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Presented  to  the 

UNIVERSITY  OF  TORONTO 
LIBRARY 

by  the 

ONTARIO  LEGISLATIVE 
LIBRARY 

1980 


THE 


71433 

ATLANTIC  MONTHLY 


A  MAGAZINE   OF 


Literature,  Science,  &rt5  ant) 


VOLUME  CXI 


BOSTON  AND  NEW  YOEK 
THE  ATLANTIC  MONTHLY  COMPANY 
Ulitoet^itie  $rc£g,  CamBtitige 

1913 


COPYRIGHT,  1912  and  1913, 
BY  THE  ATLANTIC  MONTHLY  COMPANY. 


AP 

2 


v-Hl 


Printed  at  The  Riverside  Press,  Cambridge,  Matt.,  U.  S.  A. 


CONTENTS 


INDEX  BY  TITLES 
Prose 


Adrianople,    A    Correspondent   at,    Cyril 

Campbell 846 

Alice  and  Education,  F.  B.  R.  Hellems  .     .    256 
America,  The  Religion  of,  William  Canon 

Barry 469 

American  Control  of  the  Phillipines,  Ber- 
nard Moses 585 

American  Religion,  Reasonable  Hopes  of, 

George  A.  Gordon 824 

American  Wage-Earner  Again,  The,    .     .     286 

Amulet,  The,  Mary  Antin 31 

Answering  of  Abiel  Kingsbury's  Prayers, 

The,  Virginia  Baker 837 

Atonement,  Josiah  Royce 406 

Balkan  Crisis,  The,  Roland  G.  Usher  ...  128 
Before  the  Canal  is  Opened,  Arthur  Ruhl    .  10 
Benjamin,  Judah  P.,  Gamaliel  Bradford,  Jr.  795 
Book-Publishing  and  its  Present  Tenden- 
cies, George  P.  Brett 454 

Both  Sides  of  the  Servant  Question,  Annie 

Winsor  Allen 496 

Brains  and  Buying,  Elizabeth  C.  Billings  .  768 

Breath  of  Life,  The,  John  Burroughs    ,    .  546 

Capitalistic  Government,  The  Collapse  of, 
Brooks  Adams 433 

Censured   Saints,   The,    [Reviews],   George 
Hodges 506 

Chinese  Republic,  A  Plea  for  the  Recogni- 
tion of  the,  Ching  Chun  Wang       ...      42 

Christian  Unity,  Franklin  Spencer  Spalding    640 

Collapse  of  Capitalistic  Government,  The, 
Brooks  Adams 433 

Confederate  Portraits,  Gamaliel  Bradford, 
Jr. 

J.  E.  B.  Stuart        . 98 

Judah  P.  Benjamin 795 

Confessions  of  One  Behind  the  Times,  The, 
An  Old  Timer 353 

Constantinople  hi  War-Time,  H.  G.  Dwght    443 


Correspondent  at  Adrianople,  A,  Cyril 
Campbell 846 

Cost  of  Modern  Sentiment,  The,  Agnes 
Repplier 610 

Courts  and  Legislative  Freedom,  The, 
George  W.  Alger 345 

Dangers  of  War  in  Europe,  The,  Guglielmo 
Ferrero 1 

De  Senectute,  Henry  Dwight  Sedgioick  .     .     163 

Defense  of  Purism  in  Speech,  A,  Leila 
Sprague  Learned 682 

Dickinson,  Emily,  The  Poetry  of,  Martha 
Hale  Shackford 93 

Down-and-Out,  Letters  of  a    .     .     .     .  190,  368 

Emotion  and  Etymology,  Yoshio  Markino  479 
Entertaining  the  Candidate,  Katharine 

Baker 277 

Epic  of  the  Indian,  The,  Charles  M.  Harvey  1 18 
Evening  at  Madame  Rachel's,  An,  Alfred 

De  Mussel 76 

Farmer  and  Finance,  The,  Myron  T.  Her- 
rick 170 

Guam,  The  Magic  of,  Marjorie  L.  Sewell  .    649 

Idyllic,  Robert  M.Gay 566 

Indian,  The  Epic  of  the,  Charles  M.  Har- 
vey ...  , 118 

Industrial  Peace  or  War,  Everett  P.  Wheeler  532 

Insects  and  Greek  Poetry,  Lafcadio  Hearn  .  618 

Labor  Unions,  The  Negro  and  the,  Booker 
T.  Washington 756 

Lawyer  and  Physician:  A  Contrast,  G.  M. 
Stratton 46 

Legislative  Freedom,  The  Courts  and, 
George  W.  Alger 345 

Lessons  of  the  Wilderness,  John  Muir  .    .      81 


IV 


CONTENTS 


Letters  of  a  Down-and-Out      .     .     .      190,  368 

Life  of  Irony,  The,  Randolph  S.  Bourne  .     .  357 

Machine-Trainers,  The,  Gerald  Stanley  Lee  198 
Magic  of  Guam,  The,  Marjorie  L.  Sewell  .  649 
Magic  Shadow-Shapes,  Robert  M.  Gay  .  .  419 
Massey  Money,  The,  Cornelia  A.  P.  Comer  320 
Money  Trust,  The,  Alexander  D.  Noyes  .  653 
Monroe  Doctrine,  The  :  an  Obsolete  Shib- 
boleth, Hiram  Bingham  721 

Mother  City,  The,  Zephine  Humphrey  .     .  789 

Nationalism  in  Music,  Redfern  Mason  .     .  394 

Need,  The,  Zona  Gale 744 

Negro  and  the  Labor  Unions,  The,  Booker 

T.  Washington 756 

Newest  Poets,  Two  of  the,' Robert  Shafer  .  489 

Out  of  the  Wilderness,  John  Muir    ...  266 

Passing  of  a  Dynasty,  The,  Francis  E. 

Leupp  ,t  ....  296 

Philippines,  American  Control  of  the,  Ber- 
nard Moses 583 

Philippines  by  way  of  India,  The,  H. 

Fielding-Hall 577 

Plea  for  the  Recognition  of  the  Chinese 

Republic,  A,  Ching  Chun  Wang  ...  42 
Poetry  of  Emily  Dickinson,  The,  Martha 

Hale  Shackford  93 

Precision's  English,  Ellwood  Hendrick  .  .  686 

President,  The,  E.  S 289 

Public  Utilities  and  Public  Policy,  Theodore 

N.Vail 307 

Purism  in  Speech,  A  Defense  of,  Leila 

Sprague  Learned 682 

Real  Socialism,  Henry  Kitchell  Webster  .  .  634 

Real  Yellow  Peril,  The,  J.  0.  P.  Bland  .  .  734 
Reasonable  Hopes  of  American  Religion, 

George  A.  Gordon 824 

Recent  Reflections  of  a  Novel-Reader  .  .  688 
Religion  of  America,  The,  William  Canon 

Barry 469 

Renton's  Mother,  Laura  Spencer  Portor  .  596 


Science  and  Mysticism,  Havelock  Ellis  .  .  771 

Second  Death,  The,  Josiah  Royce  ...  242 

Sense  of  Smell,  The,  Ellwood  Hendrick  .  .  332 
Servant  Question,  Both  Sides  of  the,  Annie 

Winsor  Allen 496 

Social  Order  in  an  American  Town,  The 

Randolph  S.  Bourne 227 

Speech,  A  Defense  of  Purism  in,  Leila 

Sprague  Learned 682 

Stuart,  J.  E.  B.,  Gamaliel  Bradford,  Jr.  .  .  98 

Studies  in  Solitude,  Fannie  Stearns  Davis  .  806 
Sunrise  Prayer-Meeting,  The,  Rebecca 

Frazar  140 

Syndicalism  and  its  Philosophy,  Ernest 

Dimnet 17 

Tele-Victorian  Age,  The,  John  H.  Finley  .  539 
Three- Arch  Rocks  Reservation,  Dallas  Lore 

Sharp 338 

Turkish  Pictures,  H.  G.  Dwight    ....  624 

Two  of  the  Newest  Poets,  Robert  Shafer   .  489 

United  States  versus  Pringle,  The,   Cyrus 

Guernsey  Pringle 145 

Van  Cleve  and  his  Friends,  Mary  S.  Watts 

53,  208,  378,  516,  668,  812 

Vicarious,  Edith  Ronald  Mirrielees    .     .     .  237 

Way  of  Life,  The,  Lucy  Huffaker  ....  110 
Well-Regulated  Family.  A,  C.  F.  Tucker 

Brooke 556 

What  Industries  are  Worth  Having?  F.  W. 

Taussig 701 

What  Shall  We  Say?  David  Starr  Jordan  .  137 
When  Hannah  var  Eight  Yar  Old,  Kath- 

erine  Peabody  Girling  786 

Why  it  was  W-on-the-Eyes,  Margaret 

Prescott  Montague  462 

Wished-for  Child,  The,  Laura  Spencer 

Portor        178 

Yellow  Peril,  The  Real,  J.  0.  P.  Bland    .     .  734 

Zion  Church,  Elsie  Singmaster      ....  401 


Poetry 


Cage,  The,  Arturo  M.  Giovannitti    .     .     .  751 

Faith,  Fannie  Stearns  Davis 400 

In  Memoriam,  Leo:  a  Yellow  Cat,  Margaret 

Sherwood 226 

Late  Return,  The,  Katharine  F.  Gerould    .  487 

O  Sleep,  Grace  Fallow  Norton        ....  45 
Old  Man  to  an  Old  Madeira,  An,  S.  Weir 

Mitchell ,  .426 


'Rest  is  Silence,  The,'  Mabel  Earle   ...  255 

Silver    River,    The,    Grace   Fallow    Nor- 
ton     617 

Souls,  Fannie  Stearns  Davis 117 

To  a  Motor,  Louise  Imogen  Guiney  .     .     .  531 

To  an  Orchid,  Grace  Hazard  Conkling   .     .  ^337 

To  the  Watcher,  Rabindranath  Tagore  .     .  681 

Willy  Pitcher,  George  Sterling 811 


CONTENTS 


INDEX  BY  AUTHORS 


Anonymous 

Letters  of  a  Down-and-Out  .  .  .  190,  368 
The  Confessions  of  One  Behind  the  Times  353 
Recent  Reflections  of  a  Novel-Reader  .  688 

Adams,  Brooks,  The  Collapse  of  Capitalis- 
tic Government 433 

Alger,  George  W.,  The  Courts  and  Legisla- 
tive Freedom 345 

Allen,  Annie  Winsor,  Both  Sides  of  the 
Servant  Question 496 

Antin,  Mary,  The  Amulet 31 

Baker,  Katharine,  Entertaining  the  Candi- 
date        277 

Baker,  Virginia,  The  Answering  of  Abiel 
Kingsbury's  Prayers 837 

Barry,  William,  Canon,  The  Religion  of 
America 468 

Billings,  Elizabeth  C.,  Brains  and  Buying  .     768 

Bingham,  Hiram,  The  Monroe  Doctrine: 
An  Obsolete  Shibboleth 721 

Bland,  J.O.  P.,  The  Real  Yellow  Peril    .     .    734 

Bourne,  Randolph  S. 

The  Social  Order  in  an  American  Town  .  227 
The  Life  of  Irony 357 

Bradford,  Gamaliel,  Jr. 
Confederate  Portraits; 

J.  E.  B.  Stuart 98 

Judah  P.  Benjamin 795 

Brett,  George  P.,  Book-Publishing  and  its 
Present  Tendencies 454 

Brooke,  C.  F.  Tucker,  A  Well-Regulated 
Family 556 

Burroughs,  John,  The  Breath  of  Life    .     .    546 

Campbell,  Cyril,  A  Correspondent  at  Adri- 

anople        846 

Comer,  Cornelia  A.  P.,  The  Massey  Money  320 

Conkling,  Grace  Hazard,  To  an  Orchid  .   ".  337 

Davis,  Fannie  Stearns 

Souls 117 

Faith 400 

Studies  in  Solitude 806 

De  Musset,  Alfred,  An  Evening  at  Madame 
Rachel's 76 

Dimnet,  Ernest,  Syndicalism  and  its  Philo- 
sophy     17 

Dwight,  II.  G. 

Constantinople  in  War-Time  ....  443 
Turkish  Pictures  . 624 

E.  S.,  The  President       289 

Earle,  Mabel,  'The  Rest  is  Silence  '  ...     255 
Ellis,  Havelock,  Science  and  Mysticism  .     .     771 

Ferrero,  Guglielmo,  The  Dangers  of  War  in 
Europe 1 


Fielding-Hall,  H.,  The  Philippines  by  way 

of  India 577 

Finley,  John  H.,  The  Tele-\7ictorian  Age   .  539 
Frazar,     Rebecca,    The    Sunrise    Prayer- 
Meeting     140 

Gale,  Zona,  The  Need 744 

Gay,  Robert  M. 

Magic  Shadow-  Shapes 419 

Idyllic  566 

Gerould,  Katharine  Fullerton,  The  Late 

Return 487 

Giovannitti,  Arturo  M.,  The  Cage  ...  751 
Girling,  Katherine  Peabody,  When  Hannah 

var  Eight  Yar  Old 786 

Gordon,  George  A.,  Reasonable  Hopes  of 

American  Religion 824 

Guiney,  Louise  Imogen,  To  a  Motor  .  .  .  531 

Hall,  H.  Fielding,  See  Fielding-Hall,  H. 

Harvey,  Charles  M.,  The  Epic  of  the  Indian  118 

Hearn,  Lafcadio,  Insects  and  Greek  Poetry  618 

Hellems,  F.  B.  R.,  Alice  and  Education  .  .  256 
Hendrick,  Ellwood 

The  Sense  of  Smell 332 

Precision's  English 686 

Herrick,    Myron    T.,    The    Farmer    and 

Finance 170 

Hodges,    George,    The    Censured    Saints, 

[Reviews] 506 

Huffaker,  Lucy,  The  Way  of  Life  ....  110 

Humphrey,  Zephine,  The  Mother  City  .     .  789 

Jordan,  David  Starr,  What  Shall  We  Say?  .  1 37 

Learned,    Leila    Sprague,    A    Defense    of 

Purism  in  Speech 682 

Lee,  Gerald  Stanley,  The  Machine-Trainers  198 
Leupp,  Francis  E.,  The  Passing  of  a 

Dynasty 296 

Markino,  Yoshio,  Emotion  and  Etymology  479 

Mason,  Redfern,  Nationalism  in  Music  .  .  394 

Mirrielees,  Edith  Ronald,  Vicarious  ...  237 
Mitchell,  S.  Weir,  An  Old  Man  to  an  Old 

Madeira 426 

Montague,  Margaret  Prescott,  Why  it  was 

W-on-the-Eyes  462 

Moses,  Bernard,  American  Control  of  the 

Philippines 585 

Muir,  John. 

Lessons  of  the  Wilderness 81 

Out  of  the  Wilderness 266 

Norton,  Grace  Fallow 

O  Sleep 45 

The  Silver  River 617 

Noyes,  Alexander  D.,  The  Money  Trust    .  653 


VI 


CONTENTS 


Old  Timer,  An,  The  Confessions  of  One 
Behind  the  Times 353 

Portor,  Laura  Spencer 

The  Wished-for  Child 178 

Renton's  Mother 596 

Pringle,  Cyrus  Guernsey,  The  United  States 
versus  Pringle 145 

Repplier,  Agnes,  The  Cost  of  Modern  Senti- 
ment       610 

Royce,  Josiah 

The  Second  Death 242 

Atonement 406 

Ruhl,  Arthur,  Before  the  Canal  is  Opened  .  10 

Sedgwick,  Henry  Duright,  De  Senectute  .  .  163 

Sewell,  Marjorie  L.,  The  Magic  of  Guam  .  649 
Shackford,  Martha  Hale,  The  Poetry  of 

Emily  Dickinson 93 

Shafer,  Robert,  Two  of  the  Newest  Poets  489 
Sharp,  Dallas  Lore,  Three-Arch  Rocks 

Reservation                                               .  338 


Sherwood,  Margaret,  In  Memoriam,  Leo:  a 

Yellow  Cat 226 

Singmaster,  Elsie,  Zion  Church     ....  401 

Spalding,  Franklin  Spencer,  Christian  Unity  640 

Sterling,  George,  Willy  Pitcher      ....  811 
Stratton,  G.  M.,  Lawyer  and  Physician:  A 

Contrast 46 

Taussig,  F.  W.,  What  Industries  are  Worth 
Having? 701 

Usher,  Roland,  G.,  The  Balkan  Crisis   .     .     128 

Vail,  Theodore  N.,  Public  Utilities  and 
Public  Policy 307 

Washington,  Booker  T.,  The  Negro  and  the 
Labor  Unions 756 

Watts,  Mary  S.,  Van  Cleve  and  his  Friends 

53,  208,  378,  516,  668,  812 

Webster,  Henry  Kitchell,  Real  Socialism.  A 
Story 634 

Wheeler,  Everett  P.,  Industrial  Peace  or  War    532 


THE  CONTRIBUTORS'  CLUB 

Best-Dressed  Nation,  The       428      Monstriferous  Empire  of  Women,  The  .     .  711 

Case  of  the  Ministers,  The 571      New  Year's  Gift  from  the  Battlefield,  A   .  713 

Cheerful  Workman,  The 431 

On  Adopting  One's  Parents 280 

Dickens  Discovery,  A 574      On  the  Gentle  Art  of  Letter-Reading  .     .  856 

Excitement  of  Writing,  The 427      Poetfy  of  Syndicalism,  The 853 

Publisher  and  the  Book,  The       ....  854 

From  Concord  to  Syria       284 

Rock  and  the  Pool,  The 430 

Gratitude 718 

Great  American  Poet,  A 719      Social  Spot  Cash 143 

Song  of  Deborah,  The 713 

Leo  to  his  Mistress 576      St.  David  Livingstone ,857 

Literature  and  the  World-State    .     .     »     .    716 

Letter-Reading,  On  the  Gentle  Art  of  .     .    856      What  would  Jane  say? 282 


THE  ATLANTIC  MONTHLY 


JANUARY,  1913 


THE  DANGERS  OF  WAR  IN  EUROPE 


BY   GUGLIELMO   FERRERO 


IF  one  among  the  many  liberal  states- 
men and  thinkers  who,  during  the  first 
half  of  the  nineteenth  century,  suffered 
and  struggled  for  the  destruction  of 
the  absolutism  which  ruled  the  old 
world,  were  to-day  permitted  to  revisit 
the  earth,  what  a  surprise  would  be  in 
store  for  him! 

A  permanent  peace  was  the  precious 
gift  promised  to  the  nations  by  those 
writers  and  philosophers  who,  during 
the  century  just  past,  strove  to  shift 
authority  from  the  Court  to  the  Parl- 
iament, from  the  King  to  the  People, 
and  whose  aim  it  was  to  subject  govern- 
ment to  supervision  by  a  free  press, 
and  by  a  strong  and  enlightened  public 
opinion.  It  was  a  cardinal  point  of  their 
philosophy  that  the  wars  which  deso- 
lated Europe  during  the  second  half  of 
the  seventeenth  century  were  brought 
about  by  ambitious  rulers,  jealous 
courtiers,  and  intriguing  ministers,  the 
more  inclined  to  waste  the  blood  and 
treasure  of  the  people,  since  the  latter 
could  not  protest,  much  less  struggle. 
Therefore,  when  the  day  should  come 
that  the  people,  fitted  for  self-govern- 
ment, should  assume  the  right  to  over- 
see, criticise,  and  advise  the  govern- 
ment, it  was  argued  that  they  would 
no  longer  intrust  their  most  vital  in- 
VOL.  in -NO.  i 


terests  to  an  absolute  monarch  and  an 
aristocracy  trained  to  the  use  of  arms, 
nor  would  they  allow  kings  and  courts 
to  squander  their  blood  and  treasure  to 
satisfy  royal  caprices  and  a  senseless 
thirst  for  glory.  War,  then,  would  be- 
come more  and  more  rare;  for  a  spirit 
of  aggression  and  conquest  is  not  char- 
acteristic of  free  peoples.  They  would 
consent  to  it  only  in  order  to  defend 
themselves  against  those  nations,  still 
under  the  bondage  of  tyrants,  which 
were  led  against  their  will  into  offensive 
warfare.  Liberty,  parliamentary  insti- 
tutions, and  peace,  these  would  be  the 
fruits  of  a  single  tree  which  all  Europe 
would  garner  at  the  same  time. 

It  is  now  about  fifty  years  since  all 
the  European  states,  Russia  excepted, 
came  of  age  and  acquired  the  right  to 
express  their  will  and  criticise  the  pol- 
icy of  their  governments.  For  better 
or  worse,  representative  institutions, 
in  one  form  or  another,  have  taken 
root  in  nearly  all  the  countries  of  Eu- 
rope, and  carry  forward  their  work, 
even  if  slowly.  Peace,  therefore,  ac- 
cording to  the  prophecies  of  the  doc- 
trinaire liberals  of  1848,  should  reign 
throughout  Europe  by  the  will  and  au- 
thority of  the  people  and  in  despite  of 
bellicose  governments  and  rulers,  cease- 
lessly in  search  of  adventure,  both  by 
virtue  of  ancient  tradition,  and  on 


THE  DANGERS  OF  WAR  IN  EUROPE 


account  of  their  education  and  their 
inheritance. 

Such  was  the  expectation.  What 
of  the  realization?  On  every  hand  we 
see  governments  and  kings  struggling 
against  their  people  and  against  pub- 
lic opinion.  It  is  the  people  who  are 
fired  with  a  desire  for  war,  while  their 
governments,  together  with  their  sov- 
ereigns, devoted  to  the  preservation 
of  peace,  resist  as  long  as  they  can  the 
pressure  of  public  opinion,  even  at  the 
risk  of  losing  that  popularity  for  which 
they  so  eagerly  strive. 

Last  year,  Italy  gave  the  world  a 
singular  example  of  this  phenomenon. 
It  is  no  secret  that  the  government 
and  the  King  were  very  reluctant  to 
undertake  the  conquest  of  Tripoli.  The 
difficulty  of  finding  a  decent  pretext 
for  declaring  war  on  Turkey;  the  ex- 
pense and  manifold  dangers  of  such  an 
expedition;  the  solicitude  not  to  dis- 
turb the  economic  and  political  equi- 
librium of  internal  affairs,  attained 
after  so  much  labor;  the  great  uncer- 
tainty as  to  the  value  of  the  territory 
to  be  conquered,  justly  gave  the  govern- 
ment pause.  It  is  even  said  in  Rome 
that  the  King  defined  Tripoli  as  'the 
dry  leaf  of  Africa.'  I  am  unable  to 
testify  to  this,  for  rumors  are  always 
rife  in  regard  to  important  matters  and 
it  is  impossible  to  verify  them.  Certain 
it  is,  however,  that  even  if  the  phrase 
attributed  to  the  King  is  one  that  he 
never  uttered  or  even  dreamed  of,  the 
words  remain  an  eloquent  proof  of  the 
existence,  in  high  circles,  of  hesitation 
and  misgiving  in  the  face  of  the  re- 
sponsibility of  such  an  enterprise.  And, 
indeed,  the  Italian  government  would 
have  been  unworthy  of  ruling  the 
destinies  of  a  great  nation  if  it  had  not 
hesitated  before  the  dangers  and  un- 
certainties of  an  undertaking  whose 
outcome  was  problematical.  Regard- 
less of  its  own  desire,  however,  the 
government  was  forced  to  overcome 


its  hesitation  and  yield  unwillingly  to 
the  pressure  brought  to  bear  upon  it  by 
the  people. 

Those  who  were  in  Italy  during  the 
summer  of  1911  witnessed  the  following 
extraordinary  phenomenon.  Within 
the  space  of  a  few  weeks,  in  the  midst 
of  European  peace,  a  quiet,  thrifty, 
industrious  people,  accustomed  to  the 
comforts,  conveniences,  and  safeguards 
of  modern  civilization,  a  people  whose 
country  had  been  spared  the  horrors  of 
war  for  forty-five  years,  and  for  whom, 
therefore,  war  was  as  the  memory  of 
some  distant  historical  event,  some  re- 
volution, or  famine,  —  this  people  sud- 
denly burst  forth  into  such  a  blaze  of 
militant  excitement  that  the  govern- 
ment was  reduced  to  choosing  between 
the  alternatives  of  satisfying  it  and  of 
succumbing  to  it.  The  war  in  Tripoli 
was  made  by  the  people  and  those 
newspapers  which  were  the  people's 
organs,  and  so  great  was  their  combined 
eagerness  that  the  conservative  and 
monarchical  papers  even  went  so  far 
as  to  upbraid  the  King  because  of  his 
supposed  hesitation  and  reluctance, 
and  openly  reminded  him  that  nowa- 
days the  sovereign  is  but  the  servant  of 
the  people,  and  that  when  the  people 
demand  war  he  must  satisfy  them;  or, 
if  he  lack  courage,  why  then  he  may 
abdicate! 

The  Italio-Turkish  War  in  Tripoli 
has  brought  about  a  great  Balkan  war. 
Bulgaria,  Servia,  Greece,  and  Monte- 
negro are  engaged  in  a  concerted  at- 
tack upon  Turkey.  Their  armies  are 
realizing  a  victorious  campaign*  At  the 
moment  of  writing  the  European  pow- 
ers are  in  a  state  of  great  uneasiness. 
If  the  rulers  of  the  four  states  alone 
were  the  arbiters  of  the  situation  Eu- 
rope might  rest  easy.  The  governments 
understand  perfectly  that  the  Balkan 
war,  just  now,  may  let  loose  such  a 
storm  as  to  be  a  great  present  danger, 
whatever  its  ultimate  result,  to  those 


THE  DANGERS  OF  WAR  IN  EUROPE 


smaller  states  not  always  on  the  best 
terms  with  one  another.  But  in  Servia, 
Greece,  Bulgaria,  even  in  Montene- 
gro, it  is  not  governments  alone,  but 
parliaments  and  newspapers,  which  ex- 
press the  will  of  the  people.  It  is  the 
people  who  demand  war.  While  the 
government  hesitated,  they  accused 
it  of  cowardice,  and  restively  awaited 
the  order  for  mobilization.  From  the 
outset  their  impatience  was  so  great, 
and  so  publicly  expressed,  that  the  gov- 
ernments dared  not  oppose  it,  openly 
relying  solely  upon  a  temporizing  pol- 
icy. Throughout  Europe  it  was  no  se- 
cret that  these  would  have  to  give  in 
sooner  or  later. 

The  most  typical  case  of  present-day 
conditions  is,  perhaps,  that  of  the 
German  Emperor.  When  William  II 
ascended  the  throne,  Europe  expected 
nothing  less  than  to  see  a  new  Barba- 
rossa  burst  into  the  arena  of  European 
politics.  Strange  legends  were  current 
about  him:  some  said  he  had  sworn 
never  to  drink  a  glass  of  champagne 
until  Champagne  should  be  annexed  to 
the  German  Empire;  others,  that  his 
one  ambition  was  to  cover  his  name 
with  glory,  and  that  his  warlike  as- 
pirations were  boundless.  This  was 
common  talk,  and  the  newspapers  of 
the  day  printed  it.  Twenty-four  years 
later  the  Emperor  could  boast,  as  he 
did  not  long  ago  to  a  French  friend  of 
mine,  alluding  to  the  Morocco  incident 
and  the  crisis  of  1905,  'History  will  re- 
cognize that  Europe  owes  her  peace 
to  me.'  And  history  will,  doubtless, 
recognize  this  pacific  disposition  of  his 
in  the  future  more  than  his  people  do 
now.  For  the  past  few  years  the  Ger- 
man Emperor  has  not  been  so  popular 
as  he  was  during  the  first  ten  years  of 
his  reign.  The  reasons  would  be  too 
many  to  give  here,  but  one  is  his  con- 
stant and  determined  pacific  policy. 
He  has  invariably  tried  to  reconcile 
himself  with  France  rather  than  to  seek 


occasion  for  another  war.  On  this  ac- 
count a  portion  of  his  people  accuse 
him  of  loving  peace  overmuch  and 
therefore  of  following  a  weak  and  vacil- 
lating policy,  letting  slip  opportunities 
which  might  never  present  themselves 
again. 

So  in  Germany,  the  sovereign,  Ho- 
henzollern  though  he  be,  loves  peace 
more  than  his  people,  whose  criticism 
of  him  is  that  he  will  not  squander  their 
blood  and  treasure,  but  wishes,  at  all 
costs,  to  save  the  one  and  the  other. 


ii 

Such,  more  or  less  accurately,  is  the 
situation  in  all  the  European  states;  a 
paradoxical  situation,  unforeseen,  and 
full  of  danger.  The  international  bal- 
ance of  power,  which  it  must  ever  be 
remembered  is,  in  Europe,  the  result  of 
weary  centuries  of  effort  and  struggle, 
may  at  any  moment  be  threatened  by 
one  of  those  'heat-waves'  which  pass 
over  nations,  and  which,  even  if  they 
do  not  bring  about  a  general  war,  oblige 
governments  to  increase  military  ex- 
penditure to  a  ruinous  extent.  What 
are  the  causes  of  this  condition  of  af- 
fairs, and  how  can  it  be  explained? 

The  inexperience  of  a  generation 
which  has  never  seen  a  war,  and  the 
innate,  inherited  tendencies  of  the  pop- 
ulace, are  certainly  among  the  causes 
which  underlie  this  condition.  In  the 
nineteenth  century,  Europe  expected 
too  much  from  the  progress  of  demo- 
cracy and  the  natural  proclivities  of 
the  masses.  As  the  masses  have  gradu- 
ally acquired  consciousness  of  them- 
selves, and  gained  a  certain  influence  in 
the  state,  it  appears  clearly  that  they 
are  more  conservative,  more  faithful 
to  tradition,  more  tenacious  of  ancient 
ways  of  thought,  more  like  the  gener- 
ations which  preceded  them,  than  the 
poets  and  philosophers  and  reformers 
of  the  nineteenth  century  gave  them 


THE  DANGERS  OF  WAR  IN  EUROPE 


credit  for  being.  Revolutionary  ideas, 
novel  sentiments  which  are  to  change 
the  character  of  a  civilization,  spread 
more  easily  in  those  small  aristocracies 
which  are  endowed  with  broad  culture 
and  accustomed  to  the  world  and  so- 
ciety, than  they  do  among  a  populace 
confined  within  a  narrow  circle  of  ex- 
periences, and  fearful  of  doing  what  its 
grandfathers  and  great-grandfathers 
never  did.  Now  in  the  history  of  the 
world  war  is  as  old  as  man  himself; 
and  peace,  a  lasting  peace,  as  the  nor- 
mal condition  of  the  life  of  a  people,  is 
the  painful  and  recent  acquisition  of 
our  modern  civilization.  War,  there- 
fore, exercises  a  morbid  fascination  on 
the  imagination  of  the  masses,  especial- 
ly when  they  have  not  had  to  undergo 
its  hardships,  and  have  no  conception 
of  the  fearful  suffering  it  entails. 

In  fact,  we  now  see  in  Europe,  that 
the  Christian  and  humanitarian  edu- 
cation of  centuries  has  not  succeeded 
in  eradicating  from  the  masses  their 
warlike  propensities,  while  a  prolong- 
ed season  of  peace,  with  the  omnipres- 
ence of  newspapers,  and  the  super- 
ficial instruction  of  the  elementary 
schools,  easily  deceives  the  popular  im- 
agination by  representing  war  under 
a  romantic  aspect,  as  a  kind  of  national 
sport,  creating  at  once  entertainment 
and  glory.  One  should  see  with  how 
much  eagerness,  interest,  and  excite- 
ment the  peasants  and  artisans  and 
poorest  villagers  of  Italy  read  the  pa- 
pers which  describe  episodes  of  the 
Tripoli  war.  What  the  newspapers  re- 
late to  their  readers,  day  by  day,  is 
not  a  hurried  summary  of  events,  but 
a  thrilling  popular  romance  or  legend. 
Conventional  it  may  be,  lurid  in  color, 
rough  in  outline;  but  never  mind:  the 
imagination  of  the  people  must  now, 
each  day,  work  itself  up  to  a  high  pitch 
of  excitement,  and  cares  for  neither  con- 
tradictions nor  improbabilities  in  the 
tales  it  feeds  on.  It  takes  delight  in  this 


false  image  of  war,  and  thus  keeps  up 
its  patriotic  and  warlike  fervor.  This 
state  of  mind  is,  of  course,  keener  and 
deeper  in  Italy  just  now,  than  among 
other  European  states,  because  Italy 
is  fighting; l  but  among  them  all  are  to 
be  found  the  germs  of  this  elemental 
and  romantic  love  of  war. 

What  is  now  happening  in  Europe 
proves  that  a  long  period  of  peace  may 
produce  in  nations  a  spirit  of  impru- 
dence and  levity  which  renders  them 
careless  about  playing  with  the  dangers 
of  war.  A  long  peace,  the  inexperience 
of  the  masses,  a  literature  which  falsely 
exalts  the  heroic  in  war,  and  exagger- 
ates its  influence  among  the  populace, 
are  insufficient  in  themselves  to  ex- 
plain the  warlike  impulses  of  public 
opinion  in  the  eyes  of  the  world,  but 
they  afford  a  partial  explanation  of 
the  phenomenon.  These  movements 
are  too  dangerous,  and  give  rise  to  too 
many  complications  among  the  dif- 
ferent governments,  for  us  to  believe 
that  they  are  merely  the  result  of  a 
deranged  public  opinion. 

Observing  at  close  quarters  the  pol- 
icy of  European  governments,  it  is  easy 
to  see  that  this  warlike  spirit  would 
not  be  so  strong  and  deep  in  the 
masses  were  it  not  pertinaciously  fos- 
tered by  the  newspapers,  and  by  the 
political  parties  they  represent,  by  the 
wealthy  classes,  and  by  the  nobility, 
who  have  so  much  influence  in  Europe, 
even  where,  as  in  France,  they  have 
lost  political  power,  or  in  Italy,  where 
they  are  losing  it.  In  all  the  countries 
of  Europe  it  is  the  upper  classes,  or  a 
portion  of  the  upper  classes  (and  in  this 
portion  I  include  the  moneyed  classes, 
the  aristocracy,  and  that  part  of  the 
professional  class  which  comes  most  in 
contact  with  the  nobility)  who  strive 
in  every  way  to  excite  the  belligerent 

1  Signer  Ferrero  wrote  this  essay  shortly  be- 
fore the  treaty  of  peace  between  Italy  and 
Turkey.  —  THE  EDITORS. 


THE  DANGERS  OP  WAR  IN  EUROPE 


spirit  of  the  artisans,  and  of  the  popu- 
lace, even  at  the  cost  of  bringing  about 
a  terrible  war,  and  of  forcing  the  people 
into  a  hostile  attitude  toward  the  gov- 
ernment and  its  ruler. 

The  reason  why  a  portion  of  the 
upper  classes  have  adopted  this  dan- 
gerous and  violent  policy,  —  descend- 
ing even  to  the  lowest  methods  of 
propaganda,  —  the  reason  why  this  pol- 
icy succeeds  and  finds  numerous  and 
enthusiastic  supporters  among  the 
wealthy  and  the  cultured,  among  busi- 
ness men,  manufacturers,  men  of  let- 
ters, and  University  professors,  who  all 
help  to  excite  and  inflame  the  masses, 
is  a  deep-seated  one.  It  must  be  sought 
in  the  great  political  and  social  up- 
heaval produced  in  European  society 
by  the  spread  of  democratic  and  social- 
istic ideas  among  the  working  classes, 
their  rapidly  increasing  ambitions  and 
demands;  and  by  the  spirit  of  inde- 
pendence and  criticism  which,  develop- 
ing rapidly,  has  separated  the  masses 
from  the  influence  and  patronage  of 
the  classes,  organizing  the  populace 
into  parties,  and  impelling  them  to  a 
policy  different  from  the  rich  man's 
policy,  and  often  opposed  to  it.  This 
phenomenon  is  so  vital  and  important 
that  it  needs  to  be  analyzed  even  if 
only  in  a  cursory  fashion. 

In  Europe  the  political  influence  and 
social  prestige  of  birth  and  wealth, 
while  still  great,  are  rapidly  diminish- 
ing. The  fruits  of  the  French  Revo- 
lution are  still  ripening.  Everywhere 
the  classes  opposed  to  the  aristocracy — 
tradespeople,  artisans,  and  peasants 
— are  organizing  and  taking  an  interest 
in  public  affairs.  They  are  learning  to 
read  the  papers,  and  to  make  use  of 
their  political  rights.  They  are  begin- 
ning to  demand  explanations,  to  dis- 
cuss and  criticise  those  various  forms 
of  authority  which  formerly  they  blind- 
ly obeyed  —  that  of  the  capital  which 
employs  them  in  the  factories  and  the 


fields,  that  of  the  priest  who  speaks 
to  them  in  the  name  of  God,  and  that 
of  the  government  which,  in  the  name 
of  the  king,  makes  the  laws  which  are 
their  guaranties  of  law  and  order. 

Naturally,  none  of  these  ancient 
forms  of  authority  can  any  longer 
maintain  their  former  position  and 
privileges.  The  practices  of  religious 
and  monarchical  forms  are  those  which 
are  most  deeply  affected  by  this 
change  in  the  masses.  In  eighteenth- 
century  Europe  an  atheistic  aristo- 
cracy ruled  over  a  pious  and  bigoted 
people;  now,  on  the  contrary,  the 
upper  classes  have  become  religious 
and  mystical;  while  the  people,  especi- 
ally in  the  cities,  neglect  the  churches 
and  break  away  from  that  religion 
which  for  so  many  centuries  educated 
them  to  respect  the  aristocracy.  Roy- 
alty itself  imposes  little  respect,  and 
no  awe,  upon  the  multitude.  Even  in 
Germany  the  Emperor  is  constantly 
and  bitterly  criticised  by  political  par- 
ties, both  in  the  newspapers  and  in  pub- 
lic meetings.  He  is  especially  blamed 
for  still  keeping  up  the  appearance  of 
a  real  monarch  whose  will  is  law,  and 
who  wishes  to  have  the  full  power  of  a 
genuine  authority  felt  throughout  the 
state.  The  kings  of  Belgium  and  of 
Italy  have  succeeded  in  escaping  from 
the  adverse  criticism  of  their  people, 
but  how?  By  standing  aside,  by  the 
great  simplicity  and  modesty  of  their 
habits  of  life,  by  the  utmost  approach- 
ability,  and  by  mildness  in  the  exer- 
cise of  their  authority,  trying  thus  to 
render  acceptable  a  popular  monarchy, 
homely  and  simple,  from  which  eti- 
quette is  banished,  and  which  does  not 
disdain  to  put  itself  on  a  level  with  its 
people. 

The  old-fashioned  monarchy,  based 
on  divine  right,  is  trying  to  become  de- 
mocratic; and  with  it  the  government, 
the  press,  and  a  large  portion  of  the 
cultured  world.  The  common  effort  of 


THE  DANGERS  OF  WAR  IN  EUROPE 


all  these  factors  is  to  level  themselves 
down  in  order  to  satisfy  the  aspirations, 
prejudices,  and  desires  of  the  people. 
This  is  a  wholly  natural  tendency  be- 
cause, in  proportion  as  the  lower  classes 
and  the  populace  crowd  into  cities  and 
acquire  education  and  organization, 
they  become  the  predominant  polit- 
ical force.  This  is  the  inevitable  result 
of  political  liberty,  of  the  spread  of  edu- 
cation and  universal  or  quasi-universal 
suffrage.  The  journals  cater  to  the 
public  which  supports  them,  for,  since 
the  middle  and  lower  classes  are  more 
numerous  than  the  upper,  they  form 
a  more  important  clientele.  It  is  there- 
fore not  surprising  if  in  all  countries  the 
greater  part  of  the  press  should  become 
the  organ  of  the  numerically  large  class 
which  supports  it,  rather  than  of  the 
rich  and  cultivated,  but  numerically 
small  aristocracies. 

In  proportion  as  suffrage  is  extend- 
ed, and  the  number  of  electors  in- 
creases, elective  institutions  have  to 
modify  their  tactics,  and  necessarily 
end  by  favoring  the  greatest  numbers. 
All  over  Europe  the  upper  classes  have 
consented  to  the  extension  of  the 
franchise,  in  the  hope  that,  through 
their  own  preponderant  influence, 
they  may  coerce  the  increased  number 
of  voters.  But,  sooner  or  later,  their 
calculations  have  everywhere  proved 
to  be  wrong.  Under  various  names  par- 
ties are  forming,  or  have  already  been 
formed,  which,  by  stirring  up  the  pas- 
sions of  the  masses,  or  by  rousing  their 
greed,  or  by  means  of  some  promised 
advantage,  have  succeeded  in  sepa- 
rating some  portion  of  the  artisan  or 
laboring  classes  from  the  patronage  of 
the  wealthy.  Thus  by  their  own  sheer 
strength  of  numbers,  these  parties  have 
striven  to  acquire  influence  with  the 
government. 

Thus  the  press,  parliamentary  in- 
stitutions, and  public  opinion,  which, 
until  within  the  last  fifty  years,  were 


almost  wholly  under  the  controlling 
influence  of  the  aristocracy,  are  now 
rapidly  slipping  from  its  control.  Nor 
does  public  service,  whether  in  the 
higher  ranks  or  the  lower,  escape  a 
similar  fate.  Until  within  the  last  fifty 
years  the  chief  offices  of  state,  civil  or 
military,  were  held  with  few  exceptions 
by  men  in  the  higher  walks  of  life. 
This  is  no  longer  the  case.  On  the  one 
hand,  with  the  growing  number  of  of- 
ficials, the  aristocracy  is  unable  any 
longer  to  fill  the  increased  number  of 
positions;  on  the  other  hand,  with  the 
increase  of  wealth  in  the  middle  class, 
its  facilities  for  study,  and  its  ambition 
to  rise,  there  is  a  rapid  increase  in  the 
number  of  persons  who  attempt  suc- 
cessfully to  attain  the  highest  places. 
All  over  Europe,  even  in  the  most  aris- 
tocratic states,  the  official  world  is 
made  up  from  the  two  opposing  ranks; 
a  method  which  is  often  a  source  of 
weakness  to  the  government  because 
each  party  brings  into  the  combination 
widely  differing  ideas  and  a  spirit  of 
rivalry  and  jealousy. 

So,  even  in  Europe,  the  people  are 
waking,  and  democracy  is  making  rapid 
strides,  to  the  detriment  of  the  privi- 
leged classes  which  for  so  many  centu- 
ries ruled  almost  unchecked.  But  these 
classes  are  not  going  to  allow  them- 
selves to  be  ousted  without  a  struggle. 
Too  weak  to  defend  themselves  openly, 
they  are  trying  to  preserve  their  influ- 
ence by  arousing  in  the  masses  a  patri- 
otic and  warlike  spirit.  Patriotic  en- 
thusiasm, the  fighting  spirit,  hatred  of 
a  national  enemy,  on  these  the  aristo- 
cracy have  been  obliged  to  fall  back. 
Their  old  allies  have  begun  to  fail  them. 
Religion  has  been  weakened,  the  mon- 
archy has  become  popularized,  and  the 
governments  lack  the  strength  to  op- 
pose the  political  action  of  the  major- 
ity. In  order  to  separate  at  least  a  por- 
tion of  the  middle  class  and  populace 
from  the  growing  influence  of  demo- 


THE  DANGERS  OF  WAR  IN  EUROPE 


cratic  and  socialistic  ideas,  the  privi- 
leged classes  have  fallen  back  upon  a 
new  line  of  defense. 

At  this  point  of  my  argument  the 
reader  may  justly  observe  that  if  the 
trouble  I  have  described  is  indeed  the 
deep-seated  cause  of  such  a  serious 
condition  of  things,  the  aristocracy, 
by  their  policy,  would  deserve  to  be 
stripped  of  their  privileges  at  the  hands 
of  the  lower  and  middle  classes.  Un- 
der such  circumstances,  the  reader's 
sole  regret  would  be  that  their  feathers 
should  be  slowly  plucked.  By  a  mean 
and  egotistical  spirit  that,  for  selfish 
reasons,  seeks  to  check  a  social  evolu- 
tion which,  though  it  impaired  their 
power,  would  yet  be  generally  benefi- 
cial, are  not  aristocrats  exposing  Europe 
and  its  civilization  to  the  risks  of  a 
fearful  calamity?  Has  not  the  middle 
class  —  which  for  so  many  centuries 
was  content  to  serve  and  worship  small 
and  powerful  oligarchies  —  contribu- 
ted through  its  organization,  its  educa- 
tion, and  its  aspirations  after  power, 
to  the  moral  betterment  of  the  world? 
Has  not  its  rise  to  power  aided  in  the 
suppression  of  abuses,  excesses,  and 
impositions  so  frequent  in  the  days 
when  the  world  was  ruled  by  absolute, 
all-powerful  governments,  subject  to 
no  check  or  control?  Does  not  demo- 
cracy —  the  pride  of  our  civilization  — 
consist  essentially  in  the  awakening  of 
the  political  conscience?  Is  not  our 
civilization  grander  and  richer  than 
the  ages  which  preceded  it,  just  be- 
cause each  man  feels  himself  to  be  a 
tiny  but  active  atom  in  the  great  body 
politic?  This  is  a  natural  train  of 
thought.  But  he  who  so  judges  this 
serious  condition  cannot  have  under- 
stood it,  and  runs  the  risk  of  giving  a 
superficial  opinion  of  its  meaning. 

That  the  belligerent  policy  of  the 
European  aristocracy  is  partially  influ- 
enced by  a  selfish  dread  of  losing  popu- 
larity and  power,  there  can  be  no  doubt. 


But  if  this  policy  were  simply  the  re- 
sult of  selfishness  it  would  not  be  very 
dangerous.  Its  greatest  strength  and 
greatest  danger  lie  in  the  fact  that  it 
has  succeeded  in  convincing  and  car- 
rying with  it  those  very  classes  of  the 
lower  and  middle  order  against  whose 
interests  and  ambitions  it  was  direct- 
ed. Now,  one  cannot  presume  too 
much  either  on  the  blindness  or  the  in- 
telligence of  men,  nor  can  one  believe 
that  one  party  is  so  able  and  adroit 
as  to  hoodwink  another  and  induce  it 
to  act  wholly  against  its  own  interests. 
One  part  of  the  community  cannot 
move  the  whole.  A  minority  cannot 
move  the  majority  of  a  great  nation, 
if  side  by  side  with  its  own  interests 
it  cannot  also  do  battle  for  interests 
which  are  higher  and  more  universal. 
This  is  precisely  what  is  happening  in 
Europe,  and  unless  this  difficult  point 
is  understood,  it  is  impossible  to  un- 
derstand the  present  situation. 

Let  me  make  my  remarks  quite  clear. 
The  first  effect  or  result  which  marks 
the  accession  to  power  of  a  new  party  is 
invariably  a  relaxation  of  discipline. 
Whoever  acquires  power,  whether  an 
individual,  or  a  class,  or  a  party,  wishes 
to  enjoy  it,  and  the  first  and  most  imme- 
diate method  of  enjoying  it  is  to  abuse 
it.  This  abuse  may  take  the  form  of 
lax  application  of  the  laws  generally, 
or  it  may  express  itself  through  a  dis- 
regard of  the  severer  ones.  Only  as  a 
result  of  long  practice,  and  of  experi- 
ence of  the  dangers  resulting  from  an 
abuse  of  power,  does  a  governing  class 
or  party  gradually  learn  that  it  must 
willingly,  and  without  attempt  at  eva- 
sion, undergo  severe  self-discipline; 
that  it  must  be  the  first  to  set  an  exam- 
ple of  obedience  to  the  laws  which  it 
creates. 

As  institutions,  politics,  and  cus- 
toms have  become  progressively  more 
democratic,  the  consequent  relaxation 
of  discipline  has  become,  during  the 


8 


THE  DANGERS  OF  WAR  IN  EUROPE 


last  fifteen  years,  the  most  conspicu- 
ous social  phenomenon  in  Europe. 
Everywhere  the  same  spectacle  is  ex- 
hibited. In  political  parties,  in  great 
public  and  private  undertakings,  in 
manufacturing,  in  the  church  and  reli- 
gious sects,  even  in  families,  the  feel- 
ing for  passive  obedience  and  silent 
respect  is  vanishing.  Everybody,  down 
to  the  humblest  citizen,  must  discuss, 
criticise,  advise,  argue,  refute,  and  give 
his  own  opinion.  Everywhere  author- 
ity is  more  and  more  involved  in  a 
network  of  customs,  laws,  rules,  and 
precedents  limiting  the  power  of  the 
government  over  the  governed. 

Now,  this  critical  and  democratic  at- 
titude of  mind  must  not  be  considered 
as  an  evil  in  itself.  All  over  the  world, 
extreme  conservatives,  who  look  upon 
order  and  disorder,  discipline  and  the 
lack  of  it,  as  contrary  and  incompatible 
conditions,  are  inclined  so  to  regard  it. 
In  this  they  are  wrong.  Rightly  speak- 
ing, in  the  evolution  of  a  state  from 
order  and  discipline  to  disorder  and 
anarchy,  such  as  would  render  life  in- 
tolerable and  progress  impossible,  the 
transitions  are  all  gradual.  Each  one 
of  the  stages  may  seem  dangerous  to 
those  who  compare  it  to  the  most 
strictly  ordered  of  the  stages  which 
preceded  it;  but  if  fairly  judged,  the 
condition  of  things  is,  on  the  contrary, 
quite  tolerable  in  itself,  and  admits  of 
reasonable  adjustment.  Its  possible 
disadvantages  are  accompanied  by 
many  indirect  advantages. 

All  forms  of  liberal  government  give 
rise  to  a  certain  disorder  which  is  com- 
pensated for  by  increased  initiative, 
energy,  and  dignity  in  the  individuals 
who  live  under  it,  and  by  the  keener, 
deeper  sense  of  personal  responsibil- 
ity which  it  generates  among  men. 
^  Therefore  if  Europe,  like  the  United 
States,  were  to  live  in  one  great  con- 
federation, fearing  no  serious  danger 
from  without,  it  might,  like  America, 


quietly  consider  the  inevitable  draw- 
backs of  a  free  government  and  the 
difficulties  involved  in  the  gradual 
transfer  of  power  from  the  upper  to 
the  lower  classes.  In  Europe,  demo- 
cratic disorder  is  far  from  being  so 
great  as  of  itself  to  threaten  a  social 
calamity,  and  moreover,  with  us  as  well 
as  in  America,  the  increased  liberty  of 
every  class  begets  an  increase  of  ener- 
gy and  initiative.  But  Europe  is  like  a 
great  camp  wherein  seven  great  pow- 
ers and  a  certain  number  of  smaller 
ones  live  side  by  side,  armed  to  the 
teeth,  and  yet  at  the  same  time  in 
dread  of  war.  Furthermore,  in  every 
state,  the  sad,  universal,  constant,  al- 
most tragic  subject  of  consideration 
for  serious  and  thoughtful  men  is  this : 
May  not  this  undisciplined,  critical 
spirit  which  is  spreading  among  the 
people,  even  though  it  may  legitimate- 
ly liberate  the  energies  of  a  nation, 
diminish  its  military  strength,  whether 
for  offense  or  defense?  May  not  these 
democratic  ideas  weaken  a  nation  in 
the  face  of  its  rivals?  Of  course,  his- 
tory tells  us  of  nations/  racked  by 
internal  convulsions,  throwing  them- 
selves with  overwhelming  force  upon 
enemies  beyond  their  border  and  com- 
ing off  victorious.  Rightly  or  wrong- 
ly, however,  the  general  opinion  of 
thinking  men  in  Europe  is  that  the 
military  miracles  of  the  French  Revo- 
lution are  an  exception  rather  than  a 
rule,  and  appear  only  under  condi- 
tions of  extreme  danger.  Usually,  when 
a  people,  torn  by  anarchy,  rushes  into 
war,  it  either  abuses  its  victories,  or 
is  itself  destroyed.  In  a  word,  a  peo- 
ple may  face  the  trial  of  war  with 
greater  assurance  in  direct  proportion 
as  the  masses  are  content  to  follow  the 
ruling  class  without  criticism  or  mur- 
mur of  discontent.  Doubtless,  if  this 
lawless,  critical  spirit  of  liberty  were 
spread  equally  throughout  all  coun- 
tries it  would  not  cause  much  anxiety, 


THE  DANGERS  OF  WAR  IN  EUROPE 


because  the  effect  would  be  every- 
where identical.  But  how  is  it  possible 
to  ascertain  whether  this  be  so? 

Nowadays,  the  European  states  are 
scrutinizing  one  another  anxiously;  but 
lawlessness  is  not,  like  merchandise 
for  export  or  import,  susceptible  of 
exact  appraisal,  and  its  study  may  be 
carried  on  far  more  easily  in  one's  own 
country  than  in  a  distant,  foreign 
land.  In  face  of  the  impossibility  of 
calculating,  with  any  approach  to  ac- 
curacy, whether  this  evil  is  as  great  at 
home  as  it  is  abroad,  the  desire  grows 
in  every  nation  to  check  its  progress 
as  much  as  possible.  Moreover,  since 
a  patriotic  and  warlike  spirit  is  a  cer- 
tain though  dangerous  specific  against 
lawlessness,  there  is  an  ever-increas- 
ing number  of  people  in  all  classes, 
even  in  the  middle  class,  whose  ambi- 
tion is  checked  by  such  a  spirit, — who 
work  zealously  to  stimulate  it  in  the 
masses,  under  the  firm  conviction  that 
by  so  doing  they  are  benefiting  their 
country  and  increasing  its  greatness 
and  its  power. 

This  belligerent  state  of  mind  now 
agitating  Europe  is  the  last  phase  of 
that  great  struggle  which  began  with 
the  French  Revolution,  between  con- 
servatives and  liberals,  between  the 
principle  of  authority  and  the  idea  of 
liberty,  between  the  state  and  demo- 
cracy. What  the  outcome  will  be  is 
hard  to  say.  If  the  time  should  come 
when  organized  armies  should  be  no 
more,  but  when  whole  peoples  armed 
with  fearful  instruments  of  destruc- 


tion should  hurl  themselves  upon  one 
another  —  the  very  thought  of  it 
would  be  appalling  to  us.  Yet  no  less 
serious  does  the  possibility  appear  to 
the  eyes  of  many  Europeans.  They 
are  fearful  lest  the  democratic  and 
socialist  movement  of  the  middle  and 
lower  classes  will  continue  to  progress 
swiftly;  and  lest,  as  the  democratic 
movement  spreads,  there  spread  with 
it  the  conviction  that  the  discipline  of 
obedience  to  constituted  authority  is 
everywhere  growing  weaker.  Europe  is 
not  America.  Every  European  state 
has  its  own  traditions  of  culture,  and 
its  own  political  and  military  duties, 
which  it  could  not  live  up  to  if  its  con- 
stitution were  to  become  as  democratic 
as  that  of  the  United  States. 

Standing  between  the  alternatives 
of  war  on  the  one  hand,  and  of  lawless- 
ness on  the  other,  the  European  nations 
are  all  equally  bewildered,  in  doubt 
which  way  to  turn,  while  the  approach- 
ing crisis  is  all  the  more  serious  be- 
cause thinking  men  are  giving  up  poli- 
tics for  business.  This  neglect  of  public 
duties  by  the  class  which  once  bore 
the  entire  responsibility  is  one  of  the 
most  regrettable  results  of  industrial 
development  and  universal  wealth.  I 
trust  the  day  may  never  come  when 
Europe  will  be  forced  to  realize  that 
it  would  have  been  better  for  her  if 
she  were  less  rich  but  more  wise,  if 
she  were  endowed  with  less  machinery 
and  capital,  but  with  more  powerful, 
more  stable,  and  more  enlightened 
governments. 


BEFORE  THE  CANAL  IS  OPENED 


BY  ARTHUR  RUHL 


NEXT  year,  if  all  goes  well,  the  Pan- 
ama Canal  will  be  opened.  The  dream 
of  four  centuries  will  be  realized,  the 
greatest  engineering  task  of  our  time 
accomplished,  and  the  Pacific  and  At- 
lantic made  one. 

You  can  see  now  the  great  ships  mov- 
ing through,  —  flags  flying  and  bands 
playing,  —  where  yesterday  the  lonely 
traveler  hurried  across  the  treacherous 
jungle  with  a  shiver,  and  looked  behind 
him  for  the  enemy  lurking  in  every 
shadow.  You  can  almost  hear  the  rum- 
ble and  hum  of  that  mighty  spirit  — 
our  tremendous  and  baffling  modern 
spirit  —  which,  with  all  its  superficial 
hardness  and  irreverence,  works  mira- 
cles of  practical  humanity  that  the  old 
days  never  knew  or  dreamed  of. 

The  gate  will  open  between  two  hap- 
py oceans,  new  friendliness  with  our 
South  American  neighbors  will  begin 
to  stir,  new  streams  of  north  and  south 
trade  to  flow.  But  —  there  will  be  one 
discord  in  the  harmony  of  the  cosmic 
lute.  The  nation  nearest  to  the  Canal, 
the  one,  indeed,  through  whose  land  it 
was  built,  will  not  join  in  the  common 
song. 

There  are  more  poets  in  Colombia, 
perhaps,  than  in  all  South  America  put 
together,  but  none  of  them  will  sing  of 
the  steam-shovels  or  of  the  triumphs  of 
modern  engineers.  The  journalists  of 
Bogota  write  better  Spanish,  perhaps, 
than  do  those  of  Santiago  or  Buenos 
Aires,  but  they  will  speak  of  us  only  as 
the  *  Hannibal  at  our  Gates/  or  the 
'Yanki  Huns  and  Vandals.'  Colom- 
bia is  nearer  to  us  in  actual  miles  than 

10 


any  other  South  American  country.  In 
her  cities  are  people  as  cultured  and 
charming  as  any  in  Latin  America. 
She  has  coffee,  sugar,  cocoa,  rubber, 
woods,  cattle,  minerals,  and  vast  unde- 
veloped resources  that  need  our  ma- 
chinery and  capital  and  creative  energy. 
Naturally,  we  should  be  the  best  of 
friends. 

Yet  the  Canal,  far  from  bringing 
Colombia  nearer,  has  only  pushed  her 
farther  away.  She  is  more  remote  than 
she  was  fifty  years  ago,  when  a  progres- 
sive Colombian  turned  instinctively  to 
the  United  States  for  examples  of  the 
humanity,  tolerance,  and  progress  he 
would  have  his  countrymen  emulate; 
more  remote  than  she  was  when  Sant- 
iago fell,  in  our  war  with  Spain,  and 
the  people  of  Bogota  came  crowding 
about  the  American  legation  to  cheer 
our  minister  and  our  flag. 

It  is  a  long  way  from  the  Isthmus  up 
to  Bogota,  and  the  thrill  of  achieve- 
ment there  dies  out  before  it  has 
crossed  the  intervening  jungles  and 
mountains.  The  Colombians  do  not 
feel  it  at  all.  They  know  that  the  Isth- 
mus is  still  on  their  coat-of-arms,  but 
that  the  Isthmus  itself  is  gone.  They 
still,  so  it  seems  to  them,  have  the 
treaty  of  1846,  according  to  which  the 
United  States  guaranteed  Colombia's 
sovereignty  over  the  Isthmus,  and 
agreed  that  this  promise  should  be 
'religiously  observed.'  They  have  lost 
their  sovereignty  and  the  most  valu- 
able thing,  potentially,  that  they  own- 
ed, and  they  hate  those  responsible,  as 
only  a  proud  and  helpless  people  can 


BEFORE  THE  CANAL  IS  OPENED 


11 


hate  those  by  whom  they  believe  they 
have  been  robbed. 

This  is  a  fact  which  Americans  must 
face  as  they  consider  the  possibilities 
which  the  Canal  will  bring.  Whatever 
the  original  rights  and  wrongs  of  the 
question,  this  is  a  matter  of  present  ex- 
pediency which  stands  squarely  in  front 
of  us  now.  The  taking  of  the  Isthmus 
is  just  as  live  an  issue  to-day  in  Colom- 
bia as  it  was  nine  years  ago,  when  the 
famous  *  fifty-mile  order'  was  issued 
which  prevented  Colombia  from  put- 
ting down  an  uprising  in  her  own  terri- 
tory, and  made  possible  the  recogni- 
tion of  the  independence  of  Panama. 
Scarcely  a  day — certainly  not  a  week 
7-  passes  in  Bogota,  in  which  it  is  not 
made  the  subject  of  more  or  less  vir- 
ulent editorials  and  the  motive  for 
misunderstanding  and  misrepresenting 
everything  American. 

And  if  it  is  a  live  issue  for  Colombi- 
ans, it  is  no  less  so  for  every  American 
who  is  trying  to  grow  coffee  or  to  raise 
cattle  or  to  work  a  mine  in  Colom- 
bia, or  who  would  like  to  venture  his 
energy  and  capital  and  skill  in  the 
country's  development.  This  is  a  plain 
statement  of  fact,  the  common  know- 
ledge of  all  who  have  taken  the  trouble 
—  as  the  writer  has  —  to  go  down  to 
Colombia  and  find  out  what  Colom- 
bians and  Americans  living  in,  or  inter- 
ested in,  Colombia  think. 

Of  course  history  cannot  be  turned 
back.  No  sensible  person  thinks  of  giv- 
ing up  the  Canal  Zone.  It  is  as  much 
ours  now,  for  all  practical  purposes,  as 
if  it  had  originally  been  a  county  of 
Massachusetts.  The  real  issue  is,  what, 
if  anything,  is  going  to  be  done '-to 
remedy  the  intolerable  condition  which 
now  exists  between  the  theoretically 
friendly  people  of  the  United  States 
and  Colombia  —  a  condition  which  af- 
fects our  relations  not  only  with  Co- 
lombia, but  with  all  Latin  America? 

From  examination  of  this  question, 


two  influences,  which  have  made  up 
many  people's  minds  for  them,  had 
better  be  eliminated  at  once.  It  is  not 
fair  to  assume  that  Colombia  was  right 
merely  because  Mr.  Roosevelt  —  in 
such  utterances,  for  instance,  as  *I 
took  the  Isthmus  and  let  Congress  de- 
bate'—  seemed,  to  many,  wrong.  Nor 
is  it  fair  to  assume  that  our  moral  debt 
to  Colombia  —  if  s,uch  existed  —  has 
been  somehow  wiped  out  by  the  bril- 
liance of  our  mechanical  achievement 
at  Panama. 

At  the  time  that  Colombia  lost  her 
province  of  Panama,  people  said — just 
as  ninety-nine  out  of  a  hundred  Amer- 
icans will  say  to-day  —  that  it  was  a 
'  pretty  raw  deal.'  They  said  this  good- 
humoredly,  with  a  smiling  shake  of  the 
head,  implying  their  admiration  for  the 
man  who  'did  things,'  and  their  guess 
that,  after  all,  this  one  was  somehow 
justified.  The  rawness  of  the  deal  was 
so  generally  admitted,  indeed,  that 
everything — short  of  granting  Colom- 
bia's request  that  the  matter  be  sub- 
mitted to  The  Hague  —  was  done  to 
neutralize  it.  Secretary  of  State  Hay, 
in  his  letter  to  the  Colombian  minister, 
refusing  this  request,  said  that  our  gov- 
ernment recognized  'that  Colombia 
has,  as  she  affirms,  suffered  an  appre- 
ciable loss,'  —  this  included  not  only 
the  Isthmus  itself,  but  her  income  of 
$250,000  a  year  from  the  Panama  Rail- 
road and  the  reversionary  rights  in  the 
railroad,  which  was  to  become  her  pro- 
perty in  1967,  —  'and  this  government 
has  no  desire  to  increase  or  accentuate 
her  misfortunes,  but  is  willing  to  do 
everything  in  her  power  to  ameliorate 
her  lot.' 

Mr.  Root,  the  next  Secretary  of 
State,  was  sent  on  his  splendid  pil- 
grimage of  conciliation  all  the  way 
round  South  America.  When  this  em- 
bassy of  good-will  really  seemed  to 
have  accomplished  something,  and  our 
brilliant  successes  on  the  Isthmus  were 


BEFORE  THE  CANAL  IS  OPENED 


an  added  cause  for  treating  Colombia 
with  the  consideration  due  a  weaker 
neighbor,  through  whose  misfortune  we 
had  benefited,  Mr.  Roosevelt,  speaking 
before  the  students  of  the  University 
of  California,  made  the  astounding  de- 
claration that  he  had  ignored  precedent 
and  simply  taken  the  Isthmus.  'If  I 
had  followed  traditional  conservative 
methods/  he  was  quoted  as  saying,  'I 
would  have  submitted  a  dignified  state 
paper  of  probably  two  hundred  pages 
to  Congress,  and  the  debate  on  it 
would  have  been  going  on  yet.  But  I 
took  the  Canal  Zone  and  let  Congress 
debate:  and  while  the  debate  goes  on 
the  Canal  does  also.' 

The  effect  of  such  a  declaration, 
carrying  all  the  force  of  the  words 
of  a  chief  executive  and  crystalizing 
instantly  the  vague  distrust  of  the 
United  States  felt  throughout  the 
South  American  republics,  need  not  be 
explained.  To  the  inevitable  protests 
which  this  speech  brought  out,  Mr. 
Roosevelt  replied  that  the  taking  of  the 
Isthmus  was  'as  free  from  scandal  as 
the  public  acts  of  Washington  or  Lin- 
coln'; that  *  every  action  taken  was 
carried  out  in  accordance  with  the 
highest,  finest,  and  nicest  standards  of 
public  and  governmental  ethics';  and 
that  *  any  man  who  at  any  stage  has  op- 
posed or  condemned  the  action  taken 
in  acquiring  the  right  to  dig  the  Canal 
has  really  been  the  opponent  of  any 
and  every  effort  that  could  ever  have 
been  made  to  dig  the  Canal.' 

If  there  is  any  one  thing  true  about 
the  taking  of  the  Isthmus,  it  is  that  it 
was  an  act  of  expediency  about  which 
serious  Americans  may  legitimately 
differ.  There  were  other  ways  in  which 
the  privilege  of  building  a  canal  might 
have  been  acquired  without  virtually 
breaking  a  treaty  and  committing  an 
act  of  war.  Apart  from  the  cruel  dis- 
courtesy to  a  helpless  neighbor,  the  as- 
sertion that  those  who  disagreed  with 


any  detail  of  our  government's  action 
in  the  matter,  were  opposed  to  the 
Canal  itself,  caused  many  otherwise 
cool-headed  people  simply  to  throw  up 
their  hands  and  assume  the  worst. 
While  such  assumptions  are  human, 
and  not  unnatural  in  those  who  fail  to 
recall  Mr.  Roosevelt's  way  of  seeing  all 
colors  as  either  black  or  white,  they  are 
scarcely  sound.  If  a  lady  is  trying  to 
commit  a  hold-up  —  and  it  is  Colonel 
Roosevelt's  contention  that  Colombia 
was  trying  to  hold  up  the  United  States 
—  her  moral  guilt  is  not  changed  by 
the  fact  that  she  is  lame  and  suffering 
from  anaemia,  and  that  her  victim, 
after  knocking  her  down  and  taking 
away  her  most  valuable  possession, 
concludes  by  enthusiastically  jumping 
up  and  down  on  her  neck. 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  as  every  one 
knows,  our  government  was  tried  and 
exasperated  beyond  ordinary  endur- 
ance. The  shilly-shallying  and  ineffi- 
ciency, to  put  it  mildly,  with  which  the 
negotiations  were  dragged  along  by 
Colombia  would  have  weakened  the 
patience  of  Job,  let  alone  that  of  an 
impetuous  altruist  like  our  former  Pre- 
sident. Civilization,  so  to  speak,  was 
waiting;  a  work  that  would  benefit  the 
whole  world  was  at  stake.  As  grabs  go, 
this  was  very  mild,  indeed;  few  treaty 
violations  were  ever  so  justified. 

If  it  is  unsound  to  assume,  because 
of  irrelevant  prejudice,  that  Colombia 
is  right,  it  is  equally  unsound  to  assume 
that  the  brilliance  of  our  work  on  the 
Isthmus  necessarily  proves  her  wrong. 
You  see  that  wonderful  achievement, 
the  keen,  dependable  men,  pushing 
their  work  with  as  loyal  a  devotion  as 
if  they  were  soldiers  carrying  the  flag 
into  the  enemy's  fire,  until  the  least  im- 
portant Jamaica  negro  on  the  job  has 
an  air  of  personal  pride  and  enthusiasm 
in  the  work.  You  see  the  jungle  soft- 
ened and  made  human  until  little  sta- 
tions along  the  railroad  seem  like  pieces 


BEFORE  THE  CANAL  IS  OPENED 


13 


of  Ohio  or  California.  You  catch  the 
thrill  of  battle  in  the  very  air,  and  the 
thing  sweeps  you  off  your  feet. 

After  all,  what  are  the  croaks  of  a 
few  backward  Colombians  in  the  face 
of  a  thing  like  this?  They  never  would 
have  built  the  Canal.  The  Isthmus 
was  worth  nothing  to  them.  Why 
waste  time  in  sentimentality?  The  end 
justifies  the  means.  The  idea  seems  to 
be  —  and  it  is  a  new  idea  for  Americans 
—  that  a  moral  wrong  is  righted  pro- 
vided the  Gatun  locks  are  built  high 
enough;  that  sanitation  can  wipe  out 
an  unpaid  debt;  that  if  our  honor  has 
fallen,  the  famous  steam-shovels  of 
Bucyrus,  Ohio,  can  shovel  it  up  again. 

This  idea  may  be  an  accepted  and, 
indeed,  respectable  one  in  many  parts 
of  the  world.  It  has  not,  hitherto,  been 
the  American  idea.  I  believe  that  very 
few  Americans  who  know  anything  of 
their  Latin  American  neighbors,  or 
know  what  happened  on  the  Isthmus, 
accept  it  at  all.  The  difficulty  here,  as 
so  often  in  the  case  of  our  relations 
with  South  Americans,  is  that  people 
do  not  know. 

There  is  no  need  of  going  back  here 
over  the  long  and  complicated  story. 
Both  sides  have  been  set  forth  with  suf- 
ficient warmth,  and  more  or  less  inac- 
curacy, in  several  magazines,  and  most 
of  it  can  be  found  more  fully  told  — 
and  without  the  prejudice  —  in  easily 
accessible  Senate  documents  and  re- 
cords of  foreign  relations.  Briefly,  we 
wanted  to  build  the  Canal  and  to  build 
it  through  the  Isthmus.  The  Spooner 
law  directed  the  President  to  take  the 
Nicaragua  route,  if  satisfactory  ar- 
rangements could  not  be  made  with 
Colombia  in  *a  reasonable  time.'  And 
while  it  is  not  necessary  to  accept  Co- 
lombia's notion  that  the  Spooner  law 
was  a  mere  political  expedient  to  drive 
her  to  a  bargain,  it  was  generally  known 
at  the  time  that  the  President  vastly 
preferred  the  Panama  route. 


Colombia,  naturally,  wanted  the 
Canal  built,  too.  She  had  wanted  it  for 
years  and,  long  before  the  French  un- 
dertook it,  unsuccessfully  tried  to  get 
us  to  build  it.  The  Hay-Herran  Treaty, 
apparently  embodying  her  own  sugges- 
tions of  what  the  treaty  should  be,  was 
drawn  up  and  submitted  to  both  gov- 
ernments. Our  Senate  ratified  it,  the 
Colombian  Senate  rejected  it.  That 
this  was  injudicious  —  however  it  may 
have  been  within  Colombia's  legal 
rights  —  is  generally  admitted.  Co- 
lombians themselves  admit  it;  indeed, 
too  late  to  do  any  good,  they  gladly 
would  have  passed  it. 

Mr.  Roosevelt  asserts  that  Colombia 
was  trying  to  hold  us  up,  and  with 
characteristic  informality  describes  the 
presidents  of  that  country  as  a  *  suc- 
cession of  banditti';  a  comment,  by 
the  way,  which  the  Colombians  —  un- 
accustomed to  employing,  in  public 
semi-official  references  about  other  na- 
tions, the  colloquialisms  used  by  stump- 
speakers  toward  their  opponents  in  the 
heat  of  political  campaigns  —  accepted 
literally,  and  with  complete  seriousness. 
From  this  it  was  but  a  brief  step  to  the 
popular  assumption  that  an  American 
president  had  called  all  Colombians 
bandits;  so  that  now,  in  Bogota,  a 
charming  young  lady,  pouring  tea  for 
her  guests  in  her  own  drawing-room, 
will  be  pointed  out  to  you  with  the  iron- 
ical comment,  'One  of  our  banditti!* 

The  Colombians,  on  their  side,  say 
that  the  treaty  called  for  an  alienation 
of  territory  which  was  unconstitutional, 
and  that  they  could  not  pass  the  treaty 
without  first  amending  their  constitu- 
tion. 

That  the  fairly  evident  determina- 
tion of  the  United  States  —  with  its 
fabulous  riches  —  to  have  the  Isthmus 
at  any  price,  may  well  have  dazzled 
some  of  the  Colombian  statesmen,  no 
one  acquainted  with  the  occasional 
weaknesses  of  our  own  boards  of  alder- 


14 


BEFORE  THE  CANAL  IS  OPENED 


men,  and  even  legislatures,  would  ven- 
ture to  deny,  whatever  may  have  been 
the  facts.  On  the  other  hand,  the  diffi- 
culties in  the  way  of  a  prompt  ratifica- 
tion of  the  treaty  were  much  more  than 
are  realized  by  those  unfamiliar  with 
Colombian  geography  and  politics,  and 
the  peculiar  embarrassments  of  that 
time. 

Colombia  was  staggering  up  from  a 
civil  war  which  had  cost  her  nearly  a 
hundred  thousand  lives,  —  in  a  condi- 
tion of  weakness  and  unrest  from  which 
she  is  just  now  beginning  to  get  on  her 
feet.  The  whole  country  was  like  an 
irritable,  neurotic  invalid.  It  was  the 
most  difficult  thing  in  the  world  for  any 
government  to  take  such  a  vital  step  as 
that  of  surrendering  the  sovereignty  of 
the  Isthmus  —  and  that  is  what  per- 
petual control  practically  amounted  to 
—  without  furnishing  enough  political 
capital  to  the  opposition  to  start  seri- 
ous trouble. 

Bogota  —  which,  so  far  as  the  gov- 
ernment is  concerned,  is  Colombia  — 
is  one  of  the  remotest  capitals  in  the 
world.  It  takes  from  ten  days  to  a 
month  for  letters  to  get  from  the  coast 
to  the  capital.  News  from  the  outside 
world  comes  only  in  the  briefest  round- 
about cables,  or  in  foreign  newspapers 
a  month  old.  That  quick,  journalistic- 
ally intelligent  public  opinion  which 
forms  over  night  in  a  country  like  ours, 
is  impossible  there.  It  is  a  city  of  poets 
and  politicians  and  wordy  theorists; 
at  once  slow-moving  and  punctilious, 
and,  because  of  the  country's  isolation 
and  weakness,  sensitive  and  proud. 

To  acquire  so  valuable  a  possession 
as  the  Isthmus  at  such  a  time  was  a 
task  calling  for  great  patience,  the 
nicest  consideration,  and  understand- 
ing sympathy.  If  an  ordinary  drummer 
wants  to  sell  a  steam-pump  to  a  Span- 
ish-American, he  knows  that  he  must 
proceed  with  a  certain  courtesy  and 
formality,  which  would  be  unnecessary 


at  home.  With  what  more  than  tact, 
whatever  the  incidental  irritations, 
ought  not  a  power  like  ours  to  have 
proceeded  toward  a  helpless  Latin 
neighbor  with  whom  we  were  on  terms 
of  complete  peace,  whose  sovereignty 
on  the  Isthmus  we  had  guaranteed  by 
a  treaty  'to  be  religiously  observed/ 
when  we  desired  to  acquire  the  most 
valuable  thing  she  owned,  and  still  to 
continue  her  friend. 

What  actually  happened,  of  course 
everybody  knows.  Even  before  the 
Colombian  Senate  met  to  consider  the 
treaty,  Colombia  was  curtly  warned 
that  no  amendments  would  be  per- 
mitted. Three  days  after  the  treaty  had 
been  rejected  the  *  revolution '  broke  out 
in  Panama.  There  had  been  many  of 
these  squabbles  before,  for  the  coast 
cities  have  always  thought  themselves 
ill-used  by  the  central  government,  and 
while  several  other  revolts  would  have 
given  more  ground  for  recognizing 
Panama's  independence,  the  landing  of 
a  few  marines  had  sufficed  to  keep  the 
railroad  running  without  serious  inter- 
ruption. 

Whether  the  squelching  of  this  trou- 
ble would  have  been  the  few  minutes' 
work  that  Colombians  believe,  there  is 
no  definite  means  of  knowing,  inas- 
much as  the  Colombian  troops  were 
not  allowed  to  act.  One  day  before  the 
uprising,  indeed,  when  nothing  had  oc- 
curred outwardly  to  change  the  friend- 
ly relations  between  Colombia  and  the 
United  States,  President  Roosevelt 
had  issued  his  '  fifty-mile  order '  prohib- 
iting the  landing  of  the  Colombian 
troops,  not  only  on  the  Canal  Zone, 
but  within  fifty  miles  of  Panama.  The 
troops  already  within  this  zone  were 
not  allowed  to  proceed  to  Panama,  and 
on  November  6,  less  than  two  days 
after  the  rebels  issued  their  proclama- 
tion of  independence,  the  President  re- 
cognized the  new  republic.  A  French 
citizen  interested  in  the  canal  com- 


BEFORE  THE  CANAL  IS  OPENED 


15 


pany  was  promptly  received  as  Min- 
ister from  Panama,  and  the  money  that 
was  to  have  been  paid  to  Colombia 
went  to  the  revolutionists.  And  at  the 
same  time  Colombia  lost  her  annual  in- 
come of  $250,000  from  the  Panama 
Railroad  and  her  reversionary  rights  in 
it,  for  it  was  to  go  to  her  outright  in 
1967. 

In  view  of  the  frank  'I  took  the 
Isthmus,'  it  is  unnecessary  to  indulge 
in  academic  theorizing  over  these  as- 
tonishing events.  And  there  is,  indeed, 
much  to  be  said  by  those  who  willingly 
grant  that  they  constituted  an  act  of 
war.  It  was  by  an  act  of  war  that  we 
acquired  Texas,  for  instance.  This  gave 
us  practical  ownership  of  the  Zone, 
and  it  is  undoubtedly  more  convenient 
to  own  a  man's  land  than  to  rent  it, 
however  advantageous  the  terms. 
Measured  by  the  ethical  standards  ac- 
cepted by  powerful  nations  in  the  fight 
for  trade  and  territory,  rather  than  by 
those  in  use  in  civilized  private  life,  or 
by  what  we  like  to  think  is  the  Amer- 
ican spirit  of  justice  and  fair  play,  the 
coup  d'ttat  was  a  brilliant  success. 

Even  from  the  point  of  view  of  expe- 
diency, however,  it  left  something  to 
be  desired.  We  were  able  to  start  the 
Canal  a  little  sooner  than  we  could  have 
done  otherwise,  and  practically  to  own 
the  Zone  outright.  But  we  made  ene- 
mies of  a  people  who  had  hitherto  been 
our  friends,  and  we  aroused  a  distrust 
throughout  Latin  America.  In  Co- 
lombia itself,  —  the  country  nearest  to 
us  and  the  Canal,  —  few  Americans 
would  think  now  of  investing  their 
time  or  money.  The  American  who  ran 
the  street  railroad  in  Bogota  was 
forced  by  a  boycott  to  sell  out  and 
leave  the  country.  On  the  Magdalena 
River  boats  and  in  Bogota,  a  few  weeks 
since,  I  met  Americans  who  had  come 
to  examine  the  country's  possibilities, 
—  cattle-raising  (to  which  the  opening 
of  the  Canal  ought  to  give  a  great 


boom),  coffee,  mining,  and  so  on.  They 
did  not  see  how  they  could  go  ahead  at 
present.  The  country  has  endless  pos- 
sibilities, its  riches  have  scarcely  been 
scratched,  but  no  American,  without 
unusual  influence  behind  him,  would 
care  to  risk  investment  until  at  least 
some  sort  of  entente  cordiale  is  arrived 
at. 

Nor  is  it  any  less  practical  a  mat- 
ter for  the  American  already  on  the 
ground.  Suppose  he  owns  a  coffee 
plantation  and  his  workmen  get  into 
trouble  —  as  sometimes  happens  in 
these  remote,  sparsely-settled  neigh- 
borhoods —  with  the  workmen  of  a 
neighboring  finca.  One  side  knocks 
somebody  down,  somebody  pulls  a  gun, 
before  you  know  it  there  is  a  fine  little 
row.  In  one  such  case  I  knew  of,  the 
squabble  developed  until  the  peons  of 
one  plantation  regularly  invaded  the 
other  and  so  frightened  the  workmen 
there  that  they  left  en  masse.  They  had 
been  brought  down  from  the  interior  at 
considerable  expense,  and  double  wages 
had  to  be  paid  to  fill  their  places. 
What  chance  has  this  American,  or  any 
American,  in  any  of  the  hundred 
squabbles  or  contested  issues  that  may 
arise,  of  getting  justice? 

These  are  practical  matters, —  things 
that  make  trouble  for  ministers  and 
consuls,  scare-head  stories  for  news- 
papers, and  now  and  then,  in  extreme 
cases,  give  cruisers  their  sailing  orders. 
They,  in  themselves,  are  sufficient 
cause  for  our  doing  something  to  rem- 
edy the  present  intolerable  situation, 
—  with  the  Treaty  of  1846,  guaran- 
teeing Colombia's  sovereignty  in  the 
Isthmus,  still  in  force,  so  far  as  Co- 
lombia is  concerned,  while  as  a  matter 
of  concrete  fact  Panama  is  now  a  se- 
parate republic  and  the  Canal  Zone  is 
ours. 

It  is  the  less  concrete  —  what  those 
who  ignore  Latin-American  civiliza- 
tion will  doubtless  call  the  merely  senti- 


16 


BEFORE  THE  CANAL  IS  OPENED 


mental  arguments  —  that  seem  to  me 
strongest  and  most  moving. 

The  present  situation,  no  doubt,  in- 
conveniences a  few  American  citizens. 
The  real  bitterness  of  the  thing  lies  in 
the  contrast  between  what  might  and 
ought  to  be  the  relations  between  this 
great,  free,  hopeful,  kindly  nation  of 
ours  and  its  struggling  neighbor  to  the 
south,  and  what  those  relations  are. 
We  might  be  an  inspiration  and  a  help 
to  Colombia;  the  different  civiliza- 
tions, temperaments,  and  ideals,  no" 
less  than  the  different  material  re- 
sources, ought  to  meet  and  supple- 
ment one  another;  but  how  shabby  and 
shameful  is  the  true  state  of  affairs! 

Colombia  is  not,  in  some  ways,  a 
very  pleasant  place  for  Americans  to 
visit  to-day.  With  whatever  personal 
courtesy  the  individual  is  received  — 
and  it  is  the  same  which  he  will  meet 
all  over  South  America  —  it  is  not  an 
agreeable  awakening  to  find  America 
regarded,  in  the  aggregate,  much  as 
the  Finns  or  Persians  regard  Russia. 

America  seems  very  far  away,  in 
that  venerable  mountain  capital,  buried 
behind  hundreds  of  miles  of  Andean 
walls  and  tropical  rivers,  from  the  sea 
and  the  northern  world.  Every  one,  as 
the  saying  goes,  is  a  poet  or  a  politician 
in  Bogota.  There  is  plenty  of  time  to 
read  and  write,  to  nourish  and  refine 
a  grievance.  Into  that  atmosphere  of 
repose,  of  old-fashioned  culture  and 
courtesy,  the  warmth  and  kindness  and 
beauty  of  our  American  life  scarcely 
penetrate.  Vaguely,  threateningly,  out 
of  the  distance,  comes  the  dull  roar 
of  millions  of  machines,  shrieking  ex- 
press-trains, avid,  swarming,  irrever- 
ent crowds,  the  hoarse  breath  of  the 
*  Giant  of  the  North,'  as  they  call  us, 
—  a  figure  which  suddenly  took  shape 
in  the  phrase,  'I  took  the  Isthmus/ 
and  was  heard  all  up  and  down  the 
Latin  world. 

You  pick  up  your  evening  paper  and 


learn  that  'the  Americans,  who  have 
no  ideal  except  that  of  the  dollar,  can- 
not understand  how  a  poor  people 
could  be  so  foolish  as  not  to  sell  their 
sovereignty  for  ten  million  dollars. 
For,  of  course,  the  Yankee  nation,  wor- 
shiping material  success,  ignorant  of 
honor/  and  so  on.  Or  there  is  a  dis- 
patch from  Colon  that  the  Americans 
are  going  to  buy  that  city  and  add  it  to 
the  Zone.  Panama  does  not  want  to 
sell,  but  the  United  States  insists  on 
buying,  and,  of  course,  there's  an  end 
of  it.  How  convenient  it  would  be  if 
everybody  could  act  in  this  way,  if  we 
all  had  money!  A  man  goes  to  a  widow 
for  instance,  and  says,  *  I  want  to  buy 
your  house.'  The  widow  answers  that 
she  does  not  wish  to  sell  her  house,  that 
she  has  lived  in  it  for  many  years  and  is 
very  fond  of  it.  That,  of  course,  makes 
no  difference  to  the  millionaire.  'Sell 
me  your  house  or  I'll  take  it!'  says  he, 
and  'I  took  the  Isthmus!'  is  quoted 
again. 

Many  of  these  papers  are  irrespon- 
sible wasps,  which  would  sting  their 
own  kind  as  relentlessly,  did  we  not  of- 
fer an  easier  target.  The  free  press  in 
Latin  America  has  a  venomousness  of 
which  we  know  little  at  home  —  yet  it 
undoubtedly  reflects  a  bitterness  and  a 
conviction  of  injustice  shared  by  every 
man,  woman,  and  child,  so  to  speak,  in 
Colombia,  who  can  think  at  all. 

The  precise  form  which  any  friendly 
agreement  should  take  is  a  matter  to  be 
decided  by  statesmen,  not  by  reporters. 
I  am  merely  stating  here  a  situation 
with  which  the  average  American  does 
not  concern  himself,  for  the  simple  rea- 
son that  generally  he  is  not  aware  of  it. 
Undoubtedly  many  Colombians  have 
exaggerated  notions  of  the  indemnity 
which  might  be  paid.  To  them  the 
splendid  '  States '  look  somewhat  as  the 
Twentieth  Century  Limited  might  look 
to  a  lame  man  on  foot.  A  little  steam 
clipped  from  that  whizzing  meteor,  a 


SYNDICALISM  AND  ITS  PHILOSOPHY 


17 


few  score  millions  more  or  less,  would 
make  all  the  difference  in  the  world  to 
Colombia,  and  would  never  be  missed. 

They  are  like  one  of  their  country- 
men, an  old  government  clerk,  who 
came  to  one  of  our  consuls.  He  had 
heard  of  the  millions  Rockefeller  was 
giving  away,  and  had  written  a  long, 
ceremonious  letter  asking  that  a  few 
thousands  be  set  aside  for  him.  'Is 
the  letter  properly  written?'  he  ask- 
ed. 'Yes,'  replied  our  consul,  'but  I'm 
afraid  you  will  never  get  the  money.' 
He  explained  that  such  sums  were 
supervised  by  a  committee  of  steely- 
hearted  analysts,  who  scrutinized  each 
application  through  a  microscope,  and 
probably  would  n't  be  moved  by  the 
casual  request  of  a  perfectly  healthy, 
and  somewhat  indolent,  old  gentleman 
of  Colombia.  The  old  clerk  listened 
carefully,  emitted  a  slow,  sad  *  Si  ? '  and 
shuffled  away,  tearing  his  letter  into 
longitudinal  strips. 

Or,  again,  if  an  indemnity  were  paid 


for  such  concrete  losses  as  that  of  the 
Panama  Railroad,  it  would  probably  be 
desirable  to  appoint  a  non-partisan 
commission,  and  perhaps  to  specify  the 
purpose  for  which  the  money  was  to  be 
spent,  —  a  railroad  from  Bogota  down 
to  the  Pacific,  for  instance,  —  in  order 
that  the  country  itself,  and  not  merely 
its  politicians,  might  be  benefited.  The 
boundary  between  Colombia  and  Pan- 
ama is  yet  to  be  settled  satisfactorily, 
— another  business  of  such  a  treaty,  — 
and  the  manner  of  conducting  the  whole 
negotiation  from  one  side  is  almost  as 
important  as  the  matter  of  it.  Certain- 
ly here  is  a  case  in  which  we  *  can  afford 
to  be  generous '  —  whether  we  are  fol- 
lowing mere  expediency  or  a  notion, 
perhaps  archaic,  of  noblesse  oblige.  No- 
thing might  come  of  our  attempt,  but 
we  could  at  least  show  our  South  Amer- 
ican neighbors  and  the  world,  that 
neither  time  nor  the  grim  necessities  of 
modern  life  have  changed  the  American 
spirit  of  justice  and  fair  play. 


SYNDICALISM  AND  ITS  PHILOSOPHY 


BY   ERNEST   DIMNET 


The  French  Syndicat,  corresponding 
as  every  one  knows  to  the  Trade- 
Union,  is  an  association  resting  on 
cooperative  interests.  Nothing  is  more 
familiar,  and  the  legal  details  varying 
with  the  countries  matter  little.  One  is 
not  generally  so  clear  about  the  mean- 
ing of  the  word  Syndicalism.  Some 
people  take  it  to  denote  an  industrial 
organization,  others  fear  that  it  may 
VOL.  in -NO.  i 


mean  a  rehandling  of  society,  others 
regard  it  as  a  synonym  of  revolution, 
or  of  a  dark  international  conspiracy, 
every  now  and  then  revealing  its  exist- 
ence in  occurrences  of  an  outrageous 
character. 

The  most  enlightening  introduction 
to  a  question  is  invariably  its  histor- 
ical perspective,  and  the  philosophy 
of  Syndicalism  is  so  elemental  that  it 
needs  little  else  than  its  environment 
to  appear  perfectly  perspicuous.  That 


18 


SYNDICALISM  AND  ITS  PHILOSOPHY 


French  Syndicalism  should  be  chosen 
for  such  an  expose,  rather  than  any 
other  parallel  manifestation,  ought  not 
to  be  thought  surprising;  physicians 
have  a  charming  way  of  speaking  of  a 
disease  fully  answering  the  classical 
descriptions  as  a  '  finely  characterized 
disease/  une  belle  maladie,  and  French 
Syndicalism,  whether  one  studies  it 
with  sympathy  or  the  reverse,  is  the 
most  complete  in  development  and,  if 
I  may  so  say,  the  most  perfect  in  tone. 


ii 

The  history  of  Syndicalism  in  France 
is  nothing  else  than  the  transformation 
of  a  political  into  a  social  question.  It 
is  remarkable  that  the  Revolution  of 
1789,  which  had  its  origin  in  a  litera- 
ture as  antagonistic  to  economic  as  to 
political  inequality,  had  no  immediate 
effects  on  the  situation  of  the  working- 
classes. 

The  Third  Estate  which,  in  Sieyes's 
famous  speech,  had  so  far  been  nothing, 
and  should  be  everything,  might  well 
harp  constantly  on  the  rights,  griev- 
ances, power,  and  so  forth,  of  the 
people;  it  was  not  the  people.  It  con- 
sisted, as  the  French  parliaments  still 
consist,  of  leisured  or  professional  men 
whom  little  else  than  social  distinctions 
separated  from  the  aristocracy.  Those 
men  were  full,  indeed,  of  Rousseau's 
ideas  on  the  bettering  of  the  inferior 
orders,  but  this  bettering  ought  to  be 
in  their  own  hands,  not  in  those  of  the 
people;  and  the  net  result  of  the  Revo- 
lution —  as  it  appeared  after  the  tre- 
mendous interlude  of  the  Empire  — 
was  a  constitution  and  a  parliamentary 
system  very  similar  to  those  of  Eng- 
land, but  a  complete  ignoring  of  the 
millions  whom  nobody  had  yet  had  the 
genius  to  call  —  in  a  phrase  charged 
with  significance  and  possibilities  — 
the  Fourth  Estate.  During  the  years 
from  1815  to  1845  the  working-classes 


were  as  completely  ignored  in  France  as 
under  Louis  XIV;  not  being  electors 
they  were  nil. 

The  Revolution  of  1848  coming  after, 
or  simultaneously  with,  the  works  of 
the  great  Socialists,  Saint-Simon,  Fou- 
rier, Proud'hon,  Leroux,  and  having 
had  for  its  immediate  cause  an  agi- 
tation in  the  world  of  labor,  with  the 
characteristic  motto,  *  Every  man  en- 
titled to  work/  ought  to  have  changed 
this  state  of  affairs.  In  reality  it  did 
not.  Blanqui,  who  was  the  brother  of 
an  economist  and  might  have  known 
better,  reaped  no  other  fruit  from  his 
revolutionary  efforts  than  the  forma- 
tion of  a  political  party,  le  parti  popu- 
laire,  which  the  Second  Empire  was 
soon  to  crush,  and  which  only  reap- 
peared after  fifteen  years  in  the  mild, 
and  once  more  purely  political,  form  of 
a  Republican  party.  The  workman 
was  not  taken  injto  account  as  a  work- 
ing man,  but  as  a  voting  man.  His 
importance  lay  in  his  capacity  to  sup- 
port bourgeois  deputies  possessed  of 
democratic  ideas. 

The  Second  Empire  was  a  time  of 
extraordinary  prosperity.  French  com- 
merce and  industry  increased  during 
those  eighteen  years  in  an  amazing 
proportion;  the  wages  rose  accordingly, 
and  as  the  influence  of  France  abroad 
was  also  greater  than  it  had  been  since 
1815,  one  may  say  that  there  was  gen- 
eral happiness  in  the  country.  Yet, 
with  the  development  of  industrialism, 
soon  appeared  the  inconveniences  in- 
herent in  it :  the  feeling  —  infinitely 
less  sharp  in  agricultural  communities 
—  that  the  master  stands  apart  from 
the  men;  the  bondage  in  which  the 
machine  holds  the  workman,  making  it 
compulsory  for  him  to  answer  all  its 
motions  by  corresponding  action;  the 
captivity  for  a  certain  number  of  hours 
in  the  cheerless  precincts  of  a  factory. 
And  the  atmosphere  peculiar  to  indus- 
trial milieus  began  to  make  itself  felt. 


SYNDICALISM  AND  ITS  PHILOSOPHY 


19 


The  legislation  had  not  kept  up 
with  the  speedy  development  of  the 
mechanical  industries.  It  ignored 
strikes;  and  when  the  first  and  very 
rare  attempts  at  striking  were  made, 
the  authorities  found  themselves  un- 
prepared to  deal  with  them.  The  con- 
sequence was  that  they  enforced  the 
contract  binding  the  men  to  their  em- 
ployer and  made  work  compulsory. 
It  was  not  until  the  very  last  years  of 
the  Second  Empire  that  the  right  to 
strike  was  recognized  legally.  In  the 
mean  time,  the  workmen  had  not  only 
developed  their  class  feeling,  but  they 
had  founded  secret  societies  called  So- 
cietfe  de  Resistance,  —  half  syndicates, 
half  ramifications  [of  the  Internation- 
ale, —  which  were  their  first  effort  to- 
ward self-organization.  Shortly  after, 
Karl  Marx,  inquiring  into  the  moral 
conditions  created  by  the  modern 
economic  development,  pointed  out  in 
clear  language  the  vital  distinction 
between  the  class  and  the  party,  and 
stated  definitely  that  the  class-fight 
was  the  only  object  that  the  workmen 
could  propose  to  themselves. 

Yet  many  years  elapsed  before  the 
proletariat,  as  it  began  to  be  called, 
became  sufficiently  conscious  to  think 
of  managing  its  own  affairs.  It  seems 
incredible  that  in  a  country  where  the 
Labor  vote  was  already  so  considerable 
it  was  not  until  1884  —  fourteen  years 
after  the  foundation  of  the  Republic  — 
that  the  Syndicates  were  made  legal, 
and  not  until  1901  that  a  law  on  Asso- 
ciations —  that  most  urgent  of  instru- 
ments in  a  republic  —  was  passed. 
The  country  was  absorbed  in  mere 
politics,  mostly  of  an  anti-clerical  char- 
acter, which  I  have  not  the  space  to 
review,  but  which  the  reader  ought  to 
bear  in  mind  as  the  background  of 
French  history  between  the  years  1877 
and  1905.  Electioneering  rhetoric  of 
the  cheapest  description  was  sufficient 
to  keep  the  workmen  away  from  their 


own  interests  during  the  greatest  part 
of  that  interval,  and  when  they  did  be- 
gin in  earnest  to  look  after  themselves 
they  were  so  used  to  politicians  that 
they  could  not  help  seeking  their  assist- 
tance  to  do  their  thinking  for  them. 
This  period  of  the  history  of  labor 
is  called  by  the  Syndicalists  of  to-day 
the  democratic  era. 


in 

What  the  Syndicalists  mean  by  the 
Democracy  is  nothing  else  than  the 
action  of  the  Socialist  deputies  in  the 
French  Chamber.  It  may  be  as  well 
to  say  at  once  that  —  surprising  as 
it  seems  at  first  —  they  never  use  the 
word  without  a  shade  of  contempt.  It 
was  about  1885  that  M.  Jules  Guesde 
first  shocked  the  country  with  a  popu- 
lar expose  of  the  Marxist  doctrine,  and 
the  avowed  intention  to  change  the 
basis  of  society  by  substituting  coop- 
eration for  capitalism,  and  the  freedom 
of  associations  for  authority.  Some 
ten  years  afterward  a  young  deputy, 
M.  Jean  Jaures,  who,  in  a  preceding 
chamber,  had  been  a  moderate  Repub- 
lican, was  returned  on  a  glaringly  So- 
cialistic ticket,  and  became  the  centre 
of  a  then  very  small  Socialist  group  in 
Parliament.  His  talent  as  an  orator, 
his  power  of  assimilating  the  most 
intricate  matters,  his  remarkable  tac- 
tics as  a  parliamentary  leader,  are 
well-known  and  need  not  be  enlarged 
upon.  His  success  in  his  new  position 
was  immediate.  Endowed  with  prodi- 
gious activity  and  energy,  he  went  all 
over  the  country,  and  addressed  large 
audiences  in  all  the  industrial  cities  of 
France,  with  such  success  that  in  the 
Chamber  elected  in  1902,  he  and  his 
friends  simply  became  the  regulators 
of  the  government's  action. 

During  the  Combes  ministry,  the 
prime  minister  made  everything  sub- 
servient to  the  Socialistic  opinion  and 


SYNDICALISM  AND  ITS  PHILOSOPHY 


the  Socialist  vote,  and  it  can  safely  be 
said  that  during  those  three  years  M. 
Jaures  actually  governed  France.  He 
was  anti-clerical,  and  the  confiscation 
of  church  property  along  with  the  sep- 
aration of  church  and  state  were  ac- 
complished; he  was  an  anti-militarist, 
and  the  War  and  Navy  budgets  were 
most  unwisely  lightened  with  the  com- 
plicity of  those  two  extraordinary 
ministers,  General  Andre  and  M. 
Pelletan;  peace  and  war  were  in  his 
hands,  —  a  great  deal  more  than  in 
those  of  the  Foreign  Minister,  —  and 
as  his  followers  as  well  as  his  theories 
made  it  imperative  for  him  to  be  the 
champion  of  peace,  peaceful  the  gov- 
ernment was  until  the  apparition  of 
the  Kaiser  off  the  coast  of  Morocco 
on  a  threatening  man-of-war  obliged 
them  to  make  their  choice  between  the 
risk  of  standing  for  French  dignity  at 
all  costs  and  the  shame  of  giving  up  the 
Foreign  Minister,  M.  Delcasse.  The 
influence  of  M.  Jaures,  as  well  as  the 
gravity  of  the  situation,  decided  the 
matter  at  once :  M.  Delcasse  was  thrown 
overboard. 

Meanwhile,  three  of  M.  Jaures's  po- 
litical friends,  MM.  Millerand,  Briand, 
and  Viviani,  had  acquired  so  much 
influence  in  the  Chamber,  and  the  Soci- 
alist group  who  backed  them  was  re- 
garded as  so  formidable,  that  the  gen- 
tlemen mentioned  were  able,  one  after 
the  other,  to  seek  and  take  office  in  va- 
rious cabinets;  and  although  they  were 
anathematized  by  some  of  their  friends 
for  so  doing,  their  progress  was  none 
the  less  the  Socialist  progress. 

How  is  it  that  this  triumph  of  the 
Socialist  deputies  was  looked  upon  as 
no  triumph  at  all  by  the  Socialist 
workmen?  How  is  it  that  the  very 
name  Socialist  was  gradually  dropped 
by  them,  left  exclusively  to  M.  Jaures 
and  his  group,  and  replaced  by  the 
term  Syndicalist? 

If  the  reader  will   look  once  more 


over  the  Socialist  achievements  as  I 
have  just  described  them,  he  will  notice 
that  they  were  of  a  purely  political 
character.  From  being  an  unimport- 
ant individual,  M.  Jaur&s  had  risen  to 
the  position  of  a  leader,  without  whom 
the  hypnotized  government  dared  not 
breathe;  from  being  nothing  else  than 
very  intelligent  Socialists,  MM.  Mille- 
rand, Viviani,  and  Briand  had  become 
State  Ministers,  had  moved  into  pal- 
aces, and  had  seemed  to  think  it  all 
very  natural.  In  the  mean  time  their 
notions  had  undergone  a  change;  they 
understood  what  government  means, 
and  they  advocated  the  loyalty  and 
order  without  which  no  government 
can  be. 

What  good  did  it  all  do  to  the  pro- 
letarians who  had  elected  them  ?  M. 
Jaures  promised,  year  after  year,  to 
draw  up  *  extensive  legislative  texts, 
which  would  prepare  the  legal  trans- 
formation of  the  capitalist  into  a  social- 
ist commonwealth';  but  that  epic  in 
articles  and  clauses  never  was  forth- 
coming, and  the  most  urgent  measures 
—  for  instance,  the  Association  law, 
the  Income  Tax  law,  the  Weekly  Rest 
law,  the  Old-Age  Pension  law,  and 
the  rest,  which  were  in  operation  in  a 
backward  monarchy  like  Prussia,  — 
could  not  be  passed  by  the  parliament 
in  which  M.  Jaures  had  for  years  been 
cock-of-the-walk. 


rv 

This  state  of  things  could  not  but 
be  a  great  disenchantment  for  the 
workmen;  the  more  so  as  there  was  a 
great  enchantment  for  them  in  differ- 
ent quarters.  The  Syndicates,  since 
the  law  which  had  made  them  legal  in 
1884,  had  grown  and  multiplied.  They 
had  promptly  ceased  —  without  wait- 
ing for  any  legal  permission  —  to  live 
in  isolation.  The  Syndicates  of  the 
same  industry  in  the  whole  country 


SYNDICALISM  AND   ITS   PHILOSOPHY 


were  bound  in  federations,  some  of 
which  —  la  FMraiion  du  Livre,  for 
instance,  and  the  Mining  Federation 
—  already  vied  with  the  most  prosper- 
ous English  unions.  In  the  industrial 
districts,  the  local  Syndicates  met  in 
Bourses  du  Travail,  which  served  at 
the  same  time  as  information  offices, 
popular  universities,  mutual  or  coop- 
erative societies,  and  the  like,  and 
were  of  daily  use  to  the  workmen. 
There  were  yearly  congresses,  to  which 
foreign  syndicalists  were  soon  invited, 
and  which  the  least  effort  transformed 
into  international  congresses. 

All  this  had  been  accomplished  by 
plain  workmen  who  had  seen  their 
work  spread  under  their  hands,  and 
had  not  been  afraid  of  their  growing 
responsibilities.  The  comparison  be- 
tween their  success  and  the  barren- 
ness of  their  deputies'  action  was  sure 
to  impose  itself  sooner  or  later  on 
their  minds,  and  to  result  in  the  split 
I  have  spoken  of.  At  the  same  time, 
familiar  intercourse  with  sister  organ- 
izations abroad,  just  in  the  years  when 
the  Dreyfus  Affair  had  weakened  pa- 
triotism to  an  incredible  degree,  could 
not  fail  to  lower  the  barriers  which 
tradition  had  raised  between  the  work- 
men of  different  languages,  and  make 
more  impassable  those  between  the 
workmen  and  the  bourgeois  and  them- 
selves; the  class  feeling  which  had  long 
been  latent  found  itself  suddenly  per- 
fect in  an  almost  perfect  class-organ- 
ization. A  class  philosophy  and  a  class 
literature  were  on  the  eve  of  being 
born,  in  fact,  only  needed  expression; 
but  before  finding  expression  they 
found  a  living  embodiment  in  the  Gen- 
eral Labor  Confederation. 

This  famous  Confederation  Generale 
du  Travail  —  generally  called  for  brev- 
ity's sake  the  C.  G.  T.  —  was  founded 
about  1900  by  a  young  man  of  thirty 
who  was  to  die  shortly  afterwards, 
Fernand  Pelloutier.  Judging  from  the 


admiration  of  such  a  man  as  M.  Sorel, 
Pelloutier,  whom  we  only  know  by  one 
little  volume,  L'Histoire  des  Bourses 
du  Travail,  must  have  been  a  genius. 
At  all  events  this  obscure  clerk  seems 
to  have  been  the  first  to  arrive  at  the 
full  conception  of  a  radical  severance 
of  the  workmen  from  the  rest  of  soci- 
ety, and  of  a  revolutionary  organism 
whose  spirit  and  working  fascinate  by 
their  simplicity. 

The  C.  G.  T.  is  nothing  else  than  a 
federation  of  the  federations  and  of 
the  Bourses  du  Travail.  Its  seat  is  at 
the  Paris  Bourse  du  Travail,  a  large 
building  just  off  the  Place  de  la  Re- 
publique.  It  has  no  legal  recognition, 
and  most  jurists  even  contend  that  its 
existence  is  absolutely  illegal  and  that 
it  is  an  abuse  to  tolerate  it  in  a  national 
building.  Its  expenses  are  borne  by 
the  various  federations,  and  do  not  ex- 
ceed fifty  thousand  francs  —  ten  thou- 
sand dollars  —  a  year.  Its  members 
are  the  secretaries  of  the  federations, 
one  of  whom  is  called  General  Secretary 
of  the  C.  G.  T.  It  possesses  a  weekly 
paper,  La  Voix  du  Peuple,  in  close 
connection  with  which  is  evidently  the 
daily  La  Bataille  Syndicaliste. 

As  to  its  doctrines,  they  are  found 
not  only  in  these  papers  but  in  a  more 
scientific  organ,  Le  Mouvement  Social- 
iste,  —  to  which  I  shall  have  to  advert 
further  on,  —  in  a  number  of  pamph- 
lets written  mostly  by  the  various  sec- 
retaries, Griffuelhes,  Pouget,  Pierro 
Niel,  and  others,  in  the  accounts  of  the 
yearly  congresses,  and,  night  after 
night,  in  the  addresses  delivered  in  the 
syndicates,  popular  universities,  and 
so  forth.  What  these  doctrines  —  the 
doctrines  of  Pelloutier  —  amount  to  is 
not  difficult  to  say:  they  are  the  plain, 
undisguised,  and  almost  invariably 
sober,  preaching  of  the  class-fight. 

The  separate  existence  of  the  work- 
men as  a  class  of  pariahs,  which  under- 
lay the  concepts  of  the  preceding  gen- 


SYNDICALISM  AND  ITS  PHILOSOPHY 


eration  of  French  Socialists,  and  which 
Marx  had  once  or  twice  formulated  in 
his  books,  is  dwelt  upon  as  the  one 
great  fact  on  which  the  workmen's  at- 
tention should  be  fixed.  The  proletariat 
has  its  existence  apart  in  every  country, 
and  consequently  constitutes  on  the 
globe  a  separate  class,  not  only  com- 
pletely independent  of  the  others,  but 
even  free  from  the  traditional  restraints 
embodied  in  patriotism.  On  one  side 
are  'the  masters,  that  is,  the  robbers: 
on  the  other  are  the  slaves,  the  despoil- 
ed.' What  is,  in  fact,  Capital?  How 
is  it  formed?  Is  it  not  by  constantly 
and  methodically  taking  from  labor? 
Syndicalism  is  only  the  recognition 
by  the  workmen  of  this  extraordinary 
state  of  things,  on  the  one  hand;  and 
on  the  other,  recognition  of  the  fact 
that  their  common  spoliation  is  enough 
to  give  them  unity. 

This,  as  I  said  above,  was  implied 
in  the  works  of  the  great  Socialists, 
Proud'hon,  for  instance.  But  while 
the  Socialists  placed  their  hopes  of 
seeing  all  wrongs  righted  in  the  enact- 
ment of  severe  laws  tending  more  and 
more  to  equalize  privileges  and  duties, 
the  Syndicalists  distrust  the  law  and 
its  supporters  quite  as  much  as  they  do 
capital,  and  wage  the  same  war  against 
them. 

The  notion  of  the  state  is  all  very 
well  theoretically,  but  in  reality  what 
is  the  state?  Nothing  else  than  the  rul- 
ing parties,  that  is  to  say,  politicians. 
Wherever  there  are  politicians  there  is 
confusion  instead  of  clarity,  and  the 
confusion  is  greater  in  a  democracy 
like  the  French  Republic  than  in  any 
other  form  of  government.  In  a  strict 
monarchy  of  the  German  or  Russian 
type  the  distinction  of  the  classes  is 
obvious,  whereas  in  a  democracy  the 
fictitious  and  perfectly  farcical  equal- 
ity of  men  —  considered  as  citizens 
and  not  as  economic  values  —  obscures 
it  hopelessly. 


Parliamentarianism  rests  on  compro- 
mises: the  Socialist  candidate  makes 
the  same  promises  to  his  bourgeois 
electors  that  the  bourgeois  candidate 
makes  to  his  Socialist  constituents. 
Experience  shows  also  that  the  politi- 
cal masters  act  on  exactly  the  same 
principles  as  industrial  masters,  and 
ought  to  be  treated  in  the  same  way. 
'I  think  it  very  useful,'  says  M.  Sorel, 
'to  lick  the  orators  of  democracy  and 
the  representatives  of  government/ 
The  so-called  social  laws  on  which  M. 
Jauresand  his  friends  plume  themselves 
so  much  are  mostly  frauds.  What  are 
the  Conseils  du  Travail  if  not  a  strata- 
gem to  put  the  representatives  of  the 
workmen  under  the  thumb  of  those 
of  the  capitalists?  What  are  the  pro- 
spective regulations  of  strikes  if  not  a 
roundabout  way  to  get  rid  of  strikes? 
What  good  will  accrue  to  the  people 
from  the  law  concerning  Old- Age  Pen- 
sions? The  pittance  which  the  work- 
man secures  for  his  old  days  by  con- 
tributing all  his  life  to  the  fund  is  only 
a  portion  of  his  own  money;  the  rest 
remains  in  the  treasury  of  the  state 
to  support  all  sorts  of  institutions, — 
an  army  among  the  number,  —  which 
are  simply  directed  against  him. 

The  Syndicalists  are  violently  op- 
posed not  only  to  wars  but  to  the  exist- 
ence of  an  army.  The  army  in  their 
opinion  is  the  living  demonstration  of 
the  paradox  of  a  civilization  in  which 
those  who  have  every  advantage  do 
nothing,  and  those  who  bear  all  the 
burdens  get  no  reward.  An  army  is 
useful  only  in  two  cases:  in  time  of 
peace  when  there  is  a  strike,  and  then 
the  proletarians  in  uniform  are  em- 
ployed against  the  proletarians  in  plain 
clothes;  in  time  of  war,  when  a  few 
financiers  think  it  necessary  to  have 
their  interests  protected  by  force,  and 
then  again  thousands  of  men  are  de- 
stroyed for  a  cause  not  their  own,  and 
even  opposed  to  it.  Whatever  the 


SYNDICALISM  AND  ITS  PHILOSOPHY 


workmen  do  in  support  of  the  state  is 
invariably  found  ultimately  to  turn 
against  them. 

What  then  should  they  do?  Reso- 
lutely look  upon  the  classes  above  them 
as  enemies  and  treat  them  accordingly. 
Open  warfare  being  out  of  the  question 
so  long  as  only  about  three  hundred 
thousand  men  are  connected  with  the 
C.  G.  T.,  they  must  be  content  for  the 
present  with  what  is  feasible.  Their 
first  duty  is  to  increase  their  numbers 
and  strengthen  their  organization,  that 
is  to  say,  help  in  bringing  over  as  many 
as  they  can  to  the  Syndicates.  There 
is  no  phrase  that  the  leading  Syndical- 
ists repeat  so  often  and  in  such  an  ear- 
nest tone  as,  *  Do  the  humble  and  hum- 
drum syndicate  work.'  In  fact,  the 
day  on  which  the  whole  world  of  labor 
shall  be  enlisted  and  disciplined  in 
syndicates  will  also  be  that  of  its  abso- 
lute supremacy :  overpowering  numeri- 
cal superiority  is  insufficient  so  long  as 
organization  is  wanting;  but  the  mo- 
ment some  sort  of  unity  is  given  to 
numbers,  resistance  on  the  part  of  the 
minority  becomes  impossible. 

Syndicates  of  an  aggressive  charac- 
ter are  not  the  only  form  of  organiza- 
tion advocated  by  the  C.  G.  T.  The 
workmen  are  dupes  not  only  when  they 
work  for  the  bourgeois,  but  also  when 
they  consume  and  pay  for  the  goods 
manufactured  by  the  capitalists.  All 
the  money  they  spend  foolishly  in  this 
way  ought  to  be  devoted  to  the  estab- 
lishment of  cooperative  societies  which 
must  become  in  time  formidable  rivals 
of  their  bourgeois  competitors.  For 
the  market  is,  after  all,  one  thing  with 
the  proletariat,  and  it  is  only  because 
so  many  poor  club  together  that  there 
are  a  few  rich. 

Syndicalists  feel  convinced  that  in 
the  long  run  —  no  time  can  be  named, 
as  everything  depends  on  the  rapidity 
of  the  grouping  process,  and  its  speed 
may  accelerate  in  a  catastrophic  man- 


ner —  the  cooperative  movement  will 
suffice  to  reverse  the  present  economic 
conditions  and  bring  about  the  grad- 
ual and  almost  invisible  disappearance 
of  capitalism;  but  their  warlike  spirit 
is  not  content  with  that.  Capitalism 
ought  not  only  to  be  undermined,  it 
ought  also  to  be  stormed.  The  great 
hope,  the  great  vision,  which  haunts 
and  delights  them  is  that  of  the  final 
storming,  which  they  call  the  Great 
Strike.  When  all  the  world  of  labor  has 
become  syndicalist,  when  there  are 
no  fools  left  to  fight  against  their  own 
interest,  one  fine  evening  —  le  grand 
soir  —  a  universal  strike  shall  be  de- 
creed. Next  day  there  will  be  no  bakers 
to  make  bread,  no  butchers  to  kill 
meat,  no  colliers  to  dig  up  coals,  no 
railwaymen  to  take  bourgeois  about. 
In  a  few  days  of  this  awful  stagna- 
tion, capitalism  will  realize  that  gold 
in  itself  is  nothing  while  labor  is  every- 
thing, and  the  machines1  will  be  either 
made  over  to,  or  quietly  appropriated 
by,  the  workmen. 

This  is  the  dream.  The  Syndicalists 
think  it  should  be  made  possible,  and 
openly  teach  the  ways  and  means.  The 
Great  Strike  must  be  prepared  for 
by  numberless  local  strikes  weaken- 
ing capital  and  strengthening  the  pro- 
letariat. The  C.  G.  T.  is  a  school 
for  striking,  with  professional  strike- 
organizers  called  delegates  by  the  Syn- 
dicalists and  grSviculteurs  by  the  news- 
papers. The  delegate  starts  strikes 
where  there  is  no  syndicate,  as  the 
workmen  are  infallibly  compelled  to 
unite  during  strikes,  and  seldom  resume 
work  before  making  their  accidental 
union  endurable  in  the  shape  of  a  syn- 
dicate. Where  there  are  unions,  strikes 
are  made  more  formidable  by  coali- 
tions and  by  the  pecuniary  assistance 
which  the  C.  G.  T.  obtains  from  the 
federations.  Striking  may  take  vari- 

1  In  the  Syndicalist  terminology  all  the  instru- 
ments of  production  are  called  machines. 


SYNDICALISM  AND  ITS  PHILOSOPHY 


ous  shapes,  which  the  Syndicalist  pub- 
lications detail  carefully.  Boycotting 
the  industries  which  refuse  to  admit 
syndicate  workmen  is  one  variety  of 
strike;  sabotage  is  another:  it  means  the 
repeated  injury  to  tools  and  machines, 
or  the  deliberate  hindrance  of  work. 
This  was  practiced  on  a  large  scale  dur- 
ing the  railway  agitation  in  1910,  and 
it  was  thanks  to  it  that  the  hairdressers' 
men  could  dictate  terms  to  apparent- 
ly unconquerable  masters.  In  short, 
the  theory  and  practice  of  strikes 
seems  to  have  been  brought  to  perfec- 
tion by  the  C.  G.  T. 

As  to  its  effects,  you  can  see  them  in 
issue  after  issue  of  the  Voix  du  Peuple. 
About  thirty  per  cent  of  the  strikes 
seem  successful,  and  they  never  result 
in  possible  damage  for  the  workmen.  In 
September,  1911,  a  large  manufacturer 
in  the  north  of  France  stopped  work 
at  an  hour's  notice,  on  the  mere  po- 
lite injunction  of  a  C.  G.  T.  delegate. 
Fighting  would  have  been  impossible. 
Such  facts  will  evidently  become  more 
and  more  numerous  as  the  syndical 
organization  spreads  more  widely.  The 
syndicalist  machinery  is  perfect,  and 
it  requires  only  initiative  enough  to 
put  it  in  operation  everywhere. 


This  then,  is  the  history  of  the  past 
and  present  of  Syndicalism.  Before 
trying  to  foresee  its  future,  we  should 
say  a  word  about  the  philosophers  who 
have  made  it  the  object  of  their  medi- 
tations. 

The  best  known  are  Lagardelle, 
Berth,  and,  above  all,  Georges  Sorel, 
whose  productions  have  appeared  chief- 
ly in  the  very  intellectual  review  called 
Le  Mouvement  Socialiste. 

It  was  inevitable  that  the  contribu- 
tions of  such  thinkers  —  eminently 
honest,  and  one  of  them  powerful  — 
should  influence  the  most  intelligent 


Syndicalists,  but  the  common  charac- 
teristic of  these  philosophers  is  that 
while  they  take  unbounded  interest  in 
the  organization  of  labor,  they  firmly 
believe  in  the  necessity  for  it  to  stand 
apart  and  unsophisticated,  and  would 
gladly  be  forever  unknown  to  the  very 
men  they  are  constantly  studying.  It 
would  take  a  great  deal  more  space 
than  I  have  to  do  them  justice  and 
disentangle  a  somewhat  artificial  ele- 
ment from  their  fundamental  ideas, 
but  I  can  indicate  a  few  essential 
points. 

To  begin  with  —  and  it  is  one  of 
their  aspects  I  regret  the  most  not  to 
be  able  to  deal  with  adequately  —  they 
are  wonderfully  solid  in  appearance 
and  tone,  but  they  have  not  always 
been  so,  and  Sorel  especially  has  pass- 
ed through  a  number  of  intellectual 
phases.  One  was  not  born  in  France 
with  impunity  in  the  days  when  Renan 
and  Berthelot  were  at  their  height. 
The  characteristic  of  that  period  was 
a  very  unphilosophical  belief  in  science 
and  an  accompanying  mistrust  of  met- 
aphysics, resulting  in  a  dangerously 
narrow  art  of  thinking,  and  a  complete 
lack  of  anything  like  an  art  of  living. 
All  the  intellects  which  grew  in  that 
atmosphere  and  were  not  hopelessly 
stunted  by  it  have  had  to  struggle  to- 
ward a  broader,  more  human  logic 
than  that  in  which  they  had  been  edu- 
cated, and  above  all,  toward  a  moral 
doctrine  that  would  steady  them 
through  life.  This  took  them  years. 

Georges  Sorel  and  his  friends  are 
often  called  Bergsonians,  and,  in  fact, 
the  former  has  made  a  careful  study 
of  Bergson's  books  and  has  many 
points  in  common  with  him;  but  I 
imagine  that  he  would  have  reached  his 
chief  positions  without  him  and  owes 
him  little  more  than  an  occasional 
confusing  terminology.  He  spent  prac- 
tically all  his  time  until  he  was  fifty 
doing  technical  work  in  a  factory,  get- 


SYNDICALISM  AND  ITS  PHILOSOPHY 


ting  used  to  the  realities  of  economics, 
and,  as  he  became  thus  practical  and 
positive,  cleansing  his  mind  from  the 
thick  dust  of  fallacies  it  had  accumu- 
lated since  boyhood.  Like  everybody 
else  he  was  full  of  ideas  from  outside,  of 
theories  built  on  inadequate  historical 
analyses,  especially  of  the  tremendous 
overgrowth  of  ideology  which  the  Re- 
volution produced. 

He  gradually  came  to  mistrust  and 
reconsider  all  his  notions;  he  went  back 
to  history,  chiefly  in  the  footsteps  of 
Renan,  and  learned  the  influence  of 
pure  ideas  in  the  great  historical  move- 
ments, —  the  transformation  of  the  an- 
cient world  through  Christianity,  for 
instance,  —  while  he  became  more  and 
more  convinced  of  the  preeminence  of 
materialistic  influences  in  the  develop- 
ment of  economics.  He  noticed  that  all 
the  modern  French  systems  of  politics 
and  social  philosophy  were  built  on 
the  notion  of  progress  as  conceived  by 
D'Alembert  and  the  other  Encyclopae- 
dists :  he  tested  their  apparent  clarity, 
found  it  wanting,  and  later  gave  the 
results  of  his  inquiry  in  a  most  sug- 
gestive little  book,  Les  Illusions  du 
Progres.  All  his  reading  and  thinking 
brought  him  to  the  conclusion  that  the 
logic  of  social  philosophers  and  politi- 
cians was  moonshine,  misleading  in- 
ferences with  a  semblance  of  solidity 
which  it  took  ages  to  expose,  and  which 
in  the  mean  time  stood  in  the  way  of 
an  accurate  view  of  realities.  Gener- 
alizations were  all  dangerous;  living 
facts  alone  were  fruitful,  and  one  could 
never  be  long  enough  face  to  face  with 
them. 

The  reader  must  see  at  once  the 
relationship  between  these  views  and 
the  Bergsonian  intuition,  that  is,  the 
effort  to  understand  reality,  not  by 
standing  apart  from  it,  but  by  lending 
one's  self  to  its  flow. 

About  the  time  when  Sorel  reached 
these  conclusions  he  met  Fernand 


Pelloutier.  I  have  never  seen  anybody 
who  laid  sufficient  stress  on  the  influ- 
ence which  this  meeting  must  have  had 
on  Sorel.  Here  was  Pelloutier,  a  young 
man  of  twenty-eight,  who  had  never 
lived  apart  from  the  world  of  labor, 
had  been  a  stranger  to  politics,  to  sys- 
tems and  theories  of  any  kind,  yet  had 
been  sufficiently  intelligent  —  in  the 
simple  and  beautiful  meaning  of  this 
word  —  to  connect  the  forces  of  the 
workmen  with  the  living  organism  of 
Syndicalism  and  could  see  —  rather 
than  deduce  —  the  far-reaching  conse- 
quences of  its  existence:  its  opposition 
to  present  society;  its  goal,  the  Great 
Strike;  its  method,  striking  and  strik- 
ing again  with  the  heroism  of  persever- 
ance; and  its  final  success,  the  substi- 
tution of  cooperation  for  capital.  The 
mind  of  Pelloutier  was  in  itself  a  dem- 
onstration of  the  superiority  of  intui- 
tion over  systems  and  deductions. 

Another  conclusion  forced  itself.  As 
Pelloutier  was  above  philosophers,  the 
world  of  labor  was  above  the  schools  of 
politicians.  Jaures  and  his  friends  were 
mere  logicians,  clinging  like  leeches 
to  a  reality  which  had  its  life  apart 
from  them;  they  played  nowadays  the 
part  which  the  Encyclopaedists  had 
played  before  the  Revolution,  and 
their  influence  was  as  baleful.  This  is 
the  intellectual  origin  of  Sorel's  sym- 
pathy with  the  Syndicalist  movement. 

This  sympathy  has  another  aspect, 
corresponding  to  the  moral  develop- 
ment of  the  philosopher.  As  I  said 
above,  Sorel  was  bred  in  the  determin- 
ism of  Renan,  Taine,  and  Berthelot, 
that  is  to  say,  in  a  distinctly  negative 
system  of  ethics.  His  own  nature  was 
sufficiently  noble  to  keep  him  above 
the  materialism  which  comes  too  often 
in  its  train.  But  he  was  not  far  ad- 
vanced in  life  before  he  saw  the  ter- 
rible effects  on  society  of  a  doctrine 
making  man  the  only  judge  of  his  own 
actions. 


SYNDICALISM  AND  ITS  PHILOSOPHY 


The  generation  of  M.  Sorel  —  the 
men  who  are  now  sixty  —  has  been  the 
prey  of  all  that  awaits  moral,  even 
more  than  intellectual,  uncertainty. 
The  indifference  to  motives,  the  igno- 
rance of  a  rule  of  life,  the  good-hu- 
mored condoning  of  deliberate  in- 
dulgence, the  skepticism  even  of  the 
naturally  good,  making  them  almost 
ashamed  to  be  good,  the  complicity  of 
millions  of  readers  with  a  host  of  im- 
moral writers,  the  careless  admission 
of  national  decadence  consequent  on 
depopulation  and  enervation,  have  all 
been  rife  until  a  very  recent  period, 
and  have  all  been  produced  by  phil- 
osophical doubt  succeeding  religious 
conviction. 

The  only  remedy  must  be  some  sort 
of  intellectual  basis,  an  idea  strong 
enough  not  to  be  undermined  by  the 
low  modern  infiltrations.  M.  Sorel 
himself  needed  no  personal  prop;  he 
was  naturally  above  compromises.  In 
default  of  a  philosophy  he  had  charac- 
ter. His  poet  was  Corneille;  his  heroes 
were  the  Catholic  saints,  or  even  the 
Jansenists,  with  their  purity  and  obsti- 
nacy; his  Socialist  was  Proud 'hon, 
because  Proud 'hon  built  society  on 
love,  but  the  love  of  one  woman;  but 
neither  Proud'honnor  the  Catholic  doc- 
trine of  sacrifice,  nor  the  idealism  of 
Corneille,  was  likely  to  appeal  to  the 
modern  man  and  transform  his  materi- 
alism. Socialism  —  the  Socialism  of 
Jaures  which  he  was  to  treat  later  on 
with  such  contempt  —  for  a  time  at- 
tracted him,  but  it  was  because  of  its 
apparent  interest  in  the  humble  and 
persecuted  and  its  corresponding  ap- 
parent self-denial.  The  moment  he 
found  that  the  Dreyfusist  movement 
was  in  reality  a  conspiracy  of  greed  and 
ambition,  and  that  the  Socialist  doc- 
trine rested  ultimately  on  what  he  calls 
a  *  belly  philosophy,'  he  withdrew. 

Here  again  his  acquaintance  with 
Pelloutier  was  a.n  illumination,  The 


young  clerk  had  nothing  but  scorn  for 
politics  and  the  politicians,  he  never 
gave  a  thought  to  the  possibility  of  his 
rising  above  his  sphere  and  becoming  a 
bourgeois  deputy;  his  life  was  consumed 
in  an  obscure  work  of  organization 
which  precluded  brilliant  speeches,  the 
empty  but  pleasant  activity  of  elec- 
tioneering, the  long  periods  of  rest 
after  partial  success. 

Pelloutier  knew  that  he  was  working 
for  an  ideal  which  he  would  never  see 
realized.  Not  only  was  he  consumptive 
and  doomed  to  speedy  death,  but, the 
object  he  had  been  the  first  to  conceive 
was  beyond  the  span  of  even  the  long- 
est life;  no  man  of  his  generation,  or 
even  of  the  next,  would  see  the  Great 
Evening  and  the  Great  Strike.  All  they 
could  hope  was  to  see  the  Syndicalists' 
net  gradually  spread  in  their  hands, 
and  the  great  Syndicalist  weapon  — 
strike  —  become  more  familiar  to  the 
workmen. 

But  this  daily  routine  was  fruitful  in 
positive  results,  and  these  results  were 
not  merely  the  success  of  a  propaganda. 
Pelloutier  and  Sorel  saw  that  by  per- 
suading the  workmen  to  band  together 
with  a  view  to  a  final  and  decisive,  if 
far-away,  action,  they  called  forth  the 
noblest  energies  latent  in  the  people, 
and  long  extinguished  among  the  bour- 
geoisie. Poor  laborers  gladly  gave  of 
their  own  for  the  support  of  the  Syn- 
dicates, or  joined  in  strikes  which  ap- 
parently had  no  immediate  interest  for 
them,  out  of  mere  love  for  their  class, 
and  supported  by  the  hope  —  perhaps 
the  mirage  —  of  its  final  victory.  M. 
Sorel  has  often  likened  this  state  of 
mind  to  that  of  the  early  Christians 
when  their  great  hope  was  the  Advent 
of  Christ  and  the  Establishment  of  his 
Kingdom.  But  as  the  primitive  church 
had  lost  by  becoming  protected  instead 
of  persecuted,  Sorel  realized  that,  if 
ever  the  syndicates  grew  rich  and  pow- 
erful they  would  probably  become  in- 


SYNDICALISM  AND  ITS  PHILOSOPHY 


fected  with, the  faults  of  power  and 
wealth  —  selfishness  and  indolence  — 
and  lose  their  original  virtue.  A  long 
series  of  articles  in  Le  Mouvement  Soci- 
aliste,  reprinted  since  under  the  title  of 
Reflexions  sur  la  Violence,  was  a  de- 
fense of  the  warlike  virtues  called  forth 
by  the  pregnant  idea  of  the  Great 
Strike.  Since  the  days  of  1790  when 
the  French  armies  marched,  full  of  the 
revolutionary  ideal,  no  mass  of  men 
had  appeared  possessed  of  such  a  noble 
spirit  as  the  Syndicalists. 

This  spirit,  in  Sorel's  opinion,  was 
evidently  what  mattered  the  most.  In 
the  same  book  he  confessed  openly  that 
he  did  not  believe  in  the  possibility  of 
the  Great  Strike,  and  looked  upon  it 
as  a  myth.  He  treated  at  great  length 
of  the  nature  and  influence  of  myths: 
they  were  half  ideas,  half  images,  and 
as  such  partook  of  the  power  of  both 
the  reason  and  the  imagination,  and 
imposed  themselves  on  the  minds  of 
even  the  simplest;  but  after  a  time 
their  purely  imaginative  aspect  lost 
its  brilliance  and  they  were  gradually 
forgotten.  So  the  very  basis  of  Syndi- 
calism was  in  one  respect  only  a  fasci- 
nating illusion. 

The  frankness  of  this  analysis  show- 
ed obviously  that  Sorel  was  more  inter- 
ested in  Syndicalism  than  he  expected 
the  Syndicalists  to  become  interested 
in  him.  In  other  words,  he  was  less  a 
man  of  action  than  a  philosopher  cu- 
rious of  the  motives  of  action,  and  he 
no  more  believed  in  Syndicalism  than 
in  Christianity :  both  doctrines  attract- 
ed him  by  the  purity  of  their  spirit, 
by  the  heroism  they  entailed,  not  at  all 
by  their  future.  After  all,  he  was  little 
more  than  a  sort  of  Nietzschean  seek- 
ing the  rarity  of  an  aristocratic  atti- 
tude where  it  was  likely  to  be  found. 

When  the  present  writer  first  made  a 
careful  inquiry  into  the  philosophy  of 
Sorel,1  he  wondered  why  such  tenden- 
1  Vide  The  Forum,  November,  1909. 


cies  did  not  turn  him  toward  a  political 
doctrine  widely  different  from  Syndi- 
calism in  object,  but  strikingly  similar 
in  spirit.  The  school  known  as  the 
Neo-Royalists  had  their  myth,  which 
was  the  restoration  of  the  pre-revolu- 
tionary  Monarchy;  they  stood  for  vio- 
lence, and  lost  no  occasion  to  say  that 
they  would  seize  the  first  opportunity 
to  make  a  coup  d'etat;  their  intellect- 
ual training  was  practical,  historical, 
and  positivist  like  his  own;  finally  they 
had  in  common  with  him  a  speculat- 
ive attachment  to  Christianity  which, 
however,  left  their  chief  leaders  in 
religious  unbelief.  There  was  in  them 
all  there  was  in  the  Syndicalists,  and 
less  chance  of  losing  sight  of  their  aim. 
Everything  must  appeal  to  him  in 
those  quarters.  These  previsions  have 
been  confirmed.  M.  Sorel  may  not  be 
more  of  a  Royalist  than  he  was  a  Syn- 
dicalist, but  his  sympathies  have  gone 
that  way,  and  his  name  is  frequently 
mentioned  in  the  Neo-Royalist  publica- 
tions, as  it  used  to  be,  and  even  still  is, 
every  now  and  then,  in  the  Syndicalist 
periodicals.  Meanwhile,  he  superin- 
tends the  publication  of  a  series  for  the 
defense  of  higher  culture,  in  which  both 
his  former  and  his  recent  tendencies 
are  easily  reconciled. 


VI 

Little  space  remains  for  the  last  part 
of  this  exposition,  in  which  we  ought 
not  to  prophesy,  or  even  to  state  the 
probable  destinies  of  Syndicalism,  but 
merely  to  describe  its  chances  as  they 
appear  from  the  relation  between  its 
present  conditions  and  the  evolution 
of  the  public  spirit  in  France. 

In  1908,  when  the  postal  strike  led 
men  to  realize  the  formidable  power  of 
association,  the  C.  G.  T.,  or  at  any 
rate,  the  more  revolutionary  elements 
in  the  C.  G.  T.,  seemed  to  be  at  their 
highest.  Nobody  who  followed  that 


SYNDICALISM  AND  ITS  PHILOSOPHY 


brief  drama  will  ever  forget  how  not 
only  the  government,  —  which  till  then 
had  been  uniformly  weak,  —  but  even 
the  Parliament,  —  so  far  respected,  — 
fell  at  once  into  insignificance.  The 
distinction  between  the  Democracy 
and  the  proletariat,  on  which  Sorel 
lays  so  much  stress,  was  made  tangible 
at  a  meeting  of  the  strikers  at  which 
the  well-known  M.  Buisson,  and  a  few 
other  Socialist  deputies,  had  thought 
they  would  be  welcomed  as  usual. 
They  were  simply  hooted  off  the  plat- 
form, and  the  meeting  was  conducted, 
as  well  as  the  strike  itself,  by  a  few 
delegates  of  the  C.  G.  T.,  among  whom 
was  the  famous  Pataud.  It  appeared 
clearly,  not  only  that  the  government 
was  defenseless  against  one  single  syn- 
dicate, but  that  the  Socialist  members 
of  the  Chamber,  who  had  been  so  far 
a  sort  of  very  useful  buffer  between 
the  workmen  and  their  political  mas- 
ters, had  been  definitely  thrown  back 
among  the  bourgeoisie.  Pataud  and 
his  friends,  workmen  as  they  were, 
negotiated  with  the  government  on 
equal  terms,  and  would  have  dictated 
to  them  if  M.  Clemenceau,  who  was 
then  prime  minister,  had  not  cleverly 
put  them  off,  or,  as  they  said,  taken 
them  in. 

The  experience  produced  a  tremen- 
dous sensation,  to  be  compared  only  to 
the  shock  received  two  or  three  years 
earlier  on  the  dismissal  of  M.  Delcasse 
from  the  Cabinet,  and  the  revelation 
of  the  havoc  made  in  the  Army  and 
Navy  by  M.  Pelletan  and  General 
Andre.  The  country  realized  the  weak- 
ness of  parliamentarianism,  and  knew 
that  it  had  been  leaning  for  years  on 
a  woefully  broken  reed.  The  Cham- 
ber itself  lost  at  once  all  of  the  superb 
pride  which  thirty  years*  absolute  pow- 
er in  a  country  republican  only  in  ap- 
pearance had  given  it,  and  declared 
itself  content  with  legislating  instead 
of  governing. 


Meanwhile  the  members  of  the  gov- 
ernment which  had  never  been  trained 
to  govern  were  bethinking  themselves, 
and  M.  Briand  gave  the  result  of  their 
meditations  in  a  celebrated  address  at 
Lisieux.  Modern  nations,  he  said,  had 
to  confront  the  new  fact  of  association. 
Association  was  the  feature  of  the  day, 
and  could  not  be  disregarded.  The 
Syndicates,  in  very  few  years,  had 
prospered  so  that  nobody  could  ignore 
them,  and  the  best  policy  was  to  give 
them  their  share.  What  the  share  was, 
he  pointed  out  in  general  terms,  but 
sufficiently  clearly  for  anybody  to 
understand  that  he  was  ready  to  give 
them  the  right  to  legal  possession,  and 
the  right  to  say  something  in  the  de- 
bates concerning  their  professional  in- 
terests. All  this  meant  the  beginning, 
or  at  any  rate  the  dawn,  of  the  decen- 
tralization for  which  the  best  intel- 
lects had  prayed  so  many  years,  but  it 
might  mean  also  the  preliminaries  of 
surrender  to  the  C.  G.  T. 

Many  people  believed  this.  Day  af- 
ter day  the  conservative  papers  point- 
ed out  that  the  strong,  united,  intel- 
ligent government  which  had  been  so 
long  desired,  actually  existed  in  France, 
but  sat  at  the  Bourse  du  Travail  and 
not  at  the  Elysee.  A  combination  of 
the  railwaymen,  the  postal  clerks,  and 
the  electricians  would  suffice  to  switch 
authority  from  one  place  to  the  other. 
No  revolution  could  be  easier.  The 
Syndicalists  believed  it,  too.  Their  de- 
cision turned  quickly  into  arrogance, 
and  Pataud  stopped  the  electricity  in 
Paris  three  or  four  times  in  one  win- 
ter, just  as  the  Negro  band-master 
stopped  the  music  *  for  to  show  his  au- 
thority.' It  is  only  when  one  studies 
the  history  of  Syndicalism  in  detail 
that  the  difference  between  the  intim- 
idating sobriety  of  the  theories,  —  as 
set  forth  not  only  by  Sorel  or  Lagar- 
delle,  but  even  by  Griffuelhes, — and 
the  raw  violence  of  inferior  Syndical- 


SYNDICALISM  AND  ITS  PHILOSOPHY 


ists,  appears.  La  Bataille  Syndicaliste 
is  as  near  mere  anarchy  as  Les  Re- 
flexions  sur  la  Violence  is  near  true 
philosophy. 

For  some  time  after  the  Lisieux 
speech  the  Syndicalists  affected  to 
treat  the  overtures  of  M.  Briand  as 
the  treachery  of  a  turn-coat,  and  they 
vaunted  their  anti-patriotism  more 
openly  than  ever.  But  the  ringleaders 
who  harped  on  this  high  string  were 
no  more  the  whole  of  Syndicalism  than 
Syndicalism  is  the  whole  of  the  labor 
world.  A  warning  came  to  them  first 
from  Germany,  where  the  C.  G.  T.  was 
excluded  from  the  international  con- 
gresses on  account  ipf  its  anti-patriotic 
attitude.  Then  some  powerful  syndi- 
cates, which  so  far  had  kept  away  from 
the  C.  G.  T.  (the  Book  Syndicate  and 
the  Miners'  Unions  among  the  number), 
joined  it,  but  being  experienced  and 
rich,  infused  wisdom  into  it.  Then  it 
appeared  that  if  materialism  can  occa- 
sionally nerve  itself  for  a  violent  action 
its  natural  bent  is  much  more  toward 
a  diminution  of  effort,  and  that  Briand 
had  seen  the  disposition  of  the  Syndi- 
cates pretty  accurately  when  he  had 
come  toward  them  with  an  olive- 
branch  at  Lisieux.  In  most  workmen 
the  wish  to  become  a  bourgeois  lives 
more  or  less  dormant.  The  truth  of 
this  appeared  glaringly  in  the  conver- 
sjon  of  no  less  a  person  than  Pataud, 
who,  after  finding  some  resistance 
among  his  brethren  and  some  on  the 
part  of  the  police,  gave  up  agitating, 
first  for  lecturing,  and  finally  for  a  most 
unromantic  situation  in  the  champagne 
trade.  In  short,  what  with  excessive 
violence  on  the  part  of  some  Syndical- 
ists, and  a  return  to  balance  on  the  part 
of  some  others,  the  C.  G.  T.  does  not 
appear  to-day  nearly  so  formidable  in 
its  unity,  or  so  full  of  belief  in  the  Great 
Strike,  as  it  was  four  years  ago. 

As  these  transformations  took  place 
among  Syndicalists,  another  was  notice- 


able in  the  public  spirit  of  the  French 
nation  at  large.  The  danger  from  the 
strikes  and  the  danger  from  Germany 
combined  to  awaken  people  to  the  ne- 
cessity of  a  stronger  national  attitude. 
Energy  in  the  resistance  both  to  agita- 
tors like  Pataud  and  to  browbeaters 
abroad,  after  seeming  long  impossible, 
suddenly  became  the  order  of  the  day. 
Anti-militarism,  which  had  been  ram- 
pant in  the  last  ten  years,  positively 
vanished.  Its  manifestations  are  now 
confined  to  the  lowest  anarchist  organs. 
In  the  summer  of  1911,  when  a  war 
with  Germany  was  regarded  as  almost 
inevitable,  the  prospect  was  viewed 
without  any  reluctance,  even  in  indus- 
trial districts  where  a  few  years  ago  it 
would  have  caused  furious  protests. 

This  decision  could  not  exist  without 
an  accompanying  change  in  the  cur- 
rent principles.  It  would  take  a  vol- 
ume to  describe  the  rapid  modifica- 
tion, but  it  is  a  fact  that  the  return  to  a 
saner  view  of  authority,  of  the  subor- 
dination of  the  individual  to  collective 
interests,  of  the  necessity  of  self-sacri- 
fice, etcetera,  has  been  so  marked  as  to 
nullify  the  logic  of  Socialist  material- 
ism, strong  as  it  might  still  appear  to 
crude  intellects.  The  France  of  to-day 
is  completely  different  from  the  disor- 
ganized country  which  saw  the  Drey- 
fusist  disruption,  and  apparently  never 
minded;  and  the  change  is  the  more 
striking  from  being  especially  notice- 
able among  the  rising  generation.  An 
hour's  conversation  with  any  intelli- 
gent young  man  belonging  to  the 
classes  in  which  skepticism  and  dilet- 
tantism used  to  be  strongest,  leaves  no 
doubt  that  a  new  public  spirit  has 
made  its  reappearance  in  a  new  and 
bracing  atmosphere. 

In  these  conditions,  the  element  of 
disorder  inseparable  from  the  motion 
of  the  C.  G.  T.  is  not  likely  to  find 
favor,  even  with  the  average  workman. 
The  fact  that  all  the  bandits  who,  for 


30 


SYNDICALISM  AND  ITS  PHILOSOPHY 


several  weeks,  scoured  the  environs  of 
Paris,  waylaying  motorists,  plunder- 
ing banks  and  massacring  police  were 
either  members  of  the  C.  G.  T.,  —  one 
of  them  even  a  delegate,  —  or  were 
found  in  possession  of  Syndicalist  liter- 
ature, acted  as  a  revelation.  The  violent 
agitators  whom  Sorel  admired  so  much 
seem  bound  to  be  thrown  back  into 
the  mere  anarchical  milieus,  while  the 
bulk  of  Syndicalists  will  turn  more  and 
more  toward  Reformism.  Meanwhile, 
strong  governments,  gaining  where  the 
now  despised  Chamber  loses,  will  pro- 
bably find  themselves  in  a  position  to 
pass  effective  legislation  about  the 
Syndicates.  The  dangers  to  society 
arising  from  the  existence  of  mortmain 
are  universally  known,  and  no  outcry 
will  follow  their  removal.  It  will  seem 
incredible  to  people  born  and  brought 
up  in  a  period  less  troubled  than  ours 
that  corporations  professedly  profes- 
sional ever  boasted  openly  about  treat- 
ing the  rest  of  the  world  as  enemies, 
and  actually  prepared  war  against  it. 

In  conclusion,  we  may  say  that  all 
that  Sorel  detested  —  which  is  all  that 
M.  Briand  hoped  for  when  he  delivered 
his  Lisieux  address  —  is  likely  to  hap- 
pen. Nothing  can  break  the  impulse 
which  the  Syndicalist  movement  has 
now  taken,  and  nobody  with  a  sense  of 
fairness  can  be  sorry  for  it.  There  will 
be  more  and  more  syndicates,  and  it 
is  inevitable  that  their  development 
will  in  time  largely  modify  the  eco- 
nomic and  —  to  a  certain  extent  — 
the  present  political  conditions.  But 


the  Syndicates,  growing  in  an  atmos- 
phere very  different  from  that  in  which 
they  were  born,  will  also  be  different. 
They  will  forget  the  mythical  and  a£ 
present  violent  aspect  of  their  creed; 
they  will  strive  after  immediate  im- 
provement; they  will  be  peace-loving 
and  matter-of-fact. 

Sorel  says  that  if  it  is  so,  they  will 
only  create  a  variety  of  the  very  un- 
interesting bourgeois  whom  he  hates: 
materialistic,  self-indulgent,  and  cow- 
ardly. But  this  conclusion  is  not  at  all 
certain.  The  transformation  in  the 
public  spirit  which  I  mentioned  above 
may  be  deep  enough  to  restore  idealism 
in  spite  of  peace.  /The  logic  of  such 
movements  in  Catholic  countries  in- 
variably points  to  religious  renovation. 
And  what  would  be  Catholicism  gal- 
vanized once  more  into  a  social  force 
in  a  society  based  on  authority  on  the 
one  hand  and  on  a  cooperation  organ- 
ization on  the  other?  The  answer  may 
be  startling,  but  I  think  it  is  inevitable. 

Catholicism  plus  cooperative  insti- 
tutions—  that  is,  after  all,  an  idealist 
spirit  united  to  the  most  effective  means 
of  social  and  material  improvement  — 
amounts  to  a  repetition  of  the  mediae- 
val experiment  coming  round  in  un- 
doubtedly favorable  conditions.  Will 
this  be?  Nobody  knows;  but  I  would 
not  leave  the  reader  with  a  pessimistic 
conclusion  when  a  totally  different  one 
appears  more  likely.  In  France,  at 
least,  the  crisis  in  the  growth  of  Syn- 
dicalism is  over,  and  the  materialism 
which  made  it  formidable  is  speedily 
losing  its  venom. 


THE  AMULET 


BY   MARY   ANTIN 


WHEN  Yankel  was  left  a  widower,  his 
pious  relatives  felt  that  the  Lord  had 
stretched  out  his  hand  to  remove  an 
obstacle  from  the  path  of  a  godly  man. 
This  reflection  cast  no  reproach  on  the 
memory  of  YankePs  wife.  No  one 
spoke  of  Peshe  Frede  except  with  re- 
spect and  pity.  She  had  been  a  good 
wife  —  as  good  as  God  willed  to  have 
her.  During  the  six  years  of  her  mar- 
ried life  she  had  never  given  her  hus- 
band any  cause  of  complaint  save  one, 
and  that  was  a  matter  for  sorrow  ra- 
ther than  complaint.  Peshe  Frede  had 
no  children,  and  what  are  prosperity 
and  harmony  and  mutual  devotion  to 
a  childless  pair,  in  a  community  where 
parenthood  is  the  great  career?  Their 
life  was  like  a  stage  set  for  a  play,  but 
the  characters  never  came  on. 

Yankel  was  away  a  great  deal,  look- 
ing after  his  lumber  business,  and 
whenever  he  came  home  he  found  his 
house  in  order,  his  favorite  dishes 
steaming  in  the  oven,  and  Peshe  Frede, 
trim  and  smiling,  ready  to  preside  over 
his  comfort.  But  there  was  a  stillness 
in  the  orderly  rooms  that  loving  words 
failed  to  dispel,  and  Yankel  had  to 
exercise  all  the  arts  of  kindness  to  wipe 
the  guilty  look  out  of  Peshe  Frede's 
eyes. 

No  doubt  it  was  harder  on  her,  who 
had  to  stay  at  home  with  folded 
hands;  and  yet  the  mothers  of  Pol- 
otzk,  while  commiserating  her  barren 
lot,  said  she  was  greatly  to  be  envied, 
because  her  husband  kept  her  in  honor 


and  kindness  and  made  light  of  their 
common  disappointment.  When  she 
died,  and  the  period  of  mourning  was 
spent,  Yankel's  friends  began  to  look 
forward  to  his  second  marriage,  cer- 
tain that  God  would  reward  him  at 
last  for  his  unmurmuring  patience. 

A  year  passed  after  his  second  mar- 
riage, and  Sorke,  the  nineteen-year- 
old  bride,  began  to  droop  'under  the 
weight  of  the  accumulated  silence  of 
her  orderly  house.  A  second  year 
passed  without  hope;  a  third  year  ran 
its  empty  course.  Yankel  was  thank- 
ful to  remember  that  even  in  his 
secret  soul  he  had  never  thought  of  di- 
vorcing Peshe  Frede  at  the  end  of  ten 
years,  as  by  the  Jewish  law  he  would 
have  had  a  right  to  do.  It  was  he  who 
was  doomed,  and  not  the  wife.  He 
lavished  on  Sorke  even  greater  tender- 
ness than  he  had  spent  on  Peshe  Frede, 
for  now  he  had  to  atone  for,  as  well  as 
comfort,  the  empty  heart. 

Late  on  one  afternoon  in  October, 
Sorke  was  sitting  by  the  window,  her 
head  bent  over  one  of  those  embroid- 
ery-frames that  had  become  the  sym- 
bol of  her  unwelcome  leisure.  When 
it  was  too  dark  to  work,  she  wound 
the  thread  around  her  needle  and 
folded  her  hands  in  her  lap.  There 
was  nothing  to  see  on  the  street;  still 
Sorke  remained  in  her  place,  a  vanish- 
ing image  against  the  twilight  gloom. 
Why  should  she  move?  There  was  no- 
thing waiting  to  be  done.  Chronic  in- 
ertia had  produced  in  her  a  weird 
power  of  remaining  motionless.  Even 

31 


THE  AMULET 


her  thoughts  were  paralyzed.  The 
stillness  was  like  a  wall  around  her. 
The  irregular  sounds  that  came  from 
the  kitchen  brought  no  suggestion  of 
current  activity;  they  were  the  sounds 
that  had  filled  her  ears  from  the  be- 
ginning of  time. 

Suddenly  she  jumped  up,  with  a 
startled  cry.  From  the  empty  gloom 
outside  a  face  had  sprung,  a  dark, 
« bearded,  laughing  face,  close  beside 
her  window.  She  ran  to  the  door.  Her 
husband  sprang  up  the  steps  to  meet 
her. 

'Yankel!'  she  cried,  in  a  voice  half 
way  between  surprise  and  reproach. 

'Sorele!1  I  startled  you.  How  are 
you,  little  wife?' 

'I  did  n]t  expect  you  till  the  end  of 
the  week.  How  are  you,  Yankel?' 

'Fine!  and  mighty  glad  to  get  home, 
after  two  weeks  of  knocking  about  the 
dirty  villages.' 

'Two  weeks  and  three  days/  Sorke 
soberly  corrected.  '  You  went  away  on 
a  Monday  morning,  and  this  is  Wed- 
nesday/ 

Yankel  laughed. 

'I  forgot  that  you  count  the  days. 
Well,  you  like  to  be  surprised?  But 
why  are  you  sitting  in  the  dark?  Here; 
let 's  light  the  lamp.  Let  me  see  if  my 
little  wife  is  all  there/ 

There  was  something  pathetic  in 
the  interest  with  which  Sorke  watched 
her  husband's  trifling  activity.  She 
seemed  glad  to  be  caught  up  in  the  cur- 
rent of  his  energy.  And  Yankel,  who 
had  learned  by  experience  the  signs  of 
a  lonely  woman's  moods,  put  his  ten- 
der hands  on  her  shoulders  and  stud- 
ied her  upturned  face  in  the  lamp- 
light. 

Sorke's  eyes  had  that  look  of  uncon- 
scious beseeching  that  had  haunted 
him  all  the  years  of  his  married  life: 
the  look  of  one  who  has  found  no  an- 
swer to  the  questions  of  life.  Peshe 
1  Diminutive  of  Sorke. 


Frede  had  looked  at  him  that  way,  and 
now  Sorke  —  Sorke,  whose  eyes  were 
so  merry  three  years  ago. 

'You  have  been  lonely,  Sorele. 
What  have  you  been  doing?  Tell  me 
everything  while  we  have  tea/ 

Sorke  was  glad  to  be  relieved  of  her 
husband's  scrutiny.  She  did  not  wish 
to  make  him  sad  on  his  return.  She 
called  to  the  housemaid  to  prepare  the 
samovar,  and  herself  set  out  the  glass- 
es on  a  tray. 

Yankel  watched  her  quiet  move- 
ments through  the  open  door  of  their 
bedroom,  while  he  removed  his  heavy 
boots  and  washed  the  grime  of  travel 
from  his  face  and  hands.  It  seemed 
to  him  she  was  paler  than  usual,  and 
he  divined  that  the  bits  of  neighbor- 
hood gossip  she  repeated  in  answer  to 
his  questions  had  no  real  interest  for 
her. 

'It's  good  to  be  at  home,'  he  said,  in 
his  hearty  manner,  as  he  stretched  his 
legs  under  the  table  opposite  Sorke. 
'Are  you  sure  you  did  n't  expect  me? 
It  seems  to  me  you  're  all  dressed  up/ 

Sorke  looked  down  on  her  gown, 
which  was  indeed  one  she  seldom  wore. 

'I  had  nothing  to  do,  so  I  dressed 
up.  Do  you  remember  this  dress?' 

'Is  n't  it  a  new  one?' 

She  smiled. 

'Ask  a  man  about  clothes!  This  is 
the  dress  I  wore  when  we  visited  your 
Aunt  Rachel,  the  Passover  before  we 
were  married/ 

'What!  three  years  ago?  How  did 
you  keep  it  so  new?  You  are  a  very 
careful  little  woman/ 

'It  is  n't  that.  I  have  so  many 
dresses  that  I  can't  wear  them  out/ 
She  lifted  her  head  with  a  movement 
strange  to  her,  a  sort  of  subdued  im- 
patience. 'Yankel,  what's  the  use  of 
having  so  many  dresses?' 

He  stared  at  her.  'I  swear  by  my 
beard  and  earlocks  that  I'm  the  only 
husband  in  Polotzk  who  ever  heard 


THE  AMULET 


33 


such  a  speech  from  his  wife.  Too 
many  dresses !  Well,  well !  what  next  ? ' 

But  Sorke  would  not  meet  his  tone 
of  raillery.  He  had  surprised  her  in 
the  depths  of  her  melancholy,  and  her 
trouble  cried  out  to  be  recognized. 
Loneliness  and  brooding  had  unsettled 
her  nerves.  Yankel's  cheerful,  almost 
boisterous,  manner  jarred  her  into 
something  like  rebellion. 

'Too  many  dresses,  yes,  and  too 
.  many  things  of  all  sorts.  We  have  so 
much  of  everything,  and  what's  it  all 
for?  I  can  never  get  to  the  bottom  of 
the  linen  chest  —  some  of  the  things 
have  never  been  used.  The  parlor  is 
fixed  up  like  a  furniture  store  —  there 
is  n't  a  scratch  or  stain  on  anything. 
And  look  at  my  clothes!  I've  given 
away  enough  for  a  poor  bride's  trous- 
seau; I  never  wear  out  anything. 
What's  the  use  of  so  many  things?  I 
wish  we  were  poor.  At  least  I  'd  have 
something  to  do,  then.' 

Her  tone  was  almost  vehement.  Her 
color  had  risen;  the  beseeching  look  in 
her  eyes  was  burned  away  by  a  gleam 
of  protest. 

Yankel  watched  her  in  mute  sur- 
prise. He  understood  the  inner  mean- 
ing of  her  frivolous  complaint,  perhaps 
better  than  she  did  herself,  but  he  had 
become  so  accustomed  to  her  gentle 
patience  that  he  did  not  at  once  know 
how  to  meet  her  sudden  outburst. 

Sorke  waited  a  moment  for  him  to 
speak,  then  went  on,  in  a  quieter  man- 
ner,— 

*  Really,  Yankel,  J  think  people  are 
happier  when  they  are  n't  so  well  off. 
I'd  rather  do  patching  and  darning 
than  this  everlasting  fancy-work.'  She 
cast  a  look  of  distaste  at  the  embroid- 
ery-frame in  the  corner.  *  I  want  some- 
thing real  to  do.  I  don't  think  you 
know  how  many  hours  there  are  in  the 
day,  you're  so  busy  with  your  affairs 
and  seeing  people  and  traveling.  If  I 
were  n't  ashamed,  I  'd  like  to  take  les- 
VOL.  in -NO.  i 


sons  on  the  clavier,  or  something  like 
that,  to  fill  up  the  time.' 

'Why  don't  you?' 

Sorke  looked  her  surprise. 

'A  married  woman  take  lessons? 
Everybody  would  point  at  me.  I'm 
supposed  to  be  busy  with  housekeep- 
ing. Busy?'  She  smiled  sadly.  *  I  stay 
in  bed  till  I'm  lame  from  lying;  I  go  to 
market,  I  stop  wherever  two  women 
have  their  heads  together,  I  eat  my 
dinner,  I  dress  myself  as  for  a  holi- 
day; and  it's  only  noon!  Sometimes  I 
turn  the  house  upside  down,  —  closets 
and  drawers  and  everything,  — just  to 
have  something  to  do.'  She  clasped 
her  hands  pleadingly.  *  Yankel!  I've 
asked  you  a  dozen  times,  I  ask  you 
again :  send  away  the  maid,  and  let  me 
do  the  housework.  I  '11  be  happy  as  a 
queen  with  my  arms  in  the  dough- 
tub!' 

She  ended  with  a  little  smile,  but 
Yankel  continued  to  look  gravely  at 
her. 

'You  might  try  it  for  a  while,'  he 
said  at  length,  *  but  it  would  n't  con- 
tent you  long.' 

Sorke  suppressed  a  sigh.  Her  hus- 
band's words  showed  her  that  he  knew 
her  innermost  thoughts,  still  she  made 
another  feeble  effort  to  disguise  them. 

'I'd  like  it,'  she  said,  in  her  normal 
tone;  but  she  could  not  meet  his  ear- 
nest gaze. 

Yankel  got  up  and  took  a  few  steps 
across  the  room.  With  his  hands  in  his 
pockets,  he  leaned  against  a  tall  chest 
opposite  the  table,  and  looked  so  long 
at  Sorke  that  she  felt  oppressed  by  his 
scrutiny. 

Her  cry  for  something  to  do  had 
gone  to  his  heart  like  a  subtle  accusa- 
tion. This  was  his  second  fruitless 
marriage.  What  atonement  had  he 
made  this  woman  for  her  empty  exist- 
ence? No  wonder  she  cried  out  at  last 
at  the  gilded  dross  with  which  he  had 
tried  to  beguile  her. 


THE  AMULET 


'  Sorele,  I  have  tried  to  be  good  to 
you.' 

It  was  all  he  found  to  say  in  self-ex- 
cuse, but  there  was  a  world  of  sadness 
in  his  tone.  Sorke's  heart  was  struck 
with  compunction.  She  went  over  to 
him  with  penitent  haste. 

'Yankel,'  she  said,  earnestly,  plead- 
ingly, *  don't  look  at  me  like  that.  You 
have  been  good  to  me  —  always,  al- 
ways. There  is  n't  another  husband 
like  you  in  Polotzk.  Why,  all  the  wo- 
men envy  me!  You  must  n't  mind 
my  foolish  words.  Don't  you  know 
that  a  spoiled  wife  always  has  some 
complaint?  Oh,  Yankel!  I  deserve  to 
be  cudgeled  for  my  silly  talk.' 

She  drew  close  to  him,  with  one 
hand  on  his  cheek.  Tears  of  remorse 
were  in  her  eyes.  Yankel  put  his  hand 
over  hers,  but  did  not  speak. 

'What  are  you  thinking,  Yankel? 
Won't  you  forgive  me?' 

'I'm  thinking  that  I'm  a  very  selfish 
man.' 

'You  selfish!'  Sorke  laughed.  'Your 
worst  enemy  would  n't  say  that.' 

He  freed  himself  from  her  touch,  and 
spoke  from  a  little  distance. 

'Sorke,  I  ought  to  set  you  free  to 
take  another  husband.' 

'Yankel!' 

Gesture  and  tone  expressed  her  hor- 
ror. Yankel  put  out  a  hand  to  her  at 
once. 

'I  did  n't  mean  to  shock  you,  Sorele. 
I  can  never  make  up  to  you  for  —  for 
what  you  miss.  Eight  years  I  lived  with 
Peshe  Frede,  may  she  rest  in  peace! 
and  since  our  marriage  three  years  have 
passed.  Sorele,  you  are  young  and 
fresh  as  a  maiden.  Why  should  you  be 
doomed  along  with  me?' 

Sorke  dropped  to  her  knees,  her  full 
dress  billowing  up  about  her. 

'  Yankel,  I  beg  you,  unless  you  mean 
to  divorce  me,  never  say  these  things 
to  me  again.' 

He  raised  her  and  held  her  close. 


'You  must  n't  kneel.  I  '11  never  think 
of  divorce  unless  you  ask  for  it.'  There 
came  a  look  into  his  eyes  that  made 
Sorke  hold  her  breath.  'Sorele,  my 
wife,  I  love  you.' 

At  that  word,  so  foreign  to  the  ears 
of  orthodox  Polotzk,  Sorke  hid  her 
face.  That  he  should  find  the  word 
and  she  understand  it,  was  a  double 
miracle.  For  among  the  pious  Jews  of 
their  time  romantic  love  was  unknown, 
being  constantly  anticipated  by  the 
marriage-broker.  What  Sorke  knew  of 
love  and  love-making  she  had  learned 
from  vague  rumors  emanating  from 
venturesome  circles  where  forbidden 
books  were  read.  In  her  confusion  un- 
der her  husband's  ardor,  there  was 
more  than  a  trace  of  shame. 

'Sorele,  Sorele,'  repeated  Yankel,  'I 
love  you.' 

The  wife  of  three  years  allowed  her- 
self to  be  embraced,  with  a  sense  of 
yielding  to  forbidden  things.  A  strange 
thrill  shot  through  her  body,  leaving 
her  faint  and  dazed. 

'  Oh,  Yankel!'  she  whispered,  bury- 
ing her  face  on  his  arm,  '  I  feel  so  —  so 
strange.  You  are  —  you  make  me  feel 
queer.' 

'Do  I?  Do  I?' 

He  held  her  away  from  him  and 
looked  at  her  steadily,  breathing 
through  dilated  nostrils.  Her  long 
lashes  swept  her  flaming  cheeks.  She 
wavered  toward  him,  but  he  would 
not  meet  her  movement.  At  last,  with 
a  little  gasp  of  emotion,  she  threw  her 
arms  around  his  neck.  In  the  void  left 
by  her  maternal  failure,  the  exotic  flow- 
er of  love  had  sprung  up,  that  heathen 
love  for  which  there  was  no  name  in 
the  vocabulary  of  the  orthodox. 

'Are  you  happy,  Sorele?' 

His  breath  was  warm  on  her  neck. 
She  nestled  closer,  but  did  not  speak. 

'Are  you?'  he  persisted. 

'I  don't  know  why  I'm  happy  all  of 
a  sudden.' 


THE  AMULET 


35 


She  spoke  unwillingly,  with  a  sort  of 
childish  pout.  He  raised  her  head  and 
compelled  her  look. 

'  You  are  so  beautiful,  Sorele.  If  you 
did  n't  wear  a  wig,  you  'd  be  like  a 
bride  just  before  the  wedding.  Take 
it  off.  You  have  pretty  hair/ 

His  fingers  began  to  fumble  with  the 
hairpins.  She  caught  them  playfully. 

'Don't,  Yankel.  Don't  look  like 
that,  and  don't  say  such  queer  things. 
What  makes  you?' 

'I  don't  know,  myself.  Have  I  ever 
seen  you  before?  You  look  new  to  me.' 

She  laughed  like  a  child.  Suddenly 
he  pressed  her  closer  to  him,  and  kissed 
her  again  and  again.  The  skull-cap 
fell  from  his  thick  brown  curls.  He 
looked  like  a  youth  of  twenty. 

'My  wife,  my  wife!'  he  murmured; 
and  Sorke  ceased  to  struggle. 

They  were  facing  each  other  through 
a  trembling  mist  of  passion,  the  man 
and  wife  who  had  blundered  on  the 
tricks  of  love  neglected  by  the  customs 
of  their  race;  and  lo!  it  was  only  a  more 
cunning  disguise  for  the  ultimate  pur- 
pose which  the  conventions  of  their 
world  had  scarcely  masked. 

'  If  God  would  only  grant  us  a  child 
now!'  whispered  Sorke,  summing  up 
in  one  word  both  her  old  and  her  new 
ideas  of  bliss. 


II 

A  month  or  so  later  they  were  again 
sitting  close  together  in  the  lamplight, 
Yankel  having  just  returned  from  a 
short  trip.  As  soon  as  the  door  was 
shut  on  the  inquisitive  housemaid, 
they  had  drawn  up  their  chairs  to  the 
fire,  with  that  new  instinct  of  mutual 
approach  which  was  the  sign  of  their 
belated  love.  But  Yankel  was  not 
bent  on  love-making  this  evening. 
With  an  elation  that  seemed  unwar- 
ranted by  the  prosaic  facts  he  was  re- 
citing, he  was  giving  Sorke  a  minute 


account  of  his  return  journey,  and 
she,  divining  from  his  manner  that 
he  was  leading  up  to  some  important 
revelation,  listened  with  growing  cu- 
riosity. 

'So  there  we  were,  six  versts  from 
the  railroad  station,  the  wagon  in  the 
ditch  on  top  of  the  miserable  horse, 
and  the  stupid  peasant  boy  with  just 
sense  enough  left  to  scratch  his  head. 
There  was  no  hope  now  of  catching 
my  train;  we  could  n't  raise  the  horse 
without  help.  After  a  while  my  dolt 
got  his  wits  together  and  bethought 
himself  of  a  little  inn,  kept  by  Jews,  on 
a  branch  road  half  a  verst  from  where 
we  were  spilled.  It  was  the  toughest 
half-mile  I  ever  walked.  The  mud  was 
up  to  my  calves  in  places,  and  sticky 
as  glue.  The  inn  was  a  rotten  shanty, 
but  there  were  two  men  on  the  place, 
and  I  sent  them  out  to  help  Stephanka 
raise  the  horse  and  wagon.  I  ordered 
something  to  eat  while  I  waited,  but, 
as  I  was  washing  my  hands,  I  saw  a 
queer  creature,  neither  man  nor  beast, 
climb  down  from  the  stove  ledge,  steal 
up  to  the  table,  and  snatch  the  loaf 
that  was  laid  out  for  me.  The  inn- 
keeper, a  dried-up  old  woman  with  a 
wry  face,  caught  the  creature,  beat 
him,  and  took  the  bread  from  him. 
She  explained  that  he  was  an  idiot 
from  birth,  her  only  living  child,  al- 
though she  had  had  eight  sound,  heal- 
thy children.' 

Sorke  shuddered  slightly. 

'Poor  woman!'  she  murmured. 

'It's  no  wonder  she  looks  like  a 
witch,'  Yankel  resumed,  'with  such  a 
history.  It  turned  me  just  to  look  at 
that  monster.  He  was  almost  naked, 
—  dressed  in  a  single  tattered  shirt,  — 
hairy  all  over  like  a  beast,  with  wild 
eyes;  and  he  smelt  like  a  filthy  animal.' 

'Oc/i,  what  a  horrid  creature!  Could 
he  talk?' 

'No  more  than  the  beasts.  He 
whined  and  jabbered  when  the  inn- 


36 


THE  AMULET 


keeper  beat  him,  and  suddenly  he 
wrenched  himself  out  of  her  clutch, 
and  as  she  tried  to  grab  him  again,  she 
caught  hold  of  something  he  wore  on  a 
string  around  his  neck,  the  string  broke, 
and  the  thing  was  left  in  her  hand.  At 
that  the  woman  seemed  terribly  upset, 
and  wailed  and  wrung  her  hands.  "  It 's 
a  sign,"  she  moaned,  "a  bad  sign.  Some- 
thing is  going  to  happen."  I  asked  her 
what  it  was  she  had  torn  off  the  idiot's 
neck,  and  she  said  it  was  an  amulet  he 
had  worn  since  he  was  a  baby.' 

Yankel  interrupted  himself  to  ask  a 
question. 

'Do  you  believe  in  amulets,  Sorke?' 

*  Believe  in  amulets?  Of  course  I  do. 
All  sorts  of  troubles  are  cured  by  amu- 
lets, and  they  bring  good  luck,  every- 
body knows.  But  they're  getting  rare 
now;  the  rebbes  don't  do  such  wonders 
as  they  used  to.  The  people  are  too 
sinful.' 

Sorke  spoke  with  the  simplicity  of 
the  believer.  She  came  of  a  family  of 
devout  Hasidim,  who  believed  in  mir- 
acles as  they  believed  in  the  Law  of 
Moses. 

'It  may  be,'  said  Yankel,  in  answer 
to  her  remark.  'This  amulet,  now  — 
where  do  you  think  it  came  from?' 

Sorke  shrugged  her  shoulders. 

'Do  I   know?    Tell  me  all  about 

it/ 

'Well,  the  innkeeper's  sister  gave  it 
to  the  idiot  boy  when  she  was  dying. 
She  took  it  from  her  own  neck  and  gave 
it  to  him.  She  thought  it  might  cure 
him  —  make  him  human.' 

'Where  did  she  get  it?' 

'She  had  it  from  the  Rebbe  of  Ka- 
dino.' 

Sorke  jumped  in  her  place. 

'From  the  Rebbe  of  Kadino!'  she 
exclaimed,  in  a  reverent  undertone. 
'An  amulet  from  the  Rebbe  of  Kadino! 
Oh,  Yankel,  if  I  could  only  touch  it! 
What  did  she  have  it  for?  Did  the 
innkeeper  say?' 


'It  did  n't  cure  the  idiot,  you  see; 
the  innkeeper  said  he  was  never  any 
different.' 

'But  the  Rebbe  gave  it  for  some- 
thing different,  I  suppose.  His  amu- 
lets never  failed.  If  he  were  living 
now,  I'd  have  gone  to  him  long  ago.' 

Yankel  bent  close  to  her. 

'What  for,  Sorele?  what  for?' 

She  flushed,  and  her  eyes  fell. 

'For  a  cure  for  barrenness,'  she  re- 
plied in  a  low  voice.  'He  helped  many 
women.' 

Yankel  stealthily  put  his  hand  into 
his  pocket  and  drew  out  a  small  dark 
object,  which  he  gently  placed  on 
Sorke 's  lap. 

Her  hands  unclasped  themselves, 
but  remained  poised  over  her  lap.  She 
looked  up  with  a  white  face. 

'The  amulet!'  she  whispered. 

Her  husband  nodded. 

'It  was  given  her  for  barrenness. 
She  had  been  married  six  years  with- 
out bearing.  She  made  a  pilgrimage  to 
Kadino,  got  this  amulet  from  the 
Rebbe,  and  within  the  year  she  had  a 
child.' 

They  looked  at  each  other  in  a  si- 
lence heavy  with  awe.  Through  the 
little  dark  object  lying  on  Sorke's  lap 
their  prayers  were  to  be  answered  at 
last.  The  parasite  superstition  which 
had  overgrown  the  noble  tree  of  the 
faith  of  the  Ghetto  yielded  a  drop  of 
honey  along  with  its  poisonous  sap. 
Yankel  and  Sorke,  sharing  between 
them  the  token  of  the  sainted  Rebbe, 
tasted  a  form  of  ecstasy  that  only  the 
credulous  can  know. 

Presently  Sorke  began  to  murmur, 
taking  up  the  amulet  with  reverent 
fingers,  pressing  it  to  her  bosom,  to  her 
lips. 

'Oh,  God,  dear  God!  why  are  You 
so  good  to  me?  A  little  child  —  I  shall 
have  a  little  child!  What  pious  deeds 
must  I  do  in  return  for  this?  I  will  feed 
the  hungry,  I  will  tend  the  sick,  I  will 


THE  AMULET 


37 


give  alms,  I  will  fast  and  pray.  God 
has  answered  my  petitions.' 

And  Yankel  spoke  as  tensely  as  she. 

'  I  did  so  want  a  child,  Sorke.  I  had 
got  used  to  wanting  —  I  thought  I  was 
resigned.  But  lately,  since  —  because 
you  are  so  dear  to  me,  I  wanted  it 
more  than  ever.  No  matter  where  I 
go,  I  see  your  face,  and  still  I  miss 
something  that  belongs  to  you.  I  can't 
explain  it;  I'm  ashamed  of  it  some- 
times —  a  man  to  be  always  thinking 
of  what  cannot  be!  But  now,  if  God 
wills  —  What  a  happiness,  Sorele!' 

All  that  might  come  with  the  ripen- 
ing months  they  would  owe  to  the 
blessed  talisman! 

Ill 

A  month  passed,  two,  three,  four 
months.  They  smiled  at  each  other  in 
undiminished  hope.  Sorke  wore  the 
amulet  round  her  neck  day  and  night, 
except  when  she  made  her  ritual  ablu- 
tions. The  thing  they  longed  for  would 
surely  come  to  pass.  What  if  they  had 
to  wait  another  month,  and  another? 
It  was  so  much  more  time  in  which  to 
make  their  lives  pure  and  holy.  They 
had  always  been  counted  among  the 
pious;  now  they  redoubled  their  acts 
of  devotion  and  charity.  And  always 
they  knew  that  the  thing  they  longed 
for  would  come  to  pass. 

And  so  it  did.  One  day,  returning 
from  an  absence  of  eight  weeks,  Yankel 
was  greeted  at  the  gate  by  a  speech- 
less, tremulous  Sorke,  who  blushed  the 
news  to  him  before  they  had  got  in- 
doors. Shimke,  the  money-lender,  who 
lived  in  the  next  house  on  the  right,  re- 
ported in  the  market-place  that  she 
saw  through  a  crack  in  the  fence  how 
Yankel  snatched  up  the  blushing  wife 
and  carried  her  like  a  baby  into  the 
house. 

'No  wonder/  said  the  mothers  of 
Polotzk,  when  Sorke's  news  was  out, 


'no  wonder  the  man  went  out  of  his 
head  at  the  tidings,  after  waiting  so 
long.  Sorke,  she  will  be  as  one  new- 
born. The  poor  young  thing  was  worn 
almost  to  a  shadow,  what  with  pining 
and  fasting  and  running  about  from 
one  wise  woman  to  another.  There 
is  n't  a  remedy  she  had  n't  tried.  She 
was  always  thinking  of  the  other  one, 
they  say  —  Peshe  Frede,  peace  be  to 
her  soul !  —  who  went  childless  to  her 
grave.  Well,  God  took  pity  on  her, 
and  it  does  one  good  to  think  of  her 

joy.' 

The  months  that  followed  were  the 
happiest  in  Sorke's  life.  Her  husband 
surrounded  her  with  all  the  comforts 
that  his  means  could  command,  and 
the  matrons  of  the  neigborhood 
watched  over  her  and  taught  her  all 
their  maternal  secrets.  Yankel  en- 
gaged a  little  Gentile  girl  especially  to 
wait  on  her,  'as  if  she  were  a  queen,' 
the  women  said;  and  as  Sorke's  time 
drew  near,  he  was  unwilling  to  leave 
her  side,  sometimes  letting  his  business 
suffer  rather  than  spend  a  night  away 
from  home. 

'He's  afraid  the  Messiah  will  be 
born  in  his  absence,'  the  neighbors 
laughed,  taking  note  of  Yankel's  anx- 
iety; but  the  hearts  of  the  fathers  were 
with  him,  remembering  the  time  when 
they  had  awaited  each  his  own  first- 
born; and  the  prayers  of  the  women 
were  with  his  wife,  as  they  recalled  the 
first  fears  and  shocks  and  raptures  of 
motherhood. 

One  day,  finding  himself  within  a 
few  versts  of  the  neglected  inn  where 
he  had  come  across  the  magical  amulet, 
Yankel  was  moved  to  go  and  report 
the  happy  effect  of  the  charm.  His 
heart  was  running  over  with  gratitude 
to  God  and  benevolence  to  all  the 
world.  He  suddenly  felt  that  he  had 
not  rewarded  the  woman  sufficiently 
for  the  priceless  gift  of  the  amulet.  He 
had  paid  her  ten  rubles  —  a  fortune  in 


38 


THE  AMULET 


her  eyes;  but  what  was  ten  rubles  in 
return  for  his  blissful  expectations? 

The  old  woman  was  knitting  by  the 
window  when  Yankel's  wagon  turned 
into  the  yard.  Before  he  had  set  a  foot 
on  the  ground,  she  burst  through  the 
door,  and  ran  to  meet  him  with  ges- 
tures of  excitement. 

'Oh,  Master  Jew,  Master  Jew!'  she 
cried,  grasping  his  arm  with  her  two 
bony  hands.  'You  have  come  — 
thank  God  you  have  come!  Every 
day  since  you  were  here  I've  sat  by 
the  window  watching  for  you.  I  did 
n't  know  your  name,  or  where  you 
came  from,  so  I  could  n't  send  you  a 
message.  I  hoped  I  would  see  that 
peasant  boy  again  who  upset  you  in 
the  ditch,  but  he  did  n't  come  this  way 
—  nobody  ever  comes  this  way  —  it 's 
a  castaway  corner  —  nothing  but  an 
accident  brought  you  in  the  first  place. 
You  were  lost  in  the  big  world,  and  I 
could  n't  find  you.' 

Yankel  listened  to  her  with  amaze- 
ment. The  words  came  whistling  out 
of  her  toothless  mouth  like  the  wind 
through  a  keyhole.  Her  drawn  cheeks 
were  stained  purple  with  excitement. 

'What 's  the  matter? '  he  said,  gently 
disengaging  his  arm.  'What  did  you 
want  with  me,  that  you  sat  at  the  win- 
dow, waiting  so?' 

'The  amulet  —  what  have  you  done 
with  the  amulet?' 

Yankel  thought  she  repented  of  her 
bargain. 

'You  sold  it  to  me  for  ten  rubles.  If 
that  was  n't  enough,  I'll  give  you 
more.  That's  what  I  came  for  to-day.' 

'No,  no,  I  don't  want  more  money,' 
the  woman  protested.  ' See,  I  have  n't 
changed  the  other  bill  yet.'  She  put 
her  hand  into  her  bosom  and  pulled 
out  a  rag  tied  up  into  a  knot.  'Here  it 
is  —  I  was  afraid  to  touch  it.  What 
have  you  done  with  the  amulet?' 

Her  mysterious  insistence  began  to 
annoy  him. 


'It  was  mine,'  he  said,  with  a  touch 
of  impatience,  '  and  I  did  what  I  want- 
ed with  it.  You  told  me  it  would  cure 
barrenness.  I  gave  it  to  my  wife  to 
wear.  We  had  been  married  over  three 
years  without  a  child.' 

'And  now?' 

The  woman's  voice  was  thick  with 
suspense. 

'It  was  with  my  wife  as  with  your 
sister.  Thank  God,  she  expects  a  child. 
But  what  ails  you,  woman?' 

The  innkeeper  had  turned  ashy  pale. 
She  clapped  her  bony  hands  together 
and  turned  her  eyes  to  heaven. 

'God's  will  be  done,'  she  whispered. 
'  It 's  too  late  now.  May  the  Lord  save 
her  from  all  evil.' 

Watching  her,  Yankel  felt  his  heart 
contract  with  apprehension.  He  grasp- 
ed her  by  the  arm,  and  spoke  sternly, 
almost  fiercely. 

'Listen,  woman!  If  you  have  any- 
thing to  tell  me,  out  with  it.  What  is 
it  you're  moaning  about?' 

The  innkeeper  collected  herself. 

'The  warning,  Master  Jew  —  I  for- 
got to  tell  you  the  warning.  It  was  so 
long  ago  —  my  sister's  first  child  is 
himself  a  father  now.  I  forgot  about 
the  warning,  and  you  went  away  and  I 
saw  you  no  more  until  now.' 

Yankel  set  his  teeth  and  waited  for 
her  to  work  round  to  the  point. 

'The  Rebbe  said  that  if  it  was  twins, 
one  of  them  would  die,'  the  woman 
said,  chanting  the  words  like  a  text  of 
Scripture;  'if  it  was  a  boy,  all  would 
go  well;  if  it  was  a  girl,  the  mother 
might  not  live  to  nurse  her.' 

Yankel  turned  white  under  his  beard. 

'Lord  of  all!'  he  cried;  'I  gave  it  to 
my  Sorke  to  wear.' 

At  sight  of  his  terror,  the  woman 
turned  comforter. 

'You  must  have  faith,  Master  Jew,' 
she  said.  'What!  have  you  no  faith  at 
all?  It  may  be  a  boy,  and  then  all  will 
be  well.  My  sister  —  may  she  rest  in 


THE  AMULET 


peace!  —  was  not  afraid  to  put  it  on, 
because  she  trusted  in  God/ 

'Did  she  know?' 

'Sure  she  did.  Am  I  not  telling  you 
that  the  Rebbe  gave  her  this  warning 
with  the  amulet?  She  trusted  in  God, 
and  He  rewarded  her.  A  boy  she  had 
—  may  all  Jewish  mothers  have  the 
like.  Everything  is  in  God's  hands.' 

But  Yankel  could  not  shake  off  the 
horror  that  had  seized  him.  '  If  it  is  a 
girl,  the  mother  may  not  live  to  nurse 
her.'  The  words  repeated  themselves 
in  his  ear.  He  climbed  back  into  the 
wagon  and  ordered  his  man  to  drive 
to  the  railroad  station  as  fast  as  he 
could.  There  was  a  train  in  an  hour. 
He  could  be  in  Polotzk  before  midnight. 
He  could  see  Sorke  —  he  could  assure 
himself  that  she  was  as  well  as  when 
he  had  left  her. 

The  innkeeper  stood  in  the  road  and 
watched  him  drive  off. 

'Don't  blame  me,  Master  Jew,'  she 
called  after  him.  '  I ' ve  sat  by  the  win- 
dow every  day  watching  for  you.  And 
you  must  trust  in  God.  It  will  be  a 
boy  —  a  boy  —  a  boy! ' 

Twenty  rods  or  so  below  the  inn, 
a  wild  creature  broke  through  the 
thicket  by  the  roadside  and  ran  grin- 
ning and  gibbering  across  the  road, 
right  under  the  horse's  nose.  It  was 
the  idiot  who  had  worn  the  amulet  be- 
fore Sorke.  Yankel  shuddered  and 
ordered  his  man  to  drive  faster.  The 
country  was  peopled  with  hobgoblins. 
On  every  side  he  saw  evil  omens. 

IV 

He  did  not  tell  Sorke  of  his  visit  to 
the  inn.  He  kept  his  fears  to  himself, 
and  his  heart  grew  heavier  as  the  days 
went  by.  He  redoubled  his  attentions 
to  his  wife,  —  watched  over  her  by  day, 
and  prayed  over  her  by  night.  In  his 
inexperience,  he  saw  signs  of  approach- 
ing doom  in  her  growing  inactivity 


and  lassitude,  which  were,  indeed,  due 
chiefly  to  the  fact  that  his  attentions 
left  her  no  opportunity  for  exertion. 
She  smiled  at  him  from  her  easy  chair, 
chattered  gaily  of  neighborhood  events, 
or  fell  into  sweet  abstraction,  her  hands 
serenely  folded  in  her  lap. 

One  evening,  as  she  sat  on  the  edge 
of  her  bed  plaiting  her  soft  black  hair 
for  the  night,  she  watched  him  arrange 
her  pillows  as  solicitously  as  a  nurse 
might  have  done. 

'Yankel,'  she  said,  suddenly,  'what 
would  you  do  if  you  woke  up  some 
morning  and  did  n't  find  me  here? 
You  spend  all  your  time  taking  care 
of  me.  What  would  you  do  without 
me?' 

He  turned  pale  at  her  playful  words. 
His  voice  was  hoarse  when  he  spoke. 

'Sorele,  don't  talk  like  that!  Why 
do  you  have  such  fancies?  I  shall  al- 
ways have  you  —  God  grant  it.  I 
could  n't  live  without  you,  Sorele;  it's 
a  sin  to  say  so,  but  I  could  n't.'  He 
sat  down  beside  her  and  took  her  hand. 
'My  wife,  you  are  dearer  to  me  than 
anything  else  I  have,  or  anything  I 
ever  could  have/ 

Sorke  was  somewhat  awed  by  his 
earnestness,  but  her  playfulness  was 
not  all  spent. 

'You've  forgotten  something  you're 
going  to  have,'  she  said,  archly,  blush- 
ing slightly  at  her  thoughts.  'You 
would  n't  give  that  for  other  things  — 
not  even  for  me,  perhaps.' 

'Sorele,  you  are  more  to  me  than 
the  child  I  hope  to  have.' 

She  gazed  at  him  with  a  sort  of  rev- 
erent wonder,  then  she  sighed. 

'I  don't  know  why  God  is  so  good 
to  me.  I  feel  as  if  something  must 
happen  to  us;  we  are  too  happy.' 

Once  more  superstitious  terror 
clutched  at  Yankel's  heart.  He  had 
asked  too  much  of  God;  he  might  be 
called  upon  to  part  with  a  portion  of 
his  riches,  that  he  might  learn  humil- 


40 


THE  AMULET 


ity.  He  had  had  more  to  be  thankful 
for  than  most  men :  a  happy  boyhood, 
with  loving  parents  and  good  teachers; 
a  prosperous  manhood,  and  a  digni- 
fied place  in  the  community.  Twice  a 
pious,  well-dowered  maid  was  given 
him  to  wife.  Why  was  he  not  content? 
Why  had  he  asked  for  what  God  chose 
to  withhold?  In  his  love  for  Sorke  it 
had  been  given  him  to  taste  of  a  bliss 
he  had  never  dreamed  of  —  whose  ex- 
istence in  the  world  he  had  not  even 
suspected.  It  was  as  if  for  him  alone, 
of  all  the  men  he  knew,  this  exquisite 
essence  of  happiness  had  been  distilled 
out  of  the  common  elements  of  life. 
And  he  had  asked  for  more!  He  had 
gone  meddling  with  charms  for  the 
purpose  of  thwarting  God's  will.  What 
if  the  Almighty,  in  his  divine  displeas- 
ure, should  chastise  him  through  the 
thing  he  valued  most  of  all? 

'Sorele,  Sorele!'  pleaded  Yankel, 
pressing  her  hands  to  his  heart,  *  I  beg 
of  you  not  to  say  these  things  —  do  not 
think  them  even.  Pray  with  me  that 
God  will  spare  you,  no  matter  what 
else  He  takes  from  me.  You  would  be 
happy  with  me,  would  n't  you,  even  if 
there  were  no  child?' 

*  Why,  yes,  Yankel,  I  think  I  would. 
Once  I  used  to  be  very  lonely  —  I 
wanted  children,  like  other  women  — 
but  after  —  lately  —  Oh,  but  we'll  al- 
ways be  happy!  All  of  us:  you  and  I 
and  the  baby!' 


The  neighborhood  was  apprised 
that  Sorke's  hour  had  come,  when, 
early  one  morning  in  the  autumn,  Yan- 
kel was  seen  dashing  out  of  his  gate- 
way in  a  state  of  dishevelment,  mak- 
ing straight  for  the  quarter  where  Itke, 
the  midwife,  lived.  Half  an  hour  later 
he  was  seen  returning,  this  time  in  a 
droshka,  standing  up  all  the  way,  urg- 
ing the  isvostchik  to  drive  faster.  The 


familiar  face  of  the  midwife  bobbed  in 
the  seat  behind  him. 

The  news  was  flashed  from  house 
to  house.  The  women  neglected  their 
morning  tasks,  and  found  excuses  to 
go  visiting  from  one  end  of  the  street 
to  the  other,  exchanging  opinions  and 
prophecies  as  to  Sorke 's  chances. 

*  It's  a  little  soon,'  it  was  said  in  one 
circle.  *  Sorke  hadn't  reckoned  to  be 
delivered  for  another  week  or  so.' 

'  It  was  a  sudden  call,  as  I  live,'  said 
Shimke  of  the  watchful  eye.  *  Yankel 
ran  out  with  his  sleeves  rolled  up  and 
soapsuds  in  his  beard,  —  did  n't  have 
time  to  finish  washing,  —  and  he  was 
pale  as  a  cloth.  And  did  you  see  the 
droshka  flinging  around  the  corner? 
Yankel  must  have  tipped  the  driver 
well.  Bobe  Itke  was  so  shaken  that 
she  could  n't  finish  buttoning  her  bod- 
ice. I  guess  Yankel  pulled  her  out  of 
bed.  God  be  with  her  in  her  need!' 
Shimke  finished,  piously  though  am- 
biguously. 

'God  be  with  her!'  echoed  the  gos- 
sips; and  one  or  two  applied  a  corner 
of  their  kerchiefs  to  their  eyes. 

Before  noon  there  was  every  sign 
that  Sorke's  case  was  going  badly. 
Anusha,  the  little  maid,  was  seen  run- 
ning on  many  errands,  and  to  shouted 
inquiries  she  answered  only  'Bog  zna- 
yetr  (God  knows!)  It  was  observed 
that  certain  vessels,  seldom  needed  by 
the  sprightly  mothers  of  Polotzk,  were 
borrowed  from  a  distant  quarter.  And 
then,  most  ominous  of  all  signs,  the 
well-known  carriage  of  Dr.  Isserson, 
the  best  physician  in  Polotzk,  drew 
up  before  Yankel 's  gate,  and  remained 
there  for  hours.  Itke,  the  experienced 
midwife,  who  had  ushered  two  genera- 
tions of  babies  into  Polotzk,  despised 
the  doctors  with  their  fussy,  elaborate 
ways,  and  never  called  them  in  except 
in  desperate  cases.  No  wonder  that 
pious  old  Zelde,  who  commanded  a 
view  of  the  street  from  her  little  win- 


THE  AMULET 


41 


dow,  noticing  the  arrival  of  Dr.  Isser- 
son,  dropped  her  knitting,  snatched 
up  her  shawl,  and  hobbled  off  to  the 
synagogue  to  pray. 

To  the  synagogue  repaired  also  Yan- 
kel,  driven  thither  by  Itke,  who  scold- 
ed him  for  being  in  the  way.  It  was 
bad  enough  to  have  one  man  around, 
she  complained,  with  an  unfriendly 
look  at  the  doctor's  back;  men  were  no 
good  except  to  pray. 

And  Yankel  prayed,  and  collected 
ten  men  to  recite  the  Psalms  with  him, 
and  people  passing  outside  the  syna- 
gogue heard  his  voice  above  the  rest; 
and  the  wailing,  pleading  tones  of  it 
melted  every  Jewish  heart. 

One  by  one  the  men  he  had  sum- 
moned left  the  synagogue  and  returned 
to  their  vulgar  affairs,  but  Yankel  did 
not  notice  their  going.  Wrapped  in  his 
praying  shawl,  he  leaned  his  arms  on  a 
lectern  by  the  window  and  let  his  soul 
float  away  from  him.  He  was  a  fair 
scholar,  but  never  before  had  he  open- 
ed a  sacred  book  with  such  overmas- 
tering longing  to  understand.  He 
longed  to  lose  his  fears,  to  give  up  his 
will.  He  cried  to  the  God  of  Israel,  not 
to  secure  to  him  that  which  he  prized, 
but  to  fill  him  with  the  faith  that 
would  make  his  portion  acceptable  to 
him. 

*  Cast  thy  burden  upon  the  Lord,  and 
He  shall  sustain  thee? 

YankeFs  voice  gathered  volume  as 
he  chanted,  till  the  Hebrew  syllables 
echoed  in  every  corner  of  the  empty 


synagogue.  The  long  shadows  trooped 
in,  obscuring  the  polished  benches,  the 
carved  pulpit  in  the  centre,  the  faint 
frescoes  on  the  wall.  A  last  sunbeam 
slanted  down  from  a  little  window  in 
the  women's  gallery,  drew  a  prismatic 
flash  from  the  crystal  chandelier, 
glinted  on  the  golden  fringe  of  the  cur- 
tains before  the  ark,  and  expired  in  the 
smothering  shadows. 

'  /  will  abide  in  Thy  tabernacle  for- 
ever;  I  will  trust  in  the  covert  of  Thy 
wings.9 

Yankel's  voice  had  lost  the  tremor 
of  passion.  His  brow  was  smooth  un- 
der the  shadow  of  the  praying  shawl. 
He  closed  his  eyes  and  was  silent,  only 
his  body  swayed  gently  with  the  mel- 
ody of  the  psalm. 

The  printed  page  was  blurred  when 
he  came  to  himself  with  a  shock,  to  find 
a  small  boy  plucking  him  by  the  arm. 

*  Reb'  Yankel,  there 's  a  Gentile  girl 
outside  wants  to  speak  to  you.' 

Through  the  gloom  of  the  empty 
synagogue  he  took  six  long  strides  to 
the  door.  Across  the  yard  he  flew,  the 
praying  shawl  swelling  like  a  sail 
around  him,  his  boots  clicking  on  the 
paving  stones.  A  small  figure  was 
standing  in  the  street,  barefoot,  silent, 
gray  as  the  dusk.  It  was  Sorke's  lit- 
tle maid,  and  her  kerchief  was  pulled 
far  over  her  face. 

'Anusha!' 

Terror  and  pleading  were  in  his 
voice. 

*  Master,  O  master!  it's  a  little  boy, 
and  the  mistress  will  be  well.' 


A  PLEA  FOR  THE  RECOGNITION  OF  THE  CHINESE 

REPUBLIC 

BY   CHING   CHUN   WANG 


THE  Chinese  millions  have  given  the 
world  the  greatest  revolution  of  mod- 
ern times  in  the  most  civilized  manner 
known  to  history.  We  have  emanci- 
pated ourselves  from  the  imperial  yoke, 
not  by  brute  force,  but  by  sheer  reason- 
ing and  unparalleled  toleration.  With- 
in the  amazingly  short  period  of  four 
months,  and  without  shedding  over 
one  hundredth  part  of  the  blood  that 
has  been  shed  in  other  similar  revolu- 
tions, we  have  transformed  our  im- 
mense country  from  an  empire  of  four 
thousand  years'  standing  into  a  modern 
democracy.  After  having  set  this  new 
standard  of  sanity  in  revolutions,  we 
have  organized  ourselves  into  the  new- 
est Republic,  following  up-to-date  pat- 
terns. Now  we  come  forward  with 
hands  and  hearts  open  to  join  the  sis- 
terhood of  nations,  and  all  we  ask  is 
that  the  world  will  permit  us  to  join  its 
company.  We  are  born  into  the  world 
as  a  nation,  and  we  wish  to  be  register- 
ed as  a  part  of  the  world.  We  ask  for 
recognition  of  our  Republic  because  it 
is  an  accomplished  fact.  Neither  our 
modesty  nor  our  sense  of  self-respect 
will  ever  allow  us  to  make  another  re- 
quest if  any  party  can  show  us  that 
the  Chinese  Republic  is  not  a  fact. 

The  recognition  of  a  new  nation  by 
the  family  of  nations  should  more  or 
less  resemble  the  announcement  or 
registration  of  a  newly  born  child.  If 
the  baby  is  actually  born  with  the 
functions  of  a  human  being,  it  is  the 
duty  of  the  family  and  the  court,  if 

42 


that  court  is  worth  having,  to  acknow- 
ledge the  fact.  So  it  should  be  with  the 
recognition  of  a  new  government. 

If  it  is  born  and  bona  fide  in  exist- 
ence, it  is  incumbent  upon  the  civilized 
nations  to  acknowledge  and  admit  its 
birth.  Of  course,  the  family  of  nations, 
as  the  family  of  some  barbarous  tribes, 
can  ignore  or  even  nullify  the  birth  of 
a  newly  born;  but  I  feel  that  we  have 
got  beyond  that  stage  of'  barbarity. 
The  law  of  nations,  as  in  the  case  of  the 
law  of  the  state,  has  reached  or  should 
reach  such  a  state  of  perfection  that  a 
being  should  not  only  have  the  right 
to  exist  after  it  is  born,  but  also  the 
right  to  be  born  when  it  is  bona  fide 
conceived.  We  are  thankful  that  the 
United  States  has  taken  the  initiative 
from  the  beginning  of  our  Revolution  in 
preventing  foreign  powers  from  inter- 
fering, thus  enabling  us  to  be  properly 
conceived  and  born;  but  since  we  are 
born  we  must  now  ask  for  recognition. 

Of  course  there  are  certain  usages 
to  be  fulfilled  in  order  to  be  recog- 
nized. But  China  has  fulfilled  these 
requirements  long  ago.  So  many  un- 
deniable evidences  exist,  and  so  many 
indisputable  arguments  have  already 
been  produced,  in  respect  to  interna- 
tional law,  that  it  will  be  time  wasted 
to  emphasize  this  point  here.  Suffice 
it  to  say,  that  facts  and  the  concur- 
rence of  best  opinion  testify  that 
China  deserves  recognition.  Indeed, 
the  Chinese  people,  as  well  as  many 
others,  would  be  most  happy  to  know 


A  PLEA  FOR  RECOGNITION  OF  THE  CHINESE  REPUBLIC      43 


in  what  respect  China  has  not  fulfilled 
the  requirements  to  deserve  recogni- 
tion. The  only  reason  we  have  heard  up 
to  this  time  is  that  given  by  England 
and  Russia,  namely,  that  China  must 
make  a  new  treaty  to  give  practical 
independence  to  Tibet  and  Mongolia 
before  she  can  expect  recognition  from 
these  two  countries.  Now  let  us  ask, 
how  could  the  making  of  a  new  treaty, 
or  the  granting  of  independence  to 
Tibet  and  Mongolia,  better  qualify 
China  as  a  nation?  It  seems  a  pity 
that  such  a  retrogressive  step  should 
be  taken,  and  that  the  recognition  of 
a  new  government  should  be  made  an 
excuse  for  fraudulent  bargaining. 

China  to-day  is  a  nation,  and  the 
Chinese  Republic  is  a  fact.  If  any  na- 
tion or  individual  thinks  that  China 
is  not  a  nation  and  the  Chinese  Repub- 
lic is  not  a  fact,  it  is  their  duty  to  give 
us  the  evidence.  Or,  if  they  do  not 
think  that  the  republican  form  of 
government  is  good  enough  for  recog- 
nition, then  they  must  point  out  that 
they  have  something  better  in  mind. 
As  one  of  the  most  potent  factors  to 
prevent  a  nation  from  recognizing  a 
new  government  is  the  fear  of  offend- 
ing, or  the  desire  to  help,  t)|e  old  gov- 
ernment, prolonged  delay  of  recogni- 
tion of  the  Chinese  Republic  may  mean 
that  the  Powers  hope,  or  fear,  that  the 
dissolved  Manchu  Dynasty,  with  all  its 
corruption,  will  reappear.  But  we 
must  see  that  there  is  no  more  dynas- 
ty left.  Even  the  Prince  Regent  and 
the  Dowager  Empress  have  forsaken 
it.  The  Emperor  himself  has  retired 
into  private  life  with  satisfaction.  In 
short,  the  monarchy  is  dead  —  abso- 
lutely dead.  Then  they  may  say  that 
the  dead  may  be  raised  from  the  grave, 
as  in  the  story  of  Jesus  of  old;  but 
they  must  also  remember  that  those 
who  were  raised  by  Jesus  were  good, 
and  not  such  obnoxious  and  decom- 
posed bones  as  the  Manchu  Dynasty. 


Another  reason  given  in  some  quar- 
ters for  withholding  recognition  of  the 
Chinese  Republic,  is  that  the  govern- 
ment of  the  Republic  is  called  '  provi- 
sional.' It  is  really  amusing  to  see  how 
people,  or  even  statesmen,  sometimes 
balk  at  some  single  word,  which  has  lit- 
tle or  no  substantial  meaning,  sacrific- 
ing thereby  results  of  universal  benefit. 
The  word  *  provisional '  was  adopted  in 
Nanking  really  without  much  consid- 
eration. If  anything,  it  was  due  to  the 
modesty  of  our  leaders,  who  thought 
that,  during  the  period  of  transition 
from  imperialism  to  democracy,  to  call 
the  government '  provisional '  might  be 
more  becoming,  if  not  more  expedient. 
To  illustrate  further  that  the  word  *  pro- 
visional 'has  no  substantial  significance, 
we  may  recall  that,  during  this  current 
year,  this  word  has  become  so  popular 
that  it  is  indiscriminately  prefixed  to 
pretty  nearly  everything.  Thus,  people 
say  '  provisional '  theatre,  '  provisional ' 
restaurant,  and  even  *  provisional '  en- 
joyment. What  should  be  considered 
is  the  fact,  and  not  the  name.  A  gov- 
ernment, although  called '  provisional/ 
may  be  fully  deserving  of  recognition, 
while  another  government  may  be  call- 
ed substantial,  solid,  or  whatever  else 
you  like,  and  yet  far  less  deserve  the 
characterization.  It  certainly  seems 
rather  unfortunate  that  on  account  of 
the  modesty  of  our  leaders  in  adopting 
the  word  'provisional'  the  deserved 
recognition  should  be  withheld. 

As  a  Chicago  paper  said,  'For  near- 
ly nine  months  the  republican  govern- 
ment of  China  has  been  uncontested. 
There  is  not  even  a  "pretender"  to 
the  throne.  There  is  peace  and  order, 
broadly  speaking,  throughout  China.' 
We  ask  for  recognition,  because  the 
other  nations  have  hammered  at 
our  doors  and  constantly  come  in 
contact  with  us.  We  would  not  ob- 
ject to  going  on  without  recognition 
if  the  other  Powers  really  wish  to 


44     A  PLEA  FOR  RECOGNITION  OF  THE  CHINESE  REPUBLIC 


sever  all  relations  with  us.  In  so  far 
as  our  diplomatic  and  consular  officers 
in  foreign  countries,  as  well  as  those 
officers  of  foreign  nations  accredited  to 
us,  are  now  conducting  our  interna- 
tional affairs  much  the  same  as  before, 
and  also  in  so  far  as  the  nations  have  to 
transact  business,  and  are  doing  it  now 
with  us,  just  as  if  we  were  recognized, 
we  see  no  reason  why  the  Powers,  espe- 
cially the  United  States,  which  often 
boasts  of  being  the  mother  and  cham- 
pion of  republicanism,  should  refrain 
from  simply  declaring  and  acknow- 
ledging what  is  a  fact.  Indeed,  after 
having  known  how  these  Powers  en- 
deavored to  induce  us  to  admit  them, 
and  how  eager  they  apparently  were 
in  forcing  China  to  open  her  doors,  we 
find  it  hard  to  understand  why  the 
same  Powers  should  remain  so  indiffer- 
ent, and  even  turn  a  deaf  ear  to  our  plea 
to  join  their  company,  when  we  have 
at  last  broken  loose  from  the  obstacles 
which  they  hated,  and  opened  up  not 
only  our  doors  but  our  hearts  as  well. 

Moreover,  an  early  recognition  will 
help  us  a  good  deal  to  calm  the  over- 
charged suspension  of  mind,  and  thus 
enable  the  people  to  forget  the  Revo- 
lution and  to  settle  down  to  business. 
Like  the  cheering  from  the  football 
bleachers  or  the  applause  in  the  gallery, 
there  is  perhaps  nothing  substantial  in 
the  recognition,  but  it  is  the  only  thing 
that  makes  a  team  put  in  its  last  ounce 
of  grit  and  the  actor  double  his  spirit. 
After  seeing  what  China  has  done,  we 
feel  that  she  deserves  at  least  some 
such  mild  sign  of  appreciation. 

An  early  recognition  will  also  help 
China  in  her  relations  with  other  na- 
tions. The  recognition  itself  may  not 
mean  much,  but  at  this  critical  mo- 
ment, when  China  has  the  re-making 
of  herself  in  hand,  and  when  not  every 
nation  is  too  glad  to  see  China  become 
strong  and  peaceful,  every  little  help 
means  a  good  deal.  Indeed,  a  little 


help  shown  us  to-day  means  a  thou- 
sand times  the  value  of  the  same  help 
if  it  is  shown  us  in  a  year  to  come. 
We  need  help  and  encouragement.  We 
need  help  now. 

Then  the  delay  of  public  recogni- 
tion always  casts  a  baleful  influence 
upon  the  minds  of  all  concerned,  and 
hence  invariably  hinders  the  progress 
of  a  new  nation.  Therefore,  by  delay- 
ing recognition,  you  are  not  only  re- 
fraining from  helping  us,  but  you  are 
doing  a  positive  injury  to  our  cause. 
History  tells  us  that  the  refusal  of  re- 
cognition has  contributed  its  share  in 
bringing  about  the  failure  of  former 
revolutions,  and  has  obstructed  pro- 
gress in  China  herself.  Such  delay  has 
since  been  lamented.  In  speaking  of 
the  refusal  of  the  Powers  to  recognize 
the  Tai-ping  Rebellion,  which  bears  no 
comparison  to  our  Revolution  of  last 
year,  Dr.  W.  A.  P.  Martin,  one  of  the 
best  American  authorities  on  China, 
said  several  years  ago,  *  Looking  back 
at  this  distance  of  time,  with  the 
light  of  all  subsequent  history  upon 
the  events,  we  are  still  inclined  to  ask 
whether  a  different  policy  might  not 
have  been  better.  .  .  .  Had  the  foreign 
Powers  promptly  recognized  the  Tai- 
ping  chief  on  the  outbreak  of  the  sec- 
ond war,  might  it  not  have  shortened 
a  chapter  of  horrors  that  dragged  on 
for  fifteen  more  years,  ending  in  many 
other  revolts  and  causing  the  loss  of 
fifty  millions  of  human  lives.  . .  .  More 
than  once,  when  the  insurgents  were 
on  the  verge  of  success,  the  prejudice 
of  short-sighted  diplomats  decided 
against  them,  and  an  opportunity  was 
lost  such  as  does  not  occur  once  in  a 
thousand  years.' 

We  hope  that  the  nations  are  not 
so  prejudiced  as  to  think  that  our 
Revolution  is  even  worse  than  the 
Tai-ping  Rebellion,  and  we  also  hope 
that  the  regrettable  short-sightedness 
of  the  diplomats  may  not  obtain  in  our 


O  SLEEP 


case,  so  that  posterity  may  not  have  to 
lament  our  loss  of  the  present  oppor- 
tunity, as  we  lament  the  lost  opportun- 
ity of  our  forefathers  of  sixty  years  ago. 
Then  again,  to  give  the  deserved 
recognition  will  be  of  mutual  benefit 
by  preventing  many  mutual  embar- 
rassments. The  recent  International 
Congress  of  Commerce  at  Boston,  and 
the  Panama  Exposition,  are  two  in- 
stances. In  both  cases  the  American 
people  interested,  and,  so  far  as  we  can 
see,  the  American  government  also, 
were  anxious  to  have  China  partici- 
pate. In  return,  China  was  glad  also 
to  come.  But  in  the  absence  of  that 
official  recognition,  both  parties  had  to 
go  at  the  matter  in  the  most  round- 
about way  conceivable,  so  as  to  make 
people  believe  that  the  one  in  inviting 
the  other,  and  the  other  in  accepting 
the  invitation,  were,  at  the  same  time, 
having  nothing  to  do  with  each  other. 


The  round-about  red-tape  in  playing 
this  make-believe  is  as  amusing  as  it  is 
troublesome.  Therefore,  as  a  citizen  of 
a  republic,  the  writer  feels  we  had  bet- 
ter stop  this  make-believe  and  settle 
down  to  business.  We  sympathize  with 
all  nations  concerned  in  their  interna- 
tional difficulties,  but  we  also  trust  that 
their  difficulties  will  soon  be  overcome. 
During  the  past  seven  months  China 
has  rushed  through  her  great  drama 
with  appalling  speed  and  audacity. 
She  has  run  the  hardest  Marathon 
known  in  history.  After  reaching  her 
goal,  breathless,  she  nervously  but 
confidently  looks  to  the  world  for  the 
recognition  due  to  every  such  runner. 
She  stretches  out  her  hands  to  America 
first,  because  she  prefers  to  have  her 
best  friend  be  the  first  in  giving  her 
this  deserved  encouragement.  Now, 
will  America  understand  the  truth? 
Will  America  listen  to  her  plea? 


O  SLEEP 


BY   GRACE   FALLOW  NORTON 


TAKE  me  upon  thy  breast, 

O  river  of  rest. 
Draw  me  down  to  thy  side, 

Slow-moving  tide. 
Carry  out  beyond  reacn 

Of  song  or  of  speech 
This  body  and  soul  forespent. 

To  thy  still  continent, 
Where  silence  hath  his  home, 

Where  I  would  come, 
Bear  me  now  in  thy  deep 

Bosom,  Sleep, 
O  Sleep. 


LAWYER  AND  PHYSICIAN  :  A  CONTRAST 


BY  G.  M.    STRATTON 


EVERY  lawyer  when  young  should  be 
apprenticed  to  some  good  physician, 
and  should  return  to  him  regularly 
through  life.  Then  we  might  hope  that 
from  the  neighboring  profession  of  heal- 
ing there  might  enter  into  him  a  spirit 
never  to  be  wholly  quenched  by  all  the 
deadening  influences  of  his  work. 

No  fact  could  well  be  more  surpris- 
ing or  offer  a  more  delicate  psycholog- 
ical problem  than  this,  that,  within 
two  professions  touching  life  upon  mat- 
ters of  equal  importance,  professions  of 
ancient  dignity  and  learning,  and  in- 
viting to  their  service  men  of  equal  and 
rare  ability,  there  should  in  the  same 
community  be  so  different  a  spirit. 

Medicine  stands  in  this  strange  con- 
trast to  law,  that  while  the  public  is 
clamoring  for  the  lawyers  to  advance, 
the  lawyers  themselves  as  a  class  offer 
the  chief  resistance;  the  medical  profes-- 
sion  constantly  outstrips  and  leads  the 
public  imagination  in  devices  to  check 
disease.  Although  much  at  the  start  was 
due  to  laymen,  the  campaign  against 
tuberculosis,  against  infant  mortality, 
against  malarial  and  typhoid  fevers,  is 
largely  captained  and  manned  by  doc- 
tors, who  have  the  hearty  support  of 
the  profession  as  a  whole.  The  public 
does  not  have  to  drive  and  drag  them 
from  their  satisfaction  with  methods 
which  even  to  the  laity  are  clearly  an- 
tiquated and  perverse.  The  doctors, 
unlike  the  lawyers,  have  rather  to  con- 
tend with  public  efforts  to  hold  them 
back.  Powerful  lobbies  and  mass- 
46 


meetings  have  been  known  to  oppose 
the  doctors'  most  reasonable  efforts  to 
refuse  the  license  to  the  vicious  and  un- 
trained. And  many  a  powerful  news- 
paper, despite  well-known  medical 
ethics,  publishes  advertisements  upon 
whose  face  are  all  the  signs  of  a  debas- 
ing and  often  criminal  quackery.  Yet 
the  impulse  of  the  profession,  as  a 
whole,  is  sufficiently  strong  to  insure  a 
remarkable  progress  in  the  face,  not 
only  of  its  own  inner  enemies,  but  of  this 
indifference  and  opposition  from  with- 
out. Of  two  Rip  Van  Winkles  awaken- 
ing to-day,  the  physician  would  find 
his  old  methods  as  rust-eaten  and  use- 
less as  his  instruments;  the  lawyer, 
after  a  few  hours  with  new  statutes, 
would  feel  at  home  in  any  of  our 
courts. 

In  comparing  the  lawyers  with  the 
physicians  one  should  not  lose  sight  of 
the  vices  in  medicine,  —  its  tendency 
to  sects,  its  quackery,  its  blunders  in 
diagnosis  and  in  treatment,  the  readi- 
ness of  some  physicians  to  become 
accessory  to  forms  of  sexual  evil,  its 
disgracefully  inadequate  'colleges'  in 
many  parts  of  our  country.  Nor  should 
we  lose  sight  of  the  prevalent  personal 
honor  of  lawyers,  —  which  is  fully  as 
great,  in  all  likelihood,  as  that  of  phys- 
icians, —  and  the  inestimable  service 
rendered  the  public,  not  only  in  the 
lawyers'  direct  professional  work,  but 
also  when,  as  individuals,  they  labor 
outside  the  strict  lines  of  their  profes- 
sion. As  legislators  and  high  executive 
officials,  federal  and  state,  the  lawyers 
almost  alone  govern  us,  and  we  pros- 


LAWYER  AND  PHYSICIAN:  A  CONTRAST 


47 


per.  To  men  of  the  type  of  Baldwin, 
Root,  Hughes,  and  Taft,  our  society  is 
in  deepest  debt.  Yet  the  lawyers  as  a 
body,  in  the  strict  work  of  their  profes- 
sion, —  and  it  is  of  the  pervading  spirit 
only  that  I  speak,  —  face  opposite  to 
the  men  of  medicine.  As  judges,  coun- 
sel, advocates,  they  are  of  the  back- 
ward look.  Their  inertia  here  becomes 
almost  our  despair. 

The  parallel  in  medicine  to  the  legal 
spirit  lies  in  the  distant  past  before 
that  movement  which,  led  by  men  like 
Harvey,  Sydenham,  and  Locke,  called 
modern  medicine  into  life;  at  a  time 
when  the  medical  profession  had  fin- 
ality of  tone,  looking  back  to  Galen  as 
to  the  completion  of  its  work.  In  the 
ways  of  the  lawyer  one  fancies  one 
sees  the  Middle  Ages  present  in  the 
flesh.  In  Europe  the  past  is  most  evi- 
dent in  the  Church  and  the  office  of 
the  Ruler.  With  us,  these  seem  swept 
and  garnished,  while  in  our  courts 
is  ancient  dust  and  formalism.  One 
finds  here  —  not  in  some  hole  and  cor- 
ner of  the  profession,  but  in  its  high 
and  open  places  —  a  willingness  to  look 
at  words  rather  than  at  substance. 
It  may  be  the  exception,  but  it  is 
no  rare  exception,  here  to  have  great 
issues  hang  upon  a  turn  of  phrasing, 
where  the  meaning  admits  no  doubt. 

A,  who  has  proved  that  B  has  defraud- 
ed him  of  money,  is  nevertheless  re- 
fused redress  because  a  supreme  court 
is  not  sure  but  that  'his  money/  of 
which  A  complains  that  he  has  been 
defrauded,  may  mean  the  money  of 

B.  An  action  for  murder  comes  to 
naught  because  the  complaint  fails  to 
state  that  John  Smith  slain  was  a  hu- 
man being.1 

Such  solemn  examining  of  p's  to 
see  whether  one  of-  them  may  not  be 
written  q ;  of  every  i  lest  one  may  lack 

1  This  is  taken  from  an  actual  judgment,  not 
very  long  ago,  by  the  California  Supreme  Court. 
See  137  California,  590.  —  THE  ATJTHQII. 


its  dot,  —  all  this  seems  to  the  lay- 
man little  better  than  deciding  affairs 
of  state  by  the  look  of  entrails  or  by 
the  behavior  within  the  sacred  hen- 
coop. The  Court  of  Appeals  of  New 
York  nullifying  legislative  acts  di- 
rected to  the  relief  of  workingmen,  — 
nullifying  them  because,  it  was  held, 
they  violated  the  constitutional  guar- 
antee regarding  *  due  process  of  law,'  — 
reveals  a  power  to  think  across  empty 
spaces,  which  would  have  been  hailed 
as  modern  and  envied  in  those  mediae- 
val schools  where  stout  realities  were 
affirmed  or  denied  because  of  their  sup- 
posed relation  to  distant  ideas  like 
*  quiddities'  and  'intentions.' 

Formalism  thus  run  mad  would  be 
an  anomaly  in  any  part  of  our  modern 
Occident.  It  is  trebly  strange  in  the 
most  western  of  all  peoples,  in  a  nation 
careless  of  method,  having  an  eye  to 
results.  Our  medical  profession  would 
rush  the  cup  of  cold  water  to  the  suf- 
ferer by  help  of  telephone  and  taxi- 
cab.  Our  legal  profession  would  get 
it  to  him  in  the  right  way  if  it  takes 
all  summer.  The  difference  in  the 
temper  of  the  two  bodies  is  at  once 
so  strange  and  so  important  practi- 
cally, that  we  must  no  longer  delay  our 
search  for  its  source  and  origin. 


ii 

There  is  a  kinship,  which  few  can 
have  failed  to  notice,  between  the 
Lawyer  and  the  Priest.  While  the 
priest  has  at  times  been  physician,  — 
as  with  the  Egyptian,  the  Hindu,  and 
the  mediaeval  European,  as  well  as 
with  the  savage,  —  yet  the  connection 
is  more  intimate  and  stubborn  between 
jurist  and  ecclesiastic.  Civil  and  canon 
law,  closely  joined  at  one  time  in  Eu- 
rope, have  often  been  quite  confused, 
as  in  ancient  Palestine.  At  the  dinner 
where  Jesus  denounced  the  Pharisees 
because  they  tithed  mint  and  cummin 


48 


LAWYER  AND  PHYSICIAN:  A  CONTRAST 


and  forgot  judgment  and  the  love 
of  God,  a  lawyer  present  declared, 
amazed,  that  this  attack  on  the  Phari- 
sees touched  his,  the  great  legal  profes- 
sion. Jesus  accepted  his  challenge,  in 
stinging  words  that  some  of  the  laity 
to-day  would  like  to  see  carved  on 
buildings  where  lawyers  congregate: 
*  Woe  unto  you  lawyers  also !  for  ye  lade 
men  with  burdens  grievous  to  be  borne, 
and  ye  yourselves  touch  not  the  bur- 
dens with  one  of  your  fingers.'  And 
then  he  described  legal  and  ecclesias- 
tical conservatism  so  that  none  need 
think  it  peculiar  to  any  land  or  age. 
The  lawyers,  Jesus  said,  were  always 
ready  to  stone  the  prophet,  stone  him 
who  proclaimed  the  dawn  of  a  new  day; 
but  when  ancient  dust  had  claimed  the 
man,  the  profession  would  erect  to  him 
a  costly  monument;  the  lawyers  had  no 
intercourse  with  living  truth,  they  kept 
from  men  the  key  of  knowledge. 

The  lawyer  knows  that  statutes 
change,  that  the  law  is  something  which 
legislatures  can  amend;  yet  the  body  of 
the  law  stands  there  immovable,  in 
part- —  where,  as  with  us,  the  Common 
Law  prevails  —  a  mere  mass  of  preced- 
ent which  he  is  to  accept,  expound, 
and  apply.  The  professional  mind  in 
the  presence  of  such  a  task  works  not 
unlike  that  of  the  priest  who  would  ap- 
ply and  expound  and  defend  against 
misconstruction  a  body  of  revealed 
truth.  And  especially  is  the  mind  in 
the  two  professions  tempted  to  a  like 
observance  of  all  minutiae  of  procedure. 
As  the  ritualist  resents  innovation  in 
his  ceremonial,  resents  the  estimate  of 
his  rites  by  mere  reason  and  utility,  so 
the  lawyer  shows  toward  his  legal  rites 
an  attachment  which  brings  wonder 
and  solemnity  to  laymen.  Habituated 
to  these  rites,  as  he  is,  they  have 
become  to  him  inseparable  from  the 
end  for  which  they  exist.  He  ministers 
in  the  Temple  of  Justice,  and  ancient 
piety  long  deadened  into  custom  keeps 


him  from  seeing  that  to  his  divinity  the 
new  moons  and  offerings  are  an  ab- 
omination until  there  comes  into  them 
again  some  regard  to  the  widow  and 
the  fatherless. 

For  all  the  difference  in  their  work, 
the  jurist  and  the  ecclesiastic  are  thus 
schooled  in  like  modes  of  thought. 
When  Huxley  went  forth  in  the  name 
of  Darwin  to  smite  the  embattled  bish- 
ops, the  fray  was  not  so  different,  how- 
ever it  may  have  differed  in  magnitude 
and  in  genius  of  leadership,  from  that 
which  now,  as  at  all  times,  society  must 
wage  against  its  lawyers.  There  is  in 
both  cases  an  effort  to  modernize,  to 
force  living  thought  into  the  body;  an 
effort  met  by  immense  inertia,  not  to 
speak  of  active  resistance. 

The  conservatism  of  the  lawyer 
comes  thus  in  part  from  the  contagion 
of  the  law.  For  the  law  represents  the 
stability,  the  habit,  of  our  social  life,  as 
against  creative,  reformatory  energy. 
So  we  must  not  deny  the  value  of  his 
trait.  His  is  the  virtue  —  and  the  vice 
—  that  lies  in  habit.  Here,  as  with 
each  of  us  personally,  habit  is  indis- 
pensable, even  though  it  call  forth  no 
enthusiasm.  Though  it  does  not  drive 
us  forward,  and  too  often  binds,  yet  we 
should  not  advance  without  it,  for  the 
gain  once  made  would  slip  away. 


in 

A  further  cause  for  the  lawyers'  tem- 
per is  found  in  those  influences  almost 
inseparable  from  every  establishment. 

We  have  no  established  religion;  we 
have  no  established  school  of  medicine. 
We  have,  however,  an  established  Law 
Court,  with  its  vast  body  of  minis- 
trants.  In  a  country  until  recently 
jealous  of  governmental  action,  and 
where  all  possible  things  were  left  to 
private  initiative,  we  have  wisely  re- 
frained from  intrusting  to  personal  en- 
terprise the  organization  and  support 


LAWYER  AND   PHYSICIAN:  A   CONTRAST 


49 


of  courts.  Thus  we  have  in  the  case  of 
law  an  establishment;  and,  further,  an 
establishment  without  rival. 

The  Church  of  England,  the  Luther- 
an Church  in  Prussia,  must  brook  com- 
petitors. The  organization  maintain- 
ed by  government  is  constantly  meas- 
ured and  spurred  on  by  the  work  and 
spirit  of  dissenters.  The  nonconform- 
ist, eager  and  critical,  is  a  gadfly  that 
will  not  let  the  stately  body  sleep. 
Even  the  school  system,  which  is  the 
only  other  establishment  in  the  United 
States,  —  unless  we  were  to  include 
manufacture,  which,  under  our  tariff 
laws,  is,  too,  in  a  measure  established, 
—  the  public  school  sees  its  own  handi- 
work and  economy  set  by  the  side  of 
private  enterprise.  The  public  high 
schools  must  compare  their  outcome 
with  that  of  the  great  private  acad- 
emies; the  universities  of  California, 
Wisconsin,  Michigan  must  justify 
themselves  before  rivals  like  Harvard, 
Chicago,  Stanford.  But  Law  lacks  all 
such  spur  of  rivalry.  We  cannot  choose 
whether  we  shall  bring  our  complaint 
before  a  government  court  or  before 
some  college  of  judges  erected  by  a 
Carnegie  or  a  Rockefeller,  with  its 
corps  of  assistants  to  obtain  evidence 
and  support  the  verdict.  We  thus  lack 
opportunity  to  demonstrate  how  much 
better  the  work  might  be  done.  The 
establishment,  consequently,  subject- 
ed only  to  wordy  criticism,  drones  on 
its  ancient  way.  It  suffers  the  fate  of 
any  organism  that  is  never  called  to 
energetic  struggle.  This  in  addition  to 
all  the  pride  and  deadening  satisfac- 
tion which  is  the  inner  foe  of  every  es- 
tablishment. 

IV 

Yet  we  must  also  look  to  some  cause 
which  we  do  not  share  with  others. 
For  our  American  legal  profession,  in 
its  attachment  to  form  at  the  cost  of 
substance,  outdoes  the  British,  being 
VOL.  in -NO.  i 


more  conservative,  less  pliable.  Our 
criminal  trials  are  notoriously  more 
cumbrous.  And  while,  as  Judge  Bald- 
win tells  us,  the  prosecution  of  a  crim- 
inal is  more  certain  to  occur  with  us 
than  with  the  English,  because  under- 
taken at  the  public  expense,  yet  this 
gleam  cheers  faintly  since  we  know  how 
far  less  often  we  convict;  and  even 
when  there  is  conviction,  how  preva- 
lent is  the  abuse  of  appeal.  The  selec- 
tion of  our  juries  is  viewed  with  wonder 
from  across  the  water.  The  English 
judge  is  a  more  active  director  of  the 
trial,  checking  the  advocate,  brushing 
aside  obstructions,  driving  at  the  truth. 
We  began  to  reform  our  procedure 
earlier  than  did  the  English,  but  the 
effort  soon  spent  its  force. 

This  heightened  archaism  of  our 
legal  system  arises  in  a  large  measure 
from  early  dread.  Fearing  the  official 
oppressor,  we  have  doggedly  main- 
tained and  even  strengthened  all  that 
ancient  mechanism  of  law  which 
seemed  to  promise  a  defense  of  the  in- 
dividual against  governmental  power. 
Thus  we  have  fortified  the  court  in 
order  to  check  the  other  powers  of  gov- 
ernment. But  we  have  put  our  hand 
upon  the  judge  by  having  him,  in  most 
of  our  states,  chosen  by  popular  vote. 
And  when  elected  he  often  listens,  as 
one  bereft  of  wit  and  power,  to  the  de- 
vices of  the  other  officials,  the  advo- 
cates, of  his  court;  he  acts  in  constant 
fear  of  the  error  into  which  the  court's 
own  officials  are  trying  to  entrap  him; 
his  decisions  are  subject  to  almost  end- 
less review  by  other  courts.  And  the 
jury,  as  a  further  check,  and  as  repre- 
sentative of  the  plain  and  unofficial 
people,  has  been  elevated  and  its  selec- 
tion refined  to  technical  infinity. 

Thus  the  popular  dread  of  the  strong 
official  arm  —  until,  of  late  years,  we 
have  come  to  know  the  full  strength 
of  the  private  and  corporate  arm  — 
is  responsible  for  some  of  the  very 


50 


LAWYER  AND  PHYSICIAN:  A  CONTRAST 


anachronisms  of  which  we  complain. 
The  inbred  conservatism  of  the  lawyer 
has  with  us  been  reinforced  by  the 
doubts  and  cautions  of  our  people 
themselves. 


To  these  inducements  toward  con- 
servatism should  be  added  still  an- 
other. Almost  all  our  lawyers  pass 
through  the  school  of  advocacy.  And 
advocacy  in  its  present  form  is  as 
though  planned  to  take  from  the  jurist 
whatever  rounded  view  he  may  have 
had  of  his  larger  social  duty,  his  re- 
sponsibility to  the  man  who  is  not  his 
client.  In  theory  the  attorney  is  an  offi- 
cer of  the  court :  his  first  duty  is  to  the 
court  and  to  society.  In  practice  he  is, 
in  most  cases,  hired  by  an  individual  to 
serve  that  individual's  need.  Too  often 
he  thus  becomes  in  effect  a  mercenary, 
ready  to  fight  on  either  side,  careless  of 
all  larger  issues.  He  becomes  habitu- 
ated to  shifting  from  himself  the  higher 
forms  of  obligation.  Better  that  he  win 
an  unjust  victory,  many  a  lawyer  has 
told  me,  than  that  he  should  not  main- 
tain to  the  utmost  the  side  he  has  es- 
poused. Not  he,  but  the  system  and 
those  who  frame  the  system  and  the 
laws,  are  accountable  for  the  outcome. 
His  work  is  that  of  a  wheel  in  a  mechan- 
ism; to  win  cases  when  he  can,  and  to 
leave  to  others  so  to  check  his  effort 
that  he  shall  not  win  unless  the  weight 
of  law  be  with  him. 

Great  men  like  Lincoln,  and  many 
men  less  great,  cannot  so  view  their 
work;  they  cannot  feel  themselves  re- 
leased from  their  responsibility.  But 
the  rank  and  file  of  the  profession  lose 
themselves  in  the  ancient  sophism. 
They  repeat  to  themselves  the  high 
theory  of  advocacy  and  of  its  power  for 
justice  —  a  theory  based  utterly  on 
fiction,  and  incapable  of  working  justly 
unless  the  opposing  advocates  were  al- 
ways of  equal  talent.  The  plain  lawyer. 


shutting  his  mind  to  the  larger  conse- 
quences of  his  acts,  loses  vision,  and 
the  profession  becomes  mechanical, 
dehumanized.  The  man  of  law  who 
says,  'My  concern  is  not  with  justice, 
it  is  with  the  winning  of  cases,'  has 
more  temptation  and  excuse,  but  his 
position  is  otherwise  not  unlike  that  of 
a  physician  who  should  say,  *  My  duty 
ends  with  the  man  who  pays  the  fee. 
If  a  neighbor  would  not  suffer  from  the 
infectious  substance  which  I  remove, 
let  him  and  his  own  hired  doctor  look 
to  that.' 

Advocacy  sharpens  intellect  at  the 
expense  of  character.  It  is  almost  the 
worst  of  schools.  It  trains  to  ingenuity 
and  concealment.  Hourly  the  man  is 
engaged  in  a  work  whose  success  de- 
pends to  some  extent  upon  a  warped 
judgment;  upon  seeing  both  sides  in 
some  degree,  but  in  confining  his  con- 
victions, if  possible,  to  the  one  side.  If 
he  can  bring  himself  to  believe  in  the 
partial,  the  strength  of  his  appeal  then 
has  the  strength  of  ten.  Advocacy  calls 
from  the  buried  depths  of  the  mind  the 
unsympathetic,  the  contentious,  pow- 
ers —  for  which  the  public  interest  has 
some  place,  but  a  place  daily  lessening. 
There  is  thus  a  certain  inducement  to 
relax  the  social  bond,  to  view  the  par- 
ticular rather  than  the  general  good. 
And  consequently  devotion  to  the  com- 
mon interest,  which  is  so  important  for 
advance,  here  meets  a  serious  check. 
Paid  advocacy  thus  joins  with  those 
other  inducements  which  I  have  named 
to  account  for  the  lawyers'  and  the 
law's  delay. 

VI 

The  readier  response,  the  leadership, 
which  the  medical  profession  shows, 
is  not  merely  apparent  and  due  to  the 
lagging  of  the  lawyers.  There  are 
special  conditions  favorable  to  free 
movement. 

And  first  of  tjiese  is  the  dependence 


LAWYER  AND   PHYSICIAN:  A  CONTRAST 


51 


of  medicine  upon  natural  science,  from 
whose  advance  some  motion  must  in- 
evitably be  caught.  The  knowledge  of 
the  bodily  life  and  of  its  disturbances 
has  been  steadily  increasing  since  the 
revival  of  learning.  Discoveries  like 
that  of  Harvey  have  been  encouraged 
and  supplemented  by  instrumental  in- 
vention. The  microscope,  the  stetho- 
scope, the  clinical  thermometer,  the 
centrifuge,  the  radiograph,  have  each 
given  an  added  impetus  to  medical 
studies,  and  have  helped  to  bind  medi- 
cine closer  to  science  by  making  the 
judgment  of  the  physician  surer  and 
more  exact;  while  the  various  pro- 
ducts of  germ-culture,  coming  as  they 
have  with  many  chemical  discoveries, 
have  put  into  the  hands  of  the  physi- 
cian means  like  those  which  surgery 
has  found  in  its  great  discoveries  of 
anaesthesia  and  of  the  methods  of  anti- 
sepsis and  asepsis.  The  men  of  medi- 
cine have  thus  come  to  look  daily  for 
some  new  light;  there  has  grown  in 
them  a  habit  of  expectancy  and  of  put- 
ting to  instant  use  the  fresh  offerings 
of  science  and  of  technical  invention. 
They  have,  during  the  later  centu- 
ries, and  especially  during  the  later 
decades,  been  so  frequently  given  the 
effective  means  of  advance,  that  ad- 
vance has  become  the  second  nature  of 
the  profession.  The  alliance  of  medi- 
cine with  natural  science  is  thus  close 
and  inevitable.  And  to  the  scientific 
progress  of  the  age  we  must  attribute 
much  of  the  alertness  that  is  so  signally 
present  among  the  doctors. 

A  second  cause  of  the  physicians' 
spirit  of  progress,  in  contrast  with  the 
conservatism  of  the  bar,  is  that  the  im- 
mediate end  and  object  of  medicine  is 
not  in  conflict  with  other  great  social 
ends.  The  doctor  does  not  need  to  heal 
one  man  at  the  cost  of  health  to  an- 
other. The  lawyer,  in  extending  the 
boundary  of  one  man's  right,  too  often 
must  contract  another's.  His  is  a  work 


of  adjusting  claims  in  conflict.  What- 
ever he  does  affects  the  interests  of 
other  men  and  is  scrutinized  and  re- 
sisted by  them.  The  individual  lawyer 
is  not  free  to  put  into  operation  some 
entirely  new  principle  whose  value  he 
may  perceive;  he  is  not  free  to  experi- 
ment effectively,  as  is  the  scientist  and 
the  physician.  The  counselor  must  fit 
his  judgment  into  the  usages  of  his 
society.  The  advocate  is  met  and 
checked  by  the  opposing  advocate  and 
by  the  judge.  And  the  judge's  judg- 
ment, in  turn,  must  be  approved  by 
other  judges.  Not  until  he  sits  upon 
the  supreme  bench  may  the  judge  be 
freely  inventive  and  independent,  and 
even  then  he  has  his  fellow  judges;  and 
he  has  reached  this  eminence  only  after 
a  schooling  and  a  drill  that  should  for- 
ever quiet  all  love  of  the  fresh  and 
creative. 

The  doctor,  too,  works  within  a  sys- 
tem; he,  too,  must  consult  and  is  held 
in  check  at  many  points  by  public  and 
professional  habits  of  thought.  But  he 
is,  after  all,  infinitely  freer  to  pre- 
scribe and  to  operate,  infinitely  freer  to 
attempt  some  promising  uncertainty, 
to  accept  and  apply  some  daring  scien- 
tific assurance.  His  work  is  relatively 
personal,  and  admits  of  his  flashing 
forth  that  spark  of  creative  genius 
which  is  in  each  human  being.  The 
lawyer's  work  is  social  and  collective 
and  methodically  organized,  and  can- 
not be  remodeled  by  every  eager  mind. 
The  very  eagerness  of  the  mind  is  thus 
damped  and  discouraged,  and  finally 
forever  killed. 

The  work  of  the  medical  profession 
thus  offers  a  graver  responsibility  be- 
cause offering  more  freedom  to  the  in- 
dividual practitioner;  while  with  the 
lawyer  individual  responsibility  —  al- 
though present  in  many  ways,  in  that  a 
betrayal  or  a  mistaken  judgment  may 
bring  ruin  to  others  —  is  limited  by 
the  very  limits  of  his  freedom;  he  must 


LAWYER  AND  PHYSICIAN:  A  CONTRAST 


merely  apply  principles  in  whose  mak- 
ing or  discovery  he  can,  as  he  keeps  to 
his  immediate  work,  have  but  the 
slightest  part. 

Medicine,  traditionally  less  honor- 
able than  law,  and  less  closely  knit  into 
social  and  governmental  institutions, 
thus  is  far  freer  of  limb. 


VII 

If  my  account  is  right,  the  responsi- 
bility for  this  inconvenient  contrast 
rests  with  the  laity  as  well  as  with  the 
profession.  Each  side  must  be  brought 
to  see  wherein  it  can  help  to  make  the 
work  more  responsive  to  refreshed 
ideas.  Yet  the  leadership  in  such  a 
movement  must  come  from  the  profes- 
sion itself.  For  the  lawyers  alone  can 
fully  understand  their  system,  purge 
it,  amputate  if  need  be.  The  laity  can 
only  hold  up  to  them  a  glass,  tell  them 
how  sick  and  sluggish  their  system  is, 
how  much  they  need  the  physician. 
In  this  way  the  laity  can  at  least 
aim  to  disturb  their  complacency,  to 
make  them  constantly  aware  of  the 
great  distance  between  their  accom- 
plishment and  what  society  maintains 
them  for  and  rightly  expects.  The  legal 
profession  knows,  yet  it  needs  daily  to 
be  told,  that  it  is  not  here  for  its  own 
sake  nor  merely  for  the  law.  As  the 
physician  is  to  keep  his  eye  fixed  upon 
health  and  not  upon  some  mere  sys- 
tem of  medicine,  so  the  lawyer,  looking 
beyond  law,  must  recognize  in  him- 
self a  minister  of  justice,  to  live  and 
grow  with  the  growth  of  that  great 
ideal. 

The  principle  of  justice  is  not  like  a 
Platonic  idea,  eternally  changeless;  it  is 
a  living  energy  in  the  mind,  expressing 
itself  in  changing  form,  as  does  the  idea 
of  beauty.  The  lawyer,  too  attentive 
to  mere  law,  —  a  chalky  deposit  of 
this  living  force,  —  catches  the  fixity, 


the  definiteness,  and  loses  sight  of  the 
vitality  of  justice.  He  should  know  its 
formal  utterance  in  the  past;  but  he 
should  be  ready  day  by  day  to  bring  it 
to  a  more  perfect  expression. 

Sir  Thomas  More,  while  giving  phys- 
icians high  honor  in  his  Utopia,  would 
admit  no  lawyers.  We  need  not  go  so 
far.  A  kindly  and  penetrating  auto- 
crat in  our  country  would  merely  abol- 
ish their  graver  abuses.  He  would 
watch  the  doctors  at  their  work,  notice 
in  their  ways  something  more  urbane, 
more  spiritualized  than  is  found  among 
the  men  of  law.  To  his  imagination  the 
law  court  and  the  hospital  would  re- 
veal a  common  purpose  —  to  care  for 
disorder,  to  hear  and  answer  com- 
plaint. But  how  different  is  the  man- 
ner of  the  surgeons  with  their  attend- 
ant nurses  intent  upon  their  operation, 
from  that  of  the  lawyers  and  their 
clerks  at  their  task  of  removing  from 
the  human  system  some  festering 
wrong!  The  expense  of  time,  the  bur- 
dening preliminaries,  the  gathering 
dust  and  smoke,  the  variety  of  finesse, 
perhaps  even  of  outrageous  imputation 
or  open  insult  —  one  wonders  how  a 
great  profession  can  tolerate  such 
methods  for  a  day.  They  smack  of  var- 
nished pugilism  rather  than  of  an  in- 
telligent desire  to  apply  to  human 
misery  the  spiritual,  indeed  divine, 
idea  of  justice.  There  in  the  surgery, 
the  white-gowned  doctors  and  the 
nurses,  dealing  with  a  problem  dis- 
tinctly physical,  seem  to  represent  and 
symbolize  the  refinement,  the  intelli- 
gence, the  silent  mastery,  the  perfect 
cooperation,  which  lies  at  the  heart  of 
all  that  is  truly  civilized. 

Our  autocrat,  noticing  this,  would 
compel  his  lawyers  secretly  to  watch 
the  group;  and  those  in  whom,  after 
long  watching,  no  spirit  of  emulation 
was  awakened  he  would  take  from  the 
law  and  set  to  other  tasks. 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


BY   MARY   S.   WATTS 


SYNOPSIS  OF  DECEMBER  INSTALLMENT 

Joshua  Van  Cleve,  who  was  a  successful  busi- 
nessman in  Ohio  during  the  middle  decades  of 
the  last  century,  died  about  1870,  leaving  his 
widow  and  family  a  handsome  fortune.  In  less 
than  twenty  years,  however,  they  contrived  to 
squander  almost  all  of  it  in  divers  foolish  ways; 
so  that  when  his  grandson.  Van  Cleve  Kendrick, 
who  had  been  growing  up  in  the  meanwhile, 
reached  the  age  of  eighteen,  he  found  that  he 
himself  would  have  to  be  the  main  support  of  the 
family,  namely:  his  grandmother,  his  aunt,  Mrs. 
Lucas,  and  her  daughter  Evelyn,  and  his  uncle, 
Major  Stanton  Van  Cleve.  The  boy  went  to 
work  accordingly,  and  after  various  experiences, 
finally  got  a  position  with  the  National  Loan  & 
Savings  Bank  in  Cincinnati.  This  city  was  also 
the  home  of  Van  Cleve's  closest  friend,  Bob  Gil- 
bert. Bob,  hi  contrast  to  Van  Cleve,  had  had  a 
rather  unfortunate  career  at  college,  during  the 
two  or  three  years  previous  to  this,  falling  into 
bad  company  and  being  at  length  obliged  to 
return  home  without  finishing  the  course.  He 
went  to  work  in  a  broker's  office,  with  one  of 
his  college  acquaintances,  a  young  man  named 
Philip  Cortwright;  and  it  was  at  about  this  point 
that  the  story  opened. 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE  MAN   OF   THE  HOUSE 

MR.  GEBHARDT  of  the  National 
Loan  and  Savings  Bank  had  first  come 
into  contact  with  the  Van  Cleve  family 
on  the  occasion  of  one  of  their  numer- 
ous transfers  of  property,  or  some  other 
of  those  varied  financial  operations  in 
which  they  were  almost  constantly  en- 
gaged before  young  Kendrick  put  his 
unwelcome  hand  to  the  helm.  As  the 
banker  was  a  busy  man,  daily  attend- 
ing to  a  great  many  affairs  and  seeing 
a  great  many  people,  it  was  rather  odd 


that  he  should  still  retain,  in  common 
with  everybody  else  who  had  ever  met 
them,  a  distinct,  even  vivid,  recollection 
of  every  member  of  the  family;  but  so 
he  did,  and  he  had  no  difficulty  in  *  plac- 
ing' Van  Cleve  when  the  latter  came 
hunting  for  a  job.  The  young  man, 
who  made  this  move,  as  he  had  made 
every  other  that  directly  concerned 
himself,  without  informing  his  people, 
much  less  consulting  them,  approached 
Mr.  Gebhardt  quite  unsupported.  It 
would  not  have  occurred  to  him  to 
speak  of  his  family,  even  had  he  been 
aware  that  the  banker  knew  them,  or 
anything  about  them.  And  it  was  with 
measurable  surprise  that,  upon  giving 
his  name,  he  observed  Mr.  Gebhardt  to 
consider  a  moment  and  then  heard  him 
say,  'Van  Cleve?  There  were  some 
Van  Cleves  shareholders  in  the  old 
Cincinnati,  Paducah,  and  Wheeling 
Packet  Company  that  failed  here  about 
ten  or  fifteen  years  ago.  I  remember 
meeting  them  at  the  time  when  we 
made  an  effort  to  get  some  of  the  heavi- 
est owners  together  and  see  what  could 
be  done.  Any  relation?' 

Van  explained. 

*  Indeed,  you  don't  say  so?  Yes, 
those  were  the  peoplel  I  remember 
them  all  very  well.  Your  grandmother 
was  a  very  fine-looking  woman  at  that 
time,  Mr.  Kendrick.  Is  she  still  living? 
Ah!  Your  uncle  was  a  general  in  the 
Confederate  Army,  I  think.  No?  Ah! 
You're  all  living  here  now,  you  say? 
Well,  now  —  what  has  been  your  previ- 
ous business  experience,  I  should  like  to 
ask?'  And  a  few  days  thereafter,  Mr. 

53 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


Gebhardt,  happening  to  meet  Major 
Van  Cleve  on  the  street,  not  only  re- 
cognized him  at  once,  but  stopped  and 
spoke  very  pleasantly,  referring  to  the 
new  recruit  at  the  National  Loan. 

*  Ah,  yes,  so  I  understood  from  Van,' 
said  Major  Stanton,  affably,  nodding 
at  the  other  with  a  humorously  wry 
smile.  He  spoke  confidentially.  '  The 
fact  is,  Mr.  Gebhardt,  Van  Cleve 
does  n't  really  need  to  work.  We  want- 
ed him  to  go  to  college,  but  nothing 
would  satisfy  him  but  trying  a  business 
career  first.  It  distresses  the  ladies,  my 
mother  and  sister,  a  good  deal.  But  I 
say  to  them,  "Why,  it's  his  whim  — 
for  the  Lord's  sake  let  the  boy  try  it! 
Most  people  would  be  glad  to  see  a 
young  man's  natural  wildness  take  this 
turn.  I  tell  you,  it  might  be  a  damn 
sight  worse!" 

Major  Van  Cleve  had  never  uttered 
an  oath  in  his  mother's  presence  in  his 
life,  and  it  was  now  some  years  since 
the  family  resources  had  permitted  his 
having  more  than  a  couple  of  dollars  of 
spending-money  in  his  pockets  at  one 
time — all  of  which  did  not  prevent  his 
making  these  statements  with  a  per- 
fectly clear  conscience.  He  had  a  ro- 
mantic imagination,  and  the  priceless 
gift  of  believing  the  romances  he  im- 
agined. Mr.  Gebhardt,  if  he  felt  some 
doubts,  was  still,  perhaps  unconscious- 
ly, impressed  by  the  fact  that  the  mili- 
tary gentleman's  appearance  support- 
ed, gave  a  sort  of  color  and  atmosphere 
to,  his  large  talk;  he  did  not  seem  to 
be  in  the  least  poor  or  pinched.  The 
Van  Cleves  had  the  secret  of  that;  they 
contrived,  on  next  to  nothing,  and  al- 
most without  effort,  to  look  fashion- 
able, opulent,  and  leisurely,  —  all  ex- 
cepting Van  Cleve  himelf. 

'Your  nephew  seemed  to  me  a 
bright,  practical  young  fellow,'  the 
banker  remarked;  'he  gave  the  impres- 
sion of  wanting  money  and  being  will- 
ing to  work  hard  for  it.' 


'Oh,  yes,  yes,  that's  very  character- 
istic,' said  Major  Van  Cleve,  indulg- 
ently. 'Van  Cleve  reminds  me  con- 
stantly of  a  story  my  father  used  to 
tell  which  he  had  heard  from  his  fa- 
ther, who  was  a  very  successful  attor- 
ney in  New  York  City  in  the  old  days, 
seventy-five  years  ago,  or  thereabout, 
you  know.  He  went  out  one  morning 
to  stick  up  a  sign  on  his  office  door- 
post, "Boy  Wanted."  While  he  was 
doing  it,  he  felt  a  tug  at  his  coat-tails, 
and,  turning  round,  there  was  a  rag- 
ged, barefoot  urchin  of  twelve  or  so. 
"Please,  sir,  you  don't  need  that  sign 
no  more."  "Don't  I?"  says  my 
grandfather,  astonished,  "why,  I  want 
a  boy!"  "No,  sir,  you  don't,  not  no 
more.  I'm  the  boy!"  Now  that  was 
exactly  like  Van  Cleve.  He'd  have 
done  that  very  thing.  And  that  boy, 
Mr.  Gebhardt,'  the  Major  concluded 
with  suitable  weight  and  emphasis, 
'that  boy  was  John  Jacob  Astor! ' 

Mr.  Gebhardt,  after  a  barely  per- 
ceptible pause,  received  the  anecdote 
with  such  cordial  appreciation  that 
Stanton's  opinion  of  his  parts  and  per- 
sonality rose  several  degrees. 

The  National  Loan  and  Savings  was 
not  a  large  institution,  though  reputed 
very  solid.  It  was  housed  in  an  old- 
fashioned  brick  building  on  one  of  the 
streets  up  toward  the  Canal,  among 
similarly  plain,  work-a-day  surround- 
ings; and  its  depositors,  as  Van  Cleve 
found  out  soon  after  his  entrance,  were 
mostly  laboring  folk.  They  came  in 
there  in  streams  the  first  of  the  month, 
and  on  Saturdays,  when  the  bank  was 
kept  open  till  nine  o'clock  at  night  to 
accommodate  them  with  their  pay  en- 
velopes. Van,  from  behind  the  brass 
netting  of  the  bookkeeper's  cage  in 
the  rear,  could  see  them  filing  up; 
and  being  an  observant  youth,  before 
long  could  identify  them  all  —  young 
women  stenographers;  young  men 
clerks  like  himself;  market-gardeners; 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


55 


master  carpenters  and  bricklayers; 
thrifty  servant-girls  in  feathers  and 
cheap  furs,  but  with  always  a  fraction 
of  the  week's  wages  in  their  showy 
imitation-leather  purses;  nice  old  Ger- 
man women  with  black  shawls,  and 
mysterious  little  black-lidded  baskets, 
and  clean,  brave  old  faces  under  their 
bonnets  of  black  straw  and  bugles. 
The  half-dozen  directors  themselves 
were  drawn  from  these  ranks  —  old  Mr. 
Burgstaller,  the  retired  toy  merchant 
who  looked  like  Santa  Claus's  twin 
brother  himself;  old  Mr.  O'Rourke, 
now  also  retired,  but  who  had  for  years 
conducted  the  grain  and  feed  store  on 
Wayland  Street  opposite  the  market- 
house —  these  were  of  them.  They  all 
had  such  an  air  of  age  and  experience 
that  Van  Cleve  might  have  lost  heart 
to  observe  from  example  how  long  was 
the  way  he  had  to  travel;  but  the  young 
man  was  not  of  that  temperament. 
'Lord,  if  I  thought  I'd  have  to  wait 
till  I  was  seventy  to  get  to  be  a  bank 
director,  I'd  quit  right  here!'  he  said 
to  himself  scornfully.  And  he  noticed 
with  approval  that  the  president  of 
the  National  Loan  was  much  younger 
than  any  of  his  advisers;  Mr.  Geb- 
hardt  could  not  have  been  more  than 
fifty. 

He  was  a  self-made  man,  and  as  such 
commanded  Mr.  Kendrick's  highest 
respect;  whether  he  altogether  and  al- 
ways liked  his  employer,  the  young  fel- 
low was  not  quite  certain;  Van  was 
slow  to  form  a  liking  for  anybody.  '  Mr 
Gebhardt  is  all  right  —  only  I  don't 
know  that  I  much  fancy  all  that  glad- 
hand  business,'  he  would  reflect  when, 
as  sometimes  happened,  he  saw  the 
president  come  forth  and  circulate 
among  his  depositors,  let  us  say,  on  one 
of  those  busy  and  crowded  Saturdays, 
in  a  genial,  informal  way,  conversing 
with  many  of  them  in  the  tongue  of  the 
Fatherland,  and  displaying  a  hearty 
personal  interest,  which  Van  Cleve,  for 


the  soul  of  him,  could  not  believe  to 
be  always  very  deep  or  very  sincere. 
'After  all,  he's  got  to  stand  in  with 
these  people.  Their  little  dabs  of 
money  are  what  he 's  founded  his  bank 
on.  He  knows  more  about  getting  along 
with  'em  than  I  do;  and  being  a  good 
mixer  is  a  kind  of  an  asset  in  this 
business/  he  would  argue  to  himself 
shrewdly.  However,  Van  did  not  make 
the  mistake,  as  might  have  been  ex- 
pected, of  attempting  to  be  a  'good 
mixer '  himself;  he  knew  that  he  had  no 
talent  that  way. 

Mr.  Gebhardt,  on  his  side,  extended 
that  paternal  sympathy  of  his  to  Van 
Cleve  the  same  as  to  the  others,  whe- 
ther influenced  or  not  by  the  fact  that 
the  young  man  undeniably  did  do  the 
work  assigned  him  remarkably  well, 
and  exhibited  in  all  things  an  iron  in- 
tegrity. There  were  no  sons  in  the 
Gebhardt  household,  only  a  tribe  of 
pretty,  fair-haired  girls,  with  a  pretty, 
fair-haired  mother,  looking  like  a  sister 
to  the  rest,  who  used  to  come  down  to 
the  bank  in  any  one  of  several  hand- 
some family  vehicles  with  their  dash- 
ing team  of  bays,  and  carry  the  father 
off  in  a  whirlwind  of  chattering  and 
laughter  and  caresses.  Van  Cleve  had 
met  them  —  indeed,  Mrs.  Gebhardt 
and  Natalie,  who  was  the  oldest,  and 
the  only  one  'out,'  had  a  calling  ac- 
quaintance with  the  ladies  of  Van's 
family;  but  as  Mr.  Kendrick  took  not 
the  slightest  interest  in  young  women 
and  never  put  himself  out  for  anything 
but  the  most  perfunctory  civilities,  it 
is  not  surprising  that  they  should  recip- 
rocate whole-heartedly.  On  the  con- 
trary, they  were  quite  enthusiastic 
about  Bob  Gilbert.  Robert  and  his 
friend  met  nowadays  not  infrequently 
in  a  business  way;  and  Mr.  Gebhardt, 
having  come  across  the  professor's  son 
once  or  twice,  had  the  curiosity  to  ask 
somebody  what  that  young  Gilbert 
was  doing.  The  man  he  inquired  of, 


56 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


who  happened  to  be  Mr.  Max  Stein- 
berger,  laughed. 

*  Looks  like  I  ought  to  know/  he 
said;  'why,  he's  with  us.  He's  got  the 
job  young  Van  Cleve  —  no,  that 's  not 
his  name  —  I  mean  the  young  fellow 
you  took  on  up  at  your  over-the-Rhine 
dollar-shop  —  we '  ve  got  Gilbert  in  his 
place.' 

'Is  he  any  good?' 

'Good  enough.  How's  yours?' 

Gebhardt,  who  was  never  known  to 
utter  an  unkind  or  uncharitable  crit- 
icism of  any  one,  commended  Van 
Cleve  warmly. 

'You  did  a  little  better  on  the  deal 
than  Leo  and  myself,  I  guess,'  said  the 
other,  hearing  him;  and  they  fell  to 
talking  about  the  proposed  bond  issue 
and  promptly  forgot  both  boys.  But 
one  day  a  while  later,  Mr.  Gebhardt 
took  occasion  to  ask  his  junior  book- 
'  keeper  what  was  the  real  reason  he 
had  wanted  to  leave  the  brokers. 

'I  somehow  suspected  at  the  time 
that  you  were  n't  dissatisfied  wholly  on 
account  of  the  salary,'  he  said. 

'Well,  Mr.  Gebhardt,  I  thought  I 
was  worth  more,'  said  Van,  obstinately 
reticent.  Then  he  looked  up  and,  meet- 
ing his  employer's  eye,  thawed  a  little. 
'No,  I  didn't  like  it,'  he  confessed. 
'Too  much  spend  and  too  much  souse,' 
said  he,  succinctly. 

'What,  Steinberger  and  Leo  Hirsch? 
Why,  I'm  surprised  to  hear  you  say 
that!  I  had  no  idea  — ' 

'  I  mean  the  —  the  office  force  —  the 
office  in  general,'  Van  Cleve  explained 
hastily  and  not  too  clearly;  'I  don't 
mean  Mr.  Steinberger  or  Mr.  Hirsch 
themselves.  They've  got  the  money 
to  play  the  races  and  all  the  rest  of  it, 
all  they  choose,  as  far  as  that  goes. 
And,  of  course,  they  both  take  a  drink 
now  and  then;  but  I  was  n't  talking 
about  them.  They're  Germans,  any- 
how, and  could  hold  a  barrel,  either 
one  of  'em,  without  its  feazing  them — ' 


And  at  this  point  Mr.  Kendrick, 
abruptly  remembering  the  nationality 
of  the  gentleman  he  was  addressing, 
halted  in  a  fine  beet-red  confusion.  But 
Gebhardt  only  laughed ;  he  liked  —  or 
seemed  to  like  —  the  young  man's 
bluntness. 

All  this  while,  how  were  his  elders 
supporting  Van's  persistent  'whim'  of 
making  his  own  living  and  incidentally 
a  not  inconsiderable  part  of  theirs,  to 
which  they  had  yielded  so  painfully  in 
the  first  place?  Why,  they  were  sup- 
porting it  with  the  most  astonishing  pa- 
tience! Van  sat  at  the  end  of  the  table 
and  carved  the  meat  nowadays;  he 
read  the  paper  over  his  coffee-cup  of  a 
morning  while  his  uncle  meekly  got 
through  breakfast  without  that  literary 
entertainment;  he  took  his  hat  and 
slammed  the  hall  door  behind  him  and 
went  off  down-town  to  the  office  with 
his  peers;  the  family  accounts  were 
submitted  to  him;  the  women  came  to 
him  for  their  money;  the  servants  were 
trained  to  regard  his  tastes.  'Mrs. 
Van  Cleef  she  say,  "Marta,  Mr.  Ken- 
drick, he  don't  like  those  biscuit,"  shust 
like  she'd  say,  "Marta,  der  Herr  Gott, 
He  don't  like  those  biscuit," '  their  Ger- 
man maid  remarked  acutely.  These 
were  a  few  of  the  straws  showing  what 
way  the  wind  blew. 

The  young  fellow  knew  very  well 
that  he  was  the  strongest  member,  in 
truth,  the  only  strong  member,  of  the 
family;  he  put  it,  privately,  in  his  prac- 
tical and  literal  way,  that  he  was  the 
only  one  who  had  ever  earned  a  cent, 
or  displayed  a  particle  of  common  sense 
about  either  saving  or  spending  it;  yet 
he  took  no  great  credit  to  himself  on 
that  account.  Van  Cleve  could  not, 
for  the  life  of  him,  have  understood 
how  any  man  in  the  same  circumstances 
could  have  acted  otherwise.  He  had 
to  take  care  of  them  —  Grandma  and 
Uncle  Stan  and  all  of  them,  did  n't 
he?  By  Jove,  he  —  why,  he  had  to, 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


57 


you  know!  There  was  n't  any  getting 
round  that.  They  could  n't  do  any- 
thing for  themselves;  while,  as  to  him, 
work  did  n't  worry  him  any.  He  had 
to  work,  anyhow,  did  n't  he?  Do  you 
suppose  anybody  was  going  to  give 
him  his  living  and  a  good  time  for  no- 
thing? Not  much! 

The  family  got  used  to  his  queer, 
youthful  maturity;  they  got  used  to  the 
idea  of  his  being  steady  and  successful 
as  if  it  were  the  most  everyday  thing  in 
the  world  for  a  young  man  to  be  steady 
and  successful;  they  got  used  to  being 
dependent  on  him,  and  Van  Cleve,  on 
his  own  side,  got  used  to  it,  too.  He 
directed  the  disposition  of  what  little 
money  they  had  left  from  the  original 
inheritance,  and  added  his  own  to  it, 
and  kept  the  old  strong  box,  with  'J. 
VAN  CLEVE'  on  the  top  of  it,  in  his 
closet  in  his  own  room  and  carried  the 
keys  unquestioned. 

Mrs.  Van  Cleve  sometimes  said 
with  a  sigh  that  he  reminded  her  of 
his  grandfather;  but  as  the  late  Joshua 
had  been  a  spry,  dry  little  man  with 
a  hard  jaw,  and  as  bald  as  a  turnip 
at  less  than  twenty-five  years  of  age, 
she  could  not  have  discerned  much 
physical  resemblance.  By  a  coincidence 
the  likeness  most  struck  her  about 
the  first  of  the  month  when  the  bills 
came  round:  Van  Cleve  did  not  al- 
ways see  all  of  them,  —  does  any  lady 
ever  show  the  man  of  the  house  all  her 
bills?  —  and  perhaps  the  grandmother 
recalled  the  days  when  she  had  quak- 
ingly  presented  the  milliners'  and  dress- 
makers' statements  to  her  Joshua  (who, 
nevertheless,  was  reasonably  liberal  to 
his  family),  or,  dreadful  to  relate, 
smuggled  them  out  of  his  sight  and 
knowledge.  Times  were  altered,  and 
she  and  Mrs.  Lucas  were  both  of  them 
good,  upright,  self-denying  women 
who  passed  by  the  most  enticing  shop- 
windows  and  bargain-counters  reso- 
lutely, and  turned  and  mended  and  cut 


over  their  clothes  and  remodeled  their 
old  hats,  and  made  hash  for  Monday 
dinner  out  of  Sunday's  joint  with  the 
utmost  gallantry  and  cheerfulness. 
As  has  been  hinted,  they  clashed  seri- 
ously with  Van  Cleve  only  when  the 
question  arose  of  one  of  those  indis- 
putably wise,  well-considered,  and  pro- 
fitable changes  which  everybody  in  the 
house,  except  Van  himself,  was  eter- 
nally planning. 

'That  Elmhurst  Place  house  is  only 
thirty-seven  and  a  half  a  month  — 
only  two  dollars  and  a  half  more  than 
this  —  the  rent's  practically  the  same,' 
his  aunt  argued  about  six  months  after 
their  enthusiastic  installation  at  No.  8 
Summit  Avenue;  'and  no  comparison 
between  the  houses  —  no  comparison  ! 
It 's  just  exactly  what  we  were  hunting 
for  last  summer  when  we  had  to  take 
this.  Of  course  it  was  rented  then,  — 
Elmhurst  Place  is  so  desirable.  And 
that 's  why  I  'm  so  anxious  to  speak  for 
it  at  once,  before  anybody  else  snaps  it 
up.  I'd  better  see  the  agent  to-day, 
hadn't  I,  Van?'  She  looked  at  her 
nephew  with  an  odd  mingling  of  per- 
suasion and  command;  Van  Cleve,  the 
women  said  to  one  another,  was  so 
hard  to  manage  at  times;  it  was  50  hard 
to  make  him  understand.  Now  he 
swallowed  the  last  of  his  coffee  and 
folded  up  his  napkin  with  a  maddening 
deliberation  before  answering. 

'No,  I  think  not,  Aunt  Myra.  I 
think  we'd  better  not  move.  That 
two-dollars-and-a-half  difference  in  the 
rent  just  about  pays  the  water-rate. 
It's  not  quite  the  same  thing,  you  see. 
Besides,  it  would  cost  a  lot  to  move. 
What's  the  matter  with  this  house, 
anyhow?  You  liked  it  well  enough  at 
first.' 

All  three  ladies  gave  a  gentle  scream 
of  consternation.  'Why,  Van!  This 
house  !  Why,  you  know  we  just  took  it 
because  we  had  to  go  somewhere  — !' 

'And  we  did  n't  know  what  a  state 


58 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


it  was  in  —  that  awful  pink-and-green- 
and-blue  wall-paper  on  the  back  bed- 
room — !' 

'I'm  afraid  the  place  will  fall  down 
over  our  heads  before  we  can  get  out  of 
it !  Three  of  the  door-knobs  and  I  don't 
know  how  many  window-catches  are 
all  loose  and  waggly — !'  Everybody 
began  to  declaim  vigorously,  if  without 
much  sequence;  it  was  really  impossi- 
ble to  think  immediately  of  all  the  rea- 
sons against  living  a  minute  longer  in 
this  unspeakable  house. 

'Oh,  I  guess  they'll  fix  those  things 
for  us.  It 's  not  going  to  fall  down  right 
off,  anyhow;  we'd  better  stay  and  give 
it  another  chance,'  said  Van  Cleve 
placidly,  returning  to  his  paper. 

'Well,  but  ever  since  those  horrid 
people  moved  next  door,  the  tone  of  this 
neighborhood  has  lowered  so  —  that 's 
my  main  objection  to  staying  here/ 
Mrs.  Van  Cleve  remonstrated;  'the 
woman  had  a  shawl  airing  out  of  one  of 
the  upstairs  back  windows  yesterday 
morning.  Think  of  it !  A  great,  coarse, 
red  shawl  hanging  right  in  the  window! 
I ' ve  never  lived  next  door  to  anything 
quite  so  common  as  that  before ! ' 

Van,  behind  the  newspaper,  study- 
ing the  market  reports,  gave  no  sign  of 
having  heard  her.  'He's  Joshua  all 
over!'  the  grandmother  said  inwardly, 
divided  between  exasperation  and  a 
kind  of  pride;  'he  used  to  sit  just  that 
way  and  not  answer  me,  lime  and 
again ! '  She  was  silent  a  little,  perhaps 
thinking  of  old  days ;  but  the  others  per- 
severed with  reproachful  vehemence. 

'We  could  take  that  money,  that 
sixty-five  dollars  we  got  from  the  old 
farm  the  other  day,  and  use  it  for  the 
moving,  so  it  would  n't  cost  you  any- 
thing, Van  Cleve,'  said  Evelyn,  who 
had  a  talent  for  this  style  of  argu- 
ment. 'I'm  sure  it  is  n't  healthy  here. 
There's  a  great  big  damp  spot  in  one 
corner  of  the  yard  whenever  it  rains. 
I  'm  going  to  speak  to  the  doctor  about 


it.  Mother  ought  n't  to  stay  in  a  hu- 
mid atmosphere;  her  nerves  will  give 
out.  It  takes  ever  so  much  nervous 
energy  to  stand  the  colds  she  has,  and 
of  course  the  low  quality  of  the  air  here 
must  bring  them  on.' 

'Never  mind  me,  Evelyn;  never 
mind  me  —  I  '11  soon  be  well  —  my  cold 
isn't  anything,'  cried  out  Mrs.  Lucas; 
though,  indeed,  a  sudden  wild  terror 
started  in  her  large,  beautiful  dark  eyes; 
she  was  very  easily  frightened  about 
herself  and  her  state  of  health,  and  the 
merest  suggestion  of  any  need  for  doc- 
tors sent  before  her  mind  in  dismally 
dramatic  procession  a  dozen  appalling 
pictures  of  suffering,  decline,  death- 
agonies,  the  hearse,  the  coffin,  the 
ghastly  open  grave!  She  began  with  a 
note  of  almost  frenzied  appeal  in  her 
voice. 

'Van  dear,  do  put  down  that  paper 
and  listen.  I  think  it's  more  impor- 
tant than  you  realize  for  us  to  get 
away  from  this  house  and  neighbor- 
hood, and  it  will  be  money  well  spent  to 
move.  You're  just  as  fine  and  strong 
and  splendid  as  you  can  be, Van,  —  you 
know  we  all  know  that,  —  you  're  a 
dear,  noble  fellow,'  said  Mrs.  Lucas, 
stirred  by  a  real  and  generous  emo- 
tion, her  sweet,  hysterical  voice  break- 
ing a  little;  she  was  sincerely  fond  of 
the  young  man;  'but  you  don't  realize 
how  young  you  are;  you  have  n't  had 
the  experience  I've  had.  You're  not  so 
well  able  to  judge  as  I  am.  I  think  it 's 
our  duty  to  move.  We  all  think  so,  and 
two  heads  are  better  than  one,  you 
know,  Van.' 

'Depends  on  the  heads,'  said  Van 
Cleve,  flippantly,  unmoved  by  these 
powerful  representations  which,  as  was 
provokingly  apparent,  he  was  not  even 
going  to  answer.  Instead,  he  got  up, 
taking  out  his  pipe,  and  went  over  to 
the  mantel  for  a  match. 

'  I  wish  —  I  wish  you  would  n't  do 
that,  Van,'  said  Mrs.  Joshua,  distress- 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


fully; '  I  promised  your  dear  mother  for 
you  that  you  would  n't  touch  tobacco 
or  liquor  before  you  were  twenty-five. 
It  was  a  sacred  promise,  Van.' 

Van  Cleve  looked  down  at  her,  hu- 
morous and  forbearing;  he  stuffed  the 
tobacco  down  into  the  bowl.  'Oh, 
bosh,  Grandma!'  he  said  with  profane 
cheerfulness;  and  stooped  and  kissed 
the  old  lady's  cheek,  and  walked  off 
unimpressed.  He  was  guiltless  of  diplo- 
macy; but,  strangely  and  illogically 
enough,  at  this  speech  and  the  rough, 
boyish  caress,  Mrs.  Van  Cleve  surrend- 
ered without  terms,  struck  her  colors, 
and  went  over  to  his  side  incontinently. 

'Well,  I  dare  say  Van's  right  about 
it,  Myra,'  she  said  as  the  door  closed 
behind  him.  *  There's  no  real  reason 
why  we  should  move.  And  anyhow 
Van  Cleve  ought  to  have  the  say  — 
he  's  taking  care  of  us  all  —  he 's  the 
best  boy  that  ever  lived ! '  Her  old  face 
trembled  momentarily. 

*  Oh,  of  course !  Van  Cleve  is  always 

t  right!'  Evelyn  proclaimed  satirically; 
she  remained  alone  to  fight  the  battle 
with  the  older  lady,  for  Mrs.  Lucas 
had  already  dashed  into  the  hall  after 
her  nephew,  who  was  in  the  act  of  put- 
ting on  his  overcoat. 

*  Van,'  she  said  tensely,  stopping  him 
with  one  arm  in  the  sleeve,  *  I  want  you 
to  let  me  telephone  about  that  Elm- 
hurst  Place  house  and  get  the  refusal  of 
it  for  a  day,  anyhow  —  just  for  to-day, 
Van,  so  that  you  can  see  it.'  Her  voice 
rose:  'I  want  you  to  let  me  do  that. 
You  don't  know  anything  about  the 
house.  If  you  could  see  it,  I  know  you'd 
think  differently.   It 's  so  much  nearer 
the  art  school,  for  one  thing.    Evelyn 
wouldn't  have  near  so  far  to  walk. 
She 's  not  strong,  you  know,  Van  Cleve; 
and  I'm  afraid  of  that  long  walk  for 
her.  I  'm  afraid  it  takes  her  strength  so 
that  she  can't  do  her  work  properly. 
The  other  day  when  she  came  in  her 
hands  were  perfectly  numb  with  the 


cold;  you  must  have  noticed  it  at 
dinner  — !' 

'Well,  they  weren't  so  numb  but 
that  she  could  work  her  knife  and  fork 
all  right,'  said  Van,  with  a  brutal  grin; 
'when  they  get  too  bad  for  that,  I'll 
begin  to  worry!'  And  then,  seeing  the 
look  of  outrage  on  his  aunt's  face,  he 
added  hastily,  and  with  earnest  kind- 
ness, 'Now  look  here,  Aunt  Myra,  you 
know  you're  just  feeling  a  little  rest- 
less, that's  all  that's  the  matter.  You 
often  feel  that  way,  you  know.  This 
house  is  all  right.  Now  don't  let's  talk 
any  more  about  this,  will  you?  You 
know  we  can't  afford  to  move  around. 
And  if  any  extra  money  comes  in,  like 
that  from  the  farm  last  week,  we  ought 
to  save  it.  We  can't  go  spending  it  on 
foolishness.  Now  let's  try  to  be  satis- 
fied and  stay  here.  I  '11  see  if  I  can't  get 
them  to  change  that  wall-paper  you 
hate  so,'  added  poor  Van,  unconscious- 
ly pathetic  in  his  efforts  to  appease  her. 

'Restless!' ejaculated  Mrs.  Lucas,  in- 
dignantly. 'Oh,  well,  I  suppose  it's  use- 
less for  me  to  talk.  I  might  die  in  this 
horrid  damp  hole  and  Evelyn  be  hope- 
lessly crippled  for  life  from  that  walk, 
and  you  would  still  insist  that  we  were 
just  whimsical  and  restless  —  / '  But 
Van  Cleve  was  gone. 

Mrs.  Lucas  returned  to  her  domestic 
rounds  in  abysmally  low  spirits.  Her 
cold  was  getting  steadily  worse  —  she 
could  feel  it  growing  on  her !  The  air  of 
the  house  was  positively  saturated  with 
moisture  —  particularly  in  the  back 
bedroom  with  that  pink-blue-green 
abomination  on  the  walls.  It  would  be 
her  fate  to  die  here;  she  knew  it,  she 
was  convinced  of  it !  And  the  Elmhurst 
Place  house  did  have  such  a  beautiful 
bay-window  in  the  hall,  and  two  hard- 
wood floors  downstairs!  She  was  ill  in 
bed  when  Van  Cleve  came  home  that 
evening.  Evelyn  rushed  up  and  down 
from  the  sick-room  with  tragically 
repressed  grief;  Major  Stanton  sat 


60 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


around  in  corners  out  of  the  way,  look- 
ing more  uncomfortable  than  alarmed ; 
Mrs.  Van  Cleve  poured  the  coffee  in 
reproving  silence.  And  when  the  doc- 
tor reported  that  it  looked  as  if  Mrs. 
Lucas  might  be  going  to  have  grippe, 
Van  Cleve  felt  like  an  assassin.  It  was 
in  vain  the  unlucky  youth  told  himself 
that  his  aunt  might  have  had  grippe 
anywhere,  in  any  house,  and  that  even 
if  he  had  consented  to  their  moving  to 
Elmhurst  Place  the  very  next  day,  it 
could  hardly  have  spared  her  this  at- 
tack. He  felt  wretchedly  that  her  ill- 
ness was  all  his  fault  —  everything  was 
all  his  fault  —  everybody  was  being 
made  sick  and  uncomfortable  and  un- 
happy by  Van  Cleve  Kendrick  and  his 
mean  desire  to  save  a  little  money! 

The  next  time  anybody  went  to  call 
on  the  Van  Cleves,  they  had  moved. 
They  had  been  over  on  Elmhurst  Place 
for  a  month,  and  just  loved  it,  they  de- 
clared. 

Evelyn  said  that  her  mother  had 
been  on  the  verge  of  a  dreadful  attack 
of  influenza,  but  they  got  her  away  from 
that  polluted  air  on  Summit  Avenue 
just  in  time,  and  she  began  to  mend  at 
once.  To  be  sure  this  was  only  two 
squares  off,  but  there  was  the  most 
amazing  difference  in  the  atmosphere, 
—  her  mother's  case  proved  it,  —  and 
really  that  other  house  had  got  to  be 
perfectly  awful,  you  know. 

CHAPTER  V 

MOSTLY   IDLE   TALK 

That  there  was  really  something  a 
little  unusual  about  the  Van  Cleves  — 
always  excepting  young  Kendrick,  as  I 
have  repeatedly  stated  —  is  shown  by 
the  fact  that,  in  two  or  three  years, 
more  or  less,  they  had  become  as  firmly 
established  socially  as  if  they  had  lived 
here  all  their  lives,  without  anybody 
ever  hinting  that  they  were  trying  to 


'get  in,'  or  'sniffing*  derogatorily,  as 
people  did  about  that  unfortunate 
Jameson  girl.  The  Van  Cleve  women 
were  of  a  very  different  stamp.  The 
single  thing  in  the  way  of  their  popu- 
larity was  that  it  was  not  easy  to  tell  of 
these  ladies  who  their  friends  were,  since 
they  changed  almost  as  often  as  they 
changed  houses;  one  day  they  would  be 
embracing  people  with  a  warm  passage 
of  Christian  names  and  terms  of  en- 
dearment —  and  the  next  news  you 
had,  they  had  ceased  to  speak  to  So- 
and-So!  Yet  they  were  not  without 
some  sound  and  stable  attachments, 
as  for  the  Gilberts,  for  instance,  with 
whom  they  never  had  any  grave  falling- 
out.  This,  however,  may  have  been 
partly  because  of  Van  Cleve,  who,  be- 
sides being  not  nearly  so  quick  to  make 
new  friends  nor  so  violently  enthusias- 
tic about  them,  was  very  much  more 
steadfast  to  the  old  ones.  But  at  one 
time  Miss  Lucas  was  running  over  to 
the  Warwick  Lane  house  every  day. 
She  painted  a  portrait  of  Lorrie —  an 
amazing  water-color  portrait  wherein 
Lorrie  appeared  with  a  wide,  fixed 
stare  goggling  at  you  out  of  a  jungle 
of  chocolate- tin  ted  hair.  Mrs.  Lucas 
pronounced  it  marvelously  accurate; 
Lorrie  herself  laughed  and  said  she 
supposed  you  never  really  knew  what 
you  looked  like  to  other  people,  and 
were  always  surprised  and  disappointed 
to  find  out.  Bob  remarked  ruthlessly 
that  those  eyes  reminded  him  of  two 
buckeyes  in  a  pan  of  milk.  Van  Cleve, 
upon  the  work  of  art  being  paraded 
before  him,  was  silent  —  unwisely,  as 
it  turned  out,  for  the  severest  criticism 
could  not  have  roused  Evelyn  or  her 
mother  more. 

'Well?  Well?  Are  n't  you  going  to 
say  anything?'  demanded  the  artist, 
tartly. 

'Why,  it  —  it  looks  something  like 
her,'  said  Van,  feebly. 

In  fact,  the  thing  did  have  a  sort  of 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


61 


ghostly  resemblance  to  Lorrie.  But 
what  portrait-painter  wants  to  be 
told  that  his  creation  'looks  like'  the 
original? 

'It  was  intended  to  look  like  her,' 
Evelyn  said  with  fine  scorn.  'But  I 
did  n't  expect  that  you'd  think  it  was 
good.  No  need  to  ask  you!' 

'That's  so,  Evie.  If  I  don't  say  any- 
thing you  get  mad,  and  if  I  do  you  get 
mad,  so  there  does  n't  seem  to  be  much 
need  of  your  asking  me,  sure  enough,' 
said  Van  Cleve,  with  his  unshakable 
good  humor  that  the  women  found  so 
hard  to  'put  up  with,'  as  they  them- 
selves sometimes  complained  to  one 
another. 

'Of  course,  you  don't  think  any  pic- 
ture of  her  could  be  good  enough,' 
flashed  out  Evelyn,  jerking  the  draw- 
ing-board back  into  its  corner.  'We  all 
know  what  you  think  about  Lorrie 
Gilbert,  Van.'  She  gave  him  a  savagely 
significant  glance. 

'I  know  you  get  excited  and  say  a 
lot  of  things  you  don't  mean  some- 
times,' Van  retorted,  coloring,  how- 
ever, with  temper,  —  or  could  it  have 
been  some  other  feeling? 

'  The  idea  !  She 's  at  least  a  year  older 
than  you  are — at  least  I  And  she 's  en- 
gaged to  that  Mr.  Cortwright,  any- 
how—  or  as  good  as  engaged!'  the 
young  lady  pursued,  and  had  the  satis- 
faction of  seeing,  or  fancying  she  saw, 
her  cousin  wince.  'That's  what  every- 
body says.' 

'I  don't  know  what  you're  talking 
about  —  I  don't  know  anything  about 
Miss  Gilbert's  affairs,'  Van  Cleve  stut- 
tered, turning  redder  than  ever. 

He  was  fairly  routed,  and  got  up  and 
stalked  out  of  the  house,  followed  by 
her  inquisitive  mockery.  Once  outside, 
he  said  something  much  stronger  —  a 
distressingly  strong  word  of  one  sylla- 
ble did  Mr.  Kendrick  utter;  and  he 
pulled  his  hat  down  over  his  brows 
with  a  morose  gesture  as  he  tramped 


away,  without  his  pleasant  whistle  for 
once. 

It  must  have  been  after  this  that 
there  occurred  one  of  those  intervals  of 
coolness  toward  the  other  family  on 
the  part  of  the  Van  Cleve  ladies  which 
people  were  accustomed  to  witness. 
The  Gilberts  themselves  were  quite 
unconscious  of  it;  they  were  not  look- 
ing out  for  slights  or  indifference,  and 
did  not  know  how  to  quarrel  with  any- 
body. But  Evelyn's  visits  ceased  for  a 
while,  and  perhaps  Van  Cleve  himself 
did  not  go  to  the  Professor's  house  in 
the  evenings  so  often.  Mrs.  Lucas  con- 
fided to  those  who  were  in  high  favor 
just  then  that  she  was  rather  glad  of  it; 
she  did  n't  want  to  be  uncharitable, 
but  she  could  not  honestly  say  that  she 
thought  Bob 's  a  good  influence  for  Van 
Cleve. 

An  old  friend  of  mine,  Mr.  J.  B.  B. 
Taylor,  happened  to  pass  through  the 
city  at  the  time  on  his  large  orbit  of 
travel  and  inspection,  —  he  has  some- 
thing to  do  with  civil  engineering  and  a 
concrete  construction  company,  —  and 
I  recall  a  little  talk  we  had  on  this  very 
subject.  Mr.  Taylor  has  met  the  Van 
Cleves;  he  has  met  everybody.  He 
goes  about  the  universe  lunching  with 
crowned  heads  and  eke  with  dock- 
laborers;  he  builds  bridges  in  Uganda 
and  railroads  to  Muncie.  J.  B.  knows 
the  manners  of  so  many  men  and  their 
cities  that  it  is,  on  the  whole,  not  sur- 
prising that  he  should,  at  some  time 
or  other,  have  fallen  in  with  the  Van 
Cleve  family,  who  themselves  have  al- 
ways been  active  travelers.  Once  be- 
fore when  he  was  here,  I  introduced  him 
to  Robert  Gilbert,  and  that  friend  of 
his,  that  young  Cortwright  who  was  at 
that  date  a  recent  addition  to  our  so- 
ciety. Mr.  Taylor  did  not  seem  to  be 
particularly  favorably  impressed  with 
either  young  gentleman,  I  regret  to 
state.  However,  this  time,  as  usual,  he 
asked  about  everybody;  and  I  report- 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


ed  some  observations  regarding  Van 
Cleve's  people  which  caused  J.  B.  al- 
ternately to  smile  broadly  and  wicked- 
ly, and  anon  to  grunt,  'Humph!'  in  a 
profound  manner. 

When  I  had  finished,  — 'Well/ said 
he,  'that  Kendrick  boy  is  something 
of  a  boy,  I  judge  —  considerable  of  a 
boy.  The  fact  is,  Gebhardt  spoke  to 
me  about  him,  just  in  the  ordinary 
course  of  conversation,  you  know  — 
but  when  he  found  I  knew  something 
of  the  young  man,  why,  he  warmed  up 
and  said  some  very  nice  things.  It 
seems  they  gave  Kendrick  a  raise  at 
the  National  Loan  the  other  day;  they 
think  a  good  deal  of  him.  From  what 
I  hear  he's  the  getting-ahead  kind  — 
one  of  these  longheaded,  hard-working 
fellows  that  knows  he  can't  pick  any 
money  off  of  trees,  and  expects  to 
buckle  down  and  make  it.  That's  a 
pretty  good  spirit  for  these  days  with 
all  this  get-rich-quick  feeling  in  the  air. 
And,  speaking  of  that,  I  've  got  an  im- 
pression that  our  friend  Gebhardt  him- 
self is  a  little  given  that  way  —  toward 
experimenting  on  the  get-rich-quick 
lines,  I  mean.  He's  a  visionary  fellow; 
I  wouldn't  trust  his  judgment  very 
far.'  And  here  J.  B.,  evidently  feeling 
that  he  had  allowed  himself  to  run  into 
some  indiscretion,  abruptly  changed 
topics.  '  What 's  become  of  those  other 
young  fellows?  That  pin-headed  mash- 
er—  you  know  —  What  was  his  name? 
And  the  other  boy?' 

I  informed  him  that  Mr.  Cortwright 
was  still  here,  in  business;  I  was  not 
certain  how  successful,  but  he  seemed 
to  have  money  enough;  he  was  consid- 
ered very  handsome,  and  —  er  —  well, 
a  little  inclined  to  be  —  er  —  sporty  — 
you  know;  and  he  was  still  something 
of  a  'masher,'  to  use  Mr.  Taylor's  own 
elegant  phrase.  In  fact,  at  one  time 
or  another,  Mr.  Cortwright  had  been 
sentimentally  attentive  to  every  girl  in 
society,  but  here  latterly  he  had  settled 


down  on  Miss  Gilbert,  and  people  in 
general  thought  this  would  be  a  go,  at 
last. 

'Well,  I'm  glad  she  is  n't  my  daugh- 
ter,' J.  B.  commented  briefly.  'Gilbert, 
you  say?  That  was  that  boy's  name,  I 
remember  now.  Is  he  round  still?' 

'  Yes,  it 's  the  same  family.  Yes,  he 's 
here  and  working.  He's  been  a  little 
wild;  they  say  now  he's  drinking.  I 
don't  know  how  true  it  is  —  may  be 
nothing  but  gossip,'  said  I,  not  with- 
out reluctance.  I  liked  Bob  Gilbert. 
I  never  met  anybody  that  did  n't  like 
him.  But,  with  the  most  charitable 
disposition  in  the  world,  I  still  should 
have  been  obliged  to  acknowledge  that 
one  never  heard  anything  creditable 
about -Bob;  whereas  report  concerning 
his  friend,  that  young  Mr.  Kendrick 
(nobody  thought  of  him  as  a  boy  any 
longer),  justified  all  that  J.  B.  had 
said. 

How  much  truth  was  there  in  the  ru- 
mors that  had  been  circulating  some- 
what as  above  reported  for  the  last 
year  or  so?  To  begin  with,  those  sharp 
hints  leveled  by  Miss  Lucas  at  her 
cousin,  —  how  near  the  mark  did  they 
come?  Van  Cleve  had  first  met  Lorrie 
Gilbert  years  before  when  he  was  no- 
thing but  a  big,  gangling  boy  chum  of 
her  brother's,  and  she,  although  so 
nearly  his  own  age,  already  a  grown-up 
young  lady.  In  that  far-off  time  Van 
looked  upon  her  with  both  shyness  and 
indifference.  Asked  if  he  thought  her 
pretty  or  bright,  he  would  have  replied 
that  he  did  n't  know  —  he  had  n't 
thought  about  her  at  all  —  he  did  n't 
care  for  girls,  and  never  stayed  around 
where  they  were,  if  he  could  help  it.  As 
it  happened  —  indeed,  have  we  not 
seen  it  happen  under  our  own  eyes?  — 
he  did  not  have  much  chance  to  im- 
prove or  outgrow  his  deplorable  tastes, 
for  that  summer  was  the  end  of  Van 
Cleve's  play-time,  and  really  the  end  of 
his  boyhood. 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


63 


As  he  grew  older,  it  became  his 
habit  of  mind  to  regard  marriage,  for 
a  man  in  his  position,  as  sheer  in- 
sanity, and  falling  in  love  as  only 
a  milder  form  of  the  same  affliction. 
Both  must  be  postponed  until  he  ar- 
rived at  the  locality  which  he  called  to 
himself  Easy  Street.  In  some  vast,  in- 
definite future,  when  he  felt  himself 

*  pretty  well  fixed,'  and  when  he  could 
get  Grandma  and  the  rest  of  them  com- 
fortably settled  somewhere  or  some- 
how, so  that  they  would  not  be  quite 
so  much  on  his  mind  —  in  the  future 
when  Van  planned  that  all  this  should 
happen,  he  sometimes  rather  diffident- 
ly speculated  about  a  home  for  himself 
and  Somebody.    His  prospective  wife 
was  so  far  a  delicious  myth;  notwith- 
standing the  fact  that  she  was  to  have 
brown  hair  with  gold  lights  in  it,  hair 
that  waved  a  little  nicely,  and    big 
brown  eyes,  and  a  fair  complexion  with 
a  good  deal  of  color  in  it,  and  a  short 
nose,  straight,  but  set  on  so  that  you 
were  not  quite  certain  whether  it  did 
not  tilt  upward  ever  so  slightly;  and 
she  would  have  a  very  pleasant  laugh, 
and  a  pretty  round  waist,  and  —  and, 
in  short,  anybody  in  whom  Van  Cleve 
had  confided  would  have  recognized, 
by  the  time  he  got  through,  a  sur- 
prisingly good  likeness  of  Miss  Lorrie 
Gilbert. 

The  young  man  did  not  suspect  it 
himself.  When  he  went  to  the  house, 
he  thought  in  all  honesty  it  was  to  see 
Bob.  He  took  a  meal  there  at  least 
once  in  the  week;  Mrs.  Gilbert  was  so 
used  to  him  she  sometimes  called  him 
'son*  forgetfully;  Lorrie  and  he  sat  on 
the  porch  summer  evenings,  or  by  the 
sitting-room  hearth  in  winter,  so  com- 
pletely at  home  together  that  they 
could  be  silent  when,  and  as  long  as, 
they  chose,  unembarrassed;  it  was 

*  Lorrie*   and   'Van'   as  a   matter  of 
course,  and  the  girl  openly  regarded 
him  with  almost  the  same  feeling  as 


she  did  her  brother,  save  that  she  lis- 
tened and  deferred  to  him  far  more. 
Only  when  Cortwright's  name  was 
brought  up,  or  that  debonair  gentle- 
man came  to  call,  which  he  was  begin- 
ning to  do  with  ominous  frequency,  did 
the  two  other  young  people  feel  any 
constraint. 

Lorrie,  in  her  third  or  fourth  sea- 
son, had  seen  something  of  the  world, 
and  been  not  undesired  by  young  men; 
her  novitiate  was  over.  Neverthe- 
less, she  had  a  way  of  blushing  and 
brightening  at  Cortwright's  appear- 
ance which  to  any  experienced  onlook- 
er would  have  been  full  of  meaning. 
Van  Cleve,  at  least,  saw  it  with  a  dull 
pain  of  resentment.  He  told  himself 
that  he  never  had  liked  Cortwright.  *I 
saw  enough  of  him  down  at  Stein- 
berger's;  you  can't  fool  me  about  that 
sort  of  fellow!  But,  hang  it,  I  believe 
girls  like  for  a  man  to  have  the  name  of 
being  fast,'  Van  used  to  think  angrily; 
'you  see  so  many  nice,  good  women 
married  to  'em.  It's  not  so  smart  to 
booze  and  bum,  and  chase  around  after 
women  and  horses  —  I  can't  see  what 
any  decent  woman  is  thinking  of.  I 
suppose  there  is  n't  a  man  on  earth 
but  that  's  done  some  things  he's 
ashamed  of — but  Cortwright!  Why, 
he  is  n't  fit  to  touch  Lome's  skirt!' 

Of  course  there  was  nothing  personal 
in  this,  Van  Cleve  was  convinced;  no, 
merely  on  principle,  simply  and  solely 
in  behalf  of  abstract  morality,  did  Mr. 
Kendrick  disapprove  of  Mr.  Cort- 
wright. To  have  told  him  he  was  jeal- 
ous would  have  been  to  invite  a  right- 
eous indignation.  In  the  meanwhile, 
whenever  Cortwright  chanced  to  call 
at  the  same  time,  his  arrival  was  the 
signal  for  a  sudden  fall  in  the  social 
barometer.  It  was  not  Cortwright's 
fault;  he  was  always  gay,  courteous, 
ready  with  a  joke,  a  story,  a  turn  at  the 
piano,  anything  to  make  the  evening 
go  off  well,  inimitably  good-looking 


64 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


and  at  ease;  in  becoming  contrast  to 
Van  Cleve,  who  would  sit  grumpily 
smoking  or  grumpily  un-smoking,  an- 
swering in  curt  and  disagreeably  plain 
words,  and,  after  making  a  wet  blanket 
of  himself  generally,  would  get  up  and 
go  off  in  pointed  hurry.  I  fear  Mr.  Ken- 
drick  was  not  poignantly  regretted  on 
these  occasions. 

'You  seem  to  take  life  so  seriously, 
Kendrick.  Don't  you  believe  in  people 
having  a  good  time  as  they  go  along?' 
Cortwright  once  asked  him.  Cort- 
wright,  on  his  side,  met  Van  Cleve 
with  unvarying  good  temper  and  civil- 
ity —  for  which,  you  may  believe  me, 
poor  Van  liked  him  none  the  better. 

*  Nobody  but  a  prig  objects  to  people 
having  fun/  he  retorted,  scowling;  'if 
I  'm  serious,  it 's  because  I  'm  built  that 
way,  I  suppose.  But  I  never  thought  it 
any  of  my  business  what  other  people 
do/  He  looked  hard  at  the  other. 

'That's  lucky  for  the  rest  of  us,' 
Cortwright  said  with  his  easy  laugh; 
'you've  got  such  a  severe  eye.  Has  n't 
he  got  a  severe  eye,  Miss  Jameson?' 

And  upon  this,  while  the  young  lady 
was  still  looking  sideways  at  him  under 
her  lashes,  and  smiling  just  enough  to 
show  a  charming  dimple  in  the  corner  of 
her  mouth,  Van  unceremoniously  took 
himself  off.  He  '  had  n't  much  use ' 
(to  quote  him  again)  for  Miss  Paula 
Jameson,  either,  and  often  wished 
impatiently  that  she  would  stop  her 
everlasting  running  to  the  Gilberts'. 

As  for  that  derogatory  tittle-tattle 
about  Bob  Gilbert,  sad  to  admit,  it 
was  not  without  foundation.  People 
were  beginning  to  shake  their  heads 
over  him,  and  to  tell  one  another  that 
it  was  too  bad!  They  said  that  there 
was  nothing  really  wrong  with  the 
young  fellow,  there  was  n't  any  real 
harm  in  him,  only  —  it  was  probably 
not  all  his  fault;  the  way  boys  are 
brought  up  has  a  good  deal  to  do  with 


it;  Professor  Gilbert  was  a  fine  man, 
a  splendid  scholar,  and  all  that,  but  he 
had  no  control  whatever  over  his  son, 
and  never  had  had!  Of  course,  Mrs. 
Gilbert  and  Lorrie  could  do  nothing 
with  Bob  —  two  women,  both  of  them 
too  devoted  to  him  to  see  where  he  was 
going.  That  his  destination  was  the 
one  popularly  known  as  'the  dogs,' 
everybody  was  prophesying.  Too  bad! 

Van  Cleve,  who  knew  all  about 
Bob's  failings,  who  had  very  likely 
known  about  them  long  before  they 
became  public  talk,  never  had  any- 
thing to  say  on  the  subject.  He  would 
not  condemn  his  friend,  but  neither 
would  he  take  the  other's  part.  He 
would  say  nothing  at  all.  There  was  a 
hard  streak  in  the  young  man;  he  was 
genuinely  fond  of  Bob,  yet  he  avoided 
his  company  these  days,  took  care 
never  to  be  seen  on  the  street  with  him, 
got  out  of  his  way,  and  kept  out  of  his 
way,  whenever  it  was  possible.  'I  can't 
have  him  coming  round  here  smelling 
like  a  distillery  and  asking  for  me.  It 
would  queer  me  for  good  with  some  of 
these  solid  men,'  Van  thought;  'I  can't 
risk  it.  And  what  good  would  it  do  him 
for  me  to  hang  on  to  Bob,  anyhow?  I 
can't  tell  him  anything  but  what  he 
knows  already;  he's  got  plenty  of 
sense,  if  he'll  only  use  it.  But  if  a 
man 's  going  to  make  a  fool  of  himself, 
he 's  going  to  make  a  fool  of  himself,  so 
what's  the  use?' 

Perhaps  he  did  not  fully  convince 
himself  by  these  arguments;  but  in  fact 
there  was  no  longer  much  need  for  him 
to  put  his  theories  in  practice.  Robert 
was  drifting  naturally  into  his  own 
class  of  idlers  and  ne'er-do-weels,  and 
young  Kendrick  had  less  and  less  occa- 
sion to  dodge  his  compromising  com- 
pany, they  saw  each  other  so  seldom, 
except  at  the  house.  Sometimes,  even 
when  at  home,  Bob  was  not  visible;  he 
had  had  one  of  his  wretched  headaches 
all  day,  so  that  he  was  obliged  to  keep 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


65 


his  room,  Mrs.  Gilbert  would  report,  so 
guilelessly  that  Van  Cleve,  in  spite  of 
his  cultivated  coldness,  winced  with 
pity  and  a  vicarious  shame.  He  no- 
ticed that  she  was  looking  a  great  deal 
older  nowadays;  there  had  been  a  time 
when  you  could  scarcely  tell  her  back 
from  Lome's  if  you  happened  to  be 
walking  behind  her  on  the  street  —  it 
was  different  now.  And  when  it  came  to 
Professor  Gilbert,  it  sounded  perfectly 
natural  to  call  him  an  old  gentleman, 
although  he  had  not  yet  reached  the 
sixties;  he  was  thinner  and  bonier 
than  ever,  and  wrinkled  and  bent  like 
Father  Time  himself.  He,  at  any  rate, 
understood  the  headaches,  Van  Cleve 
would  think,  regretfully  reading  the 
older  man's  haggard  and  weary  eyes; 
and  Van  wondered,  with  a  recoil  so 
strong  that  it  surprised  himself,  if  the 
poor  father  had  ever  had  to  go  out  at 
night  and  hunt  for  Bob  —  bring  him 
home  —  get  him  to  bed  and  sobered 
up  — eh,  you  know?  Good  Lord,  that 
was  pretty  bad  —  pretty  bad ! 

These  offices  Van  Cleve  had  per- 
formed himself  once  at  least.  He  was 
much  more  irritated  than  scandalized 
—  in  the  beginning  of  the  adventure, 
that  is  —  to  find  Bob  drunk  and  cling- 
ing to  the  lamp-post,  in  the  starry  win- 
ter cold,  on  his  own  way  home  at  two 
o'clock  in  the  morning.  What  was  the 
notably  steady  youth,  Mr.  Kendrick, 
doing  out  of  his  bed  at  that  hour? 
Have  no  fear,  ladies  and  gentlemen !  In 
the  pursuance  of  his  career  of  industry 
and  virtue,  he  had  been  to  the  weekly 
meeting  of  the  Central  Avenue  Build- 
ing and  Loan  Association,  in  which  he 
held  the  position  of  secretary.  The  pro- 
ceedings closing  about  eleven  o'clock, 
Mr.  Kendrick  had  allowed  himself  a 
single  chaste  mug  of  musty  ale,  and  a 
game  of  pool  (a  quarter  apiece,  loser 
pays  for  the  table),  in  the  company  of 
some  of  his  fellow  officials;  and  when 
he  started  home,  an  hour  or  so  later, 
VOL.  Ill -NO.  1 


there  was  a  block  on  the  Central-Ave- 
nue-and- John-Street  line.  Van  Cleve 
waited  for  his  Elmhill  car  within  the 
triangular  portico  of  a,  corner  drug 
store,  where  stood  another  similarly 
belated  gentleman;  and  they  smoked 
in  silence,  shrugging  and  stamping  to 
keep  warm.  Van  remembered  after- 
wards how  a  carriage  had  rolled  by; 
how  he  glanced  up  mechanically  as  it 
passed  into  the  contracted  illumina- 
tion of  the  arc-light,  and  saw  the  occu- 
pants. He  stared;  a  monosyllabic  ex- 
clamation was  jerked  out  of  him  by 
stark  surprise.  *  Humph!'  he  ejaculat- 
ed unconsciously.  The  wayfarer  who 
shared  the  vestibule  thought  his  own 
attention  was  being  challenged,  and 
obligingly  responded.  *  Peach  girl, 
was  n't  she?'  he  said;  and  further  vol- 
unteered, 'That  hair  was  a  ten-blow, 
though.  Fellow  likes  it  that  way,  I 
guess.'  Van  Cleve  grunted  non-com- 
mittally,  and  they  lapsed  again  into 
silence.  Van  could  never  forget  this 
trivial  bit  of  talk;  he  had  a  photo- 
graphic impression  of  the  whole  inci- 
dent. 

The  car  came  at  last;  and  Kendrick 
got  on  and  paid  his  fare  and  rode  to  his 
own  corner,  pondering,  part  of  the  time, 
with  a  sour  smile.  '  None  of  my  affair, 
I  suppose,'  was  the  sum  of  his  reflec- 
tions. He  swung  himself  off  the  rear 
step  at  Durham  Street  (they  moved  to 
Durham  Street  in  the  autumn  of  '96, 1 
believe)  and,  turning  toward  home,  on 
the  next  corner,  casually  observed  a 
hatless  individual  sustaining  himself 
with  difficulty  against  the  post  across 
the  way.  'There's  a  drunk,'  Van 
thought;  and  then  something  about  the 
figure  drew  him  to  look  again  with  a 
foreboding  interest.  He  stood  still  to 
watch  it.  There  appeared  a  night- 
watchman  from  one  of  the  neighboring 
apartment  buildings  and  entered  into 
altercation  with  it.  Van  crossed  the 
street  quickly  and  went  up  to  them. 


66 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


*G'  wan  now,  I  don't  want  to  run 
yuh  in,'  the  night-watchman  was  say- 
ing benevolently;  'yuh  gotta  git  a 
move  on,  that's  all.  Yuh  can't  stay 
aroun'  here,  see?  Don't  yuh  know 
where  yuh  b'long?' 

'Hello,  Bob!'  said  Van  Cleve. 

The  other  stared  at  him  fishily.  Bob 
reeked  to  heaven;  his  clothing  exhibit- 
ed signs  of  a  recent  acquaintance  with 
that  classic  resort  of  the  drunkard,  the 
gutter;  his  hat  had  fallen  off,  and  his 
face  showed  grimy  and  discolored  in 
the  lamplight.  He  smiled  vacuously. 

"LoP  he  said  at  last  thickly;  "s  ol' 
Van  Cleve!  'Lo,  Van,  ol'  top,  how  's 
shings?' 

'Party  a  friend  o'  yourn?'  inquired 
the  night-watchman. 

'Yes,  I  know  him,'  said  the  young 
man,  surveying  Robert  disgustedly. 

'Know  where  he  lives?'  the  night- 
watchman  suggested;  'I  been  tryin'  to 
git  it  out  o'  him.  I  had  n't  otter  leave 
m'  job,  or  I  'd  took  him  to  his  home, 
'f  he's  got  any.' 

'It's  all  right.  I'll  attend  to  him,' 
said  Van  Cleve,  shortly.  He  got  hold 
of  Bob  by  the  arm.  'Here,  I'm  going 
to  take  you  home,  Bob,' he  said.  'Look 
out,  you'll  fall.  That's  not  your  hat. 
Here,  don't  you  try  to  get  it,  I'll  get 
it- 

The  night-watchman,  however,  had 
already  captured  it  out  of  a  pool  of 
half-frozen  slush;  he  rammed  out  the 
dents  in  the  crown  with  his  fist,  gave  it 
a  wipe  with  a  bandanna,  and  put  it 
back  with  some  nicety  on  the  head  of 
its  owner. 

'All  right  now,  sport!'  said  he,  fall- 
ing back  a  step;  and  then  shook  his 
head  to  observe  Van  Cleve's  manner 
with  the  drunken  man.  'Careful, 
mister!  Yuh  wanter  handle  'em  real 
easy,'  he  warned,  as  Van  Cleve  started 
to  march  the  other  away;  'they're 
kinder  hard  to  manage,  if  they  git 
soured  at  yuh,  y'  know!' 


'I'm  not  drunk  —  s'pose  you  shink 
I'm  drunk!'  said  Bob,  indignantly. 
He  held  back.  'I  do'  wanna  g'  home 
yet,  Van  —  not  yet.  Dammit,  Van, 
can't  y'  unnerstan',  ol'  fellow?  I  do' 
wanna  go  home  shee  Lorrie  — '  All  at 
once  he  began  to  blubber  feebly.  'Lor- 
rie 's  bes'  girl  ever  was  —  bes'  sister  — 
ain't  she  bes'  sister  ever  was,  Van  ? ' 

'  You ' ve  got  to  go  home,  you  know, 
Bob,'  said  Van  Cleve,  urging  him 
along;  'come  on,  now.  It's  all  right; 
Lorrie  won't  know.  We  '11  get  in  with- 
out her  knowing  —  I  hope  to  God ! '  he 
added  to  himself  wretchedly.  He  had 
seen  men  drunk  before;  had  laughed  at 
them  many  times  on  the  stage  and  else- 
where; had  probably  once  in  his  life, 
himself,  taken  quite  as  much  strong 
drink  as  was  good  for  him,  like  more 
than  one  temperate  and  sensible  young 
man.  So  now  he  was  not  shocked;  Bob 
was  Bob,  and,  whatever  he  did,  im- 
mutably his  friend;  but  an  impatient 
anger  and  distress  overwhelmed  Van 
Cleve  at  the  thought  of  Lorrie.  He  got 
Bob  home  somehow;  it  was  a  sorry  but, 
after  all,  not  so  very  difficult  a  task. 
The  unlucky  young  fellow's  natural 
gentleness  and  tractability  survived 
even  in  this  degrading  defeat.  Wine 
in,  truth  out;  but  that  enemy  could 
bring  nothing  brutal  or  obscene  to  the 
surface  of  Bob's  mind;  its  shallow  wa- 
ters were  at  least  clear.  Van  got  him 
home  somehow,  protesting,  plaintively 
apologetic,  spasmodically  gay,  and  got 
him  up  into  the  porch  with  as  little 
scuffling  and  noise  as  was  possible. 
The  house  was  dark.  'They're  all 
asleep ! '  Van  thought  in  relief;  and  suc- 
ceeded in  keeping  Bob  quiet  while  he 
went  through  his  pockets  for  his  night- 
key.  Before  he  could  find  it,  however, 
a  little  light  gleamed  over  the  transom, 
the  door  opened  almost  soundlessly, 
and  Lorrie  stood  there. 

She  had  a  glass  hand-lamp  and  held 
it  up,  gazing  around  it  into  the  dark; 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


67 


she  seemed  unnaturally  tall  in  a  white 
wrapper  that  drew  into  folds  about  her 
feet;  her  long,  dark  hair  divided  in  two 
wide  braids  lay  smoothly  on  either  side 
of  her  face  and  down  over  her  breast. 
The  young  man  was  reminded  start- 
lingly  of  some  painting  or  image  of  a 
madonna  he  had  once  seen,  long  ago. 

'Is  it  you,  Bob?'  Lorrie  said  in  a 
whisper;  *  won't  you  try  not  to  wake 
Mother  —  Van  Cleve ! 9  Even  in  her 
surprise,  she  governed  her  voice. 

*  I '  ve  brought  him  home,  Lorrie  —  I 
- — I  found  him  on  the  street,'  said  Van, 
hanging  his  head.    But  after  her  first 
exclamation,  the  girl  scarcely  seemed 
to   take  account  of  him.     Her  eyes 
passed   over  Van  Cleve  and  fell  anx- 
iously on  her  brother,  huddled  on  the 
old,  rickety  porch-seat;  she  came  a  step 
out  of  the  doorway,  shivering  as  the 
cold  struck  her,  and  clutching  together 
her  light  draperies. 

*  Thank  you  —  I  —  I'm  glad  it  was 
you,  Van,'  she  said  brokenly,  yet  with 
a    self-control    that    astonished    the 
young  man;  he  looked  at  her,  touched 
and  reverent,  as  she  went  on  with  the 
same  painful  strength:   'I'm  glad  it 
was  you  —  but  won't  you  —  won't  you 
please  go  away  now?  I  can  take  care  of 
him  now  he 's  home.  I  can't  go  out  and 
find   him  —  I   just   have   to   wait  — 
that 's  really  the  —  the  worst  of  it,  you 
know.    And  I  don't  want  Mother  to 
know.  If  you  '11  just  go  away  now,  Van 
Cleve,  I  can  manage  him.   I'm  afraid 
you  —  you  might  make  some  noise,  and 
wake  them  up  —  you  're  not  used  to  it, 
you  know,'  said  poor  Lorrie,  simply. 

*  I  'm  not  going  away,  and  you  're  not 
going  to  take  care  of  him,'  said  Van 
Cleve  in  his  harshest  manner  —  though 
he,  too,  tried  to  speak  under  his  breath. 
He  put  her  aside,  and  took  Bob  by  the 
shoulder.    'Stand  up,  Bob;  you  know 
you  can  stand  up  if  you  try,'  he  com- 
manded savagely. 

'Don'  you  tush  my  sister!'  said  Bob 


in  his  thick  accent.  The  fancied  of- 
fense to  Lorrie  roused  him  in  an  extra- 
ordinary fashion;  he  shook  off  the 
other's  grasp,  and  got  upon  his  feet  un- 
aided. 'You  shan't  talk  that  way  to 
Lorrie,  I  don't  care  if  it  is  you,  Van ! '  he 
said  quite  distinctly;  and  then  equally 
unaccountably  slipped  back  to  his 
former  state.  'Leggo  me!  Whash  do- 
in'?  G'  upstairs  m'self,'  he  asserted, 
mumbling,  hiccoughing,  wavering.  Van 
Cleve  seized  and  steadied  him;  the 
lamp  cast  a  shaking  light  over  them, 
and  over  Lorrie's  white  face  and  cold, 
trembling  hands;  it  was  a  piece  of  cheap 
and  squalid  tragedy. 

'Please,  Van  Cleve,  I  can  take  care 
of  him,  truly  — '  she  began  again,  im- 
ploringly. 

'You  shall  not!'  said  Van  roughly. 

She  obeyed  him  this  time,  meekly 
following  with  the  light  while  Van 
Cleve  propped,  pushed,  and  dragged 
the  other  upstairs  to  his  own  room,  got 
some  of  his  clothes  off,  and  deposited 
him  in  the  bed,  where  he  lay  quite 
stupid  now,  and  erelong  sleeping  nois- 
ily. His  two  guardians  went  cautiously 
down  again.  The  Gilbert  family  dog 
had  come  to  look  on,  head  on  one  side, 
wrinkling  its  honest  brow  in  uncompre- 
hending doggish  curiosity  and  anxi- 
ety; it  sniffed  at  Van's  hand  inquir- 
ingly, recognized  him,  and  retired  sat- 
isfied to  its  nightly  bivouac  across  the 
threshold  of  Mrs.  Gilbert's  bedroom. 
Lorrie  stood  with  her  lamp  at  the  door 
to  light  the  young  man's  way  out. 

'What  is  it?  Is  that  you,  Lorrie? 
Are  you  sick?  What  is  the  matter? ' 
Mrs.  Gilbert  waked  up  suddenly  and 
called.  It  was  a  miracle  she  had  not 
waked  sooner.  Van  Cleve  looked  at 
Lorrie,  utterly  disconcerted. 

'Nothing  at  all,  Mother;  nothing's 
the  matter,'  she  called  back  pleasantly 
and  composedly.  'Dingo  seemed  to 
want  to  get  out,  and  then  when  I  let 
him  out,  he  began  to  scratch  and  whine 


68 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


and  make  such  a  fuss,  I  had  to  get  up 
and  let  him  in  again.' 

*  Oh,  I  thought  —  that  is— '  Mrs. 
Gilbert  paused;  there  was  a  moment  of 
blank  silence  —  it  was  singularly,  curi- 
ously, blank  and  silent.  'I  thought  I 
heard  somebody  on  the  stairs  —  I  must 
have  been  dreaming/  said  Mrs.  Gilbert 
with  a  kind  of  hurried  distinctness  and 
emphasis.  'Never  mind  me,  dearie  — 
I  would  have  waked  anyhow  — '  Her 
voice  ceased  suddenly. 

'She  does  n't  know,  Van  —  you  see 
she  does  n't  know,'  Lorrie  whispered; 
it  was  an  appeal. 

Van  Cleve  heard  the  two  women 
lying  to  each  other  with  wonder  and 
pity.  As  he  looked  at  Lorrie,  on  a 
sudden,  for  the  first  time,  he  saw  her 
face  quiver.  She  put  up  her  hands  to 
hide  it,  and  leaned  against  the  wall, 
sobbing  —  but  still  noiselessly.  Van 
Cleve  felt  desperately  that  he  would 
give  his  right  hand,  he  would  give  a 
year  out  of  his  life,  to  take  her  to  him 
and  comfort  her  —  but  what  comfort 
would  she  get  from  him  ?  To  go  away 
and  leave  her  in  peace  was  the  greatest 
kindness  he  could  do  her!  He  lingered 
an  instant,  helplessly,  dumb;  even 
without  the  risk  of  detection,  he  would 
have  been  at  a  loss  what  to  say;  so 
they  parted  at  last  without  a  word. 

CHAPTER  VI 

TREATS    OF    SUNDRY    AFFAIRS    OF    THE 
HEART 

Although  the  skeleton  in  the  Gil- 
bert family  closet  was  by  way  of  being 
uncloseted  nowadays,  was  indeed  rat- 
tling its  joints  and  stalking  abroad  in 
the  full  glare  of  noonday  to  the  horror 
of  all  temperate  and  well-behaved  per- 
sons, there  was  at  least  one  who  re- 
mained unaffected  by  the  spectacle. 
The  young  lady  whom  people  generally 
referred  to  as  'that  Jameson  girl,'  or 


'that  little  Paula  Jameson,'  must  have 
known  as  much  about  Bob's  miserable 
failing  as  anybody;  but,  drunk  or  sober, 
good  or  bad,  weak  or  strong,  it  was  ap- 
parently all  one  to  her.  She  continued 
to  make  what  the  other  girls  vowed 
was  a  'dead  set'  at  the  young  man.  It 
was  impossible  to  believe,  according  to 
them,  that  she  haunted  the  house  so 
persistently  out  of  fondness  for  Lorrie. 
Everybody  knew  (they  said)  that  she 
had  begun  her  attentions  to  Bob's  sis- 
ter long  ago  in  the  hope  of  'getting-in'; 
and  Lorrie  was  so  dear  and  sweet  she 
never  had  the  heart  to  get  rid  of  her,  to 
say  nothing  of  the  fact  that  that  would 
have  been  a  job,  because  Paula  was  too 
thick-skinned  to  take  a  hint  or  feel  any 
ordinary  rebuff.  But  now!  —  it  was 
plain  to  be  seen  that  she  was  after  Bob. 
And  she  would  probably  get  him,  too, 
—  he  was  a  good  deal  taken  with  her. 
Mercy,  nobody  else  wanted  him;  still, 
it  was  rather  a  pity,  he  was  so  nice 
when  —  when  he  was  all  right,  you 
know.  The  family  were  all  so  nice,  and 
Lorrie  was  lovely,  and  they  would  hate 
such  a  connection,  though  of  course 
they  would  stand  it  on  Bob's  account. 

What  was  it  that  was  the  matter 
with  Miss  Jameson,  then?  Merely  her 
manners?  Our  society  is  not  snob- 
bish; doubtless  there  were  people  in  it 
no  brighter  or  better-bred  than  Paula 
Jameson,  and  certainly  not  nearly  so 
pretty;  but  it  would  not  swallow  her; 
it  would  have  none  of  her  or  her  mo- 
ther. Yet  they  were  really  inoffensive 
creatures. 

Mrs.  Jameson  was  a  large,  vivid, 
extraordinarily  corseted  and  high- 
heeled  lady,  about  forty-five  years  of 
age,  with  the  same  kind  of  auburn 
hair  as  her  daughter's,  invariably  ar- 
ranged in  the  latest  fashion,  or  even  a 
little  in  advance  of  the  latest  fashion; 
and  with  a  fondness  for  perfumery  and 
for  entire  toilets  in  shades  of  purple, 
— parasols,  gloves,  silk  stockings,  suede 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


69 


shoes,  all  elaborately  matched,  where- 
with she  might  frequently  be  seen  upon 
the  streets,  bearing  herself  with  a  kind 
of  languid  chic  —  the  word  she  herself 
would  have  used.  She  was  a  widow; 
and  the  late  Mr.  Jameson  —  Levi  B. 
Jameson,  Plumbers'  Supplies,  Sewer- 
Pipe,  Metal  Roofing,  etc.  —  having 
got  together  a  reasonable  fortune  in  his 
time,  she  and  Paula  were  very  comfort- 
ably off,  or  would  have  been,  if  the  taste 
for  purple  costumes,  and  similar  tastes 
in  which  Paula  also  had  been  trained, 
had  not  kept  them  in  perpetual  hot 
water,  spending  and  retrenching  with 
an  equal  thriftlessness.  They  lived  at 
*  private'  hotels  or  fashionable  board- 
ing-houses here  and  there,  and  went  to 
the  theatre  a  great  deal;  idling  through 
the  rest  of  their  time  in  shopping,  or 
having  their  hands  manicured  and  hair 
dressed,  or  giving  the  French  bulldog 
his  bath,  or  yawning  over  the  last  lurid 
novel,  with  a  box  of  chocolate-drops,  in 
the  rocking-chairs  of  the  roof-garden  or 
lounge. 

Their  circle  of  acquaintances  was 
not  large;  Mrs.  Jameson  had  no  social 
traditions  or  aspirations,  no  hobbies, 
no  recreations,  no  aim  in  life  at  all, 
except  to  be  the  best-dressed  woman  in 
any  assembly,  to  keep  her  weight  down 
to  a  hundred  and  thirty-five  pounds, 
and  never  to  miss  her  tri-weekly  *  fa- 
cial* at  the  beauty  parlors  she  patron- 
ized. Paula  had  never  seen  her  mother 
do  anything,  had  never  known  her  to 
be  interested  in  anything,  but  the  above 
subjects,  although,  to  do  her  justice, 
Mrs.  Jameson  was  fond  of  her  daughter 
and  gave  almost  as  much  attention  to 
Paula's  wardrobe  and  figure  and  com- 
plexion as  to  her  own.  It  was  not 
strange  that  the  girl  could  conceive  of 
no  different  or  more  elevated  existence; 
that  is  a  rare  character,  the  sages  tell 
us,  that  can  be  superior  to  environ- 
ment, and  Paula  was  not  a  rare  charac- 
ter; she  was  not  especially  endowed  in 


any  way,  except  physically.  She  had 
been  curled,  scented,  arrayed  in  slip- 
pers too  tight,  and  sashes  too  wide,  and 
hats  too  big,  like  a  little  show-window 
puppet,  ever  since  she  could  remember; 
had  been  kissed  and  petted  and  ad- 
mired by  other  hotel-dwelling  women, 
and  noticed  and  flattered  by  men,  until 
it  was  natural  that  the  pretty  red-gold 
head  should  be  occupied  with  Paula's 
self,  with  her  beauty  and  her  'style,' 
and,  above  all,  her  irresistible  attrac- 
tion for  every  trousered  human  being 
she  saw,  to  the  exclusion  of  all  else. 
Why  not?  She  was  attractive.  She 
had  no  talents  or  accomplishments;  but 
she  had  been  to  two  or  three  of  the 
most  select  and  fashionable  schools; 
she  spent  infinite  pains  on  her  dress, 
with  charming  results;  she  could  not 
talk  at  all,  but  she  could  always  look, 
as  Bob  Gilbert  himself  had  said;  she 
was  very  pliable  and  good-tempered, 
ready  to  laugh  at  any  joke  she  could 
understand,  and  to  enter  into  any  plan; 
what  more  could  have  been  asked  of 
her,  or  why  should  she  not  have  been 
satisfied  with  herself? 

Why  little  Miss  Paula  should  have 
taken  the  fancy  she  apparently  did  to 
the  Professor's  daughter,  it  was  for  a 
long  while  impossible  for  the  latter  to 
guess.  Lorrie  was  too  humane  to  throw 
her  off,  which,  besides,  as  the  other  girls 
hinted,  was  no  easy  matter;  and  Miss 
Gilbert  grew  finally  to  feel  a  sort  of  ma- 
ternal fondness  and  a  certain  responsi- 
bility for  the  childish,  pretty  young 
creature,  even  after  the  other  had  in- 
genuously and  quite  unconsciously  re- 
vealed the  secret  of  her  devotion.  '  It 's 
so  nice  for  you  having  a  brother  —  a 
grown-up  one,  I  mean  —  like  Bob,  is 
n't  it?  There 're  always  such  a  lot  of 
men  coming  to  the  house  all  the  time 
—  so  nice !  You  have  ever  so  many 
more  men  than  any  of  the  other  girls. 
It's  just  lovely  here  —  there's  always 
somebody \'  she  said  one  day,  and  won- 


70 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


dered  why  Lorrie,  after  a  moment's 
meditative  pause,  looking  at  her  oddly 
the  while,  suddenly  broke  into  a  lit- 
tle laugh;  all  her  face  twinkled;  she 
laughed  and  laughed. 

*  What's  funny?  What's  the  joke?' 
demanded  Paula,  lazily  interested;  she 
picked  up  a  hand-glass,  and  moved 
closer  to  the  window. 

'"The  people  that  walked  in  dark- 
ness have  seen  a  great  light!'"  said 
Lorrie,  profanely,  reducing  her  expres- 
sion to  one  of  prodigious  gravity  on  the 
instant;  and  Paula  at  the  bureau,  pains- 
takingly examining  a  minute  speck  on 
the  right  side  of  her  chin,  which  she 
dreaded  might  be  the  beginning  of  a 
pimple,  did  not  attempt  to  follow  her 
friend's  abrupt  changes  of  mood.  Be- 
sides, Lorrie,  like  nearly  everybody 
else,  was  forever  making  speeches  which 
Paula  found  it  too  fatiguing  even  to 
pretend  to  understand. 

'Of  course  all  the  men  are  n't  nice; 
but  it 's  nice  to  have  them  come  to  call 
on  you,  anyhow.'  —  Thus  Miss  Jame- 
son.—  'I'd  feel  awfully  if  I  never  had 
a  caller.  There's  a  girl  at  the  Alt/ 
(the  young  lady's  abbreviation  of  the 
Altamont,  that  being  the  name  of  the 
caravanserai  which  sheltered  the  Jame- 
sons at  the  moment)  'that  I  don't  be- 
lieve has  ever  had  a  bit  of  attention 
in  her  life  —  not  the  least  little  tiny 
scrap !  I  'd  feel  awfully  in  her  place, 
wouldn't  you?  Momma  —  I  mean 
Mama  —  Mama  says  any  girl  that 
has  n't  had  a  proposal  before  she 's 
twenty  is  a. freak.  I  said  to  her,  "Well, 
that  lets  me  out!  I'm  safe,  anyhow!" 
Momma  —  Mama  —  simply  screamed; 
she 's  been  telling  everybody  in  the  ho- 
tel. I  don't  care.  It's  true,  you  know. 
I'm  going  on  twenty-three,  and  I've 
had  four  —  I  mean  not  counting  college 
boys  when  you  're  away  in  the  summer, 
and  all  that.  I  never  count  them, 
though  lots  of  girls  do.  I  don't  care  for 
boys  —  I'd  rather  have  men.  One  of 


mine  has  stacks  of  money;  he's  in  the 
shoe  business  in  Springfield,  Massachu- 
setts, and  used  to  come  around  and 
stop  at  the  Alt.  regularly  four  times  a 
year,  getting  up  trade  at  the  stores, 
you  know.  He  don't  come  any  more, 
though,  since  I  turned  him  down.  I 
don't  think  the  shoe  business  would  be 
very  stylish,  somehow,  do  you?  It 
would  n't  be  like  saying  your  husband 
was  president  of  a  bank,  or  something. 
He  did  give  me  lovely  things,  though.' 
She  sighed  reminiscently.  'He  gave 
me  my  silver  toilet-set  —  all  except 
those  two  big  cologne  bottles,  with  the 
silver  deposit  on  cut  glass.  Another 
man  gave  me  those.  I  priced  them 
afterwards  at  Dormer's  and  they  're  fif- 
teen dollars  apiece.  Is  n't  it  funny  how 
men  just  love  to  spend  money  on  you? 
I  had  a  fellow  once  that  gave  me  the 
cutest  little  watch  —  one  of  the  real 
little  ones  not  any  bigger  than  that, 
you  know,  dark  blue  enamel  with  pearls 
all  over  it,  and  a  little  flure-de-lee  pin 
to  match  —  too  cute  for  anything.  I  '11 
show  it  to  you  some  time  when  you  're 
over.  I  wish  you'd  come  over;  you  al- 
ways say  you  will,  and  then  you  never 
do.' 

'You  don't  mean  to  say  you  took 
those  men's  presents?'  ejaculated  Lor- 
rie, ungrammatically. 

'Why,  yes.  Why?  Would  n't  you 
have?  They're  lovely  things  —  they're 
all  real,  you  know,  the  pearls  on  the 
watch  and  everything.  I  would  n't 
have  'em  a  minute  if  they  were  n't.  I 
hate  anything  common.  But  would  n't 
you  have  taken  them?  The  men  were 
simply  gone  about  me,  you  know,  just 
crazy.9 

'Mother  wouldn't  have  let  me,' 
Lorrie  stammered,  trying,  in  her  quick 
humanity,  to  make  some  explanation 
that  might  not  hurt  the  other's  feel- 
ings. But  Paula  looked  at  her  with  no 
feeling  more  pronounced  than  surprise. 

'I  should  think  you'd  take  'em,  and 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


71 


just  not  tell  her,'  she  remarked;  'you 
can  always  say  you  saved  up  and 
bought  'em  out  of  your  own  money,  or 
some  girl  in  Seattle  or  somewhere  'way 
off  sent  'em  to  you.  Momma  don't 
know  about  all  my  things.  I  like  to 
have  presents  from  men.  I  can't  see 
that  there 's  any  harm  in  it.'  A  curious 
hardness  came  into  her  face;  she  eyed 
the  older  girl  with  something  like  cun- 
ning, an  expression  as  uncanny  on 
Paula's  soft,  dimpled  features  as  it 
would  have  been  on  a  five-year-old 
baby's.  'Didn't  anybody  ever  give 
you  anything?' 

'No,'  said  Lorrie,  shortly,  annoyed. 

'Pooh,  you  just  won't  tell.  I  think 
you  might  me,  though  —  I  would  n't 
give  you  away.  You've  had  ever  so 
many  men  awfully  gone  on  you,  every- 
body says.  I  love  to  hear  them  talk 
and  go  on  that  soft  way,  don't  you?  I 
think  you  might  tell  me.  There 'sV.C. 
K.  —  you  know  who  I  mean  —  you 
needn't  pretend  you  don't.' 

'V.  C.  K.?  Oh!'  said  Lorrie,  crim- 
soning; 'please  don't  say  things  like 
that,  Paula.  He's  just  Bob's  friend. 
It  does  n't  seem  fair  to  a  man  to  —  to 
talk  like  that.  Even  if  it  were  true,  it 
sounds  —  it  sounds '  —  She  stopped, 
hampered  for  words  the  other  could 
understand  without  offense;  she  could 
not  say  to  Paula  that  it  sounded  cheap 
and  common.  'I  would  n't  do  it,  if  I 
were  you,'  Lorrie  said  finally. 

'Seems  to  me  there's  a  lot  of  things 
you  won't  do,'  Paula  said  suspiciously. 
'  Everybody  knows  it  —  about  Van 
Kendrick,  I  mean.  He  comes  here  to 
see  you.  He  is  n't  such  a  tremendously 
good  friend  of  Bob's;  they  don't  go 
around  together  nearly  as  much  as 
they  used  to.' 

Lorrie  did  not  answer;  her  face 
clouded  unhappily. 

'  Well,  if  he  has  n't  ever  come  right 
out  and  asked  you,  I  suppose  it's  be- 
cause of  his  family,'  suggested  Paula, 


comfortingly,  misreading  the  other's 
silence  and  look  of  trouble;  'I  suppose 
he  thinks  he  can't  afford  to  get  married. 
I  don't  like  him  much,  anyhow.  He's 
always  so  —  so  —  well,  so  grumpy  and 
grouchy,  you  know.  He  always  shoots 
right  by  you  on  the  street,  and  just 
grabs  off  his  hat  and  jabs  it  on  again  as 
if  he  was  afraid  for  his  life  to  stop  and 
speak  for  fear  he  'd  have  to  ask  you  to 
go  to  lunch  with  him  or  pay  your  car- 
fare or  something.  He  never  does  offer 
to  take  a  person  anywhere,  to  the 
theatre  or  anything.  He's  awfully 
stingy.  Oh,  I  don't  suppose  he's  that 
way  with  you.  But  I  just  hope  you 
won't  take  him,  Lorrie.' 

'  I  told  you  there  was  n't  any  ques- 
tion of  that,'  said  Lorrie,  not  too  amia- 
bly. She  was  tired  of  listening  to  all 
this  dull,  distasteful  stuff.  If  she  was 
not  at  all  in  love  with  Van  Cleve  Ken- 
drick, she  still  thought  him  a  deal 
above  Miss  Jameson's  criticism. 

Paula  only  shrugged,  and  turned  her 
attention  to  her  finger-nails.  After  a 
while  she  said,  without  raising  her  eyes, 
'  Mr.  Cortwright  's  getting  to  come 
pretty  often,  too,  is  n't  he?' 

'Not  any  more  than  anybody  else,' 
said  Lorrie;  and  now  she,  too,  kept  her 
eyes  down. 

'I  thought  he  seemed  to  be  here 
every  time  I  happen  to  come  over  — 
in  the  evenings,  you  know,'  said  Paula, 
who  indeed  '  happened '  to  come  over  in 
the  evenings  two  or  three  times  a  week 
with  striking  regularity.  There  crept 
into  her  eyes  that  same  look  of  baby- 
ish sharpness  that  had  showed  there  a 
while  before.  'I  noticed  it  because  two 
or  three  times  he's  taken  me  home,' 
she  said  explanatorily. 

'Yes?'  said  Lorrie,  engrossed  in  her 
embroidery. 

'Why,  yes,  don't  you  remember?  It 
was  when  Bob  was  out  or  sick,  so  he 
could  n't,'  said  Paula,  more  explana- 
torily still.  She  went  on  quickly  with  a 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


good  deal  of  emphasis,  'I  just  said  to 
myself,  "  Well,  if  I  'd  known  you  were 
going  to  be  here,  I'd  have  stayed 
home!"  You  know  I  don't  like  Mr. 
Cortwright,  either,  Lorrie  —  I  don't 
like  him  a  little  bit!'  She  paused, 
slightly  out  of  breath,  glancing  narrow- 
ly into  her  companion's  face;  but  Lor- 
rie's  eyes  were  still  lowered,  and  at  the 
moment  she  was  matching  two  skeins 
of  pink  floss  with  elaborate  care,  so 
that  if  Paula  had  counted  on  these 
statements  making  some  visible  im- 
pression, she  was  disappointed.  'I  just 
hate  him!'  she  announced  vigorously. 

4 Oh,  poor  Mr.  Cortwright!'  said 
Lorrie,  with  a  kind  of  absent-minded 
laugh,  deciding  on  the  deeper  shade  at 
last. 

The  other  girl  scrutinized  her  silent- 
ly. 'Do  you  like  him?'  she  suddenly 
demanded. 

*  Oh,  yes.  He 's  always  been  very  nice 
to  Bob,  you  know,'  said  Lorrie,  main- 
taining her  light  tone,  but  furious  in- 
wardly to  feel  the  red  coming  into  her 
cheeks.  It  was  ridiculous  to  be  drag- 
ging in  Bob  this  way  to  account  for 
every  man  that  came  to  the  house;  she 
began  to  laugh,  a  little  nervously. 

Paula  looked  at  her  again  uncertain- 
ly. 'Well,  /  hate  him!'  she  repeated; 
*  I ' ve  never  even  asked  him  in  when  we 
got  to  the  Alt.,  or  asked  him  to  call,  or 
anything.'  Again  Paula  considered,  or, 
at  least,  had  the  appearance  of  consid- 
ering, though  it  would  have  been  hard 
to  believe  that  any  operation  of  so 
much  consequence  was  going  on  behind 
that  lovely,  inanimate  mask.  'He  don't 
like  me,  either  —  Mr.  Cortwright  just 
hates  me,  I  know  it,'  she  said,  eyeing 
Lorrie  expectantly.  'He  just  took  me 
home  those  times  because  he  had  to.' 

Lorrie  made  an  inarticulate  sound  of 
dissent,  and  went  on  with  her  fancy- 
work  assiduously. 

'Does  he  ever  say  anything  to  you 
about  me?'  asked  Paula, 


'  Why,  yes  —  no  —  I  don't  know  — 
sometimes  —  I  suppose  we  talk  about 
everybody  once  in  a  while — '  said 
Lorrie,  rather  confusedly.  Mr.  Cort- 
wright had  not  been  over  compliment- 
ary in  his  references  to  Miss  Jameson. 
But  the  latter,  who  candidly  liked  to 
stand  in  the  limelight  and  the  centre  of 
the  stage,  and  in  general  would  rather 
have  heard  that  she  had  been  severely 
reviewed,  even  lacerated,  by  the  gos- 
sips, than  that  they  had  passed  her 
over  with  no  notice  at  all,  nevertheless 
looked  not  disturbed  at  the  neglect 
Lorrie  implied. 

'Mr.  Cortwright  don't  like  me,'  she 
insisted  again. 

According  to  legend,  two  pairs  of 
ears  should  have  been  burning  pretty 
smartly  while  the  above  conversation 
went  on;  we  may  imagine  that  the  first 
gentleman  under  discussion,  could  he 
have  overheard  Miss  Jameson,  would 
have  dismissed  her  estimate  of  his  char- 
acter easily  enough.  Van  Cleve  was 
not  of  a  temper  to  be  much  ruffled  by 
the  accusation  of  stinginess  and  rude- 
ness. Very  likely  it  was  near  the  truth; 
and  he  himself  might  have  explained 
that  he  did  n't  have  any  time  for  at- 
tentions to  girls,  and  his  money  came 
too  hard  to  be  spent  plentifully.  He 
had  a  use  for  every  dollar;  and,  by 
Something-quite-strong,  if  that  young 
lady  had  ever  made  a  dollar,  she'd 
think  differently!  Also  he  would  have 
said  —  with  a  red  face  —  that  that 
was  all  rot  about  himself  and  Miss 
Gilbert. 

As  for  Cortwright,  the  fact  is,  '  poor 
Paula'  had  hit  upon  the  truth  itself  in 
those  last  remarks  of  hers,  for  he  had 
confessed  as  much  to  Lorrie!  The  girl 
bored  him  to  death,  he  had  said  with 
great  plainness  and  energy.  Pretty, 
of  course,  but  there  was  absolutely 
nothing  to  her!  He  did  wish  she 'd  give 
up  this  running  after  Bob,  and  let  the 
house  alone.  He,  too,  spoke  of  the 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


73 


times  he  had  been  obliged  to  take  her 
home  —  he  could  n't  get  out  of  it,  you 
know  —  did  n't  want  to  be  rude,  but 
really  — !  He  was  lightly  and  humor- 
ously eloquent  on  the  subject  of  Miss 
Jameson. 

*  I  think  you  are  a  little  hard  on  poor 
Paula,'  Lorrie  remonstrated,  coming 
to  the  defense  more  out  of  sex-loyalty 
than  from  any  feeling  for  the  other 
girl.    *You  ought  to  make  allowances 
for  the  way  she 's  been  brought  up.   It  's 
pathetic  when  you  stop  to  think  about 
it.  No  real  home,  and  no  real  mother  — ' 

*  What  I  No  mother?  Oh,  come  now, 
Miss  Gilbert,  you  surely  know  Mrs. 
Jameson,  don't  you?  You've  seen  her, 
anyway?  Ah,  I  see,  that's  it!  You  do 
know  Mrs.  Jameson!'  said  the  gentle- 
man, meaningly,  with  a  lazy  laugh. 

*  I   did  n't  mean    to  say  that  —  I 
did  n't  say  that  exactly.   I  meant  her 
mother  does  n't  —  is  n't  —  well,  she 's 
not  like  some  mothers,  you  know,'  said 
Lorrie,  lamely,  between  her  habitual 
desire  to  be  charitable,  and  a  strong 
disapproval  of  Mrs.  Jameson. 

Cortwright  understood  her  and 
laughed  again.  'Mrs.  Jameson  isn't 
much  like  your  kind  of  mother,'  he 
said;  and  added,  'there  aren't  many 
like  you  among  the  daughters,  either, 
for  that  matter,'  with  the  faintly  ca- 
ressing emphasis  of  which  he  had  the 
secret. 

It  made  Lorrie's  face  grow  warm 
even  in  the  dark,  as  they  sat  on  the 
porch  of  a  midsummer  night.  They 
were  sitting  in  their  customary  posi- 
tions: that  is,  Lorrie  leaning  back 
against  the  pillar,  with  her  white  skirts 
flowing  down,  and  her  small,  capa- 
ble hands  for  once  idle  in  her  lap; 
and  Cortwright,  on  the  step  below, 
bending  towards  her  in  one  of  those 
cavalier  attitudes  into  which  he  fell 
more  or  less  unaffectedly;  he  was  nat- 
urally graceful  in  his  movements;  and 
the  sword  and  mantle  of  the  Cavalier 


day  would  have  set  upon  him  as  suit- 
ably as  its  light  and  swaggering  morals. 
Sometimes  his  hand  or  foot  touched 
hers  accidentally  —  or  tentatively;  but 
as  to  any  of  the  sentimental  advances 
which  he  was  reported  to  practice,  the 
young  man  seldom  attempted  them 
with  Lorrie  Gilbert.  The  fellow  that 
tried  to  kiss  her  would  get  his,  he  some- 
times thought,  in  his  profanely  modern 
speech;  and  was  startled  to  feel  a  thrill 
of  anger,  resentment,  jealous  desire, 
dart  through  him  at  this  purely  specu- 
lative person's  act.  He  was  beginning 
to  be  much  more  in  earnest  than  he 
had  ever  dreamed  of  being;  certainly 
than  he  had  ever  been  before  with  any 
of  the  women  he  had  encountered 
throughout  his  easy,  conquering,  not 
too  scrupulous,  career.  Also  he  was 
perfectly  well  aware  that  rumor  brack- 
eted their  two  names;  and  let  it  go  un- 
denied,  keeping  silence,  but  smiling  in 
a  style  calculated  to  support  the  talk, 
if  anything.  In  reality,  it  at  once  flat- 
tered and  disconcerted  him;  he  was  not 
sure  that  he  was  so  much  in  earnest  as 
all  that,  he  said  to  himself,  half-com- 
placent and  half-alarmed.  The  very 
candor  of  Lorrie's  liking  at  once  defeat- 
ed and  spurred  him  on.  And  now,  as  he 
sat  beside  her,  sensing,  as  often  before, 
to  his  own  wonder  and  enchantment, 
an  ineffable  comfort,  restfulness,  and 
content,  physical,  spiritual,  he  did  not 
know  which,  in  her  presence  and  near- 
ness, a  sudden  small  anxiety  overtook 
him. 

'I  imagine  Miss  Jameson  tells  you 
all  about  her  love-affairs  —  what  he 
said  and  what  she  said,  and  all  the  rest 
of  it,'  he  said;  'she's  had  a  good  many, 
probably.' 

'  Oh,  yes,'  said  Lorrie,  indulgently; 
and  she  laughed. 

Cortwright  was  relieved  at  her  tone 
and  laughter.  '  After  all,  it  would  be 
a  pretty  good  thing  if  Bob  fell  in  love 
with  her.  It  would  do  him  good  to  get 


74 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


his  mind  set  on  some  girl,  I  believe/ 
he  said,  in  a  kind,  elder-brother  fashion 
that  touched  Lorrie  deeply. 

*  That's  what  I've  often  thought,' 
she  said  impulsively;  *  that's  what  I've 
often  longed  for.  Mother  and  I  —  we 
can't  do  much  —  he 's  too  used  to  us  — 
a  man  does  n't  seem  to  care  much  what 
his  mother  and  sisters  think  about  him. 
He  knows  they're  going  to  love  him, 
anyhow.  But  if  Bob  would  only  get  to 
caring  for  some  girl  —  Paula  or  any- 
body —  if  he  'd  only  —  instead  of  — ' 
Lome's  voice  failed;  all  the  pain  and 
worry  of  these  past  few  months  when 
things,  already  so  bad,  seemed  to  be 
getting  so  much  worse,  suddenly  knot- 
ted together  in  her  throat.  She  turned 
her  face  away,  sternly  resolved  to  con- 
trol herself.  'I'm  getting  silly  and 
hysterical,  laughing  one  minute  and 
wanting  to  cry  the  next!'  she  thought, 
impatiently.  Indeed,  she  had  been 
under  a  hard  strain  for  some  time  now. 

The  man,  who  knew  well  enough 
what  the  trouble  was,  looked  at  her 
and  then  down,  a  little  shamed,  a  little 
humbled.  Bob's  misbehavior  surely 
could  not  be  laid  to  his  door;  but  a 
sharp  regret  stung  him.  'Men  don't 
deserve  to  have  sisters  and  mothers 
and  —  and  wives!'  he  declared  huskily, 
not  conscious  of  the  irrelevance  of  the 
words  until  they  were  out;  and  both  of 
them  were  awkwardly  silent  an  in- 
stant. Cortwright  looked  into  her  face 
again,  and  saw  that  the  brown  eyes 
shone  suspiciously  in  the  moonlight,  as 
with  unshed  tears.  He  gave  an  ex- 
clamation. 

'Don't  do  that,  Lorrie,  don't!  I  —  I 
mean,  don't  worry  about  Bob  so!'  he 
stammered,  moved  by  a  genuine,  self- 
forgetful  sympathy  and  pity.  He  took 
her  hand;  he  kept  on  with  reassuring 
and  comforting  words.  '  Bob 's  all  right 
—  he's  going  to  come  out  all  right. 
He'll  get  over  this  running  around, 
you  know,  and  —  er  —  and  coming  in 


late  at  night,  and  —  er  —  and  all  that. 
Why,  there 're  lots  of  fellows  worse 
than  Bob—' 

'I  know  that,  Mr.  Cortwright,  but 
that  does  n't  make  it  any  easier,'  said 
Lorrie,  brokenly;  she  swallowed  hard, 
and  went  on  without  looking  at  him, 
'I'm  sure  Bob  would  n't  —  would  n't 
do  anything  wrong,  even  when  he 's  — 
when  he 's  that  way,  you  know.  But  it 's 
been  so  long  now  it  seems  as  if  maybe 
he  never  would  get  over  it.  That 's  what 
frightens  me.  It  began  when  he  was 
only  a  little  boy;  he  used  to  drink  the 
peach-brandy.  Sometimes  he  drank  it 
all  up.  When  I  found  out,  I  never  told 
Mother,  and  I  never  said  a  word  to  him. 
I  'd  go  and  fill  the  jug  up  with  syrup.  I 
suppose  it  was  wrong,  but  I  —  I  did  n't 
know  any  better.  To  this  day,  I  don't 
know  whether  Mother  knows  or  not.  I 
would  just  as  lief  stick  the  carving- 
knife  into  her  as  ask  —  or  tell  her.  She 
might  think  it  was  her  fault  because  of 
having  the  peach-brandy  around,  you 
see — '  She  drew  her  hand  away 
quickly;  she  was  frightened  at  her  own 
loss  of  self-control,  frightened  at  her 
sudden  longing  to  cry  her  troubles  out 
on  the  young  man's  shoulder. 

'  Oh,  don't  get  to  thinking  things  like 
that.  That's  morbid,  that's  foolish!' 
Cortwright  urged,  honestly  moved; 
and  none  the  less  because  the  peach- 
brandy  episode  seemed  to  him  an 
ordinary  boyish  crime,  fit  only  to  be 
laughed  at;  its  very  littleness  touched 
him.  'It  is  n't  anybody's  fault.  Near- 
ly all  men  have  some  kind  of  a  time 
like  this.  Bob  will  come  around  all 
right.  Why,  he's  a  fine  fellow,  a  splen- 
did fellow  —  he's  going  to  be  all 
right  - 

He  felt  with  a  strange  tangle  of  emo- 
tions,—  surprise,  conceit,  satisfaction, 
and  something  as  near  to  real  tender- 
ness as  he  could  entertain,  —  that  this 
sad  business  about  Bob  brought  Lorrie 
and  himself  closer  together  than  a  year 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


of  visits  and  attentions  and  frank, 
pleasant  intimacies  had  been  able  to  do. 
And  now,  as  always  when  he  was  with 
her,  Lorrie  unwittingly  called  out  all 
that  was  best  in  him.  He  was  very  gen- 
tle, governing  his  impulses  in  honest  re- 
spect, made  a  great  many  fine  forcible 
promises  to  'look  after  Bob,'  to  'see  if 
he  could  n't  do  something  with  Bob,' 
to  'get  Bob  to  straighten  up,'  and  so 
forth;  and  went  away  from  her  at  last 
in  a  very  noble,  protecting,  ardent, 
and  exalted  state  of  mind,  highly  unus- 
ual and  agreeable.  He  was  resolved 
to  straighten  up,  not  only  Robert,  but 
Philip  Cortwright,  too.  For  such  a  girl, 
a  man  ought  to  be  willing  to  do  any- 
thing !  He  would  cut  out  that  other  af- 
fair altogether;  it  would  begin  to  tire 
him  pretty  soon,  anyhow;  he  would  go 
on  the  water-wagon  himself,  drop  the 
ponies,  marry  Lorrie,  and  settle  down ! 
And  doubtless  Lorrie  went  upstairs 
to  her  room  soothed  and  sustained  and 
full  of  trust  in  him;  doubtless,  too,  she 
blushed  to  face  herself  in  the  glass  when 
she  thought  of  certain  passages,  cer- 
tain intonations  of  'his'  voice,  certain 
expressions  in  'his'  eyes;  and  combed 
out  and  braided  her  long,  thick,  waving 
crop  of  brown  hair  in  a  pensive  mood 
which  had  nothing  to  do  with  that 
unfortunate  Robert;  and  maybe  sat 
awhile  by  the  window  with  her  chin 
propped  on  her  hands,  staring  and  star- 
gazing and  dreaming,  while  the  family 
snored  unromantically  all  about  her, 
before  she  slipped  into  her  own  little 
bed. 


At  the  same  time,  not  many  squares 
away,  another  acquaintance  of  ours 
may  have  been  indulging  in  a  very 
similar  style  of  meditation,  and  survey- 
ing what  she  could  of  the  night  and 
stars  from  the  window  of  her  bedroom 
—  a  stuffy  hotel  bedroom  that  com- 
manded a  much  better  view  of  the  rear 
roofs  and  fire-escapes  and  the  windows 
of  other  stuffy  bedrooms  than  of  any- 
thing celestial.  The  young  lady,  in  a 
heavily  embroidered  lavender  crape 
kimono  somewhat  too  roomy  for  her,  — 
it  is  part  of  her  mother's  wardrobe,  in 
fact,  —  has  been  stealthily  reading  and 
re-reading  a  number  of  little  notes  re- 
ceived with  sundry  boxes  of  candy,  or 
perhaps  with  those  other  more  costly 
'presents'  for  which  she  has  a  weak- 
ness; she  has  by  heart  every  word  of 
those  notes.  They  are  'soft'  and  sug- 
ary enough  even  for  her  taste,  and 
fascinatingly  seasoned  besides  with 
hints  of  mystery,  secrecy,  and  caution. 
This  affair  quite  puts  in  the  shade  the 
honest  gentleman  of  the  shoe  business 
and  others  who  have  been  vulgarly 
plain  and  above-board  about  their  ad- 
miration and  their  hopes!  It  has  pro- 
gressed from  chance  meetings  at  first 
to  meetings  that  were  not  by  any 
means  chance,  on  her  part  at  any  rate, 
later;  and  now  to  risky  little  appoint- 
ments, delightful  stolen  moments,  sub- 
tly planned  encounters  —  exactly  like 
a  play!  Indeed,  was  there  ever  a  finer 
figure  for  a  matinee  hero  seen  on  any 
stage  than  the  individual  signing  him- 
self hers,  Phil? 


(To  be  continued.) 


AN  EVENING  AT  MADAME  RACHEL'S 


A  NEWLY  DISCOVERED   LETTER   OF   ALFRED   DE  MUSSET 


Although  the  letter  bears  no  date  and  its  envelope  has  been  lost,  it  is  still  possible  to  fix  the 
evening  precisely;  it  was  May  29,  1839.  From  this  date  the  relations  between  the  poet  and  the 
young  tragedienne  became  most  friendly.  —  THE  EDITOBS. 


MY  very  best  thanks,  honored  Ma- 
dame and  dear  Godmother,  for  the 
letter  of  the  amiable  Paolita  [Pauline 
Garcia]  which  you  sent  to  me.  This 
letter  is  both  interesting  and  charm- 
ing, but  you,  who  never  miss  an  oppor- 
tunity to  show  those  whom  you  love 
best  some  beautiful  little  attention, 
deserve  the  greatest  praise.  You  are 
the  only  human  being  whom  I  have 
found  to  be  so  constituted. 

A  charitable  act  always  finds  its  re- 
ward, and,  thanks  to  your  Desdemona 
letter,  I  shall  now  regale  you  with  a 
supper  at  Madame  Rachel's,  which 
will  amuse  you,  providing  we  are  still 
of  the  same  opinion,  and  still  share  the 
same  admiration  for  the  divine  artist. 
My  little  adventure  is  solely  intended 
for  you,  because  'the  noble  child'  de- 
tests indiscretions,  and  then  also  be- 
because  so  much  stupid  talk  and  gossip 
circulate  since  I  have  been  going  to  see 
her,  that  I  have  decided  not  even  to 
mention  it  when  I  have  been  to  see  her 
at  the  Theatre  Frangais. 

The  evening  here  referred  to  she 
played  Tancrede,  and  I  went  in  the 
intermission  to  see  her,  to  pay  her  a 
compliment  about  her  charming  cos- 
tume. In  the  fifth  act  she  read  her 
letter  with  an  expression  which  was 
especially  sincere  and  touching.  She 
told  me  herself  that  she  had  cried  at 
this  moment,  and  was  so  moved  that 
she  was  afraid  she  might  not  be  able 

16 


to  continue  to  speak.  At  ten  o'clock, 
after  the  close  of  the  theatre,  we  met 
by  accident  in  the  Colonnades  of  the 
Palais  Royal.  She  was  walking  arm- 
in-arm  with  Felix  Bonnaire,  attended 
by  a  crowd  of  young  people,  among 
whom  were  Mademoiselle  Rebut, 
Mademoiselle  Dubois,  of  the  Conserv- 
atory, and  a  few  others.  I  bow  to  her; 
she  says  to  me,  'Come  with  us.' 

Here  we  are  at  her  house;  Bonnaire 
excuses  himself  as  best  he  can,  an- 
noyed and  furious  about  the  meeting. 
Rachel  smiles  at  his  deplorable  de- 
parture. We  enter,  we  sit  down.  Each 
of  the  young  ladies  beside  her  friend, 
and  I  next  to  the  dear  Fanfan.  After 
some  conversation  Rachel  notices  that 
she  has  forgotten  her  rings  and  brace- 
lets in  the  theatre.  She  sends  her 
servant-girl  to  fetch  them.  There's 
no  girl  here  now  to  prepare  supper! 
But  Rachel  rises,  changes  her  dress, 
and  goes  into  the  kitchen.  After  a 
quarter  of  an  hour  she  reenters,  in 
house-dress  and  cap,  beautiful  as  an 
angel,  and  holds  in  her  hand  a  plate 
with  three  beefsteaks  which  she  has 
just  fried.  She  puts  the  plate  in  the 
middle  of  the  table  and  says,  'I  hope 
it  will  taste  good  to  you.'  Then  she 
goes  into  the  kitchen  again  and  re- 
turns with  a  soup-bowl  of  boiling  bouil- 
lon in  the  one  hand  and  in  the  other  a 
dish  of  spinach.  That  is  the  supper! 
No  plates,  no  spoons,  because  the  serv- 


AN  EVENING  AT  MADAME  RACHEL'S 


77 


ant  girl  has  taken  the  keys  with  her. 
Rachel  opens  the  sideboard,  finds  a 
bowl  of  salad,  takes  the  wooden  fork, 
eventually  discovers  a  plate,  and  be- 
gins to  eat  alone. 

'In  the  kitchen,'  says  Mamma,  who 
is  hungry,  'are  the  pewter  knives  and 
forks.' 

Rachel  rises,  fetches  them,  and  dis- 
tributes them  among  those  present. 
Now  the  following  conversation  takes 
place,  in  which  you  will  notice  that  I 
have  not  changed  anything. 

The  Mother:  Dear  Rachel,  the  beef- 
steaks are  too  well  done. 

Rachel:  You  are  right;  they  are  as 
hard  as  stone.  Formerly,  when  I  still  did 
the  housekeeping,  I  certainly  cooked 
much  better.  I  am  poorer  now  for  for- 
getting about  it.  There  is  nothing  to 
be  done  about  it,  and  for  that  matter 
I  have  learned  something  else  instead. 
Don't  you  eat,  Sarah?  (To  her  sister). 

Sarah:  No;  I  do  not  eat  with  pewter 
knives  and  forks. 

Rachel:  Ah,  just  listen  to  that! 
Since  I  have  bought  from  my  savings 
a  dozen  silver  knives  and  forks  you 
cannot  touch  pewter  any  more.  I  sup- 
pose when  I  become  richer  you  will 
have  to  have  a  liveried  lackey  behind 
your  chair  and  one  before.  (Pointing 
to  her  fork.)  I  shall  never  part  with 
these  old  knives  and  forks.  They  have 
done  us  service  for  too  long.  Is  n't  it 
so,  Mamma? 

The  Mother  (with  her  mouth  full): 
She  is  a  perfect  child! 

Rachel  (turning  to  me) :  Think  of  it, 
when  I  was  playing  in  the  Theatre 
Moliere  I  had  only  two  pairs  of  stock- 
ings, and  every  morning  —  (Here  the 
sister  Sarah  begins  to  speak  German 
in  order  to  prevent  her  sister  from  say- 
ing any  more) . 

Rachel  (continuing):  Stop  talking 
your  German.  That  is  no  shame  at  all. 
Yes,  I  only  had  two  pairs  of  stockings, 
and  in  order  to  be  able  to  appear  at 


night  I  had  to  wash  one  pair  every 
morning.  They  hung  in  my  room  on  a 
string  while  I  wore  the  others. 

7 :  And  you  did  the  housekeeping? 

Rachel :  I  got  up  every  morning  at 
six  o'clock,  and  at  eight  o'clock  all  the 
beds  were  made.  Then  I  went  to  the 
Halles  and  bought  the  food. 

7:  And  did  n't  you  let  a  little  profit 
go  into  your  own  pocket? 

Rachel:  No,  I  was  a  very  honest 
cook,  was  n't  I,  Mamma? 

The  Mother  (continuing  to  eat): 
Yes,  that's  true. 

Rachel:  Only  once  I  was  a  thief  for 
a  whole  month.  If  I  bought  anything 
for  four  sous  I  charged  five,  and  if  I 
paid  ten  I  charged  twelve.  At  the  end 
of  the  month  I  found  that  I  was  in 
possession  of  three  francs. 

/  (severely) :  And  what  did  you  do 
with  those  three  francs,  Mademoi- 
selle? 

The  Mother  (who  sees  that  Rachel 
is  silent):  Monsieur  de  Musset,  she 
bought  the  works  of  Moliere  for  that 
money. 

7:  Really? 

Rachel:  Why,  yes,  certainly.  I  had 
Corneille  and  Racine,  and  so  I  had  to 
have  Moliere,  and  I  bought  him  for 
three  francs;  then  I  confessed  all  my 
sins.  Why  does  Mademoiselle  Rebut 
go?  Good-night,  Mademoiselle! 

The  largest  part  of  the  dull  people 
follow  the  example  of  Mademoiselle 
Rebut.  The  servant-girl  returns  with 
the  forgotten  rings  and  bracelets. 
They  are  put  on  the  table.  The  two 
bracelets  are  magnificent,  worth  at 
least  four  to  five  thousand  francs.  In 
addition  to  them  there  is  a  most  costly 
golden  tiara.  All  this  is  lying  any- 
where about  the  table,  betwixt  and  be- 
tween the  salad,  the  pewter  spoons, 
and  the  spinach. 

The  idea  of  keeping  house,  attending 
to  the  kitchen,  making  beds,  and  of  all 
the  cares  of  a  poverty-stricken  house- 


78 


AN  EVENING  AT  MADAME  RACHEL'S 


hold,  sets  me  thinking,  and  I  look  at 
Rachel's  hands,  secretly  fearing  that 
they  are  ugly  or  ruined.  They  are 
graceful,  dainty,  white,  and  full,  the 
fingers  tapering.  In  reality,  hands  of 
a  princess. 

Sarah,  who  is  not  eating,  does  not 
cease  scolding  in  German.  It  must  be 
remarked  that,  on  this  certain  day,  in 
the  forenoon,  she  had  been  up  to  some 
pranks,  which,  according  to  her  mo- 
ther's opinion,  had  gone  a  bit  too  far, 
and  it  was  only  owing  to  the  urgent 
interference  of  her  sister  that  she  had 
been  forgiven  and  had  been  allowed  to 
retain  her  place  at  the  table. 

Rachel  (answering  to  her  German 
scolding) :  Leave  me  in  peace,  I  want 
to  speak  about  my  youth.  I  remem- 
ber that  one  day  I  wanted  to  make 
punch  in  one  of  these  pewter  spoons. 
I  held  the  spoon  over  the  light,  and  it 
melted  in  my  hand.  By  the  way, 
Sophie,  give  me  the  kirsch;  we  will 
make  some  punch.  Ouf  ...  I  have 
done;  I  have  eaten  enough.  (The  cook 
brings  a  bottle) . 

The  Mother:  Sophie  is  mistaken. 
That  is  a  bottle  of  absinthe. 

7:  Give  me  a  drop. 

Rachel:  Oh,  how  glad  I  would  be  if 
you  would  take  something  with  us. 

The  Mother:  Absinthe  is  supposed 
to  be  very  healthy. 

7:  Not  at  all.  It  is  unhealthy  and 
detestable. 

Sarah:  Why  do  you  want  to  drink 
some,  then? 

7:  In  order  to  be  able  to  say  that  I 
have  partaken  of  your  hospitality. 

Rachel:  I  want  to  drink  also.  (She 
pours  out  absinthe  into  a  tumbler  and 
drinks.  A  silver  bowl  is  brought  to 
her,  in  which  she  puts  sugar  and 
kirsch;  then  she  lights  her  punch,  and 
lets  it  flame  up.)  I  love  this  blue 
flame. 

7:  It  is  much  prettier  if  there  is  no 
candle  burning. 


Rachel:  Sophie,  take  the  candles 
away. 

The  Mother :  What  ideas  you  have ! 
Nothing  of  the  kind  shall  be  done. 

Rachel:  It  is  unbearable  .  .  .  Par- 
don, me,  Mamma,  you  dear  good  one 
.  .  .  (She  embraces  her) .  But  I  would 
like  to  have  Sophie  take  the  candles 
away. 

A  gentleman  takes  both  candles  and 
puts  them  under  the  table  —  twilight 
effect.  The  mother,  who  in  the  light 
of  the  flames  from  the  punch  appears 
now  green,  now  blue,  fixes  her  eyes 
upon  me,  and  watches  every  one  of  my 
movements.  The  candles  are  brought 
up  again. 

A  Flatterer:  Mademoiselle  Rebut  did 
not  look  well  this  evening. 

7:  You  demand  a  great  deal.  I 
think  she  is  very  pretty. 

A  second  Flatterer:  She  lacks  esprit. 

Rachel:  Why  do  you  talk  like  that? 
She  is  not  stupid,  like  many  others, 
and  besides,  she  has  a  good  heart. 
Leave  her  in  peace.  I  do  not  want  my 
colleagues  to  be  talked  about  in  this 
manner. 

The  punch  is  ready.  Rachel  fills  the 
glasses,  and  distributes  them.  The  re- 
mainder of  the  punch  she  pours  into  a 
soup  plate  and  begins  to  eat  it  with  a 
spoon.  Then  she  takes  my  cane,  pulls 
out  the  dagger  which  is  in  it,  and  com- 
mences to  pick  her  teeth  with  the  point 
of  it. 

Now  there  is  an  end  to  this  gossip 
and  this  childish  talk.  A  word  is  suffi- 
cient to  change  the  whole  atmosphere 
of  the  evening,  and  what  follows  is 
consecrated  with  the  power  of  art. 

7:  When  you  read  the  letter  this 
evening  you  were  very  much  moved. 

Rachel:  Yes,  I  felt  as  if  something 
were  breaking  within  me,  and  in  spite 
of  all  I  do  not  like  that  play  [Tan- 
crbde]  very  much.  It  is  untrue. 

7:  You  prefer  the  plays  of  Corneille 
and  Racine? 


AN  EVENING  AT  MADAME  RACHEL'S 


79 


Rachel:  I  like  Corneille  well  enough, 
although  he  is  flat  occasionally,  and 
sometimes  too  pompous.  All  that  is 
not  truth. 

7:  Eh,  eh!  Mademoiselle,  slowly, 
slowly! 

Rachel:  For  instance,  see,  when,  in 
Horace,  Sabine  says,  'One  can  change 
the  lover,  not  the  husband'  —  Well,  I 
don't  like  that;  that  is  common. 

I:  At  least  you  will  admit  that  that 
is  true. 

Rachel:  Yes,  but  is  it  worthy  of  Cor- 
neille? There  I  prefer  Racine.  I  adore 
him.  Everything  that  he  says  is  so 
beautiful,  so  true,  so  noble! 

I:  As  we  are  just  speaking  about 
Racine,  do  you  remember  that  some 
time  ago  you  received  an  anonymous 
letter  in  which  some  hints  were  given 
to  you  in  reference  to  the  last  scene  of 
Mithridate? 

Rachel:  Certainly.  I  followed  the 
advice,  and  since  then  I  have  a  tremen- 
dous amount  of  applause  in  this  scene. 
Do  you  know  the  person  who  wrote  me 
that? 

/:  Very  well.  It  is  a  woman  who  is 
the  happy  possessor  of  the  most  bril- 
liant mind  and  the  smallest  foot  in 
Paris.  Which  r61e  are  you  studying 
now? 

Rachel :  This  summer  we  shall  play 
Maria  Stuart,  and  then  Polyeucte  and 
may  be  — 

I:  What? 

Rachel  (beating  the  table  with  her 
fist):  Listen,  I  want  to  play  Phedre. 
It  is  said  that  I  am  too  young,  that  I 
am  too  thin,  and  a  hundred  other  stu- 
pidities of  that  kind.  But  I  answer,  it 
is  the  most  beautiful  part  by  Racine, 
and  I  shall  play  it. 

Sarah :  That  would  probably  not 
be  right,  Rachel. 

Rachel:  Leave  me  in  peace!  They 
think  I  am  too  young,  the  part  is  not 
appropriate.  By  Heaven,  when  I  was 
playing  Roxane  I  said  quite  differ- 


ent things,  and  what  do  I  care  about 
that?  And  if  they  say  that  I  am  too 
thin,  then  I  consider  that  a  stupidity. 
A  woman  who  is  filled  with  a  crim- 
inal love,  and  who  would  rather  die 
than  submit  to  it,  a  woman  who  is  con- 
suming herself  in  the  fire  of  her  passion, 
of  her  tears,  such  a  woman  cannot  have 
a  bosom  like  the  Paradol;  that  would 
be  absurd.  I  have  read  the  part  ten 
times  within  the  last  eight  days.  I  do 
not  know  how  I  am  going  to  play  it, 
but  I  can  tell  you  this :  I  feel  the  part. 
The  papers  can  write  what  they  please. 
They  will  not  spoil  it  for  me.  They  do 
not  know  what  to  bring  up  against  me, 
in  order  to  harm  me  instead  of  helping 
and  encouraging  me ;  but  if  there  is  no 
other  way  out  of  it  I  shall  play  it  to  only 
four  persons.  (Turning  to  me.)  Yes, 
I  have  read  many  candid  and  conscien- 
tious criticisms,  and  I  know  of  nothing 
better,  nothing  more  useful,  but  there 
are  many  people  who  are  using  their 
pen  in  order  to  lie,  in  order  to  destroy. 
They  are  worse  than  thieves  and  mur- 
derers. They  kill  the  intellect  with 
pin-pricks.  Really,  if  I  could  I  would 
poison  them! 

The  Mother :  Dear  child,  you  never 
stop  talking;  you  are  making  yourself 
tired.  You  were  on  your  feet  at  six 
o'clock  this  morning;  I  don't  know 
what  was  the  matter  with  you.  You  've 
been  gossiping  all  day.  And  then  you 
played  this  evening.  You  will  make 
yourself  sick. 

Rachel  (full  of  liveliness):  No,  let 
me  be.  I  tell  you,  no.  I  call  this  life. 
(Turning  to  me)  Shall  I  fetch  the  book? 
We  will  read  the  play  together. 

I:  There  is  no  need  of  such  a  ques- 
tion. You  cannot  make  me  a  pleas- 
ant er  suggestion. 

Sarah :  But,  dear  Rachel,  it  is  half 
past  eleven. 

Rachel:  Who  hinders  you  from  go- 
ing to  sleep? 

Sarah  actually  goes  to  bed;  Rachel 


80 


AN  EVENING  AT  MADAME  RACHEL'S 


rises  and  goes  out,  and  on  returning 
holds  in  her  hand  the  volume  of  Ra- 
cine. Her  expression  and  her  walk 
have  something  festive  and  sacred.  She 
walks  like  a  priestess  who,  carrying 
the  holy  vessels,  approaches  the  altar. 
She  sits  down  next  to  me,  and  snuffs 
the  candle;  the  mother  falls  asleep 
smilingly. 

Rachel  (opens  the  book  with  spe- 
cial reverence  and  leans  over  it) :  How 
I  love  this  man !  When  I  put  my  nose 
into  this  book  I  could  forget  to  eat  and 
to  drink  for  two  days  and  two  nights. 

Rachel  and  I  begin  to  read  Phddre. 
The  book  lies  open  between  us  on  the 
table.  All  the  others  go  away.  Rachel 
bows  to  each  one  as  they  depart,  with 
a  slight  nod  of  the  head,  and  continues 
in  her  reading.  At  first  she  reads  in  a 
monotonous  tone,  as  if  it  were  a  litany; 
by  and  by  she  becomes  more  animated; 
we  exchange  our  ideas  and  our  obser- 
vations about  each  passage.  Finally 
she  arrives  at  the  explanation.  She 
stretches  out  her  right  arm  on  her 
table,  resting  it  on  her  elbow,  the  fore- 
head in  her  left  hand.  She  lets  herself 
be  carried  away  by  the  contents  of  the 
passage;  at  the  same  time  she  speaks 


in  a  half-lowered  voice.  Suddenly  her 
eyes  flash,  the  genius  of  Racine  lights 
up  her  features,  she  pales,  she  blushes. 
Never  have  I  seen  anything  more  beau- 
tiful, anything  more  moving;  nor  did 
she  ever  make  such  a  deep  impression 
on  me  in  the  theatre. 

So  the  time  passes  until  half  past 
twelve.  The  father  returns  from  the 
opera,  where  he  had  seen  La  Nathan 
appear  for  the  first  time  in  La  Juive. 
No  sooner  had  he  sat  down  than  he 
ordered  his  daughter  in  brusque  words 
to  stop  her  declamation.  Rachel  closes 
the  book  and  says,  — 

'It  is  revolting.  I  am  going  to  buy 
myself  a  light,  and  will  read  alone  in 
bed/ 

I  looked  at  her;  big  tears  filled  her 
eyes. 

It  was  really  shocking  to  see  such  a 
creature  treated  in  this  way.  I  rose  to 
go,  filled  with  admiration,  respect,  and 
sympathy. 

Having  reached  home,  I  hurry  to 
put  down  the  details  of  this  memor- 
able evening  for  you  with  the  faithful- 
ness of  a  stenographer,  in  the  expecta- 
tion that  you  will  keep  it,  and  that  one 
day  it  will  be  found. 


LESSONS  OF  THE  WILDERNESS 


BY   JOHN   MUIR 


EXCEPTING  Sundays  we  boys  had 
only  two  days  of  the  year  to  our- 
selves, the  4th  of  July  and  the  1st  of 
January.  Sundays  were  less  than  half 
our  own,  on  account  of  Bible  lessons, 
Sunday-school  lessons,  and  church  ser- 
vices; all  the  others  were  labor-days, 
rain  or  shine,  cold  or  warm.  No  won- 
der then  that  our  two  holidays  were 
precious,  and  that  it  was  not  easy  to 
decide  what  to  do  with  them.  They 
were  usually  spent  on  the  highest  rocky 
hill  in  the  neighborhood,  called  the  Ob- 
servatory; in  visiting  our  boy  friends 
on  adjacent  farms  to  hunt,  fish,  wres- 
tle, and  play  games;  in  reading  some 
new  favorite  book  we  had  managed  to 
borrow  or  buy;  or  in  making  models  of 
machines  I  had  invented. 

One  of  our  July  days  was  spent  with 
two  Scotch  boys  of  our  own  age,  hunt- 
ing redwing  blackbirds  then  busy  in 
the  cornfields.  Our  party  had  only 
one  single-barreled  shot-gun,  which,  as 
the  oldest,  and  perhaps  because  I  was 
thought  to  be  the  best  shot,  I  had 
the  honor  of  carrying.  We  marched 
through  the  corn  without  getting  sight 
of  a  single  redwing,  but  just  as  we 
reached  the  far  side  of  the  field  a  red- 
headed woodpecker  flew  up  and  the 
Lawson  boys  cried,  'Shoot  him!  shoot 
him!  he  is  just  as  bad  as  a  blackbird. 
He  eats  corn!' 

This  memorable  woodpecker  alight- 

1  Earlier  chapters  of  John  Muir's  autobio- 
graphy have  been  published  in  the  November  and 
December  issues  of  the  Atlantic,  — THE  EDITORS. 
VOL.  in  -NO.  1 


ed  in  the  top  of  a  white  oak  tree  about 
fifty  feet  high.  I  fired  from  a  position 
almost  immediately  beneath  him  and 
he  fell  straight  down  at  my  feet.  When 
I  picked  him  up  and  was  admiring  his 
plumage  he  moved  his  legs  slightly  and 
I  said,  'Poor  bird,  he's  no  deed  yet  and 
we  '11  hae  to  kill  him  to  put  him  oot  o' 
pain,'  —  sincerely  pitying  him,  after  we 
had  taken  pleasure  in  shooting  him.  I 
had  seen  servant-girls  wringing  chick- 
ens' necks,  so  with  desperate  humanity 
I  took  the  limp  unfortunate  by  the  head, 
swung  him  around  three  or  four  times, 
thinking  I  was  wringing  his  neck,  and 
then  threw  him  hard  on  the  ground  to 
quench  the  last  possible  spark  of  life 
and  make  quick  death  doubly  sure. 
But  to  our  astonishment  the  moment 
he  struck  the  ground  he  gave  a  cry  of 
alarm  and  flew  right  straight  up  like  a 
rejoicing  lark  into  the  top  of  the  same 
tree,  and  perhaps  to  the  same  branch 
he  had  fallen  from,  and  began  to  ad- 
just his  ruffled  feathers,  nodding  and 
chirping  and  looking  down  at  us  as  if 
wondering  what  in  the  bird  world  we 
had  been  doing  to  him.  This,  of  course, 
banished  all  thought  of  killing,  so  far 
as  that  revived  woodpecker  was  con- 
cerned, no  matter  how  many  ears  of 
corn  he  might  spoil,  and  we  all  heart- 
ily congratulated  him  on  his  wonder- 
ful, triumphant  resurrection  from  three 
kinds  of  death, — shooting,  neck- wring- 
ing, and  destructive  concussion.  I  sup- 
pose only  one  pellet  had  touched  him, 
glancing  on  his  head. 

We  saw  very  little  of  the  owlish, 
serious-looking  coons,  and  no  wonder, 

81 


LESSONS  OF  THE  WILDERNESS 


since  they  lie  hidden  nearly  all  day  in 
hollow  trees,  and  we  never  had  time  to 
hunt  them.  We  often  heard  their  curi- 
ous, quavering,  whining  cries  on  still 
evenings,  but  only  once  succeeded  in 
tracing  an  unfortunate  family  through 
our  cornfield  to  their  den  in  a  big  oak 
and  catching  them  all.  One  of  our 
neighbors,  Mr.  McRath,  a  Highland 
Scotchman,  caught  one  and  made  a 
pet  of  it. 

So  far  as  I  know,  all  wild  creatures 
keep  themselves  clean.  Birds,  it  seems 
to  me,  take  more  pains  to  bathe  and 
dress  themselves  than  any  other  ani- 
mals. Even  ducks,  though  living  so 
much  in  water,  dip  and  scatter  cleans- 
ing showers  over  their  backs,  and 
shake  and  preen  their  feathers  as  care- 
fully as  land  birds.  Watching  small 
singers  taking  their  morning  baths  is 
very  interesting,  particularly  when  the 
weather  is  cold.  Alighting  in  a  shallow 
pool,  they  oftentimes  show  a  sort  of 
dread  of  dipping  into  it,  like  children 
hesitating  about  taking  a  plunge,  as  if 
they  were  subject  to  the  same  kind  of 
shock,  and  this  makes  it  easy  for  us 
to  sympathize  with  the  little  feathered 
people. 

Occasionally  I  have  seen  from  my 
study  window  red-headed  linnets  bath- 
ing in  dew  when  water  elsewhere  was 
scarce.  A  large  Monterey  cypress  with 
broad  branches  and  innumerable  leaves 
on  which  the  dew  lodges  in  still  nights 
made  a  favorite  bathing-place.  Alight- 
ing gently,  as  if  afraid  to  waste  the 
dew,  they  would  pause,  and  fidget  as 
they  do  before  beginning  to  plash  in 
pools;  then  dip  and  scatter  the  drops 
in  showers  and  get  as  thorough  a  bath 
as  they  would  in  a  pool.  I  have  also 
seen  the  same  kind  of  baths  taken  by 
birds  on  the  boughs  of  silver  firs  on 
the  edge  of  a  glacier  meadow,  but  no- 
where have  I  seen  the  dewdrops  so 
abundant  as  on  the  Monterey  cypress ; 
and  the  picture  made  by  the  quivering 


wings  and  irised  dew  was  memorably 
beautiful.  Children,  too,  make  fine 
pictures  plashing  and  crowing  in  their 
little  tubs.  How  widely  different  from 
wallowing  pigs,  bathing  with  great 
show  of  comfort,  and  rubbing  them- 
selves dry  against  rough-barked  trees! 

Some  of  our  own  species  seem  fairly 
to  dread  the  touch  of  water.  When 
the  necessity  of  absolute  cleanliness 
by  means  of  frequent  baths  was  being 
preached  by  a  friend  who  had  been 
reading  Comb's  Physiology,  in  which 
he  had  learned  something  of  the  won- 
ders of  the  skin,  with  its  millions  of 
pores  that  had  to  be  kept  open  for 
health,  one  of  our  neighbors  remark- 
ed, 'Oh!  that's  unnatural.  It's  well 
enough  to  wash  in  a  tub  maybe  once 
or  twice  in  a  year,  but  not  to  be  pad- 
dling in  the  water  all  the  time  like  a 
frog  in  a  spring-hole.'  Another  neigh- 
bor, who  prided  himself  on  his  know- 
ledge of  big  words,  said,  with  great  sol- 
emnity, *  I  never  can  believe  that  man 
is  amphibious!' 

It  seemed  very  wonderful  to  us  that 
the  wild  animals  could  keep  themselves 
warm  and  strong  in  winter  when  the 
temperature  was  far  below  zero.  Fee- 
ble-looking rabbits  scudded  away  over 
the  snow,  lithe  and  elastic,  as  if  glory- 
ing in  the  frosty  sparkling  weather  and 
sure  of  their  dinners.  I  have  seen  gray 
squirrels  dragging  ears  of  corn,  about  as 
heavy  as  themselves,  out  of  their  field 
through  loose  snow  and  up  a  tree,  bal- 
ancing them  on  limbs  and  eating  in 
comfort  with  their  dry  electric  tails 
spread  airily  over  their  backs.  Once  I 
saw  a  fine  hardy  fellow  go  into  a  knot- 
hole. Thrusting  in  my  hand,  I  caught 
him  and  dragged  him  out.  As  soon  as 
he  guessed  what  I  was  up  to,  he  took 
the  end  of  my  thumb  in  his  mouth  and 
sunk  his  teeth  right  through  it,  but  I 
gripped  him  hard  by  the  neck,  carried 
him  home,  and  shut  him  up  in  a  box 
that  contained  about  half  a  bushel  of 


LESSONS  OF  THE   WILDERNESS 


83 


hazel  and  hickory  nuts,  hoping  that 
he  would  not  be  too  much  frightened 
and  discouraged  to  eat,  while  thus  im- 
prisoned, after  the  rough  handling  he 
had  suffered. 

I  soon  learned,  however,  that  sym- 
pathy in  this  direction  was  wasted; 
for  no  sooner  did  I  pop  him  in  than 
he  fell  to  with  right  hearty  appetite, 
gnawing  and  munching  the  nuts  as  if 
he  had  gathered  them  himself  and 
were  very  hungry  that  day.  Therefore, 
after  allowing  time  enough  for  a  good 
square  meal,  I  made  haste  to  get  him 
out  of  the  nut-box  and  shut  him  up  in 
a  spare  bedroom,  in  which  father  had 
hung  a  lot  of  selected  ears  of  Indian 
corn  for  seed.  They  were  hung  up  by 
the  husks  on  cords  stretched  across 
from  side  to  side  of  the  room.  The 
squirrel  managed  to  jump  from  the 
top  of  one  of  the  bed-posts  to  the  cord, 
cut  off  an  ear,  and  let  it  drop  to  the 
floor.  He  then  jumped  down,  got  a 
good  grip  of  the  heavy  ear,  carried  it 
to  the  top  of  one  of  the  slippery,  pol- 
ished bed-posts,  seated  himself  com- 
fortably, and,  holding  it  balanced,  de- 
liberately pried  out  one  kernel  at  a 
time  with  his  long  chisel  teeth,  ate  the 
soft,  sweet  germ,  and  dropped  the  hard 
part  of  the  kernel.  In  this  masterly 
way,  working  at  high  speed,  he  demol- 
ished several  ears  a  day,  and  with  a 
good  warm  bed  in  a  box  made  himself 
at  home  and  grew  fat.  Then,  natur- 
ally, I  suppose,  free  romping  in  the 
snow  and  tree-tops  with  companions 
came  to  mind.  Anyhow  he  began  to 
look  for  a  way  of  escape.  Of  course,  he 
first  tried  the  window,  but  found  that 
his  teeth  made  no  impression  on  the 
glass.  Next  he  tried  the  sash  and 
gnawed  the  wood  off  level  with  the 
glass;  then  father  happened  to  come 
upstairs  and  discovered  the  mischief 
that  was  being  done  to  his  seed-corn 
and  window,  and  immediately  ordered 
him  out  of  the  house. 


Before  the  arrival  of  farmers  in  the 
Wisconsin  woods  the  small  ground 
squirrels,  called  *  gophers,'  lived  chief- 
ly on  the  seeds  of  wild  grasses  and 
weeds;  but  after  the  country  was  clear- 
ed and  ploughed,  no  feasting  animal 
fell  to  more  heartily  on  the  farmer's 
wheat  and  corn.  Increasing  rapidly  in 
numbers  and  knowledge,  they  became 
very  destructive,  particularly  in  the 
spring  when  the  corn  was  planted,  for 
they  learned  to  trace  the  rows  and  dig 
up  and  eat  the  three  or  four  seeds  in 
each  hill  about  as  fast  as  the  poor  farm- 
ers could  cover  them.  And,  unless 
great  pains  were  taken  to  diminish  the 
numbers  of  the  cunning  little  robbers, 
the  fields  had  to  be  planted  two  or 
three  times  over,  and  even  then  large 
gaps  in  the  rows  would  be  found.  The 
loss  of  the  grain  they  consumed  after 
it  was  ripe,  together  with  the  winter 
stores  laid  up  in  their  burrows,  amount- 
ed to  little  as  compared  with  the  loss 
of  the  seed  on  which  the  whole  crop 
depended. 

One  evening  about  sundown,  when 
my  father  sent  me  out  with  the  shot- 
gun to  hunt  them  in  a  stubble  field,  I 
learned  something  curious  and  inter- 
esting in  connection  with  these  mischie- 
vous gophers,  though  just  then  they 
were  doing  no  harm.  As  I  strolled 
through  the  stubble,  watching  for  a 
chance  for  a  shot,  a  shrike  flew  past 
me,  and  alighted  on  an  open  spot  at  the 
mouth  of  a  burrow  about  thirty  yards 
ahead  of  me.  Curious  to  see  what  he 
was  up  to,  I  stood  still  to  watch  him. 
He  looked  down  the  gopher-hole  in  a 
listening  attitude,  then  looked  back  at 
me  to  see  if  I  was  coming,  looked  down 
again  and  listened,  and  looked  back  at 
me.  I  stood  perfectly  still,  and  he  kept 
twitching  his  tail,  seeming  uneasy  and 
doubtful  about  venturing  to  do  the  sav- 
age job  that  I  soon  learned  he  had  in 
his  mind.  Finally,  encouraged  by  my 
keeping  so  still,  to  my  astonishment 


84 


LESSONS  OF  THE  WILDERNESS 


he  suddenly  vanished  in  the  gopher- 
hole. 

A  bird  going  down  a  deep  narrow 
hole  in  the  ground  like  a  ferret  or  a 
weasel  seemed  very  strange,  and  I 
thought  it  would  be  a  fine  thing  to  run 
forward,  clap  my  hand  over  the  hole, 
and  have  the  fun  of  imprisoning  him 
and  seeing  what  he  would  do  when  he 
tried  to  get  out.  So  I  ran  forward,  but 
stopped  when  I  got  within  a  dozen  or 
fifteen  yards  of  the  hole,  thinking  it 
might,  perhaps,  be  more  interesting,  to 
wait  and  see  what  would  naturally 
happen  without  my  interference.  While 
I  stood  there  looking  and  listening,  I 
heard  a  great  disturbance  going  on  in 
the  burrow,  a  mixed  lot  of  keen  squeak- 
ing, shrieking,  distressful  cries,  telling 
that  down  in  the  dark  something  terri- 
ble was  being  done. 

Then  suddenly  out  popped  a  half- 
grown  gopher,  four  and  a  half  or  five 
inches  long,  and,  without  stopping  a  sin- 
gle moment  to  choose  a  way  of  escape, 
ran  screaming  through  the  stubble 
straight  away  from  its  home,  quickly 
followed  by  another  and  another,  until 
some  half  dozen  were  driven  out,  all 
of  them  crying  and  running  in  different 
directions,  as  if  at  this  dreadful  time 
*  home,  sweet  home '  was  the  most  dan- 
gerous and  least  desirable  of  all  places 
in  the  wide  world.  Then  out  came  the 
shrike,  flew  above  the  runaway  gopher 
children,  and,  diving  on  them,  killed 
them  one  after  another  with  blows  at 
the  back  of  the  skull.  He  then  seized 
one  of  them,  dragged  it  to  the  top  of  a 
small  clod,  so  as  to  be  able  to  get  a 
start,  and  laboriously  made  out  to  fly 
with  it  about  ten  or  fifteen  yards,  when 
he  alighted  to  rest.  Then  he  dragged 
it  to  the  top  of  another  clod  and  flew 
with  it  about  the  same  distance,  repeat- 
ing this  hard  work  over  and  over  again, 
until  he  managed  to  get  one  of  the 
gophers  on  to  the  top  of  a  log  fence. 
How  much  he  ate  of  his  hard- won  prey, 


or  what  he  did  with  the  others,  I  can't 
tell,  for  by  this  time  the  sun  was  down, 
and  I  had  to  hurry  home  to  my  chores. 


ii 

At  first,  wheat,  corn,  and  potatoes 
were  the  principal  crops  we  raised; 
wheat  especially.  But  in  four  or  five 
years  the  soil  was  so  exhausted  that 
only  five  or  six  bushels  an  acre,  even 
in  the  better  fields,  were  obtained,  al- 
though when  first  ploughed  twenty  and 
twenty-five  bushels  were  about  the 
ordinary  yield.  More  attention  was 
then  paid  to  corn,  but  without  ferti- 
lizers the  corn  crop  also  became  very 
meagre.  At  last  it  was  discovered  that 
English  clover  would  grow  on  even 
the  exhausted  fields,  and  that  when 
ploughed  under  and  planted  with  corn, 
or  even  wheat,  wonderful  crops  were 
raised.  This  caused  a  complete  change 
in  farming  methods :  the  farmers  raised 
fertilizing  clover,  planted  corn,  and  fed 
the  crop  to  cattle  and  hogs. 

In  summer  the  chores  were  grinding 
scythes,  feeding  the  animals,  chopping 
stove-wood,  and  carrying  water  up  the 
hill  from  the  spring  on  the  edge  of  the 
meadow,  and  so  forth.  Then  break- 
fast, and  to  the  harvest  or  hayfield. 
I  was  foolishly  ambitious  to  be  first  in 
mowing  and  cradling,  and,  by  the  time 
I  was  sixteen,  led  all  the  hired  men. 
An  hour  was  allowed  at  noon,  and  then 
more  chores.  We  stayed  in  the  field 
until  dark;  then  supper,  and  still  more 
chores,  family  worship,  and  to  bed; 
making  altogether  a  hard,  sweaty  day 
of  about  sixteen  or  seventeen  hourso 
Think  of  that,  ye  blessed  eight-hour- 
day  laborers! 

In  winter,  father  came  to  the  foot  of 
the  stairs  and  called  us  at  six  o'clock 
to  feed  the  horses  and  cattle,  grind 
axes,  bring  in  wood,  and  do  any  other 
chores  required;  then  breakfast,  and 
out  to  work  in  the  mealy,  frosty  snow 


LESSONS  OF  THE  WILDERNESS 


85 


by  daybreak,  chopping,  fencing,  and 
so  forth.  So  in  general  our  winter  work 
was  about  as  restless  and  trying  as  that 
of  the  long-day  summer.  No  matter 
what  the  weather,  there  was  always 
something  to  do.  During  heavy  rain- 
or  snow-storms  we  worked  in  the  barn, 
shelling  corn,  fanning  wheat,  thrash- 
ing with  the  flail,  making  axe-handles, 
ox-yokes,  mending  things,  or  sorting 
sprouting  potatoes  in  the  cellar. 

No  pains  were  taken  to  diminish  or 
in  any  way  soften  the  natural  hard- 
ships of  this  pioneer  farm-life;  nor  did 
any  of  the  Europeans  seem  to  know 
how  to  find  reasonable  ease  and  com- 
fort if  they  would.  The  very  best  oak 
and  hickory  fuel  was  embarrassingly 
abundant  and  cost  nothing  but  cut- 
ting and  common  sense;  but  instead  of 
hauling  great  heart-cheering  loads  of 
it  for  wide,  open,  all-welcoming,  cli- 
mate-changing, beauty-making,  God- 
like ingle-fires,  it  was  hauled  with 
weary,  heart-breaking  industry  into 
fences  and  waste  places,  to  get  it  out 
of  the  way  of  the  plough,  and  out  of 
the  way  of  doing  good. 

The  only  fire  for  the  whole  house 
was  the  kitchen  stove,  with  a  fire- 
box about  eighteen  inches  long  and 
eight  inches  wide  and  deep,  —  scant 
space  for  three  or  four  small  sticks, 
around  which,  in  hard  zero  weather, 
all  the  family  of  ten  persons  shivered, 
and  beneath  which,  in  the  morning, 
we  found  our  socks  and  coarse  soggy 
boots  frozen  solid.  We  were  not  allow- 
ed to  start  even  this  despicable  little 
fire  in  its  black  box  to  thaw  them. 
No,  we  had  to  squeeze  our  throbbing, 
aching,  chilblained  feet  into  them, 
causing  greater  pain  than  toothache, 
and  hurry  out  to  chores.  Fortunately 
the  miserable  chilblain  pain  began  to 
abate  as  soon  as  the  temperature  of 
our  feet  approached  the  freezing-point, 
enabling  us,  in  spite  of  hard  work  and 
hard  frost,  to  enjoy  the  winter  beauty, 


• —  the  wonderful  radiance  of  the  snow 
when  it  was  starry  with  crystals,  and 
the  dawns  and  the  sunsets  and  white 
noons,  and  the  cheery  enlivening  com- 
pany of  the  brave  chickadees  and  nut- 
hatches. 

The  winter  stars  far  surpassed  those 
of  our  stormy  Scotland  in  brightness, 
and  we  gazed  and  gazed  as  though  we 
had  never  seen  stars  before.  Often- 
times the  heavens  were  made  still  more 
glorious  by  auroras,  the  long  lance 
rays,  called  'Merry  Dancers'  in  Scot- 
land, streaming  with  startling  tremu- 
lous motion  to  the  zenith.  Usually  the 
electric  auroral  light  is  white  or  pale 
yellow,  but  in  the  third  or  fourth  of  our 
Wisconsin  winters  there  was  a  mag- 
nificently colored  aurora  that  was  seen 
and  admired  over  nearly  all  the  conti- 
nent. The  whole  sky  was  draped  in 
graceful  purple  and  crimson  folds  glo- 
rious beyond  description.  Father  call- 
ed us  out  into  the  yard  in  front  of  the 
house  where  we  had  a  wide  view,  cry- 
ing, 'Come!  Come,  mother!  Come, 
bairns!  and  see  the  glory  of  God.  All 
the  sky  is  clad  in  a  robe  of  red  light. 
Look  straight  up  to  the  crown  where 
the  folds  are  gathered.  Hush  and  won- 
der and  adore,  for  surely  this  is  the 
clothing  of  the  Lord  Himself,  and  per- 
haps He  will  even  now  appear  look- 
ing down  from  his  high  heaven.'  This 
celestial  show  was  far  more  glorious 
than  anything  we  had  ever  yet  beheld, 
and  throughout  that  wonderful  winter 
hardly  anything  else  was  spoken  of. 

We  even  enjoyed  the  snow-storms; 
the  thronging  crystals,  like  daisies,  com- 
ing down  separate  and  distinct,  were 
very  different  from  the  tufted  flakes 
we  enjoyed  so  much  in  Scotland,  when 
we  ran  into  the  midst  of  the  slow-fall- 
ing, feathery  throng  shouting  with  en- 
thusiasm, '  Jennie 's  plucking  her  doos 
[doves]!  Jennie 's  plucking  her  doos! ' 

Nature  has  many  ways  of  thinning 
and  pruning  and  trimming  her  forests 


86 


LESSONS  OF  THE  WILDERNESS 


—  lightning  strokes,  heavy  snow,  and 
storm-winds  to  shatter  and  blow  down 
whole  trees  here  and  there,  or  break  off 
branches  as  required.  The  results  of 
these  methods  I  have  observed  in  dif- 
ferent forests,  but  only  once  have  I 
seen  pruning  by  rain.  The  rain  froze 
on  the  trees  as  it  fell,  and  the  ice  grew 
so  thick  and  heavy  that  many  of  them 
lost  a  third  or  more  of  their  branches. 
The  view  of  the  woods  when  the  storm 
had  passed  and  the  sun  shone  forth 
was  something  never  to  be  forgotten. 
Every  twig  and  branch  and  rugged 
trunk  was  encased  in  pure  crystal  ice, 
and  each  oak  and  hickory  and  willow 
became  a  fairy  crystal  palace.  Such 
dazzling  brilliance,  such  effects  of  white 
light  and  irised  light,  glowing  and  flash- 
ing, I  had  never  seen,  nor  have  I  since. 
This  sudden  change  of  the  leafless 
woods  to  glowing  silver  was,  like  the 
great  aurora,  spoken  of  for  years,  and 
is  one  of  the  most  beautiful  of  the 
many  pictures  that  enrich  my  life.  And 
besides  the  great  shows  there  were 
thousands  of  others,  even  in  the  cold- 
est weather,  manifesting  the  utmost 
fineness  and  tenderness  of  beauty,  and 
affording  noble  compensation  for  hard- 
ship and  pain. 


in 

Although  in  the  spring  of  1849  there 
was  no  other  settler  within  a  radius  of 
four  miles  of  our  Fountain  Lake  farm, 
in  three  or  four  years  almost  every 
quarter-section  of  government  land 
was  taken  up,  mostly  by  enthusiastic 
home-seekers  from  Great  Britain,  with 
only  here  and  there  Yankee  families 
from  adjacent  states,  who  had  come 
drifting  indefinitely  westward  in  cov- 
ered wagons,  seeking  their  fortunes 
like  winged  seeds;  all  alike  striking 
root  and  gripping  the  glacial  drift-soil 
as  naturally  as  oak  and  hickory  trees; 
happy  and  hopeful,  establishing  homes, 


and  making  wider  and  wider  fields  in 
the  hospitable  wilderness.  The  axe  and 
plough  were  kept  very  busy;  cattle, 
horses,  sheep,  and  pigs  multiplied; 
barns  and  corn-cribs  were  filled  up,  and 
man  and  beast  were  well  fed ;  a  school- 
house  was  built  which  was  used  also 
for  a  church,  and  in  a  very  short  time 
the  new  country  began  to  look  like  an 
old  one. 

Comparatively  few  of  the  first  set- 
tlers suffered  from  serious  accidents. 
One  of  the  neighbors  had  a  finger  shot 
off,  and  on  a  bitter,  frosty  night,  had 
to  be  taken  to  a  surgeon  in  Portage,  in 
a  sled  drawn  by  slow,  plodding  oxen, 
to  have  the  shattered  stump  dressed. 
Another  fell  from  his  wagon  and  was 
killed  by  the  wheel  passing  over  his 
body.  An  acre  of  ground  was  reserved 
and  fenced  for  graves,  and  soon  con- 
sumption came  to  fill  it.  One  of  the 
saddest  instances  was  that  of  a  Scotch 
family  from  Edinburgh,  consisting  of 
a  father,  son,  and  daughter,  who  set- 
tled on  eighty  acres  of  land  within  half 
a  mile  of  our  place.  The  daughter  died 
of  consumption  the  third  year  after 
their  arrival,  the  son  one  or  two  years 
later,  and  at  last  the  father  followed 
his  two  children,  completely  wiping  out 
the  entire  family.  Thus  sadly  ended 
bright  hopes  and  dreams  of  a  happy 
home  in  rich  and  free  America. 

Another  neighbor,  I  remember,  after 
a  lingering  illness,  died  of  the  same  dis- 
ease in  midwinter,  and  his  funeral  was 
attended  by  the  neighbors,  in  sleighs, 
during  a  driving  snow-storm  when  the 
thermometer  was  fifteen  or  twenty  de- 
grees below  zero. 

One  of  the  saddest  deaths  from  other 
causes  than  consumption  was  that  of  a 
poor  feeble-minded  man  whose  brother, 
a  sturdy  blacksmith  and  preacher,  and 
so  forth,  was  a  very  hard  taskmaster. 
Poor  half-witted  Charlie  was  kept 
steadily  at  work  —  although  he  was  not 
able  to  do  much,  for  his  body  was  about 


LESSONS  OF  THE  WILDERNESS 


87 


as  feeble  as  his  mind.  He  never  could 
be  taught  the  right  use  of  an  axe,  and 
when  he  was  set  to  chopping  down 
trees  for  fire-wood,  he  feebly  hacked 
and  chipped  round  and  round  them, 
sometimes  spending  several  days  in 
nibbling  down  a  tree  that  a  beaver 
might  have  gnawed  down  in  half  the 
time.  Occasionally,  when  he  had  an 
extra  large  tree  to  chop,  he  would  go 
home  and  report  that  the  tree  was  too 
tough  and  strong  for  him,  and  that  he 
could  never  make  it  fall.  Then  his  bro- 
ther, calling  him  a  useless  creature, 
would  fell  it  with  a  few  well-directed 
strokes,  and  leave  Charlie  to  nibble 
away  at  it  for  weeks  trying  to  make  it 
into  stove- wood. 

The  brawny  blacksmith-minister 
punished  his  feeble  brother  without  any 
show  of  mercy  for  every  trivial  offense 
or  mistake  or  pathetic  little  short- 
coming. All  the  neighbors  pitied  him 
—  especially  the  women,  who  never 
missed  an  opportunity  to  give  him 
kind  words,  cookies,  and  pie;  above  all 
they  bestowed  natural  sympathy  on 
the  poor  imbecile  as  if  he  were  an  un- 
fortunate motherless  child.  In  partic- 
ular, his  nearest  neighbors,  Scotch 
Highlanders,  warmly  welcomed  him  to 
their  home  and  never  wearied  in  do- 
ing everything  that  tender  sympathy 
could  suggest.  To  those  friends  he  ran 
away  at  every  opportunity.  But,  after 
years  of  suffering  from  overwork  and 
punishment,  his  feeble  health  failed, 
and  he  told  his  Scotch  friends  one  day 
that  he  was  not  able  to  work  any  more 
or  do  anything  that  his  brother  wanted 
him  to  do,  that  he  was  beaten  every 
day,  and  that  he  had  come  to  thank 
them  for  their  kindness  and  bid  them 
good-bye,  for  he  was  going  to  drown 
himself  in  Muir's  lake. 

*  Oh,  Charlie!  Charlie!'  they  cried, 
'you  must  n't  talk  that  way.  Cheer 
up!  You  will  soon  be  stronger.  We 
all  love  you.  Cheer  up!  Cheer  up! 


And  always  come  here  whenever  you 
need  anything.'  >j 

'Oh,  no!  my  friends,'  he  pathetically 
replied,  'I  know  you  love  me,  but  I 
can't  cheer  up  any  more.  My  heart's 
gone,  and  I  want  to  die.' 

Next  day,  when  Mr.  Anderson,  a 
carpenter  whose  house  was  on  the  west 
shore  of  our  lake,  was  going  to  a  spring, 
he  saw  a  man  wade  out  through  the 
rushes  and  lily-pads  and  throw  himself 
forward  into  deep  water.  This  was 
poor  Charlie.  Fortunately  Mr.  Ander- 
son had  a  skiff  close  by  and,  as  the  dis- 
tance was  not  great,  he  reached  the 
broken-hearted  imbecile  in  time  to 
save  his  life,  and  after  trying  to  cheer 
him  took  him  home  to  his  brother. 
But  even  this  terrible  proof  of  despair 
failed  to  soften  the  latter.  He  seemed 
to  regard  the  attempt  at  suicide  sim- 
ply as  a  crime  calculated  to  bring  the 
reproach  of  the  neighbors  upon  him. 
One  morning,  after  receiving  another 
beating,  Charlie  was  set  to  work  chop- 
ping fire-wood  in  front  of  the  house, 
and  after  feebly  swinging  his  axe  a  few 
times  he  pitched  forward  on  his  face 
and  died  on  the  wood-pile.  The  un- 
natural brother  then  walked  over  to 
the  neighbor  who  had  saved  Charlie 
from  drowning,  and,  after  talking  on 
ordinary  affairs,  crops,  the  weather, 
and  so  forth,  said  in  a  careless  tone, '  I 
have  a  little  job  of  carpenter  work  for 
you,  Mr.  Anderson.'  'What  is  it,  Mr. 

?'  'I  want  you  to  make  a  coffin/ 

'A  coffin!'  said  the  startled  carpenter. 
'Who  is  dead?'  'Charlie,'  he  coolly 
replied. 

All  the  neighbors  were  in  tears  over 
the  poor  child-man's  fate.  But,  strange 
to  say,  in  all  that  excessively  law-abid- 
ing neighborhood,  nobody  was  bold 
enough  or  kind  enough  to  break  the 
blacksmith's  jaw. 

The  mixed  lot  of  settlers  around  us 
offered  a  favorable  field  for  observa- 
tion of  the  different  kinds  of  people  of 


88 


LESSONS  OF  THE  WILDERNESS 


our  own  race.  We  were  swift  to  note 
the  way  they  behaved,  the  differences 
in  their  religion  and  morals,  and  in 
their  ways  of  drawing  a  living  from 
the  same  kind  of  soil  under  the  same 
general  conditions;  how  they  protect- 
ed themselves  from  the  weather;  how 
they  were  influenced  by  new  doctrines 
and  old  ones  seen  in  new  lights,  in 
preaching,  lecturing,  debating,  bring- 
ing up  their  children,  and  so  forth,  and 
how  they  regarded  the  Indians,  those 
first  settlers  and  owners  of  the  ground 
that  was  being  made  into  farms. 

I  well  remember  my  father's  discuss- 
ing with  a  Scotch  neighbor,  a  Mr. 
George  Mair,  the  Indian  question,  as 
to  the  rightful  ownership  of  the  soil. 
Mr.  Mair  remarked  one  day  that  it  was 
pitiful  to  see  how  the  unfortunate  In- 
dians, children  of  Nature,  living  on  the 
natural  products  of  the  soil,  hunting, 
fishing,  and  even  cultivating  small 
cornfields  on  the  most  fertile  spots, 
were  now  being  robbed  of  their  lands, 
and  pushed  ruthlessly  back  into  nar- 
rower and  narrower  limits  by  alien 
races  who  were  cutting  off  their  means 
of  livelihood.  Father  replied  that 
surely  it  could  never  have  been  the  in- 
tention of  God  to  allow  Indians  to  rove 
and  hunt  over  so  fertile  a  country,  and 
hold  it  forever  in  unproductive  wild- 
ness,  while  Scotch  and  Irish  and  Eng- 
lish farmers  could  put  it  to  so  much 
better  use.  Where  an  Indian  required 
thousands  of  acres  for  his  family,  these 
acres,  in  the  hands  of  industrious  God- 
fearing farmers,  would  support  ten  or  a 
hundred  times  more  people  in  a  far 
worthier  manner,  while  at  the  same 
time  helping  to  spread  the  gospel. 

Mr.  Mair  urged  that  such  farming  as 
our  first  immigrants  were  practicing 
was  in  many  ways  rude  and  full  of  the 
mistakes  of  ignorance;  yet  rude  as  it 
was,  and  ill-tilled  as  were  most  of  our 
Wisconsin  farms  by  unskillful  inex- 
perienced settlers,  who  had  been  mer- 


chants and  mechanics  and  servants  in 
the  old  countries,  how  would  we  like  to 
have  specially  trained  and  educated 
farmers  drive  us  out  of  our  homes  and 
farms,  such  as  they  were,  making  use 
of  the  same  argument,  that  God  could 
never  have  intended  such  ignorant,  un- 
profitable, devastating  farmers  as  we 
were  to  occupy  land  upon  which 
scientific  farmers  could  raise  five  or  ten 
times  as  much  per  acre  as  we  did? 
No,  my  father  retorted,  the  Lord  in- 
tended that  we  should  be  driven  out  by 
those  who  could  make  a  right  worthy 
use  of  the  soil.  And  I  well  remember 
thinking  that  Mr.  Mair  had  the  better 
side  of  the  argument. 


IV 

I  was  put  to  the  plough  at  the  age  of 
twelve,  when  my  head  reached  but  lit- 
tle above  the  handles,  and  for  many 
years  I  had  to  do  the  greater  part  of 
the  ploughing.  It  was  hard  work  for 
so  small  a  boy:  nevertheless,  as  good 
ploughing  was  exacted  from  me  as  if 
I  were  a  man,  and  very  soon  I  had 
become  a  good  ploughman,  or  rather 
plough-boy;  none  could  draw  a  straight- 
er  furrow.  For  the  first  few  years  the 
work  was  particularly  hard  on  account 
of  the  tree-stumps  that  had  to  be 
dodged.  Later  the  stumps  were  all  dug 
and  chopped  out  to  make  way  for  the 
McCormick  reaper,  and  because  I 
proved  to  be  the  best  chopper  and 
stump-digger,  I  had  nearly  all  of  it  to 
myself.  It  was  dull  hard  work  in  the 
dog-days  after  harvest,  digging  and 
leaning  over  on  my  knees  all  day, 
chopping  out  those  tough  oak  and 
hickory  stumps  deep  down  below  the 
crowns  of  the  big  roots.  Some,  though 
fortunately  not  many,  were  two  feet 
or  more  in  diameter. 

And,  being  the  eldest  boy,  the  great- 
er part  of  all  the  other  hard  work  of  the 
farm  quite  naturally  fell  on  me.  I  had 


LESSONS  OF  THE  WILDERNESS 


89 


to  split  rails  for  long  lines  of  zigzag 
fences.  The  trees  that  were  tall  enough 
and  straight  enough  to  afford  one  or 
two  logs  ten  feet  long  were  used  for 
rails,  the  others,  too  knotty  or  cross- 
grained,  were  disposed  of  in  log  and 
cord- wood  fences.  Making  rails  was 
hard  work,  and  required  no  little  skill. 
I  used  to  cut  and  split  a  hundred  a  day 
from  our  short  knotty  oak  timber, 
swinging  the  axe  and  heavy  mallet, 
often  with  sore  hands,  from  early 
morning  to  night.  Father  was  not  suc- 
cessful as  a  rail-splitter.  After  trying 
the  work  with  me  a  day  or  two,  he  in 
despair  left  it  all  to  me.  I  rather  liked 
it,  for  I  was  proud  of  my  skill,  and 
tried  to  believe  that  I  was  as  tough  as 
the  timber  I  mauled,  though  this  and 
other  heavy  jobs  stopped  my  growth 
and  earned  for  me  the  title,  'Runt  of 
the  family.' 

In  those  early  days,  before  the  great 
labor-saving  machines  came  to  our 
help,  almost  everything  connected  with 
wheat-raising  abounded  in  trying  work, 
—  sowing,  cradling  in  the  long  sweaty 
dog-days,  raking  and  binding,  stack- 
ing, thrashing,  —  and  it  often  seemed 
to  me  that  our  fierce,  over-industrious 
way  of  getting  the  grain  from  the 
ground  was  closely  connected  with 
grave-digging.  The  staff  of  life,  natur- 
ally beautiful,  oftentimes  suggested 
the  grave-digger's  spade.  Men  and 
boys,  and  in  those  days  even  women 
and  girls,  were  cut  down  while  cutting 
the  wheat.  The  fat  folk  grew  lean  and 
the  lean  leaner,  while  the  rosy  cheeks, 
brought  from  Scotland  and  other  cool 
countries  across  the  sea,  soon  faded  to 
yellow,  like  the  wheat.  We  were  all 
made  slaves  through  the  vice  of  over- 
industry. 

The  same  was  in  great  part  true 
in  making  hay  to  keep  the  cattle  and 
horses  through  the  long  winters.  We 
were  called  in  the  morning  at  four 
o'clock  and  seldom  got  to  bed  before 


nine,  making  a  broiling,  seething  day, 
seventeen  hours  long,  loaded  with  heavy 
work,  while  I  was  only  a  small  stunted 
boy;  and  a  few  years  later  my  brothers 
David  and  Daniel,  and  my  older  sis- 
ters, had  to  endure  about  as  much  as  I 
did.  In  the  harvest  dog-days  and  dog- 
nights  and  dog-mornings,  when  we 
arose  from  our  clammy  beds,  our  cot- 
ton shirts  clung  to  our  backs  as  wet 
with  sweat  as  the  bathing-suits  of 
swimmers,  and  remained  so  all  the 
long  sweltering  days.  In  mowing  and 
cradling,  the  most  exhausting  of  all  the 
farm-work,  I  made  matters  worse  by 
foolish  ambition  in  keeping  ahead  of 
the  hired  men. 

Never  a  warning  word  was  spoken  of 
the  dangers  of  overwork.  On  the  con- 
trary, even  when  sick,  we  were  held  to 
our  tasks  as  long  as  we  could  stand. 
Once  in  harvest-time  I  had  the  mumps 
and  was  unable  to  swallow  any  food 
except  milk,  but  this  was  not  allowed 
to  make  any  difference,  while  I  stag- 
gered with  weakness,  and  sometimes 
fell  headlong  among  the  sheaves.  Only 
once  was  I  allowed  to  leave  the  harvest- 
field  —  when  I  was  stricken  down  with 
pneumonia.  I  lay  gasping  for  weeks, 
but  the  Scotch  are  hard  to  kill  and  I 
pulled  through.  No  physician  was 
called,  for  father  was  an  enthusiast  and 
always  said  and  believed  that  God  and 
hard  work  were  by  far  the  best  doctors. 

None  of  our  neighbors  were  so  exces- 
sively industrious  as  father;  though 
nearly  all  of  the  Scotch,  English,  and 
Irish  worked  too  hard,  trying  to  make 
good  homes  and  to  lay  up  money 
enough  for  comfortable  independence. 
Excepting  small  garden-patches,  few  of 
them  had  owned  land  in  the  old  coun- 
try. Here  their  craving  land-hunger 
was  satisfied,  and  they  were  naturally 
proud  of  their  farms  and  tried  to  keep 
them  as  neat  and  clean  and  well-tilled 
as  gardens.  To  accomplish  this  with- 
out the  means  for  hiring  help  was  im- 


90 


LESSONS  OF  THE  WILDERNESS 


possible.  Flowers  were  planted  about 
the  neatly-kept  log  or  frame  houses; 
barn-yards,  granaries,  and  so  forth, 
were  kept  in  about  as  neat  order  as  the 
homes,  and  the  fences  and  corn-rows 
were  rigidly  straight.  But  every  uncut 
weed  distressed  them;  so  also  did  every 
ungathered  ear  of  grain,  and  all  that 
was  lost  by  birds  and  gophers;  and  this 
over-carefulness  bred  endless  work  and 
worry. 

As  for  money,  for  many  a  year  there 
was  precious  little  of  it  in  the  country 
for  anybody.  Eggs  sold  at  six  cents  a 
dozen  in  trade,  and  five-cent  calico  was 
exchanged  at  twenty-five  cents  a  yard. 
Wheat  brought  fifty  cents  a  bushel  in 
trade.  To  get  cash  for  it  before  the 
Portage  Railway  was  built  it  had  to 
be  hauled  to  Milwaukee,  a  hundred 
miles  away.  On  the  other  hand,  food 
was  abundant,  —  eggs,  chickens,  pigs, 
cattle,  wheat,  corn,  potatoes,  garden 
vegetables  of  the  best,  and  wonderful 
melons,  as  luxuries.  No  other  wild 
country  I  have  ever  known  extended  a 
kinder  welcome  to  poor  immigrants. 
Arriving  in  the  spring,  a  log  house 
could  be  built,  a  few  acres  ploughed, 
the  virgin  sod  planted  with  corn,  po- 
tatoes, and  so  forth,  and  enough  raised 
to  keep  a  family  comfortably  the  very 
first  year;  and  wild  hay  for  cows  and 
oxen  grew  in  abundance  on  the  numer- 
ous meadows.  The  American  settlers 
were  wisely  content  with  smaller  fields 
and  less  of  everything,  kept  indoors 
during  excessively  hot  or  cold  weather, 
rested  when  tired,  went  off  fishing  and 
hunting  at  the  most  favorable  times 
and  seasons  of  the  day  and  year,  gath- 
ered nuts  and  berries,  and,  in  general, 
tranquilly  accepted  all  the  good  things 
the  fertile  wilderness  offered. 


After  eight  years  of  this  dreary  work 
of  clearing  the  Fountain  Lake  farm, 


fencing  it,  and  getting  it  in  perfect  or- 
der, a  frame  house  built,  and  the  ne- 
cessary outbuildings  for  the  cattle  and 
horses,  —  after  all  this  had  been  vic- 
toriously accomplished,  and  we  had 
made  out  to  escape  with  life,  —  father 
bought  a  half-section  of  wild  land  about 
four  or  five  miles  to  the  eastward  and 
began  all  over  again  to  clear  and  fence 
and  break  up  other  fields  for  a  new 
farm,  doubling  all  the  stunting,  heart- 
breaking chopping,  grubbing,  stump- 
digging,  rail-splitting,  fence-building, 
barn-building,  house-building,  and  the 
rest. 

By  this  time  I  had  learned  to  run  the 
breaking  plough;  most  of  them  were 
very  large,  turning  furrows  from  eight- 
een inches  to  two  feet  wide,  and  were 
drawn  by  four  or  five  yoke  of  oxen. 
These  big  ploughs  were  used  only  for 
the  first  ploughing,  in  breaking  up  the 
wild  sod  woven  into  a  tough  mass 
chiefly  by  the  cordlike  roots  of  perennial 
grasses  and  reinforced  by  the  tap-roots 
of  oak  and  hickory  bushes,  called 
'grubs/  some  of  which  were  more  than 
a  century  old  and  four  or  five  inches 
in  diameter.  In  the  hardest  ploughing 
on  the  most  difficult  ground  the  grubs 
were  said  to  be  as  thick  as  the  hair  on 
a  dog's  back.  If  in  good  trim,  the 
plough  cut  through  and  turned  over 
these  grubs  as  if  the  century-old  wood 
were  soft  like  the  flesh  of  carrots  and 
turnips;  but  if  not  in  good  trim,  the 
grubs  promptly  tossed  the  plough  out 
of  the  ground.  A  stout  Highland  Scot, 
our  neighbor,  whose  plough  was  in 
bad  order  and  who  did  not  know  how 
to  trim  it,  was  vainly  trying  to  keep  it 
in  the  ground  by  main  strength,  and 
his  son,  who  was  driving  and  merrily 
whipping  up  the  cattle,  would  cry  en- 
couragingly, 'Haud  her  in,  fayther! 
Haud  her  in!'  'But  hoo  i'  the  deil 
can  I  haud  her  in  when  she'll  no  stop 
in?'  his  perspiring  father  would  reply, 
gasping  for  breath  after  each  word. 


LESSONS  OF  THE  WILDERNESS 


91 


On  the  contrary,  when  in  perfect 
trim,  with  the  share  and  coulter  sharp, 
the  plough,  instead  of  shying  at  every 
grub  and  jumping  out,  ran  straight 
ahead,  without  need  of  steering  or 
holding,  and  gripped  the  ground  so 
firmly  that  it  could  hardly  be  thrown 
out  at  the  end  of  the  furrow. 

Our  breaker  turned  a  furrow  two 
feet  wide,  and  on  our  best  land  held  so 
firm  a  grip  that,  at  the  end  of  the  field, 
my  brother,  who  was  driving  the  oxen, 
had  to  come  to  my  assistance  in  throw- 
ing it  over  on  its  side  to  be  drawn 
around  the  end  of  the  landing;  and  it 
was  all  I  could  do  to  set  it  up  again. 
But  I  learned  to  keep  that  plough  in 
such  trim  that  after  I  got  started  on 
a  new  furrow  I  used  to  ride  on  the 
cross-bar  between  the  handles,  with 
my  feet  resting  comfortably  on  the 
beam,  without  having  to  steady  or 
steer  it  in  any  way  until  it  reached  the 
other  end,  unless  we  had  to  go  around 
a  stump,  for  it  sawed  through  the  big- 
gest grubs  without  flinching. 

The  growth  of  these  grubs  was  in- 
teresting to  me.  When  an  acorn  or 
hickory  nut  had  sent  up  its  first  sea- 
son's sprout,  a  few  inches  long,  it  was 
burned  off  in  the  autumn  grass-fires; 
but  the  root  continued  to  hold  on  to 
life,  formed  a  callous  over  the  wound, 
and  sent  up  one  or  more  shoots  the 
next  spring.  Next  autumn  these  new 
shoots  were  burned  off,  but  the  root 
and  calloused  head,  about  level  with 
the  surface  of  the  ground,  continued 
to  grow  and  send  up  more  new  shoots; 
and  so  on,  almost  every  year,  until  the 
trees  were  very  old,  probably  far  more 
than  a  century,  while  the  tops,  which 
would  naturally  have  become  tall, 
broad-headed  trees,  were  only  mere 
sprouts,  seldom  more  than  two  years 
old.  Thus  the  ground  was  kept  open 
like  a  prairie,  with  only  five  or  six  trees 
to  the  acre,  which  had  escaped  the  fire 
by  having  the  good  fortune  to  grow  on  a 


bare  spot  at  the  door  of  a  fox  or  bad- 
ger den,  or  between  straggling  grass- 
tufts  wide  apart  on  the  poorest  sandy 
soil.  The  uniformly  rich  soil  of  the 
Illinois  and  Wisconsin  prairies  pro- 
duced so  close  and  tall  a  growth  of 
grasses  for  fires  that  no  tree  could  live 
on  it.  Had  there  been  no  fires,  these 
fine  prairie-spots,  so  marked  a  feature 
of  the  country,  would  have  been  cov- 
ered by  the  heaviest  forests.  As  soon 
as  the  oak  openings  in  our  neighbor- 
hood were  settled,  and  the  farmers  pre- 
vented from  running  grass-fires,  the 
grubs  grew  up  into  trees,  and  formed 
tall  thickets  so  dense  that  it  was  diffi- 
cult to  walk  through  them,  and  every 
trace  of  the  sunny  *  openings '  vanished. 
We  called  our  second  farm  Hickory 
Hill,  from  its  many  fine  hickory  trees, 
and  the  long  gentle  slope  leading  up 
to  it.  Compared  with  Fountain  Lake 
farm  it  lay  high  and  dry.  The  land  was 
better,  but  it  had  no  living  water,  no 
spring  or  stream  or  meadow  or  lake. 
A  well  ninety  feet  deep  had  to  be  dug, 
all  except  the  first  ten  feet  or  so,  in  fine- 
grained sandstone.  When  the  sand- 
stone was  struck,  my  father,  on  the  ad- 
vice of  a  man  who  had  worked  in  mines, 
tried  to  blast  the  rock;  but,  from  lack 
of  skill,  the  blasting  went  on  very 
slowly,  and  father  decided  to  have  me 
do  all  the  work  with  mason's  chisels,  a 
long  hard  job  with  a  good  deal  of  dan- 
ger in  it.  I  had  to  sit  cramped  in  a 
space  about  three  feet  in  diameter,  and 
wearily  chip,  chip,  with  heavy  ham- 
mer and  chisels,  from  early  morning 
until  dark,  day  after  day,  for  weeks 
and  months.  In  the  morning,  Father 
and  David  lowered  me  in  a  wooden 
bucket  by  a  windlass,  hauled  up  what 
chips  were  left  from  the  night  before, 
then  went  away  to  the  farm-work  and 
left  me  until  noon,  when  they  hoist- 
ed me  out  for  dinner.  After  dinner  I 
was  promptly  lowered  again,  the  fore- 
noon's accumulation  of  chips  hoisted 


LESSONS  OF  THE  WILDERNESS 


out  of  the  way,  and  I  was  left  until 
night. 

One  morning,  after  the  dreary  bore 
was  about  eighty  feet  deep,  my  life  was 
all  but  lost  in  deadly  choke-damp,  — 
carbonic  acid  gas  that  had  settled  at 
the  bottom  during  the  night.  Instead 
of  clearing  away  the  chips  as  usual 
when  I  was  lowered  to  the  bottom,  I 
swayed  back  and  forth  and  began  to 
sink  under  the  poison.  Father,  alarm- 
ed that  I  did  not  make  any  noise, 
shouted,  *  What's  keeping  you  so 
still? '  to  which  he  got  no  reply.  Just 
as  I  was  settling  down  against  the  side 
of  the  wall  I  happened  to  catch  a 
glimpse  of  a  branch  of  a  bur-oak  tree 
which  leaned  out  over  the  mouth  of  the 
shaft.  This  suddenly  awakened  me, 
and,  to  father's  excited  shouting,  I  fee- 
bly murmured,  'Take  me  out.'  But 
when  he  began  to  hoist  he  found  I  was 
not  in  the  bucket,  and  in  wild  alarm 
shouted,  'Get  in!  Get  in  the  bucket 
and  hold  on!  Hold  on!'  Somehow  I 
managed  to  get  into  the  bucket,  and 
that  is  all  I  remembered  until  I  was 
dragged  out,  violently  gasping  for 
breath. 

One  of  our  near  neighbors,  a  stone- 
mason and  miner  by  the  name  of  Wil- 
liam Duncan,  came  to  see  me,  and, 
after  hearing  the  particulars  of  the  ac- 
cident, he  solemnly  said,  'Weel!  John- 


nie, it's  God's  mercy  that  you're  alive. 
Many  a  companion  of  mine  have  I 
seen  dead  with  choke-damp,  but  none 
that  I  ever  saw  or  heard  of  was  so  near 
to  death  in  it  as  you  were  and  escaped 
without  help.'  Mr.  Duncan  taught 
father  to  throw  water  down  the  shaft 
to  absorb  the  gas,  and  also  to  drop  a 
bundle  of  brush  or  hay  attached  to  a 
light  rope,  dropping  it  again  and  again 
to  carry  down  pure  air  and  stir  up  the 
poison.  When,  after  a  day  or  two,  I 
had  recovered  from  the  shock,  father 
lowered  me  again  to  my  work,  after 
taking  the  precaution  to  test  the  air 
with  a  candle  and  stir  it  up  well  with 
a  brush  and  hay-bundle.  The  weary 
hammer  and  chisel-clipping  went  on 
as  before,  only  more  slowly,  until  nine- 
ty feet  down,  when  at  last  I  struck  a 
fine  hearty  gush  of  water.  Constant 
dropping  wears  away  stone.  So  does 
the  constant  chipping,  while  at  the 
same  time  wearing  away  the  chipper. 
Father  never  spent  an  hour  in  that 
well.  He  trusted  me  to  sink  it  straight 
and  plumb,  and  I  did,  and  built  a  fine 
covered  top  over  it,  and  swung  two 
iron-bound  buckets  in  it  from  which 
we  all  drank  for  many  a  day. 

[There  will  be  a  further  installment 
of  John  Muir's  autobiography  in  the 
February  number.] 


THE  POETRY  OF  EMILY  DICKINSON 


BY   MARTHA   HALE   SHACKFORD 


NOT  long  ago  a  distinguished  critic, 
reviewing  Father  Tabb's  poetry,  re- 
marked, *  At  his  most  obvious  affinity, 
Emily  Dickinson,  I  can  only  glance. 
It  seems  to  me  that  he  contains  in  far 
finer  form  pretty  much  everything  that 
is  valuable  in  her  thought.'  Are  we 
thus  to  lose  the  fine  significance  of  po- 
etic individuality?  A  poet  is  unique, 
incomparable,  and  to  make  these  com- 
parisons between  poets  is  to  ignore 
the  primary  laws  of  criticism,  which 
seeks  to  discover  the  essential  individ- 
uality of  writers,  not  their  chance  re- 
semblances. It  is  as  futile  as  it  is 
unjust  to  parallel  Father  Tabb's  work 
with  Emily  Dickinson's:  his  is  full  of 
quiet  reverie,  hers  has  a  sharp  stabbing 
quality  which  disturbs  and  overthrows 
the  spiritual  ease  of  the  reader.  Emily 
Dickinson  is  one  of  our  most  original 
writers,  a  force  destined  to  endure  in 
American  letters. 

There  is  no  doubt  that  critics  are  jus- 
tified in  complaining  that  her  work  is 
often  cryptic  in  thought  and  unmelodi- 
ous  in  expression.  Almost  all  her  poems 
are  written  in  short  measures,  in  which 
the  effect  of  curt  brevity  is  increased 
by  her  verbal  penuriousness.  Compres- 
sion and  epigrammatical  ambush  are 
her  aids;  she  proceeds,  without  prepara- 
tion or  apology,  by  sudden,  sharp  zig- 
zags. What  intelligence  a  reader  has 
must  be  exercised  in  the  poetic  game  of 
hare-and-hounds,  where  ellipses,  inver- 
sions, and  unexpected  climaxes  mislead 
those  who  pursue  sweet  reasonable- 
ness. Nothing,  for  instance,  could  seem 
less  poetical  than  this  masterpiece 


of  unspeakable  sounds  and  chaotic 
rhymes:  — 

COCOON 

Drab  habitation  of  whom? 
Tabernacle  or  tomb, 
Or  dome  of  worm, 
Or  porch  of  gnome, 
Or  some  elf's  catacomb. 

If  all  her  poems  were  of  this  sort  there 
would  be  nothing  more  to  say;  but  such 
poems  are  exceptions.  Because  we  hap- 
pen to  possess  full  records  of  her  varying 
poetic  moods,  published,  not  with  the 
purpose  of  selecting  her  most  artistic 
work,  but  with  the  intention  of  reveal- 
ing very  significant  human  documents, 
we  are  not  justified  in  singling  out  a 
few  bizarre  poems  and  subjecting  these 
to  skeptical  scrutiny.  The  poems  taken 
in  their  entirety  are  a  surprising  and 
impressive  revelation  of  poetic  attitude 
and  of  poetic  method  in  registering 
spiritual  experiences.  To  the  general 
reader  many  of  the  poems  seem  unin- 
spired, imperfect,  crude,  while  to  the 
student  of  the  psychology  of  literary 
art  they  offer  most  stimulating  mate- 
rial for  examination,  because  they  en- 
able one  to  penetrate  into  poetic  ori- 
gins, into  radical,  creative  energy. 
However,  it  is  not  with  the  body  of  her 
collected  poems  but  with  the  selected, 
representative  work  that  the  general 
reader  is  concerned.  Assuredly  we  do 
not  judge  an  artist  by  his  worst,  but  by 
his  best,  productions;  we  endeavor  to 
find  the  highest  level  of  his  power  and 
thus  to  discover  the  typical  significance 
of  his  work. 

To  gratify  the  aesthetic  sense  was 

93 


94 


THE  POETRY  OF  EMILY  DICKINSON 


never  Emily  Dickinson's  desire;  she 
despised  the  poppy  and  mandragora  of 
felicitous  phrases  which  lull  the  spirit 
to  apathy  and  emphasize  art  for  art's 
sake.  Poetry  to  her  was  the  expression 
of  vital  meanings,  the  transfer  of  pas- 
sionate feeling  and  of  deep  conviction. 
Her  work  is  essentially  lyric;  it  lacks 
the  slow,  retreating  harmonies  of  epic 
measures,  it  does  not  seek  to  present 
leisurely  details  of  any  sort;  its  pur- 
pose is  to  objectify  the  swiftly-passing 
moments  and  to  give  them  poignant 
expression. 

Lyric  melody  finds  many  forms  in 
her  work.  Her  repressed  and  austere 
verses,  inexpansive  as  they  are,  have 
persistent  appeal.  Slow,  serene  move- 
ment gives  enduring  beauty  to  these 
elegiac  stanzas :  — 

Let  down  the  bars,  O  Death! 
The  tired  flocks  come  in 
Whose  bleating  ceases  to  repeat. 
Whose  wandering  is  done. 

Thine  is  the  stillest  night, 
Thine  the  securest  fold; 
Too  near  thou  art  for  seeking  thee, 
Too  tender  to  be  told. 

The  opposite  trait  of  buoyant  alertness 
is  illustrated  in  the  cadences  of  the 
often-quoted  lines  on  the  humming- 
bird:— 

A  route  of  evanescence 
With  a  revolving  wheel; 
A  resonance  of  emerald, 
A  rush  of  cochineal. 

Between  these  two  margins  come  many 
wistful,  pleading,  or  triumphant  notes. 
The  essential  qualities  of  her  music  are 
simplicity  and  quivering  responsive- 
ness to  emotional  moods.  Idea  and  ex- 
pression are  so  indissolubly  fused  in  her 
work  that  no  analysis  of  her  style  and 
manner  can  be  attempted  without  real- 
izing that  every  one  of  her  phrases,  her 
changing  rhythms,  is  a  direct  reflection 
of  her  personality.  The  objective  med- 
ium is  entirely  conformable  to  the  inner 


life,  a  life  of  peculiarly  dynamic  force 
which  agitates,  arouses,  spurs  the 
reader. 

The  secret  of  Emily  Dickinson's  way- 
ward power  seems  to  lie  in  three  special 
characteristics,  the  first  of  which  is  her 
intensity  of  spiritual  experience.  Hers 
is  the  record  of  a  soul  endowed  with 
unceasing  activity  in  a  world  not  ma- 
terial, but  one  where  concrete  facts  are 
the  cherished  revelation  of  divine  sig- 
nificances. Inquisitive  always,  alert  to 
the  inner  truths  of  life,  impatient  of  the 
brief  destinies  of  convention,  she  iso- 
lated herself  from  the  petty  demands 
of  social  amenity.  A  sort  of  tireless, 
probing  energy  of  mental  action  ab- 
sorbed her,  yet  there  is  little  specula- 
tion of  a  purely  philosophical  sort  in  her 
poetry.  Her  stubborn  beliefs,  learned 
in  childhood,  persisted  to  the  end,  — 
her  conviction  that  life  is  beauty,  that 
love  explains  grief,  and  that  immortal- 
ity endures.  The  quality  of  her  writing 
is  profoundly  stirring,  because  it  be- 
trays, not  the  intellectual  pioneer,  but 
the  acutely  observant  woman,  whose 
capacity  for  feeling  was  profound.  The 
still,  small  voice  of  tragic  revelation 
one  hears  in  these  compressed  lines :  — 

PARTING 

My  life  closed  twice  before  its  close; 

It  yet  remains  to  see 
If  Immortality  unveil 

A  third  event  to  me, 

So  huge,  so  hopeless  to  conceive, 

As  these  that  twice  befell. 
Parting  is  all  we  know  of  heaven, 

And  all  we  need  of  hell. 

For  sheer,  grim,  unrelieved  expression 
of  emotional  truth  there  are  few  pass- 
ages which  can  surpass  the  personal 
experience  revealed  in  the  following 
poem :  — 

Pain  has  an  element  of  blank; 
It  cannot  recollect 
When  it  began,  or  if  there  were 
A  day  when  it  was  not. 


THE  POETRY  OF  EMILY  DICKINSON 


95 


It  has  no  future  but  itself, 
Its  infinite  realms  contain 
Its  past,  enlightened  to  perceive 
New  periods  of  pain. 

Her  absorption  in  the  world  of  feel- 
ing found  some  relief  in  associations 
with  nature;  yet  although  she  loved 
nature  and  wrote  many  nature  lyrics, 
her  interpretations  are  always  more  or 
less  swayed  by  her  own  state  of  being. 
The  colors,  the  fragrances,  the  forms  of 
the  material  world,  meant  to  her  a  di- 
vine symbolism;  but  the  spectacle  of 
nature  had  in  her  eyes  a  more  fugitive 
glory,  a  lesser  consolation,  than  it  had 
for  Wordsworth  and  other  true  lovers 
of  the  earth. 

Brilliant  and  beautiful  transcripts 
of  bird-life  and  of  flower-life  appear 
among  her  poems,  although  there  is 
in  some  cases  a  childish  fancifulness 
that  disappoints  the  reader.  Among 
the  touches  of  unforgettable  vividness 
there  are :  — 

These  are  the  days  when  skies  put  on 
The  old,  old  sophistries  of  June,  — 
A  blue  and  gold  mistake; 

and 

Nature  rarer  uses  yellow 

Than  another  hue; 
Leaves  she  all  of  that  for  sunsets,  — 

Prodigal  of  blue, 

Spending  scarlet  like  a  woman, 

Yellow  she  affords 
Only  scantly  and  selectly, 

Like  a  lover's  words. 

Never  has  any  poet  described  the 
haunting  magic  of  autumnal  days  with 
such  fine  perception  of  beauty  as 
marks  the  opening  stanzas  of  'My 
Cricket'  :- 

Farther  in  summer  than  the  birds, 
Pathetic  from  the  grass, 
A  minor  nation  celebrates 
Its  unobtrusive  mass. 

No  ordinance  is  seen, 

So  gradual  the  grace, 

A  pensive  custom  it  becomes, 

Enlarging  loneliness. 


Most  effective,  however,  are  those 
poems  where  she  describes  not  mere 
external  beauty,  but,  rather,  the  effect 
of  nature  upon  a  sensitive  observer :  — 

There  's  a  certain  slant  of  light, 
On  winter  afternoons, 
That  oppresses,  like  the  weight 
Of  cathedral  tunes. 

Heavenly  hurt  it  gives  us; 
We  can  find  no  scar, 
But  internal  difference 
Where  the  meanings  are. 

None  may  teach  it  anything, 
'T  is  the  seal,  despair,  — 
An  imperial  affliction 
Sent  us  of  the  air. 

When  it  comes,  the  landscape  listens, 
Shadows  hold  their  breath; 
When  it  goes,  't  is  like  the  distance 
On  the  look  of  death. 

It  is  essentially  in  the  world  of  spirit- 
ual forces  that  her  depth  of  poetic 
originality  is  shown.  Others  may  de- 
scribe nature,  but  few  can  describe  life 
as  she  does.  Human  nature,  the  experi- 
ences of  the  world  of  souls,  was  her 
special  study,  to  which  she  brought,  in 
addition  to  that  quality  of  intensity, 
a  second  characteristic,  —  keen  sensi- 
tiveness to  irony  and  paradox.  Near- 
ly all  her  perceptions  are  tinged  with 
penetrating  sense  of  the  contrasts  in 
human  vicissitude.  Controlled,  alert, 
expectant,  aware  of  the  perpetual  com- 
promise between  clay  and  spirit,  she 
accepted  the  inscrutable  truths  of  life 
in  a  fashion  which  reveals  how  humor 
and  pathos  contend  in  her.  It  is  this 
which  gives  her  style  those  sudden 
turns  and  that  startling  imagery.  Hu- 
mor is  not,  perhaps,  a  characteristic 
associated  with  pure  lyric  poetry,  and 
yet  Emily  Dickinson's  transcendental 
humor  is  one  of  the  deep  sources  of  her 
supremacy.  Both  in  thought  and  in 
expression  she  gains  her  piercing  qual- 
ity, her  undeniable  spiritual  thrust,  by 
this  gift,  stimulating,  mystifying,  but 


96 


THE  POETRY  OF  EMILY  DICKINSON 


forever  inspiring  her  readers  to  a  pro- 
found conception  of  high  destinies. 

The  most  apparent  instances  of  this 
keen,  shrewd  delight  in  challenging 
convention,  in  the  effort  to  establish, 
through  contrast,  reconcilement  of  the 
earthly  and  the  eternal,  are  to  be  found 
in  her  imagery.  Although  her  similes 
and  metaphors  may  be  devoid  of  lan- 
guid aesthetic  elegance,  they  are  quiver- 
ing to  express  living  ideas,  and  so  they 
come  surprisingly  close  to  what  we  are 
fond  of  calling  the  commonplace.  She 
reverses  the  usual,  she  hitches  her  star 
to  a  wagon,  transfixing  homely  daily 
phrases  for  poetic  purposes.  Such  an 
audacity  has  seldom  invaded  poetry 
with  a  desire  to  tell  immortal  truths 
through  the  medium  of  a  deep  senti- 
ment for  old  habitual  things.  It  is  true 
that  we  permit  this  liberty  to  the  great- 
est poets,  Shakespeare,  Keats,  Words- 
worth, and  some  others;  but  in  Amer- 
ica our  poets  have  been  sharply  charged 
not  to  offend  in  this  respect.  Here 
tradition  still  animates  many  critics  in 
the  belief  that  real  poetry  must  have 
exalted  phraseology. 

The  poem  already  quoted,  'Let 
down  the  bars,  O  Death!'  has  its  own 
rustic  vividness  of  association.  Even 
more  homely  is  the  domestic  suggestion 
wherewith  the  poet  sets  forth  an  eter- 
nally, profoundly  significant  fact:  — 

The  trying  on  the  utmost, 

The  morning  it  is  new, 
Is  terribler  than  wearing  it 

A  whole  existence  through. 

Surely  such  a  commonplace  comparison 
gives  startling  vividness  to  the  innate 
idea.  Many  are  the  poetic  uses  she 
makes  of  practical  everyday  life :  — 

The  soul  should  always  stand  ajar; 
and 

The  only  secret  people  keep 

Is  Immortality; 


and 


and 


and 


Such  dimity  convictions, 
A  horror  so  refined, 


Of  freckled  human  nature, 
Of  Deity  ashamed; 

And  kingdoms,  like  the  orchard, 
Flit  russetly  away; 

If  I  could  n't  thank  you, 

Being  just  asleep, 
You  will  know  I  'm  trying 

With  my  granite  lip. 

More  significantly,  however,  than  in 
these  epithets  and  figures,  irony  and 
paradox  appear  in  those  analyses  of 
truth  where  she  reveals  the  deep  note 
of  tragic  idealism :  — 

Not  one  of  all  the  purple  host 
Who  took  the  flag  to-day 
Can  tell  the  definition, 
So  clear,  of  victory, 

As  he,  defeated,  dying, 
On  whose  forbidden  ear 
The  distant  strains  of  triumph 
Break,  agonized  and  clear; 

and 

Essential  oils  are  wrung; 
The  attar  from  the  rose 
Is  not  expressed  by  suns  alone, 
It  is  the  gift  of  screws. 

She  took  delight  in  piquing  thp  curi- 
osity, and  often  her  love  of  mysterious 
challenging  symbolism  led  her  to  the 
borderland  of  obscurity.  No  other  of 
her  poems  has,  perhaps,  such  a  union 
of  playfulness  and  of  terrible  comment 
upon  the  thwarted  aspirations  of  a  suf- 
fering soul  as  has  this :  — 

I  asked  no  other  thing, 
No  other  was  denied. 
I  offered  Being  for  it; 
The  mighty  merchant  smiled. 

Brazil?  He  twirled  a  button, 
Without  a  glance  my  way: 
'  But,  madam,  is  there  nothing  else 
That  we  can  show  to-day? ' 

Since  life  seemed,  to  her,  seldom  to 
move  along  wholly  simple  and  direct 
ways,  she  delighted  to  accentuate  the 
fact  that  out  of  apparent  contradic- 


THE  POETRY  OF  EMILY  DICKINSON  97 

tions  and   discords  are  wrought  the     pie  consent.    Her  creed  was  expressed 
subtlest  harmonies :  —  in  these  stanzas :  — 


and 


and 


To  learn  the  transport  by  the  pain, 
As  blind  men  learn  the  sun; 


Sufficient  troth  that  we  shall  rise  — 
Deposed,  at  length,  the  grave  — 
To  that  new  marriage,  justified 
Through  Calvaries  of  Love; 


The  lightning  that  preceded  it 
Struck  no  one  but  myself, 
But  I  would  not  exchange  the  bolt 
For  all  the  rest  of  life. 

The  expectation  of  finding  in  her 
work  some  quick,  perverse,  illuminat- 
ing comment  upon  eternal  truths  cer- 
tainly keeps  a  reader's  interest  from 
flagging,  but  passionate  intensity  and 
fine  irony  do  not  fully  explain  Emily 
Dickinson's  significance.  There  is  a 
third  characteristic  trait,  a  dauntless 
courage  in  accepting  life.  Existence, 
to  her,  was  a  momentous  experience, 
and  she  let  no  promises  of  a  future 
life  deter  her  from  feeling  the  throbs 
of  this  one.  No  false  comfort  released 
her  from  dismay  at  present  anguish. 
An  energy  of  pain  and  joy  swept  her 
soul,  but  did  not  leave  any  residue  of 
bitterness  or  of  sharp  innuendo  against 
the  ways  of  the  Almighty.  Grief  was 
a  faith,  not  a  disaster.  She  made  no 
effort  to  smother  the  recollections  of 
old  companionship  by  that  species  of 
spiritual  death  to  which  so  many  peo- 
VOL.  in- NO. i 


They  say  that  'time  assuages,'  — 

Time  never  did  assuage; 
An  actual  suffering  strengthens, 

As  sinews  do,  with  age. 

Time  is  a  test  of  trouble, 

But  not  a  remedy. 
If  such  it  prove,  it  proves  too 

There  was  no  malady. 

The  willingness  to  look  with  clear 
directness  at  the  spectacle  of  life  is  ob- 
servable everywhere  in  her  work.  Pas- 
sionate fortitude  was  hers,  and  this  is 
the  greatest  contribution  her  poetry 
makes  to  the  reading  world.  It  is  .not 
expressed  precisely  in  single  poems,  but 
rather  is  present  in  all,  as  key  and  in- 
terpretation of  her  meditative  scru- 
tiny. Without  elaborate  philosophy, 
yet  with  irresistible  ways  of  expression, 
Emily  Dickinson's  poems  have  true 
lyric  appeal,  because  they  make  ab- 
stractions, such  as  love,  hope,  loneli- 
ness, death,  and  immortality,  seem 
near  and  intimate  and  faithful.  She 
looked  at  existence  with  a  vision  so  ex- 
alted and  secure  that  the  reader  is  long 
dominated  by  that  very  excess  of  spir- 
itual conviction.  A  poet  in  the  deeper 
mystic  qualities  of  feeling  rather  than 
in  the  external  merit  of  precise  rhymes 
and  flawless  art,  Emily  Dickinson's 
place  is  among  those  whose  gifts  are 

Too  intrinsic  for  renown. 


J.  E.  B.  STUART 


BY   GAMALIEL    BRADFORD,    JR. 


STUART  was  a  fighter  by  nature. 
His  distinguishing  characteristics  as  a 
West  Pointer  in  the  early  fifties  were 
remembered  by  Fitzhugh  Lee  as  '  a 
strict  attendance  to  his  military  du- 
ties, an  erect,  soldierly  bearing,  an  im- 
mediate and  almost  thankful  accept- 
ance of  a  challenge  from  any  cadet 
to  fight,  who  might  in  any  way  feel 
himself  aggrieved.'  The  tendency,  if 
not  inherited,  did  not  lack  paternal 
encouragement;  for  the  elder  Stuart 
writes  to  his  son,  in  regard  to  one  of 
these  combats :  *  I  did  not  consider  you 
so  much  to  blame.  An  insult  should  be 
resented  under  all  circumstances/  The 
young  cadet  also  showed  himself  to  be 
a  fearless  and  an  exceptionally  skillful 
horseman. 

These  qualities  served  him  well  in 
the  Indian  warfare  to  which  he  was  im- 
mediately transferred  from  West  Point. 
His  recklessness  in  taking  chances  was 
only  equaled  by  his  ingenuity  in  pulling 
through.  One  of  his  superiors  writes, 
*  Lieutenant  Stuart  was  brave  and  gal- 
lant, always  prompt  in  execution  of 
orders  and  reckless  of  danger  and  ex- 
posure. I  considered  him  at  that  time 
one  of  the  most  promising  young  offi- 
cers in  the  United  States  Army.' 

Later,  Stuart  took  a  prominent  part 
in  the  capture  of  John  Brown.  He  him- 
self wrote  an  account  of  the  matter  at 
the  time  for  the  newspapers,  simply  to 
explain  and  justify  Lee's  conduct.  He 
also  wrote  a  letter  to  his  mother,  with 
a  characteristic  description  of  his  own 
doings:  *I  approached  the  door  in  the 
presence  of  perhaps  two  thousand  spec- 


tators, and  told  Mr.  Smith  that  I  had 
a  communication  for  him  from  Colonel 
Lee.  He  opened  the  door  about  four 
inches,  and  placed  his  body  against 
the  crack,  with  a  cocked  carbine  in  his 
hand;  hence  his  remark  after  his  cap- 
ture that  he  could  have  wiped  me  out 
like  a  mosquito  ....  When  Smith 
first  came  to  the  door  I  recognized  old 
Ossawatomie  Brown,  who  had  given  us 
so  much  trouble  in  Kansas.  No  one 
present  but  myself  could  have  per- 
formed that  service.  I  got  his  bowie- 
knife  from  his  person,  and  have  it  yet.' 

From  the  very  beginning  of  the  war 
Stuart  maintained  this  fighting  reputa- 
tion. He  would  attack  anything,  any- 
where, and  the  men  who  served  under 
him  had  to  do  the  same;  what  is  more, 
and  marks  the  born  leader,  he  made 
them  wish  to  do  the  same.  *  Ho  wean  I 
eat,  sleep,  or  rest  in  peace  without  you 
upon  the  outpost?'  wrote  Joseph  John- 
ston; and  a  noble  enemy,  who  had  been 
a  personal  friend,  Sedgwick,  is  report- 
ed to  have  said  that  Stuart  was  'the 
greatest  cavalry  officer  ever  foaled  in 
America.' 

Danger  he  met  with  more  than  stolid 
indifference,  a  sort  of  furious  bravado, 
thrusting  himself  into  it  with  manifest 
pleasure,  and  holding  back,  when  he 
did  hold  back,  with  a  sigh.  And  some 
men's  luck!  Johnston  was  wounded 
a  dozen  times,  was  always  getting 
wounded.  Yet  Stuart,  probably  far 
more  exposed,  was  wounded  only  once, 
in  earlier  life,  among  the  Indians;  in 
the  war  not  at  all  until  the  end.  His 
clothes  were  pierced  again  and  again. 


J.  E.  B.  STUART 


99 


According  to  that  fable-mongering 
Prussian,  Von  Borcke,  the  general  had 
half  of  his  mustache  cut  off  by  a  bullet 
*  as  neatly  as  it  could  have  been  done 
by  the  hand  of  an  experienced  barber.' 
Yet  nothing  ever  drew  blood  till  the 
shot  which  was  mortal.  Such  an  im- 
munity naturally  encouraged  the  sort 
of  fatalism  not  unusual  with  great  sol- 
diers, and  Stuart  once  said  of  the  prox- 
imity of  his  enemies :  '  You  might  have 
shot  a  marble  at  them  —  but  I  am  not 
afraid  of  any  ball  aimed  at  me.' 

In  this  spirit  he  got  into  scores  of 
difficult  places  —  and  got  out  again. 
Sometimes  it  was  by  quick  action  and 
a  mad  rush,  as  when  he  left  his  hat  and 
a  few  officers  behind  him.  Sometimes 
it  was  by  stealth  and  secrecy,  as  when 
he  hid  his  whole  command  all  night 
within  a  few  hundred  yards  of  the 
marching  enemy.  'And  nothing  now 
remained  but  to  watch  and  wait  and 
keep  quiet.  Quiet?  Yes,  the  men  kept 
very  quiet,  for  they  realized  that  even 
Stuart  never  before  had  them  in  so 
tight  a  place.  But  many  times  did  we 
fear  that  we  were  betrayed  by  the 
weary,  hungry,  headstrong  mules  of 
the  ordnance  train.  Men  were  sta- 
tioned at  the  head  of  every  team;  but, 
in  spite  of  all  precautions,  a  discord- 
ant bray  would  every  now  and  then 
fill  the  air.  Never  was  the  voice  of  a 
mule  so  harsh!' 

The  men  who  had  watched  and  tried 
and  tested  him  on  such  occasions  as 
these  knew  what  he  was  and  gave 
him  their  trust.  He  asked  nothing  of 
them  that  he  would  not  do  himself. 
Therefore  they  did  what  he  asked  of 
them.  Scheibert  says  that  'he  won 
their  confidence  and  inspired  them  by 
his  whole  bearing  and  personality,  by 
his  kindling  speech,  his  flashing  eye, 
and  his  cheerfulness,  which  no  reverse 
could  overcome.'  Stuart  himself  de- 
scribes his  followers'  enthusiastic  loy- 
alty with  a  naivete  as  winning  as  it  is 


characteristic.  'There  was  something 
of  the  sublime  in  the  implicit  confi- 
dence and  unquestioning  trust  of  the 
rank  and  file  in  a  leader  guiding  them 
straight,  apparently,  into"  the  very 
jaws  of  the  enemy,  every  step  appear- 
ing to  them  to  diminish  the  very  faint- 
est hope  of  extrication.'  Yet  he  asked 
this  trust,  and  they  gave  it  simply  on 
the  strength  of  his  word.  'You  are 
about  to  engage  in  an  enterprise  which, 
to  ensure  success,  imperatively  de- 
mands at  your  hands  coolness,  deci- 
sion, and  bravery,  implicit  obedience 
to  orders  without  question  or  cavil, 
and  the  strictest  order  and  sobriety  on 
the  march  and  in  the  bivouac.  The 
destination  and  extent  of  this  expedi- 
tion had  better  be  kept  to  myself  than 
known  to  you.' 

The  men  loved  him  also  because, 
when  the  strain  was  removed,  he  put 
on  no  airs,  pretense,  or  remoteness  of 
superiority,  but  treated  them  as  man 
to  man.  'He  was  the  most  approach- 
able of  major-generals,  and  jested  with 
the  private  soldiers  of  his  command  as 
jovially  as  though  he  had  been  one  of 
themselves.  The  men  were  perfectly 
unconstrained  in  his  presence,  and 
treated  him  more  as  if  he  were  the 
chief  huntsman  of  a  hunting  party 
than  as  a  major-general.'  His  officers 
also  loved  him,  and  not  only  trusted 
him  for  war,  but  enjoyed  his  com- 
pany in  peace.  He  was  constantly  on 
the  watch  to  do  them  kindnesses,  and 
would  frolic  with  them  —  marbles, 
snowballs,  quoits,  what-not?  —  like  a 
boy  with  boys. 

And  Stuart  loved  his  men  as  they 
loved  him,  did  not  regard  them  as 
mere  food  for  cannon,  to  be  used  and 
abused  and  forgotten.  There  is  some- 
thing almost  pathetic  in  his  neglect 
of  self  in  praising  them.  'The  horse- 
man who,  at  his  officer's  bidding,  with- 
out question,  leaps  into  unexplored 
darkness,  knowing  nothing  except  that 


100 


J.  E.  B.  STUART 


there  is  danger  ahead,  possesses  the 
highest  attribute  of  the  patriot  sol- 
dier. It  is  a  great  source  of  pride  to  me 
to  command  a  division  of  such  men.' 
Careless  of  his  own  danger  always,  he 
was  far  more  thoughtful  of  those 
about  him.  In  the  last  battle  he  was 
peculiarly  reckless,  and  Major  Mc- 
Clellan  noticed  that  the  general  kept 
sending  him  with  messages  to  General 
Anderson.  'At  last  the  thought  oc- 
curred to  me  that  he  was  endeavoring 
to  shield  me  from  danger.  I  said  to 
him,  "  General,  my  horse  is  weary.  You 
are  exposing  yourself,  and  you  are 
alone.  Please  let  me  remain  with  you." 
He  smiled  at  me  kindly,  but  bade  me 
go  to  General  Anderson  with  another 
message.' 

Any  reflection  on  his  command 
aroused  him  at  once  to  its  defense. 
*  There  seems  to  be  a  growing  ten- 
dency to  abuse  and  underrate  the 
services  of  that  arm  of  the  service 
[cavalry]  by  a  few  officers  of  infantry, 
among  whom  I  regret  to  find  General 
Trimble.  Troops  should  be  taught  to 
take  pride  in  other  branches  of  the 
service  than  their  own.' 

It  is  very  rare  that  Stuart  has  any 
occasion  to  address  himself  directly  to 
the  authorities  at  Richmond.  Fight- 
ing, not  writing,  was  his  business.  But 
when  he  feels  that  his  men  and  horses 
are  being  starved  unnecessarily,  he 
bestirs  himself,  and  sends  Seddon  a 
letter  which  is  as  interesting  for  ner- 
vous and  vigorous  expression  as  for 
the  character  of  the  writer.  *  I  beg  to 
urge  that  in  no  case  should  persons 
not  connected  with  the  army,  and  who 
are  amply  compensated  for  all  that 
is  taken,  be  allowed  more  subsistence 
per  day  than  the  noble  veterans  who 
are  periling  their  lives  in  the  cause  and, 
at  every  sacrifice,  are  enduring  hard- 
ship and  exposure  in  the  ranks.' 

And  the  general's  care  and  enthu- 
siasm for  his  officers  was  as  great  as  for 


the  privates.  It  is  charming  to  see  how 
earnestly  and  how  specifically  he  com- 
mends them  in  every  report.  Partic- 
ularly, he  is  anxious  to  impress  upon 
Lee  that  no  family  considerations 
should  prevent  the  merited  advance- 
ment of  Lee's  own  son  and  nephew. 
Even  on  his  death-bed  one  of  his  last 
wishes  was  that  his  faithful  followers 
should  have  his  horses,  and  he  allotted 
them  thoughtfully  according  to  each 
officer's  need. 

The  general  did  not  allow  his  feelings 
to  interfere  with  subordination,  how- 
ever. His  discipline  'was  as  firm  as 
could  be  with  such  men  as  composed 
the  cavalry  of  General  Lee's  army,' 
writes  Judge  Garnet t.  'He  never  tol- 
erated nor  overlooked  disobedience  of 
orders.'  Even  his  favorites,  Mosby 
and  Fitz  Lee,  come  in  for  reproof  when 
needed.  Of  the  latter's  failure  to  ar- 
rive at  Raccoon  Ford  when  expected, 
he  writes,  'By  this  failure  to  comply 
with  instructions,  not  only  the  move- 
ment of  the  cavalry  across  the  Rapi- 
dan  was  postponed  a  day,  but  a  fine 
opportunity  was  lost  to  overhaul  a 
body  of  the  enemy's  cavalry  on  a 
predatory  excursion  far  beyond  their 
lines.'  His  tendency  to  severity  in  re- 
gard to  a  certain  subordinate  calls 
forth  one  of  Lee's  gently  tactful  cau- 
tions: 'I  am  perfectly  willing  to  trans- 
fer him  to  Paxton's  brigade,  if  he  de- 
sires it;  but  if  he  does  not,  I  know  of 
no  act  of  his  to  justify  my  doing  so. 
Do  not  let  your  judgment  be  warped.' 
There  were  officers  with  whom  Stuart 
could  not  get  along,  for  instance, 
'Grumble  Jones,'  who  perhaps  could 
get  along  with  no  one.  Yet,  after  Stu- 
art's death,  Jones  said  of  him,  'By  G — , 
Martin!  You  know  I  had  little  love 
for  Stuart,  and  he  had  just  as  little  for 
me;  but  that  is  the  greatest  loss  that 
army  has  ever  sustained,  except  the 
death  of  Jackson.' 

From  these  various  considerations 


J.  E.  B.   STUART 


101 


it  will  be  surmised  that  Stuart  was  no 
mere  reckless  swordsman,  no  Rupert, 
good  with  sabre,  furious  in  onset, 
beyond  that  signifying  nothing.  He 
knew  the  spirit  of  the  antique  maxim, 
'Be  bold,  and  evermore  be  bold;  be  not 
too  bold.'  He  had  learned  the  hardest 
lesson  and  the  essential  corrective  for 
such  a  temperament,  self-control.  To 
me  there  is  an  immense  pathos  in  his 
quiet,  almost  plaintive,  explanation  to 
Lee  on  one  occasion:  'The  command- 
ing general  will,  I  am  sure,  appreciate 
how  hard  it  was  to  desist  from  the  un- 
dertaking, but  to  any  one  on  the  spot 
there  could  be  but  one  opinion  —  its 
impossibility.  I  gave  it  up.'  On  the 
other  hand,  no  one  knew  better  that 
in  some  cases  perfect  prudence  and 
splendid  boldness  are  one  and  the 
same  thing.  To  use  again  his  own 
words:  'Although  the  expedition  was 
prosecuted  further  than  was  contem- 
plated in  your  instructions,  I  feel  as- 
sured that  the  considerations  which 
actuated  me  will  convince  you  that  I 
did  not  depart  from  their  spirit,  and 
that  the  bold  development  in  the  sub- 
sequent direction  of  the  march  was 
the  quintessence  of  prudence/  Lee  al- 
ways used  the  right  words.  In  one  of 
his  reports  he  says  of  Stuart,  'I  take 
occasion  to  express  to  the  Department 
my  sense  of  the  boldness,  judgment, 
and  prudence  he  displayed  in  its  exe- 
cution.' (The  italics  are  mine.) 

But  one  may  have  self-control  with- 
out commanding  intelligence.  Fre- 
mantle's  description  of  Stuart's  move- 
ments does  not  suggest  much  of  the 
latter  quality.  'He  seems  to  roam 
over  the  country  at  his  own  discre- 
tion, and  always  gives  a  good  account 
of  himself,  turning  up  at  the  right  mo- 
ment; and  hitherto  he  has  not  got  him- 
self into  any  serious  trouble.'  Later, 
more  studious  observers  do  not  take 
quite  the  same  view.  One  should  read 
the  whole  of  the  Prussian  colonel, 


Scheibert's,  account  of  Stuart's  thor- 
ough planning,  his  careful  calcula- 
tion, his  exact  methods  of  procedure. 
'Before  Stuart  undertook  any  move- 
ment, he  spared  nothing  in  the  way  of 
preparation  which  might  make  it  suc- 
ceed. He  informed  himself  as  exactly 
as  possible  by  scouts  and  spies,  him- 
self reconnoitred  with  his  staff,  often 
far  beyond  the  outposts,  had  his  engi- 
neer officers  constantly  fill  out  and  im- 
prove the  rather  inadequate  maps  and 
ascertain  the  practicability  of  roads, 
fords,  etc.  In  short,  he  omitted  no  pre- 
caution and  spared  no  pains  or  effort 
to  secure  the  best  possible  results  for 
such  undertakings  as  he  planned; 
therefore  he  was  in  the  saddle  almost 
as  long  again  as  his  men.'  Similar  tes- 
timony can  be  gathered  incidentally 
everywhere  in  Stuart's  letters  and  re- 
ports, proving  that  he  was  no  chance 
roamer,  but  went  where  he  planned  to 
go,  and  came  back  when  he  intended. 
For  instance,  he  writes  of  the  Peninsu- 
lar operations,  'It  is  proper  to  remark 
here  that  the  commanding  general 
had,  on  the  occasion  of  my  late  expedi- 
tion to  the  Pamunkey,  imparted  to  me 
his  design  of  bringing  Jackson  down 
upon  the  enemy's  right  flank  and  rear, 
and  directed  that  I  should  examine  the 
country  with  reference  to  its  practi- 
cability for  such  a  movement.  I  there- 
fore had  studied  the  features  of  the 
country  very  thoroughly,  and  knew  ex- 
actly how  to  conform  my  movements 
to  Jackson's  route.' 

On  the  strength  of  these  larger  mili- 
tary qualities  it  has  sometimes  been 
contended  that  Stuart  should  have  had 
an  even  more  responsible  command 
than  fell  to  him,  and  that  Lee  should 
have  retained  him  at  the  head  of  Jack- 
son's corps  after  Jackson's  death.  Cer- 
tainly Lee  can  have  expressed  no  higher 
opinion  of  any  one.  'A  more  zealous, 
ardent,  brave,  and  devoted  soldier  than 
Stuart  the  Confederacy  cannot  have.' 


102 


J.  E.  B.  STUART 


Johnston  called  him '  calm,  firm,  acute, 
active,  and  enterprising;  I  know  no 
one  more  competent  than  he  to  esti- 
mate occurrences  at  their  true  value/ 
Longstreet,  hitting  Jackson  as  well  as 
praising  Stuart,  said,  'His  death  was 
possibly  a  greater  loss  to  the  Confed- 
erate army  than  that  of  the  swift-mov- 
ing Stonewall  Jackson.'  Among  for- 
eign authorities,  Scheibert  tells  us  that 
'General  von  Schmidt,  the  regenera- 
tor of  our  [Prussian]  cavalry  tactics, 
has  told  me  that  Stuart  was  the  model 
cavalry  leader  of  this  century,  and  has 
questioned  me  very  often  about  his 
mode  of  fighting/  And  Captain  Bat- 
tine  thinks  that  he  should  have  had 
Jackson's  place.  Finally,  Alexander, 
sanest  of  Confederate  writers,  expresses 
the  same  view  strongly  and  definitely: 
'I  always  thought  it  an  injustice  to 
Stuart,  and  a  loss  to  the  army,  that  he 
was  not  from  that  moment  continued 
in  command  of  Jackson's  corps.  He  had 
won  the  right  to  it.  I  believe  he  had 
all  of  Jackson's  genius  and  dash  and 
originality,  without  that  eccentricity  of 
character  which  sometimes  led  to  dis- 
appointment. .  .  .  Jackson's  spirit  and 
inspiration  were  uneven.  Stuart,  how- 
ever, possessed  the  rare  quality  of  be- 
ing always  equal  to  himself  at  his  very 
best.9 

This  is  magnificent  praise,  coming 
from  such  a  source.  Nevertheless,  I 
find  it  hard  to  question  Lee's  judg- 
ment. There  was  nothing  in  the  world 
to  prevent  his  giving  Stuart  the  posi- 
tion, if  he  thought  him  qualified.  It 
is  not  absolutely  certain  how  Stuart 
would  have  carried  independent  com- 
mand. I  can  hardly  imagine  Davis 
writing  of  Jackson  as  he  did  of  Stuart : 
'The  letter  of  General  Hill  painfully 
impresses  me  with  that  which  has  be- 
fore been  indicated  —  a  want  of  vigi- 
lance and  intelligent  observation  on 
the  part  of  General  Stuart.'  Major 
Bigelow,  who  knows  the  battle  of 


Chancellorsville  as  well  as  any  one 
living,  does  not  judge  Stuart's  action 
so  favorably  as  Alexander.  And  Cooke, 
who  adored  Stuart  and  served  con- 
stantly under  him,  says,  'At  Chancel- 
lorsville, when  he  succeeded  Jackson, 
the  troops,  although  quite  enthusias- 
tic about  him,  complained  that  he  led 
them  too  recklessly  against  artillery; 
and  it  is  hard  for  those  who  knew  the 
man  to  believe  that,  as  an  army  com- 
mander, he  would  have  consented  to 
a  strictly  defensive  campaign.  Fight- 
ing was  a  necessity  of  his  blood,  and 
the  slow  movements  of  infantry  did 
not  suit  his  genius.' 

May  it  not  be,  also,  that  Lee 
thought  Stuart  indispensable  where 
he  was,  and  believed  that  it  would  be 
as  difficult  to  replace  him  as  Jackson? 
Most  of  Stuart's  correspondence  has 
perished  and  we  are  obliged  to  gather 
its  tenor  from  letters  written  to  him, 
which  is  much  like  listening  to  a  one- 
sided conversation  over  the  telephone. 
From  one  of  Lee's  letters,  however,  it 
is  fairly  evident  that  neither  he  nor 
Stuart  himself  had  seriously  considered 
the  latter's  taking  Jackson's  place.  Lee 
writes,  'I  am  obliged  to  you  for  your 
views  as  to  the  successor  of  the  great 
and  good  Jackson.  Unless  God  in  his 
mercy  will  raise  us  up  one,  I  do  not 
know  what  we  shall  do.  I  agree  with 
you  on  the  subject,  and  have  so  ex- 
pressed myself.' 

In  any  event,  what  his  countrymen 
will  always  remember  of  Stuart  is  the 
fighting  figure,  the  glory  of  battle,  the 
sudden  and  tumultuous  fury  of  charge 
and  onset. 

And  what  above  all  distinguishes 
him  in  this  is  his  splendid  joy  in  it. 
Others  fought  with  clenched  fist  and 
set  teeth,  rejoicing  perhaps,  but  with 
deadly  determination  of  lip  and  brow. 
He  laughed  and  sang.  His  blue  eye 
sparkled  and  his  white  teeth  gleamed. 
To  others  it  was  the  valley  of  the 


J.  E.  B.  STUART 


103 


shadow  of  death.  To  him  it  was  a 
picnic  and  a  pleasure  party. 

He  views  everything  on  its  pic- 
turesque side,  catches  the  theatrical 
detail  which  turns  terror  and  death 
into  a  scenic  surprise.  'My  arrival 
could  not  have  been  more  fortunately 
timed,  for,  arriving  after  dark,  the 
ponderous  march,  with  the  rolling 
artillery,  must  have  impressed  the  ene- 
my's cavalry,  watching  their  rear, 
with  the  idea  of  an  immense  army 
about  to  cut  off  their  retreat.'  He 
rushes  gayly  into  battle,  singing,  'Old 
Joe  Hooker,  won't  you  come  out  of 
the  Wilderness?'  or  his  favorite  of 
favorites,  '  If  you  want  to  have  a  good 
time,  jine  the  cavalry.'  When  he  is 
riding  off,  as  it  were  into  the  mouth 
of  hell,  his  adjutant  asks,  how  long, 
and  he  answers,  as  Touchstone  might, 
with  a  bit  of  old  ballad,  'It  may  be 
for  years  and  it  may  be  for  ever.'  His 
clear  laughter,  in  the  sternest  crises, 
echoes  through  dusty  war  books  like 
a  silver  bell.  As  he  sped  back  from  his 
raid,  the  Union  troops  were  close  upon 
him  and  the  swollen  Chickahominy 
in  front,  impassable,  it  seemed.  Stu- 
art thought  a  moment,  pulling  at  his 
beard.  Then  he  found  the  remains  of 
an  old  bridge  and  set  his  men  to  re- 
build it.  '  While  the  men  were  at  work 
upon  it,  Stuart  was  lying  down  on  the 
bank  of  the  stream,  in  the  gayest  hu- 
mor I  ever  saw,  laughing  at  the  prank 
he  had  played  on  McClellan.' 

It  is  needless  to  enlarge  on  the  effect 
of  such  a  temper,  such  exuberant 
confidence  and  cheerfulness  in  danger, 
on  subordinates.  It  lightened  labor, 
banished  fatigue,  warmed  chill  limbs 
and  fainting  courage.  'My  men  and 
horses  are  tired,  hungry,  jaded,  but 
all  right,'  was  the  last  dispatch  he  ever 
wrote.  So  long  as  he  was  with  them 
they  were  all  right.  His  very  voice 
was  like  music,  says  Fitz  Lee,  '  like  the 
silver  trumpet  of  the  Archangel.'  It 


sounded  oblivion  of  everything  but 
glory.  His  gayety,  his  laughter,  were 
infectious,  and  turned  a  raid  into  a 
revel.  'That  summer  night,'  writes 
Mosby  of  the  McClellan  expedition, 
'was  a  carnival  of  fun  I  can  never 
forget.  Nobody  thought  of  danger  or 
sleep,  when  champagne  bottles  were 
bursting,  and  wine  was  flowing  in  copi- 
ous streams.  All  had  perfect  confi- 
dence in  their  leader  ....  The  dis- 
cipline of  the  soldiers  for  a  while  gave 
way  to  the  wild  revelry  of  Comus.' 

And  this  spirit  of  adventure,  of  ro- 
mance, of  buoyant  optimism  and 
energy,  was  not  reserved  merely  for 
occasions  of  excitement,  was  not  the 
triumphant  outcome  of  glory  and  suc- 
cess. It  was  constant  and  unfailing. 
To  begin  with,  Stuart  had  a  magni- 
ficent physique.  'Nothing  seemed 
strong  enough  to  break  down  his  pow- 
erful organization  of  mind  and  body,' 
says  his  biographer;  and  Mosby:  'Al- 
though he  had  been  in  the  saddle  two 
days  and  nights  without  sleep,  he  was 
as  gay  as  a  lark.'  When  exhaustion 
finally  overcame  him,  he  would  drop 
off  his  horse  by  the  roadside,  anywhere, 
sleep  for  an  hour,  and  arise  as  active 
as  ever.  Universal  testimony  proves 
that  he  was  overcome  and  disheartened 
by  no  disaster.  He  would  be  thought- 
ful for  a  moment,  pulling  at  his  beard, 
then  seize  upon  the  best  decision  that 
presented  itself  and  push  on.  Dreari- 
ness sometimes  crushes  those  who  can 
well  resist  actual  misfortune.  Not 
Stuart.  '  In  the  midst  of  rainstorms, 
when  everybody  was  riding  along  grum 
and  cowering  beneath  the  flood  pour- 
ing down,  he  would  trot  on,  head  up, 
and  singing  gayly.' 

The  list  of  his  personal  adventures 
and  achievements  is  endless.  He 
braved  capture  and  death  with  entire 
indifference,  trusting  in  his  admirable 
horsemanship,  which  often  saved  him, 
trusting  in  Providence,  trusting  in  no- 


104 


J.  E.  B.  STUART 


thing  at  all  but  his  quick  wit  and  strong 
arm,  curious  mainly,  perhaps,  to  see 
what  would  happen.  On  one  occasion 
he  is  said  to  have  captured  forty-four 
Union  soldiers.  He  was  riding  abso- 
lutely alone  and  ran  into  them  taking 
their  ease  in  a  field.  Instantly  he 
chose  his  course.  'Throw  down  your 
arms  or  you  are  all  dead  men.'  They 
were  green  troops  and  threw  them 
down,  and  Stuart  marched  the  whole 
squad  into  camp.  When  duty  forbids 
a  choice  adventure,  he  sighs,  as  might 
Don  Quixote.  *A  scouting  party  of 
one  hundred  and  fifty  lancers  had  just 
passed  toward  Gettysburg.  I  regretted 
exceedingly  that  my  march  did  not 
admit  of  the  delay  necessary  to  catch 
them.' 

