THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL AND OTHER ESSAYS

By Ambrose Bierce

Edited by S. O. HOWES

Copyright 1909

A NOTE BY THE AUTHOR

IT WAS expected that this book would be included in my "CollectedWorks" now in course of publication, but unforeseen delay in the date ofpublication has made this impossible. The selection of its contents wasnot made by me, but the choice has my approval and the publication myauthority. 

AMBROSE BIERCE. 

Washington, D. C. March 14. 1909. 

PREFACE

THE note of prophecy! It sounds sharp and clear in many a vibrant line, in many a sonorous sentence of the essays herein collected for thefirst time. Written for various Californian journals and periodicalsand extending over a period of more than a quarter of a century, theseopinions and reflections express the refined judgment of one who hasseen, not as through a glass darkly, the trend of events. And havingseen the portentous effigy that we are making of the Liberty our fatherscreated, he has written of it in English that is the despair of thosewho, thinking less clearly, escape not the pitfalls of diffuseness andobscurity. For Mr. Bierce, as did Flaubert, holds that the right word isnecessary for the conveyance of the right thought and his sense of wordvalues rarely betrays him into error. But with an odd--I might almostsay perverse--indifference to his own reputation, he has allowedthese writings to lie fallow in the old files of papers, while others, possessing the knack of publicity, years later tilled the soil withsome degree of success. President Hadley, of Yale University, beforethe Candlelight Club of Denver, January 8, 1900, advanced, as novel andoriginal, ostracism as an effective punishment of social highwaymen. This address attracted widespread attention, and though ProfessorHadley's remedy has not been generally adopted it is regarded as hisown. Mr. Bierce wrote in "The Examiner, " January 20, 1895, as follows:"We are plundered because we have no particular aversion to plunderers. "

The 'predatory rich' (to use Mr. Stead's felicitous term) put theirhands into our pockets because they know that, virtually, none of uswill refuse to take their hands in our own afterwards, in friendlysalutation. If notorious rascality entailed social outlawry the onlyrascals would be those properly--and proudly--belonging to the 'criminalclass. '

Again, Edwin Markham has attracted to himself no little attention byadvocating the application of the Golden Rule in temporal affairs as acure for evils arising from industrial discontent In this he, too, hasbeen anticipated. Mr. Bierce, writing in "The Examiner, " March 25, 1894, said: "When a people would avert want and strife, or having them, would restore plenty and peace, this noble commandment offers the onlymeans--all other plans for safety and relief are as vain as dreams, andas empty as the crooning of fools. And, behold, here it is: 'All thingswhatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them. '"

Rev. Charles M. Sheldon created a nine days' wonder, or rather a seven, by conducting for a week a newspaper as he conceived Christ would havedone. Some years previously, June 28, 1896, to be exact, the authorof these essays wrote: "That is my ultimate and determining test ofright--'What, under the circumstances, would Christ have done?'--theChrist of the New Testament, not the Christ of the commentators, theologians, priests and parsons. "

I am sure that Mr. Bierce does not begrudge any of these gentlemen theacclaim they have received by enunciating his ideas, and I mention theinstances here merely to forestall the filing of any other claim topriority. 

The essays cover a wide range of subjects, embracing among otherthings government, dreams, writers of dialect, and dogs, and always theauthor's point of view is fresh, original and non-Philistine. Whetherone cares to agree with him or not, one will find vast entertainment inhis wit that illuminates with lightning flashes all he touches. Otherqualities I forbear allusion to, having already encroached too much uponthe time of the reader. 

S. O. HOWES. 

THE SHADOW ON THE DIAL

I. 

THERE is a deal of confusion and uncertainty in the use of the words"Socialist, " "Anarchist, " and "Nihilist. " Even the '1st himself commonlyknows with as little accuracy what he is as the rest of us know why heis. The Socialist believes that most human affairs should be regulatedand managed by the State--the Government--that is to say, the majority. Our own system has many Socialistic features and the trend of republicangovernment is all that way. The Anarchist is the kind of lunatic whobelieves that all crime is the effect of laws forbidding it--as the pigthat breaks into the kitchen garden is created by the dog that chews itsear! The Anarchist favors abolition of all law and frequently belongs toan organization that secures his allegiance by solemn oaths and dreadfulpenalties. "Nihilism" is a name given by Turgenieff to the general bodyof Russian discontent which finds expression in antagonizing authorityand killing authorities. Constructive politics would seem, as yet, tobe a cut above the Nihilist's intelligence; he is essentially adestructionary. He is so diligently engaged in unweeding the soil thathe has not given a thought to what he will grow there. Nihilism maybe described as a policy of assassination tempered by reflections uponSiberia. American sympathy with it is the offspring of an unholy unionbetween the tongue of a liar and the ear of a dupe. 

Upon examination it will be seen that political dissent, when it takesany form more coherent than the mere brute dissatisfaction of a mindthat does not know what it wants to want, finds expression in one of buttwo ways--in Socialism or in Anarchism. Whatever methods one may thinkwill best substitute for a system gradually evolved from our needs andour natures a system existing only in the minds of dreamers, one isbound to choose between these two dreams. Yet such is the intellectualdelinquency of many who most strenuously denounce the system that wehave that we not infrequently find the same man advocating in onebreath, Socialism, in the next, Anarchism. Indeed, few of these sons ofdarkness know that even as coherent dreams the two are incompatible. With Anarchy triumphant the Socialist would be a thousand years furtherfrom realization of his hope than he is today. Set up Socialism on aMonday and on Tuesday the country would be _en fête_, gaily hunting downAnarchists. There would be little difficulty in trailing them, for theyhave not so much sense as a deer, which, running down the wind, sendsits tell-tale fragrance on before. 

Socialism and Anarchism are the two extremes of political thought; theyare parts of the same dung, in the sense that the terminal points of aroad are parts of the same road. Between them, about midway, liesthe system that we have the happiness to endure. It is a "blend" ofSocialism and Anarchism in about equal parts: all that is not one is theother. Everything serving the common interest, or looking to the welfareof the whole people, is socialistic in the strictest sense of the wordas understood by the Socialist Whatever tends to private advantage oradvances an individual or class interest at the expense of a publicone, is anarchistic. Cooperation is Socialism; competition is Anarchism. Competition carried to its logical conclusion (which only cooperationprevents or can prevent) would leave no law in force no propertypossible no life secure. 

Of course the words "cooperation" and "competition" are not here used ina merely industrial and commercial sense; they are intended to coverthe whole field of human activity. Two voices singing a duet--that iscooperation--Socialism. Two voices singing each a different tune andtrying to drown each other--that is competition--Anarchism: each is alaw unto itself--that is to say, it is lawless. Everything that oughtto be done the Socialist hopes to do by associated endeavor, as an armywins battles; Anarchism is socialistic in its means only: by cooperationit tries to render cooperation impossible--combines to kill combination. Its method says to its purpose: "Thou fool!"

II. 

Everything foretells the doom of authority. The killing of kings isno new industry; it is as ancient as the race. Always and everywherepersons in high place have been the assassin's prey. We have ourselveslost three Presidents by murder, and will doubtless lose many anotherbefore the book of American history is closed. If anything is new inthis activity of the regicide it is found in the choice of victims. Thecontemporary "avenger" slays, not the merely great, but the good andthe inoffensive--an American President who had struck the chains frommillions of slaves; a Russian Czar who against the will and work of hisown powerful nobles had freed their serfs; a French President from whomthe French people had received nothing but good; a powerless AustrianEmpress, whose weight of sorrows touched the world to tears; a blamelessItalian King beloved of his people; such is a part of the recent recordof the regicide whose every entry is a tale of infamy unrelieved by onecircumstance of justice, decency or good intention. 

And the great Brazilian liberator died in exile. 

This recent uniformity of malevolence in the choice of victims is notwithout significance. It points unmistakably to two facts: first, thatthe selections are made, not by the assassins themselves, but by somecentral control inaccessible to individual preference and unaffectedby the fortunes of its instruments; second, that there is a constantpurpose to manifest an antagonism, not to any individual ruler, but torulers; not to any system of government, but to Government. It is a war, not upon those in authority, but upon Authority. The issue is defined, the alignment made, the battle set: Chaos against Order, Anarchy againstLaw. 

M. Vaillant, the French gentleman who lacked a "good opinion of thelaw, " but was singularly rich in the faith that by means of gunpowderand flying nails humanity could be brought into a nearer relation withreason, righteousness and the will of God, is said to have been nearlydevoid of a nose. Of this affliction M. Vaillant made but slightaccount, as was natural, seeing that but for a brief season did he needeven so much of nose as remained to him. Yet before its effacement bypremature disruption of his own petard it must have had a certain valueto him--he would not wantonly have renounced it; and had he foreseen itsextinction by the bomb the iron views of that controversial device wouldprobably have been denied expression. Albeit (so say the scientists)doomed to eventual elimination from the scheme of being, and to theAnarchist even now something of an accusing conscience, the nose isindubitably an excellent thing in man. 

This brings us to consideration of the human nose as a measure ofhuman happiness--not the size of it, but its numbers; its frequent orinfrequent occurrence upon the human face. We have grown so accustomedto the presence of this feature that we take it as a matter of course;its absence is one of the most notable phenomena of our observation--"anoccasion long to be remembered, " as the society reporter hath itYet "abundant testimony showeth" that but two or three centuries agonoseless men and women were so common all over Europe as to provokebut little comment when seen and (in their disagreeable way) heardThey abounded in all the various walks of life: there were honoredburgomasters without noses, wealthy merchants, great scholars, artists, teachers. Amongst the humbler classes nasal destitution was almost asfrequent as pecuniary--in the humblest of all the most common of all. Writing in the thirteenth century, Salsius mentions the retainers andservants of certain Suabian noblemen as having hardly a whole ear amongthem--for until a comparatively recent period man's tenure of his earswas even more precarious than that of his nose. In 1436, when a Bavarianwoman, Agnes Bemaurian, wife of Duke Albert the Pious, was dropped offthe bridge at Prague, she persisted in rising to the surface and tryingto escape; so the executioner gave himself the trouble to put a longpole into her hair and hold her under. A contemporary account of thematter hints that her disorderly behavior at so solemn a moment was dueto the pain caused by removal of her nose; but as her execution was byorder of her own father it seems more probable that "the extreme penaltyof the law" was not imposed. Without a doubt, though, possession of anose was an uncommon (and rather barren) distinction in those days among"persons designated to assist the executioner, " as the condemned werecivilly called. Nor, as already said, was it any too common amongpersons not as yet consecrated to that service: "Few, " says Salsius, "have two noses, and many have none. "

Man's firmer grasp upon his nose in this our day and generation isnot altogether due to invention of the handkerchief. The genesis anddevelopment of his right to his own nose have been accompanied with acorresponding advance in the possessory rights all along the line ofhis belongings--his ears, his fingers and toes, his skin, his bones, hiswife and her young, his clothes and his labor--everything that is (andthat once was not) his. In Europe and America today these things cannot be taken away from even the humblest and poorest without somebodywanting to "know the reason why. " In every decade the nation that ismost powerful upon the seas incurs voluntarily a vast expense of bloodand treasure in suppressing a slave trade which in no way is injuriousto her interests, nor to the interests of any but the slaves. 

So "Freedom broadens slowly down, " and today even the lowliest incapableof all Nature's aborted has a nose that he dares to call his own andbite off at his own sweet will. Unfortunately, with an unthinkablefatuity we permit him to be told that but for the very agencies thathave put him in possession he could successfully assert a God-given andworld-old right to the noses of others. At present the honest fellow ismainly engaged in refreshing himself upon his own nose, consuming thatcomestible with avidity and precision; but the Vaillants, Ravechols, Mosts and Willeys are pointing his appetite to other snouts than his, and inspiring him with rhinophagic ambition. Meantime the rest of us areusing those imperiled organs to snore with. 

'Tis a fine, resonant and melodious snore, but it is not going to last:there is to be a rude awakening. We shall one day get our eyes open tothe fact that scoundrels like Vaillant are neither few nor distant. We shall learn that our blind dependence upon the magic of words is afatuous error; that the fortuitous arrangement of consonants and vowelswhich we worship as Liberty is of slight efficacy in disarming thelunatic brandishing a bomb. Liberty, indeed! The murderous wretch lovesit a deal better than we, and wants more of it. Liberty! one almostsickens of the word, so quick and glib it is on every lip--so destituteof meaning. 

There is no such thing as abstract liberty; it is not even thinkable. If you ask me, "Do you favor liberty?" I reply, "Liberty for whom to dowhat? Just now I distinctly favor the liberty of the law to cut off thenoses of anarchists caught red-handed or red-tongued. If they go in formutilation let them feel what it is like. If they are not satisfied withthe way that things have been going on since the wife of Duke Albert thePious was held under water with a pole, and since the servitors of theSuabian nobleman cherished their vestigial ears, it is to be presumedthat they favor reversion to that happy state. There is grave objection, but if we must we will. Let us begin (with moderation) by reverting_them_. "

I favor mutilation for anarchists convicted of killing or inciting tokill--mutilation followed by death. For those who merely deny the rightand expediency of law, plain mutilation--which might advantageously takethe form of removal of the tongue. 

Why not? Where is the injustice? Surely he who denies men's right tomake laws will not invoke the laws that they have wickedly made! Thatwere to say that they must not protect themselves, yet are boundto protect him. What! if I beat him will he call the useless andmischievous constabulary? If I draw out his tongue shall he (in thesign-language) demand it back, and failing of restitution (for surely Ishould cut it clean away) shall he have the law on me--the naughty law, instrument of the oppressor? Why? that "goes neare to be fonny!"

Two human beings can not live together in peace without laws--lawsinnumerable. Everything that either, in consideration of the other'swish or welfare, abstains from is inhibited by law, tacit or expressed. If there were in all the world none but they--if neither had come withany sense of obligation toward the other, both clean from creation, withnothing but brains to direct their conduct--every hour would evolve anunderstanding, that is to say, a law; every act would suggest one. Theywould have to agree not to kill nor harm each other. They must arrangetheir work and all their activities to secure the best advantage. Thesearrangements, agreements, understandings--what are they but laws? Tolive without law is to live alone. Every family is a miniature Statewith a complicate system of laws, a supreme authority and subordinateauthorities down to the latest babe. And as he who is loudest indemanding liberty for himself is sternest in denying it to others, you may confidently go to the Maison Vaillant, or the Mosthaus, for aflawless example of the iron hand. 

Laws of the State are as faulty and as faultily administered as those ofthe Family. Most of them have to be speedily and repeatedly "amended, "many repealed, and of those permitted to stand, the greater number fallinto disuse and are forgotten. Those who have to be entrusted with theduty of administering them have all the limitations of intelligence anddefects of character by which the rest of us also are distinguished fromthe angels. In the wise governor, the just judge, the honest sheriffor the patient constable we have as rare a phenomenon as the faultlessfather. The good God has not given us a special kind of men upon whom todevolve the duty of seeing to the observance of the understandings thatwe call laws. Like all else that men do, this work is badly done. Thebest that we can hope for through all the failures, the injustice, thedisheartening damage to individual rights and interests, is a fairlygood general result, enabling us to walk abroad among our fellowsunafraid, to meet even the tribesmen from another valley without tooimminent peril of braining and evisceration. Of that small security theAnarchist would deprive us. But without that nothing is of value and weshall be willing to renounce all. Let us begin by depriving ourselves ofthe Anarchist. 

Our system of civilization being the natural outgrowth of our wretchedmoral and intellectual natures, is open to criticism and subjectto revision. Our laws, being of human origin, are faulty and theirapplication is disappointing. Dissent, dissatisfaction, deprecation, proposals for a better system fortified with better laws moreintelligently administered--these are permissible and should be welcome. The Socialist (when he is not carried away by zeal to pool issues withthe Anarchist) has that in him which it does us good to hear. He may bewrong b all else, yet right in showing us wherein we ourselves arewrong. Anyhow, his mission is amendment, and so long as his paths arepeace he has the right to walk therein, exhorting as he goes. TheFrench Communist who does not preach Petroleum and It rectified is to beregarded with more than amusement, more than compassion. There is roomfor him and his fad; there are hospitable ears for his boast that JesusChrist would have been a Communist if there had been Communes. Theyreally did not "know everything down in Judee. " But for the Anarchist, whose aim is not amendment, but destruction--not welfare to the race, but mischief to a part of it--not happiness for the future, but revengefor the past--for that animal there should be no close season, for thatsavage, no reservation. Society has not the right to grant life to onewho denies the right to live. The protagonist of reversion to the regimeof lacking noses should lack a nose. 

It is difficult to say if the bomb-thrower, actual or potential, isgreater as scoundrel or fool. Suppose his aim is to compel concession byterror. Can not the brute observe at each of his exploits a tighteningof "the reins of power?" Through the necessity of guarding against himthe mildest governments are becoming despotic, the most despotic moredespotic. Does he suppose that "the rulers of the earth" are sillyenough to make concessions that will not insure their safety? Can _he_give them security?

III. 

Of all the wild asses that roam the plain, the wildest wild ass thatroams the plain is indubitably the one that lifts his voice and heelagainst that socialism known as "public ownership of public utilities, "on the ground of "principle. " There may be honest, and in some degreeintelligent, opposition on the ground of expediency. Many persons whomit is a pleasure to respect believe that a Government railway, forexample, would be less efficiently managed than the same railway inprivate hands, and that political dangers lurk in the proposal soenormously to increase the number of Federal employes as Governmentownership of railways would entail. They think, in other words, thatthe policy is inexpedient. It is a duty to reason with them, which, asa rule, one can do without being insulted. But the chap who greets theproposal with a howl of derision as "Socialism!" is not a respectableopponent. Eyes he has, but he sees not; ears--oh! very abundantears--but he hears not the still, small voice of history nor the stillsmaller voice of common sense. 

Obviously to those who, having eyes, do see, public ownership ofanything is a step in the direction of Socialism, for perfect Socialismmeans public ownership of everything. But "principle" has nothing todo with it The principle of public ownership is already accepted andestablished. It has no visible opponents except in the camp of theAnarchists, and fewer of them are visible there than soap and waterwould reveal. Antagonists of the _principle_ of Socialism lost theirfight when the first human government held the dedicatory exercises of aCave of Legislation. Since then the only question about the matter hasbeen how far the _extension_ of Socialism is expedient Some would drawthe limiting line at one place, some at another; but only a fool thinksthere can be government without it, or good government without a greatdeal of it (The fact that we have always had a great deal of it yetnever had good government affirms nothing that it is worth while toconsider. ) The word-worn example of our Postal Department is only one ofa thousand instances of pure Socialism. If it did not exist how bitteran opposition a proposal to establish it would evoke from Adversaries ofthe Red Rag! The Government builds and operates bridges with generalassent; but as the late General Walker pointed out, it might under somecircumstances be more economical, or better otherwise, to build andoperate a ferry boat, which is a floating bridge. But that would beopposed as rank Socialism. 

The truth is that the men and women of principle are a pretty dangerousclass, generally speaking--and they are generally speaking. It is theythat hamper us in every war. It is they who, preventing concentrationand regulation of un-abolishable evils, promote their distribution andliberty. Moral principles are pretty good things--for the young andthose not well grounded in goodness. If one have an impediment in histhought, or is otherwise unequal to emergencies as they arise, it issafest to be provided beforehand with something to refer to in orderthat a right decision may be made without taking thought. But "spiritsof a purer fire" prefer to decide each question as it comes up, and toact upon the merits of the case, unbound and unpledged. With aquick intelligence, a capable conscience and a habit of doing rightautomatically one has little need to burden one's mind and memory witha set of solemn principles formulated by owlish philosophers who do nothappen to know that what is right is merely what, in the long run andwith regard to the greater number of cases, is expedient Principleis not always an infallible guide. For illustration, it is not alwaysexpedient--that is, for the good of all concerned--to tell the truth, to be entirely just or merciful, to pay a debt. I can conceive a case inwhich it would be right to assassinate one's neighbor. Suppose him tobe a desperate scoundrel of a chemist who has devised a means ofsetting the atmosphere afire. The man who should go through life on aninflexible line of principle would border his path with a havoc of humanhappiness. 

What one may think perfect one may not always think desirable. By"perfect" one may mean merely complete, and the word was so used inmy reference to Socialism. I am not myself an advocate of "perfectSocialism, " but as to Government ownership of railways, there isdoubtless a good deal to be said on both sides. One argument in itsfavor appears decisive; under a system subject to popular control thelaw of gravitation would be shorn of its preeminence as a means ofremoving personal property from the baggage car, and so far as it isapplicable to that work might even be repealed. 

IV. 

When M. Casimir-Perier resigned the French Presidency there werethose who regarded the act as weak, cowardly, undutiful and otherwisecensurable. It seems to me the act, not of a feeble man, but of a strongone--not that of a coward, but that of a gentleman. Indeed, I hardlyknow where to look in history for an act more entirely gratifying tomy sense of "the fitness of things" than this dignified notificationto mankind that in consenting to serve one's country one does notrelinquish the right to decent treatment--to immunity from factiousopposition and abuse--to at least as much civil consideration as is duefrom the Church to the Devil. 

M. Casimir-Perier did not seek the Presidency of the French Republic;it was thrust upon him against his protestations by an apparently almostunanimous mandate of the French people in an emergency which it wasthought that he was the best man to meet. That he met it with modestyand courage was testified without dissent. That he afterward didanything to forfeit the confidence and respect that he then inspired isnot true, and nobody believes it true. Yet in his letter of resignationhe said, and said truly:

"For the last six months a campaign of slander and insult has been goingon against the army, magistrates. Parliament and hierarchical Chief ofState, and this license to disseminate social hatred continues to becalled 'the liberty of thought. '"

And with a dignity to which it seems strange that any one could beinsensible, he added:

"The respect and ambition which I entertain for my country will notallow me to acknowledge that the servants of the country, and he whorepresents it in the presence of foreign nations, may be insulted everyday. "

These are noble words. Have we any warrant for demanding or expectingthat men of clean life and character will devote themselves to the goodof ingrates who pay, and ingrates who permit them to pay, in flung mud?It is hardly credible that among even those persons most infatuatedby contemplation of their own merit as pointed out by their thriftysycophants "the liberty of thought" has been carried to that extreme. The right of the State to demand the sacrifice of the citizen's life isa doctrine as old as the patriotism that concedes it, but the right torequire him to forego his good name--that is something new under thesun. From nothing but the dunghill of modern democracy could so noxiousa plant have sprung. 

"Perhaps in laying down my functions, " said M. Casimir-Perier, "I shallhave marked out a path of duty to those who are solicitous for thedignity, power and good name of France in the world. "

We may be permitted to hope that the lesson is wider than France andmore lasting than the French Republic. It is time that not only Francebut all other countries with "popular institutions" should learn that ifthey wish to command the services of men of honor they must accord themhonorable treatment; the rule now is for the party to which they belongto give them a half-hearted support while suffering all other partiesto slander and insult them. The action of the President of the FrenchRepublic in these disgusting circumstances is exceptional and unusualonly in respect of his courage in expressly resenting his wrong. Everywhere the unreasonable complaint is heard that good men will not"go into politics;" everywhere the ignorant and malignant masses andtheir no less malignant and hardly less ignorant leaders andspokesmen, having sown the wind of reasonless obstruction and partisanvilification, are reaping the whirlwind of misrule. So far asconcerns the public service, gentlemen are mostly on a strike againstintroduction of the mud-machine. This high-minded political workman, Casimir-Perier, never showed to so noble advantage as in gathering uphis tools and walking out. 

It may be, and a million times has been, urged that abstention fromactivity in public affairs by men of brains and character leaves thebusiness of government in the hands of the incapable and the vicious. Inwhose hands, pray, in a republic does it logically belong? What doesthe theory of "representative government" affirm? What is the lessonof every netherward extension of the suffrage? What do we mean bypermitting it to "broaden slowly down" to lower and lower intelligencesand moralities?--what but that stupidity and vice, equally with virtueand wisdom, are entitled to a voice in political affairs, a finger inthe public pie?

A person that is fit to vote is fit to be voted for. He who is competentfor the high and difficult function of choosing an officer of the Stateis competent to serve the State as an officer. To deny him the right isillogical and unjust. Participation in Government can not be at the sametime a privilege and a duty, and he who claims it as a privilege mustnot speak of another's renunciation (whereby himself is more highlyprivileged) as "shirking. " With every retirement from politics increasedpower passes to those who remain. Shall they protest? Shall they, also, who have retired? Who else is to protest? The complaint of "incivism"would be more rational if there were some one by whom it couldreasonably be made. 

My advice to slandered officials has ever been: "Resign. " The publicofficials of this favored country, Heaven be thanked, are infrequentlyslandered: they are, as a rule, so bad that calumniation is acompliment. Our best men, with here and there an exception, havebeen driven out of public life, or made afraid to enter it. Evenour spasmodic efforts at reform fail ludicrously for lack of leadersunaffiliated with "the thing to be reformed. " Unless attracted by thesalary, why should a gentleman "aspire" to the Presidency of the UnitedStates? During his canvass (and he is expected to "run, " not merely to"stand") he will have from his own party a support that should make himblush, and from all the others an opposition that will stick at nothingto accomplish his satisfactory defamation. After his election hispartition and allotment of the loaves and fishes will estrange animportant and thenceforth implacable faction of his following withoutappeasing the animosity of any one else; and during his entire servicehis sky will be dark with a flight of dead cats. At the finish of histerm the utmost that he can expect in the way of reward not expressiblein terms of the national currency is that not much more than one-half ofhis countrymen will believe him a scoundrel to the end of their days. 

V. 

The kind of government that we have seems to me one of the worst kindsextant A government that does not protect life is a flat failure, nomatter what else it may do. Life being almost universally regarded asthe most precious possession, its security is the first and highestessential--not the life of him who takes life, but the life which isexposed defenceless to his hateful hand. In no country in the world, civilized or savage, is life so insecure as in this. In no country inthe world is murder held in so light reprobation. In no battle of moderntimes have so many lives been taken as are lost annually in the UnitedStates through public indifference to the crime of homicide--throughdisregard of law, through bad government. If American self-government, with its ten thousand homicides a year, is good government, there is nosuch thing as bad. Self-government! What monstrous nonsense! Who governshimself needs no government, has no governor, is not governed. Ifgovernment has any meaning it means the restraint of the many by thefew--the subordination of numbers to brains. It means the determineddenial to the masses of the right to cut their own throats. It meansthe grasp and control of all the social forces and material enginery--avigilant censorship of the press, a firm hand upon the church, keensupervision of public meetings and public amusements, command of therailroads, telegraph and all means of communication. It means, inshort, the ability to make use of all the beneficent influences ofenlightenment for the good of the people, and to array all the powersof civilization against civilization's natural enemies--the people. Government like this has a thousand defects, but it has one merit: it isgovernment. 

