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Title: The Arena
Volume 18, No. 93, August, 1897
Author: Various
Editor: John Clark Ridpath
Release Date: September 5, 2010 [EBook #33646]
Language: English
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THE ARENA.
VOL. XVIII.
AUGUST, 1897.
NO. 93.
[Illustration: David Starr Jordan (with signature)]
EVOLUTION: WHAT IT IS AND WHAT IT IS NOT.[1]
BY DR. DAVID STARR JORDAN,
_President of Leland Stanford Junior University_.
[1] Address before the Starr King Fraternity of Oakland, Cal.
I. WHAT EVOLUTION IS.
This the age of evolution. The word is used by many men in many senses,
and still oftener perhaps in no sense at all. By some it is spoken with
a haunting dread as though it were another name for the downfall of
religion and of social stability. Still others speak it glibly and
joyously as though progress and freedom were secured by the mere use of
the name. "The word evolution (_Entwickelung_)," says a German writer,
"fills the vocal chords more perfectly than any other word." It explains
everything, and "puts the key to the universe into one's vest pocket."
So various has been the use of the word, so rarely is this use
associated with any definite idea, that one hesitates to call himself an
evolutionist. "Evolution" and "evolutionist" are almost ready to be cast
into that "limbo of spoiled phraseology" which Matthew Arnold has found
necessary for so many words in which other generations have delighted,
and which they have soiled or spoiled by careless usage.
But as the word evolution is not yet put away, as it is the bugbear of
many good people, and the "religion" of as many more equally good, it
may be worth while to consider what it still means, and what it does not
mean. For if we that use the word can agree on a definition, half our
quarrel is over.
It seems to me that the word evolution is now legitimately used in four
different senses. It is the name of a branch of science. It is a theory
of organic existence. It is a method of investigation, and it is the
basis of a system of philosophy.
_The Science of Organic Evolution, or Bionomics._ As a science,
evolution is the study of changing beings acted upon by unchanging laws.
It is a matter of common observation that organisms change from day to
day, and that day by day some alteration in their environment is
produced. It is a matter of scientific investigation that these changes
are greater than they appear. They affect not only the individual animal
or plant, but they affect all groups of living things, classes or races
or species. No character is permanent, no trait of life without change.
And as the living organism or group of organisms is undergoing
alteration, so does change take place in the objects of the physical
world about them. "Nothing endures," says Huxley, "save the flow of
energy and the rational order that pervades it." The structures and
objects change their forms and relations, and to forms and relations
once abandoned they never return. But the methods of change are, so far
as we can see, immutable. The laws of life, the laws of death, and the
laws of matter never change. If the invisible forces which rule all
visible things are themselves subject to modification and evolution, we
have not detected it. Its cosmic movements are so fine as to defy human
observation and computation. In the control of the universe we find no
trace of "variableness nor shadow of turning." "It is the law of heaven
and earth, whose way is solid, substantial, vast, and unchanging."
But the things we know do not endure. Only the shortness of human life
allows us to speak of species or even of individuals as permanent
entities. The mountain chain is no more nearly eternal than the drift of
sand. It endures beyond the period of human observation. It antedates
and outlasts human history. So does the species of animal or plant
outlast and antedate the lifetime of one man. Its changes are slight
even in the lifetime of the race. Thus the species, through the
persistence of its type among its changing individuals, comes to be
regarded as something which is beyond modification, unchanging so long
as it exists.
"I believe," said the rose to the lily in the parable--"I believe that
our gardener is immortal. I have watched him from day to day since I
bloomed, and I see no change in him. The tulip who died yesterday told
me the same thing."
As a flash of lightning in the duration of the night, so is the life of
man in the duration of nature. When one looks out on a storm at night,
he sees for an instant the landscape illumined by the lightning-flash.
All seems at rest. The branches in the wind, the flying clouds, the
falling rain are all motionless in this instantaneous view. The record
on the retina takes no account of change, and to the eye the change does
not exist. Brief as the lightning-flash in the storm is the life of man
compared with the great time-record of life upon earth. To the untrained
man who has not learned to read these records, species and types in life
are enduring. Thus arose the theory of special creation and permanence
of type, a theory which could not persist when the fact of change and
the forces causing it came to be studied in detail.
But when man came to study the facts of individual variation and to
think of their significance, the current of life no longer seemed at
rest. Like the flow of a mighty river, never returning, ever sweeping
steadily on, is the movement of all life. The changes in human history
are only typical of the changes that take place in all living creatures.
In fact, human history is only a part of one great life-current, the
movement of which is everywhere governed by the same laws, depends on
the same forces, and brings about like results.
The facts and generalizations of change constitute the subject-matter of
evolution. And as the fact of life is a fundamental one, and in some
degree modifies all phenomena which it concerns, we have as the central
axis of the science in question, the study of organic evolution. In
fact, while inorganic evolution, or orderly change in environment,
exists, we do not know to what degree the laws and forces of organic
evolution can be reduced to the same terms of expression. The theory of
the essential and necessary unity of life and non-life, of mind and
matter, is still a matter of philosophical speculation only. We can
neither prove the truth of Monism, nor understand it; nor is the
contrary hypothesis either comprehensible or credible. The fundamental
unity of organic evolution and inorganic evolution is yet to be proved,
while the laws which govern living matter are certainly in part peculiar
to life. For this reason the evolution of astronomy, of dynamic geology,
of geography, as well as the purely hypothetical evolution of chemistry,
must be separated from life evolution. Cosmic evolution and organic
evolution show, or seem to show, some divergence from each other. There
are some elements which are not held in common, or which, at least, are
not identical when measured in human terms. For the latter, the science
of organic evolution, there is therefore certainly need of a distinctive
term. This has been lately furnished by Professor Patrick Geddes, who
has chosen the term bionomics. Bionomics ([Greek: bios], life; [Greek:
nomos], law or custom) is the science which treats of the changes in
life-forms, and of the laws and forces on which these changes depend.
Even as thus restricted organic evolution, or bionomics, is the greatest
of the sciences, including in its subject-matter, not only all natural
history, not only processes like cell-division and nutrition, not only
the laws of heredity, variation, natural selection, and mutual help, but
all matters of human history, and the most complicated relations of
civics, economics, or ethics. In this enormous science no fact can be
without a meaning, and no fact or its underlying forces can be separated
from the great forces whose interaction from moment to moment writes the
great story of life.
And as the basis to the science of bionomics, as to all other science,
must be taken the conception that nothing is due to chance or whim.
Whatever occurs does so as the resultant of moving forces. Could we know
and estimate these forces, we should have, so far as our estimate is
accurate and our logic perfect, the gift of prophecy. Knowing the law,
and knowing the facts, we should foretell the results. To be able in
some degree to do this is the art of life. It is the ultimate end of
science, which finds its final purpose in human conduct.
"A law," according to Darwin, "is the ascertained sequence of events."
The necessary sequence of events it is, in fact, but man knows nothing
of what is necessary, only of what has been ascertained to occur.
Because human observation and logic can be only partial, no law of life
can be fully stated. Because the processes of the human mind are human,
with organic limitations, the study of the mind itself becomes a part
of the science of bionomics. For it is itself an instrument or a
combination of instruments by which we acquire such knowledge of the
world outside of ourselves as may be needed in the art of living, in the
degree in which we are able to practise that art.
The necessary sequence of events exists, whether we are able to
comprehend it or not. The fall of a leaf follows fixed laws as surely as
the motion of a planet. It falls by chance because its short movement
gives us no time for observation and calculation. It falls by chance
because, its results being unimportant to us, we give no heed to the
details of its motion. But as the hairs of our head are all numbered, so
are numbered all the gyrations and undulations of every chance autumn
leaf. All processes in the universe are alike natural. The creation of
man or the growth of a state is as natural as the formation of an apple
or the growth of a snow-bank. All are alike supernatural, for they all
rest on the huge unseen solidity of the universe, the imperishability of
matter and the immanence of law.
We sometimes classify sciences as exact and inexact, in accordance with
our ability exactly to weigh forces and results. The exact sciences deal
with simple data accessible and capable of measurement. The results of
their interactions can be reduced to mathematics. Because of their
essential simplicity, the mathematical sciences have been carried to
great comparative perfection. It is easier to weigh an invisible planet
than to measure the force of heredity in a grain of corn. The sciences
of life are inexact, because the human mind can never grasp all their
data. Nor has the combined effort of all men, the flower of the altruism
of the ages, that we call science been able to make more than a
beginning in this study. But however incomplete our realization of the
laws of life, we may be sure that they are never broken. Each law is the
expression of the best possible way in which causes and results can be
linked. It is the necessary sequence of events, therefore the _best_
sequence, if we may imagine for a moment that the human words "good" and
"bad" are applicable to world-processes. The laws of nature are not
executors of human justice. Each one has its own operation, and no
other. Each represents its own tendency towards cosmic order. A law in
this sense cannot be "broken." A broken law would be a discarded
universe. "If God should wink at a single act of injustice," says the
Arab proverb, "the whole universe would shrivel up like a cast-off
snake-skin." If God should wink at any violated law the universe would
vanish.
Not long ago, in an examination in a theological seminary, the question
was asked of the candidates for the ministry, "Is it right to pray for a
change of season?" The candidates thought that it was not, for the
relations which produce winter and summer are fixed in the structure of
the solar system and cannot be altered for man's pleasure or man's need.
"Is it right to pray for rain?" The candidates generally thought that it
was, because the conditions of rain are so unstable that a little change
in one way or another would bring rain or fair weather, and that it was
proper to ask for such change, as it did not concern the economy of the
universe.
The third question was: "When the signal service of the United States is
well established, so that weather conditions are perfectly known, will
it then be right to pray for rain?" And the candidates for the ministry
could not tell, for they began to see that even simple changes of
weather may have the strength of the whole universe behind them. It has
never yet rained when by any possibility it could do otherwise. It has
never failed to rain when rain was possible. The Spanish padres in
California, wise in their generation, allowed prayers for rain only in
winter, when the wind was in the south. The wind is only in the south
when the air is affected by a cyclonic movement, and this in the
California winter means rain.
We hear good men say sometimes that the crying need of this strong and
sceptical age is that it may see some law of nature definitely broken,
that it may rain when rain is impossible, or that some burning bush may,
unconsuming, proclaim that the force which is behind all law is also
above it and can break or repeal all laws at will.
Emerson somewhere speaks of the purpose in life--"To be sound and
solvent." As his life was in all ways "sound and solvent," perhaps such
rule of conduct was his own. But one may say, That is only a rule. The
man himself should be all rules and requirements of his own
establishment. Let Mr. Emerson show that his life is above his
principles. Let him break these rules. Let him be "unsound and
insolvent" for a time. Then only will his greatness appear.
The laws of nature are the expression of the infinite soundness and
solvency. They will not be broken, nor through their unsoundness and
insolvency will the "heavens roll away as a scroll," nor "the universe
shrivel up as a cast-off snake-skin."
In the growing recognition of law has been the progress of science. From
the casting aside of human notions of chance and whim the "warfare of
science" has had its rise. For every event carried over into the realm
of law some man has given his life. As the Panama railroad is said to
have cost the life of a man for every cross-tie, so has every step in
the progress of science. And such men!
Many a time in the growth of humanity has it been necessary that the
wisest, clearest, most humane, should die on the stake or the gibbet or
the cross, that men should come to realize the power of an idea; that
they should know the value of truth.
_Evolution as a Theory of Organic Development, or Darwinism._ In a
different sense the word evolution is applied to the theory of the
origin of organs and of species by divergence and development. This
theory teaches that all forms of life now existing or that have existed
on the earth have sprung from a common stock, which has undergone change
in a multitude of ways and under varied conditions, the forces and
influences producing such change being known as the "factors of organic
evolution." All characters and attributes of species and groups have
developed with changing conditions of life. The homologies among animals
are the result of common descent. The differences are due to various
influences, chief among these being competition in the struggle for
existence between individuals and between species, whereby those best
adapted to their surroundings lived and reproduced their kind.
This theory is now the central axis of all biological investigation in
all its branches, from ethics to histology, from anthropology to
bacteriology. In the light of this theory every peculiarity of
structure, every character or quality of individual or species, has a
meaning and a cause. It is the work of the investigator to find this
meaning as well as to record the fact. "One of the noblest lessons left
to the world" by Darwin is this, Mr. Frank Cramer tells us,--"this,
which to him amounted to a profound, almost religious, conviction, that
every fact in nature, no matter how insignificant, every stripe of
color, every tint of flowers, the length of an orchid's nectary, unusual
height in a plant, all the infinite variety of apparently insignificant
things, is full of significance. For him it was an historical record,
the revelation of a cause, the lurking-place of a principle."
According to the theory of evolution every structure of to-day finds its
meaning in some condition of the past. The inside of an animal tells
what it really is, for it bears the record of heredity. The outside of
an animal tells where its ancestors have been, for it bears record of
concessions to environment. Similarity in essential structure is known
as _homology_. By the theory of evolution homology, wherever it is
found, is proof of blood-relationship.
The theory of organic evolution through natural law was first placed on
a stable footing by the observations and inductions of Darwin. It has
therefore been long known as Darwinism, although that term has been
usually associated with the recognition of natural selection as the
great motive power in organic change. Darwinism was at first regarded as
a "working hypothesis." It is now an integral part of biological
science, because all opposing hypotheses have long since ceased to work.
It is as well attested as the theory of gravitation, and its elements
are open to less doubt. All investigations in biology must assume it, as
without it most such investigations would be impossible. Naturalists
could no more go back to the old notion of special creation for each
species and its organs than astronomers could go back to the old notion
of guiding angels as directors of planetary motion. Without the theory
of organic development through natural selection, the biological science
of to-day would be impossible.
_Evolution as a Method of Study._ In a third sense the word evolution is
applied to a method of investigation. It is the study of present
conditions in the light of the past. The preliminary work of science is
the descriptive part. This involves accuracy of observation and
precision of statement, but makes no great demands on the powers of
logical analysis and synthesis. The easy work of science is largely
already done. Those who would continue investigation must study not only
facts and structures, but the laws that govern them. In the words of
John Fiske, "Whether plants or mountains or mollusks or subjunctive
moods or tribal confederacies be the things studied, the scholars who
have studied them most fruitfully were those who have studied them as
phases of development. Their work has directed the current of thought."
The most difficult problems in life are susceptible of more or less
perfect solution if approached by the method of evolution. They cannot
be even stated as problems in any other terms. In every science worthy
of the name the history of origins and the study of developing forces
must take a leading part.
_Evolution as a System of Cosmic Philosophy._ In a fourth sense the word
evolution has been applied to the philosophical conceptions to which the
theory of evolution gives rise. Philosophy is not truth. When it is so
it becomes science. At the best it points the way to truth. The broader
the inductive basis of any system of philosophy, the greater its value
as an intellectual help. The system of Herbert Spencer, the greatest
exponent of the philosophy of evolution, is based wholly on the results
of scientific investigation. It consists of a series of more or less
broad and more or less probable deductions from the facts and laws
already known. Systems like these, which rest on scientific knowledge,
do not rise high above it. They can therefore be revised or rewritten as
knowledge increases. They provide the means for their own correction.
Systems resting on aphorisms or assumptions or definitions must
disappear as knowledge increases.
Philosophy is never wholly identical with truth. The partial truth which
it may contain becomes wholly error with the advance of science. The
growth of exact knowledge transforms the truth in philosophy into
science, leaving the absolute falsehood as the final residuum.
From this necessary fact comes the ultimate decay of all creeds or
philosophic formulæ. Throughout the ages science and philosophy have
been in conflict. Science is the same to all minds capable of grasping
its conclusions. Philosophy changes with the point of view. It is the
evanescent perspective in which the facts and phenomena of the universe
are seen. This can never be the same under changing times and
conditions. With the larger knowledge of to-morrow, there will be large
modifications in the accepted philosophy of evolution. Each succeeding
generation will give to the applications of the laws of organic life a
different philosophical expression.
II. WHAT EVOLUTION IS NOT.
In these four senses the word evolution is used with some degree of
accuracy. But in the current literature of the day the word has many
other meanings, some of them very far from any just basis. Some things
which evolution is not we may here notice briefly.
Evolution is not a theory that "man is a developed monkey." The question
of the immediate origin of man is not the central or overshadowing
question of evolution. This question offers no special difficulties in
theory, although the materials for exact knowledge are in many
directions incomplete. Homologies more perfect than those connecting man
with the great group of monkeys could not exist. These imply the
blood-relationship of the human race with the great host of apes and
monkeys. As to this there can be no shadow of a doubt. And as similar
homologies connect man with all members of the group of mammals, similar
blood-relationship must exist. And homologies, less close but equally
unmistakable, connect all backboned animals one with another; and the
lowest backboned types are closely joined to worm-like forms not usually
classed as vertebrates.
It is perfectly true that, with the higher or anthropoid apes, the
relations with man are extremely intimate. But man is not simply "a
developed ape." Apes and men have diverged from the same primitive
stock, apelike, manlike, but not exactly the one or the other. No apes
or monkeys now extant could apparently have been ancestors of primitive
man. None can ever "develop" into man. As man changes and diverges, race
from race, so do they. The influence of effort, the influence of
surroundings, the influence of the sifting process of natural selection,
acts upon them as it acts upon man.
The process of evolution is not progress, but better adaptation to
conditions of life. As man becomes fitted for social and civic life, so
does the ape become fitted for life in the tree-tops. The movement of
monkeys is towards "simianity," not humanity. The movement of cat-life
is towards felinity, that of the dog-races towards caninity. Each step
in evolution upward or downward, whatever it may be, carries each
species or type farther from the primitive stock. These steps are never
retraced. For an ape to become a man he must go back to the simple
characters of the simple common type from which both have sprung. These
characters are shown in the ape-baby and in the human embryo in its
corresponding stages. For ancestral traits lost in the adult are
preserved in the young. This comes through the operation of the great
force of race-memory, we call heredity.
Evidence of biology points to the descent of all mammals, of all
vertebrates, of all animals, of all organic beings, from a common stock.
Of all the races of animals, the anthropoid apes are nearest man. Their
divergence from the same stock must be comparatively recent. Man is the
nomadic, the apes the arboreal, branch of the same great family.
Evolution does not teach that all or any living forms are tending
towards humanity. It does not teach, as in Bishop Wilberforce's
burlesque, "that every favorable variety of the turnip is tending to
become man." It is not true that evolutionists expect to find, as Dr.
Seelye has affirmed, "the growth of the highest alga into a zoöphyte, a
phenomenon for which sharp eyes have sought, and which is not only
natural but inevitable on the Darwinian hypothesis, and whose discovery
would make the fame of any observer."
It is no wonder that a clear thinker should have rejected "the Darwinian
hypothesis," when stated in such terms as this. The line of junction in
evolution is always at the bottom. It is the lowest mammals which
approach the lowest reptiles. It is the lower types of plants which
approach the lower types of animals. It would be the lowest alga, to use
Dr. Seelye's illustration, which would be transmutable into the lowest
zoöphyte. It is the unspecialized, undifferentiated type from which
branches diverge in different ways. Humanity is not the "goal of
evolution," not even that of human evolution. There will be no second
"creation of man," except from man's own loins. There will not be a
second Anglo-Saxon race, unless it has the old Anglo-Saxon blood in its
veins.
Adaptation by divergence--for the most part by slow stages--is the
movement of evolution. While occasional leaps or sudden changes occur in
the process, they are by no means the rule. In most cases of "saltatory
evolution," the suddenness is in appearance only. It comes from our
inability to trace the intermediate stages. When an epoch-making
character is acquired, as the wings of a bird or the brain of man, the
process of readjustment of other characters goes on with greatly
increased rapidity. But this rapidity of evolution is along the same
lines as the slower processes. Radical changes from generation to
generation never occur. We do not expect to find birds arising from a
"flying-fish in the air, whose scales are disporting into feathers." A
flying-fish is no more of the nature of a bird than any other fish is. A
cow will never give birth to a horse, nor a horse to a cow. The slow
operation of existing causes is the central fact of organic evolution,
as it is of the evolution of mountains and valleys. Seasons change as
the relations which produce them change. But midsummer never gives way
to midwinter in an instant. Nor does the child in an instant become a
man, though in some periods of growth epoch-marking causes may make
development more rapid. Life is conservative. The law of heredity is the
expression of its conservatism. It changes slowly, but it must
constantly change, and all change is by necessity divergence.
There is in nature no single "law of progress," nor is progress in any
group a necessity regardless of conditions. That which we call progress
rests simply on the survival of the better adapted, their survival being
accompanied by their reproduction. Those that live repeat themselves.
The "innate tendency towards progression" of the early evolutionists is
a philosophic myth. Progress and degeneration are alike the resultants
of the various forces at work from generation to generation on and
within a race or species. The same forces which bring progress to a
group under one set of conditions will bring degradation under another.
In their essence the factors of evolution are no more laws of progress
than the attraction of gravitation is. Cosmic order comes from
gravitation. Organic order comes from the factors of evolution.
Evolution is simply orderly change.
_Evolution is not Spontaneous Generation._ There is no necessary
connection between the one theory and the other. Spontaneous generation,
or birth without parentage, on the part of small or useless creatures
was accepted in early times without question. As men began to observe
these animals more carefully, the fact of their spontaneous generation
was doubted. A great step was made when it was found that to screen meat
from flies would protect it from maggots. A greater step came in our own
time when it was proved that to screen infusions from air dust is to
protect them from putrefaction or fermentation. Fermentation is "life
without air." It is the decomposition of sugar by minute creatures who
disintegrate it in their life processes. Putrefaction and decay are also
the same in nature. There is literal truth in Carlyle's statement that
there is still force in a fallen leaf, "else how could it rot?" It is
the force of the minute organisms hidden in the leaf, and whose life is
the leaf's decay. The decay and death of men from contagious diseases is
known to be due to life processes of minute organisms, as is the
gangrene which follows unskilful surgery. The study of the "fauna and
flora" within living organisms has now become a science of itself,
demanding the greatest care in observation and the most complete of
appliances. "_Omne vivum ex vivo_," "all life from life," was an
aphorism of the naturalists of a century or two ago. It was to them a
new and broad generalization. It has not yet been set aside. The classic
experiments of Tyndall show that this law applies to all creatures we
have yet recognized or classified. As far as science can tell,
spontaneous generation is still a myth, having no basis in observation,
no warrant in experiment. It remains as a pure deduction from the
philosophical conception of Monism, incapable of proof, insusceptible of
refutation. The argument for it is chiefly this: Life exists on a globe
once lifeless. How did life begin? If not through spontaneous
generation, how did it come? Must it not have been by the operation of
those laws and forces which through all time change lifeless into living
matter? Very likely, but we do not know. We know nothing whatever of
such laws and forces, and we gain nothing by veiling our ignorance under
a philosophical necessity.
Moreover, if spontaneous generation occurs as a resultant of any
forces, like forces would produce it again. We have never known it to
occur. Should it occur the organisms thus produced would have no bonds
of blood-relationship with those already in existence. With these they
should show no homology, as they could have no inheritance in common.
But all known organisms have common homologies. The factors of organic
evolution are essentially the same for all. The unity of life amid all
its diversity seems to point to origin from a common stock. If not from
one stock, the lines of division between one and another are hidden from
us. The study of embryology breaks down the time-honored branch lines of
vertebrates, articulates, mollusks, and radiates. The groups of animals
are more numerous, more complex, and more intertangled than Cuvier and
Agassiz thought. The number of primary branches of animals or plants is
uncertain, their boundaries undefined.
If spontaneous generation exists, it is a factor in evolution. If it is
a factor, our explanation of the meaning and nature of homology must be
fundamentally changed. But it may be that it should be changed. We
cannot show that spontaneous generation does not exist. All we know is
that we have no means of recognizing it. If there is now spontaneous
generation of protoplasm, it cannot take the form of any creature we
know. An organism fresh from the mint of creation would be too small for
us to see with any microscope. It would be too simple for us to trace by
any instrumentality now in our possession. It could contain but a few
molecules, and a molecule in a drop of water is as small as an orange
beside the sun. Our race of creatures, spontaneously generated, without
concessions to environment, would grow hoary with the centuries before
it came to our notice. Its descendants would have belonged for ages to
the unnumbered hosts of microbes before we should be aware of its
creation.
Evolution is not a creed or a body of doctrine to be believed on
authority. There is no saving grace in being an evolutionist. There are
many who take this name and have no interest in finding out what it
means or in making any application of its principles to the affairs of
life. For one who cares not to master its ideas, there is no power in
the word. Evolution is not a panacea or a medicine to be applied to
social or personal ills. It is simply an expression of the teaching of
enlightened common sense as to the order of changes in life. If its
principles are mastered a knowledge of evolution is an aid in the
conduct of life, as knowledge of gravitation is essential in the
building of machinery.
There is nothing "occult" in the science of evolution. It is not the
product of philosophic meditation or of speculative philosophy. It is
based on hard facts, and with hard facts it must deal.
It seems to me that it is not true that "Evolution is a new religion,
the religion of the future." There are many definitions to religion, but
evolution does not fit any of them. It is no more a religion than
gravitation is. One may imagine that some enthusiastic follower of
Newton may, for the first time, have seen the majestic order of the
solar system, may have felt how futile was the old notion of guiding
angels, one for each planet to hold it up in space. He may have received
his first clear vision of the simple relations of the planets, each
forever falling toward the sun and toward each other, each one by the
same force forever preserved from collision. Such a man might have
exclaimed, "Great is gravitation; it is the new religion, the religion
of the future!" In such manner, men trained in dead traditions, once
brought to a clear insight of the noble simplicity and adequacy of the
theory of evolution, may have exclaimed, "Great is evolution; it is the
new religion, the religion of the future!"
But evolution is religion in the same sense that every truth of the
physical universe must be religion. That which is true is the truest
thing in the world, and the recognition of the infinite soundness at the
heart of the universe is an inseparable part of any worthy religion.
But, whether religion or not, the truths of evolution must be their own
witness. They can be neither strengthened nor controverted by any
authority which may speak in the name of philosophy or of theology or of
religion. "_Roma locuta est; causa finita est_" is not a dictum which
science can regard. Her causes are never finished. No power on earth can
give beforehand the answer to her questions. Her only court of appeal is
the experience of man.
HAS WEALTH A LIMITATION?
BY ROBERT N. REEVES.
There is in the government of human affairs one order that is best for
all. What that order is and how it is to be attained should be the great
problem for all who have at heart the betterment of the human race.
Never in the history of our country were the people confronted with
greater social problems than they are to-day. The strikes, boycotts, and
general discontent of late years prove conclusively that there is yet
much room for improvement in our social order. What mean the great
outcry and muttering of the masses? What means the cry from the vast
army of discontented which wells up from the very heart of the nation,
_unless_ it signifies the rumbling which is often heard before the
storm? Gloss it over as we will, the fact stands out as prominent as
ever, that there is something radically wrong with our present
economical system.
Many remedies have been suggested, many reforms have been inaugurated
with the purpose of relieving the poverty and misery which press so
heavily upon a large majority of the people. Stop immigration! Prohibit
invention! exclaim some. The population is increasing too fast! reply
others. And so the many reforms are advocated, all of which are
discussed with more or less fairness. But when it is suggested that
wealth is becoming too concentrated, that limitations should be placed
upon it, the cry immediately goes up that he who suggests such a remedy
is an anarchist, and one whose name should be synonymous with whatever
is dangerous, lawless, and subversive.
Nevertheless, the question of wealth limitation cannot be dismissed with
threats, epithets, or sneers. It will not dismiss itself, and we cannot
dismiss it. Every observant person must admit that the great
concentration of wealth, whether it be in corporations, trusts, or
individuals, has reached a point dangerous to the future prosperity of
the nation.
Millions of people idle, wealth piled up for the few by the toil of the
many, paupers and millionaires on every side, and the conditions
growing worse and worse,--these things are enough to make even the most
optimistic painfully apprehensive of the future. Our government in some
respects is in no better condition than was the old Roman Empire just
before its fall, as described by James Anthony Froude. If we are to
believe that eminent historian, the Roman Empire was crushed by the same
power of unlimited, concentrated wealth that to-day is destroying the
life, the liberty, and the happiness of the many in the United States.
In mediæval Italy, too, popular freedom was lost through a moneyed
oligarchy and proletariat. So in every country where individual wealth
has transcended the bounds of justice, the people--the toilers--have
eventually been enslaved.
Ours is fast becoming a moneyed nation; and a moneyed nation is
generally a weak one. Superfluity of riches, like superfluity of food,
causes weakness and decay. Individual prosperity or the prosperity of a
community does not mean general prosperity, or the prosperity of a
nation. Thus it has been shown that, in New York and Massachusetts and
those States in which the greatest wealth is concentrated, the largest
proportion of paupers are to be found. In 1833, when Tocqueville visited
America, he was struck by the equal distribution of wealth and the
absence of capitalists. Half a century later, when James Bryce, author
of "The American Commonwealth," visited our country, the trusts,
monopolies, and concentrated wealth so amazed him that he exclaimed: "I
see the shadows of a new structure of society--an aristocracy of
riches."
Fifty years ago there were no great fortunes here, and in fact but few
fortunes that could be called large, and in those days there was
comparatively little poverty. Now we have many gigantic fortunes and a
vast number ranging from $100,000 to $10,000,000. In the past, wealth
being more equally distributed, there was but little class distinction,
but there were a far greater number of what might be called fortunes,
and a noticeable exemption from that pauperism which has become chronic
of late years.
The Probate-Court records of the various States disclose the fact that
millionaires are becoming more numerous, while the smaller
property-owners are gradually sinking into the multitude of people
possessing nothing. In a valuable article by Eltweed Pomeroy on "The
Concentration of Wealth,"[2] some interesting figures and diagrams are
given, proving from probate records the exact extent to which small
fortunes have been crowded out or merged into enormous ones. These
records are valuable because they are official. But while they prove the
_extent_ to which wealth is concentrated, they do not disclose the
misery which that wealth is causing. For that, we must look to the
conditions about us. And in doing so it is not necessary to be a
philosopher in order to see the havoc which concentrated wealth has
wrought in recent years. Every day, it has been declared, America is
over four million dollars richer at night than in the morning. Who
receives this wealth? Surely not those who toil; else they would not
suffer so. They receive little of it. The national wealth, great as it
is, slips through their fingers to be collected in the vast reservoirs
of the moneyed aristocracy. They work, but it is the work of those who
labor to produce, but who receive none of that which is produced.
[2] THE ARENA, Dec., 1896, p. 82.
It is this condition that causes so many to declare that the present
distribution of wealth does not conform to the principles of justice.
And how can it be otherwise, when all wealth passes through the hands of
the producers and stops only when it reaches those who possess most?
Thus wealth is becoming with us not a power for general good, but a
power given to the few to control the many--a power of placing upon the
masses a yoke little better than slavery itself. The rich, becoming
further and further removed from the poor, are also becoming conscious
of being in a measure the proprietors of the poor. The poor have a
knowledge of this fact, and the strikes, boycotts, and general
discontent are but the expression of that knowledge.
In no country in the world does wealth, individual and corporate, exert
such an influence as in the United States, and as a consequence, human
life is becoming lamentably cheap. Capital is taking the place of men,
and is valued more than men. Property is becoming sacred, human life
profane. Laws are being made not for the good of humanity, but for the
sake of property. One instance may be mentioned here: in the spring of
1896 a bill was before Congress to remove all criminal cases from the
jurisdiction of the Supreme Court of the United States. It was argued by
those in favor of the bill that much of the time of the Supreme Court
was consumed listening to criminal cases (cases involving life and
liberty), while high-priced corporation lawyers, whose cases involved
millions of dollars, were required to wait in Washington until the
criminal cases were disposed of. The bill naturally passed the Senate,
but was defeated in the House.