I  have  sometimes  asked  myself  how 
much  of  this  spirit  of  romantic  adven- 
ture, of  knight-errantry,  as  it  were,  in 
Stuart,  was  conscious.  Did  he,  like 
Claverhouse,  read  Homer  and  Frois- 
sart,  and  try  to  realize  in  modern  Vir- 
ginia the  heroic  deeds,  still  more,  the 
heroic  spirit,  of  antique  chivalry?  In 
common  with  all  Southerners,  he  prob- 
ably knew  the  prose  and  poetry  of 
Scott,  and  dreamed  of  the  plume  of 
Marmion  and  the  lance  of  Ivanhoe. 
He  must  have  felt  the  weight  of  his 
name  also,  and  believed  that  James 
Stuart  might  be  aptly  fitted  with  val- 
orous adventure  and  knightly  deeds 
and  sudden  glory.  It  is  extremely  in- 
teresting to  find  him  writing  to  Jack- 
son, 'Did  you  receive  the  volume  of 
Napoleon  and  his  maxims  I  sent  you?' 
I  should  like  to  own  that  volume.  And 
in  his  newspaper  account  of  Brown's 
raid  he  quotes  Horace,  horribly,  but 
still  Horace,  '  Erant  fortes  ante  Aga- 
memnona.' 

Yet  I  do  not  gather  that  he  was 
much  of  a  student;  he  preferred  to  live 
poems  rather  than  to  read  them.  The 
spirit  of  romance,  the  instinct  of  the 
picturesque,  was  born  in  him,  and 


would  out  anywhere  and  everywhere. 
Life  was  a  perpetual  play,  with  ever- 
shifting  scenes,  and  gay  limelight,  and 
hurrying  incident,  and  passionate  cli- 
max. Again  and  again  he  reminds  me 
of  a  boy  playing  soldiers.  His  ambi- 
tion, his  love  of  glory,  was  of  this  or- 
der; not  a  bit  the  ardent,  devouring, 
frowning,  far-sighted  passion  of  Jack- 
son, but  a  jovial  sense  of  pleasant 
things  that  can  be  touched  and  heard 
and  tasted  here,  to-day. 

He  had  a  childlike,  simple  vanity 
which  all  his  biographers  smile  at,  liked 
parade,  display,  pomp,  and  gorgeous- 
ness,  utterly  differing  in  this  from  Jack- 
son, who  was  too  proud,  or  Lee,  who 
was  too  lofty.  Stuart  rode  fine  horses, 
never  was  seen  on  an  inferior  animal. 
He  wore  fine  clothes,  —  all  that  his  po- 
sition justified,  perhaps  a  little  more. 
Here  is  Fitz  Lee's  picture  of  him :  *  His 
strong  figure,  his  big  brown  beard,  his 
piercing,  laughing  blue  eye,  the  droop- 
ing hat  and  black  feather,  the  "fight- 
ing jacket"  as  he  termed  it,  the  tall 
cavalry  boots,  forming  one  of  the  most 
jubilant  and  striking  figures  in  the  war.' 
And  Cooke  is  even  more  particular: 
'His  fighting  jacket  shone  with  daz- 
zling buttons  and  was  covered  with 
gold  braid;  his  hat  was  looped  up  with 
a  golden  star,  and  decorated  with  a 
black  ostrich  plume;  his  fine  buff  gaunt- 
lets reached  to  the  elbow;  around  his 
waist  was  tied  a  splendid  yellow  sash, 
and  his  spurs  were  of  pure  gold.' 

After  this,  we  appreciate  the  bio- 
grapher's assertion  that  he  was  as  fond 
of  colors  as  a  boy  or  girl;  and  else- 
where we  read  that  he  never  moved 
without  his  gorgeous  red  battle-flag, 
which  often  drew  the  fire  of  the  enemy. 

As  to  the  spurs,  they  were  presented 
to  the  general  by  the  ladies  of  Balti- 
more,'and  he  took  great  pride  in  them, 
signing  himself  sometimes  in  private 
letters,  K.  G.  S.,  Knight  of  the  Gold- 
en Spurs. 


J.  E.  B.  STUART 


105 


This  last  touch  is  perfectly  charac- 
teristic, and  the  Stuart  of  the  pen  is 
precisely  the  same  as  the  Stuart  of  the 
sword.  He  could  express  himself  as 
simply  as  Napoleon:  'Tell  General  Lee 
that  all  is  right.  Jackson  has  not  ad- 
vanced, but  I  have;  and  I  am  going  to 
crowd  them  with  artillery/  But  usu- 
ally he  did  not.  Indeed,  the  severe 
taste  of  Lee  recoiled  from  his  subordi- 
nate's fashions  of  speech.  'The  general 
deals  in  the  flowery  style,  as  you  will 
perceive,  if  you  ever  see  his  reports  in 
detail.'  But  I  love  them,  they  ring  and 
resound  so  with  the  temper  of  the  man; 
gorgeous  scraps  of  tawdry  rhetoric, 
made  charming  by  their  riotous  sin- 
cerity, as  with  Scott  and  Dumas.  His 
*  brave  men  behaved  with  coolness  and 
intrepidity  in  danger,  unswerving  re- 
solution before  difficulties,  and  stood 
unappalled  before  the  rushing  torrent 
of  the  Chickahominy,  with  the  proba- 
bility of  an  enemy  at  their  heels  armed 
with  the  fury  of  a  tigress  robbed  of 
her  whelps.'  Could  anything  be  worse 
from  Lee's  point  of  view?  But  it  does 
put  some  ginger  into  an  official  report. 
Or  take  this  Homeric  picture  of  a 
charge,  which  rushes  like  a  half  dozen 
stanzas  of  Chevy  Chase:  'Lieutenant 
Robbins  handling  it  in  the  most  skill- 
ful manner,  managed  to  clear  the  way 
for  the  march  with  little  delay,  and  in- 
fused by  a  sudden  dash  at  a  picket 
such  a  wholesome  terror  that  it  never 
paused  to  take  a  second  look.  .  .  .  On, 
on  dashed  Robbins,  here  skirting  a 
field,  there  leaping  a  fence  or  ditch, 
and  clearing  the  woods  beyond.' 

When  I  read  these  things  I  cannot 
but  remember  Madame  de  Sevigne's 
fascinating  comment  on  the  historical 
novels  of  her  day.  'The  style  of  La 
Calprenede  is  detestable  in  a  thousand 
ways:  long-winded,  romantic  phrases, 
ill-chosen  words,  I  admit  it  all.  I  agree 
that  it  is  detestable;  yet  it  holds  me 
like  glue.  The  beauty  of  the  senti- 


ments, the  violence  of  the  passions, 
the  grandeur  of  the  events,  and  the 
miraculous  success  of  the  hero's  re- 
doubtable sword  —  it  sweeps  me  away 
as  if  I  were  a  child.' 

And  Stuart's  was  a  real  sword! 

Then,  too,  —  as  in  Shakespearean 
tragedy  or  modern  melodrama,  —  the 
tension,  in  Stuart's  case,  is  constantly 
relieved  by  hearty,  wholesome  laugh- 
ter, which  shook  his  broad  shoulders 
and  sparkled  in  his  blue  eyes.  See  what 
a  strange  comedy  his  report  makes  of 
this  lurid  night-scene,  in  which  another 
might  have  found  only  shadow  and 
death.  'It  so  far  succeeded  as  to  get 
possession  of  his  [General  Bartlett's] 
headquarters  at  one  o'clock  at  night, 
the  general  having  saved  himself  by 
precipitate  flight  in  his  nether  gar- 
ments. The  headquarters  flag  was 
brought  away.  No  prisoners  were  at- 
tempted to  be  taken,  the  party  shooting 
down  every  one  within  reach.  Some 
horses  breaking  loose  near  headquar- 
ters ran  through  an  adjacent  regiment- 
al camp,  causing  the  greatest  commo- 
tion, 'mid  firing  and  yelling  and  cries 
of  "Halt!"  "Rally!"  mingling  in  wild 
disorder,  and  ludicrous  stampede  which 
beggars  description.'  Can't  you  hear 
him  laugh? 

It  must  not  be  concluded  from  this 
that  Stuart  was  cruel  in  his  jesting. 
Where  gentleness  and  sympathy  were 
really  called  for,  all  the  evidence  shows 
that  no  man  could  give  more.  But  he 
believed  that  the  rough  places  are 
made  smooth,  and  the  hard  places  soft, 
and  the  barren  places  green  and  smil- 
ing, by  genial  laughter.  Who  shall  say 
that  he  was  wrong?  Therefore  he 
would  have  his  jest,  with  inferior  and 
superior,  with  friend  and  enemy.  Even 
the  sombre  Jackson  was  not  spared. 
When  he  had  floundered  into  winter- 
quarters  oddly  decorated,  Stuart  sug- 
gested '  that  a  drawing  of  the  apartment 
should  be  made,  with  the  race-horses, 


106 


J.  E.  B.  STUART 


gamecocks,  and  terrier  in  bold  relief, 
the  picture  to  be  labeled:  "  View  of  the 
winter-quarters  of  General  Stonewall 
Jackson,  affording  an  insight  into  the 
tastes  and  character  of  the  individual." ' 
And  Jackson  enjoyed  it. 

When  it  came  to  his  adversaries, 
Stuart's  fun  was  unlimited.  Everybody 
knows  his  telegraphed  complaint  to 
the  United  States  Commissary  Depart- 
ment that  the  mules  he  had  been  cap- 
turing lately  were  most  unsatisfactory, 
and  he  wished  they  would  provide  a 
better  quality.  Even  more  amusing 
is  the  correspondence  that  occurred  at 
Lewinsville.  One  of  Stuart's  old  com- 
rades wrote,  addressing  him  by  his 
West  Point  nickname,  'My  dear 
Beauty,  —  I  am  sorry  that  circum- 
stances are  such  that  I  can't  have  the 
pleasure  of  seeing  you,  although  so 
near  you.  Griffin  says  he  would  like 
to  have  you  dine  with  him  at  Willard's 
at  five  o'clock  on  Saturday  next.  Keep 
your  Black  Horse  off  me,  if  you  please. 
Yours,  etc.,  Orlando  M.  Poe.'  On  the 
back  of  this  was  penciled  in  Stuart's 
writing:  *I  have  the  honor  to  report 
that  "  circumstances  "  were  such  that 
they  could  have  seen  me  if  they  had 
stopped  to  look  behind,  and  I  answered 
both  at  the  cannon's  mouth.  Judging 
from  his  speed,  Griffin  surely  left  for 
Washington  to  hurry  up  that  dinner.' 

I  had  an  old  friend  who  adored  the 
most  violent  melodrama.  When  the 
curtain  and  his  tears  had  fallen  to- 
gether, he  would  sigh  and  murmur, 
*  Now  let 's  have  a  little  of  that  snare- 
drum  music.'  Such  was  Stuart.  'It 
might  almost  be  said  that  music  was 
his  passion,'  writes  Cooke.  I  doubt, 
however,  whether  he  dealt  largely  in 
the  fugues  of  Bach.  His  favorites,  in 
the  serious  order,  are  said  to  have 
been,  'The  dew  is  on  the  blossom,'  and 
4  Sweet  Evelina.'  But  his  joy  was  the 
uproarious,  'If  you  get  there  before  I 
do,'  or  his  precious,  'If  you  want  to 


have  a  good  time,  jine  the  cavalry.' 
He  liked  to  live  in  the  blare  of  trum- 
pets and  the  crash  of  cymbals,  liked 
to  have  his  nerves  tingle  and  his 
blood  leap  to  a  merry  '  hunt's-up '  or  a 
riotous  chorus,  liked  to  have  the  high 
strain  of  war's  melodrama  broken  by 
the  sudden  crackle  of  the  snare-drum. 
His  banjo-player,  Sweeney,  was  as  near 
to  him  as  an  aide-de-camp,  followed 
him  everywhere.  'Stuart  wrote  his 
most  important  correspondence  with 
the  rattle  of  the  gay  instrument  stun- 
ning everybody,  and  would  turn  round 
from  his  work,  burst  into  a  laugh,  and 
join  uproariously  in  Sweeney's  chorus.' 
And  dance  was  as  keen  a  spice  to 
peril  as  song  and  laughter.  To  fight 
all  day  and  dance  all  night  was  a  good 
day's  work  to  this  creature  of  perfect 
physique  and  inexhaustible  energy.  If 
his  staff -officers  could  not  keep  pace 
with  him  and  preferred  a  little  sleep, 
the  general  did  not  like  it  at  all. 
What?  Here  is  —  or  was  —  a  gay 
town,  and  pretty  girls.  Just  because 
we  are  here  to-day,  and  gone  to-mor- 
row, shall  we  not  fleet  the  time  care- 
lessly, as  they  did  in  the  golden  world  ? 
And  the  girls  are  all  got  together,  and  a 
ball  is  organized,  and  the  fun  grows 
swifter  and  swifter.  Perhaps  a  fortu- 
nate officer  picks  the  prettiest  and  is 
about  to  stand  up  with  her.  Stuart 
whispers  in  his  ear  that  a  pressing  mes- 
sage must  be  carried,  laughs  his  gay 
laugh,  and  slips  into  the  vacant  place. 
Then  an  orderly  hurries  in,  covered 
with  dust.  The  enemy  are  upon  us. 
'The  officers  rushed  to  their  weapons 
and  called  for  their  horses,  panic- 
stricken  fathers  and  mothers  endeav- 
ored to  collect  around  them  their  be- 
wildered children,  while  the  young 
ladies  ran  to  and  fro  in  most  admired 
despair.  General  Stuart  maintained 
his  accustomed  coolness  and  compo- 
sure. Our  horses  were  immediately 
saddled,  and  in  less  than  five  minutes 


J.  E.  B.  STUART 


107 


we  were  in  rapid  gallop  to  the  front.' 
Oh,  what  a  life! 

You  divine  that  with  such  a  tem- 
perament Stuart  would  love  women. 
So  he  did.  Not  that  he  let  them  inter- 
fere with  duty.  He  would  have  heart- 
ily accepted  the  profound  doctrine  of 
Enobarbus  in  regard  to  the  fair:  'It 
were  pity  to  cast  them  away  for  no- 
thing; yet  between  them  and  a  great 
cause  they  should  be  esteemed  as  no- 
thing.' Stuart  arrested  hundreds  of 
ladies,  says  his  biographer,  and  re- 
mained inexorable  to  their  petitions. 
Cooke's  charming  account  of  one  of 
these  arrests  should  be  read  in  full: 
how  the  fair  captives  first  raved,  and 
then  listened,  and  then  laughed,  and 
then  were  charmed  by  the  mellifluous 
Sweeney  and  the  persuasive  general, 
and  at  last  departed  with  kissed  hands 
and  kindly  hearts,  leaving  Stuart  to 
explain  to  his  puzzled  aide,  who  in- 
quired why  he  put  himself  out  so  much : 
*  Don't  you  understand?  When  those 
ladies  arrived  they  were  mad  enough 
with  me  to  bite  my  head  off,  and  I  de- 
termined to  put  them  in  good-humor 
before  they  left  me.' 

But  Cooke  dresses  his  viands.  I 
prefer  the  following  glimpse  of  Stuart 
and  girls  and  duty,  as  it  comes  unspiced 
from  the  rough-spoken  common  sol- 
dier. *  General  Lee  would  come  up  and 
spend  hours  studying  the  situation 
with  his  splendid  glasses;  and  the  glo- 
rious Stuart  would  dash  up,  always 
with  a  lady,  and  a  pretty  one,  too.  I 
wonder  if  the  girl  is  yet  alive  who  rode 
the  General's  fine  horse  and  raced 
with  him  to  charge  our  station.  When 
they  had  reached  the  level  platform, 
and  Stuart  had  left  her  in  care  of  one 
of  us  and  took  the  other  off  to  one  side 
and  questioned  the  very  sweat  out  of 
him  about  the  enemy's  position,  he 
was  General  Stuart  then;  but  when 
he  got  back  and  lifted  the  beauty 
into  the  saddle  and  rode  off  humming 


a  breezy  air  ...  he  was  Stuart  the 
beau.' 

And  the  women  liked  Stuart.  It  was 
a  grand  thing  to  be  the  first  officer  in 
the  Confederate  cavalry,  with  a  blue 
eye  and  a  fair  beard,  and  all  gold,  like 
Horace's  Pyrrha,  from  hat  to  spurs. 
When  he  rode  singing  and  laughing 
into  a  little  town,  by  river  or  seashore, 
they  flocked  to  meet  him,  young  and 
old,  and  touched  his  garments,  and 
begged  his  buttons,  and  kissed  his 
gloved  hands,  until  he  suggested  that 
his  cheeks  were  available,  and  then 
they  kissed  those,  young  and  old  alike. 
They  showered  him  with  flowers  also, 
buried  him  under  nosegays  and  gar- 
lands, till  he  rode  like  old  god  Bacchus 
or  the  Queen  of  May.  What  an  odd 
fashion  of  making  war!  And  the  best 
I  have  met  with  is,  that  one  day  Stu- 
art described  one  of  these  occurrences 
to  his  great  chieftain.  'I  had  to  wear 
her  garland,  till  I  was  out  of  sight/ 
apologized  the  young  cavalier.  'Why 
are  n't  you  wearing  it  now?'  retorted 
Lee.  Is  n't  that  admirable?  I  verily  be- 
lieve that  if  any  young  woman  had  had 
the  unimaginable  audacity  to  throw  a 
garland  over  Lee,  he  would  have  worn 
it  through  the  streets  of  Richmond 
itself. 

You  say,  then,  this  Stuart  was  dis- 
sipated, perhaps,  a  scapegrace,  a  rioter, 
imitating  Rupert  and  Murat  in  other 
things  than  great  cavalry  charges. 
That  is  the  curious  point.  The  man 
was  nothing  of  the  sort.  With  all  his 
instinct  for  revelry,  he  had  no  vices;  a 
very  Puritan  of  laughter.  He  liked 
pretty  girls  everywhere;  but  when  he 
was  charged  with  libertinism,  he  an- 
swered, in  the  boldness  of  innocence, 
'  That  person  does  not  live  who  can  say 
that  I  ever  did  anything  improper  of 
that  description';  and  he  liked  his 
wife  better  than  any  other  pretty  girl. 
He  married  her  when  he  was  twenty- 
two  years  old,  and  his  last  wish  was 


108 


J.  E.  B.  STUART 


that  she  might  reach  him  before  he 
died.  His  few  letters  to  her  that  have 
been  printed  are  charming  in  their 
playful  affection.  He  adored  his  child- 
ren also;  in  short,  was  a  pattern  of 
domesticity.  He  did,  indeed,  love  his 
country  more,  and  telegraphed  to  his 
wife,  when  she  called  him  to  his  dy- 
ing daughter's  bedside,  'My  duty  to 
the  country  must  be  performed  before 
I  can  give  way  to  the  feelings  of  a 
father';  but  the  child's  death  was  a 
cruel  blow  to  him.  With  his  intimates 
he  constantly  referred  to  her,  and  when 
he  himself  was  dying,  he  whispered,  '  I 
shall  soon  be  with  my  little  Flora  again.' 

'  I  never  saw  him  touch  a  card,'  writes 
one  who  was  very  near  him,  'and  he 
never  dreamed  of  uttering  an  oath 
under  any  provocation,  nor  would  he 
permit  it  at  his  headquarters.'  We 
are  assured  by  many  that  he  never 
drank,  and  an  explicit  statement  of  his 
own  on  the  subject  is  reported:  'I  pro- 
mised my  mother  in  my  childhood 
never  to  touch  ardent  spirits,  and  a 
drop  has  never  passed  my  lips,  except 
the  wine  of  the  communion/ 

As  the  last  words  show,  he  had  re- 
ligion as  well  as  morals.  He  joined  the 
Methodist  Church  when  he  was  fif- 
teen, later  the  Episcopal.  When  he  was 
twenty-four  he  sent  money  home  to 
his  mother  to  aid  in  the  building  of 
a  church.  He  carried  her  Bible  with 
him  always.  In  his  reports  religion  is 
not  obtrusive.  When  it  does  occur, 
it  is  evidently  sincere.  'The  Lord  of 
Hosts  was  plainly  fighting  on  our  side, 
and  the  solid  walls  of  Federal  infantry 
melted  away  before  the  straggling, 
but  nevertheless  determined,  onsets 
of  our  infantry  columns.'  'Believ- 
ing that  the  hand  of  God  was  clear- 
ly manifested  in  the  signal  deliverance 
of  my  command  from  danger,  and  the 
crowning  success  attending  it,  I  as- 
cribe to  Him  the  praise,  the  honor,  and 
the  glory.'  He  inclined  to  strictness  in 


the  observance  of  Sunday.  Captain 
Colston  writes  me  that  when  twelve 
struck  of  a  Saturday  night,  Stuart 
held  up  his  hand  relentlessly  and 
stopped  song  and  dance  in  their  full 
tide,  though  youth  and  beauty  begged 
for  just  one  more.  He  was  equally 
scrupulous  in  the  field,  though,  in  his 
feeling  of  injury  because  the  enemy 
were  not  so,  I  seem  to  detect  his  habit- 
ual touch  of  humor.  '  The  next  morning 
being  the  Sabbath,  I  recognized  my 
obligation  to  do  no  active  duty  other 
than  what  was  absolutely  necessary, 
and  determined,  so  far  as  possible,  to 
devote  it  to  rest.  Not  so  the  enemy, 
whose  guns  about  8  A.  M.  showed  that 
he  would  not  observe  it.' 

I  have  no  doubt  that  Stuart's  relig- 
ion was  inward  as  well  as  outward,  and 
remoulded  his  heart.  But,  after  all,  he 
was  but  little  over  thirty  when  he  died, 
and  I  love  to  trace  in  him  the  occa- 
sional working  of  the  old  Adam  which 
had  such  lively  play  in  the  bosom  of 
many  an  officer  who  was  unjustly 
blamed  or  missed  some  well-deserved 
promotion.  Stuart's  own  letters  are 
too  few  to  afford  much  insight  of  this 
kind.  But  here  again  we  get  that  one- 
sided correspondence  with  Lee  which 
is  so  teasingly  suggestive.  On  one 
occasion  Lee  writes,  'The  expression, 
"  appropriated  by  the  Stuart  Horse 
Artillery,"  was  not  taken  from  a  report 
of  Colonel  Baldwin,  nor  intended  in 
any  objectionable  sense,  but  used  for 
want  of  a  better  phrase,  without  any 
intention  on  my  part  of  wounding.' 
And  again,  after  Chancellors ville:  'As 
regards  the  closing  remarks  of  your 
note,  I  am  at  a  loss  to  understand 
their  reference  or  to  know  what  has 
given  rise  to  them.  In  the  manage- 
ment of  the  difficult  operations  at 
Chancellorsville,  which  you  so  prompt- 
ly undertook,  and  creditably  per- 
formed, I  saw  no  errors  to  correct,  nor 
has  there  been  a  fit  opportunity  to 


J.  E.  B.  STUART 


109 


commend  your  conduct.  I  prefer  your 
acts  to  speak  for  themselves,  nor  does 
your  character  or  reputation  require 
bolstering  up  by  out-of-place  expres- 
sions of  my  opinion.' 

But  by  far  the  most  interesting  hu- 
man revelation  of  this  kind  is  one  letter 
of  Stuart's  own,  written  to  justify  him- 
self against  some  aspersions  of  General 
Trimble.  With  the  right  or  wrong  of 
the  case  we  are  not  concerned.  Sim- 
ply with  the  fascinating  study  of  Stu- 
art's state  of  mind.  He  begins  evident- 
ly with  firm  restraint  and  a  Christian 
moderation,  'Human  memory  is  frail, 
I  know.'  But  the  exposure  of  his 
wrongs  heats  his  blood,  as  he  goes  on, 
and  spurs  him,  though  he  still  endeav- 
ors to  check  himself.  'It  is  true  I  am 
not  in  the  habit  of  giving  orders,  par- 
ticularly to  my  seniors  in  years,  in  a 
dictatorial  and  authoritative  manner, 
and  my  manner  very  likely  on  this 
occasion  was  more  suggestive  than  im- 
perative; indeed,  I  may  have  been  con- 
tent to  satisfy  myself  that  the  dis- 
positions which  he  himself  proposed 
accorded  with  my  own  ideas,  without 
any  blustering  show  of  orders  to  do 
this  or  that  .  .  .  General  Trimble 
says  I  did  not  reach  the  place  until 
seven  or  eight  o'clock.  I  was  in  plain 
view  all  the  time,  and  rode  through, 
around,  and  all  about  the  place,  soon 
after  its  capture.  General  Trimble  is 
mistaken.'  Nay,  in  his  stammering 
eagerness  to  right  himself,  his  phrases, 
usually  so  crisp  and  clear,  stumble  and 
fall  over  each  other:  'In  the  face  of 
General  Trimble's  positive  denial  of 


sending  such  a  message,  "that  he 
would  prefer  waiting  until  daylight," 
or  anything  like  it,  while  my  recollec- 
tion is  clear  that  I  did  receive  such  a 
message,  and  received  it  as  coming 
from  General  Trimble,  yet,  as  he  is  so 
positive  to  not  having  sent  such  a  mes- 
sage, or  anything  like  it,  I  feel  bound 
to  believe  that  either  the  message  was 
misrepresented,  or  made  up,  by  the 
messenger,  or  that  it  was  a  message  re- 
ceived from  General  Robertson,  whose 
sharpshooters  had  been  previously 
deployed.' 

A  real  man,  you  see,  like  the  rest  of 
us;  but  a  noble  one,  and  lovable.  For- 
tunate also,  in  his  death  as  in  his  life. 
For  he  was  not  shot  down  in  the  early 
days,  like  Jackson  and  Sidney  John- 
ston, when  it  seemed  as  if  his  great  aid 
might  have  changed  destiny.  He  had 
done  all  a  man  in  his  position  could  do. 
When  he  went,  all  hope  too  was  going. 
He  was  spared  the  long,  weary  days  of 
Petersburg,  spared  the  bitter  cup  of 
Appomattox,  spared  the  domination  of 
the  conqueror,  spared  what  was  per- 
haps, worst  of  all,  the  harsh  words  and 
reproaches  and  recrimination,  which 
flew  too  hotly  where  there  should  have 
been  nothing  but  love  and  silence.  He 
slept  untroubled  in  his  glory,  while  his 
countrymen  mourned  and  Lee  '  yearn- 
ed for  him.'  His  best  epitaph  has  been 
written  by  a  magnanimous  opponent: 
'  Deep  in  the  hearts  of  all  true  cavalry- 
men, North  and  South,  will  ever  burn 
a  sentiment  of  admiration,  mingled 
with  regret,  for  this  knightly  soldier 
and  generous  man.' 


THE  WAY  OF  LIFE 


BY   LUCY   HUFFAKER 


THERE  was  a  heavy  odor  in  the  little 
house  which  quite  blighted  the  soft 
spring  air  as  it  blew  in  through  the 
half-open  window.  For  supper  there 
had  been  onions  and  sausage,  and  the 
fried  potatoes  had  burned.  The  smells 
which  had  arisen  from  the  kitchen 
stove  had  mingled  with  the  raw,  soapy 
fumes  which  gave  testimony  that 
Monday  was  wash-day  in  the  Black 
family.  Now  the  smoking  of  the  kero- 
sene lamp  on  the  centre-table  seemed 
to  seal  in  hermetical  fashion  the  op- 
pressive room  against  the  gentle 
breeze  of  the  May  evening. 

The  woman,  bending  over  a  pair  of 
trousers  which  she  was  patching,  stuck 
the  needle  in  the  cloth,  pulled  the  thim- 
ble from  her  fat,  red  finger,  and  rubbed 
her  hands  over  her  eyes. 

4 Bed-time,  Billy,'  she  said  to  the 
nine-year-old  boy  who  was  playing  with 
a  picture-puzzle  on  the  other  side  of 
the  table. 

'Aw,  ma,  let  me  stay  up,  till  pa 
and  the  boys  get  home.' 

The  woman  shook  her  head. 

*  I  '11  get  up  in  plenty  of  time  to  feed 
the  chickens,  anyhow.  Honest,  I  will.' 

'You  ought  to  be  glad  to  go  to  bed,' 
the  mother  sighed  in  answer.  '  I  'd  be. 
Seems  to  me  I'd  be  tickled  to  death  if 
I  could  drop  into  bed  without  my  sup- 
per any  night.' 

'  I  '11  go  if  you  '11  go,  too.  I  just  hate 
to  go  to  bed  knowing  all  the  rest  of  you 
are  up.' 

'Me  go  to  bed!  Why  these  trousers 
of  yours  are  n't  finished  yet  and  I  've 
got  to  mend  Tom's  shirt  and  your  fa- 

110 


ther's  coat,  and  then  there 's  the  bread 
to  set.  Much  chance  I  have  to  go  to 
bed  for  a  couple  of  hours,  yet!  Now 
you  run  along.  If  you  go  like  a  good 
boy,  you  can  have  a  cooky.' 

She  put  the  thimble  on  her  finger 
and  bent  over  her  mending  again.  She 
sewed  steadily  on  until  an  hour  later, 
when  she  heard  the  buggy  drive  into 
the  yard  and  one  of  the  boys  came 
running  in  to  ask  her  if  she  knew  where 
the  barn  lantern  was.  It  was  in  the 
cellar,  and  there  was  barely  enough  oil 
to  make  a  dim  light  while  the  horse 
was  being  unharnessed.  The  boys  were 
sent  to  bed  immediately,  with  an  in- 
junction to  be  quiet  so  Billy  would  n't 
be  awakened.  She  heard  the  heavy 
tread  of  her  husband  in  the  kitchen  as 
he  hunted  for  the  dipper  to  get  a  drink 
of  water.  Then  he  came  into  the  sit- 
ting-room, sat  down  in  a  chair,  and  be- 
gan pulling  off  his  shoes.  He  groaned 
as  he  did  it. 

'Say,  Em,'  he  said,  'guess  who  I  saw , 
in  town  to-night?' 

'Who?'  was  the  unimaginative  re- 
sponse. 

'You'd  never  guess  in  a  hundred 
years.  You'd  never  guess  what  she 
did,  either.  She  sent  you  these.'  He 
drew  from  his  pocket  a  package  and 
a  sheet  of  note-paper.  The  woman 
looked  at  them  for  a  moment,  but  she 
did  n't  touch  them. 

'Hurry  up,  Em,'  said  the  man. 
'They  won't  bite  you.' 

'But  what — ?'  she  faltered. 

'The  best  way  to  find  out  about  'em 
is  to  open  'em.' 


THE  WAY  OF  LIFE 


111 


She  opened  the  package  first.  It 
was  a  cheap  colored  print  of  St.  Ce- 
cilia at  the  Organ.  It  was  in  a  bright 
gilt  frame.  Then  she  opened  the  note. 
She  read  it  through  once,  with  a  little 
frown  puckering  her  forehead.  Then 
more  slowly  she  read  it  the  second 
time. 

'Minnie  Jackson!'  she  murmured. 
'  I  have  n't  seen  her  for  nearly  ten 
years.  I  don't  know  when  I've  thought 
about  her,  even.  You  read  it,  Jake?' 

'Yes.  She  did  n't  seal  it.'  He  wait- 
ed a  minute,  then  said,  'I  could  n't  just 
make  out  what  it  was  all  about.  What 
day  is  this?' 

*  It 's  our  birthday  —  Minnie's  and 
mine.  We  used  to  call  ourselves  twins, 
but  she 's  a  year  older  than  I  am.  I  've 
been  so  busy  all  day  I  never  thought 
about  it.  What  does  Minnie  look  like? ' 

'Oh,  she  looks  about  the  same,  I 
guess,  as  the  last  time  she  was  home. 
She's  getting  fatter,  though.  Guess 
the  climate  out  in  California  must 
agree  with  her.' 

'  Is  she  as  fat  as  I  am? ' 

'Just  about,  I  guess.' 

'Did  she  look  as  if  they  were  well 
off?  What  kind  of  a  dress  did  she  have 
on?' 

'I  don't  know.  Good  enough,  I 
guess.  I  did  n't  see  anything  wrong 
with  it.  While  she  ran  into  the  store 
to  get  this  picture  and  write  this  note 
to  you,  old  Jackson  was  bragging  to 
me  about  how  well  Elmer  had  done. 
He  said  Min  had  married  about  as  well 
as  any  girl  round  here.' 

'  Did  he  say  anything  about  whether 
she  ever  paints  any? ' 

'Paints?  Whatever  are  you  talking 
about,  Em?' 

She  had  bent  over  her  sewing  again, 
and  he  could  not  see  her  face  as  she 
answered,  'When  Minnie  and  I  were 
little  girls,  I  reckon  we  never  had  any 
secrets  from  each  other,  at  all.  I  know 
I  talked  about  things  to  her  I  never 


could  have  told  to  anybody  else.  She 
was  that  way  with  me,  too.  Well,  she 
always  said  she  wanted  to  paint,  and 
I  wanted  to  play.  She  was  always 
copying  every  picture  she  saw.  I  re- 
member she  did  one  picture  called  A 
Yard  of  Roses,  from  a  calendar.  It 
was  so  good  you  could  n't  have  told 
the  difference.  Don't  you  remember 
the  time  she  took  the  prize  at  the  art 
exhibit  at  the  country  fair,  with  a 
picture  she  had  copied,  called  The 
Storm?  One  of  the  judges  said  it  just 
made  him  shiver  to  look  at  it,  it  was 
so  real.' 

'Come  to  think  of  it,  I  believe  I  do 
recollect  something  about  Min  having 
queer  notions.  I  know  us  boys  used 
to  think  she  was  stuck-up.  What  did 
she  mean  about  the  vow  and  about 
this  picture  being  of  you,  by  her?' 

For  a  moment  there  was  only  the 
little  click  of  her  thimble  against  the 
needle.  Then  she  said,  'I  guess  I  can't 
make  it  clear  to  you,  Jake.  Minnie 
always  did  have  her  own  way  of  put- 
ting things.  We  had  lots  of  fancies,  as 
we  used  to  call  them.  But  I  suppose 
she  was  thinking  about  our  old  dreams. 
If  they  'd  come  true,  she  might  have 
painted  me,  sitting  like  that.' 

'It  don't  look  much  like  you;  even 
when  you  was  young,'  was  the  reply  of 
the  man,  not  given  to  '  fancies  ' — '  but 
what  is  it  about  the  vow? ' 

'I  don't  know,'  said  his  wife  shortly. 
It  was  one  of  the  few  lies  she  had  ever 
told  her  husband.  Just  why,  having 
told  him  so  much,  she  could  n't  tell 
him  that  Minnie  Jackson  and  she  had 
promised  each  other  that,  no  matter 
what  happened,  nothing  should  keep 
them  from  realizing  their  ambitions, 
and  that  each  year  they  would  give  a 
report  to  each  other  on  their  birthday, 
she  could  not  have  said.  But  suddenly 
her  throat  contracted  and  she  could 
not  see  the  patch  on  the  coat. 

'How  this  lamp  does  smoke,'  she 


112 


THE  WAY  OF  LIFE 


said,  as  she  brushed  her  hand  over  her     He  let  Em  have  the  butter  and  chicken 


eyes. 

*  Well,'  yawned  her  husband,  *  I  guess 
most  folks,  leastwise  most  girls,  have 
silly  notions  when  they're  young. 

*  Who'd  ever  think  to  see  you  now, 
that  you  ever  had  any  such  ideas? 
Anyhow,   they  never  hurt   you   any. 
You're  a  good  wife  for  a  farmer,  Em. 
There  ain't  a  better  woman  anywhere 
than  you.' 

It  was  one  of  the  few  times  in  all 
the  years  of  their  marriage  that  he  had 
praised  her.  Jacob  Black  had  never 
been  one  to  question  life  or  to  marvel 
at  its  wonders.  For  him,  it  held  no 
wonders.  The  spell  of  life  had  caught 
him  when  he  was  young.  He  had  *  fallen 
in  love'  with  Emmeline  Mead  and  he 
had  married  her.  She  had  borne  him 
eight  children.  Five  of  them  had  lived. 
If  Jacob  Black  had  thought  about  it 
at  all,  which  he  did  not,  he  would  have 
said  that  was  the  way  life  went.  One 
was  young.  Then  one  grew  old.  When 
one  was  young,  one  married  and  prob- 
ably there  were  children.  The  wing  of 
romance  had  brushed  him  so  lightly  in 
its  passing,  that  at  the  time  it  had 
brought  to  him  no  yearning  for  an  un- 
known rapture,  no  wonder  at  the  mys- 
tery of  life.  After  twenty-one  years, 
if  he  had  given  it  any  thought  what- 
soever, he  would  have  said  that  their 
marriage  'had  turned  out  well.'  Em 
had  been  a  good  wife;  she  had  risen  at 
daylight  and  worked  until  after  dark. 
She  was  n't  foolish  about  money.  She 
never  went  to  town  unless  there  was 
something  to  take  her  there.  She  went 
to  church,  of  course,  and  when  it  was 

*  her  turn,'  she  entertained  the  Ladies' 
Aid.  Such  recreations  were  to  be  ex- 
pected. Yes,   Em   had   been   a   good 
wife.  But  then,  he  had  been  a  good 
husband.  He    never    drank.  He    was 
a  church  member.  He  always  hired  a 
woman  to  do  the  housework,  for  two 
weeks,  when  there  was  a  new  baby. 


money. 

The  clock  struck  nine. 

'I'm  going  to  bed,'  he  said;  'there  's 
lots  to  do  to-morrow.  Nearly  through 
your  mending?' 

'No.  Anyhow,  I  guess  I'll  wait  up 
for  John  and  Victoria  to  come  home.* 

'Better  not,  if  you're  tired.  John 
may  get  in  early,  but  probably  Vic 
will  be  mooning  along.' 

'What?'  she  cried.  'What  do  you 
mean  by  that,  Jake  Black?' 

'  Say,  Em,  are  you  blind  ?  Can't  you 
see  there's  something  between  her 
and  Jim?  Have  n't  you  noticed  that  it 
is  n't  John  he  comes  to  see  now?  Have 
n't  you  seen  how  Vic  spruces  up  nights 
when  he's  coming  over?' 

The  woman  dropped  her  sewing  in 
her  lap.  The  needle  ran  into  her  thumb. 
Mechanically,  she  pulled  it  out.  She 
was  so  intent,  looking  at  him,  trying  to 
grasp  his  meaning,  that  she  did  not 
notice  the  drops  of  blood  which  fell  on 
her  mending.  When  she  spoke,  it  was 
with  difficulty. 

'Oh,  Jake,  it  can't  be.  It  just  can't 
be.' 

'Why  can't  it?' 

'  Why,  he 's  not  good  enough  for  Vic- 
toria.' 

'Not  good  enough?  Why,  what's 
the  matter  with  Jim?  I  never  heard  a 
word  against  him  and  I ' ve  known  him 
ever  since  he  was  a  little  shaver. 
He's  steady  as  can  be,  and  a  hard 
worker.' 

'  I  know  all  that.  I  was  n't  think- 
ing about  such  things.  I  was  thinking 
about  —  oh,  about  —  other  things.' 

'Other  things?  Well,  what  on  earth 
is  the  matter  with  the  other  things? 
Forman's  place  is  as  good  as  any  here- 
abouts, and  it's  clear,  and  only  three 
children  to  be  divided  among.  There 's 
money  in  the  bank,  too,  I'll  bet.' 

'But  Victoria  is  so  young,  Jake. 
Why,  she 's  just  a  girl !' 


THE   WAY  OF  LIFE 


113 


*  She's  old  as  you  was,  when  we  got 
married,  Em.' 

He  went  into  the  kitchen  for  an- 
other drink  of  water.  When  he  came 
through  the  room,  he  bent  over  to  pick 
up  his  shoes.  'Say,  Em,'  he  said,  'you 
surely  don't  mean  what  you've  been 
saying,  do  you,  about  Jim  not  being 
good  enough  for  Vic?  'Cause  it  ain't 
likely  that  she'll  ever  get  another 
chance  as  good.' 

She  did  not  answer.  The  man  look- 
ing at  her,  the  man  who  had  lived  with 
her  for  more  than  twenty  years,  did 
not  know  that  a  sudden  rage  against 
life  was  in  her  heart.  He  did  not  know 
that  the  lost  dreams  of  her  youth  were 
crying  out  in  her  against  the  treachery 
of  life.  He  did  not  know  that  the 
blindfold  which  the  years  had  merci- 
fully bound  across  her  eyes  had  fallen 
away,  and  that  she  was  seeing  the  ever- 
lasting tragedy  of  the  conflict  between 
dreams  and  life.  He  did  not  know  that, 
in  that  moment,  she  was  facing  the 
supreme  sorrow  of  motherhood  in  the 
knowledge  that  the  beloved  child  can- 
not be  spared  the  disillusions  of  the 
years.  He  only  knew  that  she  was 
worried. 

'Don't  you  be  giving  Vic  any  of 
your  queer  notions,'  he  said  in  a  voice 
which  was  almost  harsh.  Jacob  Black 
was  an  easy-going  man.  But  he  had 
set  his  heart  on  seeing  his  daughter  the 
wife  of  Jim  Forman.  Did  not  the  For- 
man  farm  join  his  on  the  southeast? 

Until  she  heard  him  walking  around 
in  their  bedroom  overhead,  she  sewed 
on.  Then  she  laid  down  her  work.  She 
picked  up  the  picture.  It  was  small, 
but  she  held  it  clutched  in  both  hands, 
as  though  it  were  heavy.  It  would  not 
have  mattered  to  her  if  she  had  known 
that  critics  of  art  scoffed  at  the  pic- 
ture. To  her  it  was  more  than  a  mas- 
terpiece; it  was  a  miracle.  Had  she 
not  felt  like  the  pictured  saint,  when 
she  had  sat  at  the  organ,  years  ago? 
VOL.  in -NO.  i 


She,  too,  had  raised  her  eyes  in  just 
that  way,  and  if  actual  roses  had  not 
fallen  on  the  keys,  the  mystical  ones 
of  hopes  too  fragile  for  words,  and 
beauties  only  dreamed  of,  had  fallen 
all  about  her.  There  was  a  time  when 
she  had  played  the  little  organ  in 
church.  How  her  soul  had  risen  on  the 
chords  which  she  struck  for  the  Dox- 
ology,  which  always  came  just  before 
the  benediction!  Even  after  Victoria 
was  born,  she  had  played  the  organ 
for  a  time.  Then  the  babies  came  very 
fast,  and  when  one  has  milking  to  do 
and  dishes  to  wash  and  one's  fingers 
are  needle-pricked,  it  is  difficult  to  find 
the  keys.  Also  when  one  works  from 
daylight  until  dark,  one  wants  nothing 
but  rest.  There  is  a  sleep  too  deep  for 
dreams. 

It  was  years  since  Emmeline  Black 
had  dreamed  except  in  the  terms  of  her 
motherhood.  For  herself,  the  dream 
had  gone.  She  did  not  rebel.  She  ac- 
cepted. It  was  the  way  of  life  with 
women  like  her.  She  would  not  have 
said  her  life  was  hard.  Jacob  Black 
had  been  a  good  husband  to  her.  Only 
a  fool,  having  married  a  poor  farmer, 
could  expect  that  the  dreams  of  a  ro- 
mantic girl  would  ever  come  true.  Once 
she  had  expected  it,  of  course.  That 
was  when  Jacob  Black  had  seemed 
as  a  prince  to  Emmeline  Mead.  She 
had  felt  the  wing  of  romance  as  it 
brushed  past  her.  But  that  was  long 
ago.  She  did  n't  like  the  routine  of  her 
life.  But  neither  did  she  hate  it.  For 
herself,  it  had  come  to  seem  the  nat- 
ural, the  expected  thing.  But  for  Vic- 
toria — 

Her  dreams  had  not  all  gone  when 
Victoria  was  born.  That  first  year  of 
her  marriage,  it  had  seemed  like  play- 
ing at  being  a  housekeeper  to  do  the 
work  for  Jacob  and  herself.  She  had 
loved  her  garden,  and  often,  just  be- 
cause she  had  loved  to  be  with  him 
and  because  she  loved  the  smell  of  the 


114 


THE  WAY  OF  LIFE 


earth  and  the  growing  things  which 
came  from  it,  she  had  gone  into  the 
fields  with  her  husband.  Then  when 
the  year  was  almost  gone,  her  baby 
had  been  born.  She  had  loved  the 
other  children  as  they  came,  and  she 
had  grieved  for  the  girls  and  the  boy 
who  had  died,  but  Victoria  was  the 
child  of  her  dreams.  The  other  child- 
ren had  been  named  for  aunts  and 
uncles  and  grandfathers,  and  so  had 
satisfied  family  pride.  But  that  first 
baby  had  been  named  for  a  queen. 

None  of  the  boys  cared  for  music. 
They  'took  after'  the  Black  family. 
But  Victoria,  so  Emmeline  felt,  be- 
longed to  her.  She  had  always  been 
able  to  'play  by  ear,'  and  her  voice 
was  sweet  and  true.  The  butter-and- 
egg  money  for  a  long  time  had  gone  for 
music  lessons  for  Victoria.  When  the 
girl  was  twelve,  her  mother  had  begun 
a  secret  fund.  Every  week  she  pilfered 
a  few  pennies  from  her  own  small  in- 
come and  put  them  away.  Some  time, 
Victoria  was  to  go  to  the  city  and  have 
lessons  from  the  best  teacher  there. 
For  five  years  she  did  not  purchase  a 
thing  for  herself  to  wear,  except  now 
and  then  a  dress  pattern  of  calico. 
That  was  no  real  sacrifice  to  her.  The 
hard  thing  was  to  deny  pretty  clothes 
to  Victoria.  Then  a  year  of  sickness 
came.  She  tried  to  forget  the  little 
sum  of  money  hidden  away.  Surely 
their  father  could  pay  the  bills.  If  she 
had  spent  the  butter-and-egg  money, 
as  he  had  thought  she  had  done,  he 
would  have  had  to  pay  them  alone. 
But  when  the  doctor  said  that  Henry 
must  be  taken  to  the  county-seat  for 
an  operation,  there  was  no  thought 
of  questioning  her  duty.  Her  husband 
had  been  surprised  and  relieved  when 
she  gave  him  her  little  hoard.  It  was 
another  proof  that  he  had  a  good  wife, 
and  one  who  was  not  foolish  about 
money. 

At  last,  her  sewing  was  finished.  She 


went  into  the  kitchen  and  began  to  set 
the  bread.  But  her  thoughts  were  not 
on  it.  She  was  thinking  of  Emmeline 
Mead  and  her  dreams,  and  how  they 
had  failed  her.  She  had  expected  Vic- 
toria Black  to  redeem  those  dreams. 
And  now  Victoria  was  to  marry  and  go 
the  same  hard  way  toward  drab  mid- 
dle-age. She  heard  some  one  step  on 
the  front  porch.  There  was  a  low  mur- 
mur of  voices  for  a  moment  and  a  lit- 
tle half-stifled  laugh.  Then  the  door 
opened. 

'Mother,  is  that  you?'  came  some- 
thing which  sounded  half- whisper,  half- 
laugh  from  the  door. 

She  raised  her  eyes  from  the  bread- 
pan.  She  smiled.  But  she  could  not 
speak.  It  seemed  as  if  the  fingers  of 
some  world-large  hand  had  fastened 
around  her  heart.  To  her  Victoria  had 
always  been  the  most  beautiful,  the 
most  wonderful  being,  on  earth.  But 
she  had  never  seen  this  Victoria  before. 
The  girl  was  standing  in  the  door;  eyes 
shining,  lips  trembling,  her  slim  young 
body  swaying  as  if  to  some  hidden 
harmony.  Then  she  leaped  across  the 
kitchen,  and  threw  her  strong  arms 
round  her  mother. 

'I'm  so  glad  you're  up  and  alone! 
Oh,  mother,  I  had  to  see  you  to-night. 
I  could  n't  have  gone  to  bed  without 
talking  to  you.  I  was  thinking  it  was 
a  blessed  thing  father  always  sleeps  so 
hard,  for  I  could  tip-toe  in  and  get  you 
and  he'd  never  know  the  difference.' 
She  stifled  a  little  laugh  and  went  on, 
'Come  on,  outdoors.  It  is  too  lovely 
to  stay  inside.'  She  drew  her  mother, 
who  had  not  yet  spoken,  through  the 
door.  'I  guess,  mother,'  she  said,  as 
if  suddenly  shy  when  the  confines  of 
the  kitchen  were  left  behind  for  the 
star-lighted  night,  'that  you  know 
what  it  is,  don't  you?' 

For  answer,  Emmeline  Black  sobbed. 

'Don't,  mother,  don't.  You  must  n't 
mind.  Just  think  how  near  home  I'll 


THE  WAY  OF  LIFE 


115 


be.  Is  n't  that  something  to  be  glad 
about?' 

Her  mother  nodded  her  head  as 
she  wiped  her  eyes  on  her  gingham 
apron. 

'I  wondered  if  you  saw  it  coming?' 
the  girlish  voice  went  on.  'You  never 
let  on,  and  the  kids  never  teased  me 
any.  So  I  thought  perhaps  you  told 
'em  not  to.  I  have  n't  felt  like  being 
teased  about  Jim,  someway.  It 's  been 
too  wonderful,  you  know.' 

Not  until  that  moment  did  Emme- 
line  Black  acknowledge  the  defeat  of 
her  dreams.  Wonderful!  To  love  and 
be  loved  by  Jim  Forman,  of  whom  the 
most  that  could  be  said  was  that  he 
was  steady  and  a  hard  worker,  and 
that  there  were  only  two  other  child- 
ren to  share  his  father's  farm! 

'Don't  cry,  mother,'  implored  Vic- 
toria, '  though  I  know  why  you  're  do- 
ing it.  I  feel  like  crying,  too,  only 
something  won't  let  me  cry  to-night.  I 
guess  I  'm  just  too  happy  ever  to  cry 
again.' 

Still  her  mother  had  not  spoken.  She 
had  stopped  crying  and  stood  twisting 
her  apron  with  nervous  fingers. 

'Mother,'  said  Victoria,  suddenly, 
'you  like  Jim,  don't  you?'  She  said 
it  as  if  the  possibility  of  any  one's  not 
liking  Jim  was  preposterous.  But, 
nevertheless,  there  was  anxiety  in  her 
voice. 

Her  mother  nodded  her  head. 

'Then  why  are  n't  you  really  glad? 
I  thought  you  would  be,  mother.' 

There  was  no  resisting  that  appeal 
in  Victoria's  voice.  Never  in  her  life 
had  she  failed  her  daughter.  Was  she 
to  fail  her  in  this  hour? 

'You  seem  like  a  little  girl  to  me, 
Victoria,'  she  found  voice  to  say,  at 
last.  'I  guess  all  mothers  feel  like  this 
when  their  daughters  tell  them  they 
are  going  to  leave  them.  I  reckon  I 
never  understood  until  just  now,  why 
my  mother  acted  just  like  she  did  when 


I  told  her  your  father  and  I  were  going 
to  be  married.' 

Victoria  laughed  joyously.  'I'm 
not  a  little  girl.  I'm  a  woman.  And, 
mother,  Jim  is  so  good.  He  wants  to 
be  married  right  away.  He  says  he 
can't  bear  to  think  of  waiting.  But 
he  said  I  was  to  tell  you  that  if  you 
could  n't  spare  me  for  a  while,  it  would 
be  all  right.'  There  was  pride  in  her 
lover's  generosity.  But  deeper  than 
that  was  the  woman's  pride  in  the 
knowledge  that  he  could  n't  '  bear  to 
think  of  waiting.' 

'  It  is  n't  that  I  can't  spare  you, 
dear,'  said  her  mother.  'But  oh,  Vic- 
toria, I'd  wanted  to  have  you  go  off 
and  study  to  be  a  fine  musician.  I've 
dreamed  of  it  ever  since  you  were  born.' 

'But  I  could  n't  go  even  if  it  was 
n't  for  Jim.  Where  would  we  ever  get 
the  money?  Anyway,  mother,  Jim  is 
going  to  buy  me  a  piano.  What  do 
you  think  of  that?' 

'A  piano?' 

'Yes.  He  has  been  saving  money 
for  it  for  years.  He  says  I  play  too 
well  for  an  old-fashioned  organ.  And 
on  our  wedding  trip  we're  going  to 
Chicago,  and  we  're  going  to  pick  it 
out  there,  and  we're  going  to  a  con- 
cert and  to  a  theatre  and  to  some  show 
that  has  music  in  it.' 

In  spite  of  herself,  Emmeline  Black 
was  dazzled.  In  all  her  life  she  never 
had  gone  to  the  city  except  in  her 
dreams.  Until  that  far-off  day  of 
magic  when  Victoria  should  be  a  'fine 
musician'  she  had  never  hoped  to  re- 
place the  squeaky  little  organ  with  a 
piano. 

'He  says  he  has  planned  it  ever 
since  he  loved  me,  and  that  has  been 
nearly  always.  He  says  he  can  just 
see  me  sitting  at  the  piano  playing  to 
him  nights  when  he  comes  in  from 
work.  I  guess,  mother,  we  all  have  to 
have  our  dreams.  And  now  Jim's  and 
mine  are  coming  true.' 


116 


THE  WAY  OF  LIFE 


'Have  you  always  dreamed  things, 
too?'  asked  her  mother.  It  did  not 
seem  strange  to  her  that  she  and  this 
beloved  child  of  hers  had  never  talked 
about  the  things  which  were  in  their 
hearts  until  this  night.  Mothers  and 
daughters  were  like  that.  But  there 
was  a  secret  jealousy  in  knowing  that 
they  would  not  have  found  the  way  to 
those  hidden  things  if  it  had  not  been 
for  Jim  Forman.  It  was  he,  and  not 
she,  who  had  unlocked  the  secrets  of 
Victoria's  heart. 

*  Why,  yes,  of  course,  mother.  Don't 
you  remember  how  you  used   to  ask 
me  what  was  the  matter  when  I  was 
a  little  girl  and  would  go  off  some- 
times by  myself  and  sit  and  look  across 
the  fields?  I  did  n't  know  how  to  tell 
you.    I  did  n't  know  just  what  it  was. 
And  don't  you  remember  asking  me 
sometimes  if  I  was  sick  or  if  somebody 
had  hurt  my  feelings,  because  you'd 
see  tears  in  my  eyes?    I'd  tell  you  no. 
But  someway  I  could  n't  tell  you  it 
was  because  the  red  of  the  sunset  or 
the  apple  trees  in  blossom  or  the  cres- 
cent moon,  or  whatever  it  happened 
to  be,  made  me  feel  so  queer  inside.' 
She  laughed,  but  there  was  a  hint  of  a 
sob   in  her   voice.   *  Is  n't   it   strange, 
mother,  that  we  don't  seem  able  to  tell 
folks  any  of  these  things?   I  could  n't 
tell  you  even  now,  except  that  I  al- 
ways had  an  idea  you'd  felt  just  the 
same  way,  yourself.   I  seemed  to  know 
I  got  the  dreams  from  you.' 

'Hush,'  warned  her  mother.  *  There's 
some  one  coming.  Oh,  John,  is  that 
you?' 

*  Yes .  Why  don't  you  two  go  to  bed  ? ' 
answered  the  boy.   'It's  getting  late, 
and  there's  a  lot  to  do  to-morrow.' 

'It  is  bedtime,  I  guess,'  said  his  mo- 
ther. 'Run  along,  Victoria.  And  sweet 
dreams.' 

She  cautioned  John  and  his  sister 
not  to  waken  the  others,  as  they  pre- 
pared for  bed.  She  walked  into  the 


house.  She  tried  the  clock.  Yes,  Jake 
had  wound  it.  She  locked  the  door. 
She  folded  her  mending  neatly  and 
put  it  away.  She  placed  Minnie  Jack- 
son's letter  in  the  drawer  of  the  table. 
She  took  the  picture  of  St.  Cecilia  and 
balanced  it  on  the  little  shelf  above 
the  organ,  where  had  been  a  china  vase 
with  dried  grasses  in  it.  She  stood  off 
and  looked  at  it  critically.  She  de- 
cided that  was  the  very  place  for  the 
picture.  She  looked  around  the  room 
for  a  place  to  put  the  vase,  and  made 
room  for  it  on  top  of  the  little  pine  book- 
case. She  walked  to  the  table  and  hunt- 
ed in  the  drawer  until  she  found  pen 
and  ink  and  a  piece  of  ruled  paper. 

'Dear  Minnie,'  she  wrote  in  her 
cramped,  old-fashioned  hand,  'I  was 
so  glad  to  get  your  note  and  the  pic- 
ture. I  want  to  thank  you  for  it.  Can't 
you  come  out  right  away  and  spend 
the  day  with  me?  I  have  so  much  to 
tell  you,  and  I  want  that  you  should 
tell  me  all  about  yourself,  too.  You 
see  I'm  keeping  the  vow,  just  as  you 
did,  although  we  had  forgotten  it  for 
so  long.  Is  n't  it  strange,  Minnie, 
about  things?  Here  I'd  thought  for 
years  that  my  dreams  were  gone.  And 
now  it  seems  Victoria  had  them,  all  the 
time.  It's  a  secret  yet,  but  I  want  to 
tell  you,  and  I  know  she  won't  mind, 
that  Victoria  is  going  to  be  married. 
You  know  Jim  Forman,  don't  you? 
Anyway,  you  knew  Cy  Forman  and 
Milly  Davis,  and  he 's  their  eldest  child. 
I  hope  Victoria  can  keep  the  dreams 
for  herself  better  than  I  did.  Perhaps 
she  can.  She's  going  to  have  things 
easier  than  I  have,  I  hope.  But  if  she 
can't,  surely  she  can  keep  them  until 
she  has  a  child  to  give  them  to,  just  as 
I  gave  mine  to  her.  I  never  thought 
of  it  before,  but  it  seems  to  me  to-night 
that  perhaps  that  is  the  surest  way 
there  is  of  having  our  dreams  last.  I 
don't  see  how  I  'm  going  to  stand  it  to 
see  my  girl  growing  fat  and  tired  and 


SOULS  117 

old  from  hard  work,  like  I've  done,  know  it  now.  Come  out  soon,  Minnie. 

But  there  is  another  side  to  it.  You're  We'll  have  so  much  to  talk  about,  and 

a  mother,  too,  Minnie,  so  I  guess  I  I  want  that  you  and  Victoria  should 

don't   need   to   tell   you   that  all  the  know  each  other.' 

music  and  all  the  pictures  in  the  world  She  folded  the  paper  and  slipped  it 

would  n't  make  up  to  me,  now,  for  my  into  an  envelope  which  she  addressed 

children.  We  did  n't  know  that  when  and  stamped.  Then  she  blew  out  the 

we  had  our  "  fancies,"  did  we?  But  we  light. 


SOULS 


BY   FANNIE   STEARNS   DAVIS 


MY  Soul  goes  clad  in  gorgeous  things, 

Scarlet  and  gold  and  blue; 
And  at  her  shoulders  sudden  wings 

Like  long  flames  flicker  through. 

And  she  is  swallow-fleet,  and  free 

From  mortal  bonds  and  bars: 
She  laughs,  because  Eternity 

Blossoms  for  her  with  stars! 

Oh,  folk  who  scorn  my  stiff  gray  gown, 

My  dull  and  foolish  face,  — 
Can  ye  not  see  my  Soul  flash  down, 

A  singing  flame  in  space? 

And,  folk  whose  earth-stained  looks  I  hate, 

Why  may  I  not  divine 
Your  Souls,  that  must  be  passionate, 

Shining  and  swift,  as  mine?  — 


THE  EPIC  OF  THE  INDIAN 


BY   CHARLES   M.    HARVEY 


'THE  Census  Office  is  of  the  opinion 
that  the  present  enumeration  will  be 
the  last  one  to  be  taken  of  the  Indians 
in  their  present  status.  It  is  believed 
that  before  the  time  arrives  for  making 
the  next  count  of  the  country's  inhab- 
itants a  very  large  percentage  of  those 
now  holding  tribal  relations  will  have 
become  citizens,  and  will  no  longer  be 
regarded  as  Indians,  except  in  a  racial 
or  historical  sense.' 

These  are  the  words  of  the  Honor- 
able E.  Dana  Durand,  Director  of  the 
Census,  in  a  note  to  the  writer  of  this 
article.  This  means  that  before  1920 
practically  all  of  the  tribal  organiza- 
tions will  have  dissolved,  except  in  so 
far  as  some  of  them  may  be  continued 
for  social  or  historical  purposes;  com- 
munal holdings  of  property  will  have 
given  way  to  individual  ownership, 
and  the  red  men  will  have  merged 
themselves  into  the  mass  of  the  coun- 
try's voting  population.  In  the  march 
from  savagery  to  citizenship  the  Indian 
has  traveled  a  long  road,  with  many 
windings  and  turnings,  and  with  many 
halts  by  the  way;  but  at  last  the  end 
seems  to  be  in  sight.  Let  us  glance  over 
the  course,  learn  something  of  the  men 
who  traversed  it,  and  get  a  glimpse  of 
some  of  its  principal  landmarks. 

'In  order  to  win  the  friendship  of 
that  people  ...  I  presented  some  of 
them  with  red  caps  and  some  strings  of 
glass  beads,  which  they  placed  around 
their  necks,  and  with  other  trifles  of 

118 


insignificant  worth  which  delighted 
them,  and  by  which  we  got  a  wonderful 
hold  on  their  affections.  They  after- 
ward came  to  the  boats  of  the  vessels 
swimming,  bringing  us  parrots,  cotton 
thread  in  balls,  and  spears,  and  many 
other  things,  which  they  bartered  for 
others  we  gave  them,  as  glass  beads 
and  little  bells.  Finally  they  received 
everything  and  gave  whatever  they 
had  with  good-will.' 

This  is  an  entry  in  Columbus 's  jour- 
nal describing  the  natives  of  that  mem- 
ber of  the  Bahama  group  on  which  he 
made  his  first  landing  in  the  New 
World.  We  call  it  Watlings  Island.  As 
he  was  looking  for  Asia,  and  supposed 
the  island  to  be  an  outpost  of  the  East 
Indies,  he  called  the  natives  Indians,  a 
name  which  was  afterward  extended  to 
all  the  original  denizens  of  the  Western 
Hemisphere. 

But  the  aborigines  who  were  met  by 
the  first  white  men  to  reach  the  main- 
land of  the  present  United  States  — 
all  of  whom  belonged  to  the  country 
under  whose  flag  Columbus  sailed  — 
were  of  a  more  robust  breed,  morally  as 
well  as  physically,  than  were  those  who 
greeted  the  Great  Admiral  at  the  New 
World's  gateway.  Kind  and  generous 
at  the  outset,  but  ready  to  strike  back 
when  ill-treated,  were  the  Indians  who 
were  encountered  by  Ponce  de  Leon, 
when  he  sailed  northward  from  our 
present  Porto  Rico,  in  1513,  landed  at 
a  point  near  St.  Augustine,  and  called 
the  country  Florida,  on  account  of  its 
abundant  vegetation.  He  died  a  few 
years  later  from  the  effects  of  a  wound 


THE  EPIC  OF  THE   INDIAN 


119 


dealt  by  one  of  his  red  assailants.  Like 
characteristics  marked  those  met  by 
Narvaez,  who  entered  Florida  in  1527 
at  the  head  of  a  large  expedition,  and 
was  drowned  near  the  mouth  of  the 
Mississippi;  a  few  of  his  men,  after 
wandering  as  captives  throughout 
Louisiana  and  Texas,  and  braving 
many  hardships  and  perils,  reaching 
Culiacan,  on  the  west  coast  of  Mexico, 
in  1536. 

De  Soto,  who  began,  in  1539,  to 
traverse  the  country  from  Florida  to 
Arkansas  and  Missouri,  with  a  great 
army,  witnesses  to  these  same  traits. 
He  was  buried  at  midnight  in  the  Mis- 
sissippi, so  as  to  keep  his  body  out  of 
the  hands  of  his  red  foes;  and  his  fol- 
lowers, reduced  to  a  mere  remnant, 
fled  down  the  Mississippi,  pursued  for 
many  miles  by  his  enemies  in  canoes 
and  on  land,  reaching  safety  in  Panuco, 
Mexico,  in  1543.  And  Coronado  and 
his  soldiers,  in  their  foray  between 
1540  and  1542,  which  carried  them 
from  the  Gulf  of  California  up  to 
within  sight  of  the  Missouri  River  in 
Kansas,  give  us  a  similar  picture  of  the 
red  man.  De  Soto  and  Coronado  were 
here  two  thirds  of  a  century  before  the 
advent  of  the  Jamestown  colony,  the 
first  permanent  settlement  of  English- 
speaking  people  on  the  American  con- 
tinent, and  antedated  by  two  years 
Champlain's  arrival  at  Quebec  with 
the  earliest  French  colony  on  this  side 
of  the  Atlantic,  which  persisted. 

Why  was  it  that  the  Spaniards  were 
the  first  white  men  with  whom  the 
American  aborigines  on  the  Atlantic 
seaboard  and  the  Pacific  slope  came 
in  contact?  Because  in  the  sixteenth 
century  Spain  had  a  little  of  the  pre- 
eminence among  the  nations  of  the 
world  which  belonged  to  Rome  in  the 
third  and  fourth.  Those  were  the  spa- 
cious times  of  Charles  V.  The  Isthmus 
of  Panama,  across  which  the  United 
States  government  is  building  its  in- 


ter-oceanic waterway,  was  discovered 
and  penetrated  in  1513  by 

stout  Cortez,  when  with  eagle  eyes 
He  stared  at  the  Pacific  —  and  all  his  men 
Looked  at  each  other  with  a  wild  surmise  — 
Silent  upon  a  peak  in  Darien. 

But  it  was  Balboa,  another  Span- 
iard, and  not  Cortez,  who  was  there. 
Keats  was  writing  poetry,  not  history. 
Under  Magellan,  in  1519,  a  Spanish 
fleet  passed  through  the  straits  since 
called  by  his  name  at  the  lower  end  of 
South  America,  entered  the  Pacific, 
and  touched  at  the  Philippines,  where 
Magellan  was  killed  in  a  conflict  with 
the  natives.  By  way  of  the  Indian 
Ocean  and  the  Cape  of  Good  Hope, 
a  part  of  his  followers  reached  their 
starting-point.  They  were  the  first  to 
sail  round  the  globe.  Those  were  days 
when  Spain  blazed  paths  for  the  na- 
tions across  the  world's  seas. 

England  and  France  attempted  to 
plant  colonies  in  North  America  in  the 
sixteenth  century:  the  English  under 
Sir  Humphrey  Gilbert  and  Sir  Walter 
Raleigh,  and  the  French  under  Cartier 
and  others;  but  all  their  projects  failed. 
Spain  had  the  continent  to  herself  until 
England  appeared  at  Jamestown  in 
1607,  France  at  Quebec  in  1608,  Hol- 
land on  Manhattan  Island  in  1613, 
and  Sweden  on  the  Delaware  in  1638. 
The  settlements  of  the  Swedes  were 
captured  by  the  Dutch  in  1655,  and 
the  Dutch  colonies  were  absorbed  by 
the  English  in  1664.  Thus,  early  in  the 
European  occupation  of  spots  on  this 
continent,  the  Indians  came  in  contact 
with  five  distinct  families  of  the  white 


race. 


ii 


And  what  a  diversity  of  names,  and 
in  some  cases  of  traits  and  customs, 
was  possessed  by  the  tribes  or  clans 
whom  the  first  whites  encountered  in 
the  territory  of  the  present  United 
States!  There  were  the  Wampanoags, 


120 


THE  EPIC  OF  THE   INDIAN 


Pequots,  and  Narragansetts  in  New 
England  and  the  Middle  States;  the 
Powhatans  in  Virginia;  the  Creeks  in 
Georgia;  the  Seminoles  in  Florida;  the 
Chickasaws,  Choctaws,  and  Natchez 
along  the  Gulf  coast  for  a  few  hundred 
miles  inland ;  the  Apaches,  Comanches, 
and  Navajoes  in  Texas,  New  Mexico, 
and  Arizona;  with  the  Missouris,  Paw- 
nees, Osages,  Sioux,  Crows,  Winneba- 
goes,  Chippewas,  and  Blackfeet,  farther 
to  the  north  and  northwest.  And  far 
more  formidable,  both  as  friends  and 
as  enemies,  than  any  of  those  tribes, 
were  the  Iroquois,  or  Five  Nations 
(the  Mohawks,  Oneidas,  Onondagas, 
Cayugas,  and  Senecas),  who  occupied 
the  whole  of  northern  New  York,  from 
Lake  Champlain  to  Lake  Erie.  We 
need  not  wonder  that  the  numbers  of 
the  aborigines  were  placed  far  too  high 
by  the  earlier  writers.  Here  are  some 
of  the  reasons  therefor :  — 

The  first  hunters,  explorers,  mis- 
sionaries, and  traders  journeyed  by 
way  of  the  sea-coast,  the  rivers,  and 
the  lakes,  along  which  the  Indians  were 
most  numerous. 

In  their  incursions  into  the  interior 
of  the  country  the  whites  attracted  the 
Indians  through  curiosity,  and  thought 
they  were  equally  numerous  elsewhere; 
but  vast  stretches  of  forest  and  prairie 
were  absolutely  untenanted,  except  for 
short  times  each  year  when  visited  by 
hunting-parties. 

During  the  year,  war  and  the  chase 
often  took  the  same  bands  of  Indians 
to  several  points  far  removed  from 
each  other.  The  whites  thought  these 
were  different  tribes. 

Many  tribes  were  called  by  different 
names  by  the  Spaniards,  the  English, 
and  the  French,  and  among  some  tribes 
the  names  varied  at  different  places 
and  times. 

The  area  needed  to  support  a  per- 
son by  hunting,  supplemented  by  the 
crude  cultivation  of  the  soil,  was  many 


times  as  great  as  would  be  required 
under  modern  agricultural  and  indus- 
trial conditions. 

Obviously  the  estimates  of  fifteen  or 
twenty  millions  for  the  Indians  living 
three  or  four  centuries  ago  in  the  ter- 
ritory comprised  in  the  present  United 
States  were  far  too  large.  While  war, 
hunger,  and  the  perils  of  the  chase 
undoubtedly  brought  the  mortality 
among  the  red  men  to  a  high  figure,  it 
seems  safe  to  say  that  less  than  one  mil- 
lion were  here  when  Columbus  landed 
in  the  Western  Hemisphere.  The  pre- 
sent number  is  less  than  a  third  of  that 
figure,  and  the  absence  of  war  and  the 
advent  of  improved  hygienic  condi- 
tions are  bringing  a  steady  increase 
among  them.  Nevertheless,  they  were 
numerous  and  courageous  enough  to 
have  made  it  exceedingly  difficult,  had 
they  so  desired,  for  the  whites  to  obtain 
a  foothold  on  this  continent.  In  most 
cases,  however,  in  the  beginning,  they 
lent  the  whites  a  helping  hand. 

With  all  their  boasted  superiority  in 
civilization  and  adaptability  to  alien 
and  changing  conditions,  how  helpless 
the  whites  must  have  seemed  to  the 
aborigines !  They  were  few  in  numbers 
and  feeble  in  equipment  and  supplies. 
Especially  to  the  Pilgrims  at  Plymouth, 
on  their  arrival  at  the  beginning  of  a 
long  and  severe  winter,  the  outlook 
was  to  the  last  degree  hostile.  Corn  was 
native  to  America.  Without  it  early 
settlers  could  hardly  have  maintained 
themselves.  The  Indians  furnished 
Raleigh's  colonists  at  Roanoke  with 
corn,  also  with  fish  and  fruits.  Their 
short  career  would  have  been  shorter 
had  not  the  red  men  gone  to  their  res- 
cue and  warded  off  starvation. 

Not  only  did  the  Powhatans  supply 
Captain  John  Smith  and  his  James- 
town associates  with  corn,  but  they 
showed  them  how  to  cultivate  it. 
Under  the  Indian  supervision  forty 
acres  of  it  were  planted,  and  famine  was 


THE   EPIC  OF  THE   INDIAN 


121 


averted.  The  Narragansetts  rendered 
a  like  service  to  Bradford  and  his  Ply- 
mouth brethren,  and  with  rude  nets 
caught  alewives  for  them  with  which  to 
fertilize  the  ground.  In  the  densely 
wooded  regions,  where  it  was  impos- 
sible to  make  clearings  in  time  to  raise 
a  crop,  the  red  men  taught  the  whites 
how  to  girdle  the  trees  with  fire,  thus 
killing  the  foliage  and  letting  in  the 
sunshine.  They  showed  the  settlers 
how  to  dry  corn  so  as  to  utilize  it  on 
long  journeys,  thus  removing  a  serious 
obstacle  to  travel  in  the  wilderness. 

The  early  English,  Dutch,  and  French 
visitors  to  this  continent  marveled  at 
the  serviceableness  of  the  canoes,  some 
of  which  were  large  enough  to  hold  a 
dozen  men,  and  light  enough  to  be 
carried  on  the  shoulders  of  two  or  three 
at  the  portages  bet  ween  different  water- 
courses, or  in  going  around  rapids.  The 
Indians  told  the  white  men  how  to 
make  them.  The'snow-shoes  by  which 
the  Indians  traversed  great  distances, 
and  without  which,  for  mouths  at  a 
time  each  year,  hunting  or  travel  would 
have  been  impossible,  were  a  revelation 
to  the  whites,  but  they  were  taught 
how  to  make  and  use  them.  Years  be- 
fore the  heliograph  was  invented  white 
men  saw  the  Indians  of  the  plains,  — 
Sioux,  Pawnees,  Apaches,  and  others, 
— first  by  some  crude  surface  and  after- 
ward by  pieces  of  looking-glass,  send 
signal  flashes  many  miles. 

All  these  things  the  Indians  did  for 
the  whites.  They  did  more.  By  keep- 
ing their  treaty  promises  they  show- 
ed an  example  to  their  new  neighbors 
which,  unhappily,  the  latter  often  for- 
got. They  were  in  the  Stone  Age  of 
development  when  first  met,  but  they 
adapted  themselves  to  their  new  envi- 
ronment with  much  skill;  indeed,  the 
whites  in  their  own  Stone  Age  were  not 
more  adaptive  than  these  red  men. 

Cupidity  and  a  desire  to  enlist  them 
as  allies  against  other  white  or  red  men 


induced  Spaniards,  English,  Dutch,  and 
French  to  sell  firearms  to  the  Indians, 
and  in  their  use  they  soon  became  as 
proficient  as  the  whites.  The  horses 
introduced  by  Cortez  in  Mexico,  by 
Coronado  in  California  and  other  parts 
of  the  Southwest,  and  by  De  Soto  and 
others  in  the  southern  end  of  the  Mis- 
sissippi Valley,  were  the  progenitors 
of  the  vast  droves  of  mustangs  which 
were  seen  by  hunters,  trappers,  and 
explorers  in  the  Far  West  a  century  ago 
and  later,  and  from  which  many  of  the 
domestic  animals  descended.  In  util- 
izing them  the  Indians,  especially  the 
Comanches,  Apaches,  Pawnees,  Sioux, 
and  Blackfeet,  quickly  surpassed  the 
Spaniards. 

In  the  wars  which  reddened  the  an- 
nals of  the  frontier  in  our  march  from 
the  Connecticut  and  the  James  to  the 
Columbia  and  the  Sacramento,  the  In- 
dians proved  themselves  to  be  far  more 
effective  fighters  than  any  other  mem- 
bers of  the  *  inferior  races '  encountered 
by  white  men  elsewhere  in  the  world. 
By  a  significant  circumstance,  the  red 
men  of  the  territory  comprised  in  the 
present  United  States  were  much  more 
capable  warriors  than  were  those  in 
Canada,  Mexico,  or  South  America. 
And  by  their  wars  the  Indians  rendered 
a  better  service  to  the  whites  than  they 
intended,  and  than  the  whites  dreamed. 
The  British  colonists  were  thereby  pre- 
vented from  scattering  through  the 
wilderness  as  the  French  had  done  in 
Canada  and  the  Spaniards  in  Mexico; 
they  were  compelled  to  frame  the  ma- 
chinery of  self-government,  they  im- 
bibed a  military  spirit  which  enabled 
them  to  aid  in  defeating  the  French 
in  Canada  when  the  struggle  between 
the  two  countries  came,  and  thus  a 
desire  for  independence  was  aroused 
which  asserted  itself  against  England 
as  soon  as  the  French  were  driven  out. 
Many  of  the  followers  of  Putnam,  Pres- 
cott,  and  Stark,  who  held  Bunker  Hill 


THE  EPIC  OF  THE   INDIAN 


against  Gage's  veterans,  were  the  de- 
scendants of  the  men  who  fought 
Metacomet  and  Canonchet.  Campbell, 
Shelby,  Sevier,  and  the  rest  of  the  Caro- 
linians, Georgians,  Tennesseeans,  and 
Kentuckians,  when  at  King's  Moun- 
tain they  were  crushing  Cornwallis's 
fierce  fighters  under  Ferguson,  were 
applying  the  lessons  which  they  had 
learned  in  battling  with  Creeks,  Chero- 
kees,  and  Shawnees. 


in 

'The  Empire  State,  as  you  love  to 
call  it,'  said  Peter  Wilson,  a  Cayuga 
chief,  at  a  meeting  of  the  New  York 
Historical  Society  in  1847,  'was  once 
laced  by  our  trails  from  Albany  to  Buf- 
falo. Your  roads  still  traverse  the  same 
lines  of  communication  which  bound 
one  part  of  the  Long  House  to  the 
other.  Have  we,  the  first  holders  of 
this  prosperous  region,  no  longer  a 
share  in  your  history?  Glad  were  your 
fathers  to  sit  down  upon  the  threshold 
of  the  Long  House.  Had  our  fathers 
spurned  you  from  it  when  the  French 
were  thundering  at  the  opposite  gate  to 
get  a  passage  through  and  drive  you 
into  the  sea,  whatever  has  been  the  fate 
of  other  Indians,  the  Iroquois  might 
still  have  been  a  nation,  and  I,  in- 
stead of  pleading  here  for  the  privilege 
of  living  within  your  borders  —  might 
still  have  a  country.' 

This  was  no  vain  boast.  The  con- 
federation for  which  the  Cayuga  chief 
spoke  had  a  vast  influence  in  shaping 
the  affairs  of  that  part  of  the  continent 
comprised  in  the  present  United  States. 
The  service  of  the  Iroquois  to  the  An- 
glo-Saxon race  began  when  Champlain, 
the  Governor  of  Canada,  as  an  ally  of 
the  Hurons  and  Ottawas,  defeated  the 
Mohawks,  in  1609,  on  the  banks  of  the 
lake  which  has  since  then  borne  his 
name.  This  turned  the  confederation 
to  the  side  of  the  Dutch  and  the  Eng- 


lish, the  successive  occupants  of  New 
York,  and  prevented  the  French  from 
getting  control  of  the  valleys  of  the 
Mohawk  and  the  Hudson,  from  cutting 
the  then  feeble  English  settlements  in 
two,  and  from  capturing  each  section, 
the  New  England  and  the  Southern,  in 
detail. 

For  generations  the  Iroquois  held  the 
upper  waters  of  the  Mohawk,  Dela- 
ware, and  Susquehanna.  They  shut  the 
French  out  of  the  Ohio  Valley  for  a 
century,  giving  the  English  on  the 
Atlantic  an  opportunity  to  strengthen 
themselves  there  and  build  up  settle- 
ments which  contained  several  times 
as  many  inhabitants  as  the  French 
colonies  in  Canada  and  on  the  lower 
Mississippi.  And  when,  at  last,  they 
began  to  permit  some  of  the  French  to 
enter  the  coveted  region  and  make  a 
fight  for  control  of  the  Forks  of  the 
Ohio,  the  English  had  gained  sufficient 
power  to  battle  valiantly  against  them, 
and  at  last  to  drive  them  out. 

With  home  rule  for  each  tribe,  and 
with  a  central  council  composed  of 
delegates  from  all  of  them,  the  Five 
Nations  had  a  federal  scheme  centuries 
before  the  Philadelphia  Convention  of 
1787  framed  one  for  the  United  States. 
Centuries  before  the  formation  of  the 
triple  alliance  of  Germany,  Austria- 
Hungary,  and  Italy,  the  Iroquois  had  a 
quintuple  alliance,  which  was  made 
sextuple  in  1715,  when  the  Tuscaroras 
entered  the  league.  Before  Geneva 
conferences  or  Hague  courts  were  ever 
dreamed  of,  these  tribes  settled  dis- 
putes between  themselves  amicably. 
At  the  time  of  the  advent  of  the  whites 
on  this  continent  the  Iroquois,  as  over- 
lords of  the  tribes  extending  from  Lake 
Champlain  to  the  Mississippi,  and  from 
the  great  lakes  to  the  Savannah,  ruled 
over  a  larger  empire  than  Rome  in  the 
days  of  Trajan. 

Through  the  whole  wilderness  of 
North  America  the  Indians  blazed 


THE  EPIC  OF  THE  INDIAN 


paths  for  the  whites.  They  led  Cham- 
plain  and  his  associates  through  the 
Canadian  forests  and  along  its  rivers 
and  lakes;  piloted  Joliet  and  Mar- 
quette  down  the  Wisconsin  into  the 
Mississippi,  and  along  the  latter  to  the 
mouth  of  the  Arkansas;  and  guided  La 
Salle  by  way  of  the  Illinois  and  the 
Mississippi  to  the  Gulf  of  Mexico,  at 
which  point  that  explorer  'took  pos- 
session '  of  all  the  lands  drained  by  that 
river  and  its  tributaries  for  Louis  XIV. 
Not  only  did  the  course  of  empire 
through  New  York,  Pennsylvania,  and 
Ohio  lie  along  the  red  men's  trails,  but 
Boone,  Harrod,  Sevier,  Robertson,  and 
the  rest  of  the  pioneers  of  Kentucky 
and  Tennessee  followed  paths  laid  out 
by  the  aborigines.  A  Shoshone  girl, 
Sacajawea,  led  Lewis  and  Clark  over 
the  Rocky  Mountains  and  through  the 
perils  beyond,  and  saved  their  expedi- 
tion from  disaster,  a  service  which  was 
commemorated  by  a  statue  to  her  at 
the  St.  Louis  World's  Fair  of  1904,  and 
by  memorials  in  Portland,  Oregon,  and 
other  places  in  the  Trans-Mississippi 
region. 

Moreover,  the  Indian's  social  im- 
portance long  ago  projected  itself  into 
politics.  At  the  bidding  of  the  East, 
Monroe  and  every  other  President  on- 
ward, to  and  including  Tyler,  had  a 
hand  in  an  endeavor  to  create  a  great 
preserve  for  the  red  men  along  the 
western  border  of  Arkansas,  Missouri, 
and  Iowa,  which  would  have  closed  the 
overland  route  to  Oregon  to  settlers, 
and  thus  have  given  England  a  free 
hand  in  her  effort  to  gain  undisputed 
possession  of  all  the  region  west  of  the 
Rocky  Mountains  and  north  of  Mex- 
ico's territory  of  New  Mexico  and  Cali- 
fornia. Thus  the  United  States  would 
have  been  shut  out  of  the  locality  com- 
prised in  the  present  states  of  Ore- 
gon, Washington,  and  Idaho,  and  part 
of  the  western  border  of  Montana  and 
Wyoming. 


Stephen  A.  Douglas  told  this  to  his 
Boswell,  James  Madison  Cutts,  in 
1854.  This,  indeed,  was  a  manifesta- 
tion of  the  Eastern  states'  old  jealousy 
of  the  growth  of  the  West,  which  was 
first  voiced  in  a  conspicuous  way  by 
Josiah  Quincy  of  Massachusetts  in  the 
House  of  Representatives  in  1811, 
when  he  opposed  the  creation  of  the 
State  of  Louisiana,  and  when  he  said 
that  he  heard  that  six  states  would,  at 
some  time  in  the  future,  be  established 
west  of  the  Mississippi,  and  that  the 
mouth  of  the  Ohio  would  be  east  of  the 
geographical  centre  of  the  contem- 
plated empire.  Douglas  said  that  he 
halted  this  conspiracy  by  his  bill  for 
the  organization  of  the  territory  of 
Nebraska,  first  introduced  in  Congress 
by  him  in  1844,  in  the  latter  part  of 
Tyler's  presidency,  and  kept  by  him 
constantly  at  the  front  until  it  passed 
ten  years  later.  As  enacted  in  1854, 
however,  it  provided  for  two  territories, 
Kansas  and  Nebraska,  instead  of  one. 

Thus  the  Indian  innocently  had  a 
hand  in  inciting  one  of  the  most  fateful 
measures  ever  passed  by  Congress.  By 
repealing  the  Missouri  Compromise  of 
1820,  the  Kansas-Nebraska  Act  of  1854 
gave  slavery  an  equal  opportunity 
with  freedom  to  gain  possession  of  a 
region  from  which  slavery  had  been 
excluded  by  the  Missouri  adjustment. 
At  this  breach  of  a  compact  which  was 
intended  by  its  framers  to  be  perma- 
nent, a  wave  of  indignation  and  alarm 
swept  through  the  free  states,  which 
split  the  Whig  party  on  Mason  and 
Dixon's  Line,  and  sent  most  of  the 
friends  of  freedom  —  a  majority  of  the 
Northern  Whigs,  many  of  the  anti- 
slavery  Democrats,  nearly  all  the 
Northern  Know-Nothings,  and  all  the 
Abolitionists  and  Free-Soilers  —  into 
the  coalition  which  became  the  Repub- 
lican party.  The  triumph  of  that  party 
in  1860  sent  eleven  Southern  states  into 
secession,  and  precipitated  the  Civil 


124 


THE  EPIC  OF  THE  INDIAN 


War,  which  destroyed  slavery  and,  in- 
cidentally, thrust  upon  the  country 
race-issues  which  embarrass  us  to  this 
day. 

IV 

Moreover,  in  the  country's  social 
and  political  life  of  to-day  the  red  man 
is  a  factor  of  some  importance.  Exclu- 
sive of  those  in  Alaska,  there  were 
243,534  Indians  in  the  United  States  in 
1890,  270,544  in  1900,  and  304,950  in 


1910.  These  figures  are  furnished  by 
the  Commissioner  of  Indian  Affairs, 
and,  except  for  1900,  are  larger  than 
those  given  out  by  the  Director  of  the 
Census.  The  figures  given  here  are 
those  of  the  Census  Bureau,  supple- 
mented by  enumerations  made  by 
representatives  of  the  Indian  Office. 
According  to  the  count  made  by  the 
Indian  Office  the  number  of  Indians  in 
the  country  at  the  end  of  1911  was 
323,783,  distributed  as  follows:  — 


Alabama 

909 

Louisiana 

780 

North  Dakota 

8,253 

Arizona 

39,216 

Maine 

892 

Ohio 

127 

Arkansas 

460 

Maryland 

55 

Oklahoma 

117,247 

California 

16,371 

Massachusetts 

688 

Oregon 

6,403 

Colorado 

841 

Michigan 

7,519 

Rhode  Island 

284 

Connecticut 

152 

Minnesota 

10,711 

South  Carolina 

331 

Delaware 

5 

Mississippi 

1,253 

South  Dakota 

20,352 

District  of  Columbia 

68 

Missouri 

313 

Tennessee 

216 

Florida 

446 

Montana 

10,814 

Texas 

702 

Georgia 

95 

Nebraska 

3,809 

Utah 

3,123 

Idaho 

3,791 

Nevada 

5,240 

Vermont 

26 

Illinois 

188 

New  Hampshire 

34 

Virginia 

539 

Indiana 

279 

New  Jersey 

168 

Washington 

10,997 

Iowa 

369 

New  Mexico 

21,121 

West  Virginia 

36 

Kansas 

1,309 

New  York 

6,046 

Wisconsin 

11,428 

Kentucky 

234 

North  Carolina 

7,851 

Wyoming 

1,692 

Contrary  to  the  popular  notion,  the 
Indian  race  is  not  dying  out,  though 
part  of  the  gain  shown  here,  especially 
that  of  1911  over  1910,  is  probably 
due  to  the  more  complete  and  accur- 
ate enumeration  made  in  recent  years. 
The  full-bloods  are  diminishing,  but 
the  mixed  breeds  are  increasing  rap- 
idly. Nor  have  all  the  Indians  aban- 
doned the  [Atlantic  seaboard.  Maine 
and  other  states  give  a  few  hundred 
to  New  England;  the  6,046  in  New 
York,  principally  remnants  of  the  Iro- 
quois,  represent  the  large  number  of 
these,  and  of  the  Algonquins,  who  once 
occupied  the  region  covered  by  the  old 
Middle  States;  while  North  Carolina 
has  more  than  two  thirds  of  those  left 
in  the  South.  Nine  tenths  of  all  the 
Indians  are  west  of  the  Mississippi, 


Oklahoma  holding  more  of  them  than 
any  other  community.  Of  the  117,247 
in  that  State,  101,287  belong  to  the 
Five  Civilized  Tribes.  These  include, 
however,  23,345  freedmen,  the  slaves  of 
the  era  preceding  the  adoption  of  the 
Thirteenth  Amendment,  and  their  de- 
scendants, and  2,582  whites  who  have 
married  into  the  tribes.  These  101,287 
distribute  themselves  as  follows:  — 
Cherokees,  41,701;  Choctaws,  26,762; 
Creeks,  18,717;  Chickasaws,  10,984; 
Seminoles,  3,123. 

As  used  here,  the  term  *  civilized ' 
means  precisely  what  it  professes  to 
mean.  For  two  generations  preceding 
1907,  when  they  became  merged  in  the 
general  mass  of  the  country's  citizen- 
ship, each  of  these  tribes  had  its  own 
legislature,  executive  and  judiciary, 


THE  EPIC  OF  THE  INDIAN 


125 


and  governed  itself  wth  comparatively 
little  interference  from  Washington. 
Its  members  had  farms,  mines,  mills, 
mercantile  houses,  schools,  churches, 
and  banks,  and  engaged  in  most  of 
the  employments  in  vogue  in  the  white 
communities  of  their  region.  These 
tribes  occupied,  and  still  occupy,  that 
part  of  the  present  State  of  Oklahoma 
which  was  formerly  called  the  Indian 
Territory. 

Some  advances  in  their  social  status 
have  also  been  made  by  more  than  half 
of  the  remaining  203,000  Indians.  Over 
25,000  of  their  children  attend  the 
government,  missionary,  and  contract 
schools.  To  its  wards  the  government 
is  a  liberal  and  considerate  guardian. 
In  recent  times  its  appropriations  for 
Indian  schools  have  averaged  nearly 
$4,000,000  annually.  For  various  pur- 
poses Uncle  Sam's  expenditures  on 
Indian  account,  from  Washington's  in- 
auguration in  1789  to  the  middle  of 
President  Taft's  term  in  1911,  aggre- 
gated $520,000,000. 

Much  of  the  education  which  the 
Indian  pupils  receive  in  the  govern- 
ment schools  is  practical,  comprising 
farming,  fruit-  and  stock-raising  and 
the  elemental  trades  for  the  boys,  and 
cooking,  sewing,  nursing,  and  launder- 
ing for  the  girls.  Especial  attention  is 
given  to  agriculture.  Experts  are  em- 
ployed on  the  reservations  to  teach  the 
most  approved  methods  of  cultivation 
of  the  soil,  and  experiment  farms  have 
been  established  to  discover  the  crops 
which  can  be  raised  most  advanta- 
geously in  the  various  localities.  To 
stimulate  the  interest  of  the  pupils,  old 
and  young,  they  are  encouraged  to 
hold  agricultural  fairs,  where  live  stock 
and  produce  are  exhibited. 

Hundreds  of  Indians  are  working  on 
the  government's  irrigation  schemes. 
Railroads  are  offering  employment  to 
boys  who  are  learning  trades,  or  who 
show  any  inclination  for  mechanics. 


Cooperation  between  the  Bureau  of 
Indian  Affairs  and  private  corporations 
is  enabling  our  wards  to  improve  their 
economic  condition,  and  to  meet  the 
demands  of  civilization.  In  many  di- 
rections, opportunity  stretches  out  its 
hands  to  the  red  man  and  starts  him  on 
the  road  toward  social  independence. 

The  progress  of  the  Indian  in  the 
past  quarter-century,  especially  since 
the  enactment  of  the  Dawes  Severalty 
Law  in  1887,  which  gave  individual 
ownership  of  lands  to  such  of  them  as 
sought  it,  and  were  prepared  for  it, 
who  thereby  virtually  became  citizens, 
has  been  greater  than  any  other  peo- 
ple ever  made  in  the  same  length  of 
time  in  the  world's  history. 


'My  people  want  to  live  as  in  the 
days  that  are  gone,  before  the  pale- 
faces took  from  us  the  lands  that  were 
ours.  We  don't  want  schools  or  school- 
teachers. We  want  to  be  let  alone  to 
live  as  we  wish,  to  roam  free  without 
the  white  man  always  being  there  to 
tell  us  what  we  must  do  and  what  we 
will  not  be  allowed  to  do.' 

It  was  the  plaint  of  an  aged  Hopi 
chief  from  the  reservation  of  his  tribe 
in  far-off  Arizona,  uttered  in  the  White 
House,  inveighing  against  the  new  or- 
der which  the  white  man  brought.  It 
was  a  plea  for  the  resurrection  of  the 
dead  past  —  of  a  past  which  began  to 
die  before  this  old  sachem  had  reached 
middle  life,  and  which  would  be  infin- 
itely more  difficult  to  revive  than  it 
would  be  to  bring  back  the  vast  herds 
of  buffalo  which  stretched  across  the 
landscape  from  the  Missouri  to  the 
Sacramento  and  from  the  Red  River  of 
Arkansas  to  the  Red  River  of  the 
North,  in  the  days  when  the  old  chief 
was  young. 

Except  in  a  few  spots,  the  blanket 
Indian  has  vanished.  He  is  almost 


126 


THE  EPIC  OF  THE  INDIAN 


as  rare  a  sight  to-day  in  Muskogee 
or  Vinita  as  he  would  be  in  Albany 
or  Hartford.  In  proportion  to  the  num- 
ber of  inhabitants  there  are  very  near- 
ly as  many  pianos  and  automobiles  in 
the  towns  of  the  old  Cherokee  nation 
in  the  present  State  of  Oklahoma  as 
there  are  in  those  of  Vermont  or  Dela- 
ware. The  only  Indians  who  are  in  the 
old,  free,  nomadic  condition  which  the 
Hopi  warrior  would  restore  are  about 
two  hundred  Seminoles  in  the  Florida 
Everglades  and  the  big  cypress  mo- 
rass. These  Indians  are  as  independ- 
ent of  the  white  man,  and  almost  as 
isolated  from  him,  as  were  their  fore- 
fathers when  Ponce  de  Leon  and  De 
So  to  landed  in  their  neighborhood. 
They  are  neither  citizens  nor  wards  of 
the  United  States,  nor  do  they  hold 
any  relation  to  their  old  associates  who 
were  transferred  by  the  government  to 
the  west  side  of  the  Mississippi  two 
thirds  of  a  century  ago,  and  who  be- 
came one  of  the  Five  Civilized  Tribes 
of  the  present  State  of  Oklahoma. 

A  better  representative  of  the  red 
men  of  to-day  than  is  the  old  Hopi 
chief  is  the  grandson  of  Sitting  Bull,  — 
the  Sitting  Bull  who  assisted  in  the 
slaying  of  Ciister  and  his  three  hun- 
dred, —  who  tells  his  brethren  that 
their  need  is  'more  religion  and  less 
fire-water.'  He  is  a  product  of  the  gov- 
ernment's schools,  such  as  Carlisle  and 
Haskell,  which  bring  members  of  many 
tribes  together,  and  place  them  in  as- 
sociation with  whites,  compelling  them 
to  look  beyond  their  reservations  and 
their  clans,  and  holding  out  to  them 
the  goal  of  citizenship. 

For  reasons  which  may  be  easily 
guessed,  the  Indian  fits  well  into  the 
new  order.  On  the  whole,  reputable 
fiction  and  the  drama  have  treated  him 
with  tolerable  fairness.  They  have 
never  made  him  an  object  of  derision, 
as  they  have  representatives  of  other 
ethnic  types,  including  the  Caucasian. 


Always  fearless,  generally  dignified, 
sometimes  vindictive,  as  he  is  por- 
trayed in  books  and  on  the  stage,  he  is 
never  made  contemptible.  Unlike  the 
Negro,  he  is  never  subservient  or  ob- 
sequious. Assailed  as  he  was  until  re- 
cent times  by  the  slings  and  arrows  of 
outrageous  fortune,  he  has  always  suc- 
cessfully resisted  the  thraldom  which 
overwhelmed  white  men  for  many  cen- 
turies in  earlier  ages  and  in  other  coun- 
tries, and  which  held  the  blacks  in 
servitude  in  our  land  within  the  re- 
collection of  millions  of  men  still  liv- 
ing. He  has  never  been  a  slave.  In  his 
contact  with  the  whites  in  our  time  he 
arouses  no  prejudice.  The  superior  race 
which  refuses  to  associate  on  terms 
of  equality  with  men  of  black,  brown, 
or  yellow  skins,  raises  no  social  barrier 
against  the  red  man. 

The  average  Indian  is  under  no  ne- 
cessity of  asking  concessions  from  his 
Caucasian  associates  or  rivals  in  the 
ordinary  pursuits.  'Big  Chief  Bender 
of  the  Philadelphia  Athletics,  wear- 
ers of  the  blue  ribbon  of  the  baseball 
arena;  Meyer,  the  Seneca  catcher  of 
the  New  York  'Giants,'  Thorpe,  Burd, 
Arcase,  and  others  of  the  Carlisle  foot- 
ball team,  are  at  the  head  of  their  re- 
spective professions.  They  have  beaten 
hosts  of  whites  at  the  white  man's 
games.  Harvard's  football  team,  com- 
posed of  a  race  which  has  millions  to 
draw  upon,  was  one  of  the  great  white 
schools  which,  in  the  season  of  1911, 
went  down  before  the  Carlisle  players, 
whose  recruiting  field  is  narrow  in 
comparison.  In  the  Olympic  games  at 
Stockholm,  in  July,  1912,  Thorpe  and 
Sockalexis  carried  off  prizes  in  compe- 
tition with  the  best  men  in  their  par- 
ticular field  whom  Europe  and  Amer- 
ica could  muster.  As  the  winner  of  the 
pentathlon  and  the  decathlon,  Thorpe 
was  acclaimed  the  greatest  of  the 
world's  all-round  athletes. 

Probably  these  triumphs  would  not 


THE  EPIC  OF  THE  INDIAN 


127 


bring  much  pride  to  the  Hopi  chief  just 
mentioned.  Nor  would  he  have  been 
especially  pleased  at  a  recent  scene  at 
the  Ohio  state  capital  in  which  his 
race  figured.  There,  on  the  annivers- 
ary of  the  discovery  of  America,  Octo- 
ber 12,  1911,  in  a  city  named  for  the 
discoverer,  gathered  representatives, 
women  as  well  as  men,  of  a  hundred 
tribes  of  the  people  upon  whom  Colum- 
bus's  geographical  mistake  fastened 
the  designation  of  Indians.  They  met 
to  form  the  American  Indian  Associa- 
tion. Appropriately ,  too,  their  meeting- 
place  was  the  campus  of  the  Ohio  State 
University,  for  most  of  them,  of  both 
sexes,  were  graduates  of  government 
schools  of  the  higher  education  or  of 
white  institutions  of  learning.  Among 
them  were  lawyers,  physicians,  jour- 
nalists, bankers,  educators,  merchants, 
clergymen,  agriculturists,  and  partici- 
pants in  almost  all  the  other  important 
activities.  They  met  to  form  the  Amer- 
ican Indian  Association,  the  purpose  of 
which  is  to  advance  the  interests  of  the 
race  and,  while  aiming  to  preserve  its 
best  distinctive  traits,  to  bring  it  into 
harmony  with  its  new  environment, 
and  fit  it  for  the  role  it  will  have  to  play 
in  American  citizenship.  Appropri- 
ately, too,  the  Governor  of  Ohio,  the 
Commissioner  of  Indian  Affairs,  and 
other  public  officers,  took  part  in  the 
exercises. 

Two  months  later,  this  time  in 
Washington,  D.  C.,  there  was  a  similar 
assemblage,  for  the  same  general  ob- 
jects, with  the  added  purpose  of  bring- 
ing the  red  men  into  political  associa- 
tion. Delegates  of  both  sexes  were 
there,  representing  thirty-four  tribes, 
scattered  through  more  than  a  dozen 
states,  and  they  formed  the  Brother- 
hood of  North  American  Indians. 
After  a  lapse  of  centuries,  descendants 
of  the  race  which  established  the  Fed- 
eration of  the  Iroquois,  will  participate 
as  voters  in  another  federal  scheme. 


This  time  they  are  to  be  partners  of 
their  former  enemies,  to  be  on  terms  of 
equality  with  them,  and  to  work  for 
similar  objects.  United,  with  their  new 
weapon,  the  ballot,  the  Indians  could 
hold  the  balance  in  elections  in  Okla- 
homa, Montana,  the  Dakotas,  Idaho, 
New  Mexico,  Arizona,  and  Nevada. 
Probably  fifty  thousand  Indian  ballots 
were  cast  for  president  in  1912. 

The  Indian  is  entering  politics.  He 
has  already  entered.  Since  1907  he 
has  cast  thousands  of  votes  in  every 
election  in  Oklahoma.  Members  of  the 
race  are  in  the  legislature  of  that  state, 
and  also  in  Congress.  The  latter  in- 
clude Senator  Robert  L.  Owen  and 
Representative  Charles  D.  Carter  of 
Oklahoma,  the  former  of  Cherokee 
blood  and  the  latter  Chickasaw;  and 
Senator  Charles  Curtis  of  Kansas,  one 
of  whose  recent  ancestors  belonged  to 
the  Kaw  tribe. 

At  the  summit  of  an  ancient  burial- 
mound  in  the  township  of  Otsego,  New 
York,  is  a  marble  slab  on  which  is 
written :  — 

White  man,  greetings.  We  near  whose  bones  you 

stand  were  Iroquois. 

The  wide  land  which  now  is  yours  was  ours. 
Friendly  hands  have  given  back  to  us  enough  for 

a  tomb. 

But  the  red  man  is  taking  his  re- 
venge. At  home  and  abroad,  in  ro- 
mance and  drama,  he  is  held  to  be  the 
distinctive  American.  He  is  the  one 
man  among  us  who  is  not  called  upon 
to  place  a  hyphen  in  his  title.  To-day, 
as  in  the  past,  and  in  many  tongues, 
The  Last  of  the  Mohicans  and  the  rest  of 
Cooper's  forest  tales  are  read.  Puccini, 
DeMille,  Hartley,  Nevin,  Mary  Hun- 
ter Austin,  and  the  rest  of  the  writers  of 
operas  and  plays  who  aim  to  extract 
the  flavor  of  our  soil,  are  compelled  to 
call  upon  him.  The  Girl  of  the  Golden 
West,  Poia,  Strongheart,  The  Arrow- 
Maker,  and  other  productions  which 
deal  with  him,  are  presented  on  the 


128 


THE  BALKAN  CRISIS 


stage  of  two  continents.  He  is  the 
asset  which  saves  the  country  from  the 
imputation  of  vulgar  newness.  Even  if 
we  attempted  to,  we  could  not  rid  our- 
selves of  him.  As  the  world  appraises 


us,  the  Indian  is  the  dominant  feature 
of  American  artistic  life,  an  insepa- 
rable adjunct  in  its  histrionic  proper- 
ties, the  Niagara  of  America's  aesthetic 
landscape. 


THE  BALKAN   CRISIS 


BY   ROLAND    G.   USHER 


THE  great  area  of  mountain,  table- 
land, and  river  valley  stretching  from 
the  Black  and  JSgean  seas  on  the  east, 
to  the  Adriatic  on  the  west,  and  extend- 
ing from  the  Mediterranean  north  to 
the  crest  of  the  Tyrolese  and  Transyl- 
vanian  Alps,  has  long  been  loosely 
designated,  from  historical  and  politi- 
cal, rather  than  from  geographical  rea- 
sons, by  the  single  name,  the  Balkans; 
literally,  the  mountain  gaps.  It  in- 
cludes the  present  independent  states, 
Rumania,  Bulgaria,  Servia,  and  Mon- 
tenegro, the  Balkans  par  excellence, 
with  which  belong,  geographically  or 
racially,  Greece,  European  Turkey, 
and  the  Austrian  provinces  of  Dal- 
matia,  Croatia,  Bosnia,  and  Herzego- 
vina. 

A  greater  variety  of  people  is  scarce- 
ly to  be  found  in  Europe.  The  Slavs 
are  racially  in  the  majority;  the  ortho- 
dox Greek  Christians  outnumber  the 
numerous  other  creeds;  and  the  vast 
bulk  of  the  superficial  area  is  thinly 
sprinkled  with  mountaineers,  superb  in 
physique,  dense  in  their  ignorance  of 
the  rudiments  of  education,  fierce  in 
their  opposition  to  the  pressure  of  or- 
derly, centralized  administration.  The 
heterogeneous  population  is  descended 
from  the  remnants  of  the  vast  disor- 


derly hordes  which  poured  into  Europe 
from  Asia  Minor  and  the  Steppes  of 
Russia,  between  the  third  and  the 
sixteenth  centuries:  fragments  of  the 
tribes  conquered  by  the  Huns  and  the 
Goths  during  their  devastating  pass- 
age; sections  of  the  invaders  too  weak 
to  keep  up  with  the  main  body;  people 
driven  out  of  the  Byzantine  Empire  by 
the  Ottoman  invasions;  fragments  of 
the  advance-guard  of  various  expedi- 
tions who  outstripped  the  main  body 
and  then,  upon  its  retreat,  were  left 
behind.  In  development  and  intelli- 
gence, the  people  include  such  ex- 
tremes as  the  scarcely  civilized  hillmen 
of  Montenegro;  the  stolid,  inert  Bul- 
garian peasantry;  and  the  alert,  cap- 
able, cultivated  citizens  of  Sofia  and 
Athens.  An  American  correspondent 
tells  of  a  bootblack  who  introduced 
him  to  his  uncle,  the  Prime  Minister  of 
Bulgaria,  and  adds  that  neither  uncle 
nor  nephew  seemed  aware  of  any  dif- 
ference in  social  status.  By  grazing, 
and  by  a  rude  agriculture,  these  diverse 
peoples  supported  themselves  for  cen- 
turies and,  in  the  main,  still  do  so. 
Poverty-stricken  (until  lately), individ- 
ually and  collectively,  isolated  (until 
lately)  from  the  world  and  from  each 
other  by  the  difficulties  of  communica- 


THE  BALKAN  CRISIS 


129 


tion,  they  became  inevitably  narrow, 
bigoted,  fiercely  partisan,  unprogres- 
sive,  certainly  in  no  way  fitted  to  in- 
fluence the  affairs  of  Europe. 

Yet,  as  certainly,  since  the  days  of 
imperial  Rome,  no  European  state  has 
been  more  often  the  subject  of  anxious 
inquiry;  for  those  mountain  valleys  are 
the  keys  of  Europe.  Here  where  na- 
ture has  built  her  fortresses,  East  has 
met  West,  the  invaded  has  met  the 
invader.  In  these  great  defiles  are  the 
natural  roads  between  Asia  and  central 
and  western  Europe,  long  since  trod- 
den hard  by  Roman  and  Barbarian, 
Crusader  and  Infidel,  Hapsburg  and 
Ottoman.  The  Balkans  control  the 
whole  lower  half  of  the  rich  Danube 
Valley,  whose  economic  value  is  as 
patent  to-day  as  it  was  to  the  numer- 
ous invaders  of  Europe  who  recruited 
their  strength  in  its  fair  fields.  The 
Balkans  also  control  the  western  coast 
of  the  Black  Sea  and  some  of  its  finest 
natural  harbors.  Along  this  coast  runs 
the  road  from  Russia  to  Constanti- 
nople; down  through  the  Danube  Val- 
ley, across  the  mountains,  and  through 
Adrianople,  runs  the  great  highway 
from  the  Rhine  and  Danube  valleys  to 
Constantinople  and  the  East;  around 
to  the  West,  through  Albania  and  Dal- 
matia,  is  the  perfectly  practical  road, 
used  long  ago  by  the  Visigoths,  con- 
necting Constantinople  with  Trieste, 
Venice,  and  the  Valley  of  the  Po.  The 
Balkans,  in  fact,  control  Constantino- 
ple, the  only  gateway  between  Europe 
and  Asia  Minor,  the  junction  of  trade 
routes  and  military  roads  thousands 
of  years  old. 

The  Balkans  have  always  been  buf- 
fer states.  Augustus  there  erected  his 
barriers  against  the  barbarian  hordes; 
there  Alaric  and  his  horsemen  broke 
the  Roman  legionaries  at  Adrianople, 
and  from  the  mountain  fastnesses 
assailed  the  Western  Empire;  there  the 
Byzantine  Empire  made  its  last  long 
VOL.  in  -  NO.  i 


stand ;  and  there,  after  the  fall  of  Con- 
stantinople, Christian  Europe  held  the 
advancing  Turks  at  bay.  With  the 
decline  of  the  Ottoman  power  and  the 
strengthening  of  the  Hapsburg  power, 
in  the  seventeenth  and  eighteenth  cen- 
turies, the  danger  of  the  Mohammedan 
conquest  of  Christendom  passed,  and 
the  Balkans  lost  significance  for  a 
while  in  the  eyes  of  Europe.  But  to  the 
Balkans  themselves,  the  continued 
pressure  of  the  Turk  was  not  merely  a 
menace:  it  was  a  curse;  their  sufferings 
were  rendered  a  thousandfold  keener 
by  the  knowledge  that  their  oppressor 
was  an  infidel.  The  racial  antipathy  of 
the  Occidental  for  the  Oriental,  the 
fierce  religious  hatred  of  the  Christian 
for  the  Mohammedan,  are  motives 
actuating  the  Balkan  peoples  to  a 
degree  inconceivable  in  America;  and 
no  less  violently  do  they  control  the 
children  of  the  men  who  battered  the 
gates  of  Vienna  and  beached  their 
galleys  on  the  shores  of  Rhodes  and 
Malta.  This  war  is  a  gigantic  blood 
feud,  a  racial  struggle,  a  crusade.  The 
skirmishes  have  been  hand-to-hand 
fights,  and,  even  in  pitched  battles, 
Bulgarian  regiments  have  thrown 
away  their  guns  and  rushed  upon  the 
Turks,  knife  in  hand,  in  a  frenzied  lust 
for  blood.  The  outrages  upon  the  Mace- 
donian Christians,  which  were  the  os- 
tensible cause  of  the  war,  only  intensi- 
fied this  fanatical  antipathy,  handed 
down  from  father  to  son.  There  can  be 
no  doubt  that  to  the  soldiers  themselves 
the  fierce  desire  to  flesh  their  steel  in 
an  enemy's  body  outweighs  every  other 
motive. 

If  the  strategic  position  of  the  Bal- 
kans has  been  a  curse,  by  involving 
them  in  the  meshes  of  the  struggle 
between  Europe  and  Asia,  it  has  also 
proved  a  blessing,  for,  undoubtedly, 
they  owe  to  outside  pressure  such 
nominal  political  unity  as  they  have 
individually  possessed.  In  fact,  the 


130 


THE  BALKAN  CRISIS 


existence  of  a  common  oppressor,  the 
inevitability  of  military  rule,  and  its 
equally  inevitable  abuses,  have  given 
these  varied  peoples,  widely  sundered 
by  race  and  creed,  the  vigorous  bond 
of  a  common  hatred.  The  virulence  of 
that  hatred  has  rendered  their  mutual 
animosities  and  jealousies  powerless  to 
separate  them. 

Their  strategic  situation  has  also 
involved  them  deeply  in  the  dynastic 
and  international  ambitions  and  rival- 
ries of  Europe.  From  the  international 
point  of  view,  the  entire  present  war, 
from  its  causes  and  its  battles  to  the 
treaty  of  peace,  is  but  a  single  battle  in 
the  great  war  between  rival  coalitions 
for  the  domination  of  Europe  and  the 
control  of  the  known  world.  'The 
agony  of  European  Turkey  has  begun,' 
said  one  of  the  keenest  and  best  in- 
formed German  editors  in  a  recent  in- 
terview, *  and  the  question  whether  the 
Balkans  politically  and  economically 
shall  belong  to  an  alliance  or  confeder- 
ation of  states  under  Russian  influ- 
ence and  dependency,  or  remain  open 
to  Germanic  expansion,  will  be  as  a 
matter  of  life  or  death  to  Germanic 
growth,  influence,  and  life,  and  be 
finally  answered  and  decided  by  the 
sword.'  That  is  the  real  meaning  of  the 
Balkan  Crisis. 

This  phase  of  the  Balkan  question  is 
the  result  of  the  internal  development, 
and  ambition  for  further  expansion,  of 
Russia,  Austria,  and  Prussia.  The 
objective  of  all  three  has  long  been  a 
substantial  share  of  the  trade  with  the 
East  which  England  has  pretty  thor- 
oughly monopolized.  In  the  suprem- 
acy of  the  English  navy,  and  in  the 
resulting  control  of  the  Atlantic  and 
Mediterranean,  they  have  seen  the 
secret  of  her  success  and  wealth.  She 
grew  rich,  as  Venice  and  Genoa  had 
grown  rich  in  the  Middle  Ages,  car- 
rying the  eastern  goods  between  the 
termini  of  the  caravan  routes  and 


northern  Europe.  She  then  dug,  with 
French  assistance,  the  Suez  Canal, 
creating  a  new  water-route  to  India; 
she  fortified  it  by  a  great  fleet,  by  the 
possession  of  Egypt  and  the  strategic 
points  of  the  Mediterranean,  while  the 
French  settled  in  Morocco  and  Algiers. 
Obviously,  a  contest  for  the  suprem- 
acy of  the  Mediterranean  became  an 
indispensable  prerequisite  to  the  con- 
trol of  this  trade,  and  could  not  even 
be  attempted  by  Austria  or  Russia 
without  ports  and  battleships. 

Access  to  the  Mediterranean  became, 
therefore,  the  cardinal  feature  of  the 
policy  of  expansion,  which  both  long 
since  initiated,  and  neither  could  reach 
the  sea  save  through  the  Balkans.  Rus- 
sia must  possess  at  least  the  Black 
Sea,  Constantinople,  and  the  Straits; 
Austria  needed  at  least  the  strip  of  land 
through  which  ran  the  road  to  Trieste 
and  Venice,  and,  to  protect  that,  must 
hold  Servia,  Montenegro,  and  Albania. 
The  interests  of  Russia  and  Austria 
were,  however,  highly  antagonistic. 
Constantinople,  Adrianople,  and  the 
Danube  Valley  made  the  gateway  to 
Vienna  through  which  the  Turk  had  so 
often  marched,  and  Austria  could  not 
permit  it  to  fall  into  the  hands  of  her 
eastern  rival.  On  the  other  hand,  Rus- 
sia could  not  allow  the  western  Balkans 
to  fall  into  Austria's  hands  for  fear  that 
empire  might  secure  the  eastern  Bal- 
kans as  well,  or,  at  least,  attack  Russia 
on  the  flank  on  her  own  march  to  Con- 
stantinople. Nor  did  either  power  wish 
to  divide  the  eastern  Mediterranean 
with  the  other.  Under  such  circum- 
stances it  was  more  than  natural  that 
the  Balkan  States  conceived  a  terror  of 
both,  and  vastly  preferred  subjection 
to  the  Turk  to  '  freedom '  at  the  hands 
of  such  friends. 

England  and  France,  who  already 
controlled  the  Mediterranean,  were 
anxious  to  thwart  both  these  plans  at 
all  costs,  and  were  therefore  eager  to 


THE  BALKAN   CRISIS 


131 


secure  the  Balkans  and  Constantinople 
themselves,  a  step  to  which  Russia  and 
Austria  could  not  possibly  consent.  In 
fact,  the  Balkans  and  Turkey  were 
such  important  districts  that  none  of 
the  great  Powers  could  conceive  of 
their  possession  by  any  one  strong 
enough  to  use  them  for  offense.  They 
agreed,  therefore,  to  keep  the  Turk 
alive  so  that  he  might  hold  what  every 
one  wanted,  and  what  no  one  else  could 
be  allowed  to  have.  Turkey's  weakness 
was  its  only  right  to  live.  England  and 
France,  prevented  by  their  distance 
from  the  scene  of  dispute  from  using 
the  territory  for  their  own  aggrand- 
izement, were  allowed  by  the  others 
to  assume  the  direction  of  Turkey, 
and,  in  course  of  time,  the  present 
Balkan  States  were  allowed  to  become 
independent  of  Turkey  because  their 
determination  to  govern  themselves 
could  not  be  longer  repressed  without 
the  existence  of  an  army  at  the  very 
place  in  all  Europe  where  every  one 
least  wished  for  one.  Ever  since  the 
liberation  of  the  states,  the  Slavs  and 
Greeks  left  under  Turkish  rule,  have, 
with  the  aid  of  their  independent  neigh- 
bors, actively  agitated  the  question  of 
their  own  independence  of  Turkey,  but 
this  the  Powers  have  always  refused  to 
grant,  for  fear  that  their  loss  might 
weaken  Turkey  too  much,  or  possibly 
add  too  substantially  to  the  strength 
of  one  of  the  rival  powers. 

Then  the  whole  situation  was 
changed1  by  the  birth  of  the  vast 
schemes  dubbed,  for  want  of  a  better 
name,  Pan-Germanism.  Bismarck  had 
a  vision  of  a  Germano-Turkish  state, 
extending  from  the  North  Sea  to  the 
Persian  Gulf,  and  including  in  its  fed- 
erated bond  Germany,  Austria,  Hun- 
gary, the  Balkan  States,  and  Turkey. 
Once  this  great  alliance  was  perfected, 
what  would  not  be  possible?  Persia, 
Egypt,  Arabia  were  weak,  and,  once 
captured,  the  keys  to  the  East  would 


be  in  Germany's  hands:  India  would 
fall,  the  British  Empire  become  a 
thing  of  the  past,  and  Germany,  once 
more  as  in  the  Middle  Ages,  would  be 
empress  of  the  world.  With  the  con- 
trol of  the  high  road  of  commerce  from 
Hamburg  to  Constantinople  by  rail, 
with  the  Baghdad  Railroad  to  connect 
Constantinople  with  the  Persian  Gulf, 
the  trade  of  the  East  could  be  brought 
to  Europe  by  a  more  expeditious  route 
than  the  sea  route  through  Suez,  and 
Germany  and  her  allies  would  be  able 
to  break  the  English  monopoly  of  In- 
dian wares. 

To  Prussia  and  Austria,  therefore, 
the  Balkans  are  vital.  To  keep  Russia 
out  of  Constantinople,  to  prevent  her 
from  securing  a  monopoly  of  the  Black 
Sea,  is  absolutely  essential  to  the  execu- 
tion of  the  Germanic  plan,  and  cannot 
be  insured  without  the  firm  control  of 
both  the  Balkans  and  Constantinople. 
To  contest  England's  naval  supremacy 
in  the  Mediterranean,  an  Austrian 
naval  base  must  be  maintained  in  the 
Adriatic  and,  if  possible,  at  Salonica  in 
the  ^Egean;  and  in  turn  to  defend  such 
positions  Austria  must  have  control  of 
the  western  Balkans,  which  flank  not 
only  the  Adriatic,  but  her  only  road  to 
both  seas.  To  secure  and  protect  a 
great  trade  route  by  rail  from  the  Per- 
sian Gulf  to  Berlin  and  Hamburg, 
nearly  one  third  of  whose  length  lies  in 
the  defiles  of  the  Balkans,  effective 
possession  of  the  eastern  Balkans  is 
indispensable.  The  success  of  Pan- 
Germanism  depends  entirely  upon  the 
feasibility  of  securing  and  maintaining 
complete  control  of  the  Balkans  and  of 
Turkey. 

Conversely,  the  defense  of  Russia, 
England,  and  France  depends  upon  the 
Balkans.  Whoever  else  takes  posses- 
sion of  them,  the  Triple  Alliance  must 
be  kept  out.  There,  too,  is  the  best 
opportunity  for  placing  a  permanent 
obstacle  in  the  way  of  the  execution  of 


132 


THE   BALKAN  CRISIS 


the  German  plans.  Strangely  enough, 
the  Tripolitan  War  was  begun  by  Italy 
as  an  ally  of  England  and  France :  she 
was  to  receive  Tripoli  as  the  price  of 
leaving  the  Triple  Alliance,  of  joining 
her  fleet  to  the  French  fleet,  and  of  thus 
placing  the  naval  forces  of  Austria 
hopelessly  in  the  minority  in  the  Medi- 
terranean. The  failure  of  England  and 
France  'peacefully'  to  deliver  Tripoli, 
the  necessity  of  waging  an  expensive 
war  to  obtain  it,  caused  her  to  return 
to  her  old  allies  and  to  carry  Tripoli 
with  her.  England,  counting  on  Italy's 
assistance,  had  removed  most  of  her 
Mediterranean  fleet  to  the  North  Sea; 
the  French  fleet  had  not  yet  concen- 
trated at  Toulon;  the  Italian  and  Aus- 
trian fleets  combined  were  too  nearly 
the  equal  of  the  available  French  and 
English  fleets,  and  the  situation  was 
elsewhere  too  dangerous  for  the  latter 
to  risk  actual  interference.  Without 
resistance,  the  Triple  Alliance  secured 
undisputed  control  of  the  Adriatic,  a 
naval  base  in  Africa  from  which  to 
threaten  the  steamship  lines  to  Suez,  a 
military  base  from  which  to  assail 
either  Egypt  or  Tunis,  and  the  tem- 
porary possession  of  nearly  every 
strategic  point  in  the  eastern  Mediter- 
ranean save  the  Straits  and  Constan- 
tinople. In  addition,  they  actually 
landed  in  Tripoli  a  fully  equipped 
army,  and  fortified  the  chief  strategic 
points.  The  outbreak  of  the  Balkan 
War  then  enabled  them  to  extort  from 
the  unwilling  Turks  the  peaceful  ces- 
sion of  Tripoli,  which  Germany  had 
pledged  herself  to  obtain. 

Needless  to  add,  this  result  dealt 
England  the  heaviest  blow  she  had 
received  since  1798.  It  has  been  always 
said  that  Nelson's  victory  at  Aboukir 
saved  the  English  control  of  the  Medi- 
terranean. Had  he  lost  the  battle,  the 
result  could  scarcely  have  been  so  dis- 
astrous as  the  passing  of  Tripoli  into 
the  undisputed  control  of  the  Triple 


Alliance.  For  the  first  time  since  the 
loss  of  Minorca  in  1756,  England,  with 
her  undisputed  predominance  unques- 
tionably gone,  was  really  in  danger  of 
losing  actual  control  of  the  Mediter- 
ranean. Should  Austria  now  succeed  in 
executing  any  one  of  her  schemes  for 
the  reconstruction  of  the  Balkans,  Bis- 
marck's great  vision  would  be  within 
measurable  distance  of  completion, 
the  condition  of  England  and  France 
would  be  indeed  desperate,  and  Rus- 
sia's chances  of  realizing  her  ambitions 
in  the  south  would  surely  have  to  be 
postponed  at  least  half  a  century.  For 
Austria  plans  to  secure  complete  con- 
trol of  the  Adriatic  either,  as  she  would 
like  best,  by  annexing  Servia,  Monte- 
negro, and  Albania  to  her  own  terri- 
tory, or  by  the  formation  of  a  Slav 
Monarchy  out  of  those  three  states, 
the  Croatian  provinces,  Bosnia,  and 
Herzegovina,  which  would  assume  to 
Austria  proper  the  same  relation  as 
Hungary  and  make  of  the  Dual  a 
Triple  Monarchy.  Macedonia,  taking 
that  territory  in  the  broadest  sense, 
would  then  be  easily  obtained;  and 
from  the  great  port  of  Salonica,  as  a 
base,  the  Austrian  fleet  would  control 
the  ^Egean,  and  render  the  possession 
of  Constantinople  and  the  Straits  of 
little  value  to  Russia,  should  she  per- 
form the  highly  improbable  feat  of 
taking  them  after  Austria  had  been 
thus  strengthened. 

These  schemes  and  the  recent  events1 
which  seem  to  make  their  achievement 
possible  have  destroyed  the  conditions 
upon  which  the  existence  of  Turkey 
depended;  a  power  which  even  minor 
powers  can  defeat  is  no  longer  desired 
by  England  and  France  at  Constanti- 
nople. The  creation  in  its  place  of  an 
independent  confederation  of  Balkan 
states,  hating  Austria  for  racial  and 
religious  reasons,  suspicious  of  Russia 

1  This  paper  was  sent  to  press  on  November 
18.  —  THE  EDITORS. 


THE  BALKAN  CRISIS 


133 


for  political  reasons,  naturally  bound 
to  England  and  France  by  strong  fi- 
nancial ties,  is,  from  the  point  of  view 
of  England  and  France,  the  most  favor- 
able solution,  and  even  from  the  point 
of  view  of  Russia  such  an  outcome 
would  be  a  vast  improvement  on  the 
past  situation. 

These  same  events  have  also  re- 
moved the  chief  objection  that  England 
and  France  had  to  the  possession  of 
the  Balkans  and  of  Constantinople  by 
Russia  herself.  If  they  must  have  a 
rival  in  the  Black  Sea,  better  a  thou- 
sand times  a  rival  whose  navy  has  yet 
to  be  built,  and  whose  imminent  peril 
in  northern  Europe  makes  their  aid  as 
vital  to  her  in  the  Baltic  as  hers  is  to 
them  in  the  Balkans.  Indeed,  the  mere 
possession  of  the  Balkans  by  Russia 
would  be  a  permanent  guarantee  of  the 
failure  of  Bismarck's  scheme,  and  would 
do  more  than  any  other  one  thing  to 
render  Morocco,  India,  and  even  Eng- 
land itself,  safe  from  aggression.  With 
Russia  in  Poland,  in  Galicia,  and  in 
Servia,  Berlin  and  Vienna  would  be  in 
deadly  peril  in  flank  and  rear,  Trieste 
could  be  taken,  the  Adriatic  con- 
quered, Italy  isolated,  Tripoli  an- 
nexed by  England  and  France,  and  a 
stronger  hold  secured  on  the  Mediter- 
ranean and  Africa  than  ever  before. 
The  key  which  might  open  the  door  of 
the  East  might  also  effectively  lock  it. 

The  Powers,  therefore,  permitted 
the  Balkan  States  to  destroy  Turkey 
because  they  all  hoped  to  benefit  indi- 
rectly by  the  partition  of  the  Turkish 
Empire.  It  is  highly  probable  that  the 
Balkan  States  were  secretly  assured  of 
support  by  both  coalitions,  and  well 
knew,  therefore,  that  success  in  the 
war  was  a  foregone  conclusion.  The 
moment,  too,  was  opportune  in  the 
opinion  of  both  coalitions.  The  Triple 
Alliance  saw  in  it  the  first  steps  toward 
the  ultimate  consummation  of  their 
control  of  the  Balkans,  the  lever  by 


which  Tripoli,  Macedonia,  and  Albania 
could  be  pried  from  the  clutches  of  the 
reluctant  Turk,  the  surest  method  of 
obtaining  more  effective  control  of 
Asia  Minor.  Not  only  was  there  much 
to  gain  by  action,  but  much  might  be 
lost  by  waiting  till  the  English  had 
altered  their  naval  dispositions  in  the 
Mediterranean,  till  the  Baghdad  Rail- 
road and  the  Persian  Gulf  had  been 
outflanked  by  the  Trans-Persian  Rail- 
road, till  the  opening  of  the  Panama 
Canal  had  made  the  English  possession 
of  Suez  relatively  less  essential,  and, 
above  all,  till  the  death  of  Franz 
Joseph  should  produce  such  internal 
dissensions  in  Austria-Hungary  as  to 
render  the  Dual  Monarchy  helpless  for 
a  decade.  The  joy  at  the  prospect  of 
war  was  not  less  great  in  London, 
Paris,  and  St.  Petersburg.  The  wished- 
for  coup  d'Stat  which  should  destroy 
the  German  plans  was  actually  in 
progress  in  the  creation  of  a  confeder- 
ation of  really  independent  Balkan 
states.  Should  the  Sultan  actually  be 
expelled  from  Europe,  England  could 
then  offer  him  a  refuge  in  Egypt,  or,  if 
he  preferred  to  remain  in  Asia  Minor, 
she  might  secure  the  establishment  in 
Egypt  or  Morocco  of  a  new  Khalifate 
to  rule  the  Mohammedans  in  Africa 
and  Asia,  and  thus  end  for  good  and  all 
the  dangers  of  a  holy  war  in  the  Eng- 
lish and  French  territories. 

In  the  Balkans  themselves,  however, 
joy  was  literally  unconfined.  A  glorious 
opportunity  was  theirs  to  strike  off  all 
the  shackles  binding  them  to  all  the 
Powers.  Such  an  opportunity  would 
certainly  never  return.  They  feared 
Austria  most,  Russia  next,  and  Eng- 
land and  France  least.  While  the 
Turk  was  the  Sick  Man  of  Europe, 
maintained  in  desuetude,  while  the 
Powers  were  interested  in  the  Balkan 
States  merely  to  keep  them  out  of  one 
another's  hands,  Balkan  independence 
was  very  real,  and  the  rule  of  Turkey 


134 


THE  BALKAN  CRISIS 


over  their  brethren  in  the  Turkish 
Empire  was  too  inefficient  to  be  bur- 
densome. But  the  spectacle  was  terri- 
fying in  the  extreme  of  the  organiza- 
tion in  Turkey  by  German  hands  of  a 
strong  centralized  administration  with 
a  large  and  efficient  army,  trained, 
financed,  and  officered  by  Germany 
and  Austria,  and  directed  to  the  fur- 
therance of  the  latter's  interests.  Such 
a  Turkey  would  be  a  neighbor  and 
ruler  of  a  different  stamp.  The  very 
excellence  and  justice  of  the  adminis- 
tration which  the  new  regime  proposed 
to  institute  would  remove  the  casus 
belli,  the  gravamina  of  Macedonia  and 
Albania.  Should  many  men  of  the 
stamp  of  Hussein  Kiazim  Bey  be  ap- 
pointed, and  should  they  use  elsewhere 
the  vigor  he  displayed  as  Vali  of  Sal- 
onica  in  punishing  the  Turkish  gen- 
darmerie for  the  commission  of  crimes 
and  atrocities,  the  most  apparent  and 
telling  evidences  of  Turkish  misrule 
would  disappear. 

Moreover,  an  alliance  with  Austria 
and  Germany,  however  favorable  the 
constitutional  or  diplomatic  relations 
might  be,  would  mean  to  the  Balkan 
States  the  surrender  of  their  own  inde- 
pendence and  the  acceptance  of  dicta- 
tion from  Berlin  or  Vienna  of  a  policy 
made  in  the  interests  of  the  latter.  The 
economic  benefits  looked  distant  and 
nebulous:  the  rich  trade  of  the  East 
would  hardly  stop  at  their  doors  to 
afford  them  profit.  The  positive  dis- 
advantages in  time  of  peace  were  cer- 
tain: the  coalition  would  make  them 
its  fortress  for  defense  and  offense.  In 
time  of  war  the  disadvantages  would 
be  even  greater,  for  the  battles  would 
be  fought  within  their  borders.  If  they 
were  ever  to  achieve  liberty,  they  must 
strike  before  Turkey  became  more 
efficient,  and  before  one  or  the  other 
coalition  took  possession  of  them  by 
main  force. 

So   far   as   Turkey  was  concerned, 


there  was  little  effective  resistance  to 
be  expected  from  a  state  torn  by  inter- 
nal dissensions  between  the  Old  and 
the  Young  Turks.  With  the  revolu- 
tionary Party  of  Union  and  Progress 
actively  opposing  the  ministry,  with  a 
strong  belief  in  foreign  capitals  and 
chancelleries  that  the  new  regime  was 
no  better  than  the  old,  with  the  new 
Turkish  army  effectively  marooned  in 
Tripoli,  and  the  Italian  fleet  holding 
the  ^Egean,  the  chances  of  success  for 
the  Balkans  were  at  the  maximum. 
The  probability  of  European  inter- 
ference with  the  beginning  and  prose- 
cution of  the  war  they  knew  to  be 
slight,  for  they  clearly  saw  what  each 
side  hoped  to  gain  from  their  efforts. 
That  each  group  of  great  powers  de- 
pended upon  their  cooperation  for  the 
furtherance  of  its  own  interests,  made 
it  not  unlikely  that  a  really  strong  con- 
federation of  Balkan  States,  if  not 
actually  able  to  exact  its  own  price 
from  either  side,  would  for  some  years 
at  least  be  able  to  play  off  one  party 
against  the  other,  and  so  afford  an 
opportunity  for  the  consolidation  of  its 
own  union,  and  the  development  of  the 
immediate  advantages  of  victory  to 
such  an  extent  that  armed  interference 
would  become  a  serious  matter  for  any 
coalition,  however  strong.  They  well 
know  that  the  country  itself  is  a  nat- 
ural fortress,  already  improved  by  all 
the  devices  of  modern  fortification;  that 
their  armies  contain  more  than  half 
a  million  men,  natural  soldiers,  well 
equipped  by  their  *  friends"  money, 
and  well  instructed  by  their  *  friends' ' 
officers  in  all  the  multifold  strategical 
and  tactical  advantages  of  their  coun- 
try. 

Such  men,  fighting  for  independ- 
ence, ought  to  be  able  to  hold  such  a 
country  even  against  Austria  or  Rus- 
sia. If  they  cannot  win  it,  with  Turkey 
weak  and  disorganized,  with  Austria 
and  Russia  determined  to  thwart  each 


THE  BALKAN  CRISIS 


135 


other's  ambitions,  they  never  can 
maintain  their  independence.  This  is 
their  greatest,  and  perhaps  their  only 
opportunity.  While  the  Powers,  there- 
fore, complacently  watched  the  strug- 
gle with  Turkey,  each  confident  that 
the  Balkans  were  fighting  in  their 
interest,  the  Balkans  were  actually 
fighting  for  their  own  independence  of 
the  Powers  themselves.  Moreover,  by 
beginning  a  campaign,  which  they 
knew  would  be  short,  in  the  late  au- 
tumn, they  practically  insured  them- 
selves six  months  in  which  to  take  ad- 
vantage of  their  victory;  for  the  severe 
Balkan  winter,  already  upon  them,  will 
make  any  effective  armed  interposition 
by  either  Austria  or  Russia  exceedingly 
difficult,  if  not  impossible. 

The  position  of  the  confederates  dic- 
tated the  strategy  of  the  war.  The 
Servians  and  Montenegrins  were  to 
begin  the  war  in  the  west,  partly  in 
hope  of  drawing  the  Turkish  forces 
thither  and  so  weakening  the  main 
army,  partly  because  it  was  their  duty 
to  overrun  Albania  and  be  in  position 
to  attack  Macedonia  on  the  flank  at 
the  moment  when  the  Greeks  delivered 
an  assault  in  force  from  the  front.  The 
two,  thus  victorious,  would  together 
overrun  Thrace  and  fall  upon  the  rear 
of  the  main  Turkish  army  if  the  Bul- 
garian assault  upon  Adrianople  had 
not  yet  succeeded,  or  on  its  flank  in 
case  the  Turk  had  been  driven  back  on 
Constantinople.  Whichever  won  first 
would  be  immediately  in  a  most  advan- 
tageous position  to  assist  her  allies 
whether  they  were  victorious  or  de- 
feated. Rumania  remained  inactive,  to 
be  ready  to  defend  the  rear  from  pos- 
sible attacks  from  Austria  or  Russia. 

The  rapidity  with  which  these  com- 
bined attacks  were  delivered  prevented 
the  concentration  of  the  Turkish  army 
at  any  point,  and  also  made  its  provi- 
sioning and  administration  exceedingly 
difficult.  The  astounding  vigor  and 


ability  of  the  Bulgarians  enabled  them 
to  drive  the  disorganized  and  hungry 
Turks  into  Constantinople  before  the 
western  and  southern  movements  were 
finished,  and  have  rendered  the  com- 
plete overthrow  of  the  Turkish  power 
in  Europe  merely  a  question  of  time. 

The  confederates  intend  to  treat 
only  with  Turkey;  they  deny  the  right 
of  the  powers  to  interfere;  they  are 
themselves  agreed  upon  the  settlement; 
and  hold  possession  of  everything  the 
Powers  want,  with  armies  aggregating 
at  least  half  a  million  men,  flushed  with 
victory,  and  entrenched  in  a  natural 
fortress.  If  the  plans  of  the  allies  suc- 
ceed, the  King  of  Greece  is  to  be  presi- 
dent of  a  federation  composed  of  the 
independent  states  of  Bulgaria,  Ru- 
mania, Servia,  Greece,  and  Montene- 
gro. Crete,  the  JSgean  Islands,  and  the 
greater  part  of  Macedonia  will  be  an- 
nexed to  Greece;  most  of  Thrace  to  Bul- 
garia; Albania  to  Servia.  The  rest  of 
European  Turkey,  including  Salonica, 
presents  the  most  difficult  problem. 

Needless  to  say,  these  arrangements 
will  be  very  disagreeable  to  Austria 
and  Italy,  who  desire  to  erect  Alba- 
nia and  probably  Macedonia  into  king- 
doms, with  Austrian  or  Italian  prin- 
ces as  kings.  The  Balkan  States  point 
out  that  these  districts  are  merely  geo- 
graphical expressions,  —  the  people 
possessing  unity  neither  of  race  nor 
creed,  and  lacking  even  a  common 
language,  —  and  insist  that  nothing 
but  trouble  for  themselves  and  their 
neighbors  can  result  from  granting 
them  autonomy.  This  does  not  weigh 
heavily  with  the  Triple  Alliance,  the 
members  of  which  are  anxious,  if  they 
cannot  avert  the  settlement,  to  pro- 
vide for  its  prompt  failure.  England 
and  France,  and  probably  Russia,  seem 
to  be  in  favor  of  strengthening  the  ex- 
isting states,  and  decry  the  *  ungener- 
ous '  policy  of  snatching  from  them  the 
fruits  of  victory. 


136 


THE  BALKAN   CRISIS 


The  really  vital  difficulty  lies  in  the 
existence  of  Constantinople.  The  Bal- 
kans will  insist  upon  the  removal  of  the 
seat  of  Turkish  government  across  the 
Straits;  the  Powers  will  hardly  consent 
to  anything  less  than  the  neutraliza- 
tion of  Constantinople  and  the  Straits. 
In  any  case,  armed  interference  is 
highly  improbable.  The  strength  of 
the  confederation  in  men  and  re- 
sources, the  approach  of  winter,  the 
nature  of  the  ground  where  the  battles 
would  be  fought,  the  antagonistic 
interests  of  the  coalitions,  will  in  all 
probability  prevent  more  than  a  show 
of  force  by  either  Austria  or  Russia. 
The  lack  of  money  might  bring  the 
Balkans  to  terms,  were  it  not  practi- 
cally certain  that  England  and  France 
will  finance  them.  Whether  or  not 
foreseen  and  inspired  by  those  two 
nations,  the  war  has  resulted  in  giving 
back  to  them  the  strategic  position  in 
the  Mediterranean,  lost  through  the 
conquest  of  Tripoli  by  the  Triple  Alli- 
ance. Moreover,  they  have  won  it 
without  vitally  increasing  their  own 
dangers  from  Russia.  The  latter  will 
be  entirely  satisfied  with  freedom  of 
passage  to  arid  from  the  Black  Sea,  and 
will  create  there,  with  their  entire  ap- 
proval, a  strong  fleet  which  will  be- 
come a  factor  in  future  movements  in 
the  Mediterranean.  At  the  moment  of 
writing,  the  Balkan  War  is  a  victory 
for  the  Triple  Entente  over  the  Triple 
Alliance. 


As  an  outcome  of  the  struggle  it  is 
hard  to  foresee  anything  short  of  de- 
struction for  Turkey  in  Europe.  With 
the  loss  of  Albania  and  Macedonia, 
there  will  be  little  left  except  the  dis- 
trict immediately  around  Constanti- 
nople, which,  though  containing  the 
vast  majority  of  the  Turks  on  the 
northern  side  of  the  Bosphorus,  has  a 
numerous  and  hostile  Greek  element  in 
the  population.  There  is  not,  and  never 
has  been,  any  racial  or  religious  basis 
for  a  Turkish  state  in  Europe.  The 
Turks  belong  in  Asia  Minor.  The  abil- 
ity of  the  Turk  to  stand  in  either  place 
without  support  is  doubtful.  Adminis- 
trative decentralization  has  fostered 
dishonesty,  disobedience,  and  corrup- 
tion so  long  as  to  make  them  almost 
racial  traits,  which  render  the  Turk 
poor  material  for  the  independent  self- 
government  so  eagerly  desired  by  the 
Young  Turks.  And  this  very  attempt 
at  administrative  centralization  and 
honest  government  rouses  the  subject 
peoples  and  offends  the  Powers.  Only 
because  the  Turk  was  hopelessly  inef- 
ficient and  submissive  was  he  allowed 
to  exist  at  all.  The  work  of  the  Com- 
mittee of  Union  and  Progress,  whose 
ideal  is  the  exclusion  of  foreigners  from 
Turkey,  settled  its  ultimate  fate.  Like 
Persia  and  Egypt,  Turkey  must  be 
governed  in  the  interests  of  Europe  and 
not  in  its  own.  Whatever  happens,  the 
Turk  will  be  again  reduced  to  ineffi- 
ciency and  subserviency. 


WHAT  SHALL  WE   SAY? 


BY   DAVID   STARR    JORDAN 


WHAT  shall  we  say  as  to  '  free  ships ' 
and  the  Panama  Canal?  If  our  nation 
has  agreed  to  treat  all  ships  alike,  in- 
cluding our  own,  let  us  stand  by  that 
agreement.  Of  violation  of  treaties  we 
have  been  more  than  once  accused.  If 
we  know  what  we  have  promised,  let  us 
stand  by  it,  even  though  it  seems 
strange  that  we  cannot  *  throw  our 
money  to  the  birds'  while  every  other 
nation  is  free  to  do  it. 

But  why  *  throw  our  money  to  the 
birds '  ?  Do  *  the  birds '  require  it  or  ap- 
preciate it  ?  What  claim  have  coastwise 
steamships  of  the  United  States  to  use 
our  canal  at  the  expense  of  the  Ameri- 
can people?  But  these  are  'our  ships/ 
we  say.  Since  when  have  they  become 
'our  ships'?  Have  the  New  York  and 
London  capitalists  who  own  them  ever 
turned  them  over  to  us?  Have  they 
ever  agreed  to  divide  their  profits  with 
those  who  make  great  profits  possible? 
The  great  enemy  of  democracy  is  priv- 
ilege. To  grant  any  sort  of  concession, 
having  money  value,  without  a  cor- 
responding return,  is  *  privilege/  The 
granting  of  privilege  in  the  past  has 
been  the  source  of  most  of  the  great 
body  of  political  evils  from  which  the 
civilized  world  suffers  to-day. 

While  declaiming  against  privilege, 
even  while  exalting  its  curtailment  as 
the  greatest  of  national  issues  to-day, 
we  start  new  privileges  without  hesita- 
tion. We  throw  into  the  hands  of  an 
unknown  group  of  men,  to  become 
sooner  or  later  a  shipping  trust,  a  vast 


unknown  and  increasing  sum  of  money, 
extorted  by  indirect  taxation  from  the 
people  of  this  country.  No  account- 
ing is  asked  from  them;  no  returns  for 
our  generosity.  We  give  them  yearly, 
to  begin  with,  as  much  as  an  Amer- 
ican laborer  can  earn  in  twelve  thou- 
sand years;  in  other  words,  we  place  at 
their  service,  and  at  our  own  expense, 
twelve  thousand  of  our  workingmen. 
From  our  tax-roll  we  pass  over  to  them 
the  payments  each  year  of  thirty  thou- 
sand families.  And  all  because  these 
are  'our  ships.'  'Our  ships';  we  have 
here  the  primal  fallacy  of  privilege,  a 
fallacy  dominant  the  world  over,  the 
leading  agent  in  the  impending  bank- 
ruptcy of  this  spendthrift  world. 

In  Europe  and  America,  taxes  have 
doubled  in  the  last  fifteen  years,  and 
half  of  this  extra  tax  has  gone  to  build 
up  'our  ships,'  'our  bankers,'  'our  com- 
merce,' 'our  manufactures,'  'our  pro- 
moters,' 'our  defense,'  in  nation  after 
nation,  while  'the  man  lowest  down,' 
who  bears  the  brunt  of  this  taxation,  is 
never  called  on  to  share  its  benefits. 
The  ships  that  bear  our  flag  in  order  to 
go  through  our  canal  at  our  expense  are 
not '  our  ships.'  By  the  very  fact  of  free 
tolls,  we  know  them  for  the  ships  of  our 
enemy;  for  the  arch-enemy  of  demo- 
cracy is  privilege. 


ii 

As  teachers  of  private  and  to  some 
extent  of  public  morals,  what  shall  we 
say  to  the  gigantic  parade  on  the  Hud- 
son of  miles  on  miles  of  war  vessels  on 

137 


138 


WHAT    SHALL  WE   SAY? 


their  way  from  the  tax  bureau  to  the 
junk-shop? 

Let  us  look  on  this  mighty  array  of 
ships,  splendidly  equipped  and  manned 
by  able  and  worthy  men,  the  whole 
never  to  be  needed,  and  never  under 
any  conceivable  circumstances  to  be 
other  than  a  burden  and  a  danger  to 
the  nation  which  displays  it. 

We  are  told  that  a  purpose  of  this 
pageant  of  the  ships  is  to  *  popularize 
the  navy/  This  may  mean  to  get  us 
used  to  it,  and  to  paying  for  it  —  which 
is  the  chief  function  of  the  people  in 
these  great  affairs.  Or  it  may  mean  to 
work  upon  the  public  imagination  so 
that  we  may  fill  the  vacancies  in  the 
corps  of  sailors  and  marines  who  *  glare 
at  us  through  their  absences.' 

By  all  means  let  us  popularize  the 
navy.  It  is  our  navy;  we  have  paid  for 
it;  and  it  is  for  the  people  to  do  what 
they  please  with  it.  'For,  after  all,  this 
is  the  people's  country.'  And  perhaps 
we  could  bring  it  nearer  to  our  hearts 
and  thoughts  if  we  should  paint  on  the 
white  side  of  each  ship,  its  cost  in  tax- 
es, in  the  blood  and  sweat  of  working- 
men,  in  the  anguish  of  *  the  man  lowest 
down.' 

There  is  the  good  ship  North  Dakota, 
for  example.  Her  cost  is  almost  exact- 
ly the  year's  earning  of  the  prosperous 
state  for  which  she  is  named.  The  fine 
dreadnoughts  who  fear  nothing  while 
the  nation  is  in  its  senses,  and  in  war 
nothing  but  a  torpedo-boat  or  an  aero- 
bomb,—  it  would  please  the  working- 
man  to  know  that  his  wages  for  twenty 
thousand  years  would  purchase  a  ship 
of  this  kind,  and  that  the  wages  of  six- 
teen hundred  of  his  fellows  each  year 
would  keep  it  trim  and  afloat.  As  the 
procession  moves  by,  he  will  see  ships 
that  have  cost  as  much  as  the  universi- 
ties of  Cornell  or  Yale  or  Princeton  or 
Wisconsin,  and  almost  as  much  as  Har- 
vard or  Columbia,  and  on  the  flag-ship 
at  the  last  these  figures  might  be  sum- 


med up,  the  whole  costing  as  much  as 
an  American  workman  would  earn,  per- 
haps, in  two  million  years,  a  European 
workman  in  four  million,  and  an  Asiatic 
in  eight  million;  as  much,  let  us  say,  as 
all  the  churches,  ministers,  and  priests 
in  the  Christian  world  have  cost  in  half 
a  century.  These  figures  may  not  be 
all  correct.  It  would  require  an  expert 
statistician  to  make  them  so.  But  it 
would  be  worth  while. 

If  all  this  is  needed  to  insure  the 
peace  it  endangers,  by  all  means  let  us 
have  it.  There  is  no  cost  which  we  can- 
not afford  to  pay,  if  honorable  peace  is 
at  stake.  But  let  us  be  convinced  that 
peace  is  really  at  stake,  and  that  this 
is  the  means  to  secure  it.  There  are 
some  who  think  that  Christian  fellow- 
ship, the  demands  of  commerce,  and  a 
civil  tongue  in  a  foreign  office,  do  more 
for  a  nation's  peace  than  any  show  of 
force. 

'Man,'  observes  Bernard  Shaw,  'is 
the  only  animal  that  esteems  itself 
rich  in  proportion  to  the  number  and 
voracity  of  its  parasites.' 


in 

What  shall  we  say,  as  lovers  of  peace, 
in  face  of  the  Balkan  War?  Is  it  true 
that  while  Serbs  are  Serbs,  and  Greeks 
are  Greeks,  and  Turks  are  Turks,  'it 
must  needs  be  that  offenses  come '  ?  Is 
it  not  true  that  while  Turks  rule  aliens 
for  the  money  to  be  extorted,  there  can 
be  no  peace  between  them  and  their 
subjects  or  their  neighbors? 

It  is  not  necessary  for  us  to  answer 
these  questions.  They  belong  to  his- 
tory rather  than  to  morals.  The  pro- 
gress of  events  will  take  our  answer 
from  our  lips.  The  problem  comes  to 
us  too  late  for  any  act  of  ours  to  be  ef- 
fective. The  stage  was  set,  the  actors 
chosen  long  before  our  day  and  genera- 
tion. Our  part  is  to  strive  for  peace: 
first,  to  do  away  with  causes  for  war; 


WHAT  SHALL   WE   SAY? 


139 


second,  to  lead  people  to  look  to  war  as 
the  last,  and  not  the  first,  remedy  for  na- 
tional wrongs  or  national  disagree- 
ments. Most  wars  have  their  origin  in 
the  evil  passions  of  men,  and  no  war 
could  take  place  if  both  sides  were  sin- 
cerely desirous  of  honorable  peace. 

No  doubt,  the  Balkan  situation 
could  have  been  controlled  for  peace 
by  the  *  concert  of  powers '  in  Europe, 
were  it  not  that  no  such  concert  exists. 
The  instruments  are  out  of  tune  and 
time.  So  long  as  foreign  offices  are 
alike  controlled  by  the  interests  of  great 
exploiting  and  competing  corporations, 
they  can  never  stand  for  good  morals 
and  good  order.  If  they  could,  the 
Turkish  rule  of  violence  would  have 
ceased  long  ago. 

Those  who  fight  against  war  cannot 
expect  to  do  away  with  it  in  a  year  or 
a  century,  especially  when  it  is  urged 
on  by  five  hundred  years  of  crime  and 
discord.  The  roots  of  the  Balkan  strug- 
gle lie  back  in  the  Middle  Ages,  and 
along  mediaeval  lines  the  fight  is  likely 
to  be  conducted.  'The  right  to  rule 
without  the  duty  to  protect'  is  the 
bane  of  all  Oriental  imperialism.  Mean- 
while, our  own  task  is  to  help  to  moder- 
ernize  the  life  of  the  world;  to  raise, 
through  democracy,  the  estimate  of 
the  value  of  men's  lives;  to  continue, 
through  our  day,  the  enduring  revolt 
of  civilization  against  *  obsolete  forms 
of  servitude,  tyranny,  and  waste/ 

The  immediate  purpose  of  the  Peace 
Movement  is,  through  public  opinion 
and  through  international  law,  to  exalt 
order  above  violence,  and  to  take  war 
out  of  the  foreground  of  the  *  interna- 
tional mind'  in  the  event  of  disputes 
between  races  and  nations.  No  move- 
ment forward  can  succeed  all  at  once. 


Evil  habit  and  false  education  have 
left  the  idea  of  war  and  glory  too  deep- 
ly ingrained.  Men,  law-abiding  and 
patient,  willing  to  hear  both  sides, 
have  never  yet  been  in  the  majority. 
Yet  their  influence  steadily  grows  in 
weight.  The  influence  of  science  and 
arts,  of  international  fellowship,  of 
common  business  interests,  small  busi- 
ness as  well  as  great,  are  leading  the 
people  of  the  world  to  better  and  bet- 
ter understanding.  Left  alone,  civi- 
lized people  would  never  make  war. 
They  have  no  outside  grievances  they 
wish  to  submit  to  the  arbitrament  of 
wholesale  murder.  To  make  them  pre- 
pare for  war  they  must  be  scared,  not 
led.  Were  it  not  for  the  exaggeration, 
by  interested  parties,  of  trade  jealous- 
ies and  diplomatic  intrigues,  few  peo- 
ple would  ever  think  of  going  to  war. 
The  workingmen  of  Europe  suffer 
from  tax-exhaustion.  The  fear  of  war 
is  kept  before  them  to  divert  them 
from  their  own  sad  plight.  This  diver- 
sion leaves  their  plight  still  sadder. 

The  bread-riot  in  all  its  phases  is  the 
sign  of  over-taxation,  of  governmental 
disregard  of  the  lives  and  earnings  of 
the  common  man.  Anarchism  is  the 
expression  that  the  idle  and  reckless 
give  to  the  feelings  of  those  who  are 
still  law-abiding. 

The  Peace  Movement  must  stand 
against  oppression  and  waste.  It  must 
do  its  part  in  removing  grievances,  na- 
tional and  international.  It  must  give 
its  council  in  favor  of  peace  and  order, 
and  it  must  help  to  educate  men  to  be- 
lieve that  the  nation  which  guarantees 
to  its  young  men  personal  justice  and 
personal  opportunity,  has  a  greater 
glory  than  that  which  sends  forth  its 
youth  to  slaughter. 


THE  SUNRISE  PRAYER  MEETING 


BY   REBECCA   FRAZAR 


IN 


-field  we  do  not  watch  the 


Old  Year  out.  We  do  not  dance  him 
out  unless  we  are  very  young  and  fool- 
ish. For  we  know  that  promptly  at 
6.45  A.M.,  if  not  earlier,  we  shall  be 
shaken  and  shouted  out  of  warm  dreams 
by  our  elders,  to  make  ourselves  ready 
in  haste,  and  go  and  pray  the  New 
Year  in. 

The  elders  were  shaken  out  of  their 
young  sleep  so  many  bitter  mornings, 
and  their  elders  before  them,  that  it  is 
a  wonder  there  is  no  hereditary  apti- 
tude among  the  dwellers  in field 

to  waken  at  6.45  A.M.  on  every  New 
Year's  Day.  But  the  law  of  heredity 
passes  on  only  a  strict,  and  sometimes 
unreasoning,  sense  of  obligation.  We 
know  that  we  must  go  to  the  Sunrise 
Prayer  Meeting  though  a  blizzard  be 
whirling  down  from  the  hills,  smother- 
ing the  sidewalks,  and  tearing  the  trol- 
ley-wires. We  must  go  to  the  Sunrise 
Prayer  Meeting  even  if  we  be  the  poor, 
the  sick,  the  afflicted,  or  all  three  at 
once,  so  long  as  it  is  physically  possible; 
we  must  go  certainly  if  we  are  only  full 
of  sleep  and  loath  to  tumble  breathless 
out  into  the  keen  dusky  cold  before 
the  sun  rises,  while  the  church-bell 
tolls  and  the  streets  begin  to  be  filled 
with  hurrying  shapes.  For  young  and 
old,  rich  and  poor,  glad  and  sorry, 
are  all  making  what  haste  they  may  to 
the  gray  church  on  the  Square,  to  pray 
the  New  Year  in. 

The  church,  still  in  its  Christmas 
dress  of  laurel-wreaths  and  pine- 
boughs,  seems  very  old  and  mellow, 
from  shadowy  rafter  and  good  Gothic 

140 


arch  to  the  last  humble  pew  under  the 
gallery.  Lit  as  for  a  vesper  service, 
warm,  yet  touched  by  the  thin  gray 
light  and  air  of  winter  dawn,  it  receives, 
with  a  sort  of  special  dignity  and  sober 
complacence,  the  silent  people  who 
overcrowd  its  pews.  It  does  not  ask 
them  to-day  whether  they  be  Ortho- 
dox or  Unitarian,  Methodist  or  Bap- 
tist, black  or  white,  alien  or  of  the  old 
proud  stock  of  the  city's  and  the 
church's  elect.  Every  seat  is  taken 
long  before  the  organ  begins  to  grum- 
ble and  whisper;  and  while  the  bell  still 
tolls  in  the  tower  above,  and  the  ush- 
ers go  lightly  up  and  down,  hunting  a 
place  here  and  there  for  some  unaccus- 
tomed or  over-sleeping  late  arrival,  it 
seems  good  to  those  who  come  here 
year  after  year  to  sit  quietly  for  a  little 
in  the  solemn,  cheerful,  crowded  hush. 
Up  in  the  high  rafters,  old  memories 
glimmer  out  and  fade.  There  are  one's 
own  Sunrise  and  New  Year  thoughts 
to  think  before  the  minister  in  charge 
gives  out  the  first  hymn,  and  the  con- 
gregation stands  to  sing,  — 

'  While  with  ceaseless  course  the  sun 
Hasted  through  the  former  year,'  — 

or  'My  faith  looks  up  to  Thee,'  or 
'God  moves  in  a  mysterious  way.' 

Then  the  minister,  standing  humbly 
at  the  foot  of  the  high  pulpit,  reads 
somewhat  from  the  Scriptures:  the 
great  Faith  chapter  from  the  Hebrews, 
it  may  be.  And  all  the  people  repeat 
together,  with  the  reverence  of  child- 
ren, the  Twenty-third  Psalm.  There  is 
another  old,  well-beloved  hymn;  the 


THE  SUNRISE    PRAYER  MEETING 


141 


minister  prays  and  speaks  a  moment, 
quietly,  and  the  *  meeting  is  open/ 

Who  will  first  be  moved  by  the  Spir- 
it? There  is  never  long  to  wait.  A 
voice  is  lifted:  there  is  much  decent 
craning  of  necks  and  straining  of  ears. 
—  Is  it  old  Deacon  Robinson?  —  or 
Professor  Downey?  —  or  the  new  Bap- 
tist minister?  —  or  some  layman  less 
seasoned  in  public  speech  and  prayer? 
A  little  pleased  and  interested  murmur 
stirs  the  congregation.  It  is  Deacon 
Robinson:  his  silvery  head  gleams 
above  the  front  pews,  and  his  sweet, 
quavering  voice  gathers  power  and  as- 
surance as  he  tells  how  he  has  been 
mercifully  permitted  to  attend  the 
Sunrise  Prayer  Meeting  every  year 
but  one  since  he  was  a  boy,  'more  'n 
eighty-five  year  ago,'  —  and  how  he 
has  always  found  help  and  grace  there, 
and  how  the  Lord  has  always  showed 
him  the  way  and  has  answered  his 
prayers.  For,  as  he  says,  'When  I  was 
seventy  year  old,  I  asked  the  Lord  to 
let  me  live  to  be  eighty.  And  so  He 
did.  And  when  I  got  to  be  eighty,  I 
asked  Him  to  let  me  live  to  be  ninety. 
And  He  did  that,  too.  And  now  I'm 
asking  Him  to  be  a  hundred.  But, 
after  all,  I  'm  not  very  partik'ler  about 
it.' 

Then,  perhaps,  it  is  indeed  the  new 
Baptist  minister;  or  the  pastor  of  the 
little  colored  church,  a  man  whose 
dark  skin  and  humble  place  cannot 
keep  him  from  often  saying  the  keen- 
est word  and  offering  up  the  bravest 
petition.  But  they  are  not  all  clergy- 
men and  deacons  whom  the  Spirit 
moves.  Men  prominent  in  the  profes- 
sions and  industries  of  the  city;  young 
men,  who  have  gritted  their  teeth  and 
vowed,  humorous  above  their  earnest- 
ness, to  make  their  maiden  speech  or 
die  in  the  attempt,  are  on  their  feet. 
They  are  not  glib  with  the  well-round- 
ed terms  of  conventional  exhortation 
and  prayer,  but  they  speak  quickly  of 


the  needs  of  the  churches  and  the  city, 
as  eager  for  the  honor  of  the  future  as 
the  old  men  for  the  past. 

Sometimes  two  voices  are  upraised 
at  once.  One  brother  prays  the  other 
down,  as  it  were,  until  the  more  timid 
or  more  magnanimous  gives  in  and 
takes  his  seat.  Favorite  hymns  and 
poems  are  quoted,  quaint  anecdotes 
are  told;  yet  always  there  is  an  under- 
current deep  and  strong  of  reverence, 
of  mystery;  a  recognition  of  the  past 
and  the  present  and  the  future,  and 
of  that  which  makes  them  one. 

In  a  moment,  it  seems,  the  hour  is 
passed,  the  last  hymn  is  sung,  the  bene- 
diction is  spoken.  Another  hush:  and 
then  all  over  the  church  there  is  a  ris- 
ing murmur,  of  'Happy  New  Year!' 
'  Happy  New  Year! '  as  each  one  turns 
with  a  handshake  to  his  nearest  likely 
neighbor.  And  if  there  are  many  who 
find  it  hard  to  give  and  take  the  greet- 
ing lightly,  they  are  too  proud  or  too 
strong  to  let  the  shadow  cross  their 
faces,  and  the  widow  under  her  veil 
passes  the  wish  with  as  true  a  grace 
as  the  woman  whose  stalwart  husband, 
on  his  annual  pilgrimage  between 
church-walls,  walks,  half-sheepishly 
smiling,  beside  her  and  her  flock  of 
children. 

Crowding  a  little,  for  the  young  ones 
must  be  off  to  school  and  the  busy 
ones  to  the  shops  and  offices,  the  con- 
gregation throngs  out  into  the  street. 
The  *  Happy  New  Years '  grow  louder 
and  more  merry,  as  friends  draw  to- 
gether, while  sleighs  and  automobiles 
fill,  and  the  frosty  Square  has  sud- 
denly become  gay  with  chatter  and 

jingling  and  light.  For  while field 

prayed  in  the  church,  the  sun  has  risen 
beyond  the  bare  white  and  purple  hills 
that  shoulder  up  at  the  broad  street- 
end,  and  the  little  city  has  wakened 
to  another  day  and  another  year  of 
unknown  sorrow  and  joy,  failure  and 
attainment. 


142 


THE  SUNRISE   PRAYER   MEETING 


It  is  a  curious  old  custom,  handed 
down  without  a  break  from  the  days 
when  the  church  was  only  a  white 
meeting-house  on  the  village  green, 
and  when  most  of  the  good  people 
came  jingling  from  far  over  the  snow- 
bound hills  to  their  Sunrise  Meeting. 

Newcomers  in field  may  not  at  first 

understand  why  it  is  like  no  other  rite 
in  the  whole  civic  and  religious  calen- 
dar. Yet  let  them  once  bow  in  the 
quiet  church,  sing  the  old,  marching, 
faithful  hymns,  hear  the  odd  or  no- 
ble words  of  reminiscence  and  hope 
and  thanksgiving  and  intercession;  let 
them  exchange  their  'Happy  New 
Years '  in  the  church  porch  and  pass 
out  into  the  gay  shining  street;  and 
they  will  feel  somehow  that  the  hour 
has  whispered  of  a  thing  seldom  re- 
vealed, —  the  hidden,  hoping,  believ- 
ing, and  worshiping  heart  of  a  city. 
They  will  feel  that,  for  once,  an  ideal 
faith  has  been  frankly  and  simply  re- 
cognized as  the  ancient  and  future 
glory  of  the  community.  However 
smug,  however  foolish  and  covetous 
and  earthy  the  little  city  may  often 
seem  to  be,  the  Sunrise  Prayer  Meet- 
ing still  reassures  those  who  know  and 
love  it  that  the  old  desire  after  heaven- 
ly things  is  not  dead,  though  it  must 
soon  learn  to  speak  a  new  and  brisker 
tongue,  and  to  wear  a  strangely  mod- 
ern garb. 

For,  indeed,  some  day  there  will  be 
no  more  like  Deacon  Robinson,  with 


his  child-like  trust  and  quaint  old-time 
petitions.  Yet  it  seems  that  the  dwell- 
ers in field  will  not  easily  forsake 

the  assembling  of  themselves  together 
on  the  first  day  of  the  year,  to  think 
long  thoughts  of  such  things  as  are 
true  and  comely  and  of  good  report,  for 
themselves  and  for  their  city,  and  to 
sing  with  voices  half-tremulous,  yet 
proud  and  confident,  — 

Rise,  my  soul,  and  stretch  thy  wings, 

Thy  better  portion  trace: 
Rise  from  transitory  things 

Toward  Heav'n,  thy  native  place. 
Sun  and  moon  and  stars  decay, 

Time  shall  soon  this  earth  remove. 
Rise,  my  soul,  and  haste  away 

To  seats  prepared  above. 

Rivers  to  the  ocean  run, 

Nor  stay  in  all  their  course; 
Fire  ascending  seeks  the  sun; 

Both  speed  them  to  their  source. 
So  my  soul,  derived  from  God, 

Pants  to  view  His  glorious  face; 
Upward  tends  to  His  abode, 

To  rest  in  His  embrace. 

And  it  is  worth  waking  early  and 
shivering  out  in  the  dark  to  feel  that 
the  friends  and  neighbors  with  whom 
the  year-long  we  traffic  in  stupid  mor- 
tal cares  and  follies  are  singing  such 
words  with  us,  and  thinking  hard  of 
them,  and  more  than  half- believing 
them,  for  even  one  hour:  that  the 
secret  heart  of  the  city,  for  once  un- 
ashamed, is  somehow  praying  the  New 
Year  in,  as  the  sun  comes  up  over  the 
hills. 


THE  CONTRIBUTORS'  CLUB 


SOCIAL    SPOT    CASH 

SUPPOSE  you  bid  me  come  to  your 
house  to  dinner,  and  suppose  I  accept, 
and,  feeling  that  I  shall  repay  you  by 
feeding  you  at  some  future  time,  I  give 
myself  no  concern  over  my  obligation 
to  you  on  that  occasion.  Let  us  suppose 
that  I  count  my  duty  done  by  being 
properly  clothed  and  punctual.  You 
have  asked  others  to  be  present  with 
whom  you  are  on  pleasant  terms,  and 
you  are  anxious  that  they  think  well  of 
you.  I  have  no  tongue  for  small  talk 
and  can't  bother  about  trifles;  you  are 
giving  the  dinner-party  and  are  sup- 
posed to  know  what  you  want.  If  you 
want  me,  you  must  take  me  as  I  am; 
I  '11  come  and  behave  properly  —  by 
which  you  are  to  understand  that  I 
shall  not  get  drunk  or  mess  my  food; 
you  must  n't  expect  more.  So  I  pro- 
ceed to  spoil  your  dinner-party  by  not 
doing  anything.  I'm  tired,  anyway, — 
or  at  least  I  think  I  am,  —  and  by  my 
dull  and  boorish  bearing  I  make  every 
one  near  me  uncomfortable.  Those 
new  neighbors  whom  you  have  at  your 
house  for  the  first  time  are  very  inter- 
esting people;  it  is  a  good  and  illumin- 
ating thing  to  know  them;  but  after 
that  disagreeable  evening  with  me  they 
are  calmly  but  firmly  resolved  that 
your  house  is  a  place  to  avoid.  The 
professor  whom  you  have  always 
wanted  to  know  better,  now  in  town  on 
consultation,  was  fortunately  able  to 
be  present;  he  said  he  would  be  very 
glad  to  come;  but  he  was  not  glad  when 
he  went  away.  You  see,  I  was  there, 
and  I  made  talk  impossible;  my  heavy, 
uninterested  silence  killed  all  joy.  I 
satisfy  my  previous  consciousness  by 


saying  to  myself  that  I  was  not  inter- 
ested in  the  subjects  under  discussion, 
and  I  give  you  credit  for  having  fed  me 
well.  Then,  having  given  you  a  social 
black-eye,  I  make  things  what  I  call 
even  by  inviting  you  to  spoil  a  second 
and  otherwise  good  evening  by  boring 
yourself  with  me. 

It  is  clear  that  in  behaving  in  the 
manner  just  described  I  have  made  an 
error;  and  the  error  is  one  frequently 
made.  The  purpose  of  this  writing  is 
to  discover,  if  possible,  what  the  nature 
of  this  error  is,  and  to  find  an  expres- 
sion for  it  that  we  may  all  understand; 
not  only  you  who  have  suffered  by  it, 
but  I  who,  to  keep  myself  in  the  char- 
acter, must  call  myself  the  *  innocent' 
cause  of  it. 

The  answer  is  neither  involved  nor 
far  to  seek.  Social  intercourse  is  com- 
merce, in  a  way.  We  must  pay  for 
what  we  get,  but  general  welfare  and 
comity  require  that  we  pay  spot  cash. 
We  can't  pay  in  money  because  that  is 
not  current  social  coin.  If  the  conven- 
tions did  not  bar  the  way  and  make  it 
an  insult,  it  would  be  far  better  for 
you  if,  on  the  unhappy  night  when  I 
spoiled  your  party,  I  had  taken  out  my 
pocket-book  and  laid  down  upon  the 
table  the  cost  of  the  food  and  drink 
and  service.  You  would  have  been  rid 
of  me  so  much  sooner,  and  you  would 
not  have  been  called  upon  to  endure 
the  second  evening  with  me.  But  if 
money  —  dollars  and  cents  —  is  not 
current  social  coin,  neither  are  food 
and  drink;  although  in  this  respect 
convention  lags  far-and-away-behind. 
Convention  does  not  forbid  me  to  do 
the  very  thing  that  I  have  assumed  to 
do :  to  eat  your  food  to-day  and  take  a 

143 


144 


THE  CONTRIBUTORS'  CLUB 


long  credit,  paying  you  back  in  kind, 
next  week  or  next  month.  In  point  of 
fact,  that  is  not  paying  you  back  at 
all,  as  we  have  seen. 

The  only  way  that  I  can  possibly  re- 
pay you  is  to  make  my  presence  worth 
while,  and  an  advantage  to  you.  The 
debt  should  be  paid  before  I  leave  your 
threshold,  and  I  must  have  intelligence 
enough  to  know  how  to  pay  it.  By  a 
miscalculation  of  the  sort  you  made 
when  you  invited  me  in  the  first  in- 
stance, you  may  have  asked  some  one 
to  come  whom  you  thought  to  be  a 
brilliant  talker,  and  who  turns  out  on 
this  occasion  to  be  one  of  those  dreadful 
creatures  who  prove  the  wisdom  of  all 
misanthropy  by  combating  everybody 
and  everything,  and  grating  upon  the 
nerves  of  every  mortal  soul  present.  If 
I  cannot  quiet  him  or  draw  his  breezi- 
ness  upon  me  alone  so  that  others  have 
an  opportunity  to  breathe  and  talk,  it 
behooves  me  to  sit  still  and  be  good. 
They  also  serve  who  only  sit  still  and 
are  good.  But  'good'  means,  in  the 
circle,  a  part  of  whatever  good  fellow- 
ship is  available. 

When  you  open  your  house  to  your 
friends  you  do  a  brave  and  a  gracious 
thing.  You  show  yourself,  your  train- 
ing, the  measure  of  your  culture,  and 
the  things  of  which  you  are  ashamed. 
Your  intimate  self  is  made  visible.  You 
may  put  on  airs  for  your  own  satisfac- 
tion, but  you  know  and  I  know  that 
anybody  can  see  through  them.  Your 
house  is  yourself,  or  your  wife's  self; 
and  surely  there  is  no  cause  for  shame 
in  admitting  that  hers  is  the  master 
mind  when  the  day's  work  is  over  and 
you  are  at  home.  This  is  true  of  so 


many  men  of  the  very  best  sort  that  it 
will  do  you  no  harm  to  admit  it.  And 
it  will  do  you  no  good  to  deny  it. 

Suppose  a  clumsy  maid  spills  a  plate 
of  soup.  If  clothes  are  damaged  it  is 
mortifying,  and  it  may  mean  that 
some  work  must  be  done  to  the  floor 
to  repair  the  injury;  otherwise  it  is 
not  a  serious  occurrence.  But  if  I  or 
any  other  of  your  guests  offends  any 
one,  then  harm  is  done,  for  which  you 
are  in  a  way  responsible,  and  which 
rubbing  and  scrubbing  will  not  repair. 
So  the  responsibility  of  every  guest  is 
a  heavy  one.  You  have  bidden  them 
come  inside  the  line  of  your  defenses, 
and  your  social  reputation  is  in  their 
hands.  No  matter  how  great  your  ef- 
fort or  expense,  every  one  should  then 
and  there  pay  back  in  the  coin  of 
agreeable  good  fellowship,  as  nearly  as 
he  can,  in  full  for  all  value  received. 

Social  reciprocity,  the  idea  that  if 
you  feed  me  I  must  feed  you,  or  if  you 
entertain  me  I  must  entertain  you,  is 
born  of  social  inefficiency.  Who  the 
first  lady  of  fashion  or  quality  was  who 
devised  the  present  system  of  food  ex- 
changes as  the  fulfillment  of  social 
amenities,  we  shall  never  know;  but  it 
is  a  fair  guess  that  her  lord  married  her 
solely  for  her  money.  Or  if  the  custom 
became  current  by  common  consent, 
then  the  custom  itself  is  a  severe  in- 
dictment of  dullness  against  that  part 
of  society  which  is  known  as  fashion- 
able because  it  furnishes  the  example 
which  the  rest  of  the  world  accepts  and 
emulates. 

There  is  no  such  thing  as  a  deferred 
social  credit;  the  only  real  payment  is 
in  spot  cash. 


THE  ATLANTIC  MONTHLY 


FEBRUARY,  1913 


THE  UNITED  STATES   VERSUS  PRINGLE 


THE  RECORD  OF  A  QUAKER  CONSCIENCE 


On  July  13,  1863,  Cyrus  Guernsey  Pringle,  in  company  with  two  fellow  Quakers  of  Charlotte, 
Vermont,  was  drafted  for  service  in  the  Union  Army.  Through  religious  scruples,  the  conscripts 
refused  under  any  considerations  to  bear  arms,  and  although,  in  the  case  of  Pringle,  a  well-to-do 
uncle  offered  to  pay  the  price  of  a  substitute,  the  Quaker's  ardent  conscience  would  not  permit 
him  to  tempt  another  to  commit  in  his  place  the  sin  which  he  believed  to  be  against  the  Word  of  God. 
Mr.  Pringle  died  not  long  ago,  and  his  diary,  interesting  alike  as  a  study  of  character  and  as  the 
record  of  an  extraordinary  experience,  may  now  be  given  to  the  public.  —  THE  EDITORS. 


AT  Burlington,  Vt.,  on  the  13th  of 
the  seventh  month,  1863, 1  was  drafted. 
Pleasant  are  my  recollections  of  the 
14th.  Much  of  that  rainy  day  I  spent 
in  my  chamber,  as  yet  unaware  of  my 
fate;  in  writing  and  reading  and  in  re- 
flecting to  compose  my  mind  for  any 
event.  The  day  and  the  exercise,  by 
the  blessing  of  the  Father,  brought  me 
precious  reconciliation  to  the  will  of 
Providence. 

With  ardent  zeal  for  our  Faith  and 
the  cause  of  our  peaceable  principles; 
and  almost  disgusted  at  the  lukewarm- 
ness  and  unfaithfulness  of  very  many 
who  profess  these;  and  considering  how 
heavily  slight  crosses  bore  upon  their 
shoulders,  I  felt  to  say,  'Here  am  I 
Father  for  thy  service.  As  thou  will.' 
May  I  trust  it  was  He  who  called  me 
and  sent  me  forth  with  the  consolation : 
'My  grace  is  sufficient  for  thee.'  Deep- 
ly have  I  felt  many  times  since  that  I 
am  nothing  without  the  companionship 
of  the  Spirit. 

I  was  to  report  on  the  27th.  Then, 
loyal  to  our  country,  W.  L.  D.  and  I 
VOL.  in -NO.  2 


appeared  before  the  Provost  Marshal 
with  a  statement  of  our  cases.  We  were 
ordered  for  a  hearing  on  the  29th.  On 
the  afternoon  of  that  day  W.  L.  D.  was 
rejected  upon  examination  of  the  Sur- 
geon, but  my  case  not  coming  up,  he 
remained  with  me,  — much  to  my 
strength  and  comfort.  Sweet  was  his 
converse  and  long  to  be  remembered, 
as  we  lay  together  that  warm  summer 
night  on  the  straw  of  the  barracks.  By 
his  encouragement  much  was  my  mind 
strengthened;  my  desires  for  a  pure 
life,  and  my  resolutions  for  good.  In 
him  and  those  of  whom  he  spoke  I 
saw  the  abstract  beauty  of  Quakerism. 
On  the  next  morning  came  I.  M.  D. 
to  support  me  and  plead  my  case  be- 
fore the  Board  of  Enrollment.  On  the 
day  after,  the  31st,  I  came  before  the 
Board.  Respectfully  those  men  listen- 
ed to  the  exposition  of  our  principles; 
and,  on  our  representing  that  we  look- 
ed for  some  relief  from  the  President, 
the  marshal  released  me  for  twenty 
days.  Meanwhile  appeared  L.  M.  M. 
and  was  likewise,  by  the  kindness  of 


146 


THE  UNITED  STATES   VERSUS  PRINGLE 


the  marshal,  though  they  had  received 
instructions  from  the  Provost  Marshal 
General  to  show  such  claims  no  par- 
tiality, released  to  appear  on  the  20th 
day  of  the  eighth  month. 

All  these  days  we  were  urged  by  our 
acquaintances  to  pay  our  commuta- 
tion money;  by  some  through  well- 
meant  kindness  and  sympathy;  by 
others  through  interest  in  the  war;  and 
by  others  still  through  a  belief  they  en- 
tertained it  was  our  duty.  But  we  con- 
fess a  higher  duty  than  that  to  coun- 
try; and,  asking  no  military  protection 
of  our  Government  and  grateful  for 
none,  deny  any  obligation  to  support 
so  unlawful  a  system,  as  we  hold  a 
war  to  be  even  when  waged  in  oppo- 
sition to  an  evil  and  oppressive  power 
and  ostensibly  in  defense  of  liberty,  vir- 
tue, and  free  institutions;  and,  though 
touched  by  the  kind  interest  of  friends, 
we  could  not  relieve  their  distress  by  a 
means  we  held  even  more  sinful  than 
that  of  serving  ourselves,  as  by  sup- 
plying money  to  hire  a  substitute  we 
would,  not  only  be  responsible  for  the 
result,  but  be  the  agents  in  bringing 
others  into  evil.  So  looking  to  our  Fa- 
ther alone  for  help,  and  remembering 
that  *  Whoso  loseth  his  life  for  my  sake 
shall  find  it;  but  whoso  saveth  it  shall 
lose  it,'  we  presented  ourselves  again 
before  the  Board,  as  we  had  promised 
to  do  when  released.  Being  offered  four 
days  more  of  time,  we  accepted  it  as 
affording  opportunity  to  visit  our 
friends;  and  moreover  as  there  would 
be  more  probability  of  meeting  P.  D. 
at  Rutland. 

Sweet  was  the  comfort  and  sympathy 
of  our  friends  as  we  visited  them. 
There  was  a  deep  comfort,  as  we  left 
them,  in  the  thought  that  so  many 
pure  and  pious  people  follow  us  with 
their  love  and  prayers.  Appearing  fin- 
ally before  the  marshal  on  the  24th, 
suits  and  uniforms  were  selected  for 
us,  and  we  were  called  upon  to  give 


receipts  for  them.  L.  M.  M.  was  on 
his  guard,  and,  being  first  called  upon, 
declared  he  could  not  do  so,  as  that 
would  imply  acceptance.  Failing  to 
come  to  any  agreement,  the  matter 
was  postponed  till  next  morning,  when 
we  certified  to  the  fact  that  the  articles 
were  'with  us.'  Here  I  must  make  re- 
cord of  the  kindness  of  the  marshal, 
Rolla  Gleason,  who  treated  us  with  re- 
spect and  kindness.  He  had  spoken 
with  respect  of  our  Society;  had  given 
me  furloughs  to  the  amount  of  twenty- 
four  days,  when  the  marshal  at  Rut- 
land considered  himself  restricted  by 
his  oath  and  duty  to  six  days;  and  here 
appeared  in  person  to  prevent  any 
harsh  treatment  of  us  by  his  sergeants; 
and  though  much  against  his  inclina- 
tions, assisted  in  putting  on  the  uni- 
form with  his  own  hands.  We  bade 
him  Farewell  with  grateful  feelings  and 
expressions  of  fear  that  we  should  not 
fall  into  as  tender  hands  again;  and 
amid  the  rain  in  the  early  morning,  as 
the  town  clock  tolled  the  hour  of  seven, 
we  were  driven  amongst  the  flock  that 
was  going  forth  to  the  slaughter,  down 
the  street  and  into  the  cars  for  Brattle- 
boro.  Dark  was  the  day  with  murk 
and  cloud  and  rain;  and,  as  we  rolled 
down  through  the  narrow  vales  of  east- 
ern Vermont,  somewhat  of  the  shadow 
crept  into  our  hearts  and  filled  them 
with  dark  apprehensions  of  evil  fortune 
ahead;  of  long,  hopeless  trials;  of  abuse 
from  inferior  officers;  of  contempt  from 
common  soldiers;  of  patient  endurance 
(or  an  attempt  at  this),  unto  an  end 
seen  only  by  the  eye  of  a  strong  faith. 
Herded  into  a  car  by  ourselves,  we 
conscripts,  substitutes,  and  the  rest, 
through  the  greater  part  of  the  day, 
swept  over  the  fertile  meadows  along 
the  banks  of  the  White  River  and  the 
Connecticut,  through  pleasant  scenes 
that  had  little  of  delight  for  us.  At 
Woodstock  we  were  joined  by  the  con- 
scripts from  the  1st  District,  —  alto- 


THE   UNITED  STATES   VERSUS  PRINGLE 


147 


gether  an  inferior  company  from  those 
before  with  us,  who  were  honest  yeo- 
men from  the  northern  and  mountain- 
ous towns,  while  these  were  many  of 
them  substitutes  from  the  cities. 

At  Brattleboro  we  were  marched  up 
to  the  camp;  our  knapsacks  and  per- 
sons searched;  and  any  articles  of  citi- 
zen's dress  taken  from  us;  and  then 
shut  up  in  a  rough  board  building  un- 
der a  guard.  Here  the  prospect  was 
dreary,  and  I  felt  some  lack  of  confid- 
ence in  our  Father's  arm,  though  but 
two  days  before  I  wrote  to  my  dear 
friend,  E.M.H.,— 

I  go  to-morrow  where  the  din 
Of  war  is  in  the  sulphurous  air. 
I  go  the  Prince  of  Peace  to  serve, 
His  cross  of  suffering  to  bear. 

BRATTLEBORO,  26^,  Sth  month,  1863. 
—  Twenty-five  or  thirty  caged  lions 
roam  lazily  to  and  fro  through  this 
building  hour  after  hour  through  the 
day.  On  every  side  without,  sentries 
pace  their  slow  beat,  bearing  loaded 
muskets.  Men  are  ranging  through  the 
grounds  or  hanging  in  synods  about 
the  doors  of  the  different  buildings, 
apparently  without  a  purpose.  Aimless 
is  military  life,  except  betimes  its  aim 
is  deadly.  Idle  life  blends  with  violent 
death-struggles  till  the  man  is  unmade 
a  man;  and  henceforth  there  is  little 
of  manhood  about  him.  Of  a  man  he 
is  made  a  Soldier,  which  is  a  man-de- 
stroying'machine  in  two  senses,  —  a 
thing  for  the  prosecuting  or  repelling 
an  invasion  like  the  block  of  stone  in 
the  fortress  or  the  plate  of  iron  on  the 
side  of  the  Monitor.  They  are  alike. 
I  have  tried  in  vain  to  define  a  differ- 
ence, and  I  see  only  this.  The  iron-clad 
with  its  gun  is  the  bigger  soldier:  the 
more  formidable  in  attack,  the  less  li- 
able to  destruction  in  a  given  time;  the 
block  the  most  capable  of  resistance; 
both  are  equally  obedient  to  officers. 
Or  the  more  perfect  is  the  soldier,  the 


more  nearly  he  approaches  these  in 
this  respect. 

Three  times  a  day  we  are  marched  out 
to  the  mess  houses  for  our  rations.  In 
our  hands  we  carry  a  tin  plate,  whereon 
we  bring  back  a  piece  of  bread  (sour 
and  tough  most  likely),  and  a  cup. 
Morning  and  noon  a  piece  of  meat, 
antique  betimes,  bears  company  with 
the  bread.  They  who  wish  it  receive 
in  their  cups  two  sorts  of  decoctions :  in 
the  morning  burnt  bread,  or  peas  per- 
haps, steeped  in  water  with  some  sac- 
charine substance  added  (I  dare  not 
affirm  it  to  be  sugar) .  At  night  steeped 
tea  extended  by  some  other  herbs  pro- 
bably and  its  pungency  and  acridity 
assuaged  by  the  saccharine  principle 
aforementioned.  On  this  we  have  so 
far  subsisted  and,  save  some  nauseat- 
ing, comfortably.  As  we  go  out  and  re- 
turn, on  right  and  left  and  in  front  and 
rear  go  bayonets.  Some  substitutes 
heretofore  have  escaped  and  we  are  not 
to  be  neglected  in  our  attendants. 
Hard  beds  are  healthy,  but  I  query  can- 
not the  result  be  defeated  by  the  de- 
gree ?  Our  mattresses  are  boards.  Only 
the  slight  elasticity  of  our  thin  blan- 
kets breaks  the  fall  of  our  flesh  and 
bones  thereon.  Oh!  now  I  praise  the 
discipline  I  have  received  from  un- 
carpeted  floors  through  warm  summer 
nights  of  my  boyhood. 

The  building  resounds  with  petty 
talk;  jokes  and  laughter  and  swearing. 
Something  more  than  that.  Many  of 
the  caged  lions  are  engaged  with  cards, 
and  money  changes  hands  freely.  Some 
of  the  caged  lions  read,,  and  some  sleep, 
and  so  the  weary  day  goes  by. 

L.  M.  M.  and  I  addressed  the  fol- 
lowing letter  to  Governor  Holbrook  and 
hired  a  corporal  to  forward  it  to  him. 

BRATTLEBORO,  VT.,  ZGth,  8th  month,  1863. 
FREDERICK  HOLBROOK, 

Governor  of  Vermont:  — 
We»  the  undersigned   members  of 


148 


THE  UNITED  STATES   VERSUS  PRINGLE 


the  Society  of  Friends,  beg  leave  to  re- 
present to  thee,  that  we  were  lately 
drafted  in  the  3d  Dist.  of  Vermont, 
have  been  forced  into  the  army  and 
reached  the  camp  near  this  town  yester- 
day. 

That  in  the  language  of  the  elders  of 
our  New  York  Yearly  Meeting,  'We 
love  our  country  and  acknowledge  with 
gratitude  to  our  Heavenly  Father  the 
many  blessings  we  have  been  favored 
with  under  the  government;  and  can 
feel  no  sympathy  with  any  who  seek 
its  overthrow.' 

But  that,  true  to  well-known  prin- 
ciples of  our  society,  we  cannot  vio- 
late our  religious  convictions  either  by 
complying  with  military  requisitions 
or  by  the  equivalents  of  this  compli- 
ance, —  the  furnishing  of  a  substitute 
or  payment  of  commutation  money. 
That,  therefore,  we  are  brought  into 
suffering  and  exposed  to  insult  and 
contempt  from  those  who  have  us  in 
charge,  as  well  as  to  the  penalties  of 
insubordination,  though  liberty  of  con- 
science is  denied  us  by  the  Constitution 
of  Vermont  as  well  as  that  of  the  United 
States. 

Therefore,  we  beg  of  thee  as  Gover- 
nor of  our  State  any  assistance  thou 
may  be  able  to  render,  should  it  be  no 
more  than  the  influence  of  thy  position 
interceding  in  our  behalf. 

Truly  Thy  Friend, 

CYRUS  G.  PRINGLE. 

P.  S. — We  are  informed  we  are  to 
be  sent  to  the  vicinity  of  Boston  to- 
morrow.' 

%lth.  —  On  board  train  to  Boston. 
The  long  afternoon  of  yesterday  passed 
slowly  away.  This  morning  passed  by, 
—  the  time  of  our  stay  in  Brattleboro, 
and  we  neither  saw  nor  heard  anything 
of  our  Governor.  We  suppose  he  could 
not  or  would  not  help  us.  So  as  we  go 
down  to  our  trial  we  have  no  arm  to 
lean  upon  among  all  men;  but  why 


dost  thou  complain,  oh,  my  Soul? 
Seek  thou  that  faith  that  will  prove  a 
buckler  to  thy  breast,  and  gain  for  thee 
the  protection  of  an  arm  mightier  than 
the  arms  of  all  men. 

%8th.  CAMP  VERMONT:  LONG  ISLAND, 
BOSTON  HARBOR.  —  In  the  early  morn- 
ing damp  and  cool  we  marched  down 
off  the  heights  of  Brattleboro  to  take 
train  for  this  place.  Once  in  the  car 
the  dashing  young  cavalry  officer,  who 
had  us  in  charge,  gave  notice  he  had 
placed  men  through  the  cars,  with 
loaded  revolvers,  who  had  orders  to 
shoot  any  person  attempting  to  es- 
cape, or  jump  from  the  window,  and 
that  any  one  would  be  shot  if  he 
even  put  his  head  out  of  the  window. 
Down  the  beautiful  valley  of  the  Con- 
necticut, all  through  its  broad  inter- 
vales, heavy  with  its  crops  of  corn  or 
tobacco,  or  shaven  smooth  by  the 
summer  harvest;  over  the  hard  and 
stony  counties  of  northern  Massachu- 
setts, through  its  suburbs  and  under 
the  shadow  of  Bunker  Hill  Monument 
we  come  into  the  City  of  Boston,  *  the 
Hub  of  the  Universe.'  Out  through 
street  after  street  we  were  marched 
double  guarded  to  the  wharves,  where 
we  took  a  small  steamer  for  the  island 
some  six  miles  out  in  the  harbor.  A  cir- 
cumstance connected  with  this  march 
is  worth  mentioning  for  its  singularity: 
at  the  head  of  this  company,  like  con- 
victs (and  feeling  very  much  like  such), 
through  the  City  of  Boston  walked, 
with  heavy  hearts  and  down-cast  eyes, 
two  Quakers. 

Here  on  this  dry  and  pleasant  island 
in  the  midst  of  the  beautiful  Massachu- 
setts Bay,  we  have  the  liberty  of  the 
camp,  the  privilege  of  air  and  sunshine 
and  hay  beds  to  sleep  upon.  So  we 
went  to  bed  last  night  with  somewhat 
of  gladness  elevating  our  depressed 
spirits. 

Here   are    many    troops   gathering 


THE  UNITED  STATES  VERSUS  PRINGLE 


149 


daily  from  all  the  New  England  States 
except  Connecticut  and  Rhode  Island. 
Their  white  tents  are  dotting  the  green 
slopes  and  hill-tops  of  the  island  and 
spreading  wider  and  wider.  This  is  the 
flow  of  military  tide  here  just  now.  The 
ebb  went  out  to  sea  in  the  shape  of  a 
great  shipload  just  as  we  came  in,  and 
another  load  will  be  sent  before  many 
days.  All  is  war  here.  We  are  sur- 
rounded by  the  pomp  and  circum- 
stance of  war,  and  enveloped  in  the 
cloud  thereof.  The  cloud  settles  down 
over  the  minds  and  souls  of  all;  they 
cannot  see  beyond,  nor  do  they  try; 
but  with  the  clearer  eye  of  Christian 
faith  I  try  to  look  beyond  all  this  error 
unto  Truth  and  Holiness  immaculate: 
and  thanks  to  our  Father,  I  am  favored 
with  glimpses  that  are  sweet  consola- 
tion amid  this  darkness. 

This  is  one  gratification:  the  men 
with  us  give  us  their  sympathy.  They 
seem  to  look  upon  us  tenderly  and  piti- 
fully, and  their  expressions  of  kind 
wishes  are  warm.  Although  we  are  re- 
lieved from  duty  and  from  drill,  and 
may  lie  in  our  tents  during  rain  and  at 
night,  we  have  heard  of  no  complaint. 
This  is  the  more  worthy  of  note  as 
there  are  so  few  in  our  little  (Vermont) 
camp.  Each  man  comes  on  guard  half 
the  days.  It  would  probably  be  other- 
wise were  their  hearts  in  the  service; 
but  I  have  yet  to  find  the  man  in  any 
of  these  camps  or  at  any  service  who 
does  not  wish  himself  at  home.  Substi- 
tutes say  if  they  knew  all  they  know 
now  before  leaving  home  they  would 
not  have  enlisted;  and  they  have  been 
but  a  week  from  their  homes  and 
have  endured  no  hardships.  Yesterday 
L.  M.  M.  and  I  appeared  before  the 
Captain  commanding  this  camp  with 
a  statement  of  our  cases.  He  listened 
to  us  respectfully  and  promised  to  refer 
us  to  the  General  commanding  here, 
General  Devens;  and  in  the  mean  time 
released  us  from  duty.  In  a  short  time 


afterward  he  passed  us  in  our  tent, 
asking  our  names.  We  have  not  heard 
from  him,  but  do  not  drill  or  stand 
guard;  so,  we  suppose,  his  release  was 
confirmed.  At  that  interview  a  young 
lieutenant  sneeringly  told  us  he  thought 
we  had  better  throw  away  our  scruples 
and  fight  in  the  service  of  the  country; 
and  as  we  told  the  Captain  we  could 
neither  accept  pay,  he  laughed  mock- 
ingly, and  said  he  would  not  stay  here 
for  $13.00  per  month.  He  gets  more 
than  a  hundred,  I  suppose. 

How  beautiful  seems  the  world  on 
this  glorious  morning  here  by  the  sea- 
side! Eastward  and  toward  the  sun, 
fair  green  isles  with  outlines  of  pure 
beauty  are  scattered  over  the  blue  bay. 
Along  the  far  line  of  the  mainland 
white  hamlets  and  towns  glisten  in  the 
morning  sun;  countless  tiny  waves 
dance  in  the  wind  that  comes  off  shore 
and  sparkle  sunward  like  myriads  of 
gems.  Up  the  fair  vault,  flecked  by 
scarcely  a  cloud,  rolls  the  sun  in  glory. 
Though  fair  be  the  earth,  it  has  come 
to  be  tainted  and  marred  by  him  who 
was  meant  to  be  its  crowning  glory. 
Behind  me  on  this  island  are  crowded 
vile  and  wicked  men,  the  murmur  of 
whose  ribaldry  riseth  continually  like 
the  smoke  and  fumes  of  a  lower  world. 
Oh!  Father  of  Mercies,  forgive  the  hard 
heartlessness  and  blindness  and  scarlet 
sins  of  my  fellows,  my  brothers. 

PRISON  EXPERIENCES  FOR  CONSCIENCE' 
SAKE  -  OUR  PRISON 


.,  8th  month,  1863.  IN  GUARD 
HOUSE.  —  Yesterday  morning  L.  M. 
M.  and  I  were  called  upon  to  do  fatigue 
duty.  The  day  before  we  were  asked  to 
do  some  cleaning  about  camp  and  to 
bring  water.  We  wished  to  be  obliging, 
to  appear  willing  to  bear  a  hand  toward 
that  which  would  promote  our  own  and 
our  fellows'  health  and  convenience; 
but  as  we  worked  we  did  not  feel  easy. 
Suspecting  we  had  beeen  assigned  to 


150 


TilK    IMTKO   STATES    T 


PR1NGLE 


such  work,  the  more  we  discussed 
in  our  minds  the  subject,  the  more 
clearly  the  right  way  seemed  opened 
to  us;  and  we  separately  came  to  the 
judgment  that  we  must  not  conform 
to  this  requirement.  So  when  the  ser- 
geant bade  us  *  Police  the  streets/  we 
asked  him  if  he  had  received  instruc- 
tions with  regard  to  us,  and  he  replied 
we  had  been  assigned  to  *  Fatigue 
Duty.'  L.  M.  M.  answered  him  that 
we  could  not  obey.  He  left  us  immedi- 
ately for  the  Major  (Jarvis  of  Wea- 
thersfield,  Vt.),  He  came  back  and 
ordered  us  to  the  Major's  tent.  The 
latter  met  us  outside  and  inquired  con- 
cerning the  complaint  he  had  heard  of 
us.  Upon  our  statement  of  our  position, 
he  apparently  undertook  to  argue  our 
whimsies,  as  he  probably  looked  upon 
our  principles,  out  of  our  heads.  We 
replied  to  his  points  as  we  had  ability; 
but  he  soon  turned  to  bullying  us 
rather  than  arguing  with  us,  and 
would  hardly  let  us  proceed  with  a 
whole  sentence.  *  I  make  some  preten- 
sion to  religion  myself/  he  said;  and 
quoted  the  Old  Testament  freely  in 
support  of  war.  Our  terms  were,  sub- 
mission or  the  guard-house.  We  re- 
plied we  could  not  obey. 

This  island  was  formerly  occupied 
by  a  company,  who  carried  on  the 
large  farm  it  comprises  and  opened  a 
great  hotel  as  a  summer  resort. 

The  subjects  of  all  misdemeanors, 
grave  and  small,  are  here  confined. 
Those  who  have  deserted  or  attempted 
it ;  those  who  have  insulted  officers  and 
those  guilty  of  theft,  fighting,  drunk- 
enness, etc.  In  twos/,  as  in  the  camps, 
there  are  traces  yet  of  manhood  and  of 
the  Divine  Spark,  but  some  are  aban- 
doned, dissolute.  There  are  many  here 
among  the  substitutes  who  were  actors 
in  the  late  New  York  riots.  They  show 
unmistakably  the  characteristics  and 
sentiments  of  those  rioters,  and,  especi- 
ally, hatred  to  the  blacks  drafted  and 


about  camp,  and  exhibit  this  in  foul 
and  profane  jeers  heaped  upon  these 
unoffending  men  at  every  opportunity. 
In  justice  to  the  blacks  I  must  say  they 
are  superior  to  the  whites  in  all  their 
behavior. 

Slst .  p.  M.  —  Several  of  us  were  a  lit- 
tle time  ago  called  out  one  by  one  to 
answer  inquiries  with  regard  to  our  of- 
fenses. We  replied  we  could  not  com- 
ply with  military  requisitions.  P.  D., 
being  last,  was  asked  if  he  would  die 
first,  and  replied  promptly  but  mildly, 
Yes. 

Here  we  are  in  prison  in  our  own  land 
for  no  crimes,  no  offense  to  God  nor 
man;  nay,  more:  we  are  here  for  obey- 
ing the  commands  of  the  Son  of  God 
and  the  influences  of  his  Holy  Spirit. 
I  must  look  for  patience  in  this  dark 
day.  I  am  troubled  too  much  and  ex- 
cited and  perplexed. 

I*/.,  9th  month.  —  Oh,  the  horrors  of 
the  past  night  —  I  never  before  experi- 
enced such  sensations  and  fears;  and 
never  did  I  feel  so  clearly  that  I  had 
nothing  but  the  hand  of  our  Father  to 
shield  me  from  evil.  Last  night  we  three 
lay  down  together  on  the  floor  of  a  lower 
room  of  which  we  had  taken  possession. 
The  others  were  above.  We  had  but 
one  blanket  between  us  and  the  floor, 
and  one  over  us.  The  other  one  we  had 
lent  to  a  wretched  deserter  who  had 
skulked  into  our  room  for  JT/I>/,  being 
without  anything  of  his  own.  We  had 
during  the  day  gained  the  respect  of 
the  fellows,  and  they  seemed  disposed 
to  let  us  occupy  our  room  in  peace,  I 
cannot  say  in  quiet,  for  these  caged 
beasts  are  restless,  and  the  resonant 
boards  of  this  old  building  speak  of 
bedlam.  The  thin  board  partitions, 
the  light  door  fastened  only  by  a  pine 
stick  thrust  into  a  wooden  loop  on  the 
casing,  seemed  small  protection  in  case 
of  assault ;  but  we  lay  down  to  sleep  in 
quiet  trust.  But  we  had  scarcely  fallen 


THE   UNITED  STATES   VERSUS  PRINGLE 


151 


asleep  before  we  were  awakened  by  the 
demoniac  bowlings  and  yelling  of  a 
man  just  brought  into  the  next  room, 
and  allowed  the  liberty  of  the  whole 
house.  He  was  drunk,  and  further 
seemed  to  be  laboring  under  delirium 
tremens.  He  crashed  about  furiously, 
and  all  the  more  after  the  guard 
tramped  heavily  in  and  bound  him 
with  handcuffs,  and  chain  and  ball. 
Again  and  again  they  left,  only  to 
return  to  quiet  him  by  threats  or  by 
crushing  him  down  to  the  floor  and 
gagging  him.  In  a  couple  of  hours  he 
became  quiet  and  we  got  considerable 
sleep. 

In  the  morning  the  fellow  came 
into  our  room  apologizing  for  the  in- 
trusion. He  appeared  a  smart,  fine- 
looking  young  man,  restless  and  un- 
easy. P.  D.  has  a  way  of  disposing  of 
intruders  that  is  quite  effectual.  I 
have  not  entirely  disposed  of  some  mis- 
givings with  respect  to  the  legitimacy 
of  his  use  of  the  means,  so  he  com- 
menced reading  aloud  in  the  Bible. 
The  fellow  was  impatient  and  noisy, 
but  he  soon  settled  down  on  the  floor 
beside  him.  As  he  listened  and  talked 
with  us  the  recollections  of  his  father's 
house  and  his  innocent  childhood  were 
awakened.  He  was  the  child  of  pious 
parents,  taught  in  Sabbath  School  and 
under  pure  home  influences  till  thir- 
teen. Then  he  was  drawn  into  bad 
company,  soon  after  leaving  home  for 
the  sea;  and,  since  then,  has  served  in 
the  army  and  navy,  —  in  the  army  in 
Wilson's  and  Hawkins's  [brigades].  His 
was  the  old  story  of  the  total  subjection 
of  moral  power  and  thralldom  to  evil 
habits  and  associates.  He  would  get 
drunk,  whenever  it  was  in  his  power. 
It  was  wrong;  but  he  could  not  help  it. 
Though  he  was  awakened  and  recol- 
lected his  parents  looking  long  and  in 
vain  for  his  return,  he  soon  returned  to 
camp,  to  his  wallowing  in  the  mire,  and 
I  fear  to  his  path  to  certain  perdition. 


3d.  [9th  month.]  —  A  Massachusetts 
major,  the  officer  of  the  day,  in  his  in- 
spection of  the  guard-house  came  into 
our  room  to-day.  We  were  lying  on  the 
floor  engaged  in  reading  and  writing. 
He  was  apparently  surprised  at  this 
and  inquired  the  name  of  our  books; 
and  finding  the  Bible  and  Thomas  & 
Kempis's  Imitation  of  Christy  observed 
that  they  were  good  books.  I  cannot 
say  if  he  knew  we  were  Friends,  but  he 
asked  us  why  we  were  in  here. 

Like  all  officers  he  proceeded  to  rea- 
son with. us,  and  to  advise  us  to  serve, 
presenting  no  comfort  if  we  still  per- 
sisted in  our  course.  He  informed  us  of 
a  young  Friend,  Edward  W.  Holway 
of  Sandwich,  Mass.,  having  been  yes- 
terday under  punishment  in  the  camp 
by  his  orders,  who  was  to-day  doing 
service  about  camp.  He  said  he  was 
not  going  to  put  his  Quaker  in  the 
guard-house,  but  was  going  to  bring 
him  to  work  by  punishment.  We  were 
filled  with  deep  sympathy  for  him  and 
desired  to  cheer  him  by  kind  words 
as  well  as  by  the  knowledge  of  our  sim- 
ilar situation.  We  obtained  permission 
of  the  Major  to  write  to  him  a  letter 
open  to  his  inspection.  'You  may  be 
sure,'  said  E.  W.  H.  to  us  at  W.,  'the 
Major  did  not  allow  it  to  leave  his 
hands.' 

This  forenoon  the  Lieutenant  of  the 
Day  came  in  and  acted  the  same 
part,  though  he  was  not  so  cool,  and 
left  expressing  the  hope,  if  we  would 
not  serve  our  country  like  men,  that 
God  would  curse  us.  Oh,  the  trials 
from  these  officers!  One  after  another 
comes  in  to  relieve  himself  upon  us. 
Finding  us  firm  and  not  lacking  in 
words,  they  usually  fly  into  a  passion 
and  end  by  bullying  us.  How  can  we 
reason  with  such  men?  They  are  ut- 
terly unable  to  comprehend  the  pure 
Christianity  and  spirituality  of  our 
principles.  They  have  long  stiffened 
their  necks  in  their  own  strength.  They 


152 


THE  UNITED  STATES   VERSUS  PRINGLE 


have  stopped  their  ears  to  the  voice  of 
the  Spirit,  and  hardened  their  hearts 
to  his  influences.  They  see  no  duty 
higher  than  that  to  country.  What 
shall  we  receive  at  their  hands? 

This  Major  tells  us  we  will  not  be 
tried  here.  Then  we  are  to  be  sent  into 
the  field,  and  there  who  will  deliver  us 
but  God?  Ah,  I  have  nursed  in  my 
heart  a  hope  that  I  may  be  spared  to 
return  home.  Must  I  cast  it  out  and 
have  no  desire,  but  to  do  the  will  of  my 
Master.  It  were  better,  even  so.  O, 
Lord,  Thy  will  be  done.  Grant  I  may 
make  it  my  chief  delight  and  render 
true  submission  thereto. 

Yesterday  a  little  service  was  re- 
quired of  our  dear  L.  M.  M.,  but  he  in- 
sisted he  could  not  comply.  A  sergeant 
and  two  privates  were  engaged.  They 
coaxed  and  threatened  him  by  turns, 
and  with  a  determination  not  to  be 
baffled  took  him  out  to  perform  it. 
Though  guns  were  loaded  he  still  stood 
firm  and  was  soon  brought  back.  We 
are  happy  here  in  guard-house,  —  too 
happy,  too  much  at  ease.  We  should 
see  more  of  the  Comforter,  —  feel  more 
strength, — if  the  trial  were  fiercer;  but 
this  is  well.  This  is  a  trial  of  strength 
of  patience. 

6th.  [9th  month.]  —  Yesterday  we 
had  officers  again  for  visitors.  Major 
J.  B.  Gould,  13th  Massachusetts,  came 
in  with  the  determination  of  persuad- 
ing us  to  consent  to  be  transferred  to 
the  hospital  here,  he  being  the  Pro- 
vost Marshal  of  the  island  and  hav- 
ing the  power  to  make  the  transfer. 
He  is  different  in  being  and  bear- 
ing from  those  who  have  been  here 
before.  His  motives  were  apparently 
those  of  pure  kindness,  and  his  de- 
meanor was  that  of  a  gentleman. 
Though  he  talked  with  us  more  than 
an  hour,  he  lost  no  part  of  his  self-con- 
trol or  good  humor.  So  by  his  eloquence 
and  kindness  he  made  more  impression 


upon  us  than  any  before.  As  Congre- 
gationalist  he  well  knew  the  courts  of 
the  temple,  but  the  Holy  of  Holies  he 
had  never  seen,  and  knew  nothing  of  its 
secrets.  He  understood  expediency; 
but  is  not  the  man  to  *  lay  down  his  life 
for  my  sake/  He  is  sincere  and  seems 
to  think  what  Major  Gould  believes 
cannot  be  far  from  right.  After  his 
attempt  we  remained  as  firm  as  ever. 
We  must  expect  all  means  will  be  tried 
upon  us,  and  no  less  persuasion  than 
threats. 

AT  THE  HOSPITAL,  7th.  [9th  month.] 
—  Yesterday  morning  came  to  us 
Major  Gould  again,  informing  us  that 
he  had  come  to  take  us  out  of  that 
dirty  place,  as  he  could  not  see  such 
respectable  men  lying  there,  and  was 
going  to  take  us  up  to  the  hospital. 
We  assured  him  we  could  not  serve 
there,  and  asked  him  if  he  would  not 
bring  us  back  when  we  had  there  de- 
clared our  purpose.  He  would  not  re- 
ply directly;  but  brought  us  here  and 
left  us.  When  the  surgeon  knew  our 
determination,  he  was  for  haling  us 
back  at  once;  what  he  wanted,  he  said, 
was  willing  men.  We  sat  on  the  sward 
without  the  hospital  tents  till  nearly 
noon,  for  some  one  to  take  us  back; 
when  we  were  ordered  to  move  into  the 
tents  and  quarters  assigned  us  in  the 
mess-room.  The  Major  must  have  in- 
terposed, demonstrating  his  kindness 
by  his  resolution  that  we  should  oc- 
cupy and  enjoy  the  pleasanter  quarters 
of  the  hospital,  certainly  if  serving;  but 
none  the  less  so  if  we  declined.  Later  in 
the  day  L.  M.  M.  and  P.  D.  were  sit- 
ting without,  when  he  passed  them  and, 
laughing  heartily,  declared  they  were 
the  strangest  prisoners  of  war  he  ever 
saw.  He  stopped  some  time  to  talk 
with  them  and  when  they  came  in  they 
declared  him  a  kind  and  honest  man. 

If  we  interpret  aright  his  conduct, 
this  dangerous  trial  is  over,  and  we 


THE  UNITED  STATES   VERSUS  PRINGLE 


153 


have  escaped  the  perplexities  that  his 
kindness  and  determination  threw 
about  us. 

13th.  —  Last  night  we  received  a 
letter  from  Henry  Dickinson,  stating 
that  the  President,  though  sympathiz- 
ing with  those  in  our  situation,  felt 
bound  by  the  Conscription  Act,  and 
felt  liberty,  in  view  of  his  oath  to  exe- 
cute the  laws,  to  do  no  more  than  de- 
tail us  from  active  service  to  hospital 
duty,  or  to  the  charge  of  the  colored 
refugees.  For  more  than  a  week  have 
we  lain  here,  refusing  to  engage  in 
hospital  service;  shall  we  retrace  the 
steps  of  the  past  week?  Or  shall  we  go 
South  as  overseers  of  the  blacks  on  the 
confiscated  estates  of  the  rebels,  to  act 
under  military  commanders  and  to  re- 
port to  such?  What  would  become  of 
our  testimony  and  our  determination 
to  preserve  ourselves  clear  of  the  guilt 
of  this  war? 

P.S.  We  have  written  back  to  Henry 
Dickinson  that  we  cannot  purchase 
life  at  cost  of  peace  of  soul. 

I4>th.  —  We  have  been  exceeding  sor- 
rowful since  receiving  advice  —  as  we 
must  call  it  —  from  H.  D.  to  enter  the 
hospital  service  or  some  similar  situa- 
tion. We  did  not  look  for  that  from  him. 
It  is  not  what  our  Friends  sent  us  out 
for;  nor  is  it  what  we  came  for.  We  shall 
feel  desolate  and  dreary  in  our  posi- 
tion, unless  supported  and  cheered  by 
the  words  of  those  who  have  at  heart 
our  best  interests  more  than  regard  for 
our  personal  welfare.  We  walk  as  we 
feel  guided  by  Best  Wisdom.  Oh,  may 
we  run  and  not  err  in  the  high  path  of 
Holiness. 

16th.  —  Yesterday  a  son-in-law  of 
N.  B.  of  Lynn  came  to  see  us.  He  was 
going  to  get  passes  for  one  or  two  of  the 
Lynn  Friends,  that  they  might  come 
over  to  see  us  to-day.  He  informed 


us  that  the  sentiment  of  the  Friends 
hereabouts  was  that  we  might  enter 
the  hospital  without  compromising  our 
principles;  and  he  produced  a  letter 
from  W.  W.  to  S.  B.  to  the  same  effect. 
W.  W.  expressed  his  opinion  that  we 
might  do  so  without  doing  it  in  lieu 
of  other  service.  How  can  we  evade  a 
fact?  Does  not  the  government  both 
demand  and  accept  it  as  in  lieu  of  other 
service.  Oh,  the  cruelest  blow  of  all 
comes  from  our  friends. 

17th.  —  Although  this  trial  was 
brought  upon  us  by  our  friends,  their 
intentions  were  well  meant.  Their  re- 
gard for  our  personal  welfare  and  safe- 
ty too  much  absorbs  the  zeal  they 
should  possess  for  the  maintenance  of 
the  principle  of  the  peaceableness  of 
our  Master's  kingdom.  An  unfaithful- 
ness to  this  through  meekness  and  tim- 
idity seems  manifest,  —  too  great  a  de- 
sire to  avoid  suffering  at  some  sacrifice 
of  principle,  perhaps,  —  too  little  of 
placing  of  Faith  and  confidence  upon 
the  Rock  of  Eternal  Truth. 

Our  friends  at  home,  with  W.  D.  at 
their  head,  support  us;  and  yesterday, 
at  the  opportune  moment,  just  as  we 
were  most  distressed  by  the  solicita- 
tions of  our  visitors,  kind  and  cheering 
words  of  Truth  were  sent  us  through 
dear  C.  M.  P.,  whose  love  rushes  out  to 
us  warm  and  living  and  just  from  an 
overflowing  fountain. 

I  must  record  another  work  of  kind 
attention  shown  us  by  Major  Gould. 
Before  we  embarked,  he  came  to  us  for 
a  friendly  visit.  As  we  passed  him  on 
our  way  to  the  wharf  he  bade  us  Fare- 
well and  expressed  a  hope  we  should 
not  have  so  hard  a  time  as  we  feared. 
And  after  we  were  aboard  the  steamer, 
as  the  result  of  his  interference  on  our 
behalf,  we  must  believe,  we  were  sin- 
gled out  from  the  midst  of  the  prison- 
ers, among  whom  we  had  been  placed 
previous  to  coming  aboard,  and  allowed 


154 


THE  UNITED  STATES   VERSUS  PRINGLE 


the  liberty  of  the  vessel.  By  this  are 
we  saved  much  suffering,  as  the  other 
prisoners  were  kept  under  close  guard 
in  a  corner  on  the  outside  of  the  boat. 

FOREST  CITY  UP  THE  POTOMAC. 
%%nd.  [9th  month.]  —  It  was  near  noon, 
yesterday,  when  we  turned  in  from 
sea  between  Cape  Charles  and  Henry; 
and,  running  thence  down  across  the 
mouth  of  Chesapeake  Bay,  alongside 
Old  Point  Comfort,  dropped  anchor  off 
Fortress  Monroe.  The  scene  around  us 
was  one  of  beauty,  though  many  of  its 
adornments  were  the  results  and  means 
of  wrong.  The  sunshine  was  brighter, 
the  verdure  greener  to  our  eyes  weary 
of  the  sea,  and  the  calm  was  milder  and 
more  grateful  that  we  had  so  long 
tossed  in  the  storm. 

The  anchor  was  soon  drawn  up  again 
and  the  Forest  City  steamed  up  the 
James  River  toward  Newport  News, 
and  turning  to  the  left  between  the 
low,  pine-grown  banks,  passed  Norfolk 
to  leave  the  New  Hampshire  detach- 
ment at  Portsmouth. 

Coming  back  to  Fortress  Monroe, 
some  freight  was  landed;  and  in  the 
calm  clear  light  of  the  moon,  we  swung 
away  from  shore  and  dropping  down 
the  mouth  of  the  river,  rounded  Old 
Point,  and,  going  up  the  Chesapeake, 
entered  the  Potomac  in  the  night- 
time. 

OFF  SHORE,  ALEXANDRIA.  %3d.  — 
Here  we  anchored  last  night  after  the 
main  detachment  was  landed,  and  the 
Vermont  and  Masschusetts  men  re- 
mained on  board  another  night.  We 
hear  we  are  to  go  right  to  the  field, 
where  active  operations  are  going  on. 
This  seems  hard.  We  have  not  till  now 
given  up  the  hope  that  we  were  not  to 
go  out  into  Virginia  with  the  rest  of 
the  men,  but  were  to  be  kept  here  at 
Washington.  Fierce,  indeed,  are  our 
trials.  I  am  not  discouraged  entirely; 


but  I  am  weak  from  want  of  food  which 
I  can  eat,  and  from  sickness.  I  do  not 
know  how  I  am  going  to  live  in  such 
way,  or  get  to  the  front. 

P.S.  We  have  just  landed;  and  I 
had  the  liberty  to  buy  a  pie  of  a 
woman  hawking  such  things,  that  has 
strengthened  me  wonderfully. 

CAMP  NEAR  CULPEPER.  %5th.  —  My 
distress  is  too  great  for  words;  but 
I  must  overcome  my  disinclination  to 
write,  or  this  record  will  remain  unfin- 
ished. So,  with  aching  head  and  heart, 
I  proceed. 

Yesterday  morning  we  were  roused 
early  for  breakfast  and  for  preparation 
for  starting.  After  marching  out  of  the 
barracks,  we  were  first  taken  to  the 
armory,  where  each  man  received  a 
gun  and  its  equipments  and  a  piece  of 
tent.  We  stood  in  line,  waiting  for  our 
turn  with  apprehensions  of  coming 
trouble.  Though  we  had  felt  free  to 
keep  with  those  among  whom  we  had 
been  placed,  we  could  not  consent  to 
carry  a  gun,  even  though  we  did  not 
intend  to  use  it;  and,  from  our  pre- 
vious experience,  we  knew  it  would  go 
harder  with  us,  if  we  took  the  first  step 
in  the  wrong  direction,  though  it  might 
seem  an  unimportant  one,  and  an  easy 
and  not  very  wrong  way  to  avoid  diffi- 
culty. So  we  felt  decided  we  must  de- 
cline receiving  the  guns.  In  the  hurry 
and  bustle  of  equipping  a  detachment 
of  soldiers,  one  attempting  to  explain 
a  position  and  the  grounds  therefor  so 
peculiar  as  ours  to  junior,  petty  officers, 
possessing  liberally  the  characteristics 
of  these:  pride,  vanity,  conceit,  and  an 
arbitrary  spirit,  impatience,  profanity, 
and  contempt  for  holy  things,  must 
needs  find  the  opportunity  a  very  fav- 
orable one. 

We  succeeded  in  giving  these  young 
officers  a  slight  idea  of  what  we  were; 
and  endeavored  to  answer  their  ques- 
tions of  why  we  did  not  pay  our  com- 


THE  UNITED   STATES   VERSUS  PRINGLE 


155 


mutation,  and  avail  ourselves  of  that 
provision  made  expressly  for  such;  of 
why  we  had  come  as  far  as  that  place, 
etc.  We  realized  then  the  unpleasant 
results  of  that  practice,  that  had  been 
employed  with  us  by  the  successive 
officers  into  whose  hands  we  had  fallen, 
—  of  shirking  any  responsibility,  and 
of  passing  us  on  to  the  next  officer 
above. 

A  council  was  soon  holden  to  decide 
what  to  do  with  us.  One  proposed  to 
place  us  under  arrest,  a  sentiment  we 
rather  hoped  might  prevail,  as  it  might 
prevent  our  being  sent  on  to  the  front; 
but  another,  in  some  spite  and  im- 
patience, insisted,  as  it  was  their  duty 
to  supply  a  gun  to  every  man  and  for- 
ward him,  that  the  guns  should  be  put 
upon  us,  and  we  be  made  to  carry 
them.  Accordingly  the  equipment 
was  buckled  about  us,  and  the  straps 
of  the  guns  being  loosened,  they  were 
thrust  over  our  heads  and  hung  upon 
our  shoulders.  In  this  way  we  were 
urged  forward  through  the  streets  of 
Alexandria;  and,  having  been  put  upon 
a  long  train  of  dirt  cars,  were  started 
for  Culpeper.  We  came  over  a  long 
stretch  of  desolated  and  deserted  coun- 
try, through  battlefields  of  previous 
summers,  and  through  many  camps 
now  lively  with  the  work  of  this  present 
campaign.  Seeing,  for  the  first  time, 
a  country  made  dreary  by  the  war- 
blight,  a  country  once  adorned  with 
graves  and  green  pastures  and  mead- 
ows and  fields  of  waving  grain,  and 
happy  with  a  thousand  homes,  now 
laid  with  the  ground,  one  realizes  as  he 
can  in  no  other  way  something  of  the 
ruin  that  lies  in  the  trail  of  a  war.  But 
upon  these  fields  of  Virginia,  once  so 
fair,  there  rests  a  two-fold  blight,  first 
that  of  slavery,  now  that  of  war.  When 
one  contrasts  the  face  of  this  country 
with  the  smiling  hillsides  and  vales  of 
New  England,  he  sees  stamped  upon  it 
in  characters  so  marked,  none  but  a 


blind  man  can  fail  to  read,  the  great 
irrefutable  arguments  against  slavery 
and  against  war,  too;  and  must  be  fill- 
ed with  loathing  for  these  twin  relics 
of  barbarism,  so  awful  in  the  potency 
of  their  consequences  that  they  can 
change  even  the  face  of  the  country. 

Through  the  heat  of  this  long  ride, 
we  felt  our  total  lack  of  water  and  the 
meagreness  of  our  supply  of  food.  Our 
thirst  became  so  oppressive  as  we  were 
marched  here  from  Culpeper,  some 
four  miles  with  scarcely  a  halt  to  rest, 
under  our  heavy  loads,  and  through 
the  heat  and  deep  dust  of  the  road, 
that  we  drank  water  and  dipped  in  the 
brooks  we  passed,  though  it  was  dis- 
colored with  the  soap  the  soldiers  had 
used  in  washing.  The  guns  interfered 
with  our  walking,  and,  slipping  down, 
dragged  with  painful  weight  upon  our 
shoulders.  Poor  P.  D.  fell  out  from 
exhaustion  and  did  not  come  in  till  we 
had  been  some  little  time  at  the  camp. 
We  were  taken  to  the  4th  Vermont 
regiment  and  soon  apportioned  to  com- 
panies. Though  we  waited  upon  the 
officer  commanding  the  company  in 
which  we  were  placed,  and  endeavored 
to  explain  our  situation,  we  were  re- 
quired immediately  after  to  be  present 
at  inspection  of  arms.  We  declined, 
but  an  attempt  was  made  to  force  us  to 
obedience,  first,  by  the  officers  of  the 
company,  then,  by  those  of  the  regi- 
ment; but,  failing  to  exact  obedience  of 
us,  we  were  ordered  by  the  colonel  to 
be  tied,  and,  if  we  made  outcry,  to  be 
gagged  also,  and  to  be  kept  so  till  he 
gave  orders  for  our  release.  After  two 
or  three  hours  we  were  relieved  and 
left  under  guard;  lying  down  on  the 
ground  in  the  open  air,  and  covering 
ourselves  with  our  blankets,  we  soon 
fell  asleep  from  exhaustion,  and  the 
fatigue  of  the  day. 

This  morning  the  officers  told  us  we 
must  yield.  We  must  obey  and  serve. 
We  were  threatened  great  seventies 


156 


THE  UNITED  STATES   VERSUS  PRINGLE 


and  even  death.  We  seem  perfectly  at 
the  mercy  of  the  military  power,  and, 
more,  in  the  hands  of  the  inferior 
officers,  who,  from  their  being  far  re- 
moved from  Washington,  feel  less  re- 
straint from  those  Regulations  of  the 
Army,  which  are  for  the  protection  of 
privates  from  personal  abuse. 

%6th.  [9th  month.]  —  Yesterday  my 
mind  was  much  agitated:  doubts  and 
fears  and  forebodings  seized  me.  I  was 
alone,  seeking  a  resting-place  and  find- 
ing none.  It  seemed  as  if  God  had  for- 
saken me  in  this  dark  hour;  and  the 
Tempter  whispered,  that  after  all  I 
might  be  only  the  victim  of  a  delusion. 
My  prayers  for  faith  and  strength 
seemed  all  in  vain. 

But  this  morning  I  enjoy  peace,  and 
feel  as  though  I  could  face  anything. 
Though  I  am  as  a  lamb  in  the  sham- 
bles, yet  do  I  cry,  *  Thy  will  be  done/ 
and  can  indeed  say,  — 

Passive  to  His  holy  will 
Trust  I  in  my  Master  still 
Even  though  he  slay  me. 

I  mind  me  of  the  anxiety  of  our  dear 
friends  about  home,  and  of  their  pray- 
ers for  us. 

Oh,  praise  be  to  the  Lord  for  the 
peace  and  love  and  resignation  that 
has  filled  my  soul  to-day!  Oh,  the 
passing  beauty  of  holiness!  There  is 
a  holy  life  that  is  above  fear;  it  is  a  close 
communion  with  Christ.  I  pray  for 
this  continually  but  am  not  free  from 
the  shadow  and  the  tempter.  There  is 
ever  present  with  us  the  thought  that 
perhaps  we  shall  serve  the  Lord  the 
most  effectually  by  our  death,  and  de- 
sire, if  that  be  the  service  He  requires 
of  us,  that  we  may  be  ready  and  re- 
signed. 

REGIMENTAL  HOSPITAL,  4th  Ver- 
mont. Z9th.  [9th  month.]  — On  the 
evening  of  the  26th  the  Colonel  came 
to  us  apologizing  for  the  roughness 


with  which  he  treated  us  at  first,  which 
was,  as  he  insisted,  through  ignorance 
of  our  real  character  and  position.  He 
told  us  if  we  persisted  in  our  course, 
death  would  probably  follow;  though 
at  another  time  he  confessed  to  P.  D. 
that  this  would  only  be  the  extreme 
sentence  of  court-martial. 

He  urged  us  to  go  into  the  hospital, 
stating  that  this  course  was  advised 
by  Friends  about  New  York.  We  were 
too  well  aware  of  such  a  fact  to  make 
any  denial,  though  it  was  a  subject  of 
surprise  to  us  that  he  should  be  in- 
formed of  it.  He  pleaded  with  us  long 
and  earnestly,  urging  us  with  many 
promises  of  indulgence  and  favor  and 
attentions  we  found  afterwards  to  be 
untrue.  He  gave  us  till  the  next  morn- 
ing to  consider  the  question  and  report 
our  decision.  In  our  discussion  of  the 
subject  among  ourselves,  we  were  very 
much  perplexed.  If  all  his  statements 
concerning  the  ground  taken  by  our  So- 
ciety were  true,  we  seemed  to  be  liable, 
if  we  persisted  in  the  course  which 
alone  seemed  to  us  to  be  in  accord- 
ance with  Truth,  to  be  exposed  to  the 
charge  of  over-zeal  and  fanaticism  even 
among  our  own  brethren.  Regarding 
the  work  to  be  done  in  hospital  as  one 
of  mercy  and  benevolence,  we  asked 
if  we  had  any  right  to  refuse  its  per- 
formance; and  questioned  whether  we 
could  do  more  good  by  endeavoring 
to  bear  to  the  end  a  clear  testimony 
against  war,  than  by  laboring  by  word 
and  deed  among  the  needy  in  the  hos- 
pitals and  camps.  We  saw  around  us  a 
rich  field  for  usefulness  in  which  there 
were  scarce  any  laborers,  and  toward 
whose  work  our  hands  had  often 
started  involuntarily  and  unbidden. 
At  last  we  consented  to  a  trial,  at  least 
till  we  could  make  inquiries  concern- 
ing the  Colonel's  allegations,  and  ask 
the  counsel  of  our  friends,  reserving 
the  privilege  of  returning  to  our  former 
position. 


THE  UNITED  STATES   VERSUS  PRINGLE 


157 


At  first  a  great  load  seemed  rolled 
away  from  us;  we  rejoiced  in  the  pro- 
spect of  life  again.  But  soon  there  pre- 
vailed a  feeling  of  condemnation,  as 
though  we  had  sold  our  Master.  And 
that  first  day  was  one  of  the  bitterest 
I  ever  experienced.  It  was  a  time  of 
stern  conflict  of  soul.  The  voice  that 
seemed  to  say,  'Follow  me,'  as  I  sought 
guidance  the  night  before,  kept  plead- 
ing with  me,  convincing  of  sin,  till  I 
knew  of  a  truth  my  feet  had  strayed 
from  His  path.  The  Scriptures,  which 
the  day  before  I  could  scarcely  open 
without  finding  words  of  strength  and 
comfort,  seemed  closed  against  me,  till 
after  a  severe  struggle  alone  in  the 
wood  to  which  I  had  retired,  I  con- 
sented to  give  up  and  retrace  my  steps 
in  faith.  But  it  was  too  late.  L.  M.  M. 
wishing  to  make  a  fair,  honest  trial, 
we  were  brought  here  —  P.  D.  being 
already  here  unwell.  We  feel  we  are  err- 
ing; but  scarce  anything  is  required  of 
us  and  we  wait  to  hear  from  Friends. 

Of  these  days  of  going  down  into 
sin,  I  wish  to  make  little  mention.  I 
would  that  my  record  of  such  degrada- 
tion be  brief.  We  wish  to  come  to  an 
understanding  with  our  friends  and  the 
Society  before  we  move;  but  it  does  not 
seem  that  we  can  repress  the  upheav- 
ings  of  Truth  in  our  hearts.  We  are 
bruised  by  sin. 

It  is  with  pleasure  I  record  we  have 
just  waited  upon  the  Colonel  with  an 
explanation  of  our  distress  of  mind,  re- 
questing him  to  proceed  with  court- 
martial.  We  were  kindly  and  tenderly 
received.  'If  you  want  a  trial  I  can 
give  it  to  you/  he  answered.  The  bri- 
gade has  just  marched  out  to  join  with 
the  division  for  inspection.  After  that 
we  are  to  have  attention  to  our  case. 

P.M.  There  is  particular  cause  for 
congratulation  in  the  consideration 
that  we  took  this  step  this  morning, 
when  now  we  receive  a  letter  from  H. 
D.  charging  us  to  faithfulness. 


When  lately  I  have  seen  dear  L.  M. 
M.  in  the  thoroughness  and  patience  of 
his  trial  to  perform  service  in  hospital, 
his  uneasiness  and  the  intensity  of  his 
struggle  as  manifested  by  his  silence 
and  disposition  to  avoid  the  company 
of  his  friends,  and  seen  him  fail  and 
declare  to  us,  'I  cannot  stay  here/  I 
have  received  a  new  proof,  and  to  me  a 
strong  one,  because  it  is  from  the  ex- 
perimental knowledge  of  an  honest 
man,  that  no  Friend,  who  is  really  such, 
desiring  to  keep  himself  clear  of  com- 
plicity with  this  system  of  war  and  to 
bear  a  perfect  testimony  against  it,  can 
lawfully  perform  service  in  the  hospi- 
tals of  the  Army  in  lieu  of  bearing  arms. 

10th.  mo.,  3d. — To-day  dawned  fair 
and  our  Camp  is  dry  again.  I  was  ask- 
ed to  clean  the  gun  I  brought,  and  de- 
clining, was  tied  some  two  hours  upon 
the  ground. 

6th.  AT  WASHINGTON.  —  At  first, 
after  being  informed  of  our  declining 
to  serve  in  his  hospital,  Colonel  Foster 
did  not  appear  altered  in  his  kind  re- 
gard for  us.  But  his  spleen  soon  be- 
came evident.  At  the  time  we  asked 
for  a  trial  by  court-martial,  and  it  was 
his  duty  to  place  us  under  arrest  and 
proceed  with  the  preferring  of  his 
charges  against  us.  For  a  while  he  seem- 
ed to  hesitate  and  consult  his  inferior 
officers,  and  among  them  his  Chap- 
lain. The  result  of  the  conference  was 
our  being  ordered  into  our  companies, 
that,  separated,  and  with  the  force  of 
the  officers  of  a  company  bearing  upon 
us,  we  might  the  more  likely  be  sub- 
dued. Yet  the  Colonel  assured  L.  M. 
M.,  interceding  in  my  behalf,  when  the 
lieutenant  commanding  my  company 
threatened  force  upon  me,  that  he 
should  not  allow  any  personal  injury. 
When  we  marched  next  day  I  was  com- 
pelled to  bear  a  gun  and  equipments. 
My  associates  were  more  fortunate, 


158 


THE  UNITED  STATES  VERSUS  PRINGLE 


for,  being  asked  if  they  would  carry 
their  guns,  declined  and  saw  no  more 
trouble  from  them.  The  captain  of  the 
company  in  which  P.  D.  was  placed 
told  him  he  did  not  believe  he  was  ugly 
about  it,  and  that  he  could  only  put 
him  under  arrest  and  prefer  charges 
against  him.  He  accordingly  was  taken 
under  guard,  where  he  lay  till  we  left 
for  here. 

The  next  morning  the  men  were  busy 
in  burnishing  their  arms.  When  I 
looked  toward  the  one  I  had  borne, 
yellow  with  rust,  I  trembled  in  the 
weakness  of  the  flesh  at  the  trial  I  felt 
impending  over  me.  Before  the  Colonel 
was  up  I  knocked  at  his  tent,  but  was 
told  he  was  asleep,  though,  through 
the  opening,  I  saw  him  lying  gazing  at 
me.  Although  I  felt  I  should  gain  no  re- 
lief from  him,  I  applied  again  soon  af- 
ter. He  admitted  me  and,  lying  on  his 
bed,  inquired  with  cold  heartlessness 
what  I  wanted.  I  stated  to  him,  that  I 
could  never  consent  to  serve,  and,  be- 
ing under  the  war-power,  was  resigned 
to  suffer  instead  all  the  just  penalties 
of  the  law.  I  begged  of  him  release 
from  the  attempts  by  violence  to  com- 
pel my  obedience  and  service,  and  a 
trial,  though  likely  to  be  made  by  those 
having  no  sympathy  with  me,  yet  pro- 
bably in  a  manner  comformable  to  law. 

He  replied  that  he  had  shown  us  all 
the  favor  he  should;  that  he  had,  now, 
turned  us  over  to  the  military  power 
and  was  going  to  let  that  take  its 
course;  that  is,  henceforth  we  were  to 
be  at  the  mercy  of  the  inferior  officers, 
without  appeal  to  law,  justice,  or 
mercy.  He  said  he  had  placed  us  in  a 
pleasant  position,  against  which  we 
could  have  no  reasonable  objection, 
and  that  we  had  failed  to  perform  our 
agreement.  He  wished  to  deny  that 
our  consent  was  only  temporary  and 
conditional.  He  declared,  furthermore, 
his  belief,  that  a  man  who  would  not 
fight  for  his  country  did  not  deserve  to 


live.  I  was  glad  to  withdraw  from  his 
presence  as  soon  as  I  could. 

I  went  back  to  my  tent  and  laid 
down  for  a  season  of  retirement,  en- 
deavoring to  gain  resignation  to  any 
event.  I  dreaded  torture  and  desired 
strength  of  flesh  and  spirit.  My  trial 
soon  came.  The  lieutenant  called  me 
out,  and  pointing  to  the  gun  that  lay 
near  by,  asked  if  I  was  going  to  clean 
it.  I  replied  to  him,  that  I  could  not 
comply  with  military  requisitions,  and 
felt  resigned  to  the  consequences.  'I 
do  not  ask  about  your  feelings;  I  want 
to  know  if  you  are  going  to  clean  that 
gun.'  *I  cannot  do  it,'  was  my  answer. 
He  went  away,  saying,  'Very  well,' 
and  I  crawled  into  the  tent  again.  Two 
sergeants  soon  called  for  me,  and  tak- 
ing me  a  little  aside,  bid  me  lie  down 
on  my  back,  and  stretching  my  limbs 
apart  tied  cords  to  my  wrists  and  an- 
kles and  these  to  four  stakes  driven  in 
the  ground  somewhat  in  the  form  of 
anX. 

I  was  very  quiet  in  my  mind  as  I  lay 
there  on  the  ground  [soaked]  with  the 
rain  of  the  previous  day,  exposed  to 
the  heat  of  the  sun,  and  suffering  keen- 
ly from  the  cords  binding  my  wrists 
and  straining  my  muscles.  And,  if  I 
dared  the  presumption,  I  should  say 
that  I  caught  a  glimpse  of  heavenly 
pity.  I  wept,  not  so  much  from  my 
own  suffering  as  from  sorrow  that  such 
things  should  be  in  our  own  country, 
where  Justice  and  Freedom  and  Lib- 
erty of  Conscience  have  been  the  an- 
nual boast  of  Fourth-of-July  orators  so 
many  years.  It  seemed  that  our  fore- 
fathers in  the  faith  had  wrought  and 
suffered  in  vain,  when  the  privileges 
they  so  dearly  bought  were  so  soon  set 
aside.  And  I  was  sad,  that  one  en- 
deavoring to  follow  our  dear  Master 
should  be  so  generally  regarded  as  a 
despicable  and  stubborn  culprit. 

After  something  like  an  hour  had 
passed,  the  lieutenant  came  with  his 


THE  UNITED  STATES   VERSUS  PRINGLE 


159 


orderly  to  ask  me  if  I  was  ready  to 
clean  the  gun.  I  replied  to  the  order- 
ly asking  the  question,  that  it  could 
but  give  me  pain  to  be  asked  or  re- 
quired to  do  anything  I  believed 
wrong.  He  repeated  it  to  the  lieuten- 
ant just  behind  him,  who  advanced  and 
addressed  me.  I  was  favored  to  im- 
prove the  opportunity  to  say  to  him  a 
few  things  I  wished.  He  said  little;  and, 
when  I  had  finished,  he  withdrew  with 
the  others  who  had  gathered  around. 
About  the  end  of  another  hour  his  or- 
derly came  and  released  me. 

I  arose  and  sat  on  the  ground.  I  did 
not  rise  to  go  away.  I  had  not  where 
to  go,  nothing  to  do.  As  I  sat  there  my 
heart  swelled  with  joy  from  above.  The 
consolation  and  sweet  fruit  of  tribula- 
tion patiently  endured.  But  I  also 
grieved,  that  the  world  was  so  far  gone 
astray,  so  cruel  and  blind.  It  seemed 
as  if  the  gospel  of  Christ  had  never  been 
preached  upon  earth,  and  the  beautiful 
example  of  his  life  had  been  utterly 
lost  sight  of. 

Some  of  the  men  came  about  me, 
advising  me  to  yield,  and  among  them 
one  of  those  who  had  tied  me  down, 
telling  me  what  I  had  already  suffered 
was  nothing  to  what  I  must  yet  suffer 
unless  I  yielded;  that  human  flesh 
could  not  endure  what  they  would  put 
upon  me.  I  wondered  if  it  could  be 
that  they  could  force  me  to  obedience 
by  torture,  and  examined  myself 
closely  to  see  if  they  had  advanced 
as  yet  one  step  toward  the  accom- 
plishment of  their  purposes.  Though 
weaker  in  body,  I  believed  I  found  my- 
self, through  divine  strength,  as  firm 
in  my  resolution  to  maintain  my  alle- 
giance to  my  Master. 

The  relaxation  of  my  nerves  and 
muscles  after  having  been  so  tensely 
strained  left  me  that  afternoon  so  weak 
that  I  could  hardly  walk  or  perform 
any  mental  exertion. 

I   had    not    yet    eaten    the    mean 


and  scanty  breakfast  I  had  prepared, 
when  I  was  ordered  to  pack  up  my 
things  and  report  myself  at  the  lieu- 
tenant's tent.  I  was  accustomed  to 
such  orders  and  complied,  little  moved. 

The  lieutenant  received  me  politely 
with,  *  Good-morning,  Mr.  Pringle,' 
and  desiring  me  to  be  seated,  proceeded 
with  the  writing  with  which  he  was  en- 
gaged. I  sat  down  in  some  wonder- 
ment and  sought  to  be  quiet  and  pre- 
pared for  any  event. 

4  You  are  ordered  to  report  to  Wash- 
ington,' said  he;  'I  do  not  know  what  it 
is  for.'  I  assured  him  that  neither  did 
I  know.  We  were  gathered  before  the 
Major's  tent  for  preparation  for  de- 
parture. The  regimental  officers  were 
there  manifesting  surprise  and  chagrin; 
for  they  could  not  but  show  both  as 
they  looked  upon  us,  whom  the  day  be- 
fore they  were  threatening  to  crush  into 
submission,  and  attempting  also  to  ex- 
ecute their  threats  that  morning,  stand- 
ing out  of  their  power  and  under  orders 
from  one  superior  to  their  Major  Com- 
manding E.  M.  As  the  bird  uncaged, 
so  were  our  hearts  that  morning.  Short 
and  uncertain  at  first  were  the  flights  of 
Hope.  As  the  slave  many  times  before 
us,  leaving  his  yoke  behind  him,  turned 
from  the  plantations  of  Virginia  and 
set  his  face  toward  the  far  North,  so  we 
from  out  a  grasp  as  close  and  as  abun- 
dant in  suffering  and  severity,  and 
from  without  the  line  of  bayonets  that 
had  so  many  weeks  surrounded  us, 
turned  our  backs  upon  -the  camp  of  the 
4th  Vermont  and  took  our  way  over 
the  turnpike  that  ran  through  the 
tented  fields  of  Culpeper. 

At  the  War  Office  we  were  soon  ad- 
mitted to  an  audience  with  the  Adjutant 
General,  Colonel  Townsend,  whom  we 
found  to  be  a  very  fine  man,  mild  and 
kind.  He  referred  our  cases  to  the  Sec- 
retary of  War,  Stanton,  by  whom  we 
were  ordered  to  report  for  service  to 
Surgeon  General  Hammond.  Here  we 


160 


THE  UNITED  STATES  VERSUS  PRINGLE 


met  Isaac  Newton,  Commissioner  of 
Agriculture,  waiting  for  our  arrival,  and 
James  Austin  of  Nantucket,  expecting 
his  son,  Charles  L.Austin,  and  Edward 
W.  Hoi  way  of  Sandwich,  Mass.,  con- 
scripted Friends  like  ourselves,  and 
ordered  here  from  the  22nd  Massachu- 
setts. 

We  understand  it  is  through  the  in- 
fluence of  Isaac  Newton  that  Friends 
have  been  able  to  approach  the  heads 
of  Government  in  our  behalf  and  to 
prevail  with  them  to  so  great  an  extent. 
He  explained  to  us  the  circumstance  in 
which  we  are  placed.  That  the  Secre- 
tary of  War  and  President  sympa- 
thized with  Friends  in  their  present 
suffering,  and  would  grant  them  full 
release,  but  that  they  felt  themselves 
bound  by  their  oaths  that  they  would 
execute  the  laws,  to  carry  out  to  its  full 
extent  the  Conscription  Act.  That 
there  appeared  but  one  door  of  relief 
open,  —  that  was  to  parole  us  and 
allow  us  to  go  home,  but  subject  to 
their  call  again  ostensibly,  though  this 
they  neither  wished  nor  proposed  to 
do.  That  the  fact  of  Friends  in  the 
Army  and  refusing  service  had  at- 
tracted public  attention  so  that  it  was 
not  expedient  to  parole  us  at  present. 
That,  therefore,  we  were  to  be  sent  to 
one  of  the  hospitals  for  a  short  time, 
where  it  was  hoped  and  expressly  re- 
quested that  we  would  consent  to  re- 
main quiet  and  acquiesce,  if  possible, 
in  whatever  might  be  required  of  us. 
That  our  work  there  would  be  quite 
free  from  objection,  being  for  the  direct 
relief  of  the  sick;  and  that  there  he 
would  release  none  for  active  service 
in  the  field,  as  the  nurses  were  hired 
civilians. 

These  requirements  being  so  much 
less  objectionable  than  we  had  feared, 
we  felt  relief,  and  consented  to  them. 
I.  N.  went  with  us  himself  to  the  Sur- 
geon General's  office,  where  he  pro- 
cured peculiar  favors  for  us:  that  we 


should  be  sent  to  a  hospital  in  the  city, 
where  he  could  see  us  often;  and  that 
orders  should  be  given  that  nothing 
should  interfere  with  our  comfort,  or 
our  enjoyment  of  our  consciences. 

Thence  we  were  sent  to  Medical 
Purveyor  Abbot,  who  assigned  us  to 
the  best  hospital  in  the  city,  the 
Douglas  Hospital. 

The  next  day  after  our  coming  here 
I.  N.  and  James  Austin  came  to  add  to 
our  number  E.  W.  H.  and  C.  S.  L.,  so 
now  there  are  five  of  us  instead  of 
three.  We  are  pleasantly  situated  in  a 
room  by  ourselves  in  the  upper  or 
fourth  story,  and  are  enjoying  our  ad- 
vantages of  good  quarters  and  tolerable 
food  as  no  one  can  except  he  has  been 
deprived  of  them. 

[IQth  month]  8^.  —  To-day  we  have 
a  pass  to  go  out  to  see  the  city. 

9th.  —  We  all  went,  thinking  to  do 
the  whole  city  in  a  day,  but  before  the 
time  of  our  passes  expired,  we  were 
glad  to  drag  ourselves  back  to  the  rest 
and  quiet  of  D.  H.  During  the  day  we 
called  upon  our  friend  I.  N.  in  the 
Patent  Office.  When  he  came  to  see  us 
on  the  7th,  he  stated  he  had  called  upon 
the  President  that  afternoon  to  request 
him  to  release  us  and  let  us  go  home  to 
our  friends.  The  President  promised 
to  consider  it  over-night.  Accordingly 
yesterday  morning,  as  I.  N.  told  us,  he 
waited  upon  him  again.  He  found 
there  a  woman  in  the  greatest  distress. 
Her  son,  only  a  boy  of  fifteen  years  and 
four  months,  having  been  enticed  into 
the  Army,  had  deserted  and  been  sen- 
tenced to  be  shot  the  next  day.  As  the 
clerks  were  telling  her,  the  President 
was  in  the  War  Office  and  could  not 
be  seen,  nor  did  they  think  he  could 
attend  to  her  case  that  day.  I.  N. 
found  her  almost  wild  with  grief.  *  Do 
not  despair,  my  good  woman,'  said  he, 
*  I  guess  the  President  can  be  seen  after 


THE  UNITED  STATES   VERSUS  PRINGLE 


161 


a  bit.'  He  soon  presented  her  case  to 
the  President,  who  exclaimed  at  once, 
'That  must  not  be,  I  must  look  into 
that  case,  before  they  shoot  that  boy ' ; 
and  telegraphed  at  once  to  have  the 
order  suspended. 

I.  N.  judged  it  was  not  a  fit  time  to 
urge  our  case.  We  feel  we  can  afford 
to  wait,  that  a  life  may  be  saved.  But 
we  long  for  release.  We  do  not  feel 
easy  to  remain  here. 

llth. —  To-day  we  attended  meet- 
ing held  in  the  house  of  a  Friend,  Asa 
Arnold,  living  near  here.  There  were 
but  four  persons  beside  ourselves.  E. 
W.  H.  and  C.  S.  A.  showed  their  copy 
of  the  charges  about  to  have  been  pre- 
ferred against  them  in  court-martial 
before  they  left  their  regiment,  to  a 
lawyer  who  attended  the  meeting.  He 
laughed  at  the  Specification  of  Mut- 
iny, declaring  such  a  charge  could  not 
have  been  lawfully  sustained  against 
them. 

The  experiences  of  our  new  friends 
were  similar  to  ours,  except  they  fell 
among  officers  who  usually  showed 
them  favor  and  rejoiced  with  them  in 
their  release. 

13th.  —  L.  M.  M.  had  quite  an  ad- 
venture yesterday.  He  being  fireman 
with  another  was  in  the  furnace  room 
among  three  or  four  others,  when  the 
officer  of  the  day,  one  of  the  surgeons, 
passed  around  on  inspection.  'Stand 
up/  he  ordered  them,  wishing  to  be 
saluted.  The  others  arose;  but  by  no 
means  L.  The  order  was  repeated  for 
his  benefit,  but  he  sat  with  his  cap  on, 
telling  the  surgeon  he  had  supposed  he 
was  excused  from  such  things  as  he  was 
one  of  the  Friends.  Thereat  the  officer 
flew  at  him,  exclaiming,  he  would  take 
the  Quaker  out  of  him.  He  snatched 
off  his  cap  and  seizing  him  by  the  col- 
lar tried  to  raise  him  to  his  feet;  but 
finding  his  strength  insufficient  and 

VOL.  Ill -NO.  2 


that  L.  was  not  to  be  frightened,  he 
changed  his  purpose  in  his  wrath  and 
calling  for  the  corporal  of  the  guard 
had  him  taken  to  the  guard-house. 
This  was  about  eleven  A.  M.  and  he  lay 
there  till  about  six  P.M.,  when  the 
surgeon  in  charge,  arriving  home  and 
hearing  of  it,  ordered  the  officer  of  the 
day  to  go  and  take  him  out,  telling  him 
never  to  put  another  man  into  the 
guard-house  while  he  was  in  charge 
here  without  consulting  him.  The  man- 
ner of  his  release  was  very  satisfactory 
to  us,  and  we  waited  for  this  rather 
than  effect  it  by  our  own  efforts.  We 
are  all  getting  uneasy  about  remaining 
here,  and  if  our  release  do  not  come 
soon,  we  feel  we  must  intercede  with 
the  authorities,  even  if  the  alternative 
be  imprisonment. 

The  privations  I  have  endured  since 
leaving  home,  the  great  tax  upon  my 
nervous  strength,  and  my  mind  as  well, 
since  I  have  had  charge  of  our  exten- 
sive correspondence,  are  beginning  to 
tell  upon  my  health  and  I  long  for  rest. 

%Qth.  We  begin  to  feel  we  shall  have 
to  decline  service  as  heretofore,  unless 
our  position  is  changed.  I  shall  not  say 
but  we  submit  too  much  in  not  declin- 
ing at  once,  but  it  has  seemed  most  pru- 
dent at  least  to  make  suit  with  Govern- 
ment rather  than  provoke  the  hostility 
of  their  subalterns.  We  were  ordered 
here  with  little  understanding  of  the 
true  state  of  things  as  they  really  exist 
here;  and  were  advised  by  Friends  to 
come  and  make  no  objections,  being 
assured  it  was  but  for  a  very  brief  time 
and  only  a  matter  of  form.  It  might 
not  have  been  wrong;  but  as  we  find 
we  do  too  much  fill  the  places  of  sol- 
diers (L.  M.  M.'s  fellow  fireman  has 
just  left  for  the  field,  and  I  am  to  take 
his  place,  for  instance),  and  are  clearly 
doing  military  service,  we  are  continu- 
ally oppressed  by  a  sense  of  guilt,  that 
makes  our  struggles  earnest. 


162 


THE  UNITED  STATES   VERSUS   PRINGLE 


%lst.  —  I.  N.  has  not  called  yet;  our 
situation  is  becoming  almost  intoler- 
able. I  query  if  patience  is  justified  un- 
der the  circumstances.  My  distress  of 
mind  may  be  enhanced  by  my  feeble 
condition  of  health,  for  to-day  I  am  con- 
fined to  my  bed,  almost  too  weak  to  get 
downstairs.  This  is  owing  to  exposure 
after  being  heated  over  the  furnaces. 

%6th.  —  Though  a  week  has  gone  by, 
and  my  cold  has  left  me,  I  find  I  am  no 
better,  and  that  I  am  reduced  very  low 
in  strength  and  flesh  by  the  sickness 
and  pain  I  am  experiencing.  Yet  I  still 
persist  in  going  below  once  a  day.  The 
food  I  am  able  to  get  is  not  such  as  is 
proper. 

llth  mo.,  5th.  —  I  spend  most  of  my 
time  on  my  bed,  much  of  it  alone.  And 
very  precious  to  me  is  the  nearness  I  am 
favored  to  attain  to  unto  the  Master. 
Notwithstanding  my  situation  and 
state,  I  am  happy  in  the  enjoyment  of 
His  consolations.  Lately  my  confidence 
has  been  strong,  and  I  think  I  begin  to 
feel  that  our  patience  is  soon  to  be  re- 
warded with  relief;  insomuch  that  a 
little  while  ago,  when  dear  P.  D.  was 
almost  overcome  with  snow,  I  felt  bold 
to  comfort  him  with  the  assurance  of 
my  belief,  that  it  would  not  be  long  so. 
My  mind  is  too  weak  to  allow  of  my 
reading  much;  and,  though  I  enjoy  the 
company  of  my  companions  a  part  of 
the  time,  especially  in  the  evening,  I 
am  much  alone;  which  affords  me 
abundant  time  for  meditation  and  wait- 
ing upon  God.  The  fruits  of  this  are 
sweet,  and  a  recompense  for  affliction. 


6th.  —  Last  evening  E.  W.  H.  saw 
I.  N.  particularly  on  my  behalf,  I  sup- 
pose. He  left  at  once  for  the  President. 
This  morning  he  called  to  inform  us  of 
his  interview  at  the  White  House.  The 
President  was  moved  to  sympathy  in 
my  behalf,  when  I.  N.  gave  him  a  let- 
ter from  one  of  our  Friends  in  New 
York.  After  its  perusal  he  exclaimed 
to  our  friend,  'I  want  you  to  go  and 
tell  Stanton,  that  it  is  my  wish  all  those 
young  men  be  sent  home  at  once/  He 
was  on  his  way  to  the  Secretary  this 
morning  as  he  called. 

Later.  I.  N.  has  just  called  again 
informing  us  in  joy  that  we  are  free. 
At  the  War  Office  he  was  urging  the 
Secretary  to  consent  to  our  paroles, 
when  the  President  entered.  *  It  is  my 
urgent  wish,'  said  he.  The  Secretary 
yielded;  the  order  was  given,  and  we 
were  released.  What  we  had  waited 
for  so  many  weeks  was  accomplished 
in  a  few  moments  by  a  Providential 
ordering  of  circumstances. 

7th.  —  I.  N.  came  again  last  even- 
ing bringing  our  paroles.  The  pre- 
liminary arrangements  are  being  made, 
and  we  are  to  start  this  afternoon  for 
New  York. 

Note.  Rising  from  my  sick-bed  to 
undertake  this  journey,  which  lasted 
through  the  night,  its  fatigues  overcame 
me,  and  upon  my  arrival  in  New  York 
I  was  seized  with  delirium  from  which 
I  only  recovered  after  many  weeks, 
through  the  mercy  and  favor  of  Him, 
who  in  all  this  trial  had  been  our  guide 
and  strength  and  comfort. 


DE  SENECTUTE 


BY   HENRY   DWIGHT  SEDGWICK 


CATO  MAJOR,  a  man  of  fifty. 

j  I  Students  at  Harvard  College. 

Cato:  Welcome,  Scipio;  your  father 
and  I  were  friends  before  you  were 
born.  And  a  hearty  welcome  to  you, 
too,  Lselius;  all  your  family  I  esteem 
my  kinsmen.  Is  this  the  holiday  sea- 
son, or  how  comes  it  that  you  have  at 
this  time  shuffled  off  the  coil  of  acad- 
emic life? 

Scipio:  We  have  a  few  free  days  now 
according  to  the  liberal  usage  of  our 
college,  and  we  have  come,  relying  up- 
on your  kinship  with  Lselius,  and  your 
friendship  for  my  father,  to  ask  you 
some  questions. 

Cato:  I  had  thought  that  seniors  of 
Harvard  College  were  more  disposed 
to  answer  questions  than  to  ask  them; 
but  I  am  truly  glad  that  you  have  come, 
and  as  best  I  can,  I  will  endeavor  to 
satisfy  your  curiosity. 

Lcelius:  We  have  been  disputing,  sir, 
in  the  interim  between  academic  stud- 
ies, as  to  the  value  of  life;  whether,  tak- 
ing it  all  in  all,  life  should  be  regarded 
as  a  good  thing  or  not.  We  are  agreed 
that,  so  far  as  Youth  is  concerned,  life 
is  well  worth  the  living,  but  we  are 
doubtful  whether,  if  Old  Age  be  put 
into  the  same  balance  with  Youth,  the 
whole  will  outweigh  the  good  of  never 
having  lived. 

Scipio:  You  see  that  we  have  really 
come  to  ask  you  about  Old  Age,  for  as 
to  Youth,  that  we  know  of  ourselves. 

Cato:  About  Old  Age!  Naturally  that 
has  been  the  subject  of  my  meditations, 


and  I  will  gladly  impart  my  conclu- 
sions, such  as  they  are. 

Scipio:  Thank  you  very  much.  I  re- 
gret to  say  that  we  are  obliged  to  take 
the  next  train  back  to  town,  so  our 
time  is  all  too  short. 

Cato:  We  have  half  an  hour.  I  will 
waste  no  time  in  prologue.  And  I  shall 
begin  by  asking  Scipio's  pardon,  for  I 
shall  flatly  contradict  his  assumption 
that  the  young  have  a  knowledge  of 
Youth. 

Scipio:  Of  course  we  beg  you  to  let 
neither  our  youth  nor  our  opinions 
hamper  the  free  expression  of  your 
views. 

Lcdius :  We  are  all  attention,  sir. 


Cato:  In  the  first  place,  my  young 
friends,  Age  has  one  great  pleasure 
which  Youth  (in  spite  of  its  own  rash 
assumption  of  knowledge)  does  not 
have,  and  that  is  a  true  appreciation 
and  enjoyment  of  Youth. 

You  who  are  young  know  nothing  of 
Youth.  You  merely  live  it.  You  run, 
you  jump,  you  wrestle,  you  row,  you 
play  football,  you  use  your  muscles, 
without  any  consciousness  of  the  won- 
derful machinery  set  in  motion.  You 
do  not  perceive  the  beauty  of  Youth, 
the  light  in  its  eye,  the  coming  and 
going  of  color  in  its  cheek,  the  ease 
and  grace  of  its  movements.  Nor  do 
you  appreciate  the  emotions  of  Youth. 
You  are  contented  or  discontented, 
merry  or  sad,  hopeful  or  downcast;  but 
whatever  that  feeling  is,  you  are  wholly 

163 


164 


DE  SENECTUTE 


absorbed  in  it,  you  are  not  able  to 
consider  it  objectively,  nor  to  realize 
how  marvelous  and  interesting  are  the 
flood  and  ebb  of  youthful  passion. 

In  fact,  the  young  despise  Youth; 
they  are  impatient  to  hurry  on  and 
join  the  ranks  of  that  more  respectable 
and  respected  body,  their  immediate 
seniors.  The  toddling  urchin  wishes 
that  he  were  old  enough  to  be  the  in- 
teresting schoolboy  across  the  way, 
who  starts  unwillingly  to  school;  the 
school-boy,  as  he  whistles  on  his  tedious 
path,  wishes  that  he  were  a  freshman, 
so  splendid  in  his  knowledge,  his  inde- 
pendence, his  possessions,  so  familiar 
with  strange  oaths,  so  gloriously  fra- 
grant of  tobacco.  The  freshman  would 
be  a  sophomore.  You  seniors  wish  to 
be  out  in  the  great  world,  elbowing 
your  way  among  your  fellow  men,  busy 
with  what  seem  to  you  the  realities  of 
life.  Youth  feels  that  it  is  always  stand- 
ing outside  the  door  of  a  most  delect- 
able future. 

Appreciation  of  Youth  is  part  of  the 
domain  of  art.  There  is  no  virtuoso  like 
the  old  man  who  has  learned  to  see  the 
manifold  beauties  of  Youth,  the  charm 
of  motion,  the  grace  of  carriage,  the 
glory  of  innocence,  the  fascination  of 
passion.  The  world  of  art  created  by 
the  hand  of  man  has  nothing  that  can 
challenge  comparison  with  the  master- 
pieces of  Youth.  No  man,  in  Jiis  own 
boyhood,  ever  had  as  much  pleasure 
from  running  across  the  lawn,  as  he  gets 
from  seeing  his  sons  run  on  that  very 
spot;  no  laughter  of  his  own  was  ever 
half  so  sweet  to  his  ears  as  the  laugh- 
ter of  his  little  girl.  No  man  in  his 
youth  ever  understood  the  significance 
of  the  saying,  *  Of  such  is  the  Kingdom 
of  Heaven.'  You  may  smile  conde- 
scendingly, young  men,  but  in  truth 
the  appreciation  of  Youth  is  a  privilege 
and  possession  of  Old  Age. 

Lcelius:  I  did  but  smile  in  sympathy. 

Scipio:  If  I  understand  you  aright, 


Cato,  Youth  is  a  drama,  in  which  the 
actors  are  all  absorbed  in  their  parts, 
while  Age  is  the  audience. 

Cato:  You  conceive  my  meaning. 
The  play  is  worthy  for  the  gods  to 
watch,  —  it  out-Shakespeares  Shake- 
speare. 

ii 

Cato:  The  second  great  acquisition 
that  comes  to  Old  Age  is  the  mellowing 
and  ripening  of  life. 

As  I  look  back  across  the  years  I  can 
see  that  I  and  my  friends  were  all  what 
are  called  individualists.  We  were  all 
absorbed  in  self,  just  as  you  young  men 
are.  We  went  through  our  romantic 
period  in  which  self,  with  a  feather  in 
its  cap  and  a  red  waistcoat,  strutted 
over  the  stage.  It  monopolized  the 
theatre;  everybody  else  —  parents, 
brothers,  sisters,  uncles,  aunts,  cousins, 
schoolmates  —  were  supernumeraries, 
whose  business  was  to  look  on  while 
the  hero  recited  his  lines.  With  atten- 
tion concentrated  all  on  self,  the  youth 
is  shy  of  all  other  youths,  of  everybody 
whose  insolent  egotism  may  wish  to 
push  its  way  upon  his  stage  and  inter- 
rupt his  monologue.  The  I  of  Youth 
insists  upon  its  exclusive  right  to  emo- 
tion, upon  its  right  to  knowledge  of  the 
world  at  first-hand,  upon  its  right  to 
repeat  the  follies  of  its  father,  of  its 
father's  father,  of  all  its  ancestors. 
Youth,  bewildered  by  the  excitement 
of  self-consciousness,  can  hardly  see 
beyond  the  boundaries  of  self. 

Youth  is  raw  and  suspicious.  It 
looks  askance  at  its  neighbors,  is  indif- 
ferent to  their  lot,  and  delights  in  soli- 
tude, because  solitude  is  favorable  to 
egotism.  The  young  are  ashamed  of 
their  humanity.  Boys  regard  the  mass 
of  boys  as  if  they  were  of  a  different 
species;  they  fight  shy  of  any  general 
society  among  themselves;  they  form 
cliques.  The  smallest  clique  is  the  most 
honorable.  And  sacredly  enshrined  in 


DE  SENECTUTE 


165 


the  very  centre  of  the  inner  ring 
stands  the  Palladium  of  self.  You, 
Scipio,  do  not  associate  with  Gaius 
or  Balbus,  though  they  are  the  best 
scholars  in  your  class;  nor  do  you, 
Lselius,  frequent  any  but  the  Claudii. 
From  the  vantage-ground,  as  you 
think,  of  exclusiveness,  you  look  down 
upon  your  fellows  herded  in  larger 
groups.  You  turn  up  your  aristocratic 
noses  at  the  vulgarity  of  joy  in  com- 
monalty spread.  Your  judgments  are 
narrow,  your  prejudices  broad;  you 
are  distrustful  and  conservative;  you 
are  wayward  and  crotchety;  you  are 
all  for  precedent,  or  all  for  license.  You 
rejoice  in  foolish  divisions,  your  coun- 
try, your  native  province,  your  college, 
your  club,  your  way  of  doing  things; 
you  despise  all  others,  and  all  their 
ways.  A  boy  represents  the  babyhood 
of  the  race;  in  him  is  incarnate  the 
spirit  of  contempt  for  Barbarians. 

Age  is  a  reaction  from  the  restive 
individualism  of  Youth.  It  recognizes 
the  human  inability  to  stand  alone;  it 
perceives  that  the  individual  is  a  bit 
broken  from  the  human  mass,  that  our 
ragged  edges  still  maintain  the  pattern 
of  the  break,  and  are  ready  to  fit  into  the 
general  mass  again.  The  Old  Man  no 
longer  dwells  on  the  differences  between 
one  human  creature  and  his  fellows;  he 
reflects  upon  their  common  qualities. 
He  finds  no  solace  in  isolation;  he  re- 
joices in  community.  Youth  is  su- 
premely conscious  of  its  own  sensitive- 
ness, its  own  palate,  its  own  comfort, 
it  is  full  of  individual  appetite  and 
greed;  but  Age  is  conscious  of  human- 
ity, of  a  universal  sensitiveness,  of 
palates  untouched  by  delicacies,  of 
bodies  uncared  for,  of  souls  uncom- 
forted,  and  its  queasy  stomach  cannot 
bear  to  be  helped  tenfold,  a  hundred- 
fold, a  thousandfold,  while  fellow  mem- 
bers of  the  indivisible  body  human 
sicken  from  want. 

Age    perceives    a    thousand    bonds 


where  Youth  sees  discord.  Age  sets 
store  by  the  common  good  of  life,  it 
conceives  of  our  common  humanity  as 
the  mere  right  to  share,  and  of  pleas- 
ure as  sharing;  it  considers  humanity 
partly  as  an  enlargement  of  self,  partly 
as  a  refuge  from  self;  it  lightly  passes 
over  the  differences  of  speech,  of  ac- 
cent, of  clothes,  of  ways  and  customs, 
which  to  boys  like  you,  taken  with  the 
outward  aspect  of  the  world,  seem  to 
erect  such  insuperable  barriers  between 
them  and  their  fellows.  To  Old  Age 
the  sutures  of  humanity,  that  to  the 
youthful  eye  gape  so  wide,  are  all 
grown  together,  the  several  parts  are 
merged  into  one  whole. 

Of  all  pleasures,  none  is  so  satisfying 
as  the  full  enjoyment  of  our  common 
humanity.  It  loosens  the  swaddling 
clothes  that  wrap  us  round;  it  alone 
gives  us  freedom.  No  doubt  this  is 
partly  due  to  the  nearer  approach  of 
death;  the  chill  of  night  causes  the  pil- 
grim to  draw  nearer  his  fellows  and 
warm  himself  at  the  kindly  warmth  of 
human  fellowship.  But  be  the  cause 
what  it  may,  the  enjoyment  of  human- 
ity is  a  taste  that  grows  with  man's 
growth;  it  is  a  part  of  the  ripening  of 
life,  and  comes  quickest  to  those  who 
ripen  in  the  sun  of  happiness. 

There  is  another  element  in  this  pro- 
cess of  mellowing  with  age.  Old  Age  is 
intensely  aware  of  the  delicacy  of  this 
human  instrument,  on  which  fate  can 
play  all  stops  of  joy  and  pain;  it  feels 
an  infinite  concern  before  the  vast  sum 
of  human  sentience;  it  sees  in  human- 
ity the  harvest  of  all  the  tillage  of  the 
past;  it  ponders  over  the  long  stretch 
of  toil,  cruelty,  suffering,  bewilderment, 
and  terror,  of  unnumbered  generations, 
back  through  recorded  time,  back 
through  the  ages  that  paleontologists 
dimly  discern,  back  through  the  first 
stirrings  of  organic  life.  All  along  the 
path  life  flickers  up  but  to  be  quenched 
by  death.  In  contemplation  of  this 


166 


DE  SENECTUTE 


funeral  march  the  Old  Man  nuzzles  to 
the  breast  of  humanity,  and  longs  for 
more  and  more  intimate  human  com- 
munion. To  him  humanity  is  not  a 
mere  collection  of  individual  units,  but 
a  mighty  organism,  animated  by  a  com- 
mon consciousness,  proceeding  onward 
to  some  far-off  end,  with  whose  destiny 
his  own  is  inseparably  joined. 


in 

Lcelius:  What  do  you  say  to  the  phys- 
ical weakness  of  Old  Age?  Surely  the 
lack  of  physical  vigor  is  a  disadvantage. 

Cato:  It  is  true,  Laelius,  that  Old 
Age  fences  in  a  man's  activities.  We 
old  men  are  no  longer  free  to  roam  and 
amuse,  or  bore,  ourselves  with  random 
interests.  Our  bounds  are  set.  But 
with  the  diminishing  of  space  comes 
what  may  well  be  a  more  than  corre- 
sponding intensity  of  interest.  The 
need  of  boundlessness  is  one  of  the  illu- 
sions of  youth;  it  is  a  consequence  of 
youth's  instability,  of  its  unwillingness 
to  hold  its  attention  fixed.  The  tether 
of  Old  Age  obliges  us  to  fix  our  atten- 
tion; and  no  matter  on  what  our  at- 
tention is  fixed,  we  can  find  there  con- 
centrated the  essential  truths  of  the 
universe.  The  adjectives  great  and 
small  are  not  God's  words;  they  mark 
our  inability  to  throw  aside  our  ego- 
ism even  for  a  moment. 

The  Japanese  general  who  has  slain 
his  tens  of  thousands  on  the  plains  of 
Manchuria,  squats  on  his  hams  and 
contemplates  the  infinite  beauties  in 
the  iris,  as  the  sunshine  flatters  it,  or  the 
breeze  bellies  out  the  wrinkled  petals 
of  its  corolla.  Its  purple  deepens,  its 
white  emulates  the  radiance  of  morn- 
ing, its  velvet  texture  outdoes  the  royal 
couch  of  fairyland,  its  pistil  displays 
all  the  marvel  of  maternity,  its  labo- 
rious root  performs  its  appointed  task 
with  the  faithfulness  of  ministering 
angels.  The  armies  of  Russia  and 


Japan  could  not  tell  as  much  concern- 
ing the  history  of  the  universe  as  does 
this  solitary  iris.  A  garden  that  will 
hold  a  lilac  bush,  a  patch  of  mignonette, 
'a  dozen  hollyhocks,  or  a  few  peonies, 
is  enough  to  occupy  a  Diocletian.  A 
square  yard  of  vetch  will  reveal  the 
most  profound  secrets  of  our  destiny; 
the  fermentation  of  a  cup  of  wine  dis- 
closes enough  to  make  a  man  famous 
for  centuries;  the  disease  of  a  silkworm 
will  determine  the  well-being  of  a  king- 
dom; the  denizens  in  a  drop  of  blood 
cause  half  the  sufferings  of  humanity. 
The  achievements  of  modern  science 
merely  confirm  the  intuitions  of  Old 
Age.  Littleness  is  as  full  of  interest  as 
bigness. 

Youth  has  a  longing  for  Sinai  heights, 
for  the  virgin  tops  of  the  Himalayas, 
and  the  company  of  deep-breathing 
mountaineers;  this  is  because  he  can- 
not see  the  wonder  in  common  things. 
Blindly  impatient  with  what  he  has, 
blindly  discontented  with  what  is 
about  him,  he  postulates  the  beautiful, 
the  real,  the  true,  in  the  unattainable. 
But  Old  Age  delights  in  what  is  near 
at  hand,  it  sees  that  nothing  is  cut  off 
from  the  poetry  of  the  universe,  that 
the  littlest  things  throb  with  the  same 
spirit  that  animates  our  hearts,  that 
the  word  common  is  a  mere  subterfuge 
of  ignorance. 

Lodius :  If  I  conceive  your  meaning 
aright,  Cato,  Old  Age  is,  through 
greater  understanding,  nearer  the  truth 
than  Youth. 

Cato:  Yes,  Age  understands  that 
such  revelation  as  may  be  vouchsafed 
to  man  concerning  the  working  of  the 
will  of  the  Gods  needs  not  be  sought  on 
MountSinai,  but  in  whatever  spot  man 
is.  Earth,  the  waters,  the  air,  and  all 
the  starry  space,  are  waiting  to  com- 
municate the  secrets  of  the  Gods  to  the 
understanding  of  man.  Many  secrets 
they  will  reveal;  and  many,  perhaps, 
they  will  never  disclose. 


DE  SENECTUTE 


167 


IV 


Scipio:  Excuse  me,  Cato,  but  are 
you  not,  in  substance,  claiming  the  ad- 
vantages of  religion,  and  is  not  religion 
as  open  to  Youth  as  to  Old  Age? 

Cato:  By  no  means,  Scipio;  Old  Age 
is  more  religious  than  Youth.  I  do  not 
speak  of  the  emotional  crises  that  come 
upon  young  men  and  young  women  in 
early  youth;  those  crises  seem  too 
closely  related  to  physical  growth  and 
development  to  be  religious  in  the 
same  sense  in  which  Old  Age  is  reli- 
gious. That  the  emotional  crises  of 
Youth  may  bear  as  truthful  witness  to 
the  realities  of  the  universe  as  the  tem- 
perate religion  of  Old  Age,  I  do  not 
deny.  The  God  that  Youth  sees  by 
the  light  of  its  emotional  fires  may  be 
the  real  God,  but  that  image  of  God  is 
transitory,  it  appears  in  fire  and  too 
often  disappears  in  smoke.  The  image 
of  God  that  appears  to  Old  Age  is  a 
more  abiding  image;  it  reveals  itself 
to  experience  and  to  reason  instead  of 
to  the  sudden  and  brief  conviction  of 
vision.  Old  Age  finds  God  more  in  its 
own  image,  calm,  infinitely  patient,  not 
revealed  merely  by  the  vibrant  intens- 
ity of  passion,  but  in  the  familiar  and 
the  commonplace.  To  Old  Age  the 
common  things  of  life  declare  the  glory 
of  God. 

Common  things  affect  different 
minds  differently;  yet  to  most  minds 
certain  familiar  phenomena  stand  out 
conspicuous  as  matter  for  reflection. 
Most  extraordinary  of  all  common 
things  is  human  love.  Throughout  the 
universe  of  the  stellar  sky  and  the  uni- 
verse of  the  infinitely  little,  so  far  as  we 
can  see,  there  is  perpetual  movement, 
change,  readjustment;  everywhere  are 
velocities,  potencies,  forces  pushing 
other  forces,  forces  holding  other  forces 
in  check,  energies  in  furious  career, 
energies  in  dead-lock,  but  always, 
everywhere,  energy  in  travail.  And, 


apart  from  our  animal  life,  the  whole 
machinery  whirls  along  without  a 
throb  of  emotion,  without  a  touch  of 
affection.  Why  should  not  men  have 
been  mechanical,  swept  into  being  and 
borne  onward,  by  the  same  energies, 
in  the  same  iron-bound  way?  Even  if 
consciousness,  unfolding  out  of  the 
potential  chaos  that  preceded  man,  was 
able  to  wheedle  an  existence  from  Ne- 
cessity, why  was  it  expedient  to  add 
love?  Would  not  mechanical  means 
serve  the  determined  ends  of  human 
life,  and  impel  us  to  this  action  and  to 
that,  without  the  need  of  human  affec- 
tion? Human  affection  is  surely  a  very 
curious  and  interesting  device. 

And  if  the  world  must  be  peopled, 
and  the  brute  law  of  propagation  be 
adopted  in  a  universe  of  chemistry  and 
physics,  why  was  it  necessary  to  cover 
it  with  visions  of  'love  and  of  honor 
that  cannot  die,'  and  to  render  the 
common  man  for  the  moment  worthy 
of  an  infinite  destiny? 

Then  there  is  also  the  perplexity  of 
beauty.  Why  to  creatures  whose  every 
footstep  is  determined  by  the  propul- 
sions of  the  past,  should  a  flower,  a  tuft 
of  grass,  a  passing  cloud,  a  bare  tree 
that  lifts  the  tracery  of  its  branches 
against  a  sunset  sky,  cause  such  de- 
light? Descended  from  an  ancestry 
that  needed  no  lure  of  beautiful  sight 
or  of  pleasant  sound  to  induce  it  to  live 
its  appointed  life,  why  should  mankind 
become  so  capriciously  sensitive? 

Or  consider  human  happiness.  Here, 
for  example,  I  live,  in  this  little  cottage 
that  seems  to  have  alighted,  like  a  bird, 
on  the  slope  of  this  gentle  hill.  Red  and 
white  peonies  grow  before  the  door, 
enriching  the  air  with  their  fragrance. 
They  charm  both  me  and  the  bees.  In 
yonder  bush  beside  the  door  a  chipping- 
sparrow  sits  upon  her  nest;  and  in  the 
swinging  branch  of  the  elm  tree  over- 
head two  orioles  rear  their  brood,  and 
as  they  flash  by,  their  golden  colors 


168 


DE  SENECTUTE 


delight  the  human  beings  that  watch 
them.  Look  over  that  stone  wall,  and 
mark  how  its  flat  line  gives  an  incom- 
parable effect  to  the  landscape.  See 
our  New  England  fields  dotted  with 
New  England  elms;  and  far  beyond 
see  those  white-sailed  schooners  scud 
before  the  boisterous  wind.  The  farm- 
er's boy,  who  fetches  milk  and  eggs, 
left  me  that  nosegay  of  wild  flowers. 
Look!  Look!  See  how  the  whiteness  of 
that  cloud  glorifies  the  blue  of  the  sky. 
Is  it  not  strange  that  all  these  things, 
that  go  about  their  own  business, 
should,  by  the  way,  perform  a  work  of 
supererogation  and  give  us  so  much 
unnecessary  pleasure? 

The  young  do  not  see  or  do  not  heed 
these  common  things;  they  are  busy 
with  their  own  emotions.  Youth  is  a 
time  of  tyrannical  demands  upon  the 
universe.  It  expects  a  perpetual  ban- 
quet of  happiness,  and  at  the  first  dis- 
illusion charges  the  universe  with  false- 
hood and  ingratitude.  It  no  sooner 
discovers  that  all  creation  is  not  hur- 
rying to  gratify  its  impulses,  than  it 
cries  out  that  all  creation  is  a  hideous 
thing.  It  arraigns  the  universe;  it 
draws  up  an  indictment  of  countless 
crimes.  The  long  past  becomes  one 
bloody  tragedy.  Dragons  of  the  prime 
rend  one  another,  creature  preys  upon 
creature,  all  things  live  at  the  expense 
of  others,  and  death  is  the  one  reality. 
All  the  records  of  the  earth  tell  a  tale  of 
bloody,  bestial  cruelty.  The  globe  is 
growing  cold;  man  shall  perish  utterly, 
all  his  high  hopes,  all  his  good  deeds, 
all  his  prayers,  all  his  love,  shall  be- 
come as  if  they  had  never  been.  And 
Youth,  because  the  universe  for  a  mo- 
ment seems  to  neglect  it,  in  a  Prome- 
thean ecstasy  defies  the  powers  that 
be. 

But  Old  Age,  rendered  wiser  by  the 
mellowing  years,  concerns  itself  less 
with  the  records  of  paleontology  and 
the  uttermost  parts  of  the  universe, 


than  with  matters  at  closer  range  and 
more  within  its  comprehension.  It 
fixes  its  eye  less  on  death  than  on  life. 
It  considers  the  phenomena  of  love,  of 
beauty,  of  happiness,  and  the  factors 
that  have  wrought  them,  and  its 
thoughts  "  trace  back  the  long,  long 
sequence  of  causes  that  lie  behind  each 
contributing  factor;  they  follow  them 
back  through  recorded  time,  back 
through  the  ages  of  primitive  man, 
through  the  dim  times  of  the  first  stir- 
rings of  organic  life,  through  vast  geo- 
logical periods,  back  to  chaos  and  old 
night.  They  follow  each  contributory 
factor  out  through  the  universe,  to  the 
uttermost  reaches  of  space,  beyond  the 
boundaries  of  perception;  and  every- 
where they  find  those  contributory 
causes  steadily  proceeding  on  their 
several  ways  through  the  vast  stretches 
of  space  and  time,  and  combining  with 
other  factors  from  other  dark  recesses 
of  the  unknown,  in  order,  at  last,  to 
produce  love,  beauty,  happinesfe,  for 
such  as  you  and  me.  Consider,  you 
young  men,  who  pass  these  miracles 
by  as  lightly  as  you  breathe,  this 
marvelous  privilege  of  life,  the  infin- 
ite toil  and  patience  that  has  made  it 
what  it  is,  and  then,  if  you  dare,  call 
the  power  that  animates  the  universe 
cruel. 


Sdpio:  I  perceive,  Cato,  that  you 
believe  in  a  God,  a  God  in  sympathy 
with  man,  and  I  grant  —  Lselius,  too, 
will  grant  —  that  such  a  belief,  if  a 
characteristic  of  Old  Age,  does  indeed 
give  Old  Age  one  great  advantage  over 
Youth. 

Cato:  No,  I  cannot  claim  that  a  belief 
in  God  is  a  necessary  accompaniment 
of  Old  Age,  but  I  think  that  Old  Age 
is  far  more  likely  than  Youth  to  dwell 
upon  the  considerations  that  fit  in  with 
such  a  belief. 

To  Youth  all  the  energy  of  the  uni- 


DE  SENECTUTE 


169 


verse  is  inexplicable,  the  things  we  be- 
hold are  the  products  of  blind  forces; 
but  to  Old  Age  the  essential  element 
in  the  universe  is  the  potential  charac- 
ter of  its  infinitely  little  constituent 
parts.  Out  of  the  dust  came  the  human 
eye,  up  from  the  happy  combination  of 
the  nervous  system  came  the  human 
mind,  and  with  the  passage  of  time  has 
come  the  new  organic  whole,  human- 
ity. Do  not  these  phenomena  hint  at  a 
divine  element  in  the  potential  ener- 
gies of  the  universe?  What  is  all  this 
motion  and  turmoil,  all  the  ceaseless 
turnings  and  tossings  of  creation,  but 
restless  discontent  and  an  endeavor  to 
produce  a  higher  order?  Our  human 
love,  beauty,  and  happiness  are  less  to 
be  explained  by  what  has  gone  before 
than  by  what  is  to  come.  You  cannot 
explain  the  first  streaks  of  dawn  by 
the  darkness  of  the  night.  All  the 
processes  of  change  —  gases,  vapors, 
germs,  human  souls  —  are  the  per- 
turbations of  aspiration.  This  vibrant 
universe  is  struggling  in  the  throes  of 
birth.  As  out  of  the  dust  has  come  the 
human  soul,  so  out  of  the  universe 
shall  come  a  divine  soul.  God  is  to  be 
the  last  fruits  of  creation.  Out  of  chaos 
He  is  evolving. 

You  would  laugh  at  me,  Scipio,  if  it 
were  not  for  your  good  manners.  Wait 
and  learn.  Belief  in  deity  is,  in  a  meas- 
ure, the  privilege  of  us  old  men.  Age 
has  lost  the  physical  powers  of  Youth, 
and  no  one  will  dispute  that  the  loss  is 
great,  but  that  loss  predisposes  men 
to  the  acceptance  of  religious  beliefs. 
Physical  powers,  of  themselves,  imply 
an  excessive  belief  in  the  physical  uni- 
verse; muscles  and  nerves,  in  contact 
with  unyielding  things,  exaggerate  the 
importance  of  the  physical  world. 
Throughout  the  period  of  physical 


vigor  the  material  world  is  a  matter  of 
prime  consequence;  but  to  an  old  man 
the  physical  world  loses  its  tyrannical 
authority.  The  world  of  thought  and 
the  world  of  affection  rise  up  and  sur- 
pass in  interest  the  physical  world.  In 
these  worlds  the  presence  of  God  is 
more  clearly  discernible  than  in  the 
material  world;  but  if  He  is  in  them, 
He  will  surely  come  into  the  material 
world. 

Even  now,  here  and  there,  his  glory  is 
visible.  A  mother,  at  least,  cannot  be- 
lieve that  the  throbs  of  her  heart  over 
her  sick  child  are  of  no  greater  signi- 
ficance than  the  dropping  of  water  or 
the  formation  of  a  crystal.  The  pre- 
sence of  deity  has  reached  her  heart; 
in  course  of  time,  it  will  also  reach  the 
water  and  the  crystal.  If  matter  of 
itself  has  produced  the  passion  of  hu- 
man love,  it  surely  may  be  said,  with- 
out presumption,  to  be  charged  with 
potential  divinity. 

Old  Age  cares  less  and  less  for  the 
physical  world;  it  lives  more  and  more 
in  the  worlds  of  thought  and  of  affec- 
tion. It  does  not  envy  Youth,  that 
lives  so  bound  and  confined  by  things 
physical.  But  you  have  been  very 
patient.  Make  my  compliments  to 
your  families,  and  perhaps  in  part  to 
Harvard  College,  on  your  good  man- 
ners, and  remember  when  you,  too, 
shall  be  old,  to  have  the  same  gentle 
patience  with  Youth  that  you  now 
have  with  Old  Age. 

Scipio:  Thank  you,  Cato.  If  we  are 
not  convinced,  we  desire  to  be. 

Lodius:  Yes,  indeed,  we  now  doubt 
that  those  whom  the  Gods  love  die 
young. 

Cato:  You  must  hurry  or  you  will 
miss  your  train.  Good-bye. 


THE  FARMER  AND  FINANCE 


BY   MYRON  T.   HERRICK 


THE  importance  of  agriculture  as  an 
economic  and  social  factor  is  not  a 
newly  discovered  fact.  As  long  ago  as 
1859,  in  a  speech  before  the  Wisconsin 
Agricultural  Society,  Abraham  Lin- 
coln said,  'Population  must  increase 
rapidly,  more  rapidly  than  in  former 
times,  and  ere  long  the  most  valuable 
of  all  arts  will  be  the  art  of  deriving  a 
comfortable  subsistence  from  the  small- 
est area  of  soil.  No  community  whose 
every  member  possesses  this  art  can 
ever  be  the  victim  of  oppression  in  any 
of  its  forms.  Such  community  will  be 
alike  independent  of  crowned  kings, 
money  kings,  and  land  kings/ 

Unfortunately,  perhaps,  the  truth 
contained  in  Lincoln's  words  was  not 
sufficiently  well-appreciated  to  modify 
the  course  of  the  economic  develop- 
ment of  the  country.  Nations,  like 
individuals,  are  accustomed  to  regard 
lightly  those  things  that  are  easily 
acquired.  Conditions  in  this  country 
always  have  been  so  favorable  to  agri- 
culture that  it  has  been  accepted  as  an 
industry  needing  little  encouragement. 
On  the  other  hand,  manufacturing  and 
commerce  did  not  seem  to  possess  the 
inherent  qualities  of  self-development, 
and,  as  a  result,  the  economic  policy 
of  the  country  has  been  consciously 
framed  to  build  up  these  industries,  — 
not  exactly  at  the  expense  of  agricult- 
ure, but  at  least  with  the  consequence 
of  diverting  the  attention  of  the  people 
from  the  danger  of  neglecting  farming 
interests.  Consequently,  the  industry 
of  cultivating  the  soil  has  been  left  to 
develop  along  the  lines  of  least  re- 
170 


sistance,  —  that  of  seizing  temporary 
profits,  without  regard  to  future  possi- 
bilities. The  complaisant  indifference 
with  which  agricultural  development 
has  been  regarded,  has  had  its  logical 
result.  Agriculture  has  failed  to  pro- 
gress with  anywhere  near  the  rapidity 
with  which  the  population  of  the  coun- 
try and  the  demand  for  food-products 
have  increased. 

From  1900  to  1910  the  population 
of  the  United  States  increased  twenty- 
one  per  cent;  during  the  same  period 
the  number  of  farms  increased  only 
ten  and  five  tenths  per  cent;  which 
indicates  that,  in  the  ten  years,  rural 
population  increased  about  one-half  as 
much  as  the  total  population.  In  1909 
the  per-capita  production  of  cereals 
was  only  forty-nine  and  one  tenth 
bushels;  in  1899  it  was  fifty-eight  and 
four  tenths,  —  a  decrease  of  nine  bush- 
els per  head  in  ten  years.  Between 
1899  and  1909  the  aggregate  produc- 
tion of  cereals  increased  only  one  and 
seven  tenths  per  cent,  but  their  market 
value  was  higher  by  seventy-nine  and 
eight  tenths  per  cent  in  1909  than  in 
1899,  —  the  increase  in  price  being 
forty-seven  times  the  increase  in  quan- 
tity. In  1900  there  was  one  farm  for 
every  thirteen  and  two  tenths  persons ; 
in  1910  there  was  one  farm  for  every 
fourteen  and  five  tenths  persons.  On 
the  average,  therefore,  each  farm  now 
has  to  furnish  food  for  more  than  one 
more  person  than  in  1900.  In  1900, 
there  were  five  and  five  tenths  acres  of 
improved  farm  land  per  capita  of  popu- 
lation; by  1910  the  per-capita  improved 


THE  FARMER  AND  FINANCE 


171 


acreage  had  declined  to  five  and  two 
tenths  acres. 

These  figures  make  it  clear  why  the 
exports  of  food-stuffs  in  crude  condi- 
tion, and  food  animals,  have  decreased 
from  $227,300,000,  or  16.59  per  cent 
of  the  total  exports,  for  the  fiscal  year 
of  1900,  to  $99,900,000,  or  only  4.6  per 
cent  of  the  total  for  the  fiscal  year  of 
1912;  and  why  similar  imports  have 
increased  from  $68,700,000  in  1900,  to 
$180,120,000  in  1912.  Of  course  the 
splendid  crops  of  this  year  will,  for 
the  time  being,  alter  the  tendency  of 
imports  of  food-stuffs  to  increase  and 
of  exports  to  decrease,  but  unfortu- 
nately experience  indicates  that  an- 
other bumper  crop  is  not  likely  for 
several  years.  Regardless  of  other  in- 
fluences the  increasing  disparity  be- 
tween the  supply  of  and  demand  for 
food-stuffs,  as  shown  by  the  foregoing 
data,  would  seem  almost  to  furnish  an 
adequate  explanation  of  the  fact  that 
on  October  1, 1912,  Bradstreet's  index 
number  of  prices  made  a  new  high 
record  of  $9.4515. 

Surprising  as  it  may  seem,  it  is  with- 
in the  last  few  years  that  the  people  of 
the  United  States  have  recognized  the 
danger  that  lies  in  the  increasing  prices 
of  food.  The  uneasiness  with  which  the 
rise  in  the  prices  of  necessities  is  now 
regarded  is  amply  justified,  for  if  there 
is  a  further  considerable  advance,  a 
lowering  of  the  standard  of  living  of  a 
great  number  of  the  American  people, 
with  its  certain  inimical  consequences 
to  the  quality  of  our  citizenship,  is 
bound  to  occur.  It  is  largely  the  ap- 
prehension of  this  possibility  that  has 
impelled  the  national  government,  the 
states,  various  associations  and  indi- 
viduals, to  undertake  the  promotion 
of  scientific  farming,  to  the  end  that 
the  output  of  the  farms  of  this  country 
may  be  raised  to  a  maximum  consist- 
ent with  economic  production  and  the 
conservation  of  the  vital  qualities  of 


the  soil.  Educational  activity  of  this 
sort  is  excellent  and  necessary,  and 
should,  if  possible,  be  continued  with 
greater  enthusiasm.  However,  agricult- 
ure is  similar  to  other  industries  in 
that  knowledge  alone  is  not  sufficient 
for  success.  Like  those  engaged  in 
other  kinds  of  business,  farmers  must 
have  capital,  in  addition  to  knowledge 
and  skill,  and  it  is  highly  important 
that  they  obtain  the  capital  they  need 
on  terms  consistent  with  their  credit. 

What  is  being  done  to  promote  bet- 
ter farming,  through  education  and  the 
establishment  of  land-  and  agricultural- 
credit  institutions,  is  due  to  the  great 
importance  of  the  industry,  and  not  to 
any  lack  of  intelligence  on  the  part  of 
the  farmers  themselves.  There  is  no 
more  reason  to  assume  that  farmers 
are  incapable  of,  or  indifferent  to,  pro- 
gress than  there  is  to  assume  that 
bankers  are  deficient  because  they 
operate  under  a  faulty  and  inadequate 
banking  system.  The  farmers  of  the 
United  States  are  the  intellectual  su- 
periors of  the  farmers  in  any  other 
country  in  the  world,  and,  with  equal 
facilities,  they  will  set  the  pace  in  sci- 
entific agriculture. 

A  superficial  knowledge  of  agricult- 
ural conditions  in  the  United  States  is 
all  that  is  necessary  to  understand  that 
the  particular  pressing  need  of  Amer- 
ican farmers  is  financial  machinery 
whereby  the  potential  credit  that  they 
possess  in  abundance  can  be  made 
negotiable.  There  is  in  this  country  a 
serious  lack  of  financial  institutions 
suited  to  supply  farmers  with  funds. 
In  this  respect  the  United  States  is  the 
most  backward  of  any  of  the  important 
nations  of  the  world,  and,  consequent- 
ly, it  is  safe  to  say  that  this  is  the  prime 
reason  why  this  country  is  so  far  be- 
hind many  other  countries  in  the  per- 
acre  production  of  food-stuffs.  The 
average  yield  of  grain  in  the  United 
States  is  about  fifty  per  cent  less  than 


172 


THE  FARMER  AND  FINANCE 


it  is  on  the  continent  of  Europe,  and 
the  average  per-acre  yield  of  potatoes  is 
not  more  than  thirty  per  cent  of  what  it 
is  in  Germany.  The  most  striking  and 
important  difference  between  farming 
conditions  here  and  in  many  European 
countries,  is  that  there  farmers  can 
readily  obtain  the  funds  they  need, 
whereas  in  this  country  agricultural 
financing  is  difficult  and  costly. 

In  its  capital  requirements,  farming 
is  not  unlike  other  industries,  and  it 
is  like  other  industries  in  that  unless 
these  capital  requirements  are  sup- 
plied, progress  will  be  slow  and  dubi- 
ous. Like  the  merchant  and  the  manu- 
facturer, the  farmer  needs  funds :  first, 
for  the  purchase  of  property  and  for  its 
permanent  improvement;  and  second, 
for  temporary  purposes,  —  such  as 
financing  crops.  These  two  general 
divisions  of  agricultural  capital  re- 
quirements should  be  preserved  in  the 
nature  of  the  loans  that  are  made  to 
secure  funds.  Each  of  these  two  divi- 
sions can  and  should  support  its  own 
credit,  known  respectively  as  land 
credit  and  agricultural  credit.  For  the 
purpose  of  buying  land  and  making 
permanent  improvements,  farmers 
should  be  able  to  make  mortgage  loans 
which  have  a  long  time  to  run,  and 
which  they  can  gradually  repay  by 
small  yearly  installments.  Money  in- 
vested in  land  or  permanent  improve- 
ments becomes  fixed  capital,  and  the 
proportion  of  a  farmer's  income  that 
can  be  attributed  to  this  sort  of  cap- 
ital is  so  limited  that  it  is  illogical  and 
unreasonable  to  expect  the  money  so 
invested  to  be  repaid  except  after  a 
considerable  period  of  years.  The 
maximum  length  of  a  farm  loan  in  this 
country  is  from  three  to  five  years,  and, 
at  the  end  of  that  time,  it  may  or  may 
not  be  possible  to  secure  a  renewal.  As 
a  rule,  a  farm-mortgage  loan  here  has 
a  very  restricted  market,  and,  conse- 
quently, the  borrower  frequently  is 


obliged  to  pay  an  unreasonable  rate  of 
interest,  and  to  submit  to  burdensome 
conditions  from  which  the  nature  of 
the  security  he  has  to  offer  entitles  him 
to  be  exempt. 

Until  some  way  is  provided  by  which 
farm  mortgages  can  be  made  the  basis 
of  a  long-time  security,  with  the  mark- 
etable qualities  of  a  railroad  or  indus- 
trial bond,  and  which  can  be  sold  at 
a  price  very  nearly  determined  by  the 
soundness  of  the  security,  the  farmers 
of  this  country  will  continue  to  be 
burdened  by  the  terms  they  must  ac- 
cept in  making  mortgage  loans.  That 
it  is  possible  to  create  a  security  of 
this  sort  is  shown  by  the  success  of 
the  mortgage-loan  companies  and  asso- 
ciations of  foreign  countries,  whose 
obligations  sell  on  a  basis  as  favorable 
as  that  of  bonds  of  the  most  successful 
railroad  and  industrial  corporations. 
The  farmers  of  the  United  States  have 
as  good  a  claim  to  cheap  money  as  have 
railroad  and  industrial  corporations, 
because  farm  land  constitutes  as  good 
security  as  a  railroad  or  a  factory.  The 
marvelous  and  rapid  development  of 
the  railroads  of  the  country,  to  a  very 
large  extent,  is  due  to  the  low  cost  at 
which  they  have  been  able  to  obtain 
vast  sums  of  money  for  purposes  of 
development.  There  is  absolutely  no 
reason  why  just  as  cheap  money  should 
not  be  similarly  available  for  the  accel- 
eration of  agricultural  development. 

For  the  financing  of  temporary  cap- 
ital requirements,  the  personal  credit  of 
farmers  should  be  made  available.  A 
farmer  should  not  be  obliged  to  mort- 
gage his  land  to  obtain  funds  to  operate 
his  property.  As  in  the  case  of  mort- 
gage loans,  the  facilities  in  this  country 
for  making  negotiable  the  personal 
credit  of  farmers  are  inadequate. 
There  is  no  reason  why  the  industrious, 
capable  farmer  should  not  be  able  to 
borrow  on  his  personal  obligation  as 
easily  as  does  the  merchant.  A  few 


THE  FARMER  AND  FINANCE 


173 


American  farmers  do  a  banking  busi- 
ness on  a  scale  sufficiently  large  to 
make  them  desirable  clients  of  local, 
state,  and  national  banks,  but,  for  the 
great  majority,  it  is  exceedingly  diffi- 
cult, if  not  impossible,  to  secure  the 
personal  credit  accommodation  they 
need,  and  to  which  their  responsibility 
entitles  them. 

The  success  of  foreign  rural  cooper- 
ative banking  associations  in  reducing 
the  rate  of  interest  on  loans  to  farmers, 
and  the  almost  negligible  amount  that 
has  been  lost  through  the  operations 
of  these  associations,  clearly  indicates 
that  the  high  rate  of  interest  that  farm- 
ers in  this  country  must  pay,  is  due, 
not  to  any  inherent  weakness  in  their 
credit,  but  to  the  lack  of  properly  or- 
ganized facilities  for  making  their  credit 
negotiable.  The  lack  of  agricultural 
banking  facilities  is  a  tremendous  hard- 
ship for  the  farmers.  It  means  that 
they  are  laboring  under  a  handicap 
which  those  engaged  in  no  other  kind 
of  industry  have  to  bear.  Under  pre- 
sent arrangements,  farmers  are  paying 
two,  two  and  a  half,  and  three  per  cent 
more  for  money  than  they  should. 
Upon  the  enormous  amount  of  bor- 
rowed funds  that  the  farmers  of  this 
country  are  obliged  to  employ,  the 
excessive  interest  amounts  to  a  sum  so 
large  that  if  it  could  be  saved  and  ex- 
pended in  increasing  the  productivity 
of  our  farms,  it  would  do  much  toward 
solving  the  problem  of  inadequate 
crops. 

Fortunately,  in  the  attempt  to  estab- 
lish banking  facilities  for  the  farmers  of 
the  United  States,  it  is  not  necessary  to 
work  in  the  dark.  Many  of  the  farm- 
credit  institutions  of  other  countries 
are  established  on  principles  so  broad 
and  sound  that,  with  some  modifica- 
tions, they  can  be  adapted  to  conditions 
in  this  country.  It  is  important,  there- 
fore, to  know  all  we  can  of  foreign  land- 
and  agricultural-credit  institutions. 


Germany  is,  perhaps,  the  country 
where  agriculture  is  the  most  thor- 
oughly and  most  intelligently  organ- 
ized. There  are  organizations  in  Ger- 
many for  the  purpose  of  supplying 
farmers  with  capital,  and  organizations 
for  carrying  on  nearly  all  of  the  opera- 
tions connected  with  the  cultivation  of 
the  soil  —  all  owned  and  managed  by 
the  farmers  themselves.  These  organ- 
izations have  revolutionized  agricult- 
ural conditions  in  Germany.  They 
not  only  have  been  the  means  of  im- 
mensely increasing  the  productivity  of 
the  farms,  but  have  also  wonderfully 
improved  the  economic  and  social 
status  of  the  farmers  themselves.  The 
first  kind  of  agricultural  cooperative 
organization  started  in  Germany  was 
for  credit  or  banking  purposes,  and  the 
entire  fabric  of  agricultural  cooperation 
in  Germany  now  rests  on  its  elaborate 
and  efficient  system  of  credit  societies. 
Consequently  it  is  reasonable  to  assume 
that  these  credit  societies  are  respon- 
sible for  the  advanced  condition  of 
agriculture.  Agricultural  credit  in  Ger- 
many is  based  on  the  principles  of  self- 
help  and  cooperation. 

In  those  European  countries  where 
land-  and  agricultural-credit  facilities 
are  the  most  complete,  as  a  rule,  long- 
time mortgage  loans  and  short-time 
personal  loans  are  made  by  different 
institutions  organized  along  different 
lines.  Of  the  two  kinds  of  credit  insti- 
tutions, perhaps  the  most  successful 
and  efficient  are  the  Raiffeisen  banks 
in  Germany  and  the  Credit  Foncier  in 
France.  These  two  institutions  differ 
in  many  essential  particulars.  A  Raif- 
feisen bank  is  a  mutual  association,  the 
Credit  Foncier  is  an  incorporated  com- 
pany; the  Raiffeisen  banks  loan  for  the 
most  part  on  personal  obligations,  the 
Credit  Foncier  on  first  mortgages;  the 
Raiffeisen  banks  secure  most  of  their 
funds  through  the  deposits  of  the  farm- 
ers themselves,  the  Credit  Foncier, 


174 


THE  FARMER  AND  FINANCE 


through  the  debenture  bonds  that  it 
issues,  obtains  funds  for  its  loans  from 
the  conservative  investors  of  all  classes. 
It  is  because  of  these  and  other  charac- 
teristic differences,  and  by  reason  of 
the  wonderful  success  of  these  two  in- 
stitutions, that  a  knowledge  of  how 
the  Raiffeisen  banks  and  the  Credit 
Foncier  operate,  and  what  they  have 
accomplished,  is  peculiarly  illuminat- 
ing and  profitable.  Each  of  these  two 
types  of  credit  organizations  possesses 
many  features  well  adapted  for  sys- 
tems of  farm-credit  institutions  in  this 
country. 

The  Raiffeisen  banking  system  was 
founded  by  Frederick  William  Raiffei- 
sen primarily  for  the  purpose  of  freeing 
small  farmers  from  the  exactions  of 
usurers.  Raiffeisen  knew  nothing  of 
finance,  but  he  did  understand  the 
needs  of  those  who,  under  the  most  dis- 
couraging circumstances,  were  bravely 
trying  to  gain  a  living  from  the  soil  — 
a  class  among  whom  credit  was  the 
particular  and  essential  thing  lacking. 
Sir  Horace  Plunkett,  who  has  done  so 
much  for  the  agricultural  development 
of  Ireland,  has  said  that  the  establish- 
ment of  the  Raiffeisen  banks  was  sec- 
ond in  economic  importance  only  to 
the  discovery  of  steam. 

The  Raiffeisen  banking  system  is 
based  on  the  principle  of  combining 
borrowers,  to  the  end  that  by  associa- 
tion they  may  secure  credit  facilities 
which,  as  individuals,  it  would  be  im- 
possible for  them  to  obtain.  The  fun- 
damental provisions  of  the  Raiffeisen 
banks,  as  contemplated  by  Herr  Raif- 
feisen, were  those  of  gratuitous  manage- 
ment, unlimited  liability  of  members, 
and  a  strictly  local  field  of  operation. 
For  the  most  part  the  Raiffeisen  banks 
adhere  to  those  provisions.  The  mem- 
bership of  the  banks  is  made  up  al- 
most exclusively  of  farmers.  In  1909 
the  number  of  members  for  each  bank 
averaged  92.  In  the  beginning  the 


Raiffeisen  banks  had  no  capital  stock, 
but  in  1876  a  law  was  passed  which 
made  it  necessary  for  them  to  issue 
shares  of  stock.  The  value  of  the  shares 
was  fixed  at  what  was  little  more  than 
a  nominal  amount.  In  1909  the  aver- 
age paid-up  capital  per  member  was 
only  19  marks.  The  dividends  that  the 
Raiffeisen  banks  can  pay  are  strictly 
limited  —  in  no  event  can  they  exceed 
the  rate  of  interest  charged  on  loans. 
In  1909  these  banks  made  a  net  profit 
in  excess  of  7,000,000  marks,  but  of  this 
only  13  per  cent  was  paid  out  in  divi- 
dends —  the  balance  being  passed  to 
the  credit  of  the  reserve  fund.  Because 
of  the  nature  of  its  business  the  sphere 
of  operation  of  each  bank  is  very  lim- 
ited. It  is  necessary  for  the  members 
to  know  each  other,  and  to  know  for 
what  purpose  each  loan  is  made,  and 
to  see  that  the  money  is  so  used.  The 
Raiffeisen  banks  have  done  much  to 
encourage  thrift,  because  they  have 
supplied  a  new  incentive  for  saving. 
Inasmuch  as  the  successful  manage- 
ment of  these  banks  requires  a  keen 
sense  of  responsibility  on  the  part  of 
the  individual  members,  their  moral 
effect  is  very  considerable.  Through 
their  membership  in  the  Raiffeisen 
banks  many  German  farmers  have  be- 
come familiar  with  the  nature  and  uses 
of  credit  and  have  acquired  a  know- 
ledge of  business.  Altogether,  these 
small  rural  banks  have  much  improved 
the  financial  position  and  the  moral 
and  intellectual  calibre  of  their  mem- 
bers. 

Because  of  its  small  size  and  restrict- 
ed field  of  operation,  the  management 
of  a  Raiffeisen  bank  is  very  simple  and 
inexpensive.  In  1909,  the  average  cost 
of  management  per  bank  was  only  638 
marks.  The  funds  that  the  banks  have 
to  loan  to  their  members  are  made  up 
of  the  proceeds  of  the  sale  of  capital 
stock,  the  reserve  accumulated  from 
profits,  deposits,  —  both  savings  and 


THE  FARMER  AND  FINANCE 


175 


current  account,  —  and  loans  from  the 
central  cooperative  banks,  from  other 
banks,  and  from  individuals.  In  1909, 
88  per  cent  of  these  funds  consisted  of 
the  deposits  of  the  farmers  themselves. 
The  size  of  the  average  deposit  is  about 
$370. 

The  loans  which  these  banks  make 
are  either  on  current  account  —  a 
form  of  over-draft  often  used  by  Eu- 
ropean banks  —  or  for  fixed  periods. 
There  is  a  tendency  to  extend  the  prac- 
tice of  making  loans  on  current  ac- 
count, as  that  seems  to  be  the  form 
best  suited  for  members.  As  a  rule  the 
loans  made  by  the  RaifFeisen  banks  are 
for  a  short  period  —  usually  for  one 
year,  with  a  maximum  of  five.  For  the 
most  part  the  loans  are  granted  on  the 
personal  obligations  of  the  borrowers, 
to  which  usually  is  added  the  guaranty 
of  one  or  two  associate  members.  Occa- 
sionally loans  are  secured  by  deposit  of 
collateral,  or  by  mortgages.  The  aver- 
age loan  of  the  Raiffeisen  banks  in  Ger- 
many is  about  $150.  As  the  small  size 
of  the  average  loan  indicates,  the  Raif- 
feisen banks  primarily  are  institutions 
for  supplying  credit  accommodations 
to  the  small  landowner. 

The  RaifFeisen  banking  system  in 
Germany  now  comprises  about  15,000 
local  banks,  with  a  membership  of  ap- 
proximately 2,000,000.  These  banks 
are  now  doing  a  yearly  aggregate  busi- 
ness of  about  $1,500,000,000.  The  local 
Raiffeisen  banks  are  grouped  under  35 
provincial  banks,  which,  in  turn,  are 
affiliated  with  two  general  central  co- 
operative banks.  The  local  banks  bor- 
row money  from  the  provincial  banks, 
when  required,  and  also  loan  to  them 
their  surplus  funds.  The  provincial 
central  banks  are  cooperative  societies, 
with  limited  liability,  and  they  occupy 
much  the  same  position  to  ward  the  local 
rural  banks  that  the  latter  do  toward 
their  members.  Their  working  capital 
is  made  up  of  the  paid-up  shares  of  their 


members  (the  local  banks),  of  the  de- 
posits of  the  local  banks,  and  of  loans 
from  other  banks.  By  means  of  these 
provincial  and  central  cooperative 
banks,  agricultural  credit  in  those  parts 
of  Germany  where  these  banks  operate 
possesses  the  element  of  fluidity  in 
a  remarkable  degree  —  moving  from 
those  localities  where  it  is  not  needed 
to  those  where  it  is  needed.  Altogether 
the  RaifFeisen  banks  of  Germany  make 
up  a  wonderfully  efficient  organiza- 
tion, which,  by  supplying  an  enormous 
amount  of  agricultural  credit,  has  rev- 
olutionized farming  in  Germany. 

Up  to  the  middle  of  the  last  century, 
France  was  almost  entirely  lacking  in 
land-  and  agricultural-credit  facilities. 
As  a  result  of  much  agitation  there  was 
passed  in  1852  a  law  providing  for  land- 
mortgage  banks,  and  under  this  the 
Credit  Foncier  was  organized.  Because 
of  the  success  of  the  Landschaften  in 
Germany,  many  of  the  principles  and 
methods  of  these  associations  were  in- 
corporated in  the  French  law.  The 
Credit  Foncier  is  unlike  the  Landschaft- 
en in  the  very  important  particular  that 
it  is  an  incorporated  company,  not  a 
cooperative  association.  The  Credit 
Foncier  has  a  capital  of  200,000,000 
francs  and  operates  under  the  super- 
vision of  the  state.  In  the  beginning 
(1852)  the  government  granted  the 
Credit  Foncier  a  subsidy  of  10,000,000 
francs,  in  order  to  help  it  make  loans 
at  a  rate  advantageous  for  that  time. 
The  subsidy  was  not  renewed,  and  the 
state  does  not  now  intervene,  except 
occasionally,  to  exercise  control.  The 
Credit  Foncier  possesses  many  special 
privileges,  pertaining  to  the  issuance 
of  bonds  and  to  its  loans,  that  give  it 
a  practical,  if  not  a  legal  monopoly  of 
the  kind  of  business  in  which  it  is 
engaged. 

The  purposes  of  the  Credit  Foncier 
are:  — 

1.  Lending  money  to   landowners, 


176 


THE  FARMER  AND  FINANCE 


counties,  communes,  and  public  serv- 
ices. 

2.  Creating  and  negotiating  mort- 
gage bonds,  or,  more  properly,  deben- 
tures, to  a  value  which  cannot  exceed 
the  amount  of  the  sums  due  from  its 
borrowers. 

3.  As  a  necessary  accessory  to  its 
principal  business,  the  Credit  Foncier 
has  the  right  to  carry   on   ordinary 
banking  operations,  within  well-defined 
limits,  and,  in  that  connection,  it  is 
permitted  to  receive  deposits;  but  the 
aggregate  of  deposits  must  not  exceed 
100,000,000  francs. 

A  large  part  of  the  funds  received 
on  deposit  is  employed  in  discounting 
commercial  bills,  on  condition  that 
they  have  two  signatures  and  do  not 
run  over  three  months.  The  shares  of 
the  Credit  Foncier,  which  are  dealt 
in  on  the  Bourse,  are  issued  at  five 
hundred  francs,  and  any  one  can  own 
them.  The  stock  now  receives  six  per 
cent  dividends,  and  sells  for  about 
750  francs  a  share.  The  government 
appoints  the  governor  and  two  sub- 
governors,  who,  by  virtue  of  their  office 
are  members  of  the  Council  of  Admin- 
istration. There  must  also  be  three 
treasurers-general  —  state  officials  — 
among  the  23  members  of  the  Council 
of  Administration.  These  treasurers 
are  appointed  by  the  general  assem- 
bly of  the  company,  but  before  pre- 
senting their  names  to  the  assembly  it 
is  customary  to  obtain  the  approval  of 
the  Minister  of  Finance.  The  general 
assembly  represents  all  the  stockhold- 
ers, and  is  composed  of  the  two  hun- 
dred who  own  the  largest  amount  of 
stock.  These  stockholders  meet  once 
each  year  to  ratify  the  accounts,  vote 
the  dividend,  and  dispose  of  such  other 
business  as  may  properly  be  presented 
to  them.  The  general  assembly  elects 
a  Council  of  Administration  of  23 
members.  The  governor  has  a  right  to 
veto  the  acts  of  both  the  general  as- 


sembly and  the  Council,  but  there  are 
only  a  very  few  instances  on  record  of 
his  having  used  this  power.  The  Coun- 
cil of  Administration  meets  once  each 
week,  and,  among  other  things,  passes 
upon  all  loans. 

The  two  principal  kinds  of  loans 
made  by  the  Credit  Foncier  are  mort- 
gage loans  and  communal  loans,  and  its 
total  outstanding  loans  now  amount  to 
about  4,000,000,000  francs.  So  far  as 
this  country  is  concerned,  that  part  of 
its  operations  covering  the  making  of 
mortgage  loans  to  landowners  is  of  the 
greatest  interest.  Our  municipalities 
now  have  a  broad  and  steady  market 
for  their  securities. 

The  Credit  Foncier  makes  loans  to 
landowners  on  the  following  terms :  — 

1.  Short- time  loans,  without  amorti- 
zation, for  a  period  of  from  one  to  nine 
years. 

2.  Long   time   loans,    with   annual 
amortization,  for  a  period  of  from  ten 
to  seventy-five  years. 

The  rate  of  interest  on  these  loans  is 
4.30  per  cent  at  the  present  time,  and 
the  rate  is  the  same  for  all  kinds  of 
property.  The  rate  charged  on  a  loan 
must  not  exceed  the  rate  at  which 
money  is  obtained  from  the  sale  of 
bonds  by  more  than  six  tenths  of  one 
per  cent.  Loans  are  made  only  on  first- 
mortgage  security,  and  the  amount  of 
the  loan  cannot  exceed  one  half  of  the 
value  of  the  property,  except  that  loans 
on  wine  and  timber  lands  must  not 
exceed  one  third  of  their  value.  When 
the  loan  is  made  for  a  short  period,  the 
borrower  pays  each  year  only  the 
amount  of  interest  due,  and  the  prin- 
cipal sum  must  be  paid  in  full  at  the 
end  of  the  term  of  the  loan  —  from  one 
to  nine  years.  Long-time  loans  are 
amortized;  that  is  they  are  gradually 
paid  by  means  of  an  annuity,  which 
includes  the  interest  and  a  small  frac- 
tion of  the  principal.  As  a  rule,  the 
borrower  himself  fixes  the  length  of 


THE  FARMER  AND  FINANCE 


177 


time  that  the  loan  is  to  run.  The  amor- 
tization extends  over  the  whole  period 
of  the  loan,  so  that  the  total  of  the 
interest  and  capital  amount  is  repaid 
from  a  constant  yearly  annuity.  Con- 
sequently, the  cost  of  amortization 
depends  on  the  length  of  the  loan,  and 
on  the  rate  of  interest.  On  a  loan  run- 
ning for  seventy-five  years  at  4.30  per 
cent  interest,  the  annuity  —  including 
interest  and  amortization  —  is  at  the 
rate  of  4.48  per  cent  per  annum.  The 
borrower  has  the  right  to  pay  the 
principal  of  the  loan  at  any  time,  and 
to  profit  by  the  amortization  already 
made.  He  can  also  make  partial  pay- 
ments and  thereby  reduce  the  amount 
of  the  annuity. 

The  bonds  issued  by  the  Credit 
Foncier  have  no  fixed  maturity,  but 
are  called  for  payment  by  lot.  Each 
payment  of  bonds  must  be  of  such  an 
amount  that  the  bonds  remaining  in 
circulation  do  not  exceed  the  balance 
of  the  principal  owed  upon  the  hypoth- 
ecated loans.  If  the  government  ap- 
proves, there  can  be  added  to  the  bonds 
called  for  payment  certain  prizes  and 
premiums.  The  funds  received  from 
the  usual  amortization,  or  anticipated 
payments,  must  be  used  to  amortize  or 
redeem  bonds,  or  to  make  new  loans. 
In  general  the  bonds  bear  3  per  cent  on 
the  nominal  capital,  and  the  total  cost 
of  recent  loans  to  the  company,  includ- 
ing interest,  prizes,  and  premiums,  is 
about  3.60  per  cent.  The  bonds  are 
sold  by  public  subscription,  and  may 
be  paid  for  in  installments.  About 
every  three  years  the  company  issues 
bonds  sufficient  to  yield  from  300,000,- 
000  to  350,000,000  francs.  The  bonds 
are  subscribed  for  by  people  of  small 
means,  and  usually  remain  in  their 
hands;  consequently  the  quotations  of 
the  bonds  show  little  fluctuation  — 
less  than  French  railway  bonds.  The 
company  always  keeps  a  few  bonds  on 
hand  for  sale,  but  the  bulk  of  them 
VOL.  in -NO.  2 


are  disposed  of  by  public  subscrip- 
tion. 

The  Credit  Foncier  has  departed 
from  its  original  purpose  to  the  extent 
that  at  the  present  time  a  very  large 
part  of  its  loans  are  made  on  urban  real 
estate.  However,  this  is  simply  an 
incident,  and  does  not  reflect  on  the 
applicability  of  the  principles  on  which 
the  Credit  Foncier  is  founded,  to  an 
institution  confining  its  operations  to 
loans  on  rural  land. 

In  view  of  the  wonderful  success  of 
the  Credit  Foncier  and  kindred  insti- 
tutions, it  is  hard  to  understand  why 
the  principle  of  debenture  bonds,  se- 
cured by  long-time  real-estate  loans, 
payable  by  amortization,  should  not, 
long  ago,  have  been  put  in  practice  in 
this  country.  The  business  of  loaning 
money  on  farm  mortgages  in  the  Unit- 
ed States  is  still  carried  on  in  a  prim- 
itive way.  We  are  still  making  farm- 
mortgage  loans  for  such  short  periods 
that  frequent  renewals  —  often  very 
embarrassing  to  debtors  —  are  inevi- 
table. The  existence  of  facilities  where- 
by farm-mortgage  loans  could  be  made 
for  long  terms  —  say  fifty  years  or 
more,  with  provision  for  easy  payment 
by  amortization  —  would  be  a  wonder- 
ful boon  to  American  farmers,  and  a 
decided  stimulant  to  the  development 
of  efficient,  scientific  farming. 

Neither  the  RaifFeisen  banks  nor  the 
Credit  Foncier  involve  strange  finan- 
cial principles.  In  this  country,  the 
splendid  record  of  the  mutual  savings 
banks  proves  that  cooperation  can  be 
safely  and  wisely  applied  in  banking. 
We  are  familiar  with  the  principle  of 
debenture  bonds,  and  we  know  some- 
thing of  the  principle  of  amortization. 
Of  course,  it  is  impossible  to  pick  up 
any  of  the  foreign  farm-credit  systems, 
out  of  its  social  setting,  and  say,  off- 
hand, that  it  would  be  as  successful  in 
this  country.  The  history  and  success, 
as  well  as  the  details  of  organization,  of 


178 


THE  WISHED-FOR  CHILD 


every  one  of  the  foreign  farm-credit 
systems  have  been  very  largely  de- 
termined by  the  temperament,  the 
social  and  economic  status  of  the  peo- 
ple, and  by  the  conditions  of  climate 
and  soil  of  the  country  in  which  they 
are  situated.  Consequently  in  working 
out  the  plans  of  agricultural-  and  land- 
credit  systems  for  this  country,  we 
must  be  cautious  in  our  adherence  to 
foreign  models.  We  must  remember 
that  the  value  and  success  of  every  in- 
stitution depends  upon  its  being  in 
harmony  with  its  environment. 

The  importance  of  adequate  credit 
facilities  for  our  farmers  is  beginning 


to  be  keenly  appreciated.  The  Amer- 
ican Bankers  Association,  the  South- 
ern Commercial  Congress,  and  other 
organizations,  are  doing  splendid  pio- 
neer work  by  agitating  the  need  of  an 
agricultural  banking  system,  and  by 
disseminating  information  as  to  what 
has  been  accomplished  abroad. 

The  establishment  of  agricultural- 
and  land-credit  systems  in  this  coun- 
try is  not  a  political  question;  it  is 
an  economic  question  of  the  gravest 
import  —  the  proper  solution  of  which 
demands  a  patriotic  national  purpose 
and  constructive  ability  of  a  high 
order. 


THE  WISHED-FOR  CHILD1 


BY   LAURA   SPENCER   PORTOR 


SHE  made  a  place  for  me  beside  her 
on  the  moss. 

'You  see  it  will  comfort  me  to  talk 
it  over.  I  have  never  talked  of  it  with 
Marie.  But  if  the  good  God  takes  me 
first,  I  should  like  her  to  know.  You 
will  tell  her.  She  will  let  you  know, 
even  if  you  are  far  away,  that  I  am 
gone;  and  then,  you  will  either  come 
and  tell  her,  or  you  will  write  her. 

'I  need  not  begin  at  the  beginning; 
you  know  —  for  Marie  will  have  told 
you  —  that  once  I  was  as  straight  and 
tall  as  Marie  —  even  a  little  taller; 
would  you  think  it?  Then  there  came 

1  'The  Wished-For  Child'  is  in  the  main  a 
true  story.  Names  and  some  of  the  lesser  cir- 
cumstances have  been  altered,  but  the  chief  facts 
remain  as  they  were  told  to  the  writer  by  one  to 
whom  the  leading  character  of  the  story  related 
them.  —  THE  AUTHOR. 


the  accident.  After  that,  not  only  my 
body  was  bent,  but  my  dreams  also.' 

She  turned  her  misshapen  shoulders 
a  little  toward  me. 

'You  see,  up  to  that  time  I  had 
dreams  of  being  a  mother.  I  do  not 
mean  that  I  was  promised  in  marriage. 
But  there  was  one  who  had  loved  me  a 
little  and  whom  I  loved.  Some  day  I 
would  have  been  his  wife,  —  it  must 
have  been  so;  and  some  day  I  would 
be  the  mother  of  children.  Well,  after 
the  accident,  he  went  away  to  Paris. 
They  tell  me  he  became  a  great  man  in 
the  milk  trade  there.  There  was  never 
any  more  thought  of  marriage;  and 
when  I  dreamed  of  children,  it  was 
of  the  children  I  could  never  have. 
One  does  not  talk  of  suffering  like 
that;  it  goes  into  the  days  somehow. 
And  then,  by-and-by,  it  passes  into  that 


THE  WISHED-FOR  CHILD 


179 


strange  thing  that  belongs  to  all  of  us 
—  Hope. 

'God  is  a  great  Rich  Man,  made- 
moiselle, there  is  no  disputing  that; 
and  we  are  his  children;  and  we  each 
believe,  secretly,  that  for  us  there  is  an 
inheritance,  the  inheritance  of  happi- 
ness, could  we  but  find  it.  For,  some- 
times, it  is  buried  away  like  treasure; 
but  it  is  there  for  us,  could  we  but  find 
it.  And  it  is  the  hope  of  this  that  keeps 
us  alive.  Not  bread  and  bodily  com- 
forts. Bread  and  fire  are  but  symbols. 
So  I  sought  and  hoped  and  wondered 
where  now,  —  now  that  I  might  never 
have  children  of  my  own,  —  where  now 
the  treasure  of  my  happiness  was  to 
be  found. 

'Just  then,  Marie,  who  was  young 
and  tall,  had  a  lover,  Jean  Marie;  a 
man  not  of  her  station  —  quite  above 
her.  She  had  always  hands  and  a  face 
and  a  little  quiet  air  to  attract  the  well- 
born. Jean  Marie  was  the  son  of  a  rich 
carriage-maker.  He  was  a  student  in 
the  college  at  St.  Gene  vie  ve,  and  he 
lived  with  his  old  uncle  on  the  road  to 
Bragin,  the  road  that  runs  from  St. 
Gene  vie  ve  past  our  house.  He  always 
stopped  to  have  a  word  with  her  at 
twilight,  when  he  came  by  on  his  way 
home,  with  his  books.  She  spoke  to  me 
none  at  all  about  him;  but  one  needs 
not  to  be  told  such  things.  At  this  time 
I  never  touched  her  hand  after  twilight 
that  her  fingers  were  not  cold. 

'When  his  studies  were  over  and  he, 
with  the  rest  of  the  students,  was  to  get 
his  diploma,  she  dressed  herself  in  her 
white  dress.  I  had  helped  her  to  make 
it.  We  began  making  it  at  the  time  of 
the  apple-blossoms,  and  neither  of  us 
said  why  we  made  it,  though  we  both 
knew.  And  I  tied  about  her  waist  a 
blue  ribbon  I  had  that  had  belonged 
to  our  mother.  She  went  not  like  the 
rest,  by  the  road,  but  a  way  all  her  own 
across  the  fields,  to  watch  him  go  by 
in  the  long  procession  of  students,  She 


told  me,  a  long  time  afterward,  that 
by-and-by  he  came  and  spoke  to  her 
and  held  her  two  hands  in  gladness  for 
a  moment,  while  the  rich  and  well- 
dressed  ladies  looked  on;  and  that  he 
laughed  and  was  gay  and  sunny;  and 
that  he  gave  her  a  spray  of  pink  lark- 
spur. His  mother  had  brought  him  a 
big  bunch  of  it  for  his  graduation,  as 
though  he  had  been  a  girl. 

'That  evening  he  came  to  the  gate 
to  tell  her  that  he  was  going  away  to 
Paris,  to  study  more;  to  be  an  apothe- 
cary. And  then,  he  kissed  her.  I  saw 
it  myself;  I  could  not  help  it.  He  said 
nothing  to  her  about  coming  back;  but 
I  never  doubted  that  he  would.  Marie 
was  beautiful.  In  the  white  dress,  with 
my  mother's  blue  ribbon  about  her 
waist,  and  the  pink  larkspur  in  her 
hair,  she  was  already  a  bride,  a  man's 
wife,  the  mother  of  a  man's  children, 
— any  man  who  had  eyes  to  see.  So 
I  never  doubted. 

'Well,  I  had  found  the  way  to  my 
treasure  at  last,  and  to  the  happiness  I 
longed  for.  "  Marie  and  he  will  marry," 
I  said.  "They  will  have  children.  It 
is  there  that  I  shall  find  happiness.  I 
shall  feel  the  arms  of  those  children 
about  my  neck.  It  is  I  who  shall  help 
them,  guide  them,  teach  them,  rear 
them,  —  I  who  am  wiser,  wiser  than 
Marie.  Marie  is  too  yielding,  too 
gentle.  She  has  always  been  so.  She 
herself  is  dependent  on  me.  One  child, 
perhaps,  will  need  me,  one  at  least, 
more  than  the  rest.  So  you  see  I  plan- 
ned for  a  child,  oh,  definitely  planned 
for  it !  —  And  I  began  to  borrow  books 
from  the  library  of  old  Philippe  —  for 
I  said,  "If  I  read,  Jean  Marie  will 
have  more  respect  for  me,  —  he  who 
is  learned.  Marie's  beauty  will  satisfy 
him;  but  he  will  only  weary  of  having 
me  about  unless  I  am  clever  and  can  be 
of  help."  So  I  studied  a  little  of  what 
an  apothecary  would  study;  and  I 
studied  the  poets.  "The  poets,"  I  said, 


180 


THE  WISHED-FOR  CHILD 


"give  dignity  to  the  mind.  The  child 
will  lean  on  me  more  if  I  know  some 
poetry." 

'  If,  at  any  time,  doubt  came  to  me, 
I  had  only  to  remember  that  Marie, 
from  I  do  not  know  where,  had  pro- 
cured some  seed  of  the  larkspur,  that 
following  spring;  and  great  clumps  of  it 
grew  by  the  little  kitchen  path,  after 
that.  That  was  proof  enough.  We 
both  pretended  that  it  had  no  meaning, 
whereas  to  both  of  us,  —  well,  such 
silences  are  but  courtesies  between 
sisters  who  love  each  other. 

'So  I  knitted  a  pair  of  white  silk 
stockings  for  her,  and  made  her  a  set  of 
underwear  from  linen;  only  a  little  at 
a  time. 

'It  was  not  until  two  years  after, 
that  she  spoke  of  this.  Her  face  had 
grown  more  slender  and  had  a  beauty 
that  reminded  you  of  ten  o'clock  in  the 
little  church.  You  know  how  the  light 
shines  then,  back  of  the  altar,  pale 
and  waiting  and  sad.  It  was  not  until 
then  that  she  asked  me  what  I  was 
doing. 

'"I  am  knitting  stockings  for  you, 
Marie,"  I  said,  "for  when  you  are  a 
bride." 

'"I  think  it  is  of  no  use,"  she  said; 
"I  think  he  will  not  come  back." 

'But  we  waited,  she  and  I,  for  him 
to  come.  Eight  years.  Have  you  ever 
waited  eight  years  for  anything?  At 
the  end  of  the  eight  years  Marie  was 
not  the  same.  She  was  beautiful,  but 
with  the  beauty  that  loss  and  longing 
and  waiting  carve  out.  I  knew  she 
might  have  reconciled  herself  at  last  to 
giving  up  Jean  Marie,  —  though  there 
was  no  other  to  take  his  place,  —  but  I 
knew  that  she,  too,  had  dreamed  of 
having  little  children;  and  that  is  a 
longing  that  one  cannot  relinquish. 

'I  was  not  far  wrong.  One  spring 
night,  when  the  lilacs  were  in  bloom, 
and  she  and  I  sat  in  the  little  stone 
doorway,  she  raised  her  arms  a  mo- 


ment, —  a  gesture  of  despair,  —  then 
dropped  them  straight  and  heavy  in 
her  lap  and  clasped  her  hands. 

'"Zephine,  Zephine!  I  am  tall  and 
I  am  a  woman  —  but  God  has  not 
given  it  to  me  to  be  the  mother  of  a 
child." 

"'And  I  am  bent  and  a  woman,"  I 
answered  quickly,  and  perhaps  harshly, 
"and  He  has  not  given  it  to  me  either, 
nor  will." 

'At  that  she  was  all  penitence  and 
chided  herself.  But  I  soothed  her.  "It 
is  not  your  hand  that  can  hurt  me, 
little  sister,"  I  said;  "it  is  the  hand  of 
God  that  has  been  heavy  on  me.  And 
for  eight  years  I,  too,  have  waited  for 
your  happiness  to  come  to  you,  not 
just  for  your  sake,  but  for  my  own. 
For  is  not  my  happiness  all  bound  up 
in  yours?  Have  I  not  dreamed  —  oh, 
more  than  you,  I  think  —  of  loving 
your  children?  I  had  meant  that  you 
should  bear  me  one,  one  more  mine 
than  the  rest,  and  you  should  give  it  to 
me  who  can  bear  none  of  my  own." 

!"And,  oh,  they  should  have  been 
yours,  all,"  she  said,  very  still  and 
white,  "and  one  in  particular.  If  God 
had  given  me  that  joy  it  would  have 
been  great  enough,  full  great  enough 
for  two." 

'So  we  sat  a  long  while,  mademoi- 
selle. We  were  two  women,  without  so 
much  as  the  hope  of  a  child.  It  was  not 
our  custom  to  talk  together.  We  are 
silent  by  nature. 

'I  did  not  go  to  bed  at  once.  I  went 
instead  into  the  garden  to  the  little 
arbor  near  the  gate.  From  there  I 
could  see  her  moving  about  upstairs 
in  her  little  room  with  the  low  ceiling. 
Then  very  soon  she  put  out  the  light. 
After  that  she  sat  by  the  window.  I 
do  not  know  how  long  she  remained 
there. 

'But  Jean  Marie  never  came,  ma- 
demoiselle. Life  is  like  that.  You 
may  wait  all  day  with  your  face  turned 


THE  WISHED-FOR  CHILD 


181 


down  a  dusty  road,  and  all  the  while 
the  horseman  is  riding  only  farther 
away.  While  she  prayed  so  hard,  per- 
haps he  was  strolling  down  one  of  the 
streets  of  Paris,  singing  a  little  tune,  as 
I  think  men  do;  or  maybe  stopping  to 
pat  a  dog.  And  did  he  guess  all  the 
while  that  he  carried  Marie's  heart  in 
his  hand,  and  that  in  turning  his  face 
down  that  street  instead  of  up  the 
dusty  road  to  Bragin,  he  was  taking  all 
motherhood  away  from  her? 

'No,  mademoiselle.  Life  is  like  that. 
I  knew  the  road  to  Marie's  life  well  and 
I  knew  none  would  pass  her  way. 
Since  Jean  Marie  had  turned  his  face 
to  Paris  not  one  had  come  past;  not  one 
who  had  stopped.  Yet  I  prayed  that 
night  as  I  sat  in  the  little  arbor,  —  and 
as  I  saw  her  sitting  in  the  dark  window, 
—  I  prayed  God  to  send  her  mother- 
hood. 

'I  do  not  remember  how  long  I 
prayed.  I  remember,  though,  the  odor 
of  the  lilacs  and  then,  in  the  midst 
of  my  praying,  I  remember  hearing 
horses'  hoofs  on  the  road.  I  waited  for 
them  to  go  past  as  all  things  else  did, 
but  they  stopped.  Then  I  heard  the 
clank  of  a  sword  and  spurs  and  a  few 
words;  I  saw  the  light  of  a  small  lan- 
tern. Then  I  saw  two  men  dismount; 
they  were  in  uniform.  One  of  them 
swung  back  the  gate  and  almost 
brushed  against  me. 

* "  What  have  we  here ! "  He  held  up 
his  lantern  and  looked  at  me.  "We 
want  lodging  and  are  of  no  mind  to  go 
farther.  Will  you  give  us  a  bed,  my 
sister?" 

'I  suppose  I  looked  frightened.  I 
think  I  was. 

'"If  your  horses  can  go  no  farther, 
you  shall  not  go  without  a  bed,"  I  said. 

'The  face  of  the  other  soldier,  more 
tired  and  eager,  appeared  now  over  the 
shoulder  of  the  first. 

"My  friend's  horse  here  has  gone 
lame.  We  are  sick  of  hunger.  You  will 


take  us  in?  Besides  the  gold  we  can 
give,  God  finds  ways  to  reward.  You 
will  take  us  in?" 

'Only  it  was  hardly  a  question,  more 
like  an  agreement. 

'We  stood  a  moment,  the  three  of  us, 
in  a  little  circle  of  light  made  by  the 
lantern.  I  led  the  way.  They  follow- 
ed, the  big  horses  coming  in  singly, 
.through  the  little  gate,  one  limping 
badly. 

'They  followed  me  around  the  path. 
Once,  as  the  lame  horse  stopped,  one 
of  the  soldiers  gave  him  a  cut,  and  he 
threw  his  head  in  the  air  and  swerved, 
tramping  on  the  larkspur. 

:"Have  a  care!"  I  said.  "Be  more 
gentle.  Those  are  flowers  that  you 
crush." 

'For  this  speech  the  horse  got  an- 
other cut  that  brought  him  back  in  the 
middle  of  the  path. 

"'There  is  the  stable,"  I  said; 
"make  your  horses  comfortable  and 
come  back,  and  you  shall  have  food 
and  a  bed." 

'I  watched  them  go  around  the 
house.  Then  I  entered  and  hurried  up 
to  Marie's  room.  She  was  standing 
facing  the  door  in  her  nightdress,  look- 
ing like  the  Virgin,  and  expecting  me. 

'"They  are  two  soldiers,"  I  said, 
"who  ask  a  bed  and  food;  the  horse  of 
one  of  them  is  lame." 

She  began  putting  on  her  clothes, 
and  binding  up  her  hair.  In  a  few 
moments  the  men  were  back  again.  I 
set  them  chairs  in  the  kitchen  and  laid 
the  table.  I  had  a  cheese  and  some 
plum  comfits,  and  plenty  of  bread. 
There  was  a  yellow  pitcher  for  milk. 
When  Marie  entered,  both  men  looked 
at  her;  she  just  nodded  to  them  once, 
and  took  up  the  pitcher  and  carried  it 
to  the  shed  to  fill  it.  When  she  brought 
it  back  I  had  the  supper  nearly  ready. 
One  of  the  men  got  up  and  dragged 
his  chair  after  him  to  the  table,  but 
the  other  one,  the  more  tired,  the  more 


182 


THE  WISHED-FOR  CHILD 


deliberate,  still  sat,  his  eyes  openly 
watching  Marie. 

'"Come,  you  of  the  hungry  face," 
the  other  called  out  to  him;  and  then 
he  came,  too,  and  they  both  scraped 
their  chairs,  and  shuffled  their  feet 
about  under  the  table,  and  served 
themselves,  and  bent  down  with  their 
mouths  to  their  plates,  like  hungry 
men,  neither  of  them  looking  up  once, 
—  save  the  hungry-faced  one,  when 
Marie  refilled  his  milk  cup  for  him. 
Then  he  straightened  back,  and  kept 
his  hand  on  the  mug,  and  looked  at  her, 
a  long,  bold  look. 

'I  went  to  fix  a  bed  in  the  lower 
chamber.  When  I  returned,  the  hun- 
gry-faced one  had  his  arm  over  the 
back  of  the  chair,  like  a  satisfied  man, 
and  was  eating  no  more,  but  talking  to 
Marie.  I  do  not  know  what  about. 

'  I  led  the  way  with  my  candle.  As 
the  two  followed  me  Marie  shrank  a 
little  against  the  door,  to  let  them  pass 
by,  and  the  hungry-faced  one  bowed  to 
her  as  he  went  past,  and  paused,  oh, 
the  fraction  of  a  little  moment  close  to 
her,  and  his  uniform  touched  her  skirt; 
then  he  glanced  at  me  who  held  the 
door  open,  an  indifferent  glance,  and 
went  on. 

'They  liked  the  little  room  well 
enough,  —  it  is  pretty  and  white,  — 
and  the  gayer  of  the  two  fell  to  pulling 
off  his  boots  at  once. 

;"God  make  a  good  bargain  of  this 
for  you,  sister,"  he  said,  cheerfully. 
"The  bon  Dieu  is  a  good  one  to  lend 
to.  I  do  not  doubt  He  will  pay  you 
with  usury." 

'So  I  left  them,  and  Marie  and  I 
cleared  away  the  supper,  and  went  to 
bed.  The  talk  we  had  had  before  they 
came — only  an  hour  before — seemed  a 
very  long  time  gone.  I  could  not  go  to 
sleep  at  first.  It  was  like  a  great  adven- 
ture, — oh,  a  great  adventure,  I  assure 
you,  in  the  little  quiet  house;  the  two 
tired  men  sleeping  below.  I  could  hear 


them  snore  as  I  lay  in  my  bed.  I  make 
no  doubt  Marie  lay  awake  too,  think- 
ing of  Jean  Marie,  and  perhaps  still 
praying  for  him  to  return. 

'The  rest  that  I  have  to  tell  you  is  a 
thing  difficult  to  tell.  The  soldiers 
went  on  their  way  in  the  morning,  but 
it  was  not  the  last  time  that  we  saw 
them.  The  hungry-faced  one,  at  least, 
came  again.  He  was  in  command  of 
some  road-menders  who  were  rebuild- 
ing, about  three  miles  away,  a  bridge 
and  a  part  of  the  road  to  Paris,  where 
the  rains  had  harmed  it.  He  came 
again  and  still  again.  He  had  a  way  of 
twirling  a  little  string  in  his  fingers.  It 
was  not  lovable,  but  you  watched  it; 
and  other  little  ways  that  you  re- 
marked and  remembered  and  won- 
dered over;  and  something  masterful, 
though  I  cannot  remember  where  it 
lay,  nor  what  it  was. 

'I  always  made  him  welcome.  If  in 
time  he  could  take  the  place  of  the  one 
who  was  gone!  I  thought  of  it,  and 
thought  if  it.  Once  I  made  bold  to 
mention  this  to  Marie,  and  she  looked 
at  me  thin,  and  thoughtful. 

"You  do  not  know/  she  said;  "Jean 
Marie  is  as  diamond,  this  one  is  as  jade. 
Jean  Marie  is  as  gold,  this  one  is  as 
iron." 

;"But,  Marie,  if  you  could  love  him. 
You  and  I  have  need  of  more  than  each 
other.  What  will  it  be  for  us  to  grow 
old  together.  We  have  need  of  some 
one  else.  Besides,  you  have  need  of 
motherhood.  It  is  the  lot  of  woman. 
We  have  both  need  of  a  child." 

'  "You  do  not  know,"  she  said  again, 
quietly  and  sadly.  "That  kind  has  no 
wish  to  marry  any  woman.  Jean  Marie 
went  away;  and,  not  loving  me  enough, 
he  will  not  come  back;  but  this  one  will 
keep  coming  again,  and  again,  and 
again." 

* "  Eh  bien  ?  "  I  said,  a  little  impatient 
of  her  quietness. 
,    '"Until  "  —  she  shrank  and  turned 


THE   WISHED-FOR  CHILD 


183 


away  her  face  a  little.  —  "He  will  some 
day  make  his  wish  plain.  He  is  a 
hungry-faced  man." 

'At  that,  my  brain  seemed  to  spin; 
and  my  thoughts  were  like  fire.  That 
night  it  seems  as  though  I  .must  have 
prayed  nearly  all  the  night.  I  made  no 
bones  of  it.  I  prayed  frank  and  direct 
—  for  God  knew  my  thoughts  at  any 
rate  —  I  prayed  frank  and  direct  that 
even  without  wedlock,  He  would  put  a 
little  child  in  our  lives.  We  needed  it; 
needed  it;  I  told  God  that. 

'One  day  when  it  was  time  for  the 
soldier  to  come  again,  it  chanced  to  be 
time  also  for  me  to  borrow  the  but- 
cher's donkey  —  as  I  always  did  at  a 
certain  season  —  and  the  little  cart,  to 
go  to  Bragin,  as  was  my  custom,  to  sell 
cabbages,  or  whatever  we  had  to  sell. 
Lunch  I  would  have,  with  coffee,  at  the 
little  inn  at  Bouvet,  but  the  black 
bread,  and  cheese,  and  a  red  apple, 
Marie  put  in  my  basket,  as  usual,  for 
my  supper,  for  I  could  not  return  until 
well  into  the  night. 

'As  I  drove  my  miles,  I  came  at 
last,  as  I  knew  I  should,  to  the  road- 
menders. 

'The  men  scarcely  glanced  at  me, 
but  went  on  with  their  work.  The 
soldier  was  ahead,  keeping  an  eye  on 
them.  When  I  came  to  him  he  raised 
his  cap  and  smiled,  a  crooked  smile, 
with  very  white  teeth  showing. 

'"Where  are  you  going,  sister?" 

' "  I  am  going  all  the  way  to  Bragin," 
I  said. 

!"A  long  distance,"  he  said,  his  eyes 
on  me  in  their  own  bold  manner. 

'"Yes,"  I  answered. 

'"You  will  not  be  back  by  night- 
fall." 

"Not  until  long  after  moon-rise,"  I 
said,  my  heart  going  hard.  Then  sud- 
denly I  made  bold  and  feared  nothing. 
"Marie  is  there,"  I  said;  "go  and  have 
supper  and  satisfy  your  hunger.  There 
is  bread  and  milk  and  honey  and  a  pot 


of  cheese."  I  said  this  last  over  my 
shoulder;  then  I  drove  on,  not  daring 
to  look  back. 

'  When  I  got  home  there  was  no  light 
in  the  little  house.  Had  he  come?  It 
was  white,  white  moonlight,  made- 
moiselle, warm  and  white,  with  cool 
shadows.  I  cannot  tell  you  how  still 
it  was.  Perhaps  it  was  not  so  still; 
perhaps  some  of  the  stillness  was  in 
myself.  But  it  seemed  as  though  the 
world  had  stopped. 

'I  went  softly  around  by  the  stable. 
I  heard  the  quick  click  of  a  bit,  as 
when  a  horse  tosses  its  head.  We  had 
no  horse  of  our  own.  Then  suddenly,  in 
all  the  stillness  and  moonlight,  I  saw 
her  coming  from  the  fields,  and  the 
soldier  with  her.  I  shrank  back  in  the 
shadow  and  waited.  I  noticed  that 
when  his  hand  lifted  the  kitchen  latch 
and  let  her  and  himself  in,  she  went 
before  him  as  though  he  were  no  longer 
a  guest,  but  master  in  the  place.  A 
moment  later  there  was  the  flare  of  a 
match  in  the  kitchen.  I  could  see  from 
where  I  stood  that  it  was  the  soldier, 
not  she,  who  lighted  .the  candle.  Still  a 
moment  later  and  he  came  out  again, 
went  to  the  stable,  and  led  his  horse 
out.  When  he  was  not  far  from  me, 
and  was  near  to  the  kitchen,  I  stepped 
out. 

"You  are  not  going?"   I  said. 

'"Good-day,  sister.  Yes,  —  I  must 
go  to-night;  my  regiment  leaves  for 
Algiers  to-morrow." 

'I  left  them  alone  a  moment,  but 
I  think  they  said  no  farewell.  When  I 
got  back,  he  was  busy  adjusting  his 
saddle-girth;  and  she  was  standing 
beside  the  larkspur,  with  a  white  face. 

'He  did  not  come  again,  mademoi- 
selle. I  think  she  knew  that  he  would 
not.  Little  by  little,  as  the  days  went, 
and  she  grew  white  and  stricken,  I  had 
all  I  could  do  to  bring  her  into  any 
notice  of  me,  or  of  the  common  things 
of  life.  She  never  needed  to  tell  me  her 


184 


THE  WISHED-FOR  CHILD 


secret.  Had  I  not  planned  —  Was  it 
not  more  my  secret;  more  mine  than 
hers?  She  would  sit  by  the  hour  with 
no  word.  I  guessed  that  she  had  a  great 
fear  of  God,  and  that  she  remembered, 
with  fear,  too,  the  one  gone  to  Paris. 

'One  day,  when  I  could  endure  her 
silence  no  longer,  I  said,  "Marie, 
Marie,  my  little  sister!  Did  not  God 
put  your  great  longing  in  you  and 
mine  in  me?  Has  He  not  fashioned  us? 
Shall  we  be  afraid  to  trust  what  He 
will  do  with  us,  and  with  these  longings 
of  ours?" 

'She  did  not  answer,  but  only 
looked  at  me  thin  and  startled,  like  a 
deer  that  faces  the  fear  of  death. 

'"There  is  one  thing,"  I  said,  "that 
is  clear  between  you  and  God  and  me. 
However  else  we  may  have  sinned,  — 
though  I  do  not  think  it  sin,  —  we 
have  committed  no  sin  against  the 
unborn.  The  child  that  shall  be  ours 
is  a  wished-for  child,  an  enfant  voulu. 
There  are  women  who  sin  in  thought 
against  the  unborn,  who  do  not  desire 
little  children;  who  are  dismayed, 
angry,  bitter,  when  they  find  them- 
selves possessed  of  the  gift  of  God. 
But,  oh,  ours  is  better  born,  better 
born,  Marie.  It  is  a  wished-for  child, 
an  enfant  voulu.  Think,  Marie,  of  the 
ways  of  God.  God  knows.  Need  we 
teach  Him?  Is  He  so  dull  and  we  so 
wise?  Are  we  his  elders?  Shall  we  set 
laws  round  about  his  laws,  and  limits 
on  those  longings  He  has  implanted? 
Shall  we  try  to  stifle  a  fire  that  He  with 
his  breath  has  kindled  in  us?  Shall  we 
give  excuses  into  his  hands  for  his 
intentions?" 

'She  laid  her  head  in  my  lap  sud- 
denly and  wept.  After  that  she  be- 
lieved me  to  be  very  wise,  and  very 
familiar  with  God's  ways,  and  full  of 
knowledge  concerning  Him. 

'From  then  on,  the  responsibility 
seemed  to  me  mine  wholly;  and  the  sin, 
if  it  was  sin,  was  mine,  too,  not  hers. 


But  I  knew  in  my  own  wise  heart  that 
it  was  no  sin.  I  exulted  in  God  and  in 
my  own  daring,  though,  out  of  respect 
for  her  more  fearing  nature,  I  said  no 
more.  But  I  waited  and  saw  the  young 
moon  wax,  and  bloom  full,  and  darken, 
like  a  flower  that  grows  and  blooms 
and  fades  and  disappears,  a  dark  seed 
in  the  dark  of  night,  for  a  new  moon  to 
grow.  Little  by  little,  the  long  time 
was  got  over  and  God  brought  the 
waiting  to  an  end.  I  used  to  lie  in  my 
bed,  staring  awake,  when  I  lay  down  to 
rest,  wondering  what  it  must  be  like  to 
be  like  Marie  in  the  little  room  across 
the  hall,  with  life  and  death  on  either 
side  of  the  bed,  and  the  gift  of  God 
trembling  and  crying  against  your 
heart. 

'  It  was  I  who  was  with  her.  It  was  I 
who  saw  the  child  first.  I  do  not  know 
where  the  child's  father  was,  —  in  a 
hot  barracks,  playing  cards  by  the 
light  of  a  smoky  lantern  in  Algiers, 
perhaps,  —  never  guessing.  It  did  not 
matter.  The  child  seemed  not  his  but 
hers;  not  hers  but  mine. 

'You  have  wondered  why  I  am 
more  educated  than  Marie,  —  why 
I  even  know  about  Helen  of  Troy  and 
Raphael  and  Monsieur  Thiers.  Well,  I 
had  read  some,  studied  some,  before; 
but  now  I  read  more  and  more,  to  be 
the  better  fitted  to  be  wise  toward  the 
child  that  was  ours.  I  sent  to  Paris  for 
some  books. 

'I  wish  you  could  have  seen  Marie 
when  the  wonder  was  all  new,  all  new 
and  radiant  and  full  of  glory  like  the 
creche  on  Christmas  morning.  There 
was  such  a  light  about  her  face  that  I 
went  away  from  her  many  a  time  in 
those  first  days,  to  go  down  on  my 
knees.  For  I  began  to  know  now  that 
there  was  indeed  some  sin,  after  all, 
that  I  had  not  suspected.  For  I  knew 
that  it  must  be  a  sin,  surely,  that  any 
human  hand  should  dare  to  create  such 
glory  —  the  hand  of  one  like  me,  least 


THE  WISHED-FOR  CHILD 


185 


of  all,  to  whom  God  had  so  expressly 
forbidden  that  joy.  I  cannot  explain  to 
you.  It  was  as  though  in  the  darkness 
I  had  defied  God  and  had  said,  "Let 
there  be  light,"  —  and  there  was  light; 
and  I  was  dazzled  and  afraid  of  it. 

'Yet  this  was  only  in  moments,  in 
big  moments;  for  the  rest  there  was  the 
comfort,  the  piercing  comfort  of  the 
little  cry  in  the  dark  in  the  midst  of  the 
night. 

"The  days  went  by.  I  grew  more 
content  as  I  grew  more  used  to  the 
presence  of  the  child.  If  we  were  shut 
apart  now  from  our  kind,  and  if  the 
butcher's  wife  would  not  speak  to  us  — 
what  did  it  matter!  We  had  the  better 
treasure.  The  law  and  society  are 
made  by  man,  but  the  longing  of  a  wo- 
man was  put  in  her  heart  long  ago 
when  God  fashioned  her.  I  told  myself 
this  and  I  told  myself,  too,  that  God 
would  never  have  fulfilled  my  wish  if  it 
had  been  wrong.  God  had  denied  me 
to  be  a  mother,  that  is  true;  He  had 
bent  and  twisted  me  with  suffering. 
But  shall  you  tell  me  God  does  not 
know  what  He  is  about?  I  was  bent 
into  a  gnarled  root  with  no  hope  of 
blossom  of  my  own,  but  Marie  was  the 
branch  and  the  child  was  the  flower, 
and  the  flower  was  mine,  after  all.  It 
could  never  be  quite  said  that  I  had 
not  tasted  motherhood. 

*  It  was  almost  before  I  knew  it  that 
the  child  was  three  years  old,  with 
gold  hair  and  little  gentle  ways.  They 
were  the  happiest  days  of  my  life,  the 
kind  of  days  the  Virgin  must  have  had 
when  the  Christ  Child  was  little,  before 
all  the  trouble  began.  Only  now  and 
then  a  great  dread  came  to  me  lest,  as  a 
punishment,  some  ill  should  befall  the 
child. 

'One  evening  I  was  in  the  kitchen 
and  Marie  was  in  the  little  front  door- 
yard  to  get  the  coolness.  The  child  was 
on  my  lap  and  I  was  reading.  Pre- 


sently I  turned  the  lamp  low,  lifted  the 
child,  and  went  out  into  the  cool,  also, 
into  the  little  arbor.  It  was  so,  often, 
that  the  child  and  I  sat  apart  from 
Marie,  and  she  from  us.  One  must  have 
one's  own  thoughts,  and  sometimes  the 
stars  to  one's  self. 

'The  child  was  soon  asleep  on  my 
arm.  It  was  starlight,  and  the  trees 
and  the  lilac  bushes  made  big  dark 
shadows;  soft,  as  shadows  are  in  the 
light  of  the  stars. 

'Suddenly,  I  heard  the  sound  of  a 
horse's  hoofs  approaching  on  the  road, 
then  their  pause  at  the  gate.  A  mo- 
ment later  I  heard  the  gate  click  and  a 
step  on  the  gravel.  My  heart  stood 
still.  No  one  visited  us  now.  It  was  a 
man's  step.  It  was  like  the  night  long 
ago,  —  like  something  that  had  hap- 
pened before. 

'All  at  once,  like  a  stroke  out  of 
darkness  I  knew.  I  knew  that  the 
soldier  had  cared  for  her,  after  all,  in 
his  own  fashion,  and  had  returned  to 
her.  The  child  was  not  mine,  then, 
after  all;  not  hers  and  mine,  and  mostly 
mine.  It  was  rightly  his.  If  he  cared 
for  her  enough  to  come  back,  he  would 
care  for  the  child,  too,  —  in  some 
strange  fashion,  —  as  men  do.  They 
like  to  possess  things.  That  is  why 
they  like  children  of  their  own. 

'I  could  see  that  Marie  had  already 
risen.  I  could  not  tell  whether  she  was 
alarmed  or  expectant.  Perhaps  she  had 
cared,  too.  I  could  see  his  figure  in  the 
dim  starlight  come  up  the  walk.  I 
could  see  that  he  stopped  before  her 
and  looked  into  her  face.  Then  I 
heard  him  say,  — 

'"Is  this  Marie?" 

'She  did  not  answer;  only  put  her 
hand  on  her  breast.  He  repeated  the 
question,  — 

'"Is  this  Marie?" 

'Then  her  voice,  — 

'"Yes,  it  is  I.   Why  do  you  ask?" 

'"Have  you  nothing  to  say  to  me? 


186 


THE  WISHED-FOR  CHILD 


I  have  come  back  to  you,  because  I 
could  not  forget  you." 

*  Then  her  voice  —  in  the  same  even, 
almost  monotonous,  tone :  — 

"Why  should  you  think  I  do  not 
know  you.  I  have  prayed,  often,  that 
you  would  come  back." 

'This,  too,  was  like  another  flash  of 
lightning  —  heat  lightning,  that  left 
everything  darker.  Not  only  had  the 
soldier  come  back,  but  she  had  longed 
for  him  to  come  back;  yes,  longed  for 
him,  as  I  had  not  dreamed  she  would. 
The  child  was,  indeed,  not  mine,  but 
theirs,  quite  theirs. 

'I  knew,  I  had  heard  said,  that  the 
very  bearing  of  the  physical  pain  will 
make  a  woman  care  for  the  father  of 
her  child  —  though  she  may  not  have 
cared  before.  It  is  God's  way,  it  seems. 
It  is  such  power  that  God  has  given  to 
motherhood  —  that  it  may,  like  Him- 
self, work  miracles,  from  left  to  right  as 
it  goes.  She  had  not  borne  this  child 
for  me,  though  that  had  been  her  first 
intent.  She  cared  now  for  the  child's 
father.  Their  whole  world  and  the 
child  seemed  suddenly  struck  apart 
from  mine.  His  coming  back  changed 
everything.  I  had  lost  the  child,  not  by 
illness,  as  I  had  so  often  dreaded,  not 
by  death,  but  by  the  mere  beat  of  hoofs 
on  the  Bragin  road,  and  the  click  of  a 
gate  in  the  starlight,  such  little  things 
as  I  would  never  have  suspected. 

'Then  I  heard  him  speaking:  — 

'"Will  you  come  to  the  light?" 
There  was  a  patch  of  candlelight  falling 
from  within  through  an  open  window; 
falling  across  the  grass,  the  little  shell- 
path,  and  over  the  larkspur.  "I  want 
to  see  you.  I  want  to  see  how  you  have 
changed  since  I  have  been  gone." 

'I  could  just  see  that  he  stretched 
out  his  hand  to  her  and  led  her  over  to 
where  the  light  fell.  She  stepped  into 
the  soft  glow.  Her  back  was  toward 
me. 

'Then,  from   the  shadow,  he,  too, 


stepped  into  the  light  and  looked  down 
into  her  face.  I  bent  forward  and 
looked.  I  saw  the  whole  thing  now.  I 
saw  that  the  face  of  this  man  looking 
into  hers  was  not  the  hungry  face  that 
I  supposed  it  to  be.  It  was  lit  with 
another  feeling  —  oh,  another  feeling 
—  and  —  it  was  the  face,  not  of  the 
soldier,  not  of  the  soldier.  It  was  the 
face  of  Jean  Marie,  of  Jean  Marie. 

'In  the  moment  that  he  looked  at 
her,  my  world  fell  apart.  I  was  dazed, 
yet  I  knew.  I  saw.  Everything  was 
clear.  What  followed  was  flashed  on 
my  mind,  before  either  of  them  spoke; 
like  lightning  that  flashes  fast,  the 
thunder  lagging  after.  But  I  had  to 
listen.  Then  I  heard  him  say,  — 

'"Oh,  my  well-beloved!" 

'  She  answered  him  nothing,  nothing 
at  all;  just  stood  there  allowing  him  to 
search  her  face  for  the  old,  lost  girlhood. 

'  By  the  look  in  his  face  I  knew  he  had 
found  it,  to  his  own  satisfaction.  He 
had  found  it;  for,  with  a  little  quick 
motion,  he  took  her  hands. 

'Then,  like  the  older  man  he  had 
grown  to  be,  he  bent  and  folded  her  to 
him  and  kissed  her  long,  straight  on  the 
lips.  It  was  like  Marie  to  submit  and 
speak  afterwards,  if  he  would  have  let 
her  speak.  But  he  spoke,  himself, 
rapidly,  urgently,  kissing  her  between 
the  rapid  words. 

'"I  have  seen  the  women  of  Paris; 
but  always  beyond  them,  at  their  very 
shoulders,  I  saw  you  in  your  white 
dress,"  —  he  kissed  her  at  the  mem- 
ory,—  "and  the  white  stockings,"  — 
he  kissed  her  again  and  laughed, — "  for 
I  even  noticed  those,  —  and  the  blue 
ribbon,  and  the  larkspur.  Have  you 
still  got  the  dress?"  holding  away  from 
her  a  little  to  look  at  her. 

'She  nodded. 

'"Yes;  in  a  drawer  upstairs,  where 
now  and  again  I  take  it  out  and  look  at 
it." 

'He  kissed  her,  and  hurried  on. 


THE  WISHED-FOR  CHILD 


187 


'"And  when  I  drank  wine  at  little 
tables  on  the  faubourg,  and  saw  those 
small-mouthed  women,  with  their  high 
heels  and  their  great  over-sized  hats 
and  when  I  talked  with  them,  —  do 
you  know  what  I  said?  I  said  to  my- 
self, '  These  women  are  amusing  for  a 
time,  if  you  like,  for  a  time,  Jean  Marie, 
but  la!  la!  good  God!  one  knows  well 
what  city  women  with  painted  cheeks 
are!  How  a  man  may  have  them  or 
leave  them;  and  how  other  men  have 
had  them  and  left  them  before.'  And 
then  I  would  think  of  you,  —  you  in 
your  white  dress  and  the  blue  ribbon, 
—  you,  you  all  untouched,  by  any 
man,  —  you,  Marie,  —  you !  " 

'I  could  see  that  she  pushed  herself 
away  from  him  a  little,  though  he  still 
had  his  way  with  her  and  his  arms 
about  her.  Then,  elated,  I  think,  by  her 
silence,  remembering  all  the  shyness 
and  quietness  of  her,  he  drew  her  to 
him  again  like  something  lost  and 
found  and  rejoiced  over.  He  kissed  her 
once,  twice,  then  held  her,  looking 
down  at  her,  —  then  kissed  her  again. 
They  seemed  to  be  wholly  one,  the  way 
a  man  and  woman  should  be. 

'When  she  finally  had  pushed  her- 
self gently  free,  I  saw  her  brush  her 
hair,  which  he  had  disordered,  back 
from  her  eyes. 

'"  You  are  mistaken,"  she  said.  Her 
voice  sounded  still  and  quiet  like  a  part 
of  the  night. 

'"How?"  he  said. 
"I  am  not  what  you  think  me." 

'The  short  glory  was  over  now, 
almost  over.  The  great  trouble  had 
begun  to  touch  him,  too. 

"Will  you  tell  me  what  you  mean? 
You  said  you  had  prayed  for  me  to 
return.  Is  it  so?"  He  was  puzzled. 

'She  nodded.    "Yes." 

'"You  are  not  married,  then?" 
There  was  a  kind  of  quiet  horror  in  his 
voice. 

'She  shook  her  head. 


He  looked  immensely  relieved.  He 
made  a  motion  to  take  her  to  him 
again;  but  paused  to  think. 

'"You  have  not  of  late  changed  in 
your  feeling  for  me?" 

'She  shook  her  head. 

' "  You  care  for  me,"  he  urged.  "  You 
have  always  cared.  You  are  not  mar- 
ried. What  have  we  then  to  fear? 
Come;  out  with  it!  It  is  some  duty  — 
some  fancied  duty  —  to  your  crippled 
sister.  Bah!"  He  tossed  his  head  in 
quick  contempt  of  such  a  reason.  "I 
have  always  thought  there  would  be 
doubtless  some  foolish  devotion  to  her; 
yes,  I  have,  positively.  But  because 
she  will  never  marry  —  does  it  mean, 
bon  Dieu,  that  you  and  I  must  have 
spoiled  lives  and  unfulfilled  hopes?" 

'Yes,  he  said  just  that. 

'Then,  —  it  was  like  Marie  to  speak 
with  such  directness,  and  unlike,  I 
think,  every  other  woman  in  the  world. 

'"I  have  had  a  child,"  she  said 
simply. 

'  He  recoiled  from  her  —  a  slow 
movement,  a  very  slow  movement  — 
as  though  he  had  come  suddenly,  yet 
in  time,  on  something  horrible  and 
unbelievable.  Then  he  said  just  one 
word,  — 

"Tow/" 

'It  seemed  a  long  time  before  he 
spoke;  a  long  time  that  she  stood  there. 
When  he  put  his  next  question  it  was 
that  of  a  man,  and  full,  as  a  man's 
questions  are,  of  curiosity  and  jeal- 
ousy. 

'"And  the  man?  You  were  in  love 
with  him?" 

'She  shook  her  head  again,  and  he 
recoiled  from  her  a  very  little  bit  more. 

'  It  seemed  again  a  long  time.  When 
he  spoke  his  voice  was  that  of  a  man 
who  has  passed  through  the  worst  of 
sorrow,  the  voice  of  a  man  not  sorrow- 
ful but  indignant;  indignant  not  only 
with  one  woman,  but  with  all  woman- 
kind. 


188 


THE  WISHED-FOR  CHILD 


' "  Do  you  know,  loose  woman,  what 
you  have  shattered  ?  All  my  belief,  all 
of  it !  Through  everything,  everything, 
when  every  ideal  was  failing  me,  when 
I  myself  was  not  pure,  —  and  could 
count  on  no  one, — I  said,  "But  Marie, 
Marie  is  pure! "  The  painted  women  of 
the  boulevard,  one  expects  not  more  of 
them.  One  would  not  have  them  other- 
wise. They  were  not  meant  to  be  more 
than  puppets  to  play  with;  never  to  be 
the  mother  of  men's  children.  But  you, 
you — !"  He  paused,  and  began  again. 
"Do  you  know  what  it  is  to  rob  a  man 
like  that?  Do  you  know  what  you 
steal,  you  women?  Bah  I"  Returned 
away,  unable  to  go  on. 

*  She  just  stood  there,  Marie  did,  with 
one  hand  on  her  breast.  She  made  no 
defense,  —  none  at  all. 

*  I  cannot  recall,  now,  how  it  all  hap- 
pened.    I  only  know  that  by-and-by 
Jean  Marie  was  gone.  I  heard  the  gate 
click  after  him.    I  only  know  that  by- 
and-by  I  saw  Marie  enter  the  house. 

'Then,  despite  all  these  numbing 
blows  that  had  fallen,  my  brain  began 
to  work  again.  I  think  I  have  a  good 
brain.  Something  must  be  done. 

'I  rose  and  laid  the  child  down 
quickly,  on  the  floor  of  the  arbor,  — 
than  I  ran  —  ran  through  the  night. 

'By  cutting  across  the  little  path 
and  across  the  little  patch  of  grass,  one 
comes  to  the  field  and  across  that  to  the 
road,  beyond  the  bend.  If  I  ran  I  could 
get  there  before  Jean  Marie.  I  felt  the 
dew  wet  on  my  shoes  and  I  ran  on.  I 
fell  once  flat  on  my  two  hands  in  the 
little  ditch,  but  I  got  up  and  ran  on.  I 
was  faourdie  -*-  lost  in  my  mind,  per- 
haps. Presently,  I  found  I  had  gone 
too  much  to  the  right  and  had  come  to 
the  wall,  where,  instead,  I  should  have 
come  to  the  opening.  I  ran  along  be- 
side the  wall;  but  I  was  losing  time.  I 
could  hear  the  horse's  hoofs  coming, 
coming,  coming  at  a  great  gallop.  Be- 
yond the  poplars  I  could  see  the  road 


still  at  a  little  distance.  I  almost  fell. 
I  recovered  myself  and  ran.  I  came 
at  last  to  the  opening  and  stumbled 
through  it.  Jean  Marie  was  coming 
rapidly  toward  me.  I  ran  forward, 
holding  up  my  hands;  but  I  was  only 
a  shadow  in  the  darkness,  no  doubt. 
I  would  have  called,  but  my  voice 
was  gone.  If  only  I  could  be  near  when 
he  passed  by!  I  stumbled  at  last  into 
the  very  ditch  close  by  the  road.  His 
horse's  hoofs  almost  touched  me.  They 
thundered  past.  The  dust  flew  in  my 
face.  I  was  within  two  feet  of  Jean 
Marie,  within  two  feet  of  him.  Had  I 
been  tall  instead  of  bent,  I  could  even 
have  snatched  at  his  bridle. 

'He  did  not  note.  The  last  hope  I 
had  was  riding  with  him  away  from 
me,  swiftly  away  from  me,  in  a  fury, 
and  with  a  beating  of  hoofs.  Then, 
with  a  great  effort,  I  raised  myself  in 
the  ditch,  flung  my  hands  in  the  air, 
and  cried,  "Jean  Marie!  Jean  Marie! 
Comeback!" 

'  It  may  be  that  the  beat  of  the  hoofs 
drowned  the  sound.  I  do  not  know.  It 
may  be  that  he  thought  it  was  Marie, 
and  would  not  turn.  I  called  again,  but 
the  horse  galloped  on.  The  galloping 
of  the  horse  grew  fainter.  It  was  begin- 
ning to  be  a  long  way  off.  Then,  pre- 
sently, in  a  little  while  more,  it  was 
gone,  lost  in  the  night. 

'I  do  not  know,  rightly,  how  I  got 
back  to  the  house.  I  do  not  know, 
rightly,  how  any  of  the  moments  hap- 
pened after  that  —  except  that  by-and- 
by  I  entered  the  arbor  and  took  up  the 
child  again,  as  one  takes  up  a  burden. 
It  was  the  first  time  in  the  world  that 
she  had  felt  heavy  to  me.  She  slept 
soundly.  I  carried  her  upstairs  and 
placed  her  in  my  room  as  I  often  did. 
Marie  must  have  been  already  in  bed, 
I  thought.  Her  light  was  out  and  her 
door  partly  open,  as  she  always  left  it. 
Far  into  the  night  it  seemed  to  me  that 
I  must  go  to  her  and  talk  to  her  of  this 


THE  WISHED-FOR  CHILD 


189 


fearful  thing.  I  got  up  softly.  When  I 
got  to  my  door  —  I  looked  across  the 
hall.  Her  door  was  closed.  It  was 
enough  —  neither  she  nor  God  wished 
to  talk  about  this  thing.  I  returned  to 
my  bed.  I  had  the  child  I  had  wished 
for,  by  my  side.  So  we  remained  all 
that  night. 

'No,  mademoiselle.  I  have  never 
spoken  to  her  about  it,  have  never  told 
her  that  I  know.  You  see,  it  is  this 
way:  I  have  thought  much  and  deep- 
ly, and  I  know  that  life  is  bearable 
so  long  as  one  is  serving  others,  and 
above  all  so  long  as  one  is  serving  them 
better  than  they  suspect.  It  is  that 
that  puts  some  little  glory  into  life,  — 
to  give  to  those  we  love  always  a  little 
more  than  is  required;  to  serve  them 
covertly  better  than  they  guess. 

'If  I  told  Marie  that  I  knew  about 
the  coming-back  of  Jean  Marie,  it 
would  be  like  robbing  her  of  something 
more.  As  it  is  she  can  watch  me  often, 
with  the  child  in  my  arms,  and  she  can 
think,  "It  was  for  Zephine's  happiness 
that  all  this  was  suffered.  If  she  is 
happy  it  is  worth  while.  She  must 
never,  never  know  that  I  suffer."  And 
so,  you  see,  she  will  have  a  new  service 
to  render  and  to  make  life  worth  the 
living.  I  shall  be  like  another  child,  for 
whom  she  has  suffered  pangs  of  the 
flesh  and  spirit. 

Even  when  she  sits  at  dusk,  near 
the  larkspurs,  thinking  of  Jean  Marie, 


this  thought  will  give  her  strength.  She 
will  see  me  coming  down  the  path  with 
the  child,  and  she  will  be  glad  at  sight 
of  me.  For  it  is  not  those  who  sac- 
rifice themselves  for  us  that  we  most 
love,  but  always,  always,  those  for 
whom  we  sacrifice  ourselves.  That  is 
the  true  motherhood,  and  it  is  Marie 
who  has  it.  You  see  I  have  not  sacri- 
ficed myself;  not  at  all.  I  am  no  true 
mother,  and  that  is  as  God  intended  it, 

—  but  she  is;  she  is.' 

'Your  own  silence  is  a  sacrifice,  too, 
perhaps/  I  ventured. 

She  shook  her  head  and  smiled. 

'Some  day,  I  want  you  to  tell  her; 
,  that  is,  if  I  should  die  first.  In  that  case 
I  want  her  to  know.  But  if  she  goes 
first  I  shall  leave  it  to  God :  He  will  take 
a  moment  aside  some  time  to  explain  it 
to  her.  He  could  do  it  in  a  few  words. 
As  it  is,  she  sits  often  at  night  there 
by  the  larkspur,  with  the  candle-light 
from  within  falling  in  a  patch  across 
the  flowers  as  it  did  that  night,  —  and 
I  know  that  she  sees  Jean  Marie's  face 
and  remembers  the  kisses  that  he  gave 
her  in  the  starlight;  but  she  says 
nothing. 

'  Not  long  ago  I  saw  her  take  out  the 
white  dress  and  the  white  silk  stock- 
ings and  the  blue  ribbon.  She  wrapped 
them  in  a  sheet  and  put  them  all  away, 
up  in  the  attic,  in  a  trunk  containing 
things  that  belong  to  my  dead  mother 

—  a  trunk  that  we  never  open/ 


LETTERS  OF  A  DOWN-AND-OUT 


The  following  letters,  written  without  thought  of  publication,  are  selected  from  a  correspondence 
which  still  continues.  The  author  is  a  young  man  who,  soon  after  leaving  Harvard  College,  started 
life  with  excellent  prospects,  and  early  in  his  career  achieved  marked  material  success.  While  still  in 
the  earliest  thirties,  he  was  making  an  income  of  $25,000  a  year  in  a  wholesale  commission  business; 
he  was  married,  apparently  happy,  the  father  of  two  children,  and,  in  the  current  phrase,  'fixed  for 
life.'  Then  misfortunes  came.  He  lost  his  position  and  his  money,  and  at  thirty-five,  stripped  of 
everything  he  possessed,  he  went,  without  money,  friends,  or  references,  to  try  a  new  start  in  the 
West.  The  following  letters,  practically  unchanged  except  for  the  alteration  and  omission  of  names, 
take  up  his  story  at  this  point.  —  THE  EDITORS. 


COSMOPOLIS,  WASHINGTON, 
March  28,  1912. 

DEAR : 

I  landed  in  Seattle  with  three  dol- 
lars and  a  half,  thoroughly  dirty,  and 
without  any  baggage  except  a  tin  box 
of  cigarettes.  As  the  cheapest  lodging 
in  sight,  I  spent  about  a  week  in  a 
Turkish  Bath  (basement  of  Tourist 
Hotel) ,  my  shirt  studs  and  cuff  buttons 
bought  food  for  a  while,  while  the  hot 
room  made  a  most  excellent  drying 
room  after  I  had  done  my  washing,  — 
underclothes  and  socks.  I  never  before 
wore  one  shirt  for  so  many  days,  but  as 
I  did  n't  haVe  any  money  I  could  not 
buy  another. 

During  this  time  I  did  my  best  to  get 
something  to  do  in  the  coal  business,  in 
which  I  have  had  experience,  but  with 
one  exception,  the  S.  &  W.  Co.,  who 
run  a  mine  at  Renton,  some  eight  miles 
from  Seattle,  and  the  Pacific  Coal  Com- 
pany (a  subsidiary  of  the  Harriman 
system),  I  did  not  get  any  sort  of  a  bite. 
Both  of  these  will  not  materialize  until 
fall  at  the  earliest.  I  went  to  every 
concern  in  the  business,  but  no  one 
seemed  to  desire  my  undoubtedly  very 
valuable  services.  Also  I  went  to  every 
wholesale  concern  in  Seattle,  handling 
machinery,  etc.,  but  from  these  I  did 
not  get  a  smell.  I  presume  my  appear- 

190 


ance  was  somewhat  against  me  as  my 
suit  of  clothes  looked  pretty  tough. 

I  tried  everything  I  could  think  of, 
but  all  I  could  find  was  one  night's 
work  as  a  stevedore  on  S.S.  Governor. 
Even  that  work  is  very  hard  to  obtain. 
I  went  night  after  night;  from  400  to 
500  men  would  be  on  hand  and  only 
from  60  to  75  would  be  taken.  I  tried 
all  the  concerns  dealing  in  fish,  but  dis- 
covered they  take  no  one  excepting 
Swedes  or  Finns. 

I  went  to  every  Alaskan  concern 
that  has  a  Seattle  office,  all  with  no 
success. 

The  nights  in  the  Turkish  Bath  were 
interesting,  had  I  the  power  of  descrip- 
tion. A  bunch  of  prize  fighters  boxed 
and  were  rubbed  down  there.  Two  of 
them  were  pretty  decent  sort  of  chaps. 
I  acted  as  second  for  one  in  a  fight  that 
he  won.  If  anybody  in  the  crowd 
spotted  me  in  the  towel- waving  second, 
he  kept  quiet. 

I  lived  at  the  Turkish  Bath  until  I 
ran  into  a  chap  named  Jones,  that  I 
used  to  know  at  home.  He  ran  a  hotel 
in  Springfield  and  one  in  Greenfield. 
He,  I  found,  was  almost  as  destitute 
as  I,  but  he  did  have  four  dollars,  that 
looked  like  a  small  fortune.  He  had 
been  working  as  a  deckhand  on  a  tug- 
boat but  he  got  in  a  row  with  the  Swede 


LETTERS  OF  A  DOWN-AND-OUT 


191 


mate  and  was  fired.  We  moved  from 
the  Bath  to  a  dump  called  the  Hotel 
Rainer,  one  of  those  places  that  have 
(to  me)  the  most  disagreeable  smell  in 
the  world:  that  of  poverty.  We  stayed 
there  for  about  a  week,  paying  75  cents 
a  day  for  the  room.  We  answered  news- 
paper advertisements  and  followed  up 
every  clue  we  could  think  of  to  get 
work.  I  always  thought  I  had  sufficient 
brain  to  earn  my  living  with  it,  but  it 
was  n't  possible  to  get  anything  to  do 
in  Seattle.  So,  in  desperation,  Jones 
and  I  went  to  an  employment  office 
and  signed  on  for  a  job  in  the  lumber 
mill  of  Grey's  Harbor  Commercial  Co., 
located  at  Cosmopolis,  which  is  about 
100  miles  south  of  Seattle. 

Being  entirely  without  proper  clothes 
for  a  colder  place,  I  went  to  a  chap 

named  Weeks  that  B had  written 

would  give  me  help  as  a  last  resort,  and 
from  him  obtained  the  following :  — 


One  dress-suit  case 
One  flannel  shirt 
One  pair  underdrawers 
Last  night  Hotel  Rainer 
Fee,  employment  agency 
Cash 


$  .85 

.89 

.39 

.75 

2.00 

1.00 

$5.88 


The  object  of  the  dress-suit  case  (you 
can  imagine  what  kind  it  is  for  85 
cents)  was  that  to  get  your  fare  ad- 
vanced from  Seattle  to  Cosmopolis  one 
had  to  have  baggage.  As  Jones's  be- 
longings consisted  of  a  comb,  one  extra 
pair  of  shoes,  and  a  second  union  suit, 
the  dress-suit  case  really  was  quite  im- 
portant. To  get  this  large  sum  out  of 
Mr.  Weeks  was  like  pulling  teeth,  al- 
though B had  written  me  that  he 

(Weeks)  would  advance  me  what  funds 
I  needed.  Weeks  was  about  as  blood- 
less as  a  turnip. 

However,  we  left  Seattle  a  week  ago 
at  five  P.M.  and  arrived  at  Cosmopolis 
at  ten-fifteen.  A  man  met  us  at  the 
station  and  led  us  to  a  boarding-house. 
Being  very  tired,  I  went  to  bed  at  once, 


where  I  stayed  for  perhaps  thirty  min- 
utes, then  I  arose  and  spent  the  balance 
of  the  night  on  the  ground  outside  of 
the  house.  Bed-bugs.  The  mill  whistle 
blew  at  six  and  we  went  to  the  mess- 
house  for  breakfast.  The  food  was  and 
is  surprisingly  good.  Of  course,  as  they 
feed  over  400  at  once,  they  throw  it  at 
you,  but  the  place  is  clean  and  not  at 
all  bad,  excepting  the  coffee,  which  is 
awful.  Then  we  went  to  work. 

If  you  work  with  your  hands  from 
7  to  12  and  from  1  to  6,  handling  4X8s, 
three  things  happen :  plenty  of  splin- 
ters in  your  fingers,  a  very,  very  lame 
back,  and  a  devil  of  an  appetite.  I  did 
this  sort  of  work  Tuesday,  Wednes- 
day, and  Thursday.  In  the  mean  time 
I  discovered  the  remuneration  was 
$26  a  month  and  food;  from  this  you 
have  to  subtract  $5  a  month  for  a  room 
and  $1  for  the  doctor:  so,  as  the  em- 
ployment agency  in  Seattle  had  ad- 
vanced the  railroad  fare,  from  March 
19  to  April  19  I  stood  as  follows  (also 
Jones) :  — 

$26.00 

9.95 
$16.05 

In  the  mean  time,  what  the  night  at 
stevedoring  had  not  done  to  my  clothes, 
the  three  days  in  the  mill  here  had 
(en  passant,  the  Company  keep  your 
baggage  until  you  have  earned  the 
price  of  the  railroad  fare) .  So  at  four, 
Thursday  afternoon,  I  was  really  fairly 
blue,  and  then  the  first  glimmer  of 
sunshine,  since  I  left  Boston,  came  to 
the  front.  Kelley,  the  boss,  came  to 
me,  in  a  hurry,  and  said,  'The  I.  W.  W. 
are  outside;  are  you  willing  to  take 
a  chance?'  As  far  as  I  can  figure,  the 
I.  W.  W.  or,  as  they  call  themselves, 
The  Industrial  Workers  of  the  World, 
is  a  labor  organization  that  has  no 
standing  whatsoever  in  the  eastern  and 
central  American  Unions.  (I  under- 


March  19  to  April  19 

Carfare  $3.95 

Room  5.00 

Doctor  1.00 


192 


LETTERS  OF  A  DOWN-AND-OUT 


scored  American,  because  in  the  entire 
outfit  there  is  not  one  in  ten  who  can 
speak  English.) 

PRINCE  RUPERT,  B.  C.,  April  4. 

Being  a  jump  of  650  miles  north  of 
Cosmopolis,  which  I  will  explain  later. 

I  was  so  damn  tired  of  the  lumber 
business  I  was  willing  to  take  a  chance 
at  anything,  so  I  said,  'Yes,'  and  we 
beat  it  to  the  outside  of  the  mill.  There 
were  about  300  I.  W.  W.'s  just  across 
the  track,  and  after  hooting  and  jeer- 
ing, about  twenty  started  to  run  across 
the  track  and  into  the  mill  grounds. 
The  manager,  who  was  lined  up  with 
about  15  other  brave  defenders,  yelled, 
'Stab  them.'  Allen,  the  sub-foreman, 
made  a  beautiful  tackle  on  the  extreme 
end  of  the  enemy's  line  and  I  followed 
suit.  My  I.  W.  W.'s  head  struck  the 
inside  rail  and  after  he  hit  he  lay  still. 
It  had  been  so  long  since  I'd  played 
football  I  was  considerable  shook  up 
myself,  but  some  one  hopped  up  and 
tried  to  kick  me  in  the  head;  this  made 
me  sore,  so,  arising,  I  biffed  a  man  in 
the  left  eye  and  he  my  right.  Then  the 
enemy  retreated,  and  until  the  whistle 
blew  at  six,  spent  their  time  in  yelling 
and  making  speeches.  These  were 
somewhat  difficult  to  understand  as 
the  spouters  used  very  indifferent  Eng- 
lish, but  the  purport  was  that  $26  per 
month,  less  deductions,  was  too  little. 
To  this  I  thoroughly  agreed,  but  when 
the  sheriff  came  around  and  offered  me 
$5  a  day  to  act  as  a  guard,  I  decided  it 
was  plenty.  Jones  also  became  a  night 
defender,  so  for  a  week  we  walked  the 
streets  and  through  the  mill,  when  it 
was  decided  we  were  no  longer  re- 
quired. Then  I  agreed  with  the  strik- 
ers once  again,  and  we  decided  to  quit. 

We  had  just  money  enough  to  get 
here;  which  was  on  Wednesday  the 
3d.  Our  landing  was  not  particularly 
cheerful:  snowing  very  hard  and  our 
total  cash  resources  just  one  American 


penny.  I  had  walked  the  streets  of 
Cosmopolis  so  vigorously  that  I  wore  a 
hole  completely  through  my  right  shoe 
and  the  snow  was  wet.  In  fact,  as  I 
write,  both  feet  are  as  wet  as  they  can 
be.  The  steamship  agents  in  Seattle 
told  us  we  would  secure  work  within 
five  minutes  of  getting  off  the  boat,  but 
we  did  n't  and  have  n't  yet,  though  we 
have  a  half  promise  of  being  shipped 
Saturday  noon  to  the  most  eastern 
construction  camp  of  the  Grand  Trunk 
Pacific,  a  matter  of  190  miles. 

A  remark  many  men  have  made  to 
me  I  remember  well:  'Any  man  who 
really  desires  employment  can  readily 
obtain  it.'  Well,  if  anybody  ever  says 
such  a  thing  to  you,  please  reply  that 
I  say,  'It's  a  Damn  Lie.'  I  went  yes- 
terday and  to-day  to  28  offices,  stores 
and  docks,  and  asked  for  any  kind  of 
work,  and  could  n't  get  it,  and  Jones 
did  the  same.  Also  we  went  26  hours 
without  food,  and  you  take  it  from  me 
it's  a  mighty  unpleasant  thing  to  do. 
This  morning  I  walked  up  to  a  perfect 
stranger  and  said,  'Give  me  a  dol- 
lar.' (I  did  n't  say,  I  want  to  borrow, 
but  Give.)  He  gave.  Jones  and  I 
had  a  drink  apiece,  25  cents'  worth 
of  food,  and  now  at  this  writing  have 
exactly  ten  cents  for  coffee  and  dough- 
nuts for  breakfast.  In  other  words, 
just  50  cents*  worth  of  food  in  a  day 
and  a  half.  We  have  a  bed,  but  remun- 
eration for  the  hotel  man  is  extremely 
hazy. 

Now  as  to  your  letter.  I  also  will 
never  forget  the  fishing  trips  which, 
while  not  very  productive  of  fish,  were 
certainly  most  enjoyable  occasions. 
It 's  curious  how  certain  unimportant 
occurrences  stick  in  one's  memory  while 
later  much  more  important  ones  are 
entirely  forgotten.  I  remember  dis- 
tinctly the  first  two  years  I  fished 
with  your  father  that  I  was  greatly  dis- 
tressed to  see  how  little  interest  you 
showed  in  the  game.  That  first  year, 


LETTERS  OF  A  DOWN-AND-OUT 


193 


my  son,  was  just  twenty-five  years  ago. 
A  good  deal  has  happened  since  then. 

With  the  rest  of  your  letter  I  don't 
agree.  I  guess  it 's  true  that  they  don't 
come  back,  and  I  guess  I  'm  down-and- 
out  for  all  time.  I  'm  a  sight,  trousers 
torn  and  a  week  or  ten  days  of  beard 
which,  I  regret  to  say,  is  turning  quite 
gray,  giving  me  the  appearance  of  a 
venerable  old  bum.  I  don't  know  when 
you  will  receive  this  effusion  because  I 
don't  know  when  I  will  be  able  to  buy 
envelope  and  stamp,  but  when  I  do  I  '11 
mail  it.  It  seems  hardly  possible  for 
one  to  seriously  speak  of  the  cost  of  a 
postage  stamp,  but  I  'm  in  dead  earnest. 
Some  drop  for  one  who  has  held  the 
rather  important  positions  that  I  did, 
such  a  short  time  ago. 

If  it  was  n't  for  that  confounded  will 
I  guess  I  'd  try  the  long  swim  to  China. 
It's  months  since  I  heard  whether  my 
kiddies  were  dead  or  alive. 

Well,  Old  Fellow,  if  later  there  is 
anything  to  communicate  I'll  send  it 
along. 

CAMP  59,  GRAND  TRUNK  PACIFIC, 
April  8,  1912. 

To  resume  the  story  of  my  life: 
Shortly  after  I  stopped  writing  you  on 
Thursday  last,  I  received  a  telephone 
message  from  the  head  stevedore  of 
G.  T.  P.  to  report  at  midnight  to  dis- 
charge coal  on  S.S.  Princess  Ena. 
This  was  unexpected  luck  as  Jones  and 
I  had  seen  him  every  time  a  ship  was 
due.  She  actually  docked  at  one  in  the 
morning,  and  when  her  aft-hold  hatch- 
covers  were  taken  off  I  immediately 
knew  why  the  regular  crew  of  steve- 
dores had  shied  on  the  job.  Hot  coal. 
You  would  not  know  what  you  were 
up  against,  but  it  was  an  old  story  to 
me.  Ten  of  us  went  into  the  lower  hold 
and  started  loading  the  tubs.  At  two, 
an  hour  after  we  started,  Jones  fell 
over,  and  about  twenty  minutes  later 
two  others.  Gas  from  the  coal.  Three 
VOL.  in -NO.  2 


of  us  stuck  it  out  to  the  end,  ten- 
thirty  Friday  morning,  whereupon  I 
created  quite  a  scene.  On  calling  for 
our  pay,  9^  hours  at  35  cents  an  hour,  we 
were  told  by  the  paymaster  to  call  be~ 
tween  three  and  four  in  the  afternoon : 
I  fainted  and  fell  flat  on  my  face  in  the 
snow.  The  fact  was  I  was  awfully 
hungry,  my  last  meal  having  been  on 
Thursday  noon.  The  ten  cents  I  men- 
tioned I  gave  to  Jones  when  he  keeled 
over.  Besides  I  was  pretty  dizzy  from 
the  fumes.  I  felt  like  a  damn  fool  when 
I  got  up,  and  got  out  of  sight  as  quick- 
ly as  possible. 

When  I  reached  our  dump,  I  found 
Jones  in  bed,  but  he  had  saved  my  ten 
cents,  only  having  spent  his  own;  so  I 
had  coffee  and  doughnuts  and  went  to 
bed.  I  ached  so  that  I  did  n't  sleep 
much,  and  also  I  strained  my  back,  but 
we  were  at  the  paymaster's  at  three, 
and  Jones  collected  35  cents  and  I 
$3.35.  Whereupon  we  were  reckless, 
—  we  ate  $1.10  worth  of  steak  and 
coffee. 

Saturday  morning  we  were  much 
cast  down  when  the  shipping  agent 
(for  men),  who  had  half  promised  us  a 
job,  said  no.  We  followed  him  around 
all  morning  (so  did  about  75  others), 
and  finally  he  turned  to  a  chap  called 
Mac  and  said,  'Can  you  use  the  lads?' 
Mac  looked  us  over  and  allowed  he 
could.  So  at  one  we  started  and  arrived 
at  our  destination  at  five.  Four  hours 
going  59  miles,  hardly  fast  and  furious. 
A  firm  of  contractors  are  putting  in  a 
steel  bridge  with  concrete  piers,  abut- 
ments, etc.,  about  200  men  on  the  job. 
After  supper  in  the  mess-house  we  ap- 
proached the  office  guiltily.  We  knew 
we  should  have  brought  blankets  with 
us,  but  after  handing  the  Prince  Ru- 
pert landlord  the  entire  privy  purse  we 
still  owed  him  $1. 

After  Jones  had  almost  cried,  the 
storeman  handed  each  a  perfectly  good 
cotton  blanket  at  $3.25  each,  and  we 


194 


LETTERS  OF  A  DOWN-AND-OUT 


went  to  the  bridge  bunk-house.  (Five 
in  all,  with  different  names.) 

This  house  has  only  white  men. 
(Whites  evidently  means  Canadians, 
Americans,  Englishmen,  and  Germans.) 
No  bugs,  thank  God!  and  straw  mat- 
tresses. 

I  hope,  if  yesterday  was  fine,  that 
you  and  your  wife  walked  from  Massa- 
chusetts Avenue  to  Arlington  Street, 
via  Commonwealth  Avenue.  If  so  you 
probably  saw  some  stunning  sights. 
Boston,  with  the  exception  of  Philadel- 
phia and  Los  Angeles,  has,  I  think,  the 
best-looking  women  on  the  continent. 

But  though  I  worked  the  entire  day 
with  pick  and  shovel,  I  certainly  saw 
a  more  stunning.  We  are  on  the  Skeena 
River,  a  sizable  stream,  mountains  on 
both  sides  as  bold  as  I  ever  saw  and  in- 
finitely more  beautiful  than  the  Rock- 
ies. Of  course,  this  effect  may  have  been 
heightened  by  a  beautiful  day,  bright 
sun,  and  no  wind.  We  are  engaged 
in  bridging  the  second  perfect-looking 
fly-fishing  stream  I  have  ever  seen 
(the  other  being  Grand  Lake  Stream, 
in  Maine),  though  I  presume  that 
when  the  snow  begins  to  melt  it  will  be 
a  torrent. 

This  morning  the  same  old  snow  and 
rain.  Wet  to  the  skin,  of  course.  How 
I  would  like  a  pair  of  shoes,  sweater, 
and  oil-coat.  If  I  had  those  then  I 
would  get  a  fly-rod  and  get  some  trout. 
(They  look  very  much  like  landlocked 
salmon.)  But  as  the  prices  they  charge 
in  the  store  are  frightful  (at  least  100 
per  cent  extra),  it  will  be  a  week  before 
I  can  get  even  the  boots. 

It  was  so  wet  this  noon  the  company 
stopped  work.  This  I  did  not  like,  as  I 
could  n't  have  been  wetter  if  in  the 
river,  and  you  are  charged  with  your 
meals  whether  you  work  or  not.  The 
remuneration  is  as  follows.  Wages  $3 
for  10-hour  day,  less  90  cents  for  meals, 
$1  per  month  for  doctor  and  $1  for  hos- 
pital. 


I  hope  that  this  very  lengthy  epistle 
will  not  bore  you;  it  has  at  least  helped 
me  to  pass  some  weary  moments.  Also 
I  hope  you  can  read  it  (the  Camp  59 
part).  I  am  in  my  bunk  (only  one 
table,  used  by  card-players)  using  the 
celebrated  Weeks  Dress-Suit  Case  for 
a  back. 

The  surroundings  are  not  at  all  bad. 
Forty-odd  men  listening  to  a  phono- 
graph. If  they  were  not  so  afraid  of 
poisonous  fresh  air  and  would  n't  spit 
every  second  on  the  floor,  I  would  be 
satisfied. 

As  our  present  job  will  probably  last 
not  over  two  weeks, 
Address, 

Prince  Rupert,  B.  C. 

H.  D.  P. 

CAMP  No.  59, 

GRAND  TRUNK  PACIFIC  RY.  BRITISH  COLUMBIA, 
April  15,  1912. 

My  DEAR : 

For  some  days  I  have  meant  to  write 
you,  but  the  present  life  I  am  leading 
makes  it  difficult  to  do  anything  ex- 
cept work  and  sleep. 

I  am  with  the  pick-and-shovel  gang, 
which  work,  I  take  it,  takes  the  least 
intelligence  of  any  known.  We  are 
called  at  six,  breakfast  at  six-thirty, 
work  at  seven  until  noon,  then  again 
from  one  until  six.  The  bunk-house  I 
sleep  in  is  so  dimly  lighted  it  is  almost 
impossible  to  see  to  use  a  pencil,  the 
one  table  being  used  nightly  by  four 
confirmed  whist-players. 

The  work  is  not  over-hard,  but  it  is 
fearfully  monotonous  and  uninterest- 
ing, but  I  must  say  the  workman's 
view  of  life  is  novel  and  gives  one  quite 
a  different  idea  of  the  world.  Some- 
where about  two  hundred  men  are  on 
this  job,  putting  in  concrete  piers  for  a 
bridge,  and  also  somewhat  turning  the 
course  of  the  Skeena  River  (a  stream 
about  the  size  of  the  Kennebec).  We 
have  a  babel  of  language,  Canadians, 


LETTERS  OF  A  DOWN-AND-OUT 


195 


Americans,  Russians,  Finns,  Poles, 
Italians,  etc.,  etc.  The  food  is  good 
and  so  far  our  bunk-house  is  free  from 
vermin,  but  the  one  next  to  us  is  in- 
fested with  both  bed-bugs  and  lice,  and 
we  expect  a  visitation  any  day 

Wages  in  this  country  are  a  good 
deal  of  a  delusion  and  a  snare;  I  am  re- 
ceiving three  dollars  a  day  which  is,  of 
course,  nearly  double  what  I  would  get 
in  the  East  for  similar  work,  but  living 
is  very  expensive.  Twenty-five  cents 
for  a  ten-cent  tin  of  Lucky  Strike,  nine 
dollars  for  a  pair  of  shoes  not  worth 
over  four,  two  dollars  and  a  half  for 
dollar  overalls,  etc.,  etc.  For  food, 
the  contractors,  Johnson,  Carey,  and 
Helmars,  charge  90  cents  a  day,  which, 
of  course,  one  pays  whether  one  works 
or  not;  and,  of  course,  there  is  no  Sun- 
day here,  as  the  work  goes  on  seven 
days  a  week. 

I  object,  as  a  workman,  to  a  ten- 
hour  day;  it  is  too  long,  as  a  man  should 
have  a  little  daylight  in  which  to  shave, 
wash  his  clothes,  etc.  In  fact,  I  believe 
if  the  work  stopped  here  at  five  in  the 
afternoon,  or  a  nine-hour  day,  as  much 
would  be  accomplished,  as  the  last 
hour  distinctly  drags,  and  every  man  is 
hoping  for  the  whistle  every  minute. 

I  am  really  writing  this  letter  on  ac- 
count of  my  son  John.  When  you  re- 
ceive it,  I  will  be  thirty-six  years  old, 
working  with  my  hands,  with  no  pro- 
spect of  improving  my  condition.  Of 
course,  there  are  chances  for  the  man 
with  a  little  money.  I  think  with  a 
thousand  dollars  one  who  knew  the 
retail  coal  business  could  build  up  a 
very  pretty  tonnage  in  Prince  Rupert, 
which  bids  fair  to  grow  as  fast  as 
Vancouver,  as  it  will  be  the  western 
terminus  of  this  railway.  Without  ex- 
ception it  has  the  finest  harbor  I  ever 
saw,  eight  miles  of  landlocked  water 
surrounded  by  high  mountains,  a  hun- 
dred feet  in  depth  right  up  to  the  shore. 
Then  the  fish  are  here  in  almost  incon- 


ceivable numbers,  also  great  mineral 
wealth  and  much  timber;  but  all  this  is 
for  the  capitalist  and  not  for  the  work- 
ing-man. 

There  is,  however,  a  demand  for 
skilled  labor.  For  instance,  carpenters 
receive  45  cents  an  hour  and  engineers 
(donkeys)  50  cents.  As  I  in  all  proba- 
bility will  never  see  John  again,  I  sug- 
gest you  confer  with  my  wife,  with  the 
view  of  letting  John  put  in  a  few  weeks 
in  the  summer  learning  some  trade,  so 
that  if  the  worst  comes  to  worst  he 
would  have  something  to  fall  back 
upon,  and  not  find  himself  in  the  pre- 
dicament I  am  in  at  present. 

The  chance  to  write  this  letter  came 
through  rather  a  nasty  accident.  The 
anchor-line  on  one  of  the  bridge  der- 
ricks broke  about  eleven  this  morning 
and  the  whole  shooting-match  pretty 
nearly  went  in  the  river.  After  dinner 
two  other  chaps  and  myself  climbed 
out  on  the  end  (about  forty  feet  above 
ground)  to  pass  a  line,  when  the  leg 
fell.  Both  my  companions  were  killed, 
one  instantly,  the  other  dying  in  about 
an  hour.  The  bodies  are  lying  at  my 
feet,  covered  up  with  some  meal-sacks. 
A  good  horse  is  worth  $500,  but  a  man 
nothing,  in  this  country.  When  I  felt 
the  timbers  going  I  jumped  outwards 
and  landed  in  the  river,  reaching  shore 
some  two  hundred  yards  downstream 
in  an  eddy.  As  all  the  clothes  I  have 
were  on  my  back,  and  I  have  no  credit 
at  the  store,  I  am  taking  the  afternoon 
off  to  dry  out. 

If  any  one  dies  or  any  new  ones 
arrive  in  the  family  I  would  like  to  be 
advised.  As  the  work  I  am  on  will 
not  last  over  ten  days  at  the  outside, 
General  Delivery,  Prince  Rupert,  Brit- 
ish Columbia,  is  my  surest  address. 

Will  you  please  mail  this  letter  to 

,  as  he  seems  to  take  some  interest 

in  my  wanderings. 

Yours, 

H.  D.  P. 


196 


LETTERS  OF  A  DOWN-AND-OUT 


PRINCE  RUPERT,  B.  C.  April  19, 1912. 
DEAR , 

I  am  here  as  a  witness  in  the  Coro- 
ner's inquest,  held  to  determine  the 
cause  of  the  death  of  the  two  men  who 
were  killed.  No  new  news.  I've  been 
pressing  my  nose  against  the  *  Gent's 
Furnishing  Stores,'  wishing  I  had  the 
price  of  an  $18  suit. 

Have  called  on  all  the  Civil  and 
Mining  engineers,  with  the  hope  of 
getting  on  some  surveying  party,  but 
without  success. 

The  future  does  not  look  very  rosy 
as  I  write. 

As  ever, 

H.  D.  P. 

P.S.  The  harbor  here  is  the  most 
wonderful  I  ever  saw  or  dreamed  of. 

SEELEY,  B.  C.,  G.  T.  P.  R.,  May  7,  1912. 

DEAR , 

After  the  Coroner's  inquest  I  went 
back  to  camp.  There  I  stayed  until 
yesterday  morning,  working  on  rock 
and  gravel,  and  only  left  on  account 
of  the  vermin,  which  were  something 
awful.  I  got  covered  with  lice  and 
fleas,  and,  as  they  were  general  in  the 
bunk-house,  bathing  was  only  a  tem- 
porary relief.  I  begged  the  superin- 
tendent for  sufficient  lumber  to  build 
a  shack  of  my  own,  but  was  answered 
by,  *  Stay  in  the  bunk-house  or  get  out ' ; 
so  I  got.  Follows  a  diary  of  my  days. 

Monday,  May  6.  —  Started  up  river 
at  eight  this  A.M.  Followed  the  grade 
of  the  new  road  (steam)  as  it  seemed 
to  be  better  hiking  than  on  the  wagon 
road,  which  was  very  wet.  Passed 
twenty  or  twenty-five  Italian  laborers 
who  seemed  to  be  rather  poor  walkers, 
and  then  caught  up  to  a  more  nonde- 
script bunch.  Four  of  them  in  all,  one 
a  Dominion  Government  policeman 
whose  chief  duties,  apparently,  are  to 
stop  the  sale  of  liquor  to  the  Indians; 
another  a  railroad  contractor  by  the 


name  of  Corrigan,  an  Irishman  who 
looked  fifty,  and  who  told  me  he  was 
seventy-three  years  old.  He  said  he 
had  spent  the  past  winter  in  Southern 
California  and  that  he  had  been  drunk 
for  four  months.  As  he  was  feeling  ex- 
ceedingly feeble,  I  guess,  perhaps,  he 
had.  The  third  was  a  prospector,  a 
man  of  fifty-five,  who  has  spent  twenty- 
five  years  in  this  country  or  north.  I 
envied  him  his  ability  in  carrying  stuff 
on  his  back.  His  pack  weighed  about 
a  hundred  pounds,  yet  he  only  stopped 
to  rest  three  times  on  our  morning 
journey,  a  distance  of  fourteen  miles. 
My  own,  which  only  weighs  forty 
pounds,  seemed  fearfully  heavy  when 
we  reached  Seeley  at  noon.  The  fourth 
chap  was  a  youngster  who  was  looking 
for  a  chance  to  get  on  some  survey. 

After  dinner  I  hiked  on  alone  for 
New  Hazelton,  which  is  the  head- 
quarters of  Messrs.  Farrington,  Weeks, 
and  Stone,  the  contractors,  who  are 
building  the  railroad  through  B.  C.  for 
G.  T.  P.  Arrived  at  four-thirty,  pretty 
well  played-out.  Had  a  sponge  bath  in 
a  hand-basin  and  changed  my  under- 
clothes and  socks.  Then  went  out  and 
bought  a  pair  of  trousers  and  a  shirt. 
Hated  like  the  devil  to  spend  the 
money,  but  it  seemed  rather  necessary. 
Had  no  trousers,  having  worn  out  the 
only  ones  I  owned,  and  my  second 
flannel  shirt  disappeared  a  week  ago. 
If  I  could  get  my  hands  on  the  man 
that  stole  it  there  would  be  a  near  mur- 
der. On  reading  the  last  sentence  over 
it  might  appear  that  I  went  almost 
naked,  while  as  a  matter  of  fact  I  have 
a  pair  of  overalls. 

Went  to  bed  at  seven-thirty,  and,  at 
once,  I  was  reminded  of  an  illustration 
in  an  old  edition  of  Mark  Twain's 
Roughing  It.  The  cut  depicted  Brig- 
ham  Young's  bedroom,  seventy  beds 
for  his  wives.  Mark  goes  on  to  say 
the  bedroom  was  a  failure  because  all 
the  wives  breathed  in  and  out  at  the 


LETTERS  OF  A  DOWN-AND-OUT 


197 


same  time,  and  the  pressure  blew  the 
walls  down.  My  bedroom  was  an  un- 
finished loft  with  some  thirty-odd  cots 
in  it.  I  woke  in  the  night  and  the  snor- 
ing was  strenuous. 

Tuesday,  May  7.  —  Twelve  years 
ago  to-day  I  left  Boston  for  Washing- 
ton to  be  married.  My  prospects  at 
that  time  seemed  to  be  bright  and  se- 
cure, but  as  the  late  lamented  Dan 
Daly  used  to  say,  'Now  look  at  the 
damn  thing.' 

Went  to  F.  W.  &  S.  offices  at  nine, 
and  to  my  disgust  found  that  Mr. 
Stratton,  the  general  superintendent, 
had  left  a  short  time  before  for  Seeley, 
and  as  he  was  the  man  I  must  see  to  se- 
cure any  sort  of  a  position,  I  packed  up 
and  hiked  back  to  Seeley.  Arrived  at 
Seeley  at  twelve,  had  a  bite  and  caught 
Mr.  S.,  a  gruff  and  short  Irishman  of 
fifty,  on  the  steamer.  He  listened  to 
me  for  five  minutes  and  then  said, 
'You  see  Pat  Maloney  and  say  I  said 
to  take  you  on.'  On  inquiry  I  found 
that  Mr.  Maloney  is  chief  auditor  of  the 
company;  nobody  seems  to  know  his 
whereabouts,  but  he  is  somewhere  up 
the  line,  —  he  may  be  here  to-morrow 
and  may  not  be  for  a  week.  I  hope  it 's 
to-morrow  as  the  exchequer  is  running 
extremely  low.  As  I  write  I  have  a 
pay  check  for  $4.70,  and  $4.50  in 
cash.  Meals  are  50  cents  each,  and  a 
bed  $1. 


Seeley  is  the  last  landing-place  on 
the  Skeena  River  for  the  G.  T.  P.,  as 
the  river  goes  directly  north  from  here, 
while  the  railroad  is  to  go  east.  Sup- 
plies, of  course,  are  very  expensive. 
They  come  from  Vancouver  to  Prince 
Rupert  by  water,  Prince  Rupert  to 
Van  Arsdal  by  rail,  and  from  Van  Ars- 
dal  to  Seeley  by  river  steamers  which 
are  stern-wheelers  and  small  copies  of 
the  freighters  one  sees  on  the  Missis- 
sippi. 

These  towns  are  amusing:  Seeley  has 
eleven  board  buildings  and  about 
twenty  tents,  and  New  Hazelton  per- 
haps thirty  frame  buildings  and  as 
many  tents,  yet  if  you  look  at  the  real- 
estate  advertisements  in  the  Vancouver 
newspapers  you  might  imagine  both 
places  were  about  ready  for  street  cars. 
New  Hazelton,  however,  boasts  of  a 
branch  of  the  Union  Bank  of  Canada, 
which  is  at  least  picturesque,  as  it  is  a 
very  fine  log  cabin. 

In  time  a  good  deal  of  silver  will 
come  out  of  this  country,  but  up  to  the 
present  the  lack  of  transportation  has 
precluded  any  shipments  of  ore.  Min- 
eral wealth,  timber,  and  magnificent 
scenery  complete  the  entire  resources 
of  the  region,  and  the  scenery  is  n't 
much  of  a  help  to  the  working-man. 

Here  endeth  the  present  writing. 

[The  remaining  *  Letters  of  a  Down- 
and-Out '  will  be  published  in  March.] 


THE  MACHINE-TRAINERS 


BY   GERALD   STANLEY  LEE 


I  WENT  to  the  Durbar  the  other 
night  (in  kinemacolor)  and  saw  the 
King  and  Queen  through  India.  I  had 
found  my  way,  with  hundreds  of  others, 
into  a  gallery  of  the  Scala  Theatre,  and, 
out  of  that  big,  still  rim  of  watchful 
darkness  where  I  sat,  I  saw  —  there 
must  have  been  thousands  of  them  — 
crowds  of  camels  running. 

And  crowds  of  elephants  went 
swinging  past.  I  watched  them  like  a 
boy;  like  a  boy  standing  on  the  edge  of 
a  thousand  years  and  looking  off  at  a 
world.  It  was  stately  and  strange  and 
like  far  music  to  sit  quite  still  and 
watch  civilizations  swinging  past. 

Then,  suddenly,  it  became  near  and 
human,  the  spirit  of  playgrounds  and 
of  shouting  and  boyish  laughter  ran 
through  it.  And  we  watched  the  ele- 
phants naked  and  untrimmed,  lolling 
down  to  the  lake,  and  lying  down  to  be 
scrubbed  in  it,  with  comfortable,  low 
snortings  and  slow  rolling  in  the  water, 
and  the  men  standing  by,  all  the  while, 
like  little  play  nurses,  and  tending 
them  —  their  big  bungling  babies  at 
the  bath.  A  few  minutes  later  we 
watched  the  same  elephants,  hundreds 
of  them,  their  mighty  toilets  made, 
pacing  slowly  past,  swinging  their 
gorgeous  trappings  in  our  eyes,  rolling 
their  huge  hoodahs  at  us,  and,  all  the 
time,  still  those  little  funny  dots  of 
men  beside  them,  moving  them  silently, 
moving  them  invisibly,  as  by  a  spirit, 
as  by  a  kind  of  awful  wireless  —  those 
great  engines  of  the  flesh!  I  shall  never 

198 


forget  it  or  live  without  it,  that  slow 
pantomime  of  those  mighty,  silent 
Eastern  nations;  their  religions,  their 
philosophies,  their  wills,  their  souls, 
moving  their  elephants  past;  the  long 
panorama  of  it,  of  their  little,  awful, 
human  wills;  all  those  little  black,  help- 
less looking  slits  of  Human  Will  astride 
those  mighty  necks! 

I  have  the  same  feeling  when  I  see 
Count  Zeppelin  with  his  air-ship,  or 
Grahame- White  at  Hendon,  riding  his 
vast  cosmic  pigeon  up  the  sky;  and  it 
is  the  same  feeling  I  have  with  the 
locomotives  —  those  unconscious,  for- 
bidding, coldly  obedient,  terrible  fel- 
lows! Have  I  not  lain  awake  and  lis- 
tened to  them  storming  through  the 
night,  heard  them  out  there,  ahead, 
working  our  wills  on  the  blackness,  on 
the  thick  night,  on  the  stars,  on  space, 
and  on  time,  while  we  slept? 

My  main  feeling  at  the  Durbar, 
while  I  watched  those  splendid  beasts, 
the  crowds  of  camels,  the  crowds  of 
elephants,  all  being  driven  along  by 
the  little  faint,  dreamy,  sleepy-look- 
ing people,  was,  *  Why  don't  their  ele- 
phants turn  around  on  them  and  chase 
them?' 

I  kept  thinking  at  first  that  they 
would,  almost  any  minute. 

Our  elephants  chase  us,  most  of  us. 
Who  has  not  seen  locomotives  come 
quietly  out  of  their  round-houses  in 
New  York  and  begin  chasing  people; 
chasing  whole  towns,  tearing  along 
with  them,  making  everybody  hurry 
whether  or  no;  speeding  up  and  order- 
ing around  by  the  clock  great  cities, 


THE  MACHINE-TRAINERS 


199 


everybody  alike,  the  rich  and  the  poor, 
the  just  and  the  unjust,  for  hundreds  of 
miles  around?  In  the  same  way  I  have 
seen,  hundreds  of  times,  motor-cars 
turning  around  on  their  owners  and 
chasing  them,  chasing  them  fairly  out 
of  their  lives.  And  hundreds  of  thou- 
sands of  little  wood  and  rubber  Things 
with  nickel  bells  whirring  may  be  seen 
ordering  around  people  —  who  pay 
them  for  it  —  in  any  city  of  our  mod- 
ern world. 

Now  and  then  one  comes  on  a  man 
who  keeps  a  telephone  who  is  a  gentle- 
man with  it,  and  who  keeps  it  in  its 
place,  but  not  often. 

There  are  certain  questions  to  be 
asked,  and  to  be  settled,  in  any  civiliza- 
tion that  would  be  called  great. 

First.  Do  the  elephants  chase  the 
men  in  it?  Second.  And  if —  as  in  our 
western  civilization  —  the  men  have 
made  their  own  elephants,  why  should 
they  be  chased  by  them? 

There  are  some  of  us  who  have  won- 
dered a  little  at  the  comparative  infe- 
riority of  organ  music.  We  have  come 
to  the  conclusion  that,  perhaps,  organ 
music  is  inferior  because  it  has  been 
largely  composed  by  organists,  by  men 
who  sit  at  organ  machines  many  hours 
a  day,  and  who  have  let  their  organ 
machines,  with  all  their  stops  and  pe- 
dals, and  with  all  their  stop-and-pedal 
mindedness,  select  out  of  their  minds 
the  tones  that  organs  can  do  best  — 
the  music  that  machines  like. 

Wagner  has  come  to  be  recognized 
as  a  great  and  original  composer  for  a 
machine  age,  because  he  would  not  let 
his  imagination  be  cowed  by  the  mere 
technical  limitations,  the  narrowmind- 
edness  of  brass  horns,  wooden  flutes, 
and  catgut;  he  made  up  his  mind  that 
he  would  not  sing  violins.  He  made 
violins  sing  him. 

Perhaps  this  is  the  whole  secret  of 
art  in  a  machine  civilization.  Perhaps 
a  machine  civilization  is  capable  of  a 


greater  art  than  has  ever  been  dreamed 
of  in  the  world  before,  the  moment  it 
stops  being  chased  by  its  elephants. 
The  question  of  letting  the  crowd  be 
beautiful  in  our  world  of  machines  and 
crowds,  to-day,  turns  on  our  producing 
Machine-Trainers . 

Men  possessed  by  watches  in  their 
vest  pockets  cannot  be  inspired;  men 
possessed  by  churches  or  by  religion- 
machines,  cannot  be  prophets;  men 
possessed  by  school-machines  cannot 
be  educators. 

The  reason  that  we  find  the  poet,  or 
at  least  the  minor  poet,  discouraged  in 
a  machine  age,  probably  is  because 
there  is  nothing  a  minor  poet  can  do  in 
it.  Why  should  nightingales,  poppies, 
and  dells  expect,  in  a  main  trial  of 
strength,  to  compete  with  machines? 
And  why  should  human  beings  running 
for  their  souls  in  a  race  with  locomo- 
tives expect  to  keep  very  long  from 
losing  them? 

The  reason  that  most  people  are  dis- 
couraged about  machinery  to-day  is 
because  this  is  what  they  think  a  ma- 
chine civilization  is.  They  whine  at 
the  machines.  They  blame  the  locomo- 
tive. 

A  better  way  for  a  man  to  do  would 
be  to  stop  blaming  the  locomotive  and 
stop  running  along  out  of  breath  be- 
side it,  and  get  up  into  the  cab. 

This  is  the  whole  issue  of  art  in  our 
modern  civilization  —  getting  up  into 
the  cab. 

First  come  the  Machine-Trainers,  or 
poets  who  can  tame  engines.  Then  the 
other  poets.  In  the  mean  time,  the  less 
we  hear  about  nightingales  and  poppies 
and  dells  and  love  and  above,  the 
better.  Poetry  must  make  a  few  iron- 
handed,  gentle-hearted,  mighty  men 
next.  It  is  because  we  demand  and  ex- 
pect the  beautiful  that  we  say  that 
poetry  must  make  men  next. 

The  elephants  have  been  running 
around  in  the  garden  long  enough. 


200 


THE  MACHINE-TRAINERS 


ii 

There  are  people  who  say  that  ma- 
chines cannot  be  beautiful  and  cannot 
make  for  beauty  because  machines  are 
dead. 

I  would  agree  with  them  if  I  thought 
that  machines  were  dead. 

I  have  watched  in  spirit,  hundreds 
of  years,  the  machines  grow  out  of  Man 
like  nails,  like  vast  antennae,  a  kind  of 
enormous,  more  unconscious  sub-body. 
They  are  apparently  of  less  lively  and 
less  sensitive  tissue  than  tongues  or 
eyes  or  flesh;  and,  like  all  bones,  they 
do  not  renew,  of  course,  as  often  or  as 
rapidly  as  flesh.  But  the  difference  be- 
tween live  and  dead  machines  is  quite 
as  grave  and  quite  as  important  as  the 
difference  between  live  and  dead  men. 
The  generally  accepted  idea  of  a  live 
thing  is  that  it  is  a  thing  that  keeps 
dying  and  being  born  again  every  min- 
ute; it  is  seen  to  be  alive  by  its  respon- 
siveness to  the  spirit,  to  the  intelligence 
that  created  it,  and  that  keeps  re-creat- 
ing it.  I  have  known  thousands  of  fac- 
tories, and  every  factory  I  have  known 
that  is  really  strong  or  efficient  has 
scales  like  a  snake,  and  casts  off  its  old 
self.  All  the  people  in  it,  and  all  the 
iron  and  wood  in  it,  month  by  month, 
are  being  renewed  and  shedding  them- 
selves. Any  live  factory  can  always  be 
seen  moulting  year  after  year.  A  live 
spirit  goes  all  through  the  machinery, 
a  kind  of  nervous  tissue  of  invention, 
of  thought. 

We  already  speak  of  live  and  dead 
iron,  of  live  and  dead  engines  or  half- 
dead  and  half-sick  engines,  and  we  have 
learned  that  there  is  such  a  thing  as 
tired  steel.  What  people  do  to  steel 
makes  a  difference  to  it.  Steel  is  sensi- 
tive to  people.  My  human  spirit  grows 
my  arm  and  moves  it  and  guides  it  and 
expresses  itself  in  it;  keeps  re-creating 
it  and  destroying  it;  and  daily  my  soul 
keeps  rubbing  out  and  writing  in  new 


lines  upon  my  face;  and  in  the  same 
way  my  typewriter,  in  a  slow,  more 
stolid  fashion,  responds  to  my  spirit, 
too.  Two  men  changing  typewriters 
or  motor-cars  are,  though  more  subtly, 
like  two  men  changing  boots.  Sewing- 
machines,  pianos,  and  fiddles  grow  in- 
timate with  the  people  who  use  them, 
and  they  come  to  express  those  par- 
ticular people,  and  the  ways  in  which 
they  are  different  from  others.  A 
brown-eyed  typewriter  makes  her  ma- 
chine move  differently  every  day  from  a 
blue-eyed  one.  Typewriting  machines 
never  like  to  have  their  people  take  the 
liberty  of  lending  them.  Steel  bars  and 
wooden  levers  all  have  little  manner- 
isms, little  expressions,  small  souls  of 
their  ow'n,  habits  of  people  that  they 
have  lived  with,  which  have  grasped 
the  little  wood  and  iron  levers  of  their 
wills,  and  made  them  what  they  are. 

It  is  somewhere  in  the  region  of  this 
fact  that  we  are  going  to  discover  the 
great  determining  secret  of  modern 
life,  of  the  mastery  of  man  over  his 
machines.  Man  at  the  present  mo- 
ment, with  all  his  new  machines  about 
him,  is  engaged  in  becoming  as  self-con- 
trolled, as  self-expressive,  with  his  new 
machines,  with  his  wireless  telegraph 
arms,  and  his  railway  legs,  as  he  is  with 
his  flesh-and-blood  ones.  The  force  in 
man  that  is  doing  this  is  the  spiritual 
genius  in  him  that  created  the  machine, 
the  genius  of  imperious  and  implacable 
self-expression,  of  glorious  self-asser- 
tion in  matter,  the  genius  for  being  hu- 
man, for  being  spiritual,  and  for  over- 
flowing everything  he  touches,  and 
everything  he  uses,  with  his  own  will, 
and  with  the  ideals  and  desires  of  his 
soul.  The  Dutchman  has  expressed 
himself  in  Dutch  architecture  and  in 
Dutch  art,  the  American  has  expressed 
himself  in  the  motor-car,  the  English- 
man has  expressed  himself,  has  carved 
his  will  and  his  poetry,  upon  the  hills, 
and  made  his  landscape  a  masterpiece 


THE   MACHINE-TRAINERS 


201 


by  a  great  nation.  He  has  made  his 
walls  and  winding  roads,  his  rivers,  his 
very  tree-tops,  express  his  deep,  silent 
joy  in  the  earth.  So  the  great,  fresh, 
young  nations  to-day,  with  a  kind  of 
new  stern  gladness,  implacableness,  and 
hope,  have  appointed  to  their  souls 
expression  through  machinery.  Our 
engines  and  our  radium  shall  cry  to 
God.  Our  wheels  sing  in  the  sun! 

Machinery  is  our  new  art-form.  A 
man  expresses  himself  first  in  his  hands 
and  feet,  then  in  his  clothes,  and  then 
in  his  rooms  or  in  his  house,  and  then 
on  the  ground  about  him;  the  very  hills 
grow  like  him,  and  the  ground  in  the 
fields  becomes  his  countenance,  and 
now,  last  and  furthest  of  all,  requiring 
the  liveliest  and  noblest  grasp  of  his 
soul,  the  finest  circulation  of  will,  of 
all,  he  begins  expressing  himself  in  the 
vast  machines,  in  his  three-thousand- 
mile  railways,  his  vast,  cold-looking 
looms,  and  dull  steel  hammers.  With 
telescopes  for  Mars-eyes  for  his  spirit, 
he  walks  up  the  skies;  he  express- 
es his  soul  in  deep  and  dark  mines, 
and  in  mighty  foundries  melting  and 
remoulding  the  world.  He  is  making 
these  things  intimate,  sensitive  and 
colossal  expressions  of  his  soul.  They 
have  become  the  subconscious  body, 
the  abysmal,  semi-infinite  body  of  the 
man,  sacred  as  the  body  of  the  man  is 
sacred,  and  as  full  of  light  or  darkness. 

So  I  have  seen  the  machines  go 
swinging  through  the  world.  Like  arch- 
angels, like  demons,  they  mount  up  our 
desires  on  the  mountains.  We  do  as  we 
will  with  them.  We  build  Winchester 
Cathedral  all  over  again,  on  water.  We 
dive  down  with  our  steel  wheels  and 
nose  for  knowledge,  like  a  great  fish, 
along  the  bottom  of  the  sea.  We  beat 
up  our  wills  through  the  air.  We  fling 
up,  with  our  religion,  with  our  faith, 
our  bodies  on  the  clouds.  We  fly  rev- 
erently and  strangely,  our  hearts  all 
still  and  happy,  in  the  face  of  God! 


in 


The  whole  process  of  machine- 
invention  is  itself  the  most  colossal 
spiritual  achievement  of  history.  The 
bare  idea  we  have  had  of  unraveling  all 
creation,  and  of  doing  it  up  again  to 
express  our  own  souls,  —  the  idea  of 
subduing  matter,  of  making  our  ideals 
get  their  way  with  matter,  with  radium, 
ether,  antiseptics,  —  is  itself  a  religion, 
a  poetry,  a  ritual,  a  cry  to  heaven.  The 
supreme  spiritual  adventure  of  the 
world  has  become  this  task  that  man 
has  set  himself,  of  breaking  down  and 
casting  away  forever  the  idea  that  there 
is  such  a  thing  as  matter  belonging  to 
Matter  —  matter  that  keeps  on  in  a 
dead,  stupid  way,  just  being  matter. 
The  idea  that  matter  is  not  all  alive  with 
our  souls,  with  our  desires  and  prayers, 
with  hope,  terror,  worship,  with  the 
little  terrible  wills  of  men,  and  the  spirit 
of  God,  is  already  irreligious  to  us.  Is 
not  every  cubic  inch  of  iron  (the  cold- 
est blooded  scientist  admits  it)  like  a 
kind  of  little  temple,  its  million  million 
little  atoms  in  it  going  round  and 
round  and  round,  dancing  before  the 
Lord? 

And  why  should  an  Oxford  man  be 
afraid  of  a  cubic  inch  of  iron,  or  afraid 
of  becoming  like  it? 

I  daily  thank  God  that  I  have  been 
allowed  to  belong  to  this  generation. 
I  have  looked  at  last  a  little  cubic  inch 
of  iron  out  of  countenance!  I  can  sit 
and  watch  it,  the  little  cubic  inch  of 
iron,  in  its  still  coldness,  in  all  its  little 
funny  play-deadness,  and  laugh!  I 
know  that  to  a  telescope  or  a  god,  or  to 
me,  to  us,  the  little  cubic  inch  of  iron 
is  all  alive  inside;  that  it  is  whirling 
with  will,  that  it  is  sensitive  in  a  rather 
dead-looking,  but  lively,  cosmic  way, 
sensitive  like  another  kind  of  more 
slowly  quivering  flesh,  sensitive  to 
moons  and  to  stars  and  to  heat  and 
cold,  to  time  and  space,  and  to  human 


202 


THE  MACHINE-TRAINERS 


souls.  It  is  singing  every  minute,  low 
and  strange,  night  and  day,  in  its  little 
grim  blackness,  of  the  glory  of  things. 
I  am  filled  with  the  same  feeling,  the 
same  sense  of  kinship,  of  triumphant 
companionship,  when  I  go  out  among 
them,  and  watch  the  majestic  family 
of  the  machines,  of  the  engines,  those 
mighty  Innocents,  those  new,  awful 
sons  of  God,  going  abroad  through  all 
the  world,  looking  back  at  us  when  we 
have  made  them,  unblinking  and  with- 
out sin! 

Like  rain  and  sunshine,  like  chem- 
icals, and  like  all  the  other  innocent, 
godlike  things,  and  like  waves  of  water 
and  waves  of  air,  rainbows,  starlight, 
they  say  what  we  make  them  say. 
They  are  alive  with  the  life  that  is  in 
us. 

The  first  element  of  power  in  a  man 
—  in  getting  control  of  his  life  in  our 
modern  era  —  is  the  having  spirit 
enough  to  know  what  matter  is  like. 

The  Machine-Trainer  is  the  man  who 
sees  what  the  machines  are  like.  He  is 
the  man  who  conceives  of  iron  and 
wood  machines,  in  his  daily  habit  of 
thought,  as  alive.  He  has  discovered 
ways  in  which  he  can  produce  an  im- 
pression upon  iron  and  wood  with  his 
desires,  and  with  his  will.  He  goes 
about  making  iron  and  wood  machines 
do  live  things. 

It  is  never  the  machines  that  are 
dead. 

It  is  only  mechanical-minded  men 
that  are  dead. 

IV 

The  fate  of  civilization  is  not  going 
to  be  determined  by  people  who  are 
morbidly  like  machines,  on  the  one 
hand,  or  by  people  who  are  morbidly 
unmechanical,  on  the  other. 

People  in  a  machine  civilization  who 
try  to  live  without  being  automatic 
and  mechanical-minded  part  of  the 
time,  and  in  some  things, — people  who 


try  to  make  everything  they  do  artis- 
tic and  self-expressive  and  hand-made, 
who  attend  to  all  their  own  thoughts 
and  finish  off  all  their  actions  by 
hand  themselves,  soon  wish  they  were 
dead. 

People  who  do  everything  they  do 
mechanically,  or  by  machinery,  are 
dead  already. 

It  is  bad  enough  for  those  of  us  who 
are  trying  to  live  our  lives  ourselves, 
real  true  hand-made  individual  lives, 
to  have  to  fight  all  these  machines 
about  us  trying  daily  to  roar  and  roll 
us  down  into  humdrum  and  nothing- 
ness, without  having  to  fight  besides 
all  these  dear  people  we  have  about 
us,  too,  who  have  turned  machines, 
even  one's  own  flesh  and  blood.  Does 
not  one  see  them,  —  see  them  every- 
where, —  one's  own  flesh  and  blood, 
going  about  like  stone-crushers,  road- 
rollers,  lifts,  and  lawn-mowers? 

Between  the  morbidly  mechanical 
people  and  the  morbidly  unmechan- 
ical people,  modern  civilization  hangs 
in  the  balance. 

There  must  be  some  way  of  being 
just  mechanical  enough,  and  at  the 
right  time  and  right  place,  and  of  being 
just  unmechanical  enough,  at  the  right 
time  and  right  place.  And  there  must 
be  some  way  in  which  men  can  be  me- 
chanical and  unmechanical  at  will. 

The  fate  of  civilization  turns  on  men 
who  recognize  the  nature  of  machin- 
ery, who  make  machines  serve  them, 
who  add  the  machines  to  their  souls, 
like  telephones  and  wireless  telegraph, 
or  to  their  bodies,  like  radium  and  rail- 
roads, and  who  know  when  and  when 
not,  and  how  and  how  not,  to  use  them 
—  who  are  so  used  to  using  machines 
quietly,  powerfully,  that  they  do  not 
let  the  machines  outwit  them  and  un- 
man them. 

Who  are  these  men? 

How  do  they  do  it? 

They  are  the  Machine-Trainers. 


THE  MACHINE-TRAINERS 


They  are  the  men  who  understand 
people-machines,  who  understand  iron- 
machines,  and  who  understand  how  to 
make  people-machines  and  iron-ma- 
chines run  softly  together. 


There  was  a  time,  once,  in  the  old, 
simple,  individual  days,  when  dry- 
goods  stores  could  be  human.  They 
expressed  in  a  quiet,  easy  way  the  souls 
of  the  people  who  owned  them. 

When  machinery  was  invented,  and 
when  organization  was  invented,  ma- 
chines of  people  —  dry-goods  stores  — 
became  vast  selling-machines. 

We  then  faced  the  problem  of  mak- 
ing a  dry-goods  store  with  twenty-five 
hundred  clerks  in  it  as  human  as  a 
dry-goods  store  with  fifteen. 

This  problem  has  been  essentially, 
and  in  principle,  solved.  At  least  we 
know  it  is  about  to  be  solved.  We  are 
ready  to  admit  —  most  of  us  —  that 
it  is  practicable  for  a  department  store 
to  be  human.  Everything  the  man 
at  the  top  does  expresses  his  human 
nature  and  his  personality  —  to  his 
clerks.  His  clerks  become  twenty-five 
hundred  more  of  him  in  miniature. 
What  is  more,  the  very  stuff  in  which 
the  clerks  in  department  stores  work 
—  the  thing  that  passes  through  their 
hands  —  is  human,  and  everything 
about  it  is  human,  or  can  be  made 
human;  and  all  the  while  vast  currents 
of  human  beings,  huge  Mississippis  of 
human  feeling,  flow  past  the  clerks  — 
thousands  and  thousands  of  souls  a 
day  —  and  pour  over  their  souls,  mak- 
ing them  and  keeping  them  human. 
The  stream  clears  itself. 

But  what  can  we  say  about  human 
beings  in  a  mine,  about  the  practica- 
bility of  keeping  human  twenty-five 
hundred  men  in  a  hole  in  the  ground? 
And  how  can  a  mine-owner  reach  down 
to  the  men  in  the  hole,  make  himself 


felt,  as  a  human  being,  on  the  bottom 
floor  of  the  hole  in  the  ground? 

In  a  department  store,  the  employer 
expresses  himself  and  his  clerks  through 
every  one  of  the  other  twenty-five 
hundred;  they  mingle,  and  stir  their 
souls  and  hopes  and  fears  together, 
and  he  expresses  himself  to  all  of  them 
through  them  all.  But  in  a  mine  — 
two  men  work  all  alone  down  in  a  dark 
hole  in  the  ground.  Thousands  of  other 
men,  all  in  dark  holes,  are  near  by, 
with  nothing  but  the  dull  sound  of 
picks  to  come  between.  In  thousands 
of  other  holes  men  work,  each  man 
with  his  helper,  all  alone.  The  utmost 
the  helper  can  do  is  to  grow  like  the  man 
he  works  with  or  like  his  own  pick  — 
or  like  the  coal  he  chips  out  or  like 
the  black  hole.  The  utmost  the  man 
he  works  with  can  do,  in  the  way  of 
being  human,  is  with  his  helper. 

In  a  factory,  for  the  most  part,  the 
only  way,  during  working  hours,  that 
an  employer  can  express  himself  and  his 
humanness  to  his  workman,  is  through 
the  steel  machine  the  workman  works 
with  —  through  its  being  a  new,  good, 
fair  machine,  or  a  poor  one.  He  can 
only  smile  and  frown  at  him  with  steel, 
be  good  to  him  in  wheels  and  levers, 
or  now  and  then,  perhaps,  through  a 
foreman  pacing  down  the  aisles. 

The  question  the  modern  business 
man  in  a  factory  has  to  face  is  very 
largely  this :  *  I  have  acres  of  machines 
all  roaring  my  will  at  my  men.  I  have 
leather  belts,  printed  rules,  white 
steam,  pistons,  roar,  air,  water,  and  fire, 
and  silence,  to  express  myself  to  my 
workmen  in.  I  have  long,  monotonous 
swings  and  sweeps  of  cold  steel,  buckets 
of  melted  iron,  strips  of  wood;  bells, 
whistles,  clocks  —  to  express  myself, 
to  express  my  human  spirit  to  my 
men.  Is  there  any  possible  way  in 
which  my  factory,  with  its  machines, 
can  be  made  as  human  and  expressive 
of  the  human  as  a  department  store? 


204 


THE  MACHINE-TRAINERS 


This  is  the  question  that  our  machine 
civilization  has  set  itself  to  answer. 

All  the  men  with  good,  honest,  work- 
ing imaginations  —  the  geniuses  and 
freemen  of  the  world  —  are  setting 
themselves  the  task  of  answering  it. 

Some  say,  machines  are  on  the  necks 
of  the  men.  We  will  take  the  machines 
away. 

Others  say,  we  will  make  our  men  as 
good  as  our  machines.  We  will  make 
our  inventions  in  men  catch  up  with 
our  inventions  in  machines. 

We  naturally  turn  to  the  employer 
first,  as  having  the  first  chance.  What 
is  there  an  employer  can  do,  to  draw 
out  the  latent  force  in  the  men  —  evoke 
the  divine,  incalculable  passion  sleep- 
ing beneath  —  in  the  machine- walled 
minds,  the  padlocked  wills,  the  dull, 
unmined  desires  of  men?  How  can  he 
touch  and  wake  the  solar-plexus  of 
labor? 

If  an  employer  desires  to  get  into  the 
inner  substance  of  the  most  common 
type  of  workman,  —  be  an  artist  with 
him,  express  himself  with  him,  and 
change  the  nature  of  that  substance, 
give  it  a  different  color  or  light  or 
movement,  so  that  he  will  work  three 
times  as  fast,  ten  times  as  cheerfully 
and  healthfully,  and  with  his  whole 
body,  soul,  and  spirit,  —  how  is  he 
going  to  do  it? 

Most  employers  wish  they  could  do 
this.  If  they  could  persuade  their  men 
to  believe  in  them,  to  begin  to  be 
willing  to  work  with  them  instead 
of  against  them,  they  would  do  it. 

What  form  of  language  is  there  — 
whether  of  words  or  actions  —  that  an 
employer  can  use  to  make  the  men 
who  work  nine  hours  a  day  for  him, 
and  to  whom  he  has  to  express  himself 
across  acres  of  machines,  believe  in  him 
and  understand  him? 

The  modern  employer  finds  himself 
set  sternly  face  to  face,  every  day  of 
his  life,  with  this  question.  All  civiliza- 


tion seems  crowding  up,  day  by  day; 
seems  standing  outside  his  office  door 
as  he  goes  in  and  as  he  goes  out,  and 
asking  him,  now  with  despair,  now 
with  a  kind  of  grim,  implacable  hope, 
*  Do  you  believe,  or  do  you  not  believe, 
that  a  factory  can  be  made  as  human 
as  a  department  store?' 

This  question  is  going  to  be  answer- 
ed first  by  men  who  know  what  iron 
machines  really  are,  and  what  they 
are  really  for,  and  how  they  work;  who 
know  what  people-machines  really  are, 
and  what  they  are  really  for,  and  how 
they  work.  They  will  base  all  they 
do  upon  certain  resemblances  and  cer- 
tain differences  between  people  and 
machines. 

They  will  work  the  machines  of  iron 
according  to  the  laws  of  iron. 

They  will  work  the  machines  of  men 
according  to  the  laws  of  human  nature. 

There  are  certain  human  feelings, 
enthusiasms,  and  general  principles, 
concerning  the  natural  working  rela- 
tion between  men  and  machines,  that 
it  may  be  well  to  consider  as  a  basis 
for  a  possible  solution. 

What  are  our  machines,  after  all? 
How  are  the  machines  like  us?  And  on 
what  theory  of  their  relation  can  ma- 
chines and  men  expect  in  a  world  like 
this  to  work  softly  together?  These 
are  the  questions  that  men  are  going 
to  answer  next.  In  the  mean  time  I 
venture  to  believe  that  no  man  who  is 
morose  to-day  about  the  machines,  or 
who  is  afraid  of  machines  in  our  civiliza- 
tion, —  because  they  are  machines,  — 
is  likely  to  be  able  to  do  much  to  save 
the  men  in  it. 

VI 

Every  man  has,  according  to  the 
scientists,  a  place  in  the  small  of  his 
back  which  might  be  called  roughly, 
perhaps,  the  soul  of  his  body.  All  the 
little  streets  of  the  senses  or  avenues 
of  knowledge,  the  spiritual  conduits 


THE  MACHINE-TRAINERS 


205 


through  which  he  lives  in  this  world, 
meet  in  this  little  mighty  brain  in  the 
small  of  a  man's  back. 

About  nine  hundred  millions  of  his 
grandfathers  apparently  make  their 
headquarters  in  this  little  place  in  the 
small  of  his  back. 

It  is  in  this  one  little  modest  unno- 
ticed place  that  he  is  supposed  to  keep 
his  race-consciousness,  his  subcon- 
scious memory  of  a  whole  human  race; 
and  it  is  here  that  the  desires  and  the 
delights  and  labors  of  thousands  of 
years  of  other  people  are  turned  off  and 
turned  on  in  him.  This  is  the  brain 
that  has  been  given  to  every  man  for 
the  heavy,  everyday  hard  work  of  liv- 
ing. The  other  brain,  the  one  with 
which  he  does  his  thinking,  and  which 
is  kept  in  an  honored  place  up  in  the 
cupola  of  his  being,  is  a  comparatively 
light- working  organ,  merely  his  own 
private  personal  brain,  a  conscious, 
small,  and  supposably  controllable  af- 
fair. He  holds  on  to  his  own  particular 
identity  with  it.  The  great  lower  brain 
in  the  small  of  his  back  is  merely  lent 
to  him,  as  it  were,  out  of  eternity  — 
while  he  goes  by. 

It  is  like  a  great  engine,  which  he  has 
been  allowed  the  use  of  as  long  as  he 
can  keep  it  connected  up  properly  with 
his  cerebral  arrangements. 

This  appears  to  be  mainly  what  the 
cerebral  brain  is  for,  this  keeping  the 
man  connected  up.  It  acts  as  a  kind  of 
stop-cock  for  one's  infinity,  for  screw- 
ing on  or  screwing  off  one's  vast  race- 
consciousness,  one's  all-humanityness, 
all  those  unsounded  deeps  or  reservoirs 
of  human  energy,  of  hope  and  memory, 
of  love,  of  passionate  thought,  of  earth- 
ly and  heavenly  desire,  that  are  lent 
to  each  of  us,  as  we  slip  softly  by  for 
seventy  years  or  so,  by  a  whole  human 
race. 

A  human  being  is  a  kind  of  factory. 
The  engine  and  the  works  and  all  the 
various  machines  are  kept  in  the  base- 


ment, and  he  sends  down  orders  to 
them  from  time  to  time,  and  they  do 
the  work  which  has  been  conceived  up 
in  headquarters.  He  expects  the  works 
down  below  to  keep  on  doing  these 
things  without  his  taking  any  particu- 
lar notice  of  them,  while  he  occupies 
his  mind,  as  the  competent  head  of  a 
factory  should,  with  the  things  that 
are  new  and  different  and  special,  and 
that  his  mind  alone  can  do;  the  things 
which,  at  least  in  their  present  initial 
formative  or  creative  stage,  no  ma- 
chines as  yet  have  been  developed  to 
do,  and  which  can  only  be  worked  out 
by  the  man  up  in  the  headquarters, 
himself,  personally,  by  the  handiwork 
of  his  own  thought. 

The  more  a  human  being  develops, 
the  more  delicate,  sensitive,  strong, 
and  efficient,  the  more  spirit-informed, 
once  for  all,  the  machines  in  the  base- 
ment are.  As  he  grows,  the  various 
subconscious  arrangements  for  dis- 
criminating, assimilating,  classifying 
material,  for  pumping  up  power,  light, 
and  heat  to  headquarters,  all  of  which 
can  be  turned  on  at  will,  grow  more 
masterful  every  year.  They  are  found 
all  slaving  away  for  him,  dimly,  down 
in  the  dark,  while  he  sleeps.  They  hand 
him  up,  in  his  very  dreams,  new  and 
strange  powers  to  live  and  to  know 
with. 

The  men  who  have  been  most  de- 
veloped of  all,  in  this  regard,  civiliza- 
tion has  always  selected  and  set  aside 
from  the  others.  It  calls  these  men,  in 
their  generation,  men  of  genius. 

Ordinary  men  do  not  try  to  compete 
with  men  of  genius. 

The  reason  that  people  set  the  genius 
to  one  side,  and  do  not  try  to  compete 
with  him,  is  that  he  has  more  and  bet- 
ter machinery  than  they  have.  It  is 
always  the  first  thing  one  notices  about 
a  man  of  genius  —  the  incredible  num- 
ber of  things  that  he  manages  to  get 
done  for  him;  apparently,  the  things 


206 


THE  MACHINE-TRAINERS 


that  he  never  takes  any  time  off,  like 
the  rest  of  us,  to  do  himself.  The 
subconscious,  automatic,  mechanical 
equipment  of  his  senses;  the  extraordin- 
ary intelligence  and  refinement  of  his 
body;  the  way  his  senses  keep  his  spirit 
informed  automatically  and  convey 
outer  knowledge  to  him;  the  power  he 
has,  in  return,  of  informing  this  outer 
knowledge  with  his  spirit,  with  his  will, 
with  his  choices,  once  for  all,  so  that  he 
is  always  able  afterwards  to  rely  on  his 
senses  to  work  out  things  beautifully 
for  him,  quite  by  themselves,  and  to 
hand  up  to  him,  when  he  wants  them, 
rare,  deep,  unconscious  knowledge,  — 
all  the  things  he  wants  to  use  for  what 
his  soul  is  doing  at  the  moment, — it  is 
these  that  make  the  man  of  genius 
what  he  is.  He  has  a  larger  and  better 
factory  than  others,  and  has  developed 
a  huge  subconscious  service  in  mind 
and  body.  Having  all  these  things 
done  for  him  he  is  naturally  more  free 
than  others,  and  has  more  vision  and 
more  originality,  his  spirit  is  swung 
free  to  build  new  worlds,  to  take  walks 
with  God,  until  at  last  we  come  to  look 
upon  him  —  upon  the  man  of  genius 
—  a  little  superstitiously.  We  look 
up  every  little  while  from  doing  the 
things  that  he  gets  done  for  him  by 
his  subconscious  machinery,  and  we 
wonder  at  him;  we  wonder  at  the 
strange,  the  mighty  feats  he  does,  at 
his  thousand-league  boots,  at  his  ap- 
parent everywhereness.  His  songs  and 
joys,  sometimes  his  very  sorrows,  look 
miraculous. 

And  yet  it  is  all  merely  because  he 
has  a  factory,  a  great  automatic  equip- 
ment, a  thousand-employee  sense-per- 
ception, down  in  the  basement  of  his 
being,  doing  things  for  him  that  the 
rest  of  us  do,  or  think  we  are  obliged  to 
do,  ourselves,  and  give  up  all  of  our 
time  to.  He  is  not  held  back  as  we  are; 
he  moves  freely.  So  he  dives  under  the 
sea  familiarly,  or  takes  peeps  at  the 


farther  side  of  the  stars;  or  he  flies  in 
the  air,  or  he  builds  unspeakable  rail- 
roads, or  thinks  out  ships  or  sea-cities, 
or  he  builds  books,  or  he  builds  little, 
new,  still  undreamed-of  worlds  out  of 
chemistry;  or  he  unravels  history  out'of 
rocks,  or  plants  new  cities  and  mighty 
states  without  seeming  to  try;  or,  per- 
haps, he  proceeds  quietly  to  be  inter- 
ested in  men,  in  all  these  little  funny 
dots  of  men  about  him;  and  out  of  the 
earth  and  sky,  out  of  the  same  old 
earth  and  sky  that  everybody  else  has 
had,  he  makes  new  kinds  and  new  sizes 
of  men  with  a  thought,  like  some 
mighty,  serene  child  playing  with  dolls. 

It  is  generally  supposed  that  the 
man  of  genius  rules  history  and  dic- 
tates the  ideals  and  activities  of  the 
next  generation;  writes  out  the  specifi- 
cations for  the  joys  and  sorrows  of  a 
world,  and  lays  the  ground-plan  of  na- 
tions, because  he  has  an  inspired  mind. 
It  is  really  because  he  has  an  inspired 
body,  a  body  that  has  received  its 
orders  once  for  all  from  his  spirit.  We 
should  never  wonder  that  everything 
a  genius  does  has  that  vivid  and  strange 
reality  if  we  realized  what  his  body  is 
doing  for  him,  how  he  has  a  body 
which  is  at  work  automatically  drink- 
ing up  the  earth  into  everything  he 
thinks,  drinking  up  practicability,  art, 
and  technique  for  him  into  everything 
he  sees,  and  everything  he  hopes  and 
desires.  And  every  year  he  keeps  on 
adding  a  new  body;  keeps  on  handing 
down  to  his  basement  new  sets,  every 
day,  of  finer  and  yet  finer  things  to  do 
automatically. 

The  great  spiritual  genius  becomes 
great  by  economizing  his  conscious- 
ness in  one  direction,  and  letting  it 
fare  forth  in  another.  He  converts 
his  old  inspirations  into  his  new  ma- 
chines. He  converts  heat  into  power 
and  power  into  light,  and  comes  to  live 
at  last  —  as  almost  any  man  of  genius 
can  be  partly  seen  living  —  in  a  kind 


THE  MACHINE-TRAINERS 


207 


of  transfigured  or  lighted-up  body.  The 
poet  transmutes  his  subconscious  or 
machine-body  into  words,  and  the  art- 
ist transmutes  his  into  color  or  sound, 
or  into  carved  stone.  The  engineer 
transmutes  his  subconscious  body  into 
long  buildings,  into  aisles  of  windows, 
into  stories  of  thoughtful  machines. 
Every  great  spiritual  and  imaginative 
genius  is  seen  —  sooner  or  later  —  to 
be  the  transmuted  genius  of  some 
man's  body.  The  things  in  Leonardo 
da  Vinci  that  his  unconscious,  high- 
spirited,  automatic  senses  gathered  to- 
gether for  him,  piled  up  in  his  mind  for 
him  and  handed  over  to  him  for  the  use 
of  his  soul,  would  have  made  a  genius 
out  of  anybody.  It  is  not  as  if  he  had 
to  work  out  every  day  all  the  old  de- 
tails of  being  a  genius,  himself. 

The  miracles  he  seems  to  work  are 
all  made  possible  to  him  because  of  his 
thousand-man-power,  his  deep  subcon- 
scious body,  his  tremendous  factory  of 
sensuous  machinery.  It  is  as  if  he  had 
practically  a  thousand  men  all  working 
for  him,  for  dear  life,  down  in  his  base- 
ment, and  the  things  that  he  can  get 
these  men  to  attend  to  for  him  give 
him  a  start  with  which  none  of  the  rest 
of  us  could  ever  hope  to  compete.  We 
call  him  inspired,  because  he  is  more 
mechanical  than  we  are,  and  because  his 
real  spiritual  life  begins  where  our  lives 
leave  off. 

So  the  poets  who  have  filled  the 
world  with  glory  and  beauty,  have  been 
free  to  do  it  because  they  have  had 
more  perfect,  more  healthful,  and  im- 
proved subconscious  senses  handing  up 
wonder  to  them  than  the  rest  of  us 
have. 


And  so  the  engineers,  living  as  they 
always  live,  with  that  fierce,  silent, 
implacable  curiosity  of  theirs,  woven 
through  their  bodies  and  through  their 
senses  and  through  their  souls,  have 
tagged  the  Creator's  footsteps  under 
the  earth,  and  along  the  sky,  every  now 
and  then  throwing  up  new  little 
worlds  to  Him  like  his  worlds,  saying, 
'Look,  O  God,  look  at  this  I9  —  the  en- 
gineers whose  poetry  is  too  deep  to 
look  poetic  have  all  done  what  they 
have  done  because  the  unconscious 
and  automatic  gifts  of  their  senses,  of 
the  powers  of  their  observation,  have 
swung  their  souls  free,  have  given  them 
long,  still  reaches  of  thought,  and  vast 
new  orbits  of  desire,  like  gods. 

All  the  great  men  of  the  world  have 
always  had  machinery. 

Now  everybody  is  having  it.  The 
power  to  get  little  things,  innumerable, 
omnipresent,  forever-and-ever  things, 
tiny  just-so  things,  done  for  us  auto- 
matically, so  that  we  can  go  on  to  our 
inspirations,  is  no  longer  to-day  the 
special  prerogative  of  men  of  genius. 
It  is  for  all  of  us.  Machinery  is  the 
stored-up  spirit,  the  old  saved-up  in- 
spiration of  the  world  turned  on  for 
every  man.  And  as  the  greatness  of  a 
man  lies  in  his  command  over  machin- 
ery, in  his  power  to  free  his  soul  by 
making  his  body  work  for  him,  the 
greatness  of  a  civilization  lies  in  its 
getting  machines  to  do  its  work.  The 
more  of  our  living  we  can  learn  to  do 
to-day  automatically,  the  more  in- 
spired and  creative  and  godlike  and 
unmechanical  our  civilization  becomes. 

Machinery  is  the  subconscious  mind 
of  the  world. 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


BY   MARY   S.   WATTS 


[In  the  late  sixties  of  the  last  century,  Joshua 
Van  Cleve,  a  well-to-do  Ohio  business  man,  died, 
leaving  a  widow  with  three  grown  children,  two 
daughters  and  a  son,  and  a  handsome  fortune. 
Shortly  afterwards  the  daughters  married,  be- 
coming, respectively,  Mrs.  Kendrick  and  Mrs. 
Lucas;  and  each  had  a  child.  One  of  these  latter 
was  a  boy,  Van  Cleve  Kendrick.  Van  Cleve's 
parents  both  died  when  he  was  a  baby;  and  by 
the  time  he  grew  up,  his  grandfather's  estate 
had  been  almost  entirely  dissipated,  so  that,  at 
eighteen  years  of  age,  the  young  fellow  found 
himself  practically  the  only  support  of  the  fam- 
ily, which  now  consisted  of  his  grandmother, 
his  aunt,  who  was  a  widow,  with  her  daughter 
Evelyn,  and  his  uncle,  Major  Stanton  Van 
Cleve,  a  broken-down  ex-officer  of  the  Civil 
War.  Van  Cleve  accordingly  went  to  work,  and 
after  sundry  experiences,  secured  a  position  with 
the  National  Loan  and  Savings  Bank  of  Cincin- 
nati, Ohio. 


CHAPTER  VII 

t 

THE   INDUSTRIOUS  APPRENTICE 

'THE  rolling  stone  gathers  no  moss,' 
and  'The  setting  hen  never  gets  fat,' 
are  two  worthy  old  proverbs  not  less 
true,  it  would  seem,  for  being  diamet- 
rically contradictory;  and  liable,  like 
most  proverbs,  to  excite  the  retort  that 
everything  depends  on  the  individual. 
For  instance,  there  was  Van  Cleve 
Kendrick,  after  some  five  years  at  the 
bank,  as  solid  a  fixture  as  its  marble 
steps  or  safe-deposit  vaults,  the  very 
reverse  of  a  rolling  stone;  yet  no  supine 
and  starveling  setting  hen,  for  all  that. 
On  the  contrary,  the  young  fellow  was 
considered  unusually  active,  shrewd, 
self-reliant,  and  capable;  his  integrity 
was  above  question;  his  ability  such  as 
208 


It  was  at  this  time,  that  is,  as  nearly  as  I  recol- 
lect, about  1892  or  1893,  that  I  first  met  Van  Cleve 
and  his  people,  who  had  just  come  to  Cincinnati 
to  live.  Van  must  have  been  twenty-one  or  so. 
They  had  friends  here  who  introduced  them, 
Professor  Gilbert  of  our  university  and  his  fam- 
ily. There  were  two  young  Gilberts,  a  boy  and 
girl  of  Van  Cleve's  own  age.  Bob  Gilbert  had  not 
had  a  very  promising  career  so  far;  he  was  rather 
wild  at  college,  and  got  to  drinking  and  into  other 
bad  habits,  after  he  came  home.  At  this  time  he 
had  a  position  with  a  firm  of  brokers  where  a 
college  chum  of  his,  a  Mr.  Cortwright,  was  also 
employed.  Nobody  knew  much  about  Phil  Cort- 
wright, who  was  not  a  native  Cincinnatian;  he 
was  a  very  good-looking  young  man,  inclined  to 
be  fast,  we  understood,  and  in  the  habit  of  mak- 
ing love  violently  to  every  girl  he  met.  He  was  be- 
ginning now  to  be  quite  devoted  to  Lorrie  Gilbert; 
and  Van  Cleve  Kendrick  disliked  him  heartily 
—  from  which  we  drew  our  own  conclusions.] 

to  put  him  *  right  in  line  for  promotion,' 
according  to  what  people  heard.  In- 
deed, the  president  of  the  National 
Loan,  Mr.  Gebhardt  himself,  was  the 
original  source  of  this  rumor.  He  was 
an  enthusiastic  man,  a  big,  blond,  fine- 
looking  man  with  the  heavy  beard  and 
roving,  distant  blue  eyes  of  a  Viking, 
and  when  he  came  out  with  one  of  his 
strong  encomiums  about  'my  young 
friendt  Van  Cleef  Kendrick,'  in  his 
deep  and  melodious  bass  voice,  with  the 
faint  German  accent  which  he  always 
betrayed  in  moments  of  earnestness 
or  excitement,  the  effect  was  very  im- 
pressive and  convincing. 

At  twenty-seven  years  of  age,  Mr. 
Kendrick  held  eight  shares  in  the  Na- 
tional, on  which  he  had  paid  a  third 
of  what  he  had  borrowed  to  buy  them; 
he  had  six  hundred  dollars  laid  by; 
he  was  drawing  a  salary  of  twenty- 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


209 


three  hundred  a  year,  and  making 
a  little  'on  the  side,'  in  the  manage- 
ment of  various  small  savings  and 
bits  of  real  estate  for  half  a  dozen  or 
more  of  those  same  honest  hucksters, 
seamstresses,  dairymen,  and  so  on, 
whom  he  had  used  to  watch  coming  in 
with  their  deposits  Saturday  nights;  he 
had  put  his  cousin  Evelyn  through  the 
Art  School,  and  given  her  an  extra 
twelvemonth  of  study  in  New  York; 
he  had  been  supporting  a  family  for 
years,  if  not  in  luxury,  certainly  in 
ordinary  comfort. 

At  twenty-seven,  also,  Van's  hair 
was  thinning  a  little  on  the  temples, 
there  was  a  hard  line  at  the  corner  of 
his  flat,  straight  mouth,  another  be- 
tween his  eyebrows.  Since  he  began 
to  work,  he  had  seldom  had,  and  never 
asked  for,  a  vacation,  even  of  a  week, 
even  of  a  day.  There  he  stuck  at  his 
desk,  or  at  and  about  kindred  desks 
and  offices,  cool,  steady,  briefly  civil, 
ageing  before  his  time,  an  edifying 
example  of  American  thrift  and  in- 
dustry —  yet  I  know  one  person,  at 
least,  to  whom  there  was  something 
not  far  from  pathetic  in  the  spectacle. 
Youth's  a  stuff  that  can't  endure;  and 
what  was  Van  Cleve  doing  with  his? 
What  was  he  doing  with  these  beauti- 
ful, unreturning  days,  and  what,  what 
would  he  be  doing  at  sixty  or  seventy- 
five?  He  was  providing  against  that 
very  time !  *  It 's  a  bad  thing  to  be  old,' 
he  used  to  say  in  his  dry  and  cold  way. 
His  manner  may  have  inspired  confi- 
dence and  respect,  but  it  was  never 
gracious.  'It's  a  bad  thing  to  be  old,' 
said  Joshua  Van  Cleve's  grandson; 
'but  it's  the  worst  thing  that  can  hap- 
pen to  be  poor  and  old!' 

The  young  man,  with  all  his  harsh- 
ness, took  care  not  to  betray  any  such 
opinion  to  his  family,  all  of  whom,  set- 
ting aside  Evelyn,  were  well  under  way 
in  years;  if  old  age  would  not  find  them 
in  poverty,  that  was  owing  solely  to 
VOL.  in -NO.  2 


Van  Cleve's  own  efforts,  —  a  fact, 
however,  of  which  he  never  would  have 
dreamed  of  reminding  them,  even  if  he 
himself  had  fully  realized  it.  He  was  of 
the  temper  to  work  hard  and  direct  his 
affairs  with  economy  and  prudence, 
without  any  need  or  incentive  what- 
ever; and  it  was  with  a  kind  of  satirical 
patience  that  he  received,  or  rather 
endured,  the  devotion  and  admiration 
of  his  domestic  circle.  'Why,  Grand- 
ma, you've  got  me  down  fine,  have 
n't  you?  And  of  course  you're  a  pret- 
ty good  judge  of  men  at  your  time  of 
life  and  with  all  your  experience!'  he 
would  say,  in  reply  to  the  old  lady's 
half- tearful  eulogies;  'I'm  a  hero  and  a 
saint,  and  the  biggest  thing  on  top  of 
the  ground.  You  say  so,  and  you  ought 
to  know.  My  services  to  the  bank  are 
invaluable;  I  don't  believe  they  could 
find  more  than  forty  or  fifty  bright 
young  men  to  fill  my  place,  in  case  — ' 

'Oh,  don't  talk  that  way,  Van! '  cried 
his  Aunt  Myra,  aghast  at  this  sugges- 
tion; 'if  you  should  lose  your  posi- 
tion— !'  Her  eyes  roved  wildly  over 
the  pretty,  comfortable  room;  in  a 
trice  she  saw  it  a  garret,  a  hovel,  an 
almshouse,  and  herself  and  Evelyn 
starving  in  rags! 

'You  —  you  don't  think  they're 
going  to  discharge  you,  do  you,  Van 
Cleve?'  she  said,  trembling. 

'Why,  not  that  I  know  of.  I  guess 
I'll  stay  with  the  job  a  while  yet,'  said 
Van,  amused,  reading  her  easily,  per- 
haps somewhat  contemptuously.  He 
knew  his  aunt  to  be  a  sincerely  good 
woman,  and  he  supposed  that  all  good 
women  contrived  to  be  not  at  all  self- 
indulgent,  yet  thoroughly  selfish,  after 
her  fashion.  'Don't  fly  off  the  handle 
that  way,'  he  said; '  I  '11  always  manage 
to  take  care  of  you  somehow  or  other, 
Aunt  Myra.' 

'  Well,  I  hope  /  count  for  something ,' 
interposed  Evelyn,  haughtily;  'I  ex- 
pect to  do  something  with  my  brush.  I 


210 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


think  I've  shown  there's  something  in 
me  already,  for  that  matter,  getting  a 
picture  in  the  Women's  Art  League 
Exhibit  with  that  awfully  critical  jury 
that  refused  some  of  the  most  famous 
artists  in  Ohio  — ' 

'All  right,  Rosa  Bonheur,  you  get 
busy  "with  your  brush"  and  stave  off 
the  poor  house  when  the  time  comes, 
will  you?  In  the  meanwhile  I  may  as 
well  keep  on  working,'  said  Van  Cleve, 
cutting  her  short  with  the  good-humor- 
ed indifference  his  cousin  found  so  ex- 
asperating. Many  a  genius  has  suffered 
thus  from  a  lack  of  appreciation  in  the 
family;  and  I  fear  Evelyn  was  no  fonder 
of  Van  Cleve  because  he  had  contrib- 
uted to  her  artistic  education  with  un- 
hesitating liberality,  perhaps  at  the 
cost  of  some  scrimping  and  self-denial ; 
nor  did  she  like  him  any  the  better  for 
having  forgotten  all  about  these  sacri- 
fices, or  for  holding  them  of  no  mo- 
ment. Yet  she  was  not  ungrateful;  all 
that  she  wanted  was  for  him  to  take 
her  seriously  —  and  he  refused  to  take 
her  seriously.  It  was  obvious  that  he 
left  her  and  her  talents  and  her  achieve- 
ments out  of  his  reckoning  altogether. 

'All  you  think  about  is  money,  Van 
Cleve  Kendrick!'  she  burst  out  angri- 
ly; 'that's  the  only  standard  you've 
got.  If  I  sold  a  picture  for  seventy-five 
or  a  hundred  dollars,  you'd  believe  I 
could  paint  —  you  'd  think  I  was  worth 
while  I9 

'  You  bet  I  would ! '  Van  Cleve  agreed 
heartily,  if  somewhat  absently;  he  had 
got  out  his  fountain-pen  and,  sitting 
at  the  little  old-fashioned  black- walnut 
desk  in  the  corner  of  the  dining-room, 
was  running  over  the  monthly  bills 
which  Mrs.  Lucas  always  collected 
and  bestowed  in  a  certain  old  Jap- 
anese lacquer  box,  to  await  pay-day. 
'  Ought  n't  there  to  be  a  bill  here  from 
Doctor  McCrea  ? '  said  Van,  looking  up ; 
'he  generally  sends  it  at  the  half  year.' 

No  one  answered  immediately;  and 


to  his  surprise  Van  Cleve  detected  a 
conscious  glance  pass  among  the  three 
women.  His  grandmother  spoke  at 
last.  'Evelyn  has  arranged  about  that 
bill,'  she  said  proudly  and,  at  the  same 
time,  rather  timidly;  'it  was  forty-five 
dollars,  and  Evelyn  went  to  see  the 
doctor  and  arranged  to  pay  it  herself.' 

Van  Cleve  turned  his  light  gray  eyes 
on  the  girl.  'How?'  he  asked.  'How 
are  you  going  to  pay  it?'  He  looked 
interested.  'Did  you  save  it  up  your- 
self Evie?  By  George,  that's  pretty 
good!' 

'Never  mind,  Van  dearest,  we  did 
n't  want  to  bother  you  with  it;  we 
were  n't  going  to  say  a  word  to  you 
about  it,'  his  aunt  cried  out,  in  a  hectic 
excitement.  'You're  always  so  splen- 
did and  honorable,  we  knew  you  'd  pay 
the  doctor  and  go  without  a  new  spring 
suit  —  and  you  ought  to  have  a  spring 
suit,  you  said  so  yourself  the  other 
day.  And  we  could  n't  bear  to  have  you 
disappointed;  it's  a  perfect  shame  the 
way  you  deny  yourself  all  the  time, 
and  you  have  all  of  us  hanging  around 
your  neck  like  millstones.'  Her  eyes 
filled  up;  she  almost  sobbed  the  next 
words.  'So  Evelyn  thought  out  a 
p-plan,  and  she  went  to  see  the  doctor, 
and  —  you  tell  him,  Evie  —  Oh,  Van, 
she  is  the  noblest  girl!' 

'  I  simply  suggested  that  I  could  pay 
him  with  a  picture,  Van,'  said  Evelyn, 
not  without  complacency.  '  I  told  him 
that  I  had  three  that  had  been  exhib- 
ited and  very  highly  spoken  of,  and  he 
could  have  his  choice.  You  know  any 
one  of  them  is  worth  ever  so  much 
more  than  his  bill,  Van,'  said  Evelyn, 
earnestly;  'but  of  course  I  did  n't  tell 
him  that  in  so  many  words.  Only  I 
thought  it  was  n't  any  harm  to  let  him 
know  that  they  were  very  valuable, 
and  that  he  was  n't  getting  cheated. 
He  said  he  did  n't  know  much  about 
pictures.  So  I  just  told  him  in  a  general 
sort  of  way,  you  know,  what  I  would 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


211 


ask  for  these,  and  I  could  see  he  was 
perfectly  astonished  and  very  much 
impressed.  I'm  going  to  send  the  pic- 
tures over  to-morrow  for  him  to  pick 
out.  It's  that  View  of  Paradise  Park 
by  Moonlight,  and  Over  the  Rhine, 
and  that  lovely  Bend  in  the  River, 
Fort  Thomas  — ' 

'Have  you  got  his  bill?'  interrupted 
the  other;  and,  the  document  being 
produced,  Van  Cleve  silently  folded  it 
away  in  his  letter-case,  alongside  the 
rest,  with  an  expression  that  somehow 
disconcerted  the  little  assembly. 

*  I  think  you  'd  better  give  up  this  — 
this  arrangement,  Evelyn,'  he  said  un- 
emotionally. 'I'll  send  the  doctor  a 
check  to-day.  I  'd  rather  you  did  n't 
pay  any  bills  that  way.' 

'Why,  Van,  why  not?'  Evelyn  pro- 
tested; 'oh,  of  course,  I  see  !  You  think 
my  paintings  are  n't  worth  forty-five 
dollars.  You  think  they  are  n't  worth 
anything.  You  don't  realize  that  my 
pictures  are  just  the  same  as  money.' 

'Maybe  so.  You  could  n't  pay  the 
butcher  with  'em,'  said  Van  Cleve  — 
a  remark  that  momentarily  silenced 
argument.  He  rose,  the  three  women 
staring  at  him,  hurt,  angry,  bewildered. 
'Now  look  here,  Evelyn,'  he  said,  not 
unkindly,  'you're  not  to  do  anything 
like  this  again,  you  understand  me? 
I'm  not  saying  anything  against  your 
pictures;  they  may  be  worth  all  you 
claim.  But  they  are  n't  the  same  as 
money,  not  by  a  long  sight.  I  look  after 
a  little  piece  of  property  for  a  man 
that's  a  marble-cutter  over  here  on 
Gilbert  Avenue;  what  would  you  think 
if  he  offered  to  pay  me  with  a  statue  of 
Psyche,  hey?  Now  I  know  you  want 
to  help  me,  but  that's  not  the  way  to 
do  it  —  to  go  and  bunko  somebody 
into  taking  one  of  your  pictures  in 
return  for  his  work  that  he 's  trying  to 
make  his  living  by.  Sell  your  picture 
first,  and  do  what  you  want  with  the 
money  — ' 


'Stop,  Van  Cleve!  Don't  you  see 
you're  breaking  her  heart!' Mrs.  Lu- 
cas screamed,  starting  to  her  feet  and 
rushing  to  throw  her  arms  around  her 
daughter;  both  of  them  were  sobbing 
vehemently.  'How  can  you  talk  so? 
How  can  you  be  so  brutal?'  She  faced 
him  in  tragic  indignation.  '  If  it  had 
been  any  other  man,  anybody  but  you, 
Van  Cleve,  I'd  say  he  ought  to  be 
horsewhipped  I ' 

'Don't,  Mother  darling,  don't!  Now 
she  '11  have  one  of  her  heart  attacks  — 
Van,  how  could  you  —  ! '  proclaimed 
Evelyn  in  her  turn.  Mrs.  Van  Cleve 
ran  for  the  smelling-salts;  the  maid 
whirled  in  from  the  kitchen;  there  was 
a  terrifying  to-do;  in  the  midst  of  it, 
the  young  man,  who  was  not  unfamil- 
iar with  this  sort  of  scene,  made  his  es- 
cape. He  was  so  little  moved  by  the 
distress  he  left  behind  that  he  even 
grinned  to  himself  as  he  took  his  way 
down  town,  thinking,  '  I  'd  like  to  have 
seen  McCrea's  face  when  Evie  handed 
him  that  gold  brick!'  Apart  from  per- 
formances of  this  nature,  which  were 
likely  to  be  annoying,  Mr.  Van  Cleve 
attached  scarcely  any  importance  to 
what  women  said  and  did;  all  women, 
he  supposed,  were  hysterical  fools  — 
ahem !  —  well,  not  that  exactly,  but 
ill-balanced  and  excitable  and  reason- 
less —  all  but  one,  that  is.  Van  had 
seen  enough  of  Lorrie  Gilbert  to  know 
that  she,  at  least,  could  control  her- 
self, and  act  to  good  purpose  when 
need  arose. 