Despotism? Yes. It is the despotisms of the world that have been theconservators of civilization. It is the despot who, most powerful formischief, is alone powerful for good. It is conceded that government isnecessary--even by the "fierce democracies" that madly renounce it. Butin so far as government is not despotic it is not government. In Europefor the last one hundred years, the tendency of all government has beenliberalization. The history of European politics during that period isa history of renunciation by the rulers and assumption by the ruled. Sovereign after sovereign has surrendered prerogative after prerogative;the nobility privilege after privilege. Mark the result: societyhoneycombed with treason; property menaced with partition; assassinationstudied as a science and practiced as an art; everywhere powerfulsecret organizations sworn to demolish the social fabric that the slowcenturies have but just erected and unmindful that themselves willperish in the wreck. No heart in Europe can beat tranquilly under cleanlinen. Such is the gratitude, such is the wisdom, such the virtue of"The Masses. " In 1863 Alexander II of Russia freed 25, 000, 000 serfs. In1879 they had killed him and all joined the conspirators. 

That ancient and various device, "a republican form of government, "appears to be too good for all the peoples of the earth excepting one. It is partly successful in Switzerland; in France and America, wherethe majority is composed of persons having dark understandings andcriminal instincts, it has broken down. In our case, as in every case, the momentum of successful revolution carried us too far. Werebelled against tyranny and having overthrown it, overthrew also thegovernmental form in which it had happened to be manifest. In theiranger and their triumph our good old gran'thers acted somewhat in thespirit of the Irishman who cudgeled the dead snake until nothing wasleft of it, in order to make it "sinsible of its desthroction. " Theymeant it all, too, the honest souls! For a long time after the settingup of the republic the republic meant active hatred to kings, nobles, aristocracies. It was held, and rightly held, that a nobleman could notbreathe in America--that he left his title and his privileges on theship that brought him over. Do we observe anything of that in thisgeneration? On the landing of a foreign king, prince or nobleman--even amiserable "knight"--do we not execute sycophantic genuflexions? Are notour newspapers full of flamboyant descriptions and qualming adulation?Nay, does not our President himself--successor to Washington andJefferson!--greet and entertain the "nation's guest"? Is not everyAmerican young woman crazy to mate with a male of title? Does all thisrepresent no retrogression?--is it not the backward movement of theshadow on the dial? Doubtless the republican idea has struck strongroots into the soil of the two Americas, but he who rightly considersthe tendencies of events, the causes that bring them about and theconsequences that flow from them, will not be hot to affirm theperpetuity of republican institutions in the Western Hemisphere. Betweentheir inception and their present stage of development there is scarcelythe beat of a pendulum; and already, by corruption and lawlessness, the people of both continents, with all their diversities of race andcharacter, have shown themselves about equally unfit. To become a nationof scoundrels all that any people needs is opportunity, and what we arepleased to call by the impossible name of "self-government" supplies it. 

The capital defect of republican government is inability to repressinternal forces tending to disintegration. It does not take long for a"self-governed" people to learn that it is not really governed--that anagreement enforcible by nobody but the parties to it is not binding. We are learning this very rapidly: we set aside our laws whenever weplease. The sovereign power--the tribunal of ultimate jurisdiction--isa mob. If the mob is large enough (it need not be very large), evenif composed of vicious tramps, it may do as it will. It may destroyproperty and life. It may without proof of guilt inflict uponindividuals torments unthinkable by fire and flaying, mutilations thatare nameless. It may call men, women and children from their beds andbeat them to death with cudgels. In the light of day it may assail thevery strongholds of law in the heart of a populous city, and assassinateprisoners of whose guilt it knows nothing. And these things--observe, Ovictims of kings--are habitually done. One would as well be at the mercyof one's sovereign as of one's neighbor. 

For generations we have been charming ourselves with the magic of words. When menaced by some exceptionally monstrous form of the tyranny ofnumbers we have closed our eyes and murmured, "Liberty. " When armedAnarchists threaten to quench the fires of civilization in a sea ofblood we prate of the protective power of "free speech. " If, "Girt about by friends or foes, A man may speak the thing he will, "

we fondly fancy that the thing he will speak is harmless--that immunitydisarms his tongue of its poison, his thought of its infection. With afatuity that would be incredible without the testimony of observation, we hold that an Anarchist free to go about making proselytes, free topurchase arms, free to drill and parade and encourage his dupes with ademonstration of their numbers and power, is less mischievous than anAnarchist with a shut mouth, a weaponless hand and under surveillance ofthe police. The Anarchist himself is persuaded of the superiority ofour plan of dealing with him; he likes it and comes over in quantity, inpesting the political atmosphere with the "sweltered venom" engenderedby centuries of oppression--comes over here, where he is not oppressed, and sets up as oppressor. His preferred field of malefaction is thecountry that is most nearly anarchical. He comes here, partly to betterhimself under our milder institutions, partly to secure immunity whileconspiring to destroy them. There is thunder in Europe, but if the stormever break it is in America that the lightning will fall, for here isa great vortex into which the decivilizing agencies are pouring withoutobstruction. Here gather the eagles to the feast, for the quarry isdefenceless. Here is no power in government, no government. Here anenemy of order is thought to be least dangerous when suffered to preachand arm in peace. And here is nothing between him and his task ofsupervision--no pampered soldiery to repress his rising, no ironauthority to lay him by the heels. The militia is fraternal, themagistracy elective. Europe may hold out a little longer. The GreatPowers may make what stage-play they will, but they are not maintainingtheir incalculable armaments for aggression upon one another, forprotection from one another, nor for fun. These vast forces arepurely constabular--creatures and creators of discontent--phenomena ofdecivilization. Eventually they will fraternize with Disorder or becomethemselves Praetorian Guards more dangerous than the perils that havecalled them into existence. 

It is easy to forecast the first stages of the End's approach: Rioting. Disaffection of constabulary and troops. Subversion of the GovernmentA policy of decapitation. Upthrust of the serviceable Anarchist. His prompt effacement by his victorious ally and natural enemy, theSocialist. Free minting and printing of money--to every citizen ashoulder-load of the latter, to the printers a ton each. Dividedcounsels. Pandemonium. The man on horseback. Gusts of grape. ------?

Formerly the bearer of evil tidings was only slain; he is now ignored. The gods kept their secrets by telling them to Cassandra, whom no onewould believe. I do not expect to be heeded. The crust of a volcano iselectric the fumes are narcotic; the combined sensation is delightful noend. I have looked at the dial of civilization; I tell you the shadowis going back. That is of small importance to men of leisure, withwine-dipped wreaths upon their heads. They do not care to know. 

CIVILIZATION

I. 

THE question "Does civilization civilize?" is a fine example of _petitioprincipii_. And decides itself in the affirmative; for civilization mustneeds do that from the doing of which it has its name. But it is notnecessary to suppose that he who propounds is either unconscious of hislapse in logic or desirous of digging a pitfall for the feet ofthose who discuss; I take it he simply wishes to put the matter in animpressive way, and relies upon a certain degree of intelligence in theinterpretation. 

Concerning uncivilized peoples we know but little except what we aretold by travelers--who, speaking generally, can know very little but thefact of uncivilization as shown in externals and irrelevances, and aremoreover, greatly given to lying. From the savages we hear very little. Judging them in all things by our own standards, in default of aknowledge of theirs, we necessarily condemn, disparage and belittle. Onething that civilization certainly has not done is to make us intelligentenough to understand that the opposite of a virtue is not necessarily avice. Because we do not like the taste of one another it does not followthat the cannibal is a person of depraved appetite. Because, as a rule, we have but one wife and several mistresses each it is not certain thatpolygamy is everywhere--nor, for that matter, anywhere--either wrong orinexpedient. Our habit of wearing clothes does not prove that conscienceof the body, the sense of shame, is charged with a divine mandate; forlike the conscience of the spirit it is the creature of what it seems tocreate: it comes to the habit of wearing clothes. And for those who holdthat the purpose of civilization is morality it may be said that peopleswhich are the most nearly naked are, in our sense, the most nearlymoral. Because the brutality of the civilized slave owners and dealerscreated a conquering sentiment against slavery it is not intelligent toassume that slavery is a maleficent thing amongst Oriental peoples (forexample) where the slave is not oppressed. 

Some of these same Orientals whom we are pleased to term half-civilizedhave no regard for truth. "Takest thou me for a Christian dog, " saidone of them, "that I should be the slave of my word?" So far as I canperceive the "Christian dog" is no more the slave of his word than theTrue Believer, and I think the savage--allowing for the fact that hisinveracity has dominion over fewer things--as great a liar as either ofthem. For my part, I do not know what, in all circumstances, is rightor wrong; but I know, if right, it is at least stupid to judge anuncivilized people by the standards of morality and intelligence set upby civilized ones. An infinitesimal proportion of civilized men do not, and there is much to be said for civilization if they are the product ofit. 

Life in civilized countries is so complex that men there have more waysto be good than savages have, and more to be bad; more to be happy, andmore to be miserable. And in each way to be good or bad, their generallysuperior knowledge--their knowledge of more things--enables them tocommit greater excesses than the savage could widi the same opportunity. The civilized philanthropist wreaks upon his fellow creatures aranker philanthropy, the civilized scoundrel a sturdier rascality. And--splendid triumph of enlightenment!--the two characters are, incivilisation, commonly combined in one person. 

I know of no savage custom or habit of thought which has not its matein civilized countries. For every mischievous or absurd practice ofthe natural man I can name you a dozen of the unnatural which areessentially the same. And nearly every custom of our barbarian ancestorsin historic times survives in some form today. We make ourselves lookformidable in battle--for that matter, we fight. Our women paint theirfaces. We feel it obligatory to dress more or less alike, inventing themost ingenious reasons for it and actually despising and persecutingthose who do not care to conform. Within the memory of living personsbearded men were stoned in the streets; and a clergyman in New Yorkwho wore his beard as Christ wore his, was put into jail and variouslypersecuted till he died. We bury our dead instead of burning them, yetevery cemetery is set thick with urns. As there are no ashes for theurns we do not trouble ourselves to make them hollow, and we saytheir use is "emblematic. " When, following the bent of our ancestralinstincts, we go on, age after age, in the performance of some senselessact which once had a use and meaning we excuse ourselves by callingit symbolism. Our "symbols" are merely survivals. We have theology andpatriotism. We have all the savage's superstition. We propitiate andingratiate by means of gifts. We shake hands. All these and hundredsof others of our practices are distinctly, in their nature and by theirorigin, savage. 

Civilization does not, I think, make the race any better. It makes menknow more: and if knowledge makes them happy it is useful and desirable. The one purpose of every sane human being is to be happy. No onecan have any other motive than that. There is no such thing asunselfishness. We perform the most "generous" and "self-sacrificing"acts because we should be unhappy if we did not. We move on lines ofleast reluctance. Whatever tends to increase the beggarly sum of humanhappiness is worth having; nothing else has any value. 

The cant of civilization fatigues. Civilization is a fine and beautifulstructure. It is as picturesque as a Gothic cathedral. But it is builtupon the bones and cemented with the blood of those whose part in allits pomp is that and nothing more. It cannot be reared in the generoustropics, for there the people will not contribute their blood and bones. The proposition that the average American workingman or European peasantis "better off" than the South Sea Islander, lolling under a palm anddrunk with over-eating, will not bear a moment's examination. 

It is we scholars and gentlemen that are better off. 

It is admitted that the South Sea Islander in a state of nature isovermuch addicted to the practice of eating human flesh; but concerningthat I submit: first, that he likes it; second, that those who supplyit are mostly dead. It is upon his enemies that he feeds, and thesehe would kill anyhow, as we do ours. In civilized, enlightened andChristian countries, where cannibalism has not yet established itself, wars are as frequent and destructive as among the maneaters. Theuntitled savage knows at least why he goes killing, whereas the privatesoldier is commonly in black ignorance of the apparent cause ofquarrel--of the actual cause, always. Their shares in the fruits ofvictory are about equal: the Chief takes all the dead, the General allthe glory. Moreover it costs more human life to supply a Christiangentleman with food than it does a cannibal--with food alone: "board;"if you could figure out the number of lives that his lodging, clothing, amusements and accomplishment cost the sum would startle. Happily _he_does not pay it. Considering human lives as having value, cannibalism isundoubtedly the more economical system. 

II. 

Transplanted institutions grow but slowly; and civilization can not beput into a ship and carried across an ocean. The history of this countryis a sequence of illustrations of these truths. It was settled bycivilized men and women from civilized countries, yet after two and ahalf centuries with unbroken communication with the mother systems, itis still imperfectly civilized. In learning and letters, in art and thescience of government, America is but a faint and stammering echo ofEngland. 

For nearly all that is good in our American civilization we are indebtedto England; the errors and mischiefs are of our own creation. We haveoriginated little, because there is little to originate, but we haveunconsciously reproduced many of the discredited and abandoned systemsof former ages and other countries--receiving them at second hand, butmaking them ours by the sheer strength and immobility of the nationalbelief in their newness. Newness! Why, it is not possible to make anexperiment in government, in art, in literature, in sociology, or inmorals, that has not been made over, and over, and over again. Foolstalk of clear and simple remedies for this and that evil afflicting thecommonwealth. If a proposed remedy is obvious and easily intelligible, it is condemned in the naming, for it is morally certain to have beentried a thousand times in the history of the world, and had it beeneffective men ere now would have forgotten, from mere disuse, how toproduce the evil it cured. 

There are clear and simple remedies for nothing. In medicine therehas been discovered but a single specific; in politics not one. The interests, moral and natural, of a community in our highlydifferentiated civilization are so complex, intricate, delicate andinterdependent, that you can not touch one without affecting all. Itis a familiar truth that no law was ever passed that did not haveunforeseen results; but of these results, by far the greater number arenever recognized as of its creation. The best that can be said of any"measure" is, that the sum of its perceptible benefits seems so toexceed the sum of its perceptible evils as to constitute a balance ofadvantage. Yet the magnificent innocence of the statesman or philosopherto whose understanding "the whole matter lies in a nutshell"--who thinkshe can formulate a practical political or social policy within the fourcorners of an epigram--who fears nothing because he knows nothing--isconstantly to the fore with a simple specific for ills whose causes arecomplex, constant and inscrutable. To the understanding of this creaturea difficulty well ignored is half overcome; so he buttons up his eyesand assails the problems of life with the divine confidence of a blindpig traversing a labyrinth. 

The glories of England are our glories. She can achieve nothing that ourfathers did not help to make possible to her. The learning, the power, the refinement of a great nation, are not the growth of a century, but of many centuries; each generation builds upon the work of thepreceding. For untold ages our ancestors wrought to rear that "reveredpile, " the civilization of England. And shall we now try to belittle themighty structure because other though kindred hands are laying the topcourses while we have elected to found a new tower in another land? TheAmerican eulogist of civilization who is not proud of his heritage inEngland's glory is unworthy to enjoy his lesser heritage in the lesserglory of his own country. 

The English are undoubtedly our intellectual superiors; and as thevirtues are solely the product of education--a rogue being only a dunceconsidered from another point of view--they are our moral superiorslikewise. Why should they not be? It is a land not of log and pine-boardschoolhouses grudgingly erected and containing schools supported by suchniggardly tax levies as a sparse and hard-handed population will consentto pay, but of ancient institutions splendidly endowed by the State andby centuries of private benefaction. As a means of dispensing formulatedignorance our boasted public school system is not without merit; itspreads it out sufficiently thin to give everyone enough to make him amore competent fool than he would have been without it; but to compareit with that which is not the creature of legislation acting with maliceaforethought, but the unnoted outgrowth of ages, is to be ridiculous. It is like comparing the laid-out town of a western prairie, itsright-angled streets, prim cottages, "built on the installment plan, "and its wooden a-b-c shops, with the grand old town of Oxford, toppedwith the clustered domes and towers of its twenty-odd great colleges;the very names of many of whose founders have perished from human recordas have all the chronicles of the times in which they lived. 

It is not alone that we have had to "subdue the wilderness;" oureducational conditions are otherwise adverse. Our political system isunfavorable. Our fortunes, accumulated in one generation, are dispersedin the next. If it takes three generations to make a gentleman onewill not make a thinker. Instruction is acquired, but capacity forinstruction is transmitted. The brain that is to contain a trainedintellect is not the result of a haphazard marriage between a clown anda wench, nor does it get its tractable tissues from a hard-headed farmerand a soft-headed milliner. If you confess the importance of race andpedigree in a race horse and a bird dog how dare you deny it in a man?

I do not claim that the political and social system that creates anaristocracy of leisure, and consequently of intellect, is the bestpossible kind of human organization; I perceive its disadvantagesclearly enough. But I do not hold that a system under which allimportant public trusts, political and professional, civil and military, ecclesiastical and secular, are held by educated men--that is, men oftrained faculties and disciplined judgment--is not an altogether faultysystem. 

It is only in our own country that an exacting literary taste isbelieved to disqualify a man for purveying to the literary needs of ataste less exacting--a proposition obviously absurd, for an exactingtaste is nothing but the intelligent discrimination of a judgmentinstructed by comparison and observation. There is, in fact, no pursuitor occupation, from that of a man who blows up a balloon to that ofthe man who bores out the stove pipes, in which he that has talent andeducation is not a better worker than he that has either, and he thanhe that has neither. It is a universal human weakness to disparagethe knowledge that we do not ourselves possess, but it is only my ownbeloved country that can justly boast herself the last refuge and asylumof the impotents and incapables who deny the advantage of all knowledgewhatsoever. It was an American Senator (Logan) who declared that hehad devoted a couple of weeks to the study of finance, and found theaccepted authorities all wrong. It was another American Senator (Morton)who, confronted with certain ugly facts in the history of anothercountry, proposed "to brush away all facts, and argue the question onconsiderations of plain common sense. "

Republican institutions have this disadvantage: by incessant changes inthe _personnel_ of government--to say nothing of the manner of men thatignorant constituencies elect; and all constituencies are ignorant--weattain to no fixed principles and standards. There is no such thing hereas a science of politics, because it is not to any one's interest tomake politics the study of his life. Nothing is settled; no truth findsgeneral acceptance. What we do one year we undo the next, and do overagain the year following. Our energy is wasted in, and our prosperitysuffers from, experiments endlessly repeated. 

One of the disadvantages of our social system, which is the child of ourpolitical, is the tyranny of public opinion, forbidding the utterance ofwholesome but unpalatable truth. In a republic we are so accustomedto the rule of majorities that it seldom occurs to us to examine theirtitle to dominion; and as the ideas of might and right are, by ourinnate sense of justice, linked together, we come to consider publicopinion infallible and almost sacred. Now, majorities rule, not becausethey are right, but because they are able to rule. In event of collisionthey would conquer, so it is expedient for minorities to submitbeforehand to save trouble. In fact, majorities, embracing, as theydo the most ignorant, seldom think rightly; public opinion, being theopinion of mediocrity, is commonly a mistake and a mischief. But it isto nobody's interest--it is against the interest of most--to disputewith it. Public writer and public speaker alike find their account inconfirming "the plain people" in their brainless errors and brutishprejudices--in glutting their omnivorous vanity and inflaming theirimplacable racial and national hatreds. 

I have long held the opinion that patriotism is one of the mostabominable vices affecting the human understanding. Every patriot inthis world believes his country better than any other country. Now, theycannot all be the best; indeed, only one can be the best, and it followsthat the patriots of all the others have suffered themselves tobe misled by a mere sentiment into blind unreason. In its activemanifestation--it is fond of shooting--patriotism would be well enoughif it were simply defensive; but it is also aggressive, and the samefeeling that prompts us to strike for our altars and our fires impelsus likewise to go over the border to quench the fires and overturn thealtars of our neighbors. It is all very pretty and spirited, what thepoets tell us about Thermopylae, but there was as much patriotism at oneend of that pass as there was at the other. Patriotism deliberately andwith folly aforethought subordinates the interests of a whole to theinterests of a part. Worse still, the fraction so favored is determinedby an accident of birth or residence. Patriotism is like a dog which, having entered at random one of a row of kennels, suffers more incombats with the dogs in the other kennels than it would have doneby sleeping in the open air. The hoodlum who cuts the tail from aChinamen's nowl, and would cut the nowl from the body if he dared, is simply a patriot with a logical mind, having the courage of hisopinions. Patriotism is fierce as a fever, pitiless as the grave, blindas a stone and irrational as a headless hen. 

There are two ways of clarifying liquids--ebullition and precipitation;one forces the impurities to the surface as scum, the other sends themto the bottom as dregs. The former is the more offensive, and thatseems to be our way; but neither is useful if the impurities are merelyseparated but not removed. We are told with tiresome iteration that oursocial and political systems are clarifying; but when is the skimmer toappear? If the purpose of free institutions is good government where isthe good government?--when may it be expected to begin?--how is it tocome about? Systems of government have no sanctity; they are practicalmeans to a simple end--the public welfare; worthy of no respect if theyfail of its accomplishment. The tree is known by its fruit. Ours, isbearing crab-apples. 

If the body politic is constitutionally diseased, as I verily believe;if the disorder inheres in the system; there is no remedy. The fevermust burn itself out, and then Nature will do the rest. One does notprescribe what time alone can administer. We have put our criminal classin power; do we suppose they will efface themselves? Will they restoreto _us_ the power of governing _them_? They must have their way andgo their length. The natural and immemorial sequence is: tyranny, insurrection, combat. In combat everything that wears a sword has achance--even the right. History does not forbid us to hope. But itforbids us to rely upon numbers; they will be against us. If historyteaches anything worth learning it teaches that the majority of mankindis neither good nor wise. Where government is founded upon the publicconscience and the public intelligence the stability of States is adream. Nor have we any warrant for the Tennysonian faith that

 "Freedom broadens slowly down From precedent to precedent. "

In that moment of time that is covered by historical records we haveabundant evidence that each generation has believed itself wiser andbetter than any of its predecessors; that each people has believeditself to have the secret of national perpetuity. In support of thisuniversal delusion there is nothing to be said; the desolate placesof the earth cry out against it. Vestiges of obliterated civilizationscover the earth; no savage but has camped upon the sites of proudand populous cities; no desert but has heard the statesman's boast ofnational stability. Our nation, our laws, our history--all shall go downto everlasting oblivion with the others, and by the same road. But Isubmit that we are traveling it with needless haste. 

But it is all right and righteous. It can be spared--this Jonah'sgourd civilization of ours. We have hardly the rudiments of a truecivilization; compared with the splendors of which we catch dim glimpsesin the fading past, ours are as an illumination of tallow candles. Weknow no more than the ancients; we only know other things, but nothingin which is an assurance of perpetuity, and little that is truly wisdom. Our vaunted _elixir vito_ is the art of printing with moveable types. What good will those do when posterity, struck by the inevitableintellectual blight, shall have ceased to read what is printed? Ourlibraries will become its stables, our books its fuel. 

Ours is a civilization that might be heard from afar in space asa scolding and a riot; a civilization in which the race has sodifferentiated as to have no longer a community of interest andfeeling; which shows as a ripe result of the principles underlying ita reasonless and rascally feud between rich and poor; in which one isoffered a choice (if one have the means to take it) between Americanplutocracy and European militocracy, with an imminent chance ofrenouncing either for a stultocratic republic with a headsman in thepresidential chair and every laundress in exile. 

I have not a "solution" to the "labor problem. " I have only a story. Many and many years ago lived a man who was so good and wise that nonein all the world was so good and wise as he. He was one of those fewwhose goodness and wisdom are such that after some time has passed theirfellowmen begin to think them gods and treasure their words as divinelaw; and by millions they are worshiped through centuries of time. Amongst the utterances of this man was one command--not a new norperfect one--which has seemed to his adorers so preeminently wise thatthey have given it a name by which it is known over half the world. Oneof the sovereign virtues of this famous law is its simplicity, which issuch that all hearing must understand; and obedience is so easy that anynation refusing is unfit to exist except in the turbulence and adversitythat will surely come to it. When a people would avert want and strife, or having them, would restore plenty and peace, this noble commandmentoffers the only means--all other plans for safety or relief are as vainas dreams, and as empty as the crooning of fools. And behold, here itis: "All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do yeeven so to them. "

What! you unappeasable rich, coining the sweat and blood of your workmeninto drachmas, understanding the law of supply and demand as mandatoryand justifying your cruel greed by the senseless dictum that "businessis business;" you lazy workman, railing at the capitalist bywhose desertion, when you have frightened away his capital, youstarve--rioting and shedding blood and torturing and poisoning by wayof answer to exaction and by way of exaction; you foul anarchists, applauding with indelicate palms when one of your coward kind hurls abomb amongst powerless and helpless women and children; you imbecilepoliticians with a plague of remedial legislation for the irremediable;you writers and thinkers unread in history, with as many "solutions tothe labor problem" as there are dunces among you who can not coherentlydefine it--do you really think yourself wiser than Jesus of Nazareth? Doyou seriously suppose yourselves competent to amend his plan for dealingwith all the evils besetting states and souls? Have you the effronteryto believe that those who spurn his Golden Rule you can bind toobedience of an act entitled an act to amend an act? Bah! you fatiguethe spirit. Go get ye to your scoundrel lockouts, your villain strikes, your blacklisting, your boycotting, your speech-ing, marching andmaundering; but if ye do not to others as ye would that they do to youit shall occur, and that right soon, that ye be drowned in your ownblood and your pickpocket civilization quenched as a star that fallsinto the sea. 

THE GAME OF POLITICS

I. 

IF ONE were to declare himself a Democrat or a Republican and the claimshould be contested he would find it a difficult one to prove. Themissing link in his chain of evidence would be the major premise inthe syllogism necessary to the establishment of his political status--adefinition of "Democrat" or "Republican. " Most of the statesmen inpublic and private life who are poll-parroting these words, do so withentire unconsciousness of their meaning, or rather without knowledgethat they have lost whatever of meaning they once had. The words aremere "survivals, " marking dead issues and covering allegiances of theloosest and most shallow character. On any question of importance eachparty is divided against itself and dares not formulate a preference. There is no question before the country upon which one may not thinkand vote as he likes without affecting his standing in the politicalcommunion of saints of which he professes himself a member. "Partylines" are as terribly confused as the parallels of latitude andlongitude after a twisting earthquake, or those aimless linesrepresenting the competing railroad on a map published by a companyoperating "the only direct route. " It is not probable that this state ofthings can last; if there is to be "government by party"--and we shouldbe sad to think that so inestimable a boon were soon to return to Himwho gave it--men must begin to let their angry passions rise and takerides. "Ill fares the land to hastening ills a prey, " where the peopleare too wise to dispute and too good to fight. Let us have the good oldpolitical currency of bloody noses and cracked crowns; let the yawpof the demagogue be heard in the land; let ears be pestered with thespargent cheers of the masses. Give us a whoop-up that shall rouse uslike a rattling peal of thunder. Will nobody be our Moses--thereshould be two Moseses--to lead us through this detestable wilderness ofpolitical stagnation?

II. 

Nowhere "on God's green earth"--it is fitting, that this paper containa bit of bosh--nowhere is so much insufferable stuff talked in a givenperiod of time as in an American political convention. It is there thatall those objectionable elements of the national character which evokethe laughter of Europe and are the despair of our friends find freestexpression, unhampered by fear of any censorship more exacting thanthat of "the opposing party"--which takes no account of intellectualdelinquencies, but only of moral. The "organs" of the "opposing party"will not take the trouble to point out--even to observe--that the"debasing sentiments" and "criminal views" uttered in speech andplatform are expressed in sickening syntax and offensive rhetoric. Doubtless an American politician, statesman, what you will, couldgo into a political convention and signify his views with simple, unpretentious common sense, but doubtless he never does. 

