin, “America advanced to lie at my feet,”--a poodle-like attitude
which ought to disarm criticism. When this clever young woman tells
us that she “took possession of Beacon Street” (a goodly heritage),
and there “drank afternoon tea with gentle ladies whose hands were
as delicate as their porcelain cups,” we feel well content at this
swift recognition of energy and ability. It is not the first time
such pleasant things have happened, and it will not be the last. But
why should the recipient of so much attention be the one to scold us
harshly, to rail at conditions she imperfectly understands, to reproach
us for our ill-mannered children (whom we fear she must have met in
Beacon Street), our slackness in duty, our failure to observe the
precepts and fulfil the intentions of those pioneers whom she kindly,
but confusedly, calls “_our_ forefathers.”
It is the hopeless old story of opposing races, of people unable to
understand one another because they have no mutual standards, no common
denominator. Mary Antin is perfectly sincere, and, from her point of
view, justified, in bidding us remember that among the Harrison Avenue
tenants, “who pitch rubbish through their windows,” was the grocer
whose kindness helped to keep her at school. And she adds with sublime
because unconscious egotism, “Let the City Fathers strike the balance.”
But Elizabeth Robins Pennell is also sincere, and, from _her_ point
of view, justified, when she says with exceeding bitterness that, if
Philadelphia blossomed like the rose with Mary Antins, the city would
be but ill repaid for the degradation of her noble old streets, now
transformed into foul and filthy slums. Dirt is a valuable asset in
the immigrant’s hands. With its help he drives away decent neighbours,
and brings property down to his level and his purse. The ill-fated
Philadelphian is literally pushed out of his home--the only place,
sighs Mrs. Pennell, where he wants to live--by conditions which he is
unable to avert, and unwilling, as well as unfitted, to endure.
It is part of the unreality of modern sentimentalism that we should
have a strong sense of duty toward all the nations of the world except
our own. We see plainly what we owe to the Magyar and the Levantine,
but we have no concern for the Virginian or the Pennsylvanian. The
capitalist and the sentimentalist play into each other’s hands,
and neither takes thought of our country’s irrational present and
imperilled future. We go on keeping a “civic kindergarten” for
backward aliens, and we go on mutely suffering reproach for not
advancing our pupils more rapidly. In the industrial town of New
Britain, Connecticut, the foreign population is nine times greater
than the native population, which is a hideous thing to contemplate.
Twenty nationalities are represented, eighteen languages are spoken.
The handful of Americans, who are supposed to leaven this heavy
and heterogeneous mass, take their duties very seriously. Schools,
playgrounds, clubs, night-classes, vacation classes, gymnasiums,
visiting nurses, milk-stations, charitable organizations, a city
mission with numerous interpreters, a free library with books and
newspapers in divers tongues, all the leavening machinery is kept in
active service for the hard task of civic betterment. Yet it was in
New Britain that an immigrant was found who, after sixteen years’
residence in the United States, was not aware that he might, if he
chose, become a citizen; and this incident, Mary Antin considers
a heavy indictment against the community. “It makes a sensitive
American,” she writes passionately, “choke with indignation.”
It makes an exasperated American choke with angry laughter to have
the case put that way. The ballot is not necessary to safe, decent,
and prosperous living. A good many millions of women have made shift
to live safely, decently, and prosperously without it. If it is to be
regarded as an asset to the immigrant, then his own friends, his own
people, the voters of his own race, might (in the welcome absence of
political bosses) be the ones to press it upon his acceptance. If it
be considered as a safeguard for the Republic, we cannot but feel that
this highly intelligent alien might be spared permanently from the
electorate.
For the first nine months of the war, when Italy’s neutrality swayed
in the conflicting currents of national pride and national precaution,
and no one could foretell what the end would be, a young Italian
gardener, employed near Philadelphia, suffered dismal doubts concerning
the expediency of naturalization. He was a frugal person, devoid of
high political instincts. He did not covet a vote to sell, and he did
not want to pay the modest cost of becoming an American citizen. He
preferred keeping his money and staying what he was, provided always
that Italy remained at peace. But the prospect of Italy’s going to
war disposed him to look favourably upon the safeguard of a foreign
allegiance. Being unable to decipher the newspapers, he made anxious
inquiries every morning. If the headlines read, “Italy unlikely to
abandon attitude of neutrality,” he settled down contentedly to his
day’s work. If the headlines read, “Austria refuses guarantee. Italy
sending troops to northern frontier,” he became once more a prey to
indecision. Then came the May days when doubt was turned to certainty.
Italy, long straining at the leash, plunged into the conflict.
Thousands of Italians in the United States stood ready to fight for
their country, to give back to her, if need be, the lives which
they might have held safe. But one peace-loving gardener hurried to
Philadelphia, applied for his naturalization papers, failed utterly to
pass the casual tests which would have secured them, grew frightened
and demoralized by failure, appealed desperately to his employer, and,
with a little timely aid, was pitched shivering into citizenship.
If ever there comes a cloud between the United States and Italy, this
doughty “Italian-American” will, I am sure, be found fighting with
“weapons of the spirit” for the welfare of his adored and endangered
“Fatherland.”
Waiting
In the most esteemed of his advisory poems, Mr. Longfellow recommends
his readers to be “up and doing,” and at the same time learn “to
labour and to wait.” Having, all of us, imbibed these sentiments in
their harmonious setting when we were at school, we have, all of us,
endeavoured for many months to put such conflicting precepts into
practice. Mr. Longfellow, it will be remembered, gave precedence to
his “up and doing” line; but this may have been due to the exigencies
of verse. We began by waiting, and we waited long. Our deliberation
has seemed to border on paralysis. But back of this superhuman
patience--rewarded by repeated insult and repeated injury--was a
toughening resolution which snatched from insult and injury the bitter
fruit of knowledge. We are emerging from this period of suspense a
sadder and a wiser people, keenly aware of dangers which, a year ago,
seemed negligible, fully determined to front such dangers with courage
and with understanding.