He  thought  about  Lorrie  a  good  deal 
these  days,  tried  to  put  her  out  of  his 
mind,  and  found  it  returning  to  her 
again  and  again  with  a  commingled 
pain  and  pleasure  which  he  now  at  last 
understood.  As  usual  he  was  ruthless- 
ly clear-eyed  and  clear-headed  about 
it,  ruthlessly  plain-spoken  with  him- 
self. He  knew  that  he  was  nothing  to 
Lorrie;  she  had  never  encouraged  him; 
if  Van  Cleve  had  ever  assumed  a  defi- 


212 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


nitely  lover-like  attitude,  she  would 
have  denied  him  with  real  distress  and 
regretted  keenly  the  lost  friend;  and, 
besides,  she  was  credibly  reported  en- 
gaged to  another  man.  Van  worked 
harder  than  this  other  man,  and  he 
made  as  much  money;  if  not  so  orna- 
mental to  the  community,  he  was  a 
deal  more  useful;  he  was  the  good  ap- 
prentice and  the  worthy  steward;  but 
he  could  not  marry.  Even  had  Lorrie 
been  as  much  in  love  with  him  as  he 
with  her,  he  could  not  have  asked  her 
to  marry  him.  His  sense  of  duty  and 
his  hard  pride  would  have  restrained 
him. 

*  I  'm  not  going  to  ask  any  girl  to  live 
with  my  family  —  I'm  not  going  to 
put  that  on  her,  and  I'm  not  going  to 
ask  her  to  "wait  for  me,"  either,'  was 
his  idea;  'I  don't  want  anybody  taking 
a  chance  on  me.  What  would  that  be, 
anyhow,  but  hinting  to  her  to  hang  on 
till  some  of  my  people  died  off  and  left 
me  a  little  freer?  Not  for  me!  When 
I'm  making  ten  thousand  a  year  will 
be  time  enough  for  marrying.  Lorrie '11 
be  a  grandmother  by  that  time,  most 
likely!  Oh,  well!'  he  sometimes  fin- 
ished with  a  touch  of  his  harsh  fun. 
Mr.  Kendrick  did  not  lack  a  gift  of 
philosophy;  and  it  was  equally  char- 
acteristic that  he  never  for  an  instant 
doubted  he  would  some  day  make 
that  ten  thousand  a  year  and  much 
more. 

In  the  meanwhile,  life  was  not  unin- 
teresting even  to  a  hopeless  lover  —  a 
lover,  that  is,  with  as  hard  a  head  and 
as  stanch  a  digestion  as  this  hero's. 
This  very  day,  when  Van  caught  the 
next  down-going  car,  he  found  its  crowd- 
ed passengers  reading  the  latest  news 
from  the  insurrection  in  that  neigh- 
boring West  Indian  island  of  which  we 
were  beginning  to  hear  so  much  in 
those  days,  and  conclamantly  airing 
their  views  on  the  subject.  'DooM  OF 
HAVANA  SEALED!  GENERAL  GOMEZ 


CAPTURES  THE  WATERWORKS!'  one 
man  read  out  of  the  paper.  'That  set- 
tles it,  boys! '  he  announced  with  much 
solemnity;  '  the  Spanish '11  have  to  give 
up  now.  They  can't  get  any  washing 
done!'  And  everybody  laughed,  and 
another  remarked  that  he  had  never 
understood  the  Spanish  were  very 
strong  on  laundry-work,  anyhow.  Van 
Cleve,  clinging  to  his  strap,  listened 
inattentively;  this  kind  of  talk  was 
rife  that  winter  —  had  been  going 
the  rounds,  indeed,  for  the  past  year. 
Maceo  —  Weyler  —  McKinley  —  con- 
centration camps  —  filibusters  —  the 
*  Commodore '  expedition  —  do  we  not 
all  of  us  remember  it? 

Mr.  Kendrick  was  among  those  who 
were  against  intervention  —  when  he 
thought  about  Cuba's  troubles  at  all, 
which  was  seldom.  Of  late  he  had 
been  giving  a  stricter  attention  than 
ever,  if  that  were  possible,  to  the  Na- 
tional Loan's  affairs.  He  thought  they 
were  in  danger  of  *  going  to  sleep'  at 
that  institution,  to  use  his  own  words, 
notwithstanding  the  fact  that  to  out- 
siders, at  least,  it  seemed  to  be  prosper- 
ing greatly.  The  simple  old  building 
itself  had  recently  been  remodeled  at 
a  handsome  cost;  you  might  see  the 
plain  citizens  who  were  its  patrons  sur- 
veying with  awe  the  new  marble  stairs, 
the  figures  of  '  Commerce '  and  *  Indus- 
try* in  the  triangular  brow  above 
the  doors,  and  the  bronze  tablets 
set  into  the  corner-stone  with  the  mys- 
tifying legend  A.D.  MDCCCXCVI. 
Van  Cleve  did  not  wholly  approve  of 
the  changes,  being  by  nature  severely 
opposed  to  any  sort  of  show;  but  he 
could  not  deny  that  the  bank  took  in 
a  number  of  fresh  accounts  about  that 
time  which  may  have  been  due  in  large 
part  to  the  increased  majesty  and  sol- 
idity of  its  appearance.  Still  Van  was 
critical;  he  had  not  been  with  the  Loan 
and  Savings  all  these  years  for  nothing, 
and  he  had  gone  a  long  way  since  his 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


213 


early  days  in  the  office,  when  he  had 
felt  an  unquestioning  respect  for  his 
elders  and  a  readiness  to  learn  of 
them. 

'This  bank  is  Julius  Gebhardt,'  he 
used  to  say  to  himself  shrewdly;  'he  is 
the  National  Loan  and  Savings,  body 
and  bones,  hide,  horns,  and  tallow. 
Every  one  of  the  directors  is  a  back 
number.  They  keep  on  electing  them- 
selves over  and  over  again,  and  when 
they  come  trailing  in  here  Monday 
mornings  it  looks  like  an  overflow  meet- 
ing from  the  Old  Men's  Home.  I  '11  bet 
they  do  just  what  Gebhardt  says,  and 
half  the  time  they  don't  know  what 
he's  saying.  Of  course  he's  used  to  it, 
but  it's  a  pretty  big  responsibility  for 
one  man.  He  knows  the  banking  busi- 
ness as  well  as  the  next  man,  I  suppose, 
but  nobody's  infallible.'  If  he  had 
owned  a  few  more  shares,  say  twenty 
instead  of  eight,  Van  was  confident  he 
would  be  on  the  board,  and  what  was 
more,  would  probably  be  cashier  in 
place  of  Schlactman,  who  was  in  ill 
health,  and  talked  of  moving  to  Col- 
orado. In  fact,  Mr.  Gebhardt  had 
hinted  as  much,  in  his  big,  warm- 
hearted, almost  fatherly,  way.  He 
liked  Van  Cleve  and  did  not  hesitate 
to  show  it.  The  cashier's  salary  was 
three  thousand.  'I'd  have  a  use  for 
it,'  Van  thought,  with  a  grim  smile. 

The  family  had  lately  been  showing 
signs  of  their  perennially  recurrent  rest- 
lessness, which  Van  recognized  from 
ancient  acquaintance.  Once  in  a  long 
while  it  crossed  Van  Cleve's  mind  that 
he  might  some  day  surprise  them  by 
putting  his  foot  down  on  all  this  foolish- 
ness; but  the  time  never  came.  He  al- 
ways had  too  much  to  do,  and  too  many 
things  on  his  mind,  to  burden  himself 
further  by  futile  attempts  at  argu- 
ment with  his  household;  it  was  easier 
and  infinitely  more  peaceful  to  let 
them  have  their  own  way.  As  for  dis- 
cussing his  plans  and  prospects  with 


them,  or  confiding  to  them  all  that 
about  the  bank  and  the  president  and 
his  methods,  and  Van's  own  opinions, 
the  young  man  never  dreamed  of  such 
a  thing.  They  could  not  have  under- 
stood a  word  of  it;  they  were  devoted 
to  him  heart  and  soul,  but  they  could 
not  speak  his  language,  or  live  in  his 
world.  The  Office  and  the  Street  were 
his  real  home,  and  under  his  own  roof 
he  had  companions,  but  no  compan- 
ionship. 

He  had  forgotten  all  about  the  morn- 
ing's disturbance  by  dinner-time,  when 
he  reached  home;  and  was  only  re- 
minded of  it  by  finding  the  house  as 
yet  unlighted,  in  a  kind  of  symbolic 
gloom,  and  everybody  tiptoeing  about 
in  an  impressive  anxiety.  *  Mother 
has  been  very  ill,  Van  Cleve,'  Evelyn 
told  him  with  a  species  of  reproachful 
resignation;  'it  has  been  an  unusually 
sharp  seizure.  Doctor  McCrea  could 
n't  understand  this  attack  at  all,  and 
kept  saying  she  must  have  had  some 
nervous  shock.  But  of  course  we  did 
n't  tell  him  about  this  morning,'  said 
Evelyn,  magnanimously.  'It  does  n't 
make  any  difference  about  me.  Van, 
but  I  hope  you  won't  be  so  cruel  again 
to  poor  Mother,  who  only  wanted  to 
help  you  and  give  you  a  pleasure.' 

'Well,  that's  so;  I'm  sorry  about 
that,'  said  Van,  troubled;  '  I  forgot  how 
easy  Aunt  Myra  gets  sick.  But  you 
know,  Evelyn,  I  can't  have  you  doing 
things  like  that,  if  only  for  the  looks 
of  the  thing.  These  doctors  all  keep  a 
pretty  good  line  on  who  can  pay  them 
and  who  can't;  they've  got  to.  Doctor 
McCrea  knew  I  could  afford  that  bill; 
it  was  n't  exorbitant  • — ' 

'Doctor  McCrea  was  very  much  dis- 
appointed!9 his  cousin  interrupted  tri- 
umphantly. 'I  explained  to  him  in  a 
tactful  way,  so  as  not  to  put  you  in 
a  bad  light,  and  he  said,  "Oh,  don't 
I  get  any  picture,  then?"  and  I  could 
see  he  did  n't  like  it  at  all,  though  he 


214 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


gave  a  kind  of  queer  laugh.  I  could  n't 
say  anything,  of  course.' 

Van  Cleve  grunted,  but  was  other- 
wise silent,  after  the  exasperating  fash- 
ion he  had  of  allowing  Evelyn  the  last 
word,  and  the  peculiar  barrenness  of 
victory. 

*  And  there's  something  else,  Van  — 
something  you  ought  to  know.    The 
doctor  says  that  Mother  — '  She  was 
beginning  importantly;  but  was  check- 
ed by  a  look  from  her  grandmother. 

*  Dinner's  ready,  and   we'd   better 
wait  till  afterward  to  tell  Van  Cleve 
about  that,'  interrupted  the  old  lady, 
hastily,  remembering  other  days  and 
the  late  Joshua.  It  was  always  advis- 
able to  feed  a  man  first.  And  accord- 
ingly after   the   meal,    during   which 
everybody  was  painstakingly  amiable 
and  lively,  she  herself  reintroduced  the 
subject. 

'The  doctor  thinks  that  your  Aunt 
Myra  ought  to  be  in  a  different  cli- 
mate, Van  Cleve.  I  have  been  think- 
ing it  myself  for  some  time,  and  when 
I  spoke  of  it  this  morning,  he  said 
at  once  that  I  was  right,  and  that  a 
change  was  good  for  everybody.  He 
said  if  she  could  go  away  for  a  while, 
it  would  undoubtedly  make  her  feel 
better—' 

'Then  I  explained  with  perfect  frank- 
ness, because  that  is  always  best,'  Eve- 
lyn interrupted;  *  that  we  could  n't  take 
trips  South  and  all  that  sort  of  thing, 
which  I  could  see  he  was  about  to 
suggest.  "Oh,  Doctor  McCrea,"  I  said, 
"we  can't  be  running  off  on  jaunts 
that  way  just  for  pleasure.  We  have 
to  make  a  permanent  move.  And, 
besides,  we've  been  here  for  seven 
years  now,  and  I  think  Mother  ought 
to  get  out  of  it  for  good.  The  Ohio 
Valley  climate  never  has  agreed  with 
her,  and  now  she  is  fairly  saturated 
with  it,  and  you  can  see  she  's  losing 
ground  every  day."  He  said,  "Oh,  I 
think  you  exaggerate  ";  but  of  course, 


you  know,  he  said  that  just  to  soothe 
me  and  keep  me  from  being  fright- 
ened — ' 

'You  mean  to  say  you  want  to  get 
up  and  leave  here  —  you  want  me  to 
quit  my  job,  and  look  for  another 
somewhere  else,'  said  Van  Cleve,  un- 
moved as  usual. 

'But  if  it's  a  question  of  Mother's 
health,  Van  Cleve—' 

'You  can  always  get  something  to 
do  —  you  're  not  appreciated  in  the 
bank,  anyhow.  You  could  get  Mr.  Geb- 
hardt  to  transfer  you  to  some  other 
bank;  they  do  things  like  that  all  the 
time,  don't  they?  Mr.  Gebhardt  thinks 
so  highly  of  you,  he  'd  do  anything  for 
you,  Van —  you  could  go  anywhere  on 
his  recommendation,'  cried  Mrs.  Van 
Cleve. 

'Where  d'  ye  want  to  go  now?'  said 
Van  Cleve,  coming  to  the  point  with 
his  disconcerting  directness. 

Evelyn  began  eagerly,  'Why,  I 
thought  at  once  of  New  York.  I  could 
look  after  Mother,  and  still  go  on  with 
my  professional  career.  It  would  be 
an  ideal  arrangement  — ' 

'  I  never  heard  New  York  talked  up 
much  for  a  health  resort,'  said  Van 
Cleve. 

'  Well,  a  health  resort  is  n't  what  she 
needs,  you  know.  It's  the  complete 
change  that  would  be  so  beneficial. 
Doctor  McCrea  was  enthusiastic;  he 
said  it  could  n't  possibly  do  her  any 
harm,  and  would  probably  be  just  as 
good  for  her  as  anywhere.  And  you 
know  New  York  is  so  interesting,  Van. 
I  loved  it  when  I  was  studying  there. 
I  have  such  clever,  stimulating,  excep- 
tional friends.  The  change  in  the  social 
atmosphere  alone  would  brace  Mother 
right  up,  I  know  — ' 

'  New  York  is  a  wonderful  city,'  said 
Major  Van  Cleve;  'I  remember  Gen- 
eral Grant  making  that  very  remark  to 
me  once  when  we  were  walking  up 
Fifth  Avenue;  we  were  both  of  us  just 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


215 


back  from  the  War,  but  it  was  before 
he  had  been  elected  to  the  Presidency. 
He  turned  to  me  and  said,  "Well, 
Mage,"  —  that  was  his  nickname  for 
me,  — "  New  York  is  a  marvelous  place, 
is  n't  it?"  Rather  odd  that  he  should 
have  died  and  been  buried  there  after- 
ward, I  always  thought.' 

Van  Cleve  let  them  talk;  he  was  not 
angry  or  out  of  patience;  he  was  only 
sourly  amused.  This  was  Van's  day 

—  a  fair  sample  of  all  his  days.  Peo- 
ple who  happened  to  be  pretty  well 
acquainted  with  the  family  used  to  re- 
peat around  a  saying  of  Bob  Gilbert's 
that  always  brought  a  laugh  from  the 
men,  whatever  the  women  thought  of 
it.  I  suppose  it  was  really  dreadfully 
coarse.  "S  shame!'  says  Bob,  who  was 
about  three  parts  drunk,  with  tearful 
vehemence;  *  's  shame  zose  Van  Cleves. 
Kept  Van's  nose  grindstone  years  — 
always  will  keep  it  —  's  shame.  Know 
what  they  all  need?  Spankin'  —  hie 

—  ol'  lady  an'  all  of  'em  —  need  spank- 
in'  —  reiterated  Bob  with  dark  and 
frowning  emphasis.   'Goo*  spankin'!' 

CHAPTER  VIII 

IN  WHICH  WE  GIVE  A  DOG  A  BAD  NAME 

I  DO  not  remember  whether  it  is 
recorded  that  the  Industrious  Appren- 
tice ever  took  the  Idle  Apprentice 
aside,  and  pointed  out  to  him  the  folly 
of  his  ways,  scolded  him  heartily,  and 
pleaded  with  him  to  reform.  A  man 
must  have  a  tolerably  good  conceit  of 
himself  who  will  undertake  to  direct 
another  man  how  to  live,  even  though 
this  other  may  be  as  notoriously  in 
need  of  direction  as  was  Robert  Gil- 
bert. Van  Cleve  hesitated  and  shrank 
before  the  task.  He  told  himself  that 
he  had  too  stiff  a  job  doing  his  own 
duty,  to  be  qualified  to  preach  theirs 
to  other  people.  Was  he  his  brother's 
keeper,  anyhow?  It  was  impatience 


and  indignation  that  roused  him  to 
hunt  Bob  out  and  lecture  him,  at  last. 
Van  thought  the  world  was  too  kind, 
too  stupidly  kind,  to  this  culprit;  it 
liked  him  too  well;  it  was  ruinously 
soft-hearted;  it  kept  on  giving  him  a 
chance  when  it  should  have  brought 
him  up  with  a  round  turn!  And  all  this 
in  the  face  of  the  strange  fact  that 
Robert  himself  asked  no  quarter;  he 
never  offered  any  excuses;  he  was  the 
most  amiably  unashamed  and  unre- 
pentant sinner  on  earth,  and  the  most 
incurably  sanguine.  *  Never  mind,  Van 
old  man,  don't  worry  yourself  so  over 
me.  I  hate  to  see  you  so  worried!'  he 
said  affectionately,  when  the  sober  Mr. 
Kendrick  had  painfully  got  through 
with  his  exhortations.  'I'm  going  to 
come  out  all  right,  you  see  if  I  don't. 
I'll  get  out  even,  don't  you  worry.' 

'You're  always  saying  that,  Bob,' 
said  Van  Cleve,  glumly;  'you  know 
very  well  you  can't  keep  up  this  gait 
and  come  out  anywhere  but  behind. 
You're  ruining  your  health,  and  spoil- 
ing your  chances,  and  making  your 
people  unhappy.  You 've  got  plenty  of 
sense,  Bob,  and  I  can't  see  why  — ' 

'Well,  I'm  glad  you'll  allow  me  that 
much,  anyhow!'  said  Bob,  with  the  ut- 
most good  temper.  He  met  his  friend's 
severe  gaze  with  one  full  of  amusement, 
insuperable -nonchalance,  honest  affec- 
tion. 'You're  not  much  of  a  preacher, 
Van;  your  heart's  not  in  it.  You  don't 
really  want  to  reform  the  bad  little  boy 
and  make  him  a  good  little  boy,  and 
have  him  sign  the  pledge  and  all  that, 
in  the  interest  of  virtue  and  respecta- 
bility —  not  a  bit  of  it,  you  time- 
serving old  utilitarian,  you!  You 
only—' 

'  Oh,  good,  bad  —  that 's  not  what 
I'm  talking  about!'  interrupted  Van 
Cleve,  with  a  movement  of  irritation; 
'  I  don't  want  you  to  make  an  everlast- 
ing fool  of  yourself,  that 's  all !  All  this 
drinking  and  having  a  good  time  with 


216 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


the  boys,  what  does  it  amount  to? 
Can't  you  see  there's  nothing  in  it? 
You  can't  keep  on  with  that  all  your 
life.  Why,  why  —  damn  it,  Bob, 
there's  nothing  in  it!  Can't  you  see 
that?' 

*  There!   Did  n't  I  say  that  was  the 
way  you  felt!'  Bob  stated,  grinning. 
He  made  an  extravagant  display  of 
surprise.  'Why,  Van  Cleve,  it  looks  to 
me  as  if  you  were  trying  to  get  me  to 
settle  down  and  work  like  yourself! 
And  I  used  to  think  you  had  a  sense  of 
humor!  Now  Phil  Cortwright  says  — ' 

'Oh,  cut  it  out!'  said  Van,  scowling. 
'All  right,  just  as  you  say,'  the  other 
retorted  tolerantly. 

*  I  'm  only  talking  because  I  —  be- 
cause I  —  I  think  a  lot  of  you,  you 
know,  Bob,'  said  Van  Cleve,  looking 
down,  chewing  hard  at  the  end  of  his 
cigar,  mortally  abashed  by  this  senti- 
mental admission. 

The  sight  moved  Bob  as  no  amount 
of  arguing  or  hectoring  could  have  done. 
'Why,  of  course  I  know  that,  Van!' 
he  cried.  The  moisture  sprang  into 
his  eyes;  he  wiped  them  unaffectedly. 
'Why,  I  know  that,  my  dear  old  fellow! 
You  're  all  right  —  everything  you  say 
is  pretty  near  right,  I  guess,'  he  said 
incoherently.  He  pulled  himself  to- 
gether and  went  on  with  more  steadi- 
ness, even  earnestness  —  for  him. 
*  You  see,  Van  Cleve,  I '  ve  got  a  differ- 
ent way  of  looking  at  it  from  you.  I 
believe  in  —  in  —  well,  I  believe  a 
man's  life's  his  own  to  do  what  he 
wants  with,  so  long  as  he  does  n't  harm 
anybody  else.  Well,  then  /  don't  harm 
anybody  else,  do  I?  Suppose  I  do  — 
well  —  lush  some  off  and  on,  and  — 
and  all  that,  you  know  —  all  the  other 
things  you  say  —  why,  it  does  n't  hurt 
anybody  but  me,  does  it?  If  I'm  will- 
ing to  take  the  consequences,  why,  it 
does  n't  need  to  worry  you  any.  I  don't 
ask  anybody  to  suffer  for  it  but  myself. 
Then  where 's  the  harm?  I'm  not  re- 


sponsible for  any  one  else,  and  nobody 
else  needs  to  feel  responsible  for  me. 
That's  the  way  I  look  at  it.' 

'Do  the  family  look  at  it  that  way, 
too?'  Van  Cleve  asked. 

'The  family?  Oh,  well,  they  —  of 
course  they  think  more  or  less  as  you 
do,  and  the  rest  of  the  representative 
citizens,'  said  Bob,  smiling,  but  for  the 
first  time  a  little  restive  under  his 
friend's  eye.  'Hang  it,  you  goody-good 
people  don't  know  how  funny  and  in- 
consistent you  are!'  he  burst  out  in 
a  sort  of  good-natured  impatience. 
'There  're  plenty  of  respectable  old 
skinflints  walking  around  town  this 
minute  that  gouge  and  grind  and  pile 
up  the  dollars  and  do  more  mischief  in 
a  day  than  I  can  in  a  year,  and  because 
they  pass  the  plate  in  church,  and  go 
home  to  bed  with  the  chickens,  and 
never  drink  anything  stronger  than 
cold  tea,  you  hold  'em  up  to  me  for 
models  — ' 

'I  wasn't  holding  up  any  models. 
You're  dodging,  Bob,'  said  the  other, 
gloomily. 

But  Bob  had  returned  to  his  thesis. 
'Of  course  I  don't  mean  to  keep  it  up 
all  my  life,  as  you  were  saying.  I  can 
stop  whenever  I  want  to  —  when  I  get 
tired  of  it.  In  the  meanwhile  I'm  not 
hurting  anybody  but  myself,  and  I'm 
not  hurting  myself  anything  to  speak 
of.  And  I'll  pay  that  score  myself,'  he 
repeated,  rather  grandiloquently. 

'  I  don't  know  whether  a  man  can  do 
that  or  not,'  said  Van  Cleve;  'pay  for 
himself,  I  mean.  Looks  to  me  some- 
times as  if  everybody  got  assessed  for 
him  all  around.' 

Robert  had  left  Messrs.  Steinberger 
&  Hirsch  some  while  before  this  date, 
those  gentlemen  having,  in  fact,  inti- 
mated that  his  services  were  no  longer 
required.  Even  their  not  unduly  ex- 
alted standards  were  too  high  for  the 
young  man,  it  seemed. 

The  next  news  was  that  young  Gil- 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


217 


bert  had  got  a  berth  on  the  Record- 
World,  which  was  a  penny  sheet  that 
used  to  come  out  in  six  or  eight  suc- 
cessive editions  of  an  afternoon,  with 
detonating  head-lines,  every  smallest 
event  decorated  with  the  most  lurid 
purple  patch  conceivable.  For  a  while 
the  young  man  was  quite  faithful  to  his 
duties,  perhaps  finding  in  the  haste  and 
tension  of  the  work  almost  enough  of 
the  false  excitement  he  seemed  to 
crave.  As  invariably  happened,  every- 
body in  this  new  world  liked  him;  they 
liked  him  even  after  they,  too,  had 
begun  to  shake  their  heads  over  him  — 
even  when  they,  too,  had  to  *  speak  to* 
him.  In  the  end,  like  all  the  rest  of  the 
friends  he  was  constantly  making  and 
constantly  disappointing,  they  also 
acknowledged  that  Bob  was  indeed 
4  no  good/  He  had  some  fine,  warm- 
blooded virtues;  he  was  loyal,  gener- 
ous, and  humane;  he  was  curiously 
clean-minded  and  simple  with  all  his 
gross  self-indulgence.  But  —  they 
agreed  sorrowfully  —  he  was  not  over- 
clever;  he  could  not  be  depended  on  for 
half  an  hour;  he  did  not  know  the 
meaning  of  duty  and  ambition;  put 
him  to  the  test,  in  short,  and  you 
would  find  Bob  Gilbert  pretty  nearly 
worthless. 

The  family  accepted  the  unhappy 
fact  with  a  plain  and  prosaic  dignity, 
as  do  almost  all  families.  No  doubt 
they  got  used  to  it  in  the  course  of 
time;  and,  of  course,  the  Professor  and 
his  wife  had  realized  the  truth  from  the 
first,  even  when  Lorrie  was  doing  her 
best  to  shield  them  from  it.  Van  Cleve 
told  her  so  in  his  hard,  matter-of-fact 
way.  'It's  no  use,  Lorrie,'  he  said; 
'you  can't  keep  this  thing  about  Bob 
dark.  Your  mother's  probably  known 
all  along.  I  should  n't  wonder  if  she 
thought  she  was  keeping  it  from  you 
all  the  while  you  thought  you  were 
keeping  it  from  her.  I  don't  know  why 
women  make  believe  that  way.  It 


does  n't  do  any  good.  Might  as  well 
look  at  things  square  in  the  face/ 

*  You  don't  understand  —  men  can't 
understand,'  said  Lorrie,  sadly;  'why, 
Mother  and  I  can't  talk  about  it,  even 
now,  to  each  other.  We  keep  on  pre- 
tending. Why,  you  yourself  have  never 
talked  about  it  like  this  before,  and  yet 
you  knew,  you  must  have  known  about 
Bob  for  two  or  three  years,  even  if  you 
did  n't  know  before  that.  Is  that  why 
you  have  n't  —  you  have  n't  been  with 
him  so  much?' 

'Well,  Bob's  never  around  where  I 
am,  you  know,'  said  Van  Cleve,  a  little 
lamely;  it  was  not  easy  to  explain  his 
position  to  Bob's  sister.  '  I  'm  busy  — 
I  have  n't  any  time  to  hunt  him  up. 
I'm  sorry,  but  — ' 

'But  you'll  have  to  let  Bob  go?' 
Lorrie  finished  for  him,  unable  to  keep 
the  bitterness  out  of  her  voice.  '  I  'm 
sorry,  too,  Van.  You're  one  of  the 
people  that  can  do  the  most  with  him 

—  that  he  pays  the  most  attention  to. 
If  his  own  friends  give  him  up — But 
I  dare  say  you  are  right.   You  can't 
sacrifice    your    own    interests  —  you 
have  yourself  to  think  about  and  your 
own  future,  and  you  can't  be  burden- 
ed with  Bob.' 

'Yes,  I've  got  to  think  about  myself 

—  I'm  always  thinking  about  myself,' 
Van  Cleve  agreed  with  her  dryly.  Her 
words- stung  him  to  the  quick;  he  was 
conscious  of  a  certain  truth  underlying 
their  unkindness  and  unfairness.    He 
was  constantly   thinking  about  Van 
Cleve  Kendrick's  affairs  and  prospects 

—  he  was  thinking  about  himself,  but 
surely,  surely  not  wholly  for  himself! 
That  very  morning  Evelyn  and  his 
aunt  had  begun  again  with  their  New 
York  plan.     They  had  written  to  a 
dozen    friends    and   fellow   students, 
wonderfully  able,  astute  persons,  and 
got  all  manner  of  reports,  figures,  and 
estimates  pointing  unanimously  to  the 
fact  that  it  was  incalculably  cheaper 


218 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


and  healthier  to  live  in  New  York  than 
anywhere  else  on  the  face  of  this  globe! 
Two  hundred  would  move  them  beau- 
tifully —  *  You  know  we  're  very  good 
managers,  Van  dearest.'  'Two  hun- 
dred, hey?  You  must  think  I  get  my 
money  from  the  pump!'  he  had  said  in 
vain  jocularity.  Now  a  sudden  melan- 
choly invaded  the  young  man;  what 
was  he  but  a  money-making  machine? 
he  thought  dispiritedly.  Even  Lorrie 
believed  that  that  was  all  he  cared  for 

—  even  Lorrie! 

As  for  Lorrie  herself,  did  she  know 
how  she  hurt  him?  She  was  a  tender- 
hearted, good  woman,  and  shrank  from 
inflicting  pain  on  anybody;  but  even 
a  tender-hearted,  good  woman  may 
sometimes  take  advantage  of  her  posi- 
tion to  visit  some  of  her  own  unhap- 
piness  on  another's  head.  And  Lorrie 
would  have  been  more  than  a  mortal 
girl  not  to  have  suspected  her  power 
over  the  young  fellow.  At  any  rate, 
swift  contrition  and  a  desire  to  make 
amends  took  hold  of  her. 

'That  sounded  horrid,  but  I  did  n't 
mean  it  that  way,  you  know,'  she  said 
hastily  and  penitently;  'it's  only  that 
I  do  wish  —  you  have  such  an  influence 
over  Bob  —  if  he  was  only  out  of  that 

—  that  atmosphere  he 's  got  into  —  if 
he  was  with  people  like  you  — ' 

'Oh,  influence  /'  Van  broke  in  harsh- 
ly; 'I  tell  you,  Lorrie,  this  talk  about 
"unfortunate  surroundings"  and  "bad 
influence"  and  "good  influence" 
makes  me  very  tired.  Any  fellow  that 's 
too  weak-kneed  to  resist  "evil  influ- 
ence" is  too  weak-kneed  to  be  bol- 
stered up  much  by  good  ones.  Not  you 
nor  I  nor  the  Almighty  can  make  a 
man  go  crooked  any  more  than  we  can 
make  him  go  straight;  he's  got  to  do  it 
himself.  "  I  got  into  bad  company  "  — 
"I  wasn't  directed  right"—  "No- 
body looked  after  me."  —  Pooh!  that's 
the  old  eternal  incessant  yawp  of  folly 
and  feebleness  and  guilt  —  you  don't 


want  to  begin  excusing  Bob  that  way. 
Of  course,  I  know  you  will  forgive  him, 
and  keep  on  forgiving  him,  no  matter 
what  he  does  — ' 

'And  what  kind  of  a  sister  would  I 
be,  if  I  didn't?'  cried  Lorrie  with  a 
great  deal  of  spirit.  'I  don't  at  all  be- 
lieve what  you  say,  Van.  People  are 
different.  We  can't  all  be  pillars  of 
strength.  Mr.  Cortwright  says — '  She 
stopped  short.  '  Well  ? '  she  said  sharp- 
ly; for  Mr.  Kendrick's  countenance 
had  assumed  an  extremely  forbidding 
and  unpleasant  expression  at  the 
sound  of  that  name. 

'Bob  started  quoting  Cortwright  at 
me,  too,'  he  said  acridly.  'That's 
where  he's  got  his  precious  theories 
about  irresponsibility,  and  all  the  rest 
of  it.  I  recognized  the  brand.' 

'Oh!  Then  you  don't  think  Mr. 
Cortwright  is  the  proper  sort  of  friend 
for  Bob  to  have,  is  that  it  ? '  said  Lorrie, 
in  an  ominous  calm. 

'Well,  I  don't,  Lorrie,  since  you  ask 
me.  I  think  that  association  has  been 
the  worst  thing  in  the  world  for  a  fellow 
of  Bob's  disposition,'  said  Van  Cleve; 
and  he  was  honest  and  disinterested 
in  saying  it.  'I  believe  Cortwright's 
influence  — ' 

'I  thought  you  said  just  now  that 
influence  had  nothing  to  do  with  it,' 
said  Lorrie.  And  Van  Cleve  had  no 
answer,  alas!  His  own  words  con- 
founded him.  He  was  sure  he  was 
right  —  right  in  his  theory,  right  about 
the  facts;  but  no  juggling  would  fit  the 
two  together! 

The  interview  ended  rather  stiffly  on 
both  sides.  Lorrie  went  upstairs  after 
the  young  man  had  left,  with  a  fire-red 
spot  on  each  cheek.  'The  idea  of  his 
hinting  that  about  Philip!'  she  thought 
with  an  anger  no  criticism  of  herself 
could  have  aroused;  'Phil  never  says  a 
word  about  him.  And  he's  tried  and 
tried,  and  done  his  best  for  Bob.  What 
did  Van  Cleve  Kendrick  ever  do,  I'd 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


219 


like  to  know?     He's  ashamed  of  the 
way  he's  abandoned  Bob,  that's  all 

—  he's  ashamed   and  —  and   jealous, 
that's  what  made  him  talk  that  way!' 

And  that  was  all  Mr.  Kendrick  got 
for  his  interference.  It  would  have 
darkened  his  skies  enough  to  know 
that  he  had  offended  Lorrie  or  hurt  her; 
but  not  long  after  a  piece  of  news  de- 
scended upon  him  like  another  blight 

—  news  which,  by  the  way,  was  al- 
ready common  property,  and  seemed 
to  have  traveled  around  to  everybody 
before  reaching  him,  who  was  secret- 
ly  the   most   concerned.     It    had    a 
paragraph  all  to  itself  in  next  Sunday 
morning's  Society  Jottings:  'The  en- 
gagement is  announced  of  Miss  Laura 
Gilbert,  daughter  of  Professor  and  Mrs. 
Gilbert,  who  has  been  a  great  favor- 
ite ever  since  she  made  her  bow  to  so- 
ciety, two  or  three  seasons  ago,  to  Mr. 
Philip  Cortwright.    Mr.  Cortwright  is 
a  Eureka  College  man,  a  member  of  the 
old  Cortwright  family  of  Kentucky,' 
etcetera,  etcetera. 

Van  Cleve  heard  the  announcement 
silently,  with  as  indifferent  a  face  as  he 
could  manage.  '  I  chose  a  good  time  to 
tell  her  I  did  n't  approve  of  Cortwright 

—  tactful  and  opportune  in  me,  was  n't 
it?'  he  remarked  inwardly,  with  savage 
irony.  The  next  time  he  saw  her  there 
were  others  about,  and  a  good  deal  of 
joking  allusion  going  on,  and  it  would 
undoubtedly   have    been    the    proper 
moment  for  Mr.  Kendrick  to  tender 
his  compliments  on  the  happy  event; 
but,  in  point  of  fact,  he  did  nothing 
of  the  kind;  he  kept  silence  —  and  it 
may  be  Miss  Gilbert  liked  him  just  as 
well  for  saying  nothing  and  looking 
morose;  she  was  only  human,  after  all. 

In  truth,  Lorrie  was  human  enough 
to  be  very  happy  these  days,  in  spite 
of  the  skeleton  in  the  family  closet.  It 
would  be  hard  for  a  girl  yet  in  her 
twenties,  engaged  to  be  married  to  a 
very  handsome,  devoted,  popular  (or, 


at  least,  well-known)  young  fellow, 
with  whom  she  is  quite  openly  and 
genuinely  in  love  —  it  would  be  a  hard 
matter,  I  say,  for  any  girl  to  be  seri- 
ously unhappy  in  these  circumstances. 
Of  course,  they  were  not  to  be  married 
for  a  while  yet  —  Philip's  business.  It 
was  understood  that  perhaps  next  year 
—  her  mother's  wedding-day  had  been 
the  tenth  of  June;  if  Lorrie  should  be 
married  next  year,  the  tenth  of  June, 
eighteen-ninety-nine,  it  would  be  thirty 
years  to  the  day,  after  her  mother  — 
remarkable  fact!  That  would  be  the 
last  year  of  the  century,  too  —  another 
remarkable  fact! 

'No,  it  won't  be  the  last  year.  Nine- 
teen hundred's  the  last  year,'  said 
Cortwright,  laughing.  He  recited  the 
hundred-pennies-in-a-dollar  argument 
which  people  were  making  use  of  to 
convince  one  another  on  this  often  dis- 
puted point.  'Why,  you  wise,  practical 
little  person,  who  would  have  thought 
you  would  have  had  to  have  that  ex- 
plained to  you?'  he  said  fondly.  It 
pleased  him  singularly  to  catch  her 
tripping;  he  liked  to  feel  even  so  trivial 
a  superiority,  for  there  were  many  mo- 
ments, when,  secure  as  he  was  in  his 
own  conceit,  he  was  a  little  afraid,  a 
little  abashed,  in  the  presence  of  this 
girl  whom  he  was  to  marry;  sometimes 
he  wished  uncomfortably  that  Lorrie 
were  not  quite  so  good!  'Why  won't 
you  let  me  kiss  you?'  he  once  said  to 
her  aggrievedly,  in  the  first  hours  of 
their  betrothal.  'You  belong  to  me 
now.  I  would  n't  be  a  man  if  I  did  n't 
want  to.  Most  girls  like  it  —  I  mean  I 
always  supposed  they  did  —  I  always 
understood  so.  How  can  you  be  so  — 
so  cold?'  He  put  an  arm  around  her, 
at  once  masterful  and  beseeching. 
'Please,  Lorrie!  You  know  you  really 
like  —  want  me  to  — '  he  murmured 
with  lips  very  close. 

'You  can  kiss  me,  but  not  —  not  my 
neck,  that  way,'  said  Lorrie,  backing 


220 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


off,  turning  scarlet,  troubled  rather 
than  angry.  *I  —  I  don't  like  to  have 
you  kiss  my  neck  — '  for  indeed  it  was 
some  such  intimate  caress  which  he 
had  already  attempted  that  had  led  to 
this  scene.  The  young  woman  shrank 
from  it  undefinably;  she  shrank  from 
the  act  and  from  the  look  in  her  lover's 
eyes. 

Cortwright  obeyed,  resenting  what 
he  called  inwardly  her  prudery,  even 
while  clearly  conscious  that  it  was 
precisely  that  quality  about  her  which 
most  strongly  attracted  him.  She 
was  n't  cheap,  he  thought,  with  an 
exultant  thrill;  and  naturally  coveted 
her  the  more. 

This  news  of  Lorrie  Gilbert's  engage- 
ment created  only  a  mild  stir  socially, 
having  been  expected  any  time  these 
two  or  three  years.  Lorrie  might  have 
done  better,  doubtless  —  she  had  never 
lacked  attention  from  men,  some  of 
whom  had  been  better  off  in  the  world- 
ly way,  and  perhaps  more  'settled' 
than  Mr.  Cortwright.  But  it  looked  as 
if  he  was  very  much  in  love  with  Lorrie, 
and  certainly  she  was  over  head  and 
ears  in  love  with  him.  People  in  gen- 
eral were  glad  to  hear  anything  pleas- 
ant connected  with  the  poor  Gilberts, 
who  had  had  so  much  that  was  sad 
and  discreditable  to  endure  from  that 
ne'er-do-well,  Robert.  It  had  got  to 
the  pass  that  their  friends  seldom  even 
mentioned  Robert  nowadays.  The 
girls  whom  he  used  to  know,  who  came 
to  see  Lorrie  and  gave  her  engagement 
luncheons  and  engagement  presents  of 
little  silver  candlesticks  and  orna- 
mental spoons  and  after-dinner  coffee- 
cups,  who  were  already  planning  linen- 
showers,  and  chattering  to  her  about 
the  lovely  four-room  suites  in  the  new 
apartment  buildings,  those  girls  never 
asked  after  Bob.  They  never  invited 
him  to  their  homes  any  more;  they 
contrived  not  to  see  him  on  the  street. 
How  could  they?  He  had  got  to  look- 


ing so  seedy  and  run-down  and  dissi- 
pated, they  said.  Nobody  would  want 
to  be  seen  with  him  —  nobody  could 
afford  to  be  seen  with  him!  It  was  a 
universal  taboo,  excepting  on  the  part 
of  Miss  Paula  Jameson,  whom  Bob 
continued  to  visit  in  his  ostracism 
more  often  than  ever  before.  At  the 
moment,  however,  he  was  deprived 
even  of  that  resource,  for  Paula  went 
to  Palm  Beach  with  her  mother  in 
March;  conceivably,  Robert  was  the 
only  person  who  missed  her.  The 
young  lady  had  never  counted  at  all, 
socially;  she  had  no  friends,  and  heard 
from  and  wrote  to  nobody,  not  even 
Lorrie.  *  She 's  got  such  hotel  manners ! ' 
was  a  criticism  I  once  overheard  from 
some  other  young  lady;  'and  the  way 
she  simply  fastened  herself  on  to 
Lorrie  Gilbert!  I  suppose  she  found 
she  could  n't  get  in,  after  all,  because 
she  does  n't  stick  to  Lorrie  so  much 
now,  but  it  used  to  be,  really  — !' 

CHAPTER  IX 

REMEMBER   THE   MAINE! 

That  winter  all  the  world  of  our 
town,  as  of  a  hundred  other  towns  all 
over  the  country,  went  about  its  busi- 
ness and  pleasure  as  usual  without  the 
slightest  suspicion  that  a  tremendous 
national  event  was  going  to  take  place, 
though  this  will  doubtless  seem  to  our 
descendants  to  have  been  abundantly 
foreshadowed.  The  world  was  bring- 
ing its  daughters  'out'  at  dances  and 
dinners  and  teas,  and  going  to  its  clubs 
and  Symphony  concerts,  and  com- 
plaining about  its  servants  and  the 
high  cost  of  living,  even  as  it  does  to- 
day. Every  morning  the  world  got  up 
and  read  in  its  newspaper  about  Zola 
and  Dreyfus  with  a  kind  of  indignant 
amusement;  it  read  about  the  last  mur- 
der, the  last  divorce,  the  last  serum 
discovery  and  Edison  invention;  and, 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


perhaps,  wondered  indifferently  if  these 
mechanical  piano-players  and  motor- 
vehicles  they  were  experimenting  with 
would  ever  be  of  any  practical  value! 
It  also  read  that  the  Spanish  minis- 
ter, whose  name  it  considered  unpro- 
nounceable and  therefore  outlandish, 
had  resigned,  following  some  unpleas- 
antness at  Washington,  —  'Dupuy  de 
Lome,  gone  home,  no  more  to  roam!' 
the  comic  editor  facetiously  chanted,  — 
and  that  a  bomb  had  exploded  in  the 
Hotel  Inglaterra  in  the  city  of  Havana, 
and  another  bomb  in  the  mayor's 
office;  and  that  one  of  our  big  battle- 
ships had  been  sent  down  there  to  pro- 
tect American  interests. 

Then  came  the  morning  of  the  16th 
of  February  with  some  appalling  news. 
Bob  Gilbert's  paper,  being  an  after- 
noon one,  did  not  get  that  *  scoop ' ;  but 
it  made  a  gallant  effort  and  came  out 
at  noon  with  mighty  head-lines  and 
exclamation  points,  with  columns  of 
information  or  misinformation,  with 
pictures  of  the  unfortunate  vessel,  her 
captain  and  officers,  and  complete 
details  about  the  Maine's  size,  'dis- 
placement,' *  armament,'  cost,  and  pre- 
vious career.  Bob  himself  fell  into  the 
wildest  state  of  excitement;  it  kept 
him  sober  for  a  week!  To  be  sure,  he 
was  not  the  only  one  who  lost  his  head 
and  fumed  and  fretted  and  girded  at 
the  Administration,  and  denounced 
the  investigations  as  cowardly  and 
farcical  delays.  Within  a  week  of  the 
disaster  there  were  militia  companies 
drilling  furiously  all  over  the  State, 
and  all  over  every  other  state  in  the 
Union;  there  were  fiery  speeches  on 
the  floor  of  every  legislature;  and  at  a 
big  public  banquet,  while  the  temper 
of  the  Administration  still  seemed  to  be 
for  peace,  the  Assistant  Secretary  of 
the  Navy  got  up  and  made  a  speech  of 
such  strength  and  significance  that 
everybody  present  nudged  his  neigh- 
bor, and  one  gentleman  went  so  far  as 


to  say  to  the  presiding  genius  of  the 
gathering,  *  Mr.  Hanna,  may  we  please 
fight  Spain  now?'  So,  at  any  rate,  the 
newspapers  reported. 

Mr.  Van  Cleve  Kendrick,  so  far  as 
was  known,  made  but  one  comment  on 
the  situation.  ' I  guess  we  can't  get  out 
of  it  without  a  fight;  and  if  we  do  have 
war,  wheat  ought  to  jump  some,'  he 
said;  and  studied  the  market  reports 
and  gave  closer  attention  to  business 
than  ever,  these  days.  The  news  that 
troops  of  the  regular  army  had  actually 
been  ordered  to  Key  West,  that  some 
millions  of  dollars  had  been  voted  for 
'defense,'  that  the  Oregon  had  started 
for  Cape  Horn  and  Atlantic  waters, 
that  the  Vizcaya  had  anchored  off 
Manhattan  Island  (to  the  terror  of 
the  unprotected  Manhattanese!);  the 
talk  about  the  Philippines,  with  conse- 
quent searchings  of  the  map,  and  about 
the  Pacific  Squadron;  the  withdrawal 
of  the  United  States  consul  from  Ha- 
vana, and  of  Mr.  Woodford  from  the 
Embassy  at  Madrid  —  all  this  news 
and  all  the  heroic  excitement  of  the 
times  affected  Van  Cleve  not  in  the 
least. 

The  young  man  was  not  unpatri- 
otic; he  had  as  much  pride  and  spirit  as 
any  of  his  fellows,  and,  it  cannot  be 
doubted,  heard  the  songs  and  speeches, 
and  saw  the  massed  soldiery  under  the 
banner  of  his  country,  with  an  honor- 
able stirring  of  the  heart.  But  what- 
ever befell,  —  and,  like  the  rest  of  us, 
he  had  a  hearty  belief  in  the  power  of 
our  arms  and  an  unshakable  expecta- 
tion of  success,  —  Van  must  still  stay 
at  home  and  make  a  living  for  himself 
and  those  dependent  on  him.  He  was 
in  odd  contrast  to  that  time-honored 
warrior,  Major  Stanton,  who,  if  his  age 
and  state  of  health  had  not  prohibited 
it,  as  he  was  careful  to  assure  every- 
body, would  have  been  the  first  to  offer 
himself  to  the  Cause.  'It's  hard  for  us 
—  hard !  We  old  fellows  that  went  out 


222 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


for  the  Union  in  sixty-one  —  hard  to 
be  shelved  now!'  he  would  say  with  a 
magnificent  break  in  his  voice,  and 
wagging  the  grizzled  whiskers  sadly. 
It  was  an  impressive  spectacle,  and 
Major  Van  Cleve  was  very  popular  on 
all  political-military  occasions,  where, 
indeed,  he  cut  an  admirable  figure,  and 
exercised  handsomely  his  fine  gift  of 
eloquence. 

Van  Cleve's  family,  by  the  way, 
were  going  to  New  York  to  live.  The 
news  created  an  interest  in  their  set  of 
acquaintances  hardly  second  to  that 
roused  by  the  international  complica- 
tions. They  had  a  dozen  reasons  for 
going,  any  one  of  them  unanswerable : 
Mrs.  Lucas's  health,  the  possibility 
of  much  greater  economy  in  living,  a 
wider  sphere  for  Evelyn,  and  a  thor- 
oughly artistic  atmosphere  —  they  re- 
cited all  these  arguments  with  their 
customary  fervor  and  certainty.  It 
developed  that  Van  Cleve  was  not 
intending  to  move  with  them;  they 
explained  that  he  could  n't  give  up  his 
position  here,  of  course;  but  equally, 
of  course,  they  would  n't  be  so  selfish 
as  to  walk  off  and  leave  him  without 
knowing  that  he  was  perfectly  com- 
fortable; and  accordingly  a  wonderful, 
ideal,  Elysian  boarding-house  had  been 
discovered  where  they  kept  such  a 
table,  and  he  would  have  such  a  room, 
so  large,  light,  and  sunny! 

Van  had  made  no  comment  on  these 
arrangements;  the  women,  indeed, 
wondered  and  were  aggrieved  at  his 
unsympathetic  silence;  it  was  true 
that  he  gave  them  ungrudgingly  what- 
ever money  they  asked  for,  —  and  in 
fairness  it  must  be  said  they  asked  for 
as  little  as  possible,  —  but  he  paid  no 
heed  to  their  explanations,  he  took  no 
interest  in  the  plans  they  made  either 
for  themselves  or  for  his  own  comfort. 
He  would  not  even  go  to  look  at  the 
matchless  boarding-house.  'Why,  I 
suppose  it 's  all  right,  if  you  say  so  — 


it'll  be  just  as  good  as  home,'  he  said, 
cheerfully  indifferent. 

*  Van  Cleve,  how  can  you  say  such  a 
thing?  As  if  any  place  could  be  the 
same  as  your  own  home!9  they  ex- 
claimed in  reproachful  chorus;  nor 
could  they  at  all  understand  why  he 
laughed.  They  said  to  each  other  that 
Van  Cleve  was  getting  more  and  more 
wrapped  up  in  his  affairs  —  it  would 
end  by  making  him  hard  and  selfish  — 
he  might  even  become  miserly! 

It  is  strange  to  think  that  such  small 
doings  as  these  can  go  on  side  by  side 
with  the  great  stirring  business  of  the 
nation  on  the  edge  of  war,  and  receive 
within  their  own  circle  quite  as  much 
attention.  People  did  not  cease  to  be 
interested  in  spring  wardrobes  and 
summer  trips,  in  weddings  and  new 
houses  and  house-cleaning  and  the 
Musical  Festival;  everybody,  I  repeat, 
thought  and  talked  as  much  as  ever 
about  these  things  that  month  of  April, 
as  if  nothing  of  moment  had  been  go- 
ing forward.  And  on  there  at  Wash- 
ington, the  debate  about  arbitration 
and  intervention  rumbled  on,  and  the 
Senate  recognized  Cuba,  and  the  Pre- 
sident called  out  the  troops,  and  the 
Ultimatum  was  issued  and  forestalled; 
and  that  energetic  Assistant  Secretary 
of  the  Navy  resigned  and  set  about 
forming  his  regiment  of  Rough  Riders. 
The  last  did  really  touch  us  closer,  for 
here  and  there  we  heard  of  some  pro- 
spective recruit  or  aspirant  for  that 
body,  —  somebody's  cousin  or  brother, 
some  young  fellow  at  Harvard  or 
ranching  it  out  West.  One  of  the  ru- 
mors credited  that  young  Cortwright, 
—  Phil  Cortwright  that  was  with  Stein- 
berger  &  Hirsch,  —  Lorrie  Gilbert's 
Mr.  Cortwright,  with  ambitions  in 
that  direction.  Nobody  was  surprised 
to  hear  it;  he  was  a  dashing  sort  of 
fellow  and  would  make  a  first-rate 
cavalryman  —  any  man  that  came  out 
of  Kentucky  could  ride  and  shoot,  for 


VAN   CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


223 


that  matter.  Cortwright  could  pro- 
bably get  a  commission  with  ease;  at 
any  rate,  he  was  going  to  Washington 
to  make  a  try  for  it,  everybody  pre- 
sently understood. 

Lorrie,  looking  a  little  pale,  but 
sweetly  resolute  and  cheerful,  con- 
firmed the  report.  'Yes.  He's  going. 
He  thinks  he  ought  to;  he  wants  to  do 
his  duty/  she  said,  with  a  beautiful 
pride  in  her  hero;  she  had  no  concep- 
tion of  the  tinsel  and  spot-light  allure- 
ments this  martial  drama  held  out  for 
him,  as  for  nine  tenths  of  the  other 
young  fellows;  and,  for  the  matter  of 
that,  when  this  brave,  eager,  self- 
centred  restlessness  overtakes  a  man, 
is  there  a  woman  on  earth  who  can  hold 
him?  'I'd  go  myself — with  the  Red 
Cross,  you  know  —  if  Mother  thought 
she  could  get  along  without  me.  But 
she  wants  me  here,  and  there  will  be 
plenty  of  women  that  can  go/  said 
Lorrie,  who  never  had  to  explain  to 
anybody  that  she  wanted  to  do  her 
duty.  'Bob's  going,  too  —  not  with 
the  army  —  his  paper's  sending  him. 
He's  quite  wild  about  it,'  she  told 
people.  They  were  liable  to  remark  to 
one  another  afterwards  that  Bob  would 
be  no  great  loss  whatever  became  of 
him,  but  the  way  those  things  gener- 
ally turned  out,  a  fellow  like  Bob  came 
through  it  all  scot-free  without  a 
scratch  or  a  day's  sickness,  while  any 
number  of  fine,  useful  men  succumbed 
to  the  hardships  or  the  enemies' 
bullets! 

Robert,  however,  showed  a  disposi- 
tion to  straighten  up,  under  all  the  ex- 
citement, queerly  enough;  he  took  him- 
self with  gratifying  seriousness  in  the 
capacity  of  war-correspondent  to  the 
Record-World,  and  was  too  absorbed 
in  preparations  for  the  campaigning 
to  spare  any  time  to  his  former  dis- 
reputable company  and  diversions. 
In  the  beginning,  with  some  idea  of 
enlisting,  he  had  gone  and  got  him- 


self examined  at  the  recruiting  station 
for  the  regular  army.  'Those  are  the 
fellows  that  are  sure  to  go,  you  know,' 
he  said  cannily;  and  he  came  away  a 
little  chopfallen  at  being  rejected  by 
the  doctor  and  sergeant.  'Said  my 
teeth  were  defective!  Did  you  ever 
hear  of  anything  so  fine-drawn  as 
that?'  he  told  Van  Cleve  in  a  comical 
indignation. 

'Teeth,  hey?'  said  Van  Cleve,  look- 
ing the  other  over  with  his  shrewd, 
hard,  gray  eyes;  'they  must  make  a 
pretty  searching  examination.' 

'Oh,  yes,  you  have  to  strip,  of 
course.  They  measure  you  and  test 
your  lungs,  and  you  have  to  come  up  to 
some  standard  they've  got.  The  doc- 
tor said  I  was  a  little  too  light  —  too 
thin  for  my  height,  you  know;  but  I 
don't  think  that  would  have  made  any 
trouble.  I  told  him  I'd  make  it  my 
business  to  get  heavier,  and  he  kind  of 
laughed.  He  asked  me  how  long  I'd 
had  this  cough,  too  —  it 's  nothing  but 
a  cold  I '  ve  had  off  and  on  this  winter 
—  and  I  noticed  him  thumping  around 
my  chest;  that  shows  you  how  particu- 
lar they  are.  That's  all  right,  too;  I'm 
not  kicking  about  that.  They've  got 
to  have  sound  men  physically  in 
the  army.  But  teeth  —  piffle!'  Robert 
ejaculated  disgustedly.  'Well,  as  long 
as  I'm  going,  anyhow,  for  the  paper, 
I've  got  the  laugh  on  'em.  But  to  be 
with  the  army  itself  would  be  more 
fun.' 

Van  Cleve  listened  to  him  with  an 
extraordinary  inward  movement  of 
affection  and  pity;  there  were  times 
when  he  felt  old  enough  to  be  Bob's 
father.  'Well,  you  want  to  fatten  up 
and  —  and  get  rid  of  your  cold  so  as  to 
be  in  first-class  shape,  because  it's 
bound  to  be  a  good  deal  like  hard  work 
part  of  the  time,  anyhow,'  he  advised 
Robert.  But  when  they  had  parted,  he 
shook  his  head  over  the  teeth  episode. 
'  I  should  n't  wonder  if  they  said  that 


224 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


to  every  poor  devil  they  reject,  rather 
than  tell  him  right  out  what  the  matter 
is  with  him,'  he  opined  sagely;  and 
wondered  if  the  humanity  of  doctors 
was  not  sometimes  ill-judged.  It  did 
not  need  a  doctor's  experience  to  see  at 
a  glance  what  sort  of  a  fellow  Bob  was : 
the  pace  he  went  was  beginning  to  tell 
on  him;  and  even  if  he  behaved  him- 
self, he  was  not  of  the  type  wanted  in 
the  United  States  Army. 

Bob's  mother  and  sister,  who  had 
awaited  the  verdict  in  terror,  were  too 
much  relieved  to  sympathize  with  him; 
his  position  was  likely  to  be  exciting 
and  hazardous  enough,  anyhow,  they 
thought.  Mrs.  Gilbert  was  never  seen 
to  shed  a  tear,  or  heard  to  utter  a  word 
in  opposition;  but  she  used  to  follow 
him  to  the  door  whenever  he  left  the 
house,  and  watch  him  every  step  of 
the  road,  if  he  went  no  farther  than 
the  corner  or  across  the  street.  When 
he  was  at  home,  she  would  be  forever 
visiting  his  room  on  slight  errands, 
even  slipping  in  like  a  small,  gentle, 
noiseless  ghost  at  any  hour  of  the  night 
to  look  at  him  while  he  slept,  as  she 
had  when  he  was  a  little  boy  in  his  crib, 
years  ago.  All  the  things  he  liked  to 
eat  were,  constantly  on  the  table;  and 
the  mother  even  went  so  far  as  to  rout 
out  a  photograph  of  Paula  Jameson  in 
a  striking  pose,  like  a  variety  actress,  a 
photograph  that  Mrs.  Gilbert  cordially 
detested,  and  restore  it  to  the  place  on 
Bob's  bureau  whence  she  had  removed 
it  in  a  temper  six  months  before.  'I 
want  him  to  remember  everything 
pleasantly,'  she  said  to  Lorrie. 

Robert  himself  was  quite  unconscious 
or  unobservant  of  these  efforts,  though 
he  was  kind  after  his  fashion.  'Don't 
you  worry,  Moms,  correspondents  never 
get  hurt.  They  don't  have  to  stand  up 
to  be  fired  at,  you  know  —  they  can 
run  like  rabbits,  when  they  get  scared, 
and  nobody  blames  'em,'  he  said,  in  a 
laughing  but  sincere  attempt  to  reas- 


sure her.  *  There's  no  Roman  soldier, 
nor  boy-  stood  -  on  -  the  -  burning  -  deck 
about  me.  I'll  bet  the  first  volley  I 
hear  I  '11  establish  a  new  world's  record 
for  the  running  high  jump.  I'll  land 
somewhere  in  the  next  county,  and  I 
won't  get  back  till  New  Year's!' 

'No,  you  won't  run,  Bob;  you'd 
never  run  away  in  the  wide  world!* 
cried  his  mother,  flushing  all  over  her 
pretty,  faded  face;  -and  though  she 
joined  in  the  laugh  against  herself,  the 
flush  remained.  The  Virginia  woman 
remembered  the  Shenandoah  and  the 
guns  of  Chancellorsville.  It  was  with 
faces  of  resolute  calm  that  she  and  his 
sister  kissed  the  young  man  good-by 
the  morning  he  started  for  Tampa  and 
'the  front';  his  father  wrung  his  hand; 
the  little  boys  of  the  neighborhood 
hung  around,  and  scrabbled  for  the 
honor  of  carrying  his  suit-case;  Mrs. 
Gilbert  watched  him  down  the  street 
for  the  last  time;  and  he  swung  on  to 
the  rear  platform  of  the  trolley-car, 
and  his  figure  lessened  in  the  distance, 
waving  his  new  Panama  hat.  Down  at 
the  Louisville  and  Nashville  station, 
here  was  Van  Cleve  Kendrick,  that 
stoic  and  cynic  and  temperance  lec- 
turer, with  a  box  of  cigars  and  some 
kind  of  wonderful  confection  in  leather 
and  nickel-plate,  combining  a  knife, 
fork,  spoon,  cup,  flask,  and  goodness 
knows  what  else,  for  camp  use!  He 
thrust  the  gifts  confusedly  upon  Bob 
while  they  bade  each  other  good-by.  — 
'Well,  so  long,  Van!'  —  'Here's  luck, 
Bob!'  —  It  was  a  simple  ceremony. 

The  train-shed  was  crowded  with 
a  great  rush  of  arriving  and  departing 
travelers,  not  a  few  military-looking 
gentlemen  with  military-looking  lug- 
gage among  them,  for  these  were  war- 
times. On  Bob's  own  train,  there  were 
a  score  of  newspaper  men  bent  on  sim- 
ilar business  —  jolly  fellows  all;  his 
kind,  gay,  boyish  face  shone  on  Van 
Cleve  from  the  midst  of  them;  the 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


225 


train  pulled  out;  and  Van  walked  off  to 
the  office,  perhaps  envying  them  a 
little. 

In  the  meanwhile,  Lome's  Mr.  Cort- 
wright  got  his  appointment,  according 
to  his  confident  expectation,  and  came 
back  to  her  in  high  spirits.  He  had  seen 
and  had  interviews  with  the  President 
and  the  Secretary  of  War;  he  was 
to  'report  for  duty'  at  such  and  such 
a  place,  on  such  and  such  a  date;  he 
was  planning  his  baggage;  he  had 
his  photograph  taken  in  uniform  for 
Lorrie;  the  girls  used  to  see  it  standing 
on  her  dressing-table,  looking  more 
than  ever  reckless  and  handsome,  and 
said  to  one  another  that  it  was  a  pity 
he  had  n't  always  br  on  in  the  army,  it 
seemed  to  suit  him  so  well  somehow, 
he  appeared  to  so  much  advantage  as  a 
military  man.  Some  of  her  friends  may 
have  even  envied  Lorrie  her  romantic 
position;  and,  in  truth,  I  am  not  sure 
that,  in  spite  of  her  miserable  moments 
of  apprehension  for  him,  these  last 
few  weeks  may  not  have  been  the  hap- 
piest Lorrie  had  ever  spent  with  her 
lover. 

He  had  never  been  so  devoted,  so 
thoughtful  and  tender;  and  when  the 
dreaded  time  of  parting  came,  spoke  to 
her  in  a  fashion  that  became  him  well, 
gravely  and  manfully.  *  You  're  a  deal 
too  good  for  me,  my  dear;  it  makes  me 
ashamed  to  see  you  care  so  much,'  he 
said,  with  real  humility;  the  depth  of 
her  feeling,  for  the  first  time  revealed, 
surprised  and  touched  and  a  little  awed 
Philip.  'I  —  I  almost  wish  you  did  n't 
care  so  much, '  he  stammered  nervous- 
ly; and  he  did  not  offer  to  kiss  her  neck 
now,  but,  instead,  took  her  hand  and 
laid  it  against  his  lips  with  something 
like  reverence.  *  I  wish  —  I  wish — !' 
He  was  silent,  looking  down  in  a  swift, 
passing,  useless  pain  and  shame  and 


regret.    After  all,  he  told  himself,  he 
was  n't  much  worse  than  the  next  man 

—  men  could  n't  help  some  things  — 
and  anyhow  that  life  was  all  over  and 
done  with  forever  for  him  now  —  no 
use  bewailing  the  spilled  milk  —  the 
thing  was  to  live  straight  from  this  on, 
and  be  worthy  of  this  splendid  girl. 
Lorrie  and  he  would   be  married  — 
they   would    have    children  — !     He 
kissed  her  and  held  her  close  in  hon- 
est pride  and  tenderness. 

'  I  'm  not  going  to  be  silly  any  more 

—  I  did  n't  mean  to  be  silly  at  all  — 
only  I  c-could  n't  quite  help  it,'  said 
Lorrie,  bravely,  swallowing  the  rest  of 
her  sobs,  and  raising  her  head  from  his 
shoulder.  'And  you  may  not  be  in  any 
battles,  anyway! '  she  added,  so  naively 
hopeful  that  Cortwright  laughed  aloud. 

'That's  right,  little  woman.  I'm 
going  to  come  back  all  right,'  he  said 
gayly;  'but  when  it's  over,  I  believe 
I'll  stay  in  the  army;  I  could  get  into 
the  regulars,  I  think.  A  lot  of  the 
volunteer  officers  did  after  the  Civil 
War,  didn't  they?  I'll  stay  in  the 
army  and  end  up  a  major-general. 
That'll  be  better  than  pegging  along 
with  old  Leo  Hirsch,  hey?  Give  me  one 
more  kiss,  Mrs.  Major-General!' 

He  went  off  buoyantly,  with  his 
head  up  and  a  free  step,  in  his  familiar, 
carelessly  graceful  style;  and  Lorrie, 
standing  on  the  steps,  looked  after  him, 
strained  her  eyes  after  him,  as  every 
woman  has  looked  and  strained  her 
eyes  some  time  in  her  life  after  some 
man  since  this  world  began  its  journey 
through  the  stars.  It  happened  to  be  a 
Sunday  morning,  the  first  of  May,  very 
leafy,  green,  fresh,  and  warm;  people 
were  coming  home  from  church,  and 
children  skipping  on  the  pavements. 
Lorrie  thought  she  would  remember  it 
to  her  last  hour. 


(To  be  continued.) 


VOL.  in -NO.  2 


IN  MEMORIAM 

Leo:   A    Yellow  Cat 
BY  MARGARET  SHERWOOD 


IF,  to  your  twilight  land  of  dream,  — 

Persephone,  Persephone, 
Drifting  with  all  your  shadow  host,  — 
Dim  sunlight  comes  with  sudden  gleam, 
And  you  lift  veiled  eyes  to  see 
Slip  past  a  little  golden  ghost, 
That  wakes  a  sense  of  springing  flowers, 
Of  nesting  birds,  and  lambs  new-born, 
Of  spring  astir  in  quickening  hours, 
And  young  blades  of  Demeter's  corn; 
For  joy  of  that  sweet  glimpse  of  sun, 
O  goddess  of  unnumbered  dead, 
Give  one  soft  touch,  —  if  only  one,  — 
To  that  uplifted,  pleading  head! 
Whisper  some  kindly  word,  to  bless 
A  wistful  soul  who  understands 
That  life  is  but  one  long  caress 
Of  gentle  words  and  gentle  hands. 


THE  SOCIAL  ORDER  IN  AN  AMERICAN  TOWN 


BY  RANDOLPH   S.  BOURNE 


AN  American  town,  large  enough  to 
contain  a  fairly  complete  representa- 
tion of  the  different  classes  and  types 
of  people  and  social  organizations,  and 
yet  not  so  large  that  individualities  are 
submerged  in  the  general  mass,  or  the 
lines  between  the  classes  blurred  and 
made  indistinct,  is  a  real  epitome  of 
American  life.  And  the  best  and  most 
typical  qualities  are  to  be  found  in  sub- 
urban towns.  In  a  town  situated  near 
a  large  city  where  it  can  draw  nourish- 
ment from  the  city's  life  and  constant- 
ly react  to  it,  and  yet  having  a  history 
and  tradition  of  its  own  so  that  it  does 
not  become  a  mere  colorless  reflection 
of  that  other,  one  gets  the  real  flavor 
of  American  life,  and  an  insight  into 
the  way  in  which  its  fabric  is  woven. 

If  a  modern  writer  wishes  to  win  an 
imperishable  name  as  a  historian,  he 
has  only  to  write  an  exhaustive  mono- 
graph on  the  life  of  such  a  town, — 
what  kind  of  people  live  there,  how 
they  make  their  living,  what  are  the 
social  cliques,  what  the  children  are 
being  taught  in  the  schools,  what  the 
preachers  are  preaching  from  the  pul- 
pit, what  the  local  political  issues  are, 
who  form  the  ruling  class,  and  how 
the  local  political  machine  is  made  up, 
what  the  newspapers  and  the  leaders 
and  the  different  classes  think  about 
things,  what  magazines  and  books  the 
people  read,  how  the  people  amuse 
themselves,  even  how  they  dress  and 
what  their  houses  look  like,  —  in  short, 
all  those  obvious  things  that  we  never 
think  of  mentioning;  things  that  we 
would  give  much  to  know  about  our 


ancestors,  but  that  we  get  only  by  the 
most  laborious  research,  and  then  only 
in  unsatisfactory  fragments. 

The  writer  who  did  this  would 
not  only  have  produced  a  complete 
sketch  of  American  civilization  in  this 
year  of  1913,  but  he  would  have  given 
his  contemporaries  something  serious 
and  important  to  think  about.  We 
should  then  see  ourselves  for  the  first 
time  in  the  glass,  not  in  the  touched-up 
portraits  or  hideous  caricatures  which 
now  pass  muster  for  what  we  know  of 
ourselves.  I  shall  not  be  foolish  enough 
to  attempt  any  such  broad  survey  as 
this;  but  certain  of  the  more  obvious 
features  of  the  social  life  of  a  suburban 
town  where  I  used  to  spend  my  sum- 
mers have  tempted  me  to  try  to  un- 
ravel its  social  psychology,  and  study 
the  classes  of  people  who  live  there  and 
the  influences  and  ideals  that  sway 
them  as  classes,  —  in  short,  the  way 
they  are  typical  of  American  life. 

The  'lure  of  the  city'  is  a  fact  fa- 
miliar enough  in  our  social  introspec- 
tions, but  its  dramatic  quality  never 
grows  stale.  This  contest  between  the 
city  and  the  country  that  has  been  go- 
ing on  for  fifty  years  has  left  the  coun- 
try moribund,  and  made  the  city  cha- 
otic. The  country  has  been  stripped  of 
its  traditions,  and  the  city  has  grown 
so  fast  that  it  has  not  had  time  to  form 
any.  The  suburban  town  is  a  sort  of 
last  stronghold  of  Americanism.  It  is 
the  only  place,  at  least  in  the  East, 
where  life  has  a  real  richness  and 
depth.  But  it  is  on  the  firing-line;  it  has 
to  struggle  valiantly  for  its  soul.  The 

227 


THE  SOCIAL  ORDER  IN  AN  AMERICAN  TOWN 


city  cuts  a  wider  and  wider  swath,  and 
the  suburbs  are  stretching  in  an  ever- 
widening  circle  from  all  our  cities.  The 
vortex  of  the  city,  even  the  smaller  city, 
is  so  powerful  that  it  sucks  in  the  hard- 
iest and  sometimes  the  most  distant 
towns,  and  strips  them  of  all  their  in- 
dividuality and  personal  charm.  The 
city  swamps  its  neighbors,  turns  them 
into  mere  aggregations  of  expression- 
less streets  lined  with  box-like  houses 
or  shanties  of  stores,  and  degrades  their 
pleasant  meadows  into  parks  and  sites. 
These  suburban  annexes  cease  to  have 
a  life  of  their  own,  and  become  simply 
sleeping-places  for  commuters.  The 
populations  are  so  transient  that  the 
towns  seem  almost  to  be  rebuilt  and 
repopulated  every  ten  years.  And  the 
only  alternative  to  this  state  of  affairs 
seems  to  be  oblivion,  stagnation,  and 
slow  decay. 

When  one  does  come,  therefore,  into 
a  town  which  is  near  enough  to  a  city 
to  be  stimulated  by  it,  and  yet  which 
has  been  able  to  retain  its  old  houses 
and  streets,  its  old  families,  its  old 
green,  and  its  stone  church,  its  mead- 
ow-land still  stretching  long  fingers 
straight  into  the  heart  of  the  town,  one 
breathes  a  new  air.  Here  is  America, — 
what  it  used  to  be,  and  what  one  wants 
to  keep  it.  One  strikes  root  in  such  a 
place,  gets  connected  with  something 
vital,  begins  to  blot  out  the  feeling  of 
homelessness  and  sordidness  that  one 
has  after  a  protracted  journey  through 
the  dreary  city  outskirts  and  ram- 
shackle towns  and  unkempt  country 
that  make  up  so  much  of  our  Eastern 
scenery. 

In  the  East,  between  the  pull  of  the 
city  and  the  inundation  of  foreign  im- 
migration, we  feel  the  slipping-away  of 
the  American  ways  more  keenly.  An 
Eastern  town  must  be  unusually  tena- 
cious to  maintain  itself  against  the  cur- 
rents, but  it  is  for  that  reason  all  the 
more  worthy  of  intensive  study;  for  the 


forces  and  divisions  and  outlines  in  its 
social  life  are  seen  with  the  greater  dis- 
tinctness. Class  lines  that  in  other 
parts  of  the  country,  although  very 
real,  are  softened  and  blurred,  are  seen 
here  in  clearer  light.  All  the  colors  are 
much  brighter  and,  for  that  very  rea- 
son, the  picture  can  be  plainly  seen  and 
understood. 

One  cannot  live  long  in  a  town  like 
the  one  of  which  I  speak,  without  feel- 
ing that  the  people  are  graded  into 
very  distinct  social  levels.  It  is  a  com- 
mon enough  saying  that  there  are  no 
classes  in  America,  and  this,  of  course, 
is  true  if  by  *  class '  is  meant  some  rigid 
caste  based  on  arbitrary  distinctions  of 
race  or  birth  or  wealth.  But  if  all  that 
is  meant  by  class  is  a  grading  of  social 
and  economic  superiority  and  inferior- 
ity, with  definite  groupings  and  levels 
of  social  favor,  then  such  a  town  has 
classes,  and  America  has  classes.  And 
these  distinctions  are  important;  for 
they  influence  the  actions  and  ideas 
and  ideals  of  the  people  in  countless 
ways  and  form  a  necessary  background 
for  any  real  understanding  of  their 
life. 

Lowest  in  the  social  scale  is,  of  course, 
the  factory  class.  The  town  has  long 
been  an  important  manufacturing  cen- 
tre, and  it  is  possible  to  see  here  almost 
a  history  of  industrialism  in  America. 
There  is  the  old  type  of  mill,  now  rap- 
idly dying  out,  and  only  preserved  in 
favored  industries  by  a  beneficent  tariff. 
There  is  a  woolen  mill  which  is  the 
most  beautiful  example  of  paternal  feu- 
dalism that  can  be  found.  The  present 
owner  inherited  it  from  his  father,  who 
had  inherited  it  from  his.  He  lives  in  a 
big  house  overlooking  the  mill-pond, 
and  personally  visits  the  office  every 
day.  The  mill  employs  hundreds  of 
men,  women,  and  children,  and  one 
would  say  that  they  were  fortunate  to 
be  so  singularly  free  from  absentee  cap- 
italism. The  owner  is  one  of  the  most 


THE  SOCIAL  ORDER  IN  AN  AMERICAN  TOWN 


229 


respected  men  in  the  community,  head 
of  the  board  of  education,  president  of 
the  local  bank.  And  yet  to  an  outsider 
it  does  not  seem  as  if  his  employees 
are  one  whit  better  off  than  if  they 
were  working  for  a  soulless  corpora- 
tion. The  hours  are  the  maximum  al- 
lowed by  law,  the  ages  of  the  children 
the  minimum,  and  there  is  much  night 
work. 

One  who  has  had  ideas  of  the  so- 
lution of  social  problems  by  the  de- 
veloping of  more  brotherhood  between 
employer  and  employee  is  rudely  unde- 
ceived by  the  most  cursory  glance  at 
an  institution  such  as  this.  The  em- 
ployees of  the  mill  are  typical.  There 
are  little,  dried-up  men  who  have 
worked  there  for  fifty  years,  —  their 
sons  and  daughters  joining  them  as 
fast  as  they  grew  up,  —  steady,  self-re- 
specting men  who  have  perhaps  saved 
enough  to  buy  a  little  cottage  near  the 
mill.  Then  there  are  the  younger  men 
and  women,  mostly  drifters,  who  stay 
in  a  factory  until  they  are  '  laid  off'  in  a 
season  of  depression,  and  then  move 
about  until  they  find  work  somewhere 
else.  Lastly  there  is  the  horde  of  Ital- 
ian and  Polish  boys  and  girls,  'be- 
grimed, chattering  children  who  pour 
out  of  the  mill-gates  at  night  when  the 
whistle  blows,  and  whom  one  hears 
running  past  again  in  the  morning  be- 
fore seven,  always  hurrying,  always 
chattering. 

The  town  can  already  boast  a  Pol- 
ish quarter  and  an  Italian  quarter,  the 
former  somehow  infinitely  the  superior 
in  prosperity  and  attractiveness,  and 
apparently  possessing  a  vigorous  com- 
munity life  of  its  own.  The  Italian 
quarter  is  typical  enough  of  the  strug- 
gles of  too  many  of  our  immigrants.  It 
can  hardly  be  possible  that  these  peo- 
ple have  left  anything  worse  in  the 
old  country  than  this  collection  of  in- 
describable hovels,  most  of  them  built 
by  the  owners,  this  network  of  un- 


paved  streets  and  small  gardens  and 
ashes  and  filth;  and  the  suffering  in 
that  mild  native  climate  of  theirs  must 
have  been  far  less  than  it  is  here. 
The  town  has  given  them  a  school 
and  a  chapel,  but  their  fearful  squalor, 
apparent  to  every  man  who  walks 
about  the  town,  has  not  seemed  to  dis- 
tress their  American  neighbors  in  the 
least.  The  attitude  of  the  latter  is 
typical.  They  are  filled  with  an  almost 
childlike  faith  in  the  temporary  nature 
of  this  misery.  These  people  are  in 
America  now,  you  are  told,  and  will 
soon  be  making  money  and  building 
themselves  comfortable  homes.  Mean- 
while all  that  can  be  done  is  to  sur- 
round them  with  the  amenities  of  civ- 
ilization, and  wait. 

The  most  impressive  thing  about  the 
working  class,  on  the  whole,  is  the  pro- 
found oblivion  of  the  rest  of  the  popu- 
lation to  them.  They  form  a  very  con- 
siderable proportion  of  the  population, 
and  yet  it  would  be  difficult  to  find  any 
way  in  which  they  really  count  in  the 
life  of  the  town.  The  other  classes  have 
definite  social  institutions  which  bind 
them  together,  and  give  them  not  only 
recreation  but  influence.  This  work- 
ing class  has  nothing  of  the  kind.  For 
amusements  in  their  hours  of  leisure 
they  go  to  the  neighboring  city;  an  oc- 
casional employees'  ball  and  a  small 
Socialist  local  make  up  practically  all 
of  the  institutional  life  of  the  people. 
The  town  thus  seems  to  have  a  whole 
class  living  in  it,  but  not  of  it,  quite 
apart  and  detached  from  the  currents 
of  its  life. 

The  psychology  of  this  working  class 
is  different  from  that  of  the  other 
classes.  The  prevailing  tone  is  apathy. 
There  is  no  discontent  or  envy  of  the 
well-to-do,  but  neither  is  there  that 
restless  eagerness  to  better  their  posi- 
tion, and  that  confidence  in  their 
ultimate  prosperity,  which  the  Ameri- 
can spirit  is  supposed  to  instil  into  a 


230 


THE  SOCIAL  ORDER  IN  AN  AMERICAN  TOWN 


man.  Men  in  the  trades  seem  to  have 
this  spirit,  but  it  is  noticeably  absent 
from  the  factory  class.  Even  the  immi- 
grants seem  quickly  to  lose  that  flush 
of  hope  and  ambition  with  which  they 
arrive  in  this  country.  The  factory 
routine  seems  to  get  into  their  very 
souls,  so  that  their  whole  life  settles 
down  to  a  monotonous  drudgery  with- 
out a  look  forward  or  backward.  They 
are  chiefly  concerned  in  holding  their 
jobs,  and  escaping  the  horrors  of  un- 
employment —  in  making  both  ends 
meet.  Beyond  this  there  is  little  hori- 
zon for  day-dreaming  and  ambition. 
Life  to  them  is  a  constant  facing  of 
naked  realities,  and  an  actual  *  econ- 
omy/ or  management,  of  resources,  not 
an  effort  to  impress  themselves  on  their 
neighbors,  and  to  conform  to  the  ways 
of  those  about  them.  This  deep-seated 
divergence  in  standards  and  interests 
from  the  rest  of  American  life  may  or 
may  not  be  important,  for  the  factory 
class  is  thus  far  politically  negligible; 
but  it  is  interesting,  and  well  calculated 
to  suggest  many  unpleasant  things  to 
American  minds. 

The  rest  of  the  people,  while  they 
comprise  two  distinct  classes,  are  much 
more  homogeneous.  They  touch  each 
other  at  all  points  that  make  for  the 
broader  life  of  the  town,  and  diverge 
only  on  aspects  of  manners  and  social 
qualifications.  There  is  first  the  ruling 
class,  in  this  case  really  hereditary, 
consisting  of  the  direct  descendants  of 
the  early  settlers,  and  of  the  men  who 
built  the  old  church  in  1789.  The  old 
church  has  been  the  stronghold  of  their 
power;  it  preceded  the  town,  and  gave 
the  old  families  a  political  preeminence 
which,  until  very  recently,  has  never 
been  seriously  questioned.  These  fami- 
lies still  own  much  of  the  land  of  the 
town,  and  their  power  and  influence 
shows  itself  in  a  thousand  ways.  Their 
members  are  elders  and  trustees  of  the 
old  church,  officers  of  the  banks,  honor- 


ary members  of  committees  for  patri- 
otic celebrations.  No  local  enterprise 
can  be  started  without  their  assent  and 
approbation.  They  are  not  all  rich 
men,  by  any  means,  but  they  are  all 
surrounded  by  the  indefinable  glamour 
of  prestige.  They  are  the  town,  one 
somehow  feels.  They  rule  as  all  aris- 
tocracies do,  by  divine  right.  They  are 
the  safe  men,  the  responsible  men. 
Their  opinions  of  people  and  things 
percolate  down  through  the  rest  of  the 
people.  Their  frown  is  sufficient  to 
choke  off  a  local  enterprise;  a  word 
from  them  will  quench  the  strongest  of 
enthusiasms  for  a  new  idea  or  pro- 
gramme or  project.  It  is  their  interest 
that  determines  town  policy  in  the  last 
resort.  New  schools,  parks,  fire-houses, 
municipal  ownership,  —  all  these  ques- 
tions are  settled  finally  according  to  the 
effect  they  will  have  on  the  pockets  and 
interests  of  this  ruling  class. 

And  yet,  strange  to  say,  their  activ- 
ity is  seldom  direct.  They  work  rather 
through  that  great  indispensable  mid- 
dle class  that  makes  up  the  third  di- 
vision of  the  townspeople.  It  is  hard  to 
define  what  separates  these  from  the 
ruling  class.  Many  of  the  families  have 
lived  in  the  town  for  many  years;  many 
of  them  are  wealthy;  many  of  them 
have  profitable  businesses.  And  yet  it 
is  true  that  in  most  of  the  affairs  of  the 
town,  this  class  seems  to  act  as  the 
agents  of  the  ruling  class.  The  mem- 
bers of  this  class  are  the  real  backbone 
of  the  town's  life.  They  organize  the 
board  of  trade,  "boom"  the  town,  in- 
augurate and  carry  through  the  cele- 
brations, do  the  political  campaigning 
and  organizing,  and  in  general  keep 
the  civic  machinery  running.  But  little 
of  what  they  do  seems  to  be  carried 
through  on  their  own  prestige.  It  is 
always  with  the  advice  and  consent  of 
the  bigger  men.  This  is  the  curious 
irony  of  aristocracies  the  world  over, 
—  that  they  can  wield  the  ultimate 


THE  SOCIAL  ORDER  IN  AN  AMERICAN  TOWN 


231 


power  without  bearing  any  of  the  re- 
sponsibility, or  doing  any  of  the  actual 
work.  The  ruling  class  in  this  town  no 
longer  assumes  even  political  responsi- 
bility. The  town  committee  is  com- 
posed of  members  of  the  middle  class, 
and  all  the  political  workers  and 
henchmen  throughout  the  town  are 
equally  plebeian.  Those  good  people 
who  lament  that  politics  are  corrupt 
because  the  'best  men*  will  not  enter 
public  life,  forget  that  this  ruling  class 
is  behind  everything  that  is  done,  and 
is  getting  its  political  work  done  at  an 
extremely  cheap  rate.  If  the  real  rulers 
had  any  serious  objection  to  the  way 
things  are  run,  they  would  soon  enough 
be  in  politics.  They  remain  out  because 
their  interests  are  well  taken  care  of; 
another  class  bears  for  them  all  the 
burden  and  strife  of  the  day. 

The  difference  between  the  ruling 
class  and  the  middle  class  in  our  com- 
munity, though  apparently  so  intangi- 
ble, shows  itself  in  a  dozen  different 
ways.  There  is  a  distinct  line  of  cleavage 
in  social  matters,  in  church  matters,  in 
recreation  and  business.  *  Society/  of 
course,  in  the  community  is  synony- 
mous with  the  ruling  class.  An. infal- 
lible instinct  guides  the  managers  of 
receptions  and  balls,  and  the  lines  are 
as  jealously  guarded  as  if  there  were 
actual  barriers  of  nobility  erected.  The 
ladies  have  their  literary  clubs,  where 
quiet,  but  none  the  less  effective,  cam- 
paigns are  waged  against  the  admission 
of  undesirable  plebeians.  The  young 
people  ape  their  elders  in  everything. 
The  epithet  used  by  'society'  for  those 
who  are  excluded  from  its  privileges  is 
*  ordinary'  or  *  common';  the  term  is  at 
once  an  explanation  and  an  excuse  for 
the  exclusion. 

The  middle  class,  on  their  part,  have 
their  own  society,  and  their  own  ex- 
clusions. Their  social  functions,  how- 
ever, have  the  virtue  of  being  less 
formal  and  less  secular.  The  nucleus 


of  their  social  life  is  the  church,  and 
it  is  curious  to  observe  how  closely 
church  lines  follow  these  social  lines. 
The  aristocracy  is  centred  in  the  old 
church,  stanchly  Presbyterian.  Its 
temporal  and  spiritual  affairs  are  in 
these  aristocratic  hands  as  absolutely 
as  they  were  in  the  hands  of  the  great- 
grandfathers who  f  built  the  church. 
There  is,  of  course,  a  strong  admixture 
of  the  middle  class,  but  little  can  zeal 
and  hard  work  do  to  win  for  them  a 
seat  at  the  councils.  Their  strongholds 
are  the  Baptist  and  Methodist  church- 
es, and  it  is  the  few  members  of  the 
ruling  class  who  happen  to  belong  to 
those  confessions  who  are  the  governed 
and  disfranchised.  The  church  means 
much  more  to  these  middle-class  peo- 
ple than  it  does  to  the  aristocracy. 
The  services  are  conducted  with  great- 
er ardor,  and  attended  with  much 
more  regularity.  The  class  of  *  ordi- 
nary' people  that  support  them  have 
not  reached  the  degree  of  sophistica- 
tion that  makes  them  ashamed  of  the 
hearty  church-going  of  their  ancestors. 
There  is  a  Catholic  church,  but  it  con- 
fines its  ministrations  strictly  to  the 
working  class.  Nothing  is  known  of 
it  by  the  members  of  the  other  classes, 
and  any  entrance  of  its  priest  into 
public  affairs  is  looked  upon  with  the 
deepest  suspicion. 

In  business  matters  the  line  be- 
tween the  two  classes  is  equally  sharp. 
The  members  of  the  ruling  class  hold, 
as  a  rule,  business  positions  of  consid- 
erable importance  in  the  neighboring 
city,  while  the  middle  class  is  largely 
engaged  in  local  trade,  or  in  smaller  po- 
sitions in  the  city.  There  is  a  certain 
slight  social  stigma  that  attaches  itself 
to  a  young  man  who  takes  up  work  in 
town,  and  the  city  is  thus  the  goal  of 
all  the  socially  ambitious.  There  is  a 
distinct  prejudice,  also,  on  the  part  of 
the  ruling  class  against  anything  that 
savors  of  mechanical  labor,  and  this  is 


232 


THE  SOCIAL  ORDER  IN  AN  AMERICAN  TOWN 


another  point  of  divergence  from  the 
middle  class,  who  are  less  squeamish. 
It  would  be  unjust  to  imply  that  the 
ruling  class  is  not  industrious.  There 
are  no  idle  rich  in  the  town,  and  the  dif- 
ferences between  the  classes  are  differ- 
ences of  taste  and  business  position,  and 
not  in  the  least  of  industry  and  ability. 

Lastly,  the  two  classes  diverge  in  the 
way  they  amuse  themselves.  To  the 
outsider  it  looks  as  if  the  middle  class 
contrived  to  have  a  better  time  of  it 
than  the  aristocracy.  The  most  strik- 
ing institution  of  the  former  is  the 
lodge,  —  Masons  and  Odd  Fellows  and 
Elks  and  Woodmen.  The  class  mem- 
bership of  these  fraternal  organizations 
is  very  evident.  Of  all  the  institutions 
of  the  town,  the  lodge  is  the  most  de- 
finitely middle-class.  No  member  of 
the  ruling  class  or  the  factory  class  can 
be  found  within  the  ranks.  On  the 
other  hand,  inclusion  in  the  *  Assembly ' 
dances  is  the  badge  of  aristocracy.  The 
ruling  class  has  only  a  near-by  country 
club  to  compensate  it  for  its  exclusion 
from  the  lodges,  and  its  native  con- 
servatism and  thrift  permit  its  giv- 
ing to  this  club  only  a  grudging  and 
half-hearted  patronage.  In  compari- 
son with  the  busy  social,  political,  and 
church  life  of  the  middle  class,  that  of 
the  aristocracy  appears  almost  tame 
and  uninteresting.  Their  natural  cau- 
tion, prudence,  and  reserve,  and  the 
constant  sense  of  their  position  in  the 
community,  have  kept  them  almost  as 
poorly  provided  with  social  institutions 
as  the  factory  class  itself. 

Thus  these  two  classes  live  side  by 
side  in  the  town,  strangely  alike,  yet 
strangely  different,  constantly  reacting 
upon  each  other,  each  incomplete  with- 
out the  other.  The  ruling  class  is  much 
more  dependent,  of  course,  on  the  mid- 
dle class  than  the  middle  class  is  on  it. 
For  it  draws  its  sustenance  only  from 
the  inferiority  of  the  middle  class. 
Without  that  middle  class,  the  spice 


and  joy  of  aristocracy  would  be  ab- 
sent. The  factory  class  is  too  utterly 
alien,  indeed  is  hardly  aware  of  the  ex- 
istence of  an  aristocracy,  and  could 
not,  at  its  best,  even  serve  and  fortify 
and  supplement  the  ruling  class  as  does 
that  class  which  the  latter  affects  to 
despise  as  *  ordinary.' 

In  quiet  times  the  two  classes  seem 
almost  merged  into  one,  but  let  some 
knotty  local  issue  arise,  and  the  di- 
vergence is  clearly  seen.  There  is  a 
certain  amount  of  class  jealousy  exhib- 
ited at  such  times,  and  while  it  rarely 
affects  the  political  field,  it  is  apt  to 
play  havoc  in  the  affairs  of  a  church. 
That  is  why  church  politics  are  so  care- 
fully shunned;  they  have  such  fearful 
potentialities  of  trouble,  and  trouble 
that  does  not  confine  itself  to  the 
church,  but  reaches  out  into  every 
aspect  of  town  life.  Religion  is  a  very 
real  thing  in  an  American  town,  and 
a  middle  class  that  will  take  dicta- 
tion in  political  matters  from  the  *  best 
men'  of  the  community  will  bitterly 
resent  any  attempt  to  force  its  church 
into  action  of  which  it  does  not  ap- 
prove, or  which  it  is  afraid  it  will  not 
be  able  to  lead.  Proposals  for  church 
union,  for  civic  organizations  of  men's 
clubs,  or  for  organized  charity  socie- 
ties are  fruitful  causes  of  hard  feelings 
and  jealousies.  It  is  hard  to  preach 
Christian  unity  in  a  town  where  a 
church  is  not  only  a  religious  body  but 
the  stronghold  of  a  social  class.  The 
classes  must  evidently  be  merged  be- 
fore the  churches  can  be. 

Politically  there  is  not  this  sensitive- 
ness between  the  two  classes.  It  is  the 
presence  of  a  foreign  element  that  cre- 
ates local  issues,  or  it  is  the  injection  of 
religious  personalities  into  a  campaign. 
In  suburban  towns  the  dramatic  politi- 
cal contests  are  not  between  the  settled 
classes  in  the  town,  but  between  the 
old  residents  and  the  new,  between  the 
natives  and  the  commuters.  And  since 


THE  SOCIAL  ORDER  IN  AN  AMERICAN  TOWN 


233 


the  commuter  is  simply  an  aggravated 
type  of  the  modern  nomadic  American, 
the  political  fight  in  this  town  that  I 
am  speaking  of  may  be  fairly  typical  of 
a  struggle  that  is  going  on  with  more 
or  less  virulence  all  over  the  land.  In 
some  ways  the  commuter  is  the  most 
assimilable  of  all  Americans.  He  is 
indeed  far  more  fortunate  than  he  de- 
serves to  be,  for  it  is  he  who  destroys 
the  personality  of  a  town.  Passing 
lightly  from  suburb  to  suburb,  sinking 
no  roots,  and  moving  his  household 
gods  without  a  trace  of  compunction 
and  regret,  this  aimless  drifter  is  the 
deadliest  foe  to  the  cultivation  of  that 
ripening  love  of  surroundings  that  gives 
quality  to  a  place,  and  quality,  too,  to 
the  individual  life.  This  element  of 
the  population  depersonalizes  Amer- 
ican life  by  not  giving  it  a  chance  to 
take  root  and  grow.  When  it  becomes 
strong  enough  it  begins  to  play  havoc 
with  the  politics  of  a  town.  For  the 
commuters  have  permeated  all  the 
classes,  and  when  they  begin  to  take  an 
interest  in  the  local  issues,  party  and 
class  lines  are  slashed  into  pieces.  It  is 
the  perennially  dramatic  contest  be- 
tween the  old  and  the  new,  and  it  makes 
an  issue  that  is  really  momentous  for 
the  future  of  the  town.  For  the  shifting 
of  power  means  the  decay  of  a  tradi- 
tion, and  however  self-centred  and  de- 
stitute of  real  public  spirit  may  have 
been  the  rule  of  the  aristocracy,  no 
lover  of  his  town  wishes  to  see  things 
turned  over  to  a  loose  herd  of  tempo- 
rary residents. 

In  the  towns  surrounding  our  town, 
political  control  has  long  since  passed 
out  of  the  hands  of  the  old  leaders  into 
those  of  the  commuters,  and  the  com- 
munities have  paid  the  penalty  in  the 
loss  of  their  distinctive  note  and  charm. 
In  my  town,  also,  it  looks  as  if  the  fate 
of  the  ruling  class  were  irretrievably 
sealed.  They  have  recently  alienated 
their  middle-class  following  by  a  pro- 


posal to  annex  the  town  to  the  neigh- 
boring city,  the  argument  being  that 
annexation  must  come  some  time,  and 
that  it  might  as  well  be  now,  before  all 
is  lost.  But  this  measure  has  called  out 
all  the  latent  patriotism  of  the  people, 
and  it  will  undoubtedly  be  defeated  at 
the  polls. 

These  later  developments  have 
brought  out  much  that  is  typical  of 
American  life,  for  this  contest  has 
betrayed  the  incorrigible  un-social- 
mindedness  of  the  ruling  class,  the 
most  thoroughly  American  of  all.  In 
spite  of  their  pride  in  their  station  in 
the  community,  these  men,  living  on 
the  lands  of  their  great-great-grand- 
fathers, with  ancestries  stretching  back 
to  the  early  settlements,  seem  to  have 
no  sentiment  for  their  community  as  a 
community.  There  is  plenty  of  senti- 
ment for  their  own  class  and  their  own 
lands,  but  none  for  the  town.  Since 
they  are  no  longer  at  the  helm,  the 
town  is  to  them  almost  as  if  it  were 
not.  They  are  sincerely  puzzled  and 
pained  at  the  indignant  outcry  against 
the  merging  of  the  town  with  a  corrupt, 
machine-ridden  city.  They  say  it  will 
be  good  for  the  town  to  be  known  as  a 
part  of  the  city.  It  will  raise  the  value 
of  real  estate,  and  they  cannot  see  the 
exquisite  naivete  which  is  lent  to  this 
argument  by  the  fact  that  they  them- 
selves own  most  of  the  real  estate  in 
the  town.  This  argument  seems  to 
have  had  weight,  however,  for  the  pa- 
triotic pride  which  the  average  land- 
less American  feels  in  the  increase  in 
real-estate  values  in  his  community 
seems  to  be  quite  undisturbed  by  any 
consideration  of  the  increased  tribute 
that  he  must  pay  for  the  indulgence  of 
that  sentiment. 

The  social  spirit  of  this  ruling  class 
seems  to  consist  in  the  delusion  that  its 
own  personal  interests  are  identical  with 
those  of  the  community  at  large.  Some 
such  philosophy  animates,  I  suppose, 


234 


THE  SOCIAL  ORDER  IN  AN  AMERICAN  TOWN 


many  of  the  large  corporate  and  finan- 
cial American  bodies  to-day. 

The  direct  result  of  this  annexation 
contest  in  my  town  has  been  a  disil- 
lusionment of  the  middle  class.  The 
hearty  admiration  for  the  'best  men' 
has  turned  into  disgust  at  the  meagre- 
ness  of  their  local  patriotism.  The  rul- 
ing class  could  keep  its  power  only  so 
long  as  nothing  came  to  try  it.  But 
the  heart  of  the  people  is  in  the  right 
place;  they  admire  the  great  ones  of 
the  ruling  class  because  they  attribute 
to  them  virtues  which  they  do  not  pos- 
sess; they  admire  the  successful  man 
because  they  think  he  is  brave  and 
generous  and  big,  when  really  he  may 
be  only  mean  and  grasping.  They  are 
beginning  to  remind  one  another  that 
the  leading  men  have  never  done  any- 
thing for  the  town.  Any  one  of  half  a 
dozen  could  endow  a  Young  Men's 
Christian  Association,  or  some  similar 
institution,  which  the  town  needs. 
Only  recently  did  the  town  obtain  a 
library,  and  then  not  through  any  exer- 
tion of  the  citizens,  but  as  a  windfall 
from  an  industrial  princeling  who  had 
been  born  in  the  town,  but  had  never 
lived  there  since  his  childhood. 

There  is  something  in  the  old  nota- 
bles of  a  town  like  this  that  wins  al- 
most a  grudging  admiration.  Their 
self-respect  is  so  stolid,  their  individu- 
alism so  incorrigible,  their  lack  of  sen- 
sitiveness to  the  social  appeal  so  over- 
whelming. In  command  of  the  board  of 
education,  they  kept  school  facilities  at 
the  lowest  possible  point  for  years,  until 
an  iconoclastic  superintendent  aroused 
public  sentiment  and  forced  the  erec- 
tion of  new  buildings.  The  ruling  class 
in  command  of  the  old  church  does 
nothing  to  extend  its  work  beyond  the 
traditional  services  and  societies,  al- 
though there  is  crying  need  for  social 
work  among  the  foreign  population  of 
the  town.  And  since  this  ruling  class 
exercises  all  the  spiritual  initiative  of 


the  town,  none  of  the  other  churches  or 
societies  stir  out  of  the  beaten  paths 
or  try  any  hazardous  reforms  or  risky 
innovations. 

This  spiritual  initiative  is  not  a 
thing  that  is  lightly  lost.  I  have  not 
meant  to  imply  that  the  disillusion- 
ment of  the  middle  class  was  likely  to 
be  permanent.  On  the  contrary,  even 
if  political  control  does  pass  out  of  the 
hands  of  both  classes  into  those  of 
newcomers,  the  latter  will  soon  be 
brought  under  the  spell.  Wealth  and 
social  position  will  still  lead  the  town. 
Even  though  discontent  puts  political 
power  completely  into  the  hands  of  the 
newcomers,  they  will  find  themselves 
unable  to  make  headway  against  the 
ideals  and  prejudices  of  the  ruling  class. 
The  neighboring  towns  have  lost  their 
personality  because  they  have  lost  their 
ruling  class,  or  because  the  ruling  class 
has  been  in  too  hopeless  a  minority  to 
maintain  its  influence.  Where  it  can 
retain  its  hold  on  property  and  in 
church  affairs,  it  will  continue,  though 
defeated,  to  be  the  salt  of  the  earth; 
its  tone  will  permeate  the  life  of  the 
town.  That  prevailing  tone  is,  of 
course,  conservative. 

The  town  has  been,  as  I  have  said, 
on  the  firing-line,  in  constant  danger 
from  capture  by  the  commuter  ele- 
ment, and  consequently  the  ruling  class 
has  been  thrown  even  more  strongly 
on  the  defensive  than  is  usual.  This 
has  shown  itself  in  a  distrust  of  the 
younger  men;  their  entrance  into 
church  and  political  life  has  been  de- 
precated, through  fear  that  hot-head- 
edness  and  an  impatience  with  dila- 
tory methods  might  lead  them  to  take 
rash  steps  that  would  betray  the  whole 
class  to  the  enemy. 

Another  of  the  prevailing  ideas 
(typically  American)  is  that  the  ruling 
class  is  ipso  facto  competent  to  lead  in 
every  department  of  the  town's  life.  A 
wealthy  manufacturer  is  elected  head 


THE  SOCIAL  ORDER  IN  AN  AMERICAN  TOWN 


235 


of  the  board  of  education,  a  coal- 
merchant  is  chairman  of  the  library 
committee,  and  so  forth.  There  is  no 
specialization  of  functions  in  the  rul- 
ing class.  And  this  comprehensive 
scope  of  activities  is  acquiesced  in  by 
the  middle  class;  indeed  is  regarded 
almost  as  axiomatic.  The  expert  has 
no  opportunity  of  influencing  his  fel- 
low-citizens. What  can  he  know  in 
comparison  with  a  man  who  has  lived 
all  his  life  along  the  town  green  and 
who  owns  forty  houses? 

The  third  dominant  ideal  is  Puritan- 
ism. It  must  be  confessed  that  among 
the  ruling  class  this  is  more  of  an  ideal 
than  a  rule  of  life.  The  town  is  so  near 
the  city  that  it  catches  a  good  deal  of 
the  sophistication  of  the  latter.  In  the 
ruling  class,  Puritanism  is  kept  more 
for  public  use  than  for  private.  Yet  it 
is  always  correct,  even  though  it  is  a 
little  uneasy  at  times,  as  if  it  were  half 
ashamed  of  itself.  A  candidate  for  of- 
fice must  have  exceptional  qualifica- 
tions if  he  is  to  counterbalance  the  dis- 
advantages of  not  being  a  church-goer 
and  a  Protestant.  It  is  necessary  to 
'keep  the  Sabbath*  with  considerable 
strictness.  Dances  and  parties  on  Sat- 
urday night  must  end  promptly  at 
twelve.  If  Sunday  golf  and  tennis-play- 
ing occur  among  the  ruling  class,  they 
are  discreetly  hidden  from  public  gaze. 
The  Presbyterian  and  Episcopalian 
ministers  direct  their  philippics  against 
these  forms  of  vice.  In  the  churches  of 
the  middle  class,  the  world,  the  flesh, 
and  the  devil  appear  in  the  guise  of 
dances  and  the  theatres  of  the  neigh- 
boring city.  Both  classes  think  very 
highly,  however,  of  punctilious  be- 
havior. The  need  of  maintaining  the 
tone  of  the  community,  therefore,  pre- 
vents the  urban  sophistication  from 
sinking  in  very  deep. 

The  most  striking  form  in  which 
Puritanism  asserts  itself  is  in  the  an- 
nual contest  with  the  saloon.  The  sub- 


ject of  licenses  is  a  thorny  question  in 
local  politics,  and  much  good  casuistry 
is  expended  in  explaining  the  position 
of  the  ruling  class  in  the  matter.  Re- 
ligiously the  saloon  is  anathema,  but 
practically  it  is  an  established  institu- 
tion, and  therefore  entitled  to  all  that 
respect  which  our  ruling  class  pays  to 
what  is.  Prohibition  is  unthinkable; 
diminution  of  the  number  of  licenses  is 
an  attack  on  property  rights.  Moral 
sentiment  can  only  be  rightfully  ex- 
pended, therefore,  on  the  maintenance 
of  the  existing  number.  It  is  surprising 
what  a  wave  of  moral  fervor  will  sweep 
over  the  town  at  such  a  crisis.  The 
existence  of  eighteen  saloons  seems  to 
every  one,  churchman  and  infidel  alike, 
as  tolerable  and  natural:  the  presence 
of  nineteen  would  constitute  an  inex- 
piable communal  sin  against  the  Al- 
mighty. The  pulpits  thunder,  the  town 
committee  is  besieged  with  letters  and 
beset  with  *  personal  influence/  peti- 
tions are  drawn  up,  a  mass-meeting  is 
held,  the  moral  crisis  spoken  of,  and 
all  good  men  are  called  upon  to  rally 
to  preserve  the  civic  righteousness  of 
the  community. 

This  perennial  moral  excitement  and 
indulgence  illustrate  excellently  well 
the  American  zest  for  *  moral  issues.' 
Philosophers  tell  us  that  an  emphasis 
on  strictly  moral  solutions  of  political 
and  economic  problems  argues  a  rela- 
tively primitive  state  of  civilization, 
—  in  other  words,  that  the  only  valid 
solution  of  a  problem  is  a  scientific 
solution.  But  even  to  the  wisest  of 
the  ruling  class  of  the  town  it  seems 
never  to  have  occurred  that  the  saloons 
might  be  regulated  on  some  basis  of  a 
minimum  legitimate  demand,  and  of 
their  being  situated  in  those  sections 
of  the  town  where  they  will  be  least 
troublesome. 

This  Puritanism  of  the  ruling  class, 
then,  supported  and  even  forced  by  the 
middle  class,  is  not  a  reasonable  ideal, 


236 


THE  SOCIAL  ORDER  IN  AN  AMERICAN  TOWN 


but  simply  an  hereditary  one.  A  ruling 
class  follows  the  line  of  smallest  resis- 
tance. The  prestige  of  the  'man  of 
property'  gives  him  an  oracular  valid- 
ity that  nothing  can  shake.  The  ef- 
forts of  the  other  classes  will  only  be 
against  the  current.  The  middle  class 
gets  carried  along  with  the  aristocracy, 
furnishing  power,  but  no  initiative, 
while  the  factory  class  sleeps  out  its 
dreamless  sleep,  untouched,  and  with- 
out influence.  The  latter  class  is  cer- 
tainly not  touched  by  the  Puritanism 
of  the  town;  it  is  little  touched  by  the 
education. 

The  High  School  is  practically  a  class 
institution;  a  very  small  percentage  of 
the  school  children  continue  their  edu- 
cation so  far.  Neither  is  the  culture  of 
the  town,  as  a  whole,  particularly  im- 
pressive. The  university  man  may  well 
feel  that  he  has  been  wandering  about 
among  the  moonbeams,  so  few  of  the 
modern  points  of  view  and  interests 
have  seeped  down  into  the  intellectual 
life  of  the  town.  The  annual  course  of 
lectures,  managed  by  representatives  of 
the  ruling  class,  carefully  side-tracks  all 
the  deeper  questions  of  the  time;  min- 
isters on  patriotic  subjects,  naturalists 
and  travelers,  readers  of  popular  plays, 
make  up  the  list  of  speakers.  The 


library  caters  to  an  overwhelming  de- 
mand for  recent  fiction.  A  woman's 
club  discusses  unfatiguing  literary 
subjects.  A  quiet  censorship  is  exer- 
cised over  the  public  library.  Anything 
that  suggests  the  revolutionary  or  the 
obscene  is  sternly  banned.  It  is  con- 
sidered better  to  err  on  the  side  of  pru- 
dence. To  an  outsider  the  culture  of 
the  town  seems  at  times  to  evince  an 
almost  unnecessary  anxiety  to  avoid 
the  controversial  and  the  stimulating. 
So  long  as  life  is  smooth  and  unper- 
turbed, the  people  do  not  care  whether 
it  is  particularly  deep  or  not.  And 
they  are  content  to  leave  all  contro- 
versial questions  in  the  hands  of  their 
'best  men.' 

Shall  we  be  un-American  enough 
to  criticize  them?  Is  our  national 
attitude  toward  our  ruling  class  very 
different  from  the  attitude  in  this  little 
town?  Just  as  the  ruling  class  in  the 
town  is  the  converging  point  for  all 
the  currents  in  town  life,  so  is  the  rul- 
ing class  in  America  the  converging 
point  for  our  national  life.  Only  by 
understanding  it  and  all  its  workings, 
shall  we  understand  our  country.  One 
can  begin  by  understanding  that  little 
cross-section  of  American  life,  the 
suburban  town. 


VICARIOUS 


BY   EDITH   RONALD   MIRRIELEES 


THERE  were  three  professors  —  as- 
sociate and  full  —  in  the  Department 
of  Modern  History.  There  was  also  an 
office-boy.  His  printed  title  was  De- 
partment Assistant,  but  his  duties  were 
less  dignified  than  his  title. 

Each  of  the  professors  had  his  priv- 
ate office  opening  from  the  main  office. 
The  assistant  had  a  desk  in  the  main 
office  with  the  telephone  close  beside  it. 
He  answered  the  telephone  and  took 
messages  over  it,  he  assorted  roll-cards 
and  made  out  class-books  and  hunted 
through  the  files  for  records  of  former 
students.  In  the  intervals  of  his  occu- 
pation he  crammed  sedulously  from  ill- 
printed  source-books,  in  preparation  for 
the  work  of  various  advanced  courses 
in  history.  And  now  and  then,  between 
the  two  kinds  of  labor,  he  lifted  down 
the  receiver  of  the  telephone  from 
its  hook  and,  very  softly,  held  over  it 
converse  quite  unrelated  to  historical 
research. 

It  was,  unfortunately,  the  bachelor 
professor  who  first  discovered  the  rea- 
son for  this  diversion.  He  took  his  in- 
formation straight  to  the  head  of  de- 
partment and  launched  it  in  the  form 
of  a  question. 

*  It  was  Hawke  of  Illinois  who  recom- 
mended Barker  to  us,  was  n't  it?' 

'Not  Hawke;  Holland.  He  said  that 
he  had  found  him  so  earnest  — ' 

'Did  he  say  he'd  found  him  mar- 
ried?' asked  the  bachelor  professor. 

He  answered  the  question  himself. 
'Very  likely  Holland  did  n't  know.  It 
may  have  come  off  this  summer.  What 
do  we  pay  him,  by  the  way?' 


'It  amounts  to  about  forty-five  dol- 
lars a  month,'  the  head  of  department 
calculated.  'Are  you  sure,  McFar- 
land?  I  supposed  he'd  be  engaged, — 
all  graduate  students  are,  —  but  for 
anything  more  than  that  — ' 

'  I  met  the  lady  in  the  office  just  now, 
looking  for  her  husband.  Well,  of 
course  he  has  private  means  or  he 
could  n't  have  done  it.' 

'Ought  n't  to  have  done  it,'  the  head 
of  department  corrected  him.  'You 
can  get  a  marriage  license,  McFarland, 
for  considerably  less  than  forty-five 
dollars.' 

'And  pay  your  bills  with  it  after- 
wards ? '  the  bachelor  professor  retorted. 

He  went  out  across  the  main  office 
to  his  own  quarters.  The  assistant  had 
not  yet  come  in.  The  bachelor  profes- 
sor stopped  for  an  instant  beside  his 
desk  and  went  on,  laughing.  Among 
the  litter  of  papers  at  the  back  of  the 
desk  was  visible  the  head  of  a  purple 
pansy. 

He  saw  the  pansy  later  in  the  assist- 
ant's buttonhole  and  commented  on  it. 
The  assistant  reddened  to  his  crisp, 
fair  forelock. 

'My  —  Mrs.  Barker  left  it  for  me. 
We've  a  bed  of  them  at  the  house 
where  we  have  our  rooms/ 

'And  said  it  without  shame,'  the 
bachelor  professor  reported  to  his  col- 
leagues. 'Seemed  to  expect  me  to  take 
an  interest  in  her.' 

'I  do  not  know  that  it  would  have 
compromised  you  to  take  an  interest/ 
commented  the  head  of  department. 
He  spoke  with  irritation.  'It  was  out- 

237 


238 


VICARIOUS 


side  of  my  province  but  I  —  I  question- 
ed Mr.  Barker.  It  seems  he  has  a  little 
money  laid  up  from  working  in  sum- 
mer. And  with  that  and  the  hope  of 
holding  his  position  here  till  such  time 
as  he  gets  his  degree  — ' 

'So  that 's  why  he's  so  abominably 
conscientious/  the  bachelor  professor 
interpolated.  'Well,  commend  me  to 
wives !  Next  time  I  see  her,  I  shall  con- 
gratulate her/ 

Next  time  he  saw  her,  however,  he 
only  bowed  and  hurried  through  the 
office  with  a  distinct  and  amused  sensa- 
tion of  being  in  the  way.  It  was  at  the 
end  of  a  working-day,  and  the  assistant 
and  his  wife  were  departing  on  some 
evidently  planned  expedition,  an  ob- 
trusive box  bespeaking  lunch,  a  bundle 
of  wraps  promising  late  return. 

'And  on  forty-five  a  month!'  the 
bachelor  professor  wondered.  He  stop- 
ped to  chat  beside  the  assistant's  desk 
next  day,  with  a  real  humility  of  spirit, 
to  obscure  his  curiosity. 

But  the  assistant  was  not  shy  of 
gratifying  curiosity.  All  the  office 
knew  presently  of  his  expedients;  how 
he  earned  the  rental  of  their  two  rooms 
by  taking  care  of  furnace  and  lawn 
—  'No  more  than  I'd  do  if  I  lived 
in  a  house  of  my  own';  how  he  had 
engaged  to  sell  books  in  the  Christmas 
vacation. 

'Much  as  my  room-mate  used  to 
plan/  the  bachelor  professor  admit- 
ted. 'He  worked  his  way  through  col- 
lege. But  to  do  it  handicapped  by  a 
wife!' 

They  had  occasional  glimpses  of  the 
wife  for  a  time.  Then  no  more  glimpses, 
but  still  the  chance  appearance  of  pur- 
ple pansies  on  the  assistant's  desk. 
He  wore  one  daily,  too.  The  bache- 
lor professor  found  himself  wondering 
whether  the  giver  raised  them  in  pots, 
to  have  a  constant  supply;  or  whether, 
on  an  assistant's  stipend,  she  dared  to 
patronize  hot-houses. 


'She'll  get  over  it,  either  way/  he 
prophesied  to  himself.  '  It 's  all  very 
well  for  a  year  or  two.  After  that,  I 
notice  they  don't  pay  much  attention 
to  aesthetics/ 

As  the  frosts  came  on,  he  was  con- 
sciously observant  of  the  symbolic 
flower.  There  came  a  day  in  Decem- 
ber when  it  was  visibly  drooping;  then 
a  second  day  when  only  a  dead  wisp 
of  it  hung  limply  to  the  thread  of  his 
coat. 

'I  thought  they'd  get  down  to  a 
bread-and-butter  basis/  the  bachelor 
professor  rejoiced  to  the  head  of  de- 
partment. 'I  tell  you,  Callend,  it's 
a  justification  of  bachelorhood.  If 
the  pansies  won't  outlast  the  first 
winter  — ' 

'It's  a  justification  of  poor  work, 
apparently/  said  the  head  of  depart- 
ment. 'He's  forgotten  my  syllabus 
sheets/  He  opened  the  door.  'There 
was  to  be  a  syllabus  from  the  type- 
writer this  morning,  Mr.  Barker.  If 
you  have  it  there  — ' 

'I  —  I  forgot  to  stop  for  it/  said  the 
assistant.  He  reached  for  his  hat.  'It 
won't  take  me  ten  minutes  to  get  it. 
Only  —  if  the  telephone  should  ring 
— '  He  was  turning  the  hat  round  and 
round  between  his  fingers.  The  set 
crease  of  his  smile  was  like  a  scar 
across  his  face.  '  I  'm  expecting  a  mes- 
sage. That  is,  —  we  —  The  doctor 
said—' 

'Not  —  sick?'  said  the  bachelor  pro- 
fessor under  his  breath. 

But  the  head  of  department  was 
himself  a  man  of  family.  He  had  the 
assistant  by  the  shoulders. 

'Go  home,  man!'  he  was  command- 
ing. 'Go  home,  and  don't  come  back 
till  it's  a  week  old!' 

He  must  have  followed  his  command 
with  inquiries,  with  further  injunc- 
tions, for  for  five  days  the  assistant 
disappeared  from  his  desk.  In  the  in- 
terval three  professors  of  modern  his- 


VICARIOUS 


239 


tory  carried  their  own  syllabus  sheets, 
kept  their  own  roll-books  —  two  of 
them  self-consciously,  with  an  air  of 
furtive  understanding,  the  third  with 
irritation  and  obvious  injury. 

'I  never  asked  any  man  to  discom- 
mode himself  for  me,'  the  manner  of 
the  bachelor  professor  announced  ag- 
gressively as  he  made  his  occasional 
journeys  to  the  neglected  telephone. 
He  was  careful  to  evince  no  undue  in- 
terest when  the  assistant  returned,  but 
he  could  not  ignore  the  little  hum  of 
felicitation  which  filled  the  outer  of- 
fice. 'A  boy,'  he  learned  through  the 
medium  of  the  Professor  of  the  Far 
East.  'Weighed  eight  pounds/ 

The  Professor  of  the  Far  East  had 
himself  a  son,  —  a  late  addition  to  his 
married  happiness,  —  and  had  become 
since  its  arrival,  so  the  bachelor  pro- 
fessor noted,  'a  regular  old  woman.' 
He  stopped  often  beside  the  assistant's 
desk  to  compare  notes  on  unmanly 
topics,  his  wife  called  on  the  assistant's 
wife,  and  there  was  an  interchange  of 
advices  between  them. 

It  was  through  the  medium  of  the 
wives  that  there  filtered  into  general 
department  knowledge  certain  facts 
concerning  the  assistant's  household 
—  that  Mrs.  Barker  was  'no  manager/ 
that  the  baby  was  inclined  to  be  deli- 
cate, that  the  assistant  himself  had 
duties  not  included  in  the  curriculum. 

'Though  he  does  not  neglect  his 
work,'  the  head  of  department  pointed 
out.  'Sometimes  I  almost  wish  he 
would.  When  I  recollect  how  a  child 
breaks  into  your  time  — ' 

'And  he  ought  to  know,'  the  bache- 
lor professor  reminded  himself.  'Mrs. 
Callend  would  give  him  chance  enough 
to  find  out.'  He  went  over  to  the  as- 
sistant's desk.  'If  you're  crowded, 
Mr.  Barker,'  he  suggested,  '  don't  trou- 
ble with  that  list  of  references  for  next 
week.  If  you  want  to  let  them  go  over 
till  after  Commencement  — ' 


'Why,  thank  you,  Dr.  McFarland,' 
said  the  assistant,  gratefully.  He 
looked  up  with  a  smile  so  brilliant  that 
it  was  obviously  false.  'I  shall  have 
time  enough,  I  think.  In  fact,  I  was 
just  telling  Professor  Helmer  that  I  'm 
rather  looking  for  something  to  fill  in 
my  evenings  —  typewriting  or  tutor- 
ing or  something  of  the  kind.  If  you 
should  hear  of  anything  — ' 

'Idiot!'  said  the  bachelor  profes- 
sor, inside  his  own  office.  'Idiot!  And 
yet  you  can't  offer  to  help  him  out 
—  not  while  he  keeps  up  a  front  like 
that!' 

He  was  surer  than  ever  of  the  impos- 
sibility when,  next  day,  the  assistant 
knocked  at  his  office  door.  If  the  as- 
sistant's smile  had  been  brilliant  the 
day  before,  it  was  glittering  tinsel  now. 
His  bearing  was  almost  offensively 
jaunty. 

'May  I  trouble  you  a  moment,  Dr. 
McFarland?  About  those  references, 
if  you  are  quite  sure  it  would  n't  in- 
convenience you  —  You  see,  I  was 
interrupted  last  night  — ' 

'Something  wrong  at  home?'  said 
the  bachelor  professor. 

The  smile  wavered,  came  back  rein- 
forced. 

'The  boy  was  n't  quite  himself.  He 
seemed  to  have  a  little  cold  — ' 

The  telephone  rang  and  he  hurried 
to  answer  it.  All  the  office  could  hear 
his  quick  replies — an  anguish  of  mono- 
syllables. 

'Yes?  What?  Yes.  Two  degrees? 
Yes,  I'll  be  right  home." 

He  was  back  at  his  post  in  the  after- 
noon. The  Professor  of  the  Far  East 
clapped  him  jocularly  on  the  shoulder 
and  spoke  of  his  baby's  first  cold. 

'Called  a  doctor  every  time  he 
sneezed.  Two  hundred  and  thirty  dol- 
lars I  paid  out  last  winter  for  a  baby 
that  never  was  sick  at  all.' 

'  Mine 's  sick,'  said  the  assistant,  with 
his  haunted  smile.  '  He 's  got  fever.'  „ 


240 


VICARIOUS 


He  was  late  in  his  arrival  next  morn- 
ing. The  bachelor  professor,  stopping 
with  an  inquiry,  was  answered  before 
he  spoke  by  the  elaborate  indifference 
of  the  father's  manner. 

'No;  I  don't  know  that  I  can  call 
him  better.  Some  little  thing  wrong 
about  his  teeth.  They  're  going  to  op- 
erate — ' 

'What!'  cried  the  bachelor  profes- 
sor. 

' —  Going  to  operate  this  afternoon. 
They're  to  telegraph  me  — ' 

The  bachelor  professor  crossed  the 
room  to  the  office  of  the  head  of  de- 
partment. He  stopped  beside  the  desk 
as  he  had  stopped  beside  the  assistant's 
desk,  and  scowled  down  at  its  occu- 
pant. 

'Callend,  young  Barker's  no  busi- 
ness to  be  here  to-day.  His  baby — ' 

'  I  spoke  with  Mr.  Barker  as  I  came 
in/  said  the  head  of  department.  He 
looked  up  under  gray  brows.  *  There 
seems  to  be  nothing  he  could  do  if  he 
were  at  the  hospital.  I  did  not  sug- 
gest his  going.  You  see,  McFarland, 
you ' ve  never  been  under  a  strain  of  this 
kind—' 

'No;  thank  the  Lord!'  said  the 
bachelor  professor. 

'And,  perhaps,  you  underestimate 
the  value  of  occupation.  One  thing, 
though.  If  you  could  somehow  suggest 
to  Helmer  that  he  talk  less  to  Mr. 
Barker  about  his  baby  — ' 

'He'll  be  dumb,  then,'  commented 
the  colleague  of  Helmer  sourly. 

Matters  grew  worse  as  the  morning 
went  on.  The  bachelor  professor  had 
an  engagement  for  luncheon.  He  tele- 
phoned his  regrets  at  eleven;  returning 
from  the  telephone  to  his  own  quarters, 
he  was  fiercely  irritated  to  observe 
that  the  head  of  department  was  still 
in  his  office. 

'And  with  his  door  open,'  he  noted. 

He  shut  his  own  door  with  unneces- 
sary emphasis. 


But  the  assistant  seemed  to  observe 
neither  the  closed  door  nor  the  open 
one.  He  went  about  his  duties,  smiling 
valiantly  —  smiling  while  he  distrib- 
uted History  9  syllabus  sheets  to  the 
class  in  History  7;  smiling  while  his 
unsteady  fingers  shook  ink  over  the 
bachelor  professor's  immaculate  roll- 
book.  Just  after  noon  the  Professor 
of  the  Far  East  burst  in  on  his  col- 
leagues. 

'Find  an  errand  for  him  somewhere,' 
he  demanded.  '  I  can't  work  while  he 's 
around.  I  keep  on  thinking  all  the 
while,  "  What  if  it  were  my  boy?  " 

'What  if  it  were,  indeed!'  said  the 
head  of  department,  a  little  flatly. 
He  gathered  up  some  loose  sheets  off 
his  desk.  'Mr.  Barker,  will  you  take 
these  over  to  the  typewriter?  Don't 
hurry;  if  you  want  to  stay  out  in  the 
air—' 

The  assistant  rose  unreadily.  'Thank 
you.  I'll  be  right  back,  though.  If 
there  should  be  any  word  — ' 

He  was  gone  before  the  sentence 
was  finished. 

From  the  head  of  department's  win- 
dow they  watched  him  hurry  across  the 
lawn. 

'  He  '11  be  back,  certainly,  if  he  keeps 
up  that  pace,'  the  bachelor  professor 
commented.  'But  whatever  is  to  hap- 
pen will  happen  while  he's  gone,  none 
the  less.' 

He  wandered  about  the  room,  pluck- 
ing at  the  books  and  papers.  Present- 
ly, at  a  sound,  he  stopped  and  looked 
into  the  outer  office.  'See  there?'  he 
demanded,  with  a  kind  of  triumph. 

A  small  boy  stood  in  the  office.  He 
held  a  yellow  envelope  between  his  fin- 
gers. For  an  instant  all  three  waited, 
staring  at  him;  then  the  head  of  de- 
partment went  forward,  took  the  en- 
velope, and  signed  the  necessary  re- 
ceipt. He  came  back,  balancing  it. 

'I  don't  know  — There's  hardly 
time  to  send  it  after  him.' 


VICARIOUS 


241 


'Lay  it  on  his  desk,'  the  Professor 
of  the  Far  East  suggested. 

'And  for  decency's  sake,  shut  the 
door.  Don't  let  him  feel  we're  spying 
on  him,'  the  bachelor  professor  in- 
sisted. 

But  the  head  of  department  hesi- 
tated, his  hand  on  the  knob. 

'I  think  I'll  leave  it  open,  McFar- 
land.  If  it  should  be  —  the  worst  news 

—  However,  there  's  no  need  for  three 
of  us.  If  you  two  have  other  things  on 
hand—' 

*  You've  a  one-thirty  class  yourself, 
have  n't  you?'  the  bachelor  professor 
inquired.  He  resumed  his  pacing. 

They  heard  the  assistant  on  the 
stairs  presently.  They  heard  him  hurry 
into  the  room;  stop;  drag  his  way  to- 
ward the  desk.  There  was  a  noise  of 
tearing  paper,  the  crackle  of  the  sheet 
spread  large;  then,  unmistakably,  a 
sob. 

'Oh,  my  God,  if  it  was  Harold!'  said 
the  Professor  of  the  Far  East,  under  his 
breath. 

It  was  a  long  minute  before  the  as- 
sistant stirred.  When  he  did,  he  came 
toward  the  threshold,  and  the  head  of 
department  went  forward  to  meet  him 

—  haltingly. 

VOL.  Ill  -  NO.  2 


'  Mr.  Barker  —  there 's  not  much  I 
can  say.  My  own  oldest  boy  — ' 

'I  just  heard,'  said  the  assistant. 

He  held  out  the  paper. 

The  bachelor  professor  leaned  for- 
ward and  plucked  the  yellow  sheet 
from  his  fingers.  There  were  four 
words  in  the  message.  He  took  them 
in  at  a  glance. 

'Tooth  through.  Temperature  nor- 
mal.' 

'Callend,'  said  the  bachelor  profes- 
sor gently,  'you've  still  time  to  make 
that  one-thirty  class  if  you  wish  to 
make  it.  I  think  I'll  get  back  to  work 
myself,  too.' 

Inside  his  own  quarters  he  stood 
still,  looking  down  at  the  paper. 

'And  when  they're  sick,'  he  ana- 
lyzed, 'when  they're  sick,  you're  in 
torment.  And  when  they're  well,  you 
dare  n't  rejoice  for  fear  they  '11  fall  sick 
again.  And  yet  you  could  n't  per- 
suade any  one  of  them  it  was  n't  worth 
while  —  not  even  on  forty-five  dol- 
lars a  month.  There's  something  — 
something  I  miss  —  Well,  thank  the 
Lord,  the  Department  of  Modern  His- 
tory at  least  can  resume  operations. 
The  assistant's  baby  has  safely  cut  a 
tooth.' 


THE  SECOND  DEATH 


BY   JOSIAH   ROYCE 


IN  Matthew  Arnold's  essay  on  'St. 
Paul  and  Protestanism,'  there  is  a  well- 
known  passage  from  which  I  may  quote 
a  few  words  to  serve  as  a  text  for  the 
present  essay.-  These  words  express 
what  many  would  call  a  typical  mod- 
ern view  of  an  ancient  problem. 


In  this  essay,  just  before  the  words 
which  I  shall  quote,  Matthew  Arnold 
has  been  speaking  of  the  relation  be- 
tween Paul's  moral  experiences  and 
their  religious  interpretation,  as  the 
Apostle  formulates  it  in  the  Epistle  to 
the  Romans.  Referring  to  a  somewhat 
earlier  stage  of  his  own  argument,  Ar- 
nold here  says,  'We  left  Paul  in  col- 
lision with  a  fact  of  human  nature,  but 
in  itself  a  sterile  fact,  a  fact  upon  which 
it  is  possible  to  dwell  too  long,  although 
Puritanism,  thinking  this  impossible, 
has  remained  intensely  absorbed  in  the 
contemplation  of  it,  and,  indeed,  has 
never  properly  got  beyond  it,  —  the 
sense  of  sin.  Sin/  continues  Matthew 
Arnold, '  is  not  a  monster  to  be  mused 
on,  but  an  impotence  to  be  got  rid  of. 
All  thinking  about  it,  beyond  what  is 
indispensable  for  the  firm  effort  to  get 
rid  of  it,  is  waste  of  energy  and  waste 
of  time.  We  then  enter  that  element 
of  morbid  and  subjective  brooding, 
in  which  so  many  have  perished.  This 
sense  of  sin,  however,  it  is  also  possible 
to  have  not  strongly  enough  to  beget 
the  firm  effort  to  get  rid  of  it;  and  the 
Greeks,  with  all  their  great  gifts,  had 
this  sense  not  strongly  enough;  its 

242 


strength  in  the  Hebrew  people  is  one  of 
this  people's  mainsprings.  And  no  He- 
brew prophet  or  psalmist  felt  what  sin 
was  more  powerfully  than  Paul.'  In 
the  sequel,  Arnold  shows  how  Paul's 
experience  of  the  spiritual  influence  of 
Jesus  enabled  the  Apostle  to  solve  his 
own  problem  of  sin  without  falling  into 
that  dangerous  brooding  which  Arnold 
attributes  to  the  typical  Puritan  spirit. 
As  a  result,  Arnold  identifies  his  own 
view  of  sin  with  that  of  Paul,  and  coun- 
sels us  to  judge  the  whole  matter  in  the 
same  way. 

We  have  here  nothing  to  do  with  the 
correctness  of  Matthew  Arnold's  criti- 
cism of  Protestantism;  and  also  nothing 
to  say,  at  the  present  moment,  about 
the  adequacy  of  Arnold's  interpreta- 
tion either  of  Paul  or  of  Jesus.  But  we 
are  concerned  with  that  characteris- 
tically modern  view  of  the  problem  of 
sin  which  Arnold  so  clearly  states  in 
the  words  just  quoted.  What  consti- 
tutes the  moral  burden  of  the  indi- 
vidual man  —  what  holds  him  back 
from  salvation  —  may  be  described 
in  terms  of  his  natural  heritage,  —  his 
inborn  defect  of  character,  —  or  in 
terms  of  his  training,  —  or,  finally,  in 
terms  of  whatever  he  has  voluntarily 
done  which  has  been  knowingly  un- 
righteous. 

In  the  present  essay  I  am  not  in- 
tending to  deal  with  man's  original  de- 
fects of  moral  nature,  nor  yet  with  the 
faults  which  his  training,  through  its 
social  vicissitudes,  may  have  bred  in 
him.  I  am  to  consider  that  which  we 
call,  in  the  stricter  sense,  sin.  Whether 


THE  SECOND  DEATH 


243 


correctly  or  incorrectly,  a  man  often 
views  certain  of  his  deeds  as  in  some 
specially  intimate  sense  his  own,  and 
may  also  believe  that,  among  these 
his  own  deeds,  some  have  been  willfully 
counter  to  what  he  believes  to  be  right. 
Such  wrongful  deeds  a  man  may  regard 
as  his  own  sins.  He  may  decline  to 
plead  ignorance,  or  bad  training,  or  un- 
controllable defect  of  temper,  or  over- 
whelming temptation,  as  the  ground 
and  excuse  for  just  these  deeds.  Before 
the  forum  of  his  own  conscience  he 
may  say,  *  That  deed  was  the  result  of 
my  own  moral  choice,  and  was  my  sin.' 
For  the  time  being  I  shall  not  pre- 
suppose, for  the  purpose  of  this  argu- 
ment, any  philosophical  theory  about 
free  will.  I  shall  not  assert  that,  as  a 
fact,  there  is  any  genuinely  free  will 
whatever.  At  the  moment,  I  shall  pro- 
visionally accept  only  so  much  of  the 
verdict  of  common  sense  as  any  man 
accepts  when  he  says,  'That  was  my 
own  voluntary  deed,  and  was  knowing- 
ly and  willfully  sinful.'  Hereupon  I 
shall  ask:  Is  Matthew  Arnold's  opin- 
ion correct  with  regard  to  the  way  in 
which  the  fact  and  the  sense  of  sin 
ought  to  be  viewed  by  a  man  who  be- 
lieves that  he  has,  by  what  he  calls  his 
own  'free  act  and  deed,'  sinned?  Is 
Arnold's  opinion  sound  and  adequate, 
when  he  says,  '  Sin  is  not  a  monster  to 
be  mused  on,  but  an  impotence  to  be 
got  rid  of.  All  thinking  about  it,  be- 
yond what  is  indispensable  for  the  firm 
effort  to  get  rid  of  it,  is  waste  of  energy 
and  waste  of  time  —  a  brooding  in 
which  so  many  have  perished.*  Arnold 
praises  Paul  for  having  taken  sin  seri- 
ously enough  to  get  rid  of  it,  but  also 
praises  him  for  not  having  brooded 
over  sin  except  to  the  degree  that  was 
'indispensable  to  the  effort  to  get  rid 
of  it.'  Excessive  brooding  over  sin  is, 
in  Arnold's  opinion,  an  evil  character- 
istic of  Puritanism.  Is  Arnold  right  in 
his  definition  of  what  constitutes  ex- 


cess in  thinking  about  sin?  Is  he  right 
when  he  says,  'Sin  is  an  impotence  to 
be  got  rid  of? 

'Get  rid  of  your  sin,'  says  Mat- 
thew Arnold.  Paul  did  so.  He  did  so 
through  what  he  called  a  loving  union 
with  the  spirit  of  Christ.  As  he  ex- 
pressed the  matter,  he  '  died '  to  sin.  He 
'  lived '  henceforth  to  the  righteousness 
of  his  Master  and  of  the  Christian 
community.  So  far  as  sin  is  concerned, 
is  not  this  version  heartily  acceptable 
to  the  modern  mind?  Is  it  not  sensible, 
simple,  and  in  spirit  strictly  normal, 
as  well  as  moral  and  religious?  Does  it 
not  dispose,  once  for  all,  both  of  the 
religious  and  of  the  practical  aspect  of 
the  problem  of  sin? 

I  cannot  better  state  the  task  of  this 
essay  than  by  taking  the  opportun- 
ity, which  Arnold's  clearness  of  speech 
gives  me,  to  begin  the  study  of  our 
question  in  the  light  of  so  favorite  a 
modern  opinion. 

ii 

It  would  not  be  useful  for  us  to  con- 
sider any  further,  in  this  place,  Paul's 
own  actual  doctrine  about  such  sin  as 
an  individual  thinks  to  have  been  due 
to  his  own  voluntary  and  personal 
deed.  Paul's  view  regarding  the  nature 
of  original  sin  involves  other  questions 
than  the  one  which  is  at  present  before 
us.  We  speak  here  not  of  original  sin, 
but  of  knowing  and  voluntary  evil- 
doing.  Paul's  idea  of  salvation  from 
original  sin  through  grace  and  through 
loving  union  with  the  spirit  of  the  Mas- 
ter, is  inseparable  from  his  special 
opinions  regarding  the  church  as  the 
body  of  Christ,  and  regarding  the  su- 
pernatural existence  of  the  risen  Christ 
as  the  spirit  of  the  church.  These 
matters  also  are  not  now  before  us. 
The  same  may  be  said  of  Paul's  views 
concerning  the  forgiveness  of  our  vol- 
untary sins.  For,  in  Paul's  mind,  the 
whole  doctrine  of  the  sins  which  the 


244 


THE  SECOND  DEATH 


individual  has  knowingly  and  willfully 
committed,  is  further  complicated  by 
the  Apostle's  teachings  about  predes- 
tination. And  for  an  inquiry  into  those 
teachings  there  is,  in  this  essay,  nei- 
ther space  nor  motive.  Manifold  and 
impressive  though  Paul's  dealings  with 
the  problem  of  sin  are,  we  shall  there- 
fore do  well,  upon  this  occasion,  to  ap- 
proach the  doctrine  of  the  voluntary 
sins  of  the  individual  from  another  side 
than  the  one  which  Paul  most  empha- 
sizes. Let  us  turn  to  aspects  of  the 
Christian  tradition  about  willful  sin 
for  which  Paul  is  not  mainly  respons- 
ible. 

We  all  know,  in  any  case,  that  Ar- 
nold's own  views  about  the  sense  and 
the  thought  of  sin  are  not  the  views 
which  have  been  prevalent  in  the  past 
history  of  Christianity.  And  Arnold's 
hostility  to  the  Puritan  spirit  carries 
him  too  far  when  he  seems  to  attribute 
to  Puritanism  the  principal  responsi- 
bility for  having  made  the  fact  and  the 
sense  of  sin  so  prominent  as  it  has  been 
in  Christian  thought.  Long  before 
Puritanism,  mediaeval  Christianity  had 
its  own  meditations  concerning  sin. 
Others  than  Puritans  have  brooded 
too  much  over  their  sins.  And  not  all 
Puritans  have  cultivated  the  thought 
of  sin  with  a  morbid  intensity. 

I  have  no  space  for  a  history  of  the 
Christian  doctrine  of  willful  sin.  But, 
by  way  of  preparation  for  my  princi- 
pal argument,  I  shall  next  call  to  mind 
a  few  of  the  more  familiar  Christian 
beliefs  concerning  the  perils  and  the 
results  of  voluntary  sin,  without  caring 
at  the  moment  whether  these  beliefs 
are  mediaeval,  or  Puritan,  or  not. 
Thereafter,  I  shall  try  to  translate  the 
sense  of  these  traditional  beliefs  into 
terms  which  seem  to  me  to  be  worthy 
of  the  serious  consideration  of  the  mod- 
ern man.  After  this  restatement  and 
interpretation  of  the  Christian  doc- 
trine, —  not  of  original  sin,  but  of  the 


voluntary  sin  of  the  individual,  —  we 
shall  have  new  means  of  seeing  whether 
Arnold  is  justified  in  declaring  that  no 
thought  about  sin  is  wise  except  such 
thought  as  is  indispensable  for  arous- 
ing the  effort  'to  get  rid  of  sin.' 


in 

Countless  efforts  have  been  made  to 
sum  up  in  a  few  words  the  spirit  of  the 
ethical  teaching  of  Jesus.  I  make  no 
new  effort,  I  contribute  no  novel  word 
or  insight,  when  I  now  venture  to  say, 
simply  in  passing,  that  the  religion  of 
the  founder,  as  preserved  in  the  say- 
ings, is  a  religion  of  Whole-Hearted- 
ness.  The  voluntary  good  deed  is  one 
which,  whatever  its  outward  expression 
may  be,  carries  with  it  the  whole  heart 
of  love,  both  to  God  and  to  the  neigh- 
bor. The  special  act  —  whether  it  be 
giving  the  cup  of  cold  water,  or  whe- 
ther it  be  the  martyr's  heroism  in  con- 
fessing the  name  of  Jesus  in  presence 
of  the  persecutor  —  matters  less  than 
the  inward  spirit.  The  Master  gives 
no  elaborate  code  to  be  applied  to  each 
new  situation.  The  whole  heart  de- 
voted to  the  cause  of  the  Kingdom  of 
Heaven,  —  this  is  what  is  needed. 

On  the  other  hand,  whatever  willful 
deed  does  not  spring  from  love  of  God 
and  man,  and  especially  whatever  deed 
breaks  with  the  instinctive  dictates  of 
whole-hearted  love,  is  sin.  And  sin 
means  alienation  from  the  Kingdom 
and  from  the  Father;  and  hence,  in  the 
end,  means  destruction.  Here  the  au- 
gust severity  of  the  teaching  is  fully 
manifested.  But  from  this  destruction 
there  is  indeed  an  escape.  It  is  the  es- 
cape by  the  road  of  repentance.  That 
is  the  only  road  which  is  emphatically 
and  repeatedly  insisted  upon  in  the 
sayings  of  Jesus,  as  we  have  them. 
But  this  repentance  must  include  a 
whole-hearted  willingness  to  forgive 
those  who  trespass  against  us.  Thus 


THE  SECOND  DEATH 


245 


repentance  means  a  return  both  to  the 
Father  and  to  the  whole-hearted  life 
of  love.  Another  name  for  this  whole- 
heartedness,  in  action  as  well  as  in  re- 
pentance, is  faith.  For  the  true  lover 
of  God  instinctively  believes  the  word 
of  the  Son  of  Man  who  teaches  these 
things,  and  is  sure  that  the  Kingdom 
of  God  will  come. 

But,  like  the  rest  of  the  reported 
sayings  of  Jesus,  this  simple  and  august 
doctrine  of  the  peril  of  sin,  and  of  the 
way  of  escape  through  repentance, 
comes  to  us  with  many  indications 
that  some  further  and  fuller  revelation 
of  its  meaning  is  yet  to  follow.  Jesus 
appears  in  the  Gospel  reports  as  himself 
formally  announcing  to  individuals 
that  their  sins  are  forgiven.  The  escape 
from  sin  is  therefore  not  always  wholly 
due  to  the  repentant  sinner's  own 
initiative.  Assistance  is  needed.  And 
Jesus  appears  in  the  records  as  assist- 
ing. He  assists,  not  only  as  the  teacher 
who  announces  the  Kingdom,  but  as 
the  one  who  has  *  power  to  forgive  sins.' 
Here  again  I  simply  follow  the  well- 
known  records.  I  am  no  judge  as  to 
what  sayings  are  authentic. 

I  am  sure,  however,  that  it  was  but 
an  inevitable  development  of  the  orig- 
inal teaching  of  the  founder,  and  of 
these  early  reports  about  his  authority 
to  forgive,  when  the  Christian  com- 
munity later  conceived  that  salvation 
from  personal  and  voluntary  sin  had 
become  possible  through  the  work 
which  the  departed  Lord  had  done 
while  on  earth.  How  Christ  saved  from 
sin  became,  hereupon,  a  problem.  But 
that  he  saved  from  sin,  and  that  he 
somehow  did  so  through  what  he  won 
for  men  by  his  death,  became  a  cen- 
tral constituent  of  the  later  Christian 
tradition. 

A  corollary  of  this  central  teaching 
was  a  further  opinion  which  tradition 
also  emphasized,  and,  for  centuries, 
emphasized  the  more,  the  further  the 


Apostolic  age  receded  into  the  past. 
This  further  opinion  was,  that  the 
willful  sinner  is  powerless  to  return  to 
a  whole-hearted  union  with  God 
through  any  deed  of  his  own.  He  could 
not  'get  rid  of  sin,'  either  by  means 
of  repentance  or  otherwise,  unless  the 
work  of  Christ  had  prepared  the  way. 
This,  in  sum,  was  long  the  common  tra- 
dition of  the  Christian  world.  How  the 
saving  work  of  Christ  became,  or  could 
be  made,  efficacious  for  obtaining  the 
forgiveness  of  the  willful  sin  of  an  in- 
dividual, —  this  question,  as  we  well 
know,  received  momentous  and  con- 
flicting answers  as  the  Christian  Church 
grew,  differentiated,  and  went  through 
its  various  experiences  of  heresy,  of 
schism,  and  of  the  learned  interpreta- 
tion of  its  faith.  Here,  again,  the  de- 
tails of  the  history  of  dogma,  and  the 
practice  of  the  church  and  of  its  sects 
in  dealing  with  the  forgiveness  of  sins, 
concern  us  not  at  all. 

We  need,  however,  to  remind  our- 
selves, at  this  point,  of  one  further  as- 
pect of  the  tradition  about  willful  sin. 
That  sin,  if  unforgiven,  leads  to 
'death,'  was  a  thought  which  Judaism 
had  inherited  from  the  religion  of  the 
prophets  of  Israel.  It  was  a  grave 
thought,  simple  in  its  origin,  essential 
to  the  ethical  development  of  the  faith 
of  Israel,  and  capable  of  vast  develop- 
ment in  the  light  both  of  experience 
and  of  imagination.  Because  of  the 
later  growth  of  the  doctrine  of  the 
future  life,  the  word  '  death '  came  to 
mean,  for  the  Christian  mind,  what  it 
could  not  yet  have  meant  for  the  early 
prophets  of  Israel.  And,  in  conse- 
quence, Christian  tradition  gradually 
developed  a  teaching  that  the  divinely 
ordained  penalty  of  unforgiven  sin  — 
the  doom  of  the  willful  sinner  —  is  a 
'second  death,'  an  essentially  endless 
penalty.  The  Apocalypse  imagina- 
tively pictures  this  doom.  When  the 
church  came  to  define  its  faith  as  to 


246 


THE  SECOND  DEATH 


the  future  life,  it  developed  a  well- 
known  group  of  opinions  concerning 
this  endless  penalty  of  sin.  In  its  out- 
lines this  group  of  opinions  is  familiar 
even  to  all  children  who  have  learned 
anything  of  the  faith  of  the  fathers.  An 
essentially  analogous  group  of  opinions 
is  found  in  various  religions  that  are 
not  Christian.  In  its  origin  this  group 
of  opinions  goes  back  to  the  very 
beginnings  of  those  forms  of  ethical 
religion  whose  history  is  at  all  closely 
parallel  to  the  history  of  Judaism  or  of 
Christianity.  The  motives  which  are 
here  in  question  lie  deeply  rooted  in 
human  nature;  but  I  have  no  right  and 
no  space  to  attempt  to  analyze  them 
here.  It  is  enough  for  my  purpose  to 
state  that  the  idea  of  the  endless  pen- 
alty of  unforgiven  sin  is  by  no  means 
peculiar  to  Puritanism;  and  that  it  is 
certainly  an  idea  which,  for  those  who 
accept  it  with  any  hearty  faith,  very 
easily  leads  to  many  thoughts  about 
sin  which  tend  to  exceed  the  strictly 
artistic  measure  which  Matthew  Ar- 
nold assigns  as  the  only  fitting  one  for 
all  such  thoughts. 

To  think  of  a  supposed  *  endless  pen- 
alty5 as  a  certain  doom  for  all  unfor- 
given sin,  may  not  lead  to  morbid 
brooding.  For  the  man  who  begins 
such  thoughts  may  be  sedately  sure 
that  he  is  no  sinner.  Or  again,  although 
he  confesses  himself  a  sinner,  he  may 
be  pleasantly  convinced  that  forgive- 
ness is  readily  and  surely  attainable,  at 
least  for  himself.  And,  as  we  shall  soon 
see,  there  are  still  other  reasons  why 
no  morbid  thought  need  be  connected 
with  the  idea  of  endless  penalty.  But 
no  doubt  such  a  doctrine  of  endless  pen- 
alty tends  to  awaken  thoughts  which 
have  a  less  modern  seeming,  and  which 
involve  a  less  sure  confidence  in  one's 
personal  power  to  'get  rid  of  sin'  than 
Matthew  Arnold's  words,  as  we  have 
cited  them,  convey.  If,  without  any 
attempt  to  dwell  further,  either  upon 


the  history  or  the  complications  of  the 
traditional  Christian  doctrine  of  the 
willful  sin  of  the  individual,  we  reduce 
that  doctrine  to  its  simplest  terms,  it 
consists  of  two  theses,  both  of  which 
have  had  a  vast  and  tragic  influence 
upon  the  fortunes  of  Christian  civiliza- 
tion. The  theses  are  these.  First:  By 
no  deed  of  his  own,  unaided  by  the 
supernatural  consequences  of  the  work 
of  Christ,  can  the  willful  sinner  win 
forgiveness.  Second :  The  penalty  of  un- 
forgiven sin  is  the  endless  second  death. 


IV 

The  contrast  between  these  two  tra- 
ditional theses  and  the  modern  spirit 
seems  manifest  enough,  even  if  we  do 
not  make  use  of  Matthew  Arnold's 
definition  of  the  reasonable  attitude 
toward  sin.  The  old  faith  held  that 
the  very  essence  of  its  revelation  con- 
cerning righteousness  was  bound  up 
with  its  conception  of  the  consequences 
of  unforgiven  sin.  On  the  other  hand, 
if  the  education  of  the  human  race 
has  taught  us  any  coherent  lesson,  it 
has  taught  us  to  respect  the  right  of  a 
rational  being  to  be  judged  by  moral 
standards  which  he  himself  can  see  to 
be  reasonable.  Hence  the  moral  dignity 
of  the  modern  idea  of  man  seems  to  de- 
pend upon  declining  to  regard  as  just 
and  righteous  any  penalty  which  is 
supposed  to  be  inflicted  by  the  merely 
arbitrary  will  of  any  supernatural 
power.  The  just  penalty  of  sin,  to  the 
modern  mind,  must  therefore  be  the 
penalty,  whatever  it  is,  which  the  en- 
lightened sinner,  if  fully  awake  to  the 
nature  of  his  deed,  and  rational  in  his 
estimate  of  his  deed,  would  voluntar- 
ily inflict  upon  himself.  And  how  can 
one  better  express  that  penalty  than 
by  following  the  spirit  of  Matthew 
Arnold's  advice :  *  Get  rid  of  your  sin '  ? 
This  advice,  to  be  sure,  has  its  own  de- 
liberate sternness.  For  'the  firm  effort 


THE  SECOND  DEATH 


247 


to  get  rid  of  sin/  may  involve  long 
labor  and  deep  grief.  But  *  endless 
penalty/  a  *  second  death/  —  what 
ethically  tolerable  meaning  can  a  mod- 
ern mind  attach  to  these  words? 

Is  not,  then,  the  chasm  between  the 
modern  ethical  view  and  the  ancient 
faith,  at  this  point,  simply  impassable? 
Have  the  two  not  parted  company  al- 
together, both  in  letter  and,  still  more, 
in  their  inmost  spirit? 

To  this  question  some  representa- 
tives of  modern  liberal  Christianity 
would  at  once  reply  that,  as  I  have  al- 
ready pointed  out,  the  early  Gospel 
tradition  does  not  attribute  to  Jesus 
himself  the  more  hopeless  aspects  of  the 
doctrine  of  sin,  as  the  later  tradition 
was  led  to  define  them.  Jesus,  accord- 
ing to  the  reports  of  his  teaching  in  the 
Gospels,  does  indeed  more  than  once 
use  a  doctrine  of  the  endless  penalty  of 
unforgiven  sin, — a  doctrine  with  which 
a  portion  of  the  Judaism  of  his  day  was 
more  or  less  familiar.  In  well-known 
parables  he  speaks  of  the  torments  of 
another  world.  And,  in  general,  he 
deals  with  willful  sin  unsparingly.  But 
he  seems  to  leave  the  door  of  repent- 
ance always  open.  The  Father  waits 
for  the  Prodigal  Son's  return.  And  the 
Prodigal  Son  returns  of  his  own  will. 
We  hear  nothing  in  the  parables  about 
his  being  unable  effectively  to  repent 
unless  some  supernatural  plan  of  sal- 
vation has  first  been  worked  out  for 
him.  Is  it  not  possible,  then,  to  recon- 
cile the  Christian  spirit  and  the  modern 
man  by  simply  returning  to  the  Christ- 
ianity of  the  parables?  So,  in  our  day, 
many  assert. 

I  do  not  believe  that  the  parables, 
in  the  form  in  which  we  possess  them, 
present  to  us  any  complete  view  of  the 
essence  of  the  Christian  doctrine  of  sin, 
or  of  the  sinner's  way  of  escape.  I  do 
not  believe  that  they  were  intended 
by  the  Master  to  do  so.  Our  reports  of 
the  founder's  teachings  about  sin  indi- 


cate that  these  teachings  were  intend- 
ed to  receive  a  further  interpretation 
and  supplement.  Our  real  problem 
is  whether  the  interpretation  and  sup- 
plement which  later  Christian  tradi- 
tion gave,  through  its  doctrine  of  sin, 
and  of  the  endless  penalty  of  sin,  was, 
despite  its  tragedy,  its  mythical  set- 
ting, and  its  arbitrariness,  a  teaching 
whose  ethical  spirit  we  can  still  accept 
or,  at  least,  understand.  Is  the  later 
teaching,  in  any  sense,  a  just  devel- 
opment of  the  underlying  meaning 
of  the  parables?  Does  any  deeper  idea 
inform  the  traditional  doctrine  that 
the  willful  sinner  is  powerless  to  save 
himself  from  a  just  and  endless  penalty 
through  any  repentance,  or  through  any 
new  deed,  of  his  own? 

As  I  undertake  to  answer  these  ques- 
tions, let  me  ask  the  reader  to  bear  in 
mind  one  general  historical  considera- 
tion. Christianity,  even  in  its  most 
imaginative  and  in  its  most  tragic 
teachings,  has  always  been  under  the 
influence  of  very  profound  ethical  mo- 
tives, —  the  motives  which  already  in- 
spired the  prophets  of  Israel.  The 
founder's  doctrine  of  the  Kingdom,  as 
we  now  possess  that  doctrine,  was  an 
outline  of  an  ethical  religion.  It  was 
also  a  prologue  to  a  religion  that  was  yet 
to  be  more  fully  revealed,  or  at  least 
explained.  This,  as  I  suppose,  was  the 
founder's  personal  intention. 

When  the  early  church  sought  to 
express  its  own  spirit,  it  was  never 
knowingly  false,  it  was  often  most  flu- 
ently, yet  faithfully,  true,  to  the  deep- 
er meaning  of  the  founder.  Its  ex- 
pressions were  borrowed  from  many 
sources.  Its  imagination  was  construct- 
ive of  many  novelties.  Only  its  deep- 
er spirit  was  marvelously  steadfast. 
Even  when,  in  its  darker  moods,  its 
imagination  dwelt  upon  the  problem 
of  sin,  it  saw  far  more  than  it  was 
able  to  express  in  acceptable  formulas. 
Its  imagery  was  often  of  local,  or  of 


248 


THE  SECOND  DEATH 


heathen,  or  even  of  primitive,  origin. 
But  the  truth  is  that  the  imagery,  ren- 
dered edifying  and  teachable,  often 
bears,  and  invites,  an  interpretation 
whose  message  is  neither  local  nor  prim- 
itive. Such  an  interpretation,  I  believe, 
to  be  possible  in  case  of  the  doctrine  of 
sin  and  of  its  penalty;  and  to  my  own 
interpretation  I  must  now  invite  at- 
tention. 


There  is  one  not  infrequent  thought 
about  sin  upon  which  Matthew  Ar- 
nold's rule  would  surely  permit  us  to 
dwell;  for  it  is  a  thought  which  helps 
us,  if  not  wholly  *  to  get  rid  of  sin/  still, 
in  advance  of  decisive  action,  to  fore- 
stall some  temptations  to  sin  which  we 
might  otherwise  find  too  insistent  for 
our  safety.  It  is  the  thought  which 
many  a  man  expresses  when  he  says,  of 
some  imagined  act,  If  I  were  to  do  that, 
I  should  be  false  to  all  that  I  hold  most 
dear;  I  should  throw  away  my  honor; 
I  should  violate  the  fidelity  that  is  to 
me  the  very  essence  of  my  moral  inter- 
est in  my  existence.  The  thought  thus 
expressed  may  be  sometimes  merely 
conventional;  but  it  may  also  be  very 
earnest  and  heartfelt.  Every  man  who 
has  a  moral  code  which  he  accepts,  not 
merely  as  the  customary  and,  to  him, 
opaque  or  senseless  verdict  of  his  tribe 
or  of  his  caste,  but  as  his  own  chosen, 
personal  ideal  of  life,  has  the  power  to 
formulate  what  for  him  would  seem 
(to  borrow  the  religious  phraseology) 
his  'sin  against  the  Holy  Ghost,'  — 
his  own  morally  'impossible*  choice, 
so  far  as  he  can  now  predetermine  what 
he  really  means  to  do.  Different  men, 
no  doubt,  have  different  exemplary 
sins  in  mind  when  they  use  such  words. 
Their  various  codes  may  be  expressions 
of  quite  different  and  largely  accidental 
social  traditions;  their  diverse  exam- 
ples of  what,  for  each  of  them,  would  be 
his  own  instance  of  the  unpardonable 


sin,  may  be  the  outcome  of  the  tabus 
of  whatever  social  order  you  please. 
I  care  for  the  moment  not  at  all  for  the 
objective  ethical  correctness  of  any  one 
man's  definition  of  his  own  moral  code. 
And  I  am  certainly  here  formulating 
no  ethical  code  of  my  own.  I  am  simply 
pointing  out  that,  when  a  man  becomes 
conscious  of  his  own  rule  of  life,  of  his 
own  ideal  of  what  makes  his  voluntary 
life  worth  while,  he  tends  to  arrange  his 
ideas  of  right  and  wrong  acts  so  that, 
for  him  at  least,  some  acts,  when  he 
contemplates  the  bare  possibility  of 
doing  them  himself,  appear  to  him  to  be 
acts  such  that  they  would  involve  for 
him  a  kind  of  moral  suicide,  —  a  de- 
liberate wrecking  of  what  makes  life, 
for  himself,  morally  worth  while. 

One  common-sense  way  of  express- 
ing such  an  individual  judgment  upon 
these  extreme  acts  of  wrongdoing,  is 
to  say,  If  I  were  to  do  that  of  my  own 
free  will,  I  could  thereafter  never  for- 
give myself. 

Now,  in  case  a  man  thinks  of  his  own 
possible  actions  in  this  way,  he  need 
not  be  morbidly  brooding  over  sins  of 
which  it  is  well  not  to  think  too  much. 
He  may  be  simply  surveying  his  plan 
of  life  in  a  resolute  way,  and  deciding, 
as  well  as  he  can,  where  he  stands, 
what  his  leading  ideas  are,  and  what 
makes  his  voluntary  life,  from  his 
own  point  of  view,  worth  living.  Such 
thoughts  tend  to  clear  our  moral  air, 
if  only  we  think  them  in  terms  of  our 
own  personal  ideals,  and  do  not,  as  is 
too  often  the  case,  apply  them  solely 
to  render  more  dramatic  our  judg- 
ments about  our  neighbors. 


VI 

In  order  to  be  able  to  formulate 
such  thoughts,  one  must  have  an 
'ideal,'  even  if  one  cannot  state  it  in 
an  abstract  form.  One  must  think  of 
one's  voluntary  life  in  terms  of  fidelity 


THE  SECOND  DEATH 


249 


to  some  such  *  ideal,'  or  set  of  ideals. 
One  must  regard  one's  self  as  a  creature 
with  a  purpose  in  living.  One  must 
have  what  they  call  a  *  mission '  in  one's 
own  world.  And  so,  whether  one  uses 
philosophical  theories  or  religious  be- 
liefs, or  does  not  use  them,  one  must, 
when  one  speaks  thus,  actually  have 
some  sort  of  spiritual  realm  in  which, 
as  one  believes,  one's  moral  life  is 
lived,  a  realm  to  whose  total  order,  as 
one  supposes,  one  could  be  false  if  one 
chose. 

One's  mission,  one's  business,  must 
ideally  extend,  in  some  fashion,  to  the 
very  boundaries  of  this  spiritual  realm, 
so  that,  if  one  actually  chose  to  com- 
mit one's  supposed  unpardonable  sin, 
one  could  exist  in  this  entire  realm  only 
as,  in  some  sense  and  degree,  an  out- 
cast, —  estranged,  so  far  as  that  one 
unpardonable  fault  estranged  one, 
from  one's  own  chosen  moral  hearth 
and  fireside.  At  least  this  is  how  one 
resolves,  in  advance  of  decisive  ac- 
tion, to  view  the  matter,  in  case  one 
has  the  precious  privilege  of  being  able 
to  make  such  resolves.  And  I  say  that 
so  to  find  one's  self  resolving,  is  to  find 
not  weakness  and  brooding,  but  reso- 
luteness and  clearness.  Life  seems 
simply  blurred  and  dim  if  one  can  no- 
where find  in  it  such  sharp  moral  out- 
lines. And  if  one  becomes  conscious  of 
such  sharp  outlines,  one  is  not  saying, 
Behold  me,  the  infallible  judge  of 
moral  values  for  all  mankind.  Behold 
me  with  the  absolute  moral  code  pre- 
cisely worked  out.  For  one  is  so  far 
making  no  laws  for  one's  neighbors. 
One  is  accepting  no  merely  traditional 
tabus.  One  is  simply  making  up  one's 
mind  so  as  to  give  a  more  coherent 
sense  to  one's  choices.  The  penalty  of 
not  being  able  to  make  such  resolves 
regarding  what  would  be  one's  own 
unpardonable  sin,  is  simply  the  penalty 
of  flabbiness  and  irresoluteness.  To 
remain  unaware  of  what  we  propose  to 


do,  never  helps  us  to  live.  To  be  aware 
of  our  coherent  plan,  to  have  a  moral 
world  and  a  business  that,  in  ideal,  ex- 
tends to  the  very  boundaries  of  this 
world,  and  to  view  one's  life,  or  any 
part  of  it,  as  an  expression  of  one's  own 
personal  will,  is  to  assert  one's  genuine 
freedom,  and  is  not  to  accept  any  ex- 
ternal bondage.  But  it  is  also  to  bind 
one's  self,  in  all  the  clearness  of  a  calm 
resolve.  It  is  to  view  certain  at  least 
abstractly  possible  deeds  as  moral 
catastrophes,  as  creators  of  chaos,  as 
deeds  whereby  the  self,  if  it  chose 
them,  would,  at  least  in  so  far,  banish 
itself  from  its  own  country. 

To  be  able  to  view  life  in  this  way,  to 
resolve  thus  deliberately  what  genuine 
and  thorough-going  sin  would  mean 
for  one's  own  vision,  requires  a  certain 
maturity.  Not  all  ordinary  misdeeds 
are  in  question  when  one  thinks  of  the 
unpardonable  sin.  Blunders  of  all  sorts 
fill  one's  childhood  and  youth.  What 
Paul  conceived  as  our  original  sin  may 
have  expressed  itself  for  years  in  deeds 
that  our  social  order  condemns,  and 
that  our  later  life  deeply  deplores.  And 
yet,  in  all  this  maze  of  past  evil-doing 
and  of  folly,  we  may  have  been,  so  far, 
either  helpless  victims  of  our  nature 
and  of  our  training,  or  blind  followers 
of  false  gods.  What  Paul  calls  sin  may 
have  *  abounded.'  And  yet,  as  we  look 
back,  we  may  now  judge  that  all  this 
was  merely  a  means  whereby,  hence- 
forth, 'grace  may  more  abound.'  We 
may  have  learned  to  say,  —  it  may  be 
wise,  and  even  our  actual  duty  to  say, 
—  I  will  not  brood  over  these  which 
were  either  my  ignorant  or  my  helpless 
sins.  I  will  henceforth  firmly  and  simply 
resolve  'to  get  rid  of  them.'  That  is 
for  me  the  best.  Bygones  are  bygones. 
Remorse  is  a  waste  of  time.  These 
*  confusions  of  a  wasted  youth,'  must 
be  henceforth  simply  ignored.  That  is 
the  way  of  cheer.  It  is  also  the  way  of 
true  righteousness.  I  can  live  wisely 


250 


THE  SECOND  DEATH 


only  in  case  I  forget  my  former  follies, 
except  in  so  far  as  a  memory  of  these 
follies  helps  me  not  to  repeat  them. 

One  may  only  the  more  insist  upon 
this  cheering  doctrine  of  Lethe  and 
forgiveness  for  the  past,  and  of  'grace 
abounding'  for  the  future,  when  there 
come  into  one's  life  those  happenings 
which  Paul  viewed  as  a  new  birth, 
and  as  a  *  dying  to  sin.'  These  '  work- 
ings of  grace,'  if  they  occur  to  us,  may 
transform  our  'old  man'  of  inherited 
defect,  of  social  waywardness,  of  con- 
tentiousness, and  of  narrow  hatred  for 
our  neighbors  and  for  'the  law,'  into 
the  'new  life.'  It  is  a  new  life  to  us  be- 
cause we  now  seem  to  have  found  our 
own  cause,  and  have  learned  to  love 
our  sense  of  intimate  companionship 
with  the  universe.  Now,  for  the  first 
time,  we  have  found  a  life  that  seems 
to  us  to  have  transparent  sense,  unity 
of  aim,  and  an  abiding  and  sustaining 
inspiration  about  it. 

If  this  result  has  taken  place,  then, 
whatever  our  cause,  or  our  moral  opin- 
ions, or  our  religion,  may  be,  we  shall 
tend  to  rejoice  with  Paul  that  we  have 
now  '  died '  to  the  old  life  of  ignorance 
and  of  evil- working  distractions.  Here- 
upon we  may  be  ready  to  say,  with 
him,  and  joyously,  'There  is  no  con- 
demnation' for  us  who  are  ready  to 
walk  after  what  we  now  take  to  be 
'the  spirit.'  The  past  is  dead.  Grace 
has  served  us.  Forgiveness  covers  the 
evil  deeds  that  were  gone.  For  those 
deeds,  as  we  now  see,  were  not  done 
by  our  awakened  selves.  They  were 
not  our  own  'free  acts'  at  all.  They 
were  the  workings  of  what  Paul  called 
'the  flesh.'  'Grace'  has  blotted  them 
out. 

I  am  still  speaking  not  of  any  one 
faith  about  the  grace  that  saves,  or 
about  the  ideal  of  life.  Let  a  man  find 
his  salvation  as  it  may  happen  to  him 
to  find  it.  But  the  main  point  that  I 
have  further  to  insist  upon  is  this: 


Whenever  and  however  we  have  be- 
come morally  mature  enough  to  get 
life  all  colored  through  and  through  by 
what  seems  to  us  a  genuinely  illumin- 
ating moral  faith,  so  that  it  seems  to 
us  as  if,  in  every  deed,  we  could  serve, 
despite  our  weakness,  our  one  highest 
cause,  and  be  faithful  to  all  our  moral 
world  at  every  moment,  —  then  this 
inspiration  has  to  be  paid  for.  The 
abundance  of  grace  means,  henceforth, 
a  new  gravity  of  life.  For  we  have  now 
to  face  the  further  fact  that,  if  we  have 
thus  won  vast  ideals,  and  a  will  that  is 
now  inspired  to  serve  them,  we  can 
imagine  ourselves  becoming  false  to  this 
our  own  will,  to  this  which  gives  our 
life  its  genuine  value.  We  can  imag- 
ine ourselves  breaking  faith  with  our 
own  world- wide  cause  and  inspiration. 
One  who  has  found  his  cause,  if  he 
has  a  will  of  his  own,  can  become  a 
conscious  and  deliberate  traitor.  One 
who  has  found  his  loyalty  is  indeed,  at 
first,  under  the  obsession  of  the  new 
spirit  of  grace.  But  if,  henceforth,  he 
lives  with  a  will  of  his  own,  he  can,  by  a 
willful  closing  of  his  eyes  to  the  light, 
become  disloyal.  Our  actual  voluntary 
life  does  not  bear  out  any  theory  as  to 
the  fatally  predestined  perseverance 
of  the  saints.  For  our  voluntary  life 
seems  to  us  as  if  it  were  free  either  to 
persevere  or  not  to  persevere.  The 
more  precious  the  light  that  has  seem- 
ed to  come  to  me,  the  deeper  is  the 
disgrace  to  which,  in  my  own  eyes,  I 
can  condemn  myself,  if  I  voluntarily 
become  false  to  this  light.  Now,  it  is 
indeed  not  well  to  brood  over  such 
chances  of  falsity.  But  it  is  manly  to 
face  the  fact  that  they  are  present. 

In  all  this  statement,  I  have  presup- 
posed no  philosophical  theory  of  free- 
will, and  have  not  assumed  the  truth 
of  any  one  ethical  code  or  doctrine.  I 
have  been  speaking  simply  in  terms  of 
moral  experience,  and  have  been  point- 
ing out  how  the  world  seems  to  a  man 


THE  SECOND  DEATH 


251 


who  reaches  sufficient  moral  maturity 
to  possess,  even  if  but  for  a  season, 
a  pervasive  and  practically  coherent 
ideal  of  life,  and  to  value  himself  as  a 
possible  servant  of  his  cause,  but  a 
servant  whose  freedom  to  choose  is  still 
his  own. 

What  I  point  out  is  that,  if  a  man 
has  won  practically  a  free  and  conscious 
view  of  what  his  honor  requires  of  him, 
the  reverse  side  of  this  view  is  also  pre- 
sent. This  reverse  side  takes  the  form 
of  knowing  what,  for  this  man  himself, 
it  would  mean  to  be  willfully  false  to 
his  honor.  One  who  knows  that  he 
freely  serves  his  cause,  knows  that  he 
could,  if  he  chose,  become  a  traitor. 
And  if  indeed  he  freely  serves  his  cause, 
he  knows  whether  or  no  he  could  for- 
give himself  if  he  willfully  became  a 
traitor.  Whoever,  through  grace,  has 
found  the  beloved  of  his  life,  and  now 
freely  lives  the  life  of  love,  knows  that 
he  could,  if  he  chose,  betray  his  be- 
loved. And  he  knows  what  estimate 
his  own  free  choice  now  requires  him  to 
put  upon  such  betrayal.  Choose  your 
cause,  your  beloved,  and  your  moral 
ideal,  as  you  please.  What  I  now  point 
out  is  that  so  to  choose  is  to  imply  your 
power  to  define  what,  for  you,  would 
be  the  unpardonable  sin  if  you  com- 
mitted it.  This  unpardonable  sin  would 
be  betrayal. 

VII 

So  far  I  have  discussed  the  moral 
possibility  of  treason.  We  seem  to  be 
free.  Therefore,  it  seems  to  us  as  if  trea- 
son were  possible.  But  now,  do  any  of 
us  ever  actually  thus  betray  our  own 
chosen  cause?  Do  we  ever  actually 
turn  traitor  to  our  own  flag,  —  to  the 
flag  that  we  have  sworn  to  serve,  — 
after  taking  our  oath,  not  as  unto  men, 
but  as  unto  ourselves  and  our  cause? 
Do  any  of  us  ever  really  commit  that 
which,  in  our  own  eyes,  is  the  unpar- 
donable sin? 


Here,  again,  let  every  one  of  us"  judge 
for  himself.  And  let  him  also  judge 
rather  himself  than  his  neighbor.  For 
we  are  here  considering  not  customary 
codes,  or  outward  seeming,  but  how 
a  man  who  knows  his  ideal  and  knows 
his  own  will  finds  that  his  inward 
deed  appears  to  himself.  Still,  apart 
from  all  evil-speaking,  the  common  ex- 
perience of  mankind  seems  to  show  that 
such  actual  and  deliberate  sin  against 
the  light,  such  conscious  and  willful 
treason,  occasionally  takes  place.  So 
far  as  we  know  of  such  treason  at  all, 
or  reasonably  believe  in  its  existence, 
it  appears  to  us  to  be,  on  the  whole, 
the  worst  evil  with  which  man  afflicts 
his  fellows  and  his  social  order  in  this 
distracted  world  of  human  doings.  The 
blindness  and  the  naive  cruelty  of 
crude  passion,  the  strife  and  hatred 
with  which  the  natural  social  order  is 
filled,  often  seem  to  us  mild  when  we 
compare  them  with  the  spiritual  harm 
that  follows  the  intentional  betrayal  of 
great  causes  once  fully  accepted,  but 
then  willfully  forsaken,  by  those  to 
whom  they  have  been  intrusted.  'If 
the  light  that  is  in  thee  be  darkness, 
how  great  is  that  darkness.'  This  is 
the  word  which  seems  especially  fitted 
for  the  traitor's  own  case;  for  he  has 
seen  the  great  light.  The  realm  of  the 
spirit  has  been  graciously  opened  to 
him.  He  has  willingly  entered.  He  has 
chosen  to  serve.  And  then  he  has 
closed  his  eyes;  and,  by  his  own  free 
choice,  a  darkness,  far  worse  than  that 
of  man's  primal  savagery,  has  come 
upon  him.  And  the  social  world,  the 
unity  of  brotherhood,  the  beloved  life 
which  he  has  betrayed,  —  how  desolate 
he  has  left  what  was  fairest  in  it!  He 
has  brought  back  again  to  its  primal 
chaos  the  fair  order  of  those  who 
trusted  and  who  lived  and  loved  to- 
gether in  one  spirit. 

But  we  are  here  little  concerned  with 
what  others  think  of  the  traitor,  if  such 


252 


THE  SECOND  DEATH 


traitor  there  be.  We  are  interested  in 
what  (if  the  light  against  which  he  has 
sinned  returns  to  him)  the  traitor  is 
henceforth  to  think  of  himself.  Arnold 
would  say,  Let  him  think  of  his  sin, 

—  that  is,  in  this  case,  of  his  treason, 

—  only  in  so  far  as  is  indispensable 
to  the  'firm  resolve  to  get  rid  of  it.' 
We  ask  whether  Arnold's  rule  seems 
any  longer  quite   adequate    to   meet 
the  situation.  Of  course  I  am  not  vent- 
uring to  assign  to  the  supposed  trai- 
tor any  penalties  except  those  which  his 
own  will  really  intends  to  assign  to 
him.  I  am  not  acting  in  the  least  as  his 
providence.    I  am  leaving  him  quite 
free  to  decide  his  own  fate.   I  am  cer- 
tainly not  counseling  him  to  feel  any 
particular  kind  or  degree  of  the  mere 
emotion  called  remorse.   For  all  that  I 
now  shall  say,  he  is  quite  free,  if  that  is 
his  desire,  to  forget  his  treason  once  for 
all,  and  to  begin  business  afresh  with  a 
new  moral  ideal,  or  with  no  ideal  at  all, 
as  he  may  choose. 

What  I  ask  is  simply  this :  //  he  re- 
sumes his  former  position  of  knowing 
and  choosing  an  ideal,  if  he  also  re- 
members what  ideal  he  formerly  chose, 
and  what  and  how  and  how  deliber- 
ately he  betrayed,  and  knows  himself 
for  what  he  is,  what  does  he  judge  re- 
garding the  now  inevitable  and  endless 
consequences  of  his  deed?  And  what 
answer  will  he  now  make  to  Matthew 
Arnold's  kind  advice,  'Get  rid  of  your 
sin '?  He  need  not  answer  in  a  brood- 
ing way.  He  need  be  no  Puritan.  He 
may  remain  as  cheerful  in  his  pass- 
ing feelings  as  you  please.  He  may 
quite  calmly  rehearse  the  facts.  He 
may  decline  to  shed  any  tear,  either  of 
repentance  or  of  terror.  My  only  hy- 
pothesis is  that  he  sees  the  facts  as 
they  are  and  confesses,  however  coolly 
and  dispassionately,  the  moral  value 
which,  as  a  matter  of  simple  coherence 
of  view  and  opinion,  he  now  assigns  to 
himself. 


VIII 

He  will  answer  Matthew  Arnold's 
advice,  as  I  think,  thus :  Get  rid  of  my 
sin?  How  can  I  get  rid  of  it?  It  is 
done.  It  is  past.  It  is  as  irrevocable 
as  the  Archaean  geological  period,  or  as 
the  collision  of  stellar  masses,  the  light 
of  whose  result  we  saw  here  on  earth 
a  few  years  ago,  in  the  constellation 
Perseus.  I  am  the  one  who,  at  such 
a  time,  with  such  a  light  of  the  spirit 
shining  before  me,  with  my  eyes  thus 
and  thus  open  to  my  business  and  to  the 
moral  universe,  first,  so  far  as  I  could 
freely  act  at  all,  freely  closed  my  eyes, 
and  then  committed  what  my  own  will 
had  already  defined  to  be  my  unpar- 
donable sin.  So  far  as  in  me  lay,  in  all 
my  weakness,  but  yet  with  all  the  wit 
and  the  strength  that  just  then  were 
mine,  I  was  a  traitor.  That  fact,  that 
event,  that  deed,  is  irrevocable.  The 
fact  that  I  am  the  one  who  then  did 
thus  and  so,  not  ignorantly,  but  know- 
ingly, —  that  fact  will  outlast  the  ages. 
That  fact  is  as  endless  as  time.  And,  in 
so  far  as  I  continue  to  value  myself  as 
a  being  whose  life  is  coherent  in  its 
meaning,  this  fact  that  then  and  there 
I  was  a  traitor,  will  always  constitute 
a  genuine  penalty,  —  my  own  penalty, 
a  penalty  that  no  god  assigns  to  me,  but 
that  I,  simply  because  I  am  myself, 
and  take  an  interest  in  knowing  my- 
self, assign  to  myself,  precisely  in  so 
far  as,  and  whenever,  I  am  awake  to  the 
meaning  of  my  own  life.  I  can  never 
undo  that  deed.  If  I  ever  say,  I  have 
undone  that  deed,  I  shall  be  both  a 
fool  and  a  liar.  Counsel  me,  if  you  will, 
to  forget  that  deed.  Counsel  me  to  do 
good  deeds  without  number  to  set 
over  against  that  treason.  Counsel  me 
to  be  cheerful,  and  to  despise  Puritan- 
ism. Counsel  me  to  plunge  into  Lethe. 
All  such  counsel  may  be,  in  its  way  and 
time,  good.  Only  do  not  counsel  me 
'to  get  rid  of  just  that  sin.  That,  so 


THE  SECOND  DEATH 


253 


far  as  the  real  facts  are  concerned,  can- 
not be  done.  For  I  am,  and  to  the 
end  of  endless  time  shall  remain,  the 
doer  of  that  willfully  traitorous  deed. 
Whatever  other  value  I  may  get,  that 
value  I  retain  forever.  My  guilt  is  as 
enduring  as  time. 

But  hereupon  a  bystander  will  nat- 
urally invite  our  supposed  traitor  to 
repent,  and  to  repent  thoroughly,  of  his 
treason.  The  traitor,  now  cool  and 
reasonable  once  more,  can  only  apply 
to  his  own  case  Fitzgerald's  word  in 
the  stanza  from  Omar  Khayyam:  — 

The  moving  finger  writes,  and  having  writ. 
Moves  on:  nor  all  your  piety  nor  wit 
Can  lure  it  back  to  cancel  half  a  line 
Nor  all  your  tears  wash  out  a  word  of  it. 

These  very  familiar  lines  are  sometimes 
viewed  as  oriental  fatalism.  But  they 
are,  in  fact,  fully  applicable  to  the 
freest  of  deeds  when  once  that  deed  is 
done. 

We  need  not  further  pursue  any  sup- 
posed colloquy  between  the  traitor  and 
those  who  comment  upon  the  situation. 
The  simple  fact  is  that  each  deed  is  ipso 
facto  irrevocable;  that  our  hypotheti- 
cal traitor,  in  his  own  deed,  has  been 
false  to  whatever  light  he  then  and 
there  had,  and  to  whatever  ideal  he 
then  viewed  as  his  highest  good.  Here- 
upon, no  new  deed,  however  good  or 
however  faithful,  and  however  much  of 
worthy  consequences  it  introduces  into 
the  future  life  of  the  traitor,  or  of  his 
world,  can  annul  the  fact  that  the  one 
traitorous  deed  was  actually  done.  No 
question  as  to  whether  the  traitor, 
when  he  first  chose  the  cause  which  he 
later  betrayed,  was  then  ethically  cor- 
rect in  his  choice,  aids  us  to  estimate 
just  the  one  matter  which  is  here  in 
question,  —  namely,  the  value  of  the 
traitor  as  the  doer  of  that  one  traitor- 
ous deed.  For  his  treason  consists  not 
in  his  blunders  in  the  choice  of  his 
cause,  but  in  his  sinning  against  such 
light  as  he  then  and  there  had.  The 


question  is,  furthermore,  not  one  as  to 
his  general  moral  character,  apart  from 
this  one  act  of  treason.  To  condemn  at 
one  stroke  the  whole  man  for  the  one 
deed  is,  of  course,  absurd.  But  it  is  the 
one  deed  which  is  now  in  question. 

This  man  may  also  be  the  doer  of 
countless  good  deeds.  But  our  present 
question  is  solely  as  to  his  value  as  the 
doer  of  that  one  traitorous  deed.  This 
value  he  has  through  his  own  irrevoc- 
able choice.  Whatever  other  values 
his  other  deeds  may  give  him,  this  one 
value  remains,  never  to  be  removed. 
By  no  deed  of  his  own  can  he  ever  es- 
cape from  that  penalty  which  consists 
in  his  having  introduced  into  the  moral 
world  the  one  evil  which  was,  at  the 
time,  as  great  an  evil  as  he  could,  then, 
of  his  own  will,  introduce. 

In  brief,  by  his  own  deed  of  treason, 
the  traitor  has  consigned  himself  — 
not  indeed  his  whole  self,  but  his  self  as 
the  doer  of  this  deed  —  to  what  one 
may  call  the  hell  of  the  irrevocable.  All 
deeds  are  indeed  irrevocable.  But  only 
the  traitorous  sin  against  the  light  is 
such  that,  in  advance,  the  traitor's  own 
free  acceptance  of  a  cause  has  stamp- 
ed it  with  the  character  of  being  what 
his  own  will  had  defined  as  his  own 
unpardonable  sin.  Whatever  else  the 
traitor  may  hereafter  do,  —  however 
much  he  may  later  become,  and  remain, 
through  his  life,  in  this  cr  any  other 
world,  a  saint,  the  fact  will  remain: 
there  was  a  moment  when  he  freely 
did  whatever  he  could  to  wreck  the 
cause  that  he  had  sworn  to  serve.  The 
traitor  can  henceforth  do  nothing  that 
will  give  to  himself,  precisely  in  so  far 
as  he  was  the  doer  of  that  one  deed,  any 
character  which  is  essentially  different 
from  the  one  determined  by  his  trea- 
son. 

The  hell  of  the  irrevocable :  all  of  us 
know  what  it  is  to  come  to  the  border 
of  it  when  we  contemplate  our  own 
past  mistakes  or  mischances.  But  we 


254 


THE  SECOND  DEATH 


can  enter  it  and  dwell  there  only  when 
the  fact,  'This  deed  is  irrevocable,'  is 
combined  with  the  further  fact,  'This 
deed  is  one  that,  unless  I  call  treason 
my  good,  and  moral  suicide  my  life,  I 
cannot  forgive  myself  for  having  done.' 

Now  to  use  these  expressions  is  not 
to  condemn  the  traitor,  or  any  one  else, 
to  endless  emotional  horrors  of  remorse, 
or  to  any  sensuous  pangs  of  penalty 
or  grief,  or  to  any  one  set  of  emotions 
whatever.  It  is  simply  to  say,  If  I 
morally  value  myself  at  all,  it  remains 
for  me  a  genuine  and  irrevocable  evil 
in  my  world,  that  ever  I  was,  even  if 
for  but  that  one  moment,  and  in  that 
one  deed,  with  all  my  mind  and  my 
soul  and  my  heart  and  my  strength,  a 
traitor.  And  if  I  ever  had  any  cause, 
and  then  betrayed  it,  —  such  an  evil 
not  only  was  my  deed,  but  such  an  evil 
forever  remains,  so  far  as  that  one  deed 
was  done,  the  only  value  that  I  can  at- 
tribute to  myself  precisely  as  the  doer 
of  that  deed  at  that  time. 

What  the  pungency  of  the  odors, 
what  the  remorseful  griefs,  of  the  hell 
of  the  irrevocable  may  be,  for  a  given 
individual,  we  need  not  attempt  to  de- 
termine, and  I  have  not  the  least  right 
or  desire  to  imagine.  Certainly  re- 
morse is  a  poor  companion  for  an  act- 
ive life;  and  I  do  not  counsel  any  one, 
traitor  or  not  traitor,  to  cultivate  re- 
morse. Our  question  is  not  one  about 
one's  feelings,  but  about  one's  genuine 
value  as  a  moral  agent.  Certainly  for- 
getfulness  is  often  useful  when  one 
looks  forward  to  new  deeds.  I  do  not 
counsel  any  one  uselessly  to  dwell  upon 
the  past.  Still  the  fact  remains,  that 
the  more  I  come  to  the  large  and  co- 
herent views  of  my  life  and  of  its  mean- 
ing, the  more  will  the  fact  that,  by  my 
own  traitorous  deed,  I  have  banished 
myself  to  the  hell  of  the  irrevocable, 
appear  to  me  both  a  vast  and  a  grave 
fact  in  my  world.  I  shall  learn,  if  I 
wisely  grow  into  new  life,  neither  to  be 


crushed  by  any  sort  of  facing  of  that 
fact,  nor  to  brood  unduly  over  its  ever- 
lasting presence  as  a  fact  in  my  life. 
But  so  long  as  I  remain  awake  to  the 
real  values  of  my  life,  and  to  the  coher- 
ence of  my  meaning,  I  shall  know  that 
while  no  god  shuts  me,  or  could  pos- 
sibly shut  me,  if  he  would,  into  this 
hell,  it  is  my  own  will  to  say  that,  for 
this  treason,  just  in  so  far  as  I  willfully 
and  knowingly  committed  this  trea- 
son, I  shall  permit  none  of  the  gods  to 
forgive  me.  For  it  is  my  precious  priv- 
ilege to  assert  my  own  reasonable  will, 
by  freely  accepting  my  place  in  the  hell 
of  the  irrevocable,  and  by  never  for- 
giving myself  for  this  sin  against  the 
light. 

If  any  new  deed  can  assign  to  just 
that  one  traitorous  deed  of  mine  any 
essentially  novel  and  reconciling  mean- 
ing, that  new  deed  will  in  any  case 
certainly  not  be  mine.  I  can  do  good 
deeds  in  future;  but  I  cannot  revoke 
my  individual  past  deed.  If  it  ever 
comes  to  appear  as  anything  but  what 
I  myself  then  and  there  made  it,  that 
change  will  be  due  to  no  deed  of  mine. 
Nothing  that  I  myself  can  do  will  ever 
really  reconcile  me  to  my  own  deed,  so 
far  as  it  was  that  treason. 

This,  then,  as  I  suppose,  is  the  essen- 
tial meaning  which  underlies  the  tra- 
ditional doctrine  of  the  endless  penalty 
of  willful  sin.  This  deeper  meaning  is 
that,  quite  apart  from  the  judgment  of 
any  of  the  gods,  and  wholly  in  accord- 
ance with  the  true  rational  will  of  the 
one  who  has  done  the  deed  of  betrayal, 
the  guilt  of  a  free  act  of  betrayal  is  as 
enduring  as  time.  This  doctrine  so  in- 
terpreted is,  I  insist,  not  cheerless.  It 
is  simply  resolute.  It  is  the  word  of 
one  who  is  ready  to  say  to  himself, 
Such  was  my  deed,  and  I  did  it.  No 
repentance,  no  pardoning  power  can 
deprive  us  of  the  duty  and  —  as  I 
repeat  —  the  precious  privilege  of  say- 
ing that  of  our  own  deed. 


THE  REST  IS  SILENCE' 


BY   MABEL  EARLE 


(Horatio  speaks.) 

BEYOND  these  ancient  walls  of  Elsinore 
A  shrouding  mist  is  folded  on  the  snow. 
(Here  by  the  battlements  he  leans  no  more, 
Watching  the  guard  below.) 

League  after  league  along  the  cliff  the  gray 
Wide  water  darkens  with  the  darkening  west. 
(O  troubled  soul,  by  what  uncharted  way 
Hast  thou  gone  forth  to  rest?) 

Within,  the  shadows  creep  across  the  walls, 
Through  the  long  corridors  as  dusk  grows  dim. 
(The  echoing  vastness  of  the  vaulted  halls 
To-night  is  full  of  him.) 

A  gust  of  wind  steals  shuddering  down  the  floor 
Where  once  he  paced  his  hours  of  heart-wrung  watch. 
(It  may  be  that  his  foot  is  at  the  door, 
His  hand  upon  the  latch.) 

'The  rest  is  silence/  —  Ah,  my  liege,  my  prince! 
Though  storm-winds  sweep  the  seas,  and  cannon  roar, 
Silence  is  on  thy  lips,  and  ever  since 
Silence  in  Elsinore! 


ALICE  AND  EDUCATION 


BY    F.    B.   R.    HELLEMS 


*"!F  there's  no  meaning  in  it,  that 
saves  a  world  of  trouble,  as  we  need  n't 
try  to  find  any." !  Unfortunately  this 
sage  declaration  of  the  King  of  Hearts, 
uttered  when  he  was  examining  the 
cryptic  anonymous  document  intro- 
duced at  the  historic  trial,  represents 
only  too  accurately  the  attitude  of 
most  readers  of  Lewis  Carroll.  They 
prefer  to  follow  the  fantastic  adven- 
tures and  marvelous  wanderings  of 
Alice  in  a  mood  of  otiose  enjoyment, 
untroubled  by  any  glimmer  of  wonder 
whether  the  careless  and  happy  feet  of 
childhood  might  not  lead  them  to  some 
glorious  kingdom.  But  the  true  spirit, 
in  which  we  ought  to  read,  breathes  in 
the  peremptory  monarch's  later  declar- 
ation. '"And  yet  I  don't  know,"  he 
went  on,  spreading  out  the  verses  on 
his  knee  and  looking  at  them  with  one 
eye.  "I  seem  to  see  some  meaning 
in  them  after  all." '  Then  he  proceeds 
with  laudable  energy  to  search  for  reli- 
able evidence  beneath  the  meaningless 
surface. 

This  inspiring  example  has  been  con- 
stantly before  me  in  the  preparation  of 
the  present  paper,  which  is  the  out- 
come of  a  long  and  painstaking  exam- 
ination of  the  two  masterpieces  per- 
vaded by  the  personality  of  Alice, 
undertaken  in  the  belief  that  under  the 
winsome  mask  of  delicious  mockery 
would  be  found  many  serious  and  abid- 
ing truths.  And  I  may  state  forthwith 
that  my  study  soon  led  irresistibly  to 
the  conclusion  that  these  apparently 

256 


frivolous  fables  were  really  an  allegory 
of  education. 

Of  a  general  tendency  to  symbolic 
presentation  we  have  very  definite  and 
unescapable  examples  in  many  of 
Professor  Dodgson's  recognized  works. 
The  Hunting  of  the  Snark,  published  in 
1876,  is  accepted  by  every  intelligent 
commentator  as  an  allegory.  It  is  true 
that  the  poem  is  rather  bewildering, 
and  students  are  not  all  agreed  as  to 
the  exact  hidden  meaning,  although 
there  is  a  preponderance  of  opinion 
that  'The  Pursuit  of  Fame'  is  the  real 
subject  cloaked  by  this  whimsical 
verse.  Again,  both  parts  of  Sylvie  and 
Bruno  give  unmistakable  evidence  of 
this  same  tendency;  for  beneath  all  the 
drollery  is  a  manifest  effort  to  com- 
municate profound  theological  dogma. 
Moreover,  his  inherent  incapacity  to 
separate  the  serious  from  the  lighter 
vein  is  seen  most  strikingly  in  Euclid 
and  His  Modern  Rivals  (1879).  Here- 
in Professor  Dodgson  made  a  profound 
and  valuable  contribution  to  Euclidean 
geometry;  but  it  was  thrown  into  dra- 
matic form,  and,  despite  the  advice  of 
all  his  friends,  contained  so  much  ap- 
parent levity,  so  many  clutching  jokes, 
that  most  readers  refused  to  take  it 
seriously. 

Space  forbids  my  adducing  further 
arguments  of  this  type;  but  I  am  sure 
that  with  the  foregoing  I  may  count 
upon  the  sympathetic  toleration  of  my 
readers,  if  not  upon  their  unhesitating 
acquiescence.  For  their  complete  con- 
viction I  must  await  the  ineluctable 
collusiveness  of  specific  passages  and 


ALICE  AND  EDUCATION 


257 


interpretations  to  which  we  shall  turn 
in  a  moment. 

I  have  no  desire  to  blink  the  fact 
that  Professor  Dodgson  formally  de- 
nies that  our  two  books  are  anything 
more  than  they  appear  on  the  surface. 
But  no  carefully  trained  investigator 
will  be  deceived  by  this  threadbare 
device,  which  is  as  old  as  literature 
itself,  and  was  particularly  in  vogue 
about  the  time  these  volumes  were 
given  to  the  world.  The  example  of 
Kingsley  is  enough.  Water-Babies  ap- 
peared in  1863,  two  years  before  Alice 
in  Wonderland;  and  the  reverend 
author  goes  out  of  his  way  to  declare 
that  the  tale  has  no  moral  whatsoever. 
But  nobody  is  deceived.  We  all  know 
that  Mrs.  Bedonebyasyoudid  repre- 
sents the  old  dispensation,  and  Mrs. 
Doasyouwouldbedoneby  the  new,  while 
tiny  Tom  is  nothing  less  than  the  hu- 
man soul. 

But  in  whatever  sense  we  take  Tom 
(I  always  find  pleasure  in  thinking 
that  he  and  Alice  might  have  been 
playmates),  it  is  clear  that 

The  dream-child  moving  through  a  land 
Of  wonders  wild  and  new, 

is  simply  the  human  race  in  its  search, 
ever  eager  and  ever  puzzled,  for  educa- 
tion and  educational  methods. 


ii 

With  this  unavoidable  clearing  of 
the  ground,  I  feel  that  we  may  now 
turn  to  a  few  of  the  anticipations  that 
impart  to  these  allegories  their  real 
value.  In  my  more  ambitious  study, 
which  I  plan  to  make  as  nearly  exhaust- 
ive as  the  nature  of  the  subject  will 
permit,  I  hope  to  expound  Professor 
Dodgson's  system  as  a  unified  and 
philosophic  whole,  and  to  place  him  in 
a  niche  of  honor  a  little  below  Plato, 
but  well  above  such  pedagogical  celeb- 
rities as  Comenius  and  Herbert  Spen- 
cer. In  the  mean  time,  I  must  limit 
VOL.  Ill -NO.  2 


myself  to  a  few  of  those  esoteric  cogita- 
tions that  are  obviously  relevant  to  the 
stage  of  educational  evolution  repre- 
sented by  the  twentieth  century,  which 
William  Morris  prophesied  might  well 
prove  to  be  the  Century  of  Education. 

From  the  many  tempting  themes  we 
may  select  first,  *  The  Play  Element  in 
the  Development  of  the  Child.' 

We  all  know  the  history  of  the  move- 
ment. Long  prior  to  the  proud  and 
grand  doctrine  of  onto-phylogenetic 
parallelism,  and  to  the  invaluable  Teu- 
tonic researches  on  the  play  of  beast 
and  man,  we  find  Rousseau  hinting 
that  we  must  employ  the  superabun- 
dant energy  of  childhood.  From  Rous- 
seau it  was  but  a  step  to  the  epoch- 
making  conclusion  of  Froebel,  who 
fixed  upon  the  restlessness  of  children 
as  the  most  potent  utilizable  factor  in 
their  education.  From  this  seed  sprang 
the  kindergarten.  If  their  restless  act- 
ivity was  to  be  turned  to  account, 
the  children  would  have  to  play;  and 
from  the  kindergarten  the  play-element 
spread  upward  and  outward  until  we 
have  reached  our  present  superb  devo- 
tion to  a  theory  which  declares  that 
the  child  must  never  do  what  he  dis- 
likes or  does  not  understand,  and  that 
whatever  is  hard  is  to  be  shunned.  We 
must  not  only  utilize  the  play-impulse, 
but  magnify  it. 

This  stage  was  clearly  anticipated 
by  the  chapter  on  the  Lobster  Quad- 
rille. In  order  to  emphasize  the  im- 
portance attached  thereto  by  Professor 
Dodgson  I  would  point  out  not  only  that 
it  occupies  one  fourteenth  of  the  whole 
Wonderland  volume,  but  also  that  the 
author  employs  a  very  effective  device 
to  quicken  our  attention;  for  in  the 
preceding  chapter,  just  as  our  interest 
in  the  subject  of  lessons  was  keyed  to 
the  highest  pitch,  the  Gryphon  inter- 
rupted in  a  very  decided  tone  with  in- 
structions to  the  Mock  Turtle  to  Hell 
her  something  about  the  games.' 


258 


ALICE  AND  EDUCATION 


The  Lobster  Quadrille  itself  is  evi- 
dently intended  to  represent  a  kinder- 
garten game  that  shall  entertain  the 
child,  improve  his  knowledge  of  living 
creatures,  develop  the  imagination, 
and  bring  him  to  unity  with  himself,  — 
quite  as  Froebel  demanded.  As  a  mat- 
ter of  pedagogical  method,  one  ob- 
serves instantly  that  the  Mock  Turtle, 
after  vividly  describing  a  part  of  the 
dance,  proposed  that  he  and  the  Gry- 
phon should  do  the  first  figure.  No 
mere  verbal  presentation  for  him. 
Then,  just  as  in  a  well-regulated  kinder- 
garten, the  two  creatures  executed  the 
interesting  movements,  while  one  of 
them  sang,  and  both  waved  their  fore- 
arms to  mark  the  time. 

With  reference  to  the  song  itself, 
which  begins,  '"Will  you  walk  a  little 
faster,"  said  a  whiting  to  a  snail,'  and 
could  be  quoted  by  any  of  my  readers, 
I  would  merely  point  out  that  the 
rhythm  is  strongly  marked,  so  as  to  be 
caught  easily  by  the  childish  ear;  that 
there  is  enough  repetition  to  avoid 
fatiguing  the  delicate  organisms;  and 
that,  while  many  of  the  thoughts  are 
familiar,  there  is  just  enough  novelty 
to  stimulate  curiosity  and  thereby 
insure  mental  growth.  It  may  be  con- 
fidently asserted  that  the  most  cap- 
tious of  my  readers  will  feel  the  superi- 
ority of  this  poetry  —  for  it  is  poetry 
—  to  such  favorite  songs  as,  *  My  heart 
is  God's  little  garden,'  or,  'The  grass- 
hopper green  had  a  game  of  tag  with 
some  crickets  that  lived  near  by.' 

In  passing,  we  should  not  neglect  the 
reference  to  the  doctrine  of  immortal- 
ity, the  comforting  assurance  of  a  life 
hereafter,  not  formally  obtruded,  but 
gently  and  graciously  intimated  in  that 
always  attractive  phrase,  '  the  other 
shore.'  The  sterling  moralist  in  Profes- 
sor Dodgson  is  never  thrust  upon  our 
notice;  but  he  is  never  quite  absent. 

At  the  conclusion  of  the  song,  the 
Gryphon  and  Mock  Turtle  skillfully 


utilized  the  interest  and  curiosity  now 
aroused  to  impart  some  valuable  in- 
formation as  to  marine  life.  I  must  not 
quote  the  passage,  but  everybody  will 
remember  how  the  Gryphon  explained 
to  Alice  that  the  whiting  was  so-called 
because  it  did  the  boots  and  shoes  un- 
der the  sea,  where  they  obviously  must 
be  done  with  whiting;  and  that  the 
shoes  were  made  of  soles  and  eels. 

Later  on,  still  with  due  attention  to 
method,  Alice  was  herself  made  to  re- 
peat a  verse,  but,  like  some  children, 
being  dimly  and  half-resentfully  aware 
that  she  was  being  taught,  she  became 
so  confused  that  the  voice  of  the  slug- 
gard turned  into  the  voice  of  the  lob- 
ster. (It  has  always  been  suspected 
that  the  prominence  of  the  lobster 
throughout  the  chapter  has  some 
special  meaning.)  Eventually  she  sat 
down  with  her  face  in  her  hands,  won- 
dering if  anything  would  ever  happen 
in  a  natural  way  again. 

If  it  should  appear  to  any  teacher 
that  Professor  Dodgson  goes  rather  far 
in  the  importance  assigned  to  play  and 
the  principles  of  ease  and  pleasantness 
in  juvenile  training,  I  would  suggest 
that  he  represents  a  natural  reaction 
from  the  formalism  then  in  vogue;  and 
that  in  particular  he  is  striving  to  re- 
fute a  passage  in  Water-Babies,  which 
had  appeared  two  years  before,  and 
was  being  widely  quoted  with  strong 
approval.  Tom  had  been  playing 
with  lobsters  (again  that  symbolic 
crustacean)  and  other  aquatic  creat- 
ures, and  had  asked  to  go  home  with 
Ellie  on  Sunday.  To  his  request,  the 
fairy,  Mrs.  Bedonebyasyoudid,  replies, 
*  Those  who  go  there,  must  go  first 
where  they  do  not  like,  and  do  what 
they  do  not  like,  and  help  somebody 
they  do  not  like.'  It  is  no  wonder  that 
such  a  progressive  intellect  and  tender 
heart  as  Professor  Dodgson  was  driven 
to  an  extreme  in  his  protests  against 
this  benighted  and  barbarous  mediae- 


ALICE  AND  EDUCATION 


259 


valism.    It  is  no  wonder  that  we  still 
follow  in  his  gentle  footsteps. 

From  a  consideration  of  the  play- 
element,  we  have  a  natural  transition 
to  Nature  Study.  The  Alice  books 
not  only  advocate  this  pursuit,  but 
breathe  about  it  the  charming  aura  of 
novelty.  I  have  not  been  able  to  de- 
termine how  directly  Professor  Dodg- 
son  is  indebted  to  Pestalozzi;  for,  as 
a  matter  of  fact,  even  later  students 
have  failed  to  attach  due  importance 
to  that  educator's  substantial  service 
in  this  field,  when  he  was  working  at 
Stanz.  But  without  Pestalozzi,  or  any 
other  one  thinker,  this  beneficent  step 
of  pedagogical  evolution  was  bound  to 
be  taken.  We  could  not  see  children 
confined  forever  in  mud- walled  prisons. 
Liberation  was  inevitable.  And  who 
can  fail  to  recognize  the  tremendous 
gain  when,  as  one  of  Mr.  Punch's 
young  men  has  felicitously  voiced  the 
change,  — 

We  gave  up  Euclid  and  rule  of  three 
And  nature-studied  the  bumble-bee. 

It  was  only  to  be  expected  that  our 
educational  Lynceus  should  grasp  the 
uttermost  possibilities  of  this  emanci- 
pating movement.  It  is  no  accident 
that  one  of  the  first  stopping-places  of 
Alice  after  passing  through  the  looking- 
glass,  was  the '  Garden  of  Live  Flowers.' 
Nor  is  it  merely  by  hap  that  she  enters 
into  such  close  communion  with  these 
children  of  Proserpina  that  she  can 
actually  share  their  thoughts.  Would 
that  every  child  in  America  might 
learn  the  lesson ! 

* "  0  Tiger-lily,"  said  Alice,  "  I  wish 
you  could  talk." 

' "We  can  talk,"  said  the  Tiger-lily, 
"when  there's  anybody  worth  talking 
to.'" 

There  is  the  secret.  Furthermore, 
like  all  really  profound  teachers,  as 
distinguished  from  those  who  merely 
seem  profound,  he  shuns  the  senti- 
mental fallacy  of  over-idealizing.  The 


flowers  have  personalities;  they  are  not 
merely  uniform  entities  of  angelic  tem- 
perament. The  regal  Rose  and  the 
lowly  Daisy  alike  will  have  their  joke, 
declaring  that  the  tree  will  take  care  of 
them,  for  it  says  'Bough-wough,'  and 
can  bark  in  time  of  danger.  The  im- 
perial Tiger-lily  loses  her  temper  at  the 
garrulous  smaller  flowers;  while  the 
Violet  and  the  Rose  are  distinctly  rude 
to  Alice,  the  former  snarling  out  in  a 
severe  tone, '  It 's  my  opinion  you  never 
think  at  all,'  and  the  latter  exclaim- 
ing, with  even  more  startling  asperity, 
'I  never  saw  anybody  that  looked 
stupider.'  This  same  insistence  on  the 
unfriendly  possibilities  of  nature  may 
be  marked  in  the  scene  in  Maeterlinck's 
Blue  Bird,  where  the  trees  are  repre- 
sented as  frankly  hostile  to  mankind. 
And  both  teachers  are  right  in  refusing 
to  darken  knowledge  with  half-truths. 

Even  more  inspiring  than  the  won- 
derful live  flowers  are  the  looking-glass 
insects.  We  must  learn  the  fauna  as 
well  as  the  flora.  Beginning  with  the 
Horse-fly  we  pass  to  the  Rocking-horse- 
fly;  and  the  importance  of  drawing  for 
children  is  driven  home  by  Sir  John 
Tenniel's  copy  from  life  of  that  do- 
mestic insect,  to  which  I  have  often 
compared  the  curious  stick-insects  of 
Ceylon.  The  Snapdragon-fly,  with  the 
Bread-and-butter-fly,  must  likewise 
appeal  to  the  budding  sense  of  child- 
hood, if  only  the  opportunity  is  given. 
But  here  again  our  teacher  will  not 
have  us  neglect  the  final,  bitter  truth. 
If  the  Bread-and-butter-fly  cannot 
find  its  proper  food  it  must  die.  *  "But 
that  must  happen  often,"  remarked 
Alice  thoughtfully.'  (Children  will 
think  if  we  only  let  them.)  '"It  al- 
ways happens,"  said  the  Gnat.'  Na- 
ture, that  is  the  universal  creator,  is 
also  the  universal  destroyer. 

Just  a  little  later  comes  a  real  diffi- 
culty. The  Gnat,  you  will  remember, 
having  made  a  very  silly  pun,  'sighed 


260 


ALICE  AND  EDUCATION 


deeply,  while  two  large  tears  came  roll- 
ing down  its  cheeks.'  '"You  shouldn't 
make  jokes,"  Alice  said,  "if  it  makes 
you  so  unhappy." '  One  of  my  Parisian 
correspondents  will  have  it  that  the 
Gnat  was  unhappy  simply  because  the 
pun  was  so  bad;  but  I  am  inclined  to 
believe,  with  a  fellow  investigator  at 
Berlin,  that  the  incident  is  hinting  once 
more  at  the  idea  that  all  living  things 
feel  joy  and  grief,  even  as  mankind. 
Life  is  one.  From  the  lowest  forms  of 
protozoa  to  the  godlike  genius  who 
passes  beyond  the  flaming  battlements 
of  the  world  to  storm  their  secrets  from 
the  stars,  life  is  one. 

However,  from  this  tangle,  we  are 
carried  to  the  idyllic  scene  where  Alice 
and  the  Fawn  converse  together.  They 
have  forgotten  their  different  worlds, 
have  forgotten  their  very  selves,  in  this 
moment  of  complete  understanding.  I 
could  quote  passage  after  passage  deal- 
ing with  the  theme  of  nature-study,  but 
here,  I  think,  is  the  supreme  lesson; 
and  I  prefer  to  bid  farewell  to  this  sub- 
ject with  the  picture  of  our  gentle 
heroine  gazing  wistfully  into  the  great 
soulful  eyes  of  this  creature  of  the  wild. 
It  is  the  burgeoning  genius  of  the  race 
learning  to  read,  with  love,  the  manu- 
script of  God. 

But  the  more  advanced  educational 
thought  of  to-day  is  so  completely  in 
accord  with  the  above  deductions  from 
my  master's  teaching,  that  there  is  no 
occasion  to  carry  the  discussion  further. 

I  had  planned  to  continue  this  part 
of  my  paper  with  a  number  of  other 
anticipations  of  our  modern  theories 
and  practice,  including:  The  Abuse  of 
Memory  (cf.  Alice  and  the  White 
Queen  and  King) ;  Shortening  the  Peri- 
od of  Formal  Study  (cf.  the  Gryphon's 
explanation  of  lesson  as  that  which 
lessens  from  day  to  day) ;  Self-Expres- 
sion and  Vocational  Activity  (cf.  the 
Cook);  Methods  in  Education  (cf. 
Tweedledum  and  Tweedledee) ;  Devel- 


oping the  Imagination  (passim) ;  The 
Emotions  in  Education  (cf.  The  Wal- 
rus and  the  Carpenter);  and  many 
others.  Then,  with  the  light  shed  by 
these  general  discussions,  I  had  hoped 
to  consider  the  curricula  of  primary 
and  secondary  schools,  and  to  move 
from  them  to  the  college  and  univer- 
sity. 

in 

However,  I  must  omit  all  the  inter- 
vening stages  in  order  to  take  up  one 
or  two  of  his  anticipations  of  the  pro- 
blems of  higher  education ;  for  herein, 
I  think,  we  shall  find  some  of  his  most 
pointed  and  pertinent  reflections. 
Among  these  fundamental  questions 
are  The  Elective  System  and  Original 
Research;  and  inasmuch  as  the  former 
offers  an  instance  of  our  author's  pass- 
ing even  beyond  our  position  at  the 
beginning  of  the  twentieth  century,  we 
may  give  it  prior  consideration. 

Nobody  has  failed  to  observe  the 
triumphant  progress  of  the  elective 
system.  It  came  to  many  as  a  glorious 
ennobling  emancipation  from  the  old 
hide-bound  curriculum.  To  others  it 
seemed  to  offer  the  possibility  of  de- 
veloping breadth  of  horizon  without 
exacting  depth  of  thought.  It  increased 
the  number  of  students  in  many  insti- 
stutions,  thereby  encouraging  state 
legislatures  or  generous  private  bene- 
factors to  open  the  flood-gates  of  the 
golden  life-giving  stream.  It  evoked 
reams  of  debate,  always  earnest,  and 
often  bitter.  But  somehow  the  con- 
troversy has  been  softened,  until  even 
the  most  earnest  partisan  ought  to  be 
able  to  read  with  keen  enjoyment 
Professor  Dodgson's  inimitable  de- 
scription of  the  elective  system,  under 
the  guise  of  the  Caucus  Race.  If  a  few 
of  my  readers  have  hitherto  questioned 
my  interpretations,  I  look  for  their 
instant  agreement  on  this  point.  If  our 
author  was  not  writing  of  the  elective 


ALICE  AND  EDUCATION 


261 


system,  he  was  writing  of  nothing  seri- 
ous whatever.  On  this  I  am  willing  to 
stake  my  exegetical  reputation. 

It  will  be  remembered  that  they 
formed  a  damp  and  queer-looking 
party  on  the  bank  of  the  pool.  'There 
was  a  Duck,  and  a  Dodo,  a  Lory  and 
an  Eaglet,  and  several  other  curious 
creatures.'  The  Lory,  with  his  assump- 
tion of  superiority,  and  the  Mouse,  with 
his  technical  aridity,  may  well  repre- 
sent the  older  curriculum.  They  have 
nothing  to  offer  that  promises  imme- 
diate results.  But  the  Dodo  proceeds 
to  move  for  the  adoption  of  more  ener- 
getic remedies,  and,  notwithstanding 
the  protests  against  his  long  words, 
he  carries  the  day.  His  solution  comes 
in  the  proposal  for  a  Caucus  race;  and 
with  truly  commendable  pedagogical 
instinct  he  declares  that  the  best  way 
to  explain  it  is  to  do  it. 
,  '  First  it  marked  out  a  race-course,  in 
a  sort  of  circle  ("the  exact  shape 
does  n't  matter,"  it  said),  and  then  all 
the  party  were  placed  along  the  course, 
here  and  there.  There  was  no  "One, 
two,  three,  and  away,"  but  they  began 
running  when  they  liked,  and  left  off 
when  they  liked,  so  that  it  was  not  easy 
to  know  when  the  race  was  over.  How- 
ever, when  they  had  been  running  half- 
an-hour  or  so,  and  were  quite  dry  again, 
the  Dodo  suddenly  called  out,  "The 
race  is  over!"  and  they  all  crowded 
round  it,  panting,  and  asking,  "But 
who  has  won?" 

'This  question  the  Dodo  could  not 
answer  without  a  great  deal  of  thought, 
and  it  sat  for  a  long  time  with  one  fin- 
ger pressed  upon  its  forehead  (the  posi- 
tion in  which  you  usually  see  Shakes- 
speare,  in  the  pictures  of  him),  while 
the  rest  waited  in  silence.  At  last  the 
Dodo  said,  "Everybody  has  won,  and 
all  must  have  prizes." 

'"But  who  is  to  give  the  prizes?" 
quite  a  chorus  of  voices  asked. 

'"Why,  she,  of  course,"  said  the 


Dodo,  pointing  to  Alice  with  one  finger; 
and  the  whole  party  at  once  crowded 
round  her,  calling  out  in  a  confused 
way,  "Prizes!  Prizes!"' 

So  the  colleges  and  universities,  like 
Alice,  having  no  idea  what  to  do,  put 
their  hands  in  their  pockets  and  took 
out  a  number  of  diplomas.  These, 
after  being  tied  with  the  beautiful  and 
sentimental  college  colors,  were  dis- 
tributed as  prizes,  and  it  always 
'turned  out  that  there  was  one  apiece 
all  round.' 

There  can  be  no  doubt,  however,  that 
my  revered  teacher  disapproved  of  the 
elective  system.  His  own  training  had 
been  quite  the  reverse;  and  he  explic- 
itly states  that,  'Alice  thought  the 
whole  thing  very  absurd;  but  they  all 
looked  so  grave  that  she  did  not  dare  to 
laugh.'  Accordingly,  despite  the  emi- 
nence of  the  most  distinguished  spon- 
sor of  the  elective  system,  despite  the 
brilliance  and  number  of  its  advocates, 
I  can  only  declare  in  favor  of  a  group 
system.  Malo  err  are  cum  Platone  quam 
cum  istis  vera  s entire. 

'There  is  nothing  more  beautiful 
than  a  key,  as  long  as  we  do  not  know 
what  it  opens.'  Readers  of  Maeterlinck 
will  recognize  the  suggestive  avowal  of 
Aglavaine,  which  I  have  borrowed  to 
apply  to  the  thrill  of  the  student  when 
he  is  introduced  by  the  professor  to 
original  research.  Only  a  master  sym- 
bolist, like  Maeterlinck,  has  a  right  to 
attempt  to  utter  in  prose  our  profound 
emotion,  when 

We  felt  a  grand  and  beautiful  fear, 

For  we  knew  a  marvelous  thought  drew  near. 

Organized  work  in  original  investiga- 
tion by  students  in  our  American  uni- 
versities may  be  said  to  date  from  the 
foundation  of  Johns  Hopkins.  Before 
that  event,  research  was  largely  a  mat- 
ter of  individual  initiative  and  pursuit, 
while  facilities  for  the  publication  of 
original  articles  were  inadequate.  In 
an  article  on  'Three  Decades  of  the 


262 


ALICE  AND  EDUCATION 


American  University/  I  have  already 
paid  generous  tribute  to  the  solid,  pio- 
neer services  rendered  by  that  institu- 
tion. In  the  last  forty  years,  however, 
the  spirit  of  investigation  has  poured 
through  a  million  channels.  It  has 
been  of  incalculable  benefit ;  but  by  its 
side  there  has  spread  a  keenness  of  con- 
tention for  the  recognition  of  the  inves- 
tigator's service  that  is  dangerously 
near  to  being  unphilosophical.  Indeed, 
the  proverbial  odium  theologicum  could 
scarcely  exhibit  greater  acerbity  than 
the  rivalry  of  fellow  specialists  about 
priority  of  discovery,  accuracy  of  ob- 
servation, or  interpretation  of  minu- 
tiae. The  struggle  never  ends;  but 
occasionally  a  truce  is  patched  up, 
with  public  assurances  of  good-will  and 
private  confidence  of  complete  victory 
on  both  sides.  Inevitably  there  has 
sprung  up  a  certain  distrust  on  the  part 
of  the  more  aggressive  Philistines,  al- 
though the  world  at  large  is  generally 
content  with  a  smiling,  tolerant,  more 
or  less  disdainful,  aloofness.  All  of  these 
phases  were  manifestly  before  Profes- 
sor Dodgson's  mind  when  he  was  com- 
posing under  the  caption,  *  It 's  my  own 
Invention.' 

Turning  first  to  inventive  originality 
and  investigation,  we  are  attracted  at 
once  by  the  eager,  active  persistence  of 
the  White  Knight.  This  chevalier  of 
education  has  the  unusual  spirit  that 
can  delight  in  discovery  or  invention 
purely  for  its  own  sake,  without  de- 
spising practical  results.  To  word  the 
thought  in  Huxley's  matchless  phrase- 
ology, he  can  enjoy  a  sail  over  the 
illimitable  ocean  of  the  unknowable, 
without  begrudging  to  applied  science 
its  utilization  of  the  flotsam  and 
jetsam. 

As  examples  of  the  utilitarian  aspect, 
we  have  his  painful  elaboration  of  the 
beehive  and  the  mouse-trap,  which  he 
has  hung  to  his  saddle,  in  case  any  bees 
or  mice  should  come  near;  and  the  ank- 


lets round  the  horse's  feet,  to  guard 
against  the  biting  of  sharks.  Equally 
humane  and  practical  are  some  of  the 
other  results  of  his  investigations,  such 
as  the  plan  for  preventing  one's  hair 
from  falling  out,  or  the  discovery  that 
the  great  art  of  riding  is  to  keep  your 
balance  properly.  Nor  should  we  fail 
to  note  that  his  heart  is  never  daunted 
by  the  skepticism  of  Alice. 

But  even  finer,  more  professorial, 
more  like  Thales,  is  the  unsullied,  ob- 
livious, self-effacing  devotion  to  unre- 
warded research,  the  final  joy  of  the 
seeker. 

:"How  can  you  go  on  talking  so 
quietly,  head  downwards?"  Alice 
asked,  as  she  dragged  him  out  by  his 
feet,  and  laid  him  in  a  heap  on  the 
bank. 

'"What  does  it  matter  where  my 
body  happens  to  be?"  he  said.  "My 
mind  goes  on  working  all  the  same.'" 

Then  he  described  his  invention  of  a 
new  pudding,  and  Alice,  like  the  dis- 
trustful Philistine,  raised  the  query  as 
to  its  practicability.  This  evokes  the 
superb  rejoinder,  uttered  with  bowed 
head  and  lowered  voice,  — 

'"I  don't  believe  that  pudding  ever 
was  cooked.  In  fact,  I  don't  believe 
that  pudding  ever  will  be  cooked.  And 
yet  it  was  a  very  clever  pudding  to 
invent.'" 

The  famous  retort  of  Pasteur  to  the 
shoddy  French  nobility,  when  he  de- 
clared that  the  spirit  of  science  was 
above  thoughts  of  personal  gain,  was 
no  finer  than  this  hushed  self-revela- 
tion, coming  straight  from  the  heart. 

Herewith,  the  remaining  points  of 
this  topic  may  be  promptly  dismissed. 
We  have  seen  that  the  comments  of 
Alice  represent  both  the  carping  Phil- 
istine and  the  uncomprehending  pub- 
lic. It  only  remains  for  us  to  notice 
that  the  bickerings  of  researchful 
enthusiasts  are  depicted  both  by  the 
quarrel  between  the  two  White  Knights 


ALICE  AND  EDUCATION 


263 


over  the  ownership  of  the  helmet,  and 
by  the  bout  between  the  Red  Knight 
and  the  first  White  Knight  when  they 
come  upon  Alice.  Indeed,  the  choice 
of  knights  for  the  leading  personse  of 
this  instructive  drama  hints  at  the 
same  tendency,  although  it  is  doubt- 
less intended  also  to  suggest  the  chiv- 
alrous devotion  of  the  true  investi- 
gator. 

The  next  question  would  naturally 
have  been  The  Study  of  the  Classics 
in  our  Colleges,  to  which  a  new  inter- 
est has  been  given  by  the  agitation  at 
Amherst.  Both  sides  of  the  contro- 
versy are  represented  in  our  volume,  an 
excellent  starting-point  being  offered 
by  the  different  impressions  of  the 
Classical  Master  we  receive  from  the 
Gryphon  and  the  Mock  Turtle.  The 
former  maintained  that  he  was  an  old 
crab,  whereas  the  latter  asserted  that 
he  taught  Laughing  and  Grief.  Assur- 
edly the  Turtle's  phrase  has  in  mind 
the  strong  humanistic  tendency  of 
classical  studies,  while  the  Gryphon's 
vigorous  but  contemptuous  designation 
intimates  a  belief  that  such  studies  lead 
to  *  progress  backwards,'  if  I  may  be- 
come indebted  to  Mr.  Cable's  lovable 
schoolmaster. 

Omitting  this  and  many  other  top- 
ics, I  may  tarry  a  moment  on  Professor 
Dodgson's  surprising  references  to 
philosophy;  and  it  must  not  be  taken 
as  an  admission  either  of  slothfulness 
or  incapacity,  if  I  confess  that  a  few 
details  are  not  quite  clear  to  me.  De- 
spite the  fact  that  a  Kantian  discussion 
of  time  is  placed  on  the  lips  of  the  Mad 
Hatter;  despite  the  fact  that  the  same 
problem,  together  with  the  non-exist- 
ence of  space  and  the  unsubstantiality 
of  matter,  is  suggested  by  the  cake  that 
must  be  served  first  and  cut  after- 
wards, I  am  nevertheless  convinced 
that  the  household  of  the  Duchess 
must  represent  the  penetralia  contain- 
ing the  ultimate  arcana. 


That  noble  personage  herself  prob- 
ably symbolizes  the  older,  more  purely 
metaphysical  schools.  This  is  indi- 
cated by  her  dignified  vocabulary  and 
stately  copious  presentation,  as  well  as 
by  her  contempt  for  lower  mathema- 
tics, and  for  mere  human  affections. 

The  latter  aspects  are  perceived  at 
once  in  the  dialogue  following  Alice's 
uncertainty  whether  the  period  re- 
quired for  the  earth  to  revolve  on  its 
axis  might  be  twenty-four  hours  or 
twelve;  for  the  Duchess  exclaims  im- 
patiently that  she  never  could  abide 
figures,  and  begins  that  most  unfeel- 
ing of  all  lullabies:  *  Speak  roughly 
to  your  little  boy  and  beat  him  when 
he  sneezes.'  Furthermore,  that  titled 
lady's  subsequent  treatment  of  her  off- 
spring corresponds  very  closely  to  what 
is  recorded  of  two  or  three  famous 
representatives  of  the  metaphysical 
school.  This  behavior  of  hers  cannot 
be  explained,  much  less  justified,  on 
any  other  basis. 

The  former  aspects,  the  character- 
istic vocabulary  and  presentation,  are 
so  unmistakably  set  forth  in  the  follow- 
ing passage  that  I  merely  transcribe  it. 

* "  It 's  a  mineral,  I  think,"  said  Alice, 
in  support  of  her  contention  that  mus- 
tard was  not  a  bird. 

'"  Of  course  it  is,"  said  the  Duchess, 
"there's  a  large  mustard-mine  near 
here.  And  the  moral  of  that  is  —  'The 
more  there  is  of  mine,  the  less  there  is 
of  yours." 

'"Oh,  I  know!"  exclaimed  Alice, 
who  had  not  attended  to  this  last  re- 
mark. "It's  a  vegetable.  It  doesn't 
look  like  one,  but  it  is." 

"I  quite  agree  with  you,"  said  the 
Duchess;  "and  the  moral  of  that  is  — 
'  Be  what  you  would  seem  to  be '  —  or, 
if  you'd  like  it  put  more  simply  — 
'Never  imagine  yourself  not  to  be 
otherwise  than  what  it  might  appear  to 
others  that  what  you  were  or  might 
have  been  was  not  otherwise  than 


ALICE  AND  EDUCATION 


what  you  had  been  would  have  ap- 
peared to  them  to  be  otherwise.' " 

'"I  think  I  should  understand  that 
better,"  Alice  said  very  politely,  "if  I 
had  it  written  down;  but  I  can't  quite 
follow  it  as  you  say  it." 

4 "That's  nothing  to  what  I  could 
say  if  I  chose,"  the  Duchess  replied,  in 
a  pleased  tone.' 

The  Cheshire  Cat,  on  the  other  hand, 
most  probably  anticipates  the  more 
optimistic  development  of  pragma- 
tism; and  I  hope  I  may  be  forgiven  the 
personal  intrusion,  if  I  point  out  that 
I  was  the  first  writer  to  emphasize  the 
lightly  mentioned  fact  that  the  cat  is 
part  of  the  household  of  the  Duchess  and, 
therefore,  must  be  interpreted  philosoph- 
ically. 

That  it  pictures  optimism  in  some 
form  is  incontrovertible.  The  insist- 
ence that  the  comfort-giving  grin  ap- 
pears before  the  body  of  the  animal, 
and  remains  after  the  latter's  vanish- 
ing, can  only  be  explained  by  reference 
to  a  philosophy  that  will  have  all  well 
with  the  world  regardless  of  dishar- 
monies and  defects  in  the  system  of 
things;  a  philosophy,  as  is  suggested 
by  a  clever  French  litterateur,  that 
strives  to  erect  a  world  temple  with 
such  a  beautiful  fagade  that  it  shall 
hide  the  bitter  disappointment  of  man- 
kind within  the  sanctum.  And  if  we 
are  dealing  with  some  form  of  optim- 
ism, I  can  only  conclude  that  it  is  the 
more  hopeful  and  vigorous  phase  of 
pragmatism. 

The  most  pertinent,  I  might  almost 
say,  the  most  unanswerable,  passage  in 
favor  of  this  pragmatic  interpretation 
is  the  following:  — 

"Would  you  tell  me,  please,  which 
way  I  ought  to  go  from  here?" 

'"That  depends  a  good  deal  on 
where  you  want  to  get  to,"  said  the 
Cat. 

'"I  don't  much  care  where  — "  said 
Alice. 


"Then    it    doesn't    much    matter 
which  way  you  go,"  said  the  Cat. 

—  so  long  as  I  get  somewhere," 
Alice  added  as  an  explanation. 

:"Oh,  you're  sure  to  do  that,"  said 
the  Cat,  "if  you  only  walk  long 
enough."' 

None  of  my  readers  can  fail  to  recog- 
nize the  essentials  of  pragmatism  in 
this  passage.  There  is  the  crucial  re- 
cognition that  philosophy  must  be  con- 
nected with  actual  needs;  that  it  must 
deal  with  actual  conditions;  that  it 
must  appreciate  human  limitations. 
Indications  of  the  same  trend  are  to  be 
seen  in  the  Cat's  vivid  interest  in  the 
baby  that  turned  into  a  pig,  as  well  as 
in  his  friendly  converse  with  Alice  at 
the  croquet  party. 

One  argument,  suggested  to  me  by 
a  conservative,  philosophical  friend,  I 
shrink  from  introducing;  but,  inasmuch 
as  he  insists  that  it  is  finally  conclusive, 
I  indulge  his  fancy.  You  will  remember 
that  when  the  King  and  Queen  order 
the  beheading  of  the  Cat,  there  springs 
up  an  argument  as  to  whether  you  can 
cut  off  a  head  when  there  is  no  body  to 
cut  it  off  from.  Then,  at  the  critical 
moment  of  the  inquisition,  the  Cat's 
head  begins  to  fade  away  and  soon 
entirely  disappears.  My  colleague 
maintains  most  stoutly  that  this  can 
only  represent  pragmatism  before  a 
searching  examination  at  the  hands  of 
an  expert  dialectician.  If  he  is  right,  I 
could  set  down  as  final  the  explanation 
I  have  proposed.  But  in  any  event  the 
evidence  is  very  strong,  and  until  some 
other  student  shall  propose  a  more 
satisfactory  theory,  we  may  continue 
to  regard  the  Cheshire  Cat  as  a  sym- 
bol of  the  more  optimistic  phases  of 
pragmatism. 

IV 

Topic  after  topic  crowds  upon  me 
like  imprisoned  birds  fluttering  toward 
the  door  of  their  cage;  but  I  must  leave 


ALICE  AND  EDUCATION 


265 


them  all  unreleased  save  one.  In  both 
volumes  the  master  leaves  the  supreme 
lesson  until  the  end,  and  in  both  vol- 
umes the  lesson  is  the  same.  He  would 
have  us  remember  in  all  education  that 
human  creatures  are  the  one  thing 
really  important.  We  spin  our  theories 
and  weave  them  into  the  fabric  of  a 
system;  but  the  child  and  the  man  are 
above  systems  and  theories.  Bergson 
has  rendered  a  genuine  service  by  his 
insistence  that  life  is  self-developing 
and  self-comprehending.  On  ultimate 
metaphysical  analysis,  life  is  the  uni- 
verse discovering  itself  and  creating 
itself;  it  is  at  once  natura  naturans  and 
natura  naturata.  Ever  and  ever  it 
works  and  plays  with  the  visible  and 
invisible  world,  to  find  its  highest  ex- 
pression in  man.  And  for  this  highest 
manifestation,  who  shall  make  a  final 
system  of  education?  But  our  puny 
systematizers  will  have  at  least  a  day 
for  their  schematic  panaceas,  not  real- 
izing how  soon  they  must  cease  to  be, 
when  mankind,  half-smiling,  half-an- 
gry, bids  them  go.  And  this  truth,  the 
eternal  lesson,  the  final  message,  is 
delivered  to  us  in  redoubled  clarity. 
At  the  close  of  the  Wonderland  volume 
our  heroine  declares,  '"Who  cares  for 
you?  You  are  nothing  but  a  pack  of 
cards." '  Likewise,  at  the  climax  of  the 
Looking-Glass  allegory,  she  breaks  up 
the  fantastic  banquet :  '  One  good  pull, 
and  plates,  dishes,  guests,  and  candles 
come  crashing  down  together  in  a 
heap  on  the  floor.' 

So  has  it  fared,  so  will  it  ever  fare 
with  all  systems  and  theories  of  educa- 
tion that  place  their  faith  in  methods 
or  mechanism,  and  would  raise  them- 
selves above  human  nature.  Eventu- 
ally the  children  of  men  will  eat  bread 
and  butter  instead  of  dream-cakes;  will 
shake  the  Red  Queen  into  a  compan- 
ionable kitten;  will  come  back  from 
Wonderland  to  the  simple  natural  life 
of  healthful  human  beings. 


Here,  with  reluctance  and  no  little 
difficulty,  I  check  my  eager  pen.  As  I 
review  the  paper,  I  am  painfully  aware 
that  it  is  both  incomplete  and  frag- 
mentary. I  can  only  pray  that  my 
readers  will  view  the  disjecta  membra 
with  mercy,  and  wait  with  patience  for 
my  authoritative  and  exhaustive  treat- 
ment. Howbeit,  even  this  popular  pre- 
sentation in  simple  form  may  have 
served  to  establish  the  contention  with 
which  I  began.  Nor  can  I  quite  resign 
the  hope  that,  as  a  result  of  my  efforts, 
many  lovers  of  Professor  Dodgson  will 
read  him  with  enlarged  understanding 
as  well  as  with  enhanced  pleasure. 

If  it  shall  appear  to  the  more  prac- 
tical-minded critics  of  my  paper  that  I 
have  occasionally  discovered  a  hidden 
meaning  where  none  existed,  I  can 
only  point  out  that  in  such  recondite 
matters,  making  constant  demands  on 
the  creative  imagination,  a  pioneer  is 
bound  to  go  astray  at  times.  But  he 
must  persist  in  his  task,  strengthening 
himself  with  the  encouragement  of 
mighty  souls  like  Schiller,  whose  words 
seem  almost  prophetic  in  the  closeness 
of  their  application:  Wage  du  zu  irren 
und  zu  trdumen:  Hoher  Sinn  liegt  oft 
in  kind'schem  Spiel.  My  sole  aim  has 
been  the  discovery  of  the  truth;  and 
if  I  have  ever  doubted  that  under  some 
astounding  detail  of  this  childish  alle- 
gory there  lay  an  ultimate  lesson,  I 
have  always  been  saved  from  disheart- 
enment  by  the  comforting  assurance 
of  our  author  himself:  — 

'"I  can't  tell  you  now  what  the 
moral  of  that  is,"  said  the  metaphys- 
ical Duchess,  "but  I  shall  remember 
presently." 

'"Perhaps  it  hasn't  one,"  Alice 
ventured  to  remark. 

"'Tut,  tut,  child,"  said  the  Duchess, 
"everything's  got  a  moral,  if  only  you 
can  find  it."' 


OUT  OF  THE  WILDERNESS 


BY   JOHN   MUIR 


I  LEARNED  arithmetic  in  Scotland 
without  understanding  any  of  it,  al- 
though I  had  the  rules  by  heart.  But 
when  I  was  about  fifteen  or  sixteen 
years  of  age  I  began  to  grow  hungry 
for  real  knowledge,  and  persuaded  fa- 
ther, who  was  willing  enough  to  have 
me  study  provided  my  farm  work  was 
kept  up,  to  buy  me  a  higher  arithme- 
tic. Beginning  at  the  beginning,  in  one 
summer,!  easily  finished  it,  without  as- 
sistance, in  the  short  intervals  between 
the  end  of  dinner  and  the  afternoon 
start  for  the  harvest  and  hay-fields,  ac- 
complishing more  without  a  teacher  in 
a  few  scraps  of  time,  than  in  years  in 
school  before  my  mind  was  ready  for 
such  work.  Then  in  succession  I  took 
up  algebra,  geometry,  and  trigonome- 
try, and  made  some  little  progress  in 
each,  and  reviewed  grammar.  I  was 
fond  of  reading,  but  father  brought 
only  a  few  religious  books  from  Scot- 
land. 

Fortunately,  several  of  our  neigh- 
bors brought  a  dozen  or  two  of  all 
sorts  of  books,  which  I  borrowed  and 
read,  keeping  all  of  them  except  the 
religious  ones  carefully  hidden  from 
father's  eye.  Among  these  were  Scott's 
novels,  which,  like  all  other  novels,  were 
strictly  forbidden,  but  devoured  with 
glorious  pleasure  in  secret.  Father  was 
easily  persuaded  to  buy  Josephus's 
Wars  of  the  Jews,  and  D'Aubigne's 
History  of  the  Reformation,  and  I  tried 
hard  to  get  him  to  buy  Plutarch's 

1  Former  chapters  from  John  Muir's  life  have 
appeared  in  the  past  three  issues  of  the  Atlan- 
tic.—  THE  EDITORS. 

266 


Lives,  which,  as  I  told  him,  everybody, 
even  religious  people,  praised  as  a  grand 
good  book;  but  he  would  have  nothing 
to  do  with  the  old  pagan  until  the 
graham  bread  and  anti-flesh  doctrines 
came  suddenly  into  our  backwoods 
neighborhood,  making  a  stir  something 
like  phrenology  and  spirit-rappings, 
which  were  mysterious  in  their  attacks 
as  influenza.  He  then  thought  it  pos- 
sible that  Plutarch  might  be  turned  to 
account  on  the  food  question  by  re- 
vealing what  those  old  Greeks  and 
Romans  ate  to  make  them  strong;  so 
at  last  we  gained  our  glorious  Plutarch. 

Dick's  Christian  Philosophy,  which  I 
borrowed  from  a  neighbor,  I  thought 
I  might  venture  to  read  in  the  open, 
trusting  that  the  word  'Christian' 
would  be  proof  against  its  cautious  con- 
demnation. But  father  balked  at  the 
word  'Philosophy,'  and  quoted  from 
the  Bible  a  verse  which  spoke  of  'phi- 
losophy falsely  so-called.'  I  then  ven- 
tured to  speak  in  defense  of  the  book, 
arguing  that  we  could  not  do  without 
at  least  a  little  of  the  most  useful  kinds 
of  philosophy. 

'Yes,  we  can,'  he  said,  with  enthusi- 
asm, '  the  Bible  is  the  only  book  human 
beings  can  possible  require  throughout 
all  the  journey  from  earth  to  heaven.' 

'But  how,'  I  contended,  'can  we  find 
the  way  to  heaven  without  the  Bible, 
and  how  after  we  grow  old  can  we 
read  the  Bible  without  a  little  helpful 
science?  Just  think,  father,  you  can- 
not read  your  Bible  without  spectacles, 
and  millions  of  others  are  in  the  same 
fix;  and  spectacles  cannot  be  made 


OUT  OF  THE  WILDERNESS 


267 


without  some  knowledge  of  the  science 
of  optics/ 

'Oh,'  he  replied,  perceiving  the  drift 
of  the  argument,  '  there  will  always  be 
plenty  of  worldly  people  to  make  spec- 
tacles.' 

To  this  I  stubbornly  replied  with  a 
quotation  from  the  Bible  with  refer- 
ence to  the  time  coming  when  '  all  shall 
know  the  Lord  from  the  least  even  to 
the  greatest/  and  then  who  will  make 
the  spectacles?  But  he  still  objected  to 
my  reading  that  book,  called  me  a  con- 
tumacious quibbler  too  fond  of  dispu- 
tation, and  ordered  me  to  return  it  to 
the  accommodating  owner.  I  managed, 
however,  to  read  it  later. 

On  the  food  question  father  insisted 
that  those  who  argued  for  a  vegeta- 
ble diet  were  in  the  right,  because  our 
teeth  showed  plainly  that  they  were 
made  with  reference  to  fruit  and  grain, 
and  not  for  flesh  like  those  of  dogs 
and  wolves  and  tigers.  He  therefore 
promptly  adopted  a  vegetable  diet,  and 
requested  mother  to  make  the  bread 
from  graham  flour  instead  of  bolted 
flour.  Mother  put  both  kinds  on  the 
table,  and  meat  also,  to  let  all  the  fam- 
ily take  their  choice;  and  while  father 
was  insisting  on  the  foolishness  of  eat- 
ing flesh,  I  came  to  her  help  by  calling 
his  attention  to  the  passage  in  the 
Bible  which  told  the  story  of  Elijah  the 
Prophet,  who,  when  he  was  pursued  by 
enemies  who  wanted  to  take  his  life, 
was  hidden  by  the  Lord  by  the  brook 
Cherith,  and  fed  by  ravens;  and  surely 
the  Lord  knew  what  was  good  to  eat, 
whether  bread  or  meat.  And  on  what, 
I  asked,  did  the  Lord  feed  Elijah?  On 
vegetables  or  graham  bread?  No,  he 
directed  the  ravens  to  feed  his  prophet 
on  flesh.  The  Bible  being  the  sole  rule, 
father  at  once  acknowledged  that  he 
was  mistaken.  The  Lord  never  would 
have  sent  flesh  to  Elijah  by  the  ravens 
if  graham  bread  were  better. 

I  remember  as  a  great  and  sudden 


discovery  that  the  poetry  of  the  Bible, 
Shakespeare,  and  Milton  was  a  source  of 
inspiring,  exhilarating,  uplifting  pleas- 
ure and  I  became  anxious  to  know  all 
the  poets,  and  saved  up  small  sums  to 
buy  as  many  of  their  books  as  possible. 
Within  three  or  four  years  I  was  the 
proucl  possessor  of  parts  of  Shake- 
speare's, Milton's,  Cowper's,  Henry 
Kirk  White's,  Campbell's,  and  Aken- 
side's  works,  and  quite  a  number  of 
others  seldom  read  nowadays.  I  think 
it  was  in  my  fifteenth  year  that  I  began 
to  relish  good  literature  with  enthusi- 
asm, and  smack  my  lips  over  favorite 
lines;  but  there  was  desperately  little 
time  for  reading,  even  in  the,  winter 
evenings  —  only  a  few  stolen  minutes 
now  and  then. 

Father's  strict  rule  was,  straight  to 
bed  immediately  after  family  wor- 
ship, which  in  winter  was  usually  over 
by  eight  o'clock.  I  was  in  the  habit 
of  lingering  in  the  kitchen  with  a 
book  and  candle  after  the  rest  of  the 
family  had  retired,  and  considered  my- 
self fortunate  if  I  got  five  minutes 
reading  before  father  noticed  the  light 
and  ordered  me  to  bed;  an  order  that, 
of  course,  I  immediately  obeyed.  But 
night  after  night  I  tried  to  steal  min- 
utes in  the  same  lingering  way;  and 
how  keenly  precious  those  minutes 
were,  few  nowadays  can  know.  Father 
failed,  perhaps,  two  or  three  times  in 
a  whole  winter  to  notice  my  light  for 
nearly  ten  minutes,  magnificent  golden 
blocks  of  time,  long  to  be  remembered 
like  holidays  or  geological  periods.  One 
evening  when  I  was  reading  Church 
History  father  was  particularly  irrita- 
ble and  called  out  with  hope-killing 
emphasis,  *  John,  go  to  bed  !  Must  I  give 
you  a  separate  order  every  night  to  get 
you  to  go  to  bed  ?  Now,  I  will  have  no 
irregularity  in  the  family;  you  must  go 
when  the  rest  go,  and  without  my  hav- 
ing to  tell  you.'  Then,  as  an  after- 
thought, as  if  judging  that  his  words 


268 


OUT  OF  THE  WILDERNESS 


and  tone  of  voice  were  too  severe  for  so 
pardonable  an  offense,  he  unwarily 
added,  'If  you  will  read,  get  up  in  the 
morning  and  read.  You  may  get  up  in 
the  morning  as  early  as  you  like.' 

That  night  I  went  to  bed  wishing 
with  all  my  heart  and  soul  that  some- 
body or  something  might  call  me  out 
of  sleep  to  avail  myself  of  this  won- 
derful indulgence;  and  next  morning, 
to  my  joyful  surprise,  I  awoke  before 
father  called  me.  A  boy  sleeps  soundly 
after  working  all  day  in  the  snowy 
woods,  but  that  frosty  morning  I  sprang 
out  of  bed  as  if  called  by  a  trumpet 
blast,  rushed  downstairs  scarce  feeling 
my  chilblains,  enormously  eager  to  see 
how  much  time  I  had  won ;  and,  when  I 
held  up  my  candle  to  a  little  clock  that 
stood  on  a  bracket  in  the  kitchen,  I 
found  that  it  was  only  one  o'clock.  I 
had  gained  five  hours,  almost  half  a 
day!  'Five  hours  to  myself!'  I  said, 
'five  huge,  solid  hours!'  I  can  hardly 
think  of  any  other  event  in  my  life,  any 
discovery  I  ever  made  that  gave  birth 
to  joy  so  transportingly  glorious  as  the 
possession  of  these  five  frosty  hours. 

In  the  glad  tumultuous  excitement 
of  so  much  suddenly  acquired  time- 
wealth  I  hardly  knew  what  to  do  with 
it.  I  first  thought  of  going  on  with  my 
reading,  but  the  zero  weather  would 
make  a  fire  necessary,  and  it  occurred 
to  me  that  father  might  object  to  the 
cost  of  firewood  that  took  time  to  chop. 
Therefore  I  prudently  decided  to  go 
down  cellar,  where  I  at  least  would  find 
a  tolerable  temperature  very  little  be- 
low the  freezing  point,  for  the  walls 
were  banked  up  in  the  fall  to  keep  the 
potatoes  from  freezing.  There  were  a 
few  tools  in  a  corner  of  the  cellar,  a 
vise,  a  few  files,  a  hammer,  and  so 
forth,  that  father  had  brought  from 
Scotland,  but  no  saw  excepting  a 
coarse,  crooked  one  that  was  unfit  for 
sawing  dry  hickory  or  oak.  So  I  made 
a  fine-tooth  saw  suitable  for  my  work 


out  of  a  strip  of  steel  that  had  formed 
part  of  an  old-fashioned  corset,  that 
cut  the  hardest  wood  smoothly.  I  also 
made  my  own  brad-awls  and  punches, 
a  pair  of  compasses,  and  so  forth,  out 
of  wire  and  old  files,  and  went  to  work 
on  a  model  of  a  self-setting  sawmill 
I  had  invented. 

Next  morning  I  managed  joyfully  to 
get  up  at  the  same  gloriously  early 
hour.  My  cellar  workshop  was  imme- 
diately under  father's  bed  and  the  filing 
and  tapping  in  making  cog-wheels,  jour- 
nals, cams,  and  so  forth,  must  no  doubt 
have  annoyed  him;  but  with  the  per- 
mission he  had  granted,  in  his  mind, 
and  doubtless  hoping  that  I  would  soon 
tire  of  getting  up  at  one  o'clock,  he 
impatiently  waited  about  two  weeks 
before  saying  a  word.  I  did  not  vary 
more  than  five  minutes  from  one 
o'clock  all  winter,  nor  did  I  feel  any 
bad  effects  whatever,  nor  did  I  think  at 
all  about  the  subject  as  to  whether  so 
little  sleep  might  be  in  any  way  injur- 
ious; it  was  a  grand  triumph  of  will 
power  over  cold  and  common  comfort 
and  work-weariness  in  abruptly  cut- 
ting down  my  ten  hours'  allowance  of 
sleep  to  five.  I  simply  felt  that  I  was 
rich  beyond  anything  I  could  have 
dreamed  of  or  hoped  for.  I  was  far 
more  than  happy.  Like  Tam-o'-Shan- 
ter,  I  was  'glorious,  O'er  a'  the  ills  of 
life  victorious.' 

Father,  as  was  customary  in  Scot- 
land, gave  thanks  and  asked  a  blessing 
before  meals,  not  merely  as  a  matter  of 
form  and  decent  Christian  manners, 
for  he  regarded  food  as  a  gift  derived 
directly  from  the  hands  of  the  Father  in 
heaven.  Therefore  every  meal  was  to 
him  a  sacrament  requiring  conduct  and 
attitude  of  mind  not  unlike  that  befit- 
ting the  Lord's  supper.  No  idle  word 
was  allowed  to  be  spoken  at  our  table, 
much  less  any  laughing  or  fun  or  story- 
telling. When  we  were  at  the  breakfast- 
table,  about  two  weeks  after  the  great 


OUT  OF  THE  WILDERNESS 


269 


golden  time-discovery,  father  cleared 
his  throat,  preliminary,  as  we  all  knew, 
to  saying  something  considered  impor- 
tant. I  feared  that  it  was  to  be  on  the 
subject  of  my  early  rising,  and,  dreaded 
the  withdrawal  of  the  permission  he 
had  granted  on  account  of  the  noise  I 
made,  but  still  hoping  that,  as  he  had 
given  his  word  that  I  might  get  up  as 
early  as  I  wished,  he  would  as  a  Scotch- 
man stand  to  it,  even  though  it  was 
given  in  an  unguarded  moment  and 
taken  in  a  sense  unreasonably  far- 
reaching.  The  solemn  sacramental  si- 
lence was  broken  by  the  dreaded  ques- 
tion, — 

'John,  what  time  is  it  when  you  get 
up  in  the  morning?' 

*  About  one  o'clock/  I  replied  in  a 
low,  meek,  guilty  tone  of  voice. 

'And  what  kind  of  a  time  is  that, 
getting  up  in  the  middle  of  the  night 
and  disturbing  the  whole  family?' 

I  simply  reminded  him  of  the  permis- 
sion he  had  freely  granted  me  to  get  up 
as  early  as  I  wished. 

'I  know  it,'  he  said,  in  an  almost 
agonizing  tone  of  voice;  'I  know  I  gave 
you  that  miserable  permission,  but  I 
never  imagined  that  you  would  get  up 
in  the  middle  of  the  night.' 

To  this  I  cautiously  made  no  reply, 
but  continued  to  listen  for  the  heaven- 
ly one-o'clock  call,  and  it  never  failed. 

After  completing  my  self-setting  saw- 
mill I  dammed  one  of  the  streams  in  the 
meadow  and  put  the  mill  in  operation. 
This  invention  was  speedily  followed 
by  a  lot  of  others,  —  water-wheels, 
curious  door-locks  and  latches,  ther- 
mometers, hygrometers,  pyrometers, 
clocks,  a  barometer,  an  automatic  con- 
trivance for  feeding  the  horses  at  any 
required  hour,  a  lamp-lighter  and  fire- 
lighter, an  early- or-late-rising  machine, 
and  so  forth. 

After  the  sawmill  was  proved  and 
discharged  from  my  mind,  I  happened 
to  think  it  would  be  a  fine  thing  to 


make  a  timekeeper  which  would  tell 
the  day  of  the  week  and  the  day  of  the 
month,  as  well  as  strike  like  a  common 
clock  and  point  out  the  hours;  also  to 
have  an  attachment  whereby  it  could 
be  connected  with  a  bedstead  to  set  me 
on  my  feet  at  any  hour  in  the  morning; 
also  to  start  fires,  light  lamps,  and  so 
forth.  I  had  learned  the  time  laws  of 
the  pendulum  from  a  book,  but  with 
this  exception  I  knew  nothing  of  time- 
keepers, for  I  had  never  seen  the  inside 
of  any  sort  of  clock  or  watch.  After 
long  brooding,  the  novel  clock  was  at 
length  completed  in  my  mind,  and  was 
tried  and  found  to  be  durable,  and  to 
work  well  and  look  well,  before  I  had 
begun  to  build  it  in  wood.  I  carried 
small  parts  of  it  in  my  pocket  to 
whittle  at  when  I  was  out  at  work  on 
the  farm,  using  every  spare  or  stolen 
moment  within  reach  without  father's 
knowing  anything  about  it. 

In  the  middle  of  summer,  when  har- 
vesting was  in  progress,  the  novel 
time-machine  was  nearly  completed. 
It  was  hidden  upstairs  in  a  spare  bed- 
room where  some  tools  were  kept.  I 
did  the  making  and  mending  on  the 
farm;  but  one  day  at  noon,  when  I 
happened  to  be  away,  father  went  up- 
stairs for  a  hammer  or  something  and 
discovered  the  mysterious  machine 
back  of  the  bedstead.  My  sister  Mar- 
garet saw  him  on  his  knees  examining 
it,  and  at  the  first  opportunity  whis- 
pered in  my  ear,  'John,  fayther  saw 
that  thing  you're  making  upstairs.' 
None  of  the  family  knew  what  I  was 
doing,  but  they  knew  very  well  that  all 
such  work  was  frowned  on  by  father, 
and  kindly  warned  me  of  any  danger 
that  threatened  my  plans.  The  fine  in- 
vention seemed  doomed  to  destruction 
before  its  time-ticking  commenced,  al- 
though I  had  carried  it  so  long  in  my 
mind  that  I  thought  it  handsome,  and 
like  the  nest  of  Burns's  wee  mousie  it 
had  cost  me  mony  a  weary  whittling 


270 


OUT  OF  THE  WILDERNESS 


nibble.  When  we  were  at  dinner  sev- 
eral days  after  the  sad  discovery,  father 
began  to  clear  his  throat,  and  I  feared 
the  doom  of  martyrdom  was  about  to 
be  pronounced  on  my  grand  clock. 

'John,'  he  inquired,  'what  is  that 
thing  you  are  making  upstairs?' 

I  replied  in  desperation  that  I  did  n't 
know  what  to  call  it. 

'What!  You  mean  to  say  you  don't 
know  what  you  are  trying  to  do?' 

'Oh,  yes,'  I  said,  'I  know  very  well 
what  I  am  doing.' 

'What  then  is  the  thing  for?' 

'It's  for  a  lot  of  things,'  I  replied, 
'but  getting  people  up  early  in  the 
morning  is  one  of  the  main  things  it  is 
intended  for;  therefore,  it  might  per- 
haps be  called  an  early-rising  ma- 
chine.' 

After  getting  up  so  extravagantly 
early,  to  make  a  machine  for  getting  up 
perhaps  still  earlier  seemed  so  ridicu- 
lous that  he  very  nearly  laughed.  But 
after  controlling  himself,  and  getting 
command  of  a  sufficiently  solemn  face 
and  voice,  he  said  severely, '  Do  you  not 
think  it  is  very  wrong  to  waste  your 
time  on  such  nonsense?' 

'No,'  I  said  meekly,  'I  don't  think 
I  'm  doing  any  wrong.' 

'Well,'  he  replied,  'I  assure  you  I  do; 
and  if  you  were  only  half  as  zealous  in 
the  study  of  religion  as  you  are  in  con- 
triving and  whittling  these  useless, 
nonsensical  things,  it  would  be  infinite- 
ly better  for  you.  I  want  you  to  be  like 
Paul,  who  said  that  he  desired  to  know 
nothing  among  men  but  Christ  and 
Him  crucified.' 

To  this  I  made  no  reply,  gloomily 
believing  my  fine  machine  was  to  be 
burned,  but  still  taking  what  comfort  I 
could  in  realizing  that  anyhow  I  had 
enjoyed  inventing  and  making  it. 

After  a  few  days,  finding  that  no- 
thing more  was  to  be  said,  and  that 
father,  after  all,  had  not  had  the  heart 
to  destroy  it,  all  necessity  for  secrecy 


being  ended,  I  finished  it  in  the  half- 
hours  that  we  had  at  noon,  and  set  it 
in  the  parlor  between  two  chairs,  hung 
moraine  boulders,  that  had  come  from 
the  direction  of  Lake  Superior,  on  it 
for  weights,  and  set  it  running.  We 
were  then  hauling  grain  into  the  barn. 
Father  at  this  period  devoted  himself 
entirely  to  the  Bible  and  did  no  farm 
work  whatever.  The  clock  had  a  good 
loud  tick  and  when  he  heard  it  strike, 
one  of  my  sisters  told  me  that  he  left 
his  study,  went  to  the  parlor,  got  down 
on  his  knees,  and  carefully  examined 
the  machinery,  which  was  all  in  plain 
sight,  not  being  inclosed  in  a  case. 
This  he  did  repeatedly,  and  evidently 
seemed  a  little  proud  of  my  ability  to 
invent  and  whittle  such  a  thing,  though 
careful  to  give  no  encouragement  for 
anything  more  of  the  kind  in  future. 

But  somehow  it  seemed  impossible  to 
stop.  Inventing  and  whittling  faster 
than  ever,  I  made  another  hickory 
clock,  shaped  like  a  scythe  to  symbolize 
the  scythe  of  Fat  her  Time.  The  pendu- 
lum is  a  bunch  of  arrows  symbolizing 
the  flight  of  time.  It  hangs  on  a  leafless 
mossy  oak  snag  showing  the  effect  of 
time,  and  on  the  snath  is  written,  'All 
flesh  is  grass.'  This,  especially  the  in- 
scription, rather  pleased  father,  and  of 
course  mother  and  all  my  sisters  and 
brothers  admired  it.  Like  the  first,  it 
indicates  the  days  of  the  week  and 
month,  starts  fires  and  beds  at  any 
given  hour  and  minute,  and  though 
made  more  than  fifty  years  ago,  is  still 
a  good  timekeeper. 

My  mind  still  running  on  clocks,  I 
invented  a  big  one  like  a  town  clock, 
with  four  dials,  with  the  time  figures  so 
large  they  could  be  read  by  all  our  im- 
mediate neighbors  as  well  as  ourselves 
when  at  work  in  the  fields,  and  on  the 
side  next  the  house  the  days  of  the 
week  and  month  were  indicated.  It 
was  to  be  placed  on  the  peak  of  the 
barn  roof.  But  just  as  it  was  all  but 


OUT  OF  THE  WILDERNESS 


271 


finished  father  stopped  me,  saying  that 
it  would  bring  too  many  people  around 
the  barn.  I  then  asked  permission  to 
put  it  on  the  top  of  a  black  oak  tree 
near  the  house.  Studying  the  larger 
main  branches  I  thought  I  could  secure 
a  sufficiently  rigid  foundation  for  it, 
while  the  trimmed  sprays  and  leaves 
would  conceal  the  angles  of  the  cabin 
required  to  shelter  the  works  from  the 
weather,  and  the  two-second  pendu- 
lum, fourteen  feet  long,  could  be  snug- 
ly incased  on  the  side  of  the  trunk. 
Nothing  about  the  grand,  useful  time- 
keeper, I  argued,  would  disfigure  the 
tree,  for  it  would  look  something  like  a 
big  hawk's  nest.  *  But  that,5  he  object- 
ed, 'would  draw  still  bigger,  bothersome 
trampling  crowds  about  the  place,  for 
who  ever  heard  of  anything  so  queer  as 
a  big  clock  on  the  top  of  a  tree.'  So  I 
had  to  lay  aside  its  big  wheels  and  cams 
and  rest  content  with  the  pleasure  of 
inventing  it,  and  looking  at  it  in  my 
mind  and  listening  to  the  deep,  solemn 
throbbing  of  its  long  two-second  pen- 
dulum, with  its  two  old  axes  back  to 
back  for  the  bob. 

One  of  my  inventions  was  a  large 
thermometer  made  of  an  iron  rod, 
about  three  feet  long  and  five-eighths 
of  an  inch  in  diameter,  that  had  formed 
part  of  a  wagon-box.  The  expansion 
and  contraction  of  this  rod  was  multi- 
plied by  a  series  of  levers  made  of  strips 
of  hoop-iron.  The  pressure  of  the  rod 
against  the  levers  was  kept  constant 
by  a  small  counterweight,  so  that  the 
slightest  change  in  the  length  of  the  rod 
was  instantly  shown  on  a  dial  about 
three  feet  wide,  multiplied  about 
thirty-two  thousand  times.  The  zero 
point  was  gained  by  packing  the  rod 
in  wet  snow.  The  scale  was  so  large 
that  the  big  black  hand  on  the  white 
painted  dial  could  be  seen  distinctly, 
and  the  temperature  read,  while  we 
were  ploughing  in  the  field  below  the 
house.  The  extremes  of  heat  and  cold 


caused  the  hand  to  make  several  rev- 
olutions. The  number  of  these  revolu- 
tions was  indicated  on  a  small  dial 
marked  on  the  larger  one.  This  ther- 
mometer was  fastened  on  the  side  of 
the  house,  and  was  so  sensitive  that 
when  any  one  approached  it  within 
four  or  five  feet  the  heat  radiated  from 
the  observer's  body  caused  the  hand 
of  the  dial  to  move  so  fast  that  the 
motion  was  plainly  visible,  and  when  he 
stepped  back,  the  hand  moved  slowly 
back  to  its  normal  position.  It  was  re- 
garded as  a  great  wonder  by  the  neigh- 
bors, and  even  by  my  own  all-Bible 
father. 

Talking  over  plans  with  me  one  day, 
a  friendly  neighbor  said,  'Now,  John, 
if  you  wish  to  get  into  a  machine-shop, 
just  take  some  of  your  inventions  to 
the  state  fair,  and  you  may  be  sure 
that  as  soon  as  they  are  seen  they  will 
open  the  door  of  any  shop  in  the  coun- 
try for  you.  You  will  be  welcomed 
everywhere.'  And  when  I  doubtingly 
asked  if  people  would  care  to  look  at 
things  made  of  wood,  he  said,  'Made 
of  wood !  Made  of  wood !  What  does  it 
matter  what  they're  made  of  when 
they  are  so  out-and-out  original. 
There's  nothing  else  like  them  in  the 
world.  That  is  what  will  attract  atten- 
tion, and  besides  they  're  mighty  hand- 
some things  anyway  to  come  from  the 
backwoods.'  So  I  was  encouraged  to 
leave  home  and  go  at  his  direction  to 
the  state  fair  when  it  was  being  held 
in  Madison. 

When  I  told  father  that  I  was  about 
to  leave  home,  and  inquired  whether, 
if  I  should  happen  to  be  in  need  of 
money,  he  would  send  me  a  little,  he 
said,  'No.  Depend  entirely  on  your- 
self.' Good  advice,  I  suppose,  but  sure- 
ly needlessly  severe  for  a  bashful  home- 
loving  boy  who  had  worked  so  hard.  I 
had  the  gold  sovereign  that  my  grand- 
father had  given  me  when  I  left  Scot- 
land, and  a  few  dollars,  perhaps  ten, 


OUT  OF  THE  WILDERNESS 


that  I  had  made  by  raising  a  few  bush- 
els of  grain  on  a  little  patch  of  sandy, 
abandoned  ground.  So  when  I  left 
home  to  try  the  world  I  had  only  fif- 
teen dollars  in  my  pocket. 

Strange  to  say,  father  carefully 
taught  us  to  consider  ourselves  very 
poor  worms  of  the  dust,  conceived  in 
sin,  and  so  forth,  and  devoutly  believed 
that  quenching  every  spark  of  pride 
and  self-confidence  was  a  sacred  duty, 
without  realizing  that  in  so  doing  he 
might,  at  the  same  time,  be  quenching 
everything  else.  Praise  he  considered 
most  venomous,  and  tried  to  assure  me 
that  when  I  was  fairly  out  in  the  wick- 
ed world,  making  my  own  way,  I  would 
soon  learn  that,  although  I  might  have 
thought  him  a  hard  taskmaster  at 
times,  strangers  were  far  harder.  On 
the  contrary,  I  found  no  lack  of  kind- 
ness and  sympathy.  All  the  baggage  I 
carried  was  a  package  made  up  of  the 
two  clocks  and  a  small  thermometer 
made  of  a  piece  of  old  washboard,  all 
three  tied  together,  with  no  covering 
or  case  of  any  sort,  the  whole  looking 
like  one  very  complicated  machine. 

The  aching  parting  from  mother  and 
my  sisters  was  of  course  hard  to  bear. 
Father  let  David  drive  me  down  to 
Pardeeville,  a  place  I  had  never  before 
seen,  though  it  is  only  nine  miles  south 
of  the  Hickory  Hill  farm.  When  we 
arrived  at  the  village  tavern  it  seemed 
deserted.  Not  a  single  person  was  in 
sight.  I  set  my  clock  baggage  on  the 
rickety  platform.  David  said  good-bye 
and  started  for  home,  leaving  me  alone 
in  the  world.  The  grinding  noise  made 
by  the  wagon  in  turning  short  brought 
out  the  landlord,  and  the  first  thing 
that  caught  his  eye  was  my  strange 
bundle.  Then  he  looked  at  me  and 
said,  *  Hello,  young  man,  what's  this?' 

'Machines,'  I  said,  'for  keeping  time 
and  getting  up  in  the  morning,  and  so 
forth.' 

'Well!  Well!  That 's  a  mighty  queer 


get-up.  You  must  be  a  Down-East 
Yankee.  Where  did  you  get  the  pat- 
tern for  such  a  thing?' 

'In  my  head,'  I  said. 

Some  one  down  the  street  happened 
to  notice  the  landlord  looking  intently 
at  something  and  came  up  to  see  what 
it  was.  Three  or  four  people  in  that  lit- 
tle village  formed  an  attractive  crowd, 
and  in  fifteen  or  twenty  minutes  the 
greater  part  of  the  population  of  Par- 
deeville stood  gazing  in  a  circle  around 
my  strange  hickory  belongings.  I  kept 
outside  of  the  circle  to  avoid  being 
seen,  and  had  the  advantage  of  hear- 
ing the  remarks  without  being  embar- 
rassed. 

I  stayed  overnight  at  this  little  tav- 
ern, waiting  for  a  train.  In  the  morning 
I  went  to  the  station,  and  set  my  bun- 
dle on  the  platform.  Along  came  the 
thundering  train,  a  glorious  sight;  the 
first  train  I  had  ever  waited  for. 
When  the  conductor  saw  my  queer 
baggage,  he  cried,  'Hello!  What  have 
we  here? ' 

'Inventions  for  keeping  time,  early 
rising,  and  so  forth.  May  I  take  them 
into  the  car  with  me?' 

'You  can  take  them  where  you  like,' 
he  replied,  'but  you  had  better  give 
them  to  the  baggage-master.  If  you 
take  them  into  the  car  they  will  draw  a 
crowd  and  might  get  broken.' 

So  I  gave  them  to  the  baggage-mas- 
ter, and  made  haste  to  ask  the  conduc- 
tor whether  I  might  ride  on  the  engine. 
He  good-naturedly  said,  'Yes,  it's  the 
right  place  for  you.  Run  ahead,  and 
tell  the  engineer  what  I  say.'  But  the 
engineer  bluntly  refused  to  let  me  on, 
saying,  '  It  don't  matter  what  the  con- 
ductor told  you.  /  say  you  can't  ride 
on  my  engine.' 

By  this  time  the  conductor,  standing 
ready  to  start  his  train,  was  watching 
to  see  what  luck  I  had,  and  when  he 
saw  me  returning  came  ahead  to  meet 
me. 


OUT  OF  THE  WILDERNESS 


273 


'The  engineer  won't  let  me  on,'  I  re- 
ported. 

*  Won't  he?'  said  the  kind  conductor. 
'Oh,  I  guess  he  will.  You  come  down 
with  me.'  And  so  he  actually  took  the 
time  and  patience  to  walk  the  length  of 
that  long  train  to  get  me  on  to  the 
engine. 

'Charlie,'  said  he,  addressing  the 
engineer,  'don't  you  ever  take  a  pas- 
senger?' 

'Very  seldom,'  he  replied. 

'Anyhow,  I  wish  you  would  take  this 
young  man  on.  He  has  the  strangest 
machines  in  the  baggage  car  I  ever  saw 
in  my  life.  I  believe  he  could  make 
a  locomotive.  He  wants  to  see  the 
engine  running.  Let  him  on.'  Then, 
in  a  low  whisper,  he  told  me  to  jump 
on,  which  I  did  gladly,  the  engineer 
offering  neither  encouragement  nor 
objection. 

As  soon  as  the  train  was  started  the 
engineer  asked  what  the  'strange 
thing'  the  conductor  spoke  of  really 
was. 

'Only  inventions  for  keeping  time, 
getting  folks  up  in  the  morning,  and  so 
forth,'  I  hastily  replied;  and  before  he 
could  ask  any  more  questions  I  asked 
permission  to  go  outside  of  the  cab  to 
see  the  machinery.  This  he  kindly 
granted,  adding, '  Be  careful  not  to  fall 
off,  and  when  you  hear  me  whistling 
for  a  station  you  come  back,  because  if 
it  is  reported  against  me  to  the  super- 
intendent that  I  allow  boys  to  run  all 
over  my  engine,  I  might  lose  my  job.' 

Assuring  him  that  I  would  come  back 
promptly,  I  went  out  and  walked  along 
the  footboard  on  the  side  of  the  boiler, 
watching  the  magnificent  machine 
rushing  through  the  landscape  as  if 
glorying  in  its  strength  like  a  living 
creature.  While  seated  on  the  cow- 
catcher platform  I  seemed  to  be  fairly 
flying,  and  the  wonderful  display  of 
power  and  motion  was  enchanting. 
This  was  the  first  time  I  had  ever  been 
VOL.  111 -NO.  2 


on  a  train,  much  less  a  locomotive, 
since  I  had  left  Scotland.  When  I  got 
to  Madison  I  thanked  the  kind  conduc- 
tor and  engineer  for  my  glorious  ride, 
inquired  the  way  to  the  fair,  shoul- 
dered my  inventions,  and  walked  to 
the  fair-ground. 

When  I  applied  for  an  admission 
ticket  at  a  window  by  the  gate  I  told 
the  agent  that  I  had  something  to  ex- 
hibit. 

'What  is  it?'  he  inquired. 

'Well,  here  it  is.  Look  at  it.' 

When  he  craned  his  neck  through 
the  window  and  got  a  glimpse  of  my 
bundle  he  cried  excitedly,  'Oh!  you 
don't  need  a  ticket  —  come  right  in.' 

When  I  inquired  of  the  agent  where 
such  things  as  mine  should  be  exhibit- 
ed, he  said,  'You  see  that  building  up 
on  the  hill  with  a  big  flag  on  it?  That's 
the  Fine  Arts  Hall  and  it's  just  the 
place  for  your  wonderful  invention.' 

So  I  went  up  to  the  Fine  Arts  Hall 
and  looked  in,  wondering  if  they  would 
allow  wooden  things  in  so  fine  a  place. 

I  was  met  at  the  door  by  a  dignified 
gentleman  who  greeted  me  kindly  and 
said,  'Young  man,  what  have  we  got 
here?' 

'Two  clocks  and  a  thermometer/  I 
replied. 

'Did  you  make  these?  They  look 
wonderfully  beautiful  and  novel  and 
must  I  think  prove  the  most  interesting 
feature  of  the  fair.' 

'Where  shall  I  place  them?'  I  in- 
quired. 

'Just  look  around,  young  man,  and 
choose  the  place  you  like  best,  whether 
it  is  occupied  or  not.  You  can  have 
your  pick  of  all  the  building,  and  a  car- 
penter to  make  the  necessary  shelving 
and  assist  you  in  every  way  possible!' 

So  I  quickly  had  a  shelf  made  large 
enough  for  all  of  them,  went  out  on  the 
hill  and  picked  up  some  glacial  boulders 
of  the  right  size  for  weights,  and  in  fif- 
teen or  twenty  minutes  the  clocks  were 


274 


OUT  OF  THE  WILDERNESS 


running.  They  seemed  to  attract  more 
attention  than  anything  else  in  the  hall. 
I  got  lots  of  praise  from  the  crowd  and 
the  newspaper  reporters.  The  local 
press  reports  were  copied  into  the  East- 
ern papers.  It  was  considered  wonder- 
ful that  a  boy  on  a  farm  had  been  able 
to  invent  and  make  such  things,  and  al- 
most every  spectator  foretold  good  for- 
tune. But  I  had  been  so  lectured  by  my 
father  to  avoid  praise,  above  all  things, 
that  I  was  afraid  to  read  those  kind 
newspaper  notices,  and  never  clipped 
out  or  preserved  any  of  them,  just 
glanced  at  them,  and  turned  away  my 
eyes  from  beholding  vanity,  and  so 
forth.  They  gave  me  a  prize  of  ten  or 
fifteen  dollars,  and  a  diploma  for  won- 
derful things  not  down  in  the  list  of 
exhibits. 

Many  years  later,  after  I  had  written 
articles  and  books,  I  received  a  letter 
from  the  gentleman  who  had  charge  of 
the  Fine  Arts  Hall.  He  proved  to  have 
been  the  Professor  of  English  Litera- 
ture in  the  University  of  Wisconsin  at 
this  fair-time,  and  long  afterward  he 
sent  me  clippings  of  reports  of  his  lec- 
tures. He  had  a  lecture  on  me,  discuss- 
ing style,  and  so  forth,  and  telling  how 
well  he  remembered  my  arrival  at  the 
hall  in  my  shirt  sleeves  with  those  me- 
chanical wonders  on  my  shoulder,  and 
so  forth,  and  so  forth.  These  inventions, 
though  of  little  importance,  opened  all 
doors  for  me,  and  made  marks  that  have 
lasted  many  years,  simply  because  they 
were  original  and  promising. 

I  was  looking  around  in  the  mean 
time  to  find  out  where  I  should  go  to 
seek  my  fortune.  An  inventor  at  the 
fair,  by  the  name  of  Wiard,  was  exhib- 
iting an  ice-boat  he  had  invented  to  run 
on  the  upper  Mississippi  from  Prairie 
du  Chien  to  St.  Paul  during  the  winter 
months,  explaining  how  useful  it  would 
be  thus  to  make  a  highway  of  the  river 
while  it  was  closed  to  ordinary  naviga- 
tion by  ice.  After  he  saw  my  inven- 


tions, he  offered  me  a  place  in  his  foun- 
dry and  machine-shop  in  Prairie  du 
Chien,  and  promised  to  assist  me  all  he 
could.  So  I  made  up  my  mind  to  accept 
his  offer  and  rode  with  him  to  Prairie 
du  Chien  in  his  ice-boat,  which  was 
mounted  on  a  flat  car.  I  soon  found, 
however,  that  he  was  seldom  at  home, 
and  that  I  was  not  likely  to  learn  much 
at  his  small  shop.  I  found  a  place 
where  I  could  work  for  my  board  and 
devote  my  spare  hours  to  mechanical 
drawing,  geometry,  and  physics.  Mak- 
ing but  little  headway,  however,  al- 
though the  Pelton  family  for  whom  I 
worked  were  very  kind,  I  made  up  my 
mind  after  a  few  months'  stay  in 
Prairie  du  Chien  to  return  to  Madison, 
hoping  that  in  some  way  I  might  be 
able  to  gain  an  education. 

At  Madison  I  raised  a  few  dollars  by 
making  and  selling  a  few  of  those  bed- 
steads that  set  the  sleepers  on  their 
feet  in  the  morning  —  inserting  in  the 
footboard  the  works  of  an  ordinary 
clock  that  could  be  bought  for  a  dollar. 
I  also  made  a  few  dollars  addressing 
circulars  in  an  insurance  office,  while 
at  the  same  time  I  was  paying  my 
board  by  taking  care  of  a  pair  of  horses 
and  going  errands.  This  is  of  no  great 
interest  except  that  I  was  thus  earning 
my  bread  while  hoping  that  something 
might  turn  up  that  would  enable  me  to 
make  money  enough  to  enter  the  state 
university.  This  was  my  ambition, 
and  it  never  wavered,  no  matter  what  I 
was  doing.  No  university  it  seemed  to 
me  could  be  more  admirably  situated, 
and  as  I  sauntered  about  it,  charmed 
with  its  fine  lawns  and  trees  and  beau- 
tiful lakes,  and  saw  the  students  going 
and  coming  with  their  books,  and  oc- 
casionally practicing  with  a  theodolite 
in  measuring  distances,  I  thought  that 
if  I  could  only  join  them  it  would  be  the 
greatest  joy  of  life.  I  was  desperately 
hungry  and  thirsty  for  knowledge  and 
willing  to  endure  anything  to  get  it. 


OUT  OF  THE  WILDERNESS 


275 


One  day  I  chanced  to  meet  a  student 
who  had  noticed  my  inventions  at  the 
fair  and  now  recognized  me.  And 
when  I  said,  'You  are  fortunate  fel- 
lows to  be  allowed  to  study  in  this 
beautiful  place;  I  wish  I  could  join  you,' 
—  'Well,  why  don't  you?'  he  asked. 
'  I  have  n't  money  enough,'  I  said.  '  Oh, 
as  to  money,'  he  reassuringly  explain- 
ed, 'very  little  is  required.  I  presume 
you're  able  to  enter  the  Freshman 
class,  and  you  can  board  yourself,  as 
quite  a  number  of  us  do,  at  a  cost  of 
about  a  dollar  a  week.  The  baker  and 
milkman  come  every  day.  You  can 
live  on  bread  and  milk.'  'Well,'  I 
thought, '  maybe  I  have  money  enough 
for  at  least  one  beginning  term.'  Any- 
how I  could  n't  help  trying. 

With  fear  and  trembling,  overladen 
with  ignorance,  I  called  on  Professor 
Stirling,  the  dean  of  the  faculty,  who 
was  then  acting  president,  presented 
my  case,  told  him  how  far  I  had  got  on 
with  my  studies  at  home,  and  that  I 
had  n't  been  to  school  since  leaving 
Scotland  at  the  age  of  eleven  years 
(excepting  one  short  term  of  a  couple 
of  months  at  a  district  school),  because 
I  could  not  be  spared  from  the  farm 
work.  After  hearing  my  story  the  kind 
professor  welcomed  me  to  the  glorious 
university  —  next,  it  seemed  to  me,  to 
the  Kingdom  of  Heaven.  After  a  few 
weeks  in  the  preparatory  department, 
I  entered  the  Freshman  class.  In  Latin 
I  found  that  one  of  the  books  in  use  I 
had  already  studied  in  Scotland.  So 
after  an  interruption  of  a  dozen  years  I 
began  my  Latin  over  again  where  I  had 
left  off;  and  strange  to  say,  most  of  it 
came  back  to  me,  especially  the  gram- 
mar which  I  had  committed  to  memory 
at  the  Dunbar  Grammar  School. 

During  the  four  years  that  I  was  in 
the  university  I  earned  enough  in  the 
harvest-fields  during  the  long  summer 
vacations  to  carry  me  through  the  bal- 
ance of  each  year,  working  very  hard, 


cutting  with  a  cradle  four  acres  of 
wheat  a  day,  and  helping  to  put  it  in 
the  shock.  But  having  to  buy  books 
and  paying  I  think  thirty-two  dollars 
a  year  for  instruction,  and  occasionally 
buying  acids  and  retorts,  glass  tubing, 
bell-glasses,  flasks,  and  so  forth,  I  had 
to  cut  down  expenses  for  board  now 
and  then  to  half  a  dollar  a  week. 

One  winter  I  taught  school  ten  miles 
north  of  Madison,  earning  much-need- 
ed money  at  the  rate  of  twenty  dollars 
a  month,  'boarding  round,'  and  keep- 
ing up  my  university  work  by  study- 
ing at  night.    As  I  was  not  then  well 
enough  off  to  own  a  watch,  I  used  one 
of  my  hickory  clocks,  not  only  for  keep- 
ing time,  but  for  starting  the  school-fire 
in  the  cold  mornings,  and  regulating 
class  times.    I  carried  it  out  on  my 
shoulder  to  the  old  log  schoolhouse,  and 
set  it  to  work  on  a  little  shelf  nailed  to 
one  of  the  knotty,  bulging  logs.    The 
winter  was  very  cold,  and  I  had  to  go 
to  the  schoolhouse  and  start  the  fire 
about  eight  o'clock,  to  warm  it  before 
the  arrival  of  the  scholars.  This  was  a 
rather  trying  job,  and  one  that  my 
clock  might  easily  be  made   to  do. 
Therefore,  after  supper  one  evening,  I 
told  the  head  of  the  family  with  whom 
I  was  boarding  that  if  he  would  give  me 
a  candle  I  would  go  back  to  the  school- 
house  and  make  arrangements  for  light- 
ing the  fire  at  eight  o'clock,  without 
my  having  to  be  present  until  time  to 
open  the  school  at  nine.   He  said,  '  Oh, 
young  man,  you  have  some  curious 
things  in  the  school-room,  but  I  don't 
think  you  can  do  that.'    I  said,  'Oh, 
yes!    It's  easy';  and  in  hardly  more 
than  an  hour  the  simple  job  was  com- 
pleted. 

I  had  only  to  place  a  teaspoonful 
of  powdered  chlorate  of  potash  and 
sugar  on  the  stove  hearth  near  a  few 
shavings  and  kindlings,  and  at  the  re- 
quired time  make  the  clock,  through  a 
simple  arrangement,  touch  the  inflam- 


276 


OUT  OF  THE  WILDERNESS 


mable  mixture  with  a  drop  of  sulphuric 
acid.  Every  evening  after  school  was 
dismissed  I  shoveled  out  what  was  left 
of  the  fire  into  the  snow,  put  in  a  little 
kindling,  filled  up  the  big  box-stove 
with  heavy  oak  wood,  placed  the  light- 
ing arrangement  on  the  hearth,  and  set 
the  clock  to  drop  the  acid  at  the  hour 
of  eight;  all  this  requiring  only  a  few 
minutes. 

The  first  morning  after  I  had  made 
this  simple  arrangement  I  invited  the 
doubting  farmer  to  watch  the  old  squat 
schoolhouse  from  a  window  that  over- 
looked it,  to  see  if  a  good  smoke  did  not 
rise  from  the  stovepipe.  Sure  enough, 
on  the  minute,  he  saw  a  tall  column 
curling  gracefully  up  through  the 
frosty  air;  but,  instead  of  congratulat- 
ing me  on  my  success,  he  solemnly 
shook  his  head  and  said  in  a  hollow, 
lugubrious  voice,  *  Young  man,  you 
will  be  setting  fire  to  the  schoolhouse/ 
All  winter  long  that  faithful  clock-fire 
never  failed,  and  by  the  time  I  got  to 
the  schoolhouse  the  stove  was  usually 
red-hot. 

At  the  beginning  of  the  long  summer 
vacations  I  returned  to  the  Hickory 
Hill  farm  to  earn  the  means  in  the  har- 
vest-fields to  continue  my  university 
course,  walking  all  the  way  to  save  rail- 
road fares.  And  although  I  cradled 
four  acres  of  wheat  a  day,  I  made  the 
long  hard  sweaty  day's  work  still  long- 
er and  harder  by  keeping  up  my  study 
of  plants.  At  the  noon  hour  I  collected 
a  large  handful,  put  them  in  water  to 
keep  them  fresh,  and  after  supper  got 
to  work  on  them,  and  sat  up  till  after 
midnight,  analyzing  and  classifying, 
thus  leaving  only  four  hours  for  sleep; 
and  by  the  end  of  the  first  year  after 
taking  up  botany  I  knew  the  principal 
flowering  plants  of  the  region. 

I  received  my  first  lesson  in  botany 
from  a  student  by  the  name  of  Gris- 
wold  who  is  now  county  judge  of  the 
county  of  Waukesha,  Wisconsin.  In 


the  university  he  was  often  laughed  at 
on  account  of  his  anxiety  to  instruct 
others,  and  his  frequently  saying  with 
fine  emphasis,  *  Imparting  instruction 
is  my  greatest  enjoyment/ 

Nevertheless  I  still  indulged  my 
love  of  mechanical  inventions.  I  in- 
vented a  desk  in  which  the  books  I  had 
to  study  were  arranged  in  order  at  the 
beginning  of  each  term.  I  also  made  a 
bed  which  set  me  on  my  feet  every 
morning  at  the  hour  determined  on, 
and  in  dark  winter  mornings  just  as 
the  bed  set  me  on  the  floor  it  lighted 
a  lamp.  Then,  after  the  minutes  al- 
lowed for  dressing  had  elapsed,  a  click 
was  heard  and  the  first  book  to  be  stud- 
ied was  pushed  up  from  a  rack  below 
the  top  of  the  desk,  thrown  open,  and 
allowed  to  remain  there  the  number  of 
minutes  required.  Then  the  machinery 
closed  the  book  and  allowed  it  to  drop 
back  into  its  stall;  then  moved  the  rack 
forward  and  threw  up  the  next  in  order, 
and  so  on,  all  the  day  being  divided  ac- 
cording to  the  times  of  recitation,  and 
the  time  required  and  allotted  to  each 
study.  Besides  this,  I  thought  it  would 
be  a  fine  thing  in  the  summer-time 
when  the  sun  rose  early,  to  dispense 
with  the  clock-controlled  bed-machin- 
ery, and  make  use  of  sunbeams  in- 
stead. This  I  did  simply  by  taking  a 
lens  out  of  my  small  spy-glass,  fixing  it 
on  a  frame  on  the  sill  of  my  bedroom 
window,  and  pointing  it  to  the  sunrise; 
the  sunbeams  focused  on  a  thread 
burned  it  through,  allowing  the  bed- 
machinery  to  put  me  on  my  feet.  When 
I  wished  to  get  up  at  any  given  time 
after  sunrise  I  had  only  to  turn  the 
pivoted  frame  that  held  the  lens  the 
requisite  number  of  degrees  or  minutes. 
Thus  I  took  Emerson's  advice  and 
hitched  my  dumping-wagon  bed  to  a 
star. 

Although  I  was  four  years  at  the 
university,  I  did  not  take  the  regular 
course  of  studies,  but  instead  picked 


ENTERTAINING  THE   CANDIDATE 


277 


out  what  I  thought  would  be  most 
useful  to  me,  particularly  chemistry, 
which  opened  a  new  world,  and  mathe- 
matics and  physics,  a  little  Greek  and 
Latin,  botany  and  geology.  I  was  far 
from  satisfied  with  what  I  had  learned, 
and  should  have  stayed  longer.  Any- 
how I  wandered  away  on  a  glorious 
botanical  and  geological  excursion, 
which  has  lasted  nearly  fifty  years  and 
is  not  yet  completed,  always  happy 
and  free,  poor  and  rich,  without 
thought  of  a  diploma  or  of  making  a 


name,  urged  on  and  on  through  endless 
inspiring  Godful  beauty. 

From  the  top  of  a  hill  on  the  north 
side  of  Lake  Mendota  I  gained  a  last 
wistful  lingering  view  of  the  beauti- 
ful university  grounds  and  buildings 
where  I  had  spent  so  many  hungry  and 
happy  and  hopeful  days.  There  with 
streaming  eyes  I  bade  my  blessed 
Alma  Mater  farewell.  But  I  was  only 
leaving  one  university  for  another, 
the  Wisconsin  University  for  the  Uni- 
versity of  the  Wilderness. 


(The  End.) 


ENTERTAINING  THE   CANDIDATE 


BY  KATHARINE   BAKER 


BAG  in  hand,  brother  stops  in  for 
fifteen  minutes,  from  campaigning,  to 
get  some  clean  shirts.  He  says  the 
candidate  will  be  in  town  day  after 
to-morrow.  Do  we  want  him  to  come 
here,  or  shall  he  go  to  a  hotel? 

We  want  him,  of  course.  But  we  de- 
precate the  brevity  of  this  notice.  Also 
the  cook  and  chambermaid  are  new, 
and  remarkably  inexpert.  Brother, 
however,  declines  to  feel  any  concern. 
His  confidence  in  our  power  to  cope 
with  emergencies  is  flattering  if  exas- 
perating. 

There  is  nothing  in  the  markets  at 
this  time  of  year.  Guests  have  a  malig- 
nant facility  in  choosing  such  times. 
We  scour  the  country  for  forty  miles  in 
search  of  green  vegetables.  We  confide 
in  the  fishmonger,  who  grieves  sym- 
pathetically over  the  'phone,  because 
all  crabs  are  now  cold-storage,  and 


he'd  be  deceiving  us  if  he  said  other- 
wise. 

Still  we  are  determined  to  have 
luncheon  prepared  in  the  house.  Last 
time  the  august  judge  dined  with  us  we 
summoned  a  caterer  from  a  hundred 
miles  away,  and  though  the  caterer's 
food  was  good,  it  was  late.  We  love 
promptness,  and  we  are  going  to  have 
it.  Ladies  knew  all  about  efficiency 
long  before  Mr.  Frederick  Taylor.  Only 
they  could  n't  teach  it  to  servants, 
and  he  would  find  he  could  n't  either. 
But  every  mistress  of  a  house  knows 
how  to  make  short  cuts,  and  is  expert 
at  *  record  production'  in  emergencies. 

The  casual  brother  says  there  will  be 
one  or  two  dozen  people  at  luncheon. 
He  will  telephone  us  fifteen  minutes 
before  they  arrive.  Yes,  really,  that's 
the  best  he  can  do. 

So  we  prepare  for  one  or  two  dozen 


278 


ENTERTAINING  THE  CANDIDATE 


people,  and  they  must  sit  down  to 
luncheon  because  men  hate  a  buffet 
meal.  We  struggle  with  the  problem, 
how  many  chickens  are  required  for 
twelve  or  twenty-four  people?  The 
answer,  however,  is  really  obvious. 
Enough  for  twenty-four  will  be  enough 
for  twelve. 

Day  after  to-morrow  arrives.  The 
gardener  comes  in  to  lay  hearth-fires 
and  carry  tables.  We  get  out  china  and 
silver.  We  make  salad  and  rolls,  fruit- 
cup  and  cake.  We  guide  the  cook's  fal- 
tering steps  over  the  critical  moments 
of  soup  and  chicken.  We  do  the  oysters 
in  our  own  particular  way,  which  we 
fancy  inimitable.  We  arrange  bushels 
of  flowers  in  bowls,  vases,  and  baskets, 
and  set  them  on  mantels,  tables,  book- 
cases, everywhere  that  a  flower  can 
find  a  footing.  The  chauffeur  comes  in 
proudly  with  the  flower-holder  from 
the  limousine,  and  we  fill  it  in  honor  of 
the  distinguished  guest. 

Then  we  go  outside  to  see  that  the 
approach  to  the  house  is  satisfactory. 
The  bland  old  gardener  points  to  the 
ivy-covered  wall,  and  says  with  inno- 
cent joy,* it,  ain't  that  ivory 

the  prettiest  thing  you  ever  saw  in 
your  life? '  And  we  can't  deny  that  the 
lawn  looks  well,  with  ivy,  and  cosmos, 
and  innumerable  chrysanthemums. 

The  cook  and  chambermaid  will 
have  to  help  wait  on  the  table.  The 
chambermaid,  who  is  what  the  butler 
contemptuously  calls  'an  educated 
nigger,'  and  so  knows  nothing  useful, 
announces  that  she  has  no  white  uni- 
form. All  she  has  is  a  cold  in  her  head. 
We  give  her  a  blouse  and  skirt,  wonder- 
ing why  Providence  does  n't  eliminate 
the  unfit. 

We  run  upstairs  to  put  on  our  cost- 
liest shoes  and  stockings,  and  our  most 
perishable  gown.  The  leisurely  brother 
gets  us  on  the  wire  to  say  that  there 
will  be  twenty  guests  in  ten  minutes. 

Descending,  we  reset  the  tables  to 


seat  twenty  guests,  light  the  wood- 
fires,  toss  together  twenty  mint-juleps, 
and  a  few  over  for  luck,  repeat  our 
clear  instructions  to  the  goggling 
chambermaid,  desperately  implore  the 
butler  to  see  that  she  keeps  on  the  job, 
drop  a  last  touch  of  flavoring  in  the 
soup,  and  are  sitting  by  the  fire  with  an 
air  of  childish  gayety  and  carelessness 
when  the  train  of  motor-cars  draws  up 
to  the  door. 

Here  is  the  judge,  courteous  and 
authoritative.  Here  is  his  assiduous 
suite.  The  room  fills  with  faces  well 
known  in  every  country  that  an  illus- 
trated newspaper  can  penetrate.  From 
the  Golden  Gate  and  the  Rio  Grande, 
from  New  York  and  Alabama,  these 
men  have  come  together,  intent  on 
wresting  to  themselves  the  control  of 
the  Western  Hemisphere.  Now  they  are 
a  sort  of  highly  respectable  guerillas. 
To-morrow,  very  likely,  they  will  be 
awe-inspiring  magnates. 

Theoretically  we  are  impressed. 
Actually  they  have  mannerisms,  and 
some  of  them  wear  spectacles.  We 
reflect  that  the  triumvirs  very  likely 
had  mannerisms,  too,  and  Antony  him- 
self might  have  been  glad  to  own  spec- 
tacles. We  try  to  feel  reverence  for  the 
high  calling  of  these  men.  We  hope 
they'll  like  our  luncheon. 

The  butler  brings  in  the  juleps  and 
we  maintain  a  detached  look,  as  though 
those  juleps  were  just  a  happy  thought 
of  the  butler  himself,  and  we  were  as 
much  surprised  as  anybody.  The  judge 
won't  have  one,  but  most  everybody 
else  will.  The  newspaper  men  look  love 
and  gratitude  at  the  butler. 

That  earnest  youth  is  the  judge's 
secretary.  The  huge,  iron-gray  man 
expects  to  be  a  governor  after  Novem- 
ber fifth,  if  dreams  come  true.  The 
amiable  old  gentleman  who  never 
leaves  the  judge's  side,  has  come  two 
thousand  miles  out  of  pure  political 
enthusiasm,  to  protect  the  candidate 


ENTERTAINING  THE  CANDIDATE 


279 


from  assassins.  He  can  do  it,  too,  we 
conclude,  when  we  look  past  his  smil- 
ing mouth  into  his  steely  eyes. 

Here  is  the  campaign  manager,  busi- 
ness man  and  man-of-the- world. 

This  pretty  little  newspaper-woman 
from  Utah  implores  us  to  get  an  utter- 
ance on  suffrage  from  the  judge.  Just  a 
word.  It  will  save  him  thousands  of 
votes.  Well,  she's  a  dear  little  thing, 
but  we  can't  take  advantage  of  our 
guest. 

Luncheon  is  announced.  Brother, 
slightly  apologetic,  murmurs  that  there 
are  twenty-three.  Entirely  unforeseen. 
He  babbles  incoherently. 

But  it's  all  right.  We  women  won't 
come  to  the  table.  Voting  and  eating 
and  things  like  that  are  better  left  to 
the  men  anyway.  Why  should  women 
want  to  do  either,  when  they  have 
fathers  and  brothers  to  do  it  for  them? 
We  can  sit  in  the  gallery  and  watch. 
It's  very  nice  for  us.  And  exclusive. 
Nothing  promiscuous.  Yes,  go  on. 
We '11  wait. 

Whoever  is  listening  to  our  conver- 
sation professes  heartbreak  at  our  de- 
cision, and  edges  toward  the  rapidly 
filling  dining-room. 

We  sit  down  to  play  lady  of  leisure, 
in  various  affected  attitudes.  We  are 
not  going  near  the  kitchen  again.  The 
luncheon  is  simple.  Everything  is  per- 
fectly arranged.  The  servants  can  do 
it  all.  It's  mere  machine  work. 

From  afar  we  observe  the  soup  van- 
ishing. Then  one  by  one  we  stammer, 
—  *  The  mayonnaise  — '  —  *  I  wonder 
if  the  rolls  are  hot  — '  —  *  Cook's 
coffee  is  impossible, '  —  fade  silently  up 
the  front  stair,  and  scurry  down  the 
kitchen-way. 

We  cover  the  perishable  gown  with  a 
huge  white  apron,  we  send  up  a  fervent 
prayer  for  the  costly  shoes,  and  go 
where  we  are  needed  most. 

We  save  the  day  for  good  coffee. 
With  the  precision  of  a  juggler  we 


rescue  plates  from  the  chambermaid, 
who  is  overcome  by  this  introduction 
to  the  great  world  and  dawdles  con- 
templatively through  the  pantry  door. 
Charmed  with  our  proficiency,  she 
stands  by  our  side,  and  watches  us 
clear  a  shelf  of  china  in  the  twinkling  of 
an  eye.  If  she  could  find  a  stool,  she 
would  sit  at  our  feet,  making  motion 
studies.  But  she  could  n't  find  it  if  it 
were  already  there.  She  could  n't  find 
anything.  We  order  her  back  to  the 
dining-room,  where  she  takes  up  a 
strategic  position  by  the  window,  from 
which  she  can  idly  survey  the  mob  out- 
side, and  the  hungry  men  within. 

The  last  coffee-cup  has  passed 
through  the  doorway.  Cigars  and 
matches  are  circulating  in  the  butler's 
capable  hands.  No  more  need  for  us. 

We  shed  the  enveloping  aprons,  dis- 
appear from  the  kitchen,  and  mate- 
rialize again,  elegantly  useless,  in  the 
drawing-room.  Nobody  can  say  that 
luncheon  was  n't  hot  and  promptly 
served. 

Chairs  begin  to  clatter.  They  are 
rising  from  the  table.  A  brass  band 
outside  bursts  into  being. 

Brother  had  foretold  that  band  to 
us,  and  we  had  expressed  vivid  doubts. 
He  said  it  would  cost  eighty  dollars. 
Now  eighty  dollars  in  itself  is  a  re- 
spectable sum,  a  sum  capable  even  of 
exerting  some  mild  fascination,  but 
eighty  dollars  viewed  in  relation  to  a 
band  becomes  merely  ludicrous. 

We  said  an  eighty-dollar  band  was 
a  thing  innately  impossible,  like  free- 
trade,  or  a  dachshund.  Brother  at- 
tested that  the  next  best  grade  «f  band 
would  demand  eight  hundred.  We  just- 
ly caviled  at  eight  hundred.  We  inquir- 
ed, Why  any  band?  Brother  claimed 
that  it  would  make  a  cheerful  noise, 
and  we  yielded. 

So  at  this  moment  the  band  begins 
to  make  a  noise.  We  perceive  at  once 
that  the  price  was  accurately  gauged. 


280 


THE  CONTRIBUTORS'  CLUB 


It  is  unquestionably  an  eighty-dollar 
band.  We  begin  to  believe  in  dachs- 
hunds. 

To  these  supposedly  cheerful  strains 
the  gentlemen  stream  into  the  drawing- 
room.  They  beam  repletely.  They  tell 
us  what  a  fine  luncheon  it  was.  They 
are  eloquent  about  it.  All  the  condi- 
tions of  their  entertainment  were  ideal, 
they  would  have  us  believe.  They  im- 
ply that  we  are  mighty  lucky,  in  that 
our  men  can  provide  us  with  such  a 
luxurious  existence.  They  smile  with 
majestic  benignity  at  these  fair,  but 
frivolous,  pensioners  on  masculine 
bounty.  American  women  are  petted, 
helpless  dolls,  anyway.  Foreigners  have 
said  so.  They  clasp  our  useless  hands  in 
fervent  farewells.  They  proceed  in  state 
to  the  waiting  cars.  They  hope  we 
will  follow  them  to  the  meeting.  Oh, 
yes,  we  will  come,  though  incapable 
of  apprehending  the  high  problems  of 
government. 


Led  by  the  honest  band,  surrounded 
by  flags,  followed  by  cheers,  they  dis- 
appear in  magnificent  procession.  Now 
we  may  straggle  to  the  dining-room 
and  eat  cold  though  matchless  oysters, 
tepid  chicken,  and  in  general  whatever 
there  is  any  left  of. 

The  chambermaid  has  broken  a 
lovely  old  Minton  plate.  We  are  glad 
we  did  n't  use  the  coffee-cups  that  were 
made  in  France  for  Dolly  Madison.  She 
would  have  enjoyed  wrecking  those. 

We  hurry,  because  we  don't  want  to 
miss  the  meeting  altogether.  We  think 
enviously  of  the  men.  In  our  secret 
souls,  we'd  like  to  campaign.  We  love 
to  talk  better  than  anything  else  in  the 
world,  and  we  could  make  nice  speech- 
es, too.  But  we  must  do  the  oysters 
and  the  odd  jobs,  and  keep  the  hearth- 
fires  going,  like  responsible  vestal  vir- 
gins. It 's  woman's  sphere.  Man  gave 
it  to  her  because  he  did  n't  want  it 
himself. 


THE  CONTRIBUTORS'  CLUB 


ON   ADOPTING   ONE  S   PARENTS 

IT  is  strange  how  persistently  one  is 
dogged  and  tracked  down  by  one's 
dreams.  A  dream  is  the  toughest  of 
living  things.  I  myself  have  been 
hounded  through  life  by  an  ideal.  As 
an  infant  I  burned  with  a  spirit  of 
adoption,  expansive,  indiscriminate,im- 
personal;  while  I  was  still  of  years  to 
be  myself  coddled  and  kissed,  curled, 
cribbed,  scoured,  and  spanked,  I  im- 
aged myself  the  mother  of  an  orphan 
asylum.  Still  uncertain  in  speech,  I 
lisped  lullabies  to  armfuls  of  babies,  of 
every  size,  sex,  and  condition.  The 


babies  were  delivered  at  my  door  by 
packet,  singly  and  by  the  dozen,  in  all 
degrees  of  filth,  abuse,  and  emacia- 
tion. Vigorously  I  tubbed  them,  fed 
them,  bedded  them,  patted  them,  or 
paddywhacked  them,  just  as  my  ma- 
ternal conscience  demanded.  Oh,  it 
was  a  brave  institution,  that  orphan 
asylum  of  mine;  it  solaced  my  waking 
hours,  and  at  night  I  fell  asleep  suck- 
ing the  thumb  of  philanthropy. 

The  orphan  asylum  lasted  into  my 
teens,  and  then  it  contracted,  restrict- 
ed itself  in  the  sex  and  number  to  be 
admitted;  but  the  spirit  of  things  was 
much  the  same;  for  he  was  to  be  lonely 


THE  CONTRIBUTORS'  CLUB 


281 


and  abused,  world-worn  and  weary, 
and  twenty-nine  or  thirty  perhaps. 
Gladly  would  he  seek  refuge  for  his 
battered  head  on  the  wise  and  wifely 
bosom  of  sixteen.  But  he  did  n't.  The 
brisk  little  years  came  trudging  along, 
and  they  carried  him  and  my  sixteenth 
birthday  far  and  far  away,  but  still  the 
world,  for  all  of  me,  was  unadopted. 
Then  the  orphan  asylum  came  sneak- 
ing back  again,  but  this  time  it  was 
only  one,  — one  baby.  Why  could  not 
I,  I  asked  myself,  when  the  days  of 
my  spinsterhood  should  be  grown  less 
busy,  pick  up  a  bit  of  a  boy-  or  girl- 
thing,  and  run  off  with  it,  and  have  it 
for  my  own,  somewhere  in  the  house 
where  Joy  lives? 

Then,  while  I  dreamed  of  these 
things,  I  heard  a  little  noise  outside, 
and  there  at  my  door  sat  two  waifs  and 
strays  whom  fate  and  fortune  had 
tossed  and  buffeted  until  they  were 
forespent.  I  lifted  up  the  hat  of  the 
one,  and  I  undid  the  blessed  bonnet- 
strings  of  the  other,  and  lo,  it  was  my 
parents;  and  here  was  my  orphan  asy- 
lum at  last,  fallen  on  my  very  doorstep! 

Only  consider  how  much  better  for- 
tune had  done  for  me  than  I  should 
have  done  for  myself!  How  much  bet- 
ter than  adopting  an  unlimited  orphan 
asylum,  a  stray  foundling,  or  a  spouse 
'so  outwearied,  so  foredone,'  as  the  one 
previously  mentioned,  was  it  to  find 
myself  in  a  twinkling  the  proud  pos- 
sessor of  a  lusty  brace  of  parents  be- 
tween whom  and  the  world  I  stand  as 
natural  protector!  Here  is  adoption 
enough  for  me.  My  orphan  asylum, 
my  foundling,  my  husband,  might  have 
been  to  me  for  shame  and  undoing. 
The  asylum  might  have  gone  on  a  mu- 
tiny; the  foundling  might  have  broken 
out  all  over  in  hereditary  tendencies;  for 
the  choice  flowers  of  English  speech  in 
which  I  should  have  sought  to  instruct 
its  infant  tongue,  the  vicious  suckling 
might  have  returned  me  profanity  and 


spontaneous  billingsgate;  it  might  too 
have  been  vulgar,  tending  to  sneak  into 
corners  and  chew  gum.  These  are  not 
things  I  have  reason  to  expect  of  my 
parents.  As  for  a  man,  —  a  living,  eat- 
ing, smoking  man,  —  I  need  not  en- 
large on  the  temerity  of  a  woman  who 
would  voluntarily  adopt  into  a  well- 
regulated  heart  a  totally  unexplored 
husband. 

No;  if  a  woman  will  adopt,  parents 
are  the  best  material  for  the  purpose. 
They  will  not  be  insubordinate;  from 
the  days  when  from  the  vantage  of  my 
high  chair  I  clamored  sharply  with  my 
spoon  for  attention,  and  received  it, 
have  they  not  been  carefully  trained 
in  the  docility  befitting  all  good  Amer- 
ican parents?  Nor,  being  in  their  safe 
and  sober  sixties,  are  they  likely  to 
blossom  into  naughtinesses,  large  or 
small,  so  that  the  folk  will  shoot  out 
their  lorgnettes  at  me,  sneering,  '  Pray 
is  this  the  best  you  can  do  in  the 
way  of  imparting  a  bringing-up?'  — 
And  how  much  better  than  an  adopted 
husband  are  an  adopted  father  and 
mother!  They  will  not  go  about  tap- 
ping cigar  ashes  over  my  maidenly  pre- 
judices; they  will  tread  gingerly  and 
not  make  a  horrid  mess  of  my  very  best 
emotions.  Yes;  to  all  ladies  about  to 
adopt,  I  recommend  parents. 

I  warn  you,  however,  that  you  must 
go  about  your  adopting  pretty  cau- 
tiously. It  is  never  the  desire  of  the 
genuinely  adoptive  to  inspire  awe,  still 
less  gratitude.  The  parent  becomes 
shy  under  adoption ;  at  first  he  recoiled 
from  my  fire  that  warmed  him,  and 
she  held  back  from  my  board  that  fed 
her.  They  flagrantly  declared  that 
they  wanted  to  go  home,  —  their  own 
home,  the  home  that  was  n't  there. 
But  I  held  on  to  them,  affirming  that  I 
had  caught  them,  fair  prey  in  a  fair 
chase,  and  never,  never  would  I  let 
them  escape  into  any  little  old  den  in  a 
great  waste  world  that  they  might  have 


282 


THE  CONTRIBUTORS'  CLUB 


the  bad  taste  to  prefer.  At  this  they 
sulked,  courteously,  resignedly.  Worst 
of  all,  they  looked  at  me  with  the 
strange  eyes  with  which  one  regards 
that  alien  to  all  men,  a  benefactor.  The 
adopter  must  be  patient,  —  waiting, 
showing  slowly  how  shabby  it  is  of  par- 
ents, when  their  children  give  them 
bread,  to  give  them  in  return  that 
stone,  gratitude. 

Thus,  after  a  while,  the  parents  will 
find  themselves  growing  warm  and 
well-fed  and  cosy  and  comfortable,  and 
they  will  begin  to  put  forth  little  shoots 
of  sprightliness  and  glee.  Instead  of 
concealing  their  shabby  feet  under 
petticoats  and  desks  and  tables,  out 
will  come  the  tattered  seam  and  worn 
sole,  and,  'Shoe  me,  child!'  the  par- 
ent will  cry.  Or,  when  one  goes  trip- 
ping and  comes  home  again,  the  parents 
will  come  swarming  about  one's  pock- 
ets and  one's  portmanteau  demanding, 
'What  have  you  brought  me,  daugh- 
ter?' These  are  the  things  the  adopter 
was  waiting  and  watching  for,  and 
wanting. 

Thus  my  dreams  have  come  true, 
my  ideal  has  found  me.  In  the  streets 
and  on  the  trolleys  of  the  world  I  am  no 
longer  a  stranger.  *  Allow  me,  sir,  my 
turn  at  the  car-strap,  none  of  your 
airs  with  me,  if  you  please;  despite  pet- 
ticoats, I,  too,  am  a  family  man.  I  am 
none  of  your  lonely  ones;  I,  also,  be- 
long to  a  latch-key,  have  mouths  to 
feed,  have  little  ones  at  home.'  At  the 
sound  of  my  key  they  will  fly  down  the 
stairs,  fall  upon  and  welcome  me  in  to 
my  hearth  and  my  slippers,  and  to- 
gether in  the  fire-glow,  the  parents  and 
I  shall  have  our  glorious  topsy-turvy 
Children's  Hour. 

You,  sir,  who  elbow  me  going  busi- 
nessward,  are  you  plotting  surprises 
for  birthdays  and  Christmas  Days  and 
holidays  and  other  days?  So,  too,  I. 
Sometimes  a  pretty  little  check  comes 
in,  not  too  small  nor  yet  so  big  as  to 


be  serious.  Then  I  scamper  over  the 
house  until  I  find  him.  The  rascal 
knows  what's  coming.  We  regard  the 
check  right-side  up  first,  then  over  I 
flip  it  on  its  face  and  write,  *  Pay  to  the 

order  of ,'  and  by  that  time  down 

he  is  and  deep  he  is,  among  those  pre- 
cious book-catalogues  previously  anno- 
tated, noting  wantonly,  like  the  pro- 
digal father  heaven  made  him. 

Do  you,  sir,  in  your  pride  and  fat- 
ness, marshal  your  brood  to  the  thea- 
tre? So  I,  mine.  And  do  the  eyes  of 
your  brood,  that  is  young,  glow  and 
brighten,  twinkle  or  grow  dim,  as  you 
watch,  half  so  prettily  as  do  those  of 
my  brood,  that  is  old?  Can  you,  you 
commonplace,  sober-going  fathers  and 
mothers  of  families  obtained  by  the 
ordinary  conventions  of  nature,  know 
the  fine,  aromatic  flavor  of  my  fun? 

What  exhilaration  have  you  known 
like  my  pride  of  saying,  *  Whist  you, 
there,  parents  out  in  the  cold  world, 
in  here  quick,  where  it  is  warm,  where 
I  am!  in,  away  from  that  bogey,  Old 
Age,  who  will  catch  you  if  he  can,  — 
and  who  will  catch  me,  too,  before  the 
time,  if  I  don't  have  you  to  be  young 
for!' 

WHAT  WOULD  JANE   SAY? 

WAS  it  not  Jane  Austen,  most  scrup- 
ulous and  also  most  aristocratic  of 
artists,  who  dared  to  reply  to  the 
Prince  Regent's  request  for  an  histor- 
ical novel,  that  she  did  not  feel  it  possi- 
ble to  undertake  work  outside  the  lim- 
its of  her  own  observation?  Disloyal, 
and  yet  most  loyal,  Jane!  who  said 
much  of  forms  and  respect,  whose 
heads  of  families  are  '  looked  up  to '  by 
circle  upon  circle  of  kinsmen  and  neigh- 
bors, who  said  less  than  little  of  Art  and 
Structure  and  Theme,  but  who  could, 
upon  occasion,  daintily  and  distinctly 
make  her  choice  between  deferences, 
and  follow  the  voice  of  her  artistic  con- 


THE  CONTRIBUTORS'  CLUB 


283 


science.  Why  is  there  not  more  of  Jane 
with  us?  with  us  who  make  and  buy 
many  editions  of  her  and  write  essays 
upon  her,  deliver  lectures  upon  her, 
construct  synopses  of  her,  and  wring 
the  withers  of  the  undergraduate  by 
sternly  bidding  him  note  that,  at  his 
age,  Miss  Austen  had  finished  Pride 
and  Prejudice. 

It  is  good  for  criticism  that  it  be  per- 
sonal and  intimate.  Why,  for  instance, 
when  even  I  wish  to  go  over  to  the 
majority  and  write  a  short  story,  why 
do  not  I  overhaul  my  bedside  copy  of 
Jane  and  make  note  of  that  one  most 
golden  precept,  to  remain  within  the 
limits  of  my  own  observation?  Suffice 
that  I  do  not.  Video  meliora  proboque, 
deteriora  sequor.  I  rise  from  a  diet  of 
Italian  vermicelli  and  cold  Slav,  or 
from  long  observation  of  those  patient 
jewelers  whom  Thackeray  uncon- 
sciously immortalized  as  Messrs.  How- 
ell  and  James  of  Bond  Street,  and  I  go 
out  in  search  of  a  situation.  Or  rather, 
I  combine  shop-worn  bits  in  that  lit- 
erary bargain-counter,  my  mind.  And 
I  picture  to  myself  a  man,  a  man  of 
some  forty  years,  pacing  his  bachelor 
chambers,  looking  out  ever  and  anon 
into  a  dull,  wintry,  London  street,  and 
returning  toward  his  bookcases  by  a 
desk  littered  with  the  pads,  the  proof- 
sheets,  the  marked  volumes  of  the  pro- 
fessional writer.  He  sits  down  and 
draws  to  him  paper  and  the  letter  he 
has  to  answer,  which,  with  the  privilege 
of  my  class,  I  read  over  his  shoulder. 
From  a  woman,  of  course,  and  a  wo- 
man of  dignity,  though  loving.  'Do 
not,'  she  writes,  'make  the  unavoidable 
harder  for  us  both.  We  have  both  seen 
it  clearly,  planned  for  it.  Father's  need 
does  not  grow  less,  and  we  must  still 
put  away  the  thought  of  futures.' 

And  now,  nothing  being  further 
from  me  than  the  male  mind,  or  the 
male  mind  working  under  such  circum- 
stances, I  have  decided  that  a  short 


story  can  be  constructed  out  of  his 
answer.  For  would  not  the  manufac- 
ture of  that  answer  enable  me  to  dis- 
play Method,  Subtlety,  Technique? 
could  not  I,  by  taking  much  thought, 
create  for  posterity  the  picture  of  a 
very  mean  mind  of  literary  ability 
trying  to  wound  a  woman's  heart.? 
Could  not  I,  by  showing  the  various 
stages  of  that  letter,  the  evolutions  of 
the  brain  contriving  it,  succeed  in  in- 
geniously building  up,  by  implication, 
two  human  characters  and  their  mu- 
tual past?  By  implication  only,  —  no 
vulgar  direct  narrative. 

Opportunity  is  here  abundant  for  the 
management  of  that  much-prized  thing, 
to  be  spoken  of  only  with  respectful 
capitals, — Suggestive  Detail.  My  hero, 
my  subject  rather,  reaches  a  point  in 
his  composition  where  the  chill  fear 
strikes  him  that  a  dexterous  turn  of 
phrase,  colored  rich  with  reminiscence 
of  some  older  artist,  and  yet  his  own, 
which  flows  from  his  pen,  has  been  used 
by  him  recently.  Accursed  human  trick 
of  repetition !  He  searches  his  memory 
for  evidence  to  convict  or  clear  himself. 
Unfortunately  the  rough  draft  of  that 
other  letter  was  not  kept  as  usual,  and 
a  temporary  illness  had  prevented  its 
harvesting  into  the  note-book.  But  the 
matter  is  serious,  since  the  two  women 
are  friends.  Women,  one  knows,  are 
not  of  stern  stuff;  the  stricter  mascu- 
line code  of  honor  does  not  prevail 
among  them.  Letters  have  been 
shown,  letters  may  yet  be  shown. — 
Thus  would  I  suggest,  subtly,  as  one 
perceives,  and  stiffening  the  too-fluid 
movement  of  my  narrative  by  allusion 
and  echo  from  older  literature.  And 
my  final  phrase,  that  was  long  ago  de- 
cided upon.  The  letter  dispatched,  the 
door  closing  upon  the  silent  servant, 
who  goes  out  into  the  storm  with  the 
perfected  work  in  his  hand,  the  writer 
should  fling  himself  with  a  sigh  of  sat- 
isfaction upon  the  fireside  couch,  and 


284 


THE  CONTRIBUTORS'  CLUB 


take  down  a  volume  of  Meredith  with 
a  sense  of  intellectual  kinship. 

What  would  Jane  say?  I  think  I 
hear  an  echo,  —  *  outside  the  limits  of 
my  own  observation.'  And  yet,  indig- 
nant, I  demand,  What  would  Jane 
write  about  in  my  place?  Would  Jane 
go  out  into  the  kitchen  and  gather  the 
romantic  material  which  flourishes 
there  hot  and  hot  while  I  do  rechauffes 
in  the  study?  The  cook  is  thirty-five, 
short-tempered  but  sunshiny;  she  has 
been  divorced,  and  her  one  child  lies 
buried  far  away  in  a  prairie  state;  her 
husband,  after  drunken  threats  and 
wearisome  prayers  for  forgiveness,  has 
at  length  gone  his  solitary  road;  the 
absurdly  opportune  *  lover  of  my  child- 
hood/ with  no  money  saved  in  the 
past,  no  prospect  of  work  in  the  future, 
and  a  very  large  black  cigar  in  his 
mouth  in  the  present,  has  appeared. 
And  my  cook,  regardless  of  these  many 
tenses,  is  trustfully  featherstitching  her 
middle-aged  trousseau  without  heed  to 
the  angry  contempt  of  all  the  old  la- 
dies in  the  neighborhood.  It  is  a  Mary 
Wilkins  idyl  of  New  England  fidelity, 
an  Esther  Waters  of  Chicago. 

And  yet  again,  —  What  would  Jane 
say?  Are  these  my  observations?  Be- 
cause my  cook  lives  in  my  kitchen,  is 
she  therefore  my  raw  material?  Do  not 
I  see,  alas !  that  in  thinking  of  her  I  put 
her  in  her  literary  class,  that  I  have  an 
obsession  of  literature  and  no  experi- 
ences? Who  shall  cleanse  me  from 
these  masses  of  vicarious  and  super- 
incumbent knowledge  and  give  me  to 
find  myself? 

Well  may  I  guess  that  no  word  of 
reply  would  be  Jane's.  In  whatever 
nook  she  sits  sewing,  she  only  smiles. 

FROM   CONCORD    TO   SYRIA 

WHAT  have  I  brought  with  me  from 
the  Paradise  of  the  New  World,  you 
ask.  What  have  I  gained  in  the  coun- 


try of  gold  and  iron,  of  freedom  and 
trusts?  How  much  have  I  accumu- 
lated in  the  land  of  plenty  and  profu- 
sion —  how  big  a  draft  do  I  present  at 
the  Imperial  Ottoman  Bank?  Ah,  yes! 
These  are  pertinent  questions,  my 
neighbor.  I  went  to  America  with  a 
lean  purse;  I  came  back,  alas !  not  purse- 
ful  but  purseless.  Do  not  conclude 
from  this,  however,  that  I  am  poor. 
On  the  contrary,  I  deposit  in  many 
banks,  including  the  Bank  of  Wisdom; 
and  my  credit  is  good  in  many  king- 
doms, including  the  Kingdom  of  the 
Soul.  And  of  a  truth,  the  more  I  draw 
on  my  accounts,  no  matter  how  big  the 
sum,  the  bigger  my  balance  becomes. 
This  is,  indeed,  a  miracle  of  the  Soul  — 
a  paradox  not  defined  or  described  in 
the  illustrated  catalogues  of  market- 
men. 

His  best  companions,  innocence  and  health: 
And  his  best  riches,  ignorance  of  wealth. 

I  come  back  to  my  native  country 
with  no  ulterior  political  or  maleficent 
purpose.  I  am  not  here  to  undermine 
the  tottering  throne  of  his  Eminence 
the  Patriarch;  nor  to  rival  his  Excel- 
lency the  Pasha  in  his  political  jobbery 
and  his  eclat ;  nor  to  supersede  any  deco- 
rated chic  Bey  in  office;  nor  to  erect  a 
filature  near  that  of  my  rich  neighbor; 
nor  ,to  apply  for  a  franchise  to  estab- 
lish a  trolley-car  system  in  the  Leba- 
nons.  *  Blameless  and  harmless,  the 
sons  of  God.'  And  I  share  with  them  at 
least  the  last  attribute,  Excellencies, 
and  worthy  Signiors.  I  return  to  my 
native  mountains  on  a  little  — •  er  — 
private  business,  —  only,  perhaps,  to 
see  the  cyclamens  of  the  season  again. 
And  I  have  brought  with  me  from  the 
Eldorado  across  the  Atlantic  a  pair  of 
walking  shoes  and  three  books  pub- 
lished respectively  in  Philadelphia, 
Boston,  and  New  York.  The  good  Gray 
Poet,  the  Sage  of  Concord,  and  the 
Recluse  of  Walden  are  my  only  compan- 
ions in  this  grand  congt.  Whitman  and 


THE  CONTRIBUTORS'  CLUB 


285 


Emerson  and  Thoreau  are  come  to  pay 
you  a  visit,  my  beloved  Syria. 

But  who  are  these  strangers?  I  am 
asked.  Why  do  they  come  so  late? 
What  is  their  mission  to  Syria,  that  is 
to  say,  their  design  upon  her?  Ah,  dear 
Mother,  my  companions  are  neither 
missionaries,  nor  travelers,  nor  philan- 
thropists. They  come  not  to  shed  tears 
with  you  —  like  the  paid  mourners  of 
antiquity;  they  come  not  to  gaze  at 
your  ruins  and  rob  you  of  the  remnants 
of  your  temples  and  your  gods;  they 
come  not  to  pity  your  poverty  and 
trim  the  sacred  ragged  edges  of  the 
garment  of  your  glory.  My  compan- 
ions knew  and  loved  you  long  before 
you  became  the  helpless  victim  of  cor- 
morant hierarchs  and  decorated  ob- 
scurants and  rogues.  Not  that  they 
ever  visited  you  in  the  flesh;  but 
clothed  in  the  supernal  and  eternal 
mystery  of  genius,  they  continue  to  live 
and  journey  in  the  world  of  the  human 
spirit,  even  like  your  ancient  cedars, 
even  like  your  sacred  legends. 

With  a  little  digression  I  shall  en- 
deavor to  make  my  companions  better 
known  to  you.  The  elecampane,  that 
most  peculiar  of  perennial  herbs,  is  not 
a  stranger  to  your  roads  and  fields.  Its 
odor  is  strong,  acrid,  penetrating;  the 
slightest  touch  of  it  has  an  immediate 
and  enduring  effect.  When  you  ap- 
proach it,  you  must,  willy-nilly,  carry 
away  with  you  some  token  of  its  love. 
And  one  of  its  idiosyncrasies  is  that  it 
only  blooms  when  the  hills  and  fields 
are  shorn  of  every  other  variety  of 
flower.  It  is  the  message  of  spring  to 
autumn  —  the  billet  doux,  as  it  were, 
of  May  to  September.  It  bursts  with 
beautiful  yellow  flowers,  to  console  the 
almost  flower  less  season.  And  when 
all  the  bushes  and  herbs  of  the  Leba- 
non coppices  and  fields  are  glorying  in 
their  fragrance  and  beauty,  the  ele- 
campane waves  its  mucilaginous  and 
wilted  branches  in  perfect  self-satisfac- 


tion. But  when  Nature  withholds  her 
favors  from  these  wild  daughters  of 
spring,  the  flowering  of  the  elecampane 
begins  in  good  earnest.  Ay,  the  life 
beautiful  is  not  denied  even  this  bold 
and  ungainly  plant,  which  is  ubiqui- 
tous in  these  hills.  On  the  waysides, 
in  the  fields,  on  the  high  ridges,  in  the 
pine  forests,  over  terraces  and  under 
grapevines,  it  grows  and  glories  in  its 
abundance,  and  in  its  pungent  gener- 
osity. Ah,  how  it  fans  and  flatters  the 
thistle;  how  it  nestles  round  the  lilies  in 
the  valley;  how  it  spreads  itself  beneath 
the  grapevines;  how  it  waves  its  pen- 
nant of  self-satisfaction  on  yonder 
height!  Here,  beneath  an  oak  or  a 
pine,  it  stands  erect  in  its  arrogance; 
there,  it  is  bending  over  the  humble 
crocus,  or  sheltering  the  delicate  and 
graceful  cyclamen. 

Whitman  is  the  elecampane  in  the 
field  of  poetry. 

The  furze,  on  the  other  hand,  is  the 
idol  of  your  heaths  and  copses.  This 
plant,  of  course,  is  not  without  its 
thorn.  But  its  smooth  and  tender  stem, 
its  frail  and  fragrant  yellow  blossoms, 
—  those  soft,  wee  shells  of  amber,  — 
the  profusion  and  the  symmetry  of  its 
bushes,  the  delicacy  of  its  tone  of  mys- 
tery, all  tend  to  emphasize  its  attract- 
ive and  inviting  charms.  A  furze-bush 
in  full  bloom  is  the  crowning  glory  of 
your  heaths  and  copses,  thickly  over- 
grown. In  the  wadis  below  one  seldom 
meets  with  the  furze;  it  only  abounds 
on  the  hill-tops,  among  gray  cliffs  and 
crannied  rocks  and  boulders,  where 
even  the  ferns  and  poppies  feel  at 
home.  And  a  little  rest  on  one  of  these 
smooth,  fern-spread  rock-couches,  un- 
der the  cool  and  shady  arbor  of  furze- 
bushes,  in  their  delicate  fragrance  of 
mystery,  is  ineffable  delight  to  a  pil- 
grim soul.  Here,  indeed,  is  a  happy 
image  of  Transcendentalism.  Here  is 
Emerson  for  me,  —  a  furze-bush  in  full 
bloom. 


THE  AMERICAN  WAGE-EARNER  AGAIN 


Now  let  me  go  down  the  valley  to 
introduce  to  you  the  third  of  my  com- 
panions, the  stern  and  unique  Thoreau. 
You  are  no  doubt  acquainted  with  the 
terebinth  and  the  nenuphar.  They  are 
very  rare  in  your  valleys  and  forests. 
The  terebinth  is  mantled  in  a  vague  and 
mystic  charm;  its  little  heart-shaped 
pods,  filled  with  gum  and  incense,  be- 
speak an  esoteric  beauty.  Not  that 
Thoreau  ever  dealt  in  incense.  What 
he  had  of  it,  he  kept  for  his  own  beatific 
self. 

Yes,  the  terebinth  is  a  symbol  of  the 
moralist  in  Thoreau.  And  the  nenu- 
phar, with  its  delicate  and  cream-col- 
ored blossoms,  —  the  choicest  in  your 
dells  and  dales,  —  is  a  symbol  of  the 
poet.  The  first  represents  for  me  the 
vigorous  and  ruthless  thinker;  the 
second,  the  singer,  sweet  and  quaint. 
For  does  not  the  terebinth  stand  alone 
in  a  pine  grove,  or  beneath  some 


mighty  ridge,  or  over  some  high  and 
terribly  abrupt  precipice?  And  so,  too, 
the  nenuphar.  The  terebinth,  more- 
over, can  bear  fruits  of  poetry.  Graft 
upon  it  a  pistachio  and  it  will  give  forth 
those  delicious  and  aesthetic  nuts,  — 
those  little  emeralds  in  golden  shells,  — 
so  rare  outside  of  Asia. 

These,  then,  are  my  companions, 
dear  Mother.  The  terebinth  and  the 
nenuphar  of  your  valleys  —  Thoreau. 
The  flowering  furze-bush  on  your  hill- 
tops with  a  smooth  and  mighty  boulder 
for  its  throne  —  Emerson.  The  acrid 
elecampane  in  your  fields,  on  your  way- 
sides, in  your  vineyards  —  Whitman. 

And  if  the  symbol  does  not  fit  the 
subject,  or  the  subject  is  not  at  ease  in 
the  symbol,  the  fault  is  not  mine;  for 
my  American  walking  shoes  are  new, 
and  my  Oriental  eyes  are  old.  But  those 
who  slip  on  the  way,  believe  me,  often 
see  deeper  than  those  who  do  not. 


THE  AMERICAN  WAGE-EARNER  AGAIN 


LETTERS  TO   THE   EDITOR 


November  14,  1912. 

To  THE  EDITOR  OF  THE  ATLANTIC. 

Sir,  —  In  the  September  number 
of  the  Atlantic  Monthly  there  was  an 
article  by  W.  Jett  Lauck,  headed  *A 
Real  Myth/ 

Mr.  Lauck  is  well-informed  about 
immigration  matters  and  the  various 
nationalities  employed  in  the  textile 
and  other  mills. 

It  is  true  that  the  native  American 
wage-earner  has  largely  disappeared 
from  the  textile  and  other  mills,  and 
that  his  place  has  been  taken  by  for- 
eigners of  various  nationalities.  The 


American  has  not  been  driven  out,  and 
is  not  non-existent.  He  is  in  demand, 
and  employed  on  railroads  and  in  many 
other  occupations. 

Mr.  Lauck  says :  *  It  is  apparent  that 
our  wage-earners  are  not  getting  their 
proper  share  of  tariff  benefits,  and  that 
their  compensation  might  be  greatly 
increased  without  any  serious  injury 
to  profits  or  to  industry.  The  rates 
paid  to  workers,  in  the  iron  and  steel, 
paper  and  news-print,  and  the  cotton, 
woolen,  and  worsted  goods  industries, 
for  example,  might  be  doubled,  and 
still  leave  large  profits  to  be  divided  by 


THE  AMERICAN   WAGE-EARNER  AGAIN 


287 


the  manufacturer  and  the  wholesale 
and  retail  merchants.' 

This  statement  is  entirely  erroneous 
as  regards  the  textile  industries.  I  know 
this  perfectly  well  from  my  connection 
with  various  textile  manufacturing 
mills.  Doubling  wages  would  not  only 
destroy  all  profits,  but  would  make  a 
large  annual  deficit.  The  foreign  wage- 
earners  in  these  mills  are  certainly 
securing  their  share  of  protection  from 
the  tariff,  and  the  wages  received,  low, 
perhaps,  compared  with  some  of  the 
more  arduous  and  skilled  employments, 
suffice  to  draw  thousands  of  them  to 
this  country  from  Europe,  where  the 
wages  are  very  much  less,  while  they 
are  such  here  as  enable  them  to  send 
large  amounts  of  money  abroad  annu- 
ally. Their  method  of  living  in  many 
cases  is  very  objectionable,  but  it  is 
not  under  the  control  of  the  corpora- 
tions employing  them,  and  is  either 
such  as  they  are  used  to  abroad  or  is 
adopted  as  a  means  of  saving  money 
for  remittance  home. 

It  is  not  true  that  the  recent  mechan- 
ical inventions  have  rendered  skilled 
operatives  unnecessary.  Neither  is  it 
true  that  the  labor  unions  have  been 
disrupted,  or  that  they  are  not  in  a 
position  to  demand  advance  in  wages. 

The  Tariff  Board  secured  costs  of 
goods  made  in  American  mills,  as  their 
books  and  accounts  were  freely  shown, 
but  they  had  much  less  opportunity 
for  getting  the  actual  wages  paid  in 
England,  and  still  less  on  the  continent 
of  Europe.  It  was  not  very  important 
that  they  should  get  the  actual  costs 
on  foreign  goods,  because  the  deter- 
mining cause  of  competitive  importa- 
tions is  the  price  of  the  goods  in  foreign 
markets.  The  cost  of  American  goods, 
as  stated  by  the  Tariff  Board,  was  the 
cost  at  the  mill,  and  did  not  take  into 
account  heavy  charges  for  deprecia- 
tion, taxes,  interest,  general  expenses, 
and  selling-costs.  The  high  rate  of  duty 


on  worsted  goods  is  largely  caused  by 
exorbitant  duties  on  raw  wool,  a  charge 
from  which  all  manufacturing  nations 
of  Europe  are  free. 

Mr.  Lauck  also  says  the  tariff  pro- 
tects the  manufacturer  by  imposing  re- 
strictions upon  commodities,  and  thus 
enables  him  to  control  local  markets 
and  prices.  This  is  certainly  not  a  cor- 
rect statement,  and  in  all  textile  indus- 
tries there  is  most  intense  competition. 
Yours  very  truly, 

ARTHUR  T.  LYMAN. 


December  11,  1912. 

To  THE  EDITOR  OF  THE  ATLANTIC. 

Sir,  —  My  comment  upon  Mr.  Ly- 
man's  letter  is  as  follows:  — 

1.  Mr.  Lyman  states  that  the  Amer- 
ican wage-earner  has  been  displaced  in 
textile  establishments  but  that  he  has 
gone  into  better  occupations.  There  is 
no  evidence  to  support  this  statement, 
and,  although  numerous  attempts  have 
been  made  to  follow  out  these  race- 
substitutions,  none  have  been  success- 
ful.   The  native  American  may  have 
gone   into  more  highly  remunerative 
work,  but  all  the  data  which  I  have 
been   able    to    obtain   indicate    that 
Americans  have  not  found  more  lucra- 
tive employment.    My  contention  is, 
however,  that,  if  immigration  had  been 
restricted,  the  original   employees   in 
textile  establishments  would  have  re- 
mained, and   would   have   had   their 
wages  greatly  increased  without  inter- 
fering with  the  profits  of  the  mill-own- 
er, provided,  of  course,  the  protective 
tariff  remained  in  force. 

2.  Mr.    Lyman's    contention    that 
textile  workers  in  New  England  are 
now  receiving  their  share  of  protection 
from  the  tariff  is  erroneous.    By  com- 
paring the  British  Board  of  Trade  Re- 
ports on  Cost  of  Living  in  American 
Cities  with  the  Tariff  Board  Reports 
on  Wages,  Mr.  Lyman  will  find  that 


288 


THE  AMERICAN  WAGE-EARNER  AGAIN 


the  English  cotton-mill  operatives'  real 
wages  exceed  those  of  the  cotton-mill 
operatives  in  New  England.  Any  one 
who  is  acquainted  with  living  condi- 
tions among  the  operatives  in  Lanca- 
shire, England,  will,  I  think,  freely 
admit  that  they  are  much  better  than 
those  prevailing  among  the  operatives 
in  Fall  River,  Lowell,  Lawrence,  and 
Manchester.  The  English  woolen  and 
worsted  workers  in  Yorkshire  are  re- 
latively in  a  worse  condition  because  of 
the  lack  of  organization  among  these 
classes  of  operatives  in  England. 

3.  Mr.  Lyman's  claim  that  immi- 
grant workers   send   money  to   their 
home  countries  is  true.    They  are  en- 
abled to  do  this,  however,  not  because 
of   any    benefits    which  they  receive 
from  the  tariff,   but  because  of  their 
exceedingly  low  standards  of  living, 
which  enable  them  to  save. 

4.  It  is  true,  in  general,  as  Mr.  Ly- 
man  states,  that  textile  manufacturers 
are  not  responsible  for  the  presence  of 
the  immigrant  in  New  England,  and 
his  bad  living  conditions.    It  seems  to 
me  equally  true,  however,  that  it  is 
sham  and  hypocrisy  for  the  manufac- 
turers, who  know  these  conditions,  to 
make  an  appeal  for  protective  tariff 
legislation  in  the  name  of  the  American 
wage-earner,  who  appears  in  the  ratio 
of  about  1  to  10  among  their  employees. 

5.  Mr.  Lyman's  contention  that  re- 
cent immigration  has  not  disrupted 
trade  unions  is  erroneous.    Until  the 
past  year,  there  were  no  active  labor 
organizations  in  any  of  the  mill  centres 
in  New  England  except  Fall  River,  and 
there  were  only  four  weak  unions  there. 
Recently  there  has  been  activity  in  or- 
ganizing in  an  attempt  to  offset  the 
Industrial  Workers  of  the  World. 

6.  Of  course,  I  did  not  mean  to  say 
that  mechanical  inventions  had  made 
skilled  operatives  *  absolutely  unneces- 
sary,' but,  as  compared  with  former 
years,  *  unnecessary.'  This  proposition 


seems  to  me  to  be  self-evident.  Mr. 
Lyman's  acknowledgment  of  the  class 
of  operatives  in  New  England  is  a 
demonstration  of  this  fact. 

7.  Mr.  Lyman  states  that  wages  and 
prices  were  not   ascertained    by  the 
Tariff  Board  in  England.    It  so  hap- 
pened that  I  represented  the  Tariff 
Board  in  England  and,  along  with  an- 
other agent  of  the  Board,  for  several 
months  collected  prices  and  labor  and 
other  cost  in  detail.    These  costs  and 
prices  were  published  in  the  Board's 
report  in  a  form  arranged  for  compar- 
ison with  American  costs  and  prices. 
They  constitute  unanswerable   proof 
that  the  New  England  textile  operative 
is  not  receiving  benefits  to  correspond 
with  our  present  customs-duties. 

8.  Mr.  Lyman  objects  strongly  to 
my  statement  that  wages  could  be 
*  doubled '  in  the  textile  industries  with- 
out injuring  profits.    My  contention 
was  based  on  the  assumption  that  the 
manufacturer  secured  the  tariff  boun- 
ty. In  cotton-goods  manufacturing,  the 
jobber  and  converter  probably  secure 
the  benefit  from  the  tariff,  and  the 
mill  profits  would  not  permit  a  radical 
increase  in  wages.     In  woolens  and 
worsteds,  conditions  are  similar,  but 
wages  could  more  easily  be  raised,  be- 
cause a  large  combination  controls  the 
selling,  as  well  as  the  manufacturing, 
of  a  considerable  number  of  cloths.  If 
any  mill  or  mills  control  the  domestic 
output  for  a  given  fabric,  or  should 
combine  to  do  so,  my  contention  would 
hold  good.   In  any  event,  the  benefits 
of  the  tariff  are  not  being  received  by 
the  operatives,  and,  if  the  object  of  the 
protective  system  is  to  help  the  wage- 
earner,  and  if  this  purpose  was  carried 
out,  the  wages  of  the  operatives  could 
still  be  greatly  increased,  and  reason- 
able profits  would  remain  to  the  manu- 
facturer and  the  jobber. 

Faithfully  yours, 

W.  JETT  LAUCK. 


THE  ATLANTIC  MONTHLY 


MARCH,  1913 


THE  PRESIDENT 


THERE  have  been  twenty-seven  Pre- 
sidents before  him,  but  no  one  of  them 
has  brought  to  the  White  House  so 
rounded  an  achievement  of  ambition 
as  Mr.  Wilson.  Some  have  sought 
power  with  a  more  passionate  eager- 
ness; others  have  been  as  covetous  of 
opportunity;  others  still  have  been 
more  eager  to  enforce  their  creeds  of 
morals  and  of  politics.  No  one  but  Mr. 
Wilson  has  felt  that  the  Presidency 
marked  for  him  the  perfecting  of  a  per- 
sonal ideal.  For,  before  his  eyes,  there 
has  steadily  remained  a  single  goal  to- 
ward which  the  serious  man  should 
strain  if  he  would  reach  the  fullness  of 
his  powers  —  the  ideal  of  the  student 
merged  into  the  man  of  great  affairs. 
To  be  scholar  and  statesman,  too,  is  in- 
deed to  achieve  the  whole  of  education. 

Men  shrug  their  shoulders  and  say 
that  Mr.  Wilson  is  ambitious.  It  is  a 
patent  charge.  Mr.  Wilson  is  passion- 
ately ambitious.  Yet  why  should  we 
be  hypercritical,  in  men,  of  that  essen- 
tial quality  we  so  ardently  instill  into 
our  boys?  Ambition  is  not  the  thing, 
but  what  lies  behind  it;  and,  as  his 
critics  do  not  realize,  it  is  not  to  pos- 
sess, but  to  become,  that  has  been  Mr. 
Wilson's  dearest  hope.  To  him  his  elec- 
tion is  the  symbol  that  the  scholar  has 
attained  his  largest  opportunity. 

I  press  the  point  because  it  will  be 
found,  I  think,  a  key  to  Mr.  Wilson's 
whole  career.  From  boyhood  his  mind 
was  scholarly,  but  while  his  childhood's 
VOL.  in  -  NO.  s 


friends  were  bent  on  growing  up  to  be 
carpenters  or  generalissimos,  this  boy 
dreamed  steadily  of  a  political  career. 
From  the  first  printing-press  he  ever 
owned  or  borrowed,  he  struck  off 
his  cards:  *  Thomas  Woodrow  Wilson, 
United  States  Senator  from  Virginia'; 
and  when  the  proprieties  of  advancing 
years  constrained  him  to  a  more  im- 
personal expression  of  his  ambition,  he 
continually  wrote  and  taught  that  he 
was  the  most  sagacious  scholar  who 
oftenest  left  his  study  for  the  market- 
place, and  that  the  wisest  politician  was 
he  whose  hours  were  oftenest  passed  in 
studious  places. 

Apt  scholars  find  great  teachers. 
Early  in  life  Mr.  Wilson  chose  his  with 
the  confidence  of  natural  kinship.  All 
alike  were  scholars  and  all  men  of  af- 
fairs— a  noble  roster  to  which  he  refers 
with  esteem  and  gratitude.  There  were 
John  Stuart  Mill,  who  had  hammered 
out  his  theories  in  the  House  of  Com- 
mons; Morley,  famous  in  statecraft, 
and  prince  of  biographers  in  our  time; 
De  Tocqueville,  who  learned  his  wis- 
dom among  men;  the  worldly-wise  au- 
thors of  the  Federalist ;  the  inimitable 
Bagehot,  who  drew  his  knowledge  from 
the  counting-house  and  the  working 
machine  of  the  British  Constitution; 
and  'an  arrow's  flight  beyond  them 
all,'  Burke,  who  ploughed  his  philoso- 
phy with  experience  and  reaped  ex- 
perience from  his  philosophy.  A  dif- 
ferent school  is  theirs  from  the  closet 


290 


THE  PRESIDENT 


theories  of  Montesquieu,  of  Spencer,  of 
Rousseau,  and  of  Hume,  differing  by 
half  a  world;  and  at  this  school,  where 
theory  is  squared  to  the  unbending 
practices  of  men,  Mr.  Wilson  has  been 
a  life-long  student. 

If  a  man  means  to  be  a  scholar  and 
a  politician,  too,  he  had  best  begin  by 
being  a  scholar.  With  Mr.  Wilson  this 
was  the  natural  road.  He  became  a  pro- 
fessor by  virtue  of  inheritance,  a  strong 
intellectual  bent,  and  a  certain  elusive 
reticence,  even  now  discernible  in  him, 
which  made  retirement  congenial.  He 
enjoyed  the  life.  An  insatiate  reader, 
he  loved  to  teach  young  men  and  to 
light  their  torches  from  his  own.  There 
is  about  him  a  kind  of  austere  enthusi- 
asm which  warmed  young  dry-as-dusts 
into  life,  and  gave  to  their  more  elegant 
contemporaries  a  first  taste  for  serious 
things.  It  was  solely  to  raise  the  intel- 
lectual standard  of  the  students  that 
President  Wilson  first  introduced  into 
Princeton  those  thoroughgoing  reforms 
in  education  which,  by  a  kind  of  fatal- 
istic stride,  led  him  far  beyond  his  ear- 
lier purpose  and  brought  the  college  to 
the  brink  of  democratic  revolution. 

Is  it  not  Sir  Walter  Scott  who  says 
that,  even  from  a  chapter  of  the  Good 
Book,  he  could  scarcely  learn  more  of 
life  and  living  than  from  the  talk  of  a 
chance  driver,  in  the  breezy  compan- 
ionship of  the  box-seat?  This  is  the 
sentiment  of  one  who  dearly  loves  his 
fellow  men.  A  like  passion  for  ac- 
quaintance often  stirs  Mr.  Wilson.  Yet 
it  is  not  the  *  touch  of  nature*  which 
lures  him  on,  but  the  steady,  eager 
search  for  some  unhackneyed  point  of 
view,  some  fresh  check  or  stimulus  to 
his  own  social  and  political  creed,  some 
new  opportunity  of  putting  theories 
to  the  test.  'If  you  know  what  you 
are  looking  for/  he  says  in  a  charac- 
teristic passage,  'and  are  not  expect- 
ing to  find  it  advertised  in  the  newspa- 
pers, but  lying  somewhere  beneath  the 


surface  of  things,  the  dullest  fool  may 
often  help  you  to  its  discovery.5 

This  same  thought  has  evidently 
lodged  in  Mr.  Wilson's  mind  through- 
out the  presidential  campaign.  To 
a  hundred  audiences  he  has  preached 
the  strange  doctrine  that  wisdom  lies 
in  a  multitude  of  counselors.  While  he 
is  President,  he  declares,  the  bankers 
shall  not  dictate  the  regulation  of  the 
currency,  nor  shall  the  manufacturers 
prescribe  the  tariff,  but  he  will  ask  the 
opinion  of  men  of  all  sorts  and  all  con- 
ditions. So  far  as  he  is  humanly  able, 
an  entire  people,  through  him,  shall 
have  access  to  their  government. 

It  is  an  old  idea  of  democracy  this, 
that  the  chief  should  be  the  personal 
representative  of  each  member  of  the 
tribe.  It  is  so  old  that  it  has  become 
fresh  and  new  again.  Whether  the 
idea  can  be  practically  carried  out,  on 
the  vast  stage  of  the  United  States,  can 
only  be  surmised.  In  the  smaller  field 
of  New  Jersey,  however,  it  has  been 
surprisingly  successful.  There,  for  two 
years,  Governor  Wilson  has  sat,  with 
doors  wide  open.  There  he  has  wel- 
comed all  men;  only  none  might  have 
an  audience  beyond  the  range  of  other 
ears.  In  such  a  chamber  the  whisper- 
ings of  the  agents  of  '  business  govern- 
ment '  echo  terribly ;  only  matters  which 
bear  to  be  uttered  in  the  presence  of 
witnesses  can  be  transacted  there. 

In  England,  where  the  university  is 
the  training  school  of  public  life,  Mr. 
Wilson's  career  might  seem  natural 
enough.  Here  in  the  United  States 
one  may  say  with  confidence  that  it 
would  have  been  impossible  even  a 
dozen  years  ago.  A  democracy  must  be 
disciplined  before  the  expert  is  toler- 
ated. It  has  been  the  American  custom 
to  select  as  a  presidential  candidate 
some  state  governor,  more  on  account 
of  the  advertisement  the  position  has 
given  him  than  for  the  sake  of  the 
training  which  it  implies.  The  amateur, 


THE   PRESIDENT 


291 


not  the  professional,  is  the  habitual 
choice  of  universal  suffrage.  No  great 
lawyer,  if  we  except  Lincoln  (selected 
for  very  different  reasons) ,  has  ever  been 
elected  President.  Taft,  the  trained 
administrator,  was  elected  on  another 
man's  record.  Indeed,  if  we  pass  over 
Grant,  the  soldier,  no  man  truly  emi- 
nent in  a  profession  has  been  elected, 
from  the  earliest  days  of  the  Republic, 
until  this  teacher  of  boys  was  called  to 
teach  men.  In  a  nation  whose  creed 
it  has  been  till  very  lately  that  a '  smart ' 
man  may  turn  his  hand  to  anything,  the 
other  name  for  professional  is  'theo- 
rist'; and  old  men  can  remember  no 
campaign  in  which  the  cry  of '  theorist ' 
has  not  been  as  deadly  a  weapon  as  the 
arsenal  affords.  Those  who  desired 
change  because  they  had  knowledge 
were  sometimes  called  *  visionaries,' 
sometimes  *  dreamers,'  but  'theorists' 
was  the  good  old  constant  word.  Civil- 
Service  reformers  were  '  benevolent ' 
theorists,  tariff  reformers  'pernicious' 
ones.  The  most  practical  President  of 
our  generation  found  it  necessary  to 
back  each  measure  of  reform  with  the 
emphatic  assurance  that  he  was  no 
theorist.  And  of  all  theorists  the  most 
theoretic  is  the  college  professor. 

Mr.  Wilson  himself  tells  a  story 
characteristic  of  the  position  of  learn- 
ing in  a  democracy.  Two  men  sat  in 
his  audience,  and  it  seemed  they  liked 
his  speech.  'Smart  man,'  said  one. 
'He  talks  sense.'  —  'Sounds  so,'  said 
the  other;  '  but  what  gets  me  is  how  a 
sensible  man  can  stay  cooped  up  in  a 
college  for  twenty-five  years.'  There 
is  little  exaggeration  here.  Most  people 
thought  thus  until  little  more  than  a 
decade  ago.  Then  trouble  taught  them 
just  as  it  had  taught  them  in  the  grim 
days  of  the  sixties.  There  was  a  stir 
of  discontent  in  the  land.  America  was 
no  longer  an  easy  place  to  live  in.  Her 
vast  resources  began  to  contract  before 
the  mighty  increase  of  population.  It 


often  took  more  than  a  strong  body  to 
make  a  living.  Strikes  and  lockouts 
grew  in  frequency.  Socialism,  looked 
upon  as  a  senile  disease  of  the  old 
world,  began  its  ominous  spread.  Big 
business  was  hiring  its  political  partners 
in  the  open  market.  Clearly  govern- 
ment was  a  more  difficult  art  than  peo- 
ple thought.  Criticism  from  abroad  we 
came  to  accept  with  unheard-of  meek- 
ness. Vocational  training  sprang  up 
in  the  schools.  Specialization  became  a 
familiar  word,  and '  Jack-of-all-Trades ' 
ceased  to  be  an  ideal  for  boys  to  live 
up  to.  American  medicine  began  to 
work  miracles  of  discovery  which 
touched  the  national  imagination  with 
a  sense  of  the  infinite  value  of  scientific 
methods.  The  universities,  under  the 
leadership  of  Wisconsin,  began  to  sup- 
ply experts  for  public  service.  Long- 
er terms  of  office  in  governmental  posi- 
tions set  new  standards  of  efficiency. 
The  digging  of  the  Canal  at  Panama 
was  a  gigantic  advertisement  for  the 
expert  way  of  doing  things.  And  now 
the  final  tribute  of  democracy  to  the 
professional  ideal  is  the  election  of  a 
Professor  of  Politics  to  the  Presidency 
of  the  United  States. 
'  Mr.  Wilson  has  schooled  himself  to 
a  wide  knowledge  of  affairs.  But  an 
expert  in  business,  using  the  word  in 
the  narrower  sense,  he  can  never  be. 
Like  violin-playing  and  domestic  econ- 
omy, the  ways  of  business  must  be 
learned  when  one  is  young.  Moreover, 
in  the  United  States,  the  business  of 
making  money  has  become  so  highly 
specialized  a  pursuit  that  all  Mr.  Wil- 
son's prejudice  against  the  exclusive 
and  ungenerous  in  mind  has  been  roused 
against  it.  The  myopia  of  business 
makes  him  distrustful  of  its  wisdom. 
Constantly,  as  he  endeavors  to  orient 
his  theories  to  the  facts,  his  speculative 
cast  of  mind,  though  it  may  enable 
him  to  grasp  the  broad  principles  of 
business,  suffers  the  methods  to  elude 


292 


THE  PRESIDENT 


him.  Moreover,  Mr.  Wilson,  as  his 
father  before  him,  has  always  been  a 
poor  man,  and  in  his  household,  success 
has  never  been  reckoned  at  a  cash 
value.  With  lack  of  interest,  aptitude, 
and  experience,  it  is  small  wonder  that 
Mr.  Wilson  does  not  gauge  the  closeness 
of  the  bond  between  a  nation's  busi- 
ness and  its  contentment.  No  man  of 
business  inclination  could  have  sat  for 
years  on  the  Carnegie  board,  awarding 
pensions  according  to  fixed  methods, 
and  then  have  himself  applied  for  a 
pension  obviously  at  variance  with  the 
rules.  It  is  an  odd  gap  in  Mr.  Wilson's 
equipment,  and  one  which  he  seems 
unconscious  of.  There  is  no  phrase  he 
more  often  uses  than  the  practical  re- 
frain, 'Now  let's  to  business.' 

Mr.  Wilson  was  born  a  Presbyterian. 
His  father  was  a  Presbyterian  minister, 
and  the  Woodrows,  his  mother's  peo- 
ple, were  Presbyterian  to  the  core.  He 
himself  is  an  elder  of  the  church,  and  the 
Scotch  in  him  accentuates  that  seem- 
liness  which  is  so  salient  a  character- 
istic. His  devotion  to  the  church  is 
not  conventional.  Intellectually,  he 
respects  it  as  the  central  pillar  of  an 
orderly  world.  Spiritually,  he  enjoys  its 
silent  conduits  of  communion  with  his* 
fellows,  and  the  opportunity  it  gives 
for  serious  reflection.  It  was  natural 
for  him  to  join,  at  Princeton,  the  poorer 
Second  Church  instead  of  swelling  the 
assured  success  of  the  First.  Where 
he  was  needed,  there  he  went. 

The  Kirk  has  made  more  of  the  stuff 
we  call  character  than  many  of  her 
gentler  sisters;  and  although  beneath 
her  moulding  hand  that  stuff  often 
takes  angular  and  ungracious  shapes, 
we  have  learned  to  admire  and  respect 
it.  Mr.  Wilson  is  not  without  the  dour 
in  his  composition.  There  is  about  him 
that  rigidity,  part  diffidence,  part  dig- 
nity, which,  though  it  prove  a  barrier 
to  intimacy  and  death  to  good-fellow- 
ship, may  yet  be  the  salvation  of  a 


President.  He  is  not  an  agreeable  man 
to  ask  favors  of.  He  has  not  the  solid 
companionableness  of  Mr.  Cleveland. 
He  lacks  the  persuasive  charm  of  Mr. 
McKinley,  and  the  pleasant  chuckle 
of  Mr.  Taft.  His  wit  is  a  less  human 
substitute  for  humor.  He  is  too  im- 
personal for  sentiment  except  for  deep 
things,  and  too  self-conscious  to  find 
the  straight  path  to  another's  heart. 

All  this  is  very  far  from  saying  that 
Mr.  Wilson  is  unattractive.  On  the 
contrary,  the  fine  air  of  distinction  sits 
naturally  upon  him.  Excepting  Jeffer- 
son and  Lincoln,  we  have  not  had  an- 
other President  who,  by  some  right, 
human  or  divine,  is,  like  Mr.  Wilson, 
an  artist.  He  knows  that  form,  and 
form  only,  can  give  immortality  to 
truth.  '  Be  an  artist,'  so  he  wrote  some 
years  ago,  'or  prepare  for  oblivion'; 
and  this  duty  of  being  an  artist  has 
been  a  main  business  of  his  life.  How 
excellent  is  his  attainment!  His  His- 
tory, written  under  compulsion  and  in 
haste,  does  him  scant  justice.  But  his 
Congressional  Government,  his  essays, 
best  of  all,  his  speeches,  show  his  full 
powers.  His  language,  unmindful  of  the 
effort  it  has  cost,  flows  with  easy  free- 
dom to  the  very  outline  of  his  thought. 
And  that  thought  is  never  obvious.  In 
argument  he  never  storms  an  adver- 
sary's position,  but  enfilades  it.  He 
makes  diversions  in  the  rear,  or  ad- 
vances from  some  unexpected  quarter. 
He  has  not  the  sententious  solemnity  of 
Mr.  Cleveland's  periods,  or  the  prop- 
terea  quods  of  Mr.  Taft's  foolscapped 
phrase.  Still  less  has  he  in  common 
with  the  pitchforkings  of  Mr.  Roose- 
velt's utterance.  He  has  more  temper 
in  his  steel  than  any  of  them;  but  his 
blade  is  delicate,  and  there  is  rough 
work  to  be  done. 

Much  faith  comes  from  listening  to 
Mr.  Wilson.  He  talks  quietly,  as  be- 
comes a  professor,  but  he  talks  ear- 
nestly and  with  a  beautiful  accuracy. 


THE  PRESIDENT 


293 


His  argument  is  clear.  He  has  no 
tricks  of  manner  or  of  gesture,  but  at 
times  his  voice  sinks  as  he  speaks  of 
some  principle  of  democracy  as  of  a 
holy  thing.  There  is  in  his  speech  no 
venom  of  personal  allusion,  no  veneer 
of  smartness,  no  line  spoken  for  ap- 
plause, and  very  few  diversions  to  re- 
lieve the  strain  of  thought.  I  have  heard 
him  remark  that  he  should  talk  for  an 
hour;  then,  taking  his  cue  from  the  last 
speaker,  start  on  his  impromptu  speech; 
pass  in  review  the  prime  issues  of  the 
campaign,  and,  precisely  as  the  minute- 
hand  regained  the  hour,  close  the  argu- 
ment by  leading  logically  to  his  start- 
ing-point. I  have  heard  him  quote 
Burke  as  his  master,  and  discourse 
on  high  levels  of  the  philosophy  of 
Democratic  Government;  and  looking 
at  the  workingmen  round  about  me, 
I  have  seen  them  listening  with  un- 
deviating  attention  as  they  wrinkled 
their  foreheads  in  some  supreme  intel- 
lectual effort,  and  I  have  gone  away 
saying  to  myself,  'The  story  of  Athens 
may  be  true  after  all.  Such  things  are 
possible  in  a  democracy.' 

There  are  other  elements  besides 
mastery  of  speech  which  enter  into 
Mr.  Wilson's  power  over  his  audiences. 
For  those  audiences,  as  representative 
of  the  great  mass  of  people,  he  feels  a 
natural  sympathy  and  liking,  power- 
fully reinforced  by  his  reasoned  convic- 
tion of  the  wisdom  of  government  by 
the  people.  The  orderliness  of  his  men- 
tal processes  makes  one  imagine  him 
a  kind  of  intellectual  mechanism,  work- 
ing according  to  some  preconceived 
plan.  The  reality  is  widely  different. 
Mr.  Wilson  is  a  very  human  person, 
detached  from  his  fellows  partly  by 
shyness,  partly  by  a  native  austerity, 
partly  by  a  dutiful  conception  of  life 
alien  to  most  of  us;  a  man  who,  seldom 
able  to  chat  intimately  with  a  friend, 
thanks  God  for  one  friend,  at  least,  who 
will  always  chat  intimately  with  him, 


and  goes  off  cycling  by  himself  with 
Elia  crammed  into  his  pocket;  a  punc- 
tilious man,  who  finds  in  the  conven- 
tions a  refuge  from  current  intimacies 
of  speech  and  manner;  a  soberly  ambi- 
tious man,  disliking  the  superfluities 
of  intercourse;  a  man  devoted  to  the 
cultivation  of  his  talents  and  to  the  ex- 
pansion of  his  energies,  fitting  himself 
unceasingly  to  be  the  instrument  of 
effective  service. 

A  man  who  wears  this  habit  leads  a 
lonely  life.  Mr.  Wilson  makes  few  con- 
fidences, finding  on  the  platform  a  pri- 
vacy which  would  be  denied  him  in  the 
drawing-room  or  the  club.  Unwilling 
to  spend  himself  in  the  commerce  of 
friendship,  he  wins  men's  affections 
more  rarely  than  their  admiration  or 
esteem.  In  dealing  with  others  it  is  to 
the  head  rather  than  to  the  heart  that 
he  appeals,  forgetting  that  to  the  heart 
the  broader  channel  runs.  Likewise, 
his  judgment  of  men  takes  most  ac- 
count of  their  mental  abilities.  He 
likes  men  because  they  are  able;  but, 
unlike  more  than  one  of  his  predeces- 
sors, he  does  not  think  them  able  be- 
cause he  likes  them.  In  ordinary  con- 
versation there  is,  perhaps,  too  strong 
a  savor  of  logic  in  his  discourse.  *  Avoid 
disputation,'  advised  the  solidest  of 
Americans;  but  this  maxim  Mr.  Wilson 
has  never  learned.  Dialectics  he  loves. 
An  unruly  pride  of  opinion  makes  him 
overprize  their  worth,  and  often  fol- 
low his  advantage  to  the  bitter  end. 
It  is  sometimes  wiser  to  lose  an  argu- 
ment and  win  a  friend. 

I  have  said  that  Mr.  Wilson  likes 
the  people.  In  the  narrower  sense,  too, 
he  is  a  Democrat.  Virginian  born,  the 
winds  of  Monticello  rocked  his  cradle. 
His  credo  has  elements  of  the  historic 
Democratic  faith;  yet  by  virtue  of  his 
speculative  imagination  and  his  sensi- 
tiveness of  the  wide  drift  of  affairs,  he 
is  not  in  any  true  sense  a  partisan. 
With  him  the  bonds  of  party  form  no 


294 


THE  PRESIDENT 


such  nexus  as  that  which  Mr.  Roosevelt 
hated  so  passionately  to  sever.  A  shrewd 
leader,  high  in  Democratic  councils, 
said  to  me  during  the  campaign :  *  Mr. 
Wilson's  speeches  are  all  right,  but  the 
reason  we  party  spellbinders  have  to 
work  nights  and  Sundays,  is  because 
the  Governor  forgets  there  are  other 
folks  besides  the  Independents  who 
are  going  to  vote  for  him.  Our  duty  is 
to  call  nightly  on  the  names  of  Andy 
Jackson  and  the  "Historic  Party."' 

This  is  sound  criticism.  Mr.  Wilson 
believes  in  party  government,  but  in 
party  government  as  a  means  to  a 
larger  end.  Years  ago,  when  he  was 
fighting  the  Second  Battle  of  Prince- 
ton, he  made  a  famous  Declaration  of 
the  faith  which  he  has  carried  through 
the  halls  of  the  university  into  the 
wider  campus  of  the  United  States. 

'The  great  voice  of  America,'  he 
said,  'does  not  come  from  the  seats  of 
learning.  It  comes  in  a  murmur  from 
the  hills  and  woods  and  farms  and  fac- 
tories and  the  mills,  rolling  and  gain- 
ing volume  until  it  comes  to  us  from 
the  homes  of  common  men.  Do  these 
murmurs  echo  in  the  corridors  of  the 
universities?  I  have  not  heard  them. 
The  universities  would  make  men  for- 
get their  common  origins,  forget  their 
universal  sympathies,  and  join  a  class 
—  and  no  class  can  ever  serve  Amer- 
ica. I  have  dedicated  every  power 
there  is  within  me  to  bring  the  colleges 
that  I  have  anything  to  do  with  to  an 
absolutely  democratic  regeneration  in 
spirit,  and  I  shall  not  be  satisfied  until 
America  shall  know  that  the  men  in  the 
colleges  are  saturated  with  the  same 
thought,  the  same  sympathy,  that 
pulses  through  the  whole  great  body 
politic.'  This  is  a  larger  faith  than  the 
Democracy  has  yet  dared  to  confess. 

If,  in  the  calendar  of  virtue,  there  is 
one  special  Presidential  excellence,  it 
is  courage,  and  Mr.  Wilson  is  courage- 
ous. Cautious  and  considered  as  his 


manner  is,  there  is  within  him  that 
flash  of  insight  by  whose  light  he  can 
leap  through  the  dark  to  his  decision. 
Fresh  in  our  remembrance  are  the  early 
days  of  the  Convention  in  Baltimore. 
It  was  the  tip  in  every  buzzing  circle 
that  Mr.  Bryan's  active  support  was 
dynamite.  With  every  regard  to  the 
proprieties  he  was  to  be  decently,  de- 
ferentially, definitively  interred  in  po- 
litical oblivion.  It  was  then  that  Mr. 
Bryan  addressed  to'  each  candidate  a 
telegram  demanding  his  attitude  in 
regard  to  the  support  of  Wall  Street. 
It  was  a  ticklish  question,  and,  except 
one,  every  answer  was  equivocal.  On 
his  own  initiative,  without  time  for 
reflection,  Mr.  Wilson  replied  with  un- 
compromising frankness;  and  thanks 
to  the  satiric  twist  which  makes  Fate's 
actions  interesting,  it  was  this  telegram 
which  made  Mr.  Wilson,  rather  than 
his  more  prudent  rivals,  a  candidate 
for  the  Presidency. 

This  courage  of  Mr.  Wilson  is  de- 
serving of  still  greater  credit  because 
his  armor  against  the  world  has  more 
than  one  weak  joint.  He  is  a  sensitive 
man,  with  none  of  the  toughened  fibre 
of  the  veteran  politician,  nor  that  ex- 
uberant joy  of  living  which  makes  each 
blow  received  lend  zest  to  the  buffet 
given  in  return.  Not  that  he  lacks 
fighting  blood  (there  is  too  much  of  the 
Covenanter  in  him  for  that),  or  obsti- 
nacy, prime  heritage  of  the  Scots;  but 
to  him  fighting,  like  the  rest  of  life,  is 
a  serious  thing.  It  is  stuff  to  try  the 
soul's  strength  on,  not  to  enjoy  as  a 
fillip  to  good  digestion.  He  is  wary  of 
entrance  to  a  quarrel,  and  sometimes 
in  his  newspaper  interviews  one  is  sen- 
sible of  a  tactful  answer  when  a  blunt 
one  would  have  served  his  purpose 
with  finality.  Yet,  well  within  the  war- 
rant of  the  facts,  Mr.  Wilson's  bio- 
grapher can  say  that  since  Mr.  Cleve- 
land's time  no  other  man  in  public  life 
has,  on  occasion,  spoken  his  full  mind 


THE  PRESIDENT 


295 


with  a  rounder  accent  or  a  sublimer 
disregard  of  obvious  consequence. 

At  the  beginning  of  this  paper  I  set 
forth  Mr.  Wilson's  aversion  from  the- 
ory as  theory  unsquared  with  the  world. 
It  is  this  very  distrust  of  abstraction 
which  makes  him  so  deliberate  about 
coming  to  a  decision.  A  philosopher 
and  not  a  scientist,  his  approach  to  a 
problem  is  from  the  general  to  the 
specific.  To  him,  Tightness  of  attitude 
toward  a  question  is  far  more  signifi- 
cant than  the  method  of  treating  the 
question  itself.  Last  summer  the  pub- 
lic was  surprised  at  his  Letter  of  Ac- 
ceptance. To  many  it  seemed  evasive, 
to  most  of  us  it  was  indefinite;  but  be- 
cause it  outlined  so  neatly  his  state  of 
mind,  it  seemed  to  Mr.  Wilson  precise 
almost  to  the  point  of  particularity. 
The  public  was  wrong,  and  Mr.  Wilson 
was  right.  The  important  thing  for  the 
public  was  to  know  the  quality  of 
the  candidate's  mind,  and  his  attitude 
toward  the  trend  of  the  times.  The 
important  thing  for  the  candidate  was 
that  the  public  should  trust  his  judg- 
ment, that  it  should  extort  few  pro- 
mises, and  let  him  come,  hands  free, 
to  his  great  opportunity. 

And  now  Mr.  Wilson's  opportunity 
is  here.  Even  those  of  us  who  cannot 
discern  a  *  crisis '  in  every  campaign,  or 

—  when  our  friends  think  differently 

—  call  every  issue  'moral/  feel  that 
this  is  a  time  of  hesitation  in  the  affairs 
of  the  Republic.  The  ship  of  state  has 
turbine  engines,  but  the  rules  she  sails 
under  were  drawn  for  clipper   ships. 
The  conservative  dreads  change  be- 
cause it  is  change,  and  by  the  same 
token  the  radical  loves  it.  Between  the 
two  is  a  vast  multitude  of  puzzled,  ear- 
nest men,  each  out  of  step  with  the 
next.    It  is  a  national  misfortune  that, 
in  the  last  campaign,  the  shadow  of  a 
great  personality  fell  athwart  an  im- 
pressive movement  of  protest,  and  hid  it 
from  the  sight  of  men  who  would  have 


liked  to  judge  it  fairly.  Nor  must  we 
forget  that  a  substantial,  perhaps  an 
overwhelming,  majority  of  Americans 
believe  that  among  the  hodge-podge 
of  suggestions  heaped  high  on  the  Pro- 
gressive platform  (that  curious  blend- 
ing of  autocracy  and  brotherly  love,  of 
tariff  bounty  and  Christian  charity), 
are  to  be  found  the  aspirations  of  a 
race.  As  to  whether  these  aspirations 
can  be  attained  through  politics,  peo- 
ple differ;  but  the  influence  of  the  Pre- 
sident to  make  men  think  and,  when 
they  think,  to  shape  their  thoughts 
and  lead  them  a  little  further  on  the 
illimitable  road  cannot  be  doubted. 

Is  it  fanciful  to  believe  that  at  a 
time  when  politics  is  coming  more 
nearly  to  express  the  moral  purpose  of 
a  nation,  the  people  may  have  faith  in 
a  man  whose  deepest  purpose  has  been 
stirred  by  poetry?  Never,  perhaps,  has 
Mr.  Wilson  held  a  friend  so  near  his 
heart  as  he  has  held  Wordsworth,  and 
it  was  Wordsworth  who  called  poetry 
'the  impassioned  expression  which  is 
the  countenance  of  all  science/  'It  is,' 
he  said,  '  the  breath  of  the  finer  spirit 
of  knowledge/  'Poets/  said  Shelley, 
'are  the  mirrors  of  the  gigantic  shad- 
ows which  futurity  casts  upon  the  pre- 
sent/ More  than  this,  through  the  ages, 
poetry  has  been  the  defender  and  in- 
spirer  of  liberty,  the  resolute  believer 
that  men  can  perform  the  impossible. 
Who  shall  say  that  Gladstone  owed 
nothing  to  the  poetry  of  the  Testa- 
ment, or  Lincoln  to  his  much-thumbed 
Shakespeare?  In  the  companionship 
of  poets,  Mr.  Wilson  has  learned  to 
think  high  thoughts.  Will  he  write 
them  on  golden  tables  in  the  poetry  of 
deeds  well  done? 

Rise,  ladies  and  gentlemen,  Demo- 
crats, Republicans,  Progressives.  The 
Atlantic  gives  you  'The  President  of 
the  United  States/ 

E.S. 


THE  PASSING  OF  A  DYNASTY 


BY    FRANCIS   E.   LEUPP 


To  the  mind  of  one  whose  boyish 
interest  in  politics  began  with  the  first 
national  campaign  in  which  the  Repub- 
lican party  of  our  day  took  part,  and 
who  saw  President  Taft  renominated 
last  June,  the  approach  of  the  fourth 
of  March,  1913,  brings  food  for  reflec- 
tion. It  marks  the  passing  of  a  dynas- 
ty divided  into  five  reigns  or  epochs, 
which,  for  convenience,  we  may  desig- 
nate the  moral,  the  martial,  the  finan- 
cial, the  economic,  and  the  political 
stages  in  the  history  of  the  party  now 
about  to  enter  the  shadows.  It  was  a 
long  procession  from  the  daring  Path- 
finder of  1856  to  the  Law's  High  Priest 
of  1912;  but  the  rulers  who  came  be- 
tween, each  preparing  the  way  for  his 
successor,  were  types  of  the  ever- 
changing  spirit  of  the  times;  and  the 
melting  of  one  phase  of  that  spirit  into 
another,  though  moving  the  country 
one  degree  further  on  the  dial  of  a 
great  revolution,  was  so  gradual  that 
few  observers  realized  its  significance 
when  it  occurred. 

With  two  brief  interruptions,  the 
Republican  party  has  maintained  its 
supremacy  for  fifty- two  years.  This 
period  has  compassed  two  actual  and 
several  potential  wars;  the  liberation  of 
four  million  bondmen;  the  opening  of 
an  inland  empire  to  development  and 
home-building;  the  establishment  of 
domestic  industries  on  a  scale  of  which 
preceding  generations  had  never  dream- 
ed; the  crystallization  of  a  union  of 
mutually  jealous  states  into  a  superb 
national  unit,  the  master-force  of  a 
whole  hemisphere;  the  elevation  of  the 


government's  credit  from,  perhaps,  the 
poorest  to  the  proudest  place  on  the 
international  scale.  In  every  change 
thus  wrought,  the  Republican  party 
has  been  the  party  of  advance.  It  has 
been  more  effectively  organized  and 
more  ably  led  than  any  other.  Sub- 
stantially everything  it  has  set  its  hand 
to  do  it  has  done,  including  the  prompt 
suppression  of  minor  mutinies  in  its 
own  ranks.  We  may  not  soon  look  upon 
its  like  again. 


The  story  of  every  party  of  progress 
in  the  United  States  has  been  the 
same.  Borne  into  power  by  a  wave  of 
popular  enthusiasm  for  a  noble  ideal, 
it  has  fulfilled  its  special  mission,  and 
then,  presuming  too  far  upon  its 
strength,  has  discovered  that  its  vital 
essence  has  been  spent  and  cannot  be 
recalled.  This  was  the  case  with  the 
Federalist  party,  to  which  we  owe  the 
Constitution.  It  came  into  being  in 
response  to  a  general  demand  for  a 
stronger  central  authority  than  the 
Confederation  afforded.  Having  equip- 
ped the  young  republic  with  the  com- 
plete machinery  of  government  and 
an  efficient  body  of  law,  the  party 
fell  into  temptation,  and  turned  its 
thoughts  to  the  perpetuation  of  its  own 
power.  Its  ill-judged  measures  proved 
that  it  had  lost  touch  with  public  sen- 
timent, and  its  leaders  made  matters 
worse  by  quarreling  among  themselves. 
Hence  its  collapse,  after  thirty  years  of 
great  activity,  was  neither  unexpected 
nor  deplored. 


THE  PASSING  OF  A  DYNASTY 


297 


Meanwhile,  a  new  aspiration  had 
taken  shadowy  shape  in  the  minds  of 
a  multitude  of  citizens  —  an  ideal  of 
nationalism.  The  Federalist  party  had 
built  up  a  government;  now  the  Whigs 
set  to  work  to  build  up  a  people.  They 
undertook  to  make  the  rest  of  the  world 
recognize  the  distinctive  character  of 
every  thing  American;  to  bind  our  whole 
body  politic  together  for  the  promotion 
of  the  general  welfare  demanded  in  the 
preamble  to  the  Constitution;  to  raise 
an  impost  tariff  wall  for  the  protection 
of  domestic  industries  against  foreign 
competition;  and  to  initiate  a  system 
of  internal  improvements  which  should 
make  this  country  independent  of  all 
others.  In  spite  of  their  radical  pro- 
gramme, their  methods  were  concilia- 
tory. Needing  help  from  the  South, 
they  not  only  kept  their  hands,  as  a 
party,  off  Negro  slavery,  but  tried  to 
spread  the  notion  that,  when  every- 
body could  be  induced  to  ignore  that 
question,  it  would  settle  itself.  Such 
a  half-hearted  policy  satisfied  no  one; 
and,  as  the"  Federalist  party  had  been 
killed  by  overreaching,  so  the  Whig 
party,  in  its  turn,  was  killed  by  cow- 
ardice. 

Inheriting  all  that  was  progressive 
in  the  Federalist  and  Whig  parties, 
and  warned  by  the  blunders  of  both, 
the  Republican  party  came  to  the  fore. 
The  more  aggressive  foes  of  slavery, 
banding  together  under  Birney  or  Gid- 
dings,  Hale  or  Smith,  according  to  the 
angle  from  which  each  had  studied 
the  'peculiar  institution/  had  played  a 
conspicuous  part  in  three  Presidential 
campaigns.  They  had  defeated  Clay 
in  1844,  dictated  terms  to  Van  Buren 
in  1848,  and  dealt  the  Whig  party  its 
death-blow  in  1852.  They  represented 
a  public  sentiment  which,  by  the  time 
the  crisis  was  reached  in  the  Kansas- 
Nebraska  controversy,  could  be  satis- 
fied with  nothing  short  of  a  new  party 
all  its  own.  Accordingly,  in  1856,  they 


effected  a  formal  organization  and 
nominated  a  Republican  presidential 
ticket,  on  a  platform  whose  central 
plank  proclaimed  the  right  and  duty 
of  the  Federal  government  to  prohibit 
slavery  everywhere  in  its  jurisdiction; 
while  the  supporting  planks — demands 
for  a  government-aided  transconti- 
nental railroad  and  a  scheme  of  river 
and  harbor  improvements  at  the  ex- 
pense of  the  whole  people  —  were 
carefully  adjusted  so  as  to  throw  all 
the  emphasis  on  this.  A  project  for 
a  protective  tariff,  though  appealing 
strongly  to  many  of  the  founders,  was 
passed  over  for  the  time  being,  as  con- 
veying a  suggestion  of  private  advan- 
tage which  might  seem  discordant  with 
the  larger  ideals  of  the  party. 

There  was  nothing  cocksure  in  their 
prognostications;  some  of  the  sturdi- 
est of  the  anti-slavery  champions,  like 
Seward  and  Chase,  while  believing  in 
the  ultimate  triumph  of  their  cause, 
had  so  little  faith  in  the  preparedness 
of  their  generation  that  they  refused 
to  let  themselves  be  considered  as 
candidates.  Of  the  political  commit- 
ments of  Fremont,  whose  name  was 
placed  at  the  head  of  the  ticket,  not 
much  was  known  to  the  great  body  of 
delegates.  They  recognized  him  as,  in 
the  better  sense,  a  soldier  of  fortune, 
with  his  favorite  home  in  the  saddle,  a 
love  of  adventure  in  his  heart,  unswerv- 
ing devotion  to  the  religion  of  human 
freedom,  and  genuinely  patriotic  in- 
stincts. He  had  traversed  parts  of  the 
West  which  others  had  pronounced 
impenetrable;  he  had  been  largely  in- 
strumental in  saving  California  to  the 
Union;  and  he  had  been  driven  out  of 
the  army  by  official  tyranny.  Could 
any  candidate  have  been  more  fitting 
for  a  party  which  claimed  God  as  the 
author  of  its  mission,  and  which  needed 
a  leader  with  the  genius  and  the  cour- 
age to  hew  a  path  for  it  through  a  hos- 
tile political  thicket? 


THE  PASSING  OF  A  DYNASTY 


Fremont's  failure  at  the  polls  was 
not  disheartening.  His  114  electoral 
votes  made  a  creditable  showing 
against  the  174  of  Buchanan,  who  had 
not  only  the  whole  South  to  draw  on, 
but  next  to  the  largest  state  in  the 
Union  for  his  home;  and  the  new  party 
opened  its  second  National  Conven- 
tion, in  1860,  full  of  life  and  hope.  The 
Democrats  of  both  the  Douglas  and 
the  Breckinridge  wings,  and  the  Con- 
stitutional Union  party,  had  made 
their  bids  for  popular  favor,  with  vari- 
ants of  the  theory  that  to  do  nothing 
was  to  do  right.  The  Republican  plat- 
form boldly  denounced  any  attempts 
to  extend  slavery  as  unconstitutional; 
rebuked  all  threats  of  disunion  as 
treason;  and  insisted  on  homestead 
and  naturalization  laws  which  it  knew 
would  increase  the  Free-Soil  vote.  It 
also  repeated  the  call  of  four  years 
before,  for  river  and  harbor  improve- 
ments and  a  transcontinental  railroad, 
and  proposed  such  an  adjustment  of 
the  revenue  duties  on  imports  'as  to 
encourage  the  industrial  development 
of  the  whole  country.'  Electing  Abra- 
ham Lincoln  with  this  programme,  the 
party  entered  on  the  first  stage  of  its 
half-century's  rule. 

It  was  not  till  the  Civil  War  was  half 
over  that  Lincoln  saw  his  way  clear, 
as  a  measure  of  military  necessity,  to 
proclaim  the  freedom  of  the  slaves. 
Meanwhile,  though  even  loyal  Demo- 
crats in  the  North  were  supporting 
him,  as  *  administration  men,'  the  ex- 
tremist wing  of  his  own  party  had 
been  trying  to  stir  up  trouble  for  him 
because  he  was  too  slow  and  gentle  in 
his  methods.  Their  agitation  bore  fruit 
in  a  National  Convention  which  nom- 
inated Fremont  as  a  Radical  Repub- 
lican to  oppose  his  reelection  in  1864. 
But  Fremont  soon  discovered  that  the 
movement  was  ill-timed,  and  withdrew 
in  the  midst  of  the  campaign;  and  thus 
ended  the  first  Republican  mutiny. 


The  Democrats  having  mounted  a 
war  candidate  on  a  peace  platform, 
Lincoln  carried  all  but  three  of  the 
loyal  states.  His  victory  took  much  of 
the  heart  out  of  the  secession  move- 
ment, and  with  spring  came  the  sur- 
render at  Appomattox  and  the  end  of 
active  hostilities,  leading  up  to  the 
tragic  climax  of  the  assassination.  In 
the  three  years  which  followed,  the 
Republican  party  again  split  into  fac- 
tions; and  the  impeachment  trial  of 
Johnson,  with  its  margin  of  one  vote 
for  acquittal,  exposed  a  situation  which, 
had  the  Democrats  been  shrewd  enough 
to  take  advantage  of  it,  might  have 
turned  the  tide  of  history.  But  they 
blundered  again,  and  allowed  the 
reigning  dynasty  to  suppress  another 
mutiny  and  enter  upon  the  second 
stage  of  its  career. 

The  Republican  party  had  broken 
the  slave  power  at  the  cost  of  a  great 
war.  What  was  more  natural,  then, 
.than  that  it  should  select  for  its  can- 
didate in  1868  the  man  most  closely 
identified  with  the  success  of  the 
Union  arms?  In  the  field,  Grant  had 
overcome  all  resistance  by  his  firmness 
and  persistency;  yet  these  traits,  on 
the  strength  of  which  he  was  elected, 
drew  upon  him  most  of  the  criticism 
to  which  he  was  subjected  as  President, 
when  he  brought  them  into  play  for 
the  support  of  the  carpet-bag  govern- 
ments in  the  Southern  States.  His 
effort  to  annex  Santo  Domingo  aroused 
the  ire  of  Sumner,  Greeley,  Schurz,  and 
several  other  Republican  leaders,  who 
resolved  that  he  must  be  prevented 
from  serving  a  second  term,  even  if  his 
defeat  meant  the  destruction  of  their 
party. 

The  malcontent  element  put  up  a 
Liberal  Republican  ticket  with  Greeley 
at  its  head,  on  a  platform  devoted 
chiefly  to  denunciation  of  the  admin- 
istration. The  Democrats,  believing 
that,  with  so  wide  a  split  in  the  Re- 


THE   PASSING  OF  A  DYNASTY 


299 


publican  ranks,  they  had  more  to 
hope  from  finesse  than  from  any  inde- 
pendent appeal  to  time-worn  preju- 
dices, adopted  Greeley  and  his  plat- 
form bodily.  But  the  war-spirit  which 
had  pervaded  the  Republican  cam- 
paign of  1868  came  out  even  stronger, 
if  possible,  in  that  of  1872.  Parades  of 
Union  veterans  were  an  impressive 
feature,  and  a  favorite  device  of  the 
cartoonists  was  to  depict  Grant  in  the 
uniform  of  a  soldier,  defending  the 
Constitution  against  a  new  rebellion. 
Greeley  and  his  Liberal  associates 
were  held  up  to  obloquy  as  Northern 
men  who,  after  urging  the  expenditure 
of  blood  and  treasure  without  stint  to 
free  the  slaves,  crush  treason,  and  save 
the  Union,  now  proposed  tossing  the 
fruits  of  all  this  sacrifice  into  the  laps 
of  the  conspirators  who  had  made  it 
necessary.  It  was  soon  obvious  that, 
though  secession  was  dead,  the  martial 
sentiment  of  the  North  was  not. 
Grant  carried  all  but  six  states,  and 
Greeley  died  of  a  broken  heart  soon 
after  his  defeat. 

Interpreting  his  reelection  as  an 
expression  of  unqualified  approval, 
Grant  intensified,  in  his  second  term, 
some  of  the  characteristics  which,  in 
his  first,  had  driven  the  Liberals  to 
revolt.  His  administration  became 
more  and  more  like  a  monarchical 
reign.  The  Credit  Mobilier  and  Whis- 
key Ring  scandals  were  coincident 
with  a  money  stringency,  caused  partly 
by  the  emergency  financiering  of  the 
war-times,  and  partly  by  a  later  spurt 
in  railroad  building;  and  the  elections 
of  1874  threw  the  House  of  Repre- 
sentatives into  Democratic  control  for 
the  first  time  since  1860. 

Not  only  were  the  people  tiring  of  the 
'mailed  hand'  at  Washington,  but  a 
new  problem  had  risen  with  which  it  ap- 
peared that  a  civilian  in  touch  with  the 
business  world  would  be  best  able  to 
cope.  This  was  the  question  of  protect- 


ing the  public  credit.  The  greenback, 
which,  early  in  the  war  era,  had  driven 
gold  and  silver  into  hiding  and  placed 
a  premium  on  them,  was  the  only 
money  the  people  handled  in  their 
daily  exchanges.  Wages  of  labor  were 
measured  in  the  depreciated  currency; 
even  the  pensions  of  the  Union  veter- 
ans were  paid  in  it.  The  holders  of 
government  bonds,  however,  were 
receiving  their  semi-annual  interest  in 
gold,  and  this  disparity  caused  wide 
complaint.  A  Greenback  party  was 
organized,  headed  by  demagogues  and 
doctrinaires  who  clamored  for  an  un- 
limited issue  of  paper  currency  by  the 
government,  the  abolition  of  bank- 
notes as  incidental  thereto,  and  the 
payment  of  the  national  debt,  princi- 
pal and  interest,  in  paper.  The  obliga- 
tion to  redeem  the  bonds  in  gold  was 
purely  moral,  but  every  educated  citi- 
zen knew  that  the  credit  of  the  gov- 
ernment would  fall  to  zero  if,  having 
demanded  gold  for  its  bonds  in  a  crisis 
when  gold  must  be  had  at  any  cost,  it 
should  resort  to  a  technicality  to  es- 
cape buying  them  back  in  the  same 
medium.  Grant  had  killed  one  vicious 
inflation  measure  with  his  veto,  and 
had  signed  an  act,  sponsored  by  John 
Sherman,  promising  to  redeem  green- 
backs in  coin  on  and  after  the  first  of 
January,  1879.  All  these  conditions 
combined  to  bring  about  the  nomina- 
tion, in  1876,  of  Sherman's  candidate, 
Hayes. 

Whether  the  process  by  which  Hayes 
was  seated  had  any  constitutional 
warrant,  does  not  concern  us  here. 
Suffice  it  that  a  specially  created  tri- 
bunal awarded  the  Presidency  to  him, 
and  that  he  had  the  courage  to  take  it 
in  the  face  of  a  great  crisis.  Realizing 
the  part  his  administration  must  play 
as  a  bridge  between  two  epochs,  he 
had  announced  his  purpose  to  serve 
only  four  years.  Although  he  had 
been  a  volunteer  officer  in  the  Civil 


300 


THE  PASSING  OF  A  DYNASTY 


War,  he  was  committed  to  the  sub- 
ordination of  the  military  to  the  civil 
authority  in  time  of  peace,  and  one  of 
his  first  acts  as  President  was  to  with- 
draw the  troops  from  the  Southern 
capitals  where  they  had  been  bolster- 
ing up  the  carpet-bag  governments. 
He  made  Sherman  his  Secretary  of  the 
Treasury,  and  gave  him  a  free  hand  in 
battling  with  the  forces  of  financial 
dishonor.  Between  them,  the  pair  re- 
pulsed every  attempt  to  repeal  the  pro- 
vision for  specie  payments,  and  car- 
ried it  into  successful  operation;  but 
neither  dissuasion  nor  veto  availed  to 
prevent  the  enactment  of  the  Bland 
silver  law,  which  was  destined  to  in- 
jure American  credit  seriously,  not- 
withstanding the  general  faith  of  the 
world  in  the  aims  and  judgment  of  the 
Administration. 

In  the  Congressional  elections  of 
1878,  the  issue  everywhere  was  between 
honest  money  and  some  cheap  make- 
shift proposed  by  the  Democrats  or 
Greenbackers.  The  result  at  the  polls, 
largely  due  to  the  splendid  work  of 
Garfield  on  the  stump,  did  not  restore 
Republican  supremacy  in  Congress, 
but  made  sure  the  inability  of  the  in- 
flationists to  force  any  repudiatory 
legislation  into  the  statute-book.  This 
was  why,  after  wasting  thirty-five 
ballots  on  two  avowed  and  stubborn 
candidates,  the  Republican  National 
Convention  of  1880  turned  so  readily 
to  Garfield  as  a  'dark  horse'  on  the 
thirty-sixth.  The  Democrats  repeated 
their  error  of  1864  by  nominating  a 
soldier  candidate  who  was  personally 
above  criticism,  but  was  wholly  out  of 
sympathy  with  the  tendencies  of  their 
party. 

Both  Garfield  and  Hancock  had 
served  as  general  officers  in  the  Union 
army,  so  the  war  issue  had  lost  its 
vitality.  The  Southern  States  were 
reconstructed.  The  Greenback  issue 
had  been  smothered  by  the  resump- 


tion of  specie  payments.  For  a  slogan 
to  move  the  popular  heart  and  swell 
the  campaign  fund,  therefore,  the  Re- 
publicans had  to  fall  back  upon  the 
protective  tariff.  The  Democrats  fur- 
nished the  needed  ammunition,  their 
platform  demanding  a  tariff  for  reve- 
nue only,  and  their  candidate  pro- 
nouncing the  tariff  question  a  mere 
'local  issue/  For  three  months  the 
Republicans  rent  the  air  with  warnings 
of  the  disasters  sure  to  follow  if  the 
pillars  of  the  protection  temple  were 
pulled  from  under  it;  and  the  great 
producing  interests  which  they  did 
not  lay  under  contribution  before 
election  day  might  have  been  counted 
on  the  fingers  of  one  hand.  They  won 
by  an  insignificant  plurality  of  the 
popular  vote,  but  carried  enough  states 
to  save  the  Presidency.  And  thus  the 
party  entered  upon  the  fourth,  or  eco- 
nomic, stage  of  its  history. 

Garfield 's  career  as  President  was 
cut  short  by  assassination,  and  through 
most  of  the  term  for  which  he  was 
chosen,  Vice-President  Arthur  filled  his 
place.  The  Republicans,  admonished 
by  the  narrowness  of  their  margin  at 
the  polls,  began  to  suspect  that  there 
might  be  a  real  demand  for  some  mod- 
ification of  the  tariff,  and  did  a  little 
feeble  revising  on  their  own  account. 
But,  weakened  by  fresh  factional  quar- 
rels, they  lost  the  House  of  Represent- 
atives again  in  1882,  and  the  Presiden- 
cy in  1884. 

Cleveland's  inauguration  opened  the 
first  interregnum.  But  the  Democratic 
majority  in  the  House  divided  on  the 
tariff,  the  radical  wing  insisting  on  a 
more  arbitrary  cut  in  duties  than  the 
conservative  wing  was  willing  to  con- 
cede. The  President  compelled  a  truce 
between  them  by  devoting  his  third 
annual  message  exclusively  to  the 
tariff,  and  making  recommendations 
which,  while  terrifying  to  the  timid 
members,  left  the  party,  as  a  whole, 


THE  PASSING  OF  A  DYNASTY 


301 


no  alternative  but  to  support  him;  the 
House  passed  a  bill  embodying  his 
views,  and  the  National  Convention  of 
1888  nominated  him  for  a  second  term. 
The  Republicans  nominated  Harrison 
as  a  strict  protectionist,  and  the  cam- 
paign was  fought  through  on  the  tariff 
issue  alone.  For  the  third  time  in  the 
history  of  the  republic,  a  Democratic 
candidate  who  had  received  a  larger 
popular  vote  than  his  chief  competitor 
was  defeated  on  the  electoral  ballot. 
Broadly  interpreted,  this  meant  that, 
albeit  more  voters  were  friendly  than 
unfriendly  to  tariff  reform,  the  protec- 
tive policy  was  still  well  intrenched  in 
the  rich  manufacturing  states. 

The  first  session  of  Congress  after 
Harrison's  inauguration  passed  the 
McKinley  Tariff.  Again  the  Republi- 
cans discovered  that  they  had  traded 
too  heavily  on  past  successes,  for  the 
elections  immediately  following  swept 
them  out  of  power  in  the  House.  The 
National  Conventions  of  1892  renom- 
inated  Harrison  and  Cleveland  respec- 
tively, and  once  more  the  tariff  issue 
came  uppermost.  The  Democrats  won, 
and  the  new  Congress  passed  the  Wil- 
son-Gorman Tariff  Act,  which  the  Pre- 
sident refused  to  sign  because  it  belied 
the  promises  on  which  the  party  had 
been  restored  to  power.  It  became  a 
law  without  his  signature,  and  proved 
more  unpopular  than  the  McKinley 
Tariff.  Meanwhile,  a  financial  panic 
had  occurred,  for  which  each  party 
blamed  the  other,  but  whose  political 
consequences  were  visited  on  the  Demo- 
crats, pursuant  to  the  rule  which  holds 
the  party  in  power  accountable  for 
everything  that  goes  wrong.  All  this, 
together  with  Cleveland's  unyielding 
hostility  to  silver  inflation  in  every 
form,  stirred  up  the  radicals  in  his  own 
party,  and  encouraged  their  union  with 
the  People's  party,  an  organization 
born  of  the  tariff  and  currency  contro- 
versies, which  had  gathered  into  its 


platforms  all  the  economic  heresies, 
and  into  its  personnel  all  the  human 
driftwood,  that  could  find  lodgment 
nowhere  else. 

At  the  Democratic  National  Con- 
vention of  1896,  the  extremists  routed 
the  conservatives  and  nominated  Bryan 
for  President,  on  a  platform  defiant- 
ly demanding  the  free  and  unlimited 
coinage  of  silver.  The  Republicans 
took  up  the  challenge  by  nominating 
McKinley  and  declaring  for  the  '  exist- 
ing gold  standard.'  Both  parties  had 
something  to  say  of  the  tariff,  but  that 
topic  was  hardly  heard  of  in  the  cam- 
paign, so  intense  was  the  feeling  in 
business  circles  about  the  threatened 
debasement  of  the  coinage.  McKinley 
came  out  of  the  contest  with  a  clear 
majority  over  all,  and  the  silver  ghost 
was  laid,  apparently  forever.  The  Ding- 
ley  Tariff  promptly  superseded  the  Wil- 
son-Gorman Tariff;  and  the  Spanish 
War,  which  came  on  immediately  after- 
ward, aroused  enough  patriotic  fervor 
to  assure  the  reelection  of  the  Presi- 
dent who  had  directed  it.  His  assassina- 
tion threw  the  responsibilities  of  the 
Presidency  upon  Vice-President  Roose- 
velt, whose  administration  for  the  un- 
expired  term  led  to  his  election  as 
President  in  his  own  right  by  the  unpre- 
cedented plurality  of  two  and  one-half 
million  votes.  There  had  been  no  con- 
spicuous issue  in  the  campaign  of  1900 
other  than  the  question  of  letting  well 
enough  alone;  and  in  1904  the  personal- 
ities of  the  respective  candidates  — 
Roosevelt's  having  captured  the  popu- 
lar imagination,  while  Parker's  was 
rather  colorless  —  drove  every  other 
consideration  into  the  background.  It 
was  during  this  period  that  the  last,  or 
political,  epoch  of  the  Republican  dy- 
nasty was  ushered  in. 

It  was  plain,  as  the  year  1908  ap- 
proached, that  the  chief  thought  of  the 
Republican  party,  like  that  of  the 
Federalist  party  in  1816,andof  the  Whig 


302 


THE  PASSING  OF  A  DYNASTY 


party  in  1848,  was  self-perpetuation. 
No  such  clear,  vital  issues  were  in  sight 
as  the  abolition  of  slavery,  a  civil  war, 
reconstruction,  the  public  credit,  or  a 
permanent  economic  policy.  The  gener- 
ation of  strong  men  who  had  built  up 
the  party,  and  the  generation  directly 
following  who  loved  it  for  their  fathers' 
sake,  had  left  the  centre  of  the  stage. 
To  the  mass  of  the  voters  Republican- 
ism was  only  a  name,  and  an  era  of  de- 
liberation was  everywhere  giving  place 
to  an  era  of  hurry.  Roosevelt,  throwing 
the  whole  weight  of  his  own  popularity 
into  the  scale,  succeeded  in  electing 
Taft  to  the  Presidency,  on  a  platform 
largely  given  to  glorifying  the  party 
for  its  past  achievements,  but  vastly 
more  explicit  than  that  of  1904  in 
pointing  out  the  methods  whereby  its 
work  would  continue  to  be  carried  on. 
The  swing  from  a  platform  of  historic 
review  to  one  of  specific  pledges  was 
proof  of  the  party's  realization  that  its 
vitality  was  on  the  wane.  It  also,  in  a 
way,  tied  the  Taft  administration  fast 
to  plans  which  it  had  had  no  actual 
hand  in  framing. 

The  record  of  that  administration  is 
still  too  fresh  to  need  more  than  the 
most  general  rehearsal.  President  Taft, 
with  an  interpretative  conscience  train- 
ed on  the  bench,  undertook  to  carry 
out  literally  the  promises  made  in  his 
behalf.  Against  the  advice  of  every 
skilled  politician  in  his  circle  he  call- 
ed Congress  together  at  once  to  revise 
the  tariff,  and  procured  a  law  which, 
however  unsatisfactory,  was  the  best 
he  could  wrest  from  a  body  elected  by 
the  same  people  that  had  made  him 
President.  Later,  when  the  Democrats 
had  obtained  control  of  the  House,  he 
vetoed  tariff  act  after  tariff  act  passed 
in  disregard  of  the  protective  standard 
fixed  by  his  platform.  He  recommended 
currency  legislation  after  the  Monetary 
Commission  had  made  its  report,  and 
had  his  trouble  for  his  pains.  In  the 


face  of  a  storm  of  angry  abuse,  he  en- 
forced the  anti-trust  law  to  the  letter. 
He  negotiated  arbitration  treaties, 
only  to  have  them  rendered  nugatory 
by  the  Senate.  Whithersoever  he  turn- 
ed, his  efforts  to  carry  out  the  pledges 
of  his  platform  were  baffled  or  crip- 
pled by  forces  beyond  his  control,  yet 
he  was  held  by  his  critics  to  as  strict 
account  as  if  he  had  ignored  the  peo- 
ple's mandate  instead  of  strictly  obey- 
ing it.  When  he  stood  for  reelection, 
he  was  met  with  insult  in  the  campaign, 
and  was  defeated  at  the  polls  by  a 
heavy  vote. 

Half  the  commentators  set  this  down 
as  a  personal  rebuke  to  President  Taft. 
Why?  Because  he  had  followed  instruc- 
tions too  literally?  Yet  had  he  treated 
them  less  seriously  he  would  have  been 
assailed  for  negligence.  In  truth,  he 
was  between  the  upper  and  the  nether 
mill-stones :  the  voting  public,  impatient 
of  delays  in  changes  it  had  vaguely  ex- 
pected, resolved  to  empty  the  high 
places  and  fill  them  with  new  men,  and 
Taft  was  made  a  scapegoat  only  be- 
cause he  chanced  to  be  the  most  con- 
spicuous figure  in  the  party  in  power. 
Doubtless  any  other  man  in  his  posi- 
tion would  have  met  a  like  fate  when 
the  time  was  ripe  for  an  upheaval;  for 
the  swing  of  the  political  pendulum  is 
as  inexorable  as  the  order  of  economic 
evolution,  even  though  we  may  not 
always  recognize  the  signs  that  pre- 
cede it. 

ii 

Will  the  dynasty  just  driven  into 
exile  ever  be  restored?  The  reader  who 
has  followed  me  thus  far  will  under- 
stand why  my  judgment  answers,  No. 
The  dynasties  which  preceded  it  went 
to  pieces  when  they  had  reached  the 
stage  which  the  Republican  dynasty 
reached  during  the  last  ten  years.  The 
attempt  last  autumn  to  rally  its  ebbing 
strength  by  raising  the  Protection  war- 


THE  PASSING  OF  A  DYNASTY 


303 


cry  of  thirty  years  ago  was  a  pathetic 
confession  that  its  course  had  been 
run.  The  sequel  bore  out  the  symp- 
tom: the  result  at  the  polls  was  not  a 
mere  repulse,  it  was  a  collapse.  The 
party  had  started  as  a  product  of  the 
times.  It  had  maintained  its  suprem- 
acy by  keeping  abreast  of  the  times. 
Now  the  party  and  the  times  had  part- 
ed company;  the  times  were  forging 
ahead,  the  party  had  dropped  back  a 
whole  generation.  Its  platform  of  1912, 
though  strong  enough  as  measured  by 
the  standards  of  1880  or  1892,  was 
weak  as  compared  with  its  correspond- 
ing utterance  in  1908,  for  the  adverse 
elections  intervening  had  frightened  its 
programme-f ramers . 

It  is  the  fashion,  in  some  quarters, 
to  attribute  the  fate  of  the  Republican 
party  to  the  tyranny  of  'the  bosses/ 
The  outcry  against  bosses  is  entirely 
natural;  but  to  charge  to  them  all  the 
ills  which  befall  a  party  is  to  confound 
cause  and  phenomena.  Bossism  is  to 
a  party  what  gout  is  to  a  human  being, 
an  outgrowth  of  undue  self-indulgence. 
Until  a  party  becomes  highly  prosper- 
ous it  does  not  suffer  from  bossism,  for 
there  is  no  surfeit  of  the  food  on  which 
bosses  grow  great.  With  prosperity, 
moreover,  comes  a  lethargic  condition 
of  mind  and  conscience;  the  ordinary 
members  of  a  party,  after  its  early 
struggles  are  past  and  repeated  vic- 
tories have  made  it  over-confident,  fall 
into  a  habit  of  thinking  that  Providence 
is  going  to  look  after  everything  pretty 
well,  whether  the  individual  voter  pays 
any  attention  to  it  or  not;  and  thus 
not  only  is  the  way  made  easy  for  the 
bosses,  but  power  is  practically  thrust 
upon  them. 

No  party  can  be  killed  by  the  bosses 
without  the  tacit  cooperation  of  the 
bulk  of  its  membership.  If  it  could  be, 
the  Republican  party  would  have  died 
many  years  ago,  when  its  Conklings 
and  its  Blaines,  its  Camerons  and 


its  Chandlers,  were  ruling  their  baro- 
nies, writing  their  decrees  into  national 
platforms,  and  combining  on  candi- 
dates or  dividing  spoil.  Yet,  by  com- 
mon consent,  that  was  the  golden  age 
of  the  Republican  dynasty,  and  the 
overthrow  of  these  chieftains  left  the 
party  a  prey  to  its  enemies.  The  fact 
is  that  no  important  battle,  where  the 
contending  forces  are  at  all  well-match- 
ed, is  ever  won  by  an  army  in  which 
every  soldier  fights  as  he  pleases.  Com- 
pact organization,  direction  from  some 
central  point,  and  discipline  in  the 
ranks,  are  essential  to  successful  ac- 
tion by  large  bodies.  When  a  party  is 
young,  its  chief  man  is  known  as  a 
leader;  when  the  leader,  instead  of  ad- 
vising, assumes  to  command,  he  is  hail- 
ed as  a  general;  but  when  the  general 
undertakes  to  enforce  his  commands 
by  rewards  and  penalties,  he  becomes 
a  boss.  It  is  a  graduated  transition 
from  one  extreme  to  the  other,  not  a 
leap;  and  nobody  notices  it  till  some 
restless  subaltern,  punished  for  mu- 
tiny, shouts  out  his  protests. 

Is  the  Democratic  party  in  power  for 
a  long  period?  That  seems  improbable. 
Peril  lurks  in  its  unwieldy  strength. 
With  both  the  executive  and  the  legis- 
lative branches  of  the  government  in 
its  hands,  it  alone  will  be  held  respon- 
sible for  the  conduct  of  public  business; 
and  the  proceedings  of  the  Baltimore 
Convention  revealed  the  existence  of 
factional  divisions  which  can  hardly  be 
healed  by  any  form  of  compromise. 
Another  peril  lies  in  the  commitment 
of  the  party  to  the  one-term  idea,  for  it 
notifies  all  the  fellow  partisans  of  a 
president,  who  competed  with  him  for 
the  nomination,  that  they  must  begin 
at  once  to  cultivate  popularity  even 
at  the  expense  of  quarreling  with  him, 
if  they  would  try  for  better  luck  in  the 
next  convention.  For  example,  Presi- 
dent Cleveland's  first  administration, 
though  abounding  in  mistakes  due  to 


304 


THE  PASSING  OF  A  DYNASTY 


his  own  and  his  party's  inexperience, 
led  naturally  up  to  his  renomination  in 
1888  and  1892;  but,  once  seated  for 
what  was  known  to  be  his  final  term, 
all  the  vials  of  personal  envy  and  fac- 
tional malice  were  poured  upon  him. 
His  party  was  broken  in  twain;  and 
the  larger  fragment,  usurping  leader- 
ship in  the  next  campaign,  went  down 
in  a  disaster  whose  effects  it  has  taken 
sixteen  years  to  repair. 

Whether  history  is  soon  to  repeat  it- 
self, depends  less  on  Mr.  Wilson's  atti- 
tude than  on  the  willingness  of  all  his 
Democratic  rivals  to  work  unselfishly 
with  him  for  the  larger  good  of  the 
whole  party.  But  human  nature  is  — 
human  nature. 

And  as  to  the  Progressive  party? 
With  those  observers  who  believe  its 
remarkable  record  at  the  polls  due  en- 
tirely to  its  magnetic  leader,  I  cannot 
agree.  All  men  of  very  positive  traits 
inspire  intense  enmities  as  well  as  de- 
voted friendships;  and,  unique  figure 
as  he  is,  wide  and  enthusiastic  as  is  his 
following,  Mr.  Roosevelt's  candidacy 
appears  to  have  repelled  about  as  many 
wavering  votes  as  it  attracted.  The 
party  he  founded,  with  its  catch-all 
creed  and  its  energetic  combing  of  high- 
ways and  hedges  for  recruits,  might 
have  fared  as  well  under  some  other 
leader  of  high  repute  and  winning  per- 
sonality. Its  demands,  whether  wise 
or  unwise,  plain  or  indefinite  in  detail, 
recognized  the  era  of  unrest  through 
which  the  world  is  passing,  and  catered 
boldly  to  the  spirit  thereof.  It  did  not 
win,  partly  because,  while  promising  all 
things  to  all  men,  it  allowed  the  What 
utterly  to  obscure  the  How.  Still,  we 
must  not  make  too  much  of  that:  a 
like  complaint  was  lodged  by  many  of 
the  Abolitionists  against  the  Republi- 
can party  at  its  beginning.  Probably 
not  half  the  delegates  who  nominated 
Fremont  were  able  to  forecast  the 
means  whereby  the  slave  power  was  to 


be  overcome.  They  had  to  wait  until 
a  greater  than  Fremont  had  appeared 
and  taken  command,  and  the  passions 
of  their  opponents  had  provided  an 
opening;  for  even  Lincoln,  had  there 
been  no  Civil  War,  might  not  have 
found  a  way. 

The  early  steps  of  the  mother  party, 
and  those  of  her  offspring,  suggest  some 
parallels,  but  quite  as  many  contrasts. 
Both  parties  were  heralded  as  express- 
ing the  highest  hopes  of  humanity  in 
things  political.  Both  were  baptized 
in  a  flood  of  quasi-religious  zeal,  with 
a  free  paraphrasing  of  Holy  Writ  and 
a  loud  voicing  of  the  emotions  of  the 
hour  in  outbursts  of  prayer  and  praise. 
Both  welcomed  into  their  infant  circle 
all  sorts  and  conditions  of  men.  A 
Cameron  and  a  Hoar  foregathered  in 
1856  with  much  enthusiasm;  and  in 
1912  the  stalwart  bass  of  a  Flinn  and 
the  gentle  treble  of  an  Addams  blended 
in  the  militant  war-song,  *  Onward, 
Christian  soldiers!'  But  the  Republi- 
can party  owed  its  origin  to  no  accident 
of  politics.  It  was  not  organized  for  the 
special  purpose  of  beating  somebody 
it  did  n't  like;  its  chief  component  was 
not  a  branch  of  the  Whig  party  which 
had  been  worsted  in  a  contest  for  con- 
trol; it  did  not  adopt  its  leader  first 
and  its  chart  of  action  later.  It  was  a 
union  of  elements  which,  after  years 
of  patient  argument,  stirring  appeal 
and  earnest  deliberation,  had  concluded 
that  an  independent  movement  offered 
them  their  only  hope  of  achieving  the 
aims  they  had  cherished  so  long.  The 
leader  was  naturally  evolved  from  the 
movement,  whose  chief  promoters  had 
other  men  in  mind  when  they  began 
their  work.  Above  all,  the  Republican 
platform  of  1856  was  a  model  of  digni- 
fied simplicity,  in  vivid  contrast  with 
the  omnium-gatherum  quality  of  the 
Progressive  platform  of  1912,  and,  in- 
deed, with  the  overloaded  and  diffuse 
platforms  on  which  the  older  party  has 


THE  PASSING  OF  A  DYNASTY 


305 


placed  some  of  its  candidates  in  recent 
years. 

Still,  whatever  faults  we  may  find 
in  the  Progressive  party's  first  activi- 
ties, and  whatever  weaknesses  we  may 
suspect  in  its  structure  or  its  doctrines, 
let  us  not  forget  that  every  movement 
which  stirs  men's  hearts,  though  it 
may  not  accomplish  a  tithe  of  what 
was  expected  of  it,  leaves  its  mark  as  a 
leavener  of  its  age.  Luther  did  not  drive 
the  Pope  to  recant,  nor  did  Hahne- 
mann  revolutionize  the  medical  practice 
of  the  world;  but  each  accomplished 
a  modification  of  existing  conditions  of 
which  posterity  is  reaping  the  benefit. 
Even  the  People's  party,  over  whose 
turbulent  but  brief  career  we  some- 
times laugh  good-naturedly,  left  our 
conceptions  of  statecraft  a  little  differ- 
ent from  what  they  had  been,  as  wit- 
ness a  Republican  President's  recent 
interest  in  a  land-loan  plan  which  will 
do  for  the  farm  something  akin  to  the 
service  the  national  banks  are  doing 
for  the  factory. 


in 

It  may  still  be  too  early  to  make  such 
forecasts,  but  the  omens  now  visible 
seem  to  me  to  point  toward  a  reunion 
between  the  more  active  remnant  of 
the  Republican  party  and  the  Progress- 
ive seceders.  Mr.  Taft  is  no  longer  an 
issue  between  them,  and  out  with  him 
have  gone  a  number  of  prominent  Re- 
publicans who  stood  by  him  for  their 
party's  sake.  Most  of  these  men  are 
too  old  to  recover  their  former  emi- 
nence, even  if  they  wished  to  and  if 
the  way  were  otherwise  clear.  History 
shows  that  third  parties  cannot  hold 
a  permanent  place  in  our  political 
arena;  hence,  one  or  the  other  of  the 
two  parties  of  Republican  ancestry, 
now  separated  by  about  a  half-million 
votes  in  an  aggregate  of  seven  millions, 
must  presently  absorb  its  rival  and  be- 

VOL.  Ill -NO,  3 


come  the  recognized  antagonist  of  the 
Democratic  party.  Which  will  it  be? 
What  has  each  to  offer  as  a  basis  of 
combination?  The  Republican  rem- 
nant has  the  prestige  of  a  long-honored 
name;  the  seceding  body  has  the  mod- 
ern ideals,  the  vigorous  blood,  and  the 
eloquent  testimony  of  the  election  re- 
turns to  its  ability  to  quicken  the  popu- 
lar pulse.  All  the  accepting  of  new  pro- 
jects must  be  done  by  the  Republicans; 
the  most  that  can  be  asked  of  the  Pro- 
gressives is  that  they  shall  hold  in  abey- 
ance a  few  of  the  most  radical  features 
of  their  programme,  and  make  some  of 
the  others  more  explicit.  In  any  at- 
tempt at  reunion,  therefore,  the  greater 
advantage  lies  on  the  side  of  the  Pro- 
gressives, even  though  they  might  be 
compelled  to  advertise  their  parentage 
by  attaching  the  family  name  to  their 
own  and  calling  the  union  the  Progress- 
ive-Republican party. 

Whatever  title  may  be  chosen,  the 
Progressives  are  bound  to  insist  on  so 
complete  a  reconstruction  of  personnel 
and  policies  that  the  Republican  party 
under  which  our  generation  has  grown 
up  will  be  known  no  more  among  men. 
The  dynasty  whose  long  and  brilliant 
rule  transformed  the  country,  took  its 
start  in  a  revolt  against  the  subordina- 
tion of  human  rights  to  statute  law. 
The  evolutionary  cycle  traced  in  these 
pages  has  brought  around  a  situation 
which,  to  the  minds  of  an  ever-increas- 
ing body  of  people,  must  ere  long  be 
faced  in  the  same  way.  The  question 
of  'industrial  justice,'  whether  it  be  a 
live  moral  issue  or  only  an  emotional 
fad,  is,  from  the  Progressive  point  of 
view,  as  vital  as  was  that  of  Negro  slav- 
ery a  half-century  ago.  At  any  rate, 
it  is  one  which  will  never  be  disposed 
of  by  mere  bulls  or  by  blinking.  The 
popular  interest  it  is  exciting  must  be 
either  satisfied  by  concessions  or  dis- 
pelled by  a  successful  campaign  of  eco- 
nomic education. 


306 


THE  PASSING  OF  A  DYNASTY 


To  the  argument  that  most  of  the 
suffering  in  the  world  is  due  to  those 
inequalities  in  natural  human  equip- 
ment for  which  there  is  no  cure  short 
of  destroying  our  present  race  and 
founding  a  new  one,  the  answer  is 
patent,  What  cannot  be  cured  can  at 
least  be  ameliorated.  To  the  argument 
that  the  Federal  power,  under  the  Con- 
stitution, does  not  extend  to  such  mat- 
ters, the  prompt  response  is,  If  the 
'general-welfare*  clause  of  the  Pre- 
amble can  be  stretched  to  cover  our 
protective  system;  if  we  are  able  to 
maintain  a  Federal  quarantine  in  spite 
of  local  political  boundaries;  if  the  free- 
dom of  interstate  commerce  can  be 
used  to  nullify  the  police  powers  of  a 
state  respecting  the  liquor  traffic,  or 
to  split  aggregations  of  private  capital 
into  fragments  with  an  anti-trust  stat- 
ute; if  any  product  of  human  labor, 
from  a  box  of  phosphorus  matches  to  a 
state  bank  note,  can  be  taxed  out  of 
existence  at  the  option  of  Congress, 
why  must  we  assume  that  'construct- 
ive statesmanship '  may  not  yet  evolve, 
and  judicial  'interpretations'  ratify, 
a  mode  of  readjusting  some  of  the  re- 
lations of  employer  and  employed  in 
our  industries  generally?  If  this  cannot 


be  done  under  the  Constitution  as  it 
reads  to-day,  what  is  to  prevent  such 
an  amendment  of  the  Constitution  as 
has  been  undertaken  with  regard  to  an 
income  tax,  which  few  conservatives 
were  willing,  twenty  years  ago,  to  ac- 
cept as  among  the  possibilities? 

An  individualist  by  inheritance  and 
training,  and  a  believer  in  human  com- 
petition as  the  salt  of  civilization,  I 
have  no  purpose  of  pleading  the  insur- 
gent cause;  but  neither  can  I  be  blind 
to  what  is  going  on  about  me.  Philo- 
sophic sympathy  and  prophetic  com- 
mon sense  are  as  little  related  as  cant 
and  logic.  It  seems  to  me  that  the 
problem  before  the  temperate-minded 
people  of  this  country  is,  whether  the 
spirit  of  the  times,  now  moving  straight 
toward  a  socialistic  system,  can  be 
harnessed  and  controlled  so  as  to  ac- 
complish the  ends  demanded  without 
wrecking  the  republic.  Its  solution  may 
depend  largely  on  whether  we  have 
among  us,  unrecognized  as  yet,  an- 
other Lincoln,  true  of  heart,  clear  of 
vision,  calm  of  judgment,  and  as  firm 
of  hand  when  it  is  necessary  to  curb 
a  passing  madness  as  when  the  forces 
of  reason  must  be  helped  to  conquer 
fresh  ground. 


PUBLIC  UTILITIES   AND  PUBLIC  POLICY 


BY   THEODORE   N.   VAIL 


THERE  are  so  many  points  common 
to  all  utilities  and  service  companies 
that  it  is  difficult  to  differentiate  their 
relations  to  the  public.  The  under- 
standing of  the  relations,  or  mutual 
obligations,  toward  each  other,  and  of 
the  mutual  dependence  upon  each 
other,  of  the  public  and  the  corpora- 
tion, has  so  radically  changed  within 
the  recent  past,  that  any  discussion 
which  did  not  also  take  into  considera- 
tion the  causes  influencing  and  under- 
lying these  changes  would  be  futile. 
We  shall  first  try  to  establish  a  few 
fundamental  principles  common  to  all. 


1.  There  are  but  few  utilities  which 
have  no  alternative  or  substitute.  The 
alternative  or  substitute  will  generally 
have  been  less  convenient,  comfortable, 
or  efficacious,  and,  consequently,  less 
desirable  to  the  user  or  consumer;  but, 
in  the  absence  of  a  better,  it  answered 
the  purpose  and  was  cheaper,  and  at 
the  time  was  regarded  as  the  ultimate 
possibility  in  the  way  of  comfort,  con- 
venience, and  luxury.   An  instance  is 
lighting:  electric  light  has  gas  as  an 
alternative,  gas  has  burning  oils,  burn- 
ing oils  have  candles.    While,  for  a 
given  amount  of  light,  the  alternative 
may  be  more  expensive,  yet  as  it  was 
used  there  was  large  economy  and  it 
was  entirely  satisfactory. 

2.  No  utility  can  sell  its  service  or 
its  commodity  at  a  price  greater  than 
its  value,  in  comfort  or  convenience,  if 
not  in  actual  money,  to  the  purchaser 


or  consumer;  and  the  price  and  qual- 
ity of  service  or  commodity  must  be 
so  regulated  that  enough  can  be  sold 
to  produce  net  revenue  sufficient  to 
pay  a  fair  return  upon  the  cost  of  the 
plant,  and  of  the  organization  and 
establishing  of  the  business. 

3.  Net  revenue  can  be  produced  in 
two  ways;  by  a  large  percentage  of 
profit  on  a  small  business,  or  a  small 
percentage  of  profit  on  a  large  business. 
Population,  potential  business,  social 
and  business  conditions,  generally  de- 
cide which  course  will  be  followed;  but 
with  a   large   population   with   large 
potentialities,    the   experience   of   all 
industrial  and  utility  enterprises  has 
been  that  it  adds  to  the  permanency 
and  undisturbed  enjoyment  of  a  busi- 
ness,' as  well  as  to  the  profits,  if  the 
prices  are  put  at  such  a  point  as  will 
create  a  maximum  consumption  at  a 
small  percentage  of  profit. 

4.  Uniform  rates  for  public  service 
must  lead  to  a  combination  covering 
a  large  and  diversified  territory.    No 
utility  is  so  situated  that  the  same 
unit  of  service  can  be  delivered  at  the 
same  cost  over  all  sections,  nor  are 
there  in  the  same  system  of  utilities 
any  two  sections  in  which  service  can 
be  produced  or  delivered  at  the  same 
cost,  if  each  section  is  charged  with  its 
proportion  of  all  costs. 

Uniform  rates  are  based  on  average 
costs  and  must  be  as  excessive  and  un- 
reasonable under  certain  conditions  as 
they  are  inadequate  and  ridiculous  un- 
der other  conditions.  When  both  sets 
of  conditions  are  under  one  operation 

307 


308 


PUBLIC  UTILITIES  AND  PUBLIC  POLICY 


or  in  one  combination,  the  average 
applies,  and  it  is  a  benefit  in  that  it 
gives  equal  facilities  to  all  at  reason- 
able prices.  When,  however,  one  utility 
or  combination  has  all  the  favorable 
conditions  while  the  other  has  all  the 
unfavorable,  —  or  if  a  so-called  com- 
petitor should  be  allowed  to  supply 
under  the  favorable  conditions  and 
avoid  the  unfavorable  ones,  —  rank 
injustice  is  done  in  the  one  case,  while 
undue  benefits  are  granted  in  the 
other.  In  the  one  case  there  are  great 
profits  and  large  dividends;  in  the 
other  bankruptcy  and  receiverships, 
for  which  the  only  remedy  would  be 
rates  for  service  varied  according  to 
conditions,  or  a  combination  of  all  con- 
ditions under  one  operating  combina- 
tion. As  an  instance,  —  a  gas  com- 
pany could  furnish  gas  to  a  limited 
part  of  the  community  it  serves  at  a 
price  which  would  not  pay  cost  of  dis- 
tribution in  other  sections. 

A  trunk  line  of  railroad,  if  it  did  not 
have  to  support  its  distributing  and 
collecting  branches,  could  be  run  at  a 
profit  at  rates  which  would  not  pay  the 
crews  of  the  trains  on  the  branch  lines. 
There  are,  to-day,  railroad  systems, 
through  rich,  well-settled,  highly  devel- 
oped sections,  which  are  enormously 
profitable,  while  others  in  less  prosper- 
ous, or  less  fully  developed,  sections 
of  the  same  states  are  in  a  receiver's 
hands  because  of  uniform  rates.  The 
average  cost  of  one  system  is  less  than 
the  uniform  rate,  while  the  average  cost 
of  the  other  system  is  higher.  A  uni- 
form rate  is  an  advantage  to  the  com- 
munity as  a  whole,  in  that  it  gives  to 
all  equal  facilities,  as  near  as  may  be,  at 
a  uniform  cost;  it  is  equitable  in  that 
the  highly  developed  centres  are  de- 
pendent on  the  country  as  a  whole,  and, 
therefore,  should  contribute  toward 
this  policy  of  equal  facilities  at  uniform 
cost;  but  it  is  inequitable  if,  without 
remedy,  any  utility  is  obliged  to  fur- 


nish service  below  cost  at  uniform  rates 
established  on  an  average  cost  which  in- 
cludes utilities  more  favorably  located. 
The  inevitable  conclusion  is,  there- 
fore, that  if  uniform  rates  are  to  pre- 
vail in  any  utility  system,  that  system 
must  tend  to  combination  and  to  a 
single  system  or  monopoly,  if  you 
please,  if  a  highly  developed,  highly 
efficient,  and  progressive  utility  is  to  be 
maintained. 

5.  Where  competition  in  any  field 
is  carried  on  at  a  reasonable  profit  it 
may  be  the  result  of  agreement  ex- 
pressed or  implied,  or  it  may  be  that 
observation  or  experience  of  the  cost, 
and  destruction  of  aggressive  compe- 
tition, lead  to  the  exercise  of  a  reason- 
able restraint  in  the  method  and  efforts 
of  all  to  increase  business  and  maintain 
profits.    So  long  as  business  is  above 
normal  or  is  even  normal,  it  is  easy  for 
competitors  to  maintain  prices  or  to 
observe  agreements;  but  when  business 
is    sub-normal   and   hard    to   obtain, 
while  at  the  same  time  expenses  are 
constant,  charges  are  continuous,  and 
business  at  or  below  cost  is  better  than 
none,  no  agreement  or  understanding, 
expressed  or  implied,  without  penalty, 
will  be  long  observed. 

6.  Competition,    so-called,   in   any 
enterprises  carried  on  at  unreasonable 
profits  is,  without  question,  always  the 
result  of  some  understanding  or  agree- 
ment implied  or  expressed.  Unreason- 
able profits  are  bound  sooner  or  later 
to  introduce  new  conditions  and  new 
competitors  in  any  field,  whether  sta- 
tionary or  growing.  It  is  this  that  has 
given  rise  to  the  belief  in  the  great  vir- 
tues of  competition. 

Competition  is  induced  by  many 
causes:  by  a  desire  to  meet  and  share 
ah  increasing  demand  for,  or  con- 
sumption of,  any  commodity  or  serv- 
ice at  normal  profits;  or  to  obtain  a 
share  of  a  business  in  which  profits  are 
very  attractive  and  tempting;  or  to 


PUBLIC  UTILITIES  AND  PUBLIC  POLICY 


309 


share  in  an  increasing  business  with 
excessive  profits.  The  object  may  be  to 
create  a  permanent,  continuing,  and 
profitable  business,  and  to  obtain,  at 
reasonable  prices,  a  fair  share  of  the 
going  or  growing  business;  or  to  create 
by  destructive  and  aggressive  tactics 
such  a  situation  as  will  force  a  settle- 
ment by  purchase,  combination,  or  an 
understanding  of  some  kind,  with  an 
established  business;  or  to  promote  a 
business  upon  the  reputation  and  suc- 
cess of  others  and  sell  it  to  innocent 
investors  upon  misleading  statements, 
either  willful  or  mistaken. 

The  vicious  acts  associated  with 
aggressive  competition  are  responsible 
for  much,  if  not  all,  of  the  present  antag- 
onism in  the  public  mind  to  business, 
particularly  to  large  business.  These 
vices  are  the  necessary  accompaniment 
of  the  methods  of  destructive  competi- 
tion. The  reason  for  the  public's  en- 
couragement of  such  competition  lies 
in  the  belief  that  from  it  they  will  de- 
rive some  benefit.  In  the  long  run,  how- 
ever, the  public  as  a  whole  has  never 
benefited  by  destructive  competition. 

No  business  can  be  conducted  per- 
manently without  some  margin  over 
and  above  the  operating  expenses, 
which  must  include  ample  mainte- 
nance of  its  plant  at  the  highest  *  going- 
concern'  standard;  while  any  business 
can  be  conducted  for  an  indefinite 
period,  at  an  apparent  profit,  at  the 
cost  of  its  plant  or  its  capital  deprecia- 
tion, so  long  as  they  last,  and  after  that 
for  some  time  on  receivers'  certificates. 
There  may  be  a  temporary  benefit  to 
the  consumer  from  unprofitable  prices, 
but  in  the  end  prices  must  necessarily 
be  restored  or  increased  to  recoup  the 
losses  of  the  cut  prices,  and  to  pay  the 
charges  on  capital  invested  in  unne- 
cessary duplication,  if  such  capital  is 
not  to  be  absolutely  lost  to  the  investor. 

It  must  not  be  forgotten  that,  in 
competition  of  this  kind,  whether  in 


the  field  of  industrials  or  of  utilities, 
the  start  is  with  small  business  and 
between  small  businesses ;  the  big  com- 
bination or  the  big  business  is  a  com- 
bination for  offensive  and  defensive 
purposes,  and  is  to  be  likened  to  the  sur- 
vival of  the  strongest,  if  not  the  fittest. 
Business  and  production  must  be  on  a 
large  scale  commensurate  with  the  con- 
sumption and  the  new  methods  of  pro- 
duction, which  to  produce  at  all  must 
produce  by  the  thousands.  Large  busi- 
ness or  large  production  means  a  large 
aggregate  profit  from  a  small  percent- 
age of  profit,  while  small  business  or 
small  production  must  mean  large 
percentage  of  profit  or  small  and  un- 
satisfactory compensation  to  the  pro- 
ducer, or  both.  There  is  not  one  act, 
good  or  bad,  wrong  or  right,  that  is 
charged  to  big  business,  that  did  not 
originate  with,  and  does  not  still  exist, 
in  small  business;  while  big  business 
has  one  weakness  inherent  in  its  con- 
dition which  small  business  has  not, 
and  that  is  notoriety  and  publicity. 
Big  business  is  in  the  glare  of  sunlight 
while  the  smaller  business  is  more  or 
less  in  the  shade.  Big  business  is  more 
impersonal  as  to  its  proprietorship  or 
its  ownership,  or  is  centred  about  a  few 
of  those  prominently  connected  with 
it;  while  its  widespread  body  of  small 
proprietors  or  partners  —  that  is,  the 
shareholders  —  have  no  association 
with  it  in  the  minds  of  the  public,  and, 
as  a  rule,  are  indifferent  to  all  that  is 
going  on  so  long  as  dividends  are  main- 
tained. 

The  settlements  of  competitive  wars 
always  affect  the  public  unfavorably, 
not  only  toward  the  ones  engaged,  but 
toward  all  other  industrial  or  utility 
enterprises.  When  prices  are  restored, 
even  to  a  normal  and  reasonable  basis, 
they  are  in  constant  contrast  with  the 
cut  price  of  competitive  war,  and  the 
consumer  is  constantly  reminded  of  the 
differences  and  resents  them;  why,  it  is 


310 


PUBLIC   UTILITIES  AND  PUBLIC  POLICY 


hard  to  say,  for  there  is  no  reason  why 
the  public  should  suspect  that  some 
individuals  of  the  public  engage  in  this 
aggressive  competition  for  any  other 
than  a  selfish  purpose,  or  for  any  other 
benefit  than  their  own;  nor  is  there  any 
reason  why  it  should  be  expected  that 
these  disastrous  competitions  would  be 
carried  on  beyond  the  point  which  the 
competitors  believed  best  for  their  own 
interests,  or  beyond  the  point  where 
the  purpose  of  the  competition  has 
been  accomplished. 

When  those  engaged  in  the  competi- 
tive warfare  end  it  with  profit,  that 
profit  is  more  or  less  flaunted  in  the 
faces  of  the  public  and  is  a  constant 
offense;  on  the  other  hand,  the  losses 
made  in  the  unsuccessful  competitions 
are  soon  forgotten.  If  the  losses  of  the 
unsuccessful  promoters  of  enterprises, 
worthy  and  unworthy,  or  of  competi- 
tive wars,  or  the  losses  made  by  specu- 
lators and  gamblers,  were  as  much 
talked  about  and  as  well  known,  or  as 
much  in  evidence,  as  the  occasional 
gains,  the  speculator  or  undesirable 
promoter  would  find  fewer  contributors 
or  followers,  and  competition  would 
be  confined  to  rational  and  commend- 
able ends,  and  governed  by  a  decent 
self-restraint;  or,  if  those  who  did  bene- 
fit temporarily  by  aggressive  competi- 
tion also  felt  the  resultant  losses,  there 
would  be  less  encouragement  of  that 
kind  of  competition,  and  a  better  feel- 
ing on  the  part  of  the  public  toward 
those  industries  or  utilities  which  were 
trying  to  operate  a  business  in  a  leg- 
itimate manner  and  at  a  reasonable 
profit. 

Another  popular  belief  is  that  it  is  due 
to  competition  that  prices  and  charges 
have  been  permanently  reduced.  Com- 
petition may  have  been  a  slight 
stimulant,  but  permanently  reduced 
prices  are  brought  about  by  the  pro- 
tection which  encourages  the  inventor 
to  create  and  develop  labor-and-time- 


saving  machines  and  new  and  im- 
proved methods  and  devices;  by  the 
desire  to  gain  the  profits  which  reward 
the  study  of  the  wishes,  needs,  com- 
forts, and  luxuries  of  the  world,  for  the 
purpose  of  bettering  the  existing  ones 
or  creating  new  ones;  by  the  initiative 
and  enterprise  which  introduced  the 
improved  processes  and  methods;  by 
the  introduction  of  machinery  oper- 
ated by  ordinary  labor  at  high  wages, 
to  take  the  place  of  highly  skilled  labor 
at  comparatively  low  wages;  by  the 
great  increase  in  the  number  of  pur- 
chasers or  consumers,  and  by  the  in- 
crease in  the  average  purchasing  power 
of  each  individual;  by  the  development 
of  markets  of  such  magnitude  that 
large  sums  could  be  devoted  to  the 
introduction  of  machinery,  processes, 
and  methods  which  cut  producing-cost 
and  enabled  a  large  aggregate  profit  to 
be  realized  on  large  production  and 
large  scales  at  low  prices  and  small  per- 
centage of  profit.  Whether  the  con- 
sumers created  the  producers  or  the 
producers  the  consumers,  whether  the 
developing  market  produced  the  im- 
provements which  increased  produc- 
tion or  whether  the  improvements 
produced  the  market,  is  difficult  to 
determine,  but  one  thing  is  sure  — 
that  the  business  organization  of  any 
community  is  so  dependent  upon  the 
community  that  sooner  or  later  any 
effect,  whether  for  good  or  for  bad,  is 
bound  to  be  felt  over  the  whole. 


ii 

It  must  be  admitted  that  regulation 
and  control  by  commission  has  become 
a  permanent  feature  of  our  economic 
policy,  particularly  as  to  utilities.  That 
being  so,  it  is  essential  for  the  well- 
being  of  the  community  that  such  regu- 
lation and  control  should  be  effective, 
equitable,  acceptable  to  the  public,  and 
final.  There  must  be  absolute  confi- 


PUBLIC  UTILITIES  AND  PUBLIC  POLICY 


311 


dence  on  the  part  of  the  public  in  its 
constituted  commissions,  and  the  util- 
ities must  have  confidence  in  their  fair 
intent  and  equity.  To  deserve  this  con- 
fidence, the  members  of  the  commis- 
sions must  be  of  high  order,  free  from 
prejudice  or  political  favoritism  or  bias; 
and  not  only  competent,  but  determ- 
ined to  render  their  decisions  on  the 
showing  of  facts  without  regard  to 
popular  clamor  on  the  one  side  or  cor- 
porate pressure  on  the  other.  To  get 
all  this,  there  must  be  permanency  and 
lapse  of  time  sufficient  to  enable  an  ac- 
cumulation of  practice,  experience,  and 
precedent,  and  a  thorough  cooperation 
between  the  public,  the  commissions, 
and  the  corporations,  with  confidence, 
deference,  and  dependence,  and  abso- 
lute frankness  on  every  side. 

Corporations  should  be  allowed  free- 
dom from  undue  restraint  or  restriction 
on  operations,  so  long  as  good  service  is 
rendered  at  reasonable  prices  —  prices 
which  will  allow  the  best  wages  for 
the  best  service,  provide  for  the  main- 
tenance, depreciation,  and  reconstruc- 
tion of  the  plant,  pay  all  fixed  charges 
and  a  fair  return  on  the  investment, 
and  a  profit  commensurate  to  the  risk 
and  chances  peculiar  to,  and  the  ability 
required  to  establish  and  operate,  the 
undertaking.  If  discussions  of  unsup- 
ported assertions  and  biased  and  mis- 
leading statements  and  distorted  facts, 
no  matter  where  made  or  by  whom,  are 
to  prejudice  the  public  or  force  the 
commissions  to  resort  to  expedients, 
indirect  methods,  half-way  measures, 
or  to  evasions  in  the  performance  of 
their  duties,  the  old  conditions  of  trick 
and  stratagem  and '  anything-is-fair-in- 
war'  methods  to  gain  personal  ends 
will  soon  be  restored  in  worse  shape 
than  before. 

It  will  take  time  and  much  self- 
restraint  on  the  part  of  all  concerned 
tq  bring  this  happy  result  about;  and 
while  it  is  being  accomplished  and  the 


readjustment  is  taking  place,  the  pub- 
lic should  not  in  their  impatient  desire 
to. get  quick  results  allow  the  destruc- 
tion or  deterioration  of  those  hereto- 
fore thriving  enterprises  which  have 
done,  and  are  doing,  so  much  for  the 
public  development,  even  if  for  a  time 
some  inequalities  or  irregularities  due 
to  the  changing  conditions  continue. 
The  fact  that  some  corporations  have 
not  as  yet  quite  got  on  to  the  new  order 
of  things,  together  with  the  fact  that 
the  public,  fully  realizing  its  power, 
has  not  as  yet  learned  that  proper  re- 
strictions, regulation,  and  control,  can 
secure  all  that  is  wanted,  or  all  that  is 
to  be  desired,  and  all  that  can  be  got, 
or  that  conservation  is  better  than 
destruction,  is  largely  the  cause  of  the 
present  unsettled  and  unsatisfactory 
conditions.  The  relations  between  the 
public  and  the  corporations  have  not 
fully  adjusted  themselves  to  that  nicety 
of  balance  which  is  possible,  and  which 
will  give  each  of  them  all  that  either  is 
entitled  to,  or  could  get,  while  at  the 
same  time  preserving  the  prosperity 
and  the  rights  of  each. 

This  desired  and  happy  consumma- 
tion of  the  struggle,  for  it  is  a  struggle, 
will  only  come  with  education,  with 
the  realization,  on  the  part  of  the  pub- 
lic, of  the  fact  that  economic  and  nat- 
ural laws  are  above  all  statutory  laws 
and  cannot  be  disregarded  if  good  re- 
sults are  to  be  obtained;  that  the  pro- 
sperity of  all  results  from  general  indi- 
vidual prosperity;  that  prosperous  and 
solvent  communities  can  only  exist 
where  they  are  served  by  prosperous 
and  solvent  utilities;  and  on  the  part 
of  the  corporation,  that  permanent 
success  not  only  can  be,  but  can  only  be 
obtained  through  equitable  and  legiti- 
mate efforts  and  procedure. 

If,  under  these  conditions  rightfully 
administered,  this  country  cannot  se- 
cure and  maintain  the  most  sufficient, 
efficient,  and  effective  service  of  all 


312 


PUBLIC  UTILITIES  AND  PUBLIC  POLICY 


utilities,  there  must  be  something  in- 
herently wrong  in  government  regula- 
tion and  control;  and  if  government 
cannot  effectively  regulate  and  control 
through  its  commissions  and  its  laws, 
then  how  much  less  effectively  could  it 
operate  through  government  officials. 
Competition  —  excepting  that  kind 
which  is  rather  *  participation '  than 
'competition/  and  operates  under 
agreement  as  to  prices  or  territory; 
that  kind  which  provides  for  the  exten- 
sion or  development  of  the  country, 
and  is  conducted  on  the  principle  of 
maintaining  high  quality  and  fair 
prices  —  can  only  exist  where  there  are 
abuses,  either  in  the  way  of  unreason- 
able profits  or  of  excessive  capitaliza- 
tion; and  where  control  and  regulation 
are  effective,  these  abuses  cannot  exist 
or  continue.  Consequently  competi- 
tion and  control  and  regulation  do  not 
go  together,  and  if  a  mistaken  public 
opinion  demands  competition  in  estab- 
lished fields  of  'sufficient'  and  'effi- 
cient '  service  given  under  control  and 
regulation,  the  result  will  be  duplica- 
tion of  plant,  for  which  the  general 
public  must  sooner  or  later  pay  either 
in  the  loss  of  capital  invested,  or  in 
higher  charges  necessary  to  pay  re- 
turns on  the  capital  invested  in  the 
duplicated  plant.  The  losers,  as  we 
said  above,  may  not  lose  to  the  same 
individuals,  but  whatever  is  lost  to 
individuals  is  lost  to  society  and  sooner 
or  later  affects  the  individual. 


in 

All  utilities  are  dependent  not  only 
upon  the  public  for  support,  in  that 
they  must  have  customers  for  their 
service,  but  upon  the  public  good-will 
and  favor,  in  that,  from  the  public  or 
its  representatives,  they  must  have 
franchises  or  permits  under  which  they 
can  operate.  The  old  and  proper  idea 
of  franchise  put  the  public  on  the  basis 


of  a  partner,  in  a  partnership  between 
the  public,  the  capital,  the  invention 
or  utility,  and  the  individual.  The 
public  furnished  consumption  and,  of 
course,  the  license  to  serve  or  the  fran- 
chise to  furnish  something  that  it,  the 
public,  presumably  wanted.  The  in- 
dividual furnished  the  initiative,  the 
energy,  and  managing  ability;  the  cap- 
ital employed  was  essential  to  develop- 
ment and  installation;  the  invention  or 
utility  was  something  which  to  be  suc- 
cessful must  be  of  some  public  benefit. 
The  intent  or  theory  was  that  each 
should  get  its  fair  share  of  the  bene- 
fits :  the  promoters  and  inventors,  upon 
whose  initiative,  enterprise,  and  risk, 
something  of  great  public  benefit  was 
introduced,  profits  in  money;  the  pub- 
lic, something  to  their  material  advan- 
tage, in  comfort  or  well-being.  If  this 
condition  could  have  been  established 
and  maintained  in  a  well-balanced  rela- 
tion to  each  of  the  partners,  the  present 
state  of  mind  on  the  part  of  the  public 
toward  utilities  would  never  have 
existed. 

As  pertinent  to  and  having  a  direct 
bearing  on  questions  of  franchise,  at- 
tention is  called  to  the  following  facts : 

1.  At  the  beginning,  every  public 
utility  or  public  service  was  started 
as  an  improvement  upon  something, 
some  method,  or  some  practice  —  and 
was  a  luxury.  The  greater  the  real 
benefit,  or  the  greater  the  service,  of 
the  utility  to  the  public,  the  quicker 
its  adoption  and  the  more  rapid  its 
assimilation  into  the  daily  habits  and 
life  of  the  people.  The  quickness  with 
which  it  changed  from  a  luxury  or  con- 
venience to  a  necessity  was  a  direct 
measure  of  its  advantage  to  the  com- 
munity; while  at  the  same  time,  and 
in  the  same  proportion,  the  chances  of 
competition  increased,  created,  as  it 
were,  by  the  desire  of  those  who  always 
depend  on  the  enterprise  of  others  for 
their  initiative  to  secure  a  share  of  the 


PUBLIC  UTILITIES  AND  PUBLIC  POLICY 


313 


material  advantages,  to  reap  where 
others  have  sown. 

2.  The  public  have  received  through 
utilities  as  much  benefit  in  money, 
and  in  comfort,  convenience,  and  well- 
being —  if  these  could  be  measured  in 
money  —  as  the  inventors  and  pro- 
moters have  received  in  profits;  while 
the  enhancement  of  values,  or  the  un- 
earned increment,  caused  by  the  intro- 
duction of  utilities  has  far  exceeded  all 
the  profits  from  all  the  utilities,  allow- 
ing them  to  be  as  great  as  the  most 
liberal  estimates  of  the  restrictionists 
would  have  them.  The  money  profits 
from  these  enterprises  are  concentra- 
ted on  one  individual  or  on  a  group, 
while  the  intangible  values  of  comfort 
and  well-being  and  convenience,  and 
the  unearned  increment,  attach  to  the 
general  public  and  are  lost  in,  or  min- 
gled with,  general  conditions;  there- 
fore one  attracts  continued  attention 
and  causes  envy,  while  the  other  is  tak- 
en as  a  matter  of  right. 

The  increase  in  population,  the  wide 
distribution  of  wealth,  not  only  cre- 
ated tremendous  possibilities  in  old 
established  but  dormant  utilities,  but 
created  a  great  demand  for  new  ones. 
Promoters  of  new  enterprises  and  spec- 
ulators in  old  enterprises  became  act- 
ive. Franchises  were  in  demand  on  any 
terms  and  conditions.  Promises  were 
made  which  no  one  expected  to  fulfill 
or  was  expected  to  fulfill,  and  enter- 
prises were  launched  which  the  pro- 
moters knew,  or  should  have  known, 
would  not  pay.  The  partners  in  these 
enterprises,  other  than  the  public,  in 
their  eagerness  to  realize  profits  in 
advance  of  the  actual  development, 
and  in  their  eagerness  to  capitalize 
prospects  and  hopes,  and  even  unwar- 
ranted promises,  in  advance  of  estab- 
lishing any  public  benefits,  took  ad- 
vantage of  this,  and  more  attention  was 
paid  to  speculative  combinations,  pro- 
motions, and  dealings  than  to  the  wants 


and  service  of  the  public.  This  soon 
produced  a  feeling  on  the  part  of  the 
public  furnishing  the  permit  to  serve, 
on  the  one  hand,  and  the  consumers 
who  afforded  the  profit,  on  the  other 
hand,  that  the  other  partners  were  get- 
ting more  than  their  share  and  getting 
it  first,  and  that  in  some  way  they  had 
been  giving  away  or  sacrificing  some- 
thing of  great  value. 

The  methods  employed  in  these 
transactions,  the  acts  performed,  and 
the  results  sought  for  and  obtained, 
were  no  different  from  those  employed 
in  all  speculative  and  in  many  com- 
petitive businesses,  —  no  worse,  no 
better,  —  but  there  was  a  difference :  the 
utility  must  get  a  permit  or  franchise, 
which  the  industrial  does  not  need;  the 
public  as  a  body  politic  has  also  a 
control  over  the  plant  installation  and 
operation  of  public  service  and  public 
utilities,  which  it  does  not  possess 
over  industrials.  This  association  be- 
tween the  public  as  consumer,  and 
the  public  which  gave  the  franchise, 
apparently  did  not  occur  to  the  other 
partners. 

The  fact  that  the  same  public  were 
masters  of  the  situation,  in  that  they 
constituted  the  body  politic,  did  not 
find  any  lodgment  in  the  minds  of  those 
who  controlled  utilities;  nor  did  the 
public,  on  its  part,  fully  realize  this 
relation  and  its  power  until  the  realiza- 
tion was  forced  upon  it  by  an  aroused 
and  indignant  public  opinion  seeking 
for  redress  and  protection.  Regarding 
only  the  existing  conditions,  forgetting 
and  disregarding  what  the  conditions 
were  before  the  utilities  were  intro- 
duced, forgetting  that  there  was  ever 
any  initial  enterprise  or  risk  in  the  in- 
troduction of  these  utilities  or  in  the 
operation  of  these  franchises,  disre- 
garding the  benefits  following  the  in- 
troduction of  these  utilities,  the  public 
mind  furnished  a  ready  field  for  biased 
and  selfish  opinion.  Luxuries  were  fast 


314 


PUBLIC  UTILITIES  AND  PUBLIC  POLICY 


becoming  necessities;  ridiculously  low 
prices,  made  for  services  rendered  in  the 
heat  of  competitive  war,  developed  a 
tendency  in  the  public  to  demand  the 
impossible  in  the  way  of  permanent 
rates  and  prices;  and  a  desire  began  to 
develop  to  get  all  possible  for  as  little 
as  possible.  In  this  frame  of  mind  the 
public  awakened  to  a  realization  of  its 
great  strength,  through  the  right  of 
regulation  and  control,  through  the 
control  of  franchise  without  which  any 
utility  plant  already  established  was 
useless  and  worthless,  and  through  its 
power  as  a  body  politic,  a  power  which, 
if  uncontrolled  by  sober  common  sense, 
or  used  without  discrimination,  would 
destroy  every  utility,  and  in  the  de- 
struction would  also  involve  both  the 
prosperity  and  well-being  of  the  com- 
munity. 

Public  prosperity  is  largely  depend- 
ent upon  good  service  of  all  kinds,  not 
only  within  but  without.  The  inter- 
connecting interests  of  individuals 
within  a  community,  and  of  communi- 
ties with  one  another,  is  like  an  endless 
chain,  each  link  or  unit  depending  on 
the  strength  and  reliability  of  the 
whole,  and  the  effective  worth  of  the 
whole  depending  on  each  link.  Good 
or  bad  movements  in  economic  matters 
do  not  produce  immediate  effects,  but 
because  the  effects  are  not  immediate 
they  are  none  the  less  certain  to  come. 
If  the  causes  which  have  produced 
prosperity  are  ignored,  if  economic 
laws  are  disregarded,  and  experiments 
in  new  ideas  are  enforced  without  trial, 
the  resulting  trouble  will  again,  as  it 
has  in  the  past,  cause  unfortunate 
results,  which  will  in  time  bring  about 
reform,  but  the  damage  and  destruc- 
tion done  will  never  be  restored. 

Unless  the  public  is  reasonable  in 
the  use  of  its  new-found  power,  and 
exercises  it  justly  and  equitably,  but 
rigidly  and  consistently,  all  remaining 
confidence  will  be  destroyed,  and  pro- 


sperity will  cease;  for,  unless  utilities 
can  be  invested  in  with  certainty  and 
security,  investment  will  cease,  and 
growth  and  development  must  surely 
be  checked.  These  utilities,  and  those 
dependent  upon  them,  are  by  far  the 
largest  purchasers  and  consumers  of 
the  products  of  the  earth  and  the  fac- 
tory; and  a  very  large  proportion  of 
this  consumption  is  due  to  normal  or 
above-normal  activity  in  the  improve- 
ment, extension,  and  development  of 
these  utilities,  and  to  the  greater  act- 
ivity in  every  line  of  industry  or 
production  which  accompanies  these 
activities.  Activity  of  extension  and 
development  means  full  consumption 
of  all  products  and  commodities,  good 
wages,  and  full  employment  for  all. 
Sub-normal,  normal,  or  above-normal 
activity  means  the  difference  between 
shops  half  filled  with  work,  full  of  work, 
or  worked  over-time. 

Production  is  governed  by  the  de- 
mands of  consumption;  large  sums  of 
money  are  spent  annually  by  produc- 
ers to  obtain  new  markets,  enlarge  old 
ones,  and  even  to  obtain  the  customers 
of  their  rivals.  A  greater  market  can 
be  made  at  less  cost  by  a  slight  change 
of  policy  in  some  directions  toward 
some  utilities.  A  little  liberality  in 
treatment,  a  little  let-up  in  restric- 
tions, when  accompanied  by  demand 
for  increased  facilities,  will  make  a  tre- 
mendous difference  in  the  activity  in 
improvement,  extension,  and  develop- 
ment, and  in  the  accompanying  pur- 
chasing power,  direct  and  indirect,  of 
the  public  utility  and  service  corpora- 
tions and  those  dependent  upon  them. 

Do  not  think  that,  because  at  the 
moment  we  have  a  spurt  in  the  business 
conditions,  we  are  out  of  trouble.  This 
spurt,  if  one  may  so  call  it,  is  the  result 
of  the  bad  conditions,  and  is  but  a 
symptom  which  foretells  worse  condi- 
tions unless  guarded  against. 

The  present  conditions  are  due  to 


PUBLIC   UTILITIES  AND  PUBLIC  POLICY 


315 


many  causes  —  curtailed  production  in 
the  past,  exhausted  stocks  of  all  kinds 
of  manufactured  commodities  or  goods, 
accumulation  of  purchasing  ability  on 
the  part  of  the  primary  producer,  be- 
cause of  good  crops  and  good  prices, 
and  the  steady  normal  development  of 
the  country,  which  has  overtaken  the 
over-expansion  of  a  few  years  ago  in 
all  lines  of  industry. 

Unless  timely  precaution  is  taken, 
there  will  be  the  same  congestion,  the 
same  inability  on  the  part  of  all  util- 
ities, particularly  transportation,  to 
meet  the  current  demands  made  upon 
them,  and  the  same  direct  and  indirect 
losses  because  of  delay  or  the  extra 
cost  to  provide  against  delay,  the  same 
premium  for  immediate  delivery,  and 
the  same  vexations  because  conditions 
are  such  that  what  is  wanted  cannot 
be  got  when  it  is  wanted. 

Under  rational  and  effective  control 
and  regulation  there  can  be  no  danger 
to  the  public. 

Governments  are  established  for  the 
conservation  of  individual  and  public 
interest,  and  the  protection  of  individ- 
ual and  public  rights.  Wise,  equitable, 
rational  regulation  and  control  come 
well  within  these  duties,  and  well  with- 
in the  capability  of  rightly  and  hon- 
estly organized  government. 

Big  crops  and  abundant  money  are 
of  no  benefit  unless  there  is  full  con- 
sumption of  the  one  and  good  demand 
for  the  other,  and  it  is  only  through 
activity  that  these  can  come. 


IV 

The  relation  of  the  telephone  system 
to  the  public  is  unique  in  that  there  is 
no  other  public  utility  or  public  service 
which  occupies  quite  the  same  personal 
relation  to  the  public  that  the  tele- 
phone does;  and  in  this  country  the 
relationship  has  acquired  additional 
importance  as  a  public  necessity  owing 


to  the  development  of  the  service,  the 
use  made  of  it,  and  the  dependence 
upon  it  by  the  public  in  its  business 
and  social  relations. 

This  importance  is  not  only  in  the 
local  exchange  service,  but  in  the  de- 
pendence upon  a  quick  and  reliable 
service  to  all  points  within  speaking 
radius.  This  dependence  is  not  a  mere 
accident  or  development,  nor  is  it 
merely  incidental  to  the  service;  it  is 
the  result  of  a  thoroughly  considered 
endeavor  to  create  a  business  by  first 
providing  dependable  facilities. 

In  the  early  days  of  the  telephone, 
one  of  the  sub-officials  of  a  company 
made  a  protest  against  the  expenditure 
of  a  considerable  sum  in  improving 
and  rebuilding  a  certain  inferior  toll- 
line  connecting  adjacent  towns,  on  the 
ground  that  the  business  was  not  suffi- 
cient to  support  the  existing  line.  The 
answer  to  his  protest  was  that  it  could 
not  be  expected  that  business  would  be 
developed  upon  unreliable  and  ineffi- 
cient facilities  and  service;  that  unless 
telephone  service  could  be  depended 
upon  at  all  times,  it  would  only  be 
used  in  an  emergency  or  as  a  last  re- 
sort; therefore  it  was  necessary  that 
efficiency  and  reliability  should  be 
established  before  large  business  could 
be  expected :  that  the  only  question  to 
be  considered  before  establishing  serv- 
ice was  —  whether  there  was  a  popula- 
tion with  a  potential  business. 

This  is  the  policy  which  controlled 
the  development  of  the  Bell  Telephone 
system  in  America,  and  is  the  reason 
for  its  present  development. 

The  telephone  system,  however,  has 
not  been  created  without  its  setbacks, 
its  faults,  and  its  grievous  mistakes; 
and  if  the  experience  and  knowledge 
obtained  from  those  mistakes  is  ingraft- 
ed in  the  present  policy  of  the  Bell 
system,  and  they  are  not  repeated, 
too  much  emphasis  should  not  be  laid 
upon  those  ancient  and  abandoned 


316 


PUBLIC  UTILITIES  AND  PUBLIC  POLICY 


faults,  and  the  memory  should  not  be 
too  much  exercised  to  recall  them  from 
oblivion. 

As  one  reason,  but  no  excuse,  for 
those  mistakes,  it  must  be  remembered 
that  the  telephone  was  born  in  an  era 
when  it  was  generally  thought  that 
corporations  were  masters  of  the  pub- 
lic. It  is  not  at  all  likely  from  the 
present  attitude  of  the  public  that  that 
mistake  will  ever  be  repeated. 

The  telephone  was  born  when  it  was 
the  popular  idea  that  an  electrician 
was  the  man  who  put  up  the  electric 
call-bells,  when  electrical  engineers,  as 
at  present  understood,  did  not  exist; 
and,  except  in  the  workshops  of  a  few 
self-developed  working  electricians  of 
ingenuity  and  imagination,  working  on 
its  practical  application  to  industrial 
development,  the  science  of  electricity 
was  studied  only  in  college  labora- 
tories; and  there,  as  a  rule,  for  purely 
scientific  purposes. 

Patents  were  still  held  in  respect  by 
the  general  public,  if  not  by  the  spec- 
ulative promoter  and  inf ringer;  and 
the  inventor  of  something  new  and  use- 
ful was  still  regarded  as  the  world's 
benefactor,  and  as  entitled  to  some 
acknowledgment;  and  if  he  did  not 
get  it  during  the  life  of  his  patent,  it 
was  sometimes  extended. 

Never  in  the  same  period  of  the  his- 
tory of  the  world  has  there  been  such 
development  of  any  branch  of  science 
as  there  has  been  in  electricity  in  the 
less  than  four  decades  in  which  elec- 
trical communication,  and  the  indus- 
trial application  of  electricity,  have 
been  brought  from  a  period  of  almost 
nothingness  to  the  development  of 
1912;  from  a  period  of  conjecture  and 
theory  to  that  of  an  exact  science;  from 
the  experimental  stage  to  be  one  of  the 
great  industrial  forces  in  the  world, 
perhaps  the  greatest. 

When  the  telephone  was  first  intro- 
duced, the  plant  was  simple,  compara- 


tively inexpensive,  and  corresponding- 
ly inefficient  in  comparison  to  what  it 
is  now;  but  wonderful  beyond  compre- 
hension or  comparison  to  what  had 
been.  The  apparatus  consisted  of 
modifications  and  adaptations  of  ap- 
paratus designed  for  other  purposes; 
all  the  equipment  and  plant  for  ex- 
change purposes  had  to  be  invented 
and  developed.  The  first  use  of  the 
telephone  was  on  private  lines  con- 
necting two  establishments,  or  gener- 
ally the  office  and  factory  of  the  same 
establishment,  the  idea  of  the  exchange 
being  adapted  from  the  connecting  of 
telegraph  lines  together  at  a  central 
office  to  put  different  stations  into 
direct  communication  with  each  other. 
The  telephone  exchange  was  of  slow 
growth,  and  difficult  to  exploit  at  first; 
there  was  nothing  known  in  public 
service  to  use  as  an  illustration,  and  in 
itself  it  was  difficult  of  demonstration 
because  the  only  possible  demonstra- 
tion was  by  itself,  before  itself  existed; 
until  a  number  of  people  were  con- 
nected with  an  exchange,  there  could 
be  no  service. 

The  advantages,  though  slowly  ap- 
preciated at  first,  brought  a  faster 
growth  than  any  one  anticipated,  and 
both  advantages  and  growth  have 
probably  gone  far  beyond  the  most 
optimistic  estimates  of  any,  excepting 
possibly  a  few,  who  were  regarded  as 
dreamy  enthusiasts.  When  the  advan- 
tage of  the  telephone  service  was  once 
recognized  it  became  surrounded  by  a 
halo,  and  many  of  those  who  were  en- 
gaged in  its  development  were  literally 
carried  off  their  practical  business  feet, 
and  lost  their  business  heads.  Most  of 
the  promoters  in  the  field  were  young 
men  who  were  working  on  enthusiasm 
instead  of  capital,  and  with  that  pecul- 
iar energy  which  only  comes  to  those 
who  dream  dreams.  This  condition 
existed  until  decay,  depreciation,  ob- 
solescence confronted  the  operating 


PUBLIC   UTILITIES  AND  PUBLIC  POLICY 


317 


companies,  with  no  provision  or  re- 
serve to  prevent  them.  Decaying,  de- 
preciated plant,  central-office  equip- 
ment and  apparatus,  and  subscribers' 
stations  of  every  conceivable  pattern 
and  kind  were  the  rule.  Conversation 
was  interfered  with  by  the  extraneous 
noises  on  the  single  wire  which  formed 
the  then  telephone  circuit  and  which, 
like  the  antenna  of  the  wireless  tele- 
graph, caught  every  electrical  disturb- 
ance in  the  air,  from  that  caused  by  the 
aurora  borealis  to  that  caused  by  the 
electric  car  and  telegraph  currents. 
Meanwhile,  the  development  of  the  art 
had  been  steadily  and  rapidly  progress- 
ing, and  in  many  central-office  switch- 
boards there  was  'junk'  at  one  end, 
and  at  the  other  the  latest  improve- 
ment known.  Can  it  be  wondered  at 
that  the  service  left  much  to  be  desired, 
and  that  the  public  was  anything  but 
satisfied? 

Just  about  the  time  when  many  of 
the  local  companies  found  themselves 
in  a  position  where  reconstruction  of 
plant,  or  destruction  of  business,  was 
facing  them,  and  no  provision  made  for 
it,  came  that  unprecedented  period 
of  almost  unheralded  cumulative  pro- 
sperity throughout  the  country.  The 
Western  farmer  who  had  been  strug- 
gling with  the  low  prices  of  over-pro- 
duction and  undeveloped  consumption, 
found  that  consumption  had  overtaken 
production,  and  that  favorable  sea- 
sons and  large  demands  made  good 
markets  for  his  produce  and  filled  his 
pockets  with  money.  Industrial  work- 
ers found  full  employment  at  full 
wages  and  still  indulged  in  some  of  the 
reasonable  economies  of  life.  Those 
people  who  in  the  not  far-past  days  of 
overdue  interest  and  notes  and  mort- 
gages looked  upon  banks  as  places  to 
avoid,  or  upon  rapidly  diminishing 
deposits  in  savings-banks  with  dread 
of  the  future,  found  themselves  with 
abundant  and  ready  money.  What  a 


field  for  the  promoter,  and  what  an  ad- 
vantage was  taken  of  it!  Thousands, 
millions,  even  hundreds  of  millions,  of 
these  accumulations  and  savings  went 
into  all  sorts  of  industrial  and  pub- 
lic-service and  utility  schemes.  Com- 
peting gas-companies,  water-works, 
interurban  railroads,  local  tramways, 
telephone  enterprises,  were  inaugurat- 
ed in  great  numbers. 

The  old  Bell  telephone  companies, 
or  those  of  them  with  capital  all  issued 
and  no  reserves,  and  with  an  anti- 
quated plant  which  required  all  the 
earnings  for  current  expenses  and  ever- 
increasing  maintenance  and  current 
repairs,  found  themselves  opposed  by 
new  up-to-date  plants  giving  a  service 
which  could  not  be  given  by  the  old 
plants,  and  at  prices  which  only  a  new 
plant  paying  no  attention  to  deprecia- 
tion or  depreciation  reserves  could  give 
even  temporarily;  prices  which  were 
not  intended  to  be  the  basis  of  a  per- 
manent and  continuing  business,  but 
were  made  on  any  basis  that  would  get 
franchises  and  subscribers  and  thus 
enable  the  promoters  to  sell  securities. 

What  wonder  if,  in  some  localities, 
the  Bell  service  and  the  Bell  companies 
became  a  by-word  and  an  offense. 

It  would  have  been  a  bad  day  for 
the  Bell  interests  but  for  the  courage 
and  optimism  of  the  then  head  of  the 
system,  who  came  in  at  about  the  time 
when  everything  was  at  its  worst. 
Recognizing  the  conditions,  and  also 
the  cure  for,  and  the  necessities  of,  the 
conditions,  he  procured  and  poured 
millions  upon  millions  of  money  into 
these  local  companies,  rehabilitating 
and  reorganizing  them,  creating  a  new 
system  by  rebuilding  and  newly  build- 
ing exchanges  and  connecting  them  by 
thousands  of  miles  of  toll  and  long-dis- 
tance lines.  The  result  was  that  the 
Bell  system  was  once  more  in  a  posi- 
tion not  only  to  give  as  good  service  as 
could  be  given,  but  to  give  a  universal 


318 


PUBLIC  UTILITIES  AND  PUBLIC  POLICY 


service  such  as  could  not  be  given  by 
any  other  system  and  was  not  at- 
tempted by  the  independents.  While 
this  was  being  done  the  opposition 
plants  were  beginning  to  learn  that 
maintenance,  reconstruction,  obsoles- 
cence were  not  negligible  quantities, 
and  the  investing  public  that  the 
promises  and  prophecies  upon  which 
their  money  had  been  obtained  were 
wrong  and  misleading;  and  also  it  was 
demonstrated  that  while  isolated  ex- 
changes, operated  and  controlled  inde- 
pendently, could  give  good  local  serv- 
ice, they  could  not  satisfy  the  public 
as  against  a  system  which  made  each 
exchange,  in  fact  each  telephone  sta- 
tion, the  centre  of  a  system  over  which 
conversation  could  be  had  in  every  di- 
rection to  the,  utmost  talking  distance. 
Had  the  opposition  or  independent 
telephone  movement  taken  a  lesson 
from  the  mistakes  of  the  Bell  and  pro- 
fited by  its  experience  and  adopted 
its  policy  of  intercommunication,  the 
story  might  be  different  from  what  it  is, 
but  the  opportunity  has  passed,  never 
to  return.  Yet  the  lessons  to  be  learned 
from  this  experience  have  as  yet  not 
been  thoroughly  assimilated  or  appre- 
ciated by  the  public,  and  this  history 
is  given  to  show  what  underlies  what- 
ever differences  there  are  between  the 
public  and  the  operating  telephone 
companies. 

The  telephone  service  may  still  be 
called  an  undeveloped  service.  Be- 
cause the  instruments  at  the  subscrib- 
ers* stations  are  not  materially  or 
noticeably  changed  from  time  to  time, 
is  no  indication  that  the  art  is  at  a 
standstill.  Probably  the  actual  trans- 
mitter and  receiver  are  about  as  highly 
developed  as  they  ever  will  be;  but 
the  mechanism  of  the  central  office,  the 
appliances  to  get  rid  of  extraneous 
troubles  —  in  these  days  of  high  po- 
tentials in  electric  currents  in  trans- 
mission, transportation,  and  the  in- 


dustrial arts,  to  say  nothing  of  the 
wireless !  —  are  continually  changing, 
so  much  so  that  one  familiar  with  the 
art  five  years  ago  would  find  a  field 
almost  unknown  to  him  and  newly  de- 
veloped to-day.  Hundreds  of  the  bright- 
est minds  devoted  to  research,  develop- 
ment, and  improvement,  are  steadily 
and  constantly  eliminating  some  fault, 
improving  some  method  or  process, 
overcoming  some  obstacle  to  good  ser- 
vice. There  is  a  continuous  evolution 
in  a  field  with  a  limitless  horizon,  but 
the  evolution  is  so  steady  and  constant 
as  to  be  almost  unnoticed.  To  realize 
it,  one  has  only  to  compare  the  actual 
service  and  the  radius  of  communica- 
tion with  what  actually  existed  ten 
years  ago,  and  that  is  impossible  to  the 
most  impartial. 

The  public,  however,  has  begun  to 
appreciate  and  believe  that  the  tele- 
phone service  is  a  *  natural  monopoly'; 
that  any  telephone  exchange  must  give 
universal  service  —  from  every  ex- 
change and  every  subscriber  as  a  centre 
in  every  direction  to  the  farthest  talk- 
ing limits;  that  one  telephone  system 
is  sufficient,  and  more  than  one  a  nui- 
sance; that  a  telephone  conversation 
cannot  be  transferred  from  one  system 
to  another  and  therefore  that  every 
one  desiring  service  must  be  connected 
with  the  same  system;  that  the  tele- 
phone service  as  carried  on  by  the  Bell 
system  is  one  of  that  class  which  has 
no  alternative  and  no  substitute.  The 
vital  interest  of  the  public  in  the  serv- 
ice must  also  be  recognized,  and  what- 
ever is  necessary  to  insure  to  the  pub- 
lic full  and  complete  service  must  be 
done,  and  done  in  such  a  way  as  will 
bring  *  efficient'  and  'sufficient'  service 
within  the  reach  of  the  whole  public 
having  any  possible  use  for  it. 

The  telephone  service  as  now  under- 
stood and  demanded,  in  this  country, 
depends  on  uniform  development  of 
all  sections,  and  close  and  sufficient 


PUBLIC  UTILITIES  AND  PUBLIC  POLICY 


319 


connection,  with  uniform  operation, 
under  common  control,  between  them. 
The  question  of  the  profitableness  of 
each  separate  unit  of  the  system,  whe- 
ther exchange  or  connecting  lines,  can- 
not be  considered.  The  system  must 
be  considered  as  a  whole,  administered 
and  developed  as  a  whole,  and  as  a 
whole  it  must  yield  proper  return,  re- 
gardless of  the  returns  of  this  or  that 
locality  so  long  as  the  development  of 
the  locality  is  of  advantage  to  the 
system  as  a  whole. 

This  is  a  source  of  both  weakness 
and  strength  to  the  Bell  system.  The 
weakness  lies  in  the  fact  that  an  oppo- 
sition exchange  can  locate  itself  in  the 
congested  centre  of  business  and,  at  a 
low  rate,  give  a  purely  local  service, 
within  that  section,  at  a  price  which  the 
system  giving  universal  service  over  ex- 
tended areas,  profitable  and  unprofit- 
able, cannot  meet.  To  those  who  want 
a  purely  limited  service  in  some  sec- 
tions, this  appeals.  There  are  but  few 
in  such  sections  who  do  not  want  more 
than  a  limited  local  service,  and  conse- 
quently if  they  have  the  purely  local 
service  they  must  also  have  the  service 
of  the  more  extended  system.  This  is 
the  source  of  strength  to  the  Bell  sys- 
tem, which  carried  it  through  those 
days  of  reconstruction  in  the  face  of 
the  vigorous  independent  movement. 

The  practice  of  the  Bell  system  is 
founded  on  the  following  statement 
of  policy:  To  develop  the  possibilities 
of  the  service  and  to  give  the  best 
possible  service:  to  anticipate  all  the 
reasonable  demands  of  the  public  as 
to  service,  either  as  to  quality,  quan- 
tity or  extent;  to  distribute  the  charges 
for  such  service  in  such  a  manner  as 


will  make  it  possible  for  every  one  to 
be  connected  who  will  add  to  the  value 
of  the  service  to  others ;  to  collect  gross 
revenue  only  sufficient  to  pay  a  fair 
dividend  on  the  capital  invested,  after 
paying  the  fairest  possible  wages  for 
the  best  service,  after  providing  suffi- 
ciently for  the  maintenance  and  recon- 
struction of  the  plant,  whether  from 
decay  or  depreciation  or  from  obsoles- 
cence. This  is  best  shown  by  the  dis- 
tribution of  the  gross  earnings  of  the 
Bell  system. 

The  average  gross  earnings  in  1911, 
per  exchange  station,  for  exchange  ser- 
vice, toll,  and  long-distance  service, 
was  $39.83,  just  under  $40;  of  this  50 
per  cent,  or  $20,  was  paid  for  salary  and 
wages;  5  per  cent,  or  $2,  was  paid  for 
taxes;  20  per  cent,  or  $8,  for  mainte- 
nance and  miscellaneous;  6  per  cent,  or 
$2.40,  was  set  aside  for  depreciation 
and  obsolescence  reserves;  19  per  cent, 
or  $7.60,  for  dividends,  interest,  etc. 
The  average  cost  of  the  plant  per  ex- 
change station  for  1911  was  $141,  that 
is,  the  average  returns  upon  plant  cost 
were  5.4  per  cent;  or  about  the  return 
which  can  be  secured  from  first-class 
investments  with  ample  security. 

In  conclusion,  in  this  short  discus- 
sion an  attempt  has  been  made  to  give 
what  appears  to  be  the  proper  solution 
of  the  telephone  service,  and  to  show 
what  a  telephone  system  should  be. 
The  question  is,  how  best  can  the  ideal 
be  obtained?  There  seems  to  be  no 
question,  judging  from  experience,  that 
the  present  way  —  private  manage- 
ment and  ownership,  subordinated  to 
public  interests  and  under  rational  con- 
trol and  regulation  by  national,  state, 
or  municipal  bodies  —  is  the  best. 