Every community is cursed with a number of "orators"--men regarded as"eloquent"--"silver tongued" men--fellows who to the common Americanknack at brandishing the tongue add an exceptional felicity ofplatitude, a captivating mastery of dog's-eared sentiment, a copious andobedient vocabulary of eulogium, an iron insensibility to the ridiculousand an infinite affinity to fools. These afflicting Chrysostoms arealways lying in wait for an "occasion" It matters not what it is: a"reception" to some great man from abroad, a popular ceremony like thelaying of a corner-stone, the opening of a fair, the dedication of apublic building, an anniversary banquet of an ancient and honorableorder (they all belong to ancient and honorable orders) or a clubdinner--they all belong to clubs and pay dues. But it is in thepolitical convention that they come out particularly strong. By someimperious tradition having the force of written law it is decreed thatin these absurd bodies of our fellow citizens no word of sense shall beuttered from the platform; whatever is uttered in set speeches shall beaddressed to the meanest capacity present As a chain can be no strongerthan its weakest link, so nothing said by the speakers at a politicalconvention must be above the intellectual reach of the most perniciousidiot having a seat and a vote. I don't know why it is so. It seems tobe thought that if he is not suitably entertained he will not attend, asa delegate, the next convention. 

Here are the opening sentences of the speech in which a man was oncenominated for Governor:

"Two years ago the Republican party in State and Nation marched toimperial triumph. On every hilltop and mountain peak our beaconsblazed and we awakened the echoes of every valley with songs of ourrejoicings. "

And so forth. Now, if I were asked to recast those sentences so thatthey should conform to the simple truth and be inoffensive to good tasteI should say something like this:

"Two years ago the Republican party won a general election. "

If there is any thing in this inflated rigmarole that is not adequatelyexpressed in my amended statement, what is it? As to eloquence it willhardly be argued that nonsense, falsehood and metaphors which wereold when Rome was young are essential to that. The first man (in earlyGreece) who spoke of awakening an echo did a felicitous thing. Was itfelicitous in the second? Is it felicitous now? As to that militarymetaphor--the "marching" and so forth--its inventor was as great an assas any one of the incalculable multitude of his plagiarists. On thismatter hear the late Richard Grant White:

"Is it not time that we had done with the nauseous talk about campaigns, and standard-bearers, and glorious victories (imperial triumphs) andall the bloated army-bumming bombast which is so rife for the six monthspreceding an election? To read almost any one of our political papersduring a canvass is enough to make one sick and sorry. .. . An electionhas no manner of likeness to a campaign, or a battle. It is not even acontest in which the stronger or more dexterous party is the winner; itis a mere counting, in which the bare fact that one party is the morenumerous puts it in power if it will only come up and be counted; toinsure which a certain time is spent by each party in reviling andbelittling the candidates of its opponents and lauding its own; andthis is the canvass, at the likening of which to a campaign every honestsoldier might reasonably take offense. "

But, after all, White was only "one o' them dam litery fellers, " and Idare say the original proponent of the military metaphor, away offthere in "the dark backward and abysm of time, " knew a lot more aboutpractical politics than White ever did. And it is practical politics tobe an ass. 

In withdrawing his own name from before a convention, a Californiapolitician once made a purely military speech of which a single samplepassage is all that I shall allow myself the happiness to quote:

"I come before you today as a Republican of the Republican banner countyof this great State of ours. From snowy Shasta on the north to sunnyDiego on the south; from the west, where the waves of the Pacific lookupon our shores, to where the barriers of the great Sierras stand cladin eternal snow, there is no more loyal county to the Republican partyin this State than the county from which I hail. [Applause, naturally. ]Its loyalty to the party has been tested on many fields of battle[Anglice, in many elections] and it has never wavered in the contestWherever the fate of battle was trembling in the balance [Homer, andsince Homer, Tom, Dick and Harry] Alameda county stepped into the breachand rescued the Republican party from defeat. "

Translated into English this military mouthing would read somewhat likethis:

"I live in Alameda county, where the Republicans have uniformly outvotedthe Democrats. "

The orators at the Democratic convention a week earlier were no betterand no different. Their rhetorical stock-in-trade was the same oldshop-worn figures of speech in which their predecessors have dealt forages, and in which their successors will traffic to the end of--well, tothe end of that imitative quality in the national character, which, by its superior intensity, serves to distinguish us from the apes thatperish. 

III. 

"What we most need, to secure honest elections, " says a well-meaningreformer, "is the Clifford or the Myers voting machine. " Why, truly, here is a hopeful spirit--a rare and radiant intelligence suffused withthe conviction that men can be made honest by machinery--that humancharacter is a matter of gearing, ratchets and dials! One would givesomething to know how it feels to be like that. A mind so constitutedmust be as happy in its hope as a hen incubating a nest-ful of porcelaindoor-knobs. It lives in rapturous contemplation of a world of its owncreation--a world where public morality and political good order areto be had by purchase at the machine-shop. In that delectable worldreligion is superfluous; the true high priest is the mechanicalengineer; the minor clergy are the village blacksmiths. It is rathera pity that so fine and fair a sphere should prosper only in theattenuated ether of an idiot's understanding. 

Voting-machines are doubtless well enough; they save labor and enablethe statesmen of the street to know the result within a few minutes ofthe closing of the polls--whereby many are spared to their country whowould otherwise incur fatal disorders by exposure to the night airwhile assisting in awaiting the returns. But a voting-machine that humaningenuity can not pervert, human ingenuity can not invent. 

That is true, too, of laws. Your statesman of a mental stature somewhatovertopping that of the machine-person puts his faith in law. Providence has designed to permit him to be persuaded of the efficacyof statutes--good, stringent, carefully drawn statutes definitivelyrepealing all the laws of nature in conflict with any of theirprovisions. So the poor devil (I am writing of Mr. Legion) turns forrelief from law to law, ever on the stool of repentance, yet everunfouling the anchor of hope. By no power cm earth can his induratedunderstanding be penetrated by the truth that his woful state is due, not to any laws of his own, nor to any lack of them, but to his rascallyrefusal to obey the Golden Rule. How long is it since we were allclamoring for the Australian ballot law, which was to make a new Heavenand a new earth? We have the Australian ballot law and the same oldearth smelling to the same old Heaven. Writhe upon the triangle as wemay, groan out what new laws we will, the pitiless thong will fall uponour bleeding backs as long as we deserve it. If our sins, which arescarlet, are to be washed as white as wool it must be in the tears of agenuine contrition: our crocodile deliverances will profit us nothing. We must stop chasing dollars, stop lying, stop cheating, stop ignoringart, literature and all the refining agencies and instrumentalities ofcivilization. We must subdue our detestable habit of shaking hands withprosperous rascals and fawning upon the merely rich. It is not permittedto our employers to plead in justification of low wages the law ofsupply and demand that is giving them high profits. It is not permittedto discontented employees to break the bones of contented ones anddestroy the foundations of social order. It is infamous to look uponpublic office with the lust of possession; it is disgraceful to solicitpolitical preferment, to strive and compete for "honors" that aresullied and tarnished by the touch of the reaching hand. Until we amendour personal characters we shall amend our laws in vain. Though Paulplant and Apollos water, the field of reform will grow nothing but thefigless thistle and the grapeless thorn. The State is an aggregation ofindividuals. Its public character is the expression of their personalones. By no political prestidigitation can it be made better and wiserthan the sum of their goodness and wisdom. To expect that men who do nothonorably and intelligently conduct their private affairs will honorablyand intelligently conduct the affairs of the community is to be a fool. We are told that out of nothing God made the Heavens and the earth; butout of nothing God never did and man never can, make a public sense ofhonor and a public conscience. Miracles are now performed but one dayof the year--the twenty-ninth of February; and on leap year God isforbidden to perform them. 

IV. 

Ye who hold that the power of eloquence is a thing of the past and theorator an anachronism; who believe that the trend of political eventsand the results of parliamentary action are determined by committeesin cold consultation and the machinations of programmes in holes andcorners, consider the ascension of Bryan and be wise. A week before theconvention of 1896 William J. Bryan had never heard of himself; upon hisnatural obscurity was superposed the opacity of a Congressional servicethat effaced him from the memory of even his faithful dog, and made himimmune to dunning. Today he is pinnacled upon the summit of the tallestpolitical distinction, gasping in the thin atmosphere of his unfamiliarenvironment and fitly astonished at the mischance. To the dizzyelevation of his candidacy he was hoisted out of the shadow by his owntongue, the longest and liveliest in Christendom. Had he held it--whichhe could not have done with both hands--there had been no Bryan. Hiscreation was the unstudied act of his own larynx; it said, "Let therebe Bryan, " and there was Bryan. Even in these degenerate days there isa hope for the orators when one can make himself a Presidential peril bymerely waving the red flag in the cave of the winds and tormenting thecircumjacence with a brandish of abundant hands. 

To be quite honest, I do not entirely believe that Orator Bryan's tonguehad anything to do with it. I have long been convinced that personalpersuasion is a matter of animal magnetism--what in its more obviousmanifestation we now call hypnotism. At the back of the words and thepostures, and independent of them, is that secret, mysteriouspower, addressing, not the ear, not the eye, nor, through them, the understanding, but through its matching quality in the auditor, captivating the will and enslaving it That is how persuasion iseffected; the spoken words merely supply a pretext for surrender. Theyenable us to yield without loss of our self-esteem, in the delusion thatwe are conceding to reason what is really extorted by charm. The wordsare necessary, too, to point out what the orator wishes us to think, if we are not already apprised of it. When the nature of his power isbetter understood and frankly recognized, he can spare himself the toilof talking. The parliamentary debate of the future will probably beconducted in silence, and with only such gestures as go by the name of"passes. " The chairman will state the question before the House andthe side, affirmative or negative, to be taken by the honorable memberentitled to the floor. That gentleman will rise, train his compellingorbs upon the miscreants in opposition, execute a few passes and exhausthis alloted time in looking at them. He will then yield to an honorablemember of dissenting views. The preponderance in magnetic power andhypnotic skill will be manifest in the voting. The advantages of themethod are as plain as the nose on an elephant's face. The "arena" willno longer "ring" with anybody's "rousing speech, " to the irritatingabridgment of the inalienable right to pursuit of sleep. Honorablemembers will lack provocation to hurl allegations and cuspidors. Pitchforking statesmen and tosspot reformers will be unable to play atpitch-and-toss with reputations not submitted for the performance. Inshort, the congenial asperities of debate will be so mitigated that thehonorable member from Hades will retire permanently from the hauls oflegislation. 

V. 

"Public opinion, " says Buckle, "being the voice of the average man, isthe voice of mediocrity. " Is it therefore so very wise and infalliblea guide as to be accepted without other credentials than its name andfame? Ought we to follow its light and leading with no better assuranceof the character of its authority than a count of noses of thosefollowing it already, and with no inquiry as to whether it has not onmany former occasions let them and their several sets of predecessorsinto bogs of error and over precipices to "eternal mock?" Surely"the average man, " as every one knows him, is not very wise, not verylearned, not very good; how is it that his views, of so intricate anddifficult matters as those of which public opinion makes pronouncementthrough him are entitled to such respect? It seems to me that theaverage man, as I know him, is very much a fool, and something of arogue as well. He has only a smattering of education, knows virtuallynothing of political history, nor history of any kind, is incapable oflogical, that is to say clear, thinking, is subject to the suasion ofbase and silly prejudices, and selfish beyond expression. That sucha person's opinions should be so obviously better than my own thatI should accept them instead, and assist in enacting them into laws, appears to me most improbable. I may "bow to the will of the people"as gracefully as a defeated candidate, and for the same reason, namely, that I can not help myself; but to admit that I was wrong in my beliefand flatter the power that subdues me--no, that I will not do. And ifnobody would do so the average man would not be so very cock-sure ofhis infallibility and might sometimes consent to be counseled by hisbetters. 

In any matter of which the public has imperfect knowledge, publicopinion is as likely to be erroneous as is the opinion of an individualequally uninformed. To hold otherwise is to hold that wisdom can be gotby combining many ignorances. A man who knows nothing of algebra cannot be assisted in the solution of an algebraic problem by calling ina neighbor who knows no more than himself, and the solution approvedby the unanimous vote of ten million such men would count for nothingagainst that of a competent mathematician. To be entirely consistent, gentlemen enamored of public opinion should insist that the text booksof our common schools should be the creation of a mass meeting, and alldisagreements arising in the course of the work settled by a majorityvote. That is how all difficulties incident to the popular translationof the Hebrew Scriptures were composed. It should be admitted, howeverthat most of those voting knew a little Hebrew, though not much. Aproblem in mathematics is a very simple thing compared with many ofthose upon which the people are called to pronounce by resolution andballot--for example, a question of finance. 

"The voice of the people is the voice of God"--the saying is sorespectably old that it comes to us in the Latin. He is a strange, anunearthly politician who has not a score of times publicly and solemnlysignified his faith in it But does anyone really believe it? Let us see. In the period between 1859 and 1885, the Democratic party was defeatedsix times in succession. The voice of the people pronounced it in errorand unfit to govern. Yet after each overthrow it came back into thefield gravely reaffirming its faith in the principles that God hadcondemned. Then God twice reversed Himself, and the Republicans "neverturned a hair, " but set about beating Him with as firm a confidence ofsuccess (justified by the event) as they had known in the years of theirprosperity. Doubtless in every instance of a political party's defeatthere are defections, but doubtless not all are due to the voice thatspoke out of the great white light that fell about Saul of Tarsus. Bythe way, it is worth observing that that clever gentleman was under noillusion regarding the origin of the voice that wrought his celebrated"flop"; he did not confound it with the _vox populi_ The people ofhis time and place had no objection to the persecution that he wasconducting, and could persecute a trifle themselves upon occasion. 

Majorities rule, when they do rule, not because they ought, but becausethey can. We vote in order to learn without fighting which party is thestronger; it is less disagreeable to learn it that way than the otherway. Sometimes the party that is numerically the weaker is by possessionof the Government actually the stronger, and could maintain itself inpower by an appeal to arms, but the habit of submitting when outvotedis hard to break. Moreover, we all recognize in a subconscious way, thereasonableness of the habit as a practical method of getting on; andthere is always the confident hope of success in the next canvass. Thatone's cause will succeed because it ought to succeed is perhaps the mostgeneral and invincible folly affecting the human judgment Observationcan not shake it, nor experience destroy. Though you bray a partisan inthe mortar of adversity till he numbers the strokes of the pestle by thehairs of his head, yet will not this fool notion depart from him. He isalways going to win the next time, however frequently and disastrouslyhe has lost before. And he can always give you the most cogent reasonsfor the faith that is in him. His chief reliance is on the "fatalmistakes" made since the last election by the other party. There neverwas a year in which the party in power and the party out of power didnot make bad mistakes--mistakes which, unlike eggs and fish, seem alwaysworst when freshest. If idiotic errors of policy were always fatal, noparty would ever win an election and there would be a hope of bettergovernment under the benign sway of the domestic cow. 

VI. 

Each political party accuses the "opposing candidate" of refusing toanswer certain questions which somebody has chosen to ask him. I thinkmyself it is discreditable for a candidate to answer any questions atall, to make speeches, declare his policy, or to do anything whateverto get himself elected. If a political party choose to nominate a man soobscure that his character and his views on all public questions arenot known or inferable he ought to have the dignity to refuse to expoundthem. As to the strife for office being a pursuit worthy of a nobleambition, I do not think so; nor shall I believe that many do think sountil the term "office seeker" carries a less opprobrious meaningand the dictum that "the office should seek the man, not the man theoffice, " has a narrower currency among all manner of persons. That byacts and words generally felt to be discreditable a man may evoke greatpopular enthusiasm is not at all surprising. The late Mr. Barnum was notthe first nor the last to observe that the people love to be humbugged. They love an impostor and a scamp, and the best service that you can dofor a candidate for high political preferment is to prove him a littlebetter than a thief, but not quite so good as a thug. 

VII. 

The view is often taken that a representative is the same thing as adelegate; that he is to have, and can honestly entertain, no opinionthat is at variance with the whims and the caprices of his constituents. This is the very _reductio ad absurdum_ of representative government. That it is the dominant theory of the future there can be little doubt, for it is of a piece with the progress downward which is the invariableand unbroken tendency of republican institutions. It fits in well withmanhood suffrage, rotation in office, unrestricted patronage, assessmentof subordinates, an elective judiciary and the rest of it. This theoryof representative institutions is the last and lowest stage in ourpleasant performance of "shooting Niagara. " When it shall have universalrecognition and assent we shall have been fairly engulfed in thewhirlpool, and the buzzard of anarchy may hopefully whet his beak forthe national carcass. My view of the matter--which has the further meritof being the view held by those who founded this Government--is that aman holding office from and for the people is in conscience and honorbound to do what seems to his judgment best for the general welfare, respectfully regardless of any and all other considerations. This isespecially true of legislators, to whom such specific "instructions" asconstituents sometimes send are an impertinence and an insult. Pushed toits logical conclusion, the "delegate" idea would remove all necessityof electing men of brains and judgment; one man properly connectedwith his constituents by telegraph would make as good a legislator asanother. Indeed, as a matter of economy, one representative should actfor many constituencies, receiving his instructions how to vote frommass meetings in each. This, besides being logical, would have the addedadvantage of widening and hardening the power of the local "bosses, "who, by properly managing the showing of hands could have the samebeneficent influence in national affairs that they now enjoy inmunicipal. The plan would be a pretty good one if there were not so manyother ways for the Nation to go to the Devil that it appears needless. 

VIII. 

With a wiser wisdom than was given to them, our forefathers in makingthe Constitution would not have provided that each House of Congress"shall be the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications ofits own members. " They would have foreseen that a ruling majority ofCongress could not safely be trusted to exercise this power justly inthe public interest, but would abuse it in the interest of party. Aman's right to sit in a legislative body should be determined, not bythat body, which has neither the impartiality, the knowledge of evidencenor the time to determine it rightly, but by the courts of law. That ishow it is done in England, where Parliament voluntarily surrendered theright to say by whom the constituencies shall be represented, and thereis no disposition to resume it. As the vices hunt in packs, so, too, virtues are gregarious; if our Congress had the righteousness to decidecontested elections justly it would have also the self-denial not towish to decide them at all. 

IX

The purpose of the legislative custom of "eulogizing" dead members ofCongress is not apparent unless it is to add a terror to death and makehonorable and self-respecting members rather bear the ills they havethan escape through the gates of death to others that they know a gooddeal about. If a member of that kind, who has had the bad luck to "gobefore, " could be consulted he would indubitably say that he was sorryto be dead; and that is not a natural frame of mind in one who is exemptfrom the necessity of himself "delivering a eulogy. "

It may be urged that the Congressional "eulogy" expresses in a generalway the eulogist's notion of what he would like to have somebody sayof himself when he is by death elected to the Lower House. If so, thenHeaven help him to a better taste. Meanwhile it is a patriotic duty toprevent him from indulging at the public expense the taste that he has. There have been a few men in Congress who could speak of the characterand services of a departed member with truth and even eloquence. Onesuch was Senator Vest. Of many others, the most charitable thing thatone can conscientiously say is that one would a little rather hear a"eulogy" by them than on them. Considering that there are many kindsof brains and only one kind of no brains, their diversity of gifts isremarkable, but one characteristic they have in common: they are allpoets. Their efforts in the way of eulogium illustrate and illuminatePascal's obscure saying that poetry is a particular sadness. If not sadthemselves, they are at least the cause of sadness in others, for nosooner do they take to their legs to remind us that life is fleeting, and to make us glad that it is, than they burst into bloom as poets all!Some one has said that in the contemplation of death there is somethingthat belittles. Perhaps that explains the transformation. Anyhow theCongressional eulogist takes to verse as naturally as a moth to acandle, and with about the same result to his reputation for sense. 

The poetry is commonly not his own; what it violates every law of sense, fitness, metre, rhyme and taste it is. But nine times in ten it issome dog's-eared, shop-worn quotation from one of the "standard" bards, usually Shakspere. There are familiar passages from that poet whichhave been so often heard in "the halls of legislation" that they haveacquired an infamy which unfits them for publication in a decent familynewspaper; and Shakspere himself, reposing in Elysium on his bed ofasphodel and moly, omits them when reading his complete works to theshades of Kit Marlowe and Ben Jonson, for their sins. 

This whole business ought to be "cut out" It is not only a waste oftime and a sore trial to the patience of the country; it is absolutelyimmoral. It is not true that a member of Congress who, while livingwas a most ordinary mortal, becomes by the accident of death a hero, asaint, "an example to American youth. " Nobody believes these abominable"eulogies, " and nobody should be permitted to utter them in the timeand place designated for another purpose. A "tribute" that is exactedby custom and has not the fire and light of spontaneity is withoutsincerity or sense. A simple resolution of regret and respect is allthat the occasion requires and would not inhibit any further utterancethat friends and admirers of the deceased might be moved to makeelsewhere. If any bereaved gentlemen, feeling his heart getting into hishead, wishes to tickle his ear with his tongue by way of standardizinghis emotion let him hire a hall and do so. But he should not make theCapitol a "Place of Wailing" and the Congressional Record a book ofbathos. 

SOME FEATURES OF THE LAW

I. 

THERE is a difference between religion and the amazing circumstructurewhich, under the name of theology, the priesthoods have builded roundabout it, which for centuries they made the world believe was the truetemple, and which, after incalculable mischiefs wrought, immeasurableblood spilled in its extension and consolidation, is only now beginningto crumble at the touch of reason. There is the same difference betweenthe laws and the law--the naked statutes (bad enough, God knows) andthe incomputable additions made to them by lawyers. This immense body ofsuperingenious writings it is that we all are responsible to in personand property. It is unquestionable authority for setting aside anystatute that any legislative body ever passed or can pass. In it aredictates of recognized validity for turning topsy-turvy every principleof justice and reversing every decree of reason. There is no fallacy somonstrous, no deduction so hideously unrelated to common sense, as notto receive, somewhere in the myriad pages of this awful compilation, asupport that any judge in the land would be proud to recognize with adecision if ably persuaded. I do not say that the lawyers are altogetherresponsible for the existence of this mass of disastrous rubbish, norfor its domination of the laws. They only create and thrust it downour throats; we are guilty of contributory negligence in not biting thespoon. 

As long as there exists the right of appeal there is a chance ofacquittal. Otherwise the right of appeal would be a sham and an insultmore intolerable, even, than that of the man convicted of murder to saywhy he should not receive the sentence which nothing he may say willavert. So long as acquittal may ensue guilt is not established. Why, than are men sentenced before they are proved guilty? Why are theypunished in the middle of proceedings against them? A lawyer can replyto these questions in a thousand ingenious ways; there is but oneanswer. It is because we are a barbarous race, submitting to laws madeby lawyers for lawyers. Let the "legal fraternity" reflect that a lawyeris one whose profession it is to circumvent the law; that it is apart of his business to mislead and befog the court of which he is anofficer; that it is considered right and reasonable for him to live bya division of the spoils of crime and misdemeanor; that the utmostatonement he ever makes for acquitting a man whom he knows to be guiltyis to convict a man whom he knows to be innocent. I have looked intothis thing a bit and it is my judgment that all the methods of ourcourts, and the traditions of bench and bar exist and are perpetuated, altered and improved, for the one purpose of enabling the lawyers as aclass to exact the greatest amount of money from the rest of mankind. The laws are mostly made by lawyers, and so made as to encourage andcompel litigation. By lawyers they are interpreted and by lawyersenforced for their own profit and advantage. The whole intricate andinterminable machinery of precedent, rulings, decisions, objections, writs of error, motions for new trials, appeals, reversals, affirmationsand the rest of it, is a transparent and iniquitous systems of"cinching. " What remedy would I propose? None. There is none to propose. The lawyers have "got us" and they mean to keep us. But if thoughtlesschildren of the frontier sometimes rise to tar and feather the legalpelt may God's grace go with them and amen. I do not believe there is alawyer in Heaven, but by a bath of tar and a coating of hen's-down theycan be made to resemble angels more nearly than by any other process. 

The matchless villainy of making men suffer for crimes of which they mayeventually be acquitted is consistent with our entire system of laws--asystem so complicated and contradictory that a judge simply does as hepleases, subject only to the custom of giving for his action reasonsthat at his option may or may not be derived from the statute. He maysternly affirm that he sits there to interpret the law as he finds it, not to make it accord with his personal notions of right and justice. Orhe may declare that it could never have been the Legislature's intentionto do wrong, and so, shielded by the useful phrase _contra bonos mores_, pronounce that illegal which he chooses to consider inexpedient. Orhe may be guided by either of any two inconsistent precedents, as bestsuits his purpose. Or he may throw aside both statute and precedent, disregard good morals, and justify the judgment that he wishes todeliver by what other lawyers have written in books, and still others, without anybody's authority, have chosen to accept as a part of the law. I have in mind judges whom I have observed to do all these things in asingle term of court, and could mention one who has done them all in asingle decision, and that not a very long one. The amazing featureof the matter is that all these methods are lawful--made so, not bylegislative enactment, but by the judges. Language can not be used withsufficient lucidity and positiveness to land them. 

The legal purpose of a preliminary examination is not the discovery ofa criminal; it is the ascertaining of the probable guilt or innocenceof the person already charged. To permit that person's counsel to insultand madden the various assisting witnesses in the hope of making themseem to incriminate themselves instead of him by statements that mayafterward be used to confuse a jury--that is perversion of law to defeatjustice. The outrageous character of the practice is seen to betteradvantage what contrasted with the tender consideration enjoyed by theperson actually accused and presumably guilty--the presumption of hisinnocence being as futile a fiction as that a sheep's tail is a leg whencalled so. Actually, the prisoner in a criminal trial is the onlyperson supposed to have a knowledge of the facts who is not compelled totestify! And this amazing exemption is given him by way of immunityfrom the snares and pitfalls with which the paths of all witnesses arewantonly beset! To a visiting Lunarian it would seem strange indeedthat in a Terrestrial court of justice it is not deemed desirable for anaccused person to incriminate himself, and that it _is_ deemed desirablefor a subpoena to be more dreaded than a warrant. 

When a child, a wife, a servant, a student--any one under personalauthority or bound by obligation of honor--is accused or suspected anexplanation is demanded, and refusal to testify is held, and rightlyheld, a confession of guilt To question the accused--rigorously andsharply to examine him on all matters relating to the offense, and eventrap him if he seem to be lying--that is Nature's method of criminalprocedure; why in our public trials do we forego its advantages? It mayannoy; a person arrested for crime must expect annoyance. It can notmake an innocent man incriminate himself, not even a witness, but it canmake a rogue do so, and therein lies its value. Any pressure short ofphysical torture or the threat of it, that can be put upon a rogue tomake him assist in his own undoing is just and therefore expedient. 

This ancient and efficient safeguard to rascality, the right of awitness to refuse to testify when his testimony would tend to convicthim of crime, has been strengthened by a decision of the United StatesSupreme Court. That will probably add another century or two to itsmischievous existence, and possibly prove the first act in such anextension of it that eventually a witness can not be compelled totestify at all. In fact it is difficult to see how he can be compelledto now if he has the hardihood to exercise his constitutional rightwithout shame and with an intelligent consciousness of its limitlessapplication. 