When Germany struck her first blow at Belgium, the neutral nations
silently acquiesced in this breach of good faith. The burning of
Louvain, the destruction of the Cathedral of Rheims, were but the first
fruits of this sinister silence. The sinking of the Lusitania followed
in the orderly sequence of events. It was a deliberate expression of
defiance and contempt, a gauntlet thrown to the world. The lives it
cost, the innocence and helplessness of the drowned passengers, their
number and their nationalities, all combined to make this novelty in
warfare exactly what Germany meant it to be. We Americans had tried
(and it had been hard work) to bear tranquilly the misfortunes of
others. Now let us apply our philosophy to ourselves. Herr Erich von
Salzmann voiced the sentiment of his countrymen when he said in the
Berlin “Lokal Anzeiger”:--
“The Lusitania is no more. Only those who have travelled by sea can
appreciate the extraordinary impression which this news will make all
over the world.... The fact that it was we Germans who destroyed this
ship must make us proud of ourselves. The Lusitania case will obtain
for us more respect than a hundred battles won on land.”
The severing of fear from respect is a subtlety which has not
penetrated the mind of the Prussian. He recognizes no such distinction,
because his doctrine of efficiency embraces the doctrine of
frightfulness. His Kultur is free from any ethical bias. The fact that
we may greatly fear lust, cruelty, and other forms of violence, without
in the least respecting these qualities, has no significance for him.
He frankly does not care. If he can teach the French, the English, or
the Americans to fear him in 1916, as he taught the Chinese to fear him
in 1900, and by the same methods, he will be well content.
But was it fear which paralyzed us when we heard that American women
and children had been sacrificed as ruthlessly as were the Chinese
women and children sixteen years ago? The fashion in which American
gentlemen died on the Lusitania, as on the Titanic, may well acquit
us of any charge of cowardice. Whatever “respect” ensued from that
pitiless massacre was won by the victims, not by the perpetrators
thereof. Why, then, when the news was brought, did we feverishly urge
one another to “keep calm”? Why did we chatter day after day about
“rocking the boat,” as though unaware that the blow which sent us
reeling and quivering was struck by a foreign hand? Why did we let
pass the supreme moment of action, and settle down to months of
controversy? And what have we gained by delay?
All these questions have been answered many times to the satisfaction
and dissatisfaction of the querists. If we had severed diplomatic and
commercial relations with Germany, she might have declared war, and
we did not want to fight; not, at least, on such provocation as she
had given us, and with such ships and munitions as we could command.
There was a well-founded conviction that no step involving the safety
of the nation should be taken impetuously, or under the influence of
resentment, or without discreet calculation of ways and means. There
was also a rational hope that Germany might be induced to disavow the
savage slaughter of noncombatants, and promise redress. And always in
the background of our consciousness was a lurking hope that the pen
would prove mightier than the sword. The copy-books say that it is
mightier, and where shall we look for wisdom, if not to the counsels
of the copy-book!
The correspondence which ensued between the Administration in
Washington and the Imperial Government in Berlin was so remarkable
that it may well serve as a model for generations yet unborn. If the
Polite Letter-Writer ever broadens its sphere to embrace diplomatic
relations, it could not do better than reprint these admirable
specimens of what was thought to be a lost art. The urbanity and
firmness of each American note filled us with justifiable pride. Also
with a less justifiable elation, which was always dissipated by the
arrival of a German note, equally urbane and equally firm. Germany was
more than willing to state at length and at leisure her reasons for
sinking merchant ships, provided she could safely and uninterruptedly
continue the practice. Such warfare she defined in her note of July 9
as a “sacred duty.” “If the Imperial Government were derelict in these
duties, it would be guilty before God and history of the violation of
those principles of highest humanity which are the foundation of every
national existence.”
The German is certainly at home in Zion. If his god be a trifle
exacting in the matter of human sacrifice, he is otherwise the
most pliant and accommodating of deities. It is one of our many
disadvantages that we have no American god. Only the Divinity,
whose awful name is, by comment consent, omitted from diplomatic
correspondence.
When our hopes sank lowest and our hearts burned hottest, the note
of September 1, 1915, brought its welcome message of concession. It
is as little worth while to analyze the motives which prompted this
change of front as it is worth while to speculate upon its sincerity.
In the light of subsequent events, we are painfully aware that our
satisfaction was excessive, our self-congratulations unwarranted, our
jubilant editorials a trifle overcharged. But at the time we believed
what we wanted to believe, we joyfully assumed that Germany had been
converted to the ways of humanity, and that she stood ready to anger
her own people for the sake of conciliating ours.
Why the submarine warfare should have so endeared itself to the Teuton
heart is a problem for psychologists to elucidate. There is little
about it to evoke a generous enthusiasm. It lacks heroic qualities.
The singularly loathsome song which celebrated the sinking of the
Lusitania is as remote in spirit from such brave verse as “Admirals
All,” as those old sea-dogs were remote in spirit from the foul work
of Von Tirpitz. No flight of fancy can conceive of Nelson counting up
the women and children he had drowned. And because the whole wretched
business sickened as well as affronted us, we hailed with unutterable
relief any modification of its violence. For the first time in many
months our souls were lightened of their load. We felt calm enough
to review the summer of suspense, and to ask ourselves sincerely and
soberly what were the lessons that it had taught us.
The agitation produced in this country by a terrible--and to us
unexpected--European war was intensified in the spring of 1915 by
the discovery that we were not so immune as we thought ourselves. It
dawned slowly on men’s minds that the sacrifice of the nation’s honour
might not after all secure the nation’s safety; and this disagreeable
doubt impelled us to the still more disagreeable consideration of
our inadequate coast defences. Then and then only were we made aware
of the chaotic confusion which reigned in the minds of our vast and
unassimilated population. Then and then only did we understand that
perils from without--remote and ascertainable--were brought close and
rendered hideously obscure by shameful coöperation from within.