THE  MASSEY  MONEY 


BY   CORNELIA   A.    P.    COMER 


'I  HAVE  sent  for  Judge  Fordham  to 
talk  to  me  about  my  will,  Mayannah. 
He  comes  at  three.' 

'Is  that  so,  Mother  Dreer?' 

At  this  response,  which  seemed  to 
her  slipshod  and  perfunctory,  Mrs. 
Dreer,  lying  high  among  her  pillows, 
fairly  glared  at  her  son's  widow.  She 
detected  an  almost  professional  quality 
in  Mayannah's  irritating  amiability. 

In  her  point-lace  cap  and  quilted 
silk  bed-jacket,  the  high-nosed  old 
woman  looked  masterful  and  import- 
ant still,  in  spite  of  years  and  mortal 
illness.  There  was  a  red  spot  in  the 
middle  of  either  wasted  cheek,  and  her 
deep-set  black  eyes  were  glowing  with 
an  excitement  which  even  this  fateful 
occasion  hardly  warranted.  She  sent 
for  Judge  Fordham  frequently,  but 
never  before  had  she  looked  like  this. 

Mayannah  Dreer,  who  was  crochet- 
ing by  the  window,  counted  ten  stitches 
apathetically.  To  live  with  Jane  Dreer 
meant  learning  to  restrain  one's  tongue 
three  hundred  and  sixty-five  days  a 
year,  and  Mayannah  had  lived  with 
her  ten  years.  Now,  at  thirty,  she 
looked  like  a  pink  azalea  that  has  lost 
its  first  freshness;  her  cheeks  were 
somewhat  pale,  and  the  submission  and 
steadiness  in  her  clear  gray  eyes  total- 
ly denied  the  rebellious  exuberance 
of  her  waving,  red-gold  hair.  Mayan- 
nah's father  was  George  Wetherbe,  of 
old  stock  run  to  seed,  but  her  mother 
was  pretty  Katy  Curran  from  a  farm 
far  back  in  the  hills.  Thus  Mayannah 

320 


was  burdened  with  the  perplexing  in- 
heritance of  a  New  England  brain  and 
an  Irish  heart. 

'I  guess  you'd  like  to  know  what 
I'm  going  to  do  with  my  money.' 

*  Just  as  you  please,'  said  Mayannah, 
indifferently. 

The  gray  head  shook  with  vexation. 
'  Mayannah  Dreer,  you  make  me  tired, 
pretending  it's  nothing  to  you  how  I 
make  my  will!  I  tell  you,  there  is  n't 
anybody  who  don't  want  money  — 
and  you  just  as  much  as  the  rest,  even 
if  butter  won't  melt  in  your  mealy 
mouth!' 

'If  you  go  on  that  way,  you'll  get 
all  tired  out  before  Judge  Fordham 
comes,'  said  Mayannah,  counting  more 
stitches. 

This  was  undeniable,  so  Jane  Dreer 
relaxed  her  tension  a  little,  for  she  had 
much  to  say  before  the  lawyer  came, 
and  she  knew  it. 

'The  Massey  money!'  she  said. 
'And  all  of  it  in  my  hands,  for  me  to 
say  where  it  goes !  Time  was  I  used  to 
think  the  Massey  money  a  little  better 
than  any  other  money  on  earth.  But 
that  was  before  it  came  to  me.  Grand- 
sire  Nahum  Massey  and  Temperance, 
his  wife,  they  got  the  first  considerable 
amount  of  it  together,  by  littles  and  by 
littles.  But  they  got  it.  That's  the 
main  thing.' 

Mayannah  glanced  up,  interested. 
Often  as  the  Massey  money  had  been 
used  as  a  weapon  of  offense  against  her 
own  insignificance  during  the  patient 
years  she  had  been  her  mother-in-law's 
companion,  this  was  the  first  time  she 


THE  MASSEY  MONEY 


321 


had  heard  anything  about  the  genesis 
of  the  snug  little  fortune  that  loomed 
large  in  Mrs.  Dreer's  eyes. 

'Then  I  should  think  your  father 
and  your  uncle  Newton  and  your  aunt 
Eliza  would  have  had  as  much  of  it  as 
your  uncle  Jabez,'  she  observed.  'But 
I  thought  your  money  came  from  Ja- 
bez Massey.' 

'It  did.  Father  was  n't  one  to  hold 
on  to  what  he  had ;  Jabez  was  one  to 
make  more.  Families  run  like  that  —  a 
streak  o'  fat  and  a  streak  o'  lean. 
Uncle  Newt  held  on  to  his  fairly  well. 
It's  the  remains  of  Newton's  money 
the  Varian  girl  is  living  on.  She's  his 
only  grandchild.' 

Mayannah,  considering  for  a  minute 
the  various  branches  of  the  family  she 
had  married  into,  remembered  that 
Jane  Dreer  herself  was  one  of  three 
children. 

'How  did  all  your  uncle  Jabez's 
money  happen  to  come  to  you,  Mother 
Dreer?'  she  asked  idly,  hardly  expect- 
ing an  answer.  She  was  acquainted 
with  the  village  legend  which  said 
that  Jane  Dreer  came  down  like  the  As- 
syrian on  the  old  home  during  Jabez 
Massey 's  last  illness;  that  she  shut  him 
off  from  kindred  and  acquaintance, 
nursed  him,  cursed  him,  bulldozed 
him,  until,  as  a  result  of  really  excel- 
lent care,  combined  with  really  skill- 
ful browbeating,  he  had  made  her  his 
heir;  'in  view  of  a  private  compact 
between  us,  and  in  acknowledgment  of 
her  faithful  services  in  my  behalf '  ran 
his  last  testament,  as  anybody  might 
read  in  the  probate  office,  were  they 
curious  enough.  Fordhampton  people 
wondered  vastly  over  that  'private 
compact,'  but  for  twenty  years  Jane 
Dreer  had  gone  her  triumphant,  silent, 
self-determined  way.  Thus  her  answer 
now  quite  petrified  Mayannah. 

'It  did  n't  just  happen,'  returned  the 
elder  woman  grimly.  'As  for  how  I  got 
it,  that's  what  I'm  going  to  tell  you 
VOL.  in -NO.  s 


right  now.  I  promised  Jabez  Massey 
three  things,  and  the  first  was,  that 
before  I  died,  I'd  find  somebody  to 
tell  it  to.  It  might  as  well  be  you.' 

There  was  contempt  and  impatience 
in  her  voice. 

'I  don't  know  as  I  wish  to  hear  it,' 
returned  Mayannah  quickly, '  not  if  — 
if  it's  anything  against  you.' 

'Against  me!  Against  me!  I'd  like 
to  know  when  it  was  ever  against  any- 
body to  know  the  buttered  side  of 
bread!  Jabez  Massey  didn't  hold  it 
against  me,  I  can  tell  you!  Uncle  Jabez 
.was  a  smart  man;  he  knew  the  world, 
and  he  knew  folks.  And  he  was  sick 
almost  unto  death,  up  here  in  this  old 
house  in  Vermont  that  his  grandfather 
built,  when  I  heard  about  it  from 
'Gusta  Burden  and  came  on  from  Illi- 
nois to  take  care  of  him.  "  Your  uncle 
Jabez  is  n't  long  for  this  world," 
'Gusta  wrote  me, "  and  if  you  don't  look 
after  him,  I  expect  Mary  Varian  will 
come  up  from  New  York  with  her  little 
girl.  She's  the  same  kin  to  Jabez  that 
you  are." 

'At  first  I  did  n't  see  how  I  could 
leave  my  husband  and  Harold.  Harold 
was  thirteen  then,  and  into  everything. 
Jim  Dreer  was  working  in  Peoria,  and 
I  had  all  I  could  do  to  manage  on  his 
wages,  let  alone  paying  a  housekeeper. 
Providentially,  his  sister's  husband 
died  the  week  before,  and  she  did  n't 
know  what  on  earth  to  do,  for  there 
was  n't  but  four  thousand  life  insur- 
ance, and  the  house  was  mortgaged. 
So  I  planned  it  all  out  for  her  —  how 
she  was  to  pay  off  the  mortgage  with  a 
thousand  of  the  insurance,  put  the  rest 
out  at  eight  per  cent,  rent  the  house, 
and  come  look  after  Jim  and  Harold. 
I  offered  her  two  dollars  a  week  to  do  it. 
I'd  have  had  to  pay  a  girl  three,  but 
I  considered  my  planning  was  worth 
something.  You  see  it  gave  her  an 
income  she  could  save  money  on,  put 
it  all  together.' 


THE  MASSEY  MONEY 


'How  did  you  know  somebody  else 
would  n't  be  taking  care  of  Uncle  Jabez 
by  the  time  you  got  here?'  demanded 
Mayannah,  drinking  in  these  details. 

'I  didn't  —  but  one  has  to  leave 
something  to  the  Lord.  It  will  be 
twenty-one  years  the  tenth  of  October 
since  I  came.  There  were  no  through 
trains  up  this  way  then.  I  came  up 
from  the  junction  on  a  mixed  freight. 
It  looked  so  lonely  all  the  way  that  I 
was  heart-sick  —  that  old  reservoir 
with  the  stumps  sticking  up  out  of  the 
black  water,  and  the  mountains  all 
dark  with  firs,  and  just  a  few  yellow 
maples  here  and  there  to  light  them  up. 
The  old  house  looked  desolate,  too. 
Just  scraggly  chrysanthemums  and 
rain-soaked  asters  up  the  front  walk, 
and  fallen  leaves  everywhere.  I  opened 
the  front  door  and  went  in  as  if  I 
belonged  —  but  my  heart  was  in  my 
mouth.  The  downstairs  rooms  were 
all  dirt  and  disorder.  You  could  write 
your  name  on  all  that  old  mahogany. 
I  put  down  my  bag  and  walked  up- 
stairs. At  the  top  I  heard  somebody 
calling  from  the  south-east  chamber, 
so  I  went  along,  as  bold  as  brass, 
pushed  open  the  door,  and  went  in. 

*  There  sat  Uncle  Jabez  in  a  black 
skull-cap  and  flowered  dressing-gown, 
in  a  rocker  by  the  fireplace,  looking 
the  image  of  distress.  Yet  there  was 
always  something  about  him,  and  even 
about  the  things  he  said  and  the  way 
he  said  them  —  I  don't  know  what  to 
call  it  but  style,  though  that 's  a  ridicu- 
lous word  to  use  about  a  twisted  old 
man  in  a  flowered  bed-gown.  He'd 
had  rheumatic  fever,  and  it  had  left 
him  with  a  very  bad  heart,  and  so 
twisted  he  could  hardly  hobble.  Hi 
Newton  used  to  come,  night  and  morn- 
ing, to  get  him  up  and  back  to  bed, 
and  his  wife  looked  in  twice  a  day 
and  cooked  and  fussed  around  a  little. 
There  was  bread  and  milk  for  his  dinner 
on  a  dusty  table  beside  him,  and  a  log 


smouldered  in  the  corner  of  the  fire- 
place. 

'"Well,  Uncle  Jabez,"  said  I,  "how 
do  you  do?  I'm  afraid  by  the  way 
things  look,  you  don't  do  very  well." 

'He  looked  at  me  hard,  and  finally 
his  mouth  screwed  into  a  side-ways 
grin.  You  'd  call  it  sardonic  if  he  'd  been 
a  man  in  a  book. 

:"Ah,  it  is  my  dear  niece,  Jane 
Dreer!"  said  he.  "How  do  you  do, 
Jane?  —  Now  I  wonder  when  Mary 
Varian  will  be  up?  About  next  week 
or  the  week  after,  I  should  say.  Mary 
was  always  a  little  slow.  But  where 
the  carcass  is,  there  will  the  eagles  be 
gathered  together." 

"I'm  glad  you  can  still  quote 
Scripture,  Uncle  Jabez,"  said  I.  "It's 
often  a  greater  relief  to  the  feelings 
than  profanity."  With  that  I  got  down 
on  my  knees  in  front  of  the  fire  and 
fixed  the  charred  stick  for  a  back-log, 
with  some  chips  and  paper  and  small 
sticks  in  front.  "As  for  Mary  Varian," 
I  went  on,  "I  doubt  if  you  will  need 
her  now  I  am  here.  I  have  come  on 
from  Illinois  on  purpose  to  take  care  of 
you." 

'Just  then  the  sticks  burst  into  a 
flame.  Uncle  Jabez  looked  at  it.  "If 
that  Newton  woman  lived  to  be  a 
thousand,  she  could  n't  learn  to  make 
a  fire,"  he  said. 

'"Some  folks  can't,"  said  I,  dust- 
ing the  table  by  his  elbow  with  my 
handkerchief.  "Wouldn't  you  rather 
have  pop-robin  and  hot  buttered  toast 
for  your  lunch  instead  of  that  cold 
bread  and  milk?" 

'He  shut  his  eyes  and  groaned.  "Oh, 
the  flesh-pots!  The  flesh-pots!  At 
my  age  to  be  in  bondage  to  the  flesh- 
pots!" 

'"Isn't  it  premature,"  said  I,  "to 
be  worrying  about  flesh-pots  when  I 
offer  you  a  little  gruel?  Uncle  Jabez, 
you  know  this  is  no  way  for  a  man  of 
your  means  and  your  state  of  health 


THE  MASSEY  MONEY 


323 


to  live.  It  is  n't  right  and  decent;  now 
is  it?" 

'He  groaned  again  and  looked  into 
the  fire,  which  had  begun  to  snap  quite 
lively.  "Candidly,  Jane,  it  isn't,"  he 
allowed  at  last. 

'"Very  well.  Then  we're  perfectly 
agreed,"  said  I.  "  If  I  stay  here,  there  '11 
be  some  comfort  in  the  place.  Do  you 
suppose  the  Newton  woman  would 
help  me  give  this  house  one  good  clean- 
ing? And  can  her  husband  be  hired  to 
rake  up  leaves?" 

'That  was  all  the  words  we  ever  had 
about  it.  I  just  settled  down  and  got 
the  house  to  running,  and  made  him  as 
comfortable  as  he  could  be  made.  I 
did  n't  spend  more  money  than  I  had 
to,  because  it  hurt  him  so  to  see  it  go, 
but  I  used  what  was  needful.  For  all 
he  was  so  close,  Jabez  knew  what  was 
fitting. 

'When  I  had  been  here  a  couple  of 
weeks,  along  came  a  letter  from  Mary 
Varian  in  New  York  to  her  dear  uncle 
Jabez.  She  said  'Gusta  Burden  had 
written  her  of  his  illness  some  weeks 
before  (the  same  time  she  wrote  me, 
I'll  warrant  you!  That  was  like 
'Gusta  to  stir  us  both  up  and  then  sit 
back  to  see  what  would  come  of  it),  and 
she  had  been  trying  to  plan  it  so  as  to 
get  up  to  Fordhampton  to  see  him,  but 
she  hated  to  interrupt  Rowena's  term 
at  school,  and  there  was  no  one  to 
leave  her  with.  However,  they  could 
come  at  Christmas,  and  if  dear  uncle 
Jabez  thought  it  best  for  his  comfort, 
they  might  remain,  for  blood  was 
thicker  than  water,  and  she  felt  for 
him  in  his  illness  and  isolation. 

'I  wrote  straight  back  and  told  her 
she  need  n't  worry;  Uncle  Jabez's  hands 
were  too  swollen  to  write,  but  he 
was  n't  suffering  from  isolation  in  the 
least.  I  was  right  there,  and  meant  to 
stay.  And  the  doctor  thought  excite- 
ment was  n't  good  for  him,  so  he  would 
have  to  decline  her  kind  offer  of  a  visit. 


'  When  I  took  the  letter  in  for  Jabez 
to  read  before  I  sent  it,  he  grinned 
that  side-ways  grin  and  said,  "Come, 
Jane,  what  do  you  think  you  are  going 
to  do,  keeping  Mary  Varian  and  her 
girl  away  from  me?  Why  should  n't  I 
see  my  affectionate  relatives?  I  no- 
tice you  don't  encourage  the  neighbors 
to  come  in  very  much,  either.  Going  to 
get  me  under  your  thumb,  eh?  And 
then  dictate  my  last  will  and  testa- 
ment. That's  a  little  too  raw  for  a  per- 
son of  your  intelligence,  Jane." 

'That  made  me  angry.  "Let's  have 
this  thing  out,"  said  I.  "Then  we'll 
both  feel  better  and  know  where  we 
stand.  —  Uncle  Jabez,  in  the  Lord's 
own  time,  you'll  have  to  leave  the 
Massey  money  and  the  Massey  house. 
You ' ve  got  to  leave  them  to  somebody, 
and  I  suppose  it  will  be  to  some  of  your 
kin.  When  you  get  done  with  them,  I 
want  them  —  and  I  am  willing  to  earn 
them,  which  is  more  than  any  of  the 
rest  would  do.  Now  —  look  at  all  of 
us.  Take  your  own  generation  first: 
your  brother  Newton  is  dead;  my 
father  is  dead;  your  sister  Eliza  is  in 
the  Old  Ladies'  Home,  and  very  com- 
fortable she  is.  Her  only  living  son  has 
lost  the  use  of  his  faculties  and  the 
state  supports  him  as  well  as  he  needs 
to  be  supported.  Mary  Varian  and  her 
little  girl  have  Newton's  money  and 
manage  to  make  it  do.  Mary  is  a  worthy 
enough  woman,  but  she  is  crazy  about 
the  city.  She  thinks  her  flat  is  better 
than  the  house  of  her  fathers;  you'll 
never  get  her  away  for  long  from  shop- 
windows  and  bargain-counters. 

'"Then,  there's  my  own  family. 
Brother  Joseph  is  a  drunkard  and 
wastrel,  though  he  had  ability  to  begin 
with.  Sister  Delia  married  a  Canuck. 
He  took  her  out  to  Winnipeg,  where 
they  are  doing  well,  and  have  as  much 
money  as  they  ought  to  have.  Neither 
they  nor  their  children  would  care 
anything  about  the  old  Massey  house 


324 


THE  MASSEY  MONEY 


in  Fordhampton.  If  it  was  theirs,  it 
would  be  sold  to  the  first  comer,  and 
the  money  would  buy  more  Manitoba 
land.  If  that 's  what  you  want,  I  have 
nothing  to  say,  for  what  I  want  is 
different.  My  idea  is  to  live  in  the 
place  where  my  people  have  lived  — 
and  live  like  a  lady.  I'm  a  Massey, 
and  I  guess  if  anybody  could  put  life 
into  this  old  place,  I  could." 

'"Ah?  And  where  does  your  family 
come  into  your  plans?"  he  inquired, 
with  that  condescending  air  he  knew 
how  to  put  on. 

'"Jim  Dreer  could  manage  the 
quarry  and  the  farm.  My  son  should 
go  to  Cambridge  and  come  back  here  to 
take  up  Judge  Fordham's  law  practice. 
The  back-country  needs  young  men 
more  than  the  towns." 

' "Kind  of  a  sickly  boy,  is  n't  he?" 
sneered  Uncle  Jabez.  It  was  the  only 
thing  he  ever  said  that  showed  he  had 
heard  about  us,  or  thought  of  us.  - 

'  My  heart  stood  still,  for  I  had  never 
let  on,  even  to  myself,  that  Harold  was 
n't  as  strong  as  other  boys. 

'"No!"  I  said.  "All  he  needs  is  to 
live  up  here  in  the  hills  to  be  as  strong 
as  they  make  them.  He 's  a  good  boy 
and  his  heart  is  set  already  on  going  to 
college.  —  Yes,  I  'm  free  to  say  I  want 
your  money,  Uncle  Jabez,  and  I  want 
your  house!" 

"You  are  a  shrewd  woman,  Jane 
Dreer,"  he  said,  "a  shrewd  woman." 
With  that  he  sat  looking  in  the  fire  for 
half  an  hour,  not  saying  a  word.  And  I 
went  on  with  my  sewing. 

"So  you  want  to  live  like  a  lady, 
Jane?"  he  brought  out  finally.  "That's 
the  gist  of  the  matter,  is  n't  it?" 

4 "Yes,"  I  said;  "it  is." 

'"It's  a  fine  old  word,"  said  he. 
"Time  was  I  thought  it  almost  a  sacred 
word.  What  is  your  notion  of  living 
like  a  lady,  Jane?  How  would  you  go 
about  it,  now?" 

'"I  want  my  carriage  and  pair," 


said  I,  "not  a  piano-box  buggy  and  a 
utility  horse.  I  want  linen  and  silver 
befitting  this  house.  Servants  enough 
to  care  for  it  properly.  To  go  to  Europe 
at  my  pleasure.  And  to  entertain.  I 
want  to  bring  guests  from  hither  and 
yon,  to  show  this  town  the  Masseys 
are  n't  dead  nor  dying.  I  want  Harold 
to  fetch  young  people  home,  pretty 
girls  and  fine  young  men.  I  want  lights 
and  music  and  gayety,  delicate  food, 
and  the  open  door.  That 's  how  I  want 
to  live,"  said  I.  "I'm  Temperance 
Massey 's  granddaughter,  and  they  say 
I'm  her  living  image.  I  want  to  do 
these  things  in  her  house  with  her 
money,  and  do  'em  right." 

'"The  open  door!  "said  he.  "May- 
be it 's  more  your  inheritance  than  you 
know.  Do  you  happen  to  be  aware, 
Jane  Dreer,  how  Nahum  and  Temper- 
ance Massey  got  their  money  together 
at  the  first?" 

'"Why,  no,  I  don't  know  as  I  do." 
"Keeping  tavern  down  in  Connecti- 
cut and  selling  rum,  tobacco,  and  mo- 
lasses. Jonathan  and  I  were  quite  big 
boys  when  the  old  place  came  to  father, 
and  we  moved  back  here  to  fix  it  up  and 
to  ruffle  it  with  the  Fordhams  and  the 
Vyses.  Rum,  tobacco,  and  molasses," 
he  said,  "and  feeding  the  wayfarer. 
Plenty  of  other  fortunes  started  just 
that  way.  Money  is  money,  Jane.  It 
is  n't  an  air-plant.  Mostly  its  roots 
strike  down  into  the  dirt.  And  that's 
all  right  —  only  don't  put  on  airs,"  he 
said.  "It  behooves  us  all  to  remember 
the  pit  whence  we  were  digged." 

'I  won't  deny  I  was  taken  aback. 
I'd  always  said  a  good  deal  about 
being  a  Massey.  The  Fordhams  and 
the  Vyses  coined  their  money  from 
their  brains.  "You've  added  to  it,"  I 
said  finally. 

'"Oh,  yes,  I've  added  to  it,  but  not 
in  such  very  ladylike  ways,  either. 
I've  screwed  and  pinched  and  ground 
my  neighbors  like  other  men." 


THE  MASSEY  MONEY 


325 


'"If  it's  clean  enough  for  you,  it's 
clean  enough  for  me,"  I  told  him. 

'With  that,  something  came  upon 
him.  He  pulled  himself  up  out  of  his 
chair  and  began  to  hobble  up  and  down 
the  room,  hitching  himself  along.  He 
was  n't  thinking  of  me  any  longer,  or 
talking  to  me.  There  was  an  agony 
in  his  face,  and  a  kind  of  disgust,  as  if 
life  had  been  one  long  affront  to  some- 
thing far  within  him,  not  yet  dead.  I 
just  don't  know  how  to  express  it.  It 
was  so  different  from  anything  I  knew 
of  him  before. 

'"O  God,  if  I  had  had  a  child  to  be 
my  heir!"  he  said.  "Yet  if  I  had,  he 
might  have  been  altogether  such  an 
one  as  I!  Thank  God  I  did  not  have  a 
child ! "  he  cried,  and  tottered  back  to 
where  he  had  been  sitting. 

He  was  quiet  a  long  time  before  he 
came  back  to  me  and  my  concerns. 

'"I  knew  a  lady  once.  She  was  n't 
much  like  you,  Jane  Dreer.  Her  child- 
ren, now,  —  perhaps,  —  if  on?  could 
find  them  —  But  I  am  old  —  it  is  too 
late.  She  was  gentle  and  tender  and 
simple  —  anyhow  I  thought  so.  Brave, 
too  —  Sometimes  I've  thought  I'd 
like  to  have  a  lady  like  her  have  the 
spending  of  the  Massey  money.  But 
they  all  have  died,  I  guess.  I  will  leave 
you  the  money  if  you  will  find  me  such 
an  heir,  Jane  Dreer!" 

'"Jabez,  I  want  the  money,  and  I'll 
do  'most  anything  to  get  it,  but  I  tell 
you  squarely,  if  you  give  it  to  me,  it 's 
likely  I  shall  give  it  to  my  son  and  to 
his  children  if  he  marries  as  he  ought. 
I  don't  want  you  to  make  any  mistake 
about  what  I  mean  to  do." 

'He  laughed,  short  and  sharp.  "I 
know  the  Dreers,"  he  said.  "Fair  to 
look  at,  but  short-lived,  feeble  folk. 
Your  child  will  leave  no  children  for 
your  heirs,  Jane!" 

'  How  I  hated  him  for  that,  but  it 
was  true! 

'"When  you  come  to  die,  you  must 


pick  and  choose  as  I  am  doing.  I  lay 
it  on  you  that  you  find  me  a  lady  for 
your  heir!" 

"Your  notion  of  a  lady,  now,  — 
what  is  it,  Jabez?" 

He  tottered  to  his  feet  again  and  lift- 
ed his  hands  to  heaven.  His  face  was 
terrible.  I  seemed  to  see  something 
hard  and  avaricious  tearing  its  way  up 
from  the  bottom  of  his  soul,  as  though 
it  were  an  evil  spirit  going  out  of  him. 

' "One  whom  the  dollar  does  n't  domi- 
nate, by  God!"  he  cried,  and  fell  back 
in  his  chair. 

'  When  he  spoke  again,  he  was  quite 
himself.  "This  is  a  very  edifying  con- 
versation of  ours,  Jane  Dreer,"  says  he. 
"It  is  a  pity  it  should  be  entirely  lost 
to  a  greedy  world.  Can  you  remember 
what  we  have  been  saying?" 

'  "Every  word  of  it,"  said  I.  And  as 
you  can  see,  I  have. 

'"Then  see  you  pass  it  on,"  he  told 
me.  "As  for  the  Massey  money,  you 
must  pay  a  price  for  it.  I  don't  mean, 
merely,  taking  care  of  me  in  my  dotage, 
and  seeing  I  don't,  at  the  last,  will  it 
away  to  somebody  else.  Doubtless  you 
will  do  that,  and  do  it  competently. 
There  is  an  honest  streak  as  well  as  a 
grasping  one  in  you,  Jane.  But  you 
must  pay  a  higher  price  than  that,  and 
in  a  different  coin.  I  lay  it  on  you, 
Jane,"  and  he  bent  forward  as  he 
spoke,  dragging  his  words  as  if  they 
weighed  a  ton,  his  sharp  old  eyes 
boring  into  mine  like  gimlets  all  the 
while.  "  I  lay  it  on  you,  Jane,  that  from 
this  hour  you  watch  yourself  until  you 
see  what  the  Massey  money  does  with 
you.  When  you  come  to  your  end  of 
days,  tell  some  one,  whom  you  will, 
what  it  has  been  to  you  and  done  to 
you.  Tell  them  the  very  truth!  It  is 
just  common  money,  like  that  of  other 
men,  no.  better,  not  much  worse  —  but 
I  have  seen  it  work.  I  watched  my 
father  and  my  mother.  I  watched  my 
brothers  and  my  sister.  Most  of  all  I 


326 


THE  MASSEY  MONEY 


watched  —  myself,"  said  he.  "No  use 
to  tell  you  what  I've  seen  —  no  use! 
But  I  lay  it  on  you  that  you  watch 
and  see." 

4 "All  right,"  said  I.  "You  can't 
scare  me  that  way,  Uncle  Jabez.  For 
forty  years  I've  watched  what  pinch- 
ing poverty  has  done  to  me.  I  don't 
know  as  riches  can  do  worse!" 

"You  are  a  Massey  fast  enough," 
he  said,  "and  in  the  long  run  the 
Massey s  are  not  fooled.  As  well  you 
as  another." 

'So  he  made  his  will  next  day, 
though  he  lived  for  a  year  afterward. 
And  he  gave  the  money  all  to  me.' 

Jane  Dreer  was  white  and  tired  as 
she  finished.  Mayannah  dropped  her 
work  exclaiming  distressfully,  — 

'What  am  I  thinking  of!  You  have 
n't  had  your  milk  or  your  nap,  and  it's 
long  past  the  time.' 

'I'll  have  them  now.  I  need  all  the 
strength  I  can  get  to  finish  this/  the 
elder  woman  said  wearily. 


n 

It  was  one  thing  for  Jane  Dreer  to 
tell  the  story  of  her  audacious  contest 
with  Jabez  Massey,  but  quite  another 
to  relate  the  adventures  of  her  spirit  in 
contact  with  the  Massey  money.  In 
her  eyes,  the  former  tale  reflected  small 
discredit  upon  herself.  She  had  con- 
quered Jabez  by  telling  him  the  truth; 
while  he  lived,  she  had  tended  him  with 
conscience;  since  his  death  she  had 
spent  his  money  handsomely.  All  this 
was  as  it  should  be.  But  to  pluck  out  of 
the  abyss  of  her  own  nature  the  hidden 
things  she  had  learned  from  life,  to 
spread  them  in  the  light  of  day, — how 
was  she  to  bring  herself  to  that?  Yet 
she  had  promised,  and  to  Jane  Dreer  a 
promise  was  a  promise.  . 

Bitterness  surged  up  in  her  heart 
against  the  younger  woman  because 
Mayannah  was  her  appointed  auditor. 


She  had  never  loved  the  girl.  Resent- 
ing her  son's  marriage  with  an  inten- 
sity that  must  be  measured  by  her 
pride  and  her  ambition,  she  yet  clung 
to  his  widow  as  her  only  link  on  earth 
with  Harold's  life. 

Mayannah  had  dropped  without 
audible  protest  into  the  position  where 
Harold's  mother  placed  her.  She  was 
companion,  helper,  sometimes  nurse; 
at  other  times  the  lay  figure  upon 
which  Jane  Dreer  draped  the  ultra- 
fashionable  garments  she  herself  might 
not  wear.  Mayannah  looked  well  in  her 
clothes;  her  voice  was  gentle;  though 
sometimes  abstracted,  and,  in  Mrs. 
Dreer's  eyes,  mopy,  she  had  flashes  of 
the  Celtic  gayety.  People  liked  May- 
annah. 

The  two  traveled  not  a  little;  they 
had  a  winter  shelter  in  North  Carolina; 
they  invited  many  traveling-acquaint- 
ances and  winter  friends  to  the  old 
house  in  Fordhampton  during  the  sum- 
mer months.  Mrs.  Dreer  had  a  clear- 
cut  notion  of  the  kind  of  social  impor- 
tance that  was  easily  within  her  reach; 
she  lived  for  that  and  achieved  it. 
Mayannah  helped  her  by  being  pretty 
and  well-dressed,  and,  when  not  in  her 
apathetic  mood,  displaying  that  lively 
Irish  interest  in  everything  human 
which  really  goes  further,  and  in  more 
different  directions,  than  any  other 
social  qualification  on  earth.  But  all 
that  was  over  now. 

Jane  Dreer  very  simply  attributed 
her  daughter-in-law's  adherence  and 
patience  to  familiar  motives.  Of  course, 
Mayannah  wanted  the  Massey  money 
in  her  turn,  and  would  put  up  with 
whatever  was  necessary  to  get  it.  True, 
she  had  a  little  income  of  her  own 
which  Jane  had  given  to  Harold  and 
Harold  to  his  wife,  but  what  was  eleven 
hundred  dollars  a  year?  Sometimes 
Jane's  conscience  pricked  her,  for  she 
knew  perfectly  well  that  she  did  not 
mean  to  give  Mayannah  much  more. 


THE   MASSEY  MONEY 


327 


If  the  Massey  money  were  Mayannah's 
price  for  these  submissive  years,  she 
would  be  cheated  of  her  wage. 

Refreshed  by  food  and  sleep,  the 
woman  took  up  her  recital.  The  flush 
in  her  cheeks  and  the  glow  in  her  eyes 
had  died  down;  her  mouth  was  set  in 
a  hard  line;  she  pulled  the  bed-jacket 
away  from  her  dark,  bony  throat,  and 
ordered  the  window  by  her  bedside 
raised. 

'Jabez  told  me  to  watch  myself,' 
she  began  harshly.  'So  I  did.  I  hated 
to.  But  I  felt  it  would  n't  be  honest  if 
I  did  n't.  I  had  a  fine  time  fixing  up 
the  house.  It  tasted  every  bit  as  good 
as  I  thought  it  would.  I'm  not  going 
back  on  that  for  a  minute.  The  money 
was  a  pleasure.  But  I  began  to  see  it 
made  me  more  critical.  With  no  real 
worries,  I  fussed  about  little  things. 
My  heart  was  set  that  my  family 
should  live  up  to  the  money  and  the 
house.  I'd  always  been  well  enough 
satisfied  with  Jim  Dreer  before.  He 
was  a  pleasant-tempered,  well-meaning 
man,  a  good  deal  like  Harold,  but  with 
not  a  particle  of  style.  The  way  he 
looked  in  evening  clothes  was  a  dis- 
tress to  me,  and  when  it  came  to  a  tall 
hat,  I  could  have  cried  at  the  way  it 
did  n't  become  him.  Maybe  you  think 
these  are  little  things,  but  I  was  bent 
on  having  everything  according.  I'll 
not  deny  I  came  to  snapping  at  Jim 
when  he  was  dressed  up;  he  got  so  he 
hated  the  sight  of  his  good  clothes  and 
used  to  make  excuses  to  get  up  to  the 
farm  for  a  week  at  a  time  to  get  away 
from  them  and  me.  I  even  went  so  far 
as  to  wish  the  Lord  had  provided  me 
with  a  husband  who  would  fit  better 
into  our  new  circumstances. 

'The  second  winter  we  lived  here, 
he  took  pneumonia  and  died.  I  made 
him  dress  when  he  did  n't  want  to,  one 
night  when  we  went  out  to  dine,  and 
he  forgot  his  muffler.  It  was  a  bitter 
night  and  he  took  a  cold  on  his  lungs. 


Of  course,  he  had  no  business  to  forget 
the  muffler — still,  after  he  was  dead, 
I  could  n't  forget  I  'd  insisted  on  his 
wearing  those  clothes.  You  don't 
get  rid  of  such  things.  They  stick  in 
your  mind  for  all  time.  But  I  had 
Harold  left.' 

At  the  name,  Mayannah  stirred  soft- 
ly and  sat  a  little  straighter,  looking 
across  the  room  at  Mrs.  Dreer  with 
level  eyes  that  seemed  to  remember 
and  to  warn.  But  it  never  occurred  to 
the  elder  woman  that  Harold  belonged 
to  Mayannah  as  much  as  to  herself. 
In  any  case,  she  must  say  what  she  had 
to  say. 

'Harold  was  a  lot  of  comfort  to  me 
after  his  father  died.  It  broke  me  up 
for  a  long  while,  and  I  did  n't  try  to  do 
anything  but  get  through  the  days. 
Harold  was  so  thoughtful  —  you  know 
how  he  was.  For  all  it  gave  my  heart 
a  twist  every  time  I  thought  of  the 
way  Jim  died,  those  were  my  happiest 
years.  It  was  all  right  until  I  began  to 
plan  again.  But  of  course  I  had  to  get 
ambitious  for  Harold.  It  just  seemed 
to  me  I'd  die  if  he  did  n't  do  this  and 
be  that.  But  his  health  broke  down  and 
it  took  him  five  years  to  go  through 
college.  Maybe  that  was  n't  a  bitter 
pill  for  me  to  swallow!  No  honors,  no 
athletics,  not  many  young  people  com- 
ing home  with  him.  For,  after  he  grad- 
uated, he  was  n't  well;  he  did  n't  want 
young  folks  here;  he  did  n't  want  to 
travel;  it  tired  him  to  dance.  All  he 
could  do  was  to  mope  around  and  read, 
and  go  down  and  call  on  you.' 

'Yes!'  breathed  Mayannah  to  her- 
self, her  big  eyes  swimming  with  mem- 
ories. 

Jane  Dreer  did  not  notice.  She  push- 
ed on  relentlessly,  — 

'  He  was  the  heir.  That  was  the  way 
I  looked  at  it.  It  was  all  to  come  into 
his  hands,  to  rest  on  his  shoulders. 
The  scrimping  and  saving  of  three 
generations  was  all  for  him.  So  the 


328 


THE  MASSEY  MONEY 


money  was  just  another  reason  for  his 
being  splendid  and  fine  and  competent 

—  the  things   he   could  n't   be,   poor 
boy!  Perhaps  I  loved  him  more  for  it 

—  but  it  cut  deep,  just  the  same.   To 
have  him  feeble!   To  have  other  boys 
out-do  him !  Then,  to  have  him  hang- 
ing around  you!    I  used  to  remember 
how  your  grandfather,  old  Pat  Curran, 
looked  driving  down  from  Windy  Hill 
to  the  cheese  factory,  with  his  cob-pipe 
in  his  mouth,  and  his  raw-boned  old 
white  horse  balking  and  starting  and 
rattling    the   milk-cans.     Christopher 
Wetherbe,    your    other    grandfather, 
came  of  good  stock  if  you  went  far 
enough  back;  but  they  used  to  say  in 
his  dotage  that  he  went  into  other  peo- 
ple's cellars  and  took  pork  from  their 
barrels.    I  don't  know  if  it  was  true. 

—  No,  Harold  never  came  up  to  my 
notions.    I  wanted  him  to  do  and  be 
so  much!    I'd  have  given  my  heart's 
blood,  I  guess,  to  see  him  marry  Fran- 
ces Fordham.  But  he  chose  to  marry 
you!' 

Mayannah,  rigid  in  every  muscle, 
yet  lifted  her  head  as  if  it  held  a  coro- 
net. 

'Yes,'  she  echoed,  in  a  voice  Jane 
Dreer  would  have  done  well  to  note, 
'he  chose  to  marry  me!' 

'Yes!  And  he  did  it  behind  my 
back!  Took  the  property  I'd  made 
over  to  him  for  spending-money  and 
married  you  secretly  on  that!  And 
then  came  those  hemorrhages,  and  I 
had  to  forgive  him.  We  all  went  to 
Asheville  —  and  that  was  the  end. 

'  So  —  you  see  the  things  the  money 
did  to  me  those  first  ten  years.  It  added 
bitterness  to  my  married  life,  and  to 
my  motherhood,  and  to  my  mourning. 
I'll  not  deny  it.  And  it  has  torn  my 
heart  to  pieces  to  tell  you  about  it.  I 
hope  Jabez  Massey  is  satisfied! 

'And  yet  the  money  is  a  good,  and 
I  'm  glad  I ' ve  had  it.  I  '11  not  go  back 
on  that.  Only  it  does  n't  seem  to  me 


I've  got  the  worth  of  it  as  I  ought. 
Maybe  everybody  feels  that  way.' 

She  stopped  abruptly.  Candor  seem- 
ed to  demand  more,  but  she  did  not 
know  how  to  express  her  conscious- 
ness of  that  obscure,  progressive  change 
in  her  spirit,  as  fundamental  as  the 
physical  hardening  of  the  arteries,  and 
as  irretrievable.  So,  when  she  con- 
tinued, it  was  to  say,  — 

'I  don't  know  as  I've  much  to  tell 
about  the  last  ten  years.  You've  been 
with  me  all  the  time.  You've  seen  for 
yourself.  Though  he  did  n't  say  so,  I 
know  Jabez  Massey  thought  there  was 
a  miserly  microbe  in  the  Massey  blood 
that  was  bound  to  develop  in  all  of  us. 
But  so  far  as  I  can  see,  it  has  n't.  I 
like  money,  but  no  better  than  I  did 
before. 

'Since  Harold  died,  we've  gone  up 
and  down,  and  to  and  fro,  entertain- 
ing here,  being  entertained  there.  It 's 
what  I  wanted  to  do,  and  I ' ve  done  it. 
One  reason  I  kept  at  it  so  long,  I  was 
looking  for  the  woman  Jabez  Massey 
wanted  for  his  heir.  I  'm  not  very  sen- 
timental, but,  I  said,  since  everything 
has  gone  so  ill  with  me,  I  '11  find  Jabez 
his  lady  if  I  can.  I've  looked  at  'em 
north  and  south,  east  and  west,  here 
and  abroad.  I  have  n't  found  the  right 
one  yet.  That's  flat. 

'These  women  we  know  are  all  like 
you  and  me,  Mayannah,  cumberers 
of  the  ground!  It  used  to  make  me 
furious  some  nights  in  those  Southern 
hotels,  the  way  you  could  hear  'em 
spatting  on  the  cold  cream  all  down  the 
corridor,  from  room  to  room.  And  yet 
there's  no  harm  in  cold  cream.  It's 
only  that  the  women  are  all  so  fat  and 
idle  and  pampered,  and  never  thinking 
of  a  thing  except  to  spend.  I  came  to 
spending  too  late,  I  suppose.  I  can't 
help  thinking  with  Jabez  that  there 
must  be  other  things  to  a  lady,  though 
I  don't  claim  there's  been  much  else 
for  twenty  years  to  me.  I  can  look  back 


THE  MASSEY  MONEY 


and  see  how  I  had  the  money  and  I 
spent  it,  but  it  never  made  me  really 
rich.  I've  been  an  idle,  discontented, 
luxury-loving  old  woman,  restless,  and 
craving  I  don't  know  what.  If  any- 
body's been  the  better  for  my  being 
alive  since  Harold  died,  I  don't  know 
who  it  is. 

*I  suppose  you  want  the  Massey 
money  as  much  as  I  did,  and  plan  as 
I  did  what  fine  things  you  are  going 
to  do  with  it.  You're  no  worse  than 
I  am,  but  you're  younger.  There's 
some  chance  for  you.  —  What  do 
you  care  about  now  but  clothes  and 
gadding?  To  be  sure  I  asked  that  from 
you  and  asked  nothing  else.  I  won't 
say  I  have  n't  been  at  fault,  letting  you 
sit  around  like  a  tame  cat,  waiting  for 
my  shoes.  But  they  are  n't  coming  to 
you,  Mayannah  Dreer.  I  tell  you,  you 
are  n't  Jabez  Massey's  lady  and  the 
money  will  not  go  to  you!' 

Jane  Dreer's  insistent,  almost  angry, 
utterance  ceased  at  last.  She  had  said 
it  all,  bluntly  enough,  but  it  was  fin- 
ished. She  looked  at  the  silent  figure 
across  the  room  for  a  response,  and  as 
she  looked,  Mayannah  literally  flashed 
to  her  feet.  Jane  Dreer  had  such  a 
sense  of  sudden  coruscation  that  she 
rubbed  her  eyes.  Her  daughter-in-law 
stood  in  the  centre  of  the  room,  tall, 
pale,  suddenly  beautiful  in  the  splen- 
dor of  wrath.  Mrs.  Dreer  was  as- 
tounded. Mayannah  was  transformed 
before  her  into  a  woman  whom  Jane 
did  not  know  and  had  never  known. 
Jane  Dreer's  Mayannah  was  a  slim, 
docile,  old-young  girl.  This  was  a 
woman  in  her  flower.  There  was  matu- 
rity, motherliness  even,  in  her  bearing, 
but  there  was  judgment  in  her  eyes. 

*  Mother  Dreer,'  said  this  Mayannah, 
swiftly, '  there  are  a  few  things  I  simply 
have  to  tell  you  if  I  die  for  it.  I  am 
tired  of  turning  the  other  cheek.  It 's 
true  I  Ve  lived  with  you  for  the  last  ten 
years,  and  you ' ve  grown  more  discon- 


tented every  year.  /  can  tell  you  what 
the  money  has  done  for  you,  —  it  has 
blinded  you  to  the  very  thing  you  are 
trying  to  find!  You  will  never  find  a 
lady  while  you  look  for  her  with  Jane 
Dreer's  eyes!  I  know  a  dozen  women 
like  the  one  you  have  been  hunting. 
So  do  you,  but,  don't  you  see,  they 
can't  show  that  side  of  themselves  to 
you.  You  don't  call  it  out,  and  you 
can't  see  it  when  it  shows  itself.  It  has 
got  to  be  in  you  before  you  can  know 
it  is  in  them!  —  And  that  is  Gospel 
truth,  and  it  is  the  worst  thing  the 
Massey  money  has  done  for  you.  Why, 
you  would  n't  know  heaven  itself  if 
you  saw  it  with  those  eyes! 

'It's  true  I  do  want  the  Massey 
money,  and  I  'm  going  to  tell  you  why. 
It  was  Harold's  plan.  That  year  in 
Asheville,  Harold  said  to  me  over  and 
over,  "Mayannah,  stay  with  mother  if 
you  can.  You'll  be  unhappy,  for  her 
tongue  is  sharp,  but  she  is  just  and 
honest  —  and  she  has  no  one  left  but 
you.  Don't  leave  her  all  alone.  When 
she  is  done  with  the  old  place  and  the 
money,  I  hope  she  will  leave  them  to 
you.  I  used  to  think,"  he  said,  "how 
beautiful  it  would  be  to  see  you  walk- 
ing under  those  old  elms  with  a  child 
of  ours  on  either  side.  Now,  that  can 
never  be.  But  there's  a  world  full  of 
other  people's  children!  If  you  could 
find  two  or  three  you  liked,  Mayannah, 
and  give  them  an  old-fashioned  bring- 
ing-up  in  the  old  place,  playing  with 
dandelions  in  the  grass,  wading  in  the 
brook,  coasting  down  the  hill,  romping 
in  the  attic!  It's  just  the  house  for 
that.  It  has  never  been  alive  since  we 
lived  there,  but  it  would  come  alive 
again  if  it  had  children  in  it.  And  you 
are  just  the  woman!"  —  He  knew  I 
would  never  marry  again,  for  he  knew 
too  well  what  we  were  to  each  other. 
So  that  was  his  plan  for  me,  and  that  is 
why  I  have  stayed  with  you.  A  tame 
cat,  indeed!  —  I  guess  I  would  have 


330 


THE  MASSEY  MONEY 


tried  to  live  in  hell  if  Harold  had  asked 
me  to!' 

Jane  Dreer,  white  and  trembling, 
leaned  forward  from  her  pillows  and 
shook  a  shriveled  finger  in  the  air. 

'Mayannah  Dreer,  go  to  your  room 
and  stay  there  until  I  send  for  you.  Do 
you  think  I'll  take  such  words  from 
you?' 

The  younger  woman  turned  proudly 
to  the  door,  but,  as  she  opened  it,  she 
flung  back  one  sentence  more,  hot 
from  her  Irish  heart. 

'My  grandfather  is  dead,  Heaven 
rest  his  soul!  If  he  did  steal  pork,  I 
hope  it  was  because  he  was  hungry  and 
not  because  he  was  a  miser!' 

Then,  dazed  and  blind  with  the  ex- 
cess of  her  own  feeling,  she  moved 
across  the  hall  to  her  room.  The  wrath 
that  had  sustained  her  was  passing  as 
swiftly  as  it  had  come.  Stumbling 
and  sobbing,  she  fell  before  her  writ- 
ing-table and  faced  a  picture  there.  It 
showed  a  hollow-cheeked,  dark-eyed 
youth  with  a  gentle,  ineffective  face. 
But,  such  as  it  was,  it  was  the  shrine 
of  Mayannah's  heart. 

*O  Harold  —  Harold,  forgive  me. 
I've  spoiled  it  all.  Your  beautiful  plan 
can  never  come  true!  She  might  have 
changed  her  mind  before  —  but  never, 
now!  —  Oh,  my  terrible  temper!  How 
could  I  let  it  spoil  your  plan ! ' 

She  dropped  her  head  and  sobbed 
her  soul  out  hopelessly  before  the  faded 
photograph  of  the  commonplace  young 


man. 


Ill 


*I  never  thought  Mayannah  had  it 
in  her  to  stand  up  to  me  like  that!' 

Across  the  hall,  Jane  Dreer  lay  pant- 
ing on  her  pillows,  but  her  grim  old 
face  was  glowing  with  a  new  and  strange 
excitement.  She  looked  exultant,  al- 
most joyous.  She  was  seeing  clearly; 
she  was  feeling  keenly,  and  she  knew 
these  things  for  the  ultimate  good  they 


are.  It  was  not  true  that  she  could  no 
longer  see  the  finer  realities  of  char- 
acter. She  was  cleared  of  that  accusa- 
tion in  the  moment  of  its  making.  Had 
Mayannah's  flesh  dissolved  and  left 
her  white-hot  spirit  standing  there, 
Jane  could  hardly  have  had  a  more 
startling  revelation  of  her  inner  self. 

The  elder  woman  lay  very  still, 
taking  in  the  wonder  of  it.  This  was 
Mayannah,  wife  of  her  son,  the  May- 
annah Harold  had  chosen  and  adored. 
These  were  the  thoughts  that  had 
nourished  her  during  ten  years  of  tread- 
ing up  and  down  another's  stairs. 
This  passionate  acceptance  of  the 
denials  of  her  life,  this  passionate  hope 
for  the  fulfillment  of  another's  dream, 
had  been  her  meat  and  drink.  She  had 
kept  these  things  hidden  safely  from 
sight;  she  had  lived  continually  in  the 
land  of  the  heart,  and  only  this  once 
had  its  glow  shone  from  her  face.  — 
Or,  was  it  that  only  this  once  did  Jane 
Dreer  possess  the  seeing  eyes?  No  mat- 
ter which.  Once  was  enough. 

There  was  a  tap  at  the  door  and  a 
maid  entered. 

'Judge  Fordham  is  waiting,  Mrs. 
Dreer/ 

'Show  him  up,  Alice.' 

While  the  old  man  slowly  climbed  the 
stair,  Jane  Dreer  held  short  but  suffi- 
cient counsel  with  herself.  When  the 
impressive,  white-haired  gentleman  had 
greeted  her,  he  spread  out  his  papers 
on  her  bedside  table  with  a  patience 
born  of  long  experience  in  composing 
wills  for  Mrs.  Dreer. 

'And  what  is  it  to-day,  Jane?'  he 
inquired.  'Am  I  to  draft  a  will  in  favor 
of  the  Old  Ladies'  Home,  or  have  you 
decided  on  the  series  of  scholarships 
at  the  women's  colleges  —  or,  have 
you,  perhaps,  found  the  individual  heir 
you  have  been  looking  for?' 

Jane  Dreer  smiled.  The  smile  lit 
her  face  curiously,  her  lawyer  noted, 
as  if  a  light  had  fallen  on  it  from  afar. 


THE   MASSEY  MONEY 


331 


He  had  never  seen  her  look  so  chas- 
tened, yet  so  keen. 

*I  am  making  my  last  will  to-day, 
Judge/  she  said,  with  faint  but  suffi- 
cient emphasis  upon  the  adjective.  *  I 
will  dictate  my  words  to  you  as  I  wish 
them  to  stand.  If  there  are  legal  for- 
malities that  I  omit,  you  can  insert 
them  afterward.  Take  your  pen  and 
write!' 

Astonished,  he  obeyed  her. 

Jane's  excitement  and  her  sudden 
insight  met  and  mingled;  they  precipi- 
tated themselves  into  words  with  the 
miraculous  precision  of  some  chemical 
reaction.  Stirred  to  the  core  of  her 
being,  she  dictated  swiftly,  and  without 
faltering,  that  strange,  almost  lyric, 
testament  which  was  to  stand  as  her 
recognition  of  so  much  that  her  life 
had  ignored;  as  her  one  possible  amende 
to  her  son  and  her  son's  wife.  Truly, 
she  was  a  Massey.  And,  in  the  long 
run,  the  Massey s  were  not  fooled.  Old 
Jabez  knew. 

/,  Jane  Dreer  of  the  village  of  Ford- 
hampton,  being  sound  of  mind  and  solv- 
ent of  estate,  but  brought  face  to  face 
with  my  end  of  days,  do  solemnly  make 
and  declare  this  my  last  will  and  testa- 
ment :  — 

/  give  and  bequeath  all  property, 
both  real  and  personal,  of  which  I  may 


die  possessed,  to  Mayannah  Dreer,  once 
wife,  now  widow,  of  my  son. 

And  this  I  do  in  fulfillment  of  a 
private  compact  between  myself  and 
Jabez  Massey,  whose  heir  I  was,  to  the 
effect  that  his  wealth  should  pass  into  a 
"lady's"  hands.  I  have  searched  this 
land  and  Europe  for  such  an  one  as  he 
described  to  me,  but  my  eyes  were  holden, 
for  I  found  not  one  among  the  people  who 
fed  me  at  their  tables  and  broke  bread  at 
mine. 

At  last  I  saw  the  woman  I  was  seek- 
ing, sitting  at  my  hearth.  I  have  despised 
her  parentage,  but  her  heart  is  higher  than 
my  heart.  She  is  gentle,  simple,  and  ten- 
der; she  is  fearless,  patient,  warm  of 
heart.  She  knows  neither  guile  nor  greed. 
She  was  the  wife  of  my  son,  and  she  wor- 
shiped him.  To  whom  should  I  give  this 
wealth  if  not  to  her  ?  It  cannot  curse  her, 
for  she  is  beyond  the  domination  of  the 
dollar.  It  may  not  bless  her,  for  it  has 
not  blessed  me.  Yet  if  it  is  a  burden  to 
her  spirit,  what  does  it  matter  ?  She  is 
one  who  can  bear  burdens.  She  has  borne 
with  me  for  ten  long  years.  She  shall 
stand  in  my  shoes  and  sit  in  my  seat  and 
do  with  my  goods  as  she  wills.  The  place 
that  has  known  me  will  know  one  more 
gentle  than  I.  I,  departing,  bless  her, 
and  all  that  I  leave  in  her  hands.  — 
Even  so,  Lord  Jesus,  come  quickly!  In 
the  name  of  Christ,  Amen  1 


THE  SENSE  OF  SMELL 


BY   ELL  WOOD   HENDRICK 


IT  is  remarkable  how  intimate  the 
sense  of  smell  is,  how  much  it  tells  us, 
and  how  largely  it  affects  consciousness 
on  the  one  hand,  and  how  we  scorn 
consideration  of  it  on  the  other.  It  is 
the  Cinderella  of  our  organs  of  sense. 
Whether  it  was  some  sainted  anchorite, 
or  other  enthusiast  of  imagination  and 
influence,  who  found  the  use  of  the  hu- 
man nose  to  be  dangerous  to  the  soul, 
we  do  not  know,  but  in  some  way  or 
other  the  conscious  exercise  of  the  nose 
became  taboo,  and  this  has  entered 
into  the  folk-ways.  It  has  ceased  to  be 
a  sin,  but  it  remains  an  impolite  sub- 
ject. 

The  Arabs  in  their  days  of  glory  were 
not  ashamed  of  their  noses,  and  they 
planted  scented  gardens,  wonderfully 
devised,  so  that  he  who  walked  through 
them,  or  whiled  away  an  hour  there, 
might  rejoice  in  a  cultured  delight  in 
odor.  They  were  so  arranged  that  at  the 
entrance  the  olfactory  sense  would  be 
struck  by  a  pervading  and  strong  smell, 
not  necessarily  of  a  pleasant  nature. 
From  this  the  path  would  lead  gradu- 
ally through  less  coarse  fragrances  to 
those  more  delicate  until,  at  the  end, 
there  would  be  reached  an  odor  of  ex- 
quisite quality  which  only  the  cultured 
nose  could  appreciate. 

Now,  by  the  grace  of  editorial  sanc- 
tion, let  us  cast  aside  convention  and 
talk  about  it.  Every  one  of  us  has  his 
or  her  own  odor,  as  distinct  and  per- 
sonal as  are  our  countenances.  Every 
dog  knows  this  and,  unless  his  olfactory 
organs  are  atrophied,  he  makes  good 
use  of  it.  We  constantly  exude  products 

332 


of  metabolism,  and  in  the  composition 
of  these  products  we  all  differ.  Not  only 
do  we  differ  from  each  other,  but  in  no 
individual  are  these  products  constant. 
No  chemical  laboratory  is  equipped  to 
distinguish  these  minute  differences, 
and,  so  far  as  the  writer  is  aware,  the 
subject  is  still  unstudied  —  except  by 
dogs.  They,  with  their  highly  developed 
olfactory  organs,  are  impelled  by  curios- 
ity to  confirm  their  vision  when  they 
meet  their  master,  and  they  make  a 
long  and  searching  nose  investigation 
of  him,  clearly  with  a  view  to  finding 
out  more  than  their  eyes  will  tell  them. 
We  note,  too,  that  dogs  which  follow 
the  scent  closely  are  likely  occasion- 
ally to  go  into  a  mephitic  debauch  with 
a  decayed  fish  or  any  other  substance 
of  similar  pungency,  to  *  clean  their 
scent.'  That,  after  filling  the  nostrils 
with  agony  of  that  sort,  they  should 
find  them  in  better  working  order  is 
an  idea  that  does  not  seem  reasonable, 
and  yet  the  method  is  probably  a  good 
one,  for  the  same  reason  that  the  Arabs 
planted  flowers  of  pungent  and  coarse 
odor  at  the  entrances  to  their  scented 
gardens. 

The  theory  of  smell  as  given  is  very 
vague;  there  is  a  presumable  impact  of 
particles  upon  the  sensitive  regions  of 
the  nose  which,  in  some  way,  is  supposed 
to  stimulate  nerve-reaction.  Good  work 
has  been  done,  but  not  enough;  and 
enough  will  not  be  done  until  there  ob- 
tains a  lively  and  wholesome  curiosity 
about  it. 

On  the  other  hand,  consider  what 
illuminating  researches  are  available 


THE  SENSE  OF  SMELL 


333 


in  regard  to  sound  and  light!  As  an 
instance  of  the  comparative  attention 
devoted  to  these  subjects,  one  has  but 
to  open  a  book  of  reference  such  as, 
for  instance,  the  Encyclopaedia  Britan- 
nica.  In  the  last  edition  of  this  work 
over  twenty-two  pages  are  devoted  to 
sound,  sixteen  to  light,  and  but  a  page 
and  a  half  to  smell. 

Just  think  what  we  owe  to  our  eyes 
and  ears!  Through  them  we  gain  nearly 
all  of  our  knowledge.  They  are  trained 
so  that  by  them  we  read  books  and 
hear  speeches,  we  note  anger,  deceit, 
joy,  love;  by  sight  and  hearing  we  try 
to  guess  faithfulness  and  malice;  in 
fact,  through  these  two  senses  we  draw 
the  substance  of  our  information.  And 
yet  we  are  said  to  have  five  senses. 
Neither  touch  nor  hearing  nor  sight  is 
within  the  scope  of  this  paper,  and  taste 
is  a  limited  sense,  alive  only  to  sweet, 
sour,  bitter,  and  a  few  simple  nerve- 
reactions.  Owing  to  the  taboo  of  smell 
we  have  credited  to  taste  most  of  those 
olfactory  processes  which  we  have  cul- 
tivated. It  is  the  smell  of  good  food 
that  we  enjoy  while  we  are  eating  it; 
it  is  the  bouquet  of  a  wine  that  gives 
it  its  merit.  We  call  it  the  taste,  but  it 
is  chiefly  the  smell.  It  is  nearly  im- 
possible, for  instance,  to  distinguish 
between  what  we  call  the  taste  of  cin- 
namon and  that  of  cloves  if  we  hold 
our  noses. 

So  here  is  this  organ,  equipped  for 
the  acquisition  of  knowledge,  as  com- 
plex as  the  human  eye,  entering  into 
the  most  active  part  of  the  brain,  and 
we,  marveling  at  the  wonderful  ad- 
vances of  human  knowledge,  neglect 
it,  scorn  it,  politely  deny  that  there 
even  is  such  a  thing  as  an  individual 
odor  to  ourselves  and  our  friends.  We 
remain  more  ignorant  than  a  dog  about 
it.  And  yet,  despite  all  this  neglect, 
it  is  always  active.  This  must  be  true, 
else  it  would  not  be  such  an  aid  to 
memory  as  it  is. 


I  remember  once,  long  ago,  I  em- 
ployed a  chemist  to  make  a  certain 
product  that  he  had  worked  out  in  a 
factory  under  my  charge.  He  demon- 
strated it  in  the  laboratory  and  then 
proceeded,  in  the  works,  to  prepare  a 
few  hundred  pounds  in  some  tanks 
and  apparatus  at  hand.  At  this  point 
it  developed  that  the  process  was  in 
conflict  with  certain  patents,  and  that 
we  could  not  continue  without  infring- 
ing upon  rights  of  others  that  were  al- 
ready established.  So  the  whole  thing 
was  given  up  and  that  was  an  end 
of  it. 

At  the  time  I  was  intensely  engaged 
in  other  problems,  and  aside  from  oc- 
casionally visiting  the  chemist  while 
at  work,  I  had  but  little  to  do  with  it. 
Shortly  after  that  the  works  passed 
into  other  hands  and  I  quitted  the 
practice  of  chemistry  and  went  into 
business.  Ten  years  elapsed,  during 
which  time  I  had  been  out  of  practice 
and  wholly  out  of  the  thought  of  the 
process  in  question.  Then  I  was  in- 
formed that  a  chemical  manufacturer 
was  anxious  to  see  me  in  regard  to  some 
patent  litigation  in  which  he  was  en- 
gaged. I  feared  I  could  not  help  him; 
I  said  I  had  forgotten  everything  I 
knew,  but  that  if  he  wanted  to  see 
me  I  should  be  glad  to  meet  him.  He 
explained  his  problem  and  asked  me 
about  that  process.  I  could  not  re- 
member a  thing.  He  suggested  that 
we  go  through  his  factory,  which  we 
did.  *  Hello,'  I  said;  'here  is  some 
(3  naphthol!  What  lovely  figures  it 
makes ! '  And  I  dipped  my  fingers  into 
the  water  in  which  it  was  in  suspension 
and  stirred  it  around,  watching  the 
shining  scales.  Then  I  removed  my 
hand  and  smelled  of  my  fingers.  In  an 
instant  I  shouted,  'Now  I  remember 
that  process!'  and  proceeded  to  relate 
it  to  him  in  detail,  ft  naphthol  had 
been  one  of  the  materials  used  in  it. 

If,  when  you  went  to  school  as  a 


THE  SENSE  OF  SMELL 


child,  you  carried  a  tin  lunch-box  which 
often  contained,  let  us  say,  some  ginger- 
bread and  sandwiches  and  perhaps  an 
apple,  it  is  worth  while  to  take  a  sniff 
at  such  a  box  again,  now.  It  is  surpris- 
ing how  this  simple  experiment  may 
recall  the  patter  of  long-forgotten  feet 
and  the  memory  of  childish  voices  that 
startle  over  the  long  lapse  of  years. 

These  flashes  of  memory  aided  by 
smell  are  wonderful.  Through  smell  we 
achieve  a  sense  of  the  past;  the  secret 
members  of  the  mind  are  roused  to  life 
and  memory.  What  a  pity  that  we 
waste  this  talent! 

Again,  how  often  it  occurs  that  we 
see  a  friend  or  acquaintance  and  ex- 
claim, 'How  strange!  I  was  thinking 
of  you  less  than  a  minute  ago.'  In  point 
of  fact  we  have  probably  smelled  him. 
Smell  may  also  be  the  reason  why  we 
like  some  people  and  dislike  others.  I 
may  want  to  introduce  some  one  to  you 
because  you  have  many  interests  in 
common  and  may  tell  each  other  things 
you  both  want  to  know.  But  as  soon 
as  you  meet  you  will  have  none  of  him; 
you  know  he  is  honest,  of  good  repute, 
and  admirable  in  a  thousand  ways,  but 
as  for  you,  you  are  in  great  distress 
when  he  is  around,  and  you  are  glad 
when  he  goes  away.  If  you  are  of  kind- 
ly disposition  and  fair-minded,  you  are 
probably  annoyed  with  yourself  for 
your  prejudice;  if  you  are  a  bumptious 
brother  and  selfish,  you  probably  at- 
tribute some  imaginary  vice  or  evil  to 
him  by  way  of  excusing  yourself.  In 
both  instances  it  may  be  that  you  do  not 
like  the  smell  of  him,  although  you  do 
not  know  it.  You  see,  we  are  so  igno- 
rant in  our  noses  —  more  ignorant  than 
savages  or  even  animals;  we  are  very 
low  in  the  scale  of  intelligence  in  this 
respect,  and  we  respond  to  the  olfac- 
tory reactions  unconsciously.  Notwith- 
standing our  crass  ignorance,  the  noses 
are  still  there,  and  we  all  really  do 
produce  odors  despite  our  frequent 


bathing.  Varnishing  the  skin  to  close 
the  openings  of  the  sweat  glands  would 
be  the  only  way  to  put  a  stop  to  in- 
dividuality of  odor,  and  this  has  never 
been  recommended  as  an  aid  to  clean- 
liness or  to  health. 

Let  us  suppose  the  subject  were  not 
taboo  and  the  good  old  Saxon  word, 
stink,  which  bears  about  the  same  rela- 
tion 'to  odor  that  noise  does  to  sound, 
were  not  almost  unprintable  —  and 
suppose  we  really  used  our  noses  with 
consciousness  and  diligence.  There 
would  be  Americas  to  discover,  and 
life  would  be  marvelously  augmented! 
Of  course,  as  soon  as  we  begin  to  con- 
sider the  subject  we  find  ourselves 
wholly  at  sea.  There  are  no  standards. 
Out  of  the  awful  chaos  in  which  we 
wallow  we  can  possibly  find  a  few 
intimations,  but  we  cannot  'put  them 
down  as  rules.  Thus  it  would  seem 
that,  in  watching  the  order  of  nature, 
the  olfactory  phenomena  of  creation 
or  reproduction  seem  to  be  agreeable 
and  hence  desirable,  and  those  of  dis- 
solution are  likely  to  be  disagreeable. 
So  the  flowers  which  precede  the  seed- 
time of  plants  are  likely  to  produce  in 
the  nose  a  sense  of  pleasure.  They 
attract  bees  and  insects  which  are  use- 
ful to  the  continuance  of  the  species,  but 
they  attract  us  also,  and  the  cause  of 
our  attraction  is  presumably  the  same. 
Ben  Jonson,  when  he  sang  to  his  mis- 
tress of  the  rosy  wreath  which  she  sent 
him,  that  *  it  grows  and  smells,  I  swear, 
not  of  itself,  but  thee,'  knew  what  he 
was  writing.  It  may  be,  indeed  it  is 
probable,  that  the  close  relation  of 
smell  to  sex  phenomena  is  what  caused 
the  taboo.  But  there  is  a  spirit  abroad 
nowadays  to  search  the  truth,  with  the 
growing  belief  that  it  is  well  for  hu- 
manity to  adjust  itself  to  the  demands 
of  that  spirit.  The  search  for  the  truth, 
we  are  beginning  to  think,  is  a  whole- 
some occupation. 

That  the  phenomena  of  disintegra- 


THE  SENSE  OF  SMELL 


335 


tion  are  unpleasant  we  know  too  well; 
in  fact,  we  more  than  know  it;  we  have 
made  a  convention  of  it.  We  almost 
blush  in  passing  a  barnyard,  we  are 
shocked  at  the  coarseness  of  the  Ger- 
mans who  say  'kuenstliche  Duenger' 
for  artificial  fertilizers,  and  I  have 
heard  a  skunk  referred  to  as  a  *  little- 
black-and-white  animal,'  to  avoid  the 
inelegance  of  calling  his  odor  to  mind. 
Oh,  we  are  exquisite!  There 's  no  doubt 
of  that,  even  if  we  are  vastly  ignorant. 
Refinements  of  this  sort  are  of  weight 
in  aiding  us  to  make  vain  distinctions 
between  ourselves  and  those  people 
whom  we  regard  as  vulgar  and  com- 
mon, but  they  do  not  aid  us  in  the 
search  for  wisdom. 

Now,  many  of  the  processes  of  dis- 
integration are  unpleasant  and  they 
serve  as  warnings,  but  the  best  of  us 
does  not  put  his  handkerchief  to  his 
eyes  if  he  sees  an  unpleasant  sight,  or 
stop  his  ears  and  run  away  if  he  hears  a 
cry  of  pain.  The  best  of  us  listens  to 
hear  where  the  trouble  is,  and  hastens 
to  help  if  he  can.  But  when  we  smell  a 
disagreeable  odor  we  usually  get  up 
and  run  away.  It  is  all  we  know  how  to 
do.  And  every  unpleasant  odor  is  by 
no  means  a  sign  of  danger  or  even  of 
organic  disintegration.  Some  entirely 
harmless  products  are  dreadful  be- 
yond description  in  their  odor,  and,  on 
the  other  hand,  the  aroma  of  prussic 
acid  and  a  number  of  other  virulent 
poisons  is  delightful. 

But  the  field  is  far  wider  than  these 
qualifications  of  pleasantness  and  un- 
pleasantness, and  we  shall  only  baffle 
research  if  we  wed  ourselves  to  empir- 
ical rules  before  they  have  been  tested 
out. 

Sir  William  Ramsay,  whose  ever- 
young  enthusiasm  leads  him  into  so 
many  of  the  secret  gardens  of  nature, 
has  found  a  relation  between  odor  and 
molecular  weight,  and  J.  B.  Haycraft 
has  pointed  out  what  appears  to  be  a 


cousinship  of  odors  that  accords  with 
the  periodic  law;  another  notes  that 
odorous  substances  seem  to  be  readily 
oxidized,  and  Tyndall  showed  that 
many  odorous  vapors  have  a  consider- 
able power  of  absorbing  heat.  Some 
work  has  been  done  in  German, 
French,  and  Italian  laboratories  to 
discover  the  nature  of  the  phenomenon 
of  smell,  but  very  little  that  is  definite 
has  been  brought  out;  only  here  and 
there  a  few  facts;  and  nobody  seems 
to  want  to  know  them. 

And  yet  the  scientific  possibilities 
are  very  fascinating,  even  if  they  are 
bewildering.  For  instance,  it  appears 
that  the  sensitive  region  of  either  nos- 
tril is  provided  with  a  great  number  of 
olfactory  nerve-cells  embedded  in  the 
epithelium.  The  olfactory  cells  are  also 
connected  by  nerves  which  extend  to 
the  brain.  Well,  what  happens  when  we 
smell  anything?  The  olfactory  nerve- 
cells  are  surrounded  by  a  liquid.  What 
is  the  nature  of  that  liquid?  Do  the 
particles  which  we  assume  to  be  the 
cause  of  olfactory  phenomena  dissolve 
in  it?  If  they  do  —  and  here  we  pray 
thee,  oh,  great  Arrhenius,  come  help 
us !  —  does  dissociation  take  place,  and 
are  there  smell  ions?  That  is,  do  frac- 
tions of  the  molecules  of  those  bodies 
that  give  odor  dissociate  themselves 
from  the  rest  and  ride  in  an  electric 
stream  to  the  nerves?  What  do  they 
do  when  they  get  there? 

Let  us  try  again.  The  ends  of  the 
nerves  must  be  covered  with  some  sort 
of  a  membrane.  Here  is  where  osmo- 
sis may  come  in. 

Osmosis  is  the  gentle  art 
Whereby,  as  you  should  know, 
A  substance  side-steps  to  the  place 
Where  it  would  like  to  go. 

Somehow  it  would  seem  that  the 
particles  that  produce  the  sensation 
of  smell  must  get  through  those  mem- 
branes at  the  ends  of  the  nerves.  If 
they  do  not  get  through,  themselves, 


336 


THE   SENSE  OF  SMELL 


they  must  project,  something  through; 
it  cannot  be  a  simple  tapping,  gentle 
tapping,  at  the  nose's  door.  That  might 
produce  sound  or  heat  or  even  light, 
but  can  it  produce  smell?  Let  us  agree 
that  the  process  may  be  an  osmotic 
one  and  that  the  particles  glide  through 
softly,  gently;  and,  without  claiming 
that  it  has  any  special  bearing  upon 
the  subject,  let  us  remember  that  a 
healthy  dog's  nose  is  cold. 

Having  guessed  that  smell  may  be 
caused  by  an  impact  of  smell  ions  upon 
the  nerve  termini,  and  having  guessed 
again  that  the  process  may  be  an  os- 
motic one,  we  may  be  troubled  anew 
with  the  question  as  to  that  liquid 
that  we  think  covers  the  termini  of  the 
olfactory  nerves.  Is  it  a  colloidal  solu- 
tion? Now  I  begin  to  grow  comfort- 
able because  I  confess  frankly  that 
concerning  colloids  I  am  vastly  unin- 
formed; and  in  ignorance  is  easy  guess- 
ing. The  content  of  nerves  is  colloidal, 
and  it  is  fair  to  presume  that  this 
liquid  is.  All  of  those  albuminous  phys- 
iological products  are.  So,  if  the  liquid 
covering  the  nerve-ends  is  a  colloidal 
solution,  —  meaning  not  a  true  solu- 
tion in  the  usual  sense,  but  indicating 
particles  in  suspension  so  minute  that 
the  whole  behaves  like  a  solution,  — 
let  us  assume  that  the  substances  pro- 
ducing odor  enter  into  this  state,  and 
so  we  may  proceed  to  call  the  process 
colloidal.  It  may  be  both  colloidal  and 
osmotic,  it  may  be  —  but  we  shall  do 
better  to  call  for  help. 

We.  are  sorely  in  need  of  research 
along  the  olfactory  line.  We  are  still 
questioning  as  to  the  nature  of  elec- 
tricity and  what  it  is,  but  good  men 
are  working  over  it.  With  the  phenome- 
non of  smell  we  are  still  mediaeval.  No- 
body knows,  and  many  talk  big.  There 
is  little  progress  to  be  made  by  vapid 
guessing  outside  of  laboratories.  But 
those  of  us  who  are  inactive  in  research 
may  be  of  use  if  we  are  only  frank  and 


talk  about  it  enough  to  get  it  out  of  the 
taboo  under  which  it  has  rested  for  a 
thousand  years.  Then,  if  we  maintain 
a  simple  curiosity  such  as  animates 
children  and  great  men,  there  will  come 
from  laboratories  one  fact  after  another 
which  has  not  been  known  before. 
Then,  some  day,  some  one  with  the 
Vision  will  arise  and  arrange  the  facts 
in  their  real  order  and  so,  suddenly, 
there  will  stand  revealed  the  Truth! 
Thus,  with  the  sense  of  smell  added  to 
the  intelligent  use  of  mankind,  life  will 
be  greater  and  larger,  and  the  bounda- 
ries of  human  knowledge  will  be  moved 
back  a  span,  and  human  understand- 
ing will  take  one  more  great  step  in 
advance  toward  the  Infinite. 

To  return  to  the  dog,  he  seems  to 
know  and  to  recognize  certain  emo- 
tions through  his  nose.  He  seems  to 
recognize  fear,  and  to  have  all  sorts  of 
fun  with  it.  He  appears  also  to  recog- 
nize good- will,  —  although  not  always, 
as  many  of  us  can  testify,  —  and  he 
seems  to  know  anger.  Now,  we  know 
that  nerve-reactions  have  at  least  a 
chemical  accompaniment.  Metabolism 
is  often  inhibited,  the  whole  digestive 
process  is  frequently  upset,  and  there 
is  a  fair  possibility  that  the  sweat 
glands  are  so  modified  by  emotions 
that  their  processes  are  indicative  of 
emotional  reactions.  The  trained  nose 
might  recognize  this.  If  we  could  only 
advance  along  this  line  until  we  could 
recognize  anger  and  fear,  and  possibly 
even  deceit,  consider  in  what  measure 
life  would  be  augmented!  It  seems  a 
far  cry  to  imagine,  in  a  court  of  law,  the 
witness  testifying  with  two  or  three 
good  smellers  sitting  close  by,  to  note 
his  sweat-reactions;  but  it  would  be  no 
more  absurd  than  some  of  our  courts 
to-day,  with  their  far  more  mislead- 
ing entanglements  of  legal  procedure. 

We  talk  of  the  value  of  publicity  in 
regard  to  corporate  affairs,  but  we  have 
only  for  a  minute  to  consider  what  an 


TO  AN  ORCHID                                           337 

aid  to  morals  trained  noses  would  be  would  reek  to  the  ceiling  of  worry  as 

by  way  of  effecting  publicity  in  the  soon  as  he  made  his  first  false  entry, 

family.    The  mere  suggestion  unlocks  and  if  the  specific  odors  of  anger  and 

the  door  to  the  trouble  parlor;  but  then,  deceit  were  discovered  so  that  they 

no  one  would  try  to  lock  it  if  he  and  might  be  known  immediately,  we — but 

his  household  were  proficient  in  the  art  this  is  not  a  theological  discourse  and 

of  smelling.     The  defaulting  cashier  its  purpose  is  not  to  describe  Paradise. 


TO  AN  ORCHID 

BY   GRACE   HAZARD   CONKLING 


MOON-HORNED  orchid  in  the  oak, 
Uttering  thee,  what  spirit  spoke? 
Thou  who  hearest  patiently 
Humble  patois  of  the  bee, 
Hast  thou  anything  to  tell 
Of  the  angel  Israfel? 

Who  would  murmur  half  aloud 
Word  of  wind  or  star  or  cloud, 
If  thy  beauty  were  a  throat 
For  his  far  ethereal  note? 
He  by  whom  thou  wert  designed 
Kin  of  cloud  and  star  and  wind? 

Mystic  flower,  could 'st  thou  say 

If  the  little  children  play 

Much  with  Mozart  where  he  dreams 

Daylong  by  the  heavenly  streams? 

Does  he  tire  of  asphodel  ? 

And  with  Keats,  oh,  is  it  well? 

VOL.  Ill -NO.  3 


THREE-ARCH  ROCKS  RESERVATION 


BY   DALLAS   LORE   SHARP 


,  THE  fog  was  lifting.  The  thick,  wet 
drift  that  had  threatened  us  on  Tilla- 
mook  Bar  stood  clear  of  the  shoulder- 
ing sea  to  the  westward,  and  in  toward 
shore,  like  an  upper  sea,  hung  at  the 
fir-girt  middles  of  the  mountains,  as 
level  and  as  gray  as  the  sea  below. 
There  was  no  breeze.  The  long,  smooth 
swell  of  the  Pacific  swung  under  us  and 
in,  until  it  whitened  at  the  base  of  three 
dark  rocks  that  lay  in  our  course,  and 
that  now  began  to  take  on  form  out  of 
the  foggy  distance.  Gulls  were  flying 
over  us;  lines  of  black  cormorants  and 
crowds  of  murres  were  winging  past 
toward  the  rocks;  but  we  were  still  too 
far  away  from  the  looming  piles  to  see 
that  the  gray  of  their  walls  was  the 
gray  of  uncounted  colonies  of  nesting 
birds,  colonies  that  covered  the  craggy 
steeps  as  the  green  firs  clothed  the 
slopes  of  the  Coast  Range  mountains, 
up  to  the  hanging  fog. 

As  we  steamed  on  nearer,  the  sound 
of  the  surf  about  the  rocks  became 
audible;  the  birds  in  the  air  grew  more 
numerous,  their  cries  now  faintly 
mingling  with  the  sound  of  the  sea. 
The  hole  in  the  Middle  Rock,  a  mere 
fleck  of  foam  at  first,  widened  rapidly 
into  an  arching  tunnel  through  which 
our  boat  might  have  run;  the  sea  be- 
gan to  break  before  us  over  half-sunk- 
en ledges;  and  soon  upon  us  fell  the 
damp  shadows  of  Three-Arch  Rocks, 
for  now  we  were  looking  far  up  at  their 
sides,  at  the  sea-birds  in  their  guano- 
gray  rookeries,  —  gulls,  cormorants, 
guillemots,  puffins,  murres,  —  incrust- 
ing  the  ragged  walls  from  tide-line  to 
333 


pinnacle,  as  the  crowding  barnacles 
incrusted  the  bases  from  the  tide-line 
down. 

We  were  not  approaching  without 
protest,  for  the  birds  were  coming  off 
to  meet  us,  more  and  more  the  nearer 
we  drew,  wheeling  and  clacking  over- 
head in  a  constantly  thickening  cloud 
of  lowering  wings  and  tongues.  We 
rounded  the  Outer  Rock  and  headed 
slowly  in  toward  the  yawning  hole  of 
Middle  Rock  as  into  some  mighty  cave, 
so  sheer  and  shadowy  rose  the  walls 
above  us,  so  like  to  cavern  thunder  was 
the  throbbing  of  the  surf  through  the 
hollow  arches,  was  the  flapping  and 
screaming  of  the  birds  against  the  high- 
circling  walls,  was  the  deep  menacing 
grumble  of  the  sea-lions,  as  through 
the  muffle  of  surf  and  sea-fowl,  herd 
after  herd  lumbered  bellowing  into  the 
foam. 

It  was  a  strange,  wild  scene.  Hardly 
a  mile  from  the  Oregon  coast,  but  cut 
off  by  breaker  and  bar  from  the  abrupt, 
uninhabited  shore,  the  three  rocks  of 
the  Reservation,  each  pierced  with  its 
resounding  arch,  heaved  their  heavy 
shoulders  from  the  waves  straight  up, 
huge,  towering,  till  our  little  steamer 
coasted  their  dripping  sides  like  some 
puffing  pigmy.  They  were  sea  rocks,  of 
no  part  or  lot  with  the  dry  land,  their 
beryl  basins  wave-scooped,  and  set 
with  purple  star-fish,  with  green  and 
pink  anemones,  and  beaded  many  deep 
with  mussels  of  amethyst  and  jet,  a 
glitter  in  the  water's  overflow;  and 
just  above  the  jeweled  basins,  like 
fabled  beasts  of  old,  lay  the  sea-lions, 


THREE-ARCH  ROCKS  RESERVATION 


339 


lumpish,  uncouth  forms,  flippered,  re- 
versed in  shape,  with  throats  like  the 
caves  of  ^Eolus,  hollow,  hoarse,  discord- 
ant; and  higher  up,  on  every  jutting 
bench  and  shelf,  in  every  weathered  rift, 
over  every  jog  of  the  ragged  cliffs,  to 
their  bladed  backs  and  pointed  peaks, 
swarmed  the  sea-birds,  web-footed, 
amphibious,  wave-shaped,  with  stormy 
voices  given  them  by  the  winds  that 
sweep  in  from  the  sea.  And  their  num- 
bers were  the  numbers  of  the  sea. 

Crude,  crowded,  weltering,  such  life 
could  never  have  been  brought  forth 
and  nurtured  by  the  dry  land;  her 
breasts  had  withered  at  the  birth. 
Only  the  bowels  of  the  wide,  wet  sea 
could  breed  these  heaps,  these  cones  of 
life  that  rose  volcanic  from  the  waves, 
their  craters  clouded  by  the  smoke  of 
wings,  their  belted  bases  rumbling 
with  a  multi-throated  thunder.  The 
air  was  dank  with  the  must  of  a  closed 
room,  —  closed  for  an  seon  past,  — 
no  breath  of  the  land,  no  odor  of  herb, 
no  scent  of  fresh  soil;  but  the  raw, 
rank  smells  of  rookery  and  den,  saline, 
kelpy,  fetid;  the  stench  of  fish  and 
bedded  guano;  and  pools  of  reeking 
ammonia  where  the  lion  herds  lay 
sleeping  on  the  lower  rocks  in  the  sun. 

A  boat's  keel  was  beneath  me,  but  as 
I  stood  out  on  the  pointed  prow,  barely 
above  the  water,  and  found  myself 
thrust  forward  without  will  or  effort 
among  the  crags  and  caverns,  among 
the  shadowy  walls,  the  damps,  the 
smells,  the  sounds;  among  the  bellow- 
ing beasts  in  the  churning  waters  about 
me,  and  into  the  storm  of  wings  and 
tongues  in  the  whirling  air  above  me, 
I  passed  from  the  things  I  had  known, 
and  the  time  and  the  earth  of  man, 
into  a  period  of  the  past,  elemental, 
primordial,  monstrous. 

I  had  not  known  what  to  expect,  be- 
cause, never  having  seen  Three-Arch 
Rocks,  I  could  not  know  what  my 
friend  Finley  meant  when  he  said  to 


me,  *  Come  out  to  the  Pacific  Coast,  and 
I  will  take  you  back  to  your  cave-days ; 
I  will  show  you  life  as  it  was  lived  at 
the  beginning  of  the  world.'  I  had  left 
my  Hingham  garden  with  its  wood- 
chuck,  for  the  coast  of  Oregon,  a  jour- 
ney that  might  have  been  compassed 
by  steam,  that  might  have  been  meas- 
ured in  mere  miles,  had  it  stopped 
short  of  Three-Arch  Rocks  Reserva- 
tion, which  lay  seaward  off  the  shore. 
Instead  of  miles,  it  was  zones,  ages, 
worlds  that  were  traveled  as  I  passed 
into  this  haunt  of  wild  sea-bird  and 
beast.  And  I  found  myself  saying 
over  to  myself,  *  Thou  madest  him  to 
have  dominion  over  the  work  of  thy 
hands,  Thou  hast  put  all  things  under 
his  feet '  —  as  if  the  words  had  never 
before  been  uttered  in  human  ears 
and  could  not  yet  be  understood. 

For  here  was  no  man-dominion;  here 
the  trampling  feet  had  never  passed. 
Here  was  the  primeval  world,  the  fresh 
and  unaffrighted  morning  of  the  Fifth 
Day.  Then,  as  the  brute  in  me  shook 
itself  and  growled  back  at  the  brute 
about  me,  something  touched  my  arm, 
and  I  turned  to  find  the  Warden  of  the 
Rocks  at  my  side,  —  God,  as  it  were, 
seeing  again  everything  that  He  had 
made,  everything  that  man  had  un- 
made, and  saying  again  with  a  new 
and  a  larger  meaning,  'Have  domin- 
ion over  the  fowl  of  the  air,  and  over 
the  fish  of  the  sea,  and  over  whatso- 
ever passeth  through  the  paths  of  the 
seas.' 

And  here  at  my  side,  by  act  of  Con- 
gress, stood  that  Dominion,  the  Federal 
Warden,  the  collective,  spiritual  man, 
badged  and  armed  to  protect  forever 
against  the  individual  brute  man,  the 
wild  life  of  these  three  rocks  and  the 
waters  adjacent. 

But  did  I  fully  understand  the  Why? 
Did  I  wholly  comprehend  the  meaning 
and  the  value  of  such  a  sanctuary  for 
wild  life?  I  turned  to  the  Warden  with 


340 


THREE-ARCH  ROCKS  RESERVATION 


the  question.  That  honest  official  paus- 
ed a  moment,  then  slowly  answered 
that  he'd  be  hanged  if  he  knew  why. 
He  did  n't  see  any  good  in  such  protec- 
tion, his  salary  notwithstanding.  He 
had  caught  a  cormorant  (one  from  the 
Rocks)  not  long  since,  that  had  forty- 
nine  young  salmon  in  its  maw;  and  as 
for  the  sea-lions,  they  were  an  unmiti- 
gated nuisance,  each  one  of  them  de- 
stroying (so  it  had  been  reckoned)  five 
hundred  pounds  of  fish  every  day. 

Now  the  Warden's  findings  are  open 
to  question,  because  there  are  good 
reasons  for  the  cormorant's  catch  being 
other  than  salmon  fry;  still  I  have  no 
proof  of  error  in  his  figures.  I  will  ac- 
cept them  just  now,  —  the  five  hun- 
dred pounds  of  fish  a  day  for  the  sea- 
lion,  and  the  forty-nine  salmon  fry  of 
the  cormorant  (they  would  easily  total, 
four  years  later,  on  their  way  up  the 
Columbia  to  the  canneries,  a  half  ton), 
— accepting  this  fearful  loss  of  Chinook 
salmon  then  as  real,  is  there  any  answer 
to  my  question,  Why?  Any  good  and 
sufficient  reason  for  setting  aside  such 
a  reservation  as  Three- Arch  Rocks?  for 
myself  protecting  the  wild  life  of  these 
barren  rocks  against  myself? 

No,  perhaps  not,  —  not  if  this  de- 
struction means  the  utter  loss  of  the 
salmon  as  an  industry  and  as  an  article 
of  food.  But  there  is  an  adequate  and 
a  paying  catch  of  salmon  being  taken 
in  the  Columbia  this  year,  in  spite  of 
the  lions  and  the  cormorants,  as  there 
will  be  again  next  year,  for  the  state 
hatcheries  have  liberated  over  seven 
millions  of  young  salmon  this  summer 
and  sent  them  safely  down  the  Colum- 
bia to  the  sea.  No,  perhaps  not,  —  no 
good  and  sufficient  reason  for  such  pro- 
tection were  I  an  Astoria  fisherman 
with  the  sea-lions  pursuing  the  salmon 
into  my  nets  (as  occasionally  they  do), 
instead  of  a  teacher  of  literature  in 
Boston  on  the  other  side  of  the  world. 
It  is  easy  in  Boston  to  believe  in  sea- 


lions  in  Astoria.  It  is  hard  anywhere 
not  to  believe  in  canned  salmon.  Yet, 
as  sure  as  the  sun  shines,  and  the  moon, 
there  are  some  things  utterly  without 
an  equivalent  in  canned  salmon. 

Among  these  things  are  Three-Arch 
Rocks  and  Malheur  Lake  and  Klamath 
Lake  Reservations  in  Oregon,  and  the 
scores  of  other  bird  and  animal  re- 
serves created  by  Congress  all  the  way 
from  the  coast  of  Maine,  across  the 
states,  and  over-seas  to  the  Hawaian 
Islands.  They  were  set  aside  only 
yesterday;  the  sportsman,  the  pelt 
hunter,  the  plume  hunter,  the  pot  hunt- 
er, and  in  some  instances  the  legitimate 
fisherman  and  farmer,  ordered  off  to 
make  room  for  the  beast  and  the  bird. 
Small  wonder  if  there  is  some  grum- 
bling, some  law-breaking,  some  failure 
to  understand.  But  that  will  pass. 

In  to-day's  news,  cabled  from  Copen- 
hagen, I  read,  — 

'Americans  of  Danish  descent  have 
purchased  a  tract  of  300  acres  of  typ- 
ical and  virgin  Danish  heather  land- 
scape, which  is  to  be  preserved  for  all 
ages  to  come  as  a  national  park.  The 
wonderful,  picturesque  Danish  heath, 
which  for  ages  has  furnished  inspiration 
to  national  artists  and  poets,  has  been 
disappearing  fast  before  the  onslaught 
of  the  thrifty  Danish  farmers,  who  are 
bringing  every  available  square  inch 
of  Denmark's  soil  under  cultivation. 
One  day  it  dawned  upon  the  Danish 
people  that  soon  there  would  be  nothing 
left  of  this  typical  landscape,  and  while 
the  good  people  of  Denmark  were  dis- 
cussing ways  and  means  of  preserving 
this  virgin  soil,  Americans  of  Danish 
descent  had  already  had  a  representa- 
tive on  the  spot  who  had  bought  up 
from  a  number  of  small  landowners 
the  300-acre  tract  known  as  Rebild 
Bakkar  [Rebild  Hills],  considered  the 
most  beautiful  part  of  the  heath,  be- 
sides having  historical  associations 
dating  hundreds  of  years  back.' 


THREE-ARCH  ROCKS  RESERVATION 


341 


I  am  sending  the  cablegram  to  the 
Warden  of  Three-Arch  Rocks  and  to 
the  Astoria  Fisherman,  and  to  myself, 
underscoring  these  lines,  — 

'The  wonderful,  picturesque  Danish 
heath,  which  for  ages  has  furnished 
inspiration  to  national  artists  and  poets, 
has  been  disappearing  fast  before  the 
onslaught  of  the  thrifty  Danish  farm- 
ers, who  are  bringing  every  available 
square  inch  of  Denmark's  soil  under 
cultivation.' 

Three  hundred  acres  of  inspiration 
to  artists  and  poets  (and  to  common 
people,  too),  or  three  hundred  acres 
more  of  vegetables,  —  which  will  Den- 
mark have? 

Now,  I  have  a  field  pf  vegetables.  I 
was  born  and  brought  up  in  a  field  of 
vegetables  —  in  the  sweet-potato  and 
cabbage  fields  of  southern  New  Jersey. 
To  this  day  I  love  —  with  my  heart 
and  with  my  hoe  —  a  row  of  stone- 
mason cabbages;  but  there  are  cab- 
bages on  both  sides  of  the  road  all  the 
way  home,  not  fewer  cabbages  this 
year,  but  more,  and  ever  more  and 
more,  with  less  and  ever  less  and  less 
of  the  virgin  heather  in  between. 

The  heather  is  for  inspiration,  for 
pictures  and  poems;  the  cabbages  are 
for  cold-slaw  and  sauerkraut.  Have 
any  complained  of  our  lack  of  cold- 
slaw  and  sauerkraut?  No.  Have  any 
watched,  as  they  who  watch  for  the 
morning,  for  the  coming  of  our  great 
painter  and  poet?  Yea,  and  they  still 
watch. 

Cold-slaw  and  sauerkraut  and  canned 
salmon  let  us  have;  but  let  us  also  have 
the  inspiration  of  the  virgin  heath,  and 
the  occasional  restoration  to  our  prim- 
itive, elemental,  animal  selves,  in  a  re- 
turning now  and  then  to  the  clangor 
and  confusion  of  wild  life  on  Three- 
Arch  Rocks.  The  body  feeds  on  cab- 
bage. The  spirit  is  sustained  by  heath- 
er. Denmark  has  fifteen  thousand 
square  miles  devoted  to  her  body,  and 


has  saved  three  hundred  acres  for  her 
soul!   What  have  we  saved? 

I  have  not  convinced  the  Warden, 
doubtless;  but  if  I  have  encouraged 
him  to  perform  his  duty,  then  that  is 
something.  And  well  he  knows  the  need 
for  his  guard.  The  sea  was  without  a 
sail  when  we  steamed  in  toward  the 
Rocks.  We  had  scarcely  landed,  how- 
ever, when  a  boat  hove  in  sight,  and 
bearing  down  upon  us,  dropped  anchor 
within  rifle-range  of  the  lion  herds, 
the  men  on  board  pulling  their  guns 
for  an  hour's  sport! 

'Thou  hast  put  all  things  under  his 
feet';  and  the  feet  have  overrun  and 
trampled  down  all  things  except  in  the 
few  scattered  spots  where  the  trespass 
sign  and  the  Warden  are  keeping  them 
off.  I  have  been  following  these  feet 
over  the  last-left  miles  of  wild  Cana- 
dian prairie,  over  a  road  so  new  that 
I  could  still  see  crossing  it  the  faint, 
grass-grown  trails  of  the  buffalo.  I 
followed  the  feet  on  over  the  Coast 
Range  Mountains,  through  the  last- 
remaining  miles  of  first-growth  timber, 
where  the  giant  bolles,  felled  for  the 
road,  lay  untrimmed  and  still  green 
beside  the  way  —  a  straight,  steel- 
bordered  way,  for  swift,  steel-shod  feet 
that  shake  the  mountain  and  the  prairie 
in  their  passing,  and  leave  behind 
them  down  the  trail  the  bones  of  herds 
and  forests,  the  ripped  sod,  the  barbed 
wire,  the  shacks  that  curse  the  whole 
horizon,  the  heaps  of  gutted  tins,  and 
rags,  and  scrap  —  unburied  offal,  flung 
from  the  shanty  doors  with  rose-slip 
and  grain  of  wheat,  to  blossom  later  in 
the  wilderness  and  make  it  to  rejoice. 

Only  it  will  not  be  the  wilderness 
then,  or  the  solitary  place;  it  will  not 
be  prairie  or  forest.  The  fir  tree  will 
never  follow  the  rose,  nor  the  buffalo- 
grass  the  great  gasoline  tractor.  I  have 
seen  the  last  of  the  unploughed  prairies, 
the  last  of  the  virgin  forests.  It  was 
only  six  weeks  ago  that  I  passed  through 


342 


THREE-ARCH  ROCKS  RESERVATION 


the  mountain  forest,  and  to-day,  as 
I  am  writing,  those  age-old  trees  are 
falling  as  the  summer  grass  falls  across 
the  blade  of  the  mower. 

This,  I  know,  must  needs  be.  All 
of  this  was  implied,  delegated,  in  the 
command,  'Be  fruitful  and  multiply, 
and  replenish  the  earth  and  subdue  it.' 
No,  not  all  of  this  needs  to  be;  nor 
ought  to  be. 

'O  River,'  said  Mary, 

*  Why  will  you  not  stay, 
And  tell  me  the  things 
That  you  see  on  your  way. 

'Oh!  why  must  you  hurry, 
The  day  is  so  long; 
Pray,  rest  a  short  time 
And  sing  me  a  song.' 

'My  child,'  said  the  River, 
'If  I  stay  with  you, 

Why,  what  will  the  grasses 

And  sweet  flowers  do? 

'The  mills  must  be  turned; 
Ships  taken  to  sea; 
And  the  news  of  the  day 
Must  be  carried  by  me/ 

The  river  is  right,  though  the  child 
can  hardly  understand;  and  the  child, 
too,  is  right,  —  will  the  river  ever  un- 
derstand? The  mills  of  men  must  be 
turned,  their  ships  must  be  taken  to 
sea,  but  the  child,  the  eternal  child, 
must  be  told  a  story,  must  be  sung  a 
song.  For  what  does  a  child  know  of 
mills?  It  cannot  live  by  wheaten  bread 
alone. 

The  river  is  turning  my  mill,  for  I 
(a  part  of  me)  and  my  children  (a  part 
of  them)  need  bread;  but  the  heart  of 
me,  the  soul  of  me,  the  eternal  child  of 
me  and  of  my  children,  craves  some- 
thing that  the  harnessed  river  cannot 
grind  for  us,  something  that  only  the 
wild,  free  river  can  tell  to  us  under  the 
fir  trees,  at  its  far-off  headwaters,  can 
sing  to  us  as  its  clear  cascades  leap 
laughing  down  from  pool  to  boulder, 
in  its  distant  mountain  home. 


The  river  is  turning  my  mill.  I  must 
grind  and  the  river  must  help  me  grind. 
But  I  must  play  too,  and  be  told  a 
story  and  be  sung  a  song.  Am  I  not  a 
child?  and  do  I  not  owe  the  child  some- 
thing? Must  I  put  the  child  in  the 
mill  to  grind?  There  are  children  in 
our  mills,  —  little  children,  yes,  and 
big  children;  young  children,  and  old 
children,  —  more  old  children  than 
young;  grinding,  grinding,  grinding  as 
our  dank,  dark  rivers  go  turning  on,  too 
hurried  now  to  tell  a  story,  too  thick- 
tongued  to  sing  a  song. 

Here  was  still  the  story  and  the  song, 
here  on  Three-Arch  Rocks;  a  story  as 
naked  as  birth  and  death;  a  song  as 
savage  as  the  sea,  — 

Birth,  birth  and  death! 
Wing  and  claw  and  beak; 
Death,  death  and  birth! 
From  crowded  cave  to  peak. 

These  were  the  Isles  of  Life.  Here,  in 
these  rocky  caverns,  life  was  conceived 
and  brought  forth,  life  as  crude  and 
raw  and  elemental  as  the  rock  itself. 
It  covered  every  crag.  I  clutched  it  in 
my  hands;  I  crushed  it  under  my  feet; 
it  was  thick  in  the  air  about  me.  My 
narrow  path  up  the  face  of  the  rock 
was  a  succession  of  sea-bird  rookeries, 
of  crowded  eggs,  and  huddled  young, 
hairy  or  naked  or  wet  from  the  shell. 
Every  time  my  fingers  felt  for  a  crack 
overhead  they  touched  something  warm 
that  rolled  or  squirmed;  every  time 
my  feet  moved  under  me,  for  a  hold, 
they  pushed  in  among  top-shaped 
eggs  that  turned  on  the  shelf  or  went 
over  far  below;  and  whenever  I  hugged 
the  pushing  wall  I  must  bear  off  from 
a  mass  of  squealing,  struggling,  shape- 
less things,  just  hatched.  And  down 
upon  me,  as  rookery  after  rookery  of 
old  birds  whirred  in  fright  from  their 
ledges,  fell  crashing  eggs  and  unfledged 
young,  that  the  greedy  gulls  devoured 
ere  they  touched  the  sea. 

An  alarmed  wing-beat,   the  excited 


THREE-ARCH  ROCKS  RESERVATION 


343 


turn  of  a  webbed  foot,  and  the  murre's 
single  egg  or  its  single  young  was  sent 
over  the  edge,  so  narrow  was  the  foot- 
ing for  Life,  so  yawning  the  pit  below. 
But  up  out  of  the  churning  waters,  up 
from  crag  to  crag,  clambers  Life,  by 
beak,  by  claw,  falling,  clinging,  climb- 
ing, with  the  odds  forever  favoring 
Death,  with  Life  forever  finding  wings. 

I  was  mid-way  in  my  climb,  at  a  bad 
turn,  edging  inch  by  inch  along,  my 
face  hard-pressed  to  the  face  of  the 
cliff,  my  fingers  gripping  a  slight  seam 
overhead,  my  feet  feeling  blindly  at  the 
brink  beneath,  when  there  came  up  to 
me,  small  and  smothered,  the  wash  of 
the  waves,  —  the  voice  of  space  and 
nothingness  and  void,  the  call  of  the 
chasm  out  of  which  I  was  so  hardly 
climbing.  A  cold  hand  clasped  me 
from  behind. 

With  an  impulse  as  instinctive  as  the 
unfledged  murre's,  I  flattened  against 
the  toppling  rock,  fingers  and  feet,  el- 
bows, knees,  and  chin  clinging  desper- 
ately to  the  narrow  chance,  —  a  fall- 
ing fragment  of  shale,  a  gust  of  wind, 
the  wing-stroke  of  a  frightened  bird, 
enough  to  break  the  hold  and  swing 
me  out  over  the  water,  washing  faint 
and  far  below.  A  long  breath,  and  I 
was  climbing  again. 

We  were  on  the  Outer  Rock,  our 
only  possible  ascent  taking  us  up  the 
sheer  south  face.  With  the  exception 
of  an  occasional  western  gull's  and 
pigeon  guillemot's  nest,  these  steep 
sides  were  occupied  entirely  by  the 
California  murres,  —  penguin-shaped 
birds  about  the  size  of  a  wild  duck, 
chocolate-brown  above,  with  white 
breasts,  that  literally  covered  the  sides 
of  the  three  great  Rocks  wherever  they 
could  find  a  hold.  If  a  million  meant 
anything,  I  should  say  there  were  a 
million  murres  nesting  on  this  Outer 
Rock;  not  nesting  either,  for  the  egg  is 
laid  upon  the  bare  ledge,  as  you  might 
place  it  upon  a  mantel,  a  single  sharp- 


pointed  egg,  as  large  as  a  turkey's,  and 
just  as  many  of  them  on  the  ledge  as 
there  is  standing-room  for  the  birds. 
The  murre  broods  her  egg  by  standing 
straight  up  over  it,  her  short  legs,  by 
dint  of  stretching,  allowing  her  to 
straddle  the  big  egg,  her  short  tail 
propping  her  securely  from  behind. 

On,  up  along  the  narrow  back,  or 
blade,  of  the  Rock,  and  over  the  peak, 
were  the  well-spaced  nests  of  the  brand  t 
cormorants,  nests  the  size  of  an  ordi- 
nary straw  hat,  made  of  sea-grass  and 
the  yellow-flowered  sulphur-weed  that 
grew  in  a  dense  mat  over  the  north 
slope  of  the  top,  each  nest  holding  four 
long,  dirty,  blue  eggs  or  as  many  black, 
shivering  young;  and  in  the  low  sul- 
phur-weed, all  along  the  roof-like  slope 
of  the  top,  built  the  gulls  and  the 
tufted  puffins;  and,  with  the  burrowing 
puffins,  often  in  the  same  holes,  were 
found  the  stormy  petrels;  while  down 
below  them,  as  up  above  them,  —  all 
around  the  rock  rim  that  dropped  sheer 
to  the  sea,  —  stood  the  cormorants, 
black,  silent,  statuesque;  and  every- 
where were  nests  and  eggs  and  young, 
and  everywhere  were  flying,  crying 
birds  —  above,  about,  and  far  below 
me,  a  whirling,  whirring  vortex  of  wings 
that  had  caught  me  in  its  funnel. 

So  thick  was  the  air  with  wings,  so 
clangorous  with  harsh  tongues,  that 
I  had  not  seen  the  fog  moving  in,  or 
noticed  that  the  gray  wind  of  the  morn- 
ing had  begun  to  growl  about  the  crags. 
It  was  late,  and  the  night  that  I  had 
intended  to  spend  on  the  summit  would 
be  dark  and  stormy,  would  be  too  wet 
and  wild  for  watching,  where  one  must 
hold  on  with  his  hands  so  close  to  the 
edge,  or  slip  and  go  over. 

I  had  hoped  to  wrap  up  in  my  blank- 
ket  and,  in  the  dark  of  the  night,  listen 
for  the  return  of  the  petrels,  the  Kaed- 
ing  petrels,  that  built  all  over  the  top. 
The  earthy,  north  slope  of  the  top  is 
honeycombed  with  their  burrows,  yet 


S44 


THREE-ARCH  ROCKS  RESERVATION 


never  a  petrel  is  seen  about  the 
rock.  I  had  dug  out  the  brooding  bird 
and  its  single  white  egg  during  the 
afternoon,  but  I  knew  that  I  must 
wait  until  after  dark  if  I  would  hear 
the  winnowing  of  the  wings  and  the 
chittering  of  the  voices  as  the  mate 
in  the  burrow  gave  greeting  and  place 
to  the  mate  that  had  been  all  day,  and 
all  night,  at  sea.  But  the  cold  driving 
fog,  and  the  drizzle  that  was  setting 
in,  made  a  night  on  the  top  impos- 
sible; so  we  got  over  the  rim  and  by 
rope  down  along  the  south  face  of  the 
cliff,  up  which  we  had  climbed,  to  a 
small  shelf  under  an  overhanging  ledge 
about  forty  feet  above  the  waves.  Here, 
protected  from  the  north-west  wind, 
and  from  much  of  the  rain,  we  rolled 
up  in  our  blankets,  while  night  crept 
down  upon  us  and  out  over  the  sea. 

It  was  a  gray,  ghostly  night  of  dusk 
and  mist  that  swam  round  and  round 
the  crags  and  through  the  wakeful 
caverns  in  endless  undulations,  coiling 
its  laving  folds  over  the  sunken  ledges, 
and  warping  with  slow,  sucking  sounds 
its  mouthing  tentacles  round  and 
through  the  rocks.  Or  was  it  only  the 
wash  of  its  waves?  only  the  gray  of  the 
mist  and  the  drip  of  the  rain?  Or  was 
it  the  return  of  the  waters?  the  re- 
solving of  firmament  and  rock  back 
through  the  void  of  night  into  the  flux 
of  tluTsea? 

It  was  a  long  night  of  small,  distinct, 
yet  multitudinous  sounds.  The  con- 
fusion caused  by  our  descent  among 
the  birds  soon  subsided;  the  large  col- 
ony of  murres  close  by  our  heads  re- 
turned to  their  rookery;  and  with  the 
rain  and  thickening  dark  there  spread 
everywhere  the  quiet  of  a  low  mur- 
murous quacking.  Sleep  was  settling 
over  the  rookeries. 


Down  in  the  water  below  us  rose  the 
bulk  of  a  sea-lion,  an  old  lone  bull, 
whose  den  we  had  invaded.  He,  too, 
was  coming  back  to  his  bed  for  the 
night.  He  rose  and  sank  in  the  half 
light,  blinking  dully  at  the  cask  and 
other  things  that  we  had  left  below  us 
on  the  ledge  belonging  to  him.  Then 
he  slowly  clambered  out  and  hitched 
up  toward  his  bed.  My  own  bed  was 
just  above  his,  so  close  that  I  could 
hear  him  blow,  could  see  the  scars  on 
his  small  head,  and  a  long  open  gash 
on  his  side.  We  were  very  near. 

I  drew  back  from  the  edge,  pulled 
the  blanket  and  sail-cloth  over  me, 
and  turned  my  face  up  to  the  slanting 
rain.  Two  young  gulls  that  had  hid- 
den from  us  in  a  cranny  came  down 
and  nestled  quite  close  to  my  head, 
their  parents,  one  after  the  other,  perch- 
ing an  instant  on  the  rock  just  out  of 
reach,  and  all  through  the  night  call- 
ing to  them  with  a  soft  nasal  quack  to 
still  their  alarm.  In  the  murre  colony 
overhead  there  was  a  constant  stir  of 
feet  and  a  soft,  low  talk;  and  overall 
the  Rock,  through  all  the  darkened  air, 
there  was  the  silent  coming  and  going 
of  wings,  shadow-wings  of  the  stormy 
petrel,  some  of  them,  that  came  win- 
nowing in  from  afar  on  the  sea. 

The  drizzle  thickened;  the  night 
lengthened.  I  listened  to  the  wings 
about  me,  to  the  murmur  among  the 
birds  above  me,  to  the  stir  of  the  sea 
beneath  me,  to  the  breathing  of  the 
sleeping  men  beside  me;  to  the  pulse  of 
the  life  enfolding  me,  of  which  I  was 
part  and  heart;  and  under  my  body  I 
felt  a  narrow  shelf  of  rock  dividing  the 
waters  from  the  waters.  The  drizzle 
thickened;  the  night  lengthened;  and 
—  darkness  was  upon  the  face  of  the 
deep. 


THE  COURTS  AND  LEGISLATIVE  FREEDOM 


BY   GEORGE   W.   ALGER 


TWENTY-FIVE  to  fifty  years  ago  there 
were  time-honored  phrases  which  were 
applied  by  lawyers  with  more  or  less 
popular  approval  to  the  American 
judiciary.  The  courts  were  the  *  Palla- 
dium of  our  liberties/  the  *  Guardians 
of  the  Ark  of  the  Covenant.'  To-day 
the  public  attitude  has  largely  changed, 
These  phrases  are  no  longer  current. 
The  people  are  dissatisfied  with  the 
guardians,  and  in  some  quarters  there 
is  dissatisfaction  with  the  ark  itself. 
The  popular  magazines  are  full  of  art- 
icles upon  judicial  aggression,  judicial 
oligarchies,  and  the  lucubrations  of 
ingenious  laymen,  who,  unconstrained 
by  any  embarrassment  through  know- 
ledge of  law  or  of  the  functions  or 
powers  of  the  judiciary,  cheerfully  lay 
at  the  doors  of  the  courts  all  the  ills  of 
our  body  politic.  The  legislatures  and 
constitutional  conventions  are  debat- 
ing proposals  for  the  recall  of  judges, 
and  the  bar  associations  are  adding  to 
the  general  confusion  by  sweepingly 
denouncing,  as  demagogic  attacks  up- 
on the  courts,  all  proposals  of  change 
except  certain  excellent,  though  tardy, 
measures  of  procedure-reform  eman- 
ating from  themselves.  The  platform 
of  one  political  party  advocates  a  sim- 
plification of  the  method  of  impeach- 
ment. Between  indiscriminate  attack 
and  unreasoning  defense,  the  courts 
suffer  both  from  their  enemies  and, 
if  possible,  still  more  from  their  friends; 
and  sober-minded  citizens  are  left  with- 
out light  or  leading. 

What  is  the  fundamental  cause  arous- 
ing this  tumult  of  conflicting  charges, 


this  spirit  of  bitterness,  these  recrim- 
inations and  attacks?  At  bottom,  the 
difficulty  will  be  found  to  be  in  a 
change  in  the  attitude  of  the  people, 
not  toward  the  courts  themselves,  but 
toward  law-making  bodies;  and  the 
desire  to  readjust,  in  an  essential  par- 
ticular, constitutional  power  as  be- 
tween the  courts  and  the  law-making 
bodies,  by  the  only  feasible  method 
which  our  complicated  system  affords 
—  direct  application  of  public  opinion. 

To  attempt  to  analyze  the  process 
of  this  change  would  be  difficult,  and 
no  broad  generalization  can  be  made 
which  would  not  appear  in  some  quar- 
ter to  be  glaringly  inaccurate.  For  one 
thing,  there  has  been  in  our  country, 
in  recent  years,  a  decided  growth  in 
actual  democracy.  Despite  occasional 
flashes  of  its  ancient  power,  govern- 
ment by  political  oligarchies,  boss-rule, 
is  slowly  losing  ground.  Invisible  gov- 
ernment is  giving  way  to  visible  gov- 
ernment of  a  better  type.  Again,  we 
have  passed  industrially  from  individ- 
ualism to  collectivism,  and  our  law  has 
not  yet  adapted  itself  to  the  transi- 
tion. A  condition  of  interdependence, 
socially  and  industrially,  requires  re- 
cognition and  regulation  by  law.  Sena- 
tor Root  has,  with  great  felicity,  ex- 
pressed this  in  a  recent  address.  He 
says,  — 

*  Instead  of  the  give-and-take  of  free 
individual  contract,  the  tremendous 
power  of  organization  has  combined 
great  aggregations  of  capital  in  enor- 
mous industrial  establishments,  work- 
ing through  vast  agencies  of  commerce, 

345 


346 


THE  COURTS  AND  LEGISLATIVE  FREEDOM 


and  employing  great  masses  of  men  in 
movements  of  production  and  trans- 
portation and  trade,  so  great  in  the 
mass,  that  each  individual  concerned  in 
them  is  quite  helpless  by  himself.  The 
relations  between  the  employer  and 
the  employed,  between  the  owners  of 
aggregated  capital  and  the  unit  of  or- 
ganized labor,  between  the  small  pro- 
ducer, the  small  trader,  the  consumer, 
and  the  great  transporting  and  manu- 
facturing and  distributing  agencies,  all 
present  new  questions,  for  the  solution 
of  which  the  old  reliance  upon  the  free 
action  of  individual  wills  appears  quite 
inadequate.  And,  in  many  directions, 
the  intervention  of  that  organized  con- 
trol which  we  call  government  seems 
necessary  to  produce  the  same  result 
of  justice  and  right  conduct  which  ob- 
tained through  the  attrition  of  individ- 
uals before  the  new  conditions  arose.'  1 

There  is  beneath  all  a  spirit  of  rest- 
lessness in  the  people  not  to  be  over- 
come by  soporifics  or  reactionary  fore- 
bodings, a  dissatisfaction  with  things 
as  they  are,  and  a  demand  upon  law- 
making  bodies  for  greater  service  in 
harmonizing  law  to  the  requirements  of 
a  changed  industrial  order.  To  meet 
these  new  conditions  new  measures 
are  required.  They  must  proceed  from 
law-makers.  In  response  to  that  de- 
mand in  the  states  and  in  the  nation, 
long-neglected  subjects  of  legislation 
are  receiving  attention.  With  this 
growing  interest  in  such  matters  the 
law-maker,  and  those  interested  in 
legislation  upon  these  topics,  find  in 
certain  fundamental  parts  of  the  work 
of  legislation  a  conflict  of  power  be- 
tween the  law-maker  and  the  courts. 

Such  a  conflict  is  more  or  less  essen- 
tial in  any  system  of  checks  and  bal- 
ances like  ours.  With  us  it  has,  in  fact, 
always  existed,  but  just  now  the  force 

1  Judicial  Decisions  and  Public  Feeling.  An 
address  before  the  New  York  State  Bar  Associa- 
tion, January  19,  1912. 


of  public  opinion  is  more  largely  on  the 
side  of  the  law-maker  and  those  whom 
he  represents  in  the  demand  for  legis- 
lation, than  it  was  in  the  days  when 
he  was  generally  discredited  and  dis- 
trusted, and  when  he  was  less  the  re- 
presentative of  the  people  and  more 
the  tool  of  a  boss-ridden  party  system. 

The  sphere  of  power  of  the  law-maker, 
under  our  present  system  of  checks  and 
balances,  as  interpreted  by  our  courts, 
is  the  arc  of  a  pendulum,  which  has  the 
phrase  'due  process  of  law'  at  both 
extremities.  How  wide  the  pendulum 
may  swing  depends  upon  how  far  the 
courts  consider  it  lawful  that  the  legis- 
lature should  go  before  coming  in  con- 
flict with  the  phrase. 

It  will  be  said  at  once  that  this  state- 
ment is  incorrect  because  every  state 
constitution,  as  well  as  the  Constitu- 
tion of  the  nation,  has  a  multitude  of 
limitations  upon  legislative  action,  and 
the  provision  that  property  shall  not 
be  taken  without  due  process  of  law  is 
only  one  of  them.  This  criticism  is  not 
without  merit.  But  the  due-process 
clause  is  the  principal  example  of  these 
broad  general  expressions  current  in 
our  Constitution  which,  not  placed 
there  by  the  courts,  are  nevertheless 
to  be  construed  and  given  a  meaning 
and  a  force  as  limitations  of  legislative 
and  executive  power.  This  provision 
is  the  great  stumbling-block  of  the  law- 
maker because  it  is  not  defined  except 
in  vague  generalities  by  the  courts, 
and  is  not  readily  susceptible  of  de- 
finition. 

For  illustration,  take  a  subject  with 
which  a  dozen  American  states  are 
now  struggling,  and  on  which  there 
is  an  aroused  public  opinion,  —  indus- 
trial accidents.  A  workmen's  compen- 
sation act  is  under  legislative  consid- 
eration. A  bill  is  drawn  recognizing, 
as  in  Europe,  that  such  accidents  are 
an  inevitable  part  of  modern  industry 
and  are  chargeable  justly  upon  the  in- 


THE  COURTS  AND  LEGISLATIVE  FREEDOM 


347 


dustry  itself,  and  providing  for  com- 
pulsory compensation  by  the  employer 
for  all  accidents  occurring  in  his  plant, 
irrespective  of  whether  they  are  oc- 
casioned by  his  fault.  Does  it  take 
property  without  due  process  of  law? 
The  law- maker  looks  to  see  what  'due 
process*  is  declared  to  mean  by  the 
courts.  What  does  he  learn?  He  learns 
first  that  the  words  are  equivalent  to 
*  the  law  of  the  land '  as  used  in  Magna 
Charta.  This  is  historically  interesting, 
but  to  him  of  no  practical  value.  He 
then  learns,  if  he  looks  a  little  further, 
that  what  he  has  tried  to  find  out  by 
judicial  decision,  the  courts  themselves 
have  refused  to  define,  except  in  terms 
which  afford  no  practical  help,  saying 
that  these  words  are  incapable  of  accu- 
rate definition,  and  that  it  is  wiser  to 
ascertain  their  intent  and  application 
'by  the  gradual  process  of  judicial  in- 
clusion and  exclusion,  as  the  cases  pre- 
sented for  decision  shall  require,  with 
the  reasoning  upon  which  such  deci- 
sions may  be  founded.' 

'It  must  be  confessed,'  says  the 
United  States  Supreme  Court,  'that 
the  constitutional  meaning  and  value 
of  the  phrase  "due  process  of  law"  re- 
mains to-day  without  that  satisfactory 
precision  of  definition  which  judicial 
decisions  have  given  to  nearly  all  the 
other  guaranties  of  personal  rights 
found  in  the  constitutions  of  the  several 
states  and  of  the  United  States.' 

The  courts  say,  in  substance,  to  the 
law-maker,  'We  can  give  you  no  rule 
or  definition  for  this  thing  which  shall 
enable  you  to  know  what  due  pro- 
cess of  law  is  before  you  legislate,  but 
if  you  pass  some  law  and  afterwards 
it  is  questioned  in  court,  we  can  then 
tell  by  application  of  this  indefinable 
thing,  by  our  process  of  inclusion  and 
exclusion,  whether  the  particular  law 
is  void  or  not,  as  taking  property  with- 
out due  process  of  law.' 

When  a  law  has  been  enacted  and  is 


being  tested  in  court,  the  brief  of  the 
lawyer  who  attacks  it  is  usually  full  of 
illustrations  of  other  statutes  more  or 
less  like  it,  which  courts  have  held  to 
be  bad,  as  taking  property  without  due 
process  of  law.  The  brief  of  the  lawyer 
in  favor  of  the  law  is  based  on  those 
cases,  if  any  he  can  find,  in  which  more 
or  less  similar  statutes  have  been  de- 
clared valid,  and  with  these  cases  he 
has  generally  an  argument  that  this 
particular  kind  of  a  statute  which  he 
desires  to  uphold  is  what  he  calls  a  valid 
exercise  of  the  police  power. 

Now,  the  legislator  is  interested  in 
both  of  these  things.  If  he  cannot  know 
in  advance  what  is  due  process  of  law 
which  tells  him  what  he  must  not  do,  he 
will  be  quite  safe  about  his  statute- 
making  if  he  can  know  what  is  the 
scope  of  the  police  power  which  tells 
him  what  he  can  do.  Upon  searching 
among  court  decisions  for  a  definition 
of  this  police  power,  so-called,  he  finds 
there  is  no  concrete  definition  of  it.  It 
also  is  incapable  of  definition.  The 
courts  do,  of  course,  describe  it.  In  a 
thousand  decisions  it  is  referred  to  as 
the  power  of  the  law-making  body  '  to 
promote  the  health,  peace,  morals, 
education,  and  good  order  of  the  people 
by  the  enactment  of  reasonable  regu- 
lations for  that  purpose.' 

But  since  it  is  incapable  of  exact  de- 
finition and  there  are  no  certain  rules 
governing  it,  the  courts  again  say  that 
the  question  whether  a  law  is  a  valid 
exercise  of  the  police  power  must  be 
determined  by  testing  the  individual 
statute  by  application.  'With  regard 
to  the  police  power,  as  elsewhere  in  the 
law,  lines  are  pricked  out  by  the  grad- 
ual approach  and  contact  of  decisions 
on  the  opposing  sides.'  The  courts 
will  examine  the  statute.  If  they  find 
that,  in  their  judgment,  the  legislature 
adopted  it  in  the  exercise  of  a  reason- 
able discretion,  based  upon  sufficient 
facts,  they  will  hold  that  the  law  is  a 


348 


THE  COURTS  AND  LEGISLATIVE  FREEDOM 


valid  exercise  of  the  police  power.  To 
forbid  barbers  to  work  on  Sunday  is 
reasonable.  To  forbid  women  to  work 
at  night  is  unreasonable.  So  the  first 
law  is  a  valid  exercise  of  the  police 
power,  and  the  second  takes  liberty 
and  property  without  due  process  of 
law. 

In  the  meanwhile,  what  becomes  of 
the  law-maker?  He  is  endeavoring  to 
respond  to  the  demands  of  the  people 
for  legislation  on  questions  which, 
without  any  constitutional  puzzles  in- 
jected into  them,  are  in  themselves 
difficult  in  the  extreme.  New  condi- 
tions need  new  remedies.  He  devises 
the  new  remedy.  He  introduces  it  as 
a  bill,  which  contains  some  limitations 
upon  the  conduct  of  some  class  or  body. 
It  is  debated  in  committee.  It  is 
amended  to  meet  objections.  It  is  de- 
bated in  the  two  houses.  It  is  passed. 
It  is  examined  by  the  governor  and  his 
advisers.  It  becomes  law.  Then  it  goes 
to  the  court  and  if  three  out  of  five 
men,  greatly  learned  in  law,  applying 
the  judicial  mystery  of  due  process  of 
law,  decide  that  the  thing  attempted 
is,  as  they  see  it,  not  a  reasonable  exer- 
cise of  the  discretion  of  the  legislature 
in  imposing  the  restraint  or  regulation 
proposed,  the  wisdom  of  two  branches 
of  the  legislature  and  of  the  governor 
is  overcome.  The  law  is  not  a  law. 

The  thing  which  the  courts  in  these 
decisions  are  dealing  with  is  that  pro- 
cess of  adjustment,  inevitable  in  law 
as  in  life,  between  the  rights  and  liber- 
ties of  the  individual  and  the  rights 
and  necessities  of  society.  The  police 
power,  so-called,  is  in  law  the  branch 
which  expresses  the  expanding  needs 
of  society,  and  through  which  society's 
demands  upon  the  individual  are  made. 
Society  asserts,  by  legislation  based 
upon  police  power,  the  necessities  of 
social  coordination  for  the  develop- 
ment of  the  state.  The  individual  — 
or  more  often  some  one  pretending  to 


act  in  his  interest  —  resists,  through 
the  due-process  clause,  the  encroach- 
ments of  society  upon  'natural'  right. 

The  problem  thrust  upon  the  courts 
is  the  duty  of  harmonizing  —  without 
set  rules  or  chart  or  compass  —  the  re- 
lations of  man,  the  individual,  to  the 
society  to  which  he  must  belong.  Plato 
declared  that  he  was  ready  to  follow 
as  a  god  any  man  who  knew  how  to 
combine  in  his  conduct  the  law  of  the 
one  and  the  law  of  the  many.  How  in- 
finitely more  difficult  the  task  of  pre- 
scribing such  conduct,  not  for  one's  self 
only,  but  for  the  one  and  the  many  of  a 
complex  state!  It  is  the  most  difficult 
of  tasks.  It  is  imposed  upon  no  other 
courts  than  ours  in  the  world.  The 
duty  which  Milton  took  upon  himself 
in  his  epic,  of  justifying  the  ways  of 
God  to  man,  is  in  our  time  only  paral- 
leled by  the  duty  of  American  courts 
of  justifying  the  ways  of  society  to 
man  and  of  man  to  society. 

The  theory  of  procedure  in  this  pro- 
cess of  justification,  to  be  sure,  is  sim- 
ple. Show  us  —  say  the  courts  —  a 
necessity  of  society  so  great  as  to  re- 
quire the  subordination  of  the  personal 
rights  of  the  individual  to  the  greater 
demands  of  the  aggregation  of  individ- 
uals composing  the  whole,  and  we  will 
sustain  the  law  which  causes  that  sub- 
ordination. Show  us  a  case  where,  for 
an  alleged  social  need,  but  having  no 
just  cause  or  basis,  or  real  social  re- 
quirement, the  rights  of  the  individual 
are  threatened  with  arbitrary  destruc- 
tion, and  we  will  in  turn  protect  the 
individual  from  such  a  law  by  declaring 
that  his  life,  liberty,  or  property  can- 
not be  taken  without  due  process  of 
law. 

The  essential  conflicts  between  the 
courts  and  the  legislatures  on  these  sub- 
jects are  over  questions  of  fact.  The 
legislature  says,  for  example,  We  have 
found  as  a  fact  a  social  necessity  for 
limiting  the  hours  of  labor  of  bakers. 


THE  COURTS  AND  LEGISLATIVE  FREEDOM 


349 


We  have  examined  into  the  condition 
of  their  work  and  find  that  their  wel- 
fare, and  thereby  the  welfare  of  society, 
requires  such  limitations.  The  Su- 
preme Court  of  the  United  States  says 
that  there  are  no  reasonable  grounds 
for  believing  that  such  social  necessity 
exists,  and  it  finds  the  law  to  be  uncon- 
stitutional in  taking  away  the  baker's 
liberty. 

As  to  the  hours  of  women  in  laun- 
dries and  men  in  mines,  the  court  ap- 
proves the  legislative  finding  of  social 
fact,  declaring  these  to  be  cases  where 
the  legislature  has  adjudged  that  a 
limitation  is  necessary  for  the  preserv- 
ation of  the  health  of  such  employees; 
and  there  are  reasonable  grounds  for 
believing  that  such  determination  is 
sustained  by  the  facts.  The  question 
in  each  case  is  whether  the  legislature 
has  adopted  the  statute  in  the  exer- 
cise of  a  reasonable  discretion,  or  whe- 
ther its  action  is  a  mere  excuse  for  an 
unjust  discrimination  or  the  oppression 
or  spoliation  of  a  particular  class. 

The  opportunity  for  conflict  between 
the  legislature  and  the  courts  on  ques- 
tions of  social  fact  is  apparent.  In  this 
conflict,  public  opinion  finds  itself  more 
and  more  on  the  side  of  the  legislature. 
This  shift  in  public  opinion  does  not 
come  because  the  majority  of  people 
are  convinced  that  legislators  are  wiser 
than  courts  or  less  prone  to  make  mis- 
takes, but  is  born  of  a  more  general 
realization  of  the  fact  that,  so  far  as 
law  can  effect  them,  solutions  of  in- 
dustrial and  economic  questions  are  ne- 
cessarily legislative  ones,  and  that  to 
deny  the  legislator  the  power  to  make 
mistakes  is  also  to  deny  him  the  power 
to  remedy  or  correct  evils  which  can 
receive  correction  only  through  legis- 
lation. Underlying  a  great  part  of  the 
current  discussion  of  the  judiciary, 
and  as  a  main  basis  for  the  nostrum 
entitled  the  recall  of  judges,  is  this  mat- 
ter of  the  potential  domination  of  the 


legislative  idea  of  reasonableness  by 
the  judicial  idea  of  reasonableness. 

The  conservative  deprecates  and 
deplores  the  irritation  and  impatience 
thus  engendered  and  manifested  to- 
ward the  courts.  As  a  process  of  ad- 
justment of  such  difficulties  he  repeats 
the  time-honored  argument  that  the 
true  remedy  is  to  meet  these  conflicts, 
one  by  one,  with  the  cumbrous,  diffi- 
cult, and  dilatory  procedure  of  piece- 
meal constitutional  amendment.  The 
suggestion  that  the  situation  can  be 
met  in  any  other  fashion  or  by  any 
change  of  attitude  of  the  courts  them- 
selves, he  regards  as  sheer  demagogy. 
What  the  conservative  refuses  to  see, 
in  his  resistance  to  the  new  forces  in 
public  opinion,  is  that  the  more  pro- 
gressive or  radical  influences  in  our 
society  are  themselves  endeavoring  to 
accomplish  an  essential  conservative 
reform  through  this  insistence  upon  the 
recognition  by  the  courts  of  the  need 
of  greater  legislative  freedom.  They 
are  endeavoring  to  find  a  modus  vivendi 
in  our  Constitution  for  an  ancient  and 
time-honored  clause  which,  upon  the 
conservative's  own  logic,  they  should 
seek  to  repeal. 

It  is  essential  that  we  should  see  the 
true  nature  of  this  conflict,  and  the 
alternative  which  it  affords.  We  must 
do  one  of  two  things :  either  determine 
to  continue  our  courts  in  their  present 
position  of  harmonizers  between  the 
individual  and  society,  and  thereby 
continue  in  form  and  theory  their  pre- 
sent power  over  legislation,  looking  to 
the  courts  themselves  for  such  prac- 
tical modification  of  their  exercise  of 
that  power  as  shall  give  a  necessary 
leeway  to  legislation;  or,  what  has  not 
yet  been  suggested,  we  must  abolish 
vague  constitutional  limitations,  and 
decide  that  an  impracticable  and  un- 
workable power  of  the  courts  over 
legislatures  should  be  removed  by  a 
repeal  of  the  clause  or  clauses  of  the 


350 


THE  COURTS  AND  LEGISLATIVE  FREEDOM 


Constitution  forming  the  basis  for  its 
existence. 

As  a  conservative,  as  well  as  a  prac- 
tical people,  we  are  trying  the  first 
of  these  alternatives.  Without  chang- 
ing the  theory  of  judicial  power  in  any 
fundamental  way,  we  are  seeking  to 
have  it  practically  so  applied  by  the 
courts  as  to  enlarge  the  province  of 
legislation.  We  are  endeavoring  to  ac- 
complish this  largely  by  a  severe  crit- 
icism of  those  judicial  decisions  which 
interfere  with  what  many  now  recog- 
nize as  an  essential  part  of  legislative 
freedom. 

We  are  asking  to  have  the  courts 
themselves  recognize  an  extension  of 
the  ordinary  domain  of  legislative  pow- 
er, that  is,  the  domain  in  which  the 
law-maker  may  enact  his  statute  with- 
out being  obliged  to  claim  justification 
for  what  he  enacts  in  any  special  plea 
of  social  necessity,  —  the  police  power. 
The  extent  of  this  common  field  of 
legislation  depends  largely  upon  the 
breadth  of  action  permitted  by  the 
courts  in  their  definition  of  due  process 
of  law.  One  definition  of  the  test  for 
due  process,  in  the  constitutional  sense 
of  the  term,  has  been  laid  down  by 
many  decisions  of  the  courts. 

*  We  must  examine  the  Constitution 
itself  to  see  whether  this  process  be  in 
conflict  with  any  of  its  provisions.  If 
not  found  to  be  so,  we  must  look  to 
those  settled  usages  and  modes  of  pro- 
cedure existing  in  the  common  and 
statute  law  of  England  before  the  emi- 
gration of  our  ancestors,  and  which  are 
shown  not  to  have  been  unsuited  to 
their  civil  and  political  condition  by 
having  been  acted  on  by  them  after 
the  settlement  of  this  country.' 

More  briefly  they  describe  it  as  *a 
conformity  with  the  ancient  and  cus- 
tomary laws  of  the  English  people.' 

If  the  basis  for  determining  whether 
we  can  do  certain  things  legally  in  the 
twentieth  century  is  to  be  found  by  as- 


certaining whether  they  could  legally 
have  been  done  in  England  at  or  prior 
to  the  fourth  day  of  July,  1776,  the 
problem  of  grasping  new  conditions  in 
new  ways  by  new  laws  is  made  infin- 
itely difficult.  The  touchstone  for  pro- 
gress then  becomes  not  solely  the  needs 
of  the  present,  but  the  extent  to  which 
these  needs  can  be  met  by  the  applica- 
tion of  historical  precedents  of  the  past. 
Nations  are  incapable  of  growth  in  any 
such  fashion,  by  any  such  method. 

It  is  doubtless  true  that,  historically, 
due  process  of  law,  as  understood  and 
applied  in  England  from  the  days  of 
Magna  Charta  to  the  time  when  we 
adopted  our  Constitution,  contained 
far  fewer  limitations  upon  executive 
and  legislative  powers  than  those 
which  have  been  construed  into  it  by 
American  courts  in  the  past  hundred 
years.  But  it  is  the  method  of  progress 
which  is  important.  No  man  can  run 
forward  freely  while  continually  look- 
ing backward. 

There  is,  however,  another  view  of 
due  process  consistent  with  national 
growth.  As  the  Supreme  Court  of  the 
United  States  has  said,  — 

'The  Constitution  of  the  United 
States  was  ordained,  it  is  true,  by  de- 
scendants of  Englishmen  who  inherited 
the  traditions  of  English  law  and  his- 
tory, but  it  was  made  for  an  undefined 
and  expanding  future,  and  for  a  people 
gathered,  and  to  be  gathered,  from 
many  nations  and  many  tongues,  and 
while  we  take  just  pride  in  the  principles 
and  institutions  of  the  common  law,  we 
are  not  to  forget  that  in  lands  where 
other  systems  of  jurisprudence  prevail, 
the  ideas  and  processes  of  civil  justice 
are  also  not  unknown.  .  .  .  There  is 
nothing  in  Magna  Charta  rightly  con- 
strued as  a  broad  charter  of  public 
right  and  law  which  ought  to  exclude 
the  best  ideas  of  all  systems  and  of 
every  age,  and  as  it  was  the  character- 
istic principle  of  the  common  law  to 


THE  COURTS  AND  LEGISLATIVE  FREEDOM 


351 


draw  its  inspiration  from  every  foun- 
tain of  justice,  we  are  not  to  assume 
that  the  sources  of  its  supply  have 
been  exhausted.  On  the  contrary,  we 
should  expect  that  the  new  and  various 
experiences  of  our  own  situation  and 
system  will  mould  and  shape  it  into 
new  and  not  less  useful  form.' 

The  theories  of  due  process  of  law: 
the  narrow  one,  which  makes  its  touch- 
stone history  and  the  settled  usages 
and  modes  of  procedure  used  in  Eng- 
land prior  to  our  independence,  and 
the  broad  one,  which  sets  aside  all  such 
limitations  and  gives  the  phrase  the  ex- 
pansive power  by  which  there  may  be 
created  in  America  law  not  only  for  the 
descendants  of  Englishmen,  but  for  a 
people  gathered  from  many  nations 
and  many  tongues,  represent  an  actual, 
but  not  yet  freely  recognized,  conflict 
between  the  courts  themselves. 

The  expansionist  and  the  contrac- 
tionist  notions  of  due  process  of  law  are 
expressed  in  many  judicial  decisions. 
They  conflict  at  times  in  the  decisions 
of  the  same  courts.  Both  cannot  live. 
The  permanence  of  our  constitutions 
in  their  present  form  depends  upon 
the  establishment  of  a  broad  doctrine 
which  permits  a  free  exercise  of  all  the 
essential  attributes  of  legislative  power. 

What  may  be  called  the  expansion- 
ist theory  is  to-day  rapidly  gaining 
ground.  The  notion  that  the  courts 
form  an  adamantine  barrier  to  pro- 
gress is  false.  They  do  not  bow  to 
every  fitful  breath  of  change.  Some 
judges  move  more  slowly  than  others, 
to  be  sure,  in  adapting  the  law  to  the 
settled  will  of  the  people.  But  to  that 
will  they  do  conform.  What  is  taking 
place  is  a  slow  but  sure  change,  un- 
der the  pressure  of  formulated  public 
opinion,  in  the  character  and  scope 
of  the  constitutional  limitation  of  due 
process  of  law.  Even  when  found  by 
many  most  alarming,  the  movement 
from  which  this  pressure  conies  is  es- 


sentially a  conservative  one.  Nowhere 
has  there  been,  from  any  respected 
source,  the  suggestion  that  the  whole 
framework  of  our  constitutional  sys- 
tem should  be  destroyed  or  that  the 
power  of  the  courts  to  annul  acts 
which  contravene  the  clause  should 
itself  be  destroyed.  This  in  itself  is  a 
tribute  to  the  courts.  If  the  people 
were  satisfied  that  the  power  to  declare 
laws  unconstitutional  under  the  due- 
process  clause  had  been  in  the  main 
detrimental  to  their  best  interests, 
that  its  continuance  was  necessarily  or 
essentially  a  menace  to  the  progress 
of  the  nation,  the  reform  movement 
would  have  a  different  programme. 
'No,'  said  the  old  farmer;  *I  don't 
want  a  divorce,  what  I  want  is  a  leetle 
more  freedom  on  lodge  nights.' 

The  people  do  not  desire  to  abolish 
the  ancient  landmarks.  There  is  as 
yet  no  expressed  desire  on  the  part  of 
any  group  or  party  to  take  from  the 
courts  the  power  to  test  legislation  by 
ascertaining  whether  it  conforms  to  na- 
tural and  inherent  principles  of  justice; 
or  the  power  to  forbid  that  one  man's 
rights  or  property  shall  be  taken  for 
the  benefit  of  another,  or  for  the  bene- 
fit of  the  state,  without  compensation; 
or  that  any  man  should  be  condemned 
in  his  person  or  property  without  an 
opportunity  of  being  heard  in  his  own 
defense. 

No  other  country  in  the  world  per- 
mits its  courts  to  test  or  to  approve 
or  condemn  legislation  by  the  appli- 
cation of  any  vague  concept  such  as 
*  natural  and  inherent  principles  of 
justice,'  or  by  the  interpretation  of 
phrases  incapable  of  approximately 
exact  meaning  which  law-makers  can 
know  in  advance.  In  theory  at  least, 
the  continuance  of  a  constitutional 
system  for  governing  ninety  millions 
of  people  on  such  a  basis  involves  peril, 
if  not  disaster.  'Yes,'  said  an  English 
barrister  to  me  some  months  ago, 


352 


THE  COURTS  AND  LEGISLATIVE  FREEDOM 


*  things  are  pretty  bad  with  us  just 
now.  A  lot  of  this  Lloyd  George  legis- 
lation is  stuff  and  nonsense,  too.  Of 
course  Parliament  had  to  do  some- 
thing, though;  and  with  us,  to  be  sure, 
it  has  a  pretty  free  hand;  but/  he  added 
cheerfully,  'if  we  were  tied  up  with 
your  Constitution  we  should  be  having 
a  civil  war.' 

A  civil  war  is  too  remote  a  prospect 
to  arouse  in  an  American  much  sense 
of  alarm.  Our  natural  resources  are 
still  vast.  The  field  of  individual  op- 
portunity, though  narrowing,  is  still 
large.  The  sense  of  any  impending 
peril  which  requires  a  fundamental  re- 
vision in  our  system  of  government, 
our  theory  of  national  life,  is  still 
unfelt.  We  do  realize  the  need  of  a 
change  in  the  theory  of  legislative 
power  which  shall  give  the  law-maker 
more  freedom.  Some  of  us  are  aroused 
to  this  need  by  problems  of  labor,  the 
Lawrence  strike,  the  McNamara  and 
Haywood  affairs;  some  by  problems  of 
capital,  by  the  trust  investigations; 
while  the  high  cost  of  living  has  influ- 
enced the  unthinking  mass.  The  re- 
sult is  a  desire  to  readjust  the  position 
of  the  courts  in  the  general  system  of 
our  government. 

The  recall  of  judges  is  in  small  meas- 
ure due  to  a  desire  to  get  rid  of  judges, 
but  more  largely  to  a  desire  to  remind 
them,  by  its  crude  potentialities,  of 
their  duties  to  society  as  well  as  to  the 
individual.  The  misnamed  recall  of  de- 
cisions is  an  entirely  different  and  less 
objectionable  proposition  having  the 
same  general  end  in  view;  a  plan  under 
which  due  process  of  law  in  its  final 
analysis  is  to  be  determined  by  the  peo- 
ple who  put  the  words  in  the  Constitu- 
tion for  the  judges  to  follow,  and  who 
put  the  judges  in  their  places  to  inter- 
pret these  words.  Instead  of  attempt- 
ing to  terrorize  the  judge  by  the  threat 
of  personal  punishment  through  the 
recall,  instead  of  repealing  the  due-pro- 


cess clause,  instead  of  adopting  amend- 
ments to  our  constitutions,  necessarily 
broad  and  general,  and  conferring 
large  and  possibly  dangerous  powers 
on  legislators  in  advance  of  legislation, 
it  proposes  to  refer  to  the  people  a 
specific  law,  with  the  "due-process" 
objections  of  the  courts  to  its  constitu- 
tionality! Whatever  the  practical  dif- 
ficulties might  be  in  its  operation,  its 
theory  is  not  radical  but  conservative. 
It  proposes  that  the  question  whether 
a  measure  is  due  process  of  law  shall 
be  tested  by  the  judgment  of  the  legis- 
latures and  the  courts  and,  when  they 
disagree,  by  the  sober  judgment  of  the 
people,  who  created  both. 

Ohio,  in  her  constitutional  conven- 
tion, has  submitted  to  the  people,  and 
they  have  adopted  with  general  ap- 
proval, the  proposition  that  no  law 
shall  be  declared  unconstitutional  un- 
less five  out  of  six  of  the  judges  of  her 
supreme  court  concur. 

Other  proposals  with  like  objects  are 
made.  The  debates  over  them  pro- 
duce charges  and  countercharges.  The 
forces  of  reaction,  the  perpetual  min- 
ority, which  in  all  ages  has  believed 
in  the  continuance  of  things  as  they 
are,  the  conservatives  who  see,  as  they 
believe,  the  threatened  destruction  of 
the  safeguards  of  freedom,  the  still 
larger  class  which  believes  that  the 
American  people  are  as  yet  only  par- 
tially capable  of  self-government,  find 
themselves  arrayed  in  defense  of  a 
theory  of  judicial  power  which  is  out  of 
harmony  with  the  new  programme  of 
democracy. 

This  programme  has  for  its  initial 
purpose  the  more  direct  participation 
of  the  people  in  their  own  government, 
and  in  the  selection  of  their  representa- 
tives, and  in  a  more  direct  sense  of 
responsibility  by  those  representatives 
to  the  people.  Its  first  period  is  still 
one  in  which  questions  to  be  debated 
are  largely  matters  of  machinery.  The 


THE  CONFESSIONS  OF  ONE  BEHIND  THE  TIMES        353 


direct  primary,  the  presidential  pre- 
ference primary,  the  initiative,  the  re- 
ferendum, the  recall,  the  direct  elec- 
tion of  United  States  senators,  are  not 
ends  of  democracy,  they  are  the  means 
by  which  democracy  seeks  to  express 
itself.  How  it  shall  express  itself  is 
another  matter.  The  part  of  this  pro- 
gramme which  affects  the  courts  is  that 
which  seeks  to  bring  them  in  line  with 
this  movement  by  compelling  them 
to  recognize  a  shift  in  the  balance 
of  power,  a  necessary  change  in  their 


relation  to  a  system  which  must  depend 
for  its  strength,  its  efficiency,  and  its 
growth  upon  the  power  to  create, 
and  not  upon  the  power  to  complicate 
or  prevent. 

The  Ark  of  the  Constitution  is  not 
to  be  destroyed,  the  priests  are  not  to 
be  driven  from  the  temple  of  justice. 
But  the  Ark  exists  not  for  the  priests 
and  the  Levites,  but  for  an  expanding 
nation.  Its  safe  place  is  not  a  temple, 
but  the  hearts  of  a  people  whom  it 
guides,  protects,  and  serves. 


THE  CONFESSIONS  OF  ONE  BEHIND  THE  TIMES 


BY  AN   OLD-TIMER 


I  AM  engaged  upon  a  book.  Having 
by  this  statement  discouraged  all  read- 
ers save  the  very  boldest,  I  venture  to 
confide  to  them,  not  its  subject,  but  its 
causes,  so  far  as  I  may  do  so  without 
betraying  the  secrets  of  my  guild;  for 
every  trade  has  its  dark  corner,  sought 
out  by  investigating  committees  and 
muck-raking  magazines,  and  the  busi- 
ness of  university  professor  must,  like 
all  others,  protect  its  arcana  from  un- 
sympathetic scrutiny.  The  investiga- 
tion has,  in  fact,  already  begun,  and 
a  few  in  our  ranks  are  too  familiar  with 
such  terms  in  the  science  of  academic 
mensuration  as  *  research-units/  and 
*  ratio  of  professor-power  to  assistant- 
professor-power/  These  new  ideas  im- 
press me  a  good  deal,  I  confess,  es- 
pecially when  I  hear  one  of  my  pupils 
of  a  few  years  ago  demonstrating  to  us 
his  teachers  just  what  blunders  we 
made  in  his  training.  As  I  walk  home, 
deep  in  scientific  and  pedagogic  de- 
VOL.  in -NO,  3 


spondency,  I  feel  that  he  is  right,  and 
that  the  results  produced  by  my  teach- 
ers in  me  are  vastly  superior  to  what  I 
and  my  colleagues  have  accomplished 
in  him. 

I  find  myself,  in  short,  an  old-fash- 
ioned person,  not  quickly  adaptable  to 
the  times  in  which  I  live;  and  though 
I  have  been  so  duly  chastened  by  my 
juniors  as  only  rarely  and  in  secret  to 
reveal  myself  as  Silaiidator  temporis  acti, 
still  it  is  difficult  or  impossible  for  me 
to  reach  the  flying  goal  of  being  up-to- 
date. 

When  the  elective  system  was  de- 
scending upon  us,  as  some  one  has 
said,  'like  the  great  sheet  let  down  out 
of  heaven '  (and  with  equally  varied  and 
tempting  contents),  I  was  just  begin- 
ning in  my  classes  to  substitute  for  the 
dogmatic  memoriter  methods,  in  which 
I  had  been  nurtured,  a  set  of  attract- 
ively arranged  inductive  nibbles  at  the 
great  cake  of  knowledge.  Again  (if  I 


354         THE  CONFESSIONS  OF  ONE  BEHIND  THE  TIMES 


may  abruptly  change  metaphors,  like 
horses,  in  mid-stream),  when  I  had 
barely  climbed  from  the  straight  and 
narrow  way  of  prescribed  studies  to 
the  broad  open  plateau  of  unlimited 
election  and  was  rather  helplessly  try- 
ing, among  its  confused  and  recrossing 
cart-paths,  to  find  where  the  real  via 
salutis  lay,  I  was  puzzled  to  find  what 
had  become  of  my  more  progressive 
colleagues,  whose  advice  and  example 
had  lured  me  to  these  heights.  After 
considerable  search  I  found  that  they 
were  apparently  dispersed  in  a  series 
of  curious  little  natural  pockets  or 
recesses,  perfectly  self-sufficient  and 
completely  separated  one  from  another, 
and  each,  for  its  own  denizens,  as  easy 
of  access  and  as  difficult  of  egress  as 
Avernus  itself. 

As  I  looked  from  above,  from  my 
broad  but  somewhat  chilly  plateau, 
there  I  could  see  them,  each  like  a 
monk  in  his  cell,  and  each  dipping 
his  pen  in  the  newly  patented  ink 
of  productive  scholarship  or  applying 
his  already  practiced  lips  to  the  blow- 
pipe of  original  research.  I  tried  to  call 
to  one  or  two  of  them  from  where  I 
stood,  telling  them  how  pleasant  I 
had  hoped  it  would  be  to  ramble  with 
them  over  the  open  country.  They 
replied  politely  but  briefly,  saying 
that  for  me,  a  philosopher,  it  might  be 
permissible  to  stray  at  large,  but  for 
them  scholarship  must  be  henceforth 
not  broad  but  deep.  One  of  them,  in 
reply  to  a  question  of  mine,  admitted 
that  he  felt  at  times  a  little  lonely, 
and  that  he  had  thought  of  tunneling 
through  to  the  valley  of  his  nearest 
neighbor,  but  he  doubted  whether  he 
would  have  time  in  leisure  moments 
to  get  there,  without  doing  injustice 
to  his  research,  and  he  also  doubted 
whether  his  neighbor  would,  or  even 
could,  meet  him  halfway. 

So  I  left  my  former  colleagues  and 
began  to  search  over  the  plateau  for  my 


present  pupils;  but  somehow  most  of 
them  had  fallen  into  the  hollows  and 
could  n't  get  out,  and  the  few  I  could 
finally  gather  around  me  seemed  to 
have  their  attention  much  distracted, 
like  my  own,  by  the  extent  of  the  land- 
scape and  its  horizon.  Now  and  then 
they  would  run  off  to  one  side,  when- 
ever we  approached  a  hollow,  to  see 
what  their  comrades  in  it  were  doing. 
Not  a  few  in  this  process  fell  over  the 
edge  and  were  lost.  I  thought  of  the 
old  days  when  we  all,  teachers  and  pu- 
pils alike,  walked  on  the  one  straight 
road  in  the  valley,  with  fewer  views 
along  the  way,  but  with  many  pleasant 
salutations  and  conversations  as  we 
met  and  passed  one  another,  and  we 
all  were  fondly  hoping  that  the  same 
road  would  lead  us  somewhere  at  last. 
But  enough  of  metaphor,  lest  it  de- 
generate into  allegory,  which  is  alike 
unscholarly  and  out-of-date. 

A  few  years  ago,  an  acquaintance 
disclosed  to  me  that  the  only  sure  road 
to  academic  preferment  (if  that  be  the 
proper  term  —  the  English  ecclesias- 
tical term  'living'  has,  naturally,  no 
analogue  in  the  American  college)  was 
to  publish.  'Publish  what?'  said  I  in- 
nocently. '  Pages;  no  matter  what,'  said 
he,  in  a  whisper,  with  a  glance  to  see 
that  no  one  could  overhear.  Who  would 
not  be  impressed  by  wisdom  so  unself- 
ishly and  courageously  imparted?  But 
I  am  always  a  little  slow  in  acting  upon 
advice,  and  for  some  time  I  let  matters 
slide.  I  did  write  one  or  two  little  notes 
for  learned  reviews  on  more  or  less 
technical  and  unimportant  subjects, 
but  I  had  been  trained  when  a  boy  to 
say  a  thing  in  as  few  words  as  possible 
(a  defect  which  I  am  fast  outgrowing), 
and  the  few  ideas  which  nature  had 
bestowed  upon  me  did  n't  fill  many 
pages.  Clearly  this  method  would  n't 
do. 

After  a  little  it  occurred  to  me  that 
the  problem  might  be  solved  in  one 


THE  CONFESSIONS  OF  ONE  BEHIND  THE  TIMES         355 


of  two  ways:  either  by  increasing  the 
number  of  ideas  to  an  article,  or  by 
increasing  the  number  of  words  to  an 
idea;  and,  pausing  to  study  the  writ- 
ings of  some  of  my  colleagues,  who,  I 
understood,  were  considered  promis- 
ing scholars  in  their  respective  fields, 
I  soon  discovered  that  the  latter  was 
the  approved  method.  My  examination 
of  their  works  taught  me  other  valu- 
able points  in  technique,  such  as  the 
use  of  thick  paper  to  make  a  bulky 
volume,  the  dignity  of  wide  margins 
and  large  type,  and  the  insertion  of 
lengthy  quotations  and  of  columns  of 
statistics,  not  too  closely  printed.  Then, 
too,  I  noted  the  effect  of  full  tables  of 
contents,  in  which  one  tells  what  he  will 
discuss  on  each  separate  page;  and  of 
equally  full  indexes,  telling  what  he  has 
discussed  on  each  separate  page;  these 
two  features  resembling  the  water- 
tight compartments  at  the  bow  and 
stern  of  an  ocean  steamship,  designed 
to  protect  the  vital  but  frail  part  be- 
tween. But  often,  when  I  looked  with- 
in, what  was  my  surprise  to  find  that, 
in  spite  of  such  elaborate  protective 
arrangements,  the  cargo  had  apparent- 
ly been  jettisoned,  or  else  that  the  ship 
had  put  to  sea  with  nothing  on  board 
but  sand-ballast.  This  was  a  little 
startling  to  me  with  my  inherited  re- 
spect for  the  dignity  and  importance 
of  our  merchant  marine.  Yet  nil  ad- 
mirari,  as  Horace  says  —  but  I  forgot 
for  the  moment  that  one  of  the  habits 
I  have  been  trying  to  unlearn  is  that  of 
extemporaneous  and  unverified  quot- 
ation, especially  from  the  Bible  or 
from  the  classics,  which  I  find  in  par- 
ticularly bad  form  at  present. 

While  making  confessions  may  I  also 
make  another?  When  a  boy,  I  was 
taught  proper  restraint  in  the  use  of 
the  first  personal  pronoun,  but  I  had 
never  been  forbidden  its  use  entirely. 
My  models  nowadays,  I  find,  do  other- 
wise. Why,  Stubbs,  my  learned  col- 


league in  history,  told  me  the  other 
day  that  he  made  a  regular  practice,  in 
order  to  secure  proper  objectivity  in 
his  voluminous  work,  of  avoiding  the 
pronoun  'I*.  *I  find  it  hard/  he  said, 
'even  now  always  to  remember,  but  I 
have  secured  the  services  of  a  grad- 
uate student  who  runs  over  my  manu- 
script and  makes  these  substitutions: 
for  "  I "  he  writes,  "  the  critical  student 
of  history";  for  "my,"  "the  historical 
investigator's";  and  for  "me,"  "the 
candid  historian."  It  really,'  he  con- 
tinued, 'has  had  a  most  bracing  effect 
upon  my  style.'  The  next  day  he  sent 
me  a  copy,  fresh  from  the  press,  of  his 
Life  and  Letters  of  William  Murray, 
First  Settler  in  Murrayville,  Oklahoma. 
Edited,  with  a  Critical  Introduction,  by 
Roderick  Stubbs,  Ph.D.,  and  I  began  to 
find  myself  a  convert  to  the  denatured 
style  which  it  so  beautifully  illustrates. 

But  I  was  still  without  a  subject  for 
my  magnum  opus.  The  census  re- 
ports, such  an  unfailing  resource  for 
some  of  my  friends  in  other  lines  of 
work,  seemed  to  contain  little  that 
could  be  brought  to  bear  upon  phil- 
osophy. I  look  back  now  with  regret 
upon  the  supineness  with  which  we 
philosophers,  of  my  generation  and 
those  before  it,  have  allowed  the  rich 
statistical  fields  of  the  natural  sciences 
and  psychology  and  economics  and 
education  and  sociology  to  slip,  one  by 
one,  out  of  our  proprietorship.  What 
would  some  of  us  not  give  for  a  tithe 
of  those  opportunities  for  counting 
and  tabulating  that  have  fallen  now  to 
other  fingers  than  ours!  Because  we 
cannot  each  be  a  James  or  a  Bergson, 
must  we  be  excluded  from  productiv- 
ity, and  must  we  grope  in  vain  for 
some  little  theme  proportionate  to  our 
powers? 

I  thought  of  writing  some  popular 
articles  or  books  in  my  own  field,  but 
of  course  that  was  only  in  a  moment  of 
weakness,  for  I  knew  well  enough  how 


356         THE   CONFESSIONS  OF  ONE  BEHIND  THE  TIMES 


they  would  be  received.  So,  like  the 
farmer's  daughter  back  from  a  board- 
ing-school, too  highly  educated  to  live 
at  home,  and  too  unsophisticated  to 
live  anywhere  else,  I  felt  myself  some- 
thing of  a  failure.  At  this  juncture  a 
kind  friend  said  to  me,  *  Why  not  do 
some  translating?'  From  that  seed 
has  grown  my  present  work.  For  even 
a  translation,  if  it  be  big  and  of  some 
book  too  abstruse  for  the  dreaded 
popular  reader,  may  not  be  without 
an  academic  grace  of  its  own.  The 
personality  (or  lack  of  personality)  of 
the  translator  is  easily  concealed,  and 
bulk  may  be  attained  without  any  of 
the  pains  that  accompany  the  birth  of 
an  idea  or  the  anxieties  that  attend 
its  rearing.  In  short,  translation  is  like 
the  adopting  of  a  well-developed  child, 
whose  chief  defects  may  plausibly  be 
ascribed  to  heredity,  and  for  whose 
virtues  the  adopting  parents  may,  some 
day,  obtain  a  little  credit.  Not  only 
that,  but  one  good  translation  deserves 
another,  and  so  long  as  industrious 
Germans,  with  or  without  ideas,  con- 
tinue their  amazing  productivity,  so 
long  my  pen  need  never  rust  from 
disuse. 

But  one  cloud,  the  size  of  a  man's 
hand,  has  lately  appeared  upon  my 
horizon.  Can  it  be  that  another  change 
is  impending,  and  that  I,  on  the  hill, 
well  in  the  rear,  see  it  more  clearly  than 
some  of  the  foremost  fighters  in  the 
valleys?  A  visitant  has  recently  come 
to  our  shores  from  no  less  a  centre  of 
light  than  Berlin  (a  name  not  lightly 
to  be  taken  upon  any  lips),  with  the 
pronouncement  that  one  thing  still  is 
lacking  in  our  educational  fabric; 


namely,  that  quality  in  the   German 
professor  known  as  Personlichkeit. 

Far  be  it  from  me,  though  a  professed 
translator,  to  weaken  by  inadequate 
translation  that  resonant  word.  Rather 
let  me  watch  its  magic  effect  upon  my 
contemporaries.  How  sudden,  Friend 
Stubbs,  may  be  the  reversal  of  your 
most  prized  scholarly  habits  and  ideals 
if  the  aroma  of  Personlichkeit  must  be 
made  to  exhale  both  from  your  pre- 
sence and  from  your  carefully  desic- 
cated and  depersonalized  volumes! 
And  young  Whitaker,  our  efficiency 
expert,  who  will  tell  you  the  cost  to 
the  university  of  each  sheet  of  paper 
used  therein  (except  such  university 
stationery  as  he  impartially  employs 
for  his  private  correspondence),  that 
emotionless  manipulator  of  the  ma- 
chinery which  is  gradually  being  im- 
posed upon  us  —  is  Whitaker,  I  say, 
suddenly  to  pause  in  his  productive 
processes  and  clothe  himself  with  Per- 
sonlichkeit as  with  a  garment?  And 
will  my  other  colleagues  —  yes,  and 
shall  I  myself  —  some  day  be  strutting 
about  in  our  respective  Personlich- 
keiten,  as  unfamiliar  at  first  to  one  an- 
other, and  even  to  ourselves,  as  in  that 
motley  garb  of  academic  dignity  in 
which  we  disport  ourselves  on  Com- 
mencement Day?  But  my  place,  as  I 
said  before,  has  ever  been  in  the  rear  of 
great  movements;  therefore  I  must 
back  to  my  translating  (of  which  I 
should  have  been  able,  according  to 
tables  furnished  me  by  Whitaker,  to 
do  seven  and  three  sixteenths  pages 
in  the  time  wasted  over  these  lines), 
and  again  leave  to  others  the  brunt 
of  first  contact  with  the  new  order. 


THE  LIFE  OF  IRONY 


BY    RANDOLPH    S.    BOURNE 


I  COULD  never,  until  recently,  divest 
myself  of  the  haunting  feeling  that  be- 
ing ironical  had  something  to  do  with 
the  entering  of  the  iron  into  one's  soul. 
I  thought  I  knew  what  irony  was,  and  I 
admired  it  immensely.  I  could  not  be- 
lieve that  there  was  something  metallic 
and  bitter  about  it.  Yet  this  sinister 
connotation  of  a  clanging,  rasping 
meanness  of  spirit,  which  I  am  sure  it 
has  still  in  many  people's  minds,  clung 
about  it,  until  one  happy  day  my  dic- 
tionary told  me  that  the  iron  had  never 
entered  into  the  soul  at  all,  but  the  soul 
into  the  iron  (St.  Jerome  had  read  the 
psalm  wrong),  and  that  irony  was 
Greek,  with  all  the  free,  happy  play  of 
the  Greek  spirit  about  it,  letting  in 
fresh  air  and  light  into  others'  minds 
and  our  own.  It  was  to  the  Greek  an 
incomparable  method  of  intercourse, 
the  rub  of  mind  against  mind  by  the 
simple  use  of  simulated  ignorance,  and 
the  adoption,  without  committing  one's 
self,  of  another's  point  of  view.  Not 
until  I  read  the  Socrates  of  Plato  did  I 
fully  appreciate  that  this  irony,  —  this 
pleasant  challenging  of  the  world,  this 
insistent  judging  of  experience,  this 
sense  of  vivid  contrasts  and  incongrui- 
ties, of  comic  juxtapositions,  of  flaring 
brilliancies,  and  no  less  heartbreaking 
impossibilities,  of  all  the  little  parts  of 
one's  world  being  constantly  set  off 
against  each  other,  and  made  intelligi- 
ble only  by  being  translated  into  and 
defined  in  each  other's  terms,  —  that 
this  was  a  life,  and  a  life  of  beauty, 


that  one  might  suddenly  discover  one's 
self  living  it  all  unawares.  And  if  one 
could  judge  one's  own  feeble  reflection, 
it  was  a  life  that  had  no  room  for  iron 
within  its  soul. 

We  should  speak  not  of  the  Socratic 
method,  but  of  the  Socratic  life.  For 
irony  is  a  life  rather  than  a  method.  A 
life  cannot  be  taken  off  and  put  on 
again  at  will;  a  method  can.  To  be 
sure,  some  people  talk  of  life  exactly  as 
if  it  were  some  portable  commodity,  or 
some  exchangeable  garment.  We  must 
live,  they  cry,  as  if  they  were  about 
to  begin.  And  perhaps  they  are.  Only 
some  of  us  would  rather  die  than  live 
that  puny  life  that  they  can  adopt  and 
cover  themselves  with.  Irony  is  too 
rich  and  precious  a  thing  to  be  capable 
of  such  transmission.  The  ironist  is 
born  and  not  made.  This  critical  atti- 
tude toward  life,  this  delicious  sense 
of  contrasts  that  we  call  irony,  is  not  a 
pose  or  an  amusement.  It  is  something 
that  colors  every  idea  and  every  feeling 
of  the  man  who  is  so  happy  as  to  be  en- 
dowed with  it. 

Most  people  will  tell  you,  I  suppose, 
that  the  religious  conviction  of  salva- 
tion is  the  only  permanently  satisfying 
coloring  of  life.  In  the  splendid  iron- 
ists, however,  one  sees  a  sweeter,  more 
flexible  and  human  principle  of  life, 
adequate,  without  the  buttress  of  su- 
pernatural belief,  to  nourish  and  forti- 
fy the  spirit.  In  the  classic  ironist  of  all 
time,  irony  shows  an  inherent  nobility; 
a  nobility  that  all  ages  have  compared 
favorably  with  the  Christian  ideal. 
Lacking  the  spur  of  religious  emotion, 

357 


358 


THE  LIFE  OF  IRONY 


the  sweetness  of  irony  may  be  more 
difficult  to  maintain  than  the  mood  of 
belief.  But  may  it  not  for  that  very 
reason  be  judged  superior,  for  is  it  not 
written,  'He  that  endureth  unto  the 
end  shall  be  saved'? 

It  is  not  easy  to  explain  the  quality 
of  that  richest  and  most  satisfying 
background  of  life.  It  lies,  I  think,  in  a 
vivid  and  intense  feeling  of  aliveness 
which  it  gives.  Experience  comes  to 
the  ironist  in  little  darts  or  spurts,  with 
the  added  sense  of  contrast.  Most  men, 
I  am  afraid,  see  each  bit  of  personal  ex- 
perience as  a  unit,  strung  more  or  less 
loosely  on  a  string  of  other  mildly  re- 
lated bits.  But  the  man  with  the  iron- 
ical temperament  is  forced  constantly 
to  compare  and  contrast  his  experi- 
ence with  what  was,  or  what  might 
be,  or  what  ought  to  be,  and  it  is  the 
shocks  of  these  comparisons  and  con- 
trasts that  make  up  his  inner  life.  He 
thinks  he  leads  a  richer  life,  because  he 
feels  not  only  the  individual  bits  but 
the  contrasts  besides,  in  all  their  vari- 
ous shadings  and  tints.  To  this  sense  of 
impingement  of  facts  upon  life  is  due 
a  large  part  of  this  vividness  of  irony; 
and  the  rest  is  due  to  the  alertness  of 
the  ironical  mind.  The  ironist  is  al- 
ways critically  awake.  He  is  always 
judging,  and  watching  with  inexhaust- 
ible interest,  in  order  that  he  may 
judge.  Now  irony,  in  its  best  sense,  is  an 
exquisite  sense  of  proportion,  a  sort  of 
spiritual  tact  in  judging  the  values  and 
significances  of  experience.  This  sense 
of  being  spiritually  alive,  which  cease- 
less criticism  of  the  world  we  live  in 
gives  us,  combined  with  the  sense  of 
power  which  free  and  untrammeled 
judging  produces  in  us,  is  the  back- 
ground of  irony.  And  it  should  be  a 
means  to  the  truest  goodness. 

Socrates  made  one  mistake,  —  know- 
ledge is  not  goodness.  But  it  is  a  step 
toward  judging,  and  good  judgment  is 
the  true  goodness.  For  it  is  on  judg- 


ment impelled  by  desire  that  we  act. 
The  clearer  and  cleaner  our  judgments 
then,  the  more  definite  and  correlated 
ouractions.  And  the  great  value  of 
these  judgments  of  irony  is  that  they 
are  not  artificial  but  spring  naturally 
out  of  life.  Irony,  the  science  of  com- 
parative experience,  compares  things 
not  with  an  established  standard  but 
with  each  other,  and  the  values  that 
slowly  emerge  from  the  process,  values 
that  emerge  from  one's  own  vivid  re- 
actions, are  constantly  revised,  correct- 
ed, and  refined  by  that  same  sense  of 
contrast.  The  ironic  life  is  a  life  keenly 
alert,  keenly  sensitive,  reacting  prompt- 
ly with  feelings  of  liking  or  dislike  to 
each  bit  of  experience,  letting  none  of 
it  pass  without  interpretation  and  as- 
similation, a  life  full  and  satisfying,  — 
indeed  a  rival  of  the  religious  life. 

The  life  of  irony  has  the  virtues  of 
the  religious  life  without  its  defects.  It 
expresses  the  aggressive  virtues  without 
the  quiescence  of  resignation.  For  the 
ironist  has  the  courageous  spirit,  the 
sympathetic  heart,  and  the  understand- 
ing mind,  and  can  give  them  full  play, 
unhampered  by  the  searching  intro- 
spection of  the  religious  mind  that 
often  weakens  rather  than  ennobles 
and  fortifies.  He  is  at  one  with  the  re- 
ligious man  in  that  he  hates  apathy  and 
stagnation,  for  they  mean  death.  But 
he  is  superior  in  that  he  attacks  apathy 
of  intellect  and  personality  as  well  as 
apathy  of  emotion.  He  has  a  great 
conviction  of  the  significance  of  all 
life,  the  lack  of  which  conviction  is  the 
most  saddening  feature  of  the  religious 
temperament.  The  religious  man  pre- 
tends that  every  aspect  of  life  has 
meaning  for  him,  but  in  practice  he 
constantly  minimizes  the  noisier  and 
vivider  elements.  He  is  essentially  an 
aristocrat  in  his  interpretation  of 
values,  while  the  ironist  is  incorrigibly 
a  democrat. 

Religion  gives  a  man  an  intimacy 


THE  LIFE   OF  IRONY 


359 


with  a  few  selected  and  rarified  virtues 
and  moods,  while  irony  makes  him  a 
friend  of  the  poor  and  lowly  among 
spiritual  things.  When  the  religious 
man  is  healing  and  helping,  it  is  at  the 
expense  of  his  spiritual  comfort;  he 
must  tear  himself  away  from  his  com- 
panions, and  go  out  grimly  and  sacri- 
ficingly  into  the  struggle.  The  ironist, 
living  his  days  among  the  humbler 
things,  feels  no  such  severe  call  to  serv- 
ice. And  yet  the  ironist,  since  he  has 
no  citadel  of  truth  to  defend,  is  really 
the  more  adventurous.  Life,  not  fixed 
in  predestined  formulas,  or  measurable 
by  fixed,  immutable  standards,  is  fluid, 
rich,  and  exciting.  To  the  ironist  it  is 
both  discovery  and  creation.  His  cour- 
age seeks  out  the  obscure  places  of 
human  personality,  and  his  sympathy 
and  understanding  create  new  inter- 
ests and  enthusiasms  in  the  other  minds 
upon  which  they  play.  And  these  new 
interests  in  turn  react  upon  his  own  life, 
discovering  unexpected  vistas  there, 
and  creating  new  insight  into  the 
world  that  he  lives  in.  That  demo- 
cratic, sympathetic  outlook  upon  the 
feelings  and  thoughts  and  actions  of 
men  and  women  is  the  life  of  irony. 

That  life  is  expressed  in  the  social 
intercourse  of  ourselves  with  others. 
The  daily  fabric  of  the  life  of  irony  is 
woven  out  of  our  critical  communings 
with  ourselves  and  the  personalities  of 
our  friends,  and  the  people  with  whom 
we  come  in  contact.  The  ironist,  by 
adopting  another's  point  of  view  and 
making  it  his  own,  in  order  to  carry  light 
and  air  into  it,  literally  puts  himself  in 
the  other  man's  place.  Irony  is  thus  the 
truest  sympathy.  It  is  no  cheap  way 
of  ridiculing  an  opponent  by  putting  on 
his  clothes  and  making  fun  of  him. 
The  ironist  has  no  opponent,  but  only 
a  friend.  And  in  his  irony  he  is  helping 
that  friend  to  reveal  himself.  That  half- 
seriousness,  that  solemn  treatment  of 
the  trivial  and  trivial  treatment  of  the 


solemn,  which  is  the  pattern  of  the 
ironist's  talk,  is  but  his  way  of  exhib- 
iting the  unexpected  contrasts  and 
shadings  that  he  sees  to  be  requisite  to 
the  keenest  understanding  of  the  situa- 
tion. The  ironist  borrows  and  ex- 
changes and  appropriates  ideas  and 
gives  them  a  new  setting  in  juxtaposi- 
tion with  others,  but  he  never  bur- 
lesques or  caricatures  or  exaggerates 
them.  If  an  idea  is  absurd,  the  slightest 
change  of  environment  will  show  that 
absurdity. 

The  mere  transference  of  an  idea  to 
another's  mouth  will  bring  to  light  all 
its  hidden  meaninglessness.  It  needs 
no  extraneous  aid.  If  an  idea  is  hollow, 
it  will  show  itself  cowering  against  the 
intellectual  background  of  the  ironist 
like  the  puny,  shivering  thing  it  is. 
If  a  point  of  view  cannot  bear  being 
adopted  by  another  person,  if  it  is  not 
hardy  enough  to  be  transplanted,  it  has 
little  right  to  exist  at  all.  This  world 
is  no  hothouse  for  ideas  and  attitudes. 
Too  many  outworn  ideas  are  skulking 
in  dark  retreats,  sequestered  from  the 
light;  every  man  has  great,  sunless 
stretches  in  his  soul  where  base  preju- 
dices lurk  and  flourish.  On  these  the 
white  light  of  irony  is  needed  to  play. 
And  it  delights  the  ironist  to  watch 
them  shrivel  and  decay  under  that 
light. 

The  little  tabooed  regions  of  well- 
bred  people,  the  *  things  we  never  men- 
tion,' the  basic  biases  and  assumptions 
that  underlie  the  lives  and  thinking 
of  every  class  and  profession,  our  sec- 
ond-hand dogmas  and  phrases,  —  all 
these  live  and  thrive  because  they  have 
never  been  transplanted,  or  heard 
from  the  lips  of  another.  The  dictum 
that  *  the  only  requisites  for  success  are 
honesty  and  merit,'  which  we  applaud 
so  frantically  from  the  lips  of  the  suc- 
cessful, becomes  a  ghastly  irony  in  the 
mouth  of  an  unemployed  workingman. 
There  would  be  a  frightful  mortality  of 


360 


THE  LIFE  OF  IRONY 


points  of  view  could  we  have  a  perfect- 
ly free  exchange  such  as  this.  Irony  is 
just  this  temporary  borrowing  and 
lending.  Many  of  our  cherished  ideals 
would  lose  half  their  validity  were  they 
put  bodily  into  the  mouths  of  the  less 
fortunate.  But  if  irony  destroys  some 
ideals  it  builds  up  others.  It  tests 
ideals  by  their  social  validity,  by  their 
general  interchangeability  among  all 
sorts  of  people  and  the  world,  but  if  it 
leaves  the  foundations  of  many  in  a 
shaky  condition,  and  renders  more  sim- 
ply provisional,  those  that  it  does  leave 
standing  are  imperishably  founded  in 
the  common  democratic  experience  of 
all  men. 

To  the  ironist  it  seems  that  the  irony 
is  not  in  the  speaking,  but  in  the  things 
themselves.  He  is  a  poor  ironist  who 
would  consciously  distort,  or  attempt 
to  make  another's  idea  appear  in  any 
light  except  its  own.  Absurdity  is  an 
intrinsic  quality  of  so  many  things  that 
they  only  have  to  be  touched  to  reveal 
it.  The  deadliest  way  to  annihilate  the 
unoriginal  and  the  insincere  is  to  let  it 
speak  for  itself.  Irony  is  this  letting 
things  speak  for  themselves  and  hang 
themselves  by  their  own  rope.  Only,  it 
repeats  the  words  after  the  speaker, 
and  adjusts  the  rope.  It  is  the  com- 
manding touch  of  a  comprehending  per- 
sonality that  dissolves  the  seemingly 
tough  husk  of  the  idea. 

The  ironical  method  might  be  com- 
pared to  the  acid  that  develops  a  photo- 
graphic plate.  It  does  not  distort  the 
image,  but  merely  brings  clearly  to  the 
light  all  that  was  implicit  in  the  plate 
before.  And  if  it  brings  the  picture  to 
the  light  with  values  reversed,  so  does 
irony  revel  in  a  paradox,  which  is  sim- 
ply a  photographic  negative  of  the 
truth,  truth  with  the  values  reversed. 
But  turn  the  negative  ever  so  slightly 
so  that  the  light  falls  upon  it,  and  the 
perfect  picture  appears  in  all  its  true 
values  and  beauty.  Irony,  we  may 


say  then,  is  the  photography  of  the 
soul.  The  picture  goes  through  certain 
changes  in  the  hands  of  the  ironist, 
but  without  these  changes  the  truth 
would  be  simply  a  blank,  unmeaning 
surface.  The  photograph  is  a  synonym 
for  deadly  accuracy.  Similarly  the 
ironist  insists  always  on  seeing  things 
as  they  are.  He  is  a  realist,  whom  the 
grim  satisfaction  of  seeing  the  truth 
compensates  for  any  sordidness  that 
it  may  bring  along  with  it.  Things  as 
they  are,  thrown  against  the  back- 
ground of  things  as  they  ought  to  be, 
—  this  is  the  ironist's  vision.  I  should 
like  to  feel  that  the  vision  of  the  relig- 
ious man  is  not  too  often  things  as  they 
are,  thrown  against  the  background  of 
things  as  they  ought  not  to  be. 

The  ironist  is  the  only  man  who 
makes  any  serious  attempt  to  distin- 
guish between  fresh  and  second-hand 
experience.  Our  minds  are  so  unfortu- 
nately arranged  that  all  sorts  of  belief 
can  be  accepted  and  propagated  quite 
independently  of  any  rational  or  even 
experiential  basis  at  all.  Nature  does 
not  seem  to  care  very  much  whether 
our  ideas  are  true  or  not,  so  long  as  we 
get  on  through  life  safely  enough.  And 
it  is  surprising  on  what  an  enormous 
amount  of  error  we  can  get  along  com- 
fortably. We  cannot  be  wrong  on 
every  point  or  we  should  cease  to  live, 
but  so  long  as  we  are  empirically  right 
in  our  habits,  the  truth  or  falsity  of  our 
ideas  seems  to  have  little  effect  upon 
our  comfort.  We  are  born  into  a  world 
that  is  an  inexhaustible  store  of  ready- 
made  ideas,  stored  up  in  tradition,  in 
books,  and  in  every  medium  of  com- 
munication between  our  minds  and 
others.  All  we  have  to  do  is  to  accept 
this  predigested  nourishment,  and  ask 
no  questions.  We  could  live  a  whole 
life  without  ever  making  a  really  in- 
dividual response,  without  providing 
ourselves,  out  of  our  own  experience, 
with  any  of  the  material  that  our  minds 


THE  LIFE  OF  IRONY 


361 


work  on.  Many  of  us  seem  to  be  just 
this  kind  of  spiritual  parasites.  We 
may  learn  and  absorb  and  grow,  up  to 
a  certain  point.  But  eventually  some- 
thing captures  us:  we  become  incased 
in  a  suit  of  armor,  and  invulnerable  to 
our  own  experience.  We  have  lost  the 
faculty  of  being  surprised.  It  is  this  in- 
casing that  the  ironist  fears,  and  it  is 
the  ironical  method  that  he  finds  the 
best  for  preventing  it.  Irony  keeps  the 
waters  in  motion,  so  that  the  ice  never 
has  a  chance  to  form.  The  cut-and- 
dried  life  is  easy  to  form  because  it  has 
no  sense  of  contrast;  everything  comes 
to  one  on  its  own  terms,  vouching  for 
itself,  and  is  accepted  or  rejected  on  its 
own  good  looks,  and  not  because  of 
its  fitness  and  place  in  the  scheme 
of  things. 

This  is  the  courage  and  this  the  sym- 
pathy of  irony.  Have  they  not  a  beauty 
of  their  own  comparable  in  excellence 
with  the  paler  glow  of  religious  virtue? 
And  the  understanding  of  the  ironist, 
although  aggressive  and  challenging, 
has  its  justification,  too.  For  he  is  mad 
to  understand  the  world,  to  get  to  the 
bottom  of  other  personalities.  That  is 
the  reason  for  his  constant  classifica- 
tion. The  ironist  is  the  most  dogmatic 
of  persons.  To  understand  you  he 
must  grasp  you  firmly,  or  he  must  pin 
you  down  definitely;  if  he  accidentally 
nails  you  fast  to  a  dogma  that  you  in- 
dignantly repudiate,  you  must  blame 
his  enthusiasm  and  not  his  method. 
Dogmatism  is  rarely  popular,  and  the 
ironist,  of  course,  suffers.  It  hurts  peo- 
ple's eyes  to  see  a  strong  light,  and  the 
pleasant  mist-land  of  ideas  is  much 
more  emotionally  warming  than  the 
clear,  sunny  region  of  transmissible 
phrases.  How  the  average  person 
wriggles  and  squirms  under  these 
piercing  attempts  to  corner  his  person- 
ality! 'Tell  me  what  you  mean!'  or 
'What  do  you  see  in  it?'  are  the  fatal 
questions  that  the  ironist  puts,  and 


who  shall  censure  him  if  he  does  dis- 
play the  least  trace  of  malicious  delight 
as  he  watches  the  half-formed  baby 
ideas  struggle  toward  the  light,  or 
scurry  around  frantically  to  find  some 
decent  costume  in  which  they  may  ap- 
pear in  public? 

The  judgments  of  the  ironist  are 
often  discounted  as  being  too  sweep- 
ing. But  he  has  a  valid  defense.  Lack 
of  classification  is  annihilation  of 
thought.  Even  the  newest  philosophy 
will  admit  that  classification  is  a  neces- 
sary evil.  Concepts  are  indispensable, 
—  and  yet  each  concept  falsifies.  The 
ironist  must  have  as  large  a  stock  as 
possible,  but  he  must  have  a  stock. 
And  even  the  unjust  classification  is 
marvelously  effective.  The  ironist's 
name  for  his  opponent  is  a  challenge  to 
him.  The  more  sweeping  it  is,  the  more 
stimulus  it  gives  the  latter  to  repel  the 
charge.  He  must  explain  just  how  he 
is  unique  and  individual  in  his  attitude. 
And  in  this  explanation  he  reveals  and 
discovers  all  that  the  ironist  wishes  to 
know  about  him.  A  handful  of  epi- 
thets is  thus  the  ammunition  of  the 
ironist.  He  must  call  things  by  what 
seem  to  him  to  be  their  right  names. 
In  a  sense,  the  ironist  assumes  the 
prisoner  to  be  guilty  until  he  proves 
himself  innocent;  but  it  is  always  in 
order  that  justice  may  be  done,  and 
that  he  may  come  to  learn  the  prison- 
er's soul  and  all  the  wondrous  things 
that  are  contained  there. 


ii 

It  is  this  passion  for  comprehension 
that  explains  the  ironist's  apparently 
scandalous  propensity  to  publicity. 
Nothing  seems  to  him  too  sacred  to 
touch,  nothing  too  holy  for  him  to 
become  witty  about.  There  are  no 
doors  locked  to  him,  there  is  nothing 
that  can  make  good  any  claim  of  re- 
sistance to  scrutiny.  His  free-and-easy 


THE  LIFE  OF  IRONY 


manner  of  including  everything  within 
the  sweep  of  his  vision,  is  but  his  recog- 
nition, however,  of  the  fact  that  no- 
thing is  really  so  serious  as  we  think  it 
is,  and  nothing  quite  so  petty.  The 
ironist  will  descend  in  a  moment  from 
a  discussion  of  religion  to  a  squabble 
over  a  card-game,  and  he  will  defend 
himself  with  the  reflection  that  religion 
is,  after  all,  a  human  thing,  and  must 
be  discussed  in  the  light  of  every-day 
living ;  and  that  the  card-game  is  an 
integral  part  of  life,  reveals  the  person- 
alities of  the  players,  —  and  his  own 
to  himself,  —  and,  being  worthy  of  his 
interest,  is  worthy  of  his  enthusiasm. 
The  ironist  is  apt  to  test  things  by  their 
interest  as  much  as  by  their  nobility, 
and  if  he  sees  the  incongruous  and  in- 
flated in  the  lofty,  so  he  sees  the  signi- 
ficant in  the  trivial  and  raises  it  from 
its  low  degree.  Many  a  mighty  impos- 
tor does  he  put  down  from  his  seat. 
The  ironist  is  the  great  intellectual 
democrat,  in  whose  presence  and  be- 
fore whose  law  all  ideas  and  attitudes 
stand  equal.  In  his  world  there  is 
no  privileged  caste,  no  aristocracy  of 
sentiments  to  be  reverenced,  or  segre- 
gated systems  of  interests  to  be  ta- 
booed. Nothing  human  is  alien  to  the 
ironist;  the  whole  world  is  thrown 
open,  naked,  to  the  play  of  his  judg- 
ment. 

In  the  eyes  of  its  detractors,  irony 
has  all  the  vices  of  democracy.  Its 
publicity  seems  mere  vulgarity,  its  free 
hospitality  seems  to  shock  all  ideas  of 
moral  worth.  The  ironist  is  but  a 
scoffer,  they  say,  with  weapon  leveled 
eternally  at  all  that  is  good  and  true 
and  sacred.  The  adoption  of  another's 
point  of  view  seems  little  better  than 
malicious  dissimulation,  —  the  repe- 
tition of  others'  words,  an  elaborate 
mockery;  the  ironist's  eager  interest 
seems  a  mere  impudence  or  a  lack  of 
finer  instincts;  his  interest  in  the  triv- 
ial, the  last  confession  of  a  mean  spirit; 


and  his  love  of  classifying,  a  proof  of 
his  poverty  of  imaginative  resource. 
Irony,  in  other  words,  is  thought  to  be 
synonymous  with  cynicism.  But  the 
ironist  is  no  cynic.  His  is  a  kindly,  not 
a  sour,  interest  in  human  motives.  He 
wants  to  find  out  how  the  human 
machine  runs,  not  to  prove  that  it  is  a 
worthless,  broken-down  affair.  He  ac- 
cepts it  as  it  comes,  and  if  he  finds  it 
curiously  feeble  and  futile  in  places, 
blame  not  him,  but  the  nature  of  things. 
He  finds  enough  rich  compensation  in 
the  unexpected  charm  that  he  con- 
stantly finds  himself  eliciting.  The 
ironist  sees  life  steadily,  and  sees  it 
whole;  the  cynic  only  a  distorted  frag- 
ment. 

If  the  ironist  is  not  a  cynic,  neither  is 
he  merely  a  dealer  in  satire,  burlesque, 
and  ridicule.  Irony  may  be  the  raw 
material,  innocent  in  itself,  but  capable 
of  being  put  to  evil  uses.  But  it  in- 
volves neither  the  malice  of  satire,  nor 
the  horse-play  of  burlesque,  nor  the 
stab  of  ridicule.  Irony  is  infinitely 
finer,  and  more  delicate  and  imper- 
sonal. The  satirist  is  always  personal 
and  concrete,  but  the  ironist  deals  with 
general  principles  and  broad  aspects 
of  human  nature.  It  cannot  be  too 
much  emphasized  that  the  function  of 
the  ironist  is  not  to  make  fun  of  people, 
but  to  give  their  souls  an  airing.  The 
ironist  is  a  judge  on  the  bench,  giving 
men  a  public  hearing.  He  is  not  an 
aggressive  spirit  who  goes  about  seek- 
ing whom  he  may  devour,  or  a  spiritual 
lawyer  who  courts  litigation,  but  the 
judge  before  whom  file  all  the  facts  of 
his  experience:  the  people  he  meets; 
the  opinions  he  hears  or  reads;  his  own 
attitudes  and  prepossessions.  If  any 
are  convicted  they  are  self-convicted. 
The  judge  himself  is  passive,  merciful, 
lenient.  There  is  judgment,  but  no 
punishment.  Or  rather,  the  trial  itself 
is  the  punishment. 

Now,  satire  is  all  that  irony  is  not. 


THE  LIFE  OF  IRONY 


363 


The  satirist  is  the  aggressive  lawyer, 
fastening  upon  particular  people  and 
particular  qualities.  But  irony  is  no 
more  personal  than  the  sun  that  sends 
his  flaming  darts  into  the  world.  The 
satirist  is  a  purely  practical  man,  with 
a  business  instinct,  bent  on  the  main 
chance  and  the  definite  object.  He  is 
often  brutal,  and  always  overbearing; 
the  ironist  never.  Irony  may  wound 
from  the  very  fineness  and  delicacy  of 
its  attack,  but  the  wounding  is  inci- 
dental. The  sole  purpose  of  the  satirist 
and  the  burlesquer  is  to  wound;  and 
they  test  their  success  by  the  deepness 
of  the  wound.  But  irony  tests  its  own 
by  the  amount  of  generous  light  and 
air  it  has  set  flowing  through  an  idea 
or  a  personality,  and  the  broad  signi- 
ficance it  has  revealed  in  neglected 
things. 

If  irony  is  not  brutal,  neither  is  it 
merely  critical  and  destructive.  The 
world  has  some  reason,  it  is  true,  to 
complain  against  the  rather  supercili- 
ous judiciousness  of  the  ironist.  *  Who 
are  you  to  judge  us?'  it  cries.  The 
world  does  not  like  to  feel  the  scrutiniz- 
ing eyes  of  the  ironist  as  he  sits  back  in 
his  chair;  does  not  like  to  feel  that  the 
ironist  is  simply  studying  it  and  amus- 
ing himself  at  its  expense.  It  is  uneasy, 
and  acts  sometimes  as  if  it  did  not 
have  a  perfectly  clear  conscience.  To 
this  uncomfortableness  the  ironist  can 
retort, '  What  is  it  that  you  are  afraid 
to  have  known  about  you?'  If  the 
judgment  amuses  him,  so  much  the 
worse  for  the  world.  But  if  the  idea  of 
the  ironist  as  judge  implies  that  his 
attitude  is  wholly  detached,  wholly 
objective,  it  is  an  unfortunate  meta- 
phor. For  he  is  as  much  part  and  par- 
cel of  the  human  show  as  any  of  the 
people  he  studies.  The  world  is  no 
stage,  with  the  ironist  as  audience.  His 
own  personal  reactions  with  the  people 
about  him  form  all  the  stuff  of  his 
thoughts  and  judgments.  He  has  a 


personal  interest  in  the  case;  his  own 
personality  is  inextricably  mingled  in 
the  stream  of  impressions  that  flows 
past  him.  If  the  ironist  is  destructive, 
it  is  his  own  world  that  he  is  destroy- 
ing; if  he  is  critical,  it  is  his  own  world 
that  he  is  criticizing.  And  his  irony  is 
his  critique  of  life. 

This  is  the  defense  of  the  ironist 
against  the  charge  that  he  has  a  purely 
aesthetic  attitude  toward  life.  Too 
often,  perhaps,  the  sparkling  clarity  of 
his  thought,  the  play  of  his  humor,  the 
easy  sense  of  superiority  and  intellect- 
ual command  that  he  carries  off,  make 
his  irony  appear  as  rather  the  aesthetic 
nourishment  of  his  life  than  an  active 
way  of  doing  and  being.  His  rather 
detached  air  makes  him  seem  to  view 
people  as  means,  not  ends,  in  them- 
selves. With  this  delight  in  the  vivid 
and  poignant,  he  is  prone  to  see  pic- 
turesqueness  in  the  sordid,  and  tolerate 
evils  that  he  should  condemn.  For  all 
his  interests  and  activity,  it  is  said  that 
he  does  n't  really  care.  But  this  aes- 
thetic taint  to  his  irony  is  really  only 
skin-deep. 

The  ironist  is  ironical,  not  because 
he  does  not  care,  but  because  he  cares 
too  much.  He  is  feeling  the  profound- 
est  depths  of  the  world's  great  beating, 
laboring  heart,  and  his  playful  attitude 
toward  the  grim  and  sordid  is  a  neces- 
sary relief  from  the  tension  of  too  much 
caring.  It  is  his  salvation  from  unut- 
terable despair.  The  terrible  urgency 
of  the  reality  of  poverty  and  misery 
and  exploitation  would  be  too  strong 
upon  him.  Only  irony  can  give  him  a 
sense  of  proportion,  and  make  his  life 
fruitful  and  resolute.  It  can  give  him 
a  temporary  escape,  a  slight  moment- 
ary reconciliation,  a  chance  to  draw  a 
deep  breath  of  resolve,  before  plunging 
into  the  fight.  It  is  not  a  palliative  so 
much  as  a  perspective. 

This  is  the  only  justification  of  the 
aesthetic  attitude,  that,  if  taken  pro- 


364 


THE  LIFE  OF  IRONY 


visionally,  it  sweetens  and  fortifies.  It 
is  only  deadly  when  adopted  as  abso- 
lute. The  kind  of  aesthetic  irony  that 
Pater  and  Omar  display  is  a  paralyzed, 
half-seeing,  half-caring  reflection  on 
life,  —  a  tame,  domesticated  irony, 
with  its  wings  cut,  an  irony  that  fur- 
nishes a  justification  and  a  command 
to  inaction.  It  is  the  result,  not  of 
exquisitely  refined  feelings,  but  of 
social  anaesthesia.  Their  irony,  cut  off 
from  the  great  world  of  men  and 
women  and  boys  and  girls  and  their 
intricate  interweavings  and  jostlings 
and  incongruities,  turns  pale  and 
sickly  and  numb.  The  ironist  has  no 
right  to  see  beauty  in  things  unless  he 
really  cares.  The  aesthetic  sense  is 
harmless  only  when  it  is  both  ironical 
and  social. 

in 

Irony  is  thus  a  cure  for  both  optim- 
ism and  pessimism.  Nothing  is  so  re- 
volting to  the  ironist  as  the  smiling 
optimist,  who  testifies,  in  his  fatuous 
heedlessness,  to  the  desirability  of  this 
best  of  all  possible  worlds.  But  the 
ironist  has  always  an  incorrigible  pro- 
pensity to  see  the  other  side.  The 
hopeless  maladjustment  of  too  many 
people  to  their  world,  of  their  bondage 
in  the  iron  fetters  of  circumstance, 
all  this  is  too  glaring  for  the  ironist's 
placidity.  When  he  examines  the  beau- 
tiful picture,  too  often  the  best  turns 
worst  to  him.  But  if  optimism  is  im- 
possible to  the  ironist,  so  is  pessimism. 
The  ironist  may  have  a  secret  respect 
for  the  pessimist,  —  he  at  least  has  felt 
the  bitter  tang  of  life,  and  has  really 
cared,  —  but  he  feels  that  the  pessi- 
mist lacks.  For  if  the  optimist  is  blind, 
the  pessimist  is  hypnotized.  He  is  ab- 
normally suggestible  to  evil.  But  clear- 
sighted irony  sees  that  the  world  is  too 
big  and  multifarious  to  be  evil  at  heart. 
Something  beautiful  and  joyous  lurks 
even  in  the  most  hapless,  —  a  child's 


laugh  in  a  dreary  street,  a  smile  on  the 
face  of  a  weary  woman.  It  is  this  sav- 
ing quality  of  irony  that  both  optimist 
and  pessimist  miss.  And  since  plain 
common  sense  tells  us  that  things  are 
never  quite  so  bad  or  quite  so  good  as 
they  seem,  the  ironist  carries  convic- 
tion into  the  hearts  of  men  in  their 
best  moments. 

The  ironist  is  a  person  who  counts  in 
the  world.  He  has  all  sorts  of  unex- 
pected effects  on  both  the  people  he 
goes  with  and  himself.  His  is  an  in- 
sistent personality;  he  is  as  trouble- 
some as  a  missionary.  And  he  is  a 
missionary;  for,  his  own  purpose  being 
a  comprehension  of  his  fellows'  souls, 
he  makes  them  conscious  of  their  own 
souls.  He  is  a  hard  man;  he  will  take 
nothing  on  reputation;  he  will  guaran- 
tee for  himself  the  qualities  of  things. 
He  will  not  accept  the  vouchers  of  the 
world  that  a  man  is  wise,  or  clever,  or 
sincere,  behind  the  impenetrable  veil 
of  his  face.  He  must  probe  until  he 
elicits  the  evidence  of  personality,  un- 
til he  gets  at  the  peculiar  quality  which 
distinguishes  that  individual  soul.  For 
the  ironist  is,  after  all,  a  connoisseur 
in  personality,  and  if  his  conversation 
partakes  too  often  of  the  character  of 
cross-examination,  it  is  only  as  a  lover 
of  the  beautiful,  a  possessor  of  taste, 
that  he  inquires.  He  does  not  want  to 
see  people  squirm,  but  he  does  want  to 
see  whether  they  are  alive  or  not.  If 
he  pricks  too  hard,  it  is  not  from  mal- 
ice, but  merely  from  error  in  his  esti- 
mation of  the  toughness  of  their  skins. 
What  people  are  inside  is  the  most  in- 
teresting question  in  the  world  to  the 
ironist.  And,  in  finding  out,  he  stirs 
them  up.  Many  a  petty,  doubting 
spirit  does  he  challenge  and  bully  into 
a  sort  of  self-respect.  And  many  a  bag- 
of-wind  does  he  puncture.  But  his 
most  useful  function  is  this  of  stimu- 
lating thought  and  action.  The  ironist 
forces  his  friends  to  move  their  rusty 


THE  LIFE  OF  IRONY 


365 


limbs  and  unhinge  the  creaking  doors 
of  their  minds. 

The  world  needs  more  ironists.  Shut 
up  with  one's  own  thoughts,  one  loses 
the  glow  of  life  that  comes  from  frank 
exchange  of  ideas  with  many  kinds  of 
people.  Too  many  minds  are  stuffy, 
dusty  rooms  into  which  the  windows 
have  never  been  opened, — minds  heavy 
with  their  own  crotchets,  cluttered  up 
with  untested  theories  and  conflicting 
sympathies  that  have  never  got  related 
in  any  social  way.  The  ironist  blows 
them  all  helter-skelter,  sweeps  away  the 
dust,  and  sets  everything  in  its  proper 
place  again.  Your  solid,  self-respectful 
mind,  the  ironist  confesses  he  can  do 
little  with :  it  is  not  of  his  world.  He 
comes  to  freshen  and  tone  up  the  stale 
minds.  The  ironist  is  the  great  purger 
and  cleanser  of  life.  Irony  is  a  sort  of 
spiritual  massage,  rubbing  the  souls  of 
men.  It  may  seem  rough  to  some  ten- 
der souls,  but  it  does  not  sear  or  scar 
them.  The  strong  arm  of  the  ironist 
restores  the  circulation,  and  drives 
away  ansemia. 

On  the  ironist  himself  the  effect  of 
irony  is  even  more  invigorating.  We 
can  never  really  understand  ourselves 
without  at  least  a  touch  of  irony.  The 
interpretation  of  human  nature  with- 
out is  a  simple  matter  in  comparison 
with  the  comprehension  of  that  complex 
of  elations  and  disgusts,  inhibitions, 
and  curious  irrational  impulses,  that  we 
call  ourselves.  It  is  not  true  that  by  ex- 
amining ourselves  and  coming  to  an 
understanding  of  the  way  we  behave, 
we  understand  other  people,  but  that 
by  the  contrasts  and  little  revelations 
of  our  friends  we  learn  to  interpret  our- 
selves. Introspection  is  no  match  for 
irony  as  a  guide.  The  most  illuminat- 
ing experience  that  we  can  have  is  a 
sudden  realization  that  had  we  been  in 
the  other  person's  place  we  should  have 
acted  precisely  as  he  did.  To  the  iron- 
ist this  is  no  mere  intellectual  convic- 


tion, that,  after  all,  none  of  us  are  per- 
fect, but  a  vivid  emotional  experience, 
which  has  knit  him  with  that  other 
person  in  one  moment  in  a  bond  of 
sympathy  that  could  have  been  ac- 
quired in  no  other  way.  Those  minds 
that  lack  the  touch  of  irony  are  too 
little  flexible,  or  too  heavily  buttressed 
with  self-esteem  to  make  this  sudden 
change  of  attitudes.  The  ironist,  one 
might  almost  say,  gets  his  brotherhood 
intuitively,  and  feels  the  sympathy  and 
the  oneness  in  truth  before  he  thinks 
them. 

The  ironist  is  the  only  man  who 
really  gets  outside  of  himself.  What 
he  does  for  other  people,  —  that  is, 
picking  out  a  little  piece  of  their  souls 
and  holding  it  up  for  their  inspection, 
—  he  does  for  himself.  He  gets  thus  an 
objective  view  of  his  own  spirit.  The 
unhealthy  indoor  brooding  of  intro- 
spection is  artificial  and  unproductive, 
because  it  has  no  perspective  or  con- 
trast. But  the  ironist,  with  his  constant 
outdoor  look,  sees  his  own  foibles  and 
humiliations  in  the  light  of  those  of 
other  people.  He  acquires  a  more  tol- 
erant, half-amused,  half-earnest  atti- 
tude toward  himself.  His  self-respect 
is  nourished  by  the  knowledge  that 
whatever  things  discreditable  and  fool- 
ish and  worthless  he  has  done,  he  has 
seen  them  approximated  by  others,  and 
yet  his  esteem  is  kept  safely  pruned 
down  by  the  recurring  evidence  that 
nothing  he  has  is  unique.  He  is  poised 
in  life,  ready  to  soar  or  to  walk  as  the 
occasion  demands.  He  is  pivoted, 
susceptible  to  every  stimulus,  and  yet 
chained  so  that  he  can  not  be  flung 
off  into  space  by  his  own  centrifugal 
force. 

Irony  has  the  same  sweetening  and 
freshening  effect  on  one's  own  life  that 
it  does  on  the  lives  of  those  who  come 
in  contact  with  it.  It  gives  one  a  com- 
mand of  one's  resources.  The  ironist 
practices  a  perfect  economy  of  mate- 


THE  LIFE  OF  IRONY 


rial.  For  he  must  utilize  his  wealth 
constantly,  and  over  and  over  again,  in 
various  shapes  and  shadings.  He  may 
be  poor  in  actual  material,  but,  out  of 
the  contrast  and  arrangement  of  that 
slender  store,  he  is  able,  like  a  kaleido- 
scope, to  make  a  multifarious  variety 
of  wonderful  patterns.  His  current 
coin  is,  so  to  speak,  kept  bright  by 
constant  exchange.  He  is  infinitely 
richer  than  your  opulent  but  miserly 
minds  that  hoard  up  facts,  and  are 
impotent  from  the  very  plethora  of 
their  accumulations. 

Irony  is  essential  to  any  real  hon- 
esty. For  dishonesty  is,  at  bottom, 
simply  an  attempt  to  save  somebody's 
face.  But  the  ironist  does  not  want 
any  faces  saved,  neither  his  own  nor 
those  of  other  people.  To  save  faces 
is  to  sophisticate  human  nature,  to 
falsify  the  facts,  and  miss  a  delicious 
contrast,  an  illuminating  revelation  of 
how  people  act.  So  the  ironist  is  the 
only  perfectly  honest  man.  But  he 
suffers  for  it  by  acquiring  a  reputation 
for  impudence.  His  willingness  to  bear 
the  consequences  of  his  own  acts,  his 
quiet  insistence  that  others  shall  bear 
consequences,  seem  like  mere  shame- 
lessness,  a  lack  of  delicate  feeling  for 
*  situations.'  But,  accustomed  as  he  is 
to  range  freely  and  know  no  fear  nor 
favor,  he  despises  this  reserve  as  a 
species  of  timidity  or  even  hypocrisy. 
It  is  an  irony  itself  that  the  one  tem- 
perament that  can  be  said  really  to 
appreciate  human  nature,  in  the  sense 
of  understanding  it  rightly,  should  be 
called  impudent,  and  it  is  another  that 
it  should  be  denounced  as  monstrously 
egotistical.  The  ironical  mind  is  the 
only  truly  modest  mind,  for  its  point 
of  view  is  ever  outside  itself.  If  it  calls 
attention  to  itself,  it  is  only  as  another 
of  those  fascinating  human  creatures 
that  pass  ever  by  with  their  bewilder- 
ing, alluring  ways.  If  it  talks  about 
itself,  it  is  only  as  a  third  person  in 


whom  all  the  talkers  are  supposed  to  be 
eagerly  interested.  In  this  sense  the 
ironist  has  lost  his  egoism  completely. 
He  has  rubbed  out  the  line  that  separ- 
ates his  personality  from  the  rest  of 
the  world. 

The  ironist  must  take  people  very 
seriously,  to  spend  so  much  time  over 
them.  He  must  be  both  serious  and 
sincere,  or  he  would  not  persist  in  his 
irony  and  expose  himself  to  so  much 
misunderstanding.  And  since  it  is  not 
how  people  treat  him,  but  simply  how 
they  act,  that  furnishes  the  basis  for 
his  appreciation,  the  ironist  finds  it 
easy  to  forgive.  He  has  a  way  of  letting 
the  individual  offense  slide,  in  favor  of 
a  deeper  principle.  In  the  act  of  being 
grossly  misrepresented,  he  can  feel  a 
pang  of  exasperated  delight  that  peo- 
ple should  be  so  dense;  in  the  act  of  be- 
ing taken  in,  he  can  feel  the  cleverness 
of  it  all.  He  becomes,  for  the  moment, 
his  own  enemy;  and  we  can  always  for- 
give ourselves.  Even  while  being  insult- 
ed or  outraged  or  ignored,  he  can  feel, 
*  After  all,  this  is  what  life  is!  This  is 
the  way  we  poor  human  creatures  be- 
have! '  The  ironist  is  thus,  in  a  sense, 
vicarious  human  nature.  Through  that 
deep,  anticipatory  sympathy,  he  is 
kept  clean  from  hate  or  scorn. 

The  ironist,  therefore,  has  a  valid 
defense  against  all  the  charges  of  bru- 
tality and  triviality  and  irreverence 
that  the  religious  man  is  prone  to  bring 
against  him.  He  can  care  more  deeply 
about  things  because  he  can  see  so 
much  more  widely;  and  he  can  take 
life  very  seriously  because  it  interests 
him  so  intensely;  and  he  can  feel  its 
poignancy  and  its  flux  more  keenly  be- 
cause he  delivers  himself  up  bravely  to 
its  swirling,  many-hued  current.  The 
inner  peace  of  religion  seems  gained 
only  at  the  expense  of  the  reality  of 
living.  A  life  such  as  the  life  of  irony, 
lived  fully  and  joyously,  cannot  be 
peaceful;  it  cannot  even  be  happy,  in 


THE  LIFE   OF  IRONY 


367 


the  sense  of  calm  content  and  satisfac- 
tion. But  it  can  be  better  than  either 
—  it  can  be  wise,  and  it  can  be  fruit- 
ful. And  it  can  be  good,  in  a  way  that 
the  life  of  inner  peace  cannot.  For 
the  life  of  irony,  having  no  reserve 
and  weaving  itself  out  of  the  flux  of  ex- 
perience rather  than  out  of  eternal 
values,  has  the  broad,  honest  sympa- 
thy of  democracy  that  is  impossible  to 
any  temperament  with  the  aristocratic 
taint.  One  advantage  the  religious 
life  has  is  a  salvation  in  another  world 
to  which  it  can  withdraw.  The  life 
of  irony  has  laid  up  few  treasures  in. 
heaven,  but  many  in  this  world.  Hav- 
ing gained  so  much  it  has  much  to  lose. 
But  its  glory  is  that  it  can  lose  nothing 
unless  it  lose  all. 

To  shafts  of  fortune  and  blows  of 
friends  or  enemies,  then,  the  ironist  is 
almost  impregnable.  He  knows  how  to 
parry  each  thrust  and  prepare  for  every 
emergency.  Even  if  the  arrows  reach 
him,  all  the  poison  has  been  sucked  out 
of  them  by  his  clear,  resolute  under- 
standing of  their  significance.  There  is 
but  one  weak  spot  in  his  armor,  but  one 
disaster  that  he  fears  more  almost  than 
the  loss  of  his  life,  —  a  shrinkage  of  his 
environment,  a  running  dry  of  experi- 
ence. He  fears  to  be  cut  off  from 
friends  and  crowds  and  human  faces 


and  speech  and  books,  for  he  demands 
to  be  ceaselessly  fed.  Like  a  modern 
city,  he  is  totally  dependent  on  a 
steady  flow  of  supplies  from  the  out- 
side world,  and  will  be  in  danger  of 
starvation  if  the  lines  of  communica- 
tion are  interrupted.  Without  people 
and  opinions  for  his  mind  to  play  on, 
his  irony  withers  and  faints.  He  has 
not  the  faculty  of  brooding;  he  cannot 
mine  the  depths  of  his  own  soul,  and 
bring  forth,  after  labor,  mighty  nuggets 
of  thought. 

The  flow  and  swirl  of  things  is  his 
compelling  interest.  His  thoughts  are 
reactions,  immediate  and  vivid,  to  his 
daily  experience.  Some  deep,  uncon- 
scious brooding  must  go  on,  to  pro- 
duce that  happy  precision  of  judgment 
of  his;  but  it  is  not  voluntary.  He 
is  conscious  only  of  the  shifting  light 
and  play  of  life;  his  world  is  dynam- 
ic, energetic,  changing.  He  lives  in  a 
world  of  relations,  and  he  must  have 
a  whole  store  of  things  to  be  related. 
He  has  lost  himself  completely  in  this 
world  he  lives  in.  His  ironical  inter- 
pretation of  the  world  is  his  life,  and 
this  world  is  his  nourishment.  Take 
away  this  environmental  world  and 
you  have  slain  his  soul.  He  is  in- 
vulnerable to  everything  except  that 
deprivation. 


LETTERS  OF  A  DOWN-AND-OUT 


[An  earlier  installment  of  these  letters  was 
printed  in  the  Atlantic  for  February,  with  a  note 
which  explained  that  they  are  genuine  letters  writ- 
ten without  thought  of  publication.  The  writer 
is  a  young  man  in  the  thirties,  who,  having 
achieved  very  considerable  financial  success,  met 
with  misfortunes,  and  stripped  of  money,  wife, 
and  children,  went  West  to  make  a  new  start.  — 
THE  EDITORS.] 

Wednesday,  May  8. 

From  Mr.  Malone,  not  Maloney, 
this  morning  I  secured  the  job  of  time- 
keeper at  Camp  26 A.  He  and  I  walk 
up  to-morrow.  This  has  been  a  day 
of  idleness,  devoted  chiefly  to  talking 
with  the  different  men  sitting  around 
the  so-called  hotel.  Men  here  have 
been  pretty  much  all  over  the  world, 
the  greater  part  in  search  of  gold.  A 
few  have  struck  it,  but  like  most  gam- 
bling money,  they  blew  it  in  in  short 
order.  Had  a  nap  this  afternoon  and 
caught  cold. 

Thursday,  May  9. 

Left  Seeley  with  Mr.  Malone  at 
eight  o'clock.  It  seemed  good  to  be 
walking  without  a  pack.  Mine  I  left  at 
the  warehouse,  and  it  will  reach  camp 
by  the  first  freight  team  that  goes  in  to 
our  camp.  Reached  New  Hazel  ton 
about  ten,  and  after  a  few  moments  in 
the  general  office  started  once  more  up 
river,  this  time  the  Buckley,  a  branch 
of  the  Skeena,  the  Skeena  going  north 
by  north-east,  while  the  Buckley  fol- 
lows an  easterly  direction.  Walked 
steadily  until  noon,  reaching  Duncan 
Ross's  camp  just  at  dinner-time.  He  is 
working  on  the  longest  tunnel  on  the 
road. 

Resuming  our  mush  at  one,  reached 

Camp  26 A  at  three  o'clock,  and  as 

I  had  developed  a  bird  of  a  headache, 

I  for  one  was  glad  the  trip  was  over. 

368 


Camp  26A  is  not  very  large,  only 
fifty-odd  men  being  on  the  job;  it's  a 
cut-and-fill  proposition.  The  old  time- 
keeper was  overjoyed  to  see  me;  it 
seems  he  is  captain  of  the  New  Hazel- 
ton  baseball  team  and  that  they  play 
Old  Hazelton  on  Sunday.  About  two 
hours  finished  my  instructions,  and  as 
.  the  books  are  quite  simple  I  do  not  an- 
ticipate any  great  trouble  with  the 
work. 

Friday,  May  10. 

Spent  the  day  in  checking  up  my 
predecessor's  work.  Had  an  old-fash- 
ioned headache  in  the  night  which 
I  thought  would  kill  me.  Coffee  every 
half  hour  is  keeping  me  going,  and, 
by  the  way,  is  the  best  that  I've  had 
since  I  was  in  New  York.  The  cook  is 
a  good  one,  but  has  n't  a  great  deal  to 
work  with.  Of  course,  the  further 
from  the  base  of  supplies,  the  simpler 
the  food  must  be.  It's  beef,  potatoes, 
coffee,  and  tea  three  times  a  day,  and 
very  little  besides. 

Saturday,  May  11. 

Married  twelve  years  ago  to-day. 
'Tempus  fugit.J 

Have  completely  checked  up  my  ac- 
counts. Everything  O.K.  except  cash, 
which  is  50  cents  short.  Looked  over 
the  job  carefully.  It  reminds  me  a  good 
deal  of  coal-mining. 

It's  a  great  relief  to  get  a  decent 
place  to  sleep.  The  office,  occupied  by 
the  Foreman  and  myself,  is  a  small 
(15  X 15)  log  cabin,  but  clean,  with  two 
very  decent  bunks,  and  one  gets  some 
air  at  night.  A  camp  stove  in  the  mid- 
dle of  the  room  gives  a  welcome  glow  in 
the  morning  as,  though  it  is  very  warm 
in  the  middle  of  the  day,  ice  still  forms 


LETTERS  OF  A  DOWN-AND-OUT 


369 


at  night.  Mosquitoes  awful.  I  would 
swear  some  of  them  have  an  over-all 
spread  of  wings  of  at  least  an  inch  and 

a  half. 

Sunday,  May  12. 

Spent  a  large  part  of  the  day  in 
making  shelves,  etc.,  for  my  store 
stock.  I  have  most  everything  for  sale 
that  a  country  store  sells.  Prices  are 
something  terrible;  four  candles  for 
25  cents,  cake  of  soap  25  cents,  towel 
$1,  ordinary  working  shoes  $8,  socks 
75  cents,  three  envelopes  for  10  cents. 

Also  built  myself  an  armchair,  in 
which  I  sit  as  I  write.  First  armchair 
I've  sat  in  for  seven  weeks. 

Monday,  May  13. 

Walked  to  Camp  26  this  morning  to 
get  my  pack  which  the  teamster  had 
left  there  by  mistake.  It  is  a  walk  of 
about  two  miles,  with  magnificent 
scenery  and,  way  below  my  trail,  the 
Buckley  River  flowing  by  swiftly.  It  is 
*  White  Water'  for  miles,  and  above, 
the  Cascades  covered  with  snow.  Very 
hot  sun  before  I  arrived  back  at  camp. 
Shaved  (needed  it),  and  after  dinner 
had  a  grand  clean-up.  Bath,  clean 
clothes,  and  a  hair-cut  by  the  black- 
smith. 

On  my  tally  (about  three-thirty)  I 
was  a  man  out.  Finally  discovered 
that  I  had  counted  three  Russian 
brothers  as  two.  The  three  of  them 
look  identically  alike. 

To  go  back  to  the  hair-cut,  I  needed 
it,  as  it  was  in  early  March  when  I  had 
the  last.  I  looked  a  good  deal  like  the 
late  Joe  Jefferson  when  he  played  Rip 
Van  Winkle.  It 's  getting  pretty  gray, 
and  my  eyesight  is  not  what  it  was. 
Another  sign  I  notice  of  increasing 
years  is  that  I  do  not  require  near  the 
sleep  that  I  did. 

I  'm  very  much  afraid  of  our  water- 
supply,  which  comes  from  a  small 
stream  out  of  a  swamp  that  our  'fill'  is 
crossing.  It's  full  of  wrigglers.  The 
VOL.  Ill -NO.  3 


Foreman  with  scorn  has  granted  my 
request  for  men  to  dig  a  well.  Don't 
like  well  water,  but  think  that  the 
chances  of  typhoid  are  less  with  that 
than  with  swamp  water. 

Tuesday,  May  14. 

Aside  from  my  routine  duties  I  have 
done  a  number  of  odd  jobs  to-day. 
Burned  up  a  large  amount  of  garbage 
which  was  much  too  near  the  office  and 
the  cook-house;  collected  this  with  a 
rake  that  I  constructed.  Had  the  Bull 
Cook  (man-of-all-work)  carry  off  about 
4,000,000  empty  tin  cans.  Mended  the 
cook's  assembling  table,  and  in  the 
afternoon  made  a  window  in  the  back 
of  the  office,  which  was  badly  needed, 
both  for  light  and  ventilation.  As  the 
logs  are  about  a  foot  and  a  half  through, 
it  was  quite  a  job  getting  an  auger 
through  so  I  could  use  a  saw.  (No  key- 
saw  in  camp.) 

Number  30,  a  man  who  went  to  New 
Hazelton  on  Sunday,  came  in  to-night 
with  a  pair  of  slippers  that  I  had  or- 
dered. It  surely  is  a  change  for  the 
better  to  get  boots  off  at  night. 

Wednesday,  May  15. 

The  fine  weather  continues,  but  it 
has  been  excessively  warm  the  last  two 
days;  of  course,  only  in  the  middle  of 
the  day. 

In  addition  to  the  routine  work,  I 
to-day  finished  up  the  well.  I  think  it 
will  be  a  great  improvement  over  the 
present  water-supply.  It  would  rather 
seem  as  though  from  here  out  my 
life  would  be  passive  and  rather  in  the 
role  of  spectator.  Well,  at  any  rate, 
I  went  at  a  fast  and  furious  pace  from 
1898  to  1912.  What  a  lot  of  work  I 
did  crowd  in  during  those  years!  The 
— —  king  of  New  England  seemed  to 
be  in  sight,  and  now  I  'm  a  petty  clerk 
in  the  wilds  of  British  Columbia. 
Truly,  it's  a  funny  old  world,  but  as 
a  rule  the  sporting  expression,  'They 


370 


LETTERS  OF  A  DOWN-AND-OUT 


never  come  back/  I  fancy,  is  a  true 
one.  I  don't  suppose  I  ever  will. 

I  think  I  '11  have  to  write  an  essay  on 
sheets.  With  the  exception  of  two 
nights  in  Prince  Rupert  I've  gone 
without  for  almost  two  months,  while 
I've  slept  in  underclothes  for  three. 
Then  again,  washing  one's  own  clothes 
is  an  awful  chore.  I  'd  rather  do  a  hard 
day's  work  than  tackle  the  Oil  Can 
(the  universal  washing-tub  of  British 
Columbia  being  a  ten-gallon  Imperial 
Oil  Company's  —  Canadian  branch  of 
Standard  —  can) .  It  raises  the  devil 
with  the  hands  for  hard  work. 

I  presume  the  world  wags  much  as 
usual,  but  we  don't  know  it.  Days 
since  I've  seen  a  newspaper.  I  wish  I 
had  a  Dog. 

Thursday,  May  16. 

I'm  tired  to-night  as  I  have  had  a 
long  day.  Up  at  5.30  and  it  is  now  9.30. 
(Plenty  of  light  to  write.)  Books  and 
checking  up  the  men  take  but  part  of 
my  day,  so  I  have  made  a  self-closing 
screen  door,  finished  a  drain  for  the 
cook-house,  and  washed  and  darned  all 
my  clothes.  To-morrow  I  plan  to  dig 
a  hole  in  the  swamp  for  a  bath-tub. 
Mr.  Ward,  Assistant  General  Super- 
intendent for  Farrington,  Weeks  & 
Stone,  rode  in  at  dinner-time  to-day. 
He  reported  forest  fires  as  serious  be- 
low us. 

Friday,  May  17. 

Another  day  gone.  A  change  in  the 
weather,  cooler  and  showery.  The 
snow  on  the  mountains  is  going  very 
fast.  Regular  work  and  a  skylight  that 
lifts  for  ventilation  for  the  cook-house, 
is  the  record  for  the  day.  Punch,  a  fox 
terrier,  who  belongs  to  Camp  26,  is  a 
visitor;  am  told  he  stays  two  or  three 
days.  He  is  quite  welcome.  At  the 
moment  he  occupies  my  new  chair, 
drawn  up  in  front  of  the  camp  stove, 
while  I  write  on  the  side  of  my  bunk. 

One  surely  is  in  the  wilderness  in  this 
country;  it  seems  a  million  miles  from 


the  corner  of  Boylston  and  Tremont 
Streets. 

Saturday,  May  18. 

Rained  hard  in  the  night.  Camp  has 
several  bad  leaks.  Mr.  Malone  here 
this  A.M.,  also  the  Chief  Engineer  of 
G.  T.  P.  (on  tour  of  inspection) 
dropped  in  for  dinner.  Very  blue  and 
lonesome  this  afternoon,  caused  no 
doubt  by  a  severe  cold  that  makes  me 
feel  mean  all  over. 

Since  March  11,  1910,  I  have  seen 
my  wife  and  son  but  once.  I  wonder 
when  I  '11  see  them  again  ?  In  a  year  or 
never.  I  wish  I  had  some  one  to  talk 
with.  Have  about  exhausted  the 
mental  possibilities  of  the  Foreman. 

Sunday,  May  19. 

I  believe  it 's  Sunday,  but  it 's  almost 
a  guess  as  we  do  not  boast  a  calendar. 
Of  course,  keeping  books,  particularly 
Payroll  Book,  I  always  know  the  date, 
but  one  day  in  the  week  is  like  another 
in  a  railroad  camp. 

Nothing  of  interest.  Feel  mean  and 
blue,  with  plenty  of  cold.  Used  up  my 
entire  supply  of  handkerchiefs. 

I  have  the  promise  of  a  puppy  from 
Camp  26.  His  father  is  Punch,  the 
fox  terrier  that  visited  us.  His  mother 
is  an  Irish  terrier.  Will  not  bring  him 
down  until  we  get  some  condensed  milk 
as  he  is  not  old  enough  for  meat. 

It's  curious  how  the  laboring-man 
drifts  in  this  country.  There  are  forty- 
one  of  us  in  camp  to-day,  and  since 
I  Ve  been  there  about  fifteen  have  left, 
and  about  as  many  more  gone  to 
work. 

Monday,  May  20. 

Overcast  and  raw.  Fire  in  the  stove 
makes  the  office  cabin  comfortable.  My 
slippers  are  a  great  comfort.  Guess 
they  were  a  good  investment,  even  if 
they  did  cost  two  days'  pay. 

I  wonder  what  the  bunch  [a 

group  that  used  to  meet  in  the 

Hotel  in  Boston]  are  doing  to-day? 


LETTERS  OF  A  DOWN-AND-OUT 


371 


Sent  a  man  to  the  Seeley  Hospital 
yesterday  afternoon.  Think  he  had 
one  broken  bone  in  his  right  fore- 
arm. 

Telephone-line  man  has  just  gone 
out  after  a  five-minute  chat.  He  is  full 
of  trouble,  owing  to  the  recent  forest 
fires.  It  must  be  inconvenient  for  the 
head  office  in  Hazelton  not  to  be  able 
to  get  their  various  camps. 

Neuritis  still  bothering.  Had  a  bath 
in  a  swamp-hole  this  afternoon.  Blue 
and  homesick  for  Beantown  to-night. 
Gives  one  a  funny  feeling  to  go  to  bed 
night  after  night  in  broad  daylight. 

Tuesday,  May  21. 

Uneventful  day.  Heard  by  phone 
that  Seeley  Warehouse  had  tinned 
milk.  This  means  in  three  days'  time 
we  shall  have  milk  for  oatmeal  and 
coffee.  It  will  be  welcome  as  usual, 
as  the  camp  has  had  none  for  six 
weeks.  Have  ordered  a  tent,  thinking 
we  (the  Foreman  and  I)  would  be 
more  comfortable  than  in  our  cabin. 
The  middle  of  the  days  is  very  warm, 
it  must  get  close  to  90°  in  the  sun,  and 
the  cabin,  having  a  tar-paper  roof,  gets 
oppressive.  The  nights,  however,  are 
still  cool.  We  have  a  fire  morning  and 
evening. 

Wednesday,  May  22. 

Walked  up  to  Camp  26  this  morning 
to  get  detonators  which  the  Seeley 
Warehouse  failed  to  send  us.  We  use 
about  a  hundred  a  day  in  the  Gumbo 
(wet  clay  and  dirt  that  is  harder  to 
break  up  with  dynamite  than  rock). 

McCloud,  the  timekeeper,  gave  me 
my  dog.  I  have  named  him  Tony  the 
Second. 

Very  warm  this  noon.  The  snow 
now  only  reaches  a  third  of  the  way 
down  the  side  of  the  mountains;  the 
river,  of  course,  is  very  high.  It  makes 
a  constant  roar  as  it  passes  through 
the  canyon.  Had  I  a  camera  I  could 
get  some  wonderful  pictures. 


Thursday,  May  23. 

One  day  is  much  like  another;  war 
between  nations,  earthquakes,  and 
famines  might  take  place  without  our 
having  any  knowledge  of  them.  It  is 
peaceful  and  restful,  but  not  highly 
exciting.  Called  the  hospital  at  See- 
ley to  find  out  how  Doheny,  the  man 
hurt  here,  was  getting  on.  The  doc- 
tor reported  a  compound  fracture,  also 
paid  me  quite  a  compliment  on  my 
splints. 

Tony  the  Second  is  quite  amusing, 
and  helps  to  pass  some  idle  moments. 
Am  anxious,  of  course,  to  go  fishing, 
but  am  afraid  that  if  I  did  it  would  be 
the  moment  that  some  superior  officer 
dropped  in  to  see  how  our  work  was 
getting  on. 

Friday,  May  24. 

Had  two  G.  T.  P.  engineers  and 
Mr.  West  for  dinner.  Busy  all  day 
putting  up  a  tent  for  White  and  my- 
self, thinking  it  would  be  more  com- 
fortable than  the  log  cabin.  Though  it 
is  18  x  20  I  am  afraid  it  will  be  small, 
with  bricks,  stove,  and  all  the  com- 
missary stuff.  They  have  quite  a 
stunt  in  this  country:  i.e.,  the  lower 
edge  of  the  wall  of  the  tents  is  three 
or  four  feet  off  the  ground,  the  space  in 
between  being  boarded  up.  This,  of 
course,  gives  more  air  and  head-room. 

As  I  write  it  is  ten  minutes  before 
nine,  yet  the  sun  is  still  shining. 
Though  the  scene  is  grand  as  it  sinks 
behind  the  snow-covered  mountains, 
it,  in  my  opinion,  does  not  compare 
with  the  setting  sun  behind  old  Marble- 
head  seen  from  the  Neck. 

H.  D.  P. 

June  7,  1912. 

DEAR :  — 

Your  very  nice  letter  of  May  22 
reached  me  on  Tuesday  last.  .  .  . 

In  many  ways  life  with  me  at  pre- 
sent is  perfect;  as  you  may  remember, 
I  always  had  a  fondness  for  carpenter- 


372 


LETTERS  OP  A  DOWN-AND-OUT 


ing  and  camping,  and,  as  I  am  doing 
both  at  the  present  time,  I  presume  I 
should  be  content. 

I  am  sitting  in  the  office  tent,  which 
I  consider  extremely  comfortable  (as 
every  bit  of  it,  with  exception  of  putting 
up  the  ridge-pole,  is  my  work).  Two 
good  bunks,  one  for  the  Foreman,  and  a 
mattress,  a  camp  stove,  big  window, 
easy-chairs  (I  have  built  such  an  im- 
provement on  the  Morris  chair  that, 
with  the  design,  the  Paine  Furniture 
Company  would  wax  wealthy  on  it 
alone).  Desk,  shelves  for  books  and 
papers,  and,  on  my  right,  shelves  ex- 
tending the  extreme  length  of  the  tent 
(it  is  20  X  16)  for  the  commissary  stuff. 
I  keep  what  is  practically  a  country 
store.  Sell  dynamite,  sewing-thread, 
tobacco,  quinine,  shoes,  writing-paper, 
postage-stamps,  crowbars,  etc.,  etc. 
We  were  in  a  log  cabin  which  was 
within  ten  feet  of  the  kitchen  door  of 
the  cook-house,  which,  of  course,  meant 
the  flies  were  awful.  As  I  have  the 
window  screened  and  a  screen  door  and 
a  good  tight  board  floor,  we  are  quite 
free  from  insects,  but  outside  the  black 
flies  and  mosquitoes  are  awful. 

The  balance  of  the  camp  is  about 
half  and  half:  cook-house,  storehouse, 
and  two  bunk-houses  made  of  logs; 
while  the  stable  and  the  other  two 
bunk-houses  are  made  of  canvas. 

The  weather  is  truly  wonderful,  not 
over  an  hour  continuous  rain  during  the 
month  I've  been  here;  perhaps  a  trifle 
too  warm  in  the  middle  of  the  day,  but 
cool  enough  for  two  heavy  blankets  at 
night.  The  scenery  (which  is  the  only 
free  thing  in  the  country)  magnificent; 
as  I  look  up  from  the  paper  and 
through  the  door,  three  mountains  with 
snow  extending  perhaps  a  third  of  the 
way  down,  are  directly  in  my  vision. 
These  belong  to  the  Cascade  Range, 
this  camp  being  a  considerable  distance 
west  of  the  Rocky  Mountains. 

The  railroad  grade  follows  the  Buck- 


ley River,  which  is  for  mile  after  mile 
the  fastest  kind  of  fast  water.  I  have 
been  speculating  whether  or  not  one 
could  run  it  in  a  canoe.  If  one  did,  it 
would  be  at  the  rate  of  a  mile  in  two 
minutes. 

The  food  is  good,  though  you  get  the 
same  thing  day  after  day:  beef  and 
potatoes  three  times  a  day.  (We  use 
2,000  Ibs.  of  beef  a  week.)  Apple  pie 
for  dinner  and  supper,  while  we  have 
bacon  and  hot  cakes  every  morning  for 
breakfast. 

The  job  is  a  cut-and-fill;  the  fill  is 
simple,  but  the  cut  is  going  through 
what  is  known  as  Gumbo,  a  wet  blue 
clay  full  of  small  round  boulders  from 
the  size  of  a  baseball  to  a  football.  It  is 
quite  impossible  to  pick  the  stuff  to 
pieces,  so  it  is  shoot,  shoot  all  the  time, 
which,  of  course,  makes  slow  work. 
There  is  nothing  about  the  work  that 
I  have  not  done  while  coal-mining; 
so  I  have  strongly  recommended  to 
the  Assistant  General  Superintendent 
(visits  us  about  once  a  week) ,  that  he 
make  me  foreman  on  a  similar  job;  but 
to  this  writing,  Messrs.  Farrington, 
Weeks  &  Stone  have  not  acted  on  my 
suggestion.  Incidentally,  F.  W.  &  S. 
ought  to  make  an  awful  killing  on  the 
G.  T.  P.  work  through  B.  C.  The  total 
contract  is  something  over  a  hundred 
million,  and  they  should  net  at  least 
20  per  cent. 

Camp  foremen  get  one  hundred  and 
twenty-five  dollars  a  month,  which  is 
a  great  improvement  on  the  time- 
keeper's sixty,  so  I  want  to  be  a  fore- 
man; I  may  be  a  trifle  weak  on  shoot- 
ing Gumbo,  but  I  can  give  a  lot  of 
them  cards  and  spades  on  track  and 
dump-cars.  The  steel  is  supposed  to 
reach  us  by  September,  but,  in  my 
opinion,  we  won't  have  our  job  done 
before  the  first  of  October. 

Outside  of  timekeeping  and  book- 
keeping (the  first  trial  balance  I  have 
taken  in  ten  years  came  out  O.  K.  The 


LETTERS  OF  A  DOWN-AND-OUT 


373 


next,  I  suppose,  will  take  a  week),  I 
have,  as  already  stated,  fixed  the  office 
tent,  built  two  wells  (one  with  an  over- 
flow is  my  bath-tub),  put  two  glass 
skylights  in  the  cook-house  roof,  built 
a  new  meat-house,  repaired  cars,  and, 
as  the  blacksmith  went  off  on  a  drunk, 
shod  the  mules. 

I  make  a  very  long  day;  breakfast  is 
at  6.15  and,  as  it  does  not  get  dark  until 
10.30,  I  generally  do  not  turn  in  until 
that  time. 

For  the  first  time,  yesterday,  I  took 
a  couple  of  hours  off.  The  fact  is,  I  had 
made  a  fishing-rod,  butt  and  second 
joint  of  white  birch,  and  the  tip  of 
willow,  used  small  copper  wire  for  my 
rings,  and,  of  course,  lashings  to  fasten 
the  joints.  I  went  or  rather  dropped 
down  to  the  Buckley  (it 's  some  500  feet 
below  us  in  a  canyon),  took  22,  between 
three  o'clock  and  five,  that  weighed 
from  a  half  to  three  pounds.  The  men 
called  them  salmon  trout;  they  were 
shaped  more  like  a  land-locked  salmon 
than  a  square- tail,  but  had  red  spots; 
very  good  eating. 

We  have  (in  the  cut)  gone  through 
a  seam  of  mother  or  bastard  coal.  I 
have  no  doubt  that  a  true  seam  is  in 
the  near  vicinity,  but  it  means  money 
to  look  for  it. 

We  are,  of  course,  very  much  'in  the 
woods.'  F.  W.  &  S.  have  a  telephone 
line  connecting  their  camps  with  head- 
quarters in  Seeley  and  New  Hazelton, 
but  as  for  news  of  the  outside  world, 
we  get  none.  I  have  not  seen  a  news- 
paper since  I ' ve  been  here,  but  never- 
theless presume  the  Boston  National 
Baseball  Team  is  leading  (?)  the 
League. 

In  spite  of  the  glowing  advertise- 
ments, I  consider  the  land  worthless 
except  for  its  timber;  frost  most  every 
night,  which  puts  it  on  the  bum  for 
farming,  so  no  land  for  mine.  From 
present  indications,  will  be  here  till 
work  is  done  and  stay  with  F.  W.  &  S. 


if  they  have  a  job  for  me  at   that 
time.  As  ever, 

H.  D.  P. 

July  10,  1912. 

DEAR :  — 

Here  is  a  letter  I  will  call  'The  Time- 
keeper's Day's  Watch.'  It  gives  an 
average  day. 

The  puppy  bit  my  ear;  I  growled  at 
him  but  he  kept  on,  so  I  rolled  over  and 
looked  at  my  watch :  five  minutes  after 
five.  As  I  had  to  get  up  anyway  in  a 
a  few  minutes,  I  rolled  out  of  my  blank- 
ets and  made  my  toilet  in  about  four 
minutes.  If  one  in  a  moment  of  weak- 
ness lets  a  puppy  on  his  bed  one  has  to 
pay  the  penalty,  and  that  is  let  him 
sleep  on  the  foot  of  the  bed  forever 
afterwards.  The  night  cook  (who  also 
gets  breakfast)  gave  me  a  cup  of  coffee, 
then  out  on  the  grade  I  went.  First 
looked  at  the  shovel  score-board:  745 
cars,  a  very  good  night's  run;  then  I 
went  to  the  cut,  where  I  found  they 
had  taken  out  184  cars;  pretty  good 
all  around.  Bosses  reported  three  men 
only  stopped  work  at  midnight.  The 
getting-up  gong  had  already  rung  when 
I  was  once  more  back  in  camp,  and 
the  men  were  tumbling  out  of  the  tents 
and  bunk-houses.  Pretty  frowsy-look- 
ing lot  they  were,  but  cold  water  helped. 
At  six  I  took  my  customary  station  be- 
side the  entrance  of  the  mess-house, 
the  cook  rang  the  gong,  and  the  men 
filed  in. 

My  tent  was  quite  comfortable  when 
I  went  in,  as  I  had  lit  the  fire  on  getting 
up.  Fancy  a  fire  in  the  middle  of  July; 
but  the  ground  was  white  with  frost. 
To  the  mess-house  for  breakfast,  and 
pretty  good  it  was,  too:  oatmeal  and 
cream  (condensed),  beefsteak,  fried  po- 
tatoes, tea  and  coffee,  bread,  jam,  and 
that  invariable  breakfast  adjunct  (to 
railroad  work),  hot  cakes.  This  morn- 
ing, for  a  wonder,  no  one  tried  to  go  past 
me  who  was  not  working  in  the  camp. 


374 


LETTERS  OF  A  DOWN-AND-OUT 


As  a  rule  there  are  three  or  four  every 
morning,  stragglers  going  up  or  down 
the  line.  All  of  them  have  a  delightful 
habit  of  trying  to  eat  on  the  company; 
they  know  perfectly  well  they  should 
go  to  the  office  and  buy  meal-tickets 
(fifty  cents  apiece),  but  they  all  try  to 
eat  for  nothing.  The  most  effervescent 
cursing  is  answered  by  a  smile  and  *  Me 
no  understand/ 

After  breakfast  quite  a  few  came  in 
to  make  purchases  from  the  commis- 
sary; mostly  tobacco,  which  sells  for 
three  times  as  much  as  in  the  East. 
For  instance,  Bull  Durham,  a  great 
favorite,  at  fifteen  against  five  cents. 

Four  men  of  the  night  crew  wanted 
their  time,  so  I  cast  up  their  accounts, 
subtracting  their  board,  commissary 
account,  and  medical  fees,  made  out 
their  time-checks,  and  took  their  re- 
ceipts. Next,  the  men's  time  for  the 
night-shift  went  on  the  time  book. 
Then  the  sales  of  the  day  before.  After 
perhaps  a  half  hour's  work  on  the  books, 
the  cook  came  for  the  daily  supplies. 
From  the  storehouse  he  took  200  pounds 
potatoes,  200  pounds  white  flour,  a  case 
of  corn,  3  of  tomatoes,  2  of  milk,  2  of 
peas,  and  80  pounds  of  cheese,  24  tins 
of  jam,  4  boxes  of  macaroni,  a  box  of 
prunes,  figs,  and  dried  apples.  Then 
from  the  meat-house,  one  hind  quarter 
of  beef.  Quite  a  lot  of  stuff,  but  it  takes 
a  lot  of  grub  to  feed  175  men.  In  the 
next  hour  and  a  half  while  working  on 
last  month's  cook-house  report,  I  went 
to  the  supply  storehouse  five  different 
times — for  waste  oil,  track  spikes,  and 
axe  and  saw  and  shovels.  Also  an- 
swered the  telephone  five  times.  Each 
trip  meant  a  separate  entry  in  the  day 
book,  as  all  supplies  and  materials  are 
carried  in  separate  ledger  accounts, 
debited  when  received,  and  credited 
when  used.  (Trial  Balance  for  July 
showed  a  total  on  either  side  of  well 
over  $200,000). 

I  looked  at  my  watch — ten  o'clock. 


I  should  have  been  out  on  the  work  a 
half-hour  ago.  Checking  up  175  men 
with  an  average  of  15  new  faces  a  day 
is  quite  an  undertaking :  one  has  to  train 
the  mind  to  remember  faces,  on  the 
second,  and  in  any  event  the  third  sight. 
Our  work  extending  over  a  mile,  it 
takes  an  hour  and  a  quarter  to  go  over 
and  find  all  the  men.  To-day  all  hands, 
excepting  four,  were  out;  on  my  return 
to  camp  I  hunted  these  up.  Three  were 
sick;  these  I  dosed  with  quinine;  and 
the  other  one  was  laying-off.  The  men 
(it  seems  as  though  we  had  at  least  one 
representative  of  every  nationality 
under  the  sun)  are  like  children  about 
medicine,  but,  owing  to  successfully 
putting  a  man's  broken  forearm  in 
splints  last  May,  I've  quite  a  reputa- 
tion as  a  doctor.  My  two  remedies  are 
quinine  and  plenty  of  black  pills. 

This  being  done  I  made  up  two  loads 
of  freight  for  our  wagons.  Our  base  of 
supplies  is  at  Seeley,  sixteen  miles  down 
river  and  at  the  head  of  steamboat 
navigation.  Owing  to  the  poor  roads 
a  load  for  four  horses  is  4800  to  5000 
pounds.  A  little  of  everything  in  the 
10,000  pounds,  from  60  per  cent  dyna- 
mite to  smoking  tobacco,  from  canned 
tomatoes  to  Perry  Davis's  Pain-Killer. 

Dinner-time  caught  three  strangers 
at  the  door,  and  I  explained  that  Mr. 
Farrington  (he  is,  I  believe,  rated  at 
$40,000)  needed  fifty  cents  from  each 
of  them  in  the  worst  sort  of  way.  Then 
a  brisk  sale  of  commissary  goods,  up  to 
one  o'clock,  when  the  men  again  went 
out.  Right  after  one,  had  to  go  to  the 
powder-house  and  check  out  powder  for 
the  powder  boss.  The  material  we  are 
taking  out  requires  constant  shooting. 
Then  the  cook  came;  he  had  forgot- 
ten two  things  he  wanted  for  the  night 
cook.  Then  a  fifteen  minute  conversa- 
tion on  the  telephone  with  the  General 
Superintendent,  who  wanted  some  de- 
tailed information. 

Next,  my  one  luxury  of  the  day: 


LETTERS  OF  A  DOWN-AND-OUT 


375 


walked  down  river  three  quarters  of  a 
mile  where  our  pump  (water  for  shovel) 
is  located.  The  pump-man,  owing  to 
my  tears,  has  rigged  up  a  very  good 
shower-bath.  I  started  as  hot  as  I  could 
stand  it  and  ended  with  the  water  di- 
rectly from  the  spring.  On  the  way 
back  took  the  time  for  the  afternoon. 
Just  four  when  I  was  once  more  in  my 
office;  got  in  a  solid  hour  of  work  on 
reports  when  the  interruptions  started. 
The  night  men  began  coming  in,  buy- 
ing tobacco,  snuff  (up  to  this  my  know- 
ledge of  snuff  was  so  limited  I  had  sup- 
posed it  was  wholly  a  habit  of  the  past; 
I  sell  fifty  pounds  a  month),  socks, 
etc.,  etc.  And  then,  mirabile  dictu,  two 
Sisters  of  Charity  appeared,  escorted 
by  Duncan  Ross  (big  tunnel  camp). 
They,  it  seems,  are  collecting  money 
for  an  Orphan  Home  in  New  West- 
minster, a  suburb  of  Vancouver.  They 
showed  me  a  list  of  the  boys  in  the 
Home,  and  one  is  named  Henry  D.  P. 
I  had  already  given  them  a  dollar,  now 
gave  them  another,  with,  the  request 
that  they  buy  some  little  toy  for  Henry. 
I  entertained  them  while  the  men  ate 
supper;  as  soon  as  they  were  through, 
I,  accompanied  by  the  nuns,  'Bally- 
hooed '  through  camp  for  them.  We  did 
pretty  well,  I  think:  collected  $57.25. 
I  arranged  over  the  telephone  for  them 
to  pass  the  night  at  Camp  26,  but  as 
four  G.  T.  P.  Railway  engineers  (civil) 
were  spending  the  night  there,  they  had 
no  spare  blankets,  so  I  rolled  up  four 
and  with  the  nuns'  modest  baggage 
as  the  balance  of  a  pack,  we  started 
to  mush  (i.  e.  walk  with  a  pack),  turn- 
ing them  over  to  John  McCloud,  and 
after  three  or  four  God-blessings  started 
back. 

Found  the  cook  had  saved  me  a  bit 
to  eat  (it  was  after  nine) ,  which  was  wel- 
come. After  eating,  once  more  out  on 
the  grade,  taking  the  time,  then  back 
to  the  office;  as  a  rule  finish  up  work 
by  daylight,  but  after  ten  have  to  use 


a  light.  Made  up  the  daily  report 
(much  detail)  and  then  to  bed,  ten 
after  eleven.  Nothing  to  do  until  to- 
morrow. 

CAMP  26A,  August  18,  1912. 
MY  DEAR :  — 

.  .  .  Now  a  bit  about  myself.  I  am 
more  or  less  contented  with  my  lot; 
I  am  almost  literally  out-of-doors  all 
the  time  (have  n't  worn,  in  fact  don't 
own,  a  hat  for  three  months)  —  a  good 
bed,  and  plenty  of  good  plain  food.  Feel 
very  fit,  due  no  doubt  to  good  air,  lots 
of  sleep,  a  moderate  amount  of  exercise, 
and  no  rum.  But  as  far  as  attaining 
money  or  position,  I  can't  see  it.  As 
a  matter  of  fact,  neither  exists  in  the 
country. 

Railroad  contracting,  like  every- 
thing else  nowadays,  is  on  an  enor- 
mous scale,  and  it  takes  tremendous 
capital  to  butt  into  the  game.  F.  W. 
&  S.  are  supposed  to  be  worth  $50,- 
000,000,  and  quite  a  bit  of  it  must  be 
in  use  here  in  B.  C.  To  show  you  the 
magnitude  of  their  business,  I  am  told 
on  unquestionable  authority  that  they 
cleaned  up  over  $1,000,000  on  the  first 
100  miles  of  the  G.  T.  P.  (Prince  Ru- 
pert East),  and  that  the  whole  job  will 
net  them  in  the  vicinity  of  $20,000,000. 

Now,  considering  the  fact  that  mem- 
bers of  the  firm  have  inspected  the 
work  but  twice  in  six  months,  you  would 
think  their  headmen  on  the  job  would 
be  high-price  men,  but  they  are  not. 

Mr. ,  their  financial  man,  and  Mr. 

,  the  General  Superintendent,  get 

but  $6000  a  year.  There  are  numer- 
ous sub-contractors  below  and  above 
us,  but  they  seem  to  be  all  uncles, 
cousins,  and  aunts  of  members  of  the 

firm,  and  the see  to  it  that  they 

make  but  a  living.  You  see,  one  of  the 
principal  sources  of  income  to  F.  W. 
&  S.  are  supplies,  from  pins  to  dyna- 
mite, potatoes  to  steam-shovels;  and 
as  they  operate  all  over  the  world,  they 
do  a  grocery  business  that  would  make 


376 


LETTERS  OF  A  DOWN-AND-OUT 


S.  S.  Pierce  green  with  envy;  and  all 
sub-contractors  bind  themselves  to 
take  all  supplies  from  them.  Of  course, 
very  often,  they  could  not  possibly 
get  them  elsewhere.  If  it  seems  that  a 
sub  is  making  too  much  money,  up  goes 
the  price  of  all  the  stuff  going  in  to  him. 
So  you  can  see  that  a  decent  job  with 
F.  W.  &  S.,  and  sub-contracting,  are 
not  inviting. 

Outside  of  building  the  railroad,  there 
is  mighty  little.  The  country  from  either 
an  agricultural  standpoint  or  lumbering 
is  n't  worth  a  tinker's  damn,  in  spite  of 
what  you  read.  We  have  had  frosts  so 
heavy  for  the  past  three  nights  that 
nothing  like,  for  instance,  potatoes, 
could  possibly  stand.  There  does  seem 
to  be  a  lot  of  Galena  hereabouts,  but 
it  takes  money  to  go  prospecting;  if 
I  had  the  price  I  would  take  a  whack 
at  it  next  year  sure.  But  it  would  cost 
$2000  to  make  the  trip  I  have  in  mind, 
way  north  of  the  Peace  River.  To  a 
$75  a  month  clerk,  $2000  is  a  fortune; 
perhaps  you  would  like  to  grub-stake 
such  an  expedition.  The  remaining 
chance  is  the  fish  business  (when  the 
road  is  through,  Prince  Rupert  ought 
to  ship  large  quantities  of  cod,  salmon, 
and  halibut  East). 

I  don't  dare  to  return  either  to  semi- 
or  full  civilization  without  a  job  in 
sight  or  some  money.  The  few  dollars 
I've  earned  would  barely  buy  me  a 
suit  of  clothes.  (I  have  n't  even  a  coat 
to  my  name.)  If  I  had  a  few  dollars  I 
believe  I  would  try  it,  but,  of  course, 
it 's  out  of  the  question  to-day,  and  yet 
as  this  job  will  be  (for  me)  through 
by  October  1st  at  the  latest,  and  as 
F.  W.  &  S.  may  not  have  anything  for 
me,  I  may  be  driven  to  it. 

When  I  started  on  this  line  I  wrote, 
contented;  of  course  I  fully  realize  that 
a  man  going  on  to  thirty-seven  should 
be  at  about  his  best,  and  if  I  either  had 
ability,  or  have  any  left,  it  is  being 
wasted  here  in  the  woods;  but,  having 


studied  the  situation  from  every  angle, 
I  can't  see  any  way  out.  I  don't  want 
to  go  hungry  again  and  to  be  frank  I  'm 
afraid  to  tackle  town-life  again  with- 
out either  the  above-mentioned  job  or 
money  to  get  along  on  until  something 
turns  up. 

Am  on  a  *  writing  basis'  with 

now.   My  son  J is  at  B and 

has  caught  his  first  fish.  Were  I  there 
to  show  him  how,  and  teach  him  to 
swim! 

As  ever,  old  fellow, 

H.  D.  P. 

P.  S.  Am  catching  you  on  the  gray 
hairs  pretty  fast. 

August  24,  1912. 

MY  DEAR :  — 

Your  very  nice  letter  of  the  8th 
reached  me  yesterday.  Yes,  I  agree, 
my  life  for  fifteen  years  or  thereabouts 
has  been  very  much  out  of  the  ordi- 
nary. What  a  lot  of  work,  play,  dis- 
sipation, pleasure,  and  so  forth,  I've 
crowded  into  the  time  since  I  left 
Boston  on  'the  good  ship  Hopedale' 
to  Timekeeper  for  F.  W.  &  S.,  Camp 
26A,  British  Columbia.  Of  late  I  have 
wondered  just  how  *  cracked'  I  am. 
Presume  more  rather  than  less,  but  you 
see  I've  been  through  some  pretty 
tough  experiences  and  they  have  left 
marks  and  effects. 

I  have  been  very  blue  and  lonely  the 
past  week.  It 's  rather  hard  not  to  ever 
see  one's  son  and  little  daughter  and  to 
be  completely  cut  off  from  every  one 
you  know. 

It  does  seem  an  awful  waste  to  lead 
the  life  I  am  leading  now,  if  I  have 
it  left  in  me  to  do  things  again.  As  I 
wrote  you  a  few  days  ago,  I  can't  see 
much  ahead,  and  yet,  for  the  reasons 
I've  explained,  I  really  don't  care  to 
make  a  move.  However,  another  thirty 
days  will  see  the  job  (Camp  26A)  done, 
and  then  if  F.  W.  &  S.  have  nothing  to 
offer  I'll  have  to  do  something.  .  .  . 


LETTERS  OF  A  DOWN-AND-OUT 


377 


As  I  have  cut  my  right  thumb  just 
where  you  hold  pen  or  pencil,  this  must 
be  a  short  note. 

As  ever, 

H.  D.  P. 

Saturday,  September  20,  1912. 

DEAR :  — 

Life  with  me  goes  on  about  the  same; 
our  work  is  so  near  through,  our  camp 
has  dwindled  down  to  sixty  men;  the 
steel  is  only  thirteen  miles  below  us 
now  and,  when  the  wind  is  fair,  we  can 
hear  the  locomotive.  This  I  rather  re- 
sent, as  it  means  civilization  and  that 
is  something  which,  without  clothes 
and  position,  I  positively  dread. 

After  a  spell  of  bad  weather  we  are 
now  enjoying  the  most  beautiful  In- 
dian summer  that  I  have  ever  seen. 
The  weather  is  glorious  beyond  words; 
nights  sharp,  but  warm  enough  from 
8.30  till  5  in  the  afternoon  to  go  with- 
out a  coat  (that  is,  down  to  a  flannel 
shirt).  The  foliage  is  very  fine  and  its 
background,  the  snow-covered  moun- 
tain, marvelous. 

F.  W.  &  S.  have  made  no  sign  that 
they  wish  my  valuable  services?  After 
this  job  is  over,  if  they  don't,  I  plan  to 
mush  (i.  e.,  walk  or  hike)  through  the 
mountains  to  Fort  George  which,  from 
present  indications,  should  in  time  be- 
come quite  a  town.  Eventually,  the 
C.  P.  R.,  the  C.  U.  R.,  and  the  S.  T.  R. 
will  reach  it.  If  we  do  not  have  too 
much  snow  it  should  prove  a  wonder- 
ful trip.  Will  go  very  light;  two  blank- 
ets, bacon,  flour,  coffee,  and  a  rifle.  (Of 
course  a  few  flies  for  trout.) 

Besides  Tony  Christo  del  Monte 
Monks,  Jerry,  a  dog  ex  Camp  26,  has 
adopted  me.  He  is  a  most  interesting 
beast;  from  Pete  Seymour,  a  Siwash  In- 
dian, from  whom  I  buy  salmon  (3  cents 
a  Ib.  delivered,  dressed  in  camp,  the 
only  cheap  thing  in  the  country),  I  have 


learned  his  history.  As  is  the  custom, 
his  mother  was  tied  out  in  the  woods 
when  in  heat  two  falls  ago;  the  timber 
wolves  roaming  about  found  her  and, 
after  paying  their  respects,  were  shot 
by  Pete.  It  seems  that  if  they  were 
not  shot  or  driven  off  they  would  ulti- 
mately kill  her.  Curious! 

Jerry  is  now  about  a  year  and  a  half 
old  and  must  weigh  about  150  pounds. 
He  looks  more  like  a  wolf  than  a  dog, 
and  is  the  queerest  combination  of 
bravery  and  timidity  possible.  He  will 
tackle  a  bear  in  a  minute,  but  if  some- 
thing drops  behind  him  he  will  put  his 
tail  between  his  legs  and  run  like  the 
veriest  cur.  Very,  very  difficult  to  ob- 
tain his  confidence,  but  once  obtained 
he  is  my  shadow;  even  when  at  table 
he  insists  upon  having  his  head  in  my 
lap.  He  looks  so  like  a  wolf  a  short  dis- 
tance away,  I  am  greatly  afraid  some 
prospector  will  shoot  him. 

His  sleep  is  most  incredibly  light,  a 
field-mouse  will  bring  him  to  his  feet 
in  a  second  and,  unlike  a  dog,  when  on 
his  feet,  he  is  wide  awake.  He  won't 
play  with  any  one  except  me,  and  not 
with  me  if  there  is  any  one  in  sight. 
Some  weeks  ago  I  used  a  curry-comb 
on  him,  and  now  a  regular  morning  per- 
formance is  his  going  to  the  stable  and 
barking  for  me  to  come.  And  the  most 
curious  sound:  it  is  not  like  a  regular 
dog's  bark  at  all!  For  a  week  past  we 
have  had  a  band  of  wolves  around 
camp  and  Jerry  evidently  has  spent 
three  or  four  nights  with  them.  Their 
nightly  howling  is  evidently  too  much 
for  him  to  stand.  Apparently  he  wants 
to  get  out  with  the  bunch.  As  ever, 

H.  D.  P. 

[The  Atlantic  has  no  further  inform- 
ation concerning  the  writer  of  these 
letters  beyond  the  bare  fact  that  he 
has  acquired  a  steady  position.] 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


BY   MARY   S.    WATTS 


CHAPTER  X 

MRS.  AND  MISS  JAMESON  AT  HOME 

THAT  date  of  the  first  of  May,  eight- 
een-ninety-eight,  was  to  be  a  much 
more  memorable  one  even  than  poor 
Lorrie,  restlessly  following  her  sweet- 
heart on  his  journey,  through  all  the 
wan  watches  of  the  night,  dreamed. 
For,  by  dawn  of  the  next  day,  when  he 
and  many  another  girl's  sweetheart,  and 
hundreds  of  husbands  and  brothers  be- 
sides, were  long  miles  to  the  south,  or 
already  down  there  on  the  Gulf,  there 
went  blazing  through  the  country  the 
tidings  of  the  battle  in  Manila  harbor. 
The  newspapers  screamed  jubilantly, 
and  for  once  acceptably;  a  generation 
may  not  witness  more  than  one  such 
event.  Old  Glory  flapped  triumphant- 
ly from  a  thousand  flag-staffs,  fireworks 
roared  and  bonfires  flamed.  Remem- 
ber the  Maine!  No  danger,  they'd  re- 
member it  now  fast  enough!  *I  can't 
help  feeling  sorry  for  poor  old  Spain ! ' 
Bob  Gilbert  wrote  from  Tampa,  to  the 
touched  amusement  of  the  family;  that 
was  like  Bob,  they  thought  fondly,  like 
his  good-nature,  his  pliant  humanity. 
The  young  man  was,  for  a  while,  very 
diligent  about  writing;  Lorrie  has  a 
bundle  of  his  war  letters  locked  away 
in  a  drawer  this  minute.  They  have 
got  to  looking  worn  and  dust-soiled  in 
these  ten  years,  and  I  suppose  they  are 
not  written  in  a  very  high  literary 
style,  being  merely  the  headlong  scrib- 
bling, full  of  fun  and  nonsense  and 
spirit,  you  might  expect  from  Bob.  It 
378 


had  been  a  toilsome  trip,  he  wrote; 
everything  disarranged  or  'congested' 
by  the  army  trains,  nothing  running 
anywhere  on  schedule  time,  all  kinds  of 
delays,  eat  whenever  you  got  a  chance, 
and  sleep  if  you  dared!  Tampa,  of 
course,  was  chockful;  he  was  bunking 
with  some  other  newspaper  men  in  the 
office  of  the  Daily  Mail,  corner  of 
Twiggs  Street  (address  him  there). 
They  slept  on  the  floor.  Tell  Moms  not 
to  worry;  he  had  a  blanket,  and  there 
was  a  place  where  they  could  wash  up, 
and  it  was  too  roasting  hot  for  anybody 
to  catch  cold;  his  cough  was  almost 
gone.  As  for  Florida  —  give  him  little 
old  Ohio!  The  tropic  scenery  did  n't 
come  up  to  specifications.  For  one 
thing,  the  palms  were  a  fizzle.  Instead 
of  being  a  nice,  tall,  smooth,  tapering 
trunk  like  a  porch  column,  they  were 
all  swelled  out  in  the  middle  like  an 
Adam's  apple  on  a  giraffe  —  'I 
would  n't  give  one  of  our  buckeyes  for 
the  whole  outfit  of  palms  in  Florida! 
.  .  .  Everything  down  here  is  Plant's 
or  Flagler's;  they  own  the  State  be- 
tween them.  You  ought  to  see  the 
Tampa  Bay  Hotel,  the  one  Plant  spent 
so  many  millions  on.  It  looks  like 
Aladdin's  Palace  done  in  cake  or  butter 
or  something,  like  the  models  of  the 
World's  Fair  buildings  the  chef  at  the 
Queen  City  Club  made  one  New  Year's, 
don't  you  remember,  Lorrie?  All  the 
high  chief  muck-a-mucks  are  staying 
there,  and  have  their  offices  and  head- 
quarters; I  saw  Lawton  and  Roosevelt 
together.  .  .  .' 

During  succeeding  days,  the  corre- 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


379 


spondence  fell  off;  but  that  was  only 
natural,  considering  the  progress  of 
the  events  which  Robert  had  been  de- 
tailed to  watch.  Even  Lome's  other 
letters,  which  had  been  at  first  of  a  daily 
regularity,  gradually  ceased  to  come, 
although  Lieutenant  Cortwright  must 
have  had  time  to  spare,  for  he  had  com- 
plained bitterly  of  the  state  of  inaction 
in  which  the  army  was  being  kept, 
while  the  navy  was  *  right  on  the  job/ 
and  'something  happening  every  day'; 
and  he  railed  at  the  Administration, 
and  prophesied  disastrous  failure  for  a 
campaign  conducted  with  so  notable 
a  lack  of  spirit  and  'push.'  Lorrie 
thought  with  a  kind  of  adoring  and 
delighted  terror  how  brave  and  reckless 
and  altogether  demigod-like  her  hero 
was. 

It  was  her  brother's  opinion,  too, 
that  the  navy  was  getting  all  the  best 
of  it.  'They  landed  some  marines  at  a 
place  on  the  coast  somewhere,  called 
Cienfuegos,  and  had  a  fight  —  don't 
know  how  much  of  a  one.  It 's  the  talk 
here  that  the  troops  are  to  be  embark- 
ed to-morrow  —  everybody  perfectly 
crazy  to  go,  of  course,  but  only  the 
regulars  and  the  70th  New  York,  and 
perhaps  some  of  ours  to  be  taken.  The 
censorship  is  something  fierce;  not  half 
that  goes  on  gets  in  the  papers;  he  just 
blue-pencils  it,  you  know.  The  Porter 
brought  in  another  prize-ship  this 
morning,  I  heard.  That  must  make 
about  the  twentieth;  I've  lost  count. 
Wish  I  was  a  midshipmite  or  a  bo'sun 
tight,  or  a  somebody  with  a  cheerily, 
my  lads,  yo  ho!  This  prize  business  is 
as  easy  as  rolling  off  a  log.  Saw  Cort 
again  yesterday.  Nothing  doing  in  his 
regiment,'  Bob  wrote,  in  one  of  the 
last  letters  they  had  from  him. 

Spring  flowered  abundantly;  the 
noisy,  joyous-fearful  days  went  by 
with  new  wild  reports  for  almost  every 
hour  of  them.  The  State  troops  began 
to  be  more  and  more  restless  and  ag- 


grieved at  Chattanooga  and  the  other 
points  of  concentration.  Nothing  ma- 
terial seemed  to  be  happening  in  Cuba. 
The  Oregon  arrived  happily  and  joined 
the  blockading  squadron;  more  prizes 
were  pounced  upon  and  victoriously 
herded  in.  On  the  other  hand,  the 
Spanish  men-of-war  and  the  torpedo 
flotilla,  about  which  such  dire  misgiv- 
ings had  been  aroused  in  the  beginning, 
vanished  from  the  face  of  the  waters! 
And  'Quo  Vadis  hades  Cadiz  navies?' 
blithely  inquired  the  comic  journalist, 
as  much  to  the  fore  as  ever.  To  the 
ordinary  layman  and  non-combatant, 
the  host  of  American  gentlemen  of 
letters,  short-story  writers,  long-story 
writers,  magazine  contributors,  and 
newspaper  correspondents,  appeared  to 
be  the  strongest  and  most  active  force 
at  this  moment  menacing  Cuba. 

Notwithstanding  their  presence  and 
efforts,  it  was  June  before  the  location 
of  the  unlucky  '  Cadiz  navies '  was  as- 
certained to  be  the  harbor  of  Santiago. 
Towards  the  end  of  the  month  Lorrie 
got  a  letter  from  her  brother  —  the 
first  in  two  or  three  weeks  —  written 
from  Key  West,  in  the  wildest  spirits. 
Bob  had  been  cruising  on  one  of  the 
press  boats,  the  Milton  D. Bowers,  right 
off  the  coast  of  Cuba  —  right  among 
the  Fleet!  He  had  been  too  busy  to 
write  —  sorry!  —  but  tell  Moms  he 
had  not  yet  been  in  the  slightest  dan- 
ger, and  was  n't  likely  to  be  unless  he 
deliberately  went  after  it,  and  you 
might  trust  little  Percival  not  to  do 
that.  And  he  could  n't  tell  them  where 
to  address  their  letters,  he  had  no  idea 
where  he  might  be  within  a  few  hours; 
better  send  to  the  Tampa  address,  as 
heretofore. 

Lorrie  read  the  letter  to  her  mother, 
both  of  them  smiling  and  interested 
and  uneasy  as  they  sat  in  the  side 
porch  in  the  summer  morning  under 
the  honeysuckle  vine,  which  was  all 
fragrant  and  thick  with  bloom;  and  old 


380 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


Dingo  spread  out  peaceably  in  the 
patch  of  sunlight  at  their  feet,  stirred 
and  cocked  up  his  good  brown  head 
and  ears  as  she  finished.  'I  believe  he 
knows  we  were  reading  something 
from  Bob/  said  Lorrie.  She  spoke  to 
the  dog.  'Yes,  you're  right,  it's  Bob's 
letter.  Look,  Dingo,  Bob's  letter!' 

Dingo  growled  again  amicably,  and 
rose,  wagging;  and  a  shadow  came 
across  the  plot  of  sunshine.  Mrs.  Gil- 
bert gave  a  jump  and  exclamation;  she 
was  nervous  these  days,  and  the  unex- 
pected appearance  of  a  visitor  startled 
her  unduly.  *  Why,  Paula  ! '  she  ejacu- 
lated the  next  moment;  *  where  did  you 
drop  from?  Why,  we  did  n't  even  know 
you  were  in  town!  Why,  Paula!  You 
came  stealing  up  like  a  little  ghost. 
When  did  you  get  back?  Did  you  have 
a  nice  time?' 

*  It  was  in  the  paper  Sunday,  Mother, 
didn't  you  see  it?'  cried  Lorrie;  and 
sprang  up  and  would  have  kissed  the 
other,  but  that  Paula,  who,  after  her 
sudden  arrival  had  stood  for  a  second 
quite  motionless,  staring  abstractedly 
at  both  of  them,  now  stooped  or  turned 
aside,  and  dropped  down  into  the  near- 
est chair,  without  making  any  move- 
ment to  return  the  salute.  Lorrie  was 
still  standing  almost  awkwardly,  in 
her  surprise.  One  might  have  said  that 
the  girl  had  intentionally  evaded  her. 
Paula  was  arrayed  in  her  familiar  style 
of  over-ornamentation,  the  pale-blue 
fabric  of  her  dress  all  but  obscured 
by  embroidery  and  cascading  laces; 
through  the  sheer  folds  of  the  waist 
there  was  visible  yet  more  embroidery, 
threaded  with  pink  ribbons,  delicately 
enticing.  Her  hat  was  a  cloud  of  flow- 
ers, butterflies,  rhinestone  buckles, 
chiffon  rosettes;  she  had  correct  white 
silk  gloves,  correct  white  canvas  shoes; 
enough  must  have  been  spent  on  the 
toilette,  one  would  have  supposed,  to 
make  even  Paula  supremely  happy,  but 
she  did  not  look  happy.  Her  Dresden- 


china  face  wore  a  fretful  and  tired  ex- 
pression, oddly  out  of  place  on  it. 

*  We  got  back  Saturday;  they  did  n't 
get  the  right  day  in  the  paper,'  she  said, 
in  a  wearily  complaining  voice;  'and 
they  said  we'd  been  in  Atlantic  City 
ever  since  we  left  Palm  Beach,  and  we 
had  n't  at  all.  We  were  in  Atlantic 
City,  but  we ' ve  been  in  New  York  for 
four  weeks.  I  wish  we  had  n't  come 
home.  I  did  n't  want  to  come  home. 
There  is  n't  anybody  here  I  want  to 
see.  Is  n't  it  horrid  and  hot?  Oh,  I  am 
so  tired!' 

Lorrie  and  her  mother  —  of  whose 
greeting  and  extended  hand  Miss 
Jameson  had  taken  no  notice  —  sur- 
veyed her  in  a  momentary  silence,  each 
thinking  the  same  thought  with  a  cer- 
tain compassion,  namely,  that  the  poor 
child  had  never  been  taught  any  man- 
ners, and  not  being  clever  or  observ- 
ant, or  perhaps  fine-natured  enough, 
to  acquire  them  of  herself,  the  lack 
would  show  more  and  more  as  she  got 
older.  The  pause,  brief  as  it  was,  star- 
tled her  self-consciousness. 

'What's  the  matter?  What  are  you 
both  looking  at  me  that  way  for? 
Don't  I  look  all  right?  Do  I  — don't  I 
—  Is  there  anything  the  matter  with 
me?'  she  demanded  sharply,  darting 
a  glance  full  of  suspicion  from  one  to 
the  other,  and  straightened  her  figure 
with  an  effort;  she  had  allowed  herself 
to  droop  heavily  in  the  Professor's  wide, 
rough,  old  splint-bottomed  chair.  And 
she  began  to  make  nervous,  fluttering 
gestures  about  her  hair  and  flowery  hat 
and  laces  and  ribbons.  'Do  tell  me  if  I 
don't  look  right  anywhere!'  she  en- 
treated, 

'Your  dress  is  all  right,  my  dear;  it's 
so  pretty  we  could  n't  help  staring  at  it, 
that's  all.  And  your  hat  is  on  straight, 
don't  worry!'  said  Mrs.  Gilbert,  hast- 
ily, a  good  deal  amused  at  this  char- 
acteristic anxiety.  'But  you  do  look 
tired,  Paula,'  she  added,  in  a  kind 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


381 


concern;  'you  must  have  been  doing 
too  much.' 

'  Oh,  no  —  that  is,  maybe  I  have,  I 
guess  —  but  I  '11  —  I  '11  be  all  right  in  a 
little,'  Paula  said,  fingering  her  dress 
mechanically;  'it 's  only  being  tired  that 
makes  me  look  this  way  — ' 

'Traveling  around  so  much  is  really 
hard  work,'  suggested  Lorrie,  sympa- 
thetically. 

'Yes,  that's  it.  I  hate  to  look  ugly, 
though.  Do  you  think  I'm  getting 
fat?'  She  turned  her  eyes  to  Lorrie, 
with  so  tragic  an  inquiry  that  the  older 
girl,  kind-hearted  as  she  was,  could 
hardly  keep  back  her  laugh;  fat  was 
the  utter  abhorrence,  the  abominable 
thing,  the  secret  enemy  and  terror  of 
the  Jamesons,  mother  and  daughter. 

'Why,  no,  Paula,  you're  not  a  bit 
fatter,'  Lorrie  made  haste  to  assure 
her;  'that  is,  just  a  little,  maybe; 
you're  always  nice  and  round  and  no 
bones  showing,  you  know.  But  I  think 
you're  thinner  in  the  face,  if  anything.' 
In  fact,  Paula's  small,  regular  features 
did  look  rather  pinched,  and  she  was 
unnaturally  sallow. 

'I'm  tired,'  she  repeated,  prodding 
at  a  crack  in  the  porch  floor  with  the 
ferule  of  her  expensive  lingerie  parasol. 
'I  did  n't  want  to  come  back  to  this  old 
town,  anyhow,'  said  Paula,  jabbing  at 
the  floor  petulantly.  She  raised  her 
head  with  an  abrupt  motion;  her  face 
suddenly  flushed,  all  but  her  tightly 
drawn  lips,  which  kept  an  unwhole- 
some lead  color.  For  the  instant  she 
was  almost  homely;  it  was  startling. 
'Lorrie,'  she  said,  in  a  high,  accusing 
tone.  '  I  never  knew  you  were  engaged. 
I  never  knew  until  I  got  a  copy  of  our 
paper  and  saw  it  in  the  "Jottings," 
when  we  were  in  Atlantic  City;  I  never 
knew.  When  did  it  happen?  It  did 
n't  say  when  it  happened.  Did  it  hap- 
pen before  I  went  away?'  She  leaned 
forward;  her  eyes  and  her  whole  face 
burned. 


'Why  — why  — I  — I  don't  know 
— '  stammered  Lorrie,  taken  aback  at 
the  other's  fevered  interest.  'I  don't 
remember  whether  you  were  still  at 
home  or  not.' 

'Well,  anyhow,  you  know  when  it 
happened,  I  should  hope.  You  know 
when  he  asked  you,'  said  Paula,  with 
a  violent  impatience.  Lorrie  and  her 
mother  felt  the  same  inward  recoil;  for 
the  first  time  Paula  seemed  to  them 
actually  coarse.  Her  shrill  voice  was 
coarse;  her  eager,  persistent  curiosity 
was  coarse.  'When  was  it?'  she  reit- 
erated imperatively. 

'In  —  in  the  winter  —  it  was  some 
time  in  the  winter,'  said  Lorrie,  at  last, 
with  difficulty. 

'  Oh ! '  Paula  relapsed  into  the  chair 
with  a  movement  of  her  shoulder  indi- 
cating open  disbelief.  '  I  don't  see  why 
you  don't  want  to  talk  about  it.'  And, 
after  a  second  of  angry  silence,  she 
burst  out,  vehemently  reproachful, 
'Why  did  n't  you  tell  me,  Lorrie?  You 
knew  you  were  going  to  be  engaged  to 
him.  You  knew  you  were  going  to  say 
yes  the  minute  he  asked  you.  You 
knew  he'd  ask  you;  you  had  it  all  fixed 
up,  you  know  you  did.  Why  didn't 
you  tell  me?  I  think  you're  mean  — 
you  —  you  —  it  was  n't  fair.  You 
ought  to  have  told  me  at  the  very  first. 
I  think  you  're  a  mean  old  thing,  Lorrie 
Gilbert—!' 

She  choked  off,  her  lips  working,  her 
eyes  fastened  on  Lorrie  with  an  un- 
imaginable fierceness.  It  was  plain  to 
the  other  two  women  that  Paula  had 
brooded  herself  into  a  fury  over  this 
silly  grievance,  like  the  spoiled  child 
she  was;  she  might  have  been  funny, 
but  for  the  fact  that  there  is  always 
something  a  little  dreadful  about  the 
anger  of  a  fool. 

'  I  did  n't  think  you  'd  care  so  much, 
Paula,'  Lorrie  said,  kindly  setting  her- 
self to  appease  the  girl;  'and  besides,  I 
did  n't  tell  anybody  particularly,  you 


382 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


know.  It  was  announced  so  that  every- 
body would  know  all  at  once  — ' 

'Is  that  your  ring?  Did  he  give  you 
that?'  Paula  interrupted  hoarsely, 
thrusting  her  hand  out  suddenly  and 
seizing  the  other's. 

4  Yes/ 

Paula  examined  it  closely  for  a  min- 
ute. 'I  guess  it's  a  real  diamond,'  she 
said  at  length,  dropping  the  hand  as 
unexpectedly  as  she  had  snatched  it. 
All  at  once,  she  seemed  to  have  forgot- 
ten her  complaint;  indeed,  she  was  by 
nature  too  amiable  or  too  indolent  to 
keep  herself  in  such  a  state  of  ferment 
for  any  length  of  time.  'Has  every- 
body gone  away?'  she  asked.  'To  that 
old  war,  I  mean?  Your  brother  went, 
did  n't  he?' 

*  Yes.  Bob 's  at  Key  West,  now,'  said 
Lorrie  in  the  vigorously  cheerful  style 
she  always  adopted  in  her  mother's 
presence. 

'I  heard  Mr.  Cortwright  went,  too,' 
said  Paula,  working  the  parasol-tip 
around  and  around  in  a  knot-hole,  in- 
tently. 

'Yes.  Campaigning  seems  to  suit 
him.  He 's  been  very  well,  and  enjoying 
himself! '  Lome's  mother  answered  this 
time;  and  now  it  was  her  turn  to  as- 
sume the  artificial  confidence.  Neither 
of  them  was  in  the  least  deceived  by 
it;  but  if  mothers  and  daughters  should 
cease  to  practice  these  gallant  and  ten- 
der hypocrisies,  what  would  be  the  use 
of  mothers  and  daughters,  or  of  women 
at  all? 

'Do  you  know  where  he  is,  all  the 
time? '  Paula  asked,  worrying  the  knot- 
hole. 

'Why,  of  course.  He's  at  Tampa 
with  the  troops,  unless  they've  been 
moved — and  nobody  knows  what  they 
are  going  to  do  from  one  hour  to  the 
next;  but  that  was  the  last  we  heard.' 

'He  —  he  writes  to  you,  I  suppose?' 

'To  me?'  said  Mrs.  Gilbert,  with  a 
little  indulgent  smile;  'I'm  afraid,  my 


dear  child,  I'm  very  much  afraid  he's 
never  given  me  a  thought!  But  Lorrie 
has  been  getting  a  letter  every  day, 
strange  to  say ! '  She  gave  her  daughter 
a  look  full  of  affectionate  mischief  and 
fun.  Lorrie  colored  faintly;  she  wished 
Phil  would  write  every  day. 

'Are  you  sure  all  your  letters  get 
to  him?  How  do  you  address  them?' 
Paula  said  next. 

'Why,  to  his  regiment,  you  know.' 

'Well,  I  —  I  supposed  so;  I  was  n't 
sure,'  Paula  said.  She  abandoned  the 
porch  floor,  laid  the  parasol  across  her 
lap,  and  began  an  equally  automatic 
and  earnest  fidgeting  with  the  bit  of 
pompadour  ribbon  elaborately  knotted 
on  its  handle. 

'Are  you  still  getting  ready  to  be 
married,  Lorrie?  Mr.  Cortwright 
might  get  shot  in  a  fight,  you  know,' 
she  said  shrilly  and  distinctly;  and 
looked  up,  as  the  other  winced  and 
paled,  with  an  extraordinary  watchful 
curiosity.  About  the  speech  and  man- 
ner there  was  that  childish  brutality 
not  unnatural  to  Paula;  it  repelled, 
partly  because  one  felt  the  hopelessness 
of  trying  to  illuminate  her.  A  child 
might  mature,  might  learn,  but  this 
girl,  never!  There  went  through  Mrs. 
Gilbert's  mind,  even  in  the  midst  of  her 
distress  and  indignation,  a  weird  fancy 
presenting  Paula  as  one  of  the  Psyches, 
the  Undines,  the  lovely  creatures  with- 
out a  soul  that  figure  in  countless  old- 
world  legends.  'She's  hardly  responsi- 
ble!' thought  the  mother,  with  a  kind 
of  impatient  pity. 

'Well,  I  —  I  try  not  to  think  about 
that,'  Lorrie  said  with  an  effort. 

'  I  don't  see  how  you  can  help  think- 
ing about  it  —  I  'm  sure  /  would.  I 
would  n't  know  whether  to  go  on  with 
my  clothes  or  not.'  She  eyed  Lorrie 
with  a  return  of  her  morbid  interest. 
'  Don't  it  make  you  feel  awfully  when 
you  think  of  the  times  he's  kissed  you? 
He  did  kiss  you,  did  n't  he?' 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


383 


Lorrie  sat,  turning  white  and  red, 
incapable  of  a  word;  and  it  was  Mrs. 
Gilbert  who  answered  in  a  cold  voice, 
stiffening  to  her  very  marrow,  'Please 
don't,  Paula!  It's  not  necessary  to  talk 
about  —  about  things  like  that.' 

'  I  suppose  not.  It 's  no  use,  anyhow/ 
Paula  assented  dully.  There  was  an- 
other silence.  '  I  wish  we  had  n't  come 
back!'  she  burst  out  again.  'I  wish 
we'd  stayed  in  Florida.  Then  we'd 
have  been  right  near  it  —  the  war,  you 
know  —  we  'd  have  seen  them  all  —  all 
the  soldiers  and  everything  —  we  'd 
have  seen  — ' 

Her  face  puckered  together,  she  put 
up  her  hands  with  a  frantic  movement; 
the  parasol  slid  down  unheeded.  Paula 
began  to  rock  herself  back  and  forth, 
and  the  other  two  women  saw,  to 
their  fright  and  pain,  that  her  slender 
shoulders  were  heaving  violently;  it 
was  like  seeing  a  bruised  humming- 
bird in  torments. 

'Mercy!  Why,  Paula  —  why,  what 
is  the  matter?  Don't  you  feel  well? 
Are  you  sick?  What  is  it  that  hurts 
you?  Tell  me  where  it  hurts!  Don't 
cry  that  way!'  cried  out  Mrs.  Gilbert, 
all  her  anger  dissolved  in  kindness;  she 
ran  to  the  girl  with  little  soft,  purring 
ejaculations,  and  took  the  pretty, 
trivial,  bedizened  figure  into  her  mater- 
nal arms.  'There  now,  there  now!  Tell 
me  what's  the  matter!' 

'Oh,  I'm  tired  — I'm  sick  — oh,  I 
wish  we'd  never  come  back!'  sobbed 
Paula,  wildly. 

Lorrie  and  her  mother  exchanged  a 
glance  above  the  flowered  hat;  for 
goodness'  sake!  Crying  and  broken- 
hearted this  way  because  she  had  n't 
seen  the  army!  both  thought.  But 
after  all,  that  was  just  like  poor  Paula. 
They  tried  to  comfort  her  with  much 
the  same  means  they  might  have  em- 
ployed had  she  been  eight  years  old; 
and  Paula  sobbed  on  with  long,  shud- 
dering gasps  and  moans  like  a  child, 


sitting  rigid  between  them,  not  yielding 
to  their  caresses. 

'I'll  go  back  with  you  —  you're  not 
well  enough  to  go  by  yourself  that  long, 
hot  walk.  I'll  just  go  along  with  you,' 
Lorrie  assured  her,  when  they  had  got 
her  somewhat  quieted  at  last.  They 
rescued  the  parasol,  and  straightened 
Paula's  frills,  and  dabbed  her  face  and 
eyes  with  soothing  cold  water,  and 
fetched  the  talcum  powder  and  the 
smelling-salts,  and,  in  short,  performed 
all  the  hundred  and  one  small  offices 
women  find  necessary  to  such  an  occa- 
sion. '  Maybe  it  would  be  better  if  you 
lay  down  a  little  while  —  don't  you 
think?'  they  suggested  kindly. 

'I  c-can't  lie  down  in  this  d-dress,' 
said  Paula,  pitifully;  'it  would  spoil  it. 
No,  you  don't  need  to  come,  Lorrie. 
You  don't  need  to  come  with  me.  I 
can  go  by  myself.  I  don't  want  you 
to  come!'  She  spoke  with  hysterical 
entreaty,  looking  at  the  other  with 
something  like  fear,  almost  as  strong  as 
aversion,  in  her  blue  eyes,  that  were 
ordinarily  blank  and  beautiful  as  a 
mountain  lake. 

'Oh,  now,  don't  be  a  goose!'  said 
Lorrie  in  good-natured  and  sensible 
command.  'We  can't  let  you  go  off 
feeling  this  way.  It's  no  trouble;  I 
have  n't  got  a  thing  to  do.  S-sh,  now  ! 
Don't  say  another  word.  I'm  going!' 

Paula  submitted  as  unexpectedly  as 
she  had  rebelled,  and  dragged  feebly 
down  the  steps,  her  arm  interlocked 
with  Lome's,  who  walked  beside,  hat- 
less,  in  the  unconventional  summer 
style  of  our  suburbs,  erect  and  firm, 
with  all  her  chestnut-colored  hair 
ruffling  and  shining  in  the  sun.  Lorrie 
was  not  a  tall  woman  or  of  strong 
build,  yet,  in  contrast  to  her  compan- 
ion, she  produced  a  surprising  effect  of 
superiority;  perhaps  it  was  not  wholly 
physical;  one  might  have  fancied  that 
a  greater  dignity  of  spirit  in  her  had 
magically  become  visible.  Mrs.  Gilbert 


384 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


herself,  looking  after  them,  wondered 
aloud.  'Why,  I  didn't  realize  Lorrie 
was  so  —  so  — '  she  mused,  and  turned 
and  went  back  into  the  house  without 
being  able  to  find  the  proper  adjective. 

The  two  girls  went  on  slowly  and 
silently,  the  elder  in  a  good  deal  of 
private  anxiety,  as  she  noted  her 
charge's  color  wane,  and  her  hollow 
eyes,  and  the  unwholesome  moisture 
clinging  around  her  taut  lips.  In  fact, 
Paula's  strength  barely  held  out  for 
the  journey,  and  it  was  with  unmeas- 
ured relief  that  Lorrie  at  length  beheld 
the  sprawling,  decorated  fagade  of  the 
hotel  looming  ahead  of  them.  She  got 
the  other  up  the  steps,  helped  by  a 
porter  who  chanced  to  be  passing,  and 
grasped  the  situation.  Mrs.  Jameson, 
rather  cross  at  being  roused  from  her 
regular  morning  nap,  which  formed  a 
part  of  the  exercises  in  physical  preser- 
vation and  improvement  about  which 
she  was  always  most  systematic,  came 
to  the  door  of  their  room,  in  a  flowing 
white  neglige,  embroidered  with  gar- 
lands of  lilac,  wistaria,  and  what-not, 
by  some  Gallic  artist  of  the  needle, 
with  lilac-hued  ribbons  floating  and 
intermingling  with  its  flounces.  Rich 
odors  accompanied  the  lady;  indeed, 
they  gushed  out  of  the  darkened  bed- 
room (which  was  littered  with  other 
ribbons,  and  wilted  flowers,  wrapping- 
papers,  odd  slippers,  a  bath  towel  or 
two,  and  a  pair  of  pink  brocade  corsets 
draped  over  the  back  of  a  chair)  in  a 
volume  Lorrie  found  almost  suffocat- 
ing; and  Paula,  who  nevertheless  must 
have  been  accustomed  to  this  atmo- 
sphere, reeled  against  her  companion. 

*  Well,  I  must  say,  Paula  — '  her  mo- 
ther began,  sharply;  she  checked  her- 
self at  sight  of  the  visitor.  'Oh,  Miss 
Gilbert!  Do  excuse  my  hair,  please. 
I  always  put  it  up  on  kid  curlers  this 
way,  you  know.  I  don't  approve  of 
curling-irons,  they're  so  bad  for  the 
hair  — ' 


'Let  me  get  Paula  to  the  lounge, 
please,  Mrs.  Jameson;  she's  not  feeling 
very  well,'  Lorrie  interrupted  her  ruth- 
lessly; she  had  to  push  the  surprised 
woman  aside  to  enter. 

'  I  'd  like  a  drink  of  water,'  said  Paula, 
in  a  vague,  distant  whisper. 

Mrs.  Jameson  stood  stupefied  and 
entirely  useless  as  Lorrie  briskly,  and 
largely  by  main  strength,  got  her 
daughter  to  the  sofa,  opened  her  dress, 
threw  up  the  window,  ran  and  came 
back  with  a  tumbler  of  ice- water  and  a 
fan  —  all  in  five  seconds,  and  with  an 
ease,  noiselessness,  and  certainty  of 
movement  such  as  Mrs.  Jameson  had 
never  witnessed  in  her  life.  'Why, 
why  —  what  is  it?  What's  the  matter 
with  Paula?'  she  repeated  two  or  three 
times,  trailing  ineffectually  up  and 
down  in  Lorrie's  wake.  She  stopped  by 
the  sofa.  'Are  you  sick,  Paula?' 

'I'm  afraid  it's  this  heat,'  said  Lor- 
rie, kneeling  and  fanning  swiftly.  '  Just 
sip  the  water,  Paula,  just  a  little  at  a 
time.  That 's  right — yes,  you  can  swal- 
low it  —  see !  —  that 's  right .  It 's  bet- 
ter for  you  a  little  at  a  time.  Now 
lie  down  flat.  No,  let  me  take  away 
the  cushion,  Mrs.  Jameson;  she'll  feel 
better  with  her  head  low.' 

'Is  it  the  heat,  Paula?'  asked  her 
mother,  helplessly.  '  Do  you  think  it 's 
the  heat?  I  don't  know  what  to  do 
for  a  heat-stroke.  What's  best,  Miss 
Gilbert?' 

'  I  think  she  'd  better  have  a  doctor,' 
said  Lorrie;  'there's  one  in  the  hotel, 
is  n't  there?  I'll  get  him  — '  She  was 
on  her  feet  with  the  words. 

'No,  no,  I  don't  want  him,  I  don't 
want  any  doctor!'  said  Paula,  faintly, 
struggling  upright  with  wild  eyes.  She 
clutched  desperately  at  Lorrie's  skirts. 
'I  won't  have  the  doctor,  Lorrie;  I 
won't,  I  won't  I '  She  began  a  kind  of 
weak  screaming. 

*  He 's  old  school  —  the  one  in  the 
hotel  is  —  and  we '  ve  always  been 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


homoeopathic  —  the  medicine  is  so 
much  easier  to  take  — '  Mrs.  Jameson 
explained  feebly. 

Lorrie  looked  at  her,  at  the  sick  girl 
crying  and  writhing  on  the  sofa,  at 
the  hot,  untidy,  perfumed  room,  with 
a  sudden  overmastering  repugnance; 
the  next  instant  she  chided  herself 
sternly  for  it. 

*  I  '11  get  any  other  doctor  you  want, 
Mrs.  Jameson,'  she  compelled  herself 
to  say  with  gentleness;  'Paula  must 
have  somebody  —  you  can  see  that  for 
yourself.' 

4  Well,  Doctor  Booth  — '  Mrs.  Jame- 
son said,  hesitating. 

She  was  interrupted  by  Paula's  high- 
pitched  wailing.  'No,  don't  —  oh, 
don't  —  oh,  please  don't ! '  She  beat  the 
air  with  her  hands.  'I'll  tell  — I'll 
tell  —  oh,  please  — ! ' 

Lorrie  sped  down  the  hall  —  the 
hysterical  screeches  sinking  to  hysteri- 
cal chokings  and  mutterings  within  the 
room  behind  her.  She  planned  quickly. 
Doctor  Booth's  office,  fortunately,  was 
only  about  half  a  dozen  squares  away; 
he  could  reach  the  hotel  in  a  few  min- 
utes; but  if  he  was  not  in,  she  would 
call  up  the  next  nearest  —  who  would 
that  be?  —  Doctor  Livingston  —  he 
was  'old  school,'  but  pooh!  what  differ- 
ence did  that  make?  It  was  getting  on 
toward  noon,  not  a  very  good  hour  to 
go  in  search  of  doctors.  She  debated 
whether  she  had  not  better  take  it  on 
herself  to  telephone  for  a  trained  nurse, 
too,  since  it  was  plain  that  that  foolish, 
scared  woman  in  the  lavender  embroid- 
eries would  be  absolutely  of  no  account 
in  a  sick-room,  and  Paula  might  be 
going  to  be  seriously  ill  for  some  time. 
Lorrie  associated  Florida  with  malarial 
germs,  and  New  York  and  Atlantic 
City  with  incautious  eating  and  drink- 
ing; poor  water  —  typhoid  —  over- 
fatigue  —  all  the  alarmist  reports  of  the 
day  crowded  into  her  mind.  And  then 
the  sound  of  her  own  name,  distract- 

VOL.  Ill -NO.  2 


edly  called,  arrested  her  with  her  finger 
on  the  button  to  summon  the  elevator. 
'Miss  Gilbert!  Miss  Gilbert! ' 

Mrs.  Jameson  rushed  up,  gasping; 
her  face  was  ash-color  —  the  fine  lines 
and  crows'-feet  in  it  showed  merci- 
lessly; but  she  had  forgotten  all  about 
them,  she  forgot  her  kid  curlers  and 
her  neglige,  even  with  the  elevator-man 
imminent  in  his  cab.  She  ran  and 
grasped  the  front  of  Lorrie's  white 
shirtwaist  with  trembling  hands,  on 
which  all  sorts  of  rings  and  jewels 
glittered  keenly.  'Don't  get  the  doc- 
tor!' she  managed  to  get  out  in  a 
strangled  whisper.  'For  God's  sake, 
don't !  That  is,  —  if  you  could  get  one 
—  no,  no,  don't!'  She  paused  breath- 
lessly, in  a  tortured  indecision,  terrible 
to  see  on  her  doll-featured 'face. 

Lorrie  stood,  sorely  perplexed,  gen- 
uinely alarmed.  'But,  Mrs.  Jameson 
— !'  she  began  to  protest. 

'Is  there  a  doctor  here  that  nobody 
knows  —  that  nobody  ever  has  —  that 
is  n't  anybody's  doctor?'  demanded  the 
older  woman,  holding  her  fiercely.  '  If 
you  did  know  of  one  — ' 

'  Why,  no  —  how  could  I  —  why, 
what  for  —  why  — '  Lorrie  was  utterly 
bewildered. 

'No,  no,  don't  call  anybody,  then!' 
reiterated  Mrs.  Jameson,  releasing  her. 
'I  don't  want  anybody,  do  you  hear? 
I  won't  have  anybody.  I'm  her  mo- 
ther, and  I  don't  want  any  doctor  for 
her,  and  it 's  none  of  your  business,  do 
you  hear  me? '  she  said  with  stifled  vio- 
lence. She  thrust  her  face  almost  into 
Lorrie's.  'Don't  you  dare — !'  All  at 
once  she  became  a  beldame,  a  vulgar 
fury,  a  disheveled  hag  before  whom 
the  young  woman  shrank  in  some 
feeling  not  far  from  terror. 

Lorrie  went  home,  a  little  shaken  by 
the  morning's  experiences;  very  likely 
she  was  already  somewhat  overstrain- 
ed by  these  recent  trying  weeks.  'Mo- 
ther,' she  said,  gravely,  as  the  two 


386 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


ladies  sat  down  to  their  luncheon,  'I'm 
afraid  I've  been  doing  that  poor  Mrs. 
Jameson  an  awful  injustice  all  this 
while.  She  is  very  much  fonder  of 
Paula  than  I  thought  —  just  as  fond  as 
other  mothers  are  of  their  children  — 
just  like  you  !  Of  course  she  did  n't  act 
the  way  you  would  if  I  were  suddenly 
taken  sick,  but  she 's  just  as  frightened 
and  anxious.  Why,  do  you  know, 
when  she  finally  did  realize  that  Paula 
was  sick,  she  —  why,  she  was  just  like 
a  crazy  woman!' 


CHAPTER  XI 

IN  WHICH   WE  PACK  OUR  VALISES 

During  all  this  time,  the  unimpres- 
sionable Mr.  Kendrick  worked  along 
according  to  his  habit,  as  has  been 
recited,  paying  only  a  passing  atten- 
tion to  the  history-making  in  progress 
around  him.  Van  himself  was  making, 
not  history,  but  what  was  much  better 
worth  while,  from  his  point  of  view, 
Money  —  yes,  Money  with  a  capital 
letter.  The  Good  Apprentice  pros- 
pered, for  once,  as  all  good  appren- 
tices should.  He  was  shrewd,  he  was 
cool,  he  was  just,  he  was  unfathomably 
patient;  and  without  question  his  whole 
heart  was  in  the  work.  Mr.  Kendrick 
had  nowhere  else  to  bestow  it;  so  that 
steady  and  reliable  organ  beat,  presum- 
ably, only  for  himself. 

It  is  true  he  was  very  good  to  his 
family,  indulging  their  whims  as  far  as 
he  was  able,  supplying  their  wants 
with  the  utmost  liberality,  and  rarely 
inquiring  how  they  disposed  of  the 
funds  which  he  poured  into  that  ap- 
parently bottomless  hopper.  *  They 're 
mighty  good  women  —  all  of  'em,  even 
Uncle  Stan;  he's  about  the  same  as  a 
woman,'  Van  used  to  reflect  humor- 
ously; 'good  and  kind,  and  I  guess 
they've  got  as  much  sense  as  most 
women  that  are  n't  nearly  so  nice, 


either,  by  jiminy!'  Saying  which  he 
would  methodically  file  away  their 
letters  asking  for  money,  or  acknow- 
ledging the  receipt  of  it,  in  the  drawer 
he  used  for  that  purpose.  In  time  there 
got  to  be  a  stack  of  these  documents. 
...  *  Dearest  Van :  Your  noble,  gener- 
ous, splendid  check  came  this  morning. 
You  dear  old  fellow,  I  'm  so  afraid  you 
went  without  something  yourself,  to 
provide  us.  What  would  we  not  all  give 
to  take  this  burden  off  of  you!  But 
never  mind,  Van  darling,  some  day  it 
will  all  be  made  up  to  you,  that  is  my 
devout  belief/ 

Van  Cleve  used  to  skim  through 
this  part  with  a  highly  irreverent  inat- 
tention ;  he  knew  from  experience  that 
toward  page  three  the  ladies  would 
finally  come  to  the  point,  'get  down 
to  business";  that  is,  divulge  the 
amount  they  wanted.  He  had  all  their 
letters  tied  up  in  packets,  year  by  year, 
and  labeled  in  his  neat,  square  hand- 
writing: 'M.  V.  C.  Lucas  5/1/98, 
$75.  Answd.  5/22/98:  'E.  Lucas 
7/15/02,  $50,'  and  so  on.  'Don't  they 
ever  write  to  you  about  anything  but 
money?'  was  once  asked  of  him.  'Oh, 
yes.  But  that's  the  only  important 
thing.' 

Being  now  a  bachelor  at  large  upon 
the  world,  the  young  gentleman  some- 
times forsook  his  boarding-house  of  an 
evening  and  made  a  call,  or  recreated 
himself  at  the  theatre  or  at  the  club, 
which  he  had  recently  found  he  was 
able  to  join;  indeed,  this  last  was  prob- 
ably his  most  favored  resort,  for,  ex- 
cept with  other  men,  Van  had  no  great 
social  gift.  I  fear  Mr.  Kendrick  was 
not  at  all  a  ladies'  man.  They  appeared 
to  him  mostly  as  pretty,  decorative 
creatures,  sharing  doubtless  the  funny 
and  occasionally  irritating  forcible- 
feeblenesses  of  his  own  womenkind.  It 
was  a  matter  of  increasing  wonder  to 
him  that  any  man  should  voluntarily 
elect  to  spend  his  life  with  one  of  them. 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


387 


'Well,  it  would  n't  be  all  roses  for  any 
girl  that  had  to  live  with  me ! '  he  some- 
times retorted  upon  himself,  satirically 
honest.  Van  never  admitted,  even  in 
this  privacy,  that  there  was  always  an 
exception  lurking  in  the  back  of  his 
mind.  There  was  one  girl  —  heigh-ho! 
He  believed  he  could  have  lived  with 
her  and  made  her  happy. 

It  was  to  her  house  that  he  went  in 
the  hot  summer  night  of  the  day  of 
Paula's  ill-starred  visit  there.  Van 
Cleve,  too,  had  had  a  letter  from  Bob, 
and  found  no  difficulty  in  persuading 
himself  that  it  would  be  a  kindness  to 
take  it  over  for  the  family  to  read.  So 
Mr.  Kendrick  left  his  fellow  boarders 
on  the  porch,  with  their  rocking-chairs 
and  their  fans,  and  journeyed  over  to 
Warwick  Lane  in  the  face  of  an  omi- 
nous cloudbank  all  along  the  western 
horizon,  intermittently  streaked  and 
splashed  with  lightning.  Lorrie  was 
sitting,  as  usual,  on  the  Gilbert  front 
steps,  alone  in  the  sultry  dusk;  all  the 
front  steps  up  and  down  the  little  sub- 
urban street  were  thus  decorated  at 
this  hour,  and  you  might  hear  the 
young  people's  laughter,  and  a  banjo 
twanging  here  and  there;  everybody 
had  n't  gone  to  the  war.  As  he  came 
up  the  walk,  Van,  through  a  lamplit 
square  of  window,  could  perceive  the 
Professor  bending  over  a  sheaf  of  writ- 
ing —  examination  papers,  very  likely 
—  and  Mrs.  Gilbert  darning  a  stocking 
on  the  other  side  of  the  table;  the  two 
tired  gray  heads  showed  distinctly. 

The  family  had  also  heard  from  Rob- 
ert, Van  Cleve  learned,  and  his  own 
news  was  of  no  later  date.  He  and 
Lorrie  agreed  that  the  trip  seemed  to 
be  doing  Bob  good,  and  he  was  getting 
a  lot  of  fun  out  of  it,  anyhow;  his  let- 
ters were  so  happy.  *I  don't  believe 
it 's  the  —  the  sort  of  fun  that  will  harm 
him,  either,  do  you,  Van  ? '  the  girl  asked 
earnestly.  '  Of  course  there  're  all  kinds 
of  men  in  an  army  —  a  camp  like  that; 


but  they  must  be  mostly  all  right,  or 
they  could  n't  stay  in  the  army.' 

*  They 're  under  pretty  strict  disci- 
pline —  the  regulars,  that  is,  I  believe/ 
said  Van  Cleve,  trying  to  be  diploma- 
tic. *  Anyhow,  it  suits  Bob  better  than 
anything  he  has  ever  tried.    He  was 
crazy  to  go,  and  it  would  n't  have  done 
any  good  to  have  kept  him  at  home.' 

During  and  since  the  excitement, 
Lorrie  and  Van  had  tacitly  agreed  to 
forget  their  differences  over  Bob  —  to 
bury  the  hatchet.  The  old  friendly  con- 
fidence was  restored;  and  if  another 
person's  name  would  be  forever  crop- 
ping up,  Van  Cleve  realized,  with  a 
twinge,  that  this  was  natural  and  in- 
evitable. Her  lover  was  constantly  in 
Lorrie's  mind,  and  it  was  right  and 
proper  that  he  should  be;  then  how 
could  she  help  talking  about  him? 

*  That's  what  I  tell  Mother,  but  she 
can't  help  worrying,  you  know,'  said 
Lorrie,  answering  his  last  speech.    *I 
wish  Bob  could  be  more  with  —  with 
Mr.  Cortwright,  but  they  don't  seem 
to  have  seen  much  of  each    other. 
The  camp's  perfectly  huge,  they  say, 
swarming  with  men.   And  then  Philip 

—  Mr.  Cortwright  —  must  be  on  duty 
a  great  part  of  his  time,'  the  girl  added, 
with  a  note  of  pride;  'he  said  in  one 
of  his  letters  he  would  n't  have  much 
chance  to  look  after  Bob.' 

Van  Cleve,  who  still  kept  to  his  ideas 

—  doubtless    unfair    and    prejudiced 
ones  —  about  the  benefit  Robert  might 
receive  from  an  association  with  this 
gentleman,  did  not  reply  for  a  moment. 
Then  he  spoke,  overlooking  Mr.  Cort- 
wright. *I  suppose  if  we  could  be  there 
at  Tampa  or  Key  West  and  see  it,  we  'd 
laugh  at  the  notion  of  finding  or  look- 
ing out  for  anybody.    It  must  be  an 
awful  mix-up,'  he  said  wisely. 

There  was  a  pause  while  the  thunder 
began  to  rumble  overhead. 

'  Do  you  suppose  cannon  sounds  like 
that?'  Lorrie  said. 


388 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


'Don't  know.  I've  a  notion  it's 
shorter  and  boomier,  somehow  —  not 
quite  so  much  like  a  lot  of  empty  hogs- 
heads rolling  downstairs,'  Van  sug- 
gested. 'Your  mother  was  near  some 
of  the  battlefields  in  the  Civil  War, 
was  n't  she?  She  must  know  what  sort 
of  noise  the  guns  make/ 

'Yes,  but  I  don't  like  to  ask  her.  I 
think  it  pains  her  to  be  reminded  of 
it.' 

They  glanced  at  the  open  window. 

'  How  old  your  father  and  mother  are 
beginning  to  look,  Lorrie,'  Van  said, 
involuntarily;  the  knowledge  came  to 
him  with  an  unwelcome  shock. 

'Do  you  think  so?'  she  said,  trou- 
bled; 'they  have  n't  been  well,  either 
of  them;  and  Bob's  never  out  of  their 
minds  for  one  instant,  you  know.  It 
does  seem  as  if  we  'd  had  so  many  up- 
setting things  happen  lately;  and  when 
people  get  older,  they  can't  stand  them 
so  well.  Now,  to-day  Paula  Jame- 
son— '  Lorrie  gave  him  some  descrip- 
tion of  the  girl's  seizure.  'I  hope  it's 
nothing  serious,  but  it  certainly  was 
enough  to  frighten  anybody  to  see  it 
—  it  was  so  sudden,'  she  concluded. 
'Mother's  been  what  she  calls  "  as  ner- 
vous as  a  witch  "  all  day.  I  'm  glad  she 
did  n't  have  to  have  anything  to  do 
with  Mrs.  Jameson,  anyhow.  Van,  it 
was  awful !  That  poor  thing  was  com- 
pletely frightened  out  of  what  little 
sense  she  has  — Is  that  somebody  com- 
ing in?' 

The  visitor  was  Mrs.  Jameson,  walk- 
ing fast.  'Gracious!  Suppose  she  heard 
me!  I  hope  I  was  n't  speaking  very 
loud!'  Lorrie  ejaculated  inwardly, 
panic-struck;  and  greeted  the  other  in 
a  fluster  that  made  Van  Cleve  smile  in 
the  dark. 

'Why  —  why  —  good  evening,  Mrs. 
Jameson.  A  —  er  —  how  is  Paula?' 
And  then,  as  the  girl's  mother  came 
up  and  stood  breathing  hurriedly  and 
excitedly,  without  a  word,  Lorrie  add- 


ed in  quick  alarm,  'She's  not  worse? 
She's  not  going  to  be  very  sick?  What 
is  it?  A  —  a  fever?  Not  a  fever,  I 
hope?' 

Mrs.  Jameson  spoke  at  last  in  a 
hasty,  fluttering  voice,  catching  herself 
and  swallowing  at  every  other  word. 
'No,  it's  not  that  — she's  better  — 
that  is,  she  —  she'll  be  better  —  I 
don't  know  —  Who 's  that  ? '  she  cried 
out  shrilly,  and  darted  a  step  forward, 
peering  into  the  shadow  where  Van 
Cleve  sat.  'Is  that  your  brother?  Is 
that  you,  Bob  Gilbert?' 

'Why  no,  Bob's  not  home  —  he's 
gone  away  —  he 's  with  the  troops 
down  in  Florida  —  did  n't  Paula  tell 
you?'  Lorrie  explained,  a  good  deal 
startled,  as  Van  Cleve  got  to  his  feet 
and  came  into  the  light,  himself  some- 
what surprised.  Mrs.  Jameson  fell 
back  unsteadily  and  stared  at  him. 
'It's  Mr.  Kendrick,  Van  Cleve  Kend- 
rick,  you  know.  Why,  I  was  sure  you 
knew  Van  Cleve,'  said  Lorrie.  'Paula 
knows  him.'  And  she  asked  again, 
unconvinced,  'Is  Paula  better?  Can't 
I  do  something  for  her?' 

'Oh,  I've  met  Miss  Jameson  lots  of 
times — '  Van  was  saying,  a  little  em- 
barrassed. 

'Oh,  yes,  yes  —  I  —  I  beg  your 
pardon,  Mr.  Kendrick,  of  course  —  I 
could  n't  see  who  it  was  —  I  beg  your 
pardon — '  Mrs.  Jameson  said  in  a 
manner  that  so  laboriously  parodied 
her  accustomed  artificial  graces  that 
the  others  observed  it  with  a  kind  of 
incredulity.  She  put  up  a  hand  to  her 
bare  throat,  as  if  to  help  the  control  of 
her  voice.  'I  —  I  thought  for  a  minute 
your  brother  might  have  come  back, 
and  —  and  I  wanted  to  see  him  on 
business  —  a  —  a  little  business,'  she 
said  to  Lorrie. 

'  I  'm  sorry  Bob 's  not  home  — '  Lor- 
rie stammered,  confounded  by  this 
statement;  'I  can  give  you  his  last  ad- 
dress, though,  but  we're  not  sure  where 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


389 


he'll  be — '  she  was  going  on  to  say, 
when  Mrs.  Jameson  cut  her  short  with 
a  sudden  wild  ejaculation  and  gesture; 
she  threw  out  both  hands  as  if  she  rent 
and  tore  away  some  bond,  resigned 
some  struggle,  with  a  need  stronger 
than  herself.  'It  don't  make  any  dif- 
ference!' she  said  loud  and  harshly; 
*  where 's  his  father?  I  want  to  see  his 
father.  Is  he  here?' 

* Father?1  repeated  Lorrie,  blankly. 
The  request  was  stranger,  if  that  could 
be,  than  the  first.  Professor  Gilbert 
had  never  met,  had  never  even  seen, 
Mrs.  Jameson  in  his  life;  it  was  impos- 
sible to  imagine  their  having  a  single 
interest  in  common,  a  single  thought  or 
feeling.  "Father?  Why  yes,  he's  here 
—  he's  in  the  house.  Do  you  want  — 
I  mean,  shall  I  call  him  —  I  mean, 
won't  you  come  in?' 

*  I  want  to  see  your  father,'  said  Mrs. 
Jameson  again,  vehemently.  'Ls  that 
him  in  there?  That  gray-headed  man? ' 
She  advanced  into  the  full  light,  show- 
ing a  face  and  figure  in  uncanny  dis- 
order; she  had  a  black  lace  dress  and 
black  hat  flung  on  anyhow;  tag-ends 
of  lavender  ribbon  and  white  edging 
stuck  out  inappropriately  about  the 
corsage;  the  plumes  of  her  hat  swept 
and  bobbed  and  dipped  over  her  big 
white  neck  and  shoulders,  that  showed 
fleshily  under  the  figured  net  draperies; 
and  wisps  of  her  red  hair  blew  or  hung 
stringily  out  of  curl  about  her. 

The  two  young  people  looked  at  her 
almost  appalled;  for  terror  and  misery 
stared  out  of  the  woman's  eyes,  and 
walked  in  this  slattern  finery,  on  those 
pinched,  French-heeled  slippers.  'The 
poor  thing  has  gone  out  of  her  head, 
sure  enough!  Paula  must  be  going  to 
die!'  both  of  them  thought.  For  an 
instant  they  stood  helpless,  not  know- 
ing what  to  do  or  say. 

'I  want  to  see  your  father,'  said  Mrs. 
Jameson,  moving  toward  the  door, 
still  with  that  air  of  having  thrown 


down  all  barriers.  She  turned  quickly. 
'You'd  better  go  away!'  she  said,  her 
glance  comprehending  them  both. 
'Why  don't  you  go  away?  I  want  to 
see  him  by  himself.' 

'But  Mrs.  Jameson,  Father  can't  — 
he  does  n't  —  he  won't  know  who  you 
are  —  just  wait  a  minute  —  only  a 
minute,  won't  you?'  Lorrie  expostu- 
lated, trying  to  gather  up  her  own  wits, 
and  to  speak  soothingly  and  with  com- 
posure. *  Had  n't  you  better  sit  down 
here,  and  —  and  let  me  get  you  some- 
thing? You  —  you're  nervous,  you 
know.  Can't  you  tell  me  what  it  is? 
Is  it  something  about  Paula?  Tell  me, 
won't  you?' 

Mrs.  Jameson  shook  off  her  hands. 
'Let  me  alone!'  she  said  savagely;  and 
thrust  them  both  aside  and  went  into 
the  house.  Lorrie  and  Van  Cleve  hesi- 
tated behind  her,  each  questioning  the 
other's  face. 

'That's  just  the  way  she  was  to-day 
when  she  found  how  sick  poor  Paula 
was!'  whispered  the  girl.  Uncon- 
sciously she  laid  a  hand  on  his  arm. 
'Mercy,  I'm  glad  you're  here,  Van! 
What  do  you  suppose  is  the  matter? 
She  acts  as  if  she  might  do  anything  I 
And  yet  she  said  something  about 
Paula's  being  better.' 

'Oh,  she's  just  frightened,  I  guess/ 
said  Van  Cleve,  reassuringly.  Mrs. 
Jameson's  manner  reminded  him  of 
his  aunt's  when  that  lady  reached  a 
high  pitch  of  excitement.  'You'll  find 
there's  nothing  much  wrong,'  said  the 
young  man,  wagging  his  head  knowing- 
ly, as  he  followed  her.  The  storm  was 
rising  noisily,  clapping  the  doors,  and 
sending  the  Professor's  papers  scurry- 
ing all  about  the  room.  There  came  a 
dash  of  rain. 

'Lorrie!  Van!  Better  run  and  close 
the  windows!'  Mrs.  Gilbert  called  out. 
She  dropped  her  work  and  ran  to  the 
door.  'Come  in,  children,  both  of 
you !  Is  there  somebody  else  out  there  ? 


390 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


I  thought  I  heard  somebody  —  Mrs. 
Jameson ! ' 

The  other  shouldered  past  without 
heeding  her.  'Is  that  Bob  Gilbert's 
father?  Are  you  his  father?'  she  de- 
manded. 

Professor  Gilbert,  who  had  been 
gathering  sheets  of  foolscap  from  un- 
der the  fender  where  they  had  blown 
and  lodged,  straightened  up,  smooth- 
ing them  in  his  hands,  and  turned 
around.  He  pushed  up  his  glasses  and 
green  shade  to  survey  her  amazedly. 

'My  name  is  Gilbert,  madam,'  he 
said,  recovering;  and  made  a  little  cour- 
teous, old-fashioned  gesture  of  apology. 
'Er  —  who  is  it,  if  you  please?' 

'It's  Mrs.  Jameson,  Sam  —  you 
know  —  Paula  Jameson's  mother  — 
you  know  Paula,'  Mrs.  Gilbert  inter- 
posed hastily.  'My  husband,  Profes- 
sor Gilbert,  Mrs.  Jameson,'  she  added, 
conventionally,  notwithstanding  her 
surprise;  she  supposed  that  the  other 
had  run  in  for  a  refuge  from  the  rain. 
And  —  'Won't  you  sit  down?'  said 
the  hospitable  little  lady,  seeking  to 
put  the  guest  at  her  ease.  Still  Mrs. 
Jameson  did  not  move  or  speak;  and 
in  the  silence,  Lorrie's  mother  sudden- 
ly sensed  impending  calamity.  'How 
is  Paula?  Is  she  —  ?  It 's  not  serious  ? ' 
she  asked  quickly.  Her  eyes  searched 
the  other  mother's  face,  and  whatever 
she  divined  there,  stark  horror  all  at 
once  laid  hold  of  her.  'Merciful  Hea- 
ven, is  n't  she  going  to  —  to  get  well? 
She — she's  not  going  to  —  to — ' 
She  could  not  finish. 

Mrs.  Jameson  glanced  at  her  impa- 
tiently. She  made  a  movement  toward 
the  Professor,  then  checked  herself, 
as  it  seemed  unwillingly,  and  looked 
around  on  the  others.  'I  said  for  all 
of  you  to  go  away.'  Then,  as  nobody 
moved  immediately,  in  the  common  be- 
wilderment, she  threw  out  both  hands 
again  in  a  paroxysm  of  impotent  an- 
ger. 'My  God,  won't  anybody  listen 


to  me?'  she  screamed  out  violently, 
and  stamped  the  floor;  'I  know  I'm 
acting  queer  —  I  know  it  as  well  as 
you  do !  But  I  'm  not  crazy  —  not 
yet,  anyhow!'  And  with  this  outburst 
she  seemed  on  a  sudden  to  repossess 
herself!  It  was  as  if  some  unimagin- 
able flood  of  desperate  emotion  had 
deluged  and  devastated  her  soul  and 
rushed  on,  leaving  her  to  the  ultimate 
calm  —  the  calm  of  defeat.  She  went 
up  to  Professor  Gilbert  and  spoke 
steadily.  'I  have  come  aBout  your 
son.  I  mean  the  one  that 's  called  Bob. 
I  want  you  to  send  for  him  to  come 
back.  He's  got  to  come  back  here! ' 

'Bob?  You  mean  Bob?'  said  the 
father,  uncomprehendingly;  'you  want 
him  to  come  back?  But  madam,  I  — 
I  don't  understand.  What  is  the  mat- 
ter? Why—?' 

'Because  he's  ruined  my  girl  — 
that's  why!'  said  Mrs.  Jameson;  and 
as  Professor  Gilbert  moved,  with  an 
inarticulate  sound,  she  repeated  the 
words. 

There  was  a  speechless  moment. 
Outside  the  storm  roared  past  and 
shook  the  four  corners  of  the  house; 
but  for  the  people  in  the  Gilbert  sitting- 
room,  silence  engulfed  the  universe. 
Mrs.  Jameson  stood  haggardly  in  the 
midst  of  them,  her  hand  clutching  at 
her  throat;  she  was  spent  utterly  and 
could  feel  and  think  no  further.  For 
that  matter,  thought  was  beyond  the 
others,  too;  nobody  was  thinking;  their 
minds  stood  still,  clogged  with  formless 
protest.  Van  Cleve,  who  more  than  any 
one  present  had  the  habit  of  self-mas- 
tery, was  the  first  to  recognize  that 
Mrs.  Jameson  was  not  insane;  she  was 
most  tragically  sane,  and  she  believed 
herself  to  be  telling  the  truth.  It  might 
be  monstrous  —  it  was  monstrous 
—  but  it  explained  and  justified  her. 
After  another  chaotic  instant,  Lorrie 
came  to  the  same  realization;  strangely 
enough,  her  first  coherent  thought  in 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


391 


that  flash  of  miserable  illumination, 
was  not  of  her  brother,  not  of  Bob's 
guilt  or  innocence,  but  of  Paula.  Lor- 
rie  understood  now;  sick  horror  and 
pity  surged  over  her. 

Mrs.  Gilbert  spoke,  grasping  at  her 
first  definite  idea;  it  was  more  like  an 
impulse  uttered  than  a  thought.  'My 
son  never  did  that  thing.  Our  Bob 
never  did  that/  she  said. 

'Will  you  send  for  him?'  said  the 
other  mother. 

'Mrs.  Jameson/  said  the  Professor, 
collecting  himself;  'I  —  I  cannot  be- 
lieve —  I  do  not  mean  that  I  doubt 
you  —  I  mean  I  —  I  — '  He  stopped; 
then  made  another  effort.  'I  trust  you 
will  not  misunderstand  me  —  I  trust 
you  will  bear  with  me  when  I  say  I 
can't  believe  —  I  don't  believe  my  son 
would  so  wrong — '  He  had  to  stop 
again. 

'Would  Paula  lie  about  it?  What 
for?'  said  Mrs.  Jameson. 

The  rest  looked  at  one  another,  grop- 
ing for  an  answer.  Suddenly  Mrs.  Gil- 
bert became  aware  that  her  daughter 
and  a  young  man  were  in  the  room  — 
a  young  unmarried  man  and  woman. 
'You  ought  n't  to  be  here,  Lorrie  — 
you  and  Van, '  she  said  distressfully. 

Van  Cleve  obediently  turned  to  the 
door,  in  a  turmoil  of  shame  and  sym- 
pathy; but  Bob's  father  interposed 
quickly.  'Van  Cleve  —  Van!  Don't 
go!  You're  Bob's  friend  — don't  go!' 

'Oh,  Mother,  it  does  n't  make  any 
difference  —  nothing  makes  any  differ- 
ence except  whether  this  is  true  or  not. 
That's  all  that  matters!'  said  Lorrie. 
They  looked  at  her.  It  was  so.  No- 
thing mattered  but  the  truth.  The 
kindly,  well-meant  screens  and  shams 
of  daily  intercourse  were  all  abolished; 
there  they  stood,  men  and  women,  with 
their  wretched  knowledge,  like  people 
around  a  corpse. 

'Did  she  —  did  Paula  tell  you 
so?'  Mrs.  Gilbert  asked,  unconsciously 


clenching  her  hands  together.  'Did  she 
say  it  —  it  was  Bob?' 

'Yes.  I  made  her  tell  me.  She  did 
n't  want  to,  but  I  made  her.  Will  you 
send  for  him?' 

Mrs.  Gilbert  put  out  a  hand  blindly, 
and  caught  hold  of  a  table  and  clung 
to  it,  trembling.  It  was  that  little 
old  table  with  the  decanter  of  peach- 
brandy,  and  the  thing  rocked  over 
now,  struck  against  the  wall,  and  went 
smashing  unregarded  to  the  floor,  and 
the  heavy,  gummy  liquor  splashed 
and  ran  down  over  the  wall  in  a  thick 
stream.  That  was  like  the  stain  on  the 
family  honor:  it  would  never  come  off. 

*I  cannot  believe  it/  Professor  Gil- 
bert said  again.  'Bob  has  been  wild 
—  he  has  been  wild,  but  he  —  he — ' 
Torturing  doubt  appeared  on  his  face; 
his  eyes  sought  Van  Cleve's  in  unhap- 
py appeal.  'Van  Cleve,  you've  al- 
ways been  his  friend  —  you  know  him 
better  than  anybody  —  much  better 
than  I.  I've  never  known  how  to  — 
to  do  right  with  Bob/  said  the  father, 
humbly.  'Do  you  believe  it?' 

The  young  man  hung  his  head;  he, 
too,  had  been  thinking  that  Bob  was 
wild,  was  weak.  'All  that  talk  about 
never  harming  anybody  but  himself, 
what  does  that  amount  to?  If  a  fellow 
lets  go  of  himself  one  way,  he 's  bound 
to  let  go  of  himself  other  ways/  he 
thought,  gloomily.  'But  if  he  did  do 
this,  by  God,  I  know  it  was  n't  all 
Bob's  fault! '  Aloud,  he  could  only  say 
huskily,  'Mr.  Gilbert,  I  don't  want  to 
believe  it.'  The  words  sounded  as  hard 
as  his  hard  face  looked,  yet  they  were 
uttered  with  real  suffering. 

'Are  you  going  to  send  for  him?'  said 
Mrs.  Jameson. 

There  was  another  unhappy  silence; 
they  could  hear  the  water  rustling 
along  the  gutter  and  down-spout  at  the 
corner  of  the  porch;  the  storm  had 
come,  and  burst,  and  passed  since  they 
had  been  in  this  room,  and  not  one  of 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


them  had  noticed  it;  and  it  was  not  yet 
ten  minutes! 

Mrs.  Gilbert  at  last  spoke,  raising 
her  head.  'Bob  shall  come  back,  Mrs. 
Jameson/  she  said,  firmly  and  clearly. 
'He  must  come  back.  If  he  —  if  they 
have  done  wrong,  it  will  be  righted. 
Young  people  don't  always  seem  to 
know  —  they  don't  mean  to  be  wicked, 
they're  just  foolish  — ' 

She  paused,  fighting  for  self-con- 
trol; and  before  their  mental  vision 
there  rose  the  picture  of  the  pretty, 
little,  soft,  silly  girl,  the  reckless,  good- 
natured,  self-indulgent  young  man.  It 
was  sad,  it  was  shameful;  but  was  it  so 
very  strange,  was  it  wholly  their  fault? 
'Why  were  n't  you  taking  better  care 
of  your  daughter,  woman?'  the  one 
mother  wanted  to  cry  out.  'And  why 
did  n't  you  put  better  principles  into 
your  son,  Ellen  Gilbert?'  conscience 
inquired  sternly.  'It  shall  be  made 
right  —  Bob  shall  make  it  right  —  we 
want  it  as  much  as  you  do,'  Mrs.  Gil- 
bert began  again.  She  turned  to  her 
husband  with  a  fevered  eagerness. 
'We'll  telegraph  him  —  can't  we  tele- 
graph? I  mean  to-night  —  now  —  at 
once;  can't  we?' 

'If —  if  we  knew  where  he  is,'  said 
the  Professor,  in  helplessness.  He  took 
off  the  eye-shade  and  spectacles  which 
he  had  been  wearing  all  this  while,  and 
laid  them  down  under  the  lamp  with 
nervous  and  shaky  movements;  on  a 
sudden,  he  seemed  to  have  become  an 
old  man  —  old  and  infirm.  'Let  me 
think  —  I  have  to  think  a  little,'  he 
said,  brushing  a  hand  across  his  eyes. 

Lorrie  went  to  her  mother's  side, 
with  an  anxious  look  into  her  face, 
and  picked  up  Mrs.  Gilbert's  hand 
and  began  to  stroke  it  gently.  'Bob 
would  n't  come  anyhow  for  a  telegram, 
Mother.  How  could  you  tell  him  what 
was  the  matter?'  she  said  quietly. 
'What  could  we  say  in  a  telegram,  or 
even  a  letter?  Never  mind,  Mother 


dear,  one  of  us  will  go  and  find  him  and 
bring  him  home.  Nevermind!' 

'I  was  thinking  of  that,'  said  her 
father,  with  his  drawn  brows.  'I  — 
could  I  see  you  at  the  bank  to-morrow, 
VanCleve?' 

'No,  no,  you  don't  need  to.  I  have 
money  —  I  have  plenty  of  money  —  I 
can  get  more!'  Mrs.  Jameson  cried  in- 
coherently; her  woman's  mind  rushed 
forward  to  an  understanding  while  Van 
Cleve  was  yet  wondering  what  the 
Professor  meant  to  do,  or  wanted  at 
the  bank.  She  snatched  out  an  ornate 
purse  of  gilded  and  wrought  leather, 
with  chains  and  trinkets  dangling  from 
it,  and  tried  to  force  it  on  him.  'See, 
there's  plenty  —  take  it  all  —  take  it! 
I  've  got  more  —  I  can  get  more  —  it 's 
my  own  money,  you  know.  Don't 
wait  for  any  banks,  or  letters,  or  any- 
thing! You  've  got  to  get  him  here  soon 
—  please  don't  wait ! '  Suddenly  her 
features  quivered;  she  dropped  all  the 
money  at  his  feet  and  shrank  back, 
covering  her  face,  and  a  heavy  sob 
shook  her. 

The  two  men  were  inexpressibly 
touched  by  the  sight,  by  the  pitiful  of- 
fering —  and  the  two  women,  strange 
as  it  would  seem,  not  at  all.  Yet  they 
were  both  good,  tender-hearted  wo- 
men. Lorrie  stooped  and  painstaking- 
ly recovered  the  bills  and  silver  and 
pennies  that  had  scattered  in  every 
direction. 

'We  don't  want  this,  Mrs.  Jame- 
son,' she  said  coldly,  returning  it. 

The  other  gazed  at  her,  affrightedly, 
through  her  tears.  'I  did  n't  m-mean 
any  harm!'  Paula's  mother  quavered. 
'I'm  sorry  to  m-make  trouble.  I'm 
going  to  take  Paula  away  somewhere, 
so  nobody  will  know  about  it,  but  I 
c-couldn't  help — '  She  broke  down 
again.  Her  brief  flame  of  courage  and 
resolution  had  burned  out;  she  could 
only  plead  and  whimper  weakly  now. 

'If  you  could  manage  it  with  your 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


393 


bank  people,  Van?  I  don't  know  much 
about  business  methods.  I  have  never 
been  obliged  to  —  to  raise  money  hur- 
riedly before,'  said  Professor  Gilbert, 
in  a  pathetic  anxiety;  'my —  my 
personal  note  — ?' 

*  That's  all  right,  Mr.  Gilbert,'  Van 
Cleve  said,  inordinately  relieved  at  the 
introduction  of  this  safe,  commonplace, 
familiar  subject;  he  felt  as  if  his  feet 
were  on  solid  ground  at  last.    'I'll  get 
the  money  for  you,  any  amount  you 
say  — I '11  fix  all  that— ' 

*  You  can't  go,  Father,'  Lorrie  inter- 
rupted.    'You  can't  get  away  now. 
You'd  have  to  explain  — ' 

Her  father's  glance  turned  to  the 
examination  papers.  'I  don't  know — ' 
he  murmured;  'I  could  make  an  ar- 
rangement, I  think  — ' 

*I  will  go,'  said  Lorrie. 

Her  father  and  mother  stared  at  her, 
startled.  Mrs.  Jameson,  crumpled  into 
a  chair,  ceased  her  moaning  to  gaze  up 
at  the  girl  in  awed  admiration  and 
wonder.  That  a  woman  could  speak  or 
act  with  any  sort  of  promptness,  en- 
ergy, or  decision,  coolly  as  if  it  was  her 
habit,  seemed  to  Paula's  mother  some- 
thing abnormal;  she  did  not  like  Lorrie 
and  was  afraid  of  her,  yet  trusted  her 
devoutly.  It  was  Van  Cleve  who  began 
to  protest. 

'Why,  Lorrie,  you  can't  do  that! 
You  can't  go  running  around  trying  to 
hunt  up  Bob.  You  have  n't  any  idea 
what  sort  of  places  you  might  —  that 
is,  he  might  —  you  don't  know  what 
you  're  talking  about.  It 's  no  place  for 
women — ' 

'How  about  the  nurses?'  said  Lor- 
rie; 'Miss  Rodgers  —  you  know;  at 
Christ's?  —  Miss  Rodgers  is  going. 
She's  going  this  week.  She  spoke  to 
me  the  other  day  about  it,  because 
she'd  heard  I  had  said  I'd  like  to  go 
with  the  Red  Cross.  I  could  go  with 
her.' 

'  You  can't !   It 's  insane  —  ! ' 


'Van's  right,  Lorrie;  you  oughtn't 
to  think  of  going,'  said  Mrs.  Gilbert, 
in  alarm. 

'  Mother,  you  know  Bob  would  listen 
to  me  —  he  'd  pay  more  attention  to 
me  than  to  anybody  else.  I  can  do 
more  with  Bob  than  anybody  else  — 
more  than  you  or  father  — ' 

'That's  true,'  said  Professor  Gilbert, 
with  a  kind  of  groan. 

'Lorrie,  don't  talk  that  way  —  as  if 
Bob  had  to  be  made ! '  said  her  mother, 
tremulously;  'Bob  will  do  right,  as 
soon  —  as  soon  as  he  knows.  I  know 
he  will.  Bob's  not  bad.  He  may  have 
been  wild  —  ever  so  many  young  men 
are  —  but  he 's  always  done  right  in  the 
end,  or  —  or  tried  to.  You  know  he 
has,'  said  the  poor  mother,  breaking 
down,  at  last,  in  her  turn;  'you  ought 
n't  to  talk  that  way  about  him  —  your 
own  brother  —  and  everybody's  so 
against  him,  anyhow  — ! ' 

It  was  late  when  Van  Cleve  went  out 
and  called  a  carriage  and  put  Mrs. 
Jameson  into  it  to  take  her  home  —  a 
silent  and  dreary  journey,  although 
the  poor  woman  herself  would  proba- 
bly have  talked  eagerly,  in  the  relief 
and  reaction  of  the  moment,  if  she  had 
had  the  slightest  encouragement.  'Do 
you  think  Miss  —  Miss  Lorrie  ought 
to  go  that  way  by  herself?  Do  you 
think  she  really  will,  Mr.  Kendrick?' 
she  asked  him  timidly.  'I'd  be  afraid 
of  my  life.  I  don't  see  how  she  dares. 
She's  very  unusual,  isn't  she?'  Mrs. 
Jameson  added,  remembering  that  she 
had  heard  something  about  the  young 
man's  devotion  in  that  quarter,  and 
with  some  idea  of  making  herself 
agreeable. 

To  her  dismay,  he  scowled.  'Miss 
Gilbert  won't  be  by  herself,'  he  said 
briefly. 

'I  know.  That  Miss  Rodgers  —  that 
nurse,  of  course  — '  said  Mrs.  Jameson, 
hastily,  perturbed. 


394 


NATIONALISM  IN  MUSIC 


Van  Cleve  made  no  comment,  glow- 
ering silently  out  of  the  carriage  win- 
dow at  the  night-scene  of  shining  wet 
pavements,  tracked  with  lights,  and 
the  hurrying  trolley-cars  with  their 
soaked  curtains  pulled  tight.  After  a 
while,  Mrs.  Jameson  ventured  again, 
even  more  nervously  than  before,  — 

*  Mr.    Kendrick,   you  —  you   won't 
tell  anybody?' 

'Tell  anybody?'  echoed  Van  Cleve, 
not  understanding. 

*  About  us  —  about  Paula  —  about 
this  evening?'  faltered  Mrs.  Jameson, 
leaning  forward  and  clutching  at  his 
knee,  in  her  anxiety.  '  You  won't  tell? ' 


'No,  I  won't  tell,'  said  the  young 
man,  recoiling  throughout  his  whole 
being.  What  was  the  woman  made  of? 
Or  what,  in  Heaven's  name,  did  she 
think  he  was  made  of? 

'I'm  ever  so  much  obliged.  You're 
doing  a  great  deal  for  us.  I'm  awfully 
obliged,'  said  Mrs.  Jameson,  weakly, 
conscious  of  a  certain  inadequacy 
about  these  phrases;  but  her  pinch- 
beck vocabulary  afforded  nothing  bet- 
ter. Van  Cleve  left  her  at  her  hotel, 
and  paid  the  cabman,  and  went  off 
home.  He  went  upstairs  to  his  board- 
ing-house room,  and  got  a  traveling- 
bag  out  of  the  closet. 


(To  be  continued.) 


NATIONALISM  IN  MUSIC 


BY  REDFERN   MASON 


NATIONAL  music,  if  such  a  thing 
there  be,  is  a  form  of  art  the  very  men- 
tion of  which  causes  many  excellent 
people  to  shudder.  It  offends  their 
musical  ideal,  which  is  that  of  pure 
sonority  unperplexed  by  the  sugges- 
tion of  anything  outside  of  its  own 
beauty.  The  confusion  of  tongues  can- 
not reach  it;  it  dwells  far  from  the  clash 
of  races.  According  to  this  view,  to 
stamp  music  with  national  character- 
istics is  to  reduce  it  from  the  proud 
position  of  being  the  one  language 
which  all  can  understand  to  a  speech 
split  up  into  a  hundred  dialects,  some 
of  them  as  incomprehensible  to  the 
generality  of  mankind  as  pigeon-Eng- 
lish. Here  and  there,  one  of  these  ideal- 
ists will  grant  to  folk-song  national 
flavor,  just  as  there  may  be  dialect 
poetry,  or  flowers  may  develop  traits 


peculiar  to  the  part  of  the  world  in 
which  they  are  found.  But  that  the 
peculiarities  of  folk-song  are  to  be  met 
with  in  the  music  of  the  masters,  or, 
if  found,  would  become  its  dignity,  this 
they  deny,  firm  in  the  conviction  that 
the  fluctuating  qualities  of  race  and 
nationality  cannot  be  expressed  in  an 
art  so  pure  and  abstract  as  music. 

On  the  other  hand,  it  is  pointed  out 
that  our  generation,  has  not  lacked 
composers  who  chose  to  write  in  what 
they  deemed  their  national  idiom  — 
Liszt  as  a  Hungarian,  Grieg  as  a  Nor- 
wegian, Moussorgsky  as  a  Russian. 
Believers  in  the  nationalism  of  song 
assert  that  the  best  work  of  the  masters 
is  national,  and,  in  support  of  this 
view  they  point  to  the  resemblance  — 
a  resemblance  which  they  declare  not 
to  be  accidental  —  borne  by  the  best 


NATIONALISM  IN  MUSIC 


395 


melody  of  the  great  composers  to  the 
folk-music  of  their  native  land.  In  this 
resemblance  they  see  a  fitness  based 
on  the  inherent  dignity  of  national 
character;  for  a  folk-song  in  its  best 
form  is  the  people's  praise  of  love  and 
heroism,  their  hatred  of  tyranny,  their 
reaching  out  after  the  divine. 

When  Napoleon  forbade,  under  pen- 
alty of  death,  the  playing  of  the  'Ranz 
des  Vaches '  in  the  hearing  of  his  Swiss 
soldiers,  lest  they  should  desert,  as  they 
had  often  done,  sometimes  in  whole 
companies,  he  was  bearing  testimony 
to  the  existence  of  something  in  this 
mountain  music  that  had  a  meaning 
for  the  Switzers  which  it  possessed  for 
no  one  else.  Was  the  charm  merely 
a  sentimental  memory,  or  had  some 
quality  allied  to  the  genius  of  the  race 
insinuated  itself  into  the  notes?  On 
this  point  hinges  the  whole  question 
of  national  music,  whether  by  that 
term  we  mean  the  song  of  the  folk  or 
the  compositions  of  the  professional 
musician.  Mountain  melody  has  a 
character  of  its  own.  The  bold  skips 
and  arpeggios  of  Styrian  song  may 
be  paralleled,  in  significantly  different 
melodic  texture,  in  the  songs  of  Nor- 
way and  the  Scotch  Highlands.  More- 
over, strains  inspired  by  the  hills  have 
a  richness  of  harmonic  suggestion,  the 
reason  for  which  we  must  seek  in  the 
echoes  of  cliff  and  hollow. 

The  emotion  aroused  in  the  Swiss  sol- 
diers by  the  *  Ranz  des  Vaches '  has  its 
explanation  in  some  deep-seated  kin- 
ship between  the  melody  and  the  scene 
which  called  it  into  being.  To  say  this 
is  merely  to  assert  the  existence  of  an 
analogy  between  the  physical  character 
of  a  country  and  its  music.  The  songs 
of  Britanny  recall  certain  mist-drench- 
ed pages  of  Pierre  Loti;  the  airs  of 
southern  France,  on  the  other  hand, 
are  languid  with  the  fragrance  of  the 
honeysuckle.  Compare  the  Breton 
hymn,  *  Ar  Barados,'  with  the  Southern 


song  of '  Magali.'  Germany  has  *  wood- 
notes  wild'  that  suggest  the  sombre 
beauty  of  the  Black  Forest,  notes  that 
were  well  known  to  Karl  Maria  von 
Weber.  Musicians,  like  painters,  draw 
their  inspiration  from  the  land  in  which 
they  dwell,  and  the  image  of  the  old 
home^vill  slip  into  their  compositions 
much  as  the  wood-clad  hills  of  Um- 
bria  slip  into  the  Biblical  backgrounds 
of  Perugino. 

Playing  over  Redskin  melodies  on 
the  piano,  people  have  sometimes  been 
struck  by  their  apparently  Celtic  char- 
acter. Now,  if  Celt  may  be  confounded 
with  Indian,  music  as  an  index  of  na- 
tional character  is  grotesquely  decep- 
tive. The  confusion  of  types,  however, 
is  to  be  attributed,  not  to  the  similar- 
ity of  melodies,  but  to  the  imperfec- 
tions and  limitations  of  our  system  of 
notation.  The  music  of  the  Indians  is 
largely  based  on  a  scale  of  five  whole 
tones — our  major  scale  with  the  half- 
tones left  out.  Celtic  music  has  like- 
wise a  pentatonic  basis.  A  purely  theo- 
retical examination  would  leave  the 
impression  that  Celtic  and  Indian 
music  used  the  same  notes,  were  built 
of  the  same  material,  and  therefore, 
apart  from  considerations  of  contour 
and  rhythm,  might  be  expected  to 
sound  much  alike.  But  it  is  only  neces- 
sary to  hear  Indian  chanting  and  com- 
pare it  with  an  Irish  song  sung  *  in  the 
Irish  way,'  or  a  coronach  played  by 
a  Scotch  piper,  to  be  convinced  that 
between  the  music  of  the  American 
Indians  and  that  of  the  Celtic  peoples 
there  is  a  wide  gulf. 

Our  system  of  notation  has  this 
capital  defect,  that  it  obliterates  tonal 
peculiarities.  In  many  countries  the 
diatonic  scale  is  subtly  modified.  As 
interpreted  by  the  piano,  that  scale  is 
neither  the  *  scale  of  nature'  nor  the 
scale  of  any  primitive  people,  but  a 
succession  of  sounds  arbitrarily  modi- 
fied so  that  the  instrument  may  be 


396 


NATIONALISM  IN  MUSIC 


played  in  all  the  keys  —  an  impossibil- 
ity if  it  were  strictly  in  tune. 

The  pianistic  scale  differs  markedly 
from  that  of  the  Celts,  with  the  re- 
sult that  Irish  melodies  lose  much  of 
their  flavor  when  played  in  it.  Julien 
Tiersot  discovered  that  the  Arabs  use 
a  scale  analogous  to  our  own,  composed 
of  tones  and  half-tones;  but  the  pitch 
of  certain  notes  differs  from  that  of  the 
corresponding  degrees  in  the  scale  of 
northern  Europe.  To  represent  these 
shades  of  difference  on  a  keyed  instru- 
ment is  impossible;  our  system  of 
notation  treats  them  as  non-existent. 
Yet  they  are  of  the  very  essence  of  na- 
tional song.  Take  the  analogous  sub- 
ject of  language.  No  matter  how  well 
a  Frenchman  or  a  German  may  speak 
English,  a  hundred  fine  shades  of  dif- 
ference in  pronunciation  and  intonation 
will  declare  him  a  foreigner.  So  it  is  in 
music,  and  the  grave  objection  to  our 
habit  of  deferring  to  the  piano  as  the 
form  of  musical  expression  is  that,  un- 
like the  violin  or  'cello,  it  is  incapable 
of  any  speech  but  its  own  narrow  and 
individuality-destroying  vernacular. 

Between  a  notation  that  misrepre- 
sents, and  instruments  that  pervert,  na- 
tional idiom,  if  it  had  not  in  itself  some- 
thing imperishable,  would  be  lost.  The 
only  conclusive  way  in  which  this  vexed 
question  of  tonality  in  national  music 
can  be  settled,  as  matters  stand,  is  by 
the  comparison  of  phonographic  re- 
cords. Such  a  test  would  probably  show 
that  German,  Celtic,  Arab,  and  Red- 
skin music  are  based  on  as  many  vari- 
ations of  the  universal  diatonic  as  there 
are  peoples.  If  races  had  not  an  intona- 
tion peculiar  to  themselves,  the  chant 
of  an  Indian  would  often  resemble  a 
Scotch  or  an  Irish  tune.  It  does  so  on 
paper,  but  hardly  in  practice. 

We  can  learn  something  of  a  man's 
character  by  observing  his  walk.  The 
sailor's  gait  tells  its  own  story;  so  does 
the  tread  of  the  ploughman.  The  move- 


ment of  music  is  equally  significant. 
Every  race  has  some  rhythm  which  it 
prefers  to  others.  When  the  composer 
thinks  of  classic  Italy,  his  muse  may 
fittingly  chose  the  lilt  of  the  Pastorale, 
the  measure  to  which  it  is  not  unphilo- 
sophic  to  imagine  the  Sicilian  shepherds 
dancing  while  Theocritus  ruminated 
on  his  idyls.  Nor  has  it  perished  with 
the  years.  Bach  and  Handel  loved  it. 
When  we  are  moved  to  tears  by  'He 
shall  feed  his  flock,'  or  uplifted  heaven- 
high  by  the  Shepherds'  Music  from  the 
Christmas  Oratorio,  our  thanks  are 
due  not  only  to  the  composers,  but  to 
the  rustics  of  Italy  who  enriched  music 
with  this  beautiful  rhythm.  How  dif- 
ferent is  the  merrymaking  in  the  Pas- 
toral Symphony.  Here  the  humor  is 
robust,  uproarious  even;  the  Austrian 
peasants  have  no  aversion  to  getting 
tipsy.  The  change  is  not  merely  one  of 
scene,  but  of  temperament.  Beethoven 
loved  to  watch  the  villagers  at  their 
revels  and,  like  Goethe,  he  has  left  us 
a  picture  of  the  Teuton  in  holiday 
humor  that  men  will  relish  as  long  as 
they  love  art.  Here  the  dance  is  a 
waltz,  footed  with  a  bacchanalian  zest. 
Mozart's  Germans  dance  as  though 
they  wanted  to  be  Italians.  His  min- 
uets are  own  cousins  to  the  measures 
of  Padre  Martini.  Occasionally,  how- 
ever, when  the  grace  of  God  is  stronger 
than  the  fashion  of  the  day,  he  slips 
into  a  Teuton  mood.  A  Haydn  sym- 
phony would  be  incomplete  without 
some  page  in  which  elegance  is  re- 
deemed from  formality  by  humor  bor- 
rowed from  the  life  of  the  people.  Why 
is  it  that  so  many  composers — French, 
German,  Polish  —  have  written  works 
avowedly  in  the  Spanish  spirit?  It  is 
because  of  the  allure  of  the  bolero,  the 
fascination  of  the  jota.  Carmen,  the 
work  of  a  Parisian,  is  a  series  of  tab- 
leaux painted  in  the  hues  of  Spanish 
romance. 

Even  scholasticism  may  be  given  a 


NATIONALISM  IN  MUSIC 


397 


national  turn.  A  canon  by  Rameau  is 
apt  to  be  as  gracefully  French  as  one 
of  his  rondos.  Apart  from  the  exercise 
of  greater  contrapuntal  freedom,  the 
polyphony  of  Bach  differs  from  that 
of  Palestrina  by  virtue  of  some  quality 
which  enters  into  the  shape  and  articu- 
lation of  the  melody.  The  work  of  these 
great  musicians  differs  in  the  same  way 
that  Diirer's  Song  of  the  Chosen  differs 
from  Raphael's  Disputa.  One  is  the 
expression  of  Gothic  rapture,  the  other 
is  the  mystic  ecstasy  of  the  Latin;  one 
suggests  the  *  Gloria  in  excelsis '  of  the 
B  minor  Mass,  the  other  may  be  com- 
pared with  the  'Et  vitam  venturi  sae- 
culi'  of  the  Missa  Papse  Marcelli. 

Because  for  a  century  and  a  half  Ger- 
many has  had  a  preponderating  voice 
in  the  shaping  of  the  destinies  of  music, 
her  scholars  sometimes  mistake  their 
idiom  for  the  speech  of  humanity.  So 
successful  have  they  been  in  imposing 
this  view  on  the  world  at  large,  that 
composers  have  hardly  dared  to  sing 
with  the  accent  nature  gave  them.  It 
needed  all  Liszt's  encouragement  to 
stiffen  Grieg  in  his  resolution  to  be  his 
own  Norse  self,  and  not  an  imitation 
German.  One  of  his  German  critics 
wrote  that  he  had  'stuck  in  the  fjord' 
and  could  not  get  out  of  it.  These  men 
had  come  to  think  that  music  which  did 
not  realize  their  ideal  of  what  music 
ought  to  be,  must  be  bad  music.  They 
forgot,  or  did  not  realize,  that  their 
own  greatest  composers  were  militantly 
national;  not  invariably  so,  of  course, 
for  it  is  not  every  day  that  a  man  is 
allowed  to  be  the  spokesman  of  his 
race  and  there  are  dull  pages  in  Bee- 
thoven, in  Wagner;  but  when  they  are 
at  their  best  their  music  is  the  voice  of 
the  Fatherland.  I  hear  the  unconvert- 
ed absolutist  exclaim,  '  Lay  your  fin- 
gers on  the  traits  that  declare  "Casta 
diva"  Italian,  Schubert's  "Aufenthalt" 
German,  and  Gounod's  "Quand  tu 
chantes"  French.'  I  reply  to  this  ob- 


jection, 'Tell  me  by  what  token  you 
recognize  a  German  face  or  know  a 
girl  for  Irish  before  she  has  opened 
her  lips.'  To  ask  for  precise  definition 
of  all  the  things  that  go  to  make  men 
or  art  national,  is  as  reasonable  as  it 
would  be  for  parents  to  exact  of  their 
child  a  detailed  analysis  of  the  charms 
of  the  well-beloved.  It  is  demanding 
the  reduction  of  the  mystery  of  person- 
ality to  terms  of  Euclidean  precision. 
The  great  masters  prove  their  appre- 
ciation of  the  force  of  the  race-spirit 
by  their  occasional  use  of  a  foreign 
idiom.  Bach  did  not  disdain  to  copy 
Vivaldi  and  develop  an  Italian  manner. 
The  Italianism  of  Handel  is  so  marked 
that,  in  listening  to  Corelli,  we  some- 
times seem  to  have  come  upon  an 
early  Handelian  masterpiece.  Mozart's 
arias  betray  the  influence  of  southern 
cantilena  at  every  turn,  and,  when 
Wagner  wishes  to  express  rapture,  he 
makes  Brunhilde  sing  fioritures  a  la 
Bellini.  Yet,  in  spite  of  their  occa- 
sional use  of  some  foreign  mode  of  ex- 
pression, the  master  composers  touch 
their  highest  point  when  they  sing  their 
native  strains.  Beethoven  departed 
from  the  Teutonic  idiom  less  than  any 
other  of  the  Viennese  trinity.  He  is  a 
true  German;  the  virtue  of  his  music 
belongs  to  the  German  folk.  It  is  the 
glorified  echo  of  songs  sung  by  men 
whose  ancestors  listened  to  the  Minne- 
singers and  grew  large-eyed  in  wonder 
at  tales  of  the  haunted  Rhine.  Turn  to 
the  opening  movement  of  the  Seventh 
Symphony,  to  the  Allegro  Vivace  which 
follows  the  introduction.  In  no  music 
is  Beethoven  more  solidly  himself. 
How  quickly  the  spell  asserts  itself. 
The  rhythm  takes  possession  of  you; 
it  dominates  you,  gliding  off  eventually, 
when  the  sound  of  the  instruments  has 
ceased  and  the  mind  is  left  to  itself, 
into  folk-strains  like  the  old  'Grand- 
father's Dance'  or  the  genial  'Es  ritten 
drei  Reiter  zum  Thore  hinaus,'  while 


398 


NATIONALISM  IN  MUSIC 


the  heart  gratefully  confesses  that  the 
master  musician  wrote  —  not  in  a  vein 
of  impersonal  classicism  but  in  the 
heart-speech  of  the  German  folk.  When 
he  wants  to  picture  the  fraternizing  of 
humanity,  he  weds  Schiller's  poem  to 
an  air  so  gloriously  German  that  it 
seems  as  if  the  spirit  of  the  Fatherland 
had  sought  embodiment  in  a  song  and 
chosen  Beethoven  to  compose  it.  The 
canon  which  he  wrote  for  his  friend 
Maelzel  becomes  the  Allegretto  Scherz- 
ando  of  the  Eighth  Symphony;  when 
he  wants  a  contrasting  theme  for  the 
Waldstein  Sonata,  he  writes  an  air 
which  breathes  the  spirit  of  the  Ger- 
man hymn. 

If  this  reasoning  be  sound,  it  must 
bear  application  nearer  home.  France 
and  Germany  have  music  of  their  own, 
why  not  America?  Why  not  indeed? 
But  it  is  to  be  remembered  in  this  con- 
nection that  the  people  of  America  are 
only  politically  a  unit.  Racially,  sec- 
tions of  the  populace  speak  with  dif- 
ferent voices.  Saxon  and  Celt,  Slav, 
Teuton,  and  Latin,  are  slowly  blending 
into  a  racial  whole;  but,  if  we  have  to 
wait  for  American  music  until  the 
process  is  perfected,  we  shall  have  to 
wait  many  generations.  That,  how- 
ever, should  not  be  necessary.  Prob- 
ably three  fifths  of  the  people  have  no 
European  consciousness  to-day;  they 
think  and  feel  as  Americans.  There  is 
no  apparent  reason  why  a  music  char- 
acteristically American  should  not  be- 
gin to  manifest  itself  among  them. 

But  what  is  to  be  the  differentiating 
factor,  by  virtue  of  which  American 
music  shall  be  as  different  from  that 
of  Germany  as  the  music  of  Germany 
is  different  from  that  of  France?  Will 
it  be  a  matter  of  tonality,  of  rhythm, 
of  style,  or  will  it  be  a  composite  of  all 
three?  The  question  can  be  propound- 
ed, but  not  answered.  The  answer  is 
for  the  future. 

At  the  present   moment   the  only 


music  that  can  be  recognized  as  in- 
con  testably  American  — and  un-Euro- 
pean  —  is  that  in  which  the  native 
composer  has  made  use  of  the  melodies 
of  the  Redskins.  Edward  Macdowell's 
Indian  Suites  are  genuine  American 
music.  The  elements  of  music  he  de- 
rived from  the  Old  World;  but  they 
were  not  the  discovery  or  property  of 
any  one  people.  They  no  more  belong 
to  a  single  civilization  than  does  the 
alphabet.  His  musical  scholarship  he 
gained  in  Germany;  but  he  was  too 
strong  a  character  to  be  warped  from 
his  native  bent  by  the  manner  of  a 
school.  His  way  of  thinking  is  his  own 
and,  when  the  subject  matter  is  In- 
dian melody,  the  three  factors  of  ac- 
quired knowledge,  personality,  and 
thematic  material  combine  in  a  form- 
ula which  belongs  to  America,  and  to 
her  alone. 

It  is  different  with  the  New  World 
Symphony  of  Dvorak.  There  we  have 
American  themes;  but  the  composer 
thinks  as  a  foreigner.  He  paints  us 
a  series  of  pictures  of  Negro  and  In- 
dian life  as  seen  through  the  eyes  of 
a  Bohemian.  Incidentally,  this  is  the 
defect  of  his  work  considered  as  a  sym- 
phony. If  not  actual  songs,  Dvorak's 
themes  have  in  them  so  much  of  the 
folk-ego,  they  are  so  personal,  that  they 
transform  his  symphony  into  genre 
music.  Beethoven  avoided  this  pit- 
fall; he  composed  in  the  folk-song 
spirit;  but  the  note  is  not  individual, 
it  is  universal.  Wrhen  Gustav  Mahler 
called  the  Indian  melodies  crude,  he 
forgot  that  the  musical  worth  of  a 
melody  is  to  be  determined,  not  so 
much  by  its  beauty,  viewed  as  an  iso- 
lated strain,  as  by  its  potentialities  in 
the  hands  of  a  gifted  composer.  Unde- 
veloped though  the  Indian  may  be  in 
many  respects,  he  has  affinities  with 
nature  in  respect  of  which  the  white 
man  must  pay  him  the  deference  due 
to  an  interpreter  of  things  but  dimly 


NATIONALISM  IN  MUSIC 


399 


apprehended  by  the  Caucasian  mind. 
This  aspect  of  the  Indian  character 
enters  deeply  into  the  music  of  the  race, 
and  the  genius  of  Macdowell  was  quick 
to  perceive  its  evocational  power.  Un- 
like Dvorak,  he  did  not  allow  himself 
to  be  mastered  by  his  material,  but 
made  it  serve  the  artistic  purpose  which 
he  had  in  mind. 

Macdowell 's  Indian  Suites  give  an 
outlook  in  life  and  nature  peculiar 
to  the  Western  World.  That  they  are 
the  music  of  the  whole  American  peo- 
ple I  do  not  assert.  The  same  phenom- 
ena that  inspired  the  Indians  —  and, 
through  them,  furnished  Macdowell 
with  subject-matter  —  may  lead  to 
the  composition  of  music  very  differ- 
ent from  his  when  brought  to  bear  on 
the  descendants  of  Europeans  with- 
out the  intervention  of  the  aboriginal 
intelligence.  In  other  words,  American 
music,  like  that  of  other  countries,  may 
have  more  facets  than  one.  Yet  all 
will  be  national,  and,  whatever  music 
the  sons  and  daughters  of  the  New 
World  create,  we  may  be  sure  of  this, 
that  it  will  not  have  a  European  ac- 
cent. 

Not  long  ago  we  were  visited  by  an 
orchestra  of  Russian  balalaika  players. 
One  of  their  most  beautiful  numbers 
was  a  Volga  boat-song.  The  oarsmen 
of  the  Nile  have  a  similar  song.  Is  it 
unreasonable  to  suppose  that  the  Yu- 
kon, the  Mississippi,  and  the  St.  Law- 
rence will  inspire  the  American  as  the 
Volga  has  inspired  the  Muscovite  and 
the  Nile  the  Egyptian?  May  we  not 
look  for  music  of  the  Rocky  Moun- 
tains which  will  vie  in  beauty  with  that 


of  the  Tyrol,  yet  have  in  it  something 
which  belongs  to  America  alone?  To 
admit  that  this  may  be  possible  does 
not  involve  the  consequence,  as  many 
people  seem  to  fear  it  may,  that  music 
must  be  purely  a  thing  of  the  senses. 

While  the  broad  general  aspects  of 
nature  —  mountains,  rivers,  prairies, 
the  sea  —  suggest  distinctive  types  of 
melody,  these  types  are  susceptible, 
not  merely  of  a  national  complexion, 
but  of  a  charm  that  reveals  the  person- 
ality of  the  composer.  It  is  inconceiv- 
able that  the  influences  which  make 
the  wit  of  Touchstone  English,  and 
the  beauty  of  the  Phidian  marbles  Hel- 
lenic, should  be  inoperative  in  music. 
Can  we  logically  seek  the  esprit  gaulois 
in  Rabelais,  and  omit  to  look  for  it  in 
Couperin?  The  *  Funeral  March  of  a 
Marionette'  proves  its  existence  in 
Gounod.  It  is  the  functioning  of  the 
genius  of  race  in  the  composer.  That 
spirit  is  not  to  be  limited  to  tonality 
and  rhythm;  it  is  diffused  through  mel- 
ody and  makes  itself  felt  as  the  char- 
acter of  an  individual  shines  in  his 
countenance.  We  cannot  reduce  it  to 
constituents  more  fundamental.  It  is 
the  manifestation  of  something  super- 
sensuous  and  mystical.  We  can  recog- 
nize its  effects;  we  can  follow  some  of 
its  processes;  but  we  can  no  more  un- 
derstand it,  root  and  all,  branch  and 
all,  than  we  can  understand  a  mother's 
love,  or  the  infinity  of  space.  To  deny 
music  the  racial  expression  we  find  so 
significant  in  the  human  face  is  to  with- 
hold from  art  what  nature  has  given  to 
the  flowers,  to  deprive  melody  of  the 
color  of  language. 


FAITH 

BY   FANNIE   STEARNS  DAVIS 


OH,  I  am  tired  out  to-day. 

The  whole  world  leans  against  my  door: 
Cities  and  centuries.  —  I  pray,  — 

For  praying  makes  me  brave  once  more. 

I  should  have  lived  long,  long  ago, 
Before  this  age  of  steel  and  fire. 

I  am  not  strong  enough  to  throw 
A  noose  around  my  soul's  desire, 

And  strangle  it,  because  it  cries 
To  keep  its  old  unreasoned  place 

In  some  bright  simple  Paradise 
Before  a  God's  too-human  face. 

I  know  that  in  this  breathless  fray 

I  am  not  fit  to  fight  and  cry. 
My  soul  grows  faint  and  far-away 

From  blood  and  shouting,  till  I  fly, 

A  blinded  coward,  back  to  hide 
My  face  against  the  dim  old  knees 

Of  that  too-human  God,  denied 
By  these  quick  crashing  centuries. 

And  there  I  learn  deep  secret  things, 

Too  frail  for  speech,  too  strong  for  doubt: 

How  through  the  dark  of  demon-wings 
The  same  still  face  of  God  gleams  out; 

How  through  the  deadly  riotous  roar 
The  voice  of  God  speaks  on.  And  then 

I  trust  Him,  as  one  might,  before 
Faith  grew  too  fond  to  comfort  men. 


FAITH 


401 


I  should  have  lived  far,  far  away 

From  this  great  age  of  grime  and  gold. 

For  still,  I  know  He  hears  me  pray,  — 
That  close,  too-human  God  of  old ! 


ZION  CHURCH 


BY   ELSIE   SINGMASTER 


BEAUTIFUL  Zion  Valley  is  an  oval 
plain  with  hills  surrounding  it  like  the 
sides  of  a  cup,  and  with  a  winding 
stream  following  the  line  of  its  longest 
diameter.  In  the  centre  of  the  valley, 
with  the  graveyard  and  the  winding 
stream  at  its  back,  and  opposite  it  and 
across  the  road  the  house  of  Matthias 
Lucas,  stands  Zion  Church.  The  house 
of  Matthias  Lucas  is  old;  it  was  built, 
as  the  German  inscription  above  the 
door  bears  witness,  by  Matthias's 
grandfather  in  1749.  Below  the  name 
and  date,  carved  in  the  stone,  are  the 
words,  'God  bless  all  those  who  go  in 
and  out/ 

The  church  is  a  magnificent  one  for 
a  farming  community.  It  is  built  of 
gray  stone,  its  style  is  Gothic,  and  its 
spire,  a  hundred  and  ninety  feet  high 
from  the  base  to  the  golden  ball  at  its 
top,  seems  to  rise  higher  than  the 
hills.  The  great  church  room  meas- 
ures fifty  feet  from  the  floor  to  the 
apex  of  the  arched  ceiling.  There  are 
no  frescoes;  the  walls  are  gray;  the 
straight  pews  and  the  strange  high 
pulpit  with  its  winding  stairs  are  dark 
walnut;  the  woodwork  of  the  high  gal- 
leries is  painted  white.  The  windows 
are  clear  glass;  they  were  kept  bright 
at  first  by  Matthias  Lucas,  who,  after 
he  had  given  the  church,  became  for 
VOL.  111 -NO.  3 


love  of  it  its  sexton;  they  are  polished 
now  by  the  women  of  the  devout 
Pennsylvania  German  congregation. 
From  some  of  the  windows,  one  may 
see  straight  into  the  leafy  hearts  of  old 
oak  trees;  from  others  one  may  look 
through  thinner  foliage  out  across  the 
surrounding  farms  to  the  hills.  From 
the  distance,  the  gray  mass  of  Zion 
Church  dominates  the  landscape  like 
the  cathedral  of  Chartres  upon  the 
broad  plain  of  France. 

Zion  Church  is  rich;  she  owns  the 
broad  stone  house  and  the  five  farms 
of  Matthias  Lucas.  She  has  no  debt; 
her  paint  is  always  shining;  the  grassy 
lawn  about  her  is  always  smoothly 
trimmed;  her  graveyard,  whose  mounds 
are  covered  with  myrtle  or  lily-of-the- 
valley  or  clove-pink,  is  set  with  straight 
white  stones  on  which  no  moss  is  al- 
lowed to  gather. 

Many  of  the  graves  are  interest- 
ing to  the  antiquarian.  There  are  sev- 
eral of  Indians  who  were  converted 
by  the  preaching  of  the  first  pastor, 
and  there  are  many  with  German  in- 
scriptions. The  inscriptions  which  are 
carved  to-day  are  English;  sometimes, 
added  to  those  already  on  a  tall  monu- 
ment, they  form  a  record  of  the  transi- 
tion from  one  language  to  another. 
The  grandmother  of  the  Arndts  was 


402 


ZION  CHURCH 


recorded,  *  Sarah  Arndt,  geboren  Peter- 
man';  their  mother  was  described  as 
'Ellen  Arndt,  daughter  of  Rudolph 
Hummer;  above  the  grave  of  their 
young  sister-in-law,  who  died  a  year 
ago,  is  written,  'Elizabeth  Arndt,  n6e 
Miller.'  The  Pennsylvania  Germans 
have  become  cosmopolitan  indeed !  But 
the  inscriptions  on  the  Lucas  graves 
are  all  German.  Even  Matthias,  the 
last  of  his  family,  died  before  any  one 
dreamed  that  the  residents  of  Zion 
Valley  would  learn  English. 

It  is  three  generations  since  Mat- 
thias Lucas  in  his  middle-age  cursed 
the  congregation  and  the  church  and 
almost  God  himself,  and  went  no  more 
to  service. 

The  Kirchen  Rath  (church  council) 
met  one  winter  evening,  as  it  had  met 
since  the  days  of  Matthias's  grand- 
father, in  the  Lucas  kitchen,  an  appro- 
priate place,  since,  like  his  father  and 
his  grandfather,  Matthias  managed 
the  affairs  of  the  church.  The  second 
building  in  which  the  congregation 
worshiped  had  become  unfit  for  use, 
the  plans  for  a  new  church  lay  spread 
before  the  council  on  the  old  oak  table. 
The  members  of  the  council,  which  had 
been  in  session  from  seven  o'clock  until 
midnight,  had  been  arguing,  and  they 
were  tired. 

Then  rose  Matthias  Lucas  angrily 
from  his  chair.  He  was  about  forty 
years  old,  a  man  of  powerful  build  and 
with  a  fine,  ruddy  color  from  working 
in  the  fields.  He  had  inherited  wealth 
from  his  father,  and  he  was  steadily 
adding  to  it.  He  meant  to  give  largely 
to  the  new  church,  which  was  his  own 
as  much  as  was  his  great  stone  house 
or  his  farms  or  his  wife  and  child.  De- 
voted, generous,  stubborn,  Matthias 
Lucas  might  have  said  with  conviction, 
'  I  am  Zion  Church.' 

'Who  will  have  to  build  this 
church?'  he  demanded  hotly,  in  his 
sonorous  German  speech.  'Who  will 


have  to  give  most  of  the  money?  I  will ! 
Whose  people  gave  the  land  in  the  be- 
ginning but  mine?  This — '  Matthias 
laid  his  hand  on  one  of  the  papers 
spread  out  before  him  —  '  this  is  the 
way  it  is  to  be.' 

The  point  under  discussion  was  a 
minor  one,  some  small  difference  in  the 
height  of  the  steeple,  or  iri  the  work 
required  on  the  foundation,  a  point  on 
which  there  might  easily  be  two  opin- 
ions, both  of  them  right.  Matthias 
Lucas  might  have  yielded,  but  he  was 
stubborn  and  he  had  not  been  accus- 
tomed to  having  his  judgments  ques- 
tioned. On  the  other  hand,  the  church 
council  might  have  yielded,  but  it  had 
been  looking  at  plans  for  five  hours, 
and  as  far  back  as  the  mind  could 
reach  it  had  been  domineered  over  by 
a  Lucas.  When  the  vote  was  taken, 
there  were  seven  votes  against  Mat- 
thias and  none  with  him. 

Still  standing,  Matthias  had  his  say. 

'You  will  build  the  church  alone, 
then.  Not  a  penny  will  I  give.' 

Peter  Arndt  rose  and  faced  him.  The 
candle-light  made  two  bright  spots 
of  their  white  faces  in  the  great,  low 
room  with  its  brown,  raftered  ceiling 
and  its  black  shadows.  The  members 
of  Zion  Church  were  not  rich.  All 
the  low  arable  land  of  the  valley  be- 
longed to  the  Lucases,  and  the  fine  ore 
deposits  on  the  higher,  poorer  farms 
lay  still  unsuspected  and  undisturbed 
beneath  the  ground.  The  loss  of  the 
contribution  of  Matthias  Lucas  would 
be  calamitous.  But  Peter  Arndt  faced 
him  bravely. 

'Then  we  will  build  it  alone.' 

Tired  of  their  long  meeting,  certain 
that  to-morrow  Matthias  would  think 
better  of  his  foolishness,  the  other 
seven  members  of  the  church  council 
untied  their  horses  from  the  fence 
along  the  lane  and  rode  home.  Mat- 
thias laughed  when  they  had  gone. 

'Build  it  alone!'  he  mocked.    'Not 


ZION  CHURCH 


403 


while  the  world  stands!  They  will  build 
it  my  way,  or  they  will  not  build  at 
all.  They  have  no  money.' 

Matthias  was  right;  without  him 
Zion  Church  was  not  able  to  build. 
The  old  church  was  patched  up  and 
services  were  held  there  for  ten  years. 
Matthias,  sitting  in  his  front  room  on 
Sunday  mornings,  watched  the  congre- 
gation assemble,  but  did  not  join  them. 
He  listened  in  stubborn  silence  to  the 
admonition  of  the  preacher,  he  contin- 
ued to  contribute  to  the  preacher's 
salary,  but  into  the  church  he  would 
not  go. 

'I  will  not  risk  my  life  in  that  old 
shell/  he  declared  to  his  wife.  'It  will 
come  down  on  their  heads.  When  they 
are  ready  to  build,  let  them  come  to 
me  and  we  will  build.' 

But  the  church  council  did  not 
come  to  Matthias.  Presently,  his  wife 
and  his  only  son  died  of  smallpox, 
and,  since  even  this  isolated  Pennsyl- 
vania valley  had  begun  to  observe 
quarantine,  their  bodies  were  carried 
directly  from  the  house  to  the  burying- 
ground,  without  the  customary  service 
in  the  church.  Thus  Matthias  did  not 
have  to  break  his  word. 

Aghast  at  the  sorrow  which  had 
come  upon  Matthias,  the  members  of 
Zion  Church  visited  him  and  shed 
more  tears  than  did  the  stern  man  sit- 
ting in  his  grandfather's  armchair  in 
his  lonely  kitchen.  When  the  funeral 
was  over,  he  went  about  his  work  as 
though  nothing  had  happened.  The 
preacher  added  admonition  to  his  con- 
solation, he  besought  and  then  com- 
manded Matthias  to  return  to  his 
church.  But  Matthias's  heart  was  not 
softened;  it  was  then  that  he  cursed 
Zion  Church  and  said  that  as  God  had 
forsaken  him,  so  had  he  forsaken  God. 

Almost  at  once,  as  though  to  add 
to  his  bitterness  and  anger,  the  walls 
of  the  new  church  began  to  rise.  The 
deep  ore-beds  had  been  opened;  great 


blast  furnaces  had  sprung  up  through 
all  the  Pennsylvania  German  counties. 
The  members  of  Zion  Church  had  been 
saving  their  money  in  anticipation  of 
building;  now,  as  they  began  to  sell 
their  ore,  they  added  to  their  original 
plan.  They  had  for  their  church  a 
spirit  of  mediaeval  devotion  like  that 
of  the  builders  of  Amiens;  they  would 
erect  the  finest  building  in  many  days' 
journey. 

Of  their  plans,  Matthias  would  hear 
nothing.  Again  the  preacher  visited 
him;  humbly  the  church  council  asked 
his  forgiveness,  and  explained  that  all 
the  details  of  their  plans  had  changed; 
they  had  rejected  their  own  plans  as 
well  as  his.  But  he  would  not  listen. 

'You  think  you  can  cajole  me,'  an- 
swered Matthias  grimly;  'but  not  a 
penny  shall  you  have  unless  you  come 
back  and  sit  in  my  kitchen  and  vote  to 
build  the  way  I  want  it.' 

The  walls  of  the  new  church  rose 
rapidly,  and  Matthias  from  his  win- 
dow opposite,  and  from  his  farms  and 
gardens,  "watched  them  rise.  Sometimes 
he  smiled. 

'They  will  never  pay  for  it,'  he  as- 
sured himself  with  satisfaction.  'Those 
who  were  fools  enough  to  build  for  them 
will  not  get  their  money.' 

Presently  the  church  was  completed. 
By  the  day  of  dedication,  the  pastor 
had  promises  for  all  the  money  needed. 

From  his  lonely  house,  Matthias 
watched  the  final  preparations.  It  was 
October,  the  season  of  harvest-home, 
and  into  the  new  church  were  carried 
great  sheaves  of  wheat  and  the  tallest 
stalks  of  corn.  Presently,  when  Peter 
Arndt  drove  up  with  his  wagon  loaded 
with  fine  apples  and  pears  and  vege- 
tables, Matthias  crossed  the  road  to 
speak  to  him. 

'You  are  my  tenant,'  said  he,  harsh- 
ly; 'nothing  from  my  land  is  to  be 
taken  into  the  church.' 

Without    answering,    Peter    Arndt 


404 


ZION  CHURCH 


drove  away.  Matthias's  old  friends 
had  begun  to  be  afraid  of  him. 

There  was  to  be  communion  at  the 
morning  service,  and  it  had  been  ten 
years  since  Matthias  Lucas  had  gone 
to  the  communion-table.  If  his  heart 
ached  and  his  lips  hungered  for  the 
token  to  which  he  had  been  accus- 
tomed from  his  childhood,  he  comfort- 
ed himself  with  hate.  He  sat  behind 
his  bowed  shutters  and  watched  the 
congregation  of  Zion  Church  rejoicing 
in  its  new  possession.  He  saw  the  child- 
ren come  to  practice  for  their  exerci- 
ses, he  saw  flowers  being  carried  by  the 
armful  until  the  cemetery  looked  like 
a  great  garden,  and  his  heart  harden- 
ed the  more  within  him.  He  said  now 
that  they  had  cast  him  off,  and  he  be- 
lieved what  he  said.  He  realized  fully, 
with  intolerable  pain,  that  they  could 
do  without  him. 

That  night,  complete  from  floor  to 
spire,  fresh  from  the  careful  hands  of  its 
builders,  decked  with  the  fruits  of  the 
field  as  a  token  of  thankfulness  to  God, 
with  the  white  communion-cloth  spread 
already  on  the  altar,  Zion  Church, 
waiting  for  its  consecration,  burned  to 
the  ground. 

Matthias  Lucas's  maid-servant  gave 
the  alarm.  The  rosy  light,  reflected 
from  the  flames  against  the  wall  of  the 
barn  and  thence  into  her  attic  room, 
wakened  her,  and  she  went,  screaming, 
to  pound  at  Matthias's  door.  By  that 
time  the  church  was  a  mere  shell  about 
a  roaring  furnace.  The  paint  and  var- 
nish were  fresh,  and  they,  with  the  dried 
leaves  and  grain  of  the  decorations,  fed 
the  flame  to  so  fierce  a  heat  that  the 
walls  fell  outward  with  a  great  explo- 
sion. 

From  his  window,  Matthias  Lucas 
watched.  He  heard  the  screams  of  his 
servant  as  she  rushed  down  the  road,  he 
heard  the  panting  of  runners  as  they 
came  in  answer  to  her  call,  he  heard 
cries  of  frantic  inquiry  and  wild  sorrow. 


He  knew  from  whom  each  sound  came; 
he  could  tell  the  voice  of  each  of  his 
old  friends,  who  loved  their  church  as 
they  loved  their  souls:  of  Peter  Arndt, 
and  John  Lorish,  and  James  Bar,  and 
many  others.  The  silver  communion 
service  was  in  the  church;  Peter  Arndt 
had  to  be  restrained  by  force  from  rush- 
ing into  the  flames  to  find  it.  Watch- 
ing them,  listening  to  them,  Matthias 
felt  that  he  was  almost  like  God  Him- 
self. 

'They  will  come  back  to  me!'  he 
cried.  'They  owe  this  money,  they 
will  have  to  pay  it,  the  law  will  make 
them,  and  they  still  have  no  church. 
They  will  come  back  to  me!' 

When  he  had  had  his  breakfast  and 
had  looked  after  his  stock,  he  went  into 
his  parlor  and  sat  down  by  the  win- 
dow. His  heart  felt  strangely  warmed; 
he  spoke  gently  to  his  weeping  servant. 

'It  will  be  built  up,'  he  assured  her, 
to  comfort  her. 

Soon  after  nine  o'clock  the  congrega- 
tion began  to  gather.  There  were  many 
from  a  distance  who  had  not  heard  the 
dreadful  news;  as  they  came  over  the 
hill,  they  drew  rein  in  horror,  and  then 
urged  their  horses  on.  Matthias  could 
hear  their  cries  and  the  galloping  feet 
of  their  horses.  A  few  who  drove  to 
the  very  ruins  before  they  saw  that 
their  church  was  destroyed,  sat  dumb- 
ly, making  no  effort  to  dismount  from 
horse  or  wagon. 

'They  will  have  to  ask  me  to  help 
them  now,'  said  Matthias  again  to 
himself,  a  strange  peace  in  his  heart. 

But  no  one  crossed  the  road  to  Mat- 
thias's house.  The  men  tied  their 
horses  and  gathered  about  the  preach- 
er, the  women  sat  on  the  grass  in  the 
graveyard  in  the  warm  sunshine;  they 
were  helpless,  homeless,  distraught. 
From  group  to  group  went  his  weeping 
servant,  telling  what  she  knew  of  the 
fire. 

Presently  Matthias  saw  that  they 


ZION  CHURCH 


405 


were  going  to  hold  a  service.  The  older 
people  found  seats  on  the  flat  tomb- 
stones, the  younger  ones  stood  about. 
There,  within  that  low  stone  wall,  all 
the  congregation  of  Zion  Church  was 
gathered,  and  there  was  crying  such 
as  had  often  accompanied  the  laying- 
away  of  the  mother  of  little  children,  or 
of  the  strong  man,  dying  in  his  youth. 
Only  one  of  the  living  members  was  not 
present  —  Matthias  Lucas,  who  waited 
in  his  house  across  the  way. 

Through  the  open  window,  Mat- 
thias could  hear  the  preacher's  voice, 
broken,  trembling;  he  could  see  the 
preacher's  hands,  lifted  in  petition. 

' "  Lord," '  cried  he, ' "  Thou  hast  been 
our  dwelling  place  in  all  generations! " 

To  Matthias,  it  seemed  that  the 
agonized  plea  was  lifted  to  him.  Then, 
with  sobs  and  cries,  the  congregation 
tried  to  sing;  — 

Ach,  Gott,  verlass  mich  nicht, 
Gieb  mir  die  Gnadenh'ande! 

Oh,  God,  forsake  me  not, 
Thy  gracious  hand  extend  me! 

Involuntarily  Matthias  Lucas  sang 
with  them  the  words  which  he  had 
learned  at  his  mother's  knee,  — 

Thy  Holy  Spirit  grant; 
And  'neath  the  heaviest  load, 
Be  thou  my  strength  and  stay, 
Forsake  me  not,  O  God! 

They  were  in  trouble,  these  foolish, 
headstrong  people,  but  he  would  help 
them.  He  would  not  wait  for  them  to 
come  to  him;  he  would  go  to  them. 
Matthias  rose  from  his  chair. 

But,  as  the  members  of  Zion  Church 
sang,  a  change  came  over  them.  The 
hymn  rose  as  it  had  risen  many  times 
before  from  that  solemn  place,  at  first 
a  cry  of  misery.  But  presently  its  tone 
changed.  The  God  to  whom  they  cried 
had  sustained  them  always  when  they 
called  upon  Him  thus;  He  would  sustain 
them  now.  Their  voices  strengthened 
and  became  calm;  the  great  music  of  the 


choral  rose  above  the  blackened  ruins 
and  floated  out  over  the  fields  and  hills 
to  heaven  itself.  They  dried  their  tears 
and  took  heart. 

Then  they  drew  closer  together,  and 
the  preacher's  clear  voice,  cheering  and 
encouraging  them,  penetrated  to  the 
old  stone  house,  where  in  his  wealth 
and  his  bitterness,  Matthias  listened. 

'We  will  begin  to  rebuild  to-mor- 
row,' announced  the  preacher.  'God 
will  bless  us.  We  will  take  promises 
now.  I  will  give  a  year's  salary,  if  you 
will  help  me  by  sending  me  things  from 
your  gardens.' 

Immediately  the  offerings  began, 
and  steadily  they  went  on.  The  debt 
was  to  be  paid,  a  plainer  building  was 
to  be  erected  at  once,  the  congregation 
of  Zion  Church  was  equal  to  its  trou- 
ble. They  did  not  call  upon  Matthias, 
they  did  not  think  of  him.  Close  to  the 
graves  of  his  wife  and  child,  they  made 
their  plans;  without  the  fold,  alone, 
holding  to  his  chair  for  support,  stood 
Matthias  in  his  desolate  house. 

Then,  Matthias  went  slowly  out  of 
the  door  and  across  the  yard  and  the 
road  to  the  churchyard. 

*  Listen  to  me!'  he  cried.    'I  have 
something  to  say.' 

He  pressed  close  to  his  old  friends  as 
though  he  were  pursued  by  a  terror 
from  which  they  must  defend  him,  and 
they,  thinking  that  he  was  smitten 
by  disease  or  madness,  drew  away  in 
fright.  The  minister  went  toward  him, 
and  the  girl  who  had  stayed  in  his 
house  because  she  had  loved  her  mis- 
tress and  her  mistress's  child. 

*  Listen  to  me!'  he  cried  again.    'I 
will  build  you  a  church,  a  church  of 
stone,  to  last  forever,  with  a  great 
spire.  You  shall  have  my  farms  to  en- 
dow it  perpetually.  Do  not  draw  away 
from  me!  You  must  let  me  do  it,  or  I 
will  die!   For  in  the  night,  I  came  over 
with  a  candle  and  set  fire  to  the  church 
you  built  without  me  I ' 


ATONEMENT 


BY  JOSIAH  ROYCE 


THE  human  aspect  of  the  Christian 
idea  of  atonement  is  based  upon  such 
motives  that,  if  there  were  no  Christ- 
ianity and  no  Christians  in  the  world, 
the  idea  of  atonement  would  have  to 
be  invented  before  the  higher  levels  of 
our  moral  existence  could  be  fairly  un- 
derstood. To  the  illustration  of  this 
thesis  the  present  essay  is  to  be  largely 
devoted.  The  thesis  is  not  new;  yet 
it  seems  to  me  to  have  been  insufficient- 
ly emphasized  even  in  recent  literature; 
although,  as  is  well  known,  modern  ex- 
positors of  the  meaning  of  the  Christ- 
ian doctrine  of  the  Atonement  have  laid 
a  constantly  increasing  stress  upon  the 
illustrations  and  analogies  of  that  doc- 
trine which  they  have  found  present  in 
the  common  experience  of  mankind,  in 
non-theological  literature,  and  in  the 
history  of  ethics. 


The  treatment  of  the  idea  of  atone- 
ment in  the  present  paper,  if  it  in  any 
respect  aids  toward  an  understanding 
of  our  problem,  will  depend  for  what- 
ever it  accomplishes  upon  two  delib- 
erate limitations. 

The  first  limitation  is  the  one  that 
I  have  just  indicated.  I  shall  empha- 
size, more  than  is  customary,  aspects 
of  the  idea  of  atonement  which  one 
could  expound  just  as  readily  in  a  world 
where  the  higher  levels  of  moral  experi- 
ence had  somehow  been  reached  by 
the  leaders  of  mankind,  but  where 
Christians  and  Christianity  were,  as 
yet,  wholly  unknown. 

406 


My  second  limitation  will  be  this: 
I  shall  consider  the  idea  of  atonement 
in  the  light  of  the  special  problems 
which  the  close  of  the  essay  on  'The 
Second  Death'  left  upon  our  hands. 
The  result  will  be  a  view  of  the  idea 
of  atonement  which  will  be  intention- 
ally fragmentary. 

It  is  true  that  the  history  of  the 
Christian  doctrine  of  the  Atonement 
has  inseparably  linked  with  the  topics 
that  I  shall  here  most  emphasize,  va- 
rious religious  beliefs,  and  theological 
interpretations,  with  which,  under  my 
chosen  limitations,  and  despite  these 
limitations,  I  shall  endeavor  to  keep 
in  touch.  But,  in  a  great  part  of  what 
I  shall  have  to  say  I  shall  confine  my- 
self to  what  I  may  call  'the  problem 
of  the  traitor,'  —  an  ethical  problem 
which,  on  the  basis  laid  in  the  foregoing 
essay,  I  now  choose  arbitrarily  as  my 
typical  instance  of  the  human  need 
for  atonement,  and  of  a  sense  in  which, 
in  purely  human  terms,  we  are  able  to 
define  what  an  atoning  act  would  be, 
if  it  took  place,  and  what  it  could  ac- 
complish, as  well  as  what  it  could  not 
accomplish. 

Our  last  paper  familiarized  us  with 
the  conception  of  the  being  whom  I 
shall  now  call,  throughout  this  discus- 
sion, '  the  traitor. '  We  shall  soon  learn 
new  reasons  why  our  present  study 
will  gain,  in  definiteness  of  issue  and 
in  simplicity,  by  using  the  exemplary 
moral  situation  in  which  our  so-called 
'traitor'  has  placed  himself,  as  our 
means  for  bringing  to  light  what  relief, 
what  possible,  although  always  imper- 


ATONEMENT 


407 


feet,  reconciliation  of  the  traitor  with 
his  own  moral  world,  and  with  himself, 
this  situation  permits. 

Perhaps  I  can  help  the  reader  to  an- 
ticipate my  further  statement  of  my 
reasons  for  dwelling  upon  the  unlove- 
ly situation  of  the  hypothetical  traitor, 
if  I  describe  the  association  of  ideas 
which  first  conducted  me  to  the  choice 
of  the  exemplary  type  of  moral  trag- 
edy which  I  shall  use  as  the  vehicle 
whereby  we  are  here  to  be  carried  near- 
er to  our  proposed  view  of  the  idea  of 
atonement. 

In  Bach's  Matthew  Passion  Music, 
whose  libretto  was  prepared  under  the 
master's  own  guidance,  there  is  a  great 
passage  wherein,  at  the  Last  Supper, 
Christ  has  just  said,  'One  of  you  shall 
betray  me.'  *  And  they  all  begin  to  say,' 
so  the  recitative  tells  us,  although  at 
once  passing  the  words  over  into  the 
mouths  of  the  chorus,  'Is  it  I?  Is  it  I? 
Is  it  I?'  And  then  there  begins  the 
wonderful  chorus  of  'the  Believers': 
'  'T  is  I.  My  sins  betray  thee,  who  died 
to  make  me  whole.'  The  effect  of  this, 
as  well  as  of  other  great  scenes  in  the 
Passion  Music,  —  the  dramatic  and 
musical  workings  in  their  unity,  as 
Bach  devised  them,  —  is  to  transport 
the  listener  to  a  realm  where  he  no  long- 
er hears  an  old  story  of  the  past  retold, 
but  looking  down,  as  it  were,  upon  the 
whole  stream  of  time,  sees  the  betrayal, 
the  divine  tragedy,  and  the  triumph, 
in  one —  not  indeed  timeless,  but  time- 
embracing  vision.  In  this  vision,  all 
flows  and  changes  and  passes  from  the 
sorrow  of  a  whole  world  to  the  hope  of 
reconciliation.  Yet  all  this  fluent  and 
passionate  life  is  one  divine  life,  and  is 
also  the  listener's,  or,  as  we  can  also 
say,  the  spectator's  own  life.  Judas, 
the  spectator,  knows  as  himself,  as  his 
own  ruined  personality,  the  sorrow  of 
Gethsemane,  the  elemental  and  per- 
fectly human  passion  of  the  chorus: 
'Destroy  them,  destroy  them,  the  mur- 


derous brood,'  the  waiting  and  weep- 
ing at  the  tomb,  —  these  things  be- 
long to  the  present  life  of  the  believer 
who  witnesses  the  Passion.  They  are 
all  the  experiences  of  us  men,  just  as  we 
are.  They  are  also  divine  revelations, 
coming  as  if  from  a  world  that  is  some- 
how inclusive  of  our  despair,  and  that 
yet  knows  a  joy  which,  as  Bach  depicts 
it  in  his  music  drama,  is  not  so  much 
mystical,  as  simply  classic,  in  the  per- 
fection of  its  serene  self-control. 

What  the  art  of  Bach  suggests  I  have 
neither  the  right  nor  the  power  to 
translate  into  'matter-moulded  forms 
of  speech.'  I  have  here  to  tell  you  only 
a  little  about  the  being  whom  Mephis- 
topheles  calls  'der  kleine  Gott  der 
Welt,'  about  the  one  who,  as  the  demon 
says,  — 

Bleibt  stets  vom  gleichen  Schlage, 

Und  ist  so  wunderlich,  als  wie  am  ersten  Tage. 

And  I  am  forced  to  limit  myself  in  this 
essay  to  choosing  —  as  my  exemplary 
being  who  feels  the  need  of  some  form 
of  atonement  —  man  in  his  most  un- 
lovely and  drearily  discouraging  as- 
pect, —  man  in  his  appearance  as  a 
betrayer.  The  justification  of  this 
repellant  choice  can  appear,  if  at  all, 
then  only  in  the  outcome  of  our  argu- 
ment, and  in  its  later  relation  to  the 
whole  Christian  doctrine  of  life.  But 
you  may  now  see  what  first  suggested 
my  using  this  choice  in  this  paper. 

So  much,  however,  it  is  fair  to  add  as 
I  introduce  my  case.  The  'traitor'  of 
my  argument  shall  here  be  the  creature 
of  an  ideal  definition  based  upon  facts 
set  forth  in  the  last  lecture.  I  shall 
soon  have  to  speak  again  of  the  sense 
in  which  all  observers  of  human  affairs 
have  a  right  to  say  that  there  are  trai- 
tors, and  that  we  well  know  some  of 
their  works.  But  we  have  in  general  no 
right  to  say  with  assurance,  when  we 
speak  of  our  individual  neighbors,  that 
we  know  who  the  traitors  are.  For  we 
are  no  searchers  of  hearts.  And  treason 


408 


ATONEMENT 


as  I  here  define  it,  is  an  affair  of  the 
heart,  —  that  is,  of  the  inner  voluntary 
deed  and  decision. 

While  my  ideal  definition  of  the 
traitor  of  whom  we  are  now  to  speak, 
thus  depends,  as  you  see,  upon  facts 
already  discussed  in  our  essay  on  *  The 
Second  Death '  our  new  relation  to  the 
being  defined  as  a  traitor  consists  in 
the  fact  that,  on  the  last  occasion,  we 
considered  the  nature  of  his  guilt, 
while  now  we  mean  to  approach  an 
understanding  of  his  relation  to  the 
idea  of  atonement. 


ii 

Two  conditions  as  you  will  remem- 
ber from  our  last  discussion,  determine 
what  constitutes,  for  the  purposes  of 
my  definition,  a  traitor.  The  first  con- 
dition is  that  a  traitor  is  a  man  who  has 
had  an  ideal,  and  who  has  loved  it  with 
all  his  heart  and  his  soul  and  his  mind 
and  his  strength.  His  ideal  must  have 
seemed  to  him  to  furnish  the  cause  of 
his  life.  It  must  have  meant  to  him 
what  Paul  meant  by  the  grace  that 
saves.  He  must  have  embraced  it,  for 
the  time,  with  full  loyalty.  It  must 
have  been  his  religion,  his  way  of  sal- 
vation. 

The  second  condition  that  my  ideal 
traitor  must  satisfy  is  this.  Having 
thus  found  his  cause,  he  must,  as  he 
now  knows,  in  at  least  some  one  volun- 
tary act  of  his  life  have  been  deliber- 
ately false  to  his  cause.  So  far  as  in 
him  lay,  he  must,  at  least  in  that  one 
act,  have  betrayed  his  cause. 

Such  is  our  ideal  traitor.  At  the 
close  of  the  last  essay  we  left  him 
condemned,  in  his  own  sight,  to  what 
we  called  the  'hell  of  the  irrevocable.' 

We  now,  for  the  moment,  still  con- 
fine ourselves  to  his  case,  and  ask, 
Can  the  idea  of  atonement  mean  any- 
thing that  permits  its  application,  in 
any  sense,  however  limited,  to  the 


situation  of  this  traitor?  Can  there  be 
any  reconciliation,  however  imperfect, 
between  this  traitor  and  his  own  moral 
world, — any  reconciliation  which  from 
his  own  point  of  view,  and  for  his  own 
consciousness,  can  make  his  situation 
in  his  moral  world  essentially  different 
from  the  situation  in  which  his  own 
deed  has  so  far  left  him? 

In  the  hell  of  the  irrevocable  there 
may  be,  as  at  the  last  time  we  pointed 
out,  no  sensuous  penalties  to  fear.  And 
there  may  be,  for  all  that  we  know, 
countless  future  opportunities  for  the 
traitor  to  do  good  and  loyal  deeds. 
Our  problem  lies  in  the  fact  that  none 
of  these  deeds  will  ever  undo  the  sup- 
posed deed  of  treason.  In  that  sense, 
then,  no  good  deeds  of  the  traitor's 
future  will  ever  so  atone  for  his  one 
act  of  treason,  that  he  will  become 
clear  of  just  that  treason,  and  of  what 
he  finds  to  be  its  guilt. 

But  it  is  still  open  to  us  to  ask 
whether  anything  could  occur  in  the 
traitor's  moral  world  which,  without 
undoing  his  deed,  could  still  add  some 
new  aspect  to  this  deed,  —  an  aspect 
such,  that  when  the  traitor  came  to 
view  his  own  deed  in  this  light,  he 
could  say,  Something  in  the  nature  of 
a  genuinely  reconciling  element  has 
been  added,  not  only  to  my  world  and 
to  my  own  life,  but  also  to  the  inmost 
meaning  even  of  my  deed  of  treason 
itself.  My  moral  situation  has  hereby 
been  rendered  genuinely  better  than 
my  deed  left  it.  And  this  bettering 
does  not  consist  merely  in  the  fact  that 
some  new  deed  of  my  own,  or  of  some 
one  else  has  been  simply  a  good  deed, 
instead  of  a  bad  one,  and  has  thus  put 
a  good  thing  into  my  world  to  be  hence- 
forth considered  side  by  side  with  the 
irrevocable  evil  deed.  No,  this  better- 
ing consists  in  something  more  than 
this,  —  in  something  which  gives  to 
my  very  treason  itself  a  new  value;  so 
that  I  can  say,  not,  'It  is  undone'; 


ATONEMENT 


409 


but,  *I  am  henceforth  in  some  meas- 
ure, in  some  genuine  fashion,  morally 
reconciled  to  the  fact  that  I  did  this 
evil/ 

Plainly,  if  any  such  reconciliation  is 
possible,  it  will  be  at  best  but  an  imper- 
fect and  tragic  reconciliation.  It  can- 
not be  simple  and  perfectly  destruc- 
tive of  guilt.  But  the  great  tragic  poets 
have  long  since  taught  us  that  there 
are,  indeed,  tragic  reconciliations  even 
when  there  are  great  woes.  These 
tragic  reconciliations  may  be  infinitely 
pathetic;  but  they  may  be  also  in- 
finitely elevating,  and  even,  in  some 
unearthly  and  wondrous  way,  trium- 
phant. 

Our  question  is:  Can  such  a  tragic 
reconciliation  occur  in  the  case  of  the 
traitor?  If  it  can  occur,  the  result  would 
furnish  to  us  an  instance  of  an  atone- 
ment. This  atonement  would  not  mean, 
and  could  not  mean,  a  clearing-away 
of  the  traitor's  guilt  as  if  it  never  had 
been  guilt.  It  would  still  remain  true 
that  the  traitor  could  never  rationally 
forgive  himself  for  his  deed.  But  he 
might,  in  some  measure  and  in  some 
genuine  sense,  become,  not  simply,  but 
tragically,  —  sternly,  —  yet  really,  re- 
conciled, not  only  to  himself  but  to  his 
deed  of  treason,  and  to  its  meaning  in 
his  moral  world. 

Let  us  consider,  then,  in  what  way, 
and  to  what  degree,  the  traitor  might 
find  such  an  atonement. 


in 

The  Christian  idea  of  atonement  has 
always  involved  an  affirmative  answer 
to  the  question,  Is  an  atonement  for 
even  a  willful  deed  of  betrayal  possible? 
Is  a  reconciliation  of  even  the  traitor 
to  himself,  and  to  his  world,  a  possibil- 
ity? The  help  that  our  argument  gets 
from  employing  the  supposed  traitor's 
view  of  his  own  case  as  the  guide  of  our 
search  for  whatever  reconciliation  is 


still  possible  for  him,  shows  itself,  at 
the  present  point  of  our  inquiry,  by 
simplifying  the  issue,  and  by  thus 
enabling  us  at  once  to  dispose,  very 
briefly,  not  indeed  of  the  Christian  idea 
of  atonement  (for  that,  as  we  shall  see, 
will  later  reveal  itself  in  a  new  and 
compelling  form),  but  of  a  great  num- 
ber of  well-known  theological  theories 
of  the  nature  of  atonement,  so  far  as 
they  are  to  help  our  traitor  to  get  a 
view  of  his  own  case. 

These  theological  theories  stand  at  a 
peculiar  disadvantage  when  they  speak 
to  the  now  fully  awakened  traitor, 
when  he  asks  what  measure  of  recon- 
ciliation is  still,  for  him,  possible.  Our 
traitor  has  his  own  narrow,  but,  for 
that  very  reason,  clearly  outlined  pro- 
blem of  atonement  to  consider.  We  here 
confine  ourselves  to  his  view.  Calmly 
reasonable  in  his  hell  of  the  irrevocable, 
he  is  dealing,  not  with  the  *  angry 
God '  of  a  well-known  theological  tradi- 
tion, but  with  himself.  He  asks,  not 
indeed  for  escape  from  the  irrevocable, 
but  for  what  relative  and  imperfect 
tragic  reconciliation  with  his  world  and 
with  his  past,  his  moral  order  can  still 
furnish  to  him,  by  any  new  event  or 
deed  or  report.  Shall  we  offer  him  one 
of  the  traditional  theological  comforts 
and  say,  Some  one  —  namely,  a  divine 
being,  Christ  himself  —  has  accom- 
plished a  full  *  penal  satisfaction'  for 
your  deed  of  treason.  Accept  that 
satisfying  sacrifice  of  Christ,  and  you 
shall  be  reconciled.  The  traitor  need 
not  pause  to  repeat  any  of  the  now  so 
well-known  theological  and  ethical  ob- 
jections to  the  '  penal  satisfaction '  the- 
ories of  atonement.  He  needs  no  long 
dispute  to  clear  his  head.  The  cold 
wintry  light  of  his  own  insight  into 
what  was  formerly  his  moral  home, 
and  into  what  he  has  by  his  own  deed 
lost,  is  quite  enough  to  show  him  the 
mercilessly  unchangeable  outlines  of 
his  moral  landscape.  He  sees  them; 


410 


ATONEMENT 


and  that  is  so  far  enough.  Penal  satis- 
faction? That,  he  will  say,  may  some- 
how interest  the  *  angry  God'  of  one 
or  another  theologian.  If  so,  let  this 
angry  God  be  content,  if  he  chooses: 
That  does  not  reconcile  me.  So  far  as 
penalty  is  concerned,  — 

I  was  my  own  destroyer  and  will  be  my  own 
hereafter. 

I  asked  for  reconciliation  with  my  own 
moral  universe,  not  for  the  accidental 
pacification  of  some  angry  God.  The 
*  penal  satisfaction '  offered  by  another, 
is  simply  foreign  to  all  the  interests 
in  the  name  of  which  I  inquire. 

But  hereupon  let  a  grander,  —  let  a 
far  more  genuinely  religious,  and  in- 
deed truly  Christian  chord,  be  sounded 
for  the  traitor's  consolation.  Let  the 
words  of  Paul  be  heard,  *  There  is  now 
no  condemnation  for  them  that  are  in 
Christ  Jesus,  who  walk  not  after  the 
flesh,  but  after  the  spirit.'  The  simply 
human  meaning  of  those  immortal 
words,  if  understood  quite  apart  from 
Paul's  own  religious  beliefs,  is  far 
deeper  than  is  any  merely  technical 
theological  theory  of  the  Atonement. 
And  our  traitor  will  well  know  what 
those  words  of  Paul  mean.  Their  deep- 
est human  meaning  has  long-  since 
entered  into  his  life.  Had  it  not  so 
entered,  he  would  be  no  traitor;  for  he 
would  never  have  known  that  there  is 
what,  for  his  own  estimate,  has  been  a 
Holy  Spirit,  —  a  cause  to  which  to 
devote  one's  life,  —  a  love  that  is  in- 
deed redeeming,  and  —  when  it  first 
comes  to  us  —  compelling  —  the  love 
that  raises  as  if  from  the  dead,  the  man 
who  becomes  the  lover,  —  the  love  that 
also  forces  the  lover,  with  its  mysteri- 
ous power,  to  die  to  his  old  natural  life 
of  barren  contentions  and  of  distrac- 
tions, and  to  live  in  the  spirit.  That 
love  —  so  the  traitor  well  knows  —  re- 
deems the  lover  from  all  the  helpless 
natural  wretchedness  of  the,  as  yet, 
unawakened  life.  It  frees  from  *  con- 


demnation '  all  who  remain  true  to  this 
love. 

The  traitor  knows  all  this  by  experi- 
ence. And  he  knows  it  not  in  terms  of 
mere  theological  formulas.  He  knows 
it  as  a  genuinely  human  experience. 
He  knows  it  as  what  every  man  knows 
to  whom  a  transforming  love  has  re- 
vealed the  sense  of  a  new  life. 

All  this  is  familiar  to  the  traitor.  In 
his  own  way,  he  has  heard  the  voice 
of  the  Spirit.  He  has  been  converted  to 
newness  of  life.  And  therefore  he  has 
known  what  his  own  sin  against  the 
Holy  Ghost  meant.  And,  thereafter, 
he  has  deliberately  committed  that 
very  sin.  Therefore  Paul's  words  are 
at  once,  to  his  mind,  true  in  their  most 
human  as  well  as  in  their  most  spiritual 
sense.  And  just  for  that  very  reason 
they  are  to  him  now,  in  his  guilt,  as 
comfortless  and  as  unreconciling  as  a 
death-knell.  For  they  tell  him  of  pre- 
cisely that  life  which  once  was  his,  and 
which,  so  far  as  his  one  traitorous  deed 
could  lead  to  such  a  result,  he  himself 
has  deliberately  slain. 

If  there  is  to  be  any,  even  the  most 
tragic,  reconciliation  for  the  traitor, 
there  must  be  other  words  to  be  heard 
beside  just  these  words  of  Paul. 


IV 

Yet  there  are  expositors  of  the  Chris- 
tian idea  of  the  Atonement  who  have 
developed  the  various  so-called  '  moral 
theories '  of  the  atoning  work  of  Christ. 
And  these  men  indeed  have  still  many 
things  to  tell  our  traitor.  One  of  the 
most  clearly  written  and,  from  a  purely 
literary  point  of  view,  one  of  the  most 
charming  of  recent  books  on  the  moral 
theory  of  the  idea  of  atonement, 
namely,  the  little  book  with  which 
Sabatier  ended  his  life-work,  very  ef- 
fectively contrasts  with  all  the  *  penal- 
satisfaction '  theories  of  atonement, 
the  doctrine  that  the  work  of  Christ 


ATONEMENT 


411 


consisted  in  such  a  loving  sacrifice  for 
human  sin  and  for  human  sinners  that 
the  contemplation  of  this  work  arouses 
in  the  sinful  mind  a  depth  of  saving 
repentance,  as  well  as  of  love,  —  a 
depth  of  glowing  fervor,  such  as  sim- 
ply purifies  the  sinner's  soul.  For  love 
and  repentance  and  new  life,  —  these 
constitute  reconciliation.  These,  for 
Sabatier,  and  for  many  other  repre- 
sentatives of  the  'moral  theories'  of 
atonement,  —  these  are  in  themselves 
salvation. 

I  need  not  dwell  upon  such  opinions 
in  this  connection.  They  are  nowa- 
days well-known  to  all  who  have  read 
any  notable  portion  of  the  recent  lit- 
erature of  the  Atonement.  They  are 
present,  in  this  recent  literature,  in 
almost  endless  variations.  In  general 
these  views  are  deep,  and  Christian,  and 
cheering,  and  unquestionably  moral. 
And  their  authors  can  and  do  freely 
use  Paul's  words;  and,  on  occasion, 
supplement  Paul's  words  by  a  citation 
of  the  parables.  In  the  parables  there 
is  no  definite  doctrine  of  atonement 
enunciated.  But  there  is  a  doctrine  of 
salvation  through  loving  repentance. 
Cannot  our  traitor,  in  view  of  the  lov- 
ing sacrifice  that  constitutes  Christ's 
atoning  work,  repent  and  love?  Does 
that  not  reconcile  him?  May  not  the 
love  of  Christ  both  constrain  and  con- 
sole him? 


Once  more  —  speaking  still  from 
his  own  purely  human  point  of  view  — 
our  traitor  sadly  simplifies  the  labor 
of  considering  in  detail  these  various 
moral  theories  of  atonement.  The 
traitor  seeks  the  possible,  the  relative, 
the  inevitably  imperfect  reconciliation, 
which,  for  one  in  his  case,  is  still  ra- 
tionally definable.  He  discounts  all 
that  you  can  say  as  to  the  transform- 
ing pathos  and  the  compelling  power 
of  love  and  of  the  sacrifices.  All  this 


he  long  since  knows.  And,  as  I  must 
repeat,  all  this  constitutes  the  very 
essence  of  his  own  tragedy.  He  knew 
love  before  he  became  a  traitor.  He  has 
this  repentance  as  the  very  breath  of 
what  is  now  his  moral  existence  in  the 
hell  of  the  irrevocable.  As  for  amend- 
ment of  life,  and  good  deeds  yet  to 
come,  he  well  knows  the  meaning  of  all 
these  things.  He  is  ready  to  do  what- 
ever he  can.  But  none  of  all  this  doing 
of  good  works,  none  of  this  repentance, 
no  love,  and  no  tears  will  'lure  back* 
the  'moving  finger'  to  'cancel  half  a 
line,'  or  *  wash  out  a  word '  of  what  is 
written. 

Let  us  leave,  then,  both  the  'penal- 
satisfaction  '  theories  and  the  '  moral ' 
theories  to  address  themselves  to  other 
men.  Our  traitor  knows  too  well  the 
sad  lesson  of  his  own  deed  to  be  aided 
either  by  the  vain  technicalities  of  the 
more  antiquated  of  these  theological 
types  of  theories,  or  by  the  true,  but 
to  him  no  longer  applicable,  comforts 
which  the  theories  of  the  other,  —  the 
moral  type,  —  open  to  his  view. 

Plainly,  then,  the  traitor  himself 
can  suggest  nothing  further  as  to  his 
reconciliation  with  the  world  where, 
by  his  deed  of  betrayal,  he  once  chose 
to  permit  the  light  that  was  in  him  to 
become  darkness.  We  must  turn  in 
another  direction. 


VI 

We  have  so  far  considered  the  trai- 
tor's case  as  if  his  treason  had  been 
merely  an  affair  of  his  own  inner  life, 
—  a  sort  of  secret  impious  wish.  But, 
of  course,  while  we  are  indeed  suppos- 
ing the  traitor  —  now  enlightened  by 
the  view  of  his  own  deed  —  to  be 
the  judge  of  what  he  himself  has  meant 
and  done,  we  well  know  that  his 
false  deed  was,  in  his  own  opinion,  no 
mere  thought  of  unholiness.  He  had 
a  cause.  That  is,  he  lived  in  a  real 


412 


ATONEMENT 


world.  And  he  was  false  to  his  cause. 
He  betrayed.  Now  betrayal  is  some- 
thing objective.  It  breaks  ties.  It  rends 
asunder  what  love  has  joined  in  dear 
unity.  What  human  ties  the  traitor 
broke  we  leave  to  him  to  discover  for 
himself.  Why  they  were  to  his  mind 
holy,  we  also  need  not  now  inquire. 
Enough,  —  since  he  was  indeed  loyal; 

—  he  had  found  his  ties;  —  they  were 
precious  and  human  and  real;  and  he 
believed  them  holy;  —  and  he  broke 
them.    That  is,  so  far  as  in  him  lay, 
he  destroyed  by  his  deed  the  commun- 
ity in  whose  brotherhood,  in  whose  life, 
in  whose  spirit,  he  had  found  his  guide 
and  his  ideal.  His  deed,  then,  concerns 
not  himself  only,  but  that  community 
whereof  he  was  a  voluntary  member. 
The  community  knows,  or  in  the  long 
run  must  learn,  that  the  deed  of  trea- 
son has  been  done,  even  if,  being  itself 
no  searcher  of  hearts,  it  cannot  iden- 
tify the  individual  traitor.    We  often 
know  not  who  the  traitors  are.  But  if 
ours  is  the  community  that  is  wrecked, 
we  may  well  know  by  experience  that 
there  has  been  treason. 

The  problem  of  reconciliation,  then, 

—  if  reconciliation  there  is  to  be,  — 
concerns  not  only  the  traitor,  but  the 
wounded    or    shattered    community. 
Endlessly  varied  are  the  problems  — 
the  tragedies,  the  lost  causes,  the  heart- 
breaks, the  chaos  —  which  the  deeds  of 
traitors  produce.    All  this  we  merely 
hint  in  passing.     But  all  this  consti- 
tutes the  heart  of  the  sorrow  of  the 
higher  regions  of  our  human  world. 
And  we  here  refer  to  such  countless, 
commonplace,  but  crushing,  tragedies, 
to  these  ruins  which  are  the  daily  har- 
vest-home of  treason,  merely  in  "order 
to  ask  the  question,  Can  a  genuinely 
spiritual  community,  whose  ideals  are 
such  as  Paul  loved  to  portray  when  he 
wrote  to  his  churches,  —  can  such  a 
loving  and  beloved  community  in  any 
degree  reconcile  itself  to  the  existence 


of  traitors  in  its  world,  and  to  the  deeds 
of  individual  traitors?  Can  it  in  any 
wise  find  in  its  world  something  else, 
over  and  above  the  treason,  —  some- 
thing which  atones  for  the  spiritual 
disasters  that  the  very  being  of  trea- 
son both  constitutes  and  entails?  Must 
not  the  existence  of  traitors  remain,  for 
the  offended  community,  an  evil  that 
is  as  intolerable  and  irrevocable,  and 
as  much  beyond  its  powers  of  recon- 
ciliation, as  is,  for  the  traitor  himself, 
his  own  past  deed,  seen  in  all  the  light 
of  its  treachery?  Can  any  soul  of  good 
arise  or  be  created  out  of  this  evil  thing, 
or  as  an  atonement  therefor? 

You  see,  I  hope,  that  I  am  in  no  wise 
asking  whether  the  community  which 
the  traitor  has  assailed  desires,  or 
does  well,  either  to  inflict  or  to  remit 
any  penalties  said  to  be  due  to  the 
traitor  for  his  deed.  I  am  here  speak- 
ing wholly  of  the  possibility  of  inner 
and  human  reconciliations.  The  only 
penalty  which,  in  the  hell  of  the  irre- 
vocable, the  traitor  himself  inevitably 
finds,  is  the  fact,  I  did  it.  The  one 
irrevocable  fact  with  which  the  com- 
munity can  henceforth  seek  to  be  re- 
conciled, if  reconciliation  is  possible, 
is  the  fact,  This  evil  was  done.  That 
is,  These  invaluable  ties  were  broken. 
This  unity  of  brotherhood  was  shat- 
tered. The  life  of  the  community,  as  it 
was  before  the  blow  of  treason  fell, 
can  never  be  restored  to  its  former  pur- 
ity of  unscarred  love.  This  is  the  fact. 
For  this  let  the  community  now  seek, 
not  oblivion,  for  that  is  a  mere  losing 
of  the  truth;  not  annulment,  for  that 
is  impossible;  but  some  measure  of 
reconciliation. 

All  the  highest  forms  of  the  unity  of 
the  spirit,  in  our  human  world,  con- 
stantly depend,  for  their  very  exist- 
ence, upon  the  renewed  free  choices, 
the  sustained  loyalty,  of  the  members 
of  communities.  Hence  the  very  best 
that  we  know,  namely,  the  loyal  bro- 


ATONEMENT 


413 


therhood  of  the  faithful  who  choose 
to  keep  their  faith,  —  this  best  of  all 
human  goods,  I  say,  —  is  simply  in- 
separable from  countless  possibilities 
of  the  worst  of  human  tragedies,  — 
the  tragedy  of  broken  faith.  At  such 
cost  must  the  loftiest  of  our  human  pos- 
sessions in  the  realm  of  the  spirit  be 
purchased,  —  at  the  cost,  namely,  of 
knowing  that  some  deed  of  willful 
treason  on  the  part  of  some  one  whom 
we  trusted  as  brother  or  as  beloved 
may  rob  us  of  this  possession.  And  the 
fact  that  we  are  thus  helplessly  de- 
pendent on  human  fidelity  for  some  of 
our  highest  goods,  and  so  may  be  be- 
trayed, —  this  fact  is  due  not  to  the 
natural  perversity  of  men,  nor  to  the 
mere  weakness  of  those  who  love  and 
trust.  This  fact  is  due  to  something 
which,  without  any  metaphysical  the- 
ory, we  ordinarily  call  man's  freedom  of 
choice.  We  do  not  want  our  beloved 
community  to  consist  of  puppets,  or 
of  merely  fascinated  victims  of  a  me- 
chanically insistent  love.  We  want  the 
free  loyalty  of  those  who,  whatever 
fascination  first  won  them  to  their 
cause,  remain  faithful  because  they 
choose  to  remain  faithful.  Of  such  is 
the  kingdom  of  good  faith.  The  be- 
loved community  demands  for  itself 
such  freely  and  deliberately  steadfast 
members.  And  for  that  very  reason, 
in  a  world  where  there  is  such  free  and 
good  faith,  there  can  be  treason.  Hence 
the  realm  where  the  spirit  reaches  the 
highest  human  levels,  is  the  region 
where  the  worst  calamities  can,  and  in 
the  long  run  do,  assail  many  who  de- 
pend upon  the  good  faith  of  their 
brethren. 

The  community,  therefore,  never 
had  any  grounds,  before  the  treason, 
for  an  absolute  assurance  about  the 
future  traitor's  perseverance  in  the 
faith.  After  his  treason, — if  indeed  he 
repents  and  now  begins  once  more  to 
act  loyally,  —  it  may  acquire  a  rela- 


tive assurance  that  he  will  henceforth 
abide  faithful.  The  worst  evil  is  not, 
then,  that  a  trust  in  the  traitor,  which 
once  was  rightly  serene  and  perfectly 
confident,  is  now  irrevocably  lost.  It  is 
not  this  which  constitutes  the  irrecon- 
cilable aspect  of  the  traitor's  deed.  All 
men  are  frail.  And  especially  must 
those  who  are  freely  loyal  possess  a 
certain  freedom  to  become  faithless  if 
they  choose.  This  evil  is  a  condition  of 
the  highest  good  that  the  human  world 
contains.  And  so  much  the  commun- 
ity, in  presence  of  the  traitor,  ought 
to  recognize  as  something  that  was 
always  possible.  It  also  ought  to  know 
that  a  certain  always  fallible  trust  in 
the  traitor  can  indeed  be  restored  by 
his  future  good  deeds,  if  such  are  done 
by  him  with  every  sign  that  he  intends 
henceforth  to  be  faithful. 

But  what  is  indeed  irrevocably  lost 
to  the  community  through  the  traitor's 
deed  is  precisely  what  I  just  called 
'unscarred  love.'  The  traitor  remains 
—  for  the  community  as  well  as  for 
himself  —  the  traitor,  just  so  far  as 
his  deed  is  confessed,  and  just  so  far 
as  his  once  unsullied  fidelity  has  been 
stained.  This  indeed  is  irrevocable. 
It  is  perfectly  human.  But  it  is  unut- 
terably comfortless  to  the  shattered 
community. 

It  is  useless,  then,  to  say,  that  the 
problem  of  reconciliation,  so  far  as  the 
community  is  concerned,  is  the  prob- 
lem of  *  forgiveness,'  not  now  as  remis- 
sion of  penalty,  but  of  forgiveness,  in 
so  far  as  forgiveness  means  a  restor- 
ing of  the  love  of  the  community,  or  of 
its  members,  toward  the  one  who  has 
now  sinned,  but  repented.  Love  may 
be  restored.  If  the  traitor's  future  at- 
titude makes  that  possible,  human  love 
ought  to  be  restored  to  the  now  both  re- 
pentant and  well-deserving  doer  of  the 
past  evil  deed.  But  alas!  this  restored 
love  will  be  the  love  for  the  member 
who  has  been  a  traitor;  and  the  tragedy 


414 


ATONEMENT 


of  the  treason  will  permanently  form 
part  in  and  of  this  love.  Thus,  then, 
up  to  this  point,  there  appears  for  the 
community,  as  well  as  for  the  traitor, 
no  ground  for  even  the  imperfect  re- 
conciliation of  which  we  have  been  in 
search.  Is  there,  then,  any  other  way, 
still  untried,  in  which  the  commun- 
ity may  hope,  if  not  to  find,  then  to 
create,  something  which,  in  its  own 
strictly  limited  fashion,  will  reconcile 
the  community  to  the  traitor  and  to 
the  irrevocable,  and  irrevocably  evil, 
deed. 

VII 

Such  a  way  exists.  The  community 
has  lost  its  treasure;  its  once  faithful 
member  who,  until  his  deed  of  treason 
came,  had  been  wholly  its  own  member. 
And  it  has  lost  the  ties  and  the  union 
which  he  destroyed  by  his  deed.  And, 
for  all  this  loss,  it  lovingly  mourns  with 
a  sorrow  for  which,  thus  far,  we  see  no 
reconciliation.  Who  shall  give  to  it  its 
own  again? 

The  community,  then,  can  indeed 
find  no  reconciliation.  But  can  it  create 
one?  At  the  worst,  it  is  the  traitor,  and 
it  is  not  the  community,  that  has  done 
this  deed.  New  deeds  remain  to  be 
done.  The  community  is  free  to  do 
them,  or  to  be  incarnate  in  some  faith- 
ful servant  who  will  do  them.  Could 
any  possible  new  deed,  done  by,  or  on 
behalf  of  the  community,  and  done 
by  some  one  who  is  not  stained  by  the 
traitor's  deed,  introduce  into  this  hu- 
man world  an  element  which,  as  far  as 
it  went,  would  be,  in  whatever  meas- 
ure, genuinely  reconciling? 

We  stand  at  the  very  heart  and  cen- 
tre of  the  human  problem  of  atonement. 
We  have  just  now  nothing  to  do  with 
theological  opinion  on  this  topic.  I  in- 
sist that  our  problem  is  as  familiar  and 
empirical  as  is  death  or  grief.  That 
problem  of  atonement  daily  arises,  not 
as  between  God  and  man  (for  we  here 


are  simply  ignoring,  for  the  time  being, 
the  metaphysical  issues  that  lie  behind 
our  problem).  That  problem  is  daily 
faced  by  all  those  faithful  lovers  of 
wounded  and  shattered  communities 
who,  going. down  into  the  depths  of 
human  sorrow,  either  as  sufferers  or 
as  friends  who  would  fain  console,  or 
who,  standing  by  hearths  whose  fires 
burn  no  more,  or  loving  their  country 
through  all  the  sorroWs  which  traitors 
have  inflicted  upon  her,  or  who,  not 
weakly,  but  bravely,  grieving  over  the 
woe  of  the  whole  human  world,  are 
still  steadily  determined  that  no  prin- 
cipality and  no  power,  that  no  height 
and  no  depth,  shall  be  able  to  separate 
man  from  his  true  love,  which  is  the 
triumph  of  the  spirit.  That  human 
problem  of  atonement  is,  I  say,  daily 
faced.  And  faced  by  the  noblest  of 
mankind.  And  for  these  our  noblest, 
despite  all  our  human  weakness,  that 
problem  is,  in  principle  and  in  ideal, 
daily  solved.  Let  us  turn  to  such  lead- 
ers of  the  human  search  after  great- 
ness, as  our  spiritual  guides. 

Great  calamities  are,  for  all  but  the 
traitor  himself,  —  so  far  as  we  have 
yet  considered  his  case,  —  great  oppor- 
tunities. Lost  causes  have  furnished, 
times  without  number,  the  foundations 
and  the  motives  of  humanity's  most 
triumphant  loyalty. 

When  treason  has  done  its  last  and 
most  cruel  work,  and  lies  with  what  it 
has  destroyed,  —  dead  in  the  tomb  of 
the  irrevocable  past,  —  there  is  now 
the  opportunity  for  a  triumph  of  which 
I  can  only  speak  weakly  and  in  imper- 
fectly abstract  formulas.  But,  as  I  can 
at  once  say,  this  of  which  I  now  speak 
is  a  human  triumph.  It  forms  part  of 
the  history  of  man's  earthly  warfare 
with  his  worst  foes.  Moreover,  when- 
ever it  occurs  at  all,  this  is  a  triumph 
not  merely  of  stoical  endurance,  nor 
yet  of  kindly  forgiveness,  nor  of  the 
mystical  merit  which,  seeing  all  things 


ATONEMENT 


415 


in  God,  feels  them  all  to  be  good.  It  is 
a  triumph  of  the  creative  will.  And 
what  form  does  it  take  amongst  the 
best  of  men,  who  are  here  to  be  our 
guides? 

I  answer,  this  triumph  over  treason 
can  only  be  accomplished  by  the  com- 
munity, or  on  behalf  of  the  commun- 
ity, through  some  steadfastly  loyal 
servant  who  acts,  so  to  speak,  as  the 
incarnation  of  the  very  spirit  of  the 
community  itself.  This  faithful  and 
suffering  servant  of  the  community 
may  answer  and  confound  treason  by  a 
work  whose  type  I  shall  venture  next  to 
describe,  in  my  own  way,  thus:  First, 
this  creative  work  shall  include  a  deed, 
or  various  deeds,  for  which  only  just 
this  treason  furnishes  the  opportunity. 
Not  treason  in  general,  but  just  this 
individual  treason  shall  give  the  occa- 
sion, and  supply  the  condition,  of  the 
creative  deed  which  I  am  in  ideal  de- 
scribing. Without  just  that  treason, 
this  new  deed  (so  I  am  supposing) 
could  not  have  been  done  at  all.  And, 
hereupon,  the  new  deed,  as  I  suppose, 
is  so  ingeniously  devised,  so  concretely 
practical  in  the  good  which  it  accom- 
plishes, that,  when  you  look  down  upon 
the  human  world  after  the  new  creative 
deed  has  been  done  in  it,  you  say,  first, 
This  deed  was  made  possible  by  that 
treason;  and,  secondly,  The  world,  as 
transformed  by  this  creative  deed,  is  bet- 
ter than  it  would  have  been  had  all  else 
remained  the  same,  but  had  that  deed  of 
treason  not  been  done  at  all.  That  is, 
the  new  creative  deed  has  made  the 
new  world  better  than  it  was  before 
the  blow  of  treason  fell. 

Now  such  a  deed  of  the  creative  love 
and  of  the  devoted  ingenuity  of  the  suf- 
fering servant,  on  behalf  of  his  com- 
munity, breaks  open,  as  it  were,  the 
tomb  of  the  dead  and  treacherous  past, 
and  comes  forth  as  the  life  and  the 
expression  of  the  creative  and  recon- 
ciling will.  It  is  this  creative  will  whose 


ingenuity  and  whose  skill  have  exe- 
cuted the  deed  that  makes  the  human 
world  better  than  it  was  before  the 
treason. 

To  devise  and  to  carry  out  some  new 
deed  which  makes  the  human  world 
better  than  it  would  have  been  had  just 
that  treasonable  deed  not  been  done, 
is  that  not,  in  its  own  limited  way  and 
sense,  a  reconciling  form  both  of  in- 
vention and  of  conduct?  Let  us  for- 
get, for  the  moment,  the  traitor.  Let 
us  now  think  only  of  the  community. 
We  know  why,  and  in  what  sense,  it 
cannot  be  reconciled  to  the  traitor  or 
to  his  deed.  But  have  we  not  found, 
without  any  inconsistency,  a  new  fact 
which  furnishes  a  genuinely  reconcil- 
ing element?  It  indeed  furnishes  no 
perfect  reconciliation  with  the  irrevoc- 
able; and  it  transforms  the  meaning  of 
that  very  past  which  it  cannot  undo. 
It  cannot  restore  the  unscarred  love. 
It  does  supply  a  new  triumph  of  the 
spirit, — a  triumph  which  is  not  so 
much  a  mere  compensation  for  what 
has  been  lost,  as  a  transfiguration  of 
the  very  loss  into  a  gain  that,  without 
this  loss,  could  never  have  been  won. 
The  traitor  cannot  thus  transform  the 
meaning  of  his  own  past.  But  the  suf- 
fering servant  can  thus  transfigure  this 
meaning;  can  bring  out  of  the  realm  of 
death  a  new  life  that  only  this  very 
death  rendered  possible. 

The  triumph  of  the  spirit  of  the 
community  over  the  treason  which  was 
its  enemy,  the  rewinning  of  the  value 
of  the  traitor's  own  life,  when  the  new 
deed  is  done,  involves  the  old  tragedy, 
but  takes  up  that  tragedy  into  a  life 
that  is  now  more  a  life  of  triumph 
than  it  would  have  been  if  the  deed  of 
treason  had  never  been  done. 

Therefore,  if  indeed  we  suppose  or 
observe  that,  in  our  human  world,  such 
creative  deeds  occur,  we  see  that  they 
indeed  do  not  remove,  they  do  not  an- 
nul, either  treason  or  its  tragedy.  But 


416 


ATONEMENT 


they  do  show  us  a  genuinely  reconciling, 
a  genuinely  atoning  fact,  in  the  world 
and  in  the  community  of  the  traitor. 
Those  who  do  such  deeds  solve,  I  have 
just  said,  not  the  impossible  problem 
of  undoing  the  past,  but  the  genuine 
problem  of  finding,  even  in  the  worst 
of  tragedies,  the  means  of  an  otherwise 
impossible  triumph.  They  meet  the 
deepest  and  bitterest  of  estrangements 
by  showing  a  way  of  reconciliation,  and 
a  way  that  only  this  very  estrangement 
has  made  possible. 

VIII 

This  is  the  human  aspect  of  the  idea 
of  atonement.  Do  we  need  to  solve  our 
theological  problems  before  we  decide 
whether  such  an  idea  has  meaning,  and 
is  ethically  defensible?  I  must  insist 
that  this  idea  comes  to  us  not  from  the 
scholastic  quiet  of  theological  specula- 
tion, but  stained  with  the  blood  of  the 
battlefields  of  real  life.  For  myself,  I 
can  say  that  no  theological  theory 
suggested  to  me  this  interpretation  of 
the  essential  nature  of  an  atoning  deed. 
I  cannot  call  the  interpretation  new, 
simply  because  I  myself  have  learned 
it  from  observing  the  meaning  of  the 
lives  of  some  suffering  servants  — 
plain  human  beings  —  who  never 
cared  for  theology,  but  who  incarnated 
in  their  own  fashion  enough  of  the 
spirit  of  their  community  to  conceive 
and  to  accomplish  such  new  and  crea- 
tive deeds  as  I  have  just  attempted  to 
characterize.  To  try  to  describe,  at 
all  adequately,  the  life  or  the  work  of 
any  such  persons,  I  have  neither  the 
right  nor  the  power.  Here  is  no  place 
for  such  a  collection  and  analysis  of  the 
human  forms  of  the  atoning  life  as  only 
a  William  James  could  have  justly  ac- 
complished. And  upon  personal  his- 
tories I  could  dwell,  in  this  place,  only 
at  the  risk  of  intruding  upon  lives 
which  I  have  been  privileged,  some- 


times, to  see  afar  off,  and  briefly,  but 
which  I  have  no  right  to  report  as  mere 
illustrations  of  a  philosphical  argu- 
ment. It  is  enough,  I  think,  for  me 
barely  to  indicate  what  I  have  in  mind 
when  I  say  that  such  things  are  done 
among  men. 

All  of  us  well  know  of  great  public 
benefactors  whose  lives  and  good  works 
have  been  rendered  possible  through 
the  fact  that  some  great  personal  sor- 
row, some  crushing  blow  of  private 
grief,  first  descended,  and  seemed  to 
wreck  their  lives.  Such  heroic  souls 
have  then  been  able,  in  these  well- 
known  types  of  cases,  not  only  to  bear 
their  own  grief,  and  to  rise  from  the 
depths  of  it  (as  we  all  in  our  time  have 
to  attempt  to  do) .  They  have  been  able 
also  to  use  their  grief  as  the  very  source 
of  the  new  arts  and  inventions  and 
labors  whereby  they  have  become  such 
valuable  servants  of  their  communities. 
Such  people  indeed  often  remind  us 
of  the  suffering  servant  in  Isaiah;  for 
their  life-work  shows  that  they  are  will- 
ing to  be  wounded  for  the  sake  of  their 
community.  Indirectly,  too,  they  often 
seem  to  be  suffering  because  of  the 
faults,  as  well  as  because  of  the  griefs, 
of  their  neighbors,  or  of  mankind.  And 
it  indeed  often  occurs  to  us  to  speak  of 
these  public  or  private  benefactors  as 
living  some  sort  of  atoning  life,  as  bear- 
ing, in  a  sense,  not  only  the  sorrows, 
but  the  sins,  of  other  men. 

Yet  it  is  not  of  such  lives,  noble 
as  they  are,  that  I  am  now  thinking, 
nor  of  such  vicarious  suffering,  of  such 
sympathizing  helpfulness  in  human 
woe,  or  of  such  rising  from  private  grief 
to  public  service,  that  I  am  speak- 
ing, when  I  say  that  atoning  deeds,  in 
the  more  precise  sense  just  described, 
are  indeed  done  in  our  human  world. 
Sharply  contrasted  with  these  benefi- 
cent lives  and  deeds,  which  I  have  just 
mentioned,  are  the  other  lives  of  which 
I  am  thinking,  and  to  which,  in  speak- 


ATONEMENT 


417 


ing  of  atonement,  I  have  been  referring. 
These  are  the  lives  of  which  I  have 
so  little  right  to  give  more  than  a  bare 
hint  in  this  place. 

Suppose  a  community  —  a  modern 
community  —  to  be  engaged  with  the 
ideals  and  methods  of  modern  reform, 
in  its  contests  with  some  of  those  ills 
which  the  natural  viciousness,  the  evil 
training,  and  the  treasonable  choices 
of  very  many  people  combine  to  make 
peculiarly  atrocious  in  the  eyes  of  all 
who  love  mankind.  Such  evils  need 
to  be  met,  in  the  good  warfare,  not  only 
by  indignant  reformers,  not  only  by 
ardent  enthusiasts,  but  also  by  calmly 
considerate  and  enlightened  people, 
who  distinguish  clearly  between  fervor 
and  wisdom,  who  know  what  depths  of 
woe  and  of  wrong  are  to  be  sounded, 
but  who  also  know  that  only  well-con- 
trolled thoughtfulness  and  well-dis- 
ciplined self-restraint  can  devise  the 
best  means  of  help.  As  we  also  well 
know,  we  look,  in  our  day,  to  highly 
trained  professional  skill  for  aid  in  such 
work.  We  do  not  hope  that  those  who 
are  merely  well-meaning  and  loving 
can  do  what  most  needs  to  be  done.  We 
desire  those  who  know.  Let  us  suppose, 
then,  such  a  modern  community  as 
especially  needing,  for  a  very  special 
purpose,  one  who  does  know. 

Hereupon,  let  us  suppose  that  one 
individual  exists  whose  life  has  been 
wounded  to  the  core  by  some  of  trea- 
son's worst  blows.  Let  us  suppose  one 
who,  always  manifesting  true  loyalty 
and  steadfastly  keeping  strict  integ- 
rity, has  known,  not  merely  what  the 
ordinary  professional  experts  learn,  but 
also  what  it  is  to  be  despised  and  re- 
jected of  men,  and  to  be  brought  to 
the  very  depths  of  lonely  desolation, 
and  to  have  suffered  thus  through  a 
treason  which  also  deeply  affected,  not 
one  individual  only,,  but  a  whole  com- 
munity. Let  such  a  soul,  humiliated, 
offended,  broken,  so  to  speak,  through 
VOL.  in -NO.  s 


the  very  effort  to  serve  a  community 
forsaken;  long  daily  fed  only  by  grief, 
yet  still  armed  with  the  grace  of  loyalty 
and  of  honor,  and  with  the  heroism  of 
dumb  suffering,  —  let  such  a  soul  not 
only  arise,  as  so  many  great  sufferers 
have  done,  from  the  depths  of  woe; 
let  such  a  soul  not  only  triumph,  as  so 
many  have  done,  over  the  grief  that 
treason  caused;  but  let  such  a  soul 
also  use  the  very  lore  which  just  this 
treason  had  taught,  in  order  to  begin 
a  new  life-work.  Let  this  life-work  be 
full  of  a  shrewd,  practical,  serviceable, 
ingenious  wisdom  which  only  that  one 
individual  experience  of  a  great  treason 
could  have  taught.  Let  this  new  life- 
work  be  made  possible  only  because  of 
that  treason.  Let  it  bring  to  the  com- 
munity, in  the  contest  with  great  pub- 
lic evils,  methods  and  skill  and  judg- 
ment and  forethought  which  only  that 
so  dear-bought  wisdom  could  have  in- 
vented. Let  these  methods  have,  in 
fact,  a  skill  that  the  traitor's  own  wit 
has  taught,  and  that  is  now  used  for 
the  good  work.  Let  that  life  show,  not 
only  what  treason  can  do  to  wreck,  but 
what  the  free  spirit  can  learn  from  and 
through  the  very  might  of  treason's 
worst  skill. 

If  you  will  conceive  of  such  a  life 
merely  as  a  possibility,  you  may  know 
why  I  assert  that  genuinely  atoning 
deeds  occur,  and  what  I  believe  such 
deeds  to  be.  For  myself,  any  one  who 
should  supply  the  facts  to  bear  out 
my  supposition  (and  such  people,  as 
I  assert,  there  are  in  our  human  world), 
would  appear  henceforth  to  me  to  be 
a  sort  of  symbolic  personality,  —  one 
who  had  descended  into  hell  to  set  free 
the  spirits  who  are  in  prison.  When 
I  hear  those  words,  'descended  into 
hell,'  repeated  in  the  creed,  I  think 
of  such  human  beings,  and  feel  that  I 
know  at  least  some  in  this  world  of 
ours  to  whom  the  creed  in  those  words 
refers. 


418 


ATONEMENT 


IX 

Hereupon,  you  may  very  justly  say 
that  the  mere  effects  of  the  atoning 
deeds  of  a  human  individual  are  in  this 
world  apparently  petty  and  transient; 
and  that  even  the  most  atoning  of 
sacrificial  human  lives  can  devise  no- 
thing which,  within  the  range  of  our 
vision,  does  make  the  world  of  the  com- 
munity better,  in  any  of  its  most  tragic 
aspects,  than  it  would  be  if  no  treason 
had  been  committed. 

If  you  say  this,  you  merely  give  me 
the  opportunity  to  express  the  human 
aspect  of  the  idea  of  the  Atonement  in 
a  form  very  near  to  the  form  which,  as 
I  believe,  the  Christian  idea  of  atone- 
ment has  always  possessed  when  the 
interests  of  the  religious  consciousness 
(or,  if  I  may  use  the  now  favorite  word, 
the  sub-consciousness)  of  the  church, 
rather  than  the  theological  formulation 
of  the  theory  of  atonement,  have  been 
in  question.  Christian  feeling,  Christ- 
ian art,  Christian  worship,  have  been 
full  of  the  sense  that  somehow  (and  how 
has  remained  indeed  a  mystery)  there 
was  something  so  precious  about  the 
work  of  Christ,  something  so  divinely 
wise  (so  skillful  and  divinely  beautiful) 
about  the  plan  of  salvation,  —  that,  as 
a  result  of  all  this,  after  Christ's  work 
was  done,  the  world,  as  a  whole,  was  a 
nobler  and  richer  and  worthier  creation 
than  it  would  have  been  if  Adam  had 
not  sinned.  This,  I  insist,  has  always 
been  felt  to  be  the  sense  of  the  atoning 
work  of  Christ.  A  glance  at  a  great 
Madonna,  a  chord  of  truly  Christian 
music,  ancient  or  modern,  tells  you  that 
this  is  so.  And  this  sense  of  the  aton- 
ing work  cannot  be  reduced  to  what 
the  modern  'moral'  theories  of  the 
Christian  Atonement  most  empha- 
size. For  what  the  Christian  regards 
as  the  atoning  work  of  Christ  is,  from 
this  point  of  view,  not  something  about 
Christ's  work  which  merely  arouses  in 


sinful  man  love  and  repentance.  No, 
the  theory  of  atonement  which  I  now 
suggest,  and  which,  as  I  insist,  is  sub- 
consciously present  in  the  religious 
sentiment,  ritual,  and  worship  of  all 
Christendom,  is  a  perfectly  'objective* 
theory,  —  quite  as  'objective'  as  any 
'penal-satisfaction'  theory  could  be. 

Christian  religious  feeling  has  always 
expressed  itself  in  the  idea  that  what 
atones  is  something  perfectly  'objec- 
tive,' namely,  Christ's  work.  And  this 
atoning  work  of  Christ  was  for  Christ- 
ian feeling  a  deed  that  was  made  pos- 
sible only  through  man's  sin,  but  that 
somehow  was  so  wise  and  so  rich  and 
so  beautiful  and  divinely  fair  that,  after 
this  work  was  done,  the  world  was  a 
better  world  than  it  would  have  been 
had  man  never  sinned.  So  the  Christian 
consciousness,  I  insist,  has  always  felt. 
So  its  poets  have  often,  in  one  way  or 
another,  expressed  the  matter.  The 
theologians  have  disguised  this  simple 
idea  under  countless  forms.  But  every 
characteristically  Christian  act  of  wor- 
ship expresses  it  afresh.  Treason  did 
its  work  (so  the  legend  runs)  when  man 
fell.  But  Christ's  work  was  so  perfect 
that,  in  a  perfectly  objective  way,  it 
took  the  opportunity  which  man's  fall 
furnished  to  make  the  world  better 
than  it  could  have  been  had  man  not 
fallen. 

But  this  is,  indeed,  as  an  idea  con- 
cerning God  and  the  universe  and  the 
work  of  Christ,  an  idea  which  is  as 
human  in  its  spirit,  and  as  deep  in  its 
relation  to  truth,  as  it  is,  in  view  of  the 
complexity  of  the  values  which  are  in 
question,  hard  either  to  articulate  or 
to  defend.  How  should  we  know,  unless 
some  revelation  helped  us  to  know, 
whether  and  in  what  way  Christ's  sup- 
posed work  made  the  world  better 
than  it  would  have  been  had  man  not 
sinned  ? 

But  in  this  discussion  I  am  speaking 
of  the  purely  human  aspect  of  the  idea 


MAGIC  SHADOW-SHAPES 


419 


of  atonement.  That  aspect  is  now  cap- 
able of  a  statement  which  does  not  pre- 
tend to  deal  with  any  but  our  human 
world,  and  which  fully  admits  the  pet- 
tiness of  every  human  individual  effort 
to  produce  such  a  really  atoning  deed 
as  we  have  described. 

The  human  community  depending, 
as  it  does,  upon  its  loyal  human  lov- 
ers, and  wounded  to  the  heart  by  its 
traitors,  and  finding,  the  further  it  ad- 
vances in  moral  worth,  the  greater 
need  of  the  loyal,  and  the  greater  depth 
of  the  tragedy  of  treason,  utters  its 
own  doctrine  of  atonement  as  this  pos- 
tulate, —  the  central  postulate  of  its 
highest  spirituality.  This  postulate  I 
word  thus:  No  baseness  or  cruelty  of 
treason  so  deep  or  so  tragic  shall  enter 
our  human  world,  but  that  loyal  love 
shall  be  able  in  due  time  to  oppose  to 
just  that  deed  of  treason  its  fitting 
deed  of  atonement.  The  deed  of  atone- 
ment shall  be  so  wise  and  so  rich  in 
its  efficacy,  that  the  spiritual  world, 
after  the  atoning  deed,  shall  be  bet- 
ter, richer,  more  triumphant  amidst  all 
its  irrevocable  tragedies,  than  it  was 


before  that  traitor's  deed  was  done. 

This  is  the  postulate  of  the  highest 
form  of  human  spirituality.  It  cannot 
be  proved  by  the  study  of  men  as 
they  are.  It  can  be  asserted  by  the 
creative  will  of  the  loyal.  Christianity 
expressed  this  postulate  in  the  sym- 
bolic form  of  a  report  concerning  the 
supernatural  work  of  Christ.  Humanity 
must  express  it  through  the  devotion, 
the  genius,  the  skill,  the  labor  of  the 
individual  loyal  servants  in  whom  its 
spirit  becomes  incarnate. 

As  a  Christian  idea,  the  Atonement 
is  expressed  in  a  symbol,  whose  divine 
interpretation  is  merely  felt,  and  is 
viewed  as  a  mystery.  As  a  human  idea, 
atonement  is  expressed  (so  far  as  it  can 
at  any  one  time  be  expressed)  by  a 
peculiarly  noble  and  practically  effi- 
cacious type  of  human  deeds.  This 
human  idea  of  atonement  is  also  ex- 
pressed in  a  postulate  which  lies  at  the 
basis  of  all  the  best  and  most  practi- 
cal spirituality.  The  Christian  symbol 
and  the  practical  postulate  are  two 
sides  of  the  same  life,  —  at  once  hu- 
man and  divine. 


MAGIC  SHADOW-SHAPES 


BY  ROBERT   M.  GAY 


I  HAVE  an  idea  that  my  brother  and 
I  went  to  see  Little  Lord  Fauntleroy 
about  a  year  before  we  went  to  see  Rip 
van  Winkle.  We  went  sedately  with 
our  father  and  mother.  I  can  remem- 
ber little  about  it  —  my  first  visit  to 
the  theatre  —  except  that  the  seat 
was  so  wide  that  my  feet  stuck  out 
straight  in  front  of  me,  and  my  knees 


were  so  stiff  at  the  end  that  they  had  to 
be  rubbed  into  flexibility.  I  had  read 
the  story  in  Saint  Nicholas,  and  the 
little  Lord  in  his  wide  collars  and  long 
curls  did  not  appeal  to  me  strongly,  — 
my  memories  of  such  collars  and  such 
curls  were  too  fresh  and  too  painful;  yet 
it  is  curious  that  my  first  theatrical  ex- 
perience should  have  made  so  little  im- 


420 


MAGIC  SHADOW-SHAPES 


pression  upon  me.  Of  the  play  itself, 
I  can  remember  nothing;  the  vastness 
of  the  auditorium,  the  heavy  carpets 
and  plush  seats,  the  silence,  the  lights 
which  went  and  came,  seem  to  have 
conspired  to  bewilder  me  into  an  in- 
sensibility that  soon  became  confirmed 
in  a  long  doze,  punctuated  by  intervals 
of  consciousness  when  the  lights  flashed 
up  at  the  ends  of  acts.  My  brother, 
who  was  three  years  older,  poked  me 
persistently  in  the  ribs  with  his  elbow 
whenever  any  of  the  business  of  the 
stage  aroused  his  enthusiasm;  but  I 
remember  only  the  pokes. 

When,  next  day,  we  came  to  discuss 
the  play,  his  disgust  at  my  supineness 
was  boundless.  I  maintained  that 
there  was  no  excuse  for  having  a  girl 
play  the  part  of  a  boy,  and  to  this  piece 
of  acute  criticism  I  clung  desperately, 
—  and  have  clung  ever  since.  As  it  was 
the  only  piece  cf  criticism,  favorable  or 
condemnatory,  that  I  was  able  to  think 
of,  I  made  the  most  of  it;  but  he  snort- 
ed with  contempt,  holding  that  after 
one  got  used  to  her  it  made  no  differ- 
ence. I  stubbornly  insisted  that  I 
had  n't  got  used  to  her;  and  that  was 
true,  for  I  had  looked  at  her  probably 
less  than  five  minutes.  To  be  truthful, 
like  many  an  older  critic  before  and 
since,  I  had  fallen  asleep  in  the  grip  of 
an  unfavorable  criticism. 

On  two  subjects,  however,  I  waxed 
enthusiastic.  One  was  the  man  who 
sold  tickets.  To  a  boy  who  had  trouble 
remembering  what  part  of  ten  apples 
two  apples  are,  there  was  something 
preternatural  in  a  man  who  could  make 
change  with  such  jocund  ease.  I  gaped 
at  him  in  the  lobby,  heedless  of  the 
jostling  crowd,  until  I  was  dragged 
sidewise,  crab-like,  through  the  door. 
Once  in  my  seat,  however,  well  toward 
the  front  of  the  parterre,  the  antics  of 
the  trombone  player  soon  made  me 
forget  the  prodigy  of  the  box-office.  I 
had  been  given  the  aisle  seat  so  that  I 


might  be  sure  to  see  the  stage.  I  had, 
therefore,  a  clear  view  of  the  musician 
as  he  sat  behind  the  second  violins, 
lengthening  and  shortening  his  remark- 
able horn,  and  blowing  till  the  veins 
stood  out  on  his  neck.  In  vain  my 
brother  tried  to  divert  my  gaze  to 
the  painted  curtain,  the  footlights,  the 
boxes:  my  eyes  returned  willy-nilly  to 
the  trombone;  and  its  owner,  conscious 
at  last,  toward  the  end  of  the  overture, 
of  my  fascinated  gaze,  without  missing 
a  beat,  without  impairing  in  the  least 
the  smooth  slide  of  his  hand  as  he  took 
a  very  bass  note,  solemnly  closed  his 
nearer  eye  in  a  long,  humorous,  sym- 
pathetic wink.  If  that  man  had  not  left 
during  the  first  act  to  seek  refreshment, 
I  should  have  stayed  awake. 

In  our  critical  retrospect  next  morn- 
ing, therefore,  I  met  all  embarrassing 
appeals  for  opinion  on  the  play  by  re- 
ferences to  the  trombonist,  whom  my 
brother  had  not  even  looked  at.  His 
rage  at  this  inconsequential  criticism 
did  not  affect  me  a  whit,  because  I  had 
the  sweet  recollection  of  the  wink,  — 
a  personal  touch  which  he  could  not 
parallel,  that  one  touch  of  nature  of 
which  the  poet  sings.  He  gave  me  up 
as  childish  and  low-minded,  and  vowed 
that  the  next  time  he  took  me  to  the 
theatre  I'd  know  it.  Although  the 
lofty  assumption  of  the  remark  was 
irritating,  I  did  not  worry.  The  desire 
to  go  again  was  not  very  strong  in  me. 
I  felt  that  I  could  sleep  much  more 
comfortably  in  bed. 

As  I  look  back  at  that  eccentric  little 
boy,  I  feel  an  odd  kind  of  envy  of  him, 
—  not  a  sentimental  make-me-a-boy- 
again-just-for-to-night  kind  of  envy, 
but  an  envy  of  his  intellectual  inde- 
pendence. When  we  grown  people  buy 
a  ticket  for  a  play,  we  feel  that  in  order 
to  get  the  worth  of  our  money  we  must 
look  at  the  stage  and  must  keep  awake. 
If  the  plot  is  poor  or  the  acting  bad, 
if  some  of  the  mechanism  creaks  or  if 


MAGIC  SHADOW-SHAPES 


421 


the  scenery  falls  down,  we  feel  that 
we  have  been  cheated;  and  no  ticket- 
seller  or  trombone  player  can  possibly 
compensate  us.  Habit  is  more  insidi- 
ous in  our  lives  than  we  ever  know. 
Having  bought  our  ticket,  we  sit  down 
four-square  in  our  seat  and  steadfast- 
ly face  the  stage,  as  much  as  to  say, 
We  have  paid  two  dollars  for  this  chair 
and  we  expect  to  get  two  dollars' 
worth  of  play.  If  we  don't  get  it,  we  '11 
growl. 

There  is  a  tale  in  Hans  Andersen 
entitled,  I  think,  'What  the  Old  Man 
Does  is  always  Right.'  It  tells  how  the 
Old  Man  takes  a  horse  or  a  cow  to 
market  to  barter  it,  and,  after  five  or 
six  exchanges,  returns  home  to  his  wife 
with  a  peck  of  shriveled  apples.  Most 
husbands  under  such  circumstances 
would  never  return  home,  but,  like 
Hawthorne's  Wakefield,  would  take  up 
their  abode  in  another  street.  But,  be- 
hold, this  man's  paragon  of  a  wife  lis- 
tens gleefully  to  his  story  of  his  suc- 
cessive dickerings,  watches  the  horse 
shrink  into  a  cow,  a  sheep,  a  goose,  a 
hen,  the  peck  of  shriveled  apples  afore- 
said, finds  some  unanticipated  com- 
pensation in  each  new  declension,  and 
ends  by  calling  him  'my  dear,  good 
husband,'  and  giving  him  a  'sounding 
kiss.' 

Now,  I  envy  that  boy  because  he 
seems  to  me  to  have  achieved  at  a 
tender  age  —  unconsciously,  it  must 
be  admitted  —  the  philosophy  of  that 
old  woman.  Not  finding  on  the  stage 
what  he  wanted,  he  sought  and  found 
it  elsewhere;  and,  that  failing  in  turn, 
he  went  to  sleep.  It  has  cost  him  many 
a  long  year  to  realize,  weakly  and 
spasmodically,  the  same  philosophic 
wisdom. 

As  I  have  said,  my  brother,  neverthe- 
less, held  my  philosophy  in  such  utter 
contempt  that  he  rejected  my  future 
company  at  the  theatre.  This  was  not 
so  cruel  a  deprivation  for  me,  however, 


as  might  be  supposed;  for  he  never 
went  himself  until  a  year  had  elapsed, 
and  then  he  relented. 

He  had  thought  now  of  a  wonderful 
project  that  smacked  of  dare-deviltry. 
His  plan  was  for  us  to  save  our  money 
until  we  had  fifty  cents  apiece  and  then 
go  to  the  Academy  of  Music  to  see 
Joseph  Jefferson  in  Rip  van  Winkle.  To 
go  alone,  remember,  alone,  in  the  even- 
ing, riding  the  three  miles  to  and  fro  in 
the  horse-cars,  and  sitting  in  that  gal- 
lery vulgarly  known  as  the  'peanut.'  I 
had  not  much  opinion  of  Rip  van  Win- 
Ide  as  a  tale  (though  I  have  to  like  it 
now);  to  my  immature  judgment  it 
seemed  a  grain  of  story  hid  in  three 
bushels  of  words,  yet  I  felt  that  I  could 
manage  to  sit  through  it  for  the  sake  of 
the  adventure,  and  so  I  acquiesced. 

For  several  weeks  we  saved  our 
money  by  a  novel  method.  We  had 
each  two  or  three  hens  which  laid  an 
egg  now  and  then,  when  the  weather 
was  calm  and  their  temperaments  were 
unruffled;  and  this  occasional  egg  we 
now  sold  to  our  mother  for  a  cent.  As 
she  supplied  the  food  for  the  hens,  her 
investment  could  hardly  have  been  a 
paying  one,  but  she  did  not  demur. 
For  a  time,  at  least,  the  chickens  were 
regularly  fed.  We  spent  many  hours 
sitting  before  the  coops  waiting  for  the 
cackle  which  proclaimed  another  ac- 
cession to  our  hoard  of  pennies.  On  the 
principle  of  the  watched  pot,  the  hens 
were  exasperatingly  deliberate.  They 
became  hypercritical  of  the  weather, 
they  delighted  in  deluding  us  with 
false  alarms,  they  seemed  suddenly  to 
have  developed  a  Methodistical  disap- 
proval of  the  stage.  The  great  week 
came,  and  with  it  Mr.  Jefferson,  and 
still  we  had  only  thirty-five  cents 
apiece.  Our  case  was  desperate.  Some- 
thing had  to  be  done,  and  we  did  it  by 
selling  two  of  our  hens  to  our  mother 
for  pot-pie.  It  was  no  more  than  they 
deserved,  though  it  was  a  little  unfair 


422 


MAGIC  SHADOW-SHAPES 


to  her  as  she  had  bought  them  for  us  in 
the  first  place. 

We  had  enough,  then,  not  only  for 
our  admission  to  the  Academy,  but  for 
our  car-fares;  and  on  a  Wednesday 
evening  we  set  out  under  a  shower  of 
parting  injunctions  from  the  assembled 
family  grouped  on  the  *  front  stoop.' 
My  brother,  full  of  importance,  pa- 
tronized me  after  the  manner  of  elder 
brothers,  and  made  it  very  plain  to 
me  that  without  him  I  should  never 
have  dared  to  undertake  the  adven- 
ture. This  I  felt  to  be  true;  and,  as  it 
was,  I  was  visited  by  obscure  qualms 
that  added  zest  to  the  occasion.  All  the 
way  down  town  he  told  me  how  to  be- 
have, and  criticized  my  facial  expres- 
sion, which  was  probably  open  to  ex- 
ception, and  explained  the  system  of 
seat-checks  and  ushers  and  so  forth,  all 
with  the  purpose  of  making  evident 
to  me  my  extreme  youth.  I  listened, 
with  mental  reservations,  but  I  could 
not  keep  my  eyes  from  popping  at  the 
glare  of  the  shop- windows  and  the  roar 
of  the  elevated  trains  overhead,  with 
their  noisy  little  engines,  and  the  flar- 
ing lights  of  the  menders  of  the  sewer, 
and  the  darting  cabs,  and  the  majes- 
tic policemen  with  their  night-sticks. 
I  remembered  that  my  brother  was 
afraid  of  policemen  and  called  his  at- 
tention to  the  fact,  but  he  evaded  the 
soft  aspersion. 

The  inner  doors  of  the  Academy  were 
still  closed  when  we  arrived.  We  bought 
our  tickets  from  a  jocose  box-office 
man  who  asked  us  if  we  were  friends 
of  the  author,  and  we  loitered  on  the 
steps  and  in  the  lobby  trying  to  ap- 
pear unconcerned,  and  were  the  first 
to  climb  the  interminable  stairs  and  to 
enter  the  steep  incline  of  the  family 
circle,  as  the  ticker-seller  had  called  it. 
There  were  no  ushers  up  here,  as  every 
one  sat  where  he  could.  We  made  our 
way  down  to  where  the  gilded  rail 
hung  like '  the  gold  bar  of  Heaven '  over 


the  abyss,  and  innocently  chose  the 
two  seats  at  the  right  end  of  the  front 
row  because  they  seemed  nearest  the 
stage.  An  awful  emptiness  confronted 
us,  making  our  heads  swim.  I  leaned 
far  back  on  the  wooden  bench  and 
gazed  up  at  the  myriad  of  gas-jets  in 
the  ceiling,  trying  to  get  courage  to 
look  down  again. 

When  my  brother  said  sarcastically, 
'There's  the  trombone,'  I  did  look 
down,  however,  and  eagerly.  It  did 
not  occur  to  me  that  this  could  scarcely 
be  the  same  player  who  had  winked  at 
me  a  year  ago,  and  it  was  with  regret 
that  I  realized  that  from  where  we  sat 
a  wink  would  be  imperceptible.  The 
dizziness  had  passed.  Orchestra  and 
galleries  were  filling  rapidly.  The  enor- 
mous outer  curtain  rose  majestically, 
disclosing  the  painted  drop-scene.  The 
musicians  began  their  overture.  The 
great  building  hummed  and  echoed  and 
sang. 

There  in  the  upper  aerial  circles  the 
music  sounded  very  sweet,  and  warm 
smells  arose  that  were  subtly  exhilarat- 
ing. Little  boy  that  I  was,  I  felt  the 
pulsations  of  pleasure  that  ran  through 
the  place.  Gradually  there  stole  over 
me  the  spell  of  the  theatre,  so  full  of 
enticement,  whether  beneficent  or  dan- 
gerous. 

I  was  very  wide-awake  now.  I  tried 
to  see  everything  at  once.  The  crowds 
excited  me,  the  gaudy  gilding  and 
paint  and  plush  represented  a  kind  of 
luxuriousness  that  seemed  to  my  inex- 
perience to  have  come  out  of  a  dream. 
All  around  us  folk  were  talking  and 
laughing  unconcernedly,  and  just  be- 
hind us  an  old  man  was  telling  anec- 
dotes of  Mr.  Jefferson;  but  we  sat  hold- 
ing tightly  each  other's  hand  and  turn- 
ing now  and  then  to  stare  mutely  at 
each  other  with  wide-open  eyes.  We 
could  think  of  nothing  to  say.  And 
then  the  curtain  went  up. 

As  the  reader  must  perceive,  I  was 


MAGIC  SHADOW-SHAPES 


423 


by  this  time  in  a  mood  thoroughly  to 
surrender  to  the  sorcery  of  the  stage. 
I  wish  that  I  could  go  on  to  tell  how  I 
lost  all  sense  of  actual  time  and  space, 
and  lived  for  three  hours  in  an  unreal 
world,  wafted  on  the  magic  histrionic 
carpet  to  the  heart  of  the  Catskills  a 
century  and  a  half  ago,  going  forth 
homeward  in  a  dream,  and  so  forth  and 
so  forth.  An  imaginative  boy'  at  his 
first  play  ought,  according  to  all  pre- 
cedents, to  have  experienced  this  and 
more;  but  I  did  not.  A  certain  hard- 
headed  imp  who  has  pursued  me 
through  life  sat  on  my  shoulder  that 
night  and  kept  whispering  in  my  ear, 
It 's  all  a  sham.  What 's  the  use  of  cry- 
ing over  Rip's  woes  when  the  old  gen- 
tleman behind  you  says  that  Mr.  Jef- 
ferson is  getting  whole  mints  of  money 
for  being  pathetic.  Look  at  that  door, 
for  instance.  It  was  supposed  to  slam, 
but  it  did  n't  slam.  It's  made  of  laths 
and  canvas.  You  can  see  the  panes 
flap. 

There  was  no  doubt  that  Mr.  Jeffer- 
son sat  on  a  table  and  swung  his  feet  very 
well  indeed.  His  was  good  acting,  but 
the  point  is  that  I  never  for  an  instant 
forgot  that  it  was  acting,  that  the  stage 
was  a  stage,  and  the  storm  no  storm 
at  all,  but  a  concatenation  of  patter- 
ing bird-shot,  cannon-balls  rolled  in 
a  trough,  rattling  sheet-iron,  lycopo- 
dium  powder,  and  electric  flashes.  I  do 
not  mean  that  I  really  thought  of  the 
sweating  Jupiter  Pluvius  in  overalls 
behind  the  scene,  or  knew  the  nature 
or  extent  of  his  activities;  but  I  did 
know  that  somebody  was  making  that 
storm,  —  manufacturing  it,  —  and, 
while  it  could  make  me  jump,  it  could 
not  fool  me. 

The  reader  should  not  be  deceived 
into  supposing,  however,  that  this  ra- 
tionalizing interfered  with  my  enjoy- 
ment. It  is  one  of  the  blessings  of 
childhood  to  be  able  to  pretend  with 
conviction,  and  the  logical  and  orderly 


pretending  of  the  play  won  my  un- 
qualified approval  and  gave  me  endless 
delight. 

It  seems  to  me  that  the  majority  of 
adults  have  missed  this  talent  in  child- 
ren entirely.  They  think,  for  exam- 
ple, that  their  children  must  either 
have  perfect  faith  in  Santa  Glaus  or 
should  hear  nothing  about  him,  not 
perceiving  that  their  little  boys  and 
girls  can  get  a  great  deal  of  fun  out  of 
the  benevolent  old  gentleman  even 
when  they  know  that  he  is  only  a 
myth.  My  brother  and  I  cherished  an 
excellent  working  hypothesis  of  Santa 
Glaus  long  after  we  had  spent  a  chilly 
evening  sitting  on  the  stairs  in  our 
night-clothes  listening  to  our  parents 
conspiring  as  to  the  contents  of  our 
stockings.  One  summer  some  years  ago 
I  spent  many  hours  during  a  vacation 
telling  stories  to  a  little  girl.  She 
brought  her  stool  and  sat  at  my  feet, 
composed  her  hands  in  her  lap,  as- 
sumed an  expression  of  polite  interest, 
and  demurely  asked,  'Is  it  true?' 
'No,'  I  invariably  replied;  'only  a 
story.'  And  after  this  unchanging  pre- 
lude, I  proceeded  to  tell  her  the  most 
blood-curdling  tales  that  my  fancy 
could  conjure,  while  she  followed  each 
incident  with  absorption,  mirroring  in 
her  face  all  the  emotions  of  the  narra- 
tive, the  horror,  the  pity,  the  anguish, 
the  terror,  with  the  utmost  accuracy. 
At  last  my  conscience  was  roused.  I 
became  alarmed  for  the  peace  of  mind 
of  my  audience.  I  went  to  her  mother. 
'Am  I  doing  wrong  in  telling  her  such 
stories?'  I  asked  guiltily .  The  good  lady 
smiled  serenely.  '  She  has  n't  lost  any 
sleep  over  them  so  far,'  said  she.  'You 
see,  as  long  as  she  knows  they  are  n't 
true,  she  is  n't  frightened.' 

It  is  generally  conceded  nowadays 
that  it  is  detrimental  to  his  acting  for  an 
actor  to  'lose  himself  in  his  part,'  that 
when  his  acting  is  best,  it  is  conscious, 
careful,  alert,  strategic.  But  what  of 


424 


MAGIC  SHADOW-SHAPES 


the  audience?  Does  the  observation 
hold  of  them?  As  for  myself,  I  ought 
to  have  succumbed  to  the  play  that 
first  night  if  I  was  ever  to  know  the 
joys  of  disembodiment.  If  I  was  ever 
to  lose  myself  in  a  play  I  should  have 
done  so  then;  but  I  did  not,  and  have 
therefore  been  trying  to  do  so  ever 
since.  As  I  sit  in  the  theatre,  I  see  all 
around  me  people  who  seem  to  experi- 
ence the  beatific  state  continuously  for 
three  hours,  and  to  be  as  fresh  emo- 
tionally at  the  end  as  at  the  beginning. 
Studying  their  faces,  I  see  their  spirits 
peep  wildly  out  of  their  eyes.  To  watch 
them  is  fully  worth  the  price  of  the 
admission,  —  that  is  some  consolation, 

—  yet  I,  too,  would  like  to  laugh  and 
weep  and  sigh  and  wriggle  as  they, 
living  the   play  through   in  my  own 
proper  person.    Knowing  that,  accord- 
ing to  the  social  psychologist,  emotion 
is  contagious,  I  eye  them  covetously 
in  the  hope  of  catching  it,  as  boarding- 
school  boys  view  with  envy  one  of  their 
number  who  has  had  the  good  fortune 
to  develop  measles  or  chicken  pox. 

These  lucky  people,  absorbed  as  they 
are  in  the  play  or  opera,  can  listen  with- 
out a  grin  to  Cassius  speaking  with  a 
brogue  or  to  a  French  tenor  imperson- 
ating a  cowboy.  When  Elsa  is  too  fat 
or  Lohengrin's  swan-boat  sticks  (as  it 
always  does)  or  Juliet's  balcony  wob- 
bles, they  care  never  a  whit,  —  no  such 
small  matter  can  jar  them  out  of  their 
rapture.  As  for  me,  once  more,  still 
attended  by  the  perverse  imp  before 
mentioned,  and  no  longer  fascinated 
by  the  mysterious  art  of  stage-carpen- 
ter and  property-man,  one  *  such  small 
matter '  can  spoil  a  whole  play. 

Once  in  a  long  while,  some  actor  has 
caught  me  unaware.  For  five  minutes 

—  or  was  it  five  seconds?  —  I  have  for- 
gotten the  world  of  trade  and  politics 
and   bills   and   taxes,    the   sesthetical 
technique  of  climax,  suspense,  and  the 
rest;  forgotten  even  the  theatre  and 


the  seat  on  which  I  sat  and  the  clothes 
I  wore  and  the  corporeal  vesture  of  de- 
cay that  I  inhabited,  and  floated  a  dis- 
embodied spirit  that  laughed  and  cried 
regardless  of  decorum.  But  such  mo- 
ments come  like  shadows,  so  depart. 
Usually  I  sit,  'still  nursing  the  uncon- 
querable hope  '  that  the  illusion  will 
come,  but  courting  it  in  vain,  just  as  a 
man  who  greatly  desires  to  be  hypno- 
tized is  the  last  to  succumb. 

I  am  not  sure  that  many  will  un- 
derstand this  feeling,  because  it  is  not 
generally  recognized  that  self-decep- 
tion is  one  of  the  aims  of  life.  I  some- 
times think  that  life  is  one  gigantic 
struggle  to  deceive  ourselves.  To  say 
that  art  and  philosophy  and  religion 
and  science  are  largely  such  a  struggle, 
would  seem  irrational  and  perverse  to 
most  people;  but  then,  most  people  are 
not  rational,  as  any  theatre  audience 
will  show. 

But  during  these  moralizings  the 
curtain  has  risen,  the  first  act  has 
passed,  the  orchestra  —  with  the  trom- 
bone —  has  performed  again,  and  the 
second  act  has  begun.  Rip  is  in  the 
mountains;  the  storm  still  growls  in 
the  distance;  the  stage  is  dark,  murky, 
spectral.  Gradually  the  moon  begins  to 
touch  the  peaks,  the  bushes,  the  bould- 
ers, the  lone  figure  of  the  vagabond 
hero.  We  know  that  it  is  time  for  the 
crew  of  Hendrick  Hudson  to  appear. 

I  suppose  that  it  was  while  searching 
the  stage  for  any  evidence  of  the  pre- 
sence of  that  uncanny  brotherhood  of 
antiquated  nine-pin  bowlers  that  I 
made  a  discovery.  I  perceived,  first, 
that  the  bushes  and  boulders,  like  cer- 
tain beautiful  maidens  in  fairy-lore, 
were  all  front,  the  merest  shams,  thin 
flat  fasades  of  rocks  and  bushes,  made 
of  lath  and  paper;  and,  second,  that  be- 
hind each  was  plainly  visible  a  square 
hole  lighted  from  below.  As  I  stared, 
I  discerned  in  the  middle  of  each  hole 
a  pointed  cap,  a  head,  shoulders,  arms, 


MAGIC  SHADOW-SHAPES 


425 


a  gnome-like  figure,  squatting  on  a 
little  dumb-waiter  or  elevator,  ascend- 
ing from  the  depths  below  the  stage. 
And  behind  sham  bush  or  boulder  the 
little  figures  crouched,  plainly  visible 
to  us,  while  Rip,  with  transparent  pre- 
tense, wandered  hither  and  thither 
among  them,  unable  to  see  them! 

Probably  from  no  other  seats  in  the 
theatre  could  this  phenomenon  be  seen; 
but  I  had  had  a  glimpse  at  the  'very 
pulse  of  the  machine,'  and  anything 
more  delightful  it  would  be  hard  to 
imagine.  All  the  evening  thus  far  I  had 
felt  the  presence  of  contrivance  and 
artifice,  but  now  for  the  first  time  I 
actually  saw  them  in  operation.  I  felt 
some  of  the  conceit  of  the  scientist  who, 
having  discovered  a  new  aphis  or  scale, 
considers  it  more  important  than  the 
pageant  of  nature. 

I  have  to  confess  that  concerning 
the  incidents  of  the  last  act  my  mind 
remains  a  blank.  My  brother  was  full 
of  the  question  of  the  possibility  of  a 
man's  sleeping  twenty  years,  and  all 
the  way  home  desired  to  discuss  it. 
Once  more  I  was  not  prepared  to  please 
him,  because  during  Rip's  slumber  and 
awakening  I  had  been  under  the  stage 
pulling  at  ropes,  opening  and  shutting 
trap-doors,  riding  up  and  down  on 
dumb-waiters.  He  was  inclined  to  be 
angry  at  the  ticket-seller  for  not  warn- 
ing us  against  those  seats;  the  archi- 
tect of  the  theatre  for  planning  it  so 
ill;  the  stage-carpenter  and  property- 
man  for  arranging  so  clumsy  a  piece 
of  deception.  He  lost  all  patience  with 
me  because  I  chirruped  gleefully  over 
the  very  circumstance  which  he  con- 
sidered a  dark  blemish  upon  an  other- 
wise laudable  production.  Neither  of 
us  could  get  the  other's  point  of  view; 
and  so  we  rode  home  glumly  enough, 
reserving  our  several  ecstasies  for  the 
family,  who  at  least  would  pretend  to 
understand  and  sympathize.  It  seemed 


to  be  my  fate  to  misapply  my  enthus- 
iasm, to  find  the  romantic  just  where 
theoretically  it  did  not  exist.  I  do  not 
blame  my  brother  for  setting  me  down 
as  childish  and  low-minded. 

Far  from  being  sunk  in  humiliation, 
however,  the  very  next  day  I  set  about 
organizing  a  dramatic  club  and  writing 
a  play.  A  gentleman  up  the  street  had 
fortunately  built  a  chicken-house  and 
then  decided  not  to  keep  chickens;  and 
this  structure  became  our  club-house. 
We  papered,  carpeted,  and  furnished 
it  with  material  abstracted  from  family 
attics,  drew  up  a  constitution  and  by- 
laws, and  began  our  weekly  meetings 
under  the  mysterious  name  of  the  S.  N. 
S.  C.,  the  significance  of  which  initials 
I  have  forgotten.  We  were  facetiously 
known  in  the  neighborhood,  however, 
as  the  Chicken-coop  Club.  As  the  only 
member  who  had  made  a  profound 
study  of  stage-illusion,  I  was  of  course 
elected  stage-manager;  and,  whatever 
my  plays  may  have  lacked  of  literary 
and  dramatic  value,  they  were  always 
rich  in  surprising  and  terrifying  stage- 
effects.  We  invariably  had  a  storm 
with  wind,  thunder,  and  lightning; 
there  were  always  ghosts,  fairies,  and 
gnomes  popping  into  view  at  critical 
moments  in  the  action.  I  had  visions 
of  a  stage  which  I  should  build  some 
day  all  trap-doors,  elevators,  pulleys, 
and  wires;  but  my  dream  was  not 
destined  ever  to  come  true.  One  rainy 
day  when  a  bare  quorum  was  present 
in  the  club-house,  it  was  voted  to  ex- 
pend the  funds  of  the  club  for  candy 
and  ice-cream — a  dastardly  proceeding 
which  precipitated  a  quarrel  ending  in 
a  schism  that  never  could  be  healed. 
The  ice-cream  was  very  good,  but  my 
histrionic  activities  were  ended.  Once 
more  art  had  fallen  a  victim  to  the 
temptations  of  the  flesh. 

The  Chicken-coop  and  the  Academy 
have  both  long  since  burned  down. 


AN  OLD  MAN  TO  AN  OLD  MADEIRA 


BY   S.   WEIR   MITCHELL 


WHEN  first  you  trembled  at  my  kiss 
And  blushed  before  and  after, 

Your  life,  a  rose  'twixt  May  and  June, 
Was  stirred  by  breeze  of  laughter. 

I  asked  no  mortal  maid  to  leave 
A  kiss  where  there  were  plenty; 

Enough  the  fragrance  of  thy  lips 
When  I  was  five-and-twenty. 

Fair  mistress  of  a  moment's  joy, 
We  met,  and  then  we  parted; 

You  gave  me  all  you  had  to  give, 
Nor  were  you  broken-hearted! 

For  other  lips  have  known  thy  kiss, 

Oh!  fair  inconstant  lady, 
While  you  have  gone  your  shameless  way 

'Till  life  has  passed  its  heyday. 


And  then  we  met  in  middle  age, 

You  matronly  and  older; 
And  somewhat  gone  your  maiden  blush 

And  I,  well,  rather  colder. 

