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Title: The Unpopular Review Vol. I
January-June 1914
Author: Various
Editor: Henry Holt
Release Date: February 15, 2015 [EBook #48268]
Language: English
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THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW
[Illustration]
_PUBLISHED QUARTERLY_
VOL. I
JANUARY-JUNE
1914
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1913, 1914,
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
CONTENTS
VOLUME I
No. 1. JANUARY-MARCH, 1914
THE NEW IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT =The Editor= 1
THE MAJORITY JUGGERNAUT =Fabian Franklin= 22
THE DEMOCRAT REFLECTS =Grant Showerman= 34
THE NEW MORALITY =Paul Elmer More= 47
PROFESSOR BERGSON AND PSYCHICAL RESEARCH =The Editor= 63
TWO NEGLECTED VIRTUES =F. J. Mather, Jr.= 112
THE UNFERMENTED CABINET =E. S. Martin= 124
A NEEDED UNPOPULAR REFORM =H. B. Brougham= 133
OUR TOBACCO: ITS COST =Henry W. Farnam= 145
OUR ALCOHOL: ITS USE =Clayton Hamilton= 163
THE MICROBOPHOBIAC =Grant Showerman= 175
THE STANDING INCENTIVES TO WAR =David Starr Jordan= 185
THE MACHINERY FOR PEACE =H. B. Brougham= 200
EN CASSEROLE: Tobacco and Alcohol--Answering Big
Questions--Decency and the Stage--What's the Matter with our
Colleges? (VERNON L. KELLOGG)--Proportionate News (F. J.
MATHER, JR.)--Simplified Spelling 212
No. 2. APRIL-JUNE, 1914
THE SOUL OF CAPITALISM =Alvin S. Johnson= 227
A SOCIOLOGICAL NIGHTMARE =W. P. Trent= 245
SOCIAL UNTRUTH AND THE SOCIAL UNREST =Fabian Franklin= 252
NATURAL ARISTOCRACY =Paul Elmer More= 272
THE RIGHT TO BE AMUSED =F. J. Mather, Jr.= 297
HOW WOMAN SUFFRAGE HAS WORKED =H. B. Brougham= 307
THE BABY AND THE BEE =Vernon L. Kellogg= 333
THE CASE FOR PIGEON-HOLES =Grant Showerman= 343
THE GREEKS ON RELIGION AND MORALS =Emily J. Putnam= 358
OUR SUBLIME FAITH IN SCHOOLING =Calvin Thomas= 375
THE BARBARIAN INVASION =Warner Fite= 389
TRUST-BUSTING AS A NATIONAL PASTIME =Henry R. Seager= 406
OUR GOVERNMENT SUBVENTION TO LITERATURE =Charles W. Burrows= 415
EN CASSEROLE: Special to our Readers--A Specimen of "Uplift"
Legislation--A Model of Divinatory Criticism (CALVIN
THOMAS)--Some Deserving "Climbers"--Simplified Spelling 431
The Unpopular Review
VOL. 1 JANUARY, 1914 NO. 1
THE NEW IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT
We call it new. Yet there is nothing new under the sun--which
statement, like most proverbs, is but a half truth.
The world has always been full of irrepressible conflicts, and will be
as long as life is worth living in it--and longer. There was one
between centrifugal and centripetal force, at the very start (assuming
a start), when the star dust began to whirl, and all that have been
since have been but differentiations from it. Old ones are between
sex-instinct and monogamy, between license and order, or call it
liberty and authority if you please, or freedom and slavery.
Sex-instinct, license, liberty, freedom are centrifugal; monogamy,
order, authority, even slavery, are centripetal. The conflict between
freedom and slavery gave rise to the phrase The Irrepressible
Conflict. It came through Seward at the time of the Civil War.
That Irrepressible Conflict has been succeeded by one which we have
called new, but which, though in a comparatively quiescent state, is
older than Jack Cade or even than Cleon. It took its start in the fact
that in human evolution, from the pithecanthropos up, some of us have
not got along as fast as others. Primitively, the conflict began by
those in front enslaving those behind--the minority enslaving the
majority. But that built Athens; and with it, civilization--as we
regard it. (This starting point is selected somewhat arbitrarily, but
most starting points must be.) It now looks, though, as if the boot
were getting on the other leg--the majority trying to enslave the
minority; and if they do before humanity is much farther evolved, what
Athens started will stop. But probably the result of the conflict
will not be as bad as that. Something like it has happened at times,
however--say when Southern Europe was rolled over by Northern Europe,
and when the Paris that had breeches was rolled over by the Paris that
had none; and possibly something like it began when Americans that had
three thousand dollars a year and found work for the rest of the
people, and paid wages, and bought the produce of the soil, and made
commerce and finance and the best in statecraft and science and
letters and the arts--when in two instances these men were legislated
away from powers and immunities granted to others.
* * * * *
Of all human conditions, the difference among men in capacities, and
consequently in possessions, is perhaps the most troublesome; and yet
it is because of that very condition, that most men have done most of
the things that raised them from the lowest savagery. The progress of
the world, as a whole, has depended upon the superior man leading the
way, and upon the mass of men working to keep up with him. Of course
we in our wisdom can ask why it was necessary to evolve men at
different rates, thus imposing upon most of us the pains of
inferiority and envy, and the strains of emulation. We don't know, but
so it is. Life is full of such paradoxes, way down to the existence
side by side of free will and necessity; and the only effective way of
life is to devote to each of the opposing conditions the best action
our little intellects can direct, without wasting them over vain
efforts at reconciliations that are beyond us.
* * * * *
Although the wage-earner of to-day is better off than the kings of
yore in every particular except that there are more men for him to
envy, that particular is a constant source of unhappiness to him, and
is rapidly making him a constant source of unhappiness to everybody
else. The man behind is getting more and more in conflict with the man
in front. Until lately the disturbances have been local and spasmodic.
Now they have become nation-wide and world-wide; and until evolution
has got so near its goal of equilibration that the differences
between men are much less than now, and the sympathies much greater,
the conflict will be irrepressible.
The differences from which it springs were, as is well known, much
less among the ancestors who shaped our government than they are among
ourselves. Leaving out the slaves who did nothing in that work, the
population was nearer homogeneous in wealth and race than it is now,
and the differences were not so great as to cause much conflict. There
was virtually no proletariat. In those days it took character to
emigrate to these shores: in these days, it almost seems to take
character not to. The nation consisted then almost entirely of farmers
and land-owners, and there continued some sort of basis for all the
talk of equality, until the proletariat "tasted blood" in the
greenbacks issued as a war measure. The impression brought by them
into the minds of the ignorant, and fostered by the demagogues, was
that to make everybody rich, it was only necessary to print more. This
delusion dropped into the minds of the first proletariat in the world
which had long enjoyed common-school education, and in that soil it
grew rapidly, and whenever put down in one form, it has arisen in
another. When people were satisfied that the millennium could not be
brought about by greenbacks, they felt certain, under the instruction
of that eminent financier our present Secretary-of-State, that it
could be brought about by silver. When they got through playing with
that delusion, they were entirely ready to welcome a flood of other
delusions which had found their principal sources in Europe among men
denied the electoral franchise. Up to that time the toy of political
equality had kept the American proletariat sufficiently amused to
prevent their paying much attention to the socialism, anarchism and
similar "isms" which had agitated the same classes abroad. But the
essential conditions had all the while been the same here, and the
assassination of McKinley illustrated that the great republic was at
last as far along in a certain sort of "progress" as the older
civilizations. It was the direct consequence of the crazy doctrines
preached all the way from Emma Goldman up to some of the most
"progressive" of the college professors.
* * * * *
But however discouraging the situation among the wage-earners may be,
it is perhaps better than one of ox-like content. The average man is
beginning to have ideals--not very high ideals; most of them concern
merely his back and his belly; but there are a few which find vent in
the orchestras and dramatic efforts at the settlements and village
halls; and in the bandstands on the village greens, horrible as
generally are the noises made in them. But these awakening ideals also
appear in the boycotts among the Danbury hatters, in the vandalisms of
the I. W. W., in the Los Angeles dynamiting, and in murders among the
Chicago teamsters and Pennsylvania miners, as well as in the
assassination of McKinley.
Then there is an intermediate showing of them, neither in art nor in
physical force, but in the opinions behind the force, in all sorts of
schemes toward the material basis of enlarged life. The people seek
short cuts across the gulf, and follow like sheep those who promise
them what they want. Just as Jack Cade promised them that every pint
pot should hold a quart, so Bryan promised them, virtually, that
silver should be as good as gold, and Roosevelt virtually promised
them that all judges should be afraid to decide against them in
industrial conflicts. True, he explains all that away in the Hibbert
Journal. But the people he harangues do not read the Hibbert Journal,
and he is astute enough to know it.
* * * * *
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Irrepressible Conflict is
where it is not between two sides wanting the same dollars, but
between the real and the ideal. Nearly all the schemes are ideal,
eminently desirable, but utterly impossible in any state of human
nature that we know or can clearly foresee. Yet they appeal to the
sympathies of all, and therefore mislead the judgments of many. We
wish we felt as certain as we do of sunrise that in the present stage
of American evolution democratic government is not one of these
ideals; but we cannot. The American people has just passed its first
two measures of distinct and unqualified class legislation, and has
been running wild after the two greatest demagogues in history. But
fortunately as they both promise substantially the same things--"steal
each other's clothes," they tend to neutralize each other.
* * * * *
The sources of the most pronounced conflict between facts and ideals
are that ordinarily a man cannot have more than he creates and
conserves; that the desire to will torture those who create and
conserve little, as long as they have to look upon others who create
and conserve much; and that, as long as the difference lasts, those
who have little will want to get hold of what is held by those who
have much. The things that all men want, but few men have. Those who
have not, envy and often hate those who have. Of late this disposition
has been greatly intensified by the multitude of rapid fortunes from
the new control of Nature and from the trusts, and the parvenu
ostentation accompanying them. It makes a difference whether princely
state surrounds the king's son, or one's own pal of yesterday.
Worst of all, so many of these fortunes have been obtained wrongfully
that they intensify the impression that _all_ fortunes above the
average have.
Now the fundamental question in this conflict is: to whom does that
money rightfully belong? Among wise people who are not economists, the
width and profundity of the ignorance on this point tends to dissipate
the current skepticism regarding the miraculous.
The fortunes wrongfully acquired are exceptional and abnormal. Nearly
all comfortable fortunes come from legitimate industry. Within a
generation the economists have got the question of to whom they
rightfully belong, into the qualitative stage of settlement. The
quantitative stage is a much nicer and more complicated problem, and
varies more with different cases. Possibly the first germ of the
solution appeared a generation ago in a sentence in Marshall's
"Economics of Industry."
It was: "The earnings of management of a manufacturer represent the
value of the addition which his work makes to the total product of
capital and industry." The same holds true of a farmer, miner,
transporter, merchant or anybody else who directs industry. It is more
easily recognized in the case of the inventor. Francis A. Walker took
up this theme and gradually demonstrated that so far from the
employer's profits being wrung out of the wage-earner, they are
generally greatest where wages are highest, and proceed from devices
and economies effected by the employer, and would not exist without
them. This is being constantly illustrated by some employers
succeeding where others have failed, and failing where others have
succeeded. In support of the general thesis Walker says: "Discussions
in Economics and Statistics," (Vol. I., pp. 367-75):
"Looking at the better employers of whatever grade ... we note
that they pay wages, as a rule, equal to those paid by those
employers who realize no profits, or even sustain a loss; and
that, indeed, if regularity of employment be taken, as it should
be, into account, the employers of the former class pay really
higher wages than the latter class. We note, further, that the
successful men of business pay as high prices for materials and
as high rates of interest for the use of capital, if the scale of
their transactions and the greater security of payment be taken,
as it should be, into account.
"Whence, then, comes the surplus which is left in the hands of
the higher grades of employers, after the payment of wages, the
purchase of materials and supplies, the repair and renewal of
machinery and plant? I answer, This surplus, in the case of any
employer, represents that which he is able to produce over and
above what an employer of the lowest industrial grade can produce
with equal amounts of labor and capital. In other words, this
surplus is of his own creation, produced wholly by that business
ability which raises him above and distinguishes him from, the
employers of what may be called the no-profits class.
"... The excess of produce which we are contemplating comes from
directing force to its proper object by the simplest and shortest
ways; from saving all unnecessary waste of materials and
machinery; from boldly incurring the expense--the often large
expense--of improved processes and appliances, while closely
scrutinizing outgo and practicing a thousand petty economies in
unessential matters; from meeting the demands of the market most
aptly and instantly; and, lastly, from exercising a sound
judgment as to the time of sale and the terms of payment. It is
on account of the wide range among the employers of labor, in the
matter of ability to meet these exacting conditions of business
success, that we have the phenomenon, in every community and in
every trade, in whatever state of the market, of some employers
realizing no profits at all, while others are making fair
profits; others, again, large profits; others, still, colossal
profits. Side by side, in the same business, with equal command
of capital, with equal opportunities, one man is gradually
sinking a fortune, while another is doubling or trebling his
accumulations....
"If this be correct, we see how mistaken is that opinion too
often entertained by the wages class, which regards the
successful employers of labor--men who realize large fortunes in
manufactures or trade--as having in some way injured or robbed
them....
"In this view, profits constitute no part of the price of goods,
and are obtained through no deduction from the wages of labor. On
the contrary, they are the creation of those who receive them,
each employer's profits representing that which he has produced
over and above what the employers of the lowest industrial grade
have been able to produce with equal amounts of labor and
capital."
All this is now accepted doctrine among those entitled to opinions,
but as already intimated, the ignorance of it among even people of
good general intelligence is astounding, while the laboring classes
and their leaders shut their eyes to it. No man of inferior fortune
likes to admit, as this principle asks him to, that the inferiority is
in himself. And small blame to him for his reluctance.
Yet to state what is usually and normally the source of wealth, is not
to claim that individual wealth never has any other source, or to deny
that it is often increased by taking an undue advantage of inferior
capacity, and by monopoly and sundry other forms of disguised robbery.
But that wealth is _generally_ the result of pillage, and not of
invention, good management and other good forces, is probably the
worst and most destructive fallacy ever preached.
This destructive fallacy has seriously exaggerated the estimates of
the injustices and robberies on the part of employers; and in the
attempt to curb them, it has been busy for many years in impeding good
management, and has cost Labor terribly in unjustifiable strikes.
This, however, is by no means saying that there are no justifiable
strikes. They are inevitably a part of the present irrepressible
conflict, but its bitterness and cruelties are largely fed by a
general feeling that wealth generally has been accumulated at the
expense of the poor, when the truth is that generally, though not
always, it has been accumulated to their profit.
Yet it is far from plain how the man who tugs and sweats should justly
have little, while the man who does not tug and sweat should justly
have much. The man who tugs and sweats saw his own hands make, or
extract from the earth or the forests or the fields, or transport or
exchange what the other man has, and no one saw the hands of the man
who has it, do anything. Naturally, then, the man who has it not,
thinks that the man who has it, stole it--that it belongs to the man
who handled it. And he is going to take it.
But he is not going to take it by force: robbery he feels to be wrong.
He is going to take it "by due process of law"--by his vote: the law
has given him a vote, and the law is justice itself. As he is in
various ways permitted to vote away other people's possessions to his
own use, he takes it for granted that he has a moral as well as a
legal right to do so to any extent, and is full of schemes to that
end. But the law has also given the other man the property and the
means of holding onto it. Here is another outcrop of the Irrepressible
Conflict: the law is in conflict with itself. The conflict must be
reconciled: the man who wants the property must elect legislators and
judges who will change the law so the other man cannot get the
property away from the man who makes it with his own hands, and cannot
hold on to what he has already got of it.
At the outset, and to a certain extent, he is right: for to a certain
extent the principle of the greatest good of the greatest number is
unquestionably in conflict with the principle _suum cuique_. The
problem in each case is to draw the line between these opposing
forces.
Most of the expenses for public education, museums, parks, public
concerts, and even making, lighting and policing streets, and of the
courts and jails, have long been paid by taxpayers mainly for the
benefit of non-taxpayers, and no one wishes these expenses stopped. To
the education in the common schools are now being added medical
supervision, care of the eyes, dentistry, lunches, transportation to
and fro. These things are not done for the children of the people who
pay most of the money for them.
In still other ways, however, the poor man is increasing through law
his facilities for using the accumulations of the rich man. As already
indicated, we are just entering upon a system of income taxation where
there is not a pretence of making the poor man pay, or even the man of
moderately comfortable means; the poor man has had numerous statutes
passed relieving from the penalties of the common law, his
conspiracies to cripple the rich man's business if the poor man's
demands are not granted; and he has lately had wage-earners and
farmers exempted from the prosecutions under a fund for punishing
conspiracies in restraint of trade. How far can we continue along the
same road before we shall find legislation exempting the man in need,
or even fancied need, from any constraint against taking what he wants
wherever he can find it? That legislation has now entered upon that
road seems obvious. Where is it going to stop, and what is going to
stop it?
Are wage-earners and farmers going to be more definitely arrayed
against the rest of the community? We incline to think not, because
the farmer, as a rule, has property to protect, and although this
legislation is in favor of his annual income, it cannot go much
farther--especially in distributing favors elsewhere--without
attacking his accumulations. Moreover it seems impossible that there
should be a long continuance of the present degree of oblivion to the
desirability of having every man feel his interest in government,
through _some_ degree of the pinch of taxation.
Any considerable increase of the recent legislation, would of course
lead to the diminution of capital, both through expenditure and
through discouragement of accumulation. It would also diminish the
activity of those who are able to handle capital profitably, and the
consequent effect on wages would perhaps in time become apparent to
even the order of intellect behind the legislation.
How far can it go without drying up the springs of charity? There is
already free talk of saving income taxes out of charities.
Such legislation is certainly nursing antagonisms, and whether the
spread of general intelligence can be expected to be rapid enough to
prevent serious harm, is doubtful. It even sometimes appears a
question whether the conflict can be settled without more serious
bloodshed. Fortunately neither side has yet as much to complain of as
one side had in the revolutions which cost Charles I and Louis XVI
their heads; and it is doubtful whether either side has the power or
coherence or disposition to drive it to arms--whether the existing
sentiment in any civilized nation is longer such as to make such a
consummation possible. Times are growing more peaceful. Not only has
the biggest army in the world for nearly half a century been the
biggest engine of peace; not only has a permanent international
courthouse been built among the fortresses, after several temporary
ones had already done good service; but when the brotherhood of
locomotive engineers gets into conflict with their employers, instead
of settling it in the freight yards with torches and brickbats, both
sides go to the Waldorf-Astoria and have a judicial proceeding. For a
centrifugal explosion, they substitute a centripetal adjustment. And
the brawn supplies its share of the brains to do it.
The fundamental question is, of course, whether before serious harm
has been done, the differences in men's fortunes which, as said at the
outset, largely mean differences in men's powers, can be sufficiently
decreased to leave room for little conflict.
One answer is that the equalization is already taking place at a rate
that few people realize. Amid the poor, the impression that the rich
are growing richer and the poor poorer, is quite general, and of
course is fostered by the demagogues who make their living out of the
discontent--out of the justifiable discontent less perhaps than out of
the unjustifiable. Worse still, perhaps, the educated whose sympathies
lead them to instruct the ignorant, are to a shameful degree ignorant
of the truth in this regard, and, it must be feared, of the facts of
the economic situation generally: somehow the softness of heart which
actuates many such well-meaning people seems often to accompany a
softness of head which recoils from all hard facts that would narrow
the field where they delight to exercise their sympathies.
Nobody will question the progress of the average man from status to
contract--from slavery, serfdom, feudal dependence, to wage-earning;
but since the time of Marx, the claim of rich richer, and poor poorer
has been general--among the ignorant rich as well as the ignorant
poor. Nevertheless abundant authorities prove the exact contrary.
In the "poor poorer" part of the assertion, there was undeniably much
truth during the early part of the nineteenth century, especially
before industry became adjusted to the new machinery, and before the
rise of the trades unions and the overthrow of the _laissez-faire_
policy in legislation. But after those changes, there was a rapid
advance in wages, shortening of hours, and reduction in the price of
commodities. So great was the change that even Marx himself, who had
done more than any other man to spread the "increasing misery" theory,
abandoned it in an address delivered in 1864. Yet he so little
understood the force of admissions that he then made, that he let the
elaborate _a priori_ demonstration of the theory which he had already
built up, stand in his "Capital," which he did not publish till
1867.[1] But the admissions of 1864 did not end in theory. Facts
began to accumulate to confirm it. Early in the twentieth century the
changed conditions had attracted attention, and there were gathered
many data which proved that rapid betterment had taken place in the
condition of wage-earners.
[Footnote 1: See Simkhovitch: _Marxism versus Socialism_, pp.
122f.]
We have space for but a few of the facts, and they are not all up to
date. Of the results of the Census of 1910 which bear on this subject,
very few are yet published. Most of those of the Census of 1900 were
not published till 1907, and it is only up to about that time that
many data are at the moment available. But we hope before long to
present a careful study of the conditions up to the present time.
Meanwhile, it is pleasant to note the following:
In the United States wages in manufacturing industries averaged $247
in 1850, $427 in 1899, and $519 in 1909. And of course other
industries could not fall very far below manufactures.
The cost of living did not begin to show any such advance. Dun's
tables show that the yearly cost of living per capita in 1860, before
the civil war, was $16.87 _more_ than in 1905. For the sixteen years
1880 to 1895, inclusive, the average yearly cost was $101.65. For the
ten years 1896 to 1905, inclusive, the average was $81.52, $20.13
_less_ than for the earlier period. There has been a sharp advance
since 1905, but taking the whole period from 1850 to the present time,
nothing to compare with the advance in wages.
Although the recent class legislation in favor of the labor trusts
also included any possible farmer trust, the farmer appears to have
progressed with the wage-earner. His products have lately materially
advanced in price, and the abstract of the Census of 1910 says (p.
295):
The total value of the land and buildings of the 1,006,511 farms
shown for 1910 was $6,330,000,000, and the amount of debt was
$1,726,000,000, or 27.3 per cent. of the value. The corresponding
proportion in 1890, as shown in the reports, was 35.5 per cent.,
and to make this figure strictly comparable it would presumably
have to be increased slightly. There was thus during the 20
years a marked diminution in the relative importance of mortgage
debt ... but the average owner's equity per farm increased from
$2,220 to $4,574, or more than doubled.
Wholesale clothing dealers report a great increase in average size and
quality of clothes demanded, which shows that the people are better
fed and exercised and better off. Over all highly civilized countries
the consumption of food has been increasing faster than population.
This cannot mean that the rich eat and drink more; for they ate and
drank all they wanted before: so it must prove that the proportion of
those who can eat and drink freely is increasing.
Moreover, hours of labor have been decreasing without any diminution
of production. The United States Labor Bureau reports for 1913 show
that the average wage-earner is working shorter hours than ever
before, that he is receiving more pay for the short-hour week than he
formerly received for the long-hour week, and that the increase in his
average wage in most industries has been so great that its purchasing
power has risen, notwithstanding the increase in prices of many
commodities.
As to the "rich richer" fallacy: in Massachusetts for the period
1829-31 the probated estates under $5,000 were 85.6 per cent. of the
whole, in the period 1889-91 they had fallen to 69.5 of the whole. It
is nevertheless true that a few of the rich are richer than men have
been before, and in the case of an increasing proportion of them, it
has been for the good of all of us.
In Great Britain from 1840 to 1890, the number of estates subject to
succession tax increased twice as fast as population, while the
average amount per estate had not increased at all.
In France from 1853 to 1883 wages advanced some sixty per cent., and
in the principal occupations of women (outside of domestic service),
they nearly doubled.
Mr. W. H. Mallock, after an elaborate investigation in the British
Census reports, the details of which are given in his "Classes and
Masses," states the following conclusions: "The poor" (except those
who have nothing at all) "are getting richer; the rich, on an
average, getting poorer ... and of all classes in the community, the
middle class is growing the fastest." Since 1830 the population has
increased "in the proportion of 27 to 35; the increase of the section
in question [the middle class] was in the proportion of 27 to 84."
"The middle class has increased numerically in the proportion of 3 to
10; the rich class has increased only in the proportion of 3 to 8." In
1881, there were seven thousand windowless cabins occupied by families
in Scotland; by 1891, these had "almost disappeared; the one-roomed
dwellings with windows have decreased 25 per cent.; the two-roomed
dwellings have _increased_ by 8 per cent., and the three-roomed and
four-roomed dwellings by 17 per cent."
In 1815 there were 100,000 paupers in London. At the rate of increase
of population in 1875, there should have been 300,000. There actually
were less than 100,000, while from 1871 to 1908 the percentage of
population "relieved" fell from 31 to 22.
In Germany, income-tax statistics prove the same thing. In Prussia,
from 1876 to 1888, Dr. Soetbeer (quoted by Professor Mayo-Smith) finds
that the proportion of income-tax payers with their families, to the
whole population, had increased about 22 per cent., that is from 2.3
per cent. of the population to 2.8 per cent., and that the classes
which had increased at the most rapid rate were those with incomes of
over $500. And although the most rapid increase of all had been in the
class with incomes of over $25,000, the average incomes of that class
had decreased.
We regret that more recent figures than some we have given cannot be
had in time for the present article, but as already said, we hope
before long to present the results of a special study backed by the
forthcoming census bulletin, and attempting to weigh judicially the
confusing factor introduced into the situation by that part of the
rise in prices due to the unprecedented increase in the supply of
gold. Were it not for that extraneous circumstance, the showing for
the wage-earner's advance would be even greater.
The very recent and probably temporary rise in prices is principally
attributed to the unprecedented production of gold, the rush away
from the farms to the cities, the rise in wages, and certain wastes in
labor. In some trades wages have been forced to a height which, acting
on the prices of products, has in many particulars nullified the
advance in wages. All raising of wages by limiting labor instead of
increasing product, by increasing friction instead of efficiency, by
getting more than one's own instead of making one's own larger, must
raise prices. So, to put it more in detail, must all such adventitious
tricks as limiting apprentices; limiting each laborer's speed to that
of the slowest; limiting the kinds of things a man can reasonably
do--in short, all limiting of labor below its best efficiency by men
or masters, masters remembering of course that to best efficiency
reasonable rest, food and other good conditions are essential. So must
all making of work by putting onto a job more labor than can
accomplish it economically, as by calling a painter, a carpenter and a
plumber to do a little job that any one of them could complete alone,
and destroying good old product to make a call for new. Under ordinary
conditions there will always be work enough for everybody without
these efforts to create work artificially, and the extraordinary
conditions where there is not enough, are only multiplied and
intensified by such efforts.
But despite these influences contributory to the rise of prices in
recent years, the improvements in the wage-earner's lot that had been
noted for over half a century, have on the whole continued to the
present time.
* * * * *
All the forms of industrial conflict are but manifestations of
Nature's striving for equilibration--the goal of all evolution; and
only with a nearer equilibration of men's fortunes will there be
peace. How can it be brought about?
Will a victory of the socialists bring it? Yes, if, by premature
action, you make a desert and call it peace, or if you wait until the
civic virtues are so far developed that selections at the polls will
be as unbiassed and discriminating as those of Nature. But if that
time is approaching, it is with leaden feet; and to act as if it had
arrived would only delay it. Our steps must be cautious and
tentative. That the frightful wastes of both competition and monopoly
should be avoided by state management of all industries or even to any
great extent by state control, is a far-off ideal--so far-off that men
wise enough to be successful are slow to express opinions about it.
Beside this ideal, as beside the ideal of the land directly providing
the government revenue, stalks, as the extreme fallacy generally
stalks beside the truth, the false ideal of the government management
or the land tax producing enough revenue to take care of everybody,
and doing it, leaving to no one the saving duty of taking care of
himself.
The steps already taken toward that ideal, it may perhaps be worth
while to glance at. Outside of government's fundamental functions--the
maintenance of order and justice--it has also managed the post-office,
the coast and geological surveys, the currency, the census, the public
schools, the streets, and the care of the sick and incapable. Some
highly centralized and highly civilized governments have added the
railways, but the privately owned ones, with all their shortcomings,
are better; government telegraph service has been cheapened at the
expense of the taxpayers, and government telephone service has been
abominable. All this has been non-competitive work. There is not yet
any sign that government could make a success of competitive
industries. All the indications are the other way. Governments have so
far been too slow to invent or even adopt improvements, especially
where they involve scrapping old plant; and so far, government has
generally been an extravagant and wasteful employer.
* * * * *
Unlike many other conflicts, the new Irrepressible Conflict can never
be settled by violence: for violence cannot remove that difference in
the capacities of men from which the conflict arises. Violence, even
violence disguised under votes, may spasmodically lessen the natural
differences in property, but they will reappear as long as there are
differences in productive capacity, and society secures to the
individual a reasonable share of his production. In this and all
cases, advantageous exchange of course is productive of additional
value; and there is a less frequent exchange which tends not to mutual
increase of fortune, but to increased difference in fortune. Should
society ever go so far as to take from the inventor, the
capital-saver, the work-finder, the work-manager and the exchanger
their share of the products which, without them, would not exist, and
which are shared in by all, production would fall off, probably below
the starvation point.
If, then, the conflict cannot be fought out, how is peace to be
attained, even the limited degree of peace enjoyed before the modern
unrest? Simply by reducing to a negligible point the difference in the
productive powers of men--in their intelligence, energy and
reliability; and this by leveling up, not by leveling down, as some of
the trades unions, from noble but mistaken motives, attempt.
"Simply!" The general proposition is simple enough, but there are many
perplexities of detail. One inheres in the definition of "productive
powers." Probably it will serve to call them the _capacities of
furnishing satisfactions_; and to include in satisfactions those
produced for oneself as well as those exchanged. In this sense the
impecunious philosopher has high productive powers--often so high that
he would not exchange them for those of the captain of industry, and
he does not often feel discontent enough to make him a very active
factor in the Irrepressible Conflict. He does sometimes, though,
especially when he feels the pinch of his narrow financial income
compared with that of the producer of more material satisfactions. As
he is usually a man of gentle make-up, the effect of his narrow income
is increased by sympathy with the unfortunate, and sometimes these
combined influences send out mighty queer doctrine from professorial
chairs. Such phenomena, however, do not controvert the general
proposition that the satisfactions of the spirit are to be included
among those upon whose more equal production depends the disappearance
of the conflict that must be till then irrepressible.
There is no way to peace, then, other than increasing the productive
power of the less productive man. Sharing with him material goods,
except to tide over emergencies that his powers cannot meet, won't do
the trick at all, as has been abundantly proved, from the English poor
laws down, and as is going to be proved again before some of our
recent "progressive" legislation has run its course.
This is far from saying, however, that legislation really progressive
in this direction is impossible. We for our part, however, do not see
as much hope in legislation as in improvement in knowledge and
understanding and disposition among people generally. That great
improvement in disposition may be near at hand, seems indicated by
recent experiences among the most revolutionary and suggestive in
human annals. The recent meeting at Gettysburg, not to speak of the
minor earlier ones at Lookout Mountain and elsewhere, indicates an
advance in human nature so immense that it has not been realized. Not
the least significant thing it demonstrated, is the vast decrease in
the necessity of wasting thousands of lives and billions of treasure
to settle differences of opinion.
As this is now so startlingly indicated regarding the Irrepressible
Conflict which culminated at Gettysburg, and which _could_ be settled
by force, is there not even much more reason to hope for a settlement
not very remote, by methods of reason, of our new Irrepressible
Conflict, which _cannot_ be settled by force?
* * * * *
But even if the outcroppings of the conflict are so soon settled, the
fundamental conflict will persist as long as the difference in men is
so great, and that difference is the most important thing to be dealt
with by all lovers of peace and humanity. The only way to cancel it is
for the men in front to help those behind, and for those behind to
help themselves--to everything that does not belong to somebody else.
But those in front are entitled to have their judgments followed where
they are not plainly tainted by self-interest, and it will pay them to
keep self-interest out of their judgments so far as self-preservation
does not demand it. But how much self-preservation can properly cover,
is a difficult question, and space permits little more than the
suggestion of it. Shall a man's self rightly be a wearer of but one
suit of clothes, an occupant of a hut, an eater of the plainest food,
and an entertainer of no guests: or shall his self rightly be clothed
beautifully and suitably for all occasions, occupy a house that shall
be a pleasure to gaze upon, consume the food essential to both the
greatest refinement and the greatest efficiency, dispense a generous
hospitality, broaden his mind and develop his taste so that he can
enlighten and inspire others, encourage letters and the arts, and have
leisure to devote to charities, education and the common good? There
are plenty of illustrations that a man may preserve a self as large as
this--as large as Goethe's or Marcus Aurelius's--and yet issue no
advice unworthy of the respect of smaller men, and be of an advantage
to the race beside which the cost of maintaining such a self is
nothing.
If most men cannot have the things just enumerated, and if many of
those who have them abuse them, is it best that none should have them?
That all should have them is, in the present stage of human
development, impossible. If all the wealth of the United States were
divided equally among us, we would have but a little over $1,300
apiece,[2] and much of it would be wasted at once, and no conceivable
laws would prevent what might be left, being in a very short time as
unevenly distributed as now. The only glimpse we can see of a time of
even fortunes, is of a time of even capacities; and the only rational
way we can see to such a time is through helping each other: every
other experiment toward it has proved illusive.
[Footnote 2: According to the State Census of 1904 as compiled in
a Bulletin of the National Census issued in 1907. The
corresponding data for the Census of 1910 are not yet arranged.]
The principal roots of the difficulty are generalized as ignorance and
incompetence. The ignorance has already been strongly, though very
blunderingly, attacked in the public schools, but not much more
blunderingly perhaps than in the universities. It is a strange paradox
that education, though the special care of the educated, should be
among the most backward of the arts, yet so the highest-educated are
the first to admit it to be. We are making hopeful progress in it,
though, and are rapidly developing it to care for incompetence not
only in mind but in body and disposition.
Then in the struggles of wage-earners and wage-payers, the principle
of arbitration is certainly making rapid inroads on the practice of
violence. The settlement of the recent great railroad controversies
was by deliberative assemblies, not by mobs.
The farther lessening of the difference in material possessions by
leveling down on one side as well as leveling up on the other, has
lately become a very real and active question. While the inventor has
seldom realized his share of production, and while the average
director of industry has seldom realized more than his, undoubtedly
extortionists and monopolists have rolled up fortunes out of all
proportion to their deserts; and the regulation of these, though not
doing much to fill up the differences, will do more to relieve the
spirit of discontent.
It will be interesting to see how much of the share now going to the
employer can go to the employee without stopping the employer's
functions of finder, organizer and director of profitable work. We
cannot intelligently foresee conditions in which these functions on
his part will not be absolutely essential to the progress of society.
The functions, however, are being more and more performed, even under
the trusts, by men rising from the ranks; and even the men remaining
in the ranks are probably performing more and more of those same
functions, though some of the short-sighted policies of the unions are
obstructing them.
And the unions themselves, despite policies not yet outgrown, have
unquestionably done much to raise the wage-earners' fortunes, and are
probably, with more experience and wider outlook, to do vastly more.
But not until they get beyond the policy of holding their own best men
back, will they enter on their full career, and then their least
effective men will most benefit. Moreover, the wisest and most
effective men are those most ready to learn from criticism, and when
the unions realize it, they will have another avenue to usefulness.
They will be helped to realize it, however, by more patience, candor
and disinterestedness on the part of the critics. So far, everybody is
bellicose, as first at Gettysburg. Cannot both sides to the present
Irrepressible Conflict better anticipate a conciliatory disposition
than did those heroes of fifty years ago?
When we can always carry the Irrepressible Conflict into courts and
arbitrations and, as Godkin said, substitute for the shock of battle,
the shock of trained intellects, peace will be in sight.
Its first essential is always a clear understanding. There are lies
somewhere in every human conflict. Probably the most pitiful and
pernicious of all lies is that all men are equal. The only remedy is
to make it true.
THE MAJORITY JUGGERNAUT
During the past five years the agitation in favor of so modifying our
governmental system as to remove all those barriers which stand
between the will of the majority and its immediate execution has
attained formidable dimensions. That the defects which American
government has exhibited in many directions have been so serious and
so persistent as to furnish great justification for this agitation no
candid observer can deny. In both of the two ways upon which advocates
of the initiative and referendum lay so much stress, our
representative institutions have indeed sadly failed of being ideally
representative. Venality of individual legislators, or the control of
whole bodies of them by corrupt bosses, has resulted in innumerable
instances of special legislation for the benefit of powerful private
interests and contrary to the interests of the people. And it must be
admitted that apart from any question of venality or corruption there
has often been a degree of inertia in the enactment of enlightened and
progressive legislation which cannot be ascribed to legitimate
conservatism, but must be set down either to the unfitness of
legislatures for their responsibilities or to obstacles which an
extreme interpretation of constitutional restraints has unnecessarily
put in its way.
Nor can it be denied that the referendum and the initiative have
intrinsic value as remedies adapted to the counteracting of these two
evils respectively. Given a legislature owned by special interests, or
controlled by a boss, its power to give away valuable franchises or
otherwise to squander the people's inheritance can be held in check by
the requirement that upon proper demand such action shall be rendered
subject to a veto by the people at large. And if, owing to the
intricacies of party organization or to other circumstances, a
legislature is stubbornly obstructive, the initiation of legislation
by means of popular petition undeniably offers an instrument for the
overcoming of such inertia. Were it true that the control of
legislatures by private interests is on the increase, or even showing
no sign of diminution; were it true that legislation for social
betterment is making little or no headway; were it true that our
courts show no disposition to realize that a more liberal
interpretation of constitutional provisions is demanded by the changed
conditions of our time; it would probably be admitted by all except a
few irreconcilables that, however serious might be the objections to
the remedies proposed, their adoption appears to be almost dictated by
that kind of imperious necessity that knows no law.
As a matter of fact the diametrical opposite of these things is what,
upon a large survey of the state of the whole country, is unmistakably
evident. It is doubtful whether one can point anywhere to a
legislature owned as the Pennsylvania legislature used to be owned by
the Pennsylvania Railroad, the Maryland legislature by the Baltimore
and Ohio Railroad, the New Hampshire legislature by the Boston and
Maine Railroad. Child labor laws and workmen's compensation laws are
being enacted and strengthened in state after state, very much after
the fashion in which the Australian ballot laws were being passed in
state after state a quarter of a century ago. And as for our courts,
the Supreme Court of the United States, once regarded as the very
stronghold of extreme constitutionalism, has been steadily setting an
example of liberal construction; while such a decision as that of the
New York Court of Appeals in the Ives case is pointed to on all hands
as being rather in the nature of a survival of a past attitude of mind
than typical of the present temper of the courts of last resort in our
leading states.
Nevertheless, enough remains, and more than enough, to constitute a
serious grievance. The progress that has been made towards the removal
of scandalous practices or exasperating impotence is not sufficient to
justify complacency. But it is sufficient to dispose of that plea of
desperate necessity to which advocates of the "rule of the people" are
so prone to resort as over-riding all other considerations. Indeed,
the state of mind of these advocates is in no small measure an
illustration of that remarkable psychological phenomenon to which
Herbert Spencer has drawn attention as marking the progress of reform
agitations--that their excitement usually becomes most intense when
the object to which they are directed has been almost attained. A
dozen years ago it might plausibly have been urged that in our
existing representative institutions effective control of public
service corporations was impossible; but the railroad-rate legislation
of the national Congress and the institution of Public Service
Commissions in state after state have been accomplished without a jar.
A few years ago it was still the fashion to speak of the United States
Constitution as virtually incapable of amendment, this belief being
based on the fact that, apart from the amendments brought about by the
Civil War, none had been adopted since the early days of the republic.
The adoption of the sixteenth and seventeenth amendments in rapid
succession has disposed of that notion for good and all; and yet it is
only now that a proposal to substitute an easy and rapid method of
amendment in place of that now provided in the Constitution has been
brought forward and urged. Indeed, it is hardly too much to say that
to-day's impatience with our existing governmental system, to-day's
readiness to welcome short-cut remedies, is attributable rather to
exasperation with the difficulties and evils of yesterday than to the
conditions of to-day or the prospects of to-morrow.
Into the merits and defects of the various proposals for "direct rule
of the people" it is not the purpose of this brief paper to enter in
detail. Many valid considerations have been urged in their favor, and
many sound objections have been advanced against them. Speaking
generally, these arguments relate to the question of the honesty,
intelligence, and efficiency of legislation as it has been, or is
likely to be, affected by the change in question. Advocates of the new
order have pointed to the well-known deficiencies of our legislatures
as they are. Its opponents have given instances of errors, and of the
misleading of voters, under the initiative system. In the main,
however, since experience--in spite of Switzerland's long, but
sparing, use of the method--has as yet been but of the slightest
extent, serious writers on both sides have dwelt chiefly on the
inherent tendency of the system. That it cannot cover the whole
province of legislation both sides are fully agreed; and
objectors lay chief stress on the inevitable tendency of the
initiative-and-referendum system to reduce the importance and dignity
of legislatures and consequently to end all hope of raising the
quality of their membership, while advocates of the system set great
store by the educative value of the exercise of direct legislative
judgment upon the whole body of the citizenship.
There is, however, one consideration, and that perhaps the most vital
of all, which appears to have been strangely neglected. Every-day
efficiency, even every-day right-mindedness, is not the only thing
about which there is occasion for solicitude. It seems usually to be
forgotten on both sides of the discussion that there occur every now
and then, in the history of a nation, questions of a crucial nature
upon the right or wrong decision of which rest momentous and enduring
consequences. Such questions, under the traditions of representative
government as they have grown up in the course of ages, are fought out
in a very different way from that which marks the ordinary routine of
legislation and government. They are not settled by an instantaneous
show of hands. What may take place in England if it shall come to be
governed by a single chamber and under a closure system which makes
parliamentary obstruction impossible, no man can say; but up to the
present time nothing like this kind of unlimited rule by majority vote
in a parliamentary body has existed either in that country or in our
own. There has always been in both a possibility of resistance, in one
form or another, to the immediate desire of a majority of the people's
representatives; and this has profoundly affected the course of
history upon those matters which are of most vital moment.
The difference between questions of this type and the ordinary
subjects of every-day legislation is more than a mere difference of
degree. It is not only that they are more momentous; they are
different in kind, in that their decision involves a result which,
humanly speaking, is irreversible. Nothing is more common than to say
that if an act of the people should prove to be a mistake, they will
correct that mistake. But there are mistakes that cannot be corrected.
If the question of union or disunion had been put to the touch of a
majority vote, and had been decided in favor of disunion, the result
of that one day's voting would, in all human probability, have been a
permanent severance of this nation into two mutually alien parts.
Since the Civil War there has been one great issue which, though in a
wholly different way, quite as distinctly illustrates the irrevocable
character which the decision of a public question may have. It _might_
be no calamity for this country to live, either temporarily or
permanently, under a silver standard. But the truly vital point in the
silver question which occupied the attention of the nation for twenty
years was not that of the silver standard as such, but of the
repudiation and currency-debasement involved in substituting the
silver dollar, at the ratio of sixteen to one, for the gold dollar as
the monetary unit. Had this substitution been effected, the
repudiation and debasement would have taken place; and a subsequent
return to the gold standard would not in the slightest degree have
redressed the wrong. Under the existing system of government there was
opportunity for obstruction, for compromise, for the effective
influence of a few strong minds and a few powerful personalities.
Under the "direct rule of the people" the whole matter might have been
settled at a stroke; and it is by no means improbable that it would
have been so settled, at some stage or other of the struggle, in favor
of the silver standard. For it must be remembered that the very
existence of this possibility would have stimulated in an incalculable
degree the efforts of the silver agitators; and nothing is more
probable than that during the years of depression, distress, and
discontent that followed upon the panic of 1893, a moment would have
been found when the popular cry of "more money" would have swept the
country.
That questions not less fundamental, and the decision of which is not
less irrevocable, are destined to arise in the future it should be
unnecessary to argue. Never, in this country at least, has the
atmosphere been so charged with issues affecting the very bases of the
economic and social order. These issues are for the most part vague
and undefined, but their gravity and sweep is none the less apparent.
But if an illustration were needed of a more specific nature, and one
which relates to a question partly of the past and partly of the
future, such an illustration lies ready to hand. The agitation against
the right of private property in land which was started forty years
ago by Henry George's "Progress and Poverty" has only within the last
few years become a serious factor in practical politics. The shape
which it assumes in the actual proposals urged for immediate adoption
is that of a mere reduction of the tax now levied on buildings and the
placing of a corresponding additional tax on land. But the earnest
advocates of this step and its earnest opponents alike rest their case
on the animating purpose behind it. That purpose flows from the
conviction, which its leading advocates often find it politic to keep
in the background but which they seldom disavow, that the owners of
land have no rights which, in the eye of justice, the rest of the
community is bound to respect. The fiery zeal that shines through the
pages of "Progress and Poverty" is animated by this conviction on the
one hand, and on the other by the unhesitating belief that under the
regime of private property in land human wretchedness must continually
increase, while its abolition would carry with it the extinction of
poverty. Henry George did not balk at the word confiscation. Indeed it
is precisely the assertion of the right to confiscate land which,
apart from the eloquent and plausible presentation, constituted the
distinctive character of George's work. John Stuart Mill had long
advocated the interception by the state of the "unearned increment" of
the future, but firmly held that expropriation of landowners without
compensation is morally indefensible. Henry George, in spite of his
profound reverence for Mill, dismissed this judgment of the great
liberal economist and philosopher with undisguised contempt. After
quoting a certain passage from Mill, George exclaims:
In the name of the Prophet--figs! If the land of any country
belong to the people of that country, what right, in morality and
justice, have the individuals called landowners to the rent? If
the land belong to the people, why in the name of morality and
justice should the people pay its salable value for their own?
But while Henry George was convinced that outright confiscation would
be perfectly just, he proposed to accomplish the substance of
confiscation without introducing its form. "Confiscation," he said,
"would involve a needless shock to present customs and habits of
thought;" and the method he proposed for achieving his end was "to
abolish all taxation save that upon land values." But he made no
pretence whatever of there being any difference in substance between
the two things. It was of the essence of his plan that the single tax
should be tantamount to confiscation. The mere placing of the present
entire burden of taxation upon the landowners would be far from
sufficing for his purpose; and he expressly counted on what he
regarded as the inevitable and rapid growth of the land tax, when once
his principle was acknowledged, to such dimensions as to swallow up
the entire rental value of land. Not the mere expenses of government
as we are now familiar with them, but all the outlay for social and
individual betterment which the entire revenue now attaching to the
ownership of land could supply was to be available for the public
good. The idea of his program was epigrammatically, but sufficiently
accurately, conveyed in a motto that was prominent in his campaign for
mayor of New York: "No taxes at all, and a pension for everybody."
Now it requires no extraordinary effort of the fancy to imagine what
would be the natural course of such an agitation as this under a
system of government in which the idea of the direct rule of the
people had become thoroughly established; and by "thoroughly
established" we must understand, in the case of our own country, the
dominance of that idea in the nation as well as in the separate
States. If in those conditions a doctrine like that of Henry George
were put forward, and commanded the devotion of a band of earnest and
able men, the form which its propaganda would take would, in the
nature of things, be wholly different from that which we have
actually witnessed. The goal towards which all effort would be
directed would be the obtaining of a popular majority for some single
proposal, the adoption of which would insure the fulfilment of the
great purpose. The preoccupation of the nation with other issues that
divide parties or factions would be no hindrance. In order to bring
the question up for immediate decision by popular vote, all that would
be necessary would be the satisfaction of some minimum requirement
laid down in the initiative system; a minimum requirement which, be it
noted, under the principle of "direct rule," has for its only _raison
d'être_ the practical need of avoiding an intolerable multiplication
of election questions. With this minimum satisfied, the champions of
the change would advance to the charge year after year, fired with the
consciousness that the gaining of a popular majority at the very next
election would end once for all the iniquitous institution by which
mankind has been robbed of its birthright, and make poverty and
wretchedness a thing of the past.
But, it may be objected, is there after all any essential difference
between this process and that which goes on under the traditional
representative system, when it is truly representative? If the people
are really convinced that land ownership is robbery, and that they
should resume what they hold to be their own, are they not able, and
ought they not to be able, to obtain their wish through the
legislative assembly which represents them? The answer is that under
the representative system as we know it--and quite as much at its best
as at its worst--the influence of the wishes of the electorate upon
the representative body is not uniform and mechanical. Representatives
are elected not upon one issue, but upon many, and it is always a
question how definite the popular "mandate" has been upon any one of
them. From this alone it follows that there is a large, though
indefinite, region in which a representative may feel free to act
according to the dictates of his own individual judgment. In the case
of any question involving a fundamental and momentous change, it is
necessary that the mandate be extremely clear before it can be
regarded by intelligent and conscientious legislators as binding upon
them; and to accomplish this the strength of the feeling among the
people in favor of the measure must be shown in ways far more
emphatic, far more conclusive of a firm and fixed desire, than the
mere existence of a majority vote. The issue must virtually raise
itself to a prominence and intensity commensurate with its importance.
It must find its way not merely to a position in which, when people
are challenged to say yes or no, a few more say yes than say no, but
to a position in which it dominates other issues and is seen to
represent the deliberate and imperative desire of the people. And when
we add to this the constitutional checks that have thus far obtained
both in England and in this country, together with the legitimate
possibilities of parliamentary obstruction, we see how profound is the
difference between the representative system and that of direct rule.
It may almost be likened to the difference between a living organism,
endowed with the power of discrimination and judgment, and a crude
mechanical contrivance. In the one case, a great issue has to go
through an ordeal fitted to its nature; in the other, it is put into
the hopper along with the veriest trifles of every-day business, and
its fate is settled by the same monotonous turn of the wheel.
The difference which I have been endeavoring to bring out is not
identical either with the difference between conservatism and
progressiveness or the difference between carefulness and looseness in
legislation. Much has been said both for and against "direct rule" as
related to these qualities; it has been contended that direct
legislation is more conservative and less conservative, more prone to
error and less prone to error, than legislation by representative
assemblies. But what is usually held in view, on both sides, is the
course of what I have been referring to as every-day legislation.
Important, however, as the question may be in relation to such
matters, the transcendent issue involved in the question of direct
rule of the people is how it would operate in those supreme trials
which the nation is sure to be called upon in the future, as it has
been in the past, to undergo. The cardinal objection that I find to it
is not that it is radical or that it is careless, but that it is
intrinsically incapable of making that vital distinction which should
be made between these grand issues and the ordinary questions of
legislative routine. And no merely mechanical modification would
overcome this difficulty. The influences which, upon great occasions,
have been brought into play to stay the flood of immediate popular
desire perform a function for which no automatic device can serve as a
substitute. These influences are sometimes noble, as in Cleveland's
adamantine resistance to currency debasement, or in the act of the
seven Republican Senators who, at tragic cost to themselves, voted
against the conviction of Andrew Johnson; sometimes ignoble, as in the
gigantic campaign fund raised by Mark Hanna in 1896; sometimes not
specially to be marked with any moral label, but embodying the weight
naturally accorded, in any system except that of the absolute and
mechanical rule of the majority, to intellectual ability and personal
force as such. Under the system of direct rule of the people, all
possibility of such interposition would be swept away. Union or
disunion, currency debasement or currency integrity, land confiscation
or the observance of the rights of property--issues like these could
be brought before the people with the same facility as a measure
authorizing the purchase of a toll-road or defining the duties of a
sheriff; and their fate would be decided by the same simple yes or no
of the majority.
Opponents of direct rule are more or less in the habit of speaking of
it as the rule of the mob. Its advocates have no trouble in disposing
of this characterization by pointing out that the distinguishing mark
of a mob is disorder or lawlessness, while the process of taking a
vote of the people, on measures even more than on men, is eminently
orderly and regular. The phrase is open to objection; taken literally,
it cannot be defended. But in all probability what those who use it
really mean, more or less distinctly, is something very like what has
been dwelt on in this paper. What they have in mind is not the
turbulence of the mob, but its brute power, its inaccessibility to
complex considerations, its incapacity for taking counsel or modifying
its purpose, the dumb finality of its acts. A system under which the
highest questions of fundamental public policy were submitted to the
peremptory decision of a majority vote at the polls would be so
vitally different from the system of representative government as we
have known it that, allowance made for the picturesque exaggeration of
the figure, the likening of it to mob rule is by no means without
excuse.
There are of course many advocates of the initiative and referendum
who qualify their support in various ways; and, so far as that goes,
there are many opponents who admit that, within proper limitations,
these methods may be desirable. With all this I am not concerned. The
real force behind the general movement--including not only direct
legislation but also the recall of judges and the nullification of
judicial decisions by popular vote--is the dogma of the inherent
rightfulness of the unlimited rule of the majority. In the collection
of papers on the subject issued by the American Academy of Political
and Social Science, the leading place is given to a paper by Senator
Bourne, of Oregon. Of any hesitation as to the application of the
direct legislation method to the irreversible decision of fundamental
questions, he shows not the faintest trace. On the contrary, it is
precisely to questions of the highest moment, to the decision of
issues of great sweep and significance, that he regards the
application of the direct vote as peculiarly just and desirable. "It
is not proposed," he says, "that the people shall act directly in all
the intricate details of legislation." The great function of the
initiative is in the field of ideas: "Under the initiative any man can
secure the submission of his ideas to a vote of all the people,
provided eight per cent. of the people sign a petition asking that the
measure he proposes be so submitted." That any such question, so
submitted, will be decided as it should be, Senator Bourne not only
does not doubt, but apparently does not imagine that anybody else can
be so perverse as to doubt. "The people of a state will never vote
against their own interests, hence they will never vote to adopt a
law unless it proposes a change for the improvement of the general
welfare." No sign of consciousness that there may be a difference
between the interests of the majority and the interests of the whole
people, between immediate interests and permanent interests, between
apparent interests and real interests; still less of any possible
conflict between interests--as that word is commonly understood--and
the abiding principles of justice or of honor. The 300,000 are certain
to be right if the count of noses against them is but 290,000. To be
sure, no rational man can actually believe this; and there is little
doubt that Senator Bourne would repudiate such an interpretation of
his words. But there is equally little doubt as to the position he
would fall back upon. "The chief function"--this is the declaration
with which he opens his discussion--"the chief function of the
initiative and referendum is to restore the absolute sovereignty of
the people." The idea that the sovereignty of the people means
absolute and unrestricted rule over the whole people according to the
immediate will and pleasure of fifty-one per cent. of the people--a
crude error whose almost unchallenged currency among the
"progressives" of our day is one of the most remarkable psychological
phenomena of our time--lies at the bottom of the whole direct-rule
propaganda.
THE DEMOCRAT REFLECTS
The Democrat was disillusioned, but he really was a democrat. He had
been cradled and taught in the atmosphere of democracy, and was
possessed by lifelong conviction of the righteousness of the
democratic ideal. For a long time, too--until he had come to know more
of the actual business of democracy--he had never questioned
democratic practice. He was young and innocent.
But the scales had fallen from his eyes; the enlightened vision of
manhood's years had disclosed in democracy a multitude of undemocratic
things of whose existence in his youthful days he had not even
dreamed. The preceptors of his boyhood had never told him--or his
hopeful heart had not let him understand--that men had to struggle
against other men to preserve even that equality to which they were
born; that justice, even in the courts, could be, in the very nature
of things, nothing more than an approximation, and that, among men of
the world in general, it was often might that made right; that there
were ways of depriving men of the ballot, in spite of enactments; that
laws could be made by the will of minorities, or of single
individuals. Even town-meetings could sometimes be undemocratic, and
his ears were startled by those who declared that, in the nation's
life at large, there was nothing left of democracy but seeming.
His faith in men had suffered the same rude shocks as his faith in
democracy--quite naturally, for neither faith stood alone. He had come
to see that the sordidness of human beings reached heights and depths
which his youth, slow to believe and slower to perceive, had never
imagined. Surely, the love of money _was_ the root of all evil--or of
nearly all. The heated oratory of the campaign was mostly inspired by
love of money or place. The patriotic sentiment that so abounded in
the press was mostly gush, the news was colored, and the whole
belonged to men with axes to grind. Yes, the press, that boasted
educator of the people, of whose wondrous achievement and
potentiality--yes, and whose freedom--he and his schoolfellows had
written and declaimed, was sometimes bought. Votes at the polls and in
legislative halls were sometimes bought. Contracts with the government
were sometimes bought. Expert scientific opinion was sometimes bought.
War scares were manufactured for a purpose. Great industries could use
intimidation to secure a party the votes of their employees. There was
no form of meanness in life high or low that could not find ready a
hand for its undertaking. Cities were sinks of rottenness and
suffering because it paid their democratic administrators to have them
so. The greed of men could force other men to live and beget their
children in unhealthful, degrading environment, birth into which was
birth into slavery and disease of body and soul. "Life, liberty and
the pursuit of happiness" was a mockery to tens of thousands.
And all this took place under a democracy--a government which he had
been taught was the most equitable on earth, the refuge of the poor
and the oppressed, who sailed into the haven where Liberty was
Enlightening the World to enter the Land of Promise where all their
tears should be wiped away! And the worst of it was, that those who
talked most loudly of the democratic ideal were those most eager to
profit at its expense. If he could have laid it all to the rich or the
aristocratic, it would not have been so bad; but he couldn't. The poor
were by nature as greedy and unjust as the rich, and showed themselves
as bad in practice when they had the chance, and the democrat turned
tyrant as soon as it suited his purse or ambition. It was dismaying.
The contrast between the actual workings of democracy and the ideal
his innocence had worshipped was so enormous that he sometimes doubted
whether they had anything at all in common.
But in time dismay, and even surprise, had worn away, and he recovered
equanimity. He was disillusioned, but still a democrat. At the same
time he learned of the weakness of his idol, he learned of the
weakness of human nature. He knew that the evils he lamented were due
much more to human weakness than to the form of government under
which the evils occurred. With a philosopher of his own land, he
agreed that no form of government was so good as not to work ill in
the hands of the bad, and none so bad as not to work well in the hands
of the good. Henceforth, if he must worry, let it be about men.
Thus it was that the Democrat, from being a partisan, became a
Spectator. Democracy--or what was called that--was amusing: it was so
human--so human in its faults, so human in its self-deception. He was
moved to smiles at the spectacle of a nation of individuals all wisely
thinking themselves intelligent voters, patriots, and capable managers
of their country's affairs.
Was it, after all, a democracy? The Democrat possessed the none too
common art of looking behind mere words, and contemplating Things as
They Are. He was reading his magazine one evening--it contained one of
those comforting political science essays, entitled "Whither Are We
Drifting?"--when the notion seized on him to find some better name for
the government under which he lived. So he laid aside the essay, and
let his thoughts run.
Elimination seemed to appeal as a method. He made a whimsical
beginning: it wasn't a timocracy; however much the love of honor
flourished, it seemed agreed that it was not that which ruled the
nation. That the government wasn't an ochlocracy he also felt sure;
for, in spite of the rule of mobs, in labor troubles, lynchings,
institutions of learning, and weddings in high life, he well knew that
the real authority of the land lay in fewer hands.
Was it, then, an aristocracy? That could not be, for no one was better
than anyone else. In matters of personal worth there was no
superlative; there was not even a comparative. At least, there was no
surer path to defeat at the polls than for a candidate to be called
"better," to say nothing of "best."
Whether it was a theocracy hardly needed consideration. True, the coin
of the realm recorded the nation's Trust in God, and God was
frequently quoted as being heartily in favor of a variety of political
projects; but on the whole the Democrat was convinced that the
function of the inscription was decorative, and felt that any proposal
to entrust God alone with the affairs of the nation would create a
mighty upheaval in politics and commerce, and be followed by a period
of depression. He couldn't really see that God had much part in the
actual government, though he would not go so far as Epicurus, and say
that He cared nothing about what men were doing. He felt more like
agreeing with the Hebrew who conceived God as laughing men to
derision. And besides, to say that the government was at present a
theocracy would place the Democrat in the position of an adverse
critic of the Almighty, which was as much as to say that he himself
was better than the Almighty; and that would be undemocratic.
On the whole, those who called the government an oligarchy seemed to
be getting more near to reality; for at certain crises it became quite
clear that a few men determined the measures of government. And yet,
the individuals of the group were not always the same, but varied
according to the interests involved; and they were not an openly
constituted and declared body, elected by the people. To be sure, they
operated through legislators, but they themselves were more often than
not far removed from open political life. To call the real government
a plutocracy, its governing agents plutocrats, and their instruments
the legislators, seemed reasonable enough. It was humiliating, it
seemed the fact that the great democracy was ruled, not by itself, but
by a Thing.
However, the rule of money, that is, financial self-interest, was not
really a form of government; it was only an influence, and one that
might work good as well as ill. It underlay, more or less, all
governments, not only modern, but ancient as well, and had to, in the
nature of things, so long as property existed and prosperity meant
increase. What else did the phenomenon of economic history-writing
signify but the appreciation of this fact?
The Democrat concluded to let the government under which he lived
stand as a democracy. The term might not be absolutely sufficient, but
it covered the case as well as any. At any rate, whatever the
reality, the government was cast in the democratic mold: every man had
a vote, and was sovereign over it, and could sell it, or throw it
away, or even make use of it, as he chose; and he was represented, or
at least thought he was, by someone whom he elected, or thought he
elected; and was heeded when he clamored his desires or his
indignation, provided it didn't interfere too much with what his
representative was induced to conceive to be the interests of "the
people."
And there were also other manifestations of the democratic ideal which
really distinguished the government under which he lived from that of
many other nations. There was democracy in education. The public set
out to educate _all_ its sons and daughters, from kindergarten to
college Commencement. The day was past when education was only for
gentlemen's sons; the children of the people, rich and poor,
blue-blooded and flat-footed, male and female, brainy and brainless,
came to college, and within its walls there was no connection, it was
said, between honors and money or place. Students dressed from the
same clothes-shop, yelled the same college yell, bought their
apparatus at a co-operative store, ate at the same boarding-house,
took the same examinations, often subserving the cause of democracy by
evading aristocratic tyranny in the person of the faculty and making
democratic use of their neighbors' learning, and asked no questions
about each other's finances or forbears--except, of course, the
fraternity and sorority students, who had _tria nomina_ and were the
exceptions to prove the rule.
And not only were the college rolls and records indicative of
democracy, but there was a democracy of subjects to study. You had
free election: one subject was as good as another, one course as
valuable as another. So long as you had the required number of
credits, the character of the credits made no difference: an hour
contained sixty minutes, and no hour set up to be better than its
fellows. A college education was defined as "something of everything
for everybody," and the definition was especially applicable to the
education of the State Universities, those great examples of learning
in action. In them anyone might study anything at any time under any
instructor under any conditions and in any place--for you could study
in absence, and by correspondence, and hypnotism, and Christian
Science. And when you got through, whatever your method or matter or
capacity or docility or imbecility, you were labelled A. B., and were
as good as any other A. B., and had a fortune assured--until you found
out that the great democratic world thought A. B. no better than D.
F., or any other combination of letters, or no letters at all.
Yes, and there was democracy of religion as well as of education.
Ministers wore plain clothes, avoided religion in conversation,
greeted everyone with the loudness which in some way had become
confused with cordiality, romped with children, attended kissing
parties, and used slang in sermons. Men believed anything, or nothing;
it was a free country, a free age. Any religion, or any interpretation
of it, was as good as any other, so long as you really believed it.
You could pray kneeling, or standing, or sitting, or walking, or
jumping--as you chose. You could interpret your creed literally, or
symbolically, or allegorically, or pragmatically. You could devote
your church edifice to God, or you could make it a meeting-house for
the people, and use it for socials, athletics, kindergarten, lyceum,
vaudeville, soup kitchens, rummage sales, teachers' institutes--and
when all these religious activities grew too extensive for it, you
could sell it to the liveryman or the storage company or the
movie-man. What were churches for, if not for the people?
There was democracy in art, too--especially in literature. Poets wrote
in what vein and in what meter they chose, at what length, with what
attention to rhyme and rhythm, with what preparation or equipment they
chose. They bowed before no laws, ancient or modern. If they made use
of the great names in poetry, it was to justify their own vagaries.
They not only pleaded Tennyson for Tennysonian liberties, but took
what additional license they chose on the ground of personal liberty.
Didn't Homer nod? Of course; and, taking advantage of the example,
they slept the sleep of the unworrying. Poets could write in prose,
and prose authors dress their commonplace thoughts in verse. In
oratory and the novel, matter was all, form nothing. Men were content
if their readers _could_ get their meaning; the compelling power of
style and accurate expression were qualities for which they were
unwilling to pay the price of long and patient preparation. Olympus,
Helicon, and Arcadia had become the paradise of anarchists, to say
nothing of democrats. Who cared now when Zeus's ambrosial locks were
shaken in wrath, or Apollo slammed his baton down in a rage? Who were
they, to set up to be better than others?
And, as for painters and sculptors, and architects and musicians, who
should presume to tyrannize over them by requiring standards of style
or subject? If an architect chose to construct a High School that
looked like a prison or a warehouse, why shouldn't he? After all, what
was the High School but the people's college, and what was its purpose
if not to fit the sons and daughters of the commonwealth for life, and
why _should_ it be built in the Tudor style, or in any other style?
What the people needed was usefulness, not style. And if a musician
wished to compose an overture imitative of all the noises that
accompanied the Retreat from Moscow, including French and Russian
profanity, or if a painter preferred to paint a drunken prostitute
rather than Diana or a Daughter of the Revolution, why shouldn't he?
It was a free country, a democratic age, and it was time art entered
into the service of the people.
And there was democracy of manners, too, and of dress. Democracy had
grown so used to insisting on clothes not making the man, that
distinction in dress had long been a rarity, and men were no longer
constrained to live up to the garb they wore. You could wear a white
vest without obligation to keep it clean, and you could appear with
silk hat and long coat without being suspected of religion or
literature. Men made the clothes now: the process was reversed; they
made them by the wholesale, every season, and if you weren't satisfied
with a good democratic costume--i. e., the one imposed by the despotic
democratic fashion of the season--and had your clothing made to
adorn, why, you were an aristocrat.
And if clothes didn't oblige, neither did _noblesse_, that other
aristocratic bugbear, oblige. Gentlemen? Family? Why, everyone was a
gentleman, from pugilist to preacher. Who said so? Why, who but the
gentleman himself? It was a free country, and a man had a right to be
a gentleman if he chose, didn't he? Just what a gentleman was, to be
sure, no one seemed able to say; but no one failed to lay claim to the
title, or to pull off his coat and prove the justice of his claim if
you denied it. Surely there was no greater proof of the beneficent
power of democracy than that it made all men gentlemen, and all women
ladies.
And there was democracy in the home as well. The American husband was
so democratic that he bettered the apostolic instruction which told
wives to be obedient to their husbands. You might have thought that it
read the reverse. And children--the children of democratic America
were famous the world over for their unquestioning assumption of
knowledge and authority, for their assurance and aggressiveness; for
their easy contradiction of their parents, who were intimidated by the
pedagogical direction never to let your child fear you. Travellers
returned from Europe and reported no Hans and Giovannino who made wide
the mouth and thrust out the tongue in the streets of aristocracy.
Since the time of the bald-headed prophet and the two and forty
she-bears, it had been natural for youth to presume on its
superiority, but it was only the spirit of democracy which seemed to
_encourage_ the presumption.
But why not? If democracy meant equality, why not be consistent? If
all men--black and white, good and bad, rich and poor, wise and
foolish--were to be made equal, why not all women with them? Women
were surely members of the commonwealth. And why not all children?
Hadn't Spencer said so? Children were members of the commonwealth,
too. And why not the beasts, wild and tame, who were also part and
parcel of the population of the country? Why stop merely with men?
Yes, the Democrat concluded, his country was best described as a
democracy, even though the few ruled over the many in matters of
substance, and the many ruled over the few in art and manners, and
both were tyrants. He remembered Plato's definition--Plato the
blasphemer--and it seemed applicable to his own time: "Democracy, a
charming form of government, full of variety and diversity, and
dispensing equality to equals and unequals alike." It was marvellous
how men believed in their equality with other men, what
self-confidence they possessed, and what assurance came to them from
the oft repeated word liberty. "This is a free country, and I'm just
as good as you" could be said by anyone, and was said by everyone, and
as a result his back was a little stiffer and his head a degree or two
more erect. Foreigners learned to say it before they learned to speak
the language. The very animals seemed to understand it; it was Plato
over again: "And the horses and asses had come to have a way of
marching along with all the rights and dignities of free men; and they
would run at anybody whom they met in the street if he did not get out
of their way: and all things were just ready to burst with liberty."
The Democrat, you see, through his habit of looking at Things as They
Are, had come to possess a lively sense of the ridiculous side of
democracy--its inconsistencies, its unconscious enjoyment of words,
its silly self-deception and placid self-satisfaction.
Now that you have seen the workings of his mind, you will easily
understand, too, how the expression of his thoughts might provoke
those who were always on the lookout for the red rag of aristocracy.
And the fact is, that on occasion he did express his thoughts with
great frankness and no little vehemence; and, as no one likes to be
told his faults by even a friendly critic, he often brought the angry
hornets of democracy about his ears.
Yes, and by your smiling you seem to say that he deserved it. And yet
I assure you now, as I did in the beginning, that he was really a
democrat. You must not mistake realization of the faults of democracy
in operation for hostility to democracy itself. He had seen something
of life in aristocratic countries, and was thankful above all things
that there _was_ something in the atmosphere of his own land which had
the effect of making men look up. This virtue alone covered a
multitude of the sins of democracy. There _was_ something in his
country more than the mere form of democratic society. Whether men got
their rights or not, they knew they had rights, and anyone who wanted
to make them consent to injustice had at least to take the trouble of
giving it the appearance of justice. And not only were they possessed
of a lively sense of their own rights, but the air was full of talk
about other people's having _their_ rights. Generosity and benevolence
were abroad in the land. It was, to be sure, something of the sort of
Sidney Smith's benevolence--the feeling which A experienced when he
thought B ought to do something to relieve C's necessities; but even
that kind was better than none. It was vastly important whether large
classes of human beings acquiesced in being regarded as cattle--as
they seemed to in the Old World--or not.
But if he had a vivid sense of the desirability of the democratic
ideal, he had just as vivid a sense of the dangers of democratic
practice. It was not difficult to see that the universal talk about
making all men equal, vapid as it might be, was having an effect which
could but make the judicious grieve. It was pulling excellence from
her lofty seat to set her on a level with mediocrity. Democracy aimed
at equality. But equality on a high plane was impossible. Certain
men--most men--could not rise to a high plane, or would not. Those
therefore who could climb were not to keep on climbing, but to remain
at the lower level, or return from the heights, or assist those who
were at the lowest of all. Not all could reach the mountain top;
therefore let those who _were_ able to make the ascent engage in
assisting the great majority to attain the _middle_ space of the
incline. Not all could take a college degree; therefore let the
college degree be brought within the reach of all. Not all could be
gentlemen; therefore reconstruct and democratize the definition of the
gentleman. In scholarship, religion, manners, in literature, in all
the arts--in everything except the art of making money--democracy
seemed in danger of fostering the mediocre, and discouraging the
excellent. In its effort for breadth, it was encouraging shallowness.
It might be that for the poorest, the meanest, and the stupidest,
democracy meant individualism and opportunity; but for the brightest
and most ambitious, it seemed to partake of the nature of tyranny. The
main idea in Plato's Republic was the sacrifice of the individual to
the whole. In the Modern Republic it seemed something like the
sacrifice of the best to the good, the leveling down of the highest as
well as the raising up of the lowest. Certain kinds of talent and
effort were in great danger of neglect--the kind of talent and effort
which had made nations live in history. If there was anything in the
record of the past, if civilization was not on the wrong track, and if
literature and religion and the arts were indeed the supremely worth
while, it seemed plain that the encouragement of uniformity beyond
limits was a crime against the race. The atoms of Democritus,
streaming forever downward in parallel lines, would never have
accomplished a world. It needed an Epicurus and a Lucretius to
recognize that they must have swerved from their deadly course of
uniformity. It took friction and collision to beget a universe. The
democratic passion for freedom and equality and uniformity once fully
realized, what deadness and monotony! And as for the boasted educating
power of responsibility, there was as little chance for it in the
frictionless machine of perfect democracy as under despotism itself.
Democracy certainly did savor of the machine; just as the object of
machinery was to insure a uniform product without personal handling of
each individual piece, so the object of democracy seemed to be in such
wise to regulate the affairs of men that justice would be automatic.
The fact was, human laziness occupied great space in the foundations
of the democratic spirit. There were other qualities also, of course.
There was misapprehension. The democratic poor imagined ideal
possession on the part of those more prosperous than themselves, and
the democratic rich imagined the extreme of unpossession on the part
of those poorer than themselves; and both forgot, or had never
discovered, what Horace knew two thousand years ago, that the poor man
was seasick in the hired skiff the same as the rich man in his private
trireme. And there was the spirit of restlessness--the everlasting
desire of the human animal for new things, and his perennial ignorance
of the fact that a change of sky did not necessarily mean a change of
heart. And of course there was human sympathy, the greatest of them
all.
But the place of human laziness was great. Men shrank from
responsibility; uniformity and automatic justice appealed to them.
Democracy was a labor-saving device. The meting out of justice by and
to individuals was difficult, and took time, and, what was worse,
thought. It was much easier to legislate a form of equality, and have
done with it--to press a button, have a uniform product, and not
bother with hand-made goods.
Not that equality and uniformity were undesirable. The trouble with
the popular democratic ideal consisted only in its exaggeration. The
democracy of the enthusiastic multitude was an extreme. Aristocracy
went to the extreme of inequality and diversity, and democracy went to
the extreme of equality and uniformity. Both extremes were vicious;
for vices are only exaggerated virtues. And vices are easier than
virtue, extremes easier than the golden mean. To proceed on the
assumption that all men could be treated as free and equal was easier
by far than to recognize and study their inequalities and limitations,
and to attempt the best for each individual; but the result was only a
vicious approximation.
Let democracy recognize that there were two sides to the shield. The
Democrat sympathized with the ignorant and needy, and believed that
the more fortunate should make cheerful sacrifice to help them rise.
As for himself, he would regulate his conduct among men on the basis
of worth, not wealth or blood,
_scilicet uni æquus virtuti atque eius amicis_,
and stand ready to obey unselfishly any measure for the common good,
however undesirable from his particular point of view. If, however, he
demanded sacrifice on the part of the more fortunate in the interest
of the masses, he demanded no less the spirit of sacrifice on the
part of the masses for the sake of such of their fellows as gave
evidence of superior worth. A democracy should be a great family, in
which the sons of promise were gladly helped on their way to honor and
usefulness, even at the cost of deprivation and suffering on the part
of the rest of the household--as in many an actual family which
performed such sacrifice, and rejoiced in it--and by the sacrifice
added to its own glory and strength. It should give all its sons and
daughters the greatest possible opportunity of self-realization, but
never fail to recognize that some selves were more worth realization
than others. Whatever was levelled, let it not be intellect or
character.
After all, government was a means, not an end. The end was
character--individual _and_ national. A form of government was good or
bad as it succeeded or failed to produce that depth and breadth of
individual and collective spirit which marked great eras in
history--such a spirit as that which made possible the Parthenon or
the North Portal of the Erechtheum; or turned back the Armada; or
inspired the Italian Risorgimento; or crystallized into the dramas of
Shakespeare or Sophocles; or formed the soul of other periods when men
were actuated by passionate desire for the common good and common
glory, for time _and_ eternity. The momentary good of the
individual--his comfort or enjoyment--was a worthy ideal only in so
far as it contributed to character. Without elevation of the ideals of
the individual citizen, there could be no great leaders; without great
leaders there was no vision, and the people perished.
So it appears that the Democrat's ideal society was somewhere between
that of Plato, who thought that, until the union of political power
and philosophy in the same person could be effected, there would be no
relief, and that in which the Democrat lived, where men were chosen
lawmakers and rulers ostensibly because they were good fellows, or at
least none of your damned aristocrats.
THE NEW MORALITY
Some ten or twelve years ago a certain young woman, then fresh from
the hands of an esteemed but erratic professor of English literature,
wrote a novel the plot of which was roughly as follows. A college
graduate suddenly finds himself the inheritor of a shoe factory in a
New England town. Filled with the benevolent ideas absorbed in the
academic contemplation of economics, he undertakes to introduce
profit-sharing with his employees and otherwise to conduct his
business for the benefit of the community. So far, good. But hard
times follow, and his competitors by lowering wages and reducing labor
are able to undersell him. Now there is in his control a considerable
sum of money which a widow had entrusted to his father to invest for
her, and the question arises whether he shall shut down his mills and
inflict suffering upon his men, or shall divert this trust fund to his
business and so try to tide over the period of stress. He yields to
his sympathies and virtually embezzles the trust fund; but fails
nevertheless, and with his own loss brings ruin upon the widow. The
story was called "The Burden of Christopher," with the implication
that the hero was a bearer of Christ in his misfortune, and the author
indicates pretty clearly her sentiment that in surrendering his
personal integrity for the expected good of his working people he was
following the higher of two conflicting codes of ethics.
The book no doubt has gone its own way to the "limbo large and broad,"
where the heroes of ancient fiction wander with
Embryoes and idiots, eremits and friars;
but it made a lasting impression on one reader at least, as the first
popular presentation to come under his notice of a theory which now
confronts him wherever he turns his eyes. There has, in fact, been an
astonishing divulgation in the past decade of what is called, with
magnificent audacity, the New Morality.
Perhaps the most honored teacher of this code is the mistress of Hull
House, who by her devoted life and her services to the people of
Chicago in various times of need has won the right to speak with a
certain authority for the striving generation of the day. And in one
of her books, the "Newer Ideals of Peace," Miss Addams tells of an
actual occurrence and infers a moral which points in the same
direction as the novel of "Christopher." A family of five children is
left motherless. The father, a drunkard, disappears, and the household
is left to the care of a feeble old grandmother. Thereupon work is
found for the oldest boy, "a fine, manly little fellow" of twelve, who
feels keenly "his obligation to care for the family"; but after a time
he becomes "listless and indifferent," and at sixteen turns to
professional tramping. "It was through such bitter lessons as these,"
observes Miss Addams, "we learned that good intentions and the
charitable impulse do not always work for righteousness." As the story
is told there is a plain implication that to find work for a boy under
such circumstances is "cruel and disastrous" (her own comment), and
that society, and not his own nature, was responsible for his relapse.
One would suppose that scarcely an honest workman, or prosperous
merchant, or successful professional man had ever taken up the burden
of life in youth or childhood. Certainly, hardship and physical waste
often result from the demands of life, but there is not a single word
in Miss Addams's account to indicate that she has felt the higher need
for the future citizen of developing in him a sensitiveness to the
peculiar duties that confront him, or has reflected on the moral evil
that might have been done the boy if he had been relieved of his
natural obligations and his family had been supported by society. "Our
democracy," as she says with approval, "is making inroads upon the
family, the oldest of human institutions."
This is not an isolated case in Miss Addams's works, nor does it in
any wise misrepresent her. In another book, "The Spirit of Youth and
the City Streets," the thesis is maintained and reiterated, that
crime is for the most part merely the result of repressing a wholesome
"love for excitement" and "desire for adventure." In the year 1909
"there were arrested and brought into court [in Chicago] fifteen
thousand young people under the age of twenty, who had failed to keep
even the common law of the land. Most of these young people had broken
the law in their blundering efforts to find adventure." The inference
to be drawn here and throughout the book is that one need only relieve
the youth of the land from the necessity of "assuming responsibility
prematurely," affording them meanwhile abundant amusement, and the
instincts of lawlessness and the pursuit of criminal pleasure will
vanish, or almost vanish, of themselves--as if there were no Harry
Thaws, and the sons of the rich were all virtuous.
But it must not be supposed that Hull House occupies a place of lonely
isolation as the fountain of these ideas. From every self-authorized
centre of civic virtue in which a type-writer is at work, the stream
proceeds. The very presses groan, as we used to say when those
machines were still in the mythological stage, at their labor of
supplying the world with the new intellectual pabulum. At this moment
there lies before the writer of this article a pile of books, all
recently published, which are devoted more or less specifically to the
subject, and from all of which, if he had courage to go through them,
he might cull abundant examples and quotations. He was, indeed, about
to enter this "hollow cave, amid the thickest woods," when, an
unvaliant knight, he heard the warning of the lady Una:
Yea but (quoth she) the perill of this place
I better wot then you, though now too late
To wish you backe returne with foule disgrace,
Yet wisedome warnes, whilest foot is in the gate,
To stay the steppe, ere forced to retrate.
We have in fact to deal with the consummation of a long and
deep-seated revolution, and there is no better way to understand the
true character of the movement than by turning aside a moment to
glance at its historical sources. The attempt to find a new basis of
conduct, as we see it exemplified in the works of Miss Jane Addams
and a host of other modern writers, is in fact only one aspect of the
slow drift from mediæval religion to humanitarianism. For a thousand
years, and well into the second thousand, the ethical feeling of
Christian Europe may be said to have taken its color from the saying,
"What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and
lose his own soul?"--which in extreme cases was interpreted as if it
read, If he _reform_ the whole world; and on the other, kindred
saying, "Sell all that thou hast and distribute unto the poor, and
thou shalt have treasure in heaven, and come, follow me"--in which the
command of charity was held to be not so much for the benefit of the
poor as for the liberation of the giver's own soul from the powers of
this world. Such was the law, and its binding force was confirmed by
the conception of a final day of wrath when the souls of men should
stand before a merciless tribunal and be judged to everlasting joy or
everlasting torment. The vivid reality of the fear that haunted men,
at least in their moments of reflection, may be understood from the
vivid horrors of such a picture as Michael Angelo's "Last Judgment,"
or from the meditations of one of the most genial of English
cavaliers. In his little treatise on "Man in Darkness"--appropriate
title--Henry Vaughan puts the frank question to himself:
And what madness then is it, for the enjoying of one minute's
pleasure for the satisfaction of our sensual corrupt appetite, to
lie forever in a bed of burning brass, in the lake of eternal and
unquenchable fire? "Suppose," saith the same writer [Drexelius],
"that this whole globe of earth were nothing else but a huge mass
or mountain of sand, and that a little wren came but once in
every thousand years to fetch away but one grain of that huge
heap; what an innumerable number of years would be spent before
that world of sand could be so fetched away! And yet, alas! when
the damned have lain in that fiery lake so many years as all
those would amount to, they are no nearer coming out than the
first hour they entered in."
No doubt practice and precept were at variance then, as to a certain
extent they are at all times, and there were many texts in the Bible
which might be taken to mitigate the harsher commands; but such in
its purest, highest form was the law, and in the more sensitive minds
this conception of the soul naked before a judging God must have
created a tremendous anxiety in practice. Morality was obedience and
integrity and scorn of the world for an ideal of inner righteousness;
it created a sense of individual responsibility for every word and
deed; and, say what we will, there was something magnificent in this
contempt of the reckoning of other men for that eternal fame which
... lives and speaks aloft by those pure eyes,
And perfect witness of all-judging Jove.
But there was also in this law something repellent and even monstrous.
Who has not shuddered with amazement at the inscription which Dante
set over the portal of Hell: E 'L PRIMO AMORE? Was it Love that
prepared those winding coils of torture to enclose for endless time
the vast majority of mankind? Was it even justice to make the
everlasting doom of a soul depend on its grasp of truth in these few
years spent in a world of shadows and illusions? There is something
repulsively irrational in the notion of an unchanging eternity
suspended on the action of a moment of time--_ex hoc momento pendet
æternitas_. It should seem to be unthinkable, if it had not actually
been thought. As a matter of fact the rigor and crudity of this
doctrine had been mitigated in the Middle Ages by the interposition
between man and God of the very human institution of the Church with
its substitution of temporal penances and pardons, and an interposed
Purgatory in place of the terrible paradox of irrevocable judgment. It
remained for the Reformation and particularly for the Calvinistic
Puritans to tear away those veils of compromise and bring man face to
face with the awful abstraction he had created. The result was for a
while a great hardening and strengthening of character, salutary
indeed after what may be called the almost hypocritical compromise of
Catholicism; but in the end human nature could not endure the rigidity
of its own logic, and in revolting turned, not to another compromise,
but to questioning of the very hypothesis of its faith.
The inevitable reaction from the intolerable logic of the Protestants
was Deism, in which God was stript altogether of his judicial and
moral attributes and reduced to a kind of immanent, all-benevolent
force in nature. "But now comes a modern Sage," says Warburton of
Bolingbroke, "... who tells us 'that they made the Basis of Religion
far too wide; that men have no further concern with GOD than TO
BELIEVE THAT HE IS, which his _physical Attributes_ make fully
manifest; but, that he is _a rewarder of them who diligently seek
him_, Religion doth not require us to believe, since this depends on
God's MORAL ATTRIBUTES, of which we have no conception.'" But such a
position was manifestly untenable, for it left no place for the
undeniable existence of evil in this world and life. From the
unaccountable distribution of wrong and suffering the divine had
argued the certainty of adjustment in a future state; the deist had
flown in the face of facts by retaining the belief in a benevolent
Providence while taking from it the power of supernatural retribution;
the atheist was more logical, he denied the existence of Providence
altogether and turned the universe over to chance or blind law. Such
was the progress of thought from Baxter to Bolingbroke and from
Bolingbroke to Hume.
The positive consequences of this evolution are written large in the
literature of the eighteenth century. With the idea of an avenging
deity and a supernatural test there disappeared also the sense of deep
personal responsibility; the very notion of a radical and fundamental
difference between good and evil was lost. The evil that is apparent
in character comes to be regarded merely as the result of the
restraining and thwarting institutions of society as these exist--why,
no one could explain. Envy and jealousy and greed and the sheer
ambition of power, all those traits, which were summed up in the
single Greek word _pleonexia_, _the desire to have more_, are not
inherent in the human heart, but are artificially introduced by the
possession of property and a false civilization. Change these
institutions or release the individual entirely from restrictions, and
his nature will recoil spontaneously to its natural state of virtue.
He needs only follow the impulse of his instinctive emotions to be
sound and good. And as a man feels of himself, so he feels of others.
There is no real distinction between the good and the evil, but all
are naturally good, and the superficial variations we see are caused
by the greater or less freedom of development. Hence we should condemn
no man, even as we do not condemn ourselves. There is no place for
sharp judgment, and the laws which impose penalties and restrictions,
and set up false discriminations between the innocent and the
criminal, are subject to suspicion, and should be made as flexible as
possible. In place of judgment we are to regard all mankind with
sympathy, feeling with them a sort of emotional solidarity, the one
great virtue, in which are included, or rather sunk, all the law and
the prophets. In fine, we have arrived at humanitarianism; humanity
has become God.
It was the great work of the eighteenth century, beginning in England
and developing in France, to formulate this change, and indoctrinate
with it the mind of the unthinking masses. Here is not the place to
follow the development in detail, and those who care to see its
outcome may be referred to the keen and unjustly neglected chapters in
La Harpe's "Lycée" on the _philosophes_. To those, indeed, who are
acquainted with the philosophical writings that preceded and
introduced the French Revolution, the epithet "new" as it is attached
to our present-day morality may seem a bit presumptuous, for it would
be difficult to find a single fundamental idea in current literature
on this subject which could not be closely paralleled by a quotation
from Rousseau, or Diderot, or Helvétius, or one of their compeers.
Thus, in our exaltation of sympathy above judgment, and of the
unrestrained emotions generally as the final rule of character, we are
but following Diderot's philosophy of the heart: "Les passions
amorties dégradent les hommes extraordinaires"; and when we read in
Ellen Key, and a host of other feminist liberators, the apotheosis of
love as higher than any divine or human obligations, we are but
meeting again with Toussaint's religion a little disguised: "On aime
de même Dieu et sa maîtresse." Our revolt from constitutional law as
a power imposed by the slower reflection of men upon their own
immediate desires and opinions, is essentially the same as the
restlessness consecrated by the French _économistes_ in the phrase,
"le despotisme légal." And, to return whence we began, the economics
of Hull House flow only too easily from Helvétius' definition of
virtue as "le désir du bien public," and from his more specific
statement: "The integrity which is related to an individual or to a
small society is not the true integrity; integrity considered in
relation to the public is the only kind that really deserves and
generally obtains the name."
Miss Addams herself has been disturbed by these reminiscences. Thus
she quotes from one of the older humanitarians a characteristic
saying: "The love of those whom a man does not know is quite as
elemental a sentiment as the love of those whom a man does know," and
repudiates it as vague and impractical beside the New Morality. She
ought to know, and may be right; yet it is not easy to see wherein her
own ethics are any less vague, when she deplores the act of a boy who
goes to work for his starving grandmother because in doing so he is
unfitting himself for future service to society. And as for
effectiveness, it might seem that the French Revolution was a
practical result fairly equivalent in magnitude to what has been
achieved by our college settlements. But Miss Addams is by no means
peculiar in this assumption of originality. Nothing is more notable in
the Humanitarian literature of the day than the feeling that our own
age is severed from the past, and opens an entirely new epoch in
history. "_The race has now crossed the great divide of human
history!_" exclaims an hysterical doctor of divinity in a book just
published. "The tendency of the long past has been toward _diversity_,
that of the longer future will be toward _oneness_. The change in this
stream of tendency is not a temporary deviation from its age-long
course--a new bend in the river. It is an actual reversal of the
current, which beyond a peradventure will prove permanent." To this
ecstatic watcher, the sudden reversal took place at no remote date,
but yesterday; and by a thousand other watchers the same miracle is
vociferously heralded. Beyond a peradventure! Not a little of this
flattering assumption is due to the blind and passionate hope of the
human heart clamoring against the voice of experience from similar and
different movements in the past, which have somehow failed to renovate
the world. So many prophets before now have cried out, looking at the
ever-flowing current of time, and having faith in some Thessalian
magic:
Cessavere vices rerum.
... Amnisque cucurrit
Non qua pronus erat.
So often they have been disappointed; but at last we have seen--beyond
a peradventure. If the vicissitudes of fate have not ceased, yet at
least we have learned to look with complacency on the very law of
mutation, from which the eyes of men had hitherto turned away in
bewildered horror, at last the stream has turned back upon its
sources, and change itself is carrying us no longer towards diversity,
but towards the consummation of a divine oneness.
But it would equally be an error to insist too dogmatically on the
continuity of the present-day movement with that of the eighteenth
century, for, after all, "the world do move." It is true for one thing
that for a hundred years or thereabout there was a partial reaction
against the doctrines of the _philosophes_, during which time the
terrors of the Revolution lay like a warning nightmare in the
imagination of the more thoughtful men. A hundred years is a long
period for the memory to bridge, particularly in a time when the
historical sense has been weakened. Superficially, too, the
application of the theory is in some respects different from what it
was; the law of social sympathy has been developed into different
conceptions of Socialism, and we have devised fresh schemes for giving
efficacy to the immediate will of the people. Even deeper is the
change that has come over the attitude of religious organizations
towards the movement. In the age of the Revolution the Church, both
Catholic and Protestant, was still strongly entrenched in the old
beliefs, and offered a violent resistance to the substitutions of
humanitarianism for responsibility to itself and to a God. Now this
last barrier has been almost swept away. Indeed, not the least
remarkable feature of this literature is the number of clergymen who
are contributing to it, with their constant appeal to the New Morality
as the test of faith. Open one of these books before us--let us take
"The Christian Reconstruction of Modern Life," for the promise of its
title--and you will be pretty likely to come upon such a passage as
this: "Faith's fellowship with Jesus is one with the realization of
our fellowship in humanity"; or, on another page: "If the fundamental
of the true philosophy cannot be found by common men, what advantage
in any man's finding it? If life's secret, direction, and power ... is
not attainable by the lowliest, then a man of this age, living in the
social passion of our time, is forced to be indifferent to that which
would be the monopoly of a few gifted souls." If such a social passion
means anything, it means the reconstruction of life to the level of
the gutter. It is the modern sham righteousness which would have
called from Jesus the same utter scorn as that which he poured upon
the Pharisaical cant of his own day. Yet it is not in religious books
alone that you will meet with this sort of irreligion. For one sermon
you will hear on the obligation of the individual soul to its maker
and judge, and on the need of regeneration and the beauty of holiness,
you will hear a score on the relation of a man to his fellows and on
the virtue of social sympathy. In effect, the first and great
commandment, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and
with all thy soul and with all thy mind," has been almost forgotten
for the second, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." Worship in
the temple is no longer a call to contrition and repentance, but an
organized flattery of our human nature, and the theological seminary
is fast becoming a special school for investigating poverty and
spreading agnosticism. In this sense, or degree, that humanitarianism
is no longer opposed by organized religion, but has itself usurped the
place of religion, the New Morality may really justify its name.