The case in which the Supreme Court made the decision was one in which awitness refused to say whether he had received from a defendant railwaycompany a rate on grain shipments lower than the rate open to allshippers. The trial was in the United States District Court for theNorthern District of Illinois, and Judge Gresham chucked the scoundrelinto jail. He naturally applied to the Supreme Court for relief, andthat high tribunal gave joy to every known or secret malefactor in thecountry by deciding--according to law, no doubt--that witnesses in acriminal case can not be compelled to testify to anything that "_mighttend_ to criminate them _in any way_, or subject them to _possible_prosecution. " The italics are my own and seem to me to indicate, aboutas clearly as extended comment could, the absolutely boundless natureof the immunity that the decision confirms or confers. It is to behoped that some public-spirited gentleman called to the stand in somecelebrated case may point the country's attention to the state of thelaw by refusing to tell his name, age or occupation, or answer anyquestion whatever. And it would be a fitting _finale_ to the farce if hewould threaten the too curious attorney with an action for damages forcompelling a disclosure of character. 

Most lawyers have made so profound a study of human nature as to thinkthat if they have shown a man to be of loose life with regard to womenthey have shown him to be one that would tell needless lies to a jury--aconviction unsupported by the familiar facts of life and character. Different men have different vices, and addiction to one kind of"upsetting sin" does not imply addiction to an unrelated kind. Doubtlessa rake is a liar in so far as is needful to concealment, but it doesnot follow that he will commit perjury to save a horsethief from thepenitentiary or send a good man to the gallows. As to lying, generally, he is not conspicuously worse than the mere lover, male or female; forlovers have been liars from the beginning of time. They deceive when itis necessary and when it is not. Schopenhauer says that it is because ofa sense of guilt--they contemplate the commission of a crime and, likeother criminals, cover their tracks. I am not prepared to say if thatis the true explanation, but to the fact to be explained I am ready totestify with lifted arms. Yet no cross-examining attorney tries to breakthe credibility of a witness by showing that he is in love. 

An habitual liar, if disinterested, makes about as good a witnessas anybody. There is really no such thing as "the lust of lying:"falsehoods are told for advantage--commonly a shadowy and illusoryadvantage, but one distinctly enough had in mind. Discerning noopportunity to promote his interest, tickle his vanity or feed a grudge, the habitual liar will tell the truth. If lawyers would study humannature with half the assiduity that they give to resolution of hairsinto their longitudinal elements they would be better fitted for serviceof the devil than they have now the usefulness to be. 

I have always asserted the right and expediency of cross-examiningattorneys in court with a view to testing their credibility. Anattorney's relation to the trial is closer and more important than thatof a witness. He has more to say and more opportunities to deceivethe jury, not only by naked lying, but by both _suppressio veri_ and_suggestio falsi_. Why is it not important to ascertain his credibility;and if an inquiry into his private life and public reputation willassist, as himself avers, why should he not be put upon the grill andcompelled to sweat out the desired incrimination? I should think itmight give good results, for example, to compel him to answer a fewquestions touching, not his private life, but his professional. Somewhatlike this:

"Did you ever defend a client, knowing him to be guilty?"

"What was your motive in doing so?"

"But in addition to your love of fair play had you not also the hope andassurance of a fee?"

"In defending your guilty client did you declare your belief in hisinnocence?"

"Yes, I understand, but necessary as it may have been (in that it helpedto defeat justice and earn your fee) was not your declaration a lie?"

"Do you believe it right to lie for the purpose of circumventingjustice?--yes or no?"

"Do you believe it right to lie for personal gain--yes or no?"

"Then why did you do both?"

"A man who lies to beat the laws and fill his purse is--what?"

"In defending a murderer did you ever misrepresent the character, acts, motives and intentions of the man that he murdered--never mind thepurpose and effect of such misrepresentation--yes or no?"

"That is what we call slander of the dead, is it not?"

"What is the most accurate name you can think of for one who slandersthe dead to defeat justice and promote his own fortune?"

"Yes, I know--such practices are allowed by the 'ethics' of yourprofession, but can you point to any evidence that they are allowed byJesus Christ?"

"If in former trials you have obstructed justice by slander of thedead, by falsely affirming the innocence of the guilty, by cheating inargument, by deceiving the court whom you are sworn to serve and assist, and have done all this for personal gain, do you expect, and is itreasonable for you to expect, the jury in this case to believe you?"

"One moment more, please. Did you ever accept an annual, or other feeconditioned on your not taking any action against a corporation?"

"While in receipt of such refrainer--I beg you pardon, retainer--did youever prosecute a blackmailer?"

It will be seen that in testing the credibility of a lawyer it isneedless to go into his private life and his character as a man anda citizen: his professional practices are an ample field in which tosearch for offenses against man and God. Indeed, it is sufficient simplyto ask him: "What is your view of 'the ethics of your profession' as asuitable standard of conduct for a pirate of the Spanish Main?"

The moral sense of the laymen is dimly conscious of something wrongin the ethics of the noble profession; the lawyers affirming, rightlyenough, a public necessity for them and their mercenary services, permittheir thrift to construe it vaguely as personal justification. Butnobody has blown away from the matter its brumous encompassment and letin the light upon it It is very simple. 

Is it honorable for a lawyer to try to clear a man that he knowsdeserves conviction? That is not the entire question by much. Is ithonorable to pretend to believe what you do not believe? Is it honorableto lie? I submit that these questions are not answered affirmatively byshowing the disadvantage to the public and to civilization of a lawyerrefusing to serve a known offender. The popular interest, like any othergood cause, can be and commonly is, served by foul means. Justice itselfmay be promoted by acts essentially unjust. In serving a sordid ambitiona powerful scoundrel may by acts in themselves wicked augment theprosperity of a whole nation. I have not the right to deceive and lie inorder to advantage my fellowmen, any more than I have the right to stealor murder to advantage them, nor have my fellowmen the power to grant methat indulgence. 

The question of a lawyer's right to clear a known criminal (with theseveral questions involved) is not answered affirmatively by showingthat the law forbids him to decline a case for reasons personal tohimself--not even if we admit the statute's moral authority. Preservation of conscience and character is a civic duty, as well as apersonal; one's fellow-men have a distinct interest in it. That, Iadmit, is an argument rather in the manner of an attorney; clearlyenough the intent of this statute is to compel an attorney to cheat andlie for any rascal that wants him to. In that sense it may be regardedas a law softening the rigor of all laws; it does not mitigatepunishments, but mitigates the chance of incurring them. The infamy ofit lies in forbidding an attorney to be a gentleman. Like all laws itfalls something short of its intent: many attorneys, even some whodefend that law, are as honorable as is consistent with the practice ofdeceit to serve crime. 

It will not do to say that an attorney in defending a client is notcompelled to cheat and lie. What kind of defense could be made by anyone who did not profess belief in the innocence of his client?--didnot affirm it in the most serious and impressive way?--did not lie? Howwould it profit the defense to be conducted by one who would not meetthe prosecution's grave asseverations of belief in the prisoner's guiltby equally grave assurances of faith in his innocence? And in pointof fact, when was counsel for the defense ever known to forego theadvantage of that solemn falsehood? If I am asked what would becomeof accused persons if they had to prove their innocence to the lawyersbefore making a defense in court, I reply that I do not know; and in myturn I ask: What would become of Humpty Dumpty if all the king's horsesand all the king's men were an isosceles triangle?

It all amounts to this, that lawyers want clients and are not particularabout the kind of clients that they get All this is very ugly work, and a public interest that can not be served without it would better beunserved. 

 I grant, in short, 'tis better all around That ambidextrous consciences abound In courts of law to do the dirty work That self-respecting scavengers would shirk. What then? Who serves however clean a plan By doing dirty work, he is a dirty man. 

But in point of fact I do not "grant" any such thing. It is not forthe public interest that a rogue have the same freedom of defense as anhonest man; it should be a good deal harder for him. His troubles shouldbegin, not when he seeks acquital, but when he seeks counsel. It wouldbe better for the community if he could not obtain the services of areputable attorney, or any attorney at all. A defense that can not bemade without his attorney's actual knowledge of his guilt should beimpossible to him. Nor should he be permitted to remain off the witnessstand lest he incriminate himself. It ought to be the aim of the courtto let him incriminate himself--to make him do so if his testimonywill. In our courts that natural method would serve the ends of justicegreatly better than the one that we have. Testimony of the guilty wouldassist in conviction; that of the innocent would not. 

As to the general question of a judge's right to inflict arbitrarypunishment for words that he may be pleased to hold disrespectful tohimself or another judge, I do not myself believe that any such rightexists; the practice seems to be merely a survival--a heritage from thedark days of irresponsible power, when the scope of judicial authorityhad no other bounds than fear of the royal gout or indigestion. If inthese modern days the same right is to exist it may be necessary torevive the old checks upon it by restoring the throne. In freeing usfrom the monarchial chain, the coalition of European Powers commonlyknown in American history as "the valor of our forefathers" stripped usstarker than they knew. 

Suppose an attorney should find his client's interests imperiled bya prejudiced or corrupt judge--what is he to do? If he may not makerepresentations to that effect, supporting them with evidence, whereevidence is possible and by inference where it is not, what means ofprotection shall he venture to adopt? If it be urged in objection thatjudges are never prejudiced nor corrupt I confess that I shall have noanswer: the proposition will deprive me of breath. 

If contempt is not a crime it should not be punished; if a crime itshould be punished as other crimes are punished--by indictmentor information, trial by jury if a jury is demanded, with all thesafeguards that secure an accused person against judicial blunders andjudicial bias. The necessity for these safeguards is even greaterin cases of contempt than in others--particularly if the prosecutingwitness is to sit in judgment on his own grievance. That should, ofcourse, not be permitted: the trial should take place before anotherjudge. 

Why should twelve able-bodied jurymen, with their oaths to guide themand the law to back, submit to the dictation of one small judge armedwith nothing better than an insolent assumption of authority? A judgehas not the moral right to order a jury to acquit, the utmost that hecan rightly do is to point out what state of the law or facts may seemto him unfavorable to conviction. If the jurors, holding a differentview, persist in conviction the accused will have grounds, doubtless, for a new trial. But under no circumstances is a judge justified inrequiring a responsible human being to disregard the solemn obligationof an oath. 

The public ear is dowered with rather more than just enough of clottednonsense about "attacks upon the dignity of the Bench, " "bringing thejudiciary into disrepute" and the rueful rest of it. I crave leaveto remind the solicitudinarians sounding these loud alarums on theirseveral larynges that by persons of understanding men are respected, notfor what they do, but for what they are, and that one public functionarywill stand as high in their esteem as another if as high in character. The dignity of a wise and righteous judge needs not the artificialsafeguarding which is a heritage of the old days when if dissent found atongue the public executioner cut it out. The Bench will be sufficientlyrespected when it is no longer a place where dullards dream and roguesrob--when its _personnel_ is no longer chosen in the back-rooms oftipple-shops, forced upon yawning conventions and confirmed by the votesof men who neither know what the candidates are nor what they should be. With the gang that we have and under our system must continue to have, respect is out of the question and ought to be. They are entitled tojust as much of its forms and observances as are needful to maintenanceof order in their courts and fortification of their lawful power--nomore. As to their silence under criticism, that is as they please. Nobody but themselves is holding their tongues. 

II. 

A law under which the unsuccessful respondent in a divorce proceedingmay be forbidden to marry again during the life of the successfulcomplainant, the latter being subject to no such disability, isinfamous infinitely. If the disability is intended as a punishment itis exceptional among legal punishments in that it is inflicted withoutconviction, trial or arraignment, the divorce proceedings being quiteanother and different matter. It is exceptional in that the periodof its continuance, and therefore the degree of its severity, areindeterminate; they are dependent on no limiting statute, and onneither the will of the power inflicting nor the conduct of the personsuffering. 

To sentence a person to a punishment that is to be mild or severeaccording to chance or--which is even worse--circumstance, which but oneperson, and that person not officially connected with administration ofjustice, can but partly control, is a monstrous perversion of the mainprinciples that are supposed to underlie the laws. 

In "the case at bar" it can be nothing to the woman--possibly herselfremarried--whether the man remarries or not; that is, can affect onlyher feelings, and only such of them as are least creditable to her. Yet her self-interest is enlisted against him to do him incessantdisservice. By merely caring for her health she increases the sharpnessof his punishment--for punishment it is if he feels it such; every hourthat she wrests from death is added to his "term. " The expediency ofpreventing a man from marrying, without having the power to prevent himfrom making his marriage desirable in the interest of the public andvital to that of some woman, is not discussable here. If a man is everjustified in poisoning a woman who is no longer his wife it is when, byway of making him miserable, the State has given him, or he supposes itto have given him, a direct and distinct interest in her death. 

III. 

With a view, possibly, to promoting respect for law by making thestatutes so conform to public sentiment that none will fall intodisesteem and disuse, it has been advocated that there be a formalrecognition of sex in the penal code, by making a difference in thepunishment of men and of women for the same crimes and misdemeanors. Theargument is that if women were "provided" with milder punishmentjuries would sometimes convict them, whereas they now commonly get offaltogether. 

The plan is not so new as might be thought. Many of the nations ofantiquity of whose laws we have knowledge, and nearly all the Europeannations until within a comparatively recent time, punished womendifferently from men for the same offenses. And as recently as theperiod of the Early Puritan in New England women were punished for someoffenses which men might commit without fear if not without reproach. The ducking-stool, for example, was an appliance for softening thefemale temper only. In England women used to be burned at the stake forcrimes for which men were hanged, roasting being regarded as the milderpunishment. In point of fact, it was not punishment at all, the victimbeing carefully strangled before the fire touched her. Burning wassimply a method of disposing of the body so expeditiously as to giveno occasion and opportunity for the unseemly social rites commonlyperformed about the scaffold of the erring male by the jocular populace. As lately as 1763 a woman named Margaret Biddingfield was burned inSuffolk as an accomplice in the crime of "petty treason. " She hadassisted in the murder of her husband, the actual killing being done bya man; and he was hanged, as no doubt he richly deserved. For "coining, "too (which was "treason"), men were hanged and women burned. Thisdistinction between the sexes was maintained until the year of grace1790, after which female offenders ceased to have "a stake in thecountry, " and like Hood's martial hero, "enlisted in the line. "

In still earlier days, before the advantages of fire were understood, our good grandmothers who sinned were admonished by water--they weredrowned; but in the reign of Henry III a woman was hanged--withoutstrangulation, apparently, for after a whole day of it she was cut downand pardoned. Sorceresses and unfaithful wives were smothered in mud, asalso were unfaithful wives among the ancient Burgundians. The punishmentof unfaithful husbands is not of record; we only know that there wereno austerely virtuous editors to direct the finger of public scorn theirway. 

Among the Anglo-Saxons, women who had the bad luck to be detected intheft were drowned, while men meeting with the same mischance died a drydeath by hanging. By the early Danish laws female thieves were buriedalive, whether or not from motives of humanity is not now known. Thisseems to have been the fashion in France also, for in 1331 a woman namedDuplas was scourged and buried alive at Abbeville, and in 1460 PerotteMauger, a receiver of stolen goods, was inhumed by order of the Provostof Paris in front of the public gibbet. In Germany in the good olddays certain kinds of female criminals were "impaled, " a punishment toogrotesquely horrible for description, but likely enough considered bythe simple German of the period conspicuously merciful. 

It is, in short, only recently that the civilized nations have placedthe sexes on an equality in the matter of the death penalty for crime, and the new system is not yet by any means universal. That it is abetter system than the old, or would be if enforced, is a naturalpresumption from human progress, out of which it is evolved. Butcoincidently with its evolution has evolved also a sentiment adverseto punishment of women at all. But this sentiment appears to be ofindependent growth and in no way a reaction against that which causedthe change. To mitigate the severity of the death penalty for women tosome pleasant form of euthanasia, such as drowning in rose-water, orin their case to abolish the death penalty altogether and make theircapital punishment consist in a brief interment in a jail with asoftened name, would probably do no good, for whatever form it mighttake, it would be, so far as woman is concerned, the "extreme penalty"and crowning disgrace, and jurors would be as reluctant to inflict it asthey now are to inflict hanging. 

IV. 

Testators should not, from the snug security of the grave, utter aperpetual threat of disinheritance or any other uncomfortable fate todeter an American citizen, even one of his own legatees, from applyingto the courts of his country for redress of any wrong from which hemight consider himself as suffering. The courts of law ought to be opento any one conceiving himself a victim of injustice, and it should beunlawful to abridge the right of complaint by making its exercise morehazardous than it naturally is. Doubtless the contesting of wills isa nuisance, generally speaking, the contestant conspicuously devoid ofmoral worth and the verdict singularly unrighteous; but as long assome testators really _are_ daft, or subject to interested suasion, orwantonly sinful, they should be denied the power to stifle dissent byfining the luckless dissenter. The dead have too much to say in thisworld at the best, and it is monstrous and intolerable tyranny for themto stand at the door of the Temple of Justice to drive away the suitorsthat themselves have made. 

Obedience to the commands of the dead should be conditional upon theirgood behavior, and it is not good behavior to set up a censure ofactions at law among the living. If our courts are not competent tosay what actions are proper to be brought and what are unfit to beentertained let us improve them until they are competent, or abolishthem altogether and resort to the mild and humane arbitrament of thedice. But while courts have the civility to exist they should refuseto surrender any part of their duties and responsibilities to suchexceedingly private persons as those under six feet of earth, or sealedup in habitations of hewn stone. Persons no longer affectible by humanevents should be denied a voice in determining the character and trendof them. Respect for the wishes of the dead is a tender and beautifulsentiment, certainly. Unfortunately, it can not be ascertained thatthey have any wishes. What commonly go by that name are wishes onceentertained by living persons who are now dead, and who in dyingrenounced them, along with everything else. Like those who entertainedthem, the wishes are no longer in existence. "The wishes of the dead, "therefore, are not wishes, and are not of the dead. Why they shouldhave anything more than a sentimental influence upon those still in theflesh, and be a factor to be reckoned with in the practical affairsof the super-graminous world, is a question to which the merely humanunderstanding can find no answer, and it must be referred to thelawyers. When "from the tombs a doleful sound" is vented, and "thine ear"is invited to "attend the cry, " an intelligent forethought will suggestthat you inquire if it is anything about property. If so pass on--thatis no sacred spot. 

V. 

Much of the testimony in French courts, civil and martial, appears toconsist of personal impressions and opinions of the witnesses. All veryimproper and mischievous, no doubt, if--if what? Why, obviously, ifthe judges are unfit to sit in judgment By designating them to sit thedesignating power assumes their fitness--assumes that they know enoughto take such things for what they are worth, to make the necessaryallowances; if needful, to disregard a witness's opinion altogether. Ido not know if they are fit. I do not know that they do make the needfulallowances. It is by no means clear to me that any judge or juror, French, American or Patagonian, is competent to ascertain the truth whenlying witnesses are trying to conceal it under the direction of skilledand conscientiousless attorneys licensed to deceive. But his competenceis a basic assumption of the law vesting him with the duty of deciding. Having chosen him for that duty the French law very logically lets himalone to decide for himself what is evidence and what is not. It doesnot trust him a little but altogether. It puts him under conditionsfamiliar to him--makes him accessible to just such influences andsuasions as he is accustomed to when making conscious and unconsciousdecisions in his personal affairs. 

There may be a distinct gain to justice in permitting a witness tosay whatever he wants to say. If he is telling the truth he will notcontradict himself; if he is lying the more rope he is given the moresurely he will entangle himself. To the service of that end defendantsand prisoners should, I think, be compelled to testify and denied theadvantage of declining to answer, for silence is the refuge of guiltIn endeavoring by austere means to make an accused person incriminatehimself the French judge logically applies the same principle that aparent uses with a suspected child. When the Grandfather of His Countryarraigned the wee George Washington for arboricide the accused was notcarefully instructed that he need not answer if a truthful answer wouldtend to convict him. If he had refused to answer he would indubitablyhave been lambasted until he did answer, as right richly he would havedeserved to be. 

The custom of permitting a witness to wander at will over the entirefield of knowledge, hearsay, surmise and opinion has several distinctadvantages over our practice. In giving hearsay evidence, for example, he may suggest a new and important witness of whom the counsel for theother side would not otherwise have heard, and who can then be broughtinto court. On some unguarded and apparently irrelevant statement he mayopen an entirely new line of inquiry, or throw upon the case a floodof light. Everyone knows what revelations are sometimes evoked byapparently the most insignificant remarks. Why should justice be denieda chance to profit that way?

There is a still greater advantage in the French "method. " By giving awitness free rein in expression of his personal opinions and feelings weshould be able to calculate his frame of mind, his good or ill willto the prosecution or defense and, therefore, to a certain extent hiscredibility. In our courts he is able by a little solemn perjury toconceal all this, even from himself, and pose as an impartial witness, when in truth, with regard to the accused, he is full of rancor orreeking with compassion. 

In theory our system is perfect. The accused is prosecuted by a publicofficer, who having no interest in his conviction, will serve the Statewithout mischievous zeal and perform his disagreeable task with fairnessand consideration. He is permitted to entrust his defense to anotherofficer, whose duty it is to make a rigidly truthful and candidpresentation of his case in order to assist the court to a justdecision. The jurors, if there are jurors, are neither friendly norhostile, are open-minded, intelligent and conscientious. As to thewitnesses, are they not sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth (inso far as they are permitted) and nothing but the truth? What couldbe finer and better than all this?--what could more certainly assurejustice? How close the resemblance is between this ideal picture andwhat actually occurs all know, or should know. The judge is commonlyan ignoramus incapable of logical thought and with little sense of thedread and awful nature of his responsibility. The prosecuting attorneythinks it due to his reputation to "make a record" and tries to convictby hook or crook, even when he is himself persuaded of the defendant'sinnocence. Counsel for the defense is equally unscrupulous foracquittal, and both, having industriously coached their witnesses, contend against each other in deceiving the court by every artificeof which they are masters. Witnesses on both sides perjure themselvesfreely and with almost perfect immunity if detected. At the close of itall the poor weary jurors, hopelessly bewildered and dumbly resentful oftheir duping, render a random or compromise verdict, or one which bestexpresses their secret animosity to the lawyer they like least or theirfaith in the newspapers which they have diligently and disobedientlyread every night Commenting upon Rabelais' old judge who, when impeachedfor an outrageous decision, pleaded his defective eye-sight which madehim miscount the spots on the dice, the most distinguished lawyer of myacquaintance seriously assured me that if all the cases with which hehad been connected had been decided with the dice substantial justicewould have been done more frequently than it was done. If that is true, or nearly true, and I believe it, the American's right to sneer at theFrenchman's "judicial methods" is still an open question. 

It is urged that the corrupt practices in our courts of law be uncoveredto public view, whenever that is possible, by dial impeccable censor, the press. Exposure of rascality is very good--better, apparentlyfor rascals than for anybody else, for it usually suggests somethingrascally which they had overlooked, and so familiarizes the public withcrime that crime no longer begets loathing. If the newspapers of thecountry are really concerned about corrupter practices than their ownand willing to bring our courts up to the English standard there issomething better than exposure--which fatigues. Let the newspapers setabout creating a public opinion favorable to non-elective judges, wellpaid, powerful to command respect and holding office for life or goodbehavior. That is the only way to get good men and great lawyers on theBench. As matters are, we stand and cry for what the English have andrail at the way they get it. Our boss-made, press-ridden and mob-fearingpaupers and ignoramuses of the Bench give us as good a quality ofjustice as we merit A better quality awaits us whenever the will to haveit is attended by the sense to take it. 

ARBITRATION

THE universal cry for arbitration is either dishonest or unwise. Forevery evil there are quack remedies galore--especially for every evilthat is irremediable. Of this order of remedies is arbitration, for ofthis order of evils is the inadequate wage of manual labor. Since thebeginning of authentic history everything has been tried in the hopeof divorcing poverty and labor, but nothing has parted them. It is notconceivable that anything ever will; success of arbitration, antecedentlyimprobable, is demonstrably impossible. Most of the work of the worldis hard, disagreeable work, requiring little intelligence. Most of thepeople of the world are unintelligent--unfit to do any other work. Ifit were not done by them it would not be done, and it is the basic work. Withdraw them from it and the whole superstructure would topple andfall. Yet there is too little of the work, and there are so manyincapable of doing anything else that adequate return is out of thequestion. For the laboring _class_ there is no hope of an existence thatis comfortable in comparison with that of the other class; the hope ofan individual laborer lies in the possibility of fitting himself forhigher employment--employment of the head; not manual but cerebrallabor. While selfishness remains the main ingredient of human nature(and a survey of the centuries accessible to examination shows but aslow and intermittent decrease) the cerebral workers, being the wiserand no better, will manage to take the greater profit. In justice itmust be said of them that they extend a warm and sincere invitation totheir ranks, and take "apprentices;" every chance of education that theother class enjoys is proof of that. 

All this is perhaps a trifle abstruse; let us, then, look at arbitrationmore nearly; in our time it is, in form at least something new. Itbegan as "international arbitration, " which already, in settling a fewdisputes of no great importance, has shown itself a dangerous remedy. Inthe necessary negotiation to determine exactly what points to submit towhom, and how, and where, and when to submit them, and how to carry outthe arbitrator's decision, scores of questions are raised, upon each ofwhich it is as easy to disagree and fight as upon the original issue. International arbitration may be defined as the substitution of manyburning questions for a smouldering one; for disputes that have reacheda really acute stage are not submitted. The animosities that it haskindled have been hotter than those it has quenched. 

Industrial arbitration is no better; it is manifestly worse, and any lawenforcing it and enforcing compliance with its decisions, is absurd andmischievous. "Compulsory arbitration" is not arbitration, the essencewhereof is voluntary submission of differences and voluntary submissionto judgment. If either reference or obedience is enforced thearbitrators are simply a court with no powers to do anything but applythe law. Proponents of the fad would do well to consider this: If aparty to a labor dispute is _compelled_ to invoke and obey a decisionof arbitrators that decision must follow strictly the line of law; thesmallest invasion of any constitutional, statutory or common-law rightwill enable him to upset the whole judgment No legislative body canestablish a tribunal empowered to make and enforce illegal or extralegal decisions; for making and enforcing legal ones the tribunals thatwe already have are sufficient This talk of "compulsory arbitration"is the maddest nonsense that the industrial situation has yet evolved. Doubtless it is sent upon us for our sins; but had we not already aplague of inveracity?

Arbitration of labor disputes means compromise with the unions. It can, in this country, mean nothing else, for the law would not survive ahalf-dozen failures to concede some part of their demands, howeverreasonless. By repeated strikes they would eventually get all theiroriginal demand and as much more as on second thought they might chooseto ask for. Each concession would be, as it is now, followed by a newdemand, and the first arbitrators might as well allow them all that theydemand and all that they mean to demand hereafter. 