Ten years ago, two years ago, we should have laughed to scorn the
suggestion that any body of American citizens--no matter what their
lineage--would be disloyal to the State. A belief in the integrity
of citizenship was the first article of our faith. To-day, the
German-American openly disavows all pretence of loyalty, and says
as plainly and as publicly as he can that he will be betrayed into
no conflict with his “mother country,” unless the United States be
actually invaded,--by which time the rest of us would feel ourselves a
trifle insecure. It is strange that the men who, had they remained in
their mother country (a choice which was always open to them), would
never have ventured a protest against Germany’s aggressive warfare,
should here be so stoutly contumacious. What would have happened to the
president of the New York State German-American Alliance, had he lived
in Berlin instead of in Brooklyn, and had he spoken of the Kaiser as
he dared to speak of Mr. Wilson! The license which the German (muzzled
tightly in Germany) permits himself in the United States, is not unlike
the license which the newly emancipated slaves in the South mistook for
liberty when the Civil War was ended. It takes as many generations to
make a freeman as it does to make a gentleman.
The inevitable result of this outspoken disloyalty at home was a
determined and very hurtful pressure from abroad. A big, careless,
self-confident nation is an easy prey; and while we waited, not very
watchfully, Germany seized many chances to hit us below the belt,
and hit us hard. The fomenting of strikes and labour agitation; the
threatening of German workmen employed in American factories; the
misuse of the radio service at Sayville, and the continued sending
of code messages; the affidavits of Gustav Stahl before the Federal
Grand Jury, and his assisted flight from the authorities; the forged
American passports with which German spies wander over England and
the Continent; the diplomatic indiscretions--to put it mildly--of
German and Austrian ambassadors; the mysterious activities of German
officials, which we were too inexperienced to understand;--all these
things filled us with anger and alarm. We could not resort to the
simple measures of Italians, who in Philadelphia stoned the agents whom
they found trying to hold back reservists about to sail for Italy. We
bore each fresh affront as though inured to provocation; but we bore
it understandingly, and with deep resentment. If ever our temper snaps
beneath the strain, the anger so slow to ignite will be equally hard to
extinguish.
Playing consciously or unconsciously into the hands of Germany are the
pacifists,--a compact body of men and women, visibly strengthened by
months of indecision. Their methods may at times be laughable, but
we cannot afford to laugh. I do not class under this head any of the
so-called “Neutrality Leagues,” and “National Peace Councils,” which
aim at securing a German victory by withholding munitions from the
Allies. Such “neutrals” are all partisans parading under a borrowed
name, which they have rendered meaningless. They have a great deal of
money to spend on advertisements, and posters, and mass meetings. They
can any day, in any town, fill a hall with German sympathizers who are
all of one mind concerning the duty of noncombatants. Their leaders
are well aware that law and usage permit, and have long permitted, to
neutral nations the sale of munitions to belligerents. Their followers
for the most part know this too. But it seems worth while to profess
ignorance. Something can always be accomplished by agitation, were it
only a murderous attack on a financier, or the smuggling of dynamite
into the hold of a cargo boat.
But in reckoning up our perils, it is the fanatic, not the hypocrite,
who must be taken into account. Sincerity is a terrible weapon in the
hands of the ill-advised. There can be no contagion of folly, unless
that folly be sincere. And what gives the uncompromising, because
uncomprehending, pacifist his dangerous force is the fact that he is
psychologically as inevitable as were the Iconoclasts, or the Thebaid
anchorites, or any other historic instance of recoil. He is the
abnormal product of abnormal conditions. The fury of war has bred this
child of peace. The fumes of battle have stupefied him. Aggression and
defence, brutality and heroism, the might of conquest and the right of
resistance, have for him no separate significance. He is one who cannot
master--as every sane man must learn to master--the deadly sickness of
his soul.
To call the pacifist a coward is simple, but not enlightening.
Cowardice is a natural and pervasive attribute of humanity. Few of us
can flatly disavow it. There are women opposed to all war because their
sons might be shot. A popular song--now employed to raise the spirits
of school-children--expresses this sentiment. There are men opposed to
all war because they might themselves be shot. So far, no music-hall
ditty has exalted them. But this normal human cowardice is not
infectious, save in the heat of battle, where, happily, it is seldom
displayed. Infectious pacificism is a revolt from war, irrespective
of abstract considerations like justice or injustice, and of personal
considerations like loss or gain.
History is full of similar revolts, and they have always overstepped
the limits of sanity. Because the pagan sensualist tended his body
with loathsome solicitude, the Christian ascetic subjected his to
loathsome indignities. The excesses of the Roman baths sanctified the
uncleanliness of the early monasteries. Just as inevitable is the
reaction from a ravenous war to non-resistance. Because Germany’s
armaments are powerful enough to terrorize Europe, we are bidden to
weaken our defences. Because France and Belgium have been attacked
and devastated, we are implored to take no steps for self-protection.
The appeal sent out by Quaker citizens of Philadelphia--good men,
ready, no doubt, to die as honourably as they have lived--was at once
a confession of faith and a denial of duty. They asked that the money
of the taxpayer should be spent in making “more homes happy,” and
they were content to leave the security of these happy homes to the
unassisted care of Providence. To keep our powder dry implied mistrust
of God.
That the authorities of Iowa should strip the American flag of a white
border, neatly stitched around it by the pacifists of Fort Dodge, was
perhaps to be expected. The action seems peremptory; but if every
society were permitted to trim and patch our national emblem, we should
soon have as many flags as we have disputants in the field. For months
the patient post-office officials passed on without a murmur envelopes
ornamented with huge stamps, bearing pictures of a cannon partly
metamorphosed into a ploughshare, a bloated child, and a pouncing dove;
and inscribed with these soul-subduing lines:--
“I am in favour of world-wide peace,
Spread this idea, and war will cease.”
The decoration of envelopes with strange devices has long afforded
a vent for pent-up feelings. The peace-stamp was nobly seconded
by the “peace-pin,” a white enamelled dove, carrying the motto,
“World-Peace,” and destined--so its wearers assured us--to prove itself
“one of the greatest factors in eliminating prejudices and division
lines.”
Are these puerilities unworthy of consideration and comment? They are
not so preposterous as was Mr. Wanamaker’s suggestion that we should
recompense Germany for the trouble and expense she had incurred in
seizing Belgium by paying her $100,000,000,000 for her spoils. They
are not so demoralizing as the teaching of American school-children
to calculate how many bicycles they could buy for the money spent on
the battleship Oregon, or how many tickets for a ball-game could be
provided at the price of the American navy. The Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace is to be congratulated on having devised a scheme
by which boys and girls can be taught arithmetically to place pleasure
above patriotism. If Germans teach their children to deny themselves
some portion of their mid-day meal for the needs of Germany, and
Americans teach their children to hold ball-games and bicycles more
sacred than the needs of America, what chance have the men we rear
against men reared to discipline and self-sacrifice!
