Psycho-phone messages

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PSYCHO-PHONE

_ MESSAGES __

RECORDED BY

FRANCIS GRIERSON

Spiritual Messages from the late
General U. S. Grant, on Adequate
Preparation in America; Thomas Jef-
ferson, on the Future of American De-
mocracy; Benjamin Disraeli, on English
and Irish Affairs ; Prince Bismarck, on
the Indemnities ; John Marshall, on the
Psychology of the Supreme Court of
the United States; Alexander Hamil-
ton, on the Forces that Precede Revo-
lution ; Abraham Lincoln, on the Future
of Mexico; Robert Ingersoll, on Our
Great Women; Henry Ward Beecher,
on the New Puritanism; Benjamin
Wade, of Ohio, on President Harding ;
General B. H. Grierson, on Japan,
Mexico and California, etc.

GIFT OF
VK

PSYCHO-PHONE
MESSAGES

RECORDED BY

FRANCIS GRIERSON

Published by
AUSTIN PUBLISHING COMPANY

Los Angeles, California

GIFT

Copyright, June 1921
By B. F. Austin

INTRODUCTION

The word "psycho-phone" was first sug-
gested and used by Mr. Francis Grierson in a
lecture I heard him deliver before the Toron-
to Theosophical Society, August 31st, 1919,
a year before Thomas Edison announced his
intention of devising an instrument which he
hopes will serve to establish intercourse be-
tween our world and the world of spirit.

My own experiences as a student in this
sphere of psychic research in Europe and
America, covering a period of thirty years,
convince me that we have here a revelation
of a new mode of spiritual communication un-
like anything heretofore given to the world,
not only different in quality but different in
purpose.

From personal knowledge I can state that
the recorder of these messages has not acted
on ideas advanced by anyone living on our
plane.

6-

461921

Looking back over the past two decades, I
am led to believe that Mr. Grierson's predic-
tions in "The Invincible Alliance," and in that
startling poem, "The Awakening in West-
minster Abbey," forecasting the war and the
tragic events in Ireland, were spiritual and
psycho-phonic in character.

From 1909 to 1911 Francis Grierson was
the acknowledged leading writer on "The
New Age," of London, which at that time
had as contributors, H. G. Wells, Bernard
Shaw, Arnold Bennett, the two Chestertons,
Hillaire Belloc — in one word, all the most
prominent writers and advanced thinkers in
Britain, yet not one of them except Mr. Grier-
son could see the approaching world up-
heaval.

Early in 1909 he published a series of arti-
cles in that weekly depicting the coming war,
and nothing of so drastic a nature had ever
appeared in an English publication. In the
spring of 1913 these articles were published
in book form in London and New York under
the title of 'The Invincible Alliance."

In the Westminster Abbey composition,
published in "The New Age" in 1910, the

characteristics of four personalities are
plainly manifest — Coleridge, Milton, Shelley
and Shakespeare — and I have not forgotten
the sensation caused by this great work in
London at the time of its appearance.

Having had occasion to study the social
and psychic conditions in France, Germany,
Italy, Austria and England before the great
war, and after having been an eye witness of
scenes unique in the annals of musical inspir-
ation in the artistic and literary circles of
Europe as well as the most intellectual of
the royal courts, in which Mr. Grierson was
the central figure, I now have a better under-
standing of the work he accomplished and its
far-reaching import. The more complex the
work the longer must be the preparation, and
we are now confronted with what will appear
to many as the most interesting phase of
Mr. Grierson's psychic gifts, for the seer who
ushered in the new mystical movement by the
publication of "Modern Mysticism" in 1899
is now the recorder of messages which must
induce thinking and unprejudiced minds to
pause and consider such matters in a new
light, and it is to be hoped that many more

messages like these may be recorded by the
same hand.

As I write, I have before me a unique col-
lection of letters written to Mr. Grierson by
men and women eminent in philosophy, art,
music, literature and journalism, in Europe
and America. Among the letters that Mr.
Grierson values the most in this remarkable
album are eight from members of the French
Academy, with Sully Prudhomme, winner of
the first Noble Prize, heading the list. Which
reminds me that I heard him say one evening
in Paris, after hearing Mr. Grierson's music :
"You have placed me on the threshold of the
other world. There are not words in the
French language to express what I have felt
tonight!" Up to that moment the famous
Academician had been known as an avowed
agnostic.

Maeterlinck writes that the first Grierson
volume (in French) influenced him more than
any book he had ever read. There are four
letters from the Belgian mystic.

This album is filled with expressions from
the most authoritative minds in literature
and art, as well as statesmen, soldiers and dip-

lomats, such as Jules Simon, the Due de
Broglie, Lord Lytton, British ambassador at
Paris; Lord Reading, British ambassador at
Washington; Field Marshall Lord Wolseley,
General B. H. Grierson, U.S.A., leading mem-
bers of the Bonaparte family in Paris, Prince
Henri of Orleans (son of Louis Philippe),
Princess Eulalia of Spain, and crowned heads
who gave receptions in Mr. Grierson's honor
during the past thirty years. There are let-
ters from distinguished Americans, such as
Col. Henry Watterson (who wrote two long
editorials on Mr. Grierson in the Louisville
"Courier Journal"), Henry Mills Alden,
editor of "Harper's Monthly," Prof. Will-
iam James, Marion Reedy, Edwin Mark-
ham, Edith Thomas, Mary Austin, and many
leading professors of Harvard, Yale, Colum-
bia, Cornell, the Universities of Illinois, Wis-
consin and California.

Edwin Bjorkman says, in his "Voices of
Tomorrow" : —

"To Francis Grierson belongs the honor of
having first attained to prophetic vision of
the common goal. In his first volume, publish-
ed in Paris in 1889, he suggested every idea

which since then has become recognized as
essential not only to Bergson and Maeter-
linck but to the constanty increasing number
of writers engaged in making the time con-
scious of its own spirit. As we read essay af-
ter essay it is as if we beheld the globe of life
revolving slowly between us and some un-
known source of light."

The following remarks from the London
"Outlook" seem to me pertinent to the sub-
ject:—

"Grierson is an Englishman, for he was
born in Cheshire; Scotland may justly claim
him in that he is a direct descendent of Sir
Robert Grierson, the famous Laird of Lag,
who is the hero of Scott's novel, 'The Red
Gauntlet'; that America has had a part in the
making of him all readers of that wonderful
book, 'The Valley of Shadows,' know; France
can claim him since he began his musical ca-
reer in Paris and published his first book in
French; but no special country can claim to
have developed his genius — that is cosmopoli-
tan/'

As "Current Opinion" says, in a long
study : "He presents a unique combination of

thinker, writer, artist and musician who owes
nothing to any school or any master or sys-
tem of training; and his experience is with-
out a parallel in the intellectual world of our
day."

LAWRENCE WALDEMAR TONNER,
So. Spring St.
Los Angeles, California.

FOREWORD

These messages were begun in September,
1920, and the last was recorded in May, 1921.
I little dreamed that many of the predictions
set forth would be verified so soon. For
names, in themselves, count for nothing. The
subliminal mind may assume different names
on different occasions. A message is of value
exactly in proportion to the information im-
parted.

The first communication from GeneraF
Grant was recorded September ninth. It is
peremptory in tone, and contains a warning
touching the insecurity of the Panama Canal.
In November Mr. Harding made a tour of in-
spection and found the fortifications of the
Canal inadequate. I then decided on the pub-
lication of these messages.

They deal with the actual. Take, for exam-
ple, John Marshall's documents, which are
filled with warnings no reader with intelli-
gence will attempt to refute, Disraeli's indict-
ment of English statesmanship in recent

times, Lincoln's utterances on affairs in Eu-
rope and Mexico, General Grant on Prepara-
tion, Benjamin Franklin on the Privilege of
Liberty, Bishop Phillips Brooks on the Com-
ing Ordeals, to name but a few.

As a Judge sums up, regardless of who may
or may not agree, a decision is rendered ac-
cording to the vision of the one who delivers
the message. Principle, not Party, is the basis
of judgment.

Witness Disraeli's remark that the blun-
ders committed by the British Parliament
would have been impossible in an Irish Par-
liament in Dublin.