What are the results of this glorification of humanity? What does the
New Morality mean in life and conduct? Well, of such matters it is
wise to speak cautiously. The actual morals of an age are an extremely
complicated and elusive network of facts, and it is only too easy to
generalize from incomplete observation. On the other hand we must
guard against allowing ourselves to be deceived by the fallacy
everywhere heard, that, because the preacher has always, even from the
remotest record of Egypt, bewailed his own times as degenerate,
therefore no age has fallen off in morality from its predecessor. Such
an argument is a complete _non-sequitur_; there have been periods of
degeneration, and there may yet be. As for our own age, only a fool
would dogmatize; we can only balance and surmise. And in the first
place a certain good must almost certainly be placed to the credit of
humanitarianism. It has softened us and made us quicker to respond to
the sufferings of others; the direct and frightful cruelty that runs
through the annals of history like a crimson line has been largely
eliminated from civilization, and with it a good deal of the brutality
of human nature. We sometimes hear the present age compared with the
later Roman Republic and the Empire, and in some respects speciously,
but the callousness of the great Romans to human misery and their
hardness are almost unthinkable to-day. Consider a sentence or two
from Appian: "The head and hand of Cicero were suspended for a long
time from the rostra in the forum where formerly he had been
accustomed to make public speeches, and more people came together to
behold this spectacle than had previously come to listen to him. It is
said that even at his meals Antony placed the head of Cicero before
his table, until he became satiated with the horrid sight." Such an
episode scarcely stands out from the hideous story of the Civil Wars;
to the modern reader it brings a feeling almost of physical sickness.
So much we seem to have gained, and the change in this respect even
from our own seventeenth century shows that the credit is due in no
small part to the general trend of humanitarianism.
But in other directions the progress is not so clear. Statistics are
always treacherous witnesses, but so far as we can believe them and
interpret them we can at best draw no comfort from the prevalence of
crime and prostitution and divorce and insanity and suicide. At least,
whatever may be the cause of this inner canker of society, our social
passion seems to be powerless to cure it. Some might even argue that
the preaching of any doctrine which minimizes personal responsibility
is likely to increase the evil. Certainly a teacher who, like Miss
Jane Addams, virtually attributes the lawless and criminal acts of our
city hoodlums to the wholesome desire of adventure which the laws
unrighteously repress, would appear to be encouraging the destructive
and sensual proclivities which are too common in human nature, young
and old. Nor are the ways of honesty made clear by a well-known
humanitarian judge of Denver, who refused to punish a boy for stealing
a Sunday-School teacher's pocketbook, for the two good reasons, as his
honor explained in a public address, "that the boy was not
responsible, and, secondly, that there were bigger thieves in the pews
upstairs." So, too, a respectable woman of New York who asks whether
it may not be a greater wrong for a girl to submit to the slavery of
low wages than to sell herself on the street, is manifestly not
helping the tempted to resist. She is even doing what she can with her
words to confuse the very bounds of moral and physical evil.
There is, in fact, a terrible confusion hidden in the New Morality, an
ulcerous evil that is ever working inward. Sympathy, creating the
desire for even-handed justice, is in itself an excellent motive of
conduct, and the stronger it grows, the better the world shall be. But
sympathy, spoken with the word "social" prefixed, as it commonly is on
the platforms of the day, begins to take on a dangerous connotation.
And "social sympathy" erected into a theory which leaves out of
account the responsibility of the individual, and seeks to throw the
blame of evil on the laws and on society, though it may effect
desirable reforms here and there in institutions, is bound to leave
the individual weakened in his powers of resistance against the
temptations which can never be eliminated from human life. The whole
effect of calling sympathy justice, and putting it in the place of
judgment, is to relax the fibre of character, and nourish the passions
at the expense of reason and the will. And undoubtedly the conviction
is every day gaining ground among cool observers of our life that the
manners and morals of the people are beginning to suffer from this
relaxation in many insidious ways apart from acts which come into the
cognizance of the courts. The sensuality of the prevailing music and
dancing, the plays that stir the country as organs of moral
regeneration, the exaggeration of sex in the clothing seen on the
street, are but symptoms more or less ominous to our mind as we do or
do not connect them with the regnant theory of ethics. And in the end
this form of social sympathy may itself quite conceivably bring back
the brutality and cruelty from which it seems to have delivered us.
The Roman who gloated over the head of his and the people's enemy
lived two thousand years ago, and we think such bloodthirstiness is no
longer possible in public life. Yet not much more than a century ago
the preaching of social sympathy could send a Lebon and his kind over
France with an insatiable lust for killing, complicated with Sadism,
while at home the leader of the Government of the most civilized
country of Europe was justifying such a régime on the pious principle
that, "when the sovereign people exercises its power, we can only bow
before it; in all it does all is virtue and truth, and no excess,
error, or crime is possible." The animal is not dead within us, but
only asleep. If you think he has been really conquered, read what he
has been doing in Congo and the Putomayo Indians, or among the
redeemers of the Balkan states. Or if you wish to get a glimpse of
what he may yet do under the spur of social sympathy, consider the
callous indifference shown by the labor unions to the revelation, if
it deserves the name, of the system of dynamiting and murder employed
in the service of "class-consciousness." These things are to be taken
into account, not as bugbears, for society at large is no doubt sound
at heart and will arouse itself at last against its false teachers,
but as symptoms to warn and prepare.
To some few the only way out of what seems a state of moral blindness
is through a return to an acknowledgment of the responsibility of the
individual soul to its maker and inflexible judge. They may be right.
Who can tell what reversal of belief may lie before us or what
religious revolution may be preparing in the heart of infidelity? But
for the present, at least, that supernatural control has lost its
general efficacy, and even from the pulpit has only a slight and
intermittent appeal. Nor does such a loss appear without its
compensations, when we consider the harshness of mediæval theology or
the obliquities of superstition that seem to be inherent in the purest
of religions. Meanwhile, the troubled individual, whatever his
scepticism may be, need not be withheld from confirming his moral
faith by turning from the perverted doctrine of the "Enlightenment"
and its recrudescence in modern humanitarianism, to the larger and
higher philosophy which existed long before the materialism of the
eighteenth century, and before the earlier anthropomorphism, and which
persisted unchanged, though often half-concealed, through those ages,
and still persists as a kind of shamefast inheritance of truth. It is
not necessary to go to ancient books to recover that faith. Let a man
cease for a moment to look so strenuously upon what is right for his
neighbors. Let him shut out the voices of the world, and disregard the
stream of informing books which pour upon him from the modern press,
as the "floud of poyson" was spewed upon Spenser's Knight from
"_Errours den_":
Her fruitful cursed spawne of serpents small.
Let him retire into himself, and in the silence of such recollection
examine his own motives and the sources of his self-approval and
discontent. He will discover there in that dialogue with himself, if
his abstraction is complete and sincere, that his nature is not simple
and single, but dual, and the consequences to him in his judgment of
life and in his conduct will be of incalculable importance. He will
learn, with a conviction which no science or philosophy falsely
so-called can shake, that beside the passions and wandering desires
and blind impulses and the cravings for pleasure and the prod of
sensations, there is something within him and a part of him, rather in
some way his truer self, which controls and checks and knows and
pronounces judgment, unmoved amid all motion, unchanged amid continual
change, of everlasting validity above the shifting valuations of the
moment. He may not be able to express this insight in terms that will
satisfy his own reason or will convince others, but if his insight is
true, he will not waver in loyalty to it, though he may sin against it
times without number in spoken word and impulsive deed. Rather his
loyalty will be confirmed by experience. For he will discover that
there is a happiness of the soul which is not the same as the pleasure
of fulfilled desires, whether these be for good or for ill, a
happiness which is not dependent upon the results of this or that
choice among our desires, but upon the very act itself of choice and
self-control, and which grows with the habit of staying the throng of
besetting and inflicting impulses always until the judicial _fiat_ has
been pronounced. It is thus that happiness is the final test of
morality, bringing with it a sense of responsibility to the
supernatural command within the soul of the man himself, as binding as
the laws of religion, and based on no disputable revelation or outer
authority. Such a morality is neither old nor new, and stands above
the varying customs of society. It is not determined essentially by
the relation of a man to his fellows or by their approval, but by the
consciousness of rightness in the man's own breast,--in a word, by
character. Its works are temperance, truth, honesty, trustworthiness,
fortitude, magnanimity, elevation; and its crown is joy.
Then, under the guidance of this intuition, a man may turn his eyes
upon the world with no fear of being swayed by the ephemeral winds of
doctrine. Despite the clamor of the hour he will know that the
obligation to society is not the primal law, and is not the source of
personal integrity, but is secondary to personal integrity. He will
believe that social justice is in itself desirable, but he will hold
that it is far more important to preach first the responsibility of
each man to himself for his own character. He will admit that equality
of opportunity is an ideal to be aimed at, but he will think this a
small thing in comparison with the universality of duty. In his
attitude towards mankind he will not deny the claims of sympathy, but
he will listen first to the voice of judgment:
Away with charity that soothes a lie,
And thrusts the truth with scorn and anger by.
He will be sensitive to the vast injustices of life, and its
widespread sorrows, but he will not be seduced by that compassion into
the hypocrisy of saying that "the love of those whom a man does not
know is quite as elemental a sentiment as the love of those whom a man
does know."
PROFESSOR BERGSON AND THE SOCIETY FOR PSYCHICAL RESEARCH
When, some months since, M. Bergson delivered his inaugural address as
President of the Society for Psychical Research, the circumstance was
considered of enough importance to justify many cablegrams in the
American papers, and much editorial comment. Had the address not been
in French, it probably would have been reproduced here. Yet the event
was not exceptional enough for that feature to explain the attention
of the press. Men to be named in the same breath with Professor
Bergson, for instance Professor William James and Mr. Arthur Balfour,
had already been presidents of the Society. Therefore the importance
attached to M. Bergson's acceptance of the presidency may indicate not
merely an interest in his views of the subjects attacked by the
Society, but a growing interest in the subjects themselves--perhaps an
interest that may lead such of our readers as have not already studied
them, to welcome some account of both. The information is doubly worth
giving, as there is such a wide belief that the Society is but a group
of cranks, while in fact it has always included some of the best minds
of the age. This account, however, despite the disproportionate space
we venture to allot to it, can give but a pitifully inadequate idea of
the Society's work, and has been prepared mainly on the chance that it
may lead a few readers to seek adequate knowledge elsewhere.
There is also a better reason for attention to the subject. No
argument is needed to convince thinking people that this age stands in
peculiar need of a revival, from some source, of that interest in the
mysteries surrounding our little experience, without which no age has
been really great.
The work hardly seemed worth doing at all unless on the present scale.
If any reader begrudges the space, we can pretty safely promise that
the subject will not call for so large a proportion in future
[Editor].
In 1882 a group of friends who had been meeting occasionally at
Cambridge for the discussion of mysterious phenomena, formed the
Society for Psychical Research, and took rooms in London. The best
known of the early members were Professor (now Sir William) Barrett,
Professor Henry Sidgwick, Frederick W. H. Myers, Fellow of Cambridge,
Arthur J. Balfour, Richard Holt Hutton (Editor of _The Spectator_);
Professor Balfour Stewart, Hensleigh Wedgwood, Lord Houghton and
Archbishop Trench. They were soon joined by, among others, Professor
(now Sir William) Crookes, Alfred Russel Wallace, Lord Raleigh,
Ruskin, Tennyson, William James, Edmund Gurney, Richard Hodgson, Frank
Podmore, Professor (now Sir Oliver) Lodge, and Professor Schiller.
The Society's Proceedings now fill twenty-six octavo volumes, and it
has also published a Journal for its members which has reached fifteen
large twelvemo volumes.
All were originally published in "parts," of which, in all but two or
three cases, several composed a volume. Any portion of the material
can be obtained from the Society's American agents, the W. B. Clarke
Co. of Boston.
The topic first reported on by the society was thought-transference.
Experiments were made with cards, words, pictures and all sorts of
objects. The Society published scores, possibly hundreds, of pairs of
drawings, one of each pair having been made by a person not seeing the
original, who had copied it closely enough to be recognized, in
consequence of willing to copy it, and being similarly willed by
another person drawing or gazing at it. Some of the duplicates would
have been very fair performances even if the originals had been in
sight.
The conviction before existing that all sorts of impressions could be
conveyed at the will of a hypnotist, was abundantly confirmed, and a
strong conviction was aroused in some minds, and it seems to be
increasing, that all transference of thought without visible means has
a hypnotic element, and is much more frequent than yet generally
recognized.
Pictures were of course conveyed as subjective visions, and the
Society began very early to collect and classify accounts of visions
of all kinds, applying rigid canons of verification.
In 1886 the Society published a collection of "Phantasms of the
Living" compiled by Gurney, Myers and Podmore. Seven hundred cases
were thought sufficiently verified to be worth including.
This work was severely criticised by Mr. Charles Pearce in the
Proceedings of a short-lived American society, and he was there
answered by Mr. Gurney.
Gurney died while preparing a work on Phantasms of the Dead. His
material was put in shape by Myers, and published in the Proceedings
of the Society, Vol. V, pp. 403f. "Phantasms of the Living" is now out
of print but much of its material is obtainable in Journal I and the
Reports of the Literary Committee in the early volumes of the
Proceedings.
Space does not admit of enough citation and discussion from these
works to be of value. It may be said in general, however, that with
one class of partial exceptions, there is hardly any ghost story that
one has ever heard of which does not find its parallel here, confirmed
by excellent witnesses and often by considerable supplementary
investigation. The partial exceptions are the stories of freezing
horror which, the evidence now suggests, would appear to have little,
if any, basis in actual experience, but to be mainly the products of
imagination--often of deliberate imagination laboring for dramatic
effect. The authenticated phenomena are generally of gentle and
innocuous character--appearance of dying friends, etc. There are some
apparently of troubled souls, but hardly ever of malevolent ones.
The vast majority of the experiences have taken place in bed, and
therefore are presumably dreams, and there is much reason to believe
that the others come in some sort of a dream state, the whole business
probably being associated, as before indicated, with telepathy, and
telepathy probably being associated with hypnotism, not always
voluntary or conscious.
The experiences are apparently of sight, sound, touch--all the
senses. And yet in connection with visions, there have been few
changes in objective Nature to account for them.
* * * * *
Much regarding hypnotism was published in the early volumes, but that
subject is now so much a part of the knowledge of the medical world,
and even the world in general, that we will not enlarge upon it here.
* * * * *
As there have "always" been stories of visions and hypnotic control,
so there have been stories of objects moved by human beings without
the exercise of muscular force, and indeed without contact. Years
before the foundation of the S. P. R., the present writer saw a
conclusive illustration of the first. It was an exhibition of
something to which it might be well to transfer the name of
zoömagnetism, which was originally suggested by Dr. Liebault for the
force assumed to act in hypnotism. That assumption is now abandoned.
For the effects of the force--the manifestations to the senses, the
name telekinesis is accepted by the Society.
This zoömagnetic force with telekinetic effects seems quite plainly a
mode of the cosmic energy. Putting it forth generally leaves the agent
much exhausted, although very strangely in one of the best accounts,
in Pr. S. P. R. VII, 175f. by Professor Alexander, of the University
of Rio Janiero, regarding his neighbors the Davis children's
performance, he says that they were not fatigued. This seems like a
denial of the persistence of force. But there may be a force
manifested by the human system and yet not generated in it (or
appropriated by it from food and air), but merely passing through it,
as some classes of thoughts are held by some students to be entirely
independent of human origination. If so, there are _two_ modes of
force as yet uncorrelated with our knowledge, which produce
telekinetic effects: for there is certainly one which exhausts human
energies. (See Pr. VI, VII, IX, XII.)
Perhaps a more certain correlation of the zoömagnetic force with the
modes of force already well correlated, is that, if the evidence
collected by the S. P. R. is reliable, it is, like them, mutable into
the production of light--including the alleged magnetic aura, even
around persons--sound, electricity and the other modes of force
already well known. (See Pr. IV, VIII, IX, XI.) These modes possibly
include that which moves the dowser's rod. But as we know of no case
where a dowser has manifested any of the more definitely correlated
modes of zoömagnetic force, the chance of dowsing being one is small.
Much information regarding dowsing, which convinced several eminent
scientists--Sir William Barrett among them, is published by the
Society in Pr. II, XIII, XV. Moreover, there is evidence (Jour. IX,
Pr. XV), so far as it goes, that the zoömagnetic force can _resist_
heat, not only in the Fijian "fire walk," but in London drawing-rooms
in the person of the medium Home, but in him alone--that it has
enabled him and many others to counteract the effects of gravity upon
their own persons; and to "materialize," that is to produce on the
senses of other people, possibly by hypnotizing several at once,
without the aid of matter as we know it, the impressions of light,
sound, resistance and pressure which ordinarily indicate the presence
of the living human body, when no such object in the ordinary sense is
actually present. (For all this see Jour. VI, Pr. VI, IX.)
The Society investigated the display of these phenomena by many
agents, among them the notorious Eusapia Palladino. Her working in the
dark and with a "cabinet" and other apparatus favorable for fraud, was
of course against her, but it seems the unescapable conclusion that of
her phenomena some were genuine--and some fraudulent. With
unintelligent and uneducated mediums, the doctrine "falsus in uno
falsus in omnibus" does not hold: for such mediums, often, sometimes
involuntarily, eke out the lion's skin with the fox's.
* * * * *
The records of the Society contain much evidence of a connection
between telekinetic power and the telepsychic power of conveying
thought already described. Perhaps Mrs. Piper is the only well known
medium not manifesting both. The two powers are shown together in
tipping furniture or producing sounds or lights to signal yes and no;
and while the alphabet is being enunciated, to mark letters so as to
spell out significant words and sentences. There is strong reason to
believe that the intelligence in these indications has been generally
that of the operator, often acting involuntarily and entirely
honestly, and sometimes, especially in the case of "planchette," that
of some other person present, acting telepathically through the
operator. (Pr. VII, IX, XI.)
Of course there has not been the slightest necessity of attributing
any of these queer manifestations of zoömagnetism to "spirits," and,
despite one or two exceptions (notably the late Stainton Moses), the
members of the Society for Psychical Research have not so attributed
them. But the average man has attributed all mysterious things to
spirits, ever since the primitive times when everything was
mysterious.
* * * * *
Unfortunately, two of the most remarkable mediums, perhaps the most
remarkable, Foster and Home, were too early to come directly under the
investigation of the S. P. R. as a body; but fortunately Sir William
Crookes did come into association with Home in the early Seventies
before the foundation of the Society, tested his zoömagnetism many
times in the laboratory, with entirely satisfactory results, and later
gave the Society the results of his observations, which were published
in Journals VI and IX, and Pr. VI, IX and XV. Of course his testimony
to a laboratory experiment is the last word, but many of his accounts
of social sittings with Home stagger belief, and tempt an impression
that there must have been hypnosis somewhere. But the Proceedings
contain considerable collateral evidence. And Myers and Sir William
Barrett applied "the higher criticism" to Home's autobiography and his
wife's accounts of him, and published the results, which were
favorable, in Jour. IV, VI.
* * * * *
But while the evidence for the things already recounted here was
pouring in, there came evidence too strong to be thrown aside without
examination, of things harder to attribute to any incarnate power.
Home's accordeon, we are told by no less an authority than Sir William
Crookes, and by several others (Pr. Vol. VI), was often played
intelligently and beautifully without the apparent agency of human
hands; and the inspirational writing which in earlier times had come
from overwrought religious mystics, began to appear from people who
were by no means overwrought or mystical, or even religious, though
the most noted of them was. This was the Rev. W. Stainton Moses, the
first remarkable medium who associated freely with the members of the
Society. It is alleged that he manifested movement of objects without
contact, lights, sounds in both the air and material objects,
levitation and materialization--all the modes of zoömagnetism except
resistance to heat--assuming that to be one of them. His molecular
telekineses indicated intelligence.
Myers says (Pr. IX, 250f.):
"In 1882 he aided in the foundation of the Society for Psychical
Research; but he left that body in 1886, on account of its
attitude towards Spiritualism, which he regarded as unduly
critical.... Many members of the Society held an intellectual
position widely differing from that of Mr. Moses, and although
his own published records were of a kind not easily credible, no
suspicion as to his personal probity and veracity was ever, so
far as I know, either expressed or entertained.
"... [Moses] was very reticent about exhibiting his powers, and
consequently almost the only records are his own and those of his
physician, Dr. Stanhope Speer, Mrs. Speer, and their son, Mr.
Charlton T. Speer, Associate of the Royal Academy of Music--all
persons of undoubted capacity and probity.... Dr. Speer's cast of
mind was thoroughly materialistic, and it is remarkable that his
interest in Mr. Moses' phenomena was from first to last of a
purely scientific, as contrasted with an emotional or religious
nature."
There are half a dozen other good witnesses, however.
Despite Moses' telepsychic telekineses, his principal alleged
communications with the spirit world were by automatic (we prefer to
call it heteromatic) writing. Of this he left twenty-four note books.
The writings in these were in several different hands and bore the
marks of as many different characters, that were never mixed up. They
signed the names, Imperator, Rector, Doctor, etc., and declared their
earthly selves to have been various eminent persons in the remote
past.
* * * * *
We shall find later that after Moses' death, his alleged spirit gave
an entirely different set of names for the earthly originals of these
alleged personalities. Myers, having seen all the heteromatic writing,
tacitly endorses Moses' statements regarding its visible qualities.
Moses continues:
"By degrees I found that many spirits who were unable to
influence my hand themselves sought the aid of a spirit 'Rector'
[a gentleman whom we shall meet often. Editor of this article],
who was apparently able to write more freely and with less strain
on me;
He says that they differed from him and criticised him severely, but
ultimately converted him to a higher faith than the Anglicanism he had
previously preached.
* * * * *
Myers comments (Pr. XI, 69):
"The tone of the spirits towards Mr. Moses himself is habitually
courteous and respectful. But occasionally they have some
criticism which pierces to the quick, and which goes far to
explain to me Mr. Moses's unwillingness to have the books fully
inspected during his lifetime."
We have no space for any of this script, and it probably would not
tend much to edification if we had. After a good deal of reading and
pondering, I find the proportion of Moses' self in all these
proceedings looming in my apprehension larger and larger. The benefits
he got from them look to me like that portion--how large a portion I
am not saying--of the benefits of prayer which are independent of
external results, and consist in the effect upon character of intense
absorption in an inspiring subject.
Myers testifies that Moses' heteromatic writing announced the death of
a friend of Myers before it could have been known by other means, and
that the writing closely resembled hers. Moses himself declares, and
many fairly judicious people believed him, that among other marvels,
the writing told him, in advance of any other possible agency, of the
death of President Garfield, and of a suicide in London under a steam
roller. The latter statement has several confirmatory witnesses.
The account of Moses is given here, not so much because of himself, as
to prepare for later appearances of Imperator, Rector, Doctor & Co.,
which will be of more interest.
* * * * *
In America there was of course not leisure enough to continue the Am.
S. P. R., which had been started a couple of years after the English
one, and it was merged with the English Society, becoming a "branch."
In 1887 Dr. Richard Hodgson, who had been lecturing at Cambridge, was
sent over as secretary to take charge of it, and soon began a set of
experiences which immeasurably surpass all others in connection with
the subject.
In 1886, Professor William James had found a remarkable medium in Mrs.
Piper, a New England woman of average position and education, and Dr.
Hodgson devoted himself to her phenomena. In trance she spoke as a
self-alleged French physician who called himself Dr. Jean Phinuit
Schliville, and who professed to be in the other world in association
with friends of people who came to sit with Mrs. Piper. Dr. Phinuit
professed to give messages from them, and to deliver the sitters'
messages to them. The only thing apparently unprecedented in these
proceedings was the consistently dramatic character of Dr. Phinuit
himself, and the verisimilitude, varying but often astounding, between
the utterances, dramatic characterizations and recollections of the
alleged message senders, and the persons as known in life.
Mrs. Piper's career with Dr. Phinuit was an inheritance by her from a
Dr. Cocke, who was controlled by a Dr. Finney. Dr. Cocke was an
"inspirational healer" and in 1884 Mrs. Piper went to consult him
about some physical ailment. A circle was being held, and she joined
it. On a second visit she experienced a sensation as of a blinding
flash, and then fainted, and on recovering began to talk in trance as
somebody else.
Hodgson says (Pr. VIII, 46f.):
"She was said to have been controlled by an Indian girl who gave
the name 'Chlorine,' and to have given a remarkable test to a
stranger who was present. She had several more sittings with Mr.
Cocke, and was again controlled, apparently on each occasion by
'Chlorine.'
This name is evidently pitched upon on account of its euphony and
apparent femininity, by some consciousness--we can't tell whose,
perhaps Mrs. Piper's subliminal (whatever that may mean)--unaware of
the meaning of the word, which I hardly need tell the reader usually
refers to a rather fetid gas. Hodgson continues:
"She was also ostensibly controlled at occasional times by Mrs.
Siddons, Bach, Longfellow, Commodore Vanderbilt, and Loretta
Ponchini. It was said that 'Mrs. Siddons' recited a scene from
Macbeth, Longfellow was said to have written some verses, and
Loretta Ponchini (who purported to be an Italian girl) to have
made some drawings....
"Dr. Phinuit only came at first to give medical advice. He
'didn't care to come for other matters,' as he thought them 'too
_trivial_.'
"Finally Sebastian Bach said they were going to concentrate all
their powers on Phinuit, and he became ultimately the chief
control.
"Mr. Piper says that there is no question but that it is the same
Phinuit or personality who controls Dr. Cocke, no matter how
their names are spelt."
All this seems clap-trap, but wait.
* * * * *
The questions regarding Phinuit are different from those regarding
most of the other controls in the Society's records: for, with the
exception of the Imperator group, they, in ordinary life, were
generally known, personally or historically, to the sitters; while
Phinuit has loomed upon the world as free from origins as Melchizedek,
and some people think, despite his lack of priestly ways, with as
important a mission. But he has alleged a lot of origins that, so far,
cannot be traced. Even, however, if they never can be, the fact would
not prove that he never existed.
After a while the communications began to be occasionally in writing,
and at times the voice would be speaking as Phinuit, and the hand
writing as somebody else. There was at least one occasion (Pr. XIII,
293) when Phinuit was joking with a lot of young girls, and the hand
writing on other subjects with Dr. Hodgson.
The records of the S. P. R. contain the most contradictory accounts of
Phinuit's character and attainments. Several habitual sitters are very
fond of him. He and Sir Oliver Lodge were intimate friends, and while
I have had but one conversation with him, I find reading him as
delightful as reading Falstaff. Yet Professor Shaler calls him a
preposterous scoundrel, as was Falstaff; but I can't find serious
dishonesty in Phinuit.
Professor William James, who went to school in French Switzerland, and
was entirely at home in French, says Phinuit knew none. Other sitters
agree with him. Mr. Rogers Rich, who was equally at home in the
language, says he and Phinuit talked French together a good deal, to
Mr. Rich's entire satisfaction. Other sitters indicate the same. Mrs.
Piper knew no French. Mr. Rich and many sitters, including Sir Oliver
Lodge, in whose family Dr. Phinuit practiced extensively, found
benefit in his prescriptions; he successfully gave one treatment which
seems to the lay mind the opposite of reasonable, and yet I myself
found prompt relief through a similar one given by an eminent New York
physician. Nevertheless there are those who call Phinuit a shameless
quack. While in the Pr. S. P. R. there are several prescriptions by
him in correct technical language, there are also several statements
that he does not know the ordinary terms of the pharmacopeia.
The following particulars are taken from a report on Mrs. Piper's
trance which Hodgson made to the S. P. R. in 1892 published in Vol.
VIII of their Proceedings. Although the messages generally went
through Dr. Phinuit, sometimes the alleged personages themselves took
control and carried on conversations with their friends through the
vocal organs and gestures of Mrs. Piper. The voices of the controls
varied with the alleged personalities.
_R. Hodgson. First Sitting. May 4th, 1887._ (Pr. VIII, 60.)
[From notes made on return to my rooms immediately after the
sitting.]
"Phinuit began, after the usual introduction, by describing
[correctly] members of my family....
"Phinuit mentioned the name 'Fred.' ... 'He says you went to
school together. He goes on jumping-frogs, and laughs.... He had
convulsive movements before his death, struggles. He went off in
a sort of spasm.... [My cousin Fred far excelled any other person
that I have seen in the games of leap-frog, fly the garter,
etc.... He injured his spine in a gymnasium ... lingered for a
fortnight, with occasional spasmodic convulsions, in one of which
he died.] Phinuit described a lady, in general terms, dark hair,
dark eyes, slim figure, etc., and said she was much closer to me
than any other person: that she 'died slowly.' ... She had two
rings; one was buried with her body; the other ought to have gone
to you. The second part of her first name is--sie.' [True, with
the exception of the statement about the rings, which may or may
not be true.... No ring ever passed between the lady and
myself.... After trying in vain to 'hear distinctly' the first
part of the name, Phinuit gave up the attempt, and asked me what
the first name was. I told him. I shall refer to it afterwards as
'Q.']"
All this could well have been involuntary telepathy from Hodgson to
the medium. But again, wait.
At Hodgson's second sitting, November 18th, 1887, Phinuit referred to
the beautiful teeth of "Q." and Hodgson says: "'Q.'s' teeth were not
beautiful."
* * * * *
Here is something better (Pr. VIII):
"5, Boylston-place, _March 6th, 1889_.
"Mr. Robertson James has just called here on return from a
sitting with Mrs. P., during which he was informed by Mrs.
P.--entranced--that 'Aunt Kate' had died about 2 or 2.30 in the
morning. Aunt Kate was also referred to as Mrs. Walsh.
"Mrs. Walsh has been ill for some time and has been expected
during the last few days to die at any hour. This is written
before any despatch has been received informing of the death, in
presence of the following:--
"RICHARD HODGSON.
"WILLIAM JAMES.
"ROBERTSON JAMES.
"On reaching home an hour later I found a telegram as
follows:--'Aunt Kate passed away a few minutes after
midnight.--E. R. WALSH.'
"(Signed) WM. JAMES.
"Mrs. William James, who accompanied Mr. Robertson James to the
sitting on March 6th, writes as follows:--
"18, Garden-street, CAMBRIDGE, _March 28th, 1889_.
"Concerning the sitting mentioned above on March 6th, I may add
that the 'control' said, when mentioning that Aunt Kate had died,
that I would find 'a letter or telegram' when I got home, saying
she was gone.
"ALICE H. JAMES."
Now all this seems quite possibly telepathy and coincidence. But how
about this?
"_July, 1890._
"Early at this sitting I inquired, 'How is Aunt Kate?' The reply
was, 'She is poorly.' This reply disappointed me, from its
baldness. Nothing more was said about Aunt Kate till towards the
close of the sitting, when I again said, 'Can you tell me nothing
more about Aunt Kate?' The medium suddenly threw back her head
and said in a startled way, 'Why, Aunt Kate's here. All round me
I hear voices saying, "Aunt Kate has come."' Then followed the
announcement that she had died very early that morning, and on
being pressed to give the time, shortly after two was named.
"A. H. J."
And here is a manifestation eight months after Mrs. Walsh's death:
_R. Hodgson. November 7th, 1889._ (Pr. VIII, 93-4.)
[From a letter written to Professor W. James on the day of the
sitting.]
"Mrs. D. and I had sitting to-day at Arlington Heights, and the
usurpation by 'Kate Walsh' was extraordinary. The personality
seemed very intense, and spoke in effortful whispers.
"'William--William--God bless you.' Sitter: 'Who are you?'
'Kate--Walsh.' (S. 'I know you.') 'Help me--help me----' [Taking
(_i. e._, Mrs. Piper "taking," &c. Ed.) my right hand with her
right, and passing it to her left and making me take hold of her
left hand.] 'That hand's dead--dead--this one's alive' [_i. e._,
the right]--'help me.'
"The left hand ... was cooler than either of my hands, while the
right hand was warmer than either of my hands [the implication
being that Mrs. Piper was possessed by Mrs. Walsh. Ed.]
"I'm alive--I'm alive--Albert's coming over soon. He can't
stay--poor boy--poor boy--Albert--Albert--Alfred--Albert--I know
you--Alice--Alice--William--Alice----' (S. 'Yes, I know. I'll
tell them. You remember me. I stayed with you in New York.')
'Yes, I know. But, oh, I can't remember. I'm so cold--I'm so
cold. Oh, help me--help me'--[making tremulous movements of
hands]. (S. 'I know. I'll tell them. You remember me; my name's
Hodgson.') 'Yes. Mr. Hodgson. Where are the girls? Yes. You had
fish for breakfast on the second day, didn't you?' (S. 'I don't
remember very well.') 'And the tea--who was it spilt the cup of
tea? Was it you or William?' [I think I remember something about
the tea, but not very clearly. R. H.] 'You were in the corner
room--bedroom--upstairs. Were you cold? Then there was some
blancmange--you didn't like that. No. It was cream--Bavarian
cream. [Is all this Mrs. Piper, or is it Shakspere, or is it the
spirit of a fussy old lady? Ed.] Albert--poor boy; he's coming
soon. William--[something about arranging the
property]--William--God bless him.'
"The above was much less than was really said. But that was the
sort of thing, and nothing _à la mode_ Phinuit at all. It was the
most strikingly personal thing I have seen."
This, some commentators want us to believe, was still "another
personality" of Mrs. Piper--if Phinuit was. Four in the case of Sallie
Beauchamp are well established, and nine in the case of Dr. Wilcox's
patient. I wonder how many Dr. Prince would consider a probable
number, and at what number the spiritistic hypothesis would begin to
appear easier than the divided personality one. All unquestionable
cases of secondary personality that I know of do not cross the sex,
and are the results of brain injury or disease. Mrs. Piper and most of
the mediums are normal people, and do their best when physically at
their best.
The following report (Pr. VIII, 126f.) by Mr. T. Rogers Rich, a well
known artist of Boston, made from contemporary notes of the sittings,
is among the best:
"My first sitting with her was on September 6th, 1888. With
little trouble she went into the trance ... and after a moment's
silence ... I was startled by the remarkable change in her
voice--an exclamation, a sort of grunt of satisfaction, as if the
person had reached his destination and gave vent to his pleasure
thereat by this sound, uttered in an unmistakably male voice, but
rather husky. I was at once addressed in French with, 'Bonjour,
Monsieur, comment vous portez vous?' to which I gave answer in
the same language, with which I happen to be perfectly familiar.
My answer was responded to with a sort of inquiring grunt, much
like the French 'Hein?'.... Nearly all my interviews were begun
in the same manner.... I was quite unwell with nervous
troubles.... The first thing told me was of a 'great light behind
me, a good sign,' &c. Then suddenly all my ills were very clearly
and distinctly explained and so thoroughly that I felt certain
that Mrs. Piper herself would have hesitated to use such plain
language! Prescriptions were given to me...."
"_Second Sitting on October 5th._--... The 'Doctor' told me of my
niece being frequently 'in my surroundings,' and that she was
then at my side. Up to this time I had not heard my name
mentioned, so I asked for it from my niece. The 'Doctor' was
again puzzled and said, 'What a funny name--wait, I cannot go so
fast!' Then my entire name was correctly spelt out but entirely
with the French alphabet, each separate letter being clearly
pronounced in that language. My niece had been born, lived most
of her short life, and died in France. Then the attempt to
pronounce my name was amusing--finally calling me 'Thames
Rowghearce Reach.' The 'Doctor' never called me after that
anything but 'Reach.'"
The spelling of a name "entirely with the French alphabet, each
separate letter being clearly pronounced in that language," is a feat
that few English-speaking students could accomplish, because the
matter is of little consequence, and generally neglected. I have been
in France some, and have translated two French books without incurring
critical censure that I am aware of, and yet that feat would be far
beyond me.
"One day Mrs. Piper pointed to a plain gold ring on my finger and
said: 'C'est une alliance, how you call that? A wedding ring,
n'est-ce pas?' This was true. Now if Mrs. Piper had learned
French at school here [which she did not or anywhere else. Ed.]
she would most probably have called this ring 'un anneau de
marriage,' and not have given it the technical name 'alliance.'"
There are many cases of mediums speaking in languages which they did
not know, but which the control, when incarnate, did. Mr. Rich
continued:
"Breaking into the run of conversation, the 'Doctor' of a sudden
said, 'Hullo, here's Newell!' [pseudonym] (mentioning the name of
a friend who had died some months before).... 'Newell' had
frequently purported to communicate directly with his mother
through Mrs. Piper at previous sittings, but this was the first
time that any intimation of his presence was given to me. I was
totally unprepared for this, and said, 'Who did you say?' The
name was repeated with a strong foreign accent, and in the
familiar voice and tone of the 'Doctor.' Then there seemed for a
moment to be a mingling of voices as if in dispute, followed by
silence and heavy breathing of the medium. All at once I was
astonished to hear, in an entirely different tone and in the
purest English accent, 'Well, of all persons under the sun,
Rogers Rich, what brought you here? I'm glad to see you, old
fellow! How is X and Y and Z, and all the boys at the club?' Some
names were given which I knew of, but their owners I had never
met, and so reminded my friend 'Newell,' who recalled that he
followed me in college by some years and that all his
acquaintances were younger than I. I remarked an odd movement of
the medium while under this influence; she apparently was
twirling a mustache, a trick which my friend formerly practised
much."
Now if all this drama is telepathy, it certainly is not of the "common
or garden variety," and if "Newell" is a secondary personality of Mrs.
Piper, it is one of hundreds of instances of that woman having
secondary personalities who are men. I have read accounts of a good
many undoubted cases of secondary personality, and have yet to read of
one where the sex was crossed. Aren't these interpretations growing to
look a little absurd? Mr. Rich goes on:
"_June 3rd, 1889._--This time I asked to communicate with my
friend 'Newell.' ... The 'Doctor' said, 'I'll send for him,' and
kept on talking with me for a while. Then he said, 'Here's
Newell, and he wants to talk with you "Reach," so I'll go about
my business whilst you are talking with him, and will come back
again later.' ... My name was called clearly as 'Rogers, old
fellow!' without a sign of accent [Remember that 'Phinuit'
always pronounced it with an accent. Ed.] and the same questions
put as to how were the 'fellows at the club.' My hand was
cordially shaken [by the medium. Ed.], and I remarked the same
movement of twisting the mustache, ... When 'Newell' left me
there was the usual disturbance in the medium's condition, and
then the resumption of the familiar voice, accent and mannerisms
of Dr. Phinuit...."
Mr. Rich continues (Pr. VIII, 130):
"I produced a dog's collar. After some handling of it [by the
medium] the 'Doctor' recognized it as belonging to a dog which I
had once owned. I asked 'If there were dogs where he was?'
'Thousands of them!' and he said he would try to attract the
attention of my dog with this collar. In the midst of our
conversation he suddenly exclaimed, 'There! I think he knows you
are here, for I see [him] coming from away off!' He then
described my collie perfectly, and said, '_You_ call him, Reach,'
and I gave my whistle by which I used to call him. 'Here he
comes! Oh, how he jumps! There he is now, jumping upon and around
you. So glad to see you! Rover! Rover! No--G-rover, Grover!
That's his name!' The dog was once called Rover, but his name was
changed to Grover in 1884, in honor of the election of Grover
Cleveland."
The knowledge here may have been telepathic, but how about the
dramatization?
* * * * *
Mrs. Piper's English Sittings of 1889-90 were held under the
supervision of Sir Oliver Lodge and Dr. Walter Leaf, and the report of
them has an introduction by Myers, and is followed by a statement of
impressions of Mrs. Piper by James. All these experts expressed
perfect confidence in the honesty of the medium, and that the
phenomena were not explicable by any agency yet known to science.
Sir Oliver Lodge says (Pr. VI, 445):
"The details given of my family are just such as one might
imagine obtained by a perfect stranger surrounded by the whole of
one's relations in a group and able to converse freely but
hastily with one after the other; not knowing them and being
rather confused with their number and half-understood messages
and personalities, and having a special eye to their physical
weaknesses and defects. [Phinuit was (?) a doctor. Ed.] A person
in a hurry thus trying to tell a stranger as much about his
friends as he could in this way gather, would seem to me to be
likely to make much the same kind of communication as was
actually made to me."
Here is an episode explaining a nickname that Phinuit habitually
applied to Sir Oliver (Pr. VI, 471f.):
"Cousin married, and the gentleman passed out at sea, round the
sea.... Hullo, he's got funny buttons, big, bright.... A uniform.
He has been a commander, an officer, a leader; not military, but
a commander.... [A little further on Phinuit suddenly brings out
the word Cap'n in connection with him, but, in a curious and half
puzzled way, applies it to me. It remained my Phinuit nickname to
the end, though quite inapplicable.] Your mother has got a good
picture of him taken a long time ago, pretty good, old-fashioned,
but not so bad of him. Yes, pretty good. He looks like that now.
He looks younger than he did...."
As in this vision, so it was in one of my own dreams which I suspect
was in several respects veridical; and in two other dreams where I
cannot trace any veridicity: the persons had grown young.
This recalls Peter Ibbetson's statement that he and his beloved kept
themselves about twenty-seven. There are reports that Peter Ibbetson
is not all fancy, but even if it were, such reports would be
inevitable.
But in another dream which I fully believe to have been veridical, the
person had grown older in proportion to the time since "passing over,"
but there was a peculiar reason for such a manifestation: I fancy that
my friend may have wanted to appear to "grow old with me."
There are some things to suggest that if there are post-carnate souls,
they can appear as of any age in their experience--and so show their
history since separation, to anyone rejoining them.
* * * * *
Edmund Gurney, author of "Phantasms of the Living," and a very active
member of the S. P. R. died in 1888. In December, 1889, his ostensible
spirit communicated at several sittings with Sir Oliver Lodge through
Mrs. Piper. Sir Oliver says (Pr. XXIII, 141f.):
"I learned in this way more about the life and thoughts of Edmund
Gurney than I had known in his lifetime."
And Mrs. Piper knew less. Then where did it come from? These Gurney
sittings are very interesting and suggestive, but we can use our
limited space to better advantage.
* * * * *
Here are some characteristic Phinuit Touches (Pr. VI, 484):
"She remembers more than you do. What do you think she says to
me? She says, don't swear, doctor; she did, sure as you live....
"Dr.: 'Do you know who Jerry--J--E--R--R--Y--is?' O. L.: 'Yes.
Tell him I want to hear from him.' U[ncle] J[erry. Ed.]: 'Tell
Robert, [his brother] Jerry still lives. I will be very glad to
hear from me. This is my watch. Uncle Jerry--my watch.'...
"P.: 'I say, Captain, your friends have a lot to tell you,
they're just clamoring to get at you. Why the devil don't you
give them a chance?' O. L.: 'Well, I will next time.' (Watch
handled again. It was a repeater, and happened to go off.) P.:
'Hullo, I didn't do that. Jerry did that, to remind you of him.
Here, take it away--it goes springing off--it's alive.' ... 'It
was Uncle Jerry, the one that had the fall. I'll bring you some
more news of him. Give me back his nine-shooter.' (Meaning the
watch.)"
Phinuit and the Lodge family and their next-door neighbors, the
Thompsons, got to be great friends. Phinuit had given them much good
advice, professional and other, and had really been of considerable
service to them, even if only through their imaginations.
At the end of their second series of sittings, Feb. 23, 1890, he said:
"Now, all you people come here. Good-by, Susie. Good-by, Ike.
Good-by, Nelly. Now, all clear out and let me talk to Marie.
(Long conversation of a paternal kind, with thoroughly sensible
advice. Then O. L. returned.) Captain, it's not good-by, it's _au
revoir_, and you shall hear of me when I've gone away.' O. L.:
'How can I?' P.: 'Oh, I will tell some gentleman a message and he
will write it for me. You'll see.
"_Au revoir, au revoir, &c._"
Hodgson's inclination while writing his report, was to attribute the
phenomena to telepathy from the sitter. This might account for a part
of the knowledge which the medium displayed, but it did not account
for knowledge which the sitter never had, but left such knowledge to
be accounted for by the vastly less probable hypothesis of
teloteropathy from absent persons, which begins to approach the
improbability of spiritism itself. But after the medium's possession
of the knowledge is accounted for, the main problem is yet to be
approached. Knowledge of a particular circumstance is virtually the
same in all minds possessing it. But after a medium, say Mrs. Piper,
has obtained an item of knowledge from, let it be granted for
argument's sake, the sitter's mind, what makes her emotional attitude
regarding it not that of the sitter or of herself, but of some
departed friend of the sitter? What makes her rejoice in it or regret
it as this departed friend, alone among all intelligences, would? What
makes the play of her mind regarding it--suggestion, response,
appreciation or depreciation, comment and discussion of all kinds,
just what would be that of the departed soul which professes to be
speaking through her? And what makes all this occur with a fidelity to
the character and situation worthy of the greatest dramatists? And how
comes that average New England woman to display that supreme dramatic
genius virtually every day for a generation? This is not telepathy or
teloteropathy. When Hodgson wrote his first report, he and the
researchers generally had not got as far as the questions raised by
the dramatic features. But he closed with the following mysterious
paragraph:
"The foregoing report is based upon sittings not later than 1891.
Mrs. Piper has given some sittings very recently which materially
strengthen the evidence for the existence of some faculty that
goes beyond thought-transference from the sitters, and which
certainly _primâ facie_ appear to render some form of the
'spiritistic' hypothesis more plausible. I hope to discuss these
among other results in a later article."
The occasion for this paragraph was made plain in his next report,
issued in 1898, and published in Pr. S. P. R., Vol. XIII.
A young man alluded to in the S. P. R. reports as George Pelham, had
died. He was a member of a very prominent English family, and on the
distaff side, of an equally prominent family in New York. He had
graduated at Harvard and spent some years as a housemate with the
Howards (pseudonym) in Boston, though he died in New York, after some
later years passed there. He was well known to the present writer, who
finds the utterances of his alleged post-carnate self entirely in
character. He was of a very philosophic bent, and no mean writer in
both prose and verse. Psychical research was by no means his most
prominent interest, or Hodgson his most intimate friend, though he had
discussed the subject several times with Hodgson, and been introduced
by him, under a pseudonym, for a single sitting with Mrs. Piper. For a
month after G. P.'s death Hodgson's regular sittings with Mrs. Piper
went on without there being any manifestation professing to come from
G. P., when Mr. John Hart (pseudonym) who had been much more intimate
with G. P. than Hodgson had, was sitting, in Hodgson's presence, with
Mrs. Piper, and after Phinuit had announced a "George," an uncle of
Mr. Hart, he went on, as Hodgson reports (Pr. XIII, 297f.):
"There is another George who wants to speak to you. How many
Georges are there about you any way? [Hodgson continues. Ed.]
"The rest of the sitting, until almost the close, was occupied by
statements from G. P., Phinuit acting as intermediary. George
Pelham's real name was given in full, also the names, both
Christian and surname, of several of his most intimate friends,
including the name of the sitter. Moreover, incidents were
referred to which were unknown to the sitter or myself. One of
the pair of studs which J. H. was wearing was given to Phinuit
[_i. e._ to the medium. Ed.].... '(Who gave them to me?)
[Throughout these sittings, the sitters' remarks are in
parentheses. Ed.] That's mine. Mother gave you that. (No.) Well,
father then, father and mother together. You got those after I
passed out. Mother took them. Gave them to father, and father
gave them to you. I want you to keep them. I will them to you.'
Mr. Hart notes: 'The studs were sent to me by Mr. Pelham as a
remembrance of his son....
"James and Mary [Mr. and Mrs.] Howard [Pseudonyms. Ed.] were
mentioned with strongly specific references, and in connection
with Mrs. Howard came the name Katharine. 'Tell her, she'll know.
I will solve the problems, Katharine.' Mr. Hart notes: 'George,
when he had last stayed with [the Howards], had talked frequently
with Katharine (a girl of fifteen years of age) upon such
subjects as Time, Space, God, Eternity, and pointed out to her
how unsatisfactory the commonly accepted solutions were. He added
that some time he would solve the problems.' Mr. Hart added that
he was entirely unaware of these circumstances. I was myself
unaware of them, and was not at that time acquainted with the
Howards.
No telepathy then. Phinuit continues:
"'Who's Rogets? [Phinuit tries to spell the real name.] (Spell
that again.) [At the first attempt afterwards Phinuit leaves out
a letter, then spells it correctly.] Rogers.... Rogers has got a
book of mine. (What is he going to do with it?)'
"[Both Hart and G. P. knew Rogers, who at that time had a certain
MS. book of G. P. in his possession. The book was found after G.
P.'s death and given to Rogers to be edited. G. P. had promised
during his lifetime that a particular disposition should be made
of this book after his death. This action ... was here, and in
subsequent utterances which from their private nature I cannot
quote, enjoined emphatically and repeatedly, and had it been at
once carried out, as desired by G. P., much subsequent
unhappiness and confusion might have been avoided.]
"During the latter part of the sitting, and without any relevance
to the remarks immediately before and after, which were quite
clear as expressions from G. P. came the words, 'Who's James?
Will--William.' [It must be remembered that Phinuit was reporting
G. P. throughout.] This was apparently explained by Phinuit's
further remarks at the close of the sitting.
"Phinuit: 'Who's Alice? (What do you want me to say to her?) [To
R. H.] Alice in spirit. Alice in spirit says it's all over now
and tell Alice in the body all is well. Tell Will I'll explain
things later on. He [George] calls Alice, too, in the body. I
want her to know me, too, Alice and Katharine.... He won't go
till you say good-by. [The hand then wrote: George Pelham. Good
day (?) John.] ...'
"[Alice James, the sister of Professor William James, had
recently died in England. The first name of Mrs. James is also
Alice. Alice, the sister of Katharine, is the youngest daughter
of Mr. Howard and was very fond of G. P.]
"As I have already said, the most personal references made at the
sitting cannot be quoted; they were regarded by J. H. as
profoundly characteristic of Pelham.
This was followed by the most remarkable experiences of the kind that
ever occurred before Hodgson himself passed over to the majority and
was ostensibly manifested to his surviving friends through Mrs. Piper
and other mediums. G. P. sent for his friends the Howards (pseudonym)
with whom he had been a housemate in Boston, for his parents, and for
other friends. All of these came, very skeptical regarding the
genuineness of the manifestations, but Mr. Howard--an eminent scholar
of wide experience of the world, became convinced that he was in
converse with the postcarnate intelligence of his old friend; the
majority of the relatives, who were of a more orthodox habit than Mr.
Howard, were brought at least to a condition of agnosticism on the
subject, and the arch-critic Hodgson who had exposed more
"spiritualistic" frauds than all other men put together, was turned
into a militant spiritualist. G. P. was asked.
"(Can't you tell us something he or your mother has done?) 'I saw
her brush my clothes and put them away. I was by her side as she
did it. I saw her take my sleeve buttons from a small box and
give them to my father. I saw him send them to John Hart. I saw
her putting papers, etc., into a tin box.'
"The incident of the 'studs' was mentioned at the sitting of
Hart. G. P.'s clothes were brushed and put away, as Mrs. Pelham
wrote, not by herself, but by 'the man who had valeted George.'"
This incident is used by Mrs. Sidgwick in Pr. XV, 31, in support of
the thesis that a medium's communications are influenced by education
and social habits. I am disposed entirely to endorse this. The
communications seem to me to come from a blending of the control, the
medium, and the sitter. Perhaps this utterance will seem less Delphic
as we go on.
The following (Pr. XIII, 416f.) does not seem much like telepathy.
"Mrs. Piper [on coming out of the trance. Ed.]: 'There is the man
with the beard' [whom she saw in the trance. Ed.] Mrs. Piper then
described what she thought was a dream. 'I saw a bright light and
a face in it, a gentleman with a beard on his face, and he had a
very high forehead and he was writing.' R. H.: 'Would you know it
again if you saw it?' Mrs. Piper: 'Oh, yes. I would know it, I
think.' R. H.: 'Well, try and recall it....'
"After Mrs. Piper comes out of [a second. Ed.] trance she is
shown a collection of thirty-two photographs, nine of them being
of men, from which she selects the picture of the person whom she
saw when coming out of trance the first time. The photograph that
she first picked out was an excellent likeness of G. P. She
afterwards picked out another photograph of him. She stated that
she never knew the gentleman when living."
Within twenty-four hours of this experience, or some other reported
elsewhere, the dream recollection had, like dream recollections
generally, faded away: she could not recognize the photograph. We can
talk about telopsis here, if we want to, but telopsis of what? Of that
photograph? Nonsense! And as strange as anything else about it, is
that there is nothing strange about it. In my own dreams I see any
number of people I never saw before, just as plainly as I see any
number on the street, and if photographs were handed me, as those were
to Mrs. Piper, immediately on awaking, I could identify them. This
identification is nothing out of the ordinary course of nature, only
the wit to see that it is, has but just come.
But with any sitter, Mrs. Piper _may_ have had telepathically just as
definite an idea as the sitter has, or she _may_ always have been
telepathically impressed in her dream by the post-carnate man himself.
Each one of us will have to fumble to his own conviction, if he ever
reaches one.
Hodgson continues (Pr. XIII, 321-2):
"It was during this sitting [Dec. 22, 1892] that perhaps the most
dramatic incident of the whole series occurred....
"Mr. Howard: 'Tell me something that you and I alone know,
something in our past that you and I alone know.' G. P.: 'Do you
doubt me, dear old fellow?' Mr. H.: 'I simply want something--you
have failed to answer certain questions that I have asked--now I
want you to give me the equivalent of the answers to those
questions in your own terms....' G. P.: 'You used to talk to me
about....'
"The writing which followed ... contains too much of the personal
element in G. P.'s life to be reproduced here. Several statements
were read by me, and assented to by Mr. Howard, and then was
written 'private' and the hand gently pushed me away. I retired
to the other side of the room, and Mr. Howard took my place close
to the hand where he could read the writing. He did not, of
course, read it aloud, and it was too private for my perusal. The
hand, as it reached the end of each sheet, tore it off from the
block-book, and thrust it wildly at Mr. Howard, and then
continued writing. The circumstances narrated, Mr. Howard
informed me, contained precisely the kind of test for which he
had asked, and he said that he was 'perfectly satisfied,
perfectly.'
"Characteristic also of the living G. P. was the remark made to
me later, apparently with reference to the circumstances of the
private statements:
"'Thanks, Hodgson, for your kind help and reserved manners, also
patience in this difficult matter.'"
All this, I suppose, is mere telepathy or the subliminal self, or
divided self, or some other self, of an average New England housewife!
In this report the sittings take up some two hundred pages, and
Hodgson devoted about fifty pages to his reasons for accepting the
spiritistic hypothesis regarding them. James said: "I know of no more
masterly handling anywhere of so unwieldy a mass of material"; and yet
he never squarely agreed with Hodgson, though he often says he was
tempted to.
Hodgson's reasons cannot be fairly understood without familiarity with
the evidence. They are very ingenious and interesting, and would give
the most skeptical reader pause, but we have space for only a few
generalizations.
"The manifestations of this G. P. communicating have not been of
a fitful and spasmodic nature, they have exhibited the marks of a
continuous living and persistent personality ... what change has
been discernible is a change not of any process of
disintegration, but rather of integration and evolution...."
"That G. P. could get into some closer relation with his father
and the Howards than with Miss M. or myself is intelligible; but
it is not so obvious why Mrs. Piper's _secondary personality_
should...."
"... The mixtures of truth and error bear no _discernible_
relation to the consciousness of the sitters, but suggest the
action of another intelligence groping confusedly among its own
remembrances."
"We get all varieties of communication; some of them, purporting
to come from persons who when living were much mentally
disturbed, suggesting the incoherency of delirium; others of
them, purporting to come from persons who have been dead very
many years, suggesting a fainter dreaminess [or more remoteness.
Ed.]; others purporting to come from persons recently deceased
whose minds have been clear, showing a corresponding clearness.
My own conclusion ... is forced upon me by experience, and
strengthened by various statements of the communicators
themselves concerning the causes of confusion."
"Again, that persons just 'deceased' should be extremely confused
and unable to communicate directly, or even at all, seems
perfectly natural after the shock and wrench of death.
"Of such confusions as I have indicated above I cannot find any
satisfactory explanation in 'telepathy from the living,' but they
fall into a rational order when related to the personalities of
the 'dead.'"
"In cases where we should _a priori_ be led to expect that the
communicators would certainly not be confused, or, if they were
confused, the confusion would not make much difference, Phinuit
was particularly successful. The cases I refer to are those of
little children recently deceased."
This seems to me a very strong point. Its force will be realized by
most of those who read the Sutton and Thaw sittings in Pr. XIII.
Phinuit, the "preposterous old scoundrel," is eminently "the
children's friend." Hodgson continues:
"Having tried the hypothesis of telepathy from the living for
several years, and the 'spirit' hypothesis also for several
years, I have no hesitation in affirming with the most absolute
assurance that the 'spirit' hypothesis is justified by its
fruits, and the other hypothesis is not."
"Since Phinuit's 'departure' [explained below. Ed.] the voice has
been used on a few rare occasions only, and almost exclusively by
communicators who purported to be relatives of the sitters, and
who had used the voice before Phinuit's 'departure.' ... But
there never seemed to be any confusion between the personality
using the hand, whether this was 'clear' or not, and the
personality using the voice."
This consideration and those before associated with it seem to me more
for the spiritistic hypothesis than any others which we have met so
far.
G. P. soon developed into the Mercury of the spiritistic Pantheon,
turned up at almost all sittings, went to seek the friends of the
sitters in the "spirit-world," and acted as intermediary for those who
were new to the conditions of communication or had not enough of the
psychokinetic power which was alleged to be necessary to use them
effectively.
* * * * *
It should be noted that during G. P.'s life, telepathy from the sitter
had been reluctantly conceded as a defense against the spiritistic
hypothesis, but it was not till after his death that teloteropathy
from persons at a distance had been conceded; and it was not until
1909--seven years later, that James, one of the most steadfast holders
of the conservative fort, in his report on the communications from
Hodgson's alleged spirit, in Pr. XXIII, admitted, as among the
possible "sources other than R. H.'s surviving spirit for the
veridical communications from the Hodgson control," "access to some
cosmic reservoir, where the memory of all mundane facts is stored and
grouped around personal centers of association."
James had a subtler mind than mine or almost anybody's. Mine is not
subtle enough to be very seriously impressed by the difference between
"memory of mundane facts stored and grouped around personal centers of
association," and a surviving personality; and what difference does
impress me, is pretty well filled up when the "personal center" also
has "grouped around" it, the initiative, response, repartee and
emotional and dramatic elements that, as shown not only by the G. P.
control, but, years later, by the Hodgson control, and by hundreds of
others, make a gallery of characters more vivid than those depicted by
all the historians. But even claiming them to be historical, as in a
sense they are, would not be claiming them to be surviving. Many
historical characters have put in that claim through Mrs. Piper and
other mediums, and while our greatest psychologist knew as much as
anybody about the claims, and seemed somewhat on the road to admitting
them to be from surviving personalities, he did not live to go farther
than memories "stored and grouped around personal centers of
association."
But _à bas_ the "memories"! one is tempted to say; credit them all to
telepathy if you will: what are they beside the active and spontaneous
emotions and responses?
* * * * *
Meantime in 1892 our old acquaintance Stainton Moses had "passed
over," and in 1895 had ostensibly appeared through Mrs. Piper to
Professor Newbold of the University of Pennsylvania, and Professor
Newbold asked him to bring his friends Imperator, Rector, etc. These
high-toned personages--none high-toneder, as John Hay of blessed
memory, puts it--nor more bombastic or long-winded, had manifested
before only through Moses (for convenience I am using the simple
phraseology that would attend their genuineness, but do not mean to
convey any opinion), and when they came through Mrs. Piper, they
professed to find her in a very bad way because of the "earth-bound"
Phinuit, and they professed to remove him to a higher sphere where he
would be purified and disinfected and sanctified and turned from a
genial sympathetic, humorous and, it must be admitted, occasionally
slangy and profane soul, into a prig of purest ray serene. Rector now
generally took his place with Mrs. Piper, which he had done to some
extent before. The gang was very well satisfied with G. P., however,
and he appeared for some years as their valued friend and
collaborator, until in 1897 they declared his work done, and his
proper place a "higher sphere." He bade his friends here affectionate
farewells, but has occasionally sent back messages, and has once or
twice spoken himself. Mind, I am throughout speaking only
provisionally; but I would defy any writer to escape the
verisimilitude, and even if that were possible, it would involve
intolerable verbiage.
Imperator & Co. now proposed to do most of the talking themselves, and
they did a frightful amount of it; and occasionally really said
something.
Moreover, they took charge of Mrs. Piper and Hodgson too, in their
goings and comings and all their ways, dictated their diet and
exercise, and even whom they should have at sittings, giving the
preference to people of exceptionally high character, and to those in
deep distress from loss of friends, and eager to communicate with
them.
The present writer and some others are tempted to think that these
autocratic personages are products telepathically conveyed to Mrs.
Piper from the unconscious imagination of Hodgson and his recollection
of Moses' writings, with perhaps a little involuntary dash of Prof.
Newbold. But if they are, the imagination is expanded to a degree
entirely outside of ordinary experience, and its study must enlarge
our conception of the range of human faculty. Whatever they were, if
only an allegorized form of faith cure, there is no question about
their beneficial effect on the clearness of the sittings, and on the
health and happiness of Mrs. Piper and Hodgson.
* * * * *
James says something which goes to the root of the whole business, and
which, though it is episodic to the Hodgson narrative, may as well be
considered here (Pr. XXIII, 3):
"Dr. Hodgson was disposed to admit the claim to reality of Rector
and of the whole Imperator-Band, ... while I have rather favored
the idea of their all being dream-creations of Mrs. Piper.... I
can see no contradiction between Rector's being on the one hand
an improvised creature of this sort, and his being on the other
hand the extraordinarily impressive personality which he
unquestionably is.... Critical and fastidious sitters have
recognized his wisdom, and confess their debt to him as a moral
adviser. With all due respect to Mrs. Piper, I feel very sure
that her own waking capacity for being a spiritual adviser, if
it were compared with Rector's, would fall greatly behind."
"With all due respect" for Professor James's opinion, I think I do
"see [a] contradiction," and I see the contradiction because, with
Professor James, "I feel very sure that her own waking capacity for
being a spiritual adviser, if it were compared with Rector's, would
fall greatly behind." If the Imperator band were merely, as James
suggests, "dream creations," ... and if "her own waking capacity ...
compared with Rector's, would fall greatly behind," how could she make
anything so superior to herself? How can she do better as Rector than
she can as herself? The whole scheme seems to me akin to the Du-Prel
and Myers scheme of making a man lift himself higher than his head by
his own boot-straps; and beside it the spiritistic hypothesis seems
simplicity and probability themselves.
The simplest individual, incarnate (or discarnate?), of course
manifests _himself_ in a way that the most skillful dramatist could
not equal, and it may well be questioned whether it is not more
rational to assume that the hundreds of alleged personalities
dramatized in the words and gestures of Mrs. Piper are manifestations
by the personalities themselves, than that they are creations of some
as yet unknown kind of genius residing in some layer of Mrs. Piper's
consciousness, and getting its material from fragments among her own
memories or by telepathy from those of other living persons, present
or remote.
Hodgson closes his report (Pr. XIII, 409):
"It has been stated repeatedly that the 'channel is not yet
clear,' that the machine is still in process of repair; and it
has been prophesied that I shall myself return eventually to
America and spend several years further in the investigation of
Mrs. Piper's trance, and that more remarkable evidence of
identity will be given than any heretofore obtained."
He did return and continue his beloved work for several years. But the
next time we meet him it will be as an alleged denizen of the spirit
world, and perhaps his testimony in that capacity was part of the
"more remarkable evidence of identity" promised.
* * * * *
These influences, whatever their fundamental character, having made a
saint of Hodgson, as was alleged by a friend who did not believe that
the influences were from a post-carnate world, the drama took a new
turn on December 20, 1905, in the death which Hodgson had eagerly
awaited, and his ostensible reappearances through Mrs. Piper and other
mediums. The principal report of them is made by his friends Professor
William James, Mrs. Henry Sidgwick, Mr. J. G. Piddington and Sir
Oliver Lodge in Pr. XXIII, and occupies some 170 octavo pages, most of
them literal reports of sittings. Other manifestations appear in the
heteromatic writing of Mrs. Holland (Pr. XX) and elsewhere. Of course
but a few entirely inadequate scraps can be given here.
As in the case of G. P., the first appearance did not take place
until, on Dec. 28th, a peculiarly close and congenial friend of
Hodgson happened to have a sitting--an argument of course for
telepathy from the friend, but an equal argument for a genuine
communication that had to await a congenial sitter.
To avoid constant circumlocution, I will provisionally write as if
Hodgson were really speaking. Indeed, I doubt if I could persistently
do otherwise: for the utterances are so natural that all the editors
of the Pr. S. P. R. unconsciously fall into that way of expression.
James says (Pr. XXIII, 7) that the first alleged appearance of
Hodgson:
"was at Miss Theodate Pope's sitting on Dec. 28th, 1905 [the
eighth day after Hodgson's death. Ed.] ... Rector had been
writing, when the hand dropped the pencil and worked convulsively
several seconds in a very excited manner.
"Miss P.: 'What is the matter?' [The hand, shaking with
apparently great excitement, wrote the letter H, ... bearing down
so hard on the paper that the point of the pencil was broken. It
then wrote 'Hodgson.']
Was all this a "put-up job?" And if so, who put it up, and why?
"Miss P.: 'God bless you!' [The hand writes 'I am'--followed by
rapid scrawls, as if regulator of machine were out of order.]
Miss P.: 'Is this my friend?' [Hand assents by knocking five
times on paper-pad.] (Rector): 'Peace, friends, he is here, it
was he, but he could not remain, he was so choked. He is doing
all in his power to return.... Better wait for a few moments
until he breathes freer again.'"
Do spirits require a supply of oxygen, or is the expression
metaphorical for something not accurately communicable to our
intelligence? It occurs several times. Frequently the "spirits" say
they are tired, especially in the transition from the body. The
expression "choked" may be purely metaphorical, yet it hardly
reinforces the argument for spiritism.
James says (Pr. XXIII, 13f.):
"The R. H. control suddenly wrote: 'Give ring to Margaret back to
Margaret.' [Mrs. Lyman's name [pseudonym. Ed.] is not Margaret.]
Miss P.: 'Who is Margaret?' R. H.: 'I was with her in summer.'
Miss P.: 'All right, but the ring has not been found yet. Can you
find out where it is?' R. H.: 'The undertaker got it....'"
"On January 24th, Mrs. Lyman had her first sitting. As soon as
Hodgson appeared he wrote: 'The ring. You gave it me on my
fiftieth birthday. When they asked I didn't want to say you gave
it me.... Two palm-leaves joining each other--Greek. [Here
followed an illegible word. The palms truly described the ring,
which Mrs. Piper probably had seen; but it bore no Greek
inscription....]' Mrs. L.: 'Yes, Dick, where is it now?' R. H.:
'... They took it off my finger after I was gone.' Mrs. L.: 'No,
they didn't find it on your finger.' R. H.: 'Pocket, it was in my
pocket. I'll find it, you shall have it.'
"On January 29th, Mrs. L. had another sitting. The Hodgson
control wrote: 'I have been trying to make clear about that ring.
It is on my mind all the time. I thought if I could get Margaret
B. to get it for me, I would get it to you through her, then no
one would understand. I could not tell Miss Pope about you.'
[Then a possible attempt to draw a symbol engraved on the ring.]
'No one living knows this but myself and yourself.' [Note the
term 'living' as applied to himself. Ed.] Mrs. L.: 'That is true,
but what was the motto in the ring?' R. H.: 'All will be clear
to me in time. Do not ask me test questions now....'"
His failure to remember it is one of the most knock-down
anti-evidential arguments, but it is equally anti-telepathic. His
never speaking of the ring to other friends, the Jameses, and Mr.
Dorr, seems very evidential.
* * * * *
Hodgson (or the control, if you prefer, whatever that may mean), kept
worrying about the ring through several sittings, and got so far as to
imagine that he had seen it on the finger of a man who stole it. It
was eventually found in Hodgson's waistcoat pocket. James comments on
the case:
"The whole incident lends itself easily to a naturalistic
interpretation. Mrs. Piper or her trance-consciousness may
possibly have suspected the source of the ring. Mrs. Lyman's
manner may have confirmed the suspicion. The manner in which the
first misleading reference to 'Margaret' was afterwards explained
away may well have been the cunning of a 'control' trying
plausibly to cover his tracks and justify his professed
identity."
But, please, what is a "control"? And why does one want to be taken
for somebody else? Is this explanation "naturalistic"? It seems to my
poor wits to grant the whole case, and reminds me of the deniers of
telepathy availing themselves of it to explain away spiritism. Or does
James mean a control faked by Mrs. Piper? If he had not already grown
past that, he gave indications that he had later. He continues:
"The description of the house and of the man to whom he ascribes
its [the ring's. Ed.] present possession sounds like vague
groping, characteristic also of control-cunning."
But why should there be "control-cunning"? Is it anything like
commentator-cunning?
James proceeds without any "cunning:"
"On the other hand, if the hypothesis be seriously entertained
that Hodgson's spirit was there in a confused state, using the
permanent Piper automatic machinery to communicate through, the
whole record is not only plausible but natural. It presents just
that mixture of truth and groping which we ought to expect.
Hodgson has the ring 'on his mind' just as Mrs. Lyman has. Like
her, he wishes its source not to be bruited abroad. He describes
it accurately enough, truly tells of his taking it to the fatal
boat-club [He died while playing hand-ball there. Ed.], and of
putting it into his waistcoat-pocket there, of the waistcoat
being taken from the locker, and vaguely, but not quite
erroneously, indicates its present position."
And why should it not be even "_quite_ erroneously"? Nearly all the
reasoning I have seen on these matters is vitiated by the entirely
gratuitous traditional assumption that if a soul survives death, it
enters at once into measureless wisdom. Hodgson (?) and the rest seem
pretty much the same sort of people that they were here, and I for one
am glad of it.
In the sittings of many others of Hodgson's friends the control showed
a similar abundant knowledge of their experiences with Hodgson living,
and, most important of all, it seems to me, all of Hodgson's
exceptionally marked habits of thought and expression. We have room
for but little more. James says (Pr. XXIII, 36):
"Hodgson was distinguished during life by great animal spirits.
He was fond of argument, chaff, and repartee, a good deal of a
gesticulator, and a great laugher.... Chaff and slang from a
spirit have an undignified sound for the reader, but to the
interlocutors of the R. H. control they seem invariably to have
been elements of verisimilitude."
God save me from a heaven where there is no "chaff and slang"! I
should fail to recognize some of my best friends among the loftiest
souls who have escaped the flesh, Hodgson not the least. However
intense the interest heretofore taken in a future world, I doubt if it
has ever been thoroughly healthy, or ever will be before we get our
conceptions of that world off stilts. James continues (pp. 37-8):
"This, however, did not exclude very serious talk with the same
persons--quite the reverse sometimes, as when one sitter of this
class notes: 'Then came words of kindness which were too intimate
and personal to be recorded, but which left me so deeply moved
that shortly afterwards, at the sitting's close, I fainted dead
away--it had seemed as though he had in all reality been there
and speaking to me.'"
If James ran any one of his virtues into the ground, perhaps it was
his modesty concerning anything connected with himself. Instance the
following introduction and what it introduces:
_W. J.'s Sitting._ (May 21st, 1906). (Pr. XXIII, 8of.)
"[J.] The evidence is so much the same sort of thing throughout,
and makes such insipid reading, that I hesitate to print more of
it in full. But I know that many critics insist on having the
largest possible amount of _verbatim_ material on which to base
their conclusions, so I select a specimen of the R. H. control's
utterances when he was less 'strong.' The reader, I fear, will
find it long and tedious, but he can skip.
"(R. H. enters, saying:) 'Well, well, well, well! Well, well,
well, that is--here I am. Good morning, good morning, Alice.'
Mrs. W. J.:'Good morning, Mr. Hodgson.' R. H.: 'I am right here.
Well, well, well! I am delighted!' W. J.: 'Hurrah! R. H.! Give us
your hand!' R. H.: 'Hurrah, William! God bless you. How are you?'
W. J.: 'First rate.' R. H.: 'Well, I am delighted to see you.
Well, have you solved those problems yet?' W. J.: 'Which problems
do you refer to?' R. H.: 'Did you get my messages?' W. J.: 'I got
some messages about your going to convert me.' ... [R. H. had
already sent me, through other sitters, messages about my little
faith. W. J.] W. J.: 'Yes.' R. H.: 'Well, it has amounted to
this,--that I have learned by experience that there is more truth
than error in what I have been studying.' W. J.: 'Good!' R. H.:
'I am so delighted to see you to-day that words fail me.' W. J.:
'Well, Hodgson, take your time and don't be nervous.' R. H.: 'No.
Well, I think I could ask the same of you! Well, now, tell me,--I
am very much interested in what is going on in the society, and
Myers and I are also interested in the society over here. You
understand that we have to have a medium on this side, while you
have a medium on your side, and through the two we communicate
with you.' ... W. J.: 'You don't mean Rector?' R. H.: 'No, not at
all. It is----do you remember a medium whom we called Prudens?'
'Yes.'"
From one point of view, his not naming G. P. or Rector gives food for
skepticism. But why didn't Mrs. Piper do the job consistently, if it
was she who did it?
"R. H.: 'What I want to know first of all is about the society. I
am sorry that it could not go on.' W. J.: 'There was nobody to
take your place....' R. H.: 'William, can't you see, don't you
understand, and don't you remember how I used to walk up and down
before that open fireplace trying to convince you of my
experiments?' W. J.: 'Certainly, certainly.' R. H.: 'And you
would stand with your hands in your trousers pockets. You got
very impatient with me sometimes, and you would wonder if I was
correct. I think you are very skeptical.' W. J.: 'Since you have
been returning I am much more near to feeling as you felt than
ever before.' R. H.: 'Good! Well, that is capital.' W. J.: 'Your
"personality" is beginning to make me feel as you felt.' R. H.:
'If you can give up to it, William, and feel the influence of it
and the reality of it, it will take away the sting of death....
Now tell me a little bit more about the Society. That will help
me keep my thoughts clear. I think, William--are you standing?'
W. J.: 'Yes, I am standing.' R. H.: 'Well, can't you sit?' W. J.:
'Yes.' R. H.: 'Well, sit. Let's have a nice talk.'..."
There is nothing "evidential" about the last couple of lines in the
scientific sense, but there are several kinds of sense. James
continues:
(Pr. XXIII, 109): "The following incident belongs to my wife's
and Miss Putnam's sitting of June 12th, 1906:--Mrs. J. said: 'Do
you remember what happened in our library one night when you were
arguing with Margie [Mrs. J.'s sister]?'--'I had hardly said
"remember,"' she notes, 'in asking this question, when the
medium's arm was stretched out and the fist shaken
threateningly,' then these words came:
"R. H.: 'Yes, I did this in her face. I couldn't help it. She was
so impossible to move. It was wrong of me, but I couldn't help
it.' [I myself well remember this fist-shaking incident, and how
we others laughed over it after Hodgson had taken his leave. What
had made him so angry was my sister-in-law's defense of some
slate-writing she had seen in California.--W. J.]"
(Pr. XXIII, 112): "On Jan. 30, 1906, Mrs. M. had a sitting. Mrs.
M. said:
"'Do you remember our last talk together, at N., and how, in
coming home we talked about the work?' (R. H.): 'Yes, yes.' Mrs.
M.: 'And I said if we had a hundred thousand dollars--'R. H.:
'Buying Billy!!' Mrs. M.: 'Yes, Dick, that was it--"buying
Billy."' R. H.: 'Buying only Billy?' Mrs. M.: 'Oh no--I wanted
Schiller too. How well you remember!'
"Mrs. M., before R. H.'s death, had had dreams of extending the
American Branch's operations by getting an endowment, and
possibly inducing Prof. Newbold (Billy) and Dr. Schiller to
co-operate in work.
This buying Billy and Schiller brought Podmore squarely around, for
the first time, I think, from his previous life-long fight against
telepathy. He says (_Newer Spiritualism_, p. 222):
"It is impossible to doubt that we have here proof of a
supernormal agency of some kind--either telepathy by the trance
intelligence from the sitter or some kind of communication with
the dead."
Two pages farther on, however, appears the _advocatus diaboli_ (_Op.
Cit._, p. 224):
"When asked to give the contents of any sealed letters written in
his life-time for the express purpose of being read by him after
death the two sentences were given: 'There is no death' and 'out
of life into life eternal' (p. 102). Whatever Hodgson may have
written, it was surely not quite so commonplace as that."
To my gullible apprehension, it seems eminently appropriate.
* * * * *
Among the interesting phenomena investigated by the S. P. R., have
been the automatic, or I should prefer to say heteromatic, writing of
Mrs. Verrall and Mrs. Holland, which were not made in trance. Vol. XX
of the Proceedings is entirely given up to the consideration of it by
Mrs. Verrall. She is the wife of a professor in Cambridge, and herself
lecturer in Newnham College. The phenomena themselves are of moderate
interest beside most of those described in these pages, but their
evidential value is high, and their implications most important, and
the treatment of them is pervaded by wide scholarship, and is
charming. The experiences, however, do not connect with the main
Moses--Piper--G. P.--Hodgson--Myers thread on which these brief
extracts have naturally strung themselves, and I will not attenuate
that thread to make room for this outside strand. I especially commend
Mrs. Verrall's volume, however, to anybody who combines with an
interest in Psychical Research, an interest in really "elegant
letters."
* * * * *
The following scrap relating to Hodgson is from an account by Miss
Johnson (Research officer of the S. P. R.) of Mrs. Holland (pseudonym)
(Pr. XXI, 303f.):
"In February, 1905 ... Mrs. Holland found that the automatic
writing was beginning to make her feel faint or sleepy. The
condition was obviated at the time.... It now began to recur.
[This sort of thing is noted in several places as preceding the
advent of a new, and especially a strong control. Ed.]
"Mrs. Holland learned of Hodgson's death on January 2, 1906. Her
script on Friday, February 9, 1906, 9 P. M., is as follows (Pr.
XXI, 304):
"... S j d i b s e I p e h t p o--Only one letter further on--
18 8
9 15
3 4
8 7
1 19
18 15
4 14
-- --
"They are not haphazard figures read them as letters--....
"K. 57. [a Christian name]--Gray paper--
"I found that in spite of the rather obvious hints....--'Only one
letter further on' and 'Not haphazard figures read them as
letters,'--Mrs. Holland had not deciphered the initial
conundrums. The first letters are formed from the name 'Richard
Hodgson' by substituting for each letter of the name the letter
following it in the alphabet; the numbers represent the same name
by substituting for each letter the number of its place in the
alphabet.
"I asked Mrs. Holland if she had ever played at conundrums of
this kind. She told me that as a child in the nursery she had
played at a 'secret language' made by using either the letter
before or the letter after the real one. But she had never
practised or thought of using numbers in this way. She noted
afterwards: 'When my hand wrote them I thought they were an
addition sum and hoped [my subliminal] would add it very
correctly and quickly. [My supraliminal] is _very_ poor at
figures.'"
Hodgson in life was very fond of these puzzles.
All this anticipates a scrap of explanation out of a much longer and
more interesting manifestation. Mrs. Holland wrote to Miss Johnson
(Pr. XXI, 171f.):
"Any automatic writing that comes to me is nearly always in
verse, headed--
"'Believe in what thou canst not see,
Until the vision come to thee.'
"The verses, though often childishly simple in wording and
jingling in rhyme, are rarely trivial in subject. I once wrote
down fourteen poems in little over an hour.... When I write
original verse I do so slowly and carefully, with frequent
erasures: automatic verse is always as if swiftly dictated and
there are never any erasures. I am always fully conscious, but my
hand moves so rapidly that I seldom know what words it is
forming.
"... I copy one set of verses.... I wrote it down as quickly as
it was possible for my hand to move, and was surprised afterwards
to find that it had a definite form of its own. It is exactly as
it came to me, not 'polished' or altered in the least.
"'I whom he loved, am a ghost,
Wandering weary and lost.
I dare not dawn on his sight,
(Windblown weary and white)
He would shudder in hopeless fright,
He who loved me the best.
I shun the paths he will go,
Because I should frighten him so.
(Weary and lacking rest).
Two stanzas are omitted from lack of space.
"'Should I beat on the window pane,
He would think it the wind and rain,
If he saw my pale face gleam
He would deem it a stray moonbeam
Or the waft of a passing dream.
No thought for the lonely dead,
Buried away out of sight.
And I go from him veiling my head, (1896)
Windblown weary and white.'
"... Automatic verses do not deal much with facts, but once when
I was staying in Italy, in an old palazzo I had never before
seen, the day after my arrival, and before I had been into the
garden, the impulse to write came on me, and I yielded to it,
without however ceasing to take part in the conversation of two
friends who were with me. One of them, who knew about my
automatic writing, asked me to read what had come to me. I did
so:--
"'Under the orange tree
Who is it lies?
Baby hair that is flaxen fair,
Shines when the dew on the grass is wet,
Under the iris and violet.
'Neath the orange tree
Where the dead leaves be,
Look at the dead child's eyes!' (1901)
"'This is very curious,' said my friend, 'there is a tradition
that a child is buried in the garden here, but I know you have
never heard it.'"
These heteromatic poems appear to be but extreme illustrations of the
"inspiration" that poets have generally claimed for themselves. The
author's modest deprecations seem to me unjust to her own.
* * * * *
Mrs. Holland continues (p. 173f.):
"I have said that automatic verses do not deal much with facts,
but once, when I was sensitive after illness, I experienced a new
form of automatic writing, in the shape of letters which my hand
insisted on writing to a newly-made acquaintance.
"The first of these letters began with a pet name I did not know,
and was signed with the full name of someone I had never heard
of, and who I afterwards learnt had been dead some years. It was
clearly impressed upon me for whom the letter was intended, but
thinking it due to some unhealthy fancy of my own, I destroyed
it. Having done so I was punished by an agonizing headache, and
the letter was repeated, till in self-defense I sent it and the
succeeding ones to their destination."
This is perhaps the most "evidential" thing I know.
* * * * *
It has been natural to follow the career of Hodgson both incarnate and
alleged post-carnate, without interrupting for the post-carnate career
of Myers who had died in 1901, four years before Hodgson. Myers was
perhaps the leading English spirit in the S. P. R., and everybody
interested in Psychical Research--the skeptical as well as the
credulous--was looking with great interest for manifestations
professing to come from that spirit in a post-carnate state. As usual,
they are a terrible jumble. Myers was not a demonstrative person. He
had not, like Hodgson, salient characteristics of manner or
expression. In that respect the communicating personality resembles
him. His absorbing interests were the S. P. R., poetry, and classical
literature. In those respects, too, the personality resembles him.
Mr. George Dorr of Boston got from the Myers control, through Mrs.
Piper, a large mass of classical lore which Mr. Dorr asserts he never
could have possessed himself, and which certainly Mrs. Piper never did
(Pr. XXIV).
Myers' appearances, though of great interest to students, do not make
as good general reading as G. P.'s and Hodgson's, and we will make
space for only one.
On September 16, 1903, nearly three years after Myers' death and his
first alleged appearance through Mrs. Thompson, there was apparently
the first appearance of a Myers control through Mrs. Holland. Myers,
as his control intimates later, wrote, like Hodgson, for evidential
purposes in cryptic ways that the heteromatist probably never would
have deliberately used. The writing was, says Miss Johnson (Pr. XXI,
178):
"On two sides of a half-sheet of paper; the first side begins
with the initial 'F.,' and the second ends with the initial 'M.';
the whole passage is divided into four short sections, the first
three ending respectively in '17/,' '/1' and '/01.' January 17th,
1901, was the date of Mr. Myers's death, mentioned in _Human
Personality_; but the simple device of separating these initials
and items from one another was completely effective in its
apparent object. I read the passage a good many times before I
saw what they meant and I found that the meaning had entirely
escaped Mrs. Holland's notice."
This refers to the script containing the notorious stanza (Pr. XXI,
192) which excited the derision of the Philistine world of both
continents, and disturbed not a small portion of the enlightened
world:
"Friend while on earth with knowledge slight
I had the living power to write
Death tutored now in things of might
I yearn to you and cannot write."
Why the stanza excited so much adverse comment I cannot clearly make
out: for what is it but a demonstration of what it claims, "I ...
cannot write," unless it be also a demonstration that the tired shade,
or befogged subliminal, or impotent group of world-soul elements, or
what you please, could not criticise either?
It is worth remarking, by the way, that the Myers control, despite
this and some other complaints of inefficiency, generally professed,
as do the controls generally, to be in a condition of great happiness.
* * * * *
A word should be said of the very instructive and tedious subject of
Cross-Correspondence, which has lately attracted more attention from
the S. P. R. than any other topic.
If Mrs. Verrall in London and Mrs. Holland in India both, at about the
same time, write heteromatically about a subject that they both
understand, that is probably coincidence; but if both write about it
when but one of them understands it, that is probably teloteropathy;
and if both write about it when neither understands it, and each of
their respective writings is apparently nonsense, but both make sense
when put together, the only obvious hypothesis is that both were
inspired by a third mind. The term Cross-Correspondence has been
reserved for such a phenomenon. There are many famous ones--famous in
a small circle, if that's not too Hibernian. The subject is entirely
too complex for any treatment in our space. The reader is referred to
Pr. XVIII, XX, XXI, XXII, XXIV and XXV.
* * * * *
The critics generally agree upon two points as the strongest against
the spiritistic hypothesis. They were not enough for Myers, Hodgson
and Sir Oliver Lodge, but they were strongest in suspending the
judgment of James, Newbold and others of eminence.
The first is that Myers and Miss Wilde, of Holyoke, Mass., left
sealed letters, the contents of which they purposed to announce should
they be able to do so in a post-carnate life. The words ostensibly
given by them through Mrs. Piper bore no relation to those found in
the envelopes. Apologists offer in explanation that the memories are
much confused by death, and means of communication at best very poor.
There are many other cases where there is no apparent need of such
apology: that there should be need of it in perhaps the most crucial
cases of all, is itself suspicious. Farther, the apologists say that
while it is well, and may be in the System of Things, that we should
have enough communication with the world beyond to give souls aspiring
that way, hope enough to keep their aspirations alive, it would not be
well, and apparently is not in the System of Things, that we should
have such certainty as to interfere with our living our lives here
"for all we are worth"; and in support of this contention are cited
the useless and worse than useless lives that, in spite of many cases
far to the contrary, have been led in direct consequence of assumed
certainty of a future life.
Hodgson was supposed to have left some sealed letters with intentions
like those of Myers and Miss Wilde, but no such letters have been
found. His control, however, gave some sentences alleged to be in them
which are quoted some pages back.
The other hard nut in the S. P. R. records which resists the
spiritistic hypothesis, is that Moses living told Myers that the
Imperator gang gave certain well known names as borne by them on
earth, and that Moses post-carnate (?) gave Professor Newbold an
entirely different set of names for the same individualities. Of
course the apologies for the envelope failures can be tried on this
case, whether they fit it or not. And there is also the ampler, though
perhaps less adequate one, that the whole Imperator business looks
like a complex telepathic freak of the imaginations of Moses, Mrs.
Piper, Professor Newbold, Hodgson and God knows how many others.
But a proof that the spiritistic hypothesis will not fit these cases,
is no proof that it will not fit the cases of G. P., Hodgson, Gurney,
Myers and hosts of others who were known to the witnesses, and whose
post-carnate manifestations tally with their incarnate ones, and yet
with occasional and, so far, unexplainable lapses and inconsistencies.
Perhaps the best opinion of the investigators who have not reached the
faith of Myers, Hodgson and Lodge, is that while failure of the sealed
letters, and the Moses inconsistencies, are unanswerable on the
negative side, there are other circumstances equally unanswerable on
the positive side--especially the cumulative weight of the evidence,
and the dramatic renderings which apparently would be impossible from
any source but the characters themselves; that the contradictions or
paradoxes are merely like many others in the borderland of our
knowledge: for instance, that between free will and determinism; and
that the only rational attitude is a suspense of opinion until more
evidence accumulates. This was the attitude of James, who served a
term as President of the S. P. R., and contributed voluminously to its
Proceedings.
But, however we may interpret the phenomena, or if we do not interpret
them at all, we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that they point to
modes of Force and reaches of Mind vastly wider than before suspected,
and promising well to repay farther investigation. To some they may
also suggest a recovery from the scrap-heap of abandoned things, and
an appropriation to new uses, of that sadly battered and misapplied
old virtue known as Faith.
* * * * *
And now we will give the attitude of the latest of James' successors,
so far as it can be conveyed by a few extracts from the inaugural
address of Professor Bergson.
As to his estimate of the labors of the Society: in thanking them for
the honor of his election, he said (Pr., Part LXVII, Vol. XXVI,
462-3):
Je ne connais que par des lectures les phénomènes dont la Société
s'occupe; je n'ai rien vu, rien observé moi-même. Comment alors
avez-vous pu venir me prendre, pour me faire succéder aux grands
savants, aux penseurs éminents qui ont occupé tour à tour le fauteuil
présidentiel.... Si j'osais plaisanter sur un pareil sujet, je dirais
qu'il y a eu ici un effet de télépathie ou de clairvoyance, que vous
avez senti de loin l'intérêt que je prenais à vos recherches, et que
vous m'avez aperçu, à travers les quatre cents kilomètres qui nous
séparaient, lisant attentivement vos comptes-rendus, suivant vos
travaux avec une ardente curiosité. Ce que vous avez dépensé
d'ingéniosité, de pénétration, de patience, de ténacité, à
l'exploration de la _terra incognita_ des phénomènes psychiques me
paraît en effet admirable. Mais, plus encore ... j'admire le courage
qu'il vous a fallu pendant les _premières_ années surtout, pour lutter
contre les préventions d'une bonne partie du monde savant et pour
braver la raillerie, qui fait peur aux plus intrépides. C'est pourquoi
je suis fier--plus fier que je ne saurais le dire--d'avoir été élu
président de la Société de recherche psychique. J'ai lu quelque part
l'histoire d'un officier subalterne que les hasards de la bataille, la
disparition de ses chefs tués ou blessés, avaient appelé à l'honneur
de commander le régiment: toute sa vie il y pensa, toute sa vie il en
parla, et du souvenir de ces quelques heures son existence entière
restait imprégnée. Je suis cet officier subalterne, et toujours je me
féliciterai de la chance inattendue qui m'aura mis--non pas pour
quelques heures, mais pour quelques mois--à la tête d'un régiment de
braves.
* * * * *
He accounted for the indifference long shown by men of science to the
phenomena studied by the S. P. R. by the fact that they do not square
with the widely accepted theory of parallelism between mental action
and brain function. This is of course especially the case with
phenomena indicating the mind's survival of the body. He then
proceeded to dispose of the doctrine of parallelism (_Op. cit._,
470-75):
Bref, l'hypothèse d'un _parallélisme_ rigoureux entre le cérébral et
le mental paraît éminemment scientifique. D'instinct, la philosophie
et la science tendent à écarter ce qui contredirait cette hypothèse ou
ce qui serait mal compatible avec elle. Et tel paraît être, à première
vue, le cas des faits qui relèvent de la "recherche psychique,"--ou
tout au moins le cas de bon nombre d'entre eux....
Pour une seule fonction de la pensée, en effet, l'expérience a pu
faire croire qu'elle était localisée en un certain point du cerveau:
je veux parler de la mémoire, et plus particulièrement de la mémoire
des mots. Ni pour le jugement, ni pour le raisonnement, ni pour aucune
autre faculté de la pensée proprement dite nous n'avons la moindre
raison de supposer qu'elle soit attachée à tels ou tels processus
cérébraux déterminés.... Si l'on examine de près tous les faits
allégués en faveur d'une exacte correspondance et d'une espèce
_d'adhérence_ de la vie mentale à la vie cérébrale (je laisse de côté,
cela va sans dire, les sensations et les mouvements, car le cerveau
est certainement un organe sensori moteur), on voit que ces faits se
réduisent aux phénomènes de mémoire, et que c'est la localisation des
aphasies, et cette localisation seule, qui semble apporter à la
doctrine paralléliste un commencement de preuve expérimentale.
* * * * *
He says that lesions in the place in the brain already alluded to
"rendent, en réalité, impossible ou difficile _l'évocation_ des
souvenirs; elles portent sur le mécanisme du rappel, et sur ce
mécanisme seulement. Plus précisément, le rôle du cerveau est ici de
faire que l'esprit, quand il a besoin de tel ou tel souvenir, puisse
obtenir du corps une certaine attitude ou certains mouvements
naissants, qui présentent au souvenir cherché un cadre approprié. Si
le cadre est là, le souvenir viendra, de lui-même, s'y insérer.
L'organe cérébral prépare le cadre, il ne fournit pas le souvenir....