When an anti-enlistment league can be formed in a country which may
possibly be called to war, and anti-enlistment pledges can be signed
by young men who promise never to enroll themselves for their nation’s
defence, we have cause for apprehension. When college students can be
found petitioning for peace at any price, we have cause for wonder.
When women who have suffered nothing fling scorn at men who have
suffered all things, we have cause in plenty for resentment.
Cause, too, for sorrow that such evil words should be so lightly
spoken. It was but a dreary laugh that was provoked by Miss Addams’s
picture of intoxicated regiments bayoneting one another under the
stimulating influence of drink. Laughter is hard to come by in these
dark days; but Heaven knows we should gladly have foregone the mirth to
have been spared a slander so unworthy. The snatching of honour from
the soldier in the hour of his utmost trial is possible only to the
pacifist, who, sick with pity for pain, has lost all understanding of
the things which ennoble pain: of fidelity, and courage, and the love
of one’s country, which, next to the love of God, is the purest of all
emotions which winnow the souls of men.
The mad turmoil of folly and disaffection was kept at high pressure
by the adroitness of the Imperial Government in juggling with
technicalities. While we fed, like Hamlet, on the chameleon’s dish,
and, “promise-crammed,” debated windily over words, ship after ship
was sunk, and fresh exonerations and pledges were served up for
our entertainment. It became difficult even for German-Americans
to know just where they stood, and how far they might fittingly
express their contempt for the United States, without out-distancing
the Fatherland. When the “Friends of Peace” in Chicago cheered
the sinking of the Hesperian,--an exploit naturally gratifying to
peaceful souls,--they were silenced by more prudent members of the
convention, who bethought themselves that this illustration of good
faith might in turn be politely regretted. All that was left for these
enthusiasts was to praise Germany’s “magnanimity,” to brag of her
“historic friendship” for America (apparently under the impression
that Lafayette was a Prussian officer), to regret the “hysteria” of
Americans over the drowning of their countrymen, and to ascribe the
whole war to the machinations of “Grey and Asquith, and Delcassé, and
Poincaré,”--“demons whom we should hiss and howl into the abyss of
Hell.”
There was plenty of disaffection in 1776, plenty in 1861; but we fought
our two great wars without dishonour. If the Germans, well aware of
our unpreparedness and of our internal dissensions, have flouted
us unsparingly, it is because they are, as they have always been,
densely incapable of reading the souls of men. Let us not add to our
own peril by misreading the soul of Germany. We lack her discipline,
we lack her unity, we lack her efficiency, the splendid result of
thirty years’ devotion to a single purpose. It avails us very little
to analyze the “falling sickness” which has made her so mighty.
Dr. Lightner Witmer, in a profoundly thoughtful and dispassionate
paper on “The Relation of Intelligence to Efficiency,” diagnoses her
disease as “primitivism,”--“meaning thereby a reversion in manners,
customs, and principles to what is characteristic of a lower level of
civilization.” Mr. Owen Wister, who is as poignantly eloquent as Dr.
Witmer is logical and chill, reaches in “The Pentecost of Calamity” a
somewhat similar conclusion. “The case of Germany is a hospital case, a
case for the alienist; the mania of grandeur complemented by the mania
of persecution.” Even Mr. Bryan (always a past-master of infelicitous
argument) tells us that a war with Germany is impossible, because it
would be like “challenging an insane asylum;”--as if an insane asylum
which failed to restrain its inmates could be left unchallenged by the
world.
It is unwise to minimize our danger on the score of our saner judgment
or higher morality. These qualities may win out in the future, but
we are living now. Germany is none the less terrible because she
is obsessed, and we are not a whit safer because we recognize her
obsession. The German war-maps of Paris, cut into sections and
directing which sections were to be burned, are grim warnings to the
world. It is disturbing to think how insensitive Paris was to her peril
when those maps were prepared. It is disturbing to think that a fool’s
paradise is always the most popular playground of humanity. In the
“Atlantic Monthly” for August, 1915, an Englishman explained lucidly to
American readers (the only audience patient enough to hear him) that
non-resistance is the road to security. Mr. Russell, “a mathematician
and a philosopher,” is confident that if England would submit passively
to invasion, and refuse passively to obey the invader, she would suffer
no great wrong. Had he read “Sandford and Merton” when he was a little
boy, it might possibly occur to him that Germany would treat the
non-resisting strikers as Mr. Barlow treated Tommy, when that misguided
child refused to dig and hoe. Had he read the “Bryce report,”--which
is not pleasant reading,--he might feel less sure that English homes
and English women would be safe from assault because they lacked
protectors.
The same happy confidence in our receptivity and in our limitless good
nature was shown by Professor Kraus, who, in the “Atlantic Monthly” for
September, 1915, conveyed to us in the plainest possible language his
unfavourable opinion of the Monroe Doctrine and of its supporters. No
German could be less “nice” in concealing his contempt than was this
ingenuous contributor; and nothing could be better for us than to hear
such words spoken at such a time. The threat of a “general accounting”
was not even presented suavely to our ears, but it left us no room for
doubt.
That two such arguments from two such sources should have enlivened our
term of waiting is worthy of note. The Englishman, seeing us beset
by irrationalities, added one more phantasy to our load. The German,
seeing us beset by alarms, added one more menace to affright us. Our
patience is impervious to folly and to intimidation. We have plenty
of both at home. Only an American can understand the cumulative anger
in his countryman’s heart as affront is added to affront, and the
slow lapse of time brings us neither redress nor redemption. However
sanguine and however peace-loving we may be, we cannot well base our
hopes of future security on the tenderness shown us in the past. If
long months of painful suspense, of hope alternating with despondency,
and pride with shame, have wrought no other good, they have at least
revealed to us where our danger lies. They have bared disloyalty, and
have put good citizens on their guard.
Somewhere in the mind of the nation is a saving sanity. Somewhere in
the heart of the nation is a saving grace. A day may come when these
two harmonious qualities will find expression in the simple words of
Cardinal Newman: “The best prudence is to have no fear.”