This bill was but one of many indications that, in the eye of the law,
property is becoming of more value than life or liberty.
In Benjamin Franklin's time it was proposed to make the possession of a
certain amount of property a prerequisite for voting. The amount would
at the time have bought one ass. Franklin characteristically argued: If
a man with an ass could vote, and did vote, but when the ass died the
man could not vote, who was it, in fact, voted--the man or the ass?
Franklin's argument would hold good against many of the laws advocated
to-day--laws in which the object is the stability of property rather
than the freedom or happiness of man. This condition of affairs, this
conflict between the right of liberty on the one hand, and the right of
property on the other, has created a great political problem. Has the
state a right to limit wealth? Is there a limit to the accumulations of
individuals and corporations? Has the state the power to tax
concentrated wealth out of existence when such wealth has become
detrimental to the public peace and prosperity? In other words, has the
state the power to prevent the acquisition of wealth from becoming a
public curse? Government, if it stands for anything, stands for the
public interests, and one of the objects of government should be the
protection of its citizens from the encroachments of accumulated wealth.
Great individual wealth is an anti-social interest. It is the ascendency
of individuals over the interests of the public. Individuals have, it is
true, a certain amount of liberty, but it cannot be denied that society
has the right to modify the liberty of the individual where such liberty
is but the slavery of the public. The right to live also implies the
right to use the things about us which go to make life comfortable and
enjoyable, and which have not been already appropriated by others. It is
evident, however, that the use of anything by one must necessarily take
from the personal liberty of all others who otherwise would be able to
use it. And it is perfectly plain that just in proportion as one's
wealth increases, the wealth of others must decrease. This to a certain
extent is legitimate, and cannot be prevented. But when the wealth of
one increases to such an extent as to deprive others of food, shelter,
and even existence itself, it infringes upon the equality of personal
liberty far more than could any law that placed a limit to individual
wealth. When men are starving, when paupers are increasing, when to the
misfortune of poverty is added the curse of industrial slavery, when the
great concentration of wealth affects the life and liberty of all, is
not a law just which takes from a few a portion of their wealth and
indirectly restores it to the hands of the many? Does not the right to
property involve and rest upon the admission of the right to live?
Cardinal Manning startled the world some years ago when he declared:
"The obligation to feed the hungry springs from the natural right of
every man to life and to the food necessary to the sustenance of life.
So strict is this natural right that it prevails over all positive laws
of property. Necessity has no law, and a starving man has a right to his
neighbor's bread."
Strong words these for a cardinal. Sentimental philosophy it may be
called, but it is the philosophy of justice. Enormous wealth has always
been irreconcilable with equality. Its growth has caused the downfall of
many democracies. Will it bring about the ruin of the greatest democracy
in history? Are we, with the awe with which we regard the institution of
property, becoming a nation of millionaires and mendicants?
Property is only absolutely safe when those who hold it are far more
numerous than those who do not. When the middle class disappears from a
nation and the property falls into the hands of a few over-rich men,
then property is unsafe. We call such a condition an aristocracy of
money, and an aristocracy of money is always the child of a degenerated
or degenerating democracy. Some people, however, regard the
concentration of wealth as an indication of progress. In matters
political the obstacle is often taken for the cause. Monopolies,
trusts, and other forms of concentrated wealth are regarded by some as
the blessings of a prosperous nation. But examined in the light of
history we find that concentrated wealth has always been a means of
obstructing if not of destroying a nation. Our nation is not an
exception. We cannot say that the destructive power of concentrated
wealth is not now felt. All that is necessary is to observe the
conditions about us. Whenever the people of a nation become subservient
and dependent, and are oppressed and abused because they are so,
whenever there is little general prosperity but a great deal of
prosperity for a few, we naturally come to the conclusion that the cause
of the misery and lack of general prosperity is the great concentration
of wealth in the hands of the few. It is this conclusion, arrived at by
what are termed the masses, that has caused the many conflicts of recent
years between labor and capital. And such conflicts are natural. Man
always revolts when he suspects his misery is the consequence of a
social order capable of reformation. Force, of late years, has often
been called upon to subdue the spirit of resentment which agitates the
breasts of the poorer classes. The militia of the various States and
even government troops have been called upon in order to preserve
property and also maintain the supremacy of concentrated wealth.
How long this can go on before a change comes we do not know. It cannot
be maintained long. Unless some law is enacted that will stop the
encroaching power of wealth, things will go on until the inequality
becomes so glaring, so oppressive, that the pent-up social waters,
gathering force, will break through the wall of concentrated wealth and
allow society once more to regain its natural level. Every statesman,
every thinker, should know that we cannot expect a healthy growth with
class arrayed against class. Every strike, every riot, is a
retrogressive step in our nation's history. If our American civilization
is to endure and progress we must bring about a change in the
distribution of wealth. If conditions are such as to be beneficial to a
small number and injurious to society in general, those conditions
should be changed. Unless limited, the alarming development and
aggressiveness of great capitalists and powerful corporations will
eventually lead to the absolute degradation of the toiling masses.
Unless checked, it will continue to grow until it usurps the entire
legislative and executive branches of our government, and, like a huge
vampire, slowly draws the life-blood from every healthy, helpful
creature. This power of wealth is the greatest danger that has
threatened our country since the civil war, and against it we must
constantly be on our guard. If the power is permitted to grow it may
become too late, and can then be remedied only by putting class against
class--by revolution, which always means the rejoicing of the poor at
the downfall of their oppressors.
This, then, is to be the battle of the future--concentrated wealth on
one hand, concentrated poverty on the other. The battle should not be
one of force, but one of reason and agitation until wealth shall be
bound by proper constitutional limitations; a battle in which law shall
triumph; for the true remedy, the remedy most conducive to equality,
lies in legislation. But this legislation should be immediate. If we
desire to prevent actual war between class and class, it is imperative
that a legal check at once be placed upon the growing power for evil of
aggregated wealth.
The limitation of wealth by law has received the approval of some of the
most gifted as well as philanthropic of minds. In our own country such
men as Horace Greeley, Theodore Parker, and William Ellery Channing have
advocated it. Still, a ready objection of some against the limitation of
wealth is that any attempt to remedy by legislation the inequality of
fortune at once infringes upon the right of personal liberty. Have we no
laws in existence now which infringe upon the right of personal liberty?
Do not our usury laws take some rights from the individual? Does not our
custom-house law, which permits the trunks of every new arrival to be
searched, infringe somewhat upon the right of personal liberty? The
citizen who would object to these laws would have but a very narrow
conception of the true purpose of government. If we examine our laws
closely we shall find many that encroach upon individual liberty for the
sake of public good. Then why should any objection be made to those laws
which tend to limit wealth?
Undoubtedly a tax levied upon all incomes, which would be progressively
raised and graduated according to the amount of the individual or
corporate wealth could be constitutionally enacted. And if a progressive
income tax can be enacted, the graduated inheritance tax can also be
enacted, for the principle is practically the same. Senator David B.
Hill, of New York, has called the progressive tax a "modern fad." It is
so modern, however that it can be traced back to the Romans, Greeks, and
Egyptians. During the palmiest days of Greece--the days of Solon and
Lycurgus--a progressive tax was a stern reality.
Our own country has not been without a progressive tax. In 1797 a graded
inheritance tax was levied by Congress. This law was repealed in 1802.
In 1862 a similar law was passed. But after having been decided to be
constitutional by the Supreme Court, it was repealed in 1872.
Other governments at the present time tax the rich. In England, besides
the income tax, many other items of revenue are contributed entirely by
the rich--contributed upon the principle that those who have acquired
riches shall bear the burden of taxation. In the United States we seem
to place the burden of taxation upon the shoulders least fitted to bear
it. Every effort to tax the rich, to properly tax corporations and
trusts, has met with failure. The lobbyist and corporation lawyer have
defied the tax-gatherer until they have worn out the patience of the
people. The time is now ripe for proper legislation. A progressive
income tax and a tax upon inheritances should be made a law in every
State. The power to tax, it has been said, is the power to destroy. If a
scale of taxation were wisely adopted it would eventually enable us to
reach without political disturbance the almost total abolition of an
aristocracy of wealth and thus solve the great problem of the day. If we
are to consider humanity of any importance at all, wealth must be
limited. The rights of all must be considered. When this is done we may
be able to have a truly prosperous nation--a nation in which prosperity
will not be confined to a favored few, but given to all.
"Prosperity," says Rousseau, "is best secured when the medium-class
income prevails, when no citizen is so rich that he can buy others, and
no one so poor that he might be compelled to sell himself."
THE BATTLE OF THE MONEY METALS
I. BIMETALLISM SIMPLIFIED.
BY GEORGE H. LEPPER.
The "free-silver delusion" is not dead, nor will it die unless the
McKinley administration shall give it its quietus by providing the
country with a sound and popular system of bimetallism. Even the most
sanguine of the Republican leaders must admit that the prospect of
accomplishing this task by international agreement is not so encouraging
as to make the tentative consideration of other plans, not requiring
concerted action, unnecessary or useless. The purpose of this article is
to present such a plan, and to contrast it with those which have already
been tried, or have thus far been proposed.
That the financial policy we have pursued since 1878, the year of the
Bland-Allison Act, has been absurd and ruinous hardly admits of two
opinions. Secretary Carlisle, in his letter of September 16th last, gave
authoritative utterance to what had long been tacitly understood. He
said, "If the time shall ever come when the parity of the present silver
dollars and silver certificates cannot be otherwise maintained, they
will be received by the government in exchange for gold." In other
words, the vast stores of silver purchased by the United States under
the laws of 1878 and 1890 are a dead asset of the Treasury, and cannot
be utilized for purposes of redemption until sixteen ounces of silver
shall again be equivalent to one of gold, or until they are re-sold in
the open market for gold. To render this treasure available for ultimate
redemptions thus becomes a prime condition of our problem.
There is a growing disposition in certain influential quarters to evade
the difficulties in the way of international bimetallism by taking the
government out of the banking business, and relegating the matter of
currency issues more and more to the banks. Whatever may be said in
behalf of this course, it is certainly not popular with the masses, who,
justly or ignorantly, have come to look upon national banks as favored
objects of legislation, and in league with syndicates and trusts. But,
aside from this, the real core of the trouble is not removed. We but
shift the burden of responsibility. The ultimate fund for redemption
remains limited to the one metal as beforehand can serve the banks even
less efficiently, for the more divided the responsibility the larger the
proportion of gold required for reserve purposes.
International bimetallism at the contemplated ratio of 16 to 1, and
bimetallism by independent action at the same ratio, although opposing
issues in the late campaign, are founded upon the same errors and
misconceptions. Both assume that monetization creates a commercial
demand for the metals, thereby enhancing their values; that the use of
gold and silver as money substances has been one of choice with us
instead of necessity; and that legal-tender laws create value.
It may be going too far to say that monetization creates no demand, but
whatever demand it may be supposed to create is not a commercial one. In
the latter sense the word signifies both an actual purchase, or the
exchange of one thing for another, and a permanent withdrawal from the
market of the thing bought. The act of coinage is certainly not a
purchase, for, directly or indirectly, it aims to restore to the offerer
of the bullion not something else, but the _precise thing received_; nor
is the metal retired from the market, since it is actually or virtually,
though in an altered form, immediately restored thereto. The whole
process is merely one of bailment. It would therefore seem incumbent
upon those affirming the efficacy of monetization to raise the price of
the metal to show by scientific analysis just how, why, and to what
extent it does so. The fact that from 1792 to 1873, with free coinage at
a very close approximation to the market value, not once did the legal
and commercial ratios coincide, and that the change of the former from
15 to 1 to 16 to 1 in 1834 had no perceptible effect on the market,
seems to be conclusive proof that the general belief that free coinage
at a fixed ratio appreciates the over-valued metal is delusive.
It is important to inquire into the grounds upon which the use of silver
and gold is founded, for if we have _chosen_ them for that purpose there
is an implication that other substances might have served the same
object almost, if not quite, as well. Such is not the case. Silver and
gold are absolutely unique in possessing the qualities indispensable for
money, and not only nature, but immemorial custom and deep-rooted
prejudice combine to compel their use in the exchanges irrespective, and
even despite, of legislation. Monetization, therefore, cannot, for this
further reason, add to, or take away from, their respective values,
because the exchangeability that monetization is supposed to give them
is a natural quality and not the creature of law. But so much more is
this true of gold than of silver, that the dependence of modern
commerce, and, through it, modern civilization, upon it is almost
absolute. If, therefore, free coinage at a ratio unfair to gold were
attempted, gold would cease to be offered at the mints, but it would
nevertheless continue in use in final settlements, especially in
transactions of some magnitude, thus preventing its decline in value.
Suppose, then, that such a law, national or international, should go
into effect to-day, would anyone be so fatuous as to part with his gold
until the effect of the law could be discerned? If the governments at
the same time should exercise the same good sense, they would retain
their gold and disburse their silver, but such conduct would defeat the
very object of the law. If, on the other hand, they should release their
gold, retaining their silver, they would give fresh point to the
oft-proved saying, "The fool and his money are soon parted." A
_bona-fide_ attempt on the part of one or more powers to change the
market ratio of the metals could result only in transferring government
gold to private coffers, and in a general fall to the silver basis with
all its attendant evils. Meanwhile the gold would continue its functions
as money in new transactions, but at its market value, never by any
chance reaching the public treasuries except on the same basis. The
inconvenience of transacting business with a metal some thirty times as
heavy, value for value, as that to which they had been accustomed would,
without further reason, speedily induce the governments to a restoration
of the gold standard at any cost.
As for the legal-tender quality, it cannot be denied that governments
here possess a peculiar power which individuals cannot exert; but that
fact does not make the exercise of that power morally right. The
quality of legal tender infused into the debased dollar cannot but add
temporarily to its exchangeable value in a degree gradually diminishing
with the exhaustion of the accumulated credits. When, however, the last
debtor in the series is reached, and there is no longer a Peter to rob
for the sake of Paul, the fraudulent coin must inevitably sink to the
value it had as bullion prior to the act that created it.
Upon such fallacies as these it is sought to erect the elaborate
superstructure of the civilized world's monetary system! Some of the
more advanced thinkers among the self-styled bimetallists, realizing
that some deference must be paid to the lessons of experience, which
offers not a solitary instance of the concurrent use of the two metals
under a fixed ratio, argue that, even so, the chief blessing of
bimetallism--a less variable standard--will have been secured in the
automatic oscillation from one circulation to the other. If this
oscillatory feature is the object sought, the adoption of a ratio of 16
to 1, or thereabouts, would certainly not secure it, but one almost
identical with the market ratio would be imperative. Not once in the
history of our country did this alternation occur, although from 1792 to
1873 we were upon the double standard. It is true that in 1834 the
circulation changed from silver to gold, but that was due not to the
automatic effect of that system, but to an actual change of the legal
ratio from 15 to 1 to 16 to 1. But if the legal ratio is now made to
conform to the market one, what becomes of our present silver coins?
Must they be called in and be replaced by the new? If so the convenience
of our subsidiary coinage will be sacrificed, for a silver dollar twice
its present size would be intolerable.
The obstacles in the way of international bimetallism need not be
enumerated here. The proceedings at the Brussels monetary conference in
1892, though they accomplished little besides, certainly served to make
these difficulties plain. The primary object is to make silver coins and
gold coins continuously interchangeable in trade at a ratio
approximating as closely as possible to 16 to 1, and the discussion of
the means to accomplish this has apparently narrowed down to one
proposition to be answered by a simple yes or no: Shall the free coinage
of gold and silver at the ratio of 1 to 16 be restored? It will not do
to insert any other ratio (except, perhaps, 1 to 15 or 1 to 15-1/2),
because if a ratio closely approximating the commercial one is
contemplated, each nation might decide the question for itself, and an
international agreement would be superfluous. All the civilized nations
have their own established ratios of coinage varying from 15 to 15-1/2
or 16 of silver to 1 of gold, and whichever of these should prevail the
result could not but be a serious matter to those nations obliged to
reform their coinage in accordance therewith. Neither horn of the
dilemma presented by the plan of a fixed ratio is practicable; the
convenient one of 16 to 1 is impossible, and the commercial one would
necessitate recoinages and make the coins prohibitively cumbrous. The
choice of an intermediate ratio would be a virtual relinquishment of the
principle itself, for how would that ratio be arrived at if not by mere
guess? There are no data to guide us, nor is there any formulated rule
by which the desired ratio may be determined. Besides, the intermediate
ratio would still remain open to the objections advanced against the
higher ratio, both in requiring recoinage and in unduly enlarging the
coins.
The inevitable result of free coinage at a fixed ratio is to expel the
undervalued metal from circulation. There can be but one way to prevent
this, and that is by a system of sliding scale whereby scrupulous
fidelity to the state of the market from day to day may be preserved.
Diurnal recoinages are of course out of the question, but the thing is
nevertheless both easy and practicable.
Let us assume that gold only has hitherto been used as money, that 25.8
grains thereof have been taken to be one dollar, and that it is now
desired to supplement it with the use of silver. Our proposition will
necessarily take this form: If one dollar is equal to 25.8 grains of
gold, it must be equal to as many grains of silver as 25.8 grains of
gold will buy in the open market. Here we must remember that what is
true to-day may not be true to-morrow or a year hence. So many grains of
gold may to-day be worth 412-1/2 grains of silver, to-morrow they may be
worth but 400, and next day, 420. By _fixing the amount_ of silver in
the dollar we thus utter through these coins a new falsehood each day.
_Constant values, not constant weights, is what we are driving at; so
in lieu of the silver coin we must substitute a promise to pay a gold
dollar, or a gold dollar's worth of silver, whatever the state of the
market._ This is what I designate _natural bimetallism_. The silver
dollar and fractional pieces as we now have them may nevertheless
continue in circulation, for the promise can be written into them by
legislation to redeem them, upon surrender, in the same manner as the
paper promises. It is possible that Hamilton and his successors in
office prior to 1837 may have thought of this expedient, but discarded
it as not then feasible. We must remember, however, that they had
serious practical difficulties to contend with, which are now happily
removed. The advantages of the telegraph, the cable, the improved means
of transportation, and our admirable system of market quotations, enable
us now with certainty and ease to determine daily what any given thing
is worth in terms of any other.
In order to make my plan as clear as possible, I shall run the risk of
seeming elementary by following through, step by step, a typical
transaction under it: Let us fancy that the reader, bearing a nugget of
gold in his left hand and another of silver in his right, and desiring
to convert them into money, repairs to the Philadelphia mint. He applies
there to the proper clerk, who, for simplicity's sake, we will suppose
performs all the operations. The clerk weighs and assays the two pieces
of metal, and finds the gold one to contain 25,800 grains of standard
gold, worth precisely $1,000, which are counted out in bills. A similar
operation reveals that the lump of silver weighs 35,500 grains, but the
clerk is now observed to consult a table before saying, "The market
equivalent of a gold dollar is to-day 710 grains, consequently your
35,500 grains are worth $50;" and he then proceeds to count out the
money in bills precisely like those given in payment for the gold. Upon
examining these at his leisure the reader discovers imprinted thereon a
contract running as follows: "This note entitles the bearer on demand to
[the denomination of the bill] dollars in gold or to the market
equivalent thereof in silver."
In the course of time, say five years hence, these identical notes, by
the accidents of trade, have come into my hands, and I desire to have
them redeemed. Applying to the United States Treasury I find I am
granted the privilege of taking payment in silver, in gold, or partly in
one and the balance in the other. For the purposes of our illustration,
however, we will adhere to the figures already used. In exchange for the
$1,000, then, I receive back precisely the weight of gold originally
given for them. For the $50 I receive six pieces of silver of different
sizes, which I notice are arranged upon a decimal scale of grains. They
contain respectively 30,000, 5,000, 1,000, 500, 100, and 50 grains; in
all 36,650 grains, or 1,150 grains in excess of the original quantity.
Upon inquiry I learn that this excess is not due to any mistake by the
clerk, but that since the first transaction silver has fallen so that
733 grains are now commercially equal to 25.8 grains of gold, and that
the government has simply redeemed my notes at par. After this first
experience I have many subsequent transactions with the mint and with
the Treasury. At the former I find that I have the choice of notes, gold
coin, or silver coin. At first I reject the silver coins as being under
weight, but upon its being explained that they are purposely made light
for the sake of convenience, and that they are by general law redeemable
in the same manner as the notes, I no longer object to them. At the
Treasury, on the other hand, I am sometimes, though rarely, informed
that the government is exercising the option reserved in its contract;
that it is paying exclusively in gold, or exclusively in silver, or
partly in one and partly in the other. These occasional disappointments,
however, never affect the integrity of the money I have in hand, for
whether redeemed in gold or silver, everyone knows that it will be
redeemed at its _face value_, and it accordingly passes unquestioned.
Upon several occasions I present bonds of the government for redemption,
some of them issued previous to the inauguration of the new system, and
others issued afterward. In either case I find that the same system of
redemption prevails as in the example of the notes. Treasury notes,
silver coins, and silver certificates--one and all I discover are also
redeemable like the new notes or convertible into them, so that I need
never concern myself about any matter save their genuineness.
Gold certificates and greenbacks must, of course, be redeemed as their
special contract requires, but, once redeemed, they must reissue in the
new bimetallic notes which I have described. Thus a very simple method
is provided whereby this form of currency may be transmuted into another
without contracting the circulation.
The great desideratum is to make our vast stores of silver available for
ultimate redemptions, and this, natural bimetallism effectually
accomplishes. Our gold reserve would therefore cease to be indispensable
to the preservation of our national credit just as soon as the
greenbacks and gold certificates were converted into the bimetallic
notes or cancelled. But there need be no fear that the gold reserve
would ever become depleted. By removing all danger of the debasement of
our money, by insuring the parity of every dollar of our currency with
gold, and by permanently retiring the greenbacks, we destroy the
incentive to hoard gold, cause its return to the reserve, relieve it of
half the burden it formerly had to sustain, and reduce to a minimum the
tendency to withdrawals. The copious supply of gold thus secured would
enable the Treasurer to waive his option to pay in silver whenever the
customer preferred gold, thereby enabling merchants to use the less
cumbrous metal for foreign shipments. Indeed, it is entirely probable
that the new notes would be preferred to gold in international as well
as in domestic exchanges.
An advantage of especial importance is that the metals can be
concurrently used. The oscillation from one to the other, even if it be
admitted that it would provide us always with the better of them under
whatever changes may occur, is certainly not to be preferred to the
constant and equal use of both. The unlimited coinage of the two metals
upon a plan so equitable, recognizing as it does their precise market
relations from day to day, would enable us to view with indifference the
fluctuations of the market, however great, and to whatever cause due.
Incidental to this advantage, and second only to it in importance, would
be the establishment of a par of exchange simultaneously with the
gold-and with the silver-using countries by allowing customs duties to
be paid in silver bullion at market prices, or in gold.
It may be contended that under the plan here proposed the government
might lose by a continued decline in silver, and that the silver it
already has would remain depreciated far below the price the government
paid for it. I frankly admit this. But is it reasonable to suppose that
silver will continue to decline? The probabilities are that in the
succeeding twenty years the production of gold will increase more
rapidly in proportion than silver; and it also seems that whereas
processes for extracting and refining silver have well-nigh reached
their limit of economy, the new processes for treating gold are rapidly
improving. Nor must it be forgotten that should such a decline occur the
mint deposits are from day to day keeping pace with the withdrawals, the
losses on the latter thus being counterbalanced by concurrent gains, and
interest-bearing debts being constantly transmuted into non-interest
bearing currency. It is equally clear that the utilization of a dead
asset, as the government stock of silver now is, is a distinct gain, and
will permanently dispense with the future issue of bonds for the
repletion of the gold reserve. As for the silver purchased by the
government under the Acts of 1878 and 1890 having become depreciated,
the fact is there whether we choose to recognize or ignore it. There is
no better way for palliating that loss than to make that silver
immediately available for the payment of the nation's debts.
Allied to the question of the costliness of the system is that of its
tendency toward, or freedom from, speculative disturbances. So long as
payment solely in gold was compulsory, speculators had a fertile field
for their operations. By giving the Treasurer the option of payment in
silver or gold, however, raids upon either metal can be met by paying
exclusively in the other until the proper equilibrium is restored. If a
real difficulty should still be found to exist in practice, a slight
mint charge would effectually put an end to it. In any event, natural
bimetallism is much less open to criticism on this score than the
existing system, or than that of the fixed ratio.
The pieces of silver with which redemptions are to be made are in no
sense to be regarded as money. They are distinctly merchandise,
possessing a commercial value precisely equivalent to the number of
money units received or surrendered therefor, and when the notes have
been redeemed, and the commercial equivalent has been given therefor,
the government's responsibility ends. The government assumes no
obligation to maintain silver bullion at a given ratio to gold, but it
does assume to make each unit of money the equal of 25.8 grains of gold.
In other words, the fluctuations in the value of silver are confined to
it in its bullion shape, and cannot enter into its form as money. The
idea that paper currency must be redeemed in gold, _as money_, or
silver, as money, is erroneous. It is redeemed in those metals because
they have value as _merchandise_. In domestic transactions this fact is
often lost sight of, but it becomes manifest in international exchanges
when the metallic money passes strictly on its merits as bullion, and
without regard to the stamp it bears. For these reasons the Treasury
should not be understood as guaranteeing the weight or fineness of the
metal, except in its immediate transactions, although to facilitate its
ready acceptance between reputable merchants, the affixing of the
government's seal upon the pieces would be a very proper practice.
Nor is there any mechanical difficulty in the way of the operation of
the plan. The silver could be fashioned into pieces of different sizes
graduated upon a decimal scale of grains, with the smallest piece
containing fifty grains, being somewhat larger than the current dime. By
limiting redemptions, then, to fifty dollars and multiples thereof, our
pieces will in every conceivable instance enable us to make the
exchange, or redemption, to the accuracy of a single grain on each
dollar, which is certainly sufficiently close for all practical
purposes.
In contrast to the national banking system, the bonds could be retired
without derangement to our finances, the metals forming a basis upon
which our outstanding currency could directly rest--thus obviating the
extravagant features of that system and stripping us of the impediment
of an immense debt. And not only this: the encouragement natural
bimetallism would hold out to owners of bullion of both kinds would
cause our national vaults to be filled to overflowing with the sinews of
war, and make us the best equipped nation on the earth for a prolonged
struggle, should such a struggle come.
By providing a means for the remonetization of silver at the market rate
we are doing its friends a greater kindness than they ask. Free coinage
on seemingly more favorable terms would result in immediate
overproduction and a glutted market, from which condition it would be
most difficult to escape. If there be any merit in the contention that a
"demand" for the metal is what is needed, and that that demand will
enhance its price, so much the better, for in that case not only will
the condition of the silver industry improve, but the government itself
will be benefited by the enhancement in the value of the metal it
already holds and may hereafter acquire. The example set by the United
States would be gladly imitated by other nations, and the use of silver
as a basis for money would speedily rival that of gold.
Viewed as an experiment the trial of it would be inexpensive and without
peril, while congressional debates pending its consideration would give
no cause for apprehension or disturbance to business, since the gold
standard would not be jeopardized. But why should it be regarded as
experimental when the most elementary and most familiar business
principles are followed?
The question may be raised whether the preservation of the gold standard
is desirable, since, it is claimed, it is gradually appreciating in
value. To this it may be said that the peril of the gold standard does
not consist in the fact that it is rising, but that it has been hitherto
accompanied by the non-use of silver in final redemptions. That an
appreciating dollar is necessarily an evil is, moreover, fairly
debatable. During the period from 1864-1872 (which our Democratic
friends delight to laud as the most prosperous in our history), although
we were nominally on a bimetallic basis, contracts were made on that of
the greenback, which rose during that time an average of ten per cent
per annum, to wit: from 49.2 cents in 1864, to 89 cents in 1872. In
other words the debtor who borrowed $492.00 in 1864 was obliged, eight
years later, to pay his creditor $890.00 of like purchasing power as he
had received, in addition to a considerably higher interest than now
current. I do not wish to be considered as standing sponsor for the
rising dollar, but it is a pertinent question to ask those who decry the
gold standard for this reason, why the same cause did not have the same
effect in each instance.
The objection may be made that I would make of a silver mere commodity,
but the point is not well taken, inasmuch as the mint offerings are
transmuted into paper currency, which is virtually making silver, money;
moreover, the silver itself is retained in its present form of
subsidiary coinage. Silver is not a moral being possessed of rights and
sensitive to insults; it is a mere thing whose function it is to serve
us in any way we may deem most conducive to our interests. If under the
system of natural bimetallism it does this best, the question as to its
money or commodity character is vain. Moreover, under Gresham's law, one
metal under the fixed ratio is not only "reduced to a commodity," but is
absolutely expelled from circulation and as a basis for circulation; and
we have also seen that in the last analysis both silver and gold are
commodities under any system of specie payments.
Under a republican form of government, where frequent and extreme
changes from one policy to another must be guarded against, that policy
should be adopted which most nearly conforms to justice, and which the
sense of the largest majority commends. What proposition, then, could be
fairer and more apt to commend itself to the general intelligence than
that the metals should be monetized at their commercial values from day
to day, or what policy more likely to remain unaffected by the mutations
of parties and politics?
In conclusion let me sum up the salient points: We have seen (1) that
the chief weakness of the present system is the non-availability of
silver for final redemptions; (2) that "currency reform" is inadequate
because of its unpopularity and in failing to increase the primary basis
of money by the addition of silver; and (3) that the principle of the
fixed ratio is fallacious and impracticable. On the other hand, we have
discovered Natural Bimetallism to be the application of the principles
of everyday business to that business which underlies all
others,--national finance,--and that the advantages resulting therefrom
are: It dispenses with the necessity of an international agreement with
its attendant uncertainties, perils, and delays, and at the same time
points out the way to a sound and permanent home policy upon which all
our factions could unite. It practically restores to silver its
unlimited coinage at its just market rate, injects a healthy stimulus
into the languishing silver industry, preserves our admirable system of
subsidiary coinage, and utilizes both metals as companion pillars of our
national credit. It coaxes gold to the mint, keeps it there, and does
away permanently with bond issues. It provides for the retirement of the
greenbacks, supplies their place with currency equally sound but less
hazardous, and insures the absolute parity of every dollar in
circulation with every other, and with gold. In fine, as every true
principle must, and as only a true principle can, it answers every
condition of the problem to which it applies, and commends itself as the
best, if not the only, way out of our financial embarrassments.
II. BIMETALLISM EXTINGUISHED.
BY JOHN CLARK RIDPATH.
The article on "Bimetallism Simplified" by Mr. George H. Lepper is open
to one serious criticism: the title should be changed to "Bimetallism
_Extinguished_;" for, when the argument is translated out of its
sophistical form, that is its precise meaning. We are obliged, in such a
matter as this--even at the expense of courtesy--to break through the
thin film of plausibility, and at one stroke to lay bare what is in the
bottom.
It is a marvellous thing that they who engage in excogitating this kind
of double-meaning literature about bimetallism, should suppose that the
people can any longer be deluded with it. The agents of the money-power
and the fuglemen of the dominant political party seem to think that a
certain species of casuistry and complicated makeshift of argument can
still be forced into currency, as it has been in the past, and that the
great American democracy can be persuaded thereby to accept fallacy for
truth and thus to perpetuate the reigning Dynasty of Robbers. Messieurs,
you can perform this feat no longer.
Mr. Lepper admits in the outset that the McKinley administration is
doomed _unless_ it can provide the country with a sound and popular
system of bimetallism. As a matter of fact, a sound system of
bimetallism is simply bimetallism. A popular system of bimetallism is
simply bimetallism--neither more nor less. In this vital matter, the
popularity will take care of itself, and so will the soundness.