Dans le travail de la pensée en général, comme dans l'opération de la
mémoire, le cerveau nous apparaît comme chargé d'imprimer au corps les
mouvements et les attitudes qui _jouent_ ce que l'esprit _pense_ ou ce
que les circonstances l'invitent â penser.... Il en connaîtrait tout
juste ce qui est exprimable en gestes, attitudes et mouvements
du corps, ce que l'état d'âme contient d'action en voie
d'accomplissement, ou simplement naissante: le reste lui
échapperait.... Les phénomènes cérébraux sont en effet à la vie
mentale ce que les gestes du chef d'orchestre sont à la symphonie: ils
en dessinent les articulations motrices, ils ne font pas autre chose.
On ne trouverait donc rien des opérations de l'esprit proprement dit à
l'intérieur du cerveau....
Orienter notre pensée vers l'action, l'amener à préparer l'acte que
les circonstances réclament, voilâ ce pour quoi notre cerveau est
fait...."
* * * * *
Then he turns to the strange memories of the dream state, in ordinary
sleep, hypnosis and trance:
Bien des faits semblent indiquer que le passé se conserve jusque dans
ses moindres détails et qu'il n'y a pas d'oubli réel. Vous vous
rappelez ce qu'on raconte des noyés et des pendus qui, revenus à la
vie, déclarent avoir eu, en quelques secondes, la vision panoramique
de la totalité de leur vie passée....
Mais ce que je dis de la mémoire serait aussi vrai de la perception.
Je ne puis entrer ici dans le détail d'une démonstration que j'ai
faite autrefois: qu'il me suffise de rappeler que tout devient obscur,
et même incompréhensible, si l'on considère les centres cérébraux
comme des organes capables de transformer en états conscients des
ébranlements matériels, que tout s'éclaircit au contraire si l'on voit
simplement dans ces centres (et dans les dispositifs sensoriels
auxquels ils sont liés) des instruments de sélection chargés de
choisir, dans le champ immense de nos perceptions virtuelles, celles
qui devront s'actualiser.... J'estime que nous percevons virtuellement
beaucoup plus de choses que nous n'en percevons actuellement, et
qu'ici encore le rôle de notre corps est d'écarter du champ de notre
conscience tout ce qui ne nous serait d'aucun intérêt pratique, tout
ce qui ne se prête pas à notre action.
* * * * *
This implies what is more fully stated elsewhere in M. Bergson's
works, and suggested by nearly all the philosophers, that mind
pervades the universe, and flows through each organism, according to
its constitution, as force and matter do.
He does not go into the paradox (perhaps another of those we have
already alluded to) of individuality surviving as part of the
universal mind, but contents himself with saying merely:
Mais si les faits, étudiés sans parti pris, nous amènent au contraire
à considérer la vie mentale comme beaucoup plus vaste que la vie
cérébrale, la survivance devient si probable que l'obligation de la
preuve incombera à celui qui la nie, bien plutôt qu'à celui qui
l'affirme; car, ainsi que je le disais ailleurs, "l'unique raison que
nous puissions avoir de croire à une extinction de la conscience après
la mort est que nous voyons le corps se désorganiser, et cette raison
n'a plus de valeur si l'indépendance _au moins_ partielle de la
conscience à l'égard du corps est, elle aussi, un fait d'expérience."
* * * * *
Regarding telepathy, he made the following suggestions (_Op. cit._,
465, 466, 475-6):
Si la télépathie est un fait réel, c'est un fait susceptible de se
répéter indéfiniment. Je vais plus loin: si la télépathie est un fait
réel, il est fort possible qu'elle opère à chaque instant et chez tout
le monde, mais avec trop peu d'intensité pour se faire remarquer, ou
en présence d'obstacles qui neutralisent l'effet au moment même où il
va se manifester. Nous produisons de l'électricité à tout moment,
l'atmosphère est constamment électrisée, nous circulons parmi des
courants magnétiques; et pourtant des millions d'hommes ont vécu
pendant des milliers d'années sans soupçonner l'existence de
l'électricité. Il pourrait en être de même de la télépathie. Mais peu
importe. Un point est en tous cas incontestable, c'est que, si la
télépathie est réelle, elle est naturelle, et que, le jour où nous en
connaîtrions les conditions, il ne nous serait pas plus nécessaire,
pour obtenir un effet télépathique, d'attendre une hallucination
vraie, que nous n'avons besoin aujourd'hui, quand nous voulons voir
l'étincelle électrique, d'attendre que le ciel veuille bien nous en
donner le spectacle pendant une scène d'orage....
Pour ma part, quand je repasse dans ma mémoire les résultats de
l'admirable enquête poursuivie continuellement par vous pendant plus
de trente ans, quand je pense à toutes les précautions que vous avez
prises pour éviter l'erreur, quand je vois comment, dans la plupart
des cas que vous avez retenus, le récit de l'hallucination avait été
fait à une ou plusieurs personnes, souvent même noté par écrit, avant
que l'hallucination eût été reconnue véridique, quand je tiens compte
du nombre énorme des faits et surtout de leur ressemblance entre eux,
de leur air de famille, de la concordance de tant de témoignages
indépendants les uns des autres, tous examinés, contrôlés, soumis à la
critique,--je suis porté à croire à la télépathie de même que je
crois, par exemple, à la défaite de l'Invincible Armada. Ce n'est pas
la certitude mathématique que me donne la démonstration du théorème de
Pythagore; ce n'est pas la certitude physique où je suis de la vérité
de la loi de la chute des corps; c'est du moins toute la certitude
qu'on obtient en matière historique ou judiciaire.
Nos corps sont extérieurs les uns aux autres dans l'espace; et nos
consciences, en tant qu'attachées à ces corps, sont extérieures les
unes aux autres aussi. Mais si elles ne tiennent au corps que par une
partie d'elles-mêmes, on peut conjecturer que, pour le reste, elles ne
sont pas aussi nettement séparées. Loin de moi la pensée de considérer
la personnalité comme une simple apparence, ou comme une réalité
éphémère, ou comme une dépendance de l'activité cérébrale! Mais il est
fort possible qu'entre les diverses personnalités s'accomplissent sans
cesse des échanges comparables aux phénomènes d'endosmose. Si cette
endosmose existe, on peut prévoir que la nature aura pris toutes ses
précautions pour en neutraliser l'effet, et que certains mécanismes
devront être spécialement chargés de rejeter dans l'inconscient les
représentations ainsi provoquées, car elles seraient fort
embarrassantes dans la vie de tous les jours. Telle ou telle de ces
représentations pourrait cependant, ici encore, passer en contrebande,
surtout quand les mécanismes inhibitifs fonctionnent mal; et sur elles
encore s'exercerait la "recherche psychique."
TWO NEGLECTED VIRTUES
Two virtues are generally ignored in the systematic books on morals
and in the informal admonitions of fathers to sons, yet upon these
virtues depends most of the ease, delight and profit which comes to us
in human fellowship. Let me illustrate.
There is in the Metropolitan Museum a very handsome funeral slab of a
certain bailiff of Sesostris I., Menthu-Weser. This steward prepared
his own epitaph with conviction and most carefully. Among many
assertions of his own merits the most striking is, "I was one who
really listened." Here seems evidence that in Egypt early in the
second millennium before Christ the virtues of reticence and tact were
valued. Ever since they have had scant enough recognition in the
world. In our own days particularly the robust virtues have the
preference. We acclaim the square deal. We are socially minded,
meaning that we aggressively mind the business of others. Naturally
such quiet and unsensational virtues as tact and reticence are gone
out of fashion. In a land where all are equals, tact is likely to pass
for truckling, or worse for condescension, whereas reticence must
perforce be abhorrent to a generation which has trusted to an
unlimited publicity the remedying of most earthly ills. Lest we think
too hardly of our own generation, let me hasten to repeat that no age
has done full justice to these dubious virtues. Holy Writ, to be sure,
extols the value of the "word in season," while to the much married
Solomon is ascribed the proverbs, "He that keepeth his mouth keepeth
his life, but he that openeth wide his lips shall have destruction."
But this sinister aspect of loquaciousness is evidently proper to an
oriental despotism and not to a free republic. We gain but faint
glimpses of our unscheduled virtues from moralist and theologian. The
Roman Church, always meticulously analytical of both the virtues and
vices, finds no official rubric either for tact or reticence. These
capacities, indispensable stay and safeguard of the confessional, may
indeed have been regarded as the trade secret of the clergy, and, as
tending to produce too astute a laity, unfit for promulgation. However
that be, it is not to the pious manuals that we must go for examples
of tactful sayings or happy silences, but to the extra-clerical
expressions of such vagrom clerics as Boccaccio and Bandello. From
their collections of ready and witty retorts many instances of tact
might be selected, but neither of these storytellers can be said
conspicuously to illustrate the virtue of reticence.
Reticence in fact is perhaps the most unpopular of virtues. What most
people like is loquaciousness and its kindred vice tactlessness. The
reticent man is seldom that meritorious thing, a good mixer, and he
suffers from the suspicion of moroseness. Open-heartedness, on the
contrary, is charitably credited to the habitual chatterer. He is, as
the Irish happily say, an easy spoken man, joyously gregarious. A
similar credit attaches itself to the habitually tactless person. You
know where to find him. He speaks his mind without regard to your
sensibilities. At bottom, an expression which a clever French writer
has shrewdly remarked always means exceptionally, he is surely
amiable, a thoroughly good sort--at bottom. It is significant,
however, that reticence and tact may be partially condoned by the
possession of great wealth. Only recently a multimillionaire won
prominence in his obscure class, and a nickname, merely on his
silence, while another who was all things to all men, and to many
women, is still remembered as a prince charming whether among
sportsmen or statesmen. All of which goes to show that our twin
virtues are essentially aristocratic or at least capitalistic, and
appraised accordingly. A statesman or politician, being in a democracy
a hybrid between the classes and masses, must practice the virtue of
tactfulness but by the same token resolutely eschew that of reticence.
The political aspirant is heard for his much speaking, and when silent
may be said to cease to exist.
Now for such misvaluations there is generally a specious and
respectable reason. Indeed one reason will doubtless explain
nine-tenths of popular delusions--the habit of judging not from the
long but from the short run. The blurting way is the easiest way of
meeting a situation and wins the praise of frankness. It takes time
and pains to weigh a situation and adjust one's attitude to that of
another, and such considerateness often passes for obliquity. Of
course the blurting habit itself is often merely a form of pose;
confidence men practice it for good business reasons. The man who
overrides you will as often be pursuing a tactic as he cajoles you.
Indeed the professionally downright man is often more devious than the
tactful person. Battering you with a confusing flow of argument,
imposing his will at random, he is precisely the man you do not know
where to find. You yield to him in small matters out of weariness and
avoid him in great. But at any particular moment he does seem
outspoken, and he leaves a general impression of strength and candor.
Beyond such false appearances an untrained mind will rarely inquire.
The tactful man who watches his opportunity to set his matter
agreeably before you, taking you on your best side, is proceeding
quite straight-forwardly, but to an impatient or unattentive or
irresolute person the processes of tact may well seem both dilatory
and crooked. Thus the merely assertive man will usually get undue
credit on first hearing while the tactful man generally wins his
standing only on prolonged acquaintance. The great painter Delacroix,
a fastidious man if there ever was one, used to deplore the ease with
which at first meeting persons of a certain persistent aggressiveness
took him in.
Talkativeness, like tactlessness, has an undeniable face value that
largely disappears on inspection. Ten times a day in casual contacts
it might be pleasanter and easier to deal with a chatty person than
with a silent one, that is, easier and pleasanter for one to whom time
was small object. The commercial traveller is proverbially loquacious,
though in the higher ranges of the calling doubtless a businesslike
taciturnity prevails. An ex-grocer's clerk has been publishing some
amusing confessions in a popular magazine--in our unreticent age
confessions singularly abound--and he tells that his sole instructions
were "Chin the women." Evidently what was assumed of his fair
customers was rather amenability than intelligence or thrift. In a
world where there was little or no intelligence, tact and reticence
would be unnecessary virtues, rational persuasion being impossible. In
such a world the human compact would imply infinite blundering and
unrestrained conversability. Such is still the unwritten law of life
among people who have not wholly reached the conscious stage. "Yes, I
burnt it," my cook says beamingly with the air of inviting a
compliment, carelessness being quite normal in her code.
The trouble with the virtues of reticence and tact--and naturally the
ground of their unpopularity--is precisely that they are products not
of the heart but of the head. To possess these qualities opens one to
the suspicion of being a cold fish. Nobody objects to the warmer and
less rationalized virtues. If we accept the convenient and I believe
quite psychologically defensible list drawn up by the mediæval
schoolmen, we shall find that the standard virtues are almost without
exception of the heart. Obviously this is true of the prime
theological virtues, Faith, Hope, and Charity. Despite utilitarian
interpretations, these remain temperamental qualities. We are born
believing, hopeful, and loving, or not. And even such of us as are
deficient in these merits by heredity or from policy at least will
accord to the entire Pauline triad the tribute of a distant
admiration. When we approach the pagan list, Fortitude, Prudence,
Temperance and Justice, the virtues begin to make enemies. With
Fortitude no one quarrels, for that is an instinctive virtue, an
expression largely of ample circulation and steady nerves. It is the
only secular virtue that is completely popular. Justice may share such
esteem in a measure, for the inclination towards the square deal and a
rough sense of its needfulness are deeply seated in the race. Prudence
and Temperance, on the contrary, within which larger categories our
special virtues of reticence and tact are comprised, have ever been
grudgingly practiced and even theoretically disallowed. Humanity has
ever boasted a sporting contingent to whom to be prudent and temperate
was anathema. The deeply rooted feeling that every young man must sow
his wild oats is the express disavowal of these virtues so far as
male youth is concerned. Reticence and tact, then, must be content to
share the unpopularity of all the cerebral virtues. The man who is
delicately considerate of his neighbor's case must be content to be
regarded as a schemer, and he who cautiously weighs his utterances
must bear the reproach of ungeniality.
But as soon as a society becomes conscious and complicated, tact and
reticence assume high and even indispensable value. No physician who
had the confidential ways of a country postmistress would be
tolerated. Why is a parvenu stranded in a society which may consist of
his inferiors in capacity and morals? Because he has no clear notion
of his attitude to his new fellows or of theirs to him and to each
other, he lacks the tact for an untried situation. The grace of a
reticent observation may gain him time and save him appalling
blunders. If his social intelligence be keen, he will adopt such
Fabian tactics until some opening in mutual sympathy establishes
itself. But this implies reticence. As a matter of fact, he will
usually be restive, and will talk at random and constrainedly, being
ignorant of what that particular company likes to hear said or left
unsaid. His utterances successively betray him and he progressively
writes himself down an ass. Nor is his case made better, as
humanitarians confidently profess, by kindliness. His heart may be the
best in the world and understanding of the minds and manners of new
people denied him. His kindliness may condone the spectacle he
cuts, but to make his position good wants intelligence which
good-heartedness may supplement but not supplant. Nor is his dilemma
due, as Socialists will perhaps maintain, merely to the fact that his
difference is arrogantly ascribed by snobbishness to personal
inferiority. In the same circumstances a far humbler person, a
forest-guide or a sailor, will comport himself agreeably and without
constraint. Perhaps the close quarters of tent and forecastle conduce
to tolerant understanding between very different individuals, and set
natural limits to forced or heedless talk.
Between the reticent and the merely taciturn person there is constant
confusion. The silent man may simply be devoid of interests, morose
and with nothing to say. A trappist is merely speechless; not
reticent. The reticent man has much to say, but for reason says only
the part that his judgment approves. He is his own censor. His
abstentions are due to a fundamental conviction that many things never
need to be said at all, and that most personal difficulties best
adjust themselves with fewest words. His attitude evinces respect for
certain privacies. His intimate business is not in the show window nor
on the bargain counter, and he assumes as much of the personal
concerns of his fellows. If there be a human type peculiarly
intolerable, it is that which insists on stated explanations of every
trifling misunderstanding. There are minds for which no slightest
transaction is outlawed and no statute of limitations admitted. What
shall that woman say who wastes five minutes explaining why she didn't
bow to me yesterday when a real occasion of conference arises? How
shall I respect the man who insists on divulging most physiologically
the mysteries of his bed and board? How shall I bear that my own
humble Lares and Penates be bywords on reckless lips? On the whole the
finest gentleman I have ever met was the Japanese Samurai and art
critic, the late Okakura Kakuzo. I recall as vividly his courteous and
expectant silences as I do his always eloquent and brilliant
discourse. Indulgent to the small talk of others, he declined to share
it. If he ever gave utterance to a mere prejudice or to any petty
personal concern, it was not in my hearing. He appeared to husband
himself until the talk should take a wide impersonal range, and then
his comment was fervent and illuminating. A noted American poet and
critic has somewhat similar habits. His prolonged silences are
comfortable, even deferential, his rare speech instinct with
sympathetic understanding of men and books and nature. The late John
LaFarge who was in congenial society a continuous talker offered an
interesting equivalent for reticence in the allusiveness of his touch
and in a beautiful perception of the kind of sympathetic response you
would have made had you not been better occupied in listening to him.
He had what most free talkers signally lack, perfect tact.
Perhaps the most distressing and alarming feature of our American
civilization is the complete lack of any ideal of reticence.
Scientists babble for the press, clergymen fan the prurient flame of
curiosity after each especially noxious _cause célèbre_, chorus girls
divulge the hygiene of their personal charms, nameless outrage becomes
the favorite theme of venal dramatists, young girls make small talk of
the pros and cons of marriage and free love, shallow journalists
glorify the vices of the city slums, an unprincipled press and an
untrained laity freely review the findings of the courts, clever but
irresponsible scribblers pillory wholesale our industry and
finance--in short we live in an age when to expose anything is the
highest good, and to conceal anything passes for a manner of treason.
When everything conceivable has been said, boggled and muddled out, a
reaction must come. Wearied by the vociferations of the nostrum
vendors, the plain man will come to realize that what is read counts
little in comparison with what is marked and inwardly digested. In a
thoroughly unreticent age we get mere data, much of it false, far too
fast. We have yet to learn the elementary lesson of the Stoics, to
learn and fix upon that which concerns ourselves. A chief merit of the
Pragmatic philosophy, with most of which I cordially disagree, is to
have shown that we must bring words and thought to the test of action,
and a very simple test of the worth or worthlessness of talk or
writing on social matters would be whether the residual impression is
a mere perturbation, or titillation, or a firm purpose to do some
definite remedial thing. If I am taught to be merely uneasy about the
sharp practices of my retail grocer, or more likely of his wholesale
grocer, without seeking for tangible relief and redress, my last
estate is worse than my first. I merely eat in bitterness of spirit
the preservatives and adulterants which otherwise I might have
negotiated at the cost of a slight dyspepsia. Where Mr. Roosevelt has
most deserved ill of the republic is in fomenting this general
atmosphere of suspicion in the people while lodging both the
recognition of the criminal and his proper punishment in some
transcendental capacity of his own personality. He is the Dr. Munyon
of the diseased body politic, and his power consists largely in
continual and breathless reiteration of universal symptoms under which
each man may have the grateful illusion of registering his own
particular ache. Mr. Roosevelt seems to me a supreme example of the
inconveniences, nay danger, of incorrigible and thoroughly well
meaning garrulity in a political leader. But Mr. Roosevelt's tact is
often as noteworthy as his prolixity, even his indiscretions are
calculated or inspired to meet the call of the occasion. Why of X? was
his remark when a scholar of international repute was introduced at
the White House as "of X University."
The case of Mr. Roosevelt and in a quite different sense that of John
LaFarge make me question sometimes what really seems axiomatic that no
free talker can be completely tactful. Carlyle, Ruskin, Gladstone seem
to illustrate the rule, and even Lowell, as his intimates admit, long
retained certain asperities. It seems obvious that one who has never
quietly looked into himself and seen clearly, nor studied his fellow
man at leisure and accurately, can acquire the art of compatibility.
To think otherwise is to assert that the tactful man, poetlike, is
born not made. Were this so, cases of tact among young children should
be fairly common, and I doubt if the fondest parent could supply any
genuine instance. So I feel that such apparent exceptions to the rule
as John LaFarge and Mr. Roosevelt would fall into line if one knew the
whole story. There must have been a time when both, like the steward,
Menthu-Weser, listened much and took keenest note of the ways and
moods of other men.
Tact is so readily divined and so difficult of definition that I have
avoided what might seem an essayist's plain duty. Yet a tactful reader
will not require a pedantic formulation in these matters of common
experience. I suppose the basis of tact is a good understanding with
one's self, a comprehension of the permanent disposition and passing
moods of those with whom one deals, a desire to approach men on their
best side, combined with the force and initiative that enable one to
act promptly on such knowledge. Tact may or may not be coupled with
expansive kind-heartedness. In such association it gains an added
grace. Tact implies at the least a vivid human curiosity hardly
distinguishable from sympathy. If it were otherwise there would be no
motive for exercising tact in cases which involve no material
interest. And I suppose the genuinely tactful person finds his
greatest incentives and rewards in emergencies that offer only the
satisfaction of a neatly played game. In the whole matter the sense of
timeliness is everything. To wait for a softening expression, to
suppress a cherished witticism the appositeness of which has passed,
to exhaust without insistence a happy vein, to rise sharply to any
worthy lure and refuse an unworthy one without offence--such are some
of the delightful and legitimate arts of the tactful person. Whether
men or women possess these gentle arts in fuller measure would be
matter for a separate essay. The impression prevails that women do,
indeed the phrase "feminine tact" is quite stereotyped among us. I
presume that a scrutiny of the memoirs of the most highly developed
society of modern times, the French salons of the old régime, would
confirm this judgment. From my own limited experience I can only say
that while I have met ten tactful women for one tactful man, the
consummate exemplars of this virtue in my acquaintance have been of
the so-called sterner sex, and I am inclined to believe that the
finest flower of considerateness grows best in the rocky soil of the
masculine intelligence. The mere fact that the personal adjustment is
more difficult between men with no reconciling tradition of chivalry
prevailing may make for finer transactions. Possibly too, the absence
of a conventional sex loyalty, a relatively detached and impersonal
habit of thought, a somewhat ruthless will to understand, a practice
of moving resolutely in difficult affairs, may make the tact of a man
when it occurs at all a more precious and complicated product. So at
least it strikes one who confessedly knows the world largely through
books. I would rather have overheard the talk and silences of David
and Jonathan, or for that matter of Charles Eliot Norton and Carlyle,
than that of any man and woman or of any two women recorded by
historian or novelist. If, fair reader, this be treason, make the most
of it.
To the notion that tact requires both a perceptive and an active part,
I must for a moment return. The fact seems to me to explain the oft
discussed case of the shy person. In my observation shy people are
usually quite delicately perceptive, victims in fact of an almost
morbid open-mindedness and sympathy. Where they lack is in prompt
decision between diverging courses, in the sense of relativity which
brings the right word or silence at the right moment, and precisely
and only for that moment's sake. I fancy many shy persons are not
egotists, as an impatient and genial world is prone to hold them, but
absolutists, expecting of human intercourse a sort of abstract fitness
in the light of an eternal aspect which for the really tactful man has
no practical existence. In heaven and probably in hell the shy should
get along capitally. In the celestial domain active tact would be
unnecessary--it would merely trouble the perpetual beatitude; in the
nether realm tact would simply mitigate those tense affinities and
antipathies which are implied in a future punitive state. The damned,
if really tactful folk, would never have to be strictly regimented
among their infernal peers with the inevitability which a Dante or a
Swedenborg describes. In the sphere of intelligence indeed
inevitability has no meaning. Alternatives always exist. A
determinist's god cannot be tactful, and if Professors James and Royce
have been allured by the idea of a conditioned deity, I fancy it has
been largely with the hope of shading the arid conception of
omnipotence with one of the most amiable human qualities. It is a
compromise which the Christian effects less philosophically in the
doctrine of the God-man. Yet the Jesus of the Gospels remains for the
philosopher much more of a God than of a man, despite the efforts of
orthodox and skeptical criticism to elucidate the historic figure. His
sayings transcend tact, and the Jews, eminently a negotiating,
compromising and tactful race, bore true report when they said "He
speaks as never man spake."
Such serious and remote but I trust illuminating aspects of our topic
may merely be glanced at. In closing I may note that while the finest
exhibitions of tact arise between individuals or in small groups,
there is also a collective type of tact which must be mastered by the
artist, the actor, and the orator. St. Paul manifested it in the
highest degree when he addressed the curious Babists, Vedantists,
Christian Scientists, Spiritualists, Vitalists, Relativists, and
Materialists (my Greek has lapsed so I offer modern equivalents) of
Athens as men "pre-eminently religious." And it is characteristic of
the touch and go quality of every sort of tact that nothing much moved
the loiterers on Mars Hill except the Apostle's beginning. Need I add
that tact itself loyally obeys the law of measure and occasion which
it imposes on its subservient material? The high exercise of tact
requires high occasions. Of this sort was John Hancock's grim and
enlightening jest in the Continental Congress on all hanging together
lest they all hang separately. It took perhaps a singularly tactless
personality to husband this supreme and isolated flash for a lifetime
until the right occasion should occur. Merely one among countless
examples of Lincoln's tact was his solicitous inquiry as to the brand
of Grant's whiskey when a meddler brought gossip of the great
General's potations. Charles II's famous apology for unconscionable
delay in dying is frequently cited as a consummate example of tact. To
me it seems merely witty, containing as it does a hint that the
attendants had let something of impatience or weariness transpire.
It is the negative part of tact always to save at least two
faces--leaving neither party to a transaction discomforted. The most
solemn example of entire tactlessness within my knowledge was
perpetrated by a very learned man, the by no means inconspicuous
father of a far more famous son, Dr. John Rubens. During a prolonged
absence of that rather unsatisfactory husband, William of Orange, Dr.
John deeply engaged the volatile affections of Queen Anna. When the
affair was uncovered he wrote to the Prince a letter of apology, the
tenor of which was that such infelicities had been the common lot of
monarchs, as history showed, and the present mishap was the more
tolerable that he himself, Dr. John Rubens, was a man of parts and
station, a Doctor of Laws from no mean university, and at court the
equal of a baron. It does not appear that such plain intimation that
the queen might have erred with some base fellow, perhaps a mere
Bachelor of Arts, in any way comforted the taciturn Prince. When Dr.
Rubens left prison it was not because of this letter but through the
importunity of a singularly loyal wife. To emphasize the relativity of
tact let me cite a family anecdote, the appositeness of which must
condone a certain lack of reticence in its telling. My father once in
conducting a defence before a magistrate, by directing a single
crucial question to the plaintiff put him overtly in the wrong, and
noting the judge's involuntary nod of assent, rested the case,
promptly obtaining a favorable verdict. As regards the judge this was
perfect tact, but not as regards the client. He rightly expected a
more ample parade of professional skill and probably still grudges the
fee.
How much needless travail and fuss a truly reticent and tactful man
might spare himself and his neighbors--privacies profaned, trifling
misunderstandings magnified, maimed reputations, distracted aims,
thwarted accomplishment! Upon all this I could still enlarge, but I am
already rebuked by the ambiguously smiling shade of Samuel Butler of
"Erewhon" who remarks in his "Notebooks:"
"No man should try even to allude to the greater part of what he sees
in his subject, and there is hardly a limit to what he may omit. What
is required is that he shall say what he elects to say discreetly,
that he shall be quick to see the gist of a matter, and give it
pithily without either prolixity or stint of words."
THE UNFERMENTED CABINET
Mr. Bunn of Bloomington, Illinois, has put into a book the story how
in 1860 he went up to Mr. Lincoln's room in the State House of
Illinois, and met Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, just coming down. Mr. Bunn
said to Mr. Lincoln:
"You don't want to put that man into your cabinet."
"Why do you say that?"
"Because he thinks he is a great deal bigger than you are."
"Well, do you know of any other men who think they are bigger than I
am?"
"I do not know that I do. Why do you ask?"
"Because I want to put them all in my cabinet!"
Perhaps that was the principle that President Wilson went on when he
invited Mr. Bryan to be secretary of state. The objection of prudent
on-lookers to Mr. Bryan as a member of Mr. Wilson's cabinet was very
much Mr. Bunn's objection to Chase. But Lincoln took Chase, and also
Seward and Stanton to whom the same objection applied, and Wilson took
Bryan.
That argued confidence in something. Maybe it was a confidence in some
qualities and convictions of Mr. Bryan; in his sincerity, and his
loyalty to some aims that Mr. Wilson wished his administration to
express. Or it might have been a token of Mr. Wilson's confidence in
himself and his political intentions. But in the case of no other
cabinet officer did that sort of confidence find that sort of
expression. Not one of the rest of them would be picked out as a man
who thought himself a bigger man than Wilson. Except perhaps Mr. Lane,
they were all fairly green hands with almost everything to learn about
the business of conducting the federal government. Mr. Redfield and
Mr. Burleson had been in Congress, but none of them had ever been a
conspicuous figure in national politics.
They were not inexperienced men. Mr. McAdoo had had experience as a
practicing lawyer and as president of the company that financed,
built, and operated the first tube under the Hudson River. Mr.
McReynolds had been assistant attorney-general, and had been long
retained afterwards by the Department of Justice in matters relating
to enforcement of the anti-trust law, especially in the prosecution of
the tobacco cases. He was known and respected as a competent lawyer.
Mr. Garrison had been a newspaper reporter and had held a judicial
office in New Jersey. Dr. Houston was a specialist in economics, had
been president of two universities, and came to Washington fresh from
the work of reorganizing and developing the important Washington
University of St. Louis. Mr. Daniels had once been chief clerk of the
Department of the Interior, and afterwards a successful newspaper
editor and publisher in North Carolina and a member of the Democratic
national committee. Mr. Lane, drafted from the Interstate Commerce
Commission, was a man of excellent ability, had had a very valuable
experience in governmental concerns, and was probably the best
equipped for his new work of any of the President's official family.
And Mr. Burleson and Mr. Redfield, as said, had been members of
Congress. But not one of these gentlemen was in the enjoyment of a
national renown. Mr. Bryan had all of that that there was in the new
cabinet. Indeed Mr. Bryan had dominated the party so long and so
little to the liking of the older leaders of the Democrats, that,
except in the South, few other of the abler politicians of the party
had been able to keep in the public sight. Everybody knew Judge
Parker, but he, though a loyal Democrat, was not conclusively
consecrated to the cause of the New Freedom, and it was not expected
that he would be in the Cabinet. Governor Harmon was well known and
perhaps more available, but, so far as known, he was not invited. Mr.
Underwood, with the work of making a new tariff law cut out for him,
was indispensable in his place as leader of the House, and could not
be disturbed. Mr. Clark, the speaker, was in a like case, too well off
where he was, to be moved. So the new cabinet was nearly all new
timber, and not only new but fairly green. The President, it seemed,
new himself to the business of directing government, had assembled a
group of assistants that seemed all to be in a like case, and they
would all start in together to learn their new business.
It worried some observers to see such untried hands on the levers of
government. "The Unfermented Cabinet" Mr. Bryan's notions of
diplomatic dinners have led some of them to call it, and a great deal
of space has been given up in the public prints since March to its
processes of fermentation. Observers have watched them with great
curiosity, also with amusement, also at times with anxiety. It has
been a matter of importance to the country what sort of a council the
fermentation would produce; what manner of men these councillors and
assistants of the President would turn out to be, and with how much
efficiency they would finally adjust themselves to their important
duties. There were forecasts a-plenty; frequent prophecies in
particular of the speedy separation of Mr. Bryan from the official
family. There have been wild cries to the President from newspapers
claiming to be influential, to discharge this or that one,--Mr.
McReynolds because of an apparent error of judgment about a
prosecution in California; Mr. McAdoo for something else; Mr. Bryan
for official inefficiency and unofficial activity; others for other
reasons. But the cabinet still holds together as it began, and is
still apparently harmonious, and its fermentation still goes on.
The underlying idea about the fermentation has been that when it had
accomplished its work, the novelties of method and deportment peculiar
to Mr. Wilson's administration would fade out, his heads of
Departments would behave more and more like their predecessors, and
the business of government would gradually conform to the conventions
that obtained when the new hands took hold. Now the country has been
kept so busy watching its new President that it has not been able to
give more than a broken attention to his secretaries, and only the
more obstreperous of them have been much under scrutiny. But it has
been impossible to overlook Mr. Bryan, and it cannot be said that in
his case there is yet any sign that fermentation is producing the
expected result. He has been all along, and continues up to latest
advices to be, impressively different from anyone who ever sat before
in the chief seat in the State Department. No one before him set grape
juice before ambassadors at his dinner-table; no one before him went
out on the lecture platform to supplement his official salary, thereby
combining a particularly ostentatious form of money-getting with the
duties of the leading place in the cabinet. Secretary Bryan has been
very widely and enthusiastically criticised for these departures from
tradition, but that does not seem to have troubled him in the least.
Why should it? For nearly twenty years he has been an object of
criticism for about two-thirds of his countrymen and has flourished
under it because the other third liked him. To about two-thirds of the
Democratic party he was acceptable as a candidate. To the other third
and to the Republicans he was not acceptable and therefore he could
never be elected President. But a third of the voters and the people
they represent count up to thirty millions of people, and that is a
good many. It is a valuable following for a politician, a very
valuable collection for a lecturer. To the thirty million, ambassadors
are a good deal of a joke, and they are amused to have grape juice set
before these dignitaries. More than that some of them are gratified
because they consider grape juice a moral beverage, and consider it
exemplary to offer it to exalted personages who ought to want it,
though they don't. And doubtless a great many people are delighted to
welcome Mr. Bryan on the lecture platform. They like that sort of
intercourse with a high officer of government. Is it not _their_
government? Is it not _their_ secretary? And he is a fine performer
too! Clap! clap! come their echoing palms together and freely drop
their dollars into the hat. Why, to be sure, should Mr. Bryan forsake
the practices that please all the thirty million friends to whose
favor he owes his present preferment, to please fastidious persons who
never have believed in him and never will?
It is not to be denied that Mr. Bryan has nerve. There are those who
complain because President Wilson has not admonished him to be more
modish in his deportment. But President Wilson has been very busy, and
has needed the help of Mr. Bryan and his thirty million admirers, and
apparently has had it. There is concurrence of report that Mr. Bryan
has been very loyal and very useful to the administration. A man with
thirty million friends can be quite helpful to a President, or can be
quite troublesome. To leave such a person to follow, under the law,
the promptings of his own spirit in matters of taste, seems no more
than a reasonable discretion.
And there is another view that may be taken of Mr. Bryan's Chautauqua
orations. He likes to talk to the people. He does it very
successfully. His ability to do it had been the chief source of his
strength. The great newspapers of the country are pretty generally
hostile to him. If he has something to say, his preference for saying
it with his own voice rather than to have it filtered through more or
less hostile newspapers, may be understood. Our newspapers have not,
collectively, a high reputation for giving accurate reports of the
public utterances of public men. Any contemporary politician who has a
loud enough voice and sufficient physical energy in using it to make
him in any measure independent of newspapers will have considerable,
intelligent public sympathy in his reliance on his own gifts, and a
desire to keep them exercised.
But there is something more than Mr. Bryan's thirty million
(estimated) friends to keep the President harmonious with him. He is
very considerably harmonious in spirit and political desires with the
President. They have a very inclusive identity of general purpose. Mr.
Bryan is as heartily in favor of the New Freedom as Mr. Wilson is.
That is a kind of political religion in which both of them have
profound faith. What truly religious people differ about, as a general
thing, is not the controlling facts of their faith, but less essential
matters; side issues, and very often errors. Catholics and Protestants
have always agreed as to the main and really important facts of
Christianity, but they have fought ferociously about processes,
mechanisms and details. Free silver was a detail of politics. Mr.
Bryan led his faction into the wilderness about that. Government
ownership of railroads is another detail; state insurance of bank
deposits is another. Mr. Bryan has an unsurpassed gift of getting it
wrong on his details, but in his great general aim to keep the great
body of people free from domination by the strong hands he is probably
sound and sincere. It must be that that has saved him alive. He is a
bold man with a large voice and the habit of domination. He hates
bosses who are in politics for purposes of plunder; he hates all the
agencies that seem to him to purpose to monopolize the people's
heritage--trusts because he thinks they want to monopolize business,
"Wall Street" because he thinks it wants to monopolize money, Ryan and
Tammany because he thinks they want to monopolize and commercialize
politics. Of course Mr. Bryan is interested in Bryan, and is heartily
for that statesman, but he seems also to be quite heartily for human
liberty, the rights of man, peace in the world, and the greatest
happiness of the most people. It really looks as if he cared so much
for these perennial enthusiasms as to be willing if they cannot come
through himself, to help them come through someone else. And it looks
as though he thought they might come considerably through Mr. Wilson,
and was working to make them do it. Mr. Bryan's ethics are good
enough. It is his economics that have made the trouble. He behaves as
if at last he had found someone who could show him how to do what he
wanted done. He seems to see in Mr. Wilson a man who is moving in the
direction he wants to go and knows the road. He never before had
leadership of that kind offered to him. All the other eminent
Democratic guides whom he has been invited to support have seemed to
him to be merely persons who knew the road to something he wished to
avoid.
Confidence is a great harmonizer. If you think a man is going your way
and knows the road better than you do, it is no great hardship to go
along with him. The chief result that has come to notice of the
fermentation, so far, in President Wilson's cabinet is an impression
of profound confidence of the cabinet in the President. So far as
heard from, they all seem to feel that he is going their way and
either knows the road or can find it. It will be recalled that at
Princeton Mr. Wilson was not so successful in winning the confidence
of his advisers. That was because a certain proportion of them were
not going his way. It has come to be recognized that he is of no use
to anybody who is not going in the same general direction as he is. He
will stop and talk; will persuade if he can; will wait if necessary,
but he seems to have a prejudice against deviation that reminds one of
Christian in the Pilgrim's Progress. You may pave a road with gold
bricks; grade it, smooth it, dust it; it will never look attractive to
Mr. Wilson unless it leads where he wants to go. That is the
impression he makes,--an impression of a stubborn man very tenacious
of purposes very well thought out. One laughs to think of the heads
that are still sore with trying to butt him out of his course at
Princeton; of his rapid extrication of his interests from political
ties the most intimate and useful, that threatened to give an
impression that his feet were intangled! One laughs to think of the
_World_ a few months ago using its editorial megaphone to order him to
discharge three members of his cabinet. It is doubtful if the _World_
would be so ready with that kind of suggestion to-day.
Nine months of fermentation have left the cabinet considerably
clarified. We begin to think of it less as an aggregation of
individuals, and more as a team bent on putting over certain definite
accomplishments in government. It seems united in spirit; a team of
willing workers under a captain in whom they have not only confidence,
but pride. It was expected that Mr. Wilson would be hard to work with.
It was expected that his defect as an executive officer would be an
inability to enlist the sympathy of his colleagues and subordinates.
People said he had no magnetism, that he was over suspicious and
distrustful: that he would not dare to tie up to anyone, and that no
one would dare to tie up to him. But, so far, these expectations do
not find much support; in fact, so far as anybody knows, his cabinet
is an unusually happy family. Men are working with tireless devotion
to make his administration succeed. They are doing so not so much
because they like the man (though they do like him) as because they
like the cause. They follow him, support him, help him, advise him,
defer to his judgment, because he has impressed them with the notion
that he knows what he is about, and is equal to what he undertakes and
that under his leadership certain definite improvements in the social
and economic apparatus of our country may be accomplished.
Soldiers love a general not because of how he parts his hair, but
because he can win battles. President Wilson has produced the
impression that he can win battles. It is that that interests him; not
the buttons on his coat, nor to have the people holler when they see
him. He cannot win any battle without plenty of help. How does he get
the help? Is it by close attention to details of deportment?
Not at all. His deportment is agreeable so far as known, but it does
not seem to be his chief concern.
Is it by extreme solicitude to avoid small mistakes and ingratiate all
influential persons?
No. He makes his share of small mistakes and sometimes scandalizes the
influential, but it does not seem to matter.
He gets help because he seems to be worth helping; because he gives
his mind not to the retention of power, but to the use of it in
accomplishing what he was chosen to accomplish. He has signed a tariff
bill. That was one great battle won. He had to have splendid support
to win it, but he got the support. Has he rested on that victory? Not
a minute. Now it is the currency bill and it will be that until he
signs a currency bill that will satisfy the country. Then it will be
the trusts, and the Lord knows what.
But it is safe to bet that Mr. Wilson also knows what. He has thought
out a great many problems of government. He will always know of things
that ought to be done to improve the life of the people, and he will
always have a program for doing the next thing on his list, and will
always push it as hard as seems to him practicable and, probably, much
harder than will seem expedient to most observers. He has shown
himself to be a great driving force, and the kind of one that gains
ground because of the forces that he can carry with him. What he is
after will always be as clear as he can make it, and it will be
important, and those that are for it will be confident that they will
get it if they win, and those that are against it will know what they
are against. There is a good prospect for clean political and economic
issues in this country for some time to come; issues about which
people will have to think, and on which they will divide. The question
is going to be how much improvement the country can stand in a given
time. The patient is on the operating table. No doubt he needs to have
a good deal done, but if his pulse begins to sink, off he will have to
come, and wait until he gets stronger. Otherwise the disposition is to
make a new man of him and do it now.
And so, small matters are not going to make so much difference as they
might if less important changes were imminent. It may be true that the
trousers of all the cabinet bag at the knees, but nobody cares much.
Mr. Bryan may talk in the Chautauqua circuit, and do lots of other
unusual things, Mr. McAdoo's department may make mistakes in its
income-tax circulars, Mr. Daniels may behave at times too much like
Mr. Daniels, Mr. McReynolds's young men may show a too voluble zeal in
prosecution, but it will be a mistake to expand occurrences of that
size into evidences of administrative failure. Cromwell had a wart on
his nose, but still was esteemed an efficient man. His trousers would
undoubtedly have bagged at the knees if he had worn trousers, but his
statue stands at last by the Parliament House in London.
President Wilson's administration is likely to win or lose on wagers
of considerable size. It may be a good administration or it may be a
bad one, but there is no sign or symptom that it is going to be a
piker.
A NEEDED UNPOPULAR REFORM
The American people in their frugal rural days enjoyed their freedom,
knew all their neighbors, and governed themselves simply and directly.
They knew personally the men they elected. Now bosses govern them, and
the men they elect are unknown to the voters. The republic is rich,
the people are many. Still possessed of that spirit of liberty which
Edmund Burke noted as characteristic of the American colonists, and
still reaching for complete self-government, they have grasped too
much, and have lost their grip on what is essential. They have seen
the setting up of secret oligarchies in all the chief cities and
states. The head of the most considerable of these oligarchies,
regnant save in times of extraordinary protest and agitation, is
virtually king of a tributary city and state, whose population is over
thrice that of the original thirteen Colonies, whose public
expenditures are three hundred millions of dollars yearly, and whose
wealth amounts to twenty-five billions. He and his associates, too,
partake of this fierce American spirit, in the sense that they are
strong individualists. And they are captains of a peculiar industry.
The fathers foresaw this danger to the republic. Judah Hammond says
that Washington, before the close of his second term, "rebuked
self-creative societies from an apprehension that their ultimate
tendency would be hostile to the public tranquillity." The members of
the Society of Tammany, who were then celebrating its eighth birthday,
"supposed their institution to be included in the reproof, and they
almost all forsook it." But the organization's founder, William
Mooney, and a few with him, made Aaron Burr their leader, and he and
his friend Matthew L. Davis forged it and tempered it into an
instrument of perpetual and public plunder.
It was inevitable that there should be "self-creative societies" in
the United States devoted to the political preferment and personal
emolument of their members. It accorded with the genius of a people
who wished, above all things, individually to be let alone in their
lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Vast natural possessions
must be explored and exploited. The victorious new nation was engaged
in ravaging a bountiful land and in despoiling its savage possessors.
To the spirit of liberty which its citizens inherited as Englishmen
and as sons of dissidence and protestantism, was added a contagion of
wildness from their redskin foes. The "Burrites" paraded in Indian
garb, danced, and used savage ceremonies. The climate, changeable and
stimulating, and the conditions of the time, charged with the
possibilities of material and political conquest, had bred desperate
leaders differing from the patriots who headed the societies of the
Revolution. These leaders naturally opposed the party of Alexander
Hamilton, with its suggestions of a responsible, centralized, and
controlling government. The Society of old Tamenund welcomed Aaron
Burr into its wigwam after he slew Hamilton. It shielded its founder,
Mooney, after he was convicted for stealing "wampum," or "trifles for
Mrs. Mooney," from New York City's supplies. It acclaimed Benjamin
Romaine as its Grand Sachem, after his removal in 1806 from the City
Controllership for malfeasance. Abraham Stagg, political ancestor of
Charles F. Murphy, continued to get the contracts for paving the
city's streets after his conviction, in 1808, of concealing accounts
as Collector of Assessments. Tammany's braves assaulted the City Hall
in 1815 and removed the Mayor, DeWitt Clinton, who was the honest and
better prototype of William Sulzer; but Clinton later repelled their
attack on him as Governor. Under Matthew Davis they had early
perfected their mode of raiding the primaries that they might
consequently raid the City Treasury, and in 1800 their manipulations
actually resulted in the election of President Jefferson. Their
councils were so crafty that by 1816 they were ruling New York by a
committee of fourteen chieftains. In his excellent history of Tammany
Hall, Gustavus Myers says:
Substantially, fourteen men were acting for over five thousand
Republican voters, and eight members of the fourteen composed a
majority. Yet the system had all the pretence of a pure
democracy; the wards were called upon to elect delegates; the
latter chose candidates and made party rules; and the "great
popular meeting" accepted or rejected nominees; it all seemed to
spring directly from the people.
Thus early was formed the perfect and predatory "system" which
typifies the oligarchies that have acquired control of the American
states and cities. Their forays and assaults have been continuous
through more than a century. Now and then a warrior, chief, or Sachem
has been captured with his booty and punished. Such were the cases of
the treasury stealings by Ruggles Hubbard and John L. Broome in 1817;
of Jacob Barker and his fellow Sachems in the bank frauds of 1826; of
the procurement of legislative charters by bribery in 1834, involving
Peter Betts and Luke Metcalfe; of the lobbying by Samuel Swartout for
the Harlem Railroad in 1835, and his defalcations in 1838; of the
Manhattan Bank's lendings to Tammany leaders in 1840; of the gambler
Rynders and the Empire Club scandal in 1844; of the sales of
nominations under Fernando Wood in 1846, and the Council of the "Forty
Thieves" in 1851; of the extortions for ferry leases and railroad
franchises in 1854; of the election frauds of 1857, and so on, down to
the monumental thieveries of "Boss" Tweed and his "ring," exposed in
1871, the death of "Honest" John Kelly in 1886, the rise of Richard
Croker in 1890, who testified that he worked "for his pocket all the
time," and to Murphy, who in 1913 displayed the supreme power of
Tammany by bringing about the removal of William Sulzer from the
Governorship for disobeying the "invisible government." These
exposures merely punctuate a long history of sustained and systematic
plunder, for a parallel with which we must go back to the times of the
Medici and the oligarchy they reared above the fabric of the
Florentine republic.
But the rule of thieves, corruptionists, and "machine" men, which must
be acknowledged as nearly universal in the United States, a rule which
makes it impossible for the people to select their own candidates for
office, and usually dictates the elections, is strangely the price the
public pays for social and economic freedom. It was the intent of the
founders that the people should control their own government. The
founders made it as nearly a pure democracy as they dared. The
charters of American cities and the constitutions of the states reveal
long lists of elective offices. The statutes define strictly the
duties of officials; their terms are made short, and through the
multitude of offices, important and petty, it is clear that one
purpose runs to make each directly answerable to the voters. In every
quadrennial cycle the voters of New York City engage in the election
of over five hundred incumbents of offices, state and municipal.
Tickets with candidates for thirty offices in a single election are of
normal length, and between the rival candidates on four or five such
tickets each voter is expected intelligently to make his selection. If
he makes it intelligently, the officials elected will be fit; if he
understands their duties, and can spare time to watch their conduct
while he observes the behavior of several score other officials whose
terms have not yet expired, he can punish those who are unfaithful,
and reward those who show themselves worthy of public trust. But to
carry on an efficient government in this way, most of the voters would
have to leave their private pursuits, abandon the opportunities of a
great and rich country, and give their minds chiefly to the complex
administrations of all the public offices. Will they do it? Can they?
The voters, the least and most intelligent of them, all know that it
is impracticable to leave their private pursuits, to which they devote
time and energy unsparingly, and attend in this way to the government.
The very method the people have provided to secure the offices under
their direct control defeats its purpose by the amount of work and
study it entails. No owner of a large business establishment would
pretend that he could judge the qualifications of _all_ his employees
and know their work, yet this ability to assure good service in the
great business establishment of government, is presumed in every
voter. The presumption is as distinguished for its foolishness as for
its age. It has not been well founded in a century, during which time
it has been repeatedly proved false. Most elections go by default.
Excepting in the cases of a few conspicuous candidates, about whom the
public can make itself informed, and in small communities where
everyone knows his neighbor and the men in petty offices, the
electorate obeys mechanically the dictates of political leaders.
The notion of having most offices elective, originated, of course, in
the practice of the old New England town meetings. But as the towns
grew into cities, and these increased in population, the public works
expanded, public interests and activities became complex, and the
number of offices and instruments of government was multiplied, each
with its peculiar responsibilities. The private concerns of the
voters, likewise, acquired a complexity that made extra demands on
their attention, and the trades and professions became specialized.
The people could no longer rule themselves by any method resembling
that of the town meeting. As they developed their unexampled
opportunities, their eyes were diverted from the multitude of public
offices, and the plunderers came in.
The politicians were devoted. They dedicated the time the voters could
not spare to holding together the complicated public machinery. The
people could not very well go to the primaries; that should be the
business of the bosses, their bread and butter. They do their work at
least zealously. They are called traitors and plunderers, many hate
them, but perforce everybody tolerates them, and the states and cities
under the present system cannot do without them. Their low
organizations, their dives and groggeries, their gangs of "floaters"
and intimidators of voters, their levyings of tribute, their control
of men in high places, their sales of power and patronage, and their
gigantic thefts and corruption show only in its perverse working that
fierce individualistic spirit which is in freer play here and now
among all ranks of men, and in all pursuits, than elsewhere in the
world during the course of human history.
To say that the influence of such men, self-constituted governors of
the public for their own private interest, has been pernicious beyond
their immediate stealings and "honest graft," would be saying too
little. The people in their local governments, which are closer to
their lives and in the aggregate more important than the national
government, have not had the equal protection of the laws. Under the
bosses, legislatures were for sale, and sold. The corporations got
their public franchises by bribery. Vast insurance funds were juggled
in speculation. The necessaries of life were monopolized. Wholesale
adulteration of foods and medicines was permitted. Refrigerated meats
were kept for higher prices until ptomaines were produced. Unsafe
buildings were erected. The boss, in whose power was the enforcement
of laws, could instruct the aldermen or the legislators not to
appropriate money for their enforcement. He could bargain for the
passage of unwise or oppressive statutes, and he could instruct
judges, appointed to their candidacies by him, how to interpret them.
Had his influence extended only to the heads of lawless trusts, it
might have been less dangerous than it was and is. But it was
pervasive, it infected the common people. They saw the laws unequally
administered, and a general contempt for law was bred. Dr. Fritz
Reichmann, Superintendent of Weights and Measures at Albany, recently
calculated that petty tradesmen cheated New York's consumers with
short measures by at least $10,000,000 yearly. Raids upon the small
groceries and shops of Greater New York during a reform
administration, disclosed false weights and measures in the majority
of them. Here was evidence that the fabric of the body politic had
been warped and wrenched from the standards of individual rectitude.
Fortunately, signs are not lacking of what has been called a great
moral awakening. Taking advantage of the Federal system at Washington,
which is based upon the theory that the boss shall be selected by the
people and placed in the Presidency by them, appointing heads of all
the subordinate offices, the people have through the Presidents caused
the dissolution of great monopolies, and have made the business of
captaining industries by unfair means disreputable. The industrial
captains are no longer satisfied with their material gains. They want
the respect of their fellows. They are reforming their bad companies
or forsaking them, and are devoting their wealth to public ends. One
of the states has greatly aided in this change, and its example is
instructive. New Jersey, the "home of the trusts," notorious
throughout the world for its fathering of monopolies, is in all but
its legislature a "short ballot" state. The legislators are elected at
large by counties; the ballot is long in the thickly populated urban
counties, and the unfair representation of the rural counties unites
with the city bosses to control the law-making power, usually, also,
dictating the nominations for Governor. But the Governorship of New
Jersey is practically the only office to be filled by the people's
vote. Like the President at Washington the Governor appoints his own
cabinet and the rest of the state's executive and judicial officers.
New Jersey's pre-eminence as the home of the trusts was gained after
the nomination of Governor after Governor by the bosses.
In the Fall of 1910 New Jersey's bosses overreached themselves.
Ex-Senator James Smith and his nephew "Jim" Nugent, chairman of the
Democratic State Committee, saw an opportunity to defeat the
Republicans, who were in power, by the nomination of Woodrow Wilson,
then President of Princeton University. The New Jersey Democracy
adopted a platform which bore the impress of Mr. Wilson's style and
principles, and it gave to a great citizen a great opportunity for
service. He at once proclaimed his independence of his political
creators. He said that if elected Governor he would act as leader of
his party. He became, in fact, a leader among many able Governors in a
series of harmonious reforms for which the inspiration came from
within the States. But ex-Governor Pennypacker of Pennsylvania, who
was a creature of the boss system, accused Mr. Wilson of becoming the
"most arrogant boss of them all when he got to be Governor." James
Smith, shorn of his power, remarked:
New Jersey is unlike any other State in the Union. It elects very
few of its officials. Nearly all of them are named by the
Governor. He has about two hundred appointees, whose salaries
range from $2,000 to $15,000 a year. Among these appointees are
Judges, and other places that carry a great deal of influence
with them. The method gives the Governor a chance to build up a
system--which is something which I believe I was charged with
having, and of which I have recently been deprived.
No more significant utterance had been made in a century of American
politics. Governor Wilson rose immediately to the full stature of his
powers. He carried out his platform pledges, appealing to public
opinion in the passage through a hostile legislature of laws reforming
the conduct of elections, making employers liable for the injuries of
workmen, restricting campaign expenses and requiring that they be
published before elections, creating a public utilities commission,
regulating the cold storage of foods, permitting cities to adopt
governments by the short ballot, and preventing the grant of charters
to monopolistic companies. He drove through a body of reform
legislation such as had never been seen on New Jersey's statute books,
eclipsing the record of a generation. He defeated Boss Smith's
candidacy for re-election to the United States Senate, both because he
was a boss and because as one of the "Senators from Havemeyer" in
1894, Smith had betrayed the principles of the Wilson tariff bill and
President Cleveland's program for tariff reduction. Wilson became a
"veto Governor," disposing of 150 bills invading home rule, or
reckless of debts, which were dumped on him in the closing days of his
first legislative session, and which were carelessly drawn. And he
fulfilled his pledge to comply with the Civil Service rules in making
all appointments. His acceptance of the National Democratic nomination
to the Presidency in 1912 resulted in his becoming the head of a
"short ballot" nation.
President Wilson, like many of his predecessors at the National
capital, is vindicating the principle of the short ballot. The state
bosses have often invaded the Federal legislature and government, but
in comparison with their control of state machines they have never got
very far. The national party machines are made up of local fragments.
But their nominating machinery, which has such an inevitable and
disastrous influence on local elections, is concentrated upon the
three offices of President, Senator, and Representative, all of which
are of primary concern to the voters. The national candidates must
conform to higher standards than local candidates, because they are
few, conspicuous, and known of all their constituencies. In this fact
may be seen the controlling reason why, while the local governments
have everywhere been taken by the bosses from the hands of the people,
the Federal system is still theirs.
Despite the brilliant and recent example of New Jersey, handicapped as
she is by a long-ballot legislature organized on the bi-cameral
principle, and despite the continuing example of successive
administrations at Washington, it is nevertheless hard for the alarmed
electorates of the states to give up their old direct-election,
town-meeting ideals. The representative system has failed, they say.
They should see that it has failed because of its weight of machinery,
necessitated by the number of elective offices. But the tendency is
marked toward discarding the representative principle at the
primaries, and making it the duty of the people to nominate as well as
elect directly to the many offices. That adds to the work of each
voter, which is already, and confessedly, too great. Tear down
representative government; away with the system of electing delegates
at the primaries; let us nominate as well as vote for each candidate
ourselves--that is the principle of the direct primary bills which
have acquired the force of statutes in the western states, and are
being agitated in the east. It is but natural that the people should
be enraged at the manipulation of primaries by the politicians. To do
away with delegates and conventions is their first impulse. Certainly
the delegates elected, and the conventions held, are injurious to good
government. But the principle of representation by the best qualified
men of the electorate is not impaired. The establishment of the direct
primary makes necessary two campaigns instead of one, necessitates a
new equipment of political machinery, and doubles the distraction of
the people by the many offices they must fill. They do not yet see
that fewer and more responsible offices would bring abler candidates
into the field, that public opinion might be concentrated upon their
choosing by delegates in conventions, and on their intelligent
election at the polls.
The constitutional amendment submitted last Fall to the voters of
Ohio, providing fewer elective offices and centering in the Executive
the power of appointment to all lesser posts, was opposed on the
ground that it would take authority from the people. Governor Cox was
accused of trying to be king. He might well have pointed to
Washington, which has had its "kingship" since the foundation of the
republic. Governor Glynn of New York, who needed advice and counsel
after the impeached Sulzer left the capitol, held cabinet meetings
with the Secretary of State, the Attorney-General, Comptroller, State
Treasurer, and State Engineer and Surveyor. Unlike President Wilson's
cabinet, these men had been appointed, not by the Chief Executive, but
by the party machines, whose leaders foresaw that they would be voted
blindly into office. Officials whom the public did not know had the
spending of millions in party patronage. To them the new Governor was
constrained to look for support. In theory the Chief Executive, he had
to work through agents who might be hostile to his purposes. Through
such officers Mr. Murphy had extended his power throughout the state,
and his contractors were beneficiaries of the millions wasted upon
ill-constructed highways and canals.
How to dispense with the cumbersome political machinery that has
oppressed the local elections as the needs of the increasing
population became more complex, is a chief problem of these times. The
bosses have, indeed, prepared the way for its solution. It is
necessary for the people to recognize that the bosses' unofficial work
should be placed in the hands of responsible executive officials, and
thus changed from its private ends to public uses. The unskilled
committees of citizens formed during times of public agitation and
revolt may occasionally defeat the machines of more skilled
politicians, but their triumphs are short-lived, and the reform
administrations are often unsatisfactory. Public spirit abounds, it
grapples with enormous difficulties. The chief difficulty now is in a
lack of apprehension of the chief source of the public's troubles.
The smaller cities are leading in the fundamental reform. Nearly three
hundred of them have adopted the short ballot in charters that confer
government by commission. Each of the commissioners, usually five in
number, focuses public attention on his headship of a municipal
department, and the five make most or all of the appointments. The
states, likewise, are beginning to follow the lead of New Jersey. Ohio
has granted its cities the option of government by commissioners, and
has started to prune the list of state elective offices. California is
heading in the same direction, for it has made appointive its state
printer, three railroad commissioners, and clerk of the supreme court.
In New York it is sought to make the Governor's "cabinet" appointive,
as well as the state judiciary, which compares ill with the judiciary
of other states, such as New Jersey and Massachusetts, where the
judges are appointed by the Governor. The Supreme Court of the United
States, whose judges are appointed by the President for life, has won
the respect of high juridical authorities for its ability, probity,
and learning, in which it endures comparison with the greatest
European courts of last resort. A reduction of the legislatures into
single bodies has been advocated, notably by Governor Hodges of
Kansas. The legislatures with two chambers have not worked to the ends
of deliberation, but the contrary. The progress of measures has been
obscured in them until the closing days of their sessions, when there
are "jammed through" questionable acts that have never met the public
gaze until their enactment. New York has its legislative members
apportioned by districts, which, if reduced to fifty for a single
chamber, would be approved by advocates of the short ballot.
Deliberation might then be had by requiring a certain interval of time
between introduction of bills and their final passage, after revision
by skilled drafters. The county governments, also, need overhauling,
relegating the sheriffs, county clerks, registers, surrogates, and
district attorneys to the appointive lists. As for the cities, the
tendency is to fix responsibility in the Mayor or a commission.
The multiplied elective offices have come by evolution. As the needs
of the body politic increased more of them were created, with
developed and specialized functions. They were made elective because
the people were jealous of their own control, anxious to select their
representatives, and to make them responsive to their will. The people
are now more eager and persistent in their purpose of having a really
representative government than at any previous time in the national
history. They occasionally seize control of their complex machinery,
and for a time succeed in running it. But they are beginning to see
that the levers they throw must be fewer, though more powerful.
Gradually, by the reluctant assent of legislatures submitting to the
force of public opinion well led, or more rapidly and comprehensively
in constitutional conventions guided by the enlightened and patriotic
wills of public-spirited revisers, the change to a government of a few
elected executives with large appointive powers will be wrought. The
unchartered freedom of the private oligarchies will yield to the
restraints imposed by the people through their instructed heads.
OUR TOBACCO: ITS COST
A TENTATIVE BALANCE SHEET
The erudite Dr. Burton in his _Anatomy of Melancholy_ refers to the
plant nicotiana as "divine, rare, superexcellent tobacco which goes
far beyond all the panaceas, potable gold, and philosophers' stones."
It is the purpose of this article to study the social cost and the
social advantage of this divine commodity in the United States, for
the purpose of framing a rough and necessarily incomplete balance
sheet, which will bring into juxtaposition the credit and the debit
items. Such a balance sheet can obviously not aspire to accuracy in
every detail. Many items cannot be expressed in figures at all. For
those which can be translated into dollars and cents we cannot always
get perfectly reliable statistics. In many cases we must resort to
estimates. Fortunately the most important data are those for which the
figures are most trustworthy, and, as regards the others, it will not
be altogether fruitless to enumerate them, even though we may not be
able to give their value in legal tender.
_Dr._
1. The importance of tobacco in our national budget is shown by the
latest census figures, according to which it ranks eleventh among the
industries of the country, with respect to the value of the product.
Our manufactured tobacco was worth at the factory in 1909,
$416,695,000. It thus outranked bread and other bakery products,
women's clothing, copper, malt liquors, automobiles, petroleum, and
distilled liquors. It was but about a third less important than
manufactures of cotton. Its value was more than twice as great as that
of distilled liquors.[3] These figures do not, of course, tell us how
much the people now spend on tobacco. They represent the value of the
product at the factory four years ago. They do not include such items
as transportation, middlemen's profit, advertising, etc., which enter
into the retail price. Nor do they include the large amount spent upon
imported tobacco.
[Footnote 3: Abstract of 13th Census, p. 442.]
A careful statistician, Professor William B. Bailey, of Yale,
published, nearly two years ago, some figures showing that the people
of the United States spent at that time in a single year about
$1,100,000,000 on tobacco. As the receipts from the internal revenue
tax on tobacco have increased by about fourteen per cent. in the last
two years, it seems fair to assume that the general consumption has
increased by this amount. Fourteen per cent. of $1,100,000,000 would
be $154,000,000. It seems, therefore, conservative to state that at
the present time the people are spending at least $1,200,000,000 for
the pleasure of smoking and chewing. As a check upon these figures,
the author has made two independent estimates each by a different
process, and their results confirm the figures given above. It should
be noted, moreover, that this estimate applies only to the direct
purchase of tobacco. It does not include the accessories of smoking,
such as matches, pipes, receptacles for holding tobacco, cuspidors,
etc. In the fiscal year 1911-12, we imported pipes and smokers'
articles valued at $1,478,000, in addition to what we produced at
home. The difficulty of securing estimates on these accessories is so
great that no attempt has been made to include them. If they could be
included, the amount which tobacco users spend for their particular
pleasure would undoubtedly foot up a great deal more than
$1,200,000,000 a year at the present time.
The significance of these figures can best be appreciated, if we
compare them with other items in our national budget. To put the
matter concretely, "tobacco takers" spend in a single year twice the
amount spent by the entire country on railroad travel[4] and about
three times the amount which it spends on its common school system;
they pay out annually about three times the entire cost of the Panama
Canal; they destroy directly about three times as much property as
was destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake. Their smokes and chews
cost them just about twice what it costs to maintain the government of
the United States, including the interest on the public debt. Our
smokers could in a year and a half pay off the entire bonded debt of
our states, cities, and counties, as it was in 1902, and in an
additional nine months the entire interest-bearing debt of the United
States, if they were willing to exercise the self-denial which was
exercised a few years ago by the Persian people.[5]
[Footnote 4: The gross passenger receipts with payments for excess
baggage, etc., in the fiscal year ending June 30, 1913, were
$666,554,927, omitting railroads whose operating expenses were
below $100,000. Provisional report of Interstate Commerce
Commission "For the Press."]
[Footnote 5: According to W. Morgan Shuster, the people of Persia
practically gave up smoking as a protest against the concession of
a tobacco monopoly to an English Company. See _The Strangling of
Persia_, p. xvii.]
Here are also a few comparisons with foreign countries. A well-known
international jurist not long ago put together, as an argument against
war, the figures showing the expenditure of the leading nations of the
world on their army and navy. The list included Germany, Russia,
France, Great Britain, and Japan. The figures for 1910 footed up
$1,217,000,000 or approximately the amount devoted to tobacco by the
people of the United States in a single year.[6] Our smokers impose
upon the resources of the country a burden larger than the war
indemnity which Germany exacted of France after a humiliating defeat
in 1871; they spend about six times what it costs the German Empire to
maintain its elaborate and comprehensive system of workingmen's
insurance.[7]
[Footnote 6: T. S. Woolsey, _Yale Review_, March, 1913.]
[Footnote 7: The total amount spent for all purposes under
insurance for sickness, accidents, invalidity and old age in
Germany was 804,000,000 Marks or less than $200,000,000 in 1910.
_Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich_, 1912, p. 372.]
2. The cost of smoking to the country is by no means limited to its
costs to the smoker. Chief among its indirect burdens is the
incineration of property other than tobacco leaves, and the
destruction of innocent lives which it exacts as its annual toll from
non-smokers. We have had some tragic illustrations of this in recent
years. The Triangle shirtwaist fire in New York City in 1910 not only
burned up valuable property but caused a cruel loss of life. Over one
hundred and forty workers were sacrificed in this case to a
cigarette.
In the winter of 1912 occurred the destruction of the Equitable
Building, "caused by the careless tossing of a match into a waste
paper basket in the Savarin restaurant which occupied quarters in the
basement. This match had doubtless been used to light a cigar or
cigarette."[8] The waste of time caused by this fire in addition to
the actual destruction of the structure must have been enormous, if
one thinks of the loss of the records of the great corporations which
occupied the building, and of the inconvenience and delays suffered by
stockholders and policy holders and other persons who had business
relations with them. The fire which destroyed a part of the state
capitol at Albany, including a vast number of books and manuscripts,
was in all probability caused by a smoker, though the evidence is not
quite as conclusive as in the case of the Triangle shirtwaist factory
and the Equitable Building. Powell Evans says regarding this fire:
"The financial loss is $6,000,000. The loss of documents and records
is priceless." And yet to estimate the total social loss we should add
to the pecuniary value of the building and its contents, the waste of
time and labor inflicted upon a large number of innocent students who
desired to use the library, but were unable to do so. All of the
readers of the summary of legislation, e. g., were seriously
embarrassed, since this fire delayed the issue of this publication by
a couple of years.
[Footnote 8: Report of Fire Department of the City of New York for
1912, p. 13.]
These cases are referred to, because they were peculiarly dramatic and
are still fresh in the memory of newspaper readers. But it would be a
mistake to assume that they represent anything exceptional or
phenomenal, like an earthquake or a tornado. Smoking is a chronic and
regular cause of fires, perfectly familiar to those whose profession
requires them to risk their lives in fighting them, a cause as
susceptible of statistical treatment as the mortality from
tuberculosis or typhoid. Unfortunately our statistics on this subject
are very meagre, and efforts to secure figures from insurance men, who
would be expected to have a direct interest in ascertaining the facts,
have been surprisingly discouraging. Through the prompt courtesy of
the officials concerned, however, the reports of several state fire
marshals and of the fire commissioners of several large cities have
been secured, and are summarized below.
These statistics make no claim to completeness. In the nature of
things, the causes of many fires cannot be ascertained, and, even
where they are stated in a printed report, they are not always easy to
interpret. For the particular subject under discussion it is
especially hard to know what percentage of the fires caused by
carelessness with matches should be charged to smokers. The common use
of electric lights in cities, as well as of permanent fires for
cooking and heating, makes it altogether reasonable to suppose that a
very large percentage of the matches used serve the purposes of
smokers. Observation of the habits of smokers indicates that a still
larger percentage of fires caused by the careless use of matches is
attributable to them. To avoid exaggeration, however, it has been
thought best not to assume that all of the fires caused by
carelessness with matches should be charged to smokers. Hence two
columns are printed, one showing the fires due to matches (exclusive
of matches in the hands of children and matches supposed to be ignited
by rats or mice), the other showing the fires which are caused
directly by cigars, cigarette stumps, smoking in bed, etc. The column
giving the total number of fires for which causes are assigned is made
by deducting from the total number of fire alarms the cases of false
alarms, double alarms, etc., and the cases in which the cause was
either not ascertained, or so vaguely stated as to be meaningless.
CAUSES OF FIRES AS GIVEN IN LATEST REPORTS
_Percentage _Percentage
_Total Fires due to due to
_City or State_ accounted for_ tobacco_ matches_ _Total_
New York City 10,330 12.3 15.7 28
New York State
(Outside of Greater
New York) 5,599 5.2 8.8 14.0
Philadelphia 2,784 5.0 25.5 30.5
Boston 3,443 15.6[9]
Newark 1,108 9.8 20.8 30.6
New Haven 681 7.9 5.6 13.5
[Footnote 9: Includes careless use of matches and pipe, cigar,
cigarette. In addition the report enumerates 5% as caused by
matches, careless use of, and set by rats.]
It would be futile with our present knowledge to try to construct any
general average showing what percentage of fires in the country at
large can fairly be charged to smokers. In some of the western states
and cities in particular, the records are obviously incomplete as in
the report of the state fire marshal of Illinois, which gives less
than half as many fires for the city of Chicago during the year 1912
as were reported by the city fire marshal for the same period. And it
is only fair to say that in some of these western sections of the
country the percentage is much smaller than in the cities given above.
One fact is, however, incontestable, and that is that smokers are
recognized in all of the reports received as at least one of the
important causes of fires and are sometimes, as in New York City, the
most important single cause. This is clearly shown in the following
extract from the report of the fire department for the year 1912:
PRINCIPAL CAUSES OF FIRE
Matches, carelessness with 1,629
Cigars, cigarettes, etc., carelessness with 1,273
Gas, illuminating, carelessness in the use of
gaslights, ranges, radiators, etc. 849
Bonfires, brush fires, igniting fences, etc. 849
Stoves, stovepipes, furnaces, steampipes, heat
from 844
Chimney fires and sparks from chimneys 784
Children playing with matches or with fire 657
Candles, tapers, etc., carelessness with 500
Total number of fires 15,633
Not ascertained--suspicious 506
Not fully ascertained 4,797
-----
Total not ascertained causes 5,303
-------
Number of fires, causes ascertained 10,330
It also seems safe to say that in the large cities of the East, where
it may be assumed that the records are more accurate than in the
country at large, the percentages agree closely enough to justify the
estimate made by Fire Commissioner Johnson of New York City that 15 to
20% of our fires are caused by the careless throwing away of lighted
matches, cigars and cigarettes.[10]
[Footnote 10: American Industries, June, 1913, p. 21.]
The late chief of the fire department of New York, Mr. E. F. Croker,
writes: "I am certain that an examination of the fire losses in our
cities and towns, the loss of life as well as property, which has been
caused by the cigarette habit would be found appalling. The paper and
light tobacco used in cigarettes holds fire for some time, usually
until the entire remnant which has been thrown away has been consumed.
The majority of cigarette smokers are careless in the disposition of
these remnants, and usually throw or drop them wherever they may be."
So great is the menace of the smoker to property and life that New
York has passed a law forbidding smoking in factories. Under this law,
as interpreted by the corporation counsel, "the smoking of a pipe,
cigar or cigarette in or about a factory using or containing
inflammable material, is a public nuisance within the meaning of
Section 1530 of the Penal Law, which provides: 'a public nuisance is a
crime against the order and economy of the State,'" etc.[11]
[Footnote 11: Annual Report of N. Y. Fire Department for 1912, p.
13.]
The figures of fire losses given above apply to cities and dwellings.
But tobacco is also the cause of many forest fires. The state forester
of Massachusetts estimates that smokers are responsible for more
forest fires in that state than any other single agency. The number
which could be directly and positively traced to them in the single
year 1908 was 111, involving a loss of $33,000. But it is clear that
it is peculiarly difficult to trace the causes of forest fires on
account of the fact that smokers throw down their matches or cigarette
stubs, or cigar stubs, and pass on, quite unconscious of the damage
which follows in their wake. "That the careless smoker, who persists
in the habit when in woodlands or traversing the country during a dry
time, whether at work or play, is the greatest menace to future
forestry, it is believed there is little question."[12]
[Footnote 12: Sixth Annual Report of State Forester of
Massachusetts, 1909, p. 40.]
In Connecticut the state forester reports that, out of 116 fires, of
which the cause was ascertained in 1912, 25 were due to smokers.
Regarding the 58 fires attributed to "Fishermen," "Hunters,"
"Matches," and "Strollers," he says: "It is evident that most of
these fires were due to carelessness in handling matches, throwing
down cigar butts, etc., or leaving fires unextinguished."[13] The loss
of life due to smokers' fire must be enormous, but this is all that
can be safely said in the absence of reliable statistics.
[Footnote 13: Sixth Annual Report of State Forester of
Connecticut, 1912, pp. 461-2.]
The responsibility of the smoker is not limited to the destruction of
property and of life. If he causes a certain percentage of fires, he
must also be held accountable for his share of the cost of maintaining
our fire departments, of the injuries suffered by firemen in
performing their duties, of the cost of fire prevention, and of the
cost of insurance.
A careful report made by the United States Geological Survey a few
years ago estimated the annual loss and expense due to fires in the
United States in the year 1907, including fire protection and
insurance, as over $456,000,000. If smokers cause but 10% of this they
cost us $45,000,000 under this item alone. If they cause 20%, as they
obviously do in some places and as they are estimated to do by
Commissioner Johnson, the cost under this item is $90,000,000, and the
figures have undoubtedly increased since the government report was
made six years ago.
3. In studying the effect of any expenditure upon society, we must
take into account the diversion of social activity from one line of
production to another. The consumer is the ultimate director of
national production. If he elects to drink whiskey, instead of buying
bread for his children, this means that the country produces more
whiskey and less bread. If rich men elect to take large tracts of
arable land for game preserves, they prevent that land from being used
to raise food for the people. Likewise, if smokers elect to spend a
certain part of their income upon tobacco, they determine that a
certain area of land shall be devoted to the cultivation of this
plant, which would otherwise be devoted to the cultivation of
vegetables, or to dairy farming, or to raising whatever commodities
their money would otherwise have been spent for. The amount of land
thus preëmpted for the preserves of tobacco users in the United States
is very large. It amounted in 1912 to no less than 1,225,800 acres or
over one-sixth of the area devoted to raising vegetables. The value of
the tobacco product was $104,302,856, or one-quarter of the value of
all vegetables including potatoes. This must play no small part in
maintaining the high cost of living in the United States.[14] Tobacco
culture, moreover, tends, as is well known, to exhaust the soil and
thus to rob future generations, unless fertility is artificially
maintained at great expense.
[Footnote 14: See Abstract of the Census, p. 360.]
4. The demands made by smokers upon public conveyances increase
materially the capital required to equip railroads and other means of
communication. Smokers are never charged an extra fare for the
inconvenience and expense which they cause, although special cars or
parts of cars are provided for their use. On some of the smaller
railroads, where the traffic is light and a single car would be ample
to carry all of the passengers desiring to take a certain train, the
train regularly includes a smoking car, thus adding 100 per cent. to
the car accommodations required without adding to revenue. On the more
crowded trains and on roads with heavier traffic, the space wasted is
naturally not so great. But there is always some additional investment
required, for which the railroads get no return. There were 47,095
passenger cars in the United States in 1910. Assuming that only 10%
are for smokers, 4,709 cars are necessitated by the smoking habit;
assuming an average cost of $15,000 per car, over $71,000,000 of
capital, on which interest and depreciation have to be charged, must
be invested, in order to serve smokers. And yet smokers are treated in
our parlor cars as a privileged class, for, while ordinary travellers
are entitled to but one seat, smokers get two seats for one ticket.
Not infrequently a smoker will engage a seat in a parlor car and leave
it empty during the greater part of his trip. He uses the additional
seat provided gratuitously for him in the smoking section of the car,
or in a special smoking car, while a delicate woman or an invalid, who
fain would occupy and gladly pay for his seat, is debarred from doing
so.
5. The cost of keeping the world clean must be enormously enhanced by
smokers, though there is no political arithmetic which will give us
any figures on the subject. Anyone who will take but a casual glance
at the floors of railway stations, smoking cars, hotels, clubs, and
other places of public resort will realize how much disagreeable work
in the way of cleaning up the smoker forces society to do for him.
6. The effect of tobacco upon the health is an important item in the
cost of the habit to the country, though one which can obviously not
be expressed in figures. Dr. von Frankl Hochwart, the eminent nerve
specialist, has written an article dealing only with the nervous
diseases of smokers, and though this paper was read at a meeting of
neurologists and eight physicians took part in the discussion, not one
of them expressed dissent on any essential point.[15]
[Footnote 15: von Frankl Hochwart, in _Deutsche Zeitschrift für
Nervenheilkunde_, Vol. XLIII, pp. 360-387.]
This distinguished authority based his statements on the study of
1,500 of his own patients who were heavy nicotinists. After
eliminating all of the other poisons or diseases which might have
affected these cases, he reached the general conclusion that, among
smokers in general, about one-third complained of troubles which they
attributed to tobacco. These symptoms were particularly strong in the
case of heavy smokers, of whom half showed bad effects, lasting
sometimes for a considerable time. The troubles were especially
noticeable in the case of cigarette smokers. The most common
complaints were palpitation of the heart and general nervousness, but
a large number of other nervous affections were diagnosed as
specifically attributable to nicotine, such as loss of memory,
meningitis, aphasia, deafness, and dyspepsia.
Particularly striking was the unconscious evidence which was given to
the public at the time of the attack upon the life of Ex-President
Roosevelt in October, 1912, when his physicians used the following
expression in a public bulletin: "We find him in magnificent physical
condition due to his regular physical exercise, his habitual
abstinence from tobacco and liquor."
The manufacture of tobacco is generally regarded as an unhealthy
occupation, and many assert that it tends to produce miscarriage in
the case of women.[16] Some, like Sir Thomas Oliver, think the
evidence on this point not conclusive. But this eminent English
authority holds that tobacco is bad for the health of English soldiers
and speaks of it under the head of occupational diseases.[17] "Tobacco
especially," he says, "I believe to be a cause of heart trouble among
soldiers, though many authorities doubt it. I have known a man who was
anxious to be invalided out of the army produce the most marked
cardiac symptoms by the surreptitious use of strong cake tobacco."
"Smokers' cancer" is a term familiar to physicians. It is not
necessary to discuss at length the effects of tobacco on health in an
article dealing mainly with the economic and social phases of the
question. Suffice it to point out the fact of its harmfulness, leaving
to physicians the consideration of the mode and extent of nicotine
morbidity.[18]
[Footnote 16: See Appendix to Report of N. Y. Factory
Investigating Committee, pp. 492-513. See also von Frankl
Hochwart, l. c.]
[Footnote 17: _Dangerous Trades_, p. 794.]
[Footnote 18: See article by Dr. Charles B. Towns in _The
Century_, March, 1912.]
7. That tobacco is bad for the mental development of children is so
commonly conceded by teachers that the Boy Scouts organization has as
one of its main purposes the discouragement of the cigarette habit
among boys. General Sir Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy
Scouts, is said to have gone through the campaign in West Africa
without smoking and to have escaped fever when thousands of others
were attacked by it.[19] The attitude of the Boy Scouts is seen in the
following resolution, passed November, 1912, by a large conference of
scout commissioners held in New York City: "Resolved, That the local
councils of the Boy Scouts of America recommend that all scout masters
and other officials while in uniform or on duty refrain from the use
of tobacco in any form as being detrimental to the general aim of our
movement in the development of healthful habits of life in the growing
boy." In the state of Wisconsin, a movement has been inaugurated to
discountenance smoking on the part of all persons, teachers or pupils,
connected with the high schools.[20]
[Footnote 19: _School Physiology Journal_, April, 1909, p. 122.]
[Footnote 20: See files of _Wisconsin Journal of Education_.]
8. That tobacco causes a considerable loss of time must be obvious to
anyone who has observed the habits of the smoker. Not only is a
certain amount of every day devoted to this occupation, but personal
experience shows that this loss is not confined to those who smoke. It
is now a very common thing for people to smoke at committee meetings,
and it seems to the writer that the proceedings always become slower
and less brisk when the dope of tobacco smoke fills the air.
9. Tobacco often seems to have a distinct effect in weakening the
social sense. This is a statement which cannot be buttressed by
statistics, but in such a matter we can put a good deal of reliance on
the testimony of smokers whose prejudices would naturally be on the
other side. The editor of the _Outlook_ says: "Of late years men who
smoke without any regard to the comfort of others have so greatly
increased in numbers that it is not surprising that an organization
has been formed to limit smoking."[21] A more striking piece of
evidence, because obviously unconscious, is that which is given by a
well-known English author, Mr. G. K. Chesterton. A friend of his had
been dining with a man who was both a teetotaler and a non-smoker. In
relating the story he says: "It ended with the guest asking the host
if he might smoke, and receiving a stern reply in the negative. My
friend (I am happy to say) immediately lit his pipe and vanished in
smoke. Having sufficiently and properly perfumed all the curtains and
carpets with smoke, he purged the house of its smoker."[22] Note the
parenthesis "I am happy to say." Here is a well-known author who is
willing to publicly claim that it is proper and right for a guest to
knowingly and intentionally commit a nuisance in his host's house in
the matter of tobacco. "Senatorial courtesy," dominant as it is in the
matter of appointments to office, gives way before tobacco, and a
senator, whose health is seriously affected by tobacco smoke, has
appealed in vain to his fellow statesmen to spare him this infliction
in the executive sessions of the senate.
[Footnote 21: _Outlook_, Aug. 5, 1911.]
[Footnote 22: _Illustrated London News_, Nov. 2, 1912.]
The Triangle shirtwaist fire in New York made so slight an impression
on smokers, that, when in July, 1913, the inspectors visited the same
premises, they found the elevator boy smoking a cigarette and the
proprietor of a factory in the same building smoking a cigar, in
violation of a law passed in consequence of this very fire. It would
be a mistake to regard the New York factory owners who have recently
been fined for violating the anti-smoking law as peculiarly obtuse and
unimaginative. They are simply examples of the fact, familiar enough
to non-smokers, that the nicotine habit tends to make smokers
indifferent to the social effects of smoking. There is nothing
paradoxical in saying that a habit which is often associated with
sociability leads to anti-social conduct. The same is true of the
alcohol habit, the opium habit, and indeed of all similar habits. Even
the lady-like tea habit may have anti-social effects, if it so
dominates the life that a person will neglect an engagement or a duty
rather than lose the pleasure of the afternoon cup.
10. That tobacco affects the will power, and therefore national
efficiency, was recognized years ago by the genial "Autocrat of the
Breakfast Table," who said: "I think self-narcotization and
self-alcoholization are rather ignoble substitutes for undisturbed
self-consciousness and an unfettered self-control."[23] And again he
says, "I have seen the green leaf of early promise grown brown before
its time, under such nicotian regimen, and thought the umbered
meerschaum dearly bought at the cost of a brain enfeebled and a will
enslaved."[24]
[Footnote 23: _Over the Teacups_, p. 184.]
[Footnote 24: _Autocrat of the Breakfast Table_, p. 102.]
_Cr._
Having now considered what tobacco costs the United States let us
endeavor to ascertain what it does for the United States.
1. The first and most tangible item to be put on the credit side is
taxation. In the year 1911-12, the amount paid by tobacco users
towards the support of the government was as follows:
Internal revenue tax $70,590,151
Customs duties 25,572,000
-------------
$96,162,151
We may estimate the figures for 1912-13 as about $105,000,000. Thus it
is clear that the tobacco habit is a means by which the government is
able to secure a large contribution, albeit an involuntary one, from
the users.
2. The typical and commonly recognized advantage of tobacco is in the
satisfaction of a certain craving and the production of a certain
enjoyment which may be briefly designated by the medical term
euphoria. This gratification is apparently not an entirely simple
sensation, if we may credit the testimony of smokers, nor is it
uniform in all persons. Some claim that tobacco quiets the nerves and
therefore makes them more peaceably inclined, more ready to effect
compromises in a dispute, and altogether more sociable. Others on the
other hand, claim that it stimulates the mind and enables them to do
better intellectual work.
In all cases the effect is personal, not social, and the evidence with
regard to it is entirely subjective. Thus the claim that tobacco
stimulates a person's brain, rests upon his own testimony. There is no
reason to believe that the effect of nicotine on literary output can
be detected by others, and the many cases in which smokers have
deliberately given up the habit and yet continued to do their brain
work with no diminution of effectiveness, create a strong presumption
against attaching much weight to the subjective testimony on the
subject. Equally indefinite and even less susceptible of objective
measurement is the feeling of gratification or enjoyment which comes
from the taste of the weed, and the narcotic effect of the nicotine.
There is reason to suspect, however, that its comforting effects are
often exaggerated. In such a case we shall avoid a prejudiced
opinion, if we take the testimony of those whose interests favor the
use of tobacco. The following statement occurs in an advertisement
distributed by a tobacco company: "How have your cigars tasted for the
last two weeks? Haven't you a mouthful of crumbled cigar now? Do you
like a cigar that tasted like a dried cornstalk? Do you enjoy having a
cankered tongue and a tender throat?" "You are smoking cigars, aren't
you? Your throat tickles, your head is 'swimmy' in the morning, you
have to steady your hand to sign a check, your stenographer hates you
and your wife breathes a sigh of relief when you leave in the
morning." This is not from the tract of an anti-tobacco society, but
reflects unconsciously the opinion of the sellers of a certain brand
of Havana cigars regarding the effects produced by other brands, in
other words, by those which are in most common use by persons who
cannot afford the more expensive grades. Indeed, it seems very
probable that in many cases smoking is done, not because of the real
enjoyment which comes from the practice, but because it has become a
habit which the nicotinist cannot break himself of.
These facts point to the conclusion that while a part of what tobacco
users spend is contributed by them towards the support of the
government, and therefore should be credited to their account, the
only clear and definite advantage is their euphoria, the purely
subjective feeling of satisfaction which is indefinite and vague, and
which there is reason to think is often exaggerated.
Our balance sheet, based upon this discussion might thus be formulated
as follows:
MADAM NICOTINE IN ACCT. WITH THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES
_Dr._
1. To amount spent on tobacco
and accessories, $1,200,000,000
less taxes, say 105,000,000
----------------
$1,095,000,000
2. Fire loss, a. Towns, $45,000,000 to $90,000,000
" " b. Forests,
" " c. Loss of life in fires,
3. Preëmption of arable land, 1,200,000 acres,
4. Extra expense for R. R. equipment, hauling, etc.
5. Expense of keeping the country clean,
6. Morbidity,
7. Retarding education of children,
8. Waste of time,
9. Weakening of social sense,
10. Weakening of will power,
_Cr._
Smokers' Euphoria,
In this balance sheet the item _profit and loss_ is intentionally
omitted. To include it would give this study the form of an argument
instead of the simple statement of facts which it is intended to be.
Every reader must, therefore, decide for himself on which side of the
account the balance should be inserted, and doubtless many will decide
this question, as they decide so many other questions, according to
their personal inclinations. The smoker will be convinced that the
enjoyment which he gets out of tobacco is worth all that the habit
costs the community. The non-smoker, on the other hand, will feel that
the non-smoking majority pay altogether too much for the pleasure of
the smoking minority. Neither point of view interests the writer, and
he will have spent his time in vain, if he has not made it clear that
he has endeavored to construct a _social_ balance sheet. The only
question to decide, therefore, is whether the value of tobacco to
society is worth what society pays for it in direct expenditure as
well as in the destruction of property, lives, health, etc.
Certain other familiar topics are also omitted, not because they are
lacking in interest or importance, but because the author believes in
the maxim _ne sutor supra crepidam_ and, being an economist, has
limited himself to strictly economic and tangible topics. The field of
ethics, e. g., is not entered, though some of the social and economic
facts which are brought out may supply the moralist with useful data.
Nor is the subject of manners considered, though courtesy may be
regarded, in the words of an English statesman, as "a national asset."
History too, is untouched, though tobacco first led to the
introduction of slavery into Virginia and, therefore, has played an
important part in our political and social evolution.
The main purpose of the article is to give tobacco its proper
perspective. Many people, e. g., who are familiar with the
significance of our drink bill do not realize that the amount annually
spent on tobacco is about three-quarters of the amount spent on
intoxicating beverages of all kinds.[25] The national war budget is
always the subject of much criticism, and yet the appropriations for
our army and navy are less than one-fourth what we spend annually on
tobacco. For years the power of the government has been exerted to
keep down the railroad rates, until it is claimed that the roads
cannot pay the wages demanded by the men and give the public the
service which it expects without an increase in charges. And yet an
addition of but 25% to passenger fares would mean but about one-eighth
of what the tobacco users spend without a thought, and would afford
the railroads a welcome relief.
[Footnote 25: See _The American Grocer_, June 4, 1913, which
estimates the average cost of alcoholic beverages during the last
three years at $1,630,187,252.]
In estimating any social burden, account must be taken not only of its
magnitude in a single year, but also of its persistency. One
peculiarity of the tobacco habit is that, while it is often difficult
to acquire, it is still more difficult to shake off. Indeed, in most
cases the will is as much bound as if the smoker had signed, sealed,
and delivered a mortgage on his own personality. This is well
understood by the tobacco trust, which is giving away cigarettes to
the people of China in the confidence that, once the habit has been
acquired, the trust can collect its annual tribute, almost as surely
as if it had conquered the country in war. Thus, it is not unfair to
capitalize the annual expenditure on tobacco and to say that our
country carries a direct interest charge of some $1,200,000,000 on a
social mortgage, of which about $105,000,000 is in favor of the
treasury, the balance in favor of the tobacco interests, in addition
to the heavy personal and social burdens specified in our balance
sheet. The direct charge alone represents the interest at 5% on
$24,000,000,000 or over twenty-four times the interest-bearing public
debt of the United States. No wonder the tobacco dealers are happy.
And no wonder that shrewd old Dr. Burton, after saying what he could
in favor of tobacco, in the words quoted at the beginning of this
article, adds in conclusion: "A good vomit, I confess, a virtuous
herb, if it be well qualified, opportunely taken, and medicinally
used; but as it is commonly abused by most men, which take it as
tinkers do ale, 'tis a plague, a mischief, a violent purger of goods,
lands, health, hellish, devilish and damned tobacco, the ruin and
overthrow of body and soul."
OUR ALCOHOL: ITS USE
It has long been more or less proverbial that Americans cannot drink
without getting drunk; and yet the Americans are not counted an
intemperate people, because probably a smaller proportion of them
drink than of any other great nation. And it may not be altogether
fanciful to suggest that it is also because the word intemperate is
not applied to the absence of temperance in cases where people do not
drink at all. And yet, in etymology and common sense, a man on the
negative side of a temperate use of alcohol is as intemperate as a man
on the positive side.
Those who deny that any use of alcohol is desirable run counter to the
vast preponderance of all recorded opinion and sentiment--even as
eloquently expressed in poetry and song. They may nevertheless be
right, as were those who, not so long ago, were in the minority
regarding war. But this minority opposed a fact unescapable in the
then condition of human nature; and the present minority regarding
alcohol are opposing a fact unescapable in the present condition of
human nature. Whatever may be best for the future, it is undeniable
that at the present time men will drink alcohol, and the only
practical questions concern the circumstances most apt to make their
drinking of it innocuous, and even beneficial, if there is any warrant
for the widespread and time-honored opinion that, like every other
thing claimed to be good, alcohol is good only when used under certain
circumstances and in certain measure.
The temperance of the continental peoples, with their light wines, is
a commonplace. The English native supply of alcoholic beverages is
more like ours, and the climatic conditions more, on the whole, like
those of our most thickly populated regions. Probably a much larger
proportion of the English people "drink" than of our people, and they
probably do it with results better, or at worst, less disastrous than
those to such of our people as do it at all. A contrary impression,
however, is widespread in consequence of confusing England with
Scotland. But the conditions and the results are very different.