Americanism
Whenever we stand in need of intricate knowledge, balanced judgment,
or delicate analysis, it is our comfortable habit to question our
neighbours. They may be no wiser and no better informed than we are;
but a collective opinion has its value, or at least its satisfying
qualities. For one thing, there is so much of it. For another, it
seldom lacks variety. Two years ago the “American Journal of Sociology”
asked two hundred and fifty “representative” men and women “upon what
ideals, policies, programmes, or specific purposes should Americans
place most stress in the immediate future,” and published the answers
that were returned in a Symposium entitled, “What is Americanism?” The
candid reader, following this symposium, received much counsel, but
little enlightenment. There were some good practical suggestions; but
nowhere any cohesion, nowhere any sense of solidarity, nowhere any
concern for national honour or authority.
It was perhaps to be expected that Mr. Burghardt Du Bois’s conception
of true Americanism would be the abolishment of the colour line, and
that Mr. Eugene Debs would see salvation in the sweeping away of
“privately owned industries, and production for individual profit.”
These answers might have been foreseen when the questions were
asked. But it was disconcerting to find that all, or almost all, of
the “representative” citizens represented one line of civic policy,
or civic reform, and refused to look beyond it. The prohibitionist
discerned Americanism in prohibition, the equal suffragist in votes
for women, the biologist in applied science, the physician in the
extirpation of microbes, the philanthropist in playgrounds, the
sociologist in eugenism and old-age pensions, and the manufacturer in
the revision of taxes. It was refreshing when an author unexpectedly
demanded the extinction of inherited capital. Authorship seldom
concerns itself with anything so inconceivably remote.
The quality of miscellaneousness is least serviceable when we leave the
world of affairs, and seek admission into the world of ideals. There
must be an interpretation of Americanism which will express for all of
us a patriotism at once practical and emotional, an understanding of
our place in the world, and of the work we are best fitted to do in it,
a sentiment which we can hold--as we hold nothing else--in common, and
which will be forever remote from personal solicitude and resentment.
Those of us whose memories stretch back over half a century recall too
plainly a certain uneasiness which for years pervaded American politics
and American letters, which made us unduly apprehensive, and, as a
consequence, unduly sensitive and arrogant. It found expression in Mr.
William Cullen Bryant’s well-known poem, “America,” made familiar to my
generation by school readers and manuals of elocution, and impressed by
frequent recitations upon our memories.
“O mother of a mighty race,
Yet lovely in thy youthful grace!
The elder dames, thy haughty peers,
Admire and hate thy blooming years;
With words of shame
And taunts of scorn they join thy name.”
There are eight verses, and four of them repeat Mr. Bryant’s conviction
that the nations of Europe united in envying and insulting us. To be
hated because we were young, and strong, and good, and beautiful,
seemed, to my childish heart, a noble fate; and when a closer
acquaintance with history dispelled this pleasant illusion, I parted
from it with regret. France was our ally in the Revolutionary War.
Russia was friendly in the Civil War. England was friendly in the
Spanish War. If the repudiation of state debts left a bad taste in the
mouths of foreign investors, they might be pardoned for making a wry
face. Most of them were subsequently paid; but the phrase “American
revoke” dates from the period of suspense. By the time we celebrated
our hundredth birthday with a world’s fair, we were on very easy terms
with our neighbours. Far from taunting us with shameful words, our
“haughty peers” showed on this memorable occasion unanimous good temper
and good will; and “Punch’s” congratulatory verses were among the most
pleasant birthday letters we received.
The expansion of national life, fed by the great emotions of the Civil
War, and revealed to the world by the Centennial Exhibition, found
expression in education, art, and letters. Then it was that Americanism
took a new and disconcerting turn. Pleased with our progress, stunned
by finding that we had poets, and painters, and novelists, and
magazines, and a history, all of our own, we began to say, and say very
loudly, that we had no need of the poets, and painters, and novelists,
and magazines, and histories of other lands. Our attitude was not
unlike that of George Borrow, who, annoyed by the potency of Italian
art, adjured Englishmen to stay at home and contemplate the greatness
of England. England, he said, had pictures of her own. She had her own
“minstrel strain.” She had all her sons could ask for. “England against
the world.”
In the same exclusive spirit, American school boards proposed that
American school-children should begin the study of history with the
colonization of America, ignoring the trivial episodes which preceded
this great event. Patriotic protectionists heaped duties on foreign
art, and bade us buy American pictures. Enthusiastic editors confided
to us that “the world has never known such storehouses of well-selected
mental food as are furnished by our American magazines.” Complacent
critics rejoiced that American poets did not sing like Tennyson, “nor
like Keats, nor Shelley, nor Wordsworth”; but that, as became a new
race of men, they “reverberated a synthesis of all the poetic minds
of the century.” Finally, American novelists assured us that in their
hands the art of fiction had grown so fine and rare that we could
no longer stand the “mannerisms” of Dickens, or the “confidential
attitude” of Thackeray. We had scaled the empyrean heights.
There is a brief paragraph in Mr. Thayer’s “Life and Letters of John
Hay,” which vividly recalls this peculiar phase of Americanism. Mr.
Hay writes to Mr. Howells in 1882: “The worst thing in our time about
American taste is the way it treats James. I believe he would not be
read in America at all if it were not for his European vogue. If he
lived in Cambridge, he could write what he likes; but because he finds
London more agreeable, he is the prey of all the patriotisms. Of all
vices, I hold patriotism the worst, when it meddles with matters of
taste.”
So far had American patriotism encroached upon matters of taste, that
by 1892 there was a critical embargo placed upon foreign literature.
“Every nation,” we were told, “ought to supply its own second-rate
books,”--like domestic sheeting and ginghams. An acquaintance with
English authors was held to be a misdemeanour. Why quote Mr. Matthew
Arnold, when you might quote Mr. Lowell? Why write about Becky Sharp,
when you might write about Hester Prynne? Why laugh over Dickens, when
you might laugh over Mark Twain? Why eat artichokes, when you might
eat corn? American school-boys, we were told, must be guarded from
the feudalism of Scott. American speech must be guarded from the
“insularities” of England’s English. “That failure in good sense which
comes from too warm a self-satisfaction” (Mr. Arnold does sometimes say
a thing very well) robbed us for years of mental poise, of adjusted
standards, of an unencumbered outlook upon life.