In the next place, we observe that if the McKinley administration
depends upon the adoption by it of _any_ system of bimetallism, then the
administration is doomed, deeply and darkly doomed, already. Let the
world know that the McKinley administration will not provide, and has
never intended to provide, the country with _any_ kind of bimetallism.
The administration has no notion of such a thing. It was not created for
such a useful and honorable destiny. It was created to prevent
bimetallism by treacherously pretending to be in favor of it. They who
created the administration, they who determine and will continue to
determine its action, openly sneer at any system of money except the
gold-based system of monometallism.
Mr. Lepper must be aware of this fact. Indeed it is to be hoped that
there is not any longer _one man_ in the United States so far gone down
the slopes of delusion and idiotic infatuation as to imagine that the
hollow pretensions of this administration in the direction of
bimetallism by international agreement, or by any other method, have
ever been anything else than cunning subterfuge and treachery.
The politicians who worked out the St. Louis platform knew what they
were about. They knew that they were creating a hypocritical document
with which to deceive and ensnare the American people. They fixed their
net and made their haul. They succeeded to this extent--that they
elected their ticket and gained possession of the government. Lo, the
day of judgment has already come! Now, in the endeavor to postpone the
judgment, they prepare arguments under captions that have a friendly
sound but are at bottom bitterer than cassia and more mockful than the
laughter of Mephistopheles.
The next stage in the policy of these gentlemen is to invent something
that shall _seem_ to be bimetallism, but is not. This something they
seek to palm off on the world and to distract mankind with it until the
money sharks who are chuckling behind the gold-vaults of two continents
shall be enabled, in the confusion and _mêlée_, to shuffle off to covert
with their incalculable loads of booty.
Mr. Lepper's paper is a document of the kind described. The general
purport of it is this: "People of the United States, I am a physician. I
belong to the silver school. I am a graduate of the Bimetallic
Institute. This pill which I give you is out of the silver
pharmacopoeia. It will heal all your diseases perfectly." But when you
examine the pill which he exhibits, you will find it to be a solid bolus
of gold, filmed over with tin foil.
Mr. Lepper enters upon the discussion of the subject with the following
statement: "The vast stores of silver purchased by the United States
under the laws of 1878 and 1890 are a dead asset of the Treasury, and
cannot be utilized for purposes of redemption until sixteen ounces of
silver shall again be equivalent to one of gold." Observe what becomes
of these propositions under a truthful analysis. In the first place, our
"vast stores of silver" are _not_ vast stores. They are not nearly as
vast as they ought to be. There are no bursting vaults of silver in the
Treasury of the United States and never were. In the next place the
stores of silver are _not_ a dead asset of the Treasury. They are just
as much a living asset of the Treasury as is the accumulation of gold
therein--and in the same sense. These stores cannot be used for purposes
of redemption because _they do not exist for that purpose_. A
bimetallist who is not a bimetallist is always strong on redemption; and
he knows only one redeemer--gold. The redeeming business in our
financial plan of salvation has been altogether overdone. In the name of
wonder, what is it we want to redeem? Is it the greenbacks? Is it _any_
of our legal tender? The greenback is already constitutional money. Does
Mr. Lepper know that the greenback has been declared constitutional
money by the Supreme Court of the United States--this with only a single
dissenting vote? Does he know that every national bank bill in the
United States is finally redeemable in greenbacks? Does he know that in
our scheme of redemption, the people have only a _paper_ redeemer, while
the banks, with the connivance of the government, have a redeemer of
_gold_? Our "vast stores of silver" have only to be coined into silver
dollars; to be used as primary money, just as gold is used; to be paid
out just as gold is paid out in the transaction of national business,
and in particular in the payment of the national indebtedness. If this
is freely done, the exaggerated purchasing power of the latter metal
would at once be reduced to the normal standard. This reduction would
immediately express itself, or begin to express itself, in a general
rise of prices, in a revival of business, and in a universal restoration
of prosperity. Everything would again be well in the great Republic. All
this would happen without financial sin and without a redeemer.
Mr. Lepper very properly says that international bimetallism and
independent bimetallism "are founded upon the same errors and
misconceptions." He should have said that they are founded upon the same
_truths_ and _necessities_. For "errors," read truths, and for
"misconceptions" read necessities. The writer of "Bimetallism
Simplified" next goes on to say that whatever value may be created by
monetization is not a commercial value. Well, then, what kind of value
is it? Is it a social value, such as a man attributes to his child that
is not for sale? Or is it a political value, such as a party manager
attributes to a vote that _is_ for sale?
Let us see whether monetization does, or does not, create value. We will
not quibble about the phrase "commercial value," but come directly to
the issue of value in general. Take the case upon which the goldites so
greatly rely, that of the safe burned in a fire with a bag of gold coin
and a bag of silver coin fused within. The triumphant gold sophist says,
"The ten gold dollars fused into a lump will still be worth just ten
dollars, while the silver dollars fused into a lump will be worth only
five dollars." Of course the lump of fused gold will be worth ten
dollars when it is coined and measured by itself! Suppose that the lump
of fused silver be coined into dollars again; how much will that be
worth? Everybody who has a premonitory symptom of common sense knows
that the lump of fused silver will--_if coinable again into dollars_--be
worth just as much as the lump of fused gold. It is _because_ the lump
of fused gold is coinable again into dollars that it retains its value.
It is _because_ the lump of fused silver is _not_ coinable again, under
the present order, that it is not worth ten dollars.
What makes the difference? It is the fact of monetization for one of the
metals, and demonetization for the other. Does anybody suppose that ten
dollars of silver fused into a lump would not still be worth ten dollars
if the lump were re-coinable? Does anybody suppose that ten gold dollars
fused into a lump would still be worth ten dollars if the lump were not
re-coinable? The fact of monetization not only confirms the value of one
metal, but it insures the value of the other also--that is, it _would_
insure it if monetization were not denied. Incidentally, this plain
statement of the case utterly confutes the only seemingly valid
argument, that is the two-bag argument, with which the goldites have
been able to support their theory of "sound" money. Mr. Lepper's
assertion that monetization does not confer commercial value will have
to rise through many circles in the spiral of intelligence before it
reaches the plane of nonsense.
Further on in his paper, Mr. Lepper says: "The inevitable result of free
coinage at a fixed ratio, is to expel the undervalued metal from
circulation." Who taught him that? Perhaps Gresham taught him. If so, he
taught him what is not true. It is incredible that intelligent people
should be humbugged with such a fallacious proposition as Gresham's
so-called "law." Suppose that under free coinage, gold be undervalued,
and suppose that, being so, it begins to vanish--where will it go to? To
the Bank of England? If so, what will be the effect on the price of gold
in the Bank of England? Will not the price begin to fall at that point
at which the stream of gold pours out? And will it not continue to fall
as long as the outflow goes on? What, on the other hand, will be the
effect on the money market at that point from which the outflow is
established? Will there not be produced a stringency behind the outflow,
and will not all kinds of money begin to appreciate at that point from
which the flow begins? And will not this stringency become greater and
greater as long as the outflow continues? And will not the prices of all
kinds of money, silver in particular, begin to rise until the outflow
ceases? This is to say that the price of gold, like the price of
anything else whatsoever, will fall wherever it accumulates, and the
price of silver will rise in every place from which the gold is drained
away, until a parity of values between the two money metals shall be
inevitably established. This is the _real_ law of two money metals
circulating together; and Gresham's so-called "law" is only the
hocus-pocus and ghost of a law that is true to begin with, and is not
true to end with.
I now come to the gist of Mr. Lepper's article, and I invite particular
attention to the heart and core of the matter as he presents it. He says
(all the while declaring himself to be a bimetallist): "Let us assume
that gold only has hitherto been used as money, that 25.8 grains thereof
have been taken to be one dollar, and that it is now desired to
supplement it with the use of silver." I had not supposed that any
person in the world could be under the influence of a delusion to the
extent of propounding three such hypotheses as the foregoing. Mr. Lepper
might with equally good reason, in discussing the constitution of
nature, have said, "Let us assume that the world is a circular disk of
tin," or rather, "Let us assume that the world has always been
_regarded_ as a circular disk of tin. Let us assume that the world,
being a circular disk of tin, weighs 3,820 lbs., and that it is now
desired to improve its constitution by adding forty pounds to its weight
and by converting it into a square block." These propositions would be
just as philosophical, just as useful in argument, and just as well
warranted as those which he presents! His assumption is that gold _only_
has been used as money. But it is not true that gold only has been used
as money. It is not true that gold principally has been used as money.
It is not true that gold has been as widely used as silver. It is not
true that it is as universally used to-day as silver. It is not true
that it was used at as early a day as was silver. It is not true that it
has been used as a standard unit of money and account in the United
States as long and as universally as silver has been used. It is
therefore absurd to say, "Let us assume that gold only has been used as
money." It is preposterous to offer such a hypothesis. If we should
grant the affirmative of such an assertion, we should rush into a region
of falsehood and fanaticism identical in all particulars with that
station which the goldites now occupy, and from which they send forth
their clamor.
Mr. Lepper says further: "Let us assume that 25.8 grains hitherto have
been taken to be one dollar." But it is not true that 25.8 grains of
gold have hitherto in our American system been taken to be one dollar.
It is true that, according to our fundamental statute, and to all
subsequent statutes down to the year 1873, 25.8 grains of gold were
taken to be of _the value_ of a dollar; but they were not a dollar. Our
gold eagles were of _the value_ of ten dollars; our half eagles were of
_the value_ of five dollars; our double eagles were of _the value_ of
twenty dollars; our quarter eagles were of _the value_ of two and
one-half dollars; our one-dollar gold piece, of 1849, was _not_ one
dollar, but was of _the value_ of a dollar! The dollar was first, last,
and all the time, defined to be a coin composed of 371 1/4 grains of
pure _silver_. This is the very alphabet of the matter. I have myself
set forth these facts so many times that I am ashamed to repeat them;
for it implies that there are still people in the United States so
lacking in intelligence and information as to require the reiteration of
the bottom facts and principles in our American coinage system.
Twenty-five and eight-tenths grains of gold never did compose a dollar
in the United States until after the year 1873. Why, therefore, should
Mr. Lepper say, "Let us assume that 25.8 grains of gold have been taken
to be one dollar"? Then he goes on to say, "Let us assume that it is
desired to supplement it [that is the gold dollar] with silver." Why
should he speak of supplementing the use of gold with silver, any more
than supplementing the use of silver with gold? There is not as good
reason for the proposition to supplement gold with silver as there is to
supplement silver with gold. Herein lies the trouble with those
gentlemen who are trying to fix up a plan by which not to do it. They
begin with a series of false hypotheses. They work along from these
false assumptions until they reach some monstrous conclusion, and then
show how sound the conclusion is because it is logical!
Genuine bimetallists do no such thing. They claim the coinage of gold
and silver on terms of absolute equality. They do not propose to measure
the silver by the gold, or the gold by the silver. They propose to have
two standard units, and to use the one unit or the other unit at the
option of the debtor. They do not propose that the creditor shall decide
in which of these money metals a debt shall be paid or a contract made
valid--simply for the reason that the two units co-exist, and every
contract and engagement made among men is made in the face of this fact,
and with the full knowledge of it, and with the understanding of what it
implies. That understanding is that at the date of settlement, the
debtor, and _not_ the creditor, shall decide in which of the two
standard metal-moneys he shall discharge his obligation. The option is
his--exclusively _his_. The transaction is honorable, right, and just.
Whoever challenges it is an abettor of the scheme for robbing the debtor
by compelling him to transact his business, and in particular to pay his
debts, according to a standard unit differing from the dollar of the law
and the contract.
Of this outrageous fraud we will have no more. We spew it out of our
mouths. We spit on the proposition, under whatever garb it comes, to
compel the debtors of this nation to discharge their obligations in a
dollar differing from the dollar of the law and the contract. We do not
propose to "supplement" gold money with silver money--meaning the
subordination of the silver to the gold. We do not propose to
"supplement" silver money with gold money--meaning that the gold shall
be absolute and the silver only token. There is no "supplement" about
it. It is a simple proposition to have our money _in two kinds_, and not
in one kind. It is like laying a foundation of stone and brick. The
stone is not more dependent on the brick than the brick is dependent on
the stone. They are both built into one abutment; they both contribute
alike to its solidity and magnitude; they both enter into its
composition and are part of its structure; and they both shall stay
there, gentlemen of the gold craft, in spite of your efforts to take one
constituent part of the abutment away!
I now come to the next essential division of Mr. Lepper's article. I
call particular attention to what he proposes. He says:
"In order to make my plan as clear as possible, I shall run the risk of
seeming elementary by running through, step by step, a typical
transaction under it: Let us fancy that the reader, bearing a nugget of
gold in his left hand and another of silver in his right, and desiring
to convert them into money, repairs to the Philadelphia mint. He applies
there to the proper clerk, who, for simplicity's sake, we will suppose
performs all the operations. The clerk weighs and assays the two pieces
of metal, and finds the gold one to contain 25,800 grains of standard
gold, worth precisely $1,000, which are counted out in bills. A similar
operation reveals that the lump of silver weighs 35,500 grains, but the
clerk is observed to consult a table before saying: 'The market
equivalent of a gold dollar is to-day 710 grains; consequently your
35,500 grains are worth $50;' and he then proceeds to count out the
money in bills precisely like those given in payment for the gold. Upon
examining these at his leisure, the reader discovers imprinted thereon a
contract running as follows: 'This note entitles the bearer on demand to
[the denomination of the bill] dollars in gold or to the market
equivalent thereof in silver.'"
This paragraph needs only to be critically examined in order to show
forth the material of which it is builded. Mr. Lepper takes his two
nuggets, the one of gold and the other of silver. He goes to the mint.
The gold nugget weighs 25,800 grains; the silver nugget weighs 35,500
grains. Mr. Lepper adroitly slips in the clause that the gold nugget is
"_worth precisely a thousand dollars!_" In what units is the gold nugget
worth a thousand dollars? Why, in gold units. He says that the 35,500
grains of silver are found to be worth $50. In what units is that amount
of silver worth $50? Why, in gold units! That is, beginning with the
gold standard, and ignoring the silver standard, Mr. Lepper reaches
bimetallism! That is good. He assumes, to begin with, the thing he is
trying to prove! He assumes it in his major premise, implies it in his
minor premise, and reaches it in his conclusion. I say that is very
good. Twenty-five thousand eight hundred grains of gold are "worth
precisely $1,000," in gold dollars at the rate of 25.8 grains to the
dollar. Well, I should say so. The same would be true of tin, of
leather, or tree-molasses. Only assume that something is a standard, and
then measure that something by itself and you will get there. Mr. Lepper
gets there. Then again he assumes that the market equivalent of the gold
dollar at the date referred to, is 710 grains of silver; therefore,
35,500 grains of silver are worth just $50 in gold. Forsooth, it
requires a philosopher to tell us that; though a country schoolboy might
make it out just as well. It is only a problem in the rule of three. We
assume that silver is worth so much in gold; therefore, so much silver
will be worth so much in gold! That is, gold is the standard; but we are
a bimetallist, and we will write a paper on "Bimetallism Simplified"
showing how we can create a mono-bimetallic standard. The "mono" is the
essence of Mr. Lepper's scheme; the bimetallic part of it is sophism and
green cheese.
In his argument Mr. Lepper simply proposes to measure gold _by itself_;
and to measure silver _by gold_! That is all there is in it. He seems
not to know that anything measured by anything other than itself is not
primary money, and cannot be. Gold, when coined and made legal tender,
is primary money when measured by itself. Silver when coined and made a
legal tender is also primary money when measured by itself. Anything
coined and made a legal tender is primary money when measured by itself.
It is thus that Mr. Lepper creates a bimetallic system of money. He
proposes to keep it up in the same manner. He simply assumes that gold
is an unfluctuating, eternal standard, and that silver is a fluctuating,
impossible standard. He agrees that silver may be used as money and even
coined on a basis which assumes that it shall not be used as money and
not be coined at all, except by the measure of gold! His factitious and
absurd device is therefore not bimetallism, but monometallism on a basis
of gold. He might substitute pewter for silver in his scheme, and it
would be just as good; he might substitute putty or plaster of paris,
and his plan would work as well.
Such a scheme is not bimetallism at all. It is monometallism pure and
simple. I have, in a private way, pointed out the fact to Mr. Lepper
that his plan is not what it pretends to be. I have tried to show him
that what he proposes is simply a delusion of goldite hocus-pocus. As a
matter of fact, THE ARENA has not the space to be devoted to the
dissemination of such literature as Mr. Lepper's article. I did not wish
to subject the writer of "Bimetallism Simplified" to this castigation,
but he would have it so. It is no doubt an entertaining business with
Mr. Lepper to work his elaborate scheme for pretending to do a thing,
and not doing it. Practically, I might urge upon his attention the fact
that what he proposes will satisfy nobody; certainly it will not satisfy
the McKinley administration. That administration does not propose to do
_anything_. It proposes to stand still, in the midst of much bluster,
hoping all the time that the gold standard will become more and more
fixed on the American people, and that the "silver delusion" will
subside.
Mr. Lepper will have his labor for his pains. His system will be laughed
to scorn by all the goldites proper, and it is certainly rejected as
spurious, impossible, and absurd by all genuine bimetallists. I wish to
remark in this case, that the term "goldite" applied to the
monometallist, is not a misnomer or an unwarranted epithet; for
monometallists advocate the establishment of gold money only, as the
primary money and money of ultimate redemption. On the other hand, the
term "silverite" is a misnomer; if accepted, it misleads, for it implies
that he who is characterized as a silverite is a believer in silver only
as the primary money and money of ultimate redemption. There are no
people of this class of whom we have heard.
Bimetallists believe in the use of both moneys freely and on terms of
perfect equality; they will be satisfied with nothing less. They know
that they are in the majority, and that they cannot be ultimately
defrauded of their purpose. They intend to restore our coinage to what
it was before the Act of 1873. By such restoration they propose to break
the corner on gold and to reduce the exaggerated purchasing power of
that metal to the normal standard. They intend that this reduction in
the purchasing power of gold shall be answered--as they know it will
be--with a corresponding rise in the prices of all the products of
labor. They intend in this way to achieve prosperity; they intend to
wrong no man--not even the bondholder; they intend that every man shall
have his rights according to the law and the contract; they intend to
break faith with none; they intend to march right on to the achievement
of this result; in doing so, they intend to consult themselves. They
know full well that the so-called "great commercial nations" will be
glad enough to trade with us, and to take our money in both kinds too.
If not, we hold the rod! If any nation under heaven proposes to
discriminate against the United States of America because of our
bimetallic standard of money, let that nation try it! We shall see who
comes out best in that contest.
When the weak-kneed, the time-serving, and the cowardly shall be
expelled from power; when American patriots are in the high places of
authority; when the people's voice shall be heard as the voice of many
waters,--all men shall then be assured that the great republic is able
to do its own business in its own way, asking favor of none, menacing
none, and fearing none! When that good day comes with the end of the
century, such literature as Mr. Lepper's "Bimetallism Simplified," read
in the retrospect and in the light of a better verdict of the people,
will seem to the thoughtful student of history to have been the product
of some humorist, indulging a sarcastical disposition at the expense of
the very theory which he sets forth in his article.
THE SEGREGATION AND PERMANENT ISOLATION OF CRIMINALS.
BY NORMAN ROBINSON.
What shall be done with confirmed and incorrigible offenders? For a good
many thousand years the world has been wrestling with this problem, and
in this year of grace it is seemingly very little nearer a rational
solution than when the first fraternal brawl sent one brother into his
grave, and another into exile with the perpetual brand of a murderer
blazing upon his terror-stricken brow.
The savage settles the matter with a tomahawk or a war club. The remedy
is at least effectual, and society in the kraal or the tepee does not
bother its dusky brain about the possible reform of the offender. Any
type of criminality that is inconvenient or unpopular is, therefore,
summarily buried in the nearest grave.
Up to the time of the Christian era, the savage and the civilized man
alike held substantially the same theories. The one idea that dominated
all criminal law was punishment. The statutes of Draco and Lycurgus
never harbored the thought of moral improvement, much less made
provision for the reform of the criminal. Roman law and Greek law were
little better. The one right which all offenders possessed was the right
to be punished. Reformation was entirely a personal matter, which
theoretically in rare instances was possible, to which the law, save in
capital cases, interposed no special obstacles, and to which it gave no
special encouragement.
With the advent of a new and more merciful dispensation, we find
gradually creeping in a belief that the criminal classes have some
rights which society is bound to respect, and that not the least
important of these is the right to reform. For two thousand years these
not necessarily conflicting ideas of reform and punishment have
travelled down the centuries in a medley of incongruous and often
contradictory systems of criminal law. As the better classes have
generally made and administered the law, it is not strange that the
elder and more savage idea has on the whole been dominant, and that,
taking the world together, the reform of criminals is still rather a
side issue than an object of far-reaching and systematic legislative
enactment.
Even the most optimistic student of penology would be compelled to admit
that our present methods of dealing with criminals are unsatisfactory to
the last degree. Our systems of punishment do not punish in any such
sense as to be a terror to evil-doers; our systems of reformation do not
reform. The whole thing goes on in a vicious round of self-perpetuating
infamy. The central idea of our modern penal system--and it is certainly
a very venerable one--is that in some way the world will be greatly
benefited by shutting up its law-breakers for a longer or shorter
period, feeding them liberally, giving them a period of enforced steady
habits and steady work, and after a while taking off this straight
jacket of compulsory morality, and turning them loose again with
improved criminal skill and sharpened appetites to prey upon society in
the old way.
The actual result of this crowding of more or less confirmed vice into
one concentrated aggregation, is simply to intensify the evil it was
intended to remedy. The convict who enters a prison cell for the first
time--perhaps as the result of some sudden and overpowering
temptation--a man who at heart is no better and no worse than his
neighbors, and who, if by any chance he had escaped conviction, would
have finished his life as an average citizen, as a friend and advocate
of the law--finds himself here in an entirely new environment.
Self-respect is gone. The old motive for honesty is gone. He enters the
new and stifling atmosphere of concentrated crime, and with it comes the
feeling that the world is all against him. It is his first offence, but
it is by no means likely to be his last. Every man he sees, save the
grim rifle-carrying guard who growls and swears at him, is a convicted
criminal. Every object that his eyes fall upon intensifies the lesson
that he is henceforth to be counted among the enemies of his race. Every
breath that he breathes reeks with the malaria of crime. He is now an
enlisted soldier in a warfare against right and law and social order.
He is in the devil's own training school. The seven other "spirits more
wicked than himself" are all around him. Whatever prison rules may say,
there are certain to be clandestine meetings, secret conferences, in
which the novice is initiated into the higher degrees of the freemasonry
of crime. Schemes of profitable law-breaking swarm in the teeming brains
of these wearers of the stripes, to be turned into actual deeds in "the
good time coming," when these apt pupils of the high school of depravity
shall be free again to make war upon the peace and welfare of the world.
Is it any wonder that this first offender comes out of prison a
confirmed criminal, and that "the last state of that man is worse than
the first"?
If the same business sense were used in this matter which is ordinarily
given to the management of great human concerns, we should soon find
some way of improving upon this discouraging condition of affairs. No
merchant in his senses would discharge a dishonest clerk for a term of
ninety days with the distinct understanding that he was to spend his
enforced vacation in the society of thieves and cutthroats, and at the
end of the time be taken back again into his old place as though nothing
had happened. The railroad president who should discharge a drunken
engineer, and then after six months give him hold of his old throttle
again, although it was in evidence that he had spent his retirement in a
whiskey saloon, studying under competent tuition the latest methods of
holding up trains, would be very apt to be bundled off at the next
meeting of the board of directors to manage railroads from the inside of
a lunatic asylum. Courts and judges and lawyers are about the only
people on the outside that do business in that way.
Is there no help for this state of things? Must the machinery of justice
go on forever grinding over the same vile grist, retrying and
reimprisoning old offenders, cultivating rather than repressing the
law-breaking instinct, passing on to still lower depths of depravity the
soul once caught in the meshes of crime, and at last dragging the great
masses of offenders down to one common level of hopeless and helpless
hostility to social order and law?
It is, of course, much easier to point out faults than to suggest
effective remedies. I am persuaded that some happy inspiration of
genius will yet give us methods, probably so simple that we shall wonder
that they have not always been used, by which many of the gravest evils
which disgrace our present system will be effectually removed. I think
the key to the whole problem will ultimately be found in one
word--_segregation_. Worcester defines "to segregate" "to gather in a
flock, to set apart, to separate from others."
In pursuance of this idea let us suppose, save in the case of certain
crimes that disclose confirmed and hopelessly vicious tendencies, that
all first offenders were counted in a class by themselves. For these
reformatories should be built, in which a complete segregation of the
various classes of law-breakers should be made, and that, too, with the
same idea uppermost which prevails in modern hospital practice, that
infectious cases should in all instances be especially isolated.
Criminal infection is as real and morally quite as disastrous as is
physically that of cholera or smallpox. So with this predominating idea
of segregation; and with a wise discrimination which might be difficult
in the beginning, but which experience would more or less perfectly
supply, the various classes of first offenders should be separated into
distinct and non-communicating families. Hard labor should here mean
hard labor. Rigid discipline coupled with coarse but wholesome food
should emphasize the fact that this was a place, not of comfortable
leisure, but of reformatory punishment. At the same time such
educational and moral influences as enlightened experience could supply
should be brought continuously to bear, to give new aims, inspire new
motives, and impart health, strength, and soundness to morally weak but
not necessarily hopelessly criminal natures.
Under enlightened management, commitment to such reformatories might be
made for an indefinite period, with the same limited discretion that the
law now gives to courts of justice, to be dependent largely upon the
behavior of the criminal, and to be determined not before, but after his
term of imprisonment began. The superintendent and board of managers
should, in that case, be clothed with large discretionary powers to
dismiss, to detain, to place in higher or lower classes, as their best
judgments should dictate, and as the actual and tried needs and progress
of reform in each individual case might demand. The vast, costly, and
architecturally imposing structures which are now denominated
"reformatories," and which in many cases might be much more
appropriately labelled "failures," if not discarded altogether, could be
supplemented by simple and inexpensive structures, giving abundant room
and light and air. With such conditions and surroundings, and under such
a system intelligently administered, it is reasonable to believe that no
small proportion of first offenders, who, under our present method,
drift into the hopelessly, and it might in many cases be added,
helplessly, criminal classes, would be restored to moral soundness and
self-respecting citizenship.
But with the most efficient system of reformation which human wisdom
could devise, there would still be a large contingent of incorrigible
offenders, who, from hereditary taint, bad environment, or other causes,
have cut themselves off from all retreat, burned the bridges behind
them, and enlisted in a life warfare against human society and law. Most
second offenders and those whose brutal past points to an irredeemable
future should properly be classed as life criminals, and with these,
society, while not forgetting "the quality of mercy," should deal with
firm hand and inexorable justice.
As our government is not so situated that penal colonies are
practicable, walled villages might be built with all the safeguards
which modern science and inventive skill can supply for the absolute and
permanent isolation of these "life criminals." In these penal villages,
various grades and classes should be placed each by itself. Behind these
never-opening gates, and under conditions that should relieve the world
at once and forever of their presence, these avowed and unrepentant
enemies of social and civil order should be compelled to "work out their
own salvation."
No great and costly prisons would be needed. Simple and inexpensive
cottages, each with its separate plot of ground, with furniture and
housekeeping arrangements on the most frugal scale, with absolute
necessaries in food and clothing, at least for a time, would be
required. The greatest possible liberty should be given to each
individual convict. The industrious should be assured of the full
benefit of their toil. Those who would not work, should find here the
same penalties for idleness as obtain in the world they had left. Here
might be gathered the whole round of industry--artisans, shops,
manufacturers of all kinds, aided by every appliance of modern
machinery. Schools, libraries, and even churches would by no means be
excluded from this life-convict home. There is no reason why such a
community of criminals might not ultimately become largely
self-supporting and self-governing. They could have their own courts,
their own lawyers, their own judges, their own system of penal law, and
their own machinery for its enforcement.
To each small company of men there should be allotted a cottage, which
they could call their own. As far as possible these men should be left
to themselves. The outworking of social and economic laws under such
conditions might sometimes be summary and savage, but it would
ultimately be salutary. Though for a while, save as it was held back by
the mailed hand of military power, crime might run riot, the instinct of
self-preservation would at last assert itself. The murderer does not
like to be murdered; the highway robber does not like to be robbed; all
classes of criminals object to taking their own medicine; and so it
would come about that, even out of elements the most incongruous and
unpromising, some form of social order would finally be evolved. It is
needless to say that the sexes should occupy separate villages. This in
itself would cut off one very formidable source of new recruits for the
army of crime. Indeed, it is hardly too much to predict that, if this
plan of permanent segregation and isolation were carried out for even a
single generation, crime would sensibly diminish, our overcrowded courts
would be relieved, taxation be lessened, and the staggering shoulders of
modern civilization be to some extent unburdened from one of the
heaviest loads they are now condemned to bear. It may seem an ungenerous
thing to say, but it is to be feared that the opposition to any such
plans would be likely to come from those whose familiarity with the
vices of the present system should best fit them to labor for and most
earnestly to desire its improvement. Enlightened physicians gladly join
in any scheme which promises to prevent or lessen disease, in spite of
the fact that their living depends upon its prevalence. So, enlightened
judges, lawyers, and court officers might be expected cordially to
approve of any system of moral hygiene which gave promise of efficiency
as a prophylactic against crime. It is to be feared, however, that there
would be a numerically large contingent who, like "Demetrius the
silversmith," would feel that "this our craft is in danger," and who
openly or secretly would do their best, as they have in a hundred
instances in the past, to prevent the lopping off of a single twig from
that wide-spreading tree of evil, whose fruit brings little scruple and
no small gain to the cunning craftsmen who manage the costly and
complicated machinery of the courts.
If such a system as has been rudely outlined were made absolutely
secure, and the power of pardoning boards removed or greatly restricted,
it might be wise to abolish the death penalty altogether. Juries might
then have fewer scruples, and acquittals upon technical grounds, in
spite of plain and abundant evidence, become less frequent. Mob law
feeds largely upon the belief that even the worst criminals stand in
little danger of punishment, but that "by hook or by crook"--mostly
"crook"--especially if they or their friends can command means to hire
lawyers and invoke the dilatory machinery of the courts, they are almost
certain to escape. Whatever, therefore, tends to render the punishment
of crime more speedy and certain is a direct discouragement to these
sudden and savage outbursts of popular indignation against crime.
In the classification of offenders and their assignment to different
penal villages, there would, no doubt, be some so atrociously and
fiendishly criminal that it would be a cruelty to others and a mistaken
kindness to them to permit them ever to go beyond their present prison
walls. By the plan suggested, the penitentiaries in most of the States,
now so crowded, while being relieved of a large part of their present
tenants, could still be utilized for the confinement of these pariahs of
crime.
Of course, in the working out of the plan suggested, there is abundant
room for all the skill and wisdom which past history and modern
experience can supply. Whether this or some better method shall finally
prevail depends on so many uncalculated and incalculable contingencies,
that he would be a very venturesome prophet who should attempt to
forecast the future. It does not, however, seem reasonable that, in all
the upheavals of modern thought, the questioning of old methods, and the
suggestions of new and better ones, which these final years of the
century are bringing, the treatment of the criminal classes shall be the
one question that defies solution, or that the new æon which is soon to
open shall find us still bound to a system which is confessedly a
failure. Is it too much to hope that we can greet the opening of the
twentieth century with a lustrum of prison reform, which shall bring at
once the noblest mercy to the criminal, combined with absolute
protection to society from its most avowed and most persistent foes?