And  now  that  you  are  thin  and  pale, 

And  I  am  slowly  graying, 
We  meet,  remindful  of  the  past, 

When  we  two  went  a-maying. 

Alas!  while  you,  an  old  coquette, 
Still  flaunt  your  faded  roses, 

The  arctic  loneliness  of  age 
Around  my  pathway  closes. 

Dear  aged  wanton  of  the  feast, 

Egeria  of  gay  dinners, 
I  leave  your  unforgotten  charm 

To  other  younger  sinners. 


THE  CONTRIBUTORS'  CLUB 


THE  EXCITEMENT   OF   WRITING 

I  HAVE  just  read  'The  Excitement  of 
Friendship '  in  the  December  Atlantic. 
Most  of  it  makes  me  nod  my  head 
and  say,  as  one  is  always  pleased  to 
do,  *  Yes!  That  is  the  way.  So  friends 
are  known  and  kept  and  lost.'  I  like 
that  essay!  Those  are  my  own  vague 
thoughts  crystallized  and  sharpened. 

But  there  is  one  paragraph  that 
moves  me  to  challenge  the  generaliza- 
tion which  it  assumes.  It  is  only  a 
side-issue,  to  be  sure.  Mr.  Bourne  com- 
plains of  the  *  hopeless  labor  of  writ- 
ing,' —  of  the  coldness  and  grayness  of 
the  mind,  when  one  tries  heavily  to 
blow  upon  the  hearth  of  memory  those 
embers  languishing  when  the  hot  fire 
of  friendly  stimulating  intercourse  is 
burned  out.  'The  blood  runs  slug- 
gish,' he  says,  'when  one  sits  down  to 
write.' 

I  cannot  help  defending  my  own 
writing  mood;  and  what  I  am  sure 
must  be  the  mood  of  many  of  the 
Tribe,  great  or  small.  My  blood  does 
not  run  sluggish  as  I  sit  down  to  write. 
No  matter  whether  what  I  produce  has 
any  merit  or  not,  I  only  know  that  to 
write  —  to  feel  the  pen  in  my  fingers 
and  the  words  leaping  from  my  head  or 
my  heart,  or  wherever  they  abide,  out 
upon  the  paper  —  is  a  joy  to  me  almost 
as  thrilling  as  the  joy  of  great  friendly 
talk  and  silence.  I  suppose  this  argues 
a  smallness,  a  coldness,  in  me;  but  it  is 
true. 

There  is  something  half  physical 
about  it,  like  *  the  tingling  glory  of 
standing  on  an  autumn  hill-top  or  at 
the  prow  of  a  swift  sea-going  ship.  It 
is  a  breathless  speed  and  wonder.  It 


does  not  feel  like  any  slow  deliberate 
process  of  heavy  thought,  or  even  of 
cunning,  happy  craftsmanship.  There 
is  freedom  in  it,  like  the  freedom  of 
sea-gulls,  and  of  youth:  abandon,  au- 
dacity, shudderings  and  horror,  splen- 
dors and  mirth.  I  feel,  when  a  good 
spirit  of  writing  is  upon  me,  expanded, 
powerful,  infinitely  alive.  As  Whitman 
has  it,  — 

I  am  larger,  better  than  I  knew, 

I  did  not  know  I  held  so  much  goodness. 

I  draw  deep  breath,  and  am  free  to 
run  where  I  will,  over  hill  and  dale,  sea 
and  city,  dead  ice-fields  and  lush,  lazy 
tropics.  I  become  a  dweller  in  Eter- 
nity, and  am  not  at  all  afraid  to  die. 

And  yet,  when  I  am  not  writing, 
none  of  this  swift  wonder  is  with  me. 
I  have  no  winds  and  flames.  Even 
with  my  friends,  I  am  aware  often  that 
my  freest  self  is  dumb.  There  is  no 
loss  to  them  in  that,  perhaps,  for  they 
might  not  like  my  winds  and  flames  at 
all.  But  it  makes  me  sad  that  I  cannot 
share  with  them  what  seems,  at  least, 
to  be  the  happiest  of  me. 

And  then  it  makes  me  sad  —  but 
whimsically,  and  I  hope  philosoph- 
ically —  when,  the  flying  windy  won- 
der passed  and  my  feet  again  on  the 
solid  roads,  I  know  that,  after  all,  my 
ecstasy  and  urge  of  seeming  creation 
is  to  so  small  an  end.  For  what  have  I 
said,  when  all  is  reckoned  up?  I  have 
chirped  like  a  cricket,  and  mourned 
like  a  dove,  and  laughed  like  a  silly 
parrot;  and  there  is  nothing  truly 
memorable  and  worthy  in  such  chirp- 
ing and  mourning  and  laughter.  I,  too, 
shall  go  out  into  Silence,  and  what  I 
have  tried  to  sing  and  say  shall  not 
stand  by  me  then. 

427 


428 


THE  CONTRIBUTORS'  CLUB 


None  the  less  I  cannot  let  it  go 
unchallenged,  —  that  passing  accusa- 
tion of  the  writing  mood.  For  when 
I  write,  my  blood  is  not  sluggish;  it 
dances  round  my  heart  and  throbs  in 
my  throat,  and  for  one  deluded  hour 
I  dream  that  my  words  are  immortal. 
My  feet  run  East  of  the  Sun  and  West 
of  the  Moon;  and  the  gates  of  Heaven 
and  Hell  have  no  proud  locks  for  me. 


THE   BEST-DRESSED   NATION 

WITHOUT  wishing  to  take  issue  with 
this  recent  statement  in  a  Sunday  mag- 
azine: 'The  American  man,  consider- 
ing him  in  all  the  classes  that  consti- 
tute American  society,  is  to-day  the 
best-dressed  and  best-kept  man  in  the 
world/  —  it  is  nevertheless  an  inter- 
esting and  surprising  revolution  that 
has  made  such  a  statement  possible. 
For  most  of  us  it  is  easier  to  accept  the 
notion,  with  whatever  national  pride 
it  implies,  than  to  verify  it  by  personal 
observation.  If  true,  we  must  be  proud 
while  we  can,  for  it  is  only  a  question 
of  time  when  the  American  clothing 
manufacturer  will  be  addressing  the 
Young  Turks,  in  easy  colloquial  Turk- 
ish, as  *  you  well-dressed  young  fellows,' 
—  and  so  on,  nation  by  nation,  until 
even  the  blond  Esquimo  will  be  snappily 
arrayed  in  our  own  'Varsity  models. 
And  in  this  activity  of  the  clothing 
manufacturer  we  have,  perhaps,  a  more 
potent  force  for  the  creation  of  a  uni- 
form world-civilization  than  has  ever 
before  been  set  in  motion.  With  all  the 
well-dressed  young  fellows  in  a  well- 
dressed  world,  getting  their  latest  ideas 
in  style,  cut,  and  fabrics  from  the  same 
fountain-head,  war  would  become  prac- 
tically out  of  the  question;  unless,  in- 
deed, it  was  provoked  by  the  rivalries 
of  our  American  outfitters  in  some  vital 
matter  of  lapels  or  buttons. 

Ten  years  ago,  or  fifteen  at  most,  men 


prided  themselves  on  something  closely 
approaching  an  indifference  to  dress. 
The  attitude,  we  now  see,  was  either 
hypocritical  or  based  upon  complete 
ignorance  of  latent  possibilities.  It  as- 
sumed a  superiority  over  womankind 
that  has  failed  to  stand  the  test  of  sub- 
mitting it  to  what  was  then  held  a 
purely  feminine  temptation.  Styles, 
fabrics,  the  modishness  of  this  detail 
or  the  smartness  of  that,  were  essen- 
tially for  the  female  intellect  —  and 
especially  bargains!  The  male  who 
thought  seriously  about  these  trifles,  — 
and  there  were  such,  although  many 
of  them  did  little  credit  to  the  exercise 
as  a  mental  stimulant,  —  was  easily 
classed  as  a  'dude,'  and  none  but  other 
dudes  admired  him.  There  was  a  well- 
known  axiom  that  a  man  was  not  to 
be  judged  by  his  clothes.  Sex  was  dif- 
ferentiated not  only  by  clothing,  but 
also  by  its  attitude  toward  clothing:  on 
the  one  hand,  an  anxious,  fluttering, 
feminine  ambition  to  be  becomingly 
attired;  and,  on  the  other,  a  stern, 
masculine  indifference.  Then  a  man, 
putting  gain  before  tradition,  began 
advertising  clothes  for  men  in  the  same 
way  that  clothes  had  already  been  ad- 
vertised for  women  —  and  behold  us, 
each  arrayed  in  his  'Varsity  model! 

Human  nature  was,  of  course,  respon- 
sible, and  the  irresistible  appeal  to  the 
imagination.  We  young  fellows  (and 
in  this  matter  there  is  really  no  age- 
limit),  although  not  at  that  time  the 
well-dressed  young  fellows  that  we  have 
become  since,  saw  ourselves  with  new 
eyes.  The  artist,  enlisted  by  the  manu- 
facturer, showed  us  a  vision.  We  be- 
came members  of  the  leisure  class;  we 
sailed  our  yachts;  we  played  tennis;  we 
flirted  in  ball-rooms;  we  progressed  to 
motor-cars;  we  shall  in  due  course 
guide  our  own  aeroplanes  back  and 
forth  between  our  offices  and  our  coun- 
try clubs.  In  this  new  life  the  modish- 
ness  and  mannishness  of  our  attire  — 


THE  CONTRIBUTORS'  CLUB 


429 


especially  the  mannishness,  wherein  we 
forgot  how  short  a  time  ago  we  should 
have  considered  womanishness  the 
proper  word  for  this  new-born  interest 
in  our  personal  appearance  —  became 
vital  considerations.  We  learned  to 
know  our  collar  by  name,  to  appreci- 
ate autumn  effects  of  coloring  in  our 
autumn  garments,  and  to  realize  the 
subtle  distinction  that  marks  the  under- 
wear of  a  gentleman.  To-day,  or  rather 
to-night,  many  of  us  still  blush  in  our 
pajamas  to  remember  that  we  used  to 

wear  night No,  it  is  one  thing 

to  remember,  but  another  to  mention. 

Men  did  not  wear  pajamas  then. 
In  reading  history 
It 's  hard  to  think  of  famous  men 
Each  in  a  robe  de  nuit  I 

And  as  a  matter  of  fact  we  kept  the 
leisure  class  sartorially  on  the  run,  for 
as  fast  as  the  unhappy  leisure  class  in- 
vents *  something  different '  in  the  way 
of  clothing,  the  lively  manufacturer 
copies  it  for  the  rest  of  us.  More  than 
that,  we  resemble  the  advertisements. 
Nature  again  seems  to  be  imitating 
art,  for  many  of  us  are  beginning  to 
look  like  the  heroes  of  popular  fiction, 
made  over  by  the  same  illustrators  to 
be  the  heroes  of  popular  advertise- 
ments. More  than  that  again,  we  pur- 
sue bargains  and  are  not  ashamed  to  be 
caught  at  it.  Inform  us  of  a  reduction 
sale  of  cravats  and  we  are  there  in  a 
hurry,  some  of  us  trying  to  match  the 
delicate  shade  of  our  bargain  neckwear 
with  the  half-hose  at  the  next  counter. 

Truly  a  remarkable  revolution! 
whose  material  proof  lies  in  the  fact 
that  any  Sunday  magazine  can  pro- 
claim us  nationally  the  best-dressed 
and  best-kept  men  in  the  world  with- 
out arousing  our  immediate  indigna- 
tion. So  far,  however,  we  have  not 
been  referred  to  advertisingly  as  *  mi- 
lord in  his  boudoir.'  Probably,  too,  in 
the  secret  designs  of  Providence,  it  is 
well  that  we  should  eventually  all  look 


alike.  The  idea,  scornfully  repudiated 
when  advanced  by  some  of  the  earlier 
socialists,  is  in  visible  process  of  ac- 
ceptance, and  even  the  *  something  dif- 
ferent '  in  our  clothing  helps  the  move- 
ment when  we  all  wear  it  together.  The 
number  of  tailors  which  it  now  takes 
to  make  a  man  is  beyond  computation, 
but  their  tendency  is  unquestionably  to 
make  one  man  very  like  another.  Life, 
it  has  been  said,  is  the  greatest  Uni- 
versity, and  we  are  all  college  boys  to- 
gether. Fortunately  we  have  no  college 

yell. 

As  the  revolution  now  stands,  how- 
ever, the  wonder  is  that  the  penetrat- 
ing mind  of  the  suffragette  orator  has 
not  got  hold  of  it.  Without  arguing 
that  this  national  male  interest  in  dress 
marks  an  effeminization  (akin  to  the 
effeminization,  according  to  some  crit- 
ics, of  our  drama  and  literature)  of 
our  entire  male  population,  it  must  be 
evident  to  any  thoughtful  observer 
that  it  gives  the  sexes  one  more  char- 
acteristic in  common.  Neither  man  nor 
woman  is  less  physically  courageous, 
less  masculine,  or  less  feminine  for  the 
possession  of  this  common  character- 
istic. Napoleon,  it  will  be  remembered, 
appealed  to  masculine  love  of  finery  in 
equipping  his  army,  but  he  was  cer- 
tainly not  looking  for  an  effeminate 
soldiery.  And  if  the  clothing  manufac- 
turer of  the  twentieth  century  proves 
himself  as  wise  a  judge  of  men  as  Na- 
poleon, we  may  fairly  enough  take  it 
for  granted  that  the  average  manhood 
of  us  well-dressed  young  fellows  (of  all 
ages)  is  just  as  it  was  before  we  dis- 
covered how  much  our  clothes  really 
might  interest  us. 

But  even  so  it  remains  difficult  to  fol- 
low the  clothing  manufacturer  so  far  as 
to  agree  that  the  young  man  in  search 
of  a  job  should  begin  by  purchasing 
himself  a  new  suit  of  clothes.  Being 
well-dressed  doubtless  inspires  self-con- 
fidence, but  unless  we  can  afford  the 


430 


THE  CONTRIBUTORS'   CLUB 


expense  there  remains  the  fact  that  it 
ought  not  to;  nor,  as  a  rule,  are  the 
employers  of  labor  accustomed  to  limit 
their  observation  to  the  cut  of  a  young 
man's  jacket.  Some  employers  of  la- 
bor are  still  old-fashioned,  and  distrust 
swagger  and  smartness  in  the  young 
man  in  search  of  a  job.  The  theory 
that  clothes  make  the  candidate  under 
such  circumstances  is  somewhat  akin 
to  that  other  theory,  advanced  by  the 
merchants  who  sell  the  imitation  dia- 
monds, that  the  young  man  in  search 
of  a  job  is  more  likely  to  get  it  if  he 
wears  a  diamond.  Something,  a  great 
deal  in  fact,  still  lingers  of  that  sound 
old  notion  that  the  character  of  a  man 
is  independent  of  the  style  of  his  gar- 
ments. Presidential  candidates,  for  ex- 
ample, when  they  appeal  to  the  entire 
electorate  of  this  well-dressed  country, 
have  not  yet  found  it  necessary  or 
even  wise,  to  garb  themselves  in  the 
latest  'Varsity  model.  And  a  presi- 
dential candidate  who  was  known  to 
spend  time  matching  his  cravat  and  his 
half-hose  would  be  generally  rejected 
by  the  electorate  as  a  man  who  was  al- 
ready too  busy  to  assume  the  cares  of 
office. 

THE    ROCK   AND    THE    POOL 

THE  grief  of  it  is  that  I  cannot  reach 
the  rock  by  day  or  by  night  without 
disturbing  life  that  is  so  much  finer,  if 
less  conscious,  than  my  own.  Here,  be- 
side the  path,  the  partridge  takes  her 
Arab  bath;  the  warm  red  dust  is  scat- 
tered with  down,  and  rounded  to  the 
measure  of  the  little  beating  breast. 
Here  small  fungi  rise,  jewel-bright, 
above  the  mould;  touch  one,  never  so 
softly,  and  the  coral  curve  blackens  and 
is  marred,  so  delicate  is  the  poise  of  its 
perfection.  Here  is  a  span  of  slender 
grass,  flowered  with  the  clinging  bod- 
ies of  moths;  they  spread  pearl-white 
wings  barred  with  brown,  beautiful 


enough  to  beat  about  the  hurrying 
knees  of  Artemis.  But  here  Artemis 
never  came.  Those  white  feet  of  hers 
never  shook  the  early  rain  from  the 
elder.  Only  the  Indian  hunter  may 
have  found  the  rock,  stooped  above 
the  rain-pool  on  the  summit,  and  look- 
ed upon  his  own  wild  face,  shadowed 
against  his  heritage  of  stars. 

For  from  the  base  of  the  rock  all 
growth  falls  away.  The  maple  red- 
dening with  seeds,  the  wind-haunted 
birch,  even  the  thickets  of  sumach  and 
vine  and  partridge-berry  are  a  little 
withdrawn  from  it.  Fire  shaped  it. 
Cold  smoothed  it.  And  Time  himself 
could  give  no  more  to  this  ancient  of 
days  than  cupped  moss  in  the  clefts,  a 
few  fans  of  lichen  delicate  as  gray 
foam;  and  in  the  hollow  of  the  crest,  a 
pool. 

In  the  pool  is  gathered  all  the  life  of 
the  rock.  It  is  as  a  window  whereby 
the  deep  blind  existence  prisoned  in 
this  iron  mass  of  primeval  matter  may 
somehow  win  hearing  and  sight;  may 
see  his  brother  stars  afloat  upon  the 
roads  of  space,  the  bees  hurrying  to 
the  flowering  basswood,  or  hear  the 
last  thrush  in  the  cedar;  remembering 
all  the  bird- voices  of  time  as  no  more 
than  a  momentary  song. 

There  are  pools  floored  with  brown 
and  gray  leaves,  upon  which  the  water 
lies  as  warm  and  still  as  air.  There  are 
pools  rimmed  with  vervain  and  the 
wild  rock-rose.  And  there  are  pools 
beneath  the  coronals  of  goldenrod, 
where  the  bumblebee  clings,  and  the 
snails  adventure  themselves  on  sum- 
mer evenings,  and  the  moths  go  hawk- 
ing early.  But  this  pool  is  always 
clear;  gray  water  on  gray  stone.  It  is 
as  if  no  leaf  fell  here,  no  wing  stayed 
here.  This  eye  of  the  rock  gazes  un- 
shadowed and  unhindered  into  the 
very  universe. 

What  answer  there  to  the  immemo- 
rial patience  of  the  stone?  I  lay  my 


THE  CONTRIBUTORS'   CLUB 


431 


face  to  the  face  of  the  rock,  drink  the 
stored  warmth,  and  let  my  soul  go 
adrift  in  the  sun  and  the  silence.  Storm 
was  here  last  night;  a  branch  fell  from 
the  old  pine  whose  seeds  have  blown  to 
the  rock  and  withered  there  for  twice  a 
hundred  years.  Here  is  a  little  feather, 
black  and  gold.  Here,  beside  my  hand, 
a  dead,  rain-beaten  bee,  done  with  all 
flowers.  *O  earth,  my  mother  and 
maker,  is  all  well  with  you?' 

Only  the  silence,  an  oriole  fluting 
through  it,  and  the  sunlight.  The  hur- 
rying bees  shine  in  it  like  gold.  A  little 
pine,  springing  on  the  edge  of  the  thick 
thicket,  lifts  his  tassels  to  it,  golden- 
tinted.  The  sky  falls  for  a  moment 
with  the  voices  of  birds,  blown  past 
upon  a  breath  of  wind.  Soon,  the  gol- 
den lips  of  the  sun,  and  the  gray  lips  of 
the  wind,  will  drink  the  pool  from  the 
hollow,  and  it  will  be  as  if  the  rock 
slept  again,  a  blind  sleep,  in  which  the 
fall  of  a  year  and  the  fall  of  a  leaf  are 
one.  Only  within  the  transient  pool  is 
shadowed  the  infinite;  and  eternity 
within  this  transient  heart. 

THE    CHEERFUL    WORKMAN 

THE  cheerful  workman  has,  at  one 
time  or  another,  and  at  various  hands, 
received  at  least  his  due  meed  of  praise. 
I  myself,  have  in  times  past  ignor- 
antly  joined  the  chorus  of  laudation. 
Recently,  however,  when  I  have  been 
dwelling  by  sufferance  in  a  house  in- 
habited by  carpenters,  plumbers,  paint- 
ers, and  their  respective  satellites,  I 
have  been  led  to  wonder  whether  the 
perfect  artisan  —  could  such  be  found 
—  would  not  be  profoundly  glum. 

It  is  one  thing  to  be  waked  by  the 
heavy  tread  of  the  hod-carrier;  it  is 
another  to  hear  him  mixing  mortar 
at  seven-thirty  to  the  rhythm  of  Cala- 
brian  song.  It  is  one  thing  to  meet  on 
one's  furtive  way  to  the  bath  a  painter 
making  a  round  of  the  house  to  admire 


his  superior  brush-work;  it  is  a  far  more 
trying  adventure  to  have  him  herald 
his  inevitable  approach  by  whistling 
a  few  bars  from  operatic  comedy,  and 
emphasize  his  unwelcome  presence  by 
a  cheery  matutinal  greeting.  He  is  an 
intimate,  of  course,  but  the  closest 
friends  do  well  to  be  inconspicuous  and 
silent  when  encountered  before  break- 
fast. At  breakfast,  moreover,  there  is 
little  to  be  said  for  the  interchange 
of  pleasantries  overheard  between  car- 
penters in  the  next  room.  Better  the 
pounding  hammer  and  the  rasping  saw 
than  this  forced  introduction  to  the 
humors  of  the  craft.  And  in  the  dead 
vast  and  middle  of  a  summer  after- 
noon what  could  be  less  desirable  than 
the  voice  of  an  adventurous  plumber 
uplifted  in  patriotic  song? 

The  reader  may  accuse  me  of  being 
splenetic.  Perhaps  I  am.  Yet  ordi- 
narily I  am  not  devoid  of  interest  in 
the  manifestations  of  human  nature. 
I  am  not  displeased  by  the  sight  of  the 
plumber,  or  his  *  helper,'  when  the  day's 
work  is  ended,  making  merry  even 
upon  a  roller-coaster.  What  I  com- 
plain of  is  that,  to  most  of  the  workmen 
among  whom  I  dwell,  every  day  is  a 
lark,  a  playing  holiday.  To  me  the 
hanging  of  doors  and  the  setting  up 
of  radiators  seem  a  serious  business. 
I  am  bewildered  by  the  light-hearted- 
ness  that  they  appear  professionally  to 
beget.  f 

Why,  since  they  take  such  pleasure 
in  it,  should  the  workmen  of  the  world 
have  demanded  and  obtained  a  shorter 
day?  Why  should  they  not  wish  to 
labor  on  from  dawn  to  dusk?  The 
plumber  and  the  mason  frequently  rest 
and  sing;  the  carpenter  enjoys  une- 
qualed  opportunities  for  conversation; 
and  the  painter,  whereas  after  five 
o'clock  he  must  pay  for  his  beer,  before 
five  may  drink  the  beer  for  which  I 
have  paid.  The  only  reason,  indeed, 
why  the  so-called  working-day  should 


432 


THE   CONTRIBUTORS'   CLUB 


perhaps  be  of  its  present  length  is  the 
necessity,  felt  by  every  man,  of  escap- 
ing monotony.  Perhaps  the  painter 
wishes  another  kind  of  beer  than  mine, 
and  perhaps  the  carpenter  wishes  day- 
light in  which  to  tell  his  wife  all  about 
it. 

From  my  point  of  view,  moreover, 
there  can  be  no  question  that  the  eight- 
hour  day  is  a  blessing.  The  low-com- 
edy mason,  the  crab-like  plumber's 
helper,  the  loquacious  carpenter,  and 
the  cheerfully  informative  paper-hang- 
er all  depart,  and  leave  behind  them 
the  peace  of  perfect  tranquillity.  What 
though  there  are  chevaux-de-frise  of 
step-ladders  in  the  hall,  mounds  of 
shavings  in  what  may  some  time  be  the 
drawing-room,  muddy  streaks  upon 
an  adventurous  vanguard  of  rugs,  and 
the  smell  of  paint  everywhere?  The 
cheerful  workman  has  left  the  scene 
of  his  merry-making. 


Is  he  thereafter  transformed,  one 
wonders?  It  does  not  seem  humanly 
possible  that  he  can  be  so  jovial  for 
twenty-four  hours  on  end.  I  should  be 
very  sorry  if  it  were  so,  but  I  strongly 
suspect  that  out  of  my  hearing,  and  at 
home,  he  becomes  the  morose  husband 
and  the  stern  parent.  I  should  like 
him  better,  on  the  whole,  if  from  eight 
till  five  he  were  gloomy  and  did  his 
work  in  silence,  reserving  his  manifest- 
ations of  happiness  for  his  own  circle. 
I  should  prefer  to  have  him  automatic, 
easy-running,  and  (let  me  add)  inex- 
pensive to  operate,  like  all  the  many 
devices  of  domestic  machinery  by  which 
I  have  been  tempted  in  the  months 
past.  If  I  knew  how,  I  should  make  a 
workman  of  steel,  mount  him  on  pneu- 
matic tires,  and  run  him  by  electricity 
—  for  the  greater  quiet  of  the  world. 
I  detest  his  actual  resemblance  to 
sounding  brass. 


A   NOTE   FROM   MR.   BRADFORD 


THE  brief  reference  to  General  Long- 
street's  conversion  at  the  close  of  my 
portrait  of  him  in  the  December  Atlan- 
tic has  called  forth  indignant  protest 
from  many  Catholics.  I  recognize  that 
my  words  are  susceptible  of  an  inter- 
pretation which  I  certainly  did  not  in- 
tend. The  sole  point  that  interested 
me  was  that  a  man  of  Longstreet's 
immense  self-confidence,  always  indis- 
posed to  submit  to  the  judgment  of 
others,  should  make  the  most  complete 


self-surrender  in  the  world.  Intent 
upon  this  dramatic  episode,  I  express- 
ed it  with  an  uncalled-for  vivacity  of 
phrase,  which  I  shall  remove  when  I 
reprint  the  portrait.  I  had  no  desire 
whatever  to  stir  up  a  controversy  quite 
inappropriate  for  discussion  in  the 
pages  of  the  Atlantic,  and  utterly  out 
of  place  in  an  article  meant  for  all 
American  citizens,  Protestant  and 
Catholic  alike. 

GAMALIEL  BRADFORD,  JR. 


THE  ATLANTIC  MONTHLY 


APRIL,  1913 


THE  COLLAPSE  OF  CAPITALISTIC   GOVERNMENT 


BY   BROOKS   ADAMS 


A  MARKED  peculiarity  of  the  present 
generation  of  Americans  is  its  impa- 
tience of  prolonged  demands  on  the 
attention,  especially  if  the  subject  be 
tedious,  and  this  trait  has  made  Theo- 
dore Roosevelt's  task  as  a  '  Progressive ' 
much  more  difficult  than  it  would  have 
been  a  hundred  years  or  so  ago.  No 
one  can  imagine  that  such  papers  as 
Hamilton,  Madison,  and  Jay  wrote 
for  the  New  York  local  newspapers, 
could  be  printed  by  our  daily  press,  or, 
if  they  were,  that  any  one  would  read 
them,  —  least  of  all  the  lawyers,  — 
and  yet  it  is  clear  that  Theodore  Roose- 
velt's idea  is  primarily  constructive, 
much  as  General  Washington's  was  in 
1787.  Mr.  Roosevelt's  trouble  has  been 
that  his  audience  has  demanded  some- 
thing akin  to  an  emotional  attack  on 
the  present  distribution  of  property, 
while  the  opposition  not  only  has  re- 
fused to  give  him  a  hearing,  but  has 
met  him  by  unfair,  not  to  say  ferocious, 
misrepresen  ta  tion .  Notwithstanding 
which  I  apprehend  that,  fundament- 
ally, Mr.  Roosevelt's  position  is  sound. 
The  capitalistic  domination  of  society, 
which  has  prevailed  for  rather  more 
than  two  generations,  has  broken  down, 
and  men  of  the  capitalistic  type  have 
apparently  the  alternative  before  them 
VOL.  in -NO.  4 


of  adapting  themselves  to  a  new  en- 
vironment, or  of  being  eliminated  as 
every  obsolete  type  has  always  been 
eliminated. 

Were  all  other  evidence  lacking,  the 
inference  that  radical  changes  are  at 
hand  might  be  deduced  from  the  past. 
In  the  experience  of  the  English-speak- 
ing race,  about  once  in  every  three 
generations  a  social  convulsion  has  oc- 
curred; and  probably  such  catastro- 
phies  must  continue  to  occur  in  or- 
der that  laws  and  institutions  may  be 
adapted  to  physical  growth.  Human 
society  is  a  living  organism,  working 
mechanically,  like  any  other  organ- 
ism. It  has  members,  a  circulation,  a 
nervous  system,  and  a  sort  of  skin  or 
envelope,  consisting  of  its  laws  and 
institutions.  This  skin,  or  envelope, 
however,  does  not  expand  automatic- 
ally, as  it  would  had  Providence  in- 
tended humanity  to  be  peaceful,  but 
is  only  fitted  to  new  conditions  by  those 
painful  and  conscious  efforts  which  we 
call  revolutions.  Usually  these  revo- 
lutions are  warlike,  but  sometimes 
they  are  benign,  as  was  the  revolution 
over  which  General  Washington,  our 
first  great  *  Progressive/  presided,  when 
the  rotting  Confederation,  under  his 
guidance,  was  converted  into  a  rela- 
tively excellent  administrative  system 
by  the  adoption  of  the  Constitution. 


434         THE  COLLAPSE  OF  CAPITALISTIC  GOVERNMENT 


Taken  for  all  in  all,  I  conceive  Gen- 
eral Washington  to  have  been  the 
greatest  man  of  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury, but  to  me  his  greatness  chiefly 
consists  in  that  balance  of  mind  which 
enabled  him  to  recognize  when  an  old 
order  had  passed  away,  and  to  perceive 
how  a  new  order  could  be  best  intro- 
duced. Joseph  Story  was  ten  years 
old  in  1789  when  the  Constitution 
was  adopted;  his  earliest  impressions, 
therefore,  were  of  the  Confederation, 
and  I  know  no  better  description  of 
the  interval  just  subsequent  to  the 
peace  of  1783,  than  is  contained  in  a 
few  lines  in  his  dissenting  opinion  in 
the  Charles  River  Bridge  Case:  — 

*  In  order  to  entertain  a  just  view  of 
this  subject,  we  must  go  back  to  that 
period  of  general  bankruptcy,  and  dis- 
tress and  difficulty  (1785).  .  .  .  The 
union  of  the  States  was  crumbling 
into  ruins,  under  the  old  Confederation. 
Agriculture,  manufactures,  and  com- 
merce were  at  their  lowest  ebb.  There 
was  infinite  danger  to  all  the  States 
from  local  interests  and  jealousies,  and 
from  the  apparent  impossibility  of  a 
much  longer  adherence  to  that  shadow 
of  a  government,  the  Continental  Con- 
gress. And  even  four  years  afterwards, 
when  every  evil  had  been  greatly  ag- 
gravated, and  civil  war  was  added  to 
other  calamities,  the  Constitution  of 
the  United  States  was  all  but  ship- 
wrecked in  passing  through  the  state 
conventions.'  l 

This  crisis,  according  to  my  comput- 
ation, was  the  normal  one  of  the  third 
generation.  Between  1688  and  1765  the 
British  Empire  had  physically  out- 
grown its  legal  envelope,  and  the  con- 
sequence was  a  revolution.  The  thir- 
teen American  colonies,  which  formed 
the  western  section  of  the  imperial 
mass,  split  from  the  core  and  drifted 
into  chaos,  beyond  the  constraint  of 

1  Charles  River  Bridge  v.  Warren  Bridge,  11 
Peters,  608,  609. 


existing  law.  Washington  was,  in  his 
way,  a  large  capitalist,  but  he  was 
much  more.  He  was  not  only  a  wealthy 
planter,  but  he  was  an  engineer,  a 
traveler,  to  an  extent  a  manufacturer, 
a  politician,  and  a  soldier;  and  he  saw 
that,  as  a  conservative,  he  must  be 
'Progressive'  and  raise  the  law  to  a 
power  high  enough  to  constrain  all 
these  thirteen  refractory  units.  For 
Washington  understood  that  peace 
does  not  consist  in  talking  platitudes 
at  conferences,  but  in  organizing  a  sov- 
ereignty strong  enough  to  coerce  its 
subjects. 

The  problem  of  constructing  such 
a  sovereignty  was  the  problem  which 
Washington  solved,  temporarily  at 
least,  without  violence.  He  prevailed 
not  only  because  of  an  intelligence  and 
elevation  of  character  which  enabled 
him  to  comprehend,  and  to  persuade 
others,  that,  to  attain  a  common  end, 
all  must  make  sacrifices,  but  also  be- 
cause he  was  supported  by  a  body  of 
the  most  remarkable  men  whom  Amer- 
ica has  ever  produced;  men  who,  al- 
though doubtless  in  a  numerical  mi- 
nority, taking  the  country  as  a  whole, 
by  sheer  weight  of  ability  and  energy 
achieved  their  purpose. 

Yet  even  Washington  and  his  ad- 
herents could  not  alter  the  limitations 
of  the  human  mind.  He  could  postpone, 
but  he  could  not  avert,  the  impact  of 
conflicting  social  forces.  In  1789  he 
compromised,  but  he  did  not  deter- 
mine the  question  of  sovereignty.  He 
eluded  an  impending  conflict  by  intro- 
ducing courts  as  political  arbitrators, 
and  the  expedient  worked  more  or  less 
well  until  the  tension  reached  a  certain 
point.  Then  it  broke  down,  and  the 
question  of  sovereignty  had  to  be  set- 
tled in  America,  as  elsewhere,  on  the 
field  of  battle.  It  was  not  decided  un- 
til Appomattox.  But  the  function  of 
the  courts  in  American  life  is  a  sub- 
ject which  should  be  considered  apart. 


THE  COLLAPSE  OF  CAPITALISTIC  GOVERNMENT 


435 


What  is  material,  at  present,  is  the 
phenomenon  presented  by  the  rise  of 
the  'Progressives'  with  Mr.  Roosevelt 
at  their  head,  as  interpreted  in  the 
light  of  history. 


n 

If  the  invention  of  gunpowder  and 
printing  in  the  fourteenth  and  fif- 
teenth centuries  presaged  the  Reform- 
ation of  the  sixteenth,  and  if  the  Indus- 
trial Revolution  of  the  eighteenth  was 
the  forerunner  of  political  revolutions 
throughout  the  Western  World,  we  may 
well,  after  the  mechanical  and  eco- 
nomic cataclysm  of  the  nineteenth, 
cease  wondering  that  twentieth-cent- 
ury society  should  be  *  Progressive/ 
and  busy  ourselves  instead  with  con- 
sidering how  far  the  social  equilibrium 
which  Washington  established  has  been 
impaired,  and,  if  it  has  been  fatally  im- 
paired, what  provision  we  have  made, 
or  can  make,  for  our  future  safety. 

Never  since  man  first  walked  erect 
have  his  relations  toward  nature  been 
so  changed  within  the  same  space  of 
time  as  they  have  been  since  Wash- 
ington was  elected  President  and  the 
Parisian  mob  stormed  the  Bastille. 
Washington  found  the  task  of  a  read- 
justment heavy  enough,  but  the  civil- 
ization he  knew  was  simple.  When 
Washington  lived,  the  fund  of  energy 
at  man's  disposal  had  not  very  sensibly 
augmented  since  the  fall  of  Rome.  In 
the  eighteenth,  as  in  the  fourth  cen- 
tury, engineers  had  at  command  only 
animal  power,  and  a  little  wind  and 
water  power,  to  which  had  been  added, 
at  the  end  of  the  Middle  Ages,  a  low 
explosive.  There  was  nothing  in  the 
daily  life  of  his  age  which  made  the 
legal  and  administrative  principles 
which  had  sufficed  for  Justinian  in- 
sufficient for  him.  Twentieth-century 
society  rests  on  a  basis  not  different 
so  much  in  degree,  as  in  kind,  from  all 


that  has  gone  before.  Through  applied 
science  infinite  forces  have  been  do- 
mesticated, and  the  action  of  these  in- 
finite forces  upon  finite  minds  has  been 
to  create  a  tension,  together  with  a 
social  acceleration  and  concentration, 
not  only  unparalleled,  but,  apparent- 
ly, without  limit.  Meanwhile  our  laws 
and  institutions  have  remained,  in  sub- 
stance, constant.  I  doubt  if  we  have 
developed  a  single  important  adminis- 
trative principle  which  would  be  novel 
to  Napoleon,  were  he  to  live  again, 
and  I  am  quite  sure  we  have  no  legal 
principle  younger  than  Justinian. 

As  a  result,  society  has  been  squeezed, 
as  it  were,  from  its  rigid  eighteenth- 
century  legal  shell,  and  has  passed  into 
a  fourth  dimension  of  space,  where  it 
performs  its  most  important  functions 
beyond  the  cognizance  of  the  law, 
which  remains  in  a  space  of  but  three 
dimensions.  Washington  encountered 
a  somewhat  analogous  problem  when 
dealing  with  the  thirteen  petty  inde- 
pendent states,  which  had  escaped 
from  England;  but  his  problem  was 
relatively  rudimentary.  Taking  the 
theory  of  sovereignty  as  it  stood,  he 
had  only  to  apply  it  to  communities. 
It  was  mainly  a  question  of  concen- 
trating a  sufficient  amount  of  energy 
to  enforce  order  in  sovereign  social 
units.  The  whole  social  detail  remain- 
ed unchanged.  Our  conditions  would 
seem  to  imply  a  very  considerable 
extension  and  specialization  of  the 
principle  of  sovereignty,  together  with 
a  commensurate  increment  of  energy. 
Also,  the  twentieth-century  American 
problem  is  still  further  complicated 
by  the  envelope  in  which  this  highly 
volatilized  society  is  theoretically  con- 
tained. To  attain  his  object,  Washing- 
ton introduced  a  written  organic  law, 
which  of  all  things  is  the  most  inflex- 
ible. No  other  modern  nation  has  to 
consider  such  an  impediment. 

Moneyed  capital  I  take  to  be  stored 


436 


THE  COLLAPSE  OF  CAPITALISTIC  GOVERNMENT 


human  energy,  as  a  coal  measure  is 
stored  solar  energy;  and  moneyed  cap- 
ital, under  the  stress  of  modern  life, 
has  developed  at  once  extreme  fluidity, 
and  an  equivalent  compressibility. 
Thus  a  small  number  of  men  can  con- 
trol it  in  enormous  masses,  and  so  it 
comes  to  pass  that,  in  a  community  like 
the  United  States,  a  few  men,  or  even, 
in  certain  emergencies,  a  single  man, 
may  become  clothed  with  various  of 
the  attributes  of  sovereignty.  Sover- 
eign powers  are  powers  so  important 
that  the  community,  in  its  corporate 
capacity,  has,  as  society  has  central- 
ized, usually  found  it  necessary  to 
monopolize  them  more  or  less  abso- 
lutely, since  their  possession  by  private 
persons  causes  revolt.  These  powers, 
when  vested  in  some  official,  as,  for 
example,  a  king  or  emperor,  have  been 
held  by  him,  in  all  Western  countries 
at  least,  as  a  trust  to  be  used  for  the 
common  welfare.  A  breach  of  that 
trust  has  commonly  been  punished 
by  deposition  or  death.  It  was  upon 
a  charge  of  breach  of  trust  that  Charles 
I,  among  other  sovereigns,  was  tried 
and  executed.  In  short,  the  relation  of 
sovereign  and  subject  has  been  based 
either  upon  consent  and  mutual  ob- 
ligation, or  upon  submission  to  a  divine 
command;  but,  in  either  case,  upon 
recognition  of  responsibility.  Only  the 
relation  of  master  and  slave  implies  the 
status  of  sovereign  power  vested  in  an 
unaccountable  superior.  Nevertheless, 
it  is  in  a  relation  somewhat  analogous 
to  the  latter,  that  the  modern  capital- 
ist has  been  placed  toward  his  fellow 
citizens,  by  the  advances  in  applied 
science.  An  example  or  two  will  ex- 
plain my  meaning. 


in 

High  among  sovereign  powers  has 
always  ranked  the  ownership  and  ad- 
ministration of  highways.  And  it  is 


evident  why  this  should  have  been  so. 
Movement  is  life,  and  the  stoppage  of 
movement  is  death,  and  the  movement 
of  every  people  flows  along  its  high- 
ways. An  invader  has  only  to  cut  the 
communications  of  the  invaded  to 
paralyze  him,  as  he  would  paralyze 
an  animal  by  cutting  his  arteries  or 
tendons.  Accordingly,  in  all  ages  and 
all  lands,  down  to  the  nineteenth  cent- 
ury, nations  even  partially  central- 
ized have,  in  their  corporate  capacity, 
owned  and  cared  for  their  highways, 
either  directly  or  through  accountable 
agents;  and  they  have  paid  for  them 
by  direct  taxes,  as  the  Romans  did, 
or  else  by  tolls  levied  upon  traffic,  as 
many  mediaeval  governments  prefer- 
red to  do.  Either  method  answers  its 
purpose,  provided  that  the  government 
recognizes  its  responsibility;  and  no 
government  ever  recognized  this  re- 
sponsibility more  fully  than  did  the  au- 
tocratic government  of  ancient  Rome. 
So  the  absolute  regime  of  eighteenth- 
century  France  recognized  this  respon- 
sibility when  Louis  XVI  undertook  to 
remedy  the  abuse  of  unequal  taxation 
for  the  maintenance  of  the  highways, 
by  abolishing  the  corvee. 

Toward  the  middle  of  the  nineteenth 
century,  the  application,  by  science, 
of  steam  to  locomotion,  made  railways 
a  favorite  speculation.  Forthwith  pri- 
vate capital  acquired  these  highways, 
and  because  of  the  inelasticity  of 
the  old  law,  treated  them  as  ordinary 
chattels,  to  be  administered  for  the 
profit  of  the  owner  exclusively.  It  is 
true  that  railway  companies  posed  as 
public  agents  when  demanding  the 
power  to  take  private  property;  but 
when  it  came  to  charging  for  use  of 
their  ways,  they  claimed  to  be  only 
private  carriers,  authorized  to  bar- 
gain as  they  pleased.  Indeed,  it  came 
to  be  considered  as  a  mark  of  efficient 
railroad  management  to  extract  the 
largest  revenue  possible  from  the  peo- 


THE  COLLAPSE  OF  CAPITALISTIC  GOVERNMENT 


437 


pie,  along  the  lines  of  least  resistance; 
that  is,  by  taxing  most  heavily  those 
individuals  and  localities  which  could 
least  resist.  And  the  claim  by  the 
railroads  that  they  might  do  this  as 
a  matter  of  right  was  long  upheld  by 
the  courts,1  nor  have  the  judges  even 
yet,  after  a  generation  of  revolt  and  of 
legislation,  altogether  abandoned  this 
doctrine. 

The  courts  —  reluctantly,  it  is  true, 
and  principally  at  the  instigation  of 
the  railways  themselves,  who  found  the 
practice  unprofitable  —  have  latterly 
discountenanced  discrimination  as  to 
persons,  but  they  still  uphold  discrim- 
ination as  to  localities.2  Now  among 
abuses  of  sovereign  power,  this  is  one 
of  the  most  galling,  for  of  all  taxes 
the  transportation  tax  is  perhaps  that 
which  is  most,  searching,  most  insidi- 
ous, and,  when  misused,  most  destruc- 
tive. The  price  paid  for  transporta- 
tion is  not  so  essential  to  the  public 
welfare  as  its  equality;  for  neither  per- 
sons nor  localities  can  prosper  when 
the  necessaries  of  life  cost  them  more 
than  they  cost  their  competitors.  In 
towns,  no  cup  of  water  can  be  drunk, 
no  crust  of  bread  eaten,  no  garment 
worn,  which  has  not  paid  the  transport- 
ation tax,  and  the  farmer's  crops  must 
rot  upon  his  land,  if  other  farmers  pay 
enough  less  than  he  to  exclude  him 
from  markets  toward  which  they  all 
stand  in  a  position  otherwise  equal. 
Yet  this  formidable  power  has  been 
usurped  by  private  persons  who  have 
used  it  purely  selfishly,  as  no  legitimate 
sovereign  could  have  used  it,  and  by 
persons  who  have  indignantly  de- 
nounced all  attempts  to  hold  them  ac- 
countable, as  an  infringement  of  their 

1  Fitchburg  R.  R.  v.  Gage,  12  Gray,  393,  and 
innumerable  cases  following  it. 

2  See  the  decisions  of  the  Commerce  Court 
on  the  Long  and  Short-Haul  Clause.    Atchison, 
T.  &  S.  F.  Ry.  v.  United  States,  191  Federal  Rep., 
856. 


constitutional  rights.  Obviously,  cap- 
ital cannot  assume  the  position  of  an 
irresponsible  sovereign,  living  in  a 
sphere  beyond  the  domain  of  law,  with- 
out inviting  the  fate  which  has  awaited 
all  sovereigns  who  have  denied  or 
abused  their  trust. 

The  operation  of  the  New  York 
Clearing  House  is  another  example  of 
the  acquisition  of  sovereign  power  by 
irresponsible  private  persons.  Prima- 
rily, of  course,  a  clearing  house  is  an 
innocent  institution  occupied  with  ad- 
justing balances  between  banks,  and 
has  no  relation  to  the  volume  of  the 
currency.  Furthermore,  among  all 
highly  centralized  nations,  the  regu- 
lation of  the  currency  is  one  of  the  most 
jealously  guarded  of  the  prerogatives 
of  sovereignty,  because  all  values  hinge 
upon  the  relation  which  the  volume  of 
the  currency  bears  to  the  volume  of 
trade.  Yet,  as  everybody  knows,  in 
moments  of  financial  panic,  the  hand- 
ful of  financiers  who,  directly  or  in- 
directly, govern  the  Clearing  House, 
have  it  in  their  power  either  to  expand 
or  to  contract  the  currency,  by  issu- 
ing or  by  withdrawing  Clearing  House 
certificates,  more  effectually  perhaps 
than  if  they  controlled  the  Treasury 
of  the  United  States.  Nor  does  this 
power,  vast  as  it  is,  at  all  represent  the 
supremacy  which  a  few  bankers  enjoy 
over  values,  because  of  their  facilities 
for  manipulating  the  currency  and, 
with  the  currency,  credit,  —  facilities 
which  are  used  or  abused  entirely  be- 
yond the  reach  of  the  law. 

Bankers,  at  their  conventions  and 
through  the  press,  are  wont  to  denounce 
the  American  monetary  system,  and 
without  doubt  all  that  they  say,  and 
much  more  that  they  do  not  say,  is  true; 
and  yet  I  should  suppose  that  there 
can  be  little  doubt  that  American  fin- 
anciers might,  since  the  panic  of  1893, 
have  obtained  from  Congress,  at  most 
sessions,  very  reasonable  legislation, 


438         THE  COLLAPSE  OF  CAPITALISTIC  GOVERNMENT 


had  they,  first,  agreed  upon  the  re- 
forms they  demanded,  and,  secondly, 
manifested  their  readiness,  as  a  con- 
dition precedent  to  such  reforms,  to 
submit  to  effective  government  super- 
vision in  those  departments  of  their 
business  which  relate  to  the  inflation 
or  depression  of  values.  They  have 
shown  little  inclination  to  submit  to 
restraint  in  these  particulars,  nor,  per- 
haps, is  their  reluctance  surprising,  for 
the  possession  by  a  very  small  favored 
class  of  the  unquestioned  privilege,  at 
recurring  intervals,  of  subjecting  the 
debtor  class  to  such  pressure  as  the 
creditor  may  think  necessary,  in  order 
to  force  the  debtor  to  surrender  his 
property  to  the  creditor  at  the  cred- 
itor's price,  is  a  wonder  beside  which 
Aladdin's  lamp  burns  dim. 

As  I  have  already  remarked,  I  ap- 
prehend that  sovereignty  is  a  varia- 
ble quantity  of  administrative  energy, 
which,  in  civilizations  which  we  call 
advancing,  tends  to  accumulate  with  a 
rapidity  proportionate  to  the  acceler- 
ation of  movement.  That  is  to  say, 
the  community,  as  it  consolidates,  finds 
it  essential  to  its  safety  to  withdraw, 
more  or  less  completely,  from  individ- 
uals, and  to  monopolize,  more  or  less 
strictly,  itself,  a  great  variety  of  func- 
tions. At  one  stage  of  civilization  the 
head  of  the  family  administers  just- 
ice, maintains  an  armed  force  for  war 
or  police,  wages  war,  makes  treaties 
of  peace,  coins  money,  and,  not  infre- 
quently, wears  a  crown,  usually  of  a 
form  to  indicate  his  importance  in  a 
hierarchy.  At  a  later  stage  of  civil- 
ization, companies  of  traders  play  a 
great  part.  Such  aggregations  of  pri- 
vate and  irresponsible  adventurers 
have  invaded  and  conquered  empires, 
founded  colonies,  and  administered 
justice  to  millions  of  human  beings. 
In  our  own  time,  we  have  seen  many 
of  the  functions  of  these  and  similar 
private  companies  assumed  by  the 


sovereign.  We  have  seen  the  East  In- 
dia Company  absorbed  by  the  British 
Parliament;  we  have  seen  railways, 
and  telephone  and  telegraph  compan- 
ies, taken  into  possession,  very  gen- 
erally, by  the  most  progressive  govern- 
ments of  the  world;  and  now  we  have 
come  to  the  necessity  of  dealing  with 
the  domestic-trade  monopoly,  because 
trade  has  fallen  into  monopoly  through 
the  centralization  of  capital  in  a  con- 
stantly contracting  circle  of  ownership. 


IV 

Among  innumerable  kinds  of  mono- 
polies none  have  been  more  trouble- 
some than  trade  monopolies,  especially 
those  which  control  the  price  of  the 
necessaries  of  life;  for,  so  far  as  I 
know,  no  people,  approximately  free, 
has  long  endured  such  monopolies 
patiently.  Nor  could  they  well  have 
done  so  without  constraint  by  over- 
powering physical  force,  for  the  pos- 
session of  a  monopoly  of  a  necessary 
of  life  by  an  individual,  or  by  a  small 
privileged  class,  is  tantamount  to  in- 
vesting a  minority,  contemptible  alike 
in  numbers  and  in  physical  force,  with 
an  arbitrary  and  unlimited  power  ^o 
tax  the  majority,  not  for  public,  but 
for  private  purposes.  Therefore  it  has 
not  infrequently  happened  that  per- 
sistence in  adhering  to  and  in  enforc- 
ing such  monopolies  has  led,  first,  to 
attempts  at  regulation,  and,  these  at- 
tempts failing,  to  confiscation,  and 
sometimes  to  the  proscription  of  the 
owners.  An  example  of  such  a  pheno- 
menon occurs  to  me  which,  just  now, 
seems  apposite. 

In  the  earlier  Middle  Ages,  before 
gunpowder  made  fortified  houses  un- 
tenable when  attacked  by  the  sover- 
eign, the  highways  were  so  dangerous 
that  trade  and  manufactures  could  sur- 
vive only  in  walled  towns.  An  unarmed 
urban  population  had  to  buy  its  privi- 


THE  COLLAPSE  OF  CAPITALISTIC  GOVERNMENT 


439 


leges,  and  to  pay  for  these  a  syndicate 
grew  up  in  each  town,  which  became 
responsible  for  the  town  ferm,  or  tax, 
and,  in  return,  collected  what  part  of 
the  municipal  expenses  it  could  from 
the  poorer  inhabitants.  These  syndi- 
cates (called  guilds),  as  a  means  of  rais- 
ing money,  regulated  trade  and  fixed 
prices,  and  they  succeeded  in  fixing 
prices  because  they  could  prevent  com- 
petition within  the  walls.  Presently, 
complaints  became  rife  of  guild  op- 
pression, and  the  courts  had  to  enter- 
tain these  complaints  from  the  outset, 
to  keep  some  semblance  of  order;  but 
at  length  the  turmoil  passed  beyond 
the  reach  of  the  courts,  and  Parlia- 
ment intervened.  Parliament  not  only 
enacted  a  series  of  statutes  regulating 
prices  in  towns,  but  supervised  guild 
membership,  requiring  trading  compa- 
nies to  receive  new  members  upon 
what  Parliament  considered  to  be  reas- 
onable terms.  Nevertheless,  friction 
continued. 

With  advances  in  science,  artillery 
improved,  and,  as  artillery  improved, 
the  police  strengthened  until  the  king 
could  arrest  whom  he  pleased.  Then 
the  country  grew  safe  and  manufac- 
turers migrated  from  the  walled  and 
heavily  taxed  towns  to  the  cheap,  open 
villages,  and  from  thence  undersold 
the  guilds.  As  the  area  of  competition 
broadened,  so  the  guilds  weakened,  un- 
til, under  Edward  VI,  being  no  longer 
able  to  defend  themselves,  they  were 
ruthlessly  and  savagely  plundered;  and 
fifty  years  later  the  Court  of  King's 
Bench  gravely  held  that  a  royal  grant 
of  a  monopoly  had  always  been  bad  at 
common  law.1 

Though  the  Court's  law  proved  to 
be  good,  since  it  has  stood,  its  history 
was  fantastic;  for  the  trade-guild  was 
the  offspring  of  trade  monopoly,  and 
a  trade  monopoly  had  for  centuries 
been  granted  habitually  by  the  feudal 
1  Darcy  v.  Allein,  11  Rep.  84. 


landlord  to  his  tenants,  and  indeed  was 
the  only  means  by  which  an  urban 
population  could  finance  its  military 
expenditure.  Then,  in  due  course,  the 
Crown  tried  to  establish  its  exclusive 
right  to  grant  monopolies,  and  finally 
Parliament — or  King,  Lords,  and  Com- 
mons combined,  being  the  whole  nation 
in  its  corporate  capacity  —  appropri- 
ated this  monopoly  of  monopolies  as 
its  exclusive  prerogative.  And  with 
Parliament  this  monopoly  has  ever 
since  remained. 

In  fine,  monopolies,  or  competition 
in  trade,  appear  to  be  recurrent  social 
phases  which  depend  upon  the  ratio 
which  the  mass  and  the  fluidity  of 
capital,  or,  in  other  words,  its  energy, 
bears  to  the  area  within  which  compe- 
tition is  possible.  In  the  Middle  Ages, 
when  the  town  walls  bounded  that  area, 
or  -when,  at  most,  it  was  restricted 
to  a  few  lines  of  communication  be- 
tween defensible  points  garrisoned  by 
the  monopolists,  —  as  were  the  Staple 
towns  of  England  which  carried  on  the 
wool  trade  with  the  British  fortified 
counting-houses  in  Flanders,  —  a  small 
quantity  of  sluggish  capital  sufficed. 
But  as  police  improved,  and  the  area 
of  competition  broadened  faster  than 
capital  accumulated  and  quickened, 
the  competitive  phase  dawned,  whose 
advent  is  marked  by  Darcy  v.  Allein, 
decided  in  the  year  1600.  Finally,  the 
issue  between  monopoly  and  free  trade 
was  fought  out  in  the  American  Revo- 
lution, for  the  measure  which  precipi- 
tated hostilities  was  the  effort  of  Eng- 
land to  impose  her  monopoly  of  the 
Eastern  trade  upon  America.  The  Bos- 
ton Tea  Party  occurred  on  December 
16,  1773.  Then  came  the  heyday  of 
competition  with  the  acceptance  of 
the  theories  of  Adam  Smith,  and  the 
political  domination  in  England,  to- 
wards 1840,  of  the  Manchester  school 
of  political  economy. 

About  forty  years  since,  in  America 


440         THE  COLLAPSE  OF  CAPITALISTIC  GOVERNMENT 


at  least,  the  tide  would  appear  once 
more  to  have  turned.  I  fix  the  moment 
of  flux,  as  I  am  apt  to  do,  by  a  law- 
suit. This  suit  was  the  Morris  Run 
Coal  Company  v.  Barclay  Coal  Com- 
pany,1 which  is  the  first  modern  anti- 
monopoly  litigation  that  I  have  met 
with  in  the  United  States.  It  was 
decided  in  Pennsylvania  in  1871;  and 
since  1871,  while  the  area  within  which 
competition  is  possible  has  been  kept 
constant  by  the  tariff,  capital  has  ac- 
cumulated and  has  been  concentrated 
and  volatilized  until,  within  this  Re- 
public, substantially  all  prices  are  fixed 
by  a  vast  moneyed  mass.  This  mass, 
obeying  what  amounts  to  being  a  single 
volition,  has  its  heart  in  Wall  Street, 
and  pervades  every  corner  of  the  Union. 
No  matter  what  price  is  in  question, 
whether  it  be  the  price  of  meat,  or  coal, 
or  cotton  cloth,  or  of  railway  trans- 
portation, or  of  insurance,  or  of  dis- 
counts, the  inquirer  will  find  the  price 
to  be,  in  essence,  a  monopoly  or  fixed 
price;  and  if  he  will  follow  his  investi- 
gation to  the  end,  he  will  also  find  that 
the  first  cause  in  the  complex  chain 
of  cause  and  effect  which  created  the 
monopoly  is  that  mysterious  energy 
which  is  enthroned  on  the  Hudson. 

The  presence  of  monopolistic  prices 
in  trade  is  not  always  a  result  of  con- 
scious agreement;  more  frequently, 
perhaps,  it  is  automatic,  and  is  an  ef- 
fect of  the  concentration  of  capital  to 
a  point  where  competition  ceases,  as 
when  all  the  capital  engaged  in  a  trade 
belongs  to  a  single  owner.  Supposing 
ownership  to  be  enough  restricted,  com- 
bination is  easier  and  more  profitable 
than  competition;  therefore  combina- 
tion, conscious  or  unconscious,  sup- 
plants competition.  The  inference  from 
the  evidence  is  that,  in  the  United 
States,  capital  has  reached,  or  is  rapidly 
reaching,  this  point  of  concentration; 
and  if  this  be  true,  competition  cannot 
1  68  Pa.  173. 


be  enforced  by  legislation.  But,  as- 
suming that  competition  could  still  be 
enforced  by  law,  the  only  effect  would 
be  to  make  the  mass  of  capital  more 
homogeneous  by  eliminating  still  fur- 
ther such  of  the  weaker  capitalists  as 
have  survived.  Ultimately,  all  the  pre- 
sent phenomena  would  be  intensified; 
nor  would  free  trade,  probably,  have 
more  than  a  very  transitory  effect.  In 
no  department  of  trade  is  competition 
freer  than  in  the  Atlantic  passenger 
service,  and  yet  in  no  trade  is  there  a 
stricter  monopoly  price. 

The  same  acceleration  of  the  social 
movement  which  has  caused  this  cen- 
tralization of  capital  has  caused  the 
centralization  of  another  form  of  hu- 
man energy,  which  is  its  negative: 
labor  unions  organize  labor  as  a  mono- 
poly. Labor  protests  against  the  irre- 
sponsible sovereignty  of  capital,  as  men 
have  always  protested  against  irrespon- 
sible sovereignty,  declaring  that  the 
capitalistic  social  system,  as  it  now 
exists,  is  a  form  of  slavery.  Very  logic- 
ally, therefore,  the  abler  and  bolder 
labor  agitators  proclaim  that  labor  lev- 
ies actual  war  against  society,  and  that 
in  that  war  there  can  be  no  truce  until 
irresponsible  capital  has  capitulated. 
Also,  in  labor's  methods  of  warfare 
the  same  phenomena  appear  as  in  the 
autocracy  of  capital.  Labor  attacks 
capitalistic  society  by  methods  beyond 
the  purview  of  the  law,  and  may,  at 
any  moment,  shatter  the  social  system; 
while,  under  our  laws  and  institutions, 
society  is  helpless. 


Few  persons,  I  should  imagine,  who 
reflect  on  these  phenomena,  fail  to  ad- 
mit to  themselves,  whatever  they  may 
say  publicly,  that  present  social  con- 
ditions are  unsatisfactory,  and  I  take 
the  cause  of  the  stress  to  be  that  which 
I  have  stated.  We  have  extended  the 


THE  COLLAPSE  OF  CAPITALISTIC  GOVERNMENT         441 


range  of  applied  science  until  we  daily 
use  infinite  forces,  and  those  forces 
must,  apparently,  disrupt  our  society, 
unless  we  can  raise  the  laws  and  in- 
stitutions which  hold  society  together 
to  an  energy  and  efficiency  commen- 
surate to  them.  How  much  vigor  and 
ability  would  be  required  to  accom- 
plish such  a  work  may  be  measured 
by  the  experience  of  Washington,  who 
barely  prevailed  in  his  relatively  simple 
task,  surrounded  by  a  generation  of 
extraordinary  men,  and  with  the  cap- 
italistic class  of  America  behind  him. 
Without  the  capitalistic  class  he  must 
have  failed.  Therefore  one  momentous 
problem  of  the  future  is  the  attitude 
which  capital  will  assume  in  this  emer- 
gency. 

That  some  of  the  most  sagacious  of 
the  capitalistic  class  have  preserved 
that  instinct  of  self-preservation  which 
was  so  conspicuous  among  men  of  the 
type  of  Washington,  is  apparent  from 
the  position  taken  by  the  management 
of  the  United  States  Steel  Corporation, 
and  by  the  Republican  minority  of 
the  Congressional  committee  which  re- 
cently investigated  that  corporation; 
but  whether  such  men  very  strongly 
influence  the  class  to  which  they  be- 
long is  not  clear.  If  they  do  not,  much 
improvement  in  existing  conditions  can 
hardly  be  anticipated. 

If  capital  insists  upon  continuing  to 
exercise  sovereign  powers,  without  ac- 
cepting responsibility  as  for  a  trust, 
the  revolt  against  society  must  proba- 
bly continue,  and  can  be  dealt  with, 
as  all  servile  revolts  must  be  dealt 
with,  only  by  physical  force.  I  doubt, 
however,  if  even  the  most  ardent  and 
optimistic  of  capitalists  would  care 
to  speculate  deeply  upon  the  stability 
of  any  government  that  capital  might 
organize,  which  rested  on  the  funda- 
mental principle  that  the  American 
people  must  be  ruled  by  an  army. 
On  the  other  hand,  any  government  to 


be  effective  must  be  strong.  It  is  fu- 
tile to  talk  of  keeping  peace  in  labor 
disputes  by  compulsory  arbitration,  if 
the  government  has  not  the  power  to 
command  obedience  to  its  arbitrators' 
decree;  but  a  government  able  to  con- 
strain a  couple  of  hundred  thousand 
discontented  railway  employees  to 
work  against  their  will,  will  differ  con- 
siderably from  the  one  we  have.  Nor 
is  it  possible  to  imagine  that  labor  will 
ever  yield  peaceful  obedience  to  such 
constraint,  unless  capital  makes  equi- 
valent concessions,  —  unless,  perhaps, 
among  other  things,  capital  consents  to 
erect  tribunals  which  shall  offer  relief 
to  any  citizen  who  can  show  himself 
to  be  oppressed  by  the  monopolistic 
price.  In  fine,  a  government,  to  pro- 
mise stability  in  the  future,  must  ap- 
parently be  so  much  more  powerful 
than  any  private  interest,  that  all  men 
will  stand  equal  before  its  tribunals; 
and  these  tribunals  must  be  flexible 
enough  to  reach  those  categories  of 
activity  which  now  lie  beyond  legal 
jurisdiction. 

If  it  be  objected  to  my  argument 
that  the  American  people  are  incapa- 
ble of  an  effort  so  prodigious,  I  readily 
admit  that  this  may  be  true,  but  I  also 
contend  that  the  objection  is  beside 
the  issue.  What  the  American  people 
can  or  cannot  do  is  a  matter  of  opin- 
ion, but  that  social  changes  are  immi- 
nent appears  to  be  certain.  Although 
these  changes  cannot  be  prevented,  pos- 
sibly they  may,  to  a  degree,  be  guid- 
ed, as  Washington  guided  the  changes 
of  1789.  To  resist  them  perversely,  as 
they  were  resisted  at  the  Chicago  Con- 
vention, can  only  make  the  catastro- 
phe, when  it  comes,  as  overwhelming 
as  was  the  last  defeat  of  the  Republican 
party. 

Very  largely  because  of  the  stub- 
bornly reactionary  attitude  of  the 
class  which  should  be  the  most  intelli- 
gent and  flexible,  the  'Progressives,' 


442         THE  COLLAPSE  OF  CAPITALISTIC  GOVERNMENT 


with  Mr.  Roosevelt  swept  onward  at 
their  head,  are  drifting  into  a  move- 
ment which  evidently  will  be  disinte- 
grating and  not  constructive,  and  our 
society  cannot  be  much  further  volatil- 
ized without  resolving  into  chaos.  Life 
is  tolerable  under  any  form  of  orderly 
government.  Amid  disorder  it  be- 
comes intolerable.  Also,  amid  disor- 
der, capital  perishes  first.  Therefore, 
if  these  premises  be  sound,  capital  has 
come  to  the  parting  of  the  ways.  If  it 
be  true,  as  the  ordinary  phenomena 
of  our  daily  life  seem  to  demonstrate, 
that  capitalists  can  no  longer  control 
our  society  as  of  old,  while  enjoy- 
ing their  old  immunities,  because,  as 
society  increases  in  complexity  and 
gathers  momentum,  money,  when  ex- 
pended in  certain  directions,  is  losing 
its  purchasing  power,  then  capital- 
ists must  seek  some  other  than  the 
present  status  if  they  are  to  maintain 
themselves. 

Apparently  the  alternative  offered  is 
an  absolute  equality  before  the  law, 
or  social  warfare  beyond  the  law;  and 
I  should  suppose  that,  as  between  the 
two,  the  warfare  would  be  the  more 
objectionable.  Indeed,  it  might  occur, 
even  to  some  optimists,  that  capital 
would  be  fortunate  were  it  able  to  se- 
cure its  safety  for  another  fifty  years, 
on  terms  as  favorable  as  these.  There 
may  be  doubt,  if  it  continue  to  tempt 
its  fate  as  recklessly  in  the  future  as 
in  the  recent  past,  whether  any  equi- 
librium approximating  to  stability  can 
be  attained.  There  are  plenty  of  dis- 
solving societies  to  be  observed  in 
regions  not  far  distant. 

Accordingly,  I  incline  to  the  opinion 
that  the  social  problem  of  the  immedi- 
ate future  resolves  itself  into  the  main- 
tenance of  order,  and  order  is  only 
another  form  of  words  for  expressing 
the  notion  of  competent  sovereignty. 
But,  I  apprehend  that,  under  modern 
conditions,  no  sovereignty  can  be  com- 


petent, which  is  not  so  powerful  that 
all  private  interests,  great  and  small, 
shall  be  equal  before  it.  Privileged 
persons  must  cease  from  using  the 
functions  of  the  sovereign  for  the  pur- 
pose of  enriching  themselves. 

Furthermore,  it  is  clear  that,  if  so 
potent  a  sovereignty  is  to  be  created, 
it  must  be  administered  by  men  of  a 
very  different  type  from  that  which 
capitalists  have  selected  to  represent 
them  in  official  positions  for  at  least 
a  generation  back.  What  that  type 
shall  be  is  immaterial,  provided  it  be 
a  type  which  can  command  obedience. 
Personally,  I  shall  think  the  rising  gen- 
eration lucky  if  it  can  find  men  of 
the  type  of  Mr.  Roosevelt  to  protect 
it,  but,  if  capital  objects  to  Mr.  Roose- 
velt the  field  of  choice  is  open.  Capital 
has  only  to  produce  some  champion 
who  can  do  what  Mr.  Roosevelt  ap- 
pears to  be  able  to  do,  but  it  must  de- 
velop a  certain  minimum  of  energy  at 
its  peril.  So  much  promises  to  be  a 
mechanical  necessity. 

Nor  is  this  all.  I  take  it  that  a  pre- 
liminary concession  must  be  made. 
Before  Mr.  Roosevelt,  or  any  one  else, 
can  even  begin  the  work  of  construc- 
tion, the  ground  must  be  so  cleared 
that  construction  shall  be  possible,  and 
Mr.  Roosevelt's  political  instinct  never 
guided  him  more  truly  than  when  it  led 
him  to  lay  his  finger  upon  the  anoma- 
lous position  now  held  by  our  courts, 
as  the  most  vulnerable  spot  in  our 
social  system.  All  the  genius  of  Wash- 
ington and  Hamilton,  Jefferson  and 
Marshall,  singly  or  combined,  could 
they  live  again,  would  avail  nothing 
to  deal  with  a  condition  which  is  irre- 
concilable with  the  first  principles  of 
administration,  unless  we  are  to  sac- 
rifice the  fundamental  principle  of  or- 
der. I  have  conversed  with  few  intelli- 
gent foreigners,  who  have  observed 
our  institutions  attentively,  to  whom 
this  proposition  does  not  seem  self- 


CONSTANTINOPLE  IN  WAR-TIME 


443 


evident,  and  it  is  for  this  reason  that 
foreign  nations  have  been  indisposed 
to  adopt  our  system.  Many,  or  indeed 
probably  most,  conservative  Ameri- 
cans would  regard  this  thesis  which  I 
present  as  paradoxical,  but  I  am  dis- 


posed to  believe  that,  if  they  would 
but  cast  aside  prejudice  and  calmly 
examine  what  is  passing  before  their 
eyes  in  the  light  of  history  and  uni- 
versal experience,  they  would  modify 
their  opinion. 


CONSTANTINOPLE  IN  WAR-TIME 


BY  H.    G.   DWIGHT 


*  THE  hordes  of  Asia — '  That  phrase, 
fished  out  of  what  reminiscence  I  know 
not,  kept  running  in  my  head  as  the 
Anatolian  soldiers  poured  through  the 
city.  Where  did  they  all  come  from? 
Every  day,  for  three  weeks  and  more, 
the  crowded  transports  steamed  down 
the  Bosphorus,  sometimes  as  many  as 
seven  or  eight  a  day.  Opposite  each  vil- 
lage the  whistle  blew,  the  men  cheered, 
and  the  people  on  shore  waved  hand- 
kerchiefs and  flags.  When  the  trans- 
ports came  down  after  dark  it  was 
more  picturesque.  Bengal  lights  would 
answer  each  other  between  sea  and 
land,  and  the  cheering  filled  more 
of  the  silence.  It  somehow  sounded 
younger,  too.  And  it  insensibly  led 
one  into  sentimentalities  —  into  imag- 
inations of  young  wives  and  children, 
of  old  parents,  of  abandoned  fields,  of 
what  other  fields  in  Thrace  and  Mace- 
donia. 

The  hordes  from  the  Black  Sea  made 
no  more  than  their  distant  impression, 
perhaps  no  less  dramatic  for  being  so; 
and  for  them  Constantinople  can  have 
been  simply  a  fugitive  panorama  of 
cypresses  and  minarets  and  waving 


handkerchiefs.  They  passed  by,  with- 
out stopping,  to  the  ports  of  the  Sea  of 
Marmora. 

Other  hordes,  however,  poured  into 
the  city  so  fast  that  no  troop-train  or 
barracks  could  hold  them.  Hundreds, 
even  thousands  of  them  camped  every 
night  under  the  mosaics  of  St.  Sophia. 
At  first  they  all  wore  the  new  hay- 
colored  uniform  of  Young  Turkey. 
Then  older  reservists  began  to  appear 
in  the  dark-blue,  piped  with  red,  of 
Abdul  Hamid's  time.  Meanwhile,  con- 
scripts and  volunteers  of  all  ages  and 
types  and  costumes  filled  the  streets. 
It  took  a  more  experienced  eye  than 
mine,  generally,  to  pick  out  a  Greek  or 
an  Armenian  marching  to  war  for  the 
first  time  in  the  Turkish  ranks.  The 
fact  is,  that  a  Roumelian  or  seaboard 
Turk  looks  more  European  than  an 
Anatolian  Christian. 

Nevertheless,  the  diversity  of  the 
empire  was  made  sufficiently  manifest 
to  the  most  inexperienced  eye.  The 
Albanians  were  always  a  striking  note. 
Hundreds  of  them  flocked  back  from 
Roumania  in  their  white  skull-caps 
and  close-fitting  white  clothes  braided 
.  with  black.  They  are  leaner  and  often 
taller  than  the  Turks,  who  incline  to 


444 


CONSTANTINOPLE  IN  WAR-TIME 


be  thick-bodied;  fairer,  too,  as  a  rule, 
and  keener-eyed. 

Something  like  them  are  the  Laz 
from  the  region  of  Trebizond,  who  are 
slighter  and  darker  men,  but  no  less 
fierce.  They  have  the  name  of  being 
able  to  ride  farther  in  less  time  than 
any  other  tribe  of  Asia  Minor.  Their 
uniforms  were  a  khaki  adaptation  of 
their  tribal  dress  —  zouave  jackets, 
trousers  surprisingly  full  at  the  waist 
and  surprisingly  tight  about  the  leg, 
and  pointed  hoods  with  long  flaps 
knotted  into  a  sort  of  turban.  This 
comfortable  Laz  hood,  with  slight  vari- 
ations of  cut  and  color,  has  been  adopt- 
ed for  the  whole  army.  I  shall  always 
remember  it  as  a  sort  of  symbol  of  that 
winter  war. 

Certain  swarthy  individuals  from 
the  Persian  or  Russian  frontiers  also 
made  memorable  figures,  in  long,  black, 
hairy,  sleeveless  cloaks  and  tall  caps  of 
black  lamb's-wool  tied  about  with  some 
white  rag.  They  gave  one  the  impres- 
sion that  they  might  be  very  unpleas- 
ant customers  to  meet  on  a  dark  night. 
These  gentlemen,  none  the  less,  wore  in 
their  caps,  like  a  cockade,  what  might 
have  seemed  to  the  vulgar  a  paint- 
brush, but  was  in  reality  the  tooth- 
brush of  their  country.  Last  of  all 
the  Syrians  began  to  appear.  They 
were  very  noticeably  different  from  the 
broader,  flatter,  fairer  Anatolian  type. 
On  their  heads  they  wore  the  scarf  of 
their  people  bound  about  with  a  thick 
black  cord,  and  on  cold  days  some  of 
them  even  draped  a  bournous  over  their 
khaki. 

Just  such  soldiers  must  have  follow- 
ed Attila  and  Tamerlane  and  the  rov- 
ing horseman  who  founded  the  house 
of  Osman;  and  just  such  pack-animals 
as  trotted  across  Galata  Bridge,  balk- 
ing whenever  they  came  to  a  crack 
of  the  draw.  The  shaggy  ponies  all 
wore  a  blue  bead  or  two,  around 
their  necks  or  in  their  manes,  against 


the  Evil  Eye;  and  their  high  pack- 
saddles  were  decorated  with  beads  or 
small  shells  or  tufts  of  colored  worsted. 
Nor  can  the  songs  the  soldiers  sang 
have  changed  much,  I  imagine,  in  six 
hundred  years.  Not  that  many  of  them 
sang,  or  betrayed  their  martial  temper 
otherwise  than  by  the  dark  dignity  of 
bearing  common  to  all  men  of  the  East. 
It  was  strange,  to  a  Westerner,  to  see 
these  proud  and  powerful-looking  men 
stroll  about  hand  in  hand.  Yet  it  went 
with  the  mildness  and  simplicity  which 
are  as  characteristic  of  them  as  their 
fierceness.  One  of  them  showed  me 
a  shepherd's  pipe  in  his  cartridge- 
belt.  That  was  the  way  to  go  to  war, 
he  said,  —  as  to  a  wedding.  Another 
played  on  a  violin  as  he  marched,  a 
quaint  little  instrument  like  a  pochette 
or  mole  d'amour,  hanging  by  the  neck 
from  his  hand.  By  way  of  contrast,  I 
heard  a  regimental  band  march  one 
day  to  the  train  to  the  tune  of  *  Yankee 
Doodle.' 

At  the  train  no  more  emotion  was 
visible  than  in  the  streets.  The  only 
utterance  I  happened  to  catch  was 
from  an  old  body  who  watched  a  regi- 
ment march  into  the  station.  'Let 
them  cut!'  she  said,  half  to  herself  and 
half  to  those  about  her,  making  a  sig- 
nificant horizontal  movement  with  her 
hand.  'Let  them  cut!'  I  heard  of  an- 
other who  rebuked  a  girl  for  crying  on 
a  Bosphorus  steamer  after  seeing  off 
some  member  of  her  family.  'I  have 
sent  my  husband  and  my  son,'  she 
said.  'Let  them  go.  They  will  kill  the 
unbelievers.' 

I  presume  similar  sentiments  were 
often  enough  expressed  by  men.  Why 
not,  among  so  much  ignorance  and  at 
a  time  of  such  resentment  against  the 
unbeliever?  Yet  I  did  not  chance  to 
hear  anything  of  the  sort.  I  was  struck, 
on  the  contrary,  by  what  seemed  to  me 
a  distinctly  new  temper  in  Mohammed- 
ans. Nazim  Pasha  sounded  the  note  of 


CONSTANTINOPLE  IN  WAR-TIME 


445 


it  when  he  proclaimed  that  this  was  a 
political,  not  a  holy  war,  and  that  non- 
combatants  were  to  be  treated  with 
every  consideration.  If  the  proclama- 
tion was  addressed  partly  to  Europe, 
the  fact  remains  that  in  no  earlier  war 
would  a  Turkish  general  have  been 
capable  of  making  it.  It  may  be,  too, 
that  the  disdain  with  which  the  Turk 
started  out  to  fight  his  whilom  vassals 
helped  his  tolerance.  Nevertheless,  as 
I  somewhat  doubtfully  picked  my  way 
about  Stamboul,  the  sense  grew  in  me 
that  the  common  people  were,  at  last, 
capable  of  classifications  less  simple 
than  their  old  one  of  the  believing  and 
the  unbelieving. 

It  did  not  strike  me,  however,  that 
even  the  uncommon  people  had  much 
comprehension  of  the  causes  of  the  war. 
If  they  had  I  suppose  there  would  have 
been  no  war.  'We  have  no  peace  be- 
cause of  this  Roumelia,'  said  an  intel- 
ligent young  man  to  me.  'We  must 
fight.  If  I  die,  what  is  it?  My  son  at 
least  will  have  peace.'  Yet  there  was 
no  particular  enthusiasm,  save  such 
as  the  political  parties  manufactured. 
They  organized  a  few  picturesque  de- 
monstrations and  encouraged  roughs 
to  break  legation  windows.  But,  except 
for  the  soldiers,  — the  omnipresent,  the 
omnipassant  hordes  of  Asia,  —  an  out- 
sider might  never  have  guessed  that 
anything  unusual  was  in  the  air.  Least 
of  all  would  he  have  guessed  it  when 
he  heard  people  exclaim,  '  Mashallah! ' 
as  the  soldiers  went  by,  and  learned 
that  they  were  saying, '  What  God  does 
will!5  So  far  is  it  from  Turkish  nature 
to  make  a  display  of  feeling.  The  near- 
est approach  to  outward  enthusiasm 
I  saw  was  on  the  day  Montenegro  de- 
clared war.  Then  smiles  broke  out  on 
every  face  as  the  barefooted  newsboys 
ran  through  Stamboul  with  their  little 
extras.  And  the  commonest  phrase  I 
heard  that  afternoon  was,  'What  will 
be,  let  be.' 


ii 

Did  any  one  dream,  then,  what  was 
to  be?  One  might  have  known.  It  was 
not  a  question  of  courage  or  endurance. 
Nobody,  after  the  first  surprise,  doubt- 
ed that.  The  famous  hordes  of  Asia, 
—  they  were  indeed  just  such  soldiers 
as  followed  Attila  and  Tamerlane  and 
the  roving  horseman  who  founded  the 
house  of  Osman.  That  was  the  trouble 
with  them.  They  had  not  learned  that 
courage  and  endurance  are  not  enough 
for  modern  warfare.  All  Europeans 
who  have  had  dealings  with  the  Turk 
know  that  he  is  the  least  businesslike 
of  men.  He  is  constitutionally  averse 
to  order,  method,  discipline,  prompt- 
ness, responsibility.  Numbers  and  cal- 
culations are  beyond  him.  It  is  impos- 
sible to  imagine  him  as  a  banker,  a 
financier,  a  partner  in  any  enterprise 
requiring  initiative  or  the  higher  or- 
ganizing faculties.  He  simply  has  n't 
got  them  —  or,  at  all  events,  he  has 
never  developed  them.  Moreover,  there 
is  about  him  a  Hamlet-like  indecision, 
which  he  shares  with  the  rest  of  Asia. 
He  waits  until  he  is  forced,  and  then 
he  has  usually  waited  too  long  for  his 
own  interest. 

In  spite  of  so  many  straws  to  show 
how  the  wind  blew,  the  speed  with 
which  the  allies  succeeded  in  develop- 
ing their  campaign  must  have  surprised 
the  most  turcophobe  European.  As  for 
the  Turks  themselves,  they  have  al- 
ways had  a  fatalistic  —  a  fatal  —  be- 
lief that  they  will  one  day  quit  Europe. 
Many  times  before  and  after  the  deci- 
sive battles,  I  heard  the  question  utter- 
ed as  to  whether  the  destined  day  had 
come.  But  no  Turk  can  have  imagined 
that  his  army,  victorious  on  a  thousand 
fields,  would  be  smashed  to  pieces  at 
the  first  onslaught  of  an  enemy  inex- 
perienced in  war.  And  to  have  been 
beaten  by  the  serfs  of  yesterday !  But 
I,  for  one,  have  hardly  yet  the  heart 


446 


CONSTANTINOPLE  IN  WAR-TIME 


to  say  they  deserved  it.  I  remember 
too  well  the  face  of  a  Bey  in  civil  life 
whom  I  knew,  and  whom  two  weeks 
of  the  war  had  made  haggard  like  a 
disease,  and  the  look  with  which  he 
said,  when  I  expressed  regret  at  the 
passing  of  some  quaint  Turkish  cus- 
tom, 'Everything  passes  in  this  world.' 
I  quite  understood  the  Turkish  girls 
who  went  away  in  a  body  from  a  cer- 
tain international  school.  'We  cannot 
bear  the  Bulgarians/  they  said.  'They 
look  at  us  — '  One  did  not  care,  in 
those  days,  to  meet  one's  Turkish 
friends.  It  was  like  intruding  into  a 
house  of  death.  In  this  house  of  death, 
however,  something  more  than  life  had 
been  lost.  And  I  pay  my  tribute  to  the 
dignity  with  which  that  great  humilia- 
tion was  borne. 

I  stood  one  day  at  a  club  window 
watching  a  regiment  march  through 
Pera.  Two  Turkish  members  stood  near 
me.  'Fine-looking  men!'  exclaimed 
one  —  and  he  was  right.  'How  could 
soldiers  like  that  have  run  away?' 
The  other  considered  a  moment.  'If 
we  had  not  announced,'  he  said,  'that 
this  was  not 'a  holy  war,  you  would 
have  seen!'  I  am  inclined  to  believe 
there  was  something  in  his  opinion. 
At  the  time,  however,  it  reminded  me 
of  the  young  man  who  complained  that 
Roumelia  gave  the  Turks  no  peace. 
They  were  no  quicker  to  understand 
the  causes  of  their  defeat  than  they 
had  been  to  understand  the  causes  of 
the  war. 

Not  long  afterwards,  I  spent  an  even- 
ing with  some  humble  Albanians  of  my 
acquaintance.  Being  in  a  way  foreign- 
ers, like  myself,  they  could  speak  with 
more  detachment  of  what  had  hap- 
pened, although  there  was  no  doubt  as 
to  their  loyalty  to  the  empire.  They 
asked  my  views  as  to  the  reason  of  the 
disaster.  I  tried,  in  very  halting  Turk- 
ish, to  explain  how  the  Turk  had  been 
distanced  in  the  art  of  war  and  many 


other  arts,  and  how  war  no  longer  re- 
quired courage  alone,  but  other  quali- 
ties which  the  Turk  does  not  seem  to 
possess.  I  evidently  failed  to  make  my 
idea  intelligible.  Having  listened  with 
the  utmost  politeness,  my  auditors  pro- 
ceeded to  give  me  their  own  view  of  the 
case. 

The  one  who  presented  it  most  elo- 
quently had  been  himself  a  soldier  in 
the  Turkish  army.  It  was  under  the 
old  regime,  too,  when  men  served  seven 
and  nine  years.  He  attributed  the 
universal  rout  of  the  Turks  not  to  the 
incompetence,  but  to  the  cupidity, 
of  their  officers.  He  believed  like  his 
companions,  and  I  doubt  if  anything 
will  ever  shake  their  belief,  that  the 
officers,  from  Nazim  Pasha  down,  had 
been  bribed  by  the  allies.  What  other 
possible  explanation  could  there  be  of 
the  fact  that  soldiers  starved  amid  plen- 
ty, and  that  Mohammedans  —  saving 
my  presence!  —  ran  from  Christians? 
As  for  the  European  ingenuities  that  I 
made  so  much  of,  the  ships,  the  guns, 
the  railroads,  the  telephones,  the  auto- 
mobiles, the  aeroplanes,  why  should  the 
Turks  break  their  heads  learning  to 
make  them  when  they  could  buy  them 
ready-made  from  Europe?  After  all, 
what  you  need  in  war  is  a  heart,  and 
not  to  be  afraid  to  die.  My  Albanian 
then  went  on  to  criticize,  none  too 
kindly,  the  Young  Turk  officer.  In  his 
day,  he  said,  most  of  the  officers  rose 
from  the  ranks.  They  had  been  sol- 
diers themselves,  they  understood  the 
soldiers,  and  they  could  bear  hardship 
like  soldiers.  The  Young  Turks,  how- 
ever, had  changed  all  that.  The  ranked 
officers  had  been  removed  to  make 
room  for  young  mekteblis,  schoolmen, 
who  knew  nothing  of  their  men  or  of 
war.  They  knew  how  to  wear  a  collar 
perhaps,  or  how  to  turn  up  their  mous- 
taches d  la  Guillaume*  but  not  how  to 
sleep  on  the  ground;  and  when  the 
Bulgarians  fired  they  ran  away. 


CONSTANTINOPLE  IN  WAR-TIME 


447 


in 

The  crowning  bitterness  was  the 
attitude  of  Europe.  In  the  beginning 
Europe  had  loudly  announced  that  she 
would  tolerate  no  change  in  the  status 
quo.  How  then  did  Europe  come  to 
acquiesce  so  quickly  in  the  accom- 
plished fact?  Why  did  Germany,  the 
friend  of  Abdul  Hamid,  and  England, 
the  friend  of  Kiamil  Pasha,  and  France, 
the  friend  of  everybody,  raise  no  fin- 
ger to  help?  I  am  not  the  one  to  sug- 
gest that  Europe  should  have  done 
otherwise.  There  is  a  logic  of  events 
which  sometimes  breaks  through  di- 
plomatic twaddle  —  a  just  logic,  draw- 
ing into  a  common  destiny  those  who 
share  common  traditions  and  speak  a 
common  tongue.  I  make  no  doubt  that 
Austria-Hungary,  to  mention  only  one 
example,  will  one  day  prove  it  to  her 
cost.  Nevertheless,  I  am  able  to  see 
that  there  is  a  Turkish  point  of  view, 
and  that  it  must  seem  very  hard,  hav- 
ing been  helped  so  often,  not  to  be 
helped  once  more. 

I  remember,  apropos  of  that  point  of 
view,  an  old  lady  who  watched  a  cheer- 
ing transport  steam  down  the  Bos- 
phorus.  Long  after  the  armistice  had 
been  signed  they  continued  to  bring 
their  hordes. 

*  Poor  things !  Poor  things ! '  exclaim- 
ed my  old  lady.  'The  lions!  You 
would  think  they  were  going  to  a  wed- 
ding!' And  then  turning  to  me  she 
asked,  'Can  you  tell  me,  Effendim, 
why  it  is  that  all  Europe  is  against  us? 
Have  we  done  no  good  in  six  hundred 
years?' 

It  was  a  very  profound  question  the 
old  lady  asked  me.  I  made  no  pretense 
of  answering  it  then,  nor  can  I  hope  to 
answer  it  now.  Yet  it  has  remained  in- 
sistently in  the  back  of  my  mind  ever 
since.  I  might,  to  be  sure,  have  said 
what  so  many  other  people  are  say- 
ing:— 


'Madam,  most  certainly  you  have 
done  no  good  in  six  hundred  years.  It 
is  solely  because  of  the  evil  you  have 
done  that  you  enjoy  any  renown  in  the 
world.  You  have  done  nothing  but 
burn,  pillage,  massacre,  defile,  and  de- 
stroy. Your  horsemen  have  stamped 
out  civilization  wherever  they  have 
trod,  and  what  you  were  in  the  begin- 
ning you  are  now.  Your  conqueror,  the 
Bulgarian,  has  advanced  more  in  one 
generation  than  you  have  in  twenty. 
You  still  cling  to  the  forms  of  a  bloody 
and  barbaric  religion,  but  for  what  it 
teaches  of  truth  and  humanity  you 
have  no  ear.  You  make  one  justice  for 
yourself,  and  one  for  the  owner  of  the 
land  you  have  robbed.  Your  word  has 
become  a  by -word  among  the  nations. 
And  you  are  too  proud  or  too  lazy  to 
learn.  You  fear  and  try  to  imitate  the 
West;  but  of  the  toil,  the  patience,  the 
thoroughness,  the  perseverance,  that 
are  the  secret  of  the  West,  you  have  no 
inkling.  You  will  not  work  yourself, 
and  you  will  not  let_pthers  work  —  un- 
less for  your  pocket.  You  have  no  in- 
dustry, no  science,  no  art,  no  literature 
worth  the  name.  You  are  incapable  of 
building  a  road  or  a  ship.  You  take 
everything  from  others  —  only  to  spoil 
it,  like  those  territories  where  you  are 
now  at  war,  like  this  city  which  was 
once  the  glory  of  the  world.  You  have 
no  shadow  of  right  to  this  city  or  to 
those  territories.  The  graves  of  your 
ancestors  are  not  there.  You  took 
them  by  the  sword  and  you  have  slow- 
ly ruined  them,  like  everything  else 
that  comes  into  your  hand.  It  is  only 
just  that  you  should  lose  them  by  the 
sword.  For  your  sword  was  the  one 
thing  you  knew  how  to  use,  and  now 
even  that  has  rusted  in  your  hand. 
You  are  rotten  through  and  through. 
That  is  why  Europe  is  against  you.  Go 
back  to  your  tents  in  Asia  and  see  if 
you  will  be  capable  of  learning  some- 
thing in  another  six  hundred  years.' 


448 


CONSTANTINOPLE  IN  WAR-TIME 


So  might  I  have  answered  my  old 
lady  —  had  my  Turkish  been  good 
enough.  But  I  should  scarcely  have 
convinced  her.  Nor  should  I  quite  have 
convinced  myself.  For  while  it  is  a 
simple  and  often  very  refreshing  dis- 
posal of  a  man  to  damn  him  up  and 
down,  it  is  not  one  which  really  dis- 
poses of  him.  He  still  remains  there, 
solid  and  unexplained.  So  while  my 
reason  tells  me  how  incompetent  a  man 
the  Turk  is  from  most  Western  points 
of  view,  it  reminds  me  that  other  men 
have  been  incompetent  as  well,  and 
even  subject  to  violent  inconsistencies 
of  character;  that  this  man  is  a  being  in 
evolution  with  reasons  for  becoming 
what  he  is,  to  whom  Dame  Nature  may 
not  have  given  her  last  touch. 

In  this  liberal  disposition  my  reason 
is  no  doubt  quickened,  I  must  confess, 
by  the  fact  that  I  am  at  heart  a  friend 
of  the  Turk.  It  may  be  merely  associa- 
tion. I  have  known  him  many  years. 
But  there  is  about  him  something 
which  I  cannot  help  liking  —  a  simpli- 
city, a  manliness,  a  dignity.  I  like  his 
fondness  for  water,  and  flowers,  and 
green  meadows,  and  spreading  trees.  I 
like  his  love  of  children.  I  like  his  per- 
fect manners.  I  like  his  sobriety.  I  like 
his  patience.  I  like  the  way  he  faces 
death.  One  of  the  things  I  like  most 
about  him  is  what  has  been  most  his 
undoing  —  his  lack  of  any  commercial 
instinct.  I  like,  too,  what  no  one  has 
much  noticed,  the  artistic  side  of  him. 
I  do  not  know  Turkish  enough  to  ap- 
preciate his  literature,  and  his  religion 
forbids  him  —  or  he  imagines  it  does 
—  to  engage  in  the  plastic  arts.  But  in 
architecture  and  certain  forms  of  de- 
coration he  has  created  a  school  of  his 
own.  It  is  not  only  that  the  Turkish 
quarter  of  any  Anatolian  town  is  more 
picturesque  than  the  others;  the  old 
palace  of  the  Sultans  in  Constantino- 
ple, certain  old  houses  I  have  seen, 
the  mosques,  the  theological  schools, 


the  tombs,  the  fountains,  of  the  Turks, 
are  an  achievement  which  deserves  a 
more  serious  study  than  has  been  given 
it.  You  may  tell  me  that  these  things 
are  not  Turkish,  because  they  were 
modeled  after  Byzantine  originals  or 
because  Greeks  and  Persians  had  much 
to  do  with  building  them.  But  I  shall 
answer  that  every  architecture  was  de- 
rived from  another,  in  days  not  so  near 
our  own,  and  that,  after  all,  it  was  the 
Turk  who  created  the  opportunity  for 
the  foreign  artist  and  ordered  what  he 
wanted. 

I  have,  therefore,  as  little  patience 
as  possible  with  the  Gladstonian  view 
of  the  unspeakable  Turk.  When  war 
ceases,  when  murders  take  place  no 
more  in  happier  lands,  when  the  last 
riot  is  quelled,  and  the  last  Negro 
lynched,  it  will  be  time  to  discuss 
whether  the  Turk  is  by  nature  more  or 
less  bloody  than  other  men.  In  the 
meantime  I  beg  to  point  out  that  he  is, 
as  a  matter  of  fact,  the  most  peaceable, 
with  the  possible  exception  of  the 
Armenian,  of  the  various  tribes  of  his 
empire.  Kurd,  Laz,  Arab,  and  Alban- 
ian, are  all  quicker  with  their  blades. 
To  his  more  positive  qualities,  I  am  by 
no  means  alone  in  testifying.  If  I  had 
time  for  chapter  and  verse  I  might 
quote  foreign  officers  in  the  Turkish 
service  and  a  whole  literature  of  travel 
—  to  which  Pierre  Loti  has  contribu- 
ted his  share.  But  I  admit  that  this 
is  a  matter  in  which  Pierre  Loti  may  be 
as  unsafe  a  guide  as  Mr.  Gladstone. 
Neither  leads  one  any  nearer  to  under- 
standing the  strange  case  of  the  Turk: 
why,  individually  so  honest,  he  is  cor- 
porately  so  corrupt ;  why  some  strange 
infection  seizes  him  as  soon  as  he  be- 
gins to  rise  in  the  world;  why  he  can 
never  keep  a  thing  going;  what  it  is 
that  apparently  makes  him  incapable 
of  what  we  glibly  call  progress. 

To  understand  him  at  all,  I  think, 
one  needs  to  take  a  long  view  of  history. 


CONSTANTINOPLE   IN  WAR-TIME 


449 


For  some  reason  the  Turk  has  lagged 
in  his  development.  He  is  to  all  intents 
and  purposes  a  mediaeval  man.  And  it 
is  not  fair  to  judge  him  by  the  stand- 
ards of  the  twentieth  century. 

It  would  be  rather  strange,  and  the 
world  would  be  much  poorer  than  it  is, 
if  humanity  had  marched  from  the  be- 
ginning in  a  single  phalanx  —  if  the 
world  had  been  one  great  India,  or  one 
great  Egypt,  or  one  great  Greece.  The 
Turk,  then,  as  I  have  no  need  of  insist- 
ing, is  a  mediaeval  man.  And  one  rea- 
son why  he  is  so  must  be  that  he  has  a 
much  shorter  heritage  of  civilization 
than  the  countries  of  the  West.  He  is  a 
new  man,  as  well  as  a  mediaeval  one. 
In  Europe  and  in  Asia  alike,  he  is  a 
parvenu,  who  came  on  the  scene  long 
after  every  one  else.  It  is  only  verbally 
that  the  American  is  a  newer  man,  for 
in  the  thirteenth  century,  when  the 
warlike  Turkish  nomads  first  began 
to  make  themselves  known,  the  differ- 
ent states  which  have  contributed  to 
form  America  were  already  well  estab- 
lished, while  India,  China,  and  Japan 
had  long  before  reached  a  high  degree 
of  civilization. 

It  seems  to  me  that  this  fact  may  well 
account  for  much  of  the  backwardness 
of  the  Turk.  He  has  a  much  thinner 
deposit  of  heredity  in  his  brain-cells. 
It  is  conceivable,  too,  that  another 
matter  of  heredity  may  enter  into  it. 
Whether  civil  life  originated  in  Asia  or 
not,  it  is  certain  that,  of  existing  civ- 
ilizations, the  Oriental  are  older  than 
the  Occidental.  Perhaps,  therefore,  the 
Asiatic  formed  the  habit  of  pride  and 
self-sufficiency.  Then,  as  successive 
tides  of  emigration  rolled  away,  Asia 
was  gradually  drained  of  everything 
that  was  not  the  fine  flower  of  conserv- 
atism. He  who  believed  that  whatever 
is  is  best,  stayed  at  home.  The  others 
went  in  search  of  new  worlds,  and  found 
them  not  only  in  the  field  of  empire, 
but  in  those  of  science  and  art.  This 

VOL.  Ill  -  NO,  4 


continual  skimming  of  the  adventur- 
ous element  can  only  have  confirmed 
Asia  in  the  habit  of  mind  so  perfectly 
expressed  by  the  Book  of  Ecclesiastes. 
And  the  Turk,  who  was  one  of  the  last 
adventurers  to  emerge  from  Asia,  im- 
pelled by  what  obscure  causes  we  know 
not,  must  have  a  profound  racial  bent 
toward  the  belief  that  everything  is 
vanity  and  vexation  of  spirit.  He  asks 
himself  what  is  the  use,  and  lets  life 
slip  by. 

Many  people  have  held  that  there 
is  something  in  Islam  which  automat- 
ically arrests  the  development  of  those 
who  profess  it.  I  cannot  think,  myself, 
that  this  thesis  has  been  sufficiently 
proved.  While  no  one  can  deny  that 
religion,  and  particularly  that  Islam,  is 
a  great  cohesive  force,  it  seems  to  me 
that  people  make  religions,  not  that 
religions  make  people.  The  principles 
at  the  root  of  all  aspiring  life  —  call  it 
moral,  ethical,  or  religious,  as  you  will 
—  exist  in  every  religion.  And  organ- 
ized religion  has  everywhere  been  re- 
sponsible for  much  of  the  fanaticism 
and  disorder  of  the  world.  For  the 
rest,  I  find  much  in  Mohammedanism 
to  admire.  There  is  a  nobility  in  its 
stern  monotheism,  disdaining  every 
semblance  of  trinitarian  subtleties.  Its 
daily  services  impress  me  as  being  a 
simpler  and  more  dignified  expression 
of  worship  than  our  self-conscious  Sun- 
day mornings  with  their  rustling  pews 
and  operatic  choirs.  Then  the  demo- 
cracy of  Islam  and  much  of  what  it  in- 
culcates with  regard  to  family  and  civil 
life  are  worthy  of  all  respect,  to  say 
nothing  of  the  hygienic  principles 
which  it  succeeded  in  impressing  at  a 
very  early  stage  upon  a  primitive  peo- 
ple. At  the  same  time  there  can  be 
no  doubt  that  Mohammedanism  suffers 
from  the  fact  that  it  was  designed,  all 
too  definitely,  for  a  primitive  people. 
Men  at  a  higher  stage  of  evolution  than 
were  the  Arabs  of  the  seventh  century 


450 


CONSTANTINOPLE  IN  WAR-TIME 


require  no  religious  sanctions  to  keep 
themselves  clean.  For  them  the  social 
system  of  Islam,  with  its  degrading 
estimate  of  woman,  is  distinctly  anti- 
social. And  many  of  them  must  find 
the  Prophet's  persuasions  to  the  future 
life  a  little  vulgar. 

The  question  is,  whether  they  will  be 
able  to  modernize  Islam.  It  will  be 
harder  than  modernizing  Christianity, 
for  the  reason  that  Islam  is  a  far 
minuter  system.  Is  there  not  some- 
thing moving  in  the  spectacle  of  a 
people  committed  to  an  order  which 
can  never  prevail?  Even  for  this  one 
little  ironic  circumstance  it  can  never 
prevail,  in  our  hurrying  modern  world, 
because  it  takes  too  much  time  to  be 
a  good  Mohammedan.  But  the  whole 
order  is  based  on  a  conception  which 
the  modern  world  does  not  admit.  The 
word  Islam  means  resignation,  submis- 
sion to  the  will  of  God.  And  there  can 
be  no  doubt  that  the  mind  of  Islam  is 
saturated  with  that  spirit.  Why  does 
one  man  succeed  and  another  fail?  It 
is  the  will  of  God.  Why  do  some  re- 
cover from  illness  and  others  die?  It  is 
the  will  of  God.  Why  do  empires  rise 
and  fall?  It  is  the  will  of  God.  Any 
man  who  literally  believes  such  a  doc- 
trine is  lost. 

It  would  be  an  interesting  experi- 
ment to  see  what  two  generations,  say, 
of  education  might  do  for  the  Turks. 
By  education  I  mean  no  more  than  the 
three  Rs,  enough  history  and  geogra- 
phy to  know  that  Turkey  is  neither  the 
largest  nor  the  most  ancient  empire  in 
the  world,  and  some  fundamental  sci- 
entific notions.  It  is  incredible  how 
large  a  proportion  of  Turks  are  illiter- 
ate, and  what  fantastic  views  of  the 
world  and  their  place  in  it  the  common 
people  hold.  To  nothing  more  than 
this  ignorance  must  be  laid  a  great  part 
of  Turkey's  troubles.  But  another  part 
is  due  to  the  character  of  the  empire 
which  it  befell  the  Turk  to  conquer.  If 


he  had  happened,  like  ourselves,  into  a 
remote  and  practically  empty  land,  he 
might  have  developed  a  civilization  of 
his  own.  Or  if  he  had  conquered  a 
country  inhabited  by  a  single  race,  he 
would  have  had  a  better  chance.  Or  if, 
again,  he  had  appeared  on  the  scene  a 
few  centuries  earlier,  before  Europe  had 
had  time  to  get  so  far  ahead  of  him, 
and  before  an  increasing  ease  of  com- 
munication made  it  increasingly  diffi- 
cult for  one  race  to  absorb  another,  he 
might  have  succeeded  in  assimilating 
the  different  peoples  that  came  under 
his  sway. 

Why  the  conquerors  did  not  ex- 
terminate or  forcibly  convert  the  con- 
quered Christians  has  always  been  a 
question  with  me.  It  may  have  been  a 
real  humanity  on  the  part  of  the  early 
sultans,  who  without  doubt  were  re- 
markable men,  and  perhaps  wished 
their  own  wild  followers  to  acquire  the 
culture  of  the  Greeks.  Or  it  may  have 
been  a  politic  deference  to  new  Eu- 
ropean neighbors.  In  any  case,  I  am 
inclined  to  believe  that  it  was,  from  the 
Turkish  point  of  view,  a  mistake.  For 
the  Turk  has  never  been  able  to  com- 
plete his  conquest.  On  the  contrary, 
by  recognizing  the  religious  independ- 
ence of  his  subjects,  he  gave  them  wea- 
pons to  win  their  political  independ- 
ence. And  beset  by  enemies,  within 
and  without,  he  has  never  had  time  to 
learn  the  lessons  of  peace.  More  than 
that,  he  has  never  been  made  to  feel 
their  need.  He  walked  into  a  ready- 
made  empire.  He  consequently  pro- 
ceeded to  enjoy  a  ready-made  great- 
ness. It  happened  that  the  strategic 
position  of  the  empire  maintained  the 
illusion.  He  has  rarely  had  to  stand  or 
fall  by  the  consequences  of  his  own 
acts.  For  the  past  hundred  years  the 
greatness  of  the  Turkish  Empire  has 
been  more  than  ever  a  fiction,  main- 
tained solely  by  the  jealousies  of  covet- 
ous neighbors.  If  England,  if  France, 


CONSTANTINOPLE  IN  WAR-TIME 


451 


if  Germany,  were  to  be  left  to-morrow 
without  a  bayonet  or  a  battleship,  they 
would  still  be  great  powers,  by  the 
greatness  of  their  economic,  their  in- 
tellectual, their  artistic  life.  But  Tur- 
key has  no  other  greatness  than  can  be 
measured  by  bayonets  and  kilometres. 
The  Turk  has  played  the  role  of  a  great 
power  without  the  ability  to  govern 
one  village.  Forever  protected  against 
the  consequences  of  his  own  folly,  how 
should  he  learn  to  govern  a  village?  He 
has  not  stood  on  his  own  feet.  But 
now,  stripped  of  his  most  distant  and 
most  disparate  provinces,  enlightened 
by  humiliation  as  to  the  real  quality  of 
his  greatness,  he  may,  perhaps,  if  it  is 
not  too  late,  begin  at  last  to  live  and 
learn. 

IV 

After  the  hordes  of  Asia  that  went  so 
proudly  away,  it  was  a  very  different 
horde  that  began  very  soon  to  trickle 
back.  No  bands  accompanied  them 
this  time,  and  if  any  of  them  had  violins 
or  shepherds'  pipes  they  lost  them  in 
the  fields  of  Thrace.  It  was  pitiful  to 
see  how  silently,  how  almost  secretly, 
those  broken  men  came  back.  One 
would  occasionally  meet  companies  of 
them  on  the  bridge  or  in  the  vicinity  of 
a  barracks,  in  their  gray  ulsters  and 
pointed  gray  hoods,  shuffling  along  so 
muddy,  so  ragged,  so  shoeless,  so 
gaunt  and  bowed,  that  it  was  impos- 
sible to  believe  they  were  the  same 
men.  Most  of  them,  however,  came  in 
the  night.  Two  or  three  pictures  are 
stamped  in  my  memory  as  character- 
istic of  those  melancholy  times.  The 
first  I  happened  to  see  when  I  moved 
into  town  for  the  winter,  a  few  days 
after  Kirk  Kilisse.  When  I  landed  at 
dusk  from'a  Bosphorus  steamer,  with 
more  luggage  than  would  be  conven- 
ient to  carry,  I  found  to  my  relief  that 
the  vicinity  of  the  wharf  was  crowded 
with  cabs  —  scores  of  them.  But  not 


one  would  take  a  fare.  They  had  all 
been  commandeered  for  ambulance- 
service.  Near  the  first  ones  stood  a 
group  of  women,  Turkish  and  Christ- 
ian, silently  waiting.  Some  of  them 
were  crying.  Another  time,  coming 
home  late  from  a  dinner  party,  I  passed 
a  barracks  which  had  been  turned  into 
a  hospital.  At  the  entrance  stood  a 
quantity  of  cabs,  all  full  of  hooded  fig- 
ures that  were  strangely  silent  and 
strangely  lax  in  their  attitudes.  No 
such  thing  as  a  stretcher  was  visible. 
Up  the  long  flight  of  stone  steps  two 
soldiers  were  helping  a  third.  His  arms 
were  on  their  shoulders  and  each  of 
them  had  an  arm  about  him.  One  foot 
he  could  not  use.  In  the  flare  of  a  gas- 
jet  at  the  top  of  the  steps  a  sentry  stood 
in  his  big  gray  coat,  watching.  The 
three  slowly  made  their  way  to  him 
and  disappeared  within  the  doorway. 

After  Lule  Burgas  there  was  scarce- 
ly a  barracks,  or  a  guard-house,  or  a 
mosque,  or  a  school,  or  a  club,  or  an 
empty  house,  that  was  not  turned  into 
an  impromptu  hospital. 

In  the  face  of  so  great  an  emergency, 
every  one,  Mohammedan  or  Christian, 
native  or  foreigner,  took  some  part  in 
relief  work.  A  number  of  Turkish  la- 
dies of  high  rank  and  the  wives  of  the 
ambassadors  had  already  organized 
sewing-circles.  Madame  Bompard,  I 
believe,  the  French  ambassadress,  was 
the  first  to  call  the  ladies  of  her  colony 
together  to  work  for  the  wounded. 
Mrs.  Rockhill  gave  up  her  passage  for 
America  in  order  to  lend  her  services. 
Although  our  embassy  is  much  smaller 
than  the  others,  a  room  was  found  for 
a  workshop,  a  sailor  from  the  dispatch 
boat  Scorpion  cut  out,  after  models 
furnished  by  the  Turkish  hospitals, 
and  the  Singer  Company  lent  sewing- 
machines  to  any,  indeed,  who  wanted 
them  for  this  humanitarian  use.  Amer- 
ica had  a  further  share  in  these  opera- 
tions in  that  the  coarse  cotton  used  in 


452 


CONSTANTINOPLE  IN  WAR-TIME 


most  of  the  work  is  known  in  this  part 
of  the  world  as  American  cloth.  And 
shall  I  add  that  the  wives  of  the  Brit- 
ish ambassador  and  of  the  Belgian 
and  Swedish  ministers  are  Americans? 
Lady  Lowther  organized  activities  of 
another  but  no  less  useful  kind,  to  pro- 
vide for  the  families  of  poor  soldiers 
and  for  the  refugees.  In  the  German 
embassy  a  full-fledged  hospital  was  in- 
stalled by  order  of  the  Emperor.  At 
the  same  time  courses  in  bandaging  and 
nursing  were  opened  in  various  Turk- 
ish and  European  hospitals.  And  Red 
Cross  missions  came  from  abroad  in 
such  numbers  that  after  the  first  rush 
of  wounded  was  over  it  became  a  ques- 
tion to  know  what  to  do  with  the  Red 
Cross. 

There  is  also  a  Turkish  humane  so- 
ciety, which  is  really  the  same  as  the 
Red  Cross,  but  which  the  Turks,  more 
umbrageous  than  the  Japanese  with  re- 
gard to  the  Christian  symbol,  call  the 
Red  Crescent.  Foreign  doctors  and 
orderlies  wore  the  Turkish  device  on 
their  caps  or  sleeves,  and  at  first  a 
small  red  crescent  was  embroidered,  by 
request,  on  every  one  of  the  thousands 
of  pieces  of  hospital  linen  contributed 
by  foreigners.  It  is  a  pity  that  a  work 
so  purely  humanitarian  should  in  so 
unimportant  a  detail  as  a  name  arouse 
the  latent  hostility  between  two  reli- 
gious systems.  Is  it  too  late  to  suggest 
that  some  badge  be  devised  which  will 
be  equally  acceptable  to  all  the  races 
and  religions  of  the  world?  To  this 
wholly  unnecessary  cause  must  be  at- 
tributed much  of  the  friction  that  took 
place  between  the  two  organizations. 
But  I  think  it  was  only  in  irresponsible 
quarters  that  the  Red  Cross  symbol 
was  misunderstood.  At  a  dinner  given 
by  the  Prefect  of  Constantinople,  in 
honor  of  the  visiting  missions,  it  was  an 
interesting  thing,  for  Turkey,  to  see  the 
hall  decorated  with  alternate  crescents 
and  crosses. 


This  relief  work  marked  a  date  in 
Turkish  feminism,  in  that  Turkish  wo- 
men, for  the  first  time,  acted  as  nurses 
in  hospitals.  They  covered  their  hair, 
as  our  own  Scripture  recommends  that 
a  woman  should  do,  but  they  went  un- 
veiled. Women  also  served  in  humbler 
capacities,  and  something  like  organ- 
ized work  was  done  by  them  in  the  way 
of  preparing  supplies  for  the  sick.  A 
lady  who  attended  nursing  lectures  at 
a  hospital  in  Stamboul  told  me  that  her 
companions,  many  of  whom  were  of 
the  lower  classes,  went  to  the  hospital 
as  they  would  to  the  public  bath,  with 
food  for  the  day  tied  up  in  a  painted 
handkerchief.  There  they  squatted  on 
the  floor  and  smoked  as  they  sewed,  re- 
senting it  a  little  when  a  German  nurse 
in  charge  suggested  more  stitches  and 
fewer  cigarettes. 

The  barracks  and  guard-houses  al- 
lotted to  some  of  the  missions  were 
augean  stables  which  required  hercu- 
lean efforts  to  clean  them  out.  It  was 
the  more  curiously  characteristic  be- 
cause even  the  lower-class  Turk  is  al- 
ways cleanly.  His  ritual  ablutions  make 
him  more  agreeable  at  close  quarters 
than  Europeans  of  the  same  degree.  I 
have  one  infallible  way  of  picking  out 
Christian  from  Turkish  soldiers  —  by 
their  nails.  The  Turk's  are  sure  to  be 
clean.  And  in  his  house  he  has  certain 
delicacies  undreamed  of  by  us.  He  will 
not  wear  his  street  shoes  indoors.  He 
will  not  eat  without  washing  his  hands 
before  and  after  the  meal.  He  considers 
it  unclean,  as  after  all  it  is,  to  wash  his 
hands  or  his  body  in  standing  water. 
Yet  vermin  he  regards  as  a  necessary 
evil,  while  corporate  cleanliness,  like 
anything  else  requiring  organization 
and  perseverance,  seems  to  be  entirely 
beyond  him. 

Of  the  Turk,  as  patient,  I  heard  no- 
thing but  praise.  I  take  the  more  plea- 
sure in  saying  it  because  I  have  hinted 
that,  in  other  capacities,  the  Turk  does 


CONSTANTINOPLE  IN  WAR-TIME 


453 


not  always  strike  a  foreign  critic  as 
perfect.  I  had  it  again  and  again,  from 
one  source  after  another,  that  the  sol- 
diers made  perfect  patients,  docile  and 
uncomplaining,  in  many  ways  like 
great  children,  but  touchingly  grateful 
for  what  was  done  for  them.  It  has  be- 
come quite  a  habit  for  one  of  them  who 
can  write  to  send  a  letter  to  the  Turkish 
papers  in  the  name  of  his  ward,  express- 
ing thanks  to  the  doctors  and  nurses.  It 
must  be  a  new  and  strange  thing  for 
most  of  the  men  to  have  women  not  of 
their  families  caring  for  them.  They 
take  a  natural  interest  in  their  nurses, 
expressing  a  particular  curiosity  with 
regard  to  their  6tat  civil,  and  wishing 
them  young,  rich,  and  handsome  hus- 
bands when  they  do  not  happen  to  be 
already  provided  with  such.  But  I 
have  heard  of  no  case  of  rudeness  that 
could  not  be  explained  by  the  patient's 
condition.  On  the  contrary,  an  Eng- 
lish nurse  told  me  that  she  found  an 
innate  dignity  and  fineness  about  the 
men  which  she  would  never  expect 
from  the  same  class  of  patients  in  her 
own  country. 

I  am  not  very  fond  of  going  to  stare 
at  sick  people,  but  I  happened  for  one 
reason  or  another  to  visit  several  hos- 
pitals, and  I  brought  away  my  own  very 
distinct,  if  very  hasty,  impressions.  I 
remember  most  vividly  a  hospital  in- 
s.talled  in  a  building  which,  in  times  of 
peace,  is  an  art  school.  Opposite  the 
door  of  one  ward,  by  an  irony  of  which 
the  soldiers  in  the  beds  could  hardly  be 
aware,  stood  a  Winged  Victory  of  Sam- 
othrace.  Samothrace  itself  had  a  few 
days  before  been  taken  by  the  Greeks. 
The  Victory  was  veiled,  partly,  I  sup- 
pose, to  keep  her  clean,  and  partly  out 
of  deference  to  Mohammedan  suscepti- 
bilities ;  but  there  she  stood,  muffled  and 
mutilated,  above  the  beds  of  thirty  or 
forty  broken  men  of  Asia.  I  shall  always 
remember  the  look  in  their  eyes,  mute 


and  humble  and  grateful  and  uncom- 
prehending, as  we  passed  from  bed  to 
bed  giving  them  sweets  and  cigarettes. 
The  heads  that  showed  above  the  thick 
colored  quilts  were  covered  with  white 
skull-caps,  for  an  Oriental  cannot  live 
without  something  on  his  head.  It  is  a 
point  both  of  etiquette  and  of  religion. 

Those  who  were  further  on  the  way 
to  recovery  prowled  mildly  about  in 
baggy  white  pajamas  and  quilted  coats 
of  more  color  than  length.  They  had 
an  admirable  indifference  as  to  who 
saw  them.  A  great  many  had  a  left 
hand  tied  up  in  a  sling  —  a  hand,  I 
suppose,  which  some  Bulgarian  had 
seen  sticking,  with  a  gun-barrel,  out  of 
a  trench  in  Thrace.  Some  limped  pain- 
fully or  went  on  crutches.  But  it  was 
not  often  because  of  a  bullet.  There 
have  been  a  vast  number  of  cases  of 
gangrene,  simply  from  ill-fitting  shoes 
or  from  putties  too  tightly  bound, 
which  hands  were  too  weak  or  too 
numb  to  undo.  There  have  been  fewer 
resulting  amputations  than  would  be 
the  case  in  other  countries.  Not  a  few 
of  the  soldiers  refused  to  have  their 
legs  cut  off.  Life  would  be  of  no  further 
use  to  them,  they  said.  I  heard  of  one 
who  would  not  go  maimed  into  the  pre- 
sence of  Allah.  He  preferred  to  die. 
And  he  did,  without  a  word,  without  a 
groan,  waiting  silently  till  the  poison 
reached  his  heart. 

A  European  nurse  told  me  that  in 
all  her  long  experience  she  had  never 
seen  men  die  like  these  ignorant  Turkish 
peasants  —  so  simply,  so  bravely,  so 
quietly.  They  really  believe,  I  suppose. 
In  any  case,  they  are  of  Islam,  resigned 
to  the  will  of  God.  After  death  they 
must  lie  in  a  place  with  no  door  or 
window  open,  for  as  short  a  time  as 
possible.  A  priest  performs  for  them 
the  last  ritual  ablution,  and  then  they 
are  hurried  silently  away  to  a  shallow 
grave. 


BOOK-PUBLISHING  AND   ITS  PRESENT  TENDENCIES 


BY   GEORGE   P.   BRETT 


NOT  very  long  ago  a  bookseller, 
whose  name  is  known  in  this  country,  I 
think,  wherever  books  are  sold,  told 
me  that  he  was  very  much  surprised 
at  the  lack  of  growth  in  volume  of 
the  trade  in  books.  His  remark  was 
apropos  of  the  number  of  novels  sold, 
his  statement  being  that,  while  the 
number  of  new  novels  published  in  any 
year  was  constantly  increasing,  by 
leaps  and  bounds,  the  total  number  of 
such  novels  sold,  as  far  as  his  experi- 
ence was  concerned,  was  no  greater 
than  when  the  number  of  separate 
novels  issued  was  less;  the  combined 
sale  of  the  thousand  or  so  new  novels 
published  in  a  recent  year  being  very 
little  greater  than  the  combined  sale  of 
the  much  smaller  number  of  novels  is- 
sued ten  or  a  dozen  years  ago. 

This  fact,  if  it  is  one,  and  statements 
of  similar  purport  from  other  book- 
sellers throughout  the  country,  from 
time  to  time,  have  tended  to  confirm 
the  opinion  of  my  informant,  would 
seem  to  show  that  the  book-reading 
public  is  a  more  or  less  constant  one 
in  point  of  numbers;  and  perhaps, 
also,  it  would  show  that  this  public, 
even  for  works  of  fiction,  does  not 
grow  in  proportion  to  the  general 
growth  of  the  population,  and  espe- 
cially that  its  growth  is  not  nearly  com- 
mensurate with  the  growth  of  the  pop- 
ulation in  education  and  wealth,  with 
the  accompanying  increase  in  leisure 
and  general  culture. 

What  was  said  in  regard  to  the  sale 
of  works  of  fiction  is,  I  am  afraid,  even 
more  true  of  the  sale  of  serious  books, 

454 


such  as  volumes  of  essays,  the  lighter 
works  of  travel,  and  new  volumes  of  po- 
etry, and  the  like;  works  which  are  gen- 
erally referred  to  as  volumes  of  general 
literature,  the  sale  of  which,  so  far  as 
information  generally  received  from  the 
booksellers  is  to  be  relied  upon,  seems 
actually  to  have  decreased  in  recent 
years  rather  than  to  have  enjoyed  that 
increased  sale  which  would  have  been 
so  natural  in  view  of  the  continued 
wide  prosperity  throughout  the  coun- 
try. And  this  becomes  the  more  sur- 
prising when  the  much  larger  number 
of  books  of  general  literature  issued  by 
the  publishers  in  recent  years  is  con- 
sidered. 

The  number  of  books  published  in 
the  United  States  has,  in  fact,  increased 
very  greatly  in  the  last  ten  years  or  so. 
In  the  year  1901,  which  was  an  active 
one  in  the  publishing  world,  about 
eight  thousand  volumes  were  produced, 
whereas  in  1910  the  much  greater  num- 
ber of  thirteen  thousand  new  publi- 
cations was  issued,  and  the  prospects 
for  the  current  year  indicate  an  even 
larger  number  of  new  volumes.  The 
increase  in  number  of  books  published 
is  more  or  less  uniform  in  all  depart- 
ments of  literature,  but  it  is  especially 
notable,  as  might  have  been  expected, 
in  view  of  the  present  unrest  and  the 
discontent  in  existing  conditions,  that 
a  very  great  increase  has  occurred  in 
the  number  of  books  issued  in  the  last 
few  years  on  socialism  and  its  allied 
subjects,  while  the  growth  of  the  spirit 
of  humanitarianism  in  the  country  may 
be  traced  in  the  considerable  number 


BOOK-PUBLISHING  AND   ITS  PRESENT  TENDENCIES     455 


of  new  books  which  are  being  issued, 
devoted  to  social  betterment  and  phil- 
anthropic studies  and  kindred  topics. 

These  two  classes  of  books  are 
among  the  most  interesting  signs  of  the 
times,  the  books  on  socialistic  subjects 
showing  how  widely  the  criticism  of 
our  existing  system  has  entered  into 
the  thought  of  our  times,  and  how 
many  persons  must  be  devoting  their 
efforts  to  attempts  at  the  solution  of 
the  problems  of  the  present  unrest. 
And,  on  the  other  hand,  the  growth  in 
the  number  and  importance  of  vol- 
umes issued  in  what  may  be  called 
works  of  social  betterment,  show  con- 
clusively the  growth  of  the  spirit  of 
social  service,  looking  toward  the  bet- 
terment of  conditions  for  all  classes  of 
the  community. 

Some  cynic  has  suggested  that  'The 
printed  part,  tho'  far  too  large,  is  less 
than  that  which  yet  unprinted  waits 
the  press.'  As  a  matter  of  fact,  the 
number  of  books  that  appear  in  print 
is  usually  only  about  two  per  cent  of 
the  total  number  of  manuscripts  sub- 
mitted to  the  publishers  for  examina- 
tion, so  that  the  large  total  in  the  num- 
ber of  volumes  issued  indicates  very 
clearly  a  larger  number  of  persons  who 
are  interested  and  occupied  in  the 
writing  of  books.  If  the  above  rule 
holds  good,  it  is  possible  by  consider- 
ing the  number  of  books  published  in 
any  subject,  or  group  of  subjects,  to  get 
some  general  idea  of  the  total  num- 
ber of  manuscripts  submitted  on  the 
subject,  and  its  consequent  growth  or 
decline  in  public  esteem. 

If  we  turn  to  the  reason  for  the  fail- 
ure to  secure,  for  the  much  larger  num- 
ber of  volumes  annually  published,  that 
increase  in  sale  which  would  seem  only 
natural  under  the  circumstances,  and 
without  which  both  authors  and  pub- 
lishers must  fail  to  receive  the  reward 
of  their  labors,  it  is  to  be  found,  I 
think,  in  the  problems  of  distribution 


as  applied  to  books;  the  distribution 
problem  being  the  greatest  of  all  pro- 
blems of  modern  times,  and  the  one 
which  is  engaging  the  attention  of  all 
who  have  to  do  with  the  supplying  of 
the  needs  of  the  community,  whether 
of  staple  articles  or  of  those  wanted 
merely  for  the  public's  amusement  and 
gratification. 

Publishers  of  books  of  general  litera- 
ture (miscellaneous  publishers,  as  these 
houses  are  termed  in  the  trade)  have 
shown  in  recent  years  a  tendency  to 
enlarge  the  scope  of  their  operations  so 
as  to  include  the  publication  of  maga- 
zines, of  books  on  medical  or  legal 
subjects,  and  especially  of  school  and 
college  text-books,  all  of  which  are 
branches  of  the  publishing  business 
heretofore  largely  monopolized  by  pub- 
lishers dealing  solely  with  works  of  one 
of  these  classes.  This  tendency  is  be- 
coming constantly  more  marked,  so 
that  we  hear  of  one  publisher  who,  up 
to  a  few  years  ago,  had  issued  books  of 
general  literature  only,  who  now  has  an 
estimated  business  of  more  than  a  mil- 
lion dollars  a  year  in  elementary  school 
books.  Another  has  recently  supplied 
some  millions  of  Readers  to  the  grade 
schools;  and  a  third  has  developed  so 
large  a  *  subscription '  trade  in  connec- 
tion with  the  sale  of  his  magazines,  that 
this  department  of  his  business  alone 
has  far  surpassed  his  general  publish- 
ing in  importance  and  in  the  amount 
of  business  transacted.  In  fact,  among 
the  larger  publishers  of  the  country, 
that  is,  those  who  carry  on  the  business 
of  book-publishing  in  its  original  mean- 
ing, and  as  it  is  still  understood  by  the 
general  public,  there  now  remain  only  a 
few  who  confine  their  publications  to 
books  in  general  literature,  which  are 
offered  for  sale  solely  through  the 
booksellers. 

The  reasons  for  this  change  in  the 
methods  and  policies  of  the  large  pub- 
lishers of  the  day  are  many,  and  perhaps 


456     BOOK-PUBLISHING  AND  ITS  PRESENT  TENDENCIES 


no  two  observers  would  agree  as  to  the 
causes  which  have  brought  it  about. 
Those  who  hold  it  to  be  a  natural  evo- 
lution showing  the  tendency  of  all  busi- 
ness to  develop  in  bigness  until  the  pro- 
portions of  a  '  trust '  are  reached,  may 
defend  it  on  the  same  grounds  on  which 
they  justify  the  enormous  growth,  in 
recent  years,  of  general  stores  where 
every  known  want  of  the  average  buyer 
may  be  satisfied.  The  minority  may 
still  deplore  the  passing  of  the  pub- 
lisher with  a  small  list  of  the  higher 
classes  of  works  in  general  literature 
and  better  titles,  just  as  the  individual 
purchaser  of  articles  of  general  mer- 
chandise misses  the  special  merchant, 
dealing  in  a  single  class  of  wares,  whose 
existence  has  been  made  precarious  by 
the  competition  of  the  mddern  dry- 
goods  emporium,  where  anything  from 
a  needle  to  an  elephant  may  be  pur- 
chased. 

The  publication  of  books  of  general 
literature  is  by  far  the  most  interesting 
part  of  the  publishing  business,  and  the 
fact  that  our  miscellaneous  publishers 
are  taking  up  other  branches  of  the 
work  can  only  mean  that  the  publica- 
tion of  works  in  general  literature  has 
become  the  less  profitable  branch  of 
the  business.  The  discovery,  among 
the  manuscripts  submitted  to  the  pub- 
lisher, of  a  new  work  of  value  and 
importance,  and  the  finding  of  pro- 
mise in  the  work  of  a  new  author,  are 
among  the  keenest  of  all  pleasures;  and 
after  many  years  of  experience  I  can 
still  say  that  it  is  the  sort  of  pleasure 
that  never  fails  to  produce  its  thrill 
of  satisfaction;  and  the  zest  continues 
without  diminution,  so  that  the  search 
is  just  as  keen  and  as  anxious  after 
many  years  as  when  the  first  manu- 
script submitted  to  me  came  into  my 
hands. 

Publishers,  because  of  their  having 
added  the  more  profitable  branches  of 
publishing  above  referred  to,  to  their 


publishing  of  books  of  general  litera- 
ture, need  not  necessarily  be  accused  of 
merely  mercenary  motives  if,  by  taking 
this  step,  they  enable  themselves  to 
continue  the  publication  of  books  of 
poetry  or  art,  which,  as  I  have  shown, 
bring  to  them  greatly  both  pleasure 
and  satisfaction,  and  the  knowledge 
that  the  influence  of  such  books  is  of 
benefit  to  the  community,  even  if  little 
comes  in  the  way  of  monetary  returns 
from  such  ventures.  The  profits  from 
the  sale  of  school-books  or  magazines 
could  not  be  better  employed  than  in 
*  mothering*  the  publication  of  works 
of  real  and  lasting  value  in  general  lit- 
erature. 

The  indifference  of  the  public  to  the 
new  books  of  the  day  (not  fiction)  is 
commonly  blamed  for  the  changes  in 
publishing  methods.  The  assertion  is 
not  seldom  heard  that  the  audience,  as 
evidenced  by  the  sales  of  such  books, 
is  smaller  than  it  was  twenty  years  or 
more  ago.  But  this  indifference  of  the 
public  may  be  more  apparent  than 
real.  Certainly  it  is  idle  to  blame  the 
public  while  ignoring  the  principal 
factors  which  have  brought  about  the 
present  situation.  The  publisher  and 
the  bookseller  alike  must  confess  that 
the  lack  of  sales  of  works  of  literature 
is  primarily  due  to  the  inadequacy  of 
present  methods  of  distribution.  Prac- 
tically the  sole  means  for  the  bringing 
of  such  works  to  the  attention  of  the 
public  is  still  the  booksellers'  shops, 
with  shelves  and  tables  already  over- 
crowded by  the  enormous  output  of 
the  day's  fiction. 

The  outpouring  of  novels  is  so  great 
that  a  recent  authority  states  that  the 
life  of  a  'best-seller'  novel  is  now  lit- 
tle longer  than  a  month,  as  compared 
with  a  period  of  popularity  extending 
over  several  years,  when  the  vogue  of 
the  '  best-seller '  first  became  a  feature 
in  book-publishing.  Moreover,  the 
bookseller's  shop,  unfortunately  for  the 


BOOK-PUBLISHING  AND   ITS   PRESENT  TENDENCIES      457 


publisher  and  for  the  author  of  such 
books  as  those  to  which  I  am  referring, 
has  never  been  a  resort  for  the  general 
public;  and,  if  I  am  not  mistaken,  the 
number  of  books  in  general  literature 
(not  fiction)  sold  by  the  booksellers, 
does  not  increase  year  by  year.  Cer- 
tainly the  number  of  all  books  sold  by 
the  booksellers  does  not  increase  in  pro- 
portion to  the  increase  in  the  growth  of 
population  and  the  much  greater  in- 
crease in  the  education,  culture,  and 
buying  power  of  the  people. 

No  publisher  has  yet  been  clever 
enough  to  solve  the  great  modern  pro- 
blem of  distribution  of  his  books.  It 
was  Dr.  Edward  Everett  Hale,  if  I  mis- 
take not,  who  pointed  out  some  years 
ago  that  no  book  of  general  literature 
had  ever  been  adequately  distributed 
or  published  (in  the  literal  sense),  and 
the  difficulties  of  distribution,  and  es- 
pecially the  costs  of  distribution,  have 
greatly  increased  since  then.  To  have 
published  a  worthy  and  distinguished 
book  is,  as  I  have  already  pointed  out, 
a  matter  of  high  satisfaction  to  a 
publisher  of  the  right  sort,  critics  of 
publishers  and  publishing  methods  to 
the  contrary  notwithstanding;  yet,  to 
know,  or  to  feel  morally  certain,  that 
thousands  of  his  fellow  citizens  would 
value  the  work  as  greatly  as  the  pub- 
lisher himself  appreciates  it,  must  be 
a  matter  for  despair  if  no  effective  or 
practical  means  exists  for  bringing  it  to 
their  attention. 

Some  years  ago  the  publisher's  task 
was  a  happier  and  easier  one,  for  then 
there  were,  in  considerable  numbers, 
among  the  general  public,  book-lovers 
whose  chief  delight  consisted  in  the 
discovery  of  the  new  author  and  the 
new  book  of  merit.  The  discoverer 
would  tell  all  his  friends  of  his  'find/  to 
the  great  advantage  of  the  publisher 
and  author.  Many  a  dinner-table  in 
those  days  was  made  pleasant  by  such 
bookish  talk.  It  is,  alas,  very  rare  to- 


day. The  late  Goldwin  Smith,  the  last 
time  the  writer  saw  him  in  New  York, 
remarked  that  he  had  not  heard  a  book 
mentioned  at  a  dinner-table  for  several 
years. 

The  publishers  themselves  are  large- 
ly to  blame  for  the  disappearance  of 
the  book-taster,  as  a  class,  by  having 
adopted  for  their  wares  the  slogan  of 
modern  'efficient'  business:  'Take  the 
goods  to  the  customer'  —  a  method 
which  results  in  my  receiving  twenty  or 
so  circular  letters  a  day,  which  go  into 
the  waste-paper  basket  unread,  and  has 
so  filled  our  blanket  newspapers  with 
advertisements  that  my  eyes  have  be- 
come trained  until  I  think  I  can  say 
that  I  never  see  the  advertisements  in 
my  morning  newspaper.  Perhaps  this 
is  a  peculiarity  of  mine,  but  I  suspect 
it  is  becoming  general  with  the  public. 
At  least  on  one  occasion  lately,  an  au- 
thor complained  to  me  that  his  book 
was  never  advertised.  In  reply  I  point- 
ed out  to  him  an  advertisement  of  the 
book  in  question  in  the  newspaper  in 
his  hand,  which  he  confessed  to  have 
been  reading  on  his  way  to  my  office. 

The  publisher  who  discovers  or  in- 
vents a  new  method  which  shall  be 
both  practical  and  effective  for  the  dis- 
tribution of  books  of  general  literature, 
will  confer  a  boon  upon  the  author, 
whose  book  will  then  be  sold  to  all 
possible  purchasers;  upon  the  pub- 
lic, many  individuals  of  which  would 
gladly  buy  some  books,  now  on  the 
publishers'  shelves,  of  which,  under 
the  present  methods,  they  will  never 
learn ;  and  especially  upon  the  publish- 
ers themselves,  whose  profits  increase 
greatly  as  increasing  numbers  of  copies 
of  a  work  are  sold,  and  whose  lack  of 
profits  on  publications  of  these  classes 
is  due  almost  entirely  to  their  failure  to 
find  practical  methods  for  the  distribu- 
tion of  such  books. 

Complaint  is  frequently  made  of  the 
prices  at  which  publishers  sell  their 


458     BOOK-PUBLISHING  AND  ITS  PRESENT  TENDENCIES 


books,  and  the  lack  of  sale  is  often  laid 
to  this  fact  of  the  alleged  excessive 
selling-price.  Publishers  themselves  are 
the  first  to  recognize  the  theoretical 
justice  of  these  complaints.  The  book 
of  350  12mo  pages,  after  the  plates  are 
paid  for  by  the  sale  of  the  first  edition, 
costs  the  publisher,  for  manufacture 
and  author's  royalty,  usually  less  than 
fifty  cents.  The  price  to  the  public  is 
a  dollar  and  a  half  or  thereabouts.  The 
publisher's  difficulty  in  reducing  the 
price  at  retail  lies  in  the  fact  that  the 
majority  of  such  books  published  un- 
der present  methods  do  not  sell  beyond 
the  first  editions,  the  costs  of  which  in- 
clude a  large  initial  outlay  for  the  print- 
ing plates.  If  modern  *  efficient'  busi- 
ness methods  are  used  for  the  purpose 
of  *  bringing  the  goods  to  the  customer,' 
the  situation  is  not  improved,  for  then 
the  profits  even  of  the  second  and  sub- 
sequent editions  may  be  inadequate  for 
systematic  and  sustained  advertising 
of  commodities,  such  as  books,  which 
are  still,  in  these  days  of  cheap  maga- 
zines and  Sunday  supplements,  caviare 
to  the  majority  of  the  public.  A  high- 
class  automobile  which  sells  to  the  pub- 
lic at  five  thousand  dollars,  costs,  I  am 
credibly  informed,  less  than  a  thou- 
sand dollars  to  manufacture.  A  quart 
of  milk  costs  three  cents  or  thereabouts 
on  the  farm;  the  customer  pays  ten 
cents  for  it.  In  each  of  these  cases  the 
methods  of  distribution  are  as  inade- 
quate, or  nearly  so,  as  are  the  methods 
of  distribution  of  books,  and  the  costs 
of  distribution  are  an  even  greater  per- 
centage of  the  price  the  public  pays 
than  is  the  case  with  books. 

This  question  of  distribution  is  one 
which  I  think  is  of  fully  as  great  im- 
portance to  the  public  as  to  either  the 
publisher  or  the  author.  It  has 'been 
well  said  that  *  among  the  most  satisfy- 
ing of  all  pleasures  is  the  pleasure  of 
reading';  and  as  Henry  Ward  Beecher 
said,  'Books  are  the  windows  through 


which  the  soul  looks  out.  A  library  is 
not  a  luxury,  but  one  of  the  necessaries 
of  life.  A  little  library,  growing  larger 
each  year,  is  an  honorable  part  of  a 
man's  history.  It  is  a  man's  duty  to 
have  books.'  The  public  may,  more- 
over, well  take  a  greater  interest  in  the 
sale  of  books  because  of  their  educa- 
tional value,  which  is  of  great  impor- 
tance to  a  nation  growing  with  such 
rapidity  as  our  own,  and  made  up  of  so 
great  a  proportion  of  foreign  peoples, 
unfamiliar  with  our  ideas  of  liberty 
and  order.  In  such  a  country  as  our 
own,  the  dissemination  of  knowledge 
and  information  regarding  good  books 
may  well  be  regarded  as  educational 
work  of  the  highest  value  and  im- 
portance. 

Especially  is  the  distribution  of  good 
books  important  to  a  nation  approach- 
ing the  limit  of  its  free  land,  foreseeing 
a  time  when  its  material  resources  will 
no  longer  be  considered  inexhaustible, 
and  with  a  constantly  growing  discon- 
tent and  criticism  of  existing  condi- 
tions, an  unrest  only  too  likely  to  lead 
to  social  and  political  experiments  of 
doubtful  value.  The  American  people, 
in  this  time  of  rapid  change,  needs  no- 
thing else  so  much  as  the  calm  judg- 
ment that  comes  from  a  knowledge  of 
the  best  literature,  so  that  I  make  no 
excuse  for  asking  the  public  to  take  a 
hand  and  give  the  publishers  their  aid 
in  solving  the  problem  of  efficient  book- 
distribution,  a  problem  which  has  so 
far  seemed  too  difficult  for  the  pub- 
lishers and  booksellers  themselves  to 
solve. 

But  if  this  question  of  the  better  dis- 
tribution of  books  in  general  literature 
is  important  to  the  public,  and  of  great 
concern  to  the  publisher,  to  the  author 
it  is  vital.  The  publishers  are  able  to 
turn  their  energies,  as  we  have  seen, 
to  the  publication  of  other  classes  of 
books  or  of  magazines,  and  the  public, 
in  large  part,  has  hitherto  displayed  an 


BOOK-PUBLISHING  AND   ITS  PRESENT  TENDENCIES     459 


indifference  in  regard  to  the  matter 
which  may  not  disappear  until  the 
American  people  shall  find  itself  with- 
out a  literature  representing  the  cur- 
rent life  and  thought  of  the  people. 
But  the  author  is  more  intimately  af- 
fected, because,  under  the  present  con- 
ditions, many  books  of  high  quality 
either  fail  of  publication  entirely,  or  re- 
turn very  little  or  nothing  to  their  crea- 
tors. Indeed,  the  author's  royalties 
from  the  sales  of  books  of  this  class, 
which  often  represent  months  or  years 
of  painstaking  effort,  are  sometimes  so 
small  as  barely  to  pay  the  actual  cost 
of  the  paper  and  typewriting  of  the 
manuscript  which  is  submitted  to  the 
publisher  for  approval. 

The  way  out  of  the  difficulties  in 
which  the  publishers  of  works  in  gen- 
eral literature  find  themselves,  lies,  I 
feel  sure,  in  the  direction  of  issuing 
such  works  at  lower  prices.  In  both 
France  and  Germany  new  books  are 
sold  for  much  less  than  with  us,  and 
while  in  Great  Britain  new  books  are 
as  dear  as  they  are  here,  many  more 
books  are  successfully  published  in 
cheap  editions  than  is  the  case  here. 
Such  experiments,  however,  as  have 
as  yet  been  made  in  publishing  new 
books  (apart  from  fiction)  in  this  coun- 
try at  low  prices,  have  not  been  suc- 
cessful, because,  in  my  judgment,  the 
present  methods  of  distribution,  in- 
adequate at  best,  are  particularly  ill- 
adapted  to  render  efficient  service  on 
the  more  economical  basis  demanded 
by  the  lower  prices.  That  a  very  large 
public  exists,  however,  which  will  pur- 
chase new  books,  well  printed  and 
bound,  and  at  low  prices,  I  have  no 
doubt.  Many  of  the  books  which  ap- 
pear every  year,  and  have  now  but  a 
small  sale,  are  well  calculated  to  give 
pleasure  and  delight  to  thousands  if 
offered  at  a  moderate  price,  and  if  a 
means  of  distribution  for  them  could 
be  found  at  a  moderate  cost. 


If,  then,  means  can  be  found  by 
which  books  will  attain  the  wide  sale 
which  so  many  of  them  thoroughly  de- 
serve, the  author,  instead  of  doing  his 
work  merely  for  the  satisfaction  which 
it  gives  him  to  publish  his  thoughts 
and  ideas,  —  in  itself  a  not  inconsid- 
erable reward  it  is  true,  —  may  also  ob- 
tain some  pecuniary  reward  in  return 
for  his  labors.  Even  here  it  cannot 
be  gainsaid  that  the  laborer  is  worthy 
of  his  hire.  But  given  the  possibility 
of  a  successful  trial  of  the  experi- 
ment, the  author,  if  he  is  to  reap  the 
increased  harvest,  must  be  far-sighted 
enough  to  recognize  that  one  of  the 
necessary  conditions  is  a  reduction  of 
the  present  nominally  heavy  rates  of 
royalty.  The  successful  experiments  in 
the  publishing  of  cheap  editions  of 
books  abroad  are  usually  with  those 
books  which  are  either  out  of  copy- 
right, and  consequently  pay  no  royal- 
ties to  authors,  or  for  which  a  very  low 
rate  of  royalty  can  be  arranged.  From 
the  author's  point  of  view,  it  will  pro- 
bably be  better  for  him  to  reduce  the 
rate  of  percentage  of  his  royalties  — 
under  which  he  now  gets,  as  I  have 
shown,  little  or  nothing  —  to  a  rate 
which  perhaps  is  much  less  nominally, 
but  which,  with  a  much  larger  sale  of 
his  books  at  low  prices,  would  produce 
an  income  far  greater  than  he  enjoys 
at  present. 

This  question  of  the  percentage  of 
the  author's  royalties  is  certainly  one 
of  the  greatest  of  the  factors  militating 
against  the  production  of  books  at  low 
prices  to  the  public.  At  present  the 
author's  royalties  on  books,  as  most 
people  know,  range  from  ten  per  cent 
to  twenty  per  cent  of  their  retail  price, 
which  is  equivalent  to  from  twenty  to 
thirty-three  per  cent  of  the  price  re- 
ceived by  the  publisher  from  the  retail 
bookseller.  These  royalties  thus  form 
no  small  part  of  the  prime  cost  of  the 
book;  in  fact,  they  usually  represent 


460      BOOK-PUBLISHING  AND  ITS  PRESENT  TENDENCIES 


the  greater  part  of  the  total  net  profits 
obtained  from  the  publication  of  any 
work  in  general  literature.  Indeed, 
popular  belief  among  authors  to  the 
contrary  notwithstanding,  the  author's 
share  of  the  profits  is  usually  about 
twice  as  large  as  that  of  the  publisher, 
while,  in  the  case  of  novels,  the  royalty 
often  absorbs  the  entire  profit  ob- 
tained from  the  publication  of  a  pop- 
ular work  written  by  a  well-known 
author,  and  consequently  commanding 
the  highest  rate  of  royalty. 

Authors  generally  look  with  suspi- 
cion upon  any  request  on  the  part  of 
the  publisher  for  a  lower  rate  of  royalty 
for  the  publication  of  cheap  editions, 
and  I  have  known  perfectly  reasonable 
requests  of  the  kind  to  be  absolutely 
refused,  with  the  result  that  the  public 
has  been  deprived  of  cheap  editions  of 
books  which  it  would  purchase  in  con- 
siderable quantities,  merely  because  of 
the  author's  failure  to  understand  the 
plain  logic  of  the  situation.  It  would 
seem  sufficiently  evident  that,  the  cur- 
rent rate  of  royalty  being  based  on  a 
relatively  high  price,  if  a  book  is  of- 
fered at  a  low  price,  the  rate  of  royalty 
to  the  author  must  be  reduced  also. 
Yet  I  have  in  mind  at  the  moment  a 
work  for  which  a  very  considerable  de- 
mand exists  in  a  cheap  edition,  and  for 
which  in  the  high-priced. edition  there 
is  practically  no  sale,  but  which  cannot 
be  published  in  the  cheap  edition  that 
the  public  demands  because  of  the  re- 
fusal of  the  author  to  reduce  the  roy- 
alty below  the  original  rate  of  twenty 
per  cent,  as  provided  in  the  agreement 
for  the  publication  of  the  expensive 
edition  of  the  work. 

In  this  connection  it  seems  worth 
while  to  offer  a  protest  against  the  un- 
founded criticism  of  publishers  and 
publishing  methods  which  has  been  so 
rife  in  recent  years,  and  which  has  its 
origin  almost  entirely  in  the  failure  to 
obtain  adequate  sales  for  books  of  the 


classes  we  have  been  considering,  as  a 
result  of  the  want  of  confidence  on  the 
part  of  the  authors  in  the  good  faith  or 
business  judgment  of  publishers,  so 
that  authors  very  often  approach  the 
question  of  arranging  with  publishers 
for  the  publication  of  their  books  in  an 
attitude  of  suspicion,  or,  at  any  rate, 
failing  to  grasp  the  actual  facts  of  the 
situation. 

A  publisher  of  high  standing,  doing 
a  large  business  through  a  long  period 
of  time,  undoubtedly  has  built  up  a 
machinery  and  acquired  a  reputation 
which  are  of  the  greatest  possible  value 
to  the  work  of  any  author,  and  are  al- 
most indispensable  for  a  new  author 
seeking  for  the  first  time  the  presenta- 
tion of  his  book  to  the  public.  More- 
over, in  intrusting  to  a  publisher  the 
publication  of  a  book,  the  author  really 
should  exercise  more  discrimination 
than  in  the  selection  of  a  banker  to  take 
care  of  his  funds,  for  the  depositor  in  a 
bank  knows  as  well  as  the  banker  him- 
self the  precise  amount  he  is  intrusting 
to  the  care  of  another,  while  the  author 
intrusts  to  the  publisher  the  unknown 
earning  capacity  of  his  books,  and  the 
author  must  consequently  rely  entirely 
upon  the  publisher's  good  faith  and 
honesty  to  see  that  the  sums  due  him 
are  properly  and  faithfully  paid  over. 
Yet,  notwithstanding  these  facts,  it  is 
not  an  uncommon  experience  with 
nearly  all  of  the  older  publishers  to  have 
authors  endeavor  to  drive  hard  bar- 
gains with  them  for  the  publication  of 
their  works,  on  the  plea  that  some  un- 
known, new,  and  possibly  impecunious 
publisher  has  offered  a  rate  of  royalty 
on  the  publication  of  a  work  which, 
from  the  established  publisher's  point 
of  view,  is  impossible  of  payment  with 
pecuniary  profit  to  himself.  With  some 
authors,  to  paraphrase  Byron's  words, 
it  would  almost  seem  as  if  *  Death  to 
the  publisher  to  them  is  sport.' 

I  remember  in  this  connection  being 


BOOK-PUBLISHING  AND  ITS  PRESENT  TENDENCIES      461 


offered,  a  number  of  years  ago,  a  work, 
and  having  just  such  a  proposition 
from  another  publisher  quoted  to  me. 
Needless  to  say,  I  felt  obliged  to  refuse 
to  meet  this  unwise  competition  even 
although  I  knew  that  the  publisher  who 
was  quoted  as  having  made  the  rate 
could  not  possibly  fulfill  his  obliga- 
tions under  such  an  agreement.  The 
book  was  one  which  I  much  desired  to 
publish,  and  the  sequel  to  the  story  is 
that  I  finally  bought  it  at  the  sale  of  the 
publisher's  effects  when  he  went  into 
bankruptcy  some  months  afterwards. 

Possibly  we  may  find  some  help  in 
the  solution  of  the  publisher's  present 
difficulties  of  distribution  in  a  very  in- 
teresting experiment  which  is  being 
tried  by  a  firm  of  booksellers  in  Great 
Britain,  where  they  evidently  also  have 
difficulties  of  distribution  to  confront, 
although,  because  of  the  better  book- 
selling facilities,  not  to  anything  like 
the  same  extent  as  in  this  country. 
These  booksellers  have  made,  or  at- 
tempted to  make,  a  card  catalogue  of 
the  book-reading  population,  classify- 
ing the  book-buying  public  according 
to  the  subjects  in  which  the  individuals 
comprising  this  public  are  interested; 
and  whenever  a  work  comes  into  their 
book-shop  which  is  likely  to  interest 
persons  in  this  classified  list,  they  are 
communicated  with  by  postcard,  giv- 
ing a  description  of  the  book  and  au- 
thor. Thousands  of  such  cards  are 
mailed  daily.  Unfortunately,  such  an 
experiment  would  be  almost  impossi- 
ble of  trial  in  this  country  with  its 
many  large  cities  scattered  over  a  much 
greater  expanse  of  territory,  all  of 
which  are  centres  of  interest  and  influ- 
ence to  their  surrounding  populations, 
and  are,  in  addition,  much  more  shifting 
and  unstable  than  similar  communities 
in  the  Old  World. 

Some  aid  might  be  asked  of  the 
postal  authorities,  which  now  discrim- 
inate against  books,  and  hinder  their 


distribution,  by  charging  eight  cents  a 
pound  postage  on  books,  while  carrying 
magazines  through  the  mails  at  the 
rate  of  one  cent  a  pound.  All  arguments 
in  favor  of  the  low  rate  on  magazines 
are  equally  applicable  to  the  transport- 
ation of  books  at  similar  schedules; 
and  in  particular,  the  educational  value 
of  books  is  much  higher,  if  for  no  other 
reason  than  because  the  reading  of 
books  inculcates  the  habit  of  continued 
thought  and  application  of  the  mind, 
both  qualities  which  we  are  in  some 
danger  of  losing  entirely  through  a  too 
constant  perusal  of  scrappy  and  highly 
flavored  periodical  literature. 

Yet  after  all  is  said,  the  real  solution 
of  the  problem  lies  with  the  reading 
public  itself.  Good  books  will  be  pub- 
lished only  if  the  public  calls  for  and 
demands  them,  and  their  prices  will 
depend  upon  the  extent  to  which  the 
public  seeks  them  out  and  assists  in 
their  distribution,  for  in  this  way  only 
can  the  cost  of  making  them  known  to 
their  readers  be  lowered. 

Current  fiction  has  been  purposely 
excluded  in  the  survey  of  present  condi- 
tions in  the  publishing  of  works  in  gen- 
eral literature,  because  the  writer  feels 
that  not  only  the  publication,  but  the 
author's  part  as  well,  of  the  new  novel 
of  the  day  has  become  highly  commer- 
cialized. It  is  said  that  many  of  our 
journals  are  edited  strictly  with  a  view 
to  increasing  the  receipts  from  the 
advertising  pages,  with  what  truth  I 
do  not  know;  but  it  is  certain  that  much 
of  the  current  fiction  is  written  with  a 
view  to  supplying  just  the  sort  of  thrills 
the  public  demands.  Indeed,  I  am  told 
that  the  author  of  a  long  series  of  *  best- 
sellers,' immediately  after  a  new  work 
of  his  appears,  sits  in  solemn  conclave 
with  his  publishers  and  their  editors 
and  advisers,  wherein  the  subject  and 
scenes  of  his  next  effort  are  outlined 
and  voted  on,  with  a  keen  regard  to  the 
supposed  dreams  and  desires  of  the 


462 


WHY  IT  WAS  W-ON-THE-EYES 


rising  generation  of  readers.  Novels  of 
merit  and  value,  representing  honest 
work  and  the  real  convictions  of  their 
authors,  still  from  time  to  time  make 
their  appearance,  but  it  is  seldom  in- 
deed that  one  of  these  finds  its  way  into 
the  ranks  of  the  *  six  best-sellers.'  Their 
appeal  is  to  that  part  of  the  public 
which  still  discriminates  in  its  reading, 


a  smaller  percentage  of  the  whole,  I 
fear,  at  present,  than  in  any  recent  pe- 
riod of  our  history.  One  is  reminded  of 
the  remark  of  one  of  our  best  critics, 
himself  an  author  of  many  books  well 
known  to  lovers  of  the  best  literature: 
*  I  should  consider  myself  disgraced  if  I 
had  written  a  book  which  in  these  days 
had  sold  one  hundred  thousand  copies.' 


WHY  IT  WAS  W-ON-THE-EYES 


BY  MARGARET   PRESCOTT  MONTAGUE 


'I  WONDER  why  the  children's  sign 
for  little  old  Webster  should  be  W- 
on-the-eyes,'  Miss  Evans  speculated. 
'There's  nothing  peculiar  about  his 
eyes,  except  perhaps  that  they're  the 
brightest  pair  in  school.' 

Miss  Evans  was  the  new  oral  teacher 
in  theLomax  Schools  for  deaf  and  blind 
children,  and  she  was  speaking  about 
Charlie  Webster,  one  of  the  small  deaf 
mutes  in  her  class. 

That  was  his  sign,  W,  made  in  the 
manual  alphabet,  with  the  hand  placed 
against  the  eyes.  Everybody  in  the 
deaf  department  at  Lomax  had  his  or 
her  special  sign,  thus  saving  the  time 
and  trouble  of  spelling  out  the  whole 
name  on  the  fingers. 

Clarence  Chester,  the  big  deaf  boy 
who  had  finished  school,  but  still 
stayed  on  working  in  the  shoe-shop, 
was  the  one  who  made  up  the  signs  for 
the  new  pupils  and  teachers.  He  was 
rather  proud  of  his  talents  in  this  direc- 
tion, and  took  the  pains  of  an  artist 
over  every  sign.  They  were  usually 
composed  of  the  initial  letter  of  the  per- 
son's last  name  placed  somewhere  on 


the  body,  to  indicate  either  some  phy- 
sical peculiarity,  or  else  the  position 
held  by  that  person  in  the  school.  Mr. 
Lincoln,  for  instance,  who  was  the  su- 
perintendent, had  L-on-the-forehead,to 
show  that  he  was  the  head  of  the  whole 
school,  and  no  one  else,  of  course,  could 
have  L  as  high  up  as  that  —  not  even 
Mrs.  Lincoln.  She  had  to  be  contented 
with  L-on-the-cheek.  So,  in  the  same 
way,  Miss  Thompson,  who  was  the 
trained  nurse,  had  T-on-the-wrist,  be- 
cause it  was  her  business  to  feel  the 
children's  pulses. 

When  Miss  Stedman,  the  new  mat- 
ron for  the  deaf  boys,  came,  she 
should  have  had  S-on-the-chest,  as 
Clarence  made  a  habit  of  placing  all 
the  matrons'  initials  on  their  chests; 
but  unfortunately,  S  in  the  manual 
alphabet  is  made  by  doubling  up  the 
fist,  and  Clarence  explained  to  her 
that  if  a  boy  hits  himself  on  the  chest 
with  his  fist  he  is  sure  to  hit  that  mid- 
dle button  of  his  shirt,  and  make  a 
bruise.  He  had  to  make  this  rather 
complicated  explanation  in  writing  be- 
cause Miss  Stedman  was  new  to  the 


WHY  IT  WAS  W-ON-THE-EYES 


468 


sign-language  and  finger-spelling,  and 
he  had  received  his  education  at  Lom- 
ax  before  articulation  was  taken  up 
there,  and  was  therefore,  of  course,  a 
mute.  So,  on  account  of  the  button, 
S-on-the-chest  had  to  be  abandoned. 
But  Clarence  looked  at  Miss  Stedman, 
and,  for  all  that  they  called  her  a  ma- 
tron, she  was  very  young  and  small, 
and  had  delicately  rosy  cheeks,  so  he 
smiled  a  little,  and  then  made  the  letter 
S  and  the  sign  for  pretty.  And  Miss 
Stedman  went  away  quite  satisfied, 
and  showed  every  one  her  sign,  being 
innocently  unaware  that  every  time  she 
did  so  she  was  saying  that  she  was  pret- 
ty. When  her  education  in  the  sign- 
language  had  progressed  sufficiently 
for  her  to  discover  the  real  meaning  of 
her  sign  she  was  overcome  with  con- 
fusion, and  begged  Clarence  to  change 
it.  But  he  said  he  never — (never! 
NEVER!  made  vehemently  with  his 
hand) — changed  a  sign  after  it  was  once 
given;  besides,  by  that  time  all  Miss 
Stedman's  little  deaf  boys  had  got  hold 
of  it  and  no  power  on  earth  could  have 
detached  it  from  their  fingers. 

But,  to  go  back  to  Charlie  Webster, 
as  Miss  Evans  remarked,  there  was 
nothing  peculiar  about  his  eyes,  and 
therefore  why  his  sign  should  be  W-on- 
the-eyes,  caused  some  small  curiosity, 
but  not  enough  to  make  any  of  the 
teachers  or  matrons  take  the  trouble 
to  look  into  the  matter.  Among  them- 
selves, of  course,  they  did  not  speak 
of  him  as  W-on-the-eyes :  they  called 
him  Webster,  or  Charlie  Webster,  or 
most  of  all,  perhaps,  'little  old  Web- 
ster,' because  he  was  only  nine,  and 
everybody  on  the  place  adored  him. 

They  may  have  adored  him  for  that 
enchanting  smile  of  his,  a  smile  which 
curved  his  ridiculously  eager  little 
mouth,  flooded  from  his  dancing  eyes, 
and  generally  radiated  from  the  whole 
expressive  little  face  of  him.  Or,  per- 
haps, it  was  because  he  was  so  affec- 


tionate; or  again  it  might  have  been 
because  he  was  so  handsome,  so  alert 
and  gay,  and  always,  moreover,  ap- 
peared to  be  having  such  a  good  time. 
Whatever  came  little  old  Webster's 
way  seemed  always  to  be  the  most 
exciting  and  delightful  thing  that  had 
ever  happened  to  him,  and  whether  it 
was  a  game  to  be  played,  a  lesson  to  be 
learned,  or  a  person  to  be  loved,  he  did 
it  with  all  his  might,  and  with  all  his 
heart.  Perhaps,  after  all,  the  real  reason 
for  the  world's  adoring  him  was  that 
old  classical  one  for  the  lamb's  devo- 
tion to  Mary,  —  he  loved  the  world. 

Another  thing  which  sorted  him  out 
somewhat  from  among  the  other  sixty 
or  seventy  deaf  boys  of  the  school  was 
his  fondness  for  the  blind  children.  It 
is  impossible  to  imagine  any  two  sets 
of  persons  so  absolutely  shut  off  from 
one  another  as  blind  people  and  deaf 
mutes.  It  is  only  through  the  sense  of 
feeling  that  they  can  meet;  and  for  the 
most  part  at  Lomax,  sixty  blind  chil- 
dren, and  more  than  a  hundred  deaf 
ones,  move  about  through  the  same 
buildings,  eat  in  the  same  dining-room, 
and,  to  some  extent,  play  in  the  same 
grounds,  with  almost  no  intercourse  or 
knowledge  of  one  another.  They  move 
upon  different  planes.  The  deaf  child's 
plane  is  made  up  of  things  seen,  the 
blind  child's  of  things  heard.  It  is  only 
in  things  touched  that  their  paths  ever 
cross,  and  surely  only  the  economy  and 
lack  of  imagination  of  the  past  could 
have  crowded  two  such  alien  classes 
into  one  establishment.  But  little  old 
Webster  had  built  a  bridge  of  his  own 
over  these  almost  insurmountable  bar- 
riers, and  through  the  medium  of  touch 
had  carried  his  adventures  in  friend- 
ship even  into  the  country  of  the  blind. 

Some  of  the  blind  boys  knew  the 
manual  alphabet  and  could  talk  to  him 
on  their  fingers,  and  by  feeling  of  his 
hands  could  understand  what  he  said 
to  them;  but  with  most  he  had  to  be 


464 


WHY  IT  WAS  W-ON-THE-EYES 


satisfied  with  merely  putting  his  arm 
about  their  shoulders  and  grunting  a 
soft  little  inarticulate  'Ough,  ough!' 
which  was  no  word  at  all,  of  course, 
merely  an  engaging  little  expression  of 
his  friendship  and  general  good  feeling. 
The  blind  children  recognized  him  by 
these  little  grunts,  and  accepted  things 
from  him  which  they  would  never  have 
tolerated  from  any  of  the  other  '  dum- 
mies,* as  they  called  the  deaf  mutes. 
Webster  was  their  passionate  cham- 
pion on  all  occasions.  Once,  when  a 
deaf  boy  threw  a  stone  which  by  acci- 
dent hit  one  of  the  blind  boys  on  the 
forehead,  inflicting  a  bad  cut,  Webster 
flew  into  a  wild  fury  of  rage,  and  at- 
tacked the  deaf  boy  with  all  the  pas- 
sion of  his  nine  years.  Afterwards,  he 
tore  up  to  the  hospital  where  his  blind 
friend  was  having  the  cut  dressed,  and 
snuggling  his  face  against  him  grunted 
many  soft  'oughs,  oughs,'  of  sympa- 
thy. But  the  little  deaf  boy  he  had 
thrashed  had  to  come  to  the  hospital 
to  be  tied  up  as  well,  for  little  old  Web- 
ster was  no  saint,  and  once  he  set  out 
to  fight,  he  did  it,  as  he  did  everything 
else,  with  all  his  heart. 

*  I  declare/  Miss  Stedman  announced 
wearily  one  evening  in   the  officers' 
dining-room,  *  if  Charlie  Webster  keeps 
on  I  shall  just  have  to  report  him  to 
Mr.  Lincoln.    He's  been  fighting  this 
whole  blessed  afternoon — just  one  boy 
right  after  another.' 

'Oh,'  cried  Miss  Thompson,  the 
trained  nurse,  'then  that  was  the  rea- 
son there  were  so  many  of  the  little 
deaf  boys  up  in  the  hospital  this  after- 
noon with  sprained  thumbs,  and  black 
eyes,  and  so  on!' 

*  Exactly,'  Miss  Stedman  confirmed 
her,  *  that  was  Webster's  doing,  —  the 
little  scamp !  It 's  because  of  his  shirts. 
Whenever  his  mother  sends  him  a  new 
shirt,  and  he  puts  it  on,  he  has  to  fight 
almost  every  boy  in  his  dormitory.' 

'But  why?  What's  the  matter  with 


his  shirts?'  Miss  Evans,  the  oral 
teacher,  demanded. 

'Oh,  they're  the  funniest  looking 
things!  I  don't  see  what  his  mother 
can  be  thinking  of.  They  look  as 
though  they  'd  been  made  up  hind-side 
before,  and  the  sleeves  are  never  put  in 
right,  and  are  always  too  tight  for  him. 
Of  course,  the  other  children  laugh  at 
every  fresh  one,  and  that  just  sends 
him  almost  crazy,  and  he  flies  at  one 
boy  after  another.  He  knows,  himself, 
that  the  shirts  are  n't  right,  but  he  just 
will  wear  them  in  spite  of  everything. 
I  tried  once  to  get  him  to  put  on  one 
from  the  school  supply,  and,  goodness! 
I  thought  he  was  going  to  fight  me!' 

It  was  at  this  time  that  Miss  Evans 
asked  why  Webster's  sign  was  W-on- 
the-eyes.  Miss  Stedman  said  she 
thought  Chester  must  have  given  him 
that  because  he  was  so  good  to  the 
blind  children.  That  explanation  sat- 
isfied Miss  Evans,  but  was  not,  as  it 
happened,  the  right  one. 

Little  old  Webster  came  to  Lomax 
when  he  was  only  seven,  two  years  be- 
fore they  began  to  teach  articulation 
and  lip-reading  to  the  children  there. 
His  education  began  therefore  with  the 
manual  method,  and  by  the  time  he 
was  nine  there  was  hardly  a  sign  that 
he  did  not  know,  or  a  word  that  he 
could  not  spell  with  his  flying  fingers. 
But  he  was  a  little  person  who  craved 
many  forms  of  self-expression,  and  he 
often  looked  very  curiously,  and  very 
wistfully,  at  hearing  people  when  they 
talked  together  with  their  lips.  The 
year  he  was  nine,  which  was  the  year  of 
this  story,  they  began  the  oral  instruc- 
tion at  Lomax,  Miss  Evans  being  en- 
gaged for  this  purpose,  and  being  given 
by  Clarence  Chester  the  sign  of  E-on- 
the-lips,  to  show  that  she  was  the  per- 
son who  taught  the  children  to  speak. 
She  had  to  face  some  opposition  in  get- 
ting the  new  method  established.  The 
older  children  found  it  harder  than  the 


WHY  IT  WAS  W-ON-THE-EYES 


465 


familiar  signs,  and,  for  the  most  part, 
shut  their  minds  persistently  against 
any  attempt  to  make  them  speak. 

Many  of  the  teachers,  also,  were 
opposed  to  the  oral  form  of  instruction. 
There  was  Miss  Flyn,  for  instance.  She 
had  taught  deaf  children  for  ten  years 
with  the  sign-language,  and  did  not  see 
any  reason  for  abandoning  it  now.  And, 
for  all  her  plumpness,  and  soft  sweet- 
ness of  face,  Miss  Eliza  Flyn  was  a 
firm  lady,  once  her  mind  was  thorough- 
ly made  up.  Her  argument  was  that 
though  articulation  and  lip-reading 
might  be  a  wonderful  thing  for  a  few 
brilliant  children,  the  average  deaf  child 
trained  in  a  state  school  could  never 
get  much  benefit  from  it.  *  Lip-read- 
ers are  born  and  not  made,'  she  main- 
tained stoutly.  'It's  as  much  a  gift  as 
an  ear  for  music,  or  being  able  to  write 
poetry.' 

'Any  deaf  child  with  the  proper 
amount  of  brains,  and  normal  sight, 
can  be  taught  to  articulate  and  read 
the  lips,'  Miss  Evans  returned,  with 
equal  stoutness,  for  she  was '  pure  oral,' 
and  could  almost  have  found  it  in  her 
heart  to  wish  that  the  sign-language 
might  be  wiped  off  the  face  of  the  earth. 
There  she  and  Miss  Flyn  came  to  a  po- 
lite deadlock  of  opinion  in  the  matter. 

But  whatever  others  might  think, 
little  old  Webster  apparently  had  no 
doubts  of  the  advantage  of  the  oral 
method.  As  soon  as  he  found  out  what 
it  was  all  about,  he  flung  himself  into 
the  new  study  with  even  more  than  his 
usual  zest  and  enthusiasm.  Watching 
Miss  Evans's  lips  with  a  passionate  at- 
tention, his  brown  eyes  as  eager  and  as 
dumb  and  wistful  as  a  little  dog's,  he 
attempted  the  sounds  over  and  over, 
his  unaccustomed  lips  twisting  them- 
selves into  all  sorts  of  grotesque  posi- 
tions, in  his  effort  to  gain  control  over 
them.  He  always  shook  his  head  sharp- 
ly at  his  failures,  fiercely  rebuking 
himself,  and  immediately  making  a 
VOL.  in -NO.  4 


fresh  attack  upon  the  word  or  element, 
working  persistently  until  Miss  Evans's 
nod  and  smile  at  length  rewarded  him, 
upon  which  his  whole  little  face  would 
light  up,  and  he  would  heave  a  weary 
but  triumphant  sigh.  His  zeal  almost 
frightened  Miss  Evans,  and  while  she 
constantly  spurred  all  the  other  child- 
ren on  to  using  their  lips  instead  of  their 
eager  little  fingers,  Webster  she  tried 
to  check,  fearing  that  his  enthusiasm 
might  even  make  him  ill. 

Early  in  the  school  term,  when  he 
had  not  been  in  Miss  Evans's  class 
much  above  a  month,  little  old  Web- 
ster received  a  postcard  from  his  fa- 
ther saying  that  his  parents  expected 
to  come  to  Lomax  to  see  him  in  a  week 
or  so.  Webster  almost  burst  with  de- 
lighted expectancy.  He  showed  the 
card  to  every  deaf  child  who  could 
read,  and  interpreted  it  in  signs  and 
finger-spelling  to  those  who  could  not; 
he  permitted  his  blind  friends  to  feel  it 
all  over  with  their  delicate  inquiring 
fingers,  and  gave  every  teacher  and 
officer  the  high  privilege  of  reading,  — 

DEAR  LITTLE  CHARLIE  :  — 

Your  mother  and  I  expect  to  come  to 
Lomax  to  see  you  Friday  of  next  week. 
Your  loving  father, 

CHARLES  WEBSTER, 

while  he  stood  by  with  those  dancing 
eyes  of  his,  which  frequently  said  more 
than  speaking  people's  lips.  He  carried 
the  card  in  triumph  to  Miss  Evans,  and 
when  she  had  read  it  he  made  the  sign 
for  mother,  and  she  nodded  and  said 
that  was  nice,  taking  care  of  course  to 
speak  rather  than  sign.  But  his  lit- 
tle eager  face  clouded  over,  and  there 
appeared  on  it  that  shut-in  and  baffled 
expression  which  it  sometimes  wore 
when  he  failed  to  make  himself  under- 
stood. He  repeated  the  sign  and  put 
his  hand  to  his  lips  pleadingly.  Then 
she  realized  what  he  wanted. 

'Why,  bless  his  heart,  he  wants  me 


WHY  IT  WAS  W-ON-THE-EYES 


to  teach  him  to  say  mother!'  she  ex- 
claimed delightedly,  and  sitting  down 
on  the  veranda  steps,  for  it  was  out  of 
school  hours,  she  then  and  there  set  to 
work  drilling  him  in  the  desired  word, 
saying  it  repeatedly,  and  placing  his 
hand  against  her  throat  that  he  might 
feel  the  vibrations  of  sound.  At  last, 
watching  her  lips  intently,  making  re- 
peated efforts  doomed  to  failure,  shak- 
ing his  head  angrily  at  himself  each 
time,  and  renewing  the  attempt  man- 
fully, he  did  achieve  the  coveted  word. 
To  be  sure  it  was  not  very  distinctly 
said  at  first,  and  was  broken  into  two 
soft  little  syllables,  thus,  'mo-ther'; 
but  his  little  face  shone  with  the  tri- 
umph of  it.  And  then  in  gratitude  he 
said, '  Thank  you '  very  politely  to  Miss 
Evans,  having  learned  those  two  words 
before  in  his  articulation.  He  said 
them  in  his  best  voice,  carefully  plac- 
ing one  small  conscientious  finger  on 
the  side  of  his  nose,  which  gave  him  a 
most  comically  serious  expression,  but 
was  done  to  be  sure  that  he  had  suc- 
ceeded in  putting  the  proper  vibration 
into  his  *  Thank  you/ 

'Such  foolishness!'  Miss  Eliza  Flyn 
snorted,  passing  along  the  veranda  at 
this  moment.  *  What 's  the  good  of  one 
word?  And  he'll  forget  it  anyway  by 
to-morrow!' 

But  little  old  Webster  held  manfully 
to  that  hard-won  word  which  his  love 
had  bought.  Every  morning  when  he 
entered  the  class-room  he  said,  Mo- 
ther' to  Miss  Evans  with  his  enchant- 
ing smile,  so  that  she  began  to  be  afraid 
that  he  had  confused  the  meaning  of 
the  word,  and  was  calling  her  mother. 
On  the  day,  however,  that  she  permit- 
ted him  to  tear  the  leaf  from  the  school 
calendar, — a  daily  much-desired  priv- 
ilege, —  she  was  reassured  on  this 
point,  for  having  torn  off  the  proper 
date  he  turned  up  the  other  leaves 
swiftly  until  he  came  to  the  day  on 
which  his  parents  were  expected,  and 


putting  his  finger  on  the  number  he 
said,  'Mo-ther,  mo-ther,'  and  then  in 
quaint  fashion  he  pointed  to  the  calen- 
dar leaf,  and  then  to  himself,  and  lock- 
ing his  forefingers  together,  first  in  one 
direction  and  then  in  the  other,  he 
made  the  little  sign  for  friend,  meaning 
that  he  was  friends  with  that  day  be- 
cause it  would  bring  him  his  mother. 

He  said  the  word  repeatedly,  in 
school  and  out.  He  even  said  it  in  his 
sleep.  The  night  before  his  mother  was 
to  come,  when  Miss  Stedman  paid  her 
regular  visit  to  the  dormitory  where  all 
the  little  deaf  boys  were  asleep,  Web- 
ster sat  suddenly  bolt  upright  in  his 
bed,  his  eyes  wide-open,  but  unseeing 
with  sleep,  and  cried  out,  'Mother!' 

*  Goodness!'  Miss  Stedman  com- 
mented to  herself.  'I'll  be  glad  when 
his  mother  does  come!  He'll  go  crazy 
if  he  does  n't  get  that  word  off  his 
tongue  soon.' 

The  next  day,  —  the  great,  the  mi- 
raculous day,  —  little  old  Webster  was 
in  a  veritable  humming-bird  quiver  of 
excitement.  He  jumped  in  his  seat 
each  time  the  door  opened,  and  when, 
at  length,  Miss  Flyn  actually  came  to 
announce  that  his  father  and  mother 
had  really  arrived  he  leaped  up  with  a 
face  of  such  transcendent  joy,  that  his 
departure  left  Miss  Evans's  class-room 
almost  as  dark  as  if  the  sun  had  passed 
under  a  cloud.  So  much  of  pure  happi- 
ness went  with  him  that,  with  a  smile 
on  her  lips,  Miss  Evans  let  her  fancy 
follow  him  on  his  triumphant  way,  and 
for  fully  three  minutes,  while  she  pic- 
tured the  surprise  in  store  for  the  wait- 
ing mother,  she  permitted  her  'pure 
oral'  class  to  tell  each  other  over  and 
over  on  their  fingers  that  'E.  F.'  (Miss 
Flyn's  sign)  had  come  to  take  W-on- 
the-eyes  to  see  his  father  and  mother, 
before  she  awoke  to  the  fact  and  stern- 
ly recalled  their  runaway  language  from 
their  fingers  to  their  lips. 

In    the    meantime,    gripping    Miss 


WHY  IT  WAS  W-ON-THE-EYES 


467 


Flyn's  hand  tight,  little  old  Webster 
went  on  tiptoe  down  the  passageway 
leading  to  the  reception-room.  Miss 
Flyn  could  feel  the  vibration  of  excite- 
ment in  his  fingers  as  they  rested  in 
hers,  and  her  own  sympathetic  heart 
went  a  beat  or  two  faster  in  conse- 
quence. But  almost  at  the  reception- 
room  door  he  dropped  her  hand  sud- 
denly and  stopped  dead,  his  face  gone 
a  despairing  white,  and  a  lost,  agonized 
look  in  his  eyes.  For  a  moment,  he 
stared  about  him  in  passionate  bewil- 
derment, then,  bursting  into  a  storm  of 
tears,  he  turned  to  run  back  to  Miss 
Evans's  room.  But  Miss  Flyn  caught 
him  firmly  and,  forcing  him  to  look  at 
her,  signed,  'What  is  it?'  He  made  the 
sign  for  mother,  and  then  passed  his 
open  hand  despairingly  across  his  fore- 
head in  the  sign  for  forgotten,  and  Miss 
Flyn  realized  that  through  over-excite- 
ment or  some  trick  of  a  tired  brain,  his 
precious  word  had  all  at  once  slipped 
from  him.  He  looked  up  at  her,  and 
old  '  signer '  though  she  was,  she  could 
not  resist  the  appeal  of  his  tragic  little 
face.  Stooping  down,  she  pronounced 
the  lost  word,  placing  his  hand  against 
her  throat.  Remembrance  rushed  into 
his  eyes,  and  his  face  lit  like  a  flame. 
*  Mo-ther !  Mo-ther ! '  he  cried,  and  put- 
ting both  hands  tight  against  his 
mouth  as  if  to  hold  the  word  in  place, 
he  fled  down  the  hall  and  into  the  re- 
ception-room and  flung  himself  upon  a 
woman  who  sat  very  still,  her  waiting, 
listening  face  turned  toward  the  door. 

*  Mo-ther!  Mo-ther!'  he  cried,  his 
arms  tight  about  her  neck. 

She  gave  a  sharp,  an  almost  hyster- 
ical cry. 

'Charlie!'  she  screamed.  'Is  that 
Charlie?  Is  that  my  deaf  baby  talking? ' 

She  tore  his  arms  from  about  her 
neck,  and  held  him  away  from  her, 
while  her  eager,  trembling  fingers  went 
to  his  lips  and  felt  them  move  once 
more,  framing  the  wonderful  word. 


'It  is  Charlie!  It  is  my  little  deaf 
and  dumb  baby  talking!'  she  cried. 
And  then  she  went  into  a  wild  babble 
of  mother  words,  —  'My  baby!  My 
lamb!  My  darling,  precious  baby!'  — 
crying  and  kissing  him,  while  the  tears 
ran  down  from  her  eyes.  And  little  old 
Webster,  his  word  now  safely  delivered 
to  the  one  person  in  all  the  world  to 
whom  it  belonged,  relapsed  once  more 
into  his  old  soft,  inarticulate  grunting 
of 'Ough,  ough!'  nuzzling  his  face  close 
against  hers,  and  laughing  gleefully 
over  the  splendid  surprise  he  had  pre- 
pared for  her. 

And  after  one  astounded,  compre- 
hending look,  Miss  Flyn  turned,  and, 
racing  down  the  hallway,  burst  into 
Miss  Evans's  class-room  and  caught 
that  teacher  by  the  arm. 

*  Little  old  Webster's  mother  is 
blind!'  she  cried.  *  She's  stone  blind! 
She's  never  seen  Webster  in  all  her 
life.  —  She 's  never  heard  him  speak 
until  this  minute!  They've  never  been 
able  to  say  one  word  to  each  other. — 
She 's  blind,  I  tell  you !  And  that 's  why 
Webster's  sign  is  W-on-the-eyes,  — 
Clarence  Chester  must  have  known,  — 
and  that 's  why  he 's  always  so  good  to 
the  blind  children,  and  why  he  fought 
every  boy  who  laughed  at  the  funny 
way  his  shirts  were  made  —  he  knew 
his  mother  could  n't  see  to  make  them 
right!  And — and — '  Miss  Flyn  chok- 
ed, —  '  and  that 's  why  he 's  nearly  kill- 
ed himself  trying  to  learn  to  speak. 
There 's  never  been  any  way  they  could 
talk  to  each  other  except  by  feeling! 
She's  had  to  wait  nine  years  to  hear 
him  say  Mother!  And  —  and,'  Miss 
Flyn  wound  up  unsteadily,  'you 
need  n't  preach  to  me  any  more  about 
articulation  for  —  I'm  converted!' 

And  with  that  she  went  out  and 
banged  the  door  behind  her,  and  all  the 
children's  fingers  flew  up,  to  ask  Miss 
Evans  in  excited  signs  what  E.  F.  was 
crying  about. 


THE  RELIGION  OF  AMERICA 


(TO  A  CATHOLIC  MISSIONARY  IN  THE  UNITED   STATES) 


BY   WILLIAM    BARRY 


YOUR  last  letter  from  across  the 
Atlantic,  my  dear  Father,  cannot  but 
stir  in  any  reflecting  mind  a  world  of 
thought;  and  in  one  like  myself  —  a 
student  now  of  things  American  for 
more  than  half  a  century  —  reflections 
have  not  been  wanting.  I  envy  you 
indeed.  My  own  acquaintance  with 
sights  and  scenes  among  which  you 
have  spent  years  is  that  of  the  passing 
tourist.  But  you,  for  a  long  spell,  have 
been  watching  at  its  chief  centres  how 
that  multitudinous  life  ebbs  and  flows. 
Day  after  day  you  come  into  close 
touch  with  all  sorts  and  conditions  of 
men.  You  have  journeyed  over  the 
land  from  Boston  to  Seattle  and  San 
Francisco.  You  call  America  'To- 
morrow,' and  this  old  grandmotherly 
Europe  of  ours  *  Yesterday.'  With  a 
smile  you  observe  that  in  the  grammar 
of  Humanity  the  past  tense  broods 
over  London,  Berlin,  and  even  the 
Third  French  Republic;  while  the  fu- 
ture lightens  and  sparkles  out  West, 
away  beyond  Chicago,  far,  of  course, 
from  New  York,  which  is  but  a  door- 
mat whereon  immigrants  wipe  their 
feet  as  they  go  by  the  custom-house. 

Yet  I  have  an  advantage,  you  tell 
me,  denied  to  those  who  are  caught  in 
such  mighty  currents  —  I  enjoy  the 
privilege  of  distance,  which  is  perspec- 
tive. Literature  and  history  teach  me 
what  America  has  been.  Can  I  help 
you  to  forecast  what  America  will  be? 
Have  we  grounds,  you  inquire,  to  hope 

468 


that  this  great  new  people  may  con- 
tribute to  the  future  (which  will  surely 
be  theirs)  any  saving  element  whereby 
life  shall  grow  richer  and  civilization 
more  desirable?  That  is  your  question. 
I  turn  it  my  own  way,  and  I  ask, '  What 
is  the  Religion  of  America  ? '  In  the  true 
answer  to  that  query  lies  the  secret 
of  to-morrow.  How  does  the  mind  of 
the  people  judge  concerning  God,  con- 
science, and  immortality?  Is  it  still,  in 
any  sense,  Christian? 

It  is  impossible,  you  say,  and  I  must 
agree,  for  those  who  have  not  lived  on 
both  sides  of  the  Great  Water  to  realize 
how  completely  America  is  detached, 
as  a  whole,  from  the  Eastern  World  to 
which  Europe  belongs.  The  diverg- 
ence increases  with  some  vast  multi- 
ple of  the  distance.  A  fresh  order  of 
society  is  forming  on  a  scale  never 
hitherto  known,  with  a  hundred  mil- 
lions for  its  present  figure,  in  a  de- 
mocracy where  opinion,  at  least,  is 
free.  You  survey  this  illimitable  chaos 
of  beliefs,  no-beliefs,  parties,  profes- 
sions, sects,  syndicates,  trusts,  plat- 
forms, and  it  is  like  a  glimpse  of  the 
countless  glowing  lines  in  the  solar 
spectrum,  too  dazzling  for  the  eyes  of 
man.  Who  would  not  feel  overcome  at 
the  vision?  Is  there  any  way  to  master 
its  dimensions?  Has  it  a  law  of  devel- 
opment within  it?  Or  one  so  enormous 
in  range,  so  deep  and  high,  that  our 
mental  instruments  cannot  detect  its 
drift  or  anticipate  its  motions?  Well,  I 


THE  RELIGION  OF  AMERICA 


answer,  we  are  only  minor  prophets, 
for  whom  the  age  to  come  will  have 
many  a  surprise.  But  one  thing  seems 
clear  —  the  American  types  of  charac- 
ter must  go  on  diverging  from  those 
which  even  now  public  opinion  in  the 
United  States  condemns  and  rejects  as 
outworn.  Reversion  to  the  social  ideas 
prevailing  in  Europe  is  simply  not  con- 
ceivable with  Americans.  You,  my 
dear  Father,  dwelling  in  the  midst  of 
this  onward-looking  race,  know  well 
that  there  is  not  a  power  on  earth 
which  can  persuade  them  to  look  back. 
Europe  lives  by  custom  and  tradition, 
America  by  prophecy  and  adventure. 
This  is  what  the  New  World  means  by 
progress.  It  has  jettisoned  most  of  the 
objects  for  which  men  fought  three 
centuries  ago.  What  has  it  kept?  Free- 
dom and  hope.  From  your  side  of  the 
Ocean  we  appear  to  be  the  ancients, 
literary  and  picturesque,  as  the  Greeks 
and  Romans  appear  to  us. 

Now,  as  I  see  the  American  idea  — 
let  me  term  it  so  —  it  stands  for  the 
average  man,  the  common  school, 
equal  opportunities,  and  the  fine  old 
English  proverb,  'Turn  about  is  fair 
play.'  The  common  school,  I  say  again, 
not  the  'Bible  Commonwealth,'  de- 
vised by  Puritans,  or  the  peculiar 
divine  election  and  reprobation  that 
Jonathan  Edwards  reckoned  to  be  a 
doctrine  'exceedingly  pleasant,  bright, 
and  sweet.'  Calvin,  transplanted  to 
New  England,  flourished  for  a  time 
like  the  aloe,  then  withered  and  died. 
Of  all  the  Puritan  convictions,  which 
one  is  now  alive  in  the  great  multitude 
of  their  descendants?  Not  the  convic- 
tion of  sin,  or  any  strong  beliefs  con- 
cerning the  world  to  come  as  it  was 
imaged  by  the  Pilgrim  Fathers;  quite 
another  view  has  taken  hold  upon 
them,  if  they  do  not  fling  the  whole 
subject  aside;  but,  in  any  case,  the  re- 
action is  complete  and  trenchant.  Lib- 
erty for  a  man  to  make  of  himself  what 


he  can  and  will,  everywhere,  under  all 
dispensations,  is  the  shape  that  Non- 
conformity puts  on.  That  is  the  Amer- 
ican version  of  Burke's  celebrated 
phrase, '  The  dissidence  of  Dissent,  and 
the  protestantism  of  the  Protestant 
religion.' 

Moreover,  independence  from  the 
first  carried  with  it  a  principle  which 
may  be  summed  up  as  'free  associa- 
tion.' This  it  was  that  shattered  the 
Bible  Commonwealth.  Sects  multi- 
plied as  they  had  begun;  doctrines 
broadened  or  changed  into  the  clean 
contrary.  The  stern  disciple  of  Calvin 
had  a  Universalist  grandson.  From 
Edwards  to  Emerson  we  follow  an  un- 
doubted pedigree,  but  how  entire  is  the 
transformation!  'Cast  behind  you,' 
exclaims  the  sage  of  Concord,  address- 
ing youthful  ministers,  'all  conformity, 
and  acquaint  men  at  first  hand  with 
Deity.'  He  spoke  to  'a  decaying  church 
and  a  wasting  unbelief.'  He  said, 
'  The  Puritans  in  England  and  America 
found  in  the  Christ  of  the  Catholic 
Church,  and  in  the  dogmas  inherited 
from  Rome,  scope  for  their  austere 
piety  and  their  longings  for  civil  free- 
dom. But  their  creed  is  passing  away, 
and  none  arises  in  its  room.'  His  con- 
clusion or  his  premise,  —  for  we  may 
take  it  either  way,  —  was  that  '  mira- 
cles, prophecy,  poetry,  the  ideal  life, 
the  holy  life,  exist  as  ancient  history 
merely;  they  are  not  in  the  belief  nor 
in  the  aspiration  of  society/ 

Emerson  delivered  his  mournful  wit- 
ness at  Cambridge,  Massachusetts,  on 
Sunday  evening,  July  15,  1838.  It  re- 
cords a  fact  beyond  question:  the  Sab- 
bath rule  of  Puritanism  over  men's 
minds  had  come  to  its  last  hour. 
Churches  might  cling  to  it,  story-tellers 
perceive  a  sombre  kind  of  romance  in 
it;  but  the  shafts  of  light  from  Emer- 
son's Essays  were  not  more  eloquent 
than  Hawthorne's  Twice-told  Tales  in 
proclaiming  that  Jonathan  Edwards 


470 


THE  RELIGION  OF  AMERICA 


could  never  be  the  prophet  of  modern 
America.  The  Pilgrim  Fathers  and 
their  Commonwealth  sank  into  an  epi- 
sode now  rounded  off,  not  opening  into 
the  wide-ranging  national  procession, 
or  guiding  it  any  more.  But  '  the  dis- 
senter, the  theorist,  the  aspirant,'  re- 
quired no  prompting  from  Concord  to 
embark  on  seas  of  adventure;  they 
were  already  afloat,  —  often,  it  must 
be  admitted,  in  crazy  vessels.  Reform, 
now  as  always  after  the  sixteenth  cen- 
tury in  Protestant  lands,  implied  the 
breaking  up  of  larger  societies  into  in- 
numerable small  ones,  the  *  coming  out ' 
from  Babylon  to  march  towards  a  dis- 
tant New  Jerusalem,  through  many  a 
wilderness  where  souls  perished  by  the 
way  in  thousands,  a  forlorn  hope. 

But  in  that  crisis  or  judgment  of  all 
things,  it  was  still  the  average  man 
whom  its  leaders  kept  in  view.  Those 
leaders  might  be  fanatics  or  impostors, 
or  a  mixture  of  both;  among  them 
we  shall  scarcely  discern  the  tokens  of 
intellectual  greatness,  and  no  name 
shines  with  a  lustre  comparable  to  the 
glory  of  some  latter-day  seers  in  Eu- 
rope. Dreamers  wild  enough  we  watch 
as  they  struggle  in  convulsive  night- 
mares; but  they  dream  no  poetic 
dreams.  From  a  stranger,  Swedenborg, 
they  have  won  the  ideas,  and  on  his 
pattern  they  have  shaped  the  mytho- 
logy, which  they  offer  as  a  substitute 
or  supplement  to  the  Hebrew-English 
Bible.  Mark,  I  say,  that  name. 

Swedenborg  is  the  predestined  de- 
stroyer of  Puritanism,  who  discloses  to 
men  wearied  of  its  terrible  dogmas  a 
new  heaven  and  a  new  earth,  prosaic, 
solid,  near  at  hand,  to  be  reached  by 
experiment  or  by  deliberately  sought 
ecstasy.  He  is  the  father  of  Mormons, 
Spiritualists,  Second  Adventists;  the 
direct  guide  of  Thomas  Lake  Harris; 
the  ancestor,  several  times  removed,  of 
Mrs.  Eddy  and  her  Christian  Science. 
Swedenborg  occupies  in  the  develop- 


ment of  these  modern  religions  a  place 
corresponding  to  that  of  Bacon  as  re- 
gards the  Inductive  Method.  He  is  at 
once  popular  and  scientific  in  appear- 
ance; he  makes  a  boast  of  his  experi- 
mental triumphs  which  others  who 
are  competent  will  not  allow;  and  he 
does,  in  truth,  help  to  ruin  older  false 
interpretations  of  the  universe,  though 
failing  to  establish  any  of  his  own. 
Nevertheless,  one  principle  —  and  that 
essentially  Baconian  —  this  ghost-seer, 
as  Kant  named  him,  did  so  blazon  forth 
as  to  make  it  a  central  illumination  by 
which  Americans,  the  leaders  and  the 
led,  were  sure  that  they  could  not  go 
astray. 

To  Swedenborg  are  applicable  the 
curiously  exact  words  of  Hawthorne 
touching  this  entire  movement :  *  If  he 
profess  to  tread  a  step  or  two  across  the 
boundaries  of  the  spiritual  world,  yet 
he  carries  with  him  the  laws  of  our 
actual  life,  and  extends  them  over  his 
preternatural  conquests.'  There  was 
to  be  no  gulf,  and  only  a  thin  veil  easily 
swept  aside,  between  this  world  and 
the  next.  When  an  American  author- 
ess depicted  The  Gates  Ajar,  by  which 
angels  came  to  earth  and  souls  went 
to  Paradise,  it  seemed  no  more  trouble 
to  make  that  little  journey  than  to 
enter  a  neighbor's  garden.  America 
lay  on  both  sides  of  the  veil,  —  again 
let  me  quote  Hawthorne,  —  'a  country 
where  there  is  no  shadow,  no  antiquity, 
no  mystery,  no  picturesque  and  gloomy 
wrong,  nor  anything  but  a  common- 
place prosperity,  in  broad  and  simple 
daylight.' 

You  recognize  the  picture,  my  dear 
friend,  do  you  not?  How  unlike  our 
crime-laden,  storm- tossed  Europe!  My 
charming  American  friends  often  tell 
me  that  I  am  a  pessimist,  and  wonder 
that  I  should  be.  I  wonder  at  them. 
But  every  new  company  of  religious 
pilgrims  starting  from  East  to  West  in 
the  United  States  goes  out  not  merely 


THE  RELIGION  OF  AMERICA 


471 


to  discover  but  to  found  Utopia.  The 
sect  is  always  a  business  concern,  the 
prophet  a  promo  tor  of  some  *  trust,'  and 
the  temple  a  scene  of  smart  money- 
changing.  Observe,  I  do  not  say  that 
the  temple  is  nothing  else.  Reform, 
thrown  into  articles  and  loudly  pro- 
claimed, determines  what  these  be- 
lievers shall  eat,  drink,  avoid,  acquire, 
and  give  up.  They  may  be  Socialists 
with  Fourier,  Shakers  with  Anne  Lee's 
disciples,  Mormons  in  the  grasp  of 
Brigham  Young,  dwellers  at  Oneida 
Creek  with  Noyes,  enthusiasts  that  fol- 
low T.  L.  Harris  from  Mountain  Cove 
to  Santa  Rosa;  but  their  intent  is  ever 
to  set  up  a  Commonwealth  on  the  idea 
of  Perfection.  New  England  has  inocu- 
lated its  descendants  with  a  fever  for 
migration  in  quest  of  this  Eldorado, 
where  heaven  and  earth  shall  be  one. 
They  are  prospecting  for  the  Garden  of 
Eden. 

Before  they  reach  its  angel-guarded 
gates  Swedenborg  intercepts  them  once 
more.  He  whispers  to  each  new  Adam 
and  Eve  the  secret  long  ago  con- 
signed to  Platonic  Dialogues  which 
only  scholars  read,  of  'heavenly  coun- 
terparts,' or  marriages  made  in  hea- 
ven. I  am  not  speaking  figuratively; 
you  may  track  the  amazing  doctrine 
and  its  consequences  along  the  path  of 
Latter-Day  Saints,  in  the  life  and 
writings  of  Harris  or  Laurence  Oli- 
phant,  in  the  Pantagamy  of  Noyes;  and, 
as  I  am  persuaded,  it  lies  below  the 
facility  and  multiplication  of  American 
divorce,  a  sub-conscious  but  powerful 
instinct,  vulgarized  into  the  'elective 
affinities'  which  we  laugh  at  and 
loathe.  'The  more  intelligent,'  said 
Emerson,  'are  growing  uneasy  on  the 
subject  of  marriage;  they  wish  to  see 
the  character  also  represented  in  that 
covenant.'  Yes,  and  Salt  Lake  City, 
Oneida,  and  Reno,  have  replied  to  the 
gentle  '  O versoul '  with  a  vengeance,  by 
new-forming  or  getting  rid  of  the '  cove- 


nant' as  a  step  toward  improving  the 
*  character.'  Utah  gloried  in  its  poly- 
gamy; the  'sealing'  of  hapless  young 
maidens  to  dead  Joseph  Smith  might 
scandalize  Gentiles,  but  it  went  on  for 
a  generation.  T.  L.  Harris,  whom  his 
disciple  and  victim,  Laurence  Oli- 
phant,  depicted  under  the  features  of 
Masollam,  a  dull  profligate,  taught  in 
appearance  the  strange  doctrine  of 
'married  celibacy';  but  who  shall  say 
what  this  new  ordering  of  the  most  sa- 
cred of  human  relations  involved  ?  The 
Mormon  creed  was  plain  and  simple. 
'God's  service,'  they  said,  'is  the  en- 
joyment of  life.'  Americans,  we  know 
well,  did  not  as  a  people  follow  after 
Brigham  Young,  or  Harris,  or  Noyes, 
any  more  than  they  shut  themselves  up 
at  Mount  Lebanon  with  the  Shakers, 
or  trooped  out  with  Ripley  to  Brook 
Farm.  But  is  it  doing  vast  numbers 
of  them  an  injustice  to  believe  that 
they,  too,  consider  enjoyment  the  first 
and  greatest  of  the  Commandments? 
The  old  religion  preached  self-sacri- 
fice; what  could  a  new  one  oppose  to  it 
but  self-indulgence? 

Respect  for  law  is  an  English  princi- 
ple, and  it  was  carried  over  to  Massa- 
chusetts with  English  law-books.  Yet 
the  sects  which  have  sprung  up  in 
America  display  anarchic  tendencies 
not  to  be  mistaken.  The  average  man 
wants  to  feel  himself  free;  the  average 
woman  has  opportunities  of  living  her 
own  life  denied  to  most  of  her  Euro- 
pean sisters,  but  they  are  both  emi- 
nently sociable,  and  the  club  or  the 
hotel  brings  them  together.  Add  now 
some  reform  to  propagate,  some  uni- 
versal liberty  or  prohibition  to  be 
spread  'from  Maine  to  Oregon,'  as  the 
saying  runs,  —  a  crusade  against  slav- 
ery, or  whiskey,  or  in  favor  of  a  vege- 
tarian diet,  or  to  get  ready  for  the  Mil- 
lennium, —  your  club  turns  into  the 
semblance  of  a  church,  your  hotel  be- 
comes a  pulpit,  and  your  dining-room 


472 


THE  RELIGION  OF  AMERICA 


the  meeting-place  of  souls.  But  the 
most  remarkable  instances  of  free  as- 
sociation in  the  United  States,  from  a 
native  religious  point  of  view,  I  take 
to  be  Mormonism,  Spiritualism,  and 
Christian  Science. 

These  are  genuine  products  of  the 
American  soil  and  climate.  At  once 
original,  daring,  commonplace,  and  at- 
tractive to  fugitives  from  the  estab- 
lished religions,  they  may  offer  to  us 
elements,  or  even  inchoate  and  rudi- 
mentary forms,  of  the  idea  which  we 
are  seeking.  Repulsive  forms,  if  you 
will,  impostures  disguised  as  supersti- 
tions, trading  on  ignorance  and  credu- 
lity; symptoms  in  fact  of  a  disease 
widely  contagious;  'a  delusive  show  of 
spirituality,  yet  imbued  throughout 
with  a  cold  and  dead  materialism.'  I 
grant  all  that  and  more;  but,  as  Aris- 
totle shrewdly  observes,  a  man  may 
get  light  on  his  ruling  passions  and  mo- 
tives even  from  his  bad  dreams;  and 
here  we  can  study  dreams  that,  as  they 
move  and  stir  the  dreamers,  *  confront 
peace,  security,  and  all  settled  laws,  to 
unsettle  them/ 

Where  shall  we  look  for  the  future? 
Not  in  faint  shadows  of  the  once  all- 
venturing  Puritans;  therefore  outside, 
among  explorers,  or  on  their  track. 
The  American  idea  lives  elsewhere 
than  in  Baptists,  Methodists,  or  any  of 
the  earlier  Calvin-descended  Churches; 
for  it  quitted  them  long  ago.  I  hear  it 
in  a  word  of  Emerson's,  'America  is  the 
home  of  man.'  It  babbles  a  kind  of 
foolish  fairy  tale  when  the  Mormon  de- 
clares that  his  Continent  was  peopled 
from  the  lost  Ten  Tribes;  and  that 
America  is  the  true  land  of  Israel.  It 
plays  a  game  of  blind  man's  buff  with 
spirit-rapping  and  table-turning,  with 
dark  seances,  with  mediums,  trances, 
frantic  beatings  at  the  door  of  the 
tomb.  It  goes  about  staggering  amid 
delusions,  calling  on  those  who  have 
over'  to  answer  its  questions. 


It  dances  ghostly  '  Pentecostal '  dances 
after  the  fashion  of  Red  Indians,  fall- 
ing back  upon  customs  that  are  only  to 
be  found  on  this  side  of  the  world 
among  the  dervishes  of  Islam,  who 
scream  themselves  into  ecstasy  by  re- 
peating the  name  of  Allah.  In  regard 
to  marriage,  as  we  have  seen,  it  substi- 
tutes for  monogamy  the  most  varied 
forms;  sets  up  as  a  model  the  wigwam 
or  the6  harem;  and  tolerates  something 
not  unlike  Free  Love  by  its  criminal 
readiness  in  granting  divorce. 

This  American  spirit  has  made  trial 
of  Socialism  under  many  schemes,  all 
ending  in  failure;  but  still  it  struggles 
to  reconcile  the  laws  of  production  and 
distribution  with  even-handed  justice, 
although  its  vision  is  confused  by  the 
immense  respect  which  it  has  always 
felt  for  success,  whether  clean  or  un- 
clean. It  makes  laws  in  the  interest  of 
good  morals,  severely  prohibiting  the 
use  of  alcohol  and  tobacco;  yet  again,  it 
breaks  laws  by  appealing  to  the  Higher, 
or  the  Unwritten  Law;  and  it  is  so 
entangled  in  casuistries  that  because  of 
a  comma  misplaced  it  will  allow  a  mur- 
derer to  go  free.  It  is  soft  even  to  senti- 
mentalism,  but  permits  Judge  Lynch 
to  work  his  will  in  ways  that  are  not 
to  be  described.  Its  *  Bird  of  Freedom ' 
is  a  jest  and  an  inspiration  to  Lowell, 
who  treats  it  as  a  comic  symbol,  yet 
would  have  died  rather  than  give  up 
a  feather  from  that  eagle's  wing.  It  is 
emphatically  the  *  spirit  of  the  crowd,' 
liable  to  sudden  enthusiasms,  unreason- 
ing panics,  to  run  mad  about  a  celeb- 
rity one  week  and  to  forget  him  the 
week  after.  It  feels  hot  under  the  slight- 
est breath  of  criticism,  but  can  be  hum- 
ored like  a  child  with  a  little  judicious 
management.  It  is  lofty,  forgiving, 
good-natured,  alert,  curious,  and  does 
not  suspect  irony.  Its  age  is  youth;  its 
ambition  is  to  have  a  world  made  in  its 
image  and  likeness;  its  trial  passed  into 
a  more  perilous  phase  when  the  Civil 


THE  RELIGION  OF  AMERICA 


473 


War  ended  by  establishing  democracy. 
And  we,  though  strangers,  look  on  at 
the  vast  theatre,  the  high  stage,  and 
the  throng  of  actors  engaged  in  work- 
ing out  this  drama,  with  hope  and  fel- 
low-feeling. For  it  is  our  play,  too, 
since  the  future  of  mankind  hangs 
upon  it. 

Have  I  been  drawing  a  chimera,  the 
monster  of  my  own  imagination?  I 
think  not;  the  lines  upon  which  I  have 
gone  may  be  studied  in  a  library  of 
books,  and  are  visible  wherever  we 
turn  amid  American  scenes.  You  have 
felt  it  as  well  as  I,  my  dear  friend.  But 
you  will  surely  be  struck  with  a  sense 
of  the  contradictions  that  my  sketch 
brings  out.  If  they  cannot  be  resolved, 
the  *  New  Thought '  of  which  we  hear 
so  much  will  defeat  itself.  To  take  a 
crucial  instance :  Reform  has  been  the 
chief  motive  in  those  never-ending 
secessions  whereby  the  elder  Christian 
communities  were  broken  into  frag- 
ments. But  now  comes  Christian  Sci- 
ence, native  to  the  States  if  ever  any- 
thing was,  and  it  declares  evil  to  be 
non-existent,  therefore  not  in  need  of 
reform.  By  one  stroke  it  makes  an  end 
of  the  reformer  and  his  task.  Yet,  in 
this  dilemma,  the  true  American  feels 
a  secret,  an  irresistible  longing  to  agree 
with  both  sides.  He  would  have  had 
slavery  abolished  by  men  like  Garrison, 
and  pain  decreed  to  be  a  mere  phan- 
tom by  women  like  Mrs.  Eddy.  He 
cannot  give  up  any  doctrine  that  seems 
to  favor  universal  happiness.  Logic 
does  not  trouble  him,  for,  as  I  said,  he 
goes  by  sentiment.  His  theories  are 
nothing  but  his  feelings,  thrown  into 
abstract  terms  by  way  of  a  platform 
whence  he  can  address  the  world. 

At  this  point  Shakerism  puts  in  a 
claim  to  our  attention.  It  is  not  a 
growing  sect;  but  its  principles,  more 
than  forty  years  ago,  were  declared  by 
Hepworth  Dixon  to  be  *  found  in  the 
creed  of  every  new  American  Church/ 


Let  us  inquire  what  these  principles 
are.  They  lay  down  that  the  Church 
of  the  future  will  be  an  American 
Church  and  a  new  dispensation,  the 
Old  Law  having  had  its  day.  That 
intercourse  between  heaven  and  earth 
is  restored,  and  that  God  is  the  only 
King  and  Governor.  That  the  sin  of 
Adam  is  atoned,  man  made  free  from 
all  errors  except  his  personal  misdeeds, 
and  salvation  assured  to  the  whole 
race.  That  earth  is  heaven  'now  soiled 
and  stained,  but  to  be  restored  by  love 
and  labor  to  its  primeval  condition.' 
With  Swedenborg,  the  *  uniquely  gift- 
ed, uniquely  dangerous'  precursor  of 
Millenarian  sects,  the  brethren  hold 
that  the  general  Resurrection  is  al- 
ready passed,  the  *  Second  Advent' 
here;  and  they  conclude  that  the  re- 
generate should  not  marry  or  give  in 
marriage,  that  women  may  be  priests, 
that  every  one  must  labor  with  hands 
for  the  goods  which  all  are  to  enjoy. 
They  see  the  heavens  open  and  angels 
ascending  and  descending  on  Jacob's 
ladder. 

Anne  Lee,  the  female  Swedenborg, 
was  English,  not  American.  But  the 
ecstatic  revivals  to  which  Shakerism 
owes  its  converts;  the  divine  rule  of 
God-given  elders  and  elderesses;  the 
community  of  goods,  and  Family  of 
Love,  are  deeply  rooted  in  old  and  ex- 
treme aberrations  from  a  more  sober 

—  shall  we  call  it  a  less  unworldly? 

—  form  of  the  Puritan  faith.   'No  sol- 
diers, no  police,  no  judges';  but  also 
no  houses  of  temptation  to  vice;  no 
gambling,  because  no  speculation;  but 
*  order,    temperance,    frugality,    wor- 
ship'; these  are  features  of  a  Utopia 
dear  to  the  American  heart  in  its  Sab- 
bath moments,  when  it  muses  on  the 
dreams  of  its  youth.   They  express  a 
more  severe  judgment  on  the  popular 
religion,  which  builds  and  adorns  fash- 
ionable churches  with  gifts  from  Wall 
Street  millionaires,  than  earthquake  or 


474 


THE  RELIGION  OF  AMERICA 


tornado  would  be.  Mount  Lebanon  is 
a  sign  lifted  up,  pointing  to  the  'con- 
summation of  the  age/  and  to  the  need 
of  monasticism,  even  in  New  York 
State. 

A  sect,  however,  as  the  name  de- 
clares, cuts  itself  away  from  the  people 
at  large,  and  whether  Mormon  or  Shak- 
er, it  cannot  look  forward  to  making 
proselytes  of  all  Americans.  There 
was  room  about  the  year  1848  —  a  pe- 
riod marked  'stormy*  on  both  sides  of 
the  Atlantic  —  for  some  great  religious 
manifestation  which,  while  it  appealed 
to  the  general  desire  of  novelty,  should 
be  free  from  articles,  set  ministries, 
church-buildings,  and  even  the  in- 
spired Bible.  A  new  heaven  and  a  new 
earth  were  in  request.  But  could  not 
some  way  be  found,  like  printing  or 
stock-jobbing,  accessible  to  every  one 
who  chose,  by  which  religion  might  be- 
come at  once  private  and  universal,  as 
literature  was,  or  business,  or  politics? 

Two  considerations  must  be  kept  in 
view.  The  Puritans  had  revolted  from 
Catholic  tradition  because  they  would 
not  allow  any  priest,  as  they  said,  to 
stand  between  man  and  his  Maker.  By 
similar  reasoning  they  had  put  down 
the  invocation  of  Saints  and  Angels,  in 
order  to  leave  a  clear  space  before  the 
Great  White  Throne  for  suppliants 
who  would  draw  nigh  to  it.  The  conse- 
quences we  all  know.  Heaven  receded 
to  an  immeasurable  distance;  this  low- 
er world  rounded  itself  into  a  perfect 
whole;  and  intercourse  with  departed 
saints  was  no  more.  Religion  was  thus 
violently  broken  into  parts  which  lay 
utterly  separate  —  the  Here  and  the 
Hereafter  —  while  death  forbade  every 
attempt  by  prayer  to  bridge  over  the 
gulf  between  dearest  friends,  however 
they  might  yearn  for  one  another.  The 
solemn  old  services  of  Dirge  and  Re- 
quiem had  been  swept  away;  and  no- 
thing had  taken  their  place.  It  is  true, 
indeed,  that  while  Heaven  was  shut, 


'Satan's  invisible  world*  opened  its 
ponderous  jaws  and  sent  forth  its  deni- 
zens to  meet  ancient  crones  in  the  for- 
ests at  midnight,  if  the  records  of  Salem 
and  other  witch-haunted  towns  in  New 
England  may  be  trusted.  The  Com- 
munion of  Saints  was  a  lost  article  of 
the  creed.  But  the  communion  of 
devils  was,  on  Cotton  Mather's  show- 
ing, a  judicially  ascertained  fact. 
Witches,  executed  by  the  hundred, 
may  be  looked  on,  in  short,  as  pioneers 
of  Spiritualism,  and  its  earliest  martyrs 
in  the  New  World. 

They  were  destined  to  have  their  re- 
venge. If  instead  of  witch  we  write 
'medium/  how  significant  will  be  the 
change!  Yet  in  essentials  the  new  sci- 
ence and  the  old  superstition  are  at 
one.  I  call  Spiritualism  a  science,  for  it 
professed  to  yield  its  results'  by  experi- 
ments which  could  be  repeated,  tested, 
and  compared  on  the  accepted  laws  of 
evidence;  to  attain  'a  world  of  spirit 
that  took  shape  and  form  and  practical 
intelligibility,  in  ordinary  rooms  and 
under  very  nearly  ordinary  circum- 
stances.' It  said,  'Seeing  is  believing, 
handling  is  proof.'  It  did  not  require 
you  to  take  the  medium  on  trust.  It 
had  no  priesthood,  no  dogmas;  for  its 
central  statement,  that  the  living  could 
have  intercourse  with  the  dead,  was  not 
a  truth  to  be  received  on  the  word  of 
another,  but  a  challenge  which  whoso 
would  might  verify.  Moreover,  though 
some  have  questioned  if  the  name  of 
religion  can  rightly  be  attached  to 
Spiritualism,  it  does  without  doubt 
bring  its  adepts  back  from  doctrines  of 
the  lecture-room  or  abstract  theory  to 
that  primitive  condition  of  thought  in 
which  religion  finds  a  main  beginning. 
For  religion  is  the  problem  of  the  '  next 
world/  call  it  how  you  will.  And  Spir- 
itualism undertakes  to  solve  the  pro- 
blem by  the  scientific  method,  exactly 
as  the  chemist  answers  our  inquiry,  — 
for  instance,  'Does  radium  exist?'  — 


THE  RELIGION  OF  AMERICA 


475 


by  putting  a  sample  of  the  thing  sought 
into  our  hands.  Neither  the  chemist 
nor  the  medium  is  a  priest,  any  more 
than  the  class  or  the  inquirer  can  be 
termed  disciples.  Experiment,  in  both 
cases,  remains  the  ground  of  affirma- 
tion. 

Now,  then,  we  have  arrived  at  an 
idea  which,  as  it  rose  and  overspread 
the  civilized  world,  was  seen  to  be 
peculiarly  American.  Inspired  by  Mes- 
mer  and  *  animal  magnetism,'  starting 
with  vulgar  phenomena  of  raps  and 
table-turning,  noised  abroad  by  Uni- 
versalist  preachers  and  Andrew  Jack- 
son Davis,  the  Poughkeepsie  seer,  with 
'sensitives'  and  clairvoyants  to  furnish 
daily  evidence  of  its  marvels,  Spiritual- 
ism ran  its  wildfire  course,  outstripping 
every  other  propaganda  by  the  num- 
bers who  took  up  its  practices.  Any 
one  could  begin  anywhere.  *  Probably,' 
said  the  late  Frank  Podmore,  *  no  body 
of  earnest  men  and  women  ever  pre- 
sented a  more  unlovely  picture  of  the 
Hereafter.  Yet  in  spite,  or  perhaps  be- 
cause, of  the  concreteness  of  its  ideals, 
and  the  parochial  limitations  of  its 
chief  prophets,  the  new  ideas  had  suffi- 
cient motive-power  to  overrun  the 
American  continent.' 

They  did  not  reveal  a  spiritual  life  as 
conceived  by  any  previous  form  of 
Christianity;  angels  and  demons  were 
alike  absent  from  the  trance  communi- 
cations of  the  medium;  and  concerning 
the  Supreme  there  was  absolute  silence. 
Neither  heaven  nor  hell  came  into  the 
scenery  of  a  universe  as  matter  of  fact 
as  Broadway  or  State  Street  at  high 
noon.  All  the  sensitive  beheld  was  'a 
practicable  and  imminent  millennium, 
freed  from  the  fear  of  death,  and  con- 
tinuing, on  the  gray  level,  through  in- 
definite generations.'  Taking  the  wit- 
nesses at  their  own  value,  without 
heeding  the  professional  charlatan  or 
the  liar  detected  in  the  very  act  of  im- 
posture, we  feel  dumbfounded  when 


Franklin,  Washington,  and  Bacon  de- 
liver by  the  lips  of  entranced  subjects 
the  silliest  of  lectures,  in  which  not  one 
new  fact  such  as  science  lights  upon 
every  day  is  added  to  our  knowledge. 
We  cannot  be  astonished  that  hard- 
headed  rationalizers  like  Professor 
Miinsterberg  flatly  declare,  'The  facts 
as  they  are  claimed  do  not  exist,  and 
never  will  exist.'  Yet  I  would  remind 
the  eminent  professor  that  science  — 
physical  merely,  and  not  metaphysical 
—  should  be  cautious  in  prophesying 
a  universal  negative.  Science  is  quite 
incapable  of  determining  a  priori  that 
departed  spirits  are  and  ever  will  be 
unable  to  'enter  into  communication 
with  living  men  by  mediums  and  by 
incarnation.'  How  can  the  'scientist' 
possibly  know?  Let  him  lay  his  hand 
on  his  lips  when  it  is  a  question  of  what 
must  or  must  not  be,  outside  the  law  of 
contradiction. 

You  and  I,  my  dear  friend,  are  agreed 
as  Catholics  in  holding  Spiritualism  to 
be  exceedingly  dangerous,  where  it 
happens  not  to  be  false  or  delusive. 
But  you  will  readily  grant  that  so  viru- 
lent a  disease,  attaching  itself  to  Amer- 
ican religion,  is  symptomatic  of  much. 
These  fungous  growths  on  the  once 
flourishing  and  stately  cedars  of  Puri- 
tan theology  betokened  that  its  life 
was  decaying  at  the  roots.  Its  magic 
ring  was  broken.  All  its  dogmas  were 
melting  into  the  'anaemic  optimism' 
of  an  afterworld  in  which  no  difference 
appeared  between  good  and  evil.  For 
the  'spirits'  never  hinted  at  a  Day 
of  Judgment;  neither  did  they  confirm 
Swedenborg's  vision  of  many  penal 
abodes,  or  'hells,'  to  be  finally  trans- 
formed into  heavens. 

Characteristic  of  the  later  religious 
developments  in  America,  from  Shak- 
erism  to  Christian  Science,  is  this  de- 
nial of  sin,  which  Theodore  Parker  had 
done  worse  than  deny,  defining  it  in  a 
scandalous  epigram  as  a  'falling  up- 


476 


THE  RELIGION  OF  AMERICA 


wards.'  But  do  not  these  phenomena 
bear  testimony  to  the  law  of  reaction 
as  *  equal  and  opposite?'  The  witch 
supplants  the  minister;  Apollyon  is 
chained,  in  Hawthorne's  deeply  biting 
parable,  to  the  modern  fast  train  on  the 
Celestial  Railroad;  all  men  are  saved, 
instead  of  most  being  foredoomed  to 
perdition;  and  Satan  is  abolished  by 
universal  suffrage.  'Is  there  nothing 
to  fear  in  God? '  The  last  of  the  Puri- 
tans throws  down  the  question  as  a 
defiance.  But  from  every  quarter  these 
'new  theologians'  reply  with  a  great 
shout,  *  No,  there  is  nothing.'  Sin  and 
pain  and  death  are  hallucinations, 
scattered  by  the  advent  of  a  science 
which  rests  on  the  senses  and  reaches 
beyond  them. 

Yet,  even  if  a  malignant  disease,  the 
movement  known  as  Spiritualism  an- 
nounced a  religious  revolution,  —  the 
new  birth  of  ideas  long  extinct  among 
Reformed  Christians.  Again,  whether 
it  was  'salvation  by  electricity,'  as  in 
earlier  stages,  or  by  'telepathy,'  as  in 
our  day,  it  insisted  on  carrying  science 
over  the  border  into  a  living  and  not 
a  dead  cosmos,  greatly  to  the  indigna- 
tion of  comfortable  settlers  on  this  side 
of  the  tomb.  Life  has  always  been  a 
puzzle  and  an  offense  to  the  system  of 
Materialism;  but  life  beyond  the  grave, 
in  any  account  of  it,  would  totally  de- 
range the  snug  proportions  of  which 
unbelieving  physical  science  had  been 
so  proud.  It  remains  true,  nevertheless, 
that  by  ridiculous,  uncouth,  and  pro- 
voking methods  the  spirit-rapper  blun- 
dered, so  to  speak,  into  a  vast  realm  of 
obscure  yet  undeniable  phenomena, 
where  psychic  research  has  laid  bare 
operations  and  processes  altogether 
strange  to  official  biology.  Man  was 
recognized  as  living  at  once  in  two 
worlds  —  the  world  of  matter  ana- 
lyzed by  chemistry  and  the  world  of 
spirit  transcending  matter,  shaping  it 
to  ends  which  neither  chemist  nor  phys- 


icist could  grasp.  The  story  of  our 
kind  was  not,  therefore,  a  by-product 
of  atoms  at  play  among  themselves, 
but  a  chapter  in  the  Book  of  Life  which 
is  wide  as  the  universe.  Atoms  and 
ether  do  not  by  combination  produce 
that  real  thing  named  by  us  the  soul. 
On  the  contrary,  it  is  the  spirit  — 
Mind  and  Will,  existing  from  before 
all  ages  —  that  employs  atoms  and 
ether  as  its  instruments,  the  vehicles  of 
its  message  to  other  spirits,  by  laws 
which  it  has  framed  itself.  Spiritual- 
ism was  a  rebellion  against  death,  as 
physical  science  conceived  of  it.  The 
rebels  have  won.  Personality,  mira- 
cles, foreknowledge,  action  of  mind  at 
a  distance,  faith-healing,  —  'science* 
has  been  compelled  to  admit  all  these 
things  and  more  also;  —  a  life  outside 
earthly  conditions  has  been  revealed, 
justifying  religion,  which  would  not 
give  up  believing  in  it  during  the  hey- 
day of  agnostic  incredulity. 

Spiritualism,  then,  has  stumbled 
upon  facts  by  crude  experiments.  But 
it  has  not  dealt,  as  a  popular  religion, 
with  'problems  of  space  and  time,  of 
knowing  and  being,  of  evil  and  good,  of 
will  and  law.'  It  makes  no  attempt  to 
be  a  theology.  It  is,  like  the  American 
genius  that  gave  it  birth,  something 
practical,  without  literary  culture,  or  a 
sense  of  art,  or  metaphysical  subtlety, 
or  any  very  deep  elements  of  worship. 
The  fact  to  which  it  bears  witness,  we 
may  say  in  the  language  of  William 
James,  is  this,  that  '  the  conscious  per- 
son is  continuous  with  a  wider  self 
through  which  saving  experiences 
come';  but  also,  we  must  add,  experi- 
ences the  reverse  of  saving. 

These  dark  regions  of  the  sky,  mod- 
ern America  passes  over  rapidly;  and 
in  Christian  Science  it  has  invented  a 
system  that  positively  denies  them.  The 
wheel  has  come  full  circle  from  its  old 
Puritan  standpoint.  Universal  optim- 
ism finds  a  prophet  and  a  poet  of  genu- 


THE  RELIGION  OF  AMERICA 


477 


ine  fervor  in  Walt  Whitman,  who  pro- 
claimed that  the  religion  of  Americans 
is  America,  that  the  common  life  is  the 
best  life,  that  *  there  is  no  imperfection 
in  the  present,  and  can  be  none  in  the 
future.'  To  him,  'Men  and  women, 
life  and  death,  and  all  things,  are  di- 
vinely good/ 

*  The  religion  of  Americans  is  Amer- 
ica.' For  the  millions  who  never  dark- 
en the  door  of  a  church  there  seems 
to  be  no  other.  Movements  of  reform, 
so  widespread  as  to  embrace  the  Conti- 
nent, proceed  on  a  determination  not 
to  rest  until  the  evils  that  they  combat 
are  banished  from  the  United  States, 
which  ought  to  be  the  world's  Holy 
Land.  The  so-called  New  Thought  is 
American  by  origin,  deliberately  sup- 
presses reference  to  evil,  and  instead  of 
the  Lord's  Prayer  says,  *  Youth,  health, 
vigor,'  at  break  of  day.  Such  '  concrete 
therapeutics'  are  natural  to  a  young 
and  self-confident  people,  whose  prin- 
ciple has  been  pithily  summed  up  by 
R.  W.  Trine:  'One  need  remain  in  hell 
no  longer  than  one  chooses.'  Mindcure 
is  American;  Mrs.  Eddy  could  have 
flourished  nowhere  else  than  among 
a  people  who  adore  financial  success 
and  suffer  from  chronic  indigestion. 
All  these  varieties  of  religious  experi- 
ence may  be  resolved  into  Pantheism; 
but  they  derive  their  language  and  not 
a  little  of  their  power  from  Emerson, 
who  was  a  New  Englander  to  the  core. 
American  ideals  furnish  to  all  such 
evangelists  an  object  and  an  inspira- 
tion. They  have  none  of  them  been 
transplanted  from  the  Old  World  or 
the  Christian  Gospels. 

Let  me  bind  these  divers  threads  to- 
gether. Americans  once  believed  with 
shuddering  in  man's  total  depravity, 
from  which  only  the  small  number  of 
the  elect  were  redeemed.  They  now 
believe  that  man  is  by  nature  good,  by 
destiny  perfect,  and  quite  capable  of 
saving  himself.  But  in  a  sort  of  'ideal 


America'  they  recognize  the  motive 
power  of  this  more  humane  life  toward 
which  they  ought  ceaselessly  to  be 
tending.  The  Commonwealth  is  their 
goal,  business  their  way  to  heaven, 
progress  their  duty,  free  competition 
their  method.  Mystery,  obedience, 
self-denial  are  repugnant  to  them.  But 
they  admire  self-discipline  when  it  re- 
jects what  is  beneath  man's  dignity,  or, 
in  deference  to  a  fine  idea,  practices 
temperance.  They  are  a  breed  of  heroes 
rather  than  ascetics;  Western  not 
Eastern;  not  contemplatives,  nor  clois- 
tered, nor  exactly  humble  in  their 
thoughts  before  God  or  man.  If  there 
is  to  be  election,  they  are  the  elect :  in 
any  case  leaders  of  a  New  Israel  to  the 
Land  of  Promise.  For,  as  Whitman 
sings,  'Never  was  average  man,  his 
soul,  more  energetic,  more  like  a  God ' 
—  meaning  the  average  American  of 
these  States.  Whitman  is  very  bold. 

However,  when  the  true  democracy 
dawns,  it  will  acknowledge  the  'essen- 
tial sacredness  of  every  one,'  or,  as 
was  said  of  old,  that  we  are  all  God's 
children.  And  so  we  shall  be  not  an 
average  but  a  comradeship.  In  very 
rude  or  even  brutal  forms  of  association 
this  divine  germ  may  be  perceived 
under  heaps  of  dross.  When  Emerson 
cultivates  it,  the  name  is  friendship 
and  the  atmosphere  love.  Nothing 
more  severe  has  been  charged  upon 
Puritanism  than  that  it  made  a  religion 
of  hatred.  Those  who  left  its  precincts 
to  become  Unitarians  or  Universalists 
founded  their  new  beliefs  on  kindness, 
which  they  judged  to  be  the  Highest 
Law.  Herein  they  were  eminently 
American  and  democratic.  I  am  saying 
no  word  in  support  of  the  doctrines  at 
which  they  arrived  as  religious  teach- 
ers. But  this  Law  of  Kindness  it  cer- 
tainly was  that  gave  its  death-blow  to 
the  Puritan  theology. 

In  like  manner  the  American  insists 
on  freedom,  and  his  marching  song  of 


478 


THE  RELIGION  OF  AMERICA 


the  Republic  declares,  not  less  truly 
than  passionately,  that  it  is  worth  dy- 
ing for.  But  this  freedom  can  be  no 
other  than  the  individual's  choice  to 
live  a  moral,  an  heroic  life.  He  has 
broken  out  of  the  cast-iron  system 
that  made  him  a  marionette  pulled  by 
strings  of  predestination.  He  is  pro- 
gressive because  he  is  free.  He  will 
build  up,  as  I  said,  and  not  be  thrust 
onwards  blindly  into  the  New  Jerusa- 
lem. Civilization  becomes  an  enter- 
prise, and  the  future  an  object,  to  this 
adventurer,  simply  for  the  reason  that 
he  can  create  them  as  he  will.  The 
Divine  Power  is  his  Friend,  not  his 
Fate;  and  his  belief  in  human  nature 
as  something  of  intrinsic  value,  to  be 
made  perfect  hereafter,  is  the  free 
acceptance  of  a  Divine  Idea  which  it 
is  man's  duty  to  realize.  Thus  civil- 
ization and  Religion  are  but  different 
facets  of  the  same  glory. 

With  pure  metaphysical  speculation 
the  American  does  not  concern  him- 
self. He  is  more  English  than  the  Eng- 
lishman by  his  inability  to  feel  an  in- 
terest in  problems  which  the  Greek  or 
the  German  philosopher  spent  his  life 
in  brooding  over.  At  length  a  name 
has  been  found  for  this  deliberate  sup- 
pression of  metaphysics;  and  the  late 
William  James  taught  us  to  call  it 
Pragmatism.  On  such  a  showing,  Re- 
ligion must  produce  the  evidence  not 
only  of  facts,  but  of  new  and  peculiar 
facts,  —  of  a  cosmic  order  beyond  the 
reach  of  physical  science,  but  experi- 
enced, and  not  merely  inferred.  Faith 
and  prayer,  mind-cure  and  the  phe- 
nomena of  spiritualism,  the  '  subliminal 
self,'  —  what  is  the  explanation  of  our 
interest  in  all  this  but  that  we  cannot 
live  by  physics  or  metaphysics  alone? 
that  the  spirit  demands  its  own  world, 
peopled  by  conscious  beings  with  whom 
it  may  hold  communion?  At  certain 
points  the  invisible  realm  of  spirits 
touches  ours,  pouring  into  it  the  energy 


from  which  proceed  revelations,  mira- 
cles of  healing,  inspirations  to  follow 
the  dictates  of  holiness  laid  down  in 
the  Gospels  by  Jesus.  Life  rather  than 
thought,  action  far  more  than  theory, 
is  the  word  for  Americans.  And  where- 
as the  Pilgrim  Fathers  divided  heaven 
from  earth  by  a  gulf  which  death  alone 
could  pass,  their  descendants  are  learn- 
ing in  ways  most  unexpected  that  we 
attain  to  life  everlasting  by  the  Com- 
munion of  Saints.  The  earthly  and  the 
heavenly  Commonwealths  make  up  to- 
gether the  American  ideal. 

So  it  seems  to  me,  my  dear  Father, 
as  I  view,  not  without  good-will,  the 
strange  story  of  religious  development 
which  has  reversed  the  principles  of 
Puritan  theocracy  and  rejected  its 
leading  doctrines.  Often,  indeed,  it  has 
gone  to  the  other  extreme.  To  be 
*  moonstruck  with  optimism'  I  cannot 
reckon  sound  philosophy.  But,  if  there 
is  a  world  beyond  the  reaches  of  earth- 
bound  sense,  its  action,  miraculous  and 
illuminating,  was  surely  not  confined 
to  Israel  or  the  period  of  the  New 
Testament.  Religion  is  present  fact  as 
well  as  past  history.  The  Communion 
of  Saints  either  did  not  exist  at  any 
time,  or  it  exists  now.  All  that  was 
ever  in  the  Church  must  be  with  us 
under  living  forms  at  this  moment,  not 
in  the  shape  of  abstract  ideas,  but  of 
objects,  institutions,  personalities,  ac- 
cessible to  our  prayers  and  answering 
them  by  the  gift  of  powers  not  to  be 
gained  otherwise.  The  supernatural 
order,  in  short,  is  a  universe  and  we  are 
in  it,  not  isolated  or  left  to  ourselves 
as  lonely  souls  astray  in  the  midst  of  a 
godless  machinery.  Those  powers  do 
overcome  the  world;  they  reveal  here 
and  now  in  every  man  who  will  look 
within,  a  vital  force,  a  consciousness,  on 
which  time,  space,  and  material  condi- 
tions have  only  a  limited  influence. 
And  here  is  our  freedom;  for  *  where  is 
the  spirit,  there  is  liberty.' 


EMOTION  AND  ETYMOLOGY 


479 


Our  name  for  the  Communion  of 
Saints,  as  I  need  not  remind  you,  my 
dear  Father,  is  the  Catholic  Church. 
We  have  always  held  that  in  its  three 
stages,  militant,  suffering,  triumphant, 
it  is  united  by  prayer  of  invocation  and 
intercession,  by  graces  asked  and  given, 
by  the  Holy  Sacrifice.  We  never  would 
allow,  even  in  fallen  man,  total  de-  . 
pravity  of  will  or  intellect.  We  have  in 
our  Religious  Orders  that  scheme  of  a 
perfect  life  which  Mount  Lebanon  has 
attempted,  and  which  the  Socialist 
cannot  achieve.  Dreams  outside  Ca- 
tholicism become  realities  within  it. 
And  when  the  uninstructed  crowd 
makes  objection  to  it,  from  the  dis- 
tance of  Puritan  prejudice,  scientific 
conceit,  or  spiritualist  reverie,  I  would 
answer  in  the  words  of  Hawthorne, 


'The  great  Church  smiles  calmly  upon 
its  critics,  and  for  all  response  says, 
"Look  at  me! "  and  if  you  still  murmur 
for  the  loss  of  your  shadowy  perspec- 
tive, there  comes  no  reply  save  "  Look 
at  me!"  in  endless  repetition,  as  the 
one  thing  to  be  said.  And  after  looking 
many  times,  with  long  intervals  be- 
tween, you  discover  that  the  cathedral 
has  gradually  extended  itself  over  the 
whole  compass  of  your  idea;  it  covers 
all  the  site  of  your  visionary  temple, 
and  has  room  for  its  cloudy  pinnacles 
beneath  the  dome.' 

Such,  my  dear  Father,  is  the  homage 
of  New  England  to  the  old  religion,  as 
its  pilgrim  and  finest  representative  in 
literature  stands  before  St.  Peter's 
shrine.  Is  it  not  a  prophecy  of  things 
to  be? 


EMOTION  AND  ETYMOLOGY 


BY   YOSHIO   MARKINO 


IN  Japan  we  call  words  '  Kotoba '  or 
'Koto-no-Ha.'  Its  literal  meaning  is, 
the  leaves  of  Idea.  Indeed,  our  idea  is 
like  the  trunk  of  tree,  while  the  words 
are  like  the  leaves.  As  the  botanist 
judges  what  tree  it  is  by  seeing  its 
leaves,  so  we  judge  what  idea  one  has 
by  hearing  the  words. 

There  are  great  differences  between 
the  richness  and  poorness  of  words  in 
the  different  countries.  Japan  is  cer- 
tainly richer  in  her  words  than  Eng- 
land. Just  for  an  example,  we  have 
more  than  nine  words  for  the  word 
'I.'  The  Emperor  alone  calls  himself 
'Chin,'  and  all  his  subjects  call  them- 
selves 'Watakushi,'  'Washi,'  'Ore,' 


'Boku,'  'Sessha,'  'Soregashi,'  'Ware,' 
'  Yo,'  etcetera,  according  to  the  circum- 
stances. The  second  or  third  person 
changes  as  much  as  the  first  person, '  I,' 
and  all  the  verbs  accordingly.  When 
I  started  to  learn  the  English,  first 
time,  I  asked  my  American  teacher, 
'What  shall  I  call  myself  before  the 
Emperor?'  He  said,  'I.' 

'Then  what  shall  I  say  before  my 
parents?'  — 'I.' 

'What  shall  I  say  before  my  men 
friends?  And  before  my  women 
friends?'  — 'I.' 

I  was  quite  astonished  and  said, 
'  How  simple,  but  how  rude  is  the  Eng- 
lish language!' 


480 


EMOTION  AND  ETYMOLOGY 


However,  to-day  I  am  living  in  Eng- 
land and  using  only  the  English  lan- 
guage to  express  my  ideas,  and  I  do 
not  find  her  poverty  of  words  even 
though  the  stock  of  the  English  vo- 
cabularies in  my  head  is  much  poorer 
than  the  English  people's.  And  why? 
Because  I  can  put  my  own  feeling  in 
them.  I  think  words  are  just  like  pic- 
tures. If  you  draw  a  line  without  any 
idea,  it  is  no  more  than  a  simple  line, 
but  if  you  draw  a  line  with  the  feeling 
of  tree,  it  will  look  like  tree,  and  if  you 
draw  it  with  the  feeling  of  water,  it  will 
look  like  water.  With  our  own  emotion, 
we  can  make  that  single  word,  'I,'  into 
modestness,  haughtiness,  or  anything. 

Then  the  resource  of  conveying  our 
emotion  to  each  other  does  not  depend 
upon  the  wealth  of  words  only.  It  is 
our  imagination  and  our  sympathy 
which  communicates  our  emotion.  The 
more  sympathy  we  have  to  each  other, 
the  less  important  are  our  words. 

We  have  a  saying  in  Japan,  *  Lovers 
always  talk  nonsense.'  Indeed  their 
conversation  must  sound  nonsensical 
to  the  third  person,  but,  don't  you 
know,  they  are  communicating  emo- 
tions to  unmeasurable  extent  between 
themselves  ?  It  is  not  always  necessary 
to  be  in  the  sexual  love,  but  the  frater- 
nal or  paternal  love  often  conveys  its 
deep  emotion  with  some  poor  words,  or 
even  with  quite  wrong  words. 

When  I  was  in  Japan,  I  had  a  boy 
friend  called  Junji  Nonoyama.  My 
brother  took  us  both  to  the  nearest 
large  town,  called  Nagoya.  We  came 
back  by  foot  in  midnight.  It  was  rain- 
ing hard.  We  arrived  at  Junji's  house. 
Junji  knocked  the  door.  His  sister  came 
to  the  door  and  said,  'Why  have  you 
not  stayed  in  a  hotel  instead  of  coming 
back  so  late  in  such  a  dreadful  night?' 

Junji  said,  'Oh,  because  it  is  so  wet 
and  so  late.' 

His  sister  welcomed  him,  saying,  *I 
see,  I  see,  I  quite  understand  you.' 


After  we  left  there  my  brother  said, 
'What  has  she  seen  in  Junji's  argu- 
ment? It  is  most  illogical  to  say  he  has 
come  back  because  it  is  wet  and  late!' 

I  said,  'Ah,  but  it  was  their  delightful 
fraternal  love  which  they  understood 
each  other.  His  sister  must  have  appre- 
ciated Junji's  devotion  toward  her.' 

I  was  in  my  early  teens  then,  but 
since  this  incident  I  began  to  wonder 
that  where  there  is  sympathy  there 
must  be  some  emotion  communicating 
to  each  other  deeply,  quite  apart  from 
their  words.  There  is  another  example. 
When  I  was  seven  or  eight,  my  aunt 
came  to  my  house.  She  had  four  daugh- 
ters. She  was  talking  with  my  sister 
about  her  second  daughter.  But  all 
through  her  conversation  she  was  call- 
ing the  second  daughter  by  the  name 
of  the  third  daughter.  My  sister,  too, 
was  talking  in  the  same  way.  After  my 
aunt  had  gone  I  told  my  sister  how 
they  were  mistaken  about  the  girl's 
name.  She  was  quite  amazed,  as  if  she 
was  awakened  for  the  first  time  then. 

When  the  people  become  the  slaves 
of  emotion,  they  often  commit  acci- 
dental comedy.  One  of  my  father's 
friends  married  a  woman  who  looked 
like  the  Japanese  toy  tigers.  The  vil- 
lagers nicknamed  her,  'Toy- tiger  wife.' 
But  of  course  no  friend  would  dare  say 
that  to  her  or  her  husband.  One  day, 
some  friend  visited  on  them,  and  the 
husband  and  that  friend  began  the 
game  of  '  go '  (a  Japanese  draughts,  far 
more  complicated  than  that  of  Eng- 
lish). The  'go'  players  were  getting 
more  and  more  excited,  and  the  friend 
became  almost  unconscious  of  his  sur- 
rounding. Each  time  when  he  played, 
he  shouted, '  Here  is  the  toy-tiger  wife ! ' 
And  the  husband  joined  him:  'Now 
let  me  see  the  toy-tiger  wife!' 

*  Don't  you  see  the  toy-tiger  wife?' 

'Oh,  you  toy-tiger  wife.' 

'Now  then,  what  will  you  do  with 
your  toy- tiger  wife?' 


EMOTION  AND  ETYMOLOGY 


481 


*  Better  get  rid  of  this  toy-tiger  wife.' 

All  the  time  the  wife  was  listening  to 
this  in  the  next  room.  When  the  game 
was  over,  the  wife  came  out  and  jilted 
the  husband.  There  was  a  great  trou- 
ble. However,  all  those  incidents  which 
I  have  given  above  were  between  the 
friends  or  families.  But  suppose  you 
are  among  your  enemies!  The  matter 
differs  a  great  deal. 

Here  comes  in  the  necessity  of  the 
right  words  and  good  rhetoric.  Even 
your  most  thoughtful  words  often 
bring  you  an  unexpected  result.  For 
the  emotion  has  life,  while  the  words 
are  dead  things  and  very  often  you  can- 
not represent  the  living  emotion  with 
the  dead  words,  and  your  enemies  are 
always  watching  to  take  advantage. 

Once  upon  a  time,  there  was  a  very 
loyal  and  truthful  subject  in  China. 
All  the  other  officers  in  the  Court  were 
jealous  of  him,  and  accused  him  to  the 
Emperor  as  a  traitor.  The  Emperor 
believed  that  accusation  and  banished 
him  to  the  boundary  of  the  country. 

Afterwards  the  Emperor  began  to 
recollect  his  goodness  and  summoned 
him  to  take  the  former  position.  He 
was  overcome  with  the  happy  emo- 
tion, and  sent  a  poetry  to  the  Emperor : 

The  straight  root  reaches  to  the  ninth  spring  be- 
neath the  earth, 

And  it  has  no  curve  whatever. 

No  one  knows  it  in  this  world  except  the  Dragon 
in  the  ground. 

The  poor  man  meant  that  he  is  always 
straight  and  righteous  even  where  no- 
body can  see.  Only  the  Emperor  who 
has  power  in  heaven  as  well  as  in 
earth  can  see  it.  But  the  surrounding 
officers  of  the  Emperor  took  it  as  a 
great  insult  to  him.  'For,'  they  said, 
'the  dragon  in  the  ground  must  have 
meant  the  death  of  the  Emperor.'  So 
they  executed  him  into  death. 

In  Japan,  Yoritomo,  the  first  Shogun, 
had  a  hunting  near  Fuji  mountain. 
There  was  a  rumor  that  he  was  assas- 
VOL.  111 -NO.  4 


sinated.  His  wife  was  much  grieved 
with  this  rumor.  Noriyori,  the  young- 
er brother  of  the  Shogun,  said,  'Be  in 
ease,  for  here  am  I,  Noriyori.'  It  was 
merely  his  sympathetic  emotion  to- 
ward his  sister-in-law.  But  the  Shogun 
took  it  as  a  rebellious  word  and  de- 
manded him  to  commit  harakiri. 

In  Japan  or  in  China,  there  have 
been  innumerous  disasters  through  the 
insufficient  words  for  the  emotion, 
which  fell  into  the  enemy's  hands. 
Therefore  our  first  lesson  for  the  chil- 
dren is  to  be  careful  of  our  words. 
Some  three  thousand  years  ago,  there 
was  a  boy  King  called  Sei,  in  China. 
His  uncle  Shuko  was  Regent  for  him. 
One  day  this  boy  King  cut  a  leaf  of  the 
tree  into  the  shape  of  '  kei '  (the  sign  to 
appoint  a  mayor).  He  gave  it  to  his 
boy  friend  and  playfully  said,  'I  shall 
appoint  you  as  a  governor.'  Shuko 
bowed  down  before  his  young  nephew 
King  and  asked  in  most  cordial  way, 
'In  what  state  will  your  Majesty  ap- 
point this  subject  as  the  governor?' 
The  boy  King  said,  'I  was  only  joking.' 
Whereupon  Shuko  said,  'The  King 
shall  have  no  vain  word  whatever,'  and 
he  made  the  King  obliged  to  make  that 
boy  into  a  governor  of  some  state. 
Shuko  threatened  the  boy  King  and 
made  him  into  a  machine.  Poor  boy 
King !  He  could  freely  express  his  emo- 
tion no  more.  He  must  have  lessened 
all  his  pleasure  in  this  world. 

If  such  is  the  life  of  a  king,  it  is  worse 
to  be  a  king  than  to  be  a  prisoner. 
However,  that  description  of  Shuko's 
has  been  worshiped  by  some  Japanese 
and  Chinese.  There  are  quite  many 
people  who  are  over-cautious  even 
when  they  are  among  their  most  sym- 
pathetic friends.  They  are  frightened 
to  utter  a  single  word  in  fear  that  'it 
might  make  the  listeners  misunder- 
stand.' These  people  are  evidently 
trying  to  make  the  world  deadly  dull. 
It  is  all  through  their  lack  of  sense  and 


482 


EMOTION  AND  ETYMOLOGY 


wisdom  as  well  as  sympathy,  and  I 
simply  get  sick  of  them! 

On   the   other   hand,    look  at   the 
law  courts  of  to-day.    Some  solicitors, 
especially  young,  inexperienced  ones, 
often  play  upon  the  words  unneces- 
sarily.   They  leave  the  main  fact  far 
behind  and  go  on  fighting  with  words. 
Thus  they  spend  the  precious  time  and 
money  in  vain.  And  after  going  round 
and  round  with  words  they  only  have 
to  come  back  to  the  main  point  at  the 
end.  Of  course,  there  are  too  many  aw- 
ful liars  in  this  world,  and,  to  some  cer- 
tain degree,  the  fighting  of  words  may 
be  necessary  to  find  out  the  truth.  But 
the  real  resource  to  find  out  the  truth 
must  be  by  one's  wisdom  and  sympa- 
thy, not  by  unnecessary  and  insincere 
words.  By  saying  *  sympathy '  I  do  not 
mean  to  agree  foolishly  with  the  false 
statement.  I  mean  sympathy  combined 
with  wisdom  to  judge  one's  real  feeling. 
Here   I  am  using    the  two  words 
*  sympathy'  and  *  wisdom,'  for  which  I 
feel  I  need  to  give  you  the  explanation 
with  an  example.  Suppose  there  is  a 
man  who  has  never  tasted  champagne 
and  you  want  to  convince  him  what  is 
champagne,  you  shall  have  to  describe 
the  taste  of  champagne  with  other 
things  which  he  has  already  tasted.  If 
his  mental  power  is  strong,  he  may  be 
able  to  imagine  something  as  near  to 
champagne  as  possible.  But  surely  he 
shall  not  know  exactly  what  cham- 
pagne is  until  he  puts  the  champagne 
in  his  mouth  and  tastes  it.  On  the  other 
hand,  suppose  one  has  already  tasted 
champagne.   You  need  no  explanation 
at  all.  If  you  say  only  *  champagne '  he 
would  make  a  glad  eye  upon  you  and 
reply,  'Oh,  yes!'    The  words  between 
you  and  him  are  simple,  but  the  emo- 
tion will  communicate  each  other  quite 
fully.    Now,  *  wisdom'  is  that  power 
to  understand  what  is  champagne  after 
tasting  it,  and  *  sympathy '  is  that  pow- 
er to  imagine  what  champagne  is  by 


listening  to  your  description.  There- 
fore if  one  has  neither  'wisdom'  nor 
'  sympathy '  he  is  no  more  than  a  dead 
stone;  the  case  is  absolutely  hopeless 
for  you  to  convince  anything  to  him. 

And  also  there  are  many  people  who 
have  already  tasted  champagne,  yet 
when  you  describe  champagne,  they 
try  to  ignore  everything.  These  people 
are  what  I  call  'insincere'  or  'awful 
liars,'  and  you  often  find  them  among 
the  very  poor  lawyers.  We  must  get 
rid  of  them. 

As  I  said  before,  words  are  the  leaves 
of  the  trunk  called  Idea,  and  our  urgent 
duty  is  to  find  out  what  kind  of  tree  it 
is.  Even  if  there  is  a  deformed,  imper- 
fect leaf,  the  genuine  botanist  can  tell 
what  tree  it  is.  So  the  genuine  people 
ought  to  be  able  to  find  out  one's  true 
idea  with  his  imperfect  words. 

Hitherto  I  have  been  discussing  how 
to  find  out  the  third  person's  emotion 
and  idea  by  their  words,  especially  in 
the  case  where  the  third  person  is  very 
poor  in  rhetoric.  Now  let  me  talk  how 
we  ourselves  should  express  our  feeling 
with  our  words. 

It  is  just  like  to  lift  up  things  with 
your  hand.  Suppose  there  is  a  chair.  If 
you  get  hold  of  the  end  of  one  of  its 
feet,  you  may  not  be  able  to  lift  it  up, 
though  you  use  all  your  strength.  But 
if  you  find  out  the  centre  of  gravity, 
you  can  lift  it  up  quite  easily  with  your 
one  finger.  So  with  our  feelings.  If  you 
don't  know  which  part  of  your  feeling 
you  should  pick  up  in  your  words  you 
would  never  be  able  to  communicate 
your  feeling  to  the  other.  The  more 
words  you  use,  the  more  you  get  into 
muddle!  It  is  exactly  same  thing  as 
you  get  hold  of  the  wrong  part  of  the 
chair.  As  you  need  to  find  out  the  centre 
of  gravity  to  lift  up  the  chair,  so  you 
need  to  find  out  the  important  pitch  or 
gist  to  express  your  feelings. 

Perhaps  one  or  two  words  may  be 
sufficient  to  express  your  whole  feelings 


EMOTION  AND  ETYMOLOGY 


483 


in  that  way.  By  saying  this,  I  do  not 
mean  to  ignore  the  beautiful  rhetoric 
with  abundant  words. 

On  the  summer  day,  when  the  trees 
are  covered  with  abundant  beautiful 
leaves,  we  are  delighted  to  look  at 
them.  So  with  our  words.  If  every 
word  of  ours  is  quite  sincere  to  our  emo- 
tion, the  richer  is  our  vocabulary,  the 
more  we  can  win  the  hearts.  The  an- 
cient Chinese  Odes  are  the  best  exam- 
ples to  prove  this.  Confucius  said  to 
his  scholars,  'Read  the  Odes,  for  they 
give  you  the  lessons  of  the  human  emo- 
tion as  well  as  the  vocabularies.'  It  is 
my  habit  to  read  them  before  I  go  to  bed 
almost  every  night,  and  their  sincere 
emotion,  expressed  by  rich  vocabula- 
ries, soothes  my  weary  mind,  which  is 
so  often  worn-out  in  this  troublesome 
world.  I  can  only  express  my  feeling 
with  one  of  the  Odes  itself:  '  I  always 
think  of  those  ancient  people  in  order 
to  lessen  my  own  burdens.'  Let  us  hope 
that  we  may  some  day  express  our  own 
emotions  as  the  Odes  have  done.  How- 
ever, the  human  natures  are  not  always 
so  beautiful  as  the  trees,  which  are  al- 
ways natural  to  their  nature.  It  is  often 
that  some  people  have  too  much  super- 
fluous words  which  only  kill  their  real 
emotions,  and  sometimes  they  have 
quite  false  words.  By  the  way,  have 
you  ever  seen  the  trees  get  any  false 
leaves?  Ah,  how  far  inferior  are  those 
people  than  the  trees!  If  one  should 
have  too  much  superfluous  words  or 
false  words  I  would  prefer  that  he 
would  be  rather  imperfect  in  his  words. 
This  is  the  main  reason  why  there  are 
many  girls  who  love  the  foreigners 
more  than  their  own  countrymen.  For 
when  the  foreigners  cannot  master  the 
different  languages,  their  imperfect 
words  sound  very  innocent  and  that 
attracts  the  girls'  hearts  very  much. 
But  beware,  girls !  You  may  find  them 
out  quite  humbug  when  they  begin  to 
speak  your  words  perfectly. 


Now  about  the  superfluousness  of 
words,  I  have  something  to  say.  There 
is  some  difference  between  the  public 
speech  and  private  conversation.  Just 
the  right  words  for  the  public  speech 
may  become  too  much  superfluous  for 
the  private  conversation.  Too  much 
exciting  gesture  and  too  many  empha- 
sized words  are  absolutely  unnecessary 
to  convey  our  emotion  among  a  few 
people.  You  would  not  shoot  partridges 
with  the  twelve-inch  gun,  would  you? 
In  Japan  we  call  those  manners  vulgar, 
and  surely  they  are  either  insincere 
persons  or  fools.  Fortunately  most 
English  people  have  no  faults  of  such 
bad  manners.  But  I  have  noticed  that 
too  often  among  the  Continental  peo- 
ple. They  are  simply  disgusting.  The 
best  resource  of  friend-making  is  to 
express  our  emotion  in  proper  way; 
and  to  express  our  emotion,  we  need  to 
study  the  rhetoric  and  elocution,  but 
above  all  these  knowledges  we  most 
urgently  need  our  sincerity  and  sym- 
pathy. And  nothing  could  be  nobler 
than  to  be  natural  to  our  own  natures. 

Just  while  I  was  writing  this  chapter 
I  received  a  cutting  from  some  English 
paper  published  in  Japan.  It  was  such 
a  good  example  to  prove  my  logic, 
therefore  I  quote  it  here.1 

4  ...  by  Mr.  Yoshio  "Markino,"  a 
gentleman  who  does  not  seem  to  know 
how  to  spell  his  own  name,  and  whose 
contributions  to  English  journals  and 
periodicals  written  in  a  pidgin-Eng- 
lish which  is  supposed  to  be  "quaint" 
are  becoming  somewhat  wearisome  .  .  . 
The  style  is  a  pose,  for  it  is  difficult  to 
believe  that  Mr.  Markino  cannot  write 
more  accurate  English  after  his  long  re- 
sidence in  America  and  England,  and 
the  constant  use  of  the  language  not 

1  In  this  article  the  writer  has  attacked  my 
article  about  the  late  Mikado  which  appeared  in 
the  Daily  Mail.  As  this  chapter  is  exclusively 
devoted  to  the  Emotion  and  Etymology  only, 
I  shall  give  my  explanation  about  this  attack 
elsewhere  if  needed.  —  THE  AUTHOR. 


484 


EMOTION  AND  ETYMOLOGY 


only  in  every-day  life,  but  in  literary 
work  ....  The  real  fact  is  that  Mr. 
Markino  finds  that  the  English  public 
or  the  periodicals  like  these  essays  in 
broken  English,  and  he  supplies  them 
with  what  they  want.' 

Readers,  notice  what  this  writer  de- 
clares definitely:  The  real  fact  is  that 
Mr.  Markino  is  so  and  so.  How  does  he 
know  my  inner  heart?  And  how  dare 
he  declare  it  in  such  a  decided  way? 
The  real  fact  is  just  reverse.  I  am  not  a 
slave  of  either  the  publishers  or  public. 
You  may  realize  what  I  really  mean  if 
you  see  my  paintings.  There  has  been 
loud  cry  among  the  publishers  and  pub- 
lic that  I  should  not  paint  any  other 
way  than  the  Japanese  style.  From 
the  business  point  of  view,  I  would  get 
ten  times  better  result  only  if  I  *  posed ' 
and  painted  Japanese  style.  But  I  can- 
not do  so.  I  am  doing  just  what  I 
am  really  feeling.  So  with  my  writing. 
It  is  merely  unexpected  coincidence 
that  the  English  public  like  my  own 
English.  But  suppose  the  English  pub- 
lic hate  my  writing,  do  I  change  my 
style?  No,  never!  In  fact,  there  are 
some  among  my  most  intimate  Eng- 
lish friends  who  love  me,  but  hate  my 
English.  One  of  them  told  me  the 
other  day  that  he  would  correct  my 
writings  into  the  pure  English  if  I 
could  n't  write  better,  for  the  sake  to 
avoid  that  ugliness.  But  I  refused. 
Now  let  me  tell  you  whether  I  am 
*  posing'  or  not. 

There  is  some  great  reason  why  my 
English  is  not  progressing  quick 
enough  —  quite  apart  from  my  stupid- 
ity on  the  language.  It  is  true  that  I 
have  been  in  America  and  England 
long  enough  to  speak  English  per- 
fectly. But,  first  of  all,  remember  that 
I  am  an  artist,  and  I  have  not  had  the 
chances  enough  of  *  the  constant  use  of 
the  language  in  every-day  life '  as  that 
writer  imagines.  For  instance,  while  I 
was  staying  at  a  lodging-house  in  Ox- 


ford, to  illustrate  a  book,  I  used  to  go 
out  to  find  out  the  subjects,  and  then 
paint  them  in  my  room.  My  landlady 
used  to  bring  my  meals  to  my  room, 
and  I  only  nodded  my  head  to  her. 
Only  the  place  where  I  might  have  had 
a  chance  to  talk  was  a  tobacco-shop 
where  I  used  to  buy  the  tobacco  every 
day.  But  in  three  or  four  days'  time, 
my  tobacconist  began  to  know  what 
tobacco  I  wanted.  No  sooner  I  en- 
tered into  his  shop  than  he  took  out  a 
package  of  my  tobacco  and  handed  it  to 
me.  I  left  the  money  on  the  counter 
and  came  out  with  this  single  word, 
'Good-day!'  After  three  months  I  fin- 
ished my  works  there  and  came  back 
to  London.  At  Paddington  Station  a 
few  friends  were  waiting  me  on  the 
platform.  I  talked  with  them  about 
five  minutes  and  my  jaws  were  too 
tired  to  talk  any  more.  More  or  less 
in  the  same  way  I  have  spent  all  my 
life  in  England  until  quite  recently. 
Beside  this  fact,  as  I  have  so  often  said, 
I  hate  reading  book.  Who  could  ex- 
pect me  to  improve  my  English,  then? 
Fancy,  the  writer  accuses  me  that  I 
'pose.'  'Pose'  for  what?  Suppose  if 
that  writer  were  the  Chinese  Emperor 
and  I  the  poet,  he  would  kill  me.  Sup- 
pose if  he  were  the  Shogun  Yoritomo 
and  I  his  brother,  he*  would  demand 
me  to  do  harakiri! 

The  writer  so  foolishly  says,  'a  gen- 
tleman who  does  not  seem  to  know 
how  to  spell  his  own  name.'  I  suppose 
he  expects  me  to  spell  my  name 
Makino,  after  the  rule  of  '  the  Roman 
spelling  association'  which  is  existing 
among  the  foreigners  in  Japan,  and 
some  Japanese  who  are  in  contact  with 
them.  Poor  man!  I  dare  say  that 
'Roman  spelling'  rule  may  be  useful 
for  the  foreigners  in  Japan  as  long  as 
they  cannot  write  the  real  Japanese 
characters.  By  the  way,  most  for- 
eigners in  Japan  cannot  write  Japanese 
characters,  though  they  are  staying 


EMOTION  AND  ETYMOLOGY 


485 


there  longer  than  I  in  England,  there- 
fore they  use  that  Roman  spelling  rule 
to  write  Japanese.  Only  I  don't  sneer 
at  them  and  say  they  'pose.'  But  do 
you  ever  expect  all  the  nations  in  the 
world  would  follow  after  that  rule?  I 
hope  you  are  a  little  wiser  to  keep  on 
your  own  common  sense ! 

For  instance,  look  at  Esperanto!  Its 
own  idea  is  most  splendid.  But  what  is 
the  use  to  learn  the  Esperanto  for  one's 
self  as  long  as  the  whole  world  would 
not  learn  it?  I  sincerely  advise  you 
that  you  need  to  learn  those  practi- 
cal languages  more  urgently.  If  you 
learned  French  you  would  have  a  great 
convenience  in  France,  and  if  you 
learned  German  you  would  have  a  great 
convenience  in  Germany.  But  where 
can  you  get  much  convenience  by 
learning  the  Esperanto  except  with 
those  small  numbers  of  people  who 
have  learned  it?  This  world  has  many 
languages  already,  and  the  Esperanto 
speakers  have  added  one  more  new  lan- 
guage to  the  world  instead  of  reducing 
many  languages  into  one.  I  must  tell 
you  that  the  Roman  spelling  in  Japan 
is  far  more  limited  and  far  more  local 
than  the  Esperanto.  The  Great  Brit- 
ain has  forty-five  or  forty-six  millions 
population  and  still  larger  numbers  in 
her  colonies,  and  how  many  of  them 
have  been  in  Japan?  And  among 
those  comparatively  smallest  number 
who  were  in  Japan,  how  many  under- 
stand the  Roman  spelling,  which  is  so 
inconvenient  that  neither  English  nor 
Japanese  can  read  without  studying? 
And  it  is  also  so  imperfect  that  many 
Japanese  words  are  impossible  to  be 
spelled  in  its  way. 

I  am  not  surprised  if  there  are  not 
quite  one  hundred  people  in  this  coun- 
try who  can  read  the  Roman  spelling. 
Could  I  possibly  be  such  a  fool  to  spell 
my  name  for  the  sake  of  a  very  few  peo- 
ple and  give  a  great  inconvenience  to 
so  many  millions  people,  as  well  as  to 


myself?  To  tell  you  the  truth,  I  used  to 
spell  my  name  Makino  when  I  arrived 
to  England.  Once  I  went  to  a  boot- 
shop  in  Knightsbridge  and  bought  a 
pair  of  boots.  The  shopman  said  he 
would  send  them  to  my  lodging  in 
Milner  Street  on  the  same  day.  I  wait- 
ed two  days.  No  boots  came  to  me.  I 
went  to  the  shop  again  and  inquired 
about  them.  The  shopman  said,  'We 
have  delivered  them  to  your  address  on 
the  same  day,  but  a  housemaid  said  to 
our  deliverer  that  there  was  not  a  gen- 
tleman called  Mr.  Mayking.  Here  are 
the  undelivered  boots  for  you,  sir.' 

Another  time  some  stranger  was 
calling  me,  'Mr.  May-kino,  Mr.  May- 
kino.'  I  did  not  answer  him  because  it 
sounded  so  different  from  my  real 
name,  and  I  thought  he  was  calling 
somebody  else.  Every  time  when  I 
met  with  strangers,  I  had  to  explain 
them  that  my  name  was  not  May-kino. 
And  at  last  I  have  invented  a  new  spell- 
ing of  my  name  as  Markino.  Since 
then,  everybody  calls  my  name  as  near- 
est to  the  Japanese  pronunciation  as 
possible,  and  I  have  had  no  more  trou- 
ble. So  you  see,  I  am  spelling  my  name 
for  the  practical  purpose  of  my  daily 
life  in  England. 

It  is  not  only  about  the  spelling  of 
my  name  that  the  third-class  brains 
are  playing  fool  upon.  They  are  al- 
ways sticking  to  their  own  poor  logic 
and  giving  all  sorts  of  trouble  about 
trifle  matters  on  our  daily  busy  life. 
Here  is  a  Japanese  proverb  for  such  a 
person  like  that  writer:  'There  is  no 
medicine  to  cure  such  a  fool  as  you.' 

In  England  there  are  more  serious 
and  more  sincere  reviewers  than  that 
writer,  and  they  often  ask  me,  'Some 
parts  of  your  books  are  written  with 
better  English  than  the  other  parts. 
Are  you  really  not  posing  sometimes?' 

For  this  question  I  have  a  very  sin- 
cere answer.  I  must  confess  you  that  I 
have  a  friend  who  is  always  looking 


486 


EMOTION  AND  ETYMOLOGY 


after  my  writings.  She  would  not  cor- 
rect my  own  English.  But  I  asked  her 
that  when  I  talk  about  my  philosophy 
or  anything  which  I  really  mean  very 
serious,  I  do  not  want  the  reader  to 
laugh  over  my  imperfect  English, 
therefore  she  should  correct  them  into 
better  English.  At  first,  she  shook  her 
head  and  refused  to  do  so,  saying  it 
would  be  'pity.'  At  last  she  has  con- 
sented to  do  it.  That  is  why  those  seri- 
ous articles  of  mine  are  always  in  bet- 
ter English;  and  about  other  lighter 
articles,  she  passes  them  as  they  are. 
Then  I  have  a  handicap  with  the  print- 
ers. They  make  my  'to'  into  'so'  and 
'is'  into  'as,'  etcetera.  It  seems  to  me 
they  make  more  mistakes  with  my 
writing  than  that  of  English  writers. 
One  of  the  staff  of  my  publishers  told 
me  that  it  could  not  be  helped.  Because 
when  the  English  writers  write  books, 
the  printers  know  they  should  be  cor- 
rect English,  therefore  the  printers  ar- 
range the  *  types '  with  their  sense.  But 
when  they  print  my  writing  they  don't 
know  what  words  will  come  next. 
Therefore  even  when  they  made  a  mis- 
take themselves,  they  might  think  it 
was  my  mistake,  and  the  publishers 
had  no  control  over  that  matter. 

Here  let  me  add  that  even  my  lady 
collaborator  often  gets  into  the  same 
'muddle'  with  the  printers  when  she 
corrects  the  proofs  of  my  manuscripts; 
and  once  I  touched  the  proofs  myself 
after  she  passed  them.  My  publishers 
were  furious,  and  said  to  me,  'What- 
ever for  have  you  made  such  a  mess 
on  the  proofs?  The  printers  were  grum- 
bling very  much.'  I  said  'Amen'  in 
my  desperation. 

However,  my  English  will  never  be- 
come the  English  English.  Why?  Be- 
cause I  am  my  father's  son,  after  all. 
My  father  was  a  great  scholar  of  the 
ancient  Chinese  classics.  He  used  to 
lecture  those  classics  to  his  young  pu- 
pils all  day  long,  and  even  in  his  leisure 


time  he  used  to  sing  out  the  ancient 
Chinese  poetries  in  the  gardens  or  in 
the  rooms,  whenever  he  felt  the  emo- 
tion in  his  heart,  and  I  used  to  listen  to 
him  since  I  was  in  cradle.  Even  when  I 
was  such  a  little  baby  and  could  not 
understand  what  that  meant,  I  used  to 
imitate  his  recitation,  and  no  sooner  I 
began  to  pick  up  the  meaning  of  words, 
than  he  has  taught  me  all  the  ancient 
Chinese  literatures.  Naturally  to  ex- 
press my  emotion  in  the  way  of  the  an- 
cient Chinese  rhetoric  has  become  my 
own  instinct.  As  such  has  been  my 
case,  I  am  afraid  that  I  may  be  one- 
sided, but  I  cannot  help  thinking  even 
the  quite  fair-minded  critic  would 
choose  the  ancient  Chinese  literature 
as  the  highest  in  the  world. 

When  I  was  a  little  boy,  I  used  to 
swallow  the  Chinese  words  in  whole, 
and  they  came  out  exactly  as  they 
were  when  I  expressed  my  emotion. 
To-day  my  mind  is  fully  grown-up  and 
has  the  power  to  digest  them.  I  mean 
I  do  not  mock  after  the  Chinese  liter- 
ature. The  style  of  my  writing  is  en- 
tirely my  own,  but  it  is  fact  that  I  get 
all  the  nourishments  from  the  Chinese 
literature.  Since  I  came  to  England  I 
have  learned  the  English  vocabulary 
and  idioms.  But  I  can  never  satisfy 
myself  to  follow  after  the  English  col- 
loquial. I  feel  I  cannot  convey  my  own 
emotion  enough  to  you  by  doing  in 
that  way;  I  could  not  be  more  than  a 
parrot  then.  Therefore,  I  construct  my 
sentences  in  my  own  way,  then  I  fill 
them  up  with  the  English  words  which 
I  know.  I  believe  this  is  the  only  re- 
source to  express  my  emotion  truth- 
fully, and  I  have  faith  in  it.  At  the  pre- 
sent stage,  I  know  my  writing  is  very 
imperfect,  but  I  have  a  great  confidence 
to  succeed  to  establish  my  own  new 
style.  Here  is  a  Japanese  saying  for 
those  impatient  people:  'Wait  until  I 
finish  up  my  work  and  don't  criticize 
while  it  is  half  done.' 


THE  LATE  RETURN 


BY   KATHARINE   FULLERTON   GEROULD 


His  eyes  reflect  the  blue  of  seas 
That  circle  coasts  remote  and  lone; 
His  lips  are  salt  with  spray  from  these; 
His  tempered  voice  betrays  the  tone 
Of  alien  tongues;  and  in  his  ears 
Insistent  cadences  he  hears 
Of  alien  creeds  now  made  his  own. 

Pale  stars  have  met  above  his  head 
To  plot  his  peace;  and  they  have  driven 
The  hostile  comet,  vengeance-bred, 
Staggering,  spent,  across  the  heaven. 
Then,  knowing  what  the  days  prepare, 
They  lift  their  lights  in  patience  where 
Familiar  valleys  wait  his  tread. 

Star-led,  he  loiters  toward  his  dream, 
Though  weary  of  the  dream,  until 
At  last  he  sees  fair  hills  that  seem 
To  rim  his  village,  and  his  will 
Grows  unto  her  who  lingers  there, 
Where  silent  sun  and  kindly  air 
Brood  on  the  bower  by  the  stream. 

He  bows  his  head  beside  the  door 
And  speaks  in  accents  of  his  youth : 
*O  love,  whom  I  would  cherish  more 
Than  youth  could  cherish!  all  my  truth 
Comes  home  to  thee.  Forget  the  years, 
The  sad  novitiate  of  tears; 
Accept,  at  last,  my  tardy  ruth. 

'I  bring  thee  peace  and  not  alarm; 
I  lose  the  world  for  thee.   Be  thou 


488  THE  LATE  RETURN 

Set  as  a  seal  upon  my  arm, 
Bound  for  a  frontlet  on  my  brow, 
My  sign  of  faith,  my  shield  to  save, 
My  amulet  against  the  grave. 
Lo,  thou  hast  loved,  but  I  love  now!' 

He  lifts  his  eyes  to  meet  her  face, 
Her  sad  brown  eyes,  her  wistful  cheek, 
For  which  his  hunger  grows  apace, 
Which  he  has  crossed  those  hills  to  seek. 
No  vision  rises  to  assuage; 
The  thrush  has  pined  within  its  cage, 
The  hearth  is  cold,  and  void  the  place. 

From  some  dim  corner  far  within 
A  sudden  answer  rises  shrill, 
And  peering  through  her  elf-locks  thin 
An  aged  crone  leans  o'er  the  sill. 
'You  seek,'  she  croaks,  'a  bird  that's  fled, 
Her  flowers  rot,  her  thrush  is  dead. 
Here  is  no  treasure  you  can  win. 

'She  loved,  for  years,  a  worthless  wight 
Who  fled  long  since  this  quiet  spot. 
^         She  wept  by  day,  she  watched  by  night; 
She  wove  her  shroud  and  faltered  not. 
One  day  the  lightning  shattered  through 
The  loom  on  which  the  garment  grew. 
"Not  death  but  life,  then,  is  my  lot," 

'I  heard  her  murmur.  She  has  sped 
Beyond  these  hills  in  search  of  life. 
Mayhap  she  has  found  death  instead; 
Perchance  she  is  a  happy  wife. 
I  know  and  reck  not  of  her  fate. 
I  starve  and  shiver  here,  and  wait 
But  to  be  gathered  to  the  dead.' 
• 

'She  loved  him  ever?  Tell  me  this.' 
The  old  crone  answered,  'Stark  awake, 
At  night,  she  cried  out  for  his  kiss. 


TWO  OF  THE  NEWEST  POETS  489 

• 

I  heard  her  weeping.  Curses  take 
The  man  who  robbed  me,  first,  of  rest, 
And  then  of  her  who  served  me  best!' 
She  closed  the  casement  as  she  spake. 

The  little  hills  that  rim  his  home, 
How  high  they  seem!  for  he  has  turned 
To  cross  them,  unappeased,  and  roam 
Adrift  from  stars  that  erstwhile  burned 
Above  the  place  he  fancied  hers. 
There  is  no  prophet  wind  that  stirs 
To  tell  him  whither  she  has  come. 

The  little  stars  that  serve  the  moon, 

They  weep  for  silence  they  must  keep: 

They  may  not  bring  him,  late  or  soon, 

To  share  her  waking  or  her  sleep. 
'Yet  God  will  intervene,'  they  say; 
*  Earth  narrows  for  them,  day  by  day. 

Who  soweth  love,  he  love  shall  reap/ 


TWO  OF  THE  NEWEST  POETS 


BY  ROBERT   SHAFER 


WHEN,  a  few  weeks  ago,  I  picked  up  are  all  properly  joyful  at  the  funerals. 

a  copy  of  Fires  at  my  bookseller's,  I  But,  after  all,  the  new  poetic  dispensa- 

said  something  to  myself  which  all  the  tion  is  probably  a  mixed  blessing,  and 

reviewers  have  not  hesitated  to  say  in  certainly  there  have  been  some  few 

public.  I  sighed  as  I  reflected  that  estimable  people  who  have  decried  this 

decadence  was  once  more  dead  and  fresh  outburst  of  virility  and  rude 

buried.  strength.  Those  who  ha ve  come  to  love 

Of  course,  decadence  has  been  pub-  phrases  in  themselves,  those  who  have 

licly  buried  in  the  dust  of  forgotten  lived  and  dreamed  in  an  atmosphere 

vagaries  every  time  during  the  past  of  winged  and  scintillant  words,  who 

two  or  three  years  that  another  poem  have  become  craftsmen,  or,  in  the  real 

by  Mr.  Wilfrid  Wilson  Gibson  or  Mr.  sense  of  the  term,  artists  in  literature, 

John  Masefield  has  appeared;  and  we  cannot  but  feel  a  half  sad  regret  at 


490 


TWO  OF  THE  NEWEST  POETS 


this  latest  development  of  English 
poetry.  How  different  it  is  from  some 
of  that  delicately  tinted  enamel-work 
produced  by  a  few  men,  and  at  least 
one  woman,  in  the  nineties. 

I    read   a    little  poem  of  Michael 
Field's  to  a  friend  some  time  ago:  — 

I  dance  and  dance!  Another  faun, 
A  black  one,  dances  on  the  lawn. 
He  moves  with  me,  and  when  I  lift 
My  heels  his  feet  directly  shift: 
I  can't  outdance  him  though  I  try; 
He  dances  nimbler  than  I. 
I  toss  my  head,  and  so  does  he; 
What  tricks  he  dares  to  play  on  me! 
I  touch  the  ivy  in  my  hair; 
Ivy  he  has  and  finger  there. 
The  spiteful  thing  to  mock  me  so! 
I  will  outdance  him!  Ho,  ho,  ho! 

And  then  one  by  Mr.  Arthur  Symons : 

The  charm  of  rouge  on  fragile  cheeks, 
Pearl-powder,  and,  about  the  eyes, 
The  dark  and  lustrous  Eastern  dyes; 
The  floating  odor  that  bespeaks 
A  scented  boudoir  and  the  doubtful  night 
Of  alcoves  curtained  close  against  the  light. 

Gracile  and  creamy-white  and  rose, 
Complexioned  like  the  flower  of  dawn, 

Her  fleeting  colors  are  as  those 

That,  from  an  April  sky  withdrawn, 

Fade  in  a  fragrant  mist  of  tears  away 

When  weeping  noon  leads  on  the  altered  day. 

My  friend  is  very  *  modern'  and  he 
likes  his  poetry  to  'prove  something/ 
but  he  could  not  help  acknowledging 
the  sheer  beauty  of  these  exquisitely 
worked-out  pastels,  conceived  though 
they  were  in  the  days  when  decadence 
was  in  flower  and  dilettantes  were  bold. 
He  was  forced  to  admit  that  in  all  the 
qualities  of  mere  workmanship  this 
poetry  of  the  nineties  was  immeasur- 
ably superior  to  anything  and  every- 
thing in,  for  example,  The  Everlasting 
Mercy ;  and  yet  he,  a  young  poet  of 
no  inconsiderable  talent  himself,  pre- 
ferred the  latter  poem!  And  I  think  he 
was  right,  at  least  right  to  a  consider- 
able extent.  Still,  consider  the  brutal 
ugliness  of  this  passage  from  The  Ever- 
lasting Mercy,  in  which  Saul  Kane  tells 


something  of  the  fight  between  himself 
and  Billy  Myers,  the  poacher :  — 

From  the  beginning  of  the  bout 
My  luck  was  gone,  my  hand  was  out. 
Right  from  the  start  Bill  called  the  play, 
But  I  was  quick  and  kept  away 
Till  the  fourth  round,  when  work  got  mixed, 
And  then  I  knew  Bill  had  me  fixed. 
My  hand  was  out,  why,  Heaven  knows; 
Bill  punched  me  when  and  where  he  chose. 
Through  two  more  rounds  we  quartered  wide, 
And  all  the  time  my  hands  seemed  tied; 
Bill  punched  me  when  and  where  he  pleased. 
The  cheering  from  my  backers  eased, 
But  every  punch  I  heard  a  yell 
Of  'That's  the  style,  Bill,  give  him  hell.' 
No  one  for  me,  but  Jimmy's  light 
'Straight  left!    Straight  left!'  and  'Watch  his 
right.' 

This  clumsiness  of  technique,  these  un- 
couth, wretched  lines,  this  rude,  col- 
loquial speech,  we  are  hailing  with 
pleasure  as  the  first  evidence  of  really 
modern  English  poetry.  Mr.  Masefield's 
chief  offense  against  conventionality 
lies  in  the  realistic  speech  he  employs. 
While  Mr.  Gibson's  language  is  simple 
to  the  point  of  baldness,  it  is  not  collo- 
quial —  his  chief  offenses  are  metrical, 
his  verse  is  irregular  to  the  point  of 
anarchy.  Into  this  question  of  tech- 
nique we  need  scarcely  go;  and  besides, 
the  reviewers  and  academic  critics  have 
already  said  concerning  it  the  few  ob- 
vious things  that  reviewers  and  aca- 
demic critics  are  always  able  to  say. 
No  one  is  holding  up  this  poetry  as  ex- 
actly a  model  of  beauty,  and  it  seems 
clear  that  it  is  to  be  regarded  simply  as 
a  series  of  experiments,  the  groping 
footsteps  of  a  fresh  and  novel  move- 
ment that  is  yet  but  in  its  infancy.  The 
important  thing,  and,  I  am  sure,  the 
thing  which  has  made  this  poetry  so 
amazingly  popular,  is  the  spirit  which 
is  behind  it  and  in  it,  and  which  has 
caused  it  to  be  brought  forth.  Beyond 
considering  technical  faults  in  verse, 
the  academic  critics  have  not  deigned 
to  notice  Mr.  Masefield  or  Mr.  Gibson, 
and  for  this  there  is  sufficient  reason. 


TWO  OF  THE  NEWEST  POETS 


491 


A  search  for  the  spirit  and  meaning 
of  poetry  would  be  quite  beyond  the 
province  of  the  professors  of  literature 
—  that  peculiar  province  of  theirs  of 
which  no  one  envies  them  the  posses- 
sion. 

After  the  passing  of  the  'great  fig- 
ures '  of  the  Victorian  era,  a  number  of 
slighter,  if  more  companionable,  beings 
filled  the  English  stage,  such  as  it  was, 
in  the  nineties  —  some  of  them  to  the 
pious  horror  of  the  middle  classes  and 
the  journalists  of  the  lower  classes. 
These  younger  poets  were  sooner  or 
later  divided  into  some  six  or  seven 
then  already  faintly  discernible  groups. 
Several  groups  emerged  from  that  com- 
pany of  enthusiastic  young  men  who 
were  accustomed  to  gather  together  at 
the  Cheshire  Cheese  and  discuss  their 
poetry  over  mugs  of  ale  and  long  clay 
pipes,  and  who  styled  themselves  the 
Rhymers'  Club. 

In  their  number  was  Mr.  W.  B. 
Yeats,  who  was  later  to  become  the 
most  conspicuous  member  of  that  vi- 
tal and  highly  interesting  movement 
which  we  now  call  the  Irish  Renais- 
sance. There,  too,  was  Lionel  John- 
son, fastidious,  learned,  and  somewhat 
aloof  in  his  nature,  who  also  allied 
himself  with  the  Irish  movement.  Ern- 
est Dowson  and  Mr.  Arthur  Symons, 
writing  verse  of  a  peculiarly  French 
character,  and  with  temperaments  dis- 
tinctly more  Gallic  than  Anglo-Saxon, 
were  among  the  Rhymers,  forming  al- 
ready a  group  that  was  clearly  and  pre- 
cisely marked  off,  and  not  the  less  im- 
portant for  its  smallness. 

Writing  at  the  same  time  was 
Michael  Field,  obviously  following  the 
graceful  models  of  later  Hellenic  litera- 
ture. Closely  allied  to  her  work  is  that 
of  Mr.  T.  Sturge  Moore,  art  critic  and 
Greek  idyllist  of  our  own  day.  Clearly 
Tennysonian,  however,  was  the  verse 
of  Mr.  Robert  Bridges,  and  later  of  Mr. 
Alfred  Noyes;  while  that  of  Mr.  Wil- 


liam Watson,  has  been  rather  Words- 
worthian  in  character.  Francis  Thomp- 
son was  plainly  distinct  from  these,  and 
in  the  rich  decoration  and  involution  of 
his  poetry  seemed  to  indicate  a  mod- 
ified return  to  the  Elizabethan  spirit. 
He  has  been  somewhat  unworthily  fol- 
lowed by  Mr.  Darrell  Figgis.  The  note 
of  manliness  and  virility  was  sounded 
most  loudly  by  W.  E.  Henley,  and  most 
clearly  by  John  Davidson,  in  this  sup- 
posedly decadent  age.  Simple  poetry 
about  country  folk  of  the  lower  classes 
has  been  written,  most  exquisitely  by 
Professor  A.  E.  Housman,  and  with  less 
success  by  Mr.  Thomas  Hardy. 

It  is  upon  some  such  immediate 
background  as  this  hastily  sketched 
one  that  we  must  view  the  work  of 
Mr.  Masefield  and  the  later  work  of 
Mr.  Gibson.  The  question  straight- 
way arises,  however,  as  to  whether  this 
is  a  real  background,  and  the  better 
one  knows  The  Everlasting  Mercy  and 
Dauber,  Daily  Bread  and  Fires,  the 
more  insistent  does  this  question  be- 
come. 

At  first  I  fancied  that  some  resem- 
blances could  be  pointed  out  between 
Mr.  Hardy's  Wessex  poetry  and  Mr. 
Housman's  Shropshire  Lad  and  this 
new  poetry.  Resemblances  there  are, 
of  course,  but  they  proved  delusive. 
They  are  of  the  superficial  kind  that 
usually  suffice  for  the  academic  group- 
ing of  '*  schools '  and  the  tracing  of '  ori- 
gins'  and  *  sources,'  but  the  real  mean- 
ings underlying  the  two  are  essentially 
different. 

I  afterwards  thought  that  some  con- 
nection might  be  shown  between  the 
virility  of  Davidson's  work  and  that 
of  the  latest  poetry,  for  virility  is,  at 
first  sight,  the  most  evident  charac- 
teristic of  Mr.  Masefield's  verse.  But 
note  how  contradictory  the  two  con- 
ceptions really  are.  Davidson  was  all 
for  the  established  order,  and  the  key- 
note to  his  position  is  to  be  found  in 


492 


TWO  OF  THE  NEWEST  POETS 


that  most  excellent  monologue  of  his, 
'Thirty  Bob  a  Week.'  One  must  be 
a  man  in  spite  of  things  as  they  are, 
and  the  way  of  doing  it  lies  just  in 

The  power  of  some  to  be  a  boss, 
And  the  bally  power  of  others  to  be  bossed. 

One  must  still  'be  a  man,'  the  newest 
poets  are  assuring  us,  but  the  consum- 
mation will  come  in  an  entirely  differ- 
ent way,  not  through  'brave  and 
meek '  acquiescence,  but  only  by  hero- 
ical  efforts  at  changing  the  established 
order.  Says  Saul  Kane  to  the  Parson 
in  The  Everlasting  Mercy,  — 

The  English  Church  both  is  and  was 

A  subsidy  of  Caiaphas. 

I  don't  believe  in  Prayer  nor  Bible, 

They're  lies  all  through,  and  you're  a  libel, 

A  libel  on  the  Devil's  plan 

When  first  he  miscreated  man. 

You  mumble  through  a  formal  code 

To  get  which  martyrs  burned  and  glowed. 

I  look  on  martyrs  as  mistakes, 

But  still  they  burned  for  it  at  stakes; 

Your  only  fire's  the  jolly  fire 

Where  you  can  guzzle  port  with  Squire, 

And  back  and  praise  his  damned  opinions 

About  his  temporal  dominions. 

You  let  him  give  the  man  who  digs 

A  filthy  hut  unfit  for  pigs, 

Without  a  well,  without  a  drain, 

With  mossy  thatch  that  lets  in  rain, 

Without  a  'lotment,  'less  he  rent  it, 

And  never  meat,  unless  he  scent  it, 

But  weekly  doles  of  'leven  shilling 

To  make  a  grown  man  strong  and  willing, 

To  do  the  hardest  work  on  earth 

And  feed  his  wife  when  she  gives  birth, 

And  feed  his  little  children's  bones. 

I  tell  you,  man,  the  Devil  groans. 

With  all  your  main  and  all  your  might 

You  back  what  is  against  what's  right. 

Could  any  cart-tail  orator  of  the 
socialist  persuasion  have  spoken  more 
effectively  about  the  existing  abuses 
of  landlordism? 

But  there  is  more  than  incidental 
socialism  here;  behind  it  all  there  is 
that  surging,  insistent  '  life-song  of  hu- 
manity '  which  our  own  Walt  Whitman 
sang  so  well,  whether  or  not  he  sang 
it  in  poetry. 


All  life  moving  to  one  measure  — 
Daily  bread,  daily  bread  — 
Bread  of  life,  and  bread  of  labor, 
Bread  of  bitterness  and  sorrow, 
Hand-to-mouth,  and  no  to-morrow, 
Dearth  for  housemate,  death  for  neighbor. 

'Yet,  when  all  the  babes  are  fed, 
Love,  are  there  not  crumbs  to  treasure? ' 

There  is  the  keynote  to  this  poetry  of 
all  humanity,  more  plainly  expressed 
by  Mr.  Gibson,  but  none  the  less  im- 
plicit in  Mr.  Masefield. 

If  we  are  to  find  anywhere  in  con- 
temporary literature  a  parallel  for  this 
poetry  I  think  that  we  shall  have  to  go 
to  France.  How  often  one  has  to  go  to 
France!  I  wonder  if  any  one  has  ever 
realized  the  full  extent  of  the  French 
leadership  of  the  modern  world.  It  was 
there,  at  any  rate,  that,  in  1908,  La  Vie 
Unanime  was  published  by  L'Abbaye. 
The  author  of  the  poem,  M.  Jules  Ro- 
mains,  immediately  became  prominent, 
and  a  formal  'movement*  was  inaug- 
urated, Vecole  unanimiste,  which  has 
been  considerably  influenced  by  Whit- 
man. The  work  of  M.  Charles  Vildrac 
will  most  repay  reading  in  this  connec- 
tion. He  is  a  lover  of  life  in  all  its 
manifestations,  and  finds  inspiration  in 
whatsoever  he  sees  or  hears  —  a  poor 
woman  walking  along  a  country  road, 
a  sailor  left  to  drown  after  shipwreck, 
a  bit  of  ground  covered  with  the  waste 
products  of  industrialism  —  all  these 
are  grist  for  his  poetic  mill.  M.  Vil- 
drac has  called  his  latest  book  Lime 
d 'Amour,  because  he  'is  aware  that  he 
has  brought  love  and  imagination  to 
bear  on  human  wretchedness,  mean- 
ness, and  pain.' 

Certain  critics,  gifted  with  the  usual 
amount  of  discernment,  have  called 
the  work  of  Mr.  Masefield  and  Mr. 
Gibson  'futurist  poetry.'  This  may 
do  well  enough,  but  let  no  one  con- 
fuse it  with  M.  F.-T.  Marinetti  and 
Le  Futurisme.  Perhaps  our  English  po- 
etry is  an  indication  pointing  toward 


TWO  OF  THE  NEWEST  POETS 


493 


the  credo  of  M.  Marinetti,  but  it  is  at 
best  no  more  than  that,  and  bears  a 
much  closer  resemblance  to  Unanisme, 
especially  as  manifested  in  M.  Vildrac's 
poetry. 

Up  to  this  moment  I  have  coupled 
Mr.  Masefield  and  Mr.  Gibson  as  one 
does  Klaw  and  Erlanger.  It  has  been 
more  convenient  to  do  so,  but  one  must 
not  suppose  that  they  are  a  syndicate. 
For  all  I  know  they  may  never  have 
met  each  other  personally  in  the  gay 
whirl  of  London  life;  and,  though  so 
similar  in  spirit,  certainly  their  indi- 
vidualities are  very  distinct. 

Mr.  Masefield  must  be  set  down  as 
fundamentally  pessimistic.  There  are 
bright  spots  in  his  work,  of  course,  and 
many  of  them,  but  through  it  all  there 
runs  a  dark  thread,  and  at  times  the 
sinister  aspects  of  life  among  the  poor 
seem  to  have  overpowered  him.  This 
is  specially  true  of  The  Widow  in  the 
Bye  Street  and  Dauber,  his  latest  long 
narrative  poem.  This  pessimistic  out- 
look is  evident  not  alone  in  Mr.  Mase- 
field's  poetical  work,  but  also  in  his 
plays,  as  any  one  will  know  who  has 
read  The  Tragedy  of  Nan,  which  ends 
with  a  murder,  a  ptomaine  poisoning, 
and  a  suicide. 

Indeed,  one  cannot  help  but  feel  that 
Mr.  Masefield,  with  his  vivid  sensi- 
tiveness to  human  suffering  and  mis- 
ery, has  let  himself  be  carried  away 
into,  if  not  real  untruthfulness,  at 
least  a  certain  misrepresentation.  For 
we  all  know  that  the  great  mass  of 
common  working-folk  do  live;  some- 
how or  other  they  manage  to  get  along, 
and  even  have  the  time  and  inclination 
for  a  considerable  amount  of  loving, 
and  hating,  and  marrying,  and  having 
children  —  especially  having  children, 
one  sometimes  thinks.  And  yet  —  and 
yet!  —  if  their  life  really  seemed  to 
them  the  thing  Mr.  Masefield  makes  it 
out  to  be,  I  cannot  help  suspecting  that 
they  would  all  of  them,  long  ere  this, 


have  rushed  to  the  river  and  drown- 
ed themselves,  even  as  did  Mr.  Max 
Beerbohm's  odd  thousands  of  Oxford 
undergraduates.  Do  not  suppose  that 
I  am  presuming  exactly  to  condemn 
this  pessimism,  I  wish  merely  to  point 
the  thing  out  with  sufficient  clearness. 
It  seems,  indeed,  to  possess  certain  fine 
and  manly  qualities  —  it  has  the  ele- 
ments of  true  impressiveness  clinging 
darkly  around  it,  and  it  has  the  su- 
preme merit  of  being  unmistakably 
sincere.  Mr.  Masefield's  poetry  is  the 
work  of  a  man  who  has  known  thor- 
oughly that  whereof  he  writes.  We 
may  not  like  it  altogether,  but  we  can- 
not fail  of  recognizing  the  noble  truth- 
fulness and  deep  seriousness  of  The 
Everlasting  Mercy  and  of  Dauber.  That 
exaltation  of  the  dime-novel  genre  which 
he  gave  us  in  The  Widow  in  the  Bye 
Street  is  a  thing  to  forget  rather  than 
to  censure. 

Mr.  Masefield's  best  work  was  done 
in  The  Everlasting  Mercy  and  in  a  few 
short  ballads  of  the  sea  which  were 
published  in  London  several  years  ago; 
these  smaller  poems  have  lately  been 
reprinted  with  some  additions  in  the 
American  edition  of  Dauber,  under  the 
general  title,  The  Story  of  a  Round- 
House.  In  The  Everlasting  Mercy,  Mr. 
Masefield  gave  us  a  representation  of 
vital,  red-blooded  life  that  is  palpitating 
with  actual  energy  from  start  to  finish, 
in  its  glories  and  in  its  debasement,  in 
its  spiritual  exaltation  as  well  as  in  its 
drunken  frenzies.  Saul  Kane,  reeling 
drunk,  stripped  naked,  and  ringing  the 
fire-bell  at  dead  of  night  as  a  herald  of 
the  coming  of  the  devil  to  claim  his  own 
among  the  villagers,  makes  an  image 
never  to  be  forgotten,  hardly  to  be  sur- 
passed in  all  its  rude  vigor  and  native 
strength.  It  is  not  quite  enough  to  say 
that  Mr.  Masefield  is  the  poet  of  Life: 
he  is  at  the  same  time  more,  and  less, 
than  that — he  is  the  poet  of  Common 
Life. 


494 


TWO  OF  THE  NEWEST  POETS 


In  Mr.  Gibson  we  find  a  sensitive  so- 
cial conscience,  and  a  sympathy  with 
common  people  that  is  undoubtedly 
real;  but  it  has  scarcely  resulted  in 
pessimism,  or  in  sentimental  ism.  His 
outlook  is  broader  and  more  philoso- 
phic, and  the  result  of  a  more  conscious 
purpose. 

Snug  in  my  easy-chair, 

I  stirred  the  fire  to  flame. 

Fantastically  fair, 

The  flickering  fancies  came, 

Born  of  heart's  desire: 

Amber  woodland  streaming; 

Topaz  islands  dreaming, 

Sunset  cities  gleaming, 

Spire  on  burning  spire; 

Ruddy- windowed  taverns; 

Sunshine-spilling  wines; 

Crystal-lighted  caverns 

Of  Golconda's  mines; 

Summers,  unreturning; 

Passion's  crater  yearning; 

Troy,  the  ever-burning; 

Shelley's  lustral  pyre; 

Dragon-eyes,  unsleeping; 

Witches'  caldrons  leaping; 

Golden  galleys  sweeping 

Out  from  sea- walled  Tyre: 

Fancies,  fugitive  and  fair. 

Flashed  with  singing  through  the  air; 

Till,  dazzled  by  the  drowsy  glare, 

I  shut  my  eyes  to  heat  and  light, 

And  saw,  in  sudden  night, 

Crouched  in  the  dripping  dark, 

With  steaming  shoulders  stark, 

The  man  'who  hews  the  coal  to  feed  my  fire. 

Mr.  Gibson's  early  poetry  was  intri- 
cate, decorative,  exquisite,  in  a  word, 
conventional.  But  the  time  came  when 
he  perceived  that  if  his  art  was  ever  to 
be  real  it  must  concern  itself  directly 
with  life.  Accordingly  he  descended 
into  mines,  and  climbed  the  tortuous 
stairs  of  evilly  built  tenements,  talked 
to  men  starving  for  lack  of  work,  and 
to  wives  and  mothers  with  husbands 
lost  in  the  fishing-boats  at  sea  —  he 
viewed  intimately  all  that  misery  and 
wretched  slavery  which  has  been  be- 
gotten by  modern  commerce  upon 
modern  science,  that  foul  monster  over 
which  its  arrogant  parents  cannot  much 


longer  afford  to  shrug  their  shoulders 
indifferently. 

From  this  searching  of  the  heart  of 
life  there  came  forth  the  poet  of  To- 
day, and  of  To-morrow  too,  I  think. 
And  the  first  expression  of  this  new 
force  came  to  us  in  America  in  Daily 
Bread,  a  series  of  seventeen  diminu- 
tive poetic  dramas  dealing  with  simple 
themes  from  the  life  of  working-folk, 
in  diction  purged  of  all  surplusage, 
plain  to  the  point  of  austerity.  A  single 
one,  *  The  Night-Shift '  may  be  taken 
as  typical.  A  coal-miner  dies,  impris- 
oned in  the  depths  of  the  earth,  while 
his  wife  is  yet  ill  from  childbirth.  The 
effect  of  the  continual  tapping  of  the 
rescuers'  picks  as  it  is  overheard  in  the 
clairvoyant  mind  of  the  young  mother 
is  scarcely  to  be  paralleled  for  the  in- 
tensity of  the  horror  which  it  evokes 
—  it  is  *  appalling  and  sublime,'  as  an 
English  critic  has  said.  Still,  impress- 
ive as  many  of  these  dramas  are,  it  is  in 
their  cumulative  effect  that  they  are 
chiefly  powerful. 

And  the  same  thing  may  be  said 
of  Fires,  Mr.  Gibson's  latest  volume, 
which  contains  twenty-one  narrative 
poems.  All  of  these  narrative  poems 
deal  with  ordinary  or  exceptional  mo- 
ments in  the  life  of  the  so-called  com- 
mon people,  but  there  is  a  certain 
broadening  of  the  field  of  vision.  Atten- 
tion is  no  longer  concentrated  exclus- 
ively upon  the  tragical  aspects  of  life 
which  are  produced  by  modern  indus- 
trialism; there  are  also  studies  of  the 
purely  emotional  life  of  working-folk,  so 
that  we  get  a  larger  and  more  truthful 
picture.  Mr.  Gibson  is  often  interest- 
ed in  mental  states  which  result  from 
intense  emotional  experiences,  as  we 
can  see  from* The  Lodestar,'  'Devil's 
Edge,'  and  'The  Lilac  Tree,'  and  he  is 
singularly  successful  in  dealing  with 
these  difficult  themes.  In  Fires,  as  in 
Daily  Bread,  the  fundamental  note  is 
human  sympathy  with  the  whole  of  life. 


TWO  OF  THE  NEWEST  POETS 


495 


With  Mr.  Gibson  this  sympathy  is  a 
very  tender,  intimate,  and  wholly  com- 
prehending thing,  perhaps  the  least  bit 
aloof,  but  none  the  less  real  and  true. 

Though  writing  with  fundamentally 
similar  purposes,  and  actuated  by  the 
same  underlying  spirit,  the  work  of  Mr. 
Masefield  and  Mr.  Gibson  has  many 
obvious  differences.  Mr.  Gibson  has 
undeniably  the  finer,  more  delicate, 
more  sensitive,  in  a  word  more  poetic, 
mind.  Mr.  Masefield's  song  is  rather  a 
shout  —  the  shout  of  one  who  has  but 
just  come  from  that  of  which  he  speaks, 
with  the  rudeness  and  exhilaration  of 
actuality  yet  clinging  about  him.  At 
the  same  time  that  there  is  more  of  the 
observer  in  him,  there  is  in  Mr.  Gib- 
son more  of  the  power  of  true  poetic 
transformation.  There  is  much  in  the 
quality  of  Mr.  Masefield's  work  that 
in  certain  minds  compels  immediate 
enthusiasm,  but  I  suspect  that,  in  the 
long  run,  Mr.  Gibson  will  be  sincerely 
liked  where  Mr.  Masefield  will  be  mere- 
ly endured. 

Of  course,  both  men  have  cut  loose 
from  the  trammels  of  convention,  and 
so  have  antagonized  those  pious  souls 
who  can  see  only  technical  experi- 
ments in  their  work,  without  being 
able  to  penetrate  to  the  living,  burn- 
ing spirit  which  animates  them.  But 


the  few  men  in  the  world  who  do  their 
own  thinking  without  being  ashamed 
of  the  horrid  fact  will  recognize  the 
truth  of  the  assertion  that  here  we 
have  a  new  thing  in  English  poetry, 
the  first  poetic  expression  of  a  move- 
ment which  bids  fair  to  sweep  over 
the  whole  Western  World,  and  the 
seriousness  and  extent  of  which  we 
scarcely  realize,  even  though  we  are 
daily  presented  with  fresh  evidence  of 
its  strength  and  growth.  I  mean,  of 
course,  the  socialist  conception  of  life 
and  government.  We  may  view  this 
movement  with  uncomprehending  hor- 
ror, as  most  of  us  do,  or  with  clear- 
sighted recognition  of  its  defects  and 
strength,  as  Robert  Louis  Stevenson 
did  a  number  of  years  ago;  but  how- 
ever we  look  at  it  we  cannot  escape  the 
fact  of  its  ceaseless  spread  and  growth; 
and  the  appearance  of  this  new  poetry 
is  but  another  indication  of  its  deep- 
rooted  vitality. 

As  I  turn  over  again  the  pages  of 
Le  Contrat  Social,  I  seem  to  see  that 
moment  in  the  dim  future  when  the 
ethics  of  the  ant-hill  and  the  bee-hive 
will  be  applied  for  a  time  to  struggling, 
suffering  Western  humanity,  and  there 
appears  for  an  instant  a  sardonic  smile 
upon  the  face  of  that  kindly,  well- 
meaning  blunderer,  Jean  Jacques. 


BOTH  SIDES  OF  THE  SERVANT  QUESTION 


BY   ANNIE   WINSOR   ALLEN 


No  matter  how  many  girls  spurn 
housework,  homes  will  still  exist.  No 
matter  how  many  women  slink  dis- 
couraged into  hotels  and  boarding- 
houses,  the  best  of  families  will  always 
live  in  separate  homes.  No  matter 
how  many  men  remain  unmarried,  the 
majority  will  always  have  wives  and 
children.  Even  the  millennium  itself 
will  not  be  without  the  family.  Hotels 
and  boarding-houses,  even,  are  merely 
megatherianized  homes;  and  no  mat- 
ter how  much  sensible  cooperation  in 
washing  and  sewing,  cooking  and  the 
care  of  children  and  sick  folk,  may 
be  compassed,  even  those  millenniares 
will  still  have  beds  to  be  made,  floors 
to  be  swept,  doors  to  be  tended,  clothes 
to  be  sorted,  buttons  to  be  sewn  on, 
papers  to  be  burned,  dishes  to  be 
washed,  errands  to  be  run,  and  win- 
dows to  be  locked.  Folks  may  live 
without  concerts  and  trolley-cars  and 
books,  but  they  cannot  live  without 
sleeping,  dressing,  and  eating,  sickness, 
visitors,  and  children;  nor  can  they 
live  without  that  perpetual  disorder 
which  has  to  be  perpetually  cleared  up, 
and  that  perpetual  disintegration  of 
the  material  universe  which  has  to  be 
perpetually  swept  up.  Domestic  work 
there  will  always  be.  The  family  itself 
may  do  it,  or  they  may  pay  some  one 
else  to  do  it,  or  they  may  do  part  and 
pay  some  one  else  to  do  part;  but  done 
it  must  be. 

For  a  family  ranging  from  two  to 
not  more  than  six,  living  in  a  house 


which  occupies  not  more  than  one 
thousand  square  feet  of  ground  space, 
all  the  household  work  may  be  done 
after  a  fashion  by  one  woman  who  is  in 
reasonable  health.  It  often  is  so  done. 
From  half-past  five  in  the  morning  till 
half-past  nine  or  ten  or  eleven  at  night, 
she  is  cooking  something,  or  washing 
something  or  somebody;  she  is  clearing 
or  cleaning  up,  or  sewing,  and  in  the 
odd  moments  she  is  tending  children  or 
invalids,  or  the  door  or  the  table.  She 
is  never  free  to  leave  the  house,  even 
if  she  gets  time  to  read  a  newspaper. 
A  woman  will  do  all  this  for  her  own, 
if  she  must,  and  many  women  do  it 
well;  here  and  there  an  exceptionally 
gifted  woman,  exceptionally  placed, 
prefers  to  do  it  all  herself  and  does  it 
well;  but  few  women  will  prefer  to  do 
it  and  certainly  no  one  would  be  hired 
to  do  it.  On  the  other  hand,  two  to- 
gether can  do  this  same  work  for  a 
family  of  even  ten  or  twelve  and  yet 
have  time  for  rest  and  recreation.  The 
simple  fact  is  that  the  work  is  not  hard, 
but  incessant.  This  secular  character 
makes  two  workers  necessary,  if  there 
is  to  be  any  rest  but  sleep.  If  only  one 
worker  is  forthcoming  from  the  house- 
hold, then  the  other  must  be  hired. 
If  the  family  circumstances  make  no 
helper  possible,  then  the  size  of  the 
house  must  be  the  very  least  possible, 
and  food  and  clothing  must  be  reduced 
to  the  utmost  simplicity. 

If,  beyond  this,  the  mistress  of  the 
house  wants  time  for  rest  and  time 
for  other  exacting  occupations,  then 
she  must  secure  another  helper  to  take 


BOTH  SIDES  OF  THE  SERVANT  QUESTION 


497 


some  or  all  of  her  share  of  the  house- 
hold work.  Also,  if  she  wishes  to  have 
either  cooking-  or  cleaning  done  extra 
well  or  elaborately,  she  must  get  still 
another  helper,  or  two  others.  If  she 
chooses  to  have  more  than  four  living 
rooms,  if  she  wants  a  separate  sleep- 
ing-room for  each  member  of  the  fam- 
ily, and  guest-rooms  in  addition,  or 
if  she  chooses  to  have  her  rooms  aver- 
age more  than  fourteen  feet  square, 
then  also  she  must  secure  more  than 
two  servants  to  keep  these  rooms  in 
order.  It  is  all  a  matter  to  be  decided 
by  arithmetic.  From  24  hours  sub- 
tract 8  for  sleep,  2  for  meals,  and  14 
for  work;  how  much  is  left  for  pleas- 
ure? If  it  takes  three  quarters  of 
an  hour  to  sweep  and  dust  one  room 
14x15,  how  long  will  it  take  to  do 
four  such  rooms,  and  how  long  to  do 
eight  rooms  which  are  twice  as  large? 
The  resultant  fact  which  emerges  con- 
spicuously from  all  such  arithmetic  is 
that  .almost  every  home  is  the  better 
for  having  two  to  keep  it,  or  else  it 
keeps  some  one  and  must  sometimes 
keep  itself. 

More  than  this.  The  unchangeable 
thing  about  housework  is,  that  it  lasts 
from  the  waking-hour  of  the  family 
until  all  the  family  has  gone  to  sleep, 
and  even  continues  during  the  night 
if  someone  is  sick  or  a  thunderstorm 
comes  up.  The  business  of  the  house- 
mistress  is  to  care  for  the  house  and 
the  family.  This  care  can  have  no 
cessation.  She  may  delegate  its  vari- 
ous activities,  but  her  responsibility 
lasts  from  midnight  to  midnight,  — 
the  most  intimate,  the  most  necessary, 
of  all  services.  In  any  other  branch  of 
continuous  service,  such  as  telephon- 
ing, two  operators  would  be  provided, 
but  there  is  no  possibility  of  providing 
two  mothers.  The  best  that  can  be 
done  is  to  provide  one  aide  or  more. 

In  the  purely  natural  household  the 
mother's  aides  are  her  boys  and  girls, 
VOL.  111  -  NO.  4 


who,  as  fast  as  they  grow  old  enough, 
share  this  service  for  the  common  good. 
In  very  simple  conditions  she  does  not 
need  more  responsible  assistance  be- 
cause she  has  no  interests  or  duties 
outside  her  home.  In  a  complex  com- 
munity, however,  a  mother,  no  matter 
how  simple  her  interests,  has  many 
things  to  take  her  away  from  home, 
even  if  nothing  more  than  shopping. 
Then  she  must  have  a  responsible  per- 
son to  leave  in  charge. 

Because  of  its  incessant  needs,  then, 
almost  every  family  of  more  than  two 
members  is  the  better  for  having  one 
'servant,'  —  some  responsible  person, 
that  is,  —  to  help  in  the  family  service, 
to  serve  the  mistress  of  the  house,  and 
share  her  activity.  (Not  because  that 
service  is  disagreeable  to  her  or  diffi- 
cult in  any  part,  but  because  there  is 
too  much  for  one  person.)  This  serv- 
ant may  be  a  half-grown  daughter  or 
a  young  grandmother,  a  maiden  sister 
or  a  homeless  friend,  or  a  handy  boy, 
or  a  husband,  or  even  an  accommo- 
dating neighbor.  Or  it  may  be  a  paid 
person  without  any  previous  interest 
in  the  family. 

ii 

On  taking  a  paid  helper  into  the 
household,  we  step  outside  purely  nat- 
ural conditions.  What  was  a  labor  of 
love  and  mutual  service  is  now  done 
for  pay,  and  yet  it  remains  within  the 
domestic  atmosphere.  An  employee 
has  been  engaged  at  a  definite  wage  to 
work  under  direction,  according  to  the 
needs  of  the  employer,  as  she  would 
do  in  a  factory.  She  is  to  render  mostly 
personal  service,  as  she  would  do  in 
a  store  or  a  telephone  central.  But 
this  personal  service  is  private  service, 
like  that  of  a  clerk  in  an  office.  Yet 
unlike  factory-hand,  saleswoman,  tele- 
phone girl,  or  stenographer,  she  is  ren- 
dering a  service  which  brings  in  no 
money  gain  to  her  employer.  Hers  is 


498 


BOTH  SIDES  OF  THE  SERVANT  QUESTION 


not  a  commercial  service.  She  is  help- 
ing her  employer,  not  to  get  a  living, 
but  to  live.  She  aids,  not  production, 
but  consumption,  for  the  home  is  that 
famous  thing,  the  ultimate  consumer. 
This  brings  her  work  into  the  same 
class  with  that  of  the  doctor,  the  clergy- 
man, the  teacher,  and  the  nurse,  and 
like  them  she  can  have  no  fixed  hours 
of  work  agreed  upon  beforehand  and 
held  to  rigidly.  Like  a  trained  nurse 
or  a  governess,  she  is  not  paid  wholly 
in  cash.  Her  wage  is  paid  partly  in 
board  and  lodging,  so  that  in  one  as- 
pect she  is  a  boarder  and  presents  thus 
a  double  problem.  On  the  other  hand, 
she  is  unlike  the  sick  nurse  in  that  the 
need  of  her  is  continuous,  not  fitful; 
and  unlike  a  governess,  in  that  she  is 
doing  what  is  a  family  necessity,  not 
a  family  preference.  Her  service  is  an 
integral  part  of  the  daily  family  life. 
Domestic  service  is  consequently  un- 
like any  other  service. 

Of  course,  all  useful  occupation  is 
of  two  sorts,  personal  and  commercial, 
—  the  sort  which  gives  direct  assist- 
ance to  the  life  of  others,  like  housing, 
feeding,  tending,  and  teaching;  and  the 
sort  which  gives  indirect  assistance  to 
that  same  personal  life,  —  manufac- 
turing, transportation,  and  sale.  The 
one  sort  consumes  money;  the  other 
makes  it.  Homes  are  not  money-mak- 
ing establishments.  They  are  money- 
users.  Their  work  is  personal :  it  is  life- 
making,  not  money-making.  If  life  is 
not  worth  living,  money  is  not  worth 
making:  and  as  a  man's  home  is,  so 
is  his  life.  The  nearer  you  get  to  a 
good  home,  the  closer  you  are  to  the 
fountain  of  life.  For  this  reason,  good 
domestic  service  is  more  necessary  to 
life  and  happiness  than  is  good  com- 
mercial service.  Whether  you  are  paid 
for  keeping  house  or  do  it  for  love, 
does  not  matter.  The  service  is  equally 
valuable  and  indispensable. 

Domestic  service  is  not  only  indis- 


pensable, it  is  personally  exacting.  It 
requires  a  higher  grade  of  personal 
character  than  any  corresponding  grade 
of  work.  All  forms  of  personal  service 
require  this  same  quality  of  character, 
although  such  different  kinds  of  skill 
and  knowledge.  Engineer,  architect, 
lawyer,  minister,  teacher,  nurse  (sick 
or  child's),  governess,  coachman,  cook, 
maid,  housekeeper,  housewife  or  home- 
maker,  father  and  mother,  all  need  the 
same  qualities  of  fidelity,  patience, 
kindness,  devotion,  honesty,  and'good 
manners.  To  be  a  good  father  is  more 
creditable  than  to  be  a  good  business 
man,  for  it  takes,  not  more  talent  but 
more  intelligence  and  more  kinds  of 
virtue.  To  be  a  satisfactory  domestic 
cook  requires  in  the  same  way  more 
all-round  personal  excellence  and  more 
varied  good  sense  than  to  be  a  skilled 
milliner.  A  thoroughly  valuable  child's 
nurse  must  have  much  more  admirable 
personal  qualities  than  a  saleswoman 
needs. 

Of  course,  these  excellent  moral  qual- 
ities are  not  unwelcome  in  any  occupa- 
tion, but  some  can  get  along  without 
them  while  to  others  they  are  essen- 
tial. For  instance,  a  marvelously  per- 
fect glass-cutter  may  be  a  liar,  a  drunk- 
ard, and  a  thief,  but  no  one  could  be 
any  of  these  three  and  be  a  valuable 
school-teacher,  or  doctor,  or  engineer, 
or  coachman.  So  with  all  reputable 
domestic  service.  It  does  not  demand 
remarkable  talent  in  any  one  direction, 
but  it  must  have  a  high  grade  of  char- 
acter and  of  general  intelligence.  To 
establish  the  full  success  of  a  home, 
every  one  who  lives  beneath  its  roof 
must  share  in  general  the  same  moral 
standards  and  the  same  notions  of  re- 
finement. 

These  occupations  of  personal  serv- 
ice requiring,  first  and  foremost,  good 
character,  are  also  those  which  place 
the  largest  burden  of  trust.  People  who 
enter  them  need  a  clear  sense  of  honor, 


BOTH  SIDES  OF  THE  SERVANT  QUESTION 


499 


and  such  occupations  enlist  a  special 
degree  of  personal  devotion  and  loyalty. 
Who  else  gets  and  gives  such  devotion 
and  loyalty  as  the  good  family  doctor 
and  the  beloved  family  nurse?  So  in 
the  old  feudal  days,  domestic  service 
was  held  to  be  highly  honorable,  and 
so  it  is  in  these  days  wherever  servant 
and  served  are  equal  to  the  opportun- 
ity. This  is  not  a  conspicuous  or  showy 
service.  It  is  done  in  secret,  almost, 
but  it  is  one  which  wins  rich  rewards 
in  appreciation  and  lifelong  grateful 
mutual  affection  from  those  who  have 
known  and  enjoyed  its  excellence. 

The  workers  cannot  be  watched,  and 
the  limit  of  authority  cannot  be  de- 
fined; no  definition  of  mutual  service 
and  obligation,  can  be  made;  no  fixed 
contract  can  be  drawn  up.  For  the 
home  is  a  place  where  things  cannot  be 
regulated  by  rule  and  schedule.  It  is 
a  place  of  adjustment,  like  the  joint  in 
a  suspension  bridge.  Weather,  health, 
railroad  schedules,  business  appoint- 
ments, and  social  engagements,  must 
be  taken  as  fixed;  the  home  must  vary 
to  meet  them,  and  must  be  always 
ready  to  dry  wet  shoes,  run  for  the 
doctor,  have  dinner  late  or  no  dinner 
at  all,  and  to  provide  extra  dishes  or 
fresh  beds,  without  a  murmur.  In  short, 
the  house  is  maintained  for  the  ad- 
vantage of  the  family. 


in 

How  bewilderingly  true  this  is  may 
be  appreciated  by  considering  even 
briefly,  from  either  the  legal  or  the  per- 
sonal point  of  view,  the  mutual  rela- 
tions of  mistress  and  maid  as  to  work, 
hours,  pay,  health,  or  pleasure;  and  by 
then  remembering  that  every  mistress 
and  every  maid  has  to  consider  all  those 
parts  of  the  service  from  both  points 
of  view,  all  the  time.  No  wonder  be- 
wilderment arises.  If  we  do  not  follow 
the  right  method  by  instinct  and  cus- 


tom, but  depend  upon  thought,  we  are 
lost. 

Besides  obeying  the  general  spirit  of 
the  common  law  in  all  the  intimacy 
of  household  intercourse,  mistress  and 
maid  have  four  special  legal  relations: 

1.  Employer  and  Employee.  —  This 
relation  is  a  matter  of  contract.    Both 
sides  must  live  up  to  the  agreement 
which  they  make  in  the  beginning. 
The  mistress  must  not  ask  that  any- 
thing shall  be  done  by  the  maid,  of  a 
wholly  different  sort  from  the  work 
agreed  upon.    The  maid  must  not  re- 
fuse to  do  any  work  of  the  kind  orig- 
inally agreed  upon.   Of  course,  origin- 
ally, the  mistress  has  a  perfect  right  to 
propose  any  kind  of  work  so  long  as  it 
is  not  criminal.   It  is  for  the  girl  to  de- 
cide whether  she  cares  to  accept  the 
proposal. 

A  reasonable  cause  for  complaint 
on  either  side  is  something  of  which 
complaint  has  already  been  made  and 
in  which  no  improvement  followed,  or 
else  something  so  objectionable  that 
no  one  needs  to  be  told  that  it  is  un- 
endurable. But  to  allow  a  thing  to  go 
on  for  some  time  and  then  suddenly 
to  complain  and  break  the  contract 
is  not  reasonable.  Therefore  all  com- 
plaints, great  or  small,  should  be  made 
promptly.  This  is  a  legal  duty  of  .both 
sides. 

2.  Principal  and  Agent. — An  agent 
is  one  who  acts  in  another's  place  dur- 
ing the  absence  of  that  other.    The 
position  is  therefore  one  of  trust,  and 
requires   good  judgment.     An  agent 
must  behave  as  nearly  as  possible  in 
the  way  in  which  the  principal  would 
behave  under  the  circumstances,  and 
must  consider  always  the  advantage  of 
the  principal.  How  much  independent 
power  of  decision  belongs  to  the  agent, 
depends  upon  the  directions  which  he 
receives. 

Many  times  a  day  every  domestic 


500 


BOTH  SIDES  OF  THE  SERVANT  QUESTION 


servant  acts  as  an  agent.  It  is  a  posi- 
tion which  demands  a  strong  sense  of 
honor.  She  should  be  faithful  to  her 
mistress's  interests,  saving  money  for 
her,  caring  for  her  property,  and  be- 
having courteously  as  her  representa- 
tive. 

3.  Bailor  and  Bailee.  —  A  bailor  is 
one  who  gives  some  article  which  he 
owns  into  the  possession  of  another,  in 
order   that  that  other  may  do  some 
work  upon  it. 

The  bailee  is  required  to  use  all 
proper  care  in  handling  the  goods  in- 
trusted to  him  and  to  return  them 
promptly  as  soon  as  he  has  done  the 
job  agreed  upon,  while  the  bailor  is 
expected  not  to  blame  the  bailee  for 
natural  wear  and  tear  or  unavoidable 
accidents.-  All  day  long  every  servant  is 
a  bailee,  doing  some  work  upon  articles 
owned  by  another. 

4.  Host   and   Boarder.  —  The   host 
must  see  that  the  rooms  provided  are 
cleanly  and  sanitary.    The  food  must 
be  in  sound  condition  and  of  as  good 
quality  as  the  board   paid  will  war- 
rant.  The  host  has  no  claim  to  know 
anything  of  the  boarder's  private  af- 
fairs. 

The  boarder  must  behave  in  a  court- 
eous and  quiet  manner  while  in  the 
house,  doing  nothing  to  make  the  house 
unattractive  to  the  other  occupants, 
and  following  the  customs  of  the  house 
in  all  essentials.  The  boarder  has  no 
claim  upon  the  social  or  domestic  life 
of  the  host. 

There  are  two  other  important  rela- 
tions which,  to  be  sure,  mistress  and 
maid  do  not  hold  legally  toward  one 
another,  but,  living  under  the  same 
roof,  and  sharing  so  many  of  the  same 
interests,  they  appear  to  hold  these 
relations,  and  suggestions  as  to  wise 
and  acceptable  behavior  can  be  got  by 
considering  how  things  would  be  if 


these   apparent   relations   were   legal. 
These  relations  are  : — 

1.  Guardian  and  Ward. — A  guardian 
must  see  to  it  that  the  minors  under 
her  care  do  not  do  anything  to  imperil 
their  future  well-being  and  usefulness; 
she  must  see  that  they  are  properly 
occupied  during  the  hours  of  pleasure; 
and  that  they  have  sufficient  .work  to 
keep  them  busy  and  useful.   She  must 
treat  them  without  due  harshness,  but 
must  make  them  obedient.    A  good 
guardian  also  will  win  the  ward's  con- 
fidence and  take  the  place  of  a  parent 
as  much  as  possible. 

A  ward  must  be  obedient  and  indus- 
trious, truthful  and  respectful  to  the 
guardian.  A  well-conditioned  ward  will 
also  wish  to  enlist  the  guardian's  friend- 
ly interest,  and  to  get  the  benefit  of 
such  judicious  advice  as  a  larger  expe- 
rience of  life  and  greater  opportunities 
can  usually  supply. 

It  is  fortunate  when  mistress  and 
maid  are  both  such  that  a  relation  of 
guardian  and  ward  is  informally  es- 
tablished between  them.  But  a  mis- 
tress must  be  very  careful  how  she  as- 
sumes a  guardian's  rights,  since  legally 
they  are  not  hers. 

2.  Confidential  Adviser  and  Confiden- 
tial Agent.  —  The  confidential  adviser 
(such  as  a  doctor  or  a  lawyer)  must 
give  honest,  disinterested  advice,  and 
must  not  betray  the  confidence  reposed 
in  him  by  repeating  what  has  been  told 
him. 

The  confidential  agent  (such  as  a 
private  secretary)  must  not  repeat  the 
secrets  which  are  learned  in  the  course 
of  her  work,  and  must  not  use  the  know- 
ledge which  she  gains  in  any  way  to  the 
disadvantage  of  her  employer  or  of  any 
one  else. 

Although  the  law  does  not  recognize 
these  confidential  relations  as  involved 
in  domestic  service,  as  a  matter  of  fact 
they  always  are,  and  a  girl  should  scru- 


BOTH  SIDES  OF  THE  SERVANT  QUESTION 


501 


pulously  refrain  from  repeating  outside 
what  she  hears  in  the  home,  if  she 
knows  that  the  repetition  will  work  in- 
justice. 

So  unavoidably  complex  are  the 
legal  and  semi-legal  relations  between 
mistress  and  maid!  In  fulfilling  them 
successfully  special  personal  relations 

OBVERSE 
It  is  right  that 

1.  The  character  of  the  work  should 
be  definitely  understood  in  the  begin- 
ning on  both  sides. 


2.  The   work    should    be   carefully 
arranged  according  to  hours  and  days; 
but  the  mistress  should  be  willing  to 
alter  it  on  occasion  to  suit  the  prefer- 
ence or  health  or  pleasure  of  the  maid, 
provided  that  this  alteration  does  not 
seriously  interfere  with  the  well-being 
of  the  family. 

3.  When  the  usual  number  of  serv- 
ants is  lessened  for  a  considerable  time, 
those  upon  whom  the  additional  work 
comes  should  receive  extra  pay  accord- 
ing to  the  amount  of  extra  work  that 
they  do. 

4.  Extra  services  not  in  the  line  of 
work  agreed  upon  should  not  be  ex- 
pected,  nor  heavier   work   than   was 
specified  in  the  beginning. 


5.  A  mistress  who  is  not  pinched  for 
money  should  not  on  that  account  al- 
low waste  and  carelessness  among  her 
servants.     It  is  very  bad  for  anyone, 
and  very  bad  for  the  community,  to 
acquire  a  disrespect  for  values. 

6.  A  mistress  should  be  careful  about 


have  to  be  established  and  maintained. 
These  vary  with  every  case  according 
to  the  size  and  elaborateness  of  family 
and  home,  the  skill  and  temperament 
of  mistress  and  maid.  They  involve  all 
questions  of  work,  hours,  pay,  health, 
and  pleasure  on  both  sides.  For  in- 
stance :  — 

REVERSE 
It  is  right  that 

1.  A  girl  should   do  willingly  any 
work  of  the  sort  for  which  she  was  en- 
gaged which  will  be  of  benefit  to  the 
family,  whether  or  not  it  was  specific- 
ally mentioned  in  the  beginning.    The 
only  reason  for  refusing  to  do  such 
work  should  be  either  that  it  is  too 
heavy  for  her  strength,  or  that  it  con- 
stantly overruns  her  hours  of  recrea- 
tion. 

2.  A  girl  should  be  interested  to  al- 
ter her  usual  routine  to  suit  unusual 
circumstances   in   the  family.     Espe- 
cially in  regard  to  guests,  she  should 
remember  that  one  of  the  blessings  of 
a  home  is  that  friends  may  come  there 
freely. 

3.  A  girl  should  be  ready  to  do  work 
other  than  her  own  for  a  day  or  two 
without  being  annoyed  or  asking  for 
more  pay.   She  should  never  be  willing 
to  take  pay  from  guests,  as  if  she  were 
a  bootblack. 

4.  A  girl  should  not  shirk  her  work. 
She  should  work  as  hard  and  as  well  as 
she  can  without  injury  to  her  health. 
Otherwise  she  is  docking  the  amount 
of  work  for  which  she  is  paid,  and  her 
employer  would  be  justified  in  docking 
the  amount  of  pay  in  proportion. 

5.  A  girl  should  keep  things  in  good 
condition,   in    order    to  preserve    the 
property.   She  tacitly  agrees  when  she 
takes  the  place  to  practice  economy 
and  care  in  her  mistress's  interest.  She 
uses  things  in  trust  for  her. 

6.  Because  she  gets  a  certain  privi- 


502 


BOTH  SIDES  OF  THE  SERVANT  QUESTION 


suddenly  removing  privileges  to  which 
girls  have  grown  accustomed.  She 
must  always  keep  clear  which  are  privi- 
leges, even  very  common  ones. 

7.  There  should  be  about  nine  hours 
of  work  a  day;  that  is,  approximately 
sixty-three  hours  a  week;  or,  better  yet, 
one  hundred  and  twenty-six  hours  in  a 
fortnight. 

8.  The  work  each  day  should  begin 
not  more  than  fifteen  hours  from  the 
time  when  it  is  to  end;  thus  giving  time 
for  eight  hours  sleep  and  half  an  hour 
apiece  for  dressing  and  undressing. 


9.  The   distribution   of  work-hours 
through  the  day  should  be  as  nearly 
as  possible  the  same  every  day. 

10.  The  pay  offered  for    domestic 
work  should  correspond  approximately 
to  that  which  the  girl  could  probably 
get  in  some  commercial   occupation, 
(minus  the  current  price  of  board  and 
lodging) .  She  should  not  be  paid  more 
than  the  worth  of  the  grade  of  work 
which  she  actually  does. 

11.  The  board  and  lodging  which 
she  gets  at  her  place  of  service  should 
be  reckoned  as  part  of  her  pay,  at  the 
rate  which  she  herself  would  have  to 
pay,  if  she  were  working  by  the  day, 
and  not  living  at  home. 


lege  frequently  she  must  not  fall  into 
the  habit  of  thinking  that  it  is  a 
right. 

7.  A  girl  should  recognize  the  un- 
certain character  of  the  work,  and  be 
cheerfully  willing  to  work  over-time 
some  days,  in  an  emergency,  remem- 
bering that  she  often  works  under-time 
on  other  days. 

8.  A  girl  should  begin  her  day  as  early 
as  is  best  for  the  good  of  the  family, 
and  end  at  the  time  that  is  best  for 
them.    She  must  get  her  necessary  re- 
spite during  the  afternoon  or  at  some 
other  time  when  the  family  does  not 
need  her. 

9.  A  girl  should  use  good  sense,  and 
not  expect  any  family  life  to  go  on  with 
the  regularity  of  a  factory. 

10.  A  girl  should  not  expect  much 
higher  pay  than  she  knows  she  can  get 
in  some  productive  occupation. 


11.  A  girl  should  not  expect  the  food 
which  she  receives  to  be  better  than 
what  she  would  be  able  to  pay  for  if 
she  were  working  by  the  day,  nor  should 
she  take  food  between  meals  any  more 
than  she  would  if  she  were  at  a  real 
boarding-house.  Nor  should  she  eat 
at  meals  more  or  differently  than  she 
would  be  allowed  to  at  a  boarding- 
house.  If  the  food  which  she  receives 
is  of  better  quality  than  she  would 
otherwise  get,  she  should  count  that 
as  just  so  much  added  to  her  wages  in 
pleasure  and  health,  and  subtracted 
from  her  doctor's  bill,  sick-leave,  and 
so  forth. 


So  one  may  go  on  through  all  the 
minutiae  of  work,  hours,  pay,  health, 
and  pleasure,  balancing  items  on  both 
sides.  But  the  showing  is  already 


sufficient  to  illuminate  the  causes  of  the 
discontent  and  grumbling  that  are  so 
frequently  heard  on  both  sides  of  the 
domestic  service  question. 


BOTH  SIDES  OF  THE  SERVANT  QUESTION 


503 


IV 

The  fact  is  that,  both  mistress  and 
maid  occupy  a  sphere  where  honor  and 
trust  and  disinterested  hard  work  must 
be  present,  or  discontent  will  abound. 
But  honor  and  trust  do  not  rule  in  most 

Mistresses  say  : 

Housekeeping  is  wearisome  and  dis- 
heartening. There  are  many  maids 
ready  to  draw  good  pay,  and  few  ready 
to  do  good  work.  Many  do  not  know 
how  to  work  well,  and  most  do  not 
want  to  work  well.  They  all  want  to 
get  much  and  give  little. 


people,  and  overcoming  difficulties  is 
not  now  in  fashion.  This  is  the  season 
of  our  discontent.  Our  shield  of  discus- 
sion is  not  golden  on  one  side  and  silver 
on  the  other,  but  dull  lead  here  and 
rusty  iron  there;  on  both  sides  dissatis- 
faction. 

Maids  say  : 

Housework  is  tiresome  and  discour- 
aging. There  are  lots  of  mistresses 
ready  to  ask  for  good  work,  and  very 
few  ready  to  give  good  conditions.  Lots 
of  them  do  not  know  how  to  manage 
well,  and  most  of  them  do  not  want  to 
deal  fairly.  They  all  want  to  get  much 
and  give  little. 


We  are  used  to  pitying  the  mistresses 
—  if  we  are  mistresses  ourselves;  but 
if  we  are  maids,  we  consider  sadly  the 
plight  of  the  maids.  Getting  a  new  mis- 
tress is  a  very  uncertain  venture. 

First,  there  is  the  mistress  who  has 
been  bred  from  childhood  in  a  home 
where  there  was  plenty  of  service,  but 
who  is  entirely  without  any  experience 
of  the  work  itself  and  employs  her 
servants  to  rid  herself  of  what  she 
considers  mere  undesirable  activities. 
Such  a  mistress  is  frequently  unreason- 
able and  unsympathetic. 

Second,  there  are  the  houses  where 
the  mistress  is  unaccustomed  to  the 
control  and  direction  of  others:  she 
was  not  brought  up  in  a  household 
where  servants  were  employed,  and  she, 
too,  employs  them  in  order  that  she 
herself  may  be  rid  of  the  household 
work  which  she  dislikes.  These  house- 
wives who  are  just  waking  to  the  pos- 
sibility of  assistance  also  frequently 
make  very  poor  mistresses,  for  their 
attitude  is  likewise  apt  to  be  selfish. 
They  are  unaccustomed  to  being  in  au- 
thority, and  are  too  often  either  timid 
or  exacting. 

The  increasing  probability  of  coming 
under  the  control  of  such  mistresses  is 


helping  to  keep  many  of  the  most  desir- 
able girls  out  of  domestic  service.  On 
the  other  hand,  the  increased  number 
of  good  incomes,  and  the  decreased 
willingness  to  work  long  hours,  has 
added  enormously  to  the  number  of 
families  employing  servants,  and  to 
the  number  of  servants  employed  in 
each  family.  Thus,  circumstance  is 
working  at  both  ends,  increasing  the 
demand  and  decreasing  the  supply,  at 
one  blow. 

In  a  third  sort  of  house,  however,  the 
mistress,  whether  or  not  she  has  been 
accustomed  from  childhood  to  see  serv- 
ants about,  understands  the  work  her- 
self, and  is  capable  of  doing  any  part 
of  it  as  well  as  need  be.  She  employs 
servants  in  order  that  she  may  have 
free  time  for  other  occupations  which 
she  cannot  delegate,  but  which  she  con- 
siders of  great  importance  to  the  best 
development  and  usefulness  of  her  hus- 
band and  her  children.  It  is  these  wo- 
men who  can  help  gradually  to  make 
domestic  service  more  desired ;  but  per- 
haps they  are  relatively  few,  and  cer- 
tainly the  tug  of  the  times  is  against 
them.  Modern  women  have  not  a  mind 
to  it,  because  modern  girls  are  not 
bred  to  a  knowledge  of  it. 


504 


BOTH  SIDES  OF  THE  SERVANT  QUESTION 


In  fact,  as  we  are  all  weary  of  remark- 
ing, the  growing  prosperity,  independ- 
ence, and  democracy  of  the  last  thirty 
years,  have,  along  with  their  many 
blessings,  brought  disquiet.  They  have 
cast  a  definite  slur  in  our  minds  upon 
obedience,  hard  work,  drudgery,  stabil- 
ity, domestic  life,  and  personal  service. 
Easy  independence  has  become  a  stock 
idea  with  us.  The  gospel  of  sorrow 
and  suffering,  labor  and  difficulty,  has 
fallen  into  disfavor.  It  is  replaced  by 
the  gospel  of  pleasantness.  Working, 
even  to  grow  rich,  is  unpopular.  'The 
Almighty  Dollar!'  said  an  observant 
German,  full  twenty  years  ago.  'No! 
the  Americans  no  longer  worship  the 
Almighty  Dollar.  They  worship  the 
God  of  Good  Times.'  If  any  one  doubts 
the  hold  which  this  exaggerated  stock 
idea  has  upon  even  the  least  lazy  of  us, 
let  him  count  the  number  of  times  dur- 
ing the  coming  week  that  he  himself 
accepts  an  inferior  grade  of  work  from 
himself  or  from  another,  because  he 
does  not  like  to  make  things  disagree- 
able; or  decides  not  to  ask  a  simple 
favor  of  a  friend  for  fear  of  giving 
trouble.  We  are  the  first  generation 
which  has  said  of  a  woman  in  our  em- 
ploy, 'Yes,  she  is  idle,  slovenly,  and 
dishonorable,  she  does  not  give  me  a 
fair  return  for  my  money.  But  I  don't 
blame  her  :  the  work  is  disagreeable.  I 
should  not  like  to  do  it  myself.' 

Besides  this  easy  temper  of  the 
times,  another  stock  idea  disturbs  the 
peace  of  our  households.  This  is  the 
notion  of  doing  something  a  little  be- 
yond one's  capacity.  We  call  it  am- 
bition. Ninety-nine  men  you  meet  are 
ambitious,  to  one  who  is  thorough.  The 
born  clerk  wants  to  be  a  lawyer,  and 
the  born  lawyer  wants  to  be  a  rail- 
road president.  But  one  of  these  days 
innumerable  persons  of  good  mental 
training  will  have  to  go  into  occupa- 
tions which  they  now  think  not  worth 
considering.  Then  they  will  discover 


that,  in  a  democracy,  all  occupations 
are  equally  honorable.  In  a  true  de- 
mocracy everybody  works,  each  one  at 
whatever  he  can  do  best,  and  he  takes 
pride  in  it.  Not  every  one  can  do  the 
unusual  things,  or  they  would  not  be 
unusual.  Every  five  persons  need  a 
sixth  to  help  in  the  household,  but  only 
every  five  hundred  need  a  doctor.  And 
a  doctor  cannot  support  himself  on 
less  than  five  hundred  patients:  no 
one  of  them  needs  him  often  enough. 
It  is  the  same  with  trained  nurses.  So 
some  day  more  of  the  right  sort  of 
girls  who  are  welcome  in  domestic  serv- 
ice will  take  it  up.  The  right  kind  of 
girls  are  those  who  want  to  work  stead- 
ily and  well,  at  work  suited  to  their 
strength  and  ability,  for  eight  or  nine 
hours  a  day.  And  since  to  do  house- 
work satisfactorily  demands  refine- 
ment and  good  sense,  they  are  also 
girls  who  have  nice  feelings  and  a  fair 
education. 

Already,  to-day,  many  steady,  re- 
fined, sensible  girls  appreciate  the  ad- 
vantage of  working  in  other  people's 
homes,  but  they  make  four  definite  ob- 
jections to  the  occupation  as  it  is  now 
arranged.  These  are:  (1)  The  difficulty 
of  securing  a  pleasant,  quiet  place  in 
which  to  enjoy  leisure  and  to  receive 
their  callers;  that  is,  its  discomforts. 
(2)  The  difficulty  of  finding  out  before- 
hand how  the  mistress  of  any  particular 
house  is  going  to  treat  you;  that  is,  its 
uncertainty.  (3)  The  difficulty  of  being 
sure  of  pleasant  fellow-workers;  that  is, 
its  intimacy.  (4)  A  dislike  of  helping 
without  sharing  in  a  private  home  life; 
that  is,  its  aloofness.  Of  course,  also,  the 
social '  stigma '  is  urged  as  the  chief  rea- 
son why  it  is  hard  to  secure  good  help  in 
the  household.  This  is  the  reason  which 
many  girls  believe  they  have  for  not 
entering  domestic  service.  But  a  gen- 
eral sentiment  of  this  kind  follows  the 
conditions  which  create  it.  A  feeling 
is  always  a  consequence  before  it  is  a 


BOTH  SIDES  OF  THE  SERVANT  QUESTION 


505 


cause.  If  the  conditions  were  altered, 
the  sentiment  would  disappear.  In 
the  eighteenth  century  there  was  a 
social  stigma  on  artists;  the  social 
stigma  on  doctors  has  scarcely  yet  dis- 
appeared in  England;  and  that  on  re- 
tail trade  has  been  heard  of  in  this 
country.  Some  say  there  is  still  a  social 
stigma  on  dentists,  while  others  look 
upon  dentists  as  high  in  the  social  scale. 
These  are  matters  of  sentiment.  We 
cannot  work  to  efface  sentiment,  but 
only  to  efface  what  causes  the  senti- 
ment. 

This  sentiment,  among  those  who 
feel  it,  is  clearly  caused  by  the  com- 
bined pressure  of  the  four  conditions 
that  I  have  enumerated.  But  we  may 
each  of  us  work  to  efface  from  our  own 
household  gradually,  so  far  as  possible, 
its  discomfort  and  its  uncertainty.  Its 
intimacy  with  the  other  workers  must 
always  continue,  but  just  so  far  as 
girls  learn  how  to  be  agreeable  without 
being  familiar,  its  unpleasantness  will 
abate. 

Its  aloofness  from  the  family  must 
always  continue,  too,  in  most  house- 
holds, but  this  can  be  turned  to  advan- 
tage by  the  girl.  In  talking  of  the  ad- 
vantages of  domestic  service  for  young 
girls,  it  is  very  usually  said  to  secure 
them  a  good  home.  This  is  palpably 
not  so.  In  the  first  place,  many  of  the 
households  in  which  they  can  find  serv- 
ice are  not  in  themselves  good  homes; 
and,  in  the  second  place,  however  good 
the  home  may  be,  the  girl  never  wholly 
shares  it.  The  actual  situation  is  that 
by  going  into  domestic  service  a  girl 
gets  a  more  or  less  good  and  homelike 
boarding-place,  possibly  more  comfort- 
able than  what  she  could  probably  pro- 
vide for  herself  if  she  were  working  at 
any  other  occupation,  and  probably 
more  elaborate  than  the  home  from 
which  she  comes.  No  matter  how  home- 
like it  may  be,  it  is  not  her  own  home, 
it  is  some  one  else's  home.  If  the  fam- 


ily lives  well  into  the  country  in  a  simple 
way,  with  almost  no  interests  outside 
the  domestic  happenings,  then  the  girl 
feels,  and  is,  very  much  like  one  of  the 
family.  But  the  more  outside  interests 
the  family  has,  and  the  more  they  use 
their  home  for  entertaining  their  ac- 
quaintances, the  less  can  she  be  a  part 
of  their  life.  It  is  too  complicated  to 
admit  of  receiving  any  outsider  on  a 
family  footing;  the  housekeeper,  the 
governess,  or  the  trained  nurse,  feels 
this  quite  as  keenly  as  the  maid.  If 
those  employed  in  the  home  were  part 
of  the  family  it  would  defeat  the  very 
purpose  for  which  they  are  employed. 
They  are  employed  in  order  to  free  the 
family  for  outside  interests.  The  aloof- 
ness may  be  small  disadvantage  if  a 
girl  knows  how  to  use  her  unoccupied 
time,  and  has  a  just  amount  of  it. 

In  fact,  on  both  sides,  we  may  make 
domestic  service  acceptable  if  we  have 
a  mind  to.  The  long  and  the  short  of 
it  is  that  minds  must  be  changed  as 
well  as  methods.  Since  domestic  serv- 
ice is  merely  the  delegating  of  her 
own  duties  to  a  trustworthy  aide,  the 
house-mother  must  look  upon  it  with 
interest  and  respect;  and  the  house- 
worker,  since  it  is  merely  the  prophecy 
of  her  own  duties  to  come,  must  look 
upon  it  with  respect  and  interest.  And 
since  it  is  the  centre  of  human  life 
and  the  source  of  all  human  happiness, 
both  must  look  upon  it  as  indispen- 
sable, inevitable,  honorable,  and  de- 
sirable. Wherever  both  mistress  and 
maid  realize  this,  harmony  exists; 
and  the  spread  of  this  understanding 
will  separate  the  desirable  from  the 
undesirable  on  both  sides,  drawing  the 
desirable  together  in  mutual  satisfac- 
tion (of  our  mitigated  human  sort),  and 
leaving  the  undesirable  to  wrestle  with 
each  other  and  come  to  their  proper 
end,  like  the  Kilkenny  cats.  A  con- 
summation much  to  be  desired  on  both 
sides ! 


506 


THE  CENSURED  SAINTS 


Much  remains  to  be  said  as  to  meth- 
od, but  she,  on  either  side,  —  mistress 
or  maid,  —  who  believes  and  lives  up 
to  what  is  here  set  down,  is  not,  even 
now,  dwelling  in  the  Cave  of  Adullam 


—  which  is  so  big  and  crowded.  She 
has  a  little  private  cave  of  her  own, 
where  the  prospect  is  pleasant  and  the 
air  is  not  *  polluted  by  corruption  and 
groans.' 


THE  CENSURED  SAINTS 


BY   GEORGE   HODGES 


THE  saints  have  always  lived  in  peril 
of  excommunication.  Even  canonized 
saints  have  been  acquainted  with  the 
formal  censures  of  ecclesiastical  au- 
thority. 

Saint  Athanasius  was  condemned  by 
several  councils,  and  being  deposed 
from  his  place  as  Pope  of  Alexandria, 
spent  years  in  exile.  Saint  Benedict 
had  hardly  begun  to  work  as  Abbot  of 
Vicovarro,  when  the  monks  tried  to 
poison  him.  Saint  Chrysostom  was  ex- 
communicated, and  driven  out  of  Con- 
stantinople. Saint  Damasus  was  so 
energetically  opposed  by  his  brethren 
that,  upon  the  adjournment  of  the 
meeting  at  which  he  was  elected  Pope 
of  Rome,  a  hundred  and  thirty-seven 
bodies  of  dead  electors  were  found  on 
the  church  floor.  Saint  Epiphanius, 
preaching  in  Jerusalem,  was  interrupt- 
ed by  the  bishop  in  the  middle  of  his 
sermon,  and  told  to  leave  the  pulpit.  It 
is  true  that  the  saint  was  engaged  at 
that  moment  in  denouncing  the  bishop; 
but  the  fact  remains  that  even  saints 
were  unable  to  do  that  with  impunity. 
They  had  to  suffer  for  it. 

It  would  be  easy  to  go  down  the  long 
alphabet  of  censured  saints,  and  find 
plenty  of  like  cases.  The  new  Diction- 
ary of  Christian  Biography  and  Litera- 


ture1 covers  only  six  centuries,  but  it 
suffices  to  show  the  saints  in  the  endur- 
ance of  all  manner  of  tribulation.  Of 
course,  they  were  hated  by  their  pagan 
neighbors;  that  was  a  part  of  the  day's 
work.  And  if,  in  addition,  they  were 
reviled  and  persecuted  by  their  breth- 
ren in  religion,  even  that  was  plainly 
promised  in  the  last  beatitude.  The 
Dictionary  begins  at  the  end  of  the 
New  Testament.  If  it  had  gone  further 
back,  it  would  have  included  the 
stoning  of  Saint  Stephen.  The  five 
hundred  and  ninety-six  Johns  who  ap- 
peared in  the  former  four- volume  edi- 
tion are  here  a  much  more  select  com- 
pany; but  even  the  present  list  retains 
the  John  who  was  expelled  from  Alex- 
andria by  the  zeal  of  the  Patriarch  of 
Constantinople,  and  the  John  of  An- 
tioch  who  was  excommunicated  by  the 
Council  of  Ephesus,  and  the  John  of 
Constantinople  who  was  rebuked  by 
Gregory  the  Great  for  seizing  a  priest 
accused  of  heresy  and  beating  him  with 
ropes  in  the  cathedral. 

It  is  interesting  to  see  how  remote 
this  is  from  such  a  book  as  Mrs.  Lang's 

1  Dictionary  of  Christian  Biography  and  Lit- 
erature. Edited  by  HENRY  WACE  and  WIL- 
LIAM C.  PIEBCY.  Boston:  Little,  Brown  &  Co. 
1911. 


THE  CENSURED  SAINTS 


507 


Stories  of  Saints  and  Heroes.1  The 
saints  in  these  pages  have  their  various 
troubles:  Saint  Francis  has  an  unsym- 
pathetic father,  and  Saint  Elizabeth 
an  unsympathetic  mother-in-law,  and 
there  are  pagan  persecutors,  and  drag- 
ons, and  temptations  of  the  devil;  but 
the  brethren,  for  the  most  part,  are 
kind  and  true,  and  the  Church  follows 
the  saint  with  benedictions.  We  per- 
ceive, however,  that  the  stories  which 
Mrs.  Lang  has  so  pleasantly  retold  are 
like  the  accounts  of  King  David  which 
are  given  in  the  Books  of  Chronicles. 
The  Chroniclers  make  no  record  of 
the  domestic  unhappiness  of  David. 
They  omit  the  chapters  which  centre 
about  Bathsheba  and  about  Absalom. 
They  are  preparing  a  history  that  will 
be  profitable  reading  for  the  Young 
Men's  Hebrew  Association.  In  their 
pages,  the  kings  are  rarely  seen  without 
their  crowns.  So,  in  the  convention- 
al lives  of  the  worthies,  the  saints  are 
rarely  seen  without  their  halos.  Even 
in  Professor  Egan's  delightful  life  of 
Saint  Francis,2  only  a  passing  reference 
is  made  to  Brother  Elias,  *  the  prudent 
man  who  tried  to  make  the  Francis- 
cans worldly/  The  reader  is  not  told 
how  Brother  Elias  succeeded;  how,  in 
his  own  lifetime,  Francis  saw  his  ideals 
changed  against  his  will,  and  himself 
set  aside;  and  how,  after  his  death,  the 
group  of  his  first  disciples,  whose  sto- 
ries are  told  in  the  Little  Flowers,  were 
persecuted  by  the  secularizing  breth- 
ren, and  Brother  Leo  was  scourged, 
and  Brother  Bernard  was  hunted  over 
the  hills  like  a  wild  beast,  for  their  loy- 
alty to  the  saint. 

These  narratives  of  failure  and  trag- 
edy are  not  pleasant  reading,  and  there 
is  no  reason  why  Mrs.  Lang  and  Dr. 

1  Stories  of  Saints  and  Heroes.    By  MRS.  AN- 
DREW LANG.     New  York  and  London:   Long- 
mans, Green  &  Co.     1912. 

2  Everybody's  Saint  Francis.     By  MAURICE 
EGAN.    New  York:  The  Century  Co.     1912. 


Egan  should  have  included  them  in 
their  books.  They  bear  witness,  how- 
ever, to  the  fact  that  the  censure  of  the 
saints  was  not  confined  to  the  first  six 
centuries.  The  situation  is  a  psycho- 
logical one,  and  is  bound  to  recur  in  all 
lands  and  religions.  It  is  the  everlast- 
ing contention  between  the  institution 
and  the  individual.  The  institution 
has  its  established  rules  of  order,  its 
prudent  and  practical  procedure,  its 
adaptation  to  the  ordinary  man,  and 
its  conservative  convictions.  And  the 
saint  is  different.  He  has  a  new  vision 
of  truth  or  of  duty.  Sometimes  he  is 
a  prophet,  declaring  like  Isaiah  that 
God  hates  and  despises  the  feast-days, 
the  services,  and  the  sacraments  of  the 
Church.  Or  he  is  a  mystic,  who  has 
no  use  for  the  rites  and  ceremonies;  or 
a  reformer,  who  proposes  to  change 
them;  or,  being  a  saint,  he  irritates  his 
neighbors  by  the  silent  criticism  of  his 
example;  or,  being  a  scholar,  he  alarms 
them  by  his  new  readings  of  old  sen- 
tences. Often  his  difference  from  his 
brethren  sends  him  into  dissent;  and 
then  he  is  doubly  obnoxious,  adding 
to  the  sin  of  heresy  the  sin  of  schism. 
Under  these  conditions,  the  words  may 
be  fulfilled  which  say,  *  Whosoever 
killeth  you  will  think  that  he  doeth 
God  service.' 

The  name  'saint*  is  here  extended 
considerably  beyond  its  ecclesiastical 
significance,  and  is  used  to  indicate 
the  individualist  in  religion.  The  saint, 
in  this  sense,  is  the  good  man,  devout 
and  honest,  and  tremendously  in  ear- 
nest, who  differs  notably  from  his 
brethren,  either  in  his  manner  of  life 
or  in  his  theological  opinions.  Look- 
ing through  the  religious  books  of  the 
past  twelve  months,  to  find,  if  possible, 
some  common  note,  it  is  interesting  to 
see  how  many  of  them  deal  with  the 
censure  of  such  saints. 

Thus  the  Abbe  Duchesne's  Early 
History  of  the  Church,  now  in  its  second 


508 


THE   CENSURED  SAINTS 


volume,1  describes  the  schism  of  the 
Donatists,  and  gives  great  space  to  the 
heresy  of  the  Arians.  It  is  a  careful, 
learned,  and  entirely  fair  account  of  the 
days  when  good  men  were  in  perplex- 
ity. Pagan  persecution  had  frightened 
even  bishops  into  apostasy.  It  was 
commonly  believed  in  Rome  that  Pope 
Marcellinus  had  offered  incense  on  pa- 
gan altars,  to  save  his  life.  Then,  when 
peace  came,  it  was  maintained  by  the 
more  strict  that  the  ministry  of  those 
who  had  done  such  things  was  by  that 
fact  invalidated.  If  they  were  bishops, 
other  bishops  must  be  chosen  in  their 
places.  This  was  the  contention  of  the 
Donatists,  and  the  result  was  the  set- 
ting-up of  bishop  against  bishop,  and 
church  against  church,  with  mutual  ex- 
communications, and  honest,  devout, 
and  conscientious  men  on  each  side. 
Under  these  conditions,  the  puzzled 
saints  fared  ill. 

While  these  matters  agitated  the 
practical  West,  other  and  profounder 
problems  troubled  the  metaphysical 
East.  Pagan  philosophy  asked  ques- 
tions which  Christian  tradition  found 
hard  to  answer,  especially  regarding 
the  relation  of  Christ  to  the  supreme 
God :  Is  the  divinity  of  Christ  absolute 
or  relative?  Then  it  was  that  Bishop 
Leontius  of  Antioch,  passing  his  hand 
over  his  white  hair,  was  heard  to  say, 
*  When  this  snow  has  melted,  there  will 
be  mud  in  Antioch.'  The  saints  pelted 
one  another  with  the  mud. 

The  difficulties  which  were  involved 
in  these  questions  were  hopelessly  com- 
plicated by  the  purpose  of  the  ecclesi- 
astical authorities  to  preserve  uniform- 
ity. It  was  maintained  against  the 
Donatists  that  there  is  only  one  true 
church,  and  against  the  Arians  that 
there  is  only  one  true  creed.  The 

1  The  Early  History  of  the  Church :  From  its 
Foundation  to  the  End  of  the  Fifth  Century.  Vol. 

II.     By    MONSIGNOR     LOUIS    DUCHESNE.      New 

York:  Longmans,  Green  &  Co.   1912. 


idea  of  freedom  of  debate,  the  hope  of 
coming  to  conclusions  gradually,  the 
virtue  of  patience,  had  no  place  in  these 
controversies.  Whoever  advanced  an 
opinion  contrary  to  the  official  mind 
was  promptly  put  out.  The  possibility 
that  the  opinion  might  have  truth  at 
the  heart  of  it  was  rarely  considered. 
Indeed,  the  adverse  opinions  were  com- 
monly expressed  in  so  militant  a  manner 
that  they  invited  a  dispute  rather  than 
a  debate.  What  could  be  done  with  the 
defiant  saints  except  to  excommunicate 
them? 

A  like  situation  appears  in  the  his- 
tory of  dissent  in  England.  Dissent 
is  grounded  in  the  everlasting  fact  of 
difference.  It  is  made  inevitable  by 
human  nature.  There  are  always  con- 
servatives and  progressives,  always 
men  of  the  old  learning  and  men  of  the 
new,  always  those  who  believe  in  the 
authority  of  the  institution,  and  those 
who  believe  in  the  liberty  of  the  in- 
dividual. Some  are  aristocrats,  some 
are  democrats,  in  religion  as  well  as  in 
society.  Some  would  have  the  service 
of  worship  simple,  some  would  have 
it  ornate.  Some  are  'high  church'  by 
nature,  by  temperament;  some  are  'low 
church.'  The  problem  of  keeping  these 
various  persons  in  one  communion  and 
fellowship  was  frankly  given  up  on 
the  continent  of  Europe;  Luther  and 
Calvin  and  their  companion  saints  were 
expelled  from  the  Church,  with  ana- 
themas, and  founded  churches  of  their 
own. 

In  England,  an  attempt  was  made 
to  solve  the  problem,  —  an  attempt 
which  is  not  yet  abandoned,  in  spite  of 
tragic  failures.  Principal  Selbie,  in  his 
history  of  the  English  Sects,2  tells  the 
long  story.  This  little  book,  which  sus- 
tains the  high  merit  of  that  exceedingly 
useful  series,  the  Home  University  Li- 

2  English  Sects :  A  History  of  Nonconformity. 
By  W.  B,  SELBIE.  New  York:  Henry  Holt  &  Co. 
1912, 


THE   CENSURED   SAINTS 


brary,  begins  with  Wycliffe  and  comes 
down  to  General  Booth  of  the  Salva- 
tion Army.  It  is  written  in  admirable 
spirit,  never  unfair  or  partisan,  though 
sympathetic,  of  course,  with  Noncon- 
formity; and  presents  the  whole  case, 
without  encumbering  details,  in  re- 
markable perspective.  A  notable  col- 
lection of  original  documents  bearing 
upon  these  matters,  from  1550  to  1641, 
is  contained  in  Mr.  Burrage's  Early 
English  Dissenters,1  together  with  a 
learned  discussion  of  these  rare  and 
interesting  papers.  Also,  Canon  Henson 
has  published  a  candid  consideration 
of  the  Puritan  movement,  under  the 
title,  Puritanism  in  England*  in  con-' 
nection  with  the  two-hundred-and- 
fifth  anniversary  of  the  ejection  of  the 
Nonconformists  from  the  Church  of 
England.  'I  trust/  he  says  in  his  pre- 
face, 'that  nothing  has  been  said  in 
the  course  of  this  book  which  can  be 
fairly  regarded  as  lacking  in  sympathy 
or  appreciation  for  the  victims  of  what 
I  must  needs  consider  the  meanest 
persecution  which  Christian  History 
records.'  'Nevertheless,'  he  continues, 
'I  cannot  think  that  the  tradition  of 
their  sufferings  ought  to  be  allowed  to 
raise  the  temperature  of  modern  dis- 
cussions.' 

This  deprecation  of  a  heightened 
temperature,  referring,  of  course,  to 
the  current  discussion  of  disestablish- 
ment in  England,  suggests  an  error  in 
addition  which  has  interfered  all  along 
with  the  solution  of  the  problem:  to 
the  difficulties  arising  from  human  na- 
ture have  been  added  the  difficulties 
arising  from  politics.  The  situation 
was  already  sufficiently  embittered  by 
a  general  agreement  concerning  the 
essential  importance  of  uniformity. 

1  The  Early  English  Dissenters,  in  the  Light  of 
Recent  Research.  By  CHAMPLAIN  BURRAGE.  New 
York:  G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons.    1912. 

2  Puritanism  in  England.     By  H.  HENSLEY 
HENSON.  New  York:  George  H.  Doran  Co.  1912. 


We  must  do  all  alike,  they  said,  and 
think  alike;  there  must  be  but  one 
form  of  worship  and  of  administra- 
tion, one  church  and  one  creed  in  the 
realm.  A  willingness  to  tolerate  differ- 
ence was  held  to  be  a  disclosure  of  in- 
difference. Nobody  who  really  cared 
could  be  content  till  the  truth  and 
right,  as  he  understood  them,  had  en- 
tire control.  Thus  all  ecclesiastical 
discussion  was  a  duel  from  which  no 
honest  man  could  properly  retreat  till 
he  had  silenced  his  opponent.  And 
when  first  one  side  and  then  the  other 
got  possession  of  the  sword  of  state, 
and  did  his  best  to  run  his  adversary 
through  with  it,  the  temperature  of  the 
debate  was  considerably  heightened. 

How  the  political  factor  complicated 
the  psychological  factor  appears  in 
many  illuminating  pages  of  these  three 
books.  For  example,  the  ejection  of 
the  Nonconformists,  which  seems  to 
Canon  Henson  the  meanest  of  all  per- 
secutions, and  whose  meanness  is  abun- 
dantly shown  in  the  Five-Mile  Act, 
which  forbade  the  ejected  ministers  to 
continue  to  live  in  the  towns  where 
they  had  preached,  and  in  the  Con- 
venticle Acts,  which  forbade  the  eject- 
ed people  to  meet  together  more  than 
five  in  number,  on  penalty  of  fine  or 
transportation,  is  shown  by  Principal 
Selbie  to  have  been  caused  by  political 
fear,  as  well  as  by  ecclesiastical  hostil- 
ity. The  churchmen  were  honestly 
afraid  that  the  dissenters  would  again 
overturn  not  only  Church  but  State. 
They  did  not  dare  to  do  other  than 
eject  the  saints. 

Richard  Hooker  said,  indeed,  'There 
will  come  a  time  when  three  words  ut- 
tered with  charity  and  meekness  shall 
receive  a  far  more  blessed  reward  than 
three  thousand  volumes  written  with 
disdainful  sharpness  of  wit.'  But  that 
was  the  counsel  of  a  singularly  serene 
mind.  Hugh  Peters,  at  Rotterdam,  in 
the  covenant  which  he  proposed  to  the 


510 


THE  CENSURED  SAINTS 


congregation  there,  proposed  for  his 
ninth  article,  'To  Labor  to  gett  A  great 
meassuer  of  humillitie  and  meekness 
and  to  banish  pride  and  highnes  of 
spirit';  and  for  his  twelfth,  'To  Deal 
with  all  kynd  of  wisdome  and  genttell- 
nes  towards  those  that  are  without.' 
But  Peters  declared  that  anybody  who 
would  not  sign  this  covenant  should 
immediately  be  excommunicated;  and 
some  refused  to  sign  because  he  was 
so  peremptory  about  it. 

That  has  been  the  trouble  all  along. 
The  endeavor  has  been  to  change 
opinions  by  abuse  or  compulsion.  Thus 
John  Penry,  having  printed  a  paper, 
'In  behalf  of  the  country  of  Wales, 
that  some  order  may  be  taken  for  the 
preaching  of  the  Gospel  among  those 
people/  was  answered  by  Archbishop 
Whitgift  with  a  month's  imprisonment. 
This  had  so  little  persuasive  effect 
upon  Penry  that  he  said  of  the  Prayer- 
book,  'That  it  is  an  unperfect  book 
culled  and  picked  out  of  that  Popish 
dunghill  the  masse  book,  full  of  ab- 
homynations.'  This  was  so  far  from 
convincing  that  prelate  that,  when 
Penry  was  sentenced  to  be  hanged,  the 
archbishop  was  the  first  to  sign  the 
warrant. 

Henry  Jacob  published  a  work  en- 
titled, Reasons  taken  out  of  God's  Word 
and  the  best  human  Testimonies  proving 
a  necessity  of  reforming  our  churches  in 
England.  Mr.  Burrage  says  that  'the 
Bishop  of  London,  on  hearing  of  the 
publication  of  this  book,  sent  a  mes- 
senger requesting  Jacob  to  come  to 
speak  with  him.'  This  is  precisely  what 
a  bishop  of  London  ought  to  do  under 
such  circumstances.  Here  was  oppor- 
tunity for  profitable  discussion.  But 
this  is  what  followed:  'A  servant  re- 
ported the  message  to  Jacob,  and  he, 
not  knowing,  but  possibly  suspecting, 
the  object  of  this  invitation,  called 
upon  the  Bishop,  and  was  immediately 
made  a  prisoner,  and  committed  to  the 


Clink,'  to  the  great  and  increasing  dis- 
tress of  Jacob's  wife  and  four  small 
children. 

These  readings  in  church  history 
may  put  us  in  a  proper  frame  of  mind 
to  appreciate  the  three  most  notable 
religious  biographies  of  the  past  year: 
The  Life  of  John  Henry,  Cardinal  New- 
man, the  Autobiography  and  Life  of 
George  Tyrrell,  and  the  Life  of  William 
Robertson  Smith. 

Before  proceeding  to  a  considera- 
tion of  these  books,  it  may  be  noticed, 
by  the  way,  that  each  of  them  contains 
a  little  touch  of  local  interest  for  New 
England  readers.  Newman  was  brought 
under  suspicion  at  the  very  moment  of 
his  entrance  into  the  Church  of  Rome 
by  the  cordial  acceptance  given  to  his 
Essay  on  the  Development  of  Christian 
Doctrine  by  the  Unitarians  of  Boston. 
They  took  it  up  at  once  and  'quoted 
it  as  evidence  that  the  Trinitarian  doc- 
trine was  not  primitive,  but  was  a 
development  of  the  third  century.'  The 
report  came  to  Rome  that  Newman's 
book  had  given  the  Unitarians  '  big  and 
effective  guns.'  Meanwhile,  no  theo- 
logian in  Rome  was  able  to  read  Eng- 
lish with  any  facility,  and  there  was 
at  that  moment  no  French  or  Italian 
translation,  so  misunderstanding  and 
prejudice  had  time  to  grow.  An  im- 
mediate result  was  to  destroy  New- 
man's hope  of  founding  a  theological 
college.  This  was  a  work  for  which 
both  his  genius  and  his  experience  em- 
inently fitted  him.  He  might  have 
widened  and  deepened  indefinitely  the 
channel  of  passage  from  England  to 
Rome.  A  continuing  result  was  to  give 
an  impression,  which  never  wholly  dis- 
appeared from  the  Roman  mind,  that 
Newman,  while  a  very  distinguished 
convert,  was  a  person  of  whom  to  be 
afraid.  Nobody  knew  what  dangerous 
doctrine  he  might  suggest  next. 

The  local  note  in  the  life  of  Father 
Tyrrell  is  the  fact  that  almost  the  last 


THE  CENSURED  SAINTS 


511 


paper  he  wrote  was  for  the  Harvard 
Theological  Review.  As  for  Robertson 
Smith,  in  the  midst  of  his  trials  for 
heresy,  he  received  a  letter  from  Mr. 
James  Bryce,  inclosing  a  proposal  from 
the  President  of  Harvard  University 
that  he  should  accept  the  chair  of  He- 
brew and  other  Oriental  Languages. 
This  invitation,  after  much  considera- 
tion, Smith  declined,  and  Mr.  Eliot 
wrote  him  that  the  University  had 
thereupon  appointed  'an  American 
heretic,  whose  views  on  Isaiah  had  of- 
fended the  Baptist  communion  to  which 
he  had  belonged/  (Mr.  Smith's  most 
obnoxious  views  at  that  time  concerned 
the  authorship  of  Deuteronomy.)  The 
'American  heretic '  thus  appointed  was 
Professor  Toy.  A  few  months  later,  Mr. 
Eliot  wrote  to  Mr.  Bryce  to  ask  if  Mr. 
Smith  would  accept  a  chair  of  Ecclesi- 
astical History,  but  again  he  was  kept 
in  England. 

Mr.  Ward's  Life  of  Newman 1  begins 
where  the  Apologia  ends.  Two  chap- 
ters have  to  do  with  his  ministry  in  the 
Church  of  England;  the  rest  of  the  bio- 
graphy, which  is  in  two  large  volumes, 
is  a  record  of  his  ministry  in  the  Church 
of  Rome.  Newman  passed  from  one 
church  to  the  other,  and  the  door  was 
shut  behind  him.  His  popularity  in 
Oxford  had  been  *  so  extraordinary  that 
the  tradition  of  it  is  now  no  longer 
realized  and  only  half  believed.'  Then 
he  retired  to  Littlemore  and  after  a  de- 
cent interval  of  consideration,  went  to 
Rome.  In  the  England  of  that  day, 
such  a  step  involved  a  separation  from 
almost  all  his  friends.  The  break  was 
almost  as  sharp  as  if  he  had  entered 
into  another  religion.  'Alas,'  he  said, 
'can  you  point  out  any  one  who  has 
lost  more  in  the  way  of  friendship  than 
I  have?'  And  again,  'Of  my  friends  of 
a  dozen  years  ago,  whom  have  I  now  ? ' 

1  The  Life  of  John  Henry,  Cardinal  Newman. 
By  WILFRID  WARD.  Two  vols.  New  York: 
Longmans,  Green  &  Co.  1912. 


As  the  years  passed  there  came  to 
him  'some  of  the  special  bitterness 
which  falls  to  the  lot  of  a  discrowned 
king  or  a  forsaken  prophet.  He  thought 
himself  an  old  man.  His  health  was 
bad,  and  he  made  ready  for  death.  His 
books  had  already  ceased  to  sell,  and 
now  he  ceased  to  write.  His  very  name 
was  hardly  known  to  the  rising  genera- 
tion.' Then  Kingsley's  attack  pro- 
voked the  Apologia,  and  the  old  splen- 
did memories  were  revived.  Even  so, 
it  was  the  Anglican  Newman  rather 
than  the  Roman  Newman  who  was  thus 
restored  to  the  affection  of  the  English 
people.  At  last,  at  the  very  end  of  his 
long  life,  when  he  was  seventy-eight 
years  old,  the  church  of  his  adoption 
gave  him  a  tardy  recognition  and  he 
was  made  a  cardinal.  Beyond  these 
two  events,  —  the  Apologia  and  the 
cardinalate,  —  little  was  known  about 
him.  He  lived  in  the  Oratory  at  Bir- 
mingham, writing  his  letters  and  say- 
ing his  prayers.  So  far  as  most  peo- 
ple are  concerned,  Newman  practically 
died  in  1845,  when  he  left  the  Church 
of  England.  He  is  thought  of  as  the 
author  of  'Lead,  Kindly  Light,'  who 
wrote  his  autobiography  in  exquisite 
English,  and  went  into  the  Church  of 
Rome.  What  did  he  do  in  the  Church 
of  Rome? 

This  question  his  biographer  an- 
swers. In  brief,  he  did  nothing,  because 
the  ecclesiastical  authorities  would  not 
allow  him  to  do  anything.  His  life 
was  a  series  of  bitter  disappointments. 
Believing,  with  all  confidence,  that  his 
mission  was  to  commend  the  Cath- 
olic Church  to  the  English  people,  he 
found  himself  deprived  of  every  oppor- 
tunity. His  first  purpose,  to  establish 
a  theological  college,  was  prevented 
by  the  suspicions  which  were  aroused 
by  his  Essay  on  Development.  Then 
he  was  asked  to  form  a  Catholic  uni- 
versity in  Ireland.  This,  he  felt,  would 
be  the  '  renewal  of  his  work  at  Oxford, 


512 


THE   CENSURED   SAINTS 


but  with  the  world-wide  church  to  back 
him,  and  the  Rock  of  Peter  to  support 
him.'  But  the  Irish  Primate  hindered 
him,  and  the  Irish  people  were  indif- 
ferent, and  the  plan  failed.  He  was 
asked  to  edit  a  translation  of  the  Bible 
into  English;  but  that  was  stopped  by 
Cardinal  Wiseman.  He  became  editor 
of  the  Rambler,  a  review  which  was  to 
give  a  voice  to  the  intellectual  Catho- 
lics; but  'he  was  asked  to  resign  after 
his  first  number,  and  delated  to  Rome 
for  heresy  after  his  second.'  He  planned 
an  Oratory  for  Oxford,  where  he  hoped 
to  exert  an  influence  on  the  Catholic 
undergraduates;  that  was  defeated  by 
Manning.  In  1863,  he  wrote  in  his  jour- 
nal, 'Till  my  going  to  Littlemore,  I  had 
my  mouth  half  open,  and  commonly 
a  smile  on  my  face,  —  and  from  that 
time  onwards  my  mouth  has  been 
closed  and  contracted,  and  the  muscles 
are  so  set  now,  that  I  cannot  but  look 
grave  and  forbidding.'  And  he  recalled 
a  visit  to  the  Vatican  with  a  friend  who 
stopped  before  'a  statue  of  Fate  which 
was  very  striking  and  stern  and  melan- 
choly,' and  said,  'Who  can  it  be  like? 
I  know  the  face  so  well.'  Then  he 
turned  to  Newman  and  added,  'Why, 
it  is  you ! ' 

In  all  this,  there  was  no  disloyalty 
to  the  Roman  Church,  no  regretful  re- 
trospect, no  doubt  but  that  he  was  in 
the  true  Church  of  Christ  at  last;  the 
difficulty  was  that  the  Church  seem- 
ed to  have  no  use  for  him,  thwarted 
all  his  endeavors  to  serve  the  Catholic 
cause,  put  him  to  silence,  and  sub- 
jected him,  as  he  said,  to  'uninter- 
mittent  mortification.'  At  the  heart 
of  it  all  was  the  persistent  refusal  of 
the  Church  to  allow  of  any  freedom  of 
debate.  Intent  as  he  was  on  so  explain- 
ing the  Catholic  faith  as  to  bring  it  to 
the  acceptance  of  the  educated  classes, 
he  saw  the  necessity  of  a  certain  '  pro- 
visional freedom  in  the  discussion  of 
new  problems,'  He  desired  that  liberty 


of  discussion  which  was  current  in  the 
mediaeval  schools,  and  which  brought 
the  genius  of  philosophy  to  the  assist- 
ance of  the  faith.  'Truth  is  wrought 
out,'  he  said,  'by  many  minds  working 
freely  together.  As  far  as  I  can  make 
out,'  he  added,  'this  has  ever  been  the 
rule  of  the  Church  till  now.'  But  the 
Holy  See  was  in  contention  with  Con- 
tinental liberalism.  It  was  in  no  mind 
to  encourage  'the  provisional  tolera- 
tion of  freedom  of  opinion  and  of  free 
debate  among  experts.'  Not  at  all. 
Newman  found  himself  shut  up  behind 
stone  walls  of  dogmas  and  decrees. 

The  question  concerning  the  spiritual 
relationships  between  Newman  and 
Tyrrell  is  discussed  several  times  in 
Tyrrell's  Life,1  and  it  is  made  plain  that 
the  younger  man  was  quite  independ- 
ent of  the  older.  He  certainly  made 
his  way  out  of  the  Church  of  England 
into  the  Church  of  Rome  without 
Newman's  guidance;  in  fact,  without 
anybody's  guidance.  In  his  frank, 
amusing,  and  pathetic  autobiography, 
he  traces  the  steps  by  which,  as  a  lad 
without  religion,  he  found  his  way  first 
to  a  'high'  church,  and  then  on  to 
Rome.  'My  fundamental  assumption,' 
he  says,  'was  that  the  religion  I  was 
brought  up  in  was  the  only  authorized 
and  tenable  form  of  Christianity;  that 
popery  was  utterly  indefensible  except 
as  a  paradox,  and  for  the  sake  of  shock- 
ing Protestant  propriety.  But  here  was 
something  piquant:  popery  in  a  Pro- 
testant Church  and  using  the  Book  of 
Common  Prayer.  I  cannot  doubt  that 
it  was  the  wrongness,  the  soupgon  of 
wickedness  or  at  least  of  paradox,  that 
faintly  fascinated  me;  the  birettas  and 
cassock  made  the  fibres  of  one's  Pro- 
testantism quiver.  I  had  almost  dis- 
covered a  new  sin,  and  found  the  sen- 
sation novel  and  agreeable.'  Tyrrell 

1  Autobiography  and  Life  of  George  Tyrrell.  By 
M.  D.  PETRE.  New  York:  Longmans,  Green  & 
Co.  1912, 


THE   CENSURED   SAINTS 


513 


himself  remarks  upon  the  entire  dif- 
ference between  his  course  and  New- 
man's: Newman,  beginning  with  the 
presence  of  God  in  the  voice  of  con- 
science in  a  soul  naturally  religious,  and 
coming  on  through  study  into  the 
Roman  obedience;  Tyrrell,  beginning 
with  the  outside  of  religion,  with  its 
mere  ritual  fringes,  believing  first  in 
the  Church,  and  gradually  coming  to 
believe  in  God. 

The  two  men  differed  intellectually 
and  temperamentally.  Newman,  in 
spite  of  a  perpetually  recurring  skepti- 
cism, was  instinctively  submissive  to 
authority,  and  devoutly  desired  to 
think  as  the  Church  bade  him  think. 
Taking  a  divinely  communicated  body 
of  theology  and  divinely  developed 
rites  and  customs  as  the  premises  of  his 
arguments,  he  directed  the  energies  of 
his  singularly  subtle  mind  toward  the 
justification  of  these  things.  Accepting 
creed  and  custom  without  inquiry,  he 
endeavored  to  commend  them  to  his 
doubting  neighbors.  Tyrrell,  on  the 
other  hand,  was  intent  on  absolute 
reality,  and  questioned  all  assertions. 
His  mind  was  of  the  kind  called  *  scien- 
tific,' and  demanded  sufficient  proof. 
And  this  was  accentuated  by  a  certain 
natural  audacity,  and  by  a  keen  per- 
ception of  the  ridiculous. 

Thus  Newman  writes  characteris- 
tically from  Rome:  'We  saw  the  blood 
of  St.  Patrizia  half  liquid,  i.e.,  lique- 
fying, on  her  feast  day.  St.  John  Bap- 
tist's blood  sometimes  liquefies  on  the 
29th  of  August,  and  did  when  we  were 
at  Naples,  but  we  had  not  time  to  go 
to  the  church.  We  saw  the  liquid 
blood  of  an  Oratorian  Father,  a  good 
man,  but  not  a  saint,  who  died  two 
centuries  ago,  I  think;  and  we  saw  the 
liquid  blood  of  Da  Ponte,  the  great  and 
holy  Jesuit,  who,  I  suppose,  was  almost 
a  saint.  But  the  most  strange  phe- 
nomenon is  what  happens  at  Ravello, 
a  village  or  town  above  Amalfi.  There 

VOL.  211 -NO.  4 


is  the  blood  of  St.  Pantaleon.  It  is  in  a 
vessel  amid  the  stone  work  of  the  altar, 
—  it  is  not  touched,  —  but  on  his  feast 
in  June  it  liquefies.  And  more,  there  is 
an  excommunication  against  those  who 
bring  portions  of  the  True  Cross  into 
the  church.  Why?  because  the  blood 
liquefies,  whenever  it  is  brought.  I 
tell  you  what  was  told  me  by  a  grave 
and  religious  man.' 

Tyrrell  was  in  a  way  as  conservative 
about  these  matters  as  Newman,  but 
his  conservatism  was  based  on  the  pos- 
sibility that  at  the  heart  of  much  that 
was  foolish  there  might  be  some  spark 
of  truth.  'The  Church's  mythology 
and  magic,'  he  said,  'stand  for  tracts 
of  experience  wholly  discounted  '  by 
scientific  minds.  '  I  will  not  throw  away 
the  husks  till  I  am  cocksure  that  they 
are  empty.'  But  concerning  the  teach- 
ings of  'grave  and  religious'  men,  Tyr- 
rell's  account  of  his  Jesuit  novitiate 
shows  how  unawed  he  was  in  the  pre- 
sence of  these  reverend  persons.  At  the 
English  College  of  the  Jesuits  at  Malta, 
the  Rector  'thought  it  would  be  good 
for  me  to  attend  the  "points"  which 
he  gave  the  lay-brothers  over-night  for 
their  morning  meditation.  It  was  an 
irresistibly  funny  performance.  In  we 
four  trooped  every  evening,  and  no 
sooner  had  the  brothers  reached  their 
chairs  than  they  closed  their  eyes,  then 
nodded,  and  finally  snored  aloud.  And 
who  could  blame  them?  The  Rector 
would  read  through  the  pointless  points 
of  Father  Lancicius,  and  then,  in  a  few 
stumbling  words  of  his  own,  rob  them 
of  whatever  little  gleam  of  interest  or 
intelligence  they  possessed.  How  I 
used  to  stare  and  wonder!' 

Nevertheless,  Newman  and  Tyrrell 
had  the  same  sense  of  mission,  and  en- 
countered the  same  hindrances.  Each 
of  them  desired  '  to  pour  Catholic  truth 
out  of  the  scholastic  into  the  modern 
world.'  Each  of  them  perceived  that 
there  were  new  problems  which  must 


514 


THE  CENSURED  SAINTS 


be  studied  and  solved,  and  that  the 
answers  to  them  could  not  be  found  in 
the  writings  of  St.  Thomas  Aquinas. 
And  each  of  them  was  held  back  by 
the  hand  of  authority.  At  the  moment 
when  it  was  plain  to  Tyrrell  that  truth 
must  be  presented  to  educated  men, 
not  on  a  basis  of  decrees,  but  on  a 
basis  of  reason,  the  Church  was  wholly 
occupied  in  setting  forth  the  impossible 
claims  of  authority,  and  making  up  for 
lack  of  argument  by  loudness  of  voice. 
He  says,  *  The  best  policy,  I  half  think, 
would  be  not  to  oppose  but  to  fan  the 
flame  of  this  "Authority-fever,"  and 
to  get  them  to  declare  the  infallibility 
of  every  congregation,  of  the  General 
of  the  Jesuits,  of  every  Monsignore  in 
Rome,  to  define  the  earth  to  be  a  plate 
supported  on  pillars,  and  the  sky  a 
dish-cover;  in  short,  to  let  them  run 
their  heads  against  a  stone  wall,  in 
hopes  it  may  wake  them  up  to  sober 
realities.'  Meanwhile,  all  his  writing 
had  to  run  the  gauntlet  of  two  censor- 
ships, Jesuit  and  diocesan.  'I  could 
get  nothing  through  two  iron  walls,' 
he  said,  'not  even  the  Pater  Noster  if 
it  were  in  my  own  handwriting.' 

At  first,  he  published  under  other 
names,  then,  in  defiance  of  authority, 
under  his  own  name.  He  was  officially 
silenced,  then  excommunicated.  In  the 
midst  of  this  contention  between  the 
institution  and  the  individual,  Tyrrell, 
who  was  never  very  well,  died,  after  a 
brief  illness.  The  biographer,  who  tells 
the  dramatic  story  with  great  fairness 
and  restraint,  permits  herself  a  single 
bitter  sentence.  Speaking  of  Cardinal 
Mercier,  she  says,  'The  one  whom 
he  had  first  befriended  and  then  con- 
demned was  carried  to  his  grave  in  a 
Protestant  cemetery;  while  no  Prince 
of  the  Church  was  there  to  speak  over 
him  such  words  of  Christian  hope  and 
joy  and  exaltation  in  the  death  of  the 
just  as  the  Cardinal  Archbishop  him- 
self had  the  happiness  of  uttering  later, 


in  his  panegyric  of  King  Leopold  of 
Belgium.' 

What  the  Roman  authorities  really 
feared  was  that  Father  Tyrrell,  if  they 
left  him  to  himself,  might  presently 
write  such  a  history  as  Professor  John- 
ston's Holy  Christian  Church;  1  or  such 
interpretation  as  Dr.  Gilbert's  Jesus,2 
which  divests  the  life  of  Christ  of  all 
supernatural  elements;  or  such  theo- 
logy as  Professor  Leuba's  Psychological 
Study  of  Religion,*  which  maintains 
that  God  has  only  a  subjective  exist- 
ence. They  felt  themselves  unfitted 
by  their  training  to  meet  such  books 
with  satisfactory  answers.  They  did 
not  perhaps  sufficiently  consider  that 
most  people,  like  themselves,  are  provi- 
dentially endowed  with  a  certain  imper- 
viousness  of  mind.  They  were  really 
alarmed  lest  the  advocates  of  prose 
should  overcome  the  advocates  of 
poetry,  and  prove  that  flowers  and  col- 
ored clouds  do  not  exist,  and  that  there 
is  no  life  in  the  trees,  no  soul  in  man. 
They  did  not  perceive  that  'common, 
flat,  and  impoverishing '  theories  of  re- 
ligion, to  use  Tyrrell's  adjectives,  have 
something  obviously  the  matter  with 
them  by  virtue  of  their  very  reason- 
ableness. The  elemental  fact  of  mys- 
tery is  too  pervasive  to  be  long  left 
out  of  account.  Everybody  remembers 
how  Romanes,  after  invincibly  proving 
from  his  premises  that  God  does  not 
exist,  found  that  he  had  left  out  one 
or  two  very  important  premises,  and 
going  over  the  problem  again,  got  quite 
a  different  answer.  Thus  John  Fiske, 
after  some  years  of  reflection,  became 
an  expounder  of  the  Christian  creed, 
like  Professor  Royce.  Sometimes  the 
destructive  critic  falls  into  the  errors 

1  The  Holy  Christian  Church.  By  R.  M.  JOHNS- 
TON.  Boston:  Houghton  Mifflin  Co.   1912. 

2  Jesus.  By  GEORGE  HOLLET  GILBERT.    New 
York:  The  Macmillan  Co.   1912. 

3  A  Psychological  Study  of  Religion.  New  York: 
The  Macmillan  Co.   1912. 


THE   CENSURED   SAINTS 


515 


of  ignorance:  like  Professor  Johnston, 
whose  church  history  is  such  an  essay 
as  a  very  busy  geologist  might  write 
on  the  career  of  Napoleon  Bonaparte. 
It  is  the  opinion  of  the  best  historians, 
says  the  geologist,  that  Napoleon  was 
born  in  North  Carolina.  It  is  the 
opinion  of  the  best  critics,  says  Mr. 
Johnston,  that  the  earliest  gospel  was 
written  by  Luke.  And  so  on.  More 
commonly,  however,  the  destructive 
critic  lacks  what  Professor  Royce1  calls 
*  religious  insight,'  which  is  related  to 
religion  as  appreciation  is  related  to  art 
or  music. 

It  was  never  seriously  doubted  that 
Robertson  Smith2  possessed  religious 
insight,  although  it  was  complained  of 
him  that  he  had  an  irreverent  voice;  as 
for  his  knowledge,  he  had  to  account 
for  it  himself  on  the  ground  that  he 
was  one  of  the  few  persons  who  had 
read  the  entire  ninth  edition  of  the 
Encyclopaedia  Britannica,  of  which  he 
was  chief  editor.  When,  however,  his 
article  on  the  Bible  appeared  in  the 
course  of  that  work,  it  was  felt  in  Scot- 
land that  something  must  be  done. 
And  when,  soon  after,  the  alphabet 
brought  into  view  his  article  on  Deuter- 
onomy, the  minds  of  the  orthodox 
were  made  up.  The  fact  that  Smith, 
as  the  chief  scholar  of  his  nation,  might 

1  Sources   of  Religious   Insight.    By   JOSIAH 
ROYCE.      New  York  :  Charles  Scribner's  Sons. 
1912. 

2  William  Robertson  Smith.    By  J.  S.  BLACK 
and  G.  W.  CHRYSTAL.  New  York:  The  MacMil- 
lanCo.   1912. 


properly  be  expected  to  know  more 
than  many  of  his  brethren,  was  not 
considered;  nor  the  further  fact  that 
his  opinions  were  those  which  had  for 
a  long  time  been  held  in  Germany. 

In  Scotland,  as  in  Rome,  the  insti- 
tution withstood  the  individual.  The 
Holy  Scriptures  were  felt  to  be  in 
danger.  Smith  said  that  Deuteronomy 
was  written  long  after  the  days  of 
Moses.  'The  book  of  inspired  Scripture 
called  Deuteronomy,  which  is  properly 
an  historical  record,  does  not  possess 
that  character,  but  was  made  to  as- 
sume it  by  a  writer  of  a  much  later  age.' 
So  he  was  ejected  from  his  professor- 
ship. This  took  place  after  several 
trials,  and  as  the  conclusion  of  many 
free  debates,  whose  extended  publica- 
cation  in  the  newspapers  contributed 
to  the  education  of  the  people.  In  all 
this  there  is  no  note  of  sadness,  no  such 
depression  as  weighed  upon  the  souls 
of  Newman  and  Tyrrell.  The  heretic 
had  hosts  of  friends,  —  eminent  schol- 
ars, and  uncommonly  interesting  per- 
sons; between  the  terms  of  his  trials, 
he  traveled  in  the  East;  he  wrote  books 
which  were  advertised  by  his  oppo- 
nents, and  he  enjoyed  the  fray.  New- 
man would  not  have  listed  him  among 
the  saints;  he  delighted  in  the  world 
too  much  for  that.  But  he  had  the 
true  saint's  combination  of  faith  with 
reason,  and  the  true  saint's  devotion 
to  the  truth  as  the  supreme  good;  and 
he  had,  as  a  friend  said,  'the  heart  of 
a  little  child,'  without  which  nobody 
can  be  a  saint  at  all. 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


BY   MARY   S.    WATTS 


CHAPTER    XII 

IN  WHICH  WE  CONCENTRATE  AT  TAMPA 

ON  a  hot,  wet,  stifling  day  of  June  — 
it  was  the  twenty-fourth  or  toward 
that  date  —  a  train  from  the  North 
got  into  the  station  at  Tampa,  Florida, 
some  six  or  seven  hours  late,  as  was 
not  unusual,  and  discharged  its  pas- 
sengers upon  the  cinder  esplanade 
which  was  already  crowded  with  men 
in  uniform,  men  out  of  uniform,  dogs, 
boys,  crates,  barrels,  mules,  colored 
women,  drays,  boxes  labeled  '6th 
Regmt.  U.  S.  Inft.  Rush.9  —  'Lieut. 
W.  W.  Branscombe,  3d  Penn.  Vol. 
Cav.  Personal,'  and  so  on. 

The  train  discharged  into  the  middle 
of  all  this,  and  of  the  proportionate  up- 
roar and  bewilderment,  a  little  party  of 
travelers,  some  of  whom  we  ought  to  be 
able  to  recognize  by  this  time.  The  girl 
in  the  gray  coat-and-skirt  suit,  with  the 
pretty  face,  rather  tired  and  pale  just 
now,  and  with  an  anxious  look  in  her 
brown  eyes,  which  roam  about  as  if 
there  were  somebody  whom  she  half 
expects  and  half  dreads  to  see  —  that 
is,  of  a  surety,  Miss  Lorrie  Gilbert. 
And  there  is  an  active,  alert,  well-built 
woman  a  head  taller  and  five  years  old- 
er than  Lorrie,  who  must  be  the  train- 
ed nurse,  Miss  Rodgers,  from  Christ's 
Hospital,  sent  down  here  to  the  kin- 
dred military  establishment  at  Tampa, 
or  Key  West,  she  herself  is  uncertain 
which.  But  for  her,  I  suppose,  the  pre- 
sence of  that  tall,  raw-boned,  ungainly 
young  man  (V.  C.  Kendrick:  you  may 

516 


read  the  initials  on  the  end  of  his  suit- 
case), I  say,  but  for  Miss  Rodgers,  his 
presence  in  company  with  Miss  Gil- 
bert, at  this  distance  from  home,  would 
undoubtedly  be  a  scandal;  however, 
let  Mrs.  Grundy  possess  her  soul  in 
peace,  Lorrie  and  Van  are  not  eloping, 
and  they  are  sufficiently  chaperoned. 
There  is  even  another  trained  nurse 
along,  some  subordinate  of  Miss  Rod- 
gers's,  the  stout  young  woman  with  the 
fine  complexion  —  Van  Cleve  never 
can  remember  her  name. 

Mr.  Kendrick  displays  great  prompt- 
ness and  efficiency  in  getting  his  ladies 
off  the  car,  in  accumulating  their  be- 
longings, and  marooning  the  party 
safely  upon  a  reef  of  luggage,  out  of 
the  crowd  and  the  torrid  sunshine, 
while  he  starts  off  to  find  a  conveyance, 
and  incidentally  whatever  information 
about  the  town  he  can  pick  up. 

'  Say,  Jim,  git  on  to  Brigham  Young 
in  the  blue  sack-suit! '  a  lounging  khaki- 
clad  gentleman,  with  a  toothpick  in  one 
corner  of  his  mouth  and  '52d  Mich. 
V.  I.'  on  the  front  of  his  slouch  hat, 
observes  to  another  facetiously,  noting 
Van's  activities;  by  good  luck,  the  lat- 
ter does  not  hear  him. 

'They  say  the  train  goes  on  some- 
where across  the  river  and  backs  right 
up  into  the  grounds  of  the  Tampa  Bay 
Hotel,'  says  Miss  Rodgers,  staring 
about  her;  'isn't  that  the  limit  for 
you,  though?  I  never  heard  of  a  train 
running  around  hunting  up  hotels  be- 
fore. Look,  that  must  be  a  Cuban! 
No,  I  don't  mean  him  —  I  mean  him 
—  the  one  that  looks  like  a  mulatto, 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


517 


only  he  isn't.  That's  what  we're 
fighting  for!' 

The  other  nurse  remarks,  in  a  strain 
of  cheerful  fatalism  fostered  by  three 
days  and  nights  of  travel,  beset  with 
surprises  and  uncertainties,  that  you 
can't  tell  what  you  may  have  to  go  up 
against  down  here;  you've  got  just  to 
take  it  as  it  comes.  And,  'Was  your 
brother  going  to  meet  you  here,  Miss 
Gilbert?'  she  asks  with  interest. 

'No.  I  —  I  don't  even  know  where 
he  is,  you  see.  I  could  n't  send  him 
word.  I'll  have  to  look  for  him,'  says 
Lorrie,  nervously,  plucking  at  the  edge 
of  her  veil. 

The  two  nurses  exchange  a  glance 
behind  her  back.  I  believe  they  are 
not  less  sympathetic  for  being  de- 
voured with  curiosity.  They  know  all 
about  her  engagement;  trained  nurses 
always  know  Who  is  Who  in  Society 
and  what  is  being  done;  they  study 
the  "  Jottings "  column  as  devoutly 
as  the  Testament.  These  two  think 
that  Lorrie  is  as  sweet  as  she  can 
be,  and  no  wonder  she's  frightened 
to  death  about  her  feeonsay  going  off 
to  the  army;  they  have  offered  freely  to 
bet  each  other  that  she's  ten  times 
more  upset  about  him  than  about  her 
brother.  But  what  is  it  that's  wrong 
about  the  brother,  anyhow?  They 
can't  make  it  out,  but  (again  they 
bet)  there's  something  behind  it.  Was 
n't  there  some  talk  about  his  being  a 
dope-fiend,  or  something?  The  ques- 
tion has  agitated  them  for  all  these 
three  days;  nothing  to  be  got  out  of 
Mr.  Kendrick;  he  said  he  just  thought 
he'd  spend  his  vacation  taking  a  look 
at  the  army,  but  pooh!  you  couldn't 
fool  them  that  easy!  'I'm  glad  he's 
along,  anyhow,'  Miss  Rodgers  confided 
to  her  associate.  'I  tell  you,  it  cer- 
tainly is  nice  sometimes  to  have  a  man 
around  to  look  out  for  you  and  kind  of 
run  you.  I've  been  my  own  boss  so 
long,  I  did  n't  realize  how  nice  it  was. 


And  Mr.  Kendrick  never  gets  fresh  and 
talky  —  you  know,  he  never  gets  that 
way.  That's  what  I  like  about  him.' 

'Yes,  but  he's  kind  of  stiff  and  — 
and  distant,  more  than  anybody  needs 
to  be,'  said  the  stout  girl,  not  without 
resentment;  'do  you  suppose  there's 
ever  been  anything  between  him  and 
Miss  Gilbert?' 

'Well,  if  there  ever  was,  he's  good 
and  got  over  it  now.  You  'd  think  they 
were  married,  he  pays  so  little  atten- 
tion to  her,'  said  Miss  Rodgers,  with  a 
half- laugh;  and  her  companion's  face 
cleared. 

Lorrie  Gilbert  will  never  to  her  final 
breath  forget  those  hideous  days; 
sometimes  even  now,  years  afterwards, 
she  will  live  over  in  dreams  the  fren- 
zied hurry  of  her  departure,  the  grief 
and  suspense  and,  worst  of  all,  the  in- 
tolerable need  of  deception  that  drove 
and  harried  her.  Paula's  secret,  Bob's 
secret,  laid  them  all  under  its  shameful 
bondage;  honorable  men  and  women, 
they  had  to  sit  down  together  ignobly 
and  concert  falsehoods  wholesale.  All 
the  story  must  hold  together,  and  they 
must  take  care  not  to  contradict  one 
another.  She  must  pretend  that  she 
was  going  as  a  nurse,  and,  of  course, 
incidentally,  to  see  Bob  —  oh,  yes,  she 
would  see  Bob !  Her  father  and  mother 
must  pretend  that  they  approved  of  it. 
Van  Cleve  (since  he  would  insist  on 
accompanying  her  party)  must  pretend 
that  he  wanted  a  vacation  trip!  She 
could  not  meet  a  girl  friend,  she  could 
not  answer  the  telephone,  or  write  a 
note,  without  an  adjusting  of  her  mask 
and  a  renewed  conning  of  her  role.  It 
was  the  same  with  her  mother,  with 
her  father.  I  doubt  if  Paula  Jameson 
ever  felt  a  tenth  part  so  guilty  as  any 
one  of  the  upright,  blameless  people 
caught  in  the  meshes  of  her  wretched 
intrigue. 

Lorrie  had  gone  to  see  the  girl,  find- 


518 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


ing  her  silent  and  strangely  self-pos- 
sessed or  self-contained  now.  She  did 
not  complain,  and  she  made  no  excuses 
for  either  herself  or  Bob;  in  fact,  she 
would  not  speak  of  the  young  man  at 
all,  out  of  some  perverse  notion  of  loy- 
alty or  self-sacrifice,  Lorrie  guessed. 
*  You '11  see  she  won't  say  right  out  it 
was  him  —  you  can't  make  her  say  it 
right  out/  Mrs.  Jameson  explained  to 
Lorrie  in  a  voluble  whisper  outside  the 
door.  'She  just  cries  if  you  ask  her 
about  him.  It  took  me  hours  to  find  out- 
who  it  was  the  other  day.  My,  I  can 
understand  that,  can't  you?  Any 
woman  can  understand  that !  I  believe 
she 's  sorry  now  she  told  me  —  or  let 
me  find  out,  rather.  But  you  just  go 
on  in  and  talk  to  her,  anyhow;  don't 
mind  the  way  she  acts.  She  —  it's  the 
way  she  is  —  she  ain't  well  —  and  — 
and  she  ain't  going  to  be  well  for  a  while 
yet,  you  know,  Miss  Gilbert,'  said  Mrs. 
Jameson,  shamefacedly.  *  I  'm  going  to 
take  her  away  —  I  've  found  a  place 
down  in  the  country.  There's  a  good 
doctor  there,  and  I  can  telegraph  for  a 
nurse  any  time.  I'll  give  you  the  ad- 
dress, in  case  —  but  we  don't  want  to 
bother  you  or  your  folks  any  more  than 
we  can  help,  Miss  Gilbert.  You've 
been  just  as  kind  as  can  be.  And  I 
know  you  're  going  to  do  everything  you 
can  to  get  your  brother  back  — '  Her 
yoice  failed. 

It  went  to  Lome's  heart  to  see  the 
poor  woman  so  humble  and  grateful. 
Mrs.  Jameson  had  aged  a  lifetime  in 
the  last  few  days;  her  red  hair  was 
twisted  up  in  a  loose  knot,  regardless 
of  its  accustomed  puffs  and  braids  and 
carefully  set  undulations,  and  of  the 
gray  streaks  that  were  beginning  to 
show  in  it  here  and  there;  her  corsets 
were  relaxed  for  the  first  time  in  twenty 
years;  she  was  puzzling  over  a  But- 
terick  pattern  with  the  scissors  in  one 
hand  and  yards  of  incalculably  fine 
lawn  spread  upon  the  bed  before  her, 


when  Lorrie  was  ushered  in.  'It's 
queer,  the  things  are  so  little,  but 
they're  just  as  much  trouble  to  make 
as  if  they  were  big.  I  used  to  sew  pret- 
ty well,  too,  once,'  she  sighed,  looking 
at  Lorrie  with  wholly  maternal  eyes. 

She  kept  out  of  Paula's  room,  dur- 
ing this  visit,  with  a  delicacy  nobody 
would  have  expected  of  her;  it  was  bet- 
ter for  the  two  young  women  to  be 
alone.  Lorrie  told  the  other  what  they 
were  doing;  she  assured  Paula  with 
strong  emotion  that  everything  would  be 
all  right ;  that  Bob  would  come  back  to 
her;  that  when  he  realized  the  wrong 
that  he  had  done,  how  foolish  and  self- 
ish he  had  been,  he  would  be  the  most 
anxious  of  them  all  to  make  it  right. 
*  He 's  not  bad  —  he 's  not  a  bad  man  — 
and  of  course  he  —  he  cares  for  you, 
Paula,'  said  Lorrie,  shrinking  from  the 
word,  even  the  thought,  love,  in  such  a 
connection.  Of  course  Bob  and  Paula 
must  be  in  love,  after  their  fashion,  the 
girl  had  concluded;  but  she  recoiled 
from  what  seemed  to  her  the  animal 
ugliness  of  it.  Try  as  she  would,  the 
sympathy  she  wanted  to  feel  and  show 
for  Paula  was  forced  and  unreal,  and 
perhaps  the  other  girl  felt  it  to  be  so. 
She  sat  unresponsive  to  all  Lome's 
feverish  earnestness. 

'That  Mr.  Kendrick  knows.  I  don't 
see  why  Momma  had  to  let  him  know. 
I  think  it  was  real  dumb  of  her,'  she  said 
sulkily;  *  she '11  go  telling  somebody 
else,  if  she  don't  look  out.' 

'Why,  it  just  happened  so  —  your 
mother  could  n't  help  his  knowing  — 
and,  anyway,  he's  just  like  a  brother  to 
Bob,  you  know,  Paula.  He  '11  never  say 
anything,'  protested  Lorrie,  quickly, 
repelled.  Paula's  mother  was  doing  the 
best  she  could  for  her,  poor  thing! 

'I  don't  like  him.  I  don't  see  why 
she  had  to  tell  it  before  him,'  Paula  re- 
peated, shrugging  peevishly;  and  she 
let  Lorrie  kiss  her  and  go  away  with 
hardly  another  word. 


VAX  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIEXDS 


519 


It  is  likely  that  Van  Cleve,  who,  as 
he  would  have  frankly  owned,  cared 
nothing  for  the  Jameson  women,  mo- 
ther or  daughter,  was  as  much  dis- 
turbed over  his  unfortunate  knowledge 
as  Paula  herself;  he  would  have  been 
thankful  to  be  out  of  the  whole  misera- 
ble business.  But  having  become  in- 
volved against  his  will,  he  meant  to  see 
it  through.  What  made  the  situation 
serious  for  the  young  man  was  the  way 
it  affected  Lorrie.  Van  exhausted  every 
argument,  he  suggested  half  a  dozen 
other  plans,  he  lost  his  temper  and 
fumed,  to  no  avail:  nothing  he  could 
say  or  do  would  persuade  her  out  of 
going  on  what  he  considered  about  as 
wild  and  foolhardy  a  quest  as  any 
woman  could  undertake.  She  might  be 
able  to  manage  Bob  when  she  got  hold 
of  him,  but  first  get  hold  of  him  !  In 
what  unspeakable  state,  and  in  what 
unspeakable  camp,  troopship,  slum  of 
Tampa  or  Key  West  or  even  Cuba,  if 
she  got  that  far  (which  Heaven  forbid !) 
might  she  not  find  him,  after  a  search 
among  hundreds  of  men  in  scores  of 
such  places!  And  when  he  had  painted 
the  prospect  in  as  lively  colors  as  he 
could  muster  and  announced  that  she 
should  not  go  without  his  protection, 
Mrs.  Gilbert  added  the  last  straw  to 
his  burden  of  impatience  by  looking 
alarmed  and  dropping  various  care- 
fully worded  hints  about  impropriety! 
'If  Lorrie  can  stand  the  things  she's 
going  to  see  and  hear,  alone,  in  a  place 
full  of  all  kinds  of  men,  she  can  very 
well  stand  one  man  going  down  on  the 
train  with  her,  even  if  she  does  un- 
fortunately know  him,'  he  said  severe- 
ly; and  Mrs.  Gilbert  had  no  answer. 

He  who  had  never  asked  for  a  rest 
or  favor  before,  had  no  difficulty  in 
getting  this;  Mr.  Gebhardt,  indeed, 
dismissed  him  heartily,  with  many  ex- 
hortations to  have  a  good  time,  and 
burlesque  warnings  against  enlistment. 
In  fact,  Van  Cleve,  heartless  as  it  may 


seem,  did  have  a  fairly  good  time;  he 
could  not  keep  Bob's  misdoing  and  the 
nature  of  their  errand  before  his  mind 
constantly.  He  enjoyed  the  change  and 
bustle  and  the  humors  of  the  road; 
and  he  thought  Miss  Rodgers  and  the 
other  nurse,  the  pudgy  one, — he  could 
not  remember  her  name, — were  nice 
women,  even  if  they  did  ask  too  many 
questions.  Innumerable  were  the  cigars 
he  smoked,  the  games  of  cards  he 
took  a  hand  in,  the  stories  he  heard 
and  told,  in  the  *  smoker,'  while  the 
train  screeched  and  rattled  across  the 
sweltering  Southern  countryside.  At 
Montgomery  he  got  a  cinder  in  his  eye, 
and  Miss  —  the  fat  girl,  whatever  her 
name  was  —  got  it  out  for  him  with 
signal  gentleness  and  dexterity.  *The 
fellow  that  gets  you  will  be  lucky,'  said 
Van,  and  wondered  at  the  way  she 
blushed  and  giggled;  *I  mean  gets  you 
for  a  nurse,  you  know,'  he  added.  She 
turned  redder  still  and  flounced  off, 
and  would  hardly  speak  to  him  the 
rest  of  the  day,  as  he  vaguely  noticed; 
and  decided  with  regret  that  he  must 
have  made  himself  offensively  familiar. 
As  the  young  women  had  remarked,  he 
kept  himself  rather  aloof  from  Lorrie, 
while  doing  everything  he  could  think 
of  for  her  comfort  in  his  awkward  way, 
heaping  her  seat  with  magazines  and 
books  and  baskets  of  fruit,  opening 
and  shutting  windows,  fetching  and 
carrying  her  wraps  and  bags,  eagerly, 
and  diffidently,  kind. 

Miss  Gilbert,  I  am  bound  to  say, 
received  all  of  this  from  him  without 
effusive  gratitude,  quite  coolly  and  as 
a  matter  of  course.  She  was  used  to  Van 
Cleve,  whose  attentions  always  took  a 
practical  form;  and  between  her  bro- 
ther and  her  lover  poor  Lome's  mind 
was  too  filled  with  anxiety  and  unhappy 
forebodings  to  spare  Van  any  thought. 
The  young  man  knew  it;  he  accepted 
his  portion  with  his  habitual  iron  phil- 
osophy. 


520 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


The  town  of  Tampa  is  of  sufficiently 
ancient  foundation  to  have  figured  in 
our  history  a  good  while  before  the  year 
'98;  and  General  Shafter's  men  and 
his  ordnance  and  his  mules  and  his 
wagons  and  everything  else  that  was 
his,  even  the  transports  that  lay  off 
Port  Tampa,  were  not  by  any  means 
the  first  that  this  unmartial-looking 
burg  had  seen.  It  knew  at  first-hand 
all  our  bloody  struggles  with  the  Semi- 
nole  and  other  savages  of  the  peninsula; 
there  is,  indeed,  an  old  fort,  or  the  site 
of  one,  hereabouts,  and  many  of  the 
streets  bear  the  name  of  some  stout 
Indian  fighter  of  those  old  years. 

The  place  was  full  of  an  exhilarating 
noise  and  color  that  day  when  Lorrie 
reached  it:  the  wide  streets,  unpaved 
and  ankle-deep  in  sand,  wherein  the 
army  wagons  had  worn  all  manner  of 
holes  and  trenches,  were  jammed  with 
people;  it  seemed  as  if  there  were  flags 
and  groups  of  white  tents  at  the  end  of 
every  vista,  and  bugle-calls  sounding 
every  hour;  across  the  river  there  were 
pennants  streaming  from  the  minarets 
of  the  great  hotel;  exotic  trees  and 
flowers  bloomed  with  fantastic  exag- 
geration in  all  the  door-yards;  and 
a  band  somewhere  in  the  offing  was 
playing  vigorously.  *  My  gal  is  a  high- 
bo'n  lady/  it  proclaimed  in  splendid 
time  and  tune.  Something  of  the  san- 
guine excitement  communicated  itself 
even  to  Lome's  troubled  spirit;  and 
Van  Cleve,  after  he  had  got  them  all 
safely  installed  in  a  boarding-house 
(on  Florida  Street,  a  common-looking 
little  frame  building  which  is  still  there, 
or  I  saw  it  the  other  day  when  I  was 
in  the  town)  that  had  been  recom- 
metyded  to  Miss  Rodgers  by  some  Red 
Cross  authority,  had  all  he  could  do  to 
persuade  the  girl  to  stay  there  quietly 
while  he  himself  went  out  and  made 
inquiry  for  her  brother.  'I'll  find  Bob 
if  he 's  in  Tampa,  and  I  '11  bring  him  to 
you,  Lorrie,  but  you've  got  to  stay 


here  so  I'll  know  where  to  find  you. 
This  is  no  place  for  women  to  be  tag- 
ging, around  after  a  man,'  he  said  at 
last,  shortly,  quite  unconscious  of  the 
harshness  of  his  manner. 

'Yes,  Van,  I'll  — I'll  do  whatever 
you  say,'  said  Lorrie,  meekly.  All  at 
once  she  began  to  feel  unnecessary  and 
troublesome;  and, 'after  he  had  gone, 
crept  off  to  the  cramped,  little,  stuffy, 
boarding-house  bedroom,  and  cried 
miserably  to  herself,  with  her  face  in 
the  pillows.  Van  meant  well,  she  knew 
that;  about  everything  that  mattered, 
he  was  as  good  and  kind  as  could  be, 
and  thoughtful,  too,  but  —  but  Philip 
would  not  have  spoken  to  her  that  way! 

CHAPTER  XIII 

IN    WHICH   A    CERTAIN   KIND    OF   NEWS 
TRAVELS   FAST 

The  efficient  Mr.  Kendrick,  starting 
out  to  explore  Tampa  in  search  of  his 
friend,  had  no  very  clear  idea  where 
to  go  or  whom  to  ask,  for  all  his  effi- 
ciency. Upon  applying  to  the  heads  of 
Bob's  paper,  which  he  had  had  the  fore- 
thought to  do  before  leaving  home,  he 
had  been  told  that  they  did  not  know 
where  the  young  man  was,  and  fur- 
thermore they  added  with  some  strong 
qualifying  adjectives  that  they  did  not 
care;  so  far  as  the  Record  was  concern- 
ed, there  was  one  war  correspondent 
less  in  Tampa  or  at  the  front,  the  man- 
agement having  dismissed  (they  said 
'fired')  Gilbert  a  few  days  previously. 

'Why,  wasn't  he  doing  all  right?' 
Van  Cleve  asked,  and  was  immediately 
conscious,  with  a  kind  of  angry  sink- 
ing of  the  heart,  of  the  needlessness  of 
the  question. 

'Doing  all  right?'  repeated  the  au- 
thority whom  he  addressed  —  and 
whether  this  was  the  editor-in-chief  or 
some  other  editor,  or  what  position  he 
occupied,  Van,  who  had  never  been 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


521 


inside  a  newspaper  office  before,  was 
entirely  ignorant;  but  the  other  man 
spoke  like  one  of  the  powers.  *  Doing 
all  right?  Say,  you  know  Gilbert,  don't 
you?  Well,  then — !'  He  made  a  ges- 
ture. 'What's  the  use?' 

What  was  the  use,  indeed?  Van 
Cleve  came  away  in  a  very  gloomy 
mood;  he  had  not  the  courage  to  tell 
Lorrie;  the  family  had  enough  on  their 
minds  already,  and  they  would  learn 
this  only  too  soon,  anyhow.  He  felt  an 
unhappy  certainty  that  Robert  would 
not  come  home  because  of  being  thus 
deposed;  on  the  contrary,  he  was  much 
more  likely  to  stay  with  the  army, 
loafing  and  drinking  till  his  money 
gave  out,  and  then  getting  somebody 
to  stake  him  until  that  resource  was 
exhausted,  too;  after  which  he  might 
possibly  beat  his  way  home,  or  write 
for  help  —  thus  thought  Van  Cleve, 
out  of  temper  and  out  of  heart. 

He  went  out  now  through  the  crowds 
and  around  to  the  corner  of  Tampa 
and  Twiggs  Streets,  where  was  the 
home  of  that  journal  to  whose  care 
Bob's  mail  had  been  directed.  The 
place  was  in  a  prodigious  rush  of  busi- 
ness,—  messenger-boys  and  reporters 
tearing  back  and  forth,  and  bulletins 
tacked  up  outside,  about  which  people 
were  standing  three  and  four  deep  in 
the  glare  of  the  sun,  with  the  ther- 
mometer at  ninety.  There  was  a  little 
entry  on  the  ground  floor,  with  offices 
opening  on  either  hand.  Van  Cleve 
pushed  his  way  in,  and,  feeling  himself 
a  nuisance,  began  on  the  first  person  he 
could  reach,  a  shirt-sleeved  lad  pound- 
ing away  on  a  typewriter  in  the  corner, 
with  his  collar  and  tie  undone,  and  the 
moisture  beading  off  his  chin.  He  did 
not  even  look  up  when  Van  spoke. 

*  Gilbert  ?  Ump ! '  He  made  a  negative 
motion  with  his  head  and  at  the  same 
time  contrived  to  twitch  it  in  the  direc- 
tion of  the  other  side  of  the  room.  '  Ask 
the  boss.' 


The  boss  was  a  stout  man,  chewing 
the  butt  of  a  cold  cigar,  and  dictating 
to  a  young  woman  stenographer,  with 
his  foot  cocked  or  braced  up  on  the 
rung  of  her  chair.  He  stared  and  con- 
sidered. ' Gilbert?  R.  D.  Gilbert?  No, 
I  don't  remember  him.  How  is  that, 
anyhow?'  he  said  to  the  stenographer 
vaguely.  '  Do  you  know  any  thing  about 
any  Gilbert?' 

She  did  not;  and  they  both  eyed 
Van  Cleve  with  a  sort  of  fatigued  hos- 
tility, the  man  gnawing  at  his  cigar, 
the  girl  with  her  hand  poised  above  the 
writing-pad. 

'The  man  I  mean  is  a  war  corre- 
spondent for  a  Cincinnati  paper — '  Van 
Cleve  began  again;  'he  had  his  mail  — 

'Sa-ay,  how  many  correspondents 
d'ye  think  we've  had  here,  son?'  said 
the  fat  man,  in  benevolent  irony;  'one 
or  two?  You've  got  another  think 
coming.  Anyway,  they're  all  gone 
now.  They  went  with  Shafter  two 
weeks  ago.  Don't  you  get  to  see  the 
papers  in  Podunk?' 

'I  was  going  to  say  he  had  his  mail 
sent  here,  so  I  thought  possibly  you  'd 
know  something  about  him,'  Van  ex- 
plained. 'Don't  you  have  the  rural 
free  delivery  in  Tampa?' 

'Oh!  Well  now,  Mr.  Soyer  attended 
to  that,  did  n't  he,  Jennie?  I  can  have 
somebody  look  that  up,  if  you  '11  wait 
-  we're  kind  of  busy  - 

It  appeared,  however,  upon  inquiry, 
that  Mr.  Soyer  had  gone  out  to  the 
encampment  at  Tampa  Heights;  he 
had  gone  down  to  St.  Petersburg;  ho 
had  gone  over  to  the  hotel  to  inter- 
view somebody;  in  fine,  Mr.  Soyer  was 
not  to  be  found.  Anyway,  the  proba- 
bilities were  that  the  man  the  gentle- 
man was  looking  for  was  in  Cuba  — 
that's  where  he  ought  to  be  if  he 
was  on  his  job.  What  paper  did  Van 
represent? 

'I'm  not  representing  any  paper. 
I  'm  only  trying  to  hunt  this  fellow  up. 


522 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


because  he's  wanted  at  his  home. 
Sickness/  said  Van  Cleve,  truthfully 
enough.  It  had  occurred  to  him  that  he 
did  not  want  to  be  taken  for  a  private 
detective  in  search  of  a  criminal  —  an 
aspect  which  the  inquiry  gave  signs  of 
assuming! 

*  Sickness,  eh?  Too  bad!  Because 
you  're  not  going  to  have  one  easy  time 
finding  him,'  said  the  other,  perfunc- 
torily, and  resumed  his  dictation. 

Van  Cleve  walked  out  again,  baffled. 
He  went  up  to  the  other  newspaper 
office.  There  nobody  had  ever  heard 
of  Bob,  either;  but  they  suggested 
that  he  go  down  to  Key  West  and  wait 
until  one  of  the  Associated  Press  boats, 
which  were  constantly  'on  the  jump' 
between  Cuba  and  the  mainland,  came 
in.  His  friend  might  be  on  any  one  of 
them.  'What  regiment  was  he  with? 
You  might  trace  him  that  way.  Most 
of  them  asked  to  be  assigned  to  some 
particular  regiment,  you  know,'  some- 
body told  him.  'They  were  all  going 
and  getting  permits  or  credentials,  you 
might  call  'em,  from  the  staff  officer 
that  had  it  in  charge  —  Lieutenant 
Miley,  I  believe  it  was.' 

'All  right.  Where '11  I  find  Miley? 
He  might  know,  or  have  it  listed  some- 
where,' said  Van,  promptly. 

But  the  others  began  to  laugh. 

'  Lord  love  you,  man,  Miley  's  gone 
to  Cuba!  Now  the  thing  for  you  to 
do  is  to  go  on  down  to  Key  West,  and 
just  scout  around  for  those  dispatch- 
boats,  like  I'm  telling  you,'  they  ad- 
vised him  earnestly,  with  a  good-na- 
tured interest. 

Van  Cleve  gratefully  shared  among 
them  the  three  cigars  he  happened  to 
have  on  hand,  and  lingered  awhile  lis- 
tening and  asking  questions,  and  hear- 
ing mostly  that  pleasingly  free  criticism 
of  war  proceedings  at  which  civilians 
and  onlookers  are  invariably  so  apt. 
As  he  left,  they  repeated  their  assur- 
ances. 'There'll  sure  be  a  battle  before 


long;  our  fellows  have  landed,  you 
know.  And  the  minute  anything  hap- 
pens, the  press  boats  will  be  coming  in, 
thick  as  flies.  All  you've  got  to  do  is 
to  wait  — '  and  so  on. 

He  was  not  aware  of  having  been 
any  more  communicative  about  him- 
self and  his  business  than  was  neces- 
sary, and  later  received  a  shock  at 
reading  under  the  caption,  'Personals. 
Arrivals  in  Tampa,'  that  Mr.  and  Mrs. 
Kendrick  of  Cincinnati,  and  party, 
were  stopping  at  the  Holt  House! 

Our  friend  had  consumed  most  of 
the  afternoon  in  this  fruitless  business, 
and  now  faced  homeward,  or  boarding- 
houseward,  in  a  disagreeably  puzzled 
and  undecided  frame  of  mind.  'Nice 
time  Lorrie  would  have  had  down  here 
by  herself!'  he  remarked  inwardly; 
and  then  reflected  with  chagrin  that 
her  efforts  could  scarcely  have  been 
more  futile  and  ill-directed  than  his 
own.  He  did  not  know  whether  to  go  to 
Key  West  or  not;  if  the  discharge  had 
arrived  in  time,  Bob  might  not  have 
left  with  the  army  after  all;  he  might 
be  right  here  in  Tampa;  the  plain  truth 
was,  Bob's  whereabouts  was  a  matter 
of  pure  guess-work.  Van  found  him- 
self exasperated  by  the  inability  to  take 
some  kind  of  definite  action;  never  be- 
fore in  the  whole  of  his  narrow,  reso- 
lutely ordered,  undeviating  career  had 
he  hesitated  over  his  course  or  waited 
upon  another  person's  pleasure.  By 
and  by  he  fell  in  with  Miss  Rodgers 
and  the  other  nurse,  who  had  gone  out 
to  discover  what  they  might  about 
their  own  assignment  and  were  return- 
ing in  a  state  of  irritation  similar  to  his 
own. 

'It's  the  worst  mix-up  you  ever 
saw!'  Miss  Rodgers  complained  vol- 
ubly; 'nobody  can  tell  us  who  the 
surgeon  is,  or  where  he  is,  that  we're 
to  report  to.  They  don't  seem  to  know 
anything  about  their  own  business,  so 
I  suppose  it's  not  to  be  wondered  at 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


523 


that  they  don't  know  anything  about 
ours.  We've  asked  about  forty  dozen 
adjutants  and  captains  and  brigadier- 
generals  and  quartermasters,  and  not 
one  of  'em  can  even  give  us  a  steer 
in  the  right  direction.  They  keep  tell- 
ing us  that  the  hospital  ship  was  the 
Olivette,  or  that  Miss  Barton  has  gone 
to  Cuba  with  her  ship,  and,  anyway, 
we're  too  late  to  be  of  any  use!  "I 
know  all  that,"  s'd  I  to  the  last  one; 
"if  you'd  just  listen  to  what  I'm  tell- 
ing you  a  minute,"  s'd  I;  and  then  I 
said  it  all  over  again :  "  I  'm  going  to  the 
military  hospital  here  or  wherever  you 
need  nurses."  And  he  just  looked  wild- 
eyed,  and  said  in  that  case  we  'd  better 
see  Major  Thingummy  or  Colonel 
What's-his-name!' 

The  stout  young  woman  chimed  in : 
'It  made  me  so  tired  having  'em  say 
they  did  n't  know  where  the  hospital 
was,  I  just  said  to  one,  "Well,  for 
mercy's  sake,  why  don't  you  get  a 
pain  in  your  toe  or  a  case  of  appendi- 
citis and  find  out!"  He  looked  just  as 
mad  for  a  minute,  and  then  he  kind  of 
laughed.' 

*  Well,  it 's  all  very  nice  to  laugh  — 
but  I'm  here  to  nurse  sick  men,  I'm 
not  here  to  chase  around  tra-la-ing 
with  well  ones,'  said  her  superior,  im- 
patiently.  *  If  I  could  n't  run  an  army 
better  than  this,  I'd  take  a  back  seat 
and  let  somebody  do  it  that  could!' 

*  They 're  pretty  nearly  all  volun- 
teer troops,  you  know.    The  regulars 
are   better   managed,    I   guess,'   Van 
reminded  her. 

'The  Lord  help  'em  if  they  aren't!' 
retorted  Miss  Rodgers,  fervently. 

It  gave  Van  Cleve  a  queer  sense  of 
comfort  to  hear  the  two  hearty,  cap- 
able women;  and  that  they  should  be 
knocking  about  the  camp  among  all 
the  crowds  and  sights  and  sounds 
which  he  had  so  peremptorily  forbade 
Lome's  essaying,  nowise  offended 
him.  Lorrie  was  different;  these  nurses 


could  stand  anything.  For  that  mat- 
ter, they  themselves  expected  little  or 
nothing  of  her.  'These  society  girls 
— !'  the  fat  little  nurse  had  remarked 
to  Van  Cleve  privately,  with  a  know- 
ing smile;  she  did  not  finish,  but  it  was 
amazing  with  what  a  world  of  tole- 
rance, of  patient  and  good-natured  su- 
periority, she  charged  the  three  words. 
Van  Cleve  understood;  he  was  some- 
what surprised  to  note  how  confiden- 
tial Miss  —  er  —  no  use,  he  could  not 
get  her  name!  —  had  become  with  him 
in  the  few  days  of  their  acquaintance. 
And  now,  studying  his  face,  she  said 
quickly,  *  You  did  n't  find  your  friend 

—  Miss  Gilbert's  brother  —  you  could 
n't  find  him,  Mr.  Kendrick?    I'm  so 
sorry.' 

'Better  luck  to-morrow,  perhaps,' 
said  Van,  trying  to  speak  carelessly. 
As  usual,  when  the  name  of  Miss  Gil- 
bert's brother  came  up,  the  nurses 
asked  no  questions,  sending  each  other 
a  brief,  warning  glance.  Something 
was  wrong  about  that  brother,  they 
knew  it! 

They  went  back  to  Lorrie  at  the 
Holt  House  and  had  their  supper,  dur- 
ing which  meal  Van  Cleve  performed 
what  was  for  him  a  prodigy  of  dissimu- 
lation by  referring  to  his  bootless 
search  in  a  casual,  off-hand  manner, 
with  no  hint  of  any  difficulties  and 
with  a  matter-of-course  air  of  expect- 
ing success  at  any  moment.  And  he 
further  gave  it,  as  the  result  of  his 
observations,  that  this  war  was  going 
to  turn  out  a  picayune  business  after 
all  —  a  deal  of  cry  and  no  wool.  The 
Spanish  were  notoriously  much  better 
at  running  away  than  fighting.  They 
might  do  a  little  bushwhacking,  per- 
haps, but  stand  against  the  advance 
of  our  army?  Never!  The  minute  our 
troops  landed,  every  Spaniard  in  the 
neighborhood  probably  beat  it  for  the 
tall  timber,  and  left  his  gun  behind 

—  these  were  Mr.  Kendrick's  graphic 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


and  humorous  words.  According  to 
him  there  would  be  no  danger,  no 
wounds,  no  fever,  no  anything  of  any 
consequence.  He  gave  a  burlesque 
rendition  of  his  interviews  with  the 
newspaper-men  that  sent  Miss  Rodgers 
and  her  colleague  into  fits  of  laughter, 
and  even  succeeded  in  brightening  up 
Lorrie;  he  made  amiable  jokes  about 
the  eating,  which,  indeed,  was  very 
poor;  he  entered  into  affable  converse 
with  the  darky  waiter  at  their  table;  in 
short,  never  was  there  so  light-hearted 
and  care-free  a  person  as  he. 

The  nurses  were  immoderately  en- 
tertained; they  had  not  known  that 
Mr.  Kendrick  was  so  lively  and  easy 
—  easy  as  an  old  shoe!  As  for  Lorrie, 
for  whose  sole  benefit  Van  Cleve  was 
painfully  going  through  this  exhibition, 
the  girl  ended  by  being  at  least  half- 
convinced  by  it,  and  her  spirits  rose 
proportionately.  Knowing  Van  as  she 
did,  she  could  not  have  believed  him 
equal  to  so  much  humane  hypocrisy; 
the  young  man,  when  he  had  time  to 
think,  listened  to  himself  with  astonish- 
ment. 'By  Jove,  I'm  doing  as  well  as 
Uncle  Stan!  I  come  by  it  rightly,  I 
guess!'  he  thought  mirthlessly. 

After  this  they  all  went  together  to 
the  Tampa  Bay  Hotel,  upon  the  mo- 
tion of  that  indefatigable  entertainer, 
Van  Kendrick,  who  seemed  determined 
that  nobody,  including  himself,  per- 
haps, should  be  alone  for  any  length  of 
time,  or  have  a  moment  for  thought. 
*  Never  mind  letters,  Lorrie;  you  have 
n't  got  anything  to  write  about,  and 
you'll  have  plenty  of  time  after  a 
while/  he  ordered  her.  'You  want  to 
get  out  and  see  all  this.  It's  a  very 
remarkable  thing,  really,  and  it  won't 
happen  again  in  our  time.  Come  along 
now/  In  fact,  there  was  something 
very  exhilarating  in  the  lights  and  noise 
and  movement,  and  the  curious  sense 
of  nearness  to  all  the  other  people,  so 
many  thousands  of  them.  To  feel  one's 


self  alone  in  a  crowd  is  a  dreadful 
experience,  but  nobody  could  feel  alone 
in  this  crowd,  not  even  in  the  bedeck- 
ed corridors  of  the  hotel,  which  the 
newspapers  said  were  'thronged  with 
celebrities.'  Van  Cleve  got  his  party 
four  rocking-chairs  around  a  teakwood 
stand  in  a  corner  encompassed  by  the 
bronze  jardinieres,  and  Chinese  cabi- 
nets and  ormolu  mirrors  and  marble 
statuary  and  astounding  tapestries 
and  oil  paintings  with  which  the  es- 
tablishment is  well  known  to  be  pro- 
fusely furnished;  and  there  they  were 
all  sitting  when,  for  a  final  dramatic 
touch,  an  old  acquaintance  happened 
upon  them,  among  all  the  aliens. 

This  was  Mr.  J.  B.  B.  Taylor,  of  all 
men  in  the  world,  and  he  has  since 
described  the  meeting  with  a  good  deal 
of  interest.  '  I  was  n't  much  surprised,' 
he  says;  'you  were  n't  surprised  to 
meet  anybody  in  Tampa  those  days. 
The  ends  of  the  earth  came  together 
there.  And  then,  you  know,  I  'm  eter- 
nally on  the  move  and  running  into 
people,  anyhow.  Just  a  minute  before 
I  had  come  across  a  man  I  knew,  a 
Japanese,  some  kind  of  an  attache  at 
their  legation  in  Washington  that  his 
government  had  sent  down  to  follow 
our  army  around,  I  believe  —  a  little 
Mr.  Takuhira  —  a  nice  little  fellow. 
He'd  been  educated  over  here,  and 
that 's  how  I  came  to  know  him,  meet- 
ing him  at  the  Harvard  Society  ban- 
quets, —  Class  of  '90  he  was,  a  very 
pleasant  fellow,  —  I  think  he 's  back  in 
Japan  now,  in  some  big  position  over 
there.  He  knew  a  great  many  of  the 
newspaper-men  —  of  course  he  spoke 
English  perfectly  —  and  they  called 
him  Take-your-hair-off!  But  I  was 
going  to  tell  you  about  Kendrick.  I 
was  standing  talking  to  Takuhira 
when  I  caught  sight  of  him;  there  he 
was  with  Miss  Gilbert,  whom  at  that 
time  I  did  n't  know  at  all,  and  two 
other  ladies  that  I  'd  never  seen  before 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


525 


either,  with  some  lemonades  in  front 
of  them,  listening  to  the  music  and 
watching  the  crowds  and  the  epaulets 
and  uniforms  and  all  the  rest  of  it,  just 
as  if  it  were  the  most  natural  thing  in 
the  world  for  them  to  be  there.  Van 
Cleve  looked  a  good  deal  older  than  the 
last  time  I  saw  him,  and,  do  you  know, 
my  first  thought  was,  "Why,  those 
are  n't  his  own  people!  I  'd  know  the 
Van  Cleve  ladies  anywhere,  and  those 
are  n't  any  of  them,  and  what 's  become 
of  the  Major?  Can  Van  possibly  have 
got  married  and  annexed  another  fam- 
ily to  take  care  of?  "  Then  he  saw  me, 
and  got  up  and  spoke  right  away.' 

So  J.  B.  was  introduced  to  the  as- 
semblage, and  Mr.  Takuhira,  too;  and 
if  the  little  Oriental  gentleman  was 
confounded  at  the  spectacle  of  a  single 
young  man  in  company  with  three 
single  young  women  voyaging  about 
the  country  a  thousand  miles  from 
home,  unquestioned,  and  evidently  en- 
tirely respectable,  he  was  by  far  too 
mannerly  to  show  it.  'Take-your-hair- 
off  was  used  to  American  ways/  J.  B. 
said;  'and  of  course  the  Red  Cross 
explained  everything,  anyhow.  You 
saw  dozens  of  nice  girls  going  around 
by  themselves.  I  think  Van  Cleve  was 
glad  to  see  us;  he  looked  fagged  out, 
and,  after  we  joined  them,  sat  back 
and  let  us  do  the  talking  as  if  he  wanted 
a  rest.  Miss  Gilbert  and  Takuhira  got 
on  together  wonderfully;  it  turned  out 
that  they  had  some  mutual  friends,  - 
people  they  both  knew,  that  is,  —  any- 
body's a  friend  when  you  meet  away 
from  home, — Boston  and  Washington 
people,  and  I  believe  some 'army  and 
navy  men.  The  two  nurses  talked 
mainly  to  me;  they  looked  at  Takuhira 
as  if  he  were  some  kind  of  educated 
chimpanzee,  and  I'm  sure  that's  how 
they  classed  him.  That  youngest 
nurse  was  rather  making  eyes  at  Van 
Cleve,  I  thought,  but  he  did  n't  seem 
to  be  conscious  of  it  at  all;  it  was  rather 


funny.  He  told  me  he  was  down  on 
business,  and  then  caught  himself, 
and  said,  "That  is  —  well,  I'm  taking 
a  vacation  —  I'm  making  a  vacation  of 
it,  you  .know."  I  thought  he  did  n't 
look  much  like  a  man  taking  a  vaca- 
tion, but,  of  course,  it  was  no  affair  of 
mine.' 

They  sat  there  talking,  J.  B.  said, 
until  quite  late;  and  it  was  after  they 
had  all  said  their  good-nights,  and  the 
others  had  been  gone  some  time,  and  he 
himself  was  upstairs  in  his  room  get- 
ting ready  for  bed,  that,  on  a  sudden, 
a  tremendous  racket  broke  out  in  the 
streets  of  the  town  across  the  river, 
quickly  spreading  to  the  hotel  side: 
bells  ringing,  whistles  tooting,  people 
running  and  yelling,  and  by  and  by 
guns  or  fire-crackers  beginning  to  go  off 
deafeningly.  He  hustled  himself  into 
some  clothes  again  and  ran  out,  meet- 
ing in  the  halls  other  half-dressed  men, 
none  of  whom  knew  what  was  happen- 
ing; they  were  guessing  everything, 
from  a  fire-alarm  to  Spanish  gunboats 
coming  up  to  shell  Port  Tampa! 
Takuhira  joined  them.  'He  was  the 
least  interested  man  present,  you 
might  have  thought,'  J.  B.  said  after- 
wards, with  a  laugh;  'but,  by  George, 
he  was  the  first  to  suggest  that  the 
telegraph  office  was  the  place  to  inquire. 
And  he  added,  as  calm  as  Buddha, 
that  "very  possiblee  the  boats  ^mide 
have  come  outt."  He  meant  Cervera's 
fleet,  of  course.  It  sounded  so  queer 
in  his  precise,  grammatical  way  of 
talking,  and  with  no  more  expression 
on  his  face  than  if  he  had  been  carved 
out  of  old  ivory,  with  jet  eyes.  All  the 
rest  of  us  gesticulating  and  shouting 
like  lunatics ! ' 

As  they  were  hurrying  over  the 
bridge,  they  ran  into  some  men  and 
boys  who  wildly  reported  that  there 
had  been  a  battle;  there  had  been  fight- 
ing at  Santiago,  and  our  boys  had 
whipped,  of  course.  In  the  town  the 


526 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


streets  were  full  of  hurrahing  people, 
and  all  the  bells  and  sirens  were  going 
madly;  it  was  just  before  the  Fourth, 
so  there  was  a  plentiful  supply  of 
cannon-crackers  and  bonfire  material 
besides. 

J.  B.  and  the  Japanese  attache  made 
for  a  newspaper  office;  the  crowd  was 
so  wedged  together  outside  that  it  was 
impossible  to  get  through,  and  on  the 
skirts  of  it  they  fell  in  again  with  Van 
Cleve  Kendrick.  Van  had  taken  his 
ladies  to  their  hotel  and  was  on  his  way 
to  the  cot  he  had  secured  in  a  room- 
ing-house when  the  excitement  began. 
Nobody  seemed  to  know  whence  the 
information  came,  but  everybody  was 
sure  it  was  correct.  Victory!  Hurrah! 
*  There  '11  be  a  hot  time  in  the  old  town 
to-night '  — ! 

'I  suppose  it's  true?'  Van  Cleve 
asked  the  man  next  him.  'How  did 
they  get  the  news?' 

'Why,  it  was  telegraphed  from  Jack- 
sonville, I  believe  — ' 

'Jacksonville!'  ejaculated  J.  B. 
'They  could  make  up  pretty  nearly 
any  story  and  send  it  here  from  Jack- 
sonville!' 

'No,  no,  it's  a  wire  from  Key  West,' 
somebody  else  volunteered.  Mr.  Taku- 
hira,  however,  told  Van  Cleve,  in  his 
neat  English,  that  he  understood  most 
of  the  news  was  always  sent  by  dis- 
patch-boat from  Kingston,  or  by  the 
cable  off  Cienfuegos,  which  we  had 
picked  up  after  bombarding  and  de- 
stroying the  Spanish  station  there. 

Presently  the  crowd,  in  its  constant 
shifting,  allowed  them  to  press  farther 
in;  bulletins  were  already  posted,  but 
the  heads  and  hats  were  so  thick  in 
front  of  them  that  only  the  topmost 
lines  could  be  seen  from  the  edge  of  the 
sidewalk  by  a  tall  man  like  Van  Cleve 
or  J.  B.  Taylor.  Those  nearest  the 
boards  began  obligingly  to  pass  back 
bits  of  information.  The  first  fight  of 
the  land  forces  had  occurred  at  a  place 


called  Las  Guasimas;  the  Rough  Riders 
and  Tenth  Cavalry  (all  of  them  dis- 
mounted) had  been  engaged ;  they  had 
driven  the  Spaniards  back  after  a  stub- 
born resistance;  it  was  not  possible  at 
the  moment  of  writing  to  estimate  the 
loss  on  either  side,  but  the  Spaniards' 
had  been  the  most  severe;  of  the  United 
States  troops  engaged,  the  following 
were  known  to  have  been  killed :  — 

'  Captain  Allen  Capron  —  it  says 
Captain  Allen  Capron,'  repeated  the 
man  in  front  of  Van  Cleve,  turning; 
'd'ye  know  any  of  'em?'  he  asked, 
parenthetically. 

'I  know  one  man,'  said  Van,  out- 
wardly calm  at  least.  'Much  obliged. 
Can  you  read  any  more?' 

'Can't  read  any.  It's  this  fellow  in 
front  of  me  that's  telling  me;  I  can't 
see  a  thing.  —  Sergeant  Hamilton  Fish. 
Know  him?' 

Van  Cleve  shook  his  head.  The  man 
went  on.  '  He  says  there 's  a  war  cor- 
respondent killed  —  don't  see  what  a 
war  correspondent  was  doing  up  in 
front  on  the  firing-line,  do  you?' 

Van  Cleve  heard  his  own  voice  say- 
ing, 'What  was  that  man's  name?' 

'  I  did  n't  catch  it  —  wait  a  minute. 
—  Say,  say  that  over  again,  will  you? 
Hey?  It  was  a  fellow  by  the  name  of 
Marshall.  Friend  of  yours?' 

'No,'  Van  said,  with  almost  as  much 
effort  as  before;  he  was  trembling  with 
relief,  and  at  the  same  time  adjuring 
himself  impatiently  not  to  be  a  fool; 
there  must  be  a  hundred  correspond- 
ents in  the  field  besides  Bob. 

'Here,  now  you  can  get  in  and  read 
'em  for  yourself,  if  you  're  quick  about 
it,'  said  the  other,  good-naturedly, 
squeezing  aside,  as  the  crowd  swayed 
open  momentarily. 

Van  Cleve  edged  forward,  and  the 
aisle  closed  up  on  the  instant.  The 
two  men  immediately  in  front  of  him 
were  stooping  to  read  the  last  items 
at  the  bottom  of  the  manila-paper 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


527 


sheet,  one  of  them  copying  rapidly 
into  a  notebook.  Van  craned  over 
their  shoulders.  The  list  of  the  dead 

came  first.    He  read,  * Cortwright, 

shot  through  the  heart/ 

CHAPTER  XIV 

KEY   WEST 

The  triumphant  din  went  on  more 
or  less  exuberantly  until  the  small 
hours  of  that  night  at  Tampa.  The 
news  flashed  to  the  four  corners  of  the 
country,  and  thousands  read  it  next 
morning  at  their  comfortable  break- 
fast-tables, with  unbounded  martial 
pride  and  satisfaction;  and  numbers 
of  honest,  good-tempered  citizens  who 
had  never  quarreled  with  a  neighbor 
in  their  lives,  and  who  sang  lustily  in 
church  every  Sunday  great  words  about 
Peace  and  Mercy  and  Patience  and 
Brotherly  Love,  gave  the  children  a 
quarter  to  buy  fire-crackers  with  which 
to  celebrate,  and  went  out  to  their 
fields  or  factories  or  offices,  telling  one 
another  it  was  just  what  they  had  ex- 
pected and  predicted  from  the  start; 
that  our  men  were  the  best  all-round 
fighters  in  the  world,  invincible  in  open 
battle;  and  as  for  this  guerilla  style, 
why,  they  could  fairly  eat  the  other  side 
Up  at  that !  That  had  been  our  natural 
way  of  fighting  ever  since  the  pioneers 
went  into  business  against  the  Indians! 
And  it  was  a  pity  about  the  poor  fel- 
lows that  were  killed,  but  war  was  n't 
any  picnic,  we  all  knew  that,  and  so 
did  they  when  they  went  into  it. 

These,  too,  were  the  sort  of  reflec- 
tions that  would  undoubtedly  have 
occurred  to  Van  Kendrick,  if  he  had 
been  at  his  normal  occupations,  under 
normal  circumstances;  and  it  is  con- 
ceivable that  he  would  have  learned  of 
the  other  man's  death,  had  it  been  an 
ordinary  one  in  bed  after  an  ordinary 
illness,  with  no  shock  or  regret.  But, 


as  it  was,  he  presented  a  face  of  such 
ghastly  consternation  to  the  two  gentle- 
men, his  acquaintances,  who  were  still 
hovering  on  the  edge  of  the  mob  when 
he  pushed  his  way  out  to  them,  that 
they  both  observed  it,  even  by  the  art- 
ificial light,  and  exclaimed  aloud  with 
concern.  Moreover,  when  Van  Cleve 
told  them,  they  were  almost  as  much 
shocked  as  he. 

'Good  Lord,  you  say  it's  the  man 
Miss  Gilbert 's  engaged  to?  The  poor 
girl!  Why,  that's  —  that's  a  dread- 
ful thing! '  J.  B.  said  in  horror  and  com- 
passion. He  shook  his  head  solemnly. 
'  It 's  the  women  that  bear  the  brunt  of 
it  after  all,'  he  said,  in  a  lowered  voice, 
thinking  of  his  father  who  had  fallen 
gallantly  at  Shiloh,  of  the  grave  in  the 
little  old  Kentucky  churchyard,  and 
his  mother's  face  when  she  went  to  lay 
flowers  there.  'Poor  girl!  Poor  thing! 
Do  you  have  to  go  and  tell  her?  Do 
you  think  you'd  better?' 

'It  may  not  be  the  same  man.  It  is 
written  "Blank  Cortwright,"  I  think 
you  said?'  the  Japanese  gentleman 
pointed  out  practically. 

'  Yes,  I  know  —  I  thought  about 
that.  This  man's  name  is  Philip,  so 
there's  a  chance  still.  There  might 
easily  be  some  other  Cortwright  in  the 
regiment.  But  do  you  suppose  there 's 
any  way  of  finding  out?'  said  Van 
Cleve,  in  a  haggard  anxiety.  '  The  un- 
certainty only  makes  it  worse  for  her, 
you  know,'  he  added  out  of  his  not  in- 
considerable experience  with  woman- 
kind. 

They  all  three  looked  at  one  another 
blankly.  '  All  you  can  do  is  to  wait,  I  'm 
afraid,'  said  J.  B.  at  last.  As  they 
walked  away,  a  sudden  recollection 
prompted  him.  'Cortwright?  Why, 
I've  met  him,  haven't  I?  Oh,  yes, 
I  remember  perfectly  now.  I  remem- 
ber hearing  about  that  engagement. 
I  never  had  — '  had  any  use  for  that 
young  man,  Mr.  Taylor  was  on  the 


528 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


point  of  saying,  but  checked  himself. 
Cortwright  might  be  dead.  The  same 
feeling  restrained  Van  Cleve  even  from 
admitting  to  himself  that  the  fate  of 
Lome's  lover  was,  personally,  a  matter 
of  entire  indifference  to  him;  he  knew 
that  at  heart  he  did  not  care  what 
became  of  Cortwright,  one  way  or  the 
other;  but  he  was  desperately  sorry  for 
Lorrie.  She  thought  Cortwright  was 
a  hero,  poor  girl !  Probably  he  did  not 
lack  the  physical  courage  which  is  the 
least  and  commonest  of  man's  gifts; 
and  if  he  had  borne  himself  well  and 
died  doing  his  duty,  why,  the  best  of 
us  could  achieve  no  more  and  make  no 
finer  end. 

Van  Cleve's  own  endowment  did  not 
include  anything  like  tactfulness  or 
capacity  for  expressing  sympathy,  — 
a  fact  of  which  he  was  ruefully  con- 
scious; and  he  carried  this  heavy  news 
to  Lorrie  without  the  dimmest  idea  of 
how  to  *  break  it  gently,'  as  people  say, 
to  her.  Van  thought  —  and  I  am  not 
sure,  on  the  whole,  that  he  was  not 
right  —  that  bluntness  might  be  the 
best  mercy.  As  it  happened,  however, 
she  had  already  heard;  the  plump 
nurse  came  out  of  the  room  with  a 
gravely  warning  and  important  car- 
riage, and  stopped  Van  Cleve  on  the 
threshold. 

'No,  she  did  n't  faint,  and  she  has  n't 
been  crying  or  anything,'  she  whis- 
pered, in  answer  to  his  questions;  'but 
she  gave  up  right  away  that  it  was  true. 
She  says  she  does  n't  believe  there  was 
another  Cortwright.  Oh,  Mr.  Ken- 
drick,  isn't  it  awful?'  she  wound  up, 
not  without  some  enjoyment,  in  spite 
of  her  real  kindness  of  heart  and  desire 
to  help. 

'Ask  her  if  she'll  see  me,  will  you, 
Miss —  er — ,'  Van  said.  He  was  won- 
dering whether  to  tell  Lorrie  what  he 
intended  to  do  next;  whether,  indeed, 
she  would  be  in  a  fit  state  to  hear  or 
consider  his  plans. 


'My  name  is  n't  Miss  Urr  —  urr  — , 
Mr.  Kendrick,  I'm  Miss  Crow,'  said 
the  nurse,  bridling  a  little  and  mim- 
icking him  roguishly;  'I  do  believe 
you've  been  forgetting  it  right  along. 
Miss  Crow;  now  do  try  and  fix  me  in 
your  mind.' 

'All  right  —  that  is,  I  mean,  I  beg 
your  pardon  —  much  obliged,'  said 
Van  Cleve,  clumsily,  in  his  preoccupa- 
tion; at  his  best,  he  would  have  been  a 
mortally  unpromising  subject  for  a  flirt- 
ation, and  now  he  scarcely  looked  at 
the  young  woman,  scarcely  heard  her. 
'If  you'll  just  ask  Miss  Gilbert  if  she 
minds  speaking  to  me  a  minute — ?' 

Lorrie  herself  came  to  the  door,  and 
stood  before  the  young  man  with  eyes 
that  seemed  very  large  and  bright  and 
of  soundless  depth,  in  her  white  face. 
'Have  you  found  Bob,  Van  Cleve? '  she 
said  quite  steadily.  'That  is  what  we 
must  do,  whatever  comes,  you  know 
that.' 

Van  Cleve  felt  something  bravely 
self-forgetful  in  her  speech  and  manner 
that  touched  him  more  than  all  the 
tears  she  could  have  shed.  He  took 
her  hand.  '  I  'm  sorry  about  this  —  this 
other  thing  —  this  report,  Lorrie.  But 
don't  forget  it  may  not  be  he.  It  may 
be  some  other  man.  I  hope  to  Heaven 
it  is!'  he  said,  and  meant  the  words. 
It  made  no  difference  who  and  what 
and  how  unworthy  Cortwright  might 
be,  all  Van  Cleve's  dislike  and  jealousy 
of  him  were  swept  away  by  an  unselfish 
tenderness,  to  see  the  woman  he  loved 
so  stricken. 

She  looked  at  him,  tensely  composed, 
with  a  kind  of  distance  in  her  gaze,  as 
from  some  far  height;  it  almost  fright- 
ened Van  Cleve,  this  spectacle  which 
he  had  never  before  witnessed,  of  the 
essential  loneliness  of  sorrow.  '  I  think 
it  is  Phil.  I  think  he  is  dead,'  she  said. 

'Oh,  you  ought  n't  to  make  up  your 
mind  to  it  that  way,  Lorrie  —  it's 
only  a  report  —  they're  all  the  time 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


529 


making  mistakes/  Van  Cleve  began, 
awkwardly  trying  to  reassure  her. 

Lorrie  made  a  little  nervous  gesture 
as  of  renunciation,  with  her  two  shak- 
ing hands.  'If  it  is  so,  it's  for  the 
best  —  I  thought  of  that  last  night 
when  I  heard  —  it  would  be  a  noble 
way  to  die,  Van  Cleve  —  it  would  be 
the  way  of  his  choice,'  she  said  in  a 
pathetic  exaltation,  before  which  the 
young  man  stood  silent  and  somehow 
shamed. 

Van  Cleve,  having  by  dint  of  per- 
sistent inquiry  made  reasonably  sure 
that  Bob  had  at  any  rate  left  Tampa, 
now  planned  to  go  on  down  to  Key 
West,  as  he  had  been  repeatedly  ad- 
vised; he  had  made  up  his  mind  to  go 
to  Cuba,  too,  if  need  be,  and,  through 
the  good  offices  of  Mr.  Takuhira,  who 
was  supplied  with  credentials  or  some 
unknown  instruments  of  power  every- 
where, and  who  showed  himself  very 
active  and  useful,  the  trip  might  be  ar- 
ranged. The  attache  himself  had  re- 
ceived orders  from  his  chiefs  to  reach 
the  army  or  fleet  before  Santiago  with- 
out delay;  everybody  was  expecting 
news  of  a  big  engagement  on  land  or  sea, 
perhaps  both,  at  any  moment.  Lorrie 
must  stay  in  Tampa,  Van  decided,  un- 
til she  heard  from  him;  the  two  nurses 
who  had  finally  got  themselves  officially 
recognized,  would  look  after  her,  as 
far  as  their  duties  allowed;  at  least  she 
would  not  be  without  a  soul  she  knew 
in  the  place.  They  had  ceased  to  ex- 
pect her  to  act  the  part  of  volunteer 
nurse  with  which  she  had  begun,  and 
Van  himself  had  ceased  to  play  his  own. 
It  would  have  been  better  never  to 
have  attempted  that  petty  farce,  he 
thought;  of  necessity  it  would  sort  ill 
with  the  tragedies  of  these  days,  and, 
soon  or  late,  they  must  abandon  it. 
Lorrie  acquiesced  in  everything  he 
said;  for  the  time  all  the  spirit  had 
gone  out  of  the  girl. 

'  Do  you  believe  she  '11  ever  get  over 

VOL.  Ill  -  NO.  4 


it?'  the  younger  nurse  questioned;  and 
prophesied  that  Miss  Gilbert  never 
would,  recalling  many  instances  of 
brokenhearted  spinsters  who  had  re- 
mained angelically  faithful  to  an  early 
love  to  the  end  of  their  days.  She  was 
in  a  fever  of  romantic  interest,  and  felt 
as  if  they  were  '  living  in  one  of  Marie 
Corelli's  works,'  as  she  confided  to  her 
senior,  adding  that  she  '  would  n't  have 
missed  it  for  anything!' 

'Oh,  yes,  she'll  get  over  it.  Person 
has  to,  you  know,'  returned  Miss  Rod- 
gers,  who  was  of  an  eminently  prosaic 
temperament.  'I've  seen  a  raft  of 
widows  and  widowers  that  were  all 
broken-up  right  at  first,  but  mercy  me, 
they  all  got  over  it!  —  except  some  of 
the  real  old  widows,  that  is.  The  men 
are  generally  pretty  chipper  inside  of 
a  year.  It 's  not  so  awful  when  you  come 
to  think  about  it.  Nobody  can  keep 
on  grieving  right  along,  day  in  and  day 
out,  forever.  If  they  do,  you  can  take 
it  from  me,  something 's  the  matter 
with  'em!' 

'Well,  I  think  Miss  Gilbert's  the 
kind  that  would  be  loyal  to  the  grave. 
/  think  it's  lovely,'  said  the  other  with 
a  sigh.  She  was  at  hand,  accidentally, 
of  course,  when  Van  Cleve  came,  the 
next  day,  to  say  good-bye  to  Lorrie ;  and 
assured  him  earnestly  that  they  would 
take  good  care  of  Miss  Gilbert.  'She 
is  the  sweetest  thing!  And  I  hope  we'll 
hear  from  you  soon,  Mr.  Kendrick,' 
said  the  girl,  wistfully. 

'  Why,  I  hope  so  myself.  And  I  want 
to  thank  you  very  much  for  everything 
you  're  doing  —  you '  ve  been  most  kind, 
Miss  —  er  —  Miss  Sparrow,'  said  Van, 
warmly,  shaking  her  hand.  He  was 
off  without  another  thought  of  her,  as 
she  dismally  knew;  and  I  believe  they 
have  never  met  since;  when  Van  Cleve 
got  back  to  Tampa,  Miss  Rodgers  had 
been  sent  down  to  Egmont  Key  to  the 
army  hospital  there,  and  he  had  not  lei- 
sure to  look  up  the  other  young  woman. 


530 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


So  now  Mr.  Kendrick  embarked  for 
Key  West,  and  he  did  not  know  how 
much  farther.  The  vessel  on  which  he 
and  Takuhira  secured  passage  put  to 
sea  in  the  august  company  of  the  troop- 
ship Niagara,  now  known  as  Trans- 
port No.  16,  with  seven  hundred  men 
aboard  to  reinforce  Shafter  before  San- 
tiago. And  to  Van's  surprise,  this  large 
body  of  heroes  left  their  native  shores 
without  any  patriotic  or  sentimental 
to-do  whatever,  no  flags,  no  salutes,  no 
crowds  of  weeping  women,  no  band 
playing  'The  girl  I  left  behind  me/  — 
nothing  that  even  Van  Cleve's  work- 
a-day  spirit  would  have  regarded  as 
reasonable  and  appropriate.  A  fellow 
passenger  going  down  on  business  con- 
nected with  furnishing  canned  corned- 
beef  to  the  government,  enlightened 
him. 

'The  good-bye-sweetheart  business 
is  about  played  out,'  he  explained. 
*  You  see  when  the  order  first  came  for 
the  army  to  start,  everybody  went 
piling  down  to  Port  Tampa  and  gave 
the  boys  the  biggest  send-off  they  knew 
how.  Well  then,  the  last  of  the  trans- 
ports had  hardly  got  past  the  bell-buoys 
when  there  came  an  order  for  'em  to 
come  back  home!  Day  or  so  after  that, 
they  tried  it  again.  That  time  they  only 
got  about  three  hundred  yards  down  the 
bay  —  same  old  song-and-dance!  They 
just  settled  right  down  where  they  were 
and  waited.  It  was  two  or  three  days 
after  that,  I  think,  before  they  finally 
did  get  off.  Looked  like  starting  and 
stopping  was  a  kind  of  habit  with  'em 
—  "Farewell  forever  —  forever  fare- 
well !"  as  the  song  says.  Only  people  get 
tired  farewelling,  you  know;  they  can't 
keep  it  up  that  long.  Once  is  enough, 
it  don't  seem  to  have  any  point  the 
second  time.  You  can't  get  a  rise  out 
of  anybody  nowadays.' 

It  was  a  fact  that  Van  Cleve  himself 
began  to  feel,  as  it  were,  callous  to 
further  excitement;  he  had  had  enough 


of  the  alarums  and  excursions,  the 
sight  of  fighting  men  and  armaments. 
Transport  No.  16,  which  had  no  time 
to  spare,  shortly  left  them  behind,  but 
the  waters  were  full  of  other  shipping, 
which  Van  barely  noticed.  There  were 
moments  when  the  whole  adventure 
seemed  to  the  young  man's  naturally 
slow  and  cool  judgment  absolutely  in- 
sane. What  was  he,  Van  Cleve  Ken- 
drick, doing  in  this  outlandish  environ- 
ment? Why,  he  was  going  a  knight-er- 
ranting,  to  be  sure  —  knight-erranting 
at  the  end  of  the  nineteenth  century, 
on  a  little  steamer  with  a  ridiculous 
comic  opera  name,  crowded  with  men, 
tumbling  about  under  the  red-hot  sky, 
with  the  gulls  squeaking  in  their  rear, 
and  the  low  coasts  of  Florida  simmer- 
ing there  ten  miles  off!  And  here,  for  a 
final  incongruity,  was  a  polite  Oriental 
(in  a  straw  hat  and  beautifully  polished 
shoes!)  at  his  elbow,  proffering  him  a 
cigar!  He  took  the  cigar;  he  smoked 
and  talked  with  the  other  men  sitting 
in  the  narrow  shade  of  the  deck-house 
with  their  feet  propped  on  the  extra 
chairs.  He  might  have  been  traveling 
down  to  see  about  tobacco  contracts  or 
canned  corned-beef  for  the  army  like 
the  rest  of  them,  for  all  the  excitement 
he  showed  or,  indeed,  felt;  the  com- 
monplace attitude  of  his  mind  some- 
times puzzled  him. 

Twenty-four  hours  brought  them  to 
Key  West,  on  a  hot,  noisy  morning; 
and  in  the  paper  Van  Cleve  bought  on 
the  dock  he  found  a  final  report  of  the 
fight  at  Las  Guasimas,  much  enlarged, 
with  a  complete  and  verified  list  of 
killed  and  wounded.  Among  the  form- 
er, *  Troop  X,  Lieut.  Philip  Cortwright' 
appeared  half-way  down  the  page.  So 
poor  Lorrie  was  right  in  her  sad  pre- 
sentiment; and  she  too  must  have  seen 
this  last  dispatch  by  now.  Van  read 
the  account  of  the  battle.  It  did  not 
seem  to  have  been  very  spectacular;  no 
charging  up  to  breastworks,  or  hand- 


TO   A   MOTOR 


531 


to-hand  struggle.  Our  advance  had 
been  through  a  practically  pathless 
jungle;  the  Spanish  used  smokeless 
powder  so  that  it  was  almost  impos- 
sible to  locate  them  —  this  statement 
was  repeated  continually  with  a  child- 
like surprise  and  indignation;  also  their 
sharpshooting  was  very  good;  they 
had  men  posted  in  the  trees;  it  had 
been  no  such  slight  skirmish  as  at  first 
reported. 

The  United  States  troops  had  be- 
haved with  the  greatest  firmness  and 
daring,  as  indeed  the  tale  of  losses 
showed;  owing  to  the  scattering  nature 
of  the  fighting,  it  was  not  until  after 
some  time  and  search  that  it  had  been 
possible  to  get  an  accurate  list  of  the 
casualties.  Lieutenant  Cortwright  had 


pressed  forward  very  eagerly,  and  was 
one  of  the  first  to  fall  with  a  bullet 
through  the  lungs  (not  the  heart  as 
previously  stated) ;  he  died  while  being 
carried  to  the  rear.  Mr.  Marshall,  the 
correspondent,  had  not  been  killed, 
but  so  severely  wounded  that  his  re- 
covery was  improbable.  In  another 
column  was  the  statement  that  all  the 
bodies  found  had  been  buried  on  the 
field  and  could  not  be  removed  until 
after  the  close  of  the  war  —  if  even 
then.  The  graves  were  marked,  and 
whatever  small  possessions  of  the  dead 
men  seemed  worth  while,  had  been 
taken  charge  of,  in  most  cases,  by  some 
friend  or  'bunkie.' 

'Poor  Lorrie!'  said  Van  to  himself 
again. 


(To  be  continued.} 


TO  A  MOTOR 


BY  LOUISE   IMOGEN  GUINEY 


To  mark  old  hamlets,  primrose-kirtled,  where  simple  folk  seem  glad  to  dwell; 
To  mark  in  door  and  window  hurtled  the  smudge  and  stench  of  chosen  hell; 
To  mark  his  holiest  necromancies  befouled  so  never  man  can  read  them;  — 
You  Thing !  Suppose  we  part  ?    My  fancy 's  to  throttle  hatreds,  not  to  feed  them. 


INDUSTRIAL  PEACE  OR  WAR 


BY   EVERETT    P.    WHEELER 


THE  strikes  that  destroyed  the  peace 
of  England  during  1911,  the  coal  strike 
in  this  country,  which  lasted  from 
May  12  to  October  23,  1902,  and  its 
threatened  renewal  during  1912,  the 
threatened  strike  of  locomotive  engin- 
eers and  firemen,  the  Lawrence  strike, 
the  hotel-waiters'  strike  in  New  York, 
the  strike  on  the  Boston  Elevated  Rail- 
road, and  the  garment-makers'  strikes, 
have  led  thoughtful  men  to  realize 
the  danger  to  American  prosperity  and 
liberty  from  the  unsettled  relation  be- 
tween capital  and  labor. 

The  old  conception  that  the  laboring 
man  was  weak  and  needed  protec- 
tion, that  he  could  not  stand  out  and 
higgle  for  terms,  and  must  therefore 
receive  special  consideration  from  phil- 
anthropic people,  still  lingers,  but  is  no 
longer  true.  Laboring  men  in  many 
vocations  have  organized.  They  have 
energetic  leaders  whose  counsels  in  the 
main  they  follow  loyally.  These  labor 
organizations  confront  organizations  of 
capital.  In  many  parts  of  the  coun- 
try the  two  face  each  other  with  mu- 
tual distrust  and  animosity,  like  hos- 
tile camps.  When  the  skirmishers  give 
the  alarm  the  armies  are  ready  for  bat- 
tle, and  enter  upon  the  fray  with  no 
consideration  for  the  suffering  caused 
thereby  to  the  great  majority  who  take 
no  part  in  the  particular  industry 
threatened  by  the  war,  but  who  are  in 
various  ways  dependent  upon  the  re- 
sults. Of  course,  in  one  sense,  every- 
body is  a  capitalist  and  almost  every- 
body is  a  laborer.  But  in  this  article  I 
use  the  words  in  the  ordinary  sense. 

532 


The  capitalist,  in  our  usual  parlance,  is 
the  man  who  controls  large  accumulat- 
ed capital,  much  of  it  his  own,  much 
of  it  that  of  stockholders  who  intrust 
their  share  to  his  care.  The  laborer  is 
he  who  earns  wages  in  some  business 
carried  on  by  the  capitalist. ' 

Let  us  consider  what  can  be  done  to 
prevent  these  disastrous  wars.  The  fun- 
damental American  principle  is  'Lib- 
erty, protected  by  law.'  Edward  Ever- 
ett said  that  the  love  of  this  '  gave  to 
Lafayette  his  spotless  fame.'  It  is  the 
principle  embodied  in  the  American 
Constitution.  The  latter  undertook  to 
insure  to  each  man  liberty  to  use  his 
talents  and  opportunities  in  the  way 
that  seemed  wisest  to  him,  provided  he 
did  not  infringe  upon  the  equal  right  of 
his  neighbor.  The  whole  machinery  of 
government  described  in  the  Constitu- 
tion has  for  its  principal  object  the  pro- 
tection of  the  individual  in  the  exercise 
of  this  right.  The  right  of  the  capital- 
ists to  combine  for  any  lawful  purpose, 
and  that  of  the  laborers  to  combine  for 
any  lawful  purpose,  are  equally  sacred. 
But  each  combination  should  be  sub- 
ject to  laws  made  for  the  general  wel- 
fare. 

How  then  shall  the  enjoyment  of  the 
rights  of  each  be  secured  without  in- 
fringing upon  the  rights  of  the  other? 
In  an  uncivilized  country  men  fight  for 
their  rights.  Civilization  should  pro- 
vide tribunals  before  which  individuals 
must  appear  who  cannot  agree,  and 
who  claim  rights  that  conflict  with  each 
other.  It  enforces  the  judgment  of  these 
tribunals  by  the  sheriff  or  marshal,  by 


INDUSTRIAL  PEACE  OR  WAR 


533 


the  posse  comitatus,  and,  if  necessary, 
by  the  military.  For  it  is  an  essential 
characteristic  of  a  government  really 
civilized,  that  the  decision  of  the  tri- 
bunal previously  established,  rendered 
after  a  full  and  fair  hearing  of  both 
sides,  must  be  obeyed. 

One  of  the  most  familiar  and  access- 
ible illustrations  of  the  application  of 
this  principle  is  to  be  found  in  what  is 
perhaps  the  earliest  recorded  account 
of  a  trade-union  riot.1 

*A  Silversmith  named  Demetrius, 
who  made  silver  models  of  the  shrine 
of  Artemis,  and  so  gave  a  great  deal  of 
work  to  the  artisans,  got  these  men  to- 
gether as  well  as  the  workmen  engaged 
in  similar  occupations  [a  sympathetic 
strike]  and  said:  "Men,  you  know  that 
our  prosperity  depends  upon  this  work, 
and  you  see  and  hear  that,  not  only  at 
Ephesus,  but  in  almost  the  whole  of 
Roman  Asia,  this  Paul  has  convinced 
and  won  over  great  numbers  of  people, 
by  his  assertion  that  those  Gods  which 
are  made  by  hands  are  not  Gods  at  all, 
so  that  not  only  is  this  business  of  ours 
likely  to  fall  into  discredit,  but  there 
is  the  further  danger  that  the  Temple 
of  the  great  Goddess  Artemis  will  be 
thought  nothing  of,  and  that  she  her- 
self will  be  deprived  of  her  splendor, 
though  all  Roman  Asia  and  the  whole 
world  worship  her."  When  they  heard 
this,  the  men  were  greatly  enraged,  and 
began  shouting,  "Great  is  Artemis 
of  the  Ephesians!"  The  commotion 
spread  through  the  whole  city,  and  the 
people  rushed  together,  dragging  with 
them  Gaius  and  Aristarchus,  .  .  .  who 
were  Paul's  traveling  companions.  .  .  . 

'When  the  Recorder  had  succeeded 
in  quieting  the  crowd,  he  said:  "Men  of 
Ephesus,  who  is  there,  I  ask  you,  who 
needs  to  be  told  that  this  city  of  Ephe- 
sus is  Warden  of  the  Temple  of  the 
great  Artemis  and  of  the  statue  that  fell 

1  Acts  xix,  24-29,  35-39;  Twentieth-Century 
Testament  Version. 


down  from  Zeus?  As  these  are  undeni- 
able facts  you  ought  to  keep  calm  and 
do  nothing  rash;  for  you  have  brought 
these  men  here,  though  they  are 
neither  robbers  of  Temples  nor  blas- 
phemers of  our  Goddess.  If,  however, 
Demetrius  and  the  artisans  who  are 
acting  with  him  have  a  charge  to  make 
against  any  one,  there  are  Court  Days 
and  there  are  Magistrates;  let  both 
parties  take  legal  proceedings.  But  if 
you  want  anything  more,  it  will  have 
to  be  settled  in  the  regular  Assembly." ' 

In  short,  there  was,  under  the  Ro- 
man law,  in  effect,  a  court  of  arbitra- 
tion, and  an  assembly  to  which  matters 
justiciable  before  this  court  could  be 
referred.  Violence  and  riot  were  un- 
lawful, and  were  promptly  suppressed. 

How  comes  it,  then,  that  in  this 
twentieth  century  we  have  not  machin- 
ery adequate  to  accomplish  this  re- 
sult? Our  method  is  that  of  Sangrado: 
'  Warm  water  and  bleeding —  the  warm 
water  of  our  mawkish  policy,  and  the 
lancets  of  our  military.' 

The  old  English  law  dealt  with  this 
subject  in  a  different  way.  On  the  one 
hand,  it  allowed  a  borough  to  prohibit 
the  exercise  of  a  particular  craft  except 
by  those  who  belonged  to  the  guild  of 
that  craft.  This  was  the  closed  shop, 
and  in  fact  it  existed  in  many  English 
boroughs.  This  exclusive  privilege  was 
abolished  by  one  of  the  reform  laws  of 
1835.  This  law  was  considered,  and 
was  in  fact,  an  act  of  emancipation. 
The  legalized  closed  shop  had  caused 
such  grievous  abuses  that  it  was  no 
longer  tolerable. 

On  the  other  hand,  by  the  old  Eng- 
lish law,  strikes  were  unlawful,  and 
heavy  penalties  were  imposed  upon 
workmen  who  refused  to  work  for  the 
rate  of  wages  fixed  by  local  law.  This 
combination  act  was  repealed  in  1825. 
Since  then,  in  England  and  America, 
we  have  been  trying  experiments.  Capi- 
talists have  formed  their  combinations. 


534 


INDUSTRIAL  PEACE  OR  WAR 


Laborers  have  formed  theirs.  The  pow- 
er and  wealth  of  each  have  increased. 
The  wars  between  them  have  become 
more  bitter  and  more  injurious  to  the 
public. 

Finally,  came  the  great  strike  in  the 
year  1894.  This  grew  out  of  a  contro- 
versy between  the  Pullman  Company 
and  the  workmen  in  the  model  town  of 
Pullman  —  a  town  that  had  the  most 
perfect  system  of  drainage  and  the 
most  comfortable  tenements  in  the 
world.  Nevertheless,  owners  and  ten- 
ants could  not  agree.  The  tenants  pro- 
cured a  sympathetic  strike.  Railway 
trains  on  all  the  railways  leading  into 
Chicago  were  held  up  by  force.  The 
United  States  mails  could  not  be  trans- 
ported. Governor  Altgeld  refused  to 
interfere,  and  had  it  not  been  for  the 
courage  and  determination  of  Grover 
Cleveland  and  of  Richard  Olney,  we 
should  have  had  chaos  in  Illinois.  The 
Federal  troops  were  ordered  out.  Gen- 
eral Miles  took  command.  He  replied 
significantly  to  the  threats  of  Altgeld : 
If  you  persist  in  defying  the  laws  of 
your  country  we  will  give  you  another 
Appomattox.  And  the  insurrection  was 
suppressed. 

In  this  case  the  judicial  power  was 
appealed  to.  The  judges  of  the  Federal 
Circuit  Court  granted  an  injunction 
against  the  rioters.  This  was  sustained 
by  the  United  States  Supreme  Court 
in  the  Debs  Case.1  That  injunction  is 
sometimes  cited  as  an  instance  of  the 
hostility  of  the  courts  to  organized 
labor.  It  was  no  more  that  than  was 
the  indictment  of  the  McNamaras  or 
of  Darrow.  It  was  hostility  to  mur- 
der and  violence,  and  that  hostility 
the  judicial  branch  of  the  government 
should  always  manifest. 

But  this  decision  of  the  Court  was 

not,   and   under  our   present  system 

could  not  be,  rendered  until  violence 

was  threatened.    In  fact,  neither  that 

1  Reported  158,  U.  S.  Rep.,  564. 


decision,  nor  its  enforcement  by  the 
army,  could  have  been  obtained  unless 
there  had  been  actual  riot  and  blood- 
shed. That  is  the  defect  of  the  present 
American  system. 

The  suffering  and  loss  of  life  caused 
by  this  strike  led  to  the  passage  of  the 
Erdman  Act,  June  1,  1898.  This  re- 
lates to  carriers  engaged  in  interstate 
commerce  and  their  employees.  It  pro- 
vides that  when  a  dispute  arises  be- 
tween them,  either  party  may  appeal 
to  a  tribunal  of  mediation  consisting 
of  the  Commissioner  of  Labor  and  a 
member  of  the  Interstate  Commerce 
Commission.  Since  the  organization  of 
the  United  States  Commerce  Court,  a 
judge  of  that  Court  may  be  called  in. 
If  this  tribunal  fails  to  secure  an  agree- 
ment it  endeavors  to  induce  the  parties 
to  submit  the  controversy  to  arbitra- 
tion. If  arbitration  is  agreed  upon, 
each  party  selects  one  arbitrator,  and 
these  two  choose  an  umpire.  If  they  do 
not  agree,  the  mediators  name  the  um- 
pire. The  act  provides  'that  the  re- 
spective parties  to  the  award  will  each 
faithfully  execute  the  same/  During 
the  pendency  of  the  arbitration,  both 
lockouts  and  strikes  are  unlawful.  Dis- 
crimination against  members  of  labor 
organizations  and  blacklisting  are  pro- 
hibited by  the  act. 