In a series of articles in "Nash's Maga-
zine" Mr. Basil King suggests that "the
means of communication with the plane next
above us may be through the everlasting
doors which the subliminal opens upward.
Through these doors the mind may go up and
out; through these doors the light may come
in and down."

In our group of investigators we have had
the perseverence essential for serious devel-
opment, and, as in all demonstrations,
whether physical or psychical, everything de-

pends on conditions, so we have had periods
of weeks when no message of any kind was
received.

A striking feature of these communications
is their freedom from restraint imposed by
popular opinion. They contain neither the-
ories nor appeals. Warnings are uttered con-
cerning events and their inevitable reactions.
The psycho-phonic waves, by which the
messages are imparted, are as definite as
those received by wireless methods.

FRANCIS GRIERSON.

Los Angeles, California

CONTENTS

PAGE

Introduction 5

Foreword 13

Thomas Reed, of Maine, Late Speaker of

the House, on the Peace League 21

General U. S. Grant, on Adequate Prep-
aration in America 24

General U. S. Grant (second message) 27

Thomas Jefferson, on the Future of

American Democracy 30

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, on the Future

of American Women 33

Benjamin Franklin, on the Privilege of

Liberty 43

John Marshall, 'The Expounder of the
Constitution, on the Psychology of
the Supreme Court 46

Daniel Webster, on "Bohemian" States-
men 47

Oliver Wendell Holmes, on the New Eden 49

Benjamin Wade, Late Governor of Ohio,

U. S. Senator, on President Harding 51

Don Platt, Late Editor of "The Capital,"
Washington, D. C., on Prohibition and
the Blue Laws 55

Benjamin Disraeli, on English and Irish

Affairs 58

Prince Bismarck, on Germany and the

Indemnities 63

Henry Ward Beecher, on the New Puri-
tanism 70

John Marshall, on Liberty and the League

(second message) 74

Abraham Lincoln, on the Future of Mex-
ico 79

Robert Ingersoll, on Our Great Women 82

Stephen A. Douglass, on War Between

England and America 83

General B. H. Grierson, on Japan and

California 85

Alexander Hamilton, on the Forces that

Precede Revolution . . .89

Phillips Brooks, on The Coming Ordeals 93

Psycho-phone Messages

THOMAS B. REED

(Late Speaker of the House)
Recorded September seventh, 1920.

The formidable imbecility of the Senate
rivaled the fantastic irritability of the Presi-
dent.

Born with a Utopian temperament, Mr. Wil-
son has a Herculean passion for generalities
and a Lilliputian penchant for details.

You scratched the Teutons at Versailles
and found a new species of Tartar; you
scratched the Japanese and found a Paci-
fist camouflage; you scratched the Poles and
found a pianist with his hair uncut; you
scratched the French and found a tiger with
his claws undipped. Your mania for scratch-
ing other nations will keep your nails mani-
cured without the aid of scissors.

Never since the Declaration of Independ-
ence and the first peal of the Liberty Bell
did a chief executive walk up a winding stair

22 PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES

into so pretty a parlor as when Mr. Wilson,
with the naivete of a Princeton president,
faced that cacophony of sectional jazz bands
to witness the cryptic hand-writing on the
wall at the peace table. Who was his adviser?
Was it a gentleman with owl spectacles from
the oil fields of Texas? And was there no one
who could have cautioned him against the
finesse of Clemenceau who spent sixty years
sharpening his wits on the political grind-
stone of Europe? Was no one in America
aware that the French Premier is a fluent
speaker in English?

Mr. Wilson could speak no French, which
reminds me that Jack Spratt could eat no fat
and his wife could eat no lean, and so betwixt
them both they licked the platter clean. But
a clean plate does not mean a clean slate, and
the President brought one home filled with
the riddle of the Sphinx. Yet the Peace Con-
ference revealed the secret of perpetual mo-
tion and conferred a timely service, for the
hubbub created by the Wilson-Lansing-
House-Party at Versailles kept the Senate
from passing into a trance.

PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES 23

A blind man can tell the difference between
pepper pods and apple dumplings, but who
can tell where tweedle-dee ends and tweedle-
dum begins? No one. Then how can your
statesmen distinguish between the psycho-
logical characteristics of the Hungarians and
the Bohemians, the Bavarians and the Sax-
ons, the difference between a polka and a
polonaise, a pig in a stye and a pig in a
slaughter house?

Patriotism often depends on an influence
too subtle for analysis, and yet they would
enact drastic laws to bind all Europe in one
bond. They will hardly succeed in a thousand
years.

Some pay through the nose, some through
the pocket and some through the stomach.
Americans are paying through all three.
Danton declared the secret of the French
Revolution was audacity, and audacity, and
again audacity, but what you need today is
vigilance repeated ad infinitum.

I am placing you in communication with
some of the most far-reaching minds of the
past hundred and fifty years. The psycho-
phone is new and we are using it for the first
time.

THE LATE GENERAL U. S. GRANT
Recorded September Ninth, 1920

The imbroglio started by President Car-
ranza is beginning to influence the politicians
of Buenos Ayres and other centers in South
America. They have secretly repudiated
the Monroe Doctrine. Their next maneuver
will be a public repudiation.

I would say to Congress, stop juggling with
phrases and attend to the business of the
hour. The majority have been chasing shad-
ows in a sphere of politics illumined by moon-
shine bottled in the Blue Ridge. I was more
careful of my brand. When President Lin-
coln asked for the label, so he could recom-
mend it to other generals, he was not far
wrong in his surmises. It is not so much the
thing as the quality that counts. Most of you
at Washington will have to learn the differ-
ence between inhibition and prohibition.

The United States will be isolated within
three years from this date if the blowhards

PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES 25

from the woolly constituencies are not sup-
pressed. You need a broncho buster in the
Senate and a donkey muzzier in the House.

When a boycott is started by the countries
south of the Union your enemies in Europe
will begin to act. It is not a question of com-
merce but of common sense. I repeat what
Lincoln said in 1862: "The times are dark
and the spirits of ruin are abroad in all their
power."

My message to Congress is : See that fifty
thousand troops are stationed permanently
near the District of Columbia.

My message to the Governors of New York,
Pennsylvania and Illinois is: Get ready! The
troops on the borders of Texas, New Mexico
and Arizona are inadequate. The fortifica-
tions of the Panama and at San Diego and
San Pedro are inadequate. You are in the
same condition the French were in previous to
1789, when the motto was, "After us the
Deluge." The Deluge came but it did not con-
sist of water.

Our foes of the old Germany and the new
Russia count on crippling the United States
through South America, with the aid of

26 PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES

Japan ; but he who delivers the first blow will
be the victor.

The Germans still believe they can event-
ually invade France, enter Paris and cause
a revolution, found a new empire to include
France, Belgium, Holland and Switzerland,
with Italy later on. This dream includes a
practical understanding with Soviet Russia,
which, by that time, they expect would be
weary of futile experiments. Plots will be ex-
posed that will make it apparent how vain
some of your optimistic surmises have been.
Diplomats who are not psychologists will be
balked by developments in Switzerland, that
nation having become the rendezvous of dis-
illusioned wire-pullers without a country.

You are now at the cross roads, Take the
wrong turning and you will come to the skull
and cross bones.

I could say much more but we are not yet
experts in this new mode of inter-communi-
cation and must be brief.

GENERAL U. S. GRANT.

(Second Message)
Recorded May Third, 1921

I concur with Alexander Stephens when he
says: "Congress has never been so supine
and so serpentine."

Millions are sent to the people of distant
countries in no way related to our Govern-
ment or people, and yet Congress permits
thousands of veterans of the great war to
continue in a state of neglect, suffering and
humiliation.

Do the authorities believe that when the
day of trial arrives the friends and relatives
of these veterans will hurry to volunteer for
active service? The country is being fasci-
nated by incidents and events in far-off re-
gions, and the tragic conditions at home have
entered a chronic stage.

There are too many old men in Congress —
men who never did more than fight grasshop-
pers or watch a game of football from re-
served seats.