So are those of England as compared with ours, and it may be well to
compare the mood and manner of their drinking with ours. Society must
always frown upon the morose and solitary drinker--the man who drinks
merely for the purpose of injecting alcohol into his system. Drinking
should be regarded only as a means, not as an end. It is not good in
and for itself; it is good only as an aid toward loftier things. The
great virtue of drinking, granting it virtue, is that it may ease the
perilous and delicate ascent to human intercourse, or, to change the
metaphor, alcohol is the best of social lubricants. Other things
equal, it is easier to get acquainted with a man who does not scorn
the temperate wine, than with one who does. With the latter, a ready
element of mutuality is absent, and you have to beat about for some
simple and casual means of give and take. But an incidental
compotation, though it is accused, not unjustly, of being dangerous to
the weak, to the normal and preponderant proportion of humanity,
serves as a letter of introduction; and "What will you have?" is but
the first question in that mystic catechism which may lead to "What
gifts of sympathy and kindliness may we exchange?"
The justification for drinking of course asserts itself most clearly
at home around the hospitable board, or in the comfortable corner of
the club, where conversation is paramount, and an occasional sip
serves merely as a comma or semi-colon in the talk. Under such ideal
conditions, wine eases the fluency of conversation, brightens the wit,
humanizes the humor, and mystically charms away that native diffidence
which is a bar to confidence and sympathy. One does not readily deal
lies to one's host at dinner over a glass of wine; and our little
shifts and poses, our false evasions and our falser modesties, melt
away to the limbo of things forgotten when we exchange a friendly
high-ball at the club. But unfortunately a very small proportion of
the whole community can afford good wine at dinner, and hardly a
larger number can enjoy the amenities of a club. For social drinking
the vast majority of men must frequent the public bars, and adventure
on a chat with whoever is about. It follows that the atmosphere of the
public bars must exert an inevitable influence over most of the men
who drink at all. A man is moulded by the clubs that he frequents; the
public bar is the only available club for the small tradesman and the
manual laborer, the homeless and the friendless and the poor; and the
great saloon-frequenting class must necessarily become inoculated with
the social tone of the saloons that they frequent. If one reeks with
foul language, its patrons will become imbued with the habit of
profanity; but if its atmosphere be genial and genteel, its patrons
will maintain, or else adopt, the amenities of more graceful
intercourse. The social influence of the public bar is subtle and
insinuating in its effect upon the individual and unavoidable in its
effect upon the whole community; it may be an influence for evil or
for good; it may even ultimately save or damn a nation. There arises
from this circumstance a weighty problem, which demands more careful
consideration from our sociologists than it has yet received.
The proposition, simply stated, is just this: Whatever serves to lift
the tone of social drinking serves strongly to refine the nation; and
whatever tends to debase the tone of drinking in saloons and
public-houses tends to degrade the social atmosphere of the community
at large. It follows that one of the easiest and most effective ways
to clean up the slums of any of our cities would be to exercise a
sympathetic and paternal supervision over their saloons. Some such
idea as this was in the mind of the late Bishop Potter of New York
when he inaugurated the so-called Subway Tavern.
At the present time the average American saloon, particularly in our
southern and middle western states, is a vile place, and exerts a
pernicious influence over the largest class of the community. As a
result, a strong movement has been instituted to abolish the saloon.
The states that have adopted prohibition have done it not so much with
the idea that social drinking in itself is bad, as with the idea that
the average saloon is bad, and that prohibition is the only means of
undermining the influence of the average saloon. But might it not be
wiser to realize that the saloon might be made an instrument for good,
and not for evil, if, instead of being abolished, it should be
tactfully reformed? A decent and respectable saloon may radiate
decency and respectability throughout its neighborhood; and men who
learn to drink genially and temperately with their fellows are not
likely to descend to vulgar rowdyism in other ways of intercourse, or,
still worse, to "booze" at home. After hours, many, probably most,
workingmen will drink; we surely have no human right to decree that
they shall not; but we may exercise the human grace of helping them to
drink socially and decently instead of alone and vilely. At present
the rudeness of our average saloon spreads like a contagious disease
to the homes of all the men who breathe its evil air. If we could make
our saloons less vulgar and more clubable, if we could lift the tone
of public drinking among our less fortunate classes, we should spread
abroad a sense of the amenities, a wholesome social feeling, and a
glimmer of the finer graces of gentility.
There is much virtue in this "if"; and it must not be supposed that
the condition it suggests is unattainable except in the idle dreams of
an idealist. We have before us an example of precisely what we need,
in the average English public-house. The world-engirdling empery of
England is vested in the wholesomeness and sturdiness of her middle
and lower classes; and if you need evidence to convince you that
England is still dauntless and undefeatable among the nations, you
have only to observe these classes in their clubs,--the ordinary
English public taverns. In Salisbury, for instance, there is a
venerable hostelry that is called the "Haunch of Venison." I do not
hesitate to advertise it by its actual name; for it deserves and
demands a visit from every American whose interest in the solitary
contemplation of cathedral architecture has not made him forget that
man is, first of all, a social being. If he will proceed almost any
evening to the tiny smoking-room upon the second floor (ducking his
head beneath the mediæval rafters if he be above the middle height),
and will join casually in the conversation of the company he meets
there, he will discover something about the social possibilities of
the public tavern that he has never learned at home. The company
consists of small tradesmen of the town who have bolted up their
shutters and gathered for a genial glass or two of "bitter" before
resigning to the night. The talk deals earnestly with politics;
protection and free trade are weighed logically one against the other,
the measures of Mr. Lloyd-George are discussed in the spirit more of
the economist than of the partisan, the German menace is given its
meed of attention, and the boy scout movement is explained to the
visitor from overseas. A round of drinks is ordered quietly; and the
American is asked about the tariff and the growth of monopolies in his
own country, the rate of wages and the cost of living, and the
policies of Mr. Roosevelt. Then the visitor assumes the part of host,
and shifts the talk to English architecture, touching upon old houses
in the neighborhood, the timber rafters of the room in which the
company is gathered, the excavations at Old Sarum, the mood of
Stonehenge underneath the setting sun, and the high-aspiring
composition of the great cathedral. The proprietor of the tavern has
looked in, spoken to nearly everybody by name, and offered another
round of drinks with the compliments of the house. His charming wife
joins the talk without embarrassment to anyone, and becomes a sort of
sister to the company. So the evening proceeds, until at the closing
hour of eleven the company disperses with hand-shakings and good
wishes for the night.
And remember that this is a public-house, in the market-place of a
little city, open to anyone who wishes to spend two-pence for a glass
of ale. It is not a hotel; it is not aristocratic; you will not find
the name of it in Baedeker; it is just an ordinary bar that gleams a
welcome to the lax-jointed laborer in the street. And the "Haunch of
Venison" at Salisbury is not to be considered as unique, but is rather
to be taken as typical of the English public-house. In Canterbury, for
example, there is a bar-room, the name of which I dare not mention
lest I increase unduly the annual historic pilgrimage to that
cathedral capital; but I am willing to say for the benefit of future
American investigators that it may be entered either from the Parade
or from the little square adjacent to the ancient gate of the
cathedral precincts where the monument to Marlowe is erected. From the
main entrance, in the Parade, you proceed through a bar-room to a cosy
little smoking-room beyond. There is a goodly company of young clerks
and salesmen and minor officials of the town, interested in cricket,
the growing of hops, the suffragette movement, the state of business,
and the proposals to reform the House of Lords. But I have led you
thither mainly that you may meet the daughter of the proprietor, who
trips in with a tray of drinks and sandwiches. She is a glowing girl
of seventeen, exceedingly alive, pretty and witty, jolly and jocose.
She has rather an Italian look, with black eyes and black and billowy
hair, and is dressed in the deep blue that Raphael loved. She knows
everyone by name, except yourself, to whom she is speedily introduced.
She greets you with a deft remark and a delicious gurgle of young
laughter. When she leaves the room, it is as if Puck or Peter Pan had
darted away to tree-tops. You recall the harmony of her nicely
modulated speech and rich contralto laughter; and you are not
surprised when a young tradesman tells you that she has been studying
singing for eight months in London and is already a favorite at local
concerts. Again she romps into the little room, and the sense of life
enlarges. She has brought her mother this time, who wishes to meet the
newcomer to that nightly company; and at once you are reminded of
Whitman's saying about women,--"The young are beautiful: but the old
are more beautiful than the young." The mother reveals the same
abundance of essential energy, but softened, modulated, and matured.
Her face is a sweet memory of years that were: it has lost that
impudence of smiling and tossing the chin at what is yet to be. But
then the daughter laughs again and overwhelms you with the joy of
youth. And this is a place that you came upon by chance, seeking a
whiskey and soda!... How different, how wonderfully different, from
the casual American saloon!
The main reason for the difference in tone between the American saloon
and the English public-house is that the latter is hallowed by the
familiar presence of women. In England the male bartender is
practically unknown, and drinks are served almost universally by
bar-maids. It is part of the inalienable birthright of women that they
can always set the social tone of any business that they engage in,
and without effort can compel the men with whom they come in contact
to ascend or to descend to meet them on the level they have set. In
New York, for instance, the same man who is flippant with the
manicure-lady is respectful to the woman usher in the opera-house:
instinctively, and without conscious consideration, he meets any
business-woman in the mood that she expects of him. To the women and
not to the men is it granted to control the tone of any association
between the sexes: bad women can debase a business, good women can
uplift it, whereas the men with whom they are engaged would of
themselves be powerless to lower or to elevate its tone. The way in
which stenographers and shop-girls are treated depends on the
stenographers and shop-girls much more than on the men with whom their
occupation throws them. This, as everybody knows, is a law of human
nature. In England, custom has, for many generations, decreed that
women shall control the tone of social drinking in the public bars;
and it must be registered to the credit of the host of honorable women
who have served as bar-maids that the tone of public drinking in
England has been lifted to a level that has not been attained in any
other country.
Of English bars and bar-maids I think that I may speak with a certain
authority. In the course of four visits to England during the last
decade, I have traveled over nearly all the country; I have slept in
every county in England except two, and wandered from town to town
with an insatiable interest; and since I care more about people than
about any other feature of the panoramic world, I have rarely in my
rambles let slip an opportunity to pass an evening in a public-house
and listen to the chat. To attempt a similar experience in America
would be to discard it with disgust after three or four wasted
evenings; but in the bars of England there is nearly always someone
who is worthy to repay the task of seeking.
Of English bar-maids as a class I may say with certainty that they are
almost uniformly chaste and--in the literal sense of that reverent
adjective--respectable. Most of them are mature women,--the average
age, I should say, being rather above thirty than below it; many of
them are married; they have seen much of men and know how to keep all
sorts and conditions in their proper places and in the proper mood.
Yet they exercise this high command without any affectation of
austerity. They are easily affable and pleasantly familiar with all
who come. Many of them are endowed with a genuine and contagious
jollity,--a merriment that is not assumed but which has arisen
naturally from continuous converse with men of many humors. Their
business introduces them to all the world; you step in from the street
and know them; they talk with you frankly from the start, without any
preliminary dodges and retreatings: and yet no one abuses their easy
familiarity. They are addressed with deference as "Miss"; and the
casual loiterer from the street takes leave of them as if he were
saying good-evening to a hostess. In my entire experience of English
bars--setting aside only a few in the tragic East End of London--I
have never heard an obscene story told, and I have never heard the
name of God taken in vain. The conversation is necessarily refined,
out of respect for the women who stand within hearing. Furthermore,
because the bars are tended by women, there is an accepted rule in
every public-house of any standing that no drink shall ever be served
to any customer who is at all intoxicated. A drunkard who would resent
a refusal from a man accepts it without rudeness from a girl; and the
result of this system is that (barring the slums, for whose
degradation alcohol is not alone responsible) you can ramble from one
end of England to the other without finding a drunken person in a
single bar.
But you will notice at once a tragic change if you cross the border
into Scotland. In Scotland, bars are tended by men, as in America; and
their social tone is immeasurably lower than that which is maintained
in England. They are noisy and riotous; the common conversation is
heavily underscored with profanities and obscenities; and drunkenness
is so prevalent as to seem an habitual detail. Of course, other causes
than the absence of bar-maids contribute to the foulness of the
Scottish public-houses. The austere and irksome law which makes it
impossible to buy a drink after ten o'clock on any week-day evening
and shuts up every bar in the country throughout the whole of the
unbearable Scottish Sunday leads, naturally, to excessive and sodden
drinking. It is tragic, on a Saturday evening in Edinburgh or Glasgow,
to watch the hampered laborer and tradesman swilling liquor against
the ticking of the clock in a rash attempt to swallow enough before
the terminal hour of ten to carry them through the intolerable
Sabbath. This is a dark picture, for which the fanatical austerity of
the Scottish law must, in the main, be held responsible. It would be
impossible to imagine English bar-maids in such a setting; and yet one
cannot help wondering whether they might not alleviate that sodden
atmosphere if they could be introduced in Scotland.
And similarly, one wonders what would happen if we should introduce
them in America. The tone of our saloons is now prevailingly so low
that it seems likely that if bar-maids were employed sporadically here
and there they would be met with insults and be obliged either to
resign or else to debase themselves. To our shame it must be said
that, as a nation, we do not know how to treat women when we encounter
them suddenly in what is to us an unaccustomed situation. The English,
because they are many centuries older than we are, evince a
traditional respect for women of all classes and in all circumstances
that to us is not native and instinctive. The waitresses in our cheap
restaurants are usually vulgar and we treat them vulgarly. It would
doubtless take us a long time to educate ourselves up to bar-maids of
the English type; but if we could successfully adopt the English
custom, we should go far toward solving the problem of the American
saloon, and should relegate the question of prohibition to the
lumber-room of issues that are dead.
Thus far I have spoken only of the ordinary run of English
bar-maids,--the affable and wholesome type that you may encounter
everywhere. But those who linger in the memory are the exceptional
among them, who have made the bar-rooms over which they have presided
memorable among the really worthy places which one has discovered in
the world. The English bar-maid of the better class creates an
atmosphere of hospitable homeliness--in the historic sense of that
sweetly connotative word--which is a boon to everyone who comes within
its influence. You have arrived in a certain city after dark, a
stranger in a strange environment; you have wandered about the
moon-silvered solitude of the hushed cathedral close, wondering at a
majesty half glimpsed and half imagined; you have mingled with the
chattering multitude in the market-place, profoundly lonely among many
who knew and cared about each other; and at last, in a hospitable
bar-room, you meet without formality a woman who is glad to talk with
you and who mystically, for an easy half an hour, makes you feel at
home. How much of good may subtly be effected by a system that makes
the homeless feel at home I leave the reader to imagine. Surely
whatever soothes away the loneliness of the lonely may serve as a
specific against the darker moods and a preventive of vice and even
crime.
To the untraveled American, who knows only the saloons of his own
country, it may seem incredible that a common bar-room should ever
feel like home. But there is a passage in Ruskin which poetically
explains this possibility. In his second lecture in "Sesame and
Lilies," he has been saying that a true woman, wherever she goes,
carries with her the sense of home; and he adds, with a fine poetic
flourish:--
The stars only may be over her head; the glow-worm in the
night-cold grass may be the only fire at her foot: but home is
yet wherever she is; and for a noble woman it stretches far round
her, better than ceiled with cedar or painted with vermilion,
shedding its quiet light far, for those who else were homeless.
Even if Ruskin in this passage, as all too often in his writings, may
be accused of an excess of sentiment [one wonders, for instance, if
he has ever actually slept upon "the night-cold grass" and arisen
without rheumatism to write eloquent prose about it], we may yet
discern beneath his ecstasy of phrasing the existence of a solid and
indisputable truth. Merely to meet a woman who personifies the sense
of homeliness is to feel yourself at home.
And this comfortable sense of homeliness you may find in many an
English bar-maid. If you wish to investigate upon your own account,
you might try Bolland's Restaurant in Chester, or the Yates Wine
Cellar in Manchester, or the Nelson in Gloucester, or the Crown in
Salisbury, or--but I am not writing a guide-book to the bars of
England, and, besides, every traveler is likely to fare best if he is
left to his own devices. Of all the English bar-maids I have known,
one (as is but natural) recurs preeminent in my recollections. I think
that I shall tell you her name, because so many poems echo in it; but
I shall not tell you more precisely where she may be found than to say
that she is one of many who serve drinks in the bar of one of the
great hotels that are clustered near Trafalgar Square. I think it was
I who discovered Eileen; but I introduced her very soon to several of
my friends in London, and thereafter (forsaking the clubs to which we
had formerly reverted for a talk and a night-cap after the theatre) we
formed a habit of gathering at midnight to meet Eileen and to chat
amicably within the range of her most hospitable smile until the bar
closed at half past twelve. Assuredly, in that alien metropolis, she
made us feel at home; and we escaped out of the cacophonous
reverberation of the Strand into the quietude of her presence like men
who relax to slippered ease within the halo of a hearth. "She had a
weary little way with her that made you think of quiet, intimate
things,"--as one of us said at the outset of one of the many sonnets
she inspired. There is a sweet weariness that reminds you of
lullabying mothers and the drooping eyelids of little children
drifting into dreams; and this was, I think, the essence of her. Her
voice was like the soothing of a cool hand upon a tired brow. She was
very simple in her dark dress and dark hair; and there was something
maiden-motherly in her smile. You saw her most clearly when her frank
eyes looked directly at you and deepened with a gleam of gentleness,
and her lips parted tenderly to answer to the light within her eyes.
Her hand, when she gave it to you in good-night, was like a memory of
her voice; it had the same softness as of a whisper, it suggested the
same sense of insuperable peace. I grew to know her very well, and
could tell you her history if I would,--how she was brought up in the
country, one of many children; how, when her sisters married and she
did not (because the men who came were none of them the right one),
she had to earn her living and began as a bar-maid in a railway
station in the Midlands; how she came up to London and grew to be
(though this she won't admit) a light in her particular occupation; of
the long hours and the scanty leisure of her labor; of the
compensation in the occasional people who come in and make an hour
live with talk that is illumined and sincere, and in the occasional
half-holiday rambles with a married sister over Hampstead Heath; of
what is worth while in such a life and what is not; and of how it is
that the eyes, though weary, can still sincerely smile with that glow
as of a fireside, and the voice will evermore grow gentler through the
years.
But my purpose is merely to help you to estimate her effect on us, who
used to gather from the four quarters of London at the midnight hour
for the sense of being near her; and, more generally, to estimate the
effect of many women like Eileen, set in a position of publicity, upon
the community at large. To gather for a social glass in such an
atmosphere is to justify the best that poetry has claimed for the
fruit of the vine. As Browning's Andrea del Sarto stated,--"So such
things should be."
THE STORY OF A MICROBOPHOBIAC
There was once upon a time a man who underwent a severe and prolonged
attack of Microbophobia. You may not find the term in the
dictionaries, nor in the medical lexicons; but, as it is quite
possible that there are a variety of things in heaven and earth not
yet dreamt of in the lexicons, there is really no justification for
denying the existence of microbophobia on that ground. And as to the
name itself, there is hydrophobia, and photophobia, and
Anglophobia--so why not microbophobia?
Microbophobia is a disease of advanced civilization, of recent origin,
and infectious. Its victims are to be found among the married rather
than the unmarried, in the city rather than in the country, and among
the cultured rather than the uncultured. In a word, the disease rages
most in college and university communities, but is also pronounced in
high school, grade school, and kindergarten spheres of influence. As
all these, however, are in close connection with colleges and
universities, microbophobia may be said to belong to institutions of
higher learning.
Microbophobia rarely succeeds in engrafting itself onto healthy
organisms. No one in perfectly sound mental, physical, and spiritual
health need fear its attacks. Its host is almost always in a state of
depletion at the time of colonization, and the point of attack
invariably the _sensus communis_, an organ situated in that part of
the anatomy usually known as the cranial cavity.
Its symptoms--
But the history of the case shall tell you of the symptoms.
The subject was a professor. It seems that he had laid the foundations
of the disease in his college days by exposing himself to _bacillus
scientificus_, and contracting a case of _methoditis scientifica_,
again an ailment whose attack is directed at the _sensus communis_,
and whose ravages are greatest among the learned, especially those
whose work necessitates intimate contact with symbols, chemicals,
ancient manuscripts, and other odorous and dusty material. Its
victims usually betray their condition by rushing about insisting that
any and all the business of life is susceptible of the same orderly
disposition as the material of their laboratories.
This explains how it was so easy for microbophobia to get firm hold of
the professor in after days. After taking the degree of doctor of
philosophy, he was called to a university chair, where, being still in
a state of impaired vitality, he suffered from a recrudescence of
_methoditis_, which left him so weak that without resistance he fell a
prey to microbophobia in the very first year, the immediate cause of
infection being without doubt his association with various of his
faculty brethren who were in the school of medicine, or worked in the
bacteriological laboratory and lectured on sanitation, or served on
the university committee of hygiene. All of these men, he afterward
learned, were in various stages of the disease--though all considered
themselves in perfect health.
For one of the worst things about microbophobia is that the victim has
no suspicion of the real nature of his ailment; more than that, he
falls a prey to the strange hallucination that it is his environment,
and not himself, which is the seat of infection, and consequently will
not listen to diagnosis. Individuals have been known to advance in the
malady until the _sensus communis_ was all but absolutely gone,
without realizing the gravity of their condition.
The professor might have gone on for some time; for, though he was in
the grip of the disease, he had not yet begun to suffer, owing to a
good constitution inherited from sound progenitors who were not
university bred. But an event occurred which hastened the progress of
his malady. He married.
Now, marrying is ordinarily a good thing for the _sensus communis_.
Many sufferers of both sexes have found it a most efficacious remedy
for the ailments of that rather uncertain organ. But it so happened
that the professor's alliance was with a member of the Woman's Club,
who was also college bred, a possessor of the degree of Mistress of
Home Economics, and, unfortunately, already infected with
microbophobia, and visibly impaired in health. Some of his bachelor
friends had warned him that conditions in that part of town were
notorious, but he laughed at them, and said that a little fumigation
was the worst that could happen.
The gravest fears of the professor's friends, however, were soon
realized. They saw him begin to sink before their eyes. In his low
state of vitality, he was soon hopelessly in the clutches of the dread
malady. Even if he had not been vitally reduced, his case would have
been desperate, for his wife continued to expose herself week after
week at the club. And besides, she took several Health Journals, all
of which came from infected centers, and which not only she, but the
professor himself, handled with all the carelessness of immunes. The
professor read at first because he was amused, but it was not long
before he, as well as his wife, hovered with almost religious devotion
over the column headed Sanitas Sanitatum, by Doctor Septic Septington,
which he ought to have known was swarming with _bacillus
microbophobicus_.
The ravages of the disease in both of them were frightful to behold.
The professor's case developed with especial rapidity, so that in a
few months both were in the same stage.
Stage? Yes, the stages of this disease are very clearly marked. In the
first stage, you are attacked by a noticeable degree of thirst for
knowledge about microbes; you read and talk about them constantly, and
attend lectures on them at the university and the club.
This is a mild stage. You are for the most part amused, and only
occasionally entertain the strange hallucinations which afterward come
to possess you so thoroughly. Just to quiet your conscience, however,
you adopt a few precautions--such as the use of bottled spring water,
and the increase of your interest in the appearance and personal
habits of the dairyman. This stage is termed _microbophobia
intellectualis_. The professor and his wife early passed through it,
with no serious results.
The second stage is more grave. You insist on a certificate from your
dairyman, visit his barns, have the milk examined by your friend in
the university laboratory, and finally, to be absolutely sure,
pasteurize it. The drinking water you begin to filter and boil, you
withdraw your patronage from the Chinese laundryman because you have
heard of the dreadful way he sprinkles the linen, and you take an
active interest in the enforcement of the anti-salivation ordinance
and the encouragement of the bubble-cup campaign.
It is at this point that Dread, the most characteristic manifestation
of the malady, begins to assume really noticeable proportions. You
dread going out to dinner, for example, because you are afraid that
the water and milk on your friend's table will not be properly
sterilized. You don't like to abstain from both, and you don't like to
attract attention by taking a bottle of boiled water or milk with you.
The result is, that you avoid going out at all, and when you are
compelled to go, you take a double dose of microbicide. You dread the
effects of the public school system, with all its opportunities for
the distribution of microbes. Your dread extends even to the
communion, and so grows on you that you omit the sacrament because of
the common cup--or, if you are a Foot-washing Baptist, because of the
common basin. The second stage is denominated _microbophobia
alarmans_.
The professor and his wife were uncomfortable enough in this stage,
but in the third they really suffered, though of course with cheerful
resignation; for were they not enduring their hardships in the
interest of science and for the good of mankind? The third stage is
known to science as _microbophobia parentum_; in popular parlance, the
baby stage. Its symptoms are most pronounced in the female. The first
thing you do in this stage is to order Madame di Ana's Daily, "The
Mother-Maker," together with her two fine volumes on "The Mistakes of
Mothers," and "Microbes in the Home." You also join the Mothers' Club,
and take your husband to the open meetings. You make him cut off his
beard, because you have read how it looks under the microscope--and he
_will_ kiss the baby. You boil not only the drinking water, but the
water for the baby's bath, and the water you wash your hands in
before you take him up; and you insist on the sterilization of all the
baby's linen, and all the nurse's apparel. You are determined that the
child shall be brought up scientifically, and not be exposed to the
risks you ran in _your_ childhood. Having read that mothers are
subject to excitement, and that excitement is bad for the fountain
source of baby's sustenance, you substitute a bottle; and you use
pasteurized milk scientifically compounded with other ingredients
which nature forgot to employ in her chemistry; and warm it in a
sterilized glass jar, set in sterilized water in a sterilized pan in a
room which is disinfected twice a day, and you test it with a
sterilized thermometer. You keep on hand a bath of boiling water in
which you sterilize at frequent intervals all the usual
playthings--nipples, rubber rings, rattles, etc.; and you make due
provision for the little fingers which seem so bent on going into the
little mouth.
In this stage you also avoid shaking hands, never allow yourself to
touch a door knob barehanded, and leave off drawing books from the
library, determined to be neither a borrower nor a lender of books or
anything else; and, even though your church has deferred to scientific
suggestion and introduced individual communion cups, you still shrink
from the sacrament because the bread, too, is not individualized, and
you are not sure about the linen which covered it, or the silver which
contained the grape juice, or the person who picked the grapes, or the
feet by which the juice was trodden out.
The fourth stage is known as _microbophobic moscophobia_, which is the
pathological term describing the fear of flies as carriers of
infection. You get new screens, interrupt the housemaid every half
hour with orders to see whether there are more flies to be found,
cover the baby and yourself with netting when you nap, have a cement
pit made for the garbage can, and repaper or repaint your
interiors--that is, the interiors of your house--every six months. You
read, too, that mosquitoes carry yellow fever in the West Indies, and
malaria in Italy--distant places, indeed; but still, why shouldn't
mosquitoes fly across the sea and land and light on the baby, or
yourself? So you screen the household by day as well as by night, and
avoid evenings out and picnics in the shade.
In the latter part of this stage you also change your religion on
account of the communion service, have your letters disinfected, leave
off kissing the baby, steer to windward of rug-beaters and street
sweepers, hold your breath as you pass dogs and cats, eat nothing not
cooked, drink nothing not boiled, carry a bottle of microbicide in
your pocket, dream that the earth is full of microbes as the waters
cover the sea, and that the hand of every one of them is lifted
against you, and have cold sweats at night and cold feet by day. You
realize that you are uncomfortable, but the real cause of it never
occurs to you: you attribute your condition to the uncleanliness of
your environment, and to your willingness to sacrifice your own
comfort to the cause of scientific sanitation.
By this time, too, your sense of humor, never very robust, has
decayed, atrophied, and disappeared. Your fat, good-humored,
unscientific neighbor calls out from his back porch as you come out to
yours to get the milk bottle: "Dangerous stuff, that there! They say
they's forty-three million four hundred an' ninety-nine thousand two
hundred an' seventeen microbes in a half a drop of it"--and you don't
laugh, any more than you laugh when you advise your professor friend
to disinfect the contents of his pay envelope, and he replies, "Don't
worry--there's no microbe could ever live on my salary!"
In the fifth stage you begin to be physically as well as spiritually
uncomfortable. In the eloquent words of the old hymn, you are a prey
to "fightings without and fears within." What with the insufficiency
of your means to meet the demands of disinfection, and what with the
difficulty of getting properly prepared food even if you have the
money, and what with the continual strain of anxiety lest you
entertain a microbe unawares, you grow thin and nervous. Of course you
continue to lay it to microbes, and double your precautions--and worry
more, and starve more. If you are not rescued, you finally pass into
_delirium microbophobicum_, which is as much more awful than
_delirium tremens_ as microbes are smaller and more insidious and
wiser than serpents.
The professor and his wife entered upon the fifth stage, and were
alarmingly near the last extreme. If this were a subject for levity,
and not for high seriousness, I should be tempted to parody the
essayist on Man, and say:
Lo, the poor professor, whose untutored mind
Saw microbes in the clouds, and heard them in the wind.
But they were saved. One night the professor's wife dreamed that a
monster centipedal microbe slowly let himself down from the ceiling,
and enveloped her in his hundred long wriggling legs. She awoke
screaming, to find herself enmeshed in the mosquito bar.
The next day they called another doctor. Hitherto, their doctors
themselves had been infected, though neither they nor their patients
knew it. But this time they were more fortunate; Dr. Goodenough had
been attacked by the disease, had made a brilliant recovery, and
consequently was immune.
He listened to the history of their cases, gave them a thorough
examination, using his new instrument, the cranioscope--of course more
for the purpose of inspiring confidence in his patients than to find
out anything; for he well knew what ailed them.
"Don't be alarmed," he finally said. "You really _are_ in a bad state;
but I give you my word for it that you will recover. I find your
_sensus communis_ all but disappeared. A little more excitement like
that of last night, and you might have a hemorrhage--and there you
are! Now put yourself entirely in my hands, or I'll not answer for the
consequences."
He reached for his prescription blank, and after a few moments handed
them a bit of unintelligible writing--the sort that only doctors and
their druggist partners can interpret. As I happen to be in the
secret, I may tell you that the prescription called for three fluid
ounces of city water, not distilled, with two drops of aniline, a drop
of nux vomica, a lump of sugar, and a teaspoonful of whiskey, and
that the druggist charged them a dollar and seventy-five cents.
"Begin taking immediately," said the doctor impressively. "Take two
drops and a half in a half glass of boiled water every three hours
from six a. m. to nine p. m. And you must go into the country
to-morrow morning, and spend your whole vacation there.... Leave
orders for your magazines and journals of all kinds to be held here,
tell your friends they are to write you under no circumstances, and
don't dare to come back to town on any errand whatsoever. Cut loose
from everything! Delay is dangerous, and might be fatal."
The professor and his wife didn't dare to disobey. The doctor was a
vigorous and imposing personality, and he had terrified them. They
didn't know what a _sensus communis_ was, even though the professor
was a Latinist; the doctor had disguised the term by using the English
pronunciation, and imagination contributed the usual amount to the
impressiveness of his words.
So they packed up all their pasteurizers and sterilizers and
disinfectors and bottles and screens and other antiseptic
paraphernalia, and drove into the country to a farm fifteen miles away
from any car-line or railroad, where there was no telephone or other
connection with the scene of their unhappiness.
They hadn't got out of sight of the town before they began to feel
differently. No one but a college professor knows how big his
institution seems while he is within its precincts, and how small and
insignificant when he is out of sight of it. The tension left their
bodies and minds, and a balmy sense of repose and freedom succeeded.
But they felt a shock when, just as their carriage disappeared from
view over the hill on its return, they saw two dogs and a half dozen
cats on the porch of the farmhouse, noticed that the well was not more
than ninety feet from the pigpen, whereas all the journals said it
should be one hundred, and became sensible of the drowsy murmur of
swarms of flies about the kitchen door, attracted thither by a barrel
which was wide open--and smelled!
That was not all, however. Fortune seemed against them. It was bad
enough for themselves, though they could sterilize their drinking
water and pasteurize their milk, and exercise many other of their
wonted precautions; but when it came to the baby, they were almost
powerless. Watch him as they would, he was continually getting into
unhygienic predicaments of the most dreadful description. Before they
even entered the house, he had grasped one dog by the tail, and been
thrown down by the other, as a mere mark of welcome; and when he got
up, crying, in the instinctive effort to console himself of course he
resorted to the habit of sucking his fingers, and put into his mouth
two of those on the hand which had grasped the tail. The next moment,
too, he was licked all over the nose and mouth by the repentant dog
that had knocked him off his feet. Horrors!
And then the cats followed him into the house, and rubbed against his
legs and licked his fingers, while he gave little screams of delight
at the novel sensation. At supper, he toddled to the table in advance
of the rest, and before his mother realized his intentions, had an
unsterilized spoon in his mouth; and after supper he succeeded in
browbeating the baby of the house, who was a month or so younger, and
more timid than his experienced guest from the city, into giving up
his gum.
The professor and his wife were horrified, but helpless. He went on in
that way for a week. They simply could not keep track of him. He drank
out of the horse-trough, dabbled in the puddles, consorted with pigs
and chickens, shared his bread with the dogs and his milk with the
cats, picked up crumbs from the dining-room sweepings, looked upon
half rotten, muddy, and fly-specked apples found on the lawn as the
greatest of prizes, and reveled in delight with old scraps of rags and
hats and shoes which he, with the little country comrade under his
leadership, resurrected from the most unlikely and unsanitary places.
The frightened and powerless parents read up again on the periods of
incubation of all the microbes mentioned in the books. They could at
least be ready with plans to meet whatever came, and cope with it at
the earliest possible moment.
But it didn't come. At the end of two weeks nothing had happened. The
child slept well and ate all he could get, and was in the best of
spirits. At the end of three weeks he had gained four pounds. It was
in direct and flagrant violation of all reason and all science, and
thoroughly incomprehensible; but what could you do?
After much marvelling at the failure of science, however, they
concluded to make a virtue of what was plainly a necessity, and gave
the baby the freedom of the farm. And more than that; after a decent
period of worrying, they too began to tread the primrose path, and let
the little child lead them. They drank unsterilized milk and unboiled
water, threw all precaution to the winds, rough-and-tumbled with the
boys and dogs on the lawn, napped under the trees unprotected from
flies and mosquitoes, ate apples with the skins and all, and without
even washing them, went fishing in the creek a mile away up the marsh,
and when overcome by blazing thirst drank of the water in the stream,
played peg and got their mouths full of dirt, drew pictures for the
children on the slate and erased them in the old familiar way--and did
all the other reckless things they had done in their own childhood,
when the microbe had not yet made a stir in the world, when _delirium
tremens_ was still the worst example of pathological misfortune, and
nervous prostration had not yet spread to the masses.
When they returned to the city, clothed and in their right minds, they
brought with them the half emptied medicine bottle, and charged
smiling Dr. Goodenough with duplicity. He charged _them_--
Well, we shall not say what he charged them. Whatever it was, they
engaged him for the next baby, and were grateful to him ever
afterward. And as for microbes, before having to do with them in the
future, they resolved to let them come at least half way.
THE STANDING INCENTIVES TO WAR
Each civilized nation protects itself from war by being ready at any
moment to fight any other nation. Each other nation is supposed to be
charged with the spirit of aggression, and it is supposed that that
spirit can be allayed only by steadily increasing the risks involved
in attack.
The modern War System has grown up unconsciously, by way of using war
as a protection against war. The principle is that of fighting the
devil with fire. As each nation, Great Britain beginning it, has
increased its fighting material so as to assure its superiority over
all rivals, so has each rival doubled its own armament with the same
impossible ambition. All this has increased until the greatest
security against war lies in the absolutely ruinous cost with which
war is prosecuted.
The average man in England, France and Germany still believes, with
more or less insistence, that patriotism goes with armor plate. The
fact that there exists no enemy who wishes to attack, or cares to
attack, or hopes to attack, or could afford to attack, or would gain
anything whatever by attack, counts for little in this discussion. It
is always best to be on the safe side, and the money it costs is cheap
insurance against burning seaports and plundered banks. The enemy will
strike when he dares, but not against an odds of 2 to 1 or even 5 to
3. As the enemy swells his equipment to correspond, each nation is
therefore certainly in immediate and imminent danger; its safety lies
in more armed men and armored ships; and in each nation all resources
of borrowing, taxation, and conscription must be strained, that the
enemy may continue to realize that the odds are still against him.
To the observer on the outside, all this rests on a series of
chimeras, the product for the most part of men financially interested
in the war system itself. The war scares, the wars of talk but not of
action, which sweep over Europe, would be ridiculous but for their
baleful consequences.
And now we come to the secret springs of all this. The elements of the
War System are not only armies and navies, but also war traders,
armament builders, money lenders, the recipients of special
privileges, the corrupt portion of the press, and all others drawn
into its service by choice, by interest, or by necessity.
About war scares and war equipment, matters inherent in the War
System, centre the grossest exhibitions of human greed. Those who
scent from afar "the cadaverous odor of lucre" have for the most part
furnished war's dominant motive.
The cost of it all, the war and the War System, is spread over the
whole world. It is felt by you and by me and by everyone, in the
rising price of all articles of necessity. The world, to the degree in
which it is civilized, has become an economic unit. Whatever wastes
its substance here or there, robs your pocket and mine.
It is among officers of the army and navy, especially those retired
from active service, that we find the most ardent apologists for war.
To this end they are trained, and in Europe alone they find
justification for particular wars, as well as arguments for war in
general as a means of securing peace. They can be counted on for
scares or warnings in every case when petty differences arise.
Nowhere does the military class seem to have any thought or care for
ways or means. Economic preparations, the saving of money, or even the
ability to borrow it, counts for nothing with the militarist, to whom
the need to avert war by war outweighs all other considerations.
There have been in all countries many noble exceptions to this point
of view, great soldiers who have confessed with General Sherman, that
they are "sick and tired of war," its "moonshine" glories and its
cruel realities. There are in the service of every great nation
generals and admirals whom every lover of peace is proud to honor. But
the rank and file are creatures of the system, and as such their
influence is felt on the side of war and waste. The advocates of
"peace by preponderance," of peace through risk, of peace through
assured victory, must be counted on the side of war.
The character of the service journals in every nation shows this to be
true. Presumably these periodicals meet the demands made on them, and
each and every one, so far as I know, is a purveyor of war scares, an
advocate of expenditure, and an agency in behalf of the war system and
all of its ramifications.
* * * * *
But the central force of the War System does not lie with the war
makers but with the great war traders. We may never underrate a power
which has such "big money" behind it. The manufacturers of war
implements the world over form, through "interlocking directorates"
and through other means, a gigantic coöperating international trust,
perhaps the most powerful, because certainly the most profitable,
organization of its kind in the world. It is the more efficient and
the more dangerous because, alone among great trusts, it has a
privileged character as the exponent of the highest patriotism, of the
great fundamental duty of "National Defense."
The methods of organization of the syndicates for war, and of their
influence on national expenditures, have been lately set forth in
detail in two remarkable papers, the one by George Herbert Perris of
London, entitled "The War Traders," the other by Francis Delaisi of
Paris, entitled "Le Patriotisme des Plaques Blindées," (the
Patriotism of Armored Plates).
Mr. Perris tells us of the affairs of the great British companies--the
Armstrong-Whitworth Corporation, the Vickers, the John Brown, the
Cammell-Laird and the Coventry Arms Company, with their allies,
tentacles and satellites feeding the patriotism, under many flags, of
nearly half the globe. Delaisi's memoir tells of the Krupps and other
concerns in Germany, and of the Creusots and similar armament trusts
in France.
The capital invested in all the British firms amounts to about
$250,000,000, the dividends ranging each year from 7-1/2% to 15% of
the capital stock. In this industry, ten per cent. is a satisfactory
return, counting stockholders, employees, soldiers and pensioners. Mr.
Perris claims that "it is probable that 1,500,000 adult able-bodied
men, one in six of the occupied adult males in the United Kingdom,
shares to some extent in the 73,000,000 pounds ($365,000,000) a year
which 'National Defense' now costs us." Besides the minor outgoes
which form a sort of bribe money to the general public, the
distribution of dividends affects a smaller but most influential
class. In the share lists of the Armstrong-Whitworth company, Mr.
Perris finds the names of 60 noblemen or noble families, 15 baronets,
20 knights, 8 members of parliament, 20 officers of army or navy, and
8 journalists. Shareholding in the war syndicates and membership in
the naval league go together. But rich and poor are alike affected by
the large returns. "Militarism is strong in England because Lazarus
gets some poor pickings from the feast of Dives."
These great companies especially promote the patriotism of Great
Britain, but they are controlled by no narrow nativism. Under other
flags the same people develop the same noble sentiments. These British
corporations, individually or coöperating, maintain three ship
building companies in Canada: hence the recent movement for a Canadian
navy, to be built in Canadian Yards. They have five tentacles or
subsidiary companies in Italy, (Pozzuoli, Ansaldo, Odero, Terni, and
Orlando), one in Spain (Ferrol), one in Portugal, and one in Japan.
"Time was when Englishmen bled for Portugal; now our old-time ally
must bleed for us." The relations of these British trusts with similar
groups in other countries are most close and friendly. In the "Harvey
United Steel Company" (wound up in 1911), we find them in
international combination with the Bethlehem Steel Plant in
Pennsylvania, the Creusot company in France, and the Essen and
Dillingen concerns in Germany, with a similar international
combination of supporting banks. "In forty years," observes Perris,
"all the Peace Societies have not succeeded in effecting such a
Franco-German reconciliation as this. In the share list (of this
company) Mr. Newbold found the names of one British general and two
major generals, and behind these were the shadowy figures of a vast
host of princes, peers, ministers of the Crown, soldiers, sailors and
clerics. A veritable Brotherhood in Arms! I cannot believe that the
Harvey United Steel Company is really dead. Somewhere it surely has
had a glorious resurrection! Under some metamorphoses it lives and
works to prove the pettiness of national prejudice and the ease of
forgetting such sores as Alsace-Lorraine, when men have learned the
golden wisdom of 'good business.'"
A needed accessory of such good business is a series of commercial
agents, "the strong silent men," who frequent every court of Europe.
Incidental to their work of making sales, is to _create_ a market.
This is done by means of the recurrent war scares. A third element of
importance is the reiteration of the constant fact that only the
latest inventions can serve in war, and that all former purchases
should be "scrapped" as rapidly as possible. Were it not for the
scrapping process, the world's market for implements of destruction
would be speedily glutted. The machinery of war has reached such
marvelous perfection and such an acme of cost that the work of a day
may bankrupt a whole nation. The issue of a campaign may be decided by
the control of a single murderous invention. Thus science has been
called into the service of war, to a degree that inspires the hope
that, by carrying its risks to madness, it makes war virtually
impossible. But meanwhile the expenses go on.
And under such influences half the people of England, let us
say--professors, business men, manufacturers, workingmen, heads of
colleges, and dignitaries of the church, with nine-tenths of the army
and navy, are agents, conscious or unconscious, of the British
armament trust. The greater the stock of weapons, the newer and more
varied the instruments of physical defense, the more pitiful and more
persistent are the fears of invasion. A most striking example of the
collective cowardice of a great but over-armed nation, made up of men
individually brave, is found in the fear to open a tunnel under the
British Channel. Every need of commerce, of travel, of the
friendliness with France, demands the removal of a most unpleasant and
expensive obstacle. Nowhere in the world is there tolerated another
such stumbling block in the way of a gigantic traffic, as that of the
present system of crossing the English Channel. And yet half of
England cries out against the simple remedy, lest, having over-powered
Northern France, the German hordes should come pouring into Dover,
before the watchman at the portcullis should have time to drop the
gates.
The triumph of the war trades in Germany has been even more rapid and
complete than in Great Britain. By the system of interlocking
directorates, the house of Krupp is in alliance with all centres of
German finance. The army, the aristocracy, the ministry, the armament
syndicates, are all bound together in that mailed-fist coöperation in
which the power of Germany seems to lie. The King of Prussia himself
inherited from his august grandfather stock in the Krupp concern to
the amount of five million of thalers, an investment now estimated at
about $12,000,000.
The House of Krupp by various means has placed itself at the summit of
German war patriotism, and it has made most thrifty use of its
opportunities. It employs 250,000 persons, 60,000 of these on salary;
5,000 engineers. It maintains, according to Delaisi, a great hotel,
the Essenerhof, "l'Auberge de la Mort," in which are entertained most
royally all emissaries of all nations who come as purchasing agents of
tools of death. Its specialty is "National Defense," and "Defense not
Defiance" is said to be the "international code signal."
In France "armor plate patriotism" is sustained by the same methods,
and in part by the same money. The leading industries bear the names
of Creusot, Homicourt, and Châtillon-Commentry. A special feature of
the French system, not unknown to the others, is its free use of
representatives of the army and navy. Some twenty admirals and
generals have left the public service for the better paid work of
selling guns and ships. This transfer of allegiance is said to be
"perfectly legal," but it is also dangerous to the morale of the
public service. And it is to these men that we owe most of the
militant revival of French war patriotism, which had lain dormant from
the time of the "Affaire Dreyfus," to that of the "Affaire Agadir."
As to the war-syndicates in the United States, little that is definite
is on record. Like conditions produce like results. The Secretary of
the Navy, Mr. Daniels, reports the existence of a combination among
the three chief producers of armor plate in America, the Midvale,
Bethlehem, and Carnegie Companies. He is reported as saying: "When
this administration came into office, we found that the Navy was
apparently, or, so we were assured, hopelessly, at the mercy of the
three big steel corporations, who submitted practically identical bids
for armor forgings and other materials, and then divided the work
between them to suit themselves." As a result of this condition, the
Secretary rejected their bids, and by going outside, recorded a saving
of $500,000 on the battleship in question.
* * * * *
Behind the war traders, stand their allies, the finance houses who
lend money for the war system. These are not bankers, rather
pawnbrokers, dealing in the credit of nations for a certain per cent.,
according to the straits in which the borrower finds himself. The
banking system of London avoids this class of risks. Paris is now the
centre of the system, and it is usually stipulated with every foreign
war loan that the materials it covers should be bought in Paris. In
earlier times, before the great nations had borrowed to the limit, the
heads of these finance houses as "Masters of Europe" exerted great
personal influence, permitting or forbidding wars. Of recent years
this personal power has greatly dwindled, as joint stock companies of
greater capital and more or less impersonal management, have largely
taken their place. The present influence of the money-lenders is
against war, but in favor of the war system. Minor wars it permits or
even encourages, but these have their risks. The second Balkan war,
unforeseen and undesired, is said to have entailed a loss of some
$30,000,000 to the Paris backers of Bulgaria.
Interlocking with the finance houses are the great exploiting
corporations of the world, operating mostly in the backward nations of
the tropics. These "interests" are often all-powerful in foreign
affairs. They are frequently able to control the operations of the
foreign offices to such a degree that the foreign policy of a great
nation is often but the expression of their will. The desire for
colonial expansion, the "mirage of the map," is a reflection of these
interests, and most "imperial wars" have been undertaken for their
benefit. Abundant illustrations may be had from the recent history of
each of the leading nations. Civil wars in the tropics, as a rule,
have their origin in conflicting interests of people remote from the
field of battle.
Another factor supporting the war system is the hereditary
aristocracy, waning in influence, but still powerful through its
control of money, of the army, and of the Church. The profession of
arms is almost the only one not unworthy of the caste of nobleman. The
military constitutes the right arm of aristocracy; the state church,
the left; while the monarch stands as the visible head. The leaders of
official religion are, with many and honorable exceptions, upholders
of the war system, and apologists for the "God of Battles." The
dissenting churches, having no alliance with privilege, are almost as
unanimously on the side of peace.
With all this, and working toward the same end, is the false education
which the war system has unconsciously produced. For generations it
has obstructed sound teaching of history, of patriotism, of morals, of
religion. It is only after reaching manhood, if at all, that we
realize that Thackeray's "redcoat bully in his boots" has not been the
maker of England's greatness. In the schools of all nations, the man
of violence is the hero--the man on horse-back, the man who bears the
flag, even if in defiance of justice and order.
We have been taught that nations grow strong through war, and that
through war they achieve their destiny. Each man who falls in battle
on any side, in any cause, is a patriot hero, giving his life for
fatherland and for religion. Each boy learns that his own nation was
in the right in every quarrel, that in every battle it was victorious
against great odds, or else defeated through base treachery.
For the war system as it exists to-day, first and finally responsible
are the people who pay for it, the common man in the nations
concerned. The government belongs to him. It is his own fault if it
does not. It cannot go far ahead of him, and it never lags much
behind. When it is laggard, the fault still rests with him. He has
neglected to look after the machinery of government, and it has been
turned against him. This is the case in Germany and in Russia, where
the government represents only part of the people. In these nations,
the man belongs to the state. In the more democratic nations, the
state belongs to the man, who has therefore the more pressing
responsibility.
And this man on the street, the unit of the nation, whether noble or
commoner, whether educated or illiterate, overlooks one fundamental
fact. The other nations of Europe are made up of men about like
himself. What he thinks, they think; what he hopes, they hope. If he
has no designs of aggression, neither have they. If he is "hungry for
peace," so are they. If he finds his taxes distressing, so do they. If
he is one of a majority favoring more cordial relations between
states, they belong to a like majority. If he is one of a minority who
would do away with the war system, there is a similar minority which
will meet him half way. If he is a workman, his problems are those of
all other workmen; if he harbors no evil designs of a war of invasion,
neither do his fellow-workmen across the border. If he is swept off
his feet by a burst of martial music and resounding patriotism, so are
they, and it is just as easy for them to recover as it is for him. If
he is scared by the reckless talk of pangermanists across the channel,
or of chauvinists on the Paris Boulevards, or of panslavists in St.
Petersburg, or of jingoes in London or New York, let him remember that
he finds just such people at home, wherever his home may be--just as
many, just as noisy, and possessed of just as little permanent
influence. The force of mere noise grows less and less, year by year,
in each of the "settled nations." If you are convinced that other
nations need have no fear of your jingoes, by the same token you need
not fear theirs.
The War System is making this great, rich, resourceful world a
bankrupt concern in the hands of its creditors. The nations of the
earth still owe some 40 billions of dollars in gold for the wars of
the last 100 years, from Waterloo to Adrianople. But one nation of all
the number (our own) has made any progress whatever in paying its
share of this debt. The tendency is ever to borrow more, up to and
beyond the limit of credit. The interest is paid, perhaps by
borrowing, but there is no haste about the principal. Except for war,
no nation on earth would ever need to borrow a dollar.
And this interest money of a billion and a quarter every year is only
an incident in the cost of the War System--about a fourth of its
annual expense, even in what we call times of peace. Under the armed
peace of the War System, a kind of frustrate war goes on, an
antagonism the more repulsive because no one has the slightest idea
what it is all about. This antagonism is simply part of the system,
and the system itself is only organized cowardice, for it is perfectly
well known that not one of the great nations has any design to attack
any other. Only the poor crude Balkan people have taken the War System
seriously. Because they have done so, and interfered with trade, they
are now under the ban of Europe, as they lie supine on the floor of
the arena.
The War System has exhausted its own resources. The great nations have
no money with which to fight, and no stomach for fighting. The concert
of Europe is content with the suppression of discords among its own
players. And the reason for this is clearly indicated in the words of
Mr. H. Bell of Lloyds Bank in London. He calls the attention of
bankers to "the great spectre which will rise up in future before the
monied classes when they are invited to lend their money for warlike
purposes. There is going to be very clearly written in the handwriting
on the wall the word 'REPUDIATION.' The peoples of Europe will say:
'We know we ought to pay our interest. We know we ought to pay our
debt, but we cannot. We are human beings, we must live; we are
overtaxed; we cannot get enough to clothe ourselves; we cannot get
enough to eat. We can get no profit from our work!' The men who find
money for purposes of war will not get their money back again."--(H.
Bell. Remarks before the Institute of Bankers, Jan. 17, 1912.)
* * * * *
War cripples the nation physically by cutting off without posterity
its strongest and boldest men. The key of national strength in the
future is found in the good parentage of to-day. The basis of national
greatness is indicated in the principles of Eugenics. To be well born
is the first step to an effective life. "Like the seed is the
harvest." This is the law of heredity. It applies to races of men as
well as to breeds of horses or of sheep. No nation has ever fallen
from leadership, intellectual or physical, save through breeding from
inferior stock. The causes of all decline may be sought among these
three factors, emigration, immigration, war. Rome fell when her
streets swarmed with the sons of slaves, scullions, sutlers,
adventurers, men who were not Romans. When, after her wars, internal
and external, "Only cowards remained, and from their brood came forth
the new generations." The culture of Greece passed away when war had
obliterated the Greeks. "Send forth the best ye breed" and you will
breed from the second best. First best, second best, third best and
fourth among the yeomanry of Europe have been swallowed up in war in
the "Obscene seas of slaughter" over which Europe has gloried and
gloated through all these deluded ages.
The decline in the physique of the average man in France has been
usually cited in evidence of this tendency. But the same causes have
produced like effects in every warlike nation, and the decline in
stature is one of the least important of the results of reversal of
selection. These changes are just as marked in England and Scotland,
as in France, and they are not wanting in Germany. The loss of dash
and initiative is one of these results. Havelock Ellis observes: "The
reckless Englishmen who boldly sailed out from their little island to
fight the Spanish Armada were long ago exterminated; an admirably
prudent and cautious race has been left alive." Better men would make
better history. Braver men would not cower at the war scares of
to-day. Men of character and initiative would not wallow in the London
slums. The sons of those war could not use, swell the records of
pauperism. It is not the strength of the strong but the weakness of
the weak that invites and perpetuates paternalism and tyranny, two
names for the same thing. "Slaves may have wrongs, but only free men
have rights."
Another count against the War System, not unrelated to this, is its
pollution of the blood of the race. The "White Slave Traffic" goes
with the "Conscription Act," both outgrowths of the War System. Army
movement and barrack life have been leading, though not exclusive,
causes of the widespread diffusion of infectious diseases, one of the
most alarming features of civilization to-day.
Another count against war, as yet scarcely realized, is found in the
vandalisms by which it has destroyed so much of worth as well as of
intellectual importance in the art and the architecture of the past.
War respects nothing. It was German bombs which burned the library at
Strassburg. The devastation of the art world is chargeable to war. As
I write this there rise before me the paintings in the gallery at
Munich, of the twenty-one cities of Greece, from Sparta to Corinth,
from Eleusis to Salamis, not as they are now, largely fishing hamlets
by the blue Ægean Sea, not as they were in the days of the glory of
Greece--but as ruined arches and broken columns, half buried in the
ashes of war, the war which blotted out Greece from the world history.
* * * * *
It is plain that sooner or later such a system must come to an end.
The influences that have abolished cannibalism, slavery, and religious
persecution must in the end do away with international war. It seems
also clear that this result will not be obtained primarily in any
direct way by official action. The administrators of nations must
follow public opinion rather than create it. Where public opinion
demanded the burning of witches, the officials had only to see that it
was done decently and in order. At the most, they could only limit
the number to be consumed on any one occasion.
* * * * *
What is our line of attack on the War System?
For the suppression of war we must have a public opinion. And this
opinion must not rest only on the fact that war is brutal and hideous.
That is only half the struggle. There are many good men to whom the
brutal is also the heroic, and still others to whom evil methods are
condoned by success. We must further convince the world, that is, the
common man, the man on the street, that modern war attacks his pocket.
The modern phases of the Peace Movement differ from the earlier ones
in being educational rather than emotional. The early workers were
convinced that war was wicked and unholy, and with this they were
usually content to rest their case.
With the same conviction as to the immorality of war, in the bottom of
his heart, the modern worker tries to find the facts. What is the
historical evolution of war? What are its effects, economic,
biological, moral? What can be found as a national substitute? And
side by side with the study of war and war problems, rises the fabric
of international law. We may not say that the modern method is more
righteous than the earlier, or even more effective. But the treatment
of the subject from all its various points of view, and not mainly
from that of morals and religion, reaches a much wider audience and
has a more immediate effect upon public opinion.
It is an immediate purpose of the Peace Movement to make war a last
resort, not the first one, in times of international differences. To
this and every agency which tends to postpone action and give the
blood time to cool, must contribute.
In civil life, there has been through the ages, a steady movement from
violence to law, from the ordeal of private combat to the arbitration
of the courts. In like fashion, we would extend and strengthen the
parallel tendency among nations. Already arbitration is everywhere
welcomed as a means of composing differences. Conciliation goes
before arbitration and is a factor of equal importance. The very
existence of an Arbitral Tribunal before which differences may be
brought, itself insures that most differences will be adjusted without
its agency. If war is really the last resort, very few nations will
ever come to it, and the War System will decline through neglect, as
of obvious uselessness.
But so long as the War System is in full force, there is always danger
of war. So great an agency can never be fully under control. Its
existence insures the presence of a powerful group of men, anxious to
test its powerful machinery and impatient of civil authority. The War
System is designed for war, defensive of course, but it is a maxim of
war, as of football, that the best defense is to be the first to
score.
As to the Arbitration treaties and the hundreds of disputes which have
been settled for all time by the tribunals at The Hague, no verdict
thus obtained has yet been rejected or opposed, and none is likely to
be. The public opinion of the world would be as wholly opposed to the
repudiation of an adverse verdict as it would be to the repudiation of
a national debt. The verdict and the debt involve the same sanction of
national honor.
The discussion as to the need of an international police to enforce
decisions made at The Hague, is therefore wide of the mark as there
can be no occasion for the use of force in such a connection.
It is becoming more and more evident in Europe that the greatest
single asset of the Peace Movement is the success of the republic of
America.
America is opposed to the War System. There is a much larger
percentage of pacifists in the United States than in any other of the
larger nations. For one thing, it is relatively easy to be a peace man
in a republic. No criticism or obloquy attaches to it. But in Europe,
the direction of least resistance is to follow the wake of the War
System.
In spite of the unhallowed sums we have carelessly spent to build up a
War System, we have none. We shall never have any. Should we pass
under its yoke we should cease to be America. Even our admirals and
generals do not belong to the War System. They are civilians in
spirit, sometimes in disguise, but permeated with ideas of law and
justice, a condition far removed from that of the professional war
maker of the continent of Europe.
The impression of America as a great factor in international
conciliation receives impetus with the celebration of the hundred
years of Anglo-Saxon peace, with its lesson of the unguarded and
therefore perfectly defended 4,000 miles of Canadian frontier. This
impression has been strongly emphasized by the admirable skill by
which President Wilson has up to the time of this writing, honorably
avoided war with Mexico, a war which was considered inevitable in most
political circles in Europe. While on the one hand the United States
cannot have the secret treaty, the cherished tool of the War System
since the days of Machiavelli, and while Democracy is a form of
government fitted for minding one's own business, and for nothing
else, it is recognized that the United States must and should take the
lead in conciliation and in arbitration, as she is now taking the lead
in furnishing means for a world-wide survey of the War System, and for
the resultant propaganda for its abrogation.
THE MACHINERY FOR PEACE
It is understandable that Germany and Great Britain should consider
their armies, their battleships, dreadnoughts, super-dreadnoughts, and
invincibles as constituting the chief machinery for peace. In
celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of his accession to the
imperial throne the Kaiser was hailed as "the true and central factor
of the past peaceful policy of Germany." These were Lord Blyth's
words, in recognizing the avowed policy of the Emperor to preserve
peace through the utmost practicable preparation for war; and
ex-President Taft, who would refer to arbitrators even questions of
national honor, spoke of this apologist of arming for conflict between
nations as the "greatest single individual force in the practical
maintenance of the peace of the world." The Kaiser's silver jubilee
was the signal for unstinted acknowledgment by the leading men of the
world that His Majesty's policy had preserved the peace of the German
Empire for a generation. In its exterior relations Germany had looked
too terrible to encounter, and the romantic, warlike spirit that
distinguishes the Teuton had found vent in the service of preparation.
The young Germans, both aristocratic and bourgeois, were encouraged by
every means to train, to show, to be martial, but not to fight. And it
will be recalled that Germany refused to discuss the limiting of
armaments at The Hague only because the Conference was not empowered
to deal finally with it.
In response to the Czar's call, delegations of twenty-six Powers
attended in 1899 the First Hague Conference; forty-three Powers were
represented at the Second Conference in 1909. These gatherings
formulated the world's opinion against many of the evils of war. Their
agreements expressly forbade international bloodshed except between
the actual fighting forces. They made it unlawful to sack cities, to
take or destroy private property on land, or to menace the peace and
safety of non-combatants. Those who observe that the nations have not
yet agreed to do away with war overlook the fact that the
non-combatant millions within belligerent nations may not be molested
in lives or property, save that they must bear the war's financial
burdens. With respect to most of the civilized dwellers of earth the
sword is forever sheathed. Among the fighters, too, wounds are quickly
bound, and quarter is expected and given.
The machinery of peace governing this world society is not complete.
It provides a way of peaceful settlement of disputes by arbitration.
It lacks a court such as that whose decisions, backed by police and
the more potent sentiment of the people, guard the king's peace in
civilized communities. But arbitration has done much to keep the peace
of nations. The experience of the United States is in point. Up to the
time of the Second Hague Conference Mr. John Bassett Moore finds
records of more than sixty arbitrations, the tribunals sitting with
overlapping terms of years that aggregate a hundred and
twenty-five--exceeding in number the years of this nation's life. The
total cost of these tribunals was doubtless much more than would have
been the expense of an actual court kept always in session.
Before The Hague Conferences, the American Government had already been
participating in what was tantamount to a permanent tribunal of
arbitration. The questions adjusted were of every class, not merely
pecuniary claims, but questions affecting what are called "vital
interests and national honor." The case of the Creole, for instance,
brought the United States and Great Britain close to war, and later,
in 1842, nearly caused a rupture of the conferences between Daniel
Webster and Lord Ashburton--a rupture which would almost inevitably
have led to hostilities. The case came before a tribunal of
arbitration in 1853, and was so quietly disposed of that the public
paid no attention to the award. Then there was the negotiation of the
Alabama Claims by Hamilton Fish. Lord John Russell answered our
proposal to Great Britain, that it involved the honor of Her Majesty's
Government, of which it alone was guardian, and the claims were not
subject to arbitration. After being examined and critically
formulated, they were eight years later submitted to the tribunal at
Geneva, and settled. Mr. Roosevelt, opposing President Taft's treaties
of arbitration with Great Britain and France, objected that they would
embrace "questions of vital interest and honor." Perhaps he had not
studied the cases of the Creole and the Alabama.
The values involved in American arbitral proceedings have been
enormous. More than a thousand claims were adjusted in cases of the
United States against Mexico in 1868, and a thousand more
counterclaims of Mexico were disposed of under one commission, the
total amount involved being well over half a billion dollars. And the
arbitral awards of the tribunals in which America participated have in
every case been final. Not one of the awards to which the United
States has been a party but was carried into effect by both
Governments concurrently. In rare cases new facts discovered have
reopened the proceedings, but on such occasions the parties proceeded
to end them in a spirit of justice and equity.
* * * * *
It was to nations trained in self-restraint that the Russian Emperor
addressed his rescript of August 24, 1898, recognizing the fact that
the preservation of peace had been put forward as the object of
international policy. More terrible engines of destruction were being
wrought, and the intellectual and physical strength of the nations,
with their labor and capital, were diverted from their natural uses
and wasted. Economic crises threatened the world because of war
preparations, the while sentiment against war's devastation found
concrete embodiment in arbitrated disputes. A conference was proposed
to limit armaments, to prevent armed conflicts, and to mitigate the
atrocities of war. The twenty-six nations that met at The Hague on May
18, following, codified the international laws of war and peace
already existing. Delegates of the forty-three nations that met in the
Second Conference on June 15, 1907, amended and strengthened these
codes, added to them, and appointed the meeting of the Third
Conference, to be held in 1915.
In the first two Conferences the rights and duties of neutrals were
defined, the employment of force for the recovery of contract debts
was renounced, and it was laid down that the "right of belligerents to
adopt means of injuring the enemy is not unlimited." The bombardment
of undefended towns was prohibited, together with the discharge of
projectiles from balloons, the use of bullets that expand or flatten
in the human body, the poisoning of wells, pillage, violation of
"family honor," confiscation of private property, the laying of
automatic contact mines that do not become speedily harmless, the
seizing of submarine cables, destruction of monuments and works of
art, and interference with religious customs. The killing
treacherously of individuals belonging to the hostile nation or army
or of those who have surrendered was outlawed and it was forbidden to
make improper use of a flag of truce, or of the national or military
colors of the enemy, or of the Red Cross badges.
The progress in these agreements reached by the Second Conference is
notable, in that it forbade that the rights and acts of a member of
the hostile nation be abolished, suspended, or regarded as
inadmissible in a court of law; that a belligerent compel a man to
fight against his own country, even though he were in the
belligerent's service before the war broke out, or to force the
inhabitants of seized territory to give information about the army of
the other belligerent, or about its means of defense. While all
appliances for transmission of news and for transport, whether by
land, sea, or air, may be seized, together with depots of arms and all
munitions of war--even if belonging to private individuals--they must
be restored when peace is made, with due award of damages. The
inhabitants of a territory are to be regarded as belligerents only if
they "carry arms openly," and that is to be the test of their
belligerency. Besides all this, the rights of prisoners of war are
sedulously guarded.
This code, relating to the laws and customs of war, received what many
critics of the Conferences regard as an undue amount of attention; it
was even charged that, in effect, it legitimatized war. It did quite
the contrary. Francis Lieber drew up for President Lincoln in the
second year of the American civil war rules, which Lincoln ratified
and promulgated in the famous General Orders No. 100--the first code
regulating the conduct of armies in the field. The international
convention drawn by the Brussels Conference of 1874, had its origin,
as acknowledged by its President, Baron Jomini, in these rules of
Lieber and of President Lincoln. To the United States honor is due,
not for legitimatizing war between nations, but for beginning to
restrict its operations to the actual fighters and their works of
attack and defense. At The Hague the work of the Brussels Conference
became in turn a basis for reaffirming this principle, and for
restricting more closely the field of combat.
Moreover, the principles of the Geneva Red Cross Convention were
adapted to naval war. Machinery for rescue and treatment of the sick,
wounded, and shipwrecked men of the world's navies was provided.
An International Prize Court was established, which, in the opinion of
Elihu Root, should later develop into the court of justice for the
nations. The only obstacle to ratifying the convention for this court
was swept away by the code of laws of naval war embodied in the
Declaration of London, and drawn in February, 1909, by delegates of
the European Powers and the United States. The liability to capture of
the merchant ships of belligerents throws their commerce largely into
the hands of neutrals. Efforts to prevent neutrals from trading with
the enemy follow. Then blockades, searches, and seizure of contraband
goods stir up strife with other nations, and give occasion for general
war. The American war of 1812 with Great Britain resulted from such
causes, the effects of which, again, the two nations barely escaped
during our Civil War; and the sinking of British merchantmen by Russia
during its war with Japan provoked strong resentment. Excepting two
questions, those respecting the conversion of merchant ships into
warships on the high seas, and as to whether the nationality or the
domicile of the owner shall be considered in determining "enemy
property," the London declaration embodies clear and definite rules
on which the International Court of Prize may render just decisions.
* * * * *
The measures for restricting the field of actual war were accompanied
at The Hague by the erection of machinery for the pacific settlement
of international disputes. That was work of prevention, and it was in
four parts.
In the first part the contracting Powers agree to "use their best
efforts to insure the pacific settlement of international
differences."
The second provides that proffers of good offices and mediation by a
third State, never shall be regarded as unfriendly. Throughout the
Turko-Italian and Turko-Balkan Wars, and during the Inter-Balkan
conflict, the European Powers acted as mediators under this provision,
and smoothed the way to peace.
The third part provided for international commissions of inquiry, such
as were comprehended in President Taft's proposed treaties of
arbitration with Great Britain and France, and Secretary Bryan's
proposed treaties with the Central American republics and with the
Powers of Europe and Asia. The intent of these commissions is to
investigate the causes of complaint and publish them, trusting to
international public opinion to accomplish a just settlement. This
machinery worked to bring about the voluntary payment by Russia of
$300,000 damages for the destruction of British fishing boats, fired
on mistakenly by Admiral Rozhdestvensky in his ill-fated expedition
against Japan. Again, the report of a commission on the French steamer
Tavignano, seized by the Italian torpedo boat Fulmine during the
Turko-Italian War, and concerning the attack on the Tunisian mahones
Kamouna and Gaulois, was accepted July 23, 1912, and referred for the
final solution of equities to The Hague Court of Arbitration.
This court--the fourth instrumentality--is composed of three distinct
bodies; namely, the Permanent Administrative Council, the
International Bureau, and the Court of Arbitration proper. The
Permanent Council is made up of the diplomatic envoys of the signatory
Powers accredited to the Netherlands, besides the Dutch Minister for
Foreign Affairs, and was constituted after its ratification by nine of
the Powers. The Council is permanent in the sense that its members are
always at The Hague; it controls the International Bureau, appointing
its staff and methods of administration, and reporting the proceedings
of the court to the signatory Powers.
The International Bureau receives all the documents and stipulations
in disputed cases, where arbitration is agreed upon and referred to
The Hague, acting as a board of registry. It places its staff at the
disposal of tribunals of arbitration, and occasionally of those not
constituted at The Hague, and its expenses are paid by the Powers.
The Court of Arbitration proper is really an "eligible list" of
individuals, "of recognized competence in questions of international
law, enjoying the highest moral reputation," designated by the
forty-four Powers signatory to the convention. Their terms are six
years, renewable, not over four members appointed by a Power. Their
jurisdiction extends over all cases submitted to them, but sometimes
the parties agree to a special tribunal not selected from the list.
Two names may be selected from the list of arbitrators by each of the
Powers in dispute, and the amended convention of 1907 provides that
only one of these can be its envoy or chosen from its nominees to the
Court of Arbitration. The four arbitrators thus selected themselves
choose a fifth as umpire, or, if the votes of the four are equally
divided, the choice of umpire is intrusted to a third Power to be
agreed upon. If there is failure to agree upon a third Power, each
party to the controversy makes a separate choice of a Power, and the
two thus selected will try to appoint the umpire. But if they, in
turn, fail to agree, each shall within two months' time present two
candidates from the general list, excluding those selected by the
disputants or of their nations; by lot among these, the umpire is
finally elected.
* * * * *
The work of the Third Conference, besides adding to the statute law of
war, will largely concern the regulations governing the Court of
Arbitration. Since it was constituted in April, 1901, this court has
passed judgment in fourteen important cases without having established
needed rules of practice. It is not decided whether the cases and
counter-cases shall be presented with argument, or merely with
statements of the facts, the conclusions sought, and the proofs. The
practice is both ways. The thirty-five articles relating to "arbitral
procedure" fail to prescribe rules, leaving this task to the tribunal
in each case. As a result the terms of procedure in the Casablanca
dispute, for instance, which were decided hastily to avert a
threatened war, were brief and vague, and they left the discretion of
the tribunal uncontrolled. The order of oral debate is not determined
chiefly because a disputant is touchy about being classed as plaintiff
or defendant. Clear rulings on points of practice are not made when
presented, although the agents and counsel are entitled by the rules
to "present orally to the tribunal all the arguments they may consider
expedient in defense of their case." Yet opportunity to argue a motion
is sometimes not afforded when the motion is made, and an argument
presented later would be out of place. It would aid procedure to have
arguments presented and rulings made as the points come up. Finally,
the informal discussions between court and counsel frequently hinder
the straightforward presentation of a case.
But the chief defect of these arbitral tribunals, as in all
others--for practice has not reached the perfection of choosing
disinterested judges belonging to nations not concerned in the
controversy--lies in their temptation to compromise. Gallatin, in the
Northeastern Boundary case with Great Britain, remarked that the
arbitrator "has always a bias to split the difference." The Casablanca
case, the decision of which really did avert war, and more than any,
so far, justifies the establishment of the world court, depended on
law and fact, but was compromised. Dr. Heinrich Lammasch, a
distinguished member of several Hague tribunals, speaks of the
"preponderatingly diplomatic character" of this decision. Other
decisions have been criticised for the same reason, notably those of
the North Atlantic Fisheries and the Orinoco Steamship. Compromise,
while of value, is the function of diplomacy or mediation, and the
cases referred to The Hague are admittedly those which diplomacy
cannot adjust. The remedy is by direct agreement to exclude from the
tribunal judges who sit as diplomatic agents of their governments. A
beginning in this direction is in Secretary Bryan's plan for
commissions of inquiry, consisting of five members, three of whom
should be chosen from other countries than those in dispute. But these
would be merely committees. The defect of Mr. Bryan's plan, and the
great lack of the Hague Court of Arbitration, is that the agreements
to refer cases in dispute are purely voluntary; the one thing for
friends of peace to work for, of course, is to make it as easy for
differing nations as for differing men to hale each other into court,
and as impossible to refer their differences to force.
The International Court of Prize has already come nearer to this ideal
than the Court of Arbitration. It is a regular court of justice. Its
judges are not arbitrators, they receive a fixed compensation, their
jurisdiction in cases of appeal from the national prize courts
relating to captured merchant ships and cargoes, is compulsory. In
absence of treaty provisions between the states in dispute, the
convention adopted by the Second Hague Conference reads, "the court
shall apply the rules of international law; if no generally recognized
rule exists, the court shall give judgment in accordance with the
general principles of justice and equity." Before ratifying the
convention, Great Britain in 1908 called a conference in London of the
chief naval Powers, which codified the laws of naval war, covering
blockades, contraband, service ill-becoming neutrals, destruction of
neutral prizes, transfer to a neutral flag, hostile character, convoy,
resistance to search, and compensation. Here a whole category of cases
is at once removed from the judgment of biased minds.
The existing Court of Arbitration may be resorted to increasingly as a
means of diplomatic conciliation; but by its side and above it should
rise, in the opinion of all authorities on international law, a
Supreme Court of Arbitral Justice, not diplomatic but judicial, that
will render its decisions rigorously according to the declared law
and the evidence. The Second Conference at The Hague approved a
convention for the establishment of such a court. The United States
has proposed to the Powers that the Prize Court be invested with the
functions and jurisdiction of a Court of Arbitral Justice. The
practical difficulty met at The Hague was in the appointing of
permanent Judges. Forty-four, one for each state including The
Netherlands, would be too many. A court of but fifteen Judges was
recognized as desirable. Such a court could not be chosen from
forty-four nations, and the delegates were in a quandary. The
arguments were irrefragable, of course, that a small, independent body
of magistrates selected in advance is needed to settle controversies
between nations as they arise, and as a court of appeal from the
decisions of temporary tribunals. Such a tribunal might well become a
court of first as well as of last resort, because of the difficulties
and delays usually experienced in making up the mixed arbitral
commissions from the eligible list of the Court of Arbitration. The
alternative recourse is especially needed when the imminence of war
requires a speedy reference, as in the Casablanca case. For these
reasons the convention was drawn and approved, leaving to the Third
Conference the task of constituting the court. Ernest Nys, a member of
the Permanent Court of Arbitration and Counselor of the Court of
Appeals of Brussels, urging the necessity of such a tribunal, makes
the point that its members should not be chosen to represent any
countries, as such, but rather in a way to assure that the different
systems of law and procedure, as well as the principal languages of
the world, might be represented. By this means the world peace may be
permanently established. Organized justice will succeed arbitration,
guaranteeing to individuals and states the security of their rights
and institutions, precisely as the "king's peace" had come to
guarantee them within the limits of each sovereignty.
* * * * *
In this review of the instruments making for peace by conciliation and
law, the arguments for war have not been ignored. If at The Hague in
1915 the Powers should decide to nationalize the private industries
that supply armaments and engines of war, the artificial stimulus
given to those industries and the exploitation of new appliances for
war would cease; manufacturers would no longer oppose the limitation
of armaments, which every nation desires. Complete preparation for war
did not prevent the Balkan States and Turkey, not yet emerged from the
civilization of the Middle Ages, from coming to the death grip with
each other. It was different with those nations whose Council of
Ambassadors, sitting in London, and watching the kaleidoscopic changes
in the Balkans, became by the statesmanlike influence of Earl Grey, a
clearing house, through which the affairs of the six chief Powers were
adjusted to a harmonious ending. It is noteworthy that in the more
than forty years of Europe following the close of the Franco-Prussian
war--perhaps as good as a cycle of Cathay--those six Powers, though
armed for provocation, have by such careful negotiations remained at
peace. But making the allowance due to this remarkable abstention from
war, to which must be added the hundred years of peace between the
United States and Great Britain, the inherent appeal of war to the
imagination and emotions of mankind must still be recognized.
War's mutilations have never roused aught but horror, its waste of men
and treasure are deplored. But the spirit of strife, of daring, and of
heroism remains in human breasts. If war is outworn, if bloodshed and
sacrifice of lives are to cease between civilized states, as they have
long ceased within those states, it must be that better means have
been found to satisfy the profound human need of expression and of
conquest. The German Emperor, while keeping up the medieval pageantry
of arms, has welded his nation into a militant power of industry and
science. Their arts are not ignoble, their industries are not
monotonous, but have taken on the aspect of imperial enterprise and
daring. Their scientists are rescuing mankind from disease and freeing
it from menial labors, while their merchants and traders are
modernizing the orient, setting examples of method and discipline,
incidentally, to their rivals in the civilized nations. It is by such
means that civilization need no longer rear itself on human slavery;
the very beasts of burden have been freed, and man has seized control
of nature's forces. By them he is borne through cities, manners,
climates, councils, governments, more swiftly than Ulysses went, and
beyond the paths of all the western stars.
More distant horizons of science have been opened. The transmutation
of the elements, but recently announced, is expected to realize more
than the dreams of the alchemist. If we are to believe Professor
Soddy, who with Sir William Ramsay obtained in 1903 the first direct
proof that radioactive processes are veritable transmutations, this
discovery in its consequences should "absolutely revolutionize the
whole condition of existence." For of all processes, this alone
accounts for the wealth of energy dissipated so prodigally throughout
the universe over apparently endless periods of time. Once means are
found to accelerate the transmuting rate of radioactive atoms,
Professor Soddy believes the same means will suffice to break up the
other elements now unchanging, releasing energy which man may harness
a "million times greater than any at present utilized." In his
masterly address in 1908 before the American Society of International
Law, Elihu Root traced the development of the international spirit by
the use of human inventions conquering space and time. Clans,
communities, nationalities have lost their early function, and
frontiers and territorial possessions are changing their political
significance. Terrestrial pioneering is not ended, the continents are
rediscovering each other in new relations.
Much has been done to open new channels for the play of men's energies
away from war. War has had its uses to break up the old order, to let
loose new and unknown forces in society, to set men free from
tradition. That was the great work of the Crusades. Chivalry and
knighthood are still needed, but of a new order. The martyrs for
aerial navigation are the type. The machinery for peace that has been
set up in the new palace at The Hague will not confine the adventurous
spirit of mankind.
EN CASSEROLE
_Tobacco and Alcohol_
As to tobacco, since reading the article on it in this number, this
Review has really thought more seriously than ever before about (not
_of_) giving up smoking. But many doctors here and in Europe have told
us to keep on, and but one has told us to stop. How is it with you? We
wonder whether life with tobacco _can_ seem to those who know only
life without it, as bad as life without it seems to those who have
known life with it! Perhaps each class should experiment in the
other's field.
As to the outlay for mere pleasure, and the destruction of life
involved, we wonder how those caused by tobacco would compare with
those caused by travel--short trips as well as long, by carriage,
automobile, vessel--and aeroplane? Our contributor has seen these
paragraphs, and he says, very much to our edification and
entertainment:
"It is a relief to know that the tobacco article is not going to
interfere with the pleasure which 'This Review' derives from smoking.
But the writer confesses to a little surprise at the precocity of an
infant which in its first year has acquired the nicotine habit to such
an extent as to lead it to consult several physicians on the subject."
[It is many years since, but we remember that in at least two cases,
the prescription was _volunteered_. Ed.]
"As for the expense caused by driving for pleasure, our statistics do
not give us a conclusive answer, but they at least supply us with an
outside figure, for Uncle Sam in counting his horses at the time of
the last census distinguished between those on farms and those
elsewhere. It is fair to assume that the great bulk of the horses used
for pleasure are in the second class, and that they constitute a
comparatively small fraction of that class. Now horses not on farms
numbered 3,182,789 in 1910, and were valued at $422,204,393. In other
words, a third of what smokers spend for tobacco would enable them to
buy up all of the horses in a big class, only a fraction of which is
used for pleasure, and an equal amount would probably suffice for
their keep.
"In the case of automobiles, it is still more difficult to distinguish
between those used for pleasure and those used for directly productive
or public purposes. However, the object of the article was to call
attention not so much to gross figures of expenditure, as to the
indirect burden imposed by smokers upon the community at large. The
automobilist who is willing to run down innocent wayfarers rather than
curb his craze for speed is in the same class with the smoker who so
smokes as to destroy property and life. Indeed the two are often
identical, and it was no mere accident that led the Massachusetts
Forestry Association to depict upon its poster designed to stop forest
fires, a party of smoking automobilists bowling along and leaving a
trail of fire behind them. If the 'Review' can devise some painless
way of eliminating both the reckless smoker and the reckless joy-rider
from the landscape, it will kill two undesirable birds with one
stone."
* * * * *
And as to alcohol. Well! There's Horace and Schiller and the feast of
Cana, and the whiskey Lincoln wanted for his other generals, and lots
of other people and facts.
But as to bar-maids, we are bound to say that since the graceful
tribute to them on earlier pages was in type, there has been placed in
our hands evidence of a crusade against their employment in England,
and of its abolition by law in South Australia. See the Memoir of
Margaret Ethel Macdonald. London, 1913.
For all we know, the preponderance of argument may be against the
substitution of women for men as barkeepers; but we suspect that at
least it would diminish the shooting at and by barkeepers, in New
York.
And another thing we think we do know--that in these progressive days,
it would be hard to find any pursuit in which women are engaged, where
there is not agitation to improve it off the face of the earth. Their
old-fashioned pursuits of wife and mother have lately been specially
honored by such agitation.
_Answering Big Questions_
A contemporary that we have always very highly "esteemed" (we believe
that is the correct term, but we are new in the profession) is now
proceeding to fill us with awe. It announces that it is going to
circulate privately among its friends, a series of brochures that
"will answer big questions." We wish we could do that; but our
cotemporary has already engaged the only editor we know of who can.
For our poor part, we are apt to encounter in any country grocery some
question too big for us to answer. But the answers our esteemed
cotemporary is going to send out may occasionally help us in telling
how a big question that we don't profess to be able to answer, looks
to us. We have already had some help of this kind from the editor in
question: on many subjects his glowing imagination has thrown such
high lights that we have found places of shadow before unsuspected.
The matter reminds us of Horace Greeley's proposition to issue "for
the people," a series of pamphlets for five cents each, to contain
only "the pure truth." He did not say where he was going to get it.
_Decency and the Stage_
In the present agitation regarding decency on the stage, it is
probably safe to assume that the proponents for license or liberty or
freedom or whatever they call it, admit that there are _some_
necessary acts and places which should not be represented on the
stage. Now would it not clarify discussion if the said proponents were
to draw the line between such inadmissible matters and those that
should be admitted? We have never happened to see such a line drawn.
_What Is the Matter with the American Colleges_
Everybody in every one of them seems to know that something is the
matter, but nobody in any seems to know just what, much less, then, a
remedy for whatever it is.
Some say it is the suppression of the individual, the glorification of
the average. Others say it is college yelling and athletics. Yet
others, that it is vocationalizing and the deadly practical. Still
others call it the proletariat of the doctorate, the fad of the
faculties for immature or imitation research.
Can it be that it is all these things and several more, particularly
all those that exist in contrasted pairs, such as discipline and
required work according to the standard of the mean, and at the same
time, elective studies and the freedom of the city? Or simultaneous
college yells and doctor's dissertations. And can it be that all these
grow out of a single actual condition which is common to all American
higher education, and which compels it to be "lower" at the same time
that it is "higher"? For in the present organization of practically
every American college and university that condition actually does
exist.
It exists by virtue of the fact of the housing in the same dormitories
and fraternity houses, and mixing in the same class rooms and
laboratories, and providing with the same teachers and deans, and
ruling by the same regulations and gum-shoe committees, of dependent
preparatory students and independent advanced students.
Our high schools stop short of finishing the preparation of students
for University work. Our universities assume part of the high school
function along with their own. The German _Gymnasium_ and French
_lycée_ include the equivalents of the American college Freshmen and
part of the Sophomores. They finish up the drill and discipline stage
of education. The Continental university begins and carries on the
stage of intelligent and self-chosen and independent work. But in the
American universities there must be discipline, college yells, drill
in routine and elementary work, classes handled on the basis of
averages, and teachers of the _Gymnasium_ and _lycée_ type, existing
side by side with recognition and encouragement of the individual
freedom of bent, disregard of credit hours and assigned tasks, and
scholarly professors and investigators of real university type.
The outcome is that the drill teachers are made pseudo-investigators;
the investigators made unwilling drill teachers. The students are
invited to soar, and at the same time ordered to march in ranks.
Preparatory school rules are made for the sake of the Freshmen, which
the Seniors have to obey. Freedom of choice in study is offered
because of the Seniors and graduates, to the utter demoralization of
the Freshmen.
Because of this impossible juxtaposition of discipline and freedom,
drill and inspiration, the American university feels sick. It knows
very well that something is the matter with it. It has to be all
things to all students, and is, in fact, too little of a real thing to
any of them.
_Wanted: Proportionate News_
The most noteworthy difference between European and American
Journalism, as regards news, is the prominence we give to what is
technically called the news of the day. Let a great liner be sunk or
saved and all the newspapers, even the most conservative, print page
on page of repetitious story or comment, playing on the emotions from
every point of view. No European paper would feature even the most
affecting news on any such scale. Doubtless our American practice is a
natural enough tribute from the editors to the mobility of our
sympathies, not to say the flightiness of our minds. What the
enthralled reader does not realize is that to provide him with the
completely modulated thrill of the day scores of important items of
routine news have been curtailed to meaningless epitome or wholly
suppressed. For several days that duty of daily chronicle which a good
newspaper ordinarily performs is intermitted. The most important
debates of a congressional year will receive bare notice so long as a
heroic Marconi operator is in the public eye. The greatest of foreign
statesmen or authors might die in the glorious interim and receive the
barest notice; a revolution in Persia would yield to a factory fire on
the East Side.
Now something of this disproportion is necessary. No paper could live
in America which scrupulously treated news according to its abstract
importance regardless of the reader's cravings. Yet a journal that
respects itself has a function of daily chronicle that should under no
circumstances be suspended. A really good newspaper ought to be
valuable material for the historian, and our best newspaper will
several times in every twelvemonth leave him badly in the lurch. For a
week he will find admirable reports of say the discussion of a very
important measure like the currency bill, and then suddenly the
_Volturno und kein Ende_. Just about the time when mail letters were
beginning to tell a certain amount of truth about the Messina
earthquake, the telegraphic reports of which were egregious inventions
of distant improvisers, _The Republic_ was saved through the
intrepidity of Jack Binns. A correspondent who had been on the ground
at Messina and remained in close touch with the rescuers and refugees
received the sufficient answer with regard to additional earthquake
facts "Jack Binns has killed Messina." Here is obviously both a good
and a bad reason. There was every reason for celebrating at length the
pluck and loyalty of Jack Binns, and no reason for curtailing the
record of one of the greatest disasters registered in history.
The first duty of a good newspaper is to the more important routine
news. It is a duty that every American journal neglects at times quite
scandalously. The old fashion of relegating striking news of the day
to an extra had much to commend it. Abuse of the extra by the yellow
press has pretty well killed the practice among the conservative
papers. Possibly a discreet revival of the legitimate extra might help
matters. But what is really needed is a juster sense of proportion and
a clearer conception of duty among editors. With a little insight and
much courage a managing editor might make himself the controller of
the "news of the day," rather than its mere conduit. In the long run
his paper would more than gain in steady prestige what it lost in
occasional flurries of sensational success.
_Simplified Spelling_
Rather than bother our readers and distract their attention from what
we have to say, we print in the orthographic forms we are all
accustomed to. But we realize that many of these forms are
inconsistent and irrational--more so in English than in any other
civilized language--and that the difficulty of learning them wastes
the time and tissue of our children, and obstructs among foreigners
the spread of English to its natural position of a world language,
with the blessings that its attaining that position would bring in
peace and commerce.
Our orthography is, of course, an evolution. It began with picture
symbols, and some of these were gradually changed into the letters of
our alphabet. But the signs have always been later than the sounds,
and we never had enough of the former to express the niceties of the
latter. Therefore imperfections and inconsistencies in any new system
proposed should not be fatal against it, if it is enough of an advance
on the existing system, and a better advance than any other proposed.
The orthography of the future will undoubtedly be eclectic from many
proposals, and probably, like the present orthography, from many
involuntary and unreasoned practices.
The English Simplified Spelling Society, which contains the leading
British authorities, has gone on the principle that it is not worth
while to recommend any changes short of a comprehensive scheme for the
whole language, and has recommended an approximate one. Nothing more
than approximation is possible.
The American Simplified Spelling Board, sustained by Mr. Carnegie,
which corresponds in authority with the English society, has not
attempted a comprehensive system, but for the worst extravagances and
inconsistencies has simply recommended a number of remedies,
especially such forms as _tho_, _thru_, and the following changes in
final syllables--saving all silent _e's_, including the one in _ed_;
the _me_ in _gramme_, and programme; the _ue_ in final _gue_; the _te_
in final _ette_; also the substitution of _t_ for _d_ final, when so
pronounced.
As is well known, several of the remedial forms are already in
considerable use, especially in advertising and other writing where no
appreciable demands are made on the understanding or emotions.
* * * * *
From here until we giv notis on a later page, we wil uze som of those
forms and a few more--all of which may be not too radical for present
use in informal riting, as abuv mentioned, and may be regarded as
transitional toward an ideal system. It woud undoutedly be easier to
teach children a comprehensiv and consistent sistem than the existing
caos minus varius uncorrected partial remedies, as illustrated in the
present riting. The authoritys ar agreed that children woud lern a
consistent sistem years qicker than the present lac of sistem, and
having lernd the consistent sistem, woud pic up the forms they find in
newspapers and existing bouks without conscius effort. Then of course
a generation familiar with a goud sistem woud soon be suppleid with
literature in it. But a rising generation cannot be taut such a sistem
before the elders ar convinst of its utility.
We wish to promote such a conviction as far as we can, but no won
without experience can begin to realize the difficultys, in fact the
impossibility, of presenting new forms with absolute consistency.
Words really sound differently in som connections than in others; and
habit asserts itself in spite of reson. In half a dozen revisions of
these paragrafs, inconsistencys hav bin found every time, and som
undoutedly remain. But such inconsistencys ar not permanently inherent
in the reform, and shoud not prejudis it. Habits of pronunciation
disagree, and even if they did not, perfect discrimination coud not be
attaind even with an alfabet twice as large as our present one; and if
absolute discrimination wer attaind, it woud sune be nullified by an
accent in som new popular song, or from som new popular orator. The
only way to keep spelling abrest of language is for lexicografers to
cut luse from precedent, and closely follo the actual pronunciation
of their own times. William D. Whitney used to say that if they had
always don that, filological sience woud be much farther advanst.
A special cause of inconsistency is the tendency to preserv what is
not very bad, and to make changes as slight as reson wil permit, but
when no slight change wil do the tric, to make the change as goud as
possibl. But see what somtimes coms. The _w_ in _write_ is utterly
useless. Take it off, and we have a fairly good word _rite_. But the
_gh_ in _right_ is also useless--not pronounst, as is the _ch_ in the
cognate German _recht_. If we get rid of it, however, we have _rit_,
which rimes with _fit_. Now take it all in all, the best way to
lengthen that _i_ is to dubl it, just as in silabls closed with a
consonant we alreddy somtimes dubl the vowel--the _e_ in _seen_, the
_o_ in _door_. _This is not necessary in open silabls._ The S. S. S.
proposes we shal dubl the _a_ in _faather_, and the _u_ in _tuun_
(_tune_). Then if we dubl the _i_, we hav a uniform sistem with the
long vowels. This givs us _riit_. But then the processes we hav just
been thru land us with _rite_ and _riit_ for the same sound.
Of course to represent a sound in more than won way brings perplexity
to spellers. Yet several ways are resonabl to let stand until a new
generation can be educated to the best. This is a not unresonabl
concession to habit, and is not nearly so bad as to let a simbol
represent more than one sound, as in the two sounds for _tear_, and
the vowel sounds in _door_ and _poor_.