This  act  has  been  invoked  in  nearly 
sixty  controversies  during  the  last  five 
years,  and  in  every  instance  both  par- 
ties have  executed  the  award.  It  does 
not,  in  terms,  provide  for  compulsory 
arbitration.  It  is  like  a  law  which 
should  enact  that  if  two  neighbors 
cannot  agree  as  to  the  boundary-line 
between  their  property,  they  may  sub- 
mit the  question  to  arbitration  in  a  cer- 
tain prescribed  manner.  Failing  this, 
they  may  fight  it  out.  That  certainly 
would  not  be  considered  a  civilized 
way  of  settling  such  a  controversy. 
Unfortunately  there  is  such  a  lack  of 
mutual  confidence  between  labor  and 


INDUSTRIAL  PEACE  OR  WAR 


535 


capital  that  nothing  better  has  yet 
obtained  their  joint  approval.  And  the 
majority,  the  general  public,  have  been 
so  busy  about  their  own  affairs  that 
they  have  let  the  thing  alone. 

Inadequate,  however,  as  the  Erd- 
man  Act  is,  it  is  better  than  nothing. 
When,  in  1902,  the  great  coal  strike 
broke  out  in  Pennsylvania,  there  was 
no  machinery  for  voluntary  arbitra- 
tion provided  for  the  coal  trade.  The 
cruelty  of  the  strikers  to  all  who  did 
not  cooperate  with  them,  the  absolute 
barbarity  with  which  they  persecuted 
even  the  wives  and  children  of  all  in  the 
anthracite  district  who  would  not  join 
them,  justified  Wayne  MacVeagh's  de- 
scription: 'The  strike  of  1902  was  a 
foretaste  of  hell.  Each  workman  feels 
it  is  his  personal  quarrel;  in  each  breast 
there  are  kindled  feelings  of  enmity 
against  all  arrayed  on  the  side  of  the 
capitalists.' 

The  effect  of  this  strike,  as  usual, 
was  most  grievous  to  the  innocent 
poor.  Hundreds  of  thousands  of  poor 
people  in  Eastern  cities  suffered  from 
cold  and  hunger  during  that  evil  winter 
of  1902-03,  because  they  had  to  pay 
double  for  their  pailfuls  of  coal.  It  often 
happens  that  the  organized  strikers  and 
the  organized  employers  care  as  little 
for  the  sufferings  of  those  outside  their 
organizations  as  did  the  Genius  of  War 
and  Famine  in  Coleridge's  famous 
poem:  — 

The  baby  beat  his  dying  mother, 
I  had  starved  the  one,  and  was  starving  the 
other. 

They  do  not  see  these  sufferings,  and 
they  ignore  what  is  not  under  their 
eyes.  All  the  more,  therefore,  is  it  the 
duty  of  the  public  to  intervene  and 
prevent  the  wars  which  cause  the 
sufferings. 

President  Roosevelt  never  did  a 
wiser  thing  than  when  he  appointed  a 
commission  to  'inquire  into,  consider, 
and  pass  upon  the  questions  in  contro- 


versy in  connection  with  the  strike  in 
the  anthracite  region,  and  the  causes 
out  of  which  the  controversy  arose.'  A 
commission  of  seven  was  appointed,  of 
which  George  Gray,  presiding  judge 
of  the  United  States  Circuit  Court 
of  Appeals  in  the  Third  Circuit,  was 
chairman.  The  mine  owners  and  the 
'striking  anthracite-mine  workers'  ap- 
peared before  the  commission.  The  lat- 
ter were  represented  by  John  Mitchell, 
who  was  also  President  of  the  United 
Mine  Workers  of  America;  but  he 
did  not  appear  officially  in  this  capac- 
ity, because  that  organization  included 
bituminous-mine  workers,  and  it  was 
claimed  with  some  justice  by  the  own- 
ers of  anthracite  mines,  that  the  inter- 
ests of  the  two  groups  were  diverse. 

The  commission  made  its  award 
March  18, 1903.  This  was  observed  by 
both  parties,  has  been  modified  from 
time  to  time,  but  in  its  essential  fea- 
tures has  proved  the  basis  of  mutual 
agreement  ever  since  it  was  made. 

This  award  contains  recommenda- 
tions to  which  I  now  ask  attention. 
They  have  been  ignored  for  nine  years. 
It  is  time  to  brush  the  dust  from  their 
leaves. 

'The  Commission  is  led  to  the  con- 
viction, that  the  question  of  the  recog- 
nition of  the  union  and  of  dealing  with 
the  mine  workers  through  their  union, 
was  considered  by  both  operators  and 
miners  to  be  one  of  the  most  important 
involved  in  the  controversy  which  cul- 
minated in  the  strike.  .  .  . 

'  The  men  employed  in  a  certain  line 
of  work  or  branch  of  industry  have 
similar  feelings,  aspirations,  and  con- 
victions, the  natural  outgrowth  of  their 
common  work  and  common  trend  or 
application  of  mind.  The  union,  repre- 
senting their  community  of  interests, 
is  the  logical  result  of  their  commun- 
ity thought.  It  encourages  calm  and 
intelligent  consideration  of  matters  of 
common  interest.  In  the  absence  of  a 


536 


INDUSTRIAL  PEACE  OR  WAR 


union,  the  extremist  gets  a  ready  hear- 
ing for  incendiary  appeals  to  prejudice 
or  passion,  when  a  grievance,  real  or 
fancied,  of  a  general  nature,  presents 
itself  for  consideration.  .  .  . 

*  Trade  unionism  is  rapidly  becoming 
a  matter  of  business,  and  that  em- 
ployer who  fails  to  give  the  same  care- 
ful attention  to  the  question  of  his 
relation  to  his  labor  or  his  employees, 
which  he  gives  to  the  other  factors 
which  enter  into  the  conduct  of  his 
business,  makes  a  mistake,  which  soon- 
er or  later  he  will  be  obliged  to  correct. 
.  .  .  Experience  shows  that  the  more 
full  the  recognition  given  to  a  trades 
union,  the  more  businesslike  and  re- 
sponsible it  becomes.  ...  If  the  energy 
of  the  employer  is  directed  to  discour- 
agement and  repression  of  the  union, 
he  need  not  be  surprised  if  the  more 
radically  inclined  members  are  the 
ones  most  frequently  heard.  .  .  . 

'  In  order  to  be  entitled  to  such  recog- 
nition, the  labor  organization  or  union 
must  give  the  same  recognition  to  the 
rights  of  the  employer  and  of  others, 
which  it  demands  for  itself  and  for  its 
members.  The  worker  has  the  right  to 
quit  or  to  strike  in  conjunction  with  his 
fellows,  when  by  so  doing  he  does  not 
violate  a  contract  made  by  or  for  him. 
He  has  neither  right  nor  license  to 
destroy  or  to  damage  the  property  of 
the  employer;  neither  has  he  any  right 
or  license  to  intimidate  or  to  use  vio- 
lence against  the  man  who  chooses  to 
exercise  his  right  to  work,  nor  to  in- 
terfere with  those  who  do  not  feel  that 
the  union  offers  the  best  method  for 
adjusting  grievances.  .  .  . 

'The  non-union  man  assumes  the 
whole  responsibility  which  results  from 
his  being  such,  but  his  right  and  priv- 
ilege of  being  a  non-union  man  are 
sanctioned  in  law  and  morals.  .  .  .  The 
contention  that  a  majority  of  the  em- 
ployees in  an  industry,  by  voluntarily 
associating  themselves  in  a  union,  ac- 


quire authority  over  those  who  do  not  so 
associate  themselves,  is  untenable.  .  .  . 

'It,  accordingly,  hereby  adjudges 
and  awards :  That  any  difficulty  or  dis- 
agreement arising  under  this  award, 
either  as  to  its  interpretation  or  appli- 
cation, or  in  any  way  growing  out  of 
the  relations  of  the  employers  and  the 
employed,  which  cannot  be  settled  or 
adjusted  by  consultation  between  the 
superintendent  or  manager  of  the  mine 
or  mines,  and  the  miner  or  miners  di- 
rectly interested,  or  is  of  a  scope  too 
large  to  be  so  settled  and  adjusted, 
shall  be  referred  to  a  permanent  joint 
committee,  to  be  called  a  board  of  con- 
ciliation, to  consist  of  six  persons,  ap- 
pointed as  hereinafter  provided.  That 
is  to  say,  if  there  shall  be  a  division  of 
the  whole  region  into  three  districts,  in 
each  of  which  there  shall  exist  an  or- 
ganization representing  a  majority  of 
the  mine  workers  of  such  district,  one 
of  said  board  of  conciliation  shall  be 
appointed  by  the  operators,  the  operat- 
ors in  each  of  said  districts  appointing 
one  person.  .  .  . 

'The  right  to  remain  at  work  where 
others  have  ceased  to  work,  or  to  en- 
gage anew  in  work  which  others  have 
abandoned,  is  part  of  the  personal  lib- 
erty of  a  citizen,  that  can  never  be 
surrendered,  and  every  infringement 
thereof  merits,  and  should  receive,  the 
stern  denouncement  of  the  law.  .  .  . 
Approval  of  the  subject  of  a  strike,  or 
persuasion  that  its  purpose  is  high  and 
noble,  can  not  sanction  an  attempt  to 
destroy  the  right  of  others  to  a  different 
opinion  in  this  respect,  or  to  interfere 
with  their  conduct  in  choosing  to  work 
upon  what  terms  and  at  what  time  and 
for  whom  it  may  please  them  so  to 
do 

'It  also  becomes  our  duty  to  con- 
demn another  less  violent,  but  not  less 
reprehensible,  form  of  attack  upon 
those  rights  and  liberties  of  the  citizen, 
which  the  public  opinion  of  civilized 


INDUSTRIAL  PEACE  OR  WAR 


537 


countries  recognizes  and  protects.  .  .  . 
What  is  popularly  known  as  the  boy- 
cott (a  word  of  evil  omen  and  unhappy 
origin)  is  a  form  of  coercion  by  which  a 
combination  of  many  persons  seek  to 
work  their  will  upon  a  single  person,  or 
upon  a  few  persons,  by  compelling 
others  to  abstain  from  social  or  bene- 
ficial business  intercourse  with  such 
person  or  persons.  Carried  to  the  ex- 
tent sometimes  practiced  in  aid  of  a 
strike,  and  as  was  in  some  instances 
practiced  in  connection  with  the  late 
anthracite  strike,  it  is  a  cruel  weapon 
of  aggression,  and  its  use  immoral  and 
anti-social.  .  .  . 

4  The  practices,  which  we  are  con- 
demning, would  be  outside  the  pale  of 
civilized  war.  In  civilized  warfare,  wo- 
men and  children  and  the  defenseless 
are  safe  from  attack,  and  a  code  of 
honor  controls  the  parties  to  such  war- 
fare, which  cries  out  against  the  boy- 
cott we  have  in  view.  Cruel  and  cow- 
ardly are  terms  not  too  severe  by  which 
to  characterize  it. 

*  Closely  allied  to  the  boycott  is  the 
blacklist,  by  which  employers  of  labor 
sometimes  prevent  the  employment  by 
others,  of  men  whom   they  have  dis- 
charged.   In  other  words,  it  is  a  com- 
bination among  employers  not  to  em- 
ploy workmen  discharged  by  any  of  the 
members  of  said  combination.    This 
system  is  as  reprehensible  and  as  cruel 
as  the  boycott,  and  should  be  frowned 
down  by  all  humane  men.' 

The  Commission  finally  recommend- 
ed the  substantial  adoption  of  an  act 
which  was  drawn  by  Charles  Francis 
Adams.  This  is  printed  in  the  Appen- 
dix. It  is  entitled,  'An  Act  to  provide 
for  the  Investigation  of  Controversies 
affecting  Interstate  Commerce  and  for 
other  Purposes.' 

*  Section  1.    Whenever  within  any 
State  or  States,  Territory  or  Territor- 
ies of  the  United  States,  a  controversy 
concerning  wages,  hours  of  labor,  or 


conditions  of  employment  shall  arise 
between  an  employer,  being  an  indi- 
vidual, partnership,  association,  cor- 
poration or  other  combination,  and  the 
employees  or  association  or  combina- 
tion of  employees  of  such  employer,  by 
reason  of  which  controversy  the  trans- 
portation of  the  United  States  mails, 
the  operations,  civil  or  military,  of  the 
Government  of  the  United  States,  or 
the  free  and  regular  movement  of  com- 
merce among  the  several  States  and 
with  foreign  nations  is  in  the  judgment 
of  the  President  interrupted  or  directly 
affected,  or  threatened  with  being  so 
interrupted  or  so  directly  affected,  the 
President  shall  in  his  discretion  inquire 
into  the  same  and  investigate  the 
causes  thereof. 

*  Section  2.  To  this  end  the  Presi- 
dent may  appoint  a  special  Commis- 
sion, not  exceeding  seven  in  number,  of 
persons  in  his  judgment  specially  qual- 
ified to  conduct  such  an  investigation.' 

It  then  proceeds  to  provide  for  the 
organization  of  the  Commission,  for  a 
full  hearing  of  the  parties  to  the  con- 
troversy, authorizes  the  Commission 
to  administer  oaths,  to  compel  the  at- 
tendance of  witnesses  and  the  produc- 
tion of  books  and  papers.  To  this  end 
the  Commission  may  invoke  the  aid  of 
the  courts  of  the  United  States,  and  is 
vested  with  all  the  powers  of  the  Inter- 
state Commerce  Commission,  and  the 
courts  of  the  United  States  are  required 
to  render  it  aid  to  the  same  extent  as 
aid  is  rendered  to  the  Interstate  Com- 
merce Commission.  It  authorizes  the 
Commission  to  *  enter  and  inspect  any 
public  institution,  factory,  workshop, 
or  mine.'  After  the  investigation  of 
the  controversy,  the  Commission  shall 
formulate  its  report  thereon,  setting 
forth  the  causes  of  the  same,  locating, 
as  far  as  may  be,  the  responsibilities 
thereof,  and  making  such  specifications 
and  recommendations  as  shall  in  its 
judgment  put  an  end  to  such  contro- 


538 


INDUSTRIAL  PEACE  OR  WAR 


versy  or  disturbance,  and  prevent  a 
recurrence  thereof. 

Unfortunately,  this  bill  was  not  in- 
troduced in  Congress.  No  state  gave 
sufficient  attention  to  the  recommenda- 
tion of  the  Commission  to  modify  this 
bill  so  as  to  adapt  its  provisions  to  con- 
troversies within  the  state.  It  is  true 
that  some  states  have  some  legislation 
on  the  subject.  But  the  best  is  insuf- 
ficient because  it  fails  to  provide  an 
adequate  tribunal  with  adequate  pow- 
ers for  the  decision  of  these  labor  con- 
troversies. Apparently  the  American 
people  prefer  an  occasional  war  to  a 
continual  peace.  Is  it  not  time  to  re- 
vise this  conclusion  and  follow  deliber- 
ately the  things  that  make  for  peace? 
And  how  can  there  be  peace  without 
an  arbitral  tribunal,  which  is  adequate 
to  decide  controversies  without  resort 
to  war? 

A  bill  to  extend  the  provisions  of  the 
Erdman  Act  to  the  owners  and  lessees 
of  coal  mines,  the  produce  of  which 
enters  into  interstate  or  foreign  com- 
merce, and  their  employees,  was  in- 
troduced in  the  Sixty-second  Congress 
by  Mr.  R.  E.  Lee  of  Pennyslvania,1 
was  amended  and  reported  by  the 
Committee  on  Interstate  and  Foreign 
Commerce,  but  unfortunately  did  not 
become  a  law.  It  is  a  step  in  advance, 
and  will,  we  hope,  be  pressed  in  the 
next  Congress.  It  may  lead  to  enact- 
ment of  a  more  comprehensive  meas- 
ure, not  only  by  Congress,  but  in  every 
state.  The  need  for  this  has  never 
been  better  stated  than  by  Governor 
Stone  of  Pennsylvania  in  1902:  — 

*A  law  that  would  settle  labor  dis- 
putes between  employer  and  employed 
must  of  necessity  be  a  compulsory  arbi- 
tration law,  and  the  award  must  be 
final  and  conclusive.  The  law  must  be 
drafted  for  the  protection  of  society, 
and  must  not  be  drawn  in  the  interest 
of  employer  or  employee.  Experience 

1  H.  R.  22,012;  in  amended  form,  H.  R.  25,109. 


teaches  that  strikes  endanger  life  and 
property.  When  life  and  property  are 
in  jeopardy,  society  is  menaced.  The 
right  of  the  public,  the  right  of  society, 
is  greater  than  the  rights  of  the  par- 
ticipants on  both  sides  in  any  strike/ 

The  objections  to  compulsory  arbi- 
tration might  be  urged  with  equal 
force  against  our  whole  judicial  system. 
This  has  jurisdiction  over  the  most  sa- 
cred of  human  relations.  If  a  man  and 
his  wife  cannot  agree  as  to  the  custody 
of  their  children,  either  may  compel  the 
other  to  submit  the  controversy  to  the 
arbitrament  of  a  judge.  The  court 
decides  disputes  between  partners.  It 
compels  the  specific  performance  of 
contracts.  Why,  then,  should  not  the 
majority  of  our  people  provide  by  law 
a  tribunal  with  powers  adequate  to  de- 
cide controversies  between  capital  and 
labor,  and  with  power  if  necessary  to 
enforce  its  decision? 

But  forcible  enforcement  would  be 
unnecessary.  Not  once  in  a  thousand 
times  is  the  power  of  sheriff  or  marshal 
invoked  to  enforce  the  judgment  of  a 
court.  The  awards  of  the  arbitral  com- 
mittees of  the  various  exchanges  are 
obeyed  without  formal  compulsion. 

In  labor  controversies  the  most  .ef- 
fectual compulsion  is  the  indirect  me- 
thod of  prohibiting  strikes  and  lock- 
outs pending  the  arbitration.  This 
prohibition  obviates  controversy  as  to 
whether  picketing  is  peaceful  and  as  to 
whether  persuasion  has  developed  into 
physical  violence.  In  short,  it  provides 
for  peace  and  prohibits  war,  and  sub- 
stitutes for  war  a  tribunal  with  pow- 
ers to  decide  conflicting  claims  upon 
their  merits. 

This  system  of  conciliation  and  ar- 
bitration has  been  tried  by  several  of 
the  governments  which  are  federated  in 
Australasia,  and  on  the  whole  with  suc- 
cess. That  does  not  of  itself  prove  that 
it  would  work  well  in  America.  But  we 
should  be  foolish,  indeed,  if  we  did  not 


THE  TELE-VICTORIAN  AGE 


539 


profit  by  the  experience  of  others.  No 
better  plan  has  been  suggested.  The 
present  situation  is  intolerable.  Let  us 
then  give  heed  to  the  report  of  the 
State  Labor  Bureau  of  New  South 
Wales,  for  the  year  ending  June  30, 
1909:-— 

'The  Act  has  already  lived  down  the 
bitter  hostility  of  a  section  of  the  trade 
unions,  the  majority  of  them  having 
already  applied  for  the  appointment  of 
Wages  Boards  to  determine  rates  of 
wages  and  conditions  of  labor  in  their 
particular  industries.  The  opinion  is 
fast  gaining  ground  in  industrial  cir- 
cles that  greater  benefits  are  likely  to 
accrue  from  the  operations  of  the  Act 
than  could  be  expected  from  the  meth- 
ods of  a  strike.' 

The  award  of  the  Board  of  Arbitra- 
tion, which  a  few  months  ago  consid- 
ered and  decided  the  controversy  as  to 


wages  between  the  locomotive  engin- 
eers and  the  railroads  of  this  country, 
had  under  consideration  also  the  sub- 
ject of  arbitration.  The  facts  present- 
ed to  this  board  showed  very  clearly 
the  great  danger  to  the  whole  commun- 
ity incident  to  the  possibility  of  a  gen- 
eral railroad  strike.  It  recommends  a 
system  of  compulsory  arbitration.  The 
only  dissent  by  one  of  the  members 
of  the  board  was  on  the  ground  that 
such  a  system  would  be  impracticable. 
The  answer  to  that  is  that  it  is  com- 
petent for  the  legislature  to  declare 
that  either  a  strike  or  a  lockout  is  ille- 
gal until  after  a  hearing  before,  and 
an  award  by,  an  arbitration  tribunal. 
Such  a  system  has  succeeded  in  Can- 
ada and  other  countries  where  it  has 
been  tried.  There  seems  to  be  no  rea- 
son to  doubt  that  it  would  be  success- 
ful in  the  United  States. 


THE  TELE-VICTORIAN  AGE 


BY  JOHN   H.   FINLEY 


IN  violation  of  one  of  the  etymolo- 
gist's rules,  I  have  made  two  languages 
conspire  to  give  name  to  the  age  in 
which  we  live  —  the  age  of  the  victory 
over  the  remote  in  space  and  time,  the 
age  of  the  conquest  of  the  Far,  the 
'  Tele-Victorian  Age/ 

The  ancient  Hellenic  age  might  fit- 
ly be  called  by  contrast  the  Perinikian 
Age  (to  conform  for  the  moment  to 
the  etymologist's  requirements),  the 
age  of  the  conquest  of  the  Near.  The 
very  language  of  that  ancient  age  would 
intimate  to  us  this  characteristic  even 
if  we  had  no  other  testimony.  In  a 


standard  Greek  lexicon  there  are  sixty- 
seven  columns  of  words  with  the  prefix 
'peri*  (though  in  some  of  these  words 
the  prefix  has  not  the  significance  of 
nearness,  but  the  derived  sense  of  com- 
pleteness), and  there  are  less  than  five 
columns  of  words  with  the  prefix  'tele.' 
And  even  these  latter  words,  when  they 
are  defined  in  what  is  now  known  to  be 
their  geographical  reach,  are  also  but 
peri  words — words  that  tell  of  what  we 
should  now  call  the  Near.  The  striking 
afar  of  telebolos  was  not  beyond  the 
reach  of  the  sling,  the  telemachos  of  the 
arrow.  The  teleplanos,  far-wandering, 


540 


THE  TELE-VICTORIAN  AGE 


traveler  had  never  journeyed  farther 
on  the  earth's  surface  than  one  would 
now  go  in  a  day  or  two  of  twentieth- 
century  locomotion.  The  telekleitos, 
far-famed,  hero  would  be  thought  in 
this  age  to  have  but  provincial  reputa- 
tion. The  teleskopos,  far-seeing,  wise 
man  could  actually  see  no  greater  dis- 
tance than  his  naked  eye  could  dis- 
tinguish objects  from  the  tallest  peaks 
of  Greece.  The  teleboas,  far-shouting, 
orator  could  make  himself  heard  no 
farther  than  his  stentorian  voice  could 
carry.  The  telegonos,  far-born,  foreigner 
came  from  a  place  probably  no  more 
distant  than  Chicago  from  Boston. 
And  telothi,  the  far,  far,  far-away,  was 
no  more  remote  than  San  Francisco. 

The  brilliant  author  of  The  World 
Machine 1  has  recently  written  of  that 
age:  'Means  of  communication  were 
then  slow;  no  "liners"  then  raced 
straight  and  swiftly  from  port  to  port. 
Men  did  not  venture  far.  Though 
there  were  records  of  the  compass  in 
use  in  China  nine  centuries  back  of 
this,  it  was  unknown  to  the  Greek  and 
Tyrian  mariners,  who  crept  along  the 
coast  of  the  sea  in  Media-Terra,  the 
known  terra,  and  out  through  the  Pil- 
lars of  Hercules  to  the  Ultima  Thule. 
From  the  ports  of  Tyre  to  the  Gateway 
of  Night  was  scarce  two  thousand 
miles.  The  Hellespont  and  the  Euxine 
carried  the  map-maker's  stylus  scarce 
another  thousand  eastward.  Half  this 
combined  distance  reached  from  the 
mythical  borders  of  Hyperborea  to  the 
fabulous  regions  of  the  Upper  Nile. 
The  known  earth  was  a  rectangle  of 
about  the  present  size  of  the  United 
States.' 

The  perimeter  of  the  telouros,  the 
distant-boundaried,  territory  was  in- 
deed but  the  circumference  of  the  Near. 
Environment  —  adaptation  to  which 
has  been  defined  by  high  authority  as 
education  —  was  within  range  of  the 
1  The  World  Machine,  By  Carl  Snyder. 


eye,  the  ear,  the  foot,  or  the  sail;  and  a 
much  simpler  matter  adaptation,  and 
so  education,  were,  than  they  are  in 
these  days,  when  the  adaptations  have 
to  be  made  to  environments  beyond 
all  reach  of  these.  Think  of  one  man 
who  was  '  abreast  if  not  in  advance  of 
•the  astronomy  of  his  day,'  who  had, 
as  he  himself  said,  of  all  his  country- 
men, *  traversed  the  greatest  part  of  the 
earth,'  who  wrote  a  treatise  on  naviga- 
tion, who  was  learned  in  physics,  dis- 
coursing on  the  Magnet,  the  Rays  of 
Light,  and  the  Water  Clock;  who  was 
'fond  of  music  and  poetry,'  leaving 
works  on  Rhythm  and  Harmony  and 
on  the  beauty  of  epic  poems;  who  was  a 
critic  in  matters  of  art;  who  must  *  have 
been  a  physician'  since  he  left  a  book 
on  Fever,  another  on  Prognostics,  an- 
other on  Pestilences,  another  on  the 
Right  Way  of  Living;  who  assumed  to 
write  authoritatively  on  such  varied 
knowledges  as  Agriculture,  Tactics,  the 
Principles  of  Laws,  the  Calendar  and 
Colors,  Ethics,  and  finally  on  Cheerful- 
ness; besides  being  a  zoologist,  anato- 
mist, and  psychologist.  But  with  all 
this  reputed  wisdom,  his  science  was 
the  science  of  the  Near,  the  Visible,  the 
Palpable,  the  Audible,  even  though  his 
speculation  was  of  the  Afar. 

Nor  was  it  the  age  of  the  Near  in 
space  alone.  The  Greek  chronology 
did  not  stretch  backward  beyond  that 
which  was  accepted  as  the  age  of  the 
world  in  my  own  youth.  I  remember 
distinctly  that  in  my  college  days  the 
chronology  of  Ussher  was  followed  in 
fixing  the  date  of  the  creation  of  man 
as  the  year  4004  B.C.  Since  then  the 
earth  has  grown  a  million  years  or  more 
older;  and  the  age  of  man  has  been  in- 
creased to  at  least  two  hundred  thous- 
and years. 

And  a  few  months  ago  I  heard  the 
great  astronomer-physicist  Arrhenius, 
speaking  of  the  propagation  of  life 
through  the  universe,  express  the  view 


THE  TELE-VICTORIAN  AGE 


541 


that  spores  of  life  caught  or  propelled 
beyond  one  planet  or  star  atmosphere, 
wandered  in  space  until,  brought  with- 
in the  force  of  another  gravitation,  they 
entered  as  immigrant  star-dust  the  at- 
mospheric shores  of  another  planet  or 
star,  beginning  a  new  life  that  was  to 
evolve  into  the  vegetable,  and  the  ani- 
mal, and  the  human,  under  new  con- 
ditions, —  and  so  led  the  imagination 
on  from  star  to  star  and  from  eon  to 
eon,  till  infinity  of  space  and  eternity 
of  time  became  conceivable. 

Not  long  after,  I  chanced  to  hear  an- 
other Nobel  Prize  scientist  who  went  in 
the  other  direction,  as  far  as  the  micro- 
scope could  go,  to  the  fields  farthest 
back  toward  the  genetic  eternity,  to 
the  land  of  the  phagocytes,  to  the  in- 
finitesimal, to  the  atom,  crying  as  the 
ancient  poet  who  but  dreamed  of  what 
his  eyes  could  not  see,  *  considera  opera 
atomorum.' 

Together  have  these  and  such  men, 
astronomers,  biologists,  chemists,  car- 
ried the  boundaries  of  man's  environ- 
ment from  one  eternity  to  another. 

Moreover,  to  consciousness  of  dis- 
tance and  time  has  been  added  mobil- 
ity of  human  life. 

One  widely  cherished  recovery  from 
that  ancient  age,  the  wonderfully  beau- 
tiful statue  of  the  Nike,  the  Winged 
Victory,  of  Samothrace,  which  Mr.  H. 
G.  Wells,  after  his  visit  to  Boston  a 
;few  years  ago,  referred  to  as  the  sym- 
Ibol  of  the  *  terrifying  unanimity  of 
;gesthetic  discrimination,'  was  a  few 
imonths  ago  reproduced  by  a  cartoon- 
ist in  intimation  of  the  achievement 
of  that  pioneer  of  aviation,  the  first  of 
the  bird-men.  But  the  Nike  of  Samo- 
thrace was,  after  all,  perhaps  but  the 
figure-head  of  the  prow  of  a  boat.  Her 
feet  were  fastened  to  a  keel.  The  epi- 
nikian  odes  —  the  songs  of  victory  — 
were  of  races  whose  distances  were 
measured  in  stadia.  The  higher  free- 
dom, the  mobility  of  wings,  was  but  a 


possession  of  the  gods,  an  aspiration  of 
rash  men,  who,  like  Icarus,  fell  back 
to  earth  for  their  venturing. 

Those  who  are  familiar  with  the  poet 
Maeterlinck's  botany  are  aware  that 
his  story  of  the  evolution  of  animal  life 
from  the  vegetable  is  the  story  of  the 
struggle  of  life  to  escape  from  a  state 
of  immobility  into  one  of  mobility,  of 
auto-mobility;  from  a  static  slavery  to 
roots  into  the  joyous  freedom  of  feet; 
for,  as  Maeterlinck  says,  it  is  its  role  *  to 
escape  above  from  the  fatality  below, 
to  evade,  transgress  the  heavy,  sombre 
law,  to  set  itself  free,  to  shatter  the  nar- 
row sphere,  to  invent  or  invoke  wings, 
to  escape  as  far  as  it  can,  to  conquer 
the  space  in  which  destiny  encloses  it, 
to  approach  another  kingdom.' 

And  when  we  read  on  into  the  his- 
tory of  the  development  of  the  high- 
est animal,  man,  we  find  that  we  are 
following  the  story  of  the  same  kind 
of  evolution,  the  story  of  the  struggle 
from  a  lower  toward  a  higher  and 
higher  state  of  mobility.  Primitive 
patriarchs  walked.  Abraham  was  com- 
manded to  walk  through  the  land  he 
was  to  possess.  But,  from  the  very  first, 
man  longed  for  a  greater  mobility  than 
his  feet  permitted.  The  ideal,  happy, 
perfect  creature  was  one  equipped  with 
wings;  one  who  had  'the  wings  of  the 
morning,'  who  could  travel  afar,  one 
who  could  see  to  the  ends  of  the  earth, 
one  who  had  knowledge  of  all  things 
that  are  in  the  earth,  one  who  knew  the 
beginning  and  end  of  time. 

It  is  in  this  our  age  that  this  as- 
piration is  being  realized;  this  age,  in 
which  the  man  has  indeed  become  the 
ayyeAos,  at  any  rate,  in  respect  of  loco- 
motion; in  which  he  has,  in  a  sense, 
approached  another  kingdom.  He  is 
able  to  speak  and  to  hear  and  to  write 
around  the  world.  He  is  able  to  see  not 
only  to  the  ends  of  the  earth,  but  mil- 
lions of  miles  into  space.  He  can  talk 
with  the  stars  in  a  very  literal  sense, 


542 


THE  TELE- VICTORIAN  AGE 


for  he  has  made  a  new  alphabet  of  vari- 
colored lines  (spectra  they  are  called  in- 
stead of  letters),  in  which  the  stars  are 
able  to  reveal  to  him  what  is  burning  in 
their  hearts  or  what  is  glowing  in  their 
skies.  Greater  space,  longer  time,  high- 
er mobility,  and  the  flying  of  the  images 
of  all  things  to  his  senses!  Day  unto 
day  utters  a  speech  never  heard  in  the 
days  of  the  Psalmist,  and  night  unto 
night  shows  a  knowledge  beyond  the 
wisdom  of  the  wisest  of  the  elder  age. 

Lucretius,  the  ancient  Epicurean 
poet  and  philosopher,  in  trying  to  ex- 
plain perception  of  the  nearer  phenom- 
ena of  life,  assumed  that  all  bodies  were 
constantly  giving  off  filmy  images  or 
idols  of  themselves,  and  that  the  air  was 
crowded  with  millions  of  these  images, 
along  with  less  definite  emanations  — 
images  ever  passing  and  crossing  each 
other,  in  every  direction,  some  swifter, 
some  slower,  in  infinite  complexity,  yet 
in  no  confusion,  very  substantial,  yet 
keeping  their  forms  as  they  sped  on 
their  way  to  the  senses,  and  traversed 
by  mind-images,  infinitely  finer  and 
more  subtle,  and  by  those  subtlest  and 
swiftest  of  all,  the  majestic  images  of 
the  gods  who  came  flying  from  the  un- 
known afar  through  all  the  rest,  in 
never-ceasing  flow.  His  only  Afar  was 
the  dwelling  of  the  gods.  Thence  their 
images  came  flying,  majestically. 

But  now,  —  according  to  the  most 
widely  accepted  view,  —  everything 
comes  through  the  medium  of  waves; 
a  scientific  theory  which  will  some  day 
be  poetically  translated,  so  that  every 
aroma  will  have  its  wave-image,  even 
as  the  flower  that  sent  it  forth  had  its 
idol  or  image  under  the  Lucretian  the- 
ory. All  light,  sound,  perfume  even, 
are  but  different  forms  of  motion,  we 
are  assured,  revealing  themselves  in 
waves  of  varying  length  or  frequency. 
Everything  that  comes  to  us  from  the 
outer  world  comes  through  the  beat- 
ing, the  ceaseless  beating,  of  these 


waves  upon  our  bodies,  our  minds, 
which  are  as  receivers  of  some  sensi- 
tive, invisible,  wireless  system.  When 
God  said,  'Let  there  be  light,'  so  sci- 
ence would  now  express  it,  He  but 
caused  the  waves  to  vibrate  at  the  rate 
of  one  hundred  and  eighty-six  thou- 
sand a  second,  and  when  He  wished  to 
diversify  color,  He  but  made  waves  of 
varying  length. 

The  whole  history  of  the  human  race, 
since  the  first  cry  of  the  first  paleolithic 
infant  and  the  first  onomatopoetic 
verb  of  the  paleolithic  man,  has  been 
written  in  indestructible  ether. 

But  most  of  the  waves  reach  no 
human  shores,  except  through  other 
waves  to  which  they  give  their  im- 
pulses. I  have  often  recalled  hearing 
Justin  Winsor  of  Harvard  University 
say,  *  If  we  only  had  instruments  deli- 
cate, sensitive  enough  to  record  these 
unspent  waves,  what  might  we  not 
hear?  The  prayer  of  Columbus  out 
upon  the  ocean;  the  plash  of  the  oars 
of  Joliet  and  Marquette  out  upon  the 
Mississippi;  the  footfall  of  Plato  in  the 
Academe.' 

I  once  expressed  the  hope,  in  the  pre- 
sence of  Mr.  Thomas  A.  Edison,  that 
he  would  some  day  become  an  ethereal 
archaeologist  and  invent  such  an  in- 
strument :  one  that  would  bring  to  our 
eyes,  ears,  and  nostrils  the  submerged 
waves  of  the  long  past,  even  as  men 
dig  up  buried  cities;  that  we  might, 
for  example,  hear  again  the  voice  of 
Beatrice;  that  we  might  know  the  color 
of  Helen's  eyes,  and  enjoy  the  fra- 
grance even  of  the  flowers  that  once 
grew  in  the  Garden  of  Eden. 

For  all  that  record  is  there,  in  imper- 
ishable ether,  either  in  still  persistent 
waves  which  carry  their  treasure  and 
refuse  to  be  dissipated,  or  in  yet  other 
waves  to  which  they  have  given  their 
dying  impulses.  What  I  am  at  this 
moment  saying,  what  you  are  at  this 
moment  thinking,  'has  come  to  us,' 


THE  TELE-VICTORIAN  AGE 


543 


says  Carlyle,  'from  the  beginning  of 
time,  and  will  go  on  to  an  endless 
future.' 

But  whether  the  waves  of  the  past 
are  individually  recoverable  or  not,  or 
collectively  distinctive,  more  and  more 
are  the  waves  of  the  present  transmut- 
able  into  human  experience. 

Not  long  ago  I  had  an  impressive 
illustration  of  this.  I  went  one  day  to 
the  laboratory  of  a  physicist  to  witness 
an  experiment.  I  was  asked  to  stand 
in  front  of  a  rough  detached  frame  in 
the  corridor,  where  I  could  hear  only 
the  noise  of  students  speaking  or  pass- 
ing to  and  fro.  But  the  moment  I  put 
to  my  ears  a  receiver,  I  heard  exquisite 
music  coming  from  some  distant  in- 
strument, I  knew  not  where.  So  full  is 
the  ether  of  harmonies  and  melodies, 
although  there  seem  to  be  in  our  near 
environment  only  substantial  walls  and 
the  commonplace  noises  of  the  day.  I 
had  but  finished  writing  this  line  when, 
taking  up  a  daily  paper,  I  read  that  a 
bit  of  the  'Marseillaise'  played  on  the 
shores  of  Algeria  was  heard  across  the 
Mediterranean  in  southern  France.  It 
is  as  if  one  side  of  the  ancient  world 
were  singing  to  the  other,  Alexandria 
to  Athens,  across  the  sea  in  the  middle 
of  the  earth. 

But  what  of  this  age  in  which  the 
perimeter  has  become  as  the  centre, 
this  age  in  which  eternity  of  time  has 
become  conceivable,  this  age  of  an- 
gelic mobility,  this  age  of  instantane- 
ous transmissibility  of  images,  idols, 
and  ideas? 

The  most  obvious  fact  is,  not  that  the 
Almighty  has  made  of  one  clay  all  na- 
tions, but  that  this  mobility  and  trans- 
missibility are  making  of  all  nations 
one  clay.  One  of  our  greatest  jurists, 
in  a  letter  which  I  was  permitted  to  see 
a  few  days  ago,  quoted  Tarde  in  the 
statement  that  while  the  former  sanc- 
tion was  immemorial  practice,  now  a 


new  hat  goes  around  the  world  in  six 
months  and  is  forgotten  in  a  year;  and 
he  raised  the  question  whether,  instead 
of  immortality,  we  should  not  now  find 
our  glory  in  '  illocality.' 

I  find  a  most  pathetic  support  of  this 
thesis  of  the  great  jurist  in  a  letter 
from  a  missionary  out  upon  the  edge 
of  the  Orient  who,  writing  to  a  friend 
here  to  thank  her  for  sending  a  hat, 
inquired  whether  hats  were  at  present 
worn  with  dents  in  the  crown  or  whe- 
ther those  dents  were  made  in  transit. 
And  another  from  a  masculine  source. 
Attending  a  high  service  in  the  Cathe- 
dral in  Havana  (where  it  is  claimed  the 
bones  of  Columbus  were  at  that  time 
reposing),  a  service  celebrating  the  in- 
auguration of  the  Republic,  I  saw  walk- 
ing in  the  recessional  before  the  new 
President  and  the  Archbishop,  a  tall 
priest  carrying  a  salver,  and  on  it  the 
silk  hat  of  the  President  of  the  Repub- 
lic. The  immemorial  custom  of  bearing 
the  crown  or  the  sword  as  symbol  of 
office  was  modified  by  a  sense  of  dem- 
ocratic illocality. 

Human  experience  is  being  put  at 
the  command  of  the  whole  earth,  not 
only  in  images,  in  ideas,  but  in  the 
substance  of  things  wherever  they  can 
be  carried  afar,  and  where  ships  ahd 
trains  offer,  and  tariffs  do  not  interfere. 
Every  great  department  store  is  an  epi- 
nikian  ode,  and  every  jeweler's  shop  is 
a  telenikian  sonnet.  Walt  Whitman 
could  have  written  a  poem  on  demo- 
cracy from  a  railroad  time-table,  and 
on  the  federation  of  the  world  from  a 
metropolitan  grocery  catalogue.  And 
I  know  a  newspaper  man  who  could 
make  an  Iliad  from  the  weekly  cotton 
bulletin,  beginning  with  the  reports 
from  Bombay,  or  an  Odyssey  from 
Lloyds'  reports  on  ships  and  shipping. 
Mistral  might  have  added  a  notable 
poem  to  his  Poemes  du  Rhone  if  he 
had  but  put  into  verse  the  import 
of  my  seeing,  on  entering  the  gates  of 


544 


THE  TELE-VICTORIAN  AGE 


Avignon,  that  city  of  the  Palace  of 
the  Popes,  a  sign  advertising  the  Mc- 
Cormick  agricultural  implements;  and 
Daudet's  Tartarin,  who  really  lived 
in  Nimes,  I  am  told,  instead  of  Taras- 
con,  had  no  more  world-significant  ex- 
perience than  I,  who,  when  trying  to 
get  a  good  view  of  the  historic  Amphi- 
theatre, all  but  fell  over  an  Oliver 
chilled  plough,  from  Syracuse  (N.  Y.), 
standing  on  the  sidewalk  to  invite 
custom. 

Mobility  of  person  and  transmissi- 
bility  of  ideas,  one  or  both,  are  the  pre- 
requisite of  a  wide  democracy.  This 
republic  of  ours  could  not  have  become 
one,  or  remained  one,  except  by  means 
of  both;  the  railroad,  the  telegraph,  the 
newspaper,  and  the  library,  were  neces- 
sary to  'union,  one  and  inseparable,' 
unless  there  were  in  lieu  of  these  a 
mighty  standing  army.  And  the  more 
democratic  form  of  government,  which 
is  now  so  vigorously  advocated,  and 
exemplified  in  the  direct  primary,  the 
initiative  and  the  referendum,  and  the 
like,  is  possible  only  by  reason  of  this 
heightened  mobility  and  transmissi- 
bility. 

These  are,  also,  it  need  hardly  be  re- 
marked, a  condition  of  planetary  con- 
sciousness. Until  this  new  day,  as  the 
author  of  The  Great  Analysis  well  says, 
'we  have  not  really  inhabited  an  iso- 
lated sphere.  Civilization  has  always 
been  in  contact  with  the  Unknown/ 
'But  now  there  is  no  Unknown  this 
side  of  the  moon.'  There  are  no  new 
invaders  to  be  feared,  —  not  even  the 
'Hunnish  bacteria.'  We  are  prepared 
to  think  'planetarily,'  to  act  without 
fear  of  ambush  in  unexplored  spots. 
Mr.  Marconi  said  to  me  not  long  ago 
that  the  speed  of  wireless  messages  was 
retarded  when  the  ocean  was  part 
dark  and  part  light;  and  there  will  be 
retardation  of  ideas  still  as  they  pass 
into  certain  dark  spots  of  earth  from 
the  light.  Nevertheless,  the  waves  do 


carry  through  them,  as  the  conditions 
in  China  have  demonstrated.  And  the 
speed  of  progress  is  likely  to  be  quite 
as  great  in  the  next  cycle  of  Cathay 
as  in  any  now  well-lighted  tract  of 
earth. 

But  with  the  passing  of  the  un- 
known, with  the  coming  of  this  com- 
plete 'planetary  consciousness,'  with 
this  constant  calling  to  our  senses  from 
the  ends  of  the  earth,  what  time  the 
Near  is  not  more  demanding,  with  this 
increasing  appeal  of  the  road,  the  wa- 
ter and  the  air,  is  man  to  lose  the  old 
culture  of  the  local,  is  he  to  throw  away 
his  inheritance  of  the  immediate  en- 
vironments? It  was  the  prodigal  who, 
in  the  parable,  went  into  the  far  coun- 
try. And  it  was  when  he  '  came  to  him- 
self that  he  went  back  to  his  family 
heritage.  Is  it  now  the  wanderer,  the 
mobile  one,  who  is  to  find  himself,  and 
the  immobile,  jealous  elder  brother  who 
is  to  miss  again  the  greatest  gifts?  Is 
man  to  go  out  and  buy  his  experience  of 
the  race  instead  of  trying  to  raise  it  in 
his  own  little  valley  or  street?  And  the 
neighborliness  of  the  valley  and  the 
street,  with  all  its  homely  virtues,  —  is 
the  superseding  neighborliness  of  the 
Afar  to  give  something  better?  It  is, 
indeed,  to  bring  something  better  if  it 
quickens  our  spirits  to  do  for  the  im- 
personal and  the  illocal  what  our  sym- 
pathies in  narrower  circles  have  driven 
us  to  attempt  for  the  very  personal 
anguish  or  pain.  Simon  Patten  in  his 
New  Basis  of  Civilization  has  said  in 
the  same  thought,  'Civilization,'  that 
is,  this  far-seeing  and  far-calling  and 
far-helping  civilization,  'spares  us  more 
and  more  the  sight  of  anguish,  and 
our  imaginations  must  be  correspond- 
ingly sharpened  to  see  in  the  check- 
book an  agent  as  spiritual  and  poetic 
as  the  grime  and  blood-stain  of  minis- 
tering hands.'  Such  an  education  must 
come  with  the  Tele- Victorian  Age  if 
it  is  to  carry  to  a  higher  virtue  the 


THE  TELE-VICTORIAN  AGE 


545 


old  neighborliness  of  the  isolated,  the 
provincial. 

And  I  think  of  the  exquisite  joy  of 
neighborliness  that  comes  from  Afar. 
With  the  aid  of  the  waves  of  ether, 
transmuted  or  translated  into  waves  of 
sound  for  those  who  have  not  eyes,  or 
into  light  for  those  who  have  not  ears, 
we  may  find  neighbors  where  there  is 
greatest  need,  or  where  our  noblest 
need  is  best  fulfilled.  Mobility,  trans- 
missibility,  are  they  not  to  bring  man- 
kind nearer,  if  not  into,  the  higher 
kingdom,  even  as  they  brought  the 
vegetable  to  be  an  animal,  to  ap- 
proach, and  then  to  enter  its  next 
kingdom?  Arthur  O'Shaughnessy,  in 
that  poem  on  John  the  Baptist  which 
has  for  many  months  possessed  my 
memory,  wrote  of  him,  — 

I  think  he  had  not  heard  of  the  far  towns, 
Nor  ef  the  deeds  of  men,  nor  of  kings'  crowns, 
Before  the  thought  of  God  took  hold  of  him, 
As  he  was  sitting  dreaming  in  the  calm 
Of  one  first  noon  upon  the  desert's  rim. 

1  And  I  have  been  asking  myself  often, 
are  the  noises  of  the  far  towns,  these 
daily  reports  of  the  deeds  of  men,  this 
gossip  about  kings'  crowns,  are  these 
to  take  away  all  thought  of  the  super- 
nal even  from  those  who  dwell  in  wilder- 
nesses, penetrated  as  they  are  by  tele- 
phones and  newspapers?  The  majestic 
images  of  the  gods,  as  we  have  ob- 
served, walked  through  every  assem- 
blage of  the  Lucretian,  the  perinikian, 
world;  they  inhabited  every  atmo- 
sphere. And  in  the  indistinct  light  of 
the  Middle  Age,  they  were  the  supreme 
images.  Even  Dante  employed  angels 
to  move  the  crystal  spheres  about  in 
his  universe.  But  it  is  the  great  pro- 
blem of  this  day  in  which  there  are  no 
longer  secret  places  for  the  residence  of 
VOL.  in -NO.  4 


the  supernatural  on  the  globe,  in  which 
there  is  nothing  *  unknown  this  side  of 
the  moon,'  in  which  the  great  mystery 
of  creation  has  been  pushed  back  mil- 
lions of  years,  and  beyond  the  sight  of 
the  strongest  microscope,  and  the  other 
great  mystery  of  death  forward  into 
conceivable  immortality,  it  is  the  great 
problem  to  keep  the  thought  which 
took  hold  of  John  in  the  Wilderness,  or 
even  give  it  a  chance  to  take  hold  of  us. 
The  victories  of  the  physical  Afar  are, 
after  all,  of  no  value  unless  the  spirits 
of  men  become  more  valorous,  more 
independent  of  passion  or  prejudice, 
by  reason  of  them;  unless  the  mobile 
creature  grows  in  its  higher  character- 
istics toward  the  perfect  being,  whom 
the  Christian  world  has,  in  its  imagery, 
endowed  with  wings. 

It  took  the  Almighty  ages  upon  ages 
to  evolve  an  animal  that  could  fly,  a 
bird,  and  it  has  taken  ages  and  ages 
longer  to  evolve  a  human  being  that 
can  fly;  but  if  we,  learning  at  last  to  fly, 
have  not  learned,  also,  more  nobly  to 
aspire  and  to  live,  the  birds  who  have 
taken  the  short  cut  to  aviation  have 
the  advantage  over  us. 

I  believe,  however,  that  this  con- 
quest of  the  earth,  water,  air,  which 
has  given  us  planetary,  if  not  cosmic, 
consciousness,  is  but  preface  to  the  les- 
sening of  racial,  national,  and  provin- 
cial hatreds,  antipathies,  and  jealous- 
ies, preface  to  the  planning  through 
local  enlightenment  for  the  good  of  hu- 
manity as  a  whole,  and  not  for  a  selfish 
part  of  it,  preface  to  the  defining  in 
ever  higher  spiritual  terms  of  the  ideals 
of  mankind,  and  to  the  speaking  of 
man  to  man,  as  through  centuries  each 
has  spoken,  in  his  own  tongue,  to  his 
all-understanding  deity.' 


THE  BREATH  OF  LIFE 


BY   JOHN  BURROUGHS 


WHEN  for  the  third  or  fourth  time 
during  the  spring  or  summer  I  take  my 
hoe  and  go  out  and  cut  off  the  heads 
of  the  lusty  burdocks  that  send  out 
their  broad  leaves  along  the  edge  of  my 
garden  or  lawn,  I  often  ask  myself, 
'What  is  this  thing  that  is  so  hard  to 
scotch  here  in  the  grass?'  I  decapitate 
it  time  after  time  and  yet  it  forth- 
with gets  itself  another  head.  We  call 
it  burdock,  but  what  is  burdock,  and 
why  does  it  not  change  into  yellow 
dock,  or  into  a  cabbage?  What  is  it 
that  is  so  constant  and  so  irrepress- 
ible, and  before  the  summer  is  ended 
will  be  lying  in  wait  here  with  its  ten 
thousand  little  hooks  to  attach  itself 
to  every  skirt  or  bushy  tail  or  furry  and 
woolly  coat  that  comes  along,  in  order 
to  get  free  transportation  to  other 
lawns  and  gardens,  to  fresh  woods  and 
pastures  new? 

It i  is1  some  living  thing;  but  what 
is  a  living  thing,  and  how  does  it  dif- 
fer from  a  mechanical  and  non-living 
thing?  If  I  smash  or  overturn  the  sun- 
dial with  my  hoe,  or  break  the  hoe 
itself,  these  things  stay  smashed  and 
broken,  but  the  burdock  mends  itself, 
renews  itself,  and,  if  I  do  not  watch  out, 
will  surreptitiously  mature  some  of  the 
burs  before  the  season  is  passed. 

Evidently  a  living  thing  is  radically 
different  from  a  mechanical  thing;  yet 
modern  physical  science  tells  me  that 
the  burdock  is  only  another  kind  of  ma- 
chine, and  manifests  nothing  but  the 
activity  of  the  mechanical  and  chemical 

546 


principles  that  we  see  in  operation  all 
about  us  in  dead  matter;  and  that  a  lit- 
tle different  mechanical  arrangement  of 
its  ultimate  atoms  would  turn  it  into  a 
yellow  dock  or  into  a  cabbage,  into  an 
oak  or  into  a  pine,  into  an  ox  or  into  a 
man. 

I  see  that  it  is  a  machine  in  this 
respect,  that  it  is  set  going  by  a  force 
exterior  to  itself  —  the  warmth  of  the 
sun  acting  upon  it,  and  upon  the  moist- 
ure in  the  soil;  but  it  is  unmechanical 
in  that  it  repairs  itself  and  grows  and  re- 
produces itself,  and  after  it  has  ceased 
running  can  never  be  made  to  run  again. 
After  I  have  reduced  all  its  activities 
to  mechanical  and  chemical  principles, 
my  mind  seems  to  see  something  that 
chemistry  and  mechanics  do  not  ex- 
plain —  something  that  avails  itself  of 
these  forces,  but  is  not  of  them.  This 
may  be  only  my  anthropomorphic  way 
of  looking  at  things,  but  are  not  all  our 
ways  of  looking  at  things  anthropo- 
morphic? How  can  they  be  any  other? 
They  cannot  be  deific  since  we  are  not 
gods.  They  may  be  scientific.  But 
what  is  science  but  a  kind  of  anthro- 
pomorphism? Kant  wisely  said,  'It 
sounds  at  first  singular,  but  is  none 
the  less  certain,  that  the  understanding 
does  not  derive  its  laws  from  nature, 
but  prescribes  them  to  nature.'  This  is 
the  anthropomorphism  of  science. 

If  I  attribute  the  phenomenon  of 
life  to  a  vital  force  or  principle,  am  I 
any  more  unscientific  than  I  am  when 
I  give  a  local  habitation  and  a  name 
to  any  other  causal  force,  as  gravity, 
chemical  affinity,  cohesion,  osmosis, 


THE  BREATH  OF  LIFE 


547 


or  electricity?  These  terms  stand  for 
certain  special  activities  in  nature, 
and  are  as  much  the  inventions  of  our 
own  minds  as  are  any  of  the  rest  of 
our  ideas. 

We  can  help  ourselves  out  as  Haeckel 
does,  by  calling  the  physical  forces  — 
such  as  the  magnet  that  attracts  the 
iron  filings,  the  powder  that  explodes, 
the  steam  that  drives  the  locomotive, 
and  the  like  —  *  living  inorganics,'  and 
looking  upon  them  as  acting  by  '  living 
force  as  much  as  the  sensitive  mimosa 
does  when  it  contracts  its  leaves  at 
touch.'  But  living  force  is  what  we  are 
trying  to  differentiate  from  mechanical 
force,  and  what  do  we  gain  by  con- 
founding the  two?  We  can  only  look 
upon  a  living  body  as  a  machine  by 
forming  new  conceptions  of  a  machine 
—  a  machine  utterly  unmechanical, 
which  is  a  contradiction  of  terms. 

A  man  may  expend  the  same  kind  of 
force  in  thinking  that  he  expends  in 
chopping  his  wood,  but  that  fact  does 
not  put  the  two  kinds  of  activity  on 
the  same  level.  There  is  no  question 
that  the  food  consumed  is  the  source 
of  the  energy  in  both  cases,  but  in  the 
one  the  energy  is  muscular,  and  in  the 
other  it  is  nervous.  When  we  speak  of 
mental  or  spiritual  force,  we  have  as 
distinct  a  conception  as  when  we  speak 
of  physical  force.  It  requires  physical 
force  to  produce  the  effect  that  we  call 
mental  force,  though  how  the  one  can 
result  in  the  other  is  past  understand- 
ing. The  law  of  the  correlation  and  con- 
servation of  energy  requires  that  what 
goes  into  the  body  as  physical  force 
must  come  out  in  some  form  of  phys- 
ical force — heat,  light,  electricity,  and 
so  forth. 

Science  cannot  trace  force  into  the 
mental  realm  and  connect  it  with  our 
states  of  consciousness.  It  loses  track 
of  it  so  completely  that  men  like  Tyn- 
dall  and  Huxley  and  Spencer  pause  be- 
fore it  as  an  inscrutable  mystery,  while 


John  Fiske  helps  himself  out  with  the 
conception  of  the  soul  as  quite  inde- 
pendent of  the  body,  standing  related 
to  it  as  the  musician  is  related  to  his 
instrument.  This  idea  is  the  key  to 
Fiske's  proof  of  the  immortality  of  the 
soul.  Finding  himself  face  to  face  with 
an  insoluble  mystery,  he  cuts  the  knot, 
or  rather,  clears  the  chasm,  by  this 
extra-scientific  leap.  Since  the  soul,  as 
we  know  it,  is  inseparably  bound  up 
with  physical  conditions,  it  seems  to  me 
that  a  more  rational  explanation  of  the 
phenomenon  of  mentality  is  the  con- 
ception that  the  physical  force  and 
substance  that  we  use  up  in  a  mental 
effort  or  emotional  experience,  gives 
rise,  through  some  unknown  kind  of 
molecular  activity,  to  something  which 
is  analogous  to  the  electric  current  in 
a  live  wire,  and  which  traverses  the 
nerves  and  results  in  our  changing 
states  of  consciousness.  This  is  the 
mechanistic  explanation  of  mind,  con- 
sciousness, etcetera;  but  it  is  the  only 
one,  or  kind  of  one,  that  lends  itself  to 
scientific  interpretation.  Life,  spirit, 
consciousness,  may  be  a  mode  of  mo- 
tion as  distinct  from  all  other  modes 
of  motion,  such  as  heat,  light,  elec- 
tricity, as  these  are  distinct  from  each 
other. 

When  we  speak  of  force  of  mind, 
force  of  character,  we  of  course  speak 
in  parables,  since  the  force  here  alluded 
to  is  an  experience  of  our  own  minds 
entirely  and  would  not  suffice  to  move 
the  finest  dust-particle  in  the  air. 

There  could  be  no  vegetable  or  ani- 
mal life  without  the  sunbeam,  yet  when 
we  have  explained  or  accounted  for 
the  growth  of  a  tree  in  terms  of  the 
chemistry  and  physics  of  the  sunbeam, 
do  we  not  have  to  figure  to  ourselves 
something  in  the  tree  that  avails  itself 
of  this  chemistry,  that  uses  it  and  pro- 
fits by  it?  After  this  mysterious  some- 
thing has  ceased  to  operate,  or  play 
its  part,  the  chemistry  of  the  sunbeam 


548 


THE  BREATH  OF  LIFE 


is  no  longer  effective,  and  the  tree  is 
dead. 

Without  the  vibrations  that  we  call 
light,  there  would  have  been  no  eye. 
But,  as  Bergson  happily  says,  it  is  not 
light  passively  received  that  makes  the 
eye,  —  it  is  light  meeting  an  indwelling 
need  in  the  organism,  which  amounts 
to  an  active  creative  principle,  that 
begets  the  eye.  With  fish  in  under- 
ground waters  this  need  does  not  arise; 
hence  they  have  no  sight.  Fins  and 
wings  and  legs  are  developed  to  meet 
some  end  of  the  organism,  but  if  the 
organism  were  not  charged  with  an  ex- 
pansive or  developing  force  or  impulse, 
would  those  needs  arise? 

Why  should  the  vertebrate  series 
have  risen  through  the  fish,  the  reptile, 
the  mammal,  to  man,  unless  the  man- 
ward  impulse  was  inherent  in  the  first 
vertebrate;  something  that  struggled, 
that  pushed  on  and  up  from  the  more 
simple  to  the  more  complex  forms? 
Why  did  not  unicellular  life  always  re- 
main unicellular?  Could  not  the  envi- 
ronment have  acted  upon  it  endlessly 
without  causing  it  to  change  toward 
higher  and  more  complex  forms,  had 
there  not  been  some  indwelling  ab- 
original tendency  toward  these  forms? 
How  could  natural  selection,  or  any 
other  process  of  selection,  work  upon 
species  to  modify  them,  if  there  were 
not  something  in  species  pushing  out 
and  on,  seeking  new  ways,  new  forms, 
in  fact,  some  active  principle  that  is 
modifiable? 

Life  has  risen  by  stepping-stones  of 
its  dead  self  to  higher  things.  Why  has 
it  risen?  Why  did  it  not  keep  on  the 
same  level,  and  go  through  the  cycle  of 
change,  as  the  inorganic  does,  without 
attaining  to  higher  forms?  Because,  it 
may  be  replied,  it  was  life,  and  not 
mere  matter  and  motion  —  something 
that  lifts  matter  and  motion  to  a  new 
plane. 

Under  the  influence  of  the  life  im- 


pulse, the  old  routine  of  matter  —  front 
compound  to  compound,  from  solid  to 
fluid,  from  fluid  to  gaseous,  from  rock 
to  soil,  the  cycle  always  ending  where 
it  began  —  is  broken  into,  and  cycles  of 
a  new  order  are  instituted.  From  the 
stable  equilibrium  which  dead  matter 
is  always  seeking,  the  same  matter  in 
the  vital  circuit  is  always  seeking  the 
state  of  unstable  equilibrium,  or  rather 
is  forever  passing  between  the  two, 
and  evolving  the  myriad  forms  of  life 
in  the  passage.  It  is  hard  to  think  of 
the  process  as  the  work  of  the  physical 
and  chemical  forces  of  inorganic  nature, 
without  supplementing  them  with  a 
new  and  different  force. 

The  forces  of  life  are  constructive 
forces,  and  they  are  operative  in  a 
world  of  destructive  or  disintegrating 
forces  which  oppose  them  and  which 
they  overcome.  The  physical  and  chem- 
ical forces  of  dead  matter  are  at  war 
with  the  forces  of  life,  till  life  overcomes 
and  uses  them. 

The  mechanical  forces  go  on  repeat- 
ing or  dividing  through  the  same  cycles 
forever  and  ever,  seeking  a  stable  con- 
dition, but  the  vital  force  is  inventive 
and  creative  and  constantly  breaks  the 
repose  that  organic  nature  seeks  to  im- 
pose upon  it. 

External  forces  may  modify  a  body, 
but  they  cannot  develop  it  unless  there 
is  something  in  the  body  waiting  to  be 
developed,  craving  development,  as  it 
were.  The  warmth  and  moisture  in  the 
soil  act  alike  upon  the  grains  of  sand  and 
upon  the  seed-germs;  the  germ  changes 
into  something  else,  the  sand  does  not. 
These  agents  liberate  a  force  in  the 
germ  that  is  not  in  the  grain  of  sand. 
The  warmth  of  the  brooding  fowl  does 
not  spend  itself  upon  mere  passive, 
inert  matter  (unless  there  is  a  china  egg 
in  the  nest),  but  upon  matter  strain- 
ing at  its  leash,  and  in  a  state  of  ex- 
pectancy. We  do  not  know  how  the 
activity  of  the  molecules  of  the  egg 


THE   BREATH  OF  LIFE 


549 


differs  from  the  activity  of  the  mole- 
cules of  the  pebble,  under  the  influence 
of  warmth,  but  we  know  there  must  be 
a  difference  between  the  interior  move- 
ments of  organized  and  unorganized 
matter. 

Life  lifts  inert  matter  up  into  a  thou- 
sand varied  and  beautiful  forms  and 
holds  it  there  for  a  season,  —  holds  it 
against  gravity  and  chemical  affinity, 
though  you  may  say,  if  you  please,  not 
without  their  aid,  —  and  then  in  due 
course  lets  go  of  it,  or  abandons  it,  and 
lets  it  fall  back  into  the  great  sea  of  the 
inorganic.  Its  constant  tendency  is  to 
fall  back;  indeed,  in  animal  life  it  does 
fall  back  every  moment;  it  rises  on  the 
one  hand,  serves  its  purpose  of  life,  and 
falls  back  on  the  other.  In  going  through 
the  cycle  of  life  the  mineral  elements 
experience  some  change  that  chemical 
analysis  does  not  disclose  —  they  are 
the  more  readily  absorbed  again  by  life. 
It  is  as  if  the  elements  had  profited  in 
some  way  under  the  tutelage  of  life. 
Their  experience  has  been  a  unique  and 
exceptional  one.  Only  a  small  fraction 
of  the  sum  total  of  the  inert  matter  of 
the  globe  can  have  this  experience.  It 
must  first  go  through  the  vegetable 
cycle  before  it  can  be  taken  up  by  the 
animal.  The  only  things  we  can  take 
directly  from  the  inorganic  world  are 
water  and  air;  and  the  function  of  water 
is  largely  a  mechanical  one,  and  the 
function  of  air  a  chemical  one. 

I  think  of  the  vital  as  flowing  out 
of  the  physical,  just  as  the  psychical 
flows  out  of  the  vital,  and  just  as  the 
higher  forms  of  animal  life  flow  out  of 
the  lower.  It  is  a  far  cry  from  man  to 
the  dumb  brutes,  and  from  the  brutes  to 
the  vegetable  world,  and  from  the  vege- 
table to  inert  matter;  but  the  germ  and 
start  of  each  is  in  the  series  below  it. 
The  living  came  out  of  the  not-living. 
If  life  is  of  physico-chemical  origin, 
it  is  so  by  transformations  and  trans- 
lations that  physics  cannot  explain. 


The  butterfly  comes  out  of  the  grub, 
man  came  out  of  the  brute,  but,  as 
Darwin  says,  'not  by  his  own  efforts,' 
any  more  than  the  child  becomes  the 
man  by  its  own  efforts. 

The  push  of  life,  of  the  evolutionary 
process,  is  back  of  all  and  in  all.  We 
can  account  for  it  all  by  saying  the 
Creative  Energy  is  immanent  in  mat- 
ter, and  this  gives  the  mind  something 
to  take  hold  of. 


ii 

According  to  the  latest  scientific 
views  on  the  question  held  by  such  men 
as  Professor  Loeb,  the  appearance  of 
life  on  the  globe  was  a  purely  acciden- 
tal circumstance.  The  proper  elements 
just  happened  to  come  together  at  the 
right  time  in  the  right  proportions  and 
under  the  right  conditions,  and  life 
was  the  result.  It  was  an  accident  in 
the  thermal  history  of  the  globe.  Pro- 
fessor Loeb  has  lately  published  a 
volume  of  essays  and  addresses  called 
The  Mechanistic  Conception  of  Life,  en- 
forcing and  illustrating  this  view.  He 
makes  war  on  what  he  terms  the  meta- 
physical conception  of  a  '  life-principle ' 
as  the  key  to  the  problem,  and  urges  the 
scientific  conception  of  the  adequacy 
of  mechanico-chemical  forces.  In  his 
view,  we  are  only  chemical  mechanisms ; 
and  all  our  activities,  mental  and  phys- 
ical alike,  are  only  automatic  responses 
to  the  play  of  the  blind,  material  forces 
of  external  nature.  All  forms  of  life, 
with  all  their  wonderful  adaptations, 
are  only  the  chance  happenings  of  the 
blind  gropings  and  clashings  of  dead 
matter:  'We  eat,  drink,  and  reproduce 
[and,  of  course,  think  and  speculate  and 
write  books  on  the  problems  of  life], 
not  because  mankind  has  reached  an 
agreement  that  this  is  desirable,  but 
because,  machine-like,  we  are  com- 
pelled to  do  so!' 

He  reaches  the  conclusion  that  all 


550 


THE   BREATH   OF  LIFE 


our  inner  subjective  life  is  amenable 
to  physico-chemical  analysis,  because 
many  cases  of  simple  animal  instinct 
and  will  can  be  explained  on  this  basis 
—  the  basis  of  animal  tropism.  Certain 
animals  creep  or  fly  to  the  light,  others 
to  the  dark,  because  they  cannot  help 
it.  This  is  tropism.  He  believes  that  the 
origin  of  life  can  be  traced  to  the  same 
physico-chemical  activities,  because,  in 
his  laboratory  experiments,  he  has  been 
able  to  dispense  with  the  male  princi- 
ple, and  to  fertilize  the  eggs  of  certain 
low  forms  of  marine  life  by  chemical 
compounds  alone.  '  The  problem  of  the 
beginning  and  end  of  individual  life 
is  physico-chemically  clear'  —  much 
clearer  than  the  first  beginnings  of  life. 
All  individual  life  begins  with  the  egg, 
but  where  did  we  get  the  egg?  When 
chemical  synthesis  will  give  us  this,  the 
problem  is  solved.  We  can  analyze  the 
material  elements  of  an  organism,  but 
we  cannot  synthesize  them  and  pro- 
duce the  least  spark  of  living  matter. 
That  all  forms  of  life  have  a  mechan- 
cal  and  chemical  basis  is  beyond  ques- 
tion, but  when  we  apply  our  analysis 
to  them,  life  evaporates,  vanishes,  the 
vital  processes  cease.  But  apply  the 
same  analysis  to  inert  matter,  and  only 
the  form  is  changed. 

Professor  Loeb's  artificially  fathered 
embryo  and  star-fish  and  sea-urchins 
soon  die.  If  his  chemism  could  only 
give  him  the  mother-principle  also !  But 
it  will  not.  The  mother-principle  is 
at  the  very  foundations  of  the  organic 
world,  and  defies  all  attempts  of  chem- 
ical synthesis  to  reproduce  it. 

It  would  be  presumptive  in  the  ex- 
treme for  me  to  question  Professor 
Loeb's  scientific  conclusions;  he  is  one 
of  the  most  eminent  of  living  experi- 
mental biologists.  I  would  only  dissent 
from  some  of  his  philosophical  conclu- 
sions. I  dissent  from  his  statement  that 
only  the  mechanistic  conception  of  life 
can  throw  light  on  the  source  of  ethics. 


Is  there  any  room  for  the  moral  law  in 
a  world  of  mechanical  determinism? 
There  is  no  ethics  in  the  physical  or- 
der, and  if  humanity  is  entirely  in  the 
grip  of  that  order,  where  do  moral  ob- 
ligations come  in?  A  gun  and  a  steam- 
engine  know  no  ethics,  and  to  the  ex- 
tent that  we  are  compelled  to  do  things, 
are  we  in  the  same  category.  Freedom 
of  choice  alone  gives  any  validity  to 
ethical  consideration.  I  dissent  from 
the  idea  to  which  he  apparently  holds, 
that  biology  is  only  applied  physics  and 
chemistry.  Is  not  geology  also  applied 
physics  and  chemistry?  Is  it  any  more 
or  any  less?  Yet  what  a  world  of  dif- 
ference between  the  two  —  between 
a  rock  and  a  tree,  between  a  man  and 
the  soil  he  cultivates.  Grant  that  the 
physical  and  the  chemical  forces  are 
the  same  in  both,  yet  they  work  to  such 
different  ends  in  each.  In  one  case  they 
are  tending  always  to  a  deadlock,  to 
the  slumber  of  a  static  equilibrium,  in 
the  other  they  are  ceaselessly  striving 
to  reach  a  state  of  dynamic  activity  — 
to  build  up  a  body  that  hangs  forever 
between  a  state  of  integration  and  dis- 
integration. What  is  it  that  determines 
this  new  mode  and  end  of  their  activ- 
ities? 

In  all  his  biological  experimentation, 
Professor  Loeb  starts  with  living  mat- 
ter and,  finding  its  processes  capable  of 
physico-chemical  analysis,  he  hastens 
to  the  conclusion  that  its  genesis  is  to 
be  accounted  for  by  the  action  and  in- 
teraction of  these  principles  alone. 

In  the  inorganic  world,  everything  is 
in  its  place  through  the  operation  of 
blind  physical  forces;  because  the  place 
of  a  dead  thing,  its  relation  to  the  whole, 
is  a  matter  of  indifference.  But  in  the 
organic  world,  we  strike  another  order, 
an  order  where  the  relation  and  sub- 
ordination of  parts  is  everything,  and 
to  speak  of  human  existence  as  a  *  mat- 
ter of  chance '  in  the  sense,  let  us  say, 
that  the  forms  and  positions  of  inani- 


THE   BREATH  OF  LIFE 


551 


mate  bodies  are  matters  of  chance,  is 
to  confuse  terms. 

Organic  evolution  on  the  earth  shows 
steady  and  regular  progression,  —  as 
much  so  as  the  growth  and  develop- 
ment of  a  tree.  If  the  evolutionary  im- 
pulse fails  on  one  line,  it  picks  itself  up 
and  tries  on  another,  it  experiments 
endlessly  like  an  inventor,  but  always 
improves  on  its  last  attempts.  Chance 
would  have  kept  things  at  a  stand- 
still; the  principle  of  chance,  give  it 
time  enough,  must  end  where  it  began. 
Chance  is  a  man  lost  in  the  woods;  he 
never  arrives;  he  wanders  aimlessly. 
If  evolution  pursued  a  course  equally 
fortuitous,  would  it  not  still  be  wan- 
dering in  the  wilderness  of  the  chaotic 
nebulae? 

in 

A  vastly  different  and  much  more 
stimulating  view  of  life  is  given  by 
Henri  Bergson  in  his  Creative  Evolution. 
Though  based  upon  biological  science, 
it  is  a  philosophical  rather  than  a  sci- 
entific view,  and  appeals  to  our  intui- 
tional and  imaginative  nature  more 
than  to  our  constructive  reason.  M. 
Bergson  interprets  the  phenomena  of 
life  in  terms  of  spirit,  rather  than  in 
terms  of  matter  as  does  Professor  Loeb. 
The  word  *  creative '  is  the  key- word  to 
his  view.  Life  is  a  creative  impulse  or 
current  which  arose  in  matter  at  a  cer- 
tain time  and  place,  and  flows  through 
it  from  form  to  form,  from  generation 
to  generation,  augmenting  in  force  as  it 
advances.  It  is  one  with  spirit,  and  is 
incessant  creation;  the  whole  organic 
world  is  filled,  from  bottom  to  top, 
with  one  tremendous  effort.  It  is  felici- 
tously stated  by  Whitman,  '  Urge  and 
urge,  always  the  procreant  urge  of  the 
world.' 

This  conception  of  the  nature  and 
genesis  of  life  is  bound  to  be  challenged 
by  modern  physical  science,  which, 
for  the  most  part,  sees  in  biology  only 


a  phase  of  physics;  but  the  philosophic 
mind  and  the  trained  literary  mind  will 
find  in  Creative  Evolution  a  treasure- 
house  of  inspiring  ideas,  and  engaging 
forms  of  original  artistic  expression. 
As  Mr.  Balfour  says,  'M.  Bergson's 
Evolution  Creatrice  is  not  merely  a 
philosophical  treatise:  it  has  all  the 
charm  and  all  the  audacities  of  a  work 
of  art,  and  as  such  defies  adequate 
reproduction.' 

It  delivers  us  from  the  hard  mechan- 
ical conception  of  determinism,  or  of  a 
close  universe  which,  like  a  huge  man- 
ufacturing plant,  grinds  out  vegetables 
and  animals,  minds  and  spirits,  as  it 
grinds  out  rocks  and  soils,  gases  and 
fluids,  and  the  inorganic  compounds. 

With  M.  Bergson,  life  is  the  flowing 
metamorphosis  of  the  poets,  —  an  un- 
ceasing becoming,  —  and  evolution  is 
a  wave  of  creative  energy  overflowing 
through  matter  *  upon  which  each  vis- 
ible organism  rides  during  the  short 
interval  of  time  given  it  to  live.'  In  his 
view,  matter  is  held  in  the  iron  grip 
of  necessity,  but  life  is  freedom  itself. 
*  Before  the  evolution  of  life  .  .  .  the 
portals  of  the  future  remain  wide  open. 
It  is  a  creation  that  goes  on  forever  in 
virtue  of  an  initial  movement.  This 
movement  constitutes  the  unity  of  the 
organized  world  —  a  prolific  unity,  of 
an  infinite  richness,  superior  to  any 
that  the  intellect  could  dream  of,  for 
the  intellect  is  only  one  of  its  aspects 
or  products.' 

What  a  contrast  to  Herbert  Spen- 
cer's view  of  life  and  evolution !  *  Life,' 
says  Spencer,  *  consists  of  inner  action 
so  adjusted  as  to  balance  outer  action.' 
True  enough,  no  doubt,  but  not  inter- 
esting. If  the  philosopher  could  tell  us 
what  it  is  that  brings  about  the  adjust- 
ment, and  that  profits  by  it,  we  should 
at  once  prick  up  our  ears.  Of  course, 
it  is  life.  But  what  is  life?  It  is  inner 
action  so  adjusted  as  to  balance  outer 
action! 


552 


THE  BREATH  OF  LIFE 


A  recent  contemptuous  critic  of  M. 
Bergson's  book,  Mr.  Hugh  S.  R.  Elliot, 
points  out,  as  if  he  were  triumphantly 
vindicating  the  physico-chemical  the- 
ory of  the  nature  and  origin  of  life, 
what  a  complete  machine  a  cabbage  is 
for  converting  solar  energy  into  chem- 
ical and  vital  energy  —  how  it  takes 
up  the  raw  material  from  the  soil  by  a 
chemical  and  mechanical  process,  how 
these  are  brought  into  contact  with  the 
light  and  air  through  the  leaves,  and 
thus  the  cabbage  is  built  up.  In  like 
manner,  a  man  is  a  machine  for  con- 
verting chemical  energy  derived  from 
the  food  he  eats  into  motion,  and  the 
like.  As  if  M.  Bergson,  or  any  one  else, 
would  dispute  these  things.  In  the  same 
way,  a  steam  engine  is  a  machine  for 
converting  the  energy  latent  in  coal 
into  motion  and  power;  but  what  force 
lies  back  of  the  engine,  and  was  active 
in  the  construction? 

The  final  question  of  the  cabbage 
and  the  man  still  remains — Where  did 
you  get  them? 

You  assume  vitality  to  start  with  — 
how  did  you  get  it?  Did  it  arise  spon- 
taneously out  of  dead  matter  ?  Mechan- 
ical and  chemical  forces  do  all  the  work 
of  the  living  body,  but  who  or  what  con- 
trols and  directs  them,  so  that  one  com- 
pounding of  the  elements  begets  a  cab- 
bage, and  another  compounding  of  the 
same  elements  begets  an  oak  —  one 
mixture  of  them  and  we  have  a  frog, 
another  and  we  have  a  man?  Is  there 
not  room  here  for  something  besides 
blind,  indifferent  forces?  If  we  make  the 
molecules  themselves  creative,  then  we 
are  begging  the  question.  The  creative 
energy  by  any  other  name  remains  the 
same. 

IV 

At  first  glance  one  is  at  a  loss  to 
know  what  Sir  Oliver  Lodge  had  in 
mind  when  he  said  in  a  recent  essay 
that,  in  his  view,  'life  does  not  exert 


force  —  not  even  the  most  microscop- 
ical force  —  and  certainly  does  not 
supply  energy.' 

Sir  Oliver  is  evidently  speaking  of 
life  as  some  principle  or  entity  apart 
from  matter,  some  foreign  influence  or 
spirit  using  matter  as  its  instrument. 
Taken  in  that  sense,  without  its  phys- 
ical machinery,  life  of  course  cannot 
exert  physical  force,  but  when  life  en- 
ters or  awakens  in  matter  and  animates 
it,  may  it  not  be  said  as  literally  to  exert 
the  force  which  living  bodies  show  as, 
say,  heat  is  the  source  of  the  expansive 
force  of  steam? 

Apart  from  the  force  exerted  by  liv- 
ing animal  bodies,  see  the  force  exerted 
by  living  plant  bodies.  I  thought  of  the 
remark  of  Sir  Oliver  one  day  not  long 
after  reading  it,  while  I  was  walking 
in  a  beech  wood  and  noted  how  the 
sprouting  beech-nuts  had  sent  their 
pale  radicles  down  through  the  dry 
leaves  upon  which  which  they  were 
lying,  often  piercing  two  or  three  of 
them,  and  forcing  their  way  down  into 
the  mingled  soil  and  leaf  mould  a 
couple  of  inches.  Force  was  certainly 
expended  in  doing  this,  and  if  the  life 
in  the  sprouting  nut  did  not  exert  it 
or  expend  it,  what  did? 

When  I  drive  a  peg  into  the  ground 
with  my  axe  or  mallet,  is  the  life  in  my 
arm  any  more  strictly  the  source  (the 
secondary  source)  of  the  energy  ex- 
pended than  is  the  nut  in  this  case?  Of 
course,  the  sun  is  the  primal  source  of 
the  energy  in  both  cases,  and  in  all 
cases,  but  does  not  life  exert  the  force, 
use  it,  bring  it  to  bear,  which  it  receives 
from  the  universal  fount  of  energy? 

Life  cannot  supply  energy  de  novo, 
cannot  create  it  out  of  nothing,  but  it 
can  and  must  draw  upon  the  store  of 
energy  in  which  the  earth  floats  as  in 
a  sea.  When  this  energy  or  force  is 
manifest  through  a  living  body,  we  call 
it  vital  force;  when  it  is  manifest 
through  a  mechanical  contrivance,  we 


THE  BREATH  OF  LIFE 


553 


call  it  mechanical  force;  when  it  is  de- 
veloped by  the  action  and  reaction  of 
chemical  compounds,  we  call  it  chem- 
ical force;  the  same  force  in  each  case, 
but  behaving  so  differently  in  the  one 
case  from  what  it  does  in  the  other, 
that  we  come  to  think  of  it  as  a  new  and 
distinct  entity.  Now  if  Sir  Oliver  or  any 
one  else  could  tell  us  what  force  is,  this 
difference  between  the  vitalists  and 
the  mechanists  might  be  reconciled. 

Darwin  measured  the  force  of  the 
downward  growth  of  the  radicles,  such 
as  I  have  alluded  to,  as  one  quarter  of 
a  pound,  and  its  lateral  pressure  as 
much  greater.  We  know  that  the  roots 
of  trees  insert  themselves  into  seams  in 
the  rocks,  and  force  the  parts  asunder. 
This  force  is  measurable  and  is  often 
very  great.  Its  seat  seems  to  be  in  the 
soft,  milky  substance  called  the  Cam- 
brian layer,  under  the  bark.  These  min- 
ute cells  when  their  force  is  combined 
may  become  regular  rock-splitters. 

One  of  the  most  remarkable  exhibi- 
tions of  plant  force  I  ever  saw  was  in  a 
Western  city  where  I  observed  a  spe- 
cies of  wild  sunflower  forcing  its  way 
up  through  the  asphalt  pavement;  the 
folded  and  compressed  leaves  of  the 
plant,  like  a  man's  fist,  had  pushed 
against  the  hard  but  flexible  concrete 
till  it  had  bulged  up  and  then  split, 
and  let  the  irrepressible  plant  through. 
The  force  exerted  must  have  been 
many  pounds.  I  think.it  doubtful  if 
the  strongest  man  could  have  pushed 
his  fist  through  such  a  resisting  me- 
dium. If  it  was  not  life  which  exerted 
this  force,  what  was  it?  Life  activities 
are  a  kind  of  explosion,  and  the  slow 
continued  explosions  of  this  growing 
plant  rent  the  pavement  as  surely  as 
powder  would  have  done.  It  is  doubt- 
ful if  any  cultivated  plant  could  have 
overcome  such  odds.  It  required  the 
force  of  the  untamed  hairy  plant  of 
the  plains  to  accomplish  this  feat. 

That  life  does  not  supply  energy, 


that  is,  is  not  an  independent  source  of 
energy,  seems  to  me  obvious  enough, 
but  that  it  does  not  manifest  energy, 
use  energy,  or  *  exert  force,'  is  far  from 
obvious.  If  a  growing  plant  or  tree 
does  not  exert  force  by  reason  of  its 
growing,  or  by  virtue  of  a  specific  kind 
of  activity  among  its  particles,  which 
we  name  life,  and  which  does  not  take 
place  in  a  stone  or  in  a  bar  of  iron  or 
in  dead  timber,  then  how  can  we  say 
that  any  mechanical  device  or  explo- 
sive compound  exerts  force?  The  steam 
engine  does  not  create  force,  neither 
does  the  exploding  dynamite,  but  these 
things  exert  force.  We  have  to  think 
of  the  sum  total  of  the  force  of  the  uni- 
verse, as  of  matter  itself,  as  a  constant 
factor,  that  can  neither  be  increased 
nor  diminished.  All  activity,  organic 
and  inorganic,  draws  upon  this  force: 
the  plant  and  tree,  as  well  as  the  engine 
and  the  explosive  —  the  winds,  the 
tides,  the  animal,  the  vegetable  alike. 
I  can  think  of  but  one  force,  but  of  any 
number  of  manifestations  of  force,  and 
of  two  distinct  kinds  of  manifestations, 
the  organic  and  the  inorganic,  or  the 
vital  and  the  physical,  —  the  latter 
divisible  into  the  chemical  and  the 
mechanical,  the  former  made  up  of 
these  two  working  in  infinite  complex- 
ity because  drawn  into  new  relations, 
and  lifted  to  higher  ends  by  this  some- 
thing we  call  life. 

We  think  of  something  in  the  organic 
that  lifts  and  moves  and  redistributes 
dead  matter,  and  builds  it  up  into  the 
ten  thousand  new  forms  which  it  would 
never  assume  without  this  something; 
it  lifts  lime  and  iron  and  silica  and 
potash  and  carbon,  against  gravity,  up 
into  trees  and  animal  forms,  not  by  a 
new  force,  but  by  an  old  force  in  the 
hands  of  a  new  agent. 

The  cattle  move  about  the  field,  the 
drift  boulders  slowly  creep  down  the 
slopes;  there  is  no  doubt  that  the  final 
source  of  the  force  is  in  both  cases  the 


554 


THE   BREATH  OF  LIFE 


same;  what  we  call  gravity,  a  name 
for  a  mystery,  is  the  form  it  takes  in 
the  case  of  the  rocks,  and  what  we  call 
vitality,  another  name  for  a  mystery, 
is  the  form  it  takes  in  the  case  of  the 
cattle;  without  the  solar  and  stellar 
energy,  could  there  be  any  motion  of 
either  rock  or  beast? 

Force  is  universal,  it  pervades  all 
nature,  one  manifestation  of  it  we  call 
heat,  another  light,  another  electricity, 
another  cohesion,  chemical  affinity,  and 
so  on.  May  not  another  manifestation 
of  it  be  called  life,  differing  from  all  the 
rest  more  radically  than  they  differ 
from  one  another;  bound  up  with  all 
the  rest  and  inseparable  from  them  and 
identical  with  them  only  in  its  ultimate 
source  in  the  Creative  Energy  that  is 
immanent  in  the  universe?  I  have  to 
think  of  the  Creative  Energy  as  imma- 
nent in  all  matter,  and  the  final  source 
of  all  the  transformations  and  trans- 
mutations we  see  in  the  organic  and  the 
inorganic  worlds.  The  very  nature  of 
our  minds  compels  us  to  postulate  some 
power,  or  some  principle,  not  as  lying 
back  of,  but  as  active  in,  all  the  chang- 
ing forms  of  life  and  nature,  and  their 
final  source  and  cause. 

The  mind  is  satisfied  when  it  finds 
a  word  that  gives  it  a  hold  of  a  thing 
or  a  process,  or  when  it  can  picture  to 
itself  just  how  the  thing  occurs.  Thus, 
for  instance,  to  account  for  the  power 
generated  by  the  rushing  together  of 
hydrogen  and  oxygen  to  produce  water, 
we  have  to  conceive  of  space  between 
the  atoms  of  these  elements,  and  that 
the  force  generated  comes  from  the 
immense  velocity  with  which  the  infin- 
itesimal atoms  rush  together  across  this 
infinitesimal  space.  It  is  quite  possible 
that  this  is  not  the  true  explanation 
at  all,  but  it  satisfies  the  mind  because 
it  is  an  explanation  in  terms  of  mechan- 
ical forces  that  we  know. 

The  solar  energy  goes  into  the  atoms 
or  corpuscles  one  thing,  and  it  comes 


out  another;  it  goes  in  as  inorganic 
force,  and  it  comes  out  as  organic  and 
psychic.  The  change  or  transformation 
takes  place  in  those  invisible  laborato- 
ries of  the  infinitesimal  atoms.  It  helps 
my  mental  processes  to  give  that  change 
a  name  —  vitality  —  and  to  recognize 
it  as  a  supra-mechanical  force.  Pasteur 
wanted  a  name  for  it  and  called  it 
'dissy metric  force.' 

We  are  all  made  of  one  stuff  undoubt- 
edly, vegetable  and  animal,  man  and 
woman,  dog  and  donkey,  and  the  se- 
cret of  the  difference  between  us,  and 
of  the  passing  along  of  the  difference 
from  generation  to  generation  with 
but  slight  variations,  may  be,  so  to 
speak,  in  the  way  the  molecules  and 
atoms  of  our  bodies  take  hold  of  hands 
and  perform  their  mystic  dances  in  the 
inner  temple  of  life.  But  one  would 
like  to  know  who  or  what  pipes  the 
tune  and  directs  the  figures  of  the 
dance. 

In  the  case  of  the  beech-nuts,  what  is 
it  that  lies  dormant  in  the  substance  of 
the  nuts  and  becomes  alive,  under  the 
influence  of  the  warmth  and  moisture 
of  spring,  and  puts  out  a  radicle  that 
pierces  the  dry  leaves  like  an  awl?  The 
pebbles,  though  they  contain  the  same 
chemical  elements,  do  not  become  act- 
ive and  put  out  a  radicle. 


Life  is  versatile,  inventive,  expans- 
ive, original.  To  see  how  one  organism 
can  work  its  will  upon  another,  behold 
the  plant-galls.  Nothing  in  nature  is 
more  curious  and  suggestive  than  these 
galls  —  the  ease  with  which  a  tiny  in- 
sect can  cause  the  growing  stalk  or  leaf 
to  forget  its  own  purpose  and  function 
and  cut  fantastic  tricks  in  the  interests 
of  the  insect,  building  it  a  cradle  or 
a  nursery  for  its  own  young.  One  day, 
in  my  walk,  I  gathered  from  a  small 
oak  tree  four  kinds  of  oak-galls  differing 


THE   BREATH  OF  LIFE 


555 


from  each  other  in  form  and  texture  as 
much  as  any  four  different  kinds  of 
forest  trees  differ  from  each  other.  One 
kind  of  an  insect  stings  a  bud  or  a  leaf 
of  the  oak,  and  the  tree  forthwith  grows 
a  solid  nutlike  protuberance  the  size 
of  a  chestnut,  in  which  the  larvae  of  the 
insect  live  and  feed  and  mature.  An- 
other insect  stings  the  same  leaf  and 
produces  the  common  oak-apple  —  a 
smooth,  round,  green,  shell-like  body, 
filled  with  a  network  of  radiating  fila- 
ments, with  the  egg  and  then  the  grub 
of  the  insect  at  the  centre.  Still  another 
kind  of  insect  stings  the  oak-bud  and 
deposits  its  eggs  there,  and  the  oak  pro- 
ceeds to  grow  a  large  white  ball  made 
up  of  a  kind  of  succulent  vegetable 
wool  with  red  spots  evenly  distributed 
over  its  surface,  as  if  it  were  some  kind 
of  spotted  fruit  or  flower.  In  June,  it  is 
about  the  size  of  a  small  apple.  Cut  it 
in  half  and  you  find  scores  of  small  shell- 
like  growths  radiating  from  the  bud- 
stem,  like  the  seeds  of  the  dandelion, 
each  with  a  kind  of  vegetable  pappus 
rising  from  it,  and  together  making  up 
the  ball  as  the  pappus  of  the  dandelion 
seeds  makes  up  the  seed-globe  of  this 
plant.  It  is  one  of  the  most  singular 
vegetable  products,  or  vegetable  per- 
versions, that  I  know  of.  A  sham  fruit 
filled  with  sham  seeds;  each  seed-like 
growth  contains  a  grub,  which  later  in 
the  season  pupates  and  eats  its  way 
out,  a  winged  insect.  How  foreign  to 
any  thing  we  know  as  mechanical  or 
chemical  it  all  is !  —  the  surprising  and 
incalculable  tricks  of  life ! 


Yet  another  kind  of  insect  stings 
the  oak-leaf  and  there  develops  a  pale, 
smooth,  solid,  semi-transparent  sphere, 
the  size  of  a  robin's  egg,  dense  and  suc- 
culent like  the  flesh  of  an  apple,  with 
the  larvae  of  the  insect  subsisting  in  its 
interior.  Each  of  these  widely  different 
forms  is  evoked  from  the  oak-leaf  by 
the  magic  of  an  insect's  ovipositor. 
Chemically,  the  constituents  of  all  of 
them  are  undoubtedly  the  same. 

It  is  one  of  the  most  curious  and  sug- 
gestive things  in  living  nature.  It  shows 
how  plastic  and  versatile  life  is,  and 
how  utterly  unmechanical.  Life  plays 
so  many  and  various  tunes  upon  the 
same  instruments;  or  rather,  the  living 
organism  is  like  many  instruments  in 
one;  the  tones  of  all  instruments  slum- 
ber in  it,  to  be  awakened  when  the  right 
performer  appears.  At  least  four  dif- 
ferent insects  get  four  different  tunes, 
so  to  speak,  out  of  the  oak-leaf. 

Certain  insects  avail  themselves  of 
the  animal  organism  also,  and  go 
through  their  cycle  of  development  and 
metamorphosis  within  its  tissues  or 
organs  in  a  similar  manner. 

The  chemico-physical  explanation  of 
the  universe  goes  but  a  little  way. 
These  are  the  tools  of  the  creative 
process,  but  they  are  not  that  process, 
nor  its  prime  cause.  Start  the  flame 
of  life  going,  and  the  rest  may  be  ex- 
plained in  terms  of  chemistry;  start 
the  human  body  developing,  and  phys- 
iological processes  explain  its  growth; 
but  why  it  becomes  a  man  and  not  a 
monkey  —  what  explains  that? 


A  WELL-REGULATED  FAMILY 


BY  C.   F.  TUCKER   BROOKE 


JOHN  GATESDEN'S  possession  of  the 
seven  hundred  ancestral  acres  of  the 
Kingswell  estate  seemed  to  the  com- 
munity in  which  he  flourished  as  in- 
alienable a  blessing  as  his  possession 
of  the  straight  Gatesden  nose  and  the 
finest  name  in  the  county.  The  own- 
ership of  Kingswell,  every  one  felt, 
would  always  be  a  more  important 
factor  in  Gatesden's  career  than  his 
profession  of  the  law;  though  his  choice 
of  vocation,  coming  to  him  by  heredity 
as  naturally  as  his  estate,  had  never 
during  the  thirty  years  he  had  lived 
been  a  moment  in  doubt. 

Gatesden's  law  office  —  no  unfair 
index  to  the  character  of  its  occupant 
—  was  regarded  by  the  legal  fraternity 
of  Graysville  with  more  of  affection- 
ate indulgence  than  respect.  No  door  in 
the  long  low  line  of  attorneys'  quar- 
ters that  flanks  the  court-house  opened 
oftener  than  John's  to  admit  a  friend, 
and  few  remained  less  disturbed  by 
clients.  By  common  consent  of  the 
well-selected  souls  who  had  the  entree, 
Gatesden's  office  was  the  best  place  in 
town  to  idle*  away  a  vagrant  half-hour 
in  the  discussion  of  books  or  travel, 
politics  or  balls. 

Yet  there  was  nothing  flippant  about 
either  John  or  his  office.  The  walls  of 
the  two  rooms  were  lined  to  the  ceiling 
with  sheep-bound  repositories  of  cases, 
statutes,  and  reports  —  the  accretion 
of  three  earlier  generations  of  Gates- 
dens,  supplemented,  however,  in  good 
judgment,  by  recent  purchases.  Two 
diplomas,  hung  unobtrusively  low  be- 
hind the  desk,  occasionally  awoke  the 

556 


visitor  to  surprised  remembrance  that 
John  Gatesden  had  done  notably  well 
some  ten  years  before  at  the  fine  col- 
lege which  had  educated  his  grand- 
fathers, showing,  as  an  old  professor 
had  declared,  a  marked  hereditary  apti- 
tude for  legal  reasoning. 

No  one,  indeed,  could  have  said  that 
the  slight  opinion  of  Gatesden's  profes- 
sional ability  had  arisen  from  any  overt 
error  or  neglect.  On  the  contrary, 
though  the  habitues  of  his  office  gener- 
ally wasted  his  time  and  their  own  in 
miscellaneous  chatter,  John's  mind  did 
not  the  less  dominate  the  discussion 
when  a  visitor  introduced  shop-talk  in 
connection  with  some  thorny  current 
case.  Not  infrequently  in  the  past 
years,  his  struggling  and  rising  contem- 
poraries had  even  admitted,  with  a 
freedom  bred  of  the  inconceivableness 
of  rivalry,  that  the  decisive  argument 
in  an  involved  suit  had  been  suggested 
by  a  lightly  offered  reference  or  extern-  . 
porary  harangue  of  John's. 

Some  of  the  older  practitioners, 
friends  of  his  father,  would  still  ask 
when  John  Gatesden  was  going  to  stop 
fooling  and  become  a  lawyer;  but  the 
general  public,  which  in  such  cases  is 
wont  to  assume  what  is  most  agreeable 
to  it,  had  long  settled  that  John  would 
never  amount  to  much  in  his  profession. 
How  could  the  community  afford  to 
exchange  for  a  self-engrossed  intellect- 
ual machine,  this  incomparable  gentle- 
man of  leisure  and  letters,  whose  fine- 
flavored  courtesy  and  charming  mind 
lay  always  as  freely  and  generously 
open  as  his  office-door?  Had  not  fate 


A  WELL-REGULATED  FAMILY 


557 


itself  foreordained  through  two  hun- 
dred years  that  Gatesden  of  Kings- 
well  should  be  free  from  sordid  cares 
and  ambitions? 

The  smallest  hints  of  impracticality 
were  in  John's  case  joyously  exaggerat- 
ed into  proofs  of  lovable  incompetence. 
The  weekly  copy  of  Le  Figaro  on  his 
desk,  the  annotated  copy  of  Chaucer 
which  a  too  boisterous  intruder  once 
snatched  from  his  hand  with  shouts  of 
laughter,  were  regarded  as  fatal  symp- 
toms of  a  digressive  mind,  and  served 
to  discourage  clients  as  effectually  as 
any  spring-gun  on  the  door.  And  yet 
no  visitor  to  Judge  Thornton's  untidy 
adjoining  office  was  ever  rash  enough 
to  draw  a  similar  inference  from  the 
hideous  pile  of  dime  detective  novels 
with  which  that  legal  Trojan  was  used 
to  relieve  his  orgies  of  work. 

As  the  idleness  of  the  vacations  was 
followed  each  year  by  the  more  glaring 
inoccupation  of  the  terms  of  court, 
Gatesden  came  more  and  more  to  ac- 
cept the  position  which  circumstances 
and  opinion  seemed  to  have  prescribed 
for  him.  Pride  itself  helped  to  cover 
the  springs  of  energy.  Since  the  uni- 
verse had  gratuitously  adopted  this  de- 
lusion concerning  him,  was  it  not  more 
seemly  to  accept  the  false  estimate  with 
an  inward  shrug,  as  he  might  let  pass 
some  stranger's  egregious  blunder  con- 
cerning him,  rather  than  make  himself 
ridiculous  in  the  effort  to  vindicate  his 
possession  of  a  trait  which  was  never 
disputed  in  many  of  his  most  common- 
place associates? 

The  inward  protest  which  the  more 
ardent  part  of  his  nature  did  make 
from  time  to  time  against  the  trend  of 
his  existence  was  too  gentle  to  sour  his 
enjoyment  of  life;  and  it  was  every- 
where noted  that  the  years  were  deal- 
ing graciously  with  him.  Since  col- 
lege, his  fine-featured  face  had  grown  a 
shade  rounder,  his  attitudes  and  move- 
ments more  reposeful.  Though  no 


taint  of  fatness  or  self-indulgence  had 
as  yet  begun  to  coarsen  his  refinement 
of  look  and  manner,  his  personality 
now  gave  forth  the  companionable 
charm  which  comes  with  the  know- 
ledge how  to  get  the  fullest  enjoyment 
out  of  every  passing  moment.  No  man 
could  smoke  a  pipe  with  a  more  perfect 
balance  between  the  nervous  jerks  that 
frustrate  soporific  pleasure  and  the 
apathy  which  grows  oblivious  of  satis- 
faction. In  his  presence  people  realized 
for  the  first  time  how  fine  and  rare  an 
art  it  is  to  sit  properly  in  one's  chair. 

Guests  at  the  bachelor  dinners  at 
Kings  well  used  to  comment  on  John's 
growing  likeness  to  the  portrait  of  his 
Revolutionary  ancestor,  Colonel  John 
Gatesden,  which  hung  behind  the 
host's  seat  in  the  dining-room.  He  was 
in  fact  reverting  to  type,  developing  a 
more  leisurely  and  stately  manner,  with 
smoother  brow  and  slower  movement 
than  belongs  to  the  gentleman  of  the 
present  order.  And,  indeed,  he  was  not 
ill-pleased  to  have  this  observed.  The 
master  of  Kingswell  would  not  be  liv- 
ing in  vain,  he  fancied,  while  he  re- 
vived for  the  benefit  of  a  too  busy  age 
the  more  charming  traits  of  the  early 
Gatesdens. 

The  Kingswell  property,  which  was 
so  largely  responsible  for  John  Gates- 
den's  state  of  mind,  was  an  object  of 
pride  not  only  to  its  owner,  but  to 
the  entire  region.  Though  reduced  to 
less  than  a  tithe  of  its  colonial  extent, 
it  was  still  a  very  imposing  tract, 
and  almost  alone  of  the  old  demesnes 
had  been  able  to  keep  itself  in  the  un- 
disturbed possession  of  the  family  to 
which  its  original  charter  had  been 
granted.  The  land  had  been  strictly 
entailed  from  the  first,  and  though  the 
Revolution  had  annulled  the  legal 
force  of  the  old  tenure,  it  had  in  no  way 
weakened  the  religious  respect  in  which 
every  Gatesden  was  taught  to  hold 
it.  The  duty  of  preserving  the  estate 


558 


A  WELL-REGULATED  FAMILY 


indivisibly  in  the  family,  as  their  first 
ancestors  had  bequeathed  it,  had  been 
instilled  till  it  had  become  a  racial  in- 
stinct; and  the  land  passed  from  eldest 
son  to  eldest  son  as  regularly  as  if  the 
law  of  primogeniture  were  still  unques- 
tionable. It  was  a  point  on  which  the 
Gatesdens  were  fanatic,  a  channel  into 
which  was  turned  from  earliest  youth 
the  whole  force  of  their  family  pride. 
Each  will  recorded  in  the  Graysville 
court-house,  generation  after  genera- 
tion, continued  the  traditional  disposal 
of  the  property. 

For  the  younger  branches  of  the 
family,  no  treason  could  seem  blacker 
than  that  which  might,  for  selfish  ends, 
attempt  the  disruption  of  the  estate. 
This  was  the  doctrine  in  which  John 
Gatesden  had  been  bred  up.  It  was  a 
doctrine,  moreover,  which  local  feeling 
highly  approved.  Though  the  estates 
of  the  Washingtons  and  the  Randolphs 
were  falling,  one  by  one,  into  the  van- 
dal hands  of  aliens,  Virginians  might 
expect  Kingswell  to  stand  intact  against 
the  tide  of  changing  conditions  so  long 
as  the  Gatesdens  were  not  unfaithful 
to  the  tradition  of  their  race. 

Gatesden's  black  caretaker,  Dennis, 
moving  with  characteristic  delibera- 
tion about  the  removal  of  dust  and 
tobacco-ash,  was  startled  one  midsum- 
mer morning  by  an  unwonted  appari- 
tion. It  was  while  Dennis,  with  head 
and  shoulders  bent  far  out  of  the  front- 
office  window,  was  wholly  absorbed  in 
the  forbidden  but  labor-saving  device 
of  emptying  a  heaping  dust-pan  be- 
tween the  bars  of  the  grating  in  the 
pavement  below. 

'I  reckon  Mister  John  Gatson  lives 
here?'  drawled  the  voice  of  an  unseen 
speaker,  belonging  clearly  to  a  circle  of 
society  in  which  Dennis  and  his  master 
did  not  move. 

Inasmuch  as  Dennis  had  cautiously 
scanned  the  pavement  up  and  down 


before  venturing  to  display  the  objec- 
tionable dust-pan,  the  interruption  was 
distinctly  alarming  to  an  uneasy  con- 
science. He  raised  himself  with  a  haste 
which  brought  his  shoulders  into  sharp 
contact  with  the  uplifted  sash  and  left 
him  pilloried  uncomfortably  in  the 
window,  while  the  dust-pan,  diverted 
from  its  aim,  poured  an  accusing  heap 
of  cigar-stumps  directly  beside  the 
doorstep. 

It  required  several  startled  glances 
to  discover  the  speaker,  seated  on  a 
weather-beaten  spring-wagon  beside 
the  curbstone,  where  he  had  been  wait- 
ing irresolutely  for  several  minutes. 
Losing  his  alarm,  Dennis  stared  in 
growing  disapproval  at  this  intruder, 
who  continued  to  sit  on  the  hard,  un- 
backed wagon-seat  in  a  characteristic 
attitude  of  mingled  apathy  and  nerv- 
ousness. Arms  and  legs  were  twisted 
awkwardly  as  if  their  owner  sought 
to  deprecate  their  superfluous  length. 
The  face,  that  of  a  man  of  forty,  was 
covered  with  a  growth  of  sandy  hair 
in  which  moustache  and  beard  merged 
indistinguishably.  The  only  visible 
garments,  besides  the  rough  shoes  and 
wide,  chip  hat,  were  a  collarless  shirt  of 
brown  cotton  check,  and  overalls,  orig- 
inally dark-blue,  but  worn  to  a  faded 
gray  at  the  knees  and  other  points  of 
friction.  The  wagon,  drawn  by  an  aged 
mule,  was  laden  with  home-made  bas- 
kets containing  berries.  Evidently  the 
stranger  was  a  *  mountain  man*  from 
the  Blue  Ridge  beyond  the  Shenan- 
doah,  a  member  of  the  class  which  in 
the  judgment  of  the  Negro  population 
ranks  lowest  in  the  social  scale. 

'Does  Mr.  Gatson  live  here?'  re- 
peated Dennis  derisively,  forgetting  his 
embarrassment  in  the  agreeable  sense 
of  superiority  to  his  interlocutor.  *  Ev- 
erybody that  knows  anything  knows 
that  Mr.  Gatson  re-sides  at  Kings- 
well!' 

'Wall,'  replied  the  stranger,  'they 


A  WELL-REGULATED  FAMILY 


559 


tole  me  at  the  co't-house  to  count  five 
doors  up  the  street  on  the  right,  and 
this  here  is  the  fift ',  and  yonder  is  his 
name.' 

He  pointed  to  the  sign,  'John  Gates- 
den,  Attorney  at  Law,'  beside  the  door- 
way. 

'Dis  here  is  Mr.  Gatson's  orffice,' 
acknowledged  the  Negro  grudgingly, 
'whar  he  comes  to  trans-form  business 
with  his  friends,  but  he  ain't  never 
here  befo'  ten.' 

'Kin  I  see  him  ef  I  wait  till  ten?' 
persisted  the  other,  glancing  at  the 
clock  on  the  court-house,  which  now 
pointed  to  nine-forty. 

'I  cain't  exac'ly  say,'  replied  Dennis. 

*  Mister  John  he  don't  have  to  be  so 
powerful  on  time  like  a  'surance  agent 
or  that  kin'  o'  trash;  and  he  don't  see 
folks  'cep'  an'  he  wants  to.  How  come 
he  to  know  you?' 

'He'll  be  bound  to  know  me,  all 
right,  and  my  father,  too.  Leastways 
he  had  ought  to,  bein'  as  he 's  the  son 
of  Colonel  Bevis  Gatson.' 

Dennis  drew  in  his  head  with  pon- 
derous dignity  and  set  about  the  com- 
pletion of  his  duties  without  another 
glance  at  the  occupant  of  the  wagon. 
The  antipathy  between  the  mountain 
whites,  the  pariahs  of  the  district,  and 
the  old  family  Negroes,  who  regard 
themselves  as  a  part  of  the  dominant 
class,  is  as  natural  as  that  between  cat 
and  dog.  Dennis  resented  the  intru- 
sion of  this  'po'  white  trash'  as  an  af- 
front to  his  own  dignity  and  his  mas- 
ter's. He  would  gladly  have  driven 
him  away;  but  his  only  weapons,  dis- 
couragement and  condescension,  were 
clearly  ineffectual.  Moreover,  the 
Negro  was  a  little  impressed  by  the 
stranger's  familiar  allusion  to  Gates- 
den's  father,  and  by  his  correct  local 
pronunciation  of  the  name.  'Gatson,' 
he  had  pronounced  it.  Had  he  said 

*  Gates-den,'   as   strangers  often   did, 
Dennis  would  have  felt  justified  in 


turning  him  from  the  door  as  an  arrant 
intruder. 

Half  an  hour  later,  when  John 
Gatesden  walked  into  his  office,  after 
leaving  his  horse  and  buggy  as  usual  at 
the  livery-stable  in  the  next  street,  he 
found  Dennis  abstractedly  polishing 
the  backs  of  his  books,  as  if  oblivious 
of  every  other  concern. 

'Nobody  called  this  morning,  Den- 
nis?' he  asked. 

'No,  Mister  John,'  answered  the 
Negro;  'there  ain't  ben  no  callers  — 
not'  less  you  count  a  old  mountain  man 
with  berries.  He  mought  be  out  there 
still,'  he  continued,  with  an  elaborate 
affectation  of  doubt  concerning  the 
continued  presence  of  the  stranger.  '  I 
jes'  knowed  you  did  n't  want  to  see  the 
likes  of  him;  but  them  folks  is  powerful 
hard  to  decompose  when  they  gets  set 
on  a  thing.' 

A  glance  through  the  window  in  the 
direction  of  Dennis's  scornful  nod 
showed  John  the  previously  unnoticed 
mountaineer,  still  immobile  on  the 
wagon-seat.  Gatesden  returned  to  the 
door. 

'I  am  afraid  you  have  been  kept 
waiting  for  me,'  he  said,  with  his  charm- 
ing smile.  'I  am  Mr.  Gatesden.' 

For  answer,  the  mountaineer  straight- 
ened out  his  long  legs  and  climbed 
stiffly  out  of  the  wagon.  From  among 
the  litter  of  baskets  behind,  he  took  a 
stained  and  misshapen  leather  recep- 
tacle about  the  size  of  a  long  boot. 
Then  he  followed  Gatesden  into  the 
office.  Simultaneously  Dennis  retired 
with  stately  disgust  through  the  door 
into  the  rear  room. 

At  the  threshold  the  visitor  stopped 
nervously. 

'My  name  is  Jackson,'  he  said; 
'Bevis  Jackson  from  Otter  Crick  over 
thar  in  the  mountain,  fifteen  mile 
t'  other  side  of  the  river.  My  father 
was  Bevis  Jackson  too,  and  he  was  in 


560 


A  WELL-REGULATED  FAMILY 


Colonel  Gatson's  regiment  in  the  wah.' 

'Oh,  I  have  often  heard  my  father 
speak  of  him,'  exclaimed  John,  real 
interest  replacing  quizzical  curiosity  in 
his  face.  'When  he  raised  a  company, 
Bevis  Jackson  was  one  of  the  first  to 
volunteer.  He  was  his  companion  twice 
on  scouting  duty,  and  it  was  Bevis 
Jackson  that  dragged  him  to  shelter 
when  he  was  shot  in  the  last  charge  at 
Malvern  Hill.' 

'The  old  Colonel  allers  treated  Pap 
real  handsome  when  he  come  to  town. 
He  wanted  to  deed  him  our  land  in 
Otter  Crick,  because  he  said  it  was 
down  in  the  co't-house  books  that  it 
belonged  to  the  Gatsons.  But  Pap  he 
would  n't  take  no  new  deed,  for  we  uns 
allers  knowed  that  the  land  is  ours.  We 
ain't  never  been  squatters  and  our  pa- 
pers is  all  in  here,'  Jackson  concluded, 
as  he  laid  the  old  leathern  bag  on  the 
desk. 

'  Of  course,  you  know  that  your  pos- 
session will  never  be  interfered  with  by 
any  of  us,  even  if  we  should  be  able  to 
do  so;  but  if  you  will  accept  the  formal 
deed  to  your  farm  which  your  father 
declined,  we  can  quickly  make  your 
title  absolutely  clear.' 

'  T  ain't  that  that  made  me  come  to 
you,' answered  Jackson,  quickly.  'We 
know  that  you  all  would  n't  never 
make  us  no  trouble,  and  we  know  the 
land  has  always  been  rightly  ourn.  But 
this  here  lumber  company  from  Roa- 
noke  has  been  nosin'  about,  and  they 
have  drove  stakes  clean  across  our 
wood-lot.  The  engineer  fellow  allows 
as  how  it  belongs  to  them.  So  I  thought 
if  maybe  you  could  look  through  this 
here  and  tell  me  how  things  stand,  I  'd 
feel  safer  like  when  them  folks  comes 
back  to  begin  choppinV 

He  pushed  the  bag  farther  across  the 
desk  in  Gatesden's  direction. 

'I  shall  be  delighted  to  do  so,'  said 
John.  'It  will  be  only  a  small  repay- 
ment of  the  debt  we  owe  you.  Leave 


me  the  papers  and  come  back,  if  you 
can,  about  one  o'clock.' 

The  man  nodded  with  an  abruptness 
which  was  far  from  uncivil. 

'I  got  to  peddle  my  berries  aroun', 
and  buy  some  truck.  I  reckon  I'll  be 
back  by  one.' 

He  climbed  into  his  wagon  and  after 
clucking  several  times  to  the  irrespon- 
sive mule,  lumbered  down  the  street  at 
an  irregular  trot  which  drove  the  berry 
baskets  clattering  from  side  to  side. 

John  took  up  the  bag  from  the  desk 
and  looked  at  it  curiously.  It  weighed 
perhaps  five  or  six  pounds,  and  though 
much  discolored  and  misshapen,  was 
still  so  stout  as  to  seem  almost  air-tight. 
It  was  clearly  a  saddle-bag  of  the  type 
carried  by  gentlemen  of  the  eighteenth 
century,  when  travel  in  this  region  was 
all  by  horseback.  Evidently,  too,  it 
had  belonged  to  a  person  of  distinction, 
for  the  mountings  were  of  silver  and  a 
great  plate  of  the  same  metal  on  the 
flap  bore  the  armorial  badge  of  some 
family,  now  tarnished  beyond  recog- 
nition. The  lock  John  found  much 
stronger  than  he  would  have  imagined 
from  its  small  size  and  ornamental  ap- 
pearance. Though  the  silver  key  had 
been  left  within  the  keyhole,  it  refused 
for  a  long  time  to  turn.  Apparently  the 
lock  had  set  from  long  disuse. 

John  poured  a  drop  of  machine-oil 
into  the  keyhole,  and,  while  waiting  for 
the  lubricant  to  work,  occupied  him- 
self with  the  engraved  silver  plate. 
Taking  the  chamois-skin  cover  of  his 
watch,  he  rubbed  the  tarnished  metal 
several  minutes,  till  the  inscription  be- 
gan to  grow  legible. 

As  the  letters  under  the  arms  ap- 
peared, he  uttered  an  exclamation.  It 
was  the  Gatesden  motto,  'Jus  suum 
cuique,'  that  the  bag  bore.  On  the 
shield  above  could  be  traced,  though 
very  dimly,  the  outline  of  the  scroll  and 
balance  of  the  Gatesden  crest.  Tense 
with  interest,  John  turned  again  to 


A  WELL-REGULATED  FAMILY 


561 


the  lock.  The  oil  had  had  its  effect, 
and  the  key  now  turned. 

The  first  glance  inside  the  case  was 
disappointing.  It  revealed  only  a 
squat  little  volume,  mouldering  with 
damp  and  age,  a  Greek  Testament  with 
the  imprint,  'Oxoniae,  1760.'  Laying 
it  aside,  John  examined  the  bag  it- 
self more  particularly,  and  discovered, 
sewed  against  the  side,  a  kind  of  oil- 
skin envelope  designed  for  the  carrying 
of  papers.  He  unbuttoned  this  inner 
case  and  drew  forth  several  documents 
which,  though  yellowed,  had  been  pre- 
served from  decay.  The  largest  paper 
was  a  rent-roll  of  the  Gatesden  prop- 
erty, drawn  up  in  the  year  1774.  An 
official  parchment  beside  it  proclaimed 
the  appointment  of  Bevis  Gatesden,  of 
the  county  of  Frederick  in  Virginia, 
Esquire,  stamp  commissioner  for  west- 
ern Virginia,  and  representative,  under 
Lord  Dunmore,  of  the  authority  of 
King  George  the  Third. 

A  rough  note,  written  as  John  recog- 
nized in  the  hand  of  his  Revolutionary 
great-grandfather,  was  the  only  other 
paper.  It  ran  as  follows :  — 

Williamsburg,  June  8,  1775.  Hon- 
oured Brother:  It  seems  my  duty  to  ac- 
quaint you,  as  our  late  Father's  repre- 
sentative and  the  Head  of  our  Family, 
that  I  have  this  day  taken  an  action, 
which,  though  it  may  not  occasion  you 
surprise,  will,  I  doubt  not,  give  you 
vexation  and  grief.  I  have  bound  my- 
self with  many  Gentlemen  of  the  Col- 
ony to  resist  the  enforcement  of  His 
Majesty's  late  measures  and  the  will 
of  his  Governor.  Lord  Dunmore  hath 
retired  in  anger  from  the  city  and  the 
burgesses  no  longer  venture  to  hope  for 
a  peaceful  issue.  I  have  not  the  hardi- 
hood to  flatter  myself  that  you  will  re- 
gard my  step  without  anger;  but  I  beg 
you  to  reflect  that,  should  our  under- 
takings miscarry,  you  are  like  at  least 
to  be  no  more  troubled  by  a  young 

VOL.  Ill -NO.  4 


half-brother  who  has  already  caused 
you  too  much  displeasure.   I  am,  Sir, 
Your  obedient,  humble  brother, 

JOHN  GATESDEN. 

For  a  long  time  Gatesden  fingered 
the  papers.  What  an  interesting  relic 
of  his  old  Tory  ancestor,  of  whose  pas- 
sionate loyalty  to  King  George  many 
stories  were  still  rife!  By  what  curious 
accident,  he  mused,  could  this  memo- 
rial of  his  family  have  lain  for  genera- 
tions in  the  possession  of  the  Jacksons? 
And  then  he  suddenly  remembered. 
Otter  Creek  lay  deep  in  the  heart  of  the 
Blue  Ridge,  visited  even  to-day  by  none 
but  its  sparse  mountaineer  population 
and  a  few  hunters  of  wild  turkey. 
Gatesden  himself  had  never  been  there. 
It  was  somewhere  in  this  inaccessible 
part  of  the  county  that  old  Bevis 
Gatesden  had  been  killed,  according  to 
family  history,  in  a  desperate  attempt 
to  secrete  the  King's  munitions  from 
the  rising  colonists.  Overtaken  in  a 
ravine  of  the  mountains,  the  old  fellow 
had  long  fought  in  defense  of  the  royal 
stores,  and  finally,  after  the  dispersal 
of  his  followers,  had  ridden  off  the  field 
like  Hampden,  wounded  and  alone,  to 
die,  it  was  supposed,  somewhere  in  the 
wilds.  The  body  was  never  recovered; 
but  there  stood  in  the  burying  ground 
at  Kingswell  a  monument  to  his  mem- 
ory with  the  inscription,  'Officio  forti- 
ter  perfunctus  pro  rege  et  fide  vitam  de- 
posuit.9 

The  saddle-bag  had  doubtless  been 
taken  from  the  old  man's  horse  by  the 
mountaineers  who  witnessed  his  death. 
It  was  a  most  precious  heirloom,  to  be 
recovered  at  all  costs  and  treasured 
with  the  other  family  relics  at  Kings- 
well.  John  carefully  replaced  the  pa- 
pers in  the  pocket  from  which  he  had 
taken  them,  revolving  in  his  mind  as 
he  did  so  the  arguments  by  which  he 
might  best  obtain  Jackson's  surrender 
of  the  curio. 


562 


A  WELL-REGULATED  FAMILY 


As  he  rebuttoned  the  pocket,  his  eyes 
fell  again  upon  the  Testament.  Hold- 
ing the  little  volume  in  both  hands,  he 
carefully  opened  the  stiffened  leather 
and  turned  over  the  pages  in  search  of 
annotations.  On  the  fly-leaves  at  the 
back  of  the  book  he  found  several  pages 
of  manuscript,  written  in  inferior  ink 
and  much  more  weather-stained  than 
the  papers  in  the  pocket. 

As  Gatesden  slowly  deciphered  the 
faded  writing,  the  look  of  satisfaction 
died  out  of  his  face.  His  cheeks  flushed 
uncomfortably,  and  he  felt  a  chill  set- 
tling about  his  heart.  According  to 
the  inscription  on  the  Kingswell  cen- 
otaph, old  Bevis  Gatesden  had  died  in 
1775;  but  the  first  note  in  the  book 
was  dated  1778.  This  is  what  John 
read:  — 

October  9,  1778.  I,  Bevis  Gatesden, 
late  representative  of  His  Majesty  in 
these  parts,  was  this  day  married  by  a 
travelling  parson,  one  Thomas  Eckles, 
to  Joan  Ellerslie,  a  peasant  wench  by 
whom  I  have  been  nursed  these  three 
years  past  through  wounds  and  fever. 
This  I  have  done  in  sound  mind,  though 
still  infirm  health,  being  determined  to 
pass  the  poor  remainder  of  my  days 
among  these  people  who  have  sheltered 
and  preserved  me  when  my  own  have 
cast  me  off.  God  knows  I  can  do 
naught  else,  for  my  lands,  save  these 
barren  hills,  are  in  possession  of  the 
rebels,  and  my  fractured  thigh  pre- 
vents me  from  sitting  horse  again  in 
His  Majesty's  service. 

The  next  entry,  written  in  a  hand 
yet  more  wavering  and  illegible,  ran 
crookedly  across  the  middle  of  a  page: 

March  4.  1780.  On  this  day  was 
baptized  my  son  Bevis,  called  by  the 
name  of  his  forefathers,  though  like  to 
know  naught  of  his  heritage.  Better 
that  my  unhappy  strain  continue  in 


obscurity  than  that  it  contaminate  the 
Gatesden  stock  with  peasant  blood  and 
enjoy  its  patrimony  by  truckling  to 
disloyalty  and^ rebellion! 

To  John  Gatesden,  as  he  pored  over 
the  last  crabbed  letters,  the  whole 
story  became  suddenly  clear.  He  was 
unconscious  of  any  course  of  ratiocina- 
tion, however  short;  nor  did  he  feel  the 
slightest  doubt  concerning  the  over- 
powering conclusion  to  which  his  mind 
leaped.  This  mountaineer,  Bevis  Jack- 
son, bearing  like  his  father  the  unusual 
Christian  name  of  the  Gatesdens,  was 
the  descendant  of  the  elder  Bevis  of  the 
Revolution,  the  old  Tory  whom  the 
family  records  assumed  to  have  died 
without  issue.  It  was  he,  not  John, 
who  represented  the  senior  branch  and 
to  whom,  according  to  the  inviolable 
rule,  the  family  estate  should  have  de- 
scended. Even  the  name  Jackson, 
which  he  now  bore,  was  convincing 
evidence.  Gatesden  was  in  vulgar  pro- 
nunciation Gatson,  and  Gatson  would 
inevitably  pass  into  Jackson  among  the 
leveling  influences  of  the  backwoods. 

The  hours  which  dragged  away  be- 
fore the  return  of  Jackson  were  for 
John  Gatesden  the  most  poignant  of 
his  life.  Too  honest  to  dodge  realiza- 
tion of  the  new  state  of  affairs,  he  was 
yet  incapable  of  perceiving  any  toler- 
able course  of  action.  What  could  he 
do  which  should  be  just  and  honorable 
at  once  to  this  uncouth  stranger,  to 
himself,  and  to  his  trust  as  fiduciary  of 
the  family  dignity?  Like  all  men  bred 
to  a  high  sense  of  personal  responsibil- 
ity, he  had  a  horror  amounting  almost 
to  physical  repulsion  for  anything 
flashily  melodramatic  or  hysterical. 
By  heaven,  if  this  man,  whose  exist- 
ence shook  down  about  him  all  the 
stately  edifice  of  his  self-satisfaction, 
were  an  equal,  a  gentleman,  he  could 
see  his  way  and  follow  it  to  its  logical 
end  of  personal  renunciation.  But  to 


A  WELI^REGULATED  FAMILY 


563 


make  himself  ancf  all  that  his  birth  and 
position  represented  a  butt  for  wide- 
mouthed  gossip  by  investing  this  vul- 
gar jay  in  the  plumes  which  had  lain 
so  gracefully  upon  his  ancestors  and 
himself  —  to  do  this  wantonly,  with- 
out legal  compulsion,  for  the  gratifica- 
tion of  a  whimsical,  squeamish  honor 

—  would  be  not  noble,  but  hideously 
grotesque. 

To  John  there  seemed  no  escape 
from  the  horrible  dilemma.  Before  his 
brain  three  ideas  kept  repeating  them- 
selves monotonously,  as  though  he 
should  never  be  able  either  to  dismiss 
or  to  harmonize  them.  The  family 
motto  on  the  bag,  Jus  suum  cuique, 
'To  every  man  his  due';  the  old  law  of 
the  exclusive  right  of  the  elder  branch, 
which  seemed  the  holier  now  that  it 
depended  no  longer  upon  legal  force 
but  upon  race  loyalty  and  devotion; 

—  these  seemed  to  keep  hammering 
themselves  upon  his  throbbing  tem- 
ples; while  beside  them  kept  rising  in 
hideous  discord  the  image  of  the  mount- 
aineer,  himself   the  negation  of  the 
qualities  of  hereditary  nobility  which 
all  this  rigid  machinery  of  succession 
had  been  framed  to  perpetuate. 

The  actual  appearance  of  Jackson, 
standing  in  the  doorway,  unannounced 
by  knock  or  salutation,  was  a  relief. 
Something  in  the  man's  shyness  ap- 
pealed to  John's  own  embarrassment. 
He  felt  that  they  were  less  rivals  than 
comrades  in  the  bizarre  adventure 
which  fate  had  suddenly  let  fall  upon 
them. 

'Sit  down,'  he  said,  after  a  glance  of 
friendly  hesitation.  'How  much  can 
you  tell  me  about  the  original  owner  of 
these  things?'  he  asked  as  he  began 
again  to  take  out  the  contents  of  the 
bag. 

'The  old  squire,  you  mean?'  an- 
swered the  other.  'He  was  Pap's 
grandfather,  but  he  died  long  before 
Pap  was  born,  I  reckon.  They  say  he 


never  got  over  the  wounds  he  got  when 
he  first  come  into  Otter  Crick.  He'd 
been  fighting  the  Injuns  or  Britishers, 
I  reckon.  His  hoss  brought  him  up  to 
our  cabin  and  after  he  had  got  a  little 
better  he  was  married  to  Pap's  grand- 
mother. He  is  buried  in  the  buryin'- 
ground  at  the  forks  of  the  road.  They 
allers  said  as  how  he  was  a  great  man 
at  home,  but  we  never  rightly  knowed 
jest  whar  he  come  from.' 

'His  name  was  really  Bevis  Gates- 
den.  He  was  the  owner  of  the  Kings- 
well  estate,  which  passed  to  my  great- 
grandfather, because  he  was  supposed 
to  have  died  unmarried.  According  to 
the  family  rules,  the  property  should 
have  remained  with  your  branch  and 
descended  to  you,  I  suppose,  not  to  me.' 
John  went  on  slowly.  '  Here  is  the  evi- 
dence of  your  ancestor's  marriage  and 
of  the  birth  of  his  son.' 

He  read  aloud  the  entries  in  the 
Testament. 

'And  you  mean  that  the  law  would 
take  your  land  and  give  it  to  me,  if 
this  here  was  known?'  asked  Jackson, 
in  supreme  astonishment. 

'Probably  not;  but  we  have  always 
settled  our  family  affairs  without  in- 
voking the  law,  and  we  have  settled 
them  justly.  The  question  is,  what  is 
just  here?' 

'  It  says  thar  in  the  book  that  the  old 
squire  did  n't  want  Pap's  father  to  get 
the  land.' 

'That  wouldn't  bar  his  title,'  an- 
swered John.  'It  looks  to  me  as  if  the 
property  is  rightfully  yours.' 

'You  don't  mean  that  you  would 
give  it  to  me  without  having  to?' 

'I  don't  know.  You  must  help  me 
to  decide.  I  don't  see  how  I  could 
keep  what  is  morally  not  mine.' 

The  mountaineer  sat  for  a  moment 
downcast.  The  unconscious  melancholy 
of  his  expression  was  intensified  as  he 
thought.  John  bit  his  lips  as  he  stared 
at  the  wall,  irritated  with  himself  for 


564 


A  WELL-REGULATED  FAMILY 


his  inability  to  deal  decisively  with  the 
situation. 

After  two  or  three  minutes,  Jackson 
looked  up.  The  shy  awkwardness  of 
his  manner,  which  astonishment  had 
for  a  moment  shaken  off,  was  again 
upon  him. 

'If  you  please,  Mister  Gatson,  do 
you  reckon  that  I  could  see  this  place 
that  was  my  —  that  was  the  old 
squire's?' 

'Certainly/  answered  John.  'I  drive 
back  for  lunch.  Come  with  me  now.' 

Gatesden's  fast  trotter  covered  the 
two  miles  to  Kingswell  in  ten  min- 
utes. Neither  man  spoke  during  the 
drive.  John  was  a  prey  to  the  keen  an- 
noyance with  himself,  which  fills  the 
conscientious  person  when  he  scents 
unpleasant  duty  and  cannot  decide 
upon  his  course  of  action.  The  stranger 
gazed  wide-eyed  at  the  evidences  of 
prosperity  along  the  road,  at  the  hand- 
some iron  gates  adorning  the  entrance 
to  the  estate,  at  the  long  avenue,  and 
the  low,  capacious  sweep  of  the  house's 
fagade. 

Seated  tete-a-tete  with  John  in  the 
long  dining-room,  under  the  withering 
scowls  of  the  waiter,  Jackson  won  the 
cordial  respect  of  his  host.  To  the 
natural  dignity  of  the  mountaineer  he 
joined  a  quick  power  of  observation 
which  preserved  his  manners  from  rude- 
ness even  in  the  unfamiliar  environ- 
ment. John's  rare  gift  of  hospitality 
was  called  into  play  as  he  led  his  guest 
to  forget  his  embarrassment  and  en- 
tertained him  with  family  anecdotes. 
By  the  end  of  the  meal  all  stiffness 
had  disappeared. 

In  the  spirit  of  congeniality  which 
arises  from  the  recognition  of  common 
interest,  the  two  men  passed  from  a 
survey  of  the  portraits  on  the  walls  to 
the  examination  of  the  tombstones  in 
the  burying-ground  outside.  Still  occu- 
pied with  question  and  answer  about 


the  family  and  the  history  of  Kings- 
well,  they  returned  to  the  town. 

The  old  gray  mule,  standing  discon- 
solate before  the  office  door,  seemed  to 
wake  Jackson  from  a  dream.  In  a  kind 
of  stage  fright  he  tumbled  from  the 
cushioned  seat  upon  which  he  had  been 
reclining  in  unembarrassed  ease,  and 
stood  twirling  his  hat  nervously  be- 
tween his  fingers. 

'You  have  given  me  a  day,  Mr. 
Gatson,'  he  stammered,  'that  I  won't 
ever  forget,  and  —  and  that  will  maybe 
help  me  to  make  something  of  myself. 
And  if  you  are  still  agreeable  to  let  me 
have  a  deed  for  the  Otter  Crick  land, 
I'll  take  it  and  thank  you.' 

'But,  my  dear  fellow,'  answered 
John  in  surprise,  'we  can't  dispose  of 
the  matter  so  easily.  Don't  you  see 
that  as  the  representative  of  the  elder 
branch  of  our  family,  you  should  be  the 
owner  of  all  my  property  —  not  by  the 
present  law,  perhaps,  but  morally  and 
according  to  the  intention  of  the  orig- 
inal proprietors  of  the  estate?' 

'Me?'  cried  Jackson,  in  genuine 
fright.  'Do  you  think  I  could  be  mean 
enough  or  fool  enough  to  take  that? 
I'd  be  plain  miserable,  anyway,  with 
them  niggers  and  the  other  folks 
scoffin'  at  me.' 

'Well,  that's  our  problem,  cousin,' 
said  John,  frankly.  'I  can't  fancy  my- 
self standing  in  another  man's  .shoes.' 

'Tell  me,'  asked  Jackson  suddenly, 
'why  they  started  this  silly  rule  about 
the  property.' 

'  Why,  mainly  to  insure  its  remaining 
intact  in  the  family.' 

'And  you  feel  uncomfortable  about 
it  because  I  am  the  oldest  son  of  the 
oldest  son  all  the  way  down?' 

'Yes.' 

'  But  if  I  had  an  older  brother,  or  my 
father  had  had,  then  it  would  go  to 
him,  and  I  would  n't  have  no  claim?' 

'That  was  the  old  principle.' 

'Then  you  need  n't  be  nowise  dis- 


A  WELI^REGULATED  FAMILY 


565 


turbed,  sir/  said  Jackson,  looking  his 
hearer  clearly  in  the  eye,  'for  Pap  had 
an  older  brother  named  John,  who  left 
home  befo'  the  wah.  I  reckon  he  went 
out  West  when  they  was  talkin'  so  much 
about  gold  in  Californy.  We  ain't 
heard  nothin*  of  him  lately,  and  we 
ain't  likely  to;  but  even  supposin'  he 
war  my  own  brother  and  the  dearest 
kin  I  had,  I  'd  throw  him  off  clean  ef  he 
would  do  sech  a  low-down  mean  thing 
as  take  a  penny's  worth  of  what  is 
yourn.  You  see,  sir/  he  went  on  with 
a  flushed  face,  'we  uns  has  allers  had 
our  pride  too.  That's  why  we  would 
n't  take  the  old  colonel's  offer  to  deed 
us  that  land — he  bein'  a  stranger,  as 
we  thought.  And  now,  ef  we  can  think 
of  you,  livin'  here  so  fine  and  noble,  as 
our  kin  and  what  you  call  the  head  of 
our  family,  it  '11  make  us  a  deal  happier 
than  ten  times  the  land  would.  It'll  do 
me  real  good,  sir,  that  will,  and  maybe 
help  me  to  get  over  bein'  so  shiftless 
and  no-count.' 

He  wrung  John's  hand  hard  and 
mounted  his  old  wagon.  The  mule 
trotted  once  more  down  the  street.  The 
empty  baskets  rattled.  John  Gatesden 
looked  after  the  man  with  friendly  eyes. 
Then  he  turned  into  the  office.  The 
prim  tidiness  of  the  room  smote  him 
suddenly  with  sharp  reproach.  How 
amateurish  and  ineffectual  his  life  was ! 
How  ready  he  had  been  to  deck  himself 


in  borrowed  plumes!  The  rude  awak- 
ening to  his  false  position  had  taught 
him  his  lesson,  thank  God!  The  Kings- 
well  heritage,  falsely  his,  which  had  so 
long  lulled  him  in  complacent  idleness, 
would  be  in  future  his  sharpest  goad. 

One  possible  avenue  of  escape  into 
the  world  of  living  activity  lay  before 
him.  An  election  for  the  office  of  pro- 
secuting attorney  of  the  county  was 
nearly  due.  In  this  region,  with  its 
large  tracts  of  mountain  wilderness,  it 
was  a  post  of  much  labor,  and  even 
danger,  and  of  infinitesimal  profit, 
sought  usually  only  by  desperate  be- 
ginners at  the  law.  He  would  be  ridi- 
culed for  desiring  it,  but  he  could 
doubtless  have  it  for  the  asking.  It 
would  give  him  at  the  least  hard  work 
and  a  start. 

He  crossed  the  room  to  the  neatly 
folded  Figaro  on  his  table,  tore  it,  and 
flung  the  fragments  into  the  scrap- 
basket.  The  old  exhilaration  of  his  col- 
lege days  beat  intoxicatingly  about  his 
temples;  the  very  office  air  seemed  wine 
and  iron.  In  the  flush  of  the  new  dawn 
his  mind  turned  again  to  the  image  of 
the  departed  mountaineer. 

'He's  worthy  of  his  stock/  he  mur- 
mured. '  I  suppose  he  was  lying  in  what 
he  said  about  his  uncle?  Who  knows? 
But  he  is  right.  The  trust  is  mine,  and 
with  God's  help  I  will  hold  it  as  highly 
as  I  may.' 


IDYLLIC 


BY  ROBERT  M.   GAY 


IN  a  city  of  frame  houses  and  brown- 
stone  houses,  each  with  its  twenty- 
fifth  of  an  acre  of  grass-plot  in  front 
and  its  sixth  of  an  acre  of  yard  in  back, 
a  high  wall  of  gray  stone  inclosing 
whole  acres  of  lawn  and  plantation  was 
unusual  enough  to  excite  anybody's 
interest.  As  for  me,  I  was  quite  sure 
that  its  blocks  of  granite  were  about  as 
big  as  the  sandstone  blocks  of  the  Great 
Pyramid.  I  used  to  walk  down  of  an 
evening  just  to  run  my  fingers  over 
them  and  to  scratch  with  my  nails  the 
scum  of  green  lichen  that  spread  over 
the  mortar  after  a  rain.  There  was  a 
gate,  too,  of  cyclopean  planks  banded 
with  wrought  iron,  swung  between 
square  stone  columns.  On  top  of  these 
were  globes  of  granite  big  as  prize 
pumpkins.  When  I  applied  my  eye  to 
the  crack  of  the  gate,  my  nose  caught 
whiffs  of  lilac  and  syringa  mingled 
with  the  smell  of  hay  and  stables,  and 
my  ears  detected  often,  faintly,  the 
stamping  of  horses;  but,  beyond  the 
edge  of  a  dunghill  and  the  gray  side  of 
a  shed,  my  eyes  were  unrewarded.  The 
gate  was  never  opened. 

The  street  on  that  block  was  as  a 
rule  singularly  quiet.  Few  vehicles 
went  by,  perhaps  because  the  cobbles 
diverted  traffic  into  smoother  avenues. 
Grass  and  chickweed  grew  among  the 
stones  near  the  curb  and  between  the 
flags  of  the  sidewalk.  The  few  maples 
that,  last  of  their  clan,  carried  on  a 
losing  struggle  with  dust  and  gas,  were 
honeycombed  with  the  tunnels  of  black 
ants;  and,  in  August,  their  leaves  were 
decimated  by  legions  of  tussock  cater- 

566 


pillars  which  amused  themselves  be- 
tween meals  by  dangling  in  the  face  of 
the  passer-by.  As  for  the  human  in- 
habitants, I  knew  'all  their  tricks  and 
their  ways.'  I  knew  them  for  humdrum 
citizens,  to  whom  a  wall  was  merely  a 
wall,  and  a  cat  looking  over  in  the  dark 
never  by  any  possibility  an  owly- 
headed  monster.  The  smell  of  soap- 
suds exhaled  by  their  front  windows  on 
a  Monday  morning  was  no  less  familiar 
than  the  odor  of  pies  and  cakes  on  a 
Saturday.  I  knew  perfectly  well  that 
they  all  dressed  up  on  Sunday  and  pro- 
ceeded demurely  to  the  Methodist 
church  at  one  end  of  the  block  or  the 
Baptist  church  at  the  other.  I  knew 
that  they  shot  off  fire-crackers  on  the 
Fourth  of  July  with  all  the  solemn 
industry  of  true  patriots,  bobbed  for 
apples  religiously  on  Hallowe'en,  gorged 
themselves  more  or  less  thankfully  at 
Thanksgiving,  and  scrupulously  per- 
formed all  the  stocking,  Christmas 
tree,  and  Santa  Glaus  rites  at  Christ- 
mas. In  short,  I  knew  that  they  were 
just  such  people  as  I  was  myself  in  my 
social  capacity.  Whether  they  ever 
had  hours  such  as  mine  between  seven 
and  eight  of  an  evening,  when  I  was 
completely  .  unsocial,  and  therefore 
original,  it  never  occurred  to  me  to  ask. 
I  felt  all  the  scorn  of  them  that  child- 
hood can  feel  for  steady-going  age, 
never  understanding  —  until  later  — 
that  the  smallest  hall-bedroom  in  any 
one  of  their  houses  might  contain  more 
of  mystery  and  romance  than  even  my 
wilderness  over  the  wall,  however  '  spa- 
cious' it  might  be  'in  dirt,'  however 


IDYLLIC 


567 


peopled  with  rocs,  unicorns,  and  hippo- 
griffs. 

It  would  sound  very  silly  to  narrate 
what  I  did  there  on  spring  evenings  be- 
tween seven  and  eight.  It  may  be  that 
I  rode  winged  steeds  with  Astolpho, 
and  swam  Hellesponts  with  Leander, 
slew  dragons  on  Glittering  Heaths 
with  Siegfried,  and  fought,  knee-deep 
in  the  ford,  side  by  side  with  Cuchulain 
against  the  hosts  of  Queen  Maeve. 
Perhaps  so,  perhaps  not.  I  luckily 
had  a  speaking  acquaintance  with  the 
policeman  on  that  beat,  and  he  was 
indulgent. 

It  had  never  before  been  my  custom 
thus  to  moon  about  of  an  evening. 
Dick,  my  chum,  had  been  the  sharer  of 
all  my  adventures;  but  even  him,  dur- 
ing this  one  hour,  I  now  assiduously 
avoided,  picturing  him  as  at  home 
studying  his  lessons,  while  I  was  en- 
countering gorgons,  hydras,  and  chi- 
meras dire ;  but  I  little  guessed  the  truth 
till  one  evening  my  attention  was  at- 
tracted by  the  odd  deportment  of  a  boy 
across  the  street.  For  three  successive 
nights  I  had  seen  him  go  past,  but, 
intent  upon  perilous  quests,  had  not 
looked  at  him  closely.  I  scanned  him 
carefully  now,  however,  and,  to  my 
surprise,  recognized  him  as  Dick. 

Dimly  to  be  discerned  in  the  pen- 
umbra of  the  street-lamp  light,  with 
the  utter  gloom  of  a  weedy  vacant  lot 
for  a  background,  he  was  standing  on 
the  curb  with  his  back  to  me,  gazing 
up  sidewise  at  a  second-story  window 
within  which,  behind  a  drawn  shade  of 
yellow  holland,  was  burning  a  lone  gas- 
jet.  His  position  was  a  difficult  one  to 
maintain,  but  was  necessitated  by  the 
cornice  of  the  front  stoop,  which  shut 
off  all  view  of  second-story  windows  to 
people  on  that  side  of  the  street.  I 
reasoned  that,  wishing  to  be  as  near 
to  the  window  as  possible,  he  had  fore- 
gone the  less  neck-breaking  position 
of  vantage  that  I  held;  but,  unable  to 


guess  why  he  was  so  intent  upon  that 
particular  window,  I  withdrew  into 
the  murky  corner  behind  one  of  the 
gate-posts  and  watched  him  as  he 
teetered  precariously.  The  window 
presented  only  a  canary-colored  rec- 
tangle innocent  of  shadow. 

For  perhaps  five  minutes  he  contin- 
ued his  scrutiny,  and  then  turned  and 
peered  cautiously  up  and  down  the 
street  and  across.  As  the  light  fell  on 
his  face  I  was  startled.  He  had  pulled 
his  hair  down  on  his  forehead  until  it 
hung  below  his  cap  in  two  long  curved 
locks  like  the  claws  of  a  crab,  his  cap 
being  the  crab;  and  the  solemnity  of  his 
expression  and  the  stealthy  discretion 
of  his  demeanor  made  my  flesh  creep. 
Evidently  satisfied  that  he  was  unob- 
served, however,  he  turned  again 
toward  the  window  and,  after  another 
glance  hither  and  thither,  stretched 
out  his  arms  toward  it,  *  front  oblique, 
hands  supine,'  as  our  declamation 
teacher  used  to  say;  then,  gallantly, 
with  the  passionate  grace  of  a  Mai  volio, 
he  wafted  a  kiss  upward;  and  then, 
stricken  with  sudden  bashful  panic, 
he  turned  and  fled  up  the  street  toward 
home. 

I  was  by  this  time  convulsed  with 
derisive  merriment.  I  saw  it  all!  Now 
at  last  I  understood.  Many  a  time  I 
had  noticed,  without  really  looking  at 
it,  silhouetted  against  that  shade,  a 
trim  head  from  which  stuck  out  stiff- 
ly an  attenuated  pig-tail,  motionless, 
slightly  inclining  as  if  over  a  book. 
Many  a  time,  toward  the  end  of  my 
hour,  I  had  seen  the  pig-tail  grow  rest- 
ive and  bob  up  and  down  on  the  shade 
and  grow  longer  and  shorter  with  the 
turning  of  the  head  to  which  it  was 
attached.  Many  a  time  I  had  seen  the 
shade  fly  suddenly  upward  and  the 
window-sash  follow  and  the  trim  little 
head  thrust  itself  through  the  aperture. 
All  this  I  had  observed,  negligently, 
without  emotion,  docketing  the  head 


568 


IDYLLIC 


in  my  mind  as  belonging  merely  to  a 

girl- 
Dick  was  in  love!  As  in  a  flash  I 
understood  many  other  things,  too: 
why,  for  instance,  he  had  suddenly 
taken  to  blacking  his  shoes  and  wash- 
ing his  hands  and  going  regularly  to 
Sunday  School.  It  was  exceedingly 
funny.  I  laughed.  I  had  at  last  a  thorn 
to  prick  him  with  when  he  grew  super- 
cilious; material  for  waggish  innuendos 
such  as  I  had  heard  facetious  elders 
use  for  purposes  of  torture.  I  gloated 
in  anticipation. 

When  I  came  into  his  presence  next 
day,  however,  I  found  myself  suddenly 
bashful.  Try  as  I  would  to  be  funny 
at  his  expense,  my  words  were  stifled. 
I  found  myself  covertly  looking  at 
him  with  a  touch  of  awe  as  at  one  who 
had  drunk  deep  the  cup  of  experience. 
His  shiny  shoes  and  face  seemed  the 
outward  badge  of  an  inward  mysterious 
condition  which  I  was  unable  to  share. 
I  set  out  on  my  adventures  that  night 
in  a  thoughtful  mood.  The  head  show- 
ed very  black  and  impudent  upon  the 
shade,  but  Dick  did  not  appear.  I 
knew  why.  He  had  refused  to  eat  his 
potatoes  at  supper  and  had  been  con- 
demned to  sit  at  table  until  he  ate 
them.  The  peculiar  stubbornness  of 
Dick's  disposition  can  be  gauged  by 
what  he  sacrificed  for  a  principle  on 
this  occasion.  While  he  sat  at  home 
malevolently  regarding  two  large  cold 
potatoes,  I  was  feasting  my  eyes  upon 
the  effigy  in  jet  of  his  lady-love. 

But  this  is  not  to  be  a  confession  of 
treachery.  I  did  not  scheme  to  sup- 
plant my  friend.  I  did  not  like  the  tilt 
of  the  effigy's  nose.  Yet  to  be  standing 
there  in  the  dark  quiet  street  watching 
the  unconscious  shadow-play  on  the 
curtain  gave  me  a  new  kind  of  thrill. 

I  had  planned  for  that  evening  a 
deed  of  daring  far  on  the  ringing  plains 
of  windy  Troy,  —  some  such  small 
matter  as  assuming  the  part  of  Dei- 


phobus  and  rescuing  Hector  from  the 
wrath  of  Achilles  during  their  famous 
circumambulation  of  the  walls;  but, 
somehow,  although  the  stage  was  set 
and  the  lights  suitable,  I  could  not  act 
with  my  usual  absorption.  I  tried  to 
pretend  that  the  young  lady  at  the 
window  was  Andromache,  but  her 
impertinent  nose  and  quivering  pig- 
tail were  hopelessly  out  of  character. 
I  started  Hector  and  Achilles  on  their 
rounds,  and  stood  ready  to  sally  forth 
at  the  proper  moment.  Their  shadowy 
forms  flashed  by  once,  twice,  —  and 
disappeared.  I  had  forgotten  all  about 
them.  I  was  in  a  brown  study. 

The  silhouette  was  growing  restless. 
It  flounced  about,  it  yawned  and 
stretched,  it  threw  its  book  on  the  floor 
in  a  spasm  of  vindictiveness;  and  then 
the  shade  flew  up  and  the  head  ap- 
peared, craning  to  see  up  the  street.  It 
seemed  very  nice  to  be  in  love.  I  de- 
cided to  be  in  love,  too. 

When  I  came,  however,  to  think  over 
the  eligible  little  girls  of  my  acquain- 
tance, I  rejected  them  all  in  scorn. 
They  were  mere  infants,  given  to  hoops 
and  jacks.  But  next  Sunday  in  church 
I  found  that  not  impossible  She  sitting 
in  the  choir.  She  had  just  joined.  She 
sang  soprano.  She  was  dark,  —  black 
hair  and  eyes  and  gipsy  complexion. 
She  sat  very  straight  and  never  smiled. 
She  sang  easily,  without  making  faces. 
As  to  her  age,  I  indulged  in  no  vain 
speculations  about  that. 

The  choir  sat  at  the  front  of  the 
church  behind  the  minister.  During 
the  preliminary  service  they  were  hid- 
den from  view  by  a  green  curtain 
except  when  they  were  singing;  but 
when  the  minister  rose  to  preach,  the 
curtain  was  pulled  aside  with  a  loud 
rasping  of  rings.  I  had  the  object  of 
my  devotion  at  my  mercy,  then,  for  an 
hour,  morning  and  evening,  to  gaze 
at  as  I  chose.  From  that  day  I  became 
a  confirmed  church-goer.  If  my  wor~ 


IDYLLIC 


569 


ship  was  misdirected,  it  was  probably 
of  as  high  a  quality  as  that  of  many  of 
the  rest  of  the  congregation. 

I  now  set  myself  to  study  the  gentle 
art  of  being  in  love,  and,  I  must  con- 
fess, put  myself  to  a  good  deal  of  trou- 
ble. I  tried  to  lose  appetite  and  sleep, 
according  to  the  books,  but  did  not 
succeed  very  well.  However,  when  it 
comes  to  pretending,  it  is  as  easy  to 
pretend  to  be  wasting  away  as  any- 
thing else;  and  I  took  a  sombre  satis- 
faction in  pushing  aside  my  plate  when 
I  was  not  very  hungry. 

With  considerable  difficulty  I  learn- 
ed where  the  fair  incognita  lived,  —  a 
few  blocks  off, — and  my  evening  walks 
took  a  new  direction.  A  small  frame 
house  on  a  quiet  side-street  became 
the  shrine  of  my  pilgrimage,  and  I 
fixed  upon  a  second-story  front  win- 
dow as  probably  hers.  For  several 
weeks,  rain  or  shine,  I  went  there  every 
evening,  to  mope  dramatically  with  a 
curious  pleasurable  sadness;  only  to 
discover  at  last  that  I  had  expended 
my  sighs  over  the  wrong  house,  because 
she  lived  next  door.  By  this  time,  how- 
ever, I  was  too  far  gone  to  see  any 
humor  in  the  blunder.  From  making 
believe  that  I  was  in  love,  I  had  come 
really  to  believe  that  I  was;  and  when 
one  is  in  that  condition  of  mind,  a 
difference  of  one  street-number  is  a 
small  matter.  The  aura  of  the  beloved 
fills  the  whole  street. 

Now  for  the  first  time  I  began  to 
think  of  my  clothes  and  to  yearn  for 
long  trousers.  From  rebelling  against 
the  barber,  I  became  his  best  youthful 
customer,  and  the  family  were  thrown 
into  transports  of  astonishment  over 
my  neckties  and  my  ablutions.  They 
thought,  of  course,  that  I  was  ill,  and 
I  took  no  pains  to  enlighten  them.  I 
made  a  confidant  of  no  one,  not  even 
of  Dick,  looking  upon  his  affair  as  the 
merest  calf-love. 

Throughout  I  was  fortified  by  the 


illustrious  example  of  Dante,  whose 
love,  I  still  imagine,  may  have  begun 
very  much  as  mine.  I  had  often  pored 
over  the  horrific  pictures  of  Dore  in  a 
great  flat  folio  of  the  Inferno  which, 
with  another  of  Paradise  Lost,  formed 
one  of  the  ornaments  of  the  parlor. 
From  shuddering  over  the  talking  trees 
and  the  sinners  carrying  their  heads 
under  their  arms,  I  naturally  became 
curious  to  know  more  of  the  author. 
Johnson's  Encyclopaedia  and  Beeton's 
Dictionary  of  Universal  Knowledge, 
tried  friends  and  true,  served  only  to 
whet  a  hunger  which  sent  me  off  to 
the  circulating  library. 

A  friend  of  mine  maintains  that  in  a 
thousand  of  those  who  read  the  Inferno 
not  one  hundred  read  the  Purgatorio, 
and  that  not  ten  of  the  hundred  read 
the  Paradiso  ;  and  probably  he  is  right. 
When  I  told  him,  therefore,  a  while  ago, 
that  I  had  read  all  three  with  great 
relish  at  the  age  of  thirteen,  I  could  see 
that  his  politeness  was  having  a  hard 
struggle  with  his  incredulity.  He  knew 
nothing  of  my  incentive,  and  in  such 
matters  the  incentive  is  everything.  I 
once  found  a  little  cash-girl  in  a  de- 
partment-store reading  Jakob  Bohme. 
What  her  incentive  was,  I  could  not 
prevail  upon  her  to  say:  perhaps  the 
old  theosopher  had  for  her  some  of 
the  fascination  of  a  puzzle;  perhaps 
she  was  suffering  from  religious  doubt; 
at  any  rate,  she  said  that  she  '  enjoyed 
him  very  much.'  I  imagine  that  there 
are  some  astonished  immortals  in 
Elysium  if  they  know  to  what  strange 
uses  their  books  are  put. 

I  read  the  New  Life  and  the  Purga- 
tory and  the  Paradise,  and  bought  a 
plaster  bust  of  the  Father  of  Tuscan 
song  for  my  room,  and  cut  from  a  mag- 
azine a  picture  of  a  dark  beauty  who, 
I  thought,  looked  like  my  inamorata. 
The  original  painting  from  which  that 
print  was  made  I  discovered  recently 
—  with  what  tender  memories  can  be 


570 


IDYLLIC 


imagined  —  in  the  waiting-room  of  a 
New  York  Hotel.  I  used  to  sit  on  the 
edge  of  my  bed  before  I  turned  in  for 
the  night,  and  study  the  picture  and 
the  bust. 

Could  any  Beatrice  see 

A  lover  in  that  anchorite,  — 

or  in  me  ?  I  used  (in  effect)  to  ask  my- 
self. Still,  it  was  something  to  love 
even  hopelessly  in  such  company. 
Across  the  gulf  of  six  centuries  the 
sad  old  Florentine,  however  stern  of 
lineament  and  grim,  stretched  a  sym- 
pathetic hand  to  a  little  moon-struck 
boy  who  sat  dreaming  and  dreaming; 
and  from  beside  the  shiny  little  yellow 
bust  gazed  down  the  cold  dark  beauty; 
and  to  me  as  that  other  to  him,  but 
with  how  different  meaning,  she  said 
(again  in  effect), — 

Guardami  ben:  ben  son,  ben  son  Beatrice! 

Ah,  well,  as  Alighieri  himself  has 
said,  *  love  and  the  gentle  heart  are  one 
same  thing';  and  my  love  was  so  far 
from  being  fiery  that  I  purposely  ne- 
glected opportunities  to  meet  my  Bea- 
trice. On  one  occasion  Fate  literally 
threw  us  at  each  other's  head  and  I,  if 
I  may  use  so  vulgar  a  figure  of  so  fair 
an  object,  dodged. 

In  the  silent  fervor  of  my  passion, 
as  I  have  said,  I  haunted  church  and 
Sunday  school  and  fed  my  flame  by 
bashfully  ogling.  The  extent  of  my  sur- 
render to  the  little  blind  god  is  shown 
by  the  fact  that  I  permitted  myself 
to  be  inveigled  into  participating  in  a 
Christmas  entertainment  merely  be- 
cause She  was  to  recite  a  piece. 

Faithfully  I  went  to  each  rehearsal, 
bravely  I  mounted  the  platform  and 
recited  the  silly  stanza  that  fell  to  me, 
meekly  I  submitted  to  the  jibes  of  the 
Philistines,  and  all  to  listen  to  a  voice 
that  spoke  to  others,  to  treasure  up 
smiles  that  were  not  for  me.  Strange 
as  it  may  seem,  however,  this  was  quite 
enough.  I  had  no  grudge  against  fate. 
I  was  content  to  sit  and  gaze. 


It  was  at  the  last  rehearsal,  however, 
that  She  entered  the  chapel  to  find  all 
the  seats  near  the  platform  occupied 
except  the  one  next  to  mine. 

O  my  heart,  how  didst  thou  palpi- 
tate then!  O  feet  and  hands,  how 
excessively  large  did  ye  suddenly  be- 
come as,  graceful  and  self-possessed, 
She  came  tripping  toward  ye !  O  ears, 
how  did  ye  then  incarnadine  yourselves, 
and  what  a  roaring  was  in  ye  louder 
than  the 

Six  hundred  thousand  voiced  shout 

Of  Jacob  camp'd  in  Midian  put  to  rout! 

She  draws  near,  she  pauses,  she 
speaks.  'May  I  sit  beside  you?'  she 
asks,  with  gracious  condescension. 

Here  is  my  opportunity.  Here  at 
last  are  'the  time  and  the  place  and 
the  loved  one  all  together!'  A  thou- 
sand golden  witty  sayings  have  I  coined 
for  this  juncture;  but  do  I  deliver  them 
with  all  the  composure  that  I  have  disj 
played  when  practicing  them  before 
her  putative  picture  at  home?  I  do  not. 
I  forget  my  cues.  I  fumble,  I  stam- 
mer, I  swallow,  and  fall  into  silence. 
She  bends  her  gaze  upon  me  and  in- 
clines her  ear,  but  in  vain.  I  achieve 
no  intelligible  articulation. 

As  soon  as  I  could  escape  I  fled  into 
the  night  and  walked  around  the 
block  rapidly  six  times.  As  I  was  pass- 
ing the  church  for  the  seventh  time, 
the  others  were  coming  out  and  some 
boys  hailed  me.  They  were  going  to 
the  drug-store  for  soda-water;  but  I 
shook  my  head  darkly.  No  fleshly 
enticements  had  power  to  lure  me  to- 
night. I  stood  in  the  shadow  of  a  tree 
and  watched  the  girls  come  out.  As 
She  passed  under  the  light  in  the  lobby, 
she  was  talking  happily  with  a  youth 
several  years  older  than  I.  Together 
they  descended  the  church  steps  and 
made  their  way  slowly  toward  the 
drug-store. 

The  next  evening  I  went  back  to  the 
wall;  but  not  to  play  at  potting  dragons 


THE  CONTRIBUTORS'  CLUB 


571 


and  unicorns.  I  had  aged.  It  was  time 
to  put  away  childish  things.  I  went  to 
meditate,  to  school  my  spirit,  to  fortify 
my  soul.  It  was  very  pleasant  to  feel 
so  old,  so  sophisticated,  and  I  practiced 
all  the  poses  of  dejection;  but  in  time 
the  quiet  of  the  familiar  street  shed  its 
balm  upon  me.  I  reflected  that  Dante 
had  been  true  to  Beatrice,  even  after 
he  had  married  and  she  had  died,  for 
some  thirty  years.  Should  I  grow  dis- 
couraged in  scarce  as  many  days? 

Suddenly  I  looked  up.  Over  the 
wall  were  peering  two  large  round  yel- 
low-green eyes. 

'It's  an  ore!'  I  whispered  to  myself. 

Now,  I  had  long  since  devised  a 
method  of  dealing  with  ores.  It  con- 
sisted in  whirling  round  and  round  on 
the  pavement  immediately  beneath 
them  until  they  became  dizzy  and  fell 
off  the  wall,  when  they  could  be  easily 
dispatched  with  a  sword;  and  so  I 
began  whirling  on  my  heel.  So  intent 


was  I  on  this  exercise,  looking  up  mean- 
while into  the  scared  eyes  of  the  cat 
above,  that  I  was  unaware  that  some 
one  was  approaching.  Any  one  who 
has  ever  tried  spinning  like  a  whirligig 
while  looking  upward  has  probably 
fared  as  I  did.  I  turned  giddy  much 
sooner  than  the  ore  and  sat  sudden- 
ly down  directly  in  front  of  a  young 
lady  who,  vibrating  above  me,  gave 
voice  to  a  musical  little  shriek,  half  of 
laughter,  half  of  terror.  It  was  my 
Beatrice. 

There  is  no  more  to  tell.  I  had  no 
precedent  for  any  such  exigency  as 
this.  Dante  could  not  help  me.  My 
love-affair  ended  there  and  then. 

A  few  weeks  ago  I  saw  the  wall  again 
after  many  years.  There  was  a  cat 
sitting  on  top  in  the  sun.  She  could 
hardly  have  been  the  ore.  I  put  my 
hands  on  the  coping  and  pulled  myself 
up  and  looked  over.  I  wish  I  had  not 
done  so. 


THE  CONTRIBUTORS'  CLUB 


THE    CASE    OF   THE   MINISTERS 

THERE  has  always  been  to  me  some- 
thing pathetic  about  clowns  and  jest- 
ers, but  for  many  years  I  did  not  know 
why.  At  last  I  found  out:  it  was  be- 
cause they  were  compelled  to  make 
their  living  by  means  of  laughter.  Now 
laughter  is,  or  should  be,  a  spontane- 
ous, even  a  capricious  thing.  It  is  one 
of  the  delicious  *  extras '  of  life,  it  comes 
with  an  enfranchisement,  momentary 
perhaps,  but  real,  from  the  pressure  of 
sterner  realities.  That  this  gay,  free 
thing  should  be  put  in  harness,  and 
made  to  serve  these  sterner  realities, 
—  therein  lay  the  pathos  that  I  had 


always  dimly  felt.  From  such  a  lot 
might  every  one  I  loved  be  delivered! 
Let  them  work  hard  —  break  stone,  dig 
ditches,  what  you  will  —  but  let  their 
laughter  be  unenforced! 

Such  is  still  my  prayer,  but  it  has 
enlarged  its  scope.  For  I  now  see  that 
there  are  other  things  which  should  be 
left  free.  Laughter,  let  us  say,  is  the 
gleam  of  sunlight  over  life.  By  all 
means  let  us  not  try  to  turn  it  into 
*  power.'  But  there  are  other  gleams: 
the  moonlight  of  poetry,  the  white  light 
of  religious  experience,  the  radiance  of 
love.  And  in  my  prayer  I  include  all 
these. 

It  is  no  needless  prayer.  Thousands 


572 


THE  CONTRIBUTORS'  CLUB 


and  thousands  of  men  are  suffering 
to-day,  perhaps  without  knowing  it, 
because  the  prayer  has  in  their  cases 
not  been  answered,  because  they  are 
compelled,  in  the  pursuit  of  their  liveli- 
hood, to  exploit  some  one  of  these. 

I  am  thinking  particularly  of  the 
clergy.  They  have  come  to  seem  to  me 
even  more  to  be  pitied  than  the  clowns. 
Laughter,  indeed,  is  precious,  but  that 
which  our  ministers  are  required  to  put 
in  harness  is  even  more  precious:  it  is 
the  impulses  and  experiences  of  the 
religious  life. 

In  all  the  discussion  about  the  min- 
istry and  the  church  which  is  now  so 
rife,  no  one  seems  to  have  a  word  of 
pity  for  the  men  who  are  being  forced 
continually  to  do  the  impossible,  the 
unthinkable  thing,  namely,  to  exploit 
their  own  spiritual  nature  in  the  earn- 
ing of  their  daily  bread.  Some  disci- 
pline is  doubtless  good  for  us.  To  be 
compelled  to  chop  wood  when  one  is 
weary,  to  keep  books  when  one  loathes 
accounts,  to  sit  behind  a  desk  or  teach 
spelling  when  one  longs  to  go  fishing, 
these  things  may  be  good  for  one's 
moral  fibre,  or  again  they  may  not. 
But  to  be  compelled  by  one's  'job'  to 
'make  a  prayer '  when  one  does  not  feel 
prayerful,  to  be  obliged  to  talk  about 
spiritual  realities  which  are  at  the  mo- 
ment, or  perhaps  usually,  not  felt  as 
realities  at  all,  —  this  can  never  be 
good  for  the  moral  fibre;  it  must  be 
disintegrating  to  it.  This  is  not  disci- 
pline, but  the  most  disastrous  form  of 
slavery.  It  is  a  slavery  that  demoral- 
izes sometimes  past  hope  of  recovery, 
for  it  strikes  at  the  foundation  of  char- 
acter: spiritual  honesty. 

There  is  one  thing  to  which,  even 
more  than  to  life,  liberty  and  the  pur- 
suit of  happiness,  every  one  has  a  right, 
and  that  is,  the  possession  of  his  own 
depths  of  selfhood.  There  is  in  all  of 
us  a  hidden  life,  often  unacknowledged, 
usually  unexpressed,  which  is  sacred. 


With  most  of  us  it  is  protected  from 
violation  by  all  the  bars  of  reserve. 
Not  so  with  the  ministry!  With  them 
the  bolts  are  shot  back  at  the  stroke  of 
an  hour,  or  there  are  no  bolts,  and  the 
latchstring  is  out  for  every  passer-by 
to  pull.  Their  religious  life,  their  deep- 
est convictions,  their  profoundest  vis- 
ions, these  are,  to  put  it  most  crudely, 
their  stock  in  trade,  their  business  capi- 
tal. That  which  with  most  of  us  forms 
the  background  of  life,  with  ministers 
constitutes  the  foreground.  It  is  this 
that  makes  the  anomaly,  the  prepos- 
terous anomaly,  of  their  position.  It  is 
useless  to  declare  that  they  have  pri- 
vate rights  like  other  men.  Practically 
they  have  not.  Even  theoretically  they 
scarcely  have.  What  is  the  good  of 
talking  about  private  rights  when  a 
man  is  liable  at  any  minute  to  such 
demands  as  these:  pray  with  me;  talk 
to  me  about  God;  make  an  emotionally 
satisfying  address  over  the  coffin  of  my 
dead  mother. 

Contrast  the  conditions  under  which 
men  work  in  the  other  professions. 
The  lawyer,  through  years  of  training, 
to  which  he  brings  some  natural  apti- 
tude, makes  himself  master  of  certain 
branches  of  the  law.  In  these  he  is  more 
or  less  of  an  expert,  and  he  earns  his 
living  by  a  combination  of  honesty, 
industry  and  skill  in  applying  his  ex- 
pert knowledge.  All  this  he  can  do,  and 
still  preserve  that  sacred  something  we 
have  called  selfhood. 

With  the  physician  it  is  the  same :  he 
has  the  aptitude,  he  equips  himself  with 
the  knowledge  and  the  skill.  He  offers 
these  to  society,  and  society  gladly 
avails  itself  of  them.  In  both  profes- 
sions, to  be  sure,  the  self  behind  the 
day's  work  is  what  gives  the  day's 
work  its  final  value,  but  it  is  always 
behind  the  work.  It  is  not  served  up  as 
the  very  work  itself.  These  men  may 
have  sympathy,  inspiration,  reverence, 
faith,  love.  They  must  have  them,  in 


THE  CONTRIBUTORS'   CLUB 


573 


some  degree,  but  they  are  forces  that 
underlie  and  compel. 

The  case  of  the  minister  may,  indeed, 
be  stated  so  as  to  make  it  seem  parallel. 
He  too,  starting  with  some  natural 
aptitude,  spends  years  acquiring  know- 
ledge and  skill.  He  masters  ecclesiasti- 
cal history,  he  delves  in  theology,  he 
studies  church  government,  he  prac- 
tices oratory.  Along  these  lines  he  too 
becomes  to  some  extent  an  expert. 

This  sounds  well,  but  it  will  not  bear 
scrutiny.  For,  whereas  the  expert 
equipment  of  the  lawyer  or  the  doctor 
is  what  gives  him  his  value  and  ensures 
his  measure  of  success,  the  minister's 
expert  equipment,  except  perhaps  his 
training  in  oratory,  and  this  only  in  a 
minor  degree,  has  very  little  to  do  with 
his  value  or  success.  What  we  want  in 
a  lawyer  is  mastery  of  the  law,  what 
we  want  in  a  physician  is  mastery  of 
the  conditions  of  health,  but  what  we 
want  in  a  minister  is  not  mastery  of 
church  history,  theology,  church  gov- 
ernment, or  even  oratory.  The  thing  we 
really  demand  of  him  is  the  possession 
of  a  vivid  religious  life  and  the  power 
to  make  *  telling'  use  of  it  so  that  it 
gets  a  real  grip  on  the  spiritual  lives  of 
others.  Without  this  the  rest  of  his 
equipment  is  useless.  With  this,  the 
rest  may  be  dispensed  with. 

That  is,  his  sympathy,  inspiration, 
reverence,  faith,  and  love,  instead  of  be- 
ing the  underlying  forces  of  his  nature, 
must  be  kept  on  top  all  the  time,  ready 
to  pass  out  to  people  at  a  moment's 
notice.  At  certain  hours  of  the  week 
the  minister  must  summon  from  its 
hiding-place  the  spirit  of  prayer,  he 
must  literally  exploit  it  for  the  edifica- 
tion of  three  hundred  or  five  hundred 
or  a  thousand  listeners.  At  certain 
other  hours  he  must  call  forth  his  most 
solemn  convictions  about  life  and 
death,  and  exploit  them  in  the  same 
way.  And  at  uncertain  times,  at  any 
and  every  time,  week  in  and  week  out, 


he  must  have  his  personality  ready  to 
deliver  when  called  for. 

Is  this  fair?  Can  we  wonder  that 
the  weakness  of  the  ministry  is  along 
the  line  of  hypocrisy,  of  the  over-facile 
in  expression,  of  the  cheaply  ready  in 
sympathy?  that  ministers  sometimes 
develop  a  professional  manner  as 
marked  as  the  professionally  sympa- 
thetic manner  of  the  undertaker?  Is  it 
surprising  that  in  self-defense  they 
should  build  up  for  themselves  an 
armor,  not  of  obvious  reserve,  but  of 
glib  expressiveness  which  meets  the 
same  end?  If  they  were  always  really 
turning  themselves  inside  out,  as  they 
are  nominally  supposed  to  do,  there 
would  be  nothing  left  of  them,  they 
would  be  worn  to  a  frazzle  in  three 
months.  Some  there  are  who  really  do 
this,  and  these  are  usually  indeed  worn 
to  a  frazzle.  Or,  to  use  the  conventional 
term,  they  'break  down.'  Most  of 
them  do  not  do  it,  and  they  survive,  but 
ideals  suffer. 

There  is  something  wrong.  It  is  the 
wrong  of  professionalizing  what  ought 
to  be  left  free.  We  see  this  quickly 
enough  in  other  cases:  poetry  is  a 
lovely  thing,  but  so  soon  as  it  becomes 
professionalized,  it  is  in  danger.  Per- 
sonal charm  is  an  adorable  thing,  but 
when  the  actor  makes  it  a  daily  offer- 
ing to  an  expectant  public  its  finer 
bloom  is  too  apt  to  vanish.  Love  and 
friendship  are  the  greatest  things  in 
the  world,  but  when  they  are  habitually 
exploited,  they  lose  part  if  not  all  of 
their  greatness.  The  court  favorite, 
paid  for  his  devotion,  the  lover  or  the 
mistress,  paid  for  their  favors,  compell- 
ed to  render  them  without  regard  to 
the  spontaneous  impulse  behind  them, 
these  are  in  danger  of  falling  very  far 
short  of  greatness.  Perhaps  Tolstoi 
was  right,  and  every  man  should  have 
some  tangible  work  to  do,  not  perhaps 
with  his  hands  alone,  but  using  his 
whole  practical  equipment  of  skill, 


574 


THE   CONTRIBUTORS'  CLUB 


knowledge,  and  aptitude,  and  allowing 
for  an  overflow  of  energy  which  should 
follow  whatever  channels  it  found  open, 
without  being  forced  into  pipes,  to 
turn  wheels  and  push  pistons. 

Such,  indeed,  was  to  some  extent  the 
life  of  the  monks  of  old.  They  worked 
their  gardens,  they  nursed  the  sick, 
they  made  medicines,  they  taught,  they 
printed  books;  and  these  activities 
formed  as  large  a  part  of  their  lives  as 
their  daily  office,  often  a  larger  part. 
But  back  of  all  this,  the  daily  round  of 
tangible  duties,  lived  the  ardors  of 
conviction  and  faith,  flashing  through 
sometimes  in  a  radiance  of  inspiration, 
oftener  perhaps  smouldering  unrecog- 
nized in  the  depths  of  an  unchallenged 
and  unexploited  reserve. 

This  was  a  healthy  life.  And  there 
are  some  ministers  to-day  whose  lives 
are  much  like  this.  There  might  be 
more.  For  there  is  enough  practical 
work  waiting  to  be  done  to  keep  all  the 
ministers  busy,  if  they  never  again 
made  a  reluctant  prayer  or  delivered 
an  enforced  sermon.  There  are  many 
people  who  think  that  an  institutional 
church  and  a  liturgical  service  is  the 
ideal  for  the  future.  But  there  are 
many  also  who  deny  this.  And  mean- 
while, the  public  accepts,  and  demands, 
this  living  sacrifice  of  its  ministry.  It 
is  imposing  a  compulsion  which  can- 
not help  sapping  some  of  the  honesty, 
the  vitality,  the  spontaneity,  that  are 
our  most  precious  possessions. 

A   DICKENS   DISCOVERY 

BY  rights,  the  little  man  with  whom  I 
am  acquainted  should  belong  to  Dick- 
ens. He  must  have  been  lost  from  the 
pages  of  Martin  Chuzzlewit  and  placed, 
by  a  trick  of  Fate,  in  this  hustling, 
conventional  young  Southern  town.  I 
chanced  to  step  into  the  printing-office 
one  day,  and  paused  upon  the  thresh- 
old with  a  Columbus-like  thrill  at  my 


discovery.  The  little  old  man,  his 
plump  person  stuffed  into  a  chair,  was 
seated  at  what  might  be  called  a  desk, 
though  no  self-respecting  desk  would 
recognize  it.  Newspapers  in  wild  dis- 
order surrounded  him;  letters  bulged 
from  numerous  pigeon-holes;  'copy' 
straggled  out  of  dusty  corners;  and  a 
manuscript,  folded  with  some  pretense 
at  neatness  and  no  doubt  awaiting  a 
day  of  judgment,  stuck  one  ear  out  of  a 
half-open  drawer.  An  editorial,  over- 
come by  the  heat  of  its  attack  upon 
the  unsanitary  conditions  existing  in  a 
baker's  shop,  reclined  against  an  ink 
bottle  for  support.  From  this  chaos 
emerged  his  squarish  head,  with  a 
round  hat  distantly  related  to  a  break- 
fast muffin  perched  upon  it.  A  high 
collar,  in  a  vain  effort  to  meet  in  front, 
and  lacking  two  inches  of  accomplish- 
ing its  purpose,  encircled  his  neck.  A 
smart  white  tie,  realizing  its  superior- 
ity over  the  collar,  met  in  front  and 
formed  a  stiff  bow.  The  shirt  was  an 
old  friend  showing  signs  of  frequent 
contact  with  ink.  Nondescript  gray 
trousers  clung  tightly  round  his  waist, 
but  flared  out  generously  where  they 
touched  his  boots.  The  boots  which 
completed  this  costume  were  square, 
and  dented  and  covered  with  dust. 
Stay!  Had  I  come  unawares  upon  a 
friend  of  Mr.  Pickwick,  or  a  cousin  of 
the  Cheeryble  Brothers?  No;  I  was 
about  to  address  the  uncle  of  .dear 
Tom  Pinch.  At  my  greeting  he  rose 
and  clasped  my  hand  warmly,  while  his 
blue  eyes,  behind  a  pair  of  large  spec- 
tacles, beamed  kindly  into  mine.  From 
that  moment  our  friendship  is  dated. 
But  the  printing-office  without  the 
Uncle  would  be  in  a  far  more  sorry 
plight  than  the  Pecksniff  household 
without  Tom.  For  the  strong  moral 
tone  of  Tom's  master  proved  a  suf- 
ficient prop  even  after  Tom  had  been 
dismissed,  but  the  printing-office  — 
what  a  spineless  affair  it  would  become 


THE  CONTRIBUTORS'   CLUB 


575 


were  the  Uncle  to  leave!  Pray,  who 
would  collect  the  bills  or  read  the  proof? 
Who  would  conscientiously  discharge 
these  and  other  duties  filled  as  they 
are  with  a  mass  of  petty  and  irritating 
detail?  Who  indeed,  but  the  Uncle! 
The  Editor  cannot  steal  time  for  such 
matters.  Stirring  and  eloquent  articles 
glide  from  his  pen;  opinions,  buttered 
and  sugared  to  suit  the  taste  of  ques- 
tioners, drop  from  his  lips,  Smooth  and 
suave  and  sure  he  is — the  flint-hearted 
fellow!  For  five-and-thirty  years  the 
Uncle  has  shouldered  the  responsibili- 
ties of  the  newspaper  business,  receiv- 
ing small  reward.  What  high  ambitions 
may  have  been  stifled  beneath  the 
weight  of  unavoidable  duties !  Yet  not 
a  breath  of  complaint  escapes  him. 
He  always  has  a  ready  smile,  a  twinkle 
in  each  eye,  and  a  hand  that  flashes  out 
in  welcome  whenever  he  meets  you. 
Everybody  knows  and  likes  the  Uncle, 
but  few  detect  the  heart  of  gold  beat- 
ing under  the  ink-spotted  shirt,  i 

And  what  would  the  weekly  paper 
be  without  the  Uncle's  contributions? 
He  writes  under  the  name  of  the  *  Ram- 
bler,' and  the  information  gathered 
from  his  daily  rambles  appears  in  the 
Mayfield  News.  Readers  are  told  that 
Timothy  Dowdle's  new  barber  shop 
will  be  a  thing  of  beauty;  that  one  of 
our  permanent  and  popular  places  of 
amusement  has  passed  to  new  manage- 
ment; that  the  sweetness  in  Mayfield 
is  not  wasted  on  the  desert  air,  but  put 
up  in  cans  by  the  Syrup  Factory.  Or 
perhaps  the  alarm  of  fire  was  sounded 
about  one  o'clock  Tuesday  morning,  in- 
dicating that  the  scene  of  conflagration 
was  in  the  second  ward;  or  the  News 
joins  in  wishing  the  newly  married 
couple  a  happy  and  prosperous  voyage 
o'er  the  seas  of  life.  The  Uncle  himself 
is  a  bachelor,  yet  he  seems  to  impart 
an  air  of  would-be  domesticity.  If  he 
could  but  have  found  the  right  little 
woman  of  Dickensesque  style !  Perhaps 


there  was  a  bright  spot  of  romance 
coloring  the  past  prosaic  years. 

After  each  meeting  with  him,  I  fall 
to  wondering  about  his  childhood  days. 
Did  he  romp  and  shout  and  play  as 
other  boys  do?  No;  my  fancy  calls  for 
a  lad  with  a  deep  love  of  books,  who 
could  be  caught  any  fine  summer  day 
stretched  out  under  a  shady  apple 
tree,  Treasure  Island  with  its  wealth  of 
adventure  close  by,  and  in  his  hand  a 
mammoth  pippin  slowly  passing  out  of 
sight.  Or  the  question  recurs:  where 
does  he  find  his  clothes?  For  they  are 
undoubtedly  lineal  descendants  of 
Noah's  wardrobe.  He  could  not  have 
selected  them  from  a  general  stock, 
such  clothes  as  he  wears  would  suit  no 
one  but  himself.  They  were  made  for 
him;  they  strike  one  as  being  an  indis- 
pensable part  of  the  man. 

Just  recently  I  saw  him  on  the  cor- 
ner, a  bulky  umbrella  hooked  over  his 
arm,  his  eyes  fixed  thoughtfully  on  the 
ground,  coming  with  great  deliberation 
toward  me.  He  wore  a  tall,  square, 
black  hat  set  firmly  on  his  head,  and  a 
voluminous  alpaca  coat  reaching  to 
his  knees.  He  waved  his  hand  in  a 
salute  and  moved  on.  Farther  on  he 
stopped  a  passer-by  and  engaged  in  a 
wordy  bout.  Was  he  lonely,  I  ponder- 
ed? It  was  Sunday,  and  he  should  have 
been  returning  to  a  cottage  with  roses 
tumbling  over  it  in  pink  confusion. 
There,  a  comfortable  little  lady  would 
have  the  supper  spread  out  on  a  round 
table  made  for  two.  And  he  would 
know  that  she  shared  not  only  the  meal, 
but  all  his  joys  and  sorrows. 

During  our  strawberry  season,  he 
took  me  aside  to  confide,  *I  thought 
that  I  would  purchase  several  boxes 
of  strawberries  and  bring  them  up,  if 
you  will  make  me  a  real  shortcake.' 
Then,  in  a  telling  whisper,  *  You  know 
I've  never  had  enough!'  Of  course  I 
promptly  agreed,  smiling  in  remem- 
brance of  meagre  boarding-house  helps. 


576 


THE  CONTRIBUTORS'  CLUB 


So  he  came  to  dinner,  and  when  the 
cake  was  brought  to  the  table  in  all  its 
luscious  glory,  three  layers  topped  with 
fruit,  we  turned  to  each  other  with  a 
look  of  understanding.  And  let  me 
tell  you  that  my  friend  measured  his 
appetite  by  the  Dickens  standard! 

He  is  often  a  subject  of  affectionate 
discussion  in  our  home. 

'Suppose,'  says  one,  'that  he  were 
thin.' 

'The  loss  of  a  pound  would  spoil 
him,'  I  declare. 

'  It  would  never  do,'  gravely  answers 
great-aunt  Madeline. 

'Can  you  imagine  him  with  a  red 
necktie?'  queries  another. 

'A  tan  shoe  with  a  pointed  toe'  — 
suggests  a  third. 

'Oh!'  I  implore,  'any  such  innova- 
tions —  and  he  would  no  longer  be  the 
Uncle.' 

It  is  unfortunate  that  Dickens  never 
found  him,  but  good  fortune  left  him 
for  me.  I  discovered  him! 

LEO    TO   HIS   MISTRESS1 


DEAR  Mistress,  do  not  grieve  for  me 
Even  in  such  sweet  poetry. 
Alas!  It  is  too  late  for  that, 
No  mistress  can  recall  her  cat; 
Eurydice  remained  a  shade, 
Despite  the  music  Orpheus  played; 
And  pleasures  here  outlast,  I  guess, 
Your  earthly  transitoriness. 

1  Memorial  verses  to  Leo,  a  yellow  cat,  by 
his  Mistress,  appeared  in  the  Atlantic  for 
February.  —  THE  EDITORS. 


II 

You  serious  denizens  of  Earth 
Know  nothing  of  Elysian  mirth. 
With  other  shades  I  play  or  doze, 
And  wash,  and    stretch,  or    rub  my 

nose. 

I  hunt  for  mice,  or  take  a  nap 
Safe  in  Iphigenia's  lap. 
At  times  I  bite  Achilles'  heel 
To  learn  if  shadow  heroes  squeal, 
And,  should  he  turn  to  do  me  hurt, 
I  hide  beneath  Cassandra's  skirt, 


.  in 
But    should    he    smile,    no   creature 

bolder, 

I  lightly  bound  upon  his  shoulder, 
Then  leap  to  fair  Electra's  knee, 
Or  scamper  with  Antigone. 
I  chase  the  rolling  woolen  ball 
Penelope  has  just  let  fall, 
And  crouch  when  Meleager's  cheer 
Awakes  the  shades  of  trembling  deer. 
I  grin  when  Stygian  boys,  beguiled, 
Stare  after  Helen,  Ruin's  child; 
Or,  should  these  placid  pastimes  fail, 
I  play  with  Cerberus's  tail. 
At  last  I  purr,  and  sip  and  spatter 
When  kind  Demeter  fills  my  platter. 


IV 

And  yet  in  spite  of  all  of  this, 

I  sometimes  yearn  for  earthly  bliss, 

To  hear  you  calling  'Leo!'  when 

The  glorious  sun  awakens  men, 

Or  hear  your '  Good-night,  Pussy '  sound 

When  starlight  falls  on  mortal  ground; 

Then,  in  my  struggles  to  get  free, 

I  almost  scratch  Persephone. 


THE  ATLANTIC  MONTHLY 


MAT,  1913 


THE  PHILIPPINES  BY  WAY  OF  INDIA 


BY   H.   FIELDING-HALL 


THE  Editor  of  the  Atlantic  Monthly 
has  been  good  enough  to  ask  me  if 
there  is  anything  I  can  say  about  the 
task  of  the  United  States  in  the  Philip- 
pines—  the  difficulties  that  arise  from 
such  a  relationship  between  a  Western 
democracy  and  an  Eastern  people,  and 
in  what  way  they  can  be  surmounted.1 

I  have  never  been  to  the  Philip- 
pines. The  nearest  I  have  been  is 
Hong  Kong,  and  the  only  Filipinos  I 
have  seen  are  the  quartermasters  on 
the  P.  &  O.  boats  running  from  Hong 
Kong  to  Japan.  Neither  have  I  been  to 
the  United  States,  though  I  have  many 
friends  there.  Of  first-hand  knowledge, 
therefore,  I  have  none.  Yet  I  thinly 
there  are  some  things  I  can  say. 

TheJFilipinos  are  an  Eastern  people, 
not  so  very  far  removed,  according  to 
what  I  hear,  from  some  other  Eastern 
peoples  whom  I  know  well;  the  United 
States  holds  a  people  which  is  cousin 
to  my  own,  removed  in  distance  and 
in  circumstance,  yet  akin,  and  the  task 
before  the  United  States  and  the  Phil- 
ippines —  how  mutually  to  aid  in  the 
task  of  creating  a  stable  and  a  good 
government  in  those  Islands  —  is  the 

1  The  request  of  the  Atlantic  will  be  readily 
understood  by  any  one  who  has  had  the  durable 
satisfaction  of  reading  Mr.  Hall's  sympathetic 
volumes  on  the  Burmese:  The  Soul  of  a  People, 
and  A  People  at  School.  —  THE  EDITORS. 

VOL.  Ill  -  NO.  5 


same  task  that  has  confronted,  and  that 
still  confronts,  us  in  India.  In  great- 
er things,  therefore,  there  is  a  similar- 
ity between  the  English  in  India  and 
the  Americans  in  the  Philippines,  and 
the  differences  are  only  of  local  circum- 
stances of  time  and  place  and  persons. 
The  objective  and  the  principles  are 
the  same. 

I  will  therefore  ask  the  reader  to 
come  with  me  first  to  India  and  to 
Burma,  to  see  somewhat  of  things 
there:  how  the  same  problems  which 
confront  America  in  the  Philippines 
/  confront  us  there;  what  lies  below 
\  those  problems;  and  the  only  possible 
)  ;olution  there  is  for  them.  We  may  so 
J  acquire  some  principles  and  some  ideas 
which  are  not  merely  local,  but  are  uni- 
versal; not  temporary,  but  permanent; 
not  true  only  of  the  English  in  India, 
but  of  the  Americans  in  the  Philip- 
pines. They  would  require  adaptation 
in  method  and  in  detail,  but  that  is 
little.  When  you  know  what  to  aim 
at,  you  will  find  out  how  to  hit  it. 

The  first  knowledge  to  acquire  is, 
not  that  of  forms,  institutions,  customs, 
habits,  conventions,  parties,  but  that 
of  humanity  itself.  For  that  includes 
all  things,  and  conventions  of  all  kinds 
are  but  garments  it  endues  to  keep  it 
warm,  or  ornaments  to  render  it  at- 
tractive, or  fetters  bound  upon  it  by 


578 


THE  PHILIPPINES  BY  WAY  OF  INDIA 


circumstance  or  fate.  Let  us  therefore 
look  at  humanity  in  the  East. 

When  you  go  there,  the  first  impres- 
sion it  gives  you  is  of  its  apartness.  All 
seems  so  different  from  what  you  are 
accustomed  to  at  home.  It  is  not  only 
that  the  setting  —  of  blue  skies,  of 
palms  and  tropic  flora,  of  a  strange  ar- 
chitecture, all  bathed  in  sunlight  —  is 
so  strange;  it  is  the  people.  Their  skins 
are  black  or  brown;  their  faces,  their 
hair,  their  clothes,  their  voices,  are 
quite  different.  Their  ways  are  not  our 
ways;  even  their  walk  is  different.  It 
cannot  be,  we  think,  that  any  common 
humanity  binds  us  two.  Theirs  is  a 
life  apart;  within  their  skins  there  is 
a  soul  apart,  an  Eastern  soul,  unlike 
the  Western,  hardly  akin  to  it,  a  thing 
divided  far  from  us. 

Even  when  time  has  brought  us  a 
little  familiarity  with  these  people  the 
strangeness  is  not  lessened.  It  grows. 
All  that  we  observe  of  them  denotes 
difference,  and  not  likeness,  to  our- 
selves. In  their  ways  of  life,  their  mar- 
riages, their  religions,  they  are  apart 
from  us.  We  do  not  understand  them. 

We  cannot  understand  them.  There- 
fore why  try?  The  Oriental  mind  is 
inscrutable.  Could  you  understand  it, 
it  were  not  worth  the  trouble.  There- 
fore why  bother?  They  are  our  serv- 
ants, laborers,  we  buy  and  sell  for 
them,  we  rule  them.  Enough.  Leave 
it  at  that.  And  there  for  the  most  it  is 
left. 

Yet  for  him  who  will  not  stop  there, 
for  whom  a  barrier  exists  only  to  be 
climbed,  who  cares  to  go  behind  the 
appearances  of  things  to  things  them- 
selves, a  way  soon  opens.  Gangler,  the 
World-Seeker,  went  beyond  this  barrier 
to  the  land  of  Utgard  and  learned  se- 
crets; come  with  me  beyond  this  de- 
ceptive zone  of  outward  things  into  the 
heart  of  the  East,  and  you,  too,  shall 
learn  secrets.  They  may  be  useful. 
Let  us  see. 


All  this  apartness  is  but  surface.  It 
is  the  expression  which  differs,  not  the 
emotion  or  the  thought  sought  to  be 
expressed.  Humanity  is  one,  has  the 
same  hopes  and  fears,  moves  toward 
the  same  ideals,  and  there  is  no  differ- 
ence East  or  West. 

Of  course  this  knowledge  comes  but 
slowly,  and  by  bits.  You  note,  for  in- 
stance, that  when  husband  and  wife  go 
traveling  together,  the  man  walks  in 
front,  careless  and  free,  and  the  wo- 
man walks  behind,  carrying  the  bundle. 
Therefore  you  say,  'The  Oriental  cares 
not  for  his  women;  he  despises  his 
wife  and  uses  her  as  a  beast  of  burden.' 
Most  Occidentals  never  get  further 
than  that.  But  if  you  are  observant 
you  go  out  in  the  jungle  yourself, 
and  you  discover  things.  When  you 
walk  abroad  there  are  difficulties  and 
dangers.  The  paths  are  overgrown  and 
thorny,  creepers  must  be  cut  back, 
there  are  cattle  and  buffaloes  to  be 
driven  off,  and  buffaloes  are  ugly  crea- 
tures; there  are  snakes.  In  the  villages 
are  village  dogs  which  snarl  and  snap. 
You  are  a  man,  yet  you  will  be  glad  of 
some  one  to  go  in  front  of  you  with  a 
hatchet  to  clear  your  way.  No  woman 
would  walk  in  front,  and  the  man  must 
be  free.  Now  you  see  the  reason  why 
the  man  walks  in  front.  If  you  want 
to  confirm  it  you  inquire  and  find  that 
this  is  true.  Thus  the  Japanese,  the 
Burman,  goes  in  front  of  his  wife  for 
the  same  reason  that  the  Occidental 
goes  behind  —  from  courtesy.  If  he 
continues  to  do  so  when  it  is  unneces- 
sary, as  in  towns  where  there  are  roads, 
it  is  because  a  convention  once  formed 
is  hard  to  break,  East  or  West. 

With  this  as  a  clue  you  can  go  on 
and  make  discovery  after  discovery, 
and  finally  you  learn  to  know  this,  that 
East  or  West  the  instinctive  relation- 
ship of  the  sexes  is  the  same.  The  ideal 
is  the  union  of  one  man  and  one  wo- 
man :  first,  into  one  flesh,  and  following 


THE  PHILIPPINES  BY  WAY  OF  INDIA 


579 


that,  into  one  spirit.  Polygamy,  infant 
marriage,  and  all  other  deviations,  are 
the  result  of  environment. 

Polygamy  had  its  origin  in  the  sur- 
plus of  women  over  men  due  to  the  loss 
of  the  latter  by  war  or  the  dangers  of 
uncivilized  life.  Infant  marriage  and 
zenanas  were  barriers  raised  by  subject 
nations  against  the  lust  of  conquerors 
or  of  priests.  Polyandry  was  due  to  the 
necessity  of  restricting  population  by 
killing  the  female  babies;  the  means  of 
subsistence  had  reached  its  limit.  Hu- 
man nature  is  forced  into  these  chan- 
nels by  circumstance  first,  and  they  are 
perpetuated  by  convention,  because 
afterwards  each  child  is  educated  to 
believe  in  the  ways  of  its  fathers  as  it 
grows  up.  It  is  convention  fossilized. 
But  human  nature  is  not  altered;  and 
underneath,  the  soul  is  the  same.  It 
would  burst  these  bonds  if  it  could;  it 
does  when  it  can. 

Read  their  folk  tales,  their  love  sto- 
ries, those  which  warm  the  hearts  of 
boys  and  girls,  of  men  and  women, 
ay,  even  of  the  old;  those  which,  rising 
from  the  heart,  appeal  unto  the  heart. 
Their  ideals  are  our  ideals.  We  do  not 
in  the  West  reach  very  near  them  yet; 
they  reach  less  near,  perhaps,  but  that 
is  circumstance  and  flesh,  not  soul.  It  is 
the  hardness  of  our  hearts.  It  will  take 
us  long  ages  yet  to  reach  our  ideals. 
As  it  is  with  love,  which  is  the  mother 
emotion  of  all  the  emotions  which  are 
life,  so  with  all  others.  Easterns  wish 
and  strive  for  just  what  we  wish  and 
strive  for.  The  method  is  different, 
must  be  different.  *A  cosy  fireside* 
appeals  not  to  them,  nor  does '  the  shad- 
ow of  a  great  rock  in  a  thirsty  land' 
appeal  to  us  Northerns,  but  the  ideal 
is  the  same.  The  soul  of  humanity, 
the  World-Soul,  is  one.  Its  infinite 
variety  of  expression  is  due  to  the  dif- 
ferent media  through  which  it  is  exhib- 
ited. It  strives  ever  toward  the  same 
ideals,  to  be  realized  by  different  meth- 


ods, because  there  is  no  absolute,  but 
all  things  are  relative,  to  time,  place, 
and  person. 

It  is  the  same  with  governments. 
The  first  ideal  of  every  people  in  its 
government,  in  forming  or  accepting  it, 
is  to  attain  freedom.  There  is  freedom 
from  attack  from  without,  freedom 
from  anarchy  within;  that  is  the  first 
necessity.  These  may  be  achieved  un- 
der many  forms  of  government;  they 
accept  that  which  offers  the  best  pos- 
sibility of  individual  freedom.  A  for- 
eign despotism  may  be  the  best  at  the 
time.  But,  later  on,  other  necessities 
manifest  themselves,  and  a  people  be- 
comes conscious  that  to  develop  indi- 
vidually it  must  develop  corporately 
as  well,  that  an  individual  is  but  a 
cell  in  the  life  of  a  nation.  To  develop 
the  nation,  local  government  is  a  ne- 
cessity, but  it  is  a  later  necessity  than 
the  two  first  mentioned. 

All  this  was  manifested  very  clearly 
in  India.  Long  ago  there  were  self- 
governing  communities  in  India,  with 
a  wide  degree  of  individual  freedom, 
sex  equality,  and  a  relatively  high  civ- 
ilization. These  decayed  under  the 
stress  of  various  forces,  the  most  pow- 
erful of  which  was  religion.  Anarchy 
began  to  appear,  and  consequent  on 
anarchy  there  was  the  foreign  domina- 
tion of  the  Moguls.  This  was  accepted 
as  a  lesser  evil  than  anarchy.  But  this 
rapidly  decayed,  and  anarchy  again 
arose.  Then  the  English  appeared,  and 
the  country  for  the  most  part  accept- 
ed their  rule  gladly,  because  it  insured 
peace,  internal  and  external,  and  a  re- 
latively high  system  of  jurisprudence 
and  administration.  India  was  able  to 
recover  from  the  wars  which  had  deso- 
lated it  and  to  draw  free  breath  again. 
The  Mutiny  was  not,  for  the  most  part, 
a  people's  war,  but  an  insurrection  of 
mercenary  troops  who  strove  for  em- 
pire. In  the  whole  course  of  the  his- 
tory of  our  Indian  conquest  there  was 


580 


THE  PHILIPPINES  BY  WAY  OF  INDIA 


only  one  people's  war,  and  that  was  in 
Burma  in  1885-90. 

When  we  had  made  our  conquests 
we  had  to  organize  a  whole  system 
of  administration.  Of  the  old  indige- 
nous systems  of  a  thousand  years  ago 
nothing  was  left.  The  Mogul  system 
which  we  had  succeeded  disappeared 
on  the  defeat  of  its  heads.  It  was  not 
founded  in  the  soil.  It  was  a  govern- 
ment from  above.  Its  local  officers 
were  not  heads  of  local  organisms; 
they  had  not  grown  up,  but  stretched 
down.  The  heart  was  not  in  the  people 
below,  but  in  the  emperor  or  ruler  at 
the  top.  When  he  was  deposed,  all  his 
fabric  of  government  fell  with  him.  It 
was  not  indigenous.  Nothing  remain- 
ed but  innumerable  villages,  each  a 
community  in  itself. 

We  therefore  set  to  work  to  estab- 
lish a  new  system  of  government. 
Again,  it  was  not  indigenous.  It  was 
imported,  like  the  officials  who  worked 
it.  True,  it  had  strong  roots,  but  they 
were  in  England,  not  in  India.  It  is 
from  England  that  the  government  de- 
rives its  strength.  It  is  a  branch  of  a 
great  tree  whose  roots  are  six  thou- 
sand miles  away.  It  is  adapted  to  the 
needs  of  India,  but  is  not  Indian.  Were 
we  defeated  in  the  North  Sea  it  would 
disappear  as  rapidly  and  completely  as 
the  Mogul  Empire  did;  its  trunk  being 
felled,  it  would  wither  away.  It  cannot 
draw  any  nourishment  from  India. 

Now  you  can  begin  to  see  how  the 
present  discontent  in  India  has  arisen. 
For  long,  India  was  content.  It  want- 
ed peace,  and  we  gave  it  peace;  it  want- 
ed time  to  grow,  and  we  gave  it  time 
and  opportunity.  We  were,  under  the 
circumstances,  not  only  the  best  availa- 
ble government,  but  the  best  conceiv- 
able government.  I  do  not  say  that  we 
acted  from  altruistic  motives,  but  I  do 
say  that  the  results  were  admirable. 

But  things  have  changed.  India  has 
had  a  hundred  years  of  peace  and  in- 


dividual liberty,  it  has  now  begun  to 
realize  that  life  holds  more  than  this. 
Its  various  nations  are  realizing  their 
nationhood,  and  wishing  to  express  it 
in  more  than  words.  They  are  also  real- 
izing many  other  things.  Our  laws  are 
better  than  no  laws  at  all,  but  they  are 
defective;  our  administration  is  better 
than  anarchy,  but  it  is  alien  and  un- 
sympathetic. Not  being  rooted  in  the 
soil,  it  does  not  respond  readily  to  the 
people's  needs.  It  has  to  reason  out 
things.  Now  reason  is  a  very  bad  sub- 
stitute for  that  instinctive  knowledge 
which  comes  from  identity. 

Hence  the  very  natural  unrest,  an 
unrest  which  grows,  and  must  grow, 
because  it  is  in  the  nature  of  things 
for  it  to  grow.  India  is  chafing  at  her 
swaddling-bands,  and  the  older  and 
stronger  she  grows,  the  more  she  will 
chafe. 

What  is  to  be  done? 
.  Indianize  the  government,  say  some. 
Appoint  Indians  instead  of  English- 
men to  be  administrators.  Gradually 
replace  the  personnel  till  India  is  gov- 
erned entirely  by  Indians. 

There  could  not  be  a  more  disas- 
trous mistake  than  to  attempt  this. 
The  cry  is  founded  on  a  complete  mis- 
understanding of  the  nature  of  gov- 
ernments, their  functions  and  duties, 
the  causes  of  their  stability  and  health. 
You  cannot  Indianize  an  English  insti- 
tution. You  cannot  put  Indian  wine 
into  English  bottles. 

A  government  to  be  strong  and 
healthy  must  be  rooted  firmly  in  some 
soil.  Where  would  an  Indianized  gov- 
ernment of  India  be  rooted?  Not  in 
India.  It  would  not  be  representative 
of  anything  there.  It  would  be  respon- 
sible to  Downing  Street,  not  India.  It 
would  take  its  orders  from  England; 
it  would  look  to  England  for  help  in 
difficulties.  It  is  a  perfectly  impossible 
thing  to  imagine  a  government  of  In- 
dia with  Indian  officers. 


THE  PHILIPPINES  BY  WAY  OF  INDIA 


581 


Then  establish  local  parliaments,  say 
some. 

With  what  functions? 

To  rule?  They  could  not  rule.  The 
government  of  India,  which  is  a  branch 
of  the  Imperial  government,  could  not 
be  controlled,  even  in  details,  by  any 
local  assembly.  How  could  it? 

To  advise?  There  is  nothing  so  ab- 
solutely futile  as  an  individual  or  an 
assembly  whose  sole  duty  is  to  advise. 
The  only  assurance  that  the  advice 
offered  will  be  reasonable  comes  from 
the  fact  that  the  adviser  accepts  the  re- 
sponsibility if  it  be  wrong.  But  to  give 
these  assemblies  responsibility  would 
be  to  give  them  power.  They  would  be 
untried,  made  up  of  men  with  no  ex- 
perience of  government:  lawyers  and 
newspaper  editors  for  the  most  part. 
They  would  rest  on  nothing.  A  limited 
franchise  would  be  useless,  and  to  en- 
franchise three  hundred  millions  is 
impossible.  They  could  have  no  know- 
ledge, nothing  behind  them.  They 
would  simply  invite  disaster. 
•  What  then  is  to  be  done? 

India  cannot  go  on  as  it  is.  Even 
down  to  the  peasants  the  unrest  is  real, 
if  inarticulate.  And  it  is  well-founded. 

There  is  only  one  thing  to  be  done. 
You  must  begin  at  the  beginning  and 
cultivate  again  in  India  a  local  tree  of 
self-government.  The  germs  are  there. 
All  India  is  made  up  of  local  communi- 
ties called  villages  (not  necessarily  one 
hamlet).  These  have  had  from  time 
immemorial  a  common  life.  Each  is  an 
organism  in  itself  and  accustomed  to 
self-government . 

Unfortunately,  the  village  organism 
has  been  greatly  injured  by  us.  My  ex- 
perience is  of  Burma  and  Madras,  but 
what  is  true  of  them  is  true  universal- 
ly. We  have  weakened  and  debilitated 
the  self-governing  unit  by  continual 
interference.  This  has  been  done  with 
the  best  motives,  of  course.  We  have 
sought  efficiency  and  justice.  But  you 


can  get  neither  in  this  way.  The  vil- 
lage community  itself  can  alone  man- 
age its  communal  affairs  with  any  effi- 
ciency or  justice.  Interference  makes 
bad  worse.  I  know  by  much  personal 
experience  that  there  is  nothing  they 
dread  and  hate  like  this  interference. 
If  the  villages  were  maintained  on 
their  old  basis,  no  interference  would 
ever  be  necessary.  If  it  seems  so  now 
it  is  because  the  organism  has  been 
weakened  by  injudicious  and  ignorant 
interference  till  it  sometimes  will  not 
work  at  all.  These  should  be  restored 
to  their  original  status,  and  helped  to 
develop  themselves  naturally,  to  grow 
and  expand.  Little  by  little,  greater 
powers  and  responsibilities  would  be 
given  them.  Then  they  would  natur- 
ally fall  into  groups,  —  there  were  such 
in  old  days,  —  natural  groups,  not  arti- 
ficial like  our  districts;  and  to  each 
group  a  council  and  executive  —  the 
direct  outcome  of  the  village  council 
and  executive  —  could  be  allowed.  To 
these  bodies  greater  powers  could  be 
assigned. 

In  this  way  a  natural,  and  there- 
fore efficient,  system  of  self-govern- 
ment could  be  encouraged.  What  exact 
form  it  might  take  as  it  grew,  no  one  can 
tell.  It  would  become  manifest  in  the 
working.  The  principal  condition  for 
its  health  is  that  it  be  not  interfered 
with.  If  rightly  constituted,  it  would 
require  no  interference,  only  encour- 
agement and  help.  Thus  under  the 
shadow  of  the  English  Tree  of  Govern- 
ment, a  local  tree  with  a  myriad  roots 
would  slowly  rise,  and  as  it  rose  the 
English  Tree  should  retract  its  shadow. 
So  alone  would  a  firm,  a  living  organ- 
ism of  government  be  built  up,  that 
would  be  so  securely  founded  as  to  fear 
no  storm. 

How  long  it  will  take  the  English 
government  to  see  this,  I  do  not  know; 
but  it  is  the  only  way,  and  in  time  it 
must  be  seen.  It  will  take  time  to 


582 


THE  PHILIPPINES  BY  WAY  OF  INDIA 


succeed.  Nations  are  not  made  in  a 
day.  But  it  is  bound  to  come. 

Now  let  us  see  whether  from  the 
state  of  India  we  cannot  deduce  prin- 
ciples that  will  apply  equally  to  the 
Philippines.  I  think  we  can. 

The  first  is  that  individual  liberty 
must  be  secured.  This  is  the  condition 
on  which  all  else  depends  and  grows; 
it  can  be  done  only  by  the  American 
government. 

It  can  be  done  only  by  the  American 
government  in  its  own  way.  It  cannot 
be  done  in  the  Philippine  way,  or  by 
Philippine  agency.  The  American  gov- 
ernment of  the  Philippines  must  be 
American  first.  It  must  be  as  far  as 
possible  in  sympathy  with  the  Philip- 
pine people,  but  it  must  never  allow 
that  to  affect  its  efficiency.  It  can  only 
be  efficient  by  being  purely  American, 
drawing  its  strength,  its  ideas,  and  its 
methods  from  America.  By  methods 
I  do  not  mean  methods  of  constituting 
a  government  —  election  and  repre- 
sentation; but  methods  of  administra- 
tion which  should  be  adapted  mutatis 
mutandis  to  the  Philippines.  Americans 
can  efficiently  work  only  American 
methods,  just  as  we  in  India  can  effi- 
ciently work  only  English  methods. 

Therefore  do  not  allow  Filipinos, 
however  well-educated  and  able,  to  en- 
ter your  superior  service.  It  has  been 
tried  in  India,  and  has  failed.  The 
causes  of  failures  are  many,  and  are 
obvious.  The  machinery  of  the  high- 
er government  being  American,  only 
Americans  can  work  it  efficiently.  An 
American  alone  thoroughly  under- 
stands the  object  of  the  laws  and  can 
administer  them.  The  American  alone 
has  that  camaraderie  with  other  offi- 
cials and  with  non-officials,  merchants, 
bankers,  etcetera,  which  is  so  absolutely 
necessary  in  order  that  the  machinery 
may  run  smoothly.  An  American  alone 
has  the  necessary  authority ;  and,  more- 
over, the  people  dislike  and  distrust 


their  fellows  who  enter  what  is  really 
a  foreign  service.  This  is  very  notice- 
able in  India.  The  people  at  large  ac- 
cept an  Englishman's  rule  because  he 
is  an  Englishman,  and  England  rules 
India.  But  the  Indian  in  our  service 
they  regard  rather  as  a  traitor.  He  has 
left  them;  he  has  accepted  foreign  ideas; 
he  rules  his  fellow  men  not  by  reason 
of  their  suffrage,  but  by  reason  of  for- 
eign appointment.  He  is,  and  must 
be,  inefficient.  He  cannot  represent  the 
people  before  government  because  he 
is  himself  a  government  official.  There- 
fore keep  your  higher  administration 
purely  American. 

But  that  government  must  be  in 
sympathy  with  the  people,  and  make 
things  as  easy  for  them  as  possible. 

It  is  exactly  here  that  the  difficulty 
begins. 

I  suppose  it  is  natural  for  all  of  us, 
English  or  American  or  German,  for 
every  nationality,  to  think  that  in  its 
methods  it  has  discovered  not  merely 
what  is  best  relatively  to  itself  and  its 
times,  but  to  the  absolute.  We  think 
our  laws  approximate  to  the  absolutely 
right,  our  courts  to  the  absolutely  just, 
our  land  and  revenue  systems  to  the 
absolutely  efficient.  We  have  only  to 
transplant  them  as  they  are,  to  insure 
good  results.  There  could  be  no  great- 
er mistake,  for  there  is  no  absolute  in 
these  matters.  They  are  all  relative. 

To  begin  with,  there  are  the  courts 
of  criminal  justice.  Do  not  suppose 
you  can  take  your  codes  and  apply 
them  in  the  Philippines  as  in  America. 
You  cannot.  Every  people  has  its  own 
ideas  on  certain  matters  connected 
with  crime,  which  differ  from  those  of 
other  peoples.  For  instance,  in  Eng- 
lish law  an  assault  is  little;  a  theft,  no 
matter  how  small,  is  a  serious  matter. 
To  the  Oriental  it  is  the  reverse;  a 
theft  is  a  small  matter,  an  assault  a 
great  one;  he  estimates  his  self-respect 
and  dignity  above  his  pocket. 


THE  PHILIPPINES  BY  WAY  OF  INDIA 


583 


Again,  no  Oriental  believes  in  severe 
punishment  for  crime.  He  considers  our 
punishments  wickedly  severe,  therefore 
he  often  will  not  complain,  or  give 
evidence,  or  he  gives  false  evidence. 
Remember  that  'summum  jus,  summa 
injuria'  and  where  juries  do  not  exist 
to  mitigate  and  put  common  sense  into 
law,  great  harm  may  be  done.  It  is 
done  in  India. 

Therefore  try  to  find  out  how  the 
people  at  large  regard  crime;  try  to  get 
their  perspective.  You  will  find  that 
it  differs  from  yours  considerably,  ow- 
ing to  the  difference  of  circumstances. 
It  is  as  true  a  view  as  yours;  as  regards 
the  actual  circumstances,  a  much  bet- 
ter view.  They  want  to  prevent  and 
stop  crime  quite  as  much  as  you  do. 
Therefore  get  your  courts  into  accord- 
ance with  the  consciences  of  the  people. 
Otherwise  they  will  become  what  ours 
are  in  India. 

It  is  the  same  with  civil  law.  Our 
procedure  is  far  too  complicated  and 
too  expensive.  For  all  small  cases  it 
should  be  made  cheap,  expeditious, 
and  sensible.  An  Oriental  wants  a  case 
settled.  He  would  far  rather  have  it 
settled  against  him  than  that  the  case 
should  drag  out  indefinitely.  They  have 
often  told  me  this.  Do  your  best, 
therefore,  to  make  the  first  hearing 
complete,  and  have  no  appeals.  It  is 
advocates  who  create  the  delays.  Do 
not  let  your  courts,  and  therefore  your 
justice,  fall  into  the  hands  of  barris- 
ters, pleaders,  or  advocates.  As  matters 
stand  in  India,  the  barristers  or  advo- 
cates are  usually  the  principal  parties, 
the  judge  is  no  one.  The  people  hate 
this;  they  misuse  it  and  abuse  it. 

If  the  people  had  their  way,  there 
would  be  no  one  between  the  judge  and 
the  parties.  He  would  have  subordi- 
nate officials  to  prepare  each  case  for 
his  hearing  under  his  directions,  and 
there  would  be  no  advocates. 

Consider   now    what  an  enormous 


amount  of  money  goes  to  lawyers  and 
barristers.  For  what?  Mainly  to  ob- 
scure and  pervert  justice.  Do  not  let 
the  Filipinos  be  lawyer-ridden  as  we 
are  in  India. 

Do  not  try  to  reform  the  people  by 
laws,  as  we  have  tried  to  do  by  the 
gambling  acts.  Law  is  to  preserve  pub- 
lic morality,  not  private  morality. 

Remember  that  if  you  get  your 
courts  out  of  touch  with  the  people 
you  will  not  only  encourage  perjury, 
as  in  India,  but  you  will  make  them 
hated  and  inefficient.  .  . 

As  to  land,  bear  in  mind  that  the 
objective  is  an  industrious,  independ- 
ent peasantry.  Great  estates  are  in- 
jurious, and  give  rise  to  political  dis- 
content. Therefore  so  frame  the  land 
laws  as  to  tell  for  the  former,  and 
against  the  latter.  To  keep  the  small 
farmer  independent  there  should  be 
Raiffeisen  banks  l  in  every  village,  such 
as  I  began  in  Burma.  Their  value  in 
every  way  is  great;  it  is  beyond  com- 
putation, not  merely  financially,  but  as 
an  educative  force. 

And  whatever  you  do,  never  allow 
the  Filipinos  to  be  exploited  by  your 
own  people  —  monopolists,  great  cor- 
porations, and  so  on.  In  India  we  have 
almost,  though  not  quite,  escaped  this; 
and  it  is  greatly  to  our  advantage.  In 
their  own  places  they  have  great  value 
in  encouraging  and  building  up  indus- 
tries. But  there  is  danger.  Remember 
that  the  people  do  not  differentiate 
much  between  a  foreign  company  and 
a  foreign  government.  They  see  a  con- 
nection —  even  if  we  do  not. 

Finally  comes  education;  that  is  to 
say,  helping  the  children  to  develop 
their  powers  of  observation  and  intelli- 
gence and  self-command.  That  is  the 
only  education.  Reading,  writing,  and 

1  A  clear  account  of  the  working  of  these  banks 
may  be  found  in  the  article  entitled  'The  Farmer 
and  Finance,'  by  Myron  T.  Herrick.  See  the 
Atlantic  for  February,  1913.  —  THE  EDITORS. 


584 


THE  PHILIPPINES  BY  WAY  OF  INDIA 


all  other  matters  which  are  taught  are 
instruction,  which  is  quite  different. 
Instruction  has  its  value,  but  it  is  no- 
thing compared  to  that  of  education.  • 

Therefore  let  your  schools  be  secu- 
lar, because  religions  of  all  kinds  are 
more  apt  to  dull  the  intelligence  than 
to  develop  it.  If  the  parents  want  their 
children  to  learn  religion,  let  them 
arrange  it.  The  duty  of  the  American 
government  in  the  Philippines  is,  not 
to  any  form  of  religion,  but  to  the  in- 
telligence of  the  children.  You  will  find 
that  the  people  will  like  this.  They 
dislike  the  subsidizing  of  denomination- 
al schools  of  all  sorts,  even  of  their  own 
denomination.  They  do  not  like  the 
mixture.  It  is  a  Western  idea  to  mix 
up  education  and  religion.  I  do  not  say 
that  it  is  not  done  in  the  East,  but  I 
do  say  that  the  people  do  not  approve 
of  it. 

But  of  what  use  to  enter  into  de- 
tails. If  your  officers,  and  therefore 
your  administration,  have  sympathy, 
that  is  to  say,  understanding,  if  your 
administration  can  look  at  things  as 
the  people  do,  it  will  soon  see  how  best 
to  adapt  itself  to  the  people.  If  it  be 
remembered  always  that  the  people 
have  common  sense,  that  they  think 
and  reason  just  as  you  do,  only  from 
data  which  are  different  because  their 
circumstances  are  different,  the  diffi- 
culty soon  disappears.  It  requires  no 
special  gift  to  understand  an  Oriental 
people;  anybody  can  do  it  if  he  will 
give  up  his  prejudices  and  self-right- 
eousness and  try. 

So,  having  established  an  adminis- 
tration in  sympathy  with  the  people, 
an  administration  purely  American, 
strong  and  living  because  a  branch  of 
the  American  government  at  Washing- 
ton, you  can  with  a  clear  conscience 
take  the  next  step.  Under  the  aegis  of 
this  administration,  a  local  system  of 
government  should  be  encouraged. 

This  will  be  an  even  greater  diffi- 


culty. It  will  require  great  study,  great 
tact,  great  self-repression,  a  sympathy 
which  does  not  mean  being  sorry  for 
the  Filipinos,  but  being  able  to  see 
things  with  their  eyes.  It  must  not  be 
an  imported  system,  but  a  natural  and 
indigenous  system.  Unless  it  is  that, 
it  is  worth  nothing,  for  it  will  have  no 
life. 

Villages  should  be  granted  as  much 
autonomy  as  possible.  Each  village 
should  have  its  council  and  headman, 
its  village  fund,  its  duties,  and  its 
powers.  The  headman  should  be  con- 
sidered, not  a  government  official,  but 
the  representative  of  the  village  before 
government. 

Every  village  organism  should  have 
the  power  of  trying  all  petty  cases  of 
crime,  or  civil  disputes,  without  appeal. 
And  no  advocates  or  lawyers  should  be 
allowed  on  either  side.  In  small  cases 
the  headman  and  a  councilor  can  dis- 
cover truth  far  better  without  such  in- 
terference. 

Then,  villages  should  be  grouped  in 
natural  divisions,  each  group  with  its 
council  and  its  fund,  for,  say,  local 
roads,  bridges,  and  so  on,  with,  again, 
local  jurisdiction  in  certain  matters. 

A  local  government  board  should 
be  formed  at  headquarters  to  super- 
vise this  local  self-government,  and  this 
board  should  be,  if  not  at  first,  cer- 
tainly before  long,  purely  native.  This 
is  where  your  educated  and  able  na- 
tive will  come  in;  here  he  will  be  in- 
valuable. 

And  so  gradually  the  organism,  and 
the  ability  of  the  people  for  managing 
it,  would  grow;  and  it  would  become 
stable.  As  they  grew,  more  and  more 
duties  and  powers  should  be  handed 
over  to  it.  Gradually  American  pro- 
tection and  direction  could  be  with- 
drawn, until  at  length  from  these 
local  bodies  you  could  draw  a  truly 
representative  and  effective  assembly 
to  govern  the  whole  country. 


AMERICAN  CONTROL  OF  THE  PHILIPPINES 


585 


I  do  not  say  that  it  would  be  easy  to 
do  this.  It  would  be  most  difficult,  but 
it  would  be  worth  doing. 

Meanwhile  have  nothing  to  do  with 
elective  assemblies,  or  assemblies  of 
any  kind  which  would  have  power  of 
advice  without  responsibility.  They 
would  be  fatal.  Do  not  be  affected 
by  the  discontent  of  a  small  educated 
class.  They  are  not  the  people. 

You  must  not  deliver  from  one  tyr- 
anny to  raise  another,  which  would  be 


the  worse  because  it  would  have  Amer- 
ica behind  it. 

So  will  you  establish  eventually 
your  principles  of  no  taxation  without 
representation.  You  will  render  repre- 
sentation not  only  possible  but  true:  a 
representation,  not  of  individuals,  but 
of  communities.  And  when  the  Philip- 
pines have  grown  to  be  a  nation,  they 
will  be  a  daughter  nation  to  you. 

I  know  no  other  way  in  which  you 
can  accomplish  this. 


AMERICAN  CONTROL  OF  THE  PHILIPPINES 


BY   BERNARD   MOSES 


DEPENDENCIES  in  revolt  have  some- 
times found  it  advisable  to  proclaim 
in  their  declarations  of  independence 
principles  which  no  independent  na- 
tion would  be  willing  to  incorporate  in 
a  statement  of  its  national  policy.  The 
inhabitants  of  the  British  colonies  in 
America  affirmed  that  the  consent  of 
the  governed  is  essential  to  the  exist- 
ence of  a  just  government;  but,  having 
become  an  independent  nation,  they 
are  no  more  willing  to  accept  this  idea 
as  a  principle  of  national  conduct  than 
is  the  most  arbitrary  government  on 
earth.  If  the  citizens  of  California,  irri- 
tated by  the  interference  of  the  Fed- 
eral government  in  their  public  schools, 
or  in  other  matters  within  their  exclu- 
sive jurisdiction,  should  not  consent  to 
a  further  exercise  of  Federal  authority 
within  their  territory,  the  government 
of  the  United  States  would,  neverthe- 
less, proceed  to  perform  its  functions 


in  the  territory  in  question  without  the 
consent  of  the  governed.  The  Civil 
War,  between  1861  and  1865,  showed 
with  unmistakable  clearness  the  prac- 
tical attitude  of  the  nation  toward 
this  question.  Individual  persons  and 
political  parties  are  using  the  notion 
of  the  consent  of  the  governed  in  ad- 
vocating the  independence  of  the  Phil- 
ippine Islands;  but  an  argument  based 
on  this  idea  does  not  rest  on  a  solid 
foundation,  and  is  no  more  conclusive 
in  this  case  than  it  would  be  in  the  sup- 
posed case  of  California. 

The  title  under  which  the  United 
States  exercises  its  sovereign  authority 
in  the  Philippine  Islands  is  not  less  valid 
than  that  under  which  this  nation  as- 
sumed control  of  California.  The  Phil- 
ippine Islands  have  been  under  Amer- 
ican sovereignty  about  as  long  as  that 
state  had  been  at  the  beginning  of  the 
Civil  War;  and  when  California,  at 
that  time,  seemed  to  be  on  the  point 
of  withdrawing  her  consent  to  the  con- 


586 


AMERICAN  CONTROL  OF  THE  PHILIPPINES 


tinuance  of  Federal  rule  within  her 
borders,  the  government  at  Washing- 
ton was  not  disposed  to  allow  the 
political  future  of  that  region  to  be 
determined  by  the  consent,  or  non-con- 
sent, of  the  governed.  It  is  idle,  there- 
fore, for  any  person  or  any  party, 
wishing  to  sever  the  connection  be- 
tween the  United  States  and  the  Phil- 
ippine Islands,  to  affirm  that  it  is  the 
policy  of  this  nation  not  to  exercise  its 
sovereignty  over  any  of  the  great  dis- 
tricts under  its  jurisdiction  except  by 
the  consent  of  the  inhabitants  of  that 
district. 

The  attitude  of  those  persons  who 
would  have  the  United  States  with- 
draw from  the  Philippines  is  evident- 
ly not  produced  by  a  desire  that  the 
Islands  should  fall  under  the  domina- 
tion of  some  other  power,  but  by  a  mis- 
conception of  what  would  be  their  fate 
if  they  were  not  connected  with  some 
nation  of  superior  civilization.  Many 
of  the  citizens  of  the  United  States  are 
especially  liable  to  error  in  thinking 
on  a  subject  like  this.  They  possess 
the  political  instinct  in  a  more  marked 
degree  than  the  members  of  any  other 
nation.  A  group  of  Americans  of  An- 
glo-Saxon stock,  without  much  educa- 
tion or  cultivation,  set  down  in  the 
wilderness,  would  proceed  at  once, 
under  the  force  and  guidance  of  their 
political  instinct,  to  organize  and  ad- 
minister a  government,  and  the  gov- 
ernment thus  inaugurated  would  have 
many  of  the  qualities  of  a  good  govern- 
ment. This  instinct  is  to  such  an  ex- 
tent an  element  of  their  character  that 
it  is  difficult  for  them  to  conceive  that 
it  is  not  a  universal  element  of  human 
nature.  With  very  little  knowledge  of 
other  peoples,  they  are  moved  by  the 
belief  that  a  group  of  persons  from 
any  one  of  them  would  act  as  they 
themselves  would  act  under  similar 
circumstances.  When  they  think  of  in- 
dependence for  the  Filipinos,  they  pre- 


sume a  people  possessed  of  a  political 
instinct  sufficiently  powerful  to  direct 
them  in  the  organization  of  a  govern- 
ment that  would  facilitate  for  them 
the  attainment  and  preservation  of  lib- 
erty. But  in  this  they  fail  to  take  into 
account  the  fact  that  the  dominant 
elements  of  the  Filipino's  character 
have  been  formed  by  the  traditions  of 
millenniums  of  barbarism,  in  which 
political  experience  had  no  place,  and 
by  submission  to  the  autocratic  rule 
of  Spain. 

Some  of  the  Filipinos  stand  among 
the  most  advanced  members  of  the 
Malay  race,  but  besides  these  there 
are  representatives  of  various  grades 
of  human  cultivation  down  to  the  un- 
tamed Negritos.  Yet  even  the  small 
minority  of  persons  most  advanced  in 
the  way  of  civilization  have  not  been 
in  a  position  to  enjoy  an  enlightening 
political  experience.  Those  who  lived 
at  the  ports  or  in  the  principal  towns, 
during  the  centuries  of  Spanish  dom- 
ination, were  under  a  politico-ecclesi- 
astical regime,  which  tended  to  elimi- 
nate their  recollection  of  their  ancient 
tribal  relations;  but  from  the  abso- 
lute political  government  and  the  still 
more  absolute  church  they  were  not 
able  to  derive  any  idea  of  liberty  or 
any  conception  of  the  principles  on 
which  alone  it  is  possible  to  establish 
a  free  government.  At  the  close  of 
Spanish  rule,  there  were  not  a  score  of 
men  born  in  the  Islands  who  had  a 
conception  of  government  compara- 
ble with  that  entertained  by  the  bulk 
of  the  citizens  of  the  more  liberal  West- 
ern nations.  There  were,  however, 
more  than  a  score  who  wished  the 
Islands  to  be  independent,  and  by  in- 
dependence they  understood  the  rule 
of  a  small  body  of  persons  empowered 
to  carry  on  the  only  kind  of  govern- 
ment of  which  they  had  any  know- 
ledge, a  tyrannical  oligarchy  adminis- 
tered for  the  good  of  the  governing. 


AMERICAN  CONTROL  OF  THE  PHILIPPINES 


587 


At  the  time  of  the  formation  of  the 
civil  government  under  American  au- 
thority, the  ablest  and  best  educated 
men  in  the  Islands  had  an  opportun- 
ity to  express  their  opinions  on  all  of 
the  important  questions  of  government 
under  consideration;  and  their  utter- 
ances furnished  an  excellent  index  of 
the  political  views  and  aspirations  of 
the  most  worthy  representatives  of  the 
people.  Even  the  idea  of  political  inde- 
pendence was  now  and  then  brought 
into  the  discussion;  and,  on  one  occa- 
sion, a  Filipino,  arguing  in  favor  of 
it,  affirmed  the  fitness  of  his  people 
to  assume  it  on  the  ground  that  there 
were  as  many  educated  men  in  the 
Islands  as  there  would  be  offices  to 
be  filled.  On  another  occasion,  when 
advice  was  sought  from  the  principal 
men  of  the  province  as  to  the  best 
method  of  increasing  the  provincial 
revenue,  one  of  the  leading  men  of  the 
province  argued  in  favor  of  imposing 
a  special  tax  on  what  he  called  the  pro- 
letariat, —  the  great  mass  of  the  in- 
habitants with  little  or  no  property, 
who  were  gaining  a  precarious  living 
by  their  daily  labor.  There  were  a  few 
persons  wiser  than  these,  but  a  very 
small  number  whose  fundamental  ideas 
of  government  differed  widely  from 
those  which  are  somewhat  vaguely  in- 
dicated by  these  illustrations. 

This  attitude  of  the  leading  Fili- 
pinos toward  questions  of  government 
ought  not  to  surprise  us,  when  we  re- 
flect on  the  influences  under  which 
their  political  opinions  and  political 
spirit  were  formed.  In  the  first  place, 
their  whole  existence,  and  the  exist- 
ence of  their  ancestors  for  uncounted 
generations,  has  been  passed  in  the 
atmosphere,  and  under  influences  pro- 
ceeding from  the  spirit,  of  the  Orient; 
and,  in  the  second  place,  they  were 
dominated  for  nearly  four  hundred 
years  by  ecclesiastical-secular  institu- 
tions, the  spirit  of  which  laid  special 


stress  on  the  good  of  the  governing; 
and  it  is  impossible  to  conceive  as 
proceeding  from  these  influences  any 
spirit  more  liberal  or  generous  than 
that  of  an  oligarchy  ruling  without 
much  solicitude  for  the  welfare  of  the 
great  unenlightened  and  helpless  ma- 
jority. 

ii 

No  one  is  able  to  form  an  adequate 
conception  of  the  task  undertaken  by 
the  United  States  in  the  Philippines 
without  taking  account  of  the  racial 
qualities  of  the  Filipino,  the  environ- 
ment under  which  he  had  lived,  the 
traditions  which  had  modified  his  de- 
velopment, and  all  of  the  other  forces 
which  contributed  to  make  him  what 
he  was  at  the  close  of  Spanish  rule. 

In  attempting  to  improve  the  con- 
dition of  members  of  one  of  the  less- 
developed  races,  whether  in  America 
or  Asia,  the  Spaniards,  by  seeking  to 
change  the  most  fundamental  and  per- 
manent of  all  racial  ideas,  —  the  idea 
of  religion,  —  began  at  the  point  where 
success  is  practically  impossible.  The 
Americans,  on  the  other  hand,  hold- 
ing that  much  can  be  done  for  the 
advancement  and  cultivation  of  a  peo- 
ple without  imposing  upon  it  a  specific 
religious  creed,  have  directed  their  ef- 
forts to  the  task  of  communicating  to 
the  Filipinos  a  knowledge  of  the  prac- 
tical achievements  of  the  Western 
nations.  They  found,  for  example,  that 
the  inhabitants  of  the  Islands  had 
no  common  language,  and  that,  con- 
sequently, they  were  divided  into  a 
large  number  of  antagonistic  groups. 
The  ideas  of  each  group  were  narrowly 
confined  to  their  petty  provincial  af- 
fairs. The  practical  remedy  adopted 
to  improve  this  state  of  things  was  to 
give  to  the  Islanders  a  knowledge  of 
English,  through  which  social  sympa- 
thy might  be  substituted  for  social 
antagonism,  and  means  established  for 


588 


AMERICAN  CONTROL  OF  THE  PHILIPPINES 


facilitating  the  creation  of  an  exten- 
sive commonwealth.  The  Americans 
found,  moreover,  that  all  but  a  small 
percentage  of  the  Filipinos  were  ignor- 
ant of  the  language  of  any  civilized 
people,  and  that  they  were  consequent- 
ly unable  to  acquire  any  valuable  in- 
formation of  the  ideas  and  practices  of 
civilization.  Without  the  assistance 
of  this  information,  they  were  doomed 
to  remain  in,  or  to  drift  toward,  the 
stagnant  state  of  isolated  barbarians. 

Knowledge  of  a  European  language, 
possessed  by  at  least  a  considerable 
part  of  the  inhabitants  of  the  Islands, 
is  thus  essential  to  the  progress  of  the 
Filipino  people.  Without  it,  their  fate 
would  be  that  of  the  Malay  race  gen- 
erally, which,  in  none  of  its  branches, 
without  foreign  assistance,  has  risen 
above  a  low  stage  of  semi-civilization; 
and,  in  this  day  of  civilized  aggression, 
the  inhabitants  of  no  large  and  desir- 
able territory  can  have  any  security 
for  their  integrity  or  their  individual 
development,  except  by  so  organizing 
their  political  and  social  life  that  the 
rest  of  the  world  will  recognize  them 
as  belonging  in  the  ranks  of  civilization. 

The  gloomy  forebodings  entertained 
by  many  minds  forty  or  fifty  years  ago 
—  when  Mr.  Pierson  wrote  his  able 
book  on  the  wrong  side  of  the  question, 
expressing  the  views  of  a  large  number 
of  persons,  that  the  white  race  and  its 
cultivation  were  to  be  swamped  by  the 
colored  races  —  have  disappeared  be- 
fore the  apparent  determination  of 
the  white  nations  to  arouse  themselves 
and  rule  the  world.  There  is  now  no 
secure  standing-room  for  an  indepen- 
dent semi-civilized  people.  There  is  no 
place  for  the  Filipino  people,  except  as 
attached  to  a  strong  civilized  nation. 

In  opposition  to  this  view  it  is  said 
that  the  Philippines  should  be  inde- 
pendent and  neutralized.  It  is  possible 
to  neutralize  a  state  that  has  a  well- 
ordered  and  approved  government 


competent  to  give  protection  and  se- 
curity to  the  life  and  property  of 
aliens  within  its  borders;  but,  unless 
this  condition  is  fulfilled,  foreign  na- 
tions will  intervene  in  obedience  to 
the  law  of  self-protection,  and  the  in- 
dependence of  the  incompetent  state 
will  disappear. 

The  guaranty  of  an  alien's  property 
rights  and  of  the  security  of  his  life  by 
a  foreign  state,  when  that  state  is  not 
responsible  for  the  internal  govern- 
ment where  the  alien  resides  or  where 
his  property  exists,  is  a  political  ab- 
surdity; and  the  United  States  will 
not  undertake  to  furnish  such  a  guar- 
anty for  an  alien  in  the  Philippines 
while  the  American  citizens  retain 
their  sanity.  There  is  no  reason  to 
suppose  that  the  government  at  Wash- 
ington will  undertake  to  guarantee  the 
security  of  life  and  property  in  the 
Philippines,  except  while  the  internal 
government  of  the  Islands  is  subject  to 
the  sovereignty  of  the  United  States; 
and  in  the  present  condition  and  pro- 
spects of  the  Filipinos  there  is  nothing 
to  furnish  them  a  reasonable  ground 
for  seeking  to  place  themselves  in  a 
situation  where  an  appeal  to  a  foreign 
state  might  be  necessary.  In  spite  of 
the  possible  errors  of  judgment  which 
may  be  made  by  the  American  mem- 
bers of  the  Filipino  government,  the 
Filipinos  at  present  occupy  a  position 
especially  favorable  for  the  mainten- 
ance of  internal  peace  between  the  va- 
rious antagonistic  tribes,  for  the  pre- 
servation of  the  integrity  of  the  people, 
and  for  the  development  among  them 
of  the  ideas  and  practices  of  civilized 
life.  They  enjoy  an  exceptional  oppor- 
tunity among  dependencies  with  re- 
spect to  the  acquisition  of  a  European 
language;  and  the  spirit  of  the  people 
of  the  United  States,  and  the  nature  of 
their  government,  offer  them  a  pro- 
spect of  a  larger  measure  of  autono- 
mous existence  than  is  enjoyed  by  any 


AMERICAN  CONTROL  OF  THE  PHILIPPINES 


589 


other  people  in  the  world  possessing  a 
similar  degree  of  cultivation. 

It  was  the  policy  of  the  Spaniards 
in  the  Philippines,  and  of  the  Dutch  in 
Java,  not  to  mention  other  nations,  to 
discourage,  if  not  to  prohibit,  natives 
from  acquiring  and  using  the  language 
of  the  dominant  nation.  By  this  policy 
a  line  of  discrimination  was  drawn,  and 
the  native,  confined  to  the  use  of  his 
own  uncultivated  speech,  was  made  to 
feel  his  inferiority.  The  determina- 
tion of  the  United  States  not  only  to 
permit  the  Filipinos  to  use  the  English 
language,  but  also  to  provide  for  them 
the  most  ample  facilities  for  learning 
it,  was  regarded  as  a  concession  in 
favor  of  equality,  and  helps  to  explain 
the  remarkable  zeal  with  which  the 
youth  turned  to  the  study  of  English. 

This  and  other  concessions,  made  to 
a  people  who  had  lived  for  centuries 
subjected  to  the  arbitrary  and  uncom- 
promising domination  of  the  Spaniards, 
in  so  far  as  they  were  grasped  by  the 
dull  minds  of  the  poor  and  oppressed 
toilers  of  the  country,  were  regarded  as 
a  ray  of  light  in  the  darkness  of  their 
prospects.  To  a  number  of  mestizo 
dwellers  in  the  larger  towns,  who  had 
acquired  a  little  knowledge,  uncom- 
promising domination  meant  real  su- 
periority, and,  consequently,  conces- 
sions intended  for  the  welfare  of  the 
people  indicated  weakness  on  the  part 
of  those  who  made  them.  The  conces- 
sions made  by  the  Americans  tended, 
therefore,  to  belittle  them  in  the  eyes 
of  this  class,  and  to  lead  this  small 
body  of  ambitious  Filipinos  to  exag- 
gerate their  own  importance. 

For  a  large  part  of  the  American 
press  and  for  the  anti-expansion  ora- 
tors, this  conceited  and  noisy  group  of 
superficial  persons  became  the  Filipino 
people.  It  is  to  their  voice  that  Con- 
gress is  asked  to  listen.  The  seven  mil- 
lions of  workers,  who  are  trying  by  the 
rudest  means  to  make  a  living  for 


themselves,  are  nowhere  heard;  and 
independence  for  the  Islands  would 
mean  complete  liberty  for  a  hundred 
and  fifty  or  two  hundred  agitators, 
under  the  system  of  caciqueism,  to 
dominate  and  plunder  the  rest  of  the 
inhabitants.  The  welfare  of  the  genie, 
as  they  are  called,  the  mass  of  the  com- 
mon people,  has  never  entered  into  the 
plan  or  purpose  of  the  Filipino  advo- 
cates of  independence;  and  the  estab- 
lishment of  independence,  if  this  were 
possible,  before  the  inhabitants  have 
obtained  a  much  more  effective  control 
over  the  forces  that  make  for  cultiva- 
tion, would  put  off  indefinitely  the 
civilization  of  the  Islands. 


in 

It  ought  not  to  surprise  anybody 
that  some  of  the  Filipinos  are  opposed 
to  the  continuance  of  American  rule  in 
the  Islands;  for  as  long  as  the  govern- 
ment of  the  United  States  is  main- 
tained there,  the  little  oligarchic  com- 
pany of  native  'statesmen'  will  not 
have  the  desired  opportunity  to  dis- 
pose of  the  revenues,  since  these  rev- 
enues are  controlled  by  a  central 
treasury  and  provincial  treasuries,  so 
arranged  that  the  central  treasurer 
holds  a  check  on  the  provincial  treas- 
urers, and  through  his  agents  super- 
vises their  accounts.  The  feature  of 
the  financial  management  which  aston- 
ished even  the  more  cultivated  Fili- 
pinos is  that,  in  the  expenditure  of  pub- 
lic funds,  the  welfare  of  the  genie  is 
considered.  Moreover,  the  rule  estab- 
lished by  the  Americans,  that  the  pro- 
vincial revenues  should  be  expended 
in,  and  for  the  benefit  of,  the  province 
where  they  are  raised,  and  not  be 
taken  to  Manila  as  heretofore,  was  a 
measure  of  vast  importance  for  the 
provincials.  It  meant  that  the  pro- 
vinces might  have  good  roads,  might 
build  bridges  over  their  rivers  and  con- 


590 


AMERICAN  CONTROL  OF  THE  PHILIPPINES 


struct  public  buildings  for  their  own 
use.  It  meant,  in  fact,  that  the  common 
man  might  have  facilities  for  reaching 
a  market  with  his  products,  and  have  a 
decent  school  for  his  children. 

The  effect  of  Spain's  politico-eccle- 
siastical absolutism  was  to  weaken  the 
influence  of  the  tribal  bosses,  or  ca- 
ciques. There  was  thus  prepared  the 
way  for  a  regime  which  would  encour- 
age the  development  of  individuality 
and  personal  independence.  But  the 
kind  of  independence  that  the  Filipino 
agitator  demands,  is  the  freedom  of 
the  caciques  to  reestablish  their  dom- 
ination over  groups  of  the  common 
people.  The  kind  of  independence  im- 
peratively needed,  in  the  interests  of 
humanity  and  progress,  is  the  inde- 
pendence of  the  common  man;  and  the 
regime  which  will  secure  and  guarantee 
this  independence  is  demanded  by  a 
higher  authority  than  the  will  of  any 
group  of  professional  politicians. 

The  government  which  exists  in  the 
United  States  has  doubtless  weak- 
nesses and  imperfections,  but  the  gov- 
ernment of  no  other  great  nation  rests 
on  an  equally  broad  conception  of 
liberty  and  personal  independence.  It 
is  clear  to  any  one  who  knows  the  Fil- 
ipinos of  all  ranks,  and  has  some  un- 
derstanding of  their  social  history,  that 
they  have  great  need  of  independence, 
but  of  the  personal  independence  of 
the  individual  man ;  and  it  is  also  clear 
that  this  lies  nowhere  within  the  hori- 
zon of  the  present,  except  under  the 
sovereignty  of  the  United  States.  To 
reestablish  the  power  of  the  cacique 
would  be  to  deprive  the  mass  of  the 
people  of  a  large  part  of  whatever  ad- 
vantage has  come  to  them  through 
their  connection  with  civilization. 

The  Filipinos  have  need  not  only 
of  personal  independence  but  also  of 
peace;  in  fact,  their  personal  independ- 
ence can  be  achieved  only  under  the 
conditions  of  peace.  When  they  are  at 


war  the  power  of  the  leaders  is  absolute, 
and  the  habit  of  war  would  mean  that 
the  bulk  of  the  people  would  remain  in 
a  state  of  subordination.  It  is  appar- 
ently supposed  by  those  persons  who 
advocate  the  withdrawal  of  American 
authority,  that,  in  case  of  the  execution 
of  their  plan,  the  ancient  antagonisms 
and  tribal  ambitions,  now  suppressed 
by  the  presence  of  a  common  superior, 
would  be  put  aside  and  abandoned. 
This  opinion  is  evidently  held  in  igno- 
rance of  the  fact  that  there  are  several 
great  sections  of  the  population  which 
are  as  unlike  one  another  as  are  the 
nations  of  Europe.  They  occupy  dif- 
ferent parts  of  the  insular  territory; 
they  speak  different  languages;  and 
they  have  learned  enough  about  war  to 
know  that  it  is  not  without  its  com- 
pensations, —  that  power,  distinction, 
and  even  respect  and  honor  among 
their  fellows,  are  often  the  achieve- 
ments of  battle.  If  European  nations, 
with  all  their  cultivation  and  their 
knowledge  of  the  advantages  of  per- 
manent international  peace,  cannot  be 
induced  to  cease  their  ruinous  prepa- 
rations for  war,  it  is  folly  to  suppose 
that  the  Tagalogs  and  the  Illocanos, 
the  Visayans  and  the  Moros,  will  lie 
down  together  in  peace  and  harmony, 
if  there  be  no  superior  power  to  dis- 
countenance their  hostility. 

The  moral  effect  of  the  presence  of 
the  American  garrison  is  to  strengthen 
the  faith  of  the  Filipinos  in  the  bene- 
ficence of  peace.  The  supposition  that 
this  faith  would  thrive  without  this 
stimulus  leaves  out  of  account  the 
restless  and  ambitious  character  of  the 
Tagalogs,  who,  by  their  previous  con- 
duct, have  given  a  sufficient  indication 
of  their  desire  to  dominate  the  archi- 
pelago, while  some  of  the  other  sections 
of  the  population  have  shown  with 
equal  clearness  their  desire  to  be  free 
from  Tagalog  rule.  There  is  no  evi- 
dence, nor  even  a  probability,  that  a 


AMERICAN  CONTROL  OF  THE  PHILIPPINES 


591 


subjected  tribe  would  find  the  rule  of 
the  conquering  Tagalog,  or  of  any 
other  conquering  native,  more  benefi- 
cent than  the  administration  under 
which  all  sections  of  the  inhabitants 
now  live  in  peace,  and  as  equals. 

It  is  difficult  to  avoid  the  conclusion 
that  the  state  of  affairs  in  the  Philip- 
pine Islands  imposes  upon  the  govern- 
ment of  the  United  States  the  duty  to 
maintain  in  the  Islands  forces  making 
for  civilization  at  least  equal  to  those 
which  have  been  set  aside  as  a  conse- 
quence of  American  occupation.  The 
importance  of  this  obligation  will  ap- 
pear when  one  reflects  that  practically 
all  of  the  evidences  of  civilization  in 
the  Islands  are  the  result  of  their  con- 
nection with  Spain;  and  that,  with  a 
few  exceptions,  all  of  the  inhabitants 
who,  at  the  time  of  the  transfer  of  the 
sovereignty,  appeared  as  the  leaders  of 
civilized  life  in  the  various  communi- 
ties, were  Spaniards,  or  mestizos,  or 
foreigners  of  some  other  nationality. 

The  churches,  the  schools,  the  banks, 
the  commercial  houses,  and  all  of 
the  trading  establishments  except  the 
petty  shops  and  the  produce  markets, 
had  been  created  and  were  conducted 
by  men  who  were  what  they  were  by 
reason  of  their  foreign  blood.  Since 
the  overthrow  of  the  Spanish  govern- 
ment by  the  United  States,  the  increase 
of  mestizos  of  the  first  degree  has 
ceased,  and  the  mestizo  part  of  the 
population  tends  necessarily  toward 
the  elimination  of  its  Spanish  blood. 
In  the  future,  with  each  succeeding 
generation,  the  Spanish  strain  will  be 
weakened,  and  this  gradual  return  of 
the  stock  to  its  primitive  Malay  qual- 
ity means  a  gradual  diminution  of  the 
forces  that  have  introduced  into  the 
larger  towns  certain  features  of  pro- 
gress. Therefore,  in  the  course  of  time, 
if  conditions  were  established  that 
would  cause  foreign  immigration  to 
cease,  the  Islands  would  present  not  a 


state  of  progress,  but  a  state  of  retro- 
gression; and  under  these  conditions 
foreign  capital  would  not  be  invested, 
except  with  such  arrangements  as 
would  enable  the  capitalists  to  control 
the  government;  but  a  government 
thus  subject  to  the  dictation  of  capi- 
talists, many  of  whom  would  be  non- 
resident foreigners,  would  be  the  worst 
conceivable  government  for  a  people 
in  a  low  state  of  social  development. 
A  government  thus  nominally  inde- 
pendent, but  dominated  by  industrial 
corporations,  would  present  the  most 
favorable  conditions  for  merciless  ex- 
ploitation. To  abandon  the  Philip- 
pines would  be  to  acquire  the  discredit 
of  having  destroyed  the  forces  that 
have  given  the  Islanders  an  impulse 
toward  civilization,  and  then  left  them 
either  to  become  subject  to  a  less  lib- 
eral power  or  to  drift  backward  toward 
barbarism. 

IV 

In  establishing  and  administering 
a  government  in  the  Philippines,  the 
United  States  undertook  to  carry  on 
every  branch  of  beneficent  public  act- 
ivity which  had  been  relinquished  by 
the  Spaniards,  and  to  lay  stress  on  cer- 
tain functions  which  had  been  neglect- 
ed by  them.  The  new  government, 
however,  confined  itself  to  secular  mat- 
ters, and  left  the  church  freedom  in 
the  performance  of  its  functions.  This 
removal  of  all  governmental  pressure 
from  ecclesiastical  affairs  was  followed 
by  striking  religious  aberrations  on  the 
part  of  large  numbers  of  the  common 
people.  In  some  districts,  hundreds  and 
even  thousands  abandoned  their  ordin- 
ary occupations  to  follow  self-announ- 
ced religious  leaders,  whose  strange 
ideas  indicated  a  reversion  to  the  bar- 
baric notions  of  their  pagan  ancestors. 
Some  showed  intimations  of  their 
Christian  instruction  when  they  pro- 
claimed themselves  as  the  Virgin  or 


592 


AMERICAN  CONTROL  OF  THE  PHILIPPINES 


the  Christ,  and  under  these  names  ob- 
tained a  following.  The  readiness  with 
which  these  impostors,  or  self-deluded 
creatures,  gained  the  adherence  of  the 
multitude,  indicated  that  the  bulk  of 
the  inhabitants  of  the  rural  districts 
had  not  departed  widely  from  the  be- 
nighted state  of  the  tribesmen  who 
had  preceded  them. 

The  doctrine  of  the  philosophers  as 
to  the  permanence  of  racial  ideas  of 
religion  has  found  abundant  illustra- 
tion in  the  Philippines.  The  Spaniards, 
in  the  Philippines  and  in  their  Amer- 
ican possessions,  appeared  to  think  that 
when  the  Filipinos  or  the  Indians  were 
baptized  and  brought  into  the  church, 
their  minds  were  at  once  enabled  to 
grasp  the  fundamental  features  of  that 
intricate  system  of  thought  known  as 
Christian  doctrine,  and  that  by  this 
process  they  were  civilized. 

It  was  fortunate  that  the  govern- 
ment of  the  United  States  was  prac- 
tically prohibited  from  becoming  a 
positive  teacher  of  any  religion,  and 
was  made  to  rely  on  secular  means  for 
promoting  the  progress  of  the  Filipinos. 
But  in  applying  such  means  as,  for 
example,  instruction  in  a  trade-school, 
or  an  apprenticeship  in  the  govern- 
ment's printing  establishment,  it  ran 
counter  to  the  aspirations  of  a  limited 
middle  class,  composed  chiefly  of  mes- 
tizos resident  in  the  larger  towns,  and 
violated  their  views  concerning  their 
capacity  and  the  position  they  were 
destined  to  fill  in  the  world.  To  a  young 
Filipino  of  this  class,  it  seemed  strange, 
if  not  insulting,  that  one  should  urge 
him  to  learn  the  proper  use  of  tools, 
or  to  enter  the  printing-office  as  an  ap- 
prentice, and  become  familiar  with  the 
operations  of  the  machinery.  In  his 
little  knowledge  and  the  conceit  which 
often  attends  it,  he  felt  that  he  was 
born  for  higher  things. 

In  order  that  Filipinos  of  this  class 
may  become  effective  contributors  to 


the  advancement  of  their  country,  it  is 
necessary  that  some  means  should  be 
discovered  for  eradicating  their  inor- 
dinate conceit,  and  for  making  them 
willing  to  do  what  their  hands  find  to 
do.  The  members  of  this  class  have  lit- 
tle or  no  initiative  in  practical  affairs. 
The  tradition  respecting  the  attitude 
of  a  certain  class  of  Spaniards  toward 
work  is  familiar  to  them.  The  teach- 
ing which  they  have  received  has  gen- 
erally dealt  more  with  the  intangible 
things  of  heaven  than  with  the  mate- 
rial and  tangible  things  of  earth.  In 
youth  the  ambition  of  each  of  them  is 
to  become  an  escribiente,  or  clerk;  and 
their  ideal  occupation,  at  all  ages,  is 
to  sit  at  a  desk  in  a  government  office. 
Before  the  age  of  disillusionment,  they 
bestow  much  attention  on  their  per- 
sonal appearance,  and  find  great  satis- 
faction in  being  able  to  wear  a  clean 
white  suit,  a  neat  straw  hat,  and  pa- 
tent-leather shoes.  In  Java,  this  class 
of  Eurasians  has  proved  to  be  an  em- 
barrassing element  in  the  population. 
Their  European  blood  has  given  them 
a  sense  of  superiority  to  the  natives 
of  pure  Malay  stock,  and  made  them 
reluctant  to  engage  in  the  ordinary  oc- 
cupations of  their  communities.  But, 
like  the  great  mass  of  Eurasians  every- 
where, they  have  shown  themselves  in- 
competent to  fill  the  positions  to  which 
they  have  aspired. 

Besides  the  millions  of  the  common 
people  and  this  so-called  middle  class, 
there  is  a  class  very  much  smaller  than 
either  of  the  others,  which  is  composed 
of  those  persons  who  have  acquired  a 
more  or  less  extensive  education.  This 
class  embraces  the  men  who  have  stud- 
ied for  a  profession,  and  those  who 
have  attained  a  position  in  commer- 
cial life.  Among  these,  a  large  part 
of  whom  live  in  Manila,  are  found 
men  of  widely  different  qualities;  there 
are  a  few  of  solid  attainments  and  so- 
ber judgment,  but  their  names  are  not 


AMERICAN  CONTROL  OF  THE  PHILIPPINES 


593 


heard  in  connection  with  revolutions 
or  demands  for  independence.  There 
are  others  of  brilliant  minds,  who  have 
a  certain  degree  of  education,  but 
whose  tempers  are  such  that  they 
seem  to  be  incapable  of  dealing  sober- 
ly with  questions  that  touch  their  pre- 
judices or  personal  interests.  In  this 
class,  moreover,  are  found  the  politi- 
cians and  all  of  those  persons  who,  hav- 
ing recently  obtained  a  larger  measure 
of  freedom  than  they  had  ever  enjoyed 
before,  have  very  naturally  moved  for- 
ward from  demanding  liberty  to  de- 
manding political  superiority. 

With  respect  to  the  development  of 
the  Islands  and  the  progress  of  the  Fili- 
pinos, this  group  embraces  the  least 
useful  members  of  the  population  as  a 
whole,  —  the  agitators,  who,  for  their 
own  advantage,  play  upon  the  igno- 
rance of  the  common  people.  Some 
persons  who  are  disposed  to  estimate 
social  events  everywhere  in  terms  of 
American  life,  would  measure  these 
disturbers  of  the  public  peace  by  the 
patriots  of  the  American  colonies.  But 
the  political  situation  in  which  they 
are  involved  is  as  far  from  that  of  col- 
onial New  England  or  Virginia  as  the 
East  is  from  the  West.  These  are  they 
whom  certain  American  politicians  vis- 
iting the  Islands  have  flattered  and  en- 
couraged by  calling  them  the  Washing- 
tons  and  Lincolns  of  the  Philippines. 

By  the  efforts  of  the  United  States, 
order  has  been  established  where  there 
was  social  chaos  twelve  years  ago.  The 
task  was  difficult,  but  it  was  accom- 
plished with  so  little  of  the  pomp  and 
circumstance  of  power,  that  the  Fili- 
pinos who  were  interested  in  the  pro- 
cess were  apparently  convinced  that 
the  organizing  or  the  administering  of 
a  government  was,  after  all,  only  a  sim- 
ple matter. 

In  fact,  one  of  the  striking  character- 
istics of  the  Filipino  Eurasian  of  some 
education  is  the  facility  with  which,  in 
VOL.  in -NO.  5 


his  opinion,  he  acquires  the  mastery  of 
a  subject.  After  studying  English  for 
a  few  weeks,  he  is  willing  to  undertake 
to  defend  his  views  of  pronunciation 
or  construction  against  the  world;  and 
at  the  time  of  the  creation  of  the  exist- 
ing civil  government,  as  political  order 
gradually  supplanted  confusion,  and 
one  province  after  another  was  organ- 
ized and  brought  into  relation  to  a 
central  authority,  he  seemed  to  see  no 
difficulties  in  the  art  of  government. 
His  inexperience,  his  half-knowledge, 
was  the  basis  of  his  confidence;  but,  if 
the  present  regime  is  continued  for 
some  generations,  the  Filipino  will  ac- 
quire a  general  education  of  the  West- 
ern sort,  and  through  this  he  will  ac- 
quire also  some  measure  of  political 
knowledge;  and  what  is  more  hopeful 
is  the  fact  that  habit,  established  by 
long  practice,  will  supplement  his 
knowledge,  and  furnish  his  certain  di- 
rection in  the  conduct  of  affairs. 

But,  cut  loose  from  foreign  political 
influences,  he  would  run  a  very  seri- 
ous risk  of  lapsing  into  a  state  of  so- 
cial confusion  relieved  only  by  tribal 
rule.  The  Spaniards  having  departed, 
the  Spanish  language  would  gradually 
disappear;  and  the  English,  only  re- 
cently introduced  and  used  chiefly  by 
the  youth  and  the  children,  would  be 
forgotten.  Independence  within  the 
next  forty  years,  if  it  were  possible, 
would  mean  a  return  of  the  people  to 
their  native  dialects,  and  the  abolition 
of  the  existing  system  of  instruction. 
After  this,  the  forces  of  ancient  tra- 
dition would  have  an  opportunity  to 
reassert  themselves  without  effective 
opposition. 


The  preceding  statements,  which 
suggest  a  national  duty,  have  no  signi- 
ficance with  respect  to  the  future  con- 
duct of  the  United  States  in  relation 
to  the  Philippines,  unless  a  nation  by 


594 


AMERICAN  CONTROL  OF  THE  PHILIPPINES 


its  acts,  somewhat  after  the  manner  of 
an  individual  person,  may  contract,  or 
place  itself  under,  a  moral  obligation. 

A  person  might,  as  an  unanticipated 
result  of  the  pursuit  of  another  end, 
destroy  the  sole  legitimate  guide  and 
protector  of  a  child.  He  might  then, 
in  the  absence  of  any  other  guardian, 
assume  this  office;  but,  after  ten  or 
twelve  years,  having  become  tired  of 
his  charge,  he  might  cast  off  the  child 
before  he  had  attained  sufficient  ma- 
turity or  sufficient  knowledge  of  the 
world  to  enable  him  to  avoid  the  dan- 
gers by  which  his  life  would  be  sur- 
rounded. It  would  be  generally  held 
that  this  person,  partly  by  an  unfore- 
seen consequence  of  one  of  his  acts, 
and  partly  by  voluntarily  assuming  the 
control  and  guardianship  of  the  child, 
had  placed  himself  under  a  moral  ob- 
ligation, the  repudiation  of  which  could 
not  but  leave  a  disgraceful  stain  on  his 
character. 

If  nations  are  subject  to  a  moral 
law,  this  case  represents  not  unfair- 
ly the  position  of  the  United  States 
in  relation  to  the  Philippine  Islands. 
When  we  saw  that  the  guardian  had 
been  destroyed,  we  might  have  left 
the  ward  to  the  wolves,  —  and  there 
were  wolves  in  those  days.  But  we 
voluntarily  assumed  the  charge,  and 
placed  ourselves  under  a  very  grave 
obligation.  The  former  Spanish  ward 
became  our  ward;  and  now, — almost 
at  the  beginning  of  our  guardianship, 
—  the  demands  of  a  little  group  of 
Filipino  politicians,  without  experi- 
ence in  governing,  and  with  no  ade- 
quate appreciation  of  the  difficulties 
of  their  position,  do  not  furnish  the 
United  States  a  sufficient  reason  for 
renouncing  an  obligation,  which  was 
assumed  under  an  international  treaty, 
and  is  rendered  more  solemn  by  our 
relation  to  millions  of  people,  who, 
released  from  the  hard  rule  of  Spain, 
would  be  in  danger  of  falling  under  the 


more  galling  rule  of  a  native  oligarchy. 

The  majority  of  American  citizens 
have  an  acute  appreciation  of  the 
moral  aspects  of  public  questions;  and 
it  is  this  surviving  moral  sense  in  the 
people  which  often  arouses  itself  to 
prevent  a  false  step,  when  political 
traders  are  scheming  for  material  ad- 
vantage. But,  unfortunately,  popular 
judgments,  whether  involving  moral 
or  any  other  considerations,  are  im- 
portant only  where  the  issue  is  clear. 
The  question  of  the  annexation  of  ter- 
ritory to  the  national  domain  is  at- 
tended with  great  difficulties  in  this 
connection,  because  the  ordinary  man 
is  not  in  a  position  to  grasp  and  inter- 
pret the  multitude  of  facts  that  affect 
the  question.  Even  the  simpler  side  of 
the  case,  the  problem  of  material  ad- 
vantage, is  seldom  seen  until  after  the 
passage  of  the  years  required  for  ad- 
justment and  development  under  the 
new  conditions.  No  one  at  present 
denies  that  the  bitter  opposition  to  the 
annexation  of  Texas  and  California  was 
short-sighted.  Neither  those  who  fav- 
ored nor  those  who  opposed  it  had  any 
clear  vision  of  the  future.  The  pecul- 
iar advantage  which  those  persons  ex- 
pected who  desired  the  annexation  of 
Texas,  has  long  since  disappeared;  and 
the  fears  which  especially  moved  the 
opposition,  vanished  before  a  score  of 
years  had  passed. 

It  is  quite  as  difficult  to  divine  the 
future  now  as  it  was  in  the  middle  of 
the  last  century.  The  strong  opposi- 
tion which  was  aroused  by  the  annex- 
ation of  Texas  and  California  disap- 
peared in  the  course  of  time  as  the 
advantages  of  the  connection  became 
clearly  manifest.  The  commissioners 
who  negotiated  the  purchase  of  Louis- 
iana, having  agreed  to  pay  the  price 
demanded,  wished  to  receive  only  a 
comparatively  small  tract  about  the 
mouth  of  the  Mississippi,  but  they 
were  virtually  forced  to  accept  the  vast 


AMERICAN  CONTROL  OF  THE  PHILIPPINES 


595 


region  west  of  that  river  and  north  of 
the  present  State  of  Louisiana,  a  tract 
equal  to  a  dozen  states  of  the  Union, 
which  France  threw  in  as  a  gratuity. 
We  gained  an  empire,  but  the  acquisi- 
tion reflects  no  credit  on  the  wisdom  of 
the  commissioners,  or  on  the  political 
prevision  of  their  contemporaries. 

The  advantage  which  was  sought  in 
the  Louisiana  Purchase  was  access  to 
the  sea  through  the  mouth  of  the  Mis- 
sissippi; but  when  railroads  running 
east  and  west  were  developed  to  fur- 
nish an  outlet  to  the  ocean  for  the  in- 
terior of  the  country,  it  was  seen  that 
this  advantage  had  been  greatly  over- 
estimated. The  real  advantage  of  the 
ptrchase  was  entirely  unforeseen;  and 
this  is  to  a  very  great  extent  true  with 
respect  to  every  addition  that  has  been 
made  to  the  national  domain.  The 
Philippine  Islands,  with  respect  to  the 
time  and  expense  of  transportation, 
are  nearer  the  centre  of  population  of 
the  United  States  than  was  California 
at  the  time  of  its  annexation;  and  in 
view  of  the  vast  but  undeveloped  re- 
sources of  the  Islands,  and  the  unfore- 
seen consequences  of  the  transforma- 
tion which  the  Orient  is  to  undergo  in 
this  century,  there  is  no  wiser  course 
open  to  the  nation,  even  with  reference 
to  its  own  material  advantage,  than  to 
adopt  a  waiting  policy  unembarrassed 
by  pledges  or  promises. 

Waiting  is  often  less  expensive  than 
the  consequences  of  precipitate  action ; 
and  waiting  in  this  case  need  not  in- 
volve the  United  States  in  any  extra- 
ordinary expenditure;  for  the  revenues 
of  the  Islands  under  the  control  of  the 
United  States  are  sufficient  to  main- 
tain their  government  and  to  carry  on 
the  requisite  internal  improvements. 
Those  persons  who  look  for  a  better 
condition  of  affairs  under  the  supposed 
state  of  independence,  should  keep  in 
mind  the  fact  that  the  Islands  have 
now  the  advantage  of  a  public  income 


which  is  greater  than  it  would  be  if 
they  should  be  left  to  the  domination 
of  a  Malay  or  Eurasian  oligarchy,  un- 
less new  and  more  burdensome  taxes 
were  imposed;  for,  under  native  rule, 
the  public  revenue  might  be  expected 
to  decline  on  account  of  the  withdraw- 
al of  capital,  and  by  the  lessening  of 
imports  consequent  on  the  diminution 
of  that  part  of  the  population  which  is 
accustomed  to  demand  foreign  wares; 
and  this  decline  would  make  unavoid- 
able the  neglect  of  certain  internal  im- 
provements, as  well  as  of  important  de- 
partments of  the  public  service — both 
significant  steps  backward  toward  a 
lower  state  of  society. 

Writers  who  have  juggled  with  the 
statistics  of  Philippine  revenues  and 
expenditures  have  sometimes  counted 
the  cost  of  maintaining  the  American 
garrison  as  an  item  of  expense  imposed 
by  the  Philippines  on  the  Federal  treas- 
ury. But  it  is  clear  that  if  the  soldiers 
of  this  garrison  were  not  maintained 
in  the  Islands,  they  would  be  supported 
elsewhere,  and  consequently  the  only 
item  properly  chargeable  to  the  Philip- 
pines is  the  comparatively  unimport- 
ant cost  of  transportation  over  what 
would  be  incurred  for  similar  service 
if  these  troops  were  stationed  in  an- 
other part  of  the  United  States.  For 
this  expense  there  is  a  certain  com- 
pensation in  the  enlightenment  which 
officers  of  the  army  derive  from  expe- 
rience outside  of  the  continental  limits 
of  the  country.  Officers  have  need  of 
some  other  outlook  upon  the  world 
than  that  which  may  be  acquired  under 
the  deadly  monotony  of  garrison  duty 
in  Arizona,  or  on  some  other  part  of 
the  frontier.  With  neither  adequate 
opportunity  nor  sufficient  means  to 
enable  them  to  reside  for  periods  of 
military  study  in  foreign  countries, 
their  service  in  the  Philippines,  under 
new  conditions,  and  face  to  face  with 
unfamiliar  problems,  gives  them  the 


596 


RENTON'S  MOTHER 


advantage  acquired  by  the  study  and 
solution  of  these  problems. 

It  is  possible  that  the  consequences 
of  victory  may  be  quite  as  embarrass- 
ing temporarily  as  the  consequences 
of  defeat.  But  whatever  embarrass- 
ment the  United  States  may  have  suf- 
fered by  the  acquisition  of  the  Philip- 
pines has  been  to  a  very  great  extent 
set  aside  by  the  efforts  of  the  last 
twelve  years.  The  social  chaos  of  the 
years  of  transition  has  been  reduced  to 
order,  and  a  government  designed  to  in- 
crease the  well-being  of  the  whole  pop- 
ulation has  been  established  and  made 
effective  throughout  the  archipelago. 
The  public  forests,  of  nearly  fifty  mil- 
lion acres,  have  been  placed  under  reg- 


ulations which  the  government  of  the 
United  States  might  copy  with  great 
advantage  to  the  present  and  future 
of  this  country.  Courts  have  been  cre- 
ated before  which  all  cases,  by  what- 
ever social  class  presented,  may  be 
considered  freely  and  without  preju- 
dice. Provision  for  a  revenue  sufficient 
to  maintain  a  proper  government  has 
been  made  without  oppressive  taxa- 
tion. Five  hundred  thousand  children 
and  youth  have  been  assembled  from 
year  to  year  in  schools  under  intelli- 
gent instruction.  In  a  legislative  as- 
sembly, representatives  of  the  people 
have  an  opportunity  to  participate  in 
the  work  of  governing,  and  to  learn  the 
meaning  of  liberty. 


RENTON'S  MOTHER 


BY   LAURA   SPENCER    PORTOR 


RENTON'S  mother  stood  with  one 
slim  hand  on  the  library  mantel.  Her 
eyes,  which  had  been  fixed  on  the  por- 
trait over  ix.,  were  narrowed  now,  look- 
ing speculatively  into  the  fire.  Renton 
must  be  got  away  to  New  York.  That 
was  clear  to  her. 

Though  Renton 's  mother  had  ideal- 
ized her  husband;  had  consulted  him 
on  every  question,  large  and  small,  and 
had  abided  by  his  decision,  yet,  after 
his  death  —  and  Renton's  father  died 
when  Renton  was  a  baby  —  she  sud- 
denly developed  a  genius,  or  what  may 
have  been  previously  a  latent  longing, 
for  management.  She  had  arranged 
and  planned  her  son's  life  entirely.  She 


had  brought  him  up  to  obey  her  and 
respect  her;  yet  she  gave  few  com- 
mands, one  might  say  none. 

The  boy  grew  up  sensitive  and  ap- 
preciative of  her  every  wish,  swayed 
by  her  unspoken  desires.  You  have 
seen  a  high-strung  horse  trained  so  sen- 
sitively; such  a  horse  is  called  'bridle- 
wise.'  A  mere  turn  of  the  bridle,  a 
mere  slight  touch  of  the  lines  on  one 
shoulder  or  the  other,  and  it  goes  into 
the  gait  desired.  It  was  a  little  like 
that.  You  can  imagine  with  what 
nicety  and  firmness  of  hand,  with 
what  kindness  and  gentleness  of  touch, 
such  a  thing  is  accomplished. 

His  boyhood  safely  past,  his  mother 
had  arranged  for  him,  on  his  return 
from  the  university,  what  had  the  ap- 


RENTON'S  MOTHER 


597 


pearance  of  a  chance  meeting  with  the 
girl  she  had  had  in  mind  for  him  ever 
since  he  was  a  slender  shock-headed 
lad  of  fourteen.  The  result  was  what 
she  had  hoped,  and  was  indeed  hardly 
to  be  wondered  at.  It  might  be  unfair 
to  say  that  Ren  ton's  mother  made  the 
match,  because  the  girl's  beauty  itself 
might  so  easily  have  made  it.  There 
was  a  quiet  fawnlike  loveliness  about 
her,  something  aristocratic  that  match- 
ed Renton's  own  fine  high-bred  air. 

Somewhat  later,  when  he  had  been 
engaged  a  little  more  than  a  week, 
Renton  came  to  his  mother  one  moon- 
light night  and  broke  to  her  the  news 
of  this  thing.  Well,  she  had  planned 
for  it  during  some  eight  years,  and  had 
worked  for  it  definitely,  though  un- 
suspected, for  some  five  months  or 
more,  but  she  took  it  exactly  as  he 
gave  it  to  her  —  as  a  piece  of  news 
that  she,  as  his  mother,  was  entitled 
to  know.  He  hoped  she  would  under- 
stand and  approve,  but  in  any  case,  in 
matters  of  this  kind  a  man  must  be  his 
own  master,  his  own  judge,  utterly. 

Renton's  mother  made  no  show  of 
surprise,  made  no  confession  that  this 
had  long  been  her  wish;  instead,  she 
kissed  him  sedately  on  the  lips,  with 
her  two  slim,  condescending  hands 
hollowed  about  his  fine  head. 

'In  this,  as  in  other  things,  my  son, 
I  trust  you  —  as  you  know  —  wholly. 
You  are  right.  There  is  one  choice  of 
all  others  that  should  be  a  man's  own. 
I  pray  God  may  bless  you  both.' 

When  he  was  gone  to  his  room  to 
dream  dreams  of  this  girl  of  his  choice, 
Renton's  mother  sat  in  the  cretonne 
chair  in  her  bedroom  looking  out  ahead 
of  her.  She  was  no  longer  first  in  her 
son's  affections.  But  she  had  met 
that  thought  and  disposed  of  it  months 
before.  Her  thoughts  now  were  glad 
but  careful  ones  of  future  years.  She 
was  planning  already  how  Renton's 
children  should  be  raised. 


Another  woman  might  have  spent 
some  moments  on  her  knees  in  humble 
gratitude  that  her  son  had  selected  for 
a  wife  a  girl  of  the  type  of  this  girl 
whom  Renton  loved.  Not  so  Renton's 
mother.  She  was  a  devout  woman, 
but  she  believed  in  thanking  God  for 
causes,  not  for  effects.  So,  while  Ren- 
ton lay  sleepless,  with  white  fire  lick- 
ing through  his  veins,  and  the  devotion 
of  a  modern  knight  of  the  grail  cours- 
ing through  him,  she  knelt  and  thank- 
ed the  Lord  that  he  had  given  her  the 
brain  and  judgment  to  direct  her  son's 
life  as  she  had  directed  it;  to  make 
him  the  clean,  sensitive  fellow  she  had 
made  him;  and  that  she  had  been  able 
to  direct  him  to  the  love  of  this  woman. 

She  tasted  a  little  the  joy  of  creation. 
She  had  made  him  what  he  was.  In 
this  world  of  her  making  —  his  world 
—  she  had  said,  'Let  there  be  light!' 
and  there  was  light.  She  had  separ- 
ated the  sea  and  the  land  for  him;  set 
the  sun  and  the  moon  in  his  heavens. 
While  he  slept,  as  it  were,  she  had 
given  him  a  woman  for  his  mate.  It 
was  creation,  —  on  a  small  scale  if  you 
like,  but  it  was  creation.  It  had  taken 
her  not  seven  days,  but  twenty-eight 
years,  altogether,  of  days  and  nights, 
to  accomplish  it;  but  it  was  hers,  the 
work  of  her  hands.  That  Renton 
knew  nothing  of  all  this,  —  believed 
himself  to  be  the  master  of  the  beasts 
and  birds  of  his  fields,  and  of  that  para- 
dise in  which  he  found  himself,  —  what 
was  that  to  Renton's  mother?  Per- 
haps that  was  a  part  of  her  plan,  too. 
If  she  could  not  afford  generosity,  who 
indeed  could? 

The  engagement  was  like  many  an- 
other. Renton's  mother  was  gracious, 
tactful,  and  the  girl  bent  easily  to  her, 
like  a  young  birch  in  a  warm  south 
wind.  If,  at  times,  it  seemed  to  the  older 
woman  that  this  girl  carried  about  her 
an  imperturbable  mystery,  a  kind  of 
sacredness  of  possession — yet  Renton's 


598 


RENTON'S  MOTHER 


mother  turned  to  her  own  blessings, 
reassured.  Had  she  not  twenty-eight 
years,  the  making  of  his  world,  and 
all  motherhood,  the  start  of  this  girl? 
The  girl  would  be  the  mother  of  other 
men,  perhaps  (she  hoped  so,  a  mar- 
riage without  children  she  had  always 
dreaded  for  him),  but  never  his  mo- 
ther; that  was  her  own  part,  and  hers 
only,  in  the  whole  wide  world. 

When,  after  six  months  of  unspoiled 
joy,  the  girl  died,  suddenly,  Renton 's 
mother  found  herself  with  new  prob- 
lems to  face;  perhaps,  an  entire  world 
to  reconstruct.  The  sea  and  land, 
which  she  had  separated  for  him, 
threatened  to  rush  together  again. 
Would  the  sun  and  moon  keep  their 
places  in  his  heavens?  She  watched 
apprehensively  the  swaying  of  her  sys- 
tem. But  after  one  night  of  passionate, 
blinding  storm  that  rocked  the  faith 
she  had  taught  him,  and  overthrew  the 
poise  in  which  she  had  trained  him, 
Renton  met  the  grief  as  she  had  plan- 
ned and  believed  all  her  life  he  must 
and  would  meet  grief  when  it  came — 
quietly  and  with  reserve.  The  sun  and 
moon  would  resume  their  duties. 

Even  the  day  that  the  girl's  portrait 
(for  Edith  Carter  had  left  to  Renton  a 
portrait  of  herself,  in  a  brief  will  she 
had  made)  came  to  take  its  place  with 
them,  Renton  was  as  calm  as  his  mo- 
ther had  all  her  life  planned  he  should 
be  in  great  crises.  He  himself  superin- 
tended its  placing  above  the  mantel  in 
the  library.  Only,  that  evening  he  in- 
sisted on  staying  late  in  the  library, 
and  for  the  first  time  it  was  he,  not  his 
mother,  who  was  the  last-  to  go  up- 
stairs for  the  night. 

From  then  on,  his  sorrow  was  a 
closed  door  to  her.  She  knew  that  he 
suffered  in  some  inner  room,  yet  she 
never  once  laid  a  hand  on  the  latch; 
though  how  often  she  stood  outside  the 
door,  one  hand  pressed  against  her 
cheek,  listening,  it  would  be  difficult 


to  say.  Renton 's  mother  could  wait. 
When  the  time  came,  and  it  would,  he 
would  speak  to  her.  Nothing  of  this 
sort  must  be  hurried. 

After  five  months,  she  came  one 
night,  later  than  usual,  to  bid  him 
good-night,  and  found  him  seated  by 
the  fire  below  the  portrait,  his  head  in 
his  hands.  That  he  did  not  look  up  as 
she  entered,  nor  attempt  to  hide  his 
mood  from  her,  gave  her  rights  and 
privileges.  For  the  first  time  the  door 
to  his  sorrow  stood  open  ever  so  little. 
She  was  quick  to  note  it.  She  had  been 
waiting  for  just  this  moment  for  a  long, 
long  time.  She  laid  her  hand  and  arm 
about  his  shoulder.  When  he  raised 
his  face  it  was  haggard  and  looked  ill. 

*  Edith  has  been  here,'  he  said,  with- 
out preliminary,  'more  real  than  ever, 
to-night.  I  can  feel  the  touch  of  her 
hand  when  she  comes;  and  now  and 
then,  —  never  at  my  solicitation,  but 
of  her  own  will,  —  now  and  then, 
when  for  her  sake  I  have  conquered 
something,  —  have  done  what  I  be- 
lieved to  be  right,  —  she  rewards  me : 
she  kisses  me  on  the  lips.' 

His  mother  had  not  reckoned  on 
this.  For  a  moment  she  said  nothing, 
only  kept  her  arm  about  him,  protect- 
ingly.  At  last  she  looked  out  ahead  of 
her,  trying  to  speak  smoothly:  — 

'We  must  get  it  clear  in  our  minds, 
Renton,  just  what  service  to  her  is  best, 
just  what  service  is  the  service  she 
herself  would  wish.  That  you  should 
remember  her  —  keenly,  keenly,  yes, 
that  is  normal,  natural,  and  as  it  should 
be.  But  that  she  should  seem  to  you 
actually  present  —  It  is  in  that  direc- 
tion that  men's  minds '  —  She  knew 
suddenly  that  she  had  taken  a  false 
step.  To  accuse  him  of  a  kind  of  mad- 
ness —  Besides,  was  it  madness?  She 
had  never  settled  for  herself  the  ques- 
tion of  realities.  She  believed  dimly  in 
certain  spiritual  presences,  which  'ex- 
erted certain  influences.'  She  felt  about 


RENTON'S  MOTHER 


599 


for  the  right  words.  Then  she  put  one 
hand  on  his  head.  *  I  am  not  out  of  sym- 
pathy with  you,  you  understand  that/ 

He  rose  away  from  her  arm,  and 
stood  looking  at  the  portrait. 

'Her  hand  leads  or  detains  me,  will 
lead  or  detain  me  all  my  life,'  he  said. 
'Not  the  memory  of  her,  you  under- 
stand, but  her  hand,  as  actually  on  me 
as  it  is  there  on  the  chair  in  the  por- 
trait, where  she  stands.  I  used  to  be 
afraid  at  first  that  she  might  have  gone 
beyond  reach;  but  now  I  know  that 
she  has  not;  that  she  will  not.  She  can 
hear  as  well  as  you  or  I.  She  will  not 
leave  me,  thank  God!  As  to  its  being 
a  morbid  fancy,  do  you  think  she 
would  not  know  that  and  leave  me  if 
it  were?  Do  you  think  she,  most  of  all 
in  heaven  and  earth,  has  not  my  good 
and  happiness  at  heart?  I  can  trust 
myself  in  her  hands.  In  her  hands!' 

His  mother  was  behind  him  now 
without  a  word.  His  voice  broke  into 
the  full  rhythm  of  verses  she  knew  and 
distrusted.  She  had  never  believed  it 
good  for  a  man  to  read  Rossetti.  For 
sensual  beauty  in  verse,  Keats  and 
Tennyson  and  Shelley  went  far  enough. 
It  came  to  her  somewhat  as  a  shock 
that  he  not  only  had  read  these  verses, 
but  that  he  recited  them  with  so  much 
familiarity,  almost  as  though  they  had 
been  his  own.  Doubtless  he  and  Edith 
Carter  had  read  them  and  enjoyed 
them  together. 

4  The  blessed  damozel  lean'd  out 
From  the  gold  bar  of  Heaven; 

Her  eyes  were  deeper  than  the  depth 
Of  waters  still'd  at  even. 

She  had  three  lilies  in  her  hand, 

And  the  stars  in  her  hair  were  seven.' 

He  raised  his  head  listeningly:  — 

'  (Ah,  sweet!   Even  now  in  that  bird's  song, 

Strove  not  her  accents  there, 
Fain  to  be  hearken'd?    When  those  bells 

Possess'd  the  mid-day  air, 
Strove  not  her  steps  to  reach  my  side 

Down  all  the  echoing  stair?) 


' "  I  wish  that  he  were  come  to  me, 

For  he  will  come,"  she  said. 
"  Have  I  not  pray'd  in  Heaven?  —  on  earth, 

Lord,  Lord,  has  he  not  pray'd? 
Are  not  two  prayers  a  perfect  strength? 
And  shall  I  feel  afraid  ?  "  ' 

When  at  last  he  turned  to  his  mo- 
ther the  intense  mood  had  slipped 
from  him  somewhat.  She  stood,  her 
closed  hand  against  her  cheek,  drag- 
ging her  lip  down  a  little,  that  was  all. 

'You  need  have  no  fear/  he  said, 
turning  to  her,  'I  am  sound  in  mind. 
I  am  like  other  men,  only  different  in 
this,  that  I  have  a  dead  girl  to  whom 
my  life  is  dedicated.  I  might  have 
gone  to  the  devil  like  many  another 
man,  who  has  had  all  the  light  and  pur- 
pose taken  from  his  life.  But  you  can 
trust  me.  Edith  Carter's  hand  is  on 
me;  as  long  as  that  is  so  I  am  safe,  and 
shall  be  worthy  of  her.' 

So  it  was  that  Renton's  mother  knew 
clearly  and  immediately  that  he  must 
be  got  away  to  other  surroundings.  She 
who  had  always  directed  his  life  must 
rid  him  now  of  this  influence  which 
threatened  her  plans  for  him.  She  had 
a  deep  respect  for  occult  powers.  Like 
most  of  us,  she  did  not  know  how 
much  she  believed  in  the  dead;  but  this 
much  she  knew :  Edith  Carter,  or  were 
it  only  the  memory  of  her,  had  vital 
power  in  her  son's  life,  and  this  was 
to  be  reckoned  with  and  broken.  The 
hand  that  was  on  him,  whether  it  was 
a  mere  remembered  thing,  or  the  actual 
touch  of  the  dead,  if  you  wished  to  go  so 
far,  —  she  did  not,  mind  you,  —  was  to 
be  loosened,  that  was  all.  How  strong 
the  influence  of  memory  might  be,  she 
had  hardly  dreamed  till  now,  nor  how 
potent  the  presence  of  the  remembered 
dead.  Yet  she  was  not  discouraged. 

To  another  woman  this  influence  in 
Renton's  life  might  have  seemed  as  it 
seemed  to  Renton,  a  thing  beneficent, 
protecting.  Not  so  to  Renton's  mo- 
ther. She  had  not  planned  for  him  a 
complete  life,  with  wife  and  friends 


600 


RENTON'S  MOTHER 


and  children  of  his  own,  to  have  that 
plan  frustrated  now  by  a  fancied 
memoried  thing,  the  hand  of  some  dead 
girl,  some  phantom  on  his  shoulder. 

After  this,  she  used  often  to  stop  be- 
fore the  portrait  of  Edith  Carter  when 
Ren  ton  was  not  about.  She  meant  to 
know  Edith  Carter  better,  as  Renton 
himself  knew  her;  to  understand  Edith 
Carter's  memoried  power  over  Renton 
—  the  better  to  cope  with  it.  She 
stopped  day  after  day,  again  and  again, 
before  the  mantel,  and  looked  into  the 
sensitive,  melancholy  face  of  the  por- 
trait. 

The  girl  might  have  been  twenty- 
two,  perhaps  more;  the  portrait  did  not 
tell  accurately,  not  more  than  portraits 
ever  do.  In  pose  it  was  as  though, 
leaving  the  room,  she  had  been  stopped 
by  some  question,  had  paused  and 
turned  to  answer.  The  head  and  face, 
singularly  beautiful,  were  lifted  just  a 
little. 

It  was,  perhaps,  most  of  all  the  line 
of  neck  sweeping 'in  to  the  shoulder  and 
up  into  the  mass  of  hair,  which  gave 
the  slender  figure  its  patrician  grace. 
At  one  moment  it  was  as  though  the 
girl  would  linger  still  a  little  while;  at 
another  it  was  as  though,  detained 
only  by  a  word,  Edith  Carter  did  not 
mean  to  stay. 

II 

Though  it  was  certainly  not  as  ad- 
viser that  Ren  ton's  mother  had  asked 
Cousin  Benjamin  to  come  to  Brent 
Hall,  yet,  owing  to  the  wording  of  her 
letter,  he  believed  himself  to  have  come 
in  that  capacity,  and  was  no  little  flat- 
tered and  alarmed  by  the  distinction. 
Cousin  Benjamin  was  one  of  those  in- 
adequate souls  who  believe  themselves 
particularly  adequate,  and  especially 
adapted  to  the  giving  of  advice. 

He  had  been  at  Brent  Hall  some 
days.  He  came  into  the  room  one  after- 


noon and  found  Renton's  mother  in 
front  of  the  portrait.  He  stood  beside 
her,  silent,  a  moment.  Then  he  drew 
his  handkerchief  across  his  forehead,  as 
though  he  were  warm,  spread  his  hands 
to  the  blaze  as  though  he  were  cold, 
shivered  his  shoulders  straight,  and 
cleared  his  throat. 

'I  tell  you,  Cousin  Matilda,  it 's  sui- 
cidal for  him  to  keep  that  thing  before 
him.  It  ought  to  be  got  clear  out  of  his 
sight.  Why,  I  had  a  poor  photograph, 
just  a  poor  photograph,  mind  you,  of 
Molly,  —  my  youngest  girl,  you  know, 
—  taken  with  her  hair  down  her  back. 
It  had  the  trick  of  her  eyes  —  that  lit- 
tle twinkle  in  the  left  one  —  (you  never 
saw  Molly,  though) — well,  I  tell  you, 
I  put  the  thing  away;  yes,  I  did;  for 
good  and  all.  "  Molly's  gone,"  I  said; 
"she's  happier  where  she  is.  She's 
with  her  ma,"  I  said,  and  I  packed  the 
thing  away.  I  don't  think  I  tore  it  up, 
but  I  should  if  I  ever  came  across  it 
again;  'pon  my  soul,  I  should.' 

'Oh,  no,  you  would  n't,'  Renton's 
mother  said  quietly.  'You  can't  tear 
up  a  thing  of  that  kind.  I  fed  on  a 
photograph  once  myself.  You  actually 
feed  on  them,  you  know.'  She  narrow- 
ed her  eyes  with  the  memory.  'Then 
you  make  up  your  mind  not  to  look 
again.  Then  you  get  so  hungry,  sick- 
ening hungry  for  the  reality,  that  you 
look  again;  and  there  is  the  actual  per- 
son looking  out  at  you.  It  is  that  way 
with  Renton  and  this  portrait.' 

He  looked  uncomfortable,  and  took 
a  side  glance  at  her.  She  was  forever 
meeting  him  at  corners  with  some 
shadowy  truth  which  his  practical 
brain  had  dodged  for  years.  He  had 
had  exactly  that  experience,  but  had 
never  admitted  it.  Now  he  ignored  her 
words. 

'Why  should  I  mince  matters,'  he 
said.  He  spoke  with  noticeable  gentle- 
ness, laying  the  matter  smooth  on  the 
palm  of  one  hand  with  the  forefinger 


RENTON'S  MOTHER 


601 


of  the  other.  '  My  advice  is  —  get  the 
boy  off  as  soon  as  possible  to  New 
York.' 

He  swept  one  hand  off  to  the  right 
decisively,  to  indicate  that  city  and 
have  done  with  it.  Then  he  jerked  his 
shoulders,  ran  his  hands  a  little  farther 
through  his  cuffs,  brought  his  elbows  in 
tight  to  his  sides,  and  began  laying  the 
matter  smooth  again  on  his  palm,  like 
a  man  about  to  say  something  vital 
and  important. 

'Get  him  off  to  New  York;  then  — 
have  something  happen  to  that.9  He 
nodded  once  toward  Edith  Carter. 

Ren  ton's  mother  picked  an  imagin- 
ary something  from  her  sleeve,  and  rid 
her  thumb  and  forefinger  of  it  very  de- 
liberately. 

'I  am  not  quite  sure  yet  what  we 
must  do.  If  the  girl  were  here  I  should 
appeal  to  her.  Her  influence  must  be 
broken.  If  she  could  be  got  to  take 
her  hand  off  him.  And  yet  —  he  pro- 
tests it  is  just  she  who  saves  him  from 
himself/  She  narrowed  her  eyes  again. 

Cousin  Benjamin  jerked  his  head 
back  and  his  stomach  out  and  shrugged 
his  shoulders,  raised  his  eyebrows  and 
brought  them  down  nervously,  then 
up,  then  down  again. 

'  Of  course  —  if  you  consider  him  a 
fit  judge!  If  you  mean  to  talk  to  me 
about  dead  women  as  though,  as 
though  —  she 's  dead  how  many 
months,  you  say?  Seven.  Yes,  seven 
months.  Why  should  we  mince  mat- 
ters? My  dear  Cousin  Matilda,  I  do 
declare  and  profess,  you  talk  as  though 
she  were  outside  the  door  yonder!' 

His  hand  pointed  to  the  door.  His 
knees  bent  a  little  in  enthusiasm  for 
his  argument,  then  they  straightened, 
his  body  swayed  back  somewhat  and 
then  regained  its  balance,  as  though 
the  matter  were  settled. 

Ren  ton's  mother  seemed  pausing 
wisely.  She  had  been  looking  into  the 
fire  a  long  time. 


'To  him  she  is  much  nearer  than 
that.'  There  was  silence  a  moment; 
then  she  spoke  very  deliberately.  '  He 
tells  me  this  himself.  It  is  because 
of  her  that  he  lives  as  he  lives.  You 
have  only  to  look  in  the  boy's  face  to 
know.  He  is  dedicated  to  her,  body 
and  soul.' 

Cousin  Benjamin  took  up  the  argu- 
ment again,  like  a  man  vindicated. 

'Just  what  I  tell  you.  Just  what  I 
tell  you!  Get  him  away.  Get  him 
away!'  He  held  his  hands  out  as 
though  to  show  her  the  matter  once 
and  for  all,  clean  and  plain,  and  for  the 
last  time.  'Is  he  to  go  on  like  this? 
Tell  me,  is  he?' 

Renton's  mother  put  her  forehead 
against  her  hand  on  the  mantel,  and 
looked  into  the  fire,  like  a  woman  who 
has  time,  much  time,  to  think.  Cousin 
Benjamin  filled  the  pause  with  his 
handkerchief,  for  which  he  found  a 
hundred  nervous  uses  in  and  out  of  his 
coat-tails  and  around  his  collar. 

'When  I  think  of  the  boy  after  I 
am  gone '  —  Her  speech  went  slowly 
as  though  impeded  by  some  heavy 
thought. 

'  That 's  it ! '  Cousin  Benjamin  felt  of 
his  coat-tails  again,  sent  his  arms  shoot- 
ing through  his  cuffs  a  little,  with  a 
jerk,  to  gain  courage;  wiped  his  fingers 
of  some  imaginary  something.  '  That 's 
it,  exactly!' 

'Alone,' she  continued,  uninterrupt- 
ed, '  with  no  woman  in  his  life '  —  she 
narrowed  her  eyes  the  better  to  scan  the 
bare  waste  of  it,  — '  no  physical  real- 
ities; with  no  children,  —  then  I  feel  it 
is  a  matter  I  cannot  leave  to  God.  I 
must  manage  it  myself,  you  see.'  There 
was  something  proudly  insistent,  yet 
explanatory  in  her  tone.  —  '  I  am  his 
mother.'  She  smiled  and  added,  —  not 
to  Cousin  Benjamin,  not  to  any  one; 
a  mere  fact  stated  —  and  she  managed 
to  state  it  without  irreverence  —  only 
there  was  something  a  little  weary 


602 


RENTON'S  MOTHER 


and    condescending   in   her  voice,  — 
'Even  God  had  a  mother.' 

Cousin  Benjamin  took  another  side- 
wise  look  at  her,  then  began  again  on 
his  argument :  — 

'Look  at  his  life  as  it  is;  and  look  at 
what  it  ought  to  be.  I  can  see  him  in 
me  mind's  eye:  a  cosy  room/  —  he 
closed  one  eye  as  though  the  better  to 
see, —  'at  the  other  side  of  the  table 
a  real  flesh-and-blood  woman.  Roses 
in  her  cheeks,  lace  and  things  round 
her  neck,  and  sewing  on  little  frocks  by 
the  light  of  the  evening  lamp.  Child- 
ren playing  around  (the  crowning 
blessing  of  love!).  What  if  death  does 
come.  Suppose  even  the  second  woman 
dies!  He's  got'  real  things  left.  He 
is  forced  to  live  for  the  future  of  his 
children.' 

He  paused,  and  with  a  few  nervous 
gestures  got  ready  for  the  rest  of  his 
argument. 

'Take  a  girl  like  Louise  Henry,  for 
instance.  I  was  telling  you  about  her 
—  She 's  the  kind !  —  real  and  warm  as 
a  bird.  Have  n't  you  ever  held  a  warm 
bird  in  your  hand?'  He  drew  back  as 
she  shuddered.  He  remembered  now 
she  had  always  been  afraid  of  birds. 
"Fraid  of  'em?  Well,  some  women  are. 
Louise  Henry  is  like  that,  though.  I 
tell  you,  get  him  away!  Then  look  at 
that  girl  as  nothing  but  paint  and  can- 
vas and  get  her  away.  Cut  her  out  of 
the  frame.  Lord!  burn  her  up!' 

'I  mean  to  get  him  away,  of  course,' 
she  said  quietly.  'It  was  for  that  I 
asked  you  to  come.  I  wanted  you  to 
tell  me  very  exactly  about  New  York.' 

It  took  Cousin  Benjamin  a  moment 
to  right  himself.  All  his  argument  had 
been  unnecessary,  then ;  a  kind  of  use- 
less extravagance.  He  took  a  quick, 
half-baffled,  half-disconcerted  look  at 
her.  Her  eyes  were  on  the  portrait.  He 
took  a  look  at  it,  too. 

Edith  Carter's  eyes  met  theirs  with 
the  same  sureness,  the  same  melan- 


choly. The  pause  in  her  going  seemed 
very  slight.  The  pose  was  a  strangely 
living  one.  She  seemed  almost  on  the 
point  of  departure. 

There  was  a  step  outside.  The  door 
into  the  hall  opened  and  Renton  came 
in.  For  a  moment  no  one  spoke.  There 
was  among  them  the  unbroken  chill  of 
the  inopportune  moment.  Then  Ren- 
ton  threw  his  whip  and  riding-cap  and 
gloves  on  the  table. 

'It  is  snowing,'  he  said,  with  the  air 
of  a  man  who  speaks  for  courtesy's 
sake. 

Ill 

From  New  York  Renton  wrote  often; 
but  the  letters  which  Ren  ton's  mother 
opened  first,  and  not  always  with 
steady  fingers,  were  addressed  in  the 
large  flowing  hand  of  Cousin  Benjamin. 
They  were,  oftenest,  short;  sometimes 
mere  bulletins;  but  she  read  and  re- 
read them,  and  sometimes  carried  them 
in  her  bosom.  A  less  sensitive  woman 
would  have  read  them  less  often;  but 
to  Ren  ton's  mother  there  was  much  to 
be  got  out  of  them,  even  at  a  tenth 
reading. 

To  most  people  those  days  at  Brent 
Hall  might  have  seemed  —  would 
have  been  —  killingly  void.  To  Ren- 
ton's  mother  they  were  full  to  the 
brim.  Every  detail  of  the  plan  for  her 
son  was  to  be  thought  out. 

As  yet  no  very  great  encouragement 
had  come  through  the  letters  she  re- 
ceived. Cousin  Benjamin's  were  san- 
guine, but  reported  Renton  as  reserved, 
untouched,  so  far;  yet  he  took  a  bit  of 
interest,  too,  in  the  city.  'Off  to  him- 
self a  great  deal,  —  but  Rome  was 
not  built  in  a  day,  my  dear  Cousin 
Matilda.'  She  wearied  of  the  reiteration 
of  a  tiresome  sentiment  which  she 
knew  as  well  as,  or  better  than,  most 
people. 

One  day,  pausing  before  the  portrait, 
she  spoke  to  it  suddenly,  softly :  — 


RENTON'S  MOTHER 


603 


'Why  don't  you  help  me,  my  dear? 
It  is  for  his  good.' 

After  that,  for  several  days  she 
avoided  the  library  altogether;  then 
afterwards  for  several  days  more,  when- 
ever she  entered,  she  opened  the  door 
half  apologetically.  About  ten  days 
later,  as  she  was  leaving  the  room  for 
the  night,  she  paused  and  spoke  once 
again  to  the  portrait,  almost  pleading- 
ly this  time :  — 

'Let  him  see  the  world  a  little,  my 
girl,  —  it  is  every  man's  right;  and  other 
women  —  other  women  than  yourself.' 

One  day,  about  three  weeks  after  this, 
her  cheeks  flew  a  flag  all  day.  For  the 
first  time  Renton's  letters  mentioned 
Louise  Henry,  though  she  knew,  from 
Cousin  Benjamin's  letters,  how  long  a 
time  before  that  Renton  had  met  her. 

The  sentence  ran,  'She  is  a  distant 
cousin  of  the  RatclifFes,  and  beautiful 
like  them.  You  would  like  her.  She 
has  good  blood  —  the  thing  you  make 
such  a  point  of.  She  is  patrician.  She 
has  the  clear  look  in  between  the  eyes 
that  comes  with  nothing  else,  and  the 
easy  grace  and  the  lofty  gentleness.' 

Her  heart  quickened  somewhat  as 
she  read,  and  re-read,  this  sentence 
many  times.  She  glanced  at  the  por- 
trait. Edith  Carter,  meeting  her  look, 
was  patrician,  too, — the  clear  look  be- 
tween the  eyes,  the  lofty  gentleness,  — 
Renton's  entire  description  was  there. 
Not  that  the  women  were  alike,  ex- 
actly, but  in  essentials,  in  essentials, 
she  told  herself.  Then  she  looked  at 
the  matter  more  closely.  Was  the  like- 
ness an  encouraging  or  a  discouraging 
thing?  Might  not  Louise  Henry  only 
remind  him  of  Edith  Carter? 

So  the  flag  fluttered  and  drooped, 
fluttered  and  drooped  again,  in  her 
cheeks  all  day. 

She  sat  longer  than  usual  in  front  of 
the  library  fire  that  evening,  until  the 
shadows  had  crept  up  around  the  por- 
trait. She  rose  at  last  and  peered 


through  these  shadows  at  the  girl's 
face. 

'I  wish,'  she  said  at  last, —  she 
looked  about  her  to  make  sure  no  one 
was  near  to  overhear,  —  '  I  wish  you 
would  think  of  his  good  as  I  do.  Think 
it  over,  my  dear;  I  don't  ask  you  to 
decide  at  once.' 

The  winter  passed  slowly.  Then 
some  indescribable  ennui  settled  down 
beside  Renton's  mother;  such  unbear- 
able tedium  as  comes  with  waiting  for 
a  letter  that  never  arrives.  Not  that 
letters  lacked,  but  Louise  Henry  was 
not  mentipned  in  them;  scarcely  even 
in  Cousin  Benjamin's  now,  except  very 
occasionally,  very  trivially. 

Cousin  Benjamin  was  vague,  almost 
equivocal,  full  of  a  persistent  cheer 
that  might,  however,  mean  one  thing, 
might  mean  another.  As  to  Renton's 
letters  —  although  studiously  regular, 
they  lacked  fire  and  intimacy. 

Renton's  mother  considered  whether 
it  might  not  be  best  for  her  to  go  to 
New  York,  herself.  Once  on  the  ground 
she  could  judge  better.  She  wrote  to 
Cousin  Benjamin.  In  return  she  had 
this  letter,  much  underlined:  — 

'If  he  sees  you  it  may  perhaps  bring 
him  right  back  to  Edith  Carter,  who  I 
have  reason  to  think  he  is  forgetting. 
Not  altogether,  you  understand.  One 
cannot  expect  that.  Rome  was  not  built 
in  a  day.  In  any  case  he  is  seeing  life 
and  real  people;  not  dead  ones.  He  has 
taken  to  going  to  the  theatre  of  late. 
My  opinion  is  you  must  let  him  alone; 
let  him  take  his  own  course.  Even  if  he 
chose  to  go  in  for  wine  and  fast  women, 
I  'd  still  say,  let  him  alone.  Plenty  of 
men  go  in  for  that  sort  of  thing.  It 's 
real,  anyway.  I  'd  rather  have  him  with 
a  flesh-and-blood  woman  —  I  would  n't 
care  who  —  than  to  have  him  spending 
his  days  and  nights  with  a  phantom.' 

Yes,  she  believed  in  leaving  him 
alone,  certainly;  else  why  should  she 
be  here  and  he  there.  But  there  was 


604 


RENTON'S  MOTHER 


the  question  how  far  one  dared  trust 
Providence. 

She  wrote  to  Cousin  Benjamin  in 
her  neat,  somewhat  illegible  hand,  — 

*I  have  decided  not  to  go  to  New 
York.  As  to  wine  and  fast  women,  I 
thank  God,  who  permitted  me  to  give 
him  better  ideals.' 

Later  she  wrote,  — 

'In  one  of  your  former  letters,  you 
spoke  vaguely  of  a  great  variety  of 
classes  of  women  in  New  York,  for  a 
man  to  choose  from.  One  of  his  own 
class,  exactly,  is  what  I  would  wish  for 
him.  Not  having  seen  Louise  Henry,  I 
cannot  tell.  But  I  shall  drive  to  Char- 
lottesville  when  the  roads  are  passable, 
to  see  the  Ratcliffes,  who  know  her, 
and  will  write  you  then.  Tell  me  frank- 
ly, when  you  write,  if  she  cares  for  my 
boy/ 

If  she  did  not  care,  then  the  path 
was  clear  to  Renton's  mother,  she 
would  go  to  New  York  —  and  handle 
the  matter  herself.  The  girl  must  be 
got  to  care.  Girls  —  beautiful  ones 
especially  —  rarely  know  their  own 
minds.  Youth  and  beauty  flaunt,  and 
presume  on  good  fortune,  like  daffodils 
in  the  first  warm  breezes  of  March. 
Louise  Henry  would  thank  her  later. 

In  reply,  however,  Renton's  mother 
had  this :  — 

'Yes,  the  girl  does  care.  Why  should 
I  mince  matters?  There's  no  doubt  in 
my  mind,  not  a  particle.  Not  break- 
ing her  heart,  she  is  n't  that  kind  — 
but  cares9  (three  times  underscored). 
*  Let  him  take  his  time,  though.  Rome 
was  n't  built  in  a  day.  After  all  you 
can't  tell.  He  has  n't  found  himself 
yet.' 

By-and-by  she  wrote,  — 

'I  have  been  to  Charlottesville.  I 
have  seen  Louise  Henry's  photograph. 
The  oldest  Ratcliffe  girl  has  one.  She 
has  a  beautiful  face.  I  am  very  pleased 
with  it.' 

In  reply  came  this :  — 


*  Louise  Henry  is  the  girl,  exactly,  to 
be  his  wife,  and  the  mother  of  his 
children.  There's  only  one  kind  of 
woman  for  that.  The  trouble  is  —  he 
is  n't  free  just  now  to  see  her  for  the 
stunning  fine  girl  she  is.  That's  the 
point.  You  used  to  speak  of  Edith 
Carter  having  her  hand  on  him.  Well, 
he  is  being  held  fast.  What  he  needs 
is  to  be  free.  You  can't  run  the  uni- 
verse —  more 's  the  pity.  If  you  could, 
I'd  say,  "Hands  off!"  that's  all.  I'd 
have  him  free,  scot-free,  twenty-four 
hours  from  the  hand  of  any  woman, 
alive  or  dead.  When  he  woke  from 
the  unreal  things  that  spoil  his  life  — ' 
maybe  he'd  wake  to  Louise  Henry. 
Maybe  he'd  see  her  as  the  girl  to  ful- 
fill his  manhood.  I  don't  know.  The 
point  is  —  I  say  —  hands  off!  The 
question  is,  how.  You've  just  got 
to  leave  the  thing  to  chance.  Rome 
was  n't  built  in  a  day.  —  I  know  I  say 
it  often;  but  it's  true.' 

Here  was  a  letter,  indeed!  Renton's 
mother  read  it  and  re-read  it.  It  was 
by  all  odds  the  least  satisfactory  letter 
Cousin  Benjamin  had  written  her.  It 
was  full  of  vague  things  that  you  might 
interpret  this  way  or  that.  He  prac- 
tically owned  himself  defeated,  yet  he 
admitted  that  she  was  right  about 
Louise  Henry.  She  ran  her  eye  over 
the  lines  again.  *  You've  just  got  to 
leave  the  thing  to  chance.'  She  pressed 
her  thin  lips  together.  That  might  be 
the  solution  for  Cousin  Benjamin, 
scarcely  for  the  mother  of  Ren  ton.  To 
chance!  Scarcely!  There  were  several 
things  she  might  do.  She  might  go 
to  him  at  once  —  but  no,  that  might 
bring  the  home  associations  about  him 
more  strongly  than  ever.  She  would 
write  a  letter  to  him,  such  a  letter  as 
would  put  a  duty  on  him,  stronger 
than  any  duty  in  his  life. 

Throughout  the  day  she  said  over 
sentences  that  might  sway  him;  weigh- 
ed sentiments  which  might  bend  him; 


RENTON'S  MOTHER 


605 


thoughts  or  phrases  that  might  stir 
him.  It  was  no  light  matter,  nor  to  be 
done  with  haste  or  ease.  Late  in  the 
afternoon  she  began  writing.  After 
supper  she  went  back  to  the  library 
table.  Every  now  and  then  she  would 
stop,  with  her  head  on  one  side,  her 
closed  hand  on  her  cheek,  to  re-read, 
her  lips  moving  without  sound.  In 
almost  every  case  the  sheet  was  dis- 
carded for  a  fresh  one. 

At  last  she  gathered  up  all  the  pa- 
pers slowly,  tore  them  this  way  and 
that,  and  put  them  in  the  fire. 

A  dry  branch  tapped  against  the 
north  window.  She  paused  a  moment 
to  look  in  that  direction  through  the 
shadows;  then  she  seated  herself  un- 
easily before  the  fire,  on  the  edge  of 
her  chair.  Once  she  glanced  up  at  the 
portrait;  once  she  looked  over  her 
shoulder.  At  last  she  got  up  and,  with 
another  quick  glance  around  the  room, 
went  to  the  portrait  and  looked  at  it. 
Her  lips  moved.  The  words  were  just 
audible. 

'I  don't  know  how  to  deal  with 
you,'  she  said  softly.  *  I  wish  you  were 
living.  I  wish  you  could  hear  me.' 

The  portrait's  eyes  met  hers,  as  they 
met  all  things,  with  heavy-lidded,  half- 
sad  gaze. 

Renton's  mother  turned  and  walked 
away  a  little,  with  her  head  bent.  Then 
she  stopped  and  came  back  and  laid 
one  hand  on  the  mantel. 

'I  think  you  are  living  somewhere,' 
she  said  softly.  'You  have  heard  me, 
and  you  do  hear  me  now.  You  must.' 
She  put  her  other  hand  on  the  mantel. 
They  were  powerful  slim  hands,  with 
delicately  blue  veins  on  them.  'It  is 
this  way,  my  dear.  You  love  him  and 
I  love  him.  We  are  the  two  who  love 
him  longest  and  best.  But  now  there 
is  another  woman.  It  appears  she 
loves  him,  too.  If  he,  in  turn,  should 
love  her,  you  would,  of  course,  no  lon- 
ger be  his  first  thought.  It  would  be 


with  you  as  it  was  with  me  when  he  be- 
gan to  care  for  you.  But  don't  think 
of  yourself.  I  did  not.'  She  paused 
and  looked  away  and  spoke,  not  to  the 
girl,  but  to  herself.  'Why,  I  am  his 
mother ,  —  and  you,  my  girl,  are  only 
his  first  love.'  Her  glance  came  back. 
'Besides,  it  is  a  woman's  place  to  forget 
herself  for  the  man  she  loves.  When 
I  chose  you  for  him  a  long  time  ago, 
I  chose  you  because  of  that.  I  said, 
"  She  will  be  a  worthy  wife,  a  girl  who 
can  lose  her  interests  in  his;  a  girl  who 
will  gladly  go  into  the  valley  of  death 
to  bear  him  a  child,  —  who  would  give 
up  her  life  gladly,  gladly  for  him,  if 
occasion  called."  Now  think  a  minute. 
Can't  you  do  this  thing  I  ask  of  you? 
—  Can't  you  give  him  up?  —  For  his 
good,  you  know.  This  other  woman 
loves  him.  She  will  bring  him  the  real 
things  of  life.  She  will  bear  him  child- 
ren, —  flesh  and  blood.' 

She  looked  about  her,  conscious  of 
having  reached  the  most  difficult  point. 
When  she  turned  back  from  the  shad- 
ows to  the  portrait,  it  was  cautiously, 
as  though  she  were  afraid  to  meet  the 
heavy-lidded  eyes. 

The  same  dead  branch  tapped 
against  the  window,  warningly.  She 
stopped  to  listen,  and  it  stopped.  She 
turned  to  the  portrait  once  more.  'Let 
him  be  free,  Edith  Carter;  let  him  be 
free  to  go  to  the  woman  who  draws  him. 
Let  him  have  a  man's  part.  You  who 
profess  to  love  him,  take  your  hands 
off  him  to-night.  Let  him  have  a  real 
woman  of  flesh  and  blood  in  his  arms 
to-night,  not  you  —  not  you.  Loose 
him  and  let  him  go.  I  do  not  mean  to 
be  cruel.  You  will  always  be  his  first 
love;  the  sweetest  of  all  his  memories. 
He  will  turn  to  you  many  a  time;  you 
may  even  to  the  end  be  the  lady  of  his 
soul.  But  this  other  woman'  —  She 
was  pleading  now  with  a  kind  of  cun- 
ning. 'I  only  ask  you,  my  dear,  for 
twenty-four  hours.  After  that  —  come 


606 


RENTON'S  MOTHER 


back  to  his  memory,  if  you  like.  I 
merely  want  to  try  the  experiment, 
for  his  good.  For  his  good,  you  know. 
You  can  still  serve  him,  by  sacrificing 
yourself  in  this  matter.  Think  of  his 
good.  I  am  his  mother.  Go!  Go! 'She 
paused  a  moment.  'Take  away  your 
white  dead  hand  from  him,'  she  said. 
'Take  it  away,  if  you  love  him.' 

There  was  absolute  silence.  Not 
even  the  little  branch  said  anything. 
The  flames  in  the  grate  had  all  died 
down;  there  were  only  red  coals,  —  a 
bed  of  them.  The  shadows  in  the  past 
quarter  of  an  hour  had  crept  slowly, 
cautiously,  with  innumerable  little  re- 
treats, while  the  fire  still  flickered, 
closer  to  the  grate.  Once  a  little  spent 
flame  flared  suddenly,  and  they  leaped 
back  softly  behind  the  chairs  and  sofas 
and  retreated  to  the  corners.  Then,  as 
the  flame  died  down,  they  approach- 
ed again,  soft-footed,  formless  things. 
They  were  crouched  close  to  the  hearth 
now  as  the  glow  in  the  grate  died  — 
and  they  laid  unfelt  hands  on  the  skirt 
of  the  woman  who  stood  before  the 
portrait. 

Renton's  mother  turned  her  head 
slowly,  very  slowly,  like  one  afraid  to 
look  over  her  shoulder.  This  thing,  of 
talking  to  the  dead,  had  wrought  upon 
her  imaginative  nature.  One  gaunt 
hand,  the  one  which  wore  its  wedding 
ring,  pressed  her  cheek  heavily  and 
drew  down  her  lip  at  the  corner.  She 
faced  the  room,  her  head  up,  like  one 
who  has  fears,  yet  is  not  afraid.  She 
made  a  step  or  two  forward,  then 
paused,  then  went  to  each  window  and 
pulled  down  each  blind,  sharply,  soft- 
ly. She  went  to  the  door  leading  into 
the  hall.  She  did  not  once  look  toward 
the  portrait.  As  she  opened  the  door 
the  little  branch  beat  again  insistent- 
ly, as  though  it  still  had  something  to 
say.  She  paused,  and  lifted  her  head, 
a  little  as  though  daring  it.  It  stopped. 
She  stepped  into  the  hall,  pulled  the 


door  to  softly  after  her,  turned  the 
key  heavily  in  the  lock.  She  made  her 
way  up  the  bare  stairs  in  the  dark, 
her  gown  slimping  after  her. 

At  the  top  of  the  landing  she  started 
and  paused  abruptly,  one  hand  tense 
on  the  banister.  There  was  a  dull 
crash  below  stairs.  It  might  have  been 
the  overturning  of  something  in  the 
library.  The  sound  was  gone  quickly, 
and  the  silence  stepped  in  softly  again. 
She  glided  down  the  broad  upper  hall 
in  the  dark,  toward  her  room,  like  a 
shadow  in  a  dream,  only  the  frightened 
flush-flushing  of  her  skirt  following  her 
rapidly  along  the  matting.  She  locked 
her  door  after  her  that  night,  as  was 
not  her  custom. 


IV 

She  did  not  go  into  the  library  to  in- 
vestigate. For  two  days  the  door  to  it 
remained  locked.  She  was  unwilling  to 
meet  the  eyes  of  the  portrait.  There 
had  been  some  sort  of  psychological 
reaction.  She  felt  that  she  had  done 
some  absurd  and  morbid  thing,  some- 
thing abnormal,  which  yet  was  so  far 
real  that  she  half  believed  in  it.  She 
avoided  the  portrait  as  she  would  have 
avoided  a  person,  yet  remembering  per- 
fectly, too,  that  it  was  only  a  portrait. 
She  had  placed  the  key  to  the  library 
under  her  prayer-book,  on  the  little 
table  at  her  bed's  head. 

She  waited  for  the  mail  with  a  kind 
of  feverish  anxiety.  A  letter  from 
Cousin  Benjamin  made  her  heart  beat. 

'Mind  you,  I  don't  say  yet  that  it  is 
advisable  that  you  come.  It  may  be. 
If  I  think  so  I  will  send  for  you.' 

There  was  no  word  from  Ren  ton. — 
She  turned  over  in  her  mind  how  she 
could  touch  up  her  black  silk.  She  had 
a  pride  in  being  her  best  before  Louise 
Henry.  Not  that  one  Virginia  woman 
needs  a  silk  dress  in  the  presence  of 
another;  but  a  man's  mother  — 


RENTON'S  MOTHER 


607 


Two  days  went  by,  and  in  these  no 
letters.  Then  —  She  looked  up  sud- 
denly, her  needle  poised.  The  station 
fly  was  rumbling  up  the  driveway. 

She  put  her  sewing  by  with  a  little 
frantic  hurried  movement,  rose  and 
stood  still,  one  hand  on  her  breast. 
Was  Renton  returning?  Had  all  her 
care  been  for  naught? 

The  fly  did  not  come  up  to  the  door. 
It  stopped  halfway,  and  Cousin  Ben- 
jamin got  down  from  it  and  walked 
toward  the  house. 

She  laid  down  her  needle  with  a 
trembling  hand,  and  went  down  the 
steps  to  the  lower  hall  and  opened  the 
door  and  drew  him  in.  Her  face  was 
between  apprehension  and  pleasure. 

'You  need  me?  You  wish  me  to 
come  at  once?5  she  said.  'Why  did 
you  come?' 

He  rid  himself  of  his  overcoat,  hung 
it  on  the  hat-rack,  and  turned  to  the 
library. 

'No,  not  there/  she  said;  and  crossed 
to  the  unused  parlor.  In  it,  she  turned 
on  him  suddenly,  with  the  fingers  of 
one  hand  on  her  brooch. 

'Why  did  you  come?'  —  Then,  as 
he  did  not  answer,  —  '  Is  it  good  news  ? 

Cousin  Benjamin  looked  helpless, 
then  he  coughed. 

'No,  —  it  is  n't  good  news;  —  er  — 
why  should  we  mince  matters?  It's 
anything  but  good  news.  God  help  me. 
—  It 's  a  sorry  business.' 

Her  hand  went  up  to  her  throat,  like 
a  knowing  thing,  and  as  though  it 
might  help  her  to  speak. 

'He  does  not  care  for  her?  It  is  all 
useless?  He  is  coming  back  with  Edith 
Carter  still  in  his  heart.'  She  nodded 
once  toward  the  library  door.  '  Is  that 
what  you  came  to  tell  me?' 

Cousin  Benjamin  got  out  his  hand- 
kerchief, drew  it  across  his  forehead; 
wadded  it,  and  drew  it  across  his  fore- 
head again.  He  was  in  great  trouble, 
no  doubt. 


'Sit  down,'  he  said,  indicating,  with 
the  wadded  handkerchief,  a  low  arm- 
chair. He  seated  himself  on  a  little 
spindle-legged  chair  opposite  her.  'My 
dear  Cousin  Matilda,  the  ways  of  God 
are  inscrutable.  Nor  you  nor  I  can 
explain  them.' 

'What  do  you  mean  to  tell  me?'  she 
said,  almost  a  little  hoarsely.  'What 
is  the  worst  that  can  have  happened 
to  him?' 

'I  spoke  to  you  of  wine  and  wo- 
men' — 

She  nodded. 

'Well,  I  kept  it  from  you.  You 
seemed  so  sure  of  him  right  along.  He 
had  better  ideals,  you  said.  I  thought 
he  had,  too.  I  thought  he  'd  never  get 
into  that  sort  of  thing.  And  yet,  a  man, 
even  if  he  does  not  actually  expect 
that  kind  of  thing  of  another  man,  still 
knows  it  is  likely  to  happen.  —  You 
see,  I  thought  it  was  a  phase  only. 
Moreover,  I  remembered  the  Carter 
girl.  I'm  not  sentimental,  Lord,  no! 
But  somehow  I  thought  she'd  save 
him;  the  memory  of  her.  I'd  got  it  in 
my  head  she'd  keep  her  hand  on  him; 
would  n't  let  him  go,  you  know.  Then, 
there  was  Louise  Henry,  too;  I  never 
gave  up  hoping  he  'd  care  about  her. 
But  Louise  Henry,  though  she  loved 
him,  never  had  the  power.'  He  shook 
his  head.  'Never  had  the  power.  And 
the  dead  girl  —  I  don't  know  what 
happened  to  her.  —  You  said  she  had  a 
hand  on  him;  that  she  kept  him  from 
himself.  Well,  she  took  her  hand  off 
him  that  one  night.  She  must  have  let 
him  go.  He  forgot  her.  She  forgot  him. 
Something  got  in  his  blood.  I  don't 
know.  —  The  other  woman  was  beau- 
tiful, you  see.  He  believed  in  her  at 
first.  They  generally  do.  —  You  know 
Kipling's  "Vampire"?' 

'I  do  not  know  anything  of  Kip- 
ling's,' she  said,  with  tense  control. 
'Let  me  demand  of  you  to  tell  me  a 
plain  story  plainly.' 


608 


RENTON'S  MOTHER 


*  Why  should  I  mince  matters ! '  The 
man  spoke  helplessly,  and  with  effort. 
*  I  did  not  see  the  whole  cause  of  it.  I 
believe  now,  he  tried  to  keep  true  to  the 
best  in  himself,  —  to  the  dead  girl  yon- 
der, if  you  like,  —  until  the  very  last. 
Yes,  I  'm  sure  he  tried.  Then,  two  nights 
ago  —  I  suppose  the  thing  was  hard. 
You  know,  —  no,  you  don't  know,  — 
how  a  man's  passion  can  rise  suddenly 
and  sweep  him  off  his  feet/  He  flung 
out  one  arm.  '  Maybe  he  wished  to  be 
strong  —  most  men  who  have  led  his 
life  —  She  was  the  sort  of  woman  to 
lead  a  man  on,  and  he  never  guessing 
it.  —  You  didn't  bring  him  up  right. 
You  never  warned  him  of  the  danger 
a  man  meets  in  his  own  passions.  He 
did  n't  know  the  world.  He  believed 
in  women  —  all  women.  I  don't  know 
what  he  went  through.  I  only  know 
your  dead  girl  did  not  save  him.' 

The  woman's  hands  went  up,  sup- 
plicating, then  quieted  themselves,  each 
in  each,  again. 

'Yes?  And  then?'  She  waited,  aw- 
fully. 

'Why  should  we  mince  matters! 
Two  days  ago  —  I  was  called  up  at 
three  o'clock  at  night  —  by  telephone. 
The  woman  —  It  was  in  her  house 

—  Why  should  we  — '  He  broke  off 
abruptly.   *  I  cannot  go  on '  —  he  said, 
rising. 

Renton's  mother  rose  also.  One 
hand  still  quieted  the  other  tightly. 

'Why  should  you  be  a  coward?' 
she  said  softly.  'Look  at  me.  Why  in 
heaven's  name  should  you  be  a  coward? 
There  are  other  things  left  in  life  after 
disgrace.  Don't  you  suppose  that  to 
a  man's  wife  —  to  a  man's  mother  — 
Do  you  suppose  anything,  anything 
matters  to  a  man's  mother?  Go  on 

—  It  was  in  her  house  —  What  f ' 
'That  he  was  found'  — 
'Yes.  — Goon.' 

'That  he  was  found  —  dead.' 
Some  fearful  light  glowed  up  in  her 


a  moment;  then  she  took  a  step  and 
steadied  herself  with  one  hand  against 
a  chair;  the  other,  tight-closed,  was 
pressed  against  her  cheek,  dragging  her 
lip  down.  It  was  easier  for  the  man  to 
speak  now  than  to  endure  her  silence, 
and  he  hurried  on  with  his  excuses. 

'I  did  not  let  you  know.  There  was 
nothing  to  be  done.  I  knew  you  were 
alone  here.  I  feared  you  might  — 
well,  I  did  n't  know  what  you  would 
do.  I  only  knew  I  could  save  you  two 
days  knowledge,  until  I  myself  could 
explain.  —  It  seemed  merciful.  —  I 
could  bring  the  poor  boy  back  my- 
self-—' 

He  thought  she  would  have  cried 
out.  Instead  she  slipped  sidewise  into 
her  chair.  Her  voice  when  she  spoke 
was  not  weak :  — 

'It  was  by  his  own  hand?' 

Cousin  Benjamin  did  not  speak. 

She  put  her  face  in  her  hands,  and 
rocked  herself  slightly .  'Ah!'  she  said, 
letting  her  breath  out  softly,  as  though 
in  pain.  When  she  spoke  her  voice 
was  low  and  hoarse :  — 

'Oh,  Cousin  Benjamin,  if  you  had 
not  tried  to  direct  things  yourself,  man- 
age them  yourself.  What  right  had 
you?'  She  stopped  and  looked  out 
helplessly  ahead  of  her,  her  hands 
drawn  half  down  her  face.  'You  should 
have  sent  for  me,  —  for  his  mother.' 

Cousin  Benjamin  got  up  and  walked 
back  and  forth.  When  he  turned,  her 
face  was  in  her  hands  again.  She  was 
murmuring  something  softly  to  her- 
self. A  few  moments  later  she  rose  and 
glided  past  him  and  up  to  her  own 
room. 

An  hour  or  more  passed  before  he 
saw  her  again.  Before  he  was  aware  of 
her,  she  had  glided  into  the  hushed 
parlor  and  put  her  hand  on  his  arm. 
Her  face  was  haggard.  In  the  other 
hand  she  held  a  key. 

'Come  with  me,'  she  said.  'We 
must  open  the  library  for  him.' 


RENTON'S  MOTHER 


609 


They  stood  inside  the  doorway.  The 
room  was  cold  and  dark,  the  blinds  all 
down.  In  a  peevish  east  wind  the  little 
bough  tapped  insistently  against  the 
north  window  —  as  though  it  had 
known  all  the  while,  had  warned  and 
warned  repeatedly,  and  had  been  dis- 
regarded, and  would  call  attention  to 
that  fact. 

Cousin  Benjamin  and  Renton's  mo- 
ther did  not  hear  or  notice  it.  Before 
the  empty  fireplace,  face  forward,  the 
portrait  lay.  The  sharp  corner  of  the 
iron  fender  had  cut  into  it  in  its  fall. 
Ren  ton's  mother  went  to  it,  a  few  hur- 
ried steps;  then,  there  was  a  hushed 
pause.  Cousin  Benjamin  raised  the  por- 
trait and  steadied  it,  so  that  it  leaned 
against  the  brasses  of  the  fireplace. 
Ren  ton's  mother  stepped  back  from 
it  and  steadied  herself  with  one  hand 
on  the  table,  the  other,  closed,  pressed 
against  her  cheek. 

The  picture  in  its  fall  had  struck 
the  iron  fender,  and  a  dark  gash  cut  it 
across  —  marring  the  face,  part  of  the 
body,  and  one  of  the  delicate  hands. 

Renton's  mother  drew  her  eyes 
away  at  last  and  held  out  her  hand  to 
Cousin  Benjamin. 

'Come  away,'  she  said. 

They  left  the  room  with  steps  that 
tried  not  to  be  too  hurried,  and  some- 
what like  children  who  dare  not  look 
back. 

They  did  not  speak  of  the  portrait 
until  late  that  night  when  Ren  ton's 
body  lay  in  the  unaccustomed  parlor. 

'You  will  do  with  the  picture  what 
you  think  best,'  she  said,  in  answer 
to  Cousin  Benjamin's  rather  nervous 
question. 

He  waited  until  early  daylight  of  the 
morning  after  the  funeral.  He  would 
rather  not  have  any  one  to  give  him 
advice  in  the  matter.  He  kindled  a 
fire  in  the  empty  fireplace,  cut  the 
marred  picture  from  its  frame,  doubled 
it  somewhat  to  fit  the  grate,  laid  the 

VOL.  Ill -NO.  5 


tongs  against  it  to  keep  it  from  falling 
outward  on  the  hearth,  made  sure  it 
had  caught  fire,  left  the  room,  and  held 
the  door  to  by  its  knob  for  several 
minutes. 

When  he  went  back  to  make  sure 
that  all  was  safe,  only  the  shadowy 
semblance  of  a  burned  thing  lay  in  the 
grate,  and  fell  into  flaked  ashes  as  he 
removed  the  tongs. 

Two  days  later,  Renton's  mother, 
one  thin  hand  holding  together  a  little 
worsted  shawl,  stood  on  the  verandah, 
bidding  Cousin  Benjamin  good-bye. 

'Tell  Louise  Henry  that  some  time, 
some  time  I  shall  wish  to  see  her.  Not 
yet;  by-and-by.  Tell  her  I  am  glad  she 
loved  him.' 

The  rain  beat  in  on  the  verandah  in 
dreary  gusts. 

'Go  back,  I  beg  of  you!  You  will 
take  cold!' 

Cousin  Benjamin  pressed  her  hand 
again,  put  his  hat  on  securely,  with 
both  hands,  back  and  front;  held  his 
head  sidewise  a  little  against  the  beat 
of  the  wind,  and  hurried  down  the  steps. 

The  station  man,  his  head  on  one 
side  also,  already  held  open  the  door 
of  the  station  fly.  Cousin  Benjamin 
entered.  The  door  was  banged  to. 
The  station  man  mounted,  folded  the 
skirts  of  his  coat  about  him  carefully, 
wrapped  the  lap-robe  outside  of  these, 
sat  down,  took  up  the  rains,  shook 
them  out  a  little. 

The  station  fly  moved  off  at  a  brisk 
trot.  Cousin  Benjamin  leaned  forward 
with  his  hat  raised.  Renton's  mother 
watched  him  drive  away  until  the 
curve  of  the  roadway  hid  the  fly  from 
view.  Then  she  turned  and  went  back 
into  the  empty  house.  From  the  win- 
dow of  the  sitting-room  where  she 
often  sat  to  sew,  she  could  see  the 
new-made  grave.  At  her  wish  they  had 
made  it  there,  just  at  the  foot  of  the 
lawn,  where  she  could  keep  watch  of  it. 


THE   COST  OF  MODERN  SENTIMENT 


BY  AGNES   REPPLIER 


WE  are  rising  on  the  crest  of  a  great 
wave  of  sentiment,  rising  swiftly, 
strongly,  and  without  fear.  When  the 
wave  breaks,  we  may  find  ourselves 
submerged  and  in  some  danger  of 
drowning;  but  for  the  present  we  are 
full  of  hope  and  high  resolve.  Thirty 
years  ago  we  stood  in  shallow  water, 
and  mocked  a  little  at  the  mid-Victorian 
sentiment,  then  ebbing  with  the  tide. 
We  have  nothing  now  in  common  with 
that  fine,  thin  conception  of  life  and  its 
responsibilities.  We  do  not  prate  about 
duty  and  domesticity.  Humanity  is 
our  theme.  We  do  not  feel  that  fastidi- 
ous distaste  for  repulsive  details  which 
made  our  grandparents  culpably  neg- 
ligent. All  knowledge,  apart  from  its 
quality,  and  apart  from  our  require- 
ments, now  seems  to  us  desirable. 
Taste  is  no  longer  a  controlling  force. 
We  in  no  wise  resemble  the  sentimen- 
talists of  Germany,  who  played  with 
personal  emotions,  who  found  expres- 
sion in  music  and  in  literature,  who 
debauched  their  intellects  with  wild 
imaginings,  treating  love  as  a  whirl- 
wind, and  suicide  as  an  inspiration;  but 
who  left  us  out  of  that  mad  chaos  some 
grace  of  human  understanding.  Our 
beliefs  and  our  aspirations  are  more 
closely  akin  to  the  great  enthusiasms 
which  swept  France  before  the  Revo- 
lution: enthusiasms  nobly  born,  and 
profoundly  unballasted,  which  promis- 
ed unity,  and  which  gave  confusion, 
which  sought  practical  outlets,  and 
which  fell,  shattered  by  currents  they 
could  not  control. 

The  sentiment  of  to-day  is  social 

610 


and  philanthropic.  It.has  no  affiliations 
with  art,  which  stands  apart  from  it, 
—  a  new  experience  for  the  world.  It 
dominates  periodical  literature,  minor 
verse,  and  serious  fiction;  but  it  has  so 
far  given  nothing  of  permanent  value 
to  letters.  It  is  strong  politically,  and 
is  echoed  from  all  party  platforms.  It 
is  sure  of  a  hearing,  and  it  is  held  too 
sacred  for  assault.  It  is  a  force  to  be 
reckoned  with,  and  to  be  controlled. 
It  is  capable  of  raising  us  to  a  better 
and  clearer  vision,  or  of  weakening  our 
judgment,  and  shattering  our  common 
sense.  If  we  value  our  safety,  we  must 
forever  bear  in  mind  that  sentiment  is 
a  subjective  and  a  personal  thing. 
However  exalted,  and  however  ardent, 
it  cannot  be  accepted  as  a  weight  for 
justice,  or  as  a  test  of  truth. 

The  three  issues  with  which  our  mod- 
ern sentiment  chiefly  concerns  itself  are 
the  progress  of  women,  the  conditions 
of  labor,  and  the  social  evil.  Some- 
times these  issues  are  commingled.  Al- 
ways they  have  a  bearing  upon  one 
another.  There  is  also  a  distinct  and 
perilous  tendency  toward  sentiment  in 
matters  political  and  judicial;  while 
an  excess  of  emotionalism  is  the  stum- 
bling-block of  those  noble  societies 
which  work  for  the  protection  of  ani- 
mals. As  a  single  example  of  this  last 
unfortunate  proclivity,  I  quote  a  par- 
agraph copied  from  one  of  Mrs.  An- 
nie Besant's  wild  rhapsodies,  which  I 
found  offered  as  a  serious  argument  in 
the  accredited  journal  of  an  American 
philanthropic  society. 

'The  killing  of  animals  in  order  to 


THE  COST  OF  MODERN  SENTIMENT 


611 


devour  their  flesh  is  so  obviously  an 
outrage  on  all  humane  feelings,  that 
one  feels  almost  ashamed  to  mention  it 
in  a  paper  that  is  regarding  man  as  a 
director  of  evolution.  If  any  one  who 
eats  flesh  could  be  taken  to  the  sham- 
bles, to  watch  the  agonized  struggles 
of  the  terrified  victims  as  they  are 
dragged  to  the  spot  where  knife  or 
mallet  slays  them;  if  he  could  be  made 
to  stand  with  the  odors  of  the  blood 
reeking  in  his  nostrils;  if  there  his 
astral  vision  could  be  opened  so  that 
he  might  see  the  filthy  creatures  that 
flock  round  to  feast  on  the  loathsome 
exhalations,  and  see  also  the  fear  and 
horror  of  the  slaughtered  beasts  as 
they  arrive  in  the  astral  world,  and 
send  back  thence  currents  of  dread 
and  hatred  that  flow  between  men  and 
animals  in  constantly  re-fed  streams; 
if  a  man  could  pass  through  these  ex- 
periences, he  would  be  cured  of  meat- 
eating  forever.' 

Now  when  one  has  belonged  for 
many  years  to  the  society  which  re- 
printed this  precious  paragraph,  when 
one  has  believed  all  one's  life  that  to 
be  sentient  is  to  possess  rights,  and 
that,  not  kindness  only,  but  justice  to 
the  brute  creation  is  an  essential  ele- 
ment of  decent  living,  it  is  hard  to  be 
confronted  with  unutterable  nonsense 
about  astral  visions  and  astral  cur- 
rents. It  is  harder  still  to  be  held  in- 
directly responsible  for  the  publication 
of  such  nonsense,  and  to  entertain  for 
the  thousandth  time  the  weary  convic- 
tion that  common  sense  is  not  a  deter- 
mining factor  in  philanthropy. 

Mr.  Chesterton,  upon  whom  the  de- 
light of  startling  his  readers  never 
seems  to  pall,  has  declared  that  men 
are  more  sentimental  than  women, 
*  whose  only  fault  is  their  excessive 
sense.'  Also  that  the  apparent  absorp- 
tion of  the  modern  world  in  social 
service  is  not  the  comprehensive  thing 
it  seems.  The  general  public  still  re- 


mains indifferent.  This  may  or  may 
not  be  true.  It  is  as  hard  for  Mr.  Ches- 
terton as  for  the  rest  of  us  to  know 
much  about  that  remnant  of  the  pub- 
lic which  is  not  writing,  or  lecturing,  or 
collecting  data,  or  collecting  funds,  or 
working  for  clubs  and  societies.  But 
no  one  can  say  that  the  social  reformer 
is  the  slighted  creature  that  he  was  half 
a  century  ago.  He  meets  with  the  most 
distinguished  consideration,  and  he  is 
always  accorded  the  first  hearing  in 
print  and  on  the  platform.  He  com- 
mands our  respect  when  he  deals  sober- 
ly with  sober  facts  in  sober  language, 
when  his  conclusions  are  just,  his  state- 
ments irrefutable.  He  is  less  praise- 
worthy when  he  flies  to  fiction,  an 
agreeable  but  unconvincing  medium;  or 
to  verse,  which,  as  the  theologian  said 
of  Paradise  Lost,  '  proves  nothing.'  It 
is  very  good  verse  sometimes,  and  its 
grace  of  sentiment,  its  note  of  appeal, 
find  an  easy  echo  in  the  reader's  heart. 
A  little  poem  called  'The  Factories,' 
published  in  McClures  Magazine  for 
September,  1912,  gives  an  almost  per- 
fect example  of  the  modern  point  of 
view,  of  the  emotional  treatment  of  an 
economic  question,  and  of  the  mental 
confusion  which  arises  from  the  sub- 
stitution of  sympathy  for  exactness. 

I  have  shut  my  little  sister  in  from  life  and  light 
(For  a  rose,  for  a  ribbon,  for  a  wreath  across 

my  hair), 

I  have  made  her  restless  feet  still  until  the  night, 
Locked   from   sweets   of   summer,  and  from 

wild  spring  air: 
I  who  ranged  the  meadow-lands,  free  from  sun 

to  sun, 
Free  to  sing,  and  pull  the  buds,  and  watch  the 

far  wings  fly, 
I  have  bound  my  sister  till  her  playing-time  is 

done,  — 
Oh,  my  little  sister,  was  it  I?  —  was  it  I? 

I  have  robbed  my  sister  of  her  day  of  maiden- 
hood 

(For  a  robe,  for  a  feather,  for  a  trinket's  rest- 
less spark), 

Shut  from  Lo've  till  dusk  shall  fall,  how  shall  she 
know  good, 


612 


THE  COST  OF  MODERN   SENTIMENT 


How  shall  she  pass  scatheless  through  the  sin- 
lit  dark? 

I  who  could  be  innocent,  I  who  could  be  gay, 
I  who  could  have  love  and  mirth  before  the 

light  went  by, 

I  have  put  my  sister  in  her  mating-time  away,  — 
Sister,  my  young  sister,  was  it  I?  —  was  it 
I? 

I  have  robbed  my  sister  of  the  lips  against  her 

breast 
(For  a  coin,  for  the  weaving  of  my  children's 

lace  and  lawn), 

Feet  that  pace  beside  the  loom,  hands  that  can- 
not rest: 
How  can  she  know  motherhood,  whose  strength 

is  gone? 

I  who  took  no  heed  of  her,  starved  and  labor- 
worn, 

I  against  whose  placid  heart  my  sleepy  gold- 
heads  lie, 

Round  my  path  they  cry  to  me,  little  souls  un- 
born — 
God  of  Life  —  Creator!    It  was  I!    It  was  I. 

Now  if  by  'I*  is  meant  the  aver- 
age woman  who  wears  the  'robe,'  the 
*  ribbon,'  the  'feather,'  and  possibly 
—  though  rarely  —  the  'wreath  across 
my  hair,'  'I*  must  protest  distinctly 
against  assuming  a  guilt  which  is  none 
of  mine.  I  have  not  shut  my  little  sis- 
ter in  a  factory,  any  more  than  I  have 
ranged  the  meadow-lands,  'free  from 
sun  to  sun.'  What  I  probably  am  do- 
ing is  trying  to  persuade  my  sister  to 
cook  my  dinner,  and  sweep  my  house, 
and  help  me  to  take  care  of  my  'gold- 
heads,'  who  are  not  always  so  sleepy 
as  I  could  desire.  If  my  sister  declines 
to  do  this  at  a  wage  equal  to  her 
factory  earnings,  and  with  board  and 
lodging  included,  she  is  well  within  her 
rights,  and  I  have  no  business,  as  is 
sometimes  my  habit,  weakly  to  com- 
plain of  her  decision.  If  I  made  my 
household  arrangements  acceptable  to 
her,  she  would  come.  As  this  is  difficult 
or  distasteful  to  me,  she  goes  to  a  fac- 
tory instead.  The  right  of  every  man 
and  woman  to  do  the  work  he  or  she 
chooses  to  do,  and  can  do,  at  what 
wages,  and  under  what  conditions  he 
or  she  can  command,  is  the  fruit  of 


centuries  of  struggle.  It  is  now  so  well 
established  that  only  the  trade  unions 
venture  to  deny  it. 

In  that  vivid  and  sad  study  of  New 
York  factory  life,  published  by  the 
Century  Company  a  dozen  years  ago, 
under  the  title  of  The  Long  Day,  a  girl 
who  is  out  of  work,  and  who  has  lost 
her  few  possessions  in  a  lodging-house 
fire,  seeks  counsel  of  a  wealthy  stranger 
who  has  befriended  her. 

'The  lady  looked  at  me  a  moment 
out  of  fine,  clear  eyes. 

"  You  would  not  go  into  service,  I 
suppose?"  she  asked  slowly. 

'  I  had  never  thought  of  such  an  al- 
ternative before,  but  I  met  it  without 
a  moment's  hesitation.  "No,  I  would 
not  care  to  go  into  service,"  I  re- 
plied; and,  as  I  did  so,  the  lady's  face 
showed  mingled  disappointment  and 
disgust. 

'"That  is  too  bad,"  she  answered, 
"for,  in  that  case,  I'm  afraid  I  can 
do  nothing  for  you."  And  she  went  out 
of  the  room,  leaving  me,  I  must  con- 
fess, not  sorry  for  having  thus  bluntly 
decided  against  wearing  the  definite 
badge  of  servitude.' 

Here  at  least  is  a  refreshingly  plain 
statement  of  facts.  The  girl  in  ques- 
tion bore  the  servitude  imposed  upon 
her  by  the  foremen  of  half  a  dozen 
factories;  she  slept  for  many  months 
in  quarters  which  no  domestic  servant 
would  consent  to  occupy;  she  ate  food 
which  no  servant  would  be  asked  to 
eat;  she  associated  with  young  women 
whom  no  servant  would  accept  as 
equals  and  companions.  But,  as  she 
had  voluntarily  relinquished  comfort, 
protection,  and  the  grace  of  human 
relations  between  employer  and  em- 
ployed, she  accepted  her  chosen  con- 
ditions, and  tried  successfully  to  better 
them  along  her  chosen  lines.  The  read- 
er is  made  to  understand  that  it  was  as 
unreasonable  for  the  benevolent  lady 
—  who  had  visions  of  a  trim  and  white- 


THE  COST  OF  MODERN  SENTIMENT 


613 


capped  parlor-maid  dancing  before  her 
eyes  —  to  show  *  disappointment  and 
disgust '  because  her  overtures  were  re- 
jected, as  it  would  have  been  to  charge 
the  same  lady  with  robbing  the  girl  of 
her  'day  of  maidenhood,'  and  her  *  lit- 
tle souls  unborn/  by  shutting  her  up  in 
a  factory.  If  we  will  blow  our  minds 
clear  of  generous  illusions,  we  shall  un- 
derstand that  an  emotional  verdict  has 
no  validity  when  offered  as  a  criterion 
of  facts. 

The  excess  of  sentiment,  which  is 
misleading  in  philanthropy  and  eco- 
nomics, grows  acutely  dangerous  when 
it  interferes  with  legislation,  or  with 
the  ordinary  rulings  of  morality.  The 
substitution  of  a  sentimental  principle 
of  authority  for  the  impersonal  pro- 
cesses of  law  confuses  our  understand- 
ing, and  undermines  our  sense  of  just- 
ice. It  is  a  painful  truth  that  most 
laws  have  had  their  origin  in  a  profound 
mistrust  of  human  nature  (even  Mr. 
Olney  admits  that  the  Constitution,  al- 
though framed  in  the  interests  of  free- 
dom, is  not  strictly  altruistic) ;  but  the 
time  is  hardly  ripe  for  brushing  aside 
this  ungenerous  mistrust,  and  establish- 
ing the  social  order  on  a  basis  of  pure 
enthusiasm.  The  reformers  who  light- 
heartedly  announce  that  people  are 
*  tired  of  the  old  Constitution  anyway,' 
voice  the  buoyant  creed  of  ignorance. 
I  heard  last  winter  a  popular  lecturer 
say  of  a  popular  idol  that  he  *  preferred 
making  precedents  to  following  them/ 
and  the  remark  evoked  a  storm  of 
applause.  It  was  plain  that  the  audi- 
ence considered  following  a  precedent 
to  be  a  timorous  and  unworthy  thing 
for  a  strong  man  to  do;  and  it  was 
equally  plain  that  nobody  had  given 
the  matter  the  benefit  of  a  serious 
thought.  Believers  in  political  faith- 
healing  enjoy  a  supreme  immunity  from 
doubt. 

This  growing  contempt  for  paltry 
but  not  unuseful  restrictions,  this  excess 


of  sentiment,  combined  with  paucity 
of  humor  and  a  melodramatic  atti- 
tude toward  crime,  has  had  some  dis- 
couraging results.  It  is  ill  putting  the 
strong  man,  or  the  avenging  angel,  or 
the  sinned-against  woman  above  the 
law,  which  is  a  sacred  trust  for  the  pre- 
servation of  life  and  liberty.  It  is  ill  so 
to  soften  our  hearts  witfy  a  psychologi- 
cal interest  in  the  law-breaker  that  no 
criminal  is  safe  from  popularity.  More 
than  a  year  ago  the  Nation  com- 
mented grimly  on  the  message  sent  to 
the  public  by  a  murderer,  and  a  singu- 
larly cold-blooded  murderer,  through 
the  minister  who  attended  him  on  the 
scaffold.  '  Mr.  Beattie  desired  to  thank 
his  many  friends  for  kind  letters  and 
expressions  of  interest,  and  the  public 
for  whatever  sympathy  was  felt  or  ex- 


It  sounds  like  a  cabinet  minister  who 
has  lost  an  honored  and  beloved  wife; 
not  like  a  murderer  who  lured  his  wife 
to  a  lonely  spot,  and  there  pitilessly 
killed  her.  One  fails  to  see  why  'kind 
letters'  and  'expressions  of  interest' 
should  have  poured  in  upon  this  male- 
factor, just  as  one  fails  to  see  why  a 
young  woman  who  shot  her  lover,  a 
few  months  later,  in  Columbus,  Ohio, 
should  have  received  an  ovation  in  the 
court-room.  It  was  not  even  her  first 
lover  (it  seldom  is) ;  but  when  a  gallant 
jury  had  acquitted  her  of  all  blame  in 
the  trifling  matter  of  manslaughter, 
'the  crowd  shouted  its  approval/ 
'scores  of  women  spectators  rushed  up 
to  her,  and  insisted  upon  kissing  her/ 
and  an  intrepid  suitor,  stimulated  by 
circumstances  which  might  have 
daunted  a  less  venturesome  man,  an- 
nounced his  intention  of  marrying  the 
heroine  on  the  spot.  It  must  be  a 
mighty  rebound  from  the  old  callous 
cruelty,  —  the  heart-sickening  cruelty 
of  the  eighteenth  century, — which  has 
made  us  so  tender  to  criminals,  and  so 
lenient  to  their  derelictions. 


614 


THE  COST  OF  MODERN  SENTIMENT 


Imprisonment  alone  is  not 

A  thing  of  which  we  would  complain, 
Add  ill-conwenience  to  our  lot, 

But  do  not  give  the  convick  pain. 

Sentiment  has  been  defined  as  a  re- 
volt from  the  despotism  of  facts.  It  is 
often  a  revolt  from  authority,  which  to 
the  sentimentalist  seems  forever  des- 
potic; and  thjs  revolt,  or  rather  this 
easy  disregard  of  authority,  is  fatal  to 
the  noblest  efforts  of  the  humanitarian. 
The  women  of  position  and  wealth 
who,  three  years  ago,  threw  the  weight 
of  their  sympathy  into  the  cause  of 
the  striking  shirtwaist  makers  were 
all  well-intentioned,  but  not  all  well- 
advised.  In  so  far  as  they  upheld  the 
strikers  in  what  were,  on  the  whole, 
just  and  reasonable  demands,  they  did 
good  work;  and  the  substantial  aid 
they  gave  was  sweetened  by  the  spirit 
in  which  it  was  given,  —  the  sense  of 
fellow  feeling  with  their  kind.  But 
there  is  also  no  doubt  that  one  of  the 
lessons  taught  at  this  time  to  our  for- 
eign-born population  was  that  the  laws 
of  our  country  may  be  disregarded  with 
impunity.  The  rioters  who  attacked 
the  *  scabs,'  and  were  arrested  for  dis- 
orderly conduct,  were  immediately  and 
enthusiastically  released,  to  become 
the  heroines  of  the  hour.  When  I  re- 
monstrated with  a  friend  who  had 
given  bail  for  a  dozen  of  these  young 
law-breakers,  she  answered  reproach- 
fully, 'But  they  are  so  ignorant  and 
helpless.  There  were  two  poor  bewil- 
dered girls  in  court  yesterday  who  did 
not  know  enough  English  to  under- 
stand the  charge  made  against  them. 
You  could  not  conceive  of  anything 
more  pathetic.' 

I  said  that  a  young  woman  who 
bowled  over  another  young  woman 
into  the  gutter  understood  perfectly 
the  charge  made  against  her,  whether 
she  spoke  English  or  not.  One  does  not 
have  to  study  French  or  Spanish  to 
know  that  one  may  not  knock  down 


a  Frenchman  or  a  Spaniard.  No  civ- 
ilized country  permits  this  robust  line 
of  argument.  But  reason  is  powerless 
when  sentiment  takes  the  helm.  It 
would  be  as  easy  to  argue  with  a  con- 
flagration as  with  unbalanced  zeal. 
The  amazing  violence  of  the  English 
militant  suffragists,  a  violence  at  once 
puerile  and  malicious,  like  the  rioting 
of  bad  children,  affords  the  liveliest 
possible  example  of  untrammeled  emo- 
tionalism. A  rudimentary  sense  of  hu- 
mor would  prevent  such  absurdities,  a 
rudimentary  sense  of  proportion  would 
forbid  such  crimes.  Michelet  defined 
woman  as  a  creature  always  feeble  and 
often  furious;  but  although,  individu- 
ally, her  feebleness  may  cost  her  dear, 
collectively,  she  loses  only  through  her 
fury.  The  vision  of  a  good  cause  de- 
bauched by  hysteria  is  familiar  to  all 
students  of  history;  but  it  is  no  less 
melancholy  for  being  both  recognizable 
and  ridiculous. 

Perhaps  a  moderate  knowledge  of  his- 
tory—  which,  though  discouraging,  is 
also  enlightening  —  might  prove  serv- 
iceable to  all  the  enthusiasts  who  are 
engaged  in  making  over  the  world.  So 
many  of  them  (in  this  country  at  least) 
talk  and  write  as  if  nothing  in  particu- 
lar had  happened  between  the  Deluge 
and  the  Civil  War.  A  lady  lecturer, 
very  prominent  in  social  work,  made 
last  year  the  gratifying  announcement 
that  'the  greatest  discovery  of  the 
nineteenth  century  is  woman's  discov- 
ery of  herself.  It  is  only  within  the  last 
fifty  years  that  it  has  come  to  be  real- 
ized that  a  woman  is  human,  and  has 
a  right  to  think  and  act  for  herself.' 

Now,  after  all,  the  past  cannot  be  a 
closed  page,  even  to  one  so  exclusively 
concerned  with  the  present.  A  little 
less  lecturing,  a  little  more  reading,  and 
such  baseless  generalizations  would  be 
impossible,  even  on  that  stronghold 
of  ignorance,  the  platform.  If  women 
failed  to  discover  themselves  a  hundred 


THE  COST  OF  MODERN  SENTIMENT 


615 


or  a  hundred  and  fifty  years  ago,  it  was 
because  they  had  never  been  lost;  it 
was  because  their  important  activities 
left  them  no  leisure  for  self-contempla- 
tion. Yet  Miss  Jane  Addams,  who  has 
toiled  so  long  and  so  nobly  for  the  bet- 
tering of  social  conditions,  and  whose 
work  lends  weight  to  her  words,  dis- 
plays in  A  New  Conscience  and  an  An- 
cient Evil  the  same  placid  indifference 
to  all  that  history  has  to  tell.  What 
can  we  say  or  think  when  confronted 
by  such  an  astounding  passage  as  this? 

*  Formerly  all  that  the  best  woman 
possessed    was    a    negative    chastity, 
which  had  been  carefully  guarded  by 
her  parents  and  duennas.  The  chastity 
of  the  modern  woman  of  self-directed 
activity  and  of  a  varied  circle  of  inter- 
ests, which  give  her  an  acquaintance 
with  many  men  as  well  as  women,  has 
therefore  a  new  value  and  importance 
in  the  establishment  of  social  stand- 
ards.' 

*  Negative  chastity!5    *  Parents  and 
duennas!'     Was    there   ever   such   a 
maiden  outlook  upon  life!   It  was  the 
chastity  of  the  married  woman  upon 
which  rested  the  security  of  the  civi- 
lized world;  — that  chastity  which  all 
men  prized,  and  most  men  assailed, 
which  was  preserved  in  the  midst  of 
temptations  unknown  in  our  decorous 
age,    and   held    inviolate   by   women 
whose  'acquaintance  with  many  men' 
was  at  least  as  intimate  and  potent  as 
anything  experienced  to-day.     Com- 
mittees and  congresses  are  not  the  only 
meeting-grounds  for  the  sexes.    'Re- 
member,' says  M.  Taine,  writing  of  a 
time  which  was  not  so  long  ago  that  it 
need  be  forgotten,  'remember  that  dur- 
ing all  these  years  women  were  para- 
mount.   They  set  the  social  tone,  led 
society,    and    thereby   guided    public 
opinion.    When  they  appeared  in  the 
vanguard  of  political  progress,  we  may 
be  sure  that  the  men  were  following.' 

We  might  be  sure  of  the  same  thing 


to-day,  were  it  not  for  the  tendency  of 
the  modern  woman  to  sever  her  rights 
and  wrongs  from  the  rights  and  wrongs 
of  men;  thereby  resembling  the  dispu- 
tant who,  being  content  to  receive  half 
the  severed  baby,  was  adjudged  by  the 
wise  Solomon  to  be  unworthy  of  any 
baby  at  all.  Half  a  baby  is  every  whit 
as  valuable  as  the  half-measure  of  re- 
form which  fails  to  take  into  impartial 
consideration  the  inseparable  claims  of 
men  and  women.  Even  in  that  most 
vital  of  all  reforms,  the  crusade  against 
social  evils,  the  welfare  of  both  sexes 
unifies  the  subject.  Here  again  we  are 
swayed  by  our  anger  at  the  indifference 
of  an  earlier  generation,  at  the  hard 
and  healthy  attitude  of  men  like  Hux- 
ley, who  had  not  imagination  enough 
to  identify  the  possible  saint  with  the 
certain  sinner,  and  who  habitually  con- 
fined their  labors  to  fields  which  pro- 
mised sure  results.  '  In  my  judgment,' 
wrote  Huxley, '  a  domestic  servant,  who 
is  perhaps  giving  half  her  wages  to  sup- 
port her  old  parents,  is  more  worthy  of 
help  than  half  a  dozen  Magdalens.' 

If  we  are  forced  to  choose  between 
them,  —  yes.  But  our  respect  for  the 
servant's  self-respecting  life,  with  its 
decent  restraints  and  its  purely  normal 
activities,  need  not  necessarily  harden 
our  hearts  against  the  women  whom 
Mr.  Huxley  called  Magdalens,  nor 
against  those  whom  we  luridly  desig- 
nate as  'white  slaves.'  No  work  under 
heaven  is  more  imperative  than  the 
rescue  of  young  and  innocent  girls;  no 
crime  is  more  dastardly  than  the  sale 
of  their  youth  and  innocence;  no  char- 
ity is  greater  than  that  which  lifts  the 
sinner  from  her  sin.  But  the  fact  that 
we  habitually  apply  the  term  'white 
slave'  to  the  willful  prostitute  as  well 
as  to  the  entrapped  child,  shows  that  a 
powerful  and  popular  sentiment  is  ab- 
solved from  the  shackles  of  accuracy. 
Also  that  this  absolution  confuses  the 
minds  of  men.  The  sentimentalist 


616 


THE  COST  OF  MODERN   SENTIMENT 


pities  the  prostitute  as  a  victim,  the 
sociologist  abhors  her  as  a  menace.  The 
sentimentalist  conceives  that  men  prey, 
and  women  are  preyed  upon;  the  soci- 
ologist, aware  that  evil  men  and  women 
prey  upon  one  another  ceaselessly  and 
ravenously,  has  no  measure  of  tender- 
ness for  either.  The  sentimentalist 
clings  tenaciously  to  the  association  of 
youth  with  innocence;  the  sociologist 
knows  that  even  the  age-limit  which  the 
law  fixes  as  a  boundary-line  of  inno- 
cence has  no  corresponding  restriction 
in  fact.  It  is  inconceivable  that  so  many 
books  and  pamphlets  dealing  with  this 
subject  —  books  and  pamphlets  now 
to  be  found  on  every  library  shelf,  and 
in  the  hands  of  young  and  old  — 
should  dare  to  ignore  the  balance  of 
depravity,  the  swaying  of  the  pendulum 
of  vice. 

It  was  thought  and  said  a  few  years 
ago  that  the  substitution  of  organized 
charities  for  the  somewhat  haphazard 
benevolence  of  our  youth  would  elim- 
inate sentiment,  just  as  it  eliminated 
human  and  personal  relations  with  the 
poor.  It  was  thought  and  said  that  the 
steady  advance  of  women  in  commer- 
cial and  civic  life  would  correct  the 
sentimental  bias  which  only  Mr.  Ches- 
terton has  failed  to  observe  in  our  sex. 
No  one  who  reads  books,  or  listens  to 
speeches,  or  indulges  in  the  pleasures 
of  conversation,  can  any  longer  cherish 
these  illusions.  No  one  can  fail  to  see 
that  sentiment  is  the  motor-power 
which  drives  us  to  intemperate  words 
and  actions,  which  weakens  our  judg- 
ment, and  destroys  our  sense  of  pro- 
portion. The  current  phraseology,  the 
current  criticisms,  the  current  enthu- 
siasms of  the  day,  all  betray  an  excess 
of  emotionalism.  I  pick  up  a  table  of 
statistics,  furnishing  economic  data, 
and  this  is  what  I  read.  'Case  3.  Two 
children  under  five.  Mother  shortly 
expecting  the  supreme  trial  of  woman- 
hood/ That  is  the  way  to  write  stories 


and,  possibly,  sermons;  but  it  is  not  the 
way  to  write  reports.  I  pick  up  a  news- 
paper, and  learn  that  an  English  gen- 
tleman has  made  the  interesting  an- 
nouncement that  he  is  a  reincarnation 
of  one  of  the  Pharaohs,  and  that  an  at- 
tentive and  credulous  band  of  disciples 
are  gathering  wisdom  from  his  lips. 
I  pick  up  a  very  serious  and  very  well- 
written  book  on  the  Bronte  sisters,  and 
am  told  that  if  I  would  *  touch  the  very 
heart  of  the  mystery  that  was  Char- 
lotte Bronte '  (I  had  never  been  aware 
that  there  was  anything  mysterious 
about  this  famous  lady),  I  will  find  it 
—  save  the  mark!  —  in  her  passionate 
love  for  children. 

*  We  are  face  to  face  here,  not  with  a 
want,  but  with  an  abyss,  depth  beyond 
depth  of  tenderness,  and  longing,  and 
frustration;  with  a  passion  that  found 
no  clear  voice  in  her  works,  because 
it  was  one  with  the  elemental  nature 
in  her,  undefined,  unuttered,  unutter- 
able!' 

It  was  certainly  unuttered.  It  was 
not  even  hinted  at  in  Miss  Bronte's 
novels,  nor  in  her  voluminous  corre- 
spondence. Her  attitude  toward  child- 
ren —  so  far  as  it  found  expression  — 
was  the  arid  but  pardonable  attitude 
of  one  who  had  been  their  reluctant 
caretaker  and  teacher.  If,  as  we  are 
now  told,  *  there  were  moments  when  it 
was  pain  for  Charlotte  to  see  the  child- 
ren born  of  and  possessed  by  other 
women,'  there  were  certainly  hours  — 
so  much  she  makes  clear  to  us  —  in 
which  the  business  of  looking  after 
them  wearied  her  beyond  her  powers  of 
endurance.  It  is  true  that  Miss  Bronte 
said  a  few,  a  very  few,  friendly  words 
about  these  little  people.  She  did  not, 
like  Swift,  propose  that  babies  should 
be  cooked  and  eaten.  But  this  temper- 
ate regard,  this  restricted  benevolence, 
gives  us  no  excuse  for  wallowing  in 
sentiment  at  her  expense. 

'If  some  virtues  are  new,  all  vices 


THE   SILVER    RIVER 


617 


are  old.'  We  can  reckon  the  cost  of  mis- 
directed emotions  by  the  price  paid  for 
them  in  the  past.  We  know  the  full 
significance  of  that  exaggerated  sym- 
pathy which  grows  hysterical  over  ani- 
mals it  should  try  in  soberness  to  save; 
which  accuses  the  consumer  of  strange 
cruelties  to  the  producer;  which  con- 
dones law-breaking,  and  exempts  a 
*  cause'  from  all  restraints  of  decency; 
which  confuses  moral  issues,  ignores 
experience,  and  insults  the  intelligence 
of  mankind. 


The  reformer  whose  heart  is  in  the 
right  place,  but  whose  head  is  else- 
where, represents  a  waste  of  force;  and 
we  cannot  afford  any  waste  in  the  con- 
servation of  honor  and  goodness.  We 
cannot  even  afford  errors  of  taste  and 
of  judgment.  The  business  of  leading 
lives  morally  worthy  of  men  is  neither 
simple,  nor  easy,  nor  new.  And  there 
are  moments  when,  with  the  ageing 
Fontenelle,  we  sigh  and  say,  *I  am  be- 
ginning to  see  things  as  they  are.  It  is 
surely  time  for  me  to  die.' 


THE  SILVER  RIVER 


BY   GRACE   FALLOW   NORTON 


FAREWELL,  I  said,  sweet  meadow-grass; 
Farewell,  I  let  the  light  wind  pass; 
I  watch  the  shadows,  one  by  one; 
Farewell,  thou  gold  slow-setting  sun. 

I  go  within  and  fold  my  hands. 
Oh,  wondrous  are  the  day's  bright  lands 
And  evening's  robe  of  roseate  hem, 
But  dearer  now  my  dreams  of  them. 

The  stars  I  know  creep  to  the  sky; 
The  moon  will  soon  be  swimming  high; 
O  light-filled  pools  and  silver  streams! 
O  silver  river  of  my  dreams ! 


INSECTS  AND  GREEK  POETRY 


BY   LAFCADIO   HEARN 


[The  English-speaking  world  that  knows  of  Lafcadio  Heara  as  the  subtlest  interpreter  of  the  life 
and  thought  of  Japan  is  less  familiar  with  the  important  work  done  by  Heara  in  conveying  to  his 
Japanese  students  the  spirit  of  the  West.  His  method  always  was  to  select  for  discussion  with  his 
classes  in  English  literature  those  topics  and  subjects  on  the  surface  least  alien  from  the  Japanese 
mind,  and  thus  by  a  delicate  initiation  to  lead  the  class  to  a  better  comprehension  of  Western  ways 
of  thought  and  feeling.  In  the  Appendix  to  the  official  Life  and  Letters  of  Hearn  was  printed  an 
excellent  illustration  of  his  method,  a  lecture  on  *  Naked  Poetry.'  Here,  by  the  close  examination 
of  certain  poems  by  William  Allingham,  Kingsley,  and  the  exquisite  French  lyric  beginning, 

La  vie  est  vaine, 
Un  peu  d'amour, 

—  poems  almost  Japanese  in  their  compelling  simplicity,  —  he  proceeded  by  suggestive  parallels  and 
nice  distinctions  to  give  his  students  an  insight  into  the  essential  nature  of  European  poetry.  A  still 
better  example  of  the  tact  of  his  method  and  the  charm  of  his  manner  is  to  be  found  in  the  lec- 
ture on  '  Insects  and  Greek  Poetry,'  which  is  here  printed  from  his  manuscript.  The  Japanese 
habit  of  keeping  musical  insects  had  deeply  impressed  Hearn's  imagination,  and  had  been  the 
subject  of  one  of  his  best-known  essays,  'Insect  Musicians,'  which  is  printed  in  his  Exotics  and 
Retrospectives.  To  his  richly  stored  mind,  this  custom  recalled  the  numerous  references  to  the 
singing  of  insects  in  the  Greek  Anthology,  and  suggested  a  fresh  means  of  opening  Japanese  minds 
to  Western  imagery.  The  result  was  this  charming  and  illuminating  lecture.  —  THE  EDITORS.] 


THE  subject  which  I  have  chosen 
for  to-day's  lecture  might  seem  to  you 
rather  remote  from  the  topic  of  English 
literature,  at  least,  from  the  topic  of 
English  literature  as  taught  in  Japan. 
Here  the  Chinese  language  represents, 
in  your  long  course  of  studies,  what 
Greek  and  Latin  represent  to  the  Eng- 
lish student.  But  in  England,  or  in 
any  advanced  European  country,  the 
subject  would  not  be  remote  from  the 
study  of  the  native  literature,  because 
that  is  carried  on  from  first  to  last  upon 
a  classical  foundation.  Any  good  Greek 
scholar  knows  something  about  the 
Greek  poetry  on  the  subject  of  insects, 
and  knows  how  to  use  that  poetry  in 
compositions  of  his  own;  so  I  think 
that  this  departure  from  our  routine 
work  is  quite  justified,  and  I  believe 

618 


that  you  will  find  the  subject  inter- 
esting. 

Last  year,  when  lecturing  about 
Keats's  poems,  I  remarked  to  you  that 
he  was  one  of  the  very  few  English 
poets  who  wrote  about  singing  insects 
— I  refer,  of  course,  to  his  poem  on  the 
cricket.  Most  modern  European  poetry 
is  barren  on  the  subject  of  crickets, 
cicadse,  and  insects  generally  —  with 
the  exception  of  butterflies  and  bees. 
Tennyson,  indeed,  has  given  attention 
to  dragon  flies  and  other  insects.  But, 
as  a  rule,  it  is  not  to  European  poetry 
of  modern  times  that  we  can  look  for 
anything  of  an  interesting  kind  in 
regard  to  musical  insects.  We  must  go 
back  to  the  old  Greek  civilization  for 
that.  You  know  that  the  old  Greeks 
were  endowed  far  beyond  any  modern 


INSECTS  AND  GREEK  POETRY 


619 


races  of  the  West:  their  literature,  their 
arts,  their  conception  of  life,  have 
never  been  equaled  in  later  times,  and 
probably  will  not  be  equaled  again  for 
thousands  of  years.  And  it  should  be 
interesting  to  the  Japanese  student  of 
literature  to  know  that  his  own  people 
accord  with  the  old  Greeks  in  their 
appreciation  of  insect  music  as  one  of 
the  great  charms  of  country  life. 

Most  of  the  Greek  poems  about  in- 
sects are  to  be  found  in  what  is  called 
the  Greek  Anthology.  Besides  the  dis- 
tinct works  of  great  authors  which  have 
come  down  to  us,  there  have  been  pre- 
served collections  of  very  short  poems 
—  collections  which  were  made  by  the 
Greek,  themselves,  or  by  Greek  schol- 
ars of  a  later  day,  many  centuries  ago. 
None  of  these  collections  are  complete: 
a  great  deal  has  been  lost  —  to  the 
eternal  regret  of  all  lovers  of  poetry. 
But  those  that  we  have  represent  an 
immense  variety  of  little  poems  upon 
an  immense  variety  of  subjects;  and 
among  these  are  a  number  of  poems 
about  insects.  To-day  I  want  to  quote 
some  of  these  to  you,  in  an  English 
prose  translation.  There  are  many  poet- 
ical translations,  also;  but  no  modern 
poet  can  reproduce  the  real  charm  of 
the  Greek  verse.  Therefore  it  is  just  as 
well  that  we  should  read  .only  the 
plain  prose. 

The  greater  number  of  these  poems 
are  between  two  thousand  and  twenty- 
five  hundred  years  old.  Some  of  them 
were  composed  in  cities  that  no  longer 
exist;  some  of  them  were  written  by 
persons  whose  names  have  been  lost 
forever;  this  makes  them  all  the  more 
precious.  They  show  us  how  very 
much  like  modern  human  nature  was 
the  human  nature  of  those  vanished 
people.  And  they  show  us  also  that 
there  were  many  points  of  resemblance 
in  the  old  Greek  and  in  the  Japanese 
character. 

It  is  possible  that  the  Greeks  used 


to  keep  insects  in  cages,  for  the  pleas- 
ure of  hearing  them  sing.  We  have  in 
the  first  Idyl  of  Theocritus  a  descrip- 
tion of  a  boy  taking  charge  of  a  vine- 
yard to  protect  the  grapes  from  the 
foxes,  and  occupying  his  time  by  *  plait- 
ing a  pretty  locust-cage  with  stalks  of 
asphodel,  and  fitting  it  with  reeds.' 
Also  we  have  in  one  of  the  poems  of 
Meleager  a  reference  to  the  feeding  of 
crickets  with  leeks  cut  up  very  small  — 
which  would  seem  to  show  that  the 
experience  of  Greeks  and  Japanese  in 
the  feeding  of  certain  kinds  of  insects 
was  much  the  same.  A  leek,  you  know, 
is  a  kind  of  small  onion,  and  the  soft 
inner  part  of  a  similar  plant  is  used  in 
Tokyo  to-day  by  insect-feeders. 

The  poems  refer  principally  to  cicadae, 
musical  grasshoppers,  and  some  kinds  of 
night  crickets,  and  these  three  classes 
of  musical  insects  correspond  tolerably 
well  to  three  classes  of  Japanese  musi- 
cal insects.  But  whereas,  in  Japan,  the 
sound  made  by  the  semi  is  considered 
to  be  too  loud  in  most  cases  to  be  musi- 
cal, it  is  especially  the  cicada  that  is 
celebrated  in  the  Greek  poem.  This 
fact  would  not,  however,  indicate  a 
real  difference  in  the  musical  taste  of 
the  two  races;  it  would  rather  indicate 
a  difference  in  the  species  of  the  insect. 
Probably  the  Greek  semi  were  much 
less  noisy  than  their  relations  in  the 
Far  East.  But,  at  the  same  time,  per- 
haps most  beautiful  of  all  the  Greek 
poems  about  insects  is  a  poem  about 
a  night  cricket.  It  is  attributed  to  Me- 
leager —  one  of  the  sweetest  singers 
of  the  later  Greek  literature. 

*O  thou  cricket  that  cheatest  me  of 
my  regrets,  the  soother  of  slumber;  — 
O  thou  cricket  that  art  the  muse  of 
ploughed  fields,  and  art  with  shrill 
wings  the  self-formed  imitation  of  the 
lyre,  chirrup  me  something  pleasant, 
while  beating  thy  vocal  wings  with  thy 
feet.  How  I  wish,  O  cricket,  that  thou 
wouldst  release  me  from  the  troubles 


620 


INSECTS  AND  GREEK  POETRY 


of  much  sleepless  care,  weaving  the 
thread  of  a  voice  that  causes  love  to 
wander  away!  And  I  will  give  thee  for 
morning  gifts  a  leek  ever  fresh,  and 
drops  of  dew,  cut  up  small  for  thy 
mouth.' 

The  great  beauty  of  this  little  piece 
is  in  the  line  about  *  weaving  the  thread 
of  a  voice  that  causes  love  to  wander 
away';  listening  to  the  charm  of  the 
insect's  song  at  night,  the  poet  is  able 
to  forget  his  troubles.  The  expression, 
*  thread  of  a  voice,'  exquisitely  repre- 
sents what  we  would  call  to-day  the 
thin  quality  of  the  little  creature's 
song.  It  is  also  evident  that  the  Greeks 
observed  such  insects  very  closely  and 
noticed  how  their  music  was  made. 
The  cricket  is  correctly  described  as 
striking  its  wings  with  its  feet.  But  in 
the  cicada  the  stridulatory  organ  is  not 
in  the  wings  but  in  the  breast;  and  the 
old  poets  observed  this  fact  also. 

It  would  also  appear  that  Greek 
children  kept  insects  as  pets,  and 
made  little  graves  for  them  when  they 
died,  just  as  one  sees  Japanese  child- 
ren doing  to-day.  Here  is  a  little  poem 
twenty-six  hundred  years  old,  written 
by  a  Greek  girl  of  Sicily,  a  poetess 
named  Anyte.  It  is  the  epitaph  of  a 
locust  and  a  tettix  —  by  which  word 
we  may  understand  cicada.  'For  a  lo- 
cust, the  nightingale  amongst  ploughed 
fields,  and  for  the  tettix,  whose  bed  is 
in  the  oak,  did  Myro  make  a  common 
tomb,  after  the  damsel  had  dropped 
a  maiden  tear;  for  Hades,  hard  to  be 
persuaded,  had  gone  away,  taking  with 
her  two  playthings.' 

How  freshly  do  the  tears  of  this  little 
girl  still  shine  to-day,  after  the  passing 
of  twenty-six  hundred  years !  There  is 
another  poem  on  the  very  same  sub- 
ject, by  a  later  poet,  in  the  Anthology, 
—  also  celebrating  the  grief  of  Myro. 

'For  a  locust  and  a  tettix  has  Myro 
placed  this  monument,  after  throwing 
upon  both  a  little  dust  with  her  hands, 


and  weeping  affectionately  at  the 
funeral  pyre;  for  Hades  had  carried 
off  the  male  songster,  and  Proserpine 
the  other.' 

But  if  little  girls  in  old  Greece  were 
so  tender-hearted  as  this,  I  am  sorry 
to  tell  you  that  little  boys  were  not. 
They  caught  cicadse  much  as  little  boys 
in  Tokyo  to-day  catch  semi,  and  they 
were  not  very  merciful,  if  we  can  judge 
from  the  following  poem,  intended  to 
represent  the  death-song  of  a  cicada : 

'No  longer  shall  I  delight  myself  by 
singing  out  the  song  from  my  quick- 
moving  wings;  for  I  have  fallen  into 
the  savage  hand  of  a  boy,  who  seized 
me  unexpectedly,  as  I  was  sitting  under 
the  green  leaves.' 

You  must  know  that  the  cicada 
received  religious  respect  in  some  parts 
of  Greece;  it  was  believed  to  be  the 
favorite  insect  of  the  goddess  of  Wis- 
dom, and  it  was  often  represented  in 
statues  of  the  goddess.  I  do  not  mean 
that  the  Greeks  worshiped  it,  but  they 
had  many  religious  traditions  concern- 
ing it.  At  one  time  the  Athenian  women 
used  to  wear  cicadas  of  gold  in  their 
hair;  and  this  ornament  was  afterwards 
adopted  by  Roman  ladies.  As  for  the 
merits  of  the  insect  we  have  a  very 
curious  little  poem  in  which  it  is  cele- 
brated as  a  favorite  of  the  gods:  'We 
deem  thee  happy,  O  cicada,  because, 
having  drunk  like  a  king  a  little  dew, 
thou  dost  chirrup  on  the  tops  of  trees. 
For  all  those  things  are  thine  that  thou 
seest  in  the  fields,  and  whatever  the 
seasons  produce.  Yet  thou  art  a  friend 
of  land-tillers,  to  no  one  doing  any 
harm.  Thou  art  held  in  honor  by  mor- 
tals as  the  pleasant  harbinger  of  song. 
The  muses  love  thee.  Phoebus  himself 
loves  thee  and  has  gifted  thee  with  a 
shrill  song,  and  old  age  does  not  wear 
thee  down.  O  thou  clever  one,  — 
earth-born/song-loving,  without  suffer- 
ing, having  flesh  without  blood,  —  thou 
art  nearly  equal  to  the  gods,' 


INSECTS  AND  GREEK  POETRY 


621 


Another  poet  speaks  more  definitely 
about  the  relation  of  the  insect  to 
the  goddess  of  Wisdom  —  putting  his 
words  into  the  mouth  of  the  insect. 
'  Not  only  sitting  upon  lofty  trees  do  I 
know  how  to  sing,  warmed  with  the 
great  heat  of  summer,  an  unpaid  min- 
strel to  wayfaring  man,  and  sipping 
the  vapor  of  dew,  that  is  like  woman's 
milk.  But  even  upon  the  spear  of 
Athene,  with  her  beautiful  helmet,  will 
you  see  me,  the  tettix,  seated.  For  as 
much  as  we  are  loved  by  the  Muses,  so 
much  is  Athene  by  us.  For  the  virgin 
has  established  a  prize  for  melody.' 

Meleager  also  celebrates  the  tettix: 

'Thou  vocal  tettix,  drunk  with 
drops  of  dew,  thou  singest  the  muse 
that  lives  in  the  country,  thou  dost 
prattle  in  the  desert,  and  sitting  with 
thy  serrated  limbs  on  the  tops  of  pet- 
als, thou  givest  out  the  melody  of  the 
lyre  with  thy  dusky  skin!  Come  thou, 
O  friend,  and  speak  some  new  playful 
thing  to  the  wood  nymphs,  and  chirrup 
a  strain  responsive  to  Pan,  in  order 
that,  after  flying  from  love,  I  may  find 
mid-day  sleep  here,  reclining  under  a 
shady  plane  tree.' 

But  the  most  remarkable  poem  about 
a  cicada  in  the  whole  Greek  collec- 
tion is  a  little  piece  twenty-three  hun- 
dred years  old,  attributed  to  the  poet 
Evenus.  It  was  written  upon  the  occa- 
sion of  seeing  a  nightingale  catching  a 
cicada.  Evenus  calls  the  nightingale, 
*  Attic  maiden,'  because  in  Greek  my- 
thology the  nightingale  was  a  daughter 
of  an  ancient  king  of  Attica;  her  name 
was  Philomela,  and  she  was  turned  into 
a  bird  by  the  gods  out  of  pity  for  her 
great  sorrow. 

This  is  the  poem :  — 

'  Thou,  Attic  maiden,  honey-fed,  hast 
chirping  seized  a  chirping  cicada,  and 
bearest  it  to  thy  unfledged  young  — 
thou,  a  twitterer,  the  twitterer;  thou, 
the  winged,  the  well- winged;  thou,  a 
stranger,  the  stranger;  thou,  a  sum- 


mer child,  the  summer  child!  Wilt 
thou  not  quickly  throw  it  away?  For 
it  is  not  right,  it  is  not  just,  that  those 
engaged  in  song  should  perish  by  the 
mouths  of  those  engaged  in  song!' 

This  poem  has  been  put  into  Eng- 
lish verse  by  several  hands.  Most  of 
the  verse  translations  are  very  disap- 
pointing; but  in  this  case  one  transla- 
tion happens  to  be  tolerably  good,  so 
that  we  may  quote  it :  — 

Honey-nurtured  Attic  maiden, 
Wherefore  to  thy  brood  dost  wing 
With  the  shrill  cicada  laden? 
'T  is,  like  thee,  a  prattling  thing, 
'T  is  a  sojourner  and  stranger, 
And  a  summer  child,  like  thee. 
'T  is,  like  thee,  a  winged  ranger 
Of  the  air's  immensity. 
From  thy  bill  this  instant  fling  her,  — 
'T  is  not  proper,  just,  or  good, 
That  a  little  ballad-singer 
Should  be  killed  for  singer's  food. 

Another  ancient  poem  represents  the 
insect  caught  in  a  spider's  web  and 
crying  there  until  the  poet  himself  came 
to  the  rescue. 

'A  spider,  having  woven  its  thin 
web  with  its  slim  feet,  caught  a  tettix 
hampered  in  the  intricate  net.  I  did 
not,  however,  on  seeing  the  young 
thing  that  loves  music,  run  by  it,  while 
[it  was]  making  a  lament  in  the  thin 
fetters,  but,  freeing  it  from  the  net,  I 
relieved  it,  and  spoke  to  it  thus,  "Be 
free,  thou  who  singest  with  a  musical 
voice!'" 

Like  the  poets  of  the  Far  East,  the 
Greek  singers  especially  celebrated  the 
harmlessness  of  the  cicada.  We  have 
already  had  one  example  in  the  poem 
beginning,  *  We  deem  you  happy,'  etc., 
by  the  great  poet  Anacreon.  Here  is 
another  very  old  composition,  of  which 
the  authorship  is  not  known. 

*  Why,  O  Shepherds,  do  ye  drag,  by  a 
shameless  captivity,  from  dewy  boughs, 
me  a  cicada,  the  lover  of  solitude, 
the  roadside  songster  of  the  nymphs, 
chirping  shrilly  in  mid-day  heat  on  the 


622 


INSECTS  AND  GREEK  POETRY 


mountains  and  in  the  shady  groves. 
Behold  the  thrush  and  the  blackbird  — 
behold  how  many  starlings  are  plun- 
derers of  the  fields!  It  is  right  to  take 
the  destroyers  of  fruits.  Kill  them. 
What  grudging  is  there  of  leaves  and 
grassy  dew?' 

Occasionally,  too,  we  find  the  Greek 
poet,  like  the  Japanese,  compassionat- 
ing the  insects  of  autumn,  and  lament- 
ing for  their  death.  The  following 
example  is  said  to  have  been  composed 
by  an  ancient  writer  called  Mnasolcas : 
'  No  more  with  wings  shrill  sounding 
shalt  thou  sing,  O  locust,  along  the 
fertile  furrows  settling;  nor  me  reclin- 
ing under  shady  foliage  shalt  thou 
delight,  striking,  with  dusky  wings,  a 
pleasant  melody!' 

By  the  word  locust  here  is  probably 
meant  a  kind  of  musical  grasshopper  — 
of  the  same  class  as  those  insects  which 
are  so  common  in  this  country.  In 
England  and  in  America  the  word 
locust  commonly  refers  to  an  insect 
frequenting  trees  rather  than  grass. 

We  may  now  attempt  a  few  remarks 
upon  the  social  signification  of  this  old 
Greek  poetry,  and  its  charming  sug- 
gestion of  refined  sensibility  and  kind- 
ness. 

You  will  not  find  Roman  poets  writ- 
ing about  insects  —  at  least  not  until 
a  very  late  day,  and  then  only  in  imi- 
tation of  the  Greeks.  This  little  fact, 
insignificant  as  it  may  seem,  serves  us 
as  an  illustration  of  the  vast  differ- 
ence in  the  character  of  the  two  races. 
Grand  in  many  respects  the  Romans 
were  —  splendid  soldiers,  matchless 
architects,  excellent  rulers.  They  had 
all  the  qualities  of  power  and  foresight, 
and  executive  ability.  But  at  no  time 
did  they  ever  reach  the  standard  of 
old  Greek  refinement,  —  not  even  after 
they  had  been  studying  Greek  litera- 
ture and  philosophy  for  hundreds  of 
years.  Something  of  the  savage  and  the 
ferocious  always  remained  in  Roman 


character,  which  finally  developed  into 
the  most  monstrous  forms  of  cruelty 
that  the  world  has  ever  known,  the 
cruelty  of  an  age  when  the  greatest 
pleasure  of  life  was  the  spectacle  of 
death. 

On  the  other  hand,  even  in  the  times 
of  their  degradation  under  Roman 
rule,  the  Greeks  could  not  be  coldly 
cruel.  They  resisted  the  introduc- 
tion of  the  Roman  games  into  their 
civilization;  they  opposed,  whenever  it 
was  possible,  the  sentiment  of  human- 
ity and  pity  to  gladiatorial  shows.  A 
people  who  enjoyed  seeing  men  killing 
each  other  for  sport  could  not  have 
written  poems  about  insects.  And  a 
people  that  wrote  poems  about  insects 
could  not  find  pleasure  in  cruelty. 

Indeed,  I  think  that  the  capacity  to 
enjoy  the  music  of  insects  and  all  that 
it  signifies  in  the  great  poem  of  nature 
tells  very  plainly  of  goodness  of  heart, 
aesthetic  sensibility,  a  perfectly  healthy 
state  of  mind.  All  this  the  Greeks 
certainly  had.  What  most  impresses 
us  in  the  tone  of  their  literature,  in  the 
feeling  of  their  art,  in  the  charm  of 
their  conception  of  life,  is  the  great 
joyousness  of  the  Greek  nature,  —  a 
joyousness  fresh  as  that  of  a  child,  — 
combined  with  a  power  of  deep  think- 
ing, in  which  it  had  no  rival.  Those 
old  Greeks,  though  happy  as  children 
and  as  kindly,  were  very  great  philoso- 
phers, to  whom  we  go  for  instruction 
even  at  this  day.  What  the  world  now 
most  feels  in  need  of  is  the  return 
of  that  old  Greek  spirit  of  happiness 
and  of  kindness.  WTe  can  think  deep- 
ly enough;  but  all  our  thinking  only 
serves,  it  would  seem,  to  darken  our 
lives  instead  of  brightening  them. 

Now,  as  I  have  said  before,  there 
was  very  much  in  the  old  Greek  life 
that  resembled  the  old  Japanese  life; 
and  there  was  certainly  in  old  Japan  a 
certain  joyousness  and  gentleness  for 
which  the  Western  World  can  show  no 


INSECTS  AND  GREEK  POETRY 


623 


parallel  in  modern  times.  We  should 
have  to  go  back  to  the  Greek  times  for 
that.  Were  some  great  classic  scholar, 
perfectly  familiar  with  the  manners 
and  customs  of  this  country,  to  make  a 
literary  study  of  the  parallel  between 
Greek  and  Japanese  life  and  thought,  I 
am  sure  that  the  result  would  be  as 
surprising  as  it  would  be  charming. 
Although  the  two  religions  present 
great  differences,  the  religious  spirit 
offers  a  great  many  extraordinary  re- 
semblances. It  was  not  only  in  writing 
about  insects  that  the  Greek  poets 
came  close  to  the  Japanese  poets :  they 
came  close  to  them  also  in  thousands 
of  little  touches  of  an  emotional  kind, 
referring  to  the  gods,  the  fate  of  man, 
the  pleasure  of  festival  days,  those  sor- 
rows of  existence  also  which  have  been 
the  same  in  all  ages  of  humanity.  I 
wonder  if  you  remember  a  little  poem 
in  the  Man  yo  shu,  attributed  to  a 
Japanese  poet  named  Okura,  in  which, 
lamenting  the  death  of  his  little  son,  he 
begs  that  the  porter  of  the  underworld 
will  carry  the  little  ghost  upon  his 
shoulder  because  the  boy  is  too  little 
to  walk  so  far.  Is  it  not  strange  to  find 
a  Greek  poet  writing  the  very  same 
thing  thousands  of  years  ago?  The 
Greek  poet  was  called  Zonas  of  Sardis 
by  some  writers,  by  others  he  was  called 
Diodorus,  —  his  poem  is  addressed  to 
the  boatman  who  ferries  the  souls  of 
men  over  the  river  of  death. 

'Do  thou,  who  rowest  the  boat  of 
the  dead  in  the  water  of  this  lake  full 
of  reeds,  for  Hades,  having  a  painful 
task  to  do,  stretch  out,  dark  Charon, 
thy  hand  to  the  son  of  Cinyrus,  as  he 
mounts  on  the  ladder  by  the  gangway, 
and  receive  him.  For  his  sandals  will 
cause  the  lad  to  slip,  and  he  fears  to  put 
his  feet,  naked,  on  the  sands  of  the  shore.' 

Again,  just  as  it  is  the  custom  for 
little  Japanese  girls  to  make  offerings 
of  their  dolls  and  toys  to  some  divinity, 
in  various  parts  of  the  country,  so  we 


find  little  Greek  poems  written  to  cele- 
brate the  doing  of  the  same  thing  by 
Greek  girls,  ages  before  any  modern 
European  language  had  taken  shape. 
The  poet  says  in  one  of  these,  *  Timarete 
has  offered  up  her  tambourine  and  her 
ball  and  her  doll  and  her  doll's  dresses 
to  thee,  goddess,  and  do  thou,  O  god- 
dess, place  thy  hand  over  the  girl  and 
preserve  her  who  thus  devotes  herself 
unto  thee/ 

Hundreds  of  examples  of  this  kind 
might  be  quoted.  I  mention  them  only 
by  way  of  suggestion. 

At  the  beginning  of  this  lecture  I 
remarked  to  you  on  the  absence  of 
poems  about  insects  in  the  modern 
literature  of  the  West.  Of  course,  such 
absence  means  that  the  Western 
people  have  not  yet  perceived,  much 
less  understood,  certain  very  beautiful 
sides  of  nature, — in  spite  of  their  study 
of  the  Greek  poets.  There  may  be 
reasons  for  this  of  another  kind  than 
you  might  at  first  suppose.  It  would 
not  be  just  to  say  that  Western  people 
are  deficient  in  aesthetic  and  ethical 
sensibility,  —  though  they  have  not 
yet  reached  the  Greek  standard  in  that 
respect.  It  is  not  want  of  feeling;  it  is 
rather,  I  think,  inability  to  consider 
nature  in  the  largest  and  best  way,  be- 
cause of  the  restraints  that  the  Christ- 
ian religion  long  placed  upon  Western 
thought.  Christianity  gave  souls  only 
to  men,  —  not  to  animals  or  to  insects. 
Familiarity  with  animals,  however, 
compels  men  to  recognize  animal  intel- 
ligence even  while  not  daring  to  con- 
tradict the  opinion  of  the  Church. 

Familiarity  with  insects,  however, 
could  not  be  obtained  in  the  same  way, 
nor  have  the  like  result.  Even  when 
men  could  recognize  the  spirit  of  a 
horse  or  the  affectionate  intelligence  of 
a  dog,  they  would  still,  under  the 
influence  of  the  old  teaching,  think 
only  of  insects  as  automata.  In  modern 
times,  science  has  taught  them  better; 


624 


TURKISH    PICTURES 


but  I  am  speaking  of  popular  opinion. 
On  the  other  hand,  the  philosophy 
of  the  Far  East,  teaching  the  unity  of 
all  life,  would  impel  men  to  interest 
themselves  in  all  living  creatures,  — 
just  as  did  the  Greek  teaching  that  all 
forms  of  life  had  souls.  One  thing 
certainly  strikes  me  as  being  very 


interesting.  The  few  modern  writers, 
in  France  and  in  England,  who  write 
about  insect  music,  are  men  troubled 
by  the  mystery  of  the  universe  —  men 
who  have  faced  the  great  problems  of 
oriental  thought,  and  whose  ears  are 
therefore  open  to  all  the  whispers  of 
nature. 


TURKISH  PICTURES 


BY   H.    G.    DWIGHT 


SAN    STEFANO 

IT  is  strange  how  San  Stefano,  in 
spite  of  herself,  —  like  some  light  lit- 
tle person  involuntarily  caught  into  a 
tragedy,  —  seems  fated  to  be  historic. 
San  Stefano  is  a  suburb,  on  the  flat 
northwestern  shore  of  the  Marmora, 
that  tries  perseveringly  to  be  European 
and  gay.  San  Stefano  has  straight 
streets.  San  Stefano  has  not  very  se- 
rious-looking houses  standing  in  not 
very  interesting-looking  gardens.  San 
Stefano  has  a  yacht  club  whose 
members,  possessing  no  yachts,  spend 
most  of  their  time  dancing  and  play- 
ing bridge.  And  a  company  recently 
bought  land  and  planted  groves  on  the 
edge  of  San  Stefano,  with  the  idea  of 
making  a  little  Monte  Carlo  in  the 
Marmora.  Whether  San  Stefano  was 
trying  to  be  worldly  and  light-minded 
as  long  ago  as  1203,  when  Enrico  Dan- 
dolo,  Doge  of  Venice,  stopped  there 
with  the  men  of  the  Fourth  Crusade,  I 
cannot  say  —  nor  does  Villehardouin. 
But  the  Russians  camped  there  in  1878, 


under  circumstances  of  great  bitter- 
ness for  the  masters  of  San  Stefano. 
In  1909,  the  events  which  preceded  the 
fall  of  Abdul  Hamid  turned  the  yacht 
club  for  a  moment  into  the  parliament 
of  the  empire,  and  the  town  into  an 
armed  camp.  Turned  into  an  armed 
camp  again  at  the  outbreak  of  the  Bal- 
kan War,  San  Stefano  soon  became  a 
camp  of  a  more  dreadful  kind. 

I  did  not  see  San  Stefano,  myself, 
at  the  moment  of  its  greatest  horror. 
When  I  did  go  there,  one  cold  gray 
autumn  morning,  it  was  rather  unwil- 
lingly, feeling  myself  a  little  heroic,  at 
all  events  wanting  not  to  seem  too  un- 
heroic  in  the  eyes  of  the  war  corre- 
spondent who  invited  me  to  go.  I  did 
not  know  then,  in  my  ignorance,  that 
cholera  can  be  caught  only  through  the 
digestive  tract.  And  my  imagination 
was  still  full  of  the  grisly  stories  the 
war  correspondent  had  brought  back 
from  his  first  visit. 

There  was  nothing  too  grisly  to  be 
seen,  however,  as  we  landed  at  the  pier. 
Chiefly  to  be  seen  were  soldiers,  coated 
and  hooded  in  gray  as  usual,  who  were 
transferring  supplies  of  different  kinds 


TURKISH   PICTURES 


625 


from  some  small  ships  to  the  backs  of 
some  smaller  pack-animals.  The  cor- 
respondent accordingly  took  out  his 
camera.  But  he  pretended  to  focus  it 
on  me,  knowing  the  susceptibility  of 
the  Turks  in  the  matter  of  photogra- 
phy— a  susceptibility  which  has  been 
aggravated  by  the  war.  Seeing  that 
the  men  were  interested  rather  than 
displeased,  at  his  operations,  he  went 
about  posing  a  group  of  them.  Unfor- 
tunately, an  enterprising  young  police 
sergeant  appeared  at  that  moment. 
He  took  the  trouble  to  explain  to  us 
at  length  that  to  photograph  soldiers 
like  that,  at  the  pier,  with  hay  on  their 
clothes  and  their  caps  on  one  side,  was 
forbidden.  People  would  say,  when  we 
showed  the  photographs  in  our  coun- 
try, 'Ha!  That  is  a  Turkish  soldier!' 
and  get  a  wrong  impression  of  him. 
The  impression  I  got  was  of  his  size 
and  good  looks,  together  with  a  mild- 
ness amounting  to  languor.  I  don't 
know  whether  those  men  had  been 
through  the  two  great  battles  or 
whether  the  pest-house  air  of  the  place 
depressed  them.  A  Greek  who  wit- 
nessed our  discomfiture  came  up  and 
told  us  in  French  of  a  good  photograph 
we  could  take,  unmolested  by  the  po- 
lice, a  little  way  out  of  the  village, 
where  a  soldier  sat  dead  beside  the  rail- 
way track,  with  a  loaf  of  bread  in  his 
hands.  We  thanked  the  Greek,  but 
thought  we  would  not  trouble  him  to 
show  us  his  interesting  subject. 

As  we  went  on  into  the  village  we 
found  it  almost  deserted  except  by 
soldiers.  Every  resident  who  could  do 
so  had  run  away.  A  few  Greek  and 
Jewish  peddlers  hawked  small  wares 
about.  A  man  was  scattering  disin- 
fecting powder  in  the  street,  which  the 
wind  carried  in  clouds  into  our  faces. 
Patrols  strolled  up  and  down,  sentinels 
stood  at  doors,  other  soldiers,  more 
broken  than  any  I  had  seen  yet,  shuf- 
fled aimlessly  past.  We  followed  a 

VOL.  Ill -NO.  5 


street  that  led  toward  the  railway.  On 
the  sea  side  of  it  we  came  out  into  an 
open  space  inclosed  between  houses 
and  the  high  embankment.  The  grass 
that  tried  to  grow  in  this  space  was 
strewn  with  disinfecting  powder,  lemon- 
peel,  odds  and  ends  of  clothing,  —  a 
boot,  a  muddy  fez,  a  torn  girdle.  They 
were  what  was  left  of  the  soldiers  who 
strewed  the  ground  when  the  corre- 
spondent was  there  before.  There 
were  also  one  or  two  tents.  Through 
the  open  flap  of  the  nearest  one  we  saw 
a  soldier  lying  on  his  face,  ominously 
still. 

We  followed  our  road  through  the 
railway  embankment.  Sentries  were 
posted  on  either  side,  but  they  made 
no  objection  to  our  passing.  On  the 
farther  slope  of  the  bank  men  were 
burning  underbrush.  A  few  days  be- 
fore, their  fellows,  sent  back  from  the 
front,  had  been  dying  there  of  cholera. 
A  little  beyond  we  came  to  a  large 
Turkish  cholera  camp.  By  this  time 
all  the  soldiers  seemed  to  be  under 
cover.  We  passed  tents  that  were 
crowded  with  them,  some  lying  down, 
others  sitting  with  their  heads  in  their 
hands.  A  few  roamed  aimlessly  in  the 
open.  The  ground  was  in  an  indescrib- 
able condition.  No  one  was  trying  to 
make  the  men  use  the  latrines  which 
had  been  constructed  for  them.  I 
doubt  if  any  one  could  have  done  so. 
Some  of  the  soldiers,  certainly,  were  too 
weak  to  get  so  far.  After  all  they  had 
gone  through,  and  in  the  fellowship  of 
a  common  misery,  they  were  dulled  to 
the  decencies  which  a  Mohammedan  is 
quicker  than  another  to  observe. 

Near  the  station  some  long  wooden 
sheds  were  being  run  up  for  the  men 
already  in  San  Stefano,  and  for  those 
who  were  to  come.  We  made  haste  to 
get  by,  out  of  the  sickening  odor  and 
the  sense  of  a  secret  danger  lurking  in 
the  air  we  breathed.  We  crossed  the 
track  and  went  back  into  the  village, 


626 


TURKISH  PICTURES 


passing  other  soldiers.  Some  were 
crouching  or  lying  beside  the  road,  one 
against  the  other,  to  keep  warm.  I 
could  never  express  the  shrunken  effect 
the  big  fellows  made  inside  their  big 
overcoats,  with  doglike  eyes  staring 
out  of  sallow  faces*  Some  of  them  were 
slowly  eating  bread,  and  no  doubt  tak- 
ing in  infection  with  every  mouthful. 
Vendors  of  lemons  and  lemon-drops 
came  and  went  among  them.  Those 
they  seemed  to  crave  above  every- 
thing. In  front  of  the  railway  station 
were  men  who  had  apparently  just 
arrived  from  Hademkeuy.  They  were 
being  examined  by  army  doctors.  They 
submitted  like  children  while  the  doc- 
tors poked  into  their  eyes,  looked  at 
their  tongues,  and  divided  them  into 
different  categories.  In  a  leafless  beer- 
garden  opposite  the  station,  tents  were 
pitched,  sometimes  guarded  by  a  cor- 
don of  soldiers.  But  only  once  did  a 
sentry  challenge  us  or  otherwise  offer 
objection  to  our  going  about. 

We  finally  found  ourselves  at  the 
west  edge  of  the  village,  where  a  street 
is  bordered  on  one  side  by  open  fields. 
This  was  where,  until  a  few  days  before, 
hundreds,  perhaps  thousands,  of  men 
had  lain,  the  dying  among  the  dead, 
with  no  one  to  lift  a  finger  for  them. 
The  ground  was  strewn  with  such  de- 
bris of  them  as  we  had  seen  under  the 
railway  embankment,  but  more  thick- 
ly. And,  at  a  certain  distance  from  the 
road,  was  debris  more  dreadful  still.  At 
first  it  looked  like  a  heap  of  discarded 
clothing,  piled  there  to  be  burned  — 
until  I  saw  two  drawn-up  knees  stick- 
ing out  of  the  pile.  Then  I  made  out, 
here  and  there,  a  clenched  hand,  a 
gray  face.  A  little  omnibus  came  back 
from  somewhere  in  the  fields,  and  men 
began  loading  the  bodies  into  it.  The 
omnibus  was  so  short  that  most  of  the 
legs  stuck  out  of  the  door.  Sometimes 
they  had  stiffened  in  the  contortion  of 
some  last  agony.  And  half  the  legs 


were  bare.  In  their  weakness  the  poor 
fellows  had  foregone  the  use  of  the  long 
girdle  which  holds  together  every  man 
of  the  East,  and  as  they  were  pulled 
off  the  ground  or  hoisted  into  the  om- 
nibus their  clothes  fell  from  them.  We 
did  not  go  to  see  them  buried.  There 
had  been  so  many  of  them  that  the  sol- 
diers dug  trenches  no  deeper  than  they 
could  help.  The  consequence  was  that 
the  dogs  of  the  village  pawed  into  some 
of  the  graves.  The  dogs  afterwards 
went  mad  and  were  shot. 

There  are  times  when  a  man  is 
ashamed  to  be  alive,  and  that  time,  for 
me,  was  one  of  them.  What  had  I  done 
that  I  should  be  strolling  about  the 
world  with  good  clothes  on  my  back 
and  money  in  my  pocket  and  a  smug 
feeling  inside  of  me  of  being  a  little 
heroic,  and  what  had  those  poor  devils 
done  that  they  should  be  pitched,  half 
naked,  into  a  worn-out  omnibus  and 
shoveled  into  trenches  for  dogs  to 
gnaw  at?  They  had  left  their  homes 
in  order  to  save  their  country.  They 
had  suffered  privation  and  neglect; 
starved,  sick,  and  leaderless,  they  had 
fallen  back  before  an  enemy  better 
fed,  better  drilled,  better  officered, 
fighting  in  a  better  cause.  Attacked 
then  by  an  enemy  more  insidious  be- 
cause invisible,  they  had  been  dumped 
down  into  San  Stefano  and  penned 
there  like  so  many  cattle.  Some  of 
them  were  too  weak  to  get  out  of  the 
train  themselves  and  were  thrown  out, 
many  dying  where  they  fell.  Others 
crawled  into  the  village  in  search  of 
food  and  shelter.  A  few  found  tents  to 
crowd  into.  The  greater  number  lay 
where  they  could,  under  trees,  against 
houses,  side  by  side  in  fields,  and  so 
died.  Out  of  some  vague  idea  of 
keeping  the  water  uncontaminated  the 
sentries  were  ordered  to  keep  the  poor 
fellows  away  from  the  public  drin king- 
fountains,  and  hundreds  died  simply 
from  thirst. 


TURKISH  PICTURES 


627 


The  commander  of  an  Austrian  man- 
of-war,  hearing  of  this  horrible  state  of 
affairs,  went  to  see  San  Stefano  for 
himself.  He  made  no  attempt  to  con- 
ceal his  disgust  and  indignation.  He 
told  the  authorities  that  if  they  wanted 
to  save  the  last  vestige  of  their  coun- 
try's honor  they  should  within  twenty- 
four  hours  put  an  end  to  the  things  he 
had  seen.  The  authorities  did  so  by 
shipping  several  hundred  sick  soldiers 
—  prodding  them  with  bayonets  when 
they  were  too  weak  to  board  the 
steamer  —  off  to /Touzla,  on  the  Asiat- 
ic shore  of  the  Marmora,  where  they 
would  be  safely  out  of  sight  of  prying 
foreigners. 

We  were  told  several  times,  both  by 
residents  of  the  village  and  by  outsid- 
ers, that  they  were  actually  prevented 
from  doing  anything  to  help,  because, 
forsooth,  the  sick  men  had  betrayed 
and  disgraced  their  country  and  only 
deserved  to  die.  I  cannot  believe  that 
any  such  argument  was  responsibly 
put  forward,  unless  by  men  who  need- 
ed to  cover  up  their  own  stupidity  and 
criminal  incompetence.  Nevertheless 
the  fact  of  San  Stefano  remains,  too 
great  and  too  horrible  to  be  passed 
over. 

How  could  human  beings  be  so  in- 
human? Were  they  overwhelmed  and 
half-maddened  by  their  defeat?  And, 
with  their  constitutional  inability  to 
cope  with  a  crisis,  —  with  the  lack 
among  them  of  any  tradition  of  or- 
ganized humanitarianism,  —  were  they 
simply  paralyzed  by  the  magnitude  of 
the  emergency?  I  am  willing  to  be- 
lieve that  the  different  value  which  the 
Oriental  lays  on  human  life  entered 
into  the  case.  In  that  matter  I  am  in- 
clined to  think  that  our  own  suscepti- 
bility is  exaggerated.  But  that  does 
not  explain  why  the  Oriental  is  other- 
wise. Part  of  it  is  perhaps  a  real  differ- 
ence in  his  nervous  system.  Another 
part  of  it  is  no  doubt  related  to  that 


in  him  which  makes  him  a  mediaeval 
man.  Human  life  was  not  of  much 
account  in  Europe  a  few  hundred  years 
ago;  and  in  the  back  of  the  Turk's 
brain  there  may  be  some  prouji  Islamic 
view  of  battle  and  falling  therein,  de- 
scended from  the  same  remote  Asiatic 
conception  as  the  Japanese  theory  of 
suicide.  Certainly  the  Turk  fears  death 
less,  and  bears  it  more  stoically,  than 
we.  Does  that  give  him  the  right  to 
think  less  of  the  life  of  his  fellow 
beings  ? 

The  Austrian  officer  raised  his  voice, 
at  least,  for  the  soldiers  in  San  Stefano. 
The  first  to  lift  a  hand  was  a  Swiss 
lady  of  the  place.  Her  name  has  been 
pronounced  so  often  that  I  shall  not 
seem  yellow- journalistic  if  I  mention 
it  again.  Almost  every  resident  who 
could  possibly  leave  San  Stefano  had 
already  done  so.  Fraulein  Alt,  how- 
ever, remained.  She  carried  the  sol- 
diers the  water  from  which  the  sentries 
kept  them.  She  also  made  soup  in  her 
own  house  and  took  it  to  the  weakest, 
comforting  as  best  she  could  their  dy- 
ing moments.  It  was,  of  course,  very 
little  that  she  could  do,  among  so 
many.  But  she  was  the  first  who  dared 
to  do  it.  She  was  soon  joined  by  an- 
other lady  of  the  place,  Frau  Schneider; 
and  presently  a  few  Europeans  from 
the  city  helped  them  make  a  beginning 
of  relief  work  on  a  larger  scale.  One  of 
the  new  recruits  was  a  woman  also, 
Miss  Graham,  of  the  Scotch  mission  to 
the  Jews.  The  others  were  Mr.  Robert 
Frew,  the  Scotch  clergyman  of  Pera, 
Mr.  Hoffman  Philip,  first  secretary  of 
the  American  embassy,  and  two  gentle- 
men who  had  come  to  Constantinople 
for  the  war,  the  English  writer,  Mau- 
rice Baring,  and  Major  Ford  of  our 
own  army  medical  staff.  The  Amer- 
ican Red  Cross  and  English  friends 
contributed  help  in  other  ways. 

These  good  Samaritans  left  their  own 
affairs  and  did  what  they  could  to  make 


628 


TURKISH  PICTURES 


a  hospital  out  of  a  Greek  school  into 
which  sick  soldiers  had  been  turned. 
It  was  a  heroic  thing  to  do,  for  at  that 
time  no  one  knew  that  the  men  were 
chiefly  afflicted  by  dysentery  brought 
on  by  privation;  and  Red-Cross  mis- 
sions were  hesitating  to  go.  Moreover, 
the  sanitary  condition  of  the  school 
was  something  appalling.  Six  hundred 
men  were  lying  there,  on  the  filthy 
floor,  in  a  shed  which  was  the  rainy-day 
playground  of  the  school,  and  in  a  few 
tents  in  the  yard.  Some  of  the  sol- 
diers had  been  dead  two  or  three  days. 
Many  of  them  were  dying.  None  of 
them  had  had  any  care  save  such  as 
Fraulein  Alt  had  been  able  to  give 
them. 

I  felt  not  even  a  little  heroic  when  I 
went  into  the  yard  of  this  school,  next 
the  field  where  the  heap  of  dead  men 
lay,  and  saw  these  voluntary  exiles 
coming  and  going  in  their  oilskins.  I 
felt  rather  how  rarely,  in  our  modern 
world,  is  it  given  a  man  to  come  down 
to  the  primal  facts  of  life.  This  reflec- 
tion, I  think,  came  to  me  from  the 
smart  yellow  gloves  which  one  of  the 
Samaritans  wore,  and  which,  associ- 
ating them  as  I  could  with  embassies 
and  I  know  not  what  of  the  gayeties  of 
life,  looked  so  significantly  incongru- 
ous in  that  dreadful  work.  The  corre- 
spondent, of  course,  was  under  orders 
to  take  photographs;  but  his  camera 
looked  incongruous  in  another  way  — 
impertinent,  I  might  say,  if  I  did  n't 
happen  to  like  the  correspondent  —  in 
the  face  of  realities  so  horrible.  A  sol- 
dier lurched  out  of  the  school,  with  the 
gait  and  in  the  necessity  characteristic 
of  his  disease.  He  looked  about,  half- 
dazed,  and  established  himself  at  the 
foot  of  a  tree,  his  hands  clasped  in  front 
of  his  knees,  his  head  sunk  forward  on 
his  breast. 

Other  soldiers  came  and  went  in 
the  yard,  some  in  their  worn  khaki, 
some  in  their  big  gray  coats  and  hoods. 


One  began  to  rummage  in  the  circle 
of  debris  which  marked  the  place  of 
a  recent  tent.  He  picked  up  a  purse, 
one  of  the  knitted  bags  which  the 
people  of  Turkey  use,  unwound  the 
long  string,  looked  inside,  turned  the 
purse  inside  out,  and  put  it  into  his 
pocket.  An  older  man  came  up  to  us. 
'My  hands  are  cold/  he  said,  'and  I 
can't  feel  anything  with  them.  What 
shall  I  do?'  We  also  wore  hats  and 
spoke  strange  tongues,  like  the  miracle- 
workers  within:  I  suppose  the  poor 
fellow  thought  we  could  perform  a  mir- 
acle for  him.  As  we  did  not,  he  tried 
to  go  into  the  street,  but  the  sentry  at 
the  gate  turned  him  back.  Two  order- 
lies came  out  of  the  school  carrying  a 
stretcher.  A  dead  man  lay  on  it,  under 
a  blanket.  The  wasted  body  raised 
hardly  more  of  the  blanket  than  that 
of  a  child. 

When  we  went  away  the  sick  soldier 
was  still  crouching  at  the  foot  of  his 
tree,  his  hands  clasped  in  front  of  his 
knees  and  his  head  sunken  on  his 
breast. 


ii 


OUT    OF   THRACE 

Deep  in  the  Golden  Horn,  where  it 
curves  to  the  north  beyond  the  city 
wall,  lies,  in  a  hollow  of  converging 
valleys,  the  suburb  of  Eyoub  Sultan. 
If  you  know  Loti,  you  already  know 
something  of  Eyoub,  with  its  hill  of 
cypresses  overlooking  the  historic  firth 
and  the  two  beetling  cities.  The  holi- 
est mosque  in  Constantinople  stands 
at  the  foot  of  this  hill,  among  grave- 
stones and  old  trees.  The  mosque  per- 
petuates the  memory  of  a  friend  of  the 
Prophet,  his  standard-bearer,  Eyoub 
Ansari,  who  took  part  in  the  Arab 
siege  of  the  city  in  668,  and  fell  outside 
the  walls.  When  Sultan  Mohammed  II 
made  his  own  siege  eight  hundred 


TURKISH   PICTURES 


629 


years  later,  the  last  resting-place  of  the 
Arab  hero  was  miraculously  revealed 
to  him,  and  he  afterwards  built  there 
a  mosque  and  a  tomb.  They  have 
since  been  restored  or  rebuilt,  but 
every  succeeding  sultan  has  gone  there 
to  be  crowned  —  or  rather  to  be  girded 
with  the  sword  of  Osman.  Until  the 
reestablishment  of  the  constitution  in 
1908,  no  Christian  had  ever  been,  un- 
less in  disguise,  into  so  much  as  the 
outer  courtyard  of  that  mosque.  Even 
now  it  is  not  easy  for  a  Christian  to 
see  the  inside  of  the  sacred  tomb.  I 
have  never  done  so,  at  all  events.  But 
I  count  myself  happy  to  have  seen  its 
outer  wall  of  blue  and  green  tiles, 
pierced  in  the  centre  by  an  intricate 
grille  of  brass  which  shines  where  the 
hands  of  the  faithful  pass  over  certain 
mystic  letters.  On  one  side  is  a  small 
sebil,  —  a  pavilion  where  an  attend- 
ant waits  to  give  cups  of  cold  water  to 
the  thirsty.  On  the  other  side,  another 
grille,  of  small  green-bronze  hexagons, 
opens  into  a  patch  of  garden  where 
rose-bushes  grow  among  gravestones. 
And  in  the  centre  of  the  quadrangle, 
between  the  tomb  and  the  mosque, 
stands  an  enormous  plane  tree,  planted 
there  by  the  conqueror  five  hundred 
years  ago.  Other  plane  trees  shadow 
the  larger  outer  court,  where  also  is 
a  central  fountain  of  ablution,  and 
painted  gravestones  in  railings,  and  a 
colony  of  pigeons  that  are  pampered 
like  those  of  St.  Mark's. 

The  quarter  that  has  grown  up 
around  this  mosque  is  one  of  the  most 
picturesque  in  Constantinople.  No 
very  notable  houses  are  there,  but  the 
streets  take  a  tone  from  a  great  num- 
ber of  pious  institutions  which  line 
them  —  mosques,  monasteries,  the- 
ological schools,  drinking-fountains, 
and  the  domed  tombs  of  great  people. 
The  good  Sultan  Mehmet  V  has  built 
his  own  tomb  there,  between  the  great 
mosque  and  the  water,  that  he  may  lie 


to  the  last  day  in  the  company  of  so 
many  saintly  and  famous  men.  Even 
the  commoner  houses,  however,  have 
the  grave  dignity  that  the  Turks  suc- 
ceed in  putting  into  everything  they 
do.  The  streets  also  take  a  tone  from 
them,  —  of  weathered  wood,  —  and 
from  their  latticed  windows,  and  from 
their  jutting  upper  stories,  and  from 
the  many  cypress  trees  that  stand 
about  them.  And  sometimes  a  myste- 
rious procession  of  camels  marches 
from  nowhere  to  nowhere.  You  never 
meet  them  in  other  parts  of  the  city. 

They  do  not  like  Christians  to  live 
in  Eyoub,  I  am  told.  But  they  are 
used  by  this  time  to  seeing  us.  A  good 
many  of  us  go  there  to  climb  the  hill, 
and  look  at  the  view,  and  feel  as  sen- 
timental as  we  can  over  Ayizade.  And 
certainly  the  good  people  of  Eyoub 
made  no  objection  to  Lady  Lowther, 
when  she  established  in  their  midst  a 
committee  for  distributing  food  and 
charcoal  and  clothing  to  the  families 
of  poor  soldiers  and  to  the  refugees  of 
the  war.  The  hordes  of  Asia  had  not 
stopped  pouring  through  the  city  on 
their  way  to  the  west  before  a  horde 
from  Europe  began  to  pour  the  other 
way. 

In  all  Thrace,  from  the  Bulgarian 
border  to  the  Chatalja  lines,  I  do  not 
suppose  there  can  be  a  Turk  left.  It 
is  partly,  no  doubt,  because  of  the 
narrowness  of  the  field  of  operations, 
lying  as  it  does  between  two  converg- 
ing seas,  which  enabled  the  conquering 
army  to  drive  the  whole  country  in  a 
battue  before  it.  But  I  cannot  imag- 
ine any  Western  people  trekking  with 
such  unanimity.  They  would  have  been 
more  firmly  rooted  to  the  soil.  The 
Turk,  however,  is  still  half  a  tent-man, 
and  he  has  never  felt  perfectly  at  home 
in  Europe.  So  village  after  village  har- 
nessed its  black  water-buffalo,  or  its 
little  gray  oxen,  to  its  carts  of  clumsy 
wheels,  piled  thereon  its  few  effects, 


630 


TURKISH  PICTURES 


spread  matting  over  them  on  bent  sap- 
lings, and  came  into  Constantinople. 
How  many  of  them  came  I  do  not  im- 
agine any  one  knows.  Thousands  and 
tens  of  thousands  were  shipped  over 
into  Asia  Minor.  Other  thousands  re- 
main, in  the  hope  of  going  back  to 
their  burned  villages.  The  soldiers  and 
the  sick  had  already  occupied  most  of 
the  spare  room  in  the  city.  The  refugees 
had  to  take  what  was  left.  I  know  one 
colony  of  them  that  lives  in  the  fishing- 
boats  in  which  they  fled  from  the  coast 
villages  of  the  Marmora. 

So  it  is  that  Eyoub  has  taken  on  a 
new  tone.  Being  myself  like  a  Turk  in 
that  I  make  little  of  numbers  and  com- 
putations, I  have  no  means  of  know- 
ing how  many  men,  women,  and  child- 
ren, from  how  many  villages,  now  swell 
the  population  of  the  sacred  suburb. 
I  only  know  that  certain  mosques  have 
been  entirely  given  up  to  them,  that 
they  are  living  in  cloisters  and  empty 
houses,  that  their  own  people  have 
taken  in  a  goodly  number,  that  sheds, 
storerooms,  stables,  are  full  of  them. 
I  even  heard  of  four  persons  who  had 
no  other  shelter  than  a  water-closet. 
And  still  streets  and  open  spaces  are 
turned  into  camping-grounds,  where 
small  gray  cattle  are  tethered  to  big 
covered  carts  and  where  people  in  veils 
and  turbans  shiver  over  camp-fires  — 
when  they  have  camp-fires  to  shiver 
over.  But  they  can  always  fall  back 
on  cypress  wood.  It  gives  one  a  dou- 
ble pang  to  catch  the  aroma  of  such 
a  fire,  betraying  as  it  does  the  extrem- 
ity of  some  poor  exile  and  the  devasta- 
tion at  work  among  the  trees  which 
make  so  much  of  the  color  of  Constan- 
tinople. 

In  distributing  Lady  Lowther's  relief 
we  do  what  we  can  to  systematize.  We 
spend  certain  days  in  visiting,  quarter 
by  quarter,  to  see  for  ourselves  the  con- 
dition of  the  refugees  and  what  they 
most  need.  I  have  done  a  good  deal 


of  visiting  in  my  day,  being  somewhat 
given  to  seeking  the  society  of  my  kind ; 
but  it  has  not  often  happened  to  me,  in 
the  usual  course  of  visiting,  to  come  so 
near  the  realities  of  life  as  when,  with 
another  member  of  our  committee,  I 
visited  the  mosque  of  Sal  Mahmoud 
Pasha  in  Eyoub.  Like  its  more  famous 
neighbor,  it  has  two  courts.  They  are 
on  two  levels,  however,  joined  by  a 
flight  of  steps  and  each  opening  into 
a  thoroughfare  of  its  own.  How  the 
courts  of  Sal  Mahmoud  Pasha  may 
look  in  summer  I  do  not  know.  On  a 
winter  day  of  snow  they  looked  very 
cheerless  indeed,  especially  for  the 
cattle  stabled  in  their  cloisters.  The 
mosque  itself  was  open  to  any  who 
cared  to  go  in.  We  did  so,  lifting  up 
the  heavy  flap  that  hangs  at  any  pub- 
lic Turkish  doorway.  We  found  our- 
selves in  a  narrow  vestibule  in  which 
eight  or  ten  families  were  living.  One 
of  them  consisted  of  two  sick  children, 
a  little  boy  flushed  with  fever,  and  a 
pale  and  wasted  little  girl,  who  lay  on 
the  bricks  near  the  door  without  mat- 
tress or  matting  under  them.  They 
were  not  quite  alone,  we  learned.  Their 
mother  had  gone  out  to  find  them 
bread.  The  same  was  the  case  with  a 
larger  family  of  children  who  sat 
around  a  primitive  brazier.  The  young- 
est was  crying,  and  a  girl  of  ten  was 
telling  him  that  their  mother  would 
soon  be  back  with  the  bread. 

We  lifted  a  second  flap.  A  wave  of 
warm,  smoky  air  met  us,  sweetened  by 
cypress  wood,  but  sickeningly  close. 
Through  the  haze  of  smoke  we  saw  that 
the  square  of  the  interior,  surrounded 
on  three  sides  by  a  gallery,  was  pack- 
ed as  if  by  a  congregation.  The  con- 
gregation consisted  chiefly  of  women 
and  children,  which  is  not  the  thing 
in  Turkey,  sitting  on  the  matted  floor 
in  groups,  and  all  about  them  were 
chests  and  small  piles  of  bedding  and 
stray  cooking  utensils.  Each  of  these 


TURKISH  PICTURES 


631 


groups  constituted  a  house,  as  they  put 
it.  As  we  went  from  one  to  another, 
asking  questions  and  taking  notes,  we 
counted  seventy-eight  of  them.  Some 
four  hundred  people,  that  is,  —  many 
houses  consisted  of  ten  or  more  mem- 
bers, —  were  living  together  under  the 
dome  of  Sal  Mahmoud  Pasha. 

In  the  gallery,  and  under  it,  rude 
partitions  had  been  made  by  stretch- 
ing rope  between  the  pillars,  and  hang- 
ing up  a  spare  quilt  or  rug.  In  the  open 
space  of  the  centre  there  was  nothing 
to  mark  off  house  from  house  save 
the  bit  of  rug  or  matting  which  most 
of  the  families  had  had  time  to  bring 
away  with  them,  and  such  boundaries 
as  could  be  drawn  by  the  more  solid 
of  the  family  possessions,  and  by  the 
row  of  family  shoes.  Under  such  con- 
ditions had  not  a  few  of  the  congre- 
gation drawn  their  first  and  their  last 
breath. 

Each  house  had  a  brazier  of  some 
sort,  if  only  improvised  out  of  an  oil- 
can. That  was  where  the  blue  haze 
came  from,  and  the  scent  of  cypress 
wood.  Some  had  a  little  charcoal,  and 
were  daily  near  asphyxiating  them- 
selves. Others  had  no  fire  at  all.  On 
some  of  the  braziers  we  noticed  curi- 
ous flat  cakes  baking,  into  whose  com- 
position went  bran  or  even  straw.  We 
took  them  to  be  some  Thracian  dainty, 
until  we  learned  that  they  were  a  sub- 
stitute for  bread.  The  city  is  supposed 
to  give  each  refugee  a  loaf  of  bread  a 
day,  but  many  refugees  somehow  do 
not  succeed  in  getting  their  share.  A 
few  told  us  they  had  had  none  for  five 
days.  It  struck  me,  in  this  connection, 
that  not  in  any  other  country  I  knew 
would  the  mosque  carpets  still  have 
been  lying  folded  in  one  corner,  instead 
of  making  life  a  little  more  tolerable 
for  that  melancholy  congregation. 

Of  complaint,  however,  we  heard  as 
little  as  possible.  The  four  hundred  sat 
very  silently  in  their  smoky  mosque. 


Many  of  them  were  ill  and  lay  on  the 
floor  under  a  colored  quilt  or  a  rug. 
Others  had  not  only  their  lost  homes 
to  think  of.  A  father  told  us  that  when 
Chorlu  was  spoiled,  as  he  put  it,  his 
little  girl  of  nine  had  found  a  place  in 
the  *  fire-carriage '  that  went  before  his, 
and  he  had  not  seen  her  since.  One  old 
man  had  lost  the  rest  of  his  family.  He 
had  been  unable  to  keep  up  with  them, 
he  said.  It  had  taken  him  twenty- two 
days  to  walk  from  Kirk-Kilisseh.  A  tall 
ragged  young  woman  who  said  that 
her  ejfendi  made  war  in  Adrianople, 
told  us  she  had  three  children.  One  of 
them  she  was  rocking  in  a  wooden 
trough.  It  only  came  out  by  accident 
that  she  had  adopted  the  other  two 
during  the  hegira  from  Thrace.  I  re- 
member, also,  a  woman  sitting  beside 
a  brasier  with  her  two  grown  sons.  One 
of  them,  fearfully  pitted  by  smallpox, 
was  blind.  The  other  answered  our 
questions  so  vaguely  that  the  mother 
explained  that  he  had  no  mind  in  his 
head. 

Having  visited,  we  give  the  head  of 
each  house  a  numbered  ticket  which 
enables  him  or  her  to  draw  on  us  for 
certain  supplies.  We  then  take  in  the 
tickets  and  give  out  the  supplies  on  our 
own  day  at  home.  They  say  it  is  more 
blessed  to  give  than  to  receive.  I  find, 
however,  that  it  is  more  possible  to 
appreciate  the  humorous  or  decora- 
tive side  of  Thrace  on  the  days  when 
we  receive,  in  the  empty  shop  which 
is  our  headquarters.  It  is  astonishing 
how  large  a  proportion  of  Thrace  is 
god-daughter  to  Hadijeh  or  Ayesha, 
mothers  of  the  Moslems,  or  to  the 
Prophet's  daughter,  Fatma.  Many, 
however,  remind  one  of  Madame 
Chrysantheme  and  Madame  Butterfly. 
On  our  visiting  list  are  Mrs.  Hyacinth, 
Mrs.  Tulip,  Mrs.  Appletree,  and  Mrs. 
Nightingale.  I  am  also  happy  enough 
to  possess  the  acquaintance  of  Mrs. 
Sweetmeat,  Mrs.  Diamond,  Mrs.  Air, 


632 


TURKISH   PICTURES 


—  though  some  know  her  as  Mother 
Eve,  —  Miss  May-She-Laugh,  and 
Master  He-Waited.  This  last  appella- 
tion seemed  to  me  so  curious  that  I 
inquired  into  it,  and  learned  that  my 
young  gentleman  waited  to  be  born. 
These  are  not  surnames,  you  under- 
stand, for  no  Turk  owns  such  a  thing. 
To  tell  one  Mistress  Hyacinth  from 
another  you  add  the  name  of  her  man. 
And  in  his  case  all  you  can  do  is  to  tack 
on  his  father's  —  you  could  hardly  say, 
Christian  —  name. 

If  we  find  the  nomenclature  of  Mis- 
tress Hyacinth  and  her  family  a  source 
of  perplexities,  she  in  turn  is  not  a  little 
confounded  by  our  system  of  tickets. 
We  have  one  for  bread.  We  have  an- 
other for  charcoal.  We  have  a  third 
which  must  be  tied  tight  in  a  painted 
handkerchief  and  never  be  lost.  'By 
God ! '  cries  Mistress  Hyacinth,  accord- 
ing to  her  honored  idiom,  *  I  know  not 
what  these  papers  mean.'  And  it  is 
sometimes  well-nigh  impossible  to  ex- 
plain it  to  her.  A  good  part  of  her  con- 
fusion, I  suspect,  must  be  put  down  to 
our  strange  accent  and  grammar,  and 
to  our  unfamiliarity  with  the  Thracian 
point  of  view.  Still,  I  think  the  ladies 
of  that  peninsula  share  the  general  hes- 
itation of  their  race  to  concern  them- 
selves with  mathematical  accuracy. 
Asked  how  many  children  they  have, 
they  rarely  know  until  they  have 
counted  up  on  their  fingers  two  or 
three  times.  It  is  evidently  no  habit 
with  them  to  have  the  precise  number 
at  their  fingers'  ends,  as  it  were.  So 
when  they  make  an  obvious  mistake 
we  do  not  necessarily  suspect  them  of 
an  attempt  to  overestimate.  As  a  mat- 
ter of  fact,  they  are  more  likely  to 
underestimate.  Other  failures  of  mem- 
ory are  more  surprising,  as  that  of  a 
dowager  in  ebony  who  was  unable  to  tell 
us  her  husband's  name.  'How  should 
I  know?'  she  protested.  'He  died  so 
long  ago!' 


Altogether  it  is  evident  that  the  in- 
directions of  Mistress  Hyacinth  obey 
a  compass  different  from  our  own.  I 
remember  a  girl  not  more  than  sixteen 
or  seventeen  who  told  us  she  had  three 
children.  Two  of  them  were  with  her: 
where  was  the  third,  we  asked?  'Here,' 
she  answered,  tapping  herself  with  a 
simplicity  of  which  the  Anglo-Saxons 
have  lost  the  secret.  Yet  she  was  most 
scrupulous  to  keep  her  nose  and  mouth 
hidden  from  an  indiscriminate  world. 
Another  woman,  asked  about  a  child 
we  knew,  replied  non-committally, '  We 
have  sent  him  away.'  '  Where  ? '  we  de- 
manded in  alarm,  for  we  have  known 
of  refugees  giving  away  or  even  of  sell- 
ing their  children.  'Eh,  he  went,'  re- 
turned the  mother  gravely.  '  Have  you 
news  of  him? '  one  of  us  pursued.  '  Yes/ 
she  said.  And  it  was  finally  some  one 
else  who  had  to  enlighten  our  obtuse- 
ness  by  explaining  that  it  was  to  the 
other  world  the  child  had  gone.  It  is 
a  miracle  that  more  of  them  do  not  go. 
One  day  when  we  inquired  after  a  pet 
baby  of  ours  his  mother  said  he  was 
sick:  a  redness  had  come  upon  him. 
The  redness  turned  out  to  be  scarlet 
fever.  As  for  smallpox,  no  one  thinks 
any  more  of  it  than  of  a  cold. 

With  great  discreetness  does  Mis- 
tress Hyacinth  come  into  our  presence, 
rarely  so  far  forgetting  herself  as  to 
lean  on  our  table  or  throw  her  arms  in 
gratitude  about  a  benefactress's  neck. 
For  in  gratitude  she  abounds,  and  in 
such  expressions  of  it  as, '  God  give  you 
lives,'  and  'May  you  never  have  less.' 
With  a  benefactor  she  is,  I  am  happy 
to  report,  more  reserved.  Him  she  re- 
spectfully addresses  as  'my  brother,' 
'my  child,'  'my  little  one,'  or,  haply, 
'  my  mother  and  my  father.'  I  am  now 
so  accustomed  to  occupying  the  ma- 
ternal relation  to  ladies  of  all  ages 
and  colors,  that  I  am  inclined  to  feel 
slighted  when  they  coldly  address  me 
as  their  master. 


TURKISH  PICTURES 


In  the  matter  of  discretion,  how- 
ever, Mistress  Hyacinth  is  not  al- 
ways impeccable,  so  far  at  least  as 
the  concealment  of  her  charms  is  con- 
cerned. Sometimes,  indeed,  she  will 
scarcely  be  persuaded  to  raise  her  veil 
for  a  lady  to  recognize  her;  but  at  other 
times  she  appears  not  to  shrink  even 
from  the  masculine  eye.  One  day  a 
Turk,  passing  our  shop,  was  attracted 
by  the  commotion  at  the  door.  He 
came  to  the  door  himself,  looked  in, 
and  cried  out,  *  Shame ! '  at  the  disrepu- 
table spectacle  of  a  mild  male  unbe- 
liever and  a  doorkeeper  of  his  own 
country  within  the  same  four  walls  as 
some  of  Lady  Lowther's  fairer  helpers 
and  a  motley  collection  of  refugee 
women,  many  of  them  unveiled.  But 
the  latter  retorted  with  such  prompt- 
ness, that  the  shame  was  rather  upon 
him  for  leaving  the  ghiaour  to  supply 
their  needs,  that  he  was  happy  to  let 
the  matter  drop.  On  this  and  other 
occasions  I  gathered  a  very  distinct 
impression  that  if  Mistress  Hyacinth 
should  ever  take  it  into  her  head  to 
turn  suffragette,  she  would  not  wait 
long  to  gain  her  end. 

The  nails  of  Mistress  Hyacinth,  I 
notice,  are  almost  always  reddened 
with  henna  —  and  very  clean.  The 
henna  sometimes  extends  to  her  fingers 
as  well,  to  the  palms  of  her  hands,  or 
even  —  if  she  happen  to  be  advancing 
in  years  —  to  her  hair.  There  is  no 
attempt  to  simulate  a  youthful  glow. 
The  dye  is  plentifully  applied  to  make 
a  rich  coral  red.  In  other  points  of 
fashion  Mistress  Hyacinth  is  more 


catholic  than  her  sisters  of  the  West. 
What  the  ladies  of  Paris  wear  must 
be  worn  by  the  ladies  of  London,  St. 
Petersburg,  New  York,  or  Melbourne. 
But  no  such  slavishness  obtains  in 
Thrace,  where  every  village  seems  to 
have  modes  of  its  own.  I  can  only  gen- 
eralize by  saying  that  Mistress  Hya- 
cinth seems  to  prefer  a  good  baggy 
trouser,  cut  out  of  some  figured  print, 
with  no  lack  of  red  about  it.  Over  this 
she  should  wear  in  the  street  a  shape- 
less black  mantle  that  often  has  a  long 
sailor-collar,  and  she  covers  her  head 
in  various  ingenious,  but  not  very  de- 
corative, ways. 

The  consort  of  Mistress  Hyacinth, 
as  is  general  in  the  East,  is  outwardly 
and  visibly  the  decorative  member  of 
the  family.  He  inclines  less  to  baggi- 
ness  than  she,  or  than  his  brother  of 
Asia.  He  affects  a  certain  cut  of  trou- 
ser which  is  popular  all  the  way  from 
the  Bosphorus  to  the  Adriatic.  This 
trouser,  preferably  of  a  pastel  blue,  is 
bound  in  at  the  waist  by  a  broad  red 
sash  which  also  serves  as  pocket,  bank, 
arsenal,  and  anything  else  you  please. 
Over  it  goes  a  short  zouave  jacket, 
with  more  or  less  embroidery,  and 
round  my  lord's  head  twists  a  pic- 
turesque figured  turban  with  a  tassel 
dangling  in  front  of  one  ear.  He  is 
surprisingly  well-featured,  too,  —  like 
Mistress  Hyacinth  herself,  for  that 
matter,  and  the  rolypoly  small  fry  at 
their  heels.  On  the  whole,  they  give 
one  the  sense  of  furnishing  excellent 
material  for  a  race  —  if  only  the  right 
artist  could  get  hold  of  it. 


REAL  SOCIALISM 


BY   HENRY   KITCHELL   WEBSTER 


WE'D  have  been  a  very  pleasant, 
conversable  company,  but  for  the  pre- 
sence of  one  man.  There  was  a  law- 
yer with  a  hobby  for  anarchism;  a 
banker  who  was  an  enthusiastic  So- 
cialist from  3  P.M.  to  10  A.M.;  a  promi- 
nent magazine  writer,  who  specialized 
in  women;  an  archdeacon  with  a  fond- 
ness for  metaphysics  and  a  doctrine 
of  his  own  discovery,  which  he  called 
the  Conservation  of  Sin;  one  real  So- 
cialist and  a  dramatic  critic.  You  can 
see  in  a  minute  that  the  possibilities 
for  conversation  were  simply  unlim- 
ited, —  if  it  had  n't  been  for  the  Ob- 
stacle. 

He  was  a  returned  traveler  from  the 
Tropics,  and  he  was  an  infernal  nui- 
sance. Whenever  anyone  started  a  new 
topic  of  conversation,  he  appropriated 
it.  If  we  tried  to  talk  about  aviation, 
he  described  the  superior  aeroplaning 
properties  of  certain  queer  tropical 
birds.  We  mentioned  the  Red-Light 
district  and  the  police  and  launched 
him  into  a  discussion  of  the  superior 
depravities  of  Singapore.  And  when  the 
Dramatic  Critic  tried  to  talk  art,  and 
mentioned  Mary  Garden,  he  insisted 
on  telling  us  about  the  superior  frank- 
ness of  the  costume  worn  by  the  ladies 
of  Zamboango,  or  some  such  sounding 
place.  We  could  n't  even  speak  about 
the  weather,  without  being  told  that 
we  had  never  seen  a  real  rain  storm  or 
a  real  sunset  or  anything  that  could 
properly  be  called  the  light  of  the  moon. 
The  man  was  a  perfect  pest. 

At  last,  to  silence  him,  we  resorted 
to  drastic  treatment  and  began  talking 

634 


Socialism,  —  a  topic  which  you  would 
think  would  silence  anybody.  But  the 
Banker,  the  Magazine  Man,  and  the 
Archdeacon  had  no  more  than  fairly 
got  going  on  a  three-cornered  discus- 
sion of  Thorstein  Veblen's  theory  that 
the  withdrawal  of  the  interstitial  ad- 
justments from  the  discretion  of  rival 
business  men  will  result  in  an  avoidance 
of  that  systematic  mutual  hindrance 
which  characterizes  competition,  when 
the  Pest  took  a  long  preliminary  drink 
and  butted  in. 

*  Speaking  of  Socialism/  he  said,  'in 
the  course  of  my  travels  through  the 
Tropics,  I  visited  a  Socialist  state.' 

'Don't  try  to  spring  New  Zealand  or 
New  South  Wales  or  any  of  those 
places  on  us,'  said  the  Banker,  —  care- 
lessly, I'll  admit.  'They  are  n't  Social- 
istic in  any  true  sense.' 

'And  they're  not  in  the  Tropics  in 
any  sense,'  said  the  Traveler,  blandly. 
'There's  no  such  thing  as  a  popular 
knowledge  of  geography.  Here  you 
are,  a  group  of  fairly  educated  men, 
and  I'll  bet  every  one  of  you  thinks 
Vladivostock  is  north  of  Nice.' 

'Never  mind  Vladivostock,'  said  the 
Real  Socialist.  'Where  is  your  Social- 
ist state?' 

'Do  you  mean  to  say  you  don't 
know?'  inquired  the  Pest.  'Here's  a 
completely  organized  Socialist  state, 
with  thirty  thousand  inhabitants  or  so; 
been  running  for  years;  and  you  sit 
up  here  and  theorize  about  what  would 
happen  under  Socialism,  and  never 
even  have  heard  of  what  is  happening 
right  under  your  nose.' 


REAL  SOCIALISM 


635 


*  If  you  can  get  away  with  that,'  said 
the  Socialist,  'I'll  cheerfully  pay  for 
all  the  drinks  that  are  consumed  by 
this  company  while  you're  doing  it.  If 
you  can't  make  good,  you'll  have  to 
pay  for  them  yourself.  And  I  warn 
you  that  if  your  remarks  are  as  dry  as 
I  have  found  them  since  you  became 
a  returned  traveler,  the  consumption 
will  be  enormous.' 

'The  Pest  shook  his  head  sadly. 

'There's  no  real  drinking  outside 
the  Tropics,'  he  said. 

'You  told  us  all  about  that  last  Fri- 
day,' said  the  Archdeacon,  politely. 
'Revenons  a  nos  moutons.9 

'It's  got  to  be  real  Socialism,  mind 
you,'  said  the  Real  Socialist.  'Munici- 
pal ownership  and  state  pawnshops 
and  the  rest  of  those  dinky  little  parlor 
experiments  don't  go.' 

'You  yourself  shall  be  the  judge,'  the 
Pest  retorted;  and  to  show  his  confi- 
dence in  the  outcome,  he  ordered  a 
fresh  half -lit  re. 

'To  begin  with,'  he  said  confidently, 
'this  state  owns  all  the  land.  It  leases 
certain  portions  of  it,  such  as  are  n't 
required  directly  for  the  public  use, 
for  agricultural  purposes.  But  it  pur- 
chases the  product  and  reissues  it  to 
the  citizens  in  exchange  for  labor  cou- 
pons.' 

The  Socialist  looked  a  little  startled, 
and  wanted  to  know  who  issued  the 
coupons. 

'The  state,  of  course,'  said  the  im- 
perturbable Pest,  'it  being  the  only 
employer  of  labor.' 

'Is  this  an  excerpt  from  the  proof- 
sheets  of  some  work  of  fiction?'  asked 
the  Magazine  Man. 

'This  is  no  traveler's  tale,'  the  Pest 
assured  us.  'All  of  my  observations 
can  be  verified  in  the  published  annual 
reports  of  the  state  I  am  talking  about, 
and  these  reports  are  to  be  found  in  any 
library.' 

'There  's  a  joker  somewhere,'  said 


the  Banker.  'How  about  the  finances 
of  this  state?' 

'Its  credit  is  excellent,'  the  Pest 
assured  him.  'It  can  borrow  all  the 
money  it  wants  at  from  two  to  two- 
and-a-half  per  cent. 

'The  state  not  only  employs  its  citi- 
zens, it  houses  and  feeds  them.  There 
are  some  fifteen  types  of  quarters,  a 
certain  type  of  house  going  with  a  cer- 
tain class  of  work.  The  man  who  does 
the  most  difficult,  highly  skilled,  and  re- 
sponsible sort  of  work,  lives,  of  course, 
in  the  best  house.  Also,  there  is  a  dis- 
tinction, naturally,  between  the  quar- 
ters provided  for  married  and  single 
men.' 

'Then  where  does  the  equality  come 
in?'  demanded  the  Anarchist. 

'Equality,'  said  the  Pest,  'is  not  one 
of  the  cardinal  principles  of  Socialism. 
I  have  heard  my  friend  over  there 
proclaim  from  many  a  soap-box,  that 
the  stimulus  to  ambition  afforded  by 
exceptional  rewards  would  be  even 
greater  under  the  Socialist  regime  than 
under  what  he  calls  the  Capitalistic. 
I  was  glad  to  find  his  contention  so  well 
borne  out  when  I  visited  this  Socialist 
state.' 

'Come  down  to  brass  tacks,'  said 
the  Real  Socialist.  'Does  private  prop- 
erty exist,  or  does  it  not?  That's  the 
test.' 

'There  is  no  real  private  property,' 
said  the  Pest,  '  because  the  state  owns 
all  the  land  and  all  the  buildings.  There 
is  no  legal  prohibition  against  private 
personal  property.  As  a  matter  of  fact, 
the  amount  of  it  is  negligible  within 
the  boundaries  of  this  state,  because 
no  one  has  any  particular  use  for  any. 
Except,  of  course,  his  clothes,  which,  in 
the  nature  of  things,  are  bound  to  be 
privately  and  individually  possessed 
anywhere.' 

'  How  about  household  furniture  and 
so  on?' 

'I  include  that  under  housing,'  said 


636 


REAL  SOCIALISM 


the  Pest.  'The  state  provides  every- 
thing necessary  for  domestic  purposes, 
down  to  knives  and  forks,  pillow-cases 
and  dish-towels;  the  quantity  and 
quality  of  these,  like  the  houses  them- 
selves, being  graded  according  to  the 
value  of  the  service  which  the  citizen 
performs.  It  might  be  expected  that  a 
certain  class  of  persons  would  wish  for 
personal  possessions  of  a  sort  superior 
to  those  furnished  by  the  state,  but 
there  are  two  causes  which  render  this 
wish  inoperative.  The  climate  is  de- 
structive for  one  thing,  but  there  is  a 
much  stronger  reason  in  the  fact  that 
such  possessions  would  accomplish 
nothing  in  the  way  of  proclaiming 
social  superiority.  The  classification 
of  citizens  is  perfectly  understood  to  be 
upon  the  basis  of  serviceableness  to  the 
state.  It  is  proclaimed  quite  finally 
and  irrevocably  by  the  type  of  house 
you  are  assigned  to  live  in,  and  by  the 
number  of  table  napkins  which  the  gov- 
ernment issues  to  your  wife.  Private 
possessions  can  add  nothing  to  it.  In 
other  words,  no  one  has  any  reason  for 
keeping  up  a  front.' 

'You  say  the  state  feeds  its  citizens 
as  well  as  houses  them/  observed  the 
Anarchist.  'Is  the  same  nice  classifi- 
cation you  have  been  speaking  of  car- 
ried out  in  the  ration  which  is  issued  to 
citizens?  Is  the  valuable  citizen,  that 
is  to  say,  compelled  to  eat  pate-de-foie- 
gras  while  the  less  valuable  members 
of  the  community  are  permitted  to 
thrive  on  mush  and  milk?' 

'Not  at  all,'  said  the  Pest.  'Every 
one  eats  exactly  what  he  likes.  A  cer- 
tain portion  of  his  remuneration  from 
the  state  consists  of  what  are  known 
as  commissary  coupons.  The  prices  in 
coupons  are  the  same  to  all.  These  are 
published  weekly.  Up  to  the  limit  of 
his  coupons,  the  least  valuable  citizen 
may  eat  the  most  valuable  food,  if  he 
prefers.' 

'Is  the  issue  of  these  coupons  suffi- 


ciently liberal/  inquired  the  Real  So- 
cialist, 'to  provide  for  the  adequate 
nourishment  of  these  least  valuable 
citizens  ? ' 

'Not  only  that/  said  the  Pest;  'you 
remind  me  that  I  must  make  a  correc- 
tion. I  said  that  he  purchased  what 
he  liked.  But  the  state  has  found  it 
necessary  to  establish  a  minimum  per 
diem  of  food-consumption  among  the 
less  enlightened  members  of  the  com- 
munity, in  order  to  maintain  their 
working  efficiency.  A  man  who  can't 
give  evidence  that  he  has  consumed  a 
sufficient  quantity  of  food  to  keep  his 
physical  status  unimpaired,  is  liable  to 
the  rigors  of  the  law.' 

'I  thought  you  were  going  to  stick 
to  facts/  grumbled  the  Banker. 

'I  am  sticking  to  the  facts/  insisted 
the  Pest.  'It's  all  perfectly  true, 
it's  all  happening  every  day,  only  you 
fellows  are  too  busy  theorizing  about 
the  labels  on  things  to  scrutinize  their 
contents.  Consequently,  your  ignor- 
ance of  this  state  is  wholly  natural, 
because  the  founders  of  it  are  wholly 
unconscious  that  it  is  a  Socialistic  state, 
and  have  never  advertised  it  as  such. 
In  fact,  if  they  were  ever  to  learn  that 
their  governmental  activities  were  de- 
scribed in  such  terms,  they  would  be 
horrified  beyond  belief.' 

'Do  you  mean  to  say/  demanded 
the  Real  Socialist  excitedly,  'that  this 
state  has  simply  made  up  its  own  So- 
cialism spontaneously,  as  it  has  gone 
along?' 

'Precisely/  said  the  Pest.  'Paying 
no  royalties  whatever  to  Carl  Marx  or 
subsequent  patentees.' 

Once  more  he  fixed  us  with  his  glit- 
tering eye  and  resumed  his  tale :  — 

'The  state  stands,  as  the  school- 
masters used  to  say,  in  loco  parentis  to 
its  adult,  as  well  as  its  juvenile  popu- 
lation, and  as  physical  well-being  is  a 
prime  consideration,  it  goes  to  almost 
incredible  extremes  in  its  detailed 


REAL  SOCIALISM 


637 


supervision  of  public  health.  Sanitary 
inspectors  go  everywhere  and  keep  a 
watch  on  everything,  and  the  most 
trivial  infraction  of  the  sanitary  code 
is  considered  too  serious  a  matter  to 
be  overlooked. 

'Of  course  there  are  no  doctors  in 
private  practice.  Whenever  a  citizen  is 
ailing,  he  gets  not  only  medical  atten- 
dance, but  the  medicines  themselves, 
free.  If  his  case  is  serious  enough  to 
warrant  such  a  course,  he  is  taken  at 
once  and  put  into  a  hospital,  where  also 
the  treatment  is  gratuitous.  When  a 
patient  is  sufficiently  recovered  to  be 
discharged  from  the  hospital,  but  is  not 
yet  well  enough  to  resume  his  duties, 
he  is  sent  to  a  convalescent  station  -in 
an  exceedingly  beautiful,  quiet,  iso- 
lated spot,  where  he  is  cared  for  until 
fully  restored  to  health.  And  I  will 
say  for  your  benefit,'  here  the  Pest 
addressed  himself  particularly  to  the 
Anarchist,  '  that  there  is  no  distinction 
in  this  course  of  treatment  between 
the  more  and  the  less  valuable  citizen, 
the  health  of  one  being  considered  as 
indissolubly  related  to  the  health  of 
all.' 

'Are  you  sure,'  asked  the  Banker, 
'that  the  establishment  of  this  system 
is  not  a  direct  result  of  the  teachings  of 
Mr.  Bernard  Shaw?  It  is  exactly  the 
system  for  which  he  pleads  so  eagerly 
and  eloquently  in  one  of  his  numerous 
prefaces.' 

'I  doubt  very  much,'  said  the  Pest, 
'whether  Mr.  Shaw  is  any  better 
aware  of  the  existence  of  this  state 
than  you  yourselves  are.  Certainly  it 
fails  in  one  important  particular  to 
fulfill  his  prophecies.  Mr.  Shaw  says, 
very  confidently,  that  if  such  a  system 
of  medical  practice  ever  existed,  it 
would  put  an  end,  quite  finally,  to 
vaccination  and  other  immunizing  de- 
vices; to  the  prescription  of  expensive 
drugs  as  remedies,  and  to  the  use  of 
formaldehyde  and  other  germicidal 


agencies  in  places  where  infectious 
diseases  have  existed;  it  being  Mr. 
Shaw's  idea  that  all  these  practices 
are  mere  superstitions,  fostered  in  or- 
der to  provide  the  private  doctor  with 
a  livelihood.  So  exactly  contrary  to 
the  fact  is  this  prophecy,  that  the  num- 
ber of  vaccinations  in  a  year  is  over 
forty  thousand,  even  the  most  transi- 
ent visitor  being  required  to  submit  to 
the  operation;  that  over  two  hundred 
pounds  avoirdupois  of  quinine  alone 
are  consumed  monthly,  while  the  dis- 
infection brigade  for  such  diseases  as 
pneumonia  and  tuberculosis  last  year 
disinfected  and  fumigated  two  hundred 
and  thirty  houses,  and  totally  demo- 
lished thirty- two.  It  only  remains  to 
say  that  this  state,  which  in  the  past 
has  had  the  reputation  of  being  one  of 
the  unhealthiest  places  in  the  world,  is 
now  able  to  show  a  death-rate  which 
entitles  it  to  be  considered  as  a  health 
resort. 

'The  principal  care  of  the  state  is 
for  the  health  of  its  citizens,  but  it  also 
makes  some  attempt  to  provide  for  their 
other  wants  with  churches,  schools, 
libraries,  and  club-houses  of  various 
sorts,  where  certain  social  amusements 
are  provided.  There  is  also  a  public 
brass  band  for  whose  intentions  I  have 
nothing  but  praise. 

'  I  don't  feel,  however,  that  this  state 
shines  particularly  in  the  encourage- 
ment it  gives  to  the  aesthetic  develop- 
ment of  its  citizens.  In  the  matter  of 
decoration,  for  example,  only  one  kind 
of  paint  is  used,  and  this  is  applied 
indiscriminately  to  everything.  The 
formula,  which  I  took  pains  to  inquire 
about,  was  cheerfully  furnished  me.  It 
consists  of  coal-tar,  kerosene,  and  Port- 
land cement,  in  a  fixed  proportion.  It 
combines  the  merits  of  cheapness  and 
permanency  in  a  high  degree.  That  is 
all,  I  believe,  that  any  one  would  say 
for  it.' 

'What   do  they  do,'   inquired   the 


638 


REAL  SOCIALISM 


Banker,  *  besides  look  after  their  health 
and  hear  the  band  play?' 

'The  industrial  activities  of  any 
country  are  generally  pretty  well  re- 
flected by  its  railways.  In  this  case,  of 
course,  the  railway  is  a  state  affair. 
I  am  sorry  to  say  I  have  n't  the  figures 
by  me,  but  I  know  that  it  is  extremely 
profitable  and  I  should  be  greatly  sur- 
prised to  learn  that  any  railroad  in  the 
United  States  hauled  a  greater  annual 
tonnage  per  mile.  Of  course  the  in- 
dustrial enterprises  of  this  country  are 
very  intimately  correlated,  all  the 
power  being  developed  at  the  most 
naturally  advantageous  points  and 
conveyed  wherever  needed,  generally 
in  the  form  of  electricity,  although 
there  is  a  ten-inch  pipe-line  of  com- 
pressed air  running  from  one  end  of 
the  country  to  the  other.  The  govern- 
ment itself,  of  course,  conducts  all 
these  enterprises,  and,  indeed,  they  are 
by  far  its  most  important  function. 
Providing  its  citizens  with  food,  houses, 
laundry  facilities,  taking  care  of  the 
public  health,  and  providing  such  aes- 
thetic pleasures  as  are  afforded  by  that 
band,  are  mere  incidentals.' 

'So  completely  is  this  state  absorbed 
in  its  industrial  and  engineering  works, 
that  it  denies  the  exceptional  advan- 
tages its  organization  provides,  to  all 
but  workers.  A  casual  visitor  is  not 
permitted  to  patronize  the  commissary 
or  the  public  laundries,  nor  is  he  re- 
ceived at  the  regular  state  hotels. 
There  is,  indeed,  one  large  caravansary 
built  for  the  accommodation  of  vis- 
itors, but  even  here  the  visitors  are 
charged  twice  as  much  for  accommoda- 
tion as  are  the  regular  working  citizens 
of  the  state.  This  is  partly,  no  doubt, 
to  prevent  it  from  getting  overcrowded 
by  an  idle,  pleasure-loving  class,  whose 
presence  would  hinder  the  furtherance 
of  the  great  works  which  the  state  is 
prosecuting,  but  is  also  a  measure  of 
protection  to  the  merchants,  inn- 


keepers, and  so  forth,  of  the  neighbor- 
ing state,  who  would  infallibly  lose  all 
their  customers  unless  such  a  regula- 
tion were  adopted.' 

'I  am  curious,'  said  the  Real  Social- 
ist, '  to  know  something  more  about  the 
organization  of  the  government.  Any 
government  that  can  administer  such 
a  multiplicity  of  activities  in  a  manner 
at  all  satisfactory, — and  I  gather  from 
your  remarks  that  the  manner  is  sat- 
isfactory, —  must  possess  a  high  de- 
gree of  ability  and  skill.' 

*  Nominally,'  said  the  Pest,  'the  gov- 
ernment is  by  commission.  The  public 
health  is  in  charge  of  a  sanitary  com- 
missioner. There  is  a  commissioner 
in  charge  of  the  commissary  and  of 
other  supplies;  another  in  charge  of  the 
civil  administration,  while  the  great 
engineering  and  industrial  enterprises 
I  have  spoken  of  are  under  the  charge 
of  other  commissioners.' 

'Why  do  you  say  nominally?'  asked 
the  Socialist. 

'Because,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  the 
chairman  of  the  Commission  is  a  dic- 
tator. He  can  issue  administrative 
orders  to  suspend  the  operation  of 
existing  orders,  without  the  advice  or 
consent  of  the  other  members  of  the 
Commission.  Indeed,  he  is  under  no 
legal  obligation  ever  to  summon  a 
meeting  of  the  Commission.' 

'Is  this  chairman,'  inquired  the  So- 
cialist, '  elected  in  the  first  place  by  the 
Commission  and  from  their  number, 
or  is  he  elected  directly  by  the  vote  of 
the  people?' 

The  Pest  smiled,  and  finished  his 
second  half-litre. 

'Neither,'  said  he.  'The  chairman 
is  appointed  by  the  President  of  the 
United  States. 

'  Of  course,'  he  went  on,  after  a  rather 
blank  silence,  'you  can  have  been  in 
no  doubt  for  some  time  back  that  the 
place  I  have  been  talking  about  is  the 
Panama  Canal  Zone.' 


REAL  SOCIALISM 


639 


Well,  we  all  began  talking  then,  more 
or  less  at  once,  and  the  consensus  of 
opinion  was  that  the  Pest  had  n't 
played  fair.  He  had  no  business  to 
speak  of  the  Canal  Zone  as  a  state. 

Thereupon,  the  Pest  wanted  to  know 
why  not. 

'Of  course  it  is  n't  sovereign/  he 
admitted,  'but  there  are  plenty  of 
states  that  are  n't,  except  as  a  matter 
of  polite  fiction.  Take  the  one  ruled  by 
the  Sultan  of  Brunei,  or  by  the  Gaekwar 
of  Baroda.  For  working  purposes,  the 
Zone  is  a  state.  It  enforces  its  own 
body  of  laws.  It's  got  a  postal  sys- 
tem'— 

'  It  has  n't  any  foreign  relations/ 
interrupted  the  Magazine  Man. 

'Has n't  it,  just! '  said  the  Pest.  He 
had  picked  up  this  Briticism  presum- 
ably on  his  travels.  '  Go  down  and  run 
it  for  a  while  and  see  if  you  have  n't 
foreign  relations  enough  with  the 
Republic  of  Panama  to  keep  the  whole 
State  Department  busy/ 

'That's  neither  here  nor  there/  said 
the  Socialist.  'It  is  n't  a  state,  because 
its  government  does  n't  spring  from  its 
people.  In  a  word,  it  has  no  foundation 
whatever  in  Democracy/ 

'Precisely/  said  the  Pest,  with  an 


affable  smile.  'That's  what  is  so  won- 
derfully fitting  about  it.  Because 
there  's  nothing  democratic  about 
Socialism. 

'It  has  been  my  fate/  he  went  on,  'to 
hear  all  the  phases  of  Socialism  dis- 
cussed on  innumerable  occasions  and 
by  all  sorts  of  Socialists.  They  dis- 
agree almost  as  enthusiastically  as  the 
early  Christians,  but  there  is  one  point 
on  which 'there  is  no  diversity  of  opin- 
ion. When  we  have  got  the  Socialist 
state  in  full  operation,  we  always  find 
that  it  is  administered  by  an  oligarchy 
of  highly  intelligent  persons,  like  the 
speaker,  while  the  "mere  unthinking 
voter"  ramps  around  and  amuses  him- 
self with  the  illusion  that  it  is  all  his 
own  doing/ 

'You're  a  trifler/  said  the  Socialist 
severely,  'with  no  social  consciousness 
whatever,  and  I  fear  that  you  are  an 
incorrigible  individualist.' 

'  If  you  want  real  individualism/  said 
the  Pest, '  you  've  got  to  go  to  Canton, 
China.  The  merchants  there '  — 

At  this  point  we  rose  as  one  man 
and  threw  him  out.  But  we  made 
the  Socialist  pay  for  the  drinks.  Well, 
it's  lucky  these  Socialists  are  all  so 
rich. 


CHRISTIAN  UNITY 


BY   FRANKLIN    SPENCER   SPALDING 


THE  new  sense  of  social  service  in  all 
the  churches,  and  the  movement  for 
union  among  the  churches,  are  closely 
related.  So  long  as  the  chief  business 
of  ecclesiastical  organizations  was  to 
teach  dogma,  isolation  was  inevitable 
and  desirable.  The  right  of  those  who 
do  not  care  to  believe  a  particular 
creed  to  choose  another  creed  must  be 
recognized.  When,  however,  religious 
societies  accept  the  obligation  of  social 
service,  combination  is  necessary  for 
efficiency. 

When  the  motive  of  the  foreign  mis- 
sionary was  to  persuade  the  heathen  to 
believe  a  special  creed,  each  missionary 
tried  to  keep  himself  and  his  converts 
as  far  away  as  possible  from  every 
other  missionary.  But  when  the  object 
of  the  foreign  missionary  is  to  build 
schools  and  hospitals  and  to  bring  to 
the  heathen  the  benefits  of  Christian 
civilization,  the  necessity  of  coopera- 
tion is  forced  upon  him. 

This  practical  desire  to  get  helpful 
things  done  is  the  popular  reason  for 
the  increasing  interest  in  Christian 
Unity.  But  there  is  here  a  very  real 
danger.  Intense  interest  in  Social  Sci- 
ence at  home  and  abroad  may  make  us 
forget  that  the  churches  are  primarily 
religious  institutions,  not  organized 
charity  societies.  It  is  true  that  the 
names  of  those  who  love  their  fellow 
men  will  head  the  list  of  those  who  love 
the  Lord,  but  there  are  other  legitimate 
ways  of  expressing  love  for  God  and 
receiving  his  help,  which  must  not  be 
640 


overlooked.  There  may  be  scores  of 
societies  designed  to  teach  men  to  do 
justly  and  to  love  mercy,  but  the 
Church  is  the  sole  means  of  teaching 
men  to  walk  humbly  with  God. 

The  danger,  to-day,  is  that  those 
who  are  planning  for  Christian  Unity, 
in  their  zeal  to  supply  man's  physical 
needs,  will  forget  that  he  also  has  spir- 
itual needs.  We  must  thank  the  social 
experts  for  their  protest  against  selfish 
sectarianism  and  impractical  other- 
worldliness,  but  if  they  are  intelligent 
they  will  let  the  psychologists  tell  them 
that  man  cannot  live  by  bread  alone, 
even  though  every  child  be  given 
plenty  of  it,  because  the  human  soul  is 
athirst  for  the  Living  God.  The  help 
of  the  social  expert  must  be  the  help  of 
a  friendly  outsider.  He  may  tell  the 
churches  as  forcefully  as  he  will  that 
sensible  humanitarians  consider  their 
divisions  inexcusable  and  shameful, 
but  he  is  powerless  to  tell  them  how  to 
unite.  The  movement  for  Christian 
Unity  is  not  a  humanitarian,  but  a 
religious,  movement. 

At  this  point  the  theologian  offers 
himself  as  a  guide.  We  owe  him  a  debt 
of  gratitude  which  we  earnestly  ac- 
knowledge. He  has  shown  men  that 
God's  revelation  of  Himself  in  Jesus 
Christ  'is  the  fullest  disclosure  of  the 
nature  of  God,'1  and  'that  its  interpre- 
tation of  God  in  terms  of  divine  father- 
hood, and  man  in  the  terms  of  sonship, 
and  the  final  end  of  life  as  a  kingdom  in 

1  '  The  Divine  Revelation  and  the  Christian 
Religion,'  by  Daniel  Evans:  Harvard  Theological 
Review,  July,  1912. 


CHRISTIAN  UNITY 


641 


which  all  men  realize  their  nature,  is 
alone  adequate.' 

The  importance  of  this  service  few 
will  dispute,  but  writers  of  creeds  are 
rarely  able  to  see  clearly  when  their 
task  is  done,  and  the  attempts  of  the 
theologians  to  substitute  for  the  reli- 
gion of  Jesus  their  various  theological 
speculations  have  caused  more  disunion 
than  peace.  We  can,  therefore,  no 
more  let  the  theologian  lead  us  than 
the  humanitarian.  The  movement  for 
Christian  Unity  is  not  a  philosoph- 
ical or  a  metaphysical,  but  a  religious 
movement. 

Offers  of  guidance  from  the  theolo- 
gians are  numerous.  The  followers  of 
Alexander  Campbell,  who  spent  his 
life  trying  to  unify  Christendom,  ask 
this  question  as  of  fundamental  im- 
portance: 'Do  you  believe  that  the 
Protestant  Bible  is  an  all-sufficient 
statement  of  Doctrine,  of  Worship, 
and  of  Service?'  The  question  is  not 
an  invitation  to  peace,  but  a  challenge 
to  fight. 

The  peace  proposals  of  the  Protestant 
Episcopal  Church  are  also  suggestive 
of  the  dogma  which  makes  for  disagree- 
ment. The  committee  it  has  recent- 
ly appointed  to  advance  the  cause  of 
Christian  Unity  is  named,  'A  Commis- 
sion on  Faith  and  Order,'  and  it  asks 
us  to  pray  that  the  day  may  be  hasten- 
ed, 'when  all  men  shall  be  enabled  to 
see  that  Christians  endeavor  to  keep 
the  Unity  of  the  Spirit  in  the  bond 
of  peace ' ;  that  among  men  '  there  is 
one  body  and  one  spirit,  —  one  hope 
of  your  calling,  one  Lord,  one  faith, 
one  baptism,  one  God  and  Father  of 
all,  who  is  over  all  and  through  all  and 
in  all.' 

It  would  hardly  be  possible  to  put 
more  theology  into  the  same  number 
of  words,  and  it  is  the  object  of  this 
paper  to  prove  that  if  we  are  ever  to 
have  Christian  Unity  it  will  be  because 
this  prayer  is  not  used. 

VOL.  Ill  -  NO.  5 


The  following  statement  by  Andrew 
D.  White  in  the  preface  to  his  History 
of  the  Warfare  of  Science  with  Theology 
in  Christendom  expresses  probably  the 
feeling  of  the  most  thoughtful  men  to- 
day: 'My  conviction  is  that  science, 
though  it  has  evidently  conquered 
Dogmatic  Theology  based  on  biblical 
texts  and  ancient  modes  of  thought, 
will  go  hand-in-hand  with  religion;  and 
that  although  theological  control  will 
continue  to  diminish,  religion  as  seen 
in  the  recognition  of  a  "  power  in  the 
universe,  not  ourselves,  which  makes 
for  righteousness,"  and  in  the  love  of 
God  and  of  our  neighbor,  will  steadily 
grow  stronger  and  stronger,  not  only  in 
the  American  institutions  of  learning, 
but  in  the  world  at  large.' 

This  contention,  that  the  fundamen- 
tal, permanent  element  in  our  ecclesi- 
astical organizations  is  not  theology 
but  religion,  is  no  new  discovery.  Lord 
Bacon  in  Essay  3,  'Of  Unity  in  Relig- 
ion,' said  the  same  thing.  'Religion 
being  the  chief  band  of  human  society, 
it  is  a  happy  thing  when  itself  is  well 
contained  within  the  true  band  of 
unity.  The  quarrels  and  divisions  about 
religions  were  evils  unknown  to  the 
heathen.  The  reason  was,  because  the 
religion  of  the  heathen  consisted  rather 
in  rites  and  ceremonies,  than  in  any 
constant  belief.' 

Surely  a  candid  study  of  the  history 
of  the  Christian  Church  shows  clearly 
that  religion — not  theology — is  the  im- 
portant basic  matter.  The  Nicene  or  the 
Augustinian  or  the  Medieeval  theolo- 
gies, each  and  all,  no  more  exhaust  the 
full  meaning  of  man's  relation  to  God 
than  the  Ptolemaic,  the  Newtonian, 
or  the  Darwinian  theories  of  the  physi- 
cal universe  exhaust  the  full  meaning 
of  man's  relation  to  nature.  Because 
man  has  a  mind  he  cannot  but  attempt 
to  formulate  his  discoveries  about  God 
and  about  nature  into  systems  of  the- 
ology and  of  science,  but  those  systems 


642 


CHRISTIAN  UNITY 


lose  their  value  when  they  are  consid- 
ered final  and  not  tentative.  They  are 
ways  of  approach,  and  not  ends  of 
journeys. 

For  one  ecclesiastical  institution  to 
suppose  that  its  creedal  statement  ex- 
presses the  final  truth  about  God  and 
immortality  is  as  absurd  as  to  suppose 
that  Newton's  Principia  or  Darwin's 
Origin  of  Species  gives  final  and  com- 
plete knowledge  of  sky  and  earth.  To 
assert  that  the  sacramental  means  of 
grace  performed  by  one  accredited 
order  of  priests  is  the  only  way  of  ap- 
propriating divine  strength  is  as  untrue 
as  it  would  be  to  claim  that  one  type 
of  engine  utilizes  the  whole  power  of 
steam. 

The  real  value  of  any  movement  for 
Christian  Unity  depends  on  the  pro- 
gress it  makes  toward  securing  for  all 
an  adequate  expression  of  their  relig- 
ious life.  The  sole  test  of  the  worth  of 
theological  formularies  is  their  help- 
fulness toward  that  end.  If  that  end  is 
conserved,  then  the  dogmatic  state- 
ment is  useful;  if  not,  it  is  useless.  The 
end  in  view  is  an  adequate  supply  of 
spiritual  and  moral  strength,  not  a 
final,  unchangeable  statement  of  theo- 
logical truth.  It  is  not  denied  that 
such  a  statement  of  truth  would  make 
men  free  from  moral  weakness  and 
spiritual  deadness.  What  is  insisted  on 
is  that  we  can  only  arrive  at  the  doc- 
trine by  doing  the  work,  and  that, 
therefore,  in  planning  for  Christian 
Unity,  ethical  and  religious  values  are 
of  the  first  importance;  theological 
definition  can  be  left  to  look  after  it- 
self. Right  conduct  and  humble  wor- 
ship are  the  only  ways  of  becoming 
acquainted  with  God,  and  until  men 
become  acquainted  with  God  they 
cannot  write  creeds  which  state  exactly 
what  his  nature  is. 

What  is  desperately  needed  to-day  is 
not  a  creed  so  exact  that  it  contains 
all  the  truths  that  have  ever  been 


discovered  about  God,  but  a  society 
in  which  every  child  of  man  can  find 
moral  strength  and  spiritual  joy.  The 
problem  is  psychological,  not  theo- 
logical. If  the  problem  were  theolog- 
ical it  would  be  hopeless,  but  because 
it  is  psychological  it  is  solvable.  We 
can  learn  about  human  nature  if  we 
try;  and  when  we  know  human  nat- 
ure we  can  so  order  it  that  God  can 
find  his  way  in;  but  by  searching,  we 
cannot  find  out  God. 


ii 

Although  man  has  been  unconscious 
of  it,  the  varieties  of  human  nature 
have  always  influenced  the  organiza- 
tion of  religion.  The  Methodist  revival 
in  England  is  an  illustration  of  the  suc- 
cessful demand  of  a  kind  of  tempera- 
ment for  religious  satisfaction  which 
the  old  organization  was  not  supplying, 
— though  that  demand  could  not  define 
itself  in  exact  terms.  It  is  true  that 
followers  of  Wesley  developed  a  doc- 
trine of  the  Holy  Spirit  unfamiliar  to 
the  Church  of  England,  but  they  car- 
ried with  them  the  doctrinal  state- 
ments of  the  Mother  Church,  and  there 
would  have  been  no  charge  of  heresy 
had  they  remained  in  the  fold  and 
taught  *  Christian  Perfection.'  The  real 
causes  of  separation  were  psycholog- 
ical, not  theological.  They  had  to  do 
with  the  nature  of  man,  not  the  nature 
of  God.  We  are  now  able  to  recognize 
this  basic  fact,  and  in  planning  for 
Unity  we  must  give  it  its  place  of 
supreme  importance. 