28 PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES

We do not like the looks of the President's
pronunciamento. It contains too many side
issues. He is making Mr. Wilson's mistake
of being verbose. Mr. Wilson tried to hypno-
tize Europe; the Senate is trying to hypno-
tize Mr. Harding. Popularity breeds as much
contempt as familiarity. No President can
ever succeed in conciliatng all classes, sec-
tions and parties.

The politicians of Buenos Ayres have now
spoken as I predicted in my first message.
They have attacked Mr. Harding for his
speech on Pan-Americanism, all which goes
to prove that the President is repeating for
South America Mr. Wilson's blunders in
France.

Remember what Lincoln said to Judge
Whitney:—

"Those fellows think I don't see anything,
but I see all around them. I see better what
they want to do with me than they do them-
selves."

The politicians of South America see bet-
ter what the President wants to do with
them than he does himself.

PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES 29

The administration will face a critical pe-
riod in the early fall. There will be a break
in the dominant phalanx. A social and poli-
tical readjustment will compel mediation in
quarters the most unexpected.

The new political and commercial dispensa-
tion for the English-speaking countries will
begin on September twenty-second at two
P.M.

THOMAS JEFFERSON

Few politicians understand the difference
between scene-shifting and progress. Things
shift, new names are applied, but the vicious
circle continues.

I see no evidence that human nature has
changed since my time, in this or any other
country.

If the Republican Ship of State is leaking,
the Democratic craft is drifting without sail
or rudder. What your statesmen fail to un-
derstand is that progress is not induced by
force but by free will. New political planks
rammed into your platforms against the
wishes of the majority are without signifi-
cance. The phrase, "The Solid South," which
meant something vital at one time, has no
meaning in these days of quick change and
movie-show influences.

Democracy, in some sections, is a matter
of climate. If you have come to a point where
science and sentimentality are engaged in a

PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES 31

drastic war, then the Democratic phalanx
must undergo some rude changes.

The Democratic tail wagged the Republi-
can dog for some time, but that curious spec-
tacle has lost its hold on public interest. It is
not now a question of one end wagging the
other, but who will wag both. If Republicans
stand for crude force, and Democrats for an-
te-bellum sentimentality, both are doomed to-
gether. •

In the South, Democracy means politics at
the polls, aristocracy in the parlor. In the
North, Republicanism means the aristocracy
of wealth.

However, your conception of social equal-
ity is undergoing modification.

In Washington's time the slogan was revo-
lution; in Lincoln's time it was abolition; in
your time it is prohibition, which reminds me
that laws passed in haste bring long periods
of repentance.

Effective effrontery is the result of cour-
ageous ignorance, for millions are more easily
influenced by illusive promises than by the
lessons of experience.

32 PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES

Modern civilization has hurried to meet
four deadly things — riches, pleasures, mate-
rialism and war. But the tortoise is a better
example of progress than the hare fleeing be-
fore the greyhound.

ELIZABETH CADY STANTON

It appalls the normal mind to stop and con-
sider the criminal blunders made by the edu-
cated Prussian and the educated Englishman
prior to 1914. No statesman had the vision
to see what was going to happen to the man-
made world.

Since it is a question of intuition and feel-
ing versus cold reason and business logic, let
us see which side is the more vital and all-en-
during. Let us consider for a brief space
what it is that influences people. Let us con-
sider the influence exerted by the arts. What
is music? Emotion created by sound vibra-
tions. What is dramatic acting? Emotion
created by vocal vibrations combined with
gesture and physical movement. Has anyone
ever witnessed automatic acting that left a
profound impression?

Orators become famous when they unite
deep feeling with knowledge. But what gives
expression? The power of awakening emotion

34 PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES

in others. Feeling is always more convincing
than intellect. Intellect is full of theories,
notions and superstitions. But where you find
deep feeling combined with knowledge, you
will find reason directed by qualities which
pass through the surface and attain the
heart-throbs of the real.

There are many kinds of emotion. There
is the hard emotion of anger, the confused
emotion of fear, the painful emotion of jeal-
ousy, the indescribable emotion of despair,
the radiant emotion of joy. But the greatest
emotion of all is that of knowledge united to
feeling.

Men, as a rule, speak of emotion as a weak-
ness, and they confuse it with impulse — a
very different thing. Impulse is often the re-
sult of weak nerves, uncontrolled by the will;
but we must not confuse it with the emotional
quality which underlies all great achieve-
ment in art, literature, philosophy and per-
sonality. The more impulsive the individual
is, the more primitive the reasoning faculty.

English and American business men are
limited in general knowledge. I have never
been able to discover any distinctive differ-

PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES 35

ence between the two. In France and Italy
many business men are able to discuss art,
literature and music on the same level with
the masters. The Latin races and the Celtic
races possess a culture that can be traced
back for two or three thousand years, but
Anglo-Saxon culture only to the time of the
Saxon invasion. The Anglo-Saxons were the
mushrooms of our civilization. They were a
stolid business people who lacked creative
genius.

The outstanding intellect of England today
is Celtic. The Scotch, the Irish and the Welsh
combine emotion and power with tenacity of
purpose, and it is this Celtic element that
keeps America in the front rank of nations.

What women have been opposing is the
primitive monotony of the Anglo-Saxon
trend. It has meant a mixture of politics and
commerce so primitive and so naive that
Frenchmen are amazed when they visit
America and note the striking difference be-
tween the culture of the women and the men-
tality of the average man.

One of your great mystics has said: "The
chemical constituents of human bodies is the
same. The ashes of a saint and the ashes of

36 PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES

a sinner give the same chemical results. As
human bodies they are the same, but their
functions separate them and make them to-
tally different, so that the difference cannot
by any hocus-pocus of metaphysics or magic
be bridged or spanned."

Two things of the same material are really
different if their functions are different. The
real substance of a thing is in its function.
We have to. judge people by the things they
do, not by their appearance; for there is no
clear understanding between two persons
whose aims are different. This is why there
are so many divorces. This is why so many
intellectual women live separate lives from
their husbands in the same house.

People seem to be similar and equal but
they differ according to their functions. If we
take a philosopher, a hangman and a sailor
who appear to be equal as human beings we
shall see that in their functions there is
nothing in common. The souls of these men
are different in the very nature, origin and
purpose of their existence.

Thousands of people move in a world of ma-
terial shadows while their souls, the sub-

PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES 37

stance of which is intellectual and spiritual,
inhabit a sphere absolutely apart. Especially
is this the case with many of the cultured
women of our time who are compelled to live
a double life. Their intellects are far removed
from the ordinary pursuits of the commercial
world.

A woman of spiritual culture who marries
a commercial man has married a shadow. A
woman of high ideals who marries a profes-
sional politician has hitched her motor car to
a meteor. A romantic woman married to a
multi-millionaire whose world is bound in
liberty bonds loses her liberty. A metaphysi-
cal woman who marries a financier is handi-
capped by the physical.

A union of spiritual functions with mate-
rial formulas is impossible, for there is no
way in which mere sensation can be made to
harmonize with the higher emotions.

The new era of woman, which is just be-
ginning to dawn, will direct education; and
through education, politics; through politics,
the progress of nations. Heretofore, the com-
mercial and political world had a free hand.
The progressive element was confined to a

38 PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES

limited number of men in the colleges and the
ministry, together with a remnant of law-
makers. But their influence was negative
owing to lack of material support.

Women will now present a formidable force
in numbers, backed by a spiritual power, aid-
ed by men who understand the difference
between functions and appearance, sensuous
desires and ideal emotions.

For years I maintained that women do not
realize the power they possess. They live so
much in a world of their own that they do not
regard the man-made commercial world as
worth elevating.

Thousands of men are living in a sphere
some degrees below the normal. They have
been surrounded from the beginning with in-
fluences that obliterate all the higher facul-
ties of the mind.

It has taken woman some centuries to rise
to power, but the work is only half done.
Never can the commercial instinct and the in-
tellectual ideal be made to harmonize. The
two spheres of consciousness are totally dis-
tinct.

PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES 39

The modern intellect has been organized
without considering the moral meaning of its
activity. This has caused the delusion that
the crowning glory of European culture is the
dreadnaught. Ninety per cent of all modern
inventions are for bodily destruction or bodily
comfort. While the body lolls in luxury, the
spirit is soused in lethargy.