HOW TO INCREASE NATIONAL WEALTH BY THE EMPLOYMENT OF PARALYZED INDUSTRY.
BY B. O. FLOWER.
It is right and necessary that all men should have work to do which
shall be worth doing and which should be done under such conditions
as would make it neither over-wearisome nor over-anxious. Turn this
claim about as I may, think of it as long as I can, I cannot find
that it is an exorbitant claim.--_William Morris._
On the 18th of last May, while in a small restaurant on Fifth Avenue, in
Chicago, my attention was attracted by a large number of men who had
congregated on both sides of the street in front of the office of the
Chicago _Daily News_. In answer to my inquiry, a gentleman at my side
explained that these men were waiting to see the "Want" column of the
_News_, in the hope of being able to secure work. "It is an old, old
story," he continued. "Day after day crowds of men gather here and
anxiously wait for the _News_ to appear, as this paper contains more
'Want' advertisements than any other Chicago daily." I waited until the
boys rushed from the office with the newly printed papers, and saw the
men hurriedly buy copies. I noticed how scores upon scores of eyes
searched the "Help Wanted" columns, and how, one by one, they started in
quest of work. I noticed the countenances of the weary watchers. Among
them were to be seen almost all types of faces, but all, save one, were
anxious, careworn, or stolid. I shuddered as, standing inside the
restaurant unobserved, I beheld this sight of appalling misery and
national shame. The faces of these men have haunted me ever since.
Hunger was there, hate was there, despair was hovering over more than
one countenance. There were wan, dull eyes, wolfish eyes, and eyes
eloquent with mute appeals for kindness. There was the hunted look of a
beast at bay, and the craven expression of a broken spirit. One only
among the throng seemed able to be merry, though his thin face and worn
clothes indicated his wretchedness. The tragedy of these lives remains
with me. I know that this awful condition is unnecessary. I know that a
little more conscience, a little more love, a keener sense of justice,
and a little honest concern for the rights of men and the enduring
welfare of the state, a settled determination to overcome this condition
and place the good of the people and the cause of justice above a
shortsighted policy of selfishness, would change the whole aspect of
things, now so ominous, so menacing, and so essentially unjust. This
panorama of exiled industry, seeking vainly for employment, may be
witnessed from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
I am not of that number who can regard these spectacles with
indifference, nor can I feel, as do some others, that because the
present order is essentially unjust in its practical workings it is well
to turn a cold shoulder to movements calculated to arrest the downward
drift of life and lessen the unfathomable misery of the poor in order
that the crisis may be hastened. For while I believe that the present
order is as surely outgrown as was feudalism in the sixteenth century,
and though I believe most profoundly that this order must pass away or
civilization perish, as have perished the civilizations of former ages,
yet I also appreciate the fact, which to me is very important, that the
only way to bring about the revolution peaceably is, first, to educate
the brain and touch the conscience of the people; and, second, to check
the growing bitterness and hate in the hearts of our unfortunates by
giving them employment and treating them with justice and humanity. If a
crisis is precipitated, fed by blind hate and a bitterness born of a
consciousness of injustice long endured, it will assume the form of an
uncontrollable storm, a blind, passionate outburst, in which the guiding
influences of reason, judgment, and conscience will be absent. It will
spread devastation in all directions, destroying the innocent as well as
the guilty. If, on the other hand, we push forward an intelligent
educational agitation, appealing to the judgment, the conscience, and
the sense of right in the people, and at the same time supply means for
maintaining self-respecting manhood among the unemployed until this
waiting time is over, our civilization will move onward without the
crash or shock of force, the destruction of property, and the loss of
life incident to all struggles in which physical force and blind passion
dominate. It is necessary to examine this problem on the side of human
dignity and on the side of national life. The question of utility,
though of far less concern in its ultimate effect on conditions, has
also an important place in the discussion.
Only under conditions which are fundamentally unjust, and only where the
finer sensibilities of man have been blinded and deadened, could it be
possible to witness the spectacle of millions of men and women begging
for work, and begging in vain, in a nation of fabulous wealth and almost
boundless resources; and yet such a condition prevails in our republic
to-day. It is, therefore, time for every patriotic citizen to lay aside
all partisan contentions and face this great question as we would face
any great danger which suddenly came upon the nation, not as partisans,
but as patriots; not as warring factions seeking victory for some
special body or party, but as men and women who have the welfare of the
race at heart, and who appreciate the gravity of the situation. It is
the eternal law of recompense that when justice is long denied and the
rights of man are systematically ignored, though the sufferers may
Samson-like crush themselves in the ruins of the temple, yet the temple
and its inmates also must fall. Or if by some chance the ruin comes not
through the strength of the burdened ones, it will nevertheless come
with unerring certainty, and not unfrequently through the very excesses
of those who have hardened their hearts against the cry of justice.
Such is the interdependence of the units in national life that a wrong
committed against one injures the whole people; and when that wrong is
inflicted upon a large number of the units, and is of long duration, its
fatal effects become very apparent. You cannot crush a finger or a toe
without causing your whole body to suffer in consequence. You may
disregard the hurt, you may ignore the wound until mortification sets
in, but the result means death or the loss of one of the most valuable
members of your body. It is precisely so with national life; for such is
the divine economy, such the inevitable law of progress, that only by
conscious recognition of human brotherhood, and of the rights and
obligations which it implies, can any nation or civilization move onward
and upward without those great periods of depression and decline which
too frequently end in total eclipse.
Shortsighted, indeed, is that policy which places gold above manhood.
When lust for gain stifles the voice of conscience, and the cry of the
disinherited is heard throughout a land of marvellous wealth, a nation
is confronted by a deadly peril which calls for a supreme effort on the
part of every man and woman of conviction.
It is useless to close our eyes to the fact that the rising tide of
bitterness is turning into hate, and that hate darkens the eye of
judgment, obscures reason, and deadens conscience. A few years ago, when
I wrote a brief paper on the menace of the unemployed, I was assured
that the deplorable condition then present was temporary, that in a few
months at most it would be a thing of the past, and that therefore it
was not a problem calling for the intervention of the government; but
to-day there are far more unemployed than there were then. The problem
is assuming gigantic proportions, and the instincts of self-preservation
second the demand of humanity in calling for immediate measures for the
relief and the maintenance of self-respecting manhood. Whenever a
workingman becomes a tramp or sinks into the social cellar, as tens of
thousands are now doing, the nation suffers a real injury. Present
conditions call for prompt action. The unemployed must receive that
succor which will in no conventional sense be charity, but which will
elevate instead of degrade. And this can be done by the state allowing
those armies of men who now unwillingly represent unproductive labor to
become armies for increasing the wealth of the country, by extending the
productive area of the nation's domain, and by providing against the
ruin which constantly menaces tens of thousands of industrious people in
such a way as to stimulate business in all its ramifications by placing
in circulation the equivalents for the work performed and the wealth
earned. The ancient Romans understood the importance of having great
works substantially built. The mighty highways which centred in the
Eternal City, and the great public works which contributed so much to
the comfort and happiness and grandeur of Rome, while not constructed
with a view to affording employment to the unemployed, were wise
measures for the benefit of the state, and it is safe to say that no
expenditures were more serviceable or contributed more to the greatness
and essential wealth of the empire, save the money spent in the
patronage of education.
The ancient Peruvians went further. They argued that the happiness,
welfare, and prosperity of one was the concern of all. They banished
poverty by giving every person productive work, and by their system
transformed every foot of tillable land into productive gardens,
enabling them to support in affluence an immense population, only a
small fraction of which could have subsisted under conditions such as
prevail with us. In our country to-day we have vast areas of useless
land, only waiting to be transformed into tillable acres second in
richness to no land in the country. To-day we have necessary work in the
way of internal improvements which is imperatively demanded, and which,
but for the slothfulness and indifference of our government, would be
performed, thereby enormously increasing the wealth of the nation; while
the performing of the same would give productive employment to millions
of idle hands.
A striking illustration of the criminal neglect and shortsightedness of
our government was seen this last spring in the devastation created by
the floods in the Mississippi Valley, rendered possible through the
inadequate levee system. Here the losses to crops and in stock killed
are said to have been considerably over twelve million dollars, to say
nothing of the enormous outlay which will be required to patch up the
levees and make the devastated farms again habitable. This great loss
would have been averted had the government acted upon the suggestions
which I made some years ago in a paper on "Emergency Measures for
Maintaining Self-respecting Manhood," in which it was shown that a
permanent levee was practicable, and could be built in such a way as to
resist the floods, reclaim many hundreds of thousands of acres of rich
land, and protect millions of dollars' worth of property which is now
under a yearly menace through danger of floods.
In this enterprise, which I shall again touch upon, we have a striking
illustration of a practicable work which would immediately increase the
national wealth far beyond the outlay required, while it would also
change an army of idle consumers into an army of wealth-producers.
But as I wish to consider this question more at length a little later,
I now pass on to a brief notice of the vast tracts of land in the West,
which have not yet fallen into the clutches of land syndicates, and
which for a comparatively small outlay by proper irrigation could be
transformed into garden spots. Take, for example, the State of Nevada.
Here we find immense tracts of arid land, representing millions of
acres, which to-day are unproductive for lack of moisture, but which,
wherever irrigation has been introduced, have been transformed into
wonderfully productive garden land. Mr. William M. Smythe, in the April
_Forum_, has given some very interesting facts in regard to the
agricultural resources of Nevada, from which we summarize the following:
The most painstaking and systematic inquiry, however, ever made
with regard to the extent of her water supply resulted in the
conclusion that at least 6,000,000 acres of rich soil could be
irrigated. The commission of 1893 reported twenty lakes and sixteen
rivers of importance, which with minor streams and springs could be
made to irrigate upward of 5,000,000 acres; and artesian wells
would bring up the total to the figure above named. It should be
borne in mind that the splendid agricultural prosperity of Colorado
and Utah is based upon a cultivated area of only about 2,000,000
acres. It seems, then, that, so far as her agricultural
capabilities are concerned, Nevada might sustain at least as many
people as do Utah and Colorado put together, at their present stage
of development. The products of the irrigated lands of Nevada are
the fruits, the vegetables, cereals, and grasses of the temperate
zone, and, in the extreme southern portions, the more delicate
products of the semi-tropics, such as figs, olives, pomegranates,
almonds, Madeira walnuts, and, in sheltered places, even oranges.
When we add that Nevada, like all parts of the arid plateau, is
distinguished for pure dry air, an extraordinary amount of
sunshine, and consequently a very high degree of healthfulness, it
can be scarcely maintained that the state is destitute of
attractions.
What is true in regard to the possibilities of Nevada is true of large
areas of land in other Western States and Territories. It must be
remembered that irrigated land can be relied upon to yield bountiful
crops with practical regularity, as the water-supply is ever present,
while for most persons the fine pure air in these high regions is
peculiarly healthful and invigorating. Thus the great West still offers
millions of acres of exceedingly productive land which can be
transformed into gardens and made to increase the national wealth by
untold millions if the government will treat these tracts as any wise or
thrifty private owner would treat them. If the government or the various
commonwealths would take all the available land which can be irrigated
and give to the unemployed work at fair wages until the great desert
tracts become fertile areas, the national or state domain would be
enormously increased in wealth at a relatively small cost through the
wise employment of the now paralyzed hand of industry.
Returning to the question of the Mississippi river, let our national
government build a permanent levee, which, like the great highways of
ancient Rome, should be built to endure for generations.
"There are," says ex-Governor Lionel Sheldon, "over twenty-three
million acres exposed to overflow from the mouth of the Ohio to the
Gulf of Mexico. The productive power of these lands is not excelled
in any part of the world, and by proper cultivation they would
annually add many hundreds of millions of dollars to the national
wealth and afford profitable employment for several hundreds of
thousands of people."
Eminent engineers who have examined the levees under the auspices of the
Mississippi river commissioners, agree that the problem is one which can
be successfully solved if a sufficient amount is appropriated for so
gigantic an undertaking, which would require substantial uniformity in
the width of the channel of the river by building spurs and dikes at
points where the Mississippi is too wide, the proper riveting of the
banks wherever caving is likely to occur, together with the building of
permanent levees of a height and strength sufficient to confine the
waters in the channel. It is stated that since 1865 the cost of repairs
has amounted to considerably over forty million dollars, yet owing to
the fact that this work is of a temporary character the benefits which
would be derived from a permanent levee are lost, and every few years
the floods necessitate fresh expenditures of vast sums of money. Hence
this patchwork policy is shortsighted and in the long run the most
expensive. The carrying out of a comprehensive plan for permanent
improvements by the erection of impregnable levees and the governing of
the currents by dikes and spurs, would give us a territory, now
absolutely useless, which would annually add hundreds of millions of
dollars to our national wealth.
The great arid plains of the West and the levees of the Mississippi are
merely examples of internal improvements of a perfectly legitimate
character which could be undertaken most properly by the general
government, under Sec. VIII of the Constitution, which authorizes the
"raising of revenue to pay the debts and provide for the common defence
and the _general welfare_ of the United States." By such internal
improvements as those mentioned above the nation's wealth would be
increased to a far greater extent than by the amount of outlay required
for the completion of the work, while these enterprises would at once
give productive employment to our millions of out-of-works, and this
army of employed would put into immediate circulation large sums of
money which would at once stimulate business through all its
ramifications and bring about the long-hoped-for good times.
But at the very threshold of the discussion we are met with the
declaration that we have no money in the Treasury with which to carry on
these great projects. Before answering this objection I wish to point
out the fact that we have millions of dollars to spend for a useless
navy, a navy which in the hands of our senile government does not
protect the life or the property of American citizens, a navy which is a
constant and an enormous expense. While almost unlimited sums can be
raised for the building and equipment of battleships, we have not a
dollar to aid honest industry to maintain self-respecting manhood by
engaging in works which would add immensely to the real wealth of the
nation.
And, again, before pointing out how this money could be raised, I would
call attention to the fact that this cry is by no means a new one. It
was raised, and with much more show of foundation, during the dark hours
of the early sixties, but the great Civil War exploded the fallacy. One
would think that in the presence of the stupendous facts connected with
the conduct of our Civil War, even if the question of the value to the
state of an independent, contented, and prosperous manhood should be
left out of consideration, the shallowness of the objection would be so
apparent that it would have no weight with thoughtful persons. Let us
not forget that there was a time in the history of our country when the
Treasury of our government was empty, a time of great national peril
when gold had fled across the seas or into the vaults of the bankers
and usurers, as it ever flees in time of danger, when public credit was
greatly impaired by the presence of war within our borders and a strong
probability that even if the national government escaped overthrow a
large number of the States would become an independent nation. In this
crisis we had men in charge of the government who were statesmen, men
great enough to rise to the emergency of the hour. Now, if we were able
under such conditions to carry to a successful termination the most
expensive and memorable civil war of modern times by the aid of the
greenback, surely there would be no risk in resorting to a similar
medium of exchange for the carrying on of a work which would immediately
add to the nation's resources and free from the bondage of involuntary
idleness a large army of men who are now a burden to society and a
danger to stable government.
If, however, the fiction by which bondholders enslave the people still
holds such power over our legislators and the public mind that the
menace of the growing army of unemployed, the injury to the state by the
enforced degradation of her children, and the continued unproductivity
of both soil and industry must go on unless a concession is made, it
would be wiser to make the concession than to let the crime against
manhood continue. I therefore suggest that bonds on the land to be
reclaimed be issued to the amount of the national notes used for these
great works in redeeming the now useless land. The bonds issued against
these lands could be cancelled as the lands were sold. I do not for a
moment hold that this is necessary. I only advance this suggestion in
case the prejudice fostered by selfish and interested classes might
otherwise defeat a work of such inconceivable importance.
The inevitable result which would follow such wise, statesmanlike, and
humane proceedings on the part of the government may be briefly
summarized as follows:
Through this judicious, far-sighted, and enlightened course the
government would, first, so strengthen and intrench herself in the
hearts of the people that armories and militia would be little needed
against the menace of lawlessness _within our borders_, while this wise
solicitude and care for the welfare of her citizens would make millions
of persons, who to-day have little or no love for a nation which is
indifferent to their manly cry for work, loyal defenders of the flag. By
such a broad, wise, and just course the United States would do more than
she could in any other way to render herself impregnable in time of
danger. Second, by affording millions of her citizens the opportunity to
engage in productive work she would utilize a vast amount of idle energy
in adding to the permanent wealth of the nation, and the state would be
fulfilling the noble function of government to promote justice, increase
happiness, and ennoble citizenship. She would be restoring hope and the
spirit of independent manhood to her children, and so would prevent a
great increase in beggary, in degradation, and in crime, which must
inevitably follow unless present conditions are radically changed. From
an economic point of view the government would be far richer through the
amount saved from what otherwise would be required to provide prisons,
poorhouses, and court expenses. Third, it would add vastly to the
nation's wealth in increasing by untold millions the annual product of
real wealth, while it would also supply homes for millions of
home-seekers. Fourth, it would bring prosperity to America.
Let us suppose three millions of those now idle should be thus enabled
to engage in productive work, there would then be placed in circulation
each week from five to ten million dollars more money than there is now,
and it would be paid out in small amounts, so that the bulk of it would
instantly go into general circulation. The men would not only purchase
for their own needs, but would send a part of their earnings to their
loved ones, who would thus be able to do what they cannot now do--buy
coal, wood, groceries, and, indeed, life's various necessaries. The
prices of the farmer's crops would naturally rise, and he in turn would
be able to increase his buildings and purchase more machinery. The
increased demand for clothing would raise the price of wool and cotton,
while it would start up the factories without any resort to artificial
measures, such as levying a tax on imported goods.
The difference between present hard times and low prices and good times
and high prices would be illustrated in this way: To-day millions of our
people are idle, a load and an expense; they cannot buy what they need
at any price, for they have nothing to buy with. Millions of others
have to curtail in every way, frequently doing without many needed
things, for times are such that it is impossible for them to do more
than barely subsist. Now, the millions who to-day buy nothing, because
they have nothing to buy with, under these provisions for internal
improvements would soon be buying regularly, because they would have the
wherewithal to buy. They would gladly pay the farmer, manufacturer, and
merchant more than what they now ask because they would have something
to buy with, while to-day they have nothing; and those other millions
who are curtailing expenses to the last degree would gladly pay the
increased amount, for all lines of productive business would receive an
impetus from the great addition to the circulating medium put forth as a
result of the productive work being carried on. Now, our tariff taxes
may put up prices for the favored classes, but they thereby increase the
burdens of all save those who are enabled to gain added wealth from the
taxes imposed on the millions who are yet able to buy, while the small
increase in the demand for work, so long as millions are unable to buy
what is made, would make but little impression on the vast army of
unemployed.
_A tariff tax is a burden to the millions, stimulating prices
artificially, and benefiting chiefly the very wealthy._ But the plan for
internal improvements here outlined would give all ablebodied men
productive work which would benefit the nation far more than the amount
of the outlay involved, and afford time for the general work of
education, by which justice and equitable conditions could be brought
about, to proceed. Those who love peace, those who would see mankind
elevated and the wealth of the nation preserved and increased, should
favor this great palliative movement for maintaining self-respecting
manhood, for enriching the nation's resources, and for insuring
prosperity in the quickest and most healthful manner possible.
AN OPEN LETTER TO EASTERN CAPITALISTS.
BY CHARLES C. MILLARD.
Gentlemen: Against you individually, or as a class of persons who have
accumulated more or less wealth, and who loan it at interest to those
who perhaps have been less fortunate, I have not the least prejudice. I
believe that yours is an honest as well as a legitimate business; that
great wealth may be, and often is, won by honest means; and that it does
not border upon the marvellous that the capitalist is often an honest
man, and the pauper as often a rogue. I believe that you are as honest
as other men are, and that if you fully understood the situation in the
West and South, and knew that a certain line of conduct would result to
your own advantage financially, and also be a great benefit to the whole
country, you would act as other honest people would act under similar
circumstances; and it is because I so believe, that I write this letter.
I write neither as a partisan nor in the interests of any party, but to
give plain facts which can be easily verified, and to show how these
facts are seen and felt by those who, like myself, have been born and
bred on the boundless prairies, and have had a varied experience with
the ups and downs of life on the sunset side of the Father of Waters. I
hope by so doing to help you to realize the extent of the disasters
which a continuance of the present financial policy will inevitably
bring to _you_ as well as to us.
THE ACTUAL CONDITION.
In 1886, the chief clerk and trusted agent of a great loan company, who
has since been in the employ of Jarvis Conklin & Co., said to me: "There
is plenty of money to loan, but the securities are practically
exhausted." Everything "in sight" was covered with a mortgage. The few
who had escaped the mania of speculation did not want any mortgage on
farm or city property. Loans since then have been mostly renewals, and
for a time one company loaned money to be paid to another; but, with a
few exceptions, the Eastern money borrowed since 1880 has not been paid,
and anyone familiar with the facts does not need the gift of prophecy to
foretell that, under the present conditions, it never can or will be
paid.
The mortgages, bonds, and most of the coupons you still hold, and, in
many cases, you also have a deed to the property; but neither the one
nor the other is of any practical present value. The mortgagor is dead,
moved away, bankrupt, or working at daily labor--when he can get
work--for his daily bread. Therefore the debt is worthless, and the
property is but little better. The very best of it--costly business
blocks in the heart of the cities--is unremunerative. No intelligent
poor man would, or could, take a brick block as a gift and keep the
taxes and interest paid.
And perhaps the larger share of the city property is unoccupied or
paying no rental. He who rides upon a Western railroad can see the proof
of this from the car windows. In every city, town, village, and on not a
few farms, can be seen the broken or boarded-up windows which are the
footprints, not of time, but of the Eastern mortgage. This property
belongs to you. No Western man pays taxes or interest, and no one
expects to pay the principal. No one wants the property; no one has any
use for it; and no want ever existed which it was calculated to fill,
except in the brain of the monomaniac who built it. Whether you have
"foreclosed" or not, the property is virtually yours; the mortgagor has
no equity in it. While he had an equity, the decline in prices affected
that equity; now it affects only _your_ interest.
You own our business buildings, mansions, and cottages. You have an
everlasting grip on our public buildings, Board of Trade halls, Young
Men's Christian Association buildings, and even our churches. The Rev.
Mr. Wooley, in the pulpit of the Central Christian Church of Wichita,
said recently: "Every church building in this city, except one, is
heavily incumbered, and most of them are practically insolvent." Even
the "calamity howlers" of the "Populist" party are afraid or ashamed to
tell the truth, "and the whole truth," about our financial condition.
And it is not improving. A few farm mortgages are being paid, and
scarcely any new ones are being made except renewals; but all the
reduction so made is more than equalled by the sum of defaulted interest
payments on mortgages outstanding. The statements in the papers, that
the mortgage indebtedness of Kansas--or some other State--was reduced so
many thousand dollars during the past year, are misleading. They are
regularly published to restore "confidence." For the benefit of my
Eastern brother, I will explain, lest he may imagine that we are each
year paying back more money than we borrowed during that time, and that
therefore, in the course of geologic time, our debts would be paid.
The "reduction" is a reduction of record only. I have known of the
payment of $25 to reduce the record of $650, and $20 to make a
"reduction" of $400; and for various reasons many mortgages are
cancelled without any cash payment. These are well-known facts, and I
could give a long list of those which have come under my own personal
observation, while the mortgages which I have known to be paid in full
might be counted on the fingers of one hand.
In addition to this, nearly every city or incorporated town, and many of
the counties, have a bonded indebtedness as large as they can possibly
carry. In some cases bonds have been issued and sold to pay interest on
other bonds, and in one case at least--Pratt Centre--the interest
payments have been discontinued "by order of the council."
THE FUTURE PROSPECT.
So far I have been dealing only with the past and the present, and have
given only a plain statement of facts, the value of which must depend
upon my capacity as an observer, my opportunities for observation, and
my truthfulness as a writer. If you are inclined to be sceptical,
inquire of your neighbors who hold, or have held, Western mortgages. The
value of my forecast of the immediate future must depend upon the
character of my reasoning and judgment.
As "death and taxes" are certain, it is safe to predict that taxes will
be levied to pay the interest, and afterwards the principal, of city
bonds. Also, it may be assumed that you, who own the larger and more
valuable share of the property, will pay the lion's share of the taxes.
The Western man has "let go"; he is not "in the deal"; and when one
capitalist is taxed to pay another, he is not an "interested" party. I
sympathize with you. You have exchanged good money for bad property; and
with the property you have assumed the bulk of our _burden of taxation_.
You must pay our bonds, pay for the repairs and improvements of public
property, pay for educating our children and making our laws, and yet
you have no voice in determining when, how, or to what extent these
things shall be done; nor power to prevent the jobs and steals which
accompany such transactions in Kansas as well as in New York.
But, notwithstanding my sympathy, and the additional fact that I must
indirectly suffer from the effects of your suicidal policy, it is
amusing to see you trying to squeeze the remaining value out of _your
own property_. For, I repeat, it is yours. Interest payments will cease
in the same ratio that they have ceased, and for the same reasons. And
the principal cause will be that the mortgagor has _discovered_ that he
has no equity in the property. If property is worth only "what it will
bring in money," there are few pieces of mortgaged property in the West
in which there still remains an equity. But many farmers are economizing
and wearing rags in order to make interest payments, which can only
result in putting the evil day a little further off.
The Westerner is a practical man. When he finds that the equity is all
squeezed out of his property, and that it is still being squeezed at the
same rate, he stops paying taxes and interest, uses the property free
while you are foreclosing, saves up a little money, buys a house for
about one-tenth of the money it cost to build it, moves it onto a
"clear" lot, and is then ready to help you squeeze your property by
voting for taxes for various purposes. Under like circumstances the
farmer raises one or two crops without rent, taxes, or interest, clothes
his family more comfortably, replaces worn-out machinery, rents a farm,
and is in better circumstances than he has been for years.
THE PROPOSED REMEDY.
It may be that there is no remedy, but that will not prevent us from
trying to find one. During the last ten years we have experimented. We
have tried Democratic rule and Republican rule; the "McKinley bill" and
the "Wilson bill"; "tariff for protection" and "tariff for revenue
only"; a Treasury "surplus" and a Treasury "deficit"; yet none of these
things have sensibly affected the squeezing process. We have lost our
faith in the tariff and in tariff-tinkering, as well as in the leaders
who recommend it. We have dismissed our old political leaders and chosen
new ones; and as your "gold-standard" squeezing policy is the only
rational cause "in sight" for the origin and continuance of our
condition--to use an expressive Western phrase--we are "going for it."
We are willing that you should own and control the property which was
ours, and in which your money was invested, but when you attempt to
force upon us your financial policy, your politics, and your religion,
we object. You may own and control the property, but not us; here we
draw the line. This is what Marsh Murdock had in his mental view when he
said at the St. Louis Convention, "You want to own the country and run
it too." But the veteran editor of the _Eagle_ has changed his mind and
consented to being "run."
You have bought the leading papers, caused our editors to "change their
minds," flooded the country with a trashy literature that is an insult
to our intelligence, and provided funds to pay third-rate preachers for
preaching to us a religion which we do not want. We are not rich, yet we
are able to pay for our education and our religion--if it is a kind that
will be of any use to us.
We do not fear the result of our experiment. If we fail, the same old
squeeze will continue; if we succeed, there is a prospect of relief.
Without variation, there is not even a prospect of bettering our
condition. If we should succeed in creating that financial paradox, a
fifty-three-cent dollar, we are such political heretics as to prefer
that kind of a dollar to none, or to "confidence." We have unbounded
confidence in the dollars which jingle in our pockets, but very little
in those which exist only in the imagination, and are represented by
stocks, bonds, checks, drafts, clearing-house certificates, and other
devices, which always fail to perform the function of money in the last
extremity, when money is most needed.
Do not allow yourselves to be terrified at the ghost of a silver dollar,
for the ghost of it is all that will ever trouble you. In the event of
free coinage, the trains going East will not be loaded with silver
dollars to pay off old mortgages. I have seen a statement in Eastern
papers to the effect that we wanted cheap money with which to pay our
debts. It is a base slander; every intelligent Western man knows that,
whatever happens short of the miraculous, only a small share of our
mortgage debts will be paid.
All the holdings you now have in the West, new and old taken together,
are not worth fifty-three cents on the dollar; and you cannot now in any
way realize that much from them; and if your present policy is
indefinitely continued you have no prospect of ever realizing
fifty-three per cent on your investments. If, then, you should be paid
in silver dollars, or if a larger share of the loans should be paid
under the new conditions, you would be a gainer and not a loser by the
change. It seems to me that an increase in the volume of money and
rising prices are the opportunity for you to realize from your holdings,
for without some favorable change you will hardly realize twenty-five
per cent.
You can test the truth of these statements. Take twenty holdings, not
selected, and try to convert them into cash. Or offer them to some
capitalist who has travelled extensively in the West during the last
five years. Time will convince you, if nothing else will; but the
knowledge may come a little too late for practical purposes. You ought
to be with us in this free-silver movement, and you would be if you knew
what we know. We are not fools, although we may appear so to you; we
know what we want, and we are trying to get it.
You threaten "to draw in your money from the West." If you have any
money in the West which you _can_ "draw in," the sooner you do it the
better; it will be an heroic remedy instead of misery long drawn out. A
"panic" will return like a boomerang upon yourselves, and make _your_
property still less valuable. You can cause a panic, break our business
men, make more idle men and tramps, and, in short, concentrate three or
four years of squeezing into a few weeks or months; but what benefit can
_you_ hope to derive from it?
Whatever adds to _our_ prosperity will increase the actual value of
_your_ holdings; our interests are identical, then why should _you_
desire the continuance of present conditions? Have the present
conditions done anything for you, as far as Western investments are
concerned? Is not your increase of capital simply an increase "on paper"
which you can never realize? We cordially invite you to join us in our
effort to bring on an era of prosperity; forsake your political leaders,
as we have forsaken ours, and use at least as much common sense in
politics as you do in business.
Save this article; it will be good reading after the election is over.
It is not politics, it is business; it is the naked truth. The writer
does not want to borrow any money; he seeks no office, is not a
politician, has no axe to grind, and expects no reward, except to share
in the general prosperity, as he has shared in the general adversity, in
the capacity of a humble citizen.
WICHITA, KANSAS.
THE TELEGRAPH MONOPOLY.
BY PROF. FRANK PARSONS.
XIII.
10. _The Union of Telegraph and Post is needed for the Interests of the
Post as well as for those of the Telegraph._ It will elevate the skill
and competency of postal employees. When mails do not arrive on time, it
will inform the public thronging the post office, not merely that the
mail has not arrived, but when it will arrive. It will permit the
employment of the telegraph in tracing a missent letter or package,
rectifying an erroneous address, discovering the whereabouts of an
absentee, etc. It will permit the more rapid extension of the
free-delivery system by affording a larger basis for its sustenance. It
will multiply many fold the rapidity in transmitting letters across the
continent.
The telegraph is naturally a part of the post office,[3] as much a part
of it as the sewing machine is a part of a dressmaking establishment.
Suppose the government were in the clothing business (as it might have
been to advantage during the war), and continued to sew the garments
entirely by hand, leaving the sewing machine to private enterprise; it
would be a charming situation for private enterprise, but not very
delightful for the government. With such advantages private enterprise
would be apt to deprive the government of the best part of its business
in spite of its willingness to work for people at cost. The same thing
has happened to some extent with the telegraph and telephone, and will
happen to a far greater extent if they are allowed to continue in
private control. If trunk lines for automatic transit were established
by a private company, even at 25 cents per hundred words (a rate
sufficient to pay a very large profit on a corporate investment, water
and all), the post office would soon lose a considerable portion of its
most valuable business, the letter mail between the large cities.[4]
[3] Mr. Hubbard says: "The telegraph and the post office are
two great pieces of machinery going on, both for the same
purpose, the transmission of intelligence" (J. T. U. p. 17).