This  will  not  be  easy,  and  before  we 
try  to  discover  the  types  of  human 
nature  which- must  be  satisfied,  atten- 
tion may  well  be  called  to  two  obsta- 
cles in  the  way  of  progress  which  are 
so  illogical  and  unjustifiable  that  once 
they  are  known  they  ought  to  be 
quickly  removed.  The  first  is  practical, 
and  if  we  resummon  the  social  expert 


CHRISTIAN  UNITY 


643 


whom  we  dismissed  a  moment  ago,  he 
will  help  us  to  see  the  unworthiness  of 
one  of  the  causes  of  a  divided  Christ- 
endom. The  World  Almanac  for  1911 
names  166  different  Christian  organiza- 
tions in  the  United  States;  and,  either 
consciously  or  unconsciously,  the  heads 
of  each  organization,  the  editors  of  all 
the  papers  published  in  the  interest  of 
each  of  the  organizations,  the  profes- 
sors in  the  training  schools  for  ministers 
of  all  these  denominations,  the  writers 
and  publishers  of  all  the  books  in  de- 
fense of  the  peculiar  tenets  of  each  of 
these  166  churches,  oppose  any  con- 
solidation which  would  put  them  out 
of  business.  If  Christian  Unity  were 
realized  in  the  state  in  which  I  live,  one 
man  from  one  office  could  do  the  work 
now  done  by  seven  highly  paid  and  re- 
spected officials.  The  influence  of  the 
sectarian  press  is  a  striking  example 
of  sectarian  inertia  and  opposition  to 
progress  toward  Unity. 

In  the  United  States,  86  papers  are 
published  in  the  interest  of  the  Protes- 
tant Episcopal  Church.  These  papers 
support  wholly,  or  in  part,  a  large  num- 
ber of  editors,  printers,  and  contribu- 
tors. Other  denominations  use  even 
more  printers'  ink.  In  the  very  nature 
of  the  case  these  editors,  printers,  and 
contributors  must  take  themselves 
very  seriously  as  useful  public  servants, 
and  that  seriousness  blocks  advance 
toward  Unity. 

There  are  in  the  United  States  162 
theological  seminaries,  whose  1350  pro- 
fessors are  engaged  in  earning  their 
salaries  by  teaching  coming  clergymen 
that  the  particular  emphasis  for  which 
their  church  stands  in  divided  Christ- 
endom is  still  worth  fighting  for.  It 
seems,  therefore,  as  if  the  leaders  of 
thought  were,  by  a  cruel  necessity,  op- 
posed to  unity. 

On  the  other  hand,  just  because  they 
are  leaders  of  thought,  there  is  hope  that 
they  will  see  the  strength  and  the  right- 


eousness of  the  movement  toward 
Unity  and  be  willing  to  lay  down  their 
official  lives  to  advance  it.  The  pressure 
of  the  demand  of  the  missionary  who 
sees  the  weakness  of  a  divided  front 
in  the  foreign  field  is  forcing  our  Board 
officials  to  think  seriously.  The  grow- 
ing influence  and  circulation  of  un- 
denominational Christian  weekly  and 
quarterly  publications  is  showing  open- 
minded  editors  the  stupidity  of  try- 
ing to  compete  in  influencing  public 
opinion. 

Theological  seminaries  are  coming 
into  closer  relation  with  great  univers- 
ities, as  in  the  cases  of  Union  with 
Columbia  and  Andover  with  Harvard, 
and  such  association,  must  make  for 
breadth.  There  is,  therefore,  proof 
that  even  these  naturally  opposing 
forces  are  weakening  their  opposition 
to  the  great  cause  of  the  Unity  of 
Christendom.  When  the  men  who  con- 
stitute them  realize  the  situation,  they 
will  rapidly  remove  such  opposition, 
and  laymen  will  follow  their  lead.  Just 
because  this  is  not  an  age  interested  in 
theological  speculation,  those  who  still 
attend  church  are  most  obedient  to 
authority.  They  will  let  their  leaders 
think  Unity  for  them  as  willingly  as 
they  now  let  them  think  sectarianism 
for  them. 

The  other  obstacle  is  found  in  the 
inconsistent  way  in  which  even  en- 
lightened thinkers  use  the  Bible  as  an 
authority.  Very  few  advocates  of  ver- 
bal inspiration  can  be  found  to-day. 
Indeed,  most  leaders  of  thought  in  all 
the  churches  have  accepted  in  part  at 
least  the  Higher  Criticism.  But  when 
it  comes  to  the  proof  texts  of  their 
own  sectarian  basis,  then  they  forget 
their  modern  scholarship  and  criticism, 
and  go  back  to  verbal  inspiration. 

A  Baptist  scholar  may  agree  that  St. 
Paul's  rabbinical  training  made  him 
adopt  a  mode  of  exegesis  not  binding 
on  a  modern  thinker,  but  when  it  comes 


644 


CHRISTIAN  UNITY 


to  the  statement  in  Romans  vi,  4,  that 
Christians  are  buried  with  Christ  in 
baptism,  he  insists  that  every  word  is 
straight  from  God.  There  is  to-day  in 
the  Methodist  Church  a  distinctly 
rationalistic  tendency  in  its  thought  of 
inspiration.  Many  Methodist  scholars 
teach  that  St.  John's  Gospel  is  an 
interpretation  rather  than  a  verbatim 
report,  but  they  know  that  the  thought 
in  the  third  chapter  of  that  Gospel, 
'Except  a  man  be  born  again,  he  can- 
not see  the  Kingdom  of  God,'  fell  in 
exactly  those  words  from  the  lips  of 
the  Lord. 

I  suppose  the  majority  of  Anglican 
scholars  accept  the  documentary  hy- 
pothesis of  the  Gospels,  agreeing  that 
in  the  First  Gospel  we  have  a  compila- 
tion freely  made  of  older  documents, 
and  that  some  of  the  words  put  into 
the  mouth  of  Jesus  are  not  the  very 
words  he  spoke,  but  words  which  the 
Evangelist  felt  expressed  his  meaning. 
Most  of  them,  however,  forget  their 
scholarship  when  they  quote  St.  Mat- 
thew xxvin,  20,  and  insist  that  Jesus 
uttered  the  very  words,  *  Lo,  I  am  with 
you  alway,  even  unto  the  end  of  the 
world,'  and  that  He  meant,  as  the 
Prayer-Book  puts  it,  that  He  *  would 
be  with  the  ministers  of  apostolic  suc- 
cession.' 

In  this  very  discussion  of  Christian 
Unity,  we  continually  hear  men  of  very 
liberal  views  of  inspiration  say,  'We 
must  work  and  pray  for  what  our 
Lord  prayed  for,  for  in  his  high  priest- 
ly prayer  did  He  not  say,  "Neither 
pray  I  for  these  alone,  but  for  them 
also  which  shall  believe  on  me  through 
their  word;  that  they  all  may  be  one; 
as  Thou,  Father,  art  in  me,  and  I  in 
Thee,  that  they  also  may  be  one  in 
us.": 

If  they  were  consistent  they  would 
recognize  that  these  may  not  be  the 
words  of  our  Lord  at  all,  but  the  words 
which  the  author  of  the  Fourth  Gos- 


pel thought  that  He  may  have  prayed.1 

Still,  there  are  tendencies  at  work 
which  will  force  greater  consistency. 
The  interpretation  of  the  Bible  which 
is  really  being  read  to-day  is  not  issued 
in  the  interest  of  any  sect,  but  by  pub- 
lishers bidding  for  a  wider  circle  of 
readers  than  the  membership  of  any 
one  society.  They  encourage  non-par- 
tisan teachers  in  unsectarian  univer- 
sities to  publish  their  opinions,  and 
even  sectarian  teachers,  writing  for 
commentaries  like  the  Expositors,  the 
International,  and  the  Westminster,  or 
for  modern  Bible  dictionaries  and  en- 
cyclopaedias, make  an  earnest  effort 
not  to  write  as  special  pleaders,  but  as 
careful  and  judicious  scholars. 

Sometimes,  it  is  true,  sectarian  bigot- 
ry is  commended  as  church  loyalty.  In 
one  of  our  Episcopal  papers  a  thought- 
ful writer  recently  suggested  that  the 
difference  between  a  loyal  investigator 
and  a  disloyal  rationalist  was  that  the 
one  approached  all  debatable  questions 
with  a  bias  in  favor  of  the  Church's 
past  belief,  while  the  disloyal  rational- 
ist began  his  investigation  with  a  feel- 
ing that  the  Church  was  probably 
wrong  and  that  he  could  prove  it  if  he 
tried. 

The  distinction  seemed  to  me  an  im- 
portant one  when  I  read  it,  but  the 
very  next  day  a  prominent  Mormon 
—  a  graduate  of  the  University  of 
Michigan  —  to  whom  I  had  given  a 
copy  of  Dr.  I.  Woodbridge  Riley's 
psychological  study,  The  Founder  of 
Mormonism,  said  to  me,  'The  trouble 
with  that  book  is  that  the  author  ap- 
proaches the  study  of  Joseph  Smith 
with  a  prejudice  against  him.  He  be- 
gins with  a  definite  belief  that  the 

1  'These  chapters  were  written  down  and  be- 
came accepted  Scripture  not  less  than  three  quar- 
ters of  a  century  after  they  were  spoken,  by  one 
who,  in  common  with  likeminded  companions, 
had  experienced  the  faithfulness  of  our  Lord's 
promises.'  —  BISHOP  BRENT,  The  Sixth  Sense, 
page  95. 


CHRISTIAN  UNITY 


645 


founder  of  my  church  was  not  a  pro- 
phet of  God,  and  that  he  must  try  his 
best  to  prove  it.  But  I,  as  one  brought 
up  in  the  Church  of  Jesus  Christ  of 
Latter-Day-Saints,  feel  strongly  that 
such  a  bias  disqualifies  the  writer  for 
my  respect.' 

If  this  apparently  admirable  point 
of  view  of  the  prejudiced  investigator 
prevented  Mormons  from  seeing  the 
truth  about  their  false  prophet,  I  was 
forced  to  wonder  whether  it  was  a  help- 
ful point  of  view  for  any  one  to  take. 
Why  need  there  be  any  more  bias  in 
the  mind  of  the  investigator  of  spirit- 
ual problems  than  in  the  mind  of  the 
investigator  of  scientific  matters?  Per- 
haps when  we  make  religion,  and  not 
theology,  the  important  matter,  parti- 
sanship will  cease.  The  theologian  rea- 
sons deductively,  and  deductive  rea- 
soning requires  making  assumptions 
and  holding  to  them  dogmatically. 
The  study  of  religion,  on  the  other 
hand,  can  be  carried  on  inductively, 
and  preconceptions  of  any  kind  are  a 
recognized  hindrance  to  honest  induc- 
tive investigation. 


in 

There  seems,  then,  to  be  hope  that 
progress  can  be  made,  and  it  becomes 
increasingly  important  to  see  which 
way  is  really  forward.  If  our  argument 
is  valid  we  must  try  to  ascertain  what 
the  religious  needs  of  man  actually 
are,  so  that  the  United  Church  of  the 
future  may  provide  for  them.  It  is 
believed  that  there  are  really  but  three 
varieties  of  religious  experience;  but 
three  ways  in  which  men  approach 
God,  or,  perhaps  we  ought  to  say,  are 
reached  by  God. 

Some  men  have  always  satisfied 
their  religious  craving  through  the 
senses,  —  music  for  their  ears,  vest- 
ments and  lights,  color  and  images  for 
their  eyes,  incense  for  their  noses, 


beads  for  their  fingers.  In  the  oldest 
branches  of  the  Christian  Church,  the 
Greek,  the  Roman,  and  the  Anglican, 
provision  for  these  means  of  grace  has 
been  especially  provided.  If  it  be  in- 
sisted that  such  methods  of  worship 
were  far  from  the  mind  of  Christ  and 
were  borrowed  from  paganism,  such  an 
insistence  but  increases  the  proof  that 
some  men  always  have  felt  and  prob- 
ably always  will  feel  after  God,  and 
find  Him  through  their  senses.  Though 
superstition  and  idolatry  have  resulted 
from  such  sensuous  means,  it  is  also 
true  that  a  high  type  of  Christian  mys- 
ticism has  been  developed,  and  noble 
saints  through  these  visible  emblems 
have  found  Him  who  is  invisible.  The 
holiness  of  beauty  and  the  beauty  of 
holiness  are  related  to  each  other.  Art 
and  music  have  advanced  because 
religion  has  used  them.  Religion  has 
been  a  power  to  millions  because  art 
and  music  have  helped  her.  Therefore, 
the  United  Church  of  the  future  must 
provide  for  ritualistic  worship  and  for 
experts  to  conduct  it. 

But  there  always  have  been,  and  al- 
ways will  be,  those  who  are  irritated 
rather  than  helped  by  elaborate  cere- 
monial. Like  Hegel,  they  worship  b^ 
thinking.  Doubtless  many  of  theni 
will  always  be  individualists,  but  those 
who  assemble  themselves  together  will 
do  so  to  listen  to  addresses  by  thought- 
ful, ethical  teachers  delivered  in  lecture 
halls  rather  than  in  churches.  Their 
leaders  are  prophets  and  not  priests. 
Unitarians  and  Friends,  among  the 
sects  of  to-day,  illustrate  the  extreme 
of  this  type,  and  they  have  won  credit 
for  intellectual  courage  and  moral  ear- 
nestness. There  can  be  no  doubt  that 
they  find  God  by  thus  mentally  feeling 
after  Him,  because  they  have  an  heroic 
passion  for  truth  and  righteousness 
which  God  alone  can  inspire.  In  a 
United  Christendom,  provision  must  be 
made  for  those  who  find  God  through 


646 


CHRISTIAN  UNITY 


the  rational  and  logical  powers  of  the 
mind. 

And  in  the  third  place  there  are  the 
*  twice-born/  those  who  satisfy  their 
religious  craving  through  the  emo- 
tions. To  the  thousands  who  were 
spiritually  dying  in  spite  of  the  ritual 
of  Romans  and  the  intellectualism  of 
Anglicans,  the  appeal  to  the  emotions 
by  Wesley  and  Whitfield  brought  the 
breath  of  life.  The  leaders  of  the  old 
historical  churches,  with  their  dignified 
and  stilted  ritual,  and  the  preachers 
of  a  rational  gospel  of  conduct  may  feel 
that  the  revivalist  is  irreverent  and 
illogical,  but  they  cannot  deny  that 
many  —  who  have  not  been  reached 
by  them  —  he  brings  to  God  through 
the  Christ  who,  they  know,  has  saved 
them  from  their  sins.  And  the  emo- 
tional appeal  finds  as  many  responding 
hearts  to-day  as  it  ever  did.  Gypsy 
Smith  and  Billy  Sunday  continue  the 
work  of  Whitfield  and  Finney  and 
Moody. 

The  United  Church  of  the  future 
will  not  be  Catholic  unless  it  provides 
for  those  to  whom  God  comes  in  a 
subliminal  uprush.  The  story  is  told 
of  a  prim  English  curate,  who  once  en- 
tered a  meeting-house  in  which  a  com- 
pany of  Holy  Rollers  were  manifesting 
the  fruits  of  the  Spirit.  He  pushed 
his  way  to  the  platform  and  at  last 
got  a  hearing.  *  Don't  you  know,'  he 
said,  'that  God  is  not  the  God  of  dis- 
order but  of  harmony?  When  Solo- 
mon built  a  temple  to  his  glory  we  are 
told  that  there  was  neither  the  sound 
of  axe  nor  hammer,  but  in  holy  silence 
the  sacred  walls  arose.'  To  which  the 
exhorter  retorted,  'But,  parson,  we 
aren't  building  a  house,  we  're  blasting 
the  rocks.' 

No  doubt  these  three  methods  of 
religious  expression  and  divine  appro- 
priation combine  in  different  ways. 
Ritualistic  priests  deliver  thoughtful 
sermons,  and  some  of  them  preach  re- 


vivals which  they  prefer  to  call  'Mis- 
sions.' Puritan  reasoners  introduce 
liturgical  services  of  a  restrained  and 
limited  character.  They  even  replace 
the  stained  glass  which  their  fathers 
smashed.  Christian  Scientists  do  not 
appropriate  grace  by  what  other  peo- 
ple call  logic,  and  they  must,  like  the 
twice-born,  get  it  through  the  subcon- 
scious mind,  and  yet  their  public  ser- 
vices are  as  unemotional  as  Quaker 
meetings.  'Blasters  of  the  Rocks,'  like 
Dowie  and  General  Booth,  array  them- 
selves in  Episcopal  vestments  and  dec- 
orate themselves  with  brass  buttons. 
Still  it  is  believed  that  these  three  are 
the  basic  types,  and  that  if  provision 
is  made  in  one  organization  for  them, 
that  organization  will  give  adequate 
spiritual  help  to  the  vast  majority  of 
men. 

Is  it  possible  to  evolve  or  to  create 
such  an  organization?  Unless  it  can  be 
done,  Christian  Unity  is  not  desirable, 
because  the  religious  necessities  of  all 
sorts  and  conditions  of  men  will  not 
be  provided  for.  If  our  argument  is 
valid,  a  Church  which  does  not  want 
Christian  Unity  on  such  a  basis  does 
not  honestly  want  Christian  Unity  at 
all. 

IV 

A  group  of  influential  theologians 
will  protest  at  once  that  the  proposal 
to  create  an  organization  is  a  heresy 
which  denies  the  faith.  They  will  urge, 
that,  in  the  mind  of  Christ  the  Church 
is  one  already,  and  therefore  all  we  need 
to  do  is  to  realize  that  Unity. 

'The  Church  is  essentially  one,  as 
there  is  one  God,  one  Christ,  one 
Spirit,  one  fellowship.1  The  Unity  of 
the  Church  is  not  produced  by  man. 
We  may  strive  in  vain  to  produce  it.  It 

1  Prof.  Edward  L.  Brown.  From  a  paper  read 
at  a  conference  on  Christian  Unity  of  Ministers 
of  the  Congregational,  Baptist,  Presbyterian,  and 
Episcopal  Churches. 


CHRISTIAN  UNITY 


647 


already  exists.  It  is  an  actual  organic 
unity  of  believers  through  Christ, 
which  we  can  deny,  but  which  we  can 
neither  create  nor  destroy/ 

Surely  this  is  misty  mysticism.  One 
may  talk  in  the  same  vague  way  of  the 
'Solidarity  of  the  Human  Race'  and 
the  'Brotherhood  of  Man,'  because 
God  has  made  of  one  blood  all  nations 
of  men,  but  that  does  not  mean  that 
the  parliament  of  nations  and  the  fed- 
eration of  the  world  has  been  realized, 
or  can  be,  simply  by  thinking  so.  The 
President  of  Oberlin  is  a  Congrega- 
tionalist,  and  perhaps  therefore  a  hope- 
less individualist,  but  there  is  much 
wisdom  in  this  warning  in  his  Recon- 
struction of  Theology.  '  In  truth  it  needs 
to  be  said  with  emphasis  that  we  under- 
stand better  what  we  mean  by  personal 
relation  and  by  friendship,  than  we  do 
what  we  mean  by  organic  relation  and 
organism.' 

This  contention  that  the  Christian 
Church  is  an  'organism'  is  the  theo- 
logical obstacle  in  the  way  of  Christian 
Unity  which  will  die  hardest,  because 
it  lies  at  the  basis  of  the  dogma  of 
'the  Valid  Ministry'  held  so  tena- 
ciously by  those  churches  which  call 
themselves  'historic.'  They  insist  that 
the  life  of  the  organism  depends  on 
its  continuity,  and  that,  therefore,  the 
tree  of  Christianity  must  be  in  connec- 
tion with  the  apostolic  root  or  it  will 
die  even  though  it  have  a  name  to  live. 
It  is  contended  that  St.  Paul  argues 
for  this  conception  of  the  Church  in 
the  First  Epistle  to  the  Corinthians  and 
in  the  Epistle  to  the  Ephesians,  and 
that  his  argument  is  in  harmony  with 
the  argument  in  the  fifteenth  chapter  of 
St.  John  where  the  analogy  of  the  Vine 
and  its  branches  is  used.  I  remember 
well  a  picture  which  once  hung  in  the 
library  of  a  High-Church  bishop.  In 
the  centre  was  a  great  tree  with  three 
branches.  The  trunk  was  the  undi- 
vided Church  of  the  first  three  centu- 


ries. The  branches  were  the  Roman, 
the  Eastern,  and  the  Anglican  churches, 
all  in  vital  connection  with  the  trunk 
of  the  tree.  Perched  on  little  branches 
were  foolish  heretics  sawing  themselves 
off  from  the  great  branches.  Off  in  the 
corners  of  the  picture  were  Luther  and 
Calvin  and  Servetus  and  Wesley  and 
Joseph  Smith,  Jr.,  and  other  ecclesias- 
tics, each  planting  a  poor  sickly  twig, 
cut  from  the  great  tree  of  the  Catholic 
Church.  But  this  picture  when  care- 
fully considered,  fails  to  prove  its 
point,  for  even  the  Joseph-Smith-Jr. 
cutting,  once  it  takes  root,  becomes 
just  as  much  of  an  organism  as  the 
parent  tree,  and  it  is  conceivable  that 
such  a  cutting  may  grow  into  a  tree 
which,  judged  by  its  fruits,  is  a  better 
organism  than  the  old  tree  itself.  As 
has  been  wisely  said  by  the  Bishop  of 
Michigan,  '  It  is  by  fruits,  not  by  roots, 
we  are  to  be  judged.' 

An  illustration  from  another  form 
of  group-life  will  make  this  truth  still 
more  clearly  evident.  The  American 
revolutionists  deliberately  broke  with 
the  mother  country  and  created  a  new 
nation.  Their  Constitution  provided 
for  a  radically  different  method  of  na- 
tional solidarity  and  continuance;  but 
will  any  one  assert  that  at  the  present 
day  the  United  States  of  America  is  not 
a  living  organism  in  as  real  a  sense  as 
the  Kingdom  of  Great  Britain  and  Ire- 
land? 

Theology  may  make  connection  with 
God  depend  upon  theories  of  valid 
ordination,  but  religion  has  a  confi- 
dence of  its  own  that  'God  is  no  re- 
specter of  persons  but  in  every  nation 
he  that  feareth  Him  and  worketh 
righteousness  is  accepted  with  Him,' 
even  though  he  be  not  purified  accord- 
ing to  accredited  theological  methods. 
Therefore,  even  if  this  organic  concep- 
tion of  the  Church  were  true,  it  would 
not  prove  that  men's  religious  needs 
might  not  be  better  provided  for  if 


648 


CHRISTIAN  UNITY 


that  article  of  the  theological  creed 
were  denied.  We  are  not  interested  in 
preserving  dogma,  but  in  saving  life. 


What,  then,  shall  this  organization 
be?  What  is  necessary  is  an  organiza- 
tion of  religion  which  shall,  with  equal 
authority  and  credit,  provide  for  the 
three  forms  of  religious  need  so  that 
one  in  search  of  his  soul's  health  may 
pass  from  one  to  the  other  with  no 
more  suspicion  or  loss  of  standing  than 
a  citizen  of  Massachusetts  experiences 
in  going  from  Boston  to  Los  Angeles  in 
search  of  his  bodily  health. 

Present  forms  of  organization  must, 
of  course,  be  given  fair  consideration. 
The  Congregational  will  hardly  serve, 
because  it  is  rather  a  protest  against 
organization  than  a  form  of  it,  and 
the  present  development  of  organiza- 
tion in  the  Congregational  and  Baptist 
and  Campbellite  bodies,  because  of 
the  need  of  missionary  enterprises,  is 
admittedly  illogical.  The  Presbyterian 
and  the  Episcopal  forms  of  organiza- 
tion remain,  and  of  the  two  the  Epis- 
copal form  has  proved  itself  rather 
more  permanent,  and  yet  more  adapt- 
able and  flexible  than  the  Presbyte- 
rian, which  historically  was  created  in 
the  interest  of  a  definite  theological 
system.  Indeed,  to-day,  the  distinction 
between  the  Congregational  and  Pres- 
byterian is  rapidly  disappearing. 

Against  the  Episcopal  form  of  organi- 
zation is  the  undoubted  fact  that  it 
easily  falls  into  sacerdotal  temptation, 
and,  because  of  its  historical  associa- 
tion, is  almost  inevitably  aristocratic. 
Possibly  the  Methodist  form  of  Epis- 
copal leadership  may  be  more  useful 
than  either  the  Roman,  the  Anglican, 
or  the  Greek,  though  it  must  be  ad- 
mitted that  the  Methodist  bishop  is 
considered  quite  as  impressive  a  per- 
sonage as  others  who  hold  that  title. 


But  when  once  the  theological  dogma 
of  sacerdotalism  is  gone,  that  matter 
can  be  decided  on  practical  grounds. 
By  the  preservation  of  the  historic 
Episcopate  this  truth  of  fundamental 
importance  will  be  safeguarded,  and 
it  is  a  truth  so  important  that  risks 
may  well  be  taken  to  prevent  its  be- 
ing forgotten  —  that  Christianity  is 
a  historic  religion. 

The  Holy  Catholic  Church  must  not 
only  welcome  to-day  and  to-morrow 
all  sorts  and  conditions  of  men  who 
profess  and  call  themselves  Christ- 
ians, but  she  must  also  claim  kinship 
with  all  the  saints  of  all  the  Christ- 
ian centuries,  and  make  her  own  the 
fruits  of  their  victories  over  weakness 
and  sin.  None  of  the  churches  of 
to-day  appropriate  the  Christian  heri- 
tage, because  they  are  interested  in 
dogma  rather  than  life.  Those  who 
boast  that  they  are  '  historic  '  overlook 
the  values  of  the  last  five  hundred 
years  of  Christian  history;  while  the 
nonconformist  churches  fail  to  make 
their  own  the  treasures  of  the  first  five 
hundred  years.  Is  not  the  Anglican 
Church  right  in  the  feeling  that  the 
possession  of  the  historic  Episcopate 
gives  a  title  to  this  whole  heritage  and 
a  continual  reminder  of  its  value? 
Therefore,  is  not  the  proposal  to  give 
Episcopal  orders  to  the  churches  that 
have  lost  the  apostolic  succession  one 
which  should  be  seriously  considered? 
There  seems  to  be  no  more  certain  way 
of  making  the  Church,  as  a  wise  house- 
holder, take  out  of  the  treasure  things 
new  and  old. 

The  revival  of  interest  in  Christian 
Unity  dates  from  the  Edinburgh  Con- 
ference. Here  two  thousand  earnest 
men  agreed  to  forget  their  differences, 
which  meant  their  theology,  and  plan 
together  to  give  the  heathen  what  they 
all  agreed  the  heathen  really  needed  — 
the  Christian  Life.  Such  a  wonderful 
exhibition  of  brotherly  love  suggested 


THE  MAGIC  OF  GUAM 


649 


the  idea  that  it  might  be  possible  to 
hold  an  equally  representative  con- 
ference in  which  the  religious  values 
that  all  agreed  upon  should  be  put  in 
the  background,  and  where  there  should 
be  a  frank  discussion  of  the  theolog- 
ical dogmas  about  which  most  of  them 
differed. 

This  was  much  as  if,  because  a  con- 
vention of  mothers  had  shown  com- 
plete unanimity  of  opinion  in  praising 
the  glory  and  dignity  of  motherhood 
and  the  beauty  and  promise  of  child- 
hood, some  wise  one  should  decide 
that  it  would  be  a  good  time  to  secure 
agreement  on  the  best  formula  for 
sterilizing  milk. 

The  suggestion  to  call  a  world  con- 
ference to  consider  matters  of  theolog- 
ical difference  seemed  to  be  inspired 


by  the  spirit  of  truth;  but  if  our  ar- 
gument is  valid,  it  might  rather  have 
come  from  that  other  spirit  who,  on 
occasion,  is  said  to  disguise  himself  as 
an  angel  of  light,  and  who,  Milton  to 
the  contrary  notwithstanding,  has  a 
sense  of  humor  and  perhaps  said  to 
himself,  'How  much  more  exciting  it 
would  be  to  see  these  pious  brethren 
fight!' 

The  real  lesson  to  be  learned  is  that 
the  Edinburgh  Conference  was  only 
possible  because  the  tolerant  charity 
of  religion  was  for  the  time  given  full 
sway,  the  divisive  influence  of  theo- 
logy being  excluded.  Christian  Unity 
will  never  come  until  the  followers  of 
Jesus  Christ  realize  that  his  religion 
depends,  not  upon  exact  thinking,  but 
upon  Christlike  living. 


THE  MAGIC  OF  GUAM 


BY   MARJORIE   L.   SEWELL 


IN  the  midst  of  lapping  waters  floats 
a  far-off,  magic  island,  whose  purple 
mountain-peaks  rise  from  the  mists  of 
the  sea.  The  slow-heaving  swells  turn 
white  along  its  shore,  and  rocky  cliffs, 
resounding  to  the  boom  of  surf  on  the 
reef,  encircle  the  same  harbor  into 
which  Magellan  sailed  in  1521.  There 
stands  Fort  Santa  Cruz,  as  it  was  when 
so  lately  fired  upon  by  an  American 
vessel,  and  there  are  the  white  roofs 
of  Piti,  from  which  a  barge  put  out 
that  day  and  pulled  up  alongside  the 
American  battleship  in  order  to  ex- 
plain that  there  was  no  powder  on  the 
island  with  which  to  return  the  salute. 
But  it  was  not  a  salute,  and  although 


El  Gobernador  had  not  heard  of  the  war 
between  Spain  and  the  United  States, 
he  at  least  realized  the  fact,  when,  tied 
to  a  creaking  bullock-cart,  in  the  hot 
sun,  he  was  slowly  conducted  back 
to  Agana,  the  last  of  the  Spanish  gov- 
ernors. 

So  now  the  Spanish  regime  had 
passed  away,  and  the  echoing  corridors 
and  sunken  gardens  of  the  old  '  palace ' 
resounded  to  the  shouts  and  laughter 
of  small  Americans.  It  was  a  strange 
environment  for  a  western  child.  In 
the  case  of  a  little  girl  of  twelve,  there 
was,  of  course,  the  usual  routine  life  of 
the  tropics,  —  lessons  in  the  morning 
with  a  governess,  and  a  siesta  in  the 


650 


THE  MAGIC  OF  GUAM 


afternoon.  Now  and  then  a  guest 
would  take  tiffin  at  the  Government 
House;  the  captain  of  a  schooner  who 
had  lived  for  sixty  days  on  copra,  and 
who  told  wild  tales  of  the  Arctic  storms; 
or  a  German  from  distant  islands,  es- 
corted by  his  bodyguard  of  savages, 
whose  ear-lobes  touched  their  black 
shoulders,  so  heavy  were  the  beads 
they  wore.  And  once  a  month,  on 
transport-days,  when  the  mails  came, 
and  every  guiles 1  and  bull-cart  was 
pressed  into  service,  as  well  as  the 
daily  ambulance  with  the  blind  mule, 
to  carry  the  passengers  from  Piti  to 
Agafia,  why  then  all  thought  of  rou- 
tine was  abandoned,  even  lessons,  and 
a  palm  tree  was  cut  down,  so  that  the 
strangers  might  enjoy  a  palmetto  salad. 
Then,  too,  a  native  swimmer  would 
dive  deep  into  the  sea  to  draw  from 
his  home  in  a  coral  cave  that  delicacy, 
the  crawfish.  But  this,  of  course,  was 
seldom. 

At  four  o'clock  you  put  on  a  fresh 
white  dress,  socks,  and  sandals,  and 
then  the  day  really  began.  If  the  water 
was  too  hot  for  a  swim  at  Dunker's 
beach,  a  romp  with  the  little  native 
girls  was  the  next  best  thing,  —  shy 
children  with  bright  eyes,  and  eager  to 
learn  English.  Or,  you  went  to  see  the 
fat  lady,  who  made  wonderful  baskets, 
or  Senor  Martinez,  the  silversmith,  who 
would  pound  three  dollars  Mex  into  a 
bracelet  or  spoon  if  you  gave  him 
five. 

Sometimes,  even,  you  peeped  into 
Mr.  Lhemkuhl's  garden,  where  paw- 
paw and  mango  trees  were  combined 
in  a  bewildering  maze  with  every  kind 
of  tropical  and  temperate  vegetation, 
overshadowed  by  the  tall  stack  of  the 
ice-plant.  But  that  was  a  joke  you  could 

1  '  Quiles  '  is  probably  a  Chamorro  word.  It 
is  applied  to  a  two-wheeled  cart  drawn  by  one 
horse  and  seating  a  driver  and  four  people.  It  is 
used  at  Guam,  and  throughout  the  Philippines. 
—  THE  AUTHOR. 


never  quite  appreciate.  And  besides, 
not  all  the  interesting  things  were  in 
the  city.  Beyond  lay  the  rice-paddies, 
the  yam-  and  taro-fields,  and,  best  of 
all,  the  ranches,  for  there  you  caught 
and  plucked  a  chicken,  and,  as  it  fried 
over  the  fire  of  cocoanut  husks,  you  sat 
native-fashion  eating  rice  in  the  door- 
way of  a  nipa  hut.  Above  roosted  hens 
in  woven  baskets,  beneath  grunted  the 
black  pig,  tied  by  one  hind  leg.  And 
there  you  could  suck  sugar-cane  to 
your  heart's  content,  fill  your  pocket 
with  coffee-berries,  and  cocoa-beans, 
and  then,  with  oranges  dangling  from 
your  saddle,  race  home  on  a  trotting 
cow. 

While  the  Pacific  cable  was  still 
under  way,  and  before  the  first  official 
message  went  round  the  world  in  nine 
minutes,  the  child  often  visited  the 
cable  station,  a  cluster  of  temporary 
buildings  in  a  grove  of  banyan  trees. 
And  when  weary  of  the  clicking  keys 
and  of  sending  nursery  rhymes  hun- 
dreds of  miles  along  the  ocean  bottom 
by  Morse  code,  she  would  climb  high 
into  a  labyrinth  of  banyan  branches, 
where  flowers  and  ferns  grew  sixty  feet 
in  air,  until,  terrified  by  the  great 
height,  she  was  rescued,  and  descended 
on  the  shoulders  of  a  strong  young 
operator,  who  slid  down  one  of  the 
straight  roots  to  the  ground. 

So  the  American  child  learned  many 
things.  Learned?  No,  rather  absorb- 
ed, and  without  effort,  for  she  had 
merely  a  growing  consciousness  of  the 
joy  of  living.  To  be  up  with  the  sun, 
and,  leaving  the  world  wrapped  in 
mist,  to  plunge  through  thick  jungle, 
urging  the  pony  on  with  caresses,  —  and 
kicks,  —  while  wet  branches  brushed 
the  cold  dew  against  the  face,  and 
lemon  china  bushes  scratched  the 
arms,  —  this  was  to  live.  Then,  sud- 
denly, she  might  look  into  the  depth  of 
a  still  black  pool,  surrounded  by  gi- 
gantic trees,  gray  lichen,  and  matted, 


THE  MAGIC  OF  GUAM 


651 


hanging  vines.  At  one  side  the  spring 
had  overflowed  to  form  a  gliding  river, 
through  waving  pampas-grass,  and 
near  the  outlet,  where  the  water  bub- 
bled over  glistening  pebbles,  stood  two 
ruined  pillars  of  stone.  One  could  not 
learn  about  these,  but  one  could  feel 
the  hush  and  awe  of  that  enchanted 
spring,  as  it  had  been  felt  by  an  an- 
cient, unknown  civilization  centuries 
ago. 

And  there  were  other  things  that 
could  be  only  felt,  —  the  hoof-beats 
of  the  pony  on  the  hard  sea-sand,  the 
fresh,  salt  wind,  and  the  knowledge 
that  this  was  perfect  happiness,  free 
as  the,  trampling  surf.  And  in  this 
beauty,  untouched  and  unharmed  by 
man,  one  felt  akin  to  the  fawn  that 
nibbled  morning-glories  without  trem- 
bling, the  wild  boar  that  gruffly  turned 
and  fled  into  the  jungle,  and  the  stupid 
blue  starfish  that  could  be  gathered 
from  the  saddle  where  the  water  was 
shallow. 

There  were  moments  too  from  a  fairy 
tale,  when  the  black  Alphonso  swam 
and  dived  about  the  horse's  legs,  rub- 
bing them  with  a  split  cocoanut-shell, 
while  the  Princess  of  Piti  perched  high 
on  Demonie's  back,  till  the  morning 
bath  was  over.  Then,  snorting  through 
cool  lilies  on  the  river-banks,  they 
pranced  from  the  shadows  into  glisten- 
ing sunshine,  and  would  have  flown, 
had  not  the  bugle  sounded  *  colors' 
and  held  them  motionless. 

Another  phase  of  the  life  greatly'im- 
pressed  the  child  with  the  reality  and 
power  of  the  elements.  It  was  first 
evident  one  day  at  dinner  when  a  low 
rumbling  was  followed  by  severe 
shocks,  a  lamp  fell  from  a  shelf,  a  wall 
split,  each  half  falling  in  a  different 
direction,  and  the  old  shaven  St.  Ber- 
nard calmly  walked  out  on  the  terrace. 
For  he  knew,  as  does  any  painted 
junk  on  the  China  sea,  that  it  was 
merely  the  island's  stubbing  its  toes 


on  a  coral  reef.  But  earthquakes  were 
not  the  only  evidence  of  nature's 
power.  One  dark  night,  the  lightning 
flashed  so  incessantly  that  the  Orden- 
a?was  could  be  distinctly  seen  patrol- 
ling up  and  down  the  plaza.  Within, 
the  matting  rose  and  fell  in  the  long, 
draughty  rooms,  and  a  little  white- 
clad  figure,  creeping  into  her  sister's 
bed,  was  mechanically  thrust  out,  and 
spent  the  rest  of  the  night  on  the  great 
eifel-wood  table  in  the  salon,  with  only 
a  small  Jap  poodle.  By  daybreak  the 
wind  had  become  a  circling  typhoon, 
and  though  there  was  a  lull  at  noon, 
while  its  centre  passed  over  the  island, 
when  the  natives  might  rest  from 
the  tiring  position  of  sitting  on  their 
roofs  to  keep  them  down,  yet  again  the 
wind  blew  as  fiercely,  and  again  it 
raised  and  flattened  the  bamboo  band- 
stand, but  now  in  the  opposite  direc- 
tion, as  well-regulated  typhoons  always 
do. 

When  the  sun  came  out  after  that 
storm  and  the  trade-winds  blew  great 
balls  of  cotton  cloud  across  the  sky, 
a  thrill  of  patriotism  swept  over  the 
whole  island.  Against  the  clear,  deep 
blue  darted  all  sorts  and  kinds  of 
kites,  and  halfway  up  the  line  of  the 
largest,  was  run  the  American  flag. 
Then  of  a  sudden  on  the  horizon  ap- 
peared a  white  battleship,  and  then 
another,  and  another,  until  at  last  the 
whole  Asiatic  squadron  was  steaming 
by  like  so  many  white  swans  on  the 
blue  water. 

In  sharp  contrast  to  the  military 
atmosphere  of  the  island,  was  the  fer- 
vent, childlike  worship  of  the  natives, 
all  Christians.  Now  and  then,  on  a 
well-worn  road,  one  would  pass  a  lone- 
ly shrine,  covered  with  creepers  and 
decked  with  bunches  of  wild- flowers. 
And  then,  on  nearing  the  town  at 
dusk,  a  tolling  bell  would  break  the 
stillness  of  the  warm  night  air,  and 
presently,  with  lighted  candles  and 


652 


THE  MAGIC  OF  GUAM 


bared  heads,  a  long  procession  would 
pass  by,  carrying  images  of  the  saints; 
and  winding  on,  would  disappear  again 
into  the  dusk. 

At  night  the  silvery-haired  old  padre, 
who  knew  more  about  the  island  and 
its  inhabitants  than  any  one  else,  would 
sometimes  consent  to  tell  the  children 
stories.  They  were  weird,  wandering 
stories  about  the  genie  del  monte  (moun- 
tain spirits)  or  tauto  monos  (giant  peo- 
ple), but  sooner  or  later  always  came 
the  favorite  one,  the  story  of  why  the 
carabao  can  only  squeak.  Of  course 
you  know  that  the  carabao  is  the  big, 
slaty-blue  buffalo  with  long  horns,  that 
is  always  wallowing  in  the  soft,  oozy 
mud  with  only  its  eyes  and  nose  out  of 
water.  Well,  once  upon  a  time,  the 
Virgin  Mary  was  singing  the  Christ- 
Child  to  sleep,  when  down  the  street 
galloped  a  carabao,  bellowing  with  all 
his  powerful  might,  and  waking  up  the 
baby.  Whereupon  the  Virgin  Mary 
pulled  off  her  slipper  and  tapped  the 
carabao's  nose  with  it,  to  teach  him 
better  manners.  And  so  from  that  day 
to  this  the  carabao  has  been  able  to 
make  no  more  noise  than  a  little,  tiny 
mouse. 

They  were  only  stories.   But  in  the 


deep  silences  of  the  night,  when  the 
Southern  Cross  and  the  Scorpion 
shone  bright  in  the  heavens,  and  when 
a  meteor  turned  the  whole  world  now 
red,  now  green,  now  yellow,  and  dis- 
appeared behind  the  hills,  then  the 
spirits  of  the  Anitos  lay  no  longer  lost 
and  buried  in  the  jungle,  but  walked 
abroad,  and  the  tauto  monos  bathed 
in  the  sea  by  Devil's  Point,  or,  as 
of  old,  hurled  great  rocks  to  stop  the 
flight  of  the  Chamorros  in  their  swift 
canoes. 

Once,  the  western  child,  called  by 
these  spirits  of  the  night,  could  sleep 
no  longer,  but  crept  from  bed,  and  out 
upon  the  terrace.  The  world  was  very 
still,  —  only  the  dull,  distant  boom  of 
the  surf  and  the  tread  of  a  sentinel  on 
his  beat,  then  —  silence.  The  air  was 
laden  with  the  fragrance  of  opopanax, 
and  the  blossoming  ling-a-ling;  and 
blinking  from  a  branch  of  the  lemon 
tree  hung  a  bat.  Below  in  the  old, 
walled  garden,  the  moonlight  cast 
strange  shadows  through  the  tracery 
of  branches,  and,  as  the  child  flitted 
with  these  shapes  and  thoughts,  she 
breathed  the  magic  of  the  night,  and 
knew  that  this  was  life  in  the  Southern 
Seas. 


THE  MONEY  TRUST 


BY   ALEXANDER   D.   NOYES 


PERHAPS  no  public  question  of  our 
time  has  involved  considerations  of 
more  dramatic  possibilities  —  financial, 
industrial,  social,  and,  therefore,  polit- 
ical —  than  what  is  commonly  known 
as  the  problem  of  the  Money  Trust. 
Stated  in  its  most  general  terms,  the 
proposition  which  is  to  be  proved  or 
disproved,  and  the  proof  of  which,  in 
the  view  of  many  people  in  the  United 
States,  has  been  obtained  in  the  re- 
cent public  inquiry  by  the  sub-commit- 
tee of  the  House  of  Representatives' 
Banking  and  Currency  Committee,  is 
the  proposition  that  a  comparatively 
small  group  of  wealthy  financiers  con- 
trol in  their  individual  interest,  and 
can  utilize  for  their  selfish  purposes, 
the  banking  machinery  of  this  coun- 
try, and,  through  that  machinery,  all 
of  the  country's  industries.  They  can, 
it  has  been  more  or  less  generally  as- 
sumed, obstruct  the  progress  of  inde- 
pendent industry,  can  fix  not  only 
money  rates,  and  not  only  prices  of 
Stock-Exchange  securities,  but  prices 
of  merchandise.  It  has  been  argued  on 
the  floor  of  Congress,  that  they  can 
create  at  will,  and  do  create  for  their 
own  selfish  purposes,  'booms'  and 
panics,  prosperity  and  adversity.  On 
this  supposition,  their  power  over  the 
business  fortunes  and  personal  welfare 
of  the  country  as  a  whole,  and  of  every 
individual  in  the  country,  would  be 
supreme. 

Manifestly,  if  this  description  of  the 
condition  of  things  were  correct,  or  if 
the  tendency  of  existing  affairs  were 
strongly  in  such  a  direction,  the  prob- 


lem would  be  fundamental  to  all  others 
in  social  and  political  discussion.  I 
propose  to  discuss  this  problem  with- 
out fear  or  favor;  with  full  and  fair 
consideration  of  the  arguments,  both 
of  those  who  uphold  the  conclusions  as 
outlined  above,  and  of  those  who  deny 
them  absolutely. 


Before  taking  up  the  particular 
grounds  of  the  present  controversy,  it 
will  be  advisable  to  inquire  to  what 
extent  the  indictment  of  the  so-call- 
ed Money  Trust  is  a  wholly  new  phe- 
nomenon of  the  day,  and  how  far  it  is 
simply  repetition,  in  a  new  form,  of  the 
complaint,  common  to  all  the  past 
centuries  of  organized  society,  over 
the  encroachments  of  the  wealthy  and 
moneyed  classes  on  the  interests  of 
society  at  large. 

The  question  as  it  is  discussed  to- 
day could  not  in  fact  exist  before  a 
period  when  credit  on  an  enormous 
scale  was  utilized,  not  only  for  loans  to 
governments  and  individuals,  but  for 
the  capitalizing  and  equipping  of  great 
companies  in  the  field  of  transporta- 
tion and  manufacture.  It  could  hardly 
have  antedated  the  day  of  the  hun- 
dred -  million  -  dollar  corporation.  We 
are  accustomed  to  regard  the  crusade 
of  President  Andrew  Jackson  against 
the  United  States  Bank  as  a  fight  with 
the  Money  Power;  and  so  its  author 
declared  it  to  be.  But  that  contest  was 
avowedly  against  the  Money  Power  in 
politics,  not  in  trade.  Jackson's  cabinet 

653 


654 


THE  MONEY  TRUST 


memorandum  of  1833  asserted  that 
if  the  bank  were  permitted  longer  to 
hold  the  public  deposits,  'the  patri- 
otic among  our  citizens  will  despair  of 
struggling  against  its  power ' ;  and  his 
annual  message  denounced  it  on  the 
ground  of  what  he  considered  the  *  un- 
questionable proof  that  the  Bank  of 
the  United  States  was  converted  into  a 
permanent  electioneering  engine/ 

That  episode,  therefore,  is  something 
different  in  essential  respects  from  the 
present  Money-Trust  agitation.  An 
accusation,  closely  resembling  that  re- 
ferred to  at  the  beginning  of  this  paper, 
was  voiced  with  passionate  emphasis 
in  the  national  platform  of  the  People's 
party,  at  the  opening  of  the  Presi- 
dential campaign  of  1892.  Among  its 
other  indictments  of  what  was  then 
commonly  styled  the  Money  Power 
were  the  following:  — 

'The  newspapers  are  largely  subsid- 
ized or  muzzled;  public  opinion  silen- 
ced; business  prostrated;  labor  impov- 
erished; and  the  land  concentrating  in 
the  hands  of  the  capitalists.  .  .  .  The 
fruits  of  the  toil  of  millions  are  bold- 
ly stolen  to  build  up  colossal  fortunes 
for  a  few,  unprecedented  in  the  his- 
tory of  mankind;  and  the  possessors 
of  these,  in  turn,  despise  the  republic 
and  endanger  liberty.  .  .  .  Silver,  which 
has  been  accepted  as  coin  since  the 
dawn  of  history,  has  been  demonetized 
to  add  to  the  purchasing  power  of  gold 
by  decreasing  the  value  of  all  forms  of 
property  as  well  as  human  labor;  and 
the  supply  of  currency  is  purposely 
abridged  to  fatten  usurers,  bankrupt 
enterprise,  and  enslave  industry.  A 
vast  conspiracy  against  mankind  has 
been  organized  on  two  continents,  and 
it  is  rapidly  taking  possession  of  the 
world.  If  not  met  and  overthrown  at 
once,  it  forebodes  terrible  social  con- 
vulsions, the  destruction  of  civilization, 
or  the  establishment  of  an  absolute 
despotism.' 


At  first  glance,  this  declaration  of 
more  than  twenty  years  ago  would  ap- 
pear to  have  in  mind  the  identical  con- 
ditions alleged  to  exist  at  the  present 
day.  Close  examination,  however,  will 
show  some  rather  important  divergen- 
cies. The  gravamen  of  the  charge  of 
1892  was  the  allegation  that  advocacy 
of  the  gold  standard  of  currency  was 
prompted  by  a  wish  to  reduce  the 
money  supply,  increase  the  purchasing 
power  of  gold,  and  thereby  enable  the 
Money  Power  to  obtain  possession  of 
the  people's  property  through  the  re- 
sultant reduction  of  prices  for  land, 
commodities,  and  labor. 

It  may  doubtless  be  argued  that  the 
prophecies  of  the  platform  of  1892 
would  have  been  fulfilled  but  for  the 
then  quite  unanticipated  discovery  of 
new  gold  fields  in  the  Transvaal,  the 
Rocky  Mountains,  and  the  Klondike. 
But  even  if  this  were  to  be  conceded, 
the  fact  would  remain  that  the  Money 
Trust  was  attacked  in  1892  for  its  work 
in  putting  down  prices,  whereas  it  is 
attacked  in  1913  for  putting  them  up. 


ii 

When  we  now  approach  the  consid- 
eration of  the  problem  as  it  stands  to- 
day, our  first  difficulty  is  one  of  defin- 
ition. Mr.  J.  Pierpont  Morgan,  in  his 
testimony  of  December  19  before  the 
Pujo  Committee,  declared  that  'all  the 
banks  in  Christendom  could  not  con- 
trol money;  there  could  be  no  "  Money 
Trust."3  This  was,  to  be  sure,  the 
opinion  of  a  prejudiced  witness.  But 
the  counsel  of  the  committee,  whose 
attitude  on  the  general  question  is  far 
from  that  of  Mr.  Morgan,  said  in  a 
public  address  in  December,  1911, — 

*  If  it  is  expected  that  any  Congres- 
sional or  other  investigation  will  expose 
the  existence  of  a  "Money  Trust,5'  in 
the  sense  in  which  we  use  the  word 
"trust,"  as  applied  to  unlawful  indus- 


THE  MONEY  TRUST 


655 


trial  combinations,  that  expectation 
will  not  be  realized.  Of  course,  there  is 
no  such  thing.  There  is  no  definite 
union  or  aggregation  of  the  money 
powers  in  the  financial  world.  There 
certainly  is  none  that  can  be  said  to  be 
in  violation  of  existing  law.' 

It  is,  perhaps,  quite  as  well  to  empha- 
size this  admission  in  the  beginning; 
for,  although  to  people  conversant  with 
the  financial  and  banking  methods  of 
the  day,  Mr.  Untermyer's  statement 
may  seem  a  mere  truism,  there  are 
unquestionably  thousands  of  readers 
of  the  discussion  who  have  regarded 
the  alleged  'Money  Trust'  as  in  all 
respects  in  the  class  of  the  Standard 
Oil  and  American  Tobacco  trusts.  We 
should  not  get  far  in  our  argument  if 
we  did  not  first  reject  and  dismiss  this 
crude  conception  of  the  problem. 

It  is  on  the  floor  of  Congress  that  the 
most  explicit  charges  have  been  made 
against  the  organization  which,  for  the 
sake  of  convenience,  I  shall  continue 
to  describe  as  the  Money  Trust.  On 
February  24,  1912,  when  urging  the 
Congressional  inquiry  which  has  since 
been  held,  Mr.  Henry  of  Texas,  chair- 
man of  the  Rules  Committee,  remark- 
ed in  the  House  of  Representatives,  — 

'It  is  sufficient  to  say  that,  during 
the  last  five  years,  the  financial  re- 
sources of  the  country  have  been  con- 
centrated in  the  city  of  New  York,  un- 
til they  now  dominate  more  than  75 
per  cent  of  the  moneyed  interests  of 
America,  more  than  75  per  cent  of  the 
industrial  corporations  which  are  com- 
bined in  the  trusts,  and  practically  all 
of  the  great  trunk  railways  running 
from  ocean  to  ocean;  until  these  great 
forces  are  in  such  combination  and 
agreement  that  it  is  well-nigh  impos- 
sible for  honest  competition  to  be  set 
up  against  them.  .  .  .' 

On  December  15,  1911,  Mr.  Lind- 
bergh of  Minnesota,  arguing  before  the 
House  Rules  Committee  for  his  own 


resolution  of  inquiry,  thus  referred  to 
the  Money  Trust  and  the  banks  con- 
trolled by  it: — 

'We  know  that  a  few  men  and  their 
associates  control,  by  stock  holdings 
and  a  community  of  interest,  practi- 
cally all  the  most  important  industries 
and  also  the  transportation  systems  on 
which  the  products  of  all  industries 
must  be  carried  from  producers  to  con- 
sumers. These  same  few  men  control 
the  finances  of  the  country  and  may 
bring  on  a  panic  any  day  that  such 
would  suit  their  selfish  ends.  We  need 
no  evidence  of  that  fact.' 

Finally,  I  may  cite  some  passages 
from  a  long  speech  delivered  in  the 
United  States  Senate  on  March  17, 
1908,  shortly  after  the  panic  of  1907 
had  spent  its  force,  by  Mr.  La  Follette 
of  Wisconsin.  He  began  by  submitting 
a  list  of  one  hundred  men, '  to  whom  I 
have  referred  as  controlling  the  indus- 
trial life  of  the  nation.'  The  places  held 
by  these  men  on  various  company  di- 
rectorates amounted  to  *  evidence  that 
less  than  one  hundred  men  own  and 
control  railroads,  traction,  shipping, 
cable,  telegraph,  telephone,  express, 
mining,  coal,  oil,  gas,  electric  light, 
copper,  cotton,  sugar,  tobacco,  agri- 
cultural implements,  and  the  food-pro- 
ducts, as  well  as  banking  and  insur- 
ance.' 

There  was,  Senator  La  Follette  went 
on,  'every  inducement  for  those  who 
controlled  transportation  and  a  few 
great  basic  industries,  to  achieve  con- 
trol of  money  in  the  financial  centre 
of  the  country.  .  .  .  With  this  enor- 
mous concentration  of  business  it  is 
possible  to  create,  artificially,  periods 
of  prosperity  and  periods  of  panic. 
Prices  can  be  lowered  or  advanced  at 
the  will  of  the  "  System." 

'  Taking  the  general  conditions  of  the 
country,  it  is  difficult  to  find  any  suffi- 
cient reason  outside  of  manipulation 
for  the  extraordinary  panic  of  October, 


656 


THE  MONEY  TRUST 


1907.  .  .  .  There  were  no  commercial 
reasons  for  a  panic. 

'The  panic  came,'  Mr.  La  Follette 
proceeds.  'It  had  been  scheduled  to 
arrive.  The  way  had  been  prepared. 
Those  who  were  directing  it  were  not 
the  men  to  miss  anything  in  their  way 
as  it  advanced.  The  historic  third 
week  of  October  arrived;  "  the  panic  " 
was  working  well.  The  stock  market 
had  gone  to  smash.  Harriman  was  buy- 
ing back  Union  Pacific  shorts,  but 
still  smashing  the  market.  Morgan 
was  buying  in  short  Steel  stocks  and 
bonds,  but  still  smashing  the  market. 
The  Morse  group  had  been  disposed 
of.  Standard  Oil  had  settled  with 
Heinze.  .  .  . 

'The  smashing  of  the  market  be- 
came terrific.  Still  they  waited.  Union 
Pacific  declined  lOf  points  in  ten  sales. 
Northern  Pacific  and  other  stocks  went 
down  in  like  proportion.  Five  minutes 
passed  —  ten  minutes  past  2  o'clock. 
Men  looked  into  each  other's  ghastly 
faces.  Then,  at  precisely  2.15,  the  cur- 
tain went  up  with  Morgan  and  Stand- 
ard Oil  in  the  centre  of  the  stage  with 
money,  —  real  money,  twenty-five  mil- 
lions of  money,  —  giving  it  away  at  10 
per  cent.  .  .  .  And  so  ended  the  panic.' 


in 

It  is  necessary  first  to  inquire  if  the 
declarations  and  descriptions  are  ac- 
curate. In  so  far  as  the  above-cited 
speeches  set  forth  what  is  the  actual 
situation  regarding  concentrated  con- 
trol of  manufacturing  and  banking 
institutions,  they  are  dealing  with  as- 
certainable  facts,  of  which  I  shall  pre- 
sently have  more  to  say.  Let  it  for  the 
moment  suffice  to  remark  that  a  con- 
centration of  power,  quite  unexampled 
in  history,  over  the  large  banking  insti- 
tutions of  the  leading  cities  and  over  the 
huge  railway  and  industrial  corpora- 
tions, is  not  disputed;  and  has,  in  fact, 


been  admitted  by  competent  witnesses 
in  the  recent  House  Committee  in- 
quiry. 

Mr.  George  M.  Reynolds,  president 
of  the  Continental  and  Commercial 
Bank  of  Chicago,  the  largest  institu- 
tion of  the  sort  in  the  country  outside 
of  New  York  City,  repeated  in  his 
evidence  a  previous  statement  of  his 
own  that,  'the  money  power  now  lies 
in  the  hands  of  a  dozen  men,'  of  whom 
'I  plead  guilty  to  being  one';  and  he 
added  to  the  committee,  'I  am  in- 
clined to  think  that  excess  of  power  in 
a  limited  number  of  men  always  is  a 
menace.'  Mr.  George  F.  Baker,  chair- 
man of  the  First  National  Bank  of 
New  York,  perhaps  the  most  powerful 
of  the  so-called  'Morgan  institutions,' 
testified  regarding  the  control  of  credit, 
represented  by  control  of  banks  and 
trust  companies,  'I  think  it  has  gone 
about  far  enough.'  To  go  further 
'might  not  be  dangerous.  In  good 
hands,  I  do  not  say  that  it  would  do 
any  harm.  If  it  got  into  bad  hands,  it 
would  be  very  bad.'  These  statements 
would  certainly  seem  to  prove  the  gen- 
eral allegations  of  concentrated  control 
—  though  they  do  not  prove,  and  no- 
thing in  the  Pujo  Committee's  hearings 
has  proved,  the  sweeping  declarations 
which  place  not  only  the  banking, 
transportation,  and  manufacturing  in- 
dustries of  the  country,  but  its  agri- 
cultural production,  in  the  hands  of  a 
Money  Trust. 

But  if,  as  Mr.  Henry  declares,  these 
few  capitalists  '  are  the  supreme  dicta- 
tors of  the  financial  situation';  if,  as 
Mr.  Lindbergh  assures  us,  they  'may 
bring  on  a  panic  any  day  that  such 
would  suit  their  selfish  ends,'  and  if,  as 
Senator  La  Follette  concludes,  they 
did,  single-handed,  and  for  purposes  of 
selfish  gain,  deliberately  create  in  1907 
a  panic  for  which  there  was  no  other 
cause  or  explanation  than  their  wicked 
purposes  —  then  we  should  manifestly 


THE  MONEY  TRUST 


657 


be  confronted  with  a  public  enemy, 
which  must  be  utterly  destroyed  before 
such  a  thing  as  legitimate  finance  and 
industry  can  again  exist  in  the  United 
States. 

But  the  truth  of  this  matter  is,  that 
no  intelligent  man,  in  the  least  convers- 
ant with  the  facts,  has  ever  taken  seri- 
ously these  specific  accusations  of  the 
three  statesmen.  To  be  'the  supreme 
dictator  of  a  financial  situation,'  a  man 
or  a  body  of  men  must  control  not  only 
supply  on  the  security  and  commodity 
markets,  but  demand;  not  only  pro- 
duction of  iron  and  copper  and  tobacco, 
but  of  wheat  and  corn  and  cotton. 
Whoever  is  for  any  consecutive  time 
arbitrarily  to  dictate  money  rates,  must 
do  so  through  controlling  the  course, 
not  only  of  bank  loans  and  liabilities, 
but  of  bank  reserves,  and  to  be  the 
'supreme  dictators'  in  such  directions, 
must  control  such  matters  as  the 
world's  production  of  gold,  the  foreign 
exchanges,  the  requirements  on  home 
or  foreign  markets  arising  from  war, 
from  large  harvests,  from  political  ap- 
prehension, from  destruction  of  capital 
through  fire  or  earthquake,  or  from  a 
hundred  other  influences  familiar  to 
the  calculations  of  business  men,  in 
this  year  as  in  all  others. 

It  may  be  briefly  stated,  further,  in 
regard  to  a  few  of  Mr.  La  Toilette's 
facts,  that  it  is  not  at  all  'difficult 
to  find  any  sufficient  reason,  outside 
of  manipulation,  for  the  extraordinary 
panic  of  1907.'  The  crisis  was  world- 
wide; it  was  due  to  a  world-wide  over- 
strain on  credit.  It  had  been  predict- 
ed by  European  economists,  on  the 
basis  of  such  conditions,  months  be- 
fore it  swept  over  the  United  States; 
and  it  broke  out  in  other  parts  of  the 
world  —  Egypt,  Japan,  and  Hamburg, 
in  particular  —  before  it  touched  New 
York. 

As  for  the  picture  drawn  by  Mr.  La 
Follette  of  the  panic  itself,  the  most 

VOL.  Ill -NO.  5 


that  can  be  said  is  that  it  represents  in 
no  single  point  anything  more  than  the 
vivid  imagination  of  an  excited  person 
almost  wholly  unacquainted  with  the 
facts  of  that  particular  episode,  and  ex- 
tremely ignorant  of  the  ordinary  prin- 
ciples of  finance.  Nothing  in  the  Pujo 
Committee's  lengthy  examination  con- 
firmed in  a  single  particular  the  Wis- 
consin Senator's  extraordinary  version 
of  the  story.  Indeed,  nothing  stood 
forth  more  impressively,  in  those  crit- 
ical days,  than  the  consideration  that 
the  investments  and  property  of  no 
man  in  the  money  market,  however 
powerful,  were  safe  unless  the  panic 
itself  were  checked. 

Mr.  Woodrow  Wilson,  in  his  speech 
of  August  7, 1912,  accepting  the  Dem- 
ocratic nomination,  said,  'There  are 
vast  confederacies  (as  I  may  perhaps 
call  them  for  the  sake  of  convenience) 
of  banks,  railways,  express  companies, 
insurance  companies,  manufacturing 
corporations,  power  and  development 
companies,  and  all  the  rest  of  the  circle, 
bound  together  by  the  fact  that  the 
ownership  of  their  stock  and  the  mem- 
bers of  their  boards  of  directors  are 
controlled  and  determined  by  compar- 
atively small  and  closely  inter-related 
groups  of  persons  who,  by  their  in- 
formal confederacy,  may  control,  if 
they  please,  and  when  they  will,  both 
credit  and  enterprise.  There  is  no- 
thing illegal  about  these  confederacies, 
so  far  as  I  can  perceive.  They  have 
come  about  very  naturally,  generally 
without  plan  or  deliberation,  rather 
because  there  was  so  much  money  to 
be  invested  and  it  was  in  the  hands,  at 
great  financial  centres,  of  men  ac- 
quainted with  one  another  and  inti- 
mately associated  in  business,  than  be- 
cause any  one  had  conceived  and  was 
carrying  out  a  plan  of  general  control. 
But  they  are  none  the  less  a  potent 
force  in  our  economic  and  financial  sys- 
tem on  that  account.  Their  very  exist- 


658 


THE  MONEY  TRUST 


ence  gives  rise  to  the  suspicion  of  a 
Money  Trust  —  a  concentration  of  the 
control  of  credit  which  may  at  any 
time  become  infinitely  dangerous  to 
free  enterprise/ 

It  will  be  observed  that  this  state- 
ment of  the  case,  though  conceived  in 
an  altogether  different  spirit  from  the 
sweeping  and  detailed  assertions  of  the 
Congressional  orators  previously  cited, 
none  the  less  pictures  a  state  of  affairs 
which  calls  for  very  serious  and  impar- 
tial consideration.  From  the  temper- 
ate statement  of  Mr.  Wilson's  speech 
of  acceptance,  and  from  the  frank  ad- 
missions, already  cited,  of  Mr.  Rey- 
nolds and  Mr.  Baker,  one  conclusion 
becomes  inevitable;  and  that  is,  that 
we  are  in  the  presence  of  a  novel  and 
striking  condition  of  things  in  Ameri- 
can finance,  whereby  active  or  potential 
control  of  a  very  great  part  both  of  our 
financial  institutions  and  of  our  indus- 
trial institutions,  is  concentrated  in  the 
hands  of  a  comparatively  small  group 
of  financiers.  If,  as  President  Wilson 
has  said,  this  'came  about  very  natu- 
rally' and  'without  plan  or  delibera- 
tion/ all  the  more  reason  is  there  for 
inquiring  what  were  the  circumstances 
and  conditions  of  its  origin. 


rv 

Notwithstanding  the  Populist  par- 
ty's allegation  of  1892,  already  cited, 
the  historical  fact  is  that  the  state  of 
things  in  American  finance  and  indus- 
try which  is  the  basis  of  the  pending 
discussion  had  its  origin  during  the 
period  following  the  panic  of  1893. 
Low  prices,  over-production,  agricul- 
tural depression,  speculative  over- 
construction  of  railways,  speculative 
over-capitalization  of  manufacturing 
enterprise,  had  brought  the  country 
into  a  state  of  very  general  insolvency, 
which,  through  mismanagement  of  the 
national  finances,  had  all  but  touched 


the  government.  Of  the  country's  rail- 
ways in  particular,  more  than  sixty 
per  cent  of  the  outstanding  capital 
stock  was  receiving  no  dividend,  and 
twenty-five  per  cent  of  it  represented 
companies  in  the  hands  of  receivers. 

Ownership  and  control  of  these  rail- 
ways had  been  widely  distributed; 
there  was  actually  less  of  concentrated 
domination,  by  a  few  capitalists  or 
groups  of  capitalists,  than  had  existed 
a  dozen  years  before  the  panic  of  1893. 
Ownership  of  the  comparatively  new 
industrial  trusts  (a  good  part  of  which 
came  to  grief  financially  in  1893,  or 
shortly  afterward)  was  hardly  concen- 
trated at  all.  There  was  no  joint  con- 
trol of  groups  of  banking  institutions; 
in  New  York  City  itself,  each  of  the 
great  banks  was  an  independent  power. 

But  the  problem  confronting  the 
community  when  the  panic  of  1893 
had  spent  its  force,  was  one  of  financial 
reconstruction.  The  work  was  long 
surrounded  with  discouragement;  for, 
in  order  to  place  these  great  corpora- 
tions on  their  feet  again,  large  amounts 
of  fresh  capital  were  necessary,  and  an 
even  larger  command  of  credit.  These 
requirements  arose  at  a  time  while  the 
country  itself  was  poor;  when  available 
capital  was  lacking,  and  credit  hard  to 
obtain  because  of  the  doubt  and  sus- 
picion surrounding  the  previous  his- 
tory of  the  enterprises.  It  was  natural, 
and  indeed  inevitable,  that  the  owners 
of  these  insolvent  properties,  having 
failed  to  obtain  consent  of  the  conflict- 
ing interests  to  their  plan  of  reorgani- 
zation, and  having  failed  to  obtain  as- 
surance of  the  fresh  capital  required, 
should  have  asked  the  powerful  inter- 
national banking-houses  to  undertake 
the  task. 

It  was  then  that  the  contrivance 
of  the  '  voting  trust '  —  another  much- 
discussed  phenomenon  of  the  Pujo  in- 
quiry —  began  to  play  an  important 
part.  The  reasons  for  that  departure 


THE  MONEY  TRUST 


659 


from  ordinary  company  management 
obviously  were,  that  many  of  the  cor- 
porations in  question  had  lately  been 
wrecked  by  incompetent  managements, 
and  that  subscribers  of  the  requisite 
capital  for  reorganization  laid  down  the 
stipulation  that,  for  a  stated  term  of 
years,  selection  of  directors  and  general 
oversight  of  the  companies'  finances 
should  be  irrevocably  placed  in  the 
hands  of  the  banking-houses  which  had 
assumed  the  task  of  reorganization,  and 
in  whose  financial  sagacity  and  finan- 
cial probity  confidence  was  general. 

So  far  nothing  had  happened  which, 
in  the  light  of  the  actual  situation, 
was  not  logical  and  reasonable.  What 
would  have  followed,  had  the  ensuing 
decade  been  one  of  slow  and  deliberate 
industrial  expansion,  is  not  wholly  easy 
to  conjecture.  Within  half  a  dozen 
years,  however  —  partly  because  of  the 
world-wide  recovery  in  staple  prices, 
partly  because  of  great  good  fortune  of 
American  agriculture,  partly  because  of 
the  disappearance  of  the  depreciated- 
currency  peril  —  a  wave  of  extraordin- 
ary prosperity  swept  over  the  United 
States.  One  speedy  result  of  this  re- 
markable turn  in  the  situation  was 
that  capitalists  of  every  stamp  began 
snatching  for  control  of  properties  in 
some  one  else's  hands. 

From  1899  to  1901  inclusive,  three 
tendencies  shaped  the  financial  his- 
tory of  the  period.  One  was  the  ex- 
cited bidding  of  rival  groups  of  capital- 
ists, to  get  possession  of  one  or  more  of 
the  great  railways  and  industrial  cor- 
porations. Another  was  the  effort  to 
avert  mutual  hostility  and  destructive 
competition  by  arranging  that  two  or 
more  rival  companies  should  have  re- 
presentation in  one  another's  director- 
ate. The  third  was  the  buying-up  of 
outright  control  in  a  group  of  compet- 
ing corporations,  either  through  actual 
purchase,  by  one  of  the  companies,  of 
the  outstanding  shares  of  its  competi- 


tors, or  through  organization  of  an  en- 
tirely new  company,  which  bought  and 
held  a  controlling  interest  in  the  shares 
of  its  competitors. 

To  what  extent  the  second  and  third 
of  these  processes  were,  in  their  origin, 
simple  protective  measures,  honestly 
adopted  by  conservative  banking  inter- 
ests to  safeguard  a  given  corporation 
from  outside  attack  or  from  capture  by 
unscrupulous  adventurers,  and  to  what 
extent  they  were  suggested  by  grow- 
ing ambition  for  centralized  control, 
it  is  not  easy  absolutely  to  measure. 
The  public-spirited  motive  certainly 
played  some  part  in  dictating  the  pol- 
icy, especially  during  the  earlier  year 
or  two  of  that  extraordinary  period; 
that  fact  will  be  admitted  by  all  who 
studied  the  episode  at  close  range,  and 
who  knew  the  personal  character  and 
principles  of  the  newly-made  million- 
aires who  were  then  conducting  their 
campaign  of  booty.  There  was  at  least 
the  conceivable  possibility  of  another 
era  of  Jay  Goulds,  Jim  Fisks,  and 
Commodore  Vanderbilts,  with  another 
orgy,  on  a  far  larger  scale  than  that 
of  1869,  of  corrupt  and  dishonest  ad- 
ministration of  the  affairs  of  corpora- 
tions. 

As  late  as  1902,  one  of  the  most 
important  railway  companies  in  the 
United  States  actually  passed,  through 
the  medium  of  Stock-Exchange  trad- 
ing, from  the  control  of  conservative 
English  capitalists  to  the  control  of  an 
American  gambler  and  speculator,  who 
had  acquired  his  fortune  by  company 
promotions  of  an  altogether  unscru- 
pulous sort.  It  was  rescued  from  his 
grasp  through  its  purchase  by  another 
railway  company  controlled  by  con- 
servative banking  interests,  and  thus, 
apparently  without  any  such  original 
purpose  on  their  part,  became  a  link  in 
the  concentration  of  control  over  cor- 
porations. This  was  only  one  out  of 
numerous  similar  instances. 


660 


THE  MONEY  TRUST 


But  movements  of  this  nature  very 
rarely  stop  with  the  achievement  of 
their  original  purpose,  and  there  were 
special  reasons  why  that  movement 
did  not  stop.  The  period  in  which  it 
occurred  was  itself  of  a  character  to 
stimulate  enormously  the  movement 
of  corporate  concentration,  and  it  was 
manifest  from  the  start  that  a  mixture 
of  motives  was  at  work  in  it.  An  era  in 
which  unprecedentedly  easy  credit  and 
unprecedentedly  large  supplies  of  capi- 
tal seeking  investment,  coincided  with 
the  letting-down  of  the  bars  against 
unlimited  combination  of  corporations, 
was  bound  to  arouse  the  activities  of 
ambitious  financiers.  Some  of  them 
bought  up  rival  companies  and  merged 
them  with  their  own,  simply  to  crowd 
aggressive  competitors  out  of  the  field. 
Some  of  them  grasped  at  such  other 
corporations  merely  to  insure  their  own 
personal  supremacy.  Some  of  them 
bought  up  one  company,  or  a  group 
of  companies,  in  order  to  sell  the  whole 
property,  at  a  large  advance  in  price, 
to  some  one  else. 

On  the  one  hand,  the  speculators 
grew  to  believe  that  they  had  found 
the  philosopher's  stone  of  profit;  on 
the  other,  the  serious  promoting  finan- 
ciers began  to  talk  of  an  age  in  which 
business  could  no  longer  be  done  save 
under  such  auspices.  It  was  from 
this  period  that  there  dated  the  sub- 
sequently familiar  talk,  repeated  ad 
nauseam  in  the  Anti-Trust  law  con- 
troversies and  in  the  last  presidential 
campaign,  about  the  impossibility  of 
America's '  keeping  in  the  race  of  indus- 
trial competition '  unless  equipped  with 
these  monstrous  corporation  mergers. 

The  Standard  Oil,  the  American 
Tobacco,  the  Amalgamated  Copper, 
the  billion-dollar  United  States  Steel, 
the  International  Mercantile  Marine 
—  these  and  a  hundred  other  less  cele- 


brated 'holding-company*  enterprises 
were  organized  and  floated  during  a 
period  of  hardly  four  consecutive 
years,  from  1899  to  1902  inclusive. 
The  whole  thing  happened  so  sudden- 
ly and  swiftly  that  the  community 
scarcely  seemed  to  be  aware  what  was 
happening. 

Mr.  J.  P.  Morgan,  in  a  certain  famous 
statement  to  the  court,  set  forth,  in 
the  manner  of  one  inviting  unqualified 
approval,  his  belief  in  a  system  of  cor- 
porations so  large  that  nobody  could 
get  control  of  them,  and  that  no  exist- 
ing management  could  be  dislodged. 
Mr.  Morgan  was  right  in  assuming 
that,  if  the  'holding  company's '  capital 
was  large  enough,  there  was  no  human 
possibility  of  its  management  being 
dislodged.  It  was,  however,  a  justice 
of  the  Supreme  Court  who  pressed  the 
logic  of  this  new  machinery  of  corpor- 
ations pitilessly  to  its  real  conclusion. 
Pending  the  hearing  on  appeal,  he 
asked  the  counsel  for  Northern  Secu- 
rities —  the  holding  company  in  which 
had  been  lodged  two  rival  railways  and 
two  rival  interests  in  one  railway  — 
why  the  same  contrivance  might  not 
be  utilized  'until  a  single  corporation 
whose  stock  was  owned  by  three  or 
four  parties  would  be  in  practical  con- 
trol of  both  roads,  or,  having  before  us 
the  possibilities  of  combination,  the 
control  of  the  whole  transportation 
system  of  the  country.'  The  eminent 
lawyer  who  represented  the  holding 
company  replied  that  such  a  thing  was 
possible,  even  though  improbable. 


VI 

Such  was  the  situation  which  was 
coming  to  exist  in  1902.  Because  it 
was  an  unprecedented  situation,  how- 
ever, it  did  not  necessarily  follow  that 
it  was  a  mischievous  or  an  undesirable 
situation.  With  their  recollection  fixed 
on  the  reckless  and  unprincipled  guer- 


THE  MONEY  TRUST 


661 


illas  of  high  finance  in  that  and  the 
three  preceding  years,  the  bankers  who 
were  riveting  this  machinery  of  con- 
centration publicly  contended  that,  so 
far  from  being  either  mischievous  or  un- 
desirable, it  was  altogether  for  the  best 
interests  of  the  investing  public.  But 
that  assumption  naturally  remained  to 
be  proved. 

It  was  disputed,  first,  by  a  question 
immediately  put  to  the  promoters  of 
the  impregnable  corporate  strongholds, 
and  reflected  with  curious  exactness, 
a  decade  afterward,  in  Mr.  Baker's 
testimony  before  the  Pujo  Committee. 
Even  supposing  the  financiers,  now 
irrevocably  occupying  the  Seats  of  the 
Mighty,  to  be  men  so  perfectly  dis- 
interested and  capable  in  their  pol- 
icies that  no  minority  shareholder 
would  wish  to  dislodge  them,  who  was 
to  answer  for  their  successors?  For, 
manifestly,  those  successors  would  be 
virtually  named  by  the  present  incum- 
bents, and  would  be  equally  free  from 
any  fear  of  discipline  by  shareholders 
for  blunders  and  malfeasance  in  office. 
The  assumption  appeared  to  be  that 
no  mistakes  could  be  made  in  select- 
ing the  heirs  to  such  responsibilities. 
Whether  or  not  the  public  mind  would 
have  been  willing  to  surrender  itself  to 
an  inference  so  foreign  to  its  ordinary 
instinct  and  experience,  a  highly  in- 
structive test  was  soon  to  be  applied 
to  the  question  of  the  impeccability 
even  of  existing  managements  of  these 
colossal  corporations. 

A  series  of  events  raised  the  ques- 
tion whether  the  mere  possession  of 
such  power  had  not  perverted  the  or- 
dinary business  common-sense  of  the 
supposedly  infallible  directorates.  Two 
of  these  companies,  so  organized  that 
permanency  of  existing  managements 
was  insured,  were  the  Amalgamated 
Copper  and  the  United  States  Steel. 
Beginning  with  1901,  the  career  of  the 
Amalgamated  holding  company  was, 


from  the  copper  trade's  own  point  of 
view,  a  story  of  stupidity  and  mis- 
judgment  such  as,  if  practiced  by  the 
managers  of  a  ten-thousand-dollar  com- 
pany, would  have  necessitated  their 
summary  and  contemptuous  ejection 
from  office.  The  directorate  of  this 
corporation  displayed  a  complete  and 
constant  misjudgment  of  the  market 
for  their  product.  When  the  price  of 
copper  was  abnormally  high,  they  not 
only  held  back  their  own  metal  from 
market,  but  bought  the  metal  of  their 
competitors.  When,  on  the  contrary, 
it  was  abnormally  low,  as  a  result  of 
the  collapse  which  inevitably  followed, 
they  were  heavy  sellers.  The  only  prin- 
ciple of  trade  of  which  they  ever  de- 
monstrated their  mastery  was  the  prin- 
ciple that  copper-producing  companies 
would  pay  larger  dividends  with  cop- 
per at  16  or  20  cents  a  pound  than 
with  copper  at  10  or  12,  and  their  only 
distinct  programme  of  policy  was  based 
on  their  idea  that  a  producing  com- 
pany with  money  enough  to  hold  back 
its  output  for  an  abnormally  high  price 
could  make  the  consumer  buy  it  at  that 
price,  in  the  usual  quantity. 

The  United  States  Steel  began  by 
paying  dividends  on  an  inflated  com- 
mon stock,  largely  exchanged  for  stock 
of  other  companies  on  which  no  divi- 
dends had  ever  been  earned  or  paid. 
When  it  was  discovered  —  what  con- 
servative steel  experts  had  predicted 
from  the  start  —  that  the  company's 
preferred  stock  would  probably,  on  oc- 
casion, fail  to  earn  its  stipulated  divi- 
dend, the  management  proposed  to 
turn  something  like  half  of  the  $500- 
000,000  seven  per  cent  preferred  stock 
into  five  per  cent  bonds  — an  expedient 
worthy  of  the  infancy  of  financial  sci- 
ence, and  yet  for  insuring  which,  mil- 
lions were  handed  over  to  underwriting 
syndicates;  an  expedient  which  was 
eventually  stopped  by  the  protest  of 
some  of  the  company's  own  directors. 


662 


THE  MONEY  TRUST 


These  incidents  I  mention  merely  to 
show  that  there  are  flaws  in  the  theory 
that  the  interests  of  the  investing  pub- 
lic are  safe  with  any  corporation  in  the 
hands  of  self-perpetuating  director- 
ates, whatever  their  prestige  or  affilia- 
tions. As  events  turned  out,  however, 
this  tendency  to  the  rapid  and  perma- 
nent massing  of  the  agencies  of  produc- 
tion and  manufacture  in  the  hands  of  a 
few  autocratic  groups  of  financiers  en- 
countered a  different  and  more  effec- 
tive challenge  than  that  of  minority 
shareholders  or  outside  critics. 

The  Anti-Trust  law  of  1890  was 
drawn  with  a  clear  view  to  such  future 
possibilities;  for  the  process  of  concen- 
trated control  of  various  industries  had 
begun  even  then.  That  law  unquestion- 
ably voiced  a  public  sentiment  which 
has  prevented,  during  the  twenty- two 
subsequent  years,  any  weakening  of  its 
legitimate  scope  or  force.  The  North- 
ern Securities  dissolution,  in  accord- 
ance with  the  Supreme  Court  decision 
of  1904,  supplemented  by  the  Stand- 
ard Oil  and  American  Tobacco  dissolu- 
tions after  the  decisions  of  1911,  put  a 
definite  end  to  the  process  of  gathering 
productive  industry  into  the  hands  of 
a  few  huge  corporations,  under  the 
management  of  small  groups  of  men 
who  could  never  be  unseated. 

Now,  the  fact  of  particular  import- 
ance, in  the  chapter  of  history  which  I 
have  just  reviewed,  is  that  the  move- 
ment, whether  accidental  or  deliberate, 
toward  monopoly  of  transportation 
and  industrial  production,  has  been 
definitely  blocked.  An  attempt  to-day 
to  organize  another  holding  company 
such  as  the  Northern  Securities  or  the 
United  States  Steel,  would  almost  cer- 
tainly encounter  a  Federal  injunction 
which  would  strangle  it  in  its  cradle. 
New  Jersey  itself,  whose  lax  and  mis- 
chievous corporation  laws,  adopted 
twenty  years  or  so  ago,  made  of  that 
state  a  nest  for  the  new  corporations  — 


the  Steel  Trust,  the  Tobacco  Trust, 
the  Northern  Securities,  the  Standard 
Oil,  the  Mercantile  Marine  —  which 
wanted  charters  permitting  them  to  do 
anything  they  should  choose,  has  this 
year  repealed  those  laws  in  favor  of  a 
sound  incorporation  statute  which  will 
surround  both  new  and  old  companies 
with  restrictions  from  which  no  Amer- 
ican corporation  ought  ever  to  have 
been  free.  Under  the  proposed  provi- 
sions, the  *  holding-company '  device 
can  never  be  invoked  again,  and  merg- 
ers of  corporations  will  be  permitted 
only  subject  to  the  approval  of  the 
Public  Utilities  Commission. 

One  after  another,  the  most  danger- 
ous of  the  combinations  of  1899  and 
1901  have  been  dissolved  and  reduced 
to  their  component  parts.  It  was  none 
too  soon;  for  although  a  complete  priv- 
ate monopoly  of  industrial  producing 
agencies  could  never  have  been  real- 
ized, continued  and  unhindered  pro- 
gress toward  such  monopoly,  in  de- 
fault of  the  Anti-Trust  law,  would 
probably  have  invoked,  in  the  public 
defense,  the  establishment  of  a  nation- 
al bureau  to  fix  the  maximum  prices 
for  the  products  of  such  concerns.  And 
if  the  maximum  prices,  then,  in  due 
course  (as  the  Interstate  Commerce 
Commission's  regulation  of  the  rail- 
ways indicates),  the  minimum  prices 
also.  In  other  words,  granting  the  per- 
manent supremacy  of  these  enormous 
holding  companies  in  all  avenues  of  pro- 
ductive industry,  we  should  presently 
have  been  confronted  with  a  public 
declaration  that  the  law  of  supply  and 
demand  no  longer  operated,  and  with 
governmental  commissions  to  fix  the 
cost  of  living. 

That  this  formidable  step  in  the  direc- 
tion of  state  socialism  should  actually 
have  been  proposed  by  the  executive 
head  of  the  largest  of  these  industrial 
holding  companies,  was  conclusive 
proof  that  the  promoters  had  aban- 


THE  MONEY  TRUST 


663 


doned  all  hope  of  unimpeded  control  of 
the  avenues  of  production.  A  political 
party  and  a  Presidential  candidate  last 
year  repeated  this  proposal,  on  the 
grounds,  first,  that  disruption  of  the 
trusts  meant  economic  chaos;  and  sec- 
ondly, that  the  companies  already  form- 
ed out  of  such  dissolutions  were  making 
too  much  money.  But  the  very  absurd- 
ity and  contradiction  of  the  reason- 
ing showed  that  the  country  had  not 
yet  reached  the  necessity  for  any  such 
alternative.  Nothing  could  have  de- 
monstrated more  conclusively  than  the 
sequel  to  such  dissolutions  of  holding 
companies,  without  disturbance  to 
their  respective  industries,  that  the 
argument  from  the  necessity  of  these 
colossal  mergers  to  our  national  pro- 
gress is  nonsense,  that  '  Big  Business  ' 
can  be  conducted  as  successfully  and  as 
profitably  without  them  as  with  them; 
in  other  words,  that  the  'holding  com- 
pany' on  the  scale  of  the  speculative 
decade  1899-1907  is  a  malignant  excres- 
cence on  the  economic  organism. 


VII 

But  after  all  this  corrective  process, 
which  is  still  uncompleted,  there  was 
left  another  field  for  the  activities  of 
concentrated  capital.  A  dozen  years 
ago,  when  organization  of  the  huge 
industrial  trusts  was  the  order  of  the 
day,  the  problem  of  having  such  pro- 
motions originally  financed  by  power- 
ful banking  institutions,  was  a  part  of 
the  calculations.  Since  financial  rival- 
ries, disputes  as  to  the  wisdom  of  the 
undertaking,  and  doubts  over  the  pro- 
priety of  devoting  fiduciary  funds  in 
large  amount  to  purposes  of  the  sort, 
were  bound  to  arise,  it  became  a  mani- 
fest advantage  for  the  organizers  of 
the  industrial  combinations  to  possess 
a  voice  in  the  councils  of  the  banks 
themselves. 

That  such  influence  was  an  essen- 


tial factor  in  the  ambitious  enterprises 
of  the  day,  was  never  questioned  or 
denied.  In  1899,  one  of  the  largest 
national  banks  in  New  York  City  au- 
daciously handed  over  its  facilities  to 
the  promoters  of  the  Copper  Trust,  to 
facilitate  an  operation  so  surrounded 
with  questionable  financial  methods 
that  even  Wall  Street  protested  angrily 
against  it.  When  the  utterly  unsound 
and  obnoxious  plan  to  convert  the 
Steel  Trust's  preferred  stock  into 
bonds  was  intrusted  to  an  underwrit- 
ing syndicate,  powerful  banks  were 
again  brought  in  among  the  underwrit- 
ers. Both  operations,  in  my  judgment, 
were  illegal  under  the  National  Bank- 
ing law.  When  Wall  Street  high  fi- 
nance became  sharply  divided  into  two 
contending  factions,  which  collided 
with  disastrous  results  in  the  famous 
battle  of  1901  for  control  of  Northern 
Pacific  stock,  the  great  banking  insti- 
tutions of  New  York  were  already  be- 
coming known  as  'Morgan  banks/  or 
'Harriman  banks.'  No  one  who  kept 
abreast  of  Wall  Street  affairs  during 
that  period,  will  have  forgotten  the  ex- 
traordinary rise  in  the  market  for  stock 
of  both  kinds  of  institutions  —  a  rise 
which  carried  prices  of  such  shares  to 
heights  out  of  all  relation  to  the  net 
investment-yield  from  dividends. 

The  panic  of  1907  —  which,  like  all 
great  panics,  marked  the  end  of  an 
epoch  of  whose  financial  extravagances 
it  was  the  natural  result  —  necessa- 
rily altered  this  situation.  The  gov- 
ernment's successful  challenge  of  the 
movement  toward  industrial  monopoly 
through  holding  companies  would  of  it- 
self have  put  an  end  to  the  huge  railway 
and  manufacturing  promotions.  No 
such  exploits  as  the  Northern  Securities 
railway  merger,  or  the  Steel  and  Har- 
vester combinations,  have  even  been 
attempted  since  the  Supreme  Court's 
dissolution  decree  of  1904.  New  laws, 
enacted  as  a  result  of  the  scandals  of 


664 


THE  MONEY  TRUST 


1905  in  the  life-insurance  field,  and  of 
1907  in  the  domain  of  the  trust  com- 
panies, have  fixed  a  barrier  against 
such  use  of  those  institutions'  funds  as 
prevailed  in  1901  and  1902,  and  even  if 
the  old-time  facilities  were  still  open, 
the  panic  has  taught  an  impressive 
lesson  as  to  the  dangers  of  such  enter- 
prises. 

When,  therefore,  we  talk  of  the 
concentration  of  banking  power  since 
1907,  we  are  discussing  a  different  sit- 
uation. The  process  of  drawing  pow- 
erful banking  institutions  under  the 
general  control  of  other  groups  or  insti- 
tutions has  undoubtedly  been  pursued, 
since  1907,  in  some  respects  on  an  even 
more  extensive  and  ambitious  scale. 
But  its  immediate  purpose  has  neces- 
sarily changed  with  the  embargo  on 
future  hundred-million  and  thousand- 
million  mergers. 

The  familiar  form  of  indictment  of 
our  present  banking  organism  is  that 
it  has  placed,  in  the  hands  of  a  limited 
group  of  financiers,  control  of  the  larger 
machinery  of  credit.  Mr.  A.  Piatt  An- 
drew, formerly  Assistant  Secretary  of 
the  Treasury,  has  lately  shown,  from  a 
compilation  of  official  statistics,  that 
the  number  of  separate  national  banks 
in  the  United  States  (25,176  in  1912) 
had  increased  two  and  a  half  times  in 
the  past  twelve  years,  and  whereas,  in 
1900,  there  was  one  such  bank  on  the 
average  for  every  7,357  people,  in  1912, 
there  was  one  for  every  3,788.  The 
cited  figures  also  showed  that  percent- 
age of  increase  in  number,  capital,  and 
resources  of  the  banks,  during  that 
period,  had  been  two  to  four  times  as 
great  in  the  West  and  South  as  in  the 
East,  where  the  Money  Trust's  con- 
centration of  capital  was  presumed  to 
converge. 

But  this  does  not  altogether  meet 
the  question  at  issue,  since  nobody  has 
contended  that  the  alleged  'Money 
Trust '  was  controlling  all  of  the  coun- 


try's banking  institutions.  At  the 
great  financial  centres,  however,  there 
has  been  in  progress  a  quite  undeniable 
concentration  of  general  control  over 
the  larger  institutions.  The  Pujo  Com- 
mittee presented  figures  showing  that  6 
banking  firms  of  New  York  and  Boston, 
and  12  banking  institutions  of  those 
cities  and  Chicago,  whose  partners  or 
directors  numbered  180,  held,  through 
such  representatives,  385  directorships 
in  41  banks  and  trust  companies,  50 
directorships  in  11  insurance  compan- 
ies, 155  directorships  in  31  railway 
systems,  6  directorships  in  2  express 
companies,  4  directorships  in  one  steam- 
ship company,  98  directorships  in  28 
producing  and  trading  corporations, 
and  48  directorships  in  19  public  util- 
ity corporations.  All  told,  these  16 
firms  and  institutions,  with  180  part- 
ners or  directors,  held  746  seats  on  the 
managing  boards  of  134  corporations. 
Without  going  in  detail  into  the  figures 
of  the  report  regarding  the  capitaliza- 
tion, deposits,  and  earnings  of  the  cor- 
porations in  question,  it  is  enough  to 
say  that  they  are,  in  their  respective 
fields,  the  largest  in  the  United  States, 
and  that,  if  regarded  as  a  matter  of 
concentrated  control,  they  show  an  ag- 
gregate financial  power  in  finance  and 
industry  never  paralleled  in  history. 

So  far  as  the  representation  of  these 
banking  firms  in  the  managing  boards 
of  the  large  industrial  corporations 
is  concerned,  I  have  already  shown, 
in  discussing  the  financial  movement 
from  1899  to  1902,  how  it  came  about. 
It  was  not  altogether,  as  Mr.  Wilson 
said  last  August,  'because  there  was  so 
much  money  to  be  invested'  and  'be- 
cause it  was  in  the  hands  of  men  inti- 
mately associated  in  business.'  It  was 
largely  because  these  industrial  com- 
panies wished  to  affiliate  themselves 
with  strong  and  conservative  banking- 
houses  and  to  prevent  their  own  cap- 
ture by  capitalists  of  the  speculative 


THE  MONEY  TRUST 


665 


class.  Whether  the  process  of  sealing 
such  affiliation  through  so  general  a  re- 
presentation of  the  banking-houses  on 
the  managing  boards  was  carried  too 
far  or  not,  is  another  question. 

It  would  also  be  a  legitimate  mat- 
ter of  inquiry,  on  general  principles, 
first,  how  far  these  banking  represen- 
tatives dictated  the  policy  of  the  in- 
dustrial concerns;  secondly,  how  far 
that  policy  was  wise  and  in  the  pub- 
lic interest;  thirdly,  how  far  such  di- 
rectors, if  dominant  in  the  councils 
of  the  corporations,  used  their  power 
disinterestedly  or  turned  it  unfairly  to 
the  advantage  of  their  own  banking  in- 
stitutions. That  this  group  of  capital- 
ists, or  any  other  group,  has  through 
its  influence  in  the  industrial  corpora- 
tions managed  to  put  up  prices  gener- 
ally to  extortionate  heights,  is  not  true. 
To  make  that  assertion  is  to  confuse 
the  problem  of  manufacturing  combin- 
ations, taken  by  itself,  with  the  pro- 
blem of  banking-house  representation 
on  the  boards  of  such  corporate  com- 
binations. The  question  of  arbitrary 
control  of  prices,  through  mergers, 
holding  companies,  and  hundred-mil- 
lion-dollar corporations,  is  a  question 
by  itself,  and  the  government  has  al- 
ready dealt  with  it  by  itself.  In  all 
their  dissolution  suits,  the  federal  pros- 
ecuting officers  have  taken  no  account 
of  the  personality  or  outside  affiliations 
of  the  directors  of  such  companies. 

The  question  at  issue  was,  what  the 
industrial  company  was  doing,  or  had 
been  organized  to  do.  That  was  the 
logical  and  effective  way  to  approach 
the  matter.  It  laid  the  heavy  hand  of 
the  law  on  corporations,  or  the  direc- 
tors of  them,  not  because  of  the  com- 
position of  their  directing  boards,  but 
because  of  the  actions  and  powers  of 
the  companies  as  companies.  The  dan- 
ger of  arbitrary  and  artificial  prices  for 
commodities  is  being  met  in  that  way, 
and  it  could  be  effectively  met  in  no 


other.  The  danger  of  arbitrary  and 
artificially  high  transportation  rates  on 
the  country's  railways  has  long  since 
passed  away.  The  power  of  the  Money 
Trust  in  these  directions  —  if  we  as- 
sume that  there  is  a  Money  Trust  — 
must  be  judged  in  accordance  with 
such  facts. 

VIII 

But  the  concentration  in  general 
control  of  the  largest  city  banks,  which 
dispense  the  greater  part  of  the  credit 
required  for  very  large  financial  oper- 
ations, remains  as  a  problem  in  itself. 
The  fact  of  this  position  of  the  im- 
portant city  institutions  is,  I  believe, 
disputed  nowhere.  It  has,  in  fact, 
been  frankly  recognized  and  defended 
by  the  financiers  promoting  it.  Their 
arguments  in  its  favor  may  be  thus 
summed  up:  First,  the  consolidation 
of  two  or  more  banking  institutions 
makes  for  greater  economy  of  manage- 
ment and  efficiency  of  operation.  Next, 
banking  institutions  of  larger  power 
and  resources  than  hitherto  are  re- 
quired for  the  much  larger  operations 
involved  in  present-day  business  and 
finance.  Further,  the  bank  suspensions, 
in  New  York  particularly,  during  the 
panic  of  1907,  emphasized  the  dangers 
created  for  the  community  at  large  by 
weak  or  ill-managed  institutions  in  a 
central  money  market.  Finally,  the  in- 
cidents of  that  panic  —  including  the 
temporary  breakdown  of  credit  facili- 
ties, the  distrust  by  banks  of  one  an- 
other, the  lack  of  quick  and  effective 
cooperation  to  relieve  the  crisis  — 
taught  the  supreme  necessity  for  a 
banking  power  strong  enough  to  meet 
the  worst  emergency.  Concentration 
of  the  banking  resources  at  the  coun- 
try's money  centre  is,  in  the  absence  of 
a  central  institution  such  as  the  Bank 
of  England,  the  only  means  of  control- 
ling, promptly  and  effectively,  a  crisis 
of  that  kind. 


666 


THE   MONEY  TRUST 


The  arguments  are  plausible  and, 
up  to  a  certain  point,  convincing.  The 
general  criticism  which  they  invite  is, 
however,  much  the  same  as  that  which 
converged  upon  the  not  dissimilar  pro- 
gramme of  industrial  combination. 
Bank  consolidations  may  promote  econ- 
omy and  efficiency.  But  to  that  argu- 
ment alone  there  must  be  some  limit, 
as  there  was  to  the  similar  argument 
for  manufacturing  combinations ;  other- 
wise, the  ideal  state  of  things  would  be 
complete  monopoly.  Larger  banks  are 
undoubtedly  needed  to  finance  the 
larger  needs  of  modern  business;  but 
this  by  no  means  proves  that  one  al- 
ready large  institution  must  therefore 
be  affiliated,  in  management  or  general 
ownership,  with  another.  Weak  insti- 
tutions will  naturally  tend  to  seek  the 
protection  of  union  with  strong  and 
prosperous  banks;  but  it  does  not  fol- 
low that  there  must  be  a  common  con- 
trol or  ownership  for  all  such  combined 
institutions. 

The  argument  for  meeting  panic  is  in 
some  respects  the  most  forcible  of  all. 
Yet  two  rather  striking  weaknesses  in 
the  argument  must  be  noticed  —  one, 
that  the  strongest  New  York  banks, 
with  one  or  two  exceptions,  gave  little 
ground  for  believing,  in  October,  1907, 
that  their  usefulness  in  meeting  such 
emergencies  is  proportioned  to  their 
financial  strength;  the  other,  that  the 
tendency  for  the  largest  banks  to  fall 
under  the  general  domination  of  one 
financial  group  has  been,  and  is,  an  ab- 
solute barrier  to  the  establishment  of 
a  central  banking  institution  on  proper 
and  scientific  lines.  It  is  argued,  very 
properly,  that  only  through  such  a 
semi-governmental  institution  can  the 
power  of  a  so-called  *  Money  Trust '  be 
restricted  or  curtailed.  But  it  will 
quite  as  surely  be  argued  by  Congress 
and  the  public  that,  in  some  way,  di- 
rectly or  indirectly,  a  financial  power 
which  appears  on  its  face  to  be  getting 


under  its  own  general  control  the  larg- 
est private  banks  would  acquire  a 
dominating  influence  in  a  central  bank 
as  well. 

I  am  stating  the  arguments,  both 
pro  and  con,  for  what  they  are  worth. 
Neither  is  conclusive  —  a  fact  which 
usually  means  that  the  truth  lies  some- 
where between  the  two.  I  have  left  out 
of  the  foregoing  summary,  moreover, 
the  allegation  on  which  a  great  part  of 
the  pending  discussion  has  been  made 
to  hinge.  Does  the  movement  of  con- 
centration, in  the  ownership  or  poten- 
tial control  of  the  larger  banking  insti- 
tutions, mean  that  virtual  control  of 
the  market's  credit  facilities  is  passing 
into  the  hands  of  one  strong  group  of 
financiers?  Mr.  Morgan's  answer  to 
the  question  as  to  the  possibility  of 
such  control  of  credit,  that  'all  the 
money  in  Christendom  and  all  the 
banks  in  Christendom  cannot  control 
it,'  I  have  already  cited.  When  asked 
whether,  if  he  himself  'owned  all  the 
banks  of  New  York,  with  all  their  re- 
sources,' he  would  not  then  'come 
pretty  near  to  having  a  control  of 
credit,'  he  replied  emphatically,  'Not 
at  all,'  and  further  declared  that,  if  a 
competitor  or  potential  competitor  of 
his  own  industrial  enterprises  should 
come  to  these  banks  to  borrow  money, 
he  would  get  it. 

Yet  just  at  that  point  a  question 
of  by  no  means  unreasonable  doubt 
arises.  Supposing  the  general  control 
of  the  country's  greater  banking  insti- 
tutions to  be  in  the  hands  of  a  financial 
group  who  also  dominated  certain  rail- 
way companies  and  certain  industrial 
corporations,  would  it,  or  would  it  not, 
be  possible  for  an  important  legitimate 
enterprise,  competing  with  those  rail- 
ways or  industrial  corporations,  to  be 
organized  as  easily  as  before?  Human 
nature  being  what  it  is,  the  answer 
must  be  in  the  negative. 

Something  of  this  consideration  may 


THE  MONEY  TRUST 


667 


well  have  been  present  in  Mr.  Baker's 
mind,  when  he  said  of  the  machinery 
of  concentrated  banking  capital  that, 
'  if  it  got  into  bad  hands,  it  would  be 
very  bad.'  It  has  not  been  proved, 
in  all  the  collated  testimony  on  the 
question,  that  discrimination  in  grant- 
ing credit,  with  a  view  to  obstruct- 
ing competition,  has  been  practiced  on 
any  such  scale.  In  one  or  two  cases, 
unsuccessful  projectors  of  railway  or 
other  enterprises,  who  have  failed  to 
obtain  the  necessary  funds,  have  ac- 
cused  the  ' Money  Trust'  of  standing 
in  their  way;  but  the  event  has  proved 
that  the  enterprises  were  themselves 
financially  unsound.  Nevertheless,  we 
have  to  deal,  not  alone  with  what  has 
actually  been  done,  through  unusual 
and  abnormal  powers  of  this  nature, 
but  with  what  may  be  done  hereafter, 
if  the  existing  system  and  tenden- 
cies are  perpetuated.  It  is  in  some  re- 
spects the  problem  with  which  the 
Supreme  Court  was  confronted,  when 
counsel  for  the  Northern  Securities  set 
forth  that  the  company  had  performed 
no  overt  act  whatever  beyond  declar- 
ing dividends,  and  therefore  could  not 
have  acted  in  restraint  of  trade;  yet 
admitted  that  the  logical  development 
of  its  scheme  of  organization  might 
enable  it  to  own  all  the  railways  in  the 
country. 

The  question  what,  if  anything,  we 
•  are  to  do  in  the  way  of  legislation  on 
the  problem,  is  full  of  complications. 
It  is  peculiarly  a  subject  to  be  ap- 
proached with  caution,  conservatism, 
and  a  full  recognition  of  all  the  facts 
which  bear  upon  it;  for  blundering 
efforts  at  a  remedy  would  inevitably 
touch  the  sensitive  nerve  of  general 
credit.  Nothing  will  be  gained  by  such 
wild  extravagances  as  the  Congres- 
sional allegations  from  which  I  have 


repeated  the  striking  passages.  To 
deal  with  the  problem  in  such  fashion 
is  the  surest  way  to  create  and  empha- 
size the  impression,  among  thinking 
men,  that  there  is  nothing  but  malice 
or  ignorance  behind  the  agitation. 
Some  new  provisions  in  our  banking 
laws  have  probably  been  made  inevit- 
able by  the  changed  conditions  which 
have  arisen  in  the  banking  organism. 
Restrictions  may  be  necessitated  on 
the  purchase  of  one  fiduciary  institu- 
tion by  another,  to  the  extent  at  least 
of  requiring  the  approval  of  responsible 
public  officers.  There  is  plausible  ar- 
gument for  the  regulation  of  banking 
and  corporation  directorates,  so  that 
the  same  man  or  group  of  men  shall 
not  be  allowed  to  sit  on  the  boards  of 
competing  institutions. 

It  is  not  my  purpose  here,  however, 
to  discuss  the  grounds  for  or  against 
any  specific  measure  of  reform  in  the 
existing  situation,  but  to  show  what 
that  situation  actually  is.  If  the  pro- 
blem is  conservatively  dealt  with,  the 
banking  interests  of  the  country  will 
have  reason  to  be  as  grateful  as  the 
business  community  and  the  general 
public;  for  it  is  difficult  not  to  believe 
that  the  financiers  who  thus  far  have 
conducted  this  movement  of  banking 
concentration  are  themselves  aware 
that  they  have  set  in  operation  machin- 
ery which  they  cannot  check  or  stop, 
and  which  is  liable  to  get  wholly  out  of 
their  own  control.  That  was  the  fact 
with  the  movement  of  industrial  con- 
centration. It  was  the  head  of  a  pow- 
erful banking  and  promoting  interest, 
and  a  party  to  the  suit,  who  said,  when 
the  Northern  Securities  decree  put  an 
end  to  that  infatuation  of  our  great 
Wall  Street  financiers,  that  the  decision 
'  is  a  blessing  in  disguise,  for  the  move- 
ment has  already  gone  too  far.' 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


BY   MARY   S.  WATTS 


CHAPTER  XIV 

KEY  WEST  (continued) 

IF  Tampa  had  been  in  a  seething  hub- 
bub, it  was  nothing  to  Key  West,  which 
felt  itself  in  all  but  hallooing  distance 
of  the  seat  of  war,  and,  in  the  mediaeval 
phrase,  stood  within  the  Spanish  dan- 
ger; the  little  town  of  foreign-looking 
houses  and  brilliant  tropical  shrubbery, 
among  which  one  might  recognize 
many  old  friends  of  the  conservatory 
uncannily  grown  and  naturalized,  was 
incredibly  crowded;  the  hot,  white 
streets  swarmed  with  people;  the  har- 
bor was  jammed  with  shipping;  the 
quays  in  a  roaring  turmoil.  Somebody 
pointed  out  to  Van  Cleve  the  Spanish 
prizes  anchored  here  and  there,  a  pie- 
bald collection  of  steam  and  sailing- 
vessels,  and  told  him  they  were  to  be 
auctioned  off  at  public  outcry  that  very 
morning.  'Some  of  'em  ought  to  go 
cheap,  by  their  looks,'  said  Van;  and 
the  other  man  laughed.  In  truth,  they 
were  a  dirty  and  down-at-heel  set.  The 
transport  had  touched  five  hours  ear- 
lier, and  gone  on  without  delay;  an- 
other big  liner  now  in  the  government 
hire  was  just  standing  out  to  sea, 
loaded  with  supplies  and  the  army  mail, 
as  Van  was  informed.  Every  one  was 
eager  to  talk  and  answer  all  his  ques- 
tions, the  young  fellow  found;  there 
was  the  same  extraordinary  feeling  of 
kinship  and  ready-made  acquaintance 
in  the  crowds  which  he  had  noticed  in 
Tampa. 

In  the  meanwhile,  Mr.  Takuhira  had 

668 


entered  upon  what  promised  to  be  a 
difficult  and  complicated  negotiation 
with  the  authorities  over  his  passage 
to  Cuba,  which  it  appeared  even  the 
accredited  representative  of  a  foreign 
power  could  not  accomplish  without 
the  consent  or  connivance  of  every  of- 
ficial in  the  place,  and  a  truly  bewilder- 
ing display  of  red  tape.  Van  Cleve  left 
him  at  the  beginning  of  it,  and  took  his 
own  way  to  the  office  of  the  Key  West 
Sentinel;  he  could  think  of  no  better 
starting-point  for  his  haphazard  search, 
and  here,  for  once,  chance  befriended 
him. 

The  Sentinel  was  housed  and  served 
in  much  the  same  style  as  the  Tampa 
newspapers;  it  might  have  been  the 
same  flimsy  wooden  building,  the  same 
cluttered  little  office-room,  opening 
full  on  the  street,  with  a  white  awning 
over  the  door,  and  a  manila-paper 
broadside  with  *  LATEST  NEWS  FROM 
THE  SEAT  OF  WAR,'  skewered  on  the 
lamp-post  opposite.  The  same  crowd 
jostled  in  and  out;  the  same  men  chew- 
ing unlighted  cigars,  perspiring  in 
shirt-sleeves  with  handkerchiefs  tucked 
inside  their  collars,  hammered  on  the 
typewriters,  or  dictated  to  other  ham- 
merers. As  Van  had  more  than  half 
expected,  nobody  knew  anything  about 
a  Robert  Gilbert,  or  had  ever  heard  of 
him,  or  had  any  time  to  listen  to  or  an- 
swer questions  about  war-correspond- 
ents. He  was  turning  away,  when  there 
came  in  a  thin,  slow-moving  man  dress- 
ed in  soiled  white  ducks,  with  a  thin, 
yellow,  scrubby-bearded,  and  inex- 
pressibly tired  face,  who  took  off  his  hat 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


669 


and  wiped  his  forehead  with  a  languid 
gesture,  as  he  leaned  against  one  of  the 
tables,  and  asked  if  there  was  any  mail 
for  him.  Van  Cleve,  who  could  not  get 
by  in  the  higgledy-piggledy  little  place 
without  dislodging  him,  hesitated  an 
instant,  wondering,  with  that  slight 
inward  recoil  which  most  people  would 
have  felt  at  this  date,  if  the  other  might 
not  be  just  coming  out  of  an  attack 
of  the  fever;  he  had  plainly  been  very 
sick  recently  —  was  sick  still,  for  that 
matter.  The  typewriter-girl  recognized 
him,  and  got  up  to  search  a  pigeon-hole 
in  the  desk  alongside  her.  'You  don't 
look  very  good  yet,  Mr.  Schreiber,'  she 
said  kindly;  'I  don't  believe  you  ought 
to  be  out  in  the  sun.  It  brings  it  on 
again  sometimes.' 

'Oh,  I've  had  my  dose,'  said  the 
visitor,  with  a  kind  of  haggard  jaunti- 
ness.  He  was  a  young  fellow,  about 
Van's  own  age.  'Anyway,  you  might 
as  well  be  good  and  sick  as  half-up  and 
half-down  this  way.  It's  more  inter- 
esting. Is  n't  that  mine?' 

She  handed  him  a  yellow  envelope 
with  Gulf  States  Monthly  printed  in  the 
corner  of  it,  remarking  amiably,  '  Say, 
that 's  a  dandy  good  magazine.  I  buy  a 
number  every  now  and  then  —  only  ten 
cents,  you  know,  and  I  can't  see  but 
what  it's  got  every  bit  as  good  stuff 
in  it  as  Century  or  any  of  the  high-up 
ones.  Are  you  going  to  have  something 
in  pretty  soon?' 

'I  sent  'em  an  article  and  some 
photographs  just  before  I  was  taken 
sick,  —  don't  know  when  they  '11  be 
out,  of  course,  but  I  should  n't  wonder 
if  it  was  in  the  next  issue.  They  want 
all  the  war  news  to  be  right  up  to  the 
minute,'  he  said  not  without  some  im- 
portance; and  added  in  a  slightly  low- 
ered and  confidential  tone,  'Want  a 
news-item?  For  the  society  column?' 

4 Sure  we  do.  Always.  What  is  it?' 

'Well,  then,'  said  the  convalescent, 
unsmiling,  with  ironic  impressiveness, 


'you  may  just  say  that  I  leave  for  Cuba 
to-night  or  early  to-morrow  morning 
on  my  private  yacht,  the  Milton  D. 
Bowers,  which  is  now  coaling  up  and 
laying  in  a  store  of  provisions,  wines, 
etcetera,  my  special  extra  dry  cham- 
pagne, and  my  own  brand  of  cigars,  at 
Wharf  8,  foot  of  Cadoodle  Street,  or 
whatever  the  name  of  it  is  —  down  here 
three  squares  to  the  right,  I  mean.  Now 
don't  make  any  mistake;  I  don't  want 
to  have  that  telegraphed  all  over  the 
country  with  my  name  spelled  wrong. 
I'd  nevah  be  able  to  show  my  face  in 
Newport  or  Tuxedo  again,  don't  you 
know,  they'd  all  make  so  much  fun  of 
me.  Beastly  bore,  don't  you  know ! ' 

The  stenographer  did  not  laugh, 
however.  '  Oh,  my,  Mr.  Schreiber,  you 
ain't  honestly  going,  are  you?'  she  said 
with  concern.  'Why,  you  ain't  near 
well  enough  yet.  I  think  that's  awful 
reckless.' 

Van  Cleve  did  not  hear  her  remon- 
strances; he  was  busy  trying  to  re- 
member where  he  had  heard  before  of 
the  Milton  D.  Bowers;  it  must  be  the 
same  vessel,  for  no  two  that  ever  sailed 
the  seas  would  have  been  christened 
with  such  a  name.  Suddenly  he  recol- 
lected. He  spoke  to  the  other  young 
man  abruptly.  'I  beg  pardon,  are  you 
one  of  the  war-correspondents?' 

At  this  unexpected  attack,  the  steno- 
grapher jumped,  with  a  little  scream; 
Mr.  Schreiber  faced  about  with  his 
fatigued  movements,  bracing  himself 
by  the  desk,  and  ey,fid  Van  Cleve  in- 
quiringly, a  species  of  jocular  hostility 
or  wariness  showing  on  his  fever-strick- 
en youthful  face. 

'Yes,  I'm  a  correspondent.  Are  n't 
you  the  speedy  little  guesser  though!' 
he  said  lightly,  still  with  an  indescrib- 
able air  of  being  on  his  guard. 

'I  heard  you  mention  the  Milton  D. 
Bowers.  That's  one  of  the  newspaper 
boats,  is  n't  it?'  Van  pursued. 

'Yes.'   And  before  Van  Cleve  could 


670 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


open  his  mouth  for  his  next  question, 
the  other  stuck  out  a  hand  and,  grab- 
bing Van's,  pumped  it  up  and  down 
with  exaggerated  warmth,  exclaiming, 
*  WHY,  if  it  is  n't  my  dear  old  friend, 
Chauncey  Pipp  from  Hayville,  Michi- 
gan! Howdo,  Chauncey?  How's  the 
folks?' 

It  took  Van  Cleve  a  moment  or  two 
to  perceive  what  this  fantastic  per- 
formance implied.  When  he  did,  he 
frowned.  'Oh,  come  off!  Do  I  look 
like  a  green-goods  man?'  he  said  im- 
patiently. 'I  just  want  to  ask  you 
something.  I  'm  looking  for  a  man  that 's 
been  on  that  boat  —  a  correspondent, 
you  understand.  I  thought  you  might 
have  met.  His  name 's  Gilbert  —  R.  D. 
Gilbert/ 

Mr.  Schreiber  became  another  man 
on  the  instant;  he  relinquished  Van 
Cleve's  hand,  entirely  businesslike  and 
serious.  'Why,  yes,  I  know  a  Gilbert. 
We  were  on  a  cruise  together  on  the 
Milton  D.  We  got  to  knowing  each 
other  very  well,*  he  said,  interested;  'I 
don't  know  what  His  first  name  was, 
though;  I  never  happened  to  ask  him. 
What's  your  Gilbert  like?  Tall,  light- 
haired  fellow?  This  one  was  reporting 
for  a  Cleveland  paper,  I  think.' 

'No,  Cincinnati.  My  man  is  from 
Cincinnati.' 

*  Well,  maybe  it  was  Cincinnati  —  I 
don't  recollect  —  it  was  Ohio,  anyhow. 
You  say  you're  looking  for  him?' 

'Yes.  It  must  be  the  same  man. 
He-  Van  Cleve  stopped  himself, 
glancing  at  the  stenographer,  who  was 
an  open-eyed  spectator.  'Here,  let's 
go  outside  and  talk.  We're  in  the  way 
here,'  he  suggested. 

'Well,  I  call  that  a  funny  coin- 
cidence!' the  young  lady  ejaculated 
as  they  left. 

Outside,  in  chairs  under  another 
awning  in  front  of  the  saloon  across 
the  way,  Schreiber  said,  'You  are  n't  a 
brother  of  Gilbert's,  are  you?' 


'No,  just  a  friend  of  his  and  the 
family's.  The  man  I  mean  is  a  heavy 
drinker.  You  'd  know  it  even  if  he  kept 
sober  while  he  was  down  here,'  said 
Van  Cleve,  bluntly.  '  I  did  n't  want  to 
talk  about  it  before  that  girl.  You  saw 
that.' 

'Yes,'  Schreiber  said  at  once,  *  that's 
the  same  Gilbert;  he's  all  right,  if  it 
was  n't  for  that.  Good  fellow,  if  it 
was  n't  for  that.  Just  can't  let  it  alone, 
that 'sail.  I  don't  mind  a  man  taking 
a  drink  once  in  a  while  —  Here  now, 
don't  do  that,  that  was  n't  a  hint;  I 
could  n't  take  anything  but  mineral 
water,  anyhow  —  I  say  I  don't  mind 
a  man  taking  a  drink  once  in  a  while, 
but  Gilbert  — !'  he  made  a  gesture  — 
'he  just  can't  let  it  alone.  Were  you 
expecting  to  meet  him  here?' 

Van  Cleve  explained.  'I've  been 
looking  for  him  for  a  week.  His  paper 
has  let  him  go  and  the  family  want  him 
to  come  home.  They  don't  know  where 
he  is,  nor  what 's  happening  to  him.' 

The  newspaper-man  nodded  with 
full  comprehension  of  what  these  state- 
ments left  unsaid.  'Well  —  all  right, 
apollinaris  —  I  'm  afraid  you  're  going 
to  have  a  hard  time  finding  him  because 
the  last  I  knew  he  was  going  to  Cuba. 
I  had  it  all  fixed  to  go  myself,  only  I 
came  down  with  this  blankety-blanked 
fever  instead!' 

'Yellow?' 

'No,  it's  what  they  call  calenture. 
It's  nothing  like  so  serious  as  yellow, 
but  you  certainly  do  feel  rotten  after 
it.  What  day  of  the  month  is  it,  do 
you  know?  I've  lost  count  —  one 
day's  so  much  like  another  when  you 
're  sick.' 

Van  Cleve  himself  had  forgotten,  and 
was  obliged  to  refer  to  the  Sentinel 
which  he  was  still  carrying  in  his  pock- 
et. It  was  the  30th  of  June.  'Three 
weeks  since  I  began  to  feel  so  bum  I 
had  to  go  to  bed!  The  army  left  the 
next  day,'  said  Schreiber,  dolefully. 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


671 


'However  — !'  He  shrugged  away  his 
disappointment  with  one  shoulder. 
*  We've  all  got  to  take  what's  coming 
to  us.  I  will  now  proceed  to  drown  my 
woes  in  drink ! '  he  announced,  revert- 
ing to  his  attitude  of  defiant  levity,  and 
took  up  the  mild  tumbler  of  mineral 
water  with  a  flourish.  *  Here's  your 
good  health,  Mr. — ?' 

'Kendrick  —  my  name's  Kendrick.' 
Van  Cleve  got  out  a  card  and  gave  it 
to  him,  with  a  word  of  half-humorous 
apology.  'I  suppose  you're  used  to  a 
lot  of  wild-eyed  cranks  butting  in  on 
you  the  way  I  did,  though.  Is  n't  that 
so?  Newspaper  men  have  the  name  of 
being  ready  for  almost  anything.' 

*  Well,  I  don't  call  it  particularly  the 
act  of  a  wild-eyed  crank  to  take  me 
out  and  buy  me  a  drink,'  said  the  other, 
good-naturedly.  He  looked  at  the  card 
and  read  aloud,  'Mr.  Van  Cleve  Ken- 
drick,' and  repeated  his  toast,  'Here's 
looking  toward  you,  Mr.  Kendrick.  I 
have  n't  got  any  cards  with  me,  or  I  'd 
exchange  with  you.  My  name 's  Schrei- 
ber,  however,  —  if  you  '11  take  my  word 
for  it,  —  and  I  'm  here  for  the  Gulf 
States  Magazine  partly,  and  partly  on 
my  own.  If  there's  anything  I  can  do 
for  you,  I'd  be  glad  to.' 

Van  said  that  he  was  much  obliged; 
and  they  finished,  one  his  apollinaris, 
the  other  his  Baccardi  rum,  in  extra- 
ordinary amity.  It  was  a  great  place 
and  time  for  these  hit-or-miss  fellow- 
ships. 

'Funny  you  should  happen  to  ask 
me  about  Gilbert,'  the  correspondent 
commented;  'no,  thanks,  I  can't  smoke 
yet.  Oh,  wait  till  you  have  calenture; 
you'll  understand!  —  I  say  it's  funny 
you  should  have  picked  out  me  to  ask 
about  Gilbert,  because  I  'm  probably 
the  one,  single,  solitary  man  in  the 
whole  place  that  could  tell  you ! ' 

Van  Cleve  explained  about  the  Mil- 
ton D.  Bowers.  '  If  I  had  n't  heard  you 
say  that,  I'd  have  gone  on  without 


speaking.  But  I  just  happened  to  re- 
member Bob  —  Gilbert,  you  know  — 
mentioning  that  as  the  name  of  the 
dispatch-boat  he'd  been  on,  in  one  of 
his  letters  home.  It's  an  absurd  sort 
of  name  and  stuck  in  my  head  on  that 
account,  no  doubt.' 

'It  is  a  queer  name,  I  suppose,'  said 
Schreiber,  reflectively;  'I  don't  know 
why,  I  never  noticed  that  it  was  queer 
before.  Yes,  Gilbert  and  I  were  on  the 
Milton  D.  together.  It  was  an  interest- 
ing cruise.  She  is  n't  a  dispatch-boat, 
however;  the  dispatch-boats  have  these 
big,  high-powered  engines,  and  they  get 
over  the  ground,  or  the  sea  rather,  like 
an  express-train.  The  Milton  D.'s  no- 
thing but  a  sea-going  tug  —  kind  of  a 
little  bull-tug,  you  know,  very  stout 
and  strong,  but  not  at  all  fast.  She 
could  get  along  well  enough  to  keep 
up  with  the  transports,  and  that's  all 
that's  necessary.' 

'Is  that  so?  How  long  were  you  on 
that  trip?' 

'Why,  a  week  or  more.  We  went 
down  by  the  Isle  of  Pines,  keeping  out 
a  good  way  from  Havana  on  account 
of  the  fleet,  you  know.  And  then  we 
came  around  by  the  east  end  of  Cuba. 
We  must  have  been  very  near  where 
the  army  landed  the  other  day.  It 's  a 
wonderful  coast,  tall  cliffs  right  to  the 
edge  of  the  sea,  no  beach  at  all,  and  a 
whacking  big  surf  piling  up  all  around 
the  bases  of  'em.  The  mountains  are 
all  over  thick  woods,  and  every  now 
and  then  you  can  see  a  little  white 
streak  of  a  waterfall  tottering  out  like 
a  ghost  between  them.  The  sea 's  al- 
most always  very  blue,  and  the  surf 's 
white,  and  the  mountains  deep-green 
—  George!'  he  shook  his  head  in  ad- 
miration ; '  it 's  beautiful,  only  it  does  n't 
look  real,  somehow.  It  makes  you 
think  of  a  drop-curtain.' 

'Must  have  been  a  great  sight,'  said 
Van  Cleve,  with  full  appreciation.  'I 
did  n't  think  you'd  have  time  to  look 


672 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


at  scenery,  on  account  of  dodging  Span- 
ish gunboats  and  so  on.' 

Schreiber  laughed.  *  Spanish  gun- 
boats never  bothered  us.  We  had  to 
keep  on  the  hop  to  dodge  our  own. 
They'd  have  eaten  us  up  in  a  minute.' 
And  seeing  the  incredulity  on  Van's 
face,  he  added  with  emphasis,  'Yes, 
they  would.  The  fleet's  not  a  very  safe 
neighborhood  for  little  Milton  D. 
Bowerses,  or  any  other  non-combat- 
ants. They  don't  know  who  you  are, 
and  they  can't  risk  stopping  to  find 
out.  Shoot  first  and  explain  afterwards 
—  that's  their  motto!  Those  big  war- 
ships just  loaf  around  the  ocean  all 
night  long  without  a  sound  or  a  light, 
and  if  they  run  across  you — Bing! 
Dead  bird!  They  have  to,  you  know. 
You  might  be  a  torpedo-boat  sneaking 
up  on  'em.' 

Van  Cleve  pondered  this  information 
with  a  certain  stirring  of  the  adventur- 
ous longings  he  had  had  in  boyhood, 
and  had  thought  long  since  dead  and 
buried.  What  St.  Louis  soap-factory, 
what  distillery,  what  office-stool  and 
desk,  might  be  their  tombstone !  With 
something  of  an  effort,  he  got  back  to 
the  business  of  the  hour. 

'You  say  you  think  Gilbert  went  to 
Cuba  when  the  troops  did?' 

'Oh,  yes,  positive.  They  all  went. 
Everybody  went  but  me.' 

'How  did  they  get  there  —  the  news- 
paper men,  I  mean?  Did  they  have 
their  own  boat?' 

'Well,  yes,  some  of  them.  Some  were 
on  the  Associated  Press  boats,  the 
Goldenrod  and  the  Wanda  and  the 
others  —  you '  ve  probably  seen  their 
names  in  the  papers.  There  were  a  good 
many  on  one  of  the  transports.  You  can 
get  to  Cuba  any  old  way;  it's  easier 
than  going  from  here  to  New  York!  I 
was  to  have  been  on  the  Milton  D.,  but 
of  course  that  all  had  to  be  put  off.  They 
took  the  route  by  the  north  coast,  and 
the  Milton  D.  could  do  that  nicely. 


It 's  shorter,  and  does  n't  take  so  much 
coal.  Coal 's  a  very  serious  item  with 
these  little  tin  tea-pots.' 

Van  Cleve  surveyed  him  thought- 
fully. 'Were  you  in  earnest  just  now 
when  you  were  talking  about  going 
to-night?' 

The  other  nodded.  '  Of  course  I  was 
in  earnest — of  course  I'm  going.  What 
made  you  ask?' 

'Why,  you're  too  sick  still,  aren't 
you?' 

'Oh,  sick  —  thunder!'  said  Schrei- 
ber, in  genuine  irritation.  'No,  I'm 
not  sick  any  more.  I  '11  be  all  right  in 
a  day  or  two,  anyhow.  Besides,  I 
can't  stay  loafing  here.  There's  some- 
thing doing  every  minute  over  there, 
and  I  don't  want  to  miss  any  more  of 
it.  The  war  is  n't  going  to  last  forever, 
you  know  —  a  few  months,  or  a  year 
maybe,  and  we  may  never  have  an- 
other, not  in  our  time,  anyway.  If  you 
knew  anything  about  the  newspaper 
game,  you  'd  know  a  person  can't  worry 
around  over  every  little  pain  and  ache, 
when  he  might  be  out  getting  a  good 
story.' 

He  spoke  with  a  vehemence  for  which 
Van  Cleve,  who  was  not  given  to  vehe- 
mence or  excitement  himself,  rather 
warmed  to  him;  Van  thought  it  might 
be  foolish  and  exaggerated,  but  it 
showed  at  least  the  proper  spirit  with 
which  any  man  ought  to  regard  his 
work.  'If  everybody  felt  that  way 
about  their  job,  there  'd  be  a  good  deal 
more  done,  Mr.  Schreiber,'  he  said; 
'the  reason  I  asked  you,  though,  was 
that  I  was  wondering  if  I  could  make 
an  arrangement  to  go  with  you.  Would 
there  be  room  on  the  Milton  D.  Bowers 
for  one  more?' 

Schreiber  stared.  '  You  want  to  go 
to  Cuba?  Why,  look  here,  are  you  in 
the  newspaper  business,  after  all?'  he 
asked  ingenuously. 

'No,  I  just  thought  I'd  like  to  go  if 
I  got  a  chance.  I  'd  like  to  see  it.  If  we 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


673 


should  happen  to  run  across  Gilbert, 
I'd  get  him  to  come  back  with  me/ 
said  Van  Cleve,  in  as  casual  a  manner 
as  he  could  put  on ;  it  was  not  well  done, 
for  he  had  no  talent  for  that  sort  of  de- 
ception, but  Schreiber  noticed  nothing. 

CHAPTER  XV 

ONCE  ABOARD  THE  LUGGER! 

The  correspondent's  full  name  was 
Herman  Schreiber,  and  he  came  orig- 
inally from  Blucher,  Illinois,  as  he  in- 
formed Van  Cleve  in  the  course  of  the 
negotiations,  adding,  with  extreme  seri- 
ousness, that  he  was  of  Irish  descent. 
Although  he  knew  nothing  of  Mr.  Ken- 
drick's  character  and  antecedents,  he 
made  no  difficulty  about  accepting  him 
for  a  companion  on  the  voyage.  *  Why, 
if  you  want  to  go,  I  'm  sure  it 's  all  right 
as  far  as  I'm  concerned,'  he  said  with 
genial  indifference.  'You'll  have  to 
speak  to  Captain  Bowers,  but  I  don't 
believe  he'll  object,  provided  you  can 
rustle  the  price.  He 's  a  Yankee;  comes 
from  New  Bedford,  or  Gloucester,  or 
somewhere  down  east,  and  he's  about 
as  mellow  as  a  salt  cod.  Of  course,  it  '11 
be  rough;  you  don't  need  to  be  told  that. 
But  if  you  don't  mind  sleeping  with  a 
lump  of  coal  in  your  ear,  and  eating 
hard-tack  and  canned  stuff,  and  going 
without  a  shave  or  clean  clothes  for  a 
while,  why,  it 's  a  good  deal  of  fun.  The 
thing  is,  you  see  it  all,  you  know.  That 's 
the  thing,  you  see  it  all ! ' 

He  went  back  to  the  hotel  —  Key 
West  has,  or  had  at  that  date,  but  one 
—  with  Van  Cleve,  and  there  the  first 
person  they  encountered  was  Mr.  Tak- 
uhira,  whom  the  journalist  already 
knew,  and  saluted  as  Take-your-hair- 
off,  in  a  cheerfully  informal  style.  Tak- 
uhira's  own  prospects,  as  he  told  them, 
with  his  equable  smile,  were  very 
dubious.  *I  should  have  gone  by  the 
mail-boat  that  left  this  morning.  Ar- 

VOL.  Ill -NO.  5 


rangements  had  been  made,  they  say/ 
he  said;  and  permitted  himself  a  slight 
shrug.  'Unfortunately  they  omitted 
one  rather  desirable  arrangement,  that 
is,  to  tell  me.  I  did  not  know  anything 
about  it.  And  now  nobody  knows  any- 
thing about  me.  The  government  of 
Uncle  Sam  has  troubles  of  his  own,  as 
you  say,  without  to  bother  about  one 
Japan  attache.' 

*D  'ye  have  to  get  there?'  inquired 
Schreiber. 

The  Oriental  gentleman  shrugged 
again.  The  other  two  men  could  not 
help  exchanging  a  glance,  each  one 
wondering  and  knowing  that  the  other 
was  wondering  whether  this  Japanese 
would  not  be  quite  capable  of  commit- 
ting harakiri  to  satisfy  his  fanatical 
Eastern  standards  of  honor,  if  he  failed 
in  his  mission.  Almost  simultaneously 
they  proposed  to  him  their  own  vessel 
as  a  way  out  of  his  difficulties. 

*  And  he  won't  be  the  funniest  traveler 
the  old  tub  's  carried,  either/  Schreiber 
said,  after  they  had,  all  three,  com- 
pleted the  bargain  with  Captain  Bow- 
ers, who  had  been  willing  enough  to 
take  Van  Cleve,  but  inquired  a  little 
austerely  why  it  was  necessary  to  ship 
the  Chink?  He  was  won  over,  however, 
by  an  argument  which  Schreiber  as- 
sured the  others  in  private  was  always 
irresistible  with  him;  give  Captain 
Bowers  enough  (he  said)  and  he  'd  sail 
his  namesake  to  a  very  much  warmer 
place  than  Cuba  —  which  Mr.  Schrei- 
ber specified.  And  he  hinted  at  a  sinis- 
ter past,  and  at  various  desperate  ex- 
ploits of  the  Captain's  in  the  way  of 
blockade-running  during  the  Civil  War, 
filibustering  in  the  Caribbean,  and  so 
on,  which  Van  Cleve  inwardly  decided 
to  discount  a  trifle. 

Captain  Bowers  was  a  lean,  leathery, 
hard-featured  man,  upwards  of  sixty, 
who,  indeed,  looked  quite  capable  of 
the  dark  deeds  attributed  to  him;  at 
some  stage  of  his  career,  he  had  lost 


674 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


two  fingers  off  his  right  hand,  which, 
some  way  or  other,  strengthened  the 
grim  impression.  But  Van  was  shrewd 
enough  to  know  that  to  the  landsman 
the  sea  and  those  who  follow  it  will 
always  be  a  mystery,  attractive  and 
forbidding,  in  the  same  breath;  pirate 
or  preacher,  the  Captain  would  proba- 
bly have  looked  the  same  to  him,  he 
thought,  with  a  laugh;  and  what  differ- 
ence did  it  make,  anyhow? 

Their  craft,  Captain  Bowers  an- 
nounced, would  sail  at  midnight,  a 
choice  of  hours  which,  of  itself,  savored 
of  deep-sea  secrecy  and  danger,  but 
which,  Van  Cleve  vaguely  supposed, 
had  something  to  do  with  the  tide.  It 
left  them  all  the  rest  of  the  day  for  pre- 
paration, but  somehow  Van  never  can 
remember  nowadays  exactly  how  he 
spent  that  time.  He  wrote  to  his  Aunt 
Myra  and  to  the  bank,  and  a  long  let- 
ter to  Lorrie.  Takuhira  was  writing, 
too,  on  the  other  side  of  the  desk  in  the 
hotel  lounging-room,  filling  page  after 
page  with  Japanese  characters,  with 
what  might  be  called  an  unnaturally 
natural  rapidity,  as  facile  as  Van  him- 
self. The  latter  wondered  whether 
their  letters  might  not  be  a  good  deal 
alike.  There  they  sat,  each  one  a  parcel 
of  memories  and  associations  as  differ- 
ent as  possible,  yet  doubtless  funda- 
mentally the  same.  Some  slant-eyed 
little  lady  in  a  sash  might  beTakuhira's 
Lorrie;  and  instead  of  Van's  great, 
muddy  river,  and  bricked,  noisy,  sooty, 
well-loved  town,  the  Japanese  must  be 
calling  up  some  fantastic  vista  of  bam- 
boos, cock-roofed  temples,  and  rice- 
fields,  and  naming  it,  with  as  strong  a 
feeling,  home. 

Afterwards,  to  the  best  of  Van's  re- 
collection, they  went  together  and  got 
some  express  checks  cashed,  and  visited 
a  shop  where  they  bought  apparel 
which  they  dimly  conjectured  to  be 
suitable  for  the  trip  —  flannel  shirts, 
canvas  shoes,  a  blanket  apiece  —  they 


had  no  idea  what  they  would  need. 
The  little  Japanese  in  a  sou'wester  and 
jersey,  with  a  bandanna  knotted  around 
his  neck,  cowboy  fashion,  was  a  sight 
for  gods  and  men,  but  it  must  be  said 
to  Van's  credit  that  he  refrained  from 
laughter.  He  felt  too  much  of  a  clown 
in  his  own  seafarer's  haberdashery. 
One  of  the  last  things  he  remembers 
doing  was  going  with  Schreiber  to  buy 
a  revolver,  which  the  newspaper-man 
insisted  upon  as  an  indispensable  part 
of  his  outfit.  'Got  to  have  a  gun,'  he 
said  seriously.  'It's  war-times  where 
you  're  going,  you  know.  Even  if  you 
only  needed  it  once,  you'd  need  it 
mighty  bad.' 

'Well,  but  I  never  handled  one  of 
'em  in  my  life  —  I  don't  know  which 
end  they  go  off  at,'  Van  Cleve  objected. 
'I'm  not  going  to  mix  into  any  fight 
anyhow  —  not  if  traveling's  good  in 
the  opposite  direction,  I  know  that.9 

'Makes  no  difference.  You've  got 
to  put  up  a  good,  strong  bluff  just  the 
same,'  said  his  new  friend  sententiously. 
Van  had  to  yield  at  length. 

'All  right,'  he  said,  gingerly  stowing 
the  weapon  in  his  hip-pocket;  'this  is 
where  it's  considered  good  form  to 
carry  it,  I  suppose?  You  '11  change  your 
mind  about  my  needing  it  after  I've 
blown  your  ear  off,  or  plugged  a  hole 
in  the  boiler.  Come  on,  fellows.' 

They  went  down  to  the  pier. 

As  the  compiler  of  these  records 
knows  next  to  nothing  of  the  sea,  and 
as  it  has  always  been  difficult  to  get 
anything  out  of  Van  Cleve  Kendrick 
about  this  experience,  it  is  plain  that 
we  cannot  be  going  to  enter  upon  any 
thrilling  nautical  adventures.  I  could 
not  invent  them,  and  Van  never  will 
admit  that  there  were  any.  It  seems 
that  nothing  of  much  moment  hap- 
pened during  the  first  half  of  the  voy- 
age, at  least;  their  tug  was  not  a  rapid 
traveler,  and  she  labored  along  pro- 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


675 


saically  off  the  northern  coasts  of  Cuba, 
which  were  sometimes  in  sight  at  a 
prudent  distance  for  fully  forty-eight 
hours,  day  and  night,  without  storms 
or  warships  or  sensational  encounters 
of  any  kind.  The  population  of  the 
Milton  D.  Bowers,  meanwhile,  crew 
and  passengers  alike,  lived  at  incon- 
ceivably close  quarters,  in  democratic 
freedom  and  astonishing  harmony, 
and  with  a  disregard  of  dirt,  discom- 
fort, and  inconvenience,  which  any  lady 
who  reads  these  lines  would  have  look- 
ed upon  with  shuddering  horror. 

What  would  Van  Cleve's  aunt,  what 
would  any  of  his  female  relatives,  have 
said  to  the  more  than  dubious  bunk 
and  the  species  of  dog-house  wherein 
he  slept  of  a  night,  to  the  greasy  bench 
amidships  at  which  he  sat  down  to 
meals,  to  the  terrific  tea  and  coffee  and 
ships'-biscuit  and  canned  tomatoes  and 
sizzling  fried  onions  which  he  con- 
sumed (with  thorough  relish!)  out  of 
tin  plates  and  mugs  and  unspeakable 
skillets  ?  What  would  they  have  thought 
of  his  shipmates  than  whom  no  stranger 
company  were  ever  assembled  on  a 
boat,  since  Noah  went  aboard  the  Ark? 
Van  Cleve  himself  got  along  admirably 
with  them.  'They  were  all  right.  They 
were  just  man,  you  know,  just  plain 
man,9  he  once  rather  obscurely  said,  in 
an  effort  to  describe  them;  the  astute 
tolerance  of  the  phrase  better  describes 
himself.  There  was  only  one  of  them 
whom  Van  felt  he  never  would  under- 
stand, and  that  was  Takuhira,  be- 
tween whom  and  these  American  men 
there  would  forever  hang  the  impalpa- 
ble veil  of  race,  and  of  habits  of  mind, 
unconquerably  alien.  *  You  can't  get  on 
the  inside  of  him,  somehow;  you  can't 
think  his  thoughts.  It  would  n't  make 
any  difference  how  long  you  were  with 
him,  you  'd  never  know  him,'  Van  Cleve 
remarked  to  Schreiber  one  day. 

The  reporter  stared.  'What!  Little 
Take-your-hair-off?  Why,  he's  easy 


enough  to  know.  Why,  I've  never  had 
any  trouble  knowing  him, '  he  declared; 
'he's  just  as  white  as  any  man  I  ever 
met,  if  he  is  a  Jap.' 

'I  didn't  mean  anything  against 
him,'  said  Van  Cleve.  And,  seeing  that 
it  would  be  impossible  to  make  Schrei- 
ber comprehend  what  he  did  mean,  he 
gave  up  the  subject.  He  had  observed 
Schreiber's  character,  at  least,  to  some 
purpose.  In  fact,  the  newspaper  man 
afforded  a  curious  and  entertaining 
study.  Writing  was  his  profession,  yet 
he  was  no  more  capable  of  a  page  of 
good  English  than  of  a  page  of  Choc- 
taw;  but  what  he  wrote  commanded  a 
price,  and  was  sufficiently  readable. 
He  was  a  perfectly  upright  man,  yet 
he  would  sacrifice  or  distort  beyond 
recognition  any  fact  to  make  a  'good 
story/  a  trait  of  his  which  Van  had 
been  quick  to  discover.  'Get  out  and 
get  news.  If  you  can't  get  it,  make  it!' 
Schreiber  enthusiastically  quoted  to 
him  as  one  of  the  imperishable  maxims 
of  an  editorial  celebrity  under  whom  he 
had  worked;  he  was  eternally  quoting 
this  authority.  And  with  all  his  cheap 
standards,  his  bondage  to  catch- words, 
his  jingo  patriotism,  he  displayed  not 
a  few  of  the  qualities  which  we  asso- 
ciate with  very  high  and  strong  char- 
acters, among  them  a  devotion  to  his 
duty  of  'getting  out  and  getting  news' 
—  or  making  it  —  which  touched  the 
heroic.  Barely  recovered  from  a  dan- 
gerous and  wearing  illness,  he  under- 
took these  not  inconsiderable  hard- 
ships for  the  sake  of  his  magazine, 
single-mindedly,  as  if  there  were  no 
other  course  to  pursue;  he  was  dis- 
tressingly seasick,  he  could  scarcely 
eat  or  sleep,  the  fever  came  back  upon 
him  intermittently,  he  suffered  tor- 
tures from  sunburn,  —  and  he  bore  it 
all  without  a  murmur. 

Van  Cleve,  for  his  part,  had  never 
felt  better;  and,  moreover,  turned  out 
a  good  sailor  and  acceptable  shipmate, 


676 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


lending  a  hand  to  the  management  of 
the  vessel  when  extra  strength  was 
needed,  and  frankly  interested  in  all 
her  workings,  and  in  the  crew,  whom 
he  found  to  be  not  in  the  least  like  the 
sailormen  about  whom  he  had  read. 
They  were  neither  so  profane  nor  so 
simple  nor  so  blackguardly  nor  so  sub- 
limely honest  as  the  pages  of  Captain 
Marryat  and  Mr.  Clark  Russell  had 
led  him  to  expect.  The  engineer  had 
been  a  motorman  in  Chicago,  then 
shipped  for  a  couple  of  seasons  —  so  he 
told  Van  —  on  a  Duluth  freighter,  then 
drifted  to  New  York,  and  worked  for  a 
while  on  the  Staten  Island  boats,  et- 
cetera, etcetera.  His  helper  was  some 
sort  of  half-breed  Cuban.  The  cook 
hailed  from  somewhere  in  Connecticut, 
he  said;  and  he  also  said  that  he  had 
once  cooked  in  a  Maine  moose-camp 
for  Colonel  Theodore  Roosevelt.  Van 
thought  he  might  possibly  be  telling 
the  truth,  although  he  was  not  wholly 
reliable,  either  with  the  cook-stove  or 
the  whiskey  bottle. 

'In  every  sea-story  I  ever  read  the 
cook  was  a  Lascar,'  Van  Cleve  said  to 
him  one  day;  'I  feel  as  if  you  ought  to 
be,  by  rights.' 

*  Well,  I  ain't.  I  'm  Connecticut  from 
the  ground  up  —  never  was  farther 
west  than  Milwaukee  in  my  life,'  re- 
torted the  other.  'Though  I  did  think 
some  of  going  to  the  Klondike  last 
year  when  the  rush  was  on,'  he  added, 
pensively  turning  the  bacon.  *But  I 
ain't  Alasker,  not  me.' 

Captain  Bowers,  who  was  standing 
near,  smiled  grimly.  He  afterwards 
told  Van  Cleve  that  he  had  seen  Las- 
cars —  *  plenty  of  'em,  in  the  China 
Seas,  and  'round  the  Straits.  They 
wa'  n't  doing  any  cooking,  though,'  he 
said,  gazing  off  to  the  horizon  reminis- 
cently.  Van  longed  to  ask  what  they 
were  doing?  Boarding  his  ship  with 
cutlasses  between  their  teeth,  in  some 
onslaught  of  demoniac  pirate  junks? 


Whatever  the  captain's  experiences  in 
that  line,  he  had  no  tales  to  tell  about 
them;  he  was  a  taciturn  man.  His  taci- 
turnity even  extended  to  their  chief 
recreation  on  board  the  Milton  D. 
Bowers,  a  game  of  cards,  which,  when- 
ever the  skipper  took  a  hand,  invari- 
ably had  to  be  whist.  Unfortunately 
the  ace  of  spades  went  over  the  side 
in  a  light  blow  the  morning  of  the 
second  day  out,  and  thereafter  they 
were  obliged  to  play  euchre  and  call  the 
deuce  the  ace,  which  was  awkward  but 
effective. 

The  next  day  was  Sunday,  a  fact 
which  would  have  escaped  Van's  notice 
had  it  not  been  for  certain  Sabbath- 
day  observances  on  board;  the  engi- 
neer's helper  washed  his  shirt;  and 
Captain  Bowers  shaved  in  front  of  six 
inches  of  looking-glass  tacked  up  in 
the  cabin,  balancing  himself  nicely  to 
the  roll  of  the  boat,  and  wielding  the 
razor  with  uncanny  dexterity,  between 
his  thumb  and  two  remaining  fingers. 
Already  in  the  early  morning  it  was 
beginning  to  be  unbelievably  hot;  the 
horizon,  where  no  land  was  just  now 
visible  and  not  another  sail  or  smoke- 
stack, swam  in  a  glare  of  sea  and  sky 
intolerable  to  the  vision.  'We're  good 
and  tropical  now,'  Schreiber  said,  rear- 
ing painfully  up  from  his  favorite  re- 
cumbent posture  along  the  decks,  to 
look  at  it.  '  We  ought  to  make  Baiquiri 
to-night,  is  n't  that  so,  Captain?' 

"T  ain't  daiquiri,  it's  Z)aiquiri,' 
said  Bowers,  over  his  shoulder,  as  he 
walked  forward.  'Yes,  I  guess  so,  if 
we  have  luck.' 

*  Is  that  where  we  land  ? '  Van  Cleve 
asked. 

*  That's   where   the  army   landed,' 
said  the  captain,  non-committally .  Van 
felt  startled  at  the  sudden  nearness  of 
the  journey's  end. 

However,  man  proposes !  It  was  only 
a  short  while  after  this  conversation 
that  the  engines  of  the  Milton  D.  Bow- 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


677 


ers,  to  the  surprise  and  consternation 
of  her  passengers,  began  perceptibly  to 
lag;  they  slowed  down;  they  ceased 
utterly!  A  great  pow-wowing  arose 
between  the  engineer  and  his  assistant; 
Captain  Bowers  took  a  hand;  the  en- 
gineer disappeared  into  the  bowels  of 
his  machine,  and  erelong  boiler-factory 
hammerings  and  clinkings  resounded. 
Van  Cleve  and  the  attache,  after  offer- 
ing their  help,  thought  it  best  to  keep 
out  of  the  way,  and  refrain  from  annoy- 
ing questions;  but  Schreiber  had  no 
such  scruples.  He  made  repeated  trips 
to  the  seat  of  trouble  and  at  last  brought 
back  the  doleful  information  that  they 
were  going  to  be  held  up  for  the  Lord 
knew  how  long!  'I  believe  it  is  n't  any- 
thing very  bad,  because  he  says  he  can 
fix  it,  only  he  does  n't  know  how  long 
it '11  take.  This  is  grand,  is  n't  it?  This 
just  suits  us.  We're  not  in  any  hurry 
to  get  there;  we  don't  give  a  darn  if  we 
never  see  Cuba.  I'd  like  to  spend  a 
summer  vacation  right  on  this  spot. 
The  bathing  facilities  are  so  good,  you 
know.' 

'How  far  are  we  out,  anyhow?' 
'Too  far  to  swim,  that's  all  I  know,' 
said  the  correspondent.  He  resumed 
his  lounge.  They  all  sat  awhile  in  dis- 
concerted silence,  until  at  length  some- 
body proposed  the  cards  to  pass  time 
away;  and  they  were  on  the  seventh 
hand  of  cutthroat,  when  Captain  Bow- 
ers came  and  joined  them.  For  a  mo- 
ment, this  looked  encouraging;  but  to 
their  eager  inquiry  about  the  prospects, 
he  would  only  say  that  he  did  n't  know 

—  it  might  be  two  or  three  hours  yet  — 
perhaps  more  —  he  could  n't  say  —  de- 
pended on  what  Tom  found  when  he 
got  the  jacket  off  —  he  could  n't  say 

—  'It's  your  deal,  ain't  it,  Kendrick? 
My  cut.' 

As  they  were  sitting,  Van  having 
just  dealt,  and  turned  the  queen  of 
diamonds,  on  a  sudden,  they  heard,  a 
good  way  to  the  southwest,  a  dull  roll- 


ing and  booming  sound  that  paused 
and  presently  broke  out  again. 

'Hello!'  said  Schreiber,  looking  up 
and  around;  'storm  somewhere?' 

Captain  Bowers  laid  down  his  hand 
of  cards  and  said,  'Boys,  that's  can- 
non! ' 

In  a  minute  the  engineer,  chancing  to 
stick  out  his  head  for  a  breath  of  air, 
stopped  in  the  act  of  mopping  the 
sweat  from  his  forehead  and  arms  with 
a  handful  of  waste,  and  called  in  sur- 
prise, 'What's  the  matter?  D'ye  see 
anything?  What  did  you  fellows  all 
jump  up  that  way  for?'  He  had  heard 
nothing  in  the  midst  of  his  own  noise 
and  clanging.  The  rest  looked  at  one 
another  shamefacedly;  they  discover- 
ed that  they  had  all,  on  the  same  un- 
conscious impulse,  scrambled  to  their 
feet,  and  were  crowding  and  staring 
in  the  direction  of  the  cannonading,  as 
if  they  might  expect  to  see  it,  or  get 
nearer  to  it  by  the  action.  In  fact,  by 
some  illusion,  the  next  detonations 
seemed  to  them  for  an  instant  much 
louder.  It  kept  on.  They  stood  a  long 
while  listening.  Once  Schreiber  said 
in  a  subdued  voice,  '  My  Lord,  fellows, 
that  sounds  like  the  Fourth  of  July 
back  home,  and  it's  killing  men  right 
along ! '  Van  Cleve,  too,  had  been  think- 
ing of  that;  and  of  that  evening, 
scarcely  three  weeks  ago,  when  he  had 
sat  with  Lorrie  on  the  porch,  and  they 
wondered  what  cannon  sounded  like. 

The  captain  looked  at  his  watch  and 
said  it  was  ten  o'clock;  and  one  of  them 
asked  him  where  he  thought  the  battle 
might  be  going  on  —  if  they  were  shell- 
ing the  city,  would  we  hear  it?  He 
shook  his  head.  'Don't  know.  Them 
guns  are  firing  at  sea,  though,  which- 
ever way  they're  being  p'inted.  The 
sound  comes  quicker  to  you  on  the 
water  —  leastways  that 's  what  I ' ve  al- 
ways been  told,'  he  said  circumspectly. 

'Do  you  believe  the  fleet's  trying 
to  come  out? '  Van  Cleve  and  the  news- 


678 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


paper  man  chorused  in  one  excited 
breath. 

*I  presume  likely/  said  Captain 
Bowers. 

He  went  to  speak  to  the  engineer, 
and  Schreiber  watched  him  with  a  cer- 
tain admiration.  'If  he  was  in  a  book 
now,  you  would  n't  believe  in  him; 
you'd  think  he  was  ridiculously  over- 
drawn,' he  said  to  Van;  'he  doesn't 
seem  possible,  somehow,  with  his  tug- 
boat and  his  chin-beard,  and  that 
funny  down-east  drawl.  "  Presume 
likely!"  Like  any  old  New  England 
deacon!  You  notice  he  never  swears? 
You  can't  faze  him  —  nothing  fazes 
him!' 

The  day  wore  on.  The  cannon  ceased, 
and  the  silence  left  them  all  at  a  higher 
tension  than  ever.  The  cook  fished  out 
from  somewhere  an  old  battered  pair 
of  glasses  with  a  flawed  lens,  and  from 
that  on  somebody  was  constantly  on 
the  lookout  (though  the  thing  would 
scarcely  carry  a  hundred  yards),  sweep- 
ing the  seas  round  and  round  in  ex- 
pectation of  no  one  knew  what.  At 
some  time  in  the  afternoon  they  sat 
down  to  a  belated  and  half-cooked 
meal  whereat  the  engineer  complained 
loud  and  bitterly.  He  wanted  to  know 
what  all  you  dubs  (and  sundry  other 
unamiable  designations)  were  doing, 
anyhow?  He  opined  that  he  was  the 
only  man  within  sight  or  hearing  who 
was  on  his  job.  He  intimated  highly 
uncomplimentary  doubts  as  to  the 
mind,  morals,  parentage,  and  previous 
career  of  everybody  on  board,  especial- 
ly the  cook,  which  the  latter  gentleman 
naturally  resented.  Captain  Bowers 
had  to  intervene;  and  in  the  middle  of 
it  all  somebody  cried  that  the  guns 
were  going  again,  producing  peace  on 
the  instant,  as  if  by  magic!  After- 
wards, realizing  that  there  was  some 
justice  in  his  point  of  view,  one  or 
other  of  them  volunteered  as  engineer's 
helper,  and  held  a  candle,  or  passed 


tools,  or  hung  on  a  wrench  at  inter- 
vals the  rest  of  the  day.  Van  Cleve,  for 
one,  was  glad  of  any  employment;  his 
nerves,  like  everybody's,  were  feeling 
the  strain.  It  was  dark  before  they 
got  started. 

It  was  night,  in  fact,  which  came  on 
them  with  the  startling  suddenness  of 
the  tropics,  clouded  over,  with  no  stars 
or  moonlight.  The  little  tug,  crowd- 
ing on  all  steam,  ploughed  through  the 
vast,  black,  watery  silence  with  as 
much  commotion  as  leviathan,  reck- 
less of  consequences.  Excepting  Cap- 
tain Bowers  and  the  Japanese,  both 
of  whom  contrived  to  keep  an  appear- 
ance, at  least,  of  stolidity,  everybody 
was  very  much  excited,  and  there  was 
a  good  deal  of  random  talk  and  laugh- 
ing at  nothing;  also  the  cook  wanted 
to  sing,  and  wept  when  Bowers  forbade 
it  and  sternly  took  away  his  bottle  of 
whiskey. 

Schreiber  expostulated  sympathet- 
ically. '  Why,  with  all  the  noise  we  're 
making,  what 's  the  odds  if  he  does  sing, 
Captain?  Nobody  could  hear  him.' 

' 'We  could  hear  him,'  said  the  cap- 
tain, with  epigrammatic  force.  They  all 
thought  this  was  a  prodigiously  good 
joke  on  the  cook;  Van  Cleve  never  re- 
membered to  have  laughed  so  heartily! 

'I  suppose  if  we  should  run  into  a 
Spanish  ship,  they  would  n't  do  a 
thing  to  us?'  he  said  to  Schreiber  in 
ironical  gayety. 

'  Not  a  thing ! '  agreed  the  other.  Then 
he  added  more  seriously,  'But  they 
won't  be  coming  this  way,  you  know. 
They'll  make  for  Havana  most  likely 
—  if  they  get  away  at  all.'  That  the 
Spanish  might  have  won  in  the  contest 
did  not  occur  to  either  of  them. 

Some  while  after  this,  Van  Cleve 
observed  a  small,  steady  star,  very  low 
down  near  what  should  have  been  the 
horizon,  as  he  judged,  if  they  had  been 
able  to  distinguish  sea  from  sky;  he 
pointed  it  out  casually  to  the  captain, 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


679 


who  threw  a  perfunctory  glance  in  the 
direction  and  grunted. 

'That's  the  land,'  he  said;  'that's 
a  light  somewhere  on  shore.  You  could 
'a'  heard  the  surf  if  you'd  listened. 
Hear  it  now?' 

Van  strained  his  ears,  but  could  make 
out  nothing;  the  throbbing  of  their 
machinery  and  the  loud  rush  of  water 
alongside  overpowered  his  landsman's 
senses;  Schreiber  affirmed  that  he  could 
see  the  coast  in  black  outline  against 
the  lesser  blackness,  but  perhaps  his 
fancy  helped  him.  In  a  little  the  light 
vanished,  blotted  out,  no  doubt,  by  some 
reach  of  land,  for  they  were  both  quite 
sure  they  felt  the  vessel  veer  sharply 
and  change  her  course.  And  now,  all 
at  once,  there  came  to  them  a  great, 
hot,  sighing  breath,  off-shore,  laden  (or 
so  they  imagined)  with  earth  odors, 
strange  and  familiar;  then  a  cool  puff; 
then  another  warm.  The  feeling  of  it 
was  curiously  welcome;  land  is  good 
after  the  sea.  The  Milton  D.  Bowers 
slacked  up;  she  had  a  grotesque  air  of 
suddenly  remembering  something. 

'  Guess  the  old  man  thinks  we  'd  bet- 
ter go  slow  here,'  Schreiber  suggested 
in  an  undertone;  'he  does  n't  quite 
know  where  he  is  —  no  lights  nor  any- 
thing. We  must  be  somewhere  off 
Guantanamo,  I  think.' 

He  had  not  finished  speaking  when 
there  roared  up  out  of  the  darkness  a 
huge  devastating  bulk,  a  thing  of  ter- 
ror coming  at  them  like  the  end  of  the 
world.  There  was  a  light.  Van  Cleve  for 
one  appalling  second  beheld  a  mighty 
gray  shoulder  towering  above  them, 
imminent,  unescapable.  'It  looked  as 
high  as  the  Union  Trust  Building,'  he 
said  afterwards.  It  was  in  reality 
the  bow  of  the  torpedo-boat  destroyer, 
Inverness,  not  considered  by  naval 
judges  at  all  a  large  or  powerful  vessel. 
She  thundered  upon  them;  the  Milton 
D.  Bowers  raised  a  wild  screech  as  from 
one  throat,  and  went  astern  in  a  frenzy; 


and  the  Inverness  must  have  sheered 
just  in  the  nick  of  time,  or  they  would 
all,  herself  included,  have  been  at  the 
bottom  of  the  sea,  and  this  tale  need 
never  have  been  written.  As  it  was, 
the  glancing  blow  she  struck  them  sent 
the  poor  tug  staggering,  and  there  was 
a  bloodcurdling  noise  of  splintered 
wood.  When  Van  got  his  breath,  he 
found  himself  in  the  foolish  attitude 
of  clinging  to  the  far  rail,  and  '  holding 
back '  with  might  and  main !  They  were 
still  afloat;  they  were  still  on  an  even 
keel.  Near  him  Schreiber  sprawled  on 
the  deck,  clutching  one  ankle  and 
cursing  voluminously;  he  had  sprained 
it,  falling  over  a  pile  of  coal,  and  was 
in  severe  pain.  Extraordinary  sounds 
arose  from  every  part  of  the  boat ;  some- 
body was  praying  in  a  loud,  rapid,  fer- 
vent voice  like  a  camp-meeting  preach- 
er. There  was  a  hail  from  above. 

'Goldenrod,  ahoy!  Are  you  much 
hurt?' 

'This  ain't  no  Goldenrod.  This  is 
the  Milton  D.  Bowers,'  shouted  the 
captain,  crossly;  and  in  a  moment  Van 
saw  him  aft  with  a  lantern  over  the 
side,  studying  the  damage.  The  prayers 
ceased  abruptly;  Van  Cleve  had  a  sus- 
picion they  proceeded  from  the  cook, 
but  he  never  knew.  Takuhira  appeared 
from  nowhere,  and  helped  Schreiber 
take  off  his  shoe.  Up  overhead  an  in- 
visible power  manipulated  the  light 
this  way  and  that,  until  the  tug  lay 
within  its  zone;  they  could  see  faces, 
kindly  and  concerned  and  inquiring, 
peering  down  at  them.  A  man  whom 
Van,  in  his  ignorance  of  naval  matters, 
supposed  to  be  a  '  petty  officer,'  what- 
ever that  might  mean,  repeated  the 
former  question.  'Are  you  much  hurt? 
Need  any  help?'  he  asked. 

Captain  Bowers,  after  further  scru- 
tiny, pronounced  the  Milton  D.  in  no 
danger.  'She  ain't  started  anywhere, 
fur's  I  kin  see,  jest  her  side  planed  off 
some,'  he  said;  and,  walking  to  the 


680 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


engine-house,  called  in,  *  All  right  there, 
Tom?' 

'I  guess  so,'  said  the  engineer  from 
the  depths. 

'  You  ought  to  have  kept  out  of  the 
way,  Captain.  We  can't  have  anybody 
gum-shoeing  around  here,  you  know 
that,'  remarked  the  Inverness,  and 
made  another  offer  of  standing  by  in 
case  they  discovered  trouble.  Captain 
Bowers  grumpily  declining,  the  officer 
turned  away,  probably  to  report  to  a 
superior.  Some  of  the  heads  disappeared 
from  the  rail;  one  of  those  remaining 
facetiously  invited  his  mates  to  come 
and  see  the  bunch  of  Weary- Willies  in 
the  cup-defender.  Another  wanted  to 
know  who  the  reverend  conducting 
services  was?  Van  Cleve  stared  up  at 
them  in  wonder;  he  had  supposed  that 
everybody  —  of  the  rank  and  file,  at 
least  —  had  to  keep  mum  as  a  mouse 
on  board  a  warship.  They  could  hear 
an  order  given;  the  big  hull  vibrated; 
the  Inverness  began  deliberately  and 
impressively  to  back  away.  Even  in  the 
midst  of  his  suffering,  professional  zeal 
awoke  in  the  newspaper  correspond- 
ent; he  hobbled  upright,  clinging  to 
Takuhira's  shoulder,  and  hailed  de- 
sperately. 

'Hi!  Wait,  will  you?  What's  hap- 
pened? We  heard  cannon.  What's 
doing?  Was  there  a  fight?' 

The  Inverness  did  not  answer;  si- 
lence had  suddenly  fallen  on  board  of 
her,  and  all  the  faces  retreated.  In  a 
moment  the  man  who  had  spoken  to 
them  first  came  back,  making  way  at 
the  rail  for  a  tall  gentleman  in  a  beauti- 
ful, clean,  snowy-white,  tropical  uni- 


form, at  once  cool  and  radiant  in  the 
half-light.  He  could  be  seen  to  look 
them  over  with  good-natured  conde- 
scension, while  the  subordinate  pointed 
and  explained;  then  he  nodded,  gave 
the  other  an  order  (as  it  seemed) ,  and 
walked  away.  Schreiber  witnessed  the 
pantomime  in  an  agony  of  curiosity. 
The  first  man  stepped  again  to  the 
side;  he  set  a  hand  to  his  mouth  and 
cried  out,  'Newspaper  boat?' 

'  Yes.  Gulf  States  Magazine,  Jackson- 
ville Telegraph,  Atlanta  Post,  Charles- 
ton Mail!9  the  correspondent  roared 
back  impatiently.  None  of  the  last- 
named  papers  had  any  existence  out- 
side of  his  own  imagination,  as  he  later 
informed  Van  Cleve.  'That  ought  to 
be  enough  for  you,'  he  added  under 
his  breath.  'Newspaper  boat!  Take  us 
for  a  party  of  Episcopal  bishops?' 

'Well,  you  can  tell  'em  the  fleet  came 
out!' 

'Where  are  they?  What  became  of 
'em?  What  --  who  —  which  — ?' 
Schreiber  was  fairly  inarticulate  from 
excitement;  he  hopped  madly  on  one 
leg. 

'Sunk  —  beached  —  burned  up  — 
the  whole  shootin'  match!'  bawled 
their  informant,  succinctly.  He  made 
a  dramatic  pause.  'Had  to  chase  one 
of  'em  down  the  coast  a  good  piece, 
but  we  nipped  her,  too!'  The  Inver- 
ness gathered  way,  moving  off,  and  the 
wash  she  kicked  up  slapped  against  the 
tug,  causing  it  to  rock  violently.  He 
raised  his  voice,  making  a  trumpet  of 
both  hands  this  time.  '  Pity  you  missed 
it.  It's  all  over  but  the  shouting. 
There  ain't  any  more  Spanish  Fleet!' 


(To  be  continued.) 


TO  THE  WATCHER 


BY   RABINDRANATH   TAGORE 


SHE  is  still  a  child,  my  lord.  She  runs  about  your  palace  and  plays  and  tries  to 
make  you  a  plaything  of  her  own. 

When  her  hair  tumbles  down  and  her  careless  garment  drags  in  the  dust,  she 
heeds  not.  When  she  builds  her  house  with  sands  and  decks  her  dolls  with 
tinsels,  she  thinks  she  is  doing  great  works. 

Her  elders  warn  her  even  not  to  hold  you  of  small  account.  She  is  frightened, 
and  she  knows  not  how  to  serve  you.  Suddenly  she  starts  up  from  her  play 
and  reminds  herself  she  must  do  what  she  is  bid. 

She  falls  asleep  when  you  speak  to  her,  and  answers  not.  And  the  flower  you 
gave  her  in  the  morning  slips  to  the  dust  from  her  hand. 

When  the  storm  bursts  in  the  evening  with  a  sudden  clash  and  darkness  is  on 
land  and  sky,  she  is  sleepless;  her  dolls  lie  scattered  on  the  earth  and  she 
clings  to  you  in  terror. 

We  are  ever  afraid  lest  she  should  be  guilty  of  remissness.  But  smiling  you 
peep  at  the  door  of  her  playhouse,  you  watch  her  at  her  games,  and  you 
know  her. 

You  know  that  the  child  sitting  on  dust  is  your  destined  bride.  You  know 
that  all  her  play  will  end  in  love.  For  her  you  keep  ready  a  jeweled  seat  in 
your  house  and  precious  honey  in  the  golden  jar. 


A  DEFENSE  OF  PURISM  IN  SPEECH 


BY  LEILA   SPRAGUE   LEARNED 


IN  the  first  century  of  our  Christian 
era,  Quintilian,  a  learned  grammarian, 
said,  *  Language  is  established  by  rea- 
son, antiquity,  authority,  and  custom/ 
It  would  seem  from  the  general  care- 
lessness in  our  present  use  of  language, 
that  we  show  allegiance  more  often  to 
custom  than  to  common  sense.  No  one 
denies  that  language  is  an  attribute  of 
reason,  —  the  *  peculiar  ornament  and 
distinction  of  man';  but  man  seldom 
shows  a  proper  respect  for  this  priceless 
heritage. 

Some  geniuses  pretend  to  despise 
the  trammels  of  grammar  rules,  as 
some  men,  other  than  geniuses,  feel 
themselves  too  big  for  the  limitations 
of  man-made  laws.  Genius  may  often 
impart  a  fine  inborn  sense  of  propriety 
in  the  use  of  language,  and  a  life-long 
familiarity  with  the  best  in  literature 
naturally  develops  a  delicate  taste  and 
a  keen  sensitiveness  to  what  is  right 
and  wrong  in  speech.  But  less  favored 
mortals  need  guide-posts  to  keep  them 
from  stumbling  into  the  pitfalls  of  ig- 
norance. Reason,  the  rightful  arbiter 
in  matters  of  language,  should  not  be 
dethroned  by  irresponsible  usage. 

Many  believe  with  Horace,  that 
usage  is  the  deciding  authority,  bind- 
ing law,  and  rightful  rule  of  speech,  but 
it  seems  to  me  that  there  is  a  prevailing 
slovenly  use  of  language  which  is  really 
abuse. 

No  amount  of  wisdom,  genius,  or 
usage  can  justify  a  singular  noun  with 
a  plural  verb,  and  we  never  hear,  'The 
boy  are  gone';  but  we  so  often  hear 
from  the  lips  of  educated  persons  blun- 


ders like, '  Every  one  must  paddle  their 
own  canoe,'  that  no  less  an  authority 
than  Professor  Carpenter  of  Columbia 
says  that  in  referring  to  every  one, 
everybody,  anybody,  and  the  like,  we 
may  use  the  plural  pronoun.  He  gives 
as  illustrations :  — 

Every  one  here  may  ask  me  any 
questions  he  chooses. 

Every  one  here  may  ask  me  any 
questions  he  or  she  chooses. 

Every  one  here  may  ask  me  any 
questions  they  choose. 

Fortunately  for  him  he  adds  that 
the  first  form  is  preferred  in  literary 
English  and  that  the  last  construction, 
condemned  by  rhetoricians,  is  to  be 
avoided.  But  why,  I  make  bold  to  ask, 
should  this  unreasonable  form  find  any 
place  in  a  grammar,  or  have  any  sanc- 
tion? And  what  are  we  to  think  of  the 
license  given  to  students  by  Professor 
Carpenter,  when  he  writes  the  follow- 
ing: '"It  is  me"  is  an  idiomatic  col- 
loquial expression  used  without  hesi- 
tation by  the  mass  of  the  people  and 
shunned  only  by  the  fastidious.'  Pro- 
fessor Carpenter  says  further,  ' "  It  is 
I,"  however,  retains  its  place  in  literary 
English,  as  a  more  solemn  and  impres- 
sive expression,  though  not  to  the  ex- 
clusion of  the  other  phrase.  It  is  also 
tenaciously  preserved  even  in  speech 
by  those  who  have  a  strong  feeling  for 
consistency  in  grammar  forms.' 

When  a  college  professor  expresses  the 
idea  that  correct  speech  is  solemn  and 
impressive,  and  that  improprieties  are 
excusable  because  of  their  frequent  use, 
it  seems  to  me  timely  and  justifiable 


A  DEFENSE  OF  PURISM  IN  SPEECH 


683 


to  suggest  that  our  teachers  of  English 
be  examined  for  their  qualifications. 
No  man  would  be  judged  competent 
to  teach  arithmetic  who  would  be 
indifferent  to  a  pupil's  statement  that 
8X7=54.  Is  this  error  more  deplorable 
than  'It  is  me'?  To  be  sure,  arithmetic 
is  an  exact  science.  So  is  language  in 
its  fundamental  principles,  as  in  the 
relations  of  verbs  to  their  subjects  and 
objects.  Shall  we  regard  language  as  a 
go-as-you-please  affair,  with  no  laws, 
even  though  this  complicated  product 
of  evolution  is  not  fixed  or  final? 

The  growth  of  language  is  marked 
by  many  changes  in  the  meanings  and 
pronunciations  of  words,  and  by  the 
introduction  of  new  words  where 
needed.  Its  decay  is  influenced  by  the 
ever-increasing  tendency  to  slang  and 
to  colloquialisms,  which  form  a  *  pecul- 
iar kind  of  vagabond  language,  always 
hanging  on  the  outskirts  of  legitimate 
speech,  but  continually  straying  or 
forcing  its  way  into  respectable  com- 
pany/ Whatever  the  changes,  con- 
structive or  destructive,  can  any  pro- 
fessor or  armies  of  wise  and  learned 
men  make  'It  is  me'  correct,  any  more 
than  they  can  justify  4X8=36?  Such 
teaching  gives  rise  to  the  attitude  of 
many  school-girls  who  have  the  idea 
that  it  is  affected  to  say, '  It  is  I.'  They 
expect  to  be  laughed  at  when  they  use 
correct  constructions.  Even  a  lawyer 
of  my  acquaintance  told  me  that  if  he 
were  to  speak  correctly  he  would  lose 
business  with  certain  clients,  men  'in 
the  rough,'  who  would  think  he  felt 
superior  to  them.  Is  it  not  sad  that 
an  intelligent  use  of  language  is  so  rare 
that  it  sets  the  accurate  speaker  apart  ? 

Well  may  we  ask,  Is  there  any  cri- 
terion of  good  English  ?  To  what  source 
must  we  go  if  we  wish  to  speak  and 
write  our  mother  tongue  with  purity 
and  without  affectation?  How  shall 
we  choose  when  the  men  who  write 
books  on  the  subject  disagree?  How 


many  of  us,  after  reading  Richard 
Grant  White's  thirteen  pages  devoted 
to  the  unqualified  condemnation  of 
'had  better,  had  rather,  and  hadn't 
oughter,'  have  made  a  real  effort  to 
accustom  ourselves  to  'would  rather' 
and  'might  better'?  Of  course,  only 
the  most  ignorant  ever  said,  '  had  n't 
oughter.'  And  now  we  read  Professor 
Lounsbury's  thirty  pages  of  defense 
for  'had  liefer,'  'had  rather,'  and  'had 
better,'  three  legitimate  idioms,  dating 
from  the  thirteenth,  fifteenth,  and  six- 
teenth centuries,  respectively.  He  sanc- 
tions 'would  rather,'  but  says  that  the 
use  of  'would  better'  is  distinctly  re- 
pugnant if  not  absolutely  improper, 
and  that  'when  met  with,  it  is  apt  to 
provoke  a  cry  of  pain  from  him  who 
has  been  nurtured  upon  the  great  class- 
ics of  our  literature.' 

Dare  we  say  that  sometimes  Profes- 
sor Lounsbury's  use  of  language  might 
impress  the  critical  student  as  incon- 
sistent with  the  rules  of  rhetoric,  for 
he  allows  great  license  to  speech,  and 
does  not  believe  in  sacrificing  sponta- 
neity to  gain  correctness.  But  who- 
ever is  endowed  by  nature  with  spon- 
taneity, a  quality  which  can  hardly  be 
cultivated,  might  well  devote  some  en- 
ergy toward  making  accuracy  a  habit. 
There  need  be  no  loss  of  spontaneity 
in  the  process. 

This  reminds  us  of  Henry  Ward 
Beecher,  who,  when  a  college  youth 
presumed  to  point  out  errors  in  his 
speech,  replied,  'Young  man,  when  the 
English  language  gets  in  my  way,  it 
does  n't  stand  a  chance.'  Of  course, 
the  most  rigid  purists  must  acknow- 
ledge that  it  is  not  freedom  from  faults 
that  marks  either  the  great  man  or  the 
great  linguist.  Each  is  distinguished 
rather  by  that  commanding  quality 
that  takes  no  note  of  trifles. 

But,  inasmuch  as  many  trifles  make 
perfection,  is  it  not  incumbent  upon 
the  authors  of  English  books  to  avoid 


684 


A  DEFENSE  OF  PURISM  IN  SPEECH 


faulty  expressions?  We  are  surprised 
to  find  in  Professor  Lounsbury's  ex- 
cellent book,  The  Standard  of  Usage, 
the  following  sentences,  for  which,  I 
presume  to  suggest,  in  parentheses, 
better  constructions :  — 

The  process  is  liable  (likely)  to  take 
place  in  the  future. 

This  was  due  (owing)  to  the  ending. 

How  tame  it  would  have  been  to 
have  used  (to  use),  etc. 

Such  a  desirable  (so  desirable  a)  re- 
sult. 

The  opposition  to  new  forms  is  apt 
(likely)  to  assume,  etcetera. 

He  accomplished  feats  full  (fully  or 
quite)  as  difficult. 

*  Donate'  has  been  pretty  regularly 
shunned  —  (why  *  pretty '?). 

One  example  is  so  curious  (queer). 

No  one  seemed  to  think  of  or  care 
for  the  other  adjectives  —  (no  one 
seemed  to  think  of  the  other  adjectives 
or  care  for  them). 

It  was  not  for  the  like  of  me  (such 
as  I)  to  contend. 

We  find  also,  'two  last  words'  (last 
two).  This  suggests  the  frequent  mis- 
use of  last  for  latest,  and  calls  to  mind 
the  clever  girl  who,  because  of  her 
discriminating  use  of  the  words,  won  the 
coveted  autograph  of  a  blase  popular 
author.  In  his  formal,  unsigned,  type- 
written reply  to  her  request  were  these 
words,  *  Have  you  read  my  last  book  ? ' 
Her  bright  retort,  'I  hope  so,'  brought 
the  desired  autograph  from  the  author, 
who,  of  course,  meant  to  say,  *  latest' 
book. 

In  the  English  book  mentioned,  ap- 
pears also,  *  every  now  and  then,'  which 
like  *  every  once  in  a  while,'  is  hardly 
a  reasonable  use  of  language,  since 
*  every '  applies  to  what  may  be  count- 
ed, and  since  there  are  no  periods  of 
time  known  as  'now  and  then'  which 
may  be  enumerated.  *  Every'  is  again 
misused  in,  'I  have  every  confidence 


in  this  man,'  when  we  mean  entire  or 
full  confidence. 

Another  clause  which  arrests  our 
attention  is,  'He  was  the  one  above 
all,'  etc.  Would  not  a  better  construc- 
tion be,  *  It  was  he,  who,  above  (or  more 
than)  all  others,  made  it  his  business,' 
etc.?  Most  rhetorics  warn  us  against 
using  'one '  and  *  ones,'  and  what  need 
is  there  of  saying,  'This  is  the  one  I 
mean '  when  a  book  is  the  object  meant, 
or  'Are  these  the  ones  you  wish?' 
when  we  mean  gloves? 

In  Bechtel's  Slips  in  Speech,  a  useful 
little  volume  of  'Don'ts'  in  language, 
we  read  with  amazement  the  follow- 
ing:— 

'  "I  ain't  pleased,"  "  You  ain't  kind," 
"They  ain't  gentlemen,"  serve  to  illus- 
trate the  proper  use  of  "ain't,"  if  it  is 
ever  proper  to  use  such  an  inelegant 
(so  inelegant  a)  word.'  What  a  damag- 
ing influence  such  a  statement  (or  so 
shocking  a  statement)  must  have  upon 
the  student! 

Even  the  much-praised  Richard 
Grant  White  did  not  live  up  to  the 
standards  of  purism  that  he  advocated, 
when  he  wrote,  — 

'  Most  all  of  the  writer's  argument ' 
—  (almost  the  entire  argument  of  the 
writer) . 

'We  hear  that  all  around  us  among 
well-educated  people,  but  who  know 
better '  —  (why  '  but  who '  when  '  who ' 
suffices  ?) 

He  is  also  guilty  of  'so  perfect,'  even 
though  '  perfect,'  like '  unique,'  'square,' 
'round,'  'universal,'  'unanimous,' and 
many  other  adjectives,  requires  no 
modifying  adverb  to  express  degree. 

Again,  we  have  so  long  cherished 
that  old  familiar  rule  in  the  words, 
'We  cannot  look  or  feel  1  —  y,  ly,' 
that  we  do  not  like  to  excuse  Professor 
Hill  for  shattering  one  of  our  pet  idols 
by  authorizing  'I  felt  badly,'  the  ex- 
cuse being  that '  bad '  has  two  senses. 

So  long  as  the  propriety  of  any  word 


A  DEFENSE  OF  PURISM  IN  SPEECH 


or  expression  is  questioned,  one  is  wise 
to  seek  a  substitute  which  has  received 
the  approval  of  polite  society.  Such  a 
procedure  would  enrich  our  vocabu- 
lary, prevent  our  speech  from  becom- 
ing monotonous,  and  aid  us  in  forming 
the  estimable  habit  of  using  speech  to 
convey  fine  shades  of  thought  rather 
than  to  set  people  to  guessing. 

Let  us  continlie  to  look  beautiful 
(not  beautifully)  and  feel  indisposed, 
weary,  or  well  (not  nicely  or  finely), 
leaving  'bad'  and  *  badly'  to  fall  into 
disuse.  It  may  be  helpful  to  note  that 
the  *  1  —  y ,  ly '  rule  offers  an  excep- 
tion in  the  case  of '  feeling  friendly,'  for 
here  is  an  adjective  in  'ly.'  It  is  the 
adverbs  that  must  be  avoided  after 
'  look,'  *  feel,'  'seem,'  'appear,'  and  such 
verbs,  which  may  be  replaced  by  some 
form  of  the  verb  '  to  be.'  We  prove  the 
correctness  of  such  sentences  as,  'The 
sun  shines  bright,'  and '  The  child  stands 
erect,'  by  substituting  'is'  for  the  verb: 
the  sun  is  bright;  the  boy  is  erect.  And 
we  arrive  safe  and  sound  (not  safely), 
the  idea  being  that  we  are  safe. 

The  fact  that  people  appreciate  in 
language  the  excellencies  to  be  imi- 
tated, more  readily  than  they  discover 
the  blunders  to  be  avoided,  may  excuse 
my  pointing  out  the  few  flaws  selected 
from  many  pages  of  forceful  and  ex- 
pressive English,  —  the  object  being 
to  arouse  us  to  a  realization  of  our  own 
inaccuracies.  Any  one  who  attempts 
to  criticize  another's  language  is  sure 
to  realize  the  truth  in  Shakespeare's 
words,  —  '  I  can  easier  teach  twenty 
what  were  good  to  be  done,  than  be 
one  of  the  twenty  to  follow  mine  own 
teachings.' 

In  view  of  the  facts  noted,  that  our 
most  eminent  teachers  of  English  give 
the  sanction  of  usage  to  ungrammati- 
cal  locutions,  that  slipshod  methods  of 
expression  abound  in  the  speech  of  the 
majority,  as  well  as  in  the  writings  of 
good  authors,  may  we  not  say  in  Pro- 


fessor Lounsbury's  own  words  that 
grammatical  sentinels  are  needed  in 
the  watch-towers,  ready  to  attack  the 
numerous  linguistic  foes?  Though  he 
may  class  with  these  the  'purists, 
whom,  like  the  poor,  we  have  always 
with  us,'  some  of  us  will  rather  agree 
with  Professor  Kittredge  of  Harvard 
that  the  purist  is  a  necessary  factor  in 
the  development  of  a  cultivated  tongue. 

The  cry  of  several  centuries  has 
been  that  the  English  language  is  on 
the  road  to  ruin,  and  periodically  a 
Swift,  a  Bentley,  or  a  Johnson  has 
appeared  with  the  hope  of  fixing  lan- 
guage, a  hope  futile  so  long  as  the  lan- 
guage is  alive,  —  so  to  speak.  Every 
living  thing  grows  and  changes.  Latin 
and  Greek,  belonging  to  books  rather 
than  to  living  speech,  are  called  'dead 
languages.'  They  are  therefore  fixed. 

But  the  influence  of  a  Swift,  whose 
passion  was  purity  of  speech,  does 
stem  the  tide  of  corruptions  threaten- 
ing to  ruin  the  language.  Though  his 
efforts  toward  the  foundation  of  an 
academy  to  regulate  and  protect  speech 
failed,  and  though  other  purists  since 
the  Restoration  have  carried  the  pro- 
ject no  further  than  plans  and  pro- 
posals, an  English  Richelieu  may  yet 
create  an  institution  similar  to  the 
French  Academy.  Though  one  of  our 
purist-haters  underestimates  the.  ef- 
ficacy of  such  a  'linguistic  hospital, 
equipped  with  physicians  and  supplied 
with  remedies  to  cure  all  the  ills  result- 
ing from  ignorance  and  heedlessness/ 
there  is  reason  to  believe  that  the  influ- 
ence of  such  a  body  of  scholars  would 
tend  to  awaken  interest  in  English,  and 
to  stimulate  our  respect  for  the  tongue 
we  speak. 

We  need  a  Hume  or  a  Dryden  to 
erect  danger  signals  along  the  rocky 
road  of  speech,  as  warnings  to  those 
who  think  it  safer  to  sin  with  the  elect 
(authors  of  renown)  than  to  be  right- 
eous with  the  purist. 


PRECISION'S  ENGLISH 


BY   ELLWOOD   HENDRICK 


LANGUAGE  is  a  vehicle  of  intellectual 
traffic;  its  business  is  to  carry  ideas, 
mental  concepts,  information,  and  at 
times  the  truth.  It  is  a  clumsy  wagon, 
inadequate  to  its  purpose;  indeed  all  of 
the  arts  are  required  to  accomplish  that 
purpose.  Some  ideas  are  best  expressed 
in  prose,  others  in  verse;  some  by  me- 
chanical drawing,  others  again  in  paint; 
some  in  marble  and  others  in  bronze; 
and  many  find  their  only  means  of  ex- 
pression in  music.  Sometimes  a  glance 
of  the  eye  tells  the  story,  and  at  other 
times  a  gesture  is  enough.  Sometimes 
it  would  seem  that  nearly  all  the  arts 
are  needed  at  once.  The  tale  is  told  of 
a  couple  of  partially  Americanized  old 
men  of  the  florid  East  who  met  unex- 
pectedly. The  first  cried  out  his  happy 
greetings  and  straightway  grasped  his 
friend  in  a  close  embrace.  The  second 
was  smitten  with  sudden  aphasia;  he 
grew  red  in  the  face,  his  features  be- 
came contorted,  and  finally,  with  a 
mighty  effort  he  brought  himself  to  say, 
*  Leggo-ma-hands-ai- vanta-talk ! '  Lan- 
guage alone  was  inadequate;  he  needed 
gestures. 

There  is  no  doubt  of  the  truth  of  the 
assertion  that  we  do  not  study  our  lan- 
guage enough.  Without  an  intimate 
sense  of  it  we  are  nearly  helpless.  True, 
some  of  us  seem  to  achieve  an  under- 
standing of  the  anatomy  of  sentences 
almost  intuitively,  while  others,  de- 
spite intense  study,  are  unable  to  bring 
grace  and  action  into  our  speech.  But 
no  one,  with  a  love  of  literature  in  his 
heart  or  a  desire  to  read  or  to  hear 
things  said,  will  deny  the  value  of  the 


study  of  language  to  those  who  must 
use  it.  If  we  are  to  discuss  Purism  in 
Speech,  we  must  assume  at  the  outset 
that  all  parties  to  the  discussion  be- 
lieve in  the  best  possible  use  of  lan- 
guage. t 

The  point  at  issue,  as  I  take  it,  has 
to  do  with  the  primary  requirement  of 
language:  whether  it  shall  carry  the 
idea  with  the  greatest  precision,  or 
whether  the  greatest  effort  should  be 
directed  toward  making  the  vehicle 
which  carries  the  idea  a  thing  of  fault- 
less construction.  There  is  a  wide  dif- 
ference here  —  the  difference  between 
the  wagon  and  its  load;  and  we  are 
often  called  upon  to  decide  between 
the  two.  So  precision  in  the  one  must 
often  give  way  to  precision  in  the 
other. 

The  purpose  of  language  is  fulfilled 
when  an  idea  is  carried  from  the  mind 
of  the  speaker  or  the  writer  to  the  re- 
ceiving mind.  Now,  unless  language 
is  used  aright,  it  foments  discord  and 
often  proves  the  greater  wisdom  of  si- 
lence —  when  the  speaker  knows  that 
if  he  but  had  the  art,  the  right  thing 
said  would  indeed  be  golden  words. 
The  lack  of  the  art  of  speech  is  the  in- 
ability to  say  the  precise  thing.  There- 
fore, without  a  thorough  equipment  in 
language,  the  speaker  is  as  likely  to  fail 
in  saying  what  he  means  as  he  is  to  fail 
in  constructing  his  speech  on  academic 
lines. 

If  the  rule  of  precision  in  construc- 
tion stands  in  the  way  of  efficient  ex- 
pression it  should  be  made  secondary 
to  it.  Beethoven  broke  the  rules  of 


PRECISION'S   ENGLISH 


687 


composition  and  accomplished  won- 
ders. To-day  he  is  a  classic,  but  in  his 
own  day  he  was  a  dreadful  radical.  So, 
too,  painting  would  be  an  inefficient 
art  now,  had  the  best  usage  and  the 
rules  current  at  the  time  been  followed 
by  the  masters  of  the  brush. 

In  English  speech  the  words  that  sin 
most  against  clear  expression  are  ad- 
verbs. Thus  under  stress  of  dire  need 
you  may  say,  'Come  here,  quick!'  or 
'Come  here,  quickly!'  The  former  is 
theoretically  incorrect,  but  it  carries 
the  idea.  The  latter  is  theoretically 
correct,  but  it  lacks  force.  Adverbs  are 
poor  things  compared  with  adjectives. 
Indeed,  if  an  Ant  i- Ad  verb  Society 
should  ever  be  organized,  I  desire  to 
record  here  and  now  an  application  for 
membership.  It  might  worry  us  a  lit- 
tle to  read :  — 

Take  her  up  tender, 
Lift  her  with  care! 
Fashioned  so  slender, 
Young  and  so  fair. 

but  that  is  only  because  we  are  accus- 
tomed to  the  adverbs.  The  meaning 
is  all  there  without  the  adverb  forms. 
I  pick  up  a  book  from  my  library  table 
by  an  author  of  merit  and  read  're- 
freshingly,' '  flamingly , '  '  purringly , ' 
'noisily,'  besides  many  other  of  less 
offense  in  half  a  score  of  pages.  What 
sickly,  puling  words  they  are!  Henry 
James  uses  adverbs  of  his  own  make  in 
even  greater  abundance  and  he  seems 
to  need  them,  just  as  the  old  gentleman 
from  the  florid  East  needed  his  hands 
for  gesticulation.  But  we  shall  do  well 
to  grant  to  Mr.  James  all  the  adverbial 
privileges  he  takes;  he  manages  to  con- 
ceive ideas,  and  through  the  medium  of 
written  language  to  get  them  over  into 
the  understanding  of  many  of  us  who 
take  great  delight  in  them.  I  do  not 
like  his  adverbs,  and  I  often  wish  that 
he  would  adjust  his  ideas  with  wings 
that  fluttered  less  —  but  that  is  his 
business;  and  his  desire  for  truth  in  his 


art  doubtless  leads  him  to  cover  all  the 
ground  —  and  the  waters  under  the 
earth  as  well.  The  Anti-Adverb  Society 
would  never  prohibit  adverbs  if  it  ex- 
pected to  live;  it  would  only  discour- 
age them.  The  Germans  manage  to 
accomplish  a  meritorious  precision  of 
speech,  and  they  have  no  adverbs  in 
the  sense  that  these  differ  from  adjec- 
tives. So  if  the  expression,  'Come 
quick/  means  more  than  'Come  quick- 
ly/ the  chances  are  that  in  time  we 
shall  receive  grammatical  warrant  to 
use  the  words  that  carry  the  idea  with 
the  greatest  efficiency. 

The  English  language  leads  a  disso- 
lute life,  and  welcomes  any  word  that 
comes  its  way.  There  have  always 
been  bars-sinister  on  its  arms,  but  this 
has  never  seemed  to  worry  it.  In  the 
Far  East  there  are  hundreds  of  Asiatic 
words  in  current  use  in  English  and 
they  are  gradually  creeping  into  the 
dictionaries.  This  catholicity  —  to  use 
a  more  gentle  expression  —  is  its  very 
strength.  The  danger  may  lie  in  a 
splitting-up  of  the  language  into  differ- 
ent dialects,  and  it  is  the  business  of 
scholarship  to  use  every  effort  to  avoid 
this.  But  in  doing  so  it  must  be  pre- 
pared to  make  compromises,  and  to 
welcome  expressions  which  our  grand- 
fathers would  have  rejected.  Do  what 
we  please  —  teach,  instruct,  threaten, 
cajole,  or  plead:  nine  out  of  ten  boys 
will  answer,  'It's  me!'  to  the  question, 
'Who's  there?'  There  must  be  a  rea- 
son for  this.  The  French,  who  are  sup- 
posed to  pay  some  attention  to  their 
language,  use  the  same  form,  —  and  it 
has  received  scholastic  approval.  '  Me ' 
seems,  somehow,  more  intimate,  and  is 
stronger  than  '  I ' ;  which  may  be  the 
reason  why  the  child  will  say,  'Me  go 
to  mother/  and  not,  '  Give  it  to  I/ 

Scholarship  has  changed  in  the  last 
fifty  years.  Science  has  taught  us  dif- 
ferent methods  of  thought  from  those 
of  our  grandfathers.  We  have  innumer- 


688 


RECENT  REFLECTIONS  OF  A  NOVEL-READER 


able  new  facts  to  coordinate,  and  so 
language  is  beset  with  many  new  diffi- 
culties. It  is  not  a  question  of  haste,  — 
that  persistent  and  pestilent  excuse  of 
the  ignorant,  —  but  it  is  a  question  of 
scope,  efficiency,  and  precision  in  idea. 
Whatever  words  will  best  carry  the 
idea  —  get  it  over,  so  that  the  receiv- 
ing mind  comprehends  it  —  are  doing 
their  real  work. 

When  the  time  comes  that  we  have 
used  up  our  resources,  and  in  the  swing 
of  the  awful  pendulum  old  age  is  upon 
the  land  and  the  people,  and  this  our 


day  is  become  a  golden  age;  when 
scholarship  looks  backward  again  and 
inspiration  is  wholly  sought  in  the  for- 
gotten night,  savants  will  probably  re- 
vert to  the  ways  of  the  mediaeval  Latin- 
ists.  But  now,  to-day,  when  things 
are  in  the  making  and  in  the  doing, 
the  work  of  a  teacher  of  a  living  lan- 
guage is  that  of  an  engineer  of  traffic. 
He  must  do  all  he  can  to  keep  the  ve- 
hicle in  order  and  condition  to  carry 
the  greatest  loads  of  thought.  The 
vehicle  will  not  break  down;  the  loads 
of  thought  may. 


RECENT  REFLECTIONS  OF  A  NOVEL-READER 


To  confess  one's  self  a  confirmed  and 
complacent  novel-reader  for  fifty  or 
sixty  years  may  seem  a  humiliating, 
even  a  stultifying,  admission,  yet  every 
department  of  human  thought  yields 
gold  to  the  persistent  prospector.  It 
is  as  profitable  to  'stay  with 'novel- 
reading  as  with  severer  forms  of  in- 
tellectual endeavor.  The  substantial 
rewards  may  be  late  in  coming,  but 
they  do  arrive.  If,  as  children,  we 
who  are  predestined  novel-readers  read 
chiefly  for  the  story,  and,  as  youths, 
chiefly  for  style  and  form,  in  maturer 
years,  while  we  may  seem  to  be  devour- 
ing merely  as  a  pastime  the  heaps  of 
fiction  that  fall  twice  yearly  from  the 
press,  eating  them  up  as  a  girl  eats 
bonbons,  the  truth  is  that,  having  ar- 
rived at  the  time  of  life  when  gener- 
alizing is  inevitable,  we  find  in  this 
confused,  parti-colored  pile,  so  deli- 
cately redolent  of  paper  and  printer's 
ink,  much  food  for  generalization,  and 
a  rich  contribution  to  our  knowledge  of 
current  emotion. 


All  the  great  and  most  of  the  little 
movements  of  the  day  make  their  way 
into  fiction  rather  speedily :  sometimes 
explicitly  and  with  intention;  some- 
times, and  this  is  even  more  interesting, 
blindly  and  implicitly.  Here,  to-day, 
is  the  great  'march  past'  of  the  tastes, 
opinions,  passions,  and  ethical  ideas  of 
our  fellows.  To  review  this  motley 
troop  is  to  gain  a  certain  insight,  not 
otherwise  easily  obtainable,  not  only 
into  the  main  currents  of  contempo- 
rary thought  and  feeling,  but  also  into 
the  cross-currents,  drifts,  and  eddies 
due  to  the  complications  of  our  society. 
If,  often,  these  records  are  neither  lit- 
erature nor  life,  at  least  they  do  not 
fail  of  being  personality.  If  the  new 
writer  (they  are  almost  all  new  writers 
nowadays!)  tells  us  nothing  else  very 
valuable,  he  gives  us  a  pretty  clear 
notion  of  his  own  attitude  toward  life 
and  art;  even  when  oblivious  of  the 
latter  and  biased  as  to  the  former,  he 
throws  the  spot-light  on  the  point  of 
view  of  one  more  human  creature  with 


RECENT  REFLECTIONS  OF  A  NOVEL-READER 


689 


parts  and  passions  like  ourselves.  This 
is  not  what  he  means  to  do,  but  for  the 
reader  it  may  often  prove  the  better 
part  of  his  performance. 

Obviously,  to  read  with  this  in  view 
means  that  we  are  no  longer  judging 
novels  chiefly  as  literature  or  with 
strictest  reference  to  the  canons  of  per- 
fection whose  results  we  knew  and 
loved  aforetime.  In  the  last  fifteen 
years,  life  has  rushed  into  fiction  and 
trampled  those  canons  a  little  rudely 
at  times.  Needless  to  say,  the  happi- 
est literary  results  are  still  secured 
when  life  and  art  join  hands,  but  this 
union  is  not,  to-day,  so  frequent  or  so 
perfect  as  one  could  desire.  If,  then, 
one  reads  current  novels  very  extens- 
ively, and  judges  them,  one  must  read 
them  for  other  qualities  than  their 
artistry.  Putting  aside  the  finer  critical 
standards,  one  must  be  willing  to  re- 
joice in  them,  where  it  is  possible,  as 
life,  as  experience,  as  intimations  of  the 
human  struggle,  as  broken  fragments  of 
the  human  dream. 

Some  twenty-five  years  ago  Robert 
Bridges,  then  and  for  years  afterward 
the  lightest-of-hand  and  most  acute  of 
our  critics  of  fiction,  made  strong  com- 
plaint of  the  lack  of  novels  dealing 
with  men  and  their  affairs;  there  was, 
he  claimed,  a  field  for  tales  of  business 
and  the  professions.  At  that  time  this 
was  a  new  suggestion.  There  was  not 
even  any  very  large  amount  of  read- 
ing-matter for  the  tired  business  man, 
let  alone  notable  novels  about  him.  He 
read  the  Henty  books  and  the  Youth's 
Companion  for  his  amusement,  and 
Silas  Lapham  was  almost  his  only  re- 
presentative in  the  higher  walks  of  lit- 
erature. The  most  conspicuous  and 
significant  development  of  our  fiction 
in  the  quarter-century  has  been  along 
these  two  lines.  Novels  are  no  longer 
written  mainly  for  or  about  women. 
The  majority  of  them,  in  importance  as 
well  as  numbers,  are  for  and  about 

VOL.  Ill  -  NO.  5 


men.  I  remember  wondering  as  I  read 
Mr.  Bridges's  complaint,  how  novelists 
were  going  to  unite  the  practical  expe- 
rience necessary  to  depict  large  affairs 
with  the  retirement  and  study  neces- 
sary to  learn  to  write,  never  suspecting 
the  answer  —  that  many  of  the  most 
popular  would  write  without  learning 
how! 

Three  or  four  years  later  began  the 
still-rising  flood  of  historical  romances, 
of  tales  of  gore  and  crime,  whose  pop- 
ularity has  remained  and  increased. 
Some  of  them  were  pretty  enough,  and 
some  were  poor  indeed.  The  average 
technique  of  this  particular  kind  of 
story  has  improved  wonderfully  in  the 
last  eight  years,  an  amendment  large- 
ly due,  one  suspects,  to  the  standards 
and  rewards  of  the  one  American  peri- 
odical which  conspicuously  caters  to 
the  average  male  reader. 

A  little  later  the  novel  of  achieve- 
ment, of  the  material  activities  of  men, 
began  to  come  into  its  reward.  Here 
lies  the  future  stronghold  of  the  Amer- 
ican novelist.  There  is  bound  to  be  a 
movement  in  literature  reflecting  our 
material  expansion  and  commensurate 
with  it.  The  most  noteworthy  novel 
of  the  winter,  Theodore  Dreiser's  The 
Financier  1  lies  wholly  in  this  field. 

The  Financier  is  an  imposing  book, 
both  in  intention  and  execution.  If  it 
resembles  a  biography  more  than  a 
work  of  art,  that,  doubtless,  is  an  aspect 
of  the  matter  with  which  the  author 
deliberately  reckoned  before  he  began. 
The  critic  is  entitled  to  ignore  it  in 
view  of  Mr.  Dreiser's  success  in  pre- 
senting an  intimate  picture  of  the  de- 
velopment of  a  man  of  financial  genius 
whose  kind  is  only  too  common  in 
America.  Should  the  type  become  ex- 
tinct (Heaven  speed  the  day!)  and  the 
novel  survive,  our  descendants  will 
have  in  it  the  means  of  reconstructing 

1  The   Financier.     By   THEODORE    DREISER. 
New  York:  Harper  &  Bros. 


690 


RECENT  REFLECTIONS  OF  A  NOVEL-READER 


for  themselves  the  business  life  and  im- 
morality of  a  whole  period. 

The  book  details  with  endless  par- 
ticularity, but  forcefully,  the  character 
and  career  of  Frank  Cowperwood,  a 
Philadelphia  boy:  his  rise  in  the  finan- 
cial world,  his  rocket-like  descent  to 
the  status  of  a  convict,  and  the  means 
by  which  he,  later,  recoups  his  fallen 
fortunes.  The  picture  includes  his 
business  associates,  alleged  friends,  en- 
tire family  connection,  and  the  family 
of  the  girl  whom  he  finally  marries 
after  a  long  liaison,  wrecking  a  first 
marriage.  The  author  has  all  these 
threads  of  his  tapestry  well  in  hand, 
and  no  less  clear  is  his  presentation  of 
the  ins  and  outs  of  Philadelphia  poli- 
tics, and  the  opportunities  they  afford- 
ed for  unscrupulous  money-making. 
So  painstaking,  so  lavish  of  detail,  so 
determined  to  cover  the  large  canvas 
closely,  is  he,  that  he  seems  to  propose 
to  himself  the  feats  of  an  American 
Balzac.  If  this  is  the  case,  he  has  made 
a  good  beginning  and  is  alone  in  a  field 
that  is  ready  for  harvest. 

Perhaps  the  most  extraordinary 
quality  of  this  unusual  book  is  the  dry- 
ness  of  its  atmosphere.  We  are  re- 
minded of  those  caverns  where  nothing 
ever  decays,  where  all  dead  things  lie 
mummified,  retaining  the  outward  as- 
pect of  life  for  centuries.  This  effect 
is,  in  part,  intentional.  I  do  not  make 
out  to  my  own  satisfaction  whether  it 
is  wholly  so.  Certainly  Mr.  Dreiser 
wishes  us  to  feel  the  extreme  aridity  of 
nature  in  a  man  like  Cowperwood, 
who  sees  life  under  the  categories  of 
strength  and  weakness,  and  in  no  other 
way;  certainly  also  it  is  hardly  possible 
to  overestimate  the  desiccating  effect 
of  absolute  materialism  in  a  man  of  his 
ability;  doubtless,  too,  the  environ- 
ment and  relations  of  such  a  man  would 
inevitably  tend  to  grow  more  and  more 
arid.  Still,  one  would  like  to  ask  the 
author  if,  as  a  matter  of  technique,  this 


juicelessness  of  the  money-maker  might 
not  have  been  brought  out  more  poig- 
nantly by  the  introduction  into  the 
book  of  somebody  with  a  soul  —  some- 
body, that  is  to  say,  who  sees  our  exist- 
ence under  the  categories  of  good  and 
evil,  right  and  wrong.  This  is  the  chief 
thing  that  gives  atmosphere  and  per- 
spective to  life.  Lust  and  greed,  the 
pride  of  the  flesh  and  the  joy  of  life,  are 
not  shown  in  their  proper  values  unless 
they  are  contrasted  with  something 
quite  different.  This  something  differ- 
ent, the  spirit-side  of  life  as  opposed 
to  the  material  side,  is  wholly  omitted 
from  The  Financier.  As  the  book 
stands,  the  part  of  foil  is  played  by  a 
hard-headed  old  contractor  and  politi- 
cian, the  father  of  the  girl  with  whom 
Cowperwood  becomes  entangled.  But- 
ler is  a  soft-hearted  parent,  and  is 
sufficiently  shocked  and  vindictive  on 
learning  of  the  illicit  relation  in  which 
his  daughter  exults.  He  is  more  nearly 
human  than  any  other  character  of  the 
tale,  but  even  he  fails  really  to  touch 
the  reader. 

Since  the  death  of  Frank  Norris,  no 
American  novelist  has  attempted  any- 
thing on  the  scale  of  The  Financier. 
Far  apart  in  temperament  and  meth- 
od, the  two  writers  are  alike  in  the  re- 
solution to  do  a  big  thing  in  a  big  way. 
For  the  novelist,  I  apprehend  that  the 
biggest  way  of  all  is  one  which  is,  as 
yet,  closed  to  Mr.  Dreiser  by  his  phil- 
osophy. One  must  not  be  rash  in  for- 
mulating this  philosophy,  but  it  seems 
to  be  negative,  to  consist  in  the  belief 
that  life  is  an  insoluble  problem,  and 
that  the  existence  of  predatory  types 
in  nature  and  society  justifies  us  in 
indicting  that  dark  Will  which  places 
man  in  a  universe  where  'his  feet  are 
in  the  trap  of  circumstance,  his  eyes 
are  on  an  illusion.' 

Whatever  the  truth  of  such  a  phil- 
osophy, one  thing  is  certain:  the  con- 
sensus of  men's  opinions  through  the 


RECENT  REFLECTIONS  OF  A  NOVEL-READER 


691 


centuries  has  demanded  a  different 
basis  from  this  for  the  enduring  things, 
the  great  things,  in  literature.  And  the 
long  consensus  of  opinion  is  our  only 
real  criterion.  But  to  quarrel  with  Mr. 
Dreiser  upon  this  point  is,  after  all, 
to  praise  him,  since  it  makes  clear  the 
fact  that  his  achievement  must  be 
looked  at  from  the  highest  ground. 

A  man's  philosophy  is  determined  in 
part  by  his  length  of  days.  Knowing 
nothing  as  to  the  fact,  I  would  place 
the  author  of  The  Financier  near  forty- 
three  —  too  old  for  the  optimism  of 
youth,  too  young  for  the  optimism  of 
late  middle  life.  If  the  horribly  cold 
and  insanely  bitter  realism  of  Strind- 
berg  melted  at  sixty,  under  the  im- 
pact of  life,  into  a  believing  mysticism, 
who  can  say  what  insight  and  tender- 
ness, what  softness  of  atmosphere  and 
richness  of  feeling,  a  dozen  years  may 
not  add  to  the  already  very  notable 
performances  of  Mr.  Dreiser? 

One  cannot  help  wishing  that  Mark 
Lee  Luther  might  have  attacked  the 
making  of  The  Woman  of  It l  in  some- 
what the  same  spirit  in  which  Mr. 
Dreiser  assailed  The  Financier.  The 
former  had  a  story  to  tell  which  would 
have  justified  twice  as  long  and  pains- 
taking an  effort.  A  country  Congress- 
man, who  has  made  a  fortune  exploiting 
his  wife's  favorite  pickles,  goes  into 
politics  to  acquire  dignity.  Life  at  the 
capital  does  strange  things  to  the  futile, 
weak-principled  man;  a  finishing  school 
does  disagreeable  things  to  his  untu- 
tored daughter;  Yale  does  amusing 
things  to  the  pert  and  practical  son. 
Only  the  simple,  domestic-minded  wife 
keeps  her  heart  in  the  right  place,  and 
her  head  sufficiently  unturned  to  re- 
solve the  tangles  into  which  her  family 
get  themselves.  There  are  the  *  mak- 
ings '  of  something  substantial  and  dis- 
tinctively American  here. 

1  The  Woman  of  It.  By  MARK  LEE  LUTHER. 
New  York:  Harper  &  Bros. 


The  Olympian  2  by  James  Oppen- 
heim,  a  writer  of  vigorous  short  stories, 
also  essays  the  field  of  big  business. 
The  hero  comes  to  New  York  from 
Iowa  to  conquer  the  world  and  to  be- 
come, eventually,  a  steel  magnate,  by 
marriage.  The  early  steps  of  his  career 
are  convincing  enough,  for  his  creator 
evidently  knows  the  stuff  in  which  he  is 
working;  but  later  on  the  texture  of 
the  tale  grows  looser  and  attention  fal- 
ters, palpably  because  the  writer  does 
not  know  enough  about  steel,  or  mag- 
nates, or  matrimony,  to  make  them 
absorbing  to  us.  This  difficulty  is  one 
which  the  young  writer  frequently 
encounters  when  he  attempts  a  large 
theme  demanding  realistic  treatment. 
It  raises  a  question  worth  considering, 
namely,  what  are  the  most  fortunate 
themes  for  young  writers  to  attack? 

Obviously,  if  literature  is  the  calling 
with  which  a  youth  is  called,  he  can- 
not defer  the  pursuit  of  his  profession 
until  middle  life  furnishes  him  with  the 
rich  experience  and  mature  judgment 
a  realist  requires.  Once  or  twice  in  a 
century  there  appears  a  writer  under 
thirty  whose  literary  judgments  of 
life  the  man  over  thirty-five  will  listen 
to.  But  one  may  have  a  very  real  and 
worth-while  talent  for  literature  with- 
out being  one  of  these  exceptional 
intelligences.  If  this  talent  betakes 
itself  to  romance,  —  the  natural  ele- 
ment for  young  talent,  —  there  result 
such  dewy  successes  as  R.  H.  Davis  and 
some  others  knew  at  the  start.  But 
if,  like  James  Oppenheim,  the  young 
writer  burns  to  attack  serious  subjects 
in  a  large  way  while  yet  his  reach  ex- 
ceeds his  grasp,  what  must  he  do  about 
it?  Prudence  would  counsel  him  to 
stick  to  the  short  story,  but  this,  while 
practical,  is  no  solution  of  the  problem. 

Doubtless  many  answers  are  possi- 
ble. Owen  Johnson  has  recently  found 

2  The  Olympian.  By  JAMES  OPPENHEIM.  New 
York:  Harper  &  Bros. 


692 


RECENT  REFLECTIONS  OF  A  NOVEL-READER 


one  that  meets  with  general  approval. 
The  young  English  author  of  A  Pre- 
lude to  Adventure  1  has  found  another. 
His  book  has  to  do  wholly  with  un- 
dergraduate life  at  Cambridge.  With 
a  single  blow  struck  in  anger,  the 
hero  kills  a  fellow  student  whom  he 
has  so  despised  that  his  conscience 
immediately  assumes  the  burden  of 
murder  without  thought  of  evasion. 
There  is  nothing  to  connect  him  with 
the  act  but  his  own  knowledge.  The 
reaction  of  the  event  upon  his  own 
mind,  and  the  minds  of  the  two  men  to 
whom  it  becomes  known,  makes  a 
singularly  direct  and  powerful  story. 
The  writer  assumes  that  the  deed 
brought  with  it  instant  certainty,  never 
experienced  before,  of  a  God  as  an  ever- 
present  reality,  and  an  increasing  con- 
sciousness that,  as  he  had  broken  the 
normal  relation  of  man  to  his  fellow  by 
the  act,  so  he  must,  by  following  the 
inner  leading  which  he  recognizes  as 
God's  pursuit  of  him,  work  out  as  the 
way  is  shown  him  the  debt  he  has 
contracted  to  society.  Here  we  have 
our  ancient  acquaintances  *  conscience ' 
and  *  remorse'  in  work-a-day  garments. 
Their  names  are  never  so  much  as 
mentioned,  so  intent  is  the  author  on 
the  reality  of  the  feelings  for  which 
those  words  have  become  hackneyed 
symbols. 

Here  is  a  serious  theme;  and  here, 
granting  the  premise,  is  realism;  yet 
no  one  can  say  nay  to  the  writer's 
facts  or  his  psychology,  or  accuse  him 
of  immaturity.  He  is  thoroughly 
within  his  rights  in  setting,  subject,  and 
treatment.  The  result  is  a  story  which 
carries  us  wherever  it  goes.  It  is  grim, 
certainly,  but  never  repellent;  and  it  is 
done  with  such  finish  that  there  are  no 
sentences  the  critical  reader  would 
omit,  no  words  he  would  alter.  Hugh 
Walpole  is  worth  watching. 

1  A  Prelude  to  Adventure.  By  HUGH  WALPOLE. 
New  York:  The  Century  Co. 


Walpole's  absolute  concentration 
upon  the  work  in  hand,  and  his  belief 
in  it,  are  qualities  which  he  shares  with 
a  very  different  English  writer,  Mrs. 
Barclay.  It  is  because  she  believes  in 
the  stories  she  has  to  tell,  believes  in 
them  every  minute,  and  shows  that 
belief  in  every  line,  that  she  holds  her 
large  audiences  in  spite  of  their  own 
doubts.  She  is  sentimental  certainly, 
often  weakly  so,  but  sentimentality 
and  conviction  are  a  strong  combina- 
tion. Plenty  of  people  who  are  old 
enough  to  know  better  have  a  sneaking 
fondness  for  them.  The  Upas  Tree  2 
is  particularly  strong  in  both  qualities, 
and  should  stand  second  among  the 
author's  successes. 

The  season's  output  of  exciting 
stories  —  which  are  related  to  business 
life  insomuch  as  the  tired  business 
man  likes  to  get  them  from  the  circu- 
lating libraries  and  read  them  o' win- 
ter nights  because  they  tend  to  keep 
him  awake  —  is  large  and  meritorious. 
Among  the  best  are  Smoke  Bellew? 
The  Closing  Net,4  Good  Indian,5  The 
Tempting  of  Tavernake*  The  Net,7  The 
Red  Lane,8  Billy  Fortune,9  and  The 
Drifting  Diamond.10  All  are  good  read- 
ing, as  the  phrase  goes.  From  Sicily 
to  the  China  Sea  their  scenes  are  laid, 
with  side-excursions  into  the  Klondike, 
and  stops  at  London  and  Paris. 

2  The  Upas  Tree.    By  FLORENCE  BARCLAY. 
New  York:  G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons. 

3  Smoke   Bellew.     By   JACK   LONDON.     New 
York:  The  Century  Co. 

4  The  Closing  Net.  By  H.  C.  ROWLAND.   New 
York:  Dodd,  Mead  &  Co. 

6  Good  Indian.    By   BEATRICE   M.   BOWER. 
Boston:  Little  Brown  &  Co. 

6  The  Tempting  of  Tavernake.   By  E.  PHILLIPS 
OPPENHEIM.   Boston:  Little,  Brown  &  Co. 

7  The  Net.  By  REX  BEACH.  New  York:  Har- 
per &  Bros. 

8  The  Red  Lane.    By  HOLMAN  DAY.    New 
York:  Harper  &  Bros. 

9  Billy  Fortune.     BY  WILLIAM  R.  LIGHTON. 
New  York:  D.  Appleton  &  Co. 

10  The  Drifting  Diamond.    By  LINCOLN  COL- 
CORD.  New  York:  The  Macmillan  Co. 


RECENT  REFLECTIONS  OF  A  NOVEL-READER 


693 


Smoke  Bellew  is  good  without  ap- 
proaching the  best  of  Jack  London's 
work;  it  relates  the  physical  remaking, 
by  hard  toil  under  the  primitive  condi- 
tions of  Alaskan  life,  of  a  young  San 
Francisco  journalist  and  dilettante.  To 
make  the  book  complete  there  should 
have  been  some  demonstration  of 
what  Bellew  was  good  for  after  he  was 
remade.  He  felt  much  better,  no  doubt, 
to  be  tough  and  fit  and  primitive,  but 
was  he  not  quite  as  useful  in  journal- 
ism? A  hard-muscled,  primitive  man 
is  a  satisfaction  to  himself,  but  not  of 
much  value  to  the  rest  of  God's  crea- 
tures. 

Billy  Fortune  is  a  humorous  ranch- 
hand  whose  racy  human  comments  on 
the  stories  he  has  to  tell  are  better 
than  the  stories  themselves.  Probably 
the  fates  will  never  give  us  another 
Virginian,  but  failing  that  high  de- 
light, Billy  Fortune  is  an  acceptable 
understudy  to  Lin  McLean. 

The  author  of  The  Drifting  Diamond 
is  comparatively  new  at  the  job  of 
purveying  adventure  stories  to  a  hun- 
gry public,  and  he  is  of  a  generous  dis- 
position. Therefore,  he  gives  us  good 
measure  of  excitement,  and  several 
other  things  which  we  have  no  right  to 
expect;  they  are  none  the  less,  but 
rather  the  more,  a  delight.  The  tale 
follows  the  fate  of  a  jewel  which  takes 
captive  the  hearts  of  men,  fascinating 
them  to  the  point  of  passion.  It  appears 
and  disappears  on  its  own  dark  errands, 
furnishing  always  a  supreme  test  of  his 
own  character  to  the  enthralled  and 
temporary  owner.  Into  the  telling  of 
this  tale,  set  in  the  Eastern  seas,  Mr. 
Colcord  has  put  much  imagination, 
something  of  poetry,  a  touch  of  phil- 
osophy, an  apprehension  of  the  spiritual 
values  underlying  all  life  —  and  this 
without  stinting  us  of  our  due  need  of 
breathless  adventure.  May  he  never 
learn  to  hold  his  hand !  Is  it  too  much 
to  ask,  incidentally,  that  his  publish- 


ers provide  cover  designs  less  likely  to 
frighten  away  the  sensitive  reader? 

Mr.  Grant  Richards  also  has  written 
an  exciting  story  with  a  difference.  He 
seems  to  have  said  to  himself,  'Why 
not  construct  a  tale  of  the  favorite 
American  type  in  which  dark  adven- 
ture and  high  finance  dovetail,  but 
write  it  with  a  chiseled  style?  Why  not 
drape  the  steel  frame  with  orchids? 
Why  not  be  witty,  cultivated,  elabo- 
rate, in  this  species  of  writing,  no  less 
than  if  one  proposed  a  Meredithian 
task?  Is  there  any  objection  to  a  well- 
mannered,  civilized  hero  who  knows 
how  to  eat,  to  drink,  to  dress,  who  is 
really  connoisseur  as  well  as  good-liver? 
Let  me  take  such  an  Englishman  and 
give  him  a  love-affair  with  an  American 
girl;  let  me  add  such  custom-staled 
elements  of  interest  as  high  play  at 
Monte  Carlo,  miraculous  wealth  made 
in  a  day  on  Wall  Street,  the  kidnapping 
of  a  man  by  his  opponents  in  the  finan- 
cial game,  and  see  if  I  cannot  make  of 
the  melange  something  piquant,  fla- 
vorsome,  appetizing.'  The  result  is 
Caviare,1  and  it  is  truly  an  adventure 
story  de  luxe. 

The  immigration  problem  is  a  very 
serious  and  discouraging  affair  when 
looked  squarely  in  the  face,  but  as 
broken  into  fragments  and  reflected 
in  such  books  as  Eve's  Other  Children,2 
Mrs.  Van  Slyke's  stories  of  the  Syrian 
quarter  in  Brooklyn,  or  Elkan  Lub- 
liner,  American,3  it  loses  some  of  its 
terrors.  Both  writers  are  optimists, 
and  their  work  makes  one  feel  that,  in 
spite  of  the  decadence  of  New  Eng- 
land and  all  one's  worst  fears,  the 
melting-pot  may  yet  prove  a  crucible 
for  something  precious,  instead  of  the 

1  Caviare.  By  GRANT  RICHARDS.  Boston  and 
New  York:  Houghton  Mifflin  Co. 

2  Eve's  Other  Children.    By  LUCILE  BALDWIN 
VAN  SLYKE.  New  York:  F.  A.  Stokes  &  Co. 

3  Elkan  Lubliner,  American.  By  MONTAGUE 
GLASS.  New  York;  Doubleday,  Page  &  Co, 


694 


RECENT  REFLECTIONS  OF  A  NOVEL-READER 


witches'  cauldron  it  has  undoubtedly 
appeared  to  the  sane  citizen  since  the 
immigration  from  southern  Europe  be- 
gan. Whether  or  not  it  is  well  polit- 
ically to  have  our  fears  thus  allayed,  as 
a  literary  sensation  the  effect  is  dis- 
tinctly pleasing. 

Miss  318  and  Mr.  37 l  by  Rupert 
Hughes,  is  the  love-story  of  a  fireman 
and  a  girl  in  a  department  store. 
Judging  by  dialect,  one  might  almost 
classify  it  among  the  literary  excur- 
sions into  our  foreign  quarters,  but  the 
sturdy  quality  of  the  human  nature 
offered  for  inspection  is  such  as  we  are 
glad  to  think  American.  Mr.  Hughes 
has  a  mastery  over  his  material,  a  grip 
on  the  essentials  of  life,  and  a  vigor- 
ous, clear-cut  way  of  expressing  him- 
self. These  things  would  have  made 
his  work  conspicuous  twenty-five  years 
ago,  but  to-day  he  is  pressed  hard  by 
a  dozen  or  so  of  short-story  writers 
almost  equally  worth  while.  It  has  al- 
ways been  conceded  that  our  authors 
have  the  art  of  the  short  story  as  none 
save  the  great  Frenchmen  have  ever 
possessed  it,  but  never  has  it  been  so 
able-b9died,  so  mature,  so  richly  repre- 
sentative of  our  manifold  life  and  its 
underlying  spirit,  as  it  is  to-day. 

At  the  other  pole  from  the  books  for 
the  tired  business  man  lies  the  small 
and  select  class  of  tales  for  those  whose 
fiction  flavors  a  pleasant  leisure.  These 
are  the  books  which  lie  about  on 
mahogany  work-stands  and  bed-side 
tables,  dipped  into  at  moments  as 
their  readers  might  sip  tea  or  partake 
of  sweets.  Such  an  audience  does  not 
demand  the  excitement  of  swift  action; 
liking  sentiment,  it  does  not  reject 
reflection,  and  has  a  palate  for  the  flav- 
ors and  sub-flavors  of  style.  The  books 
which  please  these  readers  best  are 
usually,  when  ripest  and  most  genial, 
the  product  of  the  masculine  mind,  and 

1  Miss  318  and  Mr.  37.  By  RUPERT  HUGHES. 
New  York:  Fleming  H.  Revell  Co. 


the  mind  of  an  Englishman  at  that! 
The  London  Lavender  2  of  Mr.  Lucas  is 
one  of  these  agreeable,  friendly  vol- 
umes; Pujol,5  Prudent  Priscilla^  Con- 
cerning Sally?  The  Arm-Chair  at  the 
Inn?  and  The  Heroine  in  Bronze,1  are 
other  well-finished  examples  of  this 
kind.  James  Lane  Allen's  filagreed 
style  was  never  so  dainty  as  in  the 
latter  tale,  and  F.  Hopkinson  Smith's 
bric-a-brac,  table-service,  and  food 
were  never  more  elaborate  and  pic- 
turesque than  in  The  Arm-Chair  at  the 
Inn.  It  contains,  besides,  among  the 
storiettes  applied  on  that  effective 
background  two  —  namely,  the  anec- 
dotes of  the  penguin  people  and  of  the 
cannibal's  wife  —  that  are  of  singu- 
lar poignancy  and  interest.  Locke, 
of  course,  is  almost  a  contemporary 
classic  in  this  style,  and  Pujol,  if  not 
quite  his  delightful  best,  is  still  abun- 
dantly good.  Mr.  Hopkins  is  rapidly 
becoming,  if  he  has  not  already  become, 
one  of  the  most  pleasing  exemplars  in 
America  of  this  kind  of  fiction.  His 
Sally,  an  adorable  child  who  carries 
the  weight  of  a  whole  family  upon  her 
competent,  if  often  weary,  shoulders, 
is  a  satisfactory  small  chip  of  Plymouth 
Rock;  but  I  confess  that  of  all  this 
group  Prudent  Priscilla  amuses  me 
most.  She  is  gently,  deliciously  hu- 
morous; it  is  as  though  the  maid  on  a 
Watteau  fan  shyly  opened  her  inviting 
lips  and  related  the  story  of  her  life, 
revealing  herself  as  a  tender-souled  per- 
son whose  well-meant  Christian  efforts 

2  London  Lavender.    By  E.  V.  LUCAS.    New 
York:  The  Macmillan  Co. 

3  The  Joyous  Adventures  of  Aristide  Pujol.   By 
W.  J.  LOCKE.    New  York:  The  John  Lane  Com- 
pany. 

4  Prudent  Priscilla.  By  MARY  C.  E.  WEMYSS. 
Boston  and  New  York:  Houghton  Mifflin  Co. 

6  Concerning  Sally.   By  W.  J.  HOPKINS.    Bos- 
ton and  New  York:  Houghton  Mifflin  Co. 

6  The  Arm-Chair  at  the  Inn.  By  F.  HOPKINSON 
SMITH.    New  York:  Charles  Scribner's  Sons. 

7  The  Heroine   in  Bronze.    By  JAMES  LANE 
ALLEN.  New  York:  The  Macmillan  Co. 


RECENT  REFLECTIONS  OF  A  NOVEL-READER 


695 


at  sympathy  are  always  placing  her  in 
droll  dilemmas. 

The  Romance  of  Billy  Goat  Hill,1  and 
The  Inheritance?  might  be  included  in 
fiction  for  the  leisurely.  Though  the 
latter  story  has  a  clean-cut  and  defi- 
nitely interesting  plot,  the  main  intent 
seems  to  be  to  bring  back  the  atmo- 
sphere of  the  eighties  as  it  looked  to 
those  who  were  young  in  that  decade. 
Mrs.  Bacon  is  very  successful  in  hand- 
ling the  form  of  story-telling  by  remin- 
iscence, and  though  not  herself  entitled 
to  any  pose  of  middle  age,  she  has  un- 
deniably diffused  this  story  of  youth 
in  a  Connecticut  town  with  the  mel- 
low autumnal  glow  that  warms  old  and 
young  alike. 

Considering  the  conspicuous  part 
played  by  the  feminist  movement  in 
the  serious  literature  of  the  day,  its 
reflection  in  current  fiction  is  incon- 
siderable. This  sets  one  wondering  if 
the  importance  of  feminism  to  the 
people  who  really  matter  most  in  any 
movement,  namely  the  middle-class 
fathers,  mothers,  and  offspring  the 
country  over,  has  not  been  vastly 
exaggerated,  for  fiction  now  takes  on 
very  rapidly  the  colors  of  life  in  these 
things.  Perhaps  feminism  and  A 
Woman  of  Genius  3  ought  not  to  be 
mentioned  together,  for,  the  heroine  of 
Mrs.  Austin's  novel  admits  that  hers  is 
a  case  apart.  Her  story  only  serves 
to  confirm  the  traditional  difficulty  of 
having  one's  cake  and  eating  it  too.  It 
is  the  struggle  of  a  woman  with  the 
histrionic  gift,  first,  to  achieve  an 
opening  for  self-expression,  and,  again, 
against  her  other  self — when  her  full- 
fledged  career  seems  in  her  eyes  to  for- 
bid her  the  domestic  life  and  love  she 
really  craves. 

1  The  Romance  of  Billy  Goat  Hill.   By  ALICE 
HEGAN  RICE.  New  York:  The  Century  Co. 

2  The  Inheritance.    By  JOSEPHINE   DASKAM 
BACON.  New  York:  D.  Appleton  &  Co. 

3  A  Woman  of  Genius.    By  MARY   AUSTIN. 
New  York:  Doubleday,  Page  &  Co. 


Any  one  who  can  stand  this  book 
at  all,  will  find  it  very  interesting. 
Many  fastidious  readers  will  not  be 
able  to  stand  it,  because  it  reveals 
somewhat  nakedly  the  workings  of  an 
egotistic  soul.  Olivia  Lattimore  pre- 
sents herself  as  self-centred,  bitter, 
lax.  She  hews  out  no  philosophy,  she 
achieves  no  principles,  she  makes  no 
one  happy,  not  even  herself.  On  the 
other  hand,  she  works  hard  at  her  art, 
is  generous  where  it  costs  her  nothing, 
has  many  emotions,  a  clever  tongue,  a 
mordant  wit,  flashes  of  insight,  and 
what  she  calls  her  supernal  Gift  which 
'does  with  her  what  it  wills.'  She 
snatches  with  one  hand  what  she 
throws  away  with  the  other.  She  wants 
to  make  the  world  over  so  that  women 
of  her  type  can  be  beloved  wives, 
revered  mothers,  contented  house- 
keepers, at  the  same  time  that  they 
yield  themselves  to  passion  and  dedi- 
cate themselves  to  art.  Well  —  it 
can't  be  done.  Women  do  very  much 
as  they  please  nowadays,  but  it  is  a 
mathematical  certainty  that  one  can 
no  more  manage  two  diametrically 
opposed  lives  than  two  bodies  can 
occupy  the  same  space  at  the  same 
time.  This  is  not  saying  that  Olivia 
and  her  lover  might  not  have  achieved 
a  comfortable  compromise  between 
their  warring  interests.  Both  were 
stupid  and  selfish,  but  Olivia  the  more 
so.  She  blames  Taylorville,  Ohianna, 
organized  society,  and,  above  all,  the 
domestic  woman,  because  none  of 
them  instructed  her  as  to  how  justice 
might  be  done  simultaneously  to  a 
stage  career  and  to  a  husband  and  two 
step-children. 

There  are  some  feminine  tragedies 
for  which  society  is  deeply  to  blame, 
but  Olivia's  is  not  of  them.  Curiously 
enough  it  never  occurs  to  her  that  it 
is  the  chief  duty  of  an  individual  to 
work  out  the  answer  to  his  own  pro- 
blems, thus  accomplishing  the  end  for 


696 


RECENT  REFLECTIONS  OF  A   NOVEL-READER 


which  he  was  born,  and  realizing  his 
own  soul. 

The  present  reviewer  knows  little  or 
nothing  about  geniuses,  men  or  women, 
having  encountered  only  three  or  four 
who  could  be  thus  classified.  None  of 
these  ever  so  much  as  mentioned  a 
desire  for  self-expression.  They  had 
in  common  a  brave  acceptance  of  their 
limitations,  human  or  feminine,  as 
part  of  the  game  of  life  and  work.  It  is 
ill  generalizing  from  such  scanty  data, 
but  their  attitude  leads  one  to  suspect 
that  bitterness  and  rebellion  spring 
from  insufficient  or  diseased  talent. 
Possibly  clever,  unhappy,  interesting 
Olivia  was  not  a  woman  of  genius  after 
all! 

The  Wind  before  the  Dawn l  and  The 
Soddy  2  are  books  that  bring  life  near, 
in  spite  of  faulty  technique.  The  for- 
mer is  a  large-minded  story  of  a  Kan- 
sas farmer's  wife,  having  in  it  some- 
thing of  the  breadth  of  the  prairies  and 
the  stir  of  the  prairie  winds.  The  writer 
has  hampered  herself  with  a  thesis, 
namely,  that  the  lot  of  the  farmer's 
wife  will  be  blessed,  and  her  marital 
relations  satisfactory,  only  when  she 
has  financial  independence;  but  Mrs. 
Munger  has  enough  of  the  story-teller's 
instinct  to  hold  her  preaching  in  check. 
Besides,  as  theories  go,  this  one  has 
justice  on  its  side.  Where  Olivia  Latti- 
more  had  a  *  grouch, '  Elizabeth  Hunter 
had  a  genuine  grievance,  and  one 
should  be  able  to  listen  patiently  to 
the  latter,  even  in  fiction.  One  may 
doubt  whether  a  *  mean '  man  like  John 
Hunter  would  be  so  easily  reformed  by 
economic  means  as  the  writer  believes, 
but  perhaps  it  is  worth  trying. 

Conflict  between  husband  and  wife 
is  the  theme  of  The  Soddy  also,  but 
here  the  author  escapes  from  feminist 

1  The  Wind  before  the  Dawn.    By  DELL  H. 
MONGER.  New  York:  Doubleday,  Page  &  Co. 

2  The  Soddy.  By  SARAH  COMSTOCK.  New  York: 
Doubleday,  Page  &  Co. 


propaganda  into  the  region  of  the  per- 
sonal. Her  question  is:  when  a  hus- 
band has  once  imbued  a  wife  with  his 
enthusiasm,  his  ideal,  is  he  entitled  to 
lose  the  former,  change  the  latter,  and 
expect  her  to  follow  him?  The  answer 
is,  No,  not  even  if  both  starve  to  death 
in  the  process  of  holding  fast  their  first 
belief!  This  is  uncompromising,  but 
also  so  rare  as  to  be  rather  refreshing. 
The  husband's  enthusiasm,  in  this 
instance,  is  for  the  semi-arid  lands  of 
Nebraska  and  the  sod  house  of  the 
pioneer,  and  the  young  wife  refuses  to 
leave  them  when  he  returns,  beaten,  to 
the  East  to  earn  the  bread  the  plains 
denied  them.  Common  sense  is  dis- 
tinctly against  the  wife  in  her  struggle, 
but  then,  common  sense  and  enthusi- 
asm have  long  been  enemies,  and  even 
in  this  practical  world  the  former  does 
not  always  win. 

Merely  as  studies  in  enthusiasm, 
there  could  hardly  be  two  finer,  more 
vividly  contrasting,  pieces  of  work  than 
A  Picked  Company,3  and  The  Children 
of  Light.*  The  former  tale  crystallizes 
about  the  great  desire  of  a  righteous 
man,  seventy  years  ago,  to  follow  the 
Oregon  trail  into  a  new  land,  taking 
with  him  such  chosen  folk,  and  such 
only,  as  would  aid  in  the  upbuilding 
of  a  commonwealth  of  God ;  the  latter 
deals  with  the  great  desire  of  the  young 
sons  and  daughters  of  wealth  to-day 
to  create  in  the  slums  of  industry  a  fair 
new  life  and  conditions.  It  is  good  to 
ponder  these  two  books  together.  The 
characters  in  the  first  rely  solely  on 
God  and  the  righteousness  of  the 
individual;  in  the  second,  they  rely  on 
economic  propaganda  and  the  develop- 
ment of  socialism.  The  reader  is  en- 
titled to  suspect  that  by  neither  of 

3  A  Picked   Company.     By  MARY  HALLOCR 
FOOTE.     Boston   and    New    York:    Houghton 
Mifflin  Co. 

4  The  Children  of  Light.   By  FLORENCE  CON- 
VERSE.    Boston    and    New    York:    Houghton 
Mifflin  Co. 


RECENT  REFLECTIONS  OF  A  NOVEL-READER 


697 


these  means  alone  shall  the  world  be 
fully  saved.  The  social  conscience  must 
work  for  a  world  fit  to  live  in,  and  the 
individual  conscience  for  a  self  that  is 
fit  to  be  alive,  before  the  New  Jeru- 
salem shall  descend  like  a  bride  adorned 
to  this  our  earth. 

It  must  be  said  that  the  religion  of 
A  Picked  Company  made  more  pow- 
erful and  vital  characters  than  the 
religion  of  The  Children  of  Light.  The 
strongest  and  most  useful  of  the  latter 
are  Helen,  who  refuses  to  enter  their 
economic  fold,  and  Cyril  the  martyr, 
whose  weapon  is  prayer.  But  I  know 
no  more  delightful  children  in  recent 
literature  than  these  young  people  in 
their  earlier  days.  The  chapter  of 
their  plays  entitled,  'A  Franciscan 
Revival '  is  so  visualized  that  it  seems 
painted  rather  than  written;  it  quivers 
with  the  exquisite,  naive  beauty  of  cer- 
tain early  Italian  paintings.  The  whole 
book,  indeed,  is  tremulous  with  feeling, 
as  a  book  which  deals  with  young  en- 
thusiasm has  need  to  be.  Neverthe- 
less, the  writer  is  incomparably  more 
persuasive  as  a  preacher,  when,  as  in 
the  chapter  cited,  she  is  most  whole- 
heartedly the  artist. 

Cease  Firing  l  is  not  in  any  proper 
sense  a  novel.  It  is  history  and  elegy,  a 
tapestry  shot  through  here  and  there 
with  the  scarlet  thread  of  individual 
tragedy.  War  itself  is  protagonist  here 
as  in  The  Long  Roll,  and  individuals 
are  only  introduced  that  in  their  swift 
loves,  brief  matings,  great  loyalties, 
and  heart-crushing  deaths  we  may  taste 
more  implacably  the  strange  and  bitter 
cup  that  war  must  always  be  to  the 
individual.  Miss  Johnston's  long  labor 
of  love  is  a  work  apart,  and  not  on  the 
plane  of  things  to  be  praised  or  cen- 
sured. To  come  upon  it  in  company 
with  the  fiction  of  the  day  is  like  hear- 
ing down  a  glittering,  busy  street  the 

1  Cease  Firing.  By  MARY  JOHNSTON.  Bos- 
ton and  New  York:  Houghton  Mifflin  Co. 


roll  of  a  drum  and  the  vibrant  beat  of 
that  Funeral  March  which  seems  al- 
ways to  strike  on  the  naked  heart. 

The  most  interesting  thing  about 
the  novels  of  H.  G.  Wells  is  the  record 
they  contain  of  the  author's  own  devel- 
opment. Mr.  Wells,  as  some  shrewd 
observer  said  of  certain  English  radi- 
cals, is  educating  himself  in  public.  Do 
such  writers  guess  how  many  shrewd 
eyes  note  their  crises  and  comment 
upon  the  slow  eduction  of  their  phil- 
osophy? 

I  know  a  group  of  readers  who  de- 
lighted, some  sixteen  years  ago,  in  that 
clever  skit,  The  Wonderful  Visit,  where- 
in Wells  gayly  outlined  the  way  this 
world  would  strike  an  angel — an  an- 
gel of  art,  not  of  religion  —  if  he  fell 
through  into  our  atmosphere  by  acci- 
dent. These  readers  followed  him 
closely  thereafter,  bearing  with  his 
Islands,  Sleepers,  Martians,  as  neces- 
sary pot-boilers,  waiting  expectant  of 
something  fine.  In  their  judgment  it 
did  not  come,  and  finally  they  rebelled. 
Wells,  they  said  justly,  had  no  con- 
viction, no  philosophy,  no  clue  to  the 
labyrinth,  no  glimpse  of  the  Gleam. 
His  criticisms  of  life  were  as  little  help- 
ful as  those  of  his  own  puzzled  angel; 
all  he  could  do  was  to  depict  hopelessly 
muddled  creatures  in  a  hopelessly 
muddled  world.  They  tore  him  to  tat- 
ters for  continuing  novelist  with  only 
this  to  offer  —  and  surely  he  deserved 
it.  Yet  all  the  time  his  popularity 
increased.  The  reason  dawned  slowly 
upon  these  critics,  but  at  last  they 
recognized  that  the  essentially  modern 
world  for  which  Wells  writes  is,  itself, 
muddled,  drab,  uncertain,  not  learning 
its  lessons,  not  holding  fast  its  clues. 
Such  a  world  finds  its  faithful  reflec- 
tion reassuring.  Two  years  ago,  in  Mr. 
Polly,  appeared  a  braver  note.  For, 
though  his  heart's  desire  was  but  the 
humble  comfort  of  a  riverside  inn,  Mr. 
Polly  knew  what  he  wanted,  and  fought 


698 


RECENT  REFLECTIONS  OF  A  NOVEL-READER 


for  it.  By  that  much  he  exceeded  Wells's 
other  heroes  and  announced  himself  a 
Man.  If  his  creator  had  really  learned 
that  we  are  on  earth  to  fight  for  what- 
ever is,to  us,the  surpassing  beauty,  then 
he  might  learn  anything! 

A  member  of  this  circle  wrote  of 
Marriage,1  'I  am  enthusiastic  over  it. 
For,  more  and  more,  Wells  really  thinks 
about  life  as  it  is.  He  may  not  always 
think  logically  or  coherently,  but  he  is 
always  candid,  and  you  know  that,  so 
far  as  his  thinking  has  gone,  you  are 
getting  the  best  of  his  conclusions.' 

Marriage  is  a  book  built  up  on  cer- 
tain axioms  of  the  sociologist,  as  a 
sculptor  builds  a  clay  figure  on  sup- 
porting sticks.  The  particular  general- 
izations which  serve  as  skeletons  for 
Trafford  and  Marjorie  are  the  well-worn 
statements  that  man  is  the  more  kine- 
tic, spasmodic,  intense,  and  abstract; 
woman  the  more  static,  stoical,  vivid- 
ly concrete,  and  detailed  of  the  sexes. 
Their  first  meeting  is  sufficiently  strik- 
ing. Trafford  falls  from  a  monoplane 
at  Marjorie's  feet  just  after  her  engage- 
ment to  another  man,  and  their  subse- 
quent romance  makes  headway  against 
many  external  difficulties.  They  marry; 
Marjorie  spends  too  much  money  beau- 
tifying the  domestic  life;  Trafford  gives 
up  research  work,  his  calling  and  pas- 
sion for  applied  science,  that  Marjorie 
may  have  enough  to  spend;  Marjorie 
promptly  enlarges  all  her  schemes  of 
living  so  as  to  spend  still  more. 

With  financial  success,  life  palls  on 
Trafford.  He  is  rich  enough  to  stop 
working,  but  research  no  longer  lures; 
social  problems  disturb  him;  he  and 
Marjorie,  though  still  fond,  have  grown 
apart.  He  develops  an  immense,  tragic 
discontent,  a  desire  to  go  into  the  wil- 
derness and  think  about  life.  At  last 
the  two  undertake  a  winter  in  the  Lab- 
rador wilds.  Primitive  life,  hard  work, 

1  Marriage.  By  H.  G.  WELLS.  New  York: 
Duffield  &  Co. 


the  iron  air,  make  them  forget  their 
problems.  The  very  best  thing  in  the 
book  is  this  clear  apprehension  that 
where  the  life  of  a  man  and  a  woman  is 
lived  in  the  open,  in  necessary  mutual 
helpfulness,  marriage  has  no  problems. 
It  takes  cities,  alleged  civilization,  com- 
forts, to  develop  senseless,  fatal  discon- 
tents. Trafford  is  clawed  by  a  lynx, 
and  breaks  a  leg  while  hunting.  The 
heroic  efforts  these  events  impose  on 
Marjorie  bring  the  pair  close  together 
again  in  that  unity  maintained  by  ser- 
vice and  tenderness. 

They  have  their  talk  out  at  last.  In 
this  discourse  it  is  made  clear  that 
Trafford  is  less  an  individual  than  the 
Man  of  sociology,  the  seeking  spirit 
reaching  out  vaguely,  muddled  still, 
into  the  void  after  truth,  solutions, 
God.  Marjorie  is  less  an  individual 
than  the  embodiment  of  all  the  con- 
crete, detailed  tendencies  evolution  has 
forced  on  the  woman,  including,  hap- 
pily, the  supreme  tendency  to  do  the  ut- 
termost for  the  man  heaven  has  given 
her,  even  to  the  effacing  of  her  legiti- 
mate qualities.  The  thing  Trafford  de- 
mands of  his  wife  is  the  sacrifice  of  her 
evolutionary  attributes  to  his  evolu- 
tionary attributes,  and,  once  she  sees 
the  point,  she  joyously  promises  it. 

Just  here  one's  mind  recurs  to  Olivia 
Lattimore  and  her  predicament.  Un- 
deniably, if  Olivia  could  not  have  her 
cake  and  eat  it,  neither  in  strict  just- 
ice can  Trafford.  He  is  better  man- 
nered than  Olivia,  but  their  problems 
are  the  same.  The  fact  seems  to  be 
that  the  highly  evolved  individual  is 
willing  neither  to  remain  an  unmated 
half  of  the  biological  unit  that  man 
and  woman  together  become,  nor  to 
make  the  needful  sacrifice  of  personal- 
ity involved  in  entering  that  unit.  If 
we  maintain  that  woman  must  pay  the 
price  for  what  she  wants,  and  that  it  is 
in  better  taste  to  pay  it  silently,  then, 
in  equity,  we  must  ask  the  same  of 


RECENT  REFLECTIONS  OF  A  NOVEL-READER 


699 


man.  In  real  life,  men  usually  settle 
this  particular  account  without  un- 
seemly haggling.  However,  we  infer 
that  Mr.  Wells  thinks  they  should  not 
do  so.  Marjorie  has  a  flash  of  insight 
in  which  she  sees  that  women  are  the 
responsible  sex;  that  their  final  mis- 
sion is  to  save  men  from  feminine  de- 
mands, to  save  them  for  dreaming,  for 
creative  pondering,  to  the  end  that  the 
world  may  finally,  somehow,  be  saved. 
With  this  understanding  between 
them,  the  Traffords  leave  Labrador, 
and  Mr.  Wells  drops  the  curtain.  This 
is  'so  far  as  his  thinking  has  gone' 
about  marriage.  Marjorie's  conclusion 
that  it  is  her  part  to  sacrifice,  is  prob- 
ably masculinism  as  opposed  to  fem- 
inism, but  it  has  behind  it  precisely 
those  powerful  sanctions  of  experience 
and  convention  to  which  Wells  is  usu- 
ally opposed  on  general  principles. 
One  suspects  that  the  great  thing  he 
has  yet  to  learn  is  that  most  sanctions 
of  experience  and  convention  are  based 
on  something  deep  and  vital. 

Trafford  recognizably  presents  the 
author's  apology  for  that  grayness  and 
lack  of  conviction  we  find  so  irritating. 
There  is,  he  claims,  no  real  faith  in 
thought  and  knowledge  yet;  religions 
and  philosophies  have  pretended  too 
much;  the  immortal  idea  is  just  now 
struggling  to  be  born;  therefore  the 
mind  must  be  detached,  must  observe 
and  synthesize  at  leisure.  From  this 
point  of  view  lack,  or  rather  postpone- 
ment, of  conviction  makes  almost  the 
demand  of  religion.  They  also  serve 
who  only  stand  and  wait,  recording 
whatever  may,  by  any  means,  increase 
comprehension  of  the  great  idea  for  the 
birth  of  which  men  stand  expectant. 

Is  it  unfair  criticism  to  say  that  here 
we  have  Wells's  own  mental  peculiar- 
ities shaped  into  a  philosophy  which  is 
practically  a  religion?  He  has  plodded 
along,  working  according  to  his  bent. 
Gradually,  as  happens  to  all  candid 


thinkers,  the  light  that  lightens  every 
man  who  comes  into  the  world,  filters 
down  into  the  dim  places  of  mind  and 
soul.  Comprehension  begins,  the  seeds 
of  conviction  are  sown,  but  because 
they  have  not  yet  sprouted  richly,  he 
feels  that  the  world  is  all  expectancy. 
—  What  if  it  is  Wells,  and  not  the 
world,  that  is  waiting  for  light? 

Mrs.  Wharton's  style  has  never  been 
smoother,  more  masterly,  more  en- 
riched by  felicitous  phrases  connoting 
what  other  writers  must  say  clumsily 
in  half  a  page,  than  in  The  Reef.1  And 
this  is  well,  for  never  has  she  essayed 
a  theme  so  demanding  the  service  of 
a  flexible,  perfect  style.  She  writes  of 
the  reef  of  incidental  lust,  emerging 
from  primeval  ooze  into  the  shallower 
channels  of  being,  there  to  menace  the 
incoming  cargoes  of  ships  which  have 
long  been  steadily  homeward  bound. 
If  this  is  a  slightly  florid  description 
of  her  subject-matter,  one  can  only  say 
it  seems  to  demand  the  palliation  of 
whatever  sentiment  one  may  be  able 
to  bring  to  it. 

The  book  is  admirably  clever  and 
wonderfully  done,  but  the  people  who 
are  likely  to  inquire  most  pointedly 
whether  it  was  worth  doing  are,  pre- 
cisely, the  enthusiastic  admirers  of 
Ethan  Frome  and  The  House  of  Mirth. 
In  the  light  of  those  notable  achieve- 
ments, The  Reef  does  indeed  appear 
meagre  and  inadequate.  The  Gallic 
theory  regards  such  themes  as  appro- 
priate subjects  for  literature  because 
of  their  psychological  value;  the  Eng- 
lish-writing world  pretty  consistently 
holds  that  perversities  of  impulse,  at 
war  with  the  whole  bent  and  direction 
of  a  character,  only  become  literary 
subject-matter  by  taking  part  in  the 
making  of  a  man  who  finally  forces  his 
feet  to  carry  him  whither  he  would  go. 
Mrs.  Wharton  eschews  both  theories, 

1  The  Reef.  By  EDITH  WHARTON.  New  York: 
D.  Appleton  &  Co. 


700 


RECENT   REFLECTIONS  OP  A   NOVEL-READER 


choosing  only  to  show  that  distressing 
but  lightly  considered  incidents  may 
involve  the  actors  in  them  in  sudden, 
almost  cyclonic,  drama.  That  this 
drama  ends  as  polite  comedy  is  one's 
final  arraignment  of  the  story.  Neither 
George  Darrow  nor  Mrs.  Leath,  his 
fiancee,  is  real  enough  to  be  import- 
ant except  as  a  comedy  figure.  Darrow 
is  civilly  distressed,  and  Mrs.  Leath 
is  appropriately  agonized,  jealous,  or 
comprehending,  as  occasion  demands, 
but  one  never  feels  them  flesh  and 
blood.  The  only  person  in  the  book 
who  bleeds  when  stabbed  is  poor,  dis- 
credited little  Sophie  Viner.  She  not 
only  monopolizes  all  the  vitality,  but 
also  all  the  finer  feelings  and  all  the 
force  of  character  in  the  story.  Next  to 
hers  in  vividness  is  the  portrait  of  Mrs. 
Leath's  deceased  husband.  This  par- 
tiality in  the  distribution  of  qualities 
makes  one  suspect  that  the  author  her- 
self does  not  find  the  chief  figures  very 
congenial  creations.  She  seems  to  have 
proposed  the  plot  to  herself  as  a  mathe- 
matician sets  himself  a  problem.  As 
a  tour  de  force  it  succeeds,  but  Mrs. 
Wharton's  enduring  successes  are  of 
another  nature. 

As  the  basal  incident  of  The  Reef  is 
sheer  flesh,  so  is  that  of  The  Flaw  in  the 
Crystal 1  sheer  spirit.  It  is  equally  diffi- 
cult to  handle, — such  is  our  dual  world, 
—  and  it  is  handled  with  a  mastery 

1  The  Flaw  in  the  Crystal.  By  MAY  SINCLAIR. 
New  York:  E.  P.  Button  &  Co. 


that  equally  demands  our  admiration. 
Whether  or  not  you  believe  in  the  gift 
of  healing  as  a  psychic  endowment 
when  you  begin,  you  will  believe  in  it 
sufficiently  for  all  literary  purposes 
before  you  finish.  That  is,  you  will 
freely  admit  that,  if  it  exists,  it  must 
inevitably  be  the  thing  Agatha  Verrall 
found  it,  and  it  must  be  conditioned 
and  limited  as  she  tentatively  and 
agonizingly  experienced  it  to  be.  These 
are  large  concessions,  but  Miss  Sinclair 
is  entitled  to  them  by  virtue  of  the 
great  lucidity  with  which  she  has  set 
forth  her  heroine's  experience.  That  it 
takes  place  in  a  world  apart,  which 
most  of  us  do  not  explore,  does  not  at 
all  impair  the  value  of  the  limpid 
directness  with  which  it  is  recited.  Most 
accounts  of  psychic  experiences  appear 
nebulous,  not  to  say  murky,  whether 
we  read  or  hear  them,  but  this  has  a 
really  crystalline  clarity.  It  is  instruct- 
ive to  see  what  a  restrained  and  fin- 
ished art  can  do  with  material  usually 
left  to  a  befogged  enthusiasm. 

It  is,  as  we  premised,  only  fair,  as 
well  as  richly  compensating,  to  meas- 
ure a  novel  by  its  intimations  of  life, 
but  we  do  inevitably  measure  the  nov- 
elist by  his  execution.  With  this  differ- 
ence clearly  in  view,  we  must  confess 
Mrs.  Wharton  and  Miss  Sinclair  have 
distanced  their  competitors  in  the  sea- 
son's fiction.  Both  have  managed  to 
say  the  unsayable,  and  to  say  it  with 
distinction. 


WHAT  INDUSTRIES  ARE  WORTH  HAVING 


BY   F.   W.   TAUSSIG 


THE  title  of  this  paper  puts  in  famil- 
iar terms  a  question  which  economists 
state  in  more  technical  phraseology. 
They  speak  of  the  principle  of  com- 
parative cost,  and  of  the  relative  ad- 
vantage to  a  country  from  prosecuting 
one  or  another  industry.  The  doctrine 
of  comparative  cost  has  underlain 
almost  the  entire  discussion  of  inter- 
national trade  by  English  writers.  It 
has  received  singularly  little  attention 
from  the  economists  of  the  Continent, 
and  sometimes  has  been  discussed  by 
them  as  one  of  those  subtleties  of  the 
old  school  that  have  little  bearing  on 
the  facts  of  industry.  I  believe  that  it 
has  not  only  theoretical  consistency, 
but  direct  application  to  the  facts;  and 
that  in  particular  it  is  indispensable 
for  explaining  the  international  trade 
of  the  United  States,  and  the  working 
of  our  customs  policy.  Neither  the 
familiar  arguments  heard  in  our  tariff 
controversy  nor  the  course  of  our  in- 
dustrial history  can  be  understood  un- 
less this  principle  is  grasped  and  kept 
steadily  in  view. 

Briefly  stated,  the  doctrine  is  that  a 
country  tends  under  conditions  of  free- 
dom to  devote  its  labor  and  capital  to 
those  industries  in  which  they  work  to 
greatest  effect.  Hence  it  will  be  unpro- 
fitable to  turn  to  industries  in  which, 
although  labor  and  capital  may  be 
employed  with  effect,  they  are  applied 
with  less  effect  than  in  the  more  ad- 
vantageous industries.  The  principle 
is  simple  enough;  nor  is  it  applicable 
solely  to  international  trade.  It  bears 
on  the  division  of  labor  between  indi- 


viduals as  well  as  on  that  between  na- 
tions. The  lawyer  finds  it  advantage- 
ous to  turn  over  to  his  clerk  work  which 
he  could  do  as  well  as  the  clerk,  or  bet- 
ter, confining  himself  to  those  tasks  of 
the  profession  for  which  he  has,  by 
training  or  inborn  gift,  the  greatest 
capacity.  The  business  leader  dele- 
gates to  foremen  and  superintendents 
routine  work  of  administration  which 
he  doubtless  could  do  better  than 
they;  he  reserves  himself  for  the  larger 
problems  of  business  management  for 
which  he  has  special  aptitude.  The 
skilled  mechanic  has  a  helper  to  whom 
he  delegates  the  simpler  parts  of  his 
work,  giving  his  own  attention  to  those 
more  difficult  parts  in  which  he  has 
marked  superiority. 

It  is  in  international  trade,  however, 
that  the  principle,  if  not  most  import- 
ant, needs  most  attention;  because  it 
is  obscured  by  the  persistence  of  preju- 
dice and  shallow  reasoning  in  this  part 
of  the  field  of  economics.  It  is  closely 
related  to  the  problems  concerning  the 
varying  range  of  wages  and  prices  in 
different  countries.  There  is  perhaps 
no  topic  in  economics  on  which  there 
is  more  confusion  of  thought  than  this; 
and  although  fallacies  of  much  the 
same  sort  are  prevalent  in  all  coun- 
tries, it  is  in  the  United  States,  above 
all,  that  there  is  need  of  making  clear 
the  relation  between  the  rate  of  wages 
and  the  conditions  of  international 
trade. 

Whatever  may  be  the  differences  of 
opinion  among  economists  on  the  the- 
ory of  wages,  —  and  those  differences 

701 


702 


WHAT  INDUSTRIES  ARE  WORTH  HAVING 


are  less  in  reality  than  in  appearance, 
—  there  is  agreement  that  a  high  gen- 
eral rate  of  wages  rests  upon  general 
high  product,  that  is,  on  high  effective- 
ness of  industry.  It  is  agreed  that  high 
general  wages  and  a  high  degree  of  ma- 
terial prosperity  can  result  only  from 
the  productive  application  of  labor; 
good  tools  or  good  natural  resources, 
or  both,  being  indispensable  to  high 
productivity.  And  when  'labor'  is 
spoken  of,  not  only  manual  labor  is 
meant,  but  the  equally  important  la- 
bor of  organization  and  direction.  In 
the  United  States  particularly,  the  gen- 
eral effectiveness  of  labor  depends  in 
great  degree  on  the  work  of  the  indus- 
trial leaders. 

Now,  when  once  there  prevails  a 
high  range  of  wages,  due  to  generally 
productive  application  of  labor,  this 
high  rate  comes  to  be  considered  a  diffi- 
culty, an  obstacle.  The  business  point 
of  view  is  commonly  taken  in  these 
matters,  not  only  by  the  business  men 
themselves,  but  by  the  rest  of  the  com- 
munity. To  have  to  pay  high  wages  is 
a  discouraging  thing  to  the  employer; 
does  it  not  obviously  make  expenses 
large,  and  competition  difficult?  People 
do  not  reflect  that  if  wages  are  high, 
and  steadily  remain  high,  there  must 
be  something  to  pay  them  from.  High 
wages,  once  established,  are  taken,  in 
a  country  like  the  United  States,  as 
part  of  the  inevitable  order  of  things. 
The  ordinary  man  regards  them  simply 
as  something  which  he  must  face,  and 
too  often  as  something  that  constitutes 
a  drawback  in  industry. 

The  important  thing,  of  course,  is 
that  wages  should  be  high  not  merely 
in  terms  of  money,  but  in  commodi- 
ties —  '  real '  wages  as  distinguished 
from  money  wages.  Of  money  wages 
more  will  be  said  presently.  High  real 
wages,  to  speak  for  the  moment  with 
reference  to  these,  cannot  possibly  be 
paid  by  employers  generally  unless  the 


workmen  generally  (as  guided  by  the 
employers  and  aided  by  tools  and  ma- 
chines) turn  out  a  large  product.  In 
current  discussions  of  the  tariff  and 
wages,  it  has  often  been  alleged  that  in 
one  industry  or  another  the  skill  or 
effectiveness  of  the  workmen  is  no 
greater  in  the  United  States  than  in 
England  or  Germany;  that  the  tools 
and  machines  are  no  better,  the  raw 
materials  no  cheaper.  How,  then,  it  is 
asked,  can  the  Americans  get  higher 
wages  unless  protected  against  the 
competition  of  the  Europeans?  But, 
it  may  be  asked  in  turn,  suppose  all  the 
Americans  were  not  a  whit  more  skill- 
ful and  productive  than  the  Euro- 
peans; suppose  the  plane  of  industrial 
effectiveness  to  be  precisely  the  same 
in  the  countries  compared  —  how  could 
wages  be  higher  in  the  United  States? 
The  source  of  all  the  income  of  a  com- 
munity obviously  is  the  output  of  its 
industry.  If  its  industry  is  no  more 
effective,  if  its  labor  produces  no  more 
than  that  of  another  country,  how  can 
its  material  prosperity  be  greater,  and 
how  can  wages  be  higher?  A  high  gen- 
eral rate  of  real  wages  could  not  pos- 
sibly be  maintained  unless  there  were 
in  its  industries  at  large  a  high  general 
productiveness. 

But  when  once  these  two  concomi- 
tant phenomena  have  come  to  exist,  — 
a  high  effectiveness  of  industry  and  a 
high  general  rate  of  wages,  —  it  follows 
that  any  industry  in  which  labor  is  not 
effective,  in  which  the  plane  of  effect- 
iveness is  below  that  in  most  industries, 
finds  itself  from  the  business  point  of 
view  at  a  disadvantage.  It  must  meet 
the  general  scale  of  wages  in  order  to 
attract  workmen;  yet  the  workmen  do 
not  produce  enough  to  enable  that  gen- 
eral scale  to  be  met  and  a  profit  still 
secured.  Such  an  industry,  in  the 
terms  of  the  principle  now  under  dis- 
cussion, is  working  at  a  comparative 
disadvantage.  It  has  a  heavy  compara- 


WHAT  INDUSTRIES  ARE  WORTH  HAVING 


703 


tive  cost.  In  other  industries,  product 
is  high;  that  is,  labor  cost  is  low.  In 
this  industry,  product  is  low;  that  is, 
labor  cost  is  high.  The  industry  does 
not  measure  up  to  the  country's  stand- 
ard, and  finds  in  that  standard  an  ob- 
stacle to  its  prosecution. 

Consider  the  same  problem  from  the 
point  of  view  of  money  wages.  Here 
again  we  are  beset  by  everyday  falla- 
cies and  superficialities.  High  money 
wages,  it  is  commonly  alleged,  cannot 
be  paid  unless  there  be  high  prices  of 
the  goods  made.  A  dear  man  is  sup- 
posed to  mean  dear  bread,  and  a  cheap 
man,  cheap  bread.  Yet  is  it  not  ob- 
vious that  if  all  bread  and  meat  and 
coats  and  hats  were  high  in  price,  high 
money  wages  would  be  of  no  avail?  It 
is  certain  that  not  only  are  money 
wages  higher  in  the  United  States  than 
in  European  countries,  but  the  prices 
of  things  bought  are,  on  the  whole, 
not  higher.  Although  some  things  cost 
more,  and  the  higher  money  wages 
therefore  do  not  mean  commodity 
wages  higher  in  the  same  degree,  these 
higher  money  wages  do  mean  that  real 
wages  are  higher  by  a  substantial 
amount.  The  dear  man  does  not,  in 
fact,  mean  dear  food.  The  explanation 
is  obvious:  although  wages  in  money 
are  high,  the  effectiveness  of  the  dear 
man's  labor  on  the  whole  is  also  high, 
and  therefore  goods  on  the  whole  are 
not  dear.  When  a  man  who  is  paid 
high  wages  turns  out  a  large  number  of 
pieces,  each  piece  can  be  sold  at  a  low 
price,  and  the  employer  still  can  afford 
to  pay  the  high  wages.  With  reference 
to  individuals,  the  business  world  is 
constantly  accepting  this  principle.  A 
good  man,  we  are  told,  is  cheap  even 
at  high  wages.  To  use  the  same  phrase, 
a  good  industry  is  cheap  even  although 
high  wages  are  paid  in  it.  Where  labor 
is  effective,  high  wages  and  low  prices 
go  together. 

None  the  less,  an  established  high 


rate  of  wages  always  presents  itself  to 
the  individual  employer  as  something 
that  has  to  be  overcome.  And  to  the 
employed  it  presents  itself  as  a  thing 
in  danger,  —  something  that  must  be 
jealously  guarded.  Yet  there  is  a  real 
difficulty  for  the  employer  only  when 
the  effectiveness  of  labor  is  not  great. 
And,  for  the  employee,  so  far  as  the 
competition  of  foreign  products  is  con- 
cerned, an  industry  needs  no  protection 
where  this  same  essential  condition  is 
found.  If,  indeed,  such  effectiveness 
does  not  exist,  then  the  American  em- 
ployer cannot  pay  the  prevailing  high 
rate  of  wages  and  hold  his  own  in  free 
competition  with  competitors  in  coun- 
tries of  lower  wages.  In  other  words, 
he  cannot  hold  his  own  unless  there  is 
a  comparative  advantage  in  his  par- 
ticular industry.  The  general  high  rate 
of  wages  is  due  to  the  fact  that  in  the 
dominating  parts  of  the  country's  in- 
dustrial activity  the  comparative  ad- 
vantage exists.  These  dominating  in- 
dustries set  the  pace;  in  them  we  find 
the  basis  of  the  high  scale;  it  is  they 
which  set  a  standard  which  others  must 
meet,  and  which  presents  itself  to 
others  as  an  obstacle. 

The  principle  of  comparative  cost 
applies  more  fully  and  unequivocally 
in  the  United  States  than  in  any  coun- 
try where  conditions  are  known  to 
me.  The  difference  in  money  wages 
between  the  United  States  and  Euro- 
pean countries  is  marked;  the  difference 
in  *  real '  or  commodity  wages,  though 
not  so  great,  is  also  marked.  Not- 
withstanding these  high  wages,  consti- 
tuting an  apparent  obstacle  for  the 
domestic  producers,  the  United  States 
steadily  exports  all  sorts  of  commodi- 
ties, —  not  only  agricultural  products, 
but  manufactures  of  various  kinds. 
Evidently  they  could  not  be  exported 
unless  they  were  sold  abroad  as  cheap- 
ly as  foreign  goods  of  the  same  sort 
are  there  sold.  That  these  products  of 


704 


WHAT  INDUSTRIES  ARE  WORTH  HAVING 


highly  paid  labor  are  exported  and  are 
sold  abroad,  is  proof  that  American 
industry  has  in  them  a  comparative 
advantage. 

There  are  other  goods  which,  though 
not  exported,  are  also  not  imported; 
goods  where  the  balance  of  advantage 
is  even,  so  to  speak.  They  are  the  pro- 
ducts of  industries  in  which  American 
labor  is  effective,  yet  not  effective  to 
the  highest  pitch;  effective  in  propor- 
tion to  the  higher  range  of  money 
wages  in  the  country,  but  barely  in  that 
proportion. 

And  finally,  there  are  the  goods  whose 
importation  continues,  even  though 
there  is  no  obvious  obstacle  to  their  do- 
mestic production  from  soil  or  climate. 
These  are  things  which,  it  would  seem, 
could  be  produced  to  as  good  advantage 
at  home  as  abroad.  They  could  be  pro- 
duced to  as  good  advantage;  but  they 
lack  the  comparative  advantage.  They 
do  not  measure  up  to  the  standard  set 
by  the  dominant  industries.  There  are 
no  physical  difficulties  in  the  way  of 
their  successful  production;  but  there 
is  an  economic  difficulty.  They  find  in 
high  wages  an  insuperable  obstacle  to 
competition  with  the  foreigners.  And 
in  this  class  belong  those  industries 
which  are  protected,  and  which  would 
not  hold  their  own  without  protection. 
They  are  in  a  position  analogous  to 
that  of  the  strictly  domestic  industries 
in  which  labor  is  not  •  effective,  but 
which  are  nevertheless  carried  on  of 
necessity  within  the  country,  with  high 
prices  made  necessary  by  high  money 
wages.  The  obvious  difference  between 
the  two  cases  is,  that  the  force  which 
causes  the  strictly  domestic  industries 
to  be  carried  on  is  an  unalterable  one, 
such  as  the  difficulty  or  impossibility 
of  transportation;  while  that  which 
causes  the  protected  industries  to  be- 
come domesticated  is  the  artificial  one 
of  a  legislative  barrier. 

What,  now,  are  the  causes  of  com- 


parative advantage?  or,  to  put  the 
question  in  other  words,  what  are  the 
industries  in  which  a  comparative  ad- 
vantage is  likely  to  appear? 

The  more  common  answer  has  been, 
the  agricultural  industries.  In  a  new 
country,  with  abundance  of  fertile  land, 
labor  is  turned  with  most  effectiveness 
to  the  extractive  industries.  Hence  the 
United  States  has  long  exported  wheat, 
cotton,  meat  products.  Hence  Canada 
is  now  a  heavy  exporter  of  wheat. 
Wheat  is  specially  adapted  to  extens- 
ive culture,  and  is  easily  transporta- 
ble; it  is  the  commodity  for  which  nat- 
ure often  gives  to  a  new  country  in 
the  temperate  zone  a  clear  advantage. 
Throughout  the  nineteenth  century, 
the  international  trade  of  the  United 
States  no  doubt  was  controlled  chiefly 
by  this  cause.  The  country  was  in  the 
main  agricultural. 

It  should  be  noted,  however,  that 
not  only  the  natural  resources  told, 
but  the  manner  in  which  they  were 
used.  From  the  first,  effectiveness  and 
invention  were  shown.  The  United 
States  soon  became  the  great  country 
of  agricultural  machinery.  During 
the  second  half  of  the  nineteenth  cent- 
ury, the  skill  of  the  makers  of  agricul- 
tural implements,  and  the  intelligence 
of  the  farmers  who  used  the  imple- 
ments, were  not  less  important  factors 
than  the  great  stretches  of  new  land. 
Still  another  factor  of  importance  was 
the  cheapening  of  transportation.  Our 
railroads  have  cheapened  long  hauls  as 
nowhere  else.  The  most  striking  im- 
provements of  this  sort  were  made  in 
the  last  third  of  the  nineteenth  cent- 
ury. Then  new  lands  were  opened  and 
agricultural  products  exported  on  a 
scale  not  before  thought  possible.  When 
the  effectiveness  of  labor  is  spoken  of 
by  economists,  the  effectiveness  of  all 
the  labor  needed  to  bring  an  article 
to  market  is  meant;  not  merely  that  of 
the  labor  immediately  and  obviously 


WHAT  INDUSTRIES  ARE  WORTH  HAVING 


705 


applied  (like  that  of  the  farmer  in  this 
case),  but  that  of  the  inventor  and  the 
maker  of  the  threshing-machine,  and 
that  of  the  manager  of  railways  and 
ships.  The  labor  of  the  directing  heads, 
of  the  planners  and  designers,  tells  in 
high  degree  for  the  final  effectiveness 
of  the  labor  which  is  applied  through 
all  the  successive  stages  of  industry. 

The  economic  condition  of  the 
United  States  began  to  change  with 
the  opening  of  the  twentieth  century. 
The  period  of  limitless  free  land  was 
then  passed,  and  with  it  the  possibility 
of  increasing  agricultural  production 
under  the  specially  advantageous  con- 
ditions of  new  countries.  For  one  great 
agricultural  article,  cotton,  the  com- 
parative advantage  of  the  country  has 
indeed  maintained  itself,  and  the  ex- 
ports of  cotton  continue  to  play  a  great 
part  in  international  trade.  The  ex- 
ports of  other  agricultural  products  — 
wheat,  corn,  barley,  meat  products  — 
have  by  no  means  ceased,  nor  will  they 
cease  for  some  time.  But  they  tend  to 
decline,  absolutely  and,  even  more,  re- 
latively. Other  articles  grow  in  im- 
portance, such  as  copper,  petroleum, 
iron  and  steel  products,  various  manu- 
factures. For  some  of  these,  such  as 
copper,  the  richness  of  our  natural  re- 
sources is  doubtless  of  controlling  im- 
portance. But  the  manner  in  which 
these  natural  resources  are  turned  to 
account  is  important  throughout;  and 
in  many  cases  the  comparative  ad- 
vantage of  which  the  exports  are  proof, 
rests  not  on  the  favor  of  nature  at  all, 
but  solely  on  the  better  application  of 
labor  under  conditions  inherently  no 
more  promising  than  those  of  other 
countries. 

What  are  the  causes  of  advantage 
under  these  less  simple  conditions? 

The  question  may  be  asked  regard- 
ing a  closely  allied  phenomenon,  re- 
ferred to  a  moment  ago.  A  consider- 
able range  of  manufactured  articles, 

VOL.  Ill  -  NO.  5 


though  not  exported,  are  yet  not  im- 
ported. The  domestic  manufacturer 
holds  the  market,  while  paying  higher 
wages  than  his  foreign  competitor. 
The  range  of  such  industries  is,  in  my 
opinion,  wider  than  is  commonly  sup- 
posed. It  is  obscured  by  the  fact  that 
our  tariff  system  imposes  useless  and 
inoperative  duties  on  many  articles 
which  could  not  be  imported  in  any 
case.  On  the  other  hand,  there  is  a  con- 
siderable range  of  articles  on  which  the 
duties  have  a  substantial  effect;  arti- 
cles which  would  be  imported  but  for 
the  tariff.  There  are,  again,  things 
which  continue  to  be  imported  not- 
withstanding high  duties,  —  which 
pour  in  over  the  tariff  wall.  Why  the 
difference  between  the  two  sets  of  cases, 
—  those  in  which  the  domestic  manu- 
facturer holds  his  own,  irrespective  of 
duties;  and  those  in  which  he  needs 
the  duties,  or  even  is  beaten  notwith- 
standing tariff  support? 

The  answer  commonly  given  is  that 
American  producers  can  hold  their 
own  more  easily  when  much  machin- 
ery is  used.  Then,  it  is  said,  wages 
will  form  a  smaller  proportion  of  the 
expenses  of  production,  and  the  higher 
wages  of  the  United  States  will  be  a 
less  serious  obstacle.  But  it  requires  no 
great  economic  insight  to  see  that  this 
only  pushes  the  question  back  a  step 
further.  Why  is  not  the  machinery 
more  expensive?  The  machinery  was 
itself  made  by  labor.  A  commodity 
made  with  much  use  of  machinery  is  in 
reality  the  product  of  two  sets  of  la- 
borers, —  those  who  make  the  ma- 
chinery and  those  who  operate  it.  If  all 
those  whose  labor  is  combined  for  pro- 
ducing the  final  result  are  paid  higher 
wages  than  in  foreign  countries,  why 
cannot  the  foreigner  undersell  when 
much  machinery  is  used,  as  well  as 
when  little  is  used? 

The  real  reason  why  Americans  are 
more  likely  to  hold  their  own  where 


706 


WHAT  INDUSTRIES  ARE  WORTH  HAVING 


machinery  is  much  used,  and  where 
hand  labor  plays  a  comparatively 
small  part  in  the  expenses  of  produc- 
tion, is  that  Americans  make  and  use 
machinery  better.  They  turn  to  labor- 
saving  devices  more  quickly,  and  they 
use  devices  that  save  more  labor.  The 
question  remains  one  of  comparative 
advantage.  Where  Americans  can  ap- 
ply machinery,  they  do  so;  and  not 
only  apply  it,  but  apply  it  better  than 
their  foreign  competitors.  Their  ma- 
chinery is  not  necessarily  cheaper,  ab- 
solutely; often  it  is  dearer;  but  it  is 
cheap  relatively  to  its  effectiveness.  It 
is  better  machinery,  and  the  labor  that 
works  it  turns  out  in  the  end  a  pro- 
duct that  costs  not  more,  but  less,  than 
the  same  product  costs  in  countries 
using  no  such  devices,  or  using  devices 
not  so  good. 

This  sort  of  comparative  advantage 
is  most  likely  to  appear  in  two  classes 
of  industries,  —  those  that  turn  out 
large  quantities  of  staple  homogene- 
ous commodities,  and  those  that  them- 
selves make  tools  and  machinery.  A 
machine-using  people  directs  its  ener- 
gies to  best  advantage  where  thou- 
sands of  goods  of  the  same  pattern  are 
produced.  Specialties,  and  goods  sal- 
able only  in  small  quantities,  such  as 
luxuries  bought  by  the  rich,  goods  of 
rare  pattern,  and  the  like,  —  these  are 
likely  to  be  imported.  Ready-made 
goods,  all  of  one  pattern,  bought  by  the 
masses,  are  likely  to  be  produced  at 
home,  without  danger  from  competing 
imports.  Goods  made  to  order  must  be 
supplied  by  domestic  producers,  and 
these  are  likely  to  be  what  the  customer 
thinks  inordinately  dear;  because  they 
are  made  preponderantly,  or  at  least 
in  greater  degree,  by  hand  labor,  which 
is  paid  high  wages,  and  which  by  the 
very  condition  of  the  case  cannot  use 
labor-saving  machinery.  Again,  imple- 
ments themselves,  big  and  little,  are 
likely  to  be  well  made  in  a  country 


where  people  are  constantly  turning  to 
machinery:  from  kitchen  utensils  and 
household  hardware  to  machine  tools, 
electric  apparatus,  and  huge  printing- 
presses.  These  are  things  in  which  the 
success  of  American  industry  is  famil- 
iar; which  are  exported,  not  imported; 
in  which  it  is  proverbial  that  the 
Yankee  has  a  peculiar  knack  —  only 
another  way  of  saying  that  he  has  a 
comparative  advantage. 

In  creating  and  maintaining  this  sort 
of  advantage  in  manufacturing  indus- 
tries, the  importance  of  the  industrial 
leader  has  probably  become  greater  in 
recent  times.  The  efficiency  of  the  in- 
dividual workman  is  often  dwelt  on  in 
discussions  of  the  rivalries  of  different 
countries:  aptitude,  skill,  intelligence, 
alertness,  perhaps  inherited  traits.  No 
doubt,  qualities  of  this  sort  have 
counted  in  the  international  trade  of 
the  United  States,  and  still  count.  The 
American  mechanic  is  a  handy  fellow; 
it  is  from  his  ranks  that  the  inventors 
and  business  leaders  have  been  largely 
recruited;  and  he  can  run  a  machine 
so  as  to  make  it  work  at  its  best.  But 
there  is  a  steady  tendency  to  make 
machinery  automatic,  and  thus  largely 
independent  of  the  skill  of  the  opera- 
tive. The  mechanics  who  construct  the 
machines  and  keep  them  in  repair 
must  indeed  be  highly  skilled.  But 
when  the  elaborate  machine  has  been 
constructed  and  is  kept  in  running 
order,  the  operative  simply  needs  to  be 
assiduous.  Under  such  circumstances, 
the  essential  basis  of  a  comparative  ad- 
vantage in  the  machine-using  indus- 
tries is  found  in  management,  unflag- 
ging invention,  rapid  adoption  of  the 
best  devices. 

The  business  leader  has  been  through- 
out a  person  of  greater  consequence 
in  the  United  States  than  elsewhere. 
He  has  loomed  large  in  social  conse- 
quence because  he  has  been  of  the 
first  economic  consequence.  He  has 


WHAT  INDUSTRIES  ARE  WORTH  HAVING 


707 


constructed  the  railways,  and  opened 
up  the  country;  he  has  contributed 
immensely  to  the  utilization  of  the 
great  agricultural  resources;  he  has  led 
and  guided  the  inventor  and  mechanic. 
I  am  far  from  being  disposed  to  sing 
his  praises;  there  are  sins  enough  to  be 
laid  to  his  account;  but  he  has  played 
an  enormous  part  in  giving  American 
industry  its  special  characteristics. 
His  part  is  no  less  decisive  now  than  it 
was  in  former  times;  nay,  it  is  more  so. 
The  labor  conditions  brought  about  by 
the  enormous  immigration  of  recent 
decades  have  put  at  his  disposal  a 
vast  supply  of  docile,  assiduous,  un- 
trained workmen.  He  has  adapted  his 
methods  of  production  to  the  new  sit- 
uation. His  own  energy,  and  the  in- 
genuity and  attention  of  his  engineers 
and  inventors  and  mechanics,  have 
been  turned  to  devising  machinery 
that  will  almost  run  itself.  Here  the 
newly  arrived  immigrant  can  be  used. 
So  far  as  the  American  can  do  this 
sort  of  machinery-making  to  peculiar 
advantage,  so  far  can  he  pay  the  im- 
migrant wages  on  the  higher  Ameri- 
can scale,  and  yet  hold  his  own  against 
the  European  competitor  who  pays 
lower  wages  to  the  immigrant's  stay- 
at-home  fellow.  But  it  is  on  this  con- 
dition only  that  he  can  afford  (in  the 
absence  of  tariff  support)  to  pay  him 
wages  on  the  American  scale,  or  on 
some  approach  to  it,  —  namely,  that 
he  make  the  total  labor  more  effective. 
The  main  cause  of  greater  effective- 
ness must  then  be  found,  not  in  the  in- 
dustrial quality  of  the  rank  and  file, 
but  in  that  of  the  technical  and  busi- 
ness leaders. 

A  new  possibility  then  presents  it- 
self, however,  and  one  which  has  played 
a  considerable  part  in  recent  tariff  dis- 
cussion. The  more  automatic  machin- 
ery becomes,  the  more  readily  can  it  be 
transplanted.  Is  there  not  a  likelihood 
that  this  almost  self-acting  apparatus 


will  be  bought  by  the  countries  of  low 
wages,  and  there  used  for  producing 
articles  at  lower  price  than  is  possible 
in  those  countries  of  high  wages  where 
the  apparatus  originated  ?  In  hearings 
before  our  Congressional  committees, 
a  fear  is  often  expressed  that  Amer- 
ican inventors  and  tool-makers  will  find 
themselves  in  such  a  plight.  American 
skill,  it  is  said,  will  devise  a  new  ma- 
chine; then  an  export  of  the  machine 
itself,  or  of  its  products,  will  set  in. 
Next,  some  German  will  buy  a  speci- 
men (the  Germans  have  been  arch- 
plagiarists)  ,  and  reproduce  the  machine 
in  his  own  country.  Soon,  not  only 
will  the  exports  of  the  machine  cease, 
but  the  machine  itself  will  be  operated 
in  Germany  by  low-paid  labor,  and  the 
article  made  by  its  aid  will  be  sent  back 
to  the  United  States.  Shoe  machinery 
and  knitting  machinery  have  been 
cited  in  illustration.  The  identical  ap- 
paratus which  has  been  brought  in  the 
United  States  to  such  extraordinary 
perfection  is  sent  to  Europe  (even  made 
in  Europe  by  the  American  manufac- 
turer), and  is  there  worked  by  cheaper 
labor.  The  automatic  looms,  again, 
which  have  so  strikingly  influenced  the 
textile  industry  of  the  United  States 
and  so  much  increased  its  effectiveness, 
are  making  their  way  to  Europe,  and 
here  again  are  being  pushed  into  use  by 
the  American  loom-makers  themselves. 
Is  it  not  to  be  expected  that  they  will 
be  operated  by  cheaper  English  and 
German  and  French  labor,  and  that 
their  products  will  be  shipped  back  to 
the  United  States,  to  the  destruction 
of  the  very  American  industry  which 
they  had  first  made  strong  and  inde- 
pendent? 

This  possibility  is  subject  to  exag- 
geration. It  is  not  so  easy  as  might 
be  supposed  to  transplant  an  improved 
system  of  production,  and  all  that 
hangs  thereby.  However  automatic  a 
machine  may  be,  some  intelligence  and 


708 


WHAT  INDUSTRIES  ARE  WORTH  HAVING 


knack  in  operating  it  are  always  called 
for;  though  less,  perhaps,  among  the 
ordinary  hands  than  among  the  ma- 
chine-tenders and  foremen.  It  is  a 
common  experience  that  machinery 
will  yield  better  results  in  the  country 
of  its  invention  and  manufacture  than 
when  transplanted.  Those  very  auto- 
matic looms,  just  referred  to,  are  mak- 
ing their  way  into  Europe  very  slowly. 
They  do  not  fit  into  the  traditional  in- 
dustrial practices,  and  do  not  accom- 
plish what  they  accomplish  in  the 
United  States. 

The  difficulties  which  thus  impede 
the  transfer  of  machinery  and  meth- 
ods, are  most  strikingly  illustrated  in 
the  rivalry  of  the  Orient.  We  hear 
frequently  of  the  menace  of  the  cheap 
labor  of  China,  India,  Japan.  Will 
not  those  countries  deluge  us  with  the 
products  of  cheap  factory  labor,  when 
once  they  have  equipped  themselves 
with  our  own  machinery?  The  truth  is 
that  in  all  probability  they  will  never 
equip  themselves.  To  do  so,  would 
require  more  than  the  mere  shipment 
of  the  machinery  and  the  directions 
for  working  it.  A  completely  different 
industrial  environment  and  equipment 
would  need  to  be  transplanted.  The 
yellow  peril  has  been  as  much  exag- 
gerated in  its  economic  as  in  its  mili- 
tary aspect. 

None  the  less,  some  possibility  of 
this  sort  does  exist,  especially  in  the 
rivalry  between  those  countries  of  ad- 
vanced civilization  which  are  more 
nearly  on  the  same  industrial  level.  It 
is  by  no  means  out  of  the  question  that 
shoe  machinery  or  automatic  looms 
may  be  worked  as  well  in  Germany  as 
in  the  United  States.  Supposing  this  to 
be  done,  cannot  the  German  employer, 
who  gets  his  operatives  at  low  wages, 
undersell  the  American  employer,  who 
must  pay  high  wages?  Is  not  the  com- 
parative advantage  which  the  United 
States  possesses  in  its  ingenious  ma- 


chinery necessarily  an  elusive  one,  sure 
to  slip  away  in  time?  The  advantage 
may  indeed  be  retained  indefinitely, 
where  skill  or  intelligence  on  the  part 
of  the  individual  workman  is  necessary. 
Even  here  there  is  a  doubt  whether  it 
will  persist,  in  view  of  the  spread  of 
education  and  technical  training  the 
world  over.  Certainly  in  the  widening 
range  of  industries  where  the  workmen 
merely  tend  semi-automatic  machin- 
ery, the  manufacturing  industries  of 
the  country  having  high  wages  would 
seem  to  be  in  a  perilous  situation. 

The  only  answer  which  can  be  given 
to  questioning  of  this  sort  is  that  the 
leading  country  must  retain  its  lead. 
As  fast  as  other  countries  adopt  the 
known  and  tried  improvements,  it 
must  introduce  new  improvements. 
Unrelaxed  progress  is  essential  to  sus- 
tained superiority.  He  who  stands 
still,  inevitably  loses  first  place.  Such 
was,  in  the  main,  the  relation  between 
England  and  the  other  Western  coun- 
tries during  the  first  three  quarters  of 
the  nineteenth  century.  English  ma- 
chinery was  exported,  and  English 
methods  were  copied,  throughout  the 
world;  but  the  lead  of  the  British  was 
none  the  less  maintained.  As  fast  as 
the  other  countries  adopted  the  devices 
which  originated  in  England,  that 
country  advanced  with  new  inventions, 
or  with  goods  of  new  grades.  A  similar 
relation  seems  to  exist  at  the  present 
time  between  Germany  and  the  other 
countries  which  follow  the  German 
lead  in  some  of  the  chemical  industries. 
It  appears  again  in  the  position  of  the 
United  States  in  those  manufactur- 
ing industries  which  contribute  to  our 
exports.  As  fast  as  the  American  de- 
vices are  copied  elsewhere,  still  other 
improvements  must  be  introduced. 

This  will  seem  to  the  American  man- 
ufacturer a  harsh  sentence,  and  to 
the  ordinary  protectionist  a  heartless 
one,  even  unpatriotic.  What?  To  be 


WHAT  INDUSTRIES  ARE  WORTH  HAVING 


709 


deprived  of  the  fruits  of  our  own  en- 
terprise and  ingenuity,  without  pro- 
tection from  a  paternal  government 
against  the  interlopers?  Yet  I  see  no 
other  answer  consistent  with  a  rational 
attitude  toward  international  trade 
and  the  geographical  division  of  labor. 
The  gain  which  a  country  secures  from 
its  labor  is  largest  when  its  labor  is  ap- 
plied in  the  most  effective  way;  and 
labor  is  applied  with  the  greatest  effect- 
iveness only  when  it  proves  this  effect- 
iveness by  sustained  ability  to  hold 
the  field  constantly  against  rivals. 

This  course  of  reasoning  can  be  car- 
ried further.  It  is  conceivable  that  im- 
provements and  inventions  will  be  so 
completely  adopted  in  the  end  by  all 
the  advanced  countries  as  to  bring 
about  an  equalization  in  their  indus- 
trial condition.  The  necessary  conse- 
quence would  be  a  lessening  of  the  vol- 
ume of  trade  between  them.  Where 
an  invention  is  introduced  in  a  single 
country,  it  gives  that  country  at  the 
outset  a  comparative  advantage,  leads 
to  exports,  and  swells  international 
trade.  But  if  the  improvement  is  adopt- 
ed in  all  countries  with  the  same  ef- 
fectiveness, if  there  is  universal  adop- 
tion of  the  best,  then  the  ultimate 
consequences  will  be  different.  No  one 
country  will  then  possess  advantages 
in  manufactures  over  others;  no  one 
will  be  able  to  export  to  another;  trade 
between  them  in  manufactured  goods 
will  cease.  All  countries  will  secure,  in 
the  same  degree,  the  benefit  of  the  uni- 
versalized inventions.  All  will  be  on 
the  same  plane,  and  differences  in  gen- 
eral prosperity  and  in  rates  of  wages 
will  be  wiped  out.  Then  there  will  be 
no  room  for  comparative  advantages 
based  on  invention,  peculiar  effective- 
ness, better  machinery,  more  skillful 
organization.  Under  such  conditions 
the  only  trade  between  countries  would 
be  that  based  on  unalterable  climatic, 
or  physical,  advantages;  such  trade,  for 


instance,  as  arises  between  tropical  and 
temperate  regions,  and  between  tem- 
perate regions  having  markedly  dif- 
ferent natural  resources. 

This  consummation  will  not  be  reach- 
ed for  an  indefinite  period;  nay,  prob- 
ably it  will  never  be  reached.  Certainly 
it  is  beyond  the  range  of  possibility  for 
any  future  which  we  can  now  foresee. 
But  some  approach  to  it  is  likely  to 
come  in  the  relations  between  the  more 
advanced  countries.  There  is  a  tend- 
ency toward  equalization  in  their  use 
of  machinery  and  of  factory  methods, 
and  so  in  their  general  industrial  con- 
ditions. For  the  United  States  espe- 
cially, the  twentieth  century  will  be 
different  from  the  nineteenth.  The 
period  of  free  land  has  been  virtually 
passed.  That  great  basis  of  high  ma- 
terial prosperity,  and  of  high  general 
wages,  is  no  longer  as  broad  and  strong 
as  it  was  during  the  first  century  of  our 
national  life.  The  continued  mainten- 
ance of  a  degree  of  prosperity  greater 
than  that  of  England  and  Germany 
and  France  must  rest  on  other  causes. 
In  the  future,  a  higher  effectiveness  of 
labor  must  depend  almost  exclusively 
on  better  implements  and  higher  skill; 
on  labor  better  led  and  better  applied. 
It  may  reasonably  be  hoped  that  the 
United  States  will  long  remain  the 
land  of  promise,  in  the  van  of  material 
progress;  but  the  degree  of  difference 
may  be  less  than  it  was.  This  lessening 
difference  will  probably  come  about, 
not  because  the  United  States  will  fall 
back,  but  because  other  countries  will 
gain  on  her.  Such  has  been  the  nature 
of  the  changed  relation  between  Eng- 
land and  the  countries  of  the  Conti- 
nent during  the  last  generation;  and 
such  —  to  go  back  earlier  —  was  the 
change  in  the  relative  positions  of  Hol- 
land and  England  in  the  course  of  the 
seventeenth  and  eighteenth  centuries. 
England  no  longer  retains  the  unmis- 
takable leadership  which  she  had  over 


710 


WHAT  INDUSTRIES  ARE  WORTH  HAVING 


the  Continent  during  the  greater  part 
of  the  nineteenth  century.  But  she  has 
not  retrograded;  the  countries  of  the 
Continent  have  progressed.  Such  is 
likely  to  be  the  nature  of  the  coming 
race  between  the  United  States  and 
other  advanced  countries.  And  this 
outcome  is  one  which  every  friend  of 
humanity  must  welcome.  It  means 
diffused  prosperity,  wider  social  pro- 
gress. 

For  an  indefinite  time,  however,  dif- 
ferences in  general  industrial  effective- 
ness will  remain.  They  will  obviously 
remain,  so  far  as  natural  causes  un- 
derlie them,  —  differences  in  soil,  in 
mineral  wealth,  in  climate.  They  will 
remain  also  in  many  manufacturing  in- 
dustries in  which  physical  causes  are 
not  decisive.  The  United  States,  we 
may  hope  and  expect,  will  apply  labor- 
saving  appliances  more  freely.  The 
growth  of  the  different  industries  will 
unquestionably  continue  to-be  affected 
by  the  accidents  of  invention  and  of 
progress,  by  dominant  personalities  in 
this  country  and  in  that,  by  the  his- 
torical development  of  aptitudes  and 
tastes,  by  some  causes  of  variation  in 
industrial  leadership  that  seem  inscrut- 
able. But  a  general  trend  is  likely  to 
persist:  in  the  United  States,  labor- 
saving  devices  will  be  adopted  more 
quickly  and  more  widely,  and  the  peo- 
ple of  the  United  States  will  direct  their 
labor  with  greatest  advantage  to  the 
industries  in  which  their  abilities  thus 
tell  to  the  utmost. 

Nothing  is  more  familiar  in  current 
talk  on  the  tariff  than  the  implication 
that  it  is  desirable  to  *  acquire'  an  in- 
dustry. When  it  appears  that  certain 
linen  or  silk  fabrics  are  imported,  or 


lemons  or  sugar,  some  one  will  be  sure 
to  suggest  that  we  clap  on  a  duty  in 
order  to  acquire  one  of  these  *  valuable ' 
industries.  The  assumption  is  that 
domestic  production  is  advantageous 
per  se,  and  imports  always  disadvan- 
tageous. This  is  the  unqualified  pro- 
tectionist doctrine :  the  crudest  form  of 
protectionism,  but  very  widespread. 
He  who  holds  it  will,  of  course,  pooh- 
pooh  everything  that  has  been  said  in 
the  preceding  pages.  To  him,  all  do- 
mestic industries  are  worth  while,  and 
always  worth  while.  There  is  no  ques- 
tion of  choosing,  still  less  of  allowing 
capital  and  labor  to  take  their  un- 
fettered choice.  No;  let  us  acquire 
any  and  every  industry,  and  make  all 
things  within  our  own  borders. 

He  who,  on  the  other  hand,  accepts 
the  reasoning  of  the  preceding  pages 
is  not  necessarily  an  unqualified  free- 
trader.   He  may  admit,  for  example, 
the  force  of  the  young-industries  argu- 
ment:   that    sometimes    an    industry 
which,  in  its  earlier  stages,  failed  to 
measure  up  to  the  country's  standards, 
improves  its  methods  in  the  course  of 
time,  and  becomes  effective  and  self- 
supporting.  He  may  admit,  too,  that 
there  are  considerations  not  of  a  strict- 
ly economic  character  which  may  tell  in 
favor  of  some  protective  duties.    The 
tariff  controversy  ramifies  far,  and  its 
aspects  are  quite  too  varied  to  be  dis- 
posed of  within  the  range  of  an  article 
like  this.   But  it  is  essential  for  an  un- 
derstanding of  the  controversy  that  one 
should   reflect  on   this  first  question: 
What  industries  are  worth  while?  Any 
and  every  industry?  or  those  in  which 
the  energies  of  the  country  operate 
with  greatest  effectiveness? 


THE  CONTRIBUTORS'  CLUB 


THE  MONSTRIFEROUS   EMPIRE   OF 
WOMEN 

*  First  Blast  of  the  Trumpet  against  the 
Monstrous  Regiment  of  Women.9  This 
title  blows  like  a  winter  wind  in  these 
days  when  our  magazines  and  papers 
are  filled  with  controversies  on  the 
woman  question,  and  with  hot  polem- 
ics on  the  feminist  mind;  and  when 
suffragettes  in  England  are  smashing 
windows  on  the  Strand,  burning  the 
King's  mail,  blowing  up  the  house  of 
the  Chancellor  of  the  Exchequer,  and 
crushing  the  orchids  in  the  gardens  at 
Kew.  It  is  the  title  of  a  book  by  wor- 
thy John  Knox,  written  in  Dieppe  in 
1557,  and  published  in  the  goodly  city 
of  Geneva  in  1558. 

Brave  John  Knox  was  moved  to 
blow  this  blast  on  the  trumpet  because 
a  group  of  five  women  seemed  to  have 
in  their  control  the  realms  of  England, 
Scotland,  and  France,  and  the  destiny 
of  the  Protestant  Faith.  These  mili- 
tant suffragettes  were  Catherine  de 
Medici,  Queen  of  France;  Marie  de 
Lorraine,  Queen  Regent  of  Scotland, 
and  her  daughter  and  sole  heir,  Mary, 
afterwards  Queen  of  Scots;  Mary  Tu- 
dor, Queen  of  England,  and  her  heir 
apparent,  the  Princess  Elizabeth. 

The  horror  of  the  persecutions  in 
England  under  "Bloody  Mary"  was 
the  immediate  cause  for  this  first  blast 
of  the  trumpet.  All  this  woe,  Knox 
believed,  was  due  to  the '  monstriferous 
empire  of  women,'  especially  as  they 
were  personified  in  Mary,  'the  cursed 
lesabel  of  England.'  So,  as  was  his 
custom,  brave  John  Knox  spoke  out, 
when  most  men  considered  it '  discrete ' 
to  be  silent  and  to  walk  softly.  'And 


therefore,  I  say,  that  of  necessitie  it 
is  that  this  monstriferous  empire  of 
women  (which  amongest  all  enormities 
that  this  day  do  abound  upon  the  face 
of  the  hole  earth,  is  most  detestable 
and  damnable)  —  be  openlie  reviled 
and  plainlie  declared,  to  the  end  that 
some  may  repent  and  be  saved.' 

The  reader  will  see  that  he  blows  his 
trumpet  with  no  uncertain  tone.  He  is 
not  afraid  of  those  who  sit  in  the  seats 
of  the  mighty.  Let  them  hear!  'Even 
so  may  the  sound  of  our  weake  trum- 
pet, by  the  support  of  some  wynd 
(blowe  it  from  the  southe,  or  blowe  it 
from  the  northe,  it  is  no  matter)  come 
to  the  ears  of  our  chief  offenders.' 

Like  a  true  Scotchman,  John  Knox 
is  logical.  He  places  his  arguments  in 
battle  array.  The  Empire  of  Woman  is 

1.  Repugnant  to  nature. 

2.  Contumelie  to  God. 

3.  The  subversion  of  good  order,  of 
all  equity  and  justice. 

The  first  argument  is  obvious.  'Man, 
I  say,  in  many  other  cases  blind,  doth 
in  this  behalf,  see  verie  clearlie.'  It  is 
repugnant  to  nature  that  the  blind 
should  lead  the  blind,  and  'that  the 
foolish,  madde,  and  phrenetike  should 
govern  the  discrete.'  And  it  is  plain  to 
see,  he  adds,  that '  women  compared  to 
men  are  weak,  sick,  impotent,  foolish, 
madde,  phrenetike.' 

The  second  argument  is  no  less  ob- 
vious to  John  Knox.  The  Empire  of 
Woman  is  'contumelie  to  God,  a  thing 
most  contrarious  to  his  reveled  will  and 
approved  ordinance,'  because  so  saith 
the  scripture,  especially  Genesis  and 
St.  Paul.  If  females  are  not  worthy  to 
speak  in  meeting,  how  can  the  mon- 
strous regiment  be  rulers  of  the  realm? 

711 


712 


THE  CONTRIBUTORS'  CLUB 


And  like  a  good  scholar  he  has  his 
weighty  authorities.  What  a  scholastic 
artillery  he  commands !  Listen ! '  Politi- 
carum  Aristotelis;  Lib.  50  de  regulis 
juris;  lib.  digestorum;  ad  Senatus  con- 
sul. Velleianum;  Tertull.  de  virginibus 
velandis;  August,  lib.  22.  contra  Faus- 
tum;  Ambros.  in  Hexaemero;  Chrysost. 
homil.  in  genes/ 

John  Knox  does  n't  translate  his 
Latin  like  Chauntecleer.  He  does  n't 
say:  — 

In  principle, 

Mulier  est  hominis  confusio; 
Madame,  the  sentence  of  this  Latin  is  — 
Womman  is  mannes  Joye  and  al  his  blis. 

Quite  the  contrary.  'Madames,  the 
sentence  of  this  Latin  is  that  the  regi- 
ment of  women  is  monstriferous, 
madde,  foolish,  and  phrenetike.'  This 
is  his  translation  of  Tertullian:  'Let 
women  hear  what  Tertullian,  an  olde 
Doctor  saith.  "  Thou  art  the  porte  and 
gate  of  the  devil.  Thou  art  the  first 
transgressor  of  Goddes  lawes.  Thou 
diddest  persuade  and  easily  deceive 
him  whome  the  devil  durst  not  as- 
sault."1 

Nor  does  John  Knox  sympathize  with 
the  familiar  argument  that  women's 
votes  will  remove  divorce,  prohibit 
the  saloon,  and  cleanse  the  body  politic 
of  all  diseases.  '  And  Aristotle,  as  before 
is  touched,  doth  plainly  affirme  that 
wher  soever  women  beare  dominion, 
ther  must  nedes  the  people  be  disor- 
dered, living,  and  abounding  in  all 
intemperance,  given  to  pride,  excess, 
and  vanitie.  And  finallie,  in  the  end, 
that  they  must  needes  come  to  con- 
fusion and  ruine.' 

And  what  comfort  and  consolation 
must  come  to  the  hearts  of  Mr.  Asquith, 
and  Mr.  Lloyd  George,  when  they  hear 
this  valiant  question  addressed  to 
the  monstriferous  regiment  of  women : 
*  Whose  house,  I  pray  you,  ought  the 
Parliament  house  to  be,  Goddes  or  the 
deuilles?' 


'And  nowe,'  says  John  Knox  in  his 
Admonition,  '  to  put  an  end  to  the  first 
blast,  —  by  the  order  of  nature,  by 
the  malediction  and  curse  pronounced 
against  woman,  by  the  mouth  of  St. 
Paul  the  interpreter  of  Goddes  sen- 
tence, by  the  example  of  that  com- 
monwealth, in  which  God  by  his  word 
planted  ordre  and  policie,  and  finally 
by  the  judgement  of  most  godly  men, 
God  hath  dejected  women  from  rule, 
dominion,  empire,  and  authority  above 
men.' 

Within  three  years  after  John  Knox 
had  blown  this  first  blast  on  the 
trumpet  —  and  he  intended  to  blow  it 
thrice  —  Mary  Tudor  and  Mary  de 
Lorraine  were  dead,  Knox  was  leading 
the  Reformation  in  Scotland,  and  Eliz- 
abeth was  Queen  of  England.  Natu- 
rally, Elizabeth  for  several  reasons  did 
not  look  with  enthusiasm  on  this  book. 
So  the  editions  of  1559  and  1561  con- 
tain 'John  Knox's  Declaration'  and 
'Second  Defence  to  Queen  Elizabeth.' 
Notwithstanding  such  illustrious  wo- 
men as  Deborah  of  Israel,  and  Eliza- 
beth of  England,  he  stands  bravely  by 
his  guns.  These  women  are  only  excep- 
tions which  prove  the  rule.  On  the 
whole  the  empire  of  women  is  monstri- 
ferous. And  so  concludes  John  Knox 
to  Elizabeth  Tudor: '  Yf  these  premises 
(as  God  forbid)  neglected,  ye  shall 
begyn  to  brag  of  your  birth,  and  to 
build  your  aucthoritee  upon  your  owne 
law,  flatter  yow  who  so  list,  youre 
felicitie  shal  be  schort.' 

O  John  Knox,  if  this  was  your  first 
blast  upon  the  trumpet  against  the 
monstrous  regiment  of  women,  what 
would  have  been  the  second  and  third 
if  you  were  living  to-day!  You  could 
face  Elizabeth  of  England;  but  could 
you  face  the  militant  suffragette?  If 
even  in  your  time  the  empire  of  woman 
was  monstriferous,  what  amplitude  of 
speech  could  express  your  wrath  as  you 
beheld  'phrenetike'  females  smashing 


THE  CONTRIBUTORS'  CLUB 


713 


windows  on  the  Strand,  burning  the 
King's  mail,  and  crushing  orchids  in 
the  gardens  at  Kew? 

A  NEW  YEAR'S  GIFT  FROM  THE 

BATTLEFIELD 

[THE  following  paragraphs  are  trans- 
lated with  literalness  from  the  letter  of 
a  Greek  soldier,  wounded  in  battle,  to 
his  wife  whom  he  left  in  the  United 
States  when  he  followed  the  patriotic 
call  to  arms.  —  THE  EDITORS.] 

EVERY  year,  my  dear  Christine, 
even  in  our  greatest  poverty,  —  the 
beautiful  poverty  we  have  so  long 
shared  together,  —  I  was  wont  to  make 
you  a  present.  Very  often  this  gift 
had  to  be  simply  a  bunch  of  lilies.  But 
always  have  you  received  it  as  if  it 
were  the  most  precious  jewel,  a  thing 
which  set  great  value  on  the  poor  lilies 
and  showed  your  infinite  kindness. 

Here  where  I  am  this  year,  there  are 
not  even  lilies  together  with  which  I 
might  send  you  my  best  wishes  and 
my  New  Year's  kiss.  Here  spring  only 
mountain  poppies,  dyed  with  the  blood 
of  men.  Their  color  does  not  fit  our 
peaceful  love,  and  I  fear  the  color  of 
the  blood  is  not  love's  fitting  symbol. 
But  I  must  keep  my  custom. 

I  send  you  with  the  bearer  another 
small  gift,  an  ornament  of  a  very  cheap 
metal,  which,  nevertheless  has  cost  me 
very  dear,  since  I  have  almost  paid 
for  it  with  my  life.  I  send  you  a  beau- 
tiful shining  Mauser  bullet,  a  pretty 
work  of  art. 

This  bullet  has  pierced  my  breast, 
and  the  other  day  the  surgeon  made  me 
a  present  of  it,  after  a  long  struggle  he 
had  to  extract  it  from  within  me.  The 
bullet  is  an  heroic  gift,  is  it  not?  But, 
I  beg  of  you  not  to  receive  it  in  its 
heroic  meaning.  I  would  not  like  that 
very  much;  and  would  not  have  you 
believe  that  I  send  it  to  you  as  a  wit- 


ness of  any  heroism  of  mine.  I  am  not 
sending  you  this  bullet,  either  as  a  title 
or  as  a  medal  I  have  acquired,  nor  am 
I  sending  it  that  it  might  speak  before 
you  of  any  sacrifices.  And,  it  is  not  for 
this  reason  that  I  want  you  to  admire 
it  or  to  be  proud  of  it.  It  is  a  bullet 
that  was  washed  in  my  blood.  It  passed 
very  near  my  heart  and  heard  its 
throbs,  which  were  all  for  you,  my 
beloved.  It  is,  you  see,  a  bullet  which 
has  lost  all  its  heroism,  and  has  become 
mild,  peaceful,  passive,  —  just  like  a 
flower. 

Keep  it,  hang  it  on  your  necklace, 
wear  it  next  your  heart,  —  give  it  a 
sympathetic  friendship  in  your  life.  It 
was  a  good  kind  bullet  to  me.  It  did 
not  wish  to  separate  us  forever,  my 
beloved  Christine,  although  it  could 
have  done  so  very  well. 

I  am  going  to  be  out  of  the  hospital 
in  a  few  days.  Perhaps  another  bullet 
will  not  be  as  kind  as  this  one  has  been. 
Perhaps  you  will  not  see  me  again. 
Who  knows?  But  this  small  gift  which 
I  send  to  you,  this  worthless  little 
thing,  which  passed  so  near  my  heart 
as  if  it  wished  to  know  my  innermost 
secrets,  will  always  tell  you  how  I  loved 
you,  even  up  to  the  last  moment  of  my 
life  in  this  world.  Perhaps  this  will 
help  you  not  to  be  jealous  of  my  other 
lover,  for  whose  sake  I  am  now  sacrific- 
ing myself.  For  in  dying  for  the  father- 
land, you  will  understand  that  I  die 
for  you,  for  within  our  love  for  father- 
land lie  hidden  all  other  loves,  longings, 
and  anxieties. 

But  all  these  things  will  be  told  you 
much  better  by  my  little  gift,  which  I 
send  you  together  with  my  sweetest 
kisses. 

THE    SONG   OF   DEBORAH 

THERE  comes  one  day  in  every  year, 
when  for  me  the  drowsy  peace  of  a 
Sunday  afternoon  is  abruptly  shat- 


714 


THE  CONTRIBUTORS'  CLUB 


tered;  when  I  straighten  up  in  my  pew, 
all  my  pulses  leaping  with  delighted 
excitement,  and  cease  to  be  a  Christian 
of  the  Twentieth  Century  and  become 
a  passionate  Israelite  delivered  by  one 
marvelous  stroke  from  the  hand  of 
Jabin,  King  of  Canaan,  the  captain  of 
whose  hosts  was  Sisera. 

I  know  that  this  occurs  some  time  in 
the  late  summer  or  early  autumn,  but 
as  a  rule  I  am  taken  unaware.  I  forget 
that  anything  out  of  the  ordinary  is 
about  to  happen.  Outside  are  the  usual 
whispered  sounds  of  afternoon;  and 
then  suddenly  the  clergyman  begins: 
'Then  sang  Deborah  and  Barak  the 
son  of  Abinoam  on  that  day,  saying, 
Praise  ye  the  Lord  for  the  avenging  of 
Israel,'  and  that  astonishing,  passion- 
ate, magnificent  song  is  upon  us.  My 
imagination  leaps  through  the  gate  of 
the  opening  words,  and  instantly, 
breathlessly,  I  forget  the  time  and 
place,  and  I  see  into  the  past.  I  see 
that  jubilant  return,  and  Deborah, 
the  prophetess,  and  Barak,  the  son  of 
Abinoam,  singing  together.  'Hear,  O 
ye  kings,  give  ear,  O  ye  princes;  I,  even 
I,  will  sing  unto  the  Lord.' 

What  intoxication  of  inspiration! 
The  spirit  fairly  lashes  them  into  ex- 
pression. 'Awake,  awake  Deborah; 
awake,  awake;  utter  a  song;  arise, 
Barak,  and  lead  thy  captivity  captive.' 

Like  a  torrent  the  song  tumbles  over 
itself,  holding  certain  words  up  in  the 
glory  and  delight  of  repetition. 

'The  river  of  Kishon  swept  them 
away,  that  ancient  river,  the  river 
Kishon.' 

Then  the  song  rises  to  its  climax  in 
that  magnificent  tribute  —  the  tribute 
which  one  woman's  genius  pays  to  an- 
other's achievement.  'Blessed  above 
women  shall  Jael  the  wife  of  Heber  the 
Kenite  be;  blessed  shall  she  be  above 
women  in  the  tent.' 

In  her  savage  irony,  Deborah  con- 
ceives the  picture  of  the  waiting  mother 


of  the  dead  man:  'The  mother  of 
Sisera  looked  out  at  a  window,  and 
cried  through  the  lattice,  Why  is  his 
chariot  so  long  in  coming?  Why  tarry 
the  wheels  of  his  chariots?' 

But  in  the  end  her  religious  fervor 
stems  the  savagery  of  her  triumph,  and 
the  singer  remembers  that  she  is  pay- 
ing tribute  to  the  Lord,  and  concludes : 
'So  let  all  thine  enemies  perish,  O 
Lord;  but  let  them  that  love  him  be  as 
the  sun  when  he  goeth  forth  in  his 
might.' 

It  is  amusing  to  note  how  different 
clergymen  read  this  song  of  Deborah 
and  of  Barak.  Some  —  those,  no 
doubt,  with  the  most  imagination  — 
abandon  themselves  at  once  to  the 
splendor  of  the  music,  and  read  the 
words  with  an  echo  of  the  passion  that 
they  must  have  had  when  they  were 
first  flung  forth.  Others  begin  with  the 
determination  to  give  it  the  religious 
rendering  suitable  to  the  rest  of  the 
service,  and  manage  this  tone  well 
enough  until  they  come  to  the  words, 
'Awake,  awake,  Deborah:  awake, 
awake,  utter  a  song ' ;  when,  in  spite  of 
themselves,  they  are  swept  off  their 
feet  by  the  poet's  emotion  and  are 
carried  gloriously  away,  until  the  con- 
cluding words  of  the  lesson,  'And  the 
land  had  rest  forty  years,'  restore  them 
once  more  to  the  accustomed  religious 
atmosphere.  Others,  again,  imply  by 
their  tone  that  though  there  is  a  certain 
deplorable  impression  of  barbaric  ex- 
ultation in  the  words,  Deborah  was  in 
reality  a  very  meek  and  pious  woman. 

I  think  these  last  are  glad  to  come 
to  the  end  of  that  song,  particularly  if 
they  chance  to  be  married  —  and  turn 
with  relief  to  the  second  lesson,which 
begins,  amusingly  enough,  'Likewise, 
ye  wives,  be  in  subjection  to  your  own 
husbands;  .  .  .  whose  adorning  .  .  . 
let  it  be  ...  even  the  ornament  of  a 
meek  and  quiet  spirit.  .  .  .  For  after 
this  manner  in  the  old  time  the  holy 


THE   CONTRIBUTORS'   CLUB 


715 


women  also,  who  trusted  in  God, 
adorned  themselves,'  —  no  doubt  de- 
voutly hoping  that  their  wives  will  not 
ask  them  any  searching  questions  as 
to  the  meek  and  quiet  spirits  enjoyed 
by  those  two  holy  women  of  old,  Deb- 
orah and  Jael.  They  must  find  Jael 
extremely  hard  to  explain,  particularly 
when  they  remember  that  there  was 
peace  between  'Jabin  the  king  of 
Hazor  and  the  house  of  Heber  the 
Kenite.'  And  difficult  also  for  them  to 
explain  Deborah's  laudation  of  her,  for 
certainly  the  climax  of  the  poem  is  its 
tribute  to  Jael.  Others  are  mentioned 
with  curses  or  blessings  according  as 
they  had  given  their  help  or  refused  it, 
but  Jael  is  the  heroine,  the  great  prota- 
gonist of  Deborah's  song,  and  the  singer 
brings  all  the  treasure  of  her  genius  and 
lays  it  in  tribute  at  the  feet  of  the  wo- 
man of  the  tents.  I  do  not  know  any 
other  great  poem  that  has  this  peculi- 
arity —  the  passionate  celebration  by 
one  woman  of  another  woman's  achieve- 
ment. Will  this  modern  awakening  of 
women  bring  us  great  women  poets 
to  sing  inspired  songs  about  their  sis- 
ters? 

Would  it  might  be  so!  And  would, 
too,  that  all  our  poets,  both  men  and 
women,  might  inform  their  songs  with 
some  of  Deborah's  passionate  fire. 

The  spirit  of  the  age  appears  to  be 
tolerance.  No  doubt  a  very  good  spirit 
for  an  everyday,  jog-trot  life,  but  not 
so  good  for  the  making  of  poetry.  It 
keeps  us,  to  be  sure,  from  burning  at 
the  stake  those  whose  opinions  differ 
from  our  own,  but  it  also  keeps  us  from 
burning  ourselves  at  the  stake  of  poetic 
fire.  To  write  a  big  poem  we  must  be 
able  to  'see  red.'  We  have  nowadays 
that  paralyzing  attitude  of  mind  that 
makes  us  think  that,  after  all,  our  op- 
ponents may  be  as  nearly  right  as  our- 
selves. We  are  too  much  like  the  tribe 
of  Reuben  —  '  For  the  divisions  of 
Reuben  there  were  great  thoughts  of 


heart.  Why  abodest  thou  among  the 
sheep-folds,  to  hear  the  bleating  of  the 
flocks?' 

This  hesitancy  and  mistrust,  these 
searchings  of  heart,  and  particularly 
this  haste  to  laugh  at  our  own  ideals 
before  others  can  do  it,  has  kept  Pega- 
sus in  the  sheep-fold,  and  a  Pegasus 
so  stabled  will  result  in  songs  whose 
technique  grows  ever  more  perfect,  and 
their  passion  more  faint. 

In  his  tribute  to  Shelley,  Francis 
Thompson  says,  'In  poetry  as  well  as 
in  the  kingdom  of  God  we  should  not 
take  thought  too  greatly  wherewith 
we  should  be  clothed,  but  seek  first  the 
spirit  and  all  these  things  shall  be 
added  unto  us.' 

How  much  do  you  suppose  Deborah 
paused  to  find  the  best  word?  And  yet 
here  is  her  song  as  fresh  and  as  pulsing 
with  emotion  as  when  she  flung  it  tri- 
umphantly forth  so  many  hundreds  of 
years  ago.  Words  were  the  servants 
of  her  emotion;  not  things  to  be  wooed 
and  cajoled,  but  things  to  be  imperious- 
ly commanded. 

She  had  found  her  Kingdom  of 
Heaven,  and  the  right  words  delighted 
to  add  themselves  to  it.  If  we  cannot 
approve  of  Jael's  method  of  disposing 
of  Sisera,  we  may  at  least  learn  some- 
thing from  Deborah's  method  of  mak- 
ing poetry. 

I  believe  it  is  Mr.  Chesterton  who 
points  out  that  we  have  no  longer  any 
great  satirists  because  we  have  no 
longer  any  passionate  beliefs  about 
anything.  And  if  this  is  true  of  satire 
it  is  much  more  true  of  poetry. 

But  is  there  not  already  a  rekindling 
of  spirit  through  the  land?  And  are 
there  not  already  the  voices  of  new 
singers  heard  at  the  threshold,  or  those 
of  old  singers,  singing  with  a  new,  more 
passionate  note?  Singers  who  are 
finding  their  kingdom  of  Heaven,  and 
are  imperiously  able  to  command  the 
right  word?  This  new  century,  so 


716 


THE   CONTRIBUTORS'  CLUB 


packed  with  emotion  and  new  ideals, 
must  it  not  break  down  the  walls  of 
artificiality?  Must  it  not  create  at 
least  a  few  great  poets  of  both  sexes  — 
Deborahs  as  well  as  Baraks  —  to  voice 
its  passion? 

Well,  'and  the  land  had  rest  forty 
years.'  The  lesson  comes  to  an  end  and 
we  return  to  the  present.  We  remem- 
ber the  time  and  place,  but  for  a  few 
breathless,  golden  moments  a  Mother 
in  Israel  has  shown  us  what  abiding 
stuff  words  may  become  when  played 
upon  by  tremendous  emotion. 

LITERATURE   AND    THE   WORLD- 
STATE 

'LiFE  is  greater  than  literature,  no 
doubt,'  remarked  somebody  in  those 
old  days  of  the  nineties,  when  few 
doubted  (few,  at  least,  of  those  who 
read  the  Yellow  Book)  that  life  went 
on  so  that  Art  might  be  made  out  of 
it;  'but  without  literature,  what  were 
life?'  Well,  what  with  foreign  travel, 
and  the  Peace  Movement,  and  a  dawn- 
ing consciousness  of  the  selfishness  of 
patriotism,  it  becomes  conceivable  that 
we  are  going  to  find  out.  It  is  true  that, 
thanks  to  '  Caxton,  or  the  Phoenicians, 
or  whoever  it  was  that  invented  books,' 
no  Alexandrian  disaster  could  ever 
again  sweep  away  what  we  have;  but 
are  we  as  sure  as  we  once  were  that 
there  is  always  going  to  be  more?  It 
seems  to  have  been  ever  the  small, 
sequestered,  self-centred  district  which 
produced  the  great  literary  tradition, — 
England,  Tuscany,  Judaea,  Greece,  — 
and  the  forces  at  work  to  level  na- 
tional walls  and  create  a  'world-state,' 
will  tend  to  prevent  forevermore  the 
little  intensive,  oblivious  centre  of  cul- 
ture that  Athens  was. 

This  rather  sorrowful  notion  has 
come  to  mind  in  pondering  the  question 
why  this  Middle  West  of  mine  has  not 
produced  a  Middle- Western  literature. 


Writers  we  have,  of  distinction,  but  it 
is  not,  after  all,  the  heart  of  the  Mid- 
dle West  that  speaks  in  them;  it  is  the 
brain  of  the  admirable  observer  pre- 
senting his  results.  There  are  several 
kinds  of  Middle-Western  literature 
possible,  although  only  one  would  be 
worth  having.  It  might  be  written,  for 
example,  in  the  manner  of  the  Class- 
ical Convention,  which  speaks  of  every- 
thing in  terms  of  something  else.  Just 
as  to  our  eighteenth-century  classicists 
the  sun  was  always  Phoebus,  the  dawn 
Aurora,  and  poetry  the  Orphean  lyre 
or  the  Pierian  spring  according  to  taste, 
so  our  familiar  Middle  West  might  be 
translated  for  us  into  the  idiom  of 
English  literature.  Like  the  'Step- 
Daughter  of  the  Prairie,'  we  might  be 
taught  to  think  of  the  near-by  '  creek  ' 
as  a  '  rill '  or  a  '  burn ' ;  to  call  the  far, 
low  hills  'the  downs,'  and  our  limitless 
prairies  'steppes'  or  'moors.'  Such 
translation  was  in  fact  unconsciously 
practiced  by  a  little  girl  I  knew,  who, 
while  growing  up  in  a  Middle- Western 
city  (the  city  growing  up  the  while 
with  her)  and  fed  upon  English  fiction, 
vaguely  assumed  that  some  day  she 
would  turn  up  her  hair  and  lengthen 
her  skirts,  and  step  out  through  a 
French  window  upon  a  beautiful  Eng- 
lish lawn,  covered  with  curates  and 
afternoon  tea.  Although,  as  she  looked 
about  her  upon  her  world,  she  beheld 
none  of  these  things. 

But  the  difficulty  with  the  Classical 
Convention  is  that  it  always  comes 
to  an  end.  The  Romantic  Movement 
quenched  the  Pierian  spring;  the  Step- 
Daughter  of  the  Prairie  —  and  the 
little  girl  —  have  grown  up.  There  is 
a  more  sophisticated  literary  method, 
however,  of  a  character  possibly  less 
perishable,  which  consists  in  trading 
upon  our  deprivations.  We  are  aware, 
now,  that  we  have  no  mountains,  no 
rocks,  no  brook-watered  glens,  no  tra- 
ditional society  like  those  in  the  past 


THE  CONTRIBUTORS'   CLUB 


717 


of  Louisiana  and  Carolina,  no  Lon- 
don drawing-rooms,  no  Pyramids,  no 
Grand  Canal;  but  we  can  make  some- 
thing out  of  our  knowledge  of  this 
melancholy  fact,  and  record  the  adven- 
tures of  our  souls  when  face  to  face 
with  these  things,  or  when  sitting  at 
home  and  regretting  them.  Yet  this, 
after  all,  is  but  another  convention,  and 
has  been  worked  as  well  as  it  could  be, 
and  as  much,  perhaps,  as  it  ought  to 
be,  by  Mr.  Howells  for  the  Middle- 
Westerner  seen  against  a  background 
of  New  York,  and  by  Mr.  James  for 
the  American-at-large  silhouetted  upon 
the  map  of  Europe. 

The  third  way,  and  the  hardest,  is 
to  strike  the  ground  beneath  our  feet 
with  a  divining-rod  of  love  and  feeling, 
and  see  whether  literature  will  not 
gush  forth.  There  would  seem  to  be 
plenty  to  write  of,  in  those  early  French 
comers  and  the  poetic  people  they 
found  here;  yet  we  lack,  in  dealing 
with  them,  something  that  is  funda- 
mental to  literature,  the  unbroken  tra- 
dition. We  are  not  the  children  of 
those  French  explorers,  neither  does 
the  red  man's  blood  flow  in  our  veins. 
We  are  New  Englanders,  most  of  us, 
and  our  imagination  turns  soonest  to 
the  rocky  uplands  and  the  heroic  story 
of  the  Northeast  states .  Neither,  then , 
is  it  ours  to  write  from  the  heart,  from 
the  deeps,  of  those  later  arrivals,  the 
foreign  northern  folk  who  are  natural- 
izing their  customs  within  our  borders. 

Still,  there  is  the  soil.  We  can  feed 
or  starve  the  world  in  this  Mississippi 
Valley.  Fertility  and  drought,  times 
and  seasons  and  weather,  are  our  affair. 
We  are  an  agricultural  folk,  though  it 
is  not  often  that  we  remember  it.  We 
have  almost  the  same  things  to  sing 
of  that  the  Psalmist  had  —  *  the  moun- 
tains that  are  round  about  Jerusalem,' 
'the  east  wind  and  the  south  wind,' 
'  the  snow  like  wool  and  the  hoar-frost 
like  ashes,'  *  rain  upon  the  mown  grass 


and  showers  that  water  the  earth,'  'the 
pastures  clothed  with  flocks  and  the 
valleys  covered  with  corn.'  Save  for 
the  mountains  that  are  round  about 
Jerusalem,  there  are  as  many  strings 
to  our  harp  as  to  David's.  Only,  alas! 
we  cannot  now  forget  what  David 
never  knew  —  how  much  there  is  out- 
side. Those  mountains  shut  the  Psalm- 
ist in,  but  nothing  but  the  zone  of 
respirable  air  that  wraps  our  globe,  can 
shut  the  Middle- Westerner  in! 

As  you  go  out  from  Florence  to 
the  Certosa's  battlemented  height,  and 
cross  the  little  Ema,  you  remember 
that  Dante  wished  that  Buondelmonte 
had  been  drowned  in  it  before  ever  he 
had  entered  Florence  to  call  upon  her 
head  the  bloody  Guelf  and  Ghibelline; 
and  you  wonder  whether  the  thin 
thread  of  water  would  even  have  wet 
the  feet  of  that  splendid,  faithless, 
white-clad  young  cavalier.  Yet  six  hun- 
dred years  ago  it  had  already  a  name 
and  a  fame,  to  be  recognized  of  any 
Tuscan  when  set  into  a  poem.  What 
Middle- Westerner  could  place  an  allu- 
sion to  a  stream  so  small,  supposing  it 
to  lie  in  the  next  state,  or  even  in  the 
next  county?  Our  Middle  West  is  too 
large  for  literature  —  voila  le  grand  mot 
Ianc6 !  Then  America  will  be  too  large 
for  literature,  then  surely  the  whole 
world  will  be  too  large  for  literature! 

Shall  we  go  on,  then,  extending  the 
boundaries  of  our  literary  estate,  until 
we  shall  have  developed  a  'world  lit- 
erature' which  a  Martian  might  find 
characteristic  of  Earth  as  distinguished 
from  Mars;  or  shall  we  admit  that  in 
this  gradual  internationalizing  process 
which  we  believe  to  be  so  good  for  man, 
there  is  something  bad  for  literature, 
and  therefore  try  here  in  America  to  be 
as  local  as  we  can?  But  when  every 
state,  and  the  Negro,  and  the  Indian, 
and  every  kind  of  naturalized  new- 
comer shall  have  evolved  his  own  highly 
idiomatic  form  of  expression,  we  may 


718 


THE   CONTRIBUTORS'   CLUB 


find  such  deliberate  nurture  of  local 
literary  tradition  associating  itself,  as 
it  has  done  in  Ireland,  with  a  separate 
political  consciousness.  Can  it  be  that 
what  seems  to  be  the  best  social  ideal  is 
going  to  prove  unpropitious  for  litera- 
ture, and  that  we  shall  ever  be  called 
upon  to  make  a  choice? 

GRATITUDE 

THE  Minister  preached  this  morning 
on  the  Duty  of  Gratitude.  I  have  for- 
gotten what  the  pliable  text  was,  but 
the  lesson  drawn  from  it  was  addressed, 
rather  obviously,  to  the  children  from 
the  'Home,'  who  filled  the  front  pews 
with  bobbing,  close-cropped  heads  and 
prim  Sunday  bonnets.  I  was  pleased 
to  observe  that  the  sermon  did  not 
weigh  upon  their  spirits:  they  were  as 
full  of  tricks  as  any  normal  children 
when  they  got  out  into  the  good  fresh 
air,  and  gave  the  usual  trouble  to  the 
matron  on  their  way  back  to  the 
'Home.' 

And  why  should  it  have  disturbed 
them,  or  older  sinners,  for  that  matter? 
Is  Gratitude  a  living  virtue  like  Truth 
or  Courage,  lacking  which  a  human 
soul  is  incomplete?  Or  is  it  an  inven- 
tion of  the  people  who  confer  benefits? 
All  real  virtues,  I  take  it,  will  be  found 
springing  naturally  in  the  heart  of  an 
unspoiled  human  being.  The  seed  is 
there  if  we  seek  it.  But  we  cannot 
invent  a  virtue  any  more  than  we  can 
invent  the  smallest  flower  that  blows. 
Gratitude,  at  its  best,  is  a  blossom 
grafted  upon  love;  at  its  worst,  a  para- 
site that  kills  the  parent  plant. 

A  child,  or  any  natural  soul,  loves 
those  who  show  it  kindness,  but  it  ig- 
nores, and,  if  the  point  is  urged,  resents, 
the  idea  of  gratitude  as  the  proper 
return.  It  feels  instinctively  that  love 
must  prompt  kind  deeds,  and  love  — 
if  possible  —  is  the  reward.  This  is  the 
natural  attitude;  we  can  see  it  any  day 


and  in  any  family.  Just  as  the  wise  old 
man,  Montaigne,  saw  it  and  recognized 
its  justice  in  the  days  when  children 
were  still  weighed  down  with  the  bur- 
den of  unending  gratitude  to  the  par- 
ents who  had,  most  often  quite  casually, 
brought  them  into  the  world. 

Not  that  a  stiff-necked  incapability 
of  giving  thanks  where  thanks  are  due 
is  to  be  commended  —  least  of  all  in  a 
community  where  New  England  ances- 
tors prevailed.  Rather  it  is  to  be  pitied 
as  a  sign  of  unhappy  self-consciousness. 
Let  us  hope  that  the  little  orphans  in 
the  'Home'  are  taught  to  chirrup, 
'Thank  you,'  as  naturally  as  the  birds 
that  come  fluttering  to  a  feast  of 
crumbs.  Still  it  remains  that  Gratitude, 
so  called,  must  be  indulged  in  with  the 
greatest  moderation.  It  is  not  like 
Mercy  which  'blesseth  him  that  gives 
and  him  that  takes.'  Gratitude  may  be 
very  bad  for  the  giver,  since  it  lessens 
his  merit  in  giving  if  he  requires  or 
even  expects  it.  And,  on  the  other  hand, 
if  he  has  a  sensitive  spirit,  it  wounds 
him,  as  the  attitude  of  servant  to  mas- 
ter may  wound  and  humiliate  the  mas- 
ter. And  in  case  the  gift  is  prompted 
by  a  sense  of  duty  to  himself,  or  to  an 
ideal  held  by  the  giver,  the  recipient  is 
not  concerned  in  the  act,  though  he 
profits  by  it,  and  should  not  be  re- 
quired to  give  thanks.  It  was  not  done 
for  his  sake,  even  though  pity  prompted 
the  deed.  In  fact,  his  need  or  suffering 
has  helped  the  benefactor  to  accom- 
plish his  end,  for  the  act  of  charity  may 
easily  be  only  a  means  of  relief  for  a 
wounded  sensibility. 

And  to  the  recipient  of  favors  Grati- 
tude is  a  burden  which  only  the  freest 
affection  can  enable  him  to  bear  with 
dignity.  Let  the  burden  gall  and  it  may 
create  a  secret  core  of  resentment,  the 
more  debasing  because  it  is  ashamed,  or 
a  callous  ignominy  which  justifies  the 
airy  cynicism  of  La  Rochefoucauld's 
'  Gratitude  is  a  lively  sense  of  benefits 


THE  CONTRIBUTORS'   CLUB 


719 


to  come/  or  Edward  Gibbon's  sledge- 
hammer dictum, '  Revenge  is  profitable, 
gratitude  is  expensive/ 

Is  it  then  dangerous  to  do  too  much 
for  a  friend?  Must  we  hold  our  hand 
for  fear  of  introducing  a  third  between 
us,  the  sinister  figure  of  Gratitude? 
No;  a  thousand  times,  no!  For  Grati- 
tude, like  Fear,  can  be  cast  out  by 
perfect  Love.  But  don't  let  us  preach 
too  ponderously  the  duty  of  Gratitude, 
above  all  to  the  children. 

A  GREAT   AMERICAN   POET 

A  GREAT  American  poet!  I  had  at 
last  found  him.  It  mattered  not  that  I 
was  an  obscure  student  in  a  famous 
graduate  school;  it  mattered  not  that 
great  poets  in  their  day  had  bowed 
down  to  Denham  and  to  Bowles.  Here 
was  a  real  poet,  alive,  American, 
great,  - 

Who  yet  should  be  a  trump,  of  mighty  call 

Blown  in  the  gates  of  evil  kings 

To  make  them  fall; 

Who  yet  should  be  a  sword  of  flame  before 

The  soul's  inviolate  door 

To  beat  away  the  clang  of  hellish  wings; 

Who  yet  should  be  a  lyre 

Of  high  unquenchable  desire 

In  the  day  of  little  things. 

His  lines  burned  in  my  veins  as  I  sang 
or  shouted  them.  I  must  share  the  in- 
toxication with  my  friends. 

The  first  victim  was,  of  course,  a 
young  woman.  To  her  I  entrusted  the 
precious  little  volume.  'Read  "The 
Daguerreotype," '  I  urged,  'and  tell  me 
if  it  is  not  the  heart's  blood  of  a  true 
poet.'  She  told  me.  It  seemed  to  her  a 
commonplace  treatment  of  a  common- 
place theme. 

Abashed  but  not  discouraged,  I 
turned  to  my  good  friend  the  German 
doctor.  'Nomen  est  omen,'  was  his  first 
comment,  as  he  glanced  at  the  poet's 
name;  but  he  was  anxious  to  widen  his 
knowledge  of  English  verse,  and  took 
kindly  to  whatever  was  philosophical, 


impressionistic,  or  sonorous.  I  can  still 
hear  his  deep  voice  rumbling  out,  - 

Within  my  blood  my  ancient  kindred  spoke,  — 
Grotesque  and  monstrous  voices,  heard  afar 
Down  ocean  caves  when  behemoth  awoke, 
Or  through  fern  forests  roared  the  pleiosaur 
Locked  with  the  giant  bat  in  ghastly  war. 

The  German  doctor,  however,  was  in- 
sensitive to  subtle  shades  of  meaning 
in  English  words.  For  full  apprecia- 
tion I  must  go  to  my  own  professor  of 
English. 

Yes,  to  be  sure,  he  had  heard  of  my 
poet.  We  were  all  young  once;  he  had 
once  turned  a  verse  or  two  himself. 
Whereupon  he  dug  out  a  batch  of 
dusty  manuscript  and  read  to  me  with 
reminiscent  relish  a  number  of  his  own 
puerilia.  I  left  him  moist-eyed  and 
tender,  with  my  little  book  unopened, 
unread,  in  his  hand.  Then  if  ever  was 
the  happy  hour  for  him  to  chant,  — 

We  have  felt  the  ancient  swaying 
Of  the  earth  before  the  sun, 
On  the  darkened  marge  of  midnight  heard 

sidereal  rivers  playing; 
Rash  it  was  to  bathe  our  souls  there,  but  we 

plunged,  and  all  was  done. 
That  is  lives  and  lives  behind  us  —  lo,  our 
journey  is  begun! 

But  he  buried  the  volume  five  German 
dissertations  deep  on  a  side  shelf,  and 
I  was  not  to  see  it  again  for  three  years. 

Ten  years  have  passed  since  my 
young  enthusiasm  invaded  the  sanc- 
tum of  a  great  professor  to  proclaim 
the  merits  of  a  living  poet.  My  poet  is 
dead,  tragically  cut  off  at  the  summit 
of  his  powers;  a  single  volume  of  less 
than  five  hundred  pages  lies  before  me, 
containing  all  the  poetry  he  gave  to  the 
world,  mere  'drippings  of  the  wine- 
press of  his  days.'  As  I  turn  the  pages 
now,  do  the  scales  fall  from  my  eyes? 
Have  the  years  that  bring  the  philoso- 
phic mind  tempered  my  enthusiasm? 
Can  I  now,  with  the  old  ardor,  thrust 
this  volume  in  the  faces  of  my  friends? 

A  severe  test,  truly,  for  any  but  the 


720 


THE  CONTRIBUTORS'   CLUB 


highest.  Can  we  return  to  Byron,  to 
Shelley,  to  Swinburne,  to  Tennyson, 
him  even,  without  feeling  that  some- 
thing of  the  old  charm  has  departed? 
Stephen  Phillips  captivated  all  of  us 
with  his  beautiful  Paolo  and  Francesca; 
yet  we  sometimes  feel  for  his  work  the 
repugnance  we  have  for  lilies.  But 
Shakespeare,  Milton,  and  Words- 
worth, Chaucer,  Browning,  and  Keats, 
at  their  best,  never  disappoint  us;  our 
knowledge  of  life  and  art  never  out- 
runs them.  Has  my  poet  a  modest 
place  in  this  high  company? 

I  believe  that  he  has.  The  poems 
that  ten  years  ago  made  the  blood  leap 
in  my  veins  still  seem  to  me  fresh  and 
strong  and  beautiful.  And  I  am  con- 
firmed in  my  belief  by  the  admirable 
introduction  which  Professor  Manly 
has  written  for  this  new  and  complete 
edition  of  his  works.  The  poem  that 
my  young  friend  found  commonplace, 
Professor  Manly  finds  *so  deep  of 
thought,  so  full  of  poignant  feeling  and 
clairvoyant  vision,  so  wrought  of  pas- 


sionate beauty  that  I  know  not  where  to 
look  for  another  tribute  from  any  poet 
to  his  mother  that  equals  it.'  The 
little  volume  that  for  three  years  lay 
buried  five  German  dissertations  deep, 
contained  much  of  the  best  work  of  a 
man  who  '  brought  the  richest  intellect- 
ual and  emotional  endowment  pos- 
sessed by  any  American  poet,'  and 
whose  poetry  'was  growing  into  fuller 
and  fuller  kinship  with  that  of  the  eld- 
er and  most  authentic  poets  of  our 
tongue,  while  retaining  its  own  unmis- 
takable individuality.' 

If  these  things  are  indeed  true,  my 
long  devotion  has  not  been  misplaced; 
I  may  still  urge  all  my  friends  — 
mothers  and  maids  and  German  doc- 
tors, even  professors  in  their  sanctums 
—  to  get  and  read  and  read  again  the 
poems  and  poetic  dramas  of  William 
Vaughn  Moody.1 

1  The  Poems  and  Plays  of  William  Vaughn 
Moody.  With  an  Introduction  by  JOHN  M. 
MANLY.  Boston  and  New  York:  Houghton 
Mifflin  Company.  1912. 


THE  ATLANTIC  MONTHLY 


JUNE,  1913 


THE  MONROE  DOCTRINE  :  AN  OBSOLETE  SHIBBOLETH 


BY   HIRAM   BINGHAM 


'  The  American  continents,  by  the  free 
and  independent  condition  which  they 
have  assumed  and  maintain,  are  hence- 
forth not  to  be  considered  as  subjects  for 
future  colonization  by  European  powers. 
.  .  .  We  should  consider  any  attempt  on 
their  part  to  extend  their  system  to  any 
portion  of  this  hemisphere  as  danger- 
ous to  our  peace  and  safety,  With  the 
existing  colonies  or  dependencies  of  any 
European  power,  we  have  not  interfered 
and  shall  not  interfere.  But  with  the  gov- 
ernments who  have  declared  their  inde- 
pendence, and  maintained  it,  and  whose 
independence  we  have,  on  great  consid- 
eration, and  on  just  principles,  acknow- 
ledged, we  could  not  view  any  interposi- 
tion for  the  purpose  of  oppressing  them, 
or  controlling,  in  any  other  manner,  their 
destiny,  by  any  European  power,  in  any 
other  light  than  as  the  manifestation  of 
an  unfriendly  disposition  towards  the 
United  States. 

THUS,  in  1823,  did  President  James 
Monroe,  acting  under  the  influence 
of  his  able  Secretary  of  State,  John 
Quincy  Adams,  enunciate  a  doctrine 
which  has  been  the  most  universally 
accepted  foreign  policy  that  we  have 
ever  had.  No  one  questions  the  fact 
that  the  enunciation  of  this  policy  of 
VOL.  in  -NO.  e 


'America  for  Americans,'  and  our  firm 
adherence  to  it  for  so  many  years,  has 
had  a  very  decided  effect  upon  the  his- 
tory of  the  Western  Hemisphere. 

There  have  been  times  when  ambi- 
tious European  monarchs  would  have 
liked  nothing  better  than  to  help 
themselves  to  poorly  defended  territory 
in  what  is  now  termed  Latin  America. 
When  the  Doctrine  was  originated,  the 
Holy  Alliance  in  Europe  was  contem- 
plating the  overthrow  of  republican 
government  in  Spain,  and  unquestion- 
ably looked  with  extreme  aversion  at 
the  new  republics  in  South  and  Central 
America,  whose  independence  we  were 
hastily  recognizing.  Russia  was  reach- 
ing out  beyond  Alaska.  The  firm  de- 
claration of  this  policy  of  exclusion, 
backed  up  by  England's  attitude  to- 
ward the  Holy  Alliance,  undoubtedly 
operated  to  give  the  American  republics 
sufficient  breathing  space  to  enable 
them  to  get  on  their  feet  and  begin  the 
difficult  process  of  working  out  their 
own  salvation,  —  a  process  which  was 
rendered  all  the  more  difficult  by  rea- 
son of  Hispanic  racial  tendencies,  of 
centuries  of  autocratic  colonial  gov- 
ernment, and  of  geographical  condi- 
tions which  made  transportation  and 
social  intercourse  extremely  arduous. 

Journeys  across  Peru  even  to-day 
may  be  beset  with  more  difficulties 


THE  MONROE  DOCTRINE:  AN   OBSOLETE  SHIBBOLETH 


than  were  journeys  from  Mississippi 
to  California  sixty  years  ago,  before 
the  railroads.  It  still  takes  longer  to 
go  from  Lima,  the  capital  of  Peru,  to 
Iquitos,  the  capital  of  Peru's  largest 
province,  and  one  which  the  Putu- 
mayo  atrocities  have  recently  brought 
vividly  to  our  notice,  than  it  does  to  go 
from  London  to  Honolulu.  •• 

Had  it  not  been  for  the  Monroe 
Doctrine,  the  American  republics  would 
have  found  it  very  much  more  difficult 
to  maintain  their  independence  during 
the  first  three  quarters  of  a  century  of 
their  career.  And  this  notwithstanding 
the  fact  that  the  actual  words  *  Monroe 
Doctrine'  were  rarely  heard  or  seen. 

In  1845,  without  mentioning  this 
shibboleth  by  name,  President  Polk 
declared  that  the  United  States  would 
not  permit  any  European  intervention 
on  the  North  American  continent.  This,  • 
as  Professor  Coolidge  has  brought  out,1 
pushed  the  theory  further  than  it  has 
been  carried  out  in  practice,  although 
it  restricted  the  original  idea  by  leav- 
ing South  America  out  of  account. 

A  few  years  later,  while  we  were 
engaged  in  civil  war,  Napoleon  III 
attempted  to  set  up  a  European  mon- 
arch in  Mexico.  Scarcely  had  we  re- 
covered, however,  from  the  throes  of 
our  great  conflict,  when  Mr.  Seward 
took  up  with  the  French  government 
the  necessity  for  the  withdrawal  of 
the  French  troops  from  Maximilian's 
support.  Here  we  were  acting  strongly 
in  accordance  with  the  best  traditions 
of  the  Monroe  Doctrine,  and  yet  the 
mysterious  words  were  not  employed 
in  the  correspondence. 

In  fact,  while  it  was  generally  under- 
stood that  we  would  not  countenance 
any  European  interference  in  the  affairs 
of  North  and  South  America,  it  was 
not  until  1895,  during  the  second  ad- 

1  See  for  an  able  exposition  of  the  Monroe  Doc- 
trine, Prof.  A.  C.  Coolidge's  The  United  States  as 
a  World  Power  (Macmillan).  — THE  EDITORS. 


ministration  of  President  Cleveland, 
that  a  Secretary  of  State  thought  it 
expedient  or  necessary  to  re-state  the 
Monroe  Doctrine  and  to  bring  us  to 
the  verge  of  a  European  war  by  back- 
ing it  up  with  an  absolutely  uncompro- 
mising attitude.  Venezuela  had  had  a 
long-standing  boundary  dispute  with 
British  Guiana.  Nobody  cared  very 
much  either  way  until  it  was  discov- 
ered that  in  the  disputed  territory  were 
rich  gold  fields.  In  the  excitement 
which  ensued,  the  Venezuelans  appeal- 
ed to  the  United  States,  and  Secretary 
Olney,  invoking  the  Monroe  Doctrine, 
brought  matters  to  a  crisis. 

Our  defiant  attitude  toward  Great 
Britain  astonished  the  world,  and  great- 
ly pleased  the  majority  of  American 
citizens.  The  very  fact  that  we  had 
not  the  slightest  personal  interest  in 
the  paltry  sixty  thousand  square  miles 
of  jungle  southeast  of  the  Orinoco, 
added  to  our  self-esteem.  It  raised  our 
patriotism  to  the  highest  pitch  when  we 
realized  that  we  were  willing  to  go  to 
war  with  the  most  powerful  nation  in 
Europe  rather  than  see  her  refuse  to 
arbitrate  her  right  to  her  ancient  pos- 
session of  a  little  strip  of  tropical  forest 
with  a  government  which  was  not  in 
existence  when  England  took  British 
Guiana,  but  which  was  an  'American 
Republic.'  Fortunately  for  us,  Lord 
Salisbury  had  a  fairly  good  sense  of  hu- 
mor, and  declined  to  take  the  matter 
too  seriously.  Instead  of  standing,  in 
the  proverbial  British  manner,  strictly 
for  his  honor  and  his  rights,  he  polite- 
ly ignored  the  Boundary  Commission 
which  we  had  impetuously  called  into 
existence,  and,  dealing  directly  with 
his  neighbor  Venezuela,  arranged  for 
an  international  court  of  arbitration. 

In  our  exuberance  over  the  success 
of  Mr.  Olney's  bold  and  unselfish 
enunciation  of  the  Monroe  Doctrine 
we  failed  to  realize  several  aspects  of 
this  question. 


THE   MONROE  DOCTRINE:  AN  OBSOLETE   SHIBBOLETH    723 


In  the  first  place,  we  had  proudly 
declared  the  Monroe  Doctrine  to  be  a 
part  of  International  Law,  failing  to 
distinguish  between  law  and  policy. 

In  the  second  place,  we  had  assumed 
a  new  theorem.  In  the  words  of  Mr. 
Olney:  'The  states  of  America,  South 
as  well  as  North,  by  geographical 
proximity,  by  natural  sympathy,  by 
similarity  of  Governmental  Constitu- 
tions, are  friends  and  allies,  commer- 
cially and  politically,  of  the  United 
States.' 

A  few  years  earlier  the  then  Secre- 
tary of  State,  Blaine,  had  brought  into 
existence  the  International  Union  of 
American  Republics,  and  had  enun- 
ciated a  doctrine  of  Pan-Americanism 
which  has  glowed  more  or  less  cheer- 
fully ever  since. 

Mr.  Olney 's  words  recognized  this 
doctrine.  But  when  he  gave  *  geograph- 
ical proximity '  as  one  of  the  reasons  for 
this  Pan-American  alliance,  he  over- 
looked the  fact  that  the  largest  cities 
of  South  America  are  geographically 
nearer  to  Spain  and  Portugal  than  to 
New  York  and  New  England.  He  fail- 
ed to  consider  that  the  rich  East  Coast 
of  South  America  is  no  farther  from 
Europe  than  it  is  from  Florida,  and  that 
so  far  as  the  West  Coast  is  concerned, 
it  actually  takes  longer  to  travel  from 
Valparaiso,  the  chief  South  American 
West  Coast  port,  to  San  Francisco,  the 
chief  North  American  West  Coast  port, 
than  it  does  to  go  from  Valparaiso  to 
London.  Peru  is  as  far  from  Puget 
Sound  as  it  is  from  Labrador. 

Most  of  our  statesmen  studied  geo- 
graphy when  they  were  in  the  gram- 
mar school,  and  have  rarely  looked 
at  a  world-atlas  since.  In  other  words, 
we  began  the  new  development  of  the 
Monroe  Doctrine  with  a  false  idea  of 
the  geographical  basis  of  the  Pan- 
American  alliance. 

Furthermore,  the  new  Monroe  Doc- 
trine was  established  on  another  false 


idea,  the  existence  of  'natural  sympa- 
thy' between  South  and  North  Amer- 
ica. As  a  matter  of  fact,  instances 
might  easily  be  multiplied  to  show  that 
our  South  American  neighbors  have 
far  more  natural  sympathy  for,  and 
regard  themselves  as  much  more  near- 
ly akin  to,  the  Latin  races  of  Europe, 
than  to  the  cosmopolitan  people  of  the 
United  States. 

How  Spain  feels  was  shown  recently 
in  the  case  of  a  distinguished  Spanish 
professor  who  was  able  to  find  time  to 
make  an  extended  journey  through 
Latin  America,  urging  Pan-Hispanism, 
but  could  find  no  time  to  make  an 
extended  journey  through  the  cities  of 
the  United  States,  although  offered  lav- 
ish hospitality  and  considerable  hono- 
rariums. How  Brazil  feels  was  seen  a 
few  years  ago  in  Rio  Janeiro,  when 
Brazil  was  holding  a  national  exposi- 
tion. Each  state  of  that  great  Re- 
public had  a  building  of  its  own,  but 
no  foreign  nations  were  represented, 
except  Portugal,  the  mother  country, 
which  had  her  own  building. 

Of  the  difficulties  of  establishing  any 
kind  of  an  alliance  between  ourselves 
and  the  South  American  republics  no 
one  who  has  traveled  in  South  America 
can  be  ignorant.  As  has  been  well  said 
by  a  recent  Peruvian  writer:  'Essen- 
tial points  of  difference  separate  the 
two  Americas.  Differences  of  language, 
and  therefore  of  spirit;  the  difference 
between  Spanish  Catholicism  and  the 
multiform  Protestantism  of  the  Anglo- 
Saxons;  between  the  Yankee  individu- 
alism and  the  omnipotence  of  the  State 
natural  to  the  South.  In  their  origin, 
as  in  their  race,  we  find  fundamental 
antagonisms;  the  evolution  of  the 
North  is  slow  and  obedient  to  the  les- 
sons of  time,  to  the  influences  of  cus- 
tom; the  history  of  the  Southern 
peoples  is  full  of  revolution,  rich  with 
dreams  of  an  unattainable  perfection.' 

One  of  the  things  which  make  it  and 


724     THE   MONROE  DOCTRINE:  AN   OBSOLETE  SHIBBOLETH 


will  continue  to  make  it  difficult  for 
us  to  treat  fairly  with  our  Southern 
neighbors  is  our  racial  prejudice 
against  the  half-breed.  As  Senor  Cal- 
deron  bluntly  says:  'Half-breeds  and 
their  descendants  govern  the  Latin- 
American  republics';  and  it  is  a  well- 
known  fact  that  this  leads  to  contempt 
on  the  part  of  the  average  Anglo-Sax- 
on. Such  a  state  of  affairs  shows  the 
difficulty  of  assuming  that  Pan- Amer- 
icanism is  axiomatic,  and  of  basing 
the  logical  growth  of  the  Monroe  Doc- 
trine on  'natural  sympathy.' 

In  the  third  place,  the  new  form  of 
the  Monroe  Doctrine  declared,  in  the 
words  of  Secretary  Olney,  that  the 
*  United  States  is  practically  sovereign 
on  this  continent.'  This  at  once  aroused 
the  antagonism  and  the  fear  of  those 
very  Southern  neighbors  who,  in  an- 
other sentence,  he  had  endeavored  to 
prove  were  'friends  and  allies,  com- 
mercially and  politically,  of  the  United 
States.' 

Less  than  three  years  after  the  enun- 
ciation of  the  new  Monroe  Doctrine 
we  were  at  war  with  Spain.  The  pro- 
gress of  the  war  in  Cuba  and  the 
Spanish  colonies  was  followed  in  South 
America  with  the  keenest  interest. 
How  profoundly  it  would  have  sur- 
prised the  great  American  public  to 
realize  that  while  we  were  spending 
blood  and  treasure  to  secure  the  in- 
dependence of  another  American  re- 
public, our  neighbors  in  Buenos  Aires 
were  indulging  in  the  most  severe  and 
caustic  criticism  of  our  motives !  This 
attitude  can  be  appreciated  only  by 
those  who  have  compared  the  car- 
toons published  week  after  week,  dur- 
ing the  progress  of  the  war,  in  this 
country  and  in  Argentina.  In  the  one, 
Uncle  Sam  is  pictured  as  a  benevolent 
giant,  saving  the  poor  maid  Cuba  from 
the  jaws  of  the  ferocious  dragon,  Gen- 
eral Weyler,  and  his  cruel  mistress  in 
Spain.  In  the  other,  Uncle  Sam  in  the 


guise  of  a  fat  hog  is  engaged  in  be- 
smirching the  fair  garments  of  the 
Queen  of  Spain  in  his  violent  efforts  to 
gobble  up  her  few  American  posses- 
sions. Representations  of  our  actions 
in  the  Philippines  are  in  such  disgust- 
ing form  that  it  would  not  be  desirable 
to  attempt  to  describe  some  of  the 
Argentine  cartoons  touching  upon  that 
subject. 

Our  neighbors  felt  that  a  decided 
change  had  come  over  the  Monroe 
Doctrine!  In  1823  we  had  declared 
that  'with  the  existing  colonies  or  de- 
pendencies of  any  European  power  we 
have  not  interfered,  and  shall  not  in- 
terfere '  (so  runs  the  original  Monroe 
Doctrine).  In  1898  we  not  only  in- 
terfered, but  actually  took  away  all 
of  Spain's  colonies  and  dependencies, 
freeing  Cuba  and  retaining  for  our- 
selves Porto  Rico,  Guam,  and  the 
Philippines. 

Without  for  a  moment  wishing  to 
enter  into  a  discussion  of  the  wisdom 
of  our  actions,  I  desire  to  emphasize 
the  tremendous  difference  between  the 
old  and  the  new  Monroe  Doctrine. 
This  is  not  a  case  of  theories  and  ar- 
guments, but  of  deeds.  What  are  the 
facts? 

In  1895  we  declare  that  we  are  prac- 
tically sovereign  on  this  continent;  in 
1898  we  take  a  rich  American  island 
from  a  European  power,  and  in  1903 
we  go  through  the  form  of  preventing 
a  South  American  republic  from  sub- 
duing a  revolution  in  one  of  her  distant 
provinces,  and  eventually  take  a  strip 
of  that  province  because  we  believe  we 
owe  it  to  the  world  to  build  the  Pan- 
ama Canal.  Again,  let  it  be  clear  that 
I  am  not  interested  at  this  point  in 
defending  or  attacking  our  actions  in 
any  of  these  cases,  —  I  merely  desire 
to  state  what  has  happened,  and  to 
show  some  of  the  fruits  of  the  new 
Monroe  Doctrine.  'By  their  fruits  ye 
shall  know  them.' 


THE  MONROE  DOCTRINE:  AN   OBSOLETE  SHIBBOLETH    725 


Another  one  of  the  *  fruits'  which 
has  not  escaped  the  attention  of  our 
neighbors  in  South  America  is  our 
intervention  in  Santo  Domingo,  which, 
although  it  may  be  an  excellent  thing 
for  the  people  of  that  island,  has  un- 
doubtedly interfered  with  their  right 
to  do  as  they  please  with  their  own 
money. 

Furthermore,  within  the  past  three 
years  we  have  twice  landed  troops  in 
Central  America  and  taken  an  active 
part  by  way  of  interfering  in  local 
politics.  We  believed  that  the  condi- 
tions were  so  bad  as  to  justify  us  in 
carrying  out  the  new  Monroe  Doctrine 
by  aiding  one  side  in  a  local  revolution. 

Of  pur  armed  intervention  in  Cuba 
it  is  scarcely  necessary  to  speak,  except 
to  refer  in  passing  to  the  newspaper 
story,  credited  and  believed  in  Cuba, 
that  if  American  troops  are  again 
obliged  to  intervene  in  the  political 
life  of  that  country,  they  will  not  be 
withdrawn  as  has  been  the  practice  in 
the  past. 

The  menace  of  intervention,  armed 
intervention,  the  threatened  presence 
of  machine  guns  and  American  ma- 
rines, have  repeatedly  been  used  by 
Latin-American  politicians  in  their 
endeavors  to  keep  the  peace  in  their 
own  countries.  And  we  have  done 
enough  of  that  sort  of  thing  to  make  it 
evident  to  disinterested  observers  that 
the  new  Monroe  Doctrine,  our  present 
policy,  is  to  act  as  international  police- 
man, or  at  least  as  an  elder-brother- 
with-a-big-stick,  whenever  the  little 
fellows  get  too  fresh. 

Is  this  Doctrine  worth  while? 

Let  us  see  what  it  involves:  first, 
from  the  European,  second,  from  the 
Latin- American  point  of  view. 


ii 

By  letting  it  be  known  in  Europe 
that  we  shall  not  tolerate  any  Euro- 


pean intervention  or  the  landing  of 
European  troops  on  the  sacred  soil  of 
the  American  republics,  we  assume  all 
responsibility.  We  have  declared,  in 
the  words  of  Secretary  Olney,  that  the 
United  States  is  *  practically  sovereign 
on  this  continent,  and  that  its  fiat  is  law 
upon  the  subject  to  which  it  confines 
its  interposition.'  Therefore  European 
countries  have  the  right  to  look  to  us 
to  do  that  which  we  prevent  them 
from  doing.  A  curious  result  of  this  is 
that  some  of  the  American  republics 
float  loans  in  Europe,  believing  that 
the  United  States  will  not  allow  the 
governments  of  their  European  credi- 
tors forcibly  to  collect  these  loans. 

Personally,  I  believe  that  it  ought 
to  be  an  adopted  principle  of  interna- 
tional law  that  the  armed  intervention 
of  creditor  nations  to  collect  bad  debts 
on  behalf  of  their  bankers  and  bond- 
holders is  forbidden.  If  this  principle 
were  clearly  understood  and  accepted, 
these  bankers  and  underwriters  would 
be  far  more  particular  to  whom  they 
lent  arty  great  amount  of  money,  and 
under  what  conditions.  They  would 
not  be  willing  to  take  the  risks  which 
they  now  take,  and  many  unfortunate 
financial  tangles  would  never  have  a 
beginning.  It  is  natural  for  a  repub- 
lic which  has  great  undeveloped  re- 
sources, much  optimism,  and  a  disre- 
gard of  existing  human  handicaps,  to 
desire  to  borrow  large  amounts  of 
money  in  order  to  build  expensive 
railroads  and  carry  out  desirable  public 
improvements.  It  is  equally  natural 
that  capitalists  seeking  good  interest 
rates  and  secure  investments,  should 
depend  on  the  fact  that  if  the  debtor 
country  attempts  to  default  on  its 
national  loans,  the  government  of  the 
creditors  will  intervene  with  a  strong 
arm.  It  is  natural  that  the  money 
should  be  forthcoming,  even  though  a 
thorough,  business-like,  and  scientific 
investigation  of  the  possessions  and 


726    THE   MONROE  DOCTRINE:  AN   OBSOLETE   SHIBBOLETH 


resources  of  the  borrowing  nation 
might  show  that  the  chances  of  her 
being  able  to  pay  interest,  and  event- 
ually to  return  the  capital,  were  highly 
problematical,  and  to  be  reckoned  as 
very  high  risks. 

Millions  of  dollars  of  such  loans  have 
been  made  in  the  past.  It  is  perfectly 
evident  that  many  of  these  loans  can- 
not be  repaid;  that  the  time  is  coming 
when  the  creditor  nations  will  look  to 
us  as  the  policeman,  or  *  elder  brother/ 
of  the  Western  Hemisphere,  to  see  to 
it  that  the  little  boys  pay  for  the  candy 
and  sweetmeats  they  have  eaten.  Is  it 
worth  while  that  we  should  do  this? 

One  cannot  dodge  the  truth  that  the 
continuation  of  our  support  of  this 
Doctrine  implies  that  we  will  undertake 
to  be  responsible  for  the  good  behavior 
of  all  of  the  American  nations.  If  we 
are  the  big-brother-with-the-club  who 
will  not  permit  any  outsider  to  spank 
our  irritating  or  troublesome  younger 
brothers,  we  must  accept  the  natural 
corollary  of  keeping  them  in  order  our- 
selves, for  we  cannot  allow  the  Ameri- 
can family  to  become  a  nuisance.  And 
some  members  of  it  have  a  decided 
tendency  in  that  direction.  Is  this  task 
worth  while?  Will  it  not  cost  more 
than  it  is  worth?  Is  there  not  a  better 
way  out  of  the  difficulty? 

Furthermore  Europe  knows  that  in 
order  to  continue  to  execute  our  self- 
imposed  and  responsible  mission  we 
must  run  counter  to  the  most  approved 
principles  of  the  law  of  nations. 

The  Right  of  Independence  is  so 
fundamental  and  so  well  established  a 
principle  of  international  law,  and  re- 
spect for  it  is  so  essential  to  the  ex- 
istence of  national  self-restraint,  that 
armed  intervention,  or  any  other  action 
or  policy  tending  to  place  that  right 
in  a  subordinate  position,  is  properly 
looked  upon  with  disfavor,  not  only  in 
Latin  America,  but  by  all  the  family 
of  civilized  nations.  The  grounds  upon 


which  intervention  is  permitted  in  in- 
ternational law  differ  according  to  the 
authority  one  consults.  But  in  general 
they  are  limited  to  the  right  of  self- 
preservation,  to  averting  danger  to  the 
intervening  state,  and  to  the  duty  of 
fulfilling  engagements.  When,  however, 
the  danger  against  which  intervention 
is  directed  is  the  consequence  of  the 
prevalence  of  ideas  which  are  opposed 
to  the  views  held  by  the  intervening 
state,  most  authorities  believe  that 
intervention  ceases  to  be  legitimate. 
To  say  that  we  have  the  right  to  in- 
tervene in  order  to  modify  another 
state's  attitude  toward  revolutions  is 
to  ignore  the  fundamental  principle 
that  the  right  of  every  state  to  live  its 
life  in  a  given  way  is  precisely  equal 
to  that  of  another  state  to  live  its  life 
in  another  way. 

In  the  last  analysis,  no  intervention 
is  legal  except  for  the  purpose  of  self- 
preservation,  unless  a  breach  of  inter- 
national law  has  taken  place  or  unless 
the  family  of  civilized  states  concur  in 
authorizing  it. 

If,  then,  our  adherence  to  the  Mon- 
roe Doctrine  means,  practically,  dis- 
regard of  the  principles  of  the  accepted 
law  of  nations,  *  is  it  worth  while  to 
continue?  Why  should  we  not  aban- 
don the  Monroe  Doctrine,  and  publicly 
disclaim  any  desire  on  our  part  to 
interfere  in  the  domestic  quarrels  of 
our  neighbors?  Why  should  we  not 
publicly  state  to  Europe  that  we  shall 
not  intervene  except  at  the  request  of 
a  Pan-American  Congress,  and  then 
only  in  case  we  are  one  of  the  mem- 
bers which  such  a  Congress  selects  for 
the  specific  purpose  of  quieting  a  cer- 
tain troublesome  neighbor? 


in 

From  the  Latin-American  point  of 
view,  the  continuance  of  the  Monroe 
Doctrine  is  insulting,  and  is  bound  to 


THE   MONROE  DOCTRINE:  AN   OBSOLETE  SHIBBOLETH    727 


involve  us  in  serious  difficulties  with 
our  neighbors.  We  seem  to  be  blind 
to  actual  conditions  in  the  largest  and 
most  important  parts  of  Latin  America 
such  as  Brazil,  Argentina,  and  Chile. 
We  need  to  arouse  the  average  citi- 
zen to  study  the  commercial  situation 
and  the  recent  history  of  those  three 
Republics.  Let  him  ponder  on  the 
meaning  of  Brazil's  one  hundred  mil- 
lion dollars  of  balance  of  trade  in  her 
favor.  Let  him  realize  the  enormous 
extent  of  Argentina's  recent  growth 
and  her  ability  to  supply  the  world 
with  wheat,  corn,  beef,  and  mutton.1 
Let  him  examine  Chile's  political  and 
economic  stability.  Let  him  ponder 
whether  or  not  these  nations  are  fit  to 
take  care  of  themselves,  and  are  worthy 
of  being  included  in  an  alliance  to 
preserve  America  for  the  Americans, 
if  that  is  worth  while,  and  if  there  is 
any  danger  from  Europe.  Let  him  ask 
himself  whether  or  not  the  *A  B  C' 
powers,  that  is  the  Argentine,  Brazilian, 
and  Chilean  governments,  deserve  our 
patronizing,  we-will-protect-you-from- 
Europe  attitude. 

The  fact  is,  we  are  woefully  ignorant 
of  the  actual  conditions  in  the  leading 
American  republics.  To  the  inhabit- 
ants of  those  countries  the  very  idea 
of  the  existence  of  the  Monroe  Doc- 
trine is  not  only  distasteful,  but  posi- 
tively insulting.  It  is  leading  them  on 
the  road  toward  what  is  known  as  the 
*  A  B  C '  policy,  a  kind  of  triple  Alliance 
between  Argentina,  Brazil,  and  Chile, 
with  the  definite  object  of  opposing  the 
encroachments  of  the  United  States. 
They  feel  that  they  must  do  something 
to  counteract  that  well-known  willing- 
ness of  the  American  people  to  find 
good  and  sufficient  reasons  for  inter- 
fering and  intervening;  for  example, 

1  In  1912  Argentina's  exports  amounted  to 
$480,000,000,  of  which  $200,000,000  represented 
wheat  and  corn,  and  $188,000,000  pastoral  pro- 
ducts. —  THE  AUTHOR. 


for  taking  Porto  Rico  from  Spain,  for 
sending  armies  into  Cuba,  for  handling 
the  customs  receipts  of  Santo  Do- 
mingo, for  taking  a  strip  of  territory 
which  (South  Americans  believe)  be- 
longs to  the  Republic  of  Colombia,  for 
sending  troops  into  Nicaragua,  and  for 
mobilizing  an  army  on  the  Mexican 
frontier.  (In  regard  to  the  latter  point, 
it  may  be  stated  in  passing  that  it  is 
not  the  custom  for  South  American 
nations  to  mobilize  an  army  on  a 
neighbor's  frontier  merely  because  that 
country  is  engaged  in  civil  war  or  rev- 
olution.) 

To  the  *A  B  C'  powers,  even  the 
original  Monroe  Doctrine  is  regarded 
as  long  since  outgrown,  and  as  being 
at  present  merely  a  display  of  inso- 
lence and  conceit  on  our  part.  With 
Brazil  now  owning  the  largest  dread- 
noughts in  the  world;  with  Argentina 
and  Chile  building  equally  good  ones; 
with  the  fact  that  the  European  na- 
tions have  long  since  lost  their  ten- 
dency toward  monarchical  despotism, 
and  are  in  fact  quite  as  democratic  as 
many  American  republics,  it  does  seem 
a  bit  ridiculous  for  us  to  pretend  that 
the  Monroe  Doctrine  is  a  necessary 
element  in  our  foreign  policy. 

If  we  still  fear  European  aggression, 
and  desire  to  prevent  a  partition  of 
South  America  on  the  lines  of  the  par- 
tition of  Africa,  let  us  bury  the  Monroe 
Doctrine  and  declare  an  entirely  new 
policy,  a  policy  that  is  based  on  intel- 
ligent appreciation  of  the  present  status 
of  the  leading  American  powers ;  let  us 
declare  our  desire  to  join  with  the 
*  A  B  C '  powers  in  protecting  the  weak- 
er parts  of  America  against  any  imagi- 
nable aggressions  on  the  part  of  Euro- 
pean or  Asiatic  nations. 

Some  people  think  that  the  most 
natural  outlet  for  the  crowded  Asiatic 
nations  is  to  be  found  in  South  Amer- 
ica, and  that  Japan  and  China  will 
soon  be  knocking  most  loudly  for  the 


728    THE  MONROE  DOCTRINE:  AN  OBSOLETE  SHIBBOLETH 


admission  which  is  at  present  denied 
them.  If  we  decide  that  they  should 
enter,  well  and  good;  but  if  we  decide 
against  such  a  policy,  we  shall  be  in  a 
much  stronger  position  to  carry  out 
that  plan  if  we  have  united  with  the 
'ABC'  powers. 

If  these  'ABC'  powers  dislike  and 
despise  our  maintenance  of  the  old 
Monroe  Doctrine,  it  is  not  difficult  to 
conceive  how  much  more  they  must 
resent  the  new  one.  The  very  thought 
that  we,  proud  in  the  consciousness  of 
our  own  self-righteousness,  sit  here 
with  a  smile  on  our  faces  and  a  big 
stick  in  our  hands,  ready  to  chastise 
any  of  the  American  republics  that  do 
not  behave,  fairly  makes  their  blood 
boil.  It  may  be  denied  that  this  is  our 
attitude.  Grant  that  it  is  not;  still  our 
neighbors  believe  that  it  is,  and  if  we 
desire  to  convince  them  of  the  con- 
trary, we  must  definitely  and  public- 
ly abandon  the  Monroe  Doctrine  and 
enunciate  a  new  kind  of  foreign  policy. 

We  ought  not  to  be  blind  to  the  fact 
that  there  are  clever  authors  residing 
in  Europe  who  take  the  utmost  pains 
to  make  the  Latin  Americans  believe 
—  what  they  are  unfortunately  only 
too  willing  to  believe  —  that  we  desire 
to  be  not  only  practically,  but  actu- 
ally, sovereign  on  the  Western  Hemi- 
sphere. A  recent  French  writer,  Mau- 
rice de  Waleffe,  writing  on  'The  Fair 
Land  of  Central  America,'  begins  his 
book  with  this  startling  announcement 
of  a  discovery  he  has  made :  — 

'The  United  States  have  made  up 
their  mind  to  conquer  South  America. 
Washington  aspires  to  become  the  cap- 
ital of  an  enormous  empire,  compris- 
ing, with  the  exception  of  Canada,  the 
whole  of  the  New  World.  Eighty  mil- 
lion Yankees  want  to  annex,  not  only 
forty  million  Spanish  Americans,  but 
such  mines,  forests,  and  agricultural 
riches  as  can  be  found  nowhere  else 
on  the  face  of  the  globe.' 


Most  of  us,  when  we  read  those 
words,  smile,  knowing  that  they  are 
not  true;  yet  that  does  not  affect  the 
fact  that  the  Latin  American,  when 
he  reads  them,  gnashes  his  teeth  and 
believes  that  they  are  only  too  true. 
If  he  belongs  to  one  of  the  larger 
republics,  it  makes  him  toss  his  head 
angrily,  and  increases  his  hatred  to- 
ward those  'Yankis,'  whose  manners 
he  despises.  If  he  belongs  to  one  of  the 
smaller  republics,  his  soul  is  filled  with 
fear  mingled  with  hatred,  and  he  sul- 
lenly awaits  the  day  when  he  shall 
have  to  defend  his  state  against  the 
Yankee  invaders.  In  every  case  the 
effect  produced  is  contrary  to  the 
spirit  of  peace  and  harmony. 

In  another  book,  which  is  attracting 
wide  attention  and  was  written  by  a 
young  Peruvian  diplomatist,  there  is  a 
chapter  entitled, '  The  North  American 
Peril,'  and  it  begins  with  these  signifi- 
cant words:  'To  save  themselves  from 
Yankee  imperialism,  the  American  de- 
mocracies would  almost  accept  a  Ger- 
man alliance,  or  the  aid  of  Japanese 
arms;  everywhere  the  Americans  of  the 
North  are  feared.  In  the  Antilles  and 
in  Central  America  hostility  against 
the  Anglo-Saxon  invaders  assumes  the 
character  of  a  Latin  crusade.'  This  is 
a  statement  not  of  a  theory  but  of  a 
condition,  set  forth  by  a  man  who, 
while  somewhat  severe  in  his  criticism 
of  North  American  culture,  is  not  un- 
friendly .to  the  United  States,  and  who 
remembers  what  his  country  owes  to 
us.  Yet  he  asserts  that  in  the  United 
States,  'against  the  policy  of  respect 
for  Latin  liberties  are  ranged  the  in- 
stincts of  a  triumphant  plutocracy.' 

The  strident  protest  in  this  book  has 
not  gone  out  without  finding  a  ready 
echo  in  South  America.  Even  in  Peru, 
long  our  best  friend  on  the  Southern 
Continent,  the  leading  daily  papers 
have  during  the  past  year  shown  an 
increasing  tendency  to  criticize  our 


THE  MONROE   DOCTRINE:  AN  OBSOLETE  SHIBBOLETH    729 


actions  and  suspect  our  motives. 
Their  suspicion  goes  so  far  as  actually 
to  turn  friendly  words  against  us. 
Last  September  a  successful  American 
diplomat,  addressing  a  distinguished 
gathering  of  manufacturers  in  New 
York,  was  quoted  all  over  South 
America  as  stating  that  the  United 
States  did  not  desire  territorial  expan- 
sion, but  only  commercial,  and  that 
the  association  should  combat  all  idea 
of  territorial  expansion  if  any  states- 
man proposed  it,  as  this  was  the  only 
way  to  gain  the  confidence  of  South 
America.  This  remark  was  treated  as 
evidence  of  Machiavellian  politics.  One 
journalist  excitedly  exclaimed,  'Who 
does  not  see  in  this  paternal  interest 
a  brutal  and  cynical  sarcasm?  Who 
talks  of  confidence  when  one  of  the 
most  thoughtful  South  American  au- 
thorities, Francisco  Garcia  Calderon, 
gives  us  once  more  the  cry,  no  longer 
premature,  "  let  us  be  alert  and  on  our 
guard  against  Yankeeism."3 

Even  the  agitation  against  the  Pu- 
tumayo  atrocities  is  misunderstood. 
'To  no  one  is  it  a  secret,'  says  one 
Latin-American  writer,  'that  all  these 
scandalous  accusations  only  serve  to 
conceal  the  vehement  desire  to  impress 
American  and  English  influence  on  the 
politics  of  the  small  countries  of  South 
America;  and  they  can  scarcely  cover 
the  shame  of  the  utilitarian  end  that 
lies  behind  it  all.' 

Another  instance  of  the  attitude  of 
the  Latin-American  press  is  shown  in 
a  recent  article  in  one  of  the  leading 
daily  papers  in  Lima,  the  government 
organ.  In  the  middle  of  its  front  page 
in  a  two-column  space  is  an  article 
with  these  headlines :  *  NORTH  AMERICAN 

EXCESSES THE  TERRIBLE  LYNCHINGS 

AND  THEY  TALK  OF  THE  PUTUMAYO ! ' 

The  gist  of  the  article  may  easily  be 
imagined.  It  begins  with  these  words: 
*  While  the  Saxons  of  the  world  are 
producing  a  deafening  cry  over  the 


crimes  of  the  Putumayo,  imagining 
them  to  be  like  a  dance  of  death,  and 
giving  free  rein  to  such  imaginings; 
while  the  American  Government  re- 
solves to  send  a  commission  that  may 
investigate  what  atrocities  are  com- 
mitted in  those  regions,  there  was  pub- 
lished, as  regards  the  United  States, 
in  La  Razon  of  Buenos  Aires  a  fortnight 
ago  the  following  note,  significant  of 
the  "  lofty  civilization  and  high  justice  " 
of  the  great  Republic  of  the  North/ 
Here  follows  a  press  dispatch  describ- 
ing one  of  the  terrible  lynchings  which 
only  too  often  happen  in  the  United 
States.  Then  the  Peruvian  editor  goes 
on  to  say,  'Do  we  realize  that  in  the 
full  twentieth  century,  when  there  is 
not  left  a  single  country  in  the  world 
whose  inhabitants  are  permitted  to 
supersede  justice  by  summary  punish- 
ment, there  are  repeatedly  taking  place, 
almost  daily,  in  the  United  States, 
lynchings  like  that  of  which  we  are 
told  in  the  telegraphic  dispatch?' 


IV 

Is  it  worth  our  while  to  heed  the 
*  writing  on  the  wall  ? ' 

Is  it  not  true  that  it  is  the  present 
tendency  of  the  Monroe  Doctrine  to 
claim  that  the  United  States  is  to  do 
whatever  seems  to  the  United  States 
good  and  proper  so  far  as  the  Western 
Hemisphere  is  concerned?  Is  there  not 
a  dangerous  tendency  in  our  country 
to  believe  so  far  in  our  own  rectitude, 
that  we  may  be  excused  from  any 
restrictions  either  in  the  law  of  nations, 
or  in  our  treaty  obligations,  that  seem 
unjust,  trivial,  or  inconvenient,  not- 
withstanding the  established  practices 
of  civilized  nations?  Our  attitude  on 
the  Panama  tolls  question,  our  former 
disregard  of  treaty  rights  with  China, 
and  our  willingness  to  read  into  or  read 
out  of  existing  treaties  whatever  seems 
to  us  right  and  proper,  have  aroused 


730    THE  MONROE  DOCTRINE:  AN  OBSOLETE  SHIBBOLETH 


deep-seated  suspicion  in  our  Southern 
neighbors  which  it  seems  to  me  we 
should  endeavor  to  eradicate  if  we 
have  our  own  highest  good  at  heart. 

Are  we  not  too  much  in  the  state  of 
mind  of  Citizen  Fix-it,  who  was  more 
concerned  with  suppressing  the  noisy 
quarrels  of  his  neighbors  than  with 
quietly  solving  his  own  domestic 
difficulties?  Could  we  see  ourselves  as 
our  Southern  neighbors  see  us  in  the 
columns  of  their  daily  press,  where  the 
emphasis  is  still  on  the  prevalence  of 
murder  in  the  United  States,  the  aston- 
ishing continuance  of  lynching,  the 
freedom  from  punishment  of  the  vast 
majority  of  those  who  commit  murder, 
our  growing  disregard  of  the  rights  of 
others,  bomb  outrages,  strikes,  riots, 
labor  difficulties,  —  could  we  see  these 
things  with  their  eyes,  we  should 
realize  how  bitterly  they  resent  our 
assumed  right  to  intervene  when  they 
misbehave  themselves  or  when  a  lo- 
cal revolution  becomes  particularly 
noisy. 

So  firmly  fixed  in  the  Latin-Amer- 
ican mind  is  the  idea  that  our  foreign 
policy  to-day  means  intervention  and 
interference,  that  comments  on  the 
splendid  sanitary  work  being  done  at 
Panama  by  Colonel  Gorgas  are  tainted 
with  this  idea. 

On  the  West  Coast  of  South  America 
there  is  a  pest-hole  called  Guayaquil, 
which,  as  Ambassador  Bryce  says,  *  en- 
joys the  reputation  of  being  the  pest- 
house  of  the  continent,  rivaling  for  the 
prevalence  and  malignity  of  its  mal- 
arial fevers  such  dens  of  disease  as 
Fontesvilla  on  the  Pungwe  River  in 
South  Africa  and  the  Guinea  coast 
itself,  and  adding  to  these  the  more 
swift  and  deadly  yellow  fever,  which 
has  now  been  practically  extirpated 
from  every  other  part  of  South  America 
except  the  banks  of  the  Amazon  .  .  . 
It  seems  to  be  high  time  that  efforts 
should  be  made  to  improve  conditions 


at  a  place  whose  development  is  so  es- 
sential to  the  development  of  Ecuador 
itself/  Recent  efforts  on  the  part  of 
far-sighted  Ecuadorian  statesmen  to 
remedy  these  conditions  by  employing 
American  sanitary  engineers  and  tak- 
ing advantage  of  the  offers  of  American 
capital,  were  received  by  the  Ecuador- 
ian populace  so  ill  as  to  cause  the  fall 
of  the  Cabinet  and  the  disgrace  of  the 
minister  who  favored  such  an  experi- 
ment in  modern  sanitation. 

Peru  suffers  from  the  conditions  of 
bad  health  among  her  northern  neigh- 
bors, and  yet  the  leading  newspapers 
in  Peru,  instead  of  realizing  how  much 
they  had  to  gain  by  having  Guaya- 
quil cleaned  up,  united  in  protesting 
against  this  symptom  of  'Yanki'  im- 
perialism, and  applauded  the  action  of 
the  Ecuador  mob. 

Is  it  worth  while  to  continue  a  for- 
eign policy  which  makes  it  so  difficult 
for  things  to  be  done,  things  of  whose 
real  advantage  to  our  neighbors  there 
is  no  question? 

The  old  adage,  that  actions  speak 
louder  than  words,  is  perhaps  more  true 
in  Latin  America  than  in  the  United 
States.  A  racial  custom  of  saying 
pleasant  things  tends  Coward  a  sus- 
picion of  the  sincerity  of  pleasant 
things  when  said.  But  there  can  be  no 
doubt  about  actions.  Latin-American 
statesmen  smiled  and  applauded  when 
Secretary  Root,  in  the  Pan-American 
Congress  at  Rio  Janeiro,  said,  'We 
consider  that  the  independence  and 
the  equal  rights  of  the  smallest  and 
weakest  members  of  the  family  of  na- 
tions deserve  as  much  respect  as  those 
of  the  great  empires.  We  pretend  to 
no  right,  privilege,  or  power  that  we 
do  not  freely  concede  to  each  one  of 
the  American  Republics.'  But  they 
felt  that  their  suspicions  of  us  were 
more  than  warranted  by  our  subse- 
quent actions  in  Cuba,  Santo  Domin- 
go, and  Nicaragua.  Our  ultimatum  to 


THE   MONROE  DOCTRINE:  AN  OBSOLETE  SHIBBOLETH    731 


Chile  on  account  of  the  long-standing 
Alsop  claim  seemed  to  them  an  unmis- 
takably unfriendly  act  and  was  re- 
garded as  a  virtual  abandonment  by 
Secretary  Knox  of  the  policy  enun- 
ciated by  Secretary  Root. 

Another  unfriendly  act  was  the  ne- 
glect of  our  Congress  to  provide  a  suit- 
able appropriation  for  the  Second  Pan- 
American  Scientific  Congress. 

Before  1908  Latin- American  Scien- 
tific Congresses  had  been  held  in 
Argentina  (Buenos  Aires),  Brazil  (Rio 
Janeiro),  and  Uruguay  (Montevideo). 
When  it  came  Chile's  turn,  so  kind 
was  her  feeling  toward  Secretary  Root, 
that  the  United  States  was  asked  to 
join  in  making  the  Fourth  Latin- 
American  Scientific  Congress  become 
the  First  Pan-American.  Every  one 
of  the  four  countries  where  the  inter- 
national scientists  met  had  made  a 
suitable,  generous  appropriation  to 
cover  the  expenses  of  the  meeting. 
Chile  had  felt  that  it  was  worth  while 
to  make  a  very  large  appropriation  in 
order  suitably  to  entertain  the  dele- 
gates, to  publish  the  results  of  the 
Congress,  and  to  increase  American 
friendships.  This  First  Pan-American 
Scientific  Congress  selected  Washing- 
ton as  the  place  for  the  Second  Con- 
gress, and  named  October,  1912,  as 
the  appointed  time  for  the  meetings. 
But  when  our  State  Department  asked 
Congress  for  a  modest  appropriation 
of  fifty  thousand  dollars  to  meet  our 
international  obligations  for  this  Pan- 
American  gathering,  our  billion-dollar 
Congress  decided  to  economize  and 
denied  the  appropriation.  When  the 
matter  came  up  again  during  the  Con- 
gress that  has  just  finished  its  sessions, 
the  appropriation  was  recommended 
by  the  Committee  on  Foreign  Affairs, 
but  was  thrown  out  on  a  technical 
point  of  order. 

Now,  you  cannot  make*  a  Latin 
American  believe  that  the  United  States 


is  so  poor  that  it  cannot  afford  to  en- 
tertain International  Scientific  Con- 
gresses as  Argentina,  Brazil,  Uruguay, 
and  Chile  have  done.  They  argue  that 
there  must  be  some  other  reason  under- 
lying this  lack  of  courtesy.  No  pleasant 
words  or  profuse  professions  of  friend- 
ship and  regard  can  make  the  leading 
statesmen  and  scientists  throughout 
Latin  America  forget  that  it  was  not 
possible  to  hold  the  Second  Pan-Amer- 
ican Scientific  Congress  because  the 
United  States  did  not  care  to  assume 
her  international  obligations.  Nor  will 
they  forget  that  Chile  spent  one  hun- 
dred thousand  dollars  in  entertaining 
the  First  Pan-American  Scientific  Con- 
gress and  that  the  ten  official  delegates 
from  the  United  States  government 
enjoyed  the  bounteous  Chilean  hospi- 
tality and  were  shown  every  attention 
that  was  befitting  and  proper  for  the 
accredited  representatives  of  the  Uni- 
ted States. 

In  short,  here  is  a  concrete  case  of 
how  our  present  policy  toward  Latin 
America  justifies  the  Latin- American 
attitude  toward  the  country  that  has 
been  maintaining  the  Monroe  Doctrine. 


Finally,  there  is  another  side  to  the 
question. 

Some  of  the  defenders  of  the  Monroe 
Doctrine  state  quite  frankly  that  they 
are  selfish,  and  that  from  the  selfish 
point  of  view,  the  Monroe  Doctrine 
should  at  all  costs  be  maintained. 
They  argue  that  our  foreign  commerce 
would  suffer  were  Europe  permitted 
to  have  a  free  hand  in  South  America. 
Even  on  this  very  point  it  seems  to  me 
that  they  make  a  serious  mistake. 

You  can  seldom  sell  goods  to  a  man 
who  dislikes  you  except  when  you  have 
something  which  is  far  better  or  cheaper 
than  he  can  get  anywhere  else.  Fur- 
thermore, if  he  distrusts  you,  he  is  not 


732    THE   MONROE   DOCTRINE:   AN   OBSOLETE   SHIBBOLETH 


going  to  judge  your  goods  fairly,  or 
to  view  the  world's  market  with  an 
unprejudiced  eye.  This  can  scarcely 
be  denied.  Everyone  knows  that  a 
friendly  smile  or  cordial  greeting  and 
the  maintenance  of  friendly  relations 
are  essential  to  *  holding  one's  custom- 
ers.' Accordingly,  it  seems  that  even 
from  this  selfish  point  of  view,  which 
some  Americans  are  willing  to  take,  it 
is  absolutely  against  our  own  interests 
to  maintain  this  elder-brother-with- 
the-stick  policy,  which  typifies  the  new 
Monroe  Doctrine. 

Furthermore,  Germany  is  getting 
around  the  Monroe  Doctrine,  and  is 
actually  making  a  peaceful  conquest 
of  South  America  which  will  injure  us 
just  as  much  as  if  we  had  allowed  her 
to  make  a  military  conquest  of  the 
Southern  republics.  She  is  winning 
South  American  friendship.  She  has 
planted  colonies,  one  of  which,  in 
Southern  Brazil,  has  three  hundred 
and  fifty  thousand  people  in  it,  as 
large  a  population  as  that  of  Vermont, 
and  nearly  as  large  as  that  of  Montana. 
Germany  is  taking  pains  to  educate 
her  young  business  men  in  the  Span- 
ish language,  and  to  send  them  out 
equipped  to  capture  Spanish- American 
trade.  We  have  a  saying  that  'Trade 
follows  the  flag.'  Germany  has  mag- 
nificent steamers,  flying  the  German 
flag,  giving  fortnightly  service  to  every 
important  port  in  South  America,  — 
ports  where  the  American  flag  is 
practically  never  seen.  She  has  her 
banks  and  business  houses  which  have 
branches  in  the  interior  cities.  By 
their  means  she  is  able  to  keep  track  of 
American  commerce,  to  know  what  we 
are  doing,  and  at  what  rates.  Laughing 
in  her  sleeve  at  the  Monroe  Doctrine 
as  an  antiquated  policy,  which  only 
makes  it  easier  for  her  to  do  a  safe 
business,  Germany  is  engaged  in  the 
peaceful  conquest  of  Spanish  America. 

To  be  sure,  we  are  not  standing  still, 


and  we  are  fighting  for  the  same  trade 
that  she  is,  but  our  soldiers  are  handi- 
capped by  the  presence  of  the  very  doc- 
trine that  was  intended  to  strengthen 
our  position  in  the  New  World.  Is 
this  worth  while? 

At  all  events  let  us  face  clearly  and 
frankly  the  fact  that  the  maintenance  of 
the  Monroe  Doctrine  is  going  to  cost 
the  United  States  an  immense  amount 
of  trouble,  money,  and  men. 

Carried  out  to  its  logical  conclusion, 
it  means  a  policy  of  suzerainty  and 
interference  which  will  earn  us  the  in- 
creasing hatred  of  our  neighbors,  the 
dissatisfaction  of  Europe,  the  loss  of 
commercial  opportunities  and  the  for- 
feiture of  time  and  attention  which 
would  much  better  be  given  to  settling 
our  own  difficult  internal  problems. 
The  continuance  of  adherence  to  the 
Monroe  Doctrine  offers  opportunities 
to  scheming  statesmen  to  distract 
public  opinion  from  the  necessity  of 
concentrated  attention  at  home,  by 
arousing  mingled  feelings  of  jingoism 
and  self-importance  in  attempting  to 
correct  the  errors  of  our  neighbors. 

If  we  persist  in  maintaining  the 
Monroe  Doctrine,  we  shall  find  that 
its  legitimate,  rational,  and  logical 
growth  will  lead  us  to  an  increasing 
number  of  large  expenditures,  where 
American  treasure  and  American  blood 
will  be  sacrificed  in  efforts  to  remove 
the  mote  from  our  neighbor's  eye  while 
overlooking  the  beam  in  our  own. 

The  character  of  the  people  who 
inhabit  the  tropical  American  repub- 
lics is  such,  the  percentage  of  Indian 
blood  is  so  great,  the  little-understood 
difficulties  of  life  in  those  countries  are 
so  far-reaching,  and  the  psychological 
tendencies  of  the  people  so  different 
from  our  own,  that  opportunities  will 
continually  arise  which  will  convince 
us  that  they  require  our  intervention  if 
we  continue  to  hold  to  the  tenets  of  the 
Monroe  Doctrine. 


THE   MONROE  DOCTRINE:  AN  OBSOLETE  SHIBBOLETH    733 


It  is  for  us  to  face  the  question  fairly, 
and  to  determine  whether  it  is  worth 
while  to  continue  any  longer  on  a  road 
which  leads  to  such  great  expenditures, 
and  which  means  the  loss  of  inter- 
national friendships. 

That  international  good  will  is  a 
desideratum,  it  needs  no  words  of 
mine  to  prove  to  any  one.  Looked  at 
from  every  point  of  view,  selfishly  and 
unselfishly,  ethically,  morally,  com- 
mercially, and  diplomatically,  we  de- 
sire to  live  at  peace  with  our  neighbors 
and  to  promote  international  friend- 
ship. Can  this  be  done  by  continuing 
our  adherence  to  the  Monroe  Doc- 
trine? 

From  the  unselfish  point  of  view, 
and  from  the  point  of  view  of  the 
world's  peace  and  happiness,  there 
seems  to  be  no  question  that  the 
Monroe  Doctrine  is  no  longer  worth 
while.  Mr.  Bryce,  in  an  able  exposi- 
tion in  his  recent  South  America,  has 
clearly  pointed  out  that  the  Spanish 
American's  regard  for  the  United 
States,  and  his  confidence  in  its  pur- 
poses, have  never  even  recovered  from 
the  blow  given  by  the  Mexican  War  of 
1846,  and  the  annexation  of  California. 
For  many  years,  a  political  tie  between 
ourselves  and  the  other  American 
Republics  was  found,  says  Mr.  Bryce, 
in  our  declared  intention  *  to  resist  any 
attempt  by  European  Powers  either 
to  overthrow  republican  government 
in  any  American  state  or  to  attempt 
annexation  of  its  territory.  So  long  as 
any  such  action  was  feared  from 
Europe,  the  protection  thus  promised 
was  welcome,  and  the  United  States 
felt  a  corresponding  interest  in  their 
clients.  But  circumstances  alter  cases. 
To-day,  when  apprehensions  of  the  old 
kind  have  vanished,  and  when  some  of 
the  South  American  States  feel  them- 
selves already  powerful,  one  is  told 
that  they  have  begun  to  regard  the 
situation  with  different  eyes.  "Since 


there  are  no  longer  rainclouds  coming 
up  from  the  east,  why  should  a  friend, 
however  well-intentioned,  insist  on 
holding  an  umbrella  over  us?  We  are 
quite  able  to  do  that  for  ourselves  if 
necessary." '  Mr.  Bryce  continues :  *  It 
is  as  the  disinterested,  the  absolutely 
disinterested  and  unselfish,  advocate 
of  peace  and  good  will,  that  the  United 
States  will  have  most  influence  in  the 
Western  Hemisphere,  and  that  influ- 
ence, gently  and  tactfully  used,  may 
be  of  incalculable  service  to  mankind.' 

Old  ideas,  proverbs,  catchwords, 
national  shibboleths,  die  hard.  No 
part  of  our  foreign  policy  has  ever  been 
so  continuously  held  and  so  popularly 
accepted  as  the  Monroe  Doctrine. 
Hoary  with  age,  it  has  defied  the  ad- 
vance of  commerce,  the  increase  of 
transportation  facilities,  and  the  sub- 
jugation of  the  yellow-fever  mosquito. 
Based  on  a  condition  that  has  long 
since  disappeared,  owing  its  later 
growth  and  development  to  mistaken 
ideas,  it  appears  to  our  South  Ameri- 
can neighbors  to  be  neither  disinter- 
ested nor  unselfish,  but  rather  an  indis- 
putable evidence  of  our  overweening 
national  conceit.  The  very  words 
*  Monroe  Doctrine'  are  fraught  with  a 
disagreeable  significance  from  our 
neighbors'  point  of  view.  There  is  no 
one  single  thing,  nor  any  group  of 
things,  that  we  could  do  to  increase  the 
chances  of  peace  and  harmony  in  the 
Western  Hemisphere  comparable  with 
the  definite  statement  that  we  have 
outgrown  the  Monroe  Doctrine,  that 
we  realize  that  our  neighbors  in  the 
New  World  are  well  able  to  take  care 
of  themselves,  and  that  we  shall  not 
interfere  in  their  politics  or  send  arms 
into  their  territory,  unless  cordially  in- 
vited to  do  so,  and  then  only  in  con- 
nection with,  and  by  the  cooperation 
of,  other  members  of  the  family. 

If  it  is  necessary  to  maintain  order 
in  some  of  the  weaker  and  more  rest- 


734 


THE  REAL   YELLOW  PERIL 


less  republics,  why  not  let  the  decision 
be  made,  not  by  ourselves,  but  by  a 
Congress  of  the  leading  American 
powers?  If  it  is  found  necessary  to 
send  armed  forces  into  Central  Amer- 
ica to  quell  rebellions  that  are  proving 
too  much  for  the  recognized  govern- 
ments, why  not  let  those  forces  con- 
sist not  solely  of  American  marines,  but 
of  the  marines  of  Argentina,  Brazil, 
and  Chile  as  well?  In  some  such  way 


as  this  we  can  convince  *  the  other  Amer- 
icans '  of  our  good  faith,  and  of  the 
fact  that  we  have  not  'made  up  our 
minds  to  conquer  South  America.'  By 
adopting  a  foreign  policy  along  these 
lines  we  can  establish  on  a  broad  and 
solid  foundation  the  relations  of  inter- 
national peace  and  good  will  for  which 
the  time  is  ripe,  but  which  cannot 
arrive  till  we  are  convinced  that  the 
Monroe  Doctrine  is  not  worth  while. 


THE  REAL  YELLOW  PERIL 


BY  J.    O.   P.   BLAND 


IN  the  summer  of  1911,  my  duties  as 
Times  correspondent  took  me  to  the 
Baltic.  On  a  fine  morning  in  July,  I 
found  myself  in  the  neighborhood  of 
Riga,  walking  among  the  pine  trees 
that  grow  to  the  edge  of  the  sand  at 
the  popular  sea-bathing  resort  of  Dub- 
beln.  Riga,  be  it  observed,  boasts  of  an- 
other flourishing  watering-place  which 
rejoices  in  the  name  of  Edinbourg, 
and  is  in  hereditary  rivalry  with  Dub- 
beln;  but  the  satisfaction  which  a  wan- 
dering Englishman  may  derive  from 
the  saving  grace  of  these  names  in  par- 
tibus  infidelium  is  of  the  gentle,  mel- 
ancholy kind  which  comes  from  the 
contemplation  of  departed  greatness. 
Inevitably  one's  mind  goes  back  to  the 
days  of  our  sturdy  merchant  adven- 
turers, when  England  not  only  domin- 
ated the  commerce  of  the  White  Sea 
and  the  Baltic,  but  pushed  her  far- 
flung  trade  lines  through  Moscow  to  the 
shores  of  the  Black  Sea  and  the  Cas- 


pian. Dubbeln  and  Edinbourg  were 
originally  private  estates  and  summer 
resorts,  created  by  an  Irishman  and  a 
Scot,  respectively,  as  places  preferable 
on  summer  evenings  to  the  narrow, 
stuffy  streets  of  the  old  Hanseatic  town. 
To-day,  the  German  and  the  Dutch- 
man, with  their  wives  and  families,  fill 
the  suburban  villas  and  hotels  of  all 
that  region,  and  bathe  noisily  behind 
the  curiously  ineffective  screens  which 
stretch  along  the  water's  edge. 

I  was  reflecting,  sadly  enough,  on  the 
archaic  traditions  which  make  the  Brit- 
ish Board  of  Trade  and  Foreign  Office 
so  persistently  incapable  of  adapting 
our  national  trade  interests  to  their 
rapidly  changing  environments,  and 
wondering  why  the  German's  intelligent 
coordination  of  financial  and  industrial 
resources  should  be  beyond  the  modern 
Anglo-Saxon's  economic  capacity,  when 
suddenly  there  emerged  on  the  path  in 
front  of  me,  from  the  garden  gate  of  a 
villa  among  the  pines,  two  thick-set 
men,  clad  in  blue,  each  carrying  a  heavy 


THE  REAL  YELLOW  PERIL 


735 


bundle  on  his  back.  The  sight  of  them 
was  strangely  familiar;  at  a  glance  I 
knew  them  to  be  peddlers  from  Shan- 
tung, from  China's  Farthest  East;  but 
their  sudden  appearance  here  —  at  the 
uttermost  limit  of  western  Europe  — 
seemed  so  utterly  impossible,  that  for 
a  moment  I  stood  still,  half  expecting 
them  to  fade  and  disappear  among  the 
pines.  They  came  sturdily  along,  how- 
ever, with  the  shuffling  gait  habitual 
to  Chinese  burden-bearers  of  the  hill 
countries,  and  were  about  to  enter  the 
garden  gate  of  the  next  villa,  when  I 
stopped  them  and  asked,  in  their  own 
tongue,  what  business  brought  them 
to  this  place,  so  far  from  their  honor- 
able home. 

Talk  of  British  phlegm!  There  is 
nothing  in  the  world  to  compare  with 
the  perfectly  natural  sangfroid,  the  im- 
perturbable calm  of  the  Chinese  race. 
Neither  honest  face  showed  the  slight- 
est sign  of  surprise  at  being  thus  ad- 
dressed. One  man,  in  fact,  proceeded 
stolidly  up  the  path  to  deposit  his  pack 
by  the  doorstep,  leaving  the  other  to 
answer  the  foreigner's  questions.  Their 
trade,  he  informed  me,  was  a  peddler's 
business  in  Shantung  silks  and  pongees; 
for  twelve  years  they  had  tramped  the 
country  northwards  and  west,  from 
Moscow,  their  base  of  supplies.  It  was 
a  good  trade,  he  said,  though  even  the 
cheapest  inns  were  very  expensive,  and 
many  Russians  were  very  deficient  in 
reasonableness,  especially  the  excise  of- 
ficers; and  to  travel  at  night  was  dan- 
gerous, because  so  many  men  were 
drunken  after  dark,  and  then  violent. 
They  were  working  for  a  hong  man- 
ager, getting  a  small  share  in  the  an- 
nual profits.  Neither  of  them  had  been 
home  in  all  these  years,  but  they 
hoped  to  be  able  to  go  soon,  for  their 
sons  in  China  were  now  grown  men, 
and  they  had  saved  enough  to  be  sure 
of  rice  in  their  old  age.  Trading  in  Rus- 
sia was  easy,  easier  than  in  China,  for 


the  women  were  free  buyers  and  fond 
of  silk,  especially  when  they  could  buy 
it  at  their  doors  cheaper  than  in  the 
shops;  but  they  all  keep  late  hours,  and 
in  winter  the  working-days  are  very 
short. 

What  about  the  prospect  of  a  parlia- 
ment in  China,  I  asked,  and  the  condi- 
tion of  affairs  at  Peking?  Shouldering 
his  pack  with  a  jerk,  which  said  plainly 
that  the  time  for  idling  was  past,  he 
replied,  'I  do  not  know  about  these 
things.  All  that  is  mandarin  business; 
we  are  silk-sellers.  The  wise  dog  does 
not  try  to  catch  mice.'  Whereupon 
we  wished  each  other  peace  on  our  re- 
spective roads. 

But  as  I  stood  awhile  and  watched 
these  sons  of  Han  displaying  their 
wares  to  a  stout  lady  in  a  pink  peignoir, 
and  heard  them  bargaining  in  an  evi- 
dently serviceable  *  pidgin'  Russian, 
using  the  same  gestures,  the  same  trade 
shibboleths  which  the  Shantung  silk 
and  fur  peddlers  have  used  for  cen- 
turies in  their  closely  preserved  trades, 
these  two  lonely  figures  by  the  shores 
of  the  Baltic  seemed  to  me  to  be  fore- 
runners of  the  only  real  Yellow  Peril 
which  can  possibly  threaten  the  mate- 
rial civilization  of  the  Western  World, 
—  a  far-flung  wave  of  the  great  tide  of 
China's  hunger-driven  millions,  seek- 
ing, beyond  the  borders  of  the  Middle 
Kingdom,  to  escape  from  its  ever-pre- 
sent menace  of  starvation.  Behind 
them  I  saw  the  cloud,  no  bigger  than  a 
man's  hand  on  our  horizons  of  to-day, 
the  cloud  of  Asia's  intolerable  struggle 
for  bare  life,  unmoved  through  the  long 
centuries  of  her  splendid  isolation  by 
any  wind  of  inspiration  or  sea-breeze  of 
change.  As  I  watched  those  two  men, 
splendidly  typical  of  the  invincible 
patience  and  dogged  industry  bred  in 
their  race  by  long  ages  of  that  fierce 
struggle,  I  realized  that  their  presence 
here  was,  in  its  way,  a  portent  of  no 
mean  significance.  It  meant  that  the 


736 


THE  REAL   YELLOW  PERIL 


sea-breeze  was  rising,  and  the  cloud 
moving  at  last. 

If  there  be  a  Yellow  Peril  of  the  fu- 
ture, if  the  Western  World's  persistent 
forebodings  of  danger  to  come  from 
China's  teeming  millions  are  justified 
by  any  cause  other  than  the  natural 
nervousness  of  our  comfortable  ma- 
terialism, that  cause  lies  assuredly  in 
the  growing  perception  by  the  Chinese 
people  of  the  fact  that  relief  from  their 
intolerable  life-struggle  may  be  sought 
and  found  beyond  the  frontiers  of  the 
eighteen  provinces,  and  in  the  fact  that 
those  who,  as  pioneers,  have  sought  re- 
lief in  this  way,  are  gradually  learning, 
in  adapting  themselves  to  new  condi- 
tions of  life,  to  free  themselves  from  the 
fettering  traditions  which  have  made 
the  race  in  China  hereditary  and  unre- 
sisting victims  of  native  misrule  and 
foreign  aggression. 


ii 

This  aspect  of  the  Yellow  Peril  (to 
which  I  shall  return)  is  not  that  which 
has  usually  attracted  the  attention  and 
fretted  the  nerves  of  politicians  and 
publicists  in  Europe  and  America.  Ever 
since  Japan's  victories  over  Russia, 
the  Pickwickian  Fat  Boys  of  yellow 
journalism  have  found  their  pleasure 
and  profit  in  making  our  comfortable 
feather-bed  flesh  creep  with  lurid  de- 
scriptions of  *  China  Arming,'  with  grim 
prophecies  of  the  Celestial  giant  awak- 
ening and  proceeding,  after  a  brief 
period  of  military  training,  to  over- 
throw the  whole  fabric  of  Western 
civilization. 

Even  after  the  Boxer  rising  in  1900 
had  once  again  demonstrated  the  utter 
fatuity  of  attributing  to  the  passive 
sons  of  Han  the  qualities  of  a  con- 
quering race,  this  vision  of  a  scienti- 
fically organized,  efficient,  and  aggress- 
ive China  continued  to  oppress  the 
imagination  of  a  world  that  has  been 


taught  to  like  its  sensations  hot  and 
strong.  After  the  Russo-Japanese  war, 
the  Yellow  Peril  waxed  in  fearfulness, 
partly  because  of  the  Russian  govern- 
ment's panicky  belief  in  a  Pan-Asiatic 
movement,  and  partly  because  of  the 
highly  intelligent  work  done  by  the 
official  Japanese  press  bureau  abroad. 
If  His  Majesty  the  Kaiser  could  pro- 
fess, coram  publico,  to  believe  in  the 
prospect  of  Europe  forced  to  stand  on 
the  defensive  against  Asia,  plain  citi- 
zens were  surely  justified  in  looking  for 
Armageddon  from  that  quarter;  and 
the  Kaiser's  flights  of  poetic  imagina- 
tion had  Sir  Robert  Hart's  prophecies 
to  justify  them  in  the  press  of  the 
Western  world. 

The  popular  conception  of  the  Yel- 
low Peril  military  was  based,  in  the 
first  instance,  on  a  widespread  accept- 
ance of  two  fantastic  ideas:  first,  that 
'Asia  for  the  Asiatics'  is  a  possible 
war-cry;  and,  secondly,  that  China  is 
capable  of  rapidly  emulating  Japan  in 
the  matter  of  political  progress  and 
military  efficiency.  The  Peril,  as  a 
bogy,  derived  all  its  awe-inspiring  qual- 
ities from  sheer  weight  of  numbers. 
With  a  thoroughly  effective  national 
army  (it  has  been  freely  estimated  in 
the  European  press  at  forty  millions  of 
men  in  the  near  future),  China,  gladly 
supported  by  India  and  Japan,  must 
soon  have  Europe  at  her  mercy.  The 
idea  is  in  itself  so  utterly  absurd,  so 
completely  opposed  to  all  the  teachings 
of  history,  and  to  our  knowledge  of 
the  Chinese  people,  that  its  accept- 
ance must,  I  think,  be  partly  ascribable 
to  vague  race-memories  subconsciously 
latent  among  European  peoples,  to 
certain  unreasoning  atavistic  instincts, 
whose  origins  lie  far  back  in  those  for- 
gotten centuries,  when  all  the  world  of 
the  Middle  Ages  trembled  before  the 
resistless  Mongol  hosts,  when  Jenghiz 
Khan  ruled  from  Korea  to  Muscovy, 
and  when,  from  Cathay  to  Poland, 


THE  REAL   YELLOW  PERIL 


737 


every  race  had  felt  the  heavy  hand  of 
an  Asiatic  conqueror. 

Underlying  the  Yellow  Peril  idea  of 
the  present  day,  with  its  vague  appre- 
hensions of  danger  from  the  East,  we 
may  also  trace,  I  believe,  the  workings 
and  prickings  of  a  collective  bad  con- 
science, an  instinctive  admission  of  the 
wrongs  inflicted  by  the  white  races  up- 
on the  defenseless  Chinese  people,  and 
a  sense  of  the  fitness  of  retributive  jus- 
tice. No  one  can  study  the  history  of 
the  relations  of  the  Christian  Powers 
with  China  during  the  past  sixty  years 
without  realizing  how  little,  despite 
all  its  professions  of  philanthropy,  the 
West  has  done  to  improve  the  actual 
conditions  of  life  for  the  East;  how  cyn- 
ically our  benevolent  pretensions  of  al- 
truism have  cloaked  persistent  policies 
of  aggression.  While  our  missionaries 
have  proclaimed  the  common  brother- 
hood of  man  and  the  sanctity  of  human 
life,  organizing  famine  relief  works, 
building  hospitals,  and  preaching  sani- 
tation in  order  to  reduce  a  death-rate 
three  times  greater  than  that  of  the 
Dnited  States;  while  the  Powers  of 
Europe  and  America  have  united  to  in- 
sist upon  the  principle  of  the  open  door 
and  equal  opportunity  as  the  inalien- 
able birthright  of  every  white  man  in 
China,  we  have  made  it  plain  to  the 
Chinese  that  equal  opportunities  and 
the  rights  of  common  brotherhood  are 
not  for  them  unless,  like  the  Japanese, 
they  can  learn  to  assert  their  right 
to  them  by  force.  The  exclusion  acts 
adopted  by  the  Anglo-Saxon  peoples 
of  the  American  and  Australian  conti- 
nents, to  protect  themselves  against 
the  undeniable  economic  superiority  of 
the  yellow  races,  are  merely  a  manifest- 
ation of  nature's  grimly  fundamental 
law  of  self-preservation,  in  whose  ser- 
vice might  is  ever  right.  But,  in  the 
face  of  our  philanthropic  professions, 
these  acts  are  morally  indefensible, 
and  their  hypocrisy  becomes  the  more 

VOL.  Ill -NO.  6 


glaringly  manifest  when  viewed  in  the 
light  of  international  'dollar  diplo- 
macy,' whereby  the  birthrights  of  the 
weaker  nations  are  bought  and  sold  in 
the  open  market.  Hence  arises  a  col- 
lective bad  conscience,  disturbing  at 
times  to  the  moral  dignity  of  our  civil- 
ization, a  conscience  which  vaguely 
realizes  that  if  ever  China  should  be- 
come an  efficiently  organized  military 
power,  she  would  be  fully  justified  in 
exacting  heavy  reparation  for  these 
things. 

A  significant  indication  of  this  bad 
conscience,  and  of  an  intuitive  fear  of 
possible  retaliation,  was  given  at  the 
time  of  Prince  Katsura's  polite  'con- 
versations' with  the  Russian  govern- 
ment at  St.  Petersburg  last  summer, 
when  the  new  friends,  preparing  for  the 
dismemberment  of  China's  northern' 
dependencies,  cordially  agreed  that  *  if 
China  should  ever  recover  her  balance 
sufficiently  to  turn  her  attention  to  na- 
tional defenses,  she  should  not  be  per- 
mitted to  create  a  formidable  army.' 
It  is  obviously  to  the  advantage  of 
Russia  and  Japan  that  China  should 
not  'recover  her  balance,'  and  it  is 
highly  suggestive  of  the  lack  of  high 
principles  in  international  politics,  that 
the  other  Great  Powers,  represented 
by  their  politico-financial  syndicates, 
should  lend  themselves  to  proceedings 
evidently  intended  to  prevent  her  from 
so  doing. 

The  vision  of  a  Yellow  Peril  military 
is  now  steadily  fading,  in  the  light  of 
new  conditions  and  of  facts  which  de- 
prive it  of  all  substance.  'Asia  for  the 
Asiatics '  as  a  possible  war-cry,  or  even 
as  a  tentative  diplomatic  shibboleth  to 
offset  the  Monroe  Doctrine,  becomes 
obviously  impossible  in  the  face  of  the 
Russo-Japanese  entente  and  its  imme- 
diate consequences  in  Manchuria  and 
Mongolia.  The  moral  and  material 
weaknesses  of  China's  military  organi- 
zation, as  revealed  by  the  events  of  the 


738 


THE  REAL  YELLOW  PERIL 


recent  revolution  and  by  the  actual 
situation  at  Peking,  have  made  it  im- 
possible to  regard  Sir  Robert  Hart's 
*  millions  of  Boxers  in  serried  ranks  and 
war's  panoply'  as  a  menace  to  any  but 
the  Chinese  themselves.  Before  China 
can  possibly  possess  an  efficiently  or- 
ganized and  disciplined  national  army, 
she  must  have  proved  herself  capable 
of  effecting  radical  reforms  throughout 
her  whole  fiscal  and  administrative  sys- 
tem; she  must,  in  other  words,  have 
evolved  a  class  of  officials,  clean-hand- 
ed and  intelligently  patriotic,  capable 
of  leading  and  inspiring  a  nation  in 
arms.  Without  such  a  class, — of  which 
there  is  at  present  no*sign,  —  China's 
military  forces  (foreign-drilled  troops 
and  provincial  levies  alike)  will  con- 
tinue to  be  armed  rabbles,  mobs  of  men 
with  guns,  liable  at  any  crisis  to  lend 
themselves  to  the  purposes  of  political 
adventurers,  a  permanent  menace  to 
the  security  of  life  and  property. 

The  Yellow  Peril  military,  as  an  ef- 
fective bugbear,  is  therefore  doomed; 
nevertheless,  because  of  its  oft-proved 
usefulness  to  serve  the  ends  of  foreign 
statesmen  and  diplomats  in  the  past, 
it  is  a  phantom  which  is  likely  to  be  fre- 
quently invoked  again  by  those  who 
seek  thereby  to  justify  their  policies 
of  territorial  aggression.  Russia  and 
Japan  have  lately  used  it  with  good 
effect,  and  their  schemes  have  been 
greatly  assisted  by  the  purblind  folly 
of  Young  China,  which  continues  loud- 
ly to  proclaim  its  pathetic  warlike  in- 
tentions and  the  immediate  prospect  of 
Chinese  armies  being  organized  and 
equipped  on  a  gigantic  scale.  Sun  Yat- 
sen,  for  instance,  publicly  advises  Yuan 
Shih-k'ai  to  place  two  or  three  millions 
of  men  on  the  Mongolian  frontier,  and 
Young  China,  splendidly  indifferent  to 
facts  and  figures,  assumes  that  they  are 
already  on  the  way.  At  a  recent  con- 
ference at  Clark  University,  one  of  the 
Chinese  speakers,  a  young  student,  de- 


clared that  the  forces  of  the  Republic, 
having  easily  overcome  Manchu  im- 
perialism, were  not  likely  to  submit  to 
Russian  aggression,  a  statement  typi- 
cal of  the  boyish  bravado  and  ignorant 
valor  of  his  class,  which  was  warmly 
applauded  by  his  sympathetic  audi- 
ence. 

But  the  cooler  heads  in  China,  the 
older  men  who  recognize  the  hard  fact 
that  there  are  no  efficient  troops  avail- 
able to  put  into  the  field  against  Russia 
or  Japan,  have,  by  common  consent, 
postponed  to  some  future  date  (say, 
ten  or  fifteen  years  hence)  the  prospect 
of  seeing  China  fully  armed  and  pre- 
pared to  resist  foreign  aggression. 
Their  policy,  as  expressed  in  the  native 
press  and  reproduced  by  many  news- 
papers abroad,  is  to  be  one  of  future 
retaliation  rather  than  of  immediate 
resistance. 

Sun  Yat-sen  himself  has  been  report- 
ed as  indifferent  to  the  prospect  of  a 
period  of  alien  domination,  so  sure 
is  he  that,  sooner  or  later,  the  moral 
and  economic  superiority  of  his  coun- 
trymen will  enable  them  to  conquer 
their  conquerors.  'Wait  a  little,'  says 
Young  China;  'give  us  but  time  to  set 
our  house  in  order,  to  organize  our  finan- 
ces, and  to  train  our  army;  then  you 
will  see.'  But  in  this  matter,  Young 
China  is  merely  following  faithfully  in 
the  footsteps  of  its  ancestors.  Precise- 
ly thus  did  the  mandarin,  under  the 
Manchu  dynasty,  endeavor  to  frighten 
the  barbarian,  and  to  head  off  his 
schemes  of  aggression.  It  is  in  accord- 
ance with  every  ancient  principle  of 
Chinese  statecraft  to  devise  ways  and 
means  of  intimidating  powerful  foes; 
it  is  also  in  accordance  with  every  tra- 
dition of  the  mandarin,  ancient  and 
modern,  to  get  credit  for  the  possession 
of  a  large  army,  rather  than  to  have  to 
pay  for  one.  This  latter  tradition  has 
lately  been  powerfully  stimulated  by 
the  Chinese  officials'  belief  that  the 


THE  REAL  YELLOW  PERIL 


739 


foreign  financiers  might  be  induced  to 
advance  funds  for  the  redemption  of 
the  'war  notes'  of  the  revolution  and 
for  military  purposes;  it  was  this  belief 
that  led  T'ang  Shaoyi,  when  Premier, 
to  evolve,  from  his  own  consciousness 
and  the  reports  of  his  fellow  provin- 
cials, a  Republican  army  of  eighty  di- 
visions, most  of  which  he  proposed  to 
disband,  with  the  aid  of  a  foreign  loan. 
(It  was  at  this  time  that  the  Nanking 
Assembly  was  solemnly  passing  aca- 
demic resolutions  in  favor  of  universal 
conscription,  without  any  reference  to 
the  financial  aspects  of  that  question.) 
These  things  are  nothing  more  than 
traditional  mandarin  tactics,  with 
which  the  patient,  toiling  millions  of 
the  Chinese  people  are  in  no  way  con- 
cerned. The  structural  character  of  the 
race  remains,  and  must  long  remain, 
essentially  non-aggressive,  by  no  means 
to  be  suddenly  diverted  from  its  an- 
cient passive  philosophy  by  changes  in 
the  outward  forms  and  symbols  of  au- 
thority. As  a  Japanese  military  officer 
of  high  rank  observed,  after  witnessing 
the  foreign-drilled  troops'  manoeuvres 
in  1908,  'The  Chinese  Dragon  is  being 
painted  to  look  very  fierce;  neverthe- 
less, he  remains  a  paper  dragon.'  The 
Japanese  have  never  been  under  any 
delusions  as  to  the  Yellow  Peril,  which 
they  know  to  be  a  myth. 


in 

Another  aspect  of  the  Peril  which 
has  oppressed  the  imagination  of  many 
superficial  observers  has  resulted  from 
the  idea  that,  by  the  adoption  of  West- 
ern methods  and  Western  machinery, 
China  can  be  industrially  organized  to 
produce  manufactured  articles  on  a 
scale  defying  European  competition. 
Belief  in  a  Yellow  Peril  of  this  kind  is 
possible  only  for  those  who  accept  the 
theory  that  the  inherited  tendencies, 
institutions,  and  social  system  of  the 


Chinese  are  capable  of  sudden  and  ra- 
cial change  as  the  result  of  new  politi- 
cal arrangements.  For  theorists  of  this 
type,  who  believe  in  the  possibility  of 
'  inoculating '  the  Chinese  with  a  fight- 
ing spirit  and  a  vigorous  nationalism, 
there  is  nothing  inherently  improbable 
in  the  idea  that  they  will  suddenly 
become  imbued  with  the  qualities  re- 
quisite for  industrial  organization,  and 
relieved  of  the  social  and  economic 
conditions  which,  from  time  immemo- 
rial, have  made  such  organization  im- 
possible. 

At  first  sight,  it  would  seem,  in- 
deed, that  a  race  which  possesses  mil- 
lions of  frugally  industrious  laborers, 
able  and  willing  to  work  for  wages 
varying  between  eight  and  fifteen  cents 
a  day,  together  with  raw  materials 
produced  by  the  most  efficient  agri- 
culturists on  earth,  and  vast  resources 
of  undeveloped  mineral  wealth,  —  a 
country  unhampered  by  socialism  and 
trade-union  legislation,  —  should  be 
able  to  bring  industrial  Europe  to  its 
knees.  But  the  observer  who  studies 
the  economic  results  of  China's  social 
system,  realizes  that,  until  slow  educa- 
tive processes  shall  have  produced  a 
class  of  honest  administrators,  and, 
through  them,  a  root-and-branch  fiscal 
reform,  there  can  never  be  any  effect- 
ive combination  of  labor  and  capital  in 
China. 

The  existing  social  conditions  and 
methods  of  government  preclude  all 
reasonable  hope  of  developing  the  coun- 
try's potential  resources  and  industries 
on  a  large  scale,  or  of  producing  any 
rapid  expansion  of  manufactured  ex- 
ports. It  is  not  that  the  merchant  class 
is  lacking  in  business  capacity  or  the 
educated  class  in  intelligence,  —  far 
from  it;  the  trouble  lies  in  the  fact 
that,  in  the  absence  of  definitely  re- 
cognized rights  of  property,  protected 
by  valid  laws,  the  Chinese  capitalist 
is  not  prepared  either  to  invest  his 


THE  HEAL  YELLOW  PERIL 


money  in  government  undertakings,  or 
to  establish  joint-stock  industries  upon 
which  the  mandarins  would  levy  their 
direct  or  indirect  'squeezes.'  Certain 
enthusiastic  theorists  of  the  type  of  Sun 
Yat-sen,  who  profess,  or  did  profess, 
to  believe  that  the  average  citizen's 
reluctance  to  admit  the  possession  of 
wealth  in  any  squeezable  form  would 
pass  with  the  passing  of  the  Manchu 
dynasty,  have  been  rapidly  cured  of 
that  illusion  by  Young  China's  pro- 
ceedings in  the  matter  of  *  patriotic  sub- 
scriptions.' At  the  present  moment,  the 
Chinese  merchant,  even  in  the  com- 
parative security  of  the  foreign  settle- 
ments of  Shanghai,  dares  not  purchase 
landed  property  at  auction  in  his  own 
name  for  fear  of  attracting  the  un- 
pleasant attentions  of  the  Republican 
officials. 

Given  laws  for  the  administration  of 
joint-stock  companies,  and  justice  for 
the  individual;  given  the  abolition  of 
the  barrier-and-Zr&in  exactions  on  trade 
and  a  limit  to  the  arbitrary  rapacities 
of  the  excise  and  terminal  tax  squeezes; 
given,  in  fact,  good  government,  there 
is  no  reason  to  doubt  that  the  cap- 
italists and  merchants  of  China  might 
speedily  organize  the  opening-up  of 
mines  and  the  establishment  of  indus- 
tries as  successfully  as  their  country- 
men have  done  under  the  protection 
of  British  and  Dutch  colonies  in  the 
East.  In  the  provinces  of  Kuangtung, 
Kuangse,  and  Fuhkien,  at  all  events, 
there  are  plenty  of  returned  emigrants, 
with  practical  experience  and  capital 
capable  of  taking  the  lead  in  an  indus- 
trial movement. 

Nothing  but  the  fear  of  official  tyr- 
anny and  mandarin  rapacity  prevents 
the  development  of  China's  mineral  re- 
sources. The  mine-owner  has  no  hopes, 
under  existing  conditions,  of  organizing 
capital  and  labor  with  any  certainty  of 
profit;  at  the  same  time,  he  is  naturally 
and  violently  opposed  to  the  metropol- 


itan or  provincial  authorities'  granting 
concessions  of  mining  rights  to  foreign- 
ers, because  he  hopes  that,  in  the  course 
of  time,  he  may  be  able  to  work  them 
for  his  own  benefit.  And  similarly  with 
industrial  enterprise.  Chinese  laborers, 
artisans,  and  merchants,  working  indi- 
vidually or  in  guilds,  are  economically 
superior  to  any  race  on  earth,  but  the 
opportunities  and  the  technical  educa- 
tion necessary  for  wholesale  industrial 
organization  of  an  effective  kind  are  at 
present  entirely  beyond  them.  The 
materials  are  there,  but  it  will  take 
several  generations  to  erect  the  struc- 
ture, which  requires,  before  all  else, 
solid  foundations  of  social  and  eco- 
nomic reform.  And  even  if  China  were 
ready  and  able  to  organize  industrial- 
ism of  the  scientific  kind  which  prevails 
in  Europe  and  America,  and  to  master 
the  elements  of  modern  industrial  fi- 
nance; even  if  she  were  prepared,  under 
the  direction  of  foreign  experts,  to  train 
her  people  in  the  skilled  labor  of  fac- 
tories and  dockyards,  the  white  races 
still  could,  and  would,  protect  them- 
selves by  tariff  walls  against  the  com- 
petition of  the  Asiatic's  cheap  labor, 
just  as  they  now  protect  themselves 
from  his  presence  in  their  own  countries 
by  their  exclusion  acts. 


IV 

There  remains  the  Yellow  Peril  ra- 
cial. At  first  sight  it  is  evident  that  the 
conditions  under  which  the  Chinese 
have  until  quite  recently  been  wont  to 
emigrate  in  search  of  work  and  wealth, 
have  not  been  of  a  nature  to  threaten 
the  countries  concerned  with  race-pro- 
blems of  the  kind  produced  by  the 
Negro  population  of  the  United  States 
or  the  Jews  in  Russia.  Hitherto  (and, 
generally  speaking,  at  the  present  day), 
the  Chinese  emigrant  has  been  a  trans- 
ient breadwinner,  and  not  a  perma- 
nent settler,  overseas.  Going  abroad 


THE  REAL  YELLOW  PERIL 


741 


under  the  stern  necessity  of  mass 
pressure,  his  home  and  his  family  have 
remained  in  China,  and  if  he  died 
abroad  his  body  was  sent  back  for  bur- 
ial in  the  ancestral  graveyard.  He  was, 
in  fact,  firmly  bound  to  the  homeland 
by  immemorial  ties  and  traditions  of 
ancestor-worship.  „  The  effect  of  his 
cheap-labor  competition  on  the  white 
races,  and  the  defensive  measures  tak- 
en against  it,  have  therefore  been  of 
their  nature  local  and  economic,  and 
not  racial. 

In  order  to  appreciate  the  present 
conditions  and  tendencies  of  Chinese 
emigration,  it  is  necessary  to  bear  in 
mind  the  fact  that  it  is  only  since  the 
opening  up  of  commercial  intercourse, 
and  improved  means  of  communica- 
tion between  China  and  the  outside 
world,  that  the  people  of  China,  or,  ra- 
ther, the  people  of  the  congested  south- 
eastern maritime  provinces,  have  come 
to  the  knowledge  that  relief  from  the 
ever-present  menace  of  starvation  en 
masse  may  be  sought  and  found  over- 
seas. Prior  to  the  date  of  the  Burlin- 
game  treaty  between  the  United  States 
and  China  (1868),  the  exodus  of  Can- 
tonese and  Fuhkien  laborers  had  been 
practically  confined  to  the  nearer  Ori- 
ental lands  of  the  westward  trade- 
routes,  to  Siam,  and  Borneo,  and  the 
Malay  States;  but  it  was  then  only  a 
thin  stream  of  adventurous  pioneers. 
Until  that  date,  relief  from  the  con- 
stant pressure  of  population  had  been 
effected,  internally,  by  nature's  drastic 
remedies,  —  by  famine  and  pestilence, 
by  infanticide  and  the  slaughter  of  fre- 
quent rebellions.  In  the  Burlingame 
treaty,  the  American  government  cor- 
dially recognized  'the  inalienable  right 
of  man  to  change  his  home  and  allegi- 
ance/ with  the  immediate  result  that 
industrious  and  thrifty  Chinese  from 
the  Kuang  provinces  began  to  emi- 
grate by  thousands  in  the  '  fire-ships '  of 
the  foreigner  to  the  new  lands  of  pro- 


mise on  the  Pacific  coast  of  America, 
their  numbers  rapidly  increasing  as  the 
tale  was  spread  of  the  wealth  to  be  ac- 
quired in  California. 

But  within  ten  years  the  white  pop- 
ulation of  that  state  had  realized  the 
inherent  fallacy  of  the  doctrine  of  the 
open  door  and  equal  opportunity,  and, 
clearly  perceiving  the  economic  superi- 
ority of  the  yellow  race,  had  proceeded 
to  enforce  the  fundamental  principles 
of  self-preservation.  Chinese  emigra- 
tion to  the  white  man's  countries  has 
since  that  time  been  stopped  by  force 
majeure;  but  not  before  several  millions 
of  intelligent  southern  Chinese  have 
learned  by  practical  experience  that, 
beyond  the  borders  of  their  own  land, 
relief  is  to  be  found  from  the  burdens 
imposed  upon  them  by  bad  govern- 
ment and  economic  pressure.  And  this 
knowledge  has  steadily  increased  and 
spread  through  the  interior  of  China, 
brought  back  by  returned  emigrants, 
taught  by  foreign  missionaries,  diffused 
by  educational  bodies  and  by  the  press, 
so  that  to-day,  among  the  educated 
classes  in  all  parts  of  the  country, 
and  among  the  laboring  classes  of  the 
South,,  there  exists  a  clear  perception 
of  the  relief  which  lies  in  emigration 
and  a  feeling  of  deep  and  perfectly  just 
resentment  against  the  white  races, 
which  preach  the  gospel  of  brother- 
hood and  equal  opportunity  on  the  one 
hand,  and,  on  the  other,  refuse  its  ben- 
efits to  the  Chinese  race  in  all  parts  of 
the  world. 

Thus  the  ever-insistent  problems  of 
population  and  food-supply  have  of 
recent  years  been  complicated  by  new 
conditions  arising  directly  from  the 
changes  which  have  taken  place  in 
China's  environment,  as  the  result  of 
the  impact  of  the  West.  For  instance, 
the  work  of  missionary  and  educational 
bodies,  and  the  introduction  of  certain 
measures  of  public  health  and  sanita- 
tion spreading  from  the  treaty  ports, 


742 


THE  REAL  YELLOW  PERIL 


are  tending  to  produce  a  diminution  of 
the  death-rate,  which,  under  normal 
conditions  in  the  interior,  necessarily 
approximates  to  the  birth-rate,  and  is 
computed  at  something  like  fifty-five 
per  thousand.  In  other  words,  the  effect 
of  the  introduction  of  Western  ideas  is 
to  increase  the  pressure  of  population 
on  the  visible  means  of  subsistence, 
precisely  as  it  is  doing  in  India.  At 
the  same  time,  the  great  natural  outlet 
for  the  surplus  millions  which  the  Chi- 
nese government  has  been  lately  seek- 
ing to  develop,  by  means  of  railways 
and  assisted  colonization,  in  the  thinly 
populated  regions  of  Manchuria  and 
Mongolia,  is  now  being  closed  by  the 
territorial  encroachments  of  Russia  and 
Japan.  Thus,  while  our  medical  and 
other  missions  are  teaching  the  Chi- 
nese, on  humanitarian  principles,  ideas 
which  tend  to  increase  the  mass  pres- 
sure of  population,  the  policies  of  the 
World  Powers,  dictated  by  instincts 
either  of  self-preservation  or  of  earth- 
hunger,  are  steadily  confining  this  non- 
aggressive  race  within  narrower  limits. 
Under  these  conditions,  it  was  to  be 
expected  that,  among  the  intelligent 
and  active  inhabitants  of  the  south- 
eastern maritime  provinces,  apprecia- 
tion of  the  new  forces  and  factors 
produced  by  education  and  economic 
pressure  must  soon  bring  about  import- 
ant modifications  of  the  social  system 
based  on  ancestor-worship  and  Confu- 
cianism. Under  the  stern  pressure  of 
necessity,  and  in  the  light  of  new  know- 
ledge, it  was  inevitable  that  the  ancient 
traditions  must  go  down  in  the  struggle 
for  life,  and  that  the  communities  of 
Chinese  overseas,  the  ilite  of  the  race, 
should  gradually  find  means  of  adapt- 
ing themselves  to  their  environment, 
accepting  the  destiny  of  permanent 
settlers  in  lands  far  from  their  ances- 
tral homes  and  burial-places.  And  so  it 
is  coming  to  pass:  to-day,  in  several 
parts  of  the  world,  there  are  unmistak- 


able indications  of  a  weakening  of  the 
ties  of  ancestor-worship  as  a  rigidly 
localizing  tradition  of  the  race.  In  the 
Straits  Settlements,  a  large  proportion 
of  the  Chinese  population  (economical- 
ly the  dominant  race)  have  abandoned 
the  practice  of  sending  their  dead  back 
for  burial  in  the  home-land,  though  in 
other  respects  their  pride  of  nationality 
and  social  customs  remain  unchanged. 
Throughout  the  Malay  States  they 
have  become  permanent  settlers,  dis- 
tinguished from  the  labor  emigrants 
who  formerly  went  to  America  and 
those  who  were  employed  in  South 
Africa,  by  having  their  families  with 
them.  The  family,  the  unit  of  the  Chi- 
nese system  has,  in  fact  been  trans- 
planted, Nature's  sternest  law  finally 
triumphing  over  one  of  the  most  per- 
manent social  systems  ever  established 
by  man. 

Cut  off  from  North  America  and  Aus- 
tralia, the  Chinese  emigration  move- 
ment toward  Burma,  Siam,  Malaya, 
and  Borneo  is  steadily  proceeding,  but 
its  conditions  are  changing.  In  Burma, 
for  instance,  where  the  Chinese  popu- 
lation has  more  than  doubled  in  the 
last  ten  years,  many  of  the  emigrants 
become  permanent  settlers,  and  inter- 
marry freely  with  the  Burmese  women; 
the  sons  of  such  marriages  becoming 
Chinese  by  nationality,  and  the  daugh- 
ters remaining  Burmese.  In  Siam,  there 
are  already  some  three  million  Chinese; 
everything  points,  in  fact,  to  a  steady 
flow  westward  of  the  great  tide  of 
China's  hunger-driven  humanity,  and 
to  the  probability  that  those  who  emi- 
grate will  gradually  shed  their  racial 
customs  and  traditions,  wherever  these 
conflict  with  their  chances  of  success 
and  survival.  In  the  provinces  to  the 
north  of  the  Yangtse,  the  same  forces 
are  at  work,  but,  because  of  the  less 
actively  self-helping  type  of  race  in 
these  regions,  their  results  are  far  less 
conspicuous  than  in  the  case  of  the 


THE  REAL   YELLOW  PERIL 


743 


population  which  emigrates  from  the 
south-eastern  maritime  provinces. 

Nevertheless,  the  tide  of  the  pre- 
destined hungry  ones  flows  also  north- 
ward and  west,  wherever  vacant  lands 
are  to  be  found,  and  means  of  com- 
munication permit.  All  along  the  Si- 
berian and  Manchurian  railways,  for 
instance,  Chinese  colonists  are  stead- 
ily making  their  way,  demonstrating  at 
every  step  their  economic  superiority. 
Prior  to  the  outbreak  of  the  revolution 
settlers  (chiefly  from  Shantung)  were 
moving  into  Mongolia,  on  foot,  at  the 
rate  of  about  eight  thousand  a  month. 
Russia  has  now  forbidden  the  Chinese 
government  to  take  any  further  steps 
toward  the  colonization  of  this  region, 
but  no  ukase  of  the  Czar  can  possibly 
check  the  steady  flow  of  that  resistless 
tide,  or  protect  the  thriftless  Slav  from 
the  consequences  of  his  own  economic 
inefficiency.  Herein,  for  Russia,  lies 
the  shadow  of  the  real  Yellow  Peril,  a 
peril  against  which  she,  the  aggressor, 
can  protect  herself  only  by  openly  vio- 
lating every  principle  of  humanity  and 
justice. 

One  of  the  most  significant  aspects  of 
the  Chinese  emigration  movement  of 
to-day  is  to  be  found,  not  in  Asia,  but 
on  the  Pacific  coast  of  South  America, 
—  in  Chile  and  Peru.  Here,  almost 
unnoticed,  the  new  impulses  brought 
about  by  education  and  the  fierceness 
of  the  life-struggle  in  China,  are  pro- 
ducing results  of  unmistakable  signi- 
ficance. Among  the  fifteen  thousand 
Chinese  settlers  in  Peru,  says  a  recent 
British  consular  report,  there  are  many 
who  have  become  Christians  and  who 
have  intermarried  with  the  Peruvians. 
The  Chinese  colony  is  rich  and  influ- 
ential; it  has  taken  firm  root  in  this  new 
land,  while  it  retains  undiminished  its 
pride  of  race  and  its  active  sympathies 
for  the  progressive  movement  in  China. 

Now  it  is  safe  to  predict  that  this 
movement  of  emigration  to  the  tropi- 


cal and  sub-tropical  countries  of  South 
America  is  certain  to  develop  rapidly 
in  proportion  to  the  development  of 
direct  means  of  communication  which 
will  follow  from  the  opening  of  the 
Panama  Canal.  The  Cantonese,  held 
back  from  other  fields  of  activity,  will 
assuredly  seek  them,  as  rapidly  as  pos- 
sible, in  those  regions  of  Brazil,  Peru, 
Ecuador,  Colombia,  and  Chile,  where 
agricultural  and  other  work  is  essen- 
tially a  question  of  labor,  and  not  of 
white  labor. 

Economically  speaking,  the  develop- 
ment of  husbandry  and  industry  in 
these  regions  by  the  labor  of  Orientals 
would  appear  to  offer  the  only  practical 
solution  of  problems  upon  which,  in  no 
small  degree,  depends  the  material  wel- 
fare of  the  human  race.  Politically, 
however,  the  possibility  of  large  num- 
bers of  Chinese  and  Japanese  settling 
on  the  American  continent  opens  up 
prospects  of  new  racial  difficulties  in 
the  future.  Herein  the  separate  inter- 
ests of  individual  South  American  re- 
publics may  well  be  found  to  conflict 
with  those  Pan-American  or  Monroe 
Doctrine  ideas  which  lately  found  ex- 
pression in  the  resolution  of  the  United 
States  Senate  to  forbid  the  acquisition 
by  Japan  of  *  fishing  rights '  and  a  har- 
bor on  the  Mexican  coast.  For,  where 
the  present-day  Cantonese  go,  as  set- 
tlers, they  will  assuredly  take  root,  and 
where  they  take  root  they  will  speedily 
increase  and  multiply. 

In  the  Chinese  people's  collective 
aversion  to  starvation,  and  in  their  par- 
tial but  increasing  perception  of  ways 
and  means  to  avert  that  unpleasant 
end,  by  processes  of  *  peaceful  pene- 
tration5 beyond  China's  frontiers,  we 
may  perceive,  I  think,  dimly  outlined 
against  the  horizon  of  the  future,  the 
Yellow  Peril  racial.  It  is  a  peril  against 
which,  as  I  have  said,  the  civilized 
nations  of  the  West  can  protect  them- 
selves effectively  only  by  denying  the 


744 


THE   NEED 


fundamental  principles  of  philanthro- 
py, and  Christianity's  ideals  of  com- 
mon brotherhood.  From  our  white- 
racial  point  of  view,  which  assumes  the 
moral  superiority  of  Western  civiliza- 
tion over  that  of  the  East,  and  the  de- 
sirability of  letting  white  men,  rather 
than  yellow,  inherit  the  earth,  this 
Yellow  Peril  remains,  for  the  present, 
still  indefinite  and  remote.  From  the 
broad  philosophical  and  sublunary 


point  of  view,  there  is  nothing  to  show 
that  it  really  threatens  the  ultimate 
good  of  humanity.  But,  however  we 
regard  the  matter,  and  even  adopting 
the  racial  standpoint,  the  most  violent 
activities  of  the  Chinese  race  (which  not 
only  professes,  but  practices,  the  be- 
lief that  right  is  superior  to  might)  will 
ever  be  kindly  and  gentle  compared 
with  the  White  Perils  that  at  present 
encompass  China  on  every  side. 


THE  NEED 


BY    ZONA   GALE 


'Now  let's  us  invite  in  somebody,' 
said  Abel,  glowing. 

He  looked  abo^ut  on  the  new  furni- 
ture, the  new  piano,  the  two  shelves  of 
bright  books. 

Emily  Louise  clapped  her  hands. 

'Oh,'  she  said,  'yes.     Let's!' 

On  the  face  of  Victoria,  the  mother, 
the  pleased  pride  gave  place  to  a  look 
of  trouble. 

'We  don't  know  so  very  many,'  she 
said. 

'We!'  Abel  repeated.  'I  don't  know 
nobody.  How  should  I?  I  work  all  day 
like  a  dog  since  I  came  to  this  place. 
I've  no  time  to  know  nobody.  But 
you  —  you  stay  about  here.  Have  you 
not  made  friends?' 

'Not  well  enough  to  invite  them  in,' 
she  said.  'Why,  you  know  yourself, 
Abel,  nobody  has  invited  us  yet.' 

'What  difference  does  that  make?' 
he  wanted  to  know  irritably.  'Prob'ly 
they  can't  afford  it.  Prob'ly  they  ain't 
nice  enough  things.  Neither  did  we 
have.  But  now,  we  got  them.  I  get 


them  for  you.  Now  you  must  invite  in 
different  ones.  Let  us  see  —  we  have 
Tuesday.  Saturday  is  a  good  day.  I 
am  early  home  Saturday.  Have  it 
then.' 

'Goody,  goody,'  said  Emily  Louise. 
'A  party,  won't  it  be?' 

Her  eyes  met  her  mother's  serenely 
and  she  went  away  to  school.  Abel 
ran  for  his  train.  The  new  things  had 
come  late  in  the  evening  and  he  had 
risen  early  to  unpack  them  before  he 
went  to  work.  Left  alone,  Victoria  faced 
the  new  responsibility. 

They  had  lived  for  six  months  in  the 
suburb.  She  rehearsed  those  to  whom 
in  that  time  she  had  spoken.  There 
was  the  woman  in  the  yellow  house  on 
the  corner  to  whom  Victoria  had  once 
bowed,  though  she  could  not  be  sure 
that  her  greeting  had  been  returned; 
in  the  brick  house  across  the  street, 
Mrs.  Stern,  who  had  called  upon  her; 
the  next-door  neighbor,  who  had  not 
called  but  with  whom  she  had  some- 
times talked  across  the  fence;  and 


THE  NEED 


745 


Emily  Louise's  school-teacher,  Miss 
Moody,  who  had  come  to  see  her  about 
the  child's  throat.  With  the  exception 
of  the  tradespeople,  these  were  all. 
How,  then,  was  it  possible  that  she 
should  give  a  party? 

But  how  was  it  that  she  knew  no 
one,  she  wondered.  It  was  true,  they 
,  went  to  no  church;  but  then,  there  are 
people  who  go  to  no  churches  and  who 
still  have  friends.  It  could  not  be  Abel's 
fault  —  he  looked  just  like  any  other 
man;  and  Emily  Louise,  she  was  a  neat 
and  pretty  child.  It  must  be  she,  her- 
self, Victoria  thought. 

She  looked  in  the  mirror  of  the  new 
side-board.  She  was  worn  and  untidy. 
She  went  to  her  closet  and  examined 
her  stock  of  clothes.  Her  black  best 
dress,  she  decided,  would  pass  very 
well,  but  she  never  wore  it;  and  even 
her  gray  second-best  she  had  seldom 
troubled  to  put  on  in  the  afternoons. 
It  was  hard  to  dress  for  nobody. 

Still,  that  afternoon  she  put  on  the 
gray  dress  and  sat  rocking  on  the  front 
porch  for  a  long  time.  The  suburb  lay 
naked  to  the  August  sun.  New  side- 
walks cut  treeless  stretches  of  brown 
grass  where  insects  shrilled.  There  were 
few  houses,  and  these,  at  ragged  inter- 
vals, exposed  narrow,  staring  fronts  or 
backs  which  looked  taken  unaware. 
To  and  fro  on  the  highway  before  her 
door  continually  rolled  touring  cars, 
filled  with  people  who  hardly  saw  the 
little  town  and  never  knew  its  name. 
From  the  yellow  house  on  the  corner 
the  woman  —  a  Mrs.  Merriman  — 
came  out  and  crossed  the  street.  For  a 
moment  Victoria  thought  that  she  was 
coming  to  see  her,  but  she  went  to  the 
next-door  neighbor's. 

4 Well/  said  Abel  that  night,  'I  do 
everything  I  can  to  help  you.  When 
I  got  off  the  train  I  spoke  to  that  fine 
bakery  place  there  on  the  corner.  I 
told  him  he  should  make  us  ice-cream 
and  make  us  cakes  for  Saturday.  He 


says,  "Sure,"  and  he  wants  I  should 
tell  him  how  many.' 

'Abel,'  Victoria  said,  'I  don't  know 
what  to  do  about  this  party.  I  ain't 
acquainted  with  enough  folks  to  make 
a  party  —  honest.' 

*  You 're  too  particular,  maybe,'  he 
told  her.  *  Well,  that  is  right,'  he  added 
complacently,  *  that  is  how  you  should 
be,  particular.  But  not  too.' 

'But,  Abel,'  she  persisted,  'I  tell  you 
that  I  don't  know  — ' 

He  turned  to  her  indignantly. 

'When  I  married  you,'  he  said,  'you 
knew  half  the  village.  In  Elanpl's  you 
know  the  ladies  yet.  Here  we  have 
been  six  months  already,  and  you  say 
you  cannot  give  a  party.  I  tell  you, 
you  should  ask  what  few  you  know  and 
make  a  start.  If  you  don't,  how  will 
you  get  started?  Ain't  it  you  don't  ap- 
preciate what  I  get  for  you?  Ain't  it 
a  party  should  make  you  some  hard 
work  a'ready  ?  Or  what  ? ' 

She  was  silent.  That  night  she  tried 
to  think  it  out.  In  the  morning  she 
went  to  the  next-door  neighbor. 

'My  husband  and  I  want  your  hus- 
band and  you  should  come  over  to  our 
house  and  spend  the  evening  next  Sat- 
urday. Could  you?'  she  recited  for- 
mally. 

The  woman's  vast  face,  with  its  un- 
necessary chins,  was  genuinely  regret- 
ful. She  was  going  that  day  to  her 
mother,  who  was  sick  in  the  city,  and 
her  husband  was  to  stay  nights  at  her 
mother's. 

Victoria  went  resolutely  to  Mrs. 
Stern's  door,  at  the  brick  house.  And 
there  the  heavens  opened.  Mrs.  Stern 
would  come. 

'O,  thank  you!'  Victoria  breathed, 
and  hesitated — deploring  Mrs.  Stern's 
widowhood.  'Would  —  would  you  like 
to  bring  somebody  with  you?'  she 
asked.  'I'm  going  to  have  things  as 
nice  as  I  can.' 

Mrs.  Stern,  a  sad  little  woman  with 


746 


THE  NEED 


an  unexpectant  droop,  contrived  to 
make  her  answer  all  kindness. 

'How  many  can  come  to  the  party?' 
Abel  inquired  that  evening. 

'Mrs.  Stern  can  come,'  Victoria  re- 
plied. 

'Well?'  said  Abel  expectantly. 

'  I  have  n't  —  there  is  n't  anyone 
else.  Abel,  I  don't  think  I  can  do  it, 
truly,'  she  said. 

The  man's  face  tightened. 

'So,'  he  said,  'you  cannot  do  like 
other  men's  wives  when  they  get  a  neat 
up-to-date  little  home  furnished  like 
this.  Is  that  it?' 

'I  have  n't  had  time  yet,  either, 
Abel,'  she  pleaded  weakly.  'It  takes 
longer.  I  —  I  have  n't  heard.' 

She  remembered  how  hard  he  worked 
and  how  few  were  his  pleasures.  She 
thought  of  his  pride  in  their  new  furni- 
ture. And  in  her  flesh  was  the  sting  of 
his  words  about  other  men's  wives. 
Surely  he  was  right  —  since  they  had 
the  furniture  and  the  means,  there 
must  be  people  who  would  come.  In 
the  morning,  when  she  told  him  good- 
bye in  the  confidence  of  the  sun,  'Abel,' 
she  said  with  determination, '  the  party 
will  be  Saturday!  But  I  can't  tell  yet 
how  many  —  that  is  the  only  thing.' 

'So,'  he  said,  his  satisfaction  return- 
ing. '  Of  course,  when  a  person  wants 
to  give  parties,  people  hang  around 
'em!  You  should  manage,  Victoria.' 

There  was,  Victoria  knew,  a  little 
club  of  women  which  met  in  the  parlor 
of  a  near-by  public  hall  on  Thursdays. 
She  had  seen  the  members  pass  her 
house  on  the  way  to  the  meetings.  On 
Thursday  she  presented  herself  at  the 
door  of  the  little  room  and  asked  for 
the  president.  It  had  come  to  Victoria 
that  if  she  could  join,  she  would  invite 
that  whole  club  and  their  husbands  to 
her  house  on  Saturday  evening.  She 
waited  in  the  ante-room  through  which 
went  women  talking  as  if  they  had 
known  each  other  for  a  long  time.  At 


last  the  president  appeared.  This  wo- 
man held  her  head  back,  either  to  focus 
her  glasses  or  to  keep  them  on,  and  her 
hands  were  filled  with  loose  papers. 

'What  was  it?'  she  asked. 

She  was  in  haste,  and  it  was  hard 
for  Victoria  to  begin. 

'Could  other  folks  join  your  club?' 
Victoria  finally  inquired. 

'  If  you  get  two  members  of  the  club 
to  propose  the  name,'  the  president 
answered  kindly.  'Then  it  is  voted  on 
two  weeks  after  it  is  proposed.  Was 
that  all?' 

That  night  Abel  came  home  with  a 
large  box.  He  was  gay  with  mystery. 
The  box  was  not  to  be  opened  until 
after  dinner.  Emily  Louise  was  warned 
away.  To  please  him  Victoria  guessed: 
a  rug,  a  picture,  new  curtains,  a  bed- 
spread. 

'Yet  more  magnificent!'  cried  Abel, 
and  cut  the  string. 

It  was  a  suit  of  evening  clothes. 
Abel  had  never  worn  evening  clothes. 
These  had  been  made  for  another  man 
and  had  not  been  received  on  delivery. 

'Now  you  should  not  be  ashamed 
when  I  am  welcoming  our  company,' 
he  said.  'Can  you  tell  yet  how  many 
are  coming?'  he  demanded. 

'Not  yet,'  Victoria  said. 

'I  should  let  that  baker  know  to- 
morrow without  fail,'  he  declared. 

On  Friday  Victoria  took  the  step 
over  which  she  had  hesitated.  She 
wrote  a  note  and  sent  it  by  Emily 
Louise  to  Mrs.  Merriman  in  the  yellow 
house  on  the  corner.  The  note  said :  — 

MRS.  MERRIMAN 

MY  DEAR  NEIGHBOR:  — 
We  are  going  to  have  a  party  Satur- 
day night.  Will  you  and  your  husband 
come,  and  your  little  girl,  if  you  think 
she  would  enjoy  it.    I  would  like  to 
have  my  neighbors  come. 
Yours  sincerely, 

MRS.  ABEL  HOPE. 


THE  NEED 


747 


'Then/  Victoria  thought,  'if  she 
has  n't  called  just  because  she's  been 
busy,  she'll  come.' 

When  she  was  preparing  lunch  for 
herself  and  Emily  Louise,  the  reply 
was  delivered  by  a  maid. 

'Mr.  and  Mrs.  William  Merriman 
regret  that  they  are  unable  to  accept 
the  invitation  of  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Hope 
for  Saturday  evening.' 

Victoria  dropped  these  regrets  on  the 
coals  of  the  cooking  stove.  Her  heart 
was  heavy  in  her,  and  she  felt  a  kind 
of  physical  nausea.  Abel  had  bought 
this  fine  suit.  He  would  look  like  any 
other  man  giving  a  party  and  having  a 
wife  who  made  friends.  What  should 
she  do  now? 

While  Emily  Louise  ate  her  lunch, 
Victoria  ate  nothing.  She  tried  to 
think  it  out,  and  she  sat  staring  at  the 
automobiles  rolling  to  and  fro  on  the 
highway.  She  was  hardly  conscious  of 
the  child's  chatter  until  at  last  one 
sentence  leaped  from  the  rest  and  held 
her. 

'Miss  Moody  says  she's  coming  to 
see  you  again  about  my  throat,'  said 
Emily  Louise. 

Miss  Moody!  Why  had  she  not 
invited  her? 

'I  like  Miss  Moody,  but  I  like  Mr. 
Allen  better,'  Emily  Louise  continued 
candidly.  'He's—' 

Victoria  bent  toward  the  child. 

'  Emily  Louise,'  she  said  breathlessly, 
'how  many  teachers  is  they  in  your 
school-house?' 

At  once  the  child  became  important. 
She  named  them  all,  proud  of  her  know- 
ledge, and  Victoria  and  she  counted 
them.  There  were  seven. 

Seven !  That  number  in  itself  would 
make  a  party.  People  were  always  do- 
ing nice  things  for  teachers.  She  would 
have  them  all.  She  said  nothing  to  the 
child,  but  when  Emily  Louise  returned 


to  school,  she  took  to  Miss  Moody  a 
note  asking  her  to  invite  all  the  other 
teachers  to  Emily  Louise's  house  for 
Saturday  evening. 

That  night  the  child  waited,  as  she 
sometimes  did,  for  her  father's  train, 
and  she  came  home  with  him.  Vic- 
toria took  Miss  Moody's  note  secretly 
and  laid  it  on  a  shelf  in  the  pantry. 
She  was  in  the  midst  of  getting  dinner, 
but  this  was  not  the  real  reason  for  the 
delay.  She  dreaded  to  open  the  note. 

'How,'  Abel  inquired,  'is  our  party 
now?  By  now  you  got  to  know  how 
many  come.  Not?' 

'Ten,'  said  Victoria  faintly.  ' Count- 
ing us,  ten.' 

Oh,  yes,  she  said  to  herself,  the  teach- 
ers would  come.  They  must  come. 
Surely  they  would  be  glad  to  come. 

Abel  pursed  his  lips.  'You  should 
have  got  more,'  he  rebuked  her.  'We 
could  afford  more,  w'ile  we're  doing 
it.' 

She  said  nothing.  After  dinner, 
while  he  was  on  the  sofa  playing  with 
Emily  Louise,  she  went  to  the  pantry 
and  opened  the  note.  Miss  Moody  was 
genuinely  sorry  and  they  all  were,  ap- 
preciating as  they  did  this  attention 
from  the  parents  of  a  pupil,  but  on 
Saturday  night  they  must  all  be  at  a 
teachers'  conference  in  town. 

Victoria  washed  the  dinner  dishes 
and  laid  the  table  for  breakfast.  When 
she  could  make  no  further  excuse  for 
delay,  she  went  in  the  other  room  to 
tell  Abel.  She  was  pale  and  faint,  and 
when  she  closed  the  kitchen  door  she 
stood  leaning  against  it,  trembling. 

Only  Emily  Louise  was  in  the  room. 

'Daddy's  gone  to  the  bakery  to  tell 
him  how  many,'  she  announced.  'Just 
think,  mother!  To-morrow  night  the 
party '11  be  being!  Ain't  it  grand! ' 

Victoria  took  her  in  her  arms  and  sat 
waiting  for  Abel's  return.  She  dared 
not  think  what  he  would  do.  He  had  a 
temper  of  unreason  and  of  violence, 


748 


THE  NEED 


and  he  would  see  only  what  he  already 
saw.  Yet  when  he  came  back,  filled 
with  innocent  pride  in  the  brick  ice- 
cream and  the  little  fancy  cakes  which 
he  had  selected,  it  was  not  so  much 
her  fear  that  held  her  silent  as  her 
sick  unwillingness  to  quench  that 
almost  child-like  planning. 

'We  should  change  the  book-case 
and  the  piano/  he  declared.  'It  will 
make  the  room  stand  to  look  wider 
across.' 

She  even  helped  him  to  fold  back  the 
rug  and  to  move  the  furniture. 

'We  should  shake  hands  here,'  said 
he.  'Where  do  they  put  their  coats? 
Why  don't  you  talk  some  planning?' 

Somehow  she  evaded  everything 
save  assent,  and  Abel  was  not  one  to 
wonder  at  any  monologue  of  his  own. 
Quite  blithely  he  arranged  it  all.  He 
talked  of  it  incessantly. 

At  last  Victoria  crept  to  bed  and 
faced  what  on  the  morrow  she  must  do. 
From  the  sleep  which  came  to  her  to- 
ward dawn,  she  was  early  awakened 
by  Emily  Louise  jumping  in  her  bare 
feet  at  the  bed-side  and  calling,  — 

'  The  party 's  to-night !  The  party 's 
to-night!' 

The  phrase  beat  at  Victoria's  ears 
through  the  morning.  She  saw  Abel 
set  off  for  his  work,  and  she  said  to  her- 
self that  she  would  never  see  him  just 
like  this  again  —  perhaps  she  would 
never  see  him  again  at  all.  He  would 
work  all  day  thinking  of  the  evening. 
They  had  never  given  a  party.  Then 
he  would  come  home  and  find  the 
truth.  She  confronted  the  chief  misery 
of  every  unhappiness:  the  tracing  of 
avoidable  events  by  which  the  thing 
has  so  incredibly  come  about. 

She  made  ready  and  cooked  a  fowl 
and  a  roast  and  other  food,  enough  to 
last  Abel  for  several  days.  She  set  her 
house  in  order  and  packed  her  own  be- 
longings. She  put  on  the  gray  dress, 
and  dressed  Emily  Louise  —  perhaps, 


she  thought,  Abel  would  follow  her  for 
the  child,  and  then  she  might  make 
him  understand.  After  their  lunch  she 
sat  down  to  write  two  notes.  The  one 
to  Mrs.  Stern  was  brief  and  explained 
that  she  had  been  obliged  unexpectedly 
to  leave  home.  The  note  to  Abel  was 
harder  to  write. 

DEAR  ABEL:  —  I  am  so  sorry  it  will 
hurt  you  that  I  could  n't  invite  a  party 
like  the  other  women.  I  tried  to.  I 
asked  the  ones  I  know  any,  but  only 
Mrs.  Stern  could,  and  anyway  there 
was  n't  enough.  .  .  .' 

She  was  still  writing  at  this  when  she 
heard  a  sharp  noise  and  voices.  In  the 
road  was  standing  a  large  touring  car. 
She  watched  the  men  descend  and  ex- 
amine the  machine,  and  then  one  of 
them  came  to  her  door.  Victoria  had 
never  spoken  with  a  man  like  him,  or 
heard  speech  so  perfect.  When  she  had 
told  him  that  she  had  no  telephone  and 
had  directed  him  to  Mrs.  Stern's  house, 
she  could  not  forbear  a  sympathetic 
question. 

'Thank  you,  yes,'  he  said.  'A  rear 
axle.  If  it  had  been  a  front  one — ' 

He  smiled,  and  Victoria  smiled  too, 
although  to  her  his  words  meant  no- 
thing. 

'We'll  be  tied  up  for  some  time,  I'm 
afraid,'  he  added. 

There  were  in  the  car  three  women 
and  three  men.  Presently  Victoria  saw 
them  all  go  into  Mrs.  Stern's  garden. 
One  of  the  women  had  to  be  helped  a 
little.  She  went  into  the  house,  but 
the  others  sat  under  the  trees.  The 
men  went  away  and  the  women  laid 
aside  their  veils.  Mrs.  Stern  came  run- 
ning across  the  street. 

'Oh,  Mrs.  Hope,'  she  said,  her  dull 
face  quickened,  'have  you  got  any 
lemons  in  the  house?  Those  folks  have 
got  to  sit  here  till  they  can  send  out 
from  the  city  to  mend  their  car  —  one 


THE   NEED 


749 


of  the  ladies  is  lame.    I  thought  I'd 
give  'em  something  cool  to  drink.' 

Victoria  was  looking  at  her  breath- 
lessly. 

*  Do  you  think/  she  said,  *  that  they  'd 
come  over  here  with  you  for  dinner? 
I  could  have  it  real  prompt.' 

To  the  Audreys  and  their  friends, 
sitting  somewhat  disconsolately  in  Mrs. 
Stern's  little  garden,  Victoria  appeared 
in  a  confusion  which  unmasked  her 
eagerness.  They  protested:  it  was  too 
much;  their  own  dinner  hour  was  late 
—  there  was  no  need.  .  .  . 

'I  want  you  should  come/  Victoria 
said  earnestly,  as  if  there  were  a  need. 
'I  never  have  any  company  come  out 
here.  I  want  you  to  come.' 

They  followed  her  involuntary 
glance  to  the  treeless  stretches  and  the 
sidewalks  that  led  nowhere  and  that 
betrayed  to  how  few  footsteps  they 
ever  echoed.  Some  hint  of  Victoria's 
tragedy  was  in  the  bleak  open  of  the 
blocks. 

*  Why,  thank  you/  Mrs.  Audrey  said 
gently.  'Then  if  you  will  really  let  us, 
we  will  come/ 

Victoria  could  hardly  believe.  She 
sped  across  the  street,  the  past  days 
fallen  from  her.  She  made  ready  the 
roast  and  the  fowl  that  she  had  meant 
to  leave  for  Abel,  the  vegetables  and 
salad  fresh  from  the  garden.  Emily 
Louise  was  sent  to  hurry  the  baker,  and 
later  to  strip  the  vines  of  their  sweet 
peas.  Many  tasks  were  to  be  done,  but 
Victoria  made  of  them  nothing.  When  * 
Abel  came  home  the  savor  of  the  pre- 
paration filled  the  little  house. 

'It's  a  dinner!'  she  triumphantly 
told  him. 

'A  dinner!  So  that  was  what  was  up 
your  sleeve!'  cried  Abel,  and  ran  to 
look  over  the  table.  'That  is  right  — 
that  is  fine/  he  approved,  'only  we 
should  had  more  here.  It  was  no  more 
trouble  —  to  have  more/ 

At  six  o'clock  all  was  ready:  Victoria 


in  her  black  best  gown,  Abel  in  the  new 
suit  of  which  the  sleeves  were  a  bit 
too  long,  so  that  he  constantly  pushed 
them  up  at  the  armholes.  When  he 
saw  their  guests  at  the  gate,  he  drew 
Victoria  to  the  place  he  had  appointed. 
Emily  Louise  opened  the  door. 

'Most  pleased  to  welcome  you  hos- 
pitable under  my  little  roof/  Abel  said, 
as  he  had  planned  to  say. 

He  mastered  the  names  by  careful 
attention  and  repetition.  Victoria 
slipped  away  to  serve  the  dinner. 
When  she  called  them  with,  'You  can 
come  now/  from  the  doorway,  Abel 
genially  led  the  way. 

'Take  your  seats  where  you  like!' 
he  cried. 

The  six  guests  were  from  another 
world.  Of  everything  that  they  did 
they  made  graces.  At  Abel's  table  they 
were  instantly  at  home,  and  they  were 
found  putting  Victoria  at  her  ease. 

'You  in  business  around  here  or  in 
the  city?'  Abel  inquired  of  Audrey. 

Audrey,  a  man  of  forty,  of  fine  dis- 
tinction and  fine  humor  and  a  genu- 
ine love  of  men,  replied  that  his  work 
was  in  town. 

'What  company  you  with?'  Abel 
wished  to  know.  'The  Badington 
Electric!'  he  repeated  with  a  shout. 
'Why,  that's  my  firm!  Sure  — I'm 
for  ten  years  a  builder.  What's  your 
job  with  'em,  may  I  ask?  Travel  for 
'em,  maybe?' 

'Something  of  that  sort/  said  Au- 
drey, to  whom  a  majority  of  the  Bad- 
ington stock  belonged.  'All  three  of 
us  here  are  slaves  for  that  company/ 
he  added. 

'Well,  then/  cried  Abel,  'we  are 
already  acquainted,  ain't  it?  We  un- 
derstand each  other  like  a  family.  We 
got  a  kind  of  a  common  feeling.  Not?' 

After  that  the  talk  made  itself. 
Abel  talked,  and  to  his  eyes  came  the 
passions  of  the  men  with  whom  he 
worked,  their  needs,  their  bonds,  their 


750 


THE  NEED 


confusions.  The  three  men  listened 
and  said  what  they  could,  wondering 
at  this  unfamiliar  agglomeration  which 
to  Abel  meant  the  firm;  and  then  they 
sought  to  show  him  vistas  of  which  he 
had  taken  no  account.  The  guests 
praised  the  little  house,  and  Victoria 
told  them  how,  though  she  herself  had 
lived  in  a  village  and  had  had  more 
experience,  Abel  had  until  now  always 
lived  in  a  flat  —  *  Abel 's  never  lived  be- 
fore, what  you  might  say,  private/  she 


When  the  brick  ice-cream  and  the 
baker's  little  cakes  were  set  before 
them,  Abel  almost  kept  silence  while 
he  ate,  as  one  giving  meet  observance; 
and  he  sent  glances  of  pleased  pride  to 
Victoria. 

Finally,  Abel  proposed  to  the  men 
that  they  go  out  to  the  porch  'where 
they  could  smoke/  and  the  women  who 
had  fallen  in  talk  about  Emily  Louise, 
were  left  lingering  at  the  table.  Mrs. 
Audrey  had  a  little  girl  at  home,  the 
others  had  children  grown.  The  three 
women  told  anecdotes  of  childish  doing. 

'  Your  little  girl  must  be  a  great  deal 
of  company  for  you/  the  lame  lady 
said  quaintly. 

'  She  has  to  be/  Victoria  said  —  and 
in  the  warmth  of  their  presence,  she 
told  them  the  history  of  her  party  and 
of  how  it  had  almost  failed.  The  furni- 
ture, the  club,  her  other  invitations  — 
she  told  it  all,  except  that  Abel's  new 
suit  she  did  not  mention.  'You  see 
what  you  done  for  me/  she  ended. 
When  Audrey  came  to  tell  them  that 
the  car  was  ready,  the  eyes  of  the  wo- 
men were  filled  with  tears. 

'Well,  now/  said  Abel,  when  they 


went  with  their  guests  to  their  car, 
'  you  must  all  drop  in  on  us  some  even- 
ing. We'd  like  it,  would  n't  we,  Vic- 
toria?' 

'  We  mean  to  come/  the  women  told 
Victoria. 

'And  I'll  look  you  up  at  the  works 
some  time,  if  you  don't  mind/  Audrey 
heard  himself  saying  to  Abel. 

'Sure/  said  Abel,  'we  stand  to  know 
each  other  better  from  now  on  —  not? 
That  is  what  a  man  needs.  Sure!' 

'  Come  soon  again  —  come  soon 
again!'  Emily  Louise  called  after  the 
car. 

Mrs.  Stern  was  speaking  softly  to 
Victoria. 

'That  club  you  told  us  about/  she 
said,  'I  belong  to  that.  I'll  get  your 
name  put  up,  if  you  want/ 

Abel,  having  carefully  changed  the 
new  suit,  went  into  the  kitchen  to  help 
his  wife  with  the  dishes  and  to  talk  it 
over.  To  his  surprise,  she  had  done 
nothing;  she  stood  leaning  in  the  out- 
side kitchen  doorway.  •  In  the  late  light 
the  open  land  had  almost  the  face  of 
the  country;  and  to  that  which  had 
seemed  to  be  defined,  color  of  twilight 
was  now  giving  new  depths  and  deli- 
cacies. He  came  and  stood  beside  her. 

'Victoria/  he  said  admiringly, 
' where M  you  meet  'em?  They're  the 
right  kind  of  friends  for  anybody!' 

Then  she  told  him,  melting  suddenly 
to  tears  in  her  happiness  and  her  con- 
trition. And  she  showed  him  the  note 
'  that  she  had  meant  to  leave.  For  an 
instant  something  of  her  tragedy  was 
clear  to  Abel.  He  put  out  his  hand. 

'I  don't  care  how  you  done  it/  he 
said  loyally,  'you  done  it  magnificent.' 


THE  CAGE 


BY  ARTURO   M.    GIOVANNITTI 


SALEM   JAIL,    SUNDAY,    OCTOBER   20,    1912 

I 

IN  the  middle  of  the  great  greenish  room  stood  the  green  iron  cage. 

All  was  old  and  cold  and  mournful,  ancient  with  the  double  antiquity  of  heart 

and  brain  in  the  great  greenish  room. 
Old  and  hoary  was  the  man  who  sat  upon  the  faldstool,  upon  the  fireless  and 

godless  altar. 

Old  were  the  tomes  that  mouldered  behind  him  on  the  dusty  shelves. 
Old  was  the  painting  of  an  old  man  that  hung  above  him. 
Old  the  man  upon  his  left,  who  awoke  with  his  cracked  voice  the  dead  echoes  of 

dead  centuries;  old  the  man  upon  his  right  who  wielded  a  wand;  and  old  all 

those  who  spoke  to  him  and  listened  to  him  before  and  around  the  green 

iron  cage. 
Old  were  the  words  they  spoke,  and  their  faces  were  drawn  and  white  and  lifeless, 

without  expression  or  solemnity;  like  the  ikons  of  old  cathedrals. 
For  of  naught  they  knew,  but  of  what  was  written  in  the  old  yellow  books.  And 

all  the  joys  and  pains  and  loves  and  hatreds  and  furies  and  labors  and  strifes 

of  man,  all  the  fierce  and  divine  passions  that  battle  and  rage  in  the  heart  of 

man,  never  entered  into  the  great  greenish  room  but  to  sit  in  the  green  iron 

cage. 
Senility,  dullness  and  dissolution  were  all  around  the  green  iron  cage,  and  nothing 

was  new  and  young  and  alive  in  the  great  room,  except  the  three  men  who 

were  in  the  cage. 

ii 

Throbbed  and  thundered  and  clamored  and  roared  outside  of  the  great  greenish 
room  the  terrible  whirl  of  life,  and  most  pleasant  was  the  hymn  of  its  mighty 
polyphony  to  the  listening  ears  of  the  gods. 