As Ouspensky says, we have created two
lives — one material, the other spiritual. I be-
lieve this is owing to the fact that man is liv-
ing and working in the material and woman
in the spiritual. In other words, she is carry-
ing her own responsibilities on one shoulder
and man's baneful burdens on the other. The
figure of Atlas holding up the Globe should
be changed to that of a female.

One would think that in these days, when
psychology is taught even to children, that a
man who has lived forty years in the world of
action would know better than to boast of his
eternal activities. The word "busy" has
grown to be a veritable fetish with thousands
who have little or nothing to do. The truth is,
most men are not half as busy as they seem
and not more than a fourth as wise as they
look.

40 PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES

We have to find out by exact analysis just
what incentive lies behind people's actions.
What makes the distinction is the quality of
our acts. Everything in the material and the
spiritual worlds is judged according to qual-
ity. Gold, diamonds, clothes, bricks, music,
poetry* literature, are adjudged, in the last
resort, on the basis of intrinsic value. When
people are engaged in pursuits for the sake
of money the results will be on a plane with
the quality of the incentive.

In the work done by women in the past fifty
years in this country, the incentive has been
of a higher quality than that shown by men.

While men introduced a coarse realism into
the novel, women saved the situation by new
ideals. I do not think there would be much
left worth reading today but for woman's
taste and judgment.

In the world of intellect and emotion things
hang together. A low plane of intellect will
produce low impulses. The more we know the
greater our control of the different sense or-
gans. Nothing can happen without a corres-
ponding cause behind it.

PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES 41

The hysteria so common at great political
conventions is caused by the exceedingly
limited intelligence of the managers and di-
rectors who labor under the illusion that blind
impulse is tantamount to vision. In other
words, where the critical faculties are not de-
veloped anything can happen. And it is not
difficult to predict that when political conven-
tions are swayed by hysterical temperaments
the authority at the White House will have
all he can do to steer the Ship of State
through the troubled waters of impulse and
confusion.

There is a will to power that is blind. There
is another will to power that brings the high-
er emotions to bear on the lower impulses,
controls and directs the organs of sense.

The people who elect a President are the
ones who will influence his actions. And when
we talk about a President being a good man
for business we are compelled to seek for the
reason behind the statement.

If finance lands a President at the White
House, women, children, teachers and phil-
osophers must shift for themselves, since the
supreme test lies in function, and not in man-

42 PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES

ners, words and looks. And finance means
finesse.

Do not expect great innovations at the Capi-
tol until a strong woman takes her seat at
the White House; and by this I do not mean
one of Barnum's bearded ladies.

Conservatism is a good thing when it is
coupled with vision and judgment, but bear
in mind that monotony and mediocrity start
in the same groove, run at the same pace and
arrive at the same grave.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

There is but one mark of patriotism and
that is vigilance and enthusiasm. The cause
of your trouble is the sincerity with which
your foes think and act and the lukewarm
sentiment shown by Americans. The reason
is to be found in the comfort and luxury of
the present day compared with the pioneer
sacrifices of your fathers and grandfathers.
Your opponents are vindictive as well as vigi-
lant. They mean what they say and do what
they will. They are working as individuals,
as well as in groups and parties, but Ameri-
cans who inherited the land with liberty are
exchanging both for the license of the maw.

When school teachers and farm hands are
permitted to leave the country for the city,
the end is not so far off as your sophisticated
solons of the State Capitols would lead you
to suppose.

I once stated that three movings equal one
fire, and I can say now that the lack of teach-
ers and farm hands has resulted in a damage

44 PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES

equal to one revolution. No calamity comes
and goes single handed. The world, the flesh
and the devil are a triumvirate bound to-
gether by ties of consanguinity. Your school
teachers are passing over to the world, your
farm laborers to the flesh, and your ministers
to the devil.

You are browsing on the stubble. One de-
linquency involves another, and eventually
the monetary capital of the nation may be
reduced to that of France. The nation will
awake one day to the disillusioning fact that
peace and progress cannot be gauged by com-
mercial prosperity alone. For without food
what avails your steel, your oil and your
gold?

If you could witness the mortification poor
Andrew Carnegie is now undergoing because
of his lack of vision, you would have a lesson
not soon forgotten. He built libraries but fur-
nished no books to fill them. It was like build-
ing houses without windows. When leading
business men commit such folly what can
you expect of the nation at large?

The three things most needed by the peo-
ple are food, raiment and shelter. The next

PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES 45

three are instruction, religion and discipline.
Liberty is a privilege; it comes after all the
others. The individual has no rights inimical
to those of the collective conscience.

Until you learn this fundamental maxim,
all your knowledge will prove but a sounding
brass and a tinkling cymbal.

The nations are rattling over the cobble
stones of bankruptcy on a buckboard of com-
promise, on the high road to revolution.

JOHN MARSHALL

(The Expounder of the Constitution)

Recorded October, 1920

Some recent decisions of the Supreme
Court of the United States are, more than
any other factor, calculated to develop and
foster an element of national unrest. Its de-
liberations are beyond the intelligence of
many and above the interests of the major-
ity. Its psychology is that of a divorce be-
tween capital and labor. Its rulings remind
me of what transpired in England early in
the nineteenth century.

Many who were not socialists are beginning
to turn from the older order, imbued with
the feeling that nothing could happen in the
future worse for the country at large than
the conditions that are being endured in the
present.

A revolution arrives after a series of con-
nected events which exhausts the patience
of the public, and events are moving with in-
tensity as well as rapidity.

DANIEL WEBSTER

You will search the pages of history in vain
without finding a parallel to present condi-
tions.

The war gave Bohemia her freedom ; at the
same time it licensed a bohemian poet to
keep Italy stewing in her own juice, a bohe-
mian journalist from New York to direct af-
fairs in Moscow, and a bohemian socialist
from Switzerland to rule over Russia.

Added to this a fashionable ladies' pianist
has tried his hand, or should I say fingers,
in the science of unfurling the sails of Po-
land's new Ship of State, while shop-keepers
direct affairs in Germany and pusilanimous
politicians keep the people of America in a
state of tepid trepidation and flatulent tur-
moil. Can you wonder that the country is be-
ing hypnotized by the sight of so many can-
tankerous cataleptics?

Macbeth declared he had waded in so far
that returning would be as perilous as going

48 PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES

on. Nothing will move them until they are
swamped by the high tide of reaction and
flung as flotsam on the rocks of a stormy op-
portunism.

A new Damocles has a sword suspended
over the National Capitol, and liberty hangs
to the hinges of the Constitution by a hair.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

While a few people are ready to return to
first principles, many are giving expressions
to Garden of Eden proclivities. But instead
of the old Eve, you have the new Amazon;
instead of the old serpent, copperheads in
Congress; instead of the old Adam, fresh
brands of bluebeards.

Agreeable to the apple of the new Adam's
eye and the fruitarian diet of the new Eden,
some ladies have adopted the fig-leaf stand-
ard. But let that pass for the moment, al-
ways bearing in mind that he who loses his
sense of humor loses his equilibrium.

Millions of people are dancing their legs
off to keep their heads on.

Providence is wiser than the moralists.

There was a way out of the trenches and
there is a way out of the pessimism develop-
ed by the dying dispensation. It is not so
much a question of keeping your powder dry
as it is of keeping your wits from congealing.

50 PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES

Beware of nebulous notions and theories.
Uncanny kinks lead to calamitous brain
storms. A stitch in the side saves nine — kicks
behind the solar plexus.

BENJAMIN WADE
(Late Governor of Ohio— U. S. Senator)

Viewed in the light that shines on the
White House, there is no difference between
a man from Ohio and a gentleman from In-
diana.

Men from the pumpkin pie districts think
and feel alike, judging world politics by the
yard-stick method that prevailed in their vil-
lages when they were young men. They are
not always aware that political ruts cause so-
cial ructions.

The all-wool-and-a-yard-wide politician was
home-spun and honestly patriotic, but what
you need is a home-spun thinker whose vision
has got beyond the yard-stick measure and
can take in the whole world.