Prof. Ely calls the telegraph the "logical completion of the
post office" (ARENA, Dec. 1895, p. 49). Cyrus W. Field says:
"Why should not the two branches of what is really one service
to the public be brought together in this country, as in other
countries, and placed under one management? It would certainly
be a great convenience to the people if every telegraph office
were a post office, and every post office a telegraph office"
(_N. A. Review_, Mar. 1886).
[4] Postmaster-General Cave Johnson said: "Experience teaches
that if individual enterprise is allowed to perform such
portions of the business of the Government as it may find for
its advantage, the Government will soon be left to perform
unprofitable portions of it only, and must be driven to
abandon it entirely or carry it on at a heavy tax upon the
public Treasury.... I may further add that the Department
created under the Constitution and designed to exercise
exclusive power for the transmission of intelligence, must
necessarily be superseded in much of its most important
business if the telegraph be permitted to remain under the
control of individuals" (Reps. of 1845 and 1846).
Postmaster-General Cresswell said in 1872: "If the effects of
rivalry between the telegraph and the mail upon the revenues
of the post office have not been serious, it is due alone to
the liberal management of the latter as compared with that of
the companies, a management which since the invention of the
telegraph has reduced the rates of postage from 25 to 3 cents,
and increased tenfold the correspondence of the country" (Rep.
1872, pp. 22-3).
One of Hannibal Hamlin's three great reasons for a postal
telegraph was "for the sake of the post-office system, which
may at any time be depleted by a strong telegraph in private
hands" (_Cong. Globe_, 42-2, p. 3554).
In times of pestilence the telegraph will save the post office from
embargo. A letter from Port Gibson, Miss., says:
Whenever the yellow fever breaks out at any point, all cities and
towns, and some counties, having communication with the infected
districts, at once declare a rigid quarantine. The effect of this
is to cut off all communication between themselves and the outside
world. Trains and boats are prevented from receiving or delivering
the mails. Business men are unable to communicate by letter with
their correspondents, and all are prevented from hearing from
relatives and friends in the quarantined places, except by
telegraph, whose rates prevent many from using the wires.[5]
[5] Wan. Arg. p. 138.
The infection does not travel on an electric wire, and if the post
office possessed the telegraph, its business would go smoothly on in
spite of the plague, instead of being brought to a dead standstill
throughout the region of disaster at the very time when hearts are
breaking for daily news, and communication is of the utmost importance
to alleviate the quarantine.
11. _Employees will be benefited_ by passing from a régime of oppression
to one of elevation; from low wages[6] and long hours to high wages and
short hours; from a service almost hopeless of promotion to a service of
almost limitless possibilities to the man of character, brain, and
energy; from an employment in which they are regarded as so much
machinery to be obtained at the lowest market rates and worked for all
the profit there is in them to an employment in which their comfort and
advancement are among the main objects of solicitude with the
management; from a business in which they have no share to a business in
which they are equal partners with all their fellow-citizens; from
serfdom to liberty and manhood. No more boycotting and black-listing, no
more denial of the rights of organization and petition.
[6] In the last Congressional investigation, dated May 26,
1896, the great telegraph inventor P. B. Delayner testified
that the pay of American operators had fallen forty per cent
in the last twenty years; and he said that, "while the British
operator has had two increases of pay since 1891, his American
brother has had four reductions, and to-day the British
operator is better paid for the same amount of work, and by
his environment occupies a higher plane of comfort and
contentment, than the American operator. Good behavior and
diligence in his duties warrant him a life position, from
which the whim and caprice of no one can drive him. He is not
an itinerant wandering from place to place looking for work
and hired for a day or a week, to be again sent adrift, nor is
he permitted to work overtime to the detriment of his health
and the exclusion of another wage-earner from his share. His
increasing years of service are taken into account in various
beneficial ways. He has his yearly vacation. He is not cut off
in sickness, and, most important of all, he is not 'turned
down' in old age, but is retired on a pension, proportioned to
his years of service" (Sen. Doc. 291, 54-1, pp. 4, 6).
Some of the consequences will be the lifting of thousands to a higher
plane of living, the annihilation of strikes by uprooting the causes of
them,[7] the improvement of the service as already stated under the
seventh sub-head of this section, etc., etc.
[7] Joseph Medill, the publisher of the Chicago _Tribune_,
expressed the opinion to the Blair Committee that, with a
postal telegraph, there would be no strikes any more than
among the clerks in the Treasury or the officers of the army.
Government employees do not resign _en masse_. Their pay is
good as a rule, and, anyway, they could not get it raised till
Congress thought it right; and a strike would not be apt to
hasten the achievement of their purposes, but would place them
face to face with the limitless power of the United States.
Instead of occupying a position of brave revolt against
corporate oppression, impervious to petition, the strikers
would place themselves in the position of deliberately
departing from ready and hopeful redress by peaceful petition
and discussion, to the very objectionable method of
obstructing the public business, defying the people's
government, and dictating terms to the nation."
The telegraph system would no longer be subject to such
disasters as that so well described by the Hon. Wm. Roche in
the Ohio legislature Jan. 29th, 1885: "A convulsion of the
trade and commerce of the entire country resulted, when, on
the 19th of July, 1883, 12,000 operators left their posts
after the flat refusal of the magnates to give audience to
their representatives to state their case."
12. _The press will be relieved of an ever present tyranny_ likely at
any moment to transfer itself from the potential to the real.[8] Sen.
Report 242, 43-1, p. 5, says:
[8] We have seen in Part VI (ARENA, June, 1896) how rates were
raised on papers that criticised the Western Union's president
or advocated a postal telegraph too vigorously, how papers
were ordered not to criticise news reports under penalty of
loss of news facilities, etc. It is interesting to note that
even the largest and most influential papers do not always
escape persecution. In his speech in the House, Mar. 1, 1884,
the Hon. John A. Anderson, of Kansas, tells us that "the
Chicago _Inter-Ocean_ had the lease of a private wire from
Washington to Chicago, and published Washington news every
day. A few weeks since, Senator Hill spoke for the postal
telegraph. The _Inter-Ocean_ published the speech verbatim.
That evening word was sent to the _Inter-Ocean_ that the lease
was terminated. The manager of the _Inter-Ocean_ said
afterwards that their relations with the Western Union were
still friendly, but he had to be, of course, in order to keep
the general despatches."
The operation of the postal-telegraph system would result in a
speedy termination of this alliance [between the telegraph and news
association, and groups of favored papers], and will be a very
important step toward the freedom of the press.
Sen. Rep. 577, 48-1, p. 16, says:
The bill [for a postal telegraph] will lessen the danger of a
concealed censorship of news whereby it may be colored and
distorted so as to subserve political purposes, to mislead public
opinion as to the merits or demerits of men and measures, to
pervert legislation, and to favor schemes of private gain.
The press of the nation will not be forbidden to criticise the news, nor
will any paper be excluded from equal participation in the benefits of
the telegraph service--equal rates to all, special privileges to none.
Moreover, the rates will be greatly reduced for all press despatches,
and papers will be able to buy the world's history every day for a
fraction of what they pay now for imperfect and garbled reports.
As a result of National Ownership in England, "the press rates have been
reduced so low that every country paper can afford to print the latest
telegraphic despatches as it goes to press, and a telegraph or telephone
is at every country post office."[9]
[9] Sen. Doc. 205, 54-1, p. 50; Report of U. S. Consul at
Southampton, Consular Reports, vol. xlvii, No. 175, April,
1895, p. 564. The press rate in England averages nine cents
per hundred words. In this country it is at least 40 cents per
hundred; the electrician P. B. Delany says it is 50 cents per
100 (Sen. Doc. 291, May, 1896, p. 3).
The Report last quoted contains the testimony of Mr. Bell of
the Typographical Union, May 20, 1896, in which he says: "The
news of this country is controlled by two great press
associations, and in any place in which either has a footing,
no new journal can be established and secure telegraphic news
except on such terms as may be prescribed by the paper or
papers that already occupy the field. In England, on the
contrary, all papers are on an equal footing." The
Typographical Union is fully alive to the benefits of a
government telegraph; in fact, labor and commerce in general
very strongly favor the reform. Mr. Bell says: "In this
movement of ours we are supported by all the organized bodies
of workingmen in this country. We are a unit on this question"
(p. 17).
13. _Discrimination will receive a serious blow._ No more telegraph
rebates of 20 or 40 or 50 per cent to favored individuals and
corporations. No more telegraph blanks for legislators, politicians, and
lobbyists. No more delaying B's despatch until the rival message of C is
sent. No more precedence for bucket-shops and gamblers over honest
business and government despatches.
14. _Gambling in government stocks will cease_, speculators in wheat,
corn, pork, copper, oil, and other products of industry will be unable
to control the wires for their uses, or even secure a precedence over
the lines, and the Louisiana Lottery and similar frauds will no longer
find a refuge in the telegraph as they do at present. The post office
has been taken away from the gamblers; it is time the telegraph were
taken from them also. The telegraph in the hands of cunning men may be
the means of abstracting millions of money from the producers of the
country, and may even become a potent factor in the causation of panic
and depression. On page 3 of his Argument for a postal telegraph, Mr.
Wanamaker says:
The measureless body of producers, in order not to be manipulated
and robbed by the speculators, need to be nearer the consumers; and
the measureless body of consumers, in order not to be manipulated
and robbed by the same speculators, need to be nearer to the
producers.
Take the telegraph away from the speculators and give it to the
producers and consumers, that they may come into the closest possible
relations.
15. _Political corruption_ will lose an able contributor when the
telegraph ceases to belong to a private corporation (See Part VII,
ARENA, July, 1896).
16. _A Postal telegraph will be a step toward a fairer distribution of
wealth_ and away from the congestion of power and wealth in the hands of
a few unscrupulous men, which is one of the chief dangers threatening
the future of the country (See Part VIII, ARENA, August, 1896). On this
ground alone the establishment of a national telegraph would be
justified, were there no other reason in the case.
17. _The public safety demands a national telegraph_, not merely as a
precaution against corruption, speculation, and panic, congestion of
wealth and power, strikes, and duress of the press, but also as a
military measure and a valuable addition to the police power of the
government,--a means of strength in time of war, and a conservator of
law and order by aiding in the capture of criminals and in the general
enforcement of the law. We have already quoted the opinion of Mr.
Scudamore that the postal telegraph "will strengthen the country from
hostility from without, and the maintaining of law and order within the
kingdom." Let us call attention here to the weighty words of the New
York _Public_, cited in Wanamaker's Argument, pp. 206-7:
The Government itself absolutely needs a telegraphic system for its
own protection. This will not seem the language of exaggeration
when it is considered that the ordinary enforcement of laws, the
capture of offenders, the success of fiscal operations, the
protection of the country against domestic insurrection and foreign
invasion, have come to depend in these days upon the instant
transmission of intelligence with certain and absolute secrecy. It
may at any time come to pass that the private interests of those
controlling a telegraph system shall require the non-enforcement of
the law, the prevention or delay of a financial operation, or the
partial success of a domestic outbreak or foreign inroad. It is
nonsense to say that this cannot happen. If Mr. Gould could
suppress for a few hours or days, news of an outbreak on the
Pacific coast or of the capture of a hostile ironclad from Europe,
he could make millions by it. The Government has no certainty that
he would throw away millions. It has no certainty that its orders
bearing on great financial operations may not be betrayed and its
aims thwarted. When the Government was hunting for the Star Route
offenders, how many would have been caught if its despatches had
been secretly betrayed? An important witness happened to be a
Government director of the Union Pacific Railroad, and it has
always been a mysterious fact that the officers in search of him
could never catch him.
18. _It will be a step toward civil-service reform._ Every increase of
public business brings us nearer to thorough civil-service reform,
because it enhances the importance of that reform, impresses the need of
it more strongly upon the people, and deepens their sentiment in its
favor. This has been the experience of European cities and states. A
good reason why they are ahead of us in civil-service management, is
because they are ahead of us in the public ownership of railroads,
telegraphs, telephones, etc.
In the case of the telegraph there are special reasons to expect that
government control would carry with it an extension of the civil-service
principle. In the opinion of Mr. Rosewater the postal telegraph "would
be an entering wedge for the greatest possible success of the civil
service." He says:
It would bring into the postal service a large number of skilled
operatives whose services could not be easily dispensed with. They
would be divided in politics like every other class of citizens,
their experience and trustworthiness would be of great moment, and
their trustworthiness would be increased by the knowledge that they
could not be displaced by partisan politics. This has been the
experience in Great Britain, and would be the same here. Once get
the postal service under government control and the civil-service
act, and you would soon be able to place all departments of the
government under the same system, and a large share of the public
nuisance incident to office-holding would be done away with,
leaving the officers free to inquire into and learn their duties to
their office and to the public.[10]
[10] _The Voice_, Aug. 29, 1895, pp. 1, 8.
Prof. Ely says:
One of the strongest arguments in favor of a postal telegraph, is
that such a telegraph would carry with it an improvement in our
civil service. It would increase the number of offices in which
civil-service rules would be applied, even according to existing
law, and it would be an irresistible argument in favor of the
extension and elevation of the civil service. Some want to have us
wait until the civil service has been already improved, but the
purchase of the telegraph lines would inevitably carry with it the
improvement of the civil service.
The country would insist upon it. The acquisition of the telegraph lines
by the nation would convert more people to civil-service reform in one
day than all the speeches which have ever been delivered on the subject
would win to this good cause in a year.[11]
[11] The total number of positions that must now be filled
from the classified civil-service lists is 85,100, out of a
total of a little more than 200,000 positions in the national
service, aside from the army and navy.
The plan advocated in this paper includes the civil-service act as one
of its essential terms, for without it we run the risk of having, for a
time at least, boss-ownership instead of public ownership of the
telegraph. The recent extension of the civil-service act to 30,000 new
positions, argues well for the future of this great reform.[12] That
such an order should have come from President Cleveland, who has not
been noted for his absence of partisan feeling, indicates that the
election of a man of thorough independence would probably complete the
transformation of our service. Even without that, the work will be done
by the piece, each president ordering a section into line at the end of
his term when the delay of justice can no longer aid his own political
purposes, but may, on the contrary, strengthen his successor. Or he may
act before the end of his term and from less selfish motives; the main
thing for the nation is that he act.
[12] ARENA, Dec. 1895, pp. 51-2.
19. The public ownership of the telegraph will remove one of the
antagonisms that weaken the cohesion of society and retard the
development of civilization.[13]
[13] See Part VIII, ARENA, August, 1896.
20. It will be a step toward coöperation and partnership, away from
private monopoly, usurpations, and taxation without representation.[14]
[14] See Parts VIII and IX, ARENA, Aug. and Sept. 1896.
* * * * *
Let us now see what the defendants have to say; that means the Western
Union, for, as Mr. Bell said to the Senate Committee on Post offices and
Post roads, May 20th, 1896:
The only persons who have ever put in an appearance in opposition
to this measure, have been the officers, attorneys, and agents of
the telegraph companies. No representative of the people has ever
opposed it.[15]
[15] Sen. Doc. 291, 54-1, p. 18.
THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF THE CUBANS.
BY THOMAS W. STEEP.
When the recognition of belligerency was argued for the Cubans by the
friends of Cuba in Congress, it became a question of pivotal importance
as to whether the Cubans had a government to recognize as dual to that
of Spain; whether the government, if any, was merely nominal or
chimerical; whether, if existing and operating, it had the potency to
receive recognition and thus justify such action by the United States.
The first thing that attracted my interest on arriving at the war field
of Cuba, in the Province of Santiago, early one sunny morning in
January, was the obsequious ceremony of the government prefecto who
received me and gave me my first roasted _boniato_, upon which I
afterwards so often appeased hunger. I had come out on the field by
crawling beneath the barbed-wire military line around Santiago one night
and marching by stealth in the early dawn to the mountains and over them
to the interior. A body of Cubans escorted me. Fatigued and hungry, the
prefecto's attention in serving coffee and boniatos seemed over-due
kindness. I offered to pay him, but he raised his hands and said, "No!
No!" He was a government officer. From that time on my interest was
enlisted in the study of the civil organization of the Cubans.
When ex-President Cleveland intimated that the civil government
provisional of the Cuban insurgents was puerile and immature, and said
it was, for the most part, a government on paper, he was more correct
than otherwise. In the first place, however, let me say that the Cubans
have a government, that it is not an impractical one, that the people
are loyal to it. To this loyalty, which is so striking for its
widespread prevalence, and so sympathy-eliciting because of the
sacrifices which are made for it by the Cubans, I shall refer later.
The statement made by the ex-President, while for the most part correct,
is superficial, because it does not substantiate its assertiveness. It
is one that any intelligent observer of the anterior conditions of Cuba
last December might have correctly though vaguely made.
The Cuban government is immature. To say that most of it exists on paper
is not sinistrous to an ambitious civil organization which has been in
existence but two years. Schemed exactly like that of the States, the
unfavorable condition under which it labors makes many of its functions
of mere nominal existence. For instance, the Secretary of State just at
this time has no duty to perform other than, perhaps, to doff his
figurative robes of state and get out and fight. The Secretary of War
has no routine office, because the Cubans have no diplomatic corps and
the rebellion is conducted by aggressive generals who have the munitions
of war in their own hands.
Yet the Cuban insurgents have established a civil organization in the
interior over which they hold sway, the strength and qualities of
endurance and prominence of which defy the government of Spain itself.
The remoteness of the Cuban headquarters, and the control which Spain
has had over the regular news channels that lead from Cuba, have kept
the world largely in ignorance of the real condition of the Cuban
insurgents.
Fundamentally and upon which the plans of the government are drawn, the
Republic of Cuba now comprehends all the area of the island of Cuba. The
disposition taken by the head civil officers is that the entire island
is under dominion of the Cuban Republic, but that because some powerful
foreign enemy has landed on certain parts and taken possession--as, for
instance, Havana and its harbor, and Santiago and other cities--the
civil rule cannot be extended into these quarters until by strategy the
enemy can be driven from the shores of Cuba. In the national
organization the power of government was transferred by the popular
assembly to a Council of Government. Then departments were formed, with
secretaries at the head--state, war, foreign affairs, interior, and
finances. At the head of the government were placed a provisional
President and Vice-President. In the Council of Government is vested the
legislative power.
Politically the island is divided into four States, Oriente, Camaguey,
Las Villas, and Occidente. Each State is divided into districts, and
each district into as many prefecturas and sub-prefecturas as are deemed
necessary. A district has from seven to fifteen prefecturas. The State
is presided over by a Governor, who reports to the Secretary of
Interior. The Lieutenant-Governor is under the Governor, and has
jurisdiction over a district. His corps consists of one secretary and
one assistant clerk. The prefectura is the smallest political
subdivision but one--the sub-prefectura. The prefectura has a secretary
and assistants. Then follow the sub-prefecturas, of which there are
generally from four to eight in each prefectura.
The Lieutenant-Governor is the intermediary between the Governor and the
prefectura. Besides his executive functions the prefecto has judicial
power. He records all contracts between citizens, including marriages.
He has the power to form a jury and to try all cases, from the simplest
intrigues to those of spies guilty of treason, whenever the cases cannot
be submitted to court-martial.
Every portion of territory possessed by the Cubans is subject to civil
order. The minutest detail is so accurately and delicately balanced
that, though the thoroughness for which the civil officers are even now
adroitly working has not yet been attained, the whole governmental
machinery is in harmonic operation.
The facts which I have set down relative to the geographic distribution
of the government I have myself seen. I spent much time in the saddle on
the march with Carlos Manuel de Cespedes, who, as Governor of Oriente,
conducts the affairs of state in the saddle. With him I visited the
prefectural workshops and many well-managed prefecturas. I saw much
rearranging and readjusting of these functions by the Governor.
Almost the first thing the Governor said to me at our first meeting at
Baire Arriba, was: "I have been wishing for months that I could get hold
of an American newspaper man to show him the inside of the revolution.
The American people don't know how strong we are. They have no way of
finding out. Now I will show you our civil government as it is in
operation." We visited the medical posts--"drug-stores" as the Cubans
call them--the tanneries, workshops, and the various officials,
including the tax-collector.
Supplementary to the regular lines of civic routine are other branches
of organization necessitated by the war. The most important of these is
that of the tax-collector. The State tax-collector has as many
subordinate officers as the Governor. Taxes are levied on those engaged
in commercial pursuits. This commerce is, of course, only internal. The
levying of taxes and the subsequent shipment of Spanish money to the
United States for use by the Junta has created great scarcity of money
among the insurgents. The schedule in effect when I was with chief
tax-collector Tomas Pedro Grinan, in February, was as follows:
Coffee and cocoa 4 pesos per 100 pounds.
Timber 8 " " 1000 feet.
Hemp 4 " " 100 pounds.
Wax 4 " " 100 pounds.
Honey 1 peso per 100 pounds.
Cattle 3 pesos per head.
Cheese 2 " " 100 pounds.
Bananas .03 peso per bunch.
Tobacco (leaf) 5 pesos per 100 pounds.
The commerce consists of the exchange of the products of one part of the
island with those of another. I once saw Cespedes stop a coffee
merchant, and, upon his inability to produce a receipt for the tax on
the coffee he was transporting, take into custody him and twelve little
pack-mules. The man pleaded that there was no tax-collector in the
vicinity when he started on his journey, paid his fine, which I think
was thirty pesos, and continued his march with a receipt for taxes.
Four important branches of the government of the Republic of Cuba are
the territorial guard, the coast inspection, the postal service, and the
workshop system. Each prefectura has under its supervision ten armed
territorial guards, who serve also as police. These guards scout the
Spanish columns when they venture from their blockhouses.
Every district with a seacoast has a civil coast inspector, who ranks as
a captain in the army. He is assisted by a sub-inspector, who acts as
his secretary. The inspectors have established along the coast line and
in every bay and inlet watch posts, commanded each by a vigilant, who
has under him eight or ten coast-guards. In this way, when a Spanish
man-of-war sets out from a port, the news is signalled along the coast,
and the Cubans, if she be in sight of the land, watch every movement of
the ship. The coast-guards have captured many small Spanish sailing
vessels.
Saltmaking is carried on under the direction of an inspector. All the
salt consumed by the Cubans is made from distilled sea water. A hundred
men are continually boiling sea water in Santiago de Cuba province.
These saltmakers are ready at all times to take up arms.
The postal system is under the direct care of the Governor of each
State. Along the rough roads at intervals of ten or fifteen miles are
established the Cuban postmasters, each supplied with from four to eight
couriers. In this way official as well as private communications are
carried to any part of the island. Each post office is supplied with a
registering stamp, so that the time of the coming or going of every
parcel is registered upon it. There is a dead-letter office, and the
lists are published monthly at the presses of _El Cubano Libre_.
The workshops are under charge of foremen. These shops turn out all
kinds of roughly made but substantial leather goods, such as shoes,
boots, bags, saddles, straps, and belts. Gun shops, powder factories,
and cartridge factories are said to exist on the island, but I never saw
them. The making of other metal articles, such as cooking utensils, is
in its infancy.
The Cubans are struggling hard to form some sort of a school system. The
"little press in the woods" was just printing a little primer, written
on the fields, to be distributed among families for the tutoring of
children when I left the printing establishment last January.
The medical posts and stations are under military order, and are purely
provisional. The post of El Mate, in Jiguani, I found in charge of Dr.
Farrel, a graduate of a medical institute in Spain, and Dr. Rafael de
Lorie of New York. This post is tolerably well stocked. It contains
about one hundred pounds of antiseptic plasters, tablets and gauzes,
10,000 quinine pills and powders, thirty pounds of drugs, ten pounds of
narcotics, and fifty quarts of tonics.
Like the whole military system of the Cubans, this post has an
objectionable management, subject only to the orders of a few
officials, so that it does little practical good, and many persons are
dying for want of proper medical attention.
I have told in this article what I have seen during four months of
constant travel among the insurgents.
When it is remembered that the Cubans have spread the rebellion over
more than two-thirds of the area of the island, and have carried into
effect, for their purposes, a provisional form of government
successfully in the time of war, it is reasonable to suppose that they
are capable of rearranging their government and maintaining it in time
of peace.
A NOTED AMERICAN PREACHER.
BY DUNCAN McDERMID, M. A.
It is interesting, while it is said that preaching is losing its ancient
power, to find here and there a preacher whose influence is increasing
instead of diminishing. One of these is the Rev. Minot J. Savage, D. D.,
of the Unitarian Church.
The writer desires to call attention to the two essential conditions of
this preacher's influence and popularity. This will be instructive not
only to the public, but to the clerical profession as well. One of these
conditions may be found in the wide latitude of American opinion,
especially as it expresses itself in New England, and particularly in
the city of Boston where Mr. Savage spent many years as a preacher.
I.
In the community in which one lives, no less than in himself, often lies
the secret of a man's strength and greatness. The individual shares the
endowment or potency of those impersonal forces which sustain and
enhance public life. The spirit which animates the broader ranges of
general history acts with unhindered freedom on the narrower sphere of
the individual mind and often becomes the creator of its better moments.
Silent influences, hidden providences, are at work in society of which
the individual has no suspicion, and whose effects cannot be recorded in
statistics. Below the plane of conscious recognition there are
far-reaching movements of thought which transcend our powers of
understanding, but which act with almost unbounded sway in controlling
the thought and life of each person. The early promise is fulfilled in
the ripening powers of the mind under the cumulative influences which
nourish it from without. In the order which surrounds the individual,
and in the movement of which he has become a part, we see, as clearly as
in himself, the inevitable promise of his ultimate destiny.
In whatever pertains to liberal culture Boston is never weak or
wavering. Boston impresses one as possessing innate respect and
enthusiasm for intellectual supremacy, and reverence for the pure
sentiments of religion as continuous forces in human life. For two and a
half centuries it has been the wish and work of her most cultivated
minds to give human thought and life the highest expression; and this
has been done with monumental activity. In Boston, culture and religious
piety have never been decadent; over and above the controversies and
schisms and sectarian quarrels which from time to time have rent the
churches, they have remained intact. In spite of the manifold currents
of opposing tendencies, which now and then threaten to overwhelm
cherished beliefs and to lift the world off its hinges, they remain
essential elements in this city's social life. They are stern present
necessities, unwritten and immutable laws which she will not and cannot
transgress. From the founding of the city by the "choice spirits" of the
seventeenth century, they have retained their vitality and have been
affirmed without doubt or debate. With the growing demands and maturity
of her civilization she reiterates them as her loftiest and most sacred
privileges, subject to no vicissitudes. With these primitive traits
eternally vital, thought is quick, and intellectual enthusiasm spreads
rapidly. Boston is always stirring with "new ideas" and with the passion
for a broader ethical and religious development. The character and
repute which she acquired in former days for literary taste, clerical
influence, and the administration of religion are to-day influencing
surrounding secularity and the hurrying concerns of daily life. They are
animating every institution and ordinance, every supreme and exquisite
medium of feeling, every revelation of truth and hope in the human mind.
In this exhaustless tide of thought and aspiration, which we may accept
as Boston's native product, it is easy to interest the people and to
unite them in any attempt for the good of mankind under the sanction of
culture, benevolence, or religion.
But religion is felt to be Boston's greatest need and glory. In this
city of philosophy and poetry, art and business energy, religious faith
and life have their proper place, and are invested with power and
dignity. Fixed habit and traditional thought contribute, without doubt,
to the need and sacredness of religion; yet its transcendent results are
due to the permanent disposition of the people. They are the appropriate
manifestation of a religious culture and spirit that are fitted for all
time, the logic of truths born of religious intuitions working out in
the most practical results. However universally certain religious
beliefs are ignored, there is no disposition to put culture or
philanthropy above the gospel, the school above the church, or to make
the schoolmaster, the literary autocrat, or the princes of wealth take
precedence of the preacher. The spirit of conventionalism reigns more or
less in Boston's religious life; yet religion makes an irresistible
appeal to the understanding, the conscience, and the heart. Everything
is compelled to bow to its influence and to feel its inspiration.
Although our churches present various theological tendencies, from the
stiffest orthodoxy to the freest rationalism and pantheism, and with
creeds yet confessedly nowhere settled, reason never pronounces religion
absurd; to it homage is accorded. It is still the deepest and holiest
interest of man. We all have an elevated sense of its vast importance in
the destiny of mankind. Its manifestations may change, but its spirit is
ever the same. While edifices of towering magnificence, grand displays
of musical talent, time-honored ordinances, and attractions for popular
reverence are fashionable and full of beauty and significance, and,
possibly, prudent means to stimulate our patronage and to save to the
ranks of the churches the votaries of all that is artistic and refining
and impressive, they are no sure sign that spiritual life is departing;
they have their utility, they foster the higher interests of mind and
heart. These symbols of religious faith are not the productions of cold,
speculative reasoning, but the statement of truth wrought into the
convictions of the devout and spiritually minded.
Guided by these facts we may assume that the man who distinguishes
himself in Boston as a preacher is one to whom considerable interest
attaches. Upon such a man, as upon all her citizens of rare attainments
and peculiar personal excellence, she confers distinction.
The Rev. Minot J. Savage, D. D., who recently changed his residence and
his ministry from Boston to New York, and whose successful work in the
former city may be a prophecy of enduring honors in the latter, has thus
distinguished himself and been rewarded.
When Mr. Savage came from the West to Boston, he came "as a stranger,"
as I myself heard him say. For years he thought and walked and worked
alone. He was unpopular, and he felt his unpopularity. All religious
sects, even that of his own persuasion, were critical and sceptical. As
a preacher he had fellowship nowhere. He was met as a preacher of
unwelcome and unwholesome doctrines. But he came as one having a special
dispensation, as the witness and repository of new truth, as the
representative of no low and paltry type of the Christian ministry, but
as a living testimony to the reality and power and excellency of
religion and its institutions. He felt the difficulties with which he
had to contend. They were manifold, subtle, and fraught with deepest
peril to his ministry. Prejudices, precedents, and the theology of the
schools--whose only merit seemed to be that it was smitten with a
passion to reduce Christian doctrine to logical form--were arrayed in
open hostility to him. He was met by the _régime_ of ecclesiastical
orders, by men who preached the Gospel according to established and
venerable routine, and whose credentials, not their wisdom, were their
only power. But although he felt himself to be a _persona non
grata_,--another unpopular person to suffer for his beliefs,--he girded
himself for earnest uncompromising warfare. He planted against every
church his strongest batteries of criticism, satire, and sarcasm. He
poured forth his thoughts in words that made men's ears tingle, till the
protestations of his adversaries fell from their lips with something of
a hollow sound. Half preacher, half assassin, as he was thought to be,
repudiating as offensive the doctrines of the Cross, and hating with
every drop of his blood the general traditions and faith of the Church,
he worked and awaited the day of his triumph. It came.
Boston is slow to recognize new prophets; yet religious belief of every
kind is treated with gentleness and indulgence. The preachers of the
city might regard Mr. Savage as a teacher of "positive error," but they
could not object to the hospitality of Boston, a citizen and preacher of
which Mr. Savage became on the footing of democratic fraternity. By the
free development of reason and the spread of intelligence Boston has
become temperate and tolerant. She will not enslave the understanding or
deny anyone one vestige of religious freedom. With her, religion is a
practical and spiritual thing rather than a theoretic and ceremonial.
The latter helps to stimulate the former to the fullest discharge of
duty, but does not in itself constitute religion. The one comes by
internal necessity, the other belongs to the sphere of outward
operation, of inventive and enterprising minds. Religion is a living
mode of thought sustained by personal character, and needs not ambitious
terminology or supervision. Boston trusts her instincts, as Emerson has
taught her, and asks only ample scope for the imperative working of her
religious sentiment and the life of the heart.