Would not employers be equally unscrupulous. They would not. They couldnot afford the disturbance, the stoppage of the business, the riskof unfair decisions in a country where it is "popular" to favor andencourage, not the just, but the poor. The labor leaders have nothing tolose, not even their jobs, for their work is labor leading. Their dupes, by the way, would be dupes no longer, for with enforced arbitration thegame of "follow my leader" would pay until there should be nothing tofollow him to but empty treasuries of dead industries in an extinctcivilization. If there must be enforced arbitration it should at leastnot apply to that sum of all impudent rascalities, the "sympatheticstrike. "

As to the men who have set up the monstrous claim asserted by the"sympathetic strike, " I shall refer to the affair of 1904. If it wascreditable in them to feel so much concern about a few hundred aliens inIllinois, how about the grievances of the whole body of their countrymenin California? When their employers, who they confess were good to them, were plundering the Californians, they did not strike, sympatheticallynor otherwise. Year after year the railway companies picked the pocketsof the Californians; corrupted their courts and legislatures; laid itsBriarean hands in exaction upon every industry and interest; filled theland with lies and false reasoning; threw honest men into prisons andlocked the gates of them against thieves and assassins; by open defianceof the tax collector denied to children of the poor the advantages ofeducation--did all this and more, and these honest working men stoodloyally by it, sharing in wages its dishonest gains, receivers, in onesense, of stolen goods. The groans of their neighbors were nothing tothem; even the wrongs of themselves, their wives and their children didnot stir them to revolt. On every breeze that blew, this great chorusof cries and curses was borne past their ears unheeded. Why did they notstrike then? Where then were their fiery altruists and storm-petrelsof industrial disorder? No!--the ingenious gods who have invented theDebses and Gomperses, and humorously branded them with names that wouldmake a cat laugh, have never put it into their cold selfish hearts toorder out their misguided followers to redress a public wrong, but onlyto inflict one--to avenge a personal humiliation, gratify an appetitefor notoriety, slake a thirst for the intoxicating cup of power, orpunish the crime of prosperity. 

It is a practical, an illogical, a turbulent time, yes; it alwaysis. The age of Jesus Christ was a practical age, yet Jesus Christ wassweetly impractical. In an illogical period Socrates reasoned clearly, and logically died for it. Nero's time was a time of turbulence, yetSeneca's mind was not disturbed, nor his conscience perverted. Comparetheir fame with the everlasting infamy that time has fixed upon thenames of the Jack Cades, the Robespierres, the Tomaso Nielos--guides andgods of the "fierce democracies" which rise with a sickening periodicityto defile the page of history with a quickly fading mark of blood andfire, their own awful example their sole contribution to the good ofmankind. To be a child of your time, imbued with its spirit and endowedwith its aims--that is to petition Posterity for a niche in the Templeof Shame. 

No strike of any prominence ever takes place in this country withoutthe concomitants of violence and destruction of property, and usuallymurder. These cheerful incidents one who does not personally suffer themcan endure with considerable fortitude, but the sniveling, hypocriticalcondemnation of them by the press that has instigated them and thestrikers who have planned and executed them, and who invariably ascribethem to those whom they most injure; the solemn offers of the leaders toassist in protecting the imperiled property and avenging the dead, whileopenly employing counsel for every incendiary and assassin arrested inspite of them--these are pretty hard to bear. A strike means (for itincludes as its main method) violence, lawlessness, destruction of theproperty of others than the strikers, riot and if necessary bloodshed. Even when the strikers themselves have no hand in these crimes they aremorally liable for the foreknown consequences of their act. Nay, theyare morally liable for _all the_ consequences--all the inconveniencesand losses to the community, all the sufferings of the poor entailed byinterruptions of trade, all the privations of other workingmen whoma selfish attention to their own supposed advantage throws out of theclosed industries. They are liable in morals and should be made so inlaw--only that strikes are needless. It is not worth while to create amultitude of complex criminal responsibilities for acts which can easilybe prevented by a single and simple one. How?

First, I should like to point out that we are hearing a deal too muchabout a man's inalienable right to work or play, at his own sovereignwill. In so far as that means--and it is always used to mean--his rightto quit any kind of work at any moment, without notice and regardless ofconsequences to others, it is false; there is no such moral right, andthe law should have at least a speaking acquaintance with morality. Whatis mischievous should be illegal. The various interests of civilizationare so complex, delicate, intertangled and interdependent that no man, and no set of men, should have power to throw the entire scheme intoconfusion and disorder for pro-motion of a trumpery principle or a classadvantage. In dealing with corporations we recognize that. If for anyselfish purpose the trade union of railway managers had done what theirsacred brakemen and divine firemen did--had decreed that "no wheelshould turn, " until Mr. Pullman's men should return to work--they wouldhave found themselves all in jail the second day. _Their_ right to quitwork was not conceded: they lacked that authenticating credential ofmoral and legal irresponsibility, an indurated palm. In a small lockoutaffecting a mill or two the offender finds a half-hearted support in_the_ law if he is willing to pay enough deputy sheriffs; but eventhen he is mounted by the hobnailed populace, at its back the dailynewspapers, clamoring and spitting like cats. But let the manager of agreat railway discharge all its men without warning and "kill" its ownengines! Then see what you will see. To commit a wrong so gigantic withimpunity a man must wear overalls. 

How prevent anybody from committing it? How break up this _régime_ ofstrikes and boycotts and lockouts, more disastrous to others than tothose at whom the blows are aimed--than to those, even, who deliverthem. How make all those concerned in the management and operationof great industries, about which have grown up tangles of related anddependent interests, conduct them with some regard to the welfare ofothers? Before committing ourselves to the dubious and irretraceablecourse of "Government ownership, " or to the infectious expedient of a"pension system, " is there anything of promise yet untried?--anything ofsuperior simplicity and easier application? I think so. Make a breachof labor contract by either parly to it a criminal offense punishable byimprisonment "Fine or imprisonment" will not do--the employee, unable topay the fine, would commonly go to jail, the employer seldom. That wouldnot be fair. 

The purpose of such a law is apparent: Labor contracts would then bedrawn for a certain time, securing both employer and employee and(which is more important) helpless persons in related and dependentindustries--the whole public, in fact--against sudden and disastrousaction by either "capital" or "labor" for accomplishment of a purelyselfish or frankly impudent end. A strike or lockout compelled toannounce itself thirty days in advance would be innocuous to the public, whilst securing to the party of initiation all the advantages thatanybody professes to want--all but the advantage of ruining others andof successfully defying the laws. 

Under the present _régime_ labor contracts are useless; either party canviolate them with impunity. They offer redress only through a civil suitfor damages, and the employee commonly has nothing with which toconduct an action or satisfy a judgment. The consequence is seen inthe incessant and increasing industrial disturbances, with theirever-attendant crimes against property, life and liberty--disturbanceswhich by driving capital to investments in which it needs employ nolabor, do more than all the other causes so glibly enumerated by everynewspaper and politician, though by no two alike, to bring about the"hard times"--which in their turn cause further and worse disturbances. 

INDUSTRIAL DISCONTENT

I. 

THE time seems to have come when the two antagonistic elements ofAmerican society should, and could afford to, throw off their disguiseand frankly declare their principles and purposes. But what, it may beasked, are the two antagonistic elements? Dividing lines parting thepopulation into two camps more or less hostile may be drawn variously;for example, one may be run between the law-abiding and the criminalclass. But the elements to which reference is here made are thoseimmemorable and implacable foes which the slang of modern economicsroughly and loosely distinguishes as "Capital" and "Labor. " A moreaccurate classification--as accurate a one as it is possible tomake--would designate them as those who do muscular labor and those whodo not. The distinction between rich and poor does not serve: to thelaborer the rich man who works with his hands is not objectionable; thepoor man who does not, is. Consciously or unconsciously, and alike bythose whose necessities compel them to perform it and those whose betterfortune enables them to avoid it, manual labor is considered the mostinsufferable of human pursuits. It is a pill that the Tolstois, the"communities" and the "Knights" of Labor can not sugarcoat. We may prateof the dignity of labor; emblazon its praise upon banners; set apart aday on which to stop work and celebrate it; shout our teeth loose in itsglorification--and, God help our fool souls to better sense, we think wemean it all!

If labor is so good and great a thing let all be thankful, for allcan have as much of it as may be desired. The eight-hour law isnot mandatory to the laborer, nor does possession of leisure entailidleness. It is permitted to the clerk, the shopman, the streetpeddler--to all who live by the light employment of keeping the wolffrom the door without eating him--to abandon their ignoble callings, seize the shovel, the axe and the sledge-hammer and lay about them rightsturdily, to the ample gratification of their desire. And those who areengaged in more profitable vocations will find that with a part of theirincomes they can purchase from their employers the right to work as hardas they like in even the dullest times. 

Manual labor has nothing of dignity, nothing of beauty. It is a hard, imperious and dispiriting necessity. He who is condemned to it feelsthat it sets upon his brow the brand of intellectual inferiority. Andthat brand of servitude never ceases to burn. In no country and atno time has the laborer had a kindly feeling for the rest of us, foreverywhere and always has he heard in our patronising platitudes thenote of contempt. In his repression, in the denying him the opportunityto avenge his real and imaginary wrongs, government finds its mainusefulness, activity and justification. Jefferson's dictum thatgovernments are instituted among men in order to secure them in "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is luminous nonsense. Governmentsare not instituted; they grow. They are evolved out of the necessity ofprotecting from the handworker the life and property of the brain workerand the idler. The first is the most dangerous because the most numerousand the least content. Take from the science and the art of government, and from its methods, whatever has had its origin in the consciousnessof his ill-will and the fear of his power and what have you left? A purerepublic--that is to say, no government. 

I should like it understood that, if not absolutely devoid ofpreferences and prejudices, I at least believe myself to be; that exceptas to result I think no more of one form of government than of another;and that with reference to results all forms seem to me bad, but bad indifferent degrees. If asked my opinion as to the results of our own, Ishould point to Homestead, to Wardner, to Buffalo, to Coal Creek, to theinterminable tale of unpunished murders by individuals and by mobs, tolegislatures and courts unspeakably corrupt and executives of criminalcowardice, to the prevalence and immunity of plundering trusts andcorporations and the monstrous multiplication of millionaires. I shouldinvite attention to the pension roll, to the similar and incredibleextravagance of Republican and Democratic "Houses"--a plague o' themboth! If addressing Democrats only, I should mention the protectivetariff; if Republicans, the hill-tribe clamor for free coinage ofsilver. I should call to mind the existence of prosperous activity of athousand lying secret societies having for their sole object mitigationof republican simplicity by means of pageantry and costumes grotesquelyresembling those of kings and courtiers, and titles of address andcourtesy exalted enough to draw laughter from an ox. 

In contemplation of these and a hundred other "results, " no lessshameful in themselves than significant of the deeper shame beneathand prophetic of the blacker shame to come, I should say: "Behold theoutcome of hardly more than a century of government by the people!Behold the superstructure whose foundations our forefathers laid uponthe unstable overgrowth of popular caprice surfacing the unplummetedabysm of human depravity! Behold the reality behind our dream of theefficacy of forms, the saving grace of principles, the magic of words!We have believed in the wisdom of majorities and are fooled; trusted tothe good honor of numbers, and are betrayed. Our touching faith inthe liberty of the rascal, our strange conviction that anarchy makingproselytes and bombs is less dangerous than anarchy with a shut mouthand a watched hand--lo, this is the beginning of the aid of the dream!"

Our Government has broken down at every point, and the twoirreconcilable elements whose suspensions of hostilities are mistaken forpeace are about to try their hands at each other's tempting display ofthroats. There is no longer so much as a pretense of amity; apparentlythere will not much longer be a pretense of regard for mercy and morals. Already "industrial discontent" has attained to the magnitude of war. It is important, then, that there be an understanding of principles andpurposes. As the combatants will not define their positions truthfullyby words, let us see if it can be inferred from the actions whichare said to speak more plainly. If one of the really able men who now"direct the destinies" of the labor organizations in this country, could be enticed into the Palace of Truth and "examined" by a skilfulcatechist he would indubitably say something like this:

"Our ultimate purpose is abolition of the distinction between employerand employee, which is but a modification of that between master andslave. 

"We propose that the laborer shall be chief owner of all the propertyand profits of the enterprise in which he is engaged, and have throughhis union a controlling voice in all its affairs. 

"We propose to overthrow the system under which a man can grow richer byworking with his head than with his hands, and prevent the man who workswith neither from having anything at all. 

"In the attainment of these ends any means is to be judged, as to itsfitness for our use, with sole regard to its efficacy. We shall punishthe innocent for the sins of the guilty. We shall destroy property andlife under such circumstances and to such an extent as may seem to usexpedient. Falsehood, treachery, arson, assassination, all these we lookupon as legitimate if effective. 

"The rules of 'civilized warfare' we shall not observe, but shall putprisoners to death or torture them, as we please. 

"We do not recognize a non-union man's right to labor, nor to live. Theright to strike includes the right to strike _him_. "

Doubtless all that (and "the half is not told") sounds to theunobservant like a harsh exaggeration, an imaginative travesty of theprinciples of labor organizations. It is not a travesty; it has noelement of exaggeration. Not in the last twenty-five years has a greatstrike or lockout occurred in this country without supplying facts, notorious and undisputed, upon which some of these confessions of faithare founded. The war is practically a servile insurrection, andservile insurrections are today what they ever were: the most cruel andferocious of all manifestations of human hate. Emancipation is roughwork; when he who would be free, himself strikes the blow, he can notconsider too curiously with what he strikes it nor upon whom it falls. It will profit you to understand, my fine gentleman with the soft hands, the character of that which is confronting you. You are not threatenedwith a bombardment of roses. 

Let us look into the other camp, where General Hardhead is so engrossedwith his own greatness and power as not clearly to hear the shots on hispicket line. Suppose we hypnotize him and make him open his "shut soul"to our searching. He will say something like this:

"In the first place, I claim the right to own and enclose for my own useor disuse as much of the earth's surface as I am desirous and able toprocure. I and my kind have made laws confirming us in the occupancy ofthe entire habitable and arable area as fast as we can get it. Tothe objection that this must eventually here, as it has actually doneelsewhere, deprive the rest of you places upon which legally to be born, and exclude you after surreptitious birth as trespassers from all chanceto procure directly the fruits of the earth, I reply that you can beborn at sea and eat fish. 

"I claim the right to induce you, by offer of employment, to colonizeyourselves and families about my factories, and then arbitrarily, bywithdrawing the employment, break up in a day the homes that you havebeen years in acquiring where it is no longer possible for you toprocure work. 

"In determining your rate of wages when I employ you, I claim the rightto make your necessities a factor in the problem, thus making yourmisfortunes cumulative. By the law of supply and demand (God bless itsexpounder!) the less you have and the less chance to get more, the moreI have the right to take from you in labor and the less I am bound togive you in wages. 

"I claim the right to ignore the officers of the peace and maintain aprivate army to subdue you when you rise. 

"I claim the right to make you suffer, by creating for my advantage anartificial scarcity of the necessaries of life. 

"I claim the right to employ the large powers of the government inadvancing my private welfare. 

"As to falsehood, treachery and the other military virtues with whichyou threaten me, I shall go, in them, as far as you; but from arsonand assassination I recoil with horror. You see you have very little toburn, and you are not more than half alive anyhow. "

That, I submit, is a pretty fair definition of the position of thewealthy man who works with his head. It seems worth while to put it onrecord while he is extant to challenge or verify; for the probability isthat unless he mend his ways he will not much longer be wealthy, work, nor have a head. 

II. 

In discussion of the misdoings at Homestead and Coeur d' Alene it isamusing to observe all the champions of law and order gravely pratingof "principles" and declaring with all the solemnity of owls that thesesacred things have been violated. On that ground they have the argumentall their own way. Indubitably there is hardly a fundamental principleof law and morals that the rioting laborers have not footballed outof the field of consideration. Indubitably, too, in doing so they haveforfeited as they must have expected to forfeit, all the "moral support"for which they did not care a tinker's imprecation. If there were anyquestion of their culpability this solemn insistence upon it would lacksomething of the humor with which it is now invested and which saves theobserver from death by dejection. 

It is not only in discussions of the "labor situation" that we hear thiseternal babble of "principles. " It is never out of ear, and in politicsis especially clamant. Every success in an election is yawped of as"a triumph of Republican (or Democratic) principles. " But neitherin politics nor in the quarrels of laborers and their employers haveprinciples a place as "factors in the problem. " Their use is to supplyto both combatants a vocabulary of accusation and appeal. All the fiercetalk of an antagonist's violation of those eternal principles upon whichorganized society is founded--and the rest of it--what is it but thecry of the dog with the chewed ear? The dog that is chewing foregoes theadvantage of song. 

Human contests engaging any number of contestants are not struggles ofprinciples but struggles of interests; and this is no less true of thosedecided by the ballot than of those in which the franker bullet givesjudgment. Nor, but from considerations of prudence and expediency, willeither party hesitate to transgress the limits of the law and outragethe sense of right. At Homestead and Wardner the laborers committedrobbery, pillage and murder, as striking workmen invariably do when theydare, and as cowardly newspapers and scoundrel politicians encouragethem in doing. But what would you have? They conceive it to be to theirinterest to do these things. If capitalists conceive it to be to theirsthey too would do them. They do not do them for their interest lies inthe supremacy of the law--under which they can suffer loss but do notsuffer hunger. 

"But they do murder, " say the labor unions; "they bring in gangs ofarmed mercenaries who shoot down honest workmen striving for theirrights. " This is the baldest nonsense, as they know very well who utterit. The Pinkerton men are mere mercenaries and have no right place inour system, but there have been no instances of their attacking men notengaged in some unlawful prank. In the fight at Homestead the workmenwere actually intrenched on premises belonging to the other side, wherethey had not the ghost of a legal right to be. American working men arenot fools; they know well enough when they are rogues. But confession isnot among the military virtues, and the question. Is roguery expedient?is not so simple that it can be determined by asking the first preacheryou meet. 

It would be very nice and fine all round if idle workmen would not riotnor idle employers meet force with force, but invoke the impossibleSheriff. When the Dragon has been chained in the Bottomless Pit and weare living under the rule of the saints, things will be so ordered, butin these rascal times "revolutions are not made with rosewater, " andthis is a revolution. What is being revolutionized is the relationbetween our old friends. Capital and Labor. The relation has alreadybeen altered many times, doubtless; once, we know, within the periodcovered by history, at least in the countries that we call civilized. The relation was formerly a severely simple one--the capitalist ownedthe laborer. Of the difficulty and the cost of abolishing that systemit is needless to speak at length. Through centuries of time and withan appalling sacrifice of life the effort has gone on, a continuouswar characterized by monstrous infractions of law and morals, byincalculable cruelty and crime. Our own generation has witnessed theculminating triumphs of this revolution, and of its three mightiestleaders the assassination of two, the death in exile of the third. Andnow, while still the clank of the falling chains is echoing through theworld, and still a mighty multitude of the world's workers is in bondageunder the old system, the others, for whose liberation was all this"expense of spirit in a waste of shame, " are sharply challenging theadvantage of the new. The new is, in troth, breaking down at everypoint The relation of employer and employee is giving but little bettersatisfaction than that of master and slave. The difference between thetwo is, indeed, not nearly so broad as we persuade ourselves to thinkit. In many of the industries there is practically no difference at all, and the tendency is more and more to effacement of the difference whereit exists. 

Labor unions, strikes and rioting are no new remedies for this insidiousdisorder; they were common in ancient Rome and still more ancient Egypt. In the twenty-ninth year of Rameses III a deputation of workmen employedin the Theban necropolis met the superintendent and the priests witha statement of their grievances. "Behold, " said the spokesman, "weare brought to the verge of famine. We have neither food, nor oil, norclothing; we have no fish; we have no vegetables. Already we have sentup a petition to our sovereign lord the Pharaoh, praying that he willgive us these things and we are going to appeal to the Governor that wemay have the wherewithal to live. " The response to this complaint wasone day's rations of corn. This appears to have been enough only whileit lasted, for a few weeks later the workmen were in open revolt. Thrice they broke out of their quarter, rioting like mad and defying thepolice. Whether they were finally shot full of arrows by the Pinkertonmen of the period the record does not state. 

"Organized discontent" in the laboring population is no new thing underthe sun, but in this century and country it has a new opportunity andOmniscience alone can forecast the outcome. Of one thing we may be verysure, and the sooner the "capitalist" can persuade himself to discern itthe sooner will his eyes guard his neck: the relations between those whoare able to live without physical toil and those who are not are along way from final adjustment, but are about to undergo a profound andessential alteration. That this is to come by peaceful evolution is ahope which has nothing in history to sustain it. There are to be bloodynoses and cracked crowns, and the good people who suffer themselves tobe shocked by such things in others will have a chance to try them forthemselves. The working man is not troubling himself greatly about ajust allotment of these blessings; so that the greater part go to thosewho do not work with their hands he will not consider too curiously anyperson's claim to exemption. It would perhaps better harmonize with hissense of the fitness of things (as it would, no doubt, with that of theangels) if the advantages of the transitional period fell mostly to theshare of such star-spangled impostors as Andrew Carnegie; but almost anydistribution that is sufficiently objectionable as a whole to the otherside will be acceptable to the distributor. In the mean time it is to bewished that the moralize, and homilizers who prate of "principles" mayhave a little damnation dealt out to them on account. The head thatis unable to entertain a philosophical view of the situation would benotably advantaged by removal. 

III. 

It is the immigration of "the oppressed of all nations" that has madethis country one of the worst on the face of the earth. The change fromgood to bad took place within a generation--so quickly that few of ushave had the nimbleness of apprehension to "get it through our heads. "We go on screaming our eagle in the self-same note of triumph that wewere taught at our fathers' knees before the eagle became a buzzard. America is still "an asylum for the oppressed;" and still, as always andeverywhere, the oppressed are unworthy of asylum, avenging upon thosewho give them sanctuary the wrongs from which they fled. The saddestthing about oppression is that it makes its victims unfit for anythingbut to be oppressed--makes them dangerous alike to their tyrants, theirsaviors and themselves. In the end they turn out to be fairly energeticoppressors. The gentleman in the cesspool invites compassion, certainly, but we may be very well assured, before undertaking his relief withouta pole, that his conception of a prosperous life is merely to have hisnose above the surface with another gentleman underfoot. 

All languages are spoken in Hell, but chiefly those of SoutheasternEurope. I do not say that a man fresh from the fields or the factoriesof Europe--even of Southeastern Europe--may not be a good man; I sayonly that, as a matter of fact, he commonly is not. In nine instances inten he is a brute whom it would be God's mercy to drown on his arrival, for he is constitutionally unhappy. 

Let us not deny him his grievance: he works--when he works--for men nobetter than himself. He is required, in many instances, to take a partof his pay in "truck" at prices of breathless altitude; and the payitself is inadequate--hardly more than double what he could get in hisown country. Against all this his howl is justified; but his rioting andassassination are not--not even when directed against the property andpersons of his employers. When directed against the persons of otherlaborers, who choose to exercise the fundamental human right to work forwhom and for what pay they please--when he denies this right, and withit the right of organized society to exist, the necessity of shootinghim is not only apparent; it is conspicuous and imperative. That he andhis horrible kind, of whatever nationality, are usually forgiven thisjust debt of nature, and suffered to execute, like rivers, their annualspring rise, constitutes the most valid of the many indictments thatdecent Americans by birth or adoption find against the feeble form ofgovernment under which their country groans, A nation that will notenforce its laws has no claim to the respect and allegiance of itspeople. 

This "citizen soldiery" business is a ghastly failure. The NationalGuard is not worth the price of its uniforms. It is intended to be aGreater Constabulary: its purpose is to suppress disorders with whichthe civil authorities are too feeble to cope. How often does it do so?Nine times in ten it fraternizes with, or is cowed or beaten bythe savage mobs which it is called upon to kill. In a country witha competent militia and competent men to use it there would be crimeenough and some to spare, but no rioting. Rioting in a Republic iswithout a shadow of excuse. If we have bad laws, or if our good laws arenot enforced; if corporations and capital are "tyrannous and strong;" ifwhite men murder one another and black men outrage white women, all thisis our own fault--the fault of those, among others, who seek redressor revenge by rioting and lynching. The people have always as goodgovernment, as good industrial conditions, as effective protection ofperson, property and liberty, as they deserve. They can have what everthey have the honesty to desire and the sense to set about gettingin the right way. If as citizens of a Republic we lack the virtue andintelligence rightly to use the supreme power of the ballot so that it

 "Executes a freeman's will As lightning does the will of God"

we are unfit to be citizens of a Republic, undeserving of peace, prosperity and liberty, and have no right to rise against conditions dueto our own moral and intellectual delinquency. There is a simple way, Messieurs the Masses to correct public evils: put wise and good men intopower. If you can not do that for you are not yourselves wise, or willnot for you are not yourselves good, you deserve to be oppressed whenyou submit and shot when you rise. 

To shoot a rioter or lyncher is a high kind of mercy. Suppose thattwenty-five years ago (the longer ago the better) two or three criminalmobs in succession had been exterminated in that way, "as the lawprovides. " Suppose that several scores of lives had been so taken, including even those of "innocent spectators"--though that kind ofangel does not abound in the vicinity of mobs. Suppose that no demagoguejudges had permitted officers in command of the "firing lines" to bepersecuted in the courts. Suppose that these events had writ themselveslarge and red in the public memory. How many lives would this havesaved? Just as many as since have been taken and lost by rioters, plusthose that for a long time to come will be taken, and minus those thatwere taken at that time. Make your own computation from your own data; Iinsist only that a rioter shot in time saves nine. 

You know--you, the People--that all this is true. You know that ina Republic lawlessness is villainy entailing greater evils than itcures--that it cures none. You know that even the "money power" ispowerful only through your own dishonesty and cowardice. You know thatnobody can bribe or intimidate a voter who will not take a bribe orsuffer himself to be intimidated--that there can be no "money power"in a nation of honorable and courageous men. You know that "bosses" and"machines" can not control you if you will not suffer then to divide youinto "parties" by playing upon your credulity and senseless passions. You know all this, and know it all the time. Yet not a man has thecourage to stand forth and say to your faces what you know in yourhearts. Well, Messieurs the Masses, I don't consider you dangerous--notvery. I have not observed that you want to tear anybody to pieces forconfessing your sins, even if at the same time he confesses his own. From a considerable experience in that sort of thing I judge that yourather like it, and that he whom, secretly, you most despise is he whoechoes back to you what he is pleased to think you think and flattersyou for gain. Anyhow, for some reason, I never hear you speak well ofnewspaper men and politicians, though in the shadow of your disesteemthey get an occasional gleam of consolation by speaking fairly well ofone another. 

CRIME AND ITS CORRECTIVES

I. 

SOCIOLOGISTS have been debating the theory that the impulse to commitcrime is a disease, and the ayes appear to have it--not the impulse butthe decision. It is gratifying and profitable to have the point settled:we now know "where we are at, " and can take our course accordingly. It has for a number of years been known to all but a few back-numberphysicians--survivals from an exhausted _régime_--that all disease iscaused by bacilli, which worm themselves into the organs that secretehealth and enjoin them from the performance of that rite. Themedical conservatives mentioned attempt to whittle away the value andsignificances of this theory by affirming its inadequacy to accountfor such disorders as broken heads, sunstroke, superfluous toes, home-sickness, burns and strangulation on the gallows; but against thetestimony of so eminent bacteriologists as Drs. Koch and Pasteur theircarping is as that of the idle angler. The bacillus is not to be denied;he has brought his blankets and is here to stay until evicted, andeviction can not be wrought by talking. Doubtless we may confidentlyexpect his eventual suppression by a fresher and more ingeniousdisturber of the physiological peace, but the bacillus is now chiefamong ten thousand evils and it is futile to attempt to read him out ofthe party. 