But we must also take into account what Skeat rightly says--that the
simbol for a sound should not be distributed in two places; and
therefore _rite_ is not so good as _riit_. But the _e_ at the end of a
closed silabl to lengthen the vowel, is so intrencht in the language
that it woud be doutful policy to attack it yet in words fairly fit to
stand, e. g., _fate_, _mate_, _bite_, _mote_, _lute_. So the
transition policy we recommend is to let all fairly goud forms stand,
but where a form is to bad to stand, change it into the best possibl,
as _right_ into _riit_, even at the price of such an inconsistency as
leaving _rite_ from _write_, because _rite_ is more workabl, tho
_riit_ woud be theoretically better. Som such inconsistencys ar
inevitabl, as we cannot start fresh, but must evolv from an existing
inconsistent--very inconsistent--orthografy.
In spelling, as in matters perhaps more important (tho the importance
of rational spelling is vastly grater than generally realized), it is
wel to recognize the ideal, but to try to advocate at any time only
what is workabl at that time.
* * * * *
Now we proceed tu a much clooser approximashon tu an ideal for owr
children, so far az it appeerz practicabl with the prezzent alfabet.
It wil at first seem a very funny ideal. All such approximashonz wil
differ, and wil hav tu fiit it owt, and this wun wil seem at first tu
be caos and oold niit, but allmoost enny wun ov them, tu a miind
withowt an alien training--tu a chiild's miind, woud be moor orderly
and luminus than owr prezzent sistem, or rathther lac ov sistem.
The rezonz for the niu formz which ar not obvius wil be explaind
alfabetically after the text.
Moost ov the formz we giv ar recommended by the S. S. B. and the S. S.
S. But thair ar itemz on which theze bodyz ar not yet agreed, even
among themselvz; yet thair laborz hav reecht the point whair
individualz shoud taak hoold and subject the formz thay beleev in tu
the strugl for existens and the survival ov the fittest.
The grait difficultyz ar in indicating the vowelz with owr prezzent
alfabet, which givz, for instans, oonly the wun simbol _a_ for at
leest ait sowndz, and probably moor not generaly discriminated, and
the wun simbol _e_ for at leest fiiv, _i_ for three, _o_ for foor, and
dubld for foor moor, and _u_ for fiiv.
The short vowelz ar dispoozd ov with comparativ eez: for in a silabl
cloozd with a consonant, the vowel iz uzualy short, e. g., _bad_,
_bed_, _did_, _cod_, _cub_, but unfortunaitly not all short vowelz hav
thair silablz cloozd. In Saxon dissilablz, owr ancestorz generaly did
clooz the first silabl when it woz short, by repeeting the vowel
beginning the folloing silabl, e. g., _gabble_, _filling_, _fizzle_.
But the practis ov cloozing in this way woz generaly _restricted tu
dissilabls_, az the pronunsiashon ov polisilabls iz apt tu indicait
itself, and economy iz wurth considering. In wurdz directly from the
Latin, az thair iz les differens ov axent between the silabls, the
clozing ov the first silabl az abuv descriibd, iz not yuzual. It woud
probably be wel tu introduus it, however. If, for instans, the first
silabl wer cloozd in _viggor_, we shoud not hav such contradicshonz az
_vigor_ and _vizor_ siid by siid.
Az tu the long sowndz, the oonly way tu reprezent them, _whair thay ar
not determind by pozishon at the end ov an oopen silabl_, iz (az
allreddy illustrated) by combining the letrz with different letrz, az
we now combiin in _gain_, _real_, _mine_, _soar_, _rule_: evidently
_gan_, _rel_, _min_, _sor_, _rul_, woud not anser the purpus. We hav
tu maik theez combinashonz becawz the genius ov owr rais duz not seem
tu favor adding letrz tu owr alfabet, inazmuch az we hav allreddy
dropt tu valuabl wunz reprezenting respectivly _th_ and _dh_.
It certanly woud be best, az allreddy propoozd, tu dubl eech vowel for
its long sownd, az we allreddy du in _deem_ and _door_. But we hav no
exampl ov dubl _a_, _i_, or _u_ (except in tu or three forren wurdz
liik _bazaar_, and ov coors, owr utterly exentric _w_), but the S. S.
S. recommendz _uu_ insted ov the _oo_ in _coon_, and dubl _a_ in
_faather_, which we accept. We do not need to dubl the _a_ befoor _r_
final in monosilabls becawz it haz the _ah_ sownd befoor _r_ exept
when the _a_ follooz a _w_ sownd, iither in _w_ itself or in _cw_
exprest az _q_, e. g. in _war_ (_wawr_) or _quart_ (_qawrt_). The
foorgoing givz dubl vowelz for all but _i_, and we propooz them thair.
This iz a compleet sistem baasd on a principl.
Now for sum explanashonz.
abuv = above. The e final propperly maiks the _o_ long, and iz
entirely owt ov plais heer and in _love_, _shove_, _etc._ The
sownd ov the _o_ iz propperly a _u_ sownd, az in _but_, and iz
wun ov several cases whair we absurdly yuuz _o_ tu express _u_
sowndz.
allreddy = already. The silabl _al_ propperly riims with _gal_,
_Hal_, _pal_, _Sal_--rather a riotus set ov silabls, but thay ar
whot running down the alfabet givz. And the silabl _read_
propperly riims with _bead_, and shoud be spelt here _red_, but
_redy_ shoud riim with _needy_, so we proviid an addishonal
consonant, in the mood ov owr ancestorz, az allreddy explaind.
This iz at the sacrifis ov economy, but the reformd sistemz hav
uthther economyz, espeshally in the terminal _ed_, tu compensait.
See allso _prezzent_ and _confiuzd_.
allso = also. See _allreddy_.
allwaiz = always. The S. S. S. recommendz _ai_ for the long _a_
sownd az in _pair_. See _allreddy_.
bin = been, which propperly riimz with _seen_.
confiuuzd = confused. Withowt the _i_, propperly pronownst
_confoozd_. Moorover we wawnt tu get rid ov the apparent silabl
at the end ov such wurdz, not oonly tu economiiz the yuusles _e_,
but allso becawz forrenerz tend to pronowns the _ed_ az a silabl.
coors = course and coarse. _oo_ az in _door_ iz the best simbol
for long _o_, az _ee_ iz the best simbol for long _e_. The _ou_
simbol we reserv for such wurdz az _coud_, _shoud_, _woud_. The
temptashon tu maik coors riim with Boors, iz ov the devvil: for
Boors iz abominably spelt. It shoud be Buurz; and furze shoud be
spelt withowt the _e_. Thair iz no serius objecshon tu making
_coors_ serv for both _course_ and _coarse_: thair ar allreddy
menny cases whaar wun wurd meenz several thingz.
determind = determined. _Mined_ can propperly be pronownst oonly
with a long _i_, and the silabl or wurd _mind_, with a short _i_.
Allso see _confiuuzd_.
devvil = devil, which with dubl propriety riimz with _evil_.
duz = does, which propperly riimz with _goes_.
grait = great, which propperly riimz with _beat_.
havving = having, which propperly riimz with _saving_.
impruuvd = improved. Tu reprezent a _u_ sownd with _o_ iz absurd.
Allso see _confiuuzd_.
litl = little. Thair iz so litl vowel sownd in the last silabl ov
this and menny uthther wurdz as tu be hardly wurth expressing,
and thair ar menny difficultyz in duing it.
maid = made. Thair iz no objecshun to this from owr allreddy
havving a wurd _maid_. See _allwaiz_, also _coors_.
menny = many, which propperly and suggestivly riimz with _zany_.
no = know: the S. S. B. touk off the _w_, but after chainging
_knock_ into _noc_, bawkt at this _k_. We ar a litl moor
venchursum. _The o iz long by pozishon at the end ov an oopen
silabl._
nu = knew. See _no_.
oonly = only, which woud propperly riim with _sonly_ if thair wer
such a wurd for filial. The S. S. S. recommendz _oe_ for the long
_o_ sownd, but _oo_ iz betr, and we rigl it in az an inishal
after the manner of _eels_.
owr = our, which propperly riimz with iither _pour_ or _tour_.
The vowel sownd in _our_ iz that in _owl_.
practis = practice. In _practiced_ we pronowns the _ed_ az _t_,
and thairfor shoud spel it so. But if we maid it _practict_, the
_c_ woud be hard. Chainging the _c_ to _s_ in the parent wurd
givs us _practist_, which iz wel simboliizd.
prezzent = present, which propperly riimz with _decent_.
pronowns = pronounce. See _practis_.
pronownst = pronounced. See _practis_.
propper = proper, which propperly riimz with _toper_. See
_allreddy_, allso _litl_.
purpus = purpose. _Pose_ propperly riimz with _nose_.
reecht = reached. See _practis_.
riit = right. The _gh_ wurdz hav that simbol cognait with the
German guttural _ch_ az in _recht_, tho we du not pronowns it.
But _rit_ woud riim with _bit_.
scollar = scholar. Booth Societyz omit the _h_ in _ch_ hard. But
that woud leev _scolar_, riiming with _molar_. See _allreddy_,
allso _litl_.
scuul = school. Dubl _o_ iz abiuuzd in being maid tu reprezent a
_u_ sownd. See _oonly_.
silabl = syllable. We du not keep the dubl l, becawz this iz a
polisilabl: see p. 221 neer bottom. In spelling, children and
forrenerz, and not thay aloon, ar puzzld between _i_ and _y_. The
S. S. B. haz wiizly reservd _y_ for terminals, and we beleev in
it for inishals allso whair thay ar combiind with uthther vowelz.
See yuse and yuzed. Also see _litl_.
simbol = symbol. See _silabl_.
simboliizd = symbolized. See _silabl_. Moorover, if we wer tu
drop the _e_ from _simbolized_ tu prevent forrenerz pronownsing
the apparent last silabl, thay woud be in dainger of maiking the
ending riim with whot we hav spelt az _fizzed_ and woud now spel
az _fizd_. For this rezon we need the _iizd_ simbols. See
_simplifiid_.
simplifiid = simplified. The _ie_ freequently in English and
allwaiz in German haz the long _e_ sownd, and in English iz
alwaiz confiuuzd with the long _e_ sownd in _receiv_, etc.
Rezerving _ii_ for the long _i_ duz away with that confiuzhon. Tu
du away with the confiuzhon between such wurdz az _believe_ and
_receive_, the S. S. B. allreddy reservz _ie_, and the S. S. S.,
_ee_, which we follo.
sownd = sound. See _coors_ and _owr_.
thair = their, see _allwaiz_.
thay = they. Not _thai_ becawz _y_ iz betr than _i_ booth az
inishal and terminal.
tu = too, to and two. The absurdity of reprezenting a _u_ sownd
by _o_ is obvius. _We don't need tu dubl the u, becauz the silabl
iz oopen._
uthther = other. This iz a stumper. The inishal sownd iz the _u_
in _but_. The _th_ propperly reprezents a singl consonant sownd.
Owr Saxon ancestorz had a singl letr for it which we did badly in
throing away. That letr the Anglo-Saxons freqently yuuzd tu clooz
a silabl (see p. 221) az in siððan, _since_, and after thay began
tu yuuz _th_ insted ov the ð, thay freqently yuuzd _th_ for the
saam purpus, until its cumbrusnes thru it owt. We stil yuuz the ð
in filological publicashonz, tho often allso the Greek [Greek:
th]. If we must yuuz _th_, for consistency's saak it shoud be
repeeted in _uthther_, _bruthther_, _muthther_, etc.
Fortunaitly thair ar oonly a scoor ov such wurdz. We riit of
thair spelling partly az a curiosity that may be interesting, and
partly tu sho the dezirability ov getting bac owr oold letrz.
Macaulay's scuulboy nu, if owrz duzn't, that the Greeks wer ahed
ov us over tu thowzand yeerz ago, in havving not oonly a singl
simbol for _th_, but a long _e_ and a short _e_, and a long _o_
and a short _o_.
whot = what, which propperly riimz with _bat_.
woz or wuz = was, which propperly riimz with _gas_.
wun = one, which propperly riimz with _tone_.
wurd = word, which propperly riimz with _cord_. Its vowel is
pronownst with a _u_ sownd, which it iz absurd tu reprezent by
_o_.
wurs = worse, which propperly riimz with _horse_. We woud hardly
pronowns _horse_ az we pronowns _hearse_, tho the latter iz allso
abominabl: for _ea_ propperly reprezents the sownd in _dear_. The
riit way tu spel _hearse_ iz _hurs_, and the riit way tu spel
_her's_ iz _hur'z_.
wuz or woz = was, which propperly riimz with _gas_.
yuus or yuuz = use. See _confiuuzd_. _Use_ iz pronownst both
_uze_ and _use_. _Uze_ iz a betr way to spel the wurd which we
rongly spel _ooze_. Tu yuuz an _o_ for a _u_ sownd iz bad enuf,
and tu yuuz tu ov them iz wurs--dubly fit for _fools_.
We may venture upon another (annuthther?) spelling lesson in the next
number, especially if owr reederz giv enny siin ov wawnting it; and it
may anser sum qeschonz raazd in this lesson. And we may even go so far
az tu prezent a fiu miild innovashonz in owr text, az haz bin
heroically don by the _Educational Review_, _The Independent_ and sum
uthther periodicalz ov standing.
We woud liik to hieer from owr reedrz on the subject.
* * * * *
Press of T. MOREY & SON, Greenfield, Mass.
The Unpopular Review
VOL. 1 APRIL-JUNE, 1914 NO. 2
THE SOUL OF CAPITALISM
I
There is no such thing as capitalism, say the conservatives. It is an
empty sound, a curse in the name of a false god, directed by the
revolutionaries against the world of things as they are, as they
always have been and always shall be. Capitalism is a reality, say the
radicals. It is the appropriate designation of the current system--a
vulgar, hideous system, a brute mechanism set in motion by the energy
of blind greed, a mechanism through which human values and human lives
are thrust, to emerge smudged and flat and dead. The soul of
capitalism? Pernicious paradox!
Capitalism is no less a reality than was feudalism. The capitalist
employer is the most prominent figure in the modern state, just as the
knight was the most prominent figure in the mediæval. But the order of
knights did not of itself constitute feudalism: equally characteristic
was the class of serfs. In a fundamental sense the system consisted in
the mutual relation between knight and serf. Capitalism, in like
manner, implies a class of employers and a reciprocal and conditioning
class of workers, but as a system it consists in the mutual relation
of these classes. The conscious existence of the members of both
classes is shaped, or at least colored, by the capitalistic relation.
Not in the same way, however; for capitalism induces one set of
reactions in the minds of the employing class, and another set of
reactions in the minds of the employed. But these diverse reactions
are equally the product of capitalism, its inevitable concomitants,
its psychical essence.
Capitalism is, to be sure, not the whole of modern life; nor was
feudalism the whole of the life of the Middle Ages. In the feudal
state there were classes that were not, strictly speaking, under
feudal law. Such were the clergy, the merchants and artisans of the
towns, the freemen of the villages. Moreover, there were individuals
who rose superior to the system, such as the great feudatories, who
often assumed a regal freedom from the narrow feudal rules. There were
also elements that proved incapable of assimilation, aliens, outlaws,
mendicants. But the popular mind, with its inveterate bent towards
order and uniformity, generalized the relation beyond the range of its
proper application. To the worldly bishop, even the Pope was a great
feudatory; to the beggar's apprentice, his master was a species of
knight. So at the present time there are numerous elements that are
incongruous with capitalism. The independent worker and the small
merchant, the professional classes, the artists and the politicians,
are not properly governed by capitalistic rules. The great magnates of
the industrial world have won for themselves a measure of
immunity from the laws that govern the conduct of the typical
capitalist-employer. But the predominance of the capitalistic system
is evidenced by the fact that all these non-assimilable forms are
being translated into capitalistic terms. A farm is no longer a
"holding," it is an "investment" or a "job." A political magnate is a
"boss" and his supporters are "workers"; the political machine itself
is "invested capital." The buildings of church or school are, with
increasing frequency, described as "plant." We are beginning to hear
of "efficiency control" of college curricula; of the "unit costs" of
saving souls. Our most exalted dignitary is "the people's hired man";
and the late King Humbert of Italy was wont to speak of assassination
as a "trade risk."
With due allowance for the whimsical quality of some of the instances
cited above, we must yet admit that they indicate a general tendency
to translate all current experience into capitalistic terms. Such
instances are but indications of the collective conviction that
capitalism is the most significant fact in modern life. Why then do
our conservatives insist upon rejecting the term, upon denying the
very content of the concept? Chiefly because those who have depicted
capitalism have sketched it in black crayon, instead of painting it in
the rosy hues of romance.
To speak of capitalism as endowed with a soul, is indeed a paradox.
But the conception of soul is itself paradoxical. The man of science
dispenses with it in so far as he can. All that compels us rationally
to posit the existence of soul, is its works, good and evil. The
hypothesis of a human soul has been forced upon us by the fact that
there is in the action of man an element that transcends the needs and
purposes of the body, an element that we often see growing into such
commanding importance that it reduces the body to the rank of mere
instrument. Capitalism, too, appears to subserve purposes that
transcend its proper ends. To what end, in profit-making, is the
destruction of personality, the corruption of the sentiment of
humanity, that the Socialists attribute to capitalism? To the
Socialists themselves capitalism appears endowed with a soul, to whose
purposes capital's immediate processes are merely instrumental. Only,
the soul is one of unmixed evil.
II
Capitalism, like every other social system, implies a class that rules
and a class that is controlled. The ruling class--_pace_ those
political theorists who refuse to know that a ruling class exists--is
composed of the capitalist employers. And how do the capitalist
employers differ from any others of the masters that the world has
known? Not merely in that they possess accumulations and pay wages in
money. These are incidental facts. What is essential is that the
capitalist employers, in so far as they are truly such, are controlled
in all their active dealings by the principle of commercialization.
And commercialization is a psychical phenomenon. It is the
substitution, in economic conduct, of a process of calculation for a
process of feeling and will. The antithesis between the two processes
has long been recognized by practical men, under the form of the
contrast between "business" and "sentiment." That much maligned
abstraction of the economists, "the economic man," is nothing but the
capitalistic entrepreneur, reacting as he must to a competitive
situation. What the orthodox economists failed to observe is that
so-called "economic conduct" is class conduct. It is confined to the
merchants and manufacturers of a competitive régime, whose daily life
consists in the manipulation of exchange values. Employers who enjoy a
monopoly, independent laborers, and even the typical wage earners of
capitalism, may--indeed, must--permit their actions to be governed by
other motives, as well as by that of profit. But the capitalist
employer in a competitive trade is quickly taught by bitter experience
that it is not his function to judge and choose. His business is to
calculate; and the less non-economic principles of action interfere
with his decisions, the more certain he is of success. All elements
essential to his business present themselves in the guise of exchange
values. All magnitudes, thus, are commensurate: you compare one with
the other and choose the greater. Intelligence is required for the
ascertaining of relative magnitudes. But the calculation once made,
action is determined. Whether you are a man of strong will or weak
will, of active feelings or passive, you do not hesitate when, in
effect, a dollar is offered you in exchange for fifty cents.
It is cool intelligence, not dominant personality, that, under a
purely capitalistic system, determines the distribution of the seats
of power. The capitalist employers are our ruling class, but of all
classes that have ever held power, they least resemble personal
rulers. They calculate, but conditions beyond their control determine.
And, to be most successful, they must divest their calculations of all
elements that are irrelevant to profit making. If I am a capitalist
employer, operating under conditions of keen competition, I buy no
more readily from an honest man than from a rogue, provided the rogue
can give good title to the things he sells. I hire men, Teutons or
Slavs or Latins, white, black or yellow, with a sole view to their
effectiveness for purposes of profit. I may have private opinions on
religion or politics or morals; on the use of alcohol or opium or
tobacco. But unless I can relate such manifestations of virtues or
vices to the point of profit, I must suppress these opinions, in my
active dealings with men. It follows, then, that in all that concerns
the capitalist employer, in all that concerns his essential rulership,
he is a respecter of the liberties of men.
No one, it is true, is a capitalist employer, pure and simple. In his
social life, every one is likely to retain some of his age-old
prejudices, and to seek to enforce age-old oppressions. As a business
man, no one would be so foolish as to refuse to sit in the same board
of directors with any other capable business man, Hellene or [Greek:
barbaros]. In his club life, on the other hand, many a business man
affects a patrician exclusiveness. The most Christian business man
does not refuse to deal freely with atheists, but very likely he
refuses to admit them to his house. As a mine operator I should employ
negroes as skilled or unskilled laborers, as foremen or bosses, if
such employment were favorable to financial results. I might none the
less, as a citizen, attempt to exclude them from public office. In
business hours, the exercise of personal, political or religious
oppression is penalized by technical inefficiency and pecuniary loss.
Out of business hours, however, every man tends still to revert to the
aboriginal state of manhood, narrow, illiberal, obstinate, oppressive.
Capitalism, furthermore, is far from having attained complete
dominance, even in business affairs. Personal whim, as a
co-determinant of action, is not obsolete, but merely obsolescent. The
president of a great manufacturing corporation of the Middle West
detests cigarettes, and has promulgated the rule that no men whose
fingers are cigarette stained shall be added to his staff. Mr. Henry
Ford intends to confine the benefits of employment in his mills to men
who are "worthy," that is, to men who conform to certain standards of
conduct that are good in their employer's eyes. There are employers
who will not tolerate in their shops the presence of Socialists;
others who have engaged in a crusade to exterminate "knockers." In all
such cases of essentially personal discrimination an attempt is made,
however, to justify it on abstract grounds of efficiency. Cigarette
smokers, loose livers, Socialists and "knockers" are poor workmen,
assert these employers. The assertion, we all know, is far from being
universally true. In so far as it is false, however, it is a gracious
falsehood in the light of the spirit of capitalism. It is a concession
to the principle that pecuniary considerations alone justify an
invasion of personal liberty.
Discrimination on personal grounds is, moreover, so exceptional as to
count as amiable eccentricity. It is recognized as a handicap, which
can be overcome only by striking superiority in other directions. Mr.
Ford may watch over the private conduct of his employees, because he
is able to pay much higher wages than anyone else. The manufacturing
concern to which reference has been made may discriminate against able
workmen with cigarette stained fingers, because it is efficiently
organized, and enjoys a monopoly position. Such instances are
necessarily rare, and are interesting only as a contrast to the
businesses controlled strictly by the spirit of capitalism.
Personal oppression may still be exercised within business hours: but
it represents an added cost, readily determined by scientific
management. The machinery for its suppression is in motion; it cannot
forever survive. There is no equally effective machinery for the
elimination of the personal oppression that emerges out of business
hours. In one's business calculations, one regards a social prejudice,
even if it is directed against oneself, as irrelevant to practical
action, so long as it finds expression only beyond the realm of
business. A persistent slanderer of alien races finds no difficulty in
raising a loan from a foreign banker, provided that the security he
offers is good. No element of revenge in the relations between
Parisian banks and German customers has appeared since the Zabern
incident. Indirectly, however, the social influence of capitalistic
toleration is very considerable. One who has an alien partner may
continue to cherish the heroic myth of Anglo-Saxon superiority, but it
will be through desire for consistency, not out of conviction.
International financial forays upon weak nations, like the late Six
Power loan, have the effect of weakening many a national prejudice.
National, racial and religious prejudices retain their pristine
vitality only where capitalism has not yet reached a high state of
development. It is in Russia and Rumania, economically backward
states, not in England and America, the most capitalistic of all, that
the policy of expelling heterogeneous elements flourishes. It is in
the Old South, still in a precapitalistic stage, that the social gulf
between the races is widest. It is on the Pacific Coast, whose whole
volume of capitalistic industry could be overmatched by that of a city
like Newark, that detestation of an alien race rises to the rank of a
political issue.
III
Toleration and its counterpart, personal liberty, these are the first
constituents of the soul of capitalism. Capitalistic toleration, it is
true, originates in interest, and is limited by interest. If
capitalism admonishes me to tolerate atheism in my foreman, so long as
it does not interfere with his efficiency, it equally admonishes me to
extirpate excessive piety in his person, if, for example, intervals of
ecstatic contemplation divert his attention from my interests. Morally
such toleration is vastly inferior to that which is founded upon a
broad sentiment of humanity and a recognition of the presumption
involved in the prescribing of rules to one's fellow man. But ethical
toleration can find lodgment only in the breasts of the chosen few.
"Neither do I condemn thee." Of all the miracles, is not this
expression of toleration the greatest? Millions upon millions have
repeated the sentiment devoutly; but to how few has it become a rule
of life!
Capitalistic toleration, on the other hand, is a sentiment not too
refined for the most vulgar souls. Indeed, its appeal is probably
strongest to the very most vulgar; certainly, to the most selfish. A
high-minded employer may seek to bring up his working-folk in the way
they should go--that is, his own conception of the Way. It is the
greedy materialist who says: "What do I care how my workmen eat and
drink and play, what they read, how they vote, worship and marry? It's
all one to me, so they deliver the goods." Ethical toleration selects
for its votaries the few and the unselfish; capitalistic toleration
selects the many and the selfish. And it is for this reason that the
liberty based upon capitalistic toleration is the broadest and most
substantial of all. "City air makes free," says the proverb. Not
because the city is the abode of choice souls, but because the city is
capitalistic.
The struggle for religious liberty, it may be said, antedates
capitalism. This is not wholly true; the hot beds of religious
liberalism in early modern times were the cities, already becoming
capitalistic. The Independents and Quakers of England, the Huguenots
of France, the Calvinists of Holland, the Lutherans of Germany,
represented a germinating capitalism. If the spirit of capitalism was
not yet highly evolved, neither were the liberties sought broadly
conceived. The Charter and their own valiant spirits won for the
Puritans of Massachusetts Bay freedom to worship God. But there was no
freedom, in Massachusetts Bay, to go forth from the Puritan settlement
and dance around a maypole. Precapitalistic freedom meant only the
removal of specific oppressions, sometimes grave, sometimes trivial,
imposed by the constituted authorities. From the natural human
disposition to interfere in one another's affairs, to standardize
humanity, to excise variations above and below the normal, there never
was any freedom, except upon the lawless frontier, until capitalism
appeared upon the earth.
A class freedom! say the Socialists, and a hollow one! That the
Socialists are permitted to go up and down upon the earth, teaching
doctrines that they themselves proclaim to be subversive of the
interests of those whom they designate as the ruling class, is
sufficient evidence that the freedom is not properly described as
hollow. If Karl Marx had appeared in the days of Charles the Great to
teach doctrines equally subversive of the existing order, he would
have found short shrift indeed. That it is a class freedom is,
however, true, in a sense. The capitalist employer, who deals with
many men in the course of his business, must learn to tolerate many
personal idiosyncracies, and must in turn be met with toleration by
many. The forced repetition of acts of toleration tends to mold the
temperament of the capitalist employers as a class, and to establish
among them a large measure of personal freedom. This repetition is
lacking in the experience of the worker. Dealing with one employer
alone, or with only a few employers in infrequent succession, the
laborer is less likely to appreciate the significance of the
toleration he enjoys, or to learn from the business process itself the
need of toleration towards others.
Nevertheless, under capitalism the laborer does undoubtedly make gains
in personal liberty which he could not have made under earlier
systems. We know what the Spartans did with the Helots who varied
above the type of servile manhood. They assassinated them. We know
what the Romans did with slaves who thought too manfully. They
crucified them. In the long ages of serfdom in Western Europe, what
was the natural fate of the serf who held his head too high? The
commonplace facts of his torturings were seldom regarded worthy of
mention in the Chronicles. Within the last century, however, men have
been beaten to death in Europe for daring to maintain their
preferences in mating against the wishes of their lords.
Class liberty? Does it mean nothing to the Republican mechanic in
Birmingham, Alabama, that a Democratic employer would be universally
regarded as a fool for concerning himself with the politics of his
men? Does it mean nothing to the Roman Catholic workman that he may
live for years in a Protestant community without once encountering
discrimination against him on account of religion? Those who affirm
that the liberty of capitalism, even in its overflow to the working
class, is hollow and meaningless, can never have permitted their study
or their imagination to sound very thoroughly the depths of human
injury and wretchedness.
So much, however, must be granted: that the liberty afforded the
worker by capitalism has its offsets. If the employer no longer
regards himself as justified in ordering the private life of his
workman, neither does he feel responsible for protecting the workman
against the distress accompanying sickness or superannuation, or even
commercial disorder. The worker has paid for his freedom with
increased insecurity of his lot. But that the freedom has been bought
too dear, would be hard to maintain. Let us suppose that a landowner
organizes his possessions upon a feudal plan, and invites working
families to come and serve him, yielding implicit obedience to him in
all personal matters as well as in matters pertaining to the technique
of production. In return for their ungrudging services, let him
guarantee them a sufficiency of food, rough clothing, and rude
housing, together with rights to maintenance in disability and old
age. How many workers will make haste to attach themselves to him?
Where workers have tasted of capitalistic freedom, it is safe to say
that none would accept the offered privileges.
IV
If capitalism had offered the working class nothing but the crumbs of
middle class liberty, the diatribes of the revolutionaries would be
not without justification. For admittedly, liberty has been gained in
far greater measure by the capitalist employer than by the workman.
But capitalism has done vastly more for labor than this. It has given
rise to that most interesting and important of all modern social
phenomena, the solidarity of labor. As an active, working concept, the
fraternity of labor is just as certainly a product of capitalism as is
social toleration. The latter is the soul of capitalism, as it
manifests itself in the class of employers, the former, as it
manifests itself in the class of employees.
To this statement a Socialist will at once take exception. The
sentiment of brotherhood, the Socialists claim, originates in the
common experiences of poverty and hard labor. But the men at the
passages of the Jordan who slew one another over the pronunciation of
Shibboleth were doubtless manual workers, and were certainly poor. The
merciless strife between Saxon and Celt in England was primarily
between men who were all poor and workers. The participants in the
Sicilian vendettas, in the Scottish clan struggles, in the Kentucky
feuds, might well be honored with the title proletariat, by virtue of
poverty and laboriousness of life. Fraternity is too luxurious a plant
to bloom upon a barren soil of universal labor and poverty. Every one
who reads the documents of middle nineteenth century America is aware
of the uncompromising hostility of the American workingman toward the
distressed Irish seeking an escape from famine. Later, there is
abundant evidence of working class contempt and hostility directed
toward the immigrating workmen from Germany and Scandinavia. Twenty
years ago it was the Dago that experienced the inhospitality of the
workingmen toward their alien brothers; today it is the Wapp--the
collectivity of unfortunates of uncouth ways and unimaginable speech
that seek refuge here from the poverty and oppression of southeastern
Europe. No middle class worshipper of a family tree rooted in the old
colonies can hold the Wapp in more profound detestation than do many
of our recent arrivals. "Zese tam fools [the Wapps], zey ruins zis tam
counthry."
It is the attitude of the unions, we are told, that in the North
represents the chief obstacle to the progress of the negro away from
the menial services and the unskilled employments. It was the working
class that forced, first Chinese, and later Japanese exclusion. It is
working class politics that demands a white Australia, and vexes the
British Empire over the question of emigration from India. "Workingmen
are brothers," say the Socialists. Not by birth and native instincts.
Not by virtue of community in labor and poverty. If there is such a
thing as a fraternity of labor, it is begotten of capitalism.
An active sentiment of brotherhood, does, unquestionably, spring up
under capitalism. Differences of race and religion dwindled to
insignificance among the coal miners in the great strike of 1904. The
Lawrence and Paterson strikes, and the strike in the copper country,
have offered abundant evidence of the growing strength of the feeling
of working class solidarity. It would be difficult to cite a single
recent strike in which men and women of traditionally hostile races
and creeds have not coöperated with the utmost harmony and good will.
No one will deny that the more conscious the workers are of the
pressure of capitalism, the more rapidly does the feeling of
solidarity develop. This is the moral gain that is afforded by labor
disputes. It is a gain which is not to be had without its cost, in the
disorganization of industry, the impoverishment of multitudes of
working families, the destruction of life and property, and the
loosing upon society of evil passions. Is the gain worth its cost? In
the opinion of many observers of our social movement, the cost is
tremendous, but few of these observers attempt to strike a balance
between cost and gain. This is because they have failed to recognize
working class solidarity as a significant step in moral progress.
The development of solidarity among American workingmen is proceeding
rapidly; in other countries its progress is not less manifest. This is
true despite the fact that the problem of creating harmony between
hostile races and religions is more serious where uninterrupted
continuity on the same soil renders easy the survival of ancient
prejudices. The hostility between Czech and German, between Magyar and
Slav, is mitigated when the representatives of these warring races
work side by side in the same factory, oppressed by the same factory
regulations, impoverished by the same crises. Evidence is
accumulating, to prove that the internationalism of labor is becoming
a reality. It may not be true that French workingmen are already so
utterly averse to the idea of shooting down their German brethren as
the Socialistic literature and the spokesmen of Socialist and Labor
parties would have us believe. But there is very much more than a
fervent hope in working class anti-militarism. If French and German
workmen might at present fail to refuse to kill one another in war,
the time is perhaps not far distant when the outcome of an
international war may be rendered problematical through the extension
of working class solidarity.
For the working class, solidarity is producing results quite analogous
to those produced in the class of capitalistic employers by the
pursuit of profit. Solidarity is unthinkable without a measure of
toleration. The American trade unionist learns to tolerate the alien
origin, the broken speech and uncouth manner, the strange religion,
and the unexpected outlook upon life, of the foreign workman who must
either become a brother unionist and faithful ally, or a scab and an
enemy. And out of this toleration is created a sphere of personal
freedom from social encroachment such as no workman of an earlier
epoch ever enjoyed. Fraternity and liberty, these are the positive
acquisitions won by labor out of the very oppression of capitalism. Of
the revolutionary trinity only equality remains beyond the visible
horizon. And even equality may be brought nearer, if not realized,
through the further perfecting of working class liberty and
fraternity.
V
Capitalism is material, gross, ugly. Yes, but it has a
soul--toleration, liberty, fraternity. And this, like most souls, is
not so much in being as in becoming. It is only in the most highly
capitalistic centers that even business has partly freed itself from
elements of personal oppression. There is no state nor city in which
the fraternity of labor is more than an emerging fact. Under
capitalism, workingmen are brothers, but there is still a vast deal of
the Cain and Abel in their feelings toward one another. Remove the
pressure of capitalism at this instant, and the lessons of fraternity
would quickly be forgotten. Relax the profit motive, and mankind would
again stand forth in its pristine narrowness and bigotry and cruelty.
Conceive for a moment that the United States were now under
Socialistic management. With what spirit should we greet the oppressed
of other lands, fleeing to us for refuge? We should probably judge of
the problem in terms of dividend and divisor: so much food, so many
mouths; let not the number of mouths be increased. To be sure, there
is an economic fallacy lurking in this syllogism; but when has an
economic fallacy ever been crushed except by weight of a brute class
interest? Our workingmen are brothers of those of England and France
and Germany, under the pressure of cosmopolitan capitalism. But the
natural attitude of a group of Socialistic nations toward one another
will be a coveting of one another's rich mines and fertile provinces.
At least such will be the natural attitude until fraternity, imposed
by capitalism, has descended from men's lips and entered into their
blood.
There is a wise saying in Karl Marx's _Critique of Political Economy_
(Preface): "No social order ever disappears before all the productive
forces for which there is room in it have been developed; and new
higher relations of production never appear before the material
conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old
society." What Marx said of the material embodiment of capitalism, we
can apply to its soul. Capitalism is growing toward liberty and
fraternity. But the immense distance we must traverse before this goal
can be attained is evidence of the vitality that remains in the
system. Were capitalism to be abolished today, the hard-won gains of
the last two centuries would vanish. But by this very fact it is
proved that capitalism cannot be abolished today.
VI
In its present stage of development capitalism, every one admits, is
ugly. Haste and vandalism have characterized the work of constructing
it. It is like the wall of Athens, rough stone upon hewn memorial
tablets to the dead, upon the trunks and limbs of statues of gods and
men and beasts. The feast of Our Lady of Carmel was beautiful in
Palermo; transplanted to New York, it is grotesque. There was dignity
in the demeanor of the Lithuanian on his native soil: in the
anthracite towns, the Lithuanian is a mortar-disfigured torso, thrown
heedlessly into the courses of a rubble wall. All the mixing up of
peoples, of customs, of ideals, that an incipient capitalism implies,
produces a conglomerate that is inevitably ugly.
And quite apart from the ugliness of discordant combinations, there is
an ugliness originating in the very virtues of capitalism. As we have
seen, it is the tendency of capitalism to leave human nature free in
all that transcends the narrow limits of the process of profit making.
And this would be well if, as the optimists assure us, human nature
were uniformly beautiful. Those of us, however, who are not committed
to dogmatic optimism know that if some part of human nature is most
beautiful when unrestrained and unadorned, another part is most seemly
when well laced with stays of custom, well draped in garments of
convention. At any rate, in the initial phase of the capitalistic
liberation of human nature, which we are now experiencing, it is an
open question whether our eyes are not more frequently offended than
regaled.
It is in the field of material objects, however, that the contrasts
between present capitalism and the earlier order are most clearly
visible. Time was when the man who built a house granted to the whole
community a voice in determining its design. And the community
permitted variation from type, but only a moderate, well regulated
variation. Thus were the walled cities of the Middle Ages governed by
a harmony of construction, which gave to each dwelling, at the very
least, a beauty of use and wont. Today in America the builder is free.
If he chooses to dwell in a Greek temple or a Gothic chapel or a
Chinese pagoda, there is no one to dissuade him. No one, except
perhaps an architect whose plans have been rejected or a good citizen
at large, ex-officio adviser of an unheeding world.
In the economic field human conduct is narrowly ruled and restricted
by capitalism; but in the non-economic field--the greater and more
significant part of life--the good and the evil, the beautiful and the
ugly, are set free by capitalism, to struggle for existence.
Capitalism offers no direct pecuniary rewards for virtue and beauty.
Nor, however, does it impose any penalties upon them. Did any earlier
order of society impose such penalties? To be sure. Let us recall the
contempt for the arts on the part of militaristic Rome, the pride in
illiteracy of the glittering mediæval knight. Capitalism does not
require a merchant or a banker to become a connoisseur of art. Nor
does it require him to apologize for any such variation from typical
instincts.
If good and evil must thus strive in a fair field, neither rewarded
nor penalized economically, what will be the outcome? The evil will
prevail, say those who--strangely enough--describe themselves as
idealists. Most of us refuse to engage in prophecies. But so much is
clear: the good and the beautiful that may prevail under a
thorough-going capitalism must be better and more beautiful than the
values of old time. Capitalistic freedom demands that there must be
greater variety and wealth of beauty than an earlier order required;
capitalistic fraternity demands that charity and toleration must
extend beyond the bounds of class and race. Unless the art and the
practical ethics of perfected capitalism represent an advance in
universality, they will be thrust aside as meaningless and worthless.
It is, to be sure, more difficult to establish fixed values upon a
broad basis of human life than upon a narrow one. More difficult were
the problems that confronted Euripides the Pan-Hellene, than Sophocles
the Athenian. There is a contrast in technical perfection, between
the work of Balzac the Frenchman, and Daudet the adoptive Parisian;
between that of Kipling the imperialist, and Bridges the Englander;
between that of Ibsen the cosmopolitan, and Björnson the Norwegian.
But in all these instances the loss in classical perfection is vastly
overbalanced by the gain in human worth. There were poets and
dramatists in Scandinavia before the days of Holberg. They had an
elaborate canon, all the rules of which were violated by Holberg's
iconoclastic cosmopolitanism. What has become of the works of
Holberg's predecessors? No one can read them. But Holberg was never so
widely read and honored as today.
A broader and more liberal humanity than the world has known
before--such, after all, is the evolving soul of capitalism. This does
not indicate, however, that capitalism will last forever, or deserves
immortality. There comes a time when the most responsive body becomes
a clog upon the soul, and should accordingly be buried. The body of
capitalism is none too responsive; therefore we may be certain that it
must, in the end, be discarded. What the succeeding order will be, no
man can forecast. But it will not be one of unbridled individualism;
for a spirit of fraternity, transcending that imposed by capitalism,
will carry the principle of coöperation to lengths beyond present
dreams. And it will not be Socialism; for the spirit of toleration and
freedom, now only germinating, will have attained to its full
efflorescence in institutions that guarantee a range of personal
development not compatible with the well-regimented scheme of a
Socialistic state. Capitalism will disappear; but can we doubt that it
will be honored in history as a most significant stage in the progress
of the human soul towards liberty?
A SOCIOLOGICAL NIGHTMARE
[Greek: Ta môra gar pant' estin Aphroditê brotois.]
Eur. Troad. 989.
The wise Hecuba accused the frail Helen of throwing upon Aphrodite
blame which really belonged to no one but Helen herself. Can it be
that, now the whole world has turned sociologist, many of us are
guilty of throwing upon poor society blame that ought solely to attach
to us as would-be students of society? When emancipated spirits give
utterance to their views with regard to the iniquities of the
man-ruled world of the past, and describe the ideal eugenic world of
the future, in which woman is to be man's superior, and the family a
new thing under heaven, one wonders how far the nature of the views
and the character of the vision are determined by the deficiencies,
and how far by the exceptional endowments, mental and moral, of the
critic and prophet. When economists cross their scientific hearts, and
assure us on their honor as impartial students that, however much they
may regret to announce its speedy demise, the monogamous family is a
doomed institution, one is tempted to ask whether a few shrivelling
leaves of a brief season would be reliable authorities with regard to
the condition of a large tree at its roots. To anyone who inquires
whether a metaphor or an analogy is an argument, we will say that we
have known political economists who spoke of themselves and their work
in terms indistinguishable from those employed by students of the
so-called physical sciences.
We are free to confess that these perhaps inconsequential remarks
proceed from a middle aged person who is not a sociologist, or an
economist, or even an adept in the New History. That we make any
remarks at all is due to the fact that, as our title perhaps
indicates, a little too much sociological diet has induced in us a
condition analogous to nightmare. When a small boy of our
acquaintance, in a family not yet extinct, is afflicted with this
disorder, he invariably screams out lustily and runs to his mother.
Following his example as nearly as manners and circumstances permit,
we vent our feelings in THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW.
"But who forces you, in this free country, to feed upon sociological
diet?" This hypothetical question from a hypothetical reader admits of
an easy reply. It is impossible to earn one's living pent up in a
barricaded study, reading Greek; and outside of such a fastness, how
can one escape the amateur sociologist? He intrudes himself into your
most select circle at your club. He, or she, sends you through the
mail notices of "thon's" books and lectures. He preaches at you if you
go to church, and you make him an excuse for staying away. He assails
your ears at college commencements. He makes the _Congressional
Record_ duller. He solicits your vote for this and that candidate, on
the ground that they are advocates of a new freedom, or exponents of a
progressive social and political movement, or, at the very least,
stanch friends of the people. He writes editorials and letters in your
morning and evening newspapers, and articles in your favorite
magazine. He punishes you for your weakness in attending a public
dinner. He--or rather she--airs his--or rather her--most advanced
ideas when you are just beginning to sip your afternoon cup of tea,
and you are fortunate if, in your disgust, you do not play havoc with
the china of your hostess. Avoid sociological diet in the year of our
Lord one thousand, nine hundred and fourteen? It was far easier to
avoid the Plague in the year sixteen hundred and sixty-five.
We admit frankly that the amateur sociologist is not the only person
our weak nerves dread. We avoid a Pragmatist and a New Realist almost
as assiduously, and with but slightly more success. Latter-day
novelists, poets, statesmen, and educators, "uplift-men" in general,
and advocates of scientific efficiency in particular, preachers of
social service who blandly assume both that society wants their
services and that they have services to render, when what is chiefly
apparent is their own need of education--these and other sons of
thunder too numerous to mention have given us many a bad quarter of an
hour. But it is the amateur sociologist alone who is able to give us a
nightmare.
We confess that such was not always the case. We entered one of the
first classes ever taught in this country in what was then called the
Science of Society. We listened with amused interest, possibly with
profit, to the remarks, interspersed with puns, which the erudite
professor allowed himself to make on the subject of marriage as an
institution. Later we read ponderous books on this topic and kindred
ones, and we even plumed ourselves upon our advocacy of woman suffrage
and our practical interest in organized philanthropy. Political
economy and history were not neglected by us, and so we rounded out
the last century cherishing the delusion that we were somewhat
progressive. Alas, we were primitive enough to spell it with a small
"p." And now, but a few short years later, we are wailing in or about
a Sociological Nightmare! Is it that, in the natural course of things,
we have merely become conservative, have been caught up with, and
passed, by a more radical generation, and are taking out on them,
regardless of justice and of shifting metaphors, a spite caused by our
own weakness of mental digestion?
Perhaps so, perhaps not. Thus far we have not flung even the tiniest
of stones at the important study known as Sociology, nor have we meant
to hit any of its serious students. The banner under which we enlisted
as the humblest of privates, we still salute, and as the army of
workers marches on, we, droppers-out yet loyal, raise our feeble
cheer. But behold! we are caught in a frantic mob of camp-followers,
and we struggle in vain to extricate ourselves. And what a mob it is!
Men and women who call themselves "Progressives" without being able to
read a pedometer; anarchists who, with less sense than bulls, mistake
a red flag for a new Gospel; propagandists of peace who have no
respect for rest; advocates of nostrums who actually resent being
called quacks; women who rejoice in being "hikers;" philanthropists
who are doing their foolish best to make the under dog a mad one;
lecturers who convert their lungs into cash; fashionable women who
open their drawing-rooms to cranks, and their heads to whims;--but why
attempt an impossible description? It seems better to fall back upon
Matthew Arnold's more decorous expression of his feelings, in
_Bacchanalia; or, the New Age_:--
Thundering and bursting
In torrents, and waves,
Carolling and shouting,
Over tombs, amid graves,
See! on the cumbered plain
Clearing a stage,
Scattering the past about,
Comes the new age.
Bards make new poems,
Thinkers new schools,
Statesmen new systems,
Critics new rules.
All things begin again;
Life is their prize;
Earth with their deeds they fill,
Fill with their cries.
Have we, then, got at the root of the matter? Tired out with
"strenuosity," fatigued with American "progress," dinned with
lectures, conferences, civic forums, and all the other modes of
vociferous self-expression dear to this Age of Talk, are we, like the
poet, the poet who, be it remembered, wrote of Sophocles that he "saw
life steadily, and saw it whole," are we really longing for an
impossible golden reign of universal silence, and, in despair of
obtaining it, railing at what happens for the moment to be the most
noisy object within our dyspeptic range of hearing--the amateur
sociologist?
We are not sure that this is not the case, but why should we undertake
to analyze our own feelings? The main point is that we feel them; the
next point, almost as important to ourselves, is that we want to
express them. And who that is past fifty is not warranted in indulging
in mild objurgations when it is possible to overhear at a dinner
party, as the dominant note of an eager conversation between a lady
and a gentleman, that latest intruder into the limited vocabulary of
fashionable life, the ugly word "prostitute"! No one placed in so
astounding a situation would stop to reflect that, if he had overheard
such a conversation--save the mark!--two centuries ago, the dominant
word would have been, most assuredly, both shorter and uglier. Not for
us at least such cold philological comfort in the presence of our
arch-enemy, the amateur sociologist. Here we have caught him in the
innermost recess of civilization, caught him at our very dinner
table--a more loathsome and dangerous foe than the Satan-Toad squat at
the ear of sleeping Eve!
For where in all Creation's round
Can now a _sleeping_ Eve be found?
They are all awake--God bless them and save them!--awake and listening
to the amateur sociologist, or else to the sociological dramatist,
which is every whit as bad, or worse. They are awake and forming
drama-leagues, attending lectures for political education, giving
suffrage teas and balls, flocking to conventions, marching under
banners and "hiking" in squads, grabbing at slippery presidents,
writing their pretty fingers off, converting the tenets of the New
Morality into lullabies, in short, following a modern Pied Piper--into
what?
We are brought up with a shock before the blank wall of our own
question, and we are out of our nightmare. This world, even if in this
particular year of grace it does seem to be overstocked with
sociologists, is a pleasanter place to inhabit than a Hades tenanted
by gibbering ghosts. It is possible to advocate equal franchise and to
help along other causes in which one may believe without mistaking
one's heels for one's head, difficult though this may be in these
dancing days. We suspect that a suffrage ball in New York is in many
ways a less objectionable affair than a London masquerade of the early
eighteenth century given under the direction of the long forgotten
John James Heidegger. It is fairly certain that in the same city at
the same period "Orator Henley" was as convinced of his own
omniscience as any sociologist or political economist who discusses
the future of the family or white slavery before a woman's club. Every
age must cherish its pet variation of the standing illusion of the
race--that for our day and generation we are wiser than our ancestors
were for theirs. Who would not run after a good thing, and what better
things are there to run after than schemes for human regeneration,
even if we frequently find that our rainbow has not led us to a pot of
gold? Have we not been assured on good authority that out of the clash
of opinions truth emerges? Is it not the prime article of our
democratic creed that the _vox populi_ is the _vox dei_, and, even if
the _vox populi_ speaks with an unmistakably sociological twang, is it
not our duty, at the risk of being labelled "undesirable citizens," to
imagine, nay, to believe and aver, that we are listening to the dulcet
harmonies of heaven? What if that gruff old person, Dr. Samuel
Johnson, would, were he alive, assert in his most stentorian tones
that our strenuous democratic optimism is the vulgarest and the
shallowest philosophy ever permitted by a too indulgent Providence to
flourish under the sun! Is not the grumpy Doctor safely buried, and
common sense along with him?
But this is no way to shake off the effects of a nightmare. Let us
conclude in an humbler, more supplicatory strain. Will not our gifted
reformers, for a while at least, forbear to announce that they have
converted ethics into a science, and education into a highway to
Paradise? Will not our politicians admit between their speeches, that
people who question or censure their latest panaceas are, on the
whole, exemplary and fairly intelligent citizens, who in no other
respect than their momentary recalcitrancy seem to be fit candidates
for a jail or an asylum? Will not exponents of New History, New
Philosophy, and New Literature give a slightly larger portion of their
time to reading what a not altogether benighted past managed to
accomplish in those departments of human knowledge, speculation, and
imaginative creation? Will not suffragists and anti-suffragists call a
short truce for the purpose of admitting that, if a sense of humor and
a spirit of tolerance are totally banished from our devoted country,
the lot of future generations--if there are to be any--will be
somewhat parlous? Finally, will not the ladies and gentlemen who are
tearfully or gleefully forecasting the doom of the monogamous family,
occasionally condescend to glance at Homer's description of the
parting of Hector from Andromache and Astyanax, or at one of Raphael's
Madonnas with the Christ-Child, with the intent of asking themselves
whether in human evolution there are not other forces at work than
those dubbed economic? Let but these good men and women consider
without impatience their petitioner's modest requests, and he will
wish them Godspeed in their commendable if arduous and often thankless
task of regenerating the human race.
SOCIAL UNTRUTH AND THE SOCIAL UNREST
"The Author's object," said Dickens in the original preface to
_Nicholas Nickleby_, "in calling public attention to the system would
be very imperfectly fulfilled, if he did not state now, in his own
person, emphatically and earnestly, that Mr. Squeers and his school
are faint and feeble pictures of an existing reality, purposely
subdued and kept down, lest they should be deemed impossible." In his
preface to the later editions, he speaks of the race of Yorkshire
schoolmasters in the past tense. "Though it has not yet finally
disappeared," he says, "it is dwindling daily. A long day's work
remains to be done about us in the way of education, Heaven knows; but
great improvements and facilities towards the attainment of a good one
have been furnished, of late years, to those who can afford to pay for
it."
But if, in his pursuit of this object, Dickens had drawn an
exaggerated picture of Dotheboys Hall--even if he had depicted as
representative of a type that which was, in point of fact, merely an
individual and abnormal instance of an evil which in general was far
less extreme--the only objection to such a course would have been the
general objection to any form of untruth; unless, indeed, we were to
add that manifest misrepresentation of this kind is less likely than a
truthful presentation of the case to be effective for its object.
Dickens was driving with all his might and main at a monstrous blot on
English civilization, a hideous inhumanity and cruelty, to which
hundreds of English children were subjected by heartless parents or
guardians, and by brutal, sordid, and ignorant schoolmasters. And if
in his zeal to wipe out that blot and to end that monstrous inhumanity
he had over-stepped the bounds of legitimate portrayal, there are few
who would not say that the offense was altogether pardonable. Yet he
felt it necessary to assure the world that he had not done this; and
in his preface he not only makes the general denial of such
exaggeration quoted above, but points explicitly to the observations
made by himself, and the records of courts of law, which form the
basis of his exposure.
When we say that even if Dickens had grossly exaggerated the character
of the Yorkshire schools there would have been no great harm in it, we
have in mind two points of contrast between the task on which he was
engaged and the spirit of his time, on the one hand, and the general
objective of present-day reform movements and the spirit of our time,
on the other. Upon the desirability of putting an end to Dotheboys
Halls, if they were but one tenth as evil as they are represented to
us in _Nicholas Nickleby_, there can be no difference of opinion among
decent human beings. The question of degree may be of scientific or
historical interest, it can have no practical bearing on the decision
to be reached. An overstatement of the case may intensify our
emotions, it can hardly mislead our judgment. To know that such a
state of things exists is to desire its extinction; such a thing as
the balancing of gain against loss, of immediate benefit against
collateral or ulterior injury, does not enter into the question at
all. Very different is the case with regard to most of the problems
that are enlisting the interest of those who to-day are striving for
the betterment of social conditions. There is hardly one of these
problems which does not have wide ramifications connecting it with the
whole economic and social system. In hardly one of them is it possible
to say: Here is a flagrant wrong whose existence no rightminded person
can tolerate, whose immediate removal is a clear duty, about whose
extinction we need not hesitate for a moment on the score of any evil
which may accompany the good. And this complexity of the problems
places the question of exaggeration, or misrepresentation, or false
perspective, upon an essentially different footing. As soon as the
question of cost--the question of what sacrifices, or what dangers, or
what ulterior evil effects, may be involved--enters into the
situation, the question of degree becomes of vital moment. To
represent a given evil as a vast affliction when in reality it is
confined within narrow bounds, to represent it as hideous, morally or
materially, without just basis, is in these cases much more than a
mere violation of the abstract requirements of truth. These issues
turn fundamentally on the weighing of the good to be gained against
the sacrifices or dangers which the proposal involves. And the
reformer who, however excellent his purposes, grossly magnifies the
evil deceives and misleads the public just as a merchant does who
weighs with false scales, or a gambler who plays with loaded dice.
So much for the nature of the specific questions at issue. But there
is a contrast far more important still, which turns upon the spirit of
the time. In our day no serious attack can be made upon any particular
evil in any way connected with the existing economic order, without
being regarded by great multitudes as part of a general indictment
against that order. At the center of the socialist movement there is
now, as there has been at any time in the past half-century, a body of
convinced believers in the inherent unfitness of the existing order to
serve man's material and moral needs, and in the feasibility of a new
order which shall replace it to the infinite improvement and elevation
of mankind. But the growth of socialistic and semi-socialistic
sentiment which has been going on at so extraordinarily rapid a rate
during the past decade, especially in this country, is due in only a
relatively small measure to the making of doctrinal converts. The
growth has been in the main, or at least primarily, not at the center,
but on the fringe, of the socialist body. It has come about, above
all, through that unprecedented stimulation of humanitarian interest
and humanitarian endeavor in connection with the problems of the poor
which is in itself a just cause both for pride and satisfaction in our
generation. Between this humanitarian activity, directed toward
various specific forms of social betterment, and that kind of
discontent with the existing order which lies at the basis of
socialism, there is at once a sharp contrast and an intimate
connection. The socialist--at least the socialist as he has
traditionally been--makes it the first tenet of his practical doctrine
that social-betterment endeavors are not only vain, but mischievous.
He holds that they tend to patch up a system which is hopelessly evil,
and to reconcile to its continuance those who, if they were not thus
deluded, would see that the only remedy lies in its extinction. In
reality, however, the worker for social-betterment schemes, while
helping to make the existing order sounder with one hand, is
constantly giving powerful aid to the socialists with the other. For
it is part of his task to concentrate public attention upon evils
which would otherwise remain unnoticed in the background; and it is
safe to say that in the impression made by these agitations upon
multitudes of sensitive natures lies the chief source of that enormous
recruiting of the forces making towards socialism which we have been
witnessing. In so far as this result is the natural accompaniment of
the unfolding of a truthful picture of society, it must be accepted as
an inevitable fact. Even so, it might be deplored that a development
so momentous should in so large a measure turn on the state of mind of
persons unequipped with such mental qualities, and such intellectual
training, as would fit them duly to weigh the defects against the
virtues of the existing order, and duly to consider the objections to
the proposed remedy as well as its allurements. But, as the matter
stands, what is actually being furnished to these susceptible minds
and hearts is in large measure a mass of distorted representations of
the truth. The falsity of the picture is often a matter of direct
exaggeration or misstatement, oftener it is a matter of false
perspective, chiefly taking the form of making a part pass virtually
for the whole. But however it is brought about, we have continually
before us the spectacle of numbers of well-meaning persons, through
careless exaggeration or distortion of the truth, misleading
multitudes of young and ardent spirits into a readiness to throw
overboard the fundamental institutions of society.
* * * * *
_Children of Strife. A Dramatic Story of Rich and Poor in New York._
Such is the title of a novel that is appearing in the _Delineator_, an
old-established journal of large circulation, devoted primarily to
fashions, housekeeping matters, and the like. It is very specially
"featured." Its first chapter is ushered in with this notice,
conspicuously printed in large type below the title: "Special Request:
Great things may hinge upon this novel. Just how great will depend
upon your reception of it. It is thrilling fiction but back of it is
something else. Will you watch for that something, keeping each
instalment by you for reference?" Those who dutifully follow this last
injunction will begin by keeping by them for reference a picture of
the ways of business that is extremely interesting. Chapter I is
entitled "The Corporation." Its opening scene is in the private office
of a flourishing capitalist. Many little touches are given to heighten
the stage effect, but the real point of interest concerns the giving
out of a contract relating to the construction of a twenty-one story
building. Griffiths, the capitalist, holds an impromptu meeting of the
construction company, the other directors being office dummies; the
question to be decided is whether steel columns or cast-iron columns
are to be used:
"What's the difference in cost?" asked Mr. Griffiths, shortly,
casting a cursory glance over the items.
"If we use the iron we'll save about eighteen thousand dollars,"
the secretary replied, "but the architect says we'll be taking a
risk."
"How _much_ of a risk?" Mr. Griffiths retorted quickly. "Doesn't
Littleton think the building will stand up?"
"He _thinks_ so," Williams rejoined deprecatingly. "There are
houses on both sides. He _thinks_ it'll stand up. It ought to."
"Well," said Mr. Griffiths, pushing back his chair. "Nothing
venture, nothing have. Eh, Williams?"
Williams smiled a perfunctory smile in response to his employer's
little jest.
"Let's get to work," went on Mr. Griffiths. "Call the roll. All
present--full board. (Note that.) We waive reading the minutes of
the last meeting, and there are no reports. Mr. Flynt offers the
following resolution: Resolved, That the secretary be and hereby
is empowered to accept and ratify the contract heretofore drawn
up with Peck & Simpson, for iron columns (By the way, Williams,
White is the chief inspector for that district. You can handle
him, eh?), and to execute the same on behalf of the Company. All
in favor say 'Aye;' contrary minded, 'No.'" The chair canvassed
the vote and reported that a majority of votes were in favor of
the resolution. It was so voted. "That's all. Meeting adjourned.
Good morning."
What happens in Chapter III will surprise nobody. Griffiths' little
daughter is with her father in his luxurious library, absorbed in a
story-book, both of them enveloped in a delicious silence. But the
silence is suddenly broken by a curious and startling sound:
The sound had suggested a sliding, the collapse of something; it
was like the falling in of a gigantic house of cards. Fascinated,
Ruth's eyes sought her father's face. It was transformed, livid;
his hands clutched his chair--clutched it so convulsively that,
plump though they were, the veins stood out on them in purple
knots.
"The building," he whispered with bloodless lips. "It's gone."
The sliding stopped momentarily; the very air seemed to stay
still in an awful hush of expectation; then it caught up a new
sound--a sound that far exceeded the sliding in horror; a sound
to freeze the blood, even the warm, quick blood of a child; a
sound big with every emotion ever evoked by the voice of any
tenor who ever has sung--the inarticulate protest of men about to
be smothered--the wail of human beings caught in a trap, like
rats.
Now, it would of course be preposterous to regard a cheap melodramatic
novel in a fashion magazine as a subject for serious criticism; and it
would be equally absurd to make the policy of such a magazine, taken
in itself, an occasion for solemn moralizing or rebuke. But in
publishing this rubbish, the _Delineator_ is a magazine of fashion in
more senses than one; it is but following, according to its lights, a
fashion current in much higher circles of "uplift" literature. That
this grotesque presentation of the ways of business appears, and is
given all possible prominence and emphasis, not in a journal devoted
to reform but in one which seeks its circulation among the women of
the average "bourgeois" home, is precisely what gives significance to
a piece of fiction otherwise too insignificant to mention. Evidently
the editor of this magazine imagines, rightly or wrongly, that the
state of mind prevailing among his readers is such as to make a thing
of this kind go. They have become so accustomed to a diet of
sensationalism and exaggeration, he may well reason, that they will
never stop to inquire whether the building of collapsible skyscrapers
is a common practice--whether indeed such a thing has ever happened at
all--or in any other way to question the truth of a portrait evidently
designed to represent a large part of the capitalist class. To ask
whether either writer or editor really believes the picture to be
true--to hark back to Dickens's solemn assurance of the truthfulness
of his indictments against the evils he attacked--is the most that
need be said on the subject, to anyone accustomed to sober or
responsible thinking. But among the millions of defenceless
people--young, half-educated, well-intentioned, untrained to serious
thought--to whom such stuff is being fed every day, there is a vast
number that are misled by it into a false view of the world, and into
a state of mind that is most unwholesome and deplorable.
What is thus dealt out in popular fiction, what was for a time to be
seen filling the pages of nearly every popular magazine professedly as
plain fact, is met with in a hundred forms in the daily
newspapers--even those of a good type--and in the outgivings of many
excellent persons, and many worthy associations, engaged in
social-betterment work. A very few instances must suffice for
illustration.
"The outstanding infamy of certain of our modern industries is the
linking to the belts of factories and mills of two million children."
This statement, and variants of it which pile up the agony now in one
direction now in another, we find continually cropping up in the high
places of social reform. The quotation is from an address made a year
ago by William B. Patterson, secretary of the commission on social
service of the Philadelphia Federation of Churches. He was speaking
before the first annual Progressive Conference of Pennsylvania, and
presumably his object was to show the dire need of the Progressive
movement for the remedy of a stupendous evil. But we turn to an
article on child labor in the United States by Dr. Jacob S. Raisin, a
Troy rabbi, printed very prominently in the _Knickerbocker Press_, for
a more vivid realization of this gigantic horror. Here are some
extracts from the article:
Two million children are virtually enslaved in our cotton mills,
coal mines and sweat-shops over the breadth and length of our
country--two million little ones!
At the same time that thousands of children in our city enjoyed
their Christmas vacation and rejoiced over their newly acquired
presents, two million children of the same tender age, of the
same Caucasian race and citizens of the same prosperous land,
were pining away in the dark subterranean caves of the coal mines
in the east, in the dangerous cotton mills and tobacco factories
of the south and the sweat-shops everywhere.
Two million souls are annually sacrificed to commerce and to
greed. Parents do not get sufficient to keep the souls and bodies
of their little ones together. Mothers must leave their suckling
babes to seek for their livelihood, and these infants, in turn,
if they survive until they are six, must begin the battle of life
on their own account.
The United States Census of 1910 gives the total number of
mine-workers under sixteen years of age in 1909 as 8,151, of whom
3,117 were working below ground and 5,034 above ground. The number of
wage-earners under sixteen years of age in manufacturing industries is
stated as 161,493; and it is shown that the percentage of workers
under sixteen to the whole number of workers in these industries fell
from 3.4 per cent. in 1899 to 2.9 per cent. in 1904 and 2.4 per cent.
in 1909. Figures concerning sweat-shops are not given.
What we have before us, therefore, is a gross overstatement, on the
face of it; after making all possible allowance for false returns of
age in the census, it is evident that, merely as a matter of the
surface figures, the case is enormously exaggerated. But this is not
all. The impression is always sought to be conveyed that these two
millions are, in large part at least _little_ children; whereas even
of the (say) two hundred thousand workers under sixteen who are
actually "linked to the belts of factories and mills," and of the
(say) four thousand who are laboring "in the dark subterranean caves
of the coal mines," it is obvious that only a small fraction can be
under fourteen. That there ought not to be a single one may be true
enough; but unless we are to throw reason overboard altogether, we
must make a distinction between a question concerning a few hundreds,
or a few thousands, of little children, and one concerning two
million. And these very agitators _do_ recognize the distinction; else
why make all this noise about the figures? Driven into a corner, they
would doubtless fall back on the iniquity of having even a single
child in all the land deprived of its birthright of happiness; but in
the meanwhile they work the two million for all it is worth. As for
the violation of the Ninth Commandment, the true Progressive, whether
Christian or Jew, presumably finds in the principles of the New
Morality ample exemption from any acute pangs of conscience on that
score.
* * * * *
In the early part of the year 1910, the Consumers' League of New York
obtained permission from the _American Magazine_ to reprint as a
leaflet a little article of two pages which had appeared in the
January number of that periodical under the title _Some Dangers from
High Prices_. The article which the excellent persons who conduct the
work of that League considered so important a document was devoted in
the first place to a very precise account of what had happened in a
certain restaurant with which the writer was familiar, and which was
frequented in part by shop-girls; and secondly to the issuing of a
most solemn and tragic warning as to what this country was threatened
with as a consequence of the situation which this happening indicated.
This is the experience:
Five and six years ago I used to go to a restaurant which fed
about three hundred shop-girls a day.... I used to write down
what they could get for 15 cents. Here are three dishes each of
which then cost 15 cents. Two eggs on toast, with bread; a nice
little meat pie, hot and appetizing; chicken on toast with a rice
border. The chicken was all dark meat, to be sure, but it was
meat and the rice border was generous. In short, in that
restaurant six years ago there was for 15 cents honest
nourishment fitted to build up an honest constitution such as the
trunk class of America ought to have. And in the long run those
girls chose the nourishing food. Two years ago a change came. I
noticed a habit of lunching off a potato salad. I soon saw the
reason. The little meat pie had moved up to 25 cents, the chicken
on toast to 30 cents. Potato salad, one of the girls told me, was
the only "interesting" thing left for 15 cents. Going there last
September I said to one of the waitresses:
"What are these girls eating now?"
"Ah," she sighed, "it is dreadful! They ought not to pay more
than 15 cents; so many of them just have griddle cakes, or sweets
and coffee. They can have two cream cakes and coffee or an eclair
and coffee for 15 cents."
Please notice the sliding scale of nourishment therein displayed
in six short years. From chicken on toast with a wholesome rice
border to potato salad and from potato salad to an eclair and
coffee. One can fairly see the nourishment ooze out! It is only
fair to add, however, that the manager told me that they were
losing their shop-girls somewhat: they were going where there
were no waitresses, where they served themselves at counters.
There one could get real nourishment for 20 cents.
Upon the basis of this interesting little story, and of the loose talk
of "a dealer in milk" with whom she had conversed, the writer finds
that there is a "canker at the heart of our prosperity," that "our
great, prosperous country is at the parting of the ways." "A little
more," she warns us, "and you will have the trunk class of America an
underfed class, being slowly but surely forced down in the social
scale." And so forth.
Now it is nothing that such an article should have appeared in a
popular magazine; nor is it perhaps a matter worth finding fault with
that the managers of an important humanitarian organization, which is
in many ways doing excellent work, should have had so little critical
judgment as to regard as an exceptionally important contribution to
public discussion what is so manifestly the mere expression of one
person's superficial observations and impressions. What _does_ give
significance to the Consumers' League's performance is that it
demonstrates an indifference to facts--a lack of the sense of
responsibility for the essential veracity of anything to which one
gives one's name and which one actively disseminates among the
public--that would be amazing were it not unfortunately so common. In
half an hour, any officer of the Consumers' League could have
discovered that in New York "honest nourishment" of precisely the kind
referred to in the _American_ article was to be obtained for
fifteen cents in any one of hundreds of clean, roomy, cheerful
restaurants--not "where they served themselves at counters," but with
good waiting by a fine type of waitresses. At the time the leaflet was
issued, there had been no rise of prices at all in this class of
restaurants in New York; since then there has been a rise in some of
them, affecting certain dishes; but in no case, I believe, has the
rise been more than that from fifteen to twenty cents. The _great_
rise in food prices has taken place in the four years _since_ January,
1910; and yet to this day one can get, in any one of the scores of
handsome popular restaurants scattered all over the business section
of New York, a nourishing meat or egg luncheon, well served, for
fifteen or twenty cents, according to choice.
This may seem very homely matter, beneath the dignity of a quarterly
REVIEW. But the homeliness, or insignificance, is only on the surface.
The thing I am concerned with is not the bread and meat I am talking
about, but the state of mind of a class of men and women considerable
in point of mere numbers and tremendously important in their influence
on the political and social currents of the time. With a
responsibility resting on them a thousandfold greater than any that
belonged to reformers like Dickens--a thousandfold greater both
because the problems they touch are incomparably more complex and
because the consequences of their agitation spread out immeasurably
beyond the particular problems they touch--with this responsibility
for truthful representation upon them, how far are they from that
realization of it which is so solemnly avowed by the author of
_Nicholas Nickleby_! And in this matter of the luncheon, small as it
may seem in itself, the moral obtrudes itself with peculiar
distinctness. For here everything turns absolutely on degree. If the
shop-girl can get to-day for twenty cents the luncheon she could
formerly get for fifteen, the whole terror disappears; for five cents
a day is thirty cents a week, and surely it is not out of the question
that there has been a rise of wages sufficient to cover this
difference. Yet these good people evidently think it no harm to give
out a solemn warning of national degeneration and ruin, based on
figures which a few minutes' inquiry would have compelled them to
reject, and on an allegation of fact as to the actual fare of working
girls which a half-day's tour of the restaurants of New York would
have shown to have no substantial basis. That the rise of prices has
been hard on working people, that if it takes place without
compensating rise of wages it must have serious consequences, is true
enough; but between this and the sort of thing we have been discussing
there is precisely the difference that there is between reason and
unreason, between responsibility and recklessness.
* * * * *
To _prove_ that exaggeration and distortion and misleading
presentation abound in the reform literature of our time is not the
purpose of this paper; even if fifty examples were adduced, it would
prove nothing. What I am endeavoring to do is to cite a very few
illustrations, which I believe that intelligent readers will recognize
as typical, and to bring out their significance as bearing on a
widespread state of mind. In this regard, the next instance is
peculiarly instructive. In the _Atlantic Monthly_ for March, 1910,
there is an article by E. A. Ross, entitled _The Suppression of
Important News_. The _Atlantic_ is not a "muckraking" magazine, and
the writer is not a "muckraker;" he is a man of national note, and a
professor in the Department of Economics in the University of
Wisconsin. Much that he says about the shortcomings of newspapers is
true; but the article gives a preposterously false impression of the
conduct of the press of this country as a whole. However, I do not ask
the readers of this REVIEW to take my word for this; neither can I
enter upon what would be the very considerable task of proving my
assertion. I wish only to call attention to a single short paragraph
in Prof. Ross's article:
The party system is a "sacred cow." When a county district court
declared that the Initiative and Referendum amendment to the
Oregon Constitution was invalid, the item was spread broadcast.
But when later the Supreme Court of Oregon reversed that
decision, the fact was too trivial to be put on the wires.
Now, if this means anything, it means that it is the policy of the
Associated Press, in regard to such a matter as the Initiative and
Referendum system in Oregon, to endeavor to conceal from the American
public the fact that the attempt to overthrow it in the courts of the
State had failed. To characterize such a notion as silly would be to
place it on far too high a plane. That a person of Prof. Ross's
training, and position in the country, should find it possible to
believe such a thing is melancholy to think of; and, what is more to
the purpose, it betrays a state of mind that is fraught with all
manner of evil possibilities. For it is a state of mind in which
probability, that indispensable guide of sane thinking, is dismissed
from its place; in which whatever seems to point toward a preconceived
thesis is accepted without scrutiny and carefully treasured up, and
whatever points the other way gets scant attention; in which the sense
of the true proportions of things is hopelessly lost. What the actual
facts were about the transmission of that news from Oregon makes no
difference; the failure "to put it on the wires," which Professor Ross
alleges, may possibly have taken place. But no intelligent human being
waits to find out whether Beiliss actually did or did not murder a
child in order to reject with scorn and contempt the idea that the
blood of murdered Christian children forms part in the ritual of the
Jewish Passover; we need no evidence on the subject--it is disposed of
by its intrinsic absurdity. That Prof. Ross should have failed to see
the intrinsic absurdity of such a notion of the newspaper press of the
United States as is implied in the paragraph above quoted--that others
who talk about the suppression of news should betray similar want of
sane perception--is, to my mind, one of the most significant
illustrations of the general phenomenon that I am discussing.
If these illustrations have served to bring out some of the chief
aspects of the state of mind which underlies the exaggeration that
disfigures the reform agitations of our time, the purpose for which
they have been cited has been fulfilled. As evidence of the fact that
such exaggeration is widely current they of course amount to nothing;
nor, as I have already said, would the piling up of a large number of
examples have any probative force. There is a great deal of sober and
responsible writing in reform quarters, and there is a great deal of
the opposite kind. It would be idle to attempt to form any estimate of
the ratio between the one kind and the other. But every reader must
recognize that the type of thing which I have been discussing is
abundant, and that it plays an important part in influencing the
opinions of large bodies of well-meaning people. It may not be amiss,
however, to make brief mention of a few more examples illustrating
various phases of the phenomenon.
In the report of the first of a series of lectures on sex hygiene
recently given to fathers and mothers in the public school buildings
of Chicago, we find the lecturer saying: "The American mothers are
unable to nurse their children for the necessary nine months. This is
the cause of all the infant mortality we hear so much about." And it
is to the economic conditions of "the last fifty years" that this
deplorable state of things is ascribed. Now persons who are conversant
with mortality statistics, either at first hand or through the columns
of the newspapers, know that while it is true that "we hear so much
about" infant mortality, what we hear is not that it is increasing but
that it is declining--declining in the City of New York especially, at
a rate so steady and so rapid as would have been pronounced incredible
a quarter of a century ago. But the mothers who were drinking in the
lecturer's words were led to believe that our modern society is
responsible for an ever-increasing slaughter of the innocents. Nor is
this an isolated case, either in regard to the particular subject
concerned, or to questions of social welfare generally. The mere fact
that the evil of avoidable infant mortality is dwelt upon in our time
as never before was taken by this lecturer--and has been taken by
others--as meaning that that evil is growing ever worse; whereas the
real reason of its prominence is precisely that it is now for the
first time being hopefully and successfully attacked by comprehensive
and systematic efforts. And this substitution of the assertion that an
evil is growing worse for the mere fact that it exists, so far from
being uncommon, is met with in connection with almost every branch of
social-betterment agitation.
One of the most striking manifestations of this was furnished by
Alfred Russel Wallace in his book, _Social Environment and Moral
Progress_, which appeared shortly before his death. "It is not too
much to say," he declares, "that our whole system of society is rotten
from top to bottom, and the social environment as a whole, in relation
to our possibilities and claims, is the worst that the world has ever
seen." In support of this assertion the book as a whole does nothing
but present in eloquent language various deplorable features of our
existing civilization; apparently the idea that in order to justify
his conclusion comparison with former states of the world is essential
hardly crosses Mr. Wallace's mind. That it did obtrude itself in a
measure appears, however, from the devotion of one little chapter to
the subject of "Indications of Increasing Moral Degradation." These
indications are three in number; and not only are they pitifully
inadequate for the support of his statement, but his interpretation of
the statistics cited, in regard to the matter to which he gives most
prominence, can be easily shown to be utterly superficial and
inconclusive. The three matters to which the statistics relate are
deaths from alcoholism, suicide, and deaths of infants soon after
birth. The increase of deaths from alcoholism in the past half-century
is given the leading place. This increase has been, roughly, 25 per
million inhabitants--from 40 per million annually to 65 per million
annually; and it does not occur to Mr. Wallace that modern advances in
medicine and sanitation may account for far more than 25 drunkards per
million inhabitants who in former times would have been carried off by
all sorts of diseases but who now survive long enough to die of
"alcoholism." The temper of the man of science wholly fails to assert
itself in the weighing of facts which his zeal as a reformer impels
him to view in the light of a preconceived judgment.
Some recent phenomena in the field of public discussion in our country
have shown on a large scale the kind of loose thinking in regard to
facts which is at the bottom of the exaggerating spirit. When the
McNamara dynamitings were revealed, a wave of excitement swept off
their feet a large part of our whole humanitarian army. They had been
so filled with the idea that we are living in a strange and awful
time, that this series of crimes, committed in secret by members of a
single trade union, was acclaimed as something new under the sun, a
fearful sign and portent. The tremendous railroad riots and burnings
of 1877; the anarchist troubles at Chicago, culminating in the
Haymarket massacre; the widespread and ominous railroad labor struggle
of 1894, which took on an aspect bordering upon civil war--all these
things were forgotten, and it was solemnly asserted that we were
confronted with a crisis quite without precedent or parallel, which
demanded a new and radical examination of the very foundations of the
social order. The swift spread over the country a year ago of the
notion that starvation wages for women were, if not the sole, at least
incomparably the chief, cause of female vice and degradation, was a
somewhat similar phenomenon. One that at first sight presents no
resemblance to it, but which strikes me as a peculiarly interesting
manifestation of the same thing, is to be found in the domain of
ordinary politics. A leading feature of the Progressive crusade was
the identification of the "reactionaries"--the business world and the
conservative newspaper press--with bossism and the corruption of
politics generally. Mr. Roosevelt continually talked as though there
were a cynical alliance between all the leading New York newspapers on
the one hand, and Murphy and Barnes and the whole system of political
corruption on the other; and doubtless there were millions of good
people who completely forgot not only that a large proportion of these
papers had persistently fought for civil service reform and tariff
reform and election reform, but that they were waging an
uncompromising war against the whole brood of bosses, whether
Republican or Democratic, for many years during which Mr. Roosevelt
was an excellent friend of Quay, got along very fairly with Platt, and
did not find it in his heart even to lift a finger against the
unspeakable Addicks.
* * * * *
Now all these various forms of exaggeration, distortion and
misrepresentation converge in our time upon one object, contribute
toward one common effect. Whatever be the purpose held in view by any
particular reformer or exhorter, however far from his desire it may be
to foment dangerous unrest or to promote a revolutionary propaganda,
every extravagant picture that he draws of the depravity or the
wretchedness of our time inevitably does produce these effects, and
that upon a large scale. There are a great number of people of all
ages, and especially of young people, who, without having thought
deeply upon the problems of society, feel about them very deeply
indeed. Many of them attest the sincerity of their interest by useful
and noble work; the world has certainly never seen anything like so
widespread a devotion of the energies of young men and women among the
fortunate classes to the betterment of the lot of the unfortunate. A
far greater number, without devoting themselves to such work, are
stirred by the same emotions of sympathy and good-will. Upon these
minds and hearts the depiction of evils associated with the existing
economic order produces more than a mere transient pang of distress or
regret. What is wrong in the world they do not merely deplore; they
wish to set it right. And if the wrong is so pervasive, the evil so
deep-seated, the depravity so general, as these manifold presentments
make it out, what more natural than that they should sum up the whole
case in the conviction that the existing order of society is a
failure, and be ready to welcome almost any experiment that holds out
the promise of something better?
It is for this reason, above all others, that he who recklessly or
thoughtlessly distorts or exaggerates the facts of our time assumes a
grievous responsibility. Even in regard to each particular question,
the element of degree may be of vital consequence: what measures ought
to be taken, what objections ought to be weighed, what collateral
consequences ought to be ignored, in regard to such a matter as the
minimum wage, or unemployment insurance, or child labor, may depend
essentially both upon the present extent of the evil and upon the
influences already acting upon it. But it is the larger question that
is most deeply involved, the question whether the institutions and
traditions which have been slowly built up by ages of human effort and
trial and struggle are to be thrown aside as worthless. To the
reformer bent upon his own specific purpose it may seem a venial
offense to depict poverty as increasing, when it is really
diminishing, so long as there _is_ poverty; to represent the press of
the country in general as deliberately suppressing ordinary news of
public affairs, so long as there are some newspapers which suppress
some kinds of news; to talk of two millions of children linked to the
belts of factories and mills or pining underground in mines, so long
as there is child labor; to speak of avoidable infant mortality as an
evil peculiar to our time though the reverse is the truth, so long as
there is infant mortality which is avoidable. But between seeing
these things as they are and seeing them as they are not, the
difference is not trifling, but fundamental. For upon that difference
turns the whole issue between conservative improvement and reckless
innovation. The world is full of persons who are eager enough to prove
all things, but who seem to forget the other half of the injunction.
If we apply the probe carelessly, if we report what we find
untruthfully, how can we hope to hold fast that which is good?
NATURAL ARISTOCRACY
One evening not long since, in a certain New York club of authors and
scholars, the conversation turned, as it is so accustomed to turn, on
the politics of the day; and we were astonished when one of the
circle, a distinguished student of sociology well-known for his
radical opinions, said with conviction and emphasis that we were
talking of little things and that the one great question of the day
was whether a democratic society could develop a natural aristocracy.
By chance I had with me that night an excellent new book on _The
Political Philosophy of Burke_, by Prof. John MacCunn, late of the
University of Liverpool, and as we left the club I showed it to one of
my fellow writers with a word of commendation. "Ah," he said, handing
it back unopened, "Burke! he's dead, isn't he?" Well, Burke, I dare
say, is dead for us, as so many other great memories have perished,
and Lord Morley (plain John Morley then, a fairly practical statesman)
was indulging in the usual illusion of the biographer when, just
twenty-five years ago, he closed his luminous volume with the prophecy
that "the historic method, fitting in with certain dominant
conceptions in the region of natural science, is bringing men round to
a way of looking at society for which Burke's maxims are exactly
suited; and it seems probable that he will be more frequently and more
seriously referred to within the next twenty years than he has been
within the whole of the last eighty." The historic method has an odd
way of discrediting the authority of history, and certainly in the
lustrum since Lord Morley's predicted score of years the world of
Lloyd George and Mr. Roosevelt has not been referring abundantly to
Burke's maxims. Yet, with the words of my radical sociological friend
in my ears, I could not help reflecting on the coincidence that
Professor MacCunn, a writer thoroughly imbued with modern ideas,
should have led the whole of Burke's political philosophy up to the
same question of natural aristocracy. "For Burke's feet," he says,
"were never on surer ground than when, as we have seen, he argued that
a civil society, by the very conditions of social struggle and growth,
must needs evolve 'a natural aristocracy, without which there is no
nation.'" And then, being sufficiently trained in the historic method,
he proceeds to show how Burke entirely missed the real problem that
faces society to-day in its effort to create such a leadership--as if
human nature had first sprung into existence with the Reform Bill.
Of the urgency of the problem a reflective man will scarcely doubt.
The only thing, in fact, that might lead him to question its urgency
is its hoary antiquity. Plato wrestled with it when he undertook to
outline the ideal republic, and many of his pages on the range of
government through its five forms--aristocracy, timocracy, oligarchy,
democracy, and tyranny--sound as if he had been reading yesterday's
newspapers of London and New York. In the orgy of misrule that brought
Athens to humiliation in the last years of the Peloponnesian war he
had seen oligarchs and democrats tearing at each other's throats like
mad dogs; he had seen the disastrous triumph of the democratic party,
and, knowing its instability, he had composed the long dialogue of
_The Republic_ to show how, if possible, it might be saved from
impending tyranny. He wrote, so far as the public was concerned, in a
spirit of despair, almost as if foreseeing the domination of an
Alexander and the cold despotism of Rome; and in that saddened
scepticism he was thinking more of holding up the aristocratic
principle of balance and restraint before the happier individual soul,
and establishing the idea of justice for any pious seeker of the
future, than of creating an actual commonwealth. Yet, however his
application of the law of the individual to the machinery of politics
may appear at times fantastic, his argument never really gets far from
the everlasting questions of government.
The oligarchy which he knew and described was what we should rather
call a plutocracy. He had in mind a State in which, "instead of loving
contention and honor [as under a timocracy], men become lovers of
money and business, and they praise and admire the rich man and confer
office upon him, but despise the poor man." "And such a State," he
adds, "will necessarily be not one but two States, one of the poor,
the other of the rich, who are living in the same place and always
plotting against each other." And when in such a society the disposers
of wealth proceed from privilege to insolence and folly, and on their
side the many have lost the sense of reverence and at the same time
have become aware of the sheer power of numbers, then the plutocratic
State is converted to the true democracy, the unbridled sway of the
majority. The change is like that which comes to a rich young man who,
forgetting the discipline of necessity, passes into the libertinism of
indulgence. He will hearken to no word of advice; and if anyone tells
him there is a distinction among pleasures, that some are the
satisfaction of gross and ignoble desires and others are the
satisfaction of good and useful desires, he shakes his head in
superiority, and swears that all pleasures are alike. So the
oligarchical faction loses its power and position; and the democracy
in its turn follows the same path, despising the constraint of
authority and the guidance of experience, caught by the lure of
indiscriminate pleasure. "The father comes down to the level of the
son, being afraid of his children, and the son is on a level with his
father, having no shame or fear of his parents.... So the schoolmaster
fears and flatters his scholars, and the scholars despise their
masters and tutors; and, in general, young and old are alike, the
young competing with the old in speech and action, and the old men
condescending to the young in their gay and easy manners, from dread
of being thought morose and dictatorial."
Then arises the problem which confronted the State in Plato's day, as
it did in Burke's, and which may not seem entirely irrelevant to the
watcher of to-day: How shall the people be saved from themselves? How,
indeed? To Plato, who beheld the future as in a vision, the actual
historic answer was a gloomy picture of the change from license to
tyranny. His account of the impending fall can never lose its fresh
interest:--
When a democracy which is thirsting for freedom has evil
cup-bearers presiding over the feast, then, unless her rulers are
very amenable and give a plentiful draft, she calls them to
account and punishes them, and says that they are cursed
oligarchs. And loyal citizens are insultingly termed by her
slaves who hug their chains; she would have subjects who are like
rulers, and rulers who are like subjects: these are the men whom
she praises and honors both in private and public.
By degrees the anarchy finds a way into private houses, and ends
by getting among the animals and infecting them. Nor must I
forget to tell of the liberty and equality of the two sexes in
relation to each other. And I must add that no one who does not
know would believe, how much greater is the liberty which the
animals who are under the dominion of man have in a democracy
than in any other State: for truly, the she-dogs, as the proverb
says, are as good as their she-mistresses, and the horses and
asses have a way of marching along with all the rights and
dignities of freemen; and they will run at anybody who comes in
their way if he does not leave the road clear for them: and all
things are just ready to burst with liberty.
The ruin of oligarchy is the ruin of democracy; the same desire
magnified and intensified by liberty overmasters democracy--the
truth being that the excessive increase of anything often causes
a reaction in the opposite direction; and this is the case not
only in the seasons and in vegetable and animal life, but above
all in forms of government. The excess of liberty, whether in
States or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery.
And so tyranny naturally arises out of democracy, and the most
aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme
form of liberty.
Then come impeachments and judgments and trials of one another.
The people have always some champion whom they set over them and
nurse into greatness. This is he who begins to make a party
against the rich. After a while he is driven out, but comes back,
in spite of his enemies, a tyrant full grown. Then comes the
famous request for a body-guard--"Let not the people's friend,"
as they say, "be lost to them." (Jowett, condensed.)
One escape from this fatal declension Plato saw--that, by the working
of the inner law of self-restraint or by some divine interposition,
the people should, before it was too late, be turned to hearken to
their natural leaders, and the State should thus develop from anarchy
into a true aristocracy. The question, then or at any time, is not
whether there shall be leaders, but of what character these leaders
shall be. There was the brawling tribe of demagogues and sycophants in
the Athenian democracy, as there have been at other times of
licentious upheaval. And the character of these men is always the
same: they lead by flattery and by clamorous justification of the
passing wave of desire. The aristocratic leaders whom Plato had in
mind, and whom, for the confusion of posterity, he called
philosophers, were of the very opposite sort, being men who should
guide by imposing their authority and experience on the impulsive
emotions of the multitude. They should be politicians who might dare
the displeasure of the people, as Burke dared his constituents at
Bristol: "The very attempt towards pleasing everybody discovers a
temper always flashy, and often false and insincere.... I am to look,
indeed, to your opinions; but to such opinions as you and I _must_
have five years hence." They should be philosophers like John Stuart
Mill, who, facing the electors of Westminster and being asked whether
he had ever said the English workingmen were "generally liars,"
replied simply, "I did." Such were to be the aristocrats of Plato's
State, men of simple and rational desires, lords of their own souls,
and so masters of others. Nor should they govern for their own smaller
profit. For, as Socrates says, "it is not to the injury of the servant
that we think he ought to be governed, but because it behooves each of
us to be governed by the divine wisdom, having that power within us if
possible, or, if that be impossible, then by an external authority, so
that we may all, following the same guidance, be brought into likeness
one to another and into good will."
There is something at once strange and familiar in this political
discussion, now more than two thousand years old. To it Plato brought
all his wisdom, sometimes not disdaining sophistry, trying to show by
what kind of education and by what arts of persuasion and illusion a
natural aristocracy could be imposed and maintained. It was pretty
much the same problem that confronted Burke at the time of the French
Revolution, inspiring his earlier writings on that event with
incomparable eloquence, and stinging him in the end almost to a frenzy
of despair. Burke did not come to the question with so clear an
intuition as the Greek, and in some ways his _Reflections_, despite
their modern dress, are more remote from us than is Plato's
_Republic_, because he dealt less with the universal aspects of human
nature. And in so far as his practical reason was colored by the
peculiar circumstances of his own day, it has lost in direct
application to the needs of another age. But he is not dead, despite
my literary friend; wisdom is of longer life than the generations of
mankind, and there is scarcely another book of modern times so full of
political wisdom as Burke's _Reflections_.
And we must note, in the first place, that to Burke, as to Plato, it
never occurred to think that society, even under the most lawless
anarchy, could exist without leaders. "Power," he knew, "of some kind
or other, will survive the shock in which manners and opinions
perish." He knew too, and declared, that in the end he who made
himself master of the army would overbear all other influences; but
meanwhile he beheld the State of France under the sway of demagogues
who were preparing the people for a carnival of blood and cruelty, and
all his eloquence was exerted, and with extraordinary effect, to avert
from his own country this plague of revolution. The _philosophes_, who
had prepared the dogmas of popular flattery for the mouths of a Marat
and a Robespierre, had intensified in Burke the natural British
distrust of all application of abstract reasoning to government and
the affairs of life; and he felt a profound aversion for those who
would "lay down metaphysic propositions which infer universal
consequences," and would then "limit logic by despotism." Being thus
barred from belief in a true philosophy, by his experience of the
false, yet having himself a mind that grasped at general principles,
he turned to "the happy effect of following nature, which is wisdom
without reflection, and above it." In that "discipline of nature" he
looked for the genuine guidance of society, and one of the memorable
passages of his works is that in which he describes the character of
those who, themselves under this control, should be for others "men of
light and leading":--
A true natural aristocracy is not a separate interest in the
State, or separable from it. It is an essential integrant part of
any large body rightly constituted. It is formed out of a class
of legitimate presumptions, which, taken as generalities, must be
admitted for actual truths. To be bred in a place of estimation;
to see nothing low and sordid from one's infancy; to be taught to
respect one's self; to be habituated to the censorial inspection
of the public eye; to look early to public opinion; to stand upon
such elevated ground as to be enabled to take a large view of the
widespread and infinitely diversified combinations of men and
affairs in a large society; to have leisure to read, to reflect,
to converse; to be enabled to draw the court and attention of the
wise and learned wherever they are to be found;--to be habituated
in armies to command and to obey; to be taught to despise danger
in the pursuit of honor and duty; to be formed to the greatest
degree of vigilance, foresight, and circumspection, in a state of
things in which no fault is committed with impunity, and the
slightest mistakes draw on the most ruinous consequences;--to be
led to a guarded and regulated conduct, from a sense that you are
considered as an instructor of your fellow-citizens in their
highest concerns, and that you act as a reconciler between God
and man;--to be employed as an administrator of law and justice,
and to be thereby amongst the first benefactors to mankind;--to
be a professor of high science, or of liberal and ingenuous
art;--to be amongst rich traders, who from their success are
presumed to have sharp and vigorous understandings, and to
possess the virtues of diligence, order, constancy, and
regularity, and to have cultivated an habitual regard to
commutative justice--these are the circumstances of men, that
form what I should call a _natural_ aristocracy, without which
there is no nation.