Under these favoring conditions, by which Boston, like a mother, works
out her own character in the spirit and life of her gifted men, the Rev.
Mr. Savage was impelled onward in his daring enterprise. With stern
fidelity Boston exercised a definite and pervasive influence on Mr.
Savage's mind. Although his religious thinking came upon the public like
a new birth, he was only reiterating its progressive thought and the
stout emphasis it placed on thinking out religion in intelligible terms
and in all the breadth of its activities. Instrumental rather than
absolute, Boston's versatile and expansive thought furnished the new
preacher his coveted opportunity. Her faith failed not, nor did her
courage falter. Silently she was assailing the old theology and
elaborating the new, in which she has unhesitating belief, and which
entered with enlightening and nourishing force into Mr. Savage's broad
and free opinions. It came to him as the expression of the abiding
atmosphere in which he dwelt and with a beneficent bearing on his
ministry. Favored thus by the concurrent voices of those to whom he
ministered, and by the general freedom and grace of the entire
community, Mr. Savage made a real and salutary advance in his religious
work in Boston. And supported by the judgment of an ever widening
public, conservative thinkers about him felt his influence on current
religious opinion. While he indulged a liberty of speculation, he
instilled religious habits of thought and the spirit of worship into
many inquiring minds, and enabled them to identify themselves with the
highest development of his own religious consciousness. Boston and
vicinity became fully appreciative of the distinctiveness of his mission
and of his apprehensions of the truth. In recognition, therefore, of the
unmeasured praise and enthusiastic acceptance which he received from
the public, he was honored, at the close of his ministry in Boston, with
the degree of Doctor of Divinity at Harvard University. Harvard thus
expressed her highest confidence in the truth and permanence of his
ministry. This famous institution of classic, scientific, philosophic,
and sacred learning attested the sanity of the mind and doctrines of
this once obscure and despised but now noted preacher.
II.
Another condition of the Rev. Minot J. Savage's influence and popularity
as a preacher is his ethical intensity.
In the preceding section I have spoken of what has actually taken place.
I have there shown the favoring conditions under which Mr. Savage
labored in the city which was to him both friend and teacher, and where
he has done his most efficient work as a preacher. The particular type
of religious thought represented by him in the pulpit has not been
brought about by his or any man's device. For generations it has been
pouring itself forth from mind to mind in philosophy, science, poetry,
and religious thought. He did not initiate any distinctive movement; he
only helped to popularize and make permanent doctrines which already had
found favor among the people. He emphasized these and vitalized anew
their application to the Christian religion. In this section I shall
devote myself to a study of the ethical intensity of his ministry.
The Rev. Mr. Savage's ministry of nearly a quarter of a century in
Boston teaches some important lessons. And while he has had many
critics, no one has yet displayed and made current his most emphatic
qualities as a preacher. In attempting this the writer does so not from
the standpoint of the theologian or the professional clergyman, but from
that of a liberal thinker with mind unfettered by any prepossession.
The first thing to be noted is the candor of the man, the great
sincerity which marks whatever he says and does. His theology is simple;
his creed, which is neither the Apostles' nor the Nicene, nor the
utterances of modern pontiffs, but in a measure his own, is readily
comprehended, and betrays a sweet reasonableness which invites the
subscription of anyone without fear or trembling or convulsive
revolution. And while some of his fundamental beliefs impinge against
current prejudices and awaken enmities, he fearlessly submits them to
the judgment and common sense of mankind. What he believes he preaches,
and what he does not he rejects with all the vehemence of a man of
conviction. Correct modes or forms of religious thought he conceives to
be necessary, and the more so the firmer will be one's principles of
duty. Yet essential and sanctifying as this is, more essential in his
opinion is an honest mind,--a mind that is faithful in the pursuit of
truth and true to its own convictions and inspirations. He believes that
the most perfect man is he who is most diligent in duty and fervent in
spirit; who incorporates the truth into his selfhood; who toils with a
prompt and ardent devotion to know the truth, to maintain his opinions
firmly, to diffuse and propagate them by every means consistent with a
perfect character. With unselfish courage Mr. Savage resists every
allurement to compromise. Never timid, never complaisant or patronizing,
he exhibits some of the rarest virtues of the human mind. Oh that there
were more like him in this indolent and obsequious world!
Compared with Mr. Savage's strength of character, how contemptible are
some of the clerical and theological enigmas of our day. Waning and
waxing periods are not uncommon in our pulpits and our schools of
divinity. Now and then they diffuse a feeble as well as a strong glimmer
of religious virtue, and too often become the presages of things with
which we have no patience. It is painful to see preachers and
professors, like chartered buffoons, suppressing the light of reason,
intruding into places and folds to which they do not belong, and
sanctioning what in their hearts they do not accept. Among our
clergymen, where intelligence, character, and earnestness are
everything, we witness a conspicuous lack of sovereign motives shaping
and harmonizing life and doctrine. Nothing is more marked to-day in the
American pulpit than theological insincerity and indifference to the
obligation to preach only what is believed. Instead of feeling the might
of conscientious will and the higher aspirations of the age, they are
faint and muffled echoes of that moral force which has given efficiency
to the Christian ministry. We still hear the boast that the ministry of
to-day has outgrown the old Puritan austerity and the lines marked out
in earlier and more rigorous periods. May we not admit also that the
courage, the righteousness, and the heroic discharge of duty, by which
the Puritan has attracted the attention and the admiration of the world,
have lost something of their former greatness and power? Like hunters,
too many preachers are on the scent, not for the truth, but for
game,--for gain and earthly glory. To speak the truth might interfere
with their vocation; it might throw out of market their stock in trade.
Yet ought not the preacher to stick to his text? So great an advocate of
the truth should speak the truth and practise it. He should feel
inspired with a strong and awful prepossession in its favor. He need not
make pretension to infallibility, but we expect of him the absolute
veracity of his sacred calling and learning. His living should never
depend upon sustaining an error or an untruth. If it does, he does not
deserve the name he bears, and is not in the strictest sense a teacher
and leader of thought. We will excuse a deficiency of knowledge, but
never a deficiency in character,--in the word and spirit of what he
proclaims as the truth. Every truly devout minister of the Gospel should
rise and erase this stigma from his profession. It is a humiliating
reproach that any of this class of teachers lack true insight,
truthfulness, and faithful service; that they mask their convictions,
that they will not act out their opinions. This is a perversion of what
man really is. It makes him a vanishing spirit destitute of true
sentiment, character, and practical rectitude. Forms of worship and of
religion may be temporary and change, but love of truth and conviction
should always be an active power, uniform, eternal. Even in our
theological schools, where the human spirit is supposed to be exorcised
into worlds of graver and graver realities, we are just now learning
some valuable lessons in the flexibility of theological opinion.
He who stands in a conspicuous place in any community will always be
looked at. What he says and does will be judged by everybody. His person
and life and character, his joys and sorrows, are things of public
gossip and interest. And if the uniqueness of his position in society be
due to some sacred calling, such as a teacher of religious truth, he
evokes the highest esteem and expectations. All truth is sacred; and
truth's propagator is expected to be, not only a truth-seeker, but a
teacher of it in the interests of the public weal. The responsibility of
this is distributed among all men, but nowhere is it so great as with
the professed preacher and teacher of religious truth. He cannot absolve
himself from it. It is the price he pays for his exalted privilege, his
dignified position.
The creed-test of the Andover theological school may be unwarranted at
the present time. Yet while there is such a test, and the old creed
comes up and insists upon being reaffirmed in its original meaning by
each incumbent, we are bewildered the moment we attempt to harmonize
what happened there recently with stalwart conviction and vital piety.
Within a few months we have seen the Andover creed, over which there has
been so much wrangling, and some of whose doctrines make the human heart
to-day sink in despair, receiving unqualified indorsement. With
unfaltering confidence this ancient creed was reaffirmed by a professor
of that school of divinity without modifying the conditions of
subscription. This surprises us. It may be that the recently inducted
Professor of Sacred Rhetoric did not signify explicit allegiance to this
creed, whose doctrines are so inflexibly maintained by our older
theologians, but simply gave his assent, just as the clergy of the noble
Church of England are giving their assent, but not their strict
adherence, to the Thirty-nine Articles. And yet what is progressive
orthodoxy, so boldly and ably enunciated, but a growing away from the
old Andover creed?
Or is it only a question of emphasis, not of dogma? Are we to infer that
the old dogma abides, while only the emphasis alters? It may be that
progressive orthodoxy is not what it professes to be, that instead of
giving religious thought a definite impulse and being a necessary onward
step in sacred learning, religious thought is only receiving a richer
and deeper volume as it lies in its old bed. Be this as it may, the
verbal assent and subscription of the new incumbent gave fresh force to
every dogma of the old faith. True, we could not expect him to be so
recreant as to disown this venerable creed, to break the traditional
thread and cease to be the heir of his sires.
Yet we should like to see progressive orthodoxy, or the New Theology, of
Andover mean something; represent, without the slightest misgiving, some
distinctive dogma, some fresh insight into religious truth. At present
it is an unintelligible hypothesis. It does not appear to be definitely
settled. A master hand has sketched it, but there are none to complete
and make it triumphant. Why not go to the root of the matter?
Progressive orthodoxy is yet only "in the air." On paper it is
inspiring; in practice, a paradox to the discomfiture of every friend of
the revival of religious thought. It is subtle and disputatious, and
predicts for itself a reforming mission, but it has not the courage of
its convictions; it looks like a clever juggling of divinity. We may
speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but unless we have deep
convictions and feel the intensity of the principles we are attempting
to promulgate, we are as sounding brass; we lower the dignity of truth
and moral worth, we offend the purity of conscience. Filled with the
ecstasies of an office while enacting an untruth is satanic; it is
unworthy of any trained intelligence. Honest conviction is the
indispensable condition of the preacher and teacher. Without it he
compromises the sacred character of his particular commission, of his
appointed trust.
All this is meant to throw light upon the artless simplicity, the
outspoken but sensitive judgment, the indefinable strength of character,
of the Rev. Mr. Savage. Beneath all he says and does we may see the calm
utterance of unwavering convictions and an individuality unimpaired. He
is thoroughly possessed with the sense of duty; he has his being there.
There is nothing spurious in him; he disguises no hypocrisy. We see in
him no secret acquiescence with what he cannot conscientiously accept.
Always standing in the full light of the incomparable obligation and
privilege of his work,--which is a cheerful, happy exercise, not a
doleful and despondent one,--he influences the world not only as a
teacher, but as a character. He proclaims the sanctity of his office not
by a set of pious phrases, but by a spotless devotion to it, as the only
way by which he most completely can subserve the public welfare. This
perpetually invests the man and his ministry with interest and with an
almost magic power.
The ethical intensity of Mr. Savage's character unfolds itself in his
preaching as a consistent result. In the sermon the convictions of the
man are not sacrificed. He puts more than words into his sermons; he
puts himself. He speaks the truth "bluntly," as if it were not a hard
but an easy attainment, and an element of human nature. Without
pretension or self-exaltation, craving no man's praise and envying no
man's distinction, he endeavors in an unwavering and high-spirited
manner to disclose in his sermons the great verities, the substantial
realities, of life.
In the broadest sense of the word Mr. Savage is not a man of scholarly
attainments or tastes; not many are. He is nevertheless a highly
cultivated man. Whether he addresses us through the faculties of speech
or through his written compositions, we always feel the independence of
his intellect, his delicate and discriminating moral sense, and his love
of truth. His sermons, his public utterances, and his devout invocations
exhibit a maturity of mind and a range of culture which enable him to
impress other minds with whatever has possession of his own. In the
pulpit, in authorship, in every mode of religious activity, we meet the
cultivated, sincere, and reverent man. We feel the influence of his
sympathetic mind and singular chasteness of spirit in hearty and
symmetrical development. A culture like this, combined with a nature
deeply religious, brings one into possession more or less completely of
truths which make a direct appeal to the understanding. It has enabled
Mr. Savage to enjoy a certain lordship in the realm of mind and mental
life. He is an example of the dictum, that he who would think truly on
spiritual things must first be spiritually minded. In both his acted and
his written life he seems to comprehend and to realize the truth, to
have reached the loftiest heights of fellowship with eternal wisdom.
Judging from his own serene, unclouded, and practical vision of the
truth, one is driven to the conclusion that he is proclaiming and
formulating the ultimate gospel of mankind.
Some may sneer and scoff at his "deadly notions" and "perverted
thoughts," but in his demand for personal life, development of
conscience, and attainment in righteousness, his ministry is potent; its
inspiration is constant. He believes and preaches only those truths
which are possible to rational belief. With that exquisite instinct
which characterizes all his thinking, he places, as if he were in
apostolic succession, man's greatest need in coming to himself and in
making religion inseparable from personal thought and character. Mr.
Savage holds this forth as man's paramount task, to refuse which is
alone to be faithless and hopeless and unforgiven. His idea of religion
consists in nothing external or formal; nothing can avail with him but
the culture of the soul and the quiet discharge of duty. It is his
superlative merit that he enables one to feel his own capacity of
thought as a positive and independent efficacy, and to rest upon the
authority of his own conscience as the hope of glory and as a
coördinating power with Holy Writ. He makes a broad survey of human
nature, and commands men to traverse the whole range of their being and
to call themselves to rigid account until the germs of moral debility
are cast out of the heart. Man is not to waste his energies in grasping
the immense and misty proportions of the beliefs of this or that
traditionist or minute systems to which souls are often bent in
unwilling conformity. The object of his ministry is to summon men to
reckon with themselves every day, and to regenerate themselves by right
thinking and by deeds of piety. In his opinion each person is a
spiritual agency, a marvellous display of divine power and goodness, not
only in the majesty of the truth which he apprehends, but in the dignity
of the life which he may live. Temptation may open its alluring paths,
evil may solicit us, sin may lead us astray, sorrow may drag us down;
yet they need not. His public ministry is devoted to the infusion of
this better sentiment,--that man is not the mere victim of
circumstances, the necessary prey of temptation, or the helpless subject
of wrong; that he need not contemplate life in indolent despair, but may
check the dominion of sin and impurity, rise above not only intemperate
indulgence, but every intemperate desire and impulse, and form
dispositions of peculiar excellence, of original strength and beauty.
Mr. Savage's ministry, then, is full of truth and power. It is strongly
personal and ethical. There is no abler advocate of this important truth
and master-word of the Gospel and of religion. It is a divine truth ever
working in him, breaking into utterances, and giving to his beliefs and
his life the highest dignity. With him it is a persistent and
overwhelming duty to give to his ministry this practical content, this
ethical intensity. In this he is evangelical.
The Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments assert or imply that
without our personal agency, and without the truth in the substance and
texture of our characters, there can be no spiritual elevation or final
perfection. In the terms of the Scriptures the divine resources are
infinite; but instead of overwhelming our personal agency or
responsibility they make a stupendous demand upon us. The truth must be
received with unhesitating acceptance and assimilated to our individual
being.
To teach such consummate truths the Rev. Minot J. Savage, D. D., strong
in every fibre of intellectual and religious faith, has devoted his
talents, his strength, and his life, and for that reason he stands
before the American people as one of their most noted preachers.
THE CIVIC OUTLOOK.
BY HENRY RANDALL WAITE, PH. D.
I. FRATERNAL GOVERNMENT.
The disposition to give due attention to the spirit of American
institutions is one which needs cultivation. Government, looked upon
only as machinery, may easily become a means for the accomplishment of
ends very different from those intended by its designers. In this
connection some recent utterances by Dr. Lyman Abbott are worthy of
serious thought:
It is sometimes said that the majority rules in America, and it
would be unfortunate if it were true. The French Revolution shows
that no despotism of the individual is so cruel as the despotism of
the majority. When the decisions of the majority or minority are
supported by the whole people that is Americanism. Our democracy is
not founded on the idea that our people make mistakes, but that the
decision of all the people is better than that of one class, and
that all the men are better judges than priests and kings and their
instruments. Fraternal government is what we are trying to
establish, and whoever strikes against the spirit of fraternalism
strikes against the foundation of our government. We can get along
with anything bad in our laws and correct it in our progress, but
we can never live and prosper with the East arrayed against the
West, the North against the South, rich against the poor, and labor
against capital.
II. TRUE AMERICANISM.
Whatever other meaning may attach to the word Americanism, Dr. Abbott
points to its best definition. But what he has in mind cannot be
expected in the absence of a spirit which is made manifest in real
fraternalism conjoined with faithful devotion to intelligent convictions
of duty. This spirit will take patriotism out of the realm of mere
sentiment into that of noble passion. It will give to citizenship so
high a meaning that failures in civic duty will take on--as they clearly
ought to do--the character of sins against one's own manhood and against
the brotherhood of which the citizen is a member. If this spirit be
underneath our laws and manifest in their administration, we need have
little anxiety as to their statutory form. Political as well as
scriptural wisdom expresses itself in the statement that the "letter" of
the law kills, the "spirit" alone gives life.
III. THE RIGHT SPIRIT IN CITIZENSHIP.
How the spirit of genuine citizenship is to be made ascendant is a
question of increasing concern. It may nevertheless be doubted whether
organized forces for its suppression do not, in the matter of
painstaking and persistent energy and adroit management, excel the
organized elements specially devoted to its cultivation. Citizenship
activities, politically considered, for the most part are merged in the
machinery of parties; and this machinery, instead of representing in its
tenets the will of great bodies of independent and well-intentioned
suffragists, is too often so manipulated by a few skilful and
unprincipled political machinists as to represent their will instead. It
is obvious that in so far as these clever machinists are able to run our
politics to suit themselves, the very machinery through which the right
spirit in citizenship must come to power, if at all, is turned into a
means for its own suppression. It thus comes to pass that we have the
pitiable spectacle of great party organizations through which masses of
honest and patriotic citizens farcically--nay, tragically--coöperate for
the accomplishment of results, which, while secured through their votes
and in their name, are in reality results of the clandestine and
sinister work of a few men.
IV. REFORM IN PRIMARY ELECTIONS.
Plainly, if the right spirit in citizenship is to be ascendant, it must
find some means of doing away with the boss system in politics. This
system is made possible only by the ease with which primary elections
are controlled by coteries of designing men. Here is a battlefield where
the best and worst elements in our politics need to be brought into
immediate and conclusive conflict. A system which foists upon the people
as its candidates for office those whom they have had no real voice in
choosing, and who are not worthy, represents an actual subversion of
popular government, and calls for such a manifestation of the spirit of
true Americanism as shall overthrow it once for all. This question is an
overshadowing one. Pollution at the fountain means pollution everywhere.
Men elected to office through shameful methods may sometimes be better
than the methods by which they have profited, but they are not to be
trusted. Their responsibility is to the "bosses," not to the citizens
whose machine-directed votes elected them. The only sentiment to which
they bow is that expressed by the leader whose favor bestowed, and whose
hostility will deprive them of, official position and emoluments. The
immediate outlook is not, however, without hope. Independent movements
in several States are in progress looking to the complete uprooting of
the boss system. In parts of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and
California, and in some of the Southern States "the Crawford County
method," which takes the choice of candidates out of the hands of the
few and places it in the hands of the majority of voters, is already
being tried. In Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota similar methods have
been the subject of legislative action, and satisfactory results are
anticipated. This is a reform which should not be left to the advocacy
of a few individuals, or to the members of a few organizations like the
American Institute of Civics and local civic reform bodies. Members of
these bodies have done much and will do more to promote it, but its
final success depends upon the manifestation everywhere of an aroused
public spirit whose demands cannot be denied.
V. CIVICS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS.
Much progress has recently been made in educational provisions for the
instruction necessary to qualify American youth for the intelligent and
efficient discharge of civic obligations. The Patria Club of New York
City, a strong body organized under the auspices of the American
Institute of Civics and devoted to the objects which it represents, has
offered prizes to the pupils in the schools in the vicinity of New York
for the purpose of stimulating their interest in matters of government
and citizenship, and has undertaken a similar work in connection with
the charity industrial schools of that city. Of great importance is the
action of the New York Board of Education looking to specific
instruction in civics in all the city schools, and its later action in
giving to this subject an important place in the curriculum of the high
schools which are to be established the coming year. Another
organization which contributes to the same results, the American Guards,
is represented by battalions in several New York schools. This
movement, which has already extended into many schools in different
States, is under the fostering care of Col. H. H. Adams, an officer of
the Institute of Civics. The guards are composed of boys who voluntarily
devote a certain amount of time, out of school hours, to exercises
promotive of a virile and intelligent patriotism. These exercises
include military drill, and the youthful guards, in their becoming
uniforms, develop a marked degree of manliness and self-respect. Two of
the battalions are under the leadership of public-school principals, E.
H. Boyer and D. E. Gaddes, councillors of the Institute of Civics. The
guards participated in the ceremonies at the dedication of the Grant
monument, and no organization in line attracted more favorable
attention.
VI. RURAL INFLUENCES ON URBAN AFFAIRS.
It cannot be denied that the hitherto controlling power of voters in
rural districts has frequently been used to the prejudice of city
interests. Representatives from country regions have lent their aid in
effecting vicious as well as wholesome changes in legislation affecting
municipalities, and this aid has sometimes been secured by corrupt
methods. It is nevertheless true that the average country voter and the
average legislator who represents him sincerely desire to promote only
such legislation as will be of highest advantage to urban communities.
If their votes fail to secure this result it is more often because of
insufficient knowledge of urban conditions and needs, than of
indifference or corrupt influences.
It is, therefore, a matter of the very highest importance that citizens
remote from our great cities be made sufficiently familiar with
municipal needs to enable them to reach wiser conclusions as to the
desirability or undesirability of special measures affecting their
political, social, and industrial interests. Opinions based, as now,
chiefly upon the statements of a partisan press, too often represent the
interests of a party regardless of those of the municipalities directly
concerned.
With the steady growth of our great cities in population and political
power, the question of wholesome State legislation in matters affecting
their civic and moral wellbeing, is one of no less importance to rural
communities than to the cities themselves. Controlling power is already
drifting cityward in many States, and rural voters who have not
contributed to the creation of right civic conditions in our great
municipalities may soon find this power used to their own serious
injury. In this connection the New York _Christian Advocate_, referring
to the possibilities of good and evil in the Greater New York, justly
says:
The only balancing force in preventing the evil from triumphing
over the good, will be the influence of the remainder of the Empire
State. The morale of cities differs from that of rural regions in
that the evil-minded can consort and conceal their deeds, can
obtain great political power; and large cities are prone to
legalize vice and admit of organized political corruption. Whereas
elsewhere the laws are generally in harmony with morality, and the
difficulty of concealment impedes the growth and the increase of
the arrogance of vice.
The force of Greater New York in legislation and the administration
of law, is something appalling to contemplate. Permanent antagonism
between the Metropolis and the rest of the State will in itself be
a demoralizing element. Yet unless the State watches this immense
aggregation of heterogeneous peoples and cities, Greater New York
may become a pervading source of corruption. If there be one
tendency confirmed by history, it is that smaller cities imitate
the greater, that towns imitate the smaller cities, and villages,
the towns. Thus for good or ill the most populous centres become
the controlling force.
VII. WOMAN'S WORK IN CIVICS.
The growth of organizations which are directed by women, wholly or
chiefly devoted to reforms in civic conditions, has been paralleled by
hardly any popular movement of recent years. The Women's Christian
Temperance Union, although hardly more than a juvenile among other great
organizations, is second to few of them in its potentiality for good.
Women's clubs are found everywhere, and, wherever found, for the most
part represent a serious purpose to find and apply right remedies to
existing civic and social evils. The Federation of Women's Clubs brings
all of these local movements into harmonious efforts for the upbuilding
of unselfish patriotism in the community and the highest virtue in the
home. The National Health Protective Association, whose second annual
meeting was recently held in Philadelphia, has already made a record for
itself, through its branches in many cities, which evidences not only a
reason for its existence, but the capacity and success which women have
brought to the solution of some of the most important problems of city
life, such as protection from contagious diseases, the supply of pure
water and pure milk, the prevention of food adulterations, improvements
in tenement conditions, provisions affecting the health of working
people, attention to the sick children of the very poor, and a score of
equally important matters. The chairman of this organization is Mrs.
Etta Osgood of Portland, Maine, and its leading members include Dr.
Lozier of New York, Mrs. A. J. Perry of Brooklyn, Mrs. Theo. F. Seward
of Orange, N. J., Mrs. Henry Birkenbine of Wayne, Pa., Mrs. L. E. Harvey
of Dayton, O., Miss Florence Parsons of Yonkers, N. Y., Mrs. J. E Weiks
of Buffalo, and Mrs. John H. Scribner of Philadelphia.
In the same city was also held, shortly after the meeting of the Health
Protective Association, the Triennial Convention of Working Women's
Societies. This gathering of earnest women was notable for the keenness
which its members brought to the discussion of questions affecting the
interests of working women, and the equal sincerity of their desire to
reach only just conclusions. Here is an opportunity for the bright women
who are at the head of the Federation of Women's Clubs to establish
reciprocal relations which will be fruitful in great good.
VIII. MUNICIPAL REFORM ORGANIZATIONS.
The third year of the National Reform League has been completed with
results full of encouragement to the members of the various social
organizations of which it is composed. Its annual meeting at Louisville,
Ky., was attended by one hundred and fifty delegates. Much of the
success of the widely extended work represented by this national
organization is due to the persistent and unselfish activities of its
able secretary, Mr. Clinton Rogers Woodruff, of the Philadelphia bar,
who closed his address before the convention with these encouraging
words:
In every direction the outlook is bright and promising, not of the
immediate fulfilment of all the hopes and desires of those who are
most deeply interested perhaps, but of substantial progress and
steady growth. The sentiment for better government is gaining day
by day. It is not a movement for a particular form of local
government or of specific panaceas for municipal evils, but rather
one to bring the citizens, those who are primarily responsible, to
a fuller appreciation and a more general discharge of the duties of
citizenship--in short, a movement for citizenship reform. The
indifference and apathy of the average voter have been a matter of
general comment. To overcome this, and to replace it with that
interest and that action without which no permanent reform can be
accomplished, the realization that good government depends for its
very existence upon good men, is the fundamental basis of municipal
reform. Charter revision, civil-service rules and regulations, fair
elections, and an honest count and return are all important; but
they depend for their success upon sound public opinion, and that
depends upon good citizenship. Good laws are important; good
citizenship is essential.
The Good Citizenship League of Minneapolis adds to the means of its
increasingly useful work by the publication of a carefully edited little
periodical under the title of _Facts_, in which information that might
not otherwise reach them in proper form is placed before all citizens.
E. F. Waite is President, and Alfred Sherlock, Secretary, with offices
at 254 Hennepin Avenue.
IX. CITY TAXPAYERS.
Mr. Charles Richardson, vice-president of the National Municipal League,
in seeking the causes for the non-participation of large taxpayers in
efforts to secure good government in cities, finds the following among
other reasons:
1st. Because they fear that their opposition to influential
politicians may be punished by an increase in their assessments for
taxation, or by a loss of custom or employment, or by some other
action injurious to their personal or business interests.
2nd. Because as investors, employees, or otherwise, they have or
hope to have some pecuniary interests in corporations, contracts,
or offices, which would be much less profitable under a government
too pure to be corrupted, and too intelligent to be outwitted.
3rd. Because they believe that it pays better in dollars and cents
to submit to existing abuses than to expend the time and money
required for a long and difficult series of political contests.
4th. Because they consider that national legislation affects their
personal interests far more than any probable action of their local
government, and that their national party must therefore be
supported in its efforts to strengthen itself by securing complete
control of local affairs.
5th. Because they believe the local machine of the opposition party
is still worse than their own, and that to promote its success by
wasting their votes on a third ticket would only be jumping out of
the frying pan into the fire.
6th. Because they have no faith in the possibility of subjecting
politics to the principles of common honesty, or public affairs to
the methods of intelligent business.
This list is not complete, but it is sufficiently formidable to
show that the progress of reform principles among the taxpayers
must continue to be slow and difficult, unless city government can
be made to appear much more important and interesting than it has
hitherto seemed to be.
X. CIVICS IN STATE UNIVERSITIES.
A writer in _Christian Work_, urging the importance of action such as
the American Institute of Civics is devoted to, says:
With the new way of looking at Government, and with new tasks
imposed upon it, must come preparation for the grave
responsibilities of the present and future. Old ideas linger after
they have subserved their purposes. We are living in an industrial
age. Especially is it true in a country like the United States that
the ordinary pursuits of peace outweigh a hundredfold the interests
of war. Nevertheless, we have our well-equipped academy at West
Point to prepare young men for the army, and our excellent academy
at Annapolis to prepare young men for the navy; but we have no
civil academy to give men careful preparation for the civil
service, which is of inestimably more importance to us than either
the army or navy so far as ordinary, everyday life is concerned.
Even in his day, Washington saw the importance of a national
university which should fulfil many of the purposes of such an
academy. As a part of the remedy for trusts and combinations, and
an important part, the writer would mention institutions designed
to give the most careful training in preparation for every branch
of the civil service. This should go hand in hand with the
enlargement of this service. The progress which has already been
made in the reformation of our civil service is gratifying, but
something far more than has yet been advocated by any
civil-service-reform association is needed. As part of the general
programme of the solution of the problem of monopoly, the
development of the State universities of the country along the line
of civics may be mentioned. Each State university should, in
addition to other things, be a civil academy.
XI. A BETRAYAL OF REFORM.
These are the words applied to an act of the Republican Governor of New
York by one of the ablest and stanchest Republican journals of that
State, the _Mail and Express_ of New York City. It goes on to say:
Gov. Black's approval of the bill to place the civil service of
this State at the mercy of machine politics is a perversion of
Republican principle and a betrayal of reform. There is not one
legitimate public interest that this measure will benefit; not a
single purpose of honest administration that it will strengthen,
nor an object of sound party policy that it will help to
accomplish.
The Governor's bill is a step backward from the advanced position
of the party on the civil-service issue. It is a trick to nullify
the merit principle in appointments to public office, and it opens
the way for a full restoration of the spoils system. There is not a
boss nor a machine politician in the State who does not indorse it.
There is not an intelligent supporter of honest civil service who
will not denounce it.
The rank and file of the Republican party repudiate the Governor's
bill and disclaim all responsibility for it. Party sentiment has
spoken against it in unmistakable terms. The Governor's reflections
upon those who opposed the bill are neither well grounded nor in
good taste. They mean nothing save that he is sensitive to the
criticism which his ill-advised measure has provoked--criticism
which, it may truthfully be said, is abundantly warranted by the
character of the bill itself as well as by his own amazing advocacy
of the spoils system in the public service.
XII. STATE AID TO INDUSTRIES.
Massachusetts has undertaken an interesting experiment in the way of
promoting home industries. With the aim of producing in that State the
finer grade of goods now produced only in foreign markets, the
legislature two years ago appropriated $25,000 for the establishment of
a textile school in any town which might make a like appropriation for
the same object. This offer has now been accepted by the citizens of
Lowell, and the first school of the character proposed is being
established. It is hoped that this experiment may lead to results which
will in some degree compensate for the industrial losses sustained by
New England through the competition of the multiplying cotton mills in
the South.