It follows that in order to deal intelligently with the criminal impulsein our afflicted fellow-citizens we must discover the bacillus of crime. To that end I think that the bodies of hanged assassins and such personsof low degree as have been gathered to their fathers by the cares ofpublic office or consumed by the rust of inactivity in prison should behanded over to the microscopists for examination. The bore, too, offersa fine field for research, and might justly enough be examined alive. Whether there is one general--or as the ancient and honorable ordersprefer to say, "grand"--bacillus, producing a general (or grand)criminal impulse covering a multitude of sins, or an infinite number ofwell defined and several bacilli, each inciting to a particular crime, is a question to the determination of which the most distinguishedmicroscopist might be proud to devote the powers of his eye. If thelatter is the case it will somewhat complicate the treatment, forclearly the patient afflicted with chronic robbery will requiremedicines different from those that might be efficacious in a gentlemansuffering from constitutional theft or the desire to represent hisDistrict in the Assembly. But it is permitted to us to hope that allcrimes, like all arts, are essentially one; that murder, arson andconservatism are but different symptoms of the same physical disorder, back of which is a microbe vincible to a single medicament, albeit thesame awaits discovery. 

In the fascinating theory of the unity of crime we may not unreasonablyhope to find another evidence of the brotherhood of man, anotherspiritual bond tending to draw the various classes of society moreclosely together. 

From time to time it is said that a "wave" of some kind of crimeis sweeping the country. It is all nonsense about "waves" of crime. Occasionally occurs some crime notable for its unusual features, or forthe renown of those concerned. It arrests public attention, which for atime is directed to that particular kind of crane, and the newspapers, with business-like instinct, give, for a season, unusual prominence tothe record of similar offenses. Then, self-deceived, they talk about a"wave, " or "epidemic" of it. So far is this from the truth that one ofthe most noticeable characteristics of crime is the steady and unbrokenmonotony of its occurrence in certain forms. There is nothing so dulland unvarying as this tedious uniformity of repetition. The march ofcrime is never retarded, never accelerated. The criminals appear to bethoroughly well satisfied with their annual average, as shown by theperiodical reports of their secretary, the statistician. 

A marked illustration occurs to me. Many years ago in London awell-known and respectable gentleman was brutally garroted. It was duringthe "silly season"--between sessions of Parliament, when the newspapersare likely to be dull. They at once began to report cases of garroting. There appeared to be an "epidemic of garroting. " The public mind wasterribly excited, and when Parliament met it hastened to pass theinfamous "flogging act"--a distinct reversion to the senseless anddiscredited methods of physical torture, so alluring to the halfinstructed mind of the average journalist of today. Yet the statisticspublished by the Home Secretary under whose administration the act waspassed show that neither at the time of the alarm was there anymaterial increase of garroting, nor in the period of public tranquillitysucceeding was there any appreciable diminution. 

II. 

By advocating painless removal of incurable idiots and lunatics, incorrigible criminals and irreclaimable drunkards from this vale oftears Dr. W. Duncan McKim provoked many a respectable but otherwiseblameless person to throw a catfit of great complexity and power. YetDr. McKim seemed only to anticipate the trend of public opinion andforecast its crystallization into law. It is rapidly becoming a questionof not what we ought to do with these unfortunates, but what we shall becompelled to do. Study of the statistics of the matter shows that inall civilized countries mental and moral diseases are increasing, proportionately to population, at a rate which in the course of a fewgenerations will make it impossible for the healthy to care for theafflicted. To do so will require the entire revenue which it is possibleto raise by taxation--will absorb all the profits of all the industriesand professions and make deeper and deeper inroads upon the capitalfrom which they are derived. When it comes to that there can be butone result. High and humanizing sentiments are angel visitants, whom weentertain with pride and pleasure, but when _fine_ entertainment becomestoo costly to be borne we "speed the parting guest" forthwith. Andit may happen that in inviting to his vacant place a less excitingsuccessor--that in replacing Sentiment with Reason--we shall, in thisinstance, learn to our joy that we do but entertain another angel. Fornothing is so heavenly as Reason; nothing is so sweet and compassionateas her voice--

 "Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose, But musical as is Apollo's lute, "

Is it cruel, is it heartless, is it barbarous to use something of thesame care in breeding men and women as in breeding horses and dogs?Here is a determining question: Knowing yourself doomed to hopelessidiocy, lunacy, crime or drunkenness, would you, or would you not, welcome a painless death? Let us assume that you would. Upon whatground, then, would you deny to another a boon that you would desire foryourself?

III. 

The good American is, as a rule, pretty hard upon roguery, but heatones for his austerity by an amiable toleration of rogues. Hisonly requirement is that he must personally know the rogues. We all"denounce" thieves loudly enough, if we have not the honor of theiracquaintance. If we have, why, that is different--unless they have theactual odor of the prison about them. We may know them guilty, but wemeet them, shake hands with them, drink with them, and if they happen tobe wealthy or otherwise great invite them to our houses, and deem it anhonor to frequent theirs. We do not "approve their methods"--let that beunderstood; and thereby they are sufficiently punished. The notion thata knave cares a pin what is thought of his ways by one who is civil andfriendly to himself appears to have been invented by a humorist. On thevaudeville stage of Mars it would probably have made his fortune. If warrants of arrest were out for every man in this country who isconscious of having repeatedly shaken hands with persons whom he knew tobe knaves there would be no guiltless person to serve them. 

I know men standing high in journalism who today will "expose" andbitterly "denounce" a certain rascality and tomorrow will be hobnobbingwith the rascals whom they have named. I know legislators of renown whohabitually in "the halls of legislation" raise their voices against thedishonest schemes of some "trust magnate, " and are habitually seen infamiliar conversation with him. Indubitably these be hypocrites all. Between the head and the heart of such a man is a wall of adamant, andneither organ knows what the other is doing. 

If social recognition were denied to rogues they would be fewer by many. Some would only the more diligently cover their tracks along the deviouspaths of unrighteousness, but others would do so much violence to theirconsciences as to renounce the disadvantages of rascality for thoseof an honest life. An unworthy person dreads nothing so much as thewithholding of an honest hand, the slow inevitable stroke of an ignoringeye. 

For one having knowledge of Mr. John D. Rockefeller's social life andconnections it would be easy to name a dozen men and women who by aconspiracy of conscription could profoundly affect the plans and profitsof the Standard Oil Company. I have been asked: "If John D. Rockefellerwere introduced to you by a friend, would you refuse to take his hand?"I certainly should--and if ever thereafter I took the hand of that hardy"friend" it would be after his repentance and promise to reform hisways. We have Rockefellers and Morgans because we have "respectable"persons who are not ashamed to take them by the hand, to be seen withthem, to say that they know them. In such it is treachery to censurethem; to cry out when robbed by them is to turn State's evidence. 

One may smile upon a rascal (most of us do so many times a day) if onedoes not know him to be a rascal, and has not said he is; butknowing him to be, or having said he is, to smile upon him is to be ahypocrite--just a plain hypocrite or a sycophantic hypocrite, accordingto the station in life of the rascal smiled upon. There are more plainhypocrites than sycophantic ones, for there are more rascals of noconsequence than rich and distinguished ones, though they get fewersmiles each. The American people will be plundered as long as theAmerican character is what it is; as long as it is tolerant ofsuccessful knavery; as long as American ingenuity draws an imaginarydistinction between a man's public character and his private--hiscommercial and his personal In brief, the American people will beplundered as long as they deserve to be plundered. No human law can stopit, none ought to stop it, for that would abrogate a higher and moresalutary law: "As ye sow ye shall reap. "

In a sermon by the Rev. Dr. Parkhurst is the following: "The story ofall our Lord's dealings with sinners leaves upon the mind the invariableimpression, if only the story be read sympathetically and earnestly, that He always felt kindly towards the transgressor, but could haveno tenderness of regard toward the transgression. There is no safe andsuccessful dealing with sin of any kind save as that distinction isappreciated and made a continual factor in our feelings and efforts. "

With all due respect for Dr. Parkhurst, that is nonsense. If he willread his New Testament more understandingly he will observe thatChrist's kindly feeling to transgressors was not to be counted on bysinners of every kind, and it was not always in evidence; for example, when he flogged the money-changers out of the temple. Nor is Dr. Parkhurst himself any too amiably disposed toward the children ofdarkness. It is not by mild words and gentle means that he has hurledthe mighty from their seats and exalted them of low degree. Suchrevolutions as he set afoot are not made with spiritual rose-water;there must be the contagion of a noble indignation fueled with harderwood than abstractions. The people can not be collected and incited totake sides by the spectacle of a man fighting something that doesnot fight back. It is men that Dr. Parkhurst is trouncing--not theircrimes--not Crime. He may fancy himself "dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, " but in reality he does not hate hate but hates thehateful, and scorns, not scorn, but the scornworthy. 

It is singular with what tenacity that amusing though mischievoussuperstition keeps its hold upon the human mind--that grave _bonafide_ personification of abstractions and the funny delusion that it ispossible to hate or love them. Sin is not a thing; there is no existingobject corresponding to any of the mere counter-words that are properlynamed abstract nouns. One can no more hate sin or love virtue thanone can hate a vacuum (which Nature--itself imaginary--was once by thescientists of the period solemnly held to do) or love one of the threedimensions. We may think that while loving a sinner we hate the sin, but that is not so; if anything is hated it is other sinners of the samekind, who are not quite so close to us. 

"But, " says Citizen Goodheart, who thinks with difficulty, "shall Ithrow over my friend when he is in trouble?" Yes, when you are convincedthat he deserves to be in trouble; throw him all the harder and thefurther because he is your friend. In addition to his particular offenseagainst society he has disgraced _you_. If there are to be lenity andcharity let them go to the criminal who has foreborne to involve youin his shame. It were a pretty state of affairs if an undetected scamp, fearing exposure, could make you a co-defendant by so easy a precautionas securing your acquaintance and regard. Don't throw the first stone, of course, but when convinced that your friend is a proper target, heaveaway with a right hearty good-will, and let the stone be of serviceabledimensions, scabrous, textured flintwise and delivered with a good aim. 

The French have a saying to the effect that to know all is to pardonall; and doubtless with an omniscient insight into the causes ofcharacter we should find the field of moral responsibility prettythickly strewn with extenuating circumstances very suitable indeed forconsideration by a god who has had a hand in besetting "with pitfalland with gin" the road we are to wander in. But I submit that universalforgiveness would hardly do as a working principle. Even those who aremost apt and facile with the incident of the woman taken in adulterycommonly cherish a secret respect for the doctrine of eternal damnation;and some of them are known to pin their faith to the penal code of theirstate. Moreover there is some reason to believe that the sinning woman, being "taken, " was penitent--they usually are when found out. 

I care nothing about principles--they are lumber and rubbish. Whatconcerns our happiness and welfare, as affectible by our fellowmen, isconduct "Principles, not men, " is a rogue's cry; rascality's counsel tostupidity, the noise of the duper duping on his dupe. He shouts it mostloudly and with the keenest sense of its advantage who most desiresinattention to his own conduct, or to that forecast of it, hischaracter. As to sin, that has an abundance of expounders and is alreadyuniversally known to be wicked. What more can be said against it, andwhy go on repeating that? The thing is a trifle wordworn, whereas thesinner cometh up as a flower every day, fresh, ingenious and inviting. Sin is not at all dangerous to society; it is the sinner that does allthe mischief. Sin has no arms to thrust into the public treasury andthe private; no hands with which to cut a throat; no tongue to wrecka reputation withal. I would no more attack it than I would attack anisosceles triangle, a vacuum, or Hume's "phantasm floating in a void. "My chosen enemy must be something that has a skin for my switch, a headfor my cudgel--something that can smart and ache and, if so minded, fight back. I have no quarrel with abstractions; so far as I know theyare all good citizens. 

THE DEATH PENALTY

I. 

"DOWN with the gallows!" is a cry not unfamiliar in America. There isalways a movement afoot to make odious the just principle of "a life fora life"--to represent it as "a relic of barbarism, " "a usurpation ofthe divine authority, " and the rotten rest of it The law making murderpunishable by death is as purely a measure of self-defense as is thedisplay of a pistol to one diligently endeavoring to kill withoutprovocation. Even the most brainless opponent of "capital punishment"would do that if he knew enough. It is in precisely the same sense anadmonition, a warning to abstain from crime. Society says by that law:"If you kill one of us you die, " just as by display of the pistolthe individual whose life is attacked says: "Desist or be shot. " To beeffective the warning in either case must be more than an idle threat. Even the most unearthly reasoner among the gallows-downing unfortunateswould hardly expect to frighten away an assassin who knew the pistolto be unloaded. Of course these queer illogicians can not be made tounderstand that their position commits them to absolute non-resistanceto any kind of aggression, and that is fortunate for the rest of us, for if as Christians they frankly and consistently took that ground weshould be under the miserable necessity of respecting them. 

We have good reason to hold that the horrible prevalence of murder inthis country is due to the fact that we do not execute our laws--thatthe death penalty is threatened but not inflicted--that the pistol isnot loaded. In civilized countries, where there is enough respect forthe laws to administer them, there is enough to obey them. While manstill has as much of the ancestral brute as his skin can hold widioutcracking we shall have thieves and demagogues and anarchists andassassins and persons with a private system of lexicography who definehanging as murder and murder as mischance, and many another disagreeablecreation, but in all this welter of crime and stupidity are areas wherehuman life is comparatively secure against the human hand. It is atleast a significant coincidence that in these the death penalty formurder is fairly well enforced by judges who do not derive any part oftheir authority from those for whose restraint and punishment they holdit. Against the life of one guiltless person the lives of ten thousandmurderers count for nothing; their hanging is a public good, withoutreference to the crimes that disclose their deserts. If we coulddiscover them by other signs than their bloody deeds they should behanged anyhow. Unfortunately we must have a death as evidence. Thescientists who will tell us how to recognize the potential assassin, andpersuade us to kill him, will be the greatest benefactor of his century. 

What would these enemies of the gibbet have?--these lineal descendantsof the drunken mobs that pelted the hangmen at Tyburn Tree; this progenyof criminals, which has so defiled with the mud of its animosity thenoble office of public executioner that even "in this enlightenedage" he shirks his high duty, entrusting it to a hidden or unnamedsubordinate? If murder is unjust of what importance is it whether it'spunishment by death be just or not?--nobody needs to incur it. 

Men are not drafted for the death penalty; they volunteer. "Then it isnot deterrent, " mutters the gentleman whose rude forefather pelted thehangman. Well, as to that, the law which is to accomplish more than apart of its purpose must be awaited with great patience. Every murderproves that hanging is not altogether deterrent; every hanging that itis somewhat deterrent--it deters the person hanged. A man's first murderis his crime, his second is ours. 

The voice of Theosophy has been heard in favor of downing the gallows. As usual the voice is a trifle vague and it babbles. Clear speech is theoutcome of clear thought, and that is something to which Theosophistsare not addicted. Considering their infirmity in that way, it would behardly fair to take them as seriously as they take themselves, butwhen any considerable number of apparently earnest citizens unite in apetition to the Governor of their State, to commute the death sentenceof a convicted assassin without alleging a doubt of his guilt thephenomenon challenges a certain attention to what they do allege. Whatthese amiable persons hold, it seems, is what was held by Alphonse Karr:the expediency of abolishing the death penalty; but apparently they donot hold, with him, that the assassins should begin. They want the Stateto begin, believing that the magnanimous example will effect a change ofheart in those about to murder. This, I take it, is the meaning of theirassertion that "death penalties have not the deterring influence whichimprisonment for life carries. " In this they obviously err: death detersat least the person who suffers it--he commits no more murder; whereasthe assassin who is imprisoned for life and immune from furtherpunishment may with impunity kill his keeper or whomsoever he may beable to get at. Even as matters now are, the most incessant vigilance isrequired to prevent convicts in prison from murdering their attendantsand one another. How would it be if the "life-termer" were assuredagainst any additional inconvenience for braining a guard occasionally, or strangling a chaplain now and then? A penitentiary may be describedas a place of punishment and reward; and under the system proposed thedifference in desirableness between a sentence and an appointment wouldbe virtually effaced. To overcome this objection a life sentence wouldhave to mean solitary confinement, and that means insanity. Is that whatthese Theosophical gentlemen propose to substitute for death?

These petitioners call the death penalty "a relic of barbarism, " whichis neither conclusive nor true. What is required is not loose assertionand dogs-eared phrases, but evidence of futility, or, in lack of that, cogent reasoning. It is true that the most barbarous nations inflict thedeath penalty most frequently and for the greatest number of offenses, but that is because barbarians are more criminal in instinct and lesseasily controlled by gentle methods than civilized peoples. That iswhy we call them barbarous. It is not so very long since our Englishancestors punished more than forty kinds of crime with death. The factthat the hangman, the boiler-in-oil and the breaker-on-the-wheel hadtheir hands full does not show that the laws were futile; it shows thatthe dear old boys from whom we are proud to derive ourselves were a badlot--of which we have abundant corroborative evidence in their brutalpastimes and in their manners and customs generally. To have restrainedthat crowd by the rose-water methods of modern penology--that isunthinkable. 

The death penalty, say the memorialists, "creates blood-thirstiness inthe unthinking masses and defeats its own ends. It is a cause ofmurder, not a check. " These gentlemen are themselves of "the unthinkingmasses"--they do not know how to think. Let them try to trace andlucidly expound the chain of motives lying between the knowledge thata murderer has been hanged and the wish to commit a murder. How, precisely, does the one beget the other? By what unearthly process ofreasoning does a man turning away from the gallows persuade himself thatit is expedient to incur the danger of hanging? Let us have pointed outto us the several steps in that remarkable mental progress. Obviously, the thing is absurd; one might as reasonably say that contemplation ofa pitted face will make a man go and catch smallpox, or the spectacle ofan amputated limb on the scrap-heap of a hospital tempt him to cut offhis arm. 

"An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, " says the Theosophist, "isnot justice. It is revenge and unworthy of a Christian civilization. " Itis exact justice: nobody can think of anything more accurately justthan such punishments would be, whatever the motive in awarding them. Unfortunately such a system is not practicable, but he who denies itsabsolute justice must deny also the justice of a bushel of corn for abushel of corn, a dollar for a dollar, service for service. We can notundertake by such clumsy means as laws and courts to do to the criminalexactly what he has done to his victim, but to demand a life for a lifeis simple, practicable, expedient and (therefore) right. 

Here are two of these gentlemen's dicta, between which they inserted theone just considered, though properly they should go together in frankinconsistency:

"6. It [the death penalty] punishes the innocent a thousand times morethan the guilty. Death is merciful to the tortures which the livingrelatives must undergo. And they have committed no crime. "

"8. Death penalties have not the deterring influence which imprisonmentfor life carries. Mere death is not dreaded. See the number of suicides. Hopeless captivity is much more severe. "

Merely noting that the "living relatives" whose sorrows sosympathetically affect these soft-hearted and soft-headed persons arethose of the murderer, not those of his victim, let us consider whatthey really say, not what they think they say: "Death is no verygreat punishment, for the criminal doesn't mind it much, but hopelesscaptivity is a very great punishment indeed Therefore, let us sparethe assassin's family the tortures they will suffer if we inflictthe lighter penalty. Let us make it easier for them by inflicting theseverer one. "

There is sense for you!--sense of the sound old fruity Theosophicalsort--the kind of sense that has lifted "The Beautiful Cult" out of thedark domain of reason into the serene altitudes of inexpressible Thrill!

As to "hopeless captivity, " though, there is no such thing. In legislation, today can not bind tomorrow. By an act of theLegislature--even by a constitutional prohibition, we may do away withthe pardoning power; but laws can be repealed, constitutions amended. 

The public has a short memory, signatures to petitions in the line ofmercy are had for the asking, and tender-hearted Governors are familiarafflictions. We have life sentences already, and sometimes they areserved to the end--if the end comes soon enough! but the average lengthof "life imprisonment" is, I am told, a little more than seven years. Hope springs eternal in the human beast, and matters simply can notbe so arranged that in entering the penitentiary he will "leave hopebehind. " Hopeless captivity is a dream. 

I quote again:

"9. Life imprisonment is the natural and humane check upon one who hasproven his unfitness for freedom by taking life deliberately. "

What! it is no longer "much more severe" than the "relic of barbarism?"In the course of a half dozen lines of petition it has become "humane". Truly these are lightning changes of character! It would be pleasing toknow just what these worthy Theosophers have the happiness to think thatthey think. 

"It is the only punishment that receives the consent of conscience. "

That is to say, their conscience and that of the convicted assassin. 

"Taking the life of a murderer does not restore the life he tooktherefore, it is a most illogical punishment. Two wrongs do not make aright. "

Here's richness! Hanging an assassin is illogical because it doesnot restore the life of his victim; incarceration does; therefore, incarceration is logical--_quod erat demonstrandum_. 

Two wrongs certainly do not make a right, but the veritable thing indispute is whether taking the life of a life-taker is a wrong. So nakedand unashamed an example of _petitio principii_ would disgrace a debaterin a pinafore. And these wonder-mongers have the incredible effronteryto babble of "logic"! Why, if one of them were to meet a syllogism in alonely road he would run away in a hundred and fifty directions as hardas ever he could hook it. One is almost ashamed to dispute with suchintellectual cloudings. 

Whatever an individual may rightly do to protect himself society mayrightly do to protect him, for he is a part of itself. If he mayrightly take life in defending himself society may rightly take life indefending him. If society may rightly take life in defending him it mayrightly threaten to take it. Having rightly and mercifully threatened totake it, it not only rightly may take it, but expediently must. 

The law of a life for a life does not altogether prevent murder. No lawcan altogether prevent any form of crime, nor is it desirable that itshould. Doubtless God could so have created us that our sense of rightand justice could have existed without contemplation of injustice andwrong, as doubtless he could so have created us that we could have feltcompassion without a knowledge of suffering, but doubtless he did not. Constituted as we are, we can know good only by contrast with evil. Oursense of sin is what our virtues feed upon; in the thin air of universalmorality the altar-fires of honor and the beacons of conscience couldnot be kept alight A community without crime would be a communitywithout warm and elevated sentiments--without the sense of justice, without generosity, without courage, without magnanimity--a community ofsmall, smug souls, uninteresting to God and uncoveted by the Devil. Wecan have too much of crime, no doubt; what the wholesome proportion isnone can say. Just now we are running a good deal to murder, but he whocan gravely attribute that phenomenon, or any part of it, to inflictionof the death penalty, instead of virtual immunity from any penalty atall, is justly entitled to the innocent satisfaction that comes of beinga simpleton. 

The New Woman is against the death penalty, naturally, for she is hotand hardy in the conviction that whatever is is wrong. She has visitedthis world in order to straighten things about a bit, and is in distresslest the number of things be insufficient to her need. The matter isimportant variously; not least so in its relation to the new heaven andthe new earth that are to be the outcome of woman suffrage. There can beno doubt that the vast majority of women have sentimental objections tothe death penalty that quite outweigh such practical considerations inits favor as they can be persuaded to comprehend. Aided by the minorityof men afflicted by the same mental malady, they will indubitably effectits abolition in the first lustrum of their political activity. TheNew Woman will scarcely feel the seat of power warm beneath her beforegiving to the assassin's "unhand me villain!" the authority of law. So we shall make again the old experiment, discredited by a thousandfailures, of preventing crime by tenderness to caught criminals. Andthe criminal uncaught will treat us to a quality of toughness notablyaugmented by the Christian spirit of the régime. 

II. 

As to painless executions, the simple and practical way to make themboth just and popular is the adoption by murderers of a system ofpainless assassinations. Until this is done there seems to be no hopethat the people will renounce the wholesome discomfort of the styleof executions endeared to them by memories and associations of thetenderest character. There is also, I fancy, a shaping notion in thepublic mind that the penologists and their allies have gone about asfar as they can safely be permitted to go in the direction of a softersuasion of the criminal nature toward good behavior. The modern prisonhas become a rather more comfortable habitation than the dangerousclasses are accustomed to at home. Modern prison life has in their eyessomething of the charm and glamor of an ideal existence, like that inthe Happy Valley from which Rasselas had the folly to escape. Whateveradvantages to the public may be secured by abating the rigors ofimprisonment and inconveniences incident to execution, there isthis objection, it makes them less deterrent. Let the penologers andphilanthrope, have their way and even hanging might be made so pleasantand withal so interesting a social distinction that it would deternobody but the person hanged. Adopt the euthanasian method ofelectricity, asphyxia by smothering in rose-leaves, or slow poisoningwith rich food, and the death penalty may come to be regarded as theobject of a noble ambition to the _bon vivant_, and the rising youngsuicide may go and murder somebody else instead of himself in order toreceive a happier dispatch than his own 'prentice hand can assure him. 

But the advocates of agreeable pains and penalties tell us that in thedarker ages, when cruel and degrading punishment was the rule, and wasfreely inflicted for every light infraction of the law, crime was morecommon than it is now; and in this they appear to be right. But they oneand all overlook a fact equally obvious and vastly significant: thatthe intellectual, moral and social condition of the masses was very low. Crime was more common because ignorance was more common, poverty wasmore common, sins of authority, and therefore hatred of authority, weremore common. The world of even a century ago was a quite differentworld from the world of today, and a vastly more uncomfortable one. Thepopular adage to the contrary notwithstanding, human nature was not by along cut the same then that it is now. In the very ancient time of thatearly English king, George III, when women were burned at the stakein public for various offenses and men were hanged for "coining" andchildren for theft, and in the still remoter period, (circa 1530) whenpoisoners were boiled in several waters, divers sorts of criminals weredisemboweled and some are thought to have undergone _the pêne forte etdure_ of cold-pressing (an infliction which the pen of Hugo has sincemade popular--in literature)--in these wicked old days it is possiblethat crime flourished, not because of the law's severity, but in spiteof it. It is possible that our respected and respectable ancestorsunderstood the situation as it then was a trifle better than we canunderstand it on the hither side of this gulf of years, and that theywere not the reasonless barbarians that we think them to have been. And if they were, what must have been the unreason and barbarity of thecriminal element with which they had to deal?

I am far from thinking that severity of punishment can have the samerestraining effect as probability of some punishment being inflicted;but if mildness of penalty is to be superadded to difficulty ofconviction, and both are to be mounted upon laxity in detection, the"pile" will be "complete" with a vengeance. There is a peculiar fitness, perhaps, in the fact that all these ideas for comfortable punishmentshould be urged at a time when there appears to be a tolerably generaldisposition to inflict no punishment at all. There are, however, still afew old-fashioned persons who hold it obvious that one who is ambitiousto break the laws of his country will not with as light a heart and asairy an indifference incur the peril of a harsh penalty as he will thechance of one more nearly resembling that which he would select forhimself. 

III. 