Whirred  the  wheels  of  the  puissant  machines,  rattled  and  clanked  the  chains  of 
the  giant  cranes,  crashed  the  falling  rocks;  the  riveters  crepitated;  and  glad 
and  sonorous  was  the  rhythm  of  the  bouncing  hammers  upon  the  loud- 
throated  anvils. 
1  For  a  commentary  on  '  The  Cage/  see  the  first  article  in  the  Contributors'  Club  in  this  number. 


752  THE  CAGE 

Like  the  chests  of  wrathfully  toiling  Titans,  heaved  and  sniffed  and  panted  the 

sweaty  boilers,  like  the  hissing  of  dragons  sibilated  the  white  jets  of  steam, 

and  the  sirens  of  the  workshops  shrieked  like  angry  hawks,  flapping  above 

the  crags  of  a  dark  and  fathomless  chasm. 
The  files  screeched  and  the  trains  thundered,  the  wires  hummed,  the  dynamos 

buzzed,  the  fires  crackled;  and  like  a  thunderclap  from  the  Cyclopean  forge 

roared  the  blasts  of  the  mines. 
Wonderful  and  fierce  was  the  mighty  symphony  of  the  world,  as  the  terrible 

voices  of  metal  and  fire  and  water  cried  out  into  the  listening  ears  of  the  gods 

the  furious  song  of  human  toil. 
Out  of  the  chaos  of  sound,  welded  in  the  unison  of  one  will  to  sing,  rose  clear  and 

nimble  the  divine  accord  of  the  hymn :  — 

Out  of  the  canons  of  the  mountains, 

Out  of  the  whirlpools  of  the  lakes, 
Out  of  the  entrails  of  the  earth, 

Out  of  the  yawning  gorges  of  hell, 
From  the  land  and  the  sea  and  the  sky, 

From  wherever  comes  bread  and  wealth  and  joy, 

And  from  the  peaceful  abodes  of  men,  rose  majestic  and  fierce,  louder  than  the 
roar  of  the  volcano  and  the  bellow  of  the  typhoon,  the  anthem  of  human 
labor  to  the  fatherly  justice  of  the  Sun. 

But  in  the  great  greenish  room  there  was  nothing  but  the  silence  of  dead  cent- 
uries and  of  ears  that  listen  no  more;  and  none  heard  the  mighty  call  of  life 
that  roared  outside,  save  the  three  men  who  were  in  the  cage. 

in 
All  the  good  smells,  the  wholesome  smells,  the  healthy  smells  of  life  and  labor 

were  outside  the  great  room. 
The  smell  of  rain  upon  the  grass  and  of  the  flowers  consumed  by  their  love  for  the 

stars. 
The  heavy  smell  of  smoke  that  coiled  out  of  myriads  of  chimneys  of  ships  and 

factories  and  homes. 

The  dry  smell  of  sawdust  and  the  salty  smell  of  the  iron  filings. 
The  odor  of  magazines  and  granaries  and  warehouses,  the  kingly  smell  of  argosies 

and  the  rich  scent  of  market-places,  so  dear  to  the  women  of  the  race. 
The  smell  of  new  cloth  and  new  linen,  the  smell  of  soap  and  water  and  the  smell 

of  newly  printed  paper. 
The  smell  of  grains  and  hay  and  the  smell  of  stables,  the  warm  smell  of  cattle  and 

sheep  that  Virgil  loved. 
The  smell  of  milk  and  wine  and  plants  and  metals, 


THE   CAGE  753 

And  all  the  good  odors  of  the  earth  and  of  the  sea  and  of  the  sky,  and  the  fra- 
grance of  fresh  bread,  sweetest  aroma  of  the  world,  and  the  smell  of  human 
sweat,  most  holy  incense  to  the  divine  nostrils  of  the  gods,  and  all  the 
olympian  perfumes  of  the  heart  and  the  brain  and  the  passions  of  men,  were 
outside  of  the  great  greenish  room. 

But  within  the  old  room  there  was  nothing  but  the  smell  of  old  books  and  the 
dust  of  things  decayed,  and  the  suffocated  exhalation  of  old  graves,  and  the 
ashen  odor  of  dissolution  and  death. 

Yet  all  the  sweetness  of  all  the  wholesome  odors  of  the  world  outside  were 
redolent  in  the  breath  of  the  three  men  in  the  cage. 


IV 

Like  crippled  eagles  fallen  were  the  three  men  in  the  cage,  and  like  little  children 

who  look  into  a  well  to  behold  the  sky  were  the  men  that  looked  down  upon 

them. 
No  more  would  they  rise  to  their  lofty  eyries,  no  more  would  they  soar  above  the 

snow-capped  mountains  —  yet,  tho*  their  pinions  were  broken,  nothing 

could  dim  the  fierce  glow  of  their  eyes,  which  knew  all  the  altitudes  of  heaven. 
Strange  it  was  to  behold  the  men  in  the  cage  while  life  clamored  outside,  and 

strange  it  seemed  to  them  that  they  should  be  there  because  of  what  dead 

men  had  written  in  old  books. 

So  of  naught  did  they  think  but  of  the  old  books  and  the  green  cage. 
Thought  they:  All  things  are  born,  grow,  decay,  and  die  and  are  forgotten. 
Surely  all  that  is  in  this  great  room  will  pass  away.   But  what  will  endure  the 

longer,  the  folly  that  was  written  into  the  old  books  or  the  madness  that  was 

beaten  into  the  bands  of  this  cage? 
Which' of  these  two  powers  has  enthralled  us,  the  thought  of  dead  men  who  wrote 

the  old  books,  or  the  labor  of  living  men  who  have  wrought  this  cage? 
Long  and  intently  they  thought,  but  they  found  no  answer. 

v 
But  one  of  the  three  men  in  the  cage,  whose  soul  was  tormented  by  the  fiercest 

fire  of  hell,  which  is  the  yearning  after  the  Supreme  Truth,  spoke  and  said 

unto  his  comrades :  — 
'Aye,  brothers,  all  things  die  and  pass  away,  yet  nothing  is  truly  and  forever  dead 

until  each  one  of  the  living  has  thrown  a  regretless  handful  of  soil  into  its 

grave. 
'Many  a  book  has  been  written  since  these  old  books  were  written,  and  many  a 

proverb  of  the  sage  has  become  the  jest  of  the  fool,  yet  this  cage  still  stands 

as  it  stood  for  numberless  ages. 

VOL.  Ill -NO.  6 


754  THE  CAGE 

*  What  is  it  then  that  made  it  of  metal  more  enduring  than  the  printed  word? 
'Which  is  its  power  to  hold  us  here? 

'  Brothers,  it  is  the  things  we  love  that  enslave  us. 

*  Brothers,  it  is  the  things  we  yearn  for  that  subdue  us. 

'Brothers,  it  is  not  hatred  for  the  things  that  are,  but  love  for  the  things  that  are 

to  be,  that  makes  us  slaves. 
'And  what  man  is  more  apt  to  become  a  thrall,  brothers,  and  to  be  locked  in  a 

green  iron  cage,  than  he  who  yearns  the  most  for  the  Supreme  of  the  things 

that  are  to  be  —  he  who  most  craves  for  Freedom? 
'And  what  subtle  and  malignant  power  save  this  love  of  loves  could  be  in  the 

metal  of  this  cage  that  it  is  so  mad  to  imprison  us?' 
So  spoke  one  of  the  men  to  the  other  two,  and  then  out  of  the  silence  of  the  seons 

spoke  into  his  tormented  soul  the  metallic  soul  of  the  cage. 


VI 

'  Iron,  the  twin  brother  of  fire,  the  first  born  out  of  the  matrix  of  the  earth,  the 

witness  everlasting  to  the  glory  of  thy  labor,  am  I,  O  Man! 
'Not  for  this  was  I  meant,  O  Man!  Not  to  imprison  thee,  but  to  set  thee  free  and 

sustain  thee  in  thy  strife  and  in  thy  toil. 

'I  was  to  lift  the  pillars  of  thy  Temple  higher  than  the  mountains; 
'I  was  to  lower  the  foundations  of  thy  house  deeper  than  the  abysmal  sea; 
'  I  was  to  break  down  and  bore  through  all  the  barriers  of  the  world  to  open  the 

way  to  thy  triumphal  chariot. 
'All  the  treasures  and  all  the  bounties  of  the  earth  was  I  to  give  as  an  offering 

into  thy  hands,  and  all  its  forces  and  powers  to  bring  chained  like  crouching 

dogs  at  thy  feet. 
'Hadst  thou  not  sinned  against  the  nobility  of  my  nature  and  my  destiny,  hadst 

thou  not  numiliated  me,  an  almighty  warrior,  to  become  the  lackey  of  gold, 

I  would  never  have  risen  against  thee  and  enthralled  thee,  O  Man! 
'While  I  was  hoe  and  ploughshare  and  sword  and  axe  and  scythe  and  hammer,  I 

was  the  first  artificer  of  thy  happiness;  but  the  day  I  was  beaten  into  the 

first  lock  and  the  first  key,  I  became  fetters  and  chains  to  thy  hands  and  thy 

feet,  O  Man! 
'  My  curse  is  thy  curse,  O  Man !  and  even  if  thou  shouldst  pass  out  of  the  wicket 

of  this  cage,  never  shalt  thou  be  free  until  thou  returnest  me  to  the  joy  of 

labor. 
'O  Man!  bring  me  back  into  the  old  smithy,  purify  me  again  with  the  holy  fire  of 

the  forge,  lay  me  again  on  the  mother  breast  of  the  anvil,  beat  me  again  with 

the  old  honest  hammer  —  O  Man!  remould  me  with  thy  wonderful  hands 

into  an  instrument  of  thy  toil, 


THE   CAGE  755 

'Remake  of  me  the  sword  of  thy  justice, 

Remake  of  me  the  tripod  of  thy  worship, 
Remake  of  me  the  sickle  for  thy  grain, 

Remake  of  me  the  oven  for  thy  bread, 
And  the  andirons  for  thy  peaceful  hearth,  O  Man ! 

And  the  trestles  for  the  bed  of  thy  love,  O  Man ! 
And  the  frame  of  thy  joyous  lyre,  O  Man ! ' 


VII 

Thus  spake  to  one  of  the  three  men,  out  of  the  silence  of  centuries,  the  metallic 
soul  of  the  cage. 

And  he  listened  unto  its  voice,  and  while  it  was  still  ringing  in  his  soul, — which 
was  tormented  with  the  fiercest  fire  of  hell,  which  is  the  yearning  after  the 
Supreme  Truth  (Is  it  Death?  Is  it  Love?),  —  there  arose  one  man  in  the 
silent  assembly  of  old  men  that  were  around  the  iron  cage. 

And  that  man  was  the  most  hoary  of  all,  and  most  bent  and  worn  and  crushed 
was  he  under  the  heavy  weight  of  the  great  burden  he  bore  without  pride 
and  without  joy. 

He  arose,  and  addressing  himself — I  know  not  whether  to  the  old  man  that  sat 
on  the  black  throne,  or  to  the  old  books  that  were  mouldering  behind  him,  or 
to  the  picture  that  hung  above  him  —  he  said  (and  dreary  as  a  wind  that 
moans  through  the  crosses  of  an  old  graveyard  was  his  voice) :  — 

"  I  will  prove  to  you  that  these  three  men  in  the  cage  are  criminals  and  murderers 

r       and  that  they  ought  to  be  put  to  death.' 

Love,  it  was  then  that  I  heard  for  the  first  time  the  creak  of  the  moth  that  was 
eating  the  old  painting  and  the  old  books,  and  the  worm  that  was  gnawing 
the  old  bench,  and  it  was  then  that  I  saw  that  all  the  old  men  around  the 
great  greenish  room  were  dead. 

They  were  dead  like  the  old  man  in  the  old  painting,  save  that  they  still  read  the 
old  books  he  could  read  no  more,  and  still  spoke  and  heard  the  old  words  he 
could  speak  and  hear  no  more,  and  still  passed  the  judgment  of  the  dead, 
which  he  no  more  could  pass,  upon  the  mighty  life  of  the  world  outside 
that  throbbed  and  thundered  and  clamored  and  roared  the  wonderful 
anthem  of  Labor  to  the  fatherly  justice  of  the  Sun. 


THE  NEGRO  AND  THE  LABOR  UNIONS 


BY  BOOKER   T.  WASHINGTON 


WHEN  the  Negro  boy  from  the 
Southern  states  leaves  the  plantation 
or  the  farm  and  goes  up  to  the  city,  it 
is  not  work,  in  many  cases,  that  he  is 
looking  for.  He  has  labored  in  the  field, 
beside  his  father  and  his  mother,  since 
he  was  old  enough  to  hold  a  hoe,  and 
he  has  never  known  the  time  when  he, 
and  every  other  member  of  the  family, 
could  not  find  all  the  work  they  need- 
ed and  more  than  they  wanted.  The 
one  thing  of  which  he  has  always  had 
plenty  at  home  has  been  work.  It  is 
very  likely  that  a  promise  that  he  would 
earn  more  and  do  less  has  turned  his 
steps  from  the  farm;  but  at  bottom  it  is 
not  the  search  for  easier  work  or  higher 
wages  that  brings  the  country  boy  to 
town;  it  is  the  natural  human  desire  to 
see  a  little  more  of  the  place  he  has 
heard  of  over  yonder,  beyond  the  hori- 
zon —  the  City. 

The  thing  that  takes  the  country 
boy  to  the  city,  in  short,  is  the  desire 
to  learn  something,  either  through 
books  and  in  school,  or  in  actual  con- 
tact with  daily  life,  about  the  world 
in  which  he  finds  himself.  One  of  the 
first  and  most  surprising  things  the 
country  boy  learns  in  the  city  is  that 
work  is  not  always  to  be  had;  that  it  is 
something  a  man  has  to  go  out  and  look 
for.  Another  thing  he  very  soon  learns  is 
that  there  is  a  great  deal  of  difference 
between  skilled  and  unskilled  labor, 
and  that  the  man  who  has  learned  to 
do  some  one  thing  well,  no  matter  how 
small  it  may  be,  is  looked  upon  with  a 
certain  respect,  whether  he  has  a  white 
skin  or  a  black  skin;  while  the  man  who 

756 


has  never  learned  to  do  anything  well 
simply  does  not  count  in  the  industrial 
world. 

The  average  Negro  learns  these 
things,  as  I  have  said,  when  he  comes 
to  the  city.  I  mention  them  here  be- 
cause in  considering  the  relation  of  the 
Negro  to  the  labor  unions  it  should  be 
remembered  that  the  average  Negro 
laborer  in  the  country  districts  has 
rarely  had  the  experience  of  looking  for 
work;  work  has  always  looked  for  him. 
In  the  Southern  states,  in  many  in- 
stances, the  employment  agent  who 
goes  about  the  country  seeking  to  in- 
duce laborers  to  leave  the  plantations 
is  looked  upon  as  a  kind  of  criminal. 
Laws  are  made  to  restrict  and  even 
prohibit  his  operations.  The  result  is 
that  the  average  Negro  who  comes  to 
the  town  from  the  plantations  does  not 
understand  the  necessity  or  advantage 
of  a  labor  organization,  which  stands 
between  him  and  his  employer  and  aims 
apparently  to  make  a  monopoly  of  the 
opportunities  for  labor. 

Another  thing  which  is  to  some  ex- 
tent peculiar  about  the  Negro  in  the 
Southern  states,  is  that  the  average 
Negro  is  more  accustomed  to  work  for 
persons  than  for  wages.  When  he  gets 
a  job,  therefore,  he  is  inclined  to  con- 
sider the  source  from  which  it  comes. 
The  Negro  is  himself  a  friendly  sort  of 
person,  and  it  makes  a  great  deal  of  dif- 
ference to  him  whether  he  believes  the 
man  he  is  working  for  is  his  friend  or  his 
enemy.  One  reason  for  this  is  that  he 
has  found  in  the  past  that  the  friend- 
ship and  confidence  of  a  good  white 


THE  NEGRO  AND  THE  LABOR  UNIONS 


757 


man,  who  stands  well  in  the  commun- 
ity, are  a  valuable  asset  in  time  of 
trouble.  For  this  reason  he  does  not 
always  understand,  and  does  not  like, 
an  organization  which  seems  to  be 
founded  on  a  sort  of  impersonal  enmity 
to  the  man  by  whom  he  is  employed; 
just  as  in  the  Civil  War  all  the  people 
in  the  North  were  the  enemies  of  all  the 
people  in  the  South,  even  when  the 
man  on  the  one  side  was  the  brother 
of  the  man  on  the  other. 

I  have  tried  to  suggest  in  what  I  have 
said  why  it  is  true,  as  it  seems  to  me, 
that  the  Negro  is  naturally  not  inclined 
toward  labor  unions.  But  aside  from 
this  natural  disposition  of  the  Negro 
there  is  unquestionably  a  very  wide- 
spread prejudice  and  distrust  of  labor 
unions  among  Negroes  generally. 

One  does  not  have  to  go  far  to  dis- 
cover the  reason  for  this.  In  several 
instances  Negroes  are  expressly  ex- 
cluded from  membership  in  the  unions. 
In  other  cases  individual  Negroes  have 
been  refused  admittance  to  unions 
where  no  such  restrictions  existed,  and 
have  been  in  consequence  shut  out 
from  employment  at  their  trades. 

For  this  and  other  reasons,  Negroes, 
who  have  been  shut  out,  or  believed 
they  had  been  shut  out,  of  employment 
by  the  unions,  have  been  in  the  past 
very  willing  strike-breakers.  It  is  an- 
other illustration  of  the  way  in  which 
prejudice  works,  also,  that  the  strikers 
seemed  to  consider  it  a  much  greater 
crime  for  a  Negro,  who  had  been  denied 
an  opportunity  to  work  at  his  trade,  to 
take  the  place  of  a  striking  employee 
than  it  was  for  a  white  man  to  do  the 
same  thing.  Not  only  have  Negro 
strike-breakers  been  savagely  beaten 
and  even  murdered  by  strikers  or  their 
sympathizers,  but  in  some  instances 
every  Negro,  no  matter  what  his  occu- 
pation, who  lived  in  the  vicinity  of  the 
strike  has  found  himself  in  danger. 

Another    reason   why  Negroes    are 


prejudiced  against  the  unions  is  that, 
during  the  past  few  years,  several  at- 
tempts have  been  made  by  the  mem- 
bers of  labor  unions  which  do  not  admit 
Negroes  to  membership,  to  secure  the 
discharge  of  Negroes  employed  in  their 
trades.  For  example,  in  March,  1911, 
the  white  firemen  on  the  Queen  and 
Crescent  Railway  struck  as  the  result 
of  a  controversy  over  the  Negro  fire- 
men employed  by  the  road.  The  white 
firemen,  according  to  the  press  reports, 
wanted  the  Negro  firemen  assigned  to 
the  poorest  runs.  Another  report  sta- 
ted that  an  effort  was  made  to  compel 
the  railway  company  to  get  rid  of  the 
Negro  firemen  altogether. 

Shortly  after  this  there  was  a  long 
controversy  between  Public  Printer 
Donnelly  and  the  Washington  Brick- 
layers' Union  because,  so  the  papers 
said,  Mr.  Donnelly  would  not  'draw 
the  color  line*  in  the  employment  of 
bricklayers  on  a  job  at  the  Government 
Printing  Office.  It  appears  that  an  addi- 
tional number  of  bricklayers  was  need- 
ed. Mr.  Donnelly  drew  upon  the  Civil 
Service  Commission  for  the  required 
number  of  men.  A  colored  man  was 
certified  by  the  Commission,  where- 
upon the  white  bricklayers  struck,  re- 
fusing to  work  with  a  Negro.  Other 
Negroes  were  hired  to  take  the  strik- 
ers' places.  The  labor  union  objected  to 
this  and  threatened  to  demand  that 
President  Taft  remove  Mr.  Donnelly. 
These  are  some  of  the  reasons  why 
Negroes  generally  have  become  pre- 
judiced against  labor  unions. 

On  the  other  hand,  many  instances 
have  been  called  to  my  attention  in 
which  labor  unions  have  used  their  in- 
fluence in  behalf  of  Negroes.  On  the 
Georgia  and  Florida  Railway  the  white 
and  colored  firemen  struck  for  higher 
wages.  Mobs  composed  of  both  white 
and  black  men  held  up  trains.  It  was 
reported  that  the  Negroes  were  as  vio- 
lent in  their  demonstrations  as  the 


758 


THE  NEGRO  AND  THE   LABOR   UNIONS 


whites.  In  this  instance  the  strikers 
won.  A  recent  dispatch  from  Key 
West,  Florida,  stated  that  the  white 
carpenters  in  that  city  had  struck  be- 
cause two  Negro  workmen  had  been 
unfairly  discharged.  The  members  of 
the  white  Carpenters'  Union  refused  to 
return  to  work  until  the  Negroes  had 
been  reinstated. 

At  the  1910  National  Council  of  the 
American  Federation  of  Labor,  resolu- 
tions were  passed  urging  Negroes  and 
all  other  races  to  enter  the  unions  con- 
nected with  the  Federation.  Since  that 
time  I  have  learned  of  activity  on  the 
part  of  the  Federation  in  organizing 
Negro  laborers  in  New  Orleans,  Pitts- 
burg,  Pensacola,  Richmond,  and  sev- 
eral other  Southern  cities.  In  spite  of 
the  impression  which  prevails  general- 
ly among  colored  people  that  the  labor 
unions  are  opposed  to  them,  I  have 
known  several  instances  in  which  Ne- 
groes have  proven  enthusiastic  trade- 
unionists,  and  in  several  cases  they 
have  taken  a  leading  part  in  organiza- 
tion and  direction,  not  only  in  the  color- 
ed, but  in  the  white  unions  of  which 
they  chanced  to  be  members. 

Notwithstanding  these  facts,  some 
of  which  seem  to  point  in  one  direc- 
tion and  some  in  another,  there  seems 
to  be  no  doubt  that  there  is  prejudice 
against  Negroes  among  the  members 
of  labor  unions  and  that  there  is  a  very 
widespread  prejudice  against  labor 
unions  among  Negroes.  These  are  facts 
that  both  parties  must  reckon  with; 
otherwise,  whenever  there  is  a  strike, 
particularly  among  those  trades  which 
have  been  closed  to  Negroes,  there  will 
always  be  a  considerable  number  of 
colored  laborers  ready  and  willing  to 
take  these  positions,  not  merely  from 
a  desire  to  better  their  positions  as  in- 
dividuals, but  also  for  the  sake  of  widen- 
ing the  race's  opportunities  for  labor. 

In  such  strikes,  whatever  disadvan- 
tages they  may  have  in  other  respects, 


Negroes  will  have  this  advantage,  that 
they  are  engaged  in  a  struggle  to  main- 
tain their  right  to  labor  as  free  men, 
which,  with  the  right  to  own  property, 
is,  in  my  opinion,  the  most  important 
privilege  that  was  granted  to  black  men 
as  a  result  of  the  Civil  War. 

Under  these  circumstances  the  ques- 
tion which  presents  itself  to  black  men 
and  white  men  of  the  laboring  classes 
is  this :  Shall  the  labor  unions  use  their 
influence  to  deprive  the  black  man  of 
his  opportunity  to  labor,  and  shall 
they,  as  far  as  possible,  push  the  Ne- 
gro into  the  position  of  a  profession- 
al 'strike-breaker';  or  will  the  labor 
unions,  on  the  other  hand,  admitting 
the  facts  to  be  as  they  are,  unite  with 
those  who  want  to  give  every  man,  re- 
gardless of  color,  race  or  creed,  what 
Colonel  Roosevelt  calls  the  'square 
deal'  in  the  matters  of  labor,  using 
their  influence  to  widen  rather  than  to 
narrow  the  Negro's  present  opportun- 
ities; to  lessen  rather  than  to  magnify 
the  prejudices  which  make  it  difficult 
for  white  men  and  black  men  to  unite 
for  their  common  good? 

In  order  to  get  at  the  facts  in  refer- 
ence to  this  matter,  I  recently  sent  a 
letter  of  inquiry  to  the  heads  of  the 
various  labor  organizations  in  the 
United  States,  in  which  I  asked  the 
following  three  questions :  — 

What  are  the  rules  of  your  union 
concerning  the  admittance  of  Negroes 
to  membership? 

Do  Negroes,  as  a  rule,  make  good 
union  men?  If  not,  what  in  your  opin- 
ion is  the  cause? 

What  do  you  advise  concerning  the 
Negro  and  the  Trade-Unions? 

I  confess  that  I  was  both  interested 
and  surprised  by  the  number  and  the 
character  of  the  replies  which  I  re- 
ceived. They  not  only  indicated  that 
the  labor  leaders  had  fully  considered 
the  question  of  the  Negro  laborer,  but 


THE  NEGRO  AND  THE   LABOR  UNIONS 


759 


they  also  showed,  in  many  instances, 
a  sympathy  and  an  understanding  of 
the  difficulties  under  which  the  Negro 
labors  that  I  did  not  expect  to  find. 
A  brief  summary  of  these  letters  will 
indicate,  better  than  anything  I  can 
say,  the  actual  situation. 

In  reply  to  the  question,  'What  are 
the  rules  of  your  union  concerning  the 
admittance  of  Negroes?'  nine  unions, 
all  but  two  of  which  are  concerned  with 
transportation,  stated  that  Negroes 
are  barred  from  membership.  These 
unions  are:  the  International  Brother- 
hood of  Maintenance-of-Way  Employ- 
ees, Switchmen's  Union,  Brotherhood 
of  Railroad  Trainmen,  Brotherhood  of 
Locomotive  Firemen  and  Enginemen, 
Brotherhood  of  Locomotive  Engineers, 
Order  of  Railway  Conductors  of  Amer- 
ica, Order  of  Railway  Telegraphers, 
American  Wire  Weavers'  Protective 
Association,  and  the  International  Bro- 
therhood of  Boilermakers,  Iron  Ship- 
builders and  Helpers  of  America. 

Fifty-one  national  labor  organiza- 
tions, several  of  which  are  the  strongest 
in  the  country,  reported  that  there  was 
nothing  in  their  constitutions  prohib- 
iting the  admittance  of  Negroes.  In 
fact,  many  of  the  constitutions  ex- 
pressly state  that  there  shall  be  no 
discrimination  because  of  race  or  color. 
This  is  the  case,  for  example,  with  the 
Wood,  Wire  and  Metal  Lathers'  Union. 
The  constitution  of  the  United  Bro- 
therhood of  Carpenters  and  Joiners 
contains  the  following  statement :  '  We 
recognize  that  the  interests  of  all  classes 
of  labor  are  identical  regardless  of  oc- 
cupation, nationality,  religion  or  color, 
for  a  wrong  done  to  one  is  a  wrong  done 
to  all.' 

Mr.  Samuel  Gompers,  President  of 
the  American  Federation  of  Labor, 
replying  to  the  question  concerning 
the  admission  of  Negroes  to  labor 
unions  wrote:  *  Realizing  the  necessity 
for  the  unity  of  the  wage-earners  of  our 


country,  the  American  Federation  of 
Labor  has  upon  all  occasions  declared 
that  trade  unions  should  open  their 
portals  to  all  wage-workers  irrespec- 
tive of  creed,  color,  nationality,  sex,  or 
politics.  Nothing  has  transpired  in 
recent  years  which  has  called  for  a 
change  in  our  declared  policy  upon  this 
question;  on  the  contrary,  every  evi- 
dence tends  to  confirm  us  in  this  con- 
viction; for  even  if  it  were  not  a  matter 
of  principle,  self-preservation  would 
prompt  the  workers  to  organize  intel- 
ligently and  to  make  common  cause.' 

With  two  exceptions  the  answers  to 
my  question,  'Do  Negroes  in  your 
opinion  make  good  Union  men? '  were 
that  they  do. 

Mr.  Ralph  V.  Brandt,  of  Cleveland, 
secretary-treasurer  of  the  Wood,  Wire 
and  Metal  Lathers'  Union,  wrote:  'I 
regret  to  say  I  must  answer  "no"  to 
this  question.  We  have  had  several 
locals  in  the  South,'  he  continues, 
*  where  the  membership  was  made  up 
either  exclusively  of  Negroes  or  a  large 
majority,  and  we  have  had  only  two 
out  of  the  entire  number  that  have 
made  a  success.  One  of  these  locals 
is  in  Savannah,  Georgia,  and  the  other 
in  Charleston,  South  Carolina,  and, 
as  it  happens,  both  of  these  are  among 
the  earliest  locals  chartered  by  our 
organization.  I  have  had  this  situation 
come  under  my  personal  observation 
in  our  locals  in  this  city,  of  which  I 
am  a  member,  and  I  must  say  that 
the  Negro  lathers  in  Cleveland  have 
failed  absolutely  in  meeting  the  general 
requirements  of  union  men.' 

The  letter  goes  into  details,  describ- 
ing the  various  efforts,  all  of  them  un- 
successful, which  the  local  unions  made 
to  induce  the  Negro  lathers  to  re-affili- 
ate. They  were  promised  recognition 
in  the  governing  board  of  the  union 
and,  at  the  suggestion  of  some  of  the 
colored  lathers,  one  of  their  number 
was  recognized  as  a  contractor,  but 


760 


THE   NEGRO  AND  THE   LABOR   UNIONS 


these  measures  also  failed  of  their  pur- 
pose. 

Another  letter  to  much  the  same 
effect  was  received  from  the  secretary 
of  the  Tobacco  Workers'  International 
Union.  The  secretary  wrote:  'Our  ex- 
perience has  been  that  very  few  of 
them  have  turned  out  to  be  such  [good 
union  men].  They  have  a  large  Union 
in  Richmond,  Va.,  all  colored  men,  and 
only  a  few  of  the  whole  membership 
are  what  I  would  call  union  men.  They 
do  not  seem  to  grasp  the  significant 
feature  of  the  trade-union  [movement].' 

Mr.  B.  A.  Larger,  general  secretary 
of  the  United  Garment  Makers  of 
America,  said:  'I  think  the  Negroes 
working  in  the  trades  do  make  good 
union  men,  but  I  do  not  think  that  the 
Negro  waiters  make  good  union  men, 
as  I  have  had  some  experience  in  try- 
ing to  organize  them.  They  would  be 
well  organized  and  apparently  have  a 
strong  organization,  but  in  a  short 
time  it  would  go  to  pieces.  Among 
them  there  would  be  some  good  loyal 
members,  but  not  sufficient  [in  num- 
bers] to  keep  up  the  organization. 

'I  am  unable/  he  adds,  'to  give  a 
definite  reason  except,  perhaps,  that  it 
might  be  the  fault  of  the  head  waiter, 
who  would  induce  some  person  to  go 
into  the  organization  and  break  it  up. 
Nevertheless,  it  is  true  that  they  are 
the  most  difficult  to  organize  of  any 
class  of  people.' 

A  somewhat  different  light  is  thrown 
upon  the  situation  by  a  letter  from  Mr. 
Jacob  Fisher,  general  secretary  of  the 
Journeymen  Barbers'  International 
Union.  This  letter  is  so  interesting 
that  I  am  disposed  to  quote  from  it  at 
considerable  length.  'In  my  opinion,' 
Mr.  Fisher  writes, '  Negro  trade-union- 
ists make  as  good  members  as  any 
others,  and  I  believe  that  the  percent- 
age of  good  trade-unionists  among  the 
Negroes  is  just  as  high  as  of  any  other 
class  of  people;  but  the  percentage  of 


Negroes  of  our  trade  belonging  to  our 
organization  is  not  as  high  as  among 
other  classes.  One  of  the  greatest  ob- 
stacles we  have  to  confront,  in  inducing 
and  urging  the  Negroes  to  become 
members  of  our  organization,  is  a  gen- 
eral current  rumor  that  the  white  bar- 
bers are  trying  to  displace  and  put  out 
of  business  the  Negro  barbers.  There 
is  no  foundation  whatever  for  the 
rumor,  but  it  has  become  generally 
spread  among  the  Negro  barbers,  and 
this  feeling  has  been  urged  upon  them 
more  strongly  than  it  would  otherwise 
be,  by  Negro  employers,  who  do  every- 
thing they  can,  as  a  general  rule,  to 
keep  their  employees  from  joining  our 
trade-union.  We  have  tried  for  years 
to  impress  upon  the  minds  of  Negro 
barbers  that  their  best  hope  for  better 
conditions  lies  in  becoming  members 
of  our  organization.  But  the  feeling 
that  exists  among  them  has  been  so 
impressed  upon  their  minds  by  no  one 
else  except  the  Negro  employer,  as  to 
make  it  a  very  difficult  matter  to  in- 
duce individual  Negro  barbers  to  be- 
come members  of  our  organization.' 

Mr.  Fisher  adds  that  a  few  years 
ago  a  large  percentage  of  the  barbers 
were  Germans.  In  more  recent  years 
Jews  and  Italians  have  been  getting 
into  the  barber  business  in  large  num- 
bers. Barbers  of  all  of  these  national- 
ities are  'rapidly  becoming  educated' 
in  the  trade-union  movement,  and  are 
active  in  bringing  other  members  of 
the  trade  of  their  nationalities  into  the 
union.  'On  the  other  hand,'  he  con- 
tinues, 'the  Negro  barbers,  while  loyal 
to  the  movement  and  active  in  the  af- 
fairs within  the  organization,  do  not 
direct  their  attention  to  the  unorgan- 
ized Negro  barbers  and  use  their  en- 
deavors to  educate  them  in  trade-union 
matters.' 

The  Mine  Workers'  Union  has  the 
largest  Negro  membership  of  any  of 
the  labor  unions.  Mr.  John  Mitchell, 


THE  NEGRO  AND  THE  LABOR  UNIONS 


761 


the  former  president,  states  that,  *  while 
there  are  no  exact  statistics  as  to  the 
number  of  Negro  members  of  the 
United  Mine  Workers  of  America,  it  is 
safe  to  say  that  not  less  than  30,000 
of  the  300,000  members  are  Negroes. 
Many  important  offices  are  filled  by 
colored  members. 

'The  Negroes  who  are  mining  coal 
in  the  Northern  states,*  he  adds,  'make 
first-class  union  men.  In  the  Southern 
states  where  Negroes  are  employed  in 
large  numbers  in  the  mining  industry, 
unionism  is  not  so  strong.  This,  how- 
ever, is  in  part  accounted  for  by  the  fact 
that  the  mine-owners  oppose  strongly 
the  organization  of  their  workmen, 
and  the  miners  are  so  poor  that  they 
cannot  contend  successfully  against  the 
corporations  unless  they  are  supported 
financially  by  the  organized  men  in 
other  states.' 

Mr.  Edwin  Perry,  secretary-treas- 
urer of  the  United  Mine  Workers  of 
America,  replying  to  the  question,  *  Do 
Negroes  make  good  union  men? '  wrote : 
'I  say  unequivocally,  "yes,"  and  point 
with  pride  to  the  fact  that  the  largest 
local  branch  of  our  organization  has  at 
least  80  per  cent  colored  men.  It  is 
progressive  and  up  to  date  in  all  things. 
This  local  is  located  in  my  home  state 
at  Buxton,  Iowa. 

'It  is  possible,'  he  adds,  'that  mis- 
guided individuals  may,  in  some  isola- 
ted instances,  discriminate  against  the 
Negro,  but  when  our  attention  is  called 
to  the  same,  we  endeavor  to  overcome 
that  condition  by  the  application  of  in- 
telligence and  common  sense.  The  time 
is  not  far  distant  when  the  working 
men  and  women  of  our  country  will 
see  the  necessity  of  mutual  coopera- 
tion and  the  wiping  out  of  existence  of 
all  class  lines.' 

Mr.  John  Williams  of  Pittsburg, 
president  of  the  Amalgamated  Associ- 
ation of  Iron,  Steel  and  Tin  Workers, 
stated  that  the  laws  of  his  association 


provide  that  'all  men  working  in  and 
around  rolling  mills  are  eligible  to  mem- 
bership.' No  line  of  demarcation  is 
drawn.  He  was  of  the  opinion  that 
Negroes,  if  given  the  opportunity,  make 
good  union  men.  He  also  advised  that 
Negroes  should  be  educated  in  the  prin- 
ciples and  ideals  for  which  the  labor- 
union  movement  stands. 

In  view  of  the  newspaper  reports 
from  time  to  time  concerning  the  dis- 
crimination against  Negro  chauffeurs, 
the  statement  of  Mr.  Thomas  L. 
Hughes,  general  secretary-treasurer  of 
the  International  Brotherhood  of 
Teamsters,  Chauffeurs,  Stablemen  and 
Helpers,  concerning  Negroes  in  labor- 
unions  is  particularly  interesting. 

'I  have  had  considerable  dealing 
with  colored  men  as  members  of  our 
trade-union,'  he  writes.  'In  every  in- 
stance where  the  colored  men  have 
been  organized,  we  find  them  to  be 
loyal  to  our  union  in  every  shape  and 
manner.  To  say  that  they  make  good 
union  men  is  only  putting  it  too  lightly. 
We  have  local  unions  composed  en- 
tirely of  Negroes  in  certain  parts  of  the 
country  that  are  a  credit  to  our  inter- 
national union/ 

In  many  localities  Negroes,  Mr. 
Hughes  asserts,  belong  to  the  same  or- 
ganization as  white  men  and  get  on  sat- 
isfactorily. In  many  of  the  large  local 
unions,  where  there  are  both,  the  col- 
ored membership  is  large.  The  officers 
of  the  organization  are  also  colored. 

The  secretary  of  the  Amalgamated 
Meat -Cutters  and  Butchers'  Work- 
men, replying  to  my  question,  'Do 
Negroes  make  good  union  men?'  said, 
*  I  will  say  that  the  Negro  averages  up 
with  the  white  man  and  I  cannot  see 
any  difference,  as  it  is  all  a  matter  of 
education.  Both  classes  improve  as 
they  become  more  familiar  with  the 
work.  I  might  say,  incidentally,  that 
one  of  the  best  and  most  conscientious 
officials  we  have  is  a  Negro  member  of 


762 


THE  NEGRO  AND  THE  LABOR  UNIONS 


our  local  union  in  Kingston,  N.  Y.  He 
is  a  man  who  not  only  has  the  entire 
confidence  of  his  associates  in  the  organ- 
ization, but  is  held  in  the  highest  es- 
teem by  the  entire  community  and,  as 
an  officer,  stands  second  to  none.' 

The  answers  to  the  question,  'What 
**do  you  advise  concerning  the  Negro 
and  Trade  Unions?'  were  practically 
unanimous  in  advising  that  the  Negro 
be  organized  and  educated  in  the  prin- 
ciples of  trade-unionism.  Even  the 
leaders  of  those  unions  which  bar  out 
the  Negro  advised  that  he  be  organ- 
ized. The  president  of  the  Switchmen's 
Union,  Mr.  S.  E.  Heberling,  wrote: 
'The  laws  of  our  union  will  not  permit 
Negroes  to  join,  the  constitution  using 
the  term  "  white."  However,'  he  adds, 
'  I  advise  that  the  Negroes  in  all  trades 
organize  to  better  their  condition.  This 
organization,  in  reference  to  Negroes 
following  the  occupation  of  switchmen, 
has  advised  the  American  Federation 
of  Labor,  with  whom  we  are  affiliated, 
to  grant  the  Negroes  charters  as  mem- 
bers of  the  Federal  Labor  Union.  I 
hope  your  race  will  take  advantage  of 
the  opportunities  afforded  them.' 

Mr.  H.  B.  Perham,  of  St.  Louis, 
president  of  the  Order  of  Railroad  Tel- 
egraphers, wrote:  'The  Order  of  Rail- 
road Telegraphers  is  a  white  man's  or- 
ganization, that  provision  having  been 
in  its  constitution  since  its  inception 
twenty-six  years  ago.  I  advise  the  or- 
ganization to  help  the  poor  man  to  a 
better  standard  of  living,  better  edu- 
cation, resistance  of  injustice  and  the 
like.  As  the  Negro,  generally  speaking, 
is  poor,  he  needs  organization.' 

Mr.  John  J.  Flynn,  of  Chicago,  sec- 
retary and  treasurer  of  the  Brother- 
hood of  Railroad  Freight  Handlers, 
wrote:  'I  believe  that  a  campaign  of 
education  should  be  started  among  the 
Negro  workers  of  the  country,  this  ed- 
ucation to  dwell  principally  on  the  fact 
that  in  organization  there  is  strength 


and  that  the  surest  way  to  rise  above 
their  present  condition  is  to  become 
members  of  labor  organizations  that 
their  craft  calls  for.  In  short,  the  best 
way  for  the  Negro  to  improve  his  pre- 
sent condition  is  to  become  a  member 
of  a  branch  of  the  labor  movement 
which  covers  his  craft.' 

Mr.  James  Wilson,  general  president 
of  the  Pattern  Makers'  League,  said: 
'I  would  advise  that  the  Negro  be 
taught  to  join  the  union  of  whatever 
occupation  he  is  following,  and  if  there 
is  no  union  of  that  calling,  that  he  or- 
ganize one,  for  there  is  no  greater  edu- 
cational movement  in  the  country  for 
all  wage-earners  than  the  trade-union 
movement.' 

Mr.  E.  J.  Brais,  general  secretary  of 
the  Journeyman  Tailors'  Union,  wrote: 
'Our  opinion  is  and  our  advice  would 
be  that  the  Negroes  should  organize 
trade-unions  by  themselves  under  the 
jurisdiction,  of  course,  of  the  American 
Federation  of  Labor,  being  governed 
by  the  same  rules  in  all  their  trades  as 
the  white  mechanics.  We  believe  in 
that  case,  if  they  organize  into  separate 
locals  in  the  various  trades  and  insist 
upon  the  same  scale  of  wages  as  their 
white  brethren,  it  would  be  a  source  of 
strength  to  both  elements.' 

Mr.  James  Duncan,  international 
secretary  of  the  Granite  Cutters'  Inter- 
national Association  of  America,  re- 
plied in  substance  as  follows  to  my  in- 
quiry: 'I  advise  concerning  Negroes 
and  trade-unions,  that  they  be  organ- 
ized the  same  as  white  people  are  or- 
ganized, mixed  with  white  people,  where 
that  is  advisable,  but  in  local  unions  by 
themselves  where  circumstances  make 
it  advisable  for  white  people  and  Ne- 
groes being  in  separate  organizations.' 

Mr.  Duncan  stated  that  the  rule  did 
not  prohibit  Negroes  joining  the  union, 
but  throughout  the  South  granite-cut- 
ting was  usually  considered  a  'white 
man's  trade.'  Because  of  the  feeling 


THE  NEGRO  AND  THE  LABOR  UNIONS 


763 


in  the  South  he  believed  that  Southern 
granite-cutters  would  not  be  disposed 
to  work  at  that  trade  with  Negroes. 

'This,'  he  added,  'is  sentiment,  and 
forms  no  part  of  the  rules  of  our  associ- 
ation.' 

I  have  quoted  at  some  length  the 
statements  made  by  the  labor  leaders, 
because  it  seemed  to  me  that  these 
statements  not  only  disclose  pretty  ac- 
curately the  position  of  the  labor  or- 
ganizations as  a  whole,  in  reference  to 
the  Negro,  but  indicate,  also,  the  actual 
situation  of  the  Negro  at  the  present 
time  in  the  world  of  organized  industry. 
In  this  connection  it  should  be  remem- 
bered that  the  labor  unions  are  not 
primarily  philanthropic  organizations. 
They  have  been  formed  to  meet  con- 
ditions as  they  exist  in  a  competitive 
system  where,  under  ordinary  circum- 
stances, every  individual  and  every 
class  of  individuals  is  seeking  to  im- 
prove its  own  condition  at  the  expense, 
if  necessary,  of  every  other  individual 
and  class.  It  is  natural  enough,  under 
such  conditions,  that  union  men  should 
be  disposed  to  take  advantage  of  race 
prejudice  to  shut  out  others  from  the 
advantages  which  they  enjoy. 

The  leaders  of  the  labor  movement, 
however,  see  clearly  that  it  is  not  pos- 
sible permanently  to  close,  to  the  mil- 
lion or  more  Negro  laborers  in  this 
country,  the  opportunity  to  take  the 
positions  which  they  are  competent  to 
fill.  They  have  observed,  also,  that 
race  prejudice  is  a  two-edged  sword, 
and  that  it  is  not  to  the  advantage  of 
organized  labor  to  produce  among  the 
Negroes  a  prejudice  and  a  fear  of  labor 
unions  such  as  to  create  in  this  country 
a  race  of  strike-breakers.  The  result 
has  been  that  in  every  part  of  the 
United  States  where  Negro  laborers 
have  become  strong  enough  in  any  of 
the  trades  to  be  able  to  hold  their  own, 
the  Negro  has  been  welcomed  into  the 
unions,  and  the  prejudice  which  shut 


him  out  from  these  trades  has  disap- 
peared. 

As  an  illustration  of  this  fact,  I  can- 
not do  better  than  quote  a  few  para- 
graphs from  the  report  of  the  English 
Industrial  Commission  in  1911  in  re- 
gard to  labor  conditions  in  the  South- 
ern states,  which  gives  a  very  clear  and, 
I  think,  accurate  description  of  local 
conditions  in  cities  to  which  it  refers. 

Concerning  the  Negro  labor  unions 
in  the  Birmingham  district,  the  Eng- 
lish Industrial  Commission  reported: 
'  It  is  not  owing  to  the  existence  of  any 
very  sympathetic  feeling  betweeen  the 
white  men  and  the  Negroes  that  the 
latter  are  allowed  to  join  the  union;  it 
is  simply  because  the  white  men  feel 
that  their  interest  demands  that  col- 
ored men  should  be  organized,  as  far 
as  possible,  so  as  to  prevent  them  from 
cutting  down  the  rate  of  wages.  Where- 
ever  a  sufficient  number  of  colored  men 
can  be  organized,  they  are  encouraged 
to  form  a  union  of  their  own,  affiliated 
to  the  white  man's  union,  but  where 
there  are  not  enough  to  form  a  separate 
union,  they  are  allowed  in  the  South  to 
become  members  of  the  white  man's 
organization. 

4  The  building  and  mining  indus- 
tries,' the  report  continues,  'are  the 
two  in  which  the  white  and  colored 
races  come  into  the  most  direct  com- 
petition with  each  other,  yet  it  cannot 
be  said  that  in  either  of  these  industries 
a  situation  exists  which  occasions  fric- 
tion. No  doubt  in  both  industries  the 
white  men  would  like  to  monopolize 
the  skilled  work  for  themselves,  but 
they  recognize  that  that  is  impossible 
and  make  the  best  of  the  situation. . . . 
The  white  men  make  it  quite  clear  that 
their  connection  with  the  colored  men 
is  purely  a  matter  of  business  and  in- 
volves no  social  recognition  whatever. 
It  is  in  the  mining  industry  that  the  re- 
lations between  the  two  races,  though 
working  side  by  side,  in  direct  compe- 


764 


THE  NEGRO  AND  THE   LABOR   UNIONS 


tition,  are  smoothest.  They  acted  to- 
gether in  the  great  strike  of  1902,  and 
in  fact  the  good  feeling  between  the 
whites  and  the  colored  men  was  used 
with  great  effect  by  the  opponents  of 
the  strikers,  who  charged  the  white 
miners  with  disloyalty  to  their  race.' 

In  New  Orleans  the  Commission 
found  a  very  interesting  situation 
which  is  described  as  follows:  'It  is 
probable  that  in  New  Orleans  there  is 
a  larger  number  of  white  and  Negro 
people  in  very  much  the  same  economic 
position  than  in  any  other  American 
city,  or  anywhere  else  in  the  world. 
The  industries  of  New  Orleans  are  of  a 
kind  which  employ  mainly  unskilled 
or  semi-skilled  labor,  with  the  result 
that  both  white  men  and  Negroes  are 
found  doing  the  same  kind  of  work  and 
earning  the  same  rate  of  pay.  .  .  .  The 
various  unions  combine  in  maintaining 
the  Dock  and  Cotton  Council,  which 
dominates  the  entire  business  of  com- 
pressing, carting,  and  loading  cotton. 
.  .  .  By  arrangement  between  the  Dock 
and  Cotton  Council  and  the  employ- 
ers, work  has  to  be  impartially  appor- 
tioned between  the  white  compress 
gangs  and  the  colored  gangs.' 

In  the  letters  from  which  I  have  so 
far  quoted  the  writers  have  been  con- 
tent, for  the  most  part,  simply  to  an- 
swer the  questions  asked  them,  and 
sometimes,  when  they  have  not  come 
into  contact  with  the  racial  problem 
involved,  have  been  disposed  to  dis- 
cuss the  advantages  of  labor  organiza- 
tions in  the  abstract.  More  interest- 
ing are  the  letters  which  I  have  received 
from  labor  men  who  have  come  into 
close  quarters  with  the  problem,  in  their 
efforts  to  organize  Negro  labor  in  the 
face  of  existing  conditions. 

As  these  letters  indicate  better  than 
any  discussion  on  my  own  part,  the 
way  the  problem  works  out  in  practice, 
it  will  be  well,  perhaps,  to  let  the  writ- 
ers speak  for  themselves. 


One  of  the  most  interesting  letters 
which  I  received  was  from  Mr.  M.  J. 
Keough,  of  Cincinnati,  acting  presi- 
dent of  the  International  Moulders' 
Union.  Mr.  Keough  wrote  that  one  of 
the  national  officers  of  the  Moulders' 
Association,  who  was  a  Southerner  by 
birth,  had  been  devoting  a  very  con- 
siderable part  of  his  time  in  trying  to 
organize  the  Negro  Moulders  of  the 
South.  In  Chattanooga,  for  example, 
there  were  between  six  and  eight  hun- 
dred moulders,  whom  they  had  been 
trying,  with  no  great  success,  to  get 
into. the  union. 

*Of  course  you  are  aware,'  he  con- 
tinues, 'that  there  is  a  certain  feeling 
in  the  South  against  the  Negro,  but  we 
have  succeeded  in  overcoming  that, 
and  have  educated  our  members  to  the 
fact  that  if  the  Negro  moulder  of  Chat- 
tanooga is  not  brought  up  to  the  level 
of  the  white  man,  he,  the  Negro,  will 
eventually  drag  the  white  man  down  to 
his  condition.  It  is  our  purpose  to  con- 
tinue the  agitation  in  order  to  have  a 
thorough  organization  of  the  Negro 
moulders  of  Chattanooga. 

'  We  find  there  is  considerable  oppo- 
sition on  the  part  of  the  employers  in 
Chattanooga  to  the  Negro  moulders 
joining  the  union.  I  might  state  we 
have  a  shop  on  strike  in  which  practi- 
cally all  of  the  men  were  Negro  mould- 
ers and  are  being  supported  by  our  or- 
ganization. The  employers  are  having 
these  Negro  moulders  out  on  strike 
arrested  for  loitering,  etc.,  and  have  put 
us  to  considerable  expense  in  keeping 
our  Negro  members,  who  are  on  strike, 
out  of  jail.  In  conclusion  let  me  state 
that  we  are  very  anxious  that  the  Negro 
moulders  should  become  members  of 
our  organization  and  enjoy  all  its  rights 
and  privileges.' 

Another  important  letter  in  this  con- 
nection was  received  from  Mr.  John 
P.  Frey,  editor  of  the  International 
Moulders'  Journal.  He  said :  *  As  I  made 


THE  NEGRO  AND  THE  LABOR  UNIONS 


765 


many  earnest  efforts  to  organize  Negro 
moulders  in  the  South  some  twelve 
years  ago  and  met  with  almost  com- 
plete failure,  owing  to  what  appeared 
to  be  the  Negroes'  suspicion  as  to  the 
genuineness  of  our  intentions,  it  is  but 
natural  that  I  should  still  be  interested 
in  the  question.  While  a  Northerner, 
I  have  spent  sufficient  time  in  the 
Southern  states  to  become  familiar  per- 
sonally with  the  several  phases  pre- 
sented by  the  question  of  the  Negro 
status,  both  socially  and  industrially.' 

In  his  further  reply  to  my  question, 
Mr.  Frey  referred  to  an  editorial  in  a  re- 
cent issue  of  the  iron-moulders'  official 
organ.  In  this  editorial  the  statement 
was  made  that  the  fact  that  there 
were  so  few  Negroes  in  the  Moulders' 
Union  was  due  largely  to  race  preju- 
dice. 

'As  the  years  rolled  by,'  the  editor 
continues,  'our  members  in  the  South 
realized  that  the  question  of  Negro 
membership  was  an  industrial  one. 
The  castings  made  by  the  Negroes 
were  worth  as  much  as  those  made  by 
white  men,  but  they  might  be  sold  for 
less  in  the  open  market  because  the 
Negro  was  forced  to  work  for  much 
smaller  wages.  It  was  not  a  question 
of  social  equality,  but  a  question  of 
competition  in  the  industrial  field. 
Other  trade-unions  in  the  South  have 
faced  the  same  problem  and  have  been 
even  more  ready,  in  some  instances,  to 
take  the  Negro  mechanic  or  laborer 
into  their  ranks.  Not  long  ago  the 
largest  union  in  the  South,  No.  255,  of 
Birmingham,  Alabama,  gave  the  ques- 
tion thorough  consideration,  with  the 
result  that  it  decided  to  take  qualified 
Negro  mechanics  into  membership. 
Their  action  may  not  have  been  in  line 
with  the  sentiment  of  twenty  years 
ago,  but  it  was  in  line  with  justice  to 
themselves  and  to  the  Negro  who  had 
learned  the  trade,  for  industrial  com- 
petition pays  no  heed  to  questions 


of  social  equality.  In  our  trade,  the 
Negro  has  become  an  industrial  factor 
in  the  South,  and  the  wise  policy  of 
giving  him  the  benefit  of  membership 
in  our  organization  will  not  be  of  value 
to  him  alone,  but  to  every  one  who 
works  at  moulding.  To  expect  that  race 
prejudice  and  social  questions  will  be 
eliminated  or  adjusted  in  a  generation 
or  two,  is  to  expect  too  much ;  but  the 
question  of  the  Negro  moulder  is  neither 
one  of  race  nor  of  social  equality;  it  is 
purely  one  of  industrial  competition.' 
Mr.  Frey  referred,  also,  to  an  article 
by  Mr.  Nick  Smith,  who  is  a  South- 
erner by  birth  and  training,  has  worked 
all  his  life  as  a  moulder  in  the  South, 
and  is  now  organizer  of  his  union.  In 
this  article  Mr.  Smith  said  in  part:  'If 
we  want  to  make  the  Negro  a  good 
union  man,  we  will  have  to  grant  him 
the  same  privileges  and  the  same  treat- 
ment in  the  shop  that  is  enjoyed  by  the 
white  moulder.  Treat  the  Negro  square ; 
allow  him  to  work  in  our  shops  when 
he  presents  his  union  card,  and  we  will 
take  away  from  the  foundryman  his 
most  effective  tool,  the  Negro  strike- 
breaker. Refuse  the  Negro  this  priv- 
ilege and  the  foundryman  will  con- 
tinue to  use  him  to  trim  us  with  when 
we  have  trouble.  The  Negro  is  here, 
and  here  to  stay,  and  is  going  to  con- 
tinue to  work  at  moulding,  and  it  is  for 
us  to  say  whether  he  shall  work  with 
us  as  a  union  moulder,  or  against  us  as 
a  tool  in  the  foundryman's  hands  and  a 
strike-breaker.  When  a  Negro  comes  to 
your  town,  do  what  you  can  to  see  that 
he  gets  a  job,  and  is  treated  as  a  union 
man  should  be  treated.  Refuse  to  do 
this  and  you  force  him  to  allow  the 
foundryman  to  use  him  as  a  club  to 
beat  us  into  submission.  The  I.  M.  U. 
has  spent  considerable  money  and  time 
to  get  the  Negro  moulder  educated 
up  to  the  point  where  he  is  to-day,  and 
the  refusal  of  the  white  moulder  to  work 
with  the  Negro  will  undo  all  that  has 


766 


THE  NEGRO  AND  THE  LABOR  UNIONS 


been  accomplished.  Brothers,  it  is  up 
to  us  to  think  it  over.' 

Mr.  William  J.  Gilthorpe  of  Kansas 
City,  secretary-treasurer  of  the  Inter- 
national Brotherhood  of  Boilermakers, 
Iron  Shipbuilders  and  Helpers,  said: 
*  Being  a  Southern  man  myself,  in 
breeding  and  education,  I  naturally 
think  that  I  am  acquainted  with  the 
colored  people.  I  served,  in  1880,  in 
New  Orleans  with  the  colored  dele- 
gates to  the  central  body,  and  I  want 
to  say  that  the  colored  delegates  were 
as  true  and  loyal  to  the  principles  of 
true  labor  movement  as  any  delegate 
in  that  body.  They  make  the  best  of 
union  men.  There  is  no  trouble  with 
them  whatever.  In  answer  to  your 
question  I  say  this:  The  rules  of  this 
organization  do  not  permit  them  to  be 
initiated  into  this  order.  Now  I  am  one 
of  those  who  advocate  the  organization 
of  the  colored  men,  as  well  as  the  white 
men.  I  possess  a  few  followers,  but 
this  is  a  principle  that  is  going  to  live, 
and  it  is  going  to  be  an  established  fact, 
in  this  order,  sooner  or  later.  As  far  as 
my  advice  goes,  and  humble  efforts,  I 
would  say  organize  them  in  every  case 
where  they  are  eligible.' 

Mr.  Frank  Duffy,  general  secretary 
of  the  United  Brotherhood  of  Car- 
penters and  Joiners,  wrote:  'I  wish  to 
inform  you  that  we  do  not  draw  the 
color  line  in  our  organization,  as  is  evi- 
denced by  the  fact  that  throughout 
the  Southern  states  we  have  in  the 
United  Brotherhood  twenty-five  unions 
composed  exclusively  of  colored  men. 
We  have  found  in  our  experience  that 
where  there  are  colored  carpenters  in 
great  numbers,  it  is  an  absolute  neces- 
sity both  for  their  advancement  and 
for  the  welfare  of  the  white  carpenters 
as  well,  to  organize  them.  We  have  a 
colored  organizer  in  the  South,  Mr.  J. 
H.  Bean,  who  has  done  splendid  work 
in  getting  the  colored  carpenters  to- 
gether.' 


In  order  to  find  out  what  were  the 
experiences  and  views  of  colored  union 
men,  I  communicated  with  Mr.  Bean 
and  received  a  very  interesting  reply. 
He  wrote  that  he  had  been  connected 
with  the  United  Brotherhood  of  Car- 
penters and  Joiners  of  America  for 
'more  than  twelve  years  and  had  been  a 
delegate  to  every  national  convention 
but  one  since  1902.  Since  October, 
1908,  he  has  been  continually  engaged 
as  general  organizer  for  colored  car- 
penters in  nine  Southern  states.  'Dur- 
ing that  time,'  he  added,  'I  have  met 
with  some  opposition  from  both  races, 
until  they  saw  that  one  carpenter  is 
largely  dependent  upon  another,  and 
to  organize  our  forces  in  the  right  way 
is  not  only  helpful  to  one  but  to  all 
engaged  in  similar  work.  Then  their 
opposition  ceased.' 

One  of  the  easiest  things  in  the  world, 
I  have  found,  is  prophecy,  and  there 
have  been  a  good  many  prophecies  in 
regard  to  the  Negro.  Some  persons 
have  said  there  is  no  future  for  the 
Negro,  because,  in  the  long  run,  he 
cannot  compete  with  the  white  man, 
and,  as  a  consequence,  in  the  course  of 
time  the  Negro  will  be  crowded  out  of 
America  and  forced  to  go  to  some  other 
country. 

Other  persons  say  that  the  future  is 
dark  for  the  Negro  because,  as  soon  as 
it  appears  that  the  black  man  is  actu- 
ally able  to  live  and  work  alongside 
of  the  white  man  in  competition  for 
the  ordinary  forms  of  labor,  racial  pre- 
judice will  be  so  intensified  that  the 
Negro  will  be  driven  out  of  the  coun- 
try or  he  will  be  reduced  to  some  form 
of  industrial  servitude  and  compelled 
to  perform  the  kind  of  work  that  no 
white  man  is  willing  to  do. 

While  the  letters  I  have  quoted  do 
not  tell  the  whole  story  of  the  Negro 
and  the  unions,  they  at  least  throw 
some  light  upon  the  value  of  the  pre- 
dictions to  which  I  have  just  referred. 


THE  NEGRO  AND  THE  LABOR  UNIONS 


767 


They  indicate,  at  any  rate,  that  the 
Negro,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  can  and 
does  compete  with  the  white  laborer, 
wherever  he  has  an  opportunity  to  do 
so.  They  show  also  that,  on  the  whole, 
the  effect  of  this  competition  is  not  to 
increase  but  to  lessen  racial  prejudice. 

It  is  nevertheless  true,  that  the  pre- 
judice of  the  Negro  against  the  unions, 
on  the  one  hand,  and  of  the  white  man 
against  the  l>lack,  on  the  other,  is 
used  sometimes  by  the  unions  to  shut 
the  Negro  from  the  opportunity  of 
labor,  sometimes  by  the  employer  to 
injure  the  work  of  the  unions.  In  the 
long  run,  however,  I  do  not  believe 
that,  in  the  struggle  between  capital 
and  labor,  either  party  is  going  to  let 
the  other  use  the  sentiment  of  the  com- 
munity in  regard  to  the  race  question 
to  injure  it  in  an  industrial  way. 

When,  for  example,  the  capitalist, 
as  has  sometimes  happened,  says  that 
Negro  and  white  laborers  must  not 
unite  to  organize  a  labor  union,  because 
that  would  involve  'social  equality,' 
or  when,  as  has  happened  in  the  past, 
the  white  laborer  says  the  Negro  shall 
not  work  at  such  and  such  trades,  not 
because  he  is  not  competent  to  do  so, 
but  because  he  is  a  Negro,  the  interest 
in  *  social  equality/  so  far  as  it  refers 
to  those  particular  matters  mentioned, 
tends  to  decrease. 

So  long  as  there  is  any  honest  senti- 
ment in  favor  of  keeping  the  races 
apart  socially,  I  do  not  believe  the 
unions  or  the  public  are  willingly  go- 
ing to  permit  individuals  to  take  a  dis- 
honest advantage  of  that  sentiment. 
On  the  contrary,  so  far  as  the  labor 
unions  are  concerned,  I  am  convinced 
that  these  organizations  can  and  will 
become  an  important  means  of  doing 
away  with  the  prejudice  that  now  exists 
in  many  parts  of  the  country  against 
the  Negro  laborer.  I  believe  that  they 
will  do  this  not  merely,  as  Mr.  Gom- 
pers  has  said,  from  'principle,'  but  be- 


cause it  is  to  their  interest  to  do  so. 
At  present,  however,  that  prejudice 
exists  and  it  is  natural  that  individuals 
should  make  use  of  it  to  their  own  ad- 
vantage. If  proprietors  of  Negro  bar- 
ber shops  seek  to  prejudice  their  work- 
men, as  is  reported,  against  the  white 
unions,  so  that  they  may  pay  them 
less  wages,  it  is  likewise  true  that  some 
white  unions  take  advantage  of  the 
existing  prejudice  wholly  to  exclude 
colored  men  from  some  of  the  trades 
in  which  they  are  perfectly  competent 
to  work. 

There  is,  in  my  opinion,  need  for  a 
campaign  of  education  not  only  among 
Negro  artisans  but  among  white  arti- 
sans as  well.  With  every  such  effort  of 
the  labor  leaders  to  create  a  sentiment 
among  white  men,  as  well  as  colored, 
which  will  permit  both  races  to  work 
together  for  their  common  good,  I  am 
heartily  in  sympathy. 

In  spite  of  all  that  has  been  said  to 
the  contrary,  we  are  making  progress 
in  the  solution  of  this,  as  of  other  pro- 
blems connected  with  the  relations  of 
the  races  in  this  country.  To  say  that 
we  are  not  is  pretty  much  the  same  as 
saying  that,  in  spite  of  all  our  efforts, 
the  world  is  growing  worse  instead  of 
better.  Justice,  fair  play,  and  a  dis- 
position to  help  rather  than  to  injure 
one's  fellow  are  not  only  good  things 
in  themselves,  but  in  the  long  run  they 
are  the  only  things  that  pay,  whether 
in  the  case  of  an  individual,  a  group 
of  individuals,  or  a  race. 

It  seems  to  me  that  the  letters  to 
which  I  have  referred  in  this  article 
show  clearly  that  the  leaders  of  the 
labor  organizations  fully  realize  what 
the  masses  of  laboring  men  must  in- 
evitably come  to  see,  namely,  that  the 
future  belongs  to  the  man,  or  the  class 
of  men,  who  seeks  his  own  welfare,  not 
through  the  injury  or  oppression  of  his 
fellows,  but  in  some  form  of  service  to 
the  community  as  a  whole. 


BRAINS  AND  BUYING 


BY   ELIZABETH    C.   BILLINGS 


THERE  is  a  law  to  prohibit  dishonest 
advertising,  and  a  new  committee  has 
been  formed  to  enforce  this  law.  But 
legislative  enactments  mean  nothing, 
public  opinion  passing  freely  from  man 
to  man  means  everything.  If  we  are 
stupid  enough  to  flock  where  poorly 
made  things  are  offered  cheaply,  and 
to  buy  that  which  we  neither  need  nor 
desire,  we  deserve  to  be  made  the  sport 
of  the  advertisers. 

The  test  of  economic  efficiency  in  the 
standard  of  living  'is  not  a  question 
of  choosing  the  good  instead  of  the  bad, 
but  of  choosing  the  best  instead  of  the 
good/  and  it  is  a  far  cry  from  our  daily 
morning's  mail,  in  which  we  receive 
dozens  of  carefully  worded  notices, 
printed  at  huge  expense,  which  we  have 
to  open,  and  destroy.  Think  of  the  re- 
lief it  would  be  to  our  postman  to  have 
this  idiotic  use  of  the  United  States 
mails  stopped.  It  would  be  impossible 
to  read  all  this  printed  matter  daily. 
If  one  did,  and  acted  upon  its  sugges- 
tions, physical  collapse  would  follow 
bankruptcy. 

This  huge  and  expensive  mail  de- 
livery pertains  to  all  manner  of  sub- 
jects. Let  me  give  a  list  of  the  docu- 
ments received  in  one  day  by  a  small 
family  who  live  in  a  modest  suburban 
house. 

Notice  of  a  new  hotel  to  be  opened 
in  Chicago. 

Four  sealed  invitations  in  double 
cream  laid  envelopes,  engraved,  and 
with  an  etched  landscape  at  the  top, 
inviting  each  member  of  the  family, 
by  name,  to  the  opening  of  a  toy  shop. 

768 


Appeal  to  subscribe  to  a  colossal  new 
dictionary,  enclosing  twelve  sample 
pages.  Seven  circulars  about  new  pub- 
lications ;  three  subscription  blanks  and 
a  stamped  envelope. 

Sample  of  laundry  wax  —  with  cir- 
cular. 

Large  embossed  envelope,  containing 
a  folder,  tied  with  ribbon,  enclosing 
three  colored  plates  of  'Clothing  of 
Refinement*  for  men. 

Four-page  circular,  heavy  Irish  linen, 
with  information  about  'One  gray 
charmeuse  gown,  fur-trimmed,  with 
beaded  passementeries,  Paquin  Model. 
Value  $185.00;  sale  price  $78.00';  and 
ninety-six  other  equally  alluring  de- 
scriptions. 

'Biblical  study  picture  course'  de- 
scribed for  children  in  a  six-page 
booklet. 

Large  notice  of  society  vaudeville  in 
black  and  yellow  sealed  envelope. 

Six  tickets  to  be  sold  for  a  fair,  held 
in  aid  of  an  institution  of  which  we 
had  never  heard! 

And  to-day  was  only  an  average  day 
—  and  elections  are  over. 

As  Sidney  Smith  said,  'What  do  I 
want  of  this  piece  of  pasteboard?  It 
costs  you  two  pence  and  does  me  no 
good.' 

One  wonders  if  this  daily  deluge  of 
printers'  ink  is  a  useful  method  of 
distributing  stray  facts  to  the  com- 
munity; for  Edward  Devine,  in  his 
charming  little  book  on  'Economics,' 
states  that  'A  decrease  in  the  cost  of 
commodities,  a  discovery  of  some  new 
mechanical  process,  a  change  in  the 


BRAINS  AND  BUYING 


769 


habits  of  consumers,  make  possible 
a  higher  level  of  living  for  all  who 
have  an  assured  income  of  stipulated 
amount,'  and  that  'the  advantage  will 
be  retained,  if  the  standard  of  living  is 
modified.' 

As  individuals  we  may  not  be  able 
to  decrease  the  cost  of  commodities 
or  to  discover  new  mechanical  inven- 
tions, but  we  can  change  our  habits,  if 
we  will.  We  can  teach  children  to 
choose  the  best  instead  of  the  useless, 
the  lasting  instead  of  the  cheap,  the 
beautiful  instead  of  the  ugly,  —  and 
we  could,  by  common  consent,  and  the 
force  of  honestly  expressed  opinion, 
relieve  the  advertisers  from  the  strain 
under  which  they  are  now  laboring, 
and  ourselves  from  the  burden  of  their 
industry. 

It  is  no  easy  task  to  choose  *  the  best 
instead  of  the  good.'  This  the  work- 
ing people,  the  professional  people,  the 
conscientious  parents,  all  know,  and  to 
them  idling  in  the  shops  brings  no  last- 
ing satisfaction,  no  real  interest.  They 
do  not  often  enjoy  wandering  from 
shop  to  shop,  pricing,  discussing,  hand- 
ling articles  offered  for  sale.  Shopping 
as  an  all-day  business  is  impossible  to 
them.  They  have  no  desire  to  sit  in  the 
waiting  room  of  a  department  store, 
to  listen  to  assorted  music,  to  watch 
the  wandering  crowd,  to  examine,  with- 
out mind  to  purchase,  clothing  suitable 
for  a  court  function.  They  have  no 
willingness  to  spend  what  they  do  not 
have,  to  receive  what  they  do  not  pay 
for,  or  to  get  what  they  do  not  want, 
and  yet  they  are  often  lost  in  the  jungle 
of  things  manufactured,  and  feebly 
snatch  what  they  can  in  the  struggle  to 
get  out. 

Sometimes  one  does  not  purchase 
according  to  one's  original  intention. 
There  was  a  '  rummage  sale '  not  long 
ago,  in  aid  of  a  local  charity.  A  Soci- 
ety Bud,  in  charge  of  one  of  the  tables, 
was  earnest  in  her  effort  to  find  the 
VOL.  in -NO.  6 


real  market  value  of  her  goods  by  the 
*  test  of  final  utility  and  supply.' 

An  old  woman  came  to  purchase, 
and  spying  a  full-sized  pair  of  La 
Crosse  racquets^  asked,  'How  much 
are  those?' 

'Fifteen  cents,'  was  the  prompt 
answer. 

'Will  you  take  ten?'  asked  the  old 
woman. 

'No,'  said  the  Bud,  'that  is  too  great 
a  sacrifice.' 

'Then  give  me  that  cabbage,  and 
here  is  your  dime.' 

Saleswoman  and  purchaser  both 
smiled  contentedly,  feeling  that  a  good 
deed  had  been  well  done. 

To  buy  wisely  has  its  true  satisfac- 
tion, but  just  'buying'  seems  to  have 
irresistible  attraction  for  the  human 
mind.  We  were  spending  a  golden  hour 
at  the  top  of  a  great  headland;  far 
below,  the  sea  showed  opal  color  and 
violet  light.  The  clay  of  the  cliff 
ranged  in  tone  from  black,  through 
red,  blue,  and  yellow,  to  a  creamy 
white;  patches  of  sweet  fern  and  deli- 
cate grasses  grew  in  the  crannies,  glow- 
ing green,  giving  accent  and  harmony 
to  the  whole.  Far  below,  the  line  of  the 
golden  beach,  the  white  curl  of  the 
surf,  were  like  poetry  and  music;  and 
yet,  among  the  people  who  journeyed 
that  day  to  enjoy  a  fair  place,  only  a 
few  had  time  to  go  out  on  the  cliffs  and 
revel  in  color  and  beauty,  because,  at  a 
neat  little  stall,  there  was  a  collection 
of  perishable  souvenirs  for  sale,  and 
so  great  was  the  demand  for  them  that 
the  buyers  had  no  time  to  feast  their 
eyes  elsewhere.  A  proof  that  purchas- 
ing is  more  interesting  to  the  majority 
than  observing. 

Of  this  fact  advertisers  and  mer- 
chants are  well  aware  and  yet  they 
invite  us  to  look  also.  'No  trouble  to 
show  goods,'  is  a  slogan  freely  used, 
and  the  shop-windows  are  lessons  in 
the  art  of  display.  This  is  the  shop- 


770 


BRAINS  AND  BUYING 


keeper's  business,  thought  out,  and 
shown  to  the  passer-by.  Is  our  spend- 
ing thought  out  also?  Do  we  really 
know  our  business,  too,  when  we  come 
to  make  our  selections,  or  are  we  like 
the  executive  young  woman  who  was 
riding  in  from  Cambridge?  Opposite 
her,  in  the  car,  was  the  embodiment 
of  the  respectable  lower-middle-class 
British  matron,  with  a  child  of  ten. 
The  day  was  cold  and  raw  for  Novem- 
ber. The  child  wore  a  dress  with  low 
neck  and  short  sleeves.  The  executive 
woman  was  troubled,  and  remarked  on 
the  fact  to  her  neighbors.  'She  ought 
to  be  ashamed  of  herself  to  dress  that 
poor  little  thing  so  foolishly;  I  really 
should  like  to  take  that  child  away  from 
her;  it  is  scandalous.'  The  mother  sat 
opposite,  patient,  but  at  last  she  re- 
marked very  clearly,  *  I ' ve  'ad  twelve. 
How  many  'ave  you  'ad?' 

We  constantly  receive  catalogues  of 
*  Reduction  Sales,'  tremendous  in  bulk, 
and  explicit  in  detail,  offering  great 
opportunities  to  buy  goods  that  are 
unseasonable,  or  of  a  pronounced  and 
passing  fashion .  The  philosophy  of  such 
a  *  mark-down '  policy  was  interestingly 
illustrated  on  Cape  Ann,  where  two 
amateur  artists,  with  paint-boxes  and 
white  umbrellas,  were  searching  for  an 
abiding  place. 

'What  is  the  price  of  board  and 
room  at  your  cottage?' 

'My  prices  are  a  dollar  a  day,  or 
eight  dollars  a  week,'  replied  the  busi- 
ness-like New  England  spinster. 

Thinkers  claim  that  a  purchaser  with 
high  ideals  and  intelligence,  whose  de- 
mands call  for  a  wide  range  of  resource, 


will  win  a  commanding  place  in  the 

*  Unconscious  Economic  Struggle '  that 
constantly  goes  on.    Witness  the  as- 
sistance offered  such  a  purchaser  in  a 
recent  newspaper  advertisement,  which 
says:  — 

*  We  have  won  distinction  merely  by 
doing  well  what  all  should  be  ashamed 
to  do  in  a  wrong  way,'  and  *  firmly 
refusing  to  let  fussy  and  affected  dis- 
cords of  refined  austerity  take  the 
place  of  the  rhythmic  and  the  graceful.' 

You  know  about  the  woman  who 
was  pronounced  by  her  friends  'very 
sacrificing  —  but  she  did  not  sacrifice 
judicious';  this  is  what  is  happening 
to  our  advertisers:  they  no  longer 

*  advertise  judicious,'  and  if  they  keep 
on  at  the  rate  at  which  they  are  now 
going,    arithmetical    progression    will 
prove  that  there  will  soon  be  room  for 
naught  else  but  their  works  on  the  civ- 
ilized globe. 

Would  it  not  be  interesting  to  have 
economic  relations  taught  in  our 
schools,  just  put  into  the  simplest 
possible  language;  teaching  that  good 
not  cheap  is  the  standard,  and  that  the 
best  is  our  object  in  human  acquire- 
ment? What  a  helpful  body  of  young 
men  and  women  they  would  graduate. 
What  a  bond  there  would  be  between 
them,  what  a  force  they  would  be  in 
the  nation;  so  that  not  only  would 

*  Political  Economy '  be  a  serious  study 
for  the  learned,  but  its  simple  and  un- 
derlying truths  would  become  woven 
into  the  daily  thinking  and  accomplish- 
ment of  our  boys  and  girls,  and  its  re- 
sults would  show  in  their  relations  to 
living  and  to  trade. 


SCIENCE  AND  MYSTICISM 


BY   HAVELOCK   ELLIS 


IF  by  'science*  we  mean  an  organ- 
ized knowledge  of  the  world  we  live  in, 
adequate  to  give  us  some  degree  of 
power  over  that  world,  and  if  by  *  mys- 
ticism' we  mean  the  quintessential 
part  of  religion,  or  our  emotional  rela- 
tionship to  the  world  as  a  whole,  the 
opposition  which  we  usually  assume  to 
exist  between  them  is  of  comparatively 
modern  origin. 

Among  sava*ge  peoples  such  an  op- 
position has  no  existence.  Not  only  is 
there  no  opposition  between  the  *  sci- 
entific* and  the  *  mystical'  attitude 
among  peoples  we  may  fairly  call  prim- 
itive, but  the  two  attitudes  are  usu- 
ally combined  in  the  same  person.  The 
'medicine-man'  is  not  more  a  man  of 
science  than  he  is  a  mystic :  he  is  both 
equally.  He  cultivates  not  only  magic 
but  holiness,  he  achieves  the  conquest 
of  his  own  soul,  he  enters  into  harmony 
with  the  universe;  and  in  doing  this, 
and  partly  indeed  through  doing  this, 
his  knowledge  is  increased,  his  sensa- 
tions and  power  of  observation  are 
rendered  acute,  and  he  is  enabled  so  to 
gain  organized  knowledge  of  natural 
processes,  that  he  can  to  some  extent 
foresee  or  even  control  those  processes. 
He  is  the  ancestor  alike  of  the  hermit 
following  after  sanctity  and  of  the  in- 
ventor crystallizing  discoveries  into 
profitable  patents. 

Such  is  usually  the  medicine-man 
wherever  we  find  him,  all  over  the 
world,  around  Torres  Straits  just  as 
much  as  around  Bering's  Straits.  Yet 


we  have  totally  failed  to  grasp  the  sig- 
nificance of  this  fact. 

It  is  the  business  of  the  shaman,  as 
on  the  mystical  side  we  may  best  term 
the  medicine-man,  to  place  himself 
under  the  conditions  —  and  even  in 
primitive  life  those  conditions  are 
varied  and  subtle  —  which  bring  his 
will  into  harmony  with  the  essence  of 
the  world,  so  that  he  grows  one  with 
that  essence,  that  its  will  becomes  his 
will,  and,  reversely,  that  in  a  sense  his 
will  becomes  its.  Herewith,  in  this 
unity  with  the  spirit  of  the  world,  the 
possibilities  of  magic  and  the  power  to 
control  the  operations  of  Nature  are 
introduced  into  human  thought,  with 
its  core  of  reality  and  its  endless  trail 
of  absurdity  persisting  even  into  ad- 
vanced civilization.  But  this  harmony 
with  the  essence  of  the  universe,  this 
control  of  Nature  through  oneness  with 
Nature,  is  not  only  at  the  heart  of  re- 
ligion; it  is  also  at  the  heart  of  science. 
It  is  only  by  the  possession  of  an  ac- 
quired or  inborn  temperament  attuned 
to  the  temperament  of  Nature  that  a 
Faraday  or  an  Edison,  that  any  scien- 
tific discoverer  or  inventor,  can  achieve 
his  results.  And  the  primitive  medi- 
cine-man, who  on  the  religious  side  has 
attained  harmony  of  the  self  with  the 
not-self,  and  by  obeying  has  learned  to 
command,  cannot  fail  on  the  scientific 
side  also,  under  the  special  conditions 
of  his  isolated  life,  to  acquire  an  in- 
sight into  natural  methods,  a  practical 
power  over  human  activities  and  over 
the  treatment  of  disease,  such  as  on 
the  imaginative  and  emotional  side  he 

771 


772 


SCIENCE  AND   MYSTICISM 


already  possesses.  If  we  are  able  to 
see  this  essential  and  double  attitude 
of  the  shaman  or  medicine-man,  if  we 
are  able  to  eliminate  all  the  extraneous 
absurdities  and  extravagances  which 
conceal  the  real  nature  of  his  function 
in  the  primitive  world,  the  problem  of 
science  and  mysticism,  their  relation- 
ship to  each  other,  ceases  to  have  any 
difficulties  for  us. 

Thus  the  medicine-man's  significance 
is  surely  clear.  If  science  and  mys- 
ticism are  alike  based  on  fundamental 
natural  instincts,  appearing  spontane- 
ously all  over  the  world;  if,  moreover, 
they  naturally  tend  to  appear  in  the 
same  individual  in  such  a  way  that 
each  impulse  would  seem  to  be  depend- 
ent on  the  other  for  its  full  develop- 
ment, then  there  can  be  no  ground  for 
accepting  any  disharmony  between 
them.  The  course  of  human  evolution 
may  involve  a  division  of  labor,  a  spe- 
cialization of  science  and  of  mysticism 
along  different  lines  and  in  separate 
individuals;  but  a  fundamental  antag- 
onism of  the  two,  it  becomes  evident, 
is  not  to  be  thought  of;  it  is  unthink- 
able, even  absurd. 

If  at  some  period  in  the  course  of 
civilization  we  seriously  find  that  our 
science  and  our  religion  are  antagonis- 
tic, then  there  must  be  something  wrong 
either  with  our  science  or  with  our  reli- 
gion. Perhaps  not  seldom  there  may  be 
something  wrong  with  both.  For  if  the 
natural  impulses  which  normally  work 
best  together  are  separated  and  special- 
ized in  different  persons,  we  may  expect 
to  find  a  concomitant  state  of  atrophy 
and  hypertrophy,  both  alike  morbid. 
The  scientific  person  will  become  atro- 
phied on  the  mystical  side,  the  mysti- 
cal person  will  become  atrophied  on 
the  scientific  side.  Each  will  become 
morbidly  hypertrophied  on  his  own 
side.  But  the  assumption  that  because 
there  is  a  lack  of  harmony  between  op- 
posing pathological  states  there  must 


also  be  a  similar  lack  of  harmony  under 
natural  conditions,  is  unreasonable. 
We  must  severely  put  out  of  count 
alike  the  hypertrophied  scientific  peo- 
ple with  atrophied  religious  instincts, 
and  the  hypertrophied  religious  peo- 
ple with  atrophied  scientific  instincts. 
Neither  group  can  help  us  here;  they 
only  introduce  confusion.  The  fact  that 
at  the  present  moment  this  is  peculiar- 
ly the  case  furnishes  the  reason  why 
we  here  have  to  examine  the  matter 
critically,  to  go  back  to  first  principles, 
to  take  so  wide  a  survey  of  the  phe- 
nomena that  their  seemingly  conflict- 
ing elements  shall  fall  into  harmony. 

The  fact,  in  the  first  place,  that  the 
person  with  an  over-developed  relig- 
ious sense  combined  with  an  under- 
developed scientific  sense  necessarily 
conflicts  with  a  person,  in  whom  the 
reverse  state  of  affairs  exists  cannot  be 
doubted,  nor  is  the  reason  of  it  obscure. 
It  is  difficult  to  conceive  a  Darwin  and 
a  St.  Theresa  entering  with  full  and 
genuine  sympathy  into  each  other's 
point  of  view.  And  that  is  so  by  no 
means  because  the  two  attitudes, 
stripped  of  all  but  their  essentials,  are 
irreconcilable.  If  we  strip  St.  Theresa 
of  her  atrophied  pseudo-science,  which 
in  her  case  was  mostly  theological 
science,  there  was  nothing  in  her  atti- 
tude which  would  not  have  seemed  to 
harmonize  with  and  to  exalt  that  abso- 
lute adoration  and  service  to  natural 
truth  which  inspired  Darwin.  If  we 
strip  Darwin  of  that  atrophied  feeling 
for  poetry  and  the  arts  which  he  de- 
plored, and  that  anaemic  secular  con- 
ception of  the  universe  as  a  whole 
which  he  seems  to  have  accepted  with- 
out deploring,  there  was  nothing  in  his 
attitude  which  would  not  have  served 
to  fertilize  and  enrich  the  spiritual 
exaltation  of  Theresa,  and  even  to  have 
removed  far  from  her  that  temptation 
to  accidie  or  slothfulness  which  all  the 
mystics,  who  are  mystics  only,  have 


SCIENCE  AND   MYSTICISM 


773 


recognized  as  their  besetting  sin,  mini- 
mised as  it  was  in  Theresa  by  her 
practical  activities.  Yet  being,  as  they 
were,  persons  of  supreme  genius  devel- 
oped on  opposite  sides  of  their  common 
human  nature,  an  impassable  gulf  lies 
between  them.  It  lies  equally  between 
much  more  ordinary  people  who  yet 
show  the  same  common  character  of 
being  under-grown  on  one  side,  over- 
grown on  the  other. 

This  difficulty  is  not  diminished 
when  the  person  who  is  thus  hyper- 
trophied  on  one  side  and  atrophied  on 
the  other  suddenly  wakes  up  to  his 
one-sided  state  and  hastily  attempts  to 
remedy  it.  The  very  fact  that  such  a 
one-sided  development  has  come  about, 
indicates  that  there  has  probably  been 
a  congenital  basis  for  it,  an  innate  dis- 
harmony which  must  require  infinite 
patience  and  special  personal  experi- 
ence to  overcome  it.  But  the  heroic  and 
ostentatious  manner  in  which  these 
ill-balanced  people  hastily  attempt  the 
athletic  feat  of  restoring  their  spiritual 
balance  has  frequently  aroused  the  in- 
terest, and  too  often  the  amusement,  of 
the  spectator. 

Sir  Isaac  Newton,  the  most  quint- 
essentially  scientific  person  the  world 
has  seen,  the  searcher  who  has  made 
the  most  stupendous  effort  to  picture 
the  universe  intelligently  on  its  pure- 
ly intelligible  side,  realized  in  old  age, 
when  he  was  indeed  approaching  sen- 
ility, that  the  vast  hypertrophy  of  his 
faculties  on  that  side  had  not  been 
compensated  by  any  development  on 
the  religious  side.  He  forthwith  set  him- 
self to  the  interpretation  of  the  Book 
of  Daniel  and  puzzled  over  the  prophe- 
cies of  the  Book  of  Revelation,  with 
the  same  scientifically  serious  air  that 
he  would  have  assumed  in  analyzing 
the  spectrum.  In  reality  he  had  not 
reached  the  sphere  of  religion  at  all;  he 
had  merely  exchanged  good  science  for 
bad  science.  Such  senile  efforts  to  pen- 


etrate, ere  yet  life  is  quite  over,  the 
mystery  of  religion,  recall,  and  indeed 
have  a  real  analogy  to,  that  final  effort 
of  the  emotionally  starved  to  grasp  a 
love  which  has  been  called  'old  maids' 
insanity';  and  just  as  in  this  aberration 
the  woman  who  has  all  her  life  put  love 
into  the  subconscious  background  of 
her  mind  is  overcome  by  an  eruption 
of  the  suppressed  emotions  and  driven 
to  create  baseless  legends  of  which  she 
is  herself  the  heroine,  so  the  scientific 
man  who  has  put  religion  into  the 
sphere  subconscious,  and  has  scarcely 
known  that  there  is  such  a  thing,  may 
become  in  the  end  the  victim  of  an 
imaginary  religion. 

In  our  own  time  we  may  have  wit- 
nessed attempts  of  the  scientific  mind 
to  become  religious,  which,  without 
amounting  to  mental  aberration,  are 
yet  highly  instructive.  It  would  be  a 
double-edged  compliment,  in  this  con- 
nection, to  compare  Sir  Oliver  Lodge 
with  Sir  Isaac  Newton.  But  after  de- 
voting himself  for  many  years  to  pure- 
ly physical  research,  Lodge  also,  as  he 
has  confessed,  found  that  he  had  over- 
looked the  religious  side  of  life,  and 
therefore  set  himself  with  character- 
istic energy  to  the  task  —  the  stages 
of  which  are  described  in  a  long  series 
of  books  —  of  developing  this  atro- 
phied side  of  his  nature.  Unlike  New- 
ton, who  was  worried  about  the  future, 
Lodge  became  worried  about  the  past. 
Just  as  Newton  found  what  he  was 
contented  to  regard  as  religious  peace 
in  speculating  on  the  meaning  of  the 
books  of  Daniel  and  Revelation,  so 
Lodge  found  a  similar  satisfaction  in 
speculations  concerning  the  origin  of 
the  soul,  and  in  hunting  out  tags  from 
the  poets  to  support  his  speculations. 
So  fascinating  was  this  occupation  that 
it  seemed  to  him  to  constitute  a  great 
'message'  to  the  world.  'My  message 
is  that  there  is  some  great  truth  in  the 
idea  of  preexistence,  not  an  obvious 


774 


SCIENCE  AND  MYSTICISM 


truth,  nor  one  easy  to  formulate,  —  a 
truth  difficult  to  express,  —  not  to  be 
identified  with  the  guesses  of  reincar- 
nation and  transmigration,  which  may 
be  fanciful.  We  may  not  have  been 
individuals  before,  but  we  are  chips  or 
fragments  of  a  great  mass  of  mind,  of 
spirit,  and  of  life  —  drops,  as  it  were, 
taken  out  of  a  germinal  reservoir  of 
life,  and  incubated  until  incarnate  in  a 
material  body.' 1 

The  genuine  mystic  would  smile  if 
asked  to  accept  as  a  divine  message 
these  phraseological  gropings  in  the 
darkness,  with  their  culmination  in  the 
gospel  of  *  incubated  drops.'  They  cer- 
tainly represent  an  attempt  to  get  at 
a  real  fact.  But  the  mystic  is  not  trou- 
bled by  speculations  about  the  origin 
of  the  individual,  or  theories  of  preex- 
istence.  It  is  abundantly  evident  that 
when  the  hypertrophied  man  of  science 
seeks  to  cultivate  his  atrophied  relig- 
ious instincts  it  is  with  the  utmost  diffi- 
culty that  he  escapes  from  science.  His 
conversion  to  religion  merely  means, 
for  the  most  part,  that  he  has  ex- 
changed sound  science  for  pseudo-sci- 
ence. 

Similarly,  when  the  man  with  hyper- 
trophied religious  instincts  seeks  to  cul- 
tivate his  atrophied  scientific  instincts, 
the  results  are  scarcely  satisfactory. 
Here,  indeed,  we  are  concerned  with 
a  phenomenon  that  is  rarer  than  the 
reverse  process.  The  reason  may  not 
be  far  to  seek.  The  instinct  of  reli- 
gion develops  earlier  in  the  history  of 
a  race  than  the  instinct  of  science;  it 
is  doubtless  more  fundamental.  The 
man  who  has  found  the  massive  satis- 
faction of  his  religious  cravings  is  sel- 
dom at  any  stage  conscious  of  scien- 
tific cravings;  he  is  apt  to  feel  that  he 
already  possesses  the  supreme  know- 
ledge. The  religious  doubters  who 
vaguely  feel  that  their  faith  is  at  va- 
riance with  science  are  merely  the 

1  Sir  Oliver  Lodge,  Reason  and  Belief,  p.  19. 


creatures  of  creeds,  the  product  of 
churches;  they  are  not  the  genuine 
mystics.  The  genuine  mystics  who 
have  exercised  their  scientific  instincts 
have  generally  found  scope  for  such 
exercise  within  an  enlarged  theological 
scheme  which  they  regarded  as  part  of 
their  religion.  So  it  was  that  St.  Augus- 
tine found  scope  for  his  full  and  vivid, 
if  capricious,  intellectual  impulses;  so 
also  Aquinas,  in  whom  there  was 
doubtless  less  of  the  mystic  and  more 
of  the  scientist,  found  scope  for  the 
rational  and  orderly  development  of  a 
keen  intelligence  which  has  made  him 
an  authority,  and  even  a  pioneer,  for 
many  who  are  absolutely  indifferent  to 
his  theology. 

Again,  we  see  that  to  understand 
the  real  relations  between  science  and 
mysticism,  we  must  return  to  ages 
when,  on  neither  side,  had  any  ac- 
cumulated mass  of  dead  traditions 
effected  an  artificial  divorce  between 
two  great  natural  instincts.  It  has 
already  been  pointed  out  that  if  we  go 
outside  civilization,  the  divorce  is  not 
found;  the  savage  mystic  is  also  the 
savage  man  of  science,  the  priest  and 
the  doctor  are  one.  It  is  so  also  for 
the  most  part  in  barbarism,  among 
the  ancient  Hebrews,  for  instance,  and 
not  only  among  their  priests  but  even 
among  their  prophets.  It  appears  that 
the  most  common  Hebrew  word  for 
what  we  term  *  prophet'  signified  'one 
who  bursts  forth/  presumably  into  the 
utterance  of  spiritual  verities,  and  the 
less  usual  words  signify  'seer.'  That  is 
to  say,  the  prophet  was  primarily  a 
man  of  religion,  secondarily  a  man  of 
science.  And  that  predictive  element 
in  the  prophet's  function,  which  to  per- 
sons lacking  in  religious  instinct  seems 
the  whole  of  his  function,  has  no  rela- 
tionship at  all  to  religion;  it  is  a  func- 
tion of  science.  It  is  an  insight  into 
cause  and  effect,  a  conception  of  se- 
quences based  on  extended  observa- 


SCIENCE  AND  MYSTICISM 


775 


tion,  and  enabling  the  'prophet'  to 
assert  that  certain  lines  of  action  will 
probably  lead  to  the  degeneration  of 
a  stock,  or  to  the  decay  of  a  nation. 
It  is  a  sort  of  applied  history.  'Pro- 
phecy' has  no  more  to  do  with  reli- 
gion than  have  the  forecasts  of  the 
Meteorological  Bureau,  which  also  are 
a  kind  of  applied  science  in  earlier  ages 
associated  with  religion. 

If,  keeping  within  the  sphere  of  civil- 
ization, we  go  back  as  far  as  we  can,  the 
conclusion  we  reach  is  not  greatly  dif- 
ferent. The  earliest  of  the  great  mys- 
tics in  historical  times  is  Lao-tze.  He 
lived  six  hundred  years  earlier  than 
Jesus,  a  hundred  years  earlier  than 
Sakya-Muni,  and  he  was  more  quint- 
essentially  a  mystic  than  either.  He 
was,  moreover,  incomparably  nearer 
than  either  to  the  point  of  view  of 
science.  Even  his  occupation  in  life 
was,  in  relation  to  his  age  and  land, 
such  as  we  may  regard  as  of  a  typically 
scientific  character:  he  was,  if  we  may 
trust  uncertain  tradition,  keeper  of  the 
archives.  In  the  substance  of  his  work 
this  harmony  of  religion  and  science 
is  throughout  unmistakable;  the  very 
word  Tao,  which  to  Lao-tze  is  the 
symbol  of  all  that  to  which  religion 
may  mystically  unite  us,  is  susceptible 
of  being  translated  Reason,  although 
that  word  is  quite  inadequate  to  its 
meaning.  There  are  no  theological  or 
metaphysical  speculations  here  con- 
cerning God  (the  very  word  only  oc- 
curs once  and  may  be  a  later  interpo- 
lation), the  soul,  or  immortality.  The 
delicate  and  profound  art  of  Lao-tze 
largely  lies  in  the  skill  with  which  he 
expresses  spiritual  verities  in  the  form 
of  natural  truths.  His  affirmations  not 
only  go  to  the  core  of  religion,  but  they 
express  the  essential  methods  of  science. 
This  man  has  the  mystic's  heart,  but 
he  has  also  the  physicist's  touch  and  the 
biologist's  eye.  He  moves  in  a  sphere 
in  which  religion  and  science  are  one. 


If  we  pass  to  more  modern  times 
and  to  the  little  European  corner  of 
the  world,  around  the  Mediterranean 
shores,  which  is  the  cradle  of  our  lat- 
ter-day civilization,  again  and  again  we 
find  traces  of  this  fundamental  unity 
of  mysticism  and  science.  It  may  well 
be  that  we  never  again  find  it  in  quite 
so  pure  a  form  as  in  Lao-tze,  quite  so 
free  from  all  admixture  alike  of  bad 
religion  and  bad  science.  The  exuber- 
ant, unbalanced  activity  of  our  race, 
the  restless  acquisitiveness,  —  already 
manifested  in  the  sphere  of  ideas  and 
traditions  before  it  led  to  the  produc- 
tion of  millionaires,  —  soon  became  an 
ever-growing  impediment  to  such  unity 
of  spiritual  impulses.  Among  the  sup- 
ple and  versatile  Greeks,  indeed,  exu- 
berance and  recklessness  seem  always 
to  have  stood  in  the  way  of  approach 
to  the  essential  terms  of  this  problem. 
We  see  far  more  of  it  in  Lucretius  than 
we  can  divine  in  Epicurus.  It  was  only 
when  the  Greeks  began  to  absorb  ori- 
ental influences  that  they  became  gen- 
uine mystics,  and  as  they  approached 
mysticism  they  left  science  behind. 

If  Lucretius  is  the  first  of  moderns 
in  this  identification  of  mysticism  and 
science,  he  has  been  followed  by  many, 
even  though  it  may  be,  one  some- 
times thinks,  with  an  ever  increasing 
difficulty,  a  drooping  of  the  wings  of 
mystical  aspiration,  a  limping  of  the 
feet  of  scientific  progress.  Leonardo 
and  Giordano  Bruno  and  Spinoza  and 
Goethe,  each  with  a  little  imperfection 
on  one  side  or  the  other,  if  not  on 
both  sides,  have  moved  in  a  sphere  in 
which  the  impulses  of  religion  are  felt 
to  spring  from  the  same  centre  as  the 
impulses  of  science.  If  we  cannot  alto- 
gether include  such  men  as  Sweden- 
borg  and  Faraday  in  the  same  group,  it 
is  because  we  cannot  feel  that  in  them 
the  two  impulses,  however  highly  de- 
veloped, really  spring  from  the  same 
centre  or  really  make  a  true  harmony. 


776 


SCIENCE  AND   MYSTICISM 


We  suspect  that  these  men  and  their 
like  kept  their  mysticism  in  a  science- 
proof  compartment  of  their  minds,  and 
their  science  in  a  mysticism-proof  com- 
partment; we  tremble  for  the  explosive 
result,  should  the  wall  of  partition  ever 
be  broken  down. 

The  difficulty,  we  see  again,  has 
been  that  on  each  hand  there  has  been 
a  growth  of  non-essential  traditions 
around  the  pure  and  vital  impulse,  and 
the  obvious  disharmony  of  these  two 
sets  of  accretions  conceals  the  under- 
lying harmony  of  the  impulses  them- 
selves. The  possibility  of  reaching  the 
natural  harmony  is  thus  not  necessar- 
ily by  virtue  of  any  rare  degree  of  in- 
tellectual attainment,  nor  by  any  rare 
gift  of  inborn  spiritual  temperament, 
—  though  either  of  these  may  in  some 
cases  be  operative,  —  but  rather  in  the 
happy  chance  that  the  burden  of  tra- 
dition on  each  side  has  fallen,  and  that 
the  mystical  impulse  is  free  to  play 
without  a  dead  metaphysical  theology, 
the  scientific  impulse  without  a  dead 
metaphysical  formalism.  It  is  a  happy 
chance  that  may  befall  the  simple  more 
easily  than  the  wise  and  learned. 


ii 

The  foregoing  considerations  have 
perhaps  cleared  the  way  to  a  realiza- 
tion of  the  fact  that  when  we  'look 
broadly  at  the  matter,  when  we  clear 
away  all  the  accumulated  superstitions, 
the  unreasoned  prepossessions  on  either 
side,  and  so  reach  firm  ground,  not  only 
is  there  no  opposition  between  science 
and  mysticism,  but  in  their  essence, 
and  at  the  outset,  they  are  essentially 
related.  The  seeming  divorce  between 
them  is  due  to  a  false  and  unbalanced 
development  on  either  side,  if  not  on 
both  sides. 

Yet  all  such  considerations  as  these 
cannot  suffice  to  realize  for  us  this 
unity  of  apparent  opposites.  There  is, 


indeed,  it  has  often  seemed  to  me,  a 
certain  futility  in  all  discussion  of  the 
relative  claims  of  science  and  religion. 
This  is  a  matter  which,  in  the  last  re- 
sort, lies  beyond  the  sphere  of  argu- 
ment. It  not  only  depends  on  a  man's 
entire  psychic  equipment,  brought  with 
him  at  birth  and  never  to  be  funda- 
mentally changed,  but  it  is  the  out- 
come of  his  own  vital  experience  during 
life.  It  cannot  be  profitably  discussed 
because  it  is  experiential. 

It  seems  to  me,  therefore,  that,  hav- 
ing gone  so  far,  and  stated  what  I  con- 
sider to  be  the  relations  of  mysticism 
and  science  as  revealed  in  human  his- 
tory, I  am  bound  to  go  further  and  to 
state  what  are  my  personal  grounds  for 
believing  that  the  harmonious  satis- 
faction alike  of  the  religious  impulse 
and  of  the  scientific  impulse  may  be 
attained  to-day  by  an  ordinarily  bal- 
anced person  in  whom  both  impulses 
crave  for  satisfaction.  There  is  indeed 
a  serious  difficulty.  To  set  forth  a  per- 
sonal religious  experience  for  the  first 
time  requires  considerable  resolution, 
and  not  least  to  one  who  is  inclined  to 
suspect  that  the  experiences  usually 
so  set  forth  can  be  of  no  profound  or 
significant  nature;  that  if  the  under- 
lying motives  of  a  man's  life  can  be 
brought  to  the  surface  and  put  into 
words  their  vital  motive  power  is  gone. 
Even  the  fact  that  more  than  thirty 
years  have  passed  since  the  experience 
took  place,  scarcely  suffices  to  make  the 
confession  of  it  easy.  But  I  recall  to 
mind  that  the  first  original  book  I  ever 
planned  (and  in  fact  partly  wrote)  was 
a  book,  impersonal  though  suggested 
by  personal  experience,  on  the  founda- 
tions of  religion.1  I  put  it  aside,  saying 

1  In  connection  with  this  scheme,  it  may  be 
interesting  to  note,  I  prepared  in  1879  a  question- 
naire on  'conversion,'  on  the  lines  of  the  investi- 
gations which  some  years  later  began  to  be  so 
fruitfully  carried  out  by  the  psychologists  of 
religion  in  America.  —  THE  AUTHOR. 


SCIENCE  AND  MYSTICISM 


777 


to  myself  that  I  would  complete  it  in 
old  age,  because  it  seemed  to  me  that 
the  problem  of  religion  would  always 
be  fresh,  while  there  were  other  prob- 
lems more  pressingly  in  need  of  speedy 
investigation.  Now,  it  may  be,  I  begin 
to  feel  that  the  time  has  come  to  carry 
that  early  project  a  stage  further. 

Like  many  of  the  generation  to  which 
I  belonged,  I  was  brought  up  far  from 
the  Sunday-school  atmosphere  of  con- 
ventional religiosity.  I  received  little 
religious  instruction  outside  the  home, 
but  there  I  was  made  to  feel,  from  my  • 
earliest  years,  that  religion  was  a  very 
vital  and  personal  matter  with  which 
the  world  and  the  fashion  of  it  had  no- 
thing to  do.  To  that  teaching,  while 
still  a  child,  I  responded  in  a  whole- 
hearted way.  Necessarily,  the  exer- 
cises of  this  early  impulse  followed  the 
paths  prescribed  for  it  by  my  environ- 
ment. I  accepted  the  creed  set  before 
me;  I  privately  studied  the  New  Tes- 
tament for  my  own  satisfaction;  I  hon- 
estly endeavored,  strictly  in  private, 
to  mould  my  actions  and  impulses 
on  what  seemed  to  be  Christian  lines. 
There  was  no  obtrusive  outward  evi- 
dence of  this;  outside  the  home,  more- 
over, I  moved  in  a  world  which  might 
be  indifferent  but  was  not  actively  hos- 
tile to  my  inner  aspirations,  and  if  the 
need  for  any  external  affirmation  had 
become  absolutely  inevitable  I  should, 
I  am  fairly  certain,  have  invoked  other 
than  religious  grounds  for  my  protest. 
Religion,  as  I  instinctively  felt  then, 
and  as  I  consciously  believe  now,  is  a 
private  matter,  as  love  is.  This  was  my 
mental  state  at  the  age  of  twelve. 

Then  came  the  period  of  emotional 
and  intellectual  expansion,  when  the 
scientific  and  critical  instincts  began 
to  germinate.  These  were  completely 
spontaneous,  and  not  stimulated  by 
any  influences  of  the  environment.  To 
inquire,  to  question,  to  investigate  the 
qualities  of  the  things  around  us  and  to 


search  out  their  causes,  is  surely  as  na- 
tive an  impulse  as  the  religious  impulse 
would  be  found  to  be  if  only  we  would 
refrain  from  exciting  it  artificially.  In 
the  first  place,  this  scientific  impulse 
was  not  greatly  concerned  with  the 
traditional  body  of  beliefs  which  were 
then  inextricably  entwined  in  my  mind 
with  the  exercise  of  the  religious  in- 
stinct. In  so  far  indeed  as  it  touched 
them  it  took  up  their  defense.  Thus  I 
read  Kenan's  Life  of  Jesus,  and  the 
facile  sentiment  of  this  book,  the  atti- 
tude of  artistic  reconstruction,  aroused 
a  criticism  which  led  me  to  ignore  any 
underlying  sounder  qualities.  Yet,  all 
the  time,  the  inquiring  and  critical 
impulse  was  a  slowly  permeating  and 
invading  influence,  and  its  application 
to  religion  was,  now  and  again,  stimu- 
lated by  books,  although  such  applica- 
tion was  in  no  slightest  degree  favor- 
ed by  the  social  environment.  When, 
too,  I  came  to  read  Swinburne's  Songs 
before  Sunrise,  —  although  the  book 
made  no  very  personal  appeal  to  me,  — 
I  realized  that  it  was  possible  to  present 
in  an  attractively  modern,  emotional 
light,  religious  beliefs  which  were  in- 
compatible with  Christianity,  and  even 
actively  hostile  to  its  creed. 

The  process  of  disintegration  took 
place  in  slow  stages  that  were  not  per- 
ceived until  the  process  was  complete. 
Then  at  last  I  realized  that  I  no  longer 
possessed  any  religious  faith.  All  the 
Christian  dogmas  I  had  been  brought 
up  to  accept  unquestioned  had  slipped 
away,  and  they  had  dragged  with  them 
what  I  had  experienced  of  religion,  for 
I  could  not  then  so  far  analyze  all  that 
is  roughly  lumped  together  as  'reli- 
gion' as  to  disentangle  the  essential 
from  the  accidental.  Such  analysis,  to 
be  effectively  convincing,  demanded 
personal  experiences  I  was  not  pos- 
sessed of. 

I  was  now  seventeen  years  of  age. 
The  loss  of  religious  faith  had  produced 


778 


SCIENCE  AND  MYSTICISM 


no  change  in  conduct,  save  that  reli- 
gious observances,  which  had  never 
been  ostentatiously  performed,  were 
dropped,  so  far  as  they  might  be  with- 
out hurting  the  feelings  of  others.  The 
revolution  was  so  gradual  and  so 
natural  that  even  inwardly  the  shock 
was  not  great,  while  various  activities, 
the  growth  of  mental  aptitudes,  suf- 
ficiently served  to  occupy  the  mind.  It 
was  only  during  periods  of  depression 
that  the  absence  of  faith  as  a  satisfac- 
tion of  the  religious  impulse  became  at 
all  acutely  felt.  Possibly  it  might  have 
been  felt  less  acutely  if  I  could  have 
realized  that  there  was  even  a  real 
benefit  in  the  cutting  down  and  clear- 
ing away  of  traditional  and  non-vital 
beliefs.  Not  only  was  it  a  wholesome 
and  strenuous  effort  to  obey  at  all  costs 
the  call  of  what  was  felt  as  *  truth,' 
having  in  it,  therefore,  a  spirit  of  reli- 
gion even  though  directed  against 
religion,  but  it  was  evidently  favor- 
able to  the  training  of  intelligence.  The 
man  who  has  never  wrestled  with,  and 
overcome,  his  early  faith,  the  faith 
that  he  was  brought  up  with  and  that 
yet  is  not  his  own,  has  missed  not  only 
a  moral  but  an  intellectual  discipline. 
The  absence  of  that  discipline  may 
mark  a  man  for  life  and  render  all  his 
work  in  the  world  ineffective.  He  has 
missed  a  training  in  criticism,  in  analy- 
sis, in  open-mindedness,  in  the  resolute- 
ly impersonal  treatment  of  personal 
problems,  which  no  other  training  can 
compensate.  He  is,  for  the  most  part, 
condemned  to  live  in  a  mental  jungle 
where  his  arm  will  soon  be  too  feeble 
to  clear  away  the  growths  that  enclose 
him  and  his  eyes  too  weak  to  find  the 
light. 

While,  however,  I  had  adopted  with- 
out knowing  it,  the  best  course  to  steel 
the  power  of  thinking  and  to  render 
possible  a  patient,  humble,  self-for- 
getful attitude  toward  Nature,  there 
were  times  when  I  became  painfully, 


almost  despairingly,  conscious  of  the 
unsatisfied  cravings  of  the  religious 
impulse.  These  moods  tended  to  be- 
come more  rather  than  less  acute.  They 
were  emphasized  even  by  the  books  I 
read,  which  argued  that  religion,  in  the 
only  sense  in  which  I  understood  reli- 
gion, was  unnecessary  and  that  science, 
whether  or  not  formulated  into  a 
creed,  furnished  all  that  we  need  to 
ask  in  this  direction.  I  well  remem- 
ber the  painful  feelings  with  which  I 
read  at  this  time  D.  F.  Strauss's  The 
Old  Faith  and  the  New.  It  is  a  scienti- 
fic creed  set  down  in  old  age,  with  much 
comfortable  complacency,  by  a  man 
who  found  considerable  satisfaction 
in  the  evening  of  life  in  the  enjoyment 
of  Haydn's  quartettes  and  Munich 
brown  beer.  They  are  both  excellent 
things,  as  I  am  now  willing  to  grant, 
but  they  are  a  sorry  source  of  inspira- 
tion when  one  is  seventeen  and  con- 
sumed by  a  thirst  for  impossibly  re- 
mote ideals.  Moreover,  the  philosophic 
horizon  of  this  man  was  as  limited  and 
as  prosaic  as  the  aesthetic  atmosphere 
in  which  he  lived.  I  had  to  acknow- 
ledge to  myself  that  the  scientific 
principles  of  the  universe,  as  Strauss 
laid  them  down,  presented,  so  far  as  I 
knew,  the  utmost  scope  in  which  the 
human  spirit  could  move.  But  what  a 
poor  scope! 

I  had  the  feeling  that  the  universe 
was  a  sort  of  factory  filled  by  an 
inextricable  web  of  wheels  and  looms 
and  flying  shuttles,  in  a  deafening  din. 
That,  it  seemed,  was  the  world  as  the 
most  competent  scientific  authorities 
declared  it  to  be  made.  It  was  a  world 
I  was  prepared  to  accept,  and  yet  a 
world  in  which,  I  felt,  I  could  only 
wander  restlessly,  an  ignorant  and 
homeless  child.  Sometimes,  no  doubt, 
there  were  other  visions  of  the  uni- 
verse a  little  less  disheartening,  such 
as  that  presented  by  Herbert  Spencer's 
First  Principles,  but  the  dominant 


SCIENCE  AND  MYSTICISM 


feeling  always  was  that  while  the  scien- 
tific outlook,  the  outlook  of  Darwin 
and  Huxley,  commended  itself  to  me 
as  presenting  a  sound  view  of  the 
world,  on  the  emotional  side  I  was  a 
stranger  to  that  world,  if  indeed  I 
would  not,  with  Omar,  'shatter  it  to 
bits/ 

At  the  same  time,  it  must  be  noted, 
there  was  no  fault  to  find  with  the 
general  trend  of  my  life  and  activities. 
I  was  fully  occupied,  with  daily  duties 
as  well  as  with  the  actively  interested 
contemplation  of  an  ever  enlarging  in- 
tellectual horizon.  This  was  very  not- 
ably the  case  at  the  age  of  nineteen, 
three  years  after  all  vestiges  of  relig- 
ious faith  had  disappeared  from  the 
psychic  surface. 

I  was  still  interested  in  religious  and 
philosophic  questions,  and  it  so  chanced 
that  at  this  time  I  reread  the  Life  in 
Nature  of  James  Hinton,  who  had  al- 
ready attracted  my  attention  as  a  gen- 
uine man  of  science  with  yet  a  very 
original  and  personal  grasp  of  religion. 
I  had  read  the  book  six  months  before 
and  it  had  not  greatly  impressed  me. 
Now,  I  no  longer  know  why,  I  read  it 
again,  and  the  effect  was  very  different. 
Evidently  by  this  time  my  mind  had 
reached  a  stage  of  saturated  solution 
which  needed,  by  the  shock  of  the 
right  contact,  to  recrystallize  in  forms 
that  were  a  revelation  to  me.  Here  evi- 
dently the  right  contact  was  applied. 
Hinton  in  this  book  showed  himself  a 
scientific  biologist  who  carried  the  me- 
chanistic explanations  of  life  even  fur- 
ther than  was  then  usual.  But  he  was 
a  man  of  a  highly  passionate  type  of 
intellect,  and  what  might  otherwise  be 
formal  and  abstract  was  for  him  soaked 
in  emotion.  Thus,  while  he  saw  the 
world  as  an  orderly  mechanism,  he  was 
not  content,  like  Strauss,  to  stop  there 
and  see  nothing  else.  As  he  viewed  it, 
the  mechanism  was  not  the  mechanism 
of  a  factory,  it  was  vital,  with  all  the 


glow  and  warmth  and  beauty  of  life;  it 
was,  therefore,  something  which  not 
only  the  intellect  might  accept,  but  the 
heart  might  cling  to.  The  bearing  of 
this  conception  on  my  state  of  mind  is 
obvious.  It  acted  with  the  swiftness  of 
an  electric  contact;  the  dull  aching 
tension  was  removed;  the  two  opposing 
psychic  tendencies  were  fused  in  deli- 
cious harmony,  and  my  whole  attitude 
toward  the  universe  was  changed.  It 
was  no  longer  an  attitude  of  hostility 
and  dread,  but  of  confidence  and  love. 
My  self  was  one  with  the  not-self; 
my  will,  one  with  the  universal  will. 
I  seemed  to  walk  in  light;  my  feet 
scarcely  touched  the  ground;  I  had 
entered  a  new  world. 

The  effect  of  that  swift  revolution 
was  permanent.  At  first  there  was  a 
moment  or  two  of  wavering,  and  the 
primary  exaltation  soon  subsided  into 
an  attitude  of  calm  serenity  toward  all 
those  questions  that  had  once  seemed 
so  torturing.  In  regard  to  all  these 
matters  I  had  become  permanently 
satisfied  and  at  rest,  yet  absolutely  un- 
fettered and  free.  I  was  not  troubled 
about  the  origin  of  the  soul,  or  about 
the  destiny  of  the  soul;  I  was  entirely 
prepared  to  accept  any  analysis  of  the 
soul  which  might  commend  itself  as 
reasonable.  Neither  was  I  troubled 
about  the  existence  of  any  superior  be- 
ing or  beings,  and  I  was  ready  to  see 
that  all  the  words  and  forms  by  which 
men  try  to  picture  to  themselves  spir- 
itual realities  are  mere  metaphors  and 
images  of  an  inward  experience.  There 
was  not  a  single  clause  in  my  religious 
creed,  because  I  held  no  creed.  I  had 
found  that  all  dogmas  were  —  not  as  I 
had  once  imagined,  true,  not  as  I  had 
afterwards  supposed,  false  —  but  the 
mere  empty  shadows  of  intimate  per- 
sonal experiences.  I  had  become  indif- 
ferent to  shadows  for  I  held  the  sub- 
stance. I  had  sacrificed  what  I  counted 
dearest  at  the  call  of  what  seemed  to  be 


780 


SCIENCE  AND  MYSTICISM 


Truth,  and  now  I  was  repaid  a  thou- 
sand-fold. Henceforth  I  could  face  life 
with  confidence  and  joy,  for  my  heart 
was  at  one  with  the  world,  and  what- 
ever might  prove  to  be  in  harmony 
with  the  world  could  not  be  out  of 
harmony  with  me. 

Yet,  as  the  acute  reader  cannot  fail 
to  observe,  nothing  whatever  had  hap- 
pened, and  I  had  not  gained  one  single 
definite  belief  that  could  be  expressed 
in  a  scientific  formula  or  hardened  into 
a  religious  creed.  That,  indeed,  is  the 
essence  of  such  a  process.  A  'conver- 
sion' is  not,  as  is  often  assumed,  a 
turning  toward  a  belief.  More  strictly, 
it  is  a  turning  round,  a  revolution;  it 
has  no  primary  reference  to  any  ex- 
ternal object.  To  put  the  matter  a  lit- 
tle more  precisely,  the  change  is  fun- 
damentally a  readjustment  of  psychic 
elements  to  each  other,  enabling  the 
whole  machine  to  work  harmoniously. 
There  is  no  necessary  introduction  of 
new  ideas,  and  there  is  much  more  like- 
ly to  be  a  casting  out  of  dead  ideas 
which  have  clogged  the  vital  process. 
The  soul  had  not  been  in  harmony  with 
itself;  now  it  is  revolving  truly  on  its 
own  axis,  and  in  doing  so  it  simultan- 
eously finds  its  true  orbit  in  the  cosmic 
system.  In  becoming  one  with  itself 
it  becomes  one  with  the  universe.1 

Thus  may  be  explained  what  may 
seem  to  some  the  curious  fact  that  I 
never  for  a  moment  thought  of  accept- 
ing as  a  gospel  the  book  which  had 
brought  me  a  stimulus  of  such  inesti- 

1  The  simple  and  essential  outlines  of  'con- 
version' have  sometimes  been  obscured  to  the 
psychologists  of  religion  because  they  have 
chiefly  studied  it  within  the  churches  among 
people  whose  prepossessions  and  superstitions 
have  rendered  it  a  highly  complex  process,  and 
mixed  it  up  with  questions  of  right  and  wrong 
living  which,  important  as  they  are,  properly 
form  no  part  of  religion.  The  man  who  waits  to 
lead  a  decent  life  until  he  has  'saved  his  soul' 
is  not  likely  to  possess  a  soul  that  is  worth 
saving.  Long  ago  Edith  Simcox  (in  a  passage 


mable  value.  The  person  in  whom  *  con- 
version '  takes  place  is  usually  told  that 
the  process  is  connected  in  some  magi- 
cal manner  with  a  supernatural  influ- 
ence of  some  kind,  a  book,  a  creed,  a 
church,  or  what  not.  I  had  read  this 
book  before,  and  it  had  left  me  un- 
moved; I  knew  that  the  change  had  its 
source  in  me,  and  not  in  the  book.  I 
never  looked  into  the  book  again;  I 
cannot  tell  when  or  how  my  copy  of  it 
disappeared;  for  all  that  I  know,  hav- 
ing accomplished  its  mission,  it  was 
drawn  up  again  to  Heaven  in  a  sheet. 
As  regards  James  Hinton,  I  was  inter- 
ested in  him  before  the  date  of  the  epi- 
sode here  narrated;  I  am  interested  in 
him  still. 

It  may  further  be  noted  that  this 
process  of  'conversion'  cannot  be  re- 
garded as  the  outcome  of  despair.  The 
unfortunate  individual,  we  sometimes 
imagine,  who  is  bereft  of  religious  faith, 
sinks  deeper  and  deeper  into  despon- 
dency, until  finally  he  unconsciously 
seeks  relief  from  his  woes  by  plunging 
into  an  abyss  of  emotions,  thereby 
committing  intellectual  suicide.  On 
the  contrary,  the  period  in  which  this 
event  occurred  was  far  from  a  period  of 
dejection,  either  mental  or  physical.  I 
was  fully  occupied;  I  lived  a  healthy, 
open-air  life,  in  a  fine  climate,  amid 
beautiful  scenery;  I  was  reveling  in  new 
studies  and  the  growing  consciousness 
of  new  powers.  Instead  of  being  the 
ultimate  stage  in  a  process  of  descent, 
my  psychic  revolution  might  much 

of  her  Natural  Law  which  chanced  to  strike  my 
attention  very  soon  after  the  episode  above 
narrated)  well  described  'conversion'  as  a 
'spiritual  revolution,'  not  based  on  any  single 
rational  consideration  but  due  to  the  'cumulative 
evidence  of  cognate  impressions'  resulting  at  a 
particular  moment,  not  in  a  change  in  belief, 
but  in  a  total  rearrangement  and  recoloring  of 
beliefs  and  impressions,  with  the  supreme  result 
that  the  order  of  the  universe  is  apprehended  no 
longer  as  hostile  but  as  friendly.  This  is  the  fun- 
damental fact  of  'conversion.'  —  THE  AUTHOR. 


SCIENCE  AND   MYSTICISM 


781 


more  fittingly  be  regarded  as  the  climax 
of  an  ascending  movement. 

Moreover,  —  and  this  is  a  point  on 
which  I  would  insist,  —  nothing  had 
here  taken  place  which  by  any  effort 
of  imagination  could  be  described  as 
intellectual  suicide.  On  the  intellec- 
tual side  no  change  had  taken  place. 
No  new  creed  or  dogma  had  been 
adopted;  it  might  rather  be  said  that, 
on  the  contrary,  some  prepossessions, 
hitherto  unconscious,  had  been  realized 
and  cast  out.  The  operations  of  rea- 
son, so  far  from  being  fettered,  could 
be  effected  with  greater  freedom  and 
on  a  larger  scale. 

The  religious  process,  we  may  ob- 
serve again,  had  throughout  directly 
contributed  to  strengthen  the  scientific 
attitude.  The  mere  fact  that  one  is 
impelled  by  the  sincerity  of  one's  relig- 
ious faith  to  question,  to  analyze,  and 
finally  to  destroy  one's  religious  creed, 
is  itself  an  incomparable  training  for 
the  intelligence.  In  this  task  reason  is 
submitted  to  the  hardest  tests;  it  has 
every  temptation  to  allow  itself  to  be 
lulled  into  sleepy  repose  or  cajoled  into 
specious  reconciliations.  If  it  is  true 
to  itself  here  it  is  steeled  for  every  other 
task  in  the  world,  for  no  other  task  can 
ever  demand  so  complete  a  self-sacri- 
fice at  the  call  of  Truth.  Indeed  the 
final  restoration  of  the  religious  impulse 
on  a  higher  plane  may  itself  be  said 
to  reinforce  the  scientific  impulse,  for 
it  removes  that  sense  of  psychic  dis- 
harmony which  is  a  subconscious  fet- 
ter on  the  rational  activity.  The  new 
inward  harmony,  proceeding  from  a 
psychic  centre  that  is  at  one  alike  with 
itself  and  with  the  not-self,  imparts 
confidence  to  every  operation  of  the 
intellect.  All  the  metaphysical  images 
of  faith  in  the  unseen  —  too  familiar 
in  the  mystical  experiences  of  men  of 
all  religions  to  need  specification  —  are 
now  on  the  side  of  science.  For  he  who 
is  thus  held  in  his  path  can  pursue  that 


path  with  serenity  and  trust,  however 
daring  its  course  may  sometimes  seem. 
It  appears  to  me,  therefore,  on  the 
basis  of  personal  experience,  that  the 
process  thus  outlined  is  a  natural  pro- 
cess. The  harmony  of  the  religious 
impulse  with  the  scientific  impulse  is 
not  merely  a  conclusion  to  be  deduced 
from  the  history  of  the  past.  It  is  a 
living  fact  to-day.  However  obscured 
it  may  be  in  many  cases,  the  process 
lies  in  human  nature  and  is  still  open  to 
all  to  experience. 


in 

If  the  development  of  the  religious 
instinct  and  the  development  of  the 
scientific  instinct  are  alike  natural, 
and  if  the  possibility  of  the  harmony  of 
the  two  instincts  is  a  verifiable  fact  of 
experience,  how  is  it,  one  may  ask,  that 
there  has  ever  been  any  dispute  on  the 
matter?  Why  has  not  this  natural  ex- 
perience been  the  experience  of  all? 

Various  considerations  may  help  to 
make  clear  to  us  how  it  has  happened 
that  a  process  which  might  reasonably 
be  supposed  to  be  intimate  and  sacred 
should  have  become  so  obscured  and  so 
deformed  that  it  has  been  fiercely  ban- 
died about  by  opposing  factions.  At 
the  outset,  as  we  have  seen,  among 
comparatively  primitive  peoples,  it 
really  is  a  simple  and  natural  process 
carried  out  harmoniously  with  no  sense 
of  conflict.  A  man,  it  would  seem,  was 
not  then  overburdened  by  the  still 
unwritten  traditions  of  the  race.  He 
was  comparatively  free  to  exercise  his 
own  impulses  unfettered  by  the  chains 
forged  out  of  the  dead  impulses  of  those 
who  had  gone  before  him. 

It  is  the  same  still  among  unculti- 
vated persons  of  our  own  race  in  civil- 
ization. I  well  remember  how  once  dur- 
ing a  long  ride  through  the  Australian 
bush  with  a  settler,  a  quiet  uncommun- 
icative man  with  whom  I  had  long  been 


782 


SCIENCE  AND  MYSTICISM 


acquainted,  he  suddenly  told  me  how 
at  times  he  would  ascend  to  the  top  of  a 
hill  and  become  lost  to  himself  and  to 
everything  as  he  stood  in  contempla- 
tion of  the  scene  around  him.  Those 
moments  of  ecstasy,  of  self-forgetful 
union  with  the  Divine  beauty  of  Na- 
ture, were  entirely  compatible  with 
the  rational  outlook  of  a  simple,  hard- 
working man  who,  at  such  moments, 
had  in  his  own  humble  way,  like  Moses, 
met  God  in  a  mountain.  There  can  be 
no  doubt  that  such  an  experience  is  not 
uncommon  among  simple  folk  unen- 
cumbered by  tradition,  even  when  of 
civilized  race. 

The  burden  of  written  traditions,  of 
formalized  conventions,  of  stereotyped 
castes,  has  too  often  proved  fatal  alike 
to  the  manifestations  of  the  religious 
impulse  and  of  the  scientific  impulse. 
It  is  unnecessary  to  point  out  how 
easily  this  happens  in  the  case  of  the 
religious  impulse.  It  is  only  too  famil- 
iar to  us  how,  when  the  impulse  of 
religion  first  germinates  in  the  young 
soul,  the  ghouls  of  the  Church  rush  out 
of  their  caverns,  seize  on  the  unhappy 
victim  of  the  divine  effluence  and  pro- 
ceed to  assure  him  that  his  rapture  is 
not  a  natural  manifestation  as  free  as 
the  sunlight  and  as  gracious  as  the 
unfolding  of  a  rose,  but  the  manifest 
sign  that  he  has  been  branded  by  a 
supernatural  force  and  fettered  for 
ever  to  a  dead  theological  creed.  Too 
often  he  is  thus  caught  by  the  bait  of 
his  own  rapture;  the  hook  is  firmly 
fixed  in  his  jaw  and  he  is  drawn  whither 
his  blind  guides  will;  his  wings  droop 
and  fall  away;  so  far  as  the  finer  issues 
of  life  are  concerned  he  is  done  for  and 
damned. 

But  the  process  is  not  so  very  dif- 
ferent on  the  scientific  side,  though  here 
it  is  more  subtly  concealed.  The  youth 
in  whom  the  natural  impulse  of  science 
arises  is  sternly  told  that  the  spon- 
taneous movement  of  his  intelligence 


toward  Nature  and  Truth  is  nothing, 
for  the  one  thing  needful  is  that  he 
shall  be  put  to  discipline,  and  trained 
in  the  scientific  traditions  of  the  ages. 
The  desirability  of  such  training  for  the 
effective  questioning  of  Nature  is  so 
clear  that  both  teacher  and  pupil  are 
apt  to  overlook  the  fact  that  it  in- 
volves much  that  is  not  science  at  all : 
all  sorts  of  dead  traditions,  unrealized 
fragments  of  ancient  metaphysical  sys- 
tems, prepossessions  and  limitations, 
conscious  or  unconscious,  the  obedience 
to  arbitrary  authorities.  So  that  the 
actual  outcome  may  be  that  the  finally 
accomplished  man  of  science  has  as 
little  of  the  scientific  impulse  as  the 
fully  fledged  religious  man  need  have 
of  the  religious  impulse;  he  becomes  the 
victim  of  another  kind  of  ecclesiastical 
sectarianism. 

There  is  one  special  piece  of  ancient 
metaphysics  which,  until  recently,  sci- 
entific and  religious  sects  have  alike 
combined  to  support:  the  conception 
of  'matter.'  This  conception  has  been 
of  primary  importance  in  distorting  the 
scientific  spirit  and  in  creating  an  arti- 
ficial opposition  between  science  and 
religion.  All  sorts  of  antique  metaphy- 
sical peculiarities  were  attributed  to 
'  matter,'  and  they  were  mostly  of  a  bad 
character;  all  the  good  qualities  were 
attributed  to  'spirit';  'matter*  played 
the  Devil's  part  to  the  more  divine 
'spirit.'  Thus  it  was  that  'materialis- 
tic* came  to  be  a  term  signifying  all 
that  is  most  heavy,  opaque,  depressing, 
soul-destroying  and  diabolical  in  the 
universe.  The  party  of  traditionalized 
religion  fostered  this  conception  and 
the  party  of  traditionalized  science  fre- 
quently adopted  it,  cheerily  proposing 
to  find  infinite  potentialities  in  this  de- 
spised metaphysical  substance. 

Yet  '  matter  '  -  -  as  psychologically 
minded  philosophers  at  last  began  to 
point  out  —  is  merely  a  substance  we 
have  ourselves  invented  to  account  for 


SCIENCE  AND  MYSTICISM 


783 


our  sensations.  We  see,  we  touch,  we 
hear,  we  smell,  and  by  a  brilliant  syn- 
thetic effort  of  intelligence  we  put 
together  all  these  sensations  and  pic- 
ture to  ourselves  'matter'  as  being  the 
source  of  them.  It  is  a  useful  working 
hypothesis;  it  is  nothing  more.  Science 
itself  is  slowly  purging  'matter'  of  its 
complicated  metaphysical  properties. 
That  'matter,'  the  nature  of  which  Dr. 
Johnson,  as  Bos  well  tells  us,  thought 
he  had  settled  by  '  striking  his  foot  with 
mighty  force  against  a  large  stone,'  is 
coming  to  be  looked  upon  as  merely 
an  electrical  emanation.  We  now  ac- 
cept even  that  transmutation  of  the 
elements  of  which  the  alchemists  once 
dreamed. 

It  is  true  that  gravitation  is  still 
a  mysterious  puzzle,  and  that  we  still 
think  of  'matter'  as  having  weight. 
But  so  cautious  a  physicist  as  Sir  Jo- 
seph Thomson  has  lately  only  felt  able 
to  say  that  weight  is  an  'apparently  in- 
variable property  of  matter.'  Evident- 
ly we  are  approaching  a  time  when 
'matter'  will  be  regarded  as  almost  as 
'ethereal'  as  'spirit.'  The  spontaneous 
affirmation  of  the  mystic  that  he  lives 
in  the  spiritual  world  here  and  now,  will 
then  be,  in  other  words,  merely  the 
same  affirmation  which  the  man  of 
science  has  more  laboriously  reached. 
The  man,  therefore,  who  is  terrified  by 
'materialism'  has  reached  the  final 
outpost  of  absurdity.  He  is  a  simple- 
minded  person  who  places  his  own  hand 
before  his  eyes  and  cries  out  in  horror, 
'The  Universe  has  disappeared! ' 

We  have  not  only  to  realize  how  our 
own  prepossessions  and  the  metaphy- 
sical figments  of  our  own  creation  have 
obscured  the  simple  realities  of  religion 
and  science  alike;  we  have  also  to  see 
that  our  timid  dread  lest  religion  should 
kill  our  science,  or  science  kill  our  relig- 
ion, is  equally  fatal  here.  He  who  would 
gain  his  life  must  be  willing  to  lose  it, 
and  it  is  by  being  honest  to  one's  self 


and  to  the  facts,  by  applying  courage- 
ously the  measuring-rod  of  Truth,  that 
in  the  end  salvation  is  found. 

Here,  indeed,  the  Pragmatist  smil- 
ingly comes  up  and  assures  us  that  by 
adopting  such  a  method  we  shall  there- 
by merely  put  ourselves  in  the  wrong 
and  endure  much  unnecessary  suffering. 
There  is  no  such  thing  as  'Truth,'  he 
declares,  regarded  as  an  objective  im- 
personal reality;  we  do  not  'discover' 
truth,  we  invent  it.  Therefore  it  is  our 
business  to  invent  a  truth  which  shall 
harmoniously  satisfy  the  needs  of  our 
nature  and  aid  our  efficiency  in  prac- 
tical life.  Certainly  the  philosophers, 
and  notably  Nietzsche,  have  of  late 
years  loved  to  analyze  the  idea  of 
'  truth '  and  to  show  that  it  by  no  means 
signifies  what  we  used  to  suppose  it 
signified.  But  to  show  that  truth  is 
fluid  is  by  no  means  to  show  that  we 
can  at  will  play  fast  and  loose  with  it  to 
suit  our  own  convenience.  If  we  do  we 
merely  find  ourselves,  at  the  end,  in  a 
pool  where  we  must  tramp  round  and 
round  in  intellectual  slush  out  of  which 
there  is  no  issue.  One  may  well  doubt 
whether  the  Pragmatist  himself  has 
ever  invented  his  truth  that  way.  He 
would  be  in  the  same  position  with  a 
man  who,  having  convinced  himself 
that  all  actions  are  determined,  and 
not  the  outcome  of  free  will,  were  on 
that  account  to  drift  effortlessly  along 
the  course  of  self-indulgence.  In  that 
connection,  practically  the  best  result 
is  attained  by  the  man  who  acts  as 
though  free  will  were  a  reality  and  who 
exerts  it.  And  in  this  matter,  also, 
practically,  in  the  end,  the  best  result 
is  attained  by  assuming  that  truth  is 
an  objective  reality  which  we  must  pa- 
tiently seek,  and  in  accordance  with 
which  we  must  discipline  our  own  way- 
ward impulses. 

No  doubt  it  might  be  said,  from  the 
pragmatic  point  of  view,  that  if  the 
use  of  the  measuring-rod  of  truth  as  an 


784 


SCIENCE  AND  MYSTICISM 


objective  standard  produces  the  best 
practical  results,  that  use  is  pragmati- 
cally justified.  But  if  so,  we  are  in  ex- 
actly the  same  position  as  before  the 
Pragmatist  arrived;  we  can  get  on  as 
well  without  him,  if  not  better,  for  we 
run  the  risk  that  he  may  confuse  the 
issues  for  us.  It  may  be  said,  without 
paradox,  that  the  real  value  of  the 
Pragmatist  lies,  not  in  the  pragmatic 
but  in  the  theoretic  field. 

It  is  not  only  the  Pragmatist's  well- 
meant  efforts  to  find  an  easy  recon- 
ciliation of  belief  and  practice,  and 
indirectly  the  concord  of  religion  and 
science,  that  come  to  grief  because  he 
has  not  realized  that  the  walls  of  the 
spiritual  world  can  be  scaled  only 
with  much  expenditure  of  treasure,  with 
blood  and  sweat,  that  he  cannot  glide 
luxuriously  to  Heaven  in  his  motor-car. 
We  are  also  met  by  the  Intuitionist. 
It  is  no  accident  that  the  Intuitionist 
so  often  walks  hand  in  hand  with  the 
Pragmatist;  they  are  engaged  in  the 
same  tasks. 

Plotinus  in  the  third  century  in- 
vented intuition;  Bergson  has  skillfully 
rejuvenated  it  in  our  own  day.  A  sound 
foundation  certainly  exists  for  the  bril- 
liant Bergsonian  edifice.  There  is,  we 
have  seen,  the  impulse  of  science  which 
must  work  through  intelligence;  there 
is,  also,  the  impulse  of  religion  in  the 
satisfaction  of  which  intelligence  can 
only  take  a  very  humble  place  in  the 
ante-chamber  of  the  sanctuary.  To 
admit,  therefore,  that  reason  cannot 
extend  into  the  religious  sphere  is  ab- 
solutely sound  so  long  as  we  realize 
that  reason  has  a  coordinate  right  to 
lay  down  the  rules  of  intelligence.  But 
in  men  of  the  metaphysical  type,  in 
thinkers  like  Plotinus  and  like  Bergson, 
two  tendencies  are  alike  so  deeply  im- 
planted that  they  cannot  escape  them: 
they  are  not  only  impelled  to  go  beyond 
intelligence,  but  they  are  also  impelled 
to  carry  intelligence  with  them  outside 


its  sphere.  The  sphere  of  intelligence  is 
limited,  says  Bergson,  and  he  is  right; 
the  soul  has  other  impulses  besides  that 
of  intelligence,  and  life  needs  more  than 
knowledge  for  its  complete  satisfaction. 
But  in  Bergson's  metaphysical  hands 
the  faculty  of  intuition  which  is  to  sup- 
plant that  of  intelligence  itself  results 
in  a  product  which  is  called  *  know- 
ledge,' and  so  spuriously  bears  the  hall- 
mark which  belongs  to  the  product  of 
intelligence.  In  the  skill  by  which  that 
change  is  effected  we  witness  the  fine 
sleight  of  hand  which  has  long  made 
Bergson  so  supreme  a  conjurer  in  the 
metaphysical  world. 

But  the  result  is  disastrous.  Not 
only  is  an  illegitimate  confusion  intro- 
duced, but  by  attributing  to  the  im- 
pulse of  religion  a  character  which  it  is 
neither  entitled  to  nor  in  need  of,  we 
merely  discredit  it  in  the  eyes  of  intel- 
ligence. Bergson,  even  in  denying  in- 
telligence, is  himself  so  predominantly 
and  pervadingly  intelligent  that  in  en- 
tering what  is  for  him  the  sphere  of 
religion  he  still  moves  in  an  atmosphere 
of  rarified  intelligence.  He  is  further 
from  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven  than  the 
simple  man  who  is  quite  incapable  of 
understanding  the  Bergsonian  theory 
of  duration,  but  yet  may  be  able  to  fol- 
low his  own  religious  impulse  without 
foisting  into  it  an  intellectual  content. 
For  even  the  simple  man  may  be  one 
with  the  great  mystics,  who  all  declare 
that  the  unspeakable  quality  they 
have  acquired,  as  Eckhart  puts  it, 
'hath  no  image.'  It  is  not  in  the  sphere 
of  intelligence,  it  brings  no  knowledge, 
although  it  supplements  knowledge 
and  may  inspire  it  or  be  inspired  by  it; 
it  is  the  outcome  of  the  natural  instinct 
of  the  individual  soul. 

No  doubt  there  really  are  people  in 
whom  the  instincts  of  religion  and  of 
science  alike  are  developed  in  so  rudi- 
mentary a  degree,  if  developed  at  all, 
that  they  never  become  conscious. 


SCIENCE  AND  MYSTICISM 


785 


Even  the  instinct  of  sex,  which  is  much 
more  fundamental  than  either  of  these, 
is  not  absolutely  essential.  A  very  little 
bundle  of  instincts  and  impulses  is 
indispensable  to  a  man  on  his  way 
down  the  path  of  life  to  a  peaceful  and 
humble  grave.  A  man's  equipment  of 
tendencies,  on  the  lowest  plane,  needs 
to  be  more  complex  and  diverse  than 
an  oyster's,  yet  not  so  very  much 
more.  The  equipment  of  the  higher 
animals,  moreover,  is  needed  less  for 
the  good  of  the  individual  than  for 
the  good  of  the  race.  We  need  not, 
therefore,  be  surprised  if  the  persons 
in  whom  the  superfluous  instincts  are 
rudimentary  fail  to  understand  them, 
confusing  them  and  overlaying  them 
with  each  other  and  with  much  that  is 
outside  both.  The  wonder  would  be  if 
it  were  otherwise. 

When  all  deduction  has  been  made  of 
the  mental  and  emotional  confusions 
which  have  obscured  men's  vision,  we 
cannot  fail  to  conclude,  it  seems  to  me, 
that  Science  and  Mysticism  are  far 
nearer  to  each  other  than  some  would 
have  us  believe.  At  the  beginning  of 
human  culture,  far  from  being  opposed, 
they  may  even  be  said  to  be  identical. 
From  time  to  time,  in  later  ages,  bril- 
liant examples  have  appeared  of  men 
who  have  possessed  both  instincts  in  a 
high  degree  and  have  even  fused  the 
two  together;  while  among  the  humble 
in  spirit  and  the  lowly  in  intellect  it  is 
probable  that  in  all  ages  innumerable 
men  have  by  instinct  harmonized  their 
religion  with  their  intelligence.  But  as 
VOL.  in -NO.  e 


the  accumulated  experiences  of  civil- 
ization have  been  preserved  and  handed 
on  from  generation  to  generation,  the 
free  and  vital  play  of  the  instincts  has 
been  largely  paralyzed.  On  each  side 
fossilized  traditions  have  accumulated 
so  thickly,  the  garments  of  dead  meta- 
physics have  been  wrapped  so  closely 
around  every  manifestation  alike  of 
the  religious  instinct  and  the  scientific 
instinct,  that  not  many  persons  can 
succeed  in  revealing  one  of  these  in- 
stincts in  its  naked  beauty,  and  very 
few  in  thus  revealing  both  instincts. 
Hence  a  perpetual  antagonism. 

It  may  be,  however,  that  we  are 
beginning  to  realize  that  there  are  no 
metaphysical  formulae  to  suit  all  men, 
but  that  every  man  must  find  his  own 
philosophy.  Thus  it  is  becoming  easier 
than  it  was  before  to  liberate  ourselves 
from  a  dead  metaphysics,  and  so  to 
give  free  play  alike  to  the  religious 
instinct  and  the  scientific  instinct.  A 
man  must  not  swallow  more  beliefs 
than  he  can  digest;  no  man  can  absorb 
all  the  traditions  of  the  past;  what  he 
fills  himself  with  will  only  be  a  poison 
to  work  to  his  own  auto-intoxication. 

Along  all  these  lines  we  see  more 
clearly  than  before  the  real  harmony 
between  Mysticism  and  Science.  We 
see,  also,  that  all  arguments  are  mean- 
ingless until  we  gain  personal  experi- 
ence. One  must  win  one's  own  place 
in  the  spiritual  world,  painfully  and 
alone.  There  is  no  other  way  of  salva- 
tion. The  Promised  Land  always  lies 
on  the  other  side  of  a  wilderness. 


WHEN  HANNAH  VAR  EIGHT  YAR  OLD 


BY  KATHERINE   PEABODY   GIRLING 


'WERE  you  a  little  girl,  Hannah, 
when  you  came  to  America?'  I  asked. 

'No,'  she  replied,  letting  her  sewing 
fall  in  her  lap  as  her  grave  eyes  sought 
mine  slowly,  *  I  var  a  big  girl  eight  yar 
old.' 

*  Eight  years  old?  How  big  you  must 
have  been!  Can  you  tell  me  about  it? 
Why  you  came?' 

The  recent  accounts  of  people  driven 
to  America  by  tragedy,  or  drawn  by  a 
larger  hope  of  finding  a  life  to  live  in 
addition  to  earning  a  living,  had  col- 
ored my  thoughts  for  days.  Have  all 
immigrants  —  the  will-less,  leaden  peo- 
ple who  pass  in  droves  through  our  rail- 
way stations;  the  patient,  indifferent 
toilers  by  the  roadside;  the  maids  who 
cook  and  mend  for  us;  this  girl  who  sits 
sewing  with  me  to-day  —  a  memory 
and  a  vision?  Is  each  of  them  in  some 
degree  a  Mary  Antin?  So  I  closed  the 
magazine  and  asked  her.  —  'A  big  girl 
eight  yar  old,'  she  said. 

'Oh,  well,'  Hannah  explained,  'in 
Old  Country  if  you  are  eight  yar  old 
and  comes  younger  child'n  in  familie, 
you  are  old  woman;  you  gotta  be,  or 
who  shall  help  de  moder?' 

'Yes?  Did  your  father  and  mother 
bring  you?'  I  continued,  probing  for 
the  story. 

'No,  —  fader  and  moder  var  daid. 
My  h'aunt,  my  fader's  broder's  wife, 
se  came  for  us.  It  cost  her  twenty- 
eight  dollar,  but  se  do  it.' 

'But  surely  you  can't  go  to  Sweden 
and  return  for  twenty-eight  dollars!' 

'Seventeen  yar  ago,  yes,  but  of 
course  you  must  to  take  your  own  pro- 
786 


vidings.  It  don't  require  much.'  Han- 
nah's shoulders  drew  together  express- 
ively. 'Madam  knows  she  is  apt  to 
miss  her  appetite  at  sea!' 

'But  too  well.'  I  shrugged  sympa- 
thetically. Then  we  both  laughed. 

'  I  can  to  tell  you  how  it  is  I  came  on 
Ahmericah,  but '  —  Hannah  waited  for 
words  to  express  her  warning  —  '  it  will 
make  you  a  sharp  sadness.' 

'Please.' 

'  I  don't  know  if  I  can  tell  it  to  you 
good,  but  I  tell  it  so  good  as  I  can.  My 
fader  he  var  Swedish  fisherman  vat 
h'own  his  boat  and  go  away  by  weeks 
and  weeks,  and  sometimes  comes 
strong  wedder  and  he  can't  make  it  to 
get  home  quick.  My  moder  se  var 
German.'  Hannah  hesitated,  and  then 
in  lowered  tones  of  soft  apology  added, 
'Se  var  a  ver'  pretty  woman.  Var 
three  child'n  more  as  me  —  Olga  var  six 
yar  old,  and  Hilda  four,  and  Jens  — 
well,  Jens  var  just  a  baby,  suppose  yar 
and  half.  We  live  in  a  little  house  close 
on  by  de  sea.  It  is  yust  a  little  house, 
but  it  can  to  have  a  shed  with  a  floor  of 
stone.  The  door  of  de  shed  is  broken  so 
it  is  like  a  window  mitout  glass. 

'The  house  is  close  on  by  a  big  dock 
where  in  somer-time  comes  big  excur- 
sion-steamer mit  —  suppose  hundert 
tourist  people  who  climb  on  de  moun- 
tain up  de  road.  My  moder  se  sell  dem 
hot  coffee,  also  bread  and  cheese,  but 
dat  is  not  de  reason  why  we  live  in  de 
little  so  lonesome  house.  It  *is  de  big 
dock  is  de  reason.  My  fader  he  can  to 
come  home  from  late  fishings  mitout 
needing  dat  he  sail  walk  on  de  roads. 


WHEN  HANNAH  VAR  EIGHT  YAR  OLD 


787 


In  Sweden  in  winter  de  roads  swallow 
snow  till  it  makes  dangersome  to  you 
to  walk  because  hides  holes  to  step  in. 
We  live  dare  all  somer,  but  in  late 
autumn  my  fader  he  say,  "What  about 
de  winter?" 

'My  moder  se  say,  "I  don't  know, 
but  anyway  ve  try  it  vonce." 

*  Den  my  fader  he  go  avay  in  his  boad 
and  my  moder  se  get  bad  cold  and 
comes  sickness  on  her,  and  ven  se 
could  n't  to  keep  care  on  us  by  rea- 
son se  is  too  weak,  se  lay  on  de  cot 
in  de  kitchen-room  and  vatch  on  me 
dat  I  sail  learn  to  keep  care  on  de 
child'n.' 

'But  what  did  you  live  on?  How  did 
you  keep  warm?' 

'Oh,  —  is  plenty  fuel,  and  ve  make 
hot  stew  of  dried  meat  mit  rice  and 
raisins. 

'  One  day  my  moder  se  say  me, "  Han- 
nah," se  say,  "you  bain  a  big  girl, 
I  must  to  tell  you  sometings.  You 
fader  is  very  late,  it  seems,  and  winter 
comes  now.  I  cannot  to  wait  much 
more.  It  is  soon  I  got  to  go.  You 
must  n't  take  a  fear  of  me  if  I  come  all 
white  like  de  snow  and  don't  talk  mit 
you  any  more.  De  little  child'n  dey 
will  take  a  fear  and  cry.  I  cannot  to 
bring  a  fear  on  my  little  child'n." 

'  So  se  tell  me  what  I  sail  do  —  I  sail 
close  bot'  her  eyes  up  and  tie  her  hands 
togeder  and  lock  de  shed  door.' 

'The  shed  door!' 

'Ya.' 

Hannah  had  resumed  her  sewing. 
Her  thread  fairly  snapped  as  stitch 
fell  by  even  stitch  with  monotonous 
rhythm.  In  quiet,  uneventful  tone  she 
continued,  — 

'So  one  night  pretty  soon  se  make 
dat  I  sail  bring  her  best  nightgown 
and  help  her  mit  to  put  it  on.  Den  se 
kiss  de  little  child'n  in  dair  sleepings 
and  se  sit  on  a  stool  by  de  fire  and  say  I 
sail  put  Jens  in  her  arms.  Se  try  to 
rock  back  and  fort'  and  se  sing  on  him 


a  little  hymn.  But  se  is  too  weak,  and  I 
must  to  take  him.  Den  se  put  on  me  a 
shawl  and  tie  it  behind  under  my  arms, 
and  se  lean  heavy  on  me,  and  we  go  out 
into  de  shed.  My  moder  se  do  her  bare 
feet  on  de  stone  floor.  Se  have  yust  but 
her  nightgown  on,  but  it  is  her  best 
one  with  crocheted  lace  at  de  neck  and 
wrists.  Se  tell  me  I  sail  put  de  ironing- 
board  across  two  chair-seats,  but  it  is 
too  heavy  and  se  sail  try  to  help  me, 
but  comes  coughing  on  her  and  se  must 
to  hold  on  by  de  shed  door.  Se  look  out 
across  de  road  and  de  mountain  all  mit 
snow  white  and  mit  moonlight  cold. 
And  blood  is  on  her  lips  but  se  wipe  it 
away  mit  a  snow  bunch.  Well,  any- 
way, we  do  de  ironing-board  across  de 
chair-seats  and  I  spread  a  white  sheet 
and  put  a  head-cushion  and  my  moder 
lie  down  and  I  cover  her  mit  a  more 
other  sheet  over. 

'"Oh,  moder,"  I  say,  "let  me  make 
some  warm  coverings  on  you." 

'  "No,"  se  say,  so  soft  dat  I  listen  mit 
my  ear,  "I  must  to  come  here  while  I 
yet  have  de  stren'th,  but  I  want  to  go 
quick  away,  and  in  de  cold  I  go  more 
quick.  Oh,  Hannah!"  se  say,  "my  big 
daughter!  You  are  so  comfortable  to 
me!" 

'So  I  hold  my  moder's  hand.  Pretty 
soon  it  comes  cold.  I  klapp  it  mit  mine, 
but  it  comes  more  cold.  I  crumple  it  up 
and  breathe  my  hot  breath  in  it,  but 
it  comes  not  warm  any  more.  So  mit 
my  fader's  Sunday  handkerchief  I 
bind  her  eyes  like  if  you  play  Blindman 
mit  de  child'n,  and  mit  an  apron-string 
I  tie  her  hands  together.  Den  I  go  back 
and  make  my  hands  warm  in  de  kitch- 
en-room and  I  take  de  comb  down  off 
de  string,  and  I  go  back  to  my  moder 
and  make  her  hair  in  two  braids  like  as 
I  did  all  when  se  was  sick.  My  moder 
se  haf  very  strong  hair;  it  is  down  by 
her  knees  on  and  so  yellow,  —  so  yel- 
low as  a  copper  tea-kettle!  It  could  to 
haf  been  red  but  it  yust  are  not.  Den  I 


788 


WHEN  HANNAH  VAR  EIGHT  YAR  OLD 


lock  de  shed  door  and  crawl  in  bed  mit 
de  child'n  to  make  me  warm. 

'Next  day  I  tell  de  child'n  dat  moder 
is  gone  away.  Dey  cry  some,  but  pretty 
soon  dey  shut  up.  Anyway,  it  is  so 
long  se  haf  lain  on  de  cot  in  de  kitchen- 
room  dat  dey  don't  haf  to  miss  her. 

'So  I  keep  care  on  de  child'n  and 
play  wid  dem,  and  some  days  go  by. 
Comes  stronger  wedder  mit  storms  of 
sleet  and  snow,  and  de  wind  sob  and 
cry.  Comes  nobody  on.  At  night 
when  de  child'n  are  sleeping  I  unlock 
de  shed  door  and  go  to  see  if  it  makes  all 
right  mit  my  moder.  Sometimes  it  is  by 
the  moonlight  I  see  on  her,  but  more 
often  it  is  by  a  candle-glimmer.' 

Hannah  broke  the  subdued  tone  of 
her  narrative  to  add  in  a  lower,  more 
confiding  note,  'It  is  mit  me  now  dat 
when  I  see  a  candle  on  light  I  haf  a 
sharp  sadness. 

*  Pretty  soon  de  wedder  is  more  bet- 
ter, and  comes  a  man  trompling  troo  de 
snow  to  tell  my  moder  dat  her  husband 
can't  come  home  yust  yet  —  he  is 
drowned  in  de  sea.  When  he  see  how  it 
is  mit  my  moder  and  mit  me  and  de 
little  child'n,  de  water  stands  in  his 
eyes  —  ya.  And  he  go  on,  troo  de 
snow,  tree,  four  mile  nearer  on  de  city 
to  de  big  castle  where  live  de  lady  wat 
h'own  all  de  land  and  se  come  in  sleigh 
mit  four  horsen  and  big  robes  of  fur 
and  yingling  bells.  Se  see  on  my  moder 
and  se  go  quick  away,  but  so  soon  as  it 
can,  se  come  again  and  se  do  on  my 
moder  a  white  robe,  heavy  mit  lace, 
most  beautiful!  and  white  stockings  of 
silk  and  white  slippers  broidered  mit 
pearlen.  Se  leaf  my  moder 's  hair,  as  I 
fix  it,  in  two  braids,  but  se  put  a  wreath 


of  flowers,  white  and  green,  yust  like  de 
real  ones.  Is  few  real  flowers  in  Sweden 
in  winter.  Anyway,  dese  var  like  de 
flowers  a  girl  vat  gets  married  should  to 
wear.  Den  my  lady  se  send  her  sleigh 
dat  all  de  people  should  come  and  see 
on  de  so  brave  woman  vat  could  n't  to 
bring  a  fear  on  her  little  child'n.  And 
de  people  dey  make  admiration  on  my 
moder.  Dey  say  it  is  de  prettiest  dey 
ever  see  it,  and  dey  make  pity  dat  se 
could  n't  to  see  it  herself.'  She  paused 
and  breathed  deeply.  *  I  wish  se  could 
have  to  seen  dose  slippers!' 
.  'And  did  no  one  tell  you  that  you 
were  a  wonderful  little  girl?' 
'Oh,  veil  —  I  var  eight  yar  old.' 
'But  what  became  of  you  all?' 
'My  lady  took  us  home  in  her  sleigh 
mit  —  I  want  to  stay  mit  my  moder, 
but  se  say  I  sail  come  to  keep  care  on 
de  child'n  dat  dey  don't  cry.  And  dey 
don't  cry  —  dey  laugh  mit  de  yingling 
bells.  De  need  was  on  me  strong,  but  I 
don't  cry  before  my  lady.  Se  var  great 
dame  vat  go  in  de  court  mit  de  queen. 
Se  sent  men  and  dey  do  my  moder  in  a 
coffin  and  carry  her  to  a  little  chapel 
house  in  cemetaire  and  in  de  spring  ven 
de  snow  is  gone  dey  bury  her.  My  lady 
se  put  a  white  stone  mit  my  moder's 
name  and  some  poetry  —  I  can't  to  say 
it  good  in  English,  but  it  says,  "The 
stren'th  in  the  heart  of  her  poor  is  the 
hope  of  Sweden."  ! 

'And  then  did  your  aunt  come?' 
'  Ya;  my  lady  se  wrote  on  my  fader's 
broder  vat  var  in  Ahmericah.  Se  say 
we  can  to  stay  mit  her,  but  my  onkle  he 
send  his  wife,  and  we  come  back  mit 
her  on  Ahmericah,  und  dat  is  all  how  I 
came  to  be  here.' 


THE  MOTHER  CITY 


BY  ZEPHINE   HUMPHREY 


ONLY  those  who  have  known  trouble 
can  know  Rome. 

The  statement,  when  scrutinized, 
seems  to  involve  no  discrimination, 
and  therefore  to  be  hardly  worth  mak- 
ing. But  indiscriminateness  is  some- 
times worth  while,  especially  when  it 
concerns  the  Catholic  heart  of  the 
world.  And  there  is  a  distinction  here: 
it  debars  the  very  young,  and  the  cal- 
lous and  flippant,  and  the  followers 
of  those  philosophies  that  deny  or  re- 
fuse suffering.  For  all  the  rest  of  the 
world,  Rome  waits  with  healing  in  her 
hands. 

It  makes  absolutely  no  difference 
what  kind  of  trouble  drags  itself  to  her 
ancient  gates.  She  has  known  and 
fathomed  all  kinds  herself,  and  most 
of  them  over  and  over.  Loss,  failure, 
treachery,  cruelty,  desertion,  disgrace, 
sin, — oh,  yes,  alas!  plenty  of  sin, — 
destruction,  all  but  annihilation,  and 
the  pangs  of  re-birth.  There  is  literally 
nothing  that  she  does  not  understand. 

She  makes  no  manner  of  fuss  about 
her  tremendous  experience;  she  does 
not  even  invite  us  to  come  and  sorrow 
with  her.  She  simply  sits  and  waits 
upon  her  Seven  Hills.  Nor  yet,  when 
we  do  come,  does  she  rise  and  go  forth 
to  meet  us  with  welcome  and  sym- 
pathy. There  is  not  the  slightest  touch 
of  demonstration  in  all  the  abounding 
comfort  which  she  knows  how  to  give. 
For  she  does  not  give  it;  that  is  the 
truth.  Unless  we  know  how  to  take  it 
for  ourselves,  we  shall  never  have  it. 
And  just  here  lies  the  strong  secret  of 
her  wise  beneficence. 


How  quiet  she  is!  As  still  and  serene 
as  if  she  were  the  bride  of  the  morning 
star,  beatissima.  Where  all  is  immortal, 
her  calm  is  the  most  immortal  thing 
about  her.  Did  she  ever  speak  out? 
One  wonders.  Back  in  those  proud 
early  days,  when  her  children  were  pil- 
ing glory  upon  glory  for  her,  when  she 
was  the  mistress  of  the  world,  did  she 
ever  exult  and  sing?  And  then,  when 
those  same  children  turned  against  her, 
and  when,  from  without,  savage  hordes 
fell  upon  her,  did  she  lament?  Per- 
haps; but  one  doubts  it.  The  youth  of 
Rome  is  as  hard  to  imagine  as  the 
youth  of  the  Campagna  which  girdles 
her,  and  which  is  her  super-self,  her 
soul.  Have  they  not  together  existed 
forever,  and  do  they  not  know  that  all 
human  accidents  only  serve  to  form 
character  which  shall  at  last  be  worthy 
of  its  destiny,  and  that  exultation  and 
lamentation  are  therefore  aside  from 
the  mark? 

Certainly  they  are  still  enough  now 
—  the  two  of  them  who  are  one.  Not 
necessarily  still  to  the  outer  ear;  tram- 
cars  and  automobiles  have  nothing  to 
do  with  such  a  hush  of  the  spirit  as 
broods  over  Rome.  Or,  perhaps,  after 
all,  they  have  much  to  do  with  it;  for 
they  are  the  signs  of  the  new  life  which 
flows  steadily  through  the  old  streets, 
like  the  Tiber  drawing  fresh  waves 
from  ancient  sources,  and  which  makes 
the  repose  of  the  city  a  living,  instead 
of  a  dead,  thing.  Arrested  tumult 
clamors  forever,  beating  impotently 
against  the  barrier  of  chance  which  cut 
it  off  before  it  could  redeem  itself.  A 


790 


THE  MOTHER  CITY 


city  like  Perugia,  deserted  by  modern 
activity,  is  loud  with  petty  old  battle 
and  conflict,  vociferating  restlessly  in 
one's  inner  ear.  Even  Siena,  remote 
and  subdued;  even  Assisi,  sitting  down 
in  the  beloved  footprints  of  Saint 
Francis  —  even  these  silent  places 
know  nothing  of  the  fathomless  depth 
of  peace  which  Rome  understands. 
For  she  has  never  ceased  to  redeem 
her  old  distresses  by  the  new  hopes 
and  efforts  of  generation  after  genera- 
tion, and  she  is  constantly  in  process 
of  fulfillment.  It  may  even  be  not 
too  much  to  say  that  the  spell  of  her 
ruins  and  churches,  instead  of  suffer- 
ing from  her  apartment  houses  and 
electric  lights,  actually  owes  its  vitality 
to  them. 

I  have  said  that  she  will  not  talk 
about  herself,  that  she  will  not  explain 
herself  to  those  who  visit  her.  But 
they  can  explain  her  to  themselves  and 
thus  can  really  learn.  They  cannot  do 
it  at  once,  —  they  must  wait;  perhaps 
they  must  even  go  away  and  come 
again.  Great  lessons  take -time,  take 
patience,  take  brooding,  take  uncon- 
sciousness. 

The  humble  disciple  must  wander  un- 
hurried through  Forum  and  Colosseum, 
and  climb  the  Palatine.  He  must  sit 
on  old  bits  of  marble  (how  old!),  be- 
neath broken  pillars  and  arches,  and 
think  what  all  these  things  stand  for: 
how  here,  over  these  very  stones,  went 
Scipio,  Cato,  Caesar,  Horace,  how  the 
most  important  affairs  of  the  world 
were  determined  here.  He  must  re-cre- 
ate the  old  days  till  he  sees  the  trium- 
phal processions  sweep  past  him,  and 
hears  the  shouts  and  the  music,  and 
glories  in  the  victory.  His  heart  must 
be  wrung  with  the  old  pain  too  —  the 
anguish  of  the  captive,  the  shame 
of  the  oppressor.  Then,  stern  and 
stricken  in  soul,  he  must  catch  the  sud- 
den flaunt  of  a  scarlet  poppy  out  of  the 
tail  of  his  eye,  and,  looking  up  quickly, 


he  must  find  the  whole  bright  con- 
temporary Italian  day  smiling  at  him. 
Nay,  it  is  something  more  than  the  day 
that  smiles  at  him  out  of  that  blue, 
blue  sky,  beyond  and  above  the  slender 
columns  of  the  ruined  temple;  and  a 
most  reassuring  voice  says,  'Yes,  even 
so.  So  it  has  been,  and  so  it  is,  and 
so  it  shall  be,  eternally  so  as  I  have 
decreed.' 

It  is  not  so  much  a  return  to  the  pre- 
sent that  the  mind  makes,  after  a  ses- 
sion like  this,  as  an  association  of  past 
and  present  and  future  in  one  compre- 
hensive now.  Heaven  and  Rome  eter- 
nally are  —  the  One  working  through 
the  other  stupendous  things,  the  sum 
of  which  is  not  yet  complete.  Of  course, 
there  is  no  hurry  then,  no  room  for 
complaint  or  fear,  no  anxiety.  It  is 
this  that  makes  Rome  so  still:  she 
knows  that  God  is  God. 

In  a  sense,  time  is  nothing  to  her; 
and  yet  it  is  everything.  It  is  certainly 
everything  to  the  pilgrim  who  weighs 
his  little  feather  in  the  huge  scales  be- 
fore him,  and  is  heartened  and  ashamed. 
Forty  years!  That  is  the  most  that  the 
average  pilgrim  has  yet  to  look  forward 
to  living  when  he  comes  to  Rome  for 
comfort.  Forty  years!  Why,  the  very 
stones  might  laugh  at  him.  The  length 
of  time  is  hardly  enough  to  settle  a 
fallen  fragment  in  its  place  and  make 
it  comfortably  ready  to  share  the  life  of 
the  earth  which  has  reclaimed  it;  it  was 
not  enough  to  solve  many  a  single  pro- 
blem out  of  the  thousands  that  vexed 
the  city  in  the  old  days. 

Forty  years!  As  one  sits  among  the 
tombs  on  the  Appian  Way  and  looks 
back  to  see  the  funeral  processions 
pass,  there  is  an  unbroken  succession 
of  mourners  silently  moving  up  to  take 
their  places  as  the  mourned,  and  be- 
tween mourned  and  mourner  there  is 
but  the  space  between  summer  cloud 
and  cloud.  Literally  on  the  heels  of 
one  another,  the  generations  press  to 


THE  MOTHER  CITY 


791 


the  kindly  tomb.  One  can  only  smil- 
ingly pity  the  sorrow  of  a  person  who 
laid  his  beloved  away  two  thousand 
and  seventy  years  ago,  and  took  his 
place  beside  her  two  thousand  and 
thirty  years  ago.  Their  two  urns  must 
appear  precisely  as  old  the  one  as  the 
other. 

But  there  is  another  way  of  looking 
at  this  time  question  that  makes  for 
shame  rather  than  for  smiling.  What 
about  Rome  herself,  the  immortal,  yet 
the  supremely  human?  She  has  a  soul 
that  suffers  and  hopes,  that  is  rent 
with  vicissitudes  vaster  than  any  that 
ever  fell  to  one  mortal  lot;  and  in  all 
her  twenty-seven  hundred  years,  she 
has  never  known  the  relief  of  death. 
It  is  little  wonder  that  she  is  grave, 
with  a  profound  melancholy  breathing 
through  all  her  ancient  ways;  and,  per- 
haps, if  we  knew  God  better,  we  should 
find  it  equally  little  wonder  that  she  is 
so  undisturbed.  But  the  latter  effect  is 
admirable,  however  we  may  reason  or 
speculate  about  it;  and  it  abashes  one 
who  compares  it  with  his  own  feverish 
outcries  over  his  few  transient  troubles. 
Ah,  Rome,  mother!  when  thou  hast 
borne  so  many  and  such  bitter  woes, 
and  art  so  grandly  at  peace,  can  we  not 
at  least  be  still? 

Mother!  That  is  what  Rome  is  to 
us  all,  whether  or  not  we  choose  to 
acknowledge  the  relationship  —  the 
mightiest  mother  of  men  that  ever 
took  shape  in  a  city.  Mother  of  our 
physical  life  first  of  all,  in  the  civiliza- 
tion that  has  its  roots  securely  in  her; 
then  mother  of  our  souls  in  our  religion. 
We  of  the  Far  West  are  so  remote  in 
space  and  time,  in  sect  and  language 
and  education,  that  we  are  often  quite 
unconscious  of  the  obscure  maternal 
bond,  and  do  not  even  recognize  it  when 
we  feel  it  gripping  our  hearts  at  the 
first  glimpse  of  the  blue  Dome  across 
the  Campagna.  Yet  it  is  nothing  else 
than  a  filial  impulse  that  actuates  our 


profound  response,  our  sense  of  be- 
longing, our  feeling  of  returning  from  a 
far  country.  We  cannot  come  to  stay, 
for,  after  all,  the  far  country  is  ours 
now  and  we  love  it  best;  but  it  is  worth 
everything  to  us,  in  the  deepening  and 
strengthening  of  life,  to  grope  our  way 
back  to  old  sources  and  find  a  brim- 
ming fountain-head. 

It  is  as  mother  that  she  gathers  us  — 
or  lets  us  gather  ourselves  —  about  her 
mighty  knees  in  the  midst  of  her  ruins 
and  churches,  and  takes  us  back  to  her 
mighty  heart  to  learn  once  more  of  her. 
I  have  said  that  she  never  practices 
any  demonstration;  but  it  may  happen 
to  one  now  and  then  to  feel  a  slow  arm 
enfolding  him  as  he  sits  on  the  slope  of 
the  Palatine  in  the  mellow  late  after- 
noon. There  is  no  pressure  in  the  em- 
brace, nor  any  individual  selection.  It 
is  like  the  embrace  of  the  colonnades 
about  the  Piazza  of  Saint  Peter's,  or, 
better  still,  like  the  embrace  of  the 
arm  of  God  in  that  greatest  of  great 
pictures  on  the  ceiling  of  the  Sistine 
Chapel.  All  souls  and  all  ages  are  held 
in  it  in  a  wide,  free  compass.  Yet,  oh, 
how  it  comforts!  Healing  and  strength, 
control  and  reassurance,  are  in  its  en- 
circling gesture;  and  one  feels  the  faith 
of  all  past  and  future  things  as  one 
lingers  there. 

Also  I  have  said  that  Rome  never 
speaks.  But  there  is  an  eloquence  in 
her  silence  that  surpasses  any  sound. 
This  is  especially  true  of  the  Cam- 
pagna, the  city's  super-self.  That  is  an 
amazing  silence  out  there,  instinct 
with  so  many  songs  and  sighs,  shouts 
and  murmurs,  that  one  listens  more  in- 
tently to  it  than  to  any  orchestra. 

There  is  a  silence  where  hath  been  no  sound; 
There  is  a  silence  where  no  sound  may  be; 

But  in  green  ruins,  in  the  desolate  walls 
Of  antique  palaces,  where  Man  hath  been, 

There  the  true  Silence  is,  self-conscious  and 
alone. 


792 


THE  MOTHER  CITY 


What  does  it  all  mean  —  this  under- 
tone, this  surging,  interminable  chant 
that  breaks  upon  the  ear,  as  one  loiters 
among  the  tombs  or  wanders  away 
over  the  grassy  fields?  What  but  the 
race-song,  the  human  symphony,  that, 
beginning  to  utter  itself  untold  thou- 
sands of  years  ago,  is  not  finished  yet? 
The  same  themes  are  in  it  from  age  to 
age;  one  generation  calls  to  another  in 
familiar  cadences.  From  the  grass  that 
covers  the  dust  which  once  was  an 
Etruscan  village  come  the  voices  of  our 
comrades.  It  behooves  us  to  stoop 
very  carefully  then,  kneel  very  rever- 
ently, before  we  lay  our  ears  to  this 
august  sod.  One  cannot  cast  one's 
self  on  the  Campagna  as  on  the  slope 
of  a  New  England  orchard. 

Yet,  for  all  their  familiarity,  their 
essential  sameness,  the  themes  which 
we  hear  are  not  the  exact  counterparts 
of  the  themes  of  the  twentieth  century. 
There  is  development  in  the  latter;  at 
least,  we  must  believe  that  there  is,  or 
we  shall  hardly  have  the  heart  to  go 
on  singing.  But  there  is  an  appeal 
in  the  former,  too,  which  they  did  not 
know  when  they  were  first  uttered, 
which  they  have  acquired  from  listen- 
ing to  the  later  movements  of  the  great 
symphony.  'You  are  going  to  save  us 
at  last,  are  you  not?'  — somewhat 
thus  runs  the  anxious  burden  of  their 
inquiry.  *  We  have  waited  a  long  time, 
and  we  are  not  yet  satisfied  that  our 
old  pain  was  worth  while,  our  blind, 
groping  effort.  Unless  we  have  given 
birth  to  our  saviors,  it  were  better  not 
to  have  been/ 

The  stimulus  of  an  unexplored  coun- 
try, waiting  to  be  shaped  to  human 
ends,  is  as  nothing  compared  to  the 
urging  of  the  Roman  Campagna,  where 
the  past  cries  to  the  present  for  justi- 
fication. One  kneels  in  the  grass,  and 
looks  out  across  the  mysterious,  rolling 
country,  with  its  scattered,  broken 
columns  and  its  marching  aqueducts, 


to  the  Dome,  the  abiding  Dome,  hung 
in  the  air;  and  one  bows  the  head  as 
one  thinks  how  far  short  of  our  destiny 
we  have  all  come  in  two  thousand 
years. 

Just  as  Rome  owes  half  its  signifi- 
cance to  the  Campagna,  so  the  Cam- 
pagna depends  upon  Rome  for  the  se- 
cret of  its  spell.  There  are  moments 
and  places  among  the  gently  swelling 
hills  when  one  can  almost  look  about 
as  on  common  grass  and  flowers,  when 
the  sky  and  the  distant  mountains 
wear  the  careless  serenity  which  be- 
longs to  Nature  in  her  universal  moods. 
Both  relief  and  disappointment  lie  in 
the  experience.  One's  heart  is  light- 
ened of  a  load,  but  something  precious 
vanishes.  One  has  only  to  climb  a  slope, 
however,  or  travel  to  a  bend  in  the 
road,  and,  looking  citywards,  find  the 
Dome,  to  be  smitten  with  a  renewed 
realization  of  awful  import  in  every 
blade  and  stone.  It  is  Nature  herself 
that  vanishes  then,  clothing  herself 
with  a  solemn  garb  of  significance  above 
her  simple,  familiar  robes,  just  as  the 
priest  before  the  altar  veils  himself,  be- 
comes more  than  himself,  in  his  chas- 
uble. 

Nature  always  stands  for  God,  and 
the  priest  always  stands  for  man;  but 
it  is  when  they  stand  for  both  together 
that  they  command  our  best  adoration. 
In  like  manner,  the  Dome,  which  re- 
presents the  principle  of  the  incarna- 
tion of  God  in  man,  works  the  most 
inevitable  of  all  transformations  upon 
the  world  about  it.  The  human  garment 
of  the  Campagna  is  wrought  of  ruins 
and-  roads  and  buried  cities,  aqueducts 
and  broken  walls,  shepherds'  huts  and 
glimpses  of  white  towns  on  distant 
hills;  but  the  great  clasp,  holding  it 
all  together,  is  the  blue  Dome  in  the 
air. 

In  another  figure,  the  Dome  is  the 
magical  helmet  which  the  Campagna 
has  only  to  don  to  step  from  its  sim- 


THE  MOTHER  CITY 


793 


plicity  into  a  position  of  profound 
significance.  Nothing  else  arrests  and 
moves  us  so  potently,  nor  can  we 
ever  escape  its  dominance.  We  climb 
Monte  Cavo  only  to  sit  and  look  at 
it  across  the  purple  plain.  We  go  to 
Frascati,  and  turn  our  backs  on  the 
enchanted  gardens  that  we  may  search 
out  the  blue  curve  in  the  hazy  dis- 
tance, and,  having  found  it,  give  our- 
selves over  to  its  contemplation.  What 
an  inscrutable  air  of  expectation  it 
has!  It  waits  even  more  than  it  warns 
and  commands;  it  waits  and  watches. 
In  the  mean  time,  those  buried  Cam- 
pagna  tongues  urge  us:  how  long?  how 
long? 

It  is  hard  to  see  how  any  one  can 
think  of  Rome  as  a  dead  city  when  it 
wears  this  expectancy.  Sometimes  it 
carries  itself  almost  as  if  it  had  not  yet 
begun  to  live  at  all.  It  treats  its  great 
past  as  a  glorious,  solemn,  and  costly 
throne  on  which  it  has  climbed  to  sit 
and  await  its  future.  In  the  Sistine 
Chapel,  in  one  of  the  triangles  devoted 
to  the  ancestors  of  Christ,  there  is  a 
woman  who  seems  to  me  to  have  taken 
the  very  attitude  of  Rome.  She  is  seat- 
ed on  the  ground,  the  common  throne 
of  our  race,  —  and  no  less  glorious,  sol- 
emn, and  costly  than  any  other  seat,  — 
and  she  leans  with  one  elbow  on  her 
knee  and  her  cheek  against  her  hand. 
The  other  hand  hangs  down  before  her, 
empty,  yet  not  nerveless,  a  strong,  vi- 
tal hand,  ready  to  grasp  and  hold.  Her 
whole  bearing  is  that  of  one  who  waits, 
but  there  is  no  suggestion  of  vagueness 
or  idleness  about  her.  Her  head  is  erect, 
and  her  wide  eyes  gaze  forward,  out- 
ward, steady  and  bright.  What  is  it 
that  she  sees? 

Even  so,  Rome  gazes  over  the  heads 
of  the  present  generations,  not  ignor- 
ing them,  but  pointing  their  attention 
forward  with  hers,  absorbed  in  the  won- 
derful vision  of  things  to  come.  We 
know  now  that  the  vision  of  the  woman 


in  the  Sistine  Chapel  was  the  first  com- 
ing of  Christ;  but  Rome's  anticipation 
is  still  obscure  to  us.  Perhaps  she 
does  not  see  it  clearly  herself;  she  only 
divines  it.  But  she  is  so  very  sure  of 
it  that  we  must  be  sure,  too. 

No  mother  of  men  would  be  perfect* 
ly  fitted  for  her  great  function  unless 
she  could  sympathize  with  joy  as  well  as 
with  sorrow;  for,  mostly  sober  though 
life  is,  it  still  has  hours  of  sufficient 
ecstasy.  And  doubtless  this  paper's 
opening  sentence  ought  to  have  for  its 
corollary  the  statement  that  only  those 
who  have  known  delight  can  know  the 
Eternal  City.  Certainly,  Rome  has 
moods  of  glory  which  meet  and  chal- 
lenge the  most  exultant  heart.  Take 
her  in  mid-spring,  when  the  roses  are 
blooming  everywhere,  rioting  over  the 
walls  and  the  gateways,  climbing  the 
stems  of  the  tall  stone  pines,  lurking 
amid  the  ruins,  dancing  from  window 
to  window  down  the  length  of  a  so- 
ber street;  when  the  fountains  flash  in 
the  open  squares,  and  dream  among 
the  bird-haunted  shadows  of  the  ilex 
groves;  when  the  Forum  and  Palatine 
are  soft  with  vines  and  gay  with  pop- 
pies; when  the  marbles  in  the  museums 
glow  and  the  mosaics  in  the  church- 
es sparkle  like  jewels;  when  the  Cam- 
pagna  grass  is  so  thick  with  flowers 
that  one  can  hardly  walk,  and  the  larks 
singing  over  it  are  *  unbodied  joys/ 
Rome  is  a  sheer  intoxication  then. 
There  is  nothing  to  do  but  give  one's 
self  over  to  her  in  her  present  aspect, 
not  remembering  her  past  or  specu- 
lating upon  her  future,  but  glorying 
utterly  with  her  in  her  immediate  day. 
One  sits  by  the  hour  in  the  Borghese  or 
Medici  gardens,  dreaming  with  the 
fountains;  one  occupies  an  intense,  nar- 
row shadow  on  the  edge  of  the  Colos- 
seum arena,  and  looks  up  at  the  great 
sweep  of  the  sun-baked  walls,  with  lit- 
tle care  for  their  significance,  but  with 
a  dazzled  appreciation  of  their  moun- 


794 


THE   MOTHER  CITY 


tain-range  effect  against  the  vivid  sky; 
one  even  kneels  on  the  old  pavements 
of  the  serene,  cool  churches,  and  forgets 
that  they  were  not  made  yesterday. 
Color  and  fragrance,  warmth  and  song 
—  that  is  Rome  in  May. 

But  that  is  also  Paris  and  Naples; 
and  there  is  all  the  difference  in  the 
world  between  the  spring  moods  of  the 
two  latter  cities  and  that  of  Rome. 
Spring,  to  an  habitually  sober  heart,  is 
a  disturbing,  tormenting  affair  in  Paris 
or  Naples.  It  is  so  reckless  in  its  dis- 
regard of  the  graver  aspects  of  life,  so 
wholly  committed  to  the  cause  of  plea- 
sure. If  you  cannot  rejoice  with  it,  it 
leaves  you  in  the  lurch.  With  a  pre- 
cipitate gesture,  it  flings  its  beautiful, 
grave  winter  .garment  into  the  fire  and 
springs  forth  in  a  nakedness  which  does 
all  very  well  for  the  strong  and  the 
glad,  but  which  disconcerts  the  pens- 
ive. Rome  does  not  do  that.  She  di- 
vests herself  soberly  and  deliberately, 
not  flinging  her  garment  from  her,  but 
laying  it  aside.  Then,  in  the  midst  of 
her  revels,  she  keeps  her  wise,  watchful 
eyes  on  her  children;  and  when  she  sees 
any  of  them  flag  and  falter,  she  points 
to  the  ample,  abandoned  folds,  lying 
close  at  hand.  'Go  and  creep  back 


again,'  she  counsels.  'The  stress  is  too 
much  for  you.  I  understand.  It  was 
so  with  me  once,  too.  One  has  to  suffer 
a  great  deal  before  one  learns  how  to 
bear  sustained  delight.  Go  and  shelter 
yourselves  and  rest.  I  will  join  you 
pretty  soon/ 

Thus,  though  she  understands  joy, 
there  is  no  thoughtlessness  in  her  aban- 
don., no  real  forgetfulness  of  the  burden 
of  the  years.  She  invites  her  children 
to  dance  with  her,  coaxing  them  gen- 
tly; but  when  they  will  not,  she  covers 
them  with  her  cloak  and  then  lays 
them  down  where  she  can  find  them 
again  quickly. 

Rome  has  many  watchwords,  but 
perhaps  Quietness  is  the  best  of  them 
all.  Over  her  gates  might  be  written, 
'In  returning  and  in  rest  shall  ye  be 
saved;  in  quietness  and  confidence 
shall  be  your  strength.' 

Returning !  One  wonders  about  that. 
Some  of  us  have  wandered  so  far.  And 
'are  they  not  all  the  seas  of  God?' 
One  wonders  very  much.  But  at  least 
such  partial  returning  as  we  can  all 
make  from  time  to  time  is  profoundly 
good  for  us;  and  we  acknowledge  a  re- 
generation in  the  touch  of  our  Mother 
City. 


JUDAH  P.  BENJAMIN 


A   CONFEDERATE  PORTRAIT 


BY   GAMALIEL   BRADFORD,    JR. 


BENJAMIN  was  a  Jew.  He  was  born 
a  British  subject.  He  made  a  brilliant 
reputation  at  the  Louisiana  Bar  and 
was  offered  a  seat  in  the  United  States 
Supreme  Court.  He  became  United 
States  senator.  When  his  state  seceded, 
he  went  with  it,  and  filled  three  cab- 
inet positions  under  the  Confederacy. 
He  fell  with  the  immense  collapse  of 
that  dream  fabric.  Then,  at  the  age  of 
fifty-four,  he  set  himself  to  build  up  a 
new  fortune  and  a  new  glory;  and  he 
died  one  of  the  most  successful  and 
respected  barristers  in  London..  Such 
a  career  seems  to  offer  piquant  matter 
for  portraiture.  Let  us  see  if  it  does. 

Characteristic  of  the  man  at  the 
very  outset  is  his  attitude  about  such 
portraiture.  He  will  not  have  it,  if 
he  can  help  it;  will  not  aid  in  it,  de- 
stroys all  letters  and  papers  that  may 
contribute  to  it.  'I  have  never  kept 
a  diary,  or  retained  a  copy  of  a  let- 
ter written  by  me.  ...  I  have  read 
so  many  American  biographies  which 
reflected  only  the  passions  and  pre- 
judices of  their  writers,  that  I  do  not 
want  to  leave  behind  me  letters  and 
documents  to  be  used  in  such  a  work 
about  myself.'  And  he  is  said  to  have 
quoted  early  advice  given  him  to  the 
effect  that  the  secret  of  human  happi- 
ness was  the  destruction  of  writing. 
On  this  principle  he  acted  and  by  so 
doing  certainly  made  my  task  more 
difficult.  Indeed,  it  would  have  been 
impossible,  except  for  the  researches  of 


Professor  Pierce  Butler,  whose  excel- 
lent biography  must  form  the  basis  of 
all  future  writing  about  the  Jewish 
lawyer  and  statesman. 

But  if  Benjamin's  view  of  biography 
and  its  materials  is  characteristic  in  its 
secretiveness,  it  is  also  characteristic 
in  its  limitation  and  inadequacy.  I 
take  him  to  have  been  an  honest  man. 
Now,  an  honest  man  has  nothing  to 
gain  by  destroying  records.  Talleyrand 
spent  hours  of  his  retirement  in  burn- 
ing paper  after  paper.  John  Quincy 
Adams  spent  hours,  both  of  active  life 
and  retirement,  in  noting  every  detail 
of  his  existence  for  posterity.  Has  he 
not  gained  by  it?  Is  there  a  line  of  his 
that  does  not  emphasize  his  honesty, 
his  dignity,  his  human  worth?  Do  we 
not  love  Pepys  far  better  for  his  minute 
confessions,  even  if  he  loses  a  little  of 
his  bewigged  respectability?  No;  Ben- 
jamin's endeavors  to  conceal  himself 
remind  me  a  good  deal  of  the  ostrich 
which  rests  satisfied  when  it  has  left 
perfectly  obvious  the  least  intelligent 
part  of  it. 

The  truth  is,  destruction  of  records 
hampers  only  the  honest  investigator. 
The  partisan  and  the  scandal-monger 
remain  wholly  indifferent.  Professor 
Butler's  earnest  efforts  have  accom- 
plished everything  possible,  in  the 
scarcity  of  material,  to  clear  his  fav- 
orite; but  Benjamin's  popular  reputa- 
tion will  probably  continue  what  it 
was  at  the  end  of  the  war.  That  is, 

795 


796 


JUDAH  P.  BENJAMIN 


both  North  and  South  will  regard  him 
with  dislike  approaching  to  contempt. 
'The  ability  of  Benjamin  was  un- 
doubted/ says  Mr.  Rhodes,  express- 
ing the  mildest  Northern  view,  'but 
he  was  by  many  considered  untrust- 
worthy.' And  the  same  authority  sees 
nothing  in  the  Secretary's  career  in- 
compatible with  complicity  in  the  raid 
on  St.  Albans  and  the  attempt  to  burn 
New  York.  A  few  Southern  amenities 
may  also  be  cited.  'The  oleaginous 
Mr.  Benjamin,'  Wise  calls  him,  'his 
keg-like  form  and  over-deferential  man- 
ner suggestive  of  a  prosperous  shop- 
keeper.' 'The  hated  Jew,'  says  Dodd, 
'whom  the  President  had  retained  at 
his  council  table,  despite  the  protests 
of  the  Southern  people  and  press.'  And 
Foote  sums  him  up  choicely  as  '  Judas 
Iscariot  Benjamin.' 

It  is  our  affair,  from  the  mass  of 
anecdote  and  recollection,  and  espec- 
ially from  such  scanty  evidence  as  the 
gentleman  himself  could  not  avoid 
leaving  us,  to  find  out  how  far  this  atti- 
tude is  justified. 

To  begin,  then,  with  Benjamin's 
professional  life;  for  he  was  first  and 
last  a  lawyer,  only  by  avocation  a 
statesman.  It  is  universally  recognized 
that  as  a  pleader  in  court  he  had  few 
superiors.  His  power  of  direct,  lucid 
statement  was  remarkable,  and  no  one 
knew  better  how  to  present  every  re- 
mote possibility  of  argument  on  either 
side  of  a  case.  Even  his  admirers  con- 
fess that  he  sometimes  imposed  on  him- 
self in  this  way.  His  enemies  maintain 
that  he  was  not  imposed  on  at  all,  but 
argued  for  the  side  that  paid  him,  with 
serene  indifference  to  the  right  and 
wrong  of  it.  And  they  conclude  that 
in  politics  he  was  equally  indifferent. 
They  forget,  however,  that  the  lawyer's 
second  nature  does  not  always  drive 
out  the  first.  Cicero  pleaded  for  many 
a  client  whom  he  despised.  Neverthe- 
less, he  was  a  passionate  lover  of  Rome. 


As  to  Benjamin's  oratory,  opinions 
differ.  In  England  more  stress  was 
laid  on  his  matter  than  on  his  manner. 
But  in  America  friends  and  enemies 
alike  seem  to  agree  that  he  had  unus- 
ual gifts.  On  this  point  mere  printed 
speeches  are  not  sufficient  for  a  judg- 
ment. They  lack  the  gesture,  the 
expression,  the  fire,  cunningly  simu- 
lated or  real.  But,  so  far  as  such 
printed  testimony  goes,  I  fail  to  find 
the  basis  for  the  extravagant  praise  of 
Benjamin's  biographers.  His  rhetoric 
is  neither  better  nor  worse  than  that 
of  fifty  of  his  contemporaries,  a  clever 
knack  of  turning  large  phrases  on  sub- 
jects that  breed  rhetoric  in  the  very 
naming  of  them.  His  farewell  speech 
in  the  Senate  is  lofty  and  impressive. 
Who  could  have  failed  to  be  so  on  such 
an  occasion?  He  can  pass  a  noble 
compliment  like  that  to  Judge  Taney: 
'He  will  leave  behind  him  in  the 
scanty  heritage  that  shall  be  left  for 
his  family  the  noblest  evidence  that  he 
died,  as  he  had  lived,  a  being  honorable 
to  the  earth  from  which  he  sprang  and 
worthy  of  the  heaven  to  which  he 
aspired.'  And  a  few  minutes  later  he 
can  fall  into  screaming  melodrama: 
'Accursed,  thrice  accursed  is  that  fell 
spirit  of  party  which  desecrates  the  no- 
blest sentiments  of  the  human  heart, 
and  which,  in  the  accomplishment  of 
its  unholy  purposes,  hesitates  at  no 
violence  of  assault  on  all  which  is  held 
sacred  by  the  wise  and  good  .  .  .  Mr. 
President,  in  olden  times  a  viper  gnaw- 
ed a  file.' 

In  both  the  graces  and  the  defects  of 
Benjamin's  oratory  it  is  interesting  to 
note  the  riches  of  a  well-stored- mind. 
He  was  a  reader  all  his  life,  a  lover 
of  Shakespeare  and  the  great  poets, 
quoted  them  and  filled  his  thoughts 
with  them;  and  this,  too,  although  in 
youth  he  was  poor  and  had  to  fight 
hard  for  book  hours,  perhaps  all  the 
sweeter  when  thus  purchased. 


JUDAH  P.  BENJAMIN 


797 


But  the  strongest  element  of  Ben- 
jamin's public  speaking  is  a  singular 
frankness  and  directness.  Now  and 
then  he  comes  out  with  an  abrupt  sen- 
tence that  must  have  struck  the  Senate 
like  cold  water.  'I  did  not  think  I 
could  be  provoked  to  say  another  word 
on  this  subject,  of  which  I  am  heartily 
sick/  'If  the  object  [of  a  certain  bill] 
is  to  provide  for  friends  and  depend- 
ents, let  us  say  so  openly.'  'For  you 
cannot  say  two  words  on  this  floor  on 
any  subject  whatever  that  Kansas  is 
not  thrust  into  your  ears.' 

If  the  test  of  professional  ability  is 
success,  Benjamin  has  been  surpassed 
by  few.  His  early  income,  for  America 
of  the  fifties,  was  very  large,  and  when 
he  rebuilt  his  fortunes  in  London,  his 
earnings  again  rose  from  nothing  to 
seventy  or  eighty  thousand  dollars  a 
year.  I  can  find  no  evidence  whatever 
that  these  earnings  were  based  upon 
practice  dubious  or  questionable.  His 
connection  with  some  financial  schemes 
before  the  war  is  admitted  by  his  par- 
tial biographer  to  have  been  unfortu- 
nate, if  not  indiscreet.  But  certainly 
his  professional  standing  in  Louisiana 
was  totally  different  from  that  of  a 
man  like  Butler  in  Massachusetts. 

Moreover,  no  one  can  read  the  uni- 
versal testimony  to  his  position  at  the 
English  bar  without  believing  him  to 
have  been  a  high-minded  gentleman. 
Blaine's  contention  that  the  English 
admired  Benjamin  because  they  hated 
the  North  must  indeed  be  allowed 
some  weight  at  the  beginning  of  his 
career.  But  no  man  could  have  gain- 
ed increasingly  for  fifteen  years  the 
esteem  and  personal  affection  of  the 
first  lawyers  in  London,  if  he  had  not 
deserved  it.  'The  success  of  Benjamin 
at  the  English  Bar  is  without  parallel 
in  professional  annals/  says  a  good 
authority,  and  attributes  the  fact  that 
it  excited  no  jealousy  to  'the  simplic- 
ity of  his  manners,  his  entire  freedom 


from  assumption,  and  his  kindness  of 
heart/  Lord  Coleridge  called  him  'the 
common  honor  of  both  Bars,  of  Eng- 
land and  of  America/  And  Sir  Henry 
James,  speaking  at  the  farewell  dinner 
given  Benjamin  on  his  retirement, 
said : '  The  honor  of  the  English  Bar  was 
as  much  cherished  and  represented 
by  him  as  by  any  man  who  has  ever 
adorned  it,  and  we  all  feel  that  if  our 
profession  has  afforded  him  hospital- 
ity, he  has  repaid  it,  amply  repaid 
it,  not  only  by  the  reputation  which 
his  learning  has  brought  to  us,  but  by 
that  which  is  far  more  important,  the 
honor  his  conduct  has  gained  for  us/ 
Few  men  can  show  a  higher  testimonial 
to  character  than  that. 

Now  let  us  turn  to  the  political  as- 
pects of  this  varied  career.  The  Senate 
reports  in  the  Congressional  Globe  dur- 
ing the  later  fifties  show  how  constant 
and  how  many-sided  was  Benjamin's 
activity.  What  has  struck  me  especi- 
ally In  some  of  the  large  semi-private 
interests  that  he  espoused  is  that  he 
failed.  He  should  not  have  failed.  He 
may  have  been  a  great  lawyer.  To  be 
a  great  man,  he  failed  too  often. 

On  public  questions  he  invariably 
took,  the  extreme  Southern  view;  but 
it  is  characteristic  that  he  did  this 
without  exciting  animosity.  No  sena- 
tor seems  to  have  been  more  popular 
on  both  sides  of  the  house,  and  his 
adversaries  regarded  him  with  respect, 
sometimes  even  with  affection. 

When  the  Confederate  government 
was  organized,  Benjamin  was  first  made 
Attorney  General.  From  this  position 
he  quickly  passed  to  that  of  Secre- 
tary of  War.  Here  again  he  was  a 
failure.  He  had  no  special  knowledge 
and  this  made  him  obnoxious  to  sol- 
diers. Even  his  extraordinary  quick- 
ness and  business  instinct  were  hardly 
equal  to  learning  a  new  profession  in 
the  complicated  conditions  then  pre- 
vailing. Charges  of  laxity  and  of 


798 


JUDAH  P.  BENJAMIN 


corruption  amounting  to  treason  are 
brought  against  him,  I  think  wholly 
without  foundation.  But  he  struck 
one  rock  after  another  and  finally  met 
disaster  in  the  unfortunate  affair  of 
Roanoke  Island.  Wise  charged  that 
he  was  ordered  by  the  Secretary  to 
remain  in  an  impossible  position,  that 
powder  was  refused  him,  and  that  thus 
the  War  Office  led  up  to  the  catas- 
trophe. Benjamin  remained  silent  at 
the  time;  but  it  was  afterwards  ex- 
plained that  there  was  no  powder  and 
that  he  willingly  submitted  to  public 
censure  rather  than  reveal  the  defi- 
ciency. This  is  assuredly  to  his  credit. 
Congress  censured  him,  however,  and  a 
resolution  was  offered,  though  tabled, 
'that  it  is  the  deliberate  judgment  of 
this  House  that  the  Hon.  Judah  P. 
Benjamin,  as  Secretary  of  War,  has 
not  the  confidence  of  the  people  of  the 
Confederate  States,  nor  of  the  Army, 
to  such  an  extent  as  to  meet  the  exi- 
gencies of  the  present  crisis.' 

Upon  this,  Davis,  to  show  his  own 
confidence  in  his  favorite,  transferred 
him  to  the  still  higher  post  of  Secretary 
of  State.  It  is  said  that  Benjamin  here 
served  his  chief  in  innumerable  ways, 
drafting  public  documents,  suggesting 
and  advising  on  lines  quite  outside  the 
technical  limits  of  his  office.  The  best 
known  of  these  activities  were  in  re- 
gard to  the  Hampton  Roads  Peace 
Conference,  and  the  proposal  to  make 
military  use  of  the  Negroes,  and  even 
to  emancipate  them  for  the  sake  of 
securing  foreign  support.  In  these  at- 
tempts also  Benjamin  failed,  or  what 
slight  measure  of  success  there  was 
went  to  the  credit  of  others. 

In  the  State  Department  proper  he 
devoted  all  his  energy  for  three  years 
to  obtaining  foreign  recognition  —  and 
failed  again,  where  perhaps  no  one 
could  have  succeeded.  A  side  issue  in 
this  departmental  work  has  discredited 
him  more  seriously  than  any  other 


charge  that  can  plausibly  be  brought 
against  him.  Acting  generally  under 
Davis,  he  authorized  and  instructed 
the  agents  in  Canada  who  were  to 
attack  the  Northern  states  from  the 
rear.  These  men  —  Thompson  and 
others  —  fostered  discontent  and  in- 
surrection everywhere.  They  planned 
the  raid  on  St.  Albans  and  the  attempt 
to  burn  New  York  city  with  its  thou- 
sands of  innocent  women  and  children. 
There  is  no  evidence  that  Benjamin 
directly  instigated  these  undertakings. 
But  we  know  that  he  received  and  read 
Thompson's  account  of  them,  and  we 
do  not  know  that  he  ever  expressed  any 
disapproval.  Looked  at  now,  in  cold 
blood,  they  seem  without  excuse.  We 
can  only  remind  ourselves  that  passion 
has  strange  pleas,  and  that  the  whole 
South  believed  the  North  to  be  capable 
of  worse  deeds  than  any  Thompson 
contemplated;  nay,  to  have  done  them. 

In  this  matter  of  the  Canadian  at- 
tempts, Mr.  Rhodes  is  very  careful  to 
distinguish  Davis  from  his  Secretary, 
and  the  historian  cannot  believe  that 
the  Confederate  President  could  have 
been  a  partaker  in  such  infamy,  but 
implies  that  the  subordinate  officer  was 
much  less  sensitive.  I  hardly  think  Ben- 
jamin's character  deserves  this  sharp 
discrimination.  In  any  case,  I  have 
been  most  interested  to  find  one  of  the 
very  greatest  of  Virginia's  statesmen 
and  philanthropists  explicitly  advocat- 
ing just  such  an  attempt  as  that  to  fire 
New  York.  'She'  [England],  writes  Jef- 
ferson in  1812,  'may  burn  New  York, 
indeed,  by  her  ships  and  Congreve 
rockets,  in  which  case  we  must  burn 
the  city  of  London  by  hired  incendi- 
aries, of  which  her  starving  manufac- 
turers will  furnish  abundance.' 

In  all  these  manifold  schemes  of 
Benjamin  I  look  in  vain,  so  far  as 
the  records  go,  for  evidence  of  large, 
far-reaching,  creative  statesmanship. 
Again  and  again  I  ask  myself  what 


JUDAH  P.  BENJAMIN 


799 


Cavour  would  have  thought,  have  de- 
vised, have  done  in  that  position.  For 
it  is  sufficiently  manifest  that  a  man 
of  Cavour's  type  was  what  the  Confed- 
eracy needed  —  and  did  not  get.  Yet 
would  any  man  of  that  statesmanlike 
genius  and  close  practical  grasp  have 
attempted  to  solve  the  impossible  pro- 
blem of  reconciling  the  loose  theory  of 
state  rights  with  the  fiercely  central- 
ized government  required  to  cope  with 
the  overwhelming  force  of  the  North? 

At  any  rate,  Benjamin  was  no  Ca- 
vour. His  biographer  does,  indeed, 
point  out  that  he  had  something  of 
the  dreamy,  imaginative  side  of  his 
race,  as  shown  in  the  unpractical  con- 
ceptions of  his  early  business  efforts. 
But  dreamers  do  not  make  statesmen, 
usually  quite  the  contrary.  And  Ben- 
jamin's practical  statesmanship  was, 
I  think,  rather  of  the  makeshift  order. 
It  is  very  rare  that  in  his  diplomatic 
papers  we  find  any  reference  to  the 
cloudy  future  of  the  Confederacy,  and 
the  only  instance  in  which  he  amplifies 
on  the  subject,  predicting  that  North 
America  is  *  on  the  eve  of  being  divided 
into  a  number  of  independent  Gov- 
ernments with  rival,  if  not  conflicting, 
interests/  is  distinctly  in  the  nature 
of  a  dream. 

A  dream  also,  the  nightmare  of  a 
Jewish  prophet,  and  clung  to  with  a 
Jewish  prophet's  tenacity,  is  his  ever- 
recurring  hope  of  European  recogni- 
tion, which  should  free  the  South  and 
end  the  war.  Here  again,  it  seems  to 
me  that  Cavour  would  either  have  put 
the  thing  through  or  soon  have  felt  its 
hopelessness.  Even  Benjamin's  own 
foreign  agent  declares  that  failure 
should  have  been  foreseen  and  accepted 
at  a  very  early  stage.  But  Benjamin 
believed  that  recognition  must  come, 
that  Europe  could  not  be  so  foolish  as 
to  neglect  its  own  interest.  And  long 
after  the  war  he  told  W.  H.  Russell, 
in  London,  that  *  though  I  have  done 


with  politics,  thank  God!  I  consider 
your  government  made  a  frightful  mis- 
take which  you  may  have  occasion  to 
rue  hereafter.' 

Of  similar  character,  though  even 
more  general  in  the  South  and  less 
persistent  in  Benjamin,  was  the  delu- 
sion as  to  the  supremacy  of  cotton. 

If,  then,  Benjamin  was  not  a  states- 
man of  a  high  order,  or  of  large  and 
commanding  ideas,  how  was  it  that  he 
so  long  held  such  a  prominent  position 
in  the  Confederate  government?  The 
answer  is  simple,  and  two  good  reasons 
furnish  more  than  the  solution  of  the 
difficulty. 

In  the  first  place,  Benjamin  was  an 
admirable  man  of  business,  and  those 
who  have  had  the  privilege  of  meeting 
a  good  many  business  men  know  how 
rare  an  admirable  man  of  business  is. 
He  was  a  worker.  While  he  loved  ease 
and  luxury,  he  was  capable  of  enor- 
mous labor,  did  not  shirk  long  hours  or 
cumbrous  documents,  went  right  at  a 
job  and  finished  it.  He  would  remain 
at  his  desk,  when  necessary,  from  eight 
o'clock  one  morning  till  one  or  two  the 
next.  He  would  work  Sundays  and  holi- 
days. And  he  did  this  without  fatigue, 
complaint,  or  murmur,  always  cheerful- 
ly and  easily,  and  as  if  he  enjoyed  it. 

Industry  in  itself  does  not  go  far, 
however,  or  not  the  whole  way.  Ben- 
jamin had  what  is  worth  more  than 
industry,  system.  When  he  went  into 
the  war  office  he  was  no  soldier  and 
could  not  please  soldiers.  But  he  was 
an  administrator,  and  if  he  had  stuck 
to  that  phase,  I  imagine  he  would  have 
been  useful.  He  began  right  away  to 
bring  order  out  of  hopeless  confusion; 
he  organized,  systematized,  docketed. 
'Having  had  charge  of  the  War  De- 
partment but  a  few  days,'  he  writes, 
*  my  first  effort  was  to  master  our  situ- 
ation, to  understand  thoroughly  what 
we  had  and  in  what  our  deficiencies 
consisted,  but  I  have  been  completely 


800 


JUDAH  P.  BENJAMIN 


foiled  at  all  points  by  the  absence  of 
systematic  returns/  And  again,  *  With- 
out them  [returns]  we  cannot  of  course 
administer  the  service;  can  make  no 
calculations,  no  combinations,  can  pro- 
vide in  advance  with  no  approximation 
to  certainty,  and  cannot  know  how  to 
supply  deficiencies.'  A  systematizer  of 
this  order  was  a  useful  creature  in 
Richmond  during  those  four  years. 

But  another  quality,  even  more  val- 
uable than  business  habits,  sustained 
Benjamin  in  his  office :  he  was  a  student 
of  human  nature.  He  watched  charac- 
ter perpetually,  analyzed  the  motives 
of  others,  their  wants,  their  weaknesses, 
knew  how  to  adapt  himself  to  them. 
*No  shade  of  emotion  in  another  es- 
caped Mr.  Benjamin's  penetration,' 
writes  the  keen-sighted  Mrs.  Davis, 
whose  warm  regard  for  her  husband's 
adviser  is  one  of  his  best  credentials. 
*  He  seemed  to  have  a  kind  of  electric 
sympathy  with  every  mind  with  which 
he  came  into  contact,  and  very  often 
surprised  his  friends  by  alluding  to 
something  they  had  not  expressed  nor 
desired  him  to  interpret.' 

How  useful  this  quality  was  in  deal- 
ing with  Davis  can  be  appreciated 
only  by  those  who  have  studied  care- 
fully the  peculiarities  of  that  noble 
but  complicated  personage.  A  patri- 
otic idealist  in  purpose,  he  wished  to 
save  his  country,  but  he  wished  to 
save  it  in  his  own  way.  From  his  sub- 
ordinates he  desired  labor,  quick  com- 
prehension, a  hearty  support  of  all  his 
plans  and  methods.  Advice  he  did  not 
desire,  and  those  who  gave  it  had  to 
give  it  with  tact  and  extreme  delicacy. 
Here  was  exactly  the  chance  for  Judah 
P.  Benjamin.  Advice  he  did  not  espe- 
cially care  to  give,  but  no  man  could 
divine  Davis's  wishes  with  finer  sym- 
pathy, no  man  could  carry  out  his 
plans  with  more  intelligent  coopera- 
tion and  at  the  same  time  with  heartier 
self-effacement.  The  patient  skill  with 


which  the  result  was  accomplished  is 
well  indicated  by  Mrs.  Davis  when  she 
says:  'It  was  to  me  a  curious  spec- 
tacle; the  approximation  to  a  thorough 
friendliness  of  the  President  and  his 
war  minister.  It  was  a  very  gradual 
rapprochement,  but  all  the  more  solid 
for  that  reason.'  J.  B.  Jones,  the  diar- 
ist, who  disliked  and  distrusted  his 
Jewish  superior,  analyzes  the  relation 
between  President  and  Secretary  with 
much  less  approval.  'Mr.  Benjamin 
unquestionably  will  have  great  influ- 
ence with  the  President,  for  he  has 
studied  his  character  most  carefully. 
He  will  be  familiar  not  only  with  his 
"  likes,"  but  especially  with  his  "  dis- 
likes." '  And  when  Jones  hears  that  the 
President  is  about  to  be  baptized  and 
confirmed,  he  takes  comfort  because 
'it  may  place  a  gulf  between  him  and 
the  descendant  of  those  who  crucified 
the  Savior.' 

If  we  accept  Benjamin's  own  words, 
however,  and  I  think  we  may,  we  shall 
conclude  that  his  devotion  to  Davis 
was  founded,  at  any  rate  in  part,  on  a 
sincere  esteem  and  admiration.  Writ- 
ing to  the  London  Times  after  the  war, 
he  says:  'For  the  four  years  during 
which  I  have  been  one  of  his  most 
privileged  advisers,  the  recipient  of  his 
confidence  and  sharer  to  the  best  of  my 
ability  in  his  labors  and  responsibilities, 
I  have  learned  to  know  him  better 
perhaps  than  he  is  known  by  any  other 
living  man.  Neither  in  private  con- 
versation nor  in  Cabinet  council  have 
I  ever  heard  him  utter  one  unworthy 
thought,  one  ungenerous  sentiment.' 

No  one,  then,  could  long  retain 
Davis's  confidence  without  an  abun- 
dant supply  of  tact  and  sympathy. 
Probably  the  two  men  who  made  most 
use  of  these  qualities  in  their  deal- 
ings with  the  President  were  Lee  and 
Benjamin.  But  an  instructive  differ- 
ence strikes  us  here.  Lee's  tact  sprang 
spontaneously  from  natural  human 


JUDAH  P.  BENJAMIN 


801 


kindness.  He  treated  his  inferiors  ex- 
actly as  he  treated  his  sole  superior, 
and  was  as  courteous  and  sympathetic 
to  the  humblest  soldier  as  to  the  Presi- 
dent of  the  Confederacy.  With  Ben- 
jamin it  is  wholly  otherwise.  He  was 
at  the  war  office  for  just  six  months. 
In  that  time  I  will  not  say  he  quarreled 
with  everybody  under  him,  but  he 
alienated  many,  and  quarreled  with 
such  a  number  that  his  stay  there  is 
but  a  record  of  harsh  words  and  re- 
crimination. One  brief  telegram  to 
McCulloch  will  abundantly  illustrate 
the  cause  of  this  state  of  things:  *I 
cannot  understand  why  you  withdrew 
your  troops  instead  of  pursuing  the 
enemy  when  his  leaders  were  quarrel- 
ing and  his  army  separated  into  parts 
under  different  commanders.  Send  an 
explanation.' 

This  sort  of  dispatch,  from  a  lawyer 
who  had  never  seen  a  skirmish,  to 
generals  of  old  experience  and  solid 
training,  was  not  likely  to  breed  good 
feeling,  much  less  to  restore  it.  It  did 
not.  Benjamin  had  trouble  with  Wise, 
trouble  with  Beauregard,  trouble  re- 
peatedly with  J.  E.  Johnston,  and 
drove  Jackson  to  a  resignation  which, 
if  it  had  been  accepted,  might  have 
changed  the  course  of  the  war.  This  is 
surely  a  pretty  record  for  six  months. 
And  observe  that  in  many  instances 
the  Secretary  appears  to  have  been 
right  and  wise.  This  only  emphasizes 
the  misfortune  of  his  getting  into  such 
difficulty.  The  suavity,  the  graceful 
tact  which  served  him  so  well  with 
Davis,  seem  to  have  deserted  him  in 
dealing  with  those  over  whom  he  had 
control.  Or  rather,  it  is  said  that  the 
very  suavity  produced  double  exas- 
peration when  it  was  used  merely  to 
glove  an  arbitrary  display  of  authority. 
'When  I  do  not  agree  with  Benjamin, 
I  will  not  let  him  talk  to  me/  said 
Slidell,  who  was  his  friend,  *  he  irritates 
me  so  by  his  debonair  ways.' 
VOL.  in -NO.  e 


And  now,  with  the  qualities  of  Ben- 
jamin's public  career  clearly  suggested, 
let  us  turn  for  a  moment  to  his  private 
life  and  see  how  that  helps  to  illumin- 
ate the  other. 

To  begin  with  his  social  relations. 
As  with  Davis,  so  with  all  his  equals 
whom  he  met  in  daily  intercourse,  his 
manner  was  full  of  courtesy,  some  even 
say,  charm.  To  be  sure,  Wise  calls  him 
*  oleaginous';  but  Alfriend,  who  knew 
him  well,  goes  to  the  other  extreme: 
'I  have  never  known  a  man  socially 
more  fascinating  than  Judah  P.  Ben- 
jamin. He  was  in  his  attainments  a 
veritable  Admiral  [sic]  Crichton,  and  I 
think,  excepting  G.  P.  R.  James,  the 
most  brilliant,  fascinating  conversa- 
tionalist I  have  ever  known.'  One  is 
tempted  to  blend  these  two  views  in 
Charles  Lamb's  pleasant  characteriza- 
tion of  the  singer  Braham.  'He  was  a 
rare  composition  of  the  Jew,  the  gen- 
tleman, and  the  angel;  yet  all  these 
elements  mixed  up  so  kindly  in  him, 
that  you  could  not  tell  which  pre- 
ponderated.' 

Less  prejudiced  judges  than  those 
above  quoted  render  a  verdict  which 
is  still  decidedly  favorable.  In  his 
earlier  career  in  the  United  States 
Senate,  Benjamin  is  said  to  have  been 
generally  popular  and  to  have  en- 
deavored always  to  foster  social  rela- 
tions; and  Sumner,  his  bitterest  oppo- 
nent, bore  testimony  to  his  kindness  of 
manner  and  conformity  to  the  proprie- 
ties of  debate.  W.  H.  Russell  speaks 
of  his  *  brisk,  lively,  agreeable  man- 
ner,' and  calls  him  'the  most  open, 
frank,  and  cordial  of  the  Confederates 
whom  I  have  yet  met.'  Thomas  F. 
Bayard,  surely  a  connoisseur,  says  that 
Benjamin's  'manner  was  most  attract- 
ive —  gentle,  sympathetic,  and  abso- 
lutely unaffected,'  and  that  'he  cer- 
tainly shone  in  social  life  as  a  refined, 
genial,  charming  companion.'  And  the 
testimony  of  his  English  friends  is 


802 


JUDAH  P.  BENJAMIN 


equally  decided.  'A  charming  compan- 
ion,' writes  Sir  Frederick  Pollock,  'an 
accomplished  brother  lawyer  and  a 
true  friend;  one  I  could  not  easily 
replace.' 

In  many  of  these  social  sketches  of 
Benjamin  there  is  a  curious  insistence 
on  his  smile,  which  seems  to  have  been 
as  perennial  as  Malvolio's,  if  a  little 
more  natural.  'The  perpetual  smile 
that  basked  on  his  Jewish  lips,'  says 
the  acrid  Pollard.  And  Jones,  in  his 
Diary,  recurs  to  it  almost  as  a  third- 
rate  playwright  does  to  a  character  tag, 
so  much  so  that  on  one  occasion  he 
notes  Mr.  Benjamin's  appearance  with- 
out his  smile  as  of  inauspicious  omen. 
'Upon  his  lip  there  seems  to  bask  an 
eternal  smile;  but  if  it  be  studied,  it 
is  not  a  smile  —  yet  it  bears  no  unpleas- 
ant aspect.' 

The  implication  in  some  descriptions 
that  the  smile  and  the  courtesy  were 
only  on  the  surface  is,  I  think,  clearly 
unjust.  Benjamin  was  not,  perhaps,  a 
philanthropist;  but  there  is  record  of 
many  kindly  deeds  of  his,  none  the  less 
genuine  for  not  being  trumpeted.  He 
once  lost  sixty  thousand  dollars  by 
endorsing  a  note  for  a  friend,  which, 
of  a  Jew,  is  worth  remembering.  Al- 
though never  especially  enthusiastic 
for  his  religion,  he  was  ready  to  help  a 
fellow  Hebrew  who  wanted  help,  and 
it  is  said  that  old  and  needy  Confed- 
erates in  London  did  not  apply  to  him 
for  aid  in  vain. 

Also,  the  smile  was  for  himself,  as 
well  as  for  others.  That  is,  it  represent- 
ed an  attitude  toward  life.  Through 
many  ups  and  downs  and  odd  turns 
and  freaks  of  Fortune,  Benjamin  was 
never  discouraged,  never  depressed.  I 
do  not  think  this  meant  in  him  any 
great  strain  of  heroic  fortitude.  The 
smile  shows  that.  It  was  an  easy-going 
egotism,  which  neither  touched  nor  was 
touched  deeply,  a  serene,  healthy  well- 
being  which  let  the  blows  of  adversity 


strike  and  glance  off,  which  turned  tri- 
fles into  great  pleasures  and  very  great 
evils  into  trifles.  When  work  was  need- 
ed, he  worked  with  all  that  was  in  him. 
When  he  failed  and  fell,  instead  of 
being  crushed,  he  jumped  up,  smiled, 
brushed  off  his  clothes,  and  worked 
again.  Where  will  you  find  a  finer  in- 
stance of  recovery  after  utter  disaster 
than  this  man's  rise  in  late  life  from 
nothing  to  fortune  in  a  new  country 
and  an  untried  sphere?  Even  in  his 
formal  and  official  correspondence  you 
catch  little  glimpses  of  the  easy,  devil- 
may-care  fashion  in  which  he  took  re- 
sponsibilities that  would  have  crushed 
others.  Thus  he  ends  a  long  letter  of 
difficulty  and  trouble  to  his  predecessor 
in  the  war  office:  'What  a  bed  of  roses 
you  have  bequeathed  me ! '  Or  he  writes 
to  Sidney  Johnston  —  of  all  men :  '  In 
Mississippi  and  Tennessee  your  un- 
lucky offer  to  receive  unarmed  men  for 
twelve  months  has  played  the  deuce 
with  our  camps.'  Fancy  Lee  or  Davis 
writing  that! 

For  a  man  armed  with  a  smile  of 
this  kind,  religion  is  a  superfluity,  and 
it  appears  that  Benjamin  had  none. 
He  practically  dropped  his  own  and 
never  had  the  interest  to  pick  up  any 
other.  He  did,  indeed,  —  unless  he 
has  been  confused  with  Disraeli, — 
tell  a  sneerer  at  Judaism  that  his  own 
ancestors  were  receiving  the  law  from 
Deity  on  Mt.  Sinai  when  the  sneerer 's 
were  herding  swine  in  the  forests  of 
Saxony;  but  this  was  to  make  a  point 
for  the  gallery,  just  as  his  burial  in 
Paris  with  Catholic  rites  was  pour 
plaire  aux  dames.  His  religion  would 
not  have  been  worth  mentioning  but 
for  the  delightful  anecdote  of  Daniel 
Webster's  assuring  him  and  Maury, 
the  scientist,  that  they  were  all  three 
Unitarians  together.  Benjamin  denied 
this,  and  invited  Webster  to  dine  with 
him  to  prove  it.  They  dined  and  ar- 
gued, but  Benjamin  would  not  be  con- 


JUDAH  P.  BENJAMIN 


803 


vinced,  though  he  did  not  know  enough 
about  the  Bible  to  hold  his  ground. 
Oh,  to  have  been  present  at  that  din- 
ner! What  conversation  —  and  what 
wine  and  cigars! 

As  this  discussion  may  imply,  and  as 
abundant  evidence  proves,  Benjamin, 
for  all  his  smiles  and  all  his  optimism, 
was  neither  cold  nor  always  perfect  in 
command  of  his  temper.  'He  was 
like  fire  and  tow,'  says  Mrs.  Davis, 
perhaps  exaggerating  in  view  of  an  in- 
cident shortly  to  be  mentioned,  'and 
sensitive  about  his  dignity.'  I  do  not 
imagine  that  this  went  very  deep,  but 
at  any  rate  the  Southern  sun  had 
touched  the  surface  with  a  singular 
petulance  and  vivacity.  Even  in  age 
and  in  London  fogs  the  temper  would 
fly  out.  As  when,  before  the  solemn 
gravity  of  the  House  of  Lords,  Benja- 
min was  arguing  a  case  and  heard  the 
Lord  Chancellor  mutter,  'Nonsense!' 
The  barrister  stopped,  gathered  up  his 
papers,  and  abruptly  departed.  So  high 
was  his  standing  at  that  time  that  the 
Chancellor  felt  obliged  to  make  things 
right  by  an  apology. 

Even  more  entertaining  is  the  earl- 
ier spat  between  Benjamin  and  Davis. 
Senatorial  tempers  were  high-strained 
in  Washington  in  the  fifties,  and  men 
sometimes  fell  foul  of  friends  as  well 
as  foes.  The  slap-dash,  boyish  inter- 
change of  curt  phrases,  even  as  staled 
in  the  cold  storage  of  the  Congressional 
Globe,  must  have  rejoiced  Seward  and 
Sumner.  Its  straight-from-the-shoul- 
der  quality,  coming  from  such  reverend 
sages,  recalls  the  immortal  dialogue 
which  Adam  Smith  reports  himself  and 
Dr.  Johnson  as  exchanging,  like  coal- 
heavers.  'What  did  Dr.  Johnson  say, 
sir?'  —  Smith :  'He  said  I  was  a  liar.' 
'And  what  did  you  say?'  'I  said  he 
was  a  ' — never  mind  what.  Benjamin's 
language  is  more  senatorial,  but  not 
too  much  so.  '  The  Senator  is  mistaken 
and  has  no  right  to  state  any  such 


thing.  His  manner  is  not  agreeable  at 
all.'  — Davis:  'If  the  Senator  happens 
to  find  it  disagreeable,  I  hope  he  will 
keep  it  to  himself.' —  Benjamin :  'When 
directed  to  me,  I  will  not  keep  it  to 
myself;  I  will  repel  it  instanter.'  —  Da- 
vis: 'You  have  got  it,  sir.' 

And  pistols  for  two,  of  course.  But 
kind  friends  prevented  the  future  sec- 
retary of  state  from  shooting  at  his 
president.  More  seriously  instructive 
and  profitable  is  the  contrast  between 
the  explanations  offered  by  the  two 
men  in  the  Senate.  Davis's  is  in  his 
best  style,  nobly  characteristic,  as  thor- 
oughly frank  as  it  is  manly  and  dig- 
nified. Benjamin's  is  well  enough,  but 
cautious,  as  if  he  were  afraid  of  his  po- 
sition and  anxious  not  to  say  a  word 
too  much. 

The  keen  sensibility,  whether  super- 
ficial or  not,  which  appears  in  these 
incidents,  characterized  Benjamin  in 
other  ways  besides  temper.  He  liked 
excitement.  It  was  the  excitement  of 
public  contest  that  made  for  him,  I 
think,  the  charm  of  his  profession. 
After  the  war  he  was  offered  an  excel- 
lent opening  in  Parisian  finance,  but 
he  preferred  to  fight  his  way  up  in  the 
English  courts.  And  there  is  a  remark- 
able sentence  in  his  speech  at  the  fare- 
well dinner,  when  he  mentions  having 
been  ordered  by  his  physicians  to 
avoid  the  excitement  of  active  prac- 
tice: 'I  need  hardly  tell  an  audience 
like  this  that  to  tell  me  or  any  person 
of  a  nature  like  mine  to  abstain  from 
all  possible  excitement  is  to  tell  him 
to  cease  the  active  exercise  of  the 
profession;  for  without  the  ardor  of 
forensic  contest  what  is  the  profession 
worth?' 

He  liked  excitement  in  the  form  of 
games,  also,  liked  billiards  and  whist. 
W.  H.  Russell  even  records  as  Wash- 
ington scandal  that  Benjamin  lost  the 
major  part  of  his  very  large  income  at 
cards.  His  biographer  denies  this,  but 


804 


JUDAH  P.  BENJAMIN 


in  rather  mild  fashion,  asserting  that 
he  was  'not  a  rabid  gambler ';  and  Ben- 
jamin himself  seems  less  concerned  at 
the  accusation  than  at  Russell's  in- 
gratitude in  making  it. 

On  graver  points  of  morals  I  find  no 
trace  of  any  charge  whatever  against 
Benjamin.  But,  in  spite  of  his  im- 
mense capacity  for  work,  he  was  gen- 
erally known  as  a  lover  of  ease  and 
good  living.  This,  assuredly  no  vice  in 
itself,  came  almost  to  appear  like  one 
in  those  last  hungry  months  of  the 
Confederacy.  Very  characteristic  of 
the  man  —  more  so,  perhaps,  than  she 
means  it  to  be  —  is  Mrs.  Da  vis's  little 
sketch:  'He  used  to  say  that  with 
bread  made  of  Crenshaw's  flour,  spread 
with  paste  made  from  English  walnuts 
from  an  immense  tree  in  our  grounds, 
and  a  glass  of  McHenry  sherry,  of 
which  we  had  a  scanty  store,  "a  man's 
patriotism  became  rampant." '  Alfriend 
also  gives  us  a  significant  touch:  'Mr. 
Benjamin  loved  a  good  dinner,  a  good 
glass  of  wine,  and  reveled  in  the  delights 
of  fine  Havana  cigars.  Indeed,  even 
when  Richmond  was  in  a  state  of  siege, 
he  was  never  without  them.'  Immedi- 
ately beside  this  I  do  not  think  it  cruel 
to  put  his  own  letter  in  regard  to  sol- 
diers who  were  starving  on  half  rations 
and  to  whom  a  crust  was  luxury: 
'Hardship  and  exposure  will  undoubt- 
edly be  suffered  by  our  troops,  but 
this  is  war,  and  we  cannot  hope  to  con- 
quer our  liberties  or  secure  our  rights 
by  ease  and  comfort.'  [Italics  mine.] 

On  this  very  point  of  good  eating, 
however,  we  must  at  the  same  time 
note  the  man's  kindliness  and  gentle 
heart.  What  he  liked,  he  thought 
others  would  like,  and  was  glad  to  get 
it  for  them,  if  he  could.  Thus  Mrs. 
Davis  records  that  at  a  very  good  din- 
ner Benjamin  seemed  ill  at  ease  and 
confessed  that  he  was  thinking  how 
much  his  brother-in-law,  left  alone  at 
home,  would  enjoy  some  of  the  deli- 


cacies; whereupon  he  received  a  share 
for  his  companion  and  went  away 
contented. 

Undeniably,  in  the  matter  of  relatives 
Benjamin  appears  at  his  best,  and  his 
affection  and  thought  for  them  —  thor- 
oughly racial  attributes  —  are  pleasant 
to  read  about.  With  his  French  Cath- 
olic wife  he  did  not,  indeed,  wholly 
agree.  There  was  no  formal  separa- 
tion or  quarrel.  But  for  the  greater 
part  of  the  time  she  lived  in  Paris  and 
her  husband  in  America  or  England. 
Benjamin's  biographer  attributes  this 
largely  to  faults  of  her  disposition. 
Perhaps  he  is  right.  But  I  would  give 
a  good  deal  for  Mrs.  Benjamin's  view 
of  her  husband.  So  far  as  I  know,  only 
one  recorded  sentence  of  her  writing 
twinkles  in  the  memory  of  men.  But 
that  one  is  a  jewel.  It  paints  the 
woman;  it  paints  the  Southern  Creole 
class,  and  much  that  is  Northern  and 
human  also;  it  paints  wide  vistas  of 
domestic  infelicity;  and  it  shows 
charmingly  that  Benjamin  had  found 
the  superlative  in  an  art  in  which  he 
could  furnish  a  good  comparative  him- 
self. He  writes  to  his  wife  urging 
economy,  and  she  writes  back:  'Do 
not  speak  to  me  of  economy:  it  is  so 
fatiguing.'  Miss  Austen  might  have 
invented  the  phrase,  —  she  could  not 
have  bettered  it. 

But  Benjamin  afforded  rather  a 
singularity  in  matrimonial  affairs  by 
apparently  caring  much  more  about 
his  wife's  relatives  than  he  did  about 
her.  And  to  those  connected  with  him 
by  blood,  his  daughter,  sisters,  nieces, 
and  nephews,  he  was  deeply  and 
devotedly  attached.  His  few  extant 
letters  to  them  form  very  attractive 
reading,  and  show  a  man  as  lovable  as 
he  was  clever.  They  are  full  of  a  light 
and  graceful  playfulness,  gossiping  of 
trivial  things  in  just  the  way  that  love 
appreciates. 

Yet  how  infinite  are  the  shades  and 


JUDAH  P.  BENJAMIN 


805 


diversities  of  character!  For  all  this 
graceful  playfulness  in  his  private  let- 
ters, for  all  his  reported  wit  in  conver- 
sation, I  do  not  find  that  Benjamin 
had  much  of  that  complicated  charac- 
teristic which  we  call  humor.  I  do  not 
find  it  in  many  of  these  Southern 
leaders.  It  is  as  absent  from  the  bril- 
liant cleverness  of  a  Dick  Taylor  as  it 
is  from  the  rhetoric  of  a  Davis.  At 
any  rate,  I  miss  it  in  Benjamin.  Read 
in  the  Congressional  Globe  the  seces- 
sion debate  in  which  Baker  of  Oregon 
simply  demolishes  Benjamin,  not  by 
argument,  but  by  pure  Lincolnian 
quizzing,  which  the  Southerner  cannot 
meet  because  he  cannot  understand  it. 
For  the  height  and  depth  of  humor  the 
man  did  not  view  life  at  a  large  enough 
angle.  He  smiled  perpetually,  but  his 
smile  was  the  pleasant  smirk  of  social 
responsiveness,  and  took  no  account 
at  all  of  the  tragedies  of  existence. 

And  now  I  think  we  are  in  a  posi- 
tion to  consider  what  was  Benjamin's 
real  attitude  toward  the  Confederacy. 
First,  was  he  an  able,  selfish,  scheming, 
unscrupulous  adventurer,  who  played 
the  game  simply  for  his  own  personal 
ambition  and  aggrandizement;  a  sort 
of  Talleyrand?  This  may  be  excluded 
at  once.  If  there  were  no  other  evi- 
dence, little  more  would  be  needed 
than  his  own  evidently  genuine  com- 
parison of  Gladstone  and  Disraeli,  de- 
cidedly in  favor  of  the  former,  who, 
indeed,  is  said  to  have  been  Benjamin's 
idol.  Gilmore,  who,  with  Jacquess,  vis- 
ited the  Secretary  in  Richmond,  gives 
a  description  which  is  vital  on  this 
point.  'There  is  something,  after  all, 
in  moral  power.  Mr.  Benjamin  does 
not  possess  it,  nor  is  he  a  great  man. 
He  has  a  keen,  shrewd,  ready  intellect, 
but  not  the  stamina  to  originate,  or 
even  to  execute,  any  great  good  or 
great  wickedness.' 

But  again,  some  who  recognize  Ben- 
jamin's honesty  assert  that  he  took  up 


the  Confederate  cause  as  a  mere  law 
case,  utterly  indifferent  to  its  wrong 
or  right,  or  to  any  personal  issue,  giv- 
ing it  his  best  service  as  long  as  he 
could,  then  turning  cheerfully  to  some- 
thing else.  Here  also  I  think  there  is 
error.  The  man's  whole  heart  was  in 
the  work  and  he  felt  for  it  as  deeply  as 
he  could  feel.  Passage  after  passage  in 
his  public  and  private  writings  shows 
indisputably  the  partisan  hatred  and 
the  devoted  enthusiasm  of  the  loyal 
citizen.  'I  entertain  no  doubt  what- 
ever that  hundreds  of  thousands  of 
people  at  the  North  would  be  frantic 
with  fiendish  delight  if  informed  of  the 
universal  massacre  of  the  Southern 
people,  including  women  and  children, 
in  one  night.'  '  No  people  have  poured 
out  their  blood  more  freely  in  defense 
of  their  liberty  and  independence,  nor 
have  endured  sacrifices  with  greater 
cheerfulness  than  have  the  men  and 
women  of  these  Confederate  States. 
They  accepted  the  issue  which  was 
forced  on  them  by  an  arrogant  and 
domineering  race,  vengeful,  grasping, 
and  ambitious.  They  have  asked  no- 
thing, fought  for  nothing,  but  for  the 
right  of  self-government,  for  independ- 
ence/ 'How  it  makes  one's  breast  swell 
with  emotion  to  witness  the  calm,  her- 
oic, unconquerable  determination  to 
be  free  that  fills  the  breast  of  all  ages, 
sexes,  and  conditions.' 

Like  many  other  Southerners,  Ben- 
jamin rather  melodramatically  declared 
that  he  would  never  be  taken  alive.  He 
never  was.  Like  many  others,  he  de- 
clared that  he  would  never,  never  sub- 
mit. And  he  never  submitted.  The 
Jewish  obstinacy  would  not  be  over- 
come. 

No;  it  is  utterly  unjust  to  deny  that 
his  patriotism  was  genuine,  or  that  he 
gave  his  very  best  sincerely,  and  in  his 
way  unselfishly,  to  what  he  felt  to  be 
his  country.  Only,  with  him  nothing 
went  deep.  When  the  struggle  was 


806 


STUDIES  IN  SOLITUDE 


over,  it  was  over.  Some  measure  of  his 
sunny  cheerfulness  must  be  credited  to 
self-control.  Most  of  it  was  tempera- 
ment. Lee,  too,  made  no  complaint;  but 
the  tragedy  of  his  people  was  written 
perpetually  on  his  face.  Benjamin's 
face  would  not  take  impressions  of 
that  nature.  Not  one  regret  for  a  lost 
cause  or  a  vanished  country  is  to  be 
found  in  his  intimate  personal  letters. 
'  I  am  contented  and  cheerful  under  all 
reverses,'  he  writes.  And  he  was. 

The  truth  is,  viewed  by  the  perma- 
nent standards  of  history,  he  was  a 
small  man,  a  small  man  placed  in  a 
great  position,  and  he  rattled  about  in 
it.  The  crises  of  nations  always  exhibit 
such  misfits,  in  lamentable  number. 
But  with  Benjamin  the  impression  pre- 
vails that  he  was  a  man  of  remark- 


able ability,  an  adventurer  of  genius, 
but  of  little  character.  This  view  was 
strong  upon  me  when  I  began  to  study 
him.  Now  I  am  forced  to  the  opposite 
conclusion,  that  his  character  was  re- 
spectable, if  not  unexceptionable,  but 
his  ability  mediocre.  Davis  damned 
the  latter  with  the  faintest  possible 
praise,  to  a  nicety:  'Mr.  Benjamin,  of 
Louisiana,  had  a  very  high  reputation 
as  a  lawyer,  and  my  acquaintance 
with  him  in  the  Senate  had  impressed 
me  with  the  lucidity  of  his  intellect, 
his  systematic  habits,  and  capacity  for 
labor.' 

In  short,  he  was  an  average,  hono- 
rable, and,  in  politics,  rather  ineffect- 
ual gentleman.  Perhaps  he  would  have 
preferred  a  different  verdict.  If  so,  he 
should  not  have  destroyed  those  papers. 


STUDIES  IN  SOLITUDE 


BY   FANNIE   STEARNS  DAVIS 


SHE  was  never  lonely,  she  told  her- 
self. The  solitude  of  her  old  little  white 
house,  sitting  retired  from  the  village 
street  among  its  lilac  trees  and  syrin- 
gas,  did  not  frighten  or  depress  her. 
She  could  spend  a  whole  day  of  rain 
there,  seeing  no  one  but  the  grocer's 
boy,  the  big  gray  cat,  and  occasional 
stooped  hurrying  figures  out  in  the  wet 
street;  and  could  come  down  into  eve- 
ning calmly,  busied  with  her  enforced 
or  chosen  duties  and  thoughts.  A  cloud 
seemed  to  wrap  her  round  in  many 
folds  of  seclusion  till  the  common  world 
of  hurry  and  friction  and  loud  or  se- 


cret loves  and  hates  was  dim  to  her 
eyes  and  ears.  Street  sounds  and  whis- 
tles of  trains  at  the  cross-roads  were 
muffled  echoes;  but  the  ticking  of  the 
tall  clock,  the  throbbing  of  rain  on  a 
tin  roof,  the  infrequent  wind  banging 
at  a  loose  window,  the  cat's  creepy 
tread  on  the  stairs,  grew  rhythmic  and 
insistent. 

Yet  she  was  not  lonely.  She  never 
stopped  to  brood,  listening  long  to 
perilous  voices.  She  denied  even  to 
certain  pieces  of  furniture,  books,  or 
ornaments,  their  passive  right  to  con- 
jure up  the  spectre  of  her  solitude.  If 
a  room  seemed  too  vibrant  with  unseen 
presences,  she  would  enter  it  and  drive 


STUDIES  IN  SOLITUDE 


807 


out  the  quivering  mystery  with  some 
brisk  petty  business  of  sweeping,  of 
shifting  a  picture,  or  rearranging  a 
book-shelf.  Often  she  whistled  softly 
about  her  work,  although  there  were 
moments  when  as  if  by  an  instinct  she 
would  stop  short  and  glance  over  her 
shoulder,  to  see  nothing,  and  after  that 
to  be  still. 

So  the  day  would  shift  from  gray 
dawn  to  gray  dusk;  and  she  had  not 
allowed  herself  to  think  that  she  might 
have  cause  for  loneliness,  there  in  the 
quiet  house  behind  its  dripping  lilac 
trees. 

Only  in  the  evenings  did  the  clock 
and  the  rain  become  too  loud  and  real. 
Then,  as  she  sat  with  a  pleasant  book 
or  broidery  in  the  yellow  lamplit  circle 
of  her  sitting-room,  warm  and  quaint 
in  its  accumulation  of  color,  —  old  gay 
reds,  greens,  blues,  tumbled  together 
by  generations  of  fond  house-holders, 
and  now  subdued  into  harmony  by 
years  and  the  low  light,  —  she  would 
find  herself  all  at  once  rigid  as  an  ice- 
image,  yet  alert  as  a  coiled  serpent;  lis- 
tening, listening,  —  for  what?  For  a 
quick  step  on  the  flags  before  the  door? 
For  a  long  jangling  peal  at  the  bell  ?  For 
a  voice  in  the  hall,  or  a  sick  querulous 
summons  from  the  downstairs  cham- 
ber, or  the  scraping  of  a  chair  from 
above?  No,  she  knew  that  she  had  no 
cause  to  wait  for  these  things.  There 
was  only  the  rain,  the  clock,  sleek 
Diogenes  purring  on  the  white  fox- 
skin,  the  lamp-wick  fretting  a  little  to 
itself,  and  once  in  a  while,  out  in  the 
dark  street,  the  splash  and  clatter  of 
wheels,  the  faint  wet  whisper  of  feet 
that  always  passed  her  gate. 

So,  with  a  self-scorning  smile  and  a 
drawing  of  her  hand  across  her  eyes, 
she  would  take  up  again  the  book  or 
needle-work,  and  stop  abruptly  that 
rigid  listening  for  sounds  which  never 
came.  Long  since,  on  her  first  solitary 
night  in  the  old  house,  she  had  vowed 


to  herself  that  she  would  not  be  sad,  or 
strange,  no  matter  what  tricks  her 
heart  and  mind  might  play  her.  She 
would  not  fear  memory  and  anticipa- 
tion, but  would  compel  them  to  be  her 
servants,  to  keep  their  distance.  She 
had  been  young  then,  and  had  not 
quite  believed  in  her  solitude.  Now 
that  she  knew  it  through  and  through, 
she  was  still  aware  that  to  look  too  far 
back  or  too  far  forward  would  equally 
undo  her.  On  these  rainy  nights  of 
withdrawal,  her  trial-times  were  still 
upon  her.  If  she  failed  now,  if  one 
shudder  or  one  tear  escaped  her,  she 
was  lost  forever;  and  the  white  house 
would  drive  her  out,  into  a  world 
where  she  could  no  more  choose  her 
own  way  of  being  alone. 

But  she  was  not  lonely,  she  repeated ; 
and  to  prove  it,  her  mind  would  in- 
dulge in  a  fantasia  of  loneliness.  The 
book  would  slip  from  her  hand,  and 
she,  gazing  half-hypnotized  into  shad- 
owy corners,  visited  all  the  solitary 
people  over  the  wide  world.  It  pleased 
her  to  imagine  homesick  officers  in 
stifling  Indian  bungalows;  young  men 
and  girls,  fresh  come  to  the  City, 
wandering  forlorn  through  the  glare  of 
streets,  or  idling  under  their  meagre 
lodging-house  gas-jets;  light-keepers  on 
desolate  sand-dunes  and  rock-ledges, 
climbing  at  night  twisted  iron  steps  to 
tend  the  eternal  lamp;  night-watch- 
men pacing  deserted  ^ards  and  mill- 
corridors;  sailors  in  the  dead  watch; 
poets  and  prophets  trying  passion- 
ately to  capture  the  wild  visions  which 
leaped  across  their  darkness;  and  most 
of  all,  many  women  sitting  as  she  did 
in  warm  quaint  rooms,  near  village 
streets,  hearing  the  clock  tick  and  the 
rain  throb. 

It  pleased  her,  to  travel  so  on  light 
unhindered  wing.  Almost  it  seemed  as 
if  her  soul  left  her  body,  and  fared 
out  to  knock  against  every  lonely  win- 
dow and  to  keep  dumb  company  round 


808 


STUDIES  IN  SOLITUDE 


every  solitary  lamp.  And  she  felt 
that  she  was  one  of  an  endless  army, 
marching  straightforwardly  and  silent- 
ly out  upon  their  lives,  stripped  of 
the  disguises  that  kindred  and  close 
friendship  invent,  and  making,  in  re- 
turn for  the  silence  of  their  hearts  and 
the  smiling  of  their  lips,  only  one  de- 
mand of  all  that  encountered  them. 

That  demand  she  never  shaped,  of 
her  own  will.  But  when  she  had  sat  a 
long  time,  dreaming,  and  had  at  length 
roused  herself  to  make  fast  doors  and 
windows,  had  shut  the  cat  in  the  kitch- 
en, taken  her  hand-lamp  and  gone  up 
the  broad  stairs  to  bed,  —  then,  in  the 
gay  chintz-hung  security  of  her  own 
chamber,  her  throat  would  fashion  in- 
voluntarily those  words  that  her  heart 
and  lips  refused  to  let  themselves  speak. 

'It  is  all  right  enough/  her  throat 
would  say  for  her,  as  she  turned  down 
the  counterpane,  untied  her  shoes,  and 
wound  her  watch.  '  I  am  quite  all  safe 
and  right.  But  —  no  one  must  ask  me 
—  if  I  am  lonely.  No  one  must  ever 
ask  me  that.' 

ii 

It  had  appeared  presently  that  her 
house  was  haunted,  though  not  by 
ghostly  terrors.  For  herself,  she  had 
only  felt,  at  times,  the  vaguely  imag- 
ined intimation  of  some  presence  other 
than  her  own  in  the  quiet  rooms.  But 
she  had  no  surer  knowledge  of  her 
dimly  harbored  guests  until  a  friend, 
wearied  out  with  the  love  and  care  of 
over-many  babies,  came  to  her  for  rest; 
and  after  two  days  of  grateful  idle- 
ness in  her  sunny  window,  asked  sud- 
denly, — 

'Miriam,  whose  are  the  Voices?' 
'What  voices?'  Miriam  parried;  and 
Lucy  described  them :  happy,  laughing 
voices,  as  of  young  people  playing 
and  gossiping  together.  '  I  have  heard 
them  so  often  when  I  was  lying  alone 
and  you  were  out,  or  off  somewhere.  I 


almost  asked  a  dozen  times  who  was 
talking.  They  are  always  downstairs, 
or  across  the  hall,  or  under  the  win- 
dow; and  they  are  such  happy  voices: 
young  voices,  —  oh,  very  sweet  and 
glad.' 

Miriam  smiled  and  stroked  her 
friend's  nervous  fingers.  Lucy  had  al- 
ways heard  and  seen  more  than  other 
people  did,  and  now  that  she  was  so 
tired,  no  doubt  her  worn-out  fancy 
befooled  her  lightly.  They  talked  it 
over  together.  Lucy,  smiling  at  her- 
self, none  the  less  insisted:  there  were 
Voices  in  the  house. 

'Some  time  you'll  hear  them  too,' 
she  nodded.  '  They  're  not  sad  or  dread- 
ful or  gloomy;  oh  no!  They're  just 
young  and  glad.  I  love  to  hear  them.' 

And  another  evening,  when  Miriam 
came  into  the  sitting-room  after  an 
errand  down  the  street,  Lucy  greeted 
her  eagerly,  saying,  — 

'It  was  music  this  time.  Oh,  I've 
heard  such  music!  I  almost  went  to 
see  if  some  one  was  n't  playing.  It  was 
like  a  harp,  I  think,  with  a  violin  and 
piano:  it  was  very  beautiful.  I  thought 
some  one  must  be  playing,  until  it  came 
to  me  that  of  course  it  was  the  Young 
People.  It  was  happy  music,  just  as 
the  Voices  are  so  happy.  Miriam, 
there  are  young  people  somehow  in 
your  house.' 

It  became  a  sort  of  gentle  pleasant 
joke  between  them,  while  Lucy  stayed 
on.  'Have  you  heard  them  to-day?' 
Miriam  would  ask;  and  sometimes 
Lucy  replied,  'No;  they  must  have 
gone  off  on  a  picnic;  it  was  such  a  good 
day';  or,  'Yes;  they  were  here  while 
you  were  out  this  afternoon.  I  don't 
see  why  you  don't  hear  them.'  And 
Miriam  would  shake  her  head.  'I 
never  hear  and  see  Things,  you  know. 
They  are  your  Voices,  Lucy;  they  are 
your  babies  grown-up  who  are  talking 
to  you  even  here  in  my  old-maid  house.' 

But  Lucy  denied  it.  'No,  Miriam,  I 


STUDIES  IN  SOLITUDE 


never  heard  them  anywhere  else.  They 
belong  to  you  and  your  house,  and 
they  mean  something  good,  and  sweet, 
and  coming,  not  gone  by.  They  're  not 
ghosts.' 

And  when  at  last  Miriam  kissed  her 
good-bye  at  the  train,  Lucy  was  say- 
ing, *  I  'm  glad  to  think  of  you,  there  in 
your  nice  sunny  house,  with  the  Voices, 
and  the  Music.  Good-bye,  dear.' 

As  Miriam  sat  alone  that  evening, 
she  wondered  about  those  young 
happy  presences.  She  wished  that  she 
could  hear  them  laugh  and  sing  and 
play;  not  merely  feel  them  blindly 
stirring  about  her.  She  sat,  deep  in 
reverie,  smiling  at  Lucy's  merry  yet 
honest  insistence  upon  her  quaint  little 
hallucination,  —  at  herself  for  more 
than  half  believing  it. 

'  It  is  better  that  I  never  hear  them,' 
she  concluded  at  last,  rather  soberly. 
*  I  could  n't  live  alone  this  way  if  I 
heard  them.  It  is  all  well  enough  for 
Lucy,  with  her  husband  and  her  house- 
ful of  babies,  to  hear  things  like  that; 
granting  that  she  truly  did,  dear  mys- 
terious Lucy!  —  But  if  I  heard  them 
—  if  I  heard  them, — 'she  glanced 
about  the  room  as  if  she  half  expected 
to  see  a  gay  face  above  the  piano,  a 
bright  head  bending  by  the  lamp,  — 
'  it  would  mean  that  I  was  going  a  little 
bit  mad:  yes,  just  a  little  bit  mad,  for 
all  that  they  are  sweet,  young  voices.' 

She  shivered,  stood  up  quickly,  and 
went  over  to  the  long  mirror.  'Mir- 
iam,' she  whispered,  looking  into  the 
shadowy  face  that  met  hers,  *  Lucy  said 
those  were  young  voices,  coming  voices, 
not  gone  by.  But  you  know,  Miriam, 
that  if  they  are,  they  belong  to  some 
one  else  who  may  live  in  this  house :  to 
some  one  else,  I  tell  you,  not  to  you  at 
all.  Don't  be  a  fool.  —  You've  been 
quite  sensible  so  far:  don't  spoil  it  all 
now.  Do  you  hear?  you  must  n't  even 
wish  to  hear  those  Voices,  or  that  love- 
ly harp-music.  Now  you  understand.' 


Months  later  she  saw  her  friend 
again.  'How  are  the  Voices?'  Lucy 
asked  gayly,  across  the  laughing  baby 
who  pulled  at  her  necktie  and  snatched 
down  her  curls. 

'I  never  hear  them,'  Miriam  an- 
swered, almost  shortly.  'You  know, 
don't  you,  —  "  to  him  that  hath  shall 
be  given"?  —  Please  may  I  hold  the 
baby?' 

in 

Yet  often,  when  she  had  spent  a 
part  of  the  day  or  evening  away  from 
home,  she  had  a  curious  expectation  of 
returning  to  find  her  house  not  empty 
and  silent,  but  with  something  alive  in 
it  to  greet  her.  She  did  not  think  of  the 
people  who  had  been  her  own  in  the 
different  days  so  far  past,  nor  of  her 
living  friends,  nor  of  the  young  pre- 
sences whose  laughter  Lucy  had  in- 
sisted upon  hearing.  It  seemed  to  her 
simply  that  there  was  more  life  and 
motion  and  personality  in  her  waiting 
house,  than  just  Diogenes  crouching  on 
the  front  porch,  and  the  kettle  steam- 
ing to  itself  on  the  back  of  the  stove. 

One  winter  evening  she  walked  late 
down  the  village  street.  The  moon 
rode  high  and  white.  Every  frosty 
breath  shone,  every  step  creaked  and 
crackled  in  the  snow.  Through  the 
thin  leafless  maple-trunks  and  lilac- 
boughs  she  could  see  her  house  plainly: 
the  snowy  roof,  glittering  to  the  moon, 
the  low  eaves,  ragged  with  silver  icicles, 
and  the  four  yellow  windows  of  the 
hall  and  sitting-room,  which  she  had 
lit  against  her  late  return. 

She  had  a  definite  sense  of  expect- 
ancy. She  was  going  back  to  some- 
thing, to  somebody,  —  and  found  her- 
self hurrying  almost  joyfully.  But 
with  her  hand  on  the  gate,  she  stopped, 
and  stared  at  the  house  as  if  it  were 
strange  to  her.  An  icy  little  stream 
flowed  suddenly  round  her  heart.  For 
a  second,  all  the  world  —  the  moon, 


810 


STUDIES  IN  SOLITUDE 


the  village,  the  house,  and  her  own 
inner  secret  universe  —  staggered  and 
reeled  and  shook.  But  as  suddenly, 
everything  grew  calm  and  still  again. 
The  frightful  chill  melted  from  her 
blood;  the  moon  watched  her  with  the 
same  high  virgin  regard,  and  the  yellow 
windows  beckoned  her  home. 

She  went  slowly  up  the  path  and 
into  the  warm  silent  hall. 

In  that  moment  at  the  gate,  she  had 
realized  that  it  was  only  Herself  to 
whom  she  was  going  back.  Herself, 
who  made  those  windows  bright,  who 
piled  the  logs  on  the  hearth  that  now 
she  could  light  and  sit  by,  dreaming. 
It  was  Herself,  who  would  be  running 
down  the  stairs  to  greet  her,  and  fetch- 
ing an  apple  from  the  pantry,  and  list- 
ening to  her  story  of  the  evening's 
doings. 

It  seemed  to  her  almost  as  if  she  had 
become  two  individuals.  One  of  her 
went  out  into  the  village  and  the 
world.  The  other  stayed  always  in  the 
little  white  house.  She  would  always 
be  waiting  to  greet  her  home. 

That  was  all.  Now  that  she  under- 
stood it,  it  did  not  concern  her  any 
more. 

She  was  becoming  a  good  hermit, 
she  commented;  but  noticed,  with  the 
detachment  that  had  grown  upon  her, 
that  she  was  not  going  to  remember 
that  shuddering  moment  at  the  gate. 
She  blew  the  fire  high,  thinking,  *  After 
all,  there  is  nobody  but  Myself  who  un- 
derstands me  much,'  and  was  amused 
at  her  simple  egotism. 


IV 

But  secretly  she  knew  her  most  per- 
ilous enemy.  It  was  not  sadness,  or 
selfishness,  or  the  Voices,  or  the  odd 
wildness  of  a  determined  recluse.  It 
was  Eternity. 

There  was  no  telling  when  Eternity 
might  claim  her.  Sometimes  she  awoke 


at  dawn,  and  went  down  into  the  dewy 
garden  to  work  among  the  roses  and 
iris  and  pansy-plants,  with  the  birds 
all  singing  and  the  sun  dancing  like  a 
great  wise  morning  star.  The  day 
wore  on,  as  she  digged  and  trans- 
planted and  clipped  and  watered,  till, 
weary  a  little,  she  went  into  the  house 
and  took  up  the  endless  bit  of  sewing, 
or  some  story  or  poem  to  finish.  And 
all  at  once,  in  spite  of  the  sun,  the 
earth-smell,  the  brisk  village-sounds  be- 
yond her  garden-fence,  she  knew  that 
her  anchor  dragged,  —  she  had  slipped 
her  moorings  in  the  safe  harbor  of  Time, 
and  was  drifting  off,  off,  into  Eternity. 

Then  she  cared  nothing  for  rose- 
bugs,  or  iris-roots,  or  stockings  to 
darn,  or  stories  to  read.  She  thought 
of  Love,  and  Sin,  and  Death:  of  na- 
tions at  war  and  her  friends'  souls  in 
joy  or  agony,  of  God  Himself,  —  and 
they  were  all  as  nothing.  She  saw  the 
flickering  garden,  she  heard  the  song- 
sparrow  and  the  clucking  hen,  she  felt 
her  own  scrubbed  and  earth-stained  fin- 
gers and  her  beating  heart,  but  these 
were  not  necessary  to  her.  She  was  ter- 
ribly remote;  terribly  careless  and  still 
and  proud;  for  she  was  in  Eternity. 

'What  does  it  all  matter?'  she  would 
murmur.  'What  if  they  drink  and  steal 
and  sin  and  die?  or  love  and  lose  and 
win  and  die  too?  And  what  of  me? 
What  of  me?  — We  are  all  in  Eternity. 
God  Himself  is  in  Eternity.' 

But  she  kept  the  peril  close.  None 
of  the  neighbors,  who  hailed  her  on  the 
street  or  gossiped  on  the  vine-hung 
porch,  ever  noticed  that  often,  as  she 
talked,  she  would  clasp  her  hands  with 
a  sudden  fierce  little  gesture,  as  if  she 
were  holding  tight  to  some  strong  arm, 
and  that  in  her  heart  she  was  whis- 
pering, even  while  the  swift  crooked 
smile  danced  across  her  lips,  *O  God, 
make  me  remember!  make  me  remem- 
ber! We're  in  Time  now:  not  in  Eter- 
nity yet :  not  in  Eternity  yet  I ' 


WILLY  PITCHER 


BY   GEORGE   STERLING 


HE  is  forgotten  now, 

And  humble  dust  these  thirty  years  and  more  — 
He  whose  young  eyes  and  beautiful  wide  brow 

My  thoughts  alone  restore. 

Dead,  and  his  kindred  dead! 
And  none  remembers  in  that  quiet  place 
The  slender  form,  the  brown  and  faunlike  head, 

The  gently  wistful  face. 

And  yet  across  the  years 
I  see  us  roam  among  the  apple-trees, 
Telling  our  tale  of  boyish  hopes  and  fears 

Amid  the  hurried  bees. 

When  I  am  all  alone 
By  the  eternal  beauty  of  the  sea 
Or  where  the  mountain's  eastern  shade  is  thrown, 

His  face  comes  back  to  me  — 

A  memory  unsought; 

A  ghost  entreating,  and  I  know  not  why,  — 
A  presence  that  the  restless  winds  of  thought 

Acknowledge  with  a  sigh; 

Till  I  am  half  content 
Not  any  more  the  loneliness  to  know 
Of  him  who  died  so  young  and  innocent, 

And  ah!  so  long  ago! 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


BY  MARY  S.  WATTS 


CHAPTER  XVI 

BUT  *T  WAS  A   GLORIOUS  VICTORY 

NEXT  morning  at  daybreak,  the  argo- 
nauts steamed  into  the  harbor  of  Guan- 
tanamo,  which  they  found  already 
populous  with  shipping,  colliers,  trans- 
ports, lighters,  a  whole  fleet  of  little 
vessels  of  their  own  calibre,  herded  to- 
gether in  one  place  where  the  Milton  D. 
Bowers  herself  modestly  sought  a  berth, 
and  half  a  dozen  tall  warships.  They 
recognized  their  friend  of  the  night  be- 
fore, the  Inverness,  now  peaceably  rid- 
ing at  anchor  on  the  east  side  of  the 
channel,  close  inshore  and  just  oppo- 
site some  ridges  of  freshly  turned  earth 
which  looked  like  the  bunkers  on  the 
golf-links  at  home,  Van  Cleve  thought, 
but  which,  he  was  told,  were  the  in- 
trenchments  of  Camp  Huntington. 
All  around  there  were  other  earth- 
works and  tents,  white  and  blue  and 
khaki-colored  uniforms  going  to  and 
fro,  bugle-calls  and  the  smoke  of  camp- 
fires,  and  overhead  the  flag  spreading 
its  brave  and  cheerful  colors  on  a  strong 
breeze.  It  was  a  stirring  spectacle; 
and  though  this  place  is  adorned  with 
some  of  as  noble  and  beautiful  scenery 
as  may  be  found  anywhere  in  the  world, 
I  doubt  if  the  travelers  made  much  of 
it.  They  were  not  caring  for  scenery, 
and  the  sight  of  this  armed  occupation, 
vigilant  and  powerful,  and  the  news  of 
the  past  night  would  have  distracted 
them  from  the  most  wonderful  pano- 
rama on  the  face  of  the  globe. 

They  landed,  Schreiber  insisting  on 

812 


going,  too,  although  he  was  limping 
painfully,  with  his  ankle  very  much 
swollen  in  a  rough  bandage  they  had 
contrived,  and  went  up  to  a  shining 
little  sheet-iron-walled  stove  of  a  build- 
ing which  they  had  found  to  be  the 
telegraph-office,  at  the  foot  of  the  hill 
under  Captain  McCalla's  camp  of  ma- 
rines; and  here  Schreiber  had  the  luck 
to  fall  in  with  two  other  correspond- 
ents, a  Mr.  Hunter  of  the  New  York 
Planet,  and  another  man  whose  name 
Van  Cleve  did  not  catch,  both  of  them 
just  from  the  front  with  accounts  of 
Saturday's  fighting  and  San  Juan  Hill. 
The  army  had  known  nothing  of  the 
navy's  doings,  and  supposed  the  can- 
nonading they  had  heard  to  be  Samp- 
son bombarding  the  forts  at  the  mouth 
of  the  harbor,  as  he  had  done  before! 
'  Pshaw,  we  knew  better  than  that ! '  said 
Schreiber,  with  mock  superiority. 

'Well,  our  fellows  have  too  many 
other  things  to  think  about,  back  there 
in  the  jungle,'  Hunter  said.  He  told 
them  something  of  the  fight,  the  other 
man  joining  in.  It  had  n't  been  any 
such  soft  snap  as  the  navy  boys  had, 
to  judge  by  what  you  heard.  These 
Spaniards  were  n't  running  away,  nor 
dreaming  of  it;  they  were  fighters  — 
they  could  shoot,  too.  'Why,  it  took 
Lawton  nearly  a  whole  day,  nearly  the 
whole  of  Friday,  —  let 's  see,  it  was  Fri- 
day, was  n't  it,  Jim?  —  to  carry  that 
position  at  that  little  town  where  the 
church  was,  Caney  they  called  it  — 
nearly  the  whole  day,  and  everybody 
thought  it  would  n't  be  but  an  hour 
or  so!  Well,  of  course,  they  outnum- 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


813 


bered  our  fellows.  Oh,  yes,  two  to  one, 
at  least.  The  Cubans  hardly  counted; 
we  did  the  real  fighting.  Oh,  I  suppose 
some  of  the  Cubans  did  pretty  well, 
but  I  didn't  see  any  of  'em.  They 
were  n't  near  so  many  of  them  wound- 
ed and  killed  as  we  had,  in  proportion. 
Did  you  hear  about  that  poor  fellow, 
Lieutenant  Ord  of  the  Sixth?  Did  you 
hear  what  happened  to  him?  Why,  he 
got  to  the  top  of  the  hill  with  the  first 
ones  when  they  charged  it  (Hey?  Yes, 
it  was  the  Sixth,  and  the  Rough  Riders, 
and  the  colored  regiment,  and  parts 
of  other  regiments  mixed  in),  and  this 
Ord  came  to  a  Spaniard  lying  there 
badly  wounded,  and  says,  "Look  out 
for  this  man,  boys,"  or  "Pick  up  this 
fellow  and  see  he  gets  taken  care  of," 
or  something  like  that.  And  with  that 
the  Spaniard  raised  up  and  shot  him 
through  the  heart!  Suppose  he  thought 
Ord  was  telling  the  men  to  bayonet 
him  and  finish  him.  Probably  that's 
what  a  Spanish  or  Cuban  officer  would 
have  done.  Eh?  Oh,  the  men  killed 
him;  about  tore  him  to  pieces,  they  say. 
They  thought  a  great  deal  of  Ord. 
Nice  fellow,  they  say  —  I  never  hap- 
pened to  meet  him.  But  that  just  shows 
you  what  kind  these  Spanish  are; 
Uncle  Sam's  going  to  be  thoroughly 
sick  of  this  Cuba  Libre  job  before  long. 
All  our  fine  men  sacrificed.  You  ought 
to  see  the  wounded  —  or  rather  you 
ought  n't  to  see  them  if  you  can  help 
it.  My  God,  it's  awful!  Awful.  War's 
about  what  Sherman  said  it  was,  I 
guess.' 

They  talked  on  a  little  excitedly  at 
times,  still  under  the  spell  of  what  they 
had  witnessed.  Both  of  them  were 
dirty,  haggard,  ready  to  drop  with 
fatigue;  Hunter  told  Van  he  had  not 
slept  for  fifteen  hours,  most  of  which 
had  been  spent  on  the  way  from  the 
battlefield  here.  It  was  nothing  but  a 
jungle  trail,  almost  impassable  in  places, 
and  they  had  been  obliged  to  tramp  the 


most  of  it,  their  horses  having  given 
out  very  soon;  it  was  next  to  impossi- 
ble to  get  any  kind  of  transportation  in 
the  country.  Nevertheless,  they  were 
starting  back  as  soon  as  they  had  had 
some  rest;  something  might  happen 
any  minute,  and  they  did  n't  want  to 
miss  it.  Takuhira,  upon  this,  decided 
to  accompany  them,  hearing  that  a 
friend  of  his,  Lieutenant  Akiyama  of 
the  Imperial  Japanese  Navy,  was  al- 
ready with  the  army,  in  observation; 
and  Van  Cleve,  too,  might  have  gone, 
but  on  hearing  his  errand,  although 
neither  of  them,  unfortunately,  knew 
his  friend  Gilbert,  they  both  assured 
him  that  Siboney  would  be  the  best 
place  to  look  for  him. 

*  Everybody 's  there,  or  has  been  there 
—  or  at  Daiquiri.  The  Red  Cross,  and 
the  correspondents,  and  the  post-office 
people,  and  everybody.  That's  the 
place  to  look  for  any  one.  If  you  can't 
find  him,  you  're  sure  to  find  somebody 
that  knows  him,  and  can  put  you  on 
his  trail,'  they  said.  Van  began  to  feel 
that  he  was  getting  'hot,'  as  they  say 
in  the  children's  games,  and  wanted  to 
go  at  once  and  send  telegrams  to  Lorrie 
and  to  his  family;  but  the  gentleman 
in  charge  of  the  station  refused,  not 
without  a  smile.  The  government,  he 
said  politely,  had  raised  and  repaired 
the  Haytian  cable  at  this  point  for  its 
own  use,  and  private  individuals,  un- 
less in  some  such  capacity  as  Mr.  Hun- 
ter's, had  no  status  just  then. 

Afterwards  the  party  all  dined  to- 
gether on  board  the  Milton  D.  Bowers, 
magnificently,  the  cook  having  found 
means  to  add  some  crabs  and  a  basket 
of  mangoes  to  their  usual  bill  of  fare, 
which  was  further  enriched  by  a  can 
of  baked  beans  from  some  unknown 
source.  'I  tell  you,  the  boys  at  the 
front  would  like  some  of  this!  Those 
beans  would  look  like  the  Waldorf- 
Astoria  to  them,'  said  one  of  the  corre- 
spondents; 'all  the  time  we've  been 


814 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


with  them,  nobody's  had  anything 
but  bacon  and  hard-tack,  and  not  too 
much  of  that,  poor  fellows!  Well,  war 
is  war,  I  suppose!'  With  which  philo- 
sophical reflection  he  fell  to  heartily. 

At  two  o'clock  the  Milton  D.,  ac- 
cording to  arrangement,  once  more 
set  sail;  and  Van  Cleve  bade  good-bye 
to  these  gentlemen,  none  of  whom,  I 
believe,  he  has  aver  met  since,  except 
the  Japanese  attache,  who  turned  up  a 
few  days  later  at  Siboney  in  company 
with  Major  Shiba,  the  other  military 
envoy  of  his  country.  Santiago  had 
surrendered;  the  campaign  was  over; 
the  foreign  officers  in  observation  were 
returning  to  the  quarters  assigned  them 
on  board  ship;  even  for  Van  Cleve  him- 
self, the  adventure  was  ended. 

He  was  very  far  from  foreseeing  all 
this,  though,  as  they  steamed  west 
along  the  coast  in  a  heavy  sea  and  rising 
storm,  with  Schreiber,  erelong,  wretch- 
edly ill  in  the  cabin,  as  usual,  and  Cap- 
tain Bowers  taciturnly  smoking  a  par- 
ticularly rank  and  vicious  pipe,  which 
he  seemed  to  enjoy  most  when  the  tug's 
motion  was  at  its  worst.  The  next 
morning,  after  a  night  of  threshing 
about  in  the  seas,  Van  was  not  much 
surprised  to  hear  that  it  would  be  im- 
possible to  make  a  landing  until  the 
wind  and  swell  died  down  somewhat. 
He  could  both  see  and  hear  the  surf 
now,  booming  and  breaking  on  the  shore 
of  the  unprotected  little  cove,  a  for- 
midable spectacle.  They  contemplated 
it  all  day  long,  the  tug  taking  up  a 
station  a  quarter  of  a  mile  out,  in  line 
with  a  number  of  transports  and  other 
vessels,  like  themselves  afraid  to  risk 
launching  a  boat  in  such  weather. 

Siboney  appeared  from  this  distance 
to  be  a  row  of  shanties,  a  half-con- 
structed pier,  and  the  broken  ruins  of 
an  old  one  swept  by  waves,  with  a 
slender  strip  of  beach  in  front  and, 
grimmest  sight  of  all,  a  big  lighter,  ly- 
ing on  her  side,  about  fifty  yards  from 


shore,  a  castaway,  with  the  seas  pound- 
ing over  her  desolately. 

'Them  other  things  you  kin  make 
out  closer  inshore  is  some  more  boats 
and  stuff  that  got  stove  in  trying  to 
land  through  the  surf,'  Captain  Bow- 
ers said,  pointing  out  various  dark  ob- 
jects which  had  puzzled  Van  Cleve's 
inexperienced  eyes.  *  Ain't  it  a  sin  'n' 
a  shame?  All  that  good  stuff  wasted!' 
His  tone  was  mournful;  it  was  the  first 
and  only  time  he  had  displayed  so  much 
feeling  of  any  kind,  but  Van  under- 
stood and  thoroughly  sympathized. 
The  young  man's  own  thrifty  soul  was 
outraged. 

After  twelve  hours  or  so  more  of 
waiting,  during  which,  although  there 
was  a  great  deal  of  coming  and  going 
on  shore,  they  heard  no  sounds  of  firing, 
or  other  indications  of  hostilities  being 
resumed,  he  and  Schreiber  at  last  got 
to  land  in  a  rowboat,  manned  by  a  pair 
of  tatterdemalions,  which  came  out  to 
meet  them  finally,  in  answer  to  repeat- 
ed signals,  when  Captain  Bowers  had 
taken  the  tug  in  as  near  as  was  prudent. 
Both  boatmen  were  armed  with  pistols 
and  machetes,  though  nowise  soldierly 
(or  indeed  at  all  prepossessing)  in  ap- 
pearance. 

'Must  be  the  commanding  general 
of  the  Cuban  armies  and  his  chief-of- 
staff,'  the  newspaper-man  suggested 
satirically;  'and,  by  George,  look  at 
the  rest  of  the  patriots  getting  ready 
to  land  us!  Look  out  for  your  watch, 
Kendrick!' 

In  fact,  there  seemed  to  be  a  lively 
traffic  of  this  sort  among  the  native 
longshoremen,  running  down  into  the 
water  to  seize  a  boat  by  the  bows,  and 
rush  it  bodily  through  the  surf,  up  high 
and  dry  on  the  sand.  There  was  a  mob 
of  them,  clamoring,  villainous-faced, 
incredibly  dirty;  the  beach  was  busy 
as  a  hive.  It  was  littered  with  wreckage 
of  lighters  and  launches,  partly  sub- 
merged, or  standing  up  stark  and  stiff 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


815 


when  the  tide  was  out.  There  were 
mounds  of  barrels  and  boxes  covered 
with  tarpaulin,  under  guard;  mule- 
teams  and  wagons,  their  drivers  cursing 
royally;  soldiers  without  end;  and  a 
handful  of  bedraggled-looking  civil- 
ians, government  employees,  members 
of  the  Red  Cross  commission,  more 
correspondents . 

The  line  of  huts  they  had  seen 
from  the  harbor  the  day  before  turned 
out  to  be  ten  or  a  dozen  zinc-roofed, 
boxlike  structures  built  originally  by 
the  Spanish-American  Iron  Company 
—  which  had  mines  somewhere  in  the 
neighborhood,  as  Schreiber  vaguely 
recollected  hearing — for  its  operatives, 
but  now  in  use  as  hospitals;  and 
one  of  them,  the  largest,  bore  a  sign, 
'United  States  Post-Office,  Military 
Station  No.  1.'  Van  Cleve  and  his  com- 
panion walked  up  toward  it.  Fresh 
from  the  strong,  clean  sea,  they  had 
not  gone  a  hundred  steps  inland  when  a 
puff  of  tepid,  foul  air,  heavy  with  un- 
speakable odors  of  animal  and  vege- 
table decay  commingled,  fairly  stran- 
gled them.  Schreiber,  who  had  been 
limping  vigorously  ahead,  turned 
alarmingly  pale  and  faint  for  a  second; 
but  he  kept  on  gallantly.  'That  had  a 
kind  of  yellow-fever  taste,  didn't  it?' 
he  gasped,  with  unquenchable  levity. 
'Cheer  up,  the  worst  is  yet  to  come! 
Did  you  see  that  dead  mule  behind  one 
of  the  houses  just  now?  He  was  very 
dead.  In  fact,  he  must  have  been  quite 
entirely  dead  about  the  week  before 
last,  I  should  judge.  Viva  Cuba  Libre  ! ' 

Military  Post-Office  No.  1  had  a  high 
stoop  in  front  of  it,  that  gave  it  a  queer 
likeness  to  the  country  cross-roads 
store  and  post-office  combined,  in  a  vil- 
lage of  the  same  size  at  home;  and  two 
or  three  loungers  on  the  porch  as  our 
friends  came  up  heightened  the  resem- 
blance. 'How  it  reminds  me  of  that 
dear  Rising  Sun,  Indiana!'  murmured 
Schreiber,  tenderly.  There  were  a 


couple  of  privates  waiting,  probably, 
for  their  regimental  mail  to  be  sorted 
out,  and  another  man,  not  a  soldier, 
as  he  was  dressed  in  canvas  trousers, 
boots,  and  a  sweater,  was  taking  a  nap, 
in  informal  style,  stretched  out  on 
the  floor,  with  an  arm  across  his  face. 
The  two  orderlies  glanced  at  the  new- 
comers without  curiosity,  and  went  on 
with  a  desultory  conversation  wherein 
war  and  conquest  or  other  trade  topics 
were  not  in  the  least  concerned.  '  The 
first  time  was  at  a  picnic  given  by  the 
Eagles  —  Independent  Order  of  Eagles, 
y '  know,  they  're  pretty  strong  with  us 
—  and  I  could  n't  say  exactly  how 
often  since,'  said  one  of  them,  finishing 
some  statement;  and  the  other  nodded 
indifferently. 

'That  fellow  there  lays  like  he  was 
dead  —  notice?'  he  said  presently. 
'Guess  he's  about  played  out.  He's 
just  as  still!' 

'Dead!  Well,  I  reckon  he's  deader 
drunk  than  any  other  kind  of  dead,' 
said  the  other  man,  with  a  laugh. 
'They  don't  lay  that  way  when  they're 
shot,  though  —  mostly  they  lay  all  kind 
of  crumpled-up,  in  my  experience,'  he 
added,  with  the  air  of  a  veteran.  He 
was  a  smooth-chinned  lad  of  twenty- 
three  or  thereabouts. 

Van  Cleve  and  Schreiber  went  in- 
side. In  the  stifling  heat,  two  clerks, 
one  in  pajamas  and  the  other  wearing 
an  undershirt,  blue  denim  overalls,  and 
a  pair  of  carpet-slippers  on  his  bare 
feet,  were  sorting  mail. 

'Look  in  the  rack.  All  you  fellows' 
mail  is  together  in  one  place  —  right 
over  there.  You  can  just  look  for  your- 
self,' one  of  them  answered  the  corre- 
spondent wearily,  scarcely  glancing  up 
from  the  piles  of  letters  he  was  shuf- 
fling to  and  fro.  Van,  however,  was 
not  expecting  anything;  nobody  knew 
where  he  was.  He  wanted  to  post  a 
letter  he  had  written  to  Lorrie  the 
night  before;  and  that  done,  hastily  re- 


816 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


treated  to  the  open  air,  wiping  the  per- 
spiration from  his  face. 

'Hot,  ain't  it?'  said  one  of  the  sol- 
diers, amiably. 

'  I  don't  see  how  those  men  stand  it 
in  there.  Another  minute  of  that  oven 
would  have  finished  me,'  declared  Van. 

Schreiber  came  to  the  door  behind 
him  and  said,  not  without  excitement, 
'Look  here,  Kendrick,  there 're  two 
letters  there  for  your  friend.  I  saw 
them.  R.D.  Gilbert  — that 'she,  isn't 
it?  His  folks  must  have  got  on  to  where 
to  find  him.  He's  probably  written.' 

'R.D.  Gilbert  ? '  said  Van  Cleve,  with 
a  start.  'Then  he 's  here,  to  a  certainty. 
I  wonder  if  any  of  them  in  the  post- 
office  know  him.' 

He  was  turning  to  go  inside  again, 
when  at  the  second  repetition  of  the 
name,  the  man  on  the  floor  stirred, 
rolled  over,  sat  up  at  last,  after  two  or 
three  efforts,  staring  around  with  a 
puffy,  reddened  face.  'Whazzat?  What 
you  want?'  said  Bob. 

If  this  meeting  had  occurred  on  the 
melodramatic  stage,  for  which,  as  an  in- 
cident, it  was  well  suited,  Van  Cleve 
would  undoubtedly  have  had  to  ex- 
claim, 'My  God,  Bob!  You  here!' 
clutching  his  temples  in  a  frenzy  of  hor- 
rified astonishment.  The  plain  fact  is, 
he  did  and  said,  for  an  instant,  nothing 
at  all.  It  took  him  that  time  to  realize 
that  this  was  Bob  —  Bob  at  last  in  a 
worse  state  from  drink  and  hardships 
than  Van  had  ever  seen  him:  gaunt, 
disordered,  blear-eyed,  almost  repuls- 
ive. In  another  moment,  he  perceived 
that  Bob,  although  looking  straight  at 
him,  had  not  yet  recognized  him,  which, 
to  be  sure,  was  not  to  be  wondered  at, 
Van  quickly  remembered,  considering 
his  own  appearance,  and  that  he  was 
the  last  person  Robert  would  be  expect- 
ing to  see. 

Schreiber,  who  also  had  been  staring 
hard,  now  burst  out  with, '  Well,  I  '11  be 
—  Why,  that's  Gilbert!  Is  n't  it  Gil- 


bert? Why,  that's  him  now!  Well, 
I'll  be—!'  He  looked  all  around  help- 
lessly. Bob  surveyed  him  with  blank 
eyes. 

'Friend  of  yours?'  said  one  of  the 
soldiers,  addressing  Schreiber. 

'  No  —  yes  —  that  is,  here 's  his  friend. 
This  is  his  friend.  Been  chasing  him 
fifteen  hundred  miles!  Wouldn't  that 
jar  you,  though  ?  Fifteen  hundred  miles ! 
And  here  he  is!' 

'Why,  hello,  Bob!'  said  Van  Cleve, 
mechanically.  Then  he  collected  him- 
self, and  made  another  effort.  'Hello, 
Bob,  don't  you  know  me?  It's  Van 
Cleve  Kendrick,  you  know  —  Van 
Cleve,  you  know!'  Unconsciously  he 
raised  his  harsh  voice,  as  he  repeated 
the  name.  Bob  eyed  him  so  dully  and 
unresponsively,  it  made  him  anxious. 

'No  use  hollerin'  at  him,  mister. 
Better  let  him  sleep  it  off,'  observed 
one  of  the  privates;  'he's  pickled  for 
fair!' 

'No,  he  ain't,  he'll  know  you  in  a 
minute,'  said  the  other,  with  a  judicial 
glance;  'he  knew  when  you  called  his 
name  just  now.  Wake  up,  bo! '  he  con- 
tinued to  Bob,  genially;  'here's  some- 
body come  to  see  you!' 

This  experienced  gentleman  was 
right;  Robert  had  unquestionably  had 
some  liquor,  but  that  he  was  legiti- 
mately fagged-out  from  exertion,  want 
of  sleep,  and,  very  likely,  want  of  food, 
would  have  been  evident,  on  a  closer 
inspection,  to  anybody.  He  got  upon 
his  feet,  while  they  were  speaking, 
without  any  help;  looked  hard  at  the 
dirty,  bearded  man  in  front  of  him, 
and  ejaculated  at  last  in  his  own  nat- 
ural voice,  but  filled  with  bewilder- 
ment, 'Van  Cleve!  It's  not  you,  Van?' 

'See?  What 'd  I  tell  you?  He's  got 
you!'  said  the  soldier,  triumphantly. 

'How'd  you  get  here?'  said  Bob.  In 
the  wonder  and  perplexity  of  the  mo- 
ment, neither  of  them  thought  of  shak- 
ing hands.  Van  Cleve's  wits,  in  truth, 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


817 


were  at  a  standstill;  he  had  never 
speculated  much  as  to  the  precise  en- 
vironment and  conditions  wherein  he 
would  find  his  friend,  and  had  no  plans 
about  what  he  was  going  to  say  other 
than  to  tell  Bob  plainly  and  forcibly 
that,  having  betrayed  a  young  woman, 
according  to  her  own  confession,  he 
must  come  home  and  marry  her.  What 
he  had  not  allowed  for,  was  such  a 
chance  as  this:  the  open  beach,  the 
crowded,  noisy  camp  where  decent 
privacy  seemed  a  thing  unobtainable, 
the  sudden  stumbling  upon  the  man 
he  sought.  He  was  inordinately  taken 
aback.  It  was  only  for  a  second,  but 
the  others  looked  at  him  curiously.  Bob 
all  at  once  recognized  Schreiber,  and 
spoke  to  him  by  name,  and  they  two 
shook  hands  enthusiastically.  Robert 
pulled  out  a  half-empty  flask  from  his 
hip-pocket,  and  offered  it  all  around. 
'Have  a  drink?  It'll  do  you  good.  Got 
to  take  a  little  stimulant  in  this  cli- 
mate, you  know.  I  do  myself  all  the 
time,'  he  said  frankly;  'here's  how, 
boys!  What's  your  regiment?  Oh,  two 
regiments?  We'll  have  to  have  two 
drinks  on  that!  What 's  yours ?  Third? 
Bully  for  the  Third!  Here,  got  to  drink 
to  your  regiment,  you  know.  What's 
yours,  hey?' 

The  second  young  fellow  said,  with 
an  uneasy  grin,  glancing  at  the  others, 
that  he  belonged  to  the  Twentieth,  and 
he  did  n't  want  any,  thanky,  sir.  Van 
Cleve  interfered.  '  You  've  had  enough 
of  that,  Bob,'  he  said,  the  exertion  of 
authority  restoring  him  to  his  habitual 
poise  on  the  instant;  'here,  give  me  the 
bottle.  You  want  something  to  eat, 
that 's  what  you  want.  Where  do  you 
go  here?' 

'Aw,  Van  Cleve—!'  Bob  began 
pleadingly;  but  he  surrendered  his  flask 
without  more  protest.  No  amount  of 
drinking  could  overcome  the  poor  sin- 
ner's native  gentleness  and  tractabil- 
ity .  '  Kind  of  good  to  see  you,  Van,'  he 
VOL.  in  -  NO.  e 


said  next,  affectionately;  'but  I  must 
say,  you  took  me  by  surprise.  Don't 
all  of  us  look  like  tramps,  though!'  He 
cast  a  glance  of  whimsical  appreciation 
over  his  own  figure  and  his  friend's. 
'How'd  you  get  here?' 

'Why,  I  — I'll  tell  you  presently. 
I'd  like  to  get  something  to  eat,  first. 
Where  do  you  live?  Where  do  you  go 
to  eat  and  sleep,  I  mean?' 

Bob  burst  into  a  laugh,  broken  by 
hiccoughs.  'Where  do  I  live?  Where 
do  any  of  us  live?  How's  that,  fellows? 
Where  do  we  all  live?  Why,  in  Cuba, 
first  turn  to  your  left  and  keep  on 
going!'  He  looked  to  Schreiber  for 
sympathy.  'What's  your  address, 
Schreiber? ' 

'  It 's  going  to  be  Herman  Schreiber, 
Esquire,  The  Front,  directly,'  said  the 
war-correspondent,  himself  amused. 
'  He 's  about  right,  Kendrick,  you  don't 
live,  nor  eat,  nor  sleep  anywhere  — 
you  just  get  along  the  best  you  can. 
What's  doing,  anyhow,  Gil?' 

'At  the  front?  Nothing.  No  fighting 
I  mean.  I  came  back  last  night.  I  was 
all  in.  I  've  been  trying  to  get  a  little 
rest.' 

'Lying  here  on  the  ground?'  Van 
said,  thinking  with  a  certain  shock  of 
Mrs.  Gilbert  and  Lorrie.  If  they 
knew — !  If  they  could  see  him — ! 
But,  thank  Heaven,  they  could  n't! 

Bob  nodded,  momentarily  speech- 
less, in  a  fit  of  coughing.  'Sure!  No 
place  else  to  go,  you  know,'  he  said 
when  he  got  his  breath.  '  Why  not !  It 's 
what  they  all  do  —  sick  and  wounded 
and  all.  What's  good  enough  for  our 
army  is  good  enough  for  me,  I  hope.' 

Van  Cleve  eyed  him  over  with  a  good 
deal  of  secret  worry.  Under  the  mask 
of  dirt  and  sunburn,  and  apart  from  the 
specific  look  of  the  hard  drinker  with 
the  lines  and  hollows  and  unwhole- 
some textures  that  Bob's  face  had  be- 
gun to  show  long  ago,  Van  Cleve 
thought  he  detected  some  appearances 


818 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


graver  still;  that  cough  and  that  stoop 
were  not  due  wholly  to  privation  and 
too  much  whiskey,  he  said  to  himself. 
For  a  flash  he  was  astounded  at  the 
alarm  that  gripped  him.  Bob  was  worth- 
less; but  he  loved  Bob.  *  You  have  n't 
had  anything  to  eat  yet? '  he  said  rough- 
ly, as  usual,  when  he  was  much  moved. 
And  the  other  shaking  his  head  in  a  re- 
newed paroxysm  of  coughing,  Van  took 
him  by  the  arm.  *  Come  along,  we  '11  get 
something  —  we  '11  hunt  it  up  some- 
where,' he  said. 

They  got  Bob's  mail  —  a  letter  from 
his  father,  and  one  from  Lorrie  with 
the  Tampa  postmark,  as  Van  Cleve 
noted  to  his  surprise  —  and  started  off, 
the  newspaper  man,  who  did  not  lack 
tact,  bidding  them  good-bye  pleasant- 
ly, and  taking  the  opposite  direction. 

CHAPTER  XVII 

IN   WHICH   WE  WITNESS  A  SURRENDER 

*  How  on  earth  did  you  ever  happen 
to  hook  up  with  him  —  Schreiber,  you 
know?  How  did  you  happen  to  come 
down  here,  anyhow?'  Bob  wanted  to 
know,  in  recurrent  wonder.  *  Think 
of  my  not  knowing  who  you  were  at 
first!  But,  Van,  I  was  simply  stunned, 
I  could  n't  believe  it  was  you.'  He  look- 
ed into  his  friend's  face,  in  sudden  and 
affectionate  anxiety.  *  You  don't  mind, 
do  you?  My  not  knowing  you  right 
off,  I  mean?  I  thought  you  looked  as 
if  you  did  n't  like  it,  for  a  minute.  But 
honestly,  Van  Cleve,  I  could  n't  help  it.' 

'Oh,  that's  all  right.  I  don't  think 
anything  of  that.  It  was  perfectly  natu- 
ral,' said  Van  Cleve  shortly;  he  was  un- 
conscious of  the  impatient  note  in  his 
voice,  of  the  scowl  between  his  deep-set 
eyes.  The  thing  he  had  to  do  was  on 
his  mind,  and  it  had  all  at  once  become 
hateful  to  him,  utterly  abhorrent.  Rob- 
ert looked  so  sick  and  shaken,  Van 
Cleve  wanted  to  take  care  of  him,  not 


to  accuse  and  coerce  him;  moreover, 
face  to  face,  Bob  seemed,  as  he  always 
had  to  his  friend,  intrinsically  harmless; 
he  wronged  himself  terribly  and  irre- 
trievably, but  it  was  hard  to  believe 
that  he  could  wrong  anybody  else. 
'  Damn  that  girl ! '  Van  thought  angrily; 
'if  she's  any  too  good  herself,  I  miss 
my  guess!  It  would  be  easy  enough  to 
lead  Bob  into,  anything,  and  blame  any 
trouble  that  came  along  afterwards  on 
him.  He's  a  mark  for  any  woman.' 

Bob  was  speaking  again.  'Old 
grouch!'  he  said,  thumping  his  friend's 
shoulder  caressingly.  '  What  made  you 
come  here,  anyhow,  Van  Cleve?  Did 
you  just  take  a  notion  you  'd  come,  or 
how  was  it?' 

'Well,  I  —  I  came  after  you,  really, 
Bob.  The  family  want  you  to  come 
home.' 

'They  know  the  Record-World  fired 
me;  I  suppose  that's  the  reason?'  said 
Bob,  with  a  kind  of  amiable  annoy- 
ance. 

'Why,  yes  —  one  reason.' 

Bob  began  to  explain  cheerfully.  'I 
suppose  they  had  to  —  the  manage- 
ment, I  mean.  I  have  n't  any  kick  to 
make  about  it.  They're  all  pretty 
square  men,  and  they  .did  the  right 
thing,  from  their  standpoint,  to  let  me 
out.  I'd  —  I'd  been  drinking.  It's 
hard  to  keep  out  of  it ;  everybody  drinks 
more  or  less,  but  most  of  the  men  get 
away  with  it  somehow.  They  stand  it 
better  than  I  do;  they  can  hold  more 
without  its  affecting  them.  Oh,  well,  I 
never  did  much  like  the  work,  anyhow 
—  running  around,  asking  an  infernal 
lot  of  questions,  and  prying  into  other 
people's  business;  it  is  n't  much  of  a 
gentleman's  job,  seems  to  me.  I  was 
about  ready  to  quit  when  they  notified 
me.  I'm  even  on  the  transaction.  I've 
got  the  experience,  and  that 's  all  there 
was  in  it  for  me;  it'll  be  invaluable  in 
anything  else  I  go  into,'  he  concluded 
comfortably,  and  dismissed  the  sub- 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


819 


ject.  'But  I  don't  see  why  you  thought 
you  had  to  come  down  here  after  me, 
Van.  You  did  n't  need  to  take  all  that 
trouble.  Was  mother  worrying?' 

'Well,  you  see  they  did  n't  know 
where  you  were  or  what  had  become 
of  you.' 

'Why,  I  wrote  them.  I  told  them 
all  about  it.  I  told  them  I  was  going 
on  with  the  army.  And  then  I  wrote 
again  from  here,  as  soon  as  I  found  out 
about  the  postal  arrangements,  and 
told  them  to  address  me  here.' 

'They  had  n't  got  that  letter  when 
we  left  home,  of  course.  But  they  must 
have  since,  for  I  see  Lorrie  's  written 
you  from  Tampa,'  said  Van  Cleve. 

Bob  stared  at  him  in  stark  amaze- 
ment. 'Lorrie?  At  Tampa?  What's 
Lorrie  doing  at  Tampa?  They're  not 
all  of  them  there?' 

'No,  just  Lorrie.  She  thought  you 
were  there,  and  she  wanted  to  get  to 
you.  I  brought  her.  She  would  come,' 
Van  said,  rather  defensively,  as  he  saw 
the  indignant  surprise  on  the  brother's 
face.  Robert  was  genuinely  shocked. 
The  mere  mention  of  Lorrie  awoke  all 
the  manliness  there  was  in  him;  Lorrie 
was  his  creed  and  his  conscience. 

'  Would  come  ?  What  were  they  think- 
ing of  —  what  were  you  thinking  of,  to 
let  her  come?  That 's  no  place  for  our 
Lorrie.  Would  come!  You  talk  as  if 
Lorrie  were  one  of  these  hysterical, 
tomfool  women  that  have  to  be  given 
in  to,  or  they  '11  go  crazy.  Lorrie 's  got 
sense.  What  did  she  want  to  come  after 
me  for  ? '  He  stopped ;  and  a  new  expres- 
sion came  over  his  face,  a  look  of  self- 
forgetful  sympathy  and  tenderness  that 
made  it  beautiful  with  all  the  grime  and 
weariness  and  marks  of  dissipation. 
'Oh,  I  see!  It  was  Phil.  Poor  Lorrie! 
You  can't  blame  her  for  that.  She 
wanted  to  be  near  Phil.  Poor  Lorrie!' 
All  his  features  quivered.  'Cort's  dead. 
You  knew  that,  Van?  Killed  right  at 
the  first  before  he  'd  had  a  chance  to  do 


anything  —  poor  Cort!  He  was  the 
best  fellow.  I  know  you  never  liked 
him,  but  you  did  n't  know  him.  Cort 
was  a  splendid  fellow.' 

'I'm  sorry  for  Lorrie  just  the  same,' 
said  Van  Cleve. 

'Is  she  —  does  she  know?  How  is 
she?' 

Van  Cleve  shook  his  head  gravely. 
'  Don't  ask,  Bob.  It 's  the  saddest  thing 
I  ever  saw.  Yes,  she  heard  it  one  of  the 
first.'  He  described  the  Tampa  experi- 
ences briefly.  'The  uncertainty  was 
cruelly  hard  on  her.  But,  of  course, 
that's  all  over  now.' 

Bob  said,  'Yes,  it's  all  over,'  and 
passed  the  back  of  his  hand  across  his 
eyes.  After  a  moment  of  striving  to  get 
his  voice  under  control,  he  managed 
to  add, '  You  know  I  saw  it,  Van  Cleve. 
I  saw  him  after  he  was  shot.' 

'You  did!' 

The  other  nodded,  twisting  his  lips 
as  if  in  bodily  pain  at  the  mere  recollec- 
tion. 'Yes.  Oh,  my  God,  cruel  things 
happen  in  war!  Yes,  I  saw  it.  I  was  n't 
up  in  front  where  he  was  when  the  fight- 
ing began.  I  was  coming  along  behind, 
with  another  fellow  —  another  news- 
paper man,  I  mean.  I  don't  know  who 
he  was.  I  suppose  we  must  have  been 
a  couple  of  hundred  yards  behind  the 
nearest  soldiers.  They  marched  in  two 
lots  —  two  divisions,  you  know — some 
of  them  straight  up  this  ravine  (you 
come  to  the  Santiago  road  that  way 
directly),  and  Wood's  men,  the  Rough 
Riders  (only  they  did  n't  have  any 
horses)  went  up  that  steep  place,  past 
the  blockhouse  —  that  one  over  there 
to  your  left  —  you  're  looking  in  the 
wrong  direction.  I  followed  them.  It 
was  terribly  hot.  Sometimes  when  we 
got  to  one  of  those  little  narrow  places, 
all  walled  in  with  trees  and  vines  grown 
up  solid  on  both  sides,  it  was  like  be- 
ing at  the  bottom  of  some  kind  of 
red-hot  well;  it  made  your  head  swim. 
Some  of  the  men  fainted.  When  there 


820 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


began  to  be  firing  in  front,  the  men  got 
an  order  to  move  faster.  You  never 
would  have  called  it  a  charge;  it  was  n't 
anything  like  the  things  you  read  about 
in  books.  They  —  they  just  walked 
along  a  little  faster.  When  we  caught 
up  with  them  I  saw  one  man  near 
me  get  his  sleeve  hooked  on  a  thorn, 
and  he  stopped  to  pull  it  away,  and 
scratched  his  finger  and  said,  "  Damn  I " 
and  stuck  it  in  his  mouth!  All  the  time 
the  firing  was  going  on  in  front.' 

'They  said  Cortwright  and  those 
other  men  were  killed  at  the  first  fire,' 
Van  Cleve  interrupted  him. 

'Yes,  I  know.  I  worked  off"  to  the 
side  somehow.  You  could  n't  see  a 
thing,  you  know.  The  bushes  were  full 
of  men  spread  out  trying  to  get  through. 
I  don't  believe  any  of  them  knew  where 
they  were  any  more  than  I  did,  after  a 
little  while.  They  just  kept  going  to- 
ward where  you  could  hear  the  guns. 
The  whole  thing  only  lasted  an  hour, 
about.  Cort  did  n't  die  right  off;  some 
of  them  were  shot  dead  where  they 
stood,  but  he  was  n't.  They  lifted  him 
out  of  the  way  over  into  some  of  the 
bushes.  It  was  just  the  way  you  some- 
times see  a  dead  cat  in  an  alley  at 
home,  stuck  over  in  the  gutter  till  the 
street-cleaners  come  and  get  it.  They 
could  n't  stop  to  see  about  dying  men; 
they  just  had  to  get  him  out  of  the  road 
and  keep  on.  Cruel  things  happen  in 


war. 


Bob  paused,  his  face  working.  He 
began  again.  'I  didn't  know  about 
Cortwright  until  I  walked  on  to  him  al- 
most. You  don't  know  anything  that's 
happening  anywhere  in  a  battle  except 
right  where  you  are.  I  almost  walked 
on  to  him.'  Bob  stopped  again ;  he  swal- 
lowed and  wiped  the  sweat  from  his 
face.  'He  was  lying  there  breathing 
with  a  —  with  a  thick  sound,  and  his 
eyes  half-closed,  showing  the  whites, 
and  his  face  all  gray.  He  used  to  be  so 
good-looking  and  —  and  rather  vain 


of  his  looks,  too,  you  recollect,  Van; 
any  man  would  have  been.  And  he 
looked  so  you  did  n't  want  to  touch 
him.  That's  horrible,  but  it's  so.  I 
got  over  that,  though,  and  went  and 
raised  him  up.  I  don't  know  whether 
he  knew  me  or  not,  but  he  looked  at 
me.  I  said,  " It 's  me;  it 's  Bob  Gilbert, 
Corty,  don't  you  know  me?"  but  he 
just  said  in  a  whisper,  "I'm  thirsty." 
And  then  I  gave  him  a  drink  out  of  a 
canteen  I  had  and  he  s-said,  "Th-thank 
you!"'  Bob  broke  down  and  sobbed 
openly.  'He  was  dying,  Van;  he  was 
dying,  and  he  said,  "Thank  you!" 

'Poor  fellow!'  said  Van,  touched. 
'Was  that  all?' 

'Yes.  He  died.  He  never  said  an- 
other word.  I  wish  he  had.  If  he'd  said 
Lome's  name,  I'd  like  to  have  told 
her.  But  he  never  spoke  again.' 

There  was  a  silence  while  Bob  wiped 
his  eyes  on  the  sleeve  of  his  soiled  shirt, 
and  Van  Cleve  stared  abstractedly  at 
the  glaring  beach  and  sea.  'Well,  a 
man  can  die  but  once,'  said  the  latter 
at  last;  'I  suppose  getting  shot's  as 
good  a  way  as  there  is,  when  all 's  said 
and  done.  It 's  quick,  anyhow.  I  don't 
believe  he  could  have  suffered  much.' 

'  You  —  you  could  n't  let  me  have  a 
drink  of  the  whiskey  now,  could  you, 
Van?  I'm  pretty  well  used-up,'  said 
Bob,  pitifully. 

'Whiskey  would  n't  do  you  any 
good,'  said  Van  Cleve,  unmoved.  They 
had  found  a  temporary  resting-place  in 
the  lee  of  what  looked  like  a  heap  of 
lumber  and  scrap-iron,  but  was  in  real- 
ity a  collection  of  wagons,  'knocked 
down '  in  sections  and  roughly  bundled 
together  for  transportation.  And  now 
a  military-looking  person  came  and 
ordered  them  away  from  it  with  few 
words  and  strong.  Nevertheless,  Van 
Cleve  had  the  courage  to  inquire  of 
him  where  food  might  be  got.  Robert 
had  no  money  left,  it  appeared;  he  had 
nothing  at  all  except  the  clothes  on  his 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


back,  and  as  he  pathetically  stated, 
some  few  of  poor  Cort's  things,  his 
watch  and  a  little  bundle  of  letters 
which  Bob  had  taken  off  the  body  to 
give  to  Lorrie.  *  They  buried  him  there 
close  to  where  he  was  killed,  like  all  the 
rest,'  he  sighed. 

Van  got  out  his  wallet  and  gave  him 
five  dollars.  'Now  look  here,  you'd 
better  not  stir  around  in  this  sun  any 
more  than  you  can  help,'  he  said,  with 
his  practical  kindness;  'you  stay  near 
this  place,  while  I  go  and  see  about  the 
stuff  to  eat.  If  anybody  comes  along 
with  crackers  or  bananas,  you  might 
buy  something  without  waiting  for  me, 
only  you  ought  to  be  pretty  careful,  I 
think,'  and  went  off. 

Alas,  when  he  returned  in  half  an 
hour  or  so  with  his  supplies,  Robert 
was  nowhere  in  sight;  and  Van  Cleve, 
with  gloomy  forebodings,  which  should 
have  visited  him  earlier,  after  another 
half  hour  of  worried  search,  found  the 
other,  as  he  had  expected,  in  company 
with  a  villainous-eyed  Cuban,  drunk 
and  happy  in  a  nook  of  sand  and  scrub- 
palms,  passing  a  newly  acquired  bottle 
back  and  forth.  Bob  had  forgotten  all 
about  'poor  Cort,'  all  about  Lorrie, 
all  about  his  own  late  reverses  and  ad- 
ventures, in  this  stimulating  compan- 
ionship; he  hailed  Van  Cleve  jovially. 
But  the  Cuban,  who  was  not  at  all 
drunk,  looked  upon  the  arrival  of  this 
bodyguard  with  a  very  darkling  coun- 
tenance; and  as  Van  attempted  to  get 
Bob  away,  he  intervened  with  what 
sounded  like  evil  words  in  Spanish,  and 
what  certainly  was  an  evil  expression. 

'Get  out  of  the  way,  you!'  says  Van 
Cleve,  pushing  Bob  (who,  as  always, 
was  perfectly  amiable  and  obedient) 
along  in  front  of  him.  'Come  on,  Bob. 
Yes,  I  know  — it's  all  right,  old  fel- 
low, but  you  want  to  come  with  me, 
you  know,  now.  Get  out,  you!  Huh, 
you  would,  would  you?  Well,  I  guess 
noil  Not  this  time,  anyway!' 


The  Cuban  picked  himself  up,  and 
fled  with  a  yowl  of  malediction. 

"S  right,  knock  him  (hie)  down, 
Van!'  said  Bob,  gravely  wagging  his 
head  in  approval;  'Cubans'  —  he 
flapped  his  hand  —  'Cubans  no  good. 
Only  ought  be  careful,  Van.  Ougn  t' 
have  gun.' 

Van  Cleve  clapped  his  hip-pocket. 
'Good  Lord,  I  forgot  all  about  it!'  he 
ejaculated. 

The  next  problem  was  to  see  Bob 
safely  bestowed  somewhere,  out  of 
reach,  if  possible,  of  any  more  sympa- 
thetic natives  or  brother  Americans; 
and  in  this  extremity  Van  bethought 
him  of  the  Milton  D.  Bowers.  There 
she  lay,  two  or  three  hundred  yards  out, 
peaceful  and  secure;  and  Captain  Bow- 
ers made  only  one  comment  when  the 
boat  came  alongside  and  they  helped 
Robert  aboard.  'Found  yer  friend,  I 
see.  He's  got  a  pretty-good  load,'  he 
remarked,  turned  his  quid  reflective- 
ly, spat  into  the  water,  and  inquired, 
'  He 's  the  one  you  were  figurin'  on  takin' 
back  to  the  States,  I  presume  likely?' 

'Yes,'  said  Van  Cleve. 

'On  the  Milton  D.?'  the  captain 
asked,  stroking  his  chin-beard. 

'That's  what  I  intend  to  do,'  said 
Van. 

It  is  a  pity  that  no  reliable  witness 
was  at  hand  to  report  the  battle  of 
giants  that  ensued.  Captain  Bowers 
was  a  Connecticut  Yankee;  Van  Cleve 
was  his  grandfather's  grandson;  it  must 
have  been  a  hot  engagement.  Van  has 
never,  naturally,  been  at  all  communi- 
cative about  the  episode,  but  one  may 
conjecture  it  to  have  ended  in  a  draw. 
'Oh,  yes,  he  stuck  me.  But  he  did  n't 
stick  me  as  much  as  he  expected,'  Mr. 
Kendrick  has  been  heard  to  acknow- 
ledge. The  Gilberts,  I  think,  know 
nothing  about  the  transaction  to  this 
day. 

After  all  these  events,  and  when  he 
had  left  Bob  stertorously  sleeping  in 


822 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


the  cabin,  Van  Cleve,  who  had  vaguely 
looked  for  the  sun  to  be  setting,  found 
to  his  astonishment  that  it  was  barely 
noon !  There  had  been  no  chance  to  say 
a  word  about  the  real  cause  of  his  visit; 
it  would  have  been  worse  than  useless 
to  attempt  the  subject  in  Bob's  present 
condition.  And,  having  by  this  time 
reached  a  more  philosophical  mood 
about  it,  Van  decided  that  the  miser- 
able affair  might  wait  till  the  next 
day,  without  harm.  By  to-morrow  Bob 
would  be  at  any  rate  sober,  and  fit  to 
listen.  'His  nerves  can't  suffer  by 
it/  thought  Van,  grimly;  *  they 're  all 
gone  to  pieces  anyhow.  He  has  n't  any 
constitution  left.  He'll  probably  have 
to  go  to  Colorado  or  Arizona  or  some- 
where, to  keep  alive.  I  don't  know  how 
the  family  will  manage.  Some  people 
certainly  do  have  a  hard  time.'  For 
his  own  part,  he  felt  a  sense  of  release, 
now  that  his  errand  was  all  but  done. 
He  wrote  another  note  to  Lorrie,  briefly 
reciting  that  he  had  found  her  brother 
and  was  bringing  him  home;  that  Bob 
was  in  *  fairly  good  shape,  though  look- 
ing rather  tough,  like  everybody  else 
down  here.'  He  hoped  she  was  all 
right,  and  she  must  not  worry,  that 
everything  was  going  along  as  smoothly 
as  they  could  possibly  expect;  and  as 
near  as  he  could  calculate  just  now, 
they  would  arrive  at  Tampa  by  Satur- 
day or  Monday  at  furthest;  it  could  n't 
take  more  than  a  week. 

He  went  ashore  again  to  post  this; 
and  wandering  about  fell  in  with  and 
followed  for  some  distance  a  string  of 
pack-mules  taking  supplies  to  the  front; 
much  of  the  road,  it  seemed,  was  al- 
most impassable  for  wagons,  although 
our  engineers  had  widened  and  built  it 
up  in  many  places.  It  was  nearly  all  as 
Bob  had  described  it,  sunken  between 
solid  walls  of  greenery,  suffocatingly 
hot,  and,  until  they  began  to  climb  the 
higher  ground,  steaming  with  noisome 
odors. 


He  walked  along  by  one  of  the  driv- 
ers, who,  seeing  that  he  was  feeling 
the  heat,  offered  him  a  drink  out  of  his 
canteen,  which  Van  accepted  grate- 
fully; he  had  not  thought  to  provide 
himself  with  water.  They  got  into  talk. 
The  teamster  had  been  picked  up  by 
the  army  at  Mobile,  being  a  graduate 
of  one  of  the  old,  well-established  acad- 
emies of  mule-driving  to  be  found 
along  the  levees  at  Memphis  and  New 
Orleans,  or  indeed  almost  anywhere 
throughout  the  Southern  States;  he 
said  that  he  liked  it  *  first-rate,'  and 
reckoned  he'd  stick  with  the  job  as 
long  as  Colonel  Humphries  had  any 
use  for  him.  He  was,  in  fact,  quite  open 
and  sincere  in  a  conviction  that  his  de- 
partment was  the  most  valuable  and 
indispensable  in  the  entire  army,  of 
which  he  considered  himself  and  his 
mules  as  much  a  part  as  any  regiment, 
brigade,  or  division;  and  he  confided  to 
Van  Cleve  that  old  Pete,  his  mainstay, 
that  there  big  gray  mule  with  that  there 
scar  on  the  flank,  had  been  a  little  off  his 
feed  here  lately;  he  was  afraid  the  cli- 
mate was  *  getting  to  him';  the  trip  in 
the  transport  had  n't  done  none  of  the 
mules  no  good.  'If  Pete  er  me  was  to 
be  laid  up  with  th'  sun  er  fever  er  any- 
thin',  I  dunno  what  they'd  do  —  be 
doggoned  if  I  know  what  they'd  do!' 
he  said  seriously.  It  appeared  there 
were  none  too  many  of  either  mules  or 
packers. 

Van  Cleve,  if  he  was  a  little  amused, 
rather  liked  him  for  this  honest  and 
simple  point  of  view.  *  That's  the  way 
men  ought  to  feel  that  are  trying  to  do 
a  big  thing  together;  every  one  as  if  his 
particular  part  of  the  job  was  the  big- 
gest of  all,'  he  thought. 

His  new  acquaintance,  in  a  week  of 
traversing  the  Daiquiri  and  Siboney 
roads,  backwards  and  forwards,  had 
learned  the  countryside  by  heart,  and 
knew  the  location  of  every  body  of 
troops  as  well  as  the  commanding  gen- 


VAN  CLEVE  AND  HIS  FRIENDS 


823 


eral  himself.  *  Here's  whar  they  had 
the  first  scrimmage.  You-all  heerd 
about  that,  I  reckon/  he  said  as  they 
reached  the  summit  of  one  of  the  ridges ; 
and,  halting  to  breathe  the  mules,  he 
pointed  out  to  Van  Cleve  the  entrance 
of  the  mesa  trail  where  Wood's  men 
had  joined  the  others,  and  a  shallow  de- 
pression on  one  hand  carpeted  with 
cartridge-shells  in  ominous  profusion. 
'They  must  'a'  had  it  hot  V  heavy 
right  thar,'  he  opined.  But,  for  that 
matter,  the  jungle  floor  and  pathways 
were  now  everywhere  littered  with 
grim  reminders  of  the  fight,  rotting  rags 
of  bandages,  bits  of  clothing,  and 
wrecked  stretchers.  Van  picked  up  one 
of  the  shells  and  put  it  in  his  pocket. 

'They  buried  some  man  yonder,  I 
see,'  he  said,  nodding  toward  a  long 
mound  near-by. 

'  Buried  a  dozen  or  more  of  'em  all  in 
th'  one  hole,'  said  the  teamster.  'They 
did  n't  have  time  to  mark  their  names 
down,  mebbe  they  did  n't  even  know 
'em.' 

Van  Cleve  went  and  looked  down  at 
the  mound  whereon  some  of  the  dead 
mens'  fellows  had  raked  together  a  few 
stones  in  the  shape  of  a  cross.  The  sight 
of  the  poor  tribute  moved  the  young 
man  strongly;  he  took  off  his  hat  as  he 
stood.  Already  the  rank  jungle  was 
creeping  upon  the  grave,  effacing  it. 
Van  Cleve  wondered  if  Cortwright  lay 
there.  Cruel  things  happen  in  war. 

Some  way  farther  on  they  came  to 
another  crest,  and  suddenly,  for  the  first 
time,  the  road  and  surrounding  country 
opened  in  front  of  them.  Across  the  im- 
mediate valley  was  what  looked  like  a 
mammoth  green  field,  hills,  a  little  shin- 
ing patch  of  water,  roads  threading 
this  way  and  that.  Tents  could  be  seen, 
and  clusters  of  black  dots,  some  of  which 
moved  apparently  an  inch  or  so  while 
Van  watched  them;  but  mostly  it  was 
very  still.  It  was  not  merely  that  there 
were  no  martial  sights  and  sounds  such 


as  Van  Cleve  found  he  had  been  half 
expecting,  —  there  was  nothing;  the 
peace  of  harvest-time  at  home  was  not 
more  quiet  and  urbane.  He  could  have 
believed  the  landscape  motionless  in  an 
enchantment. 

'That's  the  city  over  thar,  cap,  — 
Santiago,  y'  know,'  said  the  driver, 
pointing  with  his  whip  to  some  faintly 
visible  buildings,  pink  and  dust-colored, 
on  the  farther  rim  of  the  valley,  as  it 
seemed.  'Hey?  Why,  about  seven  or 
eight  miles,  I  judge.  This  side,  kinder 
frontin'  to  you,  is  San  Juan  Hill,  whar 
they  fit  the  other  day.' 

'Do  you  mean  that  little  bare  spot 
over  there?  Is  that  a  hill?  I  thought 
San  Juan  was  a  high  place,'  said  Van 
Cleve,  in  surprise. 

'  It  were  high  enough,'  said  the  team- 
ster, with  a  tinge  of  offense;  but  he  re- 
lented directly,  seeing  that  Van  had 
had  no  idea  of  belittling  the  army's 
achievement;  and  showed  him  where  to 
look  for  the  earthworks  and  block-hou- 
ses, and  in  what  direction  lay  Caney, 
where  there  had  been  the  bitter  strug- 
gle last  Friday.  He  could  name  some 
of  the  groups  of  tents  and  black  dots. 
'Gin'ral  Wheeler's  division  is  right 
square  acrost  from  us  —  less  'n  they '  ve 
moved  since  yestiddy  morning.  A  di- 
vision is  jest  one  lot  o'  men,  you  know,' 
he  explained  carefully;  "t  ain't  all  the 
army.  Thar 's  a  whole  passel  more  with 
Gin'ral  Kent  round  here  kinder  quart- 
erin'  to  yer  left,  and  some  'way  over  on 
the  other  side.  You  can't  see  one  or 
t'  other  of  'em  from  here.  But  head- 
quarters is  down  this  side  tol'ble  near 
whar  we  air  now;  if  you  step  this  way  a 
little,  you  kin  see  th'  flag.' 

'  It 's  about  ninety  per  cent  safer  than 
where  General  Wheeler  is,  I  should 
say,'  commented  Van  Cleve,  having, 
after  repeated  directions,  at  last  located 
the  spot,  a  great  deal  closer  than  he 
had  supposed.  'Is  the  commanding 
general  always  that  handy  to  the  rear? ' 


824 


REASONABLE   HOPES  OF   AMERICAN    RELIGION 


'Well,  he's  got  ter  kinder  stay  put, 
ye  know.  He 's  got  to  be  alluz  in  th'  one 
place  so's  they'll  know  whar  to  find 
him.  And  up  in  front,  ye  just  nachelly 
can't  stay  in  one  place,'  the  muleteer 
suggested,  making  ready  to  move  on. 
*  You  Peet,  you  dig  right  out,  now,  you 
ol'  — !'  he  addressed  his  convoy  with 
much  affectionate  profanity. 

As  it  had  taken  them  upwards  of  three 
hours  to  reach  this  point,  Van  thought 
that  he  himself  had  better  return  before 
night  caught  him  on  the  road;  and  two 
wagon-loads  of  sick  and  wounded  on 
their  way  to  the  hospital  at  Siboney 
coming  along  just  then,  he  joined  them. 
He  was  keenly  curious,  and  indeed 
promised  himself,  to  view  the  battle- 


field nearer,  but  he  did  not  have  an- 
other chance. 

It  was  Van's  fate  throughout  to  see 
the  war  from  its  reverse  side,  to  miss  all 
its  hideous  splendors,  to  encounter  none 
of  its  heroes.  In  a  romance  of  any  pre- 
tensions, Mr.  Kendrick  would  by  this 
time  have  been  hand-in-glove  with  all 
the  celebrities  on  the  field,  and  would, 
for  his  own  part,  have  contributed 
dazzingly  to  our  successes.  But  as  a 
matter  of  fact,  during  the  whole  of  his 
desultory  adventures,  and  among  the 
numerous  companions  whom  he  picked 
up  at  random  for  a  day  or  an  hour, 
Van  Cleve  never  spoke  to  anybody 
above  the  rank  of  a  private,  and  saw 
and  did  nothing  sensational. 


(To  be  continued.) 


REASONABLE  HOPES  OF  AMERICAN  RELIGION 


BY   GEORGE  A.   GORDON 


IT  has  been  said  that  'our  dreams  are 
the  shadows  of  our  hopes/  and  some- 
times it  is  doubtless  the  case  that  our 
hopes  are  the  shadows  of  our  dreams. 
In  the  vicious  circles  of  mere  subjec- 
tivity, idea,  dream  and  hope  belong  in 
the  category  of  the  null  and  void.  To 
gain  and  retain  a  sober  meaning,  hope 
must  be  the  prophet  of  a  reasonable 
human  experience.  Kant's  three  ques- 
tions at  once  occur  to  one  here:  What 

1  Readers  of  Canon  Barry's  article,  'The  Re- 
ligion of  America,'  in  the  April  Atlantic  will  find 
his  arguments  leading  to  a  different  conclusion. 
—  THE  EDITORS. 


can  I  know?  What  ought  I  to  do?  For 
what  may  I  hope?  Knowledge  and 
moral  action  are  the  parents  of  legiti- 
mate hope.  Our  ideas  of  knowledge  and 
duty  may  differ  from  those  of  Kant; 
there  can  be  no  difference  among  sen- 
sible persons  about  the  conclusion  that 
authentic  hopes  are  the  ideal  comple- 
tions of  an  imperfect  but  an  essentially 
rational  experience.  The  reasonable 
hopes  of  men  are  therefore  like  the 
morning  fires  in  the  East;  they  herald 
the  coming  of  the  perfect  day.  America 
is  the  land  of  hope;  concerning  the 
greatest  force  in  its  life,  its  religion, 
shall  it  be  without  great  hopes? 

'Keep  in  the  middle  of  the  stream,' 


REASONABLE  HOPES  OF  AMERICAN  RELIGION 


825 


is  the  refrain  of  an  old  Negro  melody. 
The  Negro  toiling  on  the  banks  of  the 
Mississippi  had  observed  that  in  the 
mightiest  of  American  rivers  there  were 
shallows,  eddies,  counter-currents,  and 
all  sorts  of  water  pranks.  Hence  his 
warning  to  the  navigator,  4  Keep  in  the 
middle  of  the  stream.'  The  Negro's 
observation  became  a  metaphor  signi- 
ficant for  the  adventure  of  his  soul.  In 
the  religion  of  his  country  there  are 
shallows,  whirlpools,  all  sorts  of  eddies 
and  oddities.  There  is,  however,  a  vast 
central  movement.  Whoever  would 
live  religiously  must  remain  in  that 
great  current;  whoever  would  under- 
stand American  religion  must  watch 
the  middle  of  the  stream.  Otherwise, 
while  the  observer  may  write  about  the 
religion  of  America  with  genial  humor, 
obvious  charm,  kindly  sarcasm,  telling 
epigram,  and  artistic  ecclesiastical  pur- 
pose, he  must  write  without  insight  into 
the  spiritual  life  of  Americans,  and 
however  much  he  may  protest  against 
it,  the  picture  drawn  will  be  'a  chimera, 
the  monster'  of  the  writer's  imagina- 
tion. 

The  religion  of  Americans,  like  that 
of  other  peoples,  utters  itself  in  no  uni- 
form manner.  Its  natural  idiom  is  now 
formal  and  again  intangible,  obtrusive 
and  evasive,  orderly  and  vagrant, 
superconscious  and  subconscious,  nor- 
mal and  eccentric,  manifesting  itself 
here  in  creeds  and  elaborate  ritual  and 
there  as  pure  spirit.  At  last,  in  all  sig- 
nificant instances,  it  comes  to  some- 
thing like  this :  Religion  is  the  ultimate 
strength  of  man's  soul  gathered  medi- 
ately or  immediately  from  the  Soul  of 
the  universe.  Its  worth  lies  in  its  rela- 
tion to  life  as  men  wend  their  way 
through  the  wild  mysteries  of  time;  it  is 
illumination,  inspiration,  sustaining 
might,  increasing  peace.  Thus  under- 
stood, religion  carries  in  its  heart  the 
principle  of  the  complete  idealization 
of  existence.  The  religious  soul  aims 


with  Plato  at  becoming  like  God  so  far 
as  that  is  possible  for  man.  He  directs 
his  life  toward  a  supreme  end;  with 
Eudemus  he  endeavors  to  behold  God 
and  to  serve  him.  He  expects,  in  the 
highest  sense  of  the  words,  to  fare  well; 
with  St.  Paul  he  believes  that  all  things 
work  together  for  good  to  them  that 
love  God,  with  Socrates  that  in  life  or 
in  death  no  evil  can  happen  to  a  good 
man.  His  religion  is  his  final  satisfac- 
tion; he  sings  with  Augustine,  'Thou 
hast  made  us  for  thyself  and  we  are 
restless  till  we  repose  in  thee.'  He  looks 
to  the  Infinite  as  the  source  of  life's 
ideal  and  goal;  he  answers  the  sublime 
call  of  Jesus,  'Ye  shall  be  perfect  as 
your  Heavenly  Father  is  perfect.' 
Religion  is  thus  the  ideal  life  of  a  soul 
conscious  that  it  lives  and  moves  and 
has  its  being  in  the  Infinite  soul,  able 
to  utter  its  experience  and  hope  in  the 
great  confession*  'The  Eternal  God  is 
thy  dwelling  place,  and  underneath  are 
the  everlasting  arms.' 

It  is  at  once  admitted  that  nothing 
is  satisfactory  in  the  present  conditions 
of  the  religion  of  America.  As  in  every 
other  region  of  our  life,  here  too  dis- 
content and  confusion  reign.  There  is, 
however,  one  great  note  of  prophecy 
ringing  in  the  heart  of  religious  America 
audible  above  the  tumult  of  confused 
and  contentious  tongues.  A  group  of 
serious  American  students,  engaged  in 
the  arraignment  of  an  unsatisfactory 
college  preacher,  were  silenced  by  one 
of  their  number,  who  said,  '  I  plead  for 
this  preacher.  He  has  done  me  a  world 
of  good.  As  I  have  watched  him  striv- 
ing earnestly  to  find  something  and 
always  failing  to  find  it,  I  have  been 
stimulated  to  hunt  for  that  something 
myself.  I  am  now  engaged  in  the  hunt, 
and  I  have  already  found  in  religion 
a  reality  and  greatness  beyond  my 
utmost  dream.'  American  churches, 
Protestant,  Catholic  and  Greek  Ortho- 
dox, all  American  religious  bodies,  are 


826 


REASONABLE  HOPES  OF  AMERICAN  RELIGION 


more  or  less  in  the  condition  of  that 
college  preacher.  They  are  unsatisfac- 
tory; they  are  seeking  something  that 
they  have  hitherto  failed  to  find.  They 
are  however  in  earnest,  and  they  are 
stimulating  by  their  earnestness  and 
failure  a  multitude  of  the  elect  youth  of 
the  land  to  undertake  the  search  for 
themselves.  The  unattained  is  the 
glory  of  American  religion. 

The  mood  of  content,  whether  with 
the  religious  insight  won,  the  volume 
and  quality  of  experience  secured,  the 
ideals  formed,  the  fellowship  establish- 
ed, the  influence  exerted,  or  the  charac- 
ter achieved,  is  to  the  genuine  religious 
American  the  worst  of  all  bad  signs. 
Men  are  in  an  infinite  world;  they  are 
capable  of  growth  indefinitely  great; 
content  with  present  attainments  there- 
fore means  the  arrest  of  progress,  the 
blight  of  hope. 

America  has  decreed  freedom  for  re- 
ligion in  the  sure  foresight  of  the  ad- 
vent of  the  crank  and  the  freak.  These 
abound  inside  organized  religion  and 
outside.  The  American  method  of 
treating  the  normal  and  the  abnormal 
in  faith  follows  the  teaching  of  Jesus 
in  his  Parable  of  the  Wheat  and  the 
Tares:  'Let  both  grow  together  until 
the  harvest.*  Freedom  is  costly,  but  it 
is  worth  while.  It  is  the  great  test  of 
faith. 

Can  we  trust  truth  to  win  in  a  fair 
fight  with  error?  The  man  who  says 
that  he  cannot  must  secretly  despise 
the  truth.  Such  a  man  might  well  take 
a  lesson  from  the  tyrant  Tiberius,  who 
refused  to  punish  offences  against  re- 
ligion on  the  ground  that  the  gods 
can  take  care  of  themselves.  Besides, 
religion  can  never  know  itself  as  real 
save  in  the  world  of  freedom.  No  man 
can  tell  whether  religion  is  an  oasis  in 
the  desert  or  a  mirage,  who  is  not  free 
to  test  it  by  every  power  of  the  mind 
and  spirit.  Further,  self-reliant,  respon- 
sible manhood  is  gained  only  through 


the  solemnity  of  choice;  as  in  Goethe's 
song,  — 

But  heard  are  the  Voices,  — 
Heard  are  the  Sages, 
The  Worlds  and  the  Ages; 
Choose  well;  your  choice  is 
Brief  and  yet  endless. 

Once  more,  the  repression  of  the  crank 
by  the  law  of  uniformity  means  the 
excommunication  of  the  prophet.  The 
greatest  words  ever  uttered  in  behalf  of 
freedom  in  religion  are  these:  *O  Jeru- 
salem, Jerusalem,  which  killest  the 
prophets  and  stonest  them  that  are 
sent  unto  her!  how  often  would  I  have 
gathered  thy  children  together  even  as 
a  hen  gathereth  her  chickens  under  her 
wings,  and  ye  would  not !  Behold  your 
house  is  left  unto  you  desolate/  On  a 
level  immeasurably  lower  let  it  be  said 
that  since  differences  abound  in  the 
minds  of  men  it  is  in  every  way  safer 
to  provide  them  with  freedom.  Wild 
beasts  are  wild  beasts  in  cages  no  less 
than  in  jungles;  putting  them  under 
restraint  sometimes  tends  to  the  dis- 
guise of  this  fact.  The  utmost  freedom 
serves  to  disclose  the  utmost  in  man; 
under  freedom  we  shall  know  man  bet- 
ter and  learn  to  act  with  knowledge. 
One  may  put  the  skin  of  a  deer  over  the 
body  of  a  lion;  that  act  will  not  make 
the  wearer  of  the  new  robe  any  the  less 
a  beast  of  prey.  Cover  all  religious 
views  with  the  same  ecclesiastical  skin, 
if  you  can,  but  know  that  not  in  this 
way  are  doubt,  protest,  heterogeneous- 
ness,  distemper,  ruthless  passion  abol- 
ished. We  thus  keep  while  we  conceal 
these  evils;  we  add  to  them  a  whole 
brood  of  greater  evils:  insincerity,  the 
double  life,  and  sometimes  the  atheism 
that  feeds  on  the  sacramental  bread 

and  wine. 

• 

ii 

The  great  religion  is  the  product  of 
the  great  race;  when  brought  forth,  the 
religion  returns  to  exalt  and  perpetuate^ 


REASONABLE  HOPES  OF  AMERICAN  RELIGION 


827 


the  race  from  whose  life  it  has  come. 
Israel  has  given  to  the  world  the  sov- 
ereign religion,  because  in  moral  sin- 
cerity and  depth,  in  the  vision  of  God 
and  of  the  spiritual  world,  Israel  has 
been  the  sovereign  race.  If  the  reli- 
gion of  America  is  to'be  great  it  must 
have  as  its  source  a  great  American 
people.  The  mean  races  and  the  mean 
individuals  among  great  races  degrade 
religion.  Such  has  been  the  fate  of 
Christianity  many  times  in  the  course 
of  the  centuries ;  the  degenerate  person 
reflects  his  degeneracy  in  his  religious 
ideas. 

But,  Lord,  remember  me  and  mine 
Wi'  mercies  temporal  and  divine, 
That  I  for  grace  an'  gear  may  shine 

Excell'd  by  nane; 
And  a'  the  glory  shall  be  thine  — 
Amen,  Amen. 

What  about  the  race  of  Americans  ? 
It  is  without  doubt  heterogeneous;  hu- 
man beings  are  here,  it  might  almost 
be  said,  from  every  nation  under  hea- 
ven. Sometimes  in  moments  of  bewil- 
dered thought  America  seems  a  Pente- 
costal nation,  minus  the  Holy  Ghost. 
When  one  becomes  clearer  and  looks 
deeper  into  the  life  of  Americans  one 
sees  that  minus  must  be  changed  to 
plus. 

Business  stamina  and  athletic  prow- 
ess show  conclusively  that  Americans 
are  physically  a  great  people.  The  evi- 
dences of  their  mental  alertness,  in- 
genuity, inventiveness,  resourceful- 
ness, and  mastery  multiply  on  every 
hand.  Nothing  else  is  to  be  expected 
when  one  considers  that  hither  have 
come,  for  many  generations,  the  bold- 
est, the  most  energetic,  and  in  many 
ways  the  most  gifted  and  resolute,  of 
the  peoples  of  Europe.  The  physical 
and  intellectual  capacities  of  Americans 
are  beyond  dispute. 

Can  the  same  thing  be  said  about  the 
moral  qualities  and  the  spiritual  apti- 
tudes of  our  people?  I  conceive  that 


more  can  be  said  to  their  advantage 
on  this  third  and  highest  level  of  life 
than  on  either  of  the  other  two.  Im- 
migration is  the  surest  key  to  the  soul 
of  Americans.  We  are  a  nation  of  immi- 
grants; some  have  come  earlier,  some 
later;  but  the  race  as  a  whole  is  a 
stranger  in  a  strange  land.  As  of  old 
there  came  a  voice  to  the  earliest  set- 
tlers and  to  their  successors,  '  Get  thee 
out  from  thy  country,  and  from  thy 
kindred  and  from  thy  father's  house.* 
Leave  was  taken  with  hope,  and  also 
with  deep,  inevitable  regret.  The  deep- 
est psychic  fact  in  our  people  is  a  struc- 
ture of  light  and  shadow,  *  built  of 
tears  and  sacred  flames/  Few  of  all 
who  come  to  remain  here  ever  return 
or  catch  so  much  as  a  glance  of  the  land 
of  their  birth  that  lies  transfigured  in 
the  morning  memories  of  the  heart. 
Recollection  deepens  with  the  stream 
of  the  years  like  the  bed  of  the  river 
under  its  current.  The  volume  of  senti- 
ment increases;  our  people  are  deep- 
hearted;  they  are  united  by  the  ties  of 
the  soul  both  to  the  old  world  and 
the  new.  They  have  in  them  an  im- 
pulse toward  cosmopolitanism;  there  is 
among  us  a  vast  unspoken  humanity 
of  high  prophetic  moment.  Some  day 
the  voice  of  genius  will  unseal  the 
depths  and  we  shall  see  what  the  disci- 
pline of  sorrow  and  hope,  the  warp  and 
woof  of  immigration,  has  wrought  for 
this  new  race. 

Here  we  meet  a  confident,  and  some- 
times an  insolent,  objection.  Is  not 
immigration  mainly  for  economic  pur- 
poses? Are  not  the  Pilgrims  absolutely 
without  successors  in  the  motive  of 
their  settlement  here?  Should  we  not 
excite  against  ourselves  the  mirth  of 
the  world  were  we  to  claim  that  any 
mortal  now  seeks  these  shores  solely  or 
chiefly  that  he  may  have  freedom  to 
worship  God?  We  should  indeed;  yet 
that  admission  is  only  the  introduction 
to  the  epic  of  the  immigrant's  life.  Few 


828 


REASONABLE  HOPES  OF  AMERICAN  RELIGION 


gain  the  economic  Paradise  they  came 
hither  to  find;  their  hopes  prove  to  be 
more  than  half  hallucinations.  What 
the  overwhelming  majority  of  immi- 
grants discover  is  that  harder  work 
awaits  them  here  than  in  the  old  home, 
a  swifter  movement  of  activity,  severer 
conditions  of  toil,  more  pay,  but  not 
pay  enough  to  take  them  from  the  race- 
course; more  pay  but  less  play,  less 
peace;  an  existence  heightened  in  in- 
tensity and  therefore  more  exhausting, 
success  gained  through  an  abnormal 
devotion  to  material  ends,  a  success 
that  seems  poor  in  the  light  of  the 
early  economic  ideal  now  seen  to  be 
impossible. 

We  hear  much  of  the  few  great 
economic  successes  among  our  immi- 
grants; we  hear  little  of  something 
infinitely  deeper  and  more  importu- 
nate for  the  life  of  Americans,  the  eco- 
nomic disillusionment.  In  the  experi- 
ence of  millions  the  economic  ideal  is 
seen  to  be  hopeless;  by  itself  as  a  sat- 
isfaction for  the  rational  soul,  it  is  at 
length  seen  to  be  unutterably  base. 
Then  comes  the  great  epoch  and  its 
great  event,  the  recoil  of  the  disillu- 
sioned humanity  upon  itself.  This  does 
not  mean  that  all  who  pass  through  the 
experience  described  turn  up  in  the 
weekly  prayer  meeting,  that  they  go  to 
church,  adopt  a  particular  creed,  or 
embrace  any  form  of  conventional  re- 
ligion; it  means  the  growing  sense  of 
humanity  as  the  great  superlative,  the 
vision  of  something  other  and  immeas- 
urably better  than  economic  triumph 
and  obedience,  often  enough  halting 
and  broken,  but  in  heart  essentially 
true  to  this  heavenly  vision.  America 
has  been  cruelly  misrepresented  to  the 
immigrant;  it  has  been  made  to  appeal 
to  the  mere  economic  animal  in  his 
composite  existence;  experience  brings 
reversal  of  hope  and  the  vision  of  the 
true  America,  the  place  where  as  of  old 
men  earn  their  bread  in  the  sweat  of 


their  brow,  where  the  ground  is  cursed 
for  their  sake. 

Great  is  the  life  that  often  follows 
this  early  disenchantment.  The  sun  is 
down,  the  dust  is  now  laid  that  the 
wild  winds  have  blown  through  all 
the  hot  noisy  hours  of  the  day,  and 
against  the  background  of  infinite 
night  the  stars  appear,  symbols  of  the 
high  and  countless  splendors  that  exist 
in  this  amazing  universe  for  the  men 
who  have  recovered  their  humanity. 
Standing  upon  this  ground  of  the  es- 
sential moral  greatness  of  our  people, 
some  of  the  nobler  hopes  of  American 
religion  come  into  view. 


in 

Keeping  in  the  middle  of  the  stream, 
it  may  be  said  that  religion  in  America 
is  setting  toward  its  great  objects  with 
a  deeper  and  stronger  tide.  As  the 
external  supports  of  religion  have  be- 
come the  subjects  of  serious  question, 
religion  has  become  clearer  and  surer 
of  itself;  it  has  made  some  progress  in 
disengaging  essential  from  incidental, 
and  is  likely  to  make  greater  progress 
along  this  line  in  the  immediate  future. 
Once  the  Bible  was  the  book  whose 
words  settled  all  religious  debates. 
While  for  the  seer  the  Bible  has  be- 
come a  greater  book  in  passing  through 
the  fires  of  modern  criticism,  its  words 
are  no  longer  substitutes  for  insight, 
but  inspirations  and  guides  toward  the 
larger  vision.  The  letter  fails  in  the 
greatest  of  books;  because  of  the  lit- 
eral failure  the  spiritual  opportunity 
and  appeal  have  become  more  evident; 
spirit  has  been  incited  to  find  spirit 
with  increased  sureness  and  depth.  To 
be  found  of  the  Infinite  Spirit  one  must 
more  and  more  enter  the  realm  of  spirit, 
and  American  religion  may  be  said  to 
be  making  that  entrance. 

The  Christian  church,  of  whatever 
name,  no  longer  appeals  to  religious 


REASONABLE  HOPES  OF  AMERICAN  RELIGION 


Americans  as  a  distinctively  divine  in- 
stitution. It  is  indeed  a  divine  insti- 
tution in  the  sense  in  which  all  essen- 
tial human  institutions  are  divine.  The 
family,  the  state,  the  school,  the  uni- 
versity, and  the  organized  trade  of  the 
nation  are  divine  institutions;  that  is, 
they  are  essential  expressions  of  the 
life  of  our  people.  The  forms  of  these 
institutions  may  change;  the  institu- 
tions themselves  are  permanent  neces- 
sities of  man's  life  in  this  world.  They 
have  been  wrought  out  by  human 
beings,  seeking,  under  the  guidance  of 
the  Eternal  Spirit,  the  juster  and 
mightier  organization  of  existence.  The 
church  and  other  essential  human  in- 
stitutions rest,  therefore,  on  the  same 
foundations.  These  institutions  are  like 
the  different  peaks  in  some  great 
mountain  range;  higher  and  lower  they 
are,  more  and  less  massive;  one  it  may 
be  towers  far  above  all  the  others  and 
fills  a  vaster  area,  but  one  and  all  rest 
upon  the  same  earth,  one  and  all  rise 
into  the  same  heaven.  A  church  organ- 
ized out  of  heaven  and  set  apart  from 
and  above  all  other  institutions  is  a 
fiction  that  has  vanished  from  the  free 
mind  of  America.  It  exists  in  certain 
places  doubtless,  with  other  survivals 
of  an  outgrown  time;  but  among  wise 
men  it  exists  as  a  myth,  and  is  so  re- 
garded. The  Founder  of  Christianity 
was  less  of  a  churchman  than  any 
other  religious  teacher  in  the  annals  of 
history.  He  used  synagogue,  temple, 
human  homes,  mountain  tops,  desert 
places,  the  fields  and  the  sea,  as  the 
scenes  of  his  prophetic  activity  and 
worship.  It  would  not  be  too  much  to 
say  that  his  church  was  the  cosmos, 
the  lights  thereof  the  sun,  moon,  and 
stars;  the  pictures  on  its  walls  the  fires 
of  morning  and  evening  and  the  sha- 
dows of  noon;  its  altar  the  heart  of 
man;  its  music  the  whispering  winds; 
its  organ  the  universe  supporting  his 
prophetic  voice. 


From  this,  the  most  unecclesiastical 
of  teachers,  arose,  justified  by  the  neces- 
sities of  the  life  of  his  disciples,  fallen 
upon  different  times  in  different  lands, 
successive  forms  of  church  organiza- 
tion. These  were  integrated  finally 
in  the  church  of  the  East  and  the 
great  church  of  the  West.  Disintegra- 
tion at  length  set  in;  what  was  built  by 
man  in  obedience  to  the  impulse  of  life, 
was  taken  down  in  reverence  for  the 
same  impulse.  The  issue  is  the  sense 
of  the  absolute  primacy  of  the  life  of 
the  soul;  the  hope  is  that  this  builder 
and  destroyer  of  institutional  forms  will 
become  surer  of  itself  and  continue  to 
renew  itself  from  the  aboriginal  Foun- 
tain of  life. 

The  Christian  ministry  has  become 
one  vocation  among  many,  equally 
sacred  with  other  essential  vocations 
and  no  more.  The  gain  here  is  inex- 
pressibly great;  all  mere  officialism  is 
impotent  and  vain;  the  man  is  a  pro- 
phet or  priest  in  virtue  of  his  humanity 
exalted  by  the  presence  of  the  living 
God,  or  he  is  a  chimera.  No  titles,  no 
rank,  no  official  consecrations  can  serve 
as  substitutes  for  a  gifted,  disciplined, 
exalted  human  character;  they  may 
remain  convenient  signs  of  it;  they  do 
not  impart  the  grace  of  the  spirit,  at 
best  they  only  call  attention  to  that 
grace;  they  do  not  create  the  prophet 
or  priest;  they  do  their  utmost  when 
they  serve  him.  This  means  the  exalt- 
ation of  all  essential  human  callings; 
it  does  not  mean  the  degradation  of  the 
one  sacred  calling.  The  command  has 
gone  forth  to  all  vocations,  Come  up 
higher.  Again  the  outward  fails  us; 
the  boat  sinks  and  we  trust  ourselves 
to  the  deeps  of  the  Eternal  Spirit. 

For  more  than  a  thousand  years  a 
definite  system  of  thought  ruled  the 
minds  of  religious  men  throughout 
Christendom.  Protestant  and  Catholic 
confessed  substantially  the  same  theo- 
logy; Europe  and  America  stood  here 


830 


REASONABLE  HOPES  OF  AMERICAN  RELIGION 


upon  essentially  the  same  ground.  It 
was  universally  held  that  the  truth 
about  man's  world  was  reflected  in  this 
system  of  belief.  At  length  disintegra- 
tion began  here;  great  abiding  ideas 
were  dug  out  of  the  debris  and  care- 
fully conserved;  the  traditional  creed 
as  a  whole,  however,  became  incred- 
ible; the  eyes  through  which  men  for 
fifteen  centuries  had  read  the  meaning 
of  the  universe  became  dim.  The  relief 
from  this  disintegration  to  the  vexed 
religious  soul  has  been  like  escape 
from  Hades;  the  world  of  God  now  bids 
man  welcome  from  the  prison  that  he 
had  built  for  himself.  According  to 
their  differing  temperaments,  fear  or 
audacity  at  first  filled  the  minds  of 
many  persons  in  the  presence  of  this 
stupendous  event;  bewilderment  has 
encompassed  a  multitude  of  fine  souls 
like  a  thick  cloud;  there  has  been  much 
uncertainty  and  searching  of  heart; 
what  seemed  the  foundations  of  the 
world  have  given  way.  What  can  the 
religious  soul  do  in  this  extremity? 
Betake  itself  to  God,  with  all  its  heart 
singing  its  great  song,  — 

Our  little  systems  have  their  day; 
They  have  their  day  and  cease  to  be: 
They  are  but  broken  lights  of  thee, 
And  thou,  O  Lord,  art  more  than  they. 

So  it  has  been  in  ten  thousand  .instan- 
ces; our  reasonable  hope  is  that  more 
and  more  it  shall  be  thus.  The  call  has 
gone  forth  for  a  profounder  retreat 
upon  the  aboriginal  Soul  of  the  uni- 
verse. From  this  great  experience  in- 
sight will  return,  insight  into  the 
innermost  heart  of  religion  and  confi- 
dence in  its  findings.  This  is  the  issue 
for  the  religious  spirit  as  against  the 
man  to  whom  life  itself  carries  no  gos- 
pel and  whose  home  is  in  ruins  amid 
floods  and  tempests. 

The  scientific  intellect  is  at  its  task, 
dissolving  all  on  its  way  to  the  ever- 
lasting. To  the  dweller  in  the  region  of 
the  traditional  this  is  appalling;  to  the 


soul  whose  one  supreme  passion  is  to 
see  God  here  is  another  vast  inspira- 
tion. Such  a  soul  longs  for  the  things 
that  cannot  be  dissolved,  to  hear  in  the 
roar  of  this  world  of  fateful  change  the 
song  of  the  Time-Spirit,  — 

At  the  whirring  loom  of  time,  unawed, 
I  weave  the  living  mantle  of  God. 

Such  in  few  words  are  some  of  the 
graver  conditions  of  religion  to-day. 
Under  these  conditions  religion  would 
seem  bound  to  do  one  of  these  three 
things:  to  curse  God  and  die,  the  blas- 
phemy of  thought  found  on  a  tragic 
scale  inside  Christian  churches  and 
beyond  them;  to  hug  the  old  traditions 
in  the  new  environment,  hoping  by 
desperate  loyalty  to  secure  them 
against  the  fierce  critical  heat  that  en- 
compasses them,  —  a  faith  as  vain  as 
would  be  the  expectation  of  an  iceberg 
to  remain  intact  afloat  on  the  South 
Atlantic;  the  cry  of  the  mysterious 
Presence  that  wrestled  with  the  first 
Israelite,  *  Let  me  go  for  the  day  break- 
eth.' 

We  are  in  the  dawn  of  a  new  epoch. 
It  would  seem  that  religious  men  are 
to  be  deterred  by  the  decree  of  the 
living  God  from  continuing  the  prac- 
tice of  jumbling  together  in  one  in- 
distinguishable mass  the  precious  and 
the  worthless  in  human  experience,  the 
rational  and  the  mythical,  the  self- 
attesting  and  the  impossible,  the  self- 
sufficing  reality  and  the  superstitions 
that  always  dim  the  radiant  soul  of  re- 
ligion and  try  to  replace  its  pure  splen- 
dor with  their  wild  fantastic  shows. 
The  mood  of  the  time  sounds  a  more 
profound  retreat  upon  God ;  it  spreads 
its  table  in  his  presence;  it  seeks  for 
that  table  the  living  bread,  the  sus- 
tenance without  which  man  cannot  re- 
main man.  Temporal  helps  have  been 
taken  away,  that  the  Eternal  helper 
may  be  found;  religion  has  been  com- 
pelled, like  a  ship  caught  in  a  tempest 
in  shallow  water,  to  put  out  to  sea. 


REASONABLE  HOPES  OF  AMERICAN  RELIGION 


831 


Our  ship  is  good  but  there  is  safety  for 
her  and  her  precious  burden  only  on 
the  deeps. 

IV 

American  religion  is  seeking,  and  it 
is  likely  to  seek  more  and  more,  a  justi- 
fication of  its  being  out  of  the  universe 
now.  Emerson's  essay,  curiously  re- 
ferred to  in  a  recent  issue  of  the  Atlantic 
as  *  mournful/  sounds  the  note  of  a 
vast  hope.  'The  foregoing  generations 
beheld  God  and  nature  face  to  face; 
we  through  their  eyes.  Why  should  not 
we  also  enjoy  an  original  relation  to 
the  universe? '  In  these  words  Emerson 
is  the  prophet  of  all  deep  religion,  of 
the  Christian  religion  in  its  inmost 
spirit.  Protestant  and  Catholic  are 
here  one.  Communion  of  saints,  fellow- 
ship with  the  spirits  of  just  men  made 
perfect,  access  to  the  soul  of  Jesus, 
admission  to  the  immediate  presence 
of  God,  is  recognized  by  all  enlight- 
ened Christians  to  be  at  the  heart  of 
the  soul's  life.  This  immediate  contact 
with  the  Divine  reality  is  primal; 
books,  churches,  prophets,  priests, 
creeds  are  secondary.  We  press  toward 
the  light  Ineffable;  we  are  now  led 
and  again  driven  toward  this  supernal 
centre  by  the  majesty  of  the  past,  by 
the  mystery  of  the  future,  and  by  the 
present  necessities  of  the  soul.  We  seek 
with  all  religious  human  beings  the 
immediate  vision  of  the  living  God. 
The  apocalypse  for  this  day  we  crave 
as  our  daily  bread.  We  discover  that 
the  greatest  words  of  the  past  become 
living  only  in  the  experience  of  the 
present  hour;  outside  of  that  experience 
they  are  dead. 

If  the  religious  man's  soul,  the  souls 
of  his  fellow  men,  and  the  Soul  of  the 
universe  are  hidden,  as  may  well  be  the 
case,  he  may  borrow  light  from  all 
religions  to  help  him  in  his  search.  The 
point  is  that  no  religion  can  create  the 
objects  of  religion;  the  chief  religion 


comes  not  to  create,  but  to  reveal.  At 
last  the  universe  itself  must  justify  or 
discredit  our  life  in  the  spirit.  Believers 
claim  that  it  must  be  possible  to-day, 
as  in  other  days,  to  be  profoundly 
religious  and  to  justify  from  experience 
this  attitude  of  face-to-face  converse 
with  the  Eternal. 

Here  indeed  we  touch  the  inmost 
soul  of  the  Christian  faith,  that  which 
it  utters  in  its  doctrine  of  the  Holy 
Spirit.  Christians  were  never  meant  to 
rely  solely  upon  the  epic  history  of  the 
Master,  to  go  back  two  thousand  or 
ten  thousand  years  in  order  to  find  the 
warrant  for  their  faith.  There  is  the 
present  Guide  unto  all  truth ;  there  is  the 
universe  to-day  under  the  illumination 
of  the  Spirit.  The  record  of  the  Mas- 
ter's career  is  inexpressibly  precious; 
it  is  enriching,  regulative,  corrective, 
prophetic,  dynamic;  it  is  the  sovereign, 
historic  form  of  the  Infinite  compas- 
sion; yet  its  deepest  promise  is  of  the 
Presence  that  pervades  and  illumines 
the  contemporary  world  of  men,/Lo, 
I  am  with  you  alway  even  to  the  end 
of  the  world.'  The  ultimate  realities  of 
the  Christian  religion  are  souls:  the 
souls  of  men  and  the  soul  of  God;  the 
New  Testament  has  its  highest  use 
as  a  guide  to  these  ultimate  realities. 
By  the  wonder  of  the  Spirit  Jesus  be- 
comes the  contemporary  of  his  latest 
disciples. 

The  great  insight  at  work  to-day  in 
all  truly  religious  persons  that  the 
Infinite  Soul  is  with  us  lends  new  sig- 
nificance to  many  forms  of  faith  that 
must  appear  to  thoughtful  men  crude. 
New  Thought,  Theosophy,  Spiritual- 
ism, Eddyism,  the  Healing  Cult,  and 
all  kindred  mo vements  which  seem  triv- 
ial in  the  presence  of  the  greater  his- 
toric churches  of  Christendom,  which 
are  as  it  were  mushroom  growths  com- 
pared with  the  religions  of  immemorial 
influence,  which  often  appear  mere 
amusing  products  of  American  extern- 


832 


REASONABLE  HOPES  OF  AMERICAN  RELIGION 


poraneousness,  become  of  serious  im- 
portance when  viewed  either  as  man's 
face-to-face  converse  with  the  universe 
or  as  presenting  to  the  Infinite  in  the 
unending  process  of  apocalypse  the 
open  mind.  The  world  of  science  would 
stagnate,  the  growth  of  art  would  come 
to  an  end,  the  hope  of  political  and  so- 
cial betterment  would  die,  if  the  elect 
youth  in  each  new  generation  should  be 
content  with  the  insights  and  achieve- 
ments of  the  past.  The  crudeness  and 
the  eccentricity  of  youth  do  not  blind 
us  to  its  noble  dissatisfactions  with  the 
great  past  out  of  which  the  greater 
future  is  to  come.  In  the  same  way  we 
should  regard  even  the  crude,  the  ec- 
centric, the  wildly  extravagant  in  con- 
temporary religion.  It  is  at  all  events 
the  sign  that  men  are  living  in  the 
presence  of  the  Infinite;  that  their 
minds  are  in  the  mood  of  invocation; 
that  they  believe  God  to  be  greater 
than  man's  best  experience;  and  that 
they  look  for  his  mightier  manifesta- 
tion. 

From  this  new  and  eager  contact  with 
the  Divine  universe,  from  this  contem- 
porary agitation  over  life's  sovereign 
problems,  from  this  original,  immediate 
fellowship  with  the  Eternal,  it  would 
be  strange  if  there  did  not  eventuate 
a  vaster  religious  insight,  a  more  stead- 
fast religious  character.  In  the  case  of 
New  England  transcendentalism,  which 
continues  to  minister  to  the  sense  of  hu- 
mor of  many  genial  souls  of  alien  dis- 
cipline, these  four  lines  from  Emerson 
annul  the  extravagance  of  the  move- 
ment and  indicate  its  deep  prophetic 
note: — 

Speaks  not  of  self  that  mystic  tone 
But  of  the  Overgods  alone; 
It  trembles  to  the  cosmic  breath  — 
As  it  heareth  so  it  saith. 

All  religion  that  is  of  substantial  worth 
is  man's  response  to  the  whispers  of 
the  Eternal  in  his  heart.  The  speaking 
universe  and  the  listening  human  soul 


are  the  great  major  premise  of  valid 
religion.  The  contemporary  soul,  pure 
through  desperate  need  and  lofty  long- 
ing, responsive  to  the  voice  of  God 
that  wanders  through  the  world  to-day 
seeking  the  willing  ear,  whatever  its 
immaturities  and  eccentricities  may 
be,  is  a  fountain  of  life  in  the  nation's 
religion. 

The  unique  Exemplar  and  Prophet 
of  American  religion,  in  all  its  manifold 
varieties,  is  Jesus  of  Nazareth.  His 
kingdom  of  man  stands  deeper  in 
American  insight  and  sympathy  tKan 
the  programme  of  all  other  religious 
teachers  and  cults.  His  teaching  and 
example  have  set  aside  Calvin  and 
Edwards;  He  and  no  other  has  his  hand 
upon  the  springs  of  religious  desire;  He 
and  not  the  crank  or  freak  in  our  cara- 
van is  the  inspirer  of  all  that  is  worthi- 
est in  our  experience  and  surest  in  our 
hopes.  We  find  that  Jesus  is  often 
acknowledged  by  the  anarchist  crazed 
by  the  woe  of  the  nations;  He  is  not 
seldom  close  to  the  heart  of  the  Social- 
ist in  his  madness  over  the  contempt  of 
the  strong  for  the  weak;  He  is  recog- 
nized as  the  supreme  friend  of  man  by 
many  among  those  who  see  in  his  dis- 
ciples, as  organized  in  churches,  a  soli- 
darity of  selfishness  hallowed  under 
the  shadow  of  his  glorious  name;  He  is 
the  pillar  of  fire  by  night  to  many  a 
servant  of  social  betterment  to  whom 
the  universe  is  an  impenetrable  mys- 
tery; believers  in  the  humanity  of  man 
have  seen  the  incomparable  greatness 
of  Jesus.  Inside  all  communions  with 
present  power  and  the  hope  of  to-mor- 
row beating  in  their  heart  the  image  of 
the  Prophet  of  Nazareth  is  sovereign. 
Hospitable  to  all  promising  voices, 
ready  to  entertain  strangers  in  the 
hope  that  they  prove  angels  in  dis- 
guise, sadly  disillusioned  as  it  is  about 
many  of  its  guests,  American  religion 
persists  in  the  open  mind,  the  catholic 
heart,  in  the  presence  of  the  Infinite 


REASONABLE  HOPES  OF  AMERICAN  RELIGION 


833 


possibility  of  to-day;  at  the  same  time 
the  name  that  was  to  St.  Paul  above 
every  name  is  still  our  sheet-anchor  in 
the  storm.  Otherwise  to  read  the  signs 
of  the  times  in  the  religious  life  of 
America  is  to  miss  the  chief  sign. 


American  religion,  while  sympathetic 
toward  the  whole  higher  intellectual 
achievement  of  mankind,  is  likely  to  be 
less  disposed  to  ask  alien  philosophies 
to  account  for  it  or  to  accredit  it  to  the 
world.  This  is  the  issue  of  the  disci- 
pline in  historical  analysis  that  a  gen- 
eration of  great  scholars  have  imposed 
upon  themselves.  Everything  that  has 
become  mixed  with  Christianity  in  the 
course  of  the  centuries  is  not  therefore 
an  essential  part  of  its  character;  addi- 
tions to  Christianity  made  since  the 
close  of  the  apostolic  age  are  not  neces- 
sarily alien  in  spirit.  Historical  analy- 
sis exhibits  the  original  force  and  body 
of  ideas  in  the  Gospel  of  Christ;  it  dis- 
criminates between  what  is  original 
and  what  is  a  later  addition.  It  leaves 
the  free  mind  of  the  world  to  decide 
the  further  question,  How  far  is  the 
historic  accretion  compatible  with  the 
original  genius  of  Christianity?  His- 
torical analysis  has  made  good  the 
distinction  between  the  original  and 
the  derived,  the  kindred  and  the  alien, 
the  development  from  within  and  the 
addition  from  without,  the  product  of 
the  Holy  Spirit  and  the  product  of  the 
Time  Spirit.  This  distinction  has  been 
adopted  by  the  free  mind  of  religious 
America;  the  adoption  of  this  distinc- 
tion marks  an  epoch  in  the  higher 
religious  mind  of  the  nation. 

Christianity,  the  highest  form  of 
American  religion  and  incomparably 
the  widest  and  deepest  in  influence, 
has  been  obliged,  as  every  one  knows, 
to  run  itself  into  the  forms  of  philoso- 
phies more  or  less  alien  to  itself  in  order 
VOL.  in  -  NO.  6 


to  shape  the  minds  of  men  in  certain 
ages  of  the  world.  Christianity  has  at 
times  spoken  with  the  great  voice  of 
Plato;  it  has  filled  with  its  transfigur- 
ing grace  the  vast  impressive  fog  of 
Neo-Platonism;  it  has  taken  as  an  ally 
the  mighty  intellect  of  Aristotle;  it  has 
identified  its  belief  with  the  opinions 
of  men  like  Origen  and  Athanasius, 
Augustine  and  Aquinas,  who  were 
themselves  in  some  degree  products 
of  many  alien  contemporary  influences. 
Christianity  has  become  Calvinistic, 
Arminian,  Hegelian,  Evolutionary, 
Pragmatic.  As  adaptations  of  the  gen- 
ius of  Christianity  to  the  mind  of  par- 
ticular times,  these  forms  of  faith  may 
be  highly  useful ;  they  may  indeed  be  a 
temporary  necessity.  Christianity  must 
know  the  dialect  and  idiom  of  the  suc- 
cessive ages  and  speak  in  them  if  it  is 
to  be  widely  understood.  The  wonder 
of  Pentecost,  at  which  were  gathered 
the  devout  from  every  nation  under 
heaven,  each  group  hearing  in  its  own 
tongue  the  mighty  works  of  God,  has 
been  in  a  true  and  great  way  the  one 
continuous  wonder  in  the  onward  move- 
ment of  Christianity. 

Still  it  must  be  said  that  Christianity 
does  not  espouse  the  cause  of  the  abso- 
lute truth  of  these  contemporary  serv- 
ants. They  are  not  bone  of  its  bone 
or  flesh  of  its  flesh.  Nothing  is  essen- 
tial to  Christianity  as  metaphysic  but 
the  reality  of  the  souls  of  men  and  the 
soul  of  God;  nothing  is  permanently 
vital  to  the  Gospel  but  the  fellowship 
of  these  souls  in  an  ever-deepening 
moral  experience  and  the  resulting 
exaltation  of  our  human  world.  Jesus 
is  the  permanent  centre  of  his  religion 
as  mediating  between  human  souls  and 
the  Eternal  soul;  he  is  essential  as  the 
Supreme  prophet  of  a  universe  in  which 
soul  is  the  ultimate  reality. 

This  deeper  sense  of  its  distinctive 
being  and  purpose  on  the  part  of  Chris- 
tianity explains  much  in  the  Christian, 


834 


REASONABLE  HOPES  OF  AMERICAN  RELIGION 


mind  to-day.  The  mood  of  American 
religion  is  that  it  is  unwise  to  identify 
its  truth  with  the  fortunes  of  even  the 
most  important  contemporary  move- 
ments in  the  world  of  thought;  it  is  less 
unwise,  but  still  questionable,  to  make 
too  close  a  covenant  between  the  Gos- 
pel of  Jesus,  with  its  austerely  simple 
metaphysic  and  its  sublime  ethic,  and 
the  vast  enduring  systems  of  thought. 
Greek  philosophy  is  great;  on  its  human 
side  it  is  in  essence  lasting  as  the  mind 
of  man.  Yet  it  is  often  immature, 
wanting  in  width  of  sympathy;  it  is 
the  product  of  a  small  although  a  pro- 
foundly significant  world.  Religion  is 
always  the  product  of  a  vast  world;  it 
is  at  its  highest  always  in  the  sense  of 
the  Eternal,  and  the  Eternal  is  in  the 
soul  of  the  religious  man  and  commun- 
ity as  creative  spirit.  This  being  its 
genius,  religion  must  give  an  independ- 
ent account  of  itself.  As  experience,  it 
transcends  in  depth  and  character  all 
other  experiences;  as  empirical  reality, 
its  momentousness  is  self-evident;  as 
reality,  it  must  speak  for  itself,  it  must 
construe  its  own  universe,  it  must  be 
its  own  ultimate  prophet. 

VI 

We  come  now  to  the  highest  aspect 
and  hope  of  American  religion.  Vision 
is  indispensable  to  religion,  but  vision 
is  not  the  chief  element;  sentiment  is 
essential,  yet  sentiment  is  not  the  main 
thing.  The  soul  of  American  religion  is 
action  issuing  from  creative  will.  Our 
religion  adopts  Fichte's  great  insight 
that  the  vocation  of  man  is  to  become  a 
doer  of  the  will  of  the  Highest;  it  cries 
out  with  Emerson,  — 

Unless  to  Thought  is  added  Will 

Apollo  is  an  imbecile; 

it  accepts  with  reverence  and  confidence 
the  assurance  of  Jesus,  'If  any  man 
willeth  to  do  his  will  he  shall  know  of 
the  teaching.'  Knowledge  and  being 


by  the  path  of  rational  action  is  our 
firmest  possession.  American  religion 
is  often  unconventional  in  its  expres- 
sions, it  can  at  times  be  profane  in  its 
dialect;  it  cannot  acquiesce  in  hopeless 
impotence.  To  the  pious  cant  of  the 
fatalist  on  whose  soul  the  wrongs  of 
suffering  men  sit  lightly,  'Well,  God 
mend  all,'  it  answers  in  the  style  of  a 
man  with  red  blood  in  his  veins,  'Nay, 
by  God,  we  must  help  him  to  mend  it.' 
The  fighter  for  righteousness  believes 
that  the  stars  in  their  courses  are  on 
his  side;  he  does  his  duty  in  the  sense 
that  the  universe  is  the  backer  of  the 
conscientious  servant  of  man.  His 
faith  comes  up  out  of  his  experience  as 
a  creative  force.  He  is  confident  that 
in  the  long  run  humanity  cannot  be 
defeated  by  inhumanity;  in  the  vivid 
idiom  of  the  street,  the  final  triumph  of 
evil  over  good  is  as  likely  as  the  success 
of  a  celluloid  dog  chasing  an  asbestos 
cat  through  hell.  Aggressive,  confident, 
militant  action  is  the  great  watchword 
of  American  faith. 

The  actual  world  is. apt  to  be  the 
despair  of  the  religions  of  the  nations. 
The  theism  of  Mohammedanism  is 
great,  and  by  no  manner  of  means  is  it 
ineffective.  It  exalts  the  lives  of  mil- 
lions; it  prohibits  the  use  of  alcohol, 
and  it  rescues  society  from  the  retinue 
of  miseries  that  follow  the  use  of  that 
poison.  It  does  indeed  sanction  poly- 
gamy, but  it  exorcises  the  horror  of 
prostitution.  It  secures  among  certain 
races  a  creditable  measure  of  honesty, 
a  large  degree  of  kindness  and  loyalty. 
Mohammedanism  has  great  merits  and 
yet  it  is  powerless  in  the  presence  of 
the  deeper  evils  of  the  world.  The  status 
of  woman  as  inferior  to  man  it  has  es- 
tablished and  maintained,  and  this  is 
the  fountain  of  the  gravest  disorders. 
It  has  been  unable  to  sober  the  fanatic, 
to  elevate  into  sovereign  influence  the 
sentiment  of  humanity.  Above  all  it 
is  impotent  in  the  presence  of  auto- 


REASONABLE  HOPES  OF  AMERICAN  RELIGION 


835 


cratic  and  corrupt  governments;  it  is 
without  hope  before  the  distresses  that 
arise  from  disease  and  uncleanness;  it 
has  no  inspiration  for  science  and  no 
appreciation  of  the  mercies  of  applied 
science;  it  stands  dumb  as  it  looks  upon 
the  economic  misery  of  its  devotees;  it 
calls  for  submission  to  present  evils  as 
to  the  foreordained  lot  of  human  be- 
ings; it  is  exhilarated  by  no  outlook 
toward  a  new  heaven  and  a  new  earth 
wherein  dwelleth  righteousness;  it  is 
in  despair  as  it  surveys  the  actual  world 
of  men. 

The  same  is  true  of  Buddhism.  The 
core  of  that  mighty  faith  is  as  noble  as 
anything  in  the  possession  of  mankind; 
yet  it  is  essentially  the  religion  of  de- 
spair. Resignation  is  its  highest  word; 
the  path  to  extinction  of  being  by  the 
way  of  holiness  is  its  supreme  beati- 
tude. The  actual  condition  of  man's 
world  in  time  is  beyond  remedy  except 
by  spiritual  suicide.  The  universe  has 
no  light  or  help  for  those  who  cherish 
the  will  to  live.  Our  human  world  with 
all  its  relations,  interests,  experiences, 
aspirations,  and  ideal  dreams  is  a  mis- 
take. Nothing  can  cure  this  mistake 
but  the  will  to  die  in  the  sense  of  ab- 
solute extinction.  This  religion  is  the 
refuge  for  human  beings  in  defeat,  for 
the  victims  of  despair  and  for  them 
alone. 

Much  of  European  Christianity  is  in 
a  similar  state  of  mind.  It  has  no 
word  upon  the  economic  distress  of  the 
multitude;  it  does  not  lift  its  voice 
against  government  as  it  grounds  itself 
upon  brute  force;  it  has  no  vision  of 
remedial  energy  equal  to  its  vision  of 
sin;  it  has  no  social  gospel  for  this 
world;  it  confines  its  work  to  the  allev- 
iation of  evils  that  it  cannot  hope  to 
cure,  to  the  discipline  of  men  in  limita- 
tion and  sorrow  toward  blessedness  in 
another  state  of  existence;  it  has  no 
consciousness  of  a  creative  Christian- 
ity; it  throws  no  defiance  in  the  face  of 


the  total  evils  that  afflict  the  world; 
it  entertains  no  vision  of  the  victory 
of  humanity  over  inhumanity  in  the 
course  of  time. 

This  social  faith  is  the  chief  note  in 
American  religion.  It  lives  among 
evils  as  rank  and  offensive  as  exist  in 
any  nation  on  the  globe;  it  will  acknow- 
ledge none  of  them  as  inevitable  and 
final.  It  has  crudities  enough  of  its 
own;  it  can  match  at  all  points  the 
weaknesses  of  other  religions  with 
infirmities  of  its  own,  with  this  vast 
exception,  —  it  is  determined  to  absorb 
the  best  in  the  vision,  passion,  and 
character  of  the  past  and  to  wield 
this  totality  of  ideal  power  through  be- 
lieving souls  upon  the  present  condition 
of  the  nation.  All  our  efforts  at  the 
betterment  of  the  people  come  from  es- 
sentially religious  motives.  Education, 
prison  reform,  sanitation,  the  treat- 
ment of  disease,  the  programme  against 
intemperance  and  vice,  the  movements 
against  industrial  iniquity,  social  dis- 
tress, the  inhumanity  of  man  to  man, 
come  from  the  great  basic  faith  that 
there  exists  no  incurable  evil,  that  the 
Soul  of  the  universe  is  on  our  side 
while  we  strive  for  the  complete  reflec- 
tion in  our  existence  of  the  humanity  of 
Jesus. 

We  Americans  confess  at  once  that 
in  many  respects  we  are  a  crude  race, 
that  we  are  a  people  in  the  making. 
We  gratefully  acknowledge  the  re- 
sources put  at  our  disposal  by  the  older 
nations;  we  welcome  the  help  of  the 
art,  the  wisdom,  and  the  character  of 
ancient  races;  we  concede  their  supe- 
riority at  many  points,  we  are  eager  to 
learn  from  them  where  they  seem  to  be 
wiser  than  we.  We  must,  however,  add 
to  this  appreciation  a  criticism  that  we 
think  inevitable.  We  find  in  much  of 
the  Christianity  of  the  older  nations  a 
want  of  energy  and  hope  that  we  refuse 
to  make  our  own,  a  timidity  in  the 
presence  of  immemorial  wrongs  that  we 


836 


REASONABLE  HOPES  OF  AMERICAN   RELIGION 


consider  cowardly,  a  spirit  of  acquies- 
cence with  inhuman  conditions  of  ex- 
istence that  we  regard  as  equal  to  the 
denial  of  Christianity,  a  blindness  to 
the  physical  and  moral  remedies  in  the 
order  of  humanity  that  is  astounding, 
an  infatuation  with  formal  religion,  a 
contentment  with  the  pieties  of  a  purely 
personal  faith,  and  a  resignation  before 
the  woe  of  the  world  that  we  must  de- 
fine as  symptoms  of  practical  atheism. 
Above  all  we  miss  in  much  of  the  Chris- 
tianity of  the  old  world  the  conscious- 
ness of  the  Creative  Spirit,  the  Spirit 
that  proclaims,  'Behold,  I  make  all 
things  new/  that  goes  against  the  total 
evil  that  afflicts  mankind  in  a  campaign 
that  will  end  only  when  evil  is  done  to 
death. 

This  is  the  American  religious  war; 
it  includes  in  its  grand  army  many  dis- 
similar divisions,  corps,  battalions,  and 
companies;  it  is  not  the  assemblage  of 
American  churches  merely;  it  is  also 
and  in  a  great  sense  the  muster  of  the 
moral  forces  of  American  humanity; 
it  is  a  war  against  evil  to  the  knife  and 
the  knife  to  the  hilt.  Out  beyond  or- 
ganized religion  in  America  is  the  shad- 
ow of  a  mighty  dream;  the  dream  is  of 
the  Republic  of  God  in  the  Republic  of 
man;  this  dream  lives  and  works  in  the 
souls  of  our  greatest  prophets.  The 


shadow  is  the  projection  of  this  dream; 
that  shadow  claims  for  the  complete 
life  of  our  people  the  whole  circle  of 
essential  human  interests  upon  which 
it  rests. 

We  hear,  as  we  expected,  the  un- 
believing response,  'This  is  American 
optimism/  To  be  sure  it  is.  America, 
with  all  her  sins,  believes  in  God  and 
the  ultimate  omnipotence  of  duty  read 
in  the  light  of  God's  eyes.  *  This  is  the 
faith  of  a  young  nation/  is  another 
exclamation  from  our  aged  and  some- 
what infirm  neighbors.  True  again; 
and  this  faith  of  a  young  nation  repeats 
itself  in  the  successive  generations  of 
elect  American  youth.  In  this  way  the 
religious  nation  keeps  itself  young;  it 
has  in  vision  the  spirit  of  the  Divine 
youth  Jesus  before  whom  time  ap- 
peared as  the  field  of  the  apocalypse  of 
his  Father,  —  *  Heaven  and  earth  shall 
pass  away  but  my  words  shall  not  pass 
away ' ;  it  recalls  the  enthusiasm  of  the 
group  of  dauntless  youth  whom  Jesus 
commissioned  to  carry  the  news  of  his 
kingdom  into  all  the  world.  America 
is  proud  of  her  youth,  she  means  to 
renew  her  youth  like  the  eagle,  she  is 
resolved  to  make  it  everlasting  in  the 
creative  might  of  the  everlasting  God 
in  whom  is  her  trust  for  herself  and 
the  world. 


THE  ANSWERING  OF  ABIEL  KINGSBURY'S  PRAYERS 


BY   VIRGINIA   BAKER 


ABIEL  KINGSBURY,  leaning  against 
the  stone  wall  that  bounded  his  sheep 
pasture,  groaned  aloud. 

Along  the  narrow  pathway  which  zig- 
zagged across  the  lots  separating  the 
Graves  and  Kingsbury  farms  a  woman 
was  stepping  briskly.  She  was  a  small 
woman,  but  even  her  gait  indicated  ag- 
gressiveness. As  she  walked,  her  gray 
homespun  skirt  switched  the  grass  on 
either  side  smartly.  Belated  crickets 
fled  before  her  approach,  and  dry  leaves 
swirled  behind  her. 

Abiel  surveyed  her  with  disconsolate 
eyes. 

*  She's  jest  like  a  king-bird  and  I'm 
jest  like  a  crow/  he  muttered.  'I  dono 
why  I  feel  so  scart  of  a  leetle  thing 
like  her.  She 's  considerable  younger  'n 
I  be,  too,  but  I'd  ruther  face  old  Moll 
Pitcher  and  her  cannon  any  time.  I 
don't  see  how  she  knowed  I  was  down 
here.  She's  like  an  Injun  for  findin'  a 
trail.  I  b'lieve,  ef  I  was  to  make  a  v'y- 
age  to  Cuby,  she'd  git  a  faster  vessel 
and  overtake  me  in  the  horse  latitudes 
where  I  could  n't  git  away/ 

From  the  depths  of  her  lilac  sunbon- 
net,  Almira  Graves  gazed  sharply  at 
Abiel's  dejected  figure.  She  swept  up 
to  the  wall,  her  right  hand  extended. 
In  it  she  held  a  blue  dish  covered  with 
a  white  towel. 

'We  fried  doughnuts  to  our  house 
this  mornin',  'Biel,  so  I  brought  ye 
some/  she  said.  The  tones  of  her  voice 
were  startlingly  deep  as  contrasted  with 
her  rather  diminutive  figure.  'Some 
on  'em's  rings  and  some  is  twists/ 
she  continued,  lifting  the  towel,  'and 


there's  a  couple  of  pigs  for  the  twins. 
I  made  'em  myself.  Ain't  they  cute 
lookin'?" 

Abiel  made  no  movement  to  take 
the  dish. 

'You're  real  kind,  Almiry/  he  said, 
'but  I  don't  give  Kellup  and  Jacup 
many  doughnuts.  Sech  greasy  vic- 
tuals ain't  good  for  leetle  young  ones. 
It  gives  'em  dyspepsy/ 

'Fiddle-dee-dee!'  said  Almira,  her 
voice  booming  out  dominantly.  'You 
was  brought  up  on  doughnuts,  and  fried 
salt  pork  and  sassige  meat,  too,  and  you 
hain't  never  had  a  sick  day  in  your  life. 
Here,  take  'em,  quick.  I  must  be  goin' 
now,  for  I  've  got  the  dishes  to  do,  but 
I  '11  come  over  for  a  spell,  arfter  supper, 
and  darn  them  stockin's  you  washed 
yistiddy/ 

'  Charlotte  Briggs  darns  all  — '  Abiel 
began;  but  Almira,  ignoring  his  words, 
thrust  the  dish  into  his  reluctant  hands. 

'You  give  Kellup  and  Jacup  them 
pigs  jest  as  soon  as  you  git  home/  she 
commanded.  She  whirled  about  and 
began  rapidly  retracing  her  steps  along 
the  winding  path,  a  bewildered  toad 
dashing  before  her  in  a  frantic  effort 
to  escape  being  crushed. 

Abiel  stood,  dish  in  hand,  blinking 
at  the  doughnuts,  crisp,  brown,  and 
spicily  fragrant.  Suddenly  he  straight- 
ened his  drooping  shoulders. 

'They  shan't  eat  'em!'  he  cried, 
hoarsely.  'Not  a  one!  They  shan't 
even  taste  of  'em.  I  'd  jest  as  lives  give 
'em  toadstools.  I'm  a-goin'  to  throw 
the  hull  mess  on  'em  to  the  hens,  and 
I '11  tell  her  I  done  it/ 

837 


838         THE  ANSWERING  OF  ABIEL  KINGSBURY'S  PRAYERS 


He  took  down  the  bars  and  stepped 
out  of  the  lot.  Then  he  hurried  up  the 
road  to  his  barnyard.  A  large  flock  of 
hens,  quietly  feeding  there,  stretched 
their  necks  and  cackled  loudly  at  sight 
of  the  dish. 

1  Here,  biddy,  biddy,  biddy!'  Abiel 
cried. 

The  hens  came  running  with  wings 
outspread.  He  crumbled  the  doughnuts 
and  scattered  the  fragments  on  the 
ground.  A  slow  smile  of  satisfaction 
lighted  his  face  as  the  fowls  scrambled 
for  the  feast,  pushing  and  pecking  in 
their  greedy  haste. 

As  he  shook  the  last  crumbs  from 
the  dish  the  rattle  of  wheels  sounded 
in  the  distance,  and  presently  a  cart 
came  jogging  around  a  bend  in  the  road. 
It  was  a  small  cart,  painted  blue,  and 
filled  to  overflowing  with  a  motley  col- 
lection of  articles.  A  little  wizened  old 
man  was  perched  on  the  high  seat.  He 
drew  rein  when  he  saw  Abiel. 

*  All  kinds  of  goods  specially  fitted  for 
bridegrooms*  wear,'  he  cried.  'Neck- 
cloths, han'kerchers,  shoe-buckles,  ruf- 
fles, and  five  different  patterns  of  fig- 
gered  velvets  and  satins  for  weskits.' 

His  voice  was  thin  and  piping,  and 
his  deep-set  gray  eyes  twinkled  keenly. 
'  Ain't  ben  married  sence  I  was  'round 
larst  time,  hev  ye?'  he  demanded. 

Abiel  shook  his  head  vigorously. 

'No,  I  ain't  married  nobuddy,  Hez'- 
kiah,  and  I  ain't  lottin'  on  marryin' 
nobuddy,'  he  replied.  'Gittin'  married 
is  the  furtherest  thing  from  my  mind.' 

The  old  man  cackled  shrilly. 

'Lordy,  'Biel,  I  did  n't  think  you'd 
gone  and  married  anybuddy,'  he  re- 
sponded. 'I  thought,  mebbe,  some- 
buddy 'd  come  and  married  you, 
though.'  He  cackled  again.  'Better 
not  crow  tell  ye 're  out  of  the  woods. 
Almiry  Graves  is  an  almighty  smart 
woman;  though,  seems  to  me,  that 
most  any  female  not  half  as  faculized 
as  she  is  could  contrive  to  ketch  a 


widower  with  five  small  children  and 
all  on  'em  boys.  I  don't  b'lieve  she's 
a-goin'  to  ask  you  whether  you  want 
her  or  not.  When  she  gits  ready  she'll 
jest  take  ye.' 

Abiel's  sunburned  cheeks  reddened. 

'  I  know  you  're  a  skiptic,  Hez'kiah,' 
he  said, '  but  I  've  alwuz  ben  a  b'liever. 
I  'm  a-prayin'  stiddy  to  the  Lord  to  git 
shet  of  Almiry,  and  I've  trust  in  his 
power  to  save  them  that  supplicates 
Him  with  faith.  I  don't  need  no  wife. 
When  Mirandy  was  failin',  I  learnt  to 
wash  and  iron  and  cook  real  good. 
Charlotte  Briggs  tends  to  the  sewin' 
and  knittin'.  Ef  twarn't  for  Almiry 
Graves  a-comin'  here  so  much,  and  a 
shoemaker  not  a-comin'  here  at  all,  I 
should  n't  have  no  troubles,  whatever.' 

Hezekiah  raised  his  eyebrows. 

'Jehosaphat!'  he  exclaimed.  'Ain't 
Bill  Hatch  ben  round  this  way  yet? 
Why,  larst  time  I  was  here  your  fam- 
bly's  shoes  looked  like  the  town  poor.' 

'Bill  Hatch  is  awful  sick  with  asth- 
my,'  Abiel  rejoined.  'Pelick  Baxter 
went  to  Dighton  the  other  day  and  see 
him.  Said  he  sounded  as  ef  he'd  got 
the  heaves.  Mis'  Hatch  told  him  that, 
onless  boots  and  shoes  fell  from  the 
sky  in  this  deestrict,  Swansea  folks 'd 
have  to  look  for  another  shoemaker.  I 
dono  what  I  'm  a-goin'  to  do.  I  'd  ruther 
see  a  shoemaker  than  Pres'dent  Mad- 
ison himself.  I  thought,  mebbe,  you  'd 
come  acrost  one  somewheres  in  your 
travels.' 

'I  was  peddlin'  round  North  Reho- 
both  larst  week,  and  I  did  hear  of  a 
feller  that  hed  ben  workin'  up  that 
way,'  Hezekiah  answered,  'but  he 
went  over  towards  Freetown.  Ef  I'd 
known  Bill  Hatch  was  ailin',  I  could  'a 
sent  him  down  here  jest  as  well  as  not. 
I  don't  know  of  nary  other  one.  Some- 
how shoemakers  seems  dretful  scurce 
this  season.' 

'The  ones  that  useter  come  'round 
have  ben  a-dyin'  off  for  the  last  three 


THE  ANSWERING  OF  ABIEL  KINGSBURY'S  PRAYERS        839 


years,'  returned  Abiel.  'I  dono  what 
I'm  a-goin*  to  do/  he  repeated,  for- 
lornly. 'I  s'pose  old  Injun  Marg'ret, 
that  lives  in  the  cave  down  to  Birch 
Swamp,  would  make  me  some  mocca- 
sins, but  them  ain't  like  shoes/ 

The  peddler  screwed  up  his  eyes  re- 
flectively. 

'Bein'  as  you  have  so  much  faith  in 
prayer,  why  don't  you  pray  for  a  shoe- 
maker?'  he  queried.  *  My  own  belief  is 
that  the  Almighty's  too  busy  with  wind 
and  rain,  and  thunder  and  lightnin', 
and  earthquakes,  and  sech  things,  to 
bother  with  widowers  that  don't  want 
to  git  married,  or  young  ones  that  ain't 
got  no  shoes.  But  you  might  experi- 
ment with  a  prayer  or  two/ 

Abiel's  disconsolate  face  lighted. 

'Why,  yes,  I'll  pray/  he  cried  eager- 
ly; 'I'd  oughter  have  done  it  long  ago, 
but  I  never  thought  of  it.  I  'm  so  pest- 
ered with  Almiry  that  I  forgit  even  my 
religious  duties/ 

'Hope  you'll  git  answered  prompt/ 
Hezekiah  responded.  He  gathered  up 
the  reins.  'Wai,  ef  I  can't  sell  ye  any 
weddin'  finery,  I  must  be  movin'  on. 
Mebbe,  when  I  come  'round  agin,  you  '11 
be  ready  for  a  weskit  spite  of  all  your 
supplicatin'.  Git  dap,  Beelzebub!' 

He  slapped  the  reins  on  his  horse's 
back  and  the  animal,  lazily  lifting  his 
feet,  started  down  the  road  at  a  slow 
trot.  Abiel,  after  watching  the  cart 
disappear,  stood  for  several  moments 
in  deep  thought. 

'  I  '11  have  to  git  Solomon  to  holp  me 
out/  he  murmured,  at  last.  'He  ain't 
afraid  of  nothin'.  He's  got  the  Dik- 
ens  sperit.  I  did  n't  inherit  none  of 
it.  I  wisht  I  had.  I'd  like  to  see  Al- 
miry tackle  Uncle  J'siah  Dikens.  I 
ruther  guess  she  'd  find  she  'd  met  her 
match/ 

That  evening,  just  as  darkness  set- 
tled down  upon  the  earth,  Abiel  slipped 
out  of  his  back  door  and  stealthily 
sought  the  highway.  It  was  half-past 


nine  ere  he  returned  and  softly  tapped 
on  the  kitchen  window. 

The  door  was  opened  by  his  oldest 
son,  a  boy  of  twelve. 

'Is  she  gone,  Solomon?'  Abiel  whis- 
pered cautiously. 

'Ben  gone  more'n  two  hours/  Solo- 
mon responded.  'Didn't  take  me  long 
to  shoo  her  home/ 

His  father  entered  the  kitchen  and 
seated  himself  on  the  wooden  settle  by 
the  fireplace. 

'Did  you  tell  her  that  I  fed  them 
doughnuts,  pigs  and  all,  to  the  hens?' 
he  inquired,  eagerly. 

'Course  I  did.  Did  you  think  I 
wouldn't?' 

'Was  she  put  out?' 

'Put  out!'  Solomon  grinned  broad- 
ly. 'I  guess  she  was.  She  was  hornet 
mad.  I  thought  she  was  goin'  to  box 
my  ears/ 

'Did  she  ask  for  the  stockin's?' 

'I  did  n't  give  her  no  chance.  I  up 
and  told  her  that  you  'd  taken  'em  over 
to  Charlotte's,  before  she  could  git  in  a 
word  about  'em/ 

'And  what  did  she  say?' 

Solomon's  shrewd  little  face  grew 
suddenly  grave.  He  looked  keenly  at 
his  father. 

'  She  asked  me  how  I  'd  like  Charlotte 
Briggs  for  a  stepmother/  he  responded 
slowly. 

Abiel  sat  up  on  the  settle,  staring  at 
his  son  with  amazed  eyes. 

'Charlotte  Briggs  for  a  stepmother!' 
he  repeated.  'Why  she's  'leven  years 
older  than  I  be.  'Leven  years  and  two 
weeks  and  three  days.  She  told  me  her 
age  to-night.  What  on  airth  did  you 
answer?' 

'I  told  her  I  liked  Charlotte  a  good 
deal  better  than  some  other  folks  I 
knew,  and  ef  I  'd  got  to  have  a  step- 
mother, I  ruther  have  her  than  any- 
buddy.  I  told  her  Charlotte  made  the 
best  doughnuts  I  ever  tasted.  I  told 
her  I  did  n't  know  as  Charlotte  would 


840        THE  ANSWERING  OF  ABIEL  KINGSBURY'S  PRAYERS 


have  ye,  for  she  warn't  no  hand  to 
come  trapin'  round  arfter  a  husband 
like  some  women.  She  got  up,  then, 
and  started  for  home,  and  she  was  so 
mad  that  she  put  on  that  laylock  bun- 
nit  hind-side  before  and  never  knowed 
it/ 

Abiel  surveyed  his  first-born  with  an 
expression  of  wonder,  akin  to  awe. 

'You  better  go  to  bed,  now/  he  said 
after  a  moment. 

Solomon  lighted  a  candle  that  stood 
in  a  battered  candlestick  on  the  dresser. 
He  shuffled  across  the  floor,  the  soles 
of  his  ragged  shoes  flapping  noisily. 
At  the  door  of  the  garret  stairs  he 
paused,  his  hand  on  the  latch. 

'  Pa,  kin  I  hev  the  black  lamb  all  for 
myself?'  he  queried.  'I  done  my  best 
to  holp  ye  to-night/ 

'Lordy!'  Abiel  hastily  stifled  the 
ejaculation.  'Yes/  he  said  weakly, 
'you  kin  hev  it,  I  guess/ 

He  gazed  at  the  door  after  it  closed 
behind  Solomon. 

'He's  Dikens  clear  away  through/ 
he  muttered.  '  They  're  all  dretful  fore- 
handed. I  dono  as  I  done  right  puttin' 
of  him  up  to  sech  tricks,  but  I  was 
beset.  Mebbe,  ef  I'd  stayed  to  home, 
she'd  'a*  nabbed  me  off  'n  my  guard. 
Hez'kiah  Talbee  says  she's  smart  and 
there  ain't  no  disputin'  him.  I've  got 
to  be  instant  in  prayer,  in  season  and 
out  of  season,  ef  I  expect  to  git  ahead 
of  her/ 

He  slid  gently  to  his  knees  on  the 
sanded  floor. 

'Oh,  Lord/  he  murmured  softly,  'I 
thank  Thee  for  my  deliverance  this 
night.  Continue  to  protect  me  from 
female's  snares.  And  there  is  one  more 
thing,  Lord,  that  I  need  beside  strength 
to  resist  and  overcome  sech.  I  need 
a  shoemaker,  Lord,  for  the  children's 
foot-gear  is  nigh  wore  out.  Do  Thou, 
in  thy  goodness,  send  me  a  shoemaker 
as  soon  as  conveniently  may  be. 
Amen/ 


All  the  next  day  Abiel,  from  the 
wood  lot  where  he  was  cutting  hickory, 
scanned  the  unfrequented  road  eagerly. 
But  no  shoemaker,  with  kit  and  leather 
apron,  appeared.  Almira  Graves  did 
not  appear,  either,  but,  at  noon-time, 
she  sent  an  offering  of  pancakes  by  the 
hands  of  her  young  niece,  'Loizy/ 
Solomon,  who  received  these  eatables, 
promptly  deposited  them  in  the  pigs' 
trough,  returning  the  pewter  plate 
which  had  contained  them  to  the  as- 
tonished Loizy  with  the  remark  that  he 
'never  did  see  anything  to  beat  Pa's 
hogs  for  rye  and  Injun  victuals.  They 
ruther  have  'em  than  anything  else, 
mornin/  noon,  and  night/ 

Loizy  surveyed  him  with  round  won- 
dering eyes. 

'Do  you  give  'em  to  'em  often?'  she 
queried. 

'Not  so  very  often/  Solomon  re- 
turned. 'Pa  don't  find  time  to  make 
'em.  But  you  kin  tell  your  aunt  that 
they  kin  put  down  all  she  has  a  mind  to 
stand  up  and  fry/ 

'  I  did  n't  pray  fervent  enough/ 
Abiel  mused,  as  he  smoked  his  evening 
pipe  beside  the  kitchen  fire, '  leastways 
about  the  shoemaker.  The  Lord  an- 
swered me  as  fur  as  Almiry  is  concerned. 
I  wisht  that  I'd  set  Solomon  on  her 
tracks  long  ago.  But  regardin'  my 
fambly's  shoes  I  did  n't  set  forth  my 
condition  as  fully  as  I  should/ 

After  the  children  had  retired  he 
prayed  long  and  earnestly. 

'Send  me  a  shoemaker,  Lord/  he 
pleaded.  'I  am  in  sore  distress.  Octo- 
ber is  a-goin'  fast  and  winter  is  a- 
hastenin'  on.  There  ain't  a  hull  pair 
of  shoes  in  the  house  but  mine,  and 
William  Hatch  is  kep'  to  home  by  the 
asthmy.  Send  me  a  shoemaker  ter- 
morrer,  if  possible,  or  day  after  ter- 
morrer  at  the  furtherest/ 

But  when  the  morrow  drew  to  a  close, 
Abiel  Kingsbury  found  his  petition 
unanswered.  So  perturbed  was  he  that 


THE  ANSWERING  OF  ABIEL  KINGSBURY'S  PRAYERS         841 


he  took  little  heed  of  the  fact  that 
Almira  Graves  failed  to  pay  him  her 
accustomed  daily  visit.  He  ate  his 
supper  in  brooding  silence. 

At  half-past  seven  a  rap  at  the 
kitchen  door  set  his  heart  beating  hope- 
fully. He  lifted  the  latch  with  eager 
hands.  Charlotte  Briggs  stood  on  the 
broad  stone  doorsteps,  a  covered  bas- 
ket hanging  on  her  arm. 

'Land  sakes,  'Biel,'  she  exclaimed, 
'you  look  as  ef  I  was  a  ghost.' 

Abiel  smiled  feebly. 

'I  —  I  —  I  was  kinder  expectin'  to 
see  Almiry,'  he  faltered.  'She  —  she 
is  apt  to  —  er  —  drop  in  evenin's.' 

Charlotte  Briggs  sniffed. 

'I  sh'd  think  she'd  want  to  ef  you 
'pear  as  tickled  as  that  to  see  her,'  she 
responded.  'Here's  your  mendin'  and 
them  new  stockin's  you  wanted  knit 
for  the  boys.' 

'I'll  walk  home  with  ye,  Charlotte/ 
Abiel  said.  'It's  kind  of  pokey  by 
them  pine  woods.' 

'Thanks,'  returned  Miss  Briggs, 
crisply,  '  you  need  n't  bother.  But 
Solomon  can  go  a  piece  down  the  road 
if  he  feels  like  it.' 

'Yes,  marm,'  cried  Solomon  with 
alacrity,  springing  up  from  the  floor 
where  he  had  been  playing  Indians 
with  Jacob  and  Caleb,  the  twins;  'I'd 
jest  as  lives  go  as  not.' 

When  he  returned  to  the  house  he 
found  that  his  father  had  put  the  other 
children  to  bed. 

'I  guess  you  went  way  home  with 
her,'  Abiel  remarked.  'You've  been 
gone  nigh  an  hour.' 

Solomon  nodded  acquiescingly. 

'Say,  Pa,'  he  said  confidentially,  'I 
guess  I  know  what  made  Charlotte  so 
kinder  uppish  with  ye.  Almiry 's  ben 
sayin'  that  she's  tryin'  to  ketch  ye.' 

Abiel  gasped. 

'Did  she  tell  ye  that?'  he  quavered. 

'Course  not,  but  when  I  come  back 
along,  Mis'  Deacon  Morton  was  layin' 


wait  for  me  at  her  gate.  She  seen  us 
pass  by  in  the  moonlight.  And  she  says, 
"  Is  yer  Pa  sick?  "  And  I  says,  "  No." 
And  she  says,  "Oh,  I  suppose  he's 
entertainin'  his  other  flame!  Which  on 
'em  is  a-goin'  to  ketch  him,  Almiry  or 
Charlotte?  I  hear  it's  a  race  between 
'em."  And  I  says, "  Is  that  so?  "  and  run 
right  past  her.  She  hollered  after  me, 
"He'd  better  take  Charlotte,"  but  I 
did  n't  make  no  answer  and  kep'  right 
on.  I  see  that  laylock  bunnit  goin'  down 
the  road  before  nine  this  mornin,'  and  it 
never  come  back  till  jest  before  twelve. 
I  '11  bet  Almiry  went  all  round  jawin' 
about  Charlotte.' 

Abiel  shook  his  head. 

'Folks  'round  here  had  oughter 
know  Charlotte  better,'  he  said  impa- 
tiently. '  When  she  was  young  she  had 
lots  of  fellers  standin'  'round  ready  to 
spark  her,  and  she  give  the  whole  mess 
of  'em  the  mitten.  'Tain't  likely  she 
wants  to  get  married  at  her  age,  speci- 
ally to  a  man  so  much  younger  than 
she  is.  Almiry  talks  like  a  fool  and 
them  that  listens  to  her  acts  like  bigger 
fools.  I  wisht  that  I  was  as  sure  that  a 
shoemaker  will  come  here  to-morrer  as 
I  be  that  Charlotte  Briggs  don't  want 
to  marry  me.' 

Solomon  made  no  reply.  He  lighted 
his  candle  and  silently  crept  upstairs 
to  bed.  Abiel  resumed  his  pipe  with  a 
harassed  expression  of  countenance. 

'Almiry  was  bad  enough  before,'  he 
mused,  'but  if  she  is  jealous  I  dono 
what  I  be  a-goin'  to  do.  Charlotte  is 
kinder  touchy,  and  like  as  not  she'll 
r'ar  up  and  say  she  can't  take  care  of 
the  children's  clothes  any  longer.  I 
don't  blame  Charlotte  none.  Tain't 
none  too  agreeable  to  be  pestered  about 
somebody  you  hain't  never  thought  of 
settin'  your  cap  for.  I  dono  what  ever 
possessed  'Liphalet  Burden  to  up  and 
die  jest  a  week  before  the  day  sot  for 
his  and  Almiry 's  weddin'.  Ef  he'd 
'a'  lived  I  should  'a'  ben  onmolested. 


842     THE  ANSWERING  OF  ABIEL  KINGSBURY'S  PRAYERS 


It  was  an  awful  dark  providence,  his 
death  was.  But  dark  providences  seems 
to  shadder  my  path.  Where  be  all  the 
shoemakers?  I've  prayed  fer  one  so 
hard  that  seems  to  me  only  Satan 
himself  can  be  keepin'  him  away.' 

He  laid  down  his  pipe  and  knelt 
before  the  settle,  and,  in  impassioned 
accents,  poured  forth  his  troubles. 

'Oh,  Lord/  he  cried,  'silence  the 
gossip  which  is  bein'  sowed  broadcast 
in  this  deestrict  like  grains  of  wheat  in 
a  ploughed  field.  Open  the  eyes  of  the 
neighbors  that  they  may  see  that  Char- 
lotte Briggs  ain't  a-settin'  her  cap  for 
me.  Ef  possible,  perform  a  merricle  and 
put  some  sense  into  Almiry  Graves 's 
head.  Lead  her  to  onderstand  that  I 
ain't  no  thought  of  marryin'  her,  and 
never  shall  hev. 

'And,  Lord,  Thou  knowest  that  I 
need  a  shoemaker;  send  me  one.  We 
are  all  of  us  e'enamost  to  the  end  of  our 
tethers.  The  soles  of  Solomon's  shoes 
flops  when  he  walks,  and  Jacup  and 
Kellup  is  both  through  at  the  toes. 
Gustavus  has  lost  the  heel  ofFn  his 
left  boot,  and  John  Henry  is  bursted 
through  both  sides  of  his  feet.'  His 
voice  rose  to  a  piteous  wail.  'Turn 
backwards  the  steps  of  that  man  Hez'- 
kiah  Talbee  told  of.  Guide  him  from 
Freetown  acrost  Somerset  to  Swansea. 
I  think  there  will  be  a  frost  to-night 
and  all  signs  p'int  to  an  airly  winter. 
Send  me  a  shoemaker,  Lord,  before  the 
children  git  chilblains.  They  had  a 
delikit  mother  and  none  on  'em  is 
rugged.' 

Abiel  rose  from  his  knees  comforted. 
He  had  faith  to  believe  that  his  earnest 
petition  would  be  answered  speedily. 
He  slept  peacefully,  and  arose  at  dawn 
in  a  calm  and  hopeful  mood. 

Directly  after  breakfast  Caleb  and 
Jacob  were  stationed  at  the  kitchen 
window  to  watch  for  the  expected 
shoemaker.  Until  dinner  time  they 
vainly  craned  their  necks  and  strained 


their  eyes.  After  dinner  Gustavus  re- 
lieved them.  But  his  vigilance,  also, 
remained  unrewarded. 

Late  in  the  afternoon  Beelzebub 
came  jogging  up  to  the  barnyard  gate. 

'Shoemaker  come  yit?'  Hezekiah 
Talbee  demanded,  bending  from  his 
perch  to  peer  into  the  barn  where  Abiel 
was  milking  the  cows. 

Abiel  flushed.  'No,'  he  answered. 

'Did  ye  pray  fer  one?' 

'Yes.' 

The  peddler  wagged  his  head. 

'Ye  better  pray  to  the  Devil,  next 
time,'  he  said.  'My  experience  is  that 
them  thet  asks  him  fer  assistance  gin'- 
rally  gits  it.' 

Abiel  nodded  gloomily. 

'Jest  heerd  some  news  about  ye  to 
the  blacksmith's  shop,'  Mr.  Talbee 
continued.  'Heerd  ye  hev  two  gals  on 
yer  string,  one  on  'em  pooty  nigh  old 
enough  to  be  yer  ma,  and  tother  one 
pooty  nigh  young  enough  ter  be  yer 
darter.  When  I  was  there  tother  day, 
everybuddy  was.  shore  thet  Almiry 
Graves  would  fetch  ye.  Now  they're 
a-sayin'  thet  Charlotte  Briggs  has 
ketched  ye  away.  Better  look  at  my 
weskit  patterns  and  neckerchers.' 

'  It 's  all  a  mess  of  gossip,'  cried  Abiel 
angrily,  'Charlotte  Briggs  don't  want 
me,  and  I  don't  want  nobuddy.' 

'Yer  dretful  hard  to  please,  seems  to 
me,'  responded  the  peddler.  'Most  men 
don't  git  a  chance  to  make  a  choose. 
They  hev  to  take  what  they  kin  git. 
But  there  is,  and  alwuz  will  be,  some 
folks  so*£raspin'  thet,  if  they  hed  the 
airth,  they'd  want  Nantucket  Island 
throwed  in  fer  a  calf  pasture.  Git  dap 
there,  Beelzebub.  We  shan't  sell  Mr. 
Kingsbury  no  gee-gaws  to-day.  You  try 
the  Devil,  'Biel.  He  never  fails  them 
that  really  wants  him  to  help  'em.' 

Abiel  scarcely  tasted  the  evening 
meal.  Solomon  regarded  him  curiously. 
There  was  a  look  in  his  father's  eyes 
that  the  boy  had  never  seen  there 


THE  ANSWERING  OF  ABIEL  KINGSBURY'S  PRAYERS        843 


before.  It  was  the  look  of  smoulder- 
ing fire. 

After  the  dishes  were  washed  Abiel 
sat  on  the  settle,  his  unlighted  pipe 
lying  beside  him.  As  he  stared  into 
vacancy  his  face  became  rigid,  and  the 
strange  glow  in  his  eyes  grew  lurid. 
An  unwonted  hush  fell  upon  the  kitch- 
en. The  children,  vaguely  oppressed, 
whispered  in  the  corner. 

Solomon  took  them  to  the  garret  a 
quarter  of  an  hour  earlier  than  usual. 
He  felt  sure  that  his  father  desired  to 
be  alone. 

When  silence  had  settled  down,  Abiel 
stood  up  on  the  braided  hearth-rug. 
His  face  was  pallid,  except  where  two 
red  spots  burned  on  his  high  cheek 
bones.  The  smouldering  fire  of  his 
eyes  burst  into  flames. 

*  I  'm  a-goin'  to  do  it ! '  he  whispered 
in  hoarse,  unnatural  tones.  'I'm  drove 
to  it.  I've  stood  it  until  I  can't  stan'  it 
no  longer.  The  Lord  has  forsook  me!' 

He  clenched  his  knotted  hands  to- 
gether. 

'Oh,  Devil,'  he  said,  slowly  and 
clearly,  'ef  you  have  power  to  do  so, 
send  me  a  shoemaker  within  twenty- 
four  hours.' 

The  morning  sun  rose  with  a  burst  of 
glory  to  usher  in  one  of  late  October's 
perfect  days.  White  clouds,  like  fea- 
thers, dotted  the  bending,  deep  blue 
sky.  The  boughs  of  sumach  and  maple 
seemed  hung  with  rubies  and  topazes. 
Squirrels  frisked  on  the  orchard  walls, 
and  late  birds  twittered  on  swaying 
branches.  The  warm  breeze  scarcely 
rustled  the  brown  leaves  of  the  shocked 
corn. 

Abiel,  silent,  rigid,  fiery-eyed,  was 
mending  a  broken  harness  in  the  barn 
when  a  shadow  fell  across  the  floor. 
He  looked  up.  A  stranger  stood  in  the 
doorway.  He  was  a  tall,  rather  good- 
looking  young  man,  clad  in  garments 
somewhat  faded  and  frayed,  but  which 
yet  retained  a  vestige  of  former  jaun- 


tiness.  A  fur  cap  sat  lightly  on  a  mass 
of  clustering  black  curls.  Under  one 
arm  he  carried  a  bundle  rolled  in  a 
great  piece  of  leather. 

'Morning,  sir,'  he  said  in  a  crisp, 
clear  voice.  '  D'  ye  happen  to  want  any 
shoemaking  done?' 

Abiel  stared  at  him  silently. 

'Want  any  shoemaking  done?'  the 
stranger  repeated. 

Abiel,  as  if  frozen  to  the  floor,  re- 
mained speechless. 

'Deef  as  a  flat-headed  adder,'  the 
young  man  muttered.  He  elevated  his 
voice.  'How's  your  family  off  for 
shoes,  sir?  I'm  looking  for  a  job.' 

Abiel  took  a  step  backward.  His  face 
assumed  a  blue-white  hue  like  that  of 
a  corpse. 

'  Must  be  deef  and  dumb,'  the  stran- 
ger exclaimed.  'I'll  have  to  talk  by 
motions.' 

He  pointed  to  Abiel's  shoes,  then  to 
the  bundle  he  carried. 

With  a  supreme  effort  Abiel  moist- 
ened his  parched  lips. 

'No,'  he  said  huskily,  'I  don't  need 
no  shoemaker.  My  folks  is  all  fitted 
out  fer  the  winter.' 

The  young  man  nodded  and  wheeled 
about. 

'  Your  manners  need  mending  if  your 
shoes  don't,'  he  called  back  as  he  swung 
jauntily  across  the  barnyard. 

Abiel,  trembling  as  if  with  an  ague, 
staggered  against  a  grain  chest,  clutch- 
ing at  the  wall  for  support. 

'I  had  to  lie,'  he  cried  hoarsely.  'I 
did  n't  darst  do  anything  else.'  Great 
beads  of  sweat  burst  out  on  his  fore- 
head. '  I  never  believed  the  Devil  could 
send  him.  I  only  prayed  to  him  be- 
cause I  was  in  a  passion  fit.  I  am  a  sin- 
ful man,  but  I  did  n't  think  I  would  be 
took  at  my  word  like  this.' 

After  a  while  he  steadied  himself 
and,  with  shaking  hands,  led  General 
Putnam,  his  aged  white  horse,  from 
the  stall  and  saddled  him. 


844        THE  ANSWERING  OF  ABIEL  KINGSBURY'S  PRAYERS 


Presently  he  mounted  the  animal 
and  rode  up  to  the  house.  John  Henry, 
the  youngest  child,  was  feeding  a  pet 
rooster  at  the  door.  The  other  boys 
had  gone  with  Solomon  to  look  after 
the  sheep. 

'I'm  goin'  an  arrant  down  Warren 
way,'  said  Abiel.  *  You  tell  'em  to  dish 
up  dinner  and  not  wait  ef  I  ain't  back 
by  noon.' 

It  was  past  one  o'clock  when  General 
Putnam  reentered  the  barnyard. 

'Pa,  pa,'  Gustavus  shrilled  from  the 
open  kitchen  window,  'thar's  a  shoe- 
maker come!  He's  workin'  over  to 
Graveses.  Don't  you  want  me  to  go 
and  borry  him?' 

Abiel  dismounted. 

'See  here/  he  said,  'here's  a  lot  of 
good  warm  moccasins,  I  ben  down  to 
Birch  Swamp  and  bought  'em  off'n 
that  old  Injun  squaw  that  lives  in  a 
cave  thar.  We  won't  need  a  shoemaker 
till  these  is  wore  out.' 

To  Solomon  the  three  weeks  that  fol- 
lowed seemed  like  a  terrible  nightmare. 
Not  once  did  his  father's  face  lose  its 
rigid  and  ghastly  expression.  He  moved 
about  like  an  automaton,  eating  little, 
retiring  to  rest  late,  and  rising  early. 
He  grew  suddenly  shrunken  and  old- 
looking. 

Solomon  poured  out  his  fright  and 
grief  on  Charlotte  Briggs's  sympathetic 
shoulder. 

'I  can't  git  used  to  them  moccasins,' 
he  wailed.  'I  ain't  got  no  Injun  blood 
in  me.  And  I'm  scairt  that  Pa  will 
drownd  himself  or  starve  to  death.  I 
wisht  you'd  set  your  cap  at  him.  He 
ain't  but  'leven  years  younger  than  you 
be.  'Leven  years  ain't  nothin'.  There's 
a  man  up  Ta'nton  way  got  a  wife  nine- 
teen years  older 'n  he  is.' 

Charlotte  pushed  the  boy  from  her 
lap. 

'My  cap's  plain  black  lace,'  she  said. 
'  'Tain't  the  right  color  to  set  for  a  man. 
Mebbe,  ef  it  was  laylock,  I  might  do 


suthin'  with  it.  But  I  ain't  got  no  lay- 
lock  cap.  Not  even  a  laylock  sunbun- 
nit/ 

It  was  a  blustering  day  in  late  No- 
vember. The  gray  sky  frowned  at  the 
brown  earth,  and  the  trees  shook  their 
bare  branches  disconsolately  in  the 
chill  blast.  Despondent  crows  cawed 
plaintively  over  the  denuded  corn- 
fields, and  cattle  shivered  in  the  sere 
pastures. 

Abiel,  worn  and  haggard,  was  rub- 
bing down  General  Putnam,  just  re- 
turned from  the  grist-mill  at  Swansea, 
whither  Solomon  had  that  morning 
ridden  him.  He  lifted  his  bowed  head 
as  Hezekiah's  shrill  voice  penetrated 
the  barn's  dusky  interior. 

The  peddler,  who  had  alighted  from 
his  cart  and  stood  in  the  doorway, 
started  back  at  sight  of  Abiel's  face. 

'Heavens  to  Betsey,  'Biel!  What  on 
airth  is  the  matter  with  ye?'  he  ex- 
claimed. 'Be  ye  ailin'?' 

'Ailin'  in  sperrit,  not  in  body,'  Abiel 
replied.  'Graveses'  folks  says  I've  took 
to  drinkin'  cider,  but  it  ain't  so.  I'll 
tell  ye  what  ails  me,  Hez'kiah.  I  done 
what  ye  advised  me  to.  I  prayed  to  the 
Devil  for  a  shoemaker,  and  he  sent  me 
one.  I  knowed,  when  ye  told  me  to  do 
it,  't  was  only  yer  skiptic  talk,  but  I 
done  it.  I  was  mad  because  the  Lord 
did  n't  pay  no  heed  to  my  supplications, 
and  I  was  most  wild  fearin'  Almiry 
would  kitch  me  in  spite  of  myself.  I 
did  n't  believe  the  Devil  would  pick 
me  up.  I  just  done  it  to  let  off  my 
spite.  But  I  callated  wrong.  The  very 
nex'  day  the  Devil  sent  a  shoemaker 
here  to  this  very  barn.' 

'Lurdy!'  ejaculated  Mr.  Talbee. 
'What 'dye  do?' 

'I  sent  him  away.  I  thought  I  sh'd 
drop  dead  when  I  seen  him/ 

' What 'd  he  do?' 

'Went  over  to  Graveses  and  they 
hired  him.  He's  thar  yit/ 


THE  ANSWERING  OF  ABIEL  KINGSBURY'S  PRAYERS 


845 


The  peddler's  tense  features  relaxed. 
A  sudden  gleam  came  into  his  keen 
eyes. 

'He  ain't  thar,  'Biel,'  he  said  slowly. 
'Him  and  Almiry  run  away  to  Mid- 
dleborough  and  got  married  yistiddy 
arfternoon.  I  come  over  here  a-pur- 
pose  to  congratulate  ye.  Almiry  sent 
word  hum  to  her  folks  this  mornin'. 
Ole  Mis'  Graves  is  nigh  crazy.' 

*  Married!    Almiry  married  to  the 
Devil's  shoemaker!'  Abiel  gasped. 

'Sho,  'Biel!  He  ain't  none  of  Satan's 
crew  maskyradin'  as  a  man,'  answered 
Hezekiah.  'I  know  all  'bout  him.  He's 
son  to  Deacon  Perry  over  to  New  Bed- 
ford, and  a  wuthless  cuss.  Almiry 's 
brought  her  pigs  to  a  darned  pore  mar- 
kit.  And  I  don't  believe  the  Devil  sent 
him  into  this  v'cin'ty,  nuther.  I  ruther 
guess 't  was  the  Lord's  doin's,  arfter  all.' 

Over  Abiel' s  face  swept  a  sudden 
transformation,  radiant,  blissful. 

*  Almiry  married!'  he  murmured.  'I 
ben  blind,  Hez'kiah.  I'd  ought  to  have 
suspicioned  suthin'  when  she  stopped 
luggin'  victuals  over  here.   And  I  feel 
that  you're  right  about  the  Lord.   He 
got  belated  answerin'  of  me,  but 't  was 
Him,  and  not  the  Devil,  that  fetched 
that  Perry  feller  to  Swansea.' 

*  Looks  to  me  as  ef  yer  prayin'  to  the 
Devil  was  a  kind  of  providunce,  too,' 
said  the   peddler  with  a  dry  cackle. 
'  Fer,  ef  ye  had  n't  ben  afraid  of  that 
shoemaker,   ye'd    of   hired    him  and 
then,  mebbe,  he  'd  never  'a'  gone  to 
Graveses.  Now  I  s'pose  you  and  Char- 
lotte'11  git  spliced.    Hey?' 

Abiel  blushed  deeply. 

'Hev  ye  got  a  skillet  in  yer  cart? '  he 
queried.  *I  liked  to  hev  f ergot  that 
ourn  is  all  wore  out.' 

Mr.  Talbee  clambered  into  the  cart 
and  out  again  with  surprising  agility. 

*  Here's  the  skillet,'  he  said.    *  Any- 
thing else?   No?   Wai,  I'll  be  round 
agin  in  two  weeks  and  we'll  confabu- 
late about  the  weddin'  weskit.' 


'No,  'Biel,  I  ain't  a-goin'  to  marry 
ye,'  Charlotte  Briggs  said  firmly  that 
evening,  as  she  and  Abiel  sat  on  either 
side  of  the  cheery  fireplace  in  her  neat 
kitchen.  'You  don't  keer  fer  me  as  a 
husband  should.  I'm  too  old  fer  ye. 
Yer  jest  askin'  me  because  Solomon 
wants  ye  to  hev  me.  I  pity  them  child- 
ren, but  I  ain't  willin'  to  marry  no 
man  jest  to  be  a  stepmother.' 

Abiel  gazed  at  her  with  bewildered 
eyes. 

'Why,  Charlotte,'  he  remonstrated, 
'what  makes  you  talk  so?  Solomon 
ain't  never  asked  me  to  spark  you.' 

Charlotte  faced  her  wooer,  arms 
akimbo. 

'  How  on  airth  come  you  ter  think  of 
marryin'  me,  then?'  she  demanded. 

'Wai,'  said  Abiel,  softly,  "t  was  Al- 
miry's  talk  thet  fust  put  the  idee  into 
my  head,  and  the  more  I  considered  it 
the  more  I  liked  it.  I  wisht  you  could 
be  persuaded,  Charlotte.' 

At  the  wedding,  which  took  place 
some  three  months  later,  Solomon  and 
Mr.  Talbee  were  the  leading  spirits. 
The  entire  Kingsbury  flock  were  hap- 
pily conscious  that  they  were  shod  in 
brand-new,  well-fitting  shoes  made  by 
a  shoemaker  from  Seekonk  pressed  into 
service  for  the  occasion  by  the  peddler. 
The  bride,  in  a  gown  of  pale  blue 
chintz,  looked  ten  years  younger  than 
her  actual  age,  and  Abiel  was  radiant 
in  a  vest  of  flaming  crimson  velvet 
brocade. 

'  'Tain't  the  weskit  I  wanted  him  to 
s'lect,'  Mr.  Talbee  confided  to  Solo- 
mon. 'The  one  I  talked  up  to  him  was 
strip-ed,  a  kind  of  pale  yaller  and  stun- 
color.  But  he  was  sot  on  hevin'  su- 
thin' toomultoous  to  express  his  feel- 
in's.  He's  got  what  he  wanted,  sartin 
sure.*  And  to  himself  he  added,  'Red 
is  the  Devil's  own  color,  but  I'll  bet 
my  horse  and  cart  against  nothin*  that 
'Biel  ain't  never  oncet  thought  on't.' 


A  CORRESPONDENT  AT  ADRIANOPLE 


BY   CYRIL   CAMPBELL 


FROM  the  siege  of  Troy  to  March  26, 
1913,  is  a  far  step.  We  have  exchanged 
the  spear  for  the  Mauser,  the  catapult 
or  ram  for  the  howitzer:  but  human 
nature  remains  unchanged.  The  for- 
tunes of  an  invested  fortress  are  still 
followed  with  world-wide  interest,  al- 
though it  is  now  the  cable  or  the  wire- 
less, not  a  flickering  line  of  leaping 
fires,  that  announces  the  fall.  Already 
in  the  few  years  of  this  new  century, 
which,  according  to  many,  is  destined 
to  see  the  end  of  war,  two  of  the  great- 
est sieges  in  the  world's  history  have 
taken  place;  living  memory  can  recall 
another  three.  It  would  be  an  invidi- 
ous task  to  state  in  which  of  these  the 
investment  was  most  severe,  or  the 
defense  most  heroic:  one  would  cer- 
tainly not  give  the  palm  to  Adrianople, 
although,  technically  speaking,  as  a 
military  achievement  the  Bulgarian 
success  on  that  Wednesday  morning 
surpassed  that  of  the  conquerors  of 
Metz  or  Paris,  Sevastopol  or  Port  Ar- 
thur.1 These  four  surrendered,  whereas 
Adrianople  was  taken  at  the  point  of 
the  bayonet,  and  we  have  to  go  back  a 
century,  to  the  bloody  assault  on  San 
Sebastian,  to  find  another  example  of 
European  troops  capturing  in  this  way 
a  powerful  fortress  designed  on  scien- 
tific lines.  In  all  probability  it  may 
never  occur  again;  yet,  so  trivial  are 
the  things  that  shape  our  lives,  a  thread 

1  Many  will  probably  be  surprised  at  the  omis- 
sion of  Plevna,  but  though,  strictly  speaking,  it 
was  a  fortress,  its  real  strength  lay  in  its  earth- 
works (the  two  Grivitsa  redoubts  in  particular), 
which  were  made  in  three  days.  —  THE  AUTHOR. 

846 


of  mercury  in  a  glass  tube  would  have 
prevented  the  writer  from  seeing  this 
unique  spectacle,  had  it  happened  a 
day  earlier. 

War  correspondents  from  all  parts  of 
Europe  had  collected  in  Sofia  thick 
'as  leaves  in  Vallombrosa';  for  these 
gentry,  like  the  eagles,  are  never  far 
from  the  carcass.  The  Bulgarians, 
however,  were  firm  or  refused  to  budge 
from  their  dictum,  'No  journalist  at 
the  front  after  the  armistice/  Bluff, 
entreaties,  protestations,  all  alike  were 
useless  —  to  the  ill-disguised  delight  of 
the  hotel-keeper;  and  a  goodly  number 
of  these  latter-day  adventurers  had  left 
in  disgust  some  time  before  the  fate- 
ful day.  Fever,  combined  with  a  be- 
lief that  the  military  authorities  would 
not  relent,  had  induced  the  writer  to 
decide  to  follow  their  example  at  the 
end  of  the  month.  It  was  a  thoughtful 
but  peremptory  telephone  message 
which  altered  all  plans  and  caused  a 
waiter  to  come  flying  to  his  room. 

*  If  you  want  to  see  the  fall  of  Adri- 
anople, you  have  to  leave  by  special 
train  this  instant.  All  the  correspond- 
ents are  at  the  station  already.' 

Neither  fire  nor  earthquake  nor 
'vis  major*  of  any  description  could 
have  acted  with  such  effect  as  those 
last  eight  words.  To  be  left  at  the  post! 
Better  starve  or  be  dirty  for  weeks 
than  miss  the  train:  and  as  there  was 
no  time  to  buy  anything  to  eat,  or  pack 
aught  save  a  sponge,  toothbrush,  and 
pyjamas,  starvation  or  dirt  seemed  in- 
evitable. But  the  train  was  still  there — 
indeed  it  remained  a  full  twenty  minutes 


A  CORRESPONDENT  AT  ADRIANOPLE 


847 


—  but  'all'  the  correspondents  had 
dwindled  down  to  four,  to  wit:  the 
writer  who  shall  be  known  as  Ananias; 
Sapphira,  a  British  lady  wielding  both 
pen  and  cinematograph;  Tartarin,  a 
French  journalist;  Paillasse,  an  Italian 
ditto.  The  two  Latins,  by  some  occult 
means,  must  have  got  wind  of  the 
government's  intentions  regarding  the 
press,  for  they  were  beautifully  ar- 
rayed in  full  campaign  kit.  Both  were 
prepared  for  all  emergencies,  and  can 
have  left  intact  few  departments  in  the 
wholesale  store  which  had  guided  their 
purchases.  Ananias  pointed  out  their 
readiness  to  Sapphira,  and  added  that 
any  unkind  criticism  could  be  nothing 
but  the  outcome  of  envy.  A  bulky 
hamper  lying  at  their  feet  and  contrast- 
ing painfully  with  Sapphira's  paper  bag, 
lent  weight  to  his  remark.  He  himself 
meanwhile  had  bought  two  bottles  of 
dubious  Chablis,  brown  bread,  a  hunk 
of  penetrating  cheese,  and  had  *  cor- 
nered '  the  station  chocolate. 

The  quartette  were  then  ordered  in, 
and  Ananias,  encouraged  by  the  sta- 
tion master's  assurance  that  they  would 
be  in  the  lines  by  midnight  (or,  allowing 
the  usual  latitude,  10  A.M.),  proceeded 
to  complete  his  interrupted  nap.  In 
the  next  carriage  Tartarin  and  Pail- 
lasse could  be  heard  selecting  the  Bul- 
garian salient. 

The  night  must  be  allowed  to  sink 
into  the  oblivion  which  it  failed  sig- 
nally to  give  to  weary  eyes  and  limbs. 
So  far  from  being  in  the  Bulgarian  lines 
at  midnight,  or  even  at  10  A.M.  as 
Ananias  had  charitably  allowed,  the 
quartette  of  sensation-seekers  had  not 
even  crossed  the  old  frontier  at  eleven. 

Early  in  the  morning  two  trainloads 
of  wounded,  the  first  signs  of  active 
fighting,  passed  at  Rakoffsky.  Paillasse 
was  fired  with  the  zeal  of  the  novice, 
and  throwing  himself  from  the  carriage, 
sprang  on  the  footboard  of  the  other 
tram  and  questioned  the  men  eagerly  in 


the  French  of  the  Midi.  For  the  most 
part  their  wounds  were  of  a  trivial  na- 
ture, scalp  grazes,  forearms  or  fingers 
torn  by  barbed  wire;  and  the  men 
grinned,  sang,  wagged  bloodstained 
bandages  in  front  of  the  inquirer's  face 
and  demanded  cigarettes.  Of  his  flow 
of  language,  however,  they  understood 
not  a  single  word.  Somewhat  discom- 
fited, but  unwearied,  he  beat  up  the 
second  train  and  unearthed  a  Serb,  who 
spoke  a  little  halting  French.  The  dia- 
logue was  overheard  by  the  remaining 
three,  who  came  to  the  conclusion  that 
the  information  gathered  would  scarce- 
ly assist  our  companion's  *  copy,'  since  it 
was  to  the  effect  that  the  Servians  had 
done  the  work  so  far,  and  that  the  Bul- 
garians were  useless.  Paillasse  never- 
theless seemed  pleased  and  filled  two 
sheets  with  notes,  returning  to  the  car- 
riage with  the  air  of  one  who  had 
*  scooped'  his  party.  Ananias,  the  only 
one  of  the  four  who  had  seen  cam- 
paigns before,  was  too  seasoned  a  bird 
for  these  chance  stories;  Sapphira, 
though  nominally  of  the  Fourth  Estate, 
used  her  pen  rather  as  a  passport  for 
the  camera  than  for  articles;  while 
Tartarin  had  confided  to  her  that  he 
was  really  a  *  literary'  man,  and  had 
only  accepted  this  work  as  an  excep- 
tion and  at  an  exceptional  fee.  Pail- 
lasse had  the  field  to  himself  for  the 
moment.  It  was  a  harmonious  party, 
luckily,  since  each  was  working  for  the 
papers  of  a  different  country,  and  each 
was  bound  to  scoop. 

This  feeling  of  exhilaration,  however, 
was  destined  to  receive  a  rude  shock. 
The  first  instalment  came  at  Har- 
manli,  where  Ananias  learnt  that  the 
bridge  at  Marash  over  the  Maritza 
had  been  blown  up.  But  officialdom 
bade  the  party  be  of  good  courage,  for 
there  would  be  motors  ready  at  Mus- 
tapha  Pasha  to  convey  scribblers  and 
soldiers  to  the  lines  thirty-five  kilo- 
metres away.  Considering  that  behind 


848 


A  CORRESPONDENT  AT  ADRIANOPLE 


the  wagon  holding  four  such  valuable 
lives  there  were  at  least  two  hundred 
and  fifty  men,  Ananias  thought  there 
must  be  as  many  automobiles  with  the 
Bulgarian  army  as  at  a  country  elec- 
tion in  England.  Still,  if  all  the  foreign 
correspondents  with  the  Turkish  army 
had  possessed  motor  cars  and  had  ex- 
perienced the  same  luck  as  his  own 
colleague  and  the  representatives  of  the 
Telegraph  and  Chronicle,  it  was  quite 
possible.  For  the  moment  Ananias 
kept  the  evil  news  to  himself. 

At  Novo  Lubimitz,  the  next  halt, 
the  outlook  seemed  more  cheerful.  The 
automobiles  were  waiting,  not  at  Mus- 
tapha  but  at  Hadikevi,  fifteen  kilo- 
metres farther  on.  Even  if  they  failed, 
surely  it  would  be  possible  to  get  some 
conveyance,  a  country  cart,  perhaps, 
while  if  the  worst  came  to  the  worst,  it 
was  not  too  far  to  walk.  So  argued 
Sapphira,  who  was  optimistic,  ener- 
getic, and  young.  Ananias  was  out  of 
condition  and  fond  of  comfort,  Tar- 
tarin  had  the  same  tastes.  As  a  matter 
of  fact  this  unal  luring  suggestion  was 
never  put  to  the  test.  The  blow  fell  at 
Mustapha  Pasha,  renamed  Sliven  since 
the  Bulgarian  occupation. 

A  few  wounded  were  lying  in  a  tem- 
porary Red  Cross  depot  there,  and 
Paillasse  had  gone  out  as  usual,  only  to 
return  a  moment  later  with  all  his  fire 
extinguished.  The  authorities  at  Sliven 
had  received  no  warning  as  to  our  ar- 
rival, and  took  their  ground  on  the  old 
regulation  that  no  journalists  were  to 
proceed  to  the  front.  Another  train 
with  all  the  correspondents  and  mili- 
tary attaches  would  arrive  next  morn- 
ing and  we  were  to  wait  and  join  them. 
Such  was  the  verdict. 

The  indignation  of  the  travelers 
baffles  description.  To  have  received 
the  peremptory  command  which  sent 
them  —  or  rather  two  of  them  —  off 
without  food  or  change  of  clothes,  to 
have  been  shaken  and  shunted,  jolted 


and  jarred  all  night,  to  have  been 
well-nigh  starved,  and  to  have  nour- 
ished the  pleasant  idea  of  *  scoops,' 
only  to  find  that  they  were  to  wait  for 
the  remainder  of  the  correspondents 
plus  the  military  attaches,  who  had 
traveled  down  in  wagon-lits  and  divers 
luxuries,  while  the  luckless  four  had 
borne  the  burden  and  heat  of  the  day! 
Tartarin  suddenly  exclaimed  that  there 
must  be  some  mistake  and,  as  he  rather 
fancied  himself  as  a  diplomat,  started 
off  to  smooth  things  down.  In  a  short 
time  he  returned  rather  ruffled,  and  it 
was  decided  that  Sapphira  should  try 
feminine  influence.  Ananias  left  the 
conference  meanwhile  in  order  to  com- 
mune with  himself,  as  a  result  of  which 
proceeding  he  wrote  out  two  telegrams 
and  waited  the  return  of  the  lady  en- 
voy, who  had  done  no  better  and  had 
lost  her  temper  into  the  bargain. 

The  faces  of  the  officials  fell  visibly 
at  the  sight  of  a  fourth  nuisance,  but 
finding  that  he  merely  asked  to  be  al- 
lowed to  wire  the  King  and  the  Pre- 
mier, they  relaxed,  and  so  two  cables, 
the  wording  of  which  had  a  vague  and 
distant  resemblance  to  the  Habeas  Cor- 
pus Act,  were  dispatched.  But  a  great 
surprise  was  in  store  for  Ananias  on 
his  return.  Tartarin  and  Paillasse  had 
disappeared! 

Sapphira  said  that  she  had  gone  for 
a  short  stroll  and  on  reaching  the  car- 
riage saw  that  the  next  compartment 
was  empty.  The  hamper  had  vanished 
with  them,  and  as  they  can  hardly  have 
eaten  its  contents  in  one  night,  it  looked 
as  if  they  must  have  driven.  Sliven 
station,  however,  is  five  kilometres  from 
the  village,  a  carriage  could  not  be 
had  either  for  love  or  money,  and  on 
making  inquiries  it  was  found  that  not 
a  soul  had  seen  them  leave.  All  around 
save  the  one  dusty  winding  road  was 
flat  open  plain  with  only  a  shepherd 
in  sight.  If  the  earth  had  swallowed 
them,  they  could  not  have  vanished 


A  CORRESPONDENT  AT  ADRIANOPLE 


849 


more  completely.  At  this  point  they 
also  vanish  from  the  narrative,  and 
since  no  news  was  heard  of  them 
again,  it  was  pleasant  ten  days  later 
to  read  their  messages  and  know  that, 
though  somewhat  late,  they  reached 
their  objective. 

About  dinner  time  the  telegram  re- 
leasing Ananias  and  Sapphira  was 
handed  in.  The  pair  were  to  be  hurried 
on,  and  an  extra  order  was  attached 
which  will  explain  how  a  trainload  of 
agitated  correspondents  and  military 
attaches  were  detained  for  thirty-six 
hours  at  an  uninteresting  spot  called 
Harmanli. 

A  light  engine  lost  little  time  in  de- 
positing the  two  Anglo-Saxons  close  to 
the  lines,  and  a  staff  officer  was  waiting 
to  conduct  them  to  a  tent,  where  a  cold 
and  appetizing  supper  proved  a  pleas- 
ant prelude  to  slumber. 

Next  morning,  Tuesday,  March  25, 
Ananias  was  aroused  at  3  A.M.  by 
heavy  firing.  To  the  trained  ear  it  was 
plain  that  this  was  no  ordinary  bom- 
bardment, but  a  fierce  and  concen- 
trated fire  to  cover  an  assault.  Hastily 
dressing  he  went  to  the  next  tent,  where 
he  found  his  officer-guide  buckling  on 
his  sword,  and  the  pair  ran  round  to  the 
batteries. 

Most  impressive  was  the  scene.  The 
dawn  had  not  yet  fully  broken,  but  the 
ghostly  pallor  which  heralds  the  dawn 
just  showed  the  dim  outline  of  the 
Turkish  ridge.  A  grayish  mist  swathed 
slopes  and  interlying  valley  in  one 
vast  shroud,  —  grim  augury  of  coming 
death,  —  and  though  the  ceaseless  con- 
cussion and  bursting  shells  ever  and 
anon  tore  great  rents  and  fissures,  the 
fabric  was  repaired  next  moment  as  if 
invisible  hands  were  at  work.  The 
earth  around  was  all  a-quake  with  the 
thud  and  roar  of  the  steel  monsters, 
while  overhead  could  be  heard  the 
shrill  scream  of  shrapnel  that  racks 
the  inexperienced  nerves.  A  hundred 
VOL.  in -NO.  6 


paces  from  the  battery  a  Turkish  shell 
had  gouged  out  a  monstrous  hole,  but 
otherwise  their  fire  was  concentrated 
on  the  left.  Gradually  the  mist  shred- 
ded away  and  the  sun  rose  on  an 
eventful  day,  tinging  the  giant  balls  of 
cottonwool  —  for  no  other  words  can 
describe  shrapnel  exploding  in  mid  air 
—  with  exquisite  hues,  of  rose  and 
saffron.  The  cannonade  increased  in 
intensity.  The  *12  cms.'  belched  forth 
incessant  rafales,  a  practice  almost 
unique,  the  dream  of  every  gunner. 

The  novice  would  have  thought  that 
not  a  soul  could  live  in  the  hell  of  steam 
and  flame  and  lead  upon  that  ridge, 
but  ever  came  the  responsive  crash,  and 
with  increasing  accuracy  the  shells  fell 
thicker  on  the  Creusot  batteries,  throw- 
ing up  solid  masses  of  dirt  and  stones 
which  bruised  the  men  from  head  to 
foot.  Slowly  but  surely,  however,  the 
Turkish  fire  grew  less,  and  it  was  evi- 
dent that  the  storm  of  projectiles  which 
had  swept  their  position  in  the  rear, 
had  prevented  fresh  supplies  of  am- 
munition from  coming  up.  This  had 
been  the  object  of  a  cannonade  which 
surpassed  even  the  inferno  on  303 
Metre  Hill,  and  a  broad  grin  relaxed 
the  strained  countenances  of  battery 
commanders.  It  was  not  known  till 
later  how  much  a  Turkish  contractor's 
idea  of  serviceable  casements  had  as- 
sisted the  Bulgarians. 

Suddenly  the  crackle  of  musketry 
was  heard  below,  and  the  dull  uniforms 
of  infantry  were  seen  in  the  valley.  The 
sun  had  now  fully  risen  and  far  to  the 
left,  whence  came  a  sullen  roar  like  the 
beat  of  billows  6n  a  shore,  its  rays  flick- 
ered on  shining  bayonets.  A  flanking 
party  was  charging  with  the  cry,  *Na 
Prod,  na  nosht ! ' :  *  On,  on,  to  the  knife ! ' 

The  Bulgars  took  those  words  liter- 
ally. Through  his  glasses  Ananias  saw 
them  leap  into  a  line  of  trenches,  and  so 
vivid  was  the  picture  that  he  felt  he 
could  almost  hear  the  shock  of  contact, 


850 


A  CORRESPONDENT  AT  ADRIANOPLE 


the  sickening  soft  noise  of  steel  thrust 
home,  the  final  gasp,  could  almost  see 
the  blood  spurt  out,  the  reddened  blade 
snatched  out  as  the  quivering  mass  of 
flesh  was  flung  aside.  The  rifles  ceased 
and  the  centre  line  surged  on,  swarmed 
the  first  gentle  slope  and  burst  in 
among  another  set  of  entrenchments. 
The  fight  was  short  and  sharp:  a  few 
minutes  and  a  broken  scattered  mob, 
their  heads  twisted  back  to  see  if 
they  outstripped  their  dread  pursuers, 
stumbled  on  in  terror.  Willing  hands 
brought  up  the  tiny  quickfirers,  the  pets 
of  the  Bulgarian  infantry,  and  switched 
their  deadly  hail  on  those  panic-strick- 
en fugitives.  And  ever  without  pause 
thundered  the  heavy  guns.  So  pass- 
ed the  Tuesday. 

At  nightfall  Ananias  was  presented 
to  General  Ivanoff,  destined  to  win  un- 
dying fame  fourteen  hours  later.  There 
was  nothing  of  the  iron  commander 
in  his  aspect.  Short  and  stoutish  in 
appearance,  with  a  kindly  face,  broad 
forehead  and  merry  twinkling  eyes,  he 
radiated  pleasantness.  Very  quiet  and 
slow-spoken,  choosing  his  words  care- 
fully, he  talked  as  if  he  were  accom- 
plishing an  everyday  bit  of  business, 
though  with  regard  to  his  men,  he  ex- 
pressed the  hope  that  Ananias  would 
have  a  higher  opinion  than  some  other 
journalist  who,  without  seeing  them, 
had  said  a  month  before  that  they  were 
merely  third  rate.  He  advised  an  early 
bed  for  it  would  be  necessary  to  rise 
betimes.  A  glass  of  wine  was  ordered 
and  while  the  toasts  were  being  drunk, 
the  cannonade  abruptly  ceased.  Words 
fail  to  describe  the  effect.  We  seemed 
to  have  been  hurled  into  a  world  of 
dead :  voices  sounded  as  the  faint  squeak 
of  ghosts  such  as  Odysseus  met  beyond 
the  Styx. 

The  Bulgarians,  who  had  snatched 
but  little  sleep  since  Monday  dawn, 
spent  the  night  in  entrenching  them- 
selves in  their  new  positions  and  bring- 


ing up  the  field  guns  on  Mezartepe. 
On  the  right  the  main  objective  was 
Aivas  Bebe,  on  the  left  Kavkas:  they 
also  pushed  forward  their  salient  on 
Ayi  Yolu. 

At  2.50  A.M.  the  bombardment  was 
renewed,  the  '15  cms.'  in  Kavkas  fort 
receiving  special  attention.  The  ad- 
vance trenches  were  rushed  and  the 
10th  and  23d  regiments  prepared  to 
assault  the  glacis  by  Aivas,  which 
should  have  been  impregnable.  The 
whoop  of  exultant  ferocity  —  a  cry 
which  would  have  put  to  shame  a  base- 
ball yell  —  was  unforgettable.  The 
men  of  the  10th  outran  the  sappers 
who  had  been  detailed  to  cut  the  en- 
tanglements, and  threw  themselves  at 
what  was  a  miniature  Gibraltar.  It  is 
incredible,  yet  true,  that  the  Turks 
had  placed  no  searchlights  to  play  on 
an  enemy  advancing  on  barbed  wire. 
Nothing  is  so  devilish,  so  mockingly 
demoralizing,  as  that  dazzling,  blind- 
ing fugitive  glare  when  clothes  and 
flesh  are  being  rent  and  torn  and 
ripped  while  the  smack  of  lead  on  bod- 
ies can  be  heard  around.  Without  it, 
barbed  wire  loses  half  its  value;  yet  the 
dreaded  flash  never  came.  The  10th 
swarmed  up,  and  enfiladed  the  de- 
fenders as  the  23d  swung  in  upon  the 
centre.  Panic  did  the  rest.  Much  the 
same  happened  at  Kavkas,  save  that 
the  defense  was  fiercer,  and  when 
Ananias  rode  round  that  evening  the 
wire  entanglements  were  a  ghastly 
sight :  it  seemed  as  if  some  giant  shrike 
had  fitted  up  his  larder,  for  mangled 
corpses,  fragments  of  flesh,  or  muti- 
lated limbs  hung  on  those  horrid  spikes.,, 
The  enclosure  within  was  a  shambles. 

By  6  o'clock  the  troops  posted  in  the 
centre,  who  up  to  then  had  acted  as  a 
screen,  had  advanced  upon  the  heights, 
and  fighting  was  general  along  the  line. 
From  this  point  it  is  regrettable  to  state 
that  words  cannot  describe  the  cowar- 
dice of  the  defenders.  Whether  there 


A  CORRESPONDENT  AT  ADRIANOPLE 


851 


is  some  sinister  story,  apart  from  the 
disgusting  behavior  of  the  Young 
Turks  to  Shukri  Pasha,  in  the  back- 
ground, it  is  impossible  to  say,  but 
certainly  the  Aivas  glacis  should  never 
have  been  taken,  while  it  is  strange 
that  the  most  stalwart  troops  were 
concentrated  on  the  W  which  the  Bul- 
garians had  abandoned  as  an  objective 
a  week  before.  Moreover  with  a  spark 
of  that  gallant  Plevna  spirit,  the  Turks 
would  have  contested  every  inch  of  the 
ground  in  falling  back,  and  it  should 
have  taken  forty-eight  hours  for  the 
Bulgarians  to  enter  the  town.  Yet  at 
8  o'clock  the  troops  were  breaking  their 
rifles  before  the  famous  mosque  of 
Sultan  Selim. 

The  Bulgars  raced  into  the  town,  the 
Shipka  men  (the  23d)  winning  by  a 
short  head,  for  at  9.30  they  were  on 
the  Arrnautkeui  road  and  had  entered 
the  suburbs.  The  white  flag  was  run 
up  on  the  fire-station  tower  at  9.35,  and 
at  9.45  the  allied  cavalry  galloped  into 
the  town  and  took  Shukri  prisoner  in 
his  headquarters  at  Haiderlir  fort. 
The  Vali,  Ismail  Pasha,  tried  to  parley 
and  obtain  conditions,  but  was  told 
that  a  captured  town  cannot  make 
terms.  There  remained  nothing  but  the 
whipping  in  of  the  20,000  missing  pris- 
oners which  entailed  the  house-to-house 
search  that  Ivanoff  so  dreaded.  For- 
tunately in  only  three  or  four  cases  did 
fanatics,  harbored  by  friends  in  the 
low  quarters,  attempt  street  fighting, 
or  kill  the  searchers.  A  couple  en- 
sconced in  a  mosque  accounted  for 
fourteen  Bulgarians. 

Adrianople  had  fallen.  Fourteen 
other  generals,  in  past  times,  had  en- 
tered her  gates  victorious. 

The  tale  of  the  siege  from  within 
lacks  the  romance  which  surrounded 
Paris,  but  it  is  full  of  quaint  details, 
and  a  full  account  from  the  pen  of  a 
Western  resident  will,  it  is  hoped,  ap- 
pear. Few  places  can  boast  a  more 


useless  or  unreliable  civil  population. 
Low-class  Greeks,  cringing  and  treach- 
erous Armenians,  usurious,  unwarlike 
Spanish  Jews,  the  sweepings  of  the 
Levant,  —  where  could  one  look  for  a 
spark  of  patriotism,  the  makings  of  a 
single  volunteer?  One  fact  alone  was  a 
certainty :  it  would  be  necessary  to  use 
force  to  extract  the  truth  as  to  hidden 
resources  in  case  of  need. 

Sublime  over-confidence  reigned  from 
the  outset,  and  the  citizens  were  or- 
dered to  provision  themselves  for  two 
months  only.  Grain  was  even  turned 
away  from  the  gates. 

The  first  shrapnel  was  a  grievous  ex- 
perience for  Levant  nerves,  and  for 
two  days  all  shops  were  closed  and  the 
streets  deserted  save  for  foreigners. 
Even  quite  late,  no  matter  in  what 
quarter  of  the  town  there  fell  a  shell, 
up  went  the  shutters  and  away  went 
the  people,  and  the  philosophic  calm 
of  the  Oriental  must  have  been  a  most 
valuable  asset  in  those  days.  Matters 
were  not  improved  by  the  existence  of 
a  feud  between  Shukri  and  Ismail,  so 
that  the  civil  and  military  authorities 
were  in  constant  collision. 

•  Important  news  was  rigorously  with- 
held from  the  garrison,  so  that  for  some 
weeks  it  was  firmly  believed  in  the  town 
that  the  Turkish  army  was  smashing 
the  allies  all  along  the  line.  To  prevent 
complete  absence  of  information  from 
arousing  suspicions,  occasional  bulle- 
tins detailing  skirmishes  and  outpost 
affairs  were  distributed,  and  at  other 
times  general  notices  remarkable  mere- 
ly for  the  platitudinous  nature  of  their 
contents,  were  issued.  One  posted  on 
the  wall  of  the  Konak  on  November  21 
contained  the  following  paragraph: 

*  IV.  The  death  foreordained  by  God 
is  impossible  to  avoid/ 

One  wonders  what  comfort  or  encour- 
agement a  soldier  could  extract  from 
that !  Its  efficacy  was  soon  to  be  tested 
anyhow,  for  that  very  evening  the  first 


852 


A  CORRESPONDENT  AT  ADRIANOPLE 


regular  bombardment,  extending  over 
thirteen  days,  was  opened.  An  awful 
panic  at  once  seized  the  foreign  colony, 
and  the  consuls  were  obliged  to  hold 
a  consultation  and  decide  where  their 
timid  flock  could  be  bestowed  in  safety 
—  a  difficulty  finally  solved  by  send- 
ing them  to  the  school  of  the  Soeurs 
d'Agram. 

The  first  hint  of  Ottoman  disaster 
was  conveyed  in  a  notice,  printed  in 
French  and  Turkish,  which  was  drop- 
ped from  an  aeroplane  on  November 
24.  This  was  easily  countered  by  an 
official  denial,  telling  the  soldiers  to 
place  no  confidence  in  the  Bulgarian 
version,  and  all  went  well  until  the 
armistice.  The  soldiers  had  been  as- 
sured that  this  had  been  expressly  de- 
sired by  the  Bulgarians,  and  naturally 
accepted  this  as  confirmation  of  Turk- 
ish successes.  Their  disgust  can  there- 
fore be  imagined  when  they  saw  the 
trains  running  down  to  Tchataldja 
and  picked  up  the  European  papers 
with  details  of  Lule  Burgas  and  Kuma- 
novo  which  the  Bulgarians  studious- 
ly dropped  from  the  window.  To  the 
majority  of  the  garrison  and  civilians, 
this  period  was  intensely  dull  and  try- 
ing, though  the  Turkish  and  Servian 
outposts  were  on  friendly  terms. 

Curiously  enough,  toward  the  end  a 
great  activity  was  noticeable  among 
the  Young  Turk  officers,  whom  Shukri 
had  hitherto  checked.  In  ones  and  twos 
they  were  closeted  with  Ismail,  and  the 
news  of  the  coup  d'6tat  and  Nazim's 
death  surprised  no  one  in  Adrianople. 
Though  the  majority  of  officers  of  either 
party  were  glad  that  the  fortress  was 
not  to  be  surrendered  without  strik- 
ing a  blow,  the  place  was  doomed. 
Shukri  was  no  longer  master1;  for  a 
Young  Turk  officer  told  a  foreign  con- 
sul that  if  he  did  not  do  what  they  said, 
he  would  be  killed  like  Nazim.  The 

1  He  was  compelled  by  the  Young  Turks  to 
order  the  disastrous  sortie  of  February  9. 


great  error  of  not  taking  all  the  mills 
and  grain  under  military  control  had 
been  committed,  and  it  was  now  plain 
that  the  bread-supply  could  not  last 
long.  A  victualling  commission  was 
formed  to  requisition  eatables,  draw 
up  a  fixed  tariff,  and  decide  on  the 
daily  quantity,  but  it  was  not  a  success. 
First,  one  of  the  principal  members  was 
found  concealing  grain  in  his  own  cel- 
lars, and  after  obeying  the  regulations 
for  a  day  or  two,  the  Greeks  and  Jews 
found  it  more  profitable  to  say  that 
their  stock  was  exhausted,  and  then 
sell  the  goods  privately  at  a  high  price, 
if  a  rich  man  entered  the  premises. 

Meanwhile  the  renewal  of  the  bom- 
bardment on  February  3  had  caused  a 
fresh  outbreak  of  panic,  especially  as 
a  number  of  shells  fell  in  the  new  quar- 
ter where  the  better-class  residents  had 
their  quarters.  A  small  hospital  of  fifty 
beds  which  the  British  and  American 
colony,  nine  strong,  had  founded  had 
to  be  moved  farther  out,  while  the 
French  and  Italian  citizens  took  refuge 
in  the  cellars  of  the  Resurrectionist 
Fathers.  The  conduct  of  the  Soeurs 
d'Agram  at  this  period  was  wonderful. 
They  remained  at  their  posts,  tending 
the  sick  and  wounded,  a  smile  of  en- 
couragement ever  on  their  lips,  al- 
though their  hospital  was  in  an  exposed 
place  and  shells  were  falling  all  around. 
They  put  the  men  to  shame. 

Early  in  March  the  pinch  was  sorely 
felt.  Grease  and  butter  had  given  out 
completely;  petroleum  was  $8  a  tin, 
sugar  and  salt  $2  a  pound,  charcoal 
and  coal  unobtainable,  also  dry  wood, 
for  the  Turks  had  deforested  the  slopes 
around  the  town,  giving  it  a  desolate, 
woebegone  appearance,  especially  as 
all  the  fine  villas  on  the  outskirts  were 
heaps  of  ruins.  Fodder  was  finished, 
and  the  oxen  were  pitifully  thin,  while 
a  heavy  fall  of  snow  just  as  the  sheep 
were  lambing  threatened  them  with 
annihilation,  until  luckily  a  thaw  set 


THE  CONTRIBUTORS'  CLUB 


853 


in  and  freed  the  green  shoots  which 
had  been  forced  on  by  the  snow.  To- 
bacco of  an  inferior  quality  was  plen- 
tiful, but  cigarette  papers  could  not  be 
purchased  for  gold,  and  the  Jews,  mind- 
ful of  their  forefathers'  skill  in  making 
bricks  without  straw,  came  to  the  res- 
cue with  fragments  of  schoolboys' 
copybooks,  with  'Balbus  built  a  wall' 
and  the  'Pons  Asinorum'  still  legible. 
These  masterpieces  cost  2  and  3  piastres 
(10  and  15  cents)  a  packet  of  20.  Bread, 
however,  was  the  greatest  need.  The 


last  sacks  of  grain  were  kept  for  the 
garrison,  and  when  that  was  exhausted, 
a  horrid  mess  of  bran,  barley  husks, 
broomseed  or  canary  seed,  of  hideous 
hue,  with  red  and  yellow  patches,  and 
of  revolting  texture,  was  served  out  at 
fifty  cents  a  loaf.  Yet,  as  is  always  the 
case  in  places  that  have  gone  through  a 
siege,  Ananias  was  given  a  better  meal 
on  the  Wednesday  night  at  the  consul- 
ate than  he  had  eaten  for  six  weeks. 
It  was  just  the  same  at  Ladysmith  and 
Port  Arthur. 


THE  CONTRIBUTORS'  CLUB 


THE   POETRY  OF   SYNDICALISM 

THE  rhapsody  in  this  issue  of  The 
Atlantic,  entitled  'The  Cage,'  will  not 
pass  without  challenge.  A  rebel  wrote 
it,  and  thought  and  form  alike  proclaim 
rebellion.  There  will  be  a  few  to  sym- 
pathize and  many  to  contemn,  while  to 
some  it  will  seem  clear  that  if  there  is 
a  poetry  of  anarchy,  this  is  it.  'The 
Cage'  will  call  out  plenty  of  literary 
criticism,  plenty  of  expressions  of  so- 
cial sympathy  or  lack  of  it,  but  the  sim- 
ple point  which  needs  emphasis  is  that 
whether  the  poem  repels  or  attracts  the 
reader,  he  will  find  in  it,  if  he  cares 
to  look,  more  of  the  heart  and  soul  of 
the  Syndicalist  movement  than  all  the 
papers  of  all  the  economists  can  teach 
him.  It  is  ever  wise  to  listen  to  the  seri- 
ous voices  of  mankind,  and  the  sinister 
mutterings  of  our  own  day  make  the 
farsighted  pause  to  think.  Some  de- 
tails concerning  author  and  poem  will 
give  point  to  these  remarks. 

Arturo  M.  Giovannitti  was  born  in 
the  Abruzzi,  Italy,  in  1883.  His  father 


was  a  physician  and  chemist,  and  he 
himself  received  the  fundamentals  of  a 
literary  education  in  the  public  schools. 
At  eighteen  Giovannitti  emigrated  to 
America,  and,  after  encountering  many 
varied  experiences  of  an  immigrant  in 
search  of  a  livelihood,  he  entered  the 
Union  Theological  Seminary  in  New 
York,  with  the  purpose  of  becoming  a 
minister  of  the  Presbyterian  Church. 
Although  he  never  graduated,  Giovan- 
nitti saw  actual  service  in  conducting 
Presbyterian  missions  in  more  than 
one  city,  and  interested  himself  in  the 
work  of  the  Church,  until  socialism 
came  to  impersonate  religion  in  his  life 
and  led  him  through  the  vanishing 
stages  of  unbelief  into  atheism. 

During  the  Lawrence  strike,  Gio- 
vannitti preached  with  missionary  in- 
tensity the  doctrine  of  Syndicalism. 
On  June  20,  on  the  charge  of  inciting  a 
riot,  which  resulted  in  the  death  of  a 
woman,  he  was  arrested  with  Joseph 
Ettor  and  another  leader,  and  held 
without  bail  for  trial  under  a  statute 
which  had  not  been  invoked  since  the 


854 


THE   CONTRIBUTORS'  CLUB 


conscription  riots  of  the  Civil  War. 
Through  the  unreadiness  or  policy  of 
their  lawyers  the  prisoners  spent  nearly 
seven  months  in  jail.  Then  came  the 
trial  which  dragged  on  for  nearly  two 
months  longer.  During  this  period  of 
enforced  idleness,  Giovannitti  had  ac- 
cess to  a  library.  Before  his  imprison- 
ment he  had  written  poems  for  the  Ital- 
ian papers;  now  English  poetry  was 
revealed  to  him.  He  read  it  with  in- 
satiate eagerness  and  found  in  Byron 
and  Shelley  the  heady  wine  which  his 
rebellious  nature  craved.  It  was  dur- 
ing the  trial  that  W.  D.  Hay  wood,  the 
notorious  Syndicalist,  asked  Giovan- 
nitti to  write  something  about  *  Six- 
teenth-Century courts  trying  to  solve 
Twentieth-Century  problems.'  'The 
Cage*  was  the  result.  It  was  written 
one  evening  while  Giovannitti  was  still 
greatly  moved  by  news  of  the  protest 
strike  in  Lawrence,  and  by  messages 
of  sympathy  from  his  fellow  citizens, 
who  in  three  separate  districts  of  Italy 
had  nominated  him  for  the  Chamber  of 
Deputies. 

We  are  not  prepared  to  debate  the 
question  whether  Syndicalism  has  a 
soul,  but  if  it  has,  'The  Cage'  gives 
a  picture  of  it.  The  philosophy  of  the 
poem  sounds  harshly  materialistic,  yet 
we  must  not  forget  that  to  the  very 
poor,  bread,  bed,  and  sunshine  may 
suggest  something  very  different  from 
materialism.  They  are  helps  —  almost 
essential  helps  —  to  spiritual  freedom. 
Moreover,  many  readers  will  discern 
some  vague  outline  of  a  spiritual  prin- 
ciple in  'the  fatherly  justice  of  the 
sun.'  But  even  if  the  poem  offers  no 
suggestion  of  some  evolution  toward  an 
idealism  still  to  come,  if  sunshine  and 
a  chance  to  feel  its  warmth  are  really 
all  these  revolutionists  desire,  then  to 
be  shut  away  from  it  is  to  them  at  least 
an  utter  calamity. 

It  was  the  law  which  freed  Giovan- 
nitti. This  law,  read  by  'dead  men' 


out  of  'dead  books,'  had  in  it  the  spark 
of  the  eternal  life  of  justice.  The  logic 
of  facts  is  against  the  poet's  repudia- 
tion of  the  past.  So  thinks  the  con- 
servative, and  rightly.  Even  the  radi- 
cal may  maintain  that  evolution  itself 
is  against  him.  His  'singing  cage'  is  a 
part  of  the  past  continuing  into  the 
present.  It  is  not  yet  retransformed 
and  remade  into  the  'sword  of  justice' 
of  the  future,  but  in  the  fullness  of 
time  that  new  sword  of  justice  will  be 
made  out  of  the  old  cage.  This  is  not 
death.  This  is  transfiguration. 

Thus  the  radical.  But  most  of  us 
commonplace  folk,  after  pondering  the 
matter,  will  remark  with  Mr.  Asquith 
in  his  discussion  of  Parliamentary  man- 
ners, 'We  are  getting  on!' 

THE   PUBLISHER  AND  THE   BOOK 

A  LONG  row  of  tall,  soot-belching 
smoke-stacks  along  the  river  front; 
trainloads  of  manufactured  goods  leav- 
ing the  busy  railroad  yards  almost 
every  day;  a  very  efficient  street  rail- 
way and  interurban  system;  an  up-to- 
date,  recently  rehabilitated  telephone 
service;  an  adequate  pure-water  sup- 
ply; an  auto-equipped  fire  department; 
a  half-million-dollar  hotel;  a  commis- 
sion form  of  government ;  a  small  Car- 
negie library,  and  one  lone  bookstore: 
such  is  the  prosaic  picture  of  our  hus- 
tling and  bustling  western  city  of 
30,000  inhabitants. 

This  complex  aggregate  of  material 
push  and  intellectual  stagnation  may 
perhaps  explain  to  a  certain  extent  the 
publisher's  complaint  in  the  April 
Atlantic,  that  the  distribution  of  books 
of  real  merit  is  a  difficult  and  thus  far 
unsolved  problem.  'The  publisher  and 
the  bookseller  alike  must  confess  that 
the  lack  of  sales  of  works  of  literature 
is  primarily  due  to  the  inadequacy  of 
present  methods  of  distribution.'  And 
then  'the  indifference  of  the  public  to 


THE   CONTRIBUTORS'   CLUB 


855 


the  new  books  of  the  day  is  commonly 
blamed  for  the  change  in  publishing 
methods.' 

Sweet  consolation  indeed! 

Our  lone  bookshop  makes  a  specialty 
of  office  fixtures,  from  fancy  waste- 
baskets  up  to  expensive  mahogany 
desks  and  approved  filing  devices;  it 
frames  pictures,  retails  typewriters  and 
supplies,  sporting  goods  of  all  kinds, 
cameras  and  photographic  sundries. 
Whatever  space  is  left  after  room  has 
been  made  for  innumerable  view-cards 
of  our  proud  and  booming  burg,  for 
the  inanities  of  humorous-postal-card 
designers,  for  fountain  pens,  calen- 
dars, magnifying  glasses  and  some  fifty- 
seven  varieties  of  popular  magazines, 
is  eagerly  filled  in  with  glaring  post- 
ers in  multi-colored  dress,  lavishly  for- 
warded by  the  publisher  to  advertise 
to  the  blase  public  his  latest  best  seller, 
a  few  copies  of  which  are  usually  kept 
on  hand. 

But  generally  the  up-to-date  reader 
has  long  since  made  the  acquaintance 
of  the  fearless  hero  and  the  self-sacri- 
ficing heroine  between  the  covers  of 
the  popular  magazine;  he  has  no  time 
or  inclination  to  pore  over  their  stir- 
ring adventures  afresh  at  the  cost  of 
$1.50;  he  has  passed  on  to  the  next 
serial  with  its  breathless  situations  and 
melodramatic  episodes. 

Or  if  perchance  this  great  boon  have 
not  fallen  to  his  lot,  there  is  the  little 
Carnegie  bookshelf,  which  he  helps  to 
support,  and  where  the  latest  effusions 
of  the  inexhaustible  novel-writer  ap- 
pear as  early  and  as  regularly  as  in  our 
lone  bookstore.  Several  copies  are  on 
hand,  free  for  the  asking.  Why  invest 
the  good  coin  of  the  Republic  in  an 
article  whose  vogue  is  more  ephemeral 
than  that  of  the  proverbial  insect? 

For  a  work  of  general  literature  there 
is  of  course  no  room  in  our  busy  book- 
store, —  and  no  demand  that  would 
justify  the  investment  on  the  pro- 


prietor's part.  Now  it  happens  that  I 
am  in  favor  of  *  keeping  trade  at 
home,'  and  when  I  want  some  such 
work,  I  carefully  write  out  the  title, 
together  with  the  author's  and  pub- 
lisher's names,  and  take  it  to  the  book- 
store, with  instructions  to  order  the 
work  for  me.  For  I  have  long  since 
got  over  the  habit  of  inquiring  first 
whether  they  have  the  book  in  stock :  I 
believe  in  the  conservation  of  natural 
resources,  personal  as  well  as  national. 

The  order  having  been  given,  I  wait 
quietly  and  patiently,  —  in  the  sweet 
anticipation  of  spending  a  few  delight- 
ful hours  in  the  company  of  some  se- 
lect mind,  —  until  the  volume  is  sent 
up,  which  is  usually  from  four  to  eight 
weeks  later.  A  mild  complaint,  now  no 
longer  ventured  upon,  brings  the  an- 
swer that  the  order  has  been  duly  for- 
warded to  their  'jobbers  in  Chicago'; 
I  have  never  succeeded  in  tracing  it 
any  farther.  'At  any  rate,  the  book 
may  be  here  now  almost  any  day.'  I 
am  sorry  to  confess  that  at  times  I 
have  cast  my  principles  of  'keeping 
trade  at  home'  to  the  winds! 

This  is  an  honest  recital  of  twentieth- 
century  conditions  in  a  wide-awake 
American  city,  with  —  considering  its 
size  —  a  not  inconsiderable  number  of 
millionaires. 

Why  has  not  some  aggressive  book- 
dealer  set  up  a  rival  establishment, 
provoked  competition,  and  stimulated 
the  book  trade?  Most  probably  be- 
cause it  would  not  pay.  You  see,  we 
are  too  much  absorbed  in  industry  and 
manufacture,  city  improvements  and 
political  quarrels,  building  projects 
and  corporation  baiting,  to  have  any 
time  left  for  deep  cultural  reading;  and 
this  notwithstanding  all  the  ennobling 
influences  which  our  elaborate  and  ex- 
pensive public-school  system  is  sup- 
posed to  exert  in  that  direction. 

Indeed,  our  well-meaning  publishers, 
to  whom  'the  publication  of  a  worthy 


856 


THE  CONTRIBUTORS'   CLUB 


and  distinguished  book  is  a  matter  of 
high  satisfaction,'  are  facing  a  bigger 
task  than  they  are  perhaps  themselves 
aware  of. 

ON  THE  GENTLE  ART  OF  LETTER- 
READING 

FROM  time  to  time,  one  of  my  asso- 
ciates in  the  Select  Order  of  Old  Fogies 
launches  an  essay  on  the  decay  of  let- 
ter-writing as  an  art.  He  bemoans  the 
disappearance  of  the  letter  that  ram- 
bled for  twenty  pages  through  lush 
meadows  of  gossip,  leaving  a  trail  of 
epigrammatic  philosophy  to  mark  its 
course,  and  was  good  enough  for  the 
writer's  posterity  to  print  in  a  gift 
book.  Of  course,  his  lamentation  is  di- 
rected really  against  the  telephone  and 
the  typewriter,  stenographers  and  pho- 
nographs, cheap  travel  and  cheaper 
lettergrams  and  cheapest  newspapers, 
or,  rather,  the  era  of  activity  of  which 
these  are  fruits  and  symbols.  To  write 
the  old  sort  of  letters  required  a  degree 
of  leisure  and  an  absolution  from  petty 
desires  and  sordid  cares  which  are 
hardly  conceivable  under  present  con- 
ditions of  commerce  and  the  cost  of 
living.  Our  ancestors  put  into  their 
letters  what  we  now  put  into  mono- 
graphs and  essays  and  ten-minute 
chats  with  the  Contributors'  Club. 
All  that  is  left  for  a  letter  nowadays 
is  the  remnant  that  can't  be  said  face- 
to-face  at  the  cost  of  a  short  trip  by 
steam  or  electricity,  or  *  hello  '-ed  over 
a  wire.  It 's  a  waste  of  time  to  spend 
it  on  composing  such  a  trifle;  so  you 
tell  your  amanuensis  what  to  say,  and 
your  signature  does  the  rest. 

Although,  having  a  livelihood  to 
earn,  I  cannot  sympathize  with  the 
sentiment  which  would  set  the  Clock 
of  Progress  back  a  hundred  years  or  so, 
I  have  a  complaint  of  my  own  to  regis- 
ter against  the  modern  correspondent: 
he  does  n't  half  read  what  the  other 


fellow  writes  to  him.  If  he  did,  his  let- 
ters would  make  up  in  substance  for 
what  they  lack  in  style.  I  dare  say 
this  fault,  too,  will  be  charged  to  the 
atmosphere  of  hurry  which  envelops 
the  present  generation;  but  that  excuse 
is  insufficient  to  meet  his  case.  Nine 
times  out  of  ten,  his  so-called  answer  is 
not  an  answer  at  all,  but  means  one  or 
more  additional  letters  or  no  results; 
therefore  economy  would  lie  in  doing 
the  thing  properly  at  the  outset.  From 
my  folio  of  specimens  I  choose  a  brace 
so  typical  that  everyone  will  recognize 
them  at  sight. 

To  the  proprietor  of  a  summer  hotel 
I  write:  *I  want  two  connecting  rooms 
with  bath  between,  with  outlook  on  the 
water,  and  not  above  the  fourth  floor, 
with  two  single  beds  in  each  room,  for 
the  whole  month  of  August.  If  you 
will  be  able  to  accommodate  me,  please 
let  me  know  size  and  location  of 
rooms,  and  terms  for  the  month,  with 
full  board,  for  party  consisting  of  two 
adults  and  two  children  ten  and  twelve 
years  of  age.'  Neither  Addisonian  in 
elegance  nor  Lamblike  in  geniality, 
perhaps,  but  surely  simple  enough  for 
comprehension  by  the  most  common- 
place mind.  Back  comes  Mine  Host's 
answer:  — 

'Our  rooms,  single  and  in  suite,  com- 
mand beautiful  views  of  the  ocean  on 
one  side  of  the  house,  or  of  the  moun- 
tains on  the  other.  Rates,  according 
to  location  and  number  of  persons  oc- 
cupying, from  $20  per  week  upward. 
Shall  be  pleased  to  furnish  you  with 
any  information  desired.' 

Then,  for  goodness'  sake,  why  has  he 
not  furnished  the  information  I  not 
only  'desired,'  but  specifically  asked 
for?  It  would  have  required  no  greater 
effort  to  say : '  We  can  give  your  party 
the  accommodations  mentioned  in  your 
letter  of  June  16,  for  the  month  of  Au- 
gust, for  $400.  This  offer  will  remain 
open  for  receipt  of  your  acceptance  by 


THE   CONTRIBUTORS'   CLUB 


857 


mail  or  wire  till  midnight  of  June  22.' 
There  we  should  have  had  the  whole 
bargain  in  a  nutshell,  to  take  or  leave 
as  I  saw  fit,  with  no  need  of  further 
long-distance  wrestling  over  facts  and 
terms. 

Of  a  seedsman  I  inquire,  in  a  letter 
very  brief,  absolutely  to  the  point,  and 
enclosing  postage  for  reply,  which  of 
two  flowering  plants  whose  bulbs  I 
have  bought  of  him  grows  the  taller.  It 
is  already  time  to  set  out  the  bulbs,  but 
I  want  to  put  them  into  next  summer's 
bed  in  the  order  of  their  height.  In  re- 
sponse I  get  a  most  polite  note  from 
him,  assuring  me  that  he  takes  great 
pleasure  in  mailing,  under  another 
cover,  an  illustrated  catalogue  of  all 
the  garden  supplies  he  keeps  for  sale, 
and  will  take  further  pleasure  in  filling 
promptly  any  order  with  which  I  may 
favor  him,  express  prepaid  on  orders 
exceeding  $2.00  to  one  address,  unless 
sent  C.  O.  D.,  and  so  forth  and  so 
forth.  As  the  illustrated  catalogue  trav- 
els by  third-class  mail,  I  lose  two  days 
in  waiting  for  it.  When  it  arrives,  I 
find  it  a  rather  bulky  pamphlet,  with 
an  index  obviously  not  compiled  by  an 
expert,  by  the  aid  of  which  I  succeed, 
after  an  hour's  digging,  in  bringing  to 
light  some  descriptive  text  about  my 
two  plants.  It  shows  that  they  average 
the  same  height  of  growth! 

It  would  have  cost  that  man,  at  the 
most,  the  labor  of  putting  together  one 
sentence  of  five  or  six  words,  to  answer 
the  question  I  propounded,  and  spare 
me  the  infliction  of  a  pageful  of  phrases 
which  gave  me  no  fact  I  had  asked  for, 
and  none  I  did  not  already  know  from 
the  advertisements  he  had  been  bom- 
barding me  with  for  the  last  dozen 
years. 

In  spite  of  all  the  talk  about  the 
modern  disregard  of  manners,  both 
seedsman  and  landlord  were  courtesy 
itself  so  far  as  externals  go;  yet  neither 
carried  the  spirit  so  far  as  to  do  for 


me  the  little  service  requested.  The 
seedsman  did  better  in  this  respect  than 
the  landlord;  but  why  should  we  be 
reduced  to  such  a  choice  between  evils? 
A  like  criticism  will  apply  to  half  the 
personal  and  intimate  letters  I  receive 
from  friends.  One  or  two  even  ignore 
the  address  plainly  given  in  my  date- 
line, and  persist  in  sending  their  an- 
swers to  non-existing  numbers  or  un- 
discoverable  streets. 

My  dear  old  grandfather,  who  wrote 
all  his  own  letters  in  a  hand  which, 
down  to  the  day  of  his  death,  was  al- 
most plain  enough  for  a  blind  man  to 
read,  taught  me  never  to  attempt  to 
answer  a  letter  without  placing  it  be- 
fore me  and  reviewing  it  scrupulous- 
ly, paragraph  by  paragraph.  Hundreds 
of  times  have  I  devoutly  blessed  his 
memory  for  that  lesson  in  the  common- 
sense  of  correspondence.  Whenever, 
lured  by  the  pell-mell  spirit  of  the  age, 
I  stray  from  his  precepts,  I  rue  it;  and 
I  can  feel  the  flush  of  shame  overspread 
my  face  as  I  follow  a  first  letter  of  re- 
sponse with  a  second,  rendered  neces- 
sary by  the  belated  discovery  of  a 
point  left  uncovered.  The  old  copy- 
book legend,  *  Haste  breeds  careless- 
ness,' is  as  true  as  it  was  in  the  days 
when  good  penmanship  and  good  mor- 
als went  hand-in-hand  in  the  training 
of  youth.  If  slam-bang  and  hurly- 
burly  have  given  its  coup  de  grace  to 
the  once  gentle  art  of  writing  letters, 
is  not  that  all  the  more  reason  why, 
before  it  is  too  late,  we  should  rescue 
the  half-dead  art  of  reading  them? 

ST.    DAVID    LIVINGSTONE 

MUCH  has  appeared  this  spring  in 
righteous  appreciation  of  David  Liv- 
ingstone. Many  of  us  have  been  re- 
newing the  days,  and  the  reading,  and 
the  pictures  of  our  youth  when  *  Living- 
stone —  Stanley  —  Africa '  were  magic 
words.  Did  not  every  good  American 


858 


THE   CONTRIBUTORS'   CLUB 


family  have  those  volumes  on  How  I 
Found  Livingstone:  books  filled  with 
pictures  which  terrified  and  fascinated 
us?  But  now  as  we  read  Livingstone 
we  are  most  impressed  with  his  'gra- 
cious words'  and  *  mighty  deeds.' 

It  calls  to  my  mind  a  famous  story 
of  Cardinal  Manning.  That  belligerent 
ecclesiastic,  dressed  in  a  violet  gown, 
and  wearing  around  his  neck  a  massive 
gold  chain,  used  to  say,  with  a  melan- 
choly smile,  *  No  saints  have  walked  in 
England  since  the  Reformation.' 

And  while  he  was  musing,  the  fire 
burned;  while  he  was  speaking,  Liv- 
ingstone was  walking  across  a  conti- 
nent. 

I  don't  know  how  many  miles  a  man 
must  walk  in  order  to  be  canonized, 
but  29,000  seem  enough  to  silence  any 
'advocatus  diaboli.'  And  could  any 
candidate  for  the  highest  hagiology 
exhibit  a  nobler  courage  or  a  finer 
faith  than  Livingstone  made  manifest 
in  that  grim  crisis  on  the  Loangwa? 
And  surely  if  '  irresistible  grace '  be  the 
mark  of  the  saint,  how  irresistible  was 
that  grace  so  visibly  manifest  in  his 
life  and  so  quietly  in  his  words,  which 
opened  for  him  pathways  in  deserts 
and  in  forests,  which  won  for  him  the 


hearts  of  black  folks,  which  went  out 
from  him  as  virtue  to  Stanley  at 
Ujiji,  and  which  after  his  death  led 
Susi,  Chumah,  and  a  nameless  compa 
ny  of  devoted  men,  to  carry  iiis  bodv 
the  sea,  and  England.  And  what  sacer- 
dotalist  of  the  strictest  and  straitest 
sect,  if  called  upon  to  imagine  a  fitting 
departure  for  his  saint,  could  ask  for  a 
translation  so  eloquent,  so  impressive, 
so  glorious,  as  that  of  the  silent  mar 
kneeling  in  prayer,  beside  his  bed,  in.  a 
hut  built  by  Africans  in  the  heart  of 
Africa?  And  could  any  pious  monk,  or 
golden  legend,  devise  a  more  appropri- 
ate sepulchre  than  that  which  loyalty 
and  love  gave  to  David  Livingstone? 
For  his  heart  was  buried  in  the  heart  of 
the  continent  to  which  he  gave  heart, 
and  his  bones  in  the  great  abbey  of 
the  land  which  gave  him  birth.  And 
to  complete  the  requirements  of  hagio- 
logy, what  pious  puns  the  gentle  monks 
could  have  made  on  living  stones,  and 
what  scriptures  they  could  have  found 
in  Holy  Writ  for  this  modern  David 
fighting  his  Goliath,  the  slave  trade! 

Have  no  saints  walked  in  England 
since  the  Reformation?  Are  gentle- 
men in  violet  and  gold  of  necessity  so 
despondent? 


AP 
2 

A8 
v.lll 


The  Atlantic 


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