XIII. READING MATTER FOR PRISONERS.
Some time ago, in response to a need brought to its attention by one of
the local officers in Texas, the American Institute of Civics offered to
superintend the distribution among the prisons of the United States of
literature suitable for the use of prisoners. Citizens were asked to
coöperate, and much good literature has thus been placed in the hands of
those who have found it not only a source of entertainment, but, through
its refining and elevating influences, a means of great benefit. This
beneficent work can be indefinitely extended with a little cost if
citizens who appreciate its importance will give to it their aid by
contributions of literature, such as wholesome works of fiction, popular
works of history, treatises on the useful arts and industries, popular
periodicals, etc., etc.; or by assisting in the payment of the cost of
collection and distribution. One of the Institute's councillors in the
State of Washington, President Penrose of Whitman College, has recently
made an appeal for such literature for the use of convicts in the
Washington penitentiary. Inquiries as to methods of coöperation, or
gifts for the prison literature expense fund, may be sent to the
American Institute of Civics, 203 Broadway, New York.
"THE TEMPEST" THE SEQUEL TO "HAMLET."
BY EMILY DICKEY BEERY.
"The Tempest" is a little enchanted world where play all the forces that
are manifested in the larger creation from the lowest animalism to the
highest manhood, harmonious with his invisible environment. This world
in miniature--true to the laws of the macrocosm--begins in chaos, storm,
and stress, but finds completion in supernal air and divine peace. We
shall find by consecutive study of the dramas that the poet, in his
creative work, has ever risen from lower manifestations to higher as his
own soul soared on higher and higher wing. Prospero was his last,
greatest, and divinest thought of man in his unfolding godward.
Nature in her evolution takes no vast strides, and her supreme poet
follows her divine current of growth from the animal man to the grand
manifestation of his ideal. He understood that in man's unfolding not a
round could be missed of the "Jacob's Ladder" resting upon the earth,
but reaching into the heavens.
In this ideal world of "The Tempest," Caliban stands upon the earth
groping to attain the first step, while Prospero stands upon the summit
with his face heavenward. This typical man comes upon the stage on a
high plane of development. Long previously he had left the rank and file
of humanity to tread the ever lonely path to higher achievement,
therefore we must look below him to find, among the creations of the
poet, the incarnation which was the chrysalis for this last ideal. Here
our intuitive perception immediately descries Hamlet, that wonderful
human mystery who was the first of Shakspere's sons to enter the
precincts of the inner life and catch a glimpse of the godlike
potentialities of the human soul.
In Hamlet was the struggle of birth; in Prospero, the glory of
achievement, the fulfilment to some extent of the poet's ideal man, and
the first to realize that the power of thought is the supreme force in
the universe. Hamlet caught the first glimpse of this truth when he
said, "There's nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so." He is the
hero of spiritual birth and growth in man from the dawning of the
soul-life, through its fierce struggles to dominate the lower self and
rise into realms of clearer light and truth. The "godlike reason which
was not left in him to rust unused," in its aspiration became
illuminated by intuition and revealed to his awe-inspired gaze new
worlds not dreamed of by the Horatios of his time.
Hamlet was lost in wonder at himself. The lower forces of his nature
along the old inherited lines of thought, coming in contact with the
higher thought-currents, newly created, caused the blended stream to
"turn awry and lose the name of action," termed by the unseeing world
lack of courage and will-power. Even he could not understand but that in
some inexplicable way he _must_ be a coward, because he could not
perceive the _why_ of his delaying vengeance. Yet he knew he was brave
to the core of his being. When his military friends, "distilled almost
to jelly with the act of fear," would have restrained him from following
the spirit of his father, he cries out:
Why, what should be the fear? I do not set my life at a pin's fee;
and for my soul, what can it do to that, being a thing immortal as
itself? ... My fate cries out, and makes each petty artery in this
body as hardy as the Nemean lion's nerve.
He was strong of will and resolute of purpose, but had reached the plane
of development where his higher nature would not permit him to commit
murder. Yet the strong current of popular opinion, as well as all
hereditary and sub-conscious influences in himself, were ever impelling
him to do the deed. In his soul-growth, Hamlet had passed the plane of
revenge as a passion, but had not reached the divine heights of
forgiveness. To avenge the murder of his father was to him a sacred
command and duty coming in conflict with another equally sacred duty
voiced by his higher self, and the mighty meeting of these two
soul-forces always resulted in inaction. This moral battleground is the
pivotal point of the drama, indirectly putting in motion all the forces
which terminate in the final catastrophe.
In his thoughtful moods his disposition was ever shaken with "thoughts
beyond the reaches of our souls," saying, "Why is this? wherefore? what
should we do?" It was the unlaid ghost of his higher self that
propounded these queries to the apparition. The birth-throes of thought
were giving him entrance into a new world where he began to see "What a
piece of work is man! how _infinite_ in faculty! in action how like an
angel! in apprehension how like a God!"
The thoughts that Hamlet voices had passed through Shakspere's brain,
and the wonderful powers manifested by Prospero had been apprehended by
his own prophetic vision. Hamlet might have moved along on the lower
plane successfully, but the law of spiritual growth, the divine force
upheaving and uplifting his soul against the barriers of his
sub-conscious mentality and his environment, finally ended in the sad
tragedy. Yet in the defeat was a victory, for it was merely the turn of
the spiral downward for a higher rise in evolution.
Prospero is first revealed to us at about the age of Hamlet when the
curtain falls and hides him from our tear-dimmed eyes. Shakspere loved
Hamlet. He was dearest to his heart of all his children, and he felt
that he must not die, but must come into the full fruition of the
immortals. The soul so nobly struggling from its swaddling clothes
_must_ become a freed spirit of godlike power. Therefore he presents to
us an ideal world where Hamlet sits upon the throne as Prospero,
"transported and rapt in secret studies," "neglecting worldly ends, all
dedicated to closeness and the bettering of his mind with that which
o'erprized all popular rate." Prospero was born a higher type, therefore
the divine in him had freer action. His soul opened to the over-soul
like a flower to the sunlight.
The divine force in man is his will--his true will--and this force in
its perfect exercise has no human limitation. It is only the _seeming_
will that is limited. This power, _manifested in thought_, is
represented by Ariel.
The statement of Prospero that his studies bettered his mind to such
high degree is proof that they were those not of the magician, but of
the philosopher and true psychologist, for the study of magic darkens
the soul and degrades the intellect. Prospero's power was not magical,
and Shakspere used the word magician only to bring the drama within
touch of his audience, knowing full well that the wise would understand,
for "wisdom is justified of her children."
In the manifestation of soul-power we first perceive the true greatness
of Prospero and the heights to which Shakspere's own soul had risen, for
"the stream cannot rise higher than its source." The greatness of Julius
Cæsar is "weighed in the balance and found wanting," for every truly
great nature must be the rounded out and harmonious development of the
intellectual, moral, and spiritual. This is the measure of Prospero, and
in his unfolding, unseen realms and previously unknown powers had
opened, according to eternal law, to his demanding soul.
"The Tempest" is philosophical, psychological, and occult--philosophical
because thought is the motor power. Le Conte says: "That deepest of all
questions--the nature and origin of natural forces--is a question for
philosophy and not for science." Thought is a natural force; yes, a
dynamic force of the most intense power. It may be a search-light of the
universe, a thunderbolt of destruction, or a messenger of light and love
with healing in its wings. The mantle of Prospero is simply an emblem of
power, and the word is so understood among the Orientals. In Scripture,
when Elijah ascended in his fiery chariot, his mantle fell upon Elisha,
who immediately caused the waters to retreat from its stroke and
continued clothed with his master's power. So Prospero, robing himself
in his mantle or laying it aside, means his exercise or non-exercise of
what are termed supernatural powers.
Victor Hugo says that Shakspere "did not question the invisible world,
he rehabilitated it. He did not deny man's supernatural power, he
consecrated it." There is no reason why man in his higher estate should
not have free intercourse with a world invisible to him in his lower
conditions. Can the grub have the same companionship as the butterfly?
Victor Hugo also says that the "'Midsummer Night's Dream' depicts the
action of the invisible world on man, but 'The Tempest' symbolizes the
action of man on the invisible world. In the poet's youth, man obeys the
spirits. In the poet's ripe age, the _spirits obey man_." This shows a
fine apprehension of the interior revealings of the supreme poetic
genius. Every great and true poet is also a prophet and seer. Then why
should not Shakspere--the supremest in all the "tide of time"--not have
the widest and most far-reaching vision of the wonderful attainments
and powers of the perfected man. He undoubtedly saw and felt the
grandeur of the ages to come, and knew, with divine prescience, that
only the hem of the garment of knowledge had been as yet touched. There
is but one power in the universe, and as Emerson says, "Every man is an
inlet to the whole." Then where is his limitation?
Did not nature obey the Nazarene, and the winds and mountainous waves
lie gently down at His bidding? And did He not say that His disciples
should do greater works than He had done? Then why should not Prospero,
as a typical man, have control over all the forces of nature?
It is interesting to note that Shakspere has given to him almost the
identical powers of the Man of Nazareth! This is not strange, as it is
an absolute truth that when man rises to the royalty of spirit every
element will be his obedient servant. Thought will be the agent of his
ministries; which the poet has so marvellously portrayed in its
personification as Ariel. Ariel says: "Thy thoughts I cleave to;" and
Prospero, in calling him, "Come with a thought." It is now claimed by
the most advanced and best psychologists, that a forceful, living
thought does become a real embodiment which may be perceived by the
finer senses. Ariel was what the mind of his master made him, sometimes
a sprite, sometimes a sea-nymph, again a harpy, anything and everything
the master directed.
Sycorax symbolized ignorance, and thought had been long imprisoned in
the holds of nature by this creature of darkness, but ever painfully
struggling to reach the light. Ignorance imprisoned thought, but could
not free it. Prospero, as wisdom, gave it freedom and directed its
action until he could send it forth in still more glorious freedom.
Freedom of thought is a dominant strain in the drama, and is even sung
by the "reeling ripe" Stephano. Caliban represents the child of
ignorance, closely allied to nature and partaking of its poetry and
grandeur. He is man in his first estate, just emerging from the animal.
Yet, in this crude, forbidding aspect how superior in dignity compared
with Stephano and Trinculo in their vile abasement through the vices of
civilization.
Shakspere's knowledge of the power of thought over the body is shown in
his saying that Sycorax, "through age and envy, had grown into a hoop;"
and of Caliban that, "As with age his body uglier grows, so his mind
cankers." It is not strange that Shakspere perceived the new psychology,
for Milton sang--
Oft Converse with heavenly habitants
Begins to cast a beam on the outward shape,
The unpolluted temple of the mind,
And turns it by degrees to the soul's essence,
Till all be made immortal.
The poet Spenser most beautifully expresses this truth in saying:
So every spirit, as it is more pure,
And hath in it the more of heavenly light,
So it the fairer body doth procure
To habit in....
For of the soul the body form doth take,
For soul is form, and doth the body make.
This is the teaching also of St. Paul, that the body must be transformed
by the renewing of the mind.
Here we perceive the source of the heavenly beauty and grace of Miranda.
"The pure in heart shall see God." Her thought and vision wrought out
for her a bodily expression that made her seem celestial to the
beholder, and held him in doubt whether she were goddess or mortal.
In esoteric thought the perfected being must be an equal blending of the
masculine and feminine, which Balzac has so gloriously interpreted in
his "Seraphita." This quality we see in Prospero, the gentle, refined
element of motherhood, blended with sublime dignity and strength. His
child was to him "a cherubim infusing him with fortitude from heaven,"
and he gave to her the richest dower of inheritance--knowledge, with
purity of heart and purpose. With the gentle patience of love he
instructed her in the laws of nature and her being, with divine purity
of thought. For all nature is pure as God himself. Thus Miranda became
the peerless young Eve of blended wisdom and innocence.
After a display of his power, he states, in his address to Ferdinand,
the most abstruse problems of the ideal philosophy.
These ... were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
This sublime inspiration was almost the last outburst of the mighty
genius of Shakspere, and is a fitting crown of glory.
Prospero was fully conscious of his superiority, and with simple but
grandest dignity he claims that practically it was his own power that
worked all the wonders. Most sublimely he expresses this when he calls
before him his invisible helpers:
Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves,
And ye that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune and do fly him
When he comes back; ... by whose aid,
Weak masters though ye be, I have bedimm'd
The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds,
And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war; to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak
With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory
Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up
The pine and cedar; graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let them forth
By my so potent art.
Passing from his power over nature to the manifestation of his higher
self with men, we see the spiritual plane he had reached. In coming
again in contact with the world of humanity his first action is the
recognition of the good and the forgiving the evil:
--O good Gonzalo,
My true preserver, and a loyal sir
To him thou follow'st, I will pay thy graces
Home both in word and deed.
His divine forgiveness of those who had so cruelly wronged him shows the
height of his spiritual attainment:
Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick,
Yet with my nobler reason 'gainst my fury
Do I take part; the rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance: they being penitent,
The sole drift of my purpose doth extend
Not a frown further.
In the very remarkable events of his life he recognizes a higher power
in all his guidance. "Was Milan thrust from Milan, that his issue should
become kings of Naples?"
There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Roughhew them how we will.
In no drama has the poet risen to such supreme types of character.
Prospero was the highest expression of Shakspere's latest thought, but
only the shadowing forth of a supremer ideal. We can portray what is
beneath us far more vividly and truly than what is above us. Shakspere
had _lived_ Hamlet, and that is why he so vitally touches every human
soul. In Prospero it was the vision by the great poetic soul of a
promised land he had only viewed from a mountain top. He had seen the
wonderfully luscious grasps of Eschol, but had not yet tasted them. This
is why we feel the vast yet subtle difference between "Hamlet" and "The
Tempest."
If the immortal poet had lived the years allotted to man, with ever
increasing openness of vision, his own soul would have attained that
lofty height where, from the "pattern on the mount," he would have
portrayed the splendor of divine manhood in godlike majesty, the soul
irradiating the body like the shining face of Moses in its halo of
awe-inspiring divinity. The people required a veil; they would require
one still.
Although Shakspere left us before he had lived in the radiance of the
truly spiritual realm, we may well crown his Prospero with his words of
another:
He sits 'mongst men like a descended God:
He hath a kind of honor sets him off,
More than a mortal seeming.
THE CREATIVE MAN.
BY STINSON JARVIS.
In the April number of this magazine its Editor gave us a paper called
"The Man in History." Readers will not have failed to note the grand
width and depth it gave to ordinary views. The facts concerning the
human being, from the earliest records to those of the present day, were
marshalled in so masterly a way, and the mental grip on the whole mass
was so far-reaching and unique, that people must have perceived that
they were gaining the benefits of a lifetime study.
This article is therefore in no sense a reply to Dr. Ridpath's
masterpiece. On the contrary, I wish to refer to all the historical
events as he has introduced them, and can only regret that want of space
forbids a reprint which would enable the original to be read with these
comments. My endeavor is simply to bring forward for contemporaneous
consideration certain suggestions which seem to me to be of a highly
interesting character, and which were forced in upon my own thought by
the results of experiments upon the human being. After the long series
of articles published in THE ARENA about three years ago, many of my
readers will not require further explanation of these experiments; but
for others I will briefly refer, later on in this paper, to the
phenomena which greatly affect one's views regarding man's powers and
possibilities, together with the nature and extent of his agency in the
world's events.
Dr. Ridpath has brought forward as interesting a question as was ever
laid before a public, namely, how far, if at all, Man is the maker of
history. And by the word "history" the learned author does not mean
those records of events which any chance chronicler may choose to
present, but the events themselves, their causes, action, and results.
Here he presents both sides of the question, with the arguments which
may be alternately used in support of each. He cites two master
thinkers, Carlyle and Buckle, whose differences of opinion relative to
man's agency in history were distinctly defined: Carlyle seeking the
hero in each great event, and recognizing only one force, that of God,
behind the principal actor of the temporary drama, and never satisfied
until the _individual_ origins of history could be discovered. On the
other hand, Buckle, to whom man, including the part he played, appeared
"as the mere result of historical forces," and in the view of scientific
rationalism contemplating "only the lines of an infinite and unalterable
causation encompassing the world and bringing to pass whatever is done
by the agency of men _en masse_."
I confess I was not by any means clear at first as to what Buckle meant
by this "infinite and unalterable causation." If he meant the shapings
of heredity coming down through many generations to produce a man able
to lead in a certain event, then I followed him. I also sufficiently
understood him if he referred to national desires and necessities
assisting to produce competent manipulators of important events. But I
did not gather until later that this language might possibly be intended
to include what in common parlance is called "the will of God."
In the alternation of contention which Dr. Ridpath lays before us with
so much skill, we are all more or less familiar with the Carlyle side of
the argument, so let us consider a part of what is said on the Buckle
side. In sentences collected from different portions, the "believer in
the predominance of universal causation" is represented as speaking in
this way:
Men produce nothing. They control nothing. On the contrary, they
are themselves like bubbles thrown up with the heavings of an
infinite sea. They do not direct the course of history. Nations go
to battle as the clouds enter a storm. Do clouds really fight, or
are they not rather driven into concussion? Are not unseen forces
behind both the nations and the clouds? What was Rome but a
catapult, and Cæsar but the stone? He was flung from it beyond the
Alps to fall upon the barbarians of Gaul and Britain. What was
Alfred but the bared right arm of England? What was Dante but a
wail of the middle ages?--and what was Luther but a tocsin? What
was Napoleon but a thunderbolt rattling among the thrones of
Europe? He did not fling himself, but _was flung_!
The whole tendency of inquiry respecting the place of man in
history has been to reduce the agency of the individual. Every
advance in our scientific knowledge has confirmed what was
aforetime only a suspicion, that the influence of man, as man, on
the world's course of events is insignificant. Over all there is a
controlling Force and Tendency, without which events and facts and
institutions are nothing.... History may be defined as the
aggregate of human forces acting under law, moving invisibly--but
with visible phenomena.... The individuals who contribute to the
vast volume do not understand their contributions thereto, or the
general scheme of which they are little more than the atomic parts.
Over this aggregate of human forces there presides somehow and
somewhere a Will, a Purpose, a Principle, the nature of which no
man knoweth to this day. To this Will and Purpose, to this
universal Plan, which we are able to see dimly manifested in the
general results and course of things, men give various names
according to their age and race; according to their biases of
nature and education. Some call it ... Fate; some, the First Cause;
some, the Logos; some, Providence; some of the greatest races have
called it God.
We come then to the admission on the Buckle side of the argument that
the forces referred to as "universal causation" may possibly include the
will of God. And from the time this admission is made there seems to be
little of material difference between the contestants. Practically, both
refer, or may refer, back to the will of God; and the discussion here
brings me to the point at which some pertinent questions may be asked.
In what historical crises has the will of God been manifested? Can you
confidently point to one? If so, your conversational friend will
probably call your attention to some terrible disasters which arose from
it. Perhaps you may thus point to some monarchy. But your iconoclastic
friend will probably refer you to a loathsome system of parasitic
adulation, in which place and position went by favoritism and whimsical
preference, and where advancement through personal merit was almost
unknown. These ills, you think, could not be present in a republic; but
when you point to one of these, your attention is directed to an
internal rottenness in which justice and liberty are bought and sold by
men who must make their fortunes during a short term of irresponsible
office. You are then apt to smile at the idea that any of these
represented the intentions of God.
Or, to take an extreme case, you may instance the life, teachings, and
death of Christ. But if your friend be a fairly good amateur historian
he can sufficiently indicate the many wars, the almost countless
conflicts and incalculable amount of manslaughter that belief in Christ
gave rise to. He can tell of those stupendous waves of crusadic
fanaticism in the course of which the pillage and rapine of utterly
lawless hordes brought undying disgrace upon Europe. He can pile story
upon story of carnage and divided homes until you may possibly conclude
that it would have been better for the world if the cross of Golgotha
had never been heard of. A wrong conclusion, most certainly; but one
that has oceans of facts to back it.
Outside the cases in which retribution has seemed to follow close upon
wrongdoing, where can we find a momentous event of history which we can
point out to ourselves and say with confidence, "That, certainly, was
brought about by the will of God." If amalgamation of hostile baronies
into one dominant nation and the acquirement of many civil advantages
may be regarded as a blessing, then some will point back to an immensely
picturesque figure of history and claim that the Norman William was one
specially produced by the divine will for an event from which issued
peculiarly valuable results. But here we have to face a question which
is continually prominent when historical events are attributed to the
will of God: "Is it necessary," we are driven to ask ourselves, "that
God's purposes be brought to a culmination through trickery, perjury,
manslaughter, and every kind of falsity?" Personally I feel totally
unable to think this. I wish to mention the difficulties which everyone
who thinks honestly must encounter, and to do so reverently. History
thus seems to enforce acceptance of one of two conclusions: Either that
the justice of God is not what we are glad to suppose it to be; or else
that these matters were not conducted according to the divine will. For
in William's case we find all these difficulties: the claim to be acting
on Harold's promise, the prior mortgaging of the intended results to the
church of Rome in order to gain the assistance of foreign hordes by
calling the proposed invasion a holy war, and other trickeries which
need not now be set out. He brought his newly-made England into the
bondage of a hierarchy, and in buying Romish aid established a precedent
that was followed by other kings until priestcraft gained the unlimited
power which drained the coffers of Europe, impoverished Italy, beggared
Spain, revelled in the demoniacal Inquisition, subsequently degraded the
Lower Canadians to almost the ignorance of the beasts, and is now using
the whole of its political power to fasten its vampire clutch upon the
fair virgin provinces of the Canadian Northwest.
If William could have foreseen some results of his handiwork he could
have been properly regarded as one of the worst devils ever let loose
upon the earth. And yet we are asked to believe that all these things
were foreknown to the Deity, and that the shaping of William's policy
was under the divine will.
This brief survey of a great event is only one of a large number that
could be made, each collection of occurrences showing similar mixed
conditions--some exhibiting resulting benefits, but in many cases
mingled with disaster and distress to such an extent that the movement
as a whole cannot possibly be attributed by any thinking person to the
divine will.
Every historian will admit that in the great events of history, the
conquests and other large acquisitions of territory, some one or more of
the following disgraces were present: the killing of human beings, false
pretences, pillage and rapine, human tortures, treacheries,
imprisonments, introductions of diseases, plagues, and bad habits,
traffic in drugs and liquors which debauched, degraded, and killed. Such
a list is almost endless. And shall we say that an Almighty Father
caring for his children could have desired such proceedings? Surely not!
Let us be sensible and conform our judgment to the evidence.
In doing so, what is our alternative? Are we not forced to comprehend
that even the most valuable improvements were only advanced so far as
human intelligence could advance them when this intelligence was
illuminated by a partial exercise of its highest faculties? Are we not
forced to admit that the resulting benefits, whether personal or
national, were for the most part those which were humanly foreseen, and
that the subsequent disasters were for the most part those which could
not be foreseen by human intelligence?--or were foreseen and
intentionally risked and braved? Has there been a single event of
history which cannot be honestly attributed to human intelligence--this
being aided by a partial exercise of its highest faculties?
What, then, are these highest faculties? What are the powers within man
which enable him to transcend other men, and previous men? Let me here
state my conviction, which later on will seem justified, that advance in
comprehension of the higher faculties in man must be gained through a
further acquaintance with phenomena which may be present in hypnotic
conditions. I do not mean that personal attention to the experiments is
necessary, no matter how preferable. Nor do I suggest that they tell as
much as one could wish--at least, so far as I have followed them. Mine
have only led me to the outside ramparts of vast realms which await the
investigations of others.
What I mean is that everyone should in some way be made certain, either
through personal experiment or reliable hearsay, that in the human
make-up there are faculties which may be forced by will-power into an
activity which they do not manifest in the ordinary daily life. There is
no reason to doubt that these are the same faculties which become so
apparent in the keen-sightedness of those who are great in statecraft,
diplomacy, business, or in any other way. With ordinary people,
especially the laboring classes, these faculties seem more inactive,
through disuse. In most men they seem to show activity only when forced
by concentration and will-power; but there are bright people of both
sexes in whom they seem very alert without urging.
My reasons for stating that everyone should be acquainted with these
peculiarities are well founded. Without this the admission that there is
a "soul" in man is largely due to the compulsion of hearsay. Without
this, and certain other studies, some of the reasons for the evolution
of man and beast are obscured, and the most telling argument in favor of
further evolution remains practically a blank. Without this we need not
look for a better understanding of man's place in history. But, on the
other hand, this kind of research supplies proof of many seemingly
miraculous powers in man which have valuable explanations to make in
regard to the history of history.
Here the truth-seeker may prove to himself the reality of "soul." And
why should anyone admit its reality if he has never had cause to regard
himself as anything better than a good-natured animal? Unless he has had
made clear to him some soul-truths (which, owing to the fact that every
human being is a hypnotic patient, are generally made manifest without
any dabbling in experiments)--unless, I say, he has been in some way
convinced of the reality of "soul," his moral ramparts are chiefly
constructed of the hearsay that provides but slim defence. The
suggestion here is that the best way to be able to believe in miracles
is to learn how to perform them!
This paper, however, will deal solely with man's place in history, which
is only a section of the ranges of view which the study of the mesmeric
phenomena forces into consideration. We want to know more about those
who have controlled armies, nations, events, and themselves. We want to
gain a better idea of the forces at work in the making of history; how
far, if not entirely, man was responsible; how far, if at all, he was
assisted in any peculiar way toward the acquirement of a farsightedness
superior to that of his fellows; why historical events, both in their
inception and action, were so peculiarly human and often so dreadfully
animal; why the sought-for and acquired benefits have so often been
mingled with distress and catastrophe.
These somewhat numerous inquiries are answered, in effect, by an
exposition of the faculties referred to, and of the powers by which
these may be forced into increased activity. When these are understood
so far as they can be explained here, then the answers to all the above
queries will become apparent to those who apply the facts to their
knowledge of history; and they will need no more detailed answer than
that which I shall give.
Many have noted the fact that the foremost personages of history have
been men of great will-power. They might be French, Greek, Jew, or
Moslem; they might be of any occupation, rank, or color; but always they
were men of great will-power. This has been the one peculiarity common
to all. But why should will-power be a _sine qua non_ of greatness? The
reasons will appear as we proceed.
In the year 1897 an attempt to explain mesmerism is not as necessary as
it used to be. The amount of notice which the newspapers give to the
subject suggests that an interest in it is very widespread in America.
Even the most illiterate must now be aware that persons may be so
influenced by the wills of others that they pass into a sleep, or a
condition resembling sleep, during which they are to a large extent, and
sometimes entirely, subject to the wills of the actuators. Professionals
have also assisted in instructing the public as to the minor phenomena.
One of them has lately been making money in New York by keeping his
patient in the hypnotic trance for a week, during which ignorant medical
students and doctors tried brutal methods of awakening the victim--the
same methods which disgrace some of the hospitals when unfortunates pass
into trances from unknown causes. In other cases, persons in the
audience are requested to pencil secretly some lines on paper and hide
the writings in their pockets. The patient on the stage then reads the
writing, and this reading is subsequently compared with the hidden
papers and found to be correct. The numbers engraved on people's watches
are also read in the same way.
I have never attended such performances because they had nothing to
teach me; and if confederates were used, all I can say is that the
performances could be given much more easily without confederates. My
reason for mentioning these people is that their work, if genuine, as I
suppose, allows me a greater brevity in this paper; also because their
large numbers prove the truth of what I published long ago, that anyone
of fairly strong will-power can perform these seeming marvels if a
suitable patient can be procured. It may, however, be accepted as
absolutely correct that the vision of mesmerized patients is not impeded
by materials. In my earliest experiments I tried all kinds of
receptacles when secreting articles. But the changes made no difference.
The patients can discern the interior of an iron box as easily as we in
the ordinary state can see through a glass one. Of course this has
nothing to do with ordinary vision, the eyelids being closed at the
time. All such trials as this I ranked in the lowest grade, because the
patients may have been reading what was within my own knowledge--a
faculty that was partly exhibited to prominent men in chief cities by
Mr. Stuart Cumberland and Mr. Irving Bishop.
This classifying of my experiments is only to bring on their mention in
the order in which they seem to increase in importance. As a fact, the
same faculties attend to them all. Still, the division is useful.
Second, then, come those which dealt with long distances. To one of my
first patients (a messenger in a law-office) I showed scenes in Syria,
Egypt, Athens, and Rome, and after I had removed him from the mesmeric
sleep I handed him a pile of photographs which I had brought from
foreign countries. He turned them over rapidly and picked out the
picture of the scene he had witnessed, and without hesitation. I ranked
all this class next to lowest in importance because I had the scenes in
my own mind at the time. Yet the patients saw more than I was thinking
of. When I showed this messenger the obelisk in front of St. Peter's at
Rome, he also described the great colonnade around the piazza, which I
had at the moment forgotten. Subsequent experiments with others made me
know that he was viewing the scene itself.
The class ranked third, or next higher, were those in which the patients
were called from a distance. In the Arlington Heights Sanitarium some of
the patients formerly received, and I suppose still receive, beneficial
hypnotic treatment. One patient, Grace ----, could be called into the
office at any time by the simple will of Dr. Ring, the proprietor. I
received the account from a valued nurse who attended this patient in
the hospital. I was able to do the same thing myself in one case, but
only when the patient was at some occupation which did not require much
concentration. I am not prepared to speak as to the spaces across which
this influence may be exerted. With another patient, who was over two
miles away, the experiment seemed fairly successful, but I am not
sufficiently certain to claim a success.
In class four, the patients told facts which had not been previously
within their knowledge or mine. For tests of this kind I would procure
from friends some old coins wrapped up so that I could not know the
dates on them. When the first patient with whom this was tried was told
to pass into the sleep she called out the date of the coin almost
instantaneously--"1793." I thought she was still awake and guessing. But
in that instant she had passed into a deep sleep and had told the date
correctly.
In the fifth class the reader's credence will be much tested. Many of
the Scripture miracles were not a whit more difficult to believe. In
fact, some were precisely the same. Professional frauds have created
much hostility to the idea of anyone possessing clairvoyance. But the
somewhat amusing fact is that every human being is a clairvoyant--which
could be shown beyond disagreement if the doubter were placed in the
mesmeric trance. An instructive experiment has lately been told me, in
which the same patient, Grace ----, was used. A Mrs. Fuller, an invalid
in the hospital, was anxious about her daughter, who had not lately
written. Dr. Chapin, one of the house doctors, was the actuator. Under
his will the faculties of Grace ---- were made to see the child, then
about thirty miles off. She described Mrs. Fuller's home, its interior,
the daughter coming from school with her books, whom she talked to, what
she said, the precise time on a peculiar old clock in the room, and a
call on a neighbor then made by the daughter--all of which was afterward
proved to have been correctly reported. I mention Dr. Chapin's work
because it relieves me of some of the seeming egotism which a recital of
this kind enforces, and because my own experiments, which were, in
effect, precisely the same, though different in detail, have been
published elsewhere.[16]
[16] "The Ascent of Life," by Stinson Jarvis. Postal address,
Branch "X," New York, N. Y. Price $1.50.
As if these facts were not astounding enough, we come finally to a sixth
class, in which we find that these marvels can be produced by one's own
will-power acting on one's own interior faculties--the proofs of which I
have already published.
Now here, I submit, we get our right clew to the true position of man in
history. We now see why great men had always to be possessed of peculiar
will-power. They were great when the intensities of their ambitions,
desires, or necessities forced from their soul-faculties some portions
of knowledge which gave them a temporary ascendency, such, for instance,
as would provide an advantage in strategy, statecraft, duplicity,
treachery, or any other qualities which have assisted men who were
leaders. There was no limit to this, for the experiments show that there
is some quality in the soul of man that seems to be omniscient, or in
direct correspondence with omniscience.
It was always through stress. None have become great in idleness or
slackened energies. And as soon as the stress ceased, after the occasion
for the intense strivings of years passed, when the fruits of victory
were being enjoyed, when the aim of life was simply to hold and not to
gain, then the man ceased to be markedly different from others. Then
other men lead, because nature's leaderships are gained by that
intensest concentration which forces the best methods from the
soul-faculties. Apply this system of nature to any great event of
history and you will invariably find it accomplishing the known results.