After lying for more than a century dead I was revived, given a newbody, and restored to society. This was in the year 2015. The firstthing of interest that I observed was an enormous building, covering asquare mile of ground. It was surrounded on all sides by a high, strongwall of hewn stone upon which armed sentinels paced to and fro. In oneface of the wall was a single gate of massive iron, strongly guarded. While admiring the cyclopean architecture of the "reverend pile" I wasaccosted by a man in uniform, evidently The Warden, with a cheerfulsalutation. 

"Colonel, " I said, pressing his hand, "it gives me pleasure to find someone that I can believe. Pray tell me what is this building. "

"That, " said the colonel, "is the new State penitentiary. It is one oftwelve, all alike. "

"You surprise me, " I replied. "Surely the criminal element must haveincreased enormously. "

"Yes, indeed, " he assented; "under the Reform _régime_, which began inyour day, it became so powerful, bold and fierce that arrests were nolonger possible and the prisons then in existence were soon overcrowded. The State was compelled to erect others of greater capacity. "

"But, Colonel, " I protested, "if the criminals were too bold andpowerful to be taken into custody, of what use are the prisons! And howare they crowded?"

He fixed upon me a look that I could not fail to interpret as expressinga doubt of my sanity. "What?" he said, "is it possible that the modernPenology is unknown to you? Do you suppose we practise the antiquatedand ineffective method of shutting up the rascals? Sir, the growth ofthe criminal element has, as I said, compelled the erection of more andlarger prisons. We have enough to hold comfortably all the honest menand women of the State. Within these protecting walls they carry on allthe necessary vocations of life excepting commerce. That is necessarilyin the hands of the rogues as before. "

"Venerated representative of Reform, " I exclaimed, wringing his handwith effusion, "you are Knowledge, you are History, you are the HigherEducation! We must talk further. Come, let us enter this benign edifice;you shall show me your dominion and instruct me in the rules. You shallpropose me as an inmate. "

I walked rapidly to the gate. When challenged by the sentinel, Iturned to summon my instructor. He was nowhere visible: desolate andforbidding, as about the broken statue of Ozymandias, "The lone and level sands stretched far away. "

RELIGION

I. 

This is my ultimate and determining test of right--"What, in thecircumstances, would Christ have done?"--the Christ of the NewTestament, not the Christ of the commentators, theologians, priestsand parsons. The test is perhaps not infallible, but it is exceedinglysimple and gives as good practical results as any. I am not a Christian, but so far as I know, the best and truest and sweetest character inliterature, is next to Buddha, Jesus Christ. He taught nothing new ingoodness, for all goodness was ages old before he came; but with analmost infallible intuition he applied to life and conduct the entirelaw of righteousness. He was a lightning moral calculator: to hisluminous intelligence the statement of the problem carried thesolution--he could not hesitate, he seldom erred. That upon his deedsand words was founded a religion which in a debased form persists andeven spreads to this day is mere attestation of his marvelous gift:adoration is a primitive mode of recognition. 

It seems a pity that this wonderful man had not a longer life under morecomplex conditions--conditions more nearly identical with those of themodern world and the future. One would like to be able to see, throughthe eyes of his biographers, his genius applied to more and moredifficult questions. Yet one can hardly go wrong in inference of histhought and act. In many of the complexities and entanglements ofmodern affairs it is no easy matter to find an answer off-hand to thequestion, "What is it right to do?" But put it in another way: "Whatwould Christ have done?" and lo! there is light. I Doubt spreads herbat-like wings and is away; the sun of truth springs into the sky, splendoring the path of right and marking that of error with a deepershade. 

II. 

Gentlemen of the secular press dealt with the Rev. Mr. Sheldon notaltogether fairly. To some very relevant considerations they gave noweight. It was not fair, for example, to say, as the distinguishededitor of the "North American Review" did, that in professing to conducta daily newspaper for a week as he conceived that Christ would haveconducted it, Mr. Sheldon acted the part of "a notoriety seekingmountebank. " It seldom is fair to go into the question of motive, forthat is something upon which one has the least light, even when themotive is one's own. The motives that we think dominale us seem simpleand obvious; they are in most instances exceedingly complex and obscure. Complacently surveying the wreck and ruin that he has wrought, even thatgreat anarch, the "well meaning person, " can not have entire assurancethat he meant as well as the disastrous results appear to him to show. 

The trouble with Mr. Harvey of the "Review" was inability to put himselfin another's place if that happened to be at any considerable distancefrom his own place. He made no allowance for the difference in the pointof view--for the difference, that is, between his mind and the mindof Mr. Sheldon. If Mr. Harvey had undertaken to conduct that Kansasnewspaper as Christ would have done he would indeed have been "anotoriety seeking mountebank, " or some similarly unenviable thing, foronly a selfish purpose could persuade him to an obviously resultlesswork. But Mr. Sheldon was different--his was the religious mind--a mindhaving faith in an "overruling" Providence who can, and frequently does, interfere with the orderly relation of cause and effect, accomplishingan end by means otherwise inadequate to its production. Believinghimself a faithful servant of that Power, and asking daily for itsinterposition for promotion of a highly moral purpose, why should he nothave expected his favor to the enterprise? To expect that was, inMr. Sheldon, natural, reasonable, wise; his folly lay in believing inconditions making it expectable. A person convinced that the law ofgravitation is suspended is no fool for walking into a bog. Mr. Harveymay understand, but Mr. Sheldon can not understand, that Jesus Christwould not edit a newspaper at all. 

The religious mind, it should be understood, is not logical. It mayacquire, as Whateley's did, a certain familiarity with the syllogism asan abstraction, but of the syllogism's practical application, itsreal relation to the phenomena of thought, the religious mind can knownothing. That is merely to say that the mind congenitally gifted withthe power of logic and accessible to its light and leading does not taketo religion, which is a matter, not of reason, but of feeling--not ofthe head, but of the heart. Religions are conclusions for which thefacts of nature supply no major premises. They are accepted or rejectedaccording to the original mental make-up of the person to whom theyappeal for recognition. Believers and unbelievers are like two boysquarreling across a wall. Each got to his place by means of a ladder. They may fight if they will, but neither can kick away the other'ssupport. 

Believing the things that he did believe, Mr. Sheldon was entirely rightin thinking that the main purpose of a newspaper should be the salvationof souls. If his religious belief is true that should be the mainpurpose, not only of a newspaper, but of everything that has a purpose, or can be given one. If we have immortal souls and the consequences ofour deeds in the body reach over into another life in another world, determining there our eternal state of happiness or pain, that is themost momentous fact conceivable. It is the only momentous fact; allothers are chaff and rags. A man who, believing it to be a fact, doesnot make it the one purpose of his life to save his soul and the soulsof others that are willing to be saved is a fool and a rogue. If hethink that any part of this only needful work can be done by turning anewspaper into a gruelpot he ought to do so or (preferably) perish inthe attempt. 

The talk of degrading the sacred name, and all that, is mostly nonsense. If one may not test his conduct in this life by reference to the higheststandard that his religion affords it is not easy to see how religionis to be made anything but a mere body of doctrine. I do not think theChristian religion will ever be seriously discredited by an attempt todetermine, even with too dim a light, what under given circumstances, the man miscalled its "founder" would do. What else is his great examplegood for? But it is not always enough to ask oneself, "How would Christdo this?" One should first consider whether Christ would do it. It isconceivable that certain of his thrifty contemporaries may have askedhim how he would change money in the Temple. 

If Mr. Sheldon's critics were unfair his defenders were, as a rule, not much better. They meant to be fair, but they had to be foolish. Forexample, there is the Rev. Dr. Parkhurst, whose defence was publishedwith Mr. Harvey's attack. I shall give a single illustration of how thismore celebrated than cerebrated "divine" is pleased to think that hethinks. He is replying to some one's application to this matter ofChrist's injunction, "Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth. "This command, he gravely says, "is not against money, nor against themaking of money, but against the loving it for its own sake and thededicating of it to self-aggrandizing uses. " I call this a foolishutterance, because it violates the good old rule of not telling anobvious falsehood. In no word nor syllable does Christ's injunction givethe least color of truth to the reverend gentleman's "interpretation;"that is the reverend gentleman's very own, and doubtless he feelsan honest pride in it. It is the product of a controversial need--acharacteristic attempt to crawl out of a hole in an enclosure whichhe was not invited to enter. The words need no "interpretation;" arecapable of none; are as clear and unambiguous a proposition as languagecan frame. Moreover, they are consistent with all that we think we knowof their author's life and character, for he not only lived in povertyand taught poverty as a blessing, but commanded it as a duty and a meansof salvation. The probable effect of universal obedience among those whoadore him as a god is not at present an urgent question. I think even sofaithful a disciple as the Rev. Dr. Parkhurst has still a place to layhis head, a little of the wherewithal to be clothed, and a good deal ofthe power of interpretation to excuse it. 

III. 

There are other hypocrites than those of the pulpit Dr. Gatling, theingenious scoundrel who invented the gun that bears his name withcommendable fortitude, says he has given much thought to the task ofbringing the forces of war to such perfection that war will be no more. Commonly the man who talks of war becoming so destructive as to beimpossible is only a harmless lunatic, but this fellow utters his cantto conceal his cupidity. If he thought there was any danger of thenations beating their swords into plowshares we should see him "take thestump" against agriculture forthwith. The same is true of all militaryinventors. They are lions' parasites; themselves, of cold blood theyfatten upon hot. The sheep-tick's paler fare is not at all to theirtaste. 

I sometimes wish I were a preacher: preachers do so blindly ignore theirshining opportunities. I am indifferently versed in theology--whereof, so help me Heaven, I do not believe one word--but know something ofreligion. I know, for example, that Jesus Christ was no soldier; thatwar has two essential features which did not command His approval:aggression and defence. No man can either attack or defend and remainChristian; and if no man, no nation. I could quote texts by the hourproving that Christ taught not only absolute abstention from violencebut absolute non-resistance. Now what do we see? Nearly all theso-called Christian nations of the world sweating and groaning undertheir burdens of debt contracted in violation of these injunctions whichthey believe divine--contracted in perfecting their means of offenseand defense. "We must have the best, " they cry; and if armor platesfor ships were better when alloyed with silver, and guns if banded withgold, such armor plates would be put upon the ships, such guns would befreely made. No sooner does one nation adopt some rascal's costly devicefor taking life or protecting it from the taker (and these soullessinventors will as readily sell the product of their malign ingenuity toone nation as to another) than all the rest either possess themselvesof it or adopt something superior and more expensive; and so all pay thepenalty for the sins of each. A hundred million dollars is a moderateestimate of what it has cost the world to abstain from strangling theinfant Gatling in his cradle. 

You may say, if you will, that primitive Christianity--the Christianityof Christ--is not adapted to these rough-and-tumble times; that it isnot a practical scheme of conduct. As you please; I have not undertakento say what it is not, but what it partly is. I am no Christian, thoughI think that Christ probably knew what was good for man about as wellas Dr. Gatling or the United States Ordnance Office. It is not for me todefend Christianity; Christ did not. Nevertheless, I can not forbear thewish that I were a preacher, in order sincerely to affirm that the awfulburdens borne by modern nations are obvious judgments of Heaven fordisobedience to the Prince of Peace. What a striking theme to kindlefires upon the heights of imagination--to fill the secret sources ofeloquence--to stir the very stones in the temple of truth! What anoble subject for the pious gentlemen who serve (with rank, pay andallowances) as chaplains in the Army and the Navy, or the civiliandivines who offer prayer at the launching of an ironclad!

IV. 

A matter of missionaries commonly is to the fore as a cause of quarrelamong nations which have the hardihood to prefer their own religionsto ours. Missionaries constitute, in truth, a perpetual menace to thenational peace. I dare say the most of them are conscientious men andwomen of a certain order of intellect. They believe, and from the waythat they interpret their sacred book have some reason to believe, thatin meddling uninvited with the spiritual affairs of others they performa work acceptable to God--their God. They think they discern a moraldifference between "approaching" a man of another religion about thestate of his soul and approaching him on the condition of his linenor the character of his wife. I think there is no difference. I haveobserved that the person who volunteers an interest in my spiritualwelfare is the same person from whom I must expect an impudent concernabout my temporal affairs. The missionary is one who goes about throwingopen the shutters of other men's bosoms in order to project upon theblank walls a shadow of himself. 

No ruler nor government of sense would willingly permit foreigners tosap the foundation of the national religion. No ruler nor governmentever does permit it except under the stress of compulsion. It is throughthe people's religion that a wise government governs wisely--even in ourown country we make only a transparent pretense of officially ignoringChristianity, and a pretense only because we have so many kinds ofChristians, all jealous and inharmonious. Each sect would make this aTheocracy if it could, and would that make short work of any missionaryfrom abroad. Happily all religions but ours have the sloth and timidityof error; Christianity alone, drawing vigor from eternal truth, iscourageous enough and energetic enough to make itself a nuisance topeople of every other faith. The Jew not only does not bid for converts, but discourages them by imposition of hard conditions, and the MoslemTrue Believer's simple, forthright method of reducing error is to cutoff the head holding it. I don't say that this is right; I say onlythat, being practical and comprehensible, it commands a certain respectfrom the impartial observer not conversant with scriptural justificationof the other practice. 

It is only where the missionaries have made themselves hated that thereis any molestation of Europeans engaged in the affairs of this world. Chinese antipathy to Caucasians in China is neither a racial animositynor a religious; it is an instinctive dislike of persons who will notmind their own business. China has been infested with missionaries fromthe earliest centuries of our era, and they have rarely been molestedwhen they have taken the trouble to behave themselves. In the time ofthe Emperor Justinian the fact that the Christian religion was openlypreached throughout China enabled that sovereign to wrest from theChinese the jealously-guarded secret of silk-making. He sent two monksto Pekin, who alternately preached seriousness and studied sericulture, and who brought away silkworms' eggs concealed in sticks. 

In religious matters the Chinese are more tolerant than we. They let thereligions of others alone, but naturally and rightly demand that othersshall let theirs alone. In China, as in other Oriental countrieswhere the color line is not drawn and where slavery itself is a lightaffliction, the mental attitude of the zealot who finds gratificationin "spreading the light" of which he deems himself custodian, is notunderstood. Like most things not understood, it is felt to be bad, andis indubitably offensive. 

V. 

At a church club meeting a paper was read by a minister entitled, "Whythe Masses Do not Attend the Churches. " This good and pious man was notashamed to account for it by the fact that there is no Sunday law, and "the masses" can find recreation elsewhere, even in the drinkingsaloons. It is frank of him to admit that he and his professionalbrethren have not brains enough to make religious services moreattractive than shaking dice for cigars or playing cards for drink; butif it is a fact he must not expect the local government to assist inspreading the gospel by rounding-up the people and corralling them inthe churches. The truth is, and this gentleman suspects it, that "themasses" stay out of hearing of his pulpit because he talks nonsenseof the most fatiguing kind; they would rather do any one of a thousandother things than go to hear it. These parsons are like a scolding wifewho grieves because her husband will not pass his evenings with her. Themore she grieves, the more she scolds and the more diligently he keepsaway from her. I don't think Jack Satan is conspicuously wise, but heis in the main a good entertainer, with a right pretty knack at makingpeople come again; but the really reprehensible part of his performanceis not the part that attracts them. The parsons might study his methodswith great advantage to religion and morality. 

It may be urged that religious services have not entertainment for theirobject. But the people, when not engaged in business or labor, haveit for _their_ object. If the clergy do not choose to adapt theirministrations to the characters of those to whom they wish to minister, that is their own affair; but let them accept the consequences. "Themasses" move along the line of least reluctance. They do not reallyenjoy Sunday at all; they try to get through the day in the manner thatis least wearisome to the spirit. Possibly their taste is not what itought to be. If this minister were a physician of bodies instead ofsouls, and patients who had not called him in should refuse to takethe medicine which he thought his best and they his nastiest, he shouldeither offer them another, a little less disagreeable if a little lessefficacious, or let them alone. In no case is he justified in asking thecivil authority to hold their noses while he plies the spoon. 

"The masses" have not asked for churches and services; they really donot care for anything of the kind--whether they ought is another matter. If the clergy choose to supply them, that is well and worthy. But theyshould understand their relation to the impenitent worldling, which isprecisely that of a physician without a mandate from the patient, whomay not be convinced that there is very much the matter with him. Thephysician may have a diploma and a State certificate authorizing him topractise, but if the patient do not deem himself bound to be practisedupon has the physician a right to make him miserable until he willsubmit? Clearly, he has not. If he can not persuade him to come to thedispensary and take medicine there is an end to the matter, and he mayjustly conclude that he is misfitted to his vocation. 

I am sure that the ministers and that singularly small contingent ofearnest and, on the whole, pretty good persons who cluster about them donot perceive how alien they are in their convictions, tastes, sympathiesand general mental habitudes to the great majority of their fellow menand women. Their voices, like "the gushing wave" which, to the ears ofthe lotus-eaters, "Far, far away did seem to mourn and rave, "

come to us as from beyond a great gulf--mere ghosts of sound, almostdestitute of signification. We know that they would have us dosomething, but what it is we do not clearly apprehend. We feel that theyare concerned for us, but why we are imperfectly able to conceive. In anintelligible tongue they tell us of unthinkable things. Here and therein the discourse we catch a word, a phrase, a sentence--somethingwhich, from ancestors whose mother-speech it was, we have inherited thecapacity to understand; but the homily as a whole is devoid of meaning. Solemn and sonorous enough it all is, and not unmusical, but it lacksits natural accompaniment of shawm and sackbut and the wind-swept harpin the willows by the waters of Babylon. It is, in fact, something of asurvival--the memory of a dream. 

VI. 

The first week of January is set apart as a week of prayer. It is acustom of more than a half century's age, and it seems that "graciousanswers have been received in proportion to the earnestness andunanimity of the petitions. " That is to say, in this world's speech, themore Christians that have prayed and the more they have meant it, thebetter the result is known to have been. I don't believe all that. Idon't believe that when God is asked to do something that he had notintended to do he counts noses before making up his mind whether to doit or not God probably knows the character of his work, and knowing thathe has made this a world of knaves and dunces he must know that themore of them that ask for something, and the more loudly they ask, thestronger is the presumption that they ought not to have it. And I thinkGod is perhaps less concerned about his popularity than some good folkseem to suppose. 

Doubtless there are errors in the record of results--some thingsset down as "answers" to prayer which came about through the orderlyoperation of natural laws and would have occurred anyhow. I am told thatsimilar errors have been made, or are believed to have been made, inthe past. In 1730, for example, a good Bishop at Auvergne prayed for aneclipse of the sun as a warning to unbelievers. The eclipse ensued andthe pious prelate made the most of it; but when it was shown thatthe astronomers of the period had foretold it he was a sufferer fromirreverent gibes. A monk of Treves prayed that an enemy of the church, then in Paris, might lose his head, and it fell off; but it transpiredthat, unknown (or known) to the monk, the man was under sentence ofdecapitation when the prayer was made. This is related by Ausolus, whopiously explains, however, that but for the prayer the sentence mightperhaps have been commuted to service in the galleys. I have myselfknown a minister to pray for rain, and the rain came. Perhaps you canconceive his discomfiture when I showed him that the weather bureau hadpreviously predicted a fair day. 

I do not object to a week of prayer. But why only a week? If prayeris "answered" Christians ought to pray all the time. That prayer is"answered" the Scripture affirms as positively and unequivocally asanything can be affirmed in words: "All things whatsoever ye shall askin prayer, believing, that ye shall receive. " Why, then, when all theclergy of this country prayed, publicly for the recovery of PresidentMcKinley, did the man die? Why is it that although two pious Chaplainsask almost daily that goodness and wisdom may descend upon Congress, Congress remains wicked and unwise? Why is it that although in all thechurches and half the dwellings of the land God is continually asked forgood government, good government remains what it always and everywherehas been, a dream? From Earth to Heaven in unceasing ascension flows astream of prayer for every blessing that man desires, yet man remainsunblest, the victim of his own folly and passions, the sport of fire, flood, tempest and earthquake, afflicted with famine and disease, war, poverty and crime, his world an incredible welter of evil, his life'a labor and his hope a lie. Is it possible that all this praying isfutilized and invalidated by the lack of faith?--that the "asking"is not credentialed by the "believing?" When the anointed ministerof Heaven spreads his palms and uprolls his eyes to beseech a generalblessing or some special advantage is he the celebrant of a hollow, meaningless rite, or the dupe of a false promise? One does not know, butif one is not a fool one does know that his every resultless petitionproves him by the inexorable laws of logic to be the one or the other. 

VII. 

Modern Christianity is beautiful exceedingly, and he who admires not iseyed batly and minded as the mole. "Sell all thou hast, " said Christ and"give to the poor. " All--no less--in order "to be saved. " The poor wereChrist's peculiar care. Ever for them and their privations, andnot greatly for their spiritual darkness, fell from his lips thecompassionate word, the mandate divine for their relief and cherishing. Of foreign missions, of home missions, of mission schools, of churchbuildings, of work among pagans _in partibus infidelium_, of work amongsailors, of communion table, of delegates to councils--of any of thesethings he knew no more than the moon man. They were inventions ofothers, as is the entire florid and flamboyant fabric of ecclesiasticismthat has been reared, stone by stone and century after century, upon hissimple life and works and words. "Founder, " indeed! He founded nothing, instituted nothing; Paul did all that Christ simply went about doing, and being, good--admonishing the rich, whom he regarded as criminals, comforting the luckless and uttering wisdom with that Orientalindirection wherein our stupid ingenuity finds imaginary warrant for alldesiderated pranks and fads. 

IMMORTALITY

THE desire for life everlasting has commonly been affirmed to beuniversal--at least that is the view taken by those unacquainted withOriental faiths and with Oriental character. Those of us whose knowledgeis a trifle wider are not prepared to say that the desire is universalor even general. 

If the devout Buddhist, for example, wishes to "live alway, " he has notsucceeded in very clearly formulating the desire. The sort of thing thathe is pleased to hope for is not what we should call life, and not whatmany of us would care for. 

When a man says that everybody has "a horror of annihilation, " we may bevery sure that he has not many opportunities for observation, or thathe has not availed himself of all that he has. Most persons go to sleeprather gladly, yet sleep is virtual annihilation while it lasts; and ifit should last forever the sleeper would be no worse off after a millionyears of it than after an hour of it There are minds sufficientlylogical to think of it that way, and to them annihilation is not adisagreeable thing to contemplate and expect. 

In this matter of immortality, people's beliefs appear to go along withtheir wishes. The chap who is content with annihilation thinks he willget it; those that want immortality are pretty sure they are immortal, and that is a very comfortable allotment of faiths. The few of us thatare left unprovided for are those who don't bother themselves much aboutthe matter, one way or another. 

The question of human immortality is the most momentous that the mindis capable of conceiving. If it is a fact that the dead live, all otherfacts are in comparison trivial and without interest. The prospect ofobtaining certain knowledge with regard to this stupendous matter is notencouraging. In all countries but those in barbarism the powers of theprofoundest and most penetrating intelligences have been ceaselesslyaddressed to the task of glimpsing a life beyond this life; yet today noone can truly say that he knows. It is still as much a matter of faithas ever it was. 

Our modern Christian nations hold a passionate hope and belief inanother world, yet the most popular writer and speaker of his time, theman whose lectures drew the largest audiences, the work of whose penbrought him the highest rewards, was he who most strenuously strove todestroy the ground of that hope and unsettle the foundations of thatbelief. 

The famous and popular Frenchman, Professor of Spectacular Astronomy, Camille Flammarion, affirms immortality because he has talked withdeparted souls who said that it was true. Yes, Monsieur, but surelyyou know the rule about hearsay evidence. We Anglo-Saxons are veryparticular about that. Your testimony is of that character. 

"I don't repudiate the presumptive arguments of school men. I merelysupplement them with something positive. For instance, if you assumedthe existence of God this argument of the scholastics is a good one. Godhas implanted in all men the desire of perfect happiness. This desirecan not be satisfied in our lives here. If there were not another lifewherein to satisfy it then God would be a deceiver. _Voila tout_. "

There is more: the desire of perfect happiness does not implyimmortality, even if there is a God, for:

( 1 ) God may not have implanted it, but merely suffers it to exist, asHe suffers sin to exist, the desire of wealth, the desire to live longerthan we do in this world. It is not held that God implanted all thedesires of the human heart. Then why hold that He implanted that ofperfect happiness?

(2) Even if He did--even if a divinely implanted desire entail its owngratification--even if it can not be gratified in this life--that doesnot imply immortality. It implies _only_ another life long enough forits gratification just once. An eternity of gratification is not alogical inference from it. 

(3) Perhaps God _is_ "a deceiver" who knows that He is not? Assumptionof the existence of a God is one thing; assumption of the existence ofa God who is honorable and candid according to our finite conception ofhonor and candor is another. 

(4) There may be an honorable and candid God. He may have implantedin us the desire of perfect happiness. It may be--it is--impossible togratify that desire in this life. Still, another life is not implied, for God may not have intended us to draw the inference that He is goingto gratify it. If omniscient and omnipotent, God must be held to haveintended, whatever occurs, but no such God is assumed in M. Flammarion'sillustration, and it may be that God's knowledge and power are limited, or that one of them is limited. 

M. Flammarion is a learned, if somewhat "yellow" astronomer. 

He has a tremendous imagination, which naturally is more at home inthe marvelous and catastrophic than in the orderly regions of familiarphenomena. To him the heavens are an immense pyrotechnicon and he is themaster of the show and sets off the fireworks. But he knows nothingof logic, which is the science of straight thinking, and his views ofthings have therefore no value; they are nebulous. 

Nothing is clearer than that our pre-existence is a dream, havingabsolutely no basis in anything that we know or can hope to know. Ofafter-existence there is said to be evidence, or rather testimony, in assurances of those who are in present enjoyment of it--if it isenjoyable. Whether this testimony has actually been given--and it is theonly testimony worth a moment's consideration--is a disputed point Manypersons while living this life have professed to have received it. But nobody professes, or ever has professed, to have received acommunication of any kind from one in actual experience of thefore-life. "The souls as yet ungarmented, " if such there are, are dumbto question. The Land beyond the Grave has been, if not observed, yet often and variously described: if not explored and surveyed, yetcarefully charted. From among so many accounts of it that we have, hemust be fastidious indeed who can not be suited. But of the Fatherlandthat spreads before the cradle--the great Heretofore, wherein we alldwelt if we are to dwell in the Hereafter, we have no account. Nobodyprofesses knowledge of that. No testimony reaches our ears of fleshconcerning its topographical or other features; no one has been soenterprising as to wrest from its actual inhabitants any particulars oftheir character and appearance, to refresh our memory withal. And amongeducated experts and professional proponents of worlds to be there is ageneral denial of its existence. 

I am of their way of thinking about that. The fact that we have norecollection of a former life is entirely conclusive of the matter. To have lived an unrecollected life is impossible and unthinkable, forthere would be nothing to connect the new life with the old--no threadof continuity--nothing that persisted from the one life to the other. The later birth is that of another person, an altogether differentbeing, unrelated to the first--a new John Smith succeeding to the lateTom Jones. 