An old-school president, at this juncture,
will have little more authority than a Congo
king would have at a conference of jurists in
Paris.

52 PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES

Has anyone taken the trouble to find out
just what distinguishes the minority from
the majority?

While the home-spun politician was eating
cookies and buckwheat cakes made by his
mother in the Middle West, some millions in
New York, Chicago, Cleveland, and other for-
eign centers, were partaking of Wienerwurst,
sauerkraut, Swiss cheese and rye bread, and
clinking beer glasses, according to the cus-
tom of Continental Europe.

If we say that a statesman represents
Americanism, the question arises what kind
of Americanism? The Yankee, the Southern-
er, each had his place in the political econ-
omy of America from 1776 to the Emancipa-
tion Proclamation in 1863, and even up to the
Cleveland Administration, after which con-
ditions began to change with startling rap-
idity, when the children born of foreign pa-
rents were beginning to come of age and the
European ferment began to leaven the lumps
of sectional dough.

The man who occupies the White House in
1921 should take Time by the forelock and
the profiteer with the padlock, know how to

PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES 53

translate "Es ist verboten" into Russian, and
say, "Get thee behind me, Satan," in Es-
peranto.

If honesty , alone, is the best and only pol-
icy, our country would be safe, but honesty
is only one of the qualities necessary in these
days to carry a President through the mazes
of a complex administration. Honesty does
not always imply clear vision or even ordi-
nary common sense. The faculties of diplo-
matic tact and political judgment are infinite-
ly more important, and experience still more
so.

In America the roles enacted by profes-
sional politicians remind one of a masquerade
where everyone is trying to penetrate be-
hind the masks and guessing is the rule. If
in this heterogeneous ball-room you slap your
partner on the back, you may elicit a grunt
from a grouchy bolshevik or a groan from a
disgruntled "bohemian."

And yet Congress enacts laws for Ameri-
cans who understand no dialect but their own
and who have to engage interpreters when
they visit Paris. How many wealthy Ameri-
cans realize that these United States have

54 PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES

outgrown the cookie era, the buckwheat pan-
cake era, the corn cob era, the wooden nut-
meg era, and arrived at the root-hog-or-die
era?

Young America today no more resembles
the young America of thirty years ago than
a butterfly resembles a caterpillar. Young
men and women are sixty per cent cosmopoli-
tan and forty per cent rebel.

During the next five years the number of
young people who will insist on thinking for
themselves will increase two-fold, because in
that time many thousands of children born
of foreign parents in America will have be-
come mature enough to have fixed upon some
sort of ideal.

Congress will realize the situation when it
is too late for regrets to be of any service.
Which calls to mind a story apropos of
this pressing subject: A landlady, having no
means of obtaining meat for her boarders,
made a stew out of a litter of kittens. The
truth became known in a day or two. One of
the boarders said the very thought made her
sick, to which the landlady replied: "Feeling
sick won't do no good; them kittens has all
been digested."

DON PIATT

(Late Editor of "The Capital," Washing-
ton, D. C.)

Where are the debaters whose rapier
tongues ripped up the rag dolls of Congress
and kept the floor of the House supplied with
fresh saw-dust, whose fantastic fencing and
heart-piercing thrusts were the delight of
the gallery and the terror of fire eaters. Gone,
gone where the woodbine twineth. What
went they out for to see? A reed shaken by
the wind? There is a difference in reeds.
Tom Reed of Maine shook the House, but the
House never shook him. What were his fa-
vorite drinks? There was plenty to choose
from in the Washington of his day. But note
the difference between the wit of the Maine
Reed and that of the Missouri Reed.

On the other hand, where did Bryan get
the "cross of gold" inspiration in the old
days? Did he do it on tannic acid released

56 PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES

from tea leaves? Who will ever know? One
thing is certain — he never again rose to the
same level.

Is our planet revolving toward a second edi-
tion of puritanism? Probably. The esprit de
corps that animated the body politic begins
to resemble a corpse with the esprit evapor-
ated.

The human mind needs moments of exalta-
tion as well as relaxation. Brilliant results
are not produced by lukewarm sentiments
expressed in a voice that lacks enthusiasm.

Washington is now a resort for celluloid
cynics and a refuge for asbestos patriots
whose marmorian snobbery makes me think
of the ruins of temples abandoned by the
gods and forgotten by man.

The great blunder of the prohibitionists
was made when they condemned beer and
light wine. Nature abhors abruptness. Pro-
gress is not made by sudden jerks and vio-
lent laws passed in a hurry.

If a few persons living in an obscure vil-
lage in Ohio can bring about a movement like
prohibition, the same influence can bring
about a return of the old Connecticut blue
laws.

PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES 57

Violent actions are followed by violent re-
actions. From this there is no escape.

The fundamental objection to prohibition,
as it stands, lies in the cold fact that provin-
cialism, no matter how sincere, can never
compete with international common sense
and cosmopolitan culture.

Village residents are ignorant of the laws
that govern society in the most intelligent
centers of the world. What will be the result
in the long run? Antagonism between the
people of the cities and the people of the
country.

When they prohibit tobacco, a war of cuss
words will be followed by a battle of cuspi-
dors, and the very crows will cuss the cro-
cuses.

BENJAMIN DISRAELI

Some Members of Parliament have lost
their reason, the majority have lost their
wits, all are without vision.

Lloyd George presents the curious specta-
cle of a man of the people who observes them
through the glasses of a Welsh Calvinist. He
is a democrat with the demeanor of a lord,
a radical who has fallen between the two
stools of the middle-class and the landed aris-
tocracy. Nonconformist sentimentality, on
one hand, and titled wealth on the other, have
blinded him to the imperative needs of the
time and the dangers that confront the Em-
pire.

The English people of the past twenty
years have suffered as much from misgov-
ernment as the Germans and the Russians,
but they cannot stop the present stream of
progress by clatter in the House and appeals
to patriotism.

PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES 59

For years England has been saddled with
cabinets composed of professional humorists
and hum-drum moralists.

Augustine Birrell was a diluted edition of
Sydney Smith, and Bonar Law should have
been a professor of theology in a Presbyterian
seminary. Sir Edward Carson played the
role of an unfrocked priest in the service of
demiurgos. Earl Curzon is a political dere-
lict whose presence in the Council Chamber
prevents unity and impedes progress.

History will record their acts as the most
amazing in the annals of Great Britain. I see
nothing for the old order but unconditional
surrender. The hand-writing on the wall was
visible in 1909, but no preparation was made
for the change which is now sweeping the
country with cyclonic force.

We, from our side, can do no more than
utter some words of warning for the few
who have ears to hear, the tidal wave of
change not being confined to particular coun-
tries or regions.

I, too, when Prime Minister, was blind to
the reality, having been born and reared in
an atmosphere as foreign to that of the

60 PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES

masses as the atmosphere of the Winter Pal-
ace was foreign to the peasants of Russia.

We staggered under the load of a wealthy
and titled upper class. They consumed the
people's time and imposed infinite misery on
some millions of toilers, and for these things
we rewarded the men at the top with fresh
titles.

As you know, I led the Conservative Party
in England for many years, but that Party
was, and still is, avid for power.

The Liberal Party was made up of men
using Nonconformity as an instrument of ad-
vancement. They placed opportunity above
the truth, position above principle, power
above progress. We were all intellectual au-
tomatons, set in motion by springs wound up
by leaders who were themselves automatons.

England goes by machinery. Her very ex-
istence is mechanical. Now, when a loose
screw stops the evolution of the wheels, the
whole nation stops.

In what way can we be said to excel in
probity of conduct the people of Ireland? In
what way are we superior to Irish politi-
cians? The scandals that occurred in London

PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES 61

during the war would not have been tolerated
in Dublin under an Irish Parliament. And
still England is being led by a Welsh Calvinist,
opposed by a Scottish humorist who says his
prayers, backed by Anglican agnostics and
middle-class dissenters overwhelmed with
fear.

We always imitate the French, but while
we accepted Voltairianism in principle, the
French had the courage to put it into prac-
tice.

While the French became practical pagans
in 1789, we became practical hypocrites.