Not many, even among the wisest of our own generation, would fail to
respond favorably to that glowing picture of nature's aristocrats, but
when we come to the means by which Burke would assure the existence
and supremacy of such a class, it is different. Despite some tincture
of the so-called "enlightenment," which few men of that age could
entirely escape, Burke had a deep distrust of the restive,
self-seeking nature of mankind, and as a restraint upon it he would
magnify the passive as opposed to the active power of what is
really the same human nature. This passive instinct he called
"prejudice"--the unreasoning and unquestioning attachment to the
family and "the little platoon we belong to in society," from which
our affection, coincident always with a feeling of contented
obligation, is gradually enlarged to take in the peculiar institutions
of our country; "prejudice renders a man's virtues his habits, ...
through just prejudice his duty becomes a part of his nature."
Prejudice is thus the binding force which works from below upwards;
the corresponding force which moves from above is "prescription"--the
possession of rights and authority which have been confirmed by
custom. In other words, Burke believed that the only practical way of
ensuring a natural aristocracy was by the acceptance of a
prescriptive oligarchy; in the long run and after account had been
taken of all exceptions--and he was in no wise a blind worshipper of
the Whig families which then governed England--he believed that the
men of light and leading would already be found among, or by reason of
their preëminence would be assumed into, the class of those whose
views were broadened by the inherited possession of privilege and
honors.
He so believed because it seemed to him that prejudice and
prescription were in harmony with the methods of universal nature.
Sudden change was abhorrent to him, and in every chapter of history he
read that the only sound social development was that which
corresponded to the slow and regular growth of a plant, deep-rooted in
the soil and drawing its nourishment from ancient concealed sources.
_Saltus non facit natura._ In such a plan prejudice was the ally of
the powers of time, opposing to all visionary hopes a sense of duty to
the solid existing reality, and compelling upstart theory to prove
itself by winning through long resistance. And with the force of time
stood the kindred force of order and subordination personified in
privilege. "A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve,
taken together," would be Burke's standard of a statesman; "everything
else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution." In
passages of a singular elevation he combines the ideas of Hobbes on
the social contract with those of Hooker on the sweep of divine
universal law, harmonizing them with the newer conception of
evolutionary growth. "Each contract of each particular State," he
says, "is but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal
society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the
visible and invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned
by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures,
each in their appointed place." And thus, too, "our political system
is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the
world, and with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body
composed of transitory parts; wherein, by the disposition of a
stupendous wisdom, moulding together the great mysterious
incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time, is never old,
or middle-aged, or young, but, in a condition of unchangeable
constancy, moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall,
renovation, and progression. Thus, by preserving the method of nature,
in the conduct of the State, in what we improve, we are never wholly
new; in what we retain, we are never wholly obsolete."
If we look below these ideas of prejudice and privilege, time and
subordination, for their one animating principle, we shall find it, I
think, in the dominance of the faculty of the imagination. Nor did
this imaginative substructure lying beneath all of Burke's writings
and speeches, from the early essay on the _Sublime and Beautiful_ to
his latest outpourings on the French Revolution, escape the
animadversion of his enemies. Tom Paine made good use of this trait in
_The Rights of Man_, which he issued as an answer to the
_Reflections_. "The age of chivalry is gone," Burke had exclaimed at
the close of his famous tirade on the fall of Marie Antoinette. "Now
all is changed. All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle,
and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life,
and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the
sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be
dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the
decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded
ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a _moral imagination_...." To
this Paine retorted with terrible incision. Ridiculing the lamentation
over the French Queen as a mere sentimental rhapsody, he catches up
Burke's very words with malign cunning: "Not one glance of compassion,
not one commiserating reflection, that I can find throughout his book,
has he bestowed on those who lingered out the most wretched of lives,
a life without hope in the most miserable of prisons. It is painful to
behold a man employing his talents to corrupt himself. Nature has been
kinder to Mr. Burke than he has been to her. He is not affected by the
reality of distress touching his heart, but by the showy resemblance
of it striking his imagination. He pities the plumage, but forgets the
dying bird."
Now there is an element of truth in Paine's charge, but there is
distortion also. To say that Burke had no thought for the oppressed
and the miserable is a wanton slander, disproved by abundant passages
in the very _Reflections_ and by his whole career. "If it should come
to the last extremity," he had once avowed in Parliament, with no fear
of contradiction, "and to a contest of blood, God forbid! God
forbid!--my part is taken; I would take my fate with the poor, and
low, and feeble." But it is the fact nevertheless, construe it how one
will, that in the ordinary course of things Burke's ideas of
government were moulded and his sentiment towards life was colored by
the vivid industry of his imagination, and that he thought the world
at large controlled by the same power. I doubt if analysis can reach a
deeper distinction between the whole class of minds to which Burke
belongs, and that to which Paine belongs, than is afforded by this
difference in the range and texture of the imagination.
And in this Burke had with him the instinct of his people, while in a
way transcending it; for a good deal of what we regard as the British
character depends on just the excess of imagination over a rather dull
sensibility and sluggish intelligence. This, if we look into it, is
what Bagehot signalized as the saving dulness of England, and what
Walpole meant by attributing to "the good sense [note the contrast of
_sense_ and _sensibility_] of the English that they have not painted
better." It was this same quality that inspired Burke's great
comparison of the French excitability with the British stolidity:
"Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring
with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle,
reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are
silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only
inhabitants of the field." In its higher working, when sensibility and
intelligence are also magnified, the imagination, no doubt, is the
source of the loftier English poetry and eloquence, but in the lower
range, which we are now considering, it is rather a slow, yet powerful
and endearing, visualization of what is known and familiar; it is the
beginning of distrust for innovation and of that prejudice for
existing circumstances and actual relations which Burke exalted as the
mother of content. And with content it produces a kind of egotistic
satisfaction in the pomps and privileges which pass before the eye,
giving to the humble a participation in things wherein they have no
material share. In the baser nature this evokes a trait which we
condemn as snobbishness; in the higher it results in a fine
magnanimity: "He feels no ennobling principle in his own heart, who
wishes to level all the artificial institutions which have been
adopted for giving a body to opinion and permanence to fugitive
esteem. It is a sour, malignant, envious disposition, without taste
for the reality, or for any image or representation of virtue, that
sees with joy the unmerited fall of what had long flourished in
splendor and in honor." Thus, too, the imagination is an accomplice of
time, as well as of the law of subordination; indeed, its deepest and
noblest function lies in its power of carrying what was once seen and
known as a living portion and factor of the present, and there is no
surer test of the quality of a man's mind than the degree in which he
feels the long-remembered past as one of the vital and immediate laws
of his being. So it is that the imagination is the chief creator and
sustainer of the great memorial institutions of society, such as the
Crown and the Church and the other pageantries of state, which are the
very embodiment of prescription, as it were the soul of tradition
taking form and awful authority among the living. How deeply Burke
felt this prescriptive right of the imagination, no one need be told;
nor is it necessary to quote in full the familiar passages in which he
likens the British monarchy, with its bulwark of nobility, to "the
proud keep of Windsor, rising in the majesty of proportion, and girt
with the double belt of its kindred and coeval towers," or calls on
the Church to "exalt her mitred front in courts and parliaments."
There is the true Burke; he knew, as Paine knew, that the support of
these institutions was in their symbolic sway over the imaginations of
men, and that, with this defence undermined, they would crumble away
beneath the aggressive passions of the present, or would remain as
mere bloodless vanities. He thought that the real value of life was in
its meaning to the imagination, and he was not ashamed to avow that
the fall and tragedy of kings, because they bore in their person the
destiny of ancient institutions, stirred him more profoundly than the
sufferings of ordinary men.
It is perfectly easy for a keen and narrow intelligence to ridicule
Burke's trust in the imagination, but as a matter of fact there is
nothing more practical than a clear recognition of its vast domain in
human affairs--it was Napoleon Bonaparte who said that "imagination
rules the world." Burke is not dead; his pages are an inexhaustible
storehouse of inspiration and wisdom. But it is true nevertheless,
that his ideas never quite freed themselves from their matrix, and
that in his arguments the essential is involved in the contingent.
Though he saw clearly enough the imperfections of the actual union of
a prescriptive and a natural aristocracy, he was not able, with all
his insight, to conceive the existence of the latter alone and by
virtue of its own rights. He cried out that the age of chivalry was
gone; he saw that the age of prescription, however it might be propped
up for a time, was also doomed, not only in France but in his England
as well, and with that away there was nothing for his imagination but
an utter blank. As a consequence the problem of government for us
to-day in its fundamental aspects is really closer to the exposition
of the Greek philosopher two thousand years ago, than to that of the
modern English statesman. We have the naked question to answer: How
shall a society, newly shaking itself free from a disguised
plutocratic régime, be guided to suffer the persuasion of a natural
aristocracy which has none of the insignia of an old prescription to
impose its authority? Shall the true justice prevail, which by a right
discrimination would confer power and influence in accordance with
inner distinction; or shall that so-called justice prevail--for no man
acknowledges open injustice--which recommends itself as equality of
opportunity, but in practice, by confusing the distinctions of age,
sex, and character, comes at last to the brutal doctrine that might
makes right, whether that might be the material strength of money or
the jealous tyranny of numbers?
Leaders there will be, as there always have been. Leaders there are
now, of each class, and we know their names. We still call the baser
sort a demagogue, and his definition is still what it was among those
who invented the term: "a flatterer of the people." Or, if that
description seems too vague, you will recognize him as one who unites
in himself enormous physical and mental activity, yet who employs his
extraordinary talents in no serious way for the comfort and sustenance
of the higher life of the imagination, but for running about
restlessly and filling the public mind with stentorian alarms. He is
one who proclaims ostentatiously that the first aim of government
"must always be the possession by the average citizen of the right
kind of character," and then, in his own person, gives an example of
identifying character with passion by betraying a friend and
malignantly misinterpreting his words, as soon as that friend may be
decried for balking the popular will--and balking the path of the
decrier's ambition. He is one who has been honored as the leader of a
great political party, and then, as soon as he is dethroned from its
leadership, denounces that same party as the tool of privilege and the
source of corruption. He is one who in proclaiming the principles of
his new party, has constantly on his lips the magical word "justice,"
which he defines by the specious phrase "equality of opportunity," yet
in the end identifies justice with the removal of all checks from
government so that the desire of the majority may be immediately
carried out, whether right or wrong. For "it is impossible to invent
constitutional devices which will prevent the popular will from being
effective for wrong without also preventing it from being effective
for right. The only safe course to follow in this great American
democracy is to provide for making the popular judgment really
effective."
To this end our exemplary demagogue would take away every obstacle
between the opinion of the moment and the enactment of that opinion
into law. Hence the initiative and referendum.
Above the legislators is the Constitution, devised in order that
legislation upon any particular question may be made to conform
essentially with what has been laid down on deliberation as the wisest
general course of government. It is a check upon hasty action, and
implies a certain distrust of the popular judgment at any moment when
passion or delusion may be at play. Therefore our demagogue will
denounce reverence for the Constitution as a fetich. Blithely ignoring
the fact that Constitution-making and remaking is one of the pastimes
of some States, and that even the Federal Constitution can be amended
with none too great difficulty when the opinion of the people is
really formed (as in the recent case of the election of senators), he
will earnestly call upon the Constitutional Convention of Ohio "to
provide in this Constitution means which will enable the people
readily to amend it if at any point it works injustice"; and then, as
if that provision were not sufficient to relax its mortmain, he will
virtually abrogate its function of imposing any check whatsoever by
adding "means which will permit the people themselves by popular vote,
after due deliberation and discussion, but finally and without appeal,
to settle what the proper construction of any constitutional point
is"; and this construction is to be made, not legally, that is by an
attempt to get at the actual meaning of the language used, but in
accordance with the current notion of what is right.
But the full venom of his attack will be directed against the courts,
because in them is impersonated the final sovereignty of unimpassioned
judgment over the fluctuations of sentiment, and with it the last
check upon the operations of the demagogue. The interpretation of the
law in accordance with the conditions of life is to rest with the
people. If necessary they are to have the power of recalling the judge
who is recalcitrant to their views, and at the least they are to have
opportunity to reverse any decision of the courts which seems to them
wrong. In this way he thinks to ensure "an independent judiciary"! To
enforce the need of the recall he accuses the courts of "refusing to
permit the people of the States to exercise their right as a free
people." Thereupon he cites what he calls a "typical" case in New
York, in which the judges declared a workingmen's compensation act
unconstitutional. "In other words, they insisted that the Constitution
had _permanently_ cursed our people with impotence to right wrong and
had _perpetuated_ a cruel iniquity." This tirade, followed by the most
inflammatory appeals to the emotions, was uttered in 1912; at the very
time when he was inveighing against the courts for perpetuating
iniquity, the machinery was in train for amending the Constitution,
and in less than two years that permanent curse was removed by the
passage of a constitutional law in full favor of the workingman. Such
is the despotism of facts. And ever through these vituperative charges
runs the high note of flattery: "If the American people are not fit
for popular government, and if they should of right be the servants
and not the masters of the men whom they themselves put in office!"
The demagogue paints himself. In a word you may know him by this
single trait: he is one who, in the pursuit of the so-called rights of
humanity, has a supreme contempt for those
Unconcerning things, matters of fact;
one who, by means of an hypnotic loquaciousness, is constantly
persuading the people that they have only to follow their first
impulsive emotions to be right and safe, and that as a consequence
every institution should be swept away which in their wiser, calmer
moments they have created as a bulwark against their own more variable
nature. To complete the picture we need to contrast with it Burke's
portrait of the men of light and leading, with his sober statement of
the law of liberty: "Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact
proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own
appetites; in proportion as their love to justice is above their
rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of
understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as
they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good,
in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a
controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the
less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is
ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of
intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters."
Or we may go further back and look upon Plato's portrait of the guides
who have earned the right to persuade others to temperance by the
diligent exercise of that virtue in their own lives.
But the most notable example of demagoguery to-day is not a man,
though he be clothed with thunder, but an institution. There are
newspapers and magazines, reaching millions of readers, which have
reduced the art to a perfect system. Their method is as simple as it
is effective: always appeal to the emotion of the hour, and present it
in terms which will justify its excess. Thus, in times when there is
no wave of international envy disturbing the popular mind, our journal
will print edifying editorials on brotherly love, and laud the people
as the great source of peace among nations. But let some racial
dispute arise, as in the months preceding our Spanish war or the
Italian raid on Africa, and this same journal will day after day use
its editorial columns to inflame national hatred--and increase its
circulation. On days when no sensational event has occurred, it will
indulge in the prettiest sentimental sermons on the home and on family
felicities. Nothing so moral; it will even plead in lacrimose type
against the evil of allowing babies to lie in perambulators with their
eyes exposed to the sun. But let the popular mind be excited by some
crime of lust, and the same journal will forget the sweet obligations
of home and wife--
That silly old morality,
That, as these links were knit, our love should be--
and will deck out the loathsome debauchery of a murderer and his trull
as the spiritual history of two young souls finding themselves in the
pure air of passion; or some sordid liaison will be virtually lifted
above marriage by the terms "affinity" or "heart-wife." And always,
meanwhile, the people are to be soothed out of a sense of
responsibility for errors and corruption by the skilfully maintained
suggestion of a little group of men entirely removed from the feelings
and motives of ordinary humanity, sitting somewhere in secret
conclave, plotting, plotting, to pervert the government. Our public
crimes are never our own, but are the result of conspiracy.
These are the agencies that, in varying forms, have been at work in
many ages. Only now we have formulated them into a noble maxim, which
you will hear daily resounding in the pulpit and the press and in the
street: "The cure of democracy is more democracy." It is a lie, and we
know it is a lie. We know that this cry of the demagogue has
invariably in the past led to anarchy and to despotism; and we know
that to-day, were these forces unopposed, as happily they are not
unopposed, the same result would occur--
Our liberty reversed and charters gone,
And we made servants to Opinion.
The remedy for the evils of license is not in the elimination of
popular restraint, but precisely in bringing the people to respect and
follow their right leaders. The cure of democracy is not _more_
democracy, but _better_ democracy.
Nor is such a cure dependent primarily on the appearance, in a
community, of men capable of the light: for these the world always
has, and these we too have in abundance; it depends rather on so
relating these select natures to the community that they shall be also
men of leading. The danger is lest, in a State which bestows influence
and honors on its demagogues, the citizens of more refined
intelligence, those true philosophers who have discourse of reason,
and have won the difficult citadel of their own souls, should withdraw
from public affairs and retire into that citadel, as it were into an
ivory tower. The harm wrought by such a condition is twofold: it
deprives the better minds of the larger sustenance of popular
sympathy, producing among them a kind of intellectual _préciosité_ and
a languid interest in art as a refuge from life instead of an integral
part of life; and, on the other hand, it tends to leave the mass of
society a prey to the brutalized emotions of indiscriminate
pleasure-seeking. In such a State distinction becomes the sorry badge
of isolation. The need is to provide for a natural aristocracy.
Now it must be clearly understood that in advocating such a measure,
at least under the conditions that actually prevail to-day, there is
involved no futile intention of abrogating democracy, in so far as
democracy means government by and of the people. A natural aristocracy
does not demand the restoration of inherited privilege or a relapse
into the crude dominion of money; it is not synonymous with oligarchy
or plutocracy. It calls rather for some machinery or some social
consciousness which shall ensure the selection from among the
community at large of the truly "best," and the bestowal on them of
"power"; it is the true consummation of democracy. And, again, it must
be said emphatically that this is not an academic question, dealing
with unreal distinctions. No one supposes that the "best" are a
sharply defined class, moving about among their fellows with a visible
halo above them, and a smile of beatific superiority on their faces.
Society is not made of such classifications, and governments have
always been of a more or less mixed character. A natural aristocracy
signifies rather a tendency than a conclusion; and in such a sense it
was taken, no doubt, by my sociological friend of radical ideas who
pronounced it the great practical problem of the day.
The first requisite for solving this problem is that those who are
designed by nature, so to speak, to form an aristocracy should come to
an understanding of their own belief. There is a question to be faced
boldly: What is the true aim of society? Does justice consist
primarily in leveling the distribution of powers and benefits, or in
proportioning them to the scale of character and intelligence? Is the
main purpose of the machinery of government to raise the material
welfare of the masses, or to create advantages for the upward striving
of the exceptional? Is the state of humanity to be estimated by
numbers, or is it a true saying of the old stoic poet: _humanum paucis
vivit genus_? Shall our interest in mankind begin at the bottom and
progress upward, or begin at the top and progress downward? To those
who feel that the time has come for a reversion from certain present
tendencies, the answer to this question cannot be doubtful. Before
anything else is done we must purge our minds of the current cant of
humanitarianism. This does not mean that we are to deny the individual
appeals of pity, and introduce a wolfish egotism into human relations.
On the contrary it is just the preaching of false humanitarian
doctrines that practically results in weakening the response to
rightful obligations and "turning men's duties into doubts," and thus
throws the prizes of life to the hard grasping materialist and the
coarse talker. In the end the happiness of the people also, in the
wider sense, depends on the common recognition of the law of just
subordination. But, whatever the ultimate effect of this sort may be,
the need now is to counterbalance the excess of emotional
humanitarianism, with an injection of the truth--even the contemptuous
truth. Let us, in the name of a long-suffering God, put some bounds to
the flood of talk about the wages of the bricklayer and the trainman,
and talk a little more about the income of the artist and teacher and
public censor who have taste and strength of character to remain in
opposition to the tide. Let us have less cant about the great
educative value of the theatre for the people and less humbug about
the virtues of the nauseous problem play, and more consideration of
what is clean and nourishing food for the larger minds. Let us forget
for a while our absorbing desire to fit the schools to train boys for
the shop and the counting-room, and concern ourselves more effectively
with the dwindling of those disciplinary studies which lift men out of
the crowd. Let us, in fine, not number ourselves among the traitors to
their class who _invidiæ metu non audeant dicere_.
One hears a vast deal these days about class consciousness, and it is
undoubtedly a potent social instrument. Why should there not be an
outspoken class consciousness among those who are in the advance of
civilization as well as among those who are in the rear? Such a
compact of mutual sympathy and encouragement would draw the man of
enlightenment out of his sterile seclusion, and make him efficient; it
would strengthen the sense of obligation among those who hesitate to
take sides, and would turn many despondent votaries of fatalism and
many amateur dabblers in reform to a realization of the deeper needs
of the day. Nor is this an appeal to idle sentiment. Much is said
about the power of the masses and the irresistible spread of
revolutionary ideas from the lower ranks upward. The facts of history
point in quite the other direction. It was not the plebs who destroyed
the Roman republic, but the corrupt factions of the Senate, and the
treachery of such patricians as Catiline and Julius Cæsar. In like
manner the French Revolution would never have had a beginning but for
the teaching of the philosophers and the prevalence of equalitarian
fallacies among the privileged classes themselves. The Vicomtesse de
Noailles spoke from knowledge when she said: "La philosophie n'avait
pas d'apôtres plus bienveillants que les grands seigneurs. L'horreur
des abus, le mépris des distinctions héréditaires, tous ces sentiments
dont les classes inférieures se sont emparées dans leur intérêt, ont
dû leur premier éclat à l'enthousiasme des grands." And so to-day the
real strength of socialistic doctrines is not in the discontent of the
workingmen, but in the faint-hearted submission of those who by the
natural division of society belong to the class that has everything to
lose by revolution, and in the sentimental adherence of dilettante
reformers. The real danger is after all not so much from the
self-exposed demagogues as from the ignorant tamperers with explosive
material. It is not so much from the loathsome machinations of the
yellow press, dangerous as they are, as from the journals that are
supposed to stand for higher things, yet in their interest in some
particular reform, support whole-heartedly candidates who flirt with
schemes subversive of property and constitutional checks; in their
zeal for the brotherhood of man, deal loosely with facts; and in their
clamor for some specious extension of the franchise, neglect the finer
claims of justice. These men and these journals, betrayers of the
trust, are the real menace. Without their aid and abetment there may
be rumblings of discontent, wholesome enough as warnings against a
selfish stagnation, but there can be no concerted drive of society
towards radical revolution. For radical forces are by their nature
incapable of any persistent harmony of action, and have only the
semblance of cohesion from a constraining fear or hatred. The dynamic
source of revolution must be in the perversion of those at the top,
and anarchy comes with their defalcation. Against such perils when
they show themselves, the proper safeguard is the arousing of a
counter class consciousness.
It is a sound theorem of President Lowell's that popular government
"may be said to consist of the control of political affairs by public
opinion." Now there is to-day a vast organization for manipulating
public opinion in favor of the workingman, and for deluding it in the
interest of those who grow fat by pandering in the name of
emancipation to the baser emotions of mankind; but of organization
among those who suffer from the vulgarizing trend of democracy there
is little or none. As a consequence we see the conditions of life
growing year by year harder for those whose labor is not concerned
immediately with the direction of material forces or with the supply
of sensational pleasure; they are ground, so to speak, between the
upper and the nether millstone. Perhaps organization is not the word
to describe accurately what is desired among those who are fast
becoming the silent members of society, for it implies a sharper
discrimination into grades of taste and character than exists in
nature; but there is nothing chimerical in looking for a certain
conscious solidarity at the core of the aristocratical class (using
"aristocratical" always in the Platonic sense), with a looser
cohesion at the edges. Let that class become frankly convinced that
the true aim of a State is, as in the magnificent theory of Aristotle,
to make possible the high friendship of those who have raised
themselves to a vision of the Supreme Good, let them adopt means to
confirm one another in that faith, and their influence will spread
outward through society, and leaven the whole range of public opinion.
The instrument by which this control of public opinion is effected is
primarily the imagination; and here we meet with a real difficulty. It
was the advantage of such a union of aristocracy and inherited
oligarchy as Burke advocated that it gave something visible and
definite for the imagination to work upon, whereas the democratic
aristocracy of character must always be comparatively vague. But we
are not left wholly without the means of giving to the imagination a
certain sureness of range, while remaining within the forms of popular
government. The opportunity is in the hands of our higher institutions
of learning, and it is towards recalling these to their duty that the
first efforts of reform should be directed. It is not my intention
here to enter into the precise nature of this reform, for the subject
is so large as to demand a separate essay. In brief, the need is to
restore to their predominance in the curriculum those studies that
train the imagination, not, be it said, the imagination in its purely
æsthetic function, though that aspect of it also has been sadly
neglected, but the imagination in its power of grasping in a single
firm vision, so to speak, the long course of human history, and of
distinguishing what is essential therein from what is ephemeral. The
enormous preponderance of studies that deal with the immediate
questions of economics and government, inevitably results in isolating
the student from the great inheritance of the past; the frequent habit
of dragging him through the slums of sociology, instead of making him
at home in the society of the noble dead, debauches his mind with a
flabby, or inflames it with a fanatic, humanitarianism. He comes out
of college, if he has learnt anything, a _nouveau intellectuel_,
bearing the same relation to the man of genuine education as the
_nouveau riche_ to the man of inherited manners; he is narrow and
unbalanced, a prey to the prevailing passion of the hour, with no
feeling for the majestic claims of that within us which is unchanged
from the beginning. In place of this excessive contemporaneity we
shall give a larger share of time and honor to the hoarded lessons of
antiquity. There is truth in the Hobbian maxim that "imagination and
memory are but one thing"; by their union in education alone shall a
man acquire the uninvidious equivalent in character of those
broadening influences which came to the oligarch through
prescription--he is moulded indeed into the true aristocrat. And with
the assertion of what may be called an inner prescription he will find
among those over whom he is set as leader and guide a measure of
respect which springs from something in the human breast more stable
and honorable and more conformable to reason than the mere stolidity
of an unreflecting prejudice. For, when everything is said, there
could be no civilized society were it not that deep in our hearts,
beneath all the turbulences of greed and vanity, abides the instinct
of obedience to what is noble and of good repute. It awaits only the
clear call from above.
THE RIGHT TO BE AMUSED
Recent ideas of social justice have been marked by a vast extension of
the category of human rights. While these new rights are most various
they may all be covered by the general principle that wages may be of
right more than what the wage taker earns for his employer, and that
in all exchanges of any sort between the poor and the rich the poor
has the right to take more than he gives. To follow the applications
of this new doctrine of rights would be instructive. We should find
that an employer is financially responsible for accidents occurring
through an employee's recklessness. If my gardener gets drunk and
drowns himself in the cistern, I must pay roundly to his estate. Nor
have I the satisfaction, if it be such, of regarding this contribution
as a compulsory beneficence. It is my gardener's right. The odd part
is that if I, being a professor, get drunk and drown myself in the
campus fountain, the corporation is in no way bound to assuage my
widow's financial need. If the corporation should, by way of embalming
my memory, grant her a pension, it would be a case not of her rights
but of their charity. This perfectly possible instance reveals an odd
reversal of all earlier doctrines of rights. It used to be supposed
that rights increased with capacity. Now the more incapable a person
may be, the more completely the state invests him with rights. Ability
and power must be carefully hemmed in with duties. Weakness on the
contrary is freed from duties and must be privileged.
Into what moral gulf we are thus cheerfully staggering it would be a
high public service to inquire. But my theme is not so ambitious. I
wish merely to suggest in a particular instance the somewhat woeful
reaction of this new doctrine of rights upon a certain class of the
weak--to wit, ill balanced and discontented women. I have witnessed
many cases of personal unhappiness among women, some of domestic
shipwreck, owing to a wife's moral confusion, some of women hounded by
unreasonable discontent into public careers for which they have no
capacity, and perhaps the most pitiful cases of all, women pursued by
an aimless restiveness which finds no stated expression, but colors
atrociously their every act. Peace and clear thinking wither as those
women pass. They are mostly victims of a false theory that a woman has
the innate right to be amused, and that for such amusement she need
not pay. It will be seen that I have described what foreign
neurologists call _la maladie Américaine_. And as a matter of fact the
fallacy that a right to be amused exists, is more prevalent in America
than elsewhere. Let us admit that Mrs. Wharton's Undine Spragg is
overdrawn, she still retains high symbolic value. As Americans we may
doubt her in parts, but we cannot disown her as a whole. She is the
bright archangel of the dogma that while a woman must be amused, she
need not pay.
At the outset we must discriminate sharply the right to be amused,
from the ordinary pursuit of pleasure. The most reckless or voluptuous
programme of life assumes in contrast a certain dignity and morality,
from the fact that the pleasure seeker is prepared to take all risks
and pay all prices. That is the man's code the world over, and in most
countries it has imposed itself upon the community generally. It is a
poor code enough as compared with self control and social service, but
at least it has glimmerings of generosity and justice. The strong at
all times have managed to live pretty satisfactorily by it. The weak
have not suffered unduly under the rule of he who breaks must pay.
Quite apart from the Epicurean programme, all sensible people work on
a theory of reciprocity in service and in pleasure. I can't expect
nice people to seek me unless I now and then seek them. If I am
habitually silent or merely garrulous, I have no claim upon the good
talker; he will properly flee my approach. So for the person who is
not amusing there can be no right to be amused, and if he succeeds
nevertheless in extorting amusement from the world, it is at somebody
else's expense, and at the cost of his own soul.
What I frequently see in the faces of women, and especially in the
faces of young girls of the wealthy classes, is as distressing to me
as mysterious. It has been my rare good fortune to live among serene
and companionable women, women whose graciousness has been rooted in
character. Accordingly I am mystified by the hungry defiant faces I
see about me wherever women congregate. They seem to be playing a
part, to be desperately seeking something which they are getting in
insufficient measure. They have the air of being ready to resent a
slight while stubbornly maintaining a right. They are too intent.
There is no ease in them and no fragrance. Now if these observations
were of recent date or suddenly made, it would be prudent to set them
down to the score of middle age and a growing disinclination from
general society. It would be pleasant to believe that I am merely
become old fashioned, mistaking Paris modes for inner characteristics,
and particular cosmetic arts which the young girls of my youth
happened not to employ, for a sign of degeneracy. Whereas, it may
still be a true heart, the beating of which one observes too plainly
at opera or dance, and rouge tinges nothing but the skin. So I would
fain believe that the readiness with which our women assume the
stigmata of the Paris half-world, is without significance. "The
Ladies! God bless them!" it would be pleasant to end this ungracious
discourse with the familiar toast. But the toast itself no longer is
pledged with the old unction, and the modern woman is too intelligent
to be satisfied with stale and perfunctory oblations. She knows that
not all is well with her, and welcomes the probe. The satirists of
our womenkind would starve but for women readers. I who am no
satirist, but a simple observer of life, shall have my best reading
from women, or shall go unread.
That defiant hungry look on our young girls' faces, so different from
the shyness and wistfulness one generally notes in Europe, what is its
ground? A complete answer would mean the writing of a considerable
chapter of our history. One would trace the course of happy laborious
partnerships in pioneer times, to the establishment of wealth, and the
institution of a peculiar American cult of womanhood. This cult found
expression in eloquent cant phrases. "Every American woman is a queen
in her own household" was a favorite article of the liturgy. More
economically expressive was the phrase "able to support a wife," a
wife obviously being regarded as a luxury of the more expensive order.
Along with the cult went a resolute practice of keeping all business
or political cares from the women of the family. Such reticence as to
the real issues of living, such exclusion from the usual means of
education, was the lot of the American woman from early in the last
century. She was, in another favorite liturgical phrase, exclusively,
"The ornament of the home." Naturally her education was to consist
wholly of accomplishments. Money poured into her hands and out. Whence
it came, and the difficulty of getting it, were scrupulously concealed
from her. To be a good provider was the cardinal masculine merit. For
the husband the money grubbing realities; for the wife the decorative
appearances. Very soon it became a tacit convention that, already
separated in all ordinary business relations, husband and wife should
be separated also in their pleasures. He was too dull or too tired for
society, but from his fireside or club chair took a remotely conjugal
satisfaction in the report of her brilliancy and social successes: for
after all he was subsidizing her career. To be the husband of a very
successful woman was like being the background angel for a theatrical
star. It implied association and interest, but nothing like intimacy.
Being reduced to a scintillant parasitic role, the American woman, to
do her justice, played it pretty well. The literature and general
discussions of the sixties and seventies abound in her laudation,
while the American man is either charitably ignored or briefly
commended for his self effacing virtues and unlimited generosity as a
provider. It was in this black walnut era, which corresponds exactly
with the high point of the cult of the American woman, that she became
a familiar apparition in the hotels of Europe. Ostensibly she was
cultivating some accomplishment, or, less specifically, her soul. In
response to an abnormal social position she developed peculiar
capacities. She devoured wholesale miscellaneous ill assorted
information, and gave it back with interest. She acquired a brittle
fluent manner of talk, but her idea of conversation was to be
vivacious and assertive and above all merely to keep things going. She
created a social atmosphere in which no thoughtful, unaggressive
person could live. The American husband withdrew more securely into
his social nonentity, while his place was taken by nondescript
foreigners or by light footed and joyous young native male beings who
also had the gift of keeping things up. These radiant young males for
the most part flourished only for a space. In turn they became
occulted husbands and tolerated good providers.
The women were less fortunate. To be an American woman was an
inexorable career that once undertaken could not be abandoned. A few
escaped by marrying into the simple human conditions prevailing among
the European aristocracy, some American queens were dethroned through
failure of the exchequer, a few succumbed to an increasing group of
children; these were the fortunate exceptions. Most of them continued
the hopeless task of building up a satisfactory life without
including the ordinary responsibilities and loyalties. Naturally the
cardinal maxim of a life largely empty of real interests and devoted
to self exploitation along social lines, was the right to be amused.
That is what, by and large, the good looking American woman is taught
to regard as her most peculiar and precious right. That is the meaning
of the hungry and defiant faces of our young girls. They are the last
logical stage in the American notion of womanhood. They are anxiously
asserting a right which the world by no means always allows--the right
to be amused.
Let me restore a perhaps tottering reputation for humor by admitting
that the picture just sketched is somewhat overdrawn. There was
sometimes a certain unity in grotesquely sundered families. The
organizing and management of a household in days before the apartment
hotel, the telephone, and the department store, involved an
irreducible minimum of steadying duties. The cult of the American
woman often produced a sense of _noblesse oblige_, not very logical
but efficacious. The queen could in the better sense do no wrong. Then
there were always happy backwaters of society where the family was
still an alliance, and mutual understanding was the rule. What
justifies me in blackening the picture, is the fact that the dogma of
the right to be amused is as strong as ever, and more disastrous in
its results. Few duties and educational offsets help the modern girl
to see life clearly and see it whole. Increasingly detached from all
imposed responsibilities, she is more in danger of regarding the world
as her playground and other men and women as her toys. The inevitable
weakness of her position is that she has little to give. Her beauty
and the charm of her sex, a certain restless vivacity, are often her
sole current coin. It is a currency subject to rapid depreciation.
After girlhood she frequently is not amusing, has nothing to give for
the amusement become necessary to her. Establishing no stable and self
respecting relations, she flies about in search of new excitements.
Isms and ologies claim her passing fealty. Messiahs alternate with
neurologists. To the problems of life she brings the mind of a spoiled
child. If she marries well, she may at least conduct satisfactorily an
expensive will-o'-the-wisp existence. For amusement by this sort is
very exactly graded by its expensiveness. Large motor cars or yachts,
opera boxes, public dining and dancing--these are the surest evidence
that one's right to be amused is duly conceded by one's husband and by
the world. Whatever satisfactions the married butterfly commands are
largely denied to her unwedded sister. I know of no more pitiful
spectacle than that of women in the forties still conducting with a
child's mentality the occupations of girlhood. These constitute the
supporting public for all the charlatanisms--social, political, and
religious.
Of course I am aware that all babies are born with the right to be
amused--a right which child specialists have valiantly but vainly
striven to abridge. In the case of a male baby that right is pretty
soon abridged by the rough and tumble and give and take of school and
games. The sense that he must be amused is soon knocked out of a
normal boy. In a young man whatever may survive of it yields to the
somewhat grim business of earning a living. In a rich and unoccupied
young man, the problem of amusement is very much that of the woman,
with the marked difference, however, that only a very perverse young
man imagines that amusement is due him, or can be had on other terms
than his paying for it. In comparison with this wholesome process of
gradual enlightenment, how little is done for the education of a girl!
Compare with the unconditioned freedom of a well to do American
maiden, that stern subjection to the complicated interest of a clan
which is the lot of an English girl, or better, the rational
preparation for marriage and motherhood which every well born French
girl receives. To submit, to play a social part, to discount pleasure
in favor of duty, this is the very air girls breathe in the older
civilizations. A study or a mere observation of the women of Europe
and America will leave no doubt as to where the balance of happiness
lies. The boasted freedom of the American woman is often her sorrow,
and her joy is escape from freedom into some kind of service.
This is a trite story. Robert Grant, Edith Wharton, Robert Herrick
have expended the greatest artistry on the ungrateful theme of the
egocentric American woman. More blatantly, David Graham Phillips,
Upton Sinclair, and Owen Johnson have belabored the unfortunate
creature. I venture to move matter so thoroughly familiar, only in the
hope of setting it in something like historic perspective, and of
pointing out remedial tendencies. And first of all, while this is
primarily a woman's problem, it is emphatically of man's making. It
would be a most curious and interesting historical study to ascertain
just when and precisely how, the American notion of women as a luxury
and ornament came into being. Until the quite recent revulsion against
the theory, it passed for a beautiful expression of the innate
chivalry of the American man. It is possible that it is indeed a
product of that peculiar inept sentimentality--of that impotence in
the field of the emotions--which frequently accompanies a life too
narrowly devoted to business. In affairs involving the intelligence of
the heart, there is notoriously no fool comparable with a certain type
of millionaire. An unkinder view of this chivalric delusion of the
American man as regards his womankind, is that it is not a delusion at
all but a Machiavellian policy. He is overconcentrated in work, and
socially inert. He bribes his women in order to be let alone. He
dangles vanities before them in order to avoid a manly sharing of his
life. The Undine Spraggs and her sisters in fiction are prone to take
this view when they go to the rare pains of general reflection.
Probably a mixture of the two motives would supply the real cause. Our
forefathers did idolize their women, and doubtless wished to procure
them happiness without first taking the trouble to learn where a
woman's happiness really lies. Our forefathers were also over busy
men, and willing to pay handsomely for immunity from ungrateful social
duties. They may have quite honestly desired to simplify what is a
delicate and complicated personal adjustment, but in so doing they
ignored that broad community of interest which is the vitalizing
principle of any successful marriage. The present iconoclasm
concerning our once idolized women will do very little good until it
be clearly perceived that what is very much the misfortune of the
American woman is also very much the fault of the American man. When
he begins to realize that he is not merely a provider or patron, but
in the fullest sense a partner, the old sentimentalisms will give way
to reality and common sense.
Meanwhile much is happening to make our women more capable of genuine
partnership. The projection of millions of women from sheltered homes
into business has been a rude process and fraught with evils, but it
has given to these women some vision of the world of affairs. Much of
our recent humanitarian endeavor has been hysterical and half-baked,
but it has also left a considerable residuum of genuine new experience
and wisdom. Suffragist and socialist agitation has wavered between
gushing sentimentalisms and benighted fanaticisms, but it has also
been an educational process, revealing, to hundreds of thousands of
women even if in a hectic light, the real figure of the world. A great
deal that is still raw in these fermentations may eventuate in clearer
ideas of social justice and personal wisdom. In a very true sense much
of the revolt of women has been an unconscious protest against the
theory of man as paymaster general. When men understand that women
cannot live by frocks and functions alone, however generously
provided, but want companionship, less will be heard about feminism
and more about humanity.
Meanwhile it is the duty of parents to disabuse their female
offspring as to the existence of a right to be amused. To be amused is
at best a privilege conditional upon one's desire to prove amusing to
others. Amusement is necessary, but less necessary than it seems, and
always has to be paid for fairly. It seems as if such ideas could be
instilled into children, substituting a general morality and sense of
fair play, for the old pseudo-chivalric notion of sex privilege. There
was more to come of this argument when I was summoned to the telephone
to command any one of a half a dozen little playmates to come and see
my eight year old daughter. She is temporarily unoccupied and needs to
be amused. When she is a little older she shall read this article.
_Fiat justitia!_ But stop! When I consider her with many women of my
acquaintance, I am amazed that so much sweetness and efficiency have
after all survived so much false doctrine and so many unfair
kindnesses. The stock is good, if much of the thinking and training
has been bad. Quite sincerely I toast the Ladies, if not with the old
sentimental unction, at least with the profound conviction that they
are worthy of more substantial guerdon than can ever be compacted from
mere profits, dividends, and coupons. I will be more of a companion to
her who has ever been that to me, and more of a comrade too for the
little girl who wants to be amused.
HOW WOMAN SUFFRAGE HAS WORKED
That the results of applied woman suffrage may stand out the more
clearly, it will be expedient to show, first, the results achieved in
behalf of woman without its help. All are agreed that during the
sixty-five years that have elapsed since the suffragists, led by
Lucretia Mott, posted their "Declaration of Sentiments" at Seneca
Falls, N. Y., in 1848, woman has gained certain rights and privileges.
That Declaration contained a bitter indictment by woman of man who had
"oppressed her on all sides." He had made her, if married, "in the eye
of the law, civilly dead," having taken from her "all right in
property, even to the wages she earns." He had made her "morally an
irresponsible;" she could commit many crimes with impunity, "provided
they be done in the presence of her husband, he becoming to all
intents and purposes her master--the law giving him power to deprive
her of her liberty and to administer chastisement." He had so framed
the laws of divorce as to what should be the proper causes, and, in
case of separation, to whom the guardianship of the children should be
given, "as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of women--the law
in all cases going upon the false supposition of the supremacy of man,
and giving all power into his hands."
The married woman having no rights, the single woman was "taxed to
support a Government which recognizes her only when her property can
be made profitable to it." Man had "monopolized nearly all the
profitable employments;" and from those woman was permitted to follow,
"she receives but a scanty remuneration." Man had closed to woman "all
the avenues to wealth and distinction which he considers most
honorable to himself: as a teacher of theology, in medicine, or law,
she is not known." Moreover, man had "denied to her the facilities
for obtaining a thorough education, all colleges being closed against
her." In the Church, too, she was subordinated, and apostolic
authority was invoked "for her exclusion from the ministry, and, with
some exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the
Church." Men acted by a different code of morals from women, "by which
moral delinquencies which exclude women from society are not only
tolerated, but deemed of little account in men." By such means, the
indictment declared, man had discriminated against woman, endeavoring
in every way he could to "destroy her confidence in her own powers, to
lessen her self-respect, and to make her lead a dependent and abject
life." And because of these things the drawers of the indictment
demanded for women "immediate admission to all the rights and
privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States."
It was first of all as voters that the women should gain the rights
denied them. Deprivation of the vote was the fundamental evil. The
first item of their grievances named the ballot as their "inalienable
right." It was primarily because this had been wrested away, the
Declaration said, that man had been able to oppress woman on all
sides.
But it needs only the restatement of the original suffragist
grievances to show how completely woman has been emancipated since
they were formulated, and chiefly without the vote. Nowhere in the
United States is the married woman, in the eyes of the law, civilly
dead. Nowhere is she bereft of the right in property and wages. In
that year 1848 when the "Declaration of Sentiments" was drafted, New
York State, still withholding the franchise from woman, expressly
permitted married women to hold property for their sole and separate
use. By a law of 1861, married women in New York received power to
control property, including wages, and authority to will property was
given them in 1867. By 1887 the property rights of married women in
this State were more complete than those of their husbands, who could
not convey real estate without their wives' consent. Woman now has a
right of action for injuries to person or property, and she is liable
for her own wrongful acts; that is, she is no longer "morally an
irresponsible." Women are joint guardians with their husbands of their
minor children, and, in case of divorce, the custody of the children
is decreed reasonably to the innocent party without discrimination as
to sex. The laws of divorce and separation, too, though differing
widely in the several States, are impartial, applying equally to men
and women. New York's women taxpayers have the right to vote on
questions of local taxation in all towns and villages, and they are
eligible to nearly all political offices, and to various positions of
trust and responsibility. Moreover, all the professions are open to
them.
In these respects, the case of New York is fairly typical of all the
States in the Union, whether suffragist or non-suffragist. As for
men's monopolizing "nearly all the profitable employments," the
Federal census of 1900 showed that women were engaged in 295 out of
the 303 masculine occupations. The original complaint that they were
not admitted to men's pursuits on equal terms with men has changed to
a demand for laws which shall discriminate in favor of women in
industry because of their weaker physique. Only in Massachusetts,
Indiana, and Nebraska, however, three male-suffrage States, have laws
been passed prohibiting night work for women in factories and machine
shops. The eight-hour law for women in California was enacted before
they had the suffrage there, but it still exempts the great canning
industry of that State from its operation, and it does not prohibit
night work. The doubtful minimum wage act, and the maternity act for
the protection of women were first copied from anti-feminist Europe by
male-suffragist Massachusetts. Massachusetts, also, is generally
credited by child labor experts and by woman suffragists with having
the best child labor law in the Union, applied in her great textile
industries. It would seem, therefore, that the added complaint of the
latter-day suffragists of lack of discrimination in favor of working
women may be satisfied without resort by them to the ballot.
The facilities for acquiring a thorough education are now in no State
denied to woman. In the argument of Mrs. A. J. George to the woman
suffrage committee of the Federal Senate on April 19, 1913, this
anti-suffragist authority noted the fact that there are "to-day more
institutions which grant degrees to women in this country than there
are institutions which grant degrees to men." The foundation of
Vassar, of Wellesley, of Smith, of Mount Holyoke, was "in no way
connected with the suffrage movement," while the opening of the
Harvard examinations to women and the opening of the graduate
departments of Yale University to women were due to the activities of
men and women who were avowed anti-suffragists. In the universal
granting of this great privilege to woman, therefore, the ballot was
not used or needed.
The grievance that woman is subordinated in the Church was one that,
by its nature, could not be settled by the suffrage, since in this
country Church and State are irrevocably separate. As a matter of
fact, however, woman has steadily gained rights and privileges in most
denominations of the Protestant Church, including admission to the
ministry and public participation in their affairs. For example, Dr.
Anna Shaw, the President of the National Woman's Suffrage Association,
is a clergywoman. As in religion, so in morals. The legal prohibitions
of immorality are in most cases the same for both men and women; it is
only outside the domain of legislation and within the sphere of social
custom that divergencies appear, and here the discrimination is
exercised notoriously by woman against her erring sisters.
Up to this point results achieved and practicable without the suffrage
seem to argue strongly against a continuance of the propaganda to
obtain the elective franchise for the redress of aggrieved womankind.
Clothed with full rights in property and earnings, held morally
accountable for her acts, made joint guardian with her husband over
her children, welcomed to an equal competition with men in business,
industry, and the professions, after ample opportunities given for
acquiring a higher education and special training, to what further
extent can the exercise of the voting power by woman improve her
status? The grievances set forth in the "Declaration of Sentiments" of
1848 present the "whole case for woman as comprehensively as it ever
has been stated since," according to an official statement of the
National Woman Suffrage Association; the document's resolutions
comprised "practically every demand that ever afterwards was made for
women." The civil and legal rights besought therein have been so fully
recognized that the anti-suffragists, numbering many public-spirited
women who have battled zealously for these rights, now contend that
womanhood suffrage is not needed.
Their suffragist opponents will not be gainsaid. While the condition
of woman and her children has been mitigated, much remains to do, they
say, and the more quickly by the ballot. For example, while eighteen
States, comprising nearly one-half the population of the
Union--41,231,000, to be exact--enjoy the benefit of joint
guardianship laws, and in twenty-seven more States the surviving
mother is made sole guardian of her children with the same powers
exercised by the father in his lifetime, six States remain--Delaware,
Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, and Maryland, with a combined
population of 9,104,000--in which the father has power to bequeath the
guardianship to a stranger and away from the mother. To be sure, in
this ninth of the population of the country the custom ignores the
common law; husbands uniformly leave the guardianship of children to
their wives, and the mother shares authority over them with the
father. But here is a field for corrective legal action. The question
is whether, if women had the vote, this would be the swiftest and most
direct means of bringing about the reform demanded. A suffragist
writer has said: "It took the mothers of Massachusetts fifty-five
years to get an equal guardianship law, but after the women obtained
the ballot in Colorado the very next Legislature enacted one." She
forgot that New York's joint guardianship law was passed a year before
the Colorado statute. Mrs. George W. Townsend of Buffalo, who as head
of the Woman's Educational and Industrial Union was active in urging
the passage of the joint guardianship laws in both States, says of the
one in New York:
Our Union was especially careful that the Suffrage Association
should not know of the Union's effort until after the law was
passed. I remember that a prominent suffragist called to see me
as soon as she heard of it, and said, "How did you accomplish
this great good, and not let us know?" And I answered, "Because
we did not let you know." I think I was justified in saying that,
because many men in both houses were so opposed to woman suffrage
that they would not have voted for our bills. The guardianship
bill was passed without a negative vote in either house.
The work was done in a systematic manner. Circulars giving full
information in regard to laws in other States, and as to what we
desired to accomplish, and reasons therefor, were sent to every
legislator. There was no lobbying, and, in fact, it was not
necessary for me to go to Albany at all.
It should be noted in this connection that in Wyoming, while it is not
among the "benighted" states that permit the father to will the
guardianship of his children away from the mother, the women have had
an equal voice in the State Government for more than half a century
without making fathers and mothers joint guardians of their children.
It is not clear, therefore, that joint guardianship laws have been
passed the more quickly by reason of woman suffrage.
But other tests should be applied. The new complaints of woman that
have arisen since the Declaration of 1848 deal largely with her
condition in the industries which men have thrown open to her. Has the
suffrage enabled her more quickly to ameliorate this condition? Around
this point the strife rages between the "pros" and the "antis." Miss
Minnie Bronson, who was employed from 1907 to 1909 by the Federal
Bureau of Labor to investigate the conditions of labor of women and
children, and who acted as the Special Agent of the Bureau to report
on the strike of shirtwaist makers in 1910 has prepared a statement
for the Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Extension of
Suffrage to Women embodying a comparison of the laws for the
protection of wage-earning women in the various States of the Union.
Miss Bronson's contentions have been deemed of sufficient importance
to merit a reply, with an introduction by Jane Addams, written by the
two best qualified woman suffragist authorities on women in the
industries, Miss Edith Abbott of Hull House, Chicago, and Professor
Sophonisba P. Breckinridge of the University of Chicago. The
allegations of Miss Bronson and the specific replies of her opponents
thereto are marshaled below:
_"Anti" Contentions_ _Suffragist Replies_
A suffragist addressing the women When we say that if women had a
shirtwaist strikers in New York vote there would be an end of
declared that if the women child labor, and that young girls
engaged in this industry had had would work shorter hours, this
the ballot such a strike as does not mean that we think the
theirs would be unnecessary. The children in the mills and
speaker would have been surprised factories and workshops are going
to learn that 40 per cent. of the to be allowed to vote. In England
strikers were men, 36 per cent. conditions improved for all
were women under 21 years, and 6 workingmen when some workmen got
per cent. were women workers of the vote; in this country when
voting age who had not been in some women get the vote
this country long enough to gain conditions for all workingwomen
a residence. will improve.
Laws governing the labor of women Any fair-minded person need only
are constantly improved, not recall the long series of
because women have the ballot or statutes enacted in all the
want it, but because women are leading industrial states,
entering more and more into the covering nearly three-fourths of
industrial life of the country. a century, as a result of
In forty-four states the laws for workmen's efforts to get through
safeguarding wage-earning women laws a larger measure of justice
are better and more comprehensive than they could obtain through
than the laws for the their attempts to bargain with
safeguarding of wage-earning men. individual employers. This
Moreover, a comparison of the legislation, although it may in a
labor laws of the various states few cases protect the
shows that there are more and workingwoman as well as the
better laws for the protection of workingman, represents the
women wage-earners in the results of long years of earnest
non-suffrage states than in struggle by workingmen with votes
states where women have the to improve their condition. Miss
ballot. Bronson ignores this, laying
stress on the fact that some
states have a few special
provisions to protect
wage-earning women from
exploitation likely to injure
health and endanger their
children's health.
In thirty-four states laws have No suffragist would deny that
been passed limiting the hours of protective legislation has been
labor in which a woman may be obtained in states where women do
employed. Three of the four woman not vote. It is well known that
suffrage states where women have most of this legislation was
voted long enough to affect obtained through the laborious
legislation have no such law, and efforts of suffragists.
the 54-hour law in Utah was not
enacted until 1911, fifteen years No argument that protective
after woman suffrage became legislation does not exist in
operative there. some of the states in which women
have the ballot is valid which
ignores the special needs of
these states. Colorado, Wyoming,
Idaho and Utah are all mining and
agricultural states and have very
few wage-earning women who are
employed in factories.
Massachusetts had 152,713 women
in "manufacturing and mechanical
pursuits" when the last United
States Census of Occupations was
taken; Idaho had only 681. A
similar contrast might be drawn
for any of the other states:
thus, Wyoming had 501 women in
industrial occupations while New
York in the same year had
136,788.
Thirty-nine states compel The one suffrage state, Idaho,
employers in stores, factories, that fails to provide seats for
shops, etc., to provide seats for saleswomen in all at a time when
female employés. Nine states have Massachusetts had 11,985,
no such laws, and one of the nine Illinois, 12,149, and New York,
states is a suffrage state. 30,858. In most of the
thirty-nine states where voteless
women have secured these laws,
they have never received the
means of enforcing them. The
protective laws protect no one.
In forty-two states, the No reply.
territory of Alaska, and the
District of Columbia, the earnings
of a married woman are
secured to her absolutely, and
cannot be required by law, as
can the earnings of a married
man, for the support of the
family, nor are they liable for
her husband's debts. Six
states do not so provide, and
one is a suffrage state.
Sixteen states regulate the Night work for women is not
employment of women at night, and prohibited in Idaho, Colorado,
specifically state the hours Wyoming, and Utah, for the same
between which women may not be reason that the workingmen of
employed. These laws were all Nebraska have not passed a law
enacted under male suffrage. In protecting seamen.
these sixteen states are all
those that prohibit night work
for girls who are minors, but who
are over 16 and therefore not
protected by child labor laws.
Twenty-four states, only one a The same legislature of
suffrage state, restrict the California that granted equal
number of hours of employment for suffrage passed the eight-hour
women, both by the day and week, law for women. Massachusetts has
thus causing one day of rest in passed a 54-hour a week law for
seven. The suffrage states of women as the culmination of forty
Washington and California, while years of effort by indirect
limiting women's work to influence to improve conditions
forty-eight hours a week, passed for women in industry. Utah in
both laws while under male 1911 passed a nine-hour law for
suffrage. women after less than two years
of effort by its advocates. The
first legislature of which they
asked it gave it to women with
votes. Of the non-suffrage states
not one has an eight-hour law for
women, and only five have
nine-hour laws.
Eliminating the manufacturing The Nebraska law provides for a
states of the east, which have ten-hour day and a sixty-hour
the most and best remedial laws week and does not prohibit Sunday
for women, the suffrage states of labor. Nebraska, in company with
Idaho and Wyoming do not limit a large number of other states,
the hours a woman may be has a law prohibiting Sunday
employed, while the neighboring labor, which applies to both men
male-suffrage states of Oklahoma, and women.
South Dakota, North Dakota, and
Nebraska regulate the hours by The fact that Colorado has no
law, and Nebraska prohibits the Sunday labor law argues as much
employment of women at night in against suffrage for men as for
all manufacturing mechanical, or women, since the men in the large
mercantile establishments, and in metal-working establishments are
hotels, and restaurants, and chiefly affected by absence of
limits the number of hours per Sunday laws. Anyway, such laws
week, thereby insuring one day of are rarely enforced.
rest.
An eight-hour law for women was The eight-hour day of the
enacted in Colorado in 1903, a Colorado law, made for the
very inadequate law, for it was majority of workingwomen of
restricted in its application to Colorado a forty-eight-hour
women who must stand at work, and week, in contrast with the
exempted the great majority of 60-hour week in the neighboring
women employed in that state in states of Oklahoma, South Dakota,
the "seated trades" of ready-made North Dakota, and Nebraska. It is
clothing, dress-making, millinery little short of ridiculous to
and like occupations, and in discuss these laws as if they
candy-making, box-making, and were all genuinely protective
cigar-making. The law was through proper enforcement. The
pronounced unconstitutional in last census of occupations showed
1907 by the Supreme Court of but 65 women and girls in
Colorado, although state courts Colorado employed in
and the Federal Supreme Court candy-making, 11 in box-making,
have upheld similar laws in and 30 in cigar-making, in
neighboring male-suffrage states. contrast to 1,184 saleswomen, 762
Not until 1912, nineteen years waitresses, 1,599 in hand and
after woman suffrage came into steam laundries,--all in the
Colorado, was a law finally standing trades.
secured limiting the hours of
women at work.
Laws not enacted under woman The Massachusetts law relating to
suffrage are those in broken-down machinery was passed
Massachusetts prohibiting to correct peculiar abuses in the
employers from deducting the textile industries. This law was
wages of women when time is lost not needed in suffrage states. In
because machinery has broken a few states the courts took the
down, and prohibiting the position that since women were
employment of women for a fixed not voters they could not become
period before and after practicing lawyers; corrective
childbirth; the law in Delaware statutes were passed. No such law
and Louisiana exempting the wages would be needed in a state where
of women from execution, and laws women do participate in the
in California, Illinois, and Government.
Washington, providing that no
person shall on account of sex be
disqualified from entering upon
or pursuing any lawful business,
vocation, or profession.
A suffragist says that in The doctrine of the inflexibility
Massachusetts the average pay of and almost sacred character of
a female teacher is only supply and demand is outworn. The
one-third that of a male teacher, supply of child labor has been
and in almost all the states it greatly reduced in many states,
is unequal, whereas Wyoming and and is entirely cut off in others
Utah give equal pay for equal by means of protective
work. Where teachers are doing legislation; in still other
the same grade of work no such states the demand for child labor
percentage as three to one has greatly decreased as the
obtains in Massachusetts. Female result of inconvenient protective
teachers do not in the majority child labor laws and the demand
of cases receive the same pay as for labor of men and women has
men for the work of the same correspondingly increased. To get
grade; but here the law of supply equal pay the women teachers in
and demand is paramount. The New York City had to put in six
women teachers of New York City years of hard and exhausting work
receive equal pay with men by "indirect influence" while in
teachers, granted by a the suffrage states the same
male-suffrage legislature. result has come about almost
automatically.
In this conflicting testimony it does not appear that the complaint of
Lucretia Mott and her sister suffragists in 1848 that woman had been
oppressed on all sides is valid to-day. Both Miss Bronson and her
suffragist opponents agree that woman in industry has been protected,
not oppressed. It is admitted that this is not a result of the
exercise of the ballot by woman. It is unfortunate, of course, that
the suffrage states are in the agricultural and mining stages of
civilization, and cannot show how formidable the women's vote might be
in correcting the oppressive man-made laws. It is a little deplorable,
too, that the women in the male-suffrage states should have spent so
much of their time proving that protective laws might be gotten by the
despised indirect methods. Dr. Abbott and Professor Breckinridge have
perceived this tactical error, and they note it in these words:
American women would probably have got the vote long ago if they
had followed the present English method of making suffrage a
paramount issue, first, last, and all the time. Instead of this,
Miss Jane Addams in Illinois, Mrs. Florence Kelley in New York,
and a host of other ardent suffragists have labored with the
greatest devotion and self-sacrifice to secure protective
legislation for women and children. How much effort they have put
into it, how much time and energy it has cost, only those who
have been closely associated with them know. It should not be
forgotten that, as the result of their experience, they say that
the ballot is the swiftest and surest way to bring about the
reforms which are asked by and for the women workers of the
country.
But how can that last sentence be verified? Was it not explicitly
admitted that the suffrage states, by reason of their mining and
agricultural status, have had little occasion to reform the laws for
women workers, and that the reforms have all been worked out in the
east? The male workers under male suffrage have done this for
themselves, and incidentally for the women workers among them. Of
course, there are fewer woman bread-winners, the proportion being five
men to one woman. But women share equally in the benefits of labor
legislation, besides being specially protected. The unions have even
succeeded in leveling up a little the scale of women's wages, thus
measurably meeting the complaint of 1848 that in her employments
woman "receives but a scanty remuneration." And despite the equal pay
laws for teachers in the suffrage states the average pay for women
teachers is much below that of men teachers. Dr. Helen M. Sumner, the
suffragist writer of the book _Equal Suffrage_ says: "Taking public
employment as a whole, women in Colorado receive considerably less
remuneration than men;" and "the wages of men and women in all fields
of industry are governed by economic conditions." Dr. Sumner's tables
show that the pay of women in Colorado has never been quite half as
much as the pay of men; while the average weekly wage of women in that
state is 97 cents higher than the average in the United States, the
average weekly pay of men is $3.62 higher than for the United States
as a whole. Dr. Sumner frankly acknowledges that the suffrage has
probably nothing to do with the wages of either men or women.
As for hours of work, the contention of the suffragists that the
54-hour a week law in Massachusetts was "the culmination of forty
years of effort by indirect influence to improve conditions for women
in industry," while Utah granted such a law after less than two years
of effort by its suffragist advocates, merits the comment that the
forty years, or one-eighth that time, were not consumed in agitating
for this specific bit of legislation. The struggle for the law
limiting hours of women's work in Massachusetts lasted a little longer
than in Utah, chiefly because Utah is an agricultural state where
manufacturers have less at stake in the passage of such a restrictive
measure. It is not probable that the legislators of Utah blenched and
yielded this point through fear of the women's vote, or that any but
humanitarian motives dictated the legislation in either state.
Considerations of humanity, indeed, and not politics, seem to animate
the legislative programs for the protection of women and children in
most states, whether male suffragist or equal suffragist.
Pennsylvania, for example, is one of the black states on the
suffragist maps, because it has never extended the franchise to woman,
even for the election of school committees. If the woman's vote is
requisite, we should see the protective laws of Pennsylvania far
behind those of Colorado. Colorado has had equal suffrage since 1893,
and of all the woman suffragist states, conditions there are most
nearly like those in the male suffragist East. For comparison, I draw
on two unchallenged documents, one prepared by Mary C. Bradford and
published by the Colorado Equal Suffrage Association--with some
additions by Elinor Byrns and Helen Ranlett, printed in _The New York
Evening Post_ of Nov. 10, 1913--summarizing the protective laws for
women and children passed in that state from 1893 to 1912; the other,
a statement of similar laws in force in Pennsylvania in 1912, put
forth by the Pennsylvania Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage:
_Colorado_ _Pennsylvania_
Establishing a state home for Dependent, delinquent, and
dependent children, three of the incorrigible children fully
five members of the board of provided for by State Juvenile
control to be women. A juvenile court and probation officer
court with houses of detention in system. Child placed in care of
each county with population over parents, probation officers,
100,000; probation officers in industrial school, or a
counties with population over charitable association as the
25,000. Court sees best. Houses of
detention in every city of first
and second class, managed by
board of five members, two of
them women.
Requiring three of the six Visitation periodically by State
members of the county visitors to Board of Charities and Board of
be women. Visitors of all agencies having
custody of delinquent or
dependent children.
Making mother joint guardian of If husband unfit, wife has same
children with the father. rights over child as father would
have had. If wife helps support
child, she has equal rights with
husband; judges decide fitness of
parents where question of it
arises.
Raising the age of protection for Age of consent or protestation,
girls to eighteen years. sixteen years.
Requiring one woman physician One female physician in each
on the board of insane asylums. state hospital or asylum with
female inmates; provision for
women members of board of
visitors of lunatic asylums;
female attendants, paid by
counties or poor districts, for
all insane female persons in
transit; police matron in
Philadelphia county prison.
Establishing parental and truant Provision for institutions and
schools; a state industrial home societies for delinquent and
for girls, three of the five dependent children, also for
members of board of control to be Houses of Refuge in Philadelphia
women. and Western Pennsylvania;
complete system of industrial
schools, besides industrial
education in public school
system; provision for maintenance
of children committed to
industrial schools. Women
eligible as one of two overseers
of the poor in each county.
Making Colorado humane society a Humane societies throughout the
state bureau for child and animal state for child and animal
protection. protection.
Compulsory education for Compulsory education for all
children, between 8 and 16, children of school age. Parents
except those who are ill, or are and guardians failing to comply
taught at home, and those over with school attendance law are
14 who have completed the punishable for a criminal
eighth grade, or whose parents offense.
need their help and support,
and those children who must
support themselves. [Are not some
of these exemptions loopholes in
the law? Ed.] Providing for
examination of eyes, ears, teeth,
and lungs of school children.
Making father and mother joint Father and mother hold by
heirs of deceased child. entireties, with right of
survivorship, real and personal
properties of intestate child.
Establishing state traveling A free library commission
library; library commission to created, and provisions made for
consist of five women from the free libraries throughout the
State Federation of Women's state in cities of first, second
Clubs. and third classes and in
boroughs, together with public
school libraries, a state public
library, and law libraries
throughout the state.
Employing children under 14 in No minor under 14, and no
mill, factory, or underground illiterate minor under 18, shall
works punishable by imprisonment be employed in a factory,
and fine. Children of 16 and workshop, store, mercantile
under forbidden to work more than establishment, and so on. Minors
six hours a day and not after 8 under 18 shall not be employed
P. M. in any mill, factory, about blast furnaces, tanneries,
store, or other occupation that electric wires, elevators,
may be deemed unhealthful. Model railroads, vessels, or
child labor law passed 1912, "one explosives. Minors over 14 who
of the very best in the world." can read and write can be
Illiterate workers under 16 must employed only in establishments
go to night school. From 14 to 16 having proper sanitation, and in
maximum is 54 hours a week, 9 which power machinery is not
hours a day. used, or if used is safeguarded.
No minor under 16 shall be
employed unless employer keeps
employment certificates and
complete lists of minors so
employed.
Meal hours of employed children
regulated, as well as meal hours
of all other employés.
Male minors under 16 and females
under 18 forbidden employment
between 9 P. M. and 6 A. M.
No woman shall work more than Seats provided for women employed
eight hours a day at work in any establishment.
requiring her to be on her feet;
that is, in manufacturing, Sixty-hour-week and
mechanical, or mercantile twelve-hour-day maximum for women
establishments, laundries, and for minors under 16.
hotels, and restaurants.
Provisions for suitable wash and
dressing rooms and lavatories for
men and women in all
establishments.
Employment of females prohibited Employment of women in and about
in coal mines or coke offices mines or coal manufactories
except as clerks. forbidden; women and male minors
under 16 forbidden employment in
mines; women and male minors
under 14 forbidden to be employed
on outside structures of mines,
except for clerical work.
Requiring joint signature of Chattel mortgages do not exist.
husband and wife to every chattel Earnings of a married woman,
mortgage, sale of household whether as wages for labor,
goods, or mortgage of a salary, property, business or
homestead. Homestead, whether otherwise, are her own, inure to
husband's or wife's, cannot be her separate benefit and are not
sold without the consent of both. subject to levy by her husband.
No assignment of wages by husband Wife must consent to conveyance
is valid without wife's consent. of real estate by husband in
order to bar her dower, and a
mortgage requires her consent.
Criminal offense to contribute to Criminal offense to contribute to
delinquency of a child; law delinquency of a child; penalty
raising the delinquency age for of not more than $500 or
girls. imprisonment not exceeding one
year, or both.
Making it a misdemeanor to Provisions for support of every
fail to support aged or infirm poor, blind, lame, and impotent
parents. person unable to work, by his or
her relatives, either children,
grandchildren, parents, or
grandparents; provisions for
support of the wife's relatives,
either children, grandchildren,
parents or grandparents, who are
poor, blind, lame, impotent, or
unable to maintain themselves.
Abolishing the system of binding Provisions for binding out minors
out girls committed to the maintained by charitable
industrial school. Separate institutions, asylums, or
industrial school for girls corporations, to suitable
created. persons, without prejudicing
rights of such institutions over
the child.
The husband must support his wife If husband neglects or deserts
and children under 16 (legitimate rights of trade by filing a
or illegitimate); non-support is petition and securing a
made an extraditable offense. certificate from the court. Her
Parents liable for support of property is then her own
children in State institutions. absolutely and exempt from all
claims of husband or his
creditors. Statute requires
husband to support wife, and
family; desertion a misdemeanor.
All policies of life insurance or
annuities on the life of any
person for benefit of wife or
children or dependent relative
are vested full and clear from
all claims of creditors of such
person.
Improved employers' liability law Employers' Liability act of 1907
passed in 1912. Assumption of allows recovery from employer for
risk abolished except where injuries of employé, doing away
remedying defect is employe's with the "fellow-servant" rule as
chief duty. a defense.
A married woman has same right as
unmarried person to acquire and
dispose of property real and
personal, with entire freedom of
contract; but she may not
mortgage or convey real property
unless husband joins, and may not
become indorser or surety for
another.
Dower and curtesy abolished; The widow of an intestate who
neither husband nor leaves issue has one-third of the
wife may will away more than realty for life and one-third of
half of his or her property the personalty absolutely. If
without the other's consent; without issue, the widow has
wife's will validated. $5,000 worth of real or personal
estate, besides the widow's
exemption of $300. If estate
exceeds $5,000, she has one-half
the remainder for life, and
one-half the remaining personalty
absolutely.
Four deputy factory inspectors Five of the thirty-nine deputy
are required, one of them a factory inspectors must be women.
woman.
Law providing for the care Institutions for care and
of the feeble minded. School treatment of feeble minded and
for the Mute and Blind is insane maintained throughout and
declared to be an educational by the state. Institutions for
institution. care and treatment of the deaf,
dumb, blind, consumptive,
epileptic, aged, indigent,
orphan, pauper, and so on,
maintained throughout and by the
state, counties or
municipalities.
While minor differences exist in this comparison, the picture as a
whole does not show that the legislation protective of women and
children in Colorado is greatly, if at all, in advance of that in the
male-suffrage state of Pennsylvania. The American Vigilance
Association calls Pennsylvania's laws on "white slavery" and
disorderly houses "good," and Colorado's only "fair." Colorado
created in 1913 a Minimum Wage Commission, thus coming abreast of
male-suffrage Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania lacks such a commission.
But a law establishing a minimum wage is open to the objection that it
throws out of employment all who are incapable of earning that wage.
It does not protect them in industry, it simply throws them upon the
streets, thence to find their way into jails and poorhouses. Designed
as a protective measure, it has yet to vindicate that purpose, and it
seems to be adopted irrespective of the votes of women. Aside from
this it seems clear that if there is any essential difference between
the protective legislation of Colorado and Pennsylvania, it must lie
in the degree with which the women's votes compel enforcement of the
laws.
But just how effective do the suffragists themselves feel the women's
vote to be in securing redress for their injuries? Do they trust it?
Their chief grievance is the deprivation of the suffrage. The American
Woman Suffrage Association says of this, nevertheless, that while
woman must have the ballot on every other question, she cannot be
trusted to wield it in deciding this most vital question of legal
privilege; that only an electorate of men is qualified to decide it.
The association is convinced that every improvement in woman's
position thus far has been secured "not by a general demand from the
majority of women, but by the arguments, entreaties and 'continual
coming' of a persistent few." In the association's _Brief History_ of
the suffrage movement it contends that the beneficial changes of the
last half century in the laws, written and unwritten, relating to
women have necessarily come by the influence of a few men and women.
"Not one of them would have been made to this day if it had been
necessary to wait until the majority of women asked for it," the
association says. But that is an argument against the extension of the
suffrage, which works only by majorities!
It is a valid argument, and it has historical facts in its support.
Massachusetts in 1895 granted woman the right to vote on the question
whether the municipal suffrage should be extended without distinction
of sex. The suffragists made a vigorous campaign in that state. Only 4
per cent. of the women cared to go to the polls and record an
affirmative vote. When human grievances have become intolerable, men
have been willing to shed blood for their redress. This grievance of
the suffragists cannot be very widespread or keenly felt, when they
fail to persuade the women even to signify their protest.
She that is faithful in that which is least, is faithful also in much.
Mrs. George, speaking for the National Association Opposed to Woman
Suffrage, has presented to the woman suffrage committee of the Federal
Senate the record of seventeen years' voting for school committees by
the women of Massachusetts. During that time the registration showed
but 4.8 per cent. of all the women of the state who were qualified to
register and vote, and 2.1 per cent., less than one-half of them,
actually got to the polls. Mrs. George obtained from the town clerk of
Dedham, Mass., the official list of male and female voters in that
town from 1889 to 1912, which shows a steadily diminishing female vote
from 154 in 1889 to 1 in 1903; since 1903 not one of the fifty to
seventy women registered in Dedham has remembered to go to the polls
on Election Day.
If women cannot be expected to look after the interests of their
children's schooling, how can they be expected to be faithful in the
general field of politics? The Massachusetts State Association Opposed
to Woman Suffrage has compiled the total vote cast in the Presidential
election of 1912 in the six woman suffrage States of California,
Colorado, Wyoming, Washington, Idaho, and Utah--1,521,590 out of a
total possible vote of 3,200,152--showing that only 47-1/2 per cent.
of men and women in those states cared to go to the polls for the most
interesting of all elections; comparing this with the 1,587,984 male
votes cast out of a possible 2,295,119 votes--69 per cent. of the
total--in the six non-suffrage western states of Kansas, Nebraska,
Oregon, Nevada, South Dakota, and Missouri. Now if 69 per cent. of the
men voted in the woman suffrage states in 1912, then only 17.8 per
cent. of the women voters in those states actually cast their ballots.
At any rate, it is certain that the extension of suffrage to women
results in a notable decrease of the actual voting strength of the
electorate, as compared with the more healthy interest in voting shown
by the electorates of the non-suffrage states. In that same
Presidential election of 1912, Secretary of State Jordan of California
reports that 802,000 men and but 180,000 women registered to
vote--over 93 per cent. of the men, and a trifle over 27 per cent. of
the women who were qualified to register and vote. In the election in
Pasadena on March 20, 1913, deciding bond issues, some of them for
parks and playgrounds, only 4,672 men and women cast ballots out of a
voting population of 16,324; in Los Angeles four days later, the
Citizens' Committee's vigorous campaign advocating the carrying of
certain propositions and defeat of others ended in a vote of 31,000
men and women, while 130,000 qualified voters of both sexes stayed
away. Although 45,665 women registered out of 121,000 women qualified
to register and vote in San Francisco's local option election in 1913,
the votes of only 15,087, both men and women, were cast in favor of
the amendment. In all the elections of which there are records of men
and women voting, the women manifest less interest both in registering
and in voting than the men.
This fact has its vital bearing on the question of law enforcement. If
elected officials fail to enforce the law, the only corrective is the
ballot. Dr. Abbott and Professor Breckinridge, answering Miss
Bronson's statement that thirty-nine states compel employers in
stores, factories, and shops to provide seats for female employés, say
that in most of the states where voteless women have got such laws
they have never had the means of enforcing them. But if the extension
of the elective franchise to the women of these states should mean the
lowering of the total vote from 69 per cent. to but 47-1/2 per cent.
of the possible vote, what prospect is there that the laws will be
better enforced under woman suffrage? Judge Ben B. Lindsey of
Colorado, himself a suffragist by propinquity, testified in 1910 that
his battle with "the Beast" and "the System" in that state was begun
without the help of the women leaders who at national meetings had
been telling how much the women had done for the juvenile court in
Denver. They dared not help him, Judge Lindsey said, and women like
Mary C. Bradford and Mrs. Lafferty, a member of the Legislature, "took
the platform against me and supported the System." He added:
If anyone believes that woman's suffrage is a panacea for all the
evils of our political life, he does not know what those evils
are. The women are as free of the power of the Beast as the men
are, and no freer.... In a typical American community such as
ours, where the Beast rules, the women are as helpless as the
rest of us.... Their leaders in politics are politicians; when
they get their nominations from corporation machines they do the
work of the corporations; and there is almost no way under the
Beast to get a party nomination except from a corporation
machine. Women in politics are human beings; they are not
"ministering angels" of an ethereal ideality; and they are unable
to free us, because they are not free themselves.
Mrs. Nora Blatch DeForest has tried to show by tables that woman's
voting benefits women and children in the passage of laws fixing the
"age of consent" for girls; in fixing the age under which the consent
of parent or guardian is necessary for marriage; the age below which
employment of children in factories is prohibited; the maximum length
of a day's work for children, and the hours within which women may
work in factories. The tabulation includes the more recent suffrage
states of Arizona, California, Illinois, Oregon, and Washington, in
which most of the beneficial laws enumerated were passed under male
suffrage. In them and in Utah--excepting the four other suffrage
states where there are no limiting laws for women's work--the average
day's labor for women is 9.2 hours in the ten suffrage states as
against 9.9 hours in the nineteen partial suffrage states, and 10.1
hours in the nineteen non-suffrage states. The maximum day's work for
a child is 8.6 hours in the suffrage states, 9 hours in the partial
suffrage states, and 9.5 hours in the non-suffrage states, while the
ages for prohibited child labor are 14.3 years, 14.1 years, and 13.3
years, respectively. In the same order, the ages at which the consent
of parent or guardian is required for marriage of young women are 18.9
years, 19.3 years, and 19.1 years, respectively, and the ages at which
girls may consent to their own ruin are 17.5 years, 16.6 years, and 15
years in the three groups of states.
Now, if populations be considered in these three groups, instead of
political divisions merely, it will be found that only 5,193,116
people in the suffrage states of California, Colorado, Idaho, and
Kansas are under the law which fixes the ideal "age of consent" at 18;
that 6,229,263 people are under this beneficent law in the
non-suffrage states of Florida, Missouri, and Tennessee, and
17,161,100 people have passed this law in the partial suffrage states
of Delaware, Massachusetts, Montana, Nebraska, New York, North Dakota,
and Wisconsin; it should be observed, too, that the women voters in
the partial suffrage states--less than 5 per cent. of those women
vote, by the way--have nothing to do with electing the men who passed
this and the other laws discussed by Mrs. DeForest. Like proportions
of population hold with respect to all the laws passed in the three
classes of states; taking the best law in each case, it may be shown
that more people have it under male suffrage than under equal
suffrage.
Thus far this article must seem disappointing to sincere suffragists
for it reads like an "anti" document. In the length and breadth of
this Union there are no distinctive results of woman suffrage where it
has been granted in part or in whole.
But there are abundant results of the feminist movement. In agitating
for the ballot Lucretia Mott and her fellow and sister suffragists
builded better than they knew. In _not_ following the English method
of making suffrage a paramount issue "first, last, and all the time,"
they and the latter-day suffragists have rapidly brought to pass the
feminist reforms, including the extension of the suffrage to women.
They have not played the shrew like the English militants, and they
are making greater headway than the militants. In this country the
redress of woman's grievances has come ante hoc and cum hoc--not post
hoc, and hardly ever propter hoc--with respect to woman's suffrage.
The cases of California and Washington, the male-elected legislatures
of which gave to women workers eight-hour laws at the same time they
granted them the suffrage, are fairly typical; "indirect influence"
accomplished both results.
Whether the vote in woman's hands may ultimately be better utilized;
whether she may use it to aid in freeing the men voters from their
thraldom to long ballots and the bosses, with the result of giving
both sexes the direct influence on their government that they both
lack--that is a question quite beyond the scope of this article.
THE BABY AND THE BEE
The baby lay in her carriage looking up at the over-hanging soft green
leaves and white flowers of a lilac bush. A light wind came rather
chilly from the north, despite the day of blue sky and flooding
sunshine, and so the carriage had been wheeled a little around a south
corner of the house, and left there. Baby was alone with her thumbs
and fingers, her big wide eyes and the warm sunshine and her busy
little brain. She was a baby of early mental development. Her parents
thought her in the way to be a genius.
In the white flowers among the soft green leaves of the lilac bush
busy worker bees foraged. They worked actively in the warm sunshine,
some lapping up with long tongues of marvelous complexity the nectar
from the open flowerets, while others loaded their thighs with the
sticky yellowish pollen. They came and went between the flowers and
their distant hive, each one doing its own work unaided and unhindered
and even apparently unnoticed by any other.
The baby watched them with big wide eyes, uncomprehending, for nature
study had not yet come into her curriculum. She liked their activity
though, and more than once put up her tiny hands uncertainly as if to
feel or grasp them.
Suddenly one of the bees, with the pollen baskets on its thighs filled
to overflowing, dropped down on to the knitted afghan that covered the
baby's body below the arms. It staggered about a moment, buzzed its
wings violently without being able to fly, and then resignedly stood
still with legs outspread and wings occasionally gently vibrating. The
baby's eyes, soon tired of staring up into the too bright sky, turned
their attention to her wriggling thumbs, and, a moment after,
discovered the tired bee. She put out one hand suddenly toward it.
"Excuse me," said the bee, "but I wouldn't touch me if I were you."
"Why?" asked the baby, "shall I hurt you?"
"No, but I should have to hurt you," answered the bee gently.
"You? You little thing hurt me? That's rather absurd, isn't it?"
"Much littler things than I can hurt much bigger things than you,"
said the bee, sententiously. "But, really, don't you know what I am,
and what I can do?"
"No, pardon me for my stupid ignorance, but I do not. I seem to have
seen a picture in one of my father's books that resembles you; but it
was labelled _Apis mellifica_, and that told me very little."
"Oh! yes, that was me," proudly replied the bee. "That is what I am
called in books. But outdoors here my name is Bee, Honeybee."
"Thank you, Bee. And my name is Baby. I also have another name; in
fact several other names. But I rather prefer Baby. It relieves me of
much responsibility, and gives me certain powers that my other names
fail to carry with them. May I ask if you read much?"
"I do not read at all," answered the bee, "I do not need to," it
added. "I know all that I need to know when I am born."
"You mean that you do not have to study, to study books, long rows of
books, in order to know how to live?" asked the baby in surprise. "If
so then it is no wonder that my father writes about you as he does;
that he says you are the example for us all; and that you and your
cousins the, er, Formicidae...."
"Oh, the ants, yes. That we are ...?"
"That you are the true successes among all the animals because your
knowledge has led you to establish the perfect society, and to become
the only true communists among them all. He says that your life
should be the guide for ours; that when we human beings can thoroughly
adopt your ways we shall have solved all our problems."
"How wonderfully you talk!" interrupted the bee. "I suppose that comes
from reading. You do read a lot, I suppose?"
"Well, I am making a beginning, yes," answered the baby with a sigh.
"But it is discouraging sometimes. Here I've only just got through the
_Encyclopedia Britannica_ and now they have turned out a new edition.
But I get a great deal of my knowledge of life from hearing my father
and mother talk; and my nurse, she is a very superior person, too."
"Your father writes books? He is a literary man, then?" asked the bee.
"Oh, no; not at all. He is a scientific man. He writes books only
because he has such important things to tell the people."
"And he writes about me and my cousins the ants? He tells the people
that they should live as we do? Well, that is encouraging. To tell the
truth, some of us have rather envied you humans. We have wanted to be
like you."
"Oh, that is silly. Anyway, to be like us in our present stage of
evolution."
"In your present stage of, of--I am afraid I don't quite understand,"
said the bee, rubbing one antenna over its face in a rather bewildered
way.
"Oh, like us as we are now. We are in a dreadful way just now. We used
to have a very good conceit of ourselves. We were even happy. But that
was because we were so ignorant of our true condition. We know better
now, thanks to my father and some other observant and thoughtful men.
They have seen how miserable we are and they are telling everybody
about it. That is necessary, you know, in order to change it. They are
writing about it in the newspapers, in the magazines, in little
books, in big books. Our business, our politics, our government, our
society, our religion, our very line of evolution; all wrong. At the
bottom of it all there is one great trouble; we are too much
interested in ourselves as individuals. We want things for ourselves.
We should, of course, only want things for the people of the future.
We should live for the race, not the individual; just as you do, you
know."
"Why, that's funny! We complain of just the opposite. We don't see why
we shouldn't have some good things for ourselves, and not do
everything all the time for future bees. Even they won't have a good
time for they will have to work for still more future bees."
"But think of the race; the wonderful race to come!" burst in the
baby.
"Ah, yes, I suppose. But pardon me, please, I am a little dizzy with
all this. You know I dropped down here to die; but I have been so much
interested in what you said. However, I am afraid I really must die in
a few minutes; and if I don't seem to be particularly bright just now
you will understand and excuse me, won't you?" And the bee settled
down a little lower on her stiffly outstretched legs, and vibrated
both antennae gently as if to take a few last smells of the
lilac-fragrant air.
"Why, this is terrible! You poor dear bee. Dying! And you talk of it
as if it were nothing! Isn't there something we can do? I will call
somebody. All I have to do is to scream once, and somebody will come
in a hurry."
"Oh, please don't trouble yourself at all. Dying is of no importance
whatever with us, you know. In fact if I am old enough or worn out
enough to be weak I have no right to wish to live longer, and it would
be wrong for anyone to help me. That is part of our perfect communism,
you know. We only live for each other and for the race. And if we are
weak or sick--but you know, of course, from hearing your father
explain it."
The baby was silent for a moment. Her big, wide eyes, strained even
wider now by horror and pity, were fastened on the bee, while it held
its own head up as bravely as it could to look steadily into the
baby's face. The bee and the baby had someway become friends. Both
felt it. And they were silent together, but understanding each other,
as friends can.
The baby spoke first. "Dear Bee, if I can't do anything to save you,
is there anything I can do"--and a tear rolled down into her
mouth--"after?"
"Thank you; you are surprisingly good. Do you really want to do
something? Well, if you could someway arrange to see that my load of
pollen"--and it moved its two laden hind legs slightly--"gets to the
hive, it would be a great favor to me."
"Why, that is dreadful again! You are only thinking of the others. I
mean can't I do something just for you, alone?"
The bee did not answer. Her hind legs slid down and out until they
were nearly flat on the afghan. Suddenly the baby's face lighted. And
with an extraordinary and extremely precocious display of energy and
precision of movement--thus beautifully proving the words of that
lamented philosopher who said that we ordinarily draw on only about
half our resources--she twisted herself around so that her hands could
reach the bee, and put them out directly to it.
"Now don't hurt me, the way you said you could," she whispered, "for I
am going to help you." And she lifted the bee gently in one hand and
with the long sharp nail of the tiny fore finger of the other--a nail
the nurse had neglected for several days--she deftly pried the pollen
masses off the bee's legs. Then she gently put it down again and
twisted back into place, smiling happily.
"There," she said, "that will relieve you of the weight of those
horrid great pollen loads. It will help you, I am sure."
It certainly did help the bee. It stood up much higher on its legs
than before. It even made a few feeble steps nearer the baby's face.
But it did not say anything for a full minute, and when it did speak
its voice betrayed its very strong feeling. Its antennae quivered, and
its wings lifted and fell spasmodically. It was a much moved bee.
"This is very wonderful; the influence you have over me, Baby," it
said. "I ought, by all our tradition and knowledge, to have stung you.
I ought to sting every live thing that touches me that doesn't have
the nest odor. And you haven't. But you do have a very pleasing smell,
someway. Is that the odor of goodness?"
"Why, no, I suppose it's just the bathed baby odor," said the baby. "I
had my bath only half an hour ago and was put out here to go to sleep.
Only usually I don't go to sleep. Sometimes I lie and think, and
sometimes I just lie and feel good."
"And then I shouldn't at all have let you take off my pollen loads,"
went on the bee, musingly. "If I should be found by any bees after I
am dead without any pollen on my legs or nectar in my honey stomach
they would think very badly of me indeed. That is," it added a little
bitterly, "if they should think anything about me at all. But I can't
feel as badly as I ought to, someway. I really feel a great deal
better with those loads off. And I thank you for being so good to me."
"I feel much better, too," said the baby, with a beautiful smile and
sweet little gurgle. "Better because you are better, and better
because I made you better. I don't think either my bath or my bottle
makes me feel better. You dear bee, I wish I could always help you."
"Thank you, Baby. If I were really going to live much longer I should
always remember your smell, and come to you if I were in trouble."
"Ah," cried the baby, with her eyes dancing, "then you have learned
something. You didn't know everything when you were born, after all. I
expect it is not too wise to get all one's knowledge from one's
ancestors. Probably the world changes, and new things come into it,
and one needs to be ready to learn. Now we humans are much newer
things than you bees, and there are new things in our lives. That's
why my father's science, which explains everything by the old things,
has always seemed to me to leave something out of account. What does
your father think about it?"
The bee lifted its antennae in surprise. Not having eyelids to open
nor eyebrows to lift, a surprised bee can only lift its antennae.
"Why, of course, I don't know what my father thinks. I don't know my
father. I haven't even seen him. Or if I have seen him with the others
in the hive, I haven't known which one was he. I only know he was one
of the strongest and best flying bees in the hive or he would never
have been able to marry my mother."
The baby, whose eyes had opened very wide as the bee first began to
speak, soon recovered herself, for she remembered what her father had
written in the report of one of his committees, the Committee on
Eugenics, she thought it was. She had read parts of it one day when
the nurse had left her for an hour in her father's study.
"Oh, yes, I had forgotten. Only the biggest and strongest bees can be
the fathers of the future bees. And that's about all your father does,
isn't it; just be your father."
"Yes, we kill them off after mother begins bearing us," answered the
bee simply.
"Gracious, what a dreadful thing to do!"
"Why, not at all. They are all pretty old then. And we strong young
bees can do the work much better. In fact they couldn't do the work at
all. They would only be extra mouths to bring food for, and extra
bodies to give space to in the hive. It is far better for the race to
get them out of the way," said the bee.
"But your mother; you know her, don't you? And you don't kill her, I
hope?" said the baby anxiously.
"Well, I do know her, but she doesn't know me. You see when one does
nothing but bear children, and has twenty or thirty thousand of them,
and more, all very much alike, she couldn't expect to be much
interested in any one of them, or even to know them apart. She only
bears us; the nurses take care of us from the moment we are born until
we are able to take care of ourselves. We don't kill our mother,
anyway as long as she is vigorous and not too old, for it is very
economical to have a few carefully selected, tested mothers produce
all the children. But doesn't your father write about all of that in
his book that tells people how to live like us?"
Baby was silent for a little while; then answered thoughtfully. "Why,
yes; I had forgotten for the moment. He does have most of it in. But I
think not that about killing off the fathers so soon. I'd hate to
think of killing my father. He is such good fun sometimes; besides
being no end of good to me all the time. He is especially good, I
think, because I am not very strong, you know. I guess I shan't ever
be able to walk. It's my back or something. Nobody tells me much, but
I have heard them talk. And then always father comes and kisses me;
and he cries a little."
The bee looked earnestly up into the baby's face. "It seems to me," it
said after a moment, "that your father isn't very consistent. If you
can never walk, he ought to kill you now, hadn't he? Excuse me, I
didn't mean to say anything dreadful, but isn't that what the welfare
of your race demands? Only strong well people to live; especially the
women, the mothers of the race?"
The baby had recovered from her start at the bee's first words, and
kept silent, evidently very thoughtful. Then a slow smile came over
her face.
"I guess it's just because my father is a human being and not a bee or
any other lower animal that he isn't consistent. Excuse me, but you
know we have to call them that from our point of view. We are animals;
science is right about that. And we do animal things. But there are
so many different animal things. Not all animals are alike, are they?
There are big differences between you and a starfish, aren't there; or
just a stupid polyp that can only shut up and open like a plant, and
eat, and bud off little polyps and jellyfishes. And probably there are
big differences between a man and, well, even a bee or an ant. It's
the scientific fashion just now to be awfully economical about
explanations. What will explain a polyp is tried on the bees; and what
explains the successful life of the bees and ants is made to do for
human beings. I sometimes think my father's training is too much for
his head. I know it contradicts his heart. Do you know, though, he
isn't so inconsistent as he seems. For he says to mother that, weak as
I am, I may sometime do more for the world than the strongest
washerwoman that ever bore ten children. He says," and the baby
dropped her voice to a soft whisper, "that I may write a beautiful
poem or a great book that teaches faith and love, and do the world a
lot of good by it. And mother says that whether I write it or not, I
_am_ a poem of beauty and a book that teaches love. So I suppose that
is why father is so inconsistent about--about killing me, you know."
Just then a step sounded from the path around the corner.
"Oh, that is the nurse," cried the baby. "She will take me in. And she
is so stupid; she won't let me have you in the house."
"Oh, well, anyway I have to be dying so soon now," said the bee, also
a little sadly. "I am sorry that I can never see you again. It has all
been so interesting. And you have taught me some things, and besides,
and more than all, you have been good to me. I--I think you are going
to be worth while to your race. I think you are already. You are worth
while to all of us; to the whole world. You have given me ten minutes
of happy living. Could you do just one little thing more for me? Will
you drop me down under the lilac bush, so I can have our flowers,
that we both like so well, over me when I am dead?" And one antenna
rubbed slowly over one of the bee's eyes, as if this approach to
humanness had engendered the impossible, a bee's tear.
The baby twisted her infirm little body about again, stretched out her
hands, and gently lifted the bee. "Good-bye, dear Bee," she whispered;
"Good-bye, dear Baby," answered the bee. Then the baby carried the bee
to her lips, and kissed it.