It is strange to glance back upon a day when we had so little to
trouble us that we could vex our souls over feudalism and fiction;
when--in the absence of serious problems--we could raise pronunciation
or spelling into a national issue. Americanism has done with
trivialities, patriotism with matters of taste. Love for one’s country
is not a shallow sentiment, based upon self-esteem. It is a profound
and primitive passion. It may lie dormant in our souls when all goes
well. It may be thwarted and frustrated by the exigencies of party
government. It may be dissevered from pride or pleasure. But it is
part of ourselves, wholly beyond analysis, fed upon hope and fear, joy
and sorrow, glory and shame. If, after the fashion of the world, we
drowsed in our day of security, we have been rudely and permanently
awakened. The shadow of mighty events has fallen across our path.
We have witnessed a great national crime. We have beheld the utmost
heights of heroism. And when we asked of what concern to us were this
crime and this heroism, the answer came unexpectedly, and with blinding
force. The sea was strewn with our dead, our honour was undermined by
conspiracies, our factories were fired, our cargoes dynamited. We were
a neutral nation at peace with the world. The attack made upon our
industries and upon our good name was secret, malignant, and pitiless.
It was organized warfare, without the courage and candour of war.
The unavowed enemy who strikes in the dark is hard to reach, but he
is outside the pale of charity. There was something in the cold fury
of Mr. Wilson’s words, when, in his message to Congress, he denounced
the traitors “who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the
very arteries of our national life,” which turned that unexpansive
state-paper into a human document, and drove it straight to the
human hearts of an injured and insulted people. Under the menace of
disloyalty, Americanism has taken new form and substance; and our
just resentment, like the potter’s wheel, has moulded this force into
lines of strength and resistance. We have seen all we want to see of
“frightfulness” in Europe, all we want to see of injustice, supported
by violence. We are not prepared to welcome any scheme of terrorization
in the interests of a foreign power, or any interference of a foreign
power with our legitimate fields of industry. Such schemes and such
interference constitute an inconceivable affront to the nation. Their
stern and open disavowal is the shibboleth by which our elections may
be purged of treachery, and our well-being confided to good citizenship.
Of all the countries in the world, we and we only have any need to
create artificially the patriotism which is the birthright of other
nations. Into the hearts of six millions of foreign-born men--less than
half of them naturalized--we must infuse that quality of devotion which
will make them place the good of the state above their personal good,
and the safety of the state above their personal safety. It is like
pumping oxygen into six million pairs of lungs for which the common
air is not sufficiently stimulating. We must also keep a watchful eye
upon these men’s wives,--when they are so blessed,--and concentrate
our supreme energy on uncounted millions of children, whose first step
toward patriotism is the acquirement of a common tongue.
We are trying fitfully, but in good faith, to work this civic miracle.
Americanization Day is but one expression of the nation-wide endeavour.
When Cleveland invited all her citizens who had been naturalized within
a twelve-month to assemble and receive a public welcome, to sit on a
platform and be made much of, to listen to national songs and patriotic
speeches, and to take home, every man, a flag and a seal of the city,
she set a good example which will be widely followed. The celebrations
at Riverside, California, and New York City’s Pageant of the Nations
had in view the same admirable end. Sentiment is not a substitute for
duty and discipline; but it has its uses and its field of efficacy.
Such ceremonies perseveringly repeated for twenty years might work a
change in the immigrant population of to-day, were we secure from the
fresh millions which threaten us to-morrow. That the Fourth of July
should be often selected for these rites is perhaps inevitable; it is
a time when patriotism assumes a vivid and popular aspect; but Heaven
forbid that we should rechristen Independence Day, Americanization Day!
However ready we may be to welcome our new citizens, however confident
we may be of their value to the Republic, we are not yet prepared to
give them the place of honour hitherto held by the signers of the
Declaration of Independence. The name which perpetuates the memory of
that deed is a sacred name, and should be preserved no less sacredly
than the national life which was then committed to our keeping.
It is no insult to the immigrant to say that he constitutes one of
the perils of Americanism. How can it be otherwise? Assume that he
is a law-abiding citizen, that he knows nothing of the conspiracies
which have imperilled our safety, that he does not propose to use
his vote in the interests of a foreign power, and that the field of
hyphenated politics has no existence for him. For all these boons
we are sufficiently grateful. But how far does he understand the
responsibilities he assumes with the franchise, how far does he realize
that he has become part of the machinery of the state, and how far
can we depend upon him in our hour of need? He knows, or at least
he has been told, that he may not return home to fight for his own
country, if he seeks American citizenship. He must resist a natural
and a noble impulse as the price of his coveted “papers.” But will
there spring in his heart a noble, though not very natural, impulse to
fight for us if we call our sons to arms? Can we hope that his native
intelligence, unshackled by any working knowledge of our language, will
grasp our national policy and our national obligations; and that--free
from conscription--he will voluntarily risk his life in behalf of a
government for which he has no inheritance of fidelity?
We have opened our doors to unrestricted immigration, partly because
capitalists want plenty of cheap labour, which is not a good reason;
and partly because the immigrants want to come, which is not a
sufficient reason. They also--despite the heart-rending conditions
depicted by Miss Frances Kellor--want to stay. Those who return to the
higher standards of Europe do not materially affect the situation. They
stay, and either surmount their difficulties, or, succumbing to them,
fill our asylums, hospitals, and almshouses. For many years, foreign
economists must have looked with relief at the countless thousands of
derelicts who were supported by the United States instead of by their
own governments. But even the satisfaction we have thus afforded does
not wholly justify our course. Is it worth our while to fill the air
with clamour over eugenics and birth-control, to build barriers around
a marriage license, and to dramatize impassioned pleas for sterility,
when the birthrate of the Republic is nobody’s concern? If the survival
of the fittest means as much to the commonwealth as to the family, why
should we fiddle over pathology while the nation burns?