It is this element that has created the mor-
al indifference of the Anglican Church and
the intellectual apathy of the so-called Non-
conformist conscience. This is why there is
no stability behind the old phraseology, the
old ceremonials, the old confessions of faith —
now so many catch-words which the people
abhor. And this is why the working men find
it so easy to send their leaders to Parliament.
For the same reason Russian radicalism is
certain of a warm welcome on English soil.

It is true that this hypocrisy is subconsci-
ous, having had its origin during the French

62 PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES

Revolution. This renders it far more danger-
ous because political leaders in England to-
day are mentally incompetent to realize the
danger that lies before them.

We cannot reason with people whose vision
is dulled by four generations of moral apathy.
Hence they will continue to "kick against the
pricks" to the bitter end. There will be strife
added to strife, confusion to confusion, and
they, themselves, will invite the drastic
events which must follow so much stubborn
resistance to the demands of common jus-
tice and the progress of civilization.

PRINCE BISMARCK
Recorded November 3d, 1920

When I imposed an indemnity of five bil-
lion francs on the French people in 1870 we
knew that the money could and would be
paid. But there is no parallel between Ger-
many* in 1920 and France in 1870. The Rep-
arations Commission has only succeeded in
proving its incompetence. The German dele-
gates have shown that the Allied war claims
amount to more than five hundred billion
marks (gold), which is nearly four thousand
billions at the present rate of exchange.

This fantastic sum, one hundred times
more than France paid to Germany in 1870,
is expected of a country on the verge of revo-
lution and chaos. I charge this Commission
with incompetence, extravagance, luxurious
living, and claims at once absurd and ridicu-
lous.

You punish some of the most dangerous
criminals by indeterminate sentences, which

64 PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES

frequently end after a year's imprisonment,
but you expect to hold the German people in
financial bondage for more than a generation
to come because of the criminal blunders of
less than a hundred individuals.

I was blinded by material factors at the time
of my seeming triumphs but now I can see
some of the things which will never come to
pass. The French and the English are re-
peating some of the blunders I made fifty
years ago. They are counting on conditions
which will never exist, like a bird sitting on a
nest of mixed eggs from which the cuckoo
will eventually oust all the other birds.

French people are under the illusion that
Russia will meet the obligations undertaken
by the late Czar. To expect such a thing
shows the child-like illusions under which
French fanatics are living. They are still
wrapped in the swaddling clothes of politics.

We committed crimes that have brought
civilization to the brink of chaos, but we are
not capable of such naivete.

The logic of a Frenchman is no better than
the mysticism of a Russian or the sentimen-
tality of an Englishman. French people

PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES 65

learned nothing from the blunders of Napo-
leon III and the debacle of Sedan. And the
reason? They have remained provincial while
the Germans imitated the commercial cos-
mopolitanism of the English.

Advice is the cheapest of all things. Never-
theless, I advise your statesmen to place no
reliance on sentimental contracts written on
paper foredoomed to become "scraps."

I do not hesitate to declare that no agree-
ment signed since 1913 is worth more than
the seals. In Europe, leaders and rulers have
passed from an international game of chess
to a national gamble with marked cards.

You have now to deal with an element
which did not exist in my time. This element
embraces all factions of the new radicalism,
no matter in what country or under what
leader. Some of these elements may unite,
but they are not going to change. How, then,
can you undertake to insure the future by
contracts signed and sealed by elderly gen-
tlemen with good intentions and poor judg-
ment?

The war gave the new factions the long
wished-for opportunity. They seized it in

66 PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES

Russia, in Germany, in Poland, in Britain,
and other countries. But the opportunities
created by the war are one thing, the oppor-
tunities of tomorrow will be different, and it
is this contingency for which your leaders are
not prepared. You will have to select men of
vision who will judge events as they arrive,
without regard to the distant future, which
belongs to no man.

One of my greatest mistakes was in sepa-
rating Protestant Prussia from the interests
of the Catholics of South Germany.

The new radicalism is opposed to some
things which are irrevocably linked with re-
ligious doctrine.

Without the Catholic Church all Europe
would be in the throes of the Commune. The
principal cause of our disintegration was that
we sanctioned Protestant flirtation with mod-
ern materialism.

France is beginning to see that even a
weak monarchy is better than a radical gov-
ernment without a God.

You may expect a return of the monarchy
in more than one country. Agnostics and
Protestants, moved by fear on one side, and

PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES 67

disgust on the other, will unite for a restora-
tion as their last hope. There will be a repe-
tition of historic events.

Bonaparte was ushered in by the French
Revolution, and his advent was followed by
three kings and one emperor.

The majority treat their rulers as children
treat their toys: when the novelty wears off
a change is demanded.

Political psychology and religious senti-
ment are not the same thing. Nevertheless,
they must be considered together. The Ger-
mans are now awaiting the hour when the in-
evitable change will be demanded. Events
take crowns from some heads and place them
on others. If the ex-Kaiser ever occupies the
throne again a modern Nero will fiddle
amidst the ruins of German imperialism, for
you know he meddled with fiddle strings as
well as with political wires.

You think it strange? The impossible is
always happening. Never lose sight of the
fact that an organized minority is more for-
midable than a disorganized majority. Three
men brought about the coup d'etat that
placed the outcast Louis Napoleon on the

68 PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES

throne, one man started the Russian Revo-
lution, I planned the overthrow of the Second
Empire with the aid of Count von Moltke.
The majority put their trust in numbers, but
the bigger a thing grows the nearer it is to
disintegration. An autocratic minority ruled
in Germany, an automatic majority rules in
France and England. Two men started the
present rule in Moscow, both of them from
the outside.

"God has been merciful to us," said Ca-
vour, in the Italian Senate, "He has made
Spain one degree lower than Italy." God has
been merciful to Germany, He has made Rus-
sian communism more abhorrent than Ger-
man socialism.

Nothing will be left undone by the French
government to secure permanent occupation
of the coal district of the Rhine.

Conditions will not remain long as they are.
They are preparing decisive coups in Bava-
ria, Hanover, Austria and Hungary. New
combinations will amaze your statesmen and
diplomats, who are ignorant of the fact that
changes and upheavals operate in cycles of
three and seven. What they call chance is the

PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES 69

working of law. Spiritual forces operate
through the physical, and nature will take a
hand in the reactions in Petrograd and Mos-
cow. Cold, hunger and starvation will dissi-
pate the hopes of the ruling minority. Un-
told numbers will be sacrificed.

During the French Revolution philosophers
and thinkers were decapitated. In Russia
such men are killed by hunger, the difference
being one of method.

Such conditions will be repeated in differ-
ent countries until people learn that the spir-
itual cannot be separated from the material
without pain and slaughter.

After all the long-winded conferences and
shorthand reports nothing is left but a con-
fusion of blots on the tissue paper of time.

I may say more on another occasion.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

The happy-go-lucky humor of the day is no
match for the cool calculation of European
communists. English and American humor-
ists do for the public what the court jester
once did for blase kings.

In the sardonic temper of the Russian rev-
olutionist, I see a return of the French tem-
per of 1793.

Most of the sermons and speeches of the
time are chameleon in character and tepid in
feeling. English humorists developed a flag-
rant cynicism, spotted with a varioloid para-
dox, while French writers have halted be-
tween the isolation of the hospital and the in-
sularity of the home.

The war brought Anatole France to his
senses, the last of the Gallic wits, who pos-
sessed a greater charm than Voltaire with-
out attaining his universal prestige. Prince
Bismarck declares that the French have
learned nothing since their defeat at Sedan.

PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES 71

Yet French writers have learned more from
the great war than the writers of any other
country.

English humor is meant to entertain a
public lost in the cynical buffooneries of ma-
terialism; American humor is meant to
amuse a public lost in the mazes of extrava-
gant pleasures and provincial inanities.

English humor has a certain seal; Ameri-
can humor a certain mark — the difference
between sealing wax and a postage stamp.
Both aim to fill the ghastly gap left by the
doctrine of evolution since it caught the fancy
of agnostic freebooters in 1870 — forerunners
of something grimmer than the Soviet sym-
bols of a return of puritanism even now
creeping into view as ivy creeps up the water
spouts.