There you will find a man making a name for himself, and, in a sense,
making history. Always through stress, strain, and necessity, in the
same ways that extraordinary ingenuity comes to men and animals to
assist their escape from situations of dire peril. Lock up the human
wild beasts who agonize for liberty, and you will find that few jails
will hold them. And their escapes may well be called miraculous.
The question then comes back for answer: What about this "universal
causation"?--Fate?--the will of God? Here it must be said, as before,
that no event of history can be selected which cannot be honestly
referred to the intelligence of man when this has been assisted by a
partial use of his soul-faculties. When human projects ran foul of
natural laws, disaster followed. For instance, the acquirement of a new
territory may take a vast amount of energy and heroic fighting--and the
will of one man may then be paramount in making a fact of history
coupled with his name; but if the army of occupation dies in the swamps
of the conquered country, shall the disaster be attributed to God? Shall
we not rather say that if the events of history were in His intended
control they would be less cruel, less human, less bestial? Can anyone
trace a lasting benefit that arose from Napoleon's career? The meteor
disappeared into impalpable dust. The conquered lands returned to their
owners. Was any country improved by his coming? He left a bloody trail
through Egypt, but not till the last decade has the Egyptian fellah
known a whiff of liberty or justice for two thousand years. The only
outcome that lasts to the present day is the assisted vanity of the
French people, a vanity built on the abilities of one man, which were
lost to the country when he died. Does anyone see a trace of the will of
God in all this? I do not.
His Corsican mother bore him while she attended her husband in his
battles. The offspring was marked for war in his mother's womb. He was
preëminently a natural product; and in him we find indomitable will
continually concentrated on faculties which yielded the discernments
that made him master of men and master of war. No man came under his
scrutiny without feeling that he was read to the core. The weaknesses,
strengths, vanities, braveries, and ambitions of others were all read,
used, and played upon for one man's ends. And from Bismarck back to
Cyrus we find all the great ones ruling in the same way--through the
discernments that are will-forced from the soul-faculties.
But among lesser men, and in everyday life? Here, the same, only in
lesser degrees; not with a knowledge of the processes at work, and thus
without the conscious direction of effort which would produce more
satisfactory results; though often the world is astonished when the
extraordinary introspection of some business men enables them to make
money in all their dealings. This is not luck. Their amassed wealth is
the proof of their life's strain--almost another name for it. And it
should be remarked, in passing, that most of the great ones have been
deeply religious in their own ways. Jay Gould was deeply religious in
his own way, though I am told he wrecked many. So is Bismarck. So were
Wellington and Von Moltke--men who guided frightful carnage. We may
smile at the religion which wrecks and kills and prays, but we do not
remove the combination; and it is probable that the great ones have been
too closely conscious of their own sudden discernments to find a gross
materialism possible. It was the same with the pagans. Even Bonaparte
had an implicit belief in what he called his lucky star.
The followers of Buckle claim that man is personally hardly more than a
cipher in history, that his name is hardly worth writing in the great
scroll. But how is this when the fate of Europe rests, as it may rest at
this moment, wholly and solely in the faculties of one man? The instinct
of hero-worship is too deep-set to be valueless. And the experiments
which do so much to explain the sources of increased human knowledge
point to the fact that it is in the man of the hour that the history of
the hour is written. One leads; the others follow. Gifted he may be,
even before he is born; endowed he may be, by forefathers who were
clean; but when the event approaches there is always one who more than
others realizes the stress, strain, or peril, and in a mighty effort
creates from his own faculties a scheme or plan which others are glad to
follow.
That is greatness. That is history. That is creation. For creation is of
spirit; and man, as these seemingly trivial experiments prove, is also,
in part, of spirit. The disasters that may result through other causes
from his action are only the proof of his humanness--proof that his
strain for enlightenment was not continued. In these ways history is
human, but always with a partly secreted and godlike faculty awaiting
demand. "Seek, and ye shall find. Knock, and it shall be opened unto
you." The greatest man that ever lived taught this. And whatever he was,
or was not, he knew more than any other man.
This article is by no means intended to suggest that the will of God
need not be considered in the study of history. When it is proved that
human privacy is impossible, and that any ordinary person's soul may be
made to see us at all times, then we may be quite sure that the Giver of
these faculties to man possesses them himself and that we are watched
both personally and nationally. But the article _is_ intended to suggest
that man has progressed and has been great when the exercise of his
will-power, or the concentrated desire of prayer, has forced his
interior faculties, perhaps through their correspondences, to help him
through enlightenment. We find ourselves placed on this planet in total
ignorance as to why we came or where we go, but there seems to be one
continuous purpose through all--that man shall improve. It may be that
high intelligence, combined with experience in all grades of life, is
required somewhere else. It may be that in order to gain such experience
it must be lived through. There would certainly be no striving if
everything came to us as an unearned gift. The disasters resulting from
one man's action are a warning to the next venturer; and if experience
is not, or cannot be, sent into a soul as an unearned gift, then the
higher wisdom may be non-interference.
The estimate of man's personal agency in history is necessarily raised
when the faculties he has utilized in gaining his ends are inquired
into. Such a study seems to lead toward an alteration in the accepted
idea of divine control in matters of history when it suggests this
intention--that the divinity of a right control shall be shown through
man. Such a study shows that he is sufficiently endowed with a spiritual
nature, not only for this purpose, but for any other; and it suggests
that, as his faculties bring him into direct connection with some
All-knowledge from which every kind of intelligence may be drawn, he is
expected to use his opportunities; also that the natural consequences of
mistakes will not be rectified except through the intelligence supplied
to further demand.
PLAZA OF THE POETS.
THE NEW WOMAN.[17]
BY MILES MENANDER DAWSON.
[17] From advance sheets of "Poems of the New Time," by Miles
Menander Dawson, The Humboldt Library, Publishers: New York.
Cloth, 12mo, $1.00.
She stands beside her mate, companion-wise,
Erect, self-poised, with clear, straightforward eyes.
For what she knows he is she holds him dear,
And not for what she fancies him--with fear.
Brave spirit! Disillusionized, she lifts
What blinder women bear as heaven's ill gifts.
She asks but, ere she reproduce a man,
He truly be one, so a woman can.
She gives not for the asking, nor as one
Who does unpleasant things that must be done.
Nay, he who half-unwilling love receives
Knows not the full-orbed joy she freely gives.
Emancipated, on firm feet she stands,
And all that man exacts of her demands;
The new morality, the art of life,
And not obedience, holds her as wife.
Hail, the new woman! By her choices she
Determines wisely what mankind shall be.
She will not with eyes open be beguiled
To choose a tainted father for her child.
UNDER THE STARS.
BY COATES KINNEY.
It is a sad, sad sight.--_Carlyle._
O stars! as the flakes of a snowstorm
How ye fly and fall and drift!
Swift snowing of suns out of darkness,
Whirled by winds of force and whiffed!
Fly! fall! but the wind the Almighty
Still behind you always runs,
Still pushes you onward together,
Fixed each sun in drift of suns.
Fixed, ay, to the vision of mortal
Never change hath shown in you;
Lands, seas, and their kingdoms and races
All have changed, but ye are true--
Still true to the old constellations,
Such as when the forebrain first
Uplifted itself to their glories
With this human spirit's thirst.
Calm! still! though in every sparkle
Motions like the thunderbolt,
Wide whirlings of worlds in their sunlight,
Planet's wheel and comet's volt,
All hang, as it were, in a dewdrop
Frozen to a steadfast gleam;
Time, place, dwindled down to a glitter,
Whimseys of an instant's dream.
Drift! drift! all the universe drifting
Round some sun too vast for thought!
On! on! awful maelstrom of matter
Whirling in a gulf of naught!
Whirl! wheel! and my soul like a seabird
Flies across and dips and flees--
Wild wings of my soul, like the seabird's,
Tossed and lost upon the seas!
THE CRY OF THE VALLEY.
BY CHARLES MELVIN WILKINSON.
Too long, too long on the mountain's brow
You linger, O storm-cloud! Know you not
I, the suffering lowland, need you now
Where the scorching sun glares hot?
You deluge the barren cliffs of chalk
While wither the grass and the fruitful grain,
And the red rose, shrivelling, dies on its stalk
With a smothered cry for rain.
You lavish your wealth on the lordly height
That knows not a miser's need therefor,--
With a smile I must take what is mine by right
As the gift true souls abhor.
But the rain that is mine by the love of God,
By the grace of the mountain a gift to me,
Of what avail to the parching sod,
Since it runneth down to the sea?
O cloud, I charge you to right my wrongs!
Be just with the bounty of God's own hand,
And scatter the rain where the rain belongs,
On the hot and thirsty land.
I charge you, cloud, by the love of God,
That you pour His gift on the humble plain
Till the myriad mouths of the parching sod
Drink deep of the blessèd rain.
A RADICAL.
BY ROBERT F. GIBSON.
I am a Radical, and this my faith:
The aim and hope of all true citizens
Are justice and real happiness for all.
Some are content--I know not why--to sit
Among the sleepy worshippers who fill
The gilded temple of conservatism,
And sitting, awestruck, there they think they serve.
I am too busy for idolatry.
I carry in my hand a naked sword,
And pity, roused for one, stays not my hand
When prompt, sure blows mean freedom for a score.
That is my faith, and I am not afraid
To face my Maker when my name is called.
THE EDITOR'S EVENING.
Our Totem.
Carlyle has remarked upon the significance of symbolism. All nations
seek a sign. The sign becomes the visible expression of the highest
thought. It is made into an emblem around which the given people march
by day and encamp by night. Thus have come all the totems which mankind
have lifted up, from the brazen snake in the desert to the Stars and
Stripes on the mountain.
Symbolism has its beauty and also its ugliness. In some cases the symbol
is happily conceived. It is benign; it expresses hope, truth, fidelity,
aspiration, even immortality. Behold the egg of the Egyptians and their
circle expressive of undying life and eternity. Note the owl of the
Athenians. Note the sweet lily of ancient Provence, adopted by France as
the emblem of purity and national peace. Note the Irish shamrock--that
delicate green trifolium which has signified so much of union and hope
to an enthusiastic and failing race. On the other hand, note the serpent
of the Aztecs, the crawling reptiles of Malaysia and India, the savage
beasts and carnivorous birds adopted as the symbols of race-life and
purpose by the coarse barbarians of northern Europe, and preserved on
the flags and banners of their descendants to the present day.
Russia is a bear. Germany is a black eagle. France also, in her
Bonaparte mood, is an eagle. Imperial Rome _was_ an eagle from the days
of the Cæsars. Great Britain is a lion, and Prussia is a leopard, and
Siam is an elephant, and Mexico is still a snake. As for Great Britain,
not satisfied with one lion, she repeats him seven times, rampant or
couchant, on the royal standard. She also preserves on her coat-of-arms
and coins the unicorn, that fabulous, one-horned monster of a horrid
dream.
The American Republic seems to have accepted the eagle for its totem. We
might have taken a bear or a caribou, but the eagle has pleased our
mythologists more--and so, instead of belonging to the tribe of the
Turkey, the tribe of the Dog, or the tribe of the Calf, we belong to
the tribe of the Eagle. But what does our totem signify?
The eagle in our symbolism and war-myth has come to us from the past. He
was of old the totem of the Romans. From the Tiber he flew beyond the
Alps, to perch on the standards of German chieftains and Gallic
emperors. He has visited all lands that are affected with the civil and
ethnic life of Rome. He has appeared here and there on the flags of the
Latin races in the Old World and the New. He has made an eyrie in our
mountains, and his scream has been heard in our wars. He has settled on
our flagstaffs, and has been seen by certain and sundry poets who
apostrophize him in verse. He has been admired by orators whose
imaginations rise as high as battle and conquest, but not as high as the
Stars and Stripes. He has been adored in academic essays. He has hovered
over the pages of inchoate histories, until his claim to be regarded as
the American bird is established. The eagle has become traditional as
the totem of the United States.
In so far as the eagle is the symbol of the independence and freedom of
men, let us accept him! In so far as he represents the idea and
sublimity of height and flight, let him soar! The eagle as a sign of the
free voyage of the human mind, triumphant over nature, visiting on
strong wing the far and otherwise inaccessible heights of escape and
glory, is the noblest of all the totems ever discovered by man; for
flight is the noblest and most sublime of earthly actions. Height is the
sublimest of all earthly stations. Height and flight are precisely the
dream which we would select from the infinite visions of the soul and
have engraved on our seal as a motto for eternity. Height and flight and
freedom!
In so far as the eagle may be regarded as the bird of the past; in so
far as he stands for violence and conquest; in so far as he represents
the rending and destruction of life, the carnivorous passion in mankind,
the rage of battle and triumph,--to that extent be there no eagle for
the Republic or for us! It is high time that some race of men should
rise to the height of discarding violence and blood as the beginnings of
fame and power. It is high time that some race should renounce all bears
and leopards and lions and mythological monsters as the symbols of its
spirit and purpose. It is high time that some nation should ascend to a
level from which it may look down on the savage emblems and beast-born
symbolism of the past world as no longer fit to express the central
purposes and noblest visions of an enlightened people.
The American eagle in the better and more glorious sense--in the sense
in which he typifies freedom and height and flight--is a totem of which
neither philosopher nor peasant need be ashamed. The eagle's wing is
more than pinion; it is thought. The eagle's eye is more than fierce
disdain; it is a flash of ineffable light. His glance is more than
terror; it is an arrow shot into the darkness. His breast is more than
pressure and force; it is defiance of wind and battle-rack. His spirit
is more than destruction; it is supremacy over chaotic elements and the
triumph of the emancipated spirit. His scream is more than the shriek of
carnal victory and rage of destroying strength; it is the cry of liberty
and the shout of progress to all peoples in the valleys of the world.
Give man the spirit of the eagle. Give him height and flight and
freedom. Give us who are Americans the splendid arena of the plains and
the open vault of heaven. Give us the mountain, the beetling crag, the
precipice, the gnarled oak, the lightning, and the cloud. Give us the
warfare of the lawless elements, the world-blaze of the magnificent sun,
the starlight of the profound and unspeakable night. Give us the
transport of the unchained seasons, the snow-blast and the sun-flash,
the tenderness of the dawn, the sorrow of the evening, the rainspout of
the bursting nimbus, and the mellow light of autumn. Give us the
splendid apocalypse of October and the infinite air-bath of the perfumed
June. Give us all the aspirations of the man-soul standing in the midst
of this splendor and mutation, standing high and opening the eagle-wing
to cloudland and the sky, soaring and circling unfettered, viewing all
lakes and hills from the aerial curves of freedom, alighting at will on
the chosen summit, undisturbed by fear and untroubled by the torments of
power!
Vive La France.
A strange fact is the apathy of the American nation towards France and
the French people. There is every reason to expect a different sentiment
on this side of the sea. France was ever our friend; since the colonial
days we have never warred with her. The French were our allies when the
days were dark and the winds of our destiny were loosed on the deep. We
had been assailed by an unnatural mother. That strong mother had wronged
us, treated us as aliens, erased us from her book, turned loose
mercenary armies upon us, killed our patriot fathers.
In that hour of fate France appeared willingly on the scene as our
champion. She succored us. Whatever may have been her motive, she put
her ægis over our head. She sent her heroes to our camps; she gave us
Lafayette and Rochambeau. She placed her fleets at our ports, with guns
pointed seaward for protection. Then, when the fight was won, she aided
us to enlarge our territories, to confirm our new republican empire.
Though in the afterdays of her monarchical gloom France sometimes looked
askance at our flag, the French nation was never once disloyal to
us--never once indifferent to the fate of our great democracy.
In our institutional development for more than a century we have
proceeded on the same general lines with the French. If we are satisfied
with the result--if we _believe_ in our republic--we ought, in good
reason, to believe in the republic of France; for the republic is a
universal fact, little trammelled by locality. The barrier of race ought
not to predominate over political and social sympathies. The barrier of
race ought not to separate us from our own. The fact that we are allied
in ethnic descent with the English people ought not to make us enamored
of the social life and civil institutions of Great Britain. Much less
should the industrial and commercial life of England allure us as if to
provoke a like manner of life in ourselves. Least of all should the
financial method of Great Britain lead us by imitation to fix upon
ourselves a similar incubus and horror.
This leads us to say that to break away from Great Britain, even when
incited thereto by the antipathy and prejudice which we must needs hold
against her; to leave her behind; to treat her as a historical fact not
favorable, but inimical rather, to our progress and independent
destiny,--seems to be the hardest task imposed upon the American
democracy. The preference of race and language is so profound, the
influences of the commercial life are so far-reaching, the admiration
for political stability is so natural, the domination of centralized
wealth is so overwhelming, and the allurements of consolidated power so
well calculated to fascinate the masses, that even American democracy
has found it hard to break the British tie and sail away uncabled and
disenchanted on the sea.
This deluded instinct of attachment to Great Britain, and this unnatural
lack of sympathy for France have cost us dearly. The two sentiments have
modified our national life, and have left a result different by not a
little from what it would have been if influenced by other and more
wholesome dispositions on our part. Our nationality has lost much force
on both counts--on the score of our illogical attachment to Great
Britain on the one hand, and of our unnatural indifference to France on
the other. Under the one influence we have become _tolerant of
subserviency_ as a national trait, and under the other we have become in
a measure _incapable of enthusiasm_. The addition of British
subserviency has been aggravated with the subtraction of French
enthusiasm from our public and private life.
All this had been better otherwise. All this--even after the lapse of a
hundred and twenty-one years from the great summer of our
Independence--ought still to be bettered with amendment. It is not
needed, stiff as we have already become in our national instincts and
methods, to go forward by going backwards. To approximate Great Britain
is to go backwards. The English _people_ are among the greatest of the
historic races, but the British _monarchy_, with its mediæval
pretensions, its humbug of a throne and a crown, its subordinated ranks
of society, its military and naval despotism, and its vast skein of
_tentaculæ_ stretching to every valuable thing in the world,--is perhaps
the one thing that modern civilization should most dread and put away
from the field of its desires.
On the other hand France is, in nearly all respects, admirable. Her
mobility is life, and her warmth is a fructifying force. France gives
forth more than she takes from the nations. Her republic is a splendid
piece of political workmanship. Her spirit is patriotic. Her people,
instead of straggling over the world like adventurers and pirates,
remain in the borders of _La Patrie_, happy and vital in the possession
of freedom.
Her lilies still bloom in the depth of the valleys.
Her vineyards are a covert under which if there be a peasantry it is not
a peasantry forced down by oppression, but only the modest residue of
the stronger life above and beyond. The free institutions of this
beautiful land are the natural counterpart of our own; we should be all
the better for warming ourselves not a little in the glow of the Gallic
enthusiasm. _Vive la France!_
Le Siècle.
The century passes as a broken dream
That fades into the darkness ere the dawn!
The hopes it cherished and its griefs are gone
As spirit-shadows on Time's silent stream!
The outcry and the anguish of it seem
Like echoes on dusk hills--like lights upon
The haunted borders of oblivion--
Pale will-o'-wisps of a disordered scheme.
O thou New Age that comest! welcome thrice--
More welcome than the ever-welcome birth
Of the expected love-child of our youth!
Bring us a nobler portion--nobler twice
Than ever yet was given unto earth!
Bring us our freedom--bring us love and truth.
BOOK REVIEWS.
[_In this Department of_ THE ARENA _no book will be reviewed which
is not regarded as a real addition to literature._]
President Jordan's Saga of the Seal.
David Starr Jordan, President of Leland Stanford Junior University, has
many times deserved well of his country. As a scientific man he has, we
believe, given to the American public and the world a greater number of
original monographs on important branches of current investigation than
has any of his distinguished contemporaries. From his special department
of ichthyology, in which he became an expert fully a score of years ago,
he has branched into nearly all fields of scientific exploration,
finding ever new paths, leading to new regions and new empires of
knowledge.
Upon this basis is builded Dr. Jordan's fame as an educator. In two
great States of the Union he has presided over the affairs of high-grade
institutions of learning. After a successful career as President of the
Indiana University, he was selected from the great array of American
scholars to preside over the destinies of Leland Stanford Junior
University, at Palo Alto, California. But the onerous duties and
responsibilities of these positions have hardly distracted Dr. Jordan's
mind from his central motive and aim of scientific investigation.
Through all the years of his busy career he has prosecuted his
researches with the most conspicuous success.
Meanwhile, he has endeared himself to the American people as an able
publicist, whose writings and leadership have become potent in many
lines of our public policy. President Cleveland had the good judgment to
select Dr. Jordan to preside over the inquiry into the condition of
affairs in Bering Sea. The fur-seal imbroglio had already become an
international menace; the peace of great nations was threatened by it.
It has thus fallen to Dr. Jordan's lot in his official position to
conduct an inquiry of the highest importance. He is the United States
Commissioner in charge of the fur-seal investigation, and it is this
fact and the results of this fact that now bring him to the fore in a
literary production, the only adverse criticism on which is its brevity.
Would it were longer.
In 1896 Dr. Jordan published his "Observations on the Fur Seals of the
Pribilof Islands." This was a _preliminary_ report. But it is
nevertheless replete with statements of the bottom facts and of
generalized information from which a clear notion of the condition of
affairs in the fur-seal regions must be derived. It is not of this work,
however, that we shall at the present speak, but rather of Dr. Jordan's
later production, "Matka and Kotik; a Tale of the Mist-Islands."[18]
[18] "Matka and Kotik; a Tale of the Mist-Islands." By David
Starr Jordan, President of the Leland Stanford Junior
University and of the California Academy of Sciences; United
States Commissioner in charge of Fur-Seal Investigations. One
volume, square duodecimo, illustrated, pp. 68. San Francisco:
The Whitaker & Ray Company, 1897.
It appears that during his investigations from a scientific and official
point of view the author's mind has been profoundly impressed on the
sentimental and poetic side by the conditions in which he found himself
in the Pribilof Islands. The result of this profound impression is the
little work before us. Though it is done in prose it is none the less a
poem; it is the Saga of the Seals. It is a poetic appeal to all
Christendom in the simple and dramatic way of Frithiof and his
contemporaries.
"Matka and Kotik" will be a revelation to those of Dr. Jordan's friends
and admirers who were not already acquainted with the deep, clear vein
of poetry in his composition. I have noted that several of our
nineteenth-century scientists have this vein. Huxley was of this number;
the spirits at the séances used to designate him as the "Poet of
Science." Dr. Jordan in "Matka and Kotik" vindicates his right to be
known as the _American_ Poet of Science.
It is evident that while the President of the Fur-Seal Commission was
performing his duty in the Pribilofs, in the summer of 1896, his mind
became profoundly impressed with the sorrows of the seal. Not only have
commerce and the equity of nations been outraged in this matter, but the
cry of humanity is heard. Aye, more; the cry of the seals themselves is
heard; and it is this cry that Dr. Jordan has interpreted and sent to
the world. Not satisfied with the preparation of his preliminary report,
he has found opportunity to appease his sense of indignation, by writing
this book, every line of which tells a story of avarice and crime and
butchery which, if we mistake not, the roused-up spirit of mankind will
soon abate.
Dr. Jordan's book is a sort of dramatical story, the _personæ_ of which
are all Seals except one man, Apollon the Destroyer, and a few of the
creatures such as Chignotto, the sea-otter; Bobrik, her son; Epatka, the
sea parrot; Eichkao, the blue fox; Isogh, the hair-seal; Amogada, the
walrus; Sivutch, the sea lion; and Kagua, his wife, etc. The principal
actors are Atagh, an old "beach-master" living on the Tolstoi Mys;
Matka, his wife; Kotik, their child; Unga, Atagh's brother; Polsi,
Matka's brother; Minda and Lakutha, Kotik's sisters; Ennatha, Matka's
sister, and Annak, Ennatha's child. It is the manner of life and fate
of these personages that Dr. Jordan has delineated in the "Tale of the
Mist-Islands." He tells us that it is a true story--that the author
personally knew Matka before Kotik was born, and that he witnessed the
events which he describes.
I shall not attempt to give an extended review of the story of "Matka
and Kotik." I must satisfy myself and, I trust, incite the interest of
the readers of THE ARENA, by sketching only an outline of the Saga of
the Seal. The scene of the story is the Mist-Island, or, more properly,
certain parts of the shore and headlands of that island whereon the
seals pass an important part of their migratory life. From these coast
lines they take to sea at certain seasons and swim away, generally to
the south. Tolstoi Head is the point of observation from which Dr.
Jordan begins his charming delineations of seal-life, and there he
concludes the story; which, in the meantime, transforms itself into the
pathos of sad separations and finally into the dumb tragedy of slaughter
and death.
The author gives character--human character--to his personages,
discriminating them according to their natures into beings whose very
names, notwithstanding the limited range of their faculties, bring us
into intimate and profound sympathy with them. Old Atagh, the lordly
sea-bull of the Tolstoi Mys, looms up grandly above the rest--
In shape and gesture proudly eminent.
Matka, the wife, is an embodiment of her sex. Kotik is the child of her
choice. All her offspring are veritable children: the uncles are uncles,
the aunts are aunts, the cousins are cousins, and the rest are the rest.
Even the "supers" appear in the nebulous names of the drama.
The point of the "Tale of the Mist-Islands," the great lesson of it, is
the horrid abuses and cruelties to which the seals have been subjected
by the brutal fur-pirates who have thronged the Alaskan waters in the
past two decades, and whose intolerable lust of slaughter and
devastation has threatened the extinction of the fur-seal race. If the
story of "Matka and Kotik" could be perused, as it should be, by the
American people, the very mothers of the country would rise up against
the piratical butchers of the Pribilofs, who would quail under their
frown. Meanwhile, diplomacy drags its length, and official reports carry
to Congressional Committees a vague statistical account of what has been
done and is still doing in the Alaskan waters.
I most heartily commend to all who are interested--and who is not?--in
the fur-seal question and in the manner of its solution, Dr. Jordan's
interesting little book. I have hardly ever seen a better piece of
English than this. The author's style is admirable. I scarcely recall
another book so monosyllabic and terse. Whoever commences to read "Matka
and Kotik" will continue to the end. The story fascinates while it
instructs. I dare say that Dr. Jordan, in the scientific sketches which
are cunningly scattered in these paragraphs, is always correct.
If our space permitted, we should be glad to make extended quotations in
illustration of the sterling merits of this tale of our far Northwest. I
shall be obliged to conclude the review with only a single extract, but
must first remark that "Matka and Kotik" is illustrated with forty-two
striking photographic reproductions, the beauty and excellency of which
can hardly be too highly praised. To these are added thirty-four pen
sketches by Miss Chloe Frances Lesley, a student in zoölogy in Leland
Stanford Junior University. The illustrations which appear are adapted
to the text with perfect good taste. We also note "The Calendar of the
Mist-Islands." This is appended to the story proper, as is also the map
of the Mist-Island. In the calendar Dr. Jordan gives a diary of the
movements of the seals beginning January 1st and ending November 15th.
These notes convey a great amount of scientific information in the most
condensed and interesting form. It is evident that Dr. Jordan has
written under a strong sense of the significance of the scenes which he
wishes to portray. At the close, he says:
And when Kotik came back in the spring and climbed over the broken
ice-floes to take his place at Tolstoi, Atagh was sleeping yet. [It
was the sleep of death!]
And now the dreary days have come to the twin Mist-Islands. The
ships of the Pirate Kings swarm in the Icy Sea. To the Islands of
the Four Mountains they have found the way. The great Smoke-Island
has ceased to roar, because it cannot keep them back. The blood of
the silken-haired ones, thousand by thousand, stains the waves as
they rise and fall. The decks of the schooners are smeared with
their milk and their blood, while their little ones are left on the
rocks to wail and starve. The cries of the little ones go up day
and night from all the deserted homes, from Tolstoi and Zoltoi,
from Lukanin and Vostochni, and from the sister island of Staraya
Artil.
Meanwhile, Kotik and Unga, Polsi and Holostiak, stand in their
places, roaring and groaning, waiting for the silken-haired ones
that never come.
Their call comes across the green waves as I write. I turn my eyes
away from Tolstoi Head and put aside my pen. It is growing very
chill. The mist is rising from the Salt Lagoon, and there is no
brightness on the Zoltoi sands.
THE ARENA FOR SEPTEMBER.
THE ARENA for September will carry to our patrons more than the usual
number of superior contributions. Several of these are timely to a
degree. It is intended that the great questions of the epoch--the real
questions in which the people feel an instinctive concern--shall be
discussed in THE ARENA with the sole purpose of elucidating them in the
best possible manner, thus conducing to the betterment of the serious
conditions now present in American society.
One such article of the first importance will appear in the number for
September. This is a contribution on the "CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH," by
Herman E. Taubeneck, well known as an expert in the political and
economic questions of the times. The present article is the first of two
on the same subject. Mr. Taubeneck patiently undertakes the theme on the
foundation of fact, and reaches his conclusions by an able and
irrefutable inductive argument.
A second article of like interest is that on "MULTIPLE MONEY," by
Eltweed Pomeroy, President of The Direct Legislation League of the
United States. Mr. Pomeroy is known to THE ARENA readers as a strong and
thoroughgoing publicist whose writings are as instructive in
subject-matter as they are lucid in style.
A third contribution in THE ARENA for September will be an article
entitled "ANTICIPATING THE UNEARNED INCREMENT," by Hon. I. W. Hart,
Official Reporter of the Third Judicial District of Idaho. Mr. Hart's
contribution is a powerful exposé of the evils of land speculation in
cities and towns, and the consequent extravagant prices of realty and of
high rents.
Our special contributor, sent by the courtesy of the Yarmouth Steamship
Co. and the Dominion Atlantic and Intercolonial Railways to Nova Scotia
and New Brunswick to investigate the Social and Industrial Conditions
prevailing in those regions, is engaged in completing his article, and
the same will appear in THE ARENA for September.
Besides the abovenamed contributions, THE ARENA for September will
contain "STUDIES IN ULTIMATE SOCIETY," by Lawrence Gronlund and K. T.
Takahashi; a special article, "THE AUTHOR OF THE MESSIAH," by B. O.
Flower; an article entitled "SUICIDE: IS IT WORTH WHILE?" by Charles B.
Newcomb; "THE FIRST DEADLY SIN," by Marvin Dana; "MUSEUMS OF REPRODUCED
ART," by Arthur Altschul; "THE CIVIC OUTLOOK," by Dr. Henry Randall
Waite; Plaza of the Poets; Editor's Evening; Book Reviews, etc. Our
readers will find THE ARENA for September, with its 144 well-filled
pages, a feast of good things, participating in which they will be wiser
and stronger for the battle that is toward in these lands.
The Great Opportunity.
The reduction of the subscription price of THE ARENA to two dollars and
fifty cents a year brings to all the friends and relatives of THE ARENA
family (their name being legion) a golden opportunity to add their names
to the swelling list of our patrons. Let every champion of our cause
send in his name and the names of his friends for the subscribers' list
of THE ARENA. Begin with the number for July and thus secure the
complete volume.
Remember the great reduction!
_$2.50 for_ THE ARENA _for one year_!
Address all subscriptions and other business communications to
JOHN D. MCINTYRE, Manager,
Arena Company,
Copley Sq., Boston.
* * * * *
[Transcriber's Notes:
The transcriber made these changes to the text to correct obvious
errors:
1. p. 165 aggressivenes --> aggressiveness
2. p. 182 assest --> asset
3. p. 200 uncalculable --> incalculable
4. p. 208 involutary --> involuntary
5. p. 221 Footnote anchor missing for footnote #9. Footnote text
placed after most likely paragraph.
6. p. 226 aud --> and
7. p. 259 abtruse --> abstruse
8. p. 266 falculties --> faculties
End of Transcriber's Notes]
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