Miss Kellor is not the only kind-hearted American who holds her
countrymen to blame for the deficiencies of the immigrant. Her point
of view is a common one, and has some foundation in fact. She censures
us even for his dirt, though if she had ever listened to the vitriolic
comments of the police, she might revise her judgment on that score.
“Can’t you _do_ anything?” I once asked a disconsolate guardian of
the peace, who stood on a fine hot day contemplating the forth-flung
garbage of the Israelite. To which he made answer: “Did ye iver thry
to clane out a sthable wid a toothpick?” And as this had not been one
of my life’s endeavours, I offered no further comment. But Miss Kellor
touches a vital truth when she says that Americans will never weld a
mass of heterogeneous humanity into a nation, until they are able to
say what they want that nation to be, and until they are prepared to
follow a policy intelligently outlined. In other words, Americanism
is not a medley of individual theories, partial philanthropies, and
fluid sentiment. A consistent nationalism is essential to civic life,
and we are not dispensed from achieving consistent nationalism by the
difficulties in our way. No multiplication of difficulties makes an
impossibility. Upon what props did the Venetians build the fairest city
of the world?
We cannot in this country hope for the compelling devotion which has
animated Germany; still less for the supreme moral and intellectual
force which is the staying power of France. Mrs. Wharton has best
described the intelligence with which Frenchmen translate their ideals
into doctrine. They know for what they stand in the civilized world,
and the first “white heat of dedication” has hardened into steel-like
endurance. To the simple emotions of men who are defending their homes
from assault have been added the emotions of men who are defending
the world’s noblest inheritance from degradation. “It is the reasoned
recognition of this peril which is making the most intelligent people
in the world the most sublime.”
The problems of England are so closely akin to our own problems, and
her perplexities are so closely akin to our own perplexities, that we
should regard them with insight and with sympathy. We too must pause in
every keen emergency to cajole, to persuade, to placate, to reconcile
conflicting interests, to humour conflicting opinions,--termed by
those who hold them, “principles.” We too must forever bear in mind
the political party which is in power, and the political party which
waits to get into power; and we must pick our way as best we can by the
cross-lights of their abiding hostility. We too must face and overcome
the dough-like resistance of apathy.
I have been told--though I refuse to believe it on hearsay--that
British labourers have asked what difference it would make to them
whether they worked for British or for German masters. It is quite true
that British pacifists and British radicals have not only put this
question, but have answered it, greatly to their own satisfaction, in
American periodicals; but American periodicals are not mouth-pieces
of the British workmen. I make no doubt that if we were fighting
for our lives, there would be found American pacifists and American
radicals writing in British periodicals that no great harm would come
to America if she submitted passively to invasion; and that, whether
their country’s cause were right or wrong, the slaughter of her sons
was a crime, and the wealth of her capitalists was a sufficient reason
for refusing to do battle for her liberty. The painful certainty that
we should never be free from the babbling of treason, any more than
England is free from it now, makes Americanism (the Americanism which
means civic loyalty founded on civic intelligence) shine like a far-off
star on a very dim horizon.
At present, disloyalty founded upon ignorance meets with more attention
than it deserves. Why, after all, should two thousand people assemble
in New York to hear Miss Helen Keller say that, in the event of
invasion, the American workman “has nothing to lose but his chains”? He
has his manhood to lose, and it should mean as much to him as to any
millionaire in the land. What new and debilitating doctrine is this
which holds that personal honour is the exclusive attribute of wealth,
and that a labourer has no more business with it than has a dog! The
fact that Miss Keller has overcome the heavy disabilities which nature
placed in her path, lends interest to her person, but no weight to her
opinions, which give evidence of having been adopted wholesale, and of
having never filtered through any reasoning process of her own. It is
always agreeable to hear her speak about good and simple things. When
she said in Philadelphia that happiness does not lie in pleasure, and
that, although she did not expect to be always pleased, she did expect
to be always happy, by doing what she could to make those about her
happy, we gave our hearty concurrence to sentiments so unexceptionable.
It was the way we ourselves should have liked to feel, and we knew it
was our own fault that we did not. But when in New York she adjured
workingmen never to enter the United States Army, and informed us that
all we needed for adequate defence were shooting-galleries “within
reach of every family,” so that we could all learn--like the old
ladies in “Punch”--to fire a gun, there was something profoundly sad in
words so ill-judged and so fatuous. It cannot be a matter of no moment
that, in the hour of our danger and indecision, thousands of people
stand ready to applaud the disloyal utterances which should affront
every honourable man or woman who hears them.
The “Yale Review” quotes the remark of a “foreigner” that Americans
are always saying, “I don’t care.” The phrase is popular, and sounds
disheartening; but if we spare ourselves concern over trivial things
(if, for example, we were not excited or inflamed by Captain von
Papen’s calling us “idiotic Yankees”), it does not follow that big
issues leave us unmoved. If they did, if they ever should, the word
Americanism might as well be obliterated from the language. The
consistent nationalism for which it stands admits of no indifference.
It is true that the possible peril of New York--as defenceless as a
soft-shell crab, and as succulent--is not an ever-present care to San
Francisco. It is true that San Francisco’s deep anxiety over Japanese
immigration and land-ownership was lightly treated by New York. And
it is true that Denver, sitting in the safety zone, looks down from
her lofty heights without any pressing solicitude about either of her
sister cities. But just as the San Francisco earthquake wrung the heart
of New York, so the first gun fired at New York would arm the citizens
of San Francisco. Only it might then be too late.
The Christmas cartoon of Uncle Sam holding a package marked “Peace
and Prosperity,” and saying with a broad smile, “Just what I wanted!”
was complacent rather than comprehensive. We want peace and we want
prosperity, but they are not all we want; partly because their
permanency depends upon certain props which seem to many of us a
bit unsteady, and partly because we do not, any more than other men,
live by bread alone. The things of the spirit are for us, even as for
heroic and suffering France, of vital worth and import. If we could
say with certainty, “All is gained but honour,” there are still some
of us who would feel our blessings incomplete; but, as it chances, the
contempt meted out to us has taken the palpable form of encroachment
upon our common rights. Until we can protect our industries from
assault and our citizens from butchery, until we can couple disavowal
of past injuries with real assurance of safety in the future, peace
limps, and prosperity is shadowed. With every fresh shock we have
received, with every fresh sorrow we have endured, there has come to
us more and more clearly the vision of a noble nationalism, purged of
“comfort-mongering,” and of perverted sentiment.