Laughter will vanish, since there will be
nothing left to laugh at. Dancing will cease,
for curfew will ring at nine and people will
begin work at five.

Remember that all the great modern move-
ments had an obscure origin. Spiritualism
began in a country farm-house, Christian

72 PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES

Science developed out of mediumship, prohi-
bition was started in a village, woman's suf-
frage was started by a Quakeress, Theosophy
began at a farm-house in Vermont, the Sal-
vation Army was started by a group of ob-
scure persons.

The new puritanism will start by a com-
mittee of persons unknown to the public,
chosen from the ranks of the Methodists,
Baptists and Presbyterians. Grim determin-
ists, they will ignore satire, sarcasm and
irony, ignore party politics, ignore the oppo-
sition of luke-warm Christians, form commit-
tees, in which they will be aided by drastic
reactions during the period of readjustment.

Centers will soon be formed in Atlanta,
Nashville, Cleveland, Boston, Hartford, Phila-
delphia and Washington, D. C.

What is causing so much crime? Not one,
but many elements of decadence, all oper-
ating together, among which I can name rag,
jazz, high balls, cabarets, free verse, neuro-
tic art, sentimental optimism, cheap notions
of progress, neutral sermons, automobilism,
lack of child discipline, absence of fear

PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES 73

among people under the age of forty — evils
which you may apply to all English-speaking
countries.

The licence of the cities dominates country
life and country thought. The city minority
rules the majority in the country, and it is in
the country that the reaction will begin.

JOHN MARSHALL
(Second Message)

Many of the smaller nations, instead of
being content with their liberty, have thrown
it away for the licence that always goes with
land grabbing. For a nation is nothing more
than an individual with a certain amount of
collective ambition.

Much of the work of the League of Nations
will have to be undone. But it will not be un-
done by any League. The nations will settle
differences in accordance with the law that
permits the more powerful to wield control
commensurate with their geographical and
intellectual importance.

All people have rights which ought to be
respected, but some have privileges as well as
rights, and the privileged will hold the upper
hand as long as intelligence takes precedence
of illiteracy, energy dominates over lethargy,
and the power of organized numbers rules
over minorities.

PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES 75

Your statesmen and your mediators will
have to learn the distinction between rights
and privileges. All are supposed to possess
common rights under the common law, but
it is wisdom, supported by poise and power,
that constitutes privilege. David and Solo-
mon were privleged. So were Alfred the
Great, Washington and Lincoln.

A nation is temperamental like an individ-
ual. The temperament may be vascillating or
it may be stolid; it may be logical or it may
be commercial; or a combination of the Saxon
and the Celt.

The nations that will hold the balance of
power in the future will be the ones with the
most will and poise, backed by number.
Riches, alone, will not save. Wealth did not
save Germany from disaster, nor did it help
Nopoleon III to ward off the Prussian inva-
sion in 1870. Wealth invites invasion and
conquest. This is why England and America
will now be the principal target for the am-
bitious and the discontented. This is why
Japan seeks a firm foothold in China, and the
Russians an entrance to India through Persia.

76 PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES

Without the prospects of loot there would
be no war. When ambition and glory lure a
nation on, the desire for loot supplies the mo-
tor force. When hunger forces a people to in-
vade a nation, loot becomes a necessity.

What the wealthy of every nation refuse
to understand, or even to consider, is that ma-
terial force engenders vanity, individualism,
rivalry and envy. All manifestations of force
contain an element of disintegration. The
type of a nation will always represent the pol-
icy and the trend of the nation.

The supreme blunder of the Peace Confer-
ence was made when the delegates, with
Mr. Wilson at their head, refused to face the
fact that no nation can rise above the ideals
and idiosyncrasies of the national tempera-
ment, and that sudden liberation from re-
straint is as dangerous for a country as it is
for an individual.

There is but one step between liberty and
licence, and that step meant pandemonium
for all classes in Russia. For other peoples it
may mean political bondage and the total loss
of a national spirit. For the Hindoos it will
mean civil wars between the different native

PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES 77

rulers, for China it has meant a series of re-
volutions and counter revolutions which may
have to be suppressed by the drastic hand of
a Japanese Bonaparte.

The League Conference at Versailles took
no account of the working of natural law.
Sentimentality was the key-note of Mr. Wil-
son's idealism, and commercial expansion the
dominant idea of his opponents.

As for religion exerting any fundamental
influence for peace and right thinking, it
caused Protestants to fight Protestants and
Catholics to fight Catholics, while German
and Austrian cardinals did all in their power
to aid in the invasion and conquest of Belgium
and France, on one hand, and Italy, the
stronghold of the Papal See, on the other;
and all this in the face of the statement of
the Kaiser that Catholicism must be destroy-
ed. Nothing like it has been known since the
dawn of Christianity.

The only apparent reason for the quies-
cent attitude of some of the smaller nations
is that they are without the material means
of waging war on their neighbors.

78 PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES

Just as long as politicians are impelled by
self-interest there will be found nations that
will have to use force for the suppression of
licence and the curtailment of liberty. In ev-
ery country the people are getting what their
thoughts and deeds create for them.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Events come and go in cycles — there is a
beginning, a middle and an end. The League
of Nations had a beginning and it will have
an end. But what kind of an end? Will it be
one of victory or one of ignominy?

The two fatal blunders of the Kaiser and
his cohorts consisted in the delusion that
England could not raise, equip and transport a
body of troops sufficient to offer adequate re-
sistance to the invaders of France in con-
junction with the French and Belgian armies,
and that America could not or would not join
the European Allies.

At the present juncture the inimical forces,
both in continental Europe and in America,
are repeating the old blunders under fresh
conditions.

History is a repetition of the old tunes with
new variations. Just now the fireworks of
sophistry and rhetoric drown out the familiar
tune and what is heard is the buzz-saw of
political machinery.

80 PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES

Hyenas are gnawing the bones left by the
lion rampant of Czardom; and Siberia, the
remnant, is being consumed by jackals from
Japan. It remains to be seen how long voters
with American pedigrees will be influenced
by demagogues who would induce them to
part with their birthright for a mess of pot-
tage burnt on the bottom.

The longer you wink at anarchy in Europe
the greater will be the menace of social chaos
at home. The worship of shibboleths cannot
be kept up beyond a point where the majority
grow tired of hocus-pocus politics and
academical agnosticism.

There should be harmony of interests in
dealing with the people of Mexico, from whom
you have much to learn in many ways.

The Obregon Government should be recog-
nized at Washington and immediate steps
taken to insure cordial relations between the
two countries.

The City of Mexico is a capital with a great
future.

You are about to pass through a period of
'great confusion. Warnings have been given
hut not heeded. Unless you cease to theorize,

PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES 81

and propagate a spirit of justice and judg-
ment, the near future will develop something
more than storms in the blue china teapots of
diplomacy.

ROBERT G. INGERSOLL

Washington needs a breaker of images.

The pedestrian sauntering down Pennsyl-
vania Avenue cannot but note the hefty Han-
cock on horseback, looking as if he had just
left a meeting of ward politicians, and, in an-
other part of the city, McClellan, the Beau
Brummel of the Civil War, on a charger, snif-
fing the smoke of battle from a safe distance,
and others whose names are writ in water but
whose effigies remain in bronze.

To the scrap heap with these, and in their
places erect memorials for the women, who
did as much for America as Joan of Arc did
for France, the intrepid pioneers of their
race, the prophetic patriots of the nineteenth .
century— Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia
Mott and Susan B. Anthony.

It would take a Lincoln Memorial to depict
their serenity, a National Capitol to symbol-
ize their nobility, a Washington Monument
to typify the towering height of their
achievement and the scope and clarity of their
vision.

STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS

A war between America and England
would fill your homes with desolation and
bring ruin to the whole country. Do your sins
of omission merit such a punishment? I am
here to tell you what to expect if such a hur-
ricane of disaster ever sweeps the two coun-
tries.

Millions of people are under the impression
that the United States can act independently
of the conditions prevailing in the other great
nations. This suggestion, coming, as it did,
from a professional joker in England, has met
with eager response from revolutionary emis-
saries now in your midst, supported by politi-
cal fillibusters who are masking the truth.