At that very moment the nurse leaned over the carriage with an
indulgent smile on her face, which changed swiftly to horrified dismay
as she saw the bee at baby's lips. She cried aloud, while baby with a
quick flirt of little hands lightly tossed the bee under the lilac. As
the nurse saw the tears streaming down the baby's face she believed
her worst fears realized, and catching the child to her bosom, she ran
into the house saying over and over:
"Did a bad bee sting my itty bitty sweetie angel?" And as she ran she
was amazed to hear among the baby's sobs what sounded like a spoken
word repeated again and again. Baby really seemed to be saying, "_No,
No, No, No!_"
THE CASE FOR PIGEON-HOLES
The gigantic desk at which the Essayist was seated displayed row on
row of pigeon-holes, and above them all was a big white card, on which
appeared, in distinct black letters:
Saturday, January 31, 1914
7.30 a. m. ...... 12.30 p. m. ......... Pigeon-holes
12.30 p. m. ...... 3.00 p. m. ......... Miscellany
3.00 p. m. ......
but the rest of the day need not concern us.
The Essayist had been reared in a stronghold of Method--a home where
the dishes were never left over and the tools were always returned to
their places, where the children always went to Sunday School and
never stopped to think that they didn't enjoy it, and their elders
always went to prayer-meeting and never missed church--in a word,
where everybody was always doing everything never and always, and
nobody ever doing anything sometimes.
Thus it came to pass that the Madness of Method followed, or rather
pursued, him all his days, and his existence was filled with devices
for the facilitation of the business of life. The big desk was one of
these devices. It had a hundred and twenty pigeon-holes, and their
labelling, especially in the rows that were to receive classified
ideas, was a triumph of invention. He had had trouble with ideas. They
got wrongly assorted, or lost, got away over night, flew at him in
parabolic curves and never came back, or flitted about his head and
would not submit to scrutiny, and otherwise flouted him. He would have
no more of it.
Just now he was contemplating with a glow of satisfaction not only
his own particular pigeon-holes, but Pigeon-holes Universal. Blessings
on the soul of that primitive man, the first really deserving to be
called ancestor of the human race, who noticed that some things were
like other things--that the world about him was not a mere
agglomeration of endless individual objects and phenomena! What an
impulse to the setting in order of the world's business, for example,
and what relief to himself, when the Lucretian father of astronomy and
history settled to the satisfaction of himself and his hairy fellows
that the same sun they saw sink behind the hills at night would appear
again next morning:
And when the sun and light of day had gone,
With wailings loud they did not roam the fields,
Crying for it among the shades of night,
But quiet lay, in slumber sepulchred,
Until the sun, with rosy torch, should come,
And bring his light into the heaven again.
Hence the pigeon-holing of day and night, of moon and stars, of
seasons and years, "seed-time and harvest, heat and hoary frost," of
all the possibilities of life and achievement. Incomparable
benefaction!
And what ineffable relief--his thoughts ran on--when men began to
realize that some human beings were like others not only in form, but
in feeling; that it was not necessary to scan each individual act of
your neighbor in order to form a basis for each of your own acts, but
that some details of conduct were _semper_, _ubique_, _ab omnibus_!
What a gain to be able to classify men into friends and enemies, to
set apart by themselves the common good and the common bane, to be
aware of correspondences of action and emotion, to judge of the future
by the past! What an advance on the high road leading to stability of
expectation and all its fruitful consequences!
And when men began to apply the principle of pigeon-holing to the
actual business of life, what economy of time and of energy!
Civilization itself, with its multitudinous associations of human
beings in common effort, was a big desk with pigeon-holes. Man had
_noticed_, and was fast approaching the peak of perfection, while the
races of wild, wide-wandering beasts, ignorant both of the blessings
and of the very conception of pigeon-holing, still lived their hard
and coarse existence among the acorn-bearing groves,
Of common welfare had no thought, nor knew
The use of law and custom among men.
With all its intelligence, effort, and boldness, what would the human
race not achieve! What had it not achieved already! The Essayist's
enthusiasm was kindled as he thought of the past and present wonders
of classification and organization--of races, nations, parties,
unions, communities, families; of the marvels of social, educational,
political, industrial, and military coöperation; of the religions and
philosophies of history; of classified and recorded knowledge. He
thought of the arts, sciences, law, and the crafts, with everything
about them all printed in books and deposited in libraries, where
anyone might read and learn. What high and rapid building, what
numerous and rushing trains, what capacious liners and freighters,
what ease and quickness of communication, what mingling of nations,
what universalization of ideas! What wise use of means, and what
efficiency! In education alone, scores of thousands of children in his
own land, large and small, rich and poor, various in blood, quality,
and color, were at that moment being instructed by common methods with
common money in common ideas and ideals--the homogeneous fine flour of
American citizenship ground in one great mill of omnicapacious hopper.
He looked next into the future, and there saw glorious visions. For
pigeon-holing was not only progress, but cumulative progress. The
greatest of its many virtues was that the more it was perfected, the
more time there was to make it still more perfect. Pigeon-holing begat
organization; organization begat leisure; leisure begat contemplation;
contemplation begat wisdom; wisdom begat action; action begat
progress; progress meant advance in civilization; and civilization
meant more and better pigeon-holing. The chain was endless.
Yes, pigeon-holing meant cumulative progress, and the cumulative
process had never been so rapid, nor given so much promise, as just
now. The world had never before possessed so many appliances to
facilitate the pigeon-holing of men and things and movements. There
had always been enormous losses in efficiency. Now, however, nothing
was being lost or wasted, as in the days when System had been a less
jealous goddess; now, everything which men found out was being
accurately recorded or neatly tied up, or carefully deposited, or put
into the general circulation of life universal, or otherwise
conserved.
And not only was everything conserved, but production itself, thanks
to pigeon-holing, was far more rapid now than ever before. The march
of civilization was quickening to double time. Pigeon-holing and
Efficiency were the two great features of the age, and walked, or
rather rushed, hand in hand. The more pigeon-holing, the more
efficiency; the more efficiency, the more time saved; the more time
saved, the more pigeon-holes; and so on, with ever increasing
momentum, _in saecula saeculorum amen_. From the labor unions that
maintained walking delegates and boycotts, to the great trusts that
were responsible for high-priced beef and long-packed eggs and
pure-food inspectors, everyone was working with the greatest possible
speed and efficiency, and everything was being pigeon-holed to the
utmost perfection. It was the age of time-tables and interest-tables,
cash registers, and adding machines; steam shovels, steam seeders,
harvesters, and threshers; cyclometers, pedometers, and taxicabs;
type-writing and linotyping and photography; telephones and
automobiles and book reviews; technical schools and teachers'
courses, education by correspondence, books on etiquette and
how-to-enjoy-the-arts, piano-players and phonographs;
library cataloguers, Who's Whos, encyclopedias, and
blanks-to-be-filled-out-and-returned-at-once; world languages,
one-class steamers, democracy, cosmopolitanism, and peace conferences;
tinned foods, department stores, and women's clubs; reference Bibles,
dictionaries of handy quotations, hints on diet, menus for the month,
short cuts to culture, wireless telegraphy, big guns and big business,
joy riding, air-ships, simplified spellings, and a universal A.B.
degree.
Let us not be surprised if the Essayist grew a trifle delirious.
Progress is a thing of enthusiasm, and its devotees are easily wrought
upon by the frenzy of the god.
What was to be the glorious goal of this cumulative progress? The
Essayist's thoughts took on aërial daring. In the realm of knowledge,
for example--what an inspiring vision! He had often thought of the
pity of it--that scholars through the ages had consumed their lives in
effort that was largely in vain: laboriously amassing the knowledge
possessed by their predecessors, only to die and leave it as scant as
when they had received it.
But that was in the olden time. Now, with the art of printing
democratized, with specialization firmly established, with all the
wonderful book-keeping and card-cataloguing that characterized
intellectual activities, with the willingness of scholars to study and
record _everything_, and of libraries to purchase and preserve
_everything_, for fear of losing _anything_, with all the learning of
the past immediately at hand, and with all the means and appliances
available for its rapid utilization, why might scholarship not aspire
to reach the absolute heights of knowledge? Might it not be possible
now for the scholar to receive the torch of learning fully ablaze, and
to run the race that was set before him without the necessity of
stopping to renew or even trim it--for him to make, so to speak, more
effective dashes at the pole of learning--or to build to the very
heaven the intellectual Tower of Babel, whose downfall would not be so
easily possible now as in an age when men had not been alive to the
need of linguistic pigeon-holes?
But intellect was not the greatest thing in the world. Might not the
ever increasing skill in pigeon-holing lead before long to a
definition of religion, the cessation of doctrinal quarrels, and the
sinking of all differences in a common ideal of administration,
conduct, and even belief? Yes; might it not lead to the final
obliteration of national and racial, and even social, distinctions?
Might it not lead, and at no distant date, not only to democracy and
social equality, but to universal democracy--when the war-drum
throbbed no longer, etc.?
Having thus in imagination surveyed the glories of pigeon-holing, the
Essayist seized upon his pen, and rapidly set his thoughts to paper,
not omitting to make liberal use of the pigeon-holes before him
whenever he adumbrated quotations with which he thought his page might
be embellished.
The task finished, he glanced at the clock. The forenoon was only half
spent. Looking over his sheets, too, he observed that his essay was
only half the length an intelligent and good-natured reader ought to
endure.
This was just as he would have it, for he had begun with the definite
intention of appearing both for and against pigeon-holes. There was
time enough left to make his work symmetrical by presenting the other
side, and to append a conveniently stated conclusion. He knew from the
editors that readers in general disliked nothing quite so much as
being left to make up their own minds.
* * * * *
So he took up the pen again.
What! After all that rhapsodizing, not a believer in pigeon-holes?
Not so bad as that. He was a believer, but not a blind believer. The
fact is, he had a lively sense of the limitations of pigeon-holing. He
had arrived at familiarity with both its virtues and its defects
through personal experience. He had dealt in pigeon-holes himself, had
made them, used them, and had been in them, and for years had been
growing more and more conscious that the use of them was a difficult
and delicate matter.
Earlier in life, it had not been so. He still remembered vividly the
time when all men were easily classifiable--into good and bad,
Christian and heathen, saved and unsaved, rich and poor, wise and
foolish, as easily as into black and white, or fat and lean; when all
nations except the United States, and all governments except
democracy, were inferior. He remembered the surprise with which he had
heard for the first time that there was a difference between
prohibition and temperance, that there were many forms of intemperance
besides drunkenness, that English government had many points of
superiority over American. He had always supposed that with those
questions it was as with slavery in the mind of Charles Sumner:
"Gentlemen, to this slavery question there can be no other side."
He also recalled the ferment started in his mind by a much respected
teacher's remark that all truth was relative, not absolute: whether a
man was good depended on what you meant by goodness; whether two and
two made four depended on whether one and one made two; grammar and
spelling were after all only fashions, and things that appeared in
print might not be true; not even the dictionary was absolute, and the
Bible was not inspired in every letter and punctuation mark.
All this shook the ground under his feet, and it took some time to
recover. That about the Bible and the dictionary was especially
confounding. He reeled to and fro, and staggered like a drunken man,
and was at his wit's end.
You will call him stupid. He was. Most pigeon-holers are, to tell the
truth. He was like them in being so busy with virtuous action that he
found but little time for thought. He used the pigeon-holes customary
in his neighborhood, without questioning the correctness of content or
label.
But in time he came to realize that there was religion outside of
sects and that there were many believers who were unconscious
unbelievers, that men might be honest and still dishonorable, that a
great deal of the most pernicious lying in the world was done without
the utterance of a syllable, that the guiltless were often criminal
and the criminal guiltless, that many democrats were really
aristocrats, many fools really wise, many a rich man poor and many a
poor man rich, many a learned man ignorant, many pessimists really
optimists, and many optimists really stumbling-blocks to progress.
By the Saturday morning on which we catch sight of him, he had come to
have a wholesome distrust of the pigeon-holes of others; and whenever
he took a specimen from his own, he submitted it to fresh examination,
tolerating pigeon-holes at all only under perpetual protest against
men's careless use of them.
For there were multitudinous differences between things to all
appearances absolutely alike. It was impossible to classify even the
inanimate without some sort of violence. Even the products of the die
and the press showed variation, however infinitesimal; and as for
Nature, in her realm there were no two things alike. Plants, animals,
persons, mountains, valleys, and streams--unending variety was the
rule. The two faces most alike in all the world proved widely
different on close examination, and the points of difference between
the persons who owned them were infinite.
And not only that. Not only _were_ all individual things really
different from all other things, but each individual thing _seemed_
different to different persons. Pigeon-holing implied pigeon-holers,
and no two pigeon-holers were alike. Like the artists in Plato, they
saw the same thing from different angles: "I mean, that you may look
at a bed from different points of view, obliquely or directly, or from
any other point of view, and the bed will appear different, but there
is no difference in reality." The same man appeared better or worse,
according to the standards of his judge; the same rain was good or
bad, according to the health or the purpose of the person under the
umbrella. One man's meat was another man's poison. No two men ever
formulated the same definition of a thing, let alone an abstraction;
and if definitions agreed in words, the words themselves meant
different things to their authors. The Essayist thought of the
desperate pass of Philosophy, patiently waiting while her disciples
fruitlessly endeavored to define each other's definitions. Lucky for
life that living did not hang on wisdom of that sort!
Yes, more than that; no thing--at least, no living thing--had ever
been seen twice in exactly the same aspect by the same person. Not
only did the object change from second to second, under the outward
impulse of sun and wind and rain and the inner impulse of expanding
cell, but the beholder himself was absolutely identical at no two
moments. He might change his physical position, or be subject to any
of the thousand mutations that sweep over the human spirit like waves
of shadow over the wheat. Everything was in the state of flux.
Becoming, not Being, was the order of all things. And more, each
reacted not only upon its fellow, but upon everything else. The
shifting of an atom affected every other atom in the universe.
Withdraw a drop of water from the ocean, and there was immediate
readjustment of all the waters that covered the earth. Withdraw a
member from human society, or change him by ever so little--in health,
so that he ate more; in stature, so that he wore more; in morals, so
that he acted differently--and the whole fabric suffered modification.
Nothing could be lost, nothing changed, without impairing in some
sort the universal order. Nothing could be duplicated.
And so in the world of ideas. There was no item of truth not connected
with and dependent upon all other truth. Let an individual idea in the
ocean of a man's ideas suffer modification, and there was instant
readjustment of all his other ideas, and of his emotions, and of his
actions; and, under their impulse, of the actions, emotions, and ideas
of all other individuals. Truth was one great, unified whole, never
yet beheld, save in partial vision, by the human mind. To know one
item in all its connections was to possess all knowledge. For the
botanist who knew completely the flower, the mystery of the universe
was solved.
What folly, then, to look for perfect pigeon-holing, when no two atoms
could be found alike, to say nothing of the motions of the human
spirit,
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream.
And what injustice and cruelty might it be guilty of, did its devotees
become too rapt in their enthusiasm!
What injustice had they not been guilty of, in the past! What violence
done to nature and to man! What forcings together and what tearings
asunder! What attenuations and amputations on Procrustean beds! What
heart-burnings they had caused, what hatred and what strife! What wars
on sea and land, what slaughter, what laying waste, what famine,
disease, and hardship, what bereavement, what languishings in prison,
what falling of men from high estates, what oppression, what rackings
and twistings and manglings of limbs, what persecutions and executions
and excommunications and banishments, what sunderings of nations and
communities, what separations of persons really congenial who would
have been friends if left to themselves, what disorders--all sprung
from men's desire to force their fellows into their own social and
religious pigeon-holes! And ideas--what struggling and bleeding and
screaming of _them_ at being forced by brutal hands into narrow and
stifling cells with other ideas in mutual hot resentment. History was
filled with the heartless compulsion of men and things and ideas into
groups where they rebelled against going.
Nor were persecutions and strife confined to the past. The injustices
of pigeon-holing were rampant in the Essayist's own enlightened time.
The old-time sets of pigeon-holes might no longer be used to such
deadly purpose, but there were others that bade fair to take their
place. The pigeon-holes of religion were less insisted on, but the
pigeon-holes of science gave promise of another tyranny hardly less
unendurable. The two prime factors in tyranny--arrogant authority and
superstitious multitude--were already clearly to be seen. The tyranny
of aristocratic pigeon-holing seemed past, but its place was being
taken by the hardly less outrageous tyranny of democracy's
pigeon-holes. In a world that boasted of producing the greatest
equality known to human kind, there were more classifiers and more
class feeling than men had ever known before. The pigeon-holes were
different, but they were there, and their partitions as impenetrable
as ever.
The very consciousness that they _were_ in different compartments kept
men from attempting to understand each other, let alone their real
differences; more, it made them hostile, and even aggressive. What
philosopher, from Thales to the latest enemy of Pragmatism, what
dogmatist, from the Stoic to the latest ridiculer of Christian
Science, what political critic, from Aristophanes to the anarchist of
yesterday, ever tried or was willing to understand his opponent, and
did not wilfully misrepresent in order to confute him? Longfellow was
right when he said that the South should come to see the North, the
North go to see the South, and then the war would be over. Let men
forsake their pigeon-holes and meet face to face, and many a problem
of religion, philosophy, sociology, industry, and pedagogy would
cease to be a problem--and many an official and professorial chair
would be vacant.
But for the most part, either from their own impulse or from
compulsion, men remained in their pigeon-holes. Many a man who had
voluntarily emerged found his fellows unwilling to stir to meet him,
or even take note of his having come forth. Many a man could not get
out, if he would, and spent his life beating against the partitions,
clamoring loudly and unheeded for redistribution on the ground of a
thousand facts.
In vain! The malefactor and the magdalen could be rescued from their
pigeon-holes only by a miracle, were they ever so repentant and filled
with good works. The world had disposed of them, ceased to consider
them, forgotten them--even though it was a loser as well as a tyrant.
What service had been lost to the State by the pigeon-holing of
party--talent and patriotism denied a sphere of usefulness because of
being among the minority! What willing hearts lost to religion because
of the pigeon-holes of creed and denomination! And there were men who
were misjudged and abused all their lives long, living sacrifices to
some accident of pigeon-holing, and to the neglect which was its usual
consequence. Give a dog a bad name, and hang him.
Away with pigeon-holing then, as violent, tyrannical, and oppressive,
a foe to individuality of men and ideas, and an obstacle to real
progress! Away with curbs and yardsticks and tapes and molds and
stamps and presses and dies, and all manner of interference with
nature and her methods of expansion! Let nature, and especially human
nature, realize itself, like any plant or flower! Fired by
imagination, the Essayist started up, glowering at his desk and
thinking of the axe. He had not yet attained, you see, to the full
measure of Scientific Calm, and was in a fair way to usurp the
functions of judge, jury, and sheriff, as well as attorney.
But he sat back again, and reflected. No pigeon-holes at all? What
heresy, thus to fly in the face of his own practice, and of evolution!
Imagine it--for men to eat only when hungry, to plan a costume for
every dinner out, to have no office hours and no fixed prices, no
churches and no schools, no coined money, no uniforms in parades, and
no parades, no laws to regulate conduct in the large, no street
numbers, no marks by which to detect a book agent or a mine promoter
before answering the door-bell, no catalogues, no voting-machines, no
diplomas, no marriage-bond, no social and religious ties at all! Why,
what was that but anarchy?
Of course it was anarchy, and the Essayist knew it all the time. You
must remember that he had set out to present both sides of the case.
If he was a bit carried away by his own pleading, that is not a bad
fault in the advocate.
And now he was ready to assume also the role of judge, and to charge
the jury--by which I mean, of course, the readers of THE UNPOPULAR.
Being a Horatian, he summed up in favor of the Golden Mean, and
recommended pigeon-holing to the favorable consideration of the jury.
It had its proper use, and it had its misuse. There was harmless
pigeon-holing, where you reduced to order dead and material things, or
classified living entities on the basis of essentials. So long as you
did no great violence, and were ready to entertain motions for
reconsideration, it was desirable for the sake of economy in time and
energy to use pigeon-holes, even at some cost. In other words, if you
were to enjoy the benefits of civilization, or, indeed, to possess it
at all, you must introduce into the anarchy of perfect individualism a
greater or less degree of the artificiality of collectivism.
But there was a limit beyond which neither individual man nor society
in the aggregate should go.
A limit, Your Honor? And pray, who was to establish the limit? That
was not so easy. Clearly, no man could establish the limit for
another man. Each man must determine for himself; and society must
determine for _its_ self, by means of that most mysterious of all
consciousnesses, the universal consciousness.
In other words, pigeon-holing was the creation of no rule; it was an
Art. The masterpiece was an individual product, a resolution of many
forces. And civilization, so closely dependent upon pigeon-holing, was
an Art, not a science--no, not even a social science. Let those who
looked to save society by invention and application of rules alone
consider well their ways. No anarchist was farther removed than they
from the truth that should make men free.
In still other words, it was the Golden Mean which society, as well as
the individual, should strive for. And this was no easy Panacea. The
Golden Mean meant struggle--a struggle constant and eternal--to
maintain an equilibrium. You had to watch unceasingly your balances,
and to shift and reshift your weights--without intermittence, and
forever. The devotion called for was so great that it took the
inspiration of religious ideals to insure it. Human society was a
Gothic cathedral--a unified and beautiful structure, but one whose
complex members exerted everlasting pressure each on each, and must
not long be left to themselves. To measure, and hew, and build, was
not all. The pile could not be finished at once and forever. Let the
architect relax his watchfulness, and decaying members soon would
spoil the symmetry of the noble lines, or even precipitate the whole
in awful ruin.
And here was where lay most of the trouble with pigeon-holing, past
and present. Man was lazy. It was not wholly the enlightened desire
for progress which had inspired him to pigeon-holing, and was
continuing to inspire. Dislike of work, and selfishness, and vanity,
all played a part as well, and not a small one.
It was so reposeful to dispose of things in the large--to educate by
the hundred thousand, to rest in the arms of creed, to stand at the
lever of a great machine, to have your tailor plan your suits and the
cook or the newspaper your meals, to have a dozen pigeon-holes into
which you conveniently popped new acquaintances and had them off your
mind forever. It was so much easier to force men to accept your own
beliefs and plans than to take the trouble to acquaint yourself with
theirs. It was so much more satisfying and final to follow mere logic
and go to the end of the process than always to be engaged in that
most laborious of tasks--thinking and forming judgments. To write a
volume embodying all the facts was much easier than to write an essay
presenting the essentials and their interpretation. A perfectly
democratic or a perfectly absolute government was far less difficult
to plan than the ideal commonwealth. It was much easier to act on
insufficient premises than to travail with thought and find that after
all there was no ground for action. It was easier to be an ignoramus
or a pedant than a real scholar, a dogmatist or an atheist than a good
preacher, a lecturer on education than a teacher, a slouch or a dandy
than a well dressed man, a persecutor or a humanitarian than a saver
of souls, a despot or an anarchist than a shepherd of the people, a
censor or an abettor than a monitor and adviser, a total abstainer or
a drunkard than a temperate man, a conservative or a radical than a
patriot, a boor or a fop than a gentleman. It was easier to be a
beast, or not to be at all, than to be a MAN.
The Essayist looked at the clock. It was twelve-thirty. Once more he
had successfully pigeon-holed the hours of his morning.
THE GREEKS ON RELIGION AND MORALS
I
If any lesson can be learned from history, which historians tell us is
not the case, it would seem to be that what we call "goodness" is on
the whole ineradicable. By goodness the race survives. Every one of
us, struggle as he may, is constrained in his degree to be less bad
than he might be. Many of us confess freely that we do not know why
this is so. We do not know whether there is a moral law. If there is a
moral law, we do not know whether its origin is transcendental and
arbitrary, biological and definitely ascertainable, or social and
fluctuating. Moreover we do not so much as know whether we are free
agents, choosing continually between good and evil, or automata,
feeling, to be sure, the stress of conflicting forces, but bound
mathematically to follow the line of their compromise. We are of
course comfortably able to ignore all these considerations in our
everyday trains of thought. Just as the schoolboy learns to say
parrotwise that the sun sits still and swings us round, though he sees
him every evening descend to rest in New Jersey like a tired commuter;
and just as the uncompromising idealist behaves exactly like the man
who believes in the knowable reality of the world; so the most
convinced determinist must act from morning to night as though he were
a free agent, and must judge his fellowmen as though they too were
choosers. Moreover almost all of us adopt instinctively some concrete
reason for the choices we assume we are making. These reasons being
inevitably partial and ludicrously incommensurate with the cosmic
results that we hang upon them, are constantly in process of giving
way under the strain. The so-called "religious" reasons land us in the
position of having to give an immoral basis for morality. Either they
involve the doctrine of a future life, and so vitiate the moral
impulse with egoism at its source, or, with a diminished confidence in
the sureness of reward, which is all to the good, they tend to
perpetuate affirmations that have lost their meaning, which is all to
the bad. It seems to have been on the whole a misfortune that religion
and morality, which historically and logically have neither more nor
less to do with each other than marriage and love, should have become
profoundly associated in Europe in the last two thousand years. The
most pressing duty of the moralist--and every man is a moralist--is to
dissolve the merger, and there are circumstances connected with its
origin which may lessen our estimate of the inconvenience involved in
the dissolution. The mythology, cult, doctrine, exegesis and ethics of
Christianity are considerably more Greek than Hebraic in origin, and
the Greeks in their prime had excellent ways of their own of dealing
with all these matters. They managed to be profoundly religious while
avoiding the two pits into which the Hebrews fell, first, the
confounding of myth with history, and, second, the erection of morals
on a supernatural, jural and egoistic basis. Let us then consider the
Greeks.
II
The most remarkable fact in connection with the religion of the Greeks
is its attitude towards the use of the reason. Of all the religions
known to us this exercised the least restrictive power over the minds
of those who entertained it. Over their conduct in matters of ritual
it did of course exercise power both restrictive and positive, but the
reason it left free. Greek religion is therefore recalcitrant to M.
Reinach's definition of religion in general as "a sum of scruples
which impede the free exercise of our faculties." All that was
obligatory was ritual; there was no confession of faith, the priests
did not form a class with vested interests to maintain. The absence
of dogma from a religion will not recommend it to everybody, but those
who regard that as a fortunate circumstance will grant that the credit
rests not with the religion itself but with the people who hold it.
Just as any state can have as many paupers as it cares to pay for, so
any body of religionists can have as many dogmas as it chooses to
encourage. Greek religion began like any other with its terrors, its
taboos and its magic. If it did not tie up its adherents hand and
foot, as other primitive religions have done, that was due to the
psychological idiosyncracy of the Greeks. When their time of expansion
was over they became the patients and the agents of dogma, but in
connection with a foreign religion. It might have been expected from
the history of native religions in Greece, that the strong influence
of Greek thought on early Christianity would have been anti-dogmatic.
On the contrary, practically the whole dogmatic structure of the
fathers, though Oriental in spirit, is Greek in form. The tradition of
free thought could not stand before St. Paul, and Greek religion,
which for fifteen hundred years had given the world a lesson in the
true function and status of mythology, lent itself in its decay to the
creation of a system which, in the hands of races of very different
temperament, became dogma. But though Greek religion began with magic
and ended with dogma, it very early rendered the one harmless, and
never submitted to the other in connection with a native cult.
For the primitive Greek, as for the primitive Hebrew, the Latin, the
Maori, the Melanesian, the American Indian, the world was full of a
mysterious force, unaccountable, able either to curse or to bless; and
man's very existence depended on his ability to learn the laws of this
power's action, to direct it if possible, and if not, to placate it.
As man proceeds along the well-worn path to animism, the force comes
to be thought of as wielded by will and intelligence like his own. But
he never leaves it behind him. After the gods are born, he worships
them in terms of it. From his earliest ritualistic act, to the
contemporary sacrament of the Christian church, holy water for
instance has been the means of salvation. For unnumbered ages ritual
has remained unchanged, but its psychology has changed. What is
everywhere performed today with hope, originated everywhere in the
dark past with fear.
The Eleusinian mysteries sprang doubtless from as primitive beginnings
as any Greek ritual of which we have knowledge. Nevertheless they are
free from many of the marks of primitive ritual. They show no
cannibalism, probably no totemism, certainly no orgiastic excesses. If
animal sacrifice was practised in the precincts, no blood was spilt in
the hall of the mysteries. Moreover there was originally nothing
either mystic or mysterious about them, in our sense. But a god came
to be associated with them, a newcomer to Greece, who brought mystery
and mysticism in his train, a god whose mission was to emotionalize
religion. Dionysus, of Thracian origin, was, to begin with, a
vegetation-power, the son of the earth-goddess. The vine with its
strange psychic powers became the plant oftenest associated with him,
but the plane and the pine were also his, and if he was
Dionysus-the-Grape at Philippi, he was Dionysus-the-Ivy at Acharnania.
Remnants of strong magic, compelling the earth to fertility, were
present in his rites. Like other vegetation-powers he had a dark side;
he suffered death and resurrection, and was powerful in the world of
the dead. In the history of culture the ritual of Dionysus has a
distinguished place as the putative father of tragedy. In the history
of religion that ritual is chiefly remarkable for having brought into
Greece, together with all the phenomena of auto-suggestion, a
conception that was to have a portentous sequel, the conception of a
sacramental meal consisting of the body and blood of the god himself,
by partaking of which the communicant shared the divine nature. The
whole aim of the Dionysiac method in its native Thrace was hypnosis;
the wild Bacchic dance, the tossing of the head, the frantic clash of
the tambourine, the harrowing cry of wind-instruments, the waving of
torches in the night, the use of stimulants or narcotics, and finally
the rending and devouring of the still quivering flesh of the animal
which incarnated the god, were all means of so altering the psychic
states of the participant that he was no longer conscious of the
operation of his own will, but was filled with the god,--enthusiastic.
The practical aim of the induced ecstasy was doubtless originally the
acquisition of divine power for magical purposes. As the savage eats
his brave enemy to acquire his bravery, so the early agrarian eats the
vegetation-god to acquire his power of making things grow. But in
classical times the phenomena of enthusiasm had taken on a
significance that overshadowed the claims of vegetation-magic. Among a
people temperamentally self-restrained, nothing is more curious than
the psychology of self-abandonment. If we must select one aspect of
the godhead as most expressive of the Greek mind, that aspect will
unquestionably be Apollo, lucid, rational, self-possessed and
civilized. The gulf between the two doctrines, between Apollo's "never
too much" and Dionysus' exhortation to let yourself go, would have
constituted heresy and schism in a dogmatic age.
But the Greek, seeing how true and how indispensable both are, made
shift to bridge the gulf by the set of opinions associated with the
name of Orpheus. The state of our knowledge of the origins of Orphism
may be illustrated by the fact that Maass says Orpheus was a god and
indigenous in Greece, Miss Harrison believes him to have been a man,
probably a native of Crete whence he made his way to Greece by way of
Thrace, while Reinach declares he was a fox-totem of the Bassarids.
Fortunately it does not greatly matter. What is really important, not
only for Hellenism but for Christianity, is the spirit of his
doctrine, of which we can recover, not it is true, anything like
expository teaching, but the traces of the color it laid on almost
every fabric of Greek thought. No image could more justly picture it
than the faded remnants of paint found on the remains of Greek
buildings and sculptures. It is pretty nearly impossible to our
imagination to tolerate the vision of a temple or a statue clad
otherwise than in its original whiteness or in the beautiful tones
bestowed by time and rust. And similarly the forms of Greek spiritual
expression show to the soul's eye as logical, pure and monotone. But
just as surely as the houses of the gods were painted gaudily with red
and blue and green, as surely as their hair was ruddy and their cheeks
glowing, so surely was their worship touched and tinted with the
emotion that transcends and defies reason.
Orphism took up and developed the mystic elements of the Dionysiac
cult, giving them a higher spiritual content and a more restrained
expression. It was a scheme of salvation, based on the hope of life
after death. The central fact of religious experience was communion
with the god; by eating his body and drinking his blood the worshipper
partook of his nature, of which immortality was an attribute. "To
become Bacchus" was the aim of the partaker of the sacrament. But
whereas the old Thracian ritual surrendered the worshipper to the god
by means of drunkenness and frenzy, the new ritual induced ecstasy by
the equally efficacious use of fasting, silence and quiet suggestion.
Orphism though of foreign origin became a genuine Greek religion, and
was the last. It was never adopted by the state, but remained in the
hands of private congregations. Through these it permeated Greece.
Thinkers and poets and the plain people were reached by its different
methods of appeal. If we sum up its most striking characteristics, we
cannot fail to see how strong was its influence on the world-religion
that was to succeed it. Orphism took up the beliefs of paganism, and
adapted them to its own ends. It gave them fresh life through its
doctrine of the immortality of the soul. It taught that the soul after
death rests for a time in a state of probation, and is finally,
according to the works done in the body, either admitted to felicity
or punished by reincarnation. Final felicity was to be obtained by
ceremonial purity of life, reached through the use of sacraments
necessary to salvation, and the chief of these sacraments was the
symbolic and memorial partaking of the body and blood of a god slain
by his enemies. By the proper use of sacraments, the living could
improve the condition of the dead; unscrupulous priests sometimes
traded on the simplicity of ignorant worshippers, and engaged for
money to perform rites that should free the transgressor from the
consequences of his transgression, whether he were alive or dead. The
cult of Orpheus therefore summarizes an enormous range of human
history. From the Mountain Mother of the Cretan seals and her son,
through the patriarchal reign of Zeus, to Mary and the son of Mary, it
follows certain apparently unchanging requirements of the soul.
The ceremony of the Eleusinia was a magnificent pageant, the
culmination of the religious year. It was a strong appeal to eye and
ear, and to the _psychologie de la foule_. It was probably accompanied
neither by dogmatic exhortation nor by any appeal to the intellect.
Aristotle analyzed the method in a sentence: "The initiated do not
learn anything; rather they feel certain emotions, and are put into a
certain frame of mind." This frame of mind was a hopeful one for this
life and the next. On the supernatural side, the mystic felt that he
was sure of the good-will of the great powers of the underworld,
having done them honor, eaten of their food and enrolled himself as
their friend and follower. On the natural side, he had felt the
benefit--on which all ritual is based--of performing, in unison with
others, after preparation both bodily and mental, and with the moving
accompaniments of beautiful and impressive sights and sounds, certain
acts entirely apart from the ordinary routine of life, and venerable
with the usage of the past. But it is to be noted that although the
door was open for communication between religion and morals, the
original conception of purity was formal and ceremonial, a survival of
magic. We may picture Greek morals as standing with one foot on a
religious, the other on a social basis; but if, as in the usual
posture of Greek sculpture, the weight of the body is thrown chiefly
on one foot, that is the social one. When foreign cults began to make
their way into Greece, they generally followed the form of the
mystery. Isis, Serapis and Mithras, oriental in origin but Hellenized
in ritual, were centers for religions of the personal, mystic and
consolatory type. All these oriental cults brought with them a
tendency to take literally what the Greeks had taken loosely, and
Mithraism brought a high development of the tendency to base morality
on the egoistic motive.
Bearing in mind the wide prevalence of these and similar rites on the
shores of the Mediterranean during the first century of our era, we
are in a position to understand a situation which Archdeacon Cheetham
and Dr. Hatch discussed fifteen years ago. In apostolic times the
Christian sacraments were of the most informal character possible. A
man could be baptized at any time in any place by anyone. "Lo, here is
water; what hindereth me to be baptized?" For the years immediately
succeeding the apostolic, we have no evidence, and by the time
evidence begins again, a great change is visible. Baptism no longer
follows at once on conversion, but is preceded by a probationary term,
as was initiation. It can no longer be performed anywhere at any time,
but only in the great churches and at one of the great festivals,
generally Easter-even or Pentecost. Similarly, once in the year, on
the 16th of Boedromion, the candidates for initiation used to go down
to the sea in a body to be purified by immersion. And baptism is no
longer a simple thing done in the sight of all men but a mystery--so
Justin Martyr calls it--and the officiant is a "mystagogos." The
baptized are now called "initiate," the unbaptized "uninitiate."
Before the Lord's supper, the priest now asks, as the mystagogos used
to ask, "Is there anyone who has a quarrel with any?" And until infant
baptism removed the distinction, the "uninitiate" were directed to
withdraw before the consummation of the mystery, as for unnumbered
ages they had been bidden to withdraw from the crowning rites of the
Eleusinia. It is clear that the founders of Christian mysticism,
Clement for instance and Dionysius the Areopagite, did consciously all
in their power to emphasize the resemblances between the new and the
old. Gregory of Nyssa calls baptism "the mystic bath," Athanasius
calls unction "the mystic oil," Gregory of Nazianzen calls the
elements "mystic food." Secret formulas, the idea of which comes from
the mysteries, are called by the old name, "what must not be spoken."
Clement speaks the technical language of the mysteries. "O truly
sacred mysteries! O stainless light! My way is lighted with torches,
and I survey the heavens and God! I am become holy while I am being
initiated! The Lord is my hierophant!"
During the last ten years the researches of Reitzensteim and Cumont
have corrected the first impression that the influence of mystic cult
and language was late and self-conscious. The very origin of the
Christian sacraments, the very theology of Saint Paul, are now
believed by many scholars to reflect the Hermitic and Gnostic versions
of the mysteries.
III
The doctrine of the early church underwent as great a modification as
its cult. The studies of Hatch were directed by the reflection
expressed in the first paragraph of his _Influence of Greek Ideas and
Usages on the Christian Church_. "It is impossible for anyone, whether
he be a student of history or no, to fail to notice a difference of
both form and content between the Sermon on the Mount and the Nicene
Creed. The Sermon on the Mount is the promulgation of a new law of
conduct; it assumes beliefs rather than formulates them; the
theological conceptions which underlie it belong to the ethical rather
than the speculative side of theology; metaphysics are wholly absent.
The Nicene Creed is a statement partly of historical facts and partly
of dogmatic inferences; the metaphysical terms which it contains would
probably have been unintelligible to the first disciples; ethics have
no place in it. The one belongs to a world of Syrian peasants, the
other to a world of Greek philosophers." The simple first formula of
the creed dealt with matters of fact only, "Jesus Christ and him
crucified." At the end of the second century it included various
philosophical ideas, the creation of the world out of nothing, the
Word, the revelation of the Creator to the world, of the Word or Son
to the Father and of both to men. The Word--the _logos_ of Heraclitus
and Philo--threatened to supplant the Messiah, and originated the
endless and bitter controversies of the early church about the Trinity
and the Incarnation. Christian scholars take pleasure and apparently
pride in deriving the philosophical and ontological elements of their
faith from the Greeks. Dr. Caird says, "In this case we can see that
conquered Greece laid spiritual fetters on its victor. Greece provided
Christianity with the weapons of culture which enabled it to subdue
the minds of its opponents, but at the same time it did much to
determine the main bias and direction of the religious consciousness
which was established by its means. It gave its own form to the life
and doctrines of the Church."
The very word "faith" changed its meaning under Greek influence. When
the Hebrews spoke of having faith in Jehovah they meant that they had
confidence in his character and good intentions. They used the word
as people used it when they said that they had faith in Mr.
Gladstone. Of course the formula assumed the existence of Jehovah, as
of Mr. Gladstone, but that was supposed to be an object of knowledge,
not of faith. The disciples again meant by faith the knowledge, direct
or based on direct evidence, of certain historical facts. It was the
Greeks, with their reliance on the processes of reason, who developed
the doctrine that since the reflective action of the mind is at least
as authoritative as the reports of the senses, the results of its
cogitations are the objects of positive knowledge and faith is the
evidence of things not seen. In a word the reasoned monotheism of the
Greeks, originating, as far as we are concerned, with Plato, afforded
a dialectic basis for the naive monotheism of the Hebrews. A passage
from the writings of Hippolytus, of the third Christian century, puts
the matter clearly before us: "The one God, the first and sole and
universal Maker and Lord, had nothing coaeval with him, ... but he was
one, alone by himself.... This supreme and only God begets Reason
first, having formed the thought of him, not reason as a spoken word,
but as an internal mental process of the universe.... The cause of the
things that came into being was the Reason, bearing in himself the
active will of Him who begat him ... so that when the Father bade the
world come into being, the Reason brought each thing to perfection
thus pleasing God." Obviously persons interested in tracing the
pedigree of the God of Hippolytus will do well to turn not to
_Genesis_ but to Plato's _Timaeus_.
The fact that the Greek philosophers were the real fathers of the
church, that the theological systems which have played so dominating a
social and political role in Europe are rooted in the speculations of
the great pagans, is a tribute to the power of Hellas. But the
circumstances under which that power was exerted were unfavorable. It
is interesting to consider what might have been the religious history
of our civilisation if Christianity had appeared while the Greek was
still not only mythopoeic but mythocrates, still the master of his
creation; if Socrates, for instance, perhaps the only religious
teacher in history who could have dominated Saint Paul, had been the
apostle to the gentiles, and if the great dynamic power of
Christianity had been attached to the mechanism of Greek thought at
its best. The Greek thought of early Christian times had become
stereotyped; it is often characterized as sterile, but no adjective
could be less apt in view of the mass and power of the doctrines that
sprang from it. And stereotyped as it was, it was still flexible in
comparison with its Christian offspring. The history of the word
"dogma" is an instructive one. Beginning with a modest connotation,
since it meant only "my impression," it stiffened gradually as
accumulated authority adhered to it, yet even to the last in
pre-Christian usage it meant simply a doctrine which one might take or
leave. The union of the Christian notion of divine authority with the
Greek notion of hard and fast definition made ruinous combination, and
gave birth to the Christian belief that it is sometimes necessary to
put a man to the torture or to the death to correct his ideas.
IV
Christian exegesis also is of Greek origin, but Greek exegesis sprang
in the first place from a rationalistic motive. The first case of
allegorical interpretation of the scriptures of which we know occurred
in the sixth century before Christ, and was an attempt to moralize one
of the most scandalous passages in Homer, the battle of the gods in
the twentieth book of the Iliad. Reason and morality had already
combined at that time to acknowledge a uniform course of action in
nature, and to make the gods the guardians of this uniformity. What
could be said therefore of a hand-to-hand scrimmage between the
guardians of the order of the world? Why, it could be said, and
Theagenes of Rhegium said it, that the gods represented inimical
natural powers or inimical passions of the mind. "Against Hephaestos
stood the great deep-eddying river whom gods call Zanthos and men
Scamandros." Naturally, since fire and water cannot dwell together in
unity. Science adopted this attractive way of dealing with scripture.
Diogenes of Apollonia, who devoted his life to the effort to reconcile
every system to every other, declared that Homer used the myths to
propagate scientific truth. Antisthenes and the Cynics--a preaching
order--developed the method to the full. When Christianity was making
its way into a Hellenized world, the principle was established that
the written word might have three meanings, the obvious one, the
inferential ethical meaning and the symbolic meaning. This principle
was eagerly adopted by educated Jews, and applied to their own
scriptures. "The application," says Hatch, "fulfilled a double
purpose. It enabled educated Jews on the one hand to reconcile their
own adoption of Greek philosophy with their continued adhesion to
their ancestral religion, and on the other hand to show to the
educated Greeks with whom they associated, and whom they frequently
tried to convert, that their literature was neither barbarous nor
unmeaning nor immoral." Christian exegesis naturally adopted the same
method in order to find Christianity everywhere, not only in the
Pentateuch but in Homer. And it was inevitably applied to the New
Testament, for the time came when the story of the life of Christ
needed as much squaring with theology as the old traditions of the
Hebrews. Irenaeus says, for instance, that "when Simeon took the young
child in his arms and said _Nunc dimittis_, he was a picture of the
Demiurge who had learned his own change of place on the coming of the
Saviour, and who gave thanks to the infinite depth." As the pope said
later to Father Tom, "the figgers of spache are the pillars of the
church."
Plato had deprecated the symbolic method. He causes Socrates to say,
_à propos_ of the story of Boreas and Oreithyia, "If I disbelieved it
as the philosophers do, I should not be unreasonable: then I might
say, talking like a philosopher, that Oreithyia was a girl who was
caught by a strong wind and carried off while playing on the cliffs
yonder; but it would take a long and laborious and not very happy
lifetime to deal with all such questions; and for my own part I cannot
investigate them until, as the Delphian precept bids me, I first know
myself." Plato's own method of exegesis consists quite simply of
expurgation. "The chaining of Hera, and the flinging forth of
Hephaistos by his father, and all the fightings of gods which Homer
has described, we shall not admit into our state, whether with
allegories or without them." To this method also Christian exegesis
owed a great debt. Plato's famous short way with Homer and the other
poets, his rejection of all myths that do not tend to edification, and
that detract from the goodness of the gods, showed the fathers how to
deal with what scandalized them in the Hebrew scriptures. Anyone who
reads the last pages of the second book of Plato's _Republic_ will see
whence Clement took his cue when he wrote: "Far be it from us to
believe that the Master of the universe, the Maker of heaven and
earth, 'tempts' men as though he did not know--for who then does
foreknow? and if he 'repents,' who is perfect in thought and firm in
judgment? and if he 'hardens' men's hearts, who makes them wise? and
if he 'blinds' them, who makes them to see? and if he desires a
'fruitful hill,' whose then are all things? and if he wants the savor
of sacrifices, who is it that needeth nothing? and if he delights in
lamps, who is it that set the stars in heaven?"
V
But many feel that all these phenomena--cult, doctrine and exegesis,
important as they are in the composition of Christianity, are still
not the essential matter. Essential Christianity is a state of mind
and a rule of life, and its basis is generally held to be the
principles of the Sermon on the Mount. But while a great many people
assent theoretically to the Sermon on the Mount, no one has ever put
it in practice in its entirety and all the time. So-called Christian
society is not organized on the lines of the Sermon on the Mount. It
is not organized on the principle of self-abnegation tending to
self-perfection, but on the principle of the development of the
individual as a unit of society, with duties laid upon him by his
relation to society, and rights guaranteed him by the society he
supports. Our ethics are not conceived as founded on laws god-given
and final, but as evolved by the growth of society, and subject to
endless and progressive change. Where the interest of society requires
that the desires of the bee shall be subordinated to the welfare of
the hive, Christian ethics is often called in as an ally; but if it
were fully in control, society as now organized would disintegrate.
The ethics in which we live and move is that of Roman law, and Roman
law is to a considerable extent a practical version of the ethics of
the Stoics. Moreover the ethics of the Christian church is based on
the doctrine of Ambrose, bishop of Milan, and the doctrine of Ambrose
is based on Cicero _de Officiis_, and Cicero's book is based on the
works of Panaetius the Greek stoic of the second century before
Christ. Socrates and Plato had long ago bidden men to love their
enemies, to take no heed for the morrow, to die rather than do wrong,
and to hold their goods in common. The fathers were astounded by the
Christlike utterances of these pagans, and cried in admiration that
they were Christians before Christianity. When the old scholiast read
how Plato's Socrates said that "there is no good thing which is not
the gift of the gods," he wrote on his margin: "Every good gift and
every perfect gift cometh from above." The anti-national character of
Christianity, its determination to ignore frontiers, was anticipated
in the Stoic and Cynic movements. The world was full of missionaries,
and the itinerant Cynic preacher was very near to the Christian.
Epictetus, who exhorted men to remember that they were sons of God,
and to make their lives worthy of their divine parentage gives us a
picture of the true Cynic apostle. That he may be free to deliver his
message to his fellowmen the true Cynic goes as naked, homeless, and
houseless, as a Christian apostle. Like the Christian he goes without
wife, child and friends, if only he may thereby bring others to a
knowledge of themselves and of God. We know of actual cases where
Cynics became Christians, and Christians became Cynics, without any
very great ado. It was, however, the Stoic system, embedded in Roman
institutions, that conquered the world.
VI
It is clear that the Greeks are largely responsible for bringing
religion in Europe to the present _impasse_, where many people
seriously hold that if we cease to affirm the incredible and the
unproven, morals will suffer, and that a boy had better believe in
hell when he is entrusted with his first latch-key. But it is the
Greek also who can get us out. Whatever worthy sense we attach to the
word "religious," the Greeks illustrate it. Their extraordinary moral
earnestness is obscured for us only by the variety of their appeals to
our attention. But they never from first to last allowed religion to
swallow morals. They first of men perceived and declared that morals
are man-made and are constantly to be altered by man; that the state
exists to secure the noblest life for the citizens; that therefore
social science, by definition, (says Aristotle) deals with right
conduct. Plato was deeply interested in all the problems of religion,
and alive to all the religious implications of the mysterious universe
in which we live; but he worked out in his masterpiece--_The
Republic_--a complete account of the social origin and sanction of
ethics. And as for his theology, "the father and maker of all this
universe," said he, "is past finding out; and even if we found him, to
tell of him to all men would be impossible."
Contemporary writers on religion are trying, thus far unsuccessfully,
to agree on a definition of their subject. But while no one can define
religion, everyone feels what it is. No society that we know of has
been without it, and there is no reason to suppose that it will ever
disappear. Both religion and morals are apparently social products,
both are, as far as we can see, indestructible, and both have suffered
cruelly from too close a union. And when they recover their
independence, the religious emotion, like the other emotions, must be
governed by morals.
OUR SUBLIME FAITH IN SCHOOLING
I
Is it _not_ sublime? Really there appears to be no limit to the
demands that are made on our schools and colleges. They are supposed
to ground the rising generation in the principles and practise of good
citizenship, in morality, and to some extent in religion; to develop
the power to think (an endlessly difficult matter), the ability to
enjoy nature and art, the desire to be useful; to instil habits of
industry, self-control and wholesome living; and withal to impart
_memoriter_ a mass of miscellaneous book-knowledge such as can be
tested by examination. Of late, too, we hear more and more that the
schools should fit the young for some specific business in life--for a
job, that is. In short we look to the schools to inculcate all the
possible virtues of mind and character, and at the same time to turn
out what the newest jargon calls efficient social units. And then
there are special problems, more acute in some places than in others,
such as the induction of alien children into the mysteries of the
English language and American ways.
Now all that makes a pretty big task. It is safe to say that an army
of Pestalozzis, Arnolds and Horace Manns, if we could command their
services and give them all the money they might ask for, would never
perform it to our entire satisfaction. Here and there we should find
loose ends of failure. What wonder, then, if the schoolma'am, mostly
an ordinary sort of well-meaning mortal, who is the victim of routine
and must do her appointed work under hopeless conditions of
"mass-treatment"--what wonder if many people are saying that the
schoolma'am does not seem to measure up to her mission? It is not
altogether strange that she is being overtaken by the fate of Hamlet,
whose tragic calamity it was, according to Goethe, to be obliged to
shoulder a burden that was too heavy for him. In reading educational
literature, one is sometimes reminded of those tribal gods from whom
all things are demanded, and whom it is therefore proper to scold or
to flog if anything goes wrong. For illustration let me quote a recent
deliverance culled from a newspaper. It is by a man of some
distinction, whose name I do not give because the language is probably
nothing but a reporter's paraphrase. In speaking to an audience on
"the fundamental trouble with conditions and the cause of the unrest
today," the gentleman is said to have laid it all to "our national
educational system, which is teaching the youth of our land to be
consumers instead of producers, and only to acquire instead of to
serve."
There we have it in a nutshell. It is the schools which are really to
blame for the manifold ills that so many people are talking about. If
we only had the right kind of schools--teaching the right things in
the right way--our whole sea of troubles would quickly turn into
pleasant arable land. Historical pundits are just now much interested
in what is called the economic interpretation of history; that is, the
theory that the whole history of man, including his religions and
philosophies and ethnic movements, his flowerings of art, his
Periclean and Augustan Ages, his Protestant Reformations and French
Revolutions--has been determined primarily by economic conditions. And
now, behold, the economic conditions themselves are the work of the
schoolma'am. Verily, _das Ewigweibliche zieht uns hinan_ with a
vengeance!
* * * * *
The newest thing is to have the schools cure the ancient ills that
grow out of the pressure of sex--a subject that of late seems to claim
more than its fair share of the limelight. The Paris dressmakers,
accustomed for ages to attire women very seductively for evening
exhibition, suddenly take to attiring them rather less seductively
for the street. And lo, the Puritan eye is shocked. There are visions
of social ruin à la Sodom and Gomorrah. Coincidently the theaters,
newspapers and wofsmiths (Mr. Howells' word, wof meaning
work-of-fiction), go in for the public washing of dirty linen, the
existence and dirtiness of which have been known for some thousands of
years. At the same time a new race of "sociologists" seek to alarm us
by stirring up the foul pool of social vice and talking about it as if
the filth were a thing of the day before yesterday. Result: a pretty
general demand that the schools teach sex hygiene and physiology, in
order that the boys and girls may be warned betimes of the dangers
that lie in wait for them. I am not arguing that children should not
be told the truth about these things. I am merely animadverting on the
growing tendency to put everything on the schools.
II
The natural and intended inference from what precedes is that we
demand too much of the schools--more than any schools could possibly
do and do well. The result is that they are often blamed unreasonably,
and that reasonable criticism is apt to be resented as unjust. There
is wide-spread complaint of shortcomings--some even speak of the
"failure" of popular education,--but the teachers reply with perfect
truth that they are doing the best they can. The truth is, however,
that there is more or less floundering due to multiplicity of aims,
dispersion of effort, and the lack of a simple dominating principle by
which to gage the relative importance of things. It is time for
educationists to take sober thought and decide, if they can, what is
on the whole the most valuable among the possible results of good
schooling. If we could somehow reach a working agreement on that
point, the path of wisdom would be tolerably clear: we should require
our schools to drive hard at the particular thing deemed most
essential, no matter how many smatterings might have to be thrown
overboard. It were better for the nation to lose somewhat of its
sublime faith in schooling, if by expecting less it might get a surer
and more valuable return on its enormous investment. The best of
teachers, in kindergarten, high school or university, can never give
the best that is in him unless he has a fairly definite idea of what
it is all for. Only then can he see the main issue in its proper
relation to the side-issues of his routine. Let us then attack this
question with holy boldness--somewhat in the spirit of a prudent
householder considering what one thing would be best worth saving if
his house should take fire.
If we look for the fundamental charter of popular education in these
United States we shall find it, if anywhere, in the famous Ordinance
of 1787, one memorable passage of which runs thus: "Religion, morality
and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of
mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be
encouraged." This formulation, which sees the purpose of education in
the promotion of good government and the general happiness, may still
be accepted. One might balk, perhaps, at the word "happiness," which
to the modern mind is apt to connote a more or less passive
contentment with one's lot. If the fathers ever thought that popular
education was going to produce general contentment, they
miscalculated. Its normal effect is the exact opposite. A wholesome
discontent is the beginning of progress toward better things. It is
vain to preach or teach contentment to the man who sees a chance to
better his lot or who feels that he is being kept down by conditions
that can in any wise be remedied. We have learned that class struggle
of one kind or another is inherent in human society; and where there
is class struggle there will be discontent. Today, then, one might
prefer the word "welfare," which is not only compatible with
discontent, but in great degree actually grows out of it.
The subject-matter of education was to be religion, morality and
knowledge. Let us consider the impressive triad in the reverse order.
It is patent enough, and must have been patent to the fathers, that,
so far as good government and the general welfare are concerned, there
is no inherent virtue in mere knowledge. Knowledge got from books and
teachers may be socially inert, or it may be positively harmful.
Everything depends on the use to which it is put. It is true that,
having regard to the long run, we may rest securely on the proposition
that the more men know--really _know_ in an accurate way--the better
off they will be, and the more likely to secure good government. The
advancement of science--taking the word in its very broadest sense--is
certainly an ideal that deserves our warmest allegiance. It is thus
vastly important in any system of education, to keep open to talent a
career from the humblest hovel to the high places of distinction and
service.
But there are not many--not one in ten thousand--to whom it is given
to increase knowledge in a way to affect government and the general
welfare, which must always be largely concerned with the short run and
with the preservation of a stable order amid the conflicts of classes,
opinions and interests. And in this domain, as was remarked above,
there is no inherent virtue in knowledge. What is learned in school
may be put to bad use and become a social curse. Some knowledge of
chemistry figures in the mental outfit of every dynamiter and
adulterator of foods. A knowledge of law or medicine may be used to
defeat as well as to promote the ends of justice. Indeed, a large part
of our worst trouble comes now from "educated" men and women who
prostitute their knowledge to anti-social purposes.
And then there is another reason why the schools should not conceive
it to be their highest mission to impart book-knowledge, or to train
the mind, as the phrase runs. That reason is that they do not and can
not really train the mind, when operating on a large number of pupils
at the same time by the method of "recitation." What gets trained in
that way is at best the memory; and when the pupil leaves school--at
whatever stage of progress--he soon forgets what he has learned,
unless he has constant occasion to use it. The result is that the most
of the knowledge laboriously acquired in school and college soon
becomes quite inert for the purposes of good government and the
general welfare. Now it may be necessary, indeed it is necessary, in a
progressive school system, to spend a good deal of time over
knowledges that are destined soon to be forgotten. But that essential
thing that we are searching for, that which the schools are to regard
as the vitally important thing, must clearly be something that the
pupil is going to need and to use all the time, no matter when his
schooldays come to an end.
Next in our triad comes morality. If any one chooses to insist at this
point that there can be no morality without religion, let him wait a
moment or go off and debate the subject with a metaphysician. In the
common use of words morality may be and is independent of religion,
and our question here is whether the inculcation of it can possibly be
the thing we are looking for, namely the chief end of schooling.
Hardly, the wise will say, if the word is to be taken in its usual
sense. For it is distinctly a low-caste word. People commonly speak of
"mere morality" as if the thing by itself did not amount to much. One
recalls the remark of Emerson to the effect that this is very much as
if one should say, "Poor God with nobody to help him." Still, the fact
remains that the word connotes something rather ordinary. This is why
Lord Haldane in a recent address preferred to avoid it and to commend
the German _Sittlichkeit_, as a more soulful term. One notices, too,
that thoughtful teachers who feel the weakness of a schooling that
lays all the stress on memory-work such as can be tested by
examination, are apt, when they wish to suggest something higher and
larger, to use some such phrase as "character-building" rather than
"moral training."
In short, the connotations of the word "morality" are such as to put
it out of the running as a name for a high educational ideal; and a
high ideal we must of course have. It suggests hardly more than what
Mr. Roosevelt is wont to call "decent living;" and decent living is
not a matter that can very well be progressively unfolded, idealized
and realized. For a pupil coming from a family where decent living is
the rule, and associating with mates of whom the same is true, it is
not much to live decently. There is almost nothing for him to learn.
This is no doubt why it is generally assumed, and in the main quite
correctly, that in a normally wholesome environment morality will take
care of itself or come as a by-product of school experience, the
teacher having nothing in particular to do except to look after the
occasional transgressor.
But now suppose we put in place of mere morality, the perfection of
the social mind. Suppose we say that the central purpose of popular
education ought to be the _development of a sensitive social
conscience enlightened to the limits of opportunity_. To put it a
little differently: suppose we could agree that the best possible
result of education is a mind trained and habituated to think in terms
of social obligation, and to act accordingly. We should then have, at
any rate, something that is high enough and big enough for anybody;
something that is capable of progressive realization from the
kindergarten to the university and thereafter; something, in fine,
that would reach out from the humblest ego to the utmost periphery of
human existence.
Thirdly, religion. Let it be granted at the outset that for an immense
number of the noblest souls that have ever lived "Thou God seest me"
has been the highest, most inclusive, most compelling incentive to
right social conduct, that we know anything about. In practise,
however, a great deal depends on the nature of the God that is feared,
and still more, perhaps, on whether that God is really and truly
feared or only spoken of with conventional respect in token of some
ecclesiastical loyalty. Can religion be "taught" in school--any kind
of school? Can it be taught, I mean, not as a matter of formal
observance and glib recitation, but in its vital essence as a
quickening spirit destined to stick fast in the character and be a
permanent incentive to right living? It is only in this sense that the
"teaching" of religion has any bearing on good government and the
general welfare.
The difficulty of teaching religion in this socially effective way is
not confined to the secular public schools. It does not grow entirely
out of the neutrality of the state, the jealousy of sects and the
impossibility of finding a common basis free from any sectarian tinge.
It goes deeper than that, and affects also church schools that fly the
banner of religion and are conducted for the express purpose of giving
prominence to the beliefs and usages of some particular denomination.
What can be done to teach religion? Of course the pupil can be exposed
to what are called religious influences, and made to breathe what is
called a religious atmosphere. He can be required to attend chapel
exercises, and to go to church on Sunday; to read the Bible or hear it
read; to memorize texts, creeds, hymns and commandments. He can learn
church history, and familiarize himself with the arguments and tenets
of "our people." But when, as is usually the case, all this precedes
any vital personal experience of religion, it is apt presently to
float away, along with the Latin and algebra, into the limbo of things
once known but no longer usable. The teaching of religion so that it
will stick fast, not merely as an ecclesiastical loyalty, but as a
socially regenerative force, is a very difficult matter. Multitudes of
parents who are profoundly anxious about the matter, fail in the home,
clergymen fail rather notoriously with their own sons and daughters.
Can the school be expected to succeed where they are baffled?
But suppose it were understood that the supreme purpose of all
education, no matter what banner the schoolhouse or college might fly,
is the development of character trained and habituated to think in
terms of social obligation, and to act accordingly: should we not then
have a formula on which all who really mean well by their fellowmen
could unite? For surely the perfection of the social mind--that and
nothing else--is the finest flower of the religious spirit.
III
There are reasons for thinking that such a theory of popular education
as has been outlined, and a modified practise based on the theory, are
needed at the present time as a measure of social therapeutics.
Without joining the prophets of evil who think we are moving swiftly
toward a social revolution, one may say in all sobriety that there are
signs which look ominous for the future of our democratic experiment.
It is not merely that there is wide-spread discontent and a general
breaking away from old standards and restraints. All that, which is
apt to look so threatening to elderly people, especially if they are
not much given to the reading of history, may be nothing but the sign
of healthy life and growth. Stable democratic society may consist with
almost any amount of discontent, provided it discharges itself by way
of legal channels duly provided for the purpose in advance.
But the really menacing symptom of our time, is in a
word,--lawlessness. I have not chiefly in mind the shocking and
increasing prevalence of outrageous crimes against person and
property. That is certainly bad enough. That life and property are not
as safe in the United States as they were a generation ago, and not
as safe as they are today in the British Empire, France, Germany,
Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries, is surely a fact to give
us pause. And yet, in that fact alone there is nothing highly ominous
for the future of democracy. In all ages, under all forms of
government, there have been murderers, thieves and ravishers, but
social order has never been destroyed or even seriously imperiled by
them. Society has found ways to protect itself. The statistics of
crime vary from decade to decade under the operation of causes that
are fairly well understood by experts. An excess at any time can be
corrected by known methods if a people sets resolutely about it.
The danger lies rather in a diminishing respect for law as such among
large masses of the nominally respectable population. Multitudes have
come to look on the will of the community as expressed in law, not as
an obligation binding on the conscience, but as a sort of solemn
joke--something meant for the other fellow. This cynicism with regard
to law has become a veritable cancer of the social body. The matter is
difficult to treat statistically, but surely there can be no doubt
about it. It is no illusion of perspective, not the nightmare of a
pessimist, but simple damning truth, that the law-abiding spirit has
of late been losing ground rapidly. The case is not stated too
strongly by a recent writer when he says:
In spite of his vulnerability he [the capitalist] is of all
citizens the most lawless. He appears to assume that the law will
always be enforced by some special personnel whose duty lies that
way, while he may evade the law, when convenient, or bring it
into contempt, with impunity. The capitalist seems incapable of
feeling his responsibility as a member of the governing class, in
this respect, and that he is bound to uphold the law that others
may do the like.... He therefore looks on the evasion of a law
devised for public protection, but inimical to him, as innocent
or even meritorious.[26]
[Footnote 26: Brooks Adams, _Theory of Social Revolutions_, page 212.]
Of course there are many honorable exceptions; indeed this very
remark is made by Mr. Adams himself. It may be said too that the
influential men who fall as a class under this sweeping indictment can
often allege a colorable excuse for their anti-social conduct--as that
the law they try to "beat" was devised in ignorance or malice by
corrupt politicians. And so they play the game of money against
politics, and are not aware of the social menace of their conduct.
They subordinate the greater to the less, and know not what they
do--any more than the aristocracy and clergy of France knew what they
were doing just prior to 1789. They think themselves the salt of the
earth. Many of them are more or less zealous church-members, and have
had a "religious education." And yet, in playing fast and loose with
the law, they are playing with fire in their own cellars. When a
ruling class--our government is a qualified plutocracy--loses its
sense of responsibility, and takes to violating the law, it takes the
surest way to bring all law into contempt. And when the general
contempt for law reaches a certain point, then comes anarchy and--the
strong man on horse-back to tell us what to do, and shoot us if we
don't do it.
* * * * *
The vocation of the croaker is not lightly tolerated by the public
opinion of our day. Every one votes him a nuisance. A deep-seated
American optimism expects that we shall somehow weather the storms of
the future as we have weathered those of the past. The writer of these
reflections has the national temperament, but he thinks the time has
come to reef sails and trim ship. For law and obedience to law there
must be, if society is to cohere and go on its way; and in a democracy
lawlessness is not so much _a_ peril as _the_ peril. We must look to
our democratic foundations, lest they be undermined while we go on
gaily amusing ourselves, piling up money, and assuring each other that
everything is all right in the best government the sun ever shone
upon. There is need of a vast co-operative effort on the part of all
the ethical forces of society--an effort directed consciously and
vigorously to the specific end of checking and turning back the rising
tide of lawlessness. There is work for the home, for the church, for
the voluntary association; and of course there is work for the school,
with which we are here more immediately concerned.
IV
What can the schools do for the better training of the social
conscience? (I use the word "training" in the double sense of
habituation and enlightenment). It is evident that that question needs
more space than can be given to it here. A few words must suffice.
In the first place, teachers can recognize--that is, they can
gradually be brought to recognize--that the training of the social
conscience is the great work they have to do; that it is more
important than anything else. A general recognition of that fact would
itself have a highly stimulating effect. It would clarify ideas,
furnish criteria of value that would be independent of personal or
local whim, divert attention from piddling questions of routine, and
so do something to elevate the business of teaching in the public
estimation. It is now commonly spoken of as a noble profession, but
only a very few really think of it in that light. In the better
atmosphere I am thinking of, the teacher would not be a drill-sergeant
bossing the details of a mental lock-step, but the physician of the
social conscience. And, in harmony with the new drift in medicine, our
physician would pin his faith to preventive treatment. He would not be
able to avoid some punishment of the wrong-doer, but he would see his
highest mission in the development of a sensitive conscience that
would inhibit wrong-doing. This means skillful and well-paid teachers
for children, not too many pupils to the teacher, and much friendly
study of the individual pupil in school and out.
Then again teachers could put into practise far more generally than
has been attempted hitherto, what has been found out by scientific men
with regard to the social conscience and the way it works. They could
appeal in every possible way to the social instinct, and make use of
its well-known rewards and inhibitions. The foundation principle would
be to make the penalty for misbehavior take the form, so far as
possible, of social disapproval, with consequent suffering in
self-esteem. To be effective, a penalty needs to be quick-acting and
sure. It should depend as little as possible on the accident of
getting caught. If a potential miscreant is taught to fear punishment
at the hands of some authority outside of and above his own life, and
if then he does wrong, and nothing unpleasant happens, he soon begins
to enjoy the game of matching his wits against the law. Pretty soon he
is really being schooled in the exciting art of law-breaking. Somehow
he must learn to dread the disapproval of his mates and the prick of
his own conscience.
Another principle, hardly less fundamental, would be to make the
learner see that the rules he is called on to obey, at work or at
play, are for the general good, _including his own_. Of course
difficulty would be created by the young anarchist, the imp who
refuses to play the game in accordance with the rules, is insensitive
to communal opinion, and enjoys the excitement of beating the law.
Such a mental twist is generally due to a vicious environment in home
or street, where the standards are different from those of the school.
How to deal with such cases, when they have reached the advanced stage
of criminality, has always been one of the hardest problems of the
civilized man, and no very satisfactory solution of it has yet been
found. Down to quite recent time, our forbears put their faith in the
deterrent effect of harsh and public punishments; and the rod of the
schoolmaster kept pace, so to speak, with the stern decrees of the
criminal law. It was found not to work very well, a humaner epoch set
in, and with that too the schools have kept pace. We have come to
feel that society itself is to blame for the miscreant, because it
creates and perpetuates the conditions that make him. Meanwhile
society is experiencing the disastrous effects of dealing gently with
the criminal, and the schools are breeding up a generation to which
anything like stern discipline is on the whole rather repugnant.
The one hopeful idea on the horizon is the idea of prevention. The
potential miscreant must be caught and cured in the early stages of
his making. It is unfortunately true that even the most enlightened
and single-minded efforts of the school will produce but lame results
so long as society permits criminals to breed with their kind, and
tolerates the economic conditions which create for decently born
children a hopelessly bad environment outside the schoolroom. It is
for society to remedy these conditions as fast as it can. Meanwhile
much would be gained if we could once clearly see, and begin to act on
the principle, that the _chief end_ of popular education should be,
not a smattering of knowledges, but the development of social-minded
character.
THE BARBARIAN INVASION
Ingenuas didicisse fideliter artes
Emollit mores, nec sinit esse feros.
Readers of Thackeray will remember that these are the lines in which
Colonel Newcome used regretfully to sing the praises of those arts
into which he had been but barely initiated. Of the thousands in the
United States who are now annually certified as bachelors of arts,
nine-tenths would be unable to translate the passage, and if the
passage were translated, fully one-half would see little or nothing in
it. When men are asking what is the matter with our colleges, one is
tempted to suggest that perhaps this is the matter: that a controlling
interest in the academic establishment is made up of those who have no
belief that higher education should result in refinement of mind and
transformation of character, and no comprehension of what these things
would mean; or, in plain terms, that higher education is in the hands
of the barbarians.
That our academic population has grown some three or four-fold within
a generation, is no indication of a corresponding increase in the
number of persons of cultivated intelligence. The growth has been
brought about mainly through a change in the tone and purpose of the
college course to appeal to those who formerly despised a college
education as a useless luxury; so that now we have a large number of
college graduates in whose eyes the degree confers no distinction and
imposes no responsibility. It may be that the older science was crude
and the older scholarship vague. By no means all college students of a
generation ago were animated by a love of knowledge. Yet even the
idlers, who sought the degree because it was reputable, testified to a
general respect for higher education, and bore witness to the idea
that a college graduate was supposed to be a gentleman. No such
expectation prevails today; and least of all in the West, where the
increase of numbers has been most marked. Today a college education is
supposed to be merely useful. Yet at the same time it is felt to be a
ground for wonder that so many can pass through the college course
with no visible refinement of taste or speech, no clarification of the
sense of honor and justice, and no increase in thoughtfulness or in
independence of mind--that, in a word, a college graduate is
indistinguishable in general society. Some time ago I sat at a hotel
table with six commercial travellers and one college graduate, who was
also a college professor,--all talking baseball. Sherlock Holmes
himself could not have identified the professor. Some time before, I
had ventured to propose in a talk to some students that a college
degree should impose the obligation of _noblesse_, and preserve a man
from some of the meaner things which might be condoned in the less
fortunate. I learned afterwards that the idea was resented as
"undemocratic"--yet not by the students: for today it seems to be the
college professor who is chiefly contemptuous of liberal culture.
It is rather difficult to see how _higher_ education is to be
conceived as "democratic" in the sense of creating no personal
distinctions. Only, it should seem, if the gifts of education are
purely external and without effect upon mind and character. On the
other hand, if democracy is to stand simply for freedom of
opportunity, and selection of the best, doubtless few will deny that
the college should be open to every youth who shows himself capable of
measuring up to the idea of an educated man. But this is another
matter. The "democratic" theory of higher education stands for a
process of measuring down. The process began when the teachers of
science insisted that a student whose course was made up mostly of
laboratory practice in natural science should nevertheless be
graduated as a bachelor of arts. One may cheerfully admit the
importance of scientific conceptions for general culture: the point is
that if scientific training had developed half of the intellectual
qualities that were claimed for it, the degree in science should soon
have displaced that of bachelor of arts. As it was, the issue was
obscured, and under the blessings of the blanket degree, "democracy"
has made rapid progress. No form of speech is now too destitute of
ideas to be called a science. Leaving aside the last new science of
"efficiency," we have a science of cooking and of dressmaking, a
science of carpentering (called manual training), a science of
commerce, a science of journalism, and a science of football, any of
which may now entitle one to credit towards a degree of bachelor of
arts--so that no one can now charge that the college degree implies an
invidious distinction.
Such is the outcome of "democracy." At first glance the term conveys
the pleasing suggestion that our universities attach a high importance
to the cultivation of individuality. But the suggestion is misleading.
In the academic "democracy" every student, like every dollar, counts
for just one "and nobody for more than one," and the only question of
importance is how many. Not long ago, while crossing the Rocky
Mountains, and listening to the admiration expressed by my
fellow-travelers for the impressive engineering and industrial
undertakings of that region and the Pacific Coast, I became gradually
aware that the conventional mode of describing such an
enterprise was to speak of it as "a two-million-dollar plant" or
"twenty-million-dollar plant," as the case might be, on the ground,
evidently, that no other aspect of the matter could conceivably be
interesting. Such barbaric innocence seemed to me diverting until I
remembered that this was the point of view and these the same tribe of
barbarians as those whose aspirations now control the policies of our
institutions of learning. With few exceptions, our academic managers
prefer to state their attainments and their ambitions in terms of an
n-million dollar plant, with n-thousand students and n-hundred
instructors. And in the interest of bigness any argument is good. Just
now the argument is vocational, and college presidents and professors,
especially in the state-universities of the West, are fairly falling
over one another to prove that they are "practical men," and
incidentally to disavow any interest in the promotion of liberal
culture. When the fashion changes, as it doubtless will--for it is
unlikely that even the agricultural communities are as uncivilised as
the appeal that is made to them--the argument will change. Especially
instructive from this point of view is the standing appeal for more
money to make good a deficit; or to improve the quality of instruction
by paying better salaries to the faculty. In the logic of academic
administration there appears to be no contradiction between pleading
poverty and at the same time using the funds in hand to establish some
new department, some advertising feature, such as a summer session,
correspondence courses, university extension, or what not, which will
attract a more illiterate class of students, scatter the energies of
the faculty, lower their teaching efficiency, preserve the deficit,
and leave the institution less than ever free to shape its own course
or to act as a critic of popular opinion.
Academic authorities are accustomed to explain these seeming
inconsistencies by a vague appeal to the obligations of the university
to the community. These "social obligations" will repay a careful
study. To grasp the idea that is now current in most of the
state-universities, one must think of a state-hospital for the insane
in which the care of patients is regarded as secondary to the purpose
of impressing the people of the state with the evil of insanity, and
the need of larger appropriations for the state-hospital. A careful
analysis of present academic conceptions of "social obligation" fails
to show that such obligation differs in any essential respect from the
obligation of a merchant to procure new customers, and incidentally
to take some of them away from his competitors. The merchant's
obligation is made humanly intelligible by considerations of profit or
prestige. It is rather difficult to grasp the sort of academic
prestige that comes from cheapening the college degree. And when we
find that even the older and richer institutions show a disposition to
sacrifice their academic distinction for the prestige of numbers, it
seems simpler to abandon the search for rational motive, and to refer
the ambitions of our institutions of learning to the same primitive
instinct that prompts one man or woman to outshine his neighbor in the
splendor of his diamonds or his dinners, and another in the size of
his motor-car.
A sure key to the interpretation of "social obligation" will be found
in inter-collegiate athletics. I am speaking here, not of athletic
sports as such, nor necessarily of athletic contests between colleges,
but of inter-collegiate contests as a matter of public exhibition--"a
Roman holiday"--and commercial enterprise. Only a finely drawn
distinction saves the college athlete from being classed as a
professional. It is true that (as a rule) he does not pay for his
living out of the gate-receipts. But the gate-receipts pay for his
sport, and the sport covers a good deal of expensive traveling and
sojourning at expensive hotels, not to speak of the services of a
professional coach, now commonly appointed by the college
administration at a salary often higher than that of a full
professor. And when we remember that the gate-receipts total many
thousands--$50,000 from a single game is not uncommon--and further
that such sums are needed to maintain the sport at its present (shall
we not say "professional"?) perfection, it is hard to see that amateur
sport is not a business enterprise of serious dimensions. The
difficulty becomes greater if we define a man's profession to be that
which consumes most of his time and attention. This applies especially
to football. The very purpose of the training is to provide that
during the season no member of the team shall waste his time or
strength on any other purpose. The schedule for practice would be
sufficient to demonstrate this point, apart from the testimony of
numerous football men, among them men of fair ability and
conscientious students. During the season they can do little more than
attend their classes and trust to the mercy of the instructor. This
mercy they are pretty sure to receive, first, because they have, as a
rule, carefully avoided electing the courses of the unmerciful,
secondly, because even a rather independent instructor will often
prefer to give a football man the grade needed to keep him on the team
rather than face a storm of execration from students and colleagues,
not to speak of a long argument in the president's office. Such
arguments are not uncommon; and a college professor who attaches any
importance to the reports published of the high average of scholarship
maintained by athletes must be lacking in a sense of humor.
Older apologists for inter-collegiate athletics were accustomed to
talk about _mens sana in corpore sano_. But every one knows now that
inter-collegiate athletics are as little related to sound health as
inter-collegiate debates to sound logic. Nor does it suffice to point
to the need of a safety-valve for the spirits of youth. This argument
may pass for some of the Eastern colleges, but the Western student is
apt to be a sober and steady, if somewhat unimaginative youth, who
looks at college mostly from a business standpoint; and it is fair to
say that inter-collegiate sports would have amounted to little in the
West if they had not been carefully fostered by the college
administration. This is so far true that a youth who happens to be
husky and strong can hardly hope to escape the football team except
under the imputation of "disloyalty;" and more than one who had hoped
to give his time to other things has yielded to the importunities, not
so much of his fellow-students as of the faculty sports and those
connected with the administration. In the college community generally,
and in the speeches made by the faculty before gatherings of students,
the highest tribute is reserved for the athletic heroes. Those who win
college honors, or who make Phi Beta Kappa or Sigma Xi, are rarely
heard of. The present theory seems to be--and again, the theory, not
so much of the students as of the faculty and administration--that the
student who wins honors work only for himself, while he who helps win
a game does something for the college.
A generation ago the management of athletics was in the hands of the
students, and the faculty was content to confine itself to the task of
keeping the games within proper limits. But the amount of money
involved became too great for undergraduate business methods and, in
some cases, for undergraduate honesty. Hence, in one college after
another, the administration assumed the direction of athletics in the
interest of good management and at the same time, it was claimed, of
preserving their amateur character. This claim has been very strangely
justified. The result has been rather that in the hands of the
administration athletics became an instrument of competition, and for
the first time a serious and important business; and in the
prosecution of the business along professional lines, the
administration has been shown to be, not more scrupulous than the
undergraduates, but only more resourceful. Impecunious athletes could
now be provided for by scholarships or by places in the library, the
college office, or the college book-store. Why, pray, should a student
be debarred from the privilege of "working his way through" because he
happens to be an athlete? Or why, for this reason, should a president
be deprived of the benevolent satisfaction of helping a deserving
student out of his own pocket? Or why should a similar privilege be
withheld from "loyal" alumni or from disinterested persons who happen
to have money on the game? Cases of this kind are matters of common
report in academic circles; and when players are disqualified for
professionalism by the inter-collegiate conference, the circumstances
point not seldom to complicity on the part of the academic
authorities. Among men of the world who are gentlemen, it is thought
to be one of the primitive moralities to be a good sport--to play the
game on the square and to treat your opponent as a gentleman. Neither
of these points seems to be quite intelligible to many of our academic
sports. One college president might be named whose speeches at
football "rallies" are said to suggest an expedition against savages.
A private citizen who should set up a billiard table in his house, and
then earn the cost of it by giving exhibition games for admission
fees, would be promptly put down as a professional sport. I have
suggested to a number of colleagues that college athletics will never
be a gentleman's sport until the gate-receipts are abolished, the
professional coach dismissed, and the scope of athletics is limited to
what can be supported by private subscription, preferably confined to
students. One can readily see how this would improve the _morale_ of
athletics. There would be some loss of proficiency, but in matters of
sport no gentleman can afford to be too proficient. The usual reply
has been, however, "Oh, that would never do." Now of course it would
never do. But there is just one reason why, namely, that athletics are
today regarded as the most important measure and criterion of academic
prestige. They are indeed an abominable nuisance. They absorb the
attention of the administration, take up the time of faculty meetings
or of governing committees, send traveling about the country students
who ought to be at work, and give to the members of the team a public
importance which their personality fails to justify. But every
institution feels itself bound to make a good showing for fear that a
barbarian public, and the rich barbarians among the alumni, will judge
that it is lacking in vitality. The fear is doubtless exaggerated,
but such is the _rationale_ of inter-collegiate athletics.
Further light upon the "social obligations" of our colleges and
universities will be afforded by a study of the departments of
education, or teachers' colleges, which have been established in most
of the larger institutions, and which now often receive a greater
share of the attention of the administration than any other part of
the institution. It is unnecessary to ask whether the history or
philosophy of education are important subjects of study. The fact
remains that the history of education is about as necessary a
preliminary to the practice of teaching, as the history of medicine to
the practice of medicine, while any genuine philosophy of education
implies a broad basis of ripe culture. Nor may we question the need of
a higher standard of general culture for the teachers in the secondary
schools. All of this is irrelevant to the department of education. The
very last thing named there is the need of broad culture and sound
knowledge. On the contrary, the idea is commonly conveyed that a too
thorough knowledge of the subject will be bad for the teacher. As I
write, there comes to me the published report of a speech by the dean
of one of the teachers' colleges, who says that "it is harder for a
Phi Beta Kappa to learn to teach than for medium students." Of course
the moral is clear: no student who intends to teach, and who hopes to
receive an appointment, can afford to waste his time in making a
record for excellence of scholarship and breadth of culture, such as
would recommend him to Phi Beta Kappa, especially since any
deficiencies in these directions can be more than made good by a
"professional training" in child-psychology, the science of method,
and the social aims of education.
The result of this appeal is to bring to the university a large class
of students whose personal ambition does not extend beyond the desire
for a comfortable job, and who regard the university, not as an _alma
mater_, but simply as an emporium from which they may procure a
professional outfit; and at the same time to instal in the faculty a
set of men whose prevailing point of view is that of the
_entrepreneur_. In all of our universities, from the Atlantic coast to
the Pacific, the department of education, with its courses, students,
and instructors, is an object of ridicule and malediction on the part
of most of the faculty. Even the less fastidious are disposed to
resent the presence in the university of a department whose
intellectual and cultural status is hardly superior to that of a
normal school. There would seem to be only one reason for the
importance attached to the department by the administration, namely,
the large and steady constituency which it is able to command through
the questionable logic of its vocational appeal. For the purpose of
enlarging the "plant," nothing better has been yet devised than the
plan of offering "professional training" for teachers.
Hardly less significant, however, for a study of the social
obligations resting upon our universities is the graduate school. In
the West local patriotism demands that every state shall have its
state-university, and no institution is a complete university without
a graduate school. That several states should combine to form one
graduate school of really good quality has, to my knowledge, never
been suggested. Meanwhile, to measure the urgency of the need for
graduate schools, it will be sufficient to contemplate the kind of men
who are awarded fellowships in the graduate schools already well
established, in the East or in the West. A dispassionate observer
might readily conclude that the capacity of the country for graduate
work had been satisfied for a century to come. And he would be the
more confirmed in his opinion if he should reflect upon the cost of
graduate instruction, the small number of students who attend the
graduate courses, and the few who are not subsidized to attend. In his
book on _University Control_ Professor Cattell has called attention
to the fact that our graduate schools procure most of their students
only by paying them, and to the more significant fact that, with all
the inducements offered by scholarships and fellowships, the material
is of not more than mediocre quality. Even at Harvard it has been
noted that the graduate students were as a class inferior in personal
genius and intellectual endowment to the best class of undergraduates.
Nor does it seem worth while to increase the stipend. Some years ago
one of our college presidents, an artist in inflation, conceived the
idea of splitting his fellowships into two; with a scarcely observable
change of quality, he obtained two graduate students for the price of
one. From all this one would be led to conclude that what is now
needed is, not more graduate schools, but a working outfit of really
eligible students for those already established.
Since the college faculty is recruited from the graduate school, this
means that there is a corresponding lack of eligible material for
college professorships. Professor Cattell suggests that the lack of
good material for the graduate fellowships is due to the
unsatisfactory conditions which, in America, surround the profession
of scholar and teacher. Doubtless this is true, but the deeper fact
seems to be that cultural conditions in the United States have not yet
developed a sufficient number of men with a taste for academic work to
fill the places created by a policy of hasty expansion. The result is
that a fair number of those composing our college faculties--fully
half, one might say, viewing them as a whole,--are men who have no
special sense of professional dignity or of professional
responsibility; and some of those who write "Professor" before, or
"A.B., Ph.D." after their names are all but illiterate. An unselected
group of college professors leaves no impression of special culture.
Their ordinary conversation conveys no impression of superior insight
in matters of politics, or of art, or of social reform--very probably
the subject of conversation is football and the prospects of the team.
In any community a group of college professors is likely to represent,
not a higher level of culture, but simply a fairly assorted average, a
vertical section, so to speak, of the culture of the community. Under
normal conditions many of those who now compose our college faculties
would probably be teaching in the elementary schools, while others,
especially those, now highly esteemed by the administration, who
prefer the stir and bustle of traveling and speech-making to the
humdrum of study and teaching, would be carrying a case of samples or
selling life-insurance. One of the striking things about our college
professors is their frequent distaste for quiet occupations. Hence,
while it is true that the conditions prevailing in the profession
react upon the graduate schools, the reverse is also true. One reason
that operates against better salaries for college professors is that
so many are now worth no more than they get, while for men of a better
quality there is no immediately promising source of supply.
On the other hand, it is obvious that a policy of indiscriminate
expansion is committed to the employment of Chinese cheap labor in
teaching. To this necessity we owe the elaborate academic hierarchy
extending through the grades of fellow, assistant, instructor,
assistant professor, associate professor, full professor, to the
culminating dignity of "professor and head of the department;" to this
we owe the employment of women in the coëducational colleges (who
rarely get beyond the grade of instructor); and to this we owe the
fact that, even in the oldest and richest of our universities, a great
part of the instruction is given by instructors at about a thousand
dollars a year. Yet all the while a course by a thousand-dollar
instructor yields the same amount of credit towards the degree as a
course by a full professor. From the administration's standpoint,
however, it is foolish to pay four or five thousand dollars for one
man when you can get two or three for that sum; and especially when
your public is of a kind that only a small portion of it will know the
difference.
Peculiarly favorable to this policy has been the importation from
Germany of the _wissenschaftliche Methode_ and, in particular, of the
scientific method of creating a Doctor of Philosophy, based upon the
curious Teutonic conception of a "contribution to knowledge." One such
contribution is sufficient for a Doctor of Philosophy; the number of
them is the measure of a scientific reputation. What is positively
needed to constitute a contribution to knowledge, is not altogether
clear. It seems quite certain, however, that a contribution to
knowledge need not be a contribution to ideas. And a census of the
contributions printed by the journals devoted to special departments
of knowledge suggests that little more is needed than an industrious
description of some region of unexplored fact. It matters little that
the fact is insignificant, or that the analysis (if there be analysis)
throws no new light upon the principles of science or upon the motives
of history or of literature--a fact is still a fact; and a "negative
result" in response to an improbable hypothesis is still a
"contribution." It is evident that the "scientific method," whatever
be its first intention, need not in practice imply the operation of
intelligence. And this may help to explain why the "results of
science" are occasionally indistinguishable from those of manual
labor, and how a man may rank as a scientific authority whose general
intelligence would not clearly distinguish him from an ordinary
carpenter or bricklayer. All of this, indeed, is implied in the logic
of "method." As the purpose of a machine is to be foolproof, so is it
the purpose of scientific method to make scientific discovery
independent of personal endowment or genius. In the wholesale creation
of academic establishments the method plays a particularly important
part, since it furnishes a supply of accredited reputations at a
relatively moderate cost.
The scientific method represents the introduction of "democracy" into
the fields of science and scholarship. And thus it enables us to
explain the paradox, otherwise mystifying, that college professors are
the first to teach the student to attach a superior importance to men
of affairs; to value a practical experience of things above a clear
understanding of them; the intuitions of the plain man, or of the
child of nature, above the decisions of reflective judgment; and that
they are the first to warn him against allowing plain common sense to
be disturbed by the exercise of reason. All of this would be rather
perplexing if one were unfamiliar with the democratic theory that a
contribution to knowledge implies no exercise of intelligence, and
that intellectual discipline works no change in the quality of the
man.
When, however, it becomes a question of democracy for the faculty--or,
in other words, of a form of academic administration appropriate to
the idea of a learned profession--the democrats of this type are apt
to be either silent or contemptuous. One of the reasons why academic
administration is imperialistic in democratic America, while it is
democratic in imperialistic Germany, is that American scholars have no
illusions regarding the dignity of their profession. On the other
hand, a commercial, or, if you please, scientific, theory of academic
organization leads quite naturally to the conception of the
college-president as a captain of industry--while a study of the acts
of college professors in their corporate capacity as a faculty might
easily lead one to believe that most of them are capable only of doing
what they are told. But all this is but one manifestation of a deeper
reason. For a true basis of comparison, we must turn, not to the
German university, but to the German army, and then back again to the
citizen soldiery of the United States. On a peace footing, if academic
progress be the end in question, there appears to be no reason why a
body of academic teachers, presumably men of culture and of experience
in academic affairs, should not be able to govern an educational
institution both efficiently and progressively under the presiding
direction of one of their number responsible to themselves. Nor may we
see why any scholar should be disinclined to interrupt his studies for
a term to assume the office. But for an aggressive campaign against
the state-treasury, or the pockets of the wealthy, or a raid upon the
constituency of a rival institution, such a form of organization would
be as little fitted as our National Guard for an invasion of Canada. A
campaign of conquest calls for the autocratic powers of a captain of
industry.
In institutions of established reputation, the tradition of culture is
usually strong enough to demand that the president be a scholar and a
man of distinction--though he need not be a conspicuous illustration
of the theory that familiarity with the arts _emollit mores, nec sinit
esse feros_. A glance, however, at what is expected of the president
in the great majority of colleges and universities will convince one
that it is easier for the rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than
for the president to live up to the ideal of a scholar and a
gentleman. It will also help to account for the number of strange and
even grotesque characters which have figured in the office. Every one
has known college presidents whose personality would suggest the
politician, the promoter, the theatrical manager, or the
quack-doctor--anything rather than the head of an institution of
learning. When a professor is elevated to the presidency, he ceases to
be a teacher, and becomes an "educator" (with a long _o_). The duties
of the office leave no time, as a rule, either for teaching or for
study--for which, doubtless, those who have been "training" for the
office are often grateful. The result is that the educational manager
is usually far removed from the realities of education. And, indeed,
the last thing of which our college presidents are expected to have
any personal knowledge is the courses that are given in their
institution and the ideas of the instructor who is giving them. What
is chiefly demanded of them is "executive ability," especially that
kind of which the chief ingredient is a histrionic capacity for
attracting attention.
Thus the duties of the office are only remotely academic. On the side
of internal administration, the first duty of the president is to
swell the volume of "life" by a paternal encouragement, mingled at
times with insistence, of all the organizations representing "student
interests"--those athletic, first of all, but then the countless other
societies, religious, social, dramatic, musical, terpsichorean,
journalistic, forensic, or what not, which give a tone of "vitality"
to our academic life (or, as you may choose to put it, make a howling
wilderness of the academic halls); and among which the literary
society of the older days is the least considered. If college life is
to yield material for publicity nothing should be left to the
student's spontaneity; on the other hand, the modern college student
is apt to blame the administration if he is backward in making friends
or fails to make a place for himself among his fellows. On the side of
external administration, the duties of the president may be summed up
in the two words, money and publicity. To procure the first of these,
he is expected to make himself acceptable to men of wealth; or, in the
state-university, to the politicians. Those who idealize the
independence of the state-university are apt to forget that it has its
own seamy side. At the same time, to strengthen his appeal, the
college president is expected to create a larger clientele among the
public, and, for all these purposes, to organize the alumni into a
compact fighting force. This means that he must be half the time
traveling and making speeches. The demands upon him for talk alone are
usually far in excess of any normal capacity for thinking; and it
would be an extraordinary man who, under all these conditions, should
preserve a high sincerity or a deeply thoughtful attitude towards
life.