Cynical newspaper writers have begun to say that the best way to
make Americans forget one injury is to inflict on them another. This
is hardly a half-truth. The sinking of the Ancona did not obliterate
from our minds the names of the Falaba, the Gulflight, the Frye, the
Hesperian, the Arabic, and the Lusitania. Neither has the sinking of
the Persia buried the Ancona in oblivion. And it is not simple humanity
which has burned these names into the tablets of our memories. The
loss of American lives through the savage torpedoing of liners and
merchant ships might be doubled and trebled any summer day by the
sinking of an excursion steamer, and we should soon forget. A country
which reports eight thousand murders in a single year is not wont to be
deeply stirred by the perils which beset our munition-workers. But when
Americans have gone to their deaths through the violence of another
government, or in the interests of another government, then the
wrong done them is elevated to the importance of a national calamity,
and redress becomes a national obligation. Because we do not wearily
reiterate this patent truth does not mean that we have forgotten it.
If words could save, if words could heal, we should have no fear, nor
shame, nor sorrow. Nothing is less worth while than to go on prattling
about a consistent foreign policy. The corner-stone of civilization is
man’s dependence for protection on the state which he has reared for
his own safety and support.
The concern of Americans for America (I use the word to symbolize
the United States) must be the deep and loyal sentiment which brooks
no injustice and no insult. We have need of many things, but first
and foremost of fidelity. It is a matter of pride and pleasure that
some of our foreign-born citizens should excel in art and letters;
that, under our tutelage, they should learn to design posters, model
statuary, write poems, and make speeches. These things have their
admitted place and value. The encouragement which is given them, the
opportunities which are made for them, the praise which is lavished
upon them, are proofs of our good-will, and of our genuine delight in
fostering ability. But the real significance of the “Americanization”
movement, the summoning of conferences, the promoting of exhibitions,
the bestowing of prizes, is the need we all feel of unification, the
hope we all cherish that, through the influence of congenial work,
immigrants and the children of immigrants will become one in spirit
with the native born. We could make shift to do without the posters and
the symbolic statuary; we could read fewer poems and listen to fewer
speeches; but we cannot possibly do without the loyalty which we have a
right to demand, and which is needful to the safety of the Republic.
For the main thing to be borne in mind is that Americanization does
not mean only an increase of opportunity for the alien, an effort
toward his permanent well-being. It means also service and sacrifice on
his part. This is what citizenship entails, although voters and those
who clamour for the vote seldom take into account such an inexorable
truth. The process of assimilation must go deeper than the polling
booth and the trade union can carry it. Democracy forever teases
us with the contrast between its ideals and its realities, between
its heroic possibilities and its sorry achievements. But it is our
appointed road, and the stones over which we perpetually stumble deny
us the drowsy perils of content. When we read Dr. Eliot’s noble words
in praise of free government and equal opportunities, we know that
his amazing buoyancy does not imply ignorance of primaries, of party
methods, and of graft. With these things he has been familiar all
his life; but the creaking machinery of democracy has never dimmed
his faith in its holiness. Remediable disorders, however grievous
and deep-seated, afford us the comfort of hope, and the privilege of
unending exertion.
To no one ignorant of history can the right of citizenship assume any
real significance. In our country the ballot is so carelessly guarded,
so shamefully misused, that it has become to some men a subject of
derision; to many, an unconsidered trifle; to all, or almost all, an
expression of personal opinion, which, at its best, reflects a popular
newspaper, and, at its worst, stands for nothing less hurtful than
stupidity. A recent contributor to the “Unpopular Review” reminds us
soberly that, as the democratic state cannot rise above the level of
its voters, and as nationality means for us merely the will of the
people, it might not be amiss to guard the franchise with reasonable
solicitude, and to ask something more than unlimited ignorance, and
the absence of a criminal record, as its price. If every man--alien
or native-born--who casts his ballot could be made to know and to feel
that “all the political forces of his country were mainly occupied
for a hundred years in making that act possible,” and that the United
States is, and has always been, the nation of those “who willed to be
Americans,” citizenship might become for us what it was to Rome, what
it is to France,--the exponent of honour, the symbol of self-sacrifice.
A knowledge of history might also prove serviceable in enabling us to
recognize our place and our responsibility among the nations of the
world. No remoteness (geographical remoteness counts for little in
the twentieth century) can sever our interests from the interests of
Europe, or lift from our shoulders the burden of helping to sustain
the collective rights of mankind. We know now that the menace of
frightfulness has overshadowed us. We know that, however cautiously we
picked our steps, we could not, and did not, escape molestation. But
even if we had saved our own skin, if we had suffered no destruction of
property, and if none of our dead lay under the water, the freedom of
Europe, the future of democracy, and the rights of man would be to us
matters of concern.
It is true, moreover, that friendship and alliance with those European
states whose aspirations and ideals respond to our own aspirations
and ideals, are as consistent with Americanism as are friendship and
alliance with the states of South America, which we are now engaged
in loving. It is not from Bolivia, or Chile, or Venezuela, or the
Argentine that we have drawn our best traditions, our law, language,
literature, and art. We extend to these “sister Republics” the arms of
commercial affection; but they have no magic words like Magna Charta
and _le Tiers État_ to stir our souls an inch beyond self-profit. When
we count up our assets, we must reckon heavily on the respect of those
nations which we most respect, and whose good-will in the past is a
guarantee of good-will in the future. It is worth our while, even from
the standpoint of Americanism, to prove our fellowship with humanity,
our care for other interests than our own. The civilization of the
world is the business of all who live in the world. We cannot see it
crashing down, as it crashed in the sinking of the Lusitania and the
Ancona, and content ourselves with asking how many Americans were
drowned. Noble standards, and noble sympathies, and noble sorrows have
their driving power, their practical utility. They have counted heavily
in the destinies of nations. Carthage had commerce. Rome had ideals.
THE END
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
U · S · A
Transcriber’s Note
A few minor punctuation and spelling errors have been silently
corrected.
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