If England ever starts such a war she will
lose India. Her direction of the reins of civili-
zation in many quarters of the world would
cease on the day hostilities began. But I am
speaking for America.

84 PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES

A war with England would Russianize the
United States within three months. Even if
the navy could keep the enemy at a safe dis-
tance the destructive forces at home would
loot the principal cities and spread terror
from ocean to ocean.

The first to lose in such an upheaval would
be the wealthy propagandists of disorder and
violence, who, living in security now, would
be hurled with destructive force against the
weapons of their own creation.

GENERAL BENJAMIN H. GRIERSON

Late Commander of the Military Depart-
ment of Southern California, Arizona
and New Mexico

In 1914 western civilization was threatened
by a military autocracy centralized at Berlin.
Europe is now threatened by a communistic
tyranny centralized at Moscow and by an
autocratic aristocracy centered in Japan, anti-
Christian, anti-democratic, anti-American.
You may call it fate or destiny, it matters not
so long as you know what the signs and por-
tents are.

We can see what is going on in the navy
yards of the Nipponese Empire. We have
noted the strenuous efforts put forth in naval
preparations there.

A Japanese Bonaparte will soon dominate
China and prevent Christian propaganda
throughout Asia. I could give you the dates
fixed for certain maneuvers and events in
connection with Japanese ambitions relating

86 PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES

to America, but they could change the dates.
Suffice it to say they are making ready as
fast as possible, much faster than many in
this country could be made to believe. When
the decisive moment arrives for action it will
come suddenly, like the invasion of Belgium
by the Germans.

Here are some of their expectations: —

The invasion of the coast of Mexico and a
coalition of Japanese forces with some mili-
tary faction in Mexico likely to be of practical
aid, the bombing of American cities on the
Pacific Coast from the air, virtual cessation
of communication between certain sections
east of the Rocky Mountains and California,
brought about not so much by physical
means as by revolutionary influences. They
are counting on a Soviet revolution east of
the Rockies while they are gaining a foothold
in California.

One of their first attempts would be to
bomb the railway passes in the Cascades and
the Sierra Nevadas.

General Grant has warned you in regard
to the Panama Canal and other points that
need immediate attention. Millions would be

PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES 87

alarmed if they could realize how much the
Government at Washington resembles the
British Government just before the German
descent into Belgium. Are they waiting un-
til they can spy the enemy through field
glasses?

I could give a map of the plans of approach
of the Japanese navy, intended to operate in
separate units, but it would do no good. They
are ready to change their tactics at any time,
and have done so more than once.

Let me add that the bellicose attitude of
the war party in Japan is such that a war be-
tween England and America would be hailed
as a symbol of their divine destiny.

Do not be surprised when I say that they
proclaim the end of Christian civilization was
reached when the Anglo-Saxons took posses-
sion of the Pacific Coast.

In the Far East, British domination at-
tained its zenith in India; in America, Anglo-
Saxon influence attained its limit in Cali-
fornia. The possession of the Pacific Coast
of North America is, therefore, the limit for
the dominant white race. The tocsin has

88 PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES

sounded for a Japanese avatar who will unify
the political, commercial and religious forces
of Japan and China, give the coup de grace
to a tottering civilization and dominate the
world. So do they reason and preach.

ALEXANDER HAMILTON

What do the clouds on the social horizon
predict? Is Nature a book of fate? If so, is
it sealed or open? Whoever understands the
political actions of the past can foresee the
reactions of the future.

Human nature is always the same.

The two things brought to the surface by
great upheavals are extreme virtues and ex-
treme vices. The virtue of self sacrifice, on
the one hand, the vice of self interest on the
other. Vice is flexible, cunning, adaptable.

You are living at a time when profiteers
amaze by their cynical audacity, but profit-
eers have always existed. Before the war the
nobles of Russia and Germany were profiteers
in landed privileges and governmental per-
quisites. The tillers of the soil were free in
name, serfs in practice. In England two or
three hundred lords and peers possess the
land. In America food profiteering began dur-
ing the Civil War. This national vice has
never been attacked at the roots.

90 PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES

Your age is characterized by a high level
of predatory ability and a low level of pro-
phetic visibility.

The old hackneyed phrase, "This is a free
country," has been applied in varying degrees
according to the caprice of the individual with
the most aggressive will.

New words, definitions, excuses, have been
invented to meet the new conditions, but of
all the words yet brought into use, "camou-
flage" is the only one that covers the cynical
effrontery of predatory hypocrisy. It is a
vocable of universal utility. It applies to the
cock-pits of commerce as well as to the arena
of bull and bear politics.

It depicts a Hindoo patience in the pulpit
and a Hoodoo palsy in the pews.

The word "democracy" itself is the stripes
painted, on the sides of the old Ship of State
in her zig-zag course to elude the torpedoes of
the proletarian submarines.

A capitalistic profiteer is a high brow op-
timist who lives by the sweat of the low brow
pessimist. The stretching process will cease
suddenly like the snapping of a rubber string
stretched beyond the limit.

PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES 91

The masses withojut a voice always find ar-
ticulation in the unlooked-for man, the un-
looked-for group.

The people without a mouthpiece are a mob,
and no mob can run itself for more than a
few days. It is the initiated who lead, and
leadership requires time, patience, judgment.

In the world of genius there are no up-
starts.

The great leader never rises suddenly.
Bonaparte was a military graduate, Grant
was a product of West Point, Lincoln was
thirty years preparing for the Presidency,
Lenine spent twenty years in the study of
economics. All countries have the same ex-
perience.

Voltaire endowed the middle classes of
France with a voice, united the disaffected of
all classes, and peppered their indignation
with pungent epigrams. He created an intel-
lectual garden for lovers of liberty, and from
the realm of the mind flung the thorns of
ridicule in the face of titled imbeciles and
crowned the heads of scholars with laurel.

92 PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES

The people of France were washed by Louis
XIV, wrung by Louis XV, and dried in the
back yard of tyrannical economics by Louis
XVI.

But it was the orators and pamphleteers
who ironed out the frills and furbelows of the
old order.

Statistical facts may convince but they do
not compel. Who knows how the French Rev-
olution would have ended had Mirabeau, ora-
tor of the great and solemn days, survived to
put into action the idealism of Rousseau? In-
tellect alone never passes the halfway house.
When intellect, reason and emotion are fused
in one, the summit of achievement is at-
tained.

PHILLIPS BROOKS

The time for discipline is approaching.
Happy are those who, under Divine direction,
consent to be led, for, in the words of Quin-
tilian: — Nulla poena est nisi invito, or as
Seneca expressed it, Fata volentum ducunt,
involentem trahunt, — those who refuse will
be dragged.

You must in some manner experience the
ordeals common to other peoples, and you
have seen from a distance what has over-
taken many cities and nations, the inhabi-
tants of which felt themselves as fixed as the
rocks in the soil. Yet, all that is happening
is in harmony with Divine law. You will find
it in Isaiah and Jeremiah. The repetition is
inevitable except for those who possess vis-
ion.

The time for appeals is past.

"The earth mourneth and f adeth away, the
world languisheth and fadeth, the haughty
people of the world do languish."

94 PSYCHO-PHONE MESSAGES

<rWhen thou shalt cease to spoil, thou shaft
be spoiled, and when thou shalt make an end
to deal treacherously, they shall deal treach-
erously with thee."

Are the people astonished? Let them mar-
vel at their own willfulness.

"The kings of the earth and all the inhabi-
tants of the world would not have believed
that the adversary and the enemy should
have entered into the gates of Jerusalem."

Titus, with his army, destroyed the Holy
City. The enemy entered the gates from
without but your adversaries have long been
entrenched within.

Mammon is heavily laden and will fall
from the top. Material power is volatile.

In the day of trial, the retainer and the
hireling will seek a refuge, every man for
himself. They will melt like the wax image
before the heat of the furnace. On that day
humility will be as a precious gift and pov-
erty as a peace offering.

Blessed is he who uses the spade and the
hoe, for by the sweat of his brow he shall eat
the bread of security.

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