All of this is the outcome of an expensive "democracy," based, we are
told, upon broad conceptions of social responsibility. How far the
elevation of society is involved in this democratic program I have
tried to make clear. In any case there would seem to be a need for a
few institutions of learning with the courage to be aristocratic. An
aristocratic college (or university, as the case may be) would
necessarily limit the scope of its work, in range of courses and
number of students, to what it could do well upon the income at its
command. Several of our academic endowments might seem to be already
sufficient for maintaining a uniformly high standard of very fair
scope. An aristocratic institution of learning would then be
represented by an aristocratic faculty, composed of men whose life and
teaching rest upon the conviction that exercise of intellect and
cultivation of taste produce a finer type of man. With the possible
exception of a few of the younger men, an aristocratic faculty would
be made up of men worthy of the rank and salary of a full professor.
In the aristocratic college or university the competition for students
would be replaced by the competition of applicants for entrance; and
an institution which preserved its independence by thus deliberately
determining the scope of its work would have the choice of the best.
Admission to college would then become what it might conceivably be
expected to be, an aristocratic privilege. Of course, an aristocratic
institution of learning could not hope to make a constant noise in the
world. It should none the less be an inspiring and pervasive influence
in the direction of a higher tone of thought and morals for all of
society.
TRUST-BUSTING AS A NATIONAL PASTIME
A German economist recently visiting the United States was asked to
explain how Germany's policy toward industrial combinations differed
from ours. He said the difference that struck him most was that
Germany did not go about solving the problem through legislation in
the same light-hearted way that we seemed to. Perhaps, he added, this
is because the old fashioned view still prevails in Germany that laws
once enacted are to be rigidly and impartially enforced. He continued,
that beyond amending her corporation law to insure that actual assets
should bear a constant relation to nominal capital, to impose personal
liability upon promoters and directors for losses due to untrue or
misleading information which they might circulate, and to punish
severely all forms of unfair competition, Germany had refrained from
legislating on the subject. Nothing, he pointed out, like our
anti-trust act,--to say nothing of our New Jersey seven-sister laws or
our pending federal five-brother bills,--was to be found in German
legislation. On the contrary, he asserted, combination agreements
fixing prices and controlling outputs are enforced by German courts as
readily as any other contracts, and the dissolution of a combination
like the Westphalian coal cartell would be regarded not as a matter
for public rejoicing, but as a serious blow to national prosperity. He
did not maintain that Germany had solved the trust problem, but said
that her attitude was well described as one of "watchful waiting."
To American statesmen the policy of Germany must seem weak and
pusillanimous to a degree. They have become so habituated to the
thought that "the anti-trust act is the _magna charta_ of our business
liberties," that attorneys-general and members of Congress vie with
one another in the race to add fresh victims to the list of busted
trusts to the credit of the dominant political party. Presidents
"point with pride" to the number of prosecutions carried to a
successful conclusion during their administrations. If the zeal of the
department of justice seems to flag, Congress creates special
committees to investigate the steel trust or other suspected
combination, and thus a healthful rivalry is maintained which not only
keeps the names of the "busters" prominently before the public, but
supplies an unending stream of near facts for our newspapers, ever
fearless champions of truth and justice.
Exhilarating as is this national pastime of trust-busting, the latest
legislative proposals in Congress may well give pause even to the most
ardent. Four bills have been seriously put forward which if enacted
would make criminal many of the most common practices of American
business men. The climax is reached in a clause in one of these
measures that specifically makes it a crime for business men "to make
any agreement, enter into any arrangement, or arrive at any
understanding by which they, directly or indirectly, undertake to
prevent a free and unrestricted competition among themselves or among
any purchasers or consumers in the sale, production or transportation
of any product, article, or commodity." Under this clause California
orange growers who join together for the grading, packing and
marketing of their fruit would be parties to a criminal conspiracy.
Milk farmers who maintain coöperative creameries would be equally
culpable. Labor organizations restraining the competition of their
members in the sale of their labor are condemned. This bill, if
enacted and rigidly enforced would make of business a _bellum omnium
contra omnes_, and bring us back to the atomic stage of our industrial
development. That such ill-considered legislation will be enacted is
highly improbable, but its serious proposal invites a sober
reconsideration of our whole trust policy.
The first aspect of the present situation that must strike the
impartial observer is the inconsistency of the policy we are adopting
toward our railroads and other common carriers. Since 1887 these
businesses have been subject to regulation through the Interstate
Commerce Commission, justified on the ground that for them competition
is not an adequate means of control, and that unless their
monopolizing greed is subjected to rigid regulation, the interests of
the public must suffer. That these businesses are natural monopolies
of organization, that is, businesses that can be most efficiently and
economically administered as single or closely combined organizations
in each of the localities to which they minister, every economist
would agree. Competition in rates among railroads is undesirable
because it means costly and destructive rate wars that can only end in
rate agreements, tacit or open.
The policy of empowering the Interstate Commerce Commission to fix
rates, and thus secure reasonableness and stability, is thus sound
public policy. Amendments to the interstate commerce act, giving the
commission a similar power over express rates and telegraph and
telephone rates, where competition is also absent or self-destructive,
have been made or should be made.
But while we are committed to this policy of regulated combination of
common carriers, we still apply to them the Sherman act prohibiting
combinations! Without any attempt to decide or even discuss whether
the combinations into which the railroads have entered (the lease of
the Southern Pacific by the Union Pacific, for example) make for
economy and efficiency, the Attorney-General feels compelled by the
law which he is bound to administer, to search out such combinations
and force their dissolution. No well informed railroad man would
maintain that any benefit redounded either to the public or to the
railroads by forcing the Southern Pacific and the Union Pacific apart.
Yet the Attorney-General congratulates himself on the achievement, and
public opinion approves because it is clear that the process was both
costly and painful to the railroads themselves. That what is bad for
the railroads must be good for the rest of us seems to be the popular
logic of the matter.
The most recent triumph of the department of justice, in this field,
is the forcing apart of the telephone and telegraph monopolies. That
these businesses can best be operated in combination, is obvious to
anyone who has given any thought to the character of the services they
render. Receiving and delivering telegrams by telephone add greatly to
the efficiency of the system, not only because of the saving of time,
but because of the multiplication of offices from which either
telephone calls or telegrams may be despatched. In many localities the
same poles may be used for stringing both kinds of wires. Finally, on
the administrative side, the opportunity for saving through
concentration of management is considerable. At the same time that the
Attorney-General was effecting this divorce, the Postmaster General
was urging the advantages not only of having these two businesses
combined, but of having both managed by the government in connection
with the postal service. As has been well said, if the Postmaster
General is right in advocating the operation of both the telegraph and
long-distance telephone businesses by the post-office, the
Attorney-General cannot be right in thinking the dismemberment of the
telegraph-telephone combination was in the line of wise public policy.
It has long been clear to thoughtful citizens that as the policy of
regulating natural monopolies is perfected, the policy of prohibiting
combination in this field of enterprise should be abandoned. No such
amendment of the anti-trust act is, however, included among the trust
bills now before Congress! They continue to ignore the distinction
between natural monopolies and ordinary businesses, and to force upon
both the _form_ of competition; although, as regards the former, the
reality has long been notoriously absent. Under the law as applied by
the Supreme Court, it is still criminal for the railroads to enter
into rate agreements. That they do enter into such agreements,
however, is tacitly recognized even by the Interstate Commerce
Commission, in entertaining from them a collective demand for a five
per cent increase in rates. No wonder a German visitor is led to
remark upon the contrast his country presents, where the old fashioned
view still prevails that laws should be enforced!
As combination in the railroad, telegraph and telephone businesses is
a perfectly normal economic development, conducing to the public
interest rather than opposed to it, so it is far from proven that
combinations among manufacturers, such as are freely permitted in
Germany, are not often advantageous. The steel industry may be used to
illustrate the argument. Here is a branch of business in which
concentration and large scale production make for economy, until a
scale of operations is attained calling for millions of dollars of
capital and thousands of employees. The Carnegie Steel Company, the
Jones-Laughlin Steel Company, the Illinois Steel Company, all grew up
under highly competitive conditions, and each attained a gigantic size
without passing the point where enlarging the scale of operations
continued to make for economy in production. But when an industry is
of such a character that success necessitates the investment of
millions of dollars in each competing aggregation of producing units,
a situation is presented where the losses due to unrestrained
competition are correspondingly enormous. In times of prosperity, each
producing organization expands to realize more fully the economies of
large scale production. Iron and coke properties are secured to insure
uninterrupted supply of raw materials; transportation facilities are
acquired, since the business is so large as to require for its
exclusive use fleets of vessels and special railroad carriers; blast
furnaces and rolling mills are built in convenient proximity, to
permit the conversion of raw materials into finished products with
least expenditure of time and effort. This development is in obedience
to the laws of expanding trade. If the industry is to be economically
conducted, it must occur, and the public interest demands that it
shall occur.
A period of depression now ensues. If each of the competing units
pursues its own interest blindly, disregardful of the general good of
the trade, each will compete desperately to secure the largest share
of the diminished trade. Prices will be recklessly cut. It is better
to operate mines and mills at low profits, at no profits, or even at a
loss, than to have mines and mills shut down, the properties
deteriorate, and the skilled labor force that has been slowly drawn
together dispersed far and wide over the country. There is thus no
limit short of actual bankruptcy to which the competitors will not
find it to their interest to go so long as they remain competitors.
But why should they carry their competition to such reckless lengths?
Will it not be better for each and for all to produce moderately at
low profits until the depression has passed, and conserve all the
producing machinery for the time when business will revive, as it
surely will revive, and all will again be needed? Is such combination
to restrain competition opposed to the interest of the whole
community? What useful purpose, after all, is served by forcing large
numbers of steel plants into bankruptcy in every period of depression,
with the result that the machinery for production becomes quite
inadequate to meet the demand when prosperity returns, and prices are
forced to levels as unreasonably high as they were unreasonably low
during the depression? Instead of having steel either prince or
pauper, is it not better to have steel a contented and moderately
prosperous citizen at all times? It is contended that this life and
death competition makes for more rapid improvement in productive
methods, but does it? Under a regime of regulated combination, each
producing unit is still under strong pressure to cut down its expenses
of production, and to make its profits by that much larger. Is there
any real evidence that improvements in methods have not been
introduced as rapidly since the steel trust was organized in 1901, as
they were before? In that period the open hearth process has been
substituted on a vast scale for the Bessemer process. The Steel
Corporation has spent millions of dollars in developing its plants at
Gary to the highest efficiency yet known in the industry. Its smaller
rivals have been equally active. Although in many lines prices have
been steadied, and run-away markets in either direction prevented,
there have been as eager efforts to improve on existing methods, and
to concentrate production at the points best fitted for it, as there
ever were before.
There are, of course, considerations to be urged on the other side. If
allowed to combine to prevent disastrously low prices, steel
manufacturers will be under temptation to take advantage of the
situation by imposing unreasonably high prices. "When producers reach
for one another's hands, let consumers guard their throats!" If such
combination is to be tolerated, it must be under the restraining
influence of a strong federal commission that will enforce publicity,
will prevent unfair and oppressive methods toward non-members of the
combination, and will be prepared as a last resort to ask Congress for
authority to prescribe reasonable prices in exceptional cases, just as
the Interstate Commerce Commission has been given authority to
regulate in the public interest the charges of common carriers.
The objection most strongly urged against such a policy in high
quarters is that it means "regulated monopoly" and that monopoly is
intolerable. There are three possible policies which government may
apply to business: that of enforced competition, that of regulated
competition, and that of regulated monopoly. The bill that we have
criticized would enforce competition by penalizing every slightest
departure from it in the direction of coöperation. This is so
obviously not in harmony with the coöperative spirit of the day, that
the latest _pronunciamento_ from Washington declares in favor not of
"enforced" competition but of "regulated" competition. Regulated
competition is a policy on which all may seemingly unite, but there is
wide difference of opinion as to what it will ultimately lead to.
Those who consider regulated monopoly intolerable believe that in all
lines of business, provided that small business men are protected from
unfair and oppressive methods of competition on the part of their
larger rivals, that a reasonable amount of publicity is required, and
that artificial methods of bringing about monopoly are prevented,
competition will remain a dominant force. They make light of the
alleged economies of combination and view the whole trust movement as
the offspring of monopolistic greed and the profit-hunger of the
promoter and high financier. Those who believe that in other lines of
business than the recognized natural monopolies, all embracing
combinations would be able to produce more efficiently and therefore
sell more cheaply than smaller producing units, think that regulated
competition, at least for these lines, must develop in the long run
into regulated monopoly. Instead of regarding regulated monopoly as
intolerable they view it as natural and inevitable. While they admit
that the superiority of large combinations cannot be proved from
American experience, since regulated competition is only just
beginning to have a fair trial here, they point confidently, in
support of their theory, to what is going on in Germany. In view of
this diversity of expert opinion, it would seem to be the part of
prudence to give regulated competition a fuller trial before going in
either for enforced competition, on the one hand, or regulated
monopoly, on the other.
As a step toward a wiser solution of the combination problem, than the
blind condemnation and prohibition of all combinations, which has thus
far dominated American legislation, the proposal to create an
Interstate Trade Commission now before Congress merits the support of
all classes. Such a commission could aid materially in the enforcement
of the anti-trust act, and should therefore be favored by the
trust-busters. It could pass on the plans of business men before they
enter upon them, and thus give at least negative aid in avoiding
arrangements that might be held unlawful. Finally, it could collect
the information necessary to a wise decision between our present
policy of prohibiting combinations and the German policy of permitting
them, subject to a policy of "watchful waiting" on the part of the
government.
It is indicative of the present state of mind of our public men that
the very committees of Congress which are considering the creation of
such a commission, are considering at the same time measures that
would largely prevent it from accomplishing the good that is to be
expected from it. It is earnestly to be hoped that Congress may be
induced to content itself at this time with creating a competent trade
commission. If it is not prepared expressly to exempt from the
operation of the anti-trust act the common carriers subject to
regulation by the Interstate Commerce Commission, may it at least
refrain from making that act odious as well as ridiculous, and leave
to the Supreme Court the task, on which it is so well advanced, of
giving it an interpretation that is at once clear and reasonable!
OUR GOVERNMENT SUBVENTION TO LITERATURE
M. Paul Otlet, the Secretary of the Brussels International
Bibliographic Institute, places the total annual book production of
the entire globe at approximately 150,000 volumes per annum.
Senor Eduardo Ravarro Salvador, a distinguished Spanish author, has
compiled with greatest care statistics of a similar nature which are
printed in the _Madrid Heraldo_, and his estimate quite closely
confirms the other, aggregating approximately a little over 160,000
for the year 1911.
A dozen years ago, when book production was smaller than today, Mr.
Percy L. Parker, in the _New York Independent_, gave the total number
of books issued by thirteen countries in an average year as 77,250,
which would be not as large as the estimates of either Senor Salvador
or M. Otlet, but is nevertheless of use in confirming them, and
increasing the probability that a mean of the three estimates may be
quite substantially near to the truth.
Mr. Joseph B. Gilder, in an article in the _New York Times_, for
January 25, 1914, states that our Ambassador to the Court of St.
James, Mr. Page of the publishing firm of Doubleday, Page and Co.,
said not long before departing for his post, that American men spend
less for books than for neckties, and American women less than for the
buttons on their frocks. The same article quotes the Boston
bookseller, Mr. W. B. Clarke, who is Chairman of the Executive
Committee of the American Booksellers Association, as saying that the
per capita consumption of books is less than of any other commodity.
Following Mr. Gilder's article, and using the statistics of the
_Statesman's Year Book_, as to population, and of the _World Almanac_,
as to book production in 1910, we find that in Switzerland there was
one book printed for every 872 population; in Japan one to 1,224; in
Germany one to 2,075; in France one to 3,809; in Great Britain one to
3,808; and in the United States one to 7,295. In 1911 our showing was
not quite so good.
According to statistics prepared for the _World Almanac_, and to
sources indicated above, and others, the number of books issued
annually in the United States varies in late years but little either
way from 10,000. It would appear that the United States issued roughly
only about six per cent of the total, and if we deduct new editions
and translations, only about four per cent of the total.
Further, by an examination of these various and varying statistics
from the best experts, it is evident that little Switzerland, which is
scarcely one-eighteenth the size of our State of Texas, and whose
population is less than one-twenty-fifth that of the United States,
publishes more than three-quarters as many books per annum as we do;
in other words, ten times as many books per million inhabitants per
annum are published by Switzerland as by the United States. In fact
she leads the world in this particular.
By similar analysis, we find that the Scandinavian countries, Denmark,
Sweden and Norway, which in book production are next in rank to
Switzerland, have an output of about six times ours. Germany, France,
the British Empire, Holland, Italy, Austria greatly surpass us, all
running, per million of population, from three and one-half to five
times our output. Roumania, with one-thirteenth our population,
publishes one-fourth as many books; Japan with slightly more than half
our population, publishes four times as many; in other words, eight
times as many per million of population; but a large number of these
are pamphlets: so instead of publishing in percentages eight times as
many, she really issues an average of between three and four times as
many, which makes our showing even then bad enough.
In the density of our ignorance, we sometimes think and speak of
Russia as a benighted country, forgetting that in her middle and upper
circles, she is vibrant with intellectual and artistic energy. In book
production, even though the showing on her side is distorted by the
countless millions of her ignorant peasant class, who number about 79
per cent of her population, we find that she produces two and
three-quarters times as many books as we do, and has a population only
one and two-thirds times larger. In other words, she materially
exceeds us in book production.
This leaves us to seek in Spain the only one of the civilized nations
of the entire globe that publishes so few books per million of
population per annum as we do; and it is questionable whether we are
able to hold the lead over even her: for an analysis of the statistics
of both Otlet and Salvador places us slightly behind united Spain and
Portugal, the figures for the two being given in conjunction. Beneath
these there is no lower depth.
Germany produces more books than any other nation in the seven highly
creditable classes of educational, arts and sciences, _belles
lettres_, theology, medicine, voyages, and law.
Italy holds first rank in political economy; France in history, poetry
and drama; and the United States ties France for first place in one
item only, books on sport. That is our best bid for a premier place.
The _Publishers' Weekly_, the semi-official organ of the book trade,
in its issue of Jan. 30, 1904, contains the following statement:
The great decrease in all the more serious departments of
literature, as well as in some of the lighter ones, is a curious
and unexplainable condition of our book production. Scientific
and philosophical writings are as conspicuous through their
absence as are the simply amusing books.
Moreover, this backward condition of America's book production is a
new situation that has existed for a generation only. That this is so,
is shown in various ways, but particularly in the parlous condition of
the retail bookselling trade. A generation ago, when our population
was a little less than one-half what it is today, there were in the
United States, it is estimated, between three and four thousand
booksellers carrying fairly good stocks of books representative of
history, light science, economics, art, biography, travel, poetry,
essays, fiction and _belles lettres_ generally.
There are less than fifteen hundred booksellers left, and this number
is steadily being diminished through withdrawals from business. Yet on
January 9, 1914, the Secretary of the American News Company told the
House Committee on Post Office that the country contains nearly a
hundred thousand news stands.
Since there were three or four thousand bookstores, not only has the
population of the country more than doubled, but the general average
of wealth has increased markedly, being quite four times what it was
then: so that by good rights the three or more thousand booksellers of
that day should have increased three-fold or over, to at least ten
thousand, instead of diminishing by more than one-half.
* * * * *
If it be true, as has been repeatedly asserted, that a good bookstore,
well stocked and intelligently managed, performs an educational work
in any community only slightly, if indeed at all, less important than
that done by its schools, colleges, libraries or churches, this
deplorable condition of affairs merits serious attention.
The reason for the situation is not far to seek: though not even its
existence, let alone its cause, is as generally known as it should be.
Yet the cause seems plainly and definitely determinable. To arrive at
it, we must turn from book production to another printing-trade
industry that has waxed in the United States as book production has
waned. Forty years ago less than ten million copies of periodicals,
exclusive of newspapers, were published annually. Today it is
estimated that there are published over seven-and-a-half billion, and
of this quantity more than one-half gets distribution through the
mails. These extra hundreds of millions of periodicals would seem to
mean as many tens of millions fewer good books; and that seems to be
virtually the sole cause of the disappearance of the books.
* * * * *
On June 23, 1874, there was approved an act of Congress establishing a
pound rate of postage on mail matter of the second-class--newspapers
and periodicals. At first this rate was three cents a pound for
magazines, and two for newspapers. Soon it was lowered to two cents
for each, and still later, becoming operative on July 1, 1885, the
rate was reduced to only one cent per pound for each. The cost of
service rendered then and every year since, is many times that amount:
at present it is estimated by various experts and commissions as
running from 6-1/2 cents to 12 cents per pound.
The effect of that law is emphatically shown in the following table
giving amounts of second-class mail (periodical literature) carried by
the Post Office Department at various dates.
For 1875 (first year law was operative) 40,000,000 pounds
" 1880 61,000,000 "
" 1890 204,000,000 "
" 1900 450,000,000 "
" 1913 1,096,000,000 "
At this rate, within less than ten years, if the law is not changed,
this output will have increased to more than _two billion pounds_ per
annum.
Evidently giving to periodical literature this service at one cent
per pound, $20. per ton, the cost being eight or ten times as much,
has been simply a subvention, and a very effective one. Although we
publish few books as compared with other civilized nations, we issue
more periodicals than all other nations put together, and half as much
again: for we publish sixty per cent of the periodical literature of
the entire globe.
The United States, according to the report of the Third Assistant
Postmaster General for January, 1914, handled in the second-class
mail, during the fiscal year ending June 30, 1913, over five thousand
million copies of periodicals--more than fifty for each man, woman and
child in the United States--enough to make more than 2,600 train loads
of ten fully loaded cars per train. And this does not take into
consideration the enormous number of copies of daily newspapers and
other periodicals which are circulated outside of the mails, by
carriers, newsdealers and others.
* * * * *
Underlying this megalosaurus-like development, is the factor that
carriage by the government at the nearly free rate of one cent per
pound, covers not only the literary product but the advertising
material which has been the determining factor in this marvellous
increase. At the time the pound-rate law first became operative,
magazines were few in number, and contained little advertising and
much good literature; but the pound-rate law gave birth to a new kind
of magazine issued at less than cost for the revenue to be derived,
because of the immense circulation possible under the subvention, from
its advertising pages; _and their advertising pages generally weigh
more and cost the government more to transport, than do their literary
pages_.
To increase this revenue, circulations were forced by methods that
directly violated the law, and these methods are still being used.
Premiums were given to an extent that led to an investigation by the
Post Office Department, and it was found (Third Assistant Postmaster
General's report, Dec. 1, 1911, p. 39) that in one case four-fifths of
the subscribers went for the premium, the publication being worth
nothing except as an advertising medium because of its large
circulation--a circulation with which, despite the government
subvention, literature had nothing to do. Another periodical, weekly
and agricultural, forced by premium 122,000 subscriptions out of
143,000; another 41,000 out of 53,000.
There are hundreds of needless growths of this sort. As an instance,
there are published in the United States some eighty-six banking
periodicals. The Secretary of the American Bankers' Association, when
asked how many of these were needed, replied: "From three to six, and
the other eighty are 'leg pullers.' They live in great part by
sandbagging advertising out of financial interests."
* * * * *
Dr. Talcott Williams, at the session of the American Historical
Association at Washington a few years ago, said that one hundred years
earlier, the aggregate weight of one copy of each issue of an ordinary
city daily for a year was about ten pounds; fifty years later it was
twenty-five pounds; twenty-five years later it had become fifty
pounds; and when he spoke it was a hundred and twenty-five pounds;
while in some instances the Sunday editions alone weigh more than
that. How much of it is published to the real advantage of the
community?
Upon careful consideration, it seems evident that at first the law
diverted the patronage of the reading public from books to the
higher-priced and more respectable magazines, those so priced that
their sale at the published rate would be possible even if the
advertising were a minor consideration; that next, the twenty-five
cent issues cut the ground from under these older and higher-priced
ones; that then rapidly appeared the fifteen-cent ones, and next the
ten-cent ones--all so expensive to make that only the great volume of
advertising rendered the low price possible; and that now the
five-cent issues are, in their turn, no less rapidly displacing the
ten-cent ones. Swift's doggerel tells the tale:
So, naturalists observe, a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite 'em;
And so proceed _ad infinitum_.
While this article has primarily to do with the decadence of our
literature, the economic side should not be lost sight of.
For the fiscal year ending June 30, 1913, the expense account of the
Post Office Department amounted to over $260,000,000. The second-class
mail supplied nearly two-thirds of the tonnage, and cost more than
one-third of the total aggregate of expense, but the revenue paid by
its publishers amounted to just under $10,000,000, as against the cost
of over $86,000,000.
To make up for the loss thus incurred, the first-class mail--the
letter mail, which weighed only about one-fifth as many pounds, had to
supply $175,000,000 of revenue from a service costing the government
less than $100,000,000. That is to say, the letter mail paid eighteen
times as much revenue as the second-class mail, and weighed but
one-fifth as much.
There were carried the past year very nearly two billions of postal
cards which produced a revenue of nearly $20,000,000. The weight of
these was only about 12,000,000 pounds. _Twelve_ million pounds of
postal cards therefore produced almost exactly twice as much revenue
as _one thousand_ million pounds of publishers' second-class mail.
Averaging all in all, first-class mail costs at most not quite four
times as much per pound as second-class mail, and pays eighty-four
times as much.
In other words, each time that one of the forty or fifty million
users of the first-class mail puts a two-cent stamp on a letter, one
cent pays for the service rendered, and nearly all of the other cent
is taken by the Department to give the "special privilege" of service
at one-eighth of cost, to less than thirty thousand periodical
publishers.
* * * * *
Is it any wonder that new periodicals have begun their career in the
United States at the rate of more than ten a day for every day,
Sundays and holidays included, of the past fifteen years? Fortunately,
however, the death rate is nearly as great as the birth rate; but
since those that persist are the selected growths, there is, as we
have seen, a tremendous annual increase.
One expert estimates that the total number of books published in the
world since the invention of printing is some fifteen millions, and
another, more modest, places the figures at between ten and twelve
millions. Assuming for each book a first edition of one thousand
copies, a somewhat common issue, we should have from ten billion to
fifteen billion copies of _all_. In other words, there are issued in
the United States _each year_ from one-half to three-quarters as many
copies of periodicals as have _ever_ been published in the first
editions of _all_ books ever printed by all the nations of the world.
There can be no deduction made from the general features of the
situation other than that the distribution of this one class of
merchandise at a practically free rate is nearly the sole reason for
this wasteful over-production.
When the pound-rate law was enacted, the distinct purpose was
announced that its effect should be educational. The contrary is
unmistakably the case. The reading of the ten to twenty minute
magazine article or the skimming over of the Sunday paper, seems to
have become too often the limit of the intellectual activity of our
people of average education.
To carry the _Police Gazette_ at a cent a pound while charging eight
times as much for a spelling book or Bible, and then to claim that
the law permitting this discrepancy was enacted in the interests of
education, is at least edifying. Archbishop Hare in his bright little
volume _Guesses at Truth_ once remarked that a very bad reason was in
effect next to a very good one.
Mr. J. N. Larned the very eminent librarian says:
The so-called _news_paper which interests itself and which labors
to interest its readers in the trivialities and ignoble
occurrences of the day--in the prize fights and mean
preliminaries of prize fights, the boxing matches, the ball
games, the races, the teas, the luncheons, the receptions, the
dresses, the goings and comings and private doings of private
persons--making the most in all possible ways of all petty things
and low things, while treating grave matters with levity and
impertinence--with what effect can such a _news_paper be read? I
do not care to say. If I spoke my mind, I might strike harshly at
too many whose reading is confined to such sheets, but I will
venture so much remark as this: That I would prefer absolute
illiteracy for a son or a daughter of mine, total inability to
spell a single printed word, rather than that he or she should be
habitually a reader of the common newspaper of America of today,
and a reader of nothing better.
According to Census Bulletin No. 57 for 1905, there was spent in the
preceding year in the entire country for newspapers the enormous sum
of $280,000,000, and for all textbooks for use in both public and
private schools, sectarian and non-sectarian, and in all colleges,
only some $12,000,000! More than $23 spent for ephemeral literature,
much of which debases the literary taste of the community, for each
dollar spent for literature whose function was technically
educational.
To get a further idea of the literary pabulum that the government
subvention is creating for us, let us consider an average magazine of
the so-called popular sort. Someone defines it as follows:
"A magazine is a small body of literature, entirely surrounded by
advertising. In this respect, it resembles a railroad ham sandwich
with the advertising bread cut very thick and the literary meat in
especially thin slices. The situation is well summarized when Dooley
says: 'Hinnessy, mon, last night on my way home from wurruk I bought
one of them popular magazines expectin' after I had eaten me supper
and put on me slippers, and lighted me pipe, to sit down for a quiet
avenin's enjoyment looking over the advertisements, and do you know,
mon, twinty-five per cent of the dommed thing was just nothing but
"litherachoor."'"
The magazine frequently gives great prominence to pictures of
actresses--doubtless by favorable arrangements with their managers.
With these may appear an article with an alliterative title, showing
How Cleveland was Cunningly Conned; How Placid Philadelphia's
Putridity was Purged; Why Denver went to the Devil; etc. Then may
follow an article explaining how our reporter Wily Willie went under
"_Jawn Dee's_" window and, by making a noise like an extra dividend,
secured an interview with him. Then a trifling poem or two, and a long
continued dry-as-dust serial story, which serves in some measure as
the talcum powder to disinfect, so to speak, the rest. Then may follow
a Retraction article, showing that whereas we stated in our latest
issue that an emissary of the Standard Oil Co. was responsible for the
Chicago Conflagration by sneaking up behind Mrs. O'Leary's cow and
sticking a pin into her while she was being milked, we wish to inform
our readers that we are now convinced that this was incorrect. Further
investigation shows that the Standard Oil Co. was entirely innocent.
It was an employee of the Packing House Trust who was guilty of the
dastardly deed. Then perhaps will follow a Passionate Personal Appeal
from the publisher for subscriptions to about $10,000,000 worth of
stock of the Magazine Company. (Send in any sum from $1 up, use the
corner coupon.) All of this will be encased in a gaudy, if not neat,
cover bearing a design showing a girl's face and some of her form. If
you want to see the rest of that, look at the corset advertisements
inside. An old lady lately said that when she read her modern
magazine, she felt that she had been to an undress party where the men
all came in their "_unions_" and the women in their "_nemos_." Then
will follow advertisements of soaps, soups, shoes, massage creams and
a thousand other articles.
As illustrating another abuse that results from the pound-rate
privilege: Let me refer to some periodicals that are light in weight;
certain small magazines, for example, weigh but a fraction of an
ounce, and the government must distribute many of them in order to
secure one cent. We have in our possession a little Farm Journal so
light that it takes forty copies to make a pound. As it is published
monthly, not until the Post Office has served a subscriber with this
journal for three years and four months, will it get as much as a
single cent for the entire service.
And the government carries this kind of literature, advertising and
all, at one cent a pound--$20 per ton, and charges for books eight
cents per pound--$160 per ton, and for the social-letter and business
mail, 84 cents per pound, $1680 per ton!!
* * * * *
Bryan's philosophy was sounder than it sometimes has been, when he
said:
The Supreme Court has described _unjust taxation as larceny in
the form of law_. If one citizen is compelled by law to pay ten
dollars for the support of the government where he ought to only
pay five, and under the same law a neighbor is required to pay
but five where he should pay ten, the law which causes this
inequality simply transfers five dollars from one man's pocket to
another's.
Then a law which is each year taking over seventy-five million dollars
of net profit, above cost of service, from the ninety-three million
people who benefit from letters, in order to give the thirty thousand
periodical publishers service for ten million dollars which costs
_many_ times that sum, is certainly not merely petty larceny or grand
larceny, but larceny that is absolutely grandiose.
To illustrate: One publishing company, it is reported, made last year
a net profit of over two million dollars. Their postage was about
$650,000, and it cost the government over $4,500,000 to handle the
output. Moreover, more than $11,000,000 of advertising was borne on
the pages of those publications, and for it the company also received
virtually free distribution.
* * * * *
Had a special privilege as great as this of the second-class mail rate
been enjoyed at national expense by any class of citizens other than
its publishers, the publishers would not have permitted it to exist a
year. Yet the loss has long been well known to post-office officials
and members of Congress, though for a time it was kept from the
knowledge of the public, because practically the sole means the public
has had of obtaining the knowledge, has been through the columns of
journals that enjoy the privilege. The _North American Review_ for
February, 1908, had a most scathing article by Professor Munroe Smith,
entitled _The Dogma of Journalistic Inerrancy_ that illustrated this
situation forcibly.
No lobby sent to Washington in furtherance of corrupt legislation has
ever been more persistent or dealt less fairly with both legislators
and public than the lobby that has worked for retention of the
second-class mail rate. Some able editors have been accused of hunting
very jealously for other people's pulls while maintaining a pretty
heavy one of their own.
And the ceaselessly increasing monthlies of mammoth circulation that
so nobly, though with somewhat of iteration, harp upon the graft of
our plutocrats, our patent medicine manufacturers, our frenzied
financiers, our food trusts, our fraudulent insurance officials--is it
possible that none of their diatribes, worthy though they may be, are
never to be directed against themselves? Let us hope that some of
these public-spirited citizens so patriotically intent upon ridding a
much-suffering land of its various forms of organized rapacity, may be
led to see a great light in connection with the one industry of this
country that is by law largely relieved from subjection to those
competitive forces to which producers and distributors of all other
articles are keenly alive.
* * * * *
We may in time realize the truth of Emerson's remark that "though no
checks to a new evil appear, the checks exist and will appear." For it
is fast becoming notorious that that advertising which is as the
breath of life to all those low-priced periodicals, has passed beyond
the line of marginal utility, and will not compensate the farther sale
of the magazines at less than cost of production.
A generation ago an English-born resident of Australia was homesick.
He thought how charming it would be to see gamboling about his place
an English rabbit. He imported a pair. The soil and climate proved
congenial. They multiplied with enormous rapidity, and recently the
Australian government had a standing offer of £25,000 for anybody who
would devise some practical method of exterminating the rabbit pest.
Another settler, this time a New Zealander of Caledonian birth,
recalling to mind the rugged beauty of the Scotch thistle, imported
that, and planted it at his doorway. The resultant development was
similar. There are hundreds and hundreds of square miles of Scotch
thistles in New Zealand. A few years ago, a scientist imported for
experimental purposes, the gypsy moth, and caged it in his back yard
in one of the suburbs of Boston. A storm of wind and rain wrecked the
cage, and some of the moths escaped, with the result that the state of
Massachusetts has spent over three million dollars in an effort to
exterminate this pest that is devastating its forests and bids fair to
extend over the entire United States with a resultant loss of
countless millions of dollars.
In legislation as in biology, it sometimes seems easier, even with
good motives, to spread noxious things than useful ones. Our postal
legislation has bred a swarm of periodicals of which the vast majority
are but a swarm of pests.
In attacking them "at the source"--the cheap postage by which we
ourselves superficially seem to benefit, we are entitled to no credit.
On the contrary, while we think our action is in favor of the good
literature which we try to serve, we still must own up to selfish
motives. The rank growth of worthless periodical literature tends to
smother the kind which we and a few of our colleagues are trying to
make. We think some of those colleagues are standing in their own
light when they advocate the policy which breeds their worthless
competitors. Periodicals are like currency: the bad always drives out
the good.
* * * * *
The publishers of this REVIEW hope that, without having their motives
misconstrued, they can add, from their own experience, a very
suggestive illustration of the main contention of the foregoing
article. Most of the readers of the REVIEW are familiar with the Home
University Library, and some of them have praised it highly. In
England it has had a phenomenal success, in America but a very
moderate one. The American publishers are constantly being told that
in England it is on every railway news stand, and asked why it is not
here. The answer is that here the flood of cheap periodicals leaves no
room for anything more substantial. The Home University Library
appeals to a popular constituency, and there is a tremendous popular
demand for it in England, while in America there is none: its
circulation here is virtually restricted to the highly educated. The
rank and file of American readers have their tastes formed and
supplied by the Sunday newspapers and the cheap periodicals. The idea
of gathering a library of cheap books on substantial subjects is
virtually unknown among them.
The worst feature of the whole case is that the enormous demand for
inferior stuff limits the field for writers who can produce valuable
matter, and consequently checks the development of such writers. It
would be as difficult to produce a Home University Library in America
as it is to sell it. We have men of the requisite knowledge, but our
conditions do not attract them to cultivate the literary art. Few of
our scientific men and scholars are writers, many more of those in
England are. And as for imaginative literature!
The cheap carriage of our periodicals was avowedly enacted as a
government subvention to literature. Why was it not extended to books?
In a year's shipments they do not bulk nearly as large as periodicals.
Are we forced to the conclusion that at the present stage of
evolution, a helpful subvention to literature is beyond the power of a
pure democracy? If so, that is one reason for working all the harder
to raise the character of that democracy. Would the withdrawal of the
subvention be a good beginning?
EN CASSEROLE
_Special to Our Readers_
Many of our readers whom we have met have asked: "Why don't you give
us the names of your contributors?" and we suppose that many whom we
have not had the pleasure of meeting have the same curiosity.
Well, in the first place, we wish our articles to be taken on their
merits, and each, so far as practicable, to carry whatever authority
the REVIEW as a whole may be able to attain.
Next, among the popular fashions that we do not wish to follow is that
of exploiting names.
And finally, to be very candid, we need to profit by whatever
discussion may be aroused by speculation regarding the authorship of
the contributions.
Three months of anonymity, however, will be enough to secure the first
consideration, to lessen the objections inherent in the second, and to
give us most of whatever benefit may be realized from the third; and
therefore in such lists of contents of previous numbers as are
included in our advertising pages, we shall indicate the authors.
Moreover our advertising pages will often include lists of our most
frequent contributors, and this may add zest to such guessing at the
authorship of contributions as our readers may care to do.
Virtually all our contributors approve the anonymity, perhaps partly
because the names of most of them are so well known as to make farther
publicity a matter of indifference.
* * * * *
Another question often put to us by friends is: "How are you getting
along?"
Well (again), as our title indicates, we entered upon the enterprise
with our eyes wide open to the fact that it could never be popular.
Our only hope was that there might be enough people with standards
above the popular, to support the undertaking. We still feel justified
in entertaining that hope. Of course some ludicrous failures to
understand what we are about have been forced upon our attention, but
not as many as we expected; and we looked for more letters like the
first one following, which, we are surprised and glad to say, is the
only one of the kind we have received. All other dissent has been
expressed with intelligence and courtesy; and this is the only
occasion when our motives have been impugned. We think we can trust
our readers to understand why we give the letter, and also the answer
which the writer of the letter did not expect us to send. The former
seems to us one of the most interesting and instructive contributions
it has been our privilege to present, though not exactly for the
reasons which make our other contributions worth while. We are glad to
repeat, however, that the indications, so far, are that there is less
of this sort of thing about than we had supposed.
Here is the letter, in its essentials:
... This number contains some of the most insidious and dangerous
fallacies that it has been my fortune to peruse in many years,
and that are only intended to craftily instil into the minds of
the "rather large class" of people the erroneous doctrines thus
covertly inculcated by insinuations and to promote the consequent
satisfaction with their comparatively hard lot and the necessity
of contentment with their own condition as well as with that of
those who are subjects of a more forlorn state.
Now I am going to make a proposition to you that will prove
conclusively that your object in publishing that REVIEW is solely
for the purpose last above enumerated, as I do not hope that you
will accept my proposition; and that the REVIEW is supported by
the capital of the men who are a part of the financial oligarchy
that is bent on ruining the poorer classes of this country: I
will write you an article in opposition to the _Irrepressible
Conflict_ and the _Juggernaut of the Majority_, which will be
written in as good a diction as either of those articles and not
more controversial in tone and style than _Irrepressible
Conflict_, and shall expect as much pay for it as either of those
two articles secured to their respective authors, or as much as
it is worth if those articles were produced by respective members
of the said oligarchy; and shall insist, if you refuse to publish
it, that it is the substance and doctrine of it that make it
unavailable and _not_ the diction and style. I have a right to
ask this as the public press which claims to be the leaders of
public opinion, are teeming with just such articles as these that
I have criticised and are published for the _express purpose_ of
leading me and the remainder of the public astray on vital
questions affecting the material interests of us all,--in other
words, there is a comprehensive and well formed conspiracy among
publishers of almost _all_ newspapers and magazines to do as I
have said and to refuse to permit the other side to be heard. I
do not expect to ever get an answer to this letter but I shall
make just such use of the reticence and your silence as my poor
judgment teach me is legitimate and proper.
Our answer was:
... THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW is entirely the property of its
publishers.
It is not a forum for discussion, but a pulpit for the preaching
of what we believe to be sound doctrine. As you don't believe our
doctrine is sound, probably we would not believe yours is sound:
so your challenge to us to put it in our pulpit is of course
outside the case. You should send it to somebody of your own way
of thinking, or set up a pulpit of your own--into which we
certainly should not wish to challenge you to insert anything of
ours.
A change of subject may be welcome.
If any of our readers have been expecting an article on Psychical
Research in this number, their disappointment at not finding one may
be somewhat assuaged by the realization that the article in the first
number was of four times the average length. The apparent neglect here
however, is not real, but it has been impracticable to get what we
wanted. We hope to be more fortunate in the future.
_A Specimen of "Uplift" Legislation_
Since the bull against the comet, there has probably been no assertion
of authority as absurd as one recently furnished by our National
Government. Yet there was no attention called to it in the debate
preceding the passage of the act containing it, and we do not remember
seeing any notice of it in the press, although it was immense enough
and pitiful enough to justify Iliads.
For years, government--and no government more energetically than
President Wilson's--had been hammering away at the trusts, especially
those producing petroleum, steel and tobacco. Yet petroleum, steel and
tobacco are not necessaries of life, nor have their prices been rising
as much as the prices of necessaries of life. These have been rising
more than anything else. What has been done about them by the
government that has been destroying the trusts in other things? It has
simply gone out of its way to specially legalize a trust in these
things. In a bill providing money to fight trusts in comparatively
non-essential things, Congress specially exempted from prosecution any
trust that may be formed by the farmers to raise the price of food.
Other trusts claim to lower the prices of their products, and
sometimes have done it; but our government has not merely authorized
the farmers to form trusts, to raise the price of foods, but has
specially authorized them, in the letter of the law, to use methods
denied to everybody else but wage-earners; and this at a time when the
one problem above all others was how to lower the price of foods, and
when the high price was the one burden above all others on the poor.
This piece of imbecility was virtually a "rider" on the
trade-union-exemption rider, and was of course "playing politics" to
catch support for the principal rider.
_A Model of Divinatory Criticism_
In our efforts to uphold the dignity of letters, of course we intend
that each of our contributions shall be as nearly as possible a
perfect example from its special field, and ordinarily it would ill
become us to suggest the possibility of degrees of perfection. But our
readers will, we trust, find justification for our calling special
attention to the following model of divinatory criticism.
The fact that it has already passed the ordeal of the Authors' Club,
though a trifling derogation from its novelty, is much weightier as a
reason for presenting it for the careful consideration of our readers.
[Ed.]
* * * * *
The subject is the proper interpretation of a familiar lyric poem,
which runs, in the _textus receptus_, as follows:
Dr. Foster went to Gloucester
In a shower of rain;
He stepped in a puddle up to his middle
And never went there again.
The question is, What does this poem mean? What does it mean, that is,
in its intimate and ultimate essence? According to the conventional
interpretation these lines are didactic. Their higher import--what we
may call their spiritual center of gravity--is believed to reside in a
pragmatic moral conveyed, or at least adumbrated, in the last line:
"He never went there again." The idea is supposed to be--remember that
I am now speaking of the conventional interpretation--that he never
went there again because he had learned wisdom by experience--the
annoying experience of the puddle. According to this view the dominant
note of the poem is not lyrical feeling, but what literary critics are
wont to call--usually with a shade of contempt--ethicism. It is
supposed to be a sort of psalm of life--pitched to be sure in a minor
key, but essentially didactic.
I wish to show you that this conventional interpretation is altogether
wrong. I shall try to prove that we have to do here, not with a
shallow didactic rime, not with a piece of brain-spun ethicism, such
as a common poetaster might produce, but with a lyrical ballad of
deeply felt tragic import.
I call your attention, in the first place, to the singular ambiguity
in that famous last line. "He never went there again." "Never went
where?" one instinctively asks. Are we to understand merely that
Foster henceforth avoided the particular puddle into which he had
stepped, or that he in after time discontinued his visits to
Gloucester altogether? This is evidently a question of vital
importance, and the poem at first does not seem to answer it at all.
In the absence of biographical data extraneous to the text, we can
only attack the problem by analytic methods. Let us consider the only
two possible hypotheses.
1. That Foster never went to Gloucester again. This supposition is
utterly untenable, because it is clearly inconsistent with Foster's
character, which can be read from the poem itself with entire
certainty. In the first place, he was clearly a doctor of medicine.
Had he been a doctor of laws, or letters, or philosophy, there would
have been no special urgency in his call to Gloucester, and he would
surely have waited until the weather should clear up. Secondly he was
a youngish doctor. Had he been an elderly practitioner he would not
have gone himself, but would have sent his assistant. Or perhaps he
would have telephoned that he would come immediately, and would then
have quietly waited for the rain to cease. But our Dr. Foster
"went"--went in a shower of rain. From this we see, in the third
place, that he was a man of energy, capable of self-abnegation,
dominated by a strong sense of professional duty. Now can we suppose
that such a man would have renounced forever his practice in
Gloucester merely because he had stepped casually into a puddle in a
well meant effort to reach the place? The supposition is an insult to
his intelligence and to ours. No doubt the incident of the puddle was
humiliating, but we do not read that there were spectators. In the
absence of specific evidence to the contrary we must assume that
Foster was alone. That being so, a man of his character would surely
have extricated himself from his unpleasant dilemma, given vent to his
emotions in language suited to the occasion, and gone on his way. It
is simply impossible to believe that he can have taken from the puddle
such a deep and lasting chagrin that he would have been willing to
renounce forevermore his growing practice in Gloucester.
2. We turn now to the other hypothesis, according to which Mater Anser
means merely that Foster never again stepped in that particular
puddle. This supposition makes the whole poem trivial to the point of
banality. Why in the world should any man in his senses deliberately
step into a deep puddle a second time? Remember too that it was
raining at the time. The puddle did not exist ordinarily, but was a
transitory affair due to the freshet. Had Foster chosen to come back
the next day, there would have been no puddle there, hence nothing to
be afraid of. To assume that a man of Foster's intelligence would have
retained through life a morbid dread of a mere depression in the
ground where he had once encountered a puddle is contrary to all
reason. Evidently we must seek some other interpretation for that
mysterious last line, "He never went there again."
And now observe, please, a singular technical defect in a poem which
is otherwise technically perfect. I refer to the dubious rime
_puddle-middle_. There has never been a time in the history of the
English language, so far as I know, when that was a tolerable rime. If
puddle were of French origin and had retained its French _ü_-sound,
"He stepped in a püddle up to his middle" might perhaps pass muster.
But _puddle_ is not of French origin. It was this bad rime, coupled
with the anatomical vagueness of the phrase "up to his middle," which
led me to conjecture that the _textus receptus_ must be corrupt. It is
pretty evident that Mater Anser originally wrote not "middle," but
some word which was taken for "middle" by a pestilent scribe. And what
word can that possibly have been but "noddle"? Perhaps a captious
critic may object that, as a matter of rime, _puddle-noddle_ is not
much better than _puddle-middle_. But remember that in early English o
and u were often confused. It is altogether likely that the word which
we pronounce _puddle_ was familiar to Mater Anser's dialect as
_poddle_. What she wrote was: He stepped in a poddle up to his noddle.
In the light flashed on the poem by this recension of the text, we
penetrate at once the mystery of that last line, "He never went there
again," because he never went anywhere again. He perished. His
promising career came then and there to an untimely end. We now
understand why it is that the career of Dr. Foster subsequent to his
memorable expedition to Gloucester has failed to interest the Muse.
There was no subsequent career.
I trust I have made it clear that Dr. Foster is the hero of a tragical
ballad. He is evidently a being of the same order as Achilles and
Siegfried--those dazzling heroes of the Dawn who are destined to run a
brilliant career in the pride of their youthful strength, and then to
meet with an untimely end. It is true that Achilles and Siegfried are
invulnerable, except in one place, and that we hear nothing of
Foster's invulnerability. But if you look closely you will find
something in his case that is quite analogous. The underlying idea of
the invulnerability is always simply this: That the hero is fated to
die in one particular way, and in no other. Now it is clear that
Foster was fated to die by water. Water was his enemy, his fate. A
pious mother had no doubt brought him up to dread and avoid it. When
he set out on that last journey he of course took an umbrella, but his
precautions did not end there. In view of the inclement weather he of
course felt the need of something to fortify the inner man, but he
durst not and did not drink water. He drank something else. Just what
it was we are not told, but it was evidently something that made him a
little unsteady on his feet. And so, just as in the case of Oedipus,
the very precautions that he took to avoid his predestined fate only
served to precipitate it.
* * * * *
I conclude by summing up briefly what my interpretation does for the
advancement of science.
1. It converts what has been supposed to be a rather trivial didactic
rime into a tragical ballad of heart-rending pathos.
2. It removes the one serious technical defect of the poem.
3. It accounts in a natural way for the oblivion which has settled
like a pall over the career of Dr. Foster after his visit to
Gloucester.
4. It enables us to connect Foster with the great heroes of epic song.
_Some Deserving "Climbers"_
Language, like society, has to recruit its upper strata from the
lower. Here are some recent candidates.
I. The very eminent author of _The Baby and the Bee_ in this number
puts into the mouth of one of the characters the word "humans" as an
equivalent for human beings. The same use of it has been met elsewhere
in quarters of less dignity. Many of our readers must have regretted
the absence from the language of a single word equivalent to _homo_.
Is not "human" as a noun worthy of being raised to that dignity?
II. Another new labor-saving locution has already found its way into
the Standard Dictionary, and seems worthy of general recognition. The
dictionary treats it thus:
thon, 1 thon; 2 thon, pron. sing. pl. [thon's, poss.; thon, obj.]
that one; he, she, or it; a pronoun of the 3rd person, common
gender; a contracted and solidified form of _that one_, proposed
in 1858 by Charles Crozat Converse, of Erie, Pennsylvania, as a
substitute in cases where the use of a restrictive pronoun
involves either inaccuracy or obscurity, or its non-employment
necessitates awkward repetition. The following examples, first as
ordinarily written, and afterward with the substitution of the
genderless pronoun, illustrate the grammatical deficiencies of
the English language in this particular and the proposed method
of removal: "If Harry or his wife comes, I will be on hand to
meet _him_ or _her_ (or whichever appears)." "Each pupil must
learn _his_ or _her_ own lesson." With the substitution of
_thon_; "If Harry or his wife comes, I will be on hand to meet
_thon_ (i.e., that one who comes)." "Each pupil must learn thon's
lesson (i.e., _his_ or _her_ own)." Compare he'er, him'er,
his'er.
III. A third applicant for the _cachet_ is "near," not as a
preposition, but as an adjective signifying imitation or ineffective
approximation, as, near pearls, near lover, near artist, etc., etc. It
would at least often save several syllables, and sometimes save a
circumlocution. It seems to have begun rather low down. We don't half
like it, and we were surprised to find it as far up as in an article
by an eminent professor in our present number. But there it was, and
it seems well on the way to full habilitation.
_Simplified Spelling_
The invitation in the January number for views on Simplified Spelling
has brought some interesting letters from both sides. The best
objections that we have seen anywhere are the following:
(1) From an eminent professor:
... This point, briefly, is whether the spoken language is the
only _entity_, so to say, to be considered in the case, and the
written language merely an effort to represent it, or whether the
written language is equally a reality for the purposes of
civilization....
I have just received a holiday greeting ... reading
Harty Crismas Greetings.
The chain of frendship reaching far
Links days that wer with days that ar.
For him [the sender] all written characters are absolutely
nothing but the effort to express spoken sounds, and he puts
anything on paper which he thinks will represent the sound he
wants most immediately for the reader's intelligence. If he is
right, if our written language is nothing but this, there should
be no delay in altering it radically.
But is my philological friend right? I think certainly not. Since
printing came to take a really large place in civilization, the
written word has been a _logos_--a direct means of representing
thought--quite as truly as the spoken. As an agency for
communicating thought between absent persons, for preserving
thought from one time to another, and even for communicating the
knowledge of a foreign tongue to a contemporary learner, the
written word actually exceeds the spoken in general importance.
And to a very large extent it does this _not_ by representing the
sounds of the spoken word, but by representing the idea through
an independent convention. When I read the word "choir" I do not
think first that it represents the syllable _kwiir_, and then
that the syllable _kwiir_ means a company of singers. Some
foreigners who have learned English orally doubtless do go
through this process; but those who have learned it primarily by
reading, or for reading, do not....
The participle _finished_ has a certain real existence as a
language fact, undisturbed by the accident that it is now
pronounced _finisht_.
And this great entity, the written English language, the chief
medium of scholarship, literature, history, law, and even
business ... is what it is proposed to change. Perhaps it should
be done; perhaps the times demand an heroic sacrifice of the
organ of scholarly and literary communication and tradition, in
the interest of increased efficiency on the part of the average
man for whom the language of scholarship and literature is
negligible. But we should not mistake the meaning of the effort.
It is not the mere effort to do better what we are doing
already--writing words so-and-so because they sound so-and-so;
for we are already doing nothing of the kind. It is the effort to
transfer English from the group where, with modern French and
other tongues, it now belongs,--the group of languages whose
history has differentiated a written and a spoken form,--to the
group represented by classic Latin and modern Italian, whose
(doubtless happier) history has kept the written form a fairly
accurate replica of the spoken....
The impression often prevails that those who hesitate to commit
themselves to the enticements of the Spelling Board do so merely
because the new spellings "look so queer." Of course this very
statement is a clumsy and unpenetrating way of expressing the
fact that the whole language psychology of a _reading_ generation
is disturbed by the efforts in question.
(II) From a lady:
This unspeakable spelling is history-destroying,
tradition-annihilating, and puts the veriest hind on a semblance
of equality with a person of elegance.
As Nietsche says: "Let us be free from moralic acid"!!
Possibly to some tastes, a neck without a goitre would be more
"elegant" than a neck with one--or _tho_ than _though_.
(III) From a well-known author:
The tendency of our English speech is constantly to "reform" its
Orthography! Witness the betterment between the spelling of
Chaucer and that of Shakespeare, and between that of Shakespeare
and that of the days of Queen Anne! Well then, granting it to be
the irresistible tendency of our Orthography to better itself,
why not permit it to go on in peace bettering itself? Why assist
Fate? Are our awful Spelling Reformers, like the impatient young
gentleman in Mr. Stockton's story, appointed to the task of
Assisting Fate?
(IV) From a talented author and critic--a lady:
You must allow me, as an old friend of yours and a new friend of
the REVIEW's, to protest against the introduction of "reformed
spelling" into a literary journal of a high class, which is what
we all consider the new venture. To many of us who respect the
English language as an inheritance, and are content to leave its
simplification to the slow erosion of time, pages like those at
the end of the REVIEW give positive pain.
It would indeed be a hardened reformer who would not feel the force of
the foregoing objections.
To "Why assist Fate?" and "the slow erosion of time" the answer is
that the doctrine of _laissez faire_ has had its day, and can hardly
be regarded as open for discussion.
* * * * *
On the other side, we have received many letters favoring the reform
from the highest philological authorities:
(I) From a Johns Hopkins Professor:
Serious study of the problem becomes the duty of every thoughtful
person.
(II) From a Harvard Professor:
A discussion of orthographic possibilities can hardly fail to be
enlightening. I do not much like the scheme you tentatively
advocate, but anything that reveals existing absurdities and
opens up new vistas is useful at this stage.
(III) On the other hand, the Superintendent of Education in one of the
Canadian provinces, whose sympathies are naturally British, writes:
"Your simplified spelling appeals to me in preference to that of
the S. S. S. of London."
The main differences are illustrated in (the S. S. B. coming first)
_tiem_ and _tiim_ for _time_, _doer_ and _door_ for _door_, _tiping_
and _tipping_ for _tipping_.
(IV) A Nova Scotian, president of an important educational
institution, writes:
Your article on simplified spelling is a very courageous
one--_for an American_! Probably it has alredy brought upon you
the whips and scorns of the conventional journalist. In the Old
Country, scholars are accustomd to stand up against professional
journalists. Do you think you can do so with your new scheme? I
hope so, for it seems to me simple in principle, and, on the
whole, a good working basis. One is tempted, of course, to ask
why such inconsistencies as:
Allwaiz--Becauz.
Oonly--Molar.
We accept the _aw_ sound for _a_ before _ll_, but probably _awl_ is
better than _all_; and in _becauz_ it should undoubtedly be _aw_.
As to _molar_, we propose that a single vowel should always, as
generally now, be long at the end of a syllable.
The same correspondent continues:
Again, if long vowels are to be indicated by the doubling of the
letter, is there any need of doubling the consonant after a short
vowel?
(V) Another correspondent joins in the same charge:
It hardly seems logical to double a vowel to indicate its
lengthening and at the same time to double a consonant to
indicate the closing of a preceding vowel. It strikes me as
rather a clumsy artifice at best, and leads to some very cumbrous
forms, of which "annuthther," as you point out, is an extreme
instance.
But, as just said, it is not proposed that always "long vowels are to
be indicated by doubling of the letter," but only when the syllable is
closed by a consonant. See also the second paragraph of the following
letter answering a correspondent, which shows some aspects of the
question that may be worth presenting to other readers as well:
Thanks for your letter.... I wish all that I get on the subject
were equally sensible. At the same time, there are two or three
things that call for rejoinder.
When a consonant beginning a second syllable, is repeated at the
end of the preceding syllable, to prevent the vowel being counted
as long, the consonant is by no means "doubled" in the sense that
a vowel is doubled to make it count as long, or as the terminal
consonant is doubled in fall, call, etc.
In English spelling probably there cannot be carried out any
principle that won't land us somewhere into awkwardnesses almost
as great as "annuthther." That particular one, I have no doubt,
if ever adopted, would work into smaller dimensions, which of
course would have some elements of inconsistency. There is no
reason, however, why we should not use the methods which lead to
absurdities in that word, in hosts of other words where they
don't.
I shall never take any part in an attempt to add characters to
the English language. The only thing in that line it has done
since it began taking shape, is to get rid of two very useful
ones; and I don't believe it will ever move in the opposite
direction. My humble efforts will be concentrated on doing the
best practicable with those we have, though I wish Godspeed to
everybody who works for consistency and reasonableness, even if
he thinks he can introduce a new alphabet.
It is never going to simplify our language to introduce
diacritical marks. My little experience with French satisfies me
on that subject.
I am glad you agree with me as to dropping the _u_ after _q_.
I am not sure about using _x_ without a vowel preceding it (_e.
g._ xpense). Theoretically no consonant carries a vowel, but _x_
is pronounced as if there were a short _e_ before it, though,
like any other consonant, it will take the color of any vowel.
I don't believe that I am going to be any farther reformed in
regard to vowels than _oo_ in _door_, _ee_ in _feel_, _aa_ as
suggested by the British Society in "faather," _uu_ in "suun" as
also suggested by them; and _ii_ in "tiim," as suggested by me
and probably by others whom I don't know of. I only wish you
would leave your diacritics and new letters, and fight with me
for these vowels. There seems to be some hope in such a fight, as
the English Society is for all but the _ii_, and consistent
people will naturally work for their accepting _ii_; and as
nobody that I am aware of, in the direction of either body, is
with you for new letters and diacritics.
To the same correspondent:
Your letter of the 5th is very suggestive.
I think one trouble between us is that you think it worth while
to strive for ideal perfection in spelling. If we attained it, it
would not stay put.
You say: "It seems to me simple arithmetic admonishes us that we
have to have new characters for the vowel sounds." There are two
reasons why we don't. One is that (_me judice_) there is no use
in seeking absolute perfection. Another is that we can do with
existing letters as much of the work as we need to.
It may be "important" to "develop an alphabet in which each
character stands for a precise sound" but I haven't the slightest
idea that the English-speaking people will ever do it.
Of course all existing languages have come because "peoples ...
drift so far apart in pronunciation as sooner or later to become
almost unintelligible to each other," but printing and facilities
of communication are probably obstructing farther movements in
that direction, and I should not be surprised if the present
tendency were toward unity.
I am sorry you are one of the reformers who "believe that we
should go the whole way, or let things stay as they are." It is
not often that any reform goes the whole way, and I suspect that
we would be a good deal farther along if people of reforming
disposition would be content to go only so far as practicable.
On one side, then, we have habit and sensitive associations, and on
the other side the facts which cannot be denied by anyone who is
thoughtful and educated (not always synonymous terms) that the
anomalies of English spelling not only breed lawlessness in the
juvenile mind, increase the difficulties of education, and waste much
labor and expense in writing and printing, but also seriously obstruct
commerce, diplomacy, and the peace of the world.
No wonder these opposing conditions produce the frame of mind
expressed to us by a leading city Superintendent of Schools: "I
abominate simplified spelling, but I am in favor of it."
Now between this Scylla and this Charybdis, what is the reasonable
course?
We must regard two considerations too often ignored by reformers,
though they were insisted on by as great an authority as Spencer. The
first is that feeling, more than reason, determines conduct; the other
is that everything is so inextricably connected with other things,
that raising one is like raising a strand of a net, which involves
raising many other strands with it. With this reform are tangled up
not only the feelings and habits illustrated in the foregoing
quotations, but all existing English literature, including many
thousand tons of it in electrotype plates. All these obstruct a sudden
reform. Must then the reform be as gradual as that from Chaucer's
spelling to ours? Prophecy is dangerous, but we are inclined to think
not.
We favor simplified spellings, but we don't want our attention
diverted by them from anything that we value more, and we don't want
to interfere with anybody's Shakspere or Tennyson, any more than we
want anybody to interfere with ours. We are glad, however, when we see
the sign of a "Fotografer," or an announcement of a "thru" train. We
have no doubt that a large and increasing number of people share both
these sets of feelings, and they seem to indicate the way out of the
dilemma.
Now there's no question of intrinsic beauty between the new forms and
the old. Preference for the latter is simply a matter of habit, but
habit is stronger than intelligence; and here, with the student,
intelligence balks at habit in a paradoxical way. In reading an
impassioned passage, he encounters a "_thru_"; his thoughts are not
only diverted to the spelling, but to the years of association he may
have with the problems concerning it. For ourselves, the more we study
it, if we meet it in literature the more we "abominate" it, with the
superintendent already quoted; but the more we see it in
advertisements and other indifferent places, the more we are "in favor
of it"; and this we think is apt to be the experience of those who
really bring their intellects to the problem. Nay, we even think that,
in time, the younger portion of the thinking people whose habits favor
the old forms, may perhaps come around to the new: for, after writing
the most radical of the new forms, as in the last number of the
REVIEW, we have been surprised at the way they linger in the memory
and seem for a while more habitual than the old forms. This experience
makes it seem probable that if, for our children's sake, and for the
sake of the great causes already indicated, we were to condemn
ourselves for a few weeks, or possibly even a few days, to the better
forms, they would become more natural than the worse.
* * * * *
Press of T. MOREY & SON, Greenfield, Mass.
INDEX
THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW
VOL. I
[_Titles of Articles are printed in heavier type. The names of authors
of articles are printed in italics._]
Abbot, Miss Edith, 313, 319, 329.
Addams, Jane, 48-50, 54, 319.
Alcohol, 213.
=Alcohol, Our: Its Use=, 163
--use of the word intemperance, 163
--American drinking habits contrasted with English, 163-174
--social value of drinking, 164
--American public bars, 165
--improving the saloon, 165-166
--English public-houses, 166-174
--influence of women, 169
--the average English bar-maids, 169-170
--drinking in Scotland, 170-171
--effect of bar-maids in America, 171
--sense of home, 172-173
--Eileen, 173-174.
American Magazines, 261.
Anonymity of writers for this REVIEW, 43.
Arbitration, 10, 20.
=Aristocracy, Natural=, 272
--the one great question of to-day, 272
--Plato and his ideal republic, 273-277
--the natural growth of tyranny out of democracy, 275-276
--the method of escape which Plato saw, 276-277
--the political wisdom of Burke's _Reflections_, 277
--the need of leaders, 277-279
--Burke's definition of a true natural aristocracy, 278-279
--his ideas of prejudice, privilege, time and subordination, 279-281
--the part of imagination in Burke's ideas of government, 281-282
--Tom Paine's charge, 281-282
--picture of the demagogue, 285-288
--initiative and referendum; amending constitutions, 286
--attack on courts, 287
--Burke's portrait of men of light and leading, 288
--the demagoguery of an institution like the public press, 289
--the cure of democracy not _more_ but _better_ democracy,
290
--our need is to provide for a natural aristocracy, 290
--the cant of humanitarianism; the need of a class consciousness
among the advanced, 292-295
--the real strength of socialistic doctrine and the real danger,
293-294
--duty of our higher institutions of learning to train the
imagination, 295-296.
Athens, 1.
_Atlantic_, 264.
"Aunt Kate," as spirit control, 74-76.
Automatic writing. _See_ Heteromatic.
=Baby and the Bee=, 333.
=Barbarian Invasion, The=, 389
--higher education is in the hands of barbarians, 389
--college education and college professors to-day, 389-390
--democratic education a process of measuring down, 390-391
--new sciences, 391
--academic managers and their policies, 391-392
--appeals for money and advertising features, 392
--the cant of a university's obligation to the community, 392-393
--inter-collegiate athletics a key to the meaning of social
obligations, 393
--amateur sport a business enterprise of college authorities,
393-396
--football, 394
--the argument for athletics as opposed to study, 395
--rich barbarian alumni, 396
--teachers' colleges, their character and relation to the college
proper, 397-398
--graduate schools, 398
--material for college professors, 399
--illiteracy, 399
--average quality, 400
--the Ph.D. and his "contribution to knowledge," 401
--the scientific theory of academic organization, 402
--college presidents, 403
--the "educator," 403
--the howling wilderness of academic halls, 404
--money and publicity, 404
--need of an aristocratic institution of learning, 405
--and of culture and finer manhood in colleges and universities,
405.
Bee. _See_ 'Baby and the Bee.'
Bergson, Henri, as president of Society for Psychical Research, 63,
106-107
--on psychic phenomena, 107-111.
Boss rule, 138.
Bourne, Senator, 32-33.
Bradford, Mary C., 321, 330.
Breckinridge, Prof. Sophonisba P., 313, 319, 329.
Bronson, Miss Minnie, 313, 318, 329.
_Brougham, H. B._, 'A Needed Unpopular Reform,' 133
--'The Machinery for Peace,' 200
--'How Woman Suffrage Has Worked,' 307.
Bryan, W. J., 3, 4, 5, 124-129.
Burke, Edmund, his political ideas and their present applicability,
272-273, 277-284.
_Burrows, Charles W._, 'Our Government Subvention to Literature,'
415.
Burton, Dr., on tobacco, 145, 162.
Butler, Samuel, 123.
=Cabinet, The Unfermented=, 124
--composition of Pres. Wilson's cabinet and experience of its
members, 124-125
--public observation and expectations, 126
--Bryan, 126-129
--his Chautauqua lectures, 128
--the cabinet's confidence in the president, 129-130
--its unity, 130
--Wilson's power, 131-132.
=Capitalism, The Soul of=, 227
--capitalism compared to feudalism, 227-228
--capitalism a predominant and significant fact in modern life,
228-229
--the paradoxical conception of a soul in capitalism, 229
--commercialization; "business" vs. "sentiment," 230
--capitalism a respecter of the liberties of men, 231
--personal prejudices out of business hours still rule, 232
--discrimination in business exceptional; Mr. Henry Ford, 232
--toleration necessitated by business tends to break down national,
racial and religious prejudices, 233
--this toleration is interested and not ethical, 234
--yet liberty based on capitalistic toleration is broad and
substantial, 234
--precapitalistic liberty, 235
--class liberty, 235
--the laborer's great gains in personal liberty, 236
--capitalism the real source and cause of the fraternity of labor,
237-238
--the natural race antagonisms among laborers, 238
--moral gain of labor disputes, 239
--solidarity in American and in foreign laborers, 239
--anti-militarism in the laboring class, 239
--the soul of capitalism begins to emerge as toleration, liberty and
fraternity, 240
--Socialism, 241
--Karl Marx cited, 241
--the initial ugliness of capitalism, 241-242
--the struggle of good and evil in the non-economic field and its
outcome, 243
--Holberg, 244
--a broader and more liberal humanity the evolving soul of
capitalism, 244.
Cattell, Prof., 399.
Charles II, 122.
Chesterton, G. K., unconscious testimony against tobacco, 156.
Child labor, facts and misrepresentation as to extent, 259-260.
Classification. _See_ Pigeon-Holes.
=Climbers, Some Deserving=, 439.
=Colleges, What is the Matter with the American?= 214.
_See also_ 'Barbarian Invasion, The'; Schooling.
Consumers' League, 261-262.
Cost of living, 12, 261-262.
=Criticism, A Model of Divinatory=, 435.
Crookes, Sir Wm., 64, 68, 69.
Cross-Correspondence, 104.
=Decency and the Stage=, 214.
DeForest, Mrs. Nora Blatch, 330, 331.
Delaisi, Francis, 187.
_Delineator, The_, 256, 258.
Demagogues, 4-5
--Roosevelt as an example, 285-288.
Democracy, 34
--what it has done for higher education, 389.
=Democrat Reflects, The=, 34
--disillusionment, 34, 35
--questionings as to real nature of democracy, 36, 37
--plutocracy, 37
--democracy in education, 38
--in religion and art, 39, 40
--in manners and dress, 40, 41
--in the home, 41
--Plato on democracy, 42
--ridiculous side of the idea, 42
--mediocrity, 43, 44
--democracy as a machine, 44, 45
--character the Supreme end, 46.
"Doctor Foster went to Gloucester," 435.
Dog, in Rich's sitting, 79.
Dorr, George, with Myers control, 103.
Dowsing, 67.
Drama. _See_ Decency.
Dramatic power of mediums, 82.
Dreams, 65-66, 109.
Drink. _See_ Alcohol.
Education. _See_ Schooling; Colleges; 'Barbarian Invasion, The.'
=En Casserole=, 212, 431.
_Farnam, Henry W._, 'Our Tobacco: its Cost,' 145.
Feminism, abundant results of woman's influence in legislation, 332.
Fires resulting from smoking tobacco, 147-152.
_Fite, Warner_, 'The Barbarian Invasion,' 389.
Football, 394.
Ford, Henry, 232.
Foster, the medium, 68.
_Franklin, Fabian_, 'The Majority Juggernaut,' 22
--Social Untruth and the Social Unrest,' 252.
Freedom. _See_ Liberty.
George, Henry, 27-28.
George, Mrs. A. J., 310, 328.
Germany, peace policy, 200;
trust legislation, 406.
Ghost stories, 65.
Glynn, Governor, 142.
Government management, 16.
=Greeks, The, on Religion and Morals=, 358
--relation of religion and morals, 358-359
--the Greek attitude toward reason, 359-360
--its psychological development, 360
--the eleusinian mysteries; Dionysus, 361
--hypnosis, ecstasy, enthusiasm, 362
--orphism and immortality, 362-364
--Aristotle on the Eleusinia, 364
--Oriental cults: Unthraism, 365
--origin of the Christian sacraments and the theology of St. Paul to
be found in these mysteries, 365-366
--the doctrine of the early church modified by Greek ideas; the
Nicene Creed, 366-367
--"faith," 367
--Hippolytus and Plato, 368
--the influence of Greece on dogma, 368-369
--Christian exegesis also of Greek origin, 369
--its principle, 370
--Plato's exegesis, 371
--the ethics of Christianity as related to Stoicism and Cynicism,
371-373
--religion and morals among the Greeks differentiated, 372
--Plato's _Republic_, 373
--religion and morality have suffered from too close a union, 374.
Gurney, Edmund, as control, 80.
_Hamilton, Clayton_, 'Our Alcohol: its Use,' 163.
Hancock, John, 122.
Heteromatic writing, 69-70, 99-104.
Hodgson, Dr. Richard, 64
--first Piper report, 71-79
--second Piper report, 83-90
--argument for spiritism, 87-88
--as control, 93-103.
Holberg, 244.
Holland, Mrs., heteromatic writing, 99-103
--with Hodgson control, 100.
_Holt, Henry_, 'The New Irrepressible Conflict,' 1
--'Prof. Bergson and the Society for Psychical Research,' 63
--'Tobacco and Alcohol,' 212
--'Answering Big Questions,' 214
--'Decency and the Stage,' 214
--'Simplified Spelling,' 218, 440
--'Special to our Readers,' 431
--'A Specimen of Uplift Legislation,' 434
--'Some Deserving Climbers,' 439.
Home, the medium, 67, 68.
Hours of labor, 13.
"Howard" family and G. P., 84-87.
Hull House. _See_ Addams, Jane.
Humanitarianism, current cant deprecated, 292.
"Humans," 439.
Hypnotism, 65, 109.
Immortality, faith in, possible justification for, 106.
Imperator, 70, 90, 91
--inconsistent names, 105.
Infant mortality, 266.
Intemperance, strict sense of the word, 163.
_See also_ Alcohol.
Interstate Commissions, Commerce and Trade, 408, 413-414.
=Irrepressible Conflict, The New=, 1
--minority vs. majority, 1
--Seward's Irrepressible Conflict and others, 1-2
--class legislation, 2, 5
--value of the superior man, 2
--growing disturbances from the man behind, 2-3
--greenbacks start a crazy cycle, 3
--Bryan and Silver, 3-4
--ideals of the average man, 4
--Jack Cade, Bryan and Roosevelt, 4
--two greatest demagogues in history, 5
--rightful owners of wealth, 5
--Marshall's "Economics of History," 5-6
--Francis A. Walker on profits of employers, 6-7
--source of wealth, 7-8
--Socialism, 8
--taxes mainly for the benefit of the non-taxpayers, 9
--arbitration, 10, 20
--progress of the average man, 11-15
--Karl Marx and his "increasing misery" theory, 11
--rising wages, 12-15
--cost of living, 12
--decreasing hours of labor, 13
--government management, 15-16
--the way to peace, 15-21
--improvement in human nature, 18
--mutual help, 18-19
--trade unions, 20, 21
--education and individual improvement, 19-20.
James, Prof. Wm., 64
--finds Mrs. Piper, 71
--with "Aunt Kate," 74-76
--with G. P., 84
--argument on spiritism, 89, 91-92, 93, 94-98
--with Hodgson control, 97-98.
Jerry, uncle of Sir Oliver Lodge, 81.
Jesus Christ, 121.
_Johnson, Alvin S._, 'The Soul of Capitalism,' 227.
_Jordan, David Starr_, 'The Standing Incentives to War,' 185.
Journalism, American, 216.
Kakuzo, Okakura, 117.
_Kellogg, Vernon L._, 'What is the Matter with the American
Colleges?' 214
--'The Baby and the Bee,' 333.
_Knickerbocker Press_, 259.
Labor, antagonisms, 238
--gain of disputes, 239.
LaFarge, John, 117, 119.
Language, some new words, 439.
Larned, J. N., on the newspaper, 424.
Legislation, specimen, 434.
Letters as posthumous evidence of spiritism, 104-106.
Liberty, breadth and strength of that which comes from capitalism, 234
--Puritan and precapitalistic, 235.
Lieber, Francis, 204.
Lincoln, A., anecdote, 124
--tactfulness, 122
--war rules, 204.
Lindsey, Judge Ben. B., 58
--on woman suffrage in Colorado, 330.
=Literature, Our Government Subvention to=, 415
--book production in the United States compared with that of other
countries, 415-417
--decrease of book sellers, 418
--growth of periodicals, 419
--as the effect of a low rate of postage, 419-421
--increase of bulk and circulation in periodicals and newspapers,
420-421
--disproportionate postage rates, 422-423
--number of periodicals, 423
--quality of newspapers, 424
--great disproportion between bad and good literature, 424
--picture of the pabulum in the popular magazine, 425
--injustice of postal rates further illustrated, 426
--profits of a publisher, 427
--facts kept from the public, 427
--lobby, 427
--the Home University Library, 429
--why not carry books cheaply? 430.
Lodge, Sir Oliver, 64, 73, 93;
sitting with Mrs. Piper, 79-81.
MacCunn, Prof. John, 272, 273.
McNamara dynamitings, 268.
=Majority Juggernaut, The=, 22
--initiative and referendum, 22-23
--cause of existing impatience with governmental methods, 23-24
--direct rule of the people, 24-25
--need of resistance to the immediate desire of the majority in
settling certain momentous questions, 25-31
--Henry George and the single tax, 27-28
--difference between representative rule and direct rule, 29-30
--mob rule, 31-32
--Senator Bourne's position, 32-33
--inherent error of the direct-rule propaganda, 32-33.
_Martin, E. S._, 'The Unfermented Cabinet,' 124.
Marx, Karl, 11, 235, 241.
Materialization, 67.
_Mather, F. J., Jr._, 'Two Neglected Virtues,' 112
--'Wanted: Proportionate News,' 216
--'The Right to be Amused,' 297.
=Microbophobiac, The Story of a=, 175.
Morality, Greek, 358.
=Morality, The New=, 47
--Miss Jane Addams as its exponent, 48
--her works, 48-50, 54
--revolution from mediæval religion to humanitarianism, 49-52
--lessened sense of personal responsibility, 52
--modern social sympathy, 53-59
--change of view in the church, 56
--results of humanitarianism, 56, 57
--confusion of moral standards and relaxation of morals, 58, 59
--remedy, 60
--permanent worth of character and its relation to social justice,
61, 62.
_More, Paul Elmer_, 'The New Morality,' 47
--'Natural Aristocracy,' 272.
Moses, Rev. W. Stainton, 68, 69-71
--in Newbold sittings, 90.
Mott, Lucretia, 307, 318, 332.
Murphy, Chas. F., 134, 135, 142.
Myers, F. W. H., 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 99
--as control with Dorr, 103
--with Mrs. Holland, 103-104
--posthumous letter, 105.
"Near," 440.
New Jersey reform, 139-143.
New York City, causes of fires, 150
--numerous elective offices, 136.
Newbold, Prof. J. R., sittings with Mrs. Piper, 90.
Newell, in Rich's Piper Sitting, 78.
=News, Wanted: Proportionate=, 216.
Newspapers, 421, 424.
Nys, Ernest, 209.
Page, Walter H., 415.
Paine, Tom, on Burke, 281, 282.
Palladino, Eusapia, 67.
Patterson, Wm. B., 259.
Peace, present phase of movement, 197.
=Peace, The Machinery for=, 200
--peaceful policy of Germany and Great Britain, 200
--the work of the First Hague Conference, 200, 202, 203
--arbitration and American arbitral proceedings previous to the
Hague Conferences, 201-202
--Roosevelt's objection, 202
--work of the Second Hague Conference, 200, 202, 203-206
--Francis Lieber, President Lincoln, and the Brussels Conference of
1874, 204
--naval war, 204
--International Prize Court, 204, 208
--Declaration of London, 204
--machinery for pacific settlement of international disputes, 205
--international commissions, 205
--Hague Court of Arbitration, composition, 205-206
--work of the Third Hague Conference in 1915, 206-209
--Casablanca case, 207
--tendency to compromise, 207-208
--Supreme Court of Arbitral Justice, 208-209
--Ernest Nys, 209
--arguments for war, 209-211
--industrial and scientific substitutes for war, 210-211
--Prof. Soddy cited, 211.
"Pelham," George, 83-90, 92, 97, 99
--Mrs. Piper recognizes portrait, 86.
Periodicals. _See_ Literature.
Perris, Geo. H., 187.
Personality, secondary, 76.
Peter Ibbetson, 80.
Phinuit, Dr., 71
--his French, 73-77.
=Pigeon-Holes, The Case for=, 343
--method, 343
--classification of ideas, 343-344
--value to civilization, 345-346
--method and efficiency, 346
--the machine age, 346-347
--value of system in scholarship and religion, 347-348
--the other side of the case: limitations to the use of system and
classifications, 349-354
--men and truths not easily classified, 349
--the multitudinous differences in things, 350
--different points of view, 351
--mutations of the human spirit, 351
--wholeness of truth, 352
--system a violence to nature, 352
--its injustice and tyranny, 353
--an obstacle to progress, 354
--the judicial view of the case, 355-357
--limitations and qualifications in the employment of method, 355
--an art after all, 356
--the Golden Mean and human quality, 356-357.
Piper, Mrs., 67
--sittings with Hodgson, 74-75
--with Rich, 76-79
--with Lodge, 79-81
--Hodgson second report, 83
--George "Pelham," 83-90.
Plato, character of his _Republic_, 371, 373
--picture of the change from license to tyranny, 275-276.
Podmore, Frank, 64
--conversion, 99.
Postal rates on periodicals, 419.
=Psychical Research, Prof. Bergson and the Society for=, 63
--formation of the society, early members, publications, 64
--thought-transference, 64-65
--"Phantasms of the Living," 65
--zoömagnetism and telekinesis, 66
--Home, the medium, 67, 68
--Eusapia Palladino, 67
--U. S. Moses, 68, 69-71
--Myers on Moses, 69
--Sir Wm. Crookes, 68, 69
--American S. P. R., Hodgson, James, and Mrs. Piper, 71
--Phinuit, etc., 71-73
--reports of sittings, 74-76
--T. Rogers Rich; telepathy or what? 76-79
--Piper English sittings; Sir O. Lodge, 79-80
--Gurney sittings, 80-81
--telepathy and teloteropathy insufficient to explain Piper
phenomena, 82
--George "Pelham" sittings, 83-85
--Hodgson and spirit hypothesis, 85-89
--Wm. James's reluctant admissions, 89-98
--W. R. Newbold, 90
--Imperator and followers, 90-91
--death of Hodgson, 93
--Hodgson as control, 93-99
--spirits very human, 96
--character of future world, 96
--Prof. James, 97-98
--conversion of Frank Podmore, 99
--heteromatic writing of Mrs. Verrall and Mrs. Holland, 99-102
--Mrs. Verrall's heteromatic writing, 99
--Mrs. Holland's cipher writing, 100
--automatic verse, 101-102
--letter and its strong evidence, 102
--on death of Myers, 102-103
--his appearances, 103
--notorious stanza, 104
--happiness of controls, 104
--Cross-Correspondence, 104
--two strongest points against spiritism, 104-105
--failure in regard to sealed letters and Moses inconsistencies, 105
--indication of phenomena, 106
--Prof. Bergson's estimate of the Society, 106-107
--on indifference of learned world, 107
--on parallelism, 107-108
--on hypnosis and dreams, 109
--on survival of individuality, 109-110
--on telepathy, 110-111.
_Putnam, Emily J._, 'The Greeks on Religion and Morals,' 358.
"Q," Hodgson's friend, as control, 74.
=Questions, Answering Big=, 214.
Raisin, Jacob S., 259.
Rector, "Spirit" control, 70, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 97.
=Reform, A Needed Unpopular=, 133
--secret oligarchies in chief cities and states of the United
States, 133-138
--Tammany, 133-135
--too many offices under direct control of the people, 135-137
--the town meeting of New England, 137
--politicians and bosses as plunderers, 137-138
--moral awakening, 138
--reform in New Jersey, 139-143
--Ex-Senator James Smith, 139-140
--Woodrow Wilson as Governor of New Jersey, 139-140
--conduct of elections and the short ballot, 140
--the direct primary principle, 141
--the problem of cumbersome political machinery, 142-144
--executive responsibility, 142-143
--commission government in cities, 143-144
--judiciary appointments, 143.
Religion, Greek, 358.
Rich, T. Rogers, with Mrs. Piper, 76-79.
=Right to be Amused, The=, 297
--new doctrine of human rights, 297
--its reaction on women, 298
--the right to be amused distinguished from the ordinary pursuit of
pleasure, 298-299
--the hungry defiant faces of modern women, 299-300
--the American woman in the nineteenth century, 300-301
--the peculiar right of the good looking American woman, 302
--the modern girl's detachment from responsibilities, 302-303
--little done for right education of girls, 303
--American writers of fiction who picture woman as a mere ornament,
304
--the fault of the American man that she is so, 304-305
--the effect of the projection of women into business and social
reforms, 305
--woman's need of companionship; true marriage, 305-306.
Roosevelt, T., 4, 5, 118, 119
--demagoguery, 285-288
--misleading talk compared with previous conduct, 269
--opposition to arbitration, 202.
Ross, Prof. E. A., 264.
St. Paul, 122.
Saloon. _See_ Alcohol.
=Schooling, Our Sublime Faith in=, 375
--demands made on our schools, 375
--criticisms, 376
--putting everything on the schools, 377
--the main purpose of popular education, 377-378
--public welfare, 378
--religion, morality and knowledge as subjects for teaching, 379
--the knowledge desirable, 379-380
--morality, character-building, and the development of the social
conscience, 380-381
--religion and the difficulty of teaching it, 381-383
--the present development of the spirit of lawlessness, 383-386
--diminishing respect for law among the better class; capitalists,
384-385
--its evil effect, 385
--time to take thought, 385
--what the schools can do, 386
--the social conscience, the social instinct, and the good of the
whole, 386-388
--prevention, 388
--social-minded character, 388.
_Seager, H. R._, 'Trust-Busting as a National Pastime,' 406.
Seward's phrase "The Irrepressible conflict," 1.
Shaw, Dr. Anna, 310.
_Showerman, Grant_, 'The Democrat Reflects,' 34
--'The Story of a Microbophobiac,' 175
--'The Case for Pigeon-Holes,' 343.
=Simplified Spelling=, 218, 440.
Smith, James, in New Jersey, 139-140.
Smith, Munroe, on publishers privileges, 427.
Socialism, 8
--future of, 244
--real strength, 293.
Social justice, 54-62.
=Social Untruth and the Social Unrest=, 252
--legitimate and illegitimate portrayal of existing social evils,
252-253
--nature of present social problems, 253
--danger of deceiving the public, 254
--how well-meaning reformers play into the hands of the Socialists,
254-255
--illustrations of well-meant exaggeration, distortion and
misleading presentation of present evils, 256-269
--instance of rubbishy story, 256-258
--exaggerated statements cited about extent of child labor, 259-261
--case of misrepresentation on the part of the Consumers' League as
to the rising price of food in restaurants, 261-263
--reformers' indifference to facts, 262-264
--further illustrations, 264-269
--Prof. E. S. Ross's misleading article in the _Atlantic_ on
the suppression by the press of important news, 264-265
--misrepresentation as to infant mortality, 266-267
--Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace's inability to weigh facts in his zeal
for reform, 267-268
--loose thinking consequent on the McNamara dynamitings, 268
--Mr. Roosevelt's misleading talk compared with his previous
conduct, 269
--the dangerous unrest consequent upon all this distortion and
deception, 269-271.
Society for Psychical Research (S. P. R.), 63-111.
=Sociological Nightmare=, 245.
Soddy, Prof., 211.
Speer, Dr. Stanhope, 69.
Spiritism, Hodgson's argument for, 87-88, 104-106
--James on, 89, 91-92, 93, 94-98, 104.
Stage. _See_ Decency.
Steel industry, 410, 412.
Sumner, Dr. Helen M., 320.
Tammany, 133-135.
Taxation, 9, 27-28.
Telekinesis, 66-67.
Telepathy, 64-65, 82
--Bergson on, 110.
_Thomas, Calvin_, 'Our Sublime Faith in Schooling,' 375
--'A Model of Divinatory Criticism,' 435.
"Thon," 440.
Thought-transference. _See_ Telepathy.
Tobacco, 212.
=Tobacco, Our: Its Cost=, 145
--value of factory product, 145
--annual amount spent for tobacco, 146
--comparisons, 146-147, 161
--loss of life and property through fires caused by smokers, 147-152
--forest fires thus caused, 151-152
--land required for tobacco culture, 152-153
--cost to railroads, 153
--cost of cleanliness, 153-154
--effects on physical health, 154-155
--effect on mental development, 155
--loss of time, 156
--weakening of the social sense, 156-157
--effect on efficiency and the will power, 157
--credit side of the account, 158-159
--taxes and duties, 158
--euphoria, 158-159
--habit, 159
--the social balance sheet, 159-160
--further considerations and conclusion, 161-162
--Dr. Burton cited, 145, 162.
Toleration, 234, 240.
Townsend, Mrs. Geo. W., 312.
_Trent, W. P._, 'A Sociological Nightmare,' 245.
=Trust-Busting as a National Pastime=, 406
--trust legislation in Germany, 406
--in America, 406-407
--dangerous bills proposed, 407
--inconsistent railroad policy, 408
--Interstate Commerce Commission and rate fixing, 408
--prohibiting combinations, 408
--advantage of combination, 409-412
--Union Pacific-Southern Pacific separation, 408
--telephone and telegraph separation, 409
--the steel industry and advantages of combination, 410-412
--regulated competition and regulated monopoly, 412-413
--merits of an Interstate Trade Commission, 413-414.
Universities, duty of, 295;
_See also_ Colleges.
=Uplift Legislation, A Specimen of=, 434.
=Virtues, Two Neglected=, 112
--reticence and tact out of fashion, 112-113
--face value of talkativeness, 114
--unpopularity of reticence and tact due to their being "head"
virtues, 115-116
--increasing value in complicated society, 116
--taciturnity, 116-117
--Okakura Kakuzo, 117
--John LaFarge, 117, 119
--American garrulity, 118
--one merit of Pragmatism, 118
--Roosevelt, 118-119
--incompatibility of free talk and tactfulness, 119
--the gentle arts of tact, 119-120
--feminine and masculine tact, 120
--shy people, 121
--tact of Jesus, 121
--of St. Paul, John Hancock, Lincoln, Charles II, 122
--tactlessness of Dr. John Rubens, 122-123
--relativity of tact, 122-123
--Samuel Butler quoted, 123.
Verrall, Mrs., heteromatic writing, 99.
Visions, 65.
Wages, 12-15.
Walker, Francis A., 6-7.
Wallace, Alfred Russel, 267.
Walsh, Mrs., Kate, as spirit control, 74-76.
=War, The Standing Incentives to=, 185
--modern war system of "peace by preponderance," 185-186
--its elements and advocates, 186-187
--war traders and war trusts, 187-188
--papers by G. H. Perris and Francis Delaisi, 187-188
--British, French and German companies interested in war, 187-190
--war scares, 189
--war-syndicates in the United States, 191
--money-lenders, 191
--exploiting companies, 191-192
--hereditary aristocracy, 192
--false education, 192
--the responsibility of the individual citizen, 193
--national debts, 194
--hollowness of the system, 194
--repudiation, 194
--causes of national decline, 195
--disease and vandalism, 196
--our proper line of attack on the war system, 197
--present phase of the peace movement, 197
--arbitration and conciliation, 198
--America's position, 198-199.
Wealth, 7.
Wilde, Miss, posthumous letters, 104-106.
Williams, Talcott, 421.
Wilson, Woodrow, character of his cabinet and administration, 124
--Governor of New Jersey, 139-140.
Wofsmiths, 377.
=Woman Suffrage, How [it] has Worked=, 307
--the indictment against man by the suffragists of 1848 in their
"Declaration of Sentiments," 307-308
--woman's emancipation has come about chiefly without the ballot,
308-309
--married woman's position at present in New York State, 308-309
--other States and the industrial position of women, 309-310
--educational privileges that have been gained by woman without the
ballot, 310
--her rights and privileges in Protestant churches, 310
--so many results achieved without the ballot indicate that it is
not needed, 311
--suffragists contend that much remains to be done, 311-313
--joint guardianship laws, 311-312
--method by which the New York law was obtained, 312
--strife of "antis" and "pros," 313
--contentions and replies in parallel columns regarding various
state laws for the protection of wage-earning women, 313-318
--Miss Bronson vs. Miss Abbott and Prof. Breckinridge, 313, 318-319,
329
--statements on both sides of the controversy show amelioration not
due to exercise of ballot, 318-319
--nevertheless it is still contended that the ballot is the quickest
and surest way, 319
--Dr. Helen M. Sumner on the pay of women in Colorado, 320
--hours of work in Massachusetts and in Utah, 320
--laws of Colorado (a woman suffrage State) and of Pennsylvania (a
male-suffrage State) in regard to the protection of women and
children compared in parallel columns, 321-326
--the minimum wage question, 327
--the real argument of the American Woman Suffrage Association
itself appears to be against suffrage extension, 327-328
--statistics showing small percentage of women who go to the polls,
328-329
--women generally show less interest in registering and in voting
than men, 329
--the bearing of this fact on law enforcement, 329-330
--Judge Lindsey's testimony, 330
--more persons have laws beneficial to women and children under male
suffrage than under equal suffrage, 331
--no distinctive results of woman suffrage in the Union where it has
been granted in part or in whole, 332
--results from the indirect influence of women, 332.
Zoömagnetism, 66-67.
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