Let us not be misled here by a false analogy. Today I may get athwack on the mazzard which will give me an intervening season ofunconsciousness between yesterday and tomorrow. Thereafter I may live toa green old age with no recollection of anything that I knew, or did, orwas before the accident; yet I shall be the same person, for between theold life and the new there will be a _nexus_, a thread of continuity, something spanning the gulf from the one state to the other, and thesame in both--namely, my body with its habits, capacities and powers. That is I; that identifies me as my former self--authenticates andcredentials me as the person that incurred the cranial mischance, dislodging memory. 

But when death occurs _all_ is dislodged if memory is; for betweentwo merely mental or spiritual existences memory is the only _nexus_conceivable; consciousness of identity is the only identity. Tolive again without memory of having lived before is to live another. Re-existence without recollection is absurd; there is nothing tore-exist. 

OPPORTUNITY

THIS is not a country of equal fortunes; outside a Socialist's dream nosuch country exists or can exist. But as nearly as possible this is acountry of equal opportunities for those who begin life with nothing butnature's endowments--and of such is the kingdom of success. 

In nine instances in ten successful Americans--that is Americanswho have succeeded in any worthy ambition or legitimate field ofendeavor--have started with nothing but the skin they stood in. Italmost may be said, indeed, that to begin with nothing is a maincondition of success--in America. 

To a young man there is no such hopeless impediment as wealth or theexpectation of wealth. Here a man and there a man will be born soabundantly endowed by nature as to overcome the handicap of artificial"advantages, " but that is not the rule; usually the chap "born witha gold spoon in his mouth" puts in his time sucking that spoon, andwithout other employment. Counting possession of the spoon success, whyshould he bestir himself to achieve what he already has?

The real curled darling of opportunity has nothing in his mouth but histeeth and his appetite--he knows, or is likely to know, what it is tofeel his belly sticking to his back. If he have brains a-plenty hewill get on, for he must be up and doing--the penalty of indiligence isfamine. If he have not, he may up and do to the uttermost satisfactionof his mind and heart, but the end of that man is failure, with possiblySocialism, that last resort of conscious incompetence. It fatigues, thistalk of the narrowing opportunities of today, the "closed avenues tosuccess, " and the rest of it. Doubtless it serves its purpose of makingmischief for the tyrant trusts and the wicked rich generally, but in asix months' bound volume of it there is not enough of truth to float areligion. 

Men of brains never had a better chance than now to accomplish all thatit is desirable that they should accomplish; and men of no brains neverdid have much of a chance, nor under any possible conditions can havein this country, nor in any other. They are nature's failures, God's botchwork. Let us be sorry for them, treating them justly andgenerously; but the Socialism that would level us all down to theirplane of achievement and reward is a proposal of which they arethemselves the only proponents. 

Opportunity, indeed! Who is holding me from composing a great opera thatwould make me rich and famous?

What oppressive laws forbade me to work my passage up the Yukon asdeckhand on a steamboat and discover the gold along Bonanza creek?

What is there in our industrial system that conceals from me the secretof making diamonds from charcoal?

Why was it not I who, entering a lawyer's office as a suitable person tosweep it out, left it as an appointed Justice of the Supreme Court?

The number of actual and possible sources of profit and methods ofdistinction is infinite. Not all the trusts in the world combined in onetrust of trusts could appreciably reduce it--could condemn to permanentfailure one man with the talent and the will to succeed. They canabolish that doubtful benefactor of the "small dealer, " who livesby charging too much, and that very thickly disguised blessing the"drummer, " whom they have to add to the price of everything they sell;but for every opportunity they close they open a new one and leaveuntouched a thousand actual and a million possible ones. As to theirdishonest practices, these are conspicuous and striking, because"lumped, " but no worse than the silent, steady aggregate of cheating;by which their constituent firms and individuals, formerly consumed theconsumer without his special wonder. 

CHARITY

THE promoter of organized charity protests against "the wasteful andmischievous method of undirected relief. " He means, naturally, relief that is not directed by somebody else than the persongiving it--undirected by him and his kind--professionalalmoners--philanthropists who deem it more blessed to allot thanto bestow. Indubitably much is wasted and some mischief done byindiscriminate giving--and individual givers are addicted to that faultypractice. But there is something to be said for "undirected relief"quite the same. It blesses not only him who receives (when he is worthy;and when he is not upon his own head be it), but him who gives. Tothose uncalculating persons who, despite the protests of the organizedcharitable, concede a certain moral value to the spontaneous impulses ofthe heart and read in the word "relief" a double meaning, the officeof the mere distributor is imperfectly sacred. He is even withoutscriptural authority, and lives in the perpetual challenge of a moral_quo warranto_. Nevertheless he is not without his uses. He is atapper of tills that do not open automatically. He is almoner to theuncompassionate, who but for him would give no alms. He negotiatesunnatural but not censurable relations between selfishness andingratitude. The good that he does is purely material. He makes twoleaves of fat to grow where but one grew before, lessens the sum ofgastric pangs and dorsal chills. All this is something, certainly, but it generates no warm and elevated sentiments and does nothing inmitigation of the poor's animosity to the rich. Organized charity is asapid and savorless thing; its place among moral agencies is no higherthan that of root beer. 

Christ did not say "Sell whatsoever thou hast and give to the church togive to the poor. " He did not mention the Associated Charities of theperiod. I do not find the words "The Little Sisters of the Poor ye havealways with you, " nor "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least ofthese Dorcas societies ye have done it unto me. " Nowhere do I findmyself commanded to enable others to comfort the afflicted and visit thesick and those in prison. Nowhere is recorded God's blessing upon himwho makes himself a part of a charity machine--no, not even if he be theguiding lever of the whole mechanism. 

Organized charity is a delusion and a snare. It enables Munniglut tothink himself a good man for paying annual dues and buying transferablemeal tickets. Munniglut is not thereby, a good man. On the Last GreatDay, when he cowers in the Ineffable Presence and is asked for anaccounting it will not help him to say, "Hearing that A was in want Igave money for his need to B. " Nor will it help B to say, "When A wasin distress I asked C to relieve him, and myself allotted the reliefaccording to a resolution of D, E and F. "

There are blessings and benefactions that one would willinglyforego--among them the poor. Quack remedies for poverty amuse; a realspecific would kindle a noble enthusiasm. Yet the world would lose muchby it; human nature would suffer a change for the worse. Happily andunhappily poverty is not abolishable: "The poor ye have always with you"is a sentence that can never become unintelligible. Effect of a thousandcauses, poverty is invincible, eternal. And since we must have it let usthank God for it and avail ourselves of all its advantages to mind andcharacter. He who is not good to the deserving poor--who knows not thoseof his immediate environment, who goes not among them making inquiry oftheir personal needs, who does not wish with all his heart and both hishands to relieve them--is a fool. 

EMANCIPATED WOMAN

WHAT I should like to know is, how "the enlargement of woman's sphere"by entrance into the various activities of commercial, professional andindustrial life benefits the sex. It may please Helen Gougar and satisfyher sense of logical accuracy to say, as she does: "We women must workin order to fill the places left vacant by liquor-drinking men. " But whofilled these places before? Did they remain vacant, or were there thendisappointed applicants, as now? If my memory serves, there has been notime in the period that it covers when the supply of workers--abstemiousmale workers--was not in excess of the demand. That it has always beenso is sufficiently attested by the universally inadequate wage rate. 

Employers seldom fail, and never for long, to get all the workmen theyneed. The field, then, into which women have put their sickles wasalready overcrowded with reapers. Whatever employment women haveobtained has been got by displacing men--who would otherwise besupporting women. Where is the general advantage? We may shout "hightariff, " "combination of capital, " "demonetization of silver, " and whatnot, but if searching for the cause of augmented poverty and crime, "industrial discontent, " and the tramp evil, instead of dogmaticallyexpounding it, we should take some account of this enormous, suddenaddition to the number of workers seeking work. If any one thinks thatwithin the brief period of a generation the visible supply of labor canbe enormously augmented without profoundly affecting the stability ofthings and disastrously touching the interests of wage-workers, let norude voice dispel his dream of such maleficent agencies as his slumbrousunderstanding may joy to affirm. And let our Widows of Ashur unlungthemselves in advocacy of quack remedies for evils for which theythemselves are cause; it remains true that when the contention of twolions for one bone is exacerbated by the accession of a lioness thesquabble is not composable by stirring up some bears in the cageadjacent. 

Indubitably a woman is under no obligation to sacrifice herself to thegood of her sex by refusing needed employment in the hope that itmay fall to a man gifted with dependent women. Nevertheless ourcongratulations are more intelligent when bestowed upon her individualhead than when sifted into the hair of all Eve's daughters. This isa world of complexities, in which the lines of interest are sointertangled as frequently to transgress that of sex; and one ambitiousto help but half the race may profitably know that every effort to thatend provokes a counterbalancing mischief. The "enlargement of woman'sopportunities" has benefited individual women. It has not benefited thesex as a whole, and has distinctly damaged the race. The mind that cannot discern a score of great and irreparable general evils distinctlytraceable to "emancipation of woman" is as impregnable to the light as atoad in a rock. 

A marked demerit of the new order of things--the régime of femalecommercial service--is that its main advantage accrues, not to the race, not to the sex, not to the class, not to the individual woman, but tothe person of least need and worth--the male employer. (Female employersin any considerable number there will not be, but those that we havecould give the male ones profitable instruction in grinding the facesof their employees. ) This constant increase of the army of labor--alwaysand everywhere too large for the work in sight--by accession of a newcontingent of natural oppressibles makes the very teeth of old Munniglutthrill with a poignant delight. It brings in that situation known as twolaborers seeking one job---and one of them a person whose bones he caneasily grind to make his bread. And Munniglut is a miller of skill andexperience, dusted all over with the evidence of his useful craft. WhenHeaven has assisted the Daughters of Hope to open to women a new "avenueof opportunities" the first to enter and walk therein, like God in theGarden of Eden, is the good Mr. Munniglut, contentedly smoothing thefolds out of the superior slope of his paunch, exuding the peculiararoma of his oleagmous personality, and larding the new roadway with theoverflow of a righteousness secreted by some spiritual gland stimulatedto action by relish of his own identity. And ever thereafter the subtlesuggestion of a fat Philistinism lingers along the path of progress likean assertion of a possessory right. 

It is God's own crystal truth that in dealing with women unfortunateenough to be compelled to earn their own living and fortunate enoughto have wrested from Fate an opportunity to do so, men of business andaffairs treat them with about the same delicate consideration that theyshow to dogs and horses of the inferior breeds. It does not commonlyoccur to the wealthy "professional man, " or "prominent merchant, " to beashamed to add to his yearly thousands a part of the salary justly dueto his female bookkeeper or typewriter, who sits before him all day withan empty belly in order to have an habilimented back. He has a vague, hazy notion that the law of supply and demand is mandatory, and that insubmitting himself to it by paying her a half of what he would have topay a man of inferior efficiency he is supplying the world with a nobleexample of obedience. I must take the liberty to remind him that thelaw of supply and demand is not imperative; it is not a statute, buta phenomenon. He may reply: "It is imperative; the penalty fordisobedience is failure. If I pay more in salaries and wages than I needto, my competitor will not; and with that advantage he will drive mefrom the field. " If his margin of profit is so small that he must ekeit out by coining the sweat of his workmen into nickels, I've nothing tosay to him. Let him adopt in peace the motto, "I cheat to eat" I do notknow why he should eat, but Nature, who has provided sustenance for theworming sparrow, the sparrowing owl, and the owling eagle, approves theneedy man of prey, and makes a place for him at table. 

Human nature is pretty well balanced; for every lacking virtue there isa rough substitute that will serve at a pinch--as cunning is thewisdom of the unwise, and ferocity the courage of the coward. Nobodyis altogether bad; the scoundrel who has grown rich by underpayingthe workmen in his factory will sometimes endow an asylum for indigentseamen. To oppress one's own workmen, and provide for the workmen ofa neighbor--to skin those in charge of one's own interests, whilecottoning and oiling the residuary product of another's skinnery--thatis not very good benevolence, nor very good sense, but it serves inplace of both. The man who eats _pâté de fois gras_ in the sweat of hisgirl cashier's face, or wears purple and fine linen in order that histypewriter may have an eocene gown and a pliocene hat, seems a tolerablysatisfactory specimen of the genus thief; but let us not forget that inhis own home--a fairly good one--he may enjoy and merit that highestand most honorable title in the hierarchy of woman's favor, "a goodprovider. " One having a just claim to that glittering distinction shouldenjoy a sacred immunity from the coarse and troublesome question, "Fromwhose backs and bellies do you provide?"

So much for the material results to the sex. What are the moral results?One does not like to speak of them, particularly to those who do not andcan not know--to good women in whose innocent minds female immoralityis inseparable from flashy gowning and the painted face; to foolish, book-taught men who honestly believe in some protective sanctity thathedges womanhood. If men of the world with years enough to have livedout of the old _régime_ into the new would testify in this matter therewould ensue a great rattling of dry bones in bodices of reform ladies. Nay, if the young man about town, knowing nothing of how things werein the "dark backward and abysm of time, " but something of the moraldifference between even so free-running a creature as the society girland the average working girl of the factory, the shop and the office, would speak out (under assurance of immunity from prosecution) histestimony would be a surprise to the cartilaginous virgins, blowsymatrons, acrid relicts and hairy males of Emancipation. It would pain, too, some very worthy but unobservant persons not in sympathy with "thecause. "

Certain significant facts are within the purview of all but the veryyoung and the comfortably blind. To the woman of today the man of todayis imperfectly polite. In place of reverence he gives her "deference;"to the language of compliment has succeeded the language of raillery. Men have almost forgotten how to bow. Doubtless the advanced femaleprefers the new manner, as may some of her less forward sisters, thinking it more sincere. It is not; our giddy grandfather talkedhigh-flown nonsense because his heart had tangled his tongue. He treatedhis woman more civilly than we ours because he loved her better. Henever had seen her on the "rostrum" and in the lobby, never had seenher in advocacy of herself, never had read her confessions of his sins, never had felt the stress of her competition, nor himself assisted bydaily personal contact in rubbing the bloom off her. He did not knowthat her virtues were due to her secluded life, but thought, dear oldboy, that they were a gift of God. 

THE OPPOSING SEX

EMANCIPATION of woman is not of American invention. The "movement, "like most others that are truly momentous, originated in Europe, and hasbroken through and broken down more formidable barriers of law, customand tradition there than here. It is not true that the English marriedwoman is "virtually a bondwoman" to her husband; that "she can hardlygo and come without his consent, and usually he does not consent;" that"all she has is his. " If there is such a thing as "the bitterness of theEnglish married woman to the law, " underlying it there is such a thingas ignorance of what the law is. The "subjection of woman, " as it existstoday in England, is customary and traditionary--a social, not a legal, subjection. Nowhere has law so sharply challenged that male dominionwhose seat is in the harder muscles, the larger brain and the coarserheart And the law, it may be worth while to point out, was not of womanborn; nor was it handed down out of Heaven engraved on tables of stone. Learned English judges have decided that virtually the term "maritalrights" has no longer a legal signification. As one writer puts it, "The law has relaxed the husband's control over his wife's person andfortune, bit by bit, until legally it has left him nothing but the powerto prevent her, if he is so disposed, and arrives in time, from jumpingout of the window. " He will find it greatly to his interest to arrive intime when he conveniently can, and to be so disposed, for the husband isstill liable for the wife's torts; and if she makes the leap he may haveto pay for the telescoping of a subjacent hat or two. 

In England it is the Tyrant Man himself who is chafing in his chain. Notonly is a husband still liable for the wrongs committed by the wife whomhe has no longer the power to restrain from committing them, but in manyways--in one very important way--his obligation to her remains intactafter she has had the self-sacrifice to surrender all obligation to him. Moreover, if his wife has a separate estate he has to endure the painof seeing it hedged about from her creditors (themselves not altogetherhappy in the contemplation) with restrictions which do not hamper theright of recourse against his own. Doubtless all this is not without asoftening effect upon his character, smoothing down his dispositionalasperities and endowing him day by day with fresh accretions ofhumility. And that is good for him. I do not say that female autonomy isnot among the most efficacious agencies for man's reclamation from thesin of pride; I only say that it is not indigenous to this country, thesweet, sweet home of the assassiness, the happy hunting ground of thewhiplady, the paradise of the vitrioleuse. 

If the protagonists of woman suffrage are frank they are shallow; ifwise, uncandid. Continually they affirm their conviction that politicalpower in the hands of women will give us better government. To proof ofthat proposition they address all the powers that they have and marshalsuch facts as can be compelled to serve under their flag. They eitherthink or profess to think that if they can show that women's votes willpurify politics they will have proved their case. That is not true;whether they know it or not, the strongest objection to woman suffragewould remain untouched. Pure politics is desirable, certainly, but itis not the chief concern of the best and most intelligent citizens. Goodgovernment is "devoutly to be wished, " but more than good government weneed good women. If all our public affairs were to be ordered withthe goodness and wisdom of angels, and this state of perfection wereobtained by sacrifice of any of those qualities which make the best ofour women, if not what they should be, nor what the mindless male thinksthem, at least what they are, we should have purchased the advantage toodearly. The effect of woman suffrage upon the country is of secondaryimportance: the question for profitable consideration is, How will itaffect the character of woman? He who does not see in the goodness andcharm of such women as are good and charming something incalculably moreprecious than any degree of political purity or national prosperity maybe a patriot: doubtless he is; but also he has the distinction to be apig. 

I should like to ask the gallant gentlemen who vote for removal ofwoman's political disability if they have observed in the minds andmanners of the women in the forefront of the movement nothing "ominousand drear. " Are not these women different--I don't say worse, justdifferent--from the best types of women of peace who are not exhibitsand audibles? If they are different, is the difference of such a natureas to encourage a hope that activity in public affairs will work animprovement in women generally? Is "the glare of publicity" good for hergrowth in grace and winsomeness? Would a sane and sensible husband orlover willingly forego in wife or sweetheart all that the colonels of hersex appear to lack, or find in her all that they appear to have and tovalue?

A few more questions--addressed more particularly to veteran observersthan to those to whom the world is new and strange. Have you observedany alteration in the manner of men toward women? If so, is it in thedirection of greater rudeness or of more ceremonious respect? And again, if so, has not the change, in point of time, been coincident with thegenesis and development of woman's "emancipation" and her triumphalentry into the field of "affairs"? Are you really desirous that thechange go further? Or do you think that when women are armed with theballot they will compel a return of the old _régime_ of deferenceand delicate consideration--extorting by their power the tribute oncevoluntarily paid to their weakness? Is there any known way by whichwomen can at once be our political equals and our social superiors, ourcompetitors in the sharp and bitter struggle for glory, gain or bread, and the objects of our unselfish and undiminished devotion? The presentpredicts the future; of the foreshadow of the coming event all sensitivefemale hearts feel the chill. For whatever advantages, real or illusory, some women enjoy under this _régime_ of partial "emancipation" all womenpay. Of the coin in which payment is made the shouldering shouters ofthe sex have not a groat and can bear the situation with impunity. Theyhave either passed the age of masculine attention or were born withoutthe means to its accroachment. Dwelling in the open bog, they can affordto defy eviction. 

While men did nearly all the writing and public speaking of the world, setting so the fashion in thought, women, naturally extolled with truesexual extravagance, came to be considered, even by themselves, as avery superior order of beings, with something in them of divinity whichwas denied to man. Not only were they represented as better, generally, than men, as indeed anybody could see that they were, but their goodnesswas supposed to be a kind of spiritual endowment and more or lessindependent of environmental influences. 

We are changing all that. Women are beginning to do much of the writingand public speaking, and not only are they going to extol us (to thefattening of our conceit) but they are bound to disclose, even to theunthinking, certain defects of character in themselves which theirsilence had veiled. Their competition, too, in several kinds of affairswill slowly but certainly provoke resentment, and moreover expose themto temptations which will distinctly lower the morality of theirsex. All these changes, and many more having a similar effect andsignificance, are occurring with amazing rapidity, and the statedresults are already visible to even the blindest observation. Inaccurate depiction of the new order of things conjecture fails, butso much we know: the woman-superstition has already received its deathwound and must soon expire. 

Everywhere, and in no reverential spirit, men are questioning thedear old idolatry; not "sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer, " butdispassionately applying to its basic doctrine the methods of scientificcriticism. He who within even the last twenty years has not marked insociety, in letters, in art, in everything, a distinct change in man'sattitude toward women--a change which, were one a woman, one would notwish to see--may reasonably conclude that much, otherwise observable, ishidden by his nose. In the various movements--none of them consciouslyiconoclastic--engaged in overthrowing this oddest of modernsuperstitions there is something to deprecate, and even deplore, butthe superstition can be spared. It never had much in it that was eithercreditable or profitable, and all through its rituals ran a note ofinsincerity which was partly Nature's protest against the rites, butpartly, too, hypocrisy. There is no danger that good men will ever ceaseto respect and love good women, and if bad men ever cease to adorethem for their sex when not beating them for their virtues the gain inconsistency will partly offset the loss in religious ecstasy. 

Let the patriot abandon his fear, his betters their hope, that onlythe low class woman will vote--the unlettered wench of the slums, theraddled hag of the dives, the war-painted _protégée_ of the police. Intothe vortex of politics goes every floating thing that is free to move. The summons to the polls will be imperative and incessant. Duty willthunder it from every platform, conscience whisper it into every ear, pride, interest, the lust of victory--all the motives that impel men topartisan activity will act with equal power upon women as upon men; andto all the other forces flowing irresistibly toward the polls will beadded the suasion of men themselves. The price of votes will not declinebecause of the increased supply, although it will in most instances beoffered in currencies too subtle to be counted. As now, the honest andrespectable elector will habitually take bribes in the invisible coinof the realm of Sentiment--a mintage peculiarly valued by woman. Forone reason or another all women will vote, even those who now view the"right" widi aversion. The observer who has marked the strength andactivity of the forces pent in the dark drink of politics and given offin the act of bibation will not expect inaction to the victim of the"habit, " be he male or she female. In the partisan, conviction iscompulsion---opinions bear fruit in conduct. The partisan thinks indeeds, and woman is by nature a partisan--a blessing for which the Lordhas never made her male relatives and friends sufficiently thankful. Nota mere man of them would have the effrontery to ask her toleration ifshe were not Depend upon it, the full strength of the female vote willeventually be cast at every election. And it would be well indeed forcivilization and the interests of the race if woman suffrage meant nomore than going to the polling-place and polling--which clearly is allthat it has been thought out to mean by the headless horsemen spurringtheir new hobbies bravely at the tail of the procession. That would bea very simple matter; the opposition based upon the impropriety of thefemale rubbing shoulders at the polls with such scurvy blackguardsas ourselves may with advantage be retired from service. Nor is itparticularly important what men and measures the women will vote for. Byone means or another Tyrant Man will have his way; the Opposing Sex canmerely obstruct him in his way of having it. And should that obstructionever be too pronounced, the party line and the sex line coinciding, woman suffrage will then and henceforth be no more. 

In the politics of this bad world majorities are of several kinds. Oneof the most "overwhelming" is made up of these simple elements: (1) anumerical minority; (2) a military superiority. If not a single electionwere ever in any degree affected by it, the introduction of womansuffrage into our scheme of manners and morals would nevertheless be themost momentous and mischievous event of modern history. Compared withthe action of this destructive solvent, that of all other disintegratingagencies concerned in our decivilization is as the languorousindiligence of rosewater to the mordant fury of nitric acid. 

Lively Woman is indeed, as Carlyle would put it, "hellbent" onpurification of politics by adding herself as an ingredient. It isunlikely that the injection of her personality into the contention(and politics is essentially a contention) will allay any animosities, sweeten any tempers, elevate any motives. The strifes of women aredistinctly meaner than those of men--which are out of all reason mean;their methods of overcoming opponents distinctly more unscrupulous. Thattheir participation in politics will notably alter the conditions of thegame is not to be denied; that, unfortunately, is obvious; but that itwill make the player less malignant and the playing more honorable isa proposition in support of which one can utter a deal of gorgeousnonsense, with a less insupportable sense of its unfitness, than in theservice of any other delusion. 

The frosty truth is that except in the home the influence of women isnot elevating, but debasing. When they stoop to uplift men who needuplifting, they are themselves pulled down, and that is all that isaccomplished. Wherever they come into familiar contact with men who arenot their relatives they impart nothing, they receive all; they do notaffect us with their notions of morality; we infect them with ours. 

In the last forty years, in this country, they have entered a hundredavenues of activity from which they were previously debarred by anunwritten law. They are found in the offices, the shops, the factories. Like Charles Lamb's fugitive pigs, they have run up all manner ofstreets. Does any one think that in that time there has been an advancein professional, commercial and industrial morality? Are lawyersmore scrupulous, tradesmen more honest? When one has been served by a"saleslady" does one leave the shop with a feebler sense of injurythan was formerly inspired by a transaction at the counter--a dullerconsciousness of being oneself the commodity that has changed hands?Have actresses elevated the stage to a moral altitude congenial to thecolder virtues? In studios of the artists is the "sound of revelry bynight" invariably a deep, masculine bass? In literature are the immoralbooks--the books "dealing" with questionable "questions"--always, oreven commonly, written by men?

There is one direction in which "emancipation of woman" and enlargementof her "sphere" have wrought a reform: they have elevated the_personnel_ of the little dinner party in the "private room. " Formerly, as any veteran man-about-town can testify, if he will, the femalecontingent of the party was composed of persons altogether unspeakable. That element now remains upon its reservation; among the superioradvantages enjoyed by the man-about-town of today is that of thecompanionship, at his dinner _in camera_, of ladies having an honorablevocation. In the corridors of the "French restaurant" the swish ofPseudonyma's skirt is no longer heard; she has been superseded by thePrincess Tap-tap (with Truckle & Cinch), by my lady Snip-snip (from the"emporium" of Boltwhack & Co. ), by Miss Chink-chink, who sits at thereceipt of customs in that severely un-French restaurant, the MaisonHash. That the man-about-town has been morally elevated by thisEmancipation of Girl from the seclusion of home to that of the "privateroom" is too obvious for denial. Nothing so uplifts Tyrant Man as thetable talk of good young women who earn their own living. 

I do not wish to be altogether ironical about this rather seriousmatter--not so much so as to forfeit anything of lucidity. Let me state, then, in all earnestness and sobriety and simplicity of speech, what isknown to every worldly-wise male dweller in the cities, to every scampand scapegrace of the clubs, to every reformed sentimentalist and everyobserver with a straight eye--namely, that in all the various classes ofyoung women in our cities who support, or partly support, themselvesin vocations which bring them into personal contact with men, femalechastity is a vanishing tradition. In the lives of the "main andgeneral" of these, all those _considerate_ which have their origin inpersonal purity, and cluster about it, and are its signs and safeguards, have almost ceased to cut a figure. It is needless to remind me thatthere are exceptions--I know that. With some of them I have personalacquaintance, or think I have, and for them a respect withheld fromany woman of the rostrum who points to their misfortune and calls itemancipation--to their need and calls it a spirit of independence. Itis not from these good girls that you will hear the flippant boast of anunfettered life, with "freedom to develop;" nor is it they who will beforemost and furious in denial and resentment of my statements regardingthe morals of their class. They do not know the whole truth, thankHeaven, but they know enough for a deprecation too deep to find reliefin a cheap affirmation of woman's purity, which is, and always has been, the creature of seclusion. 

The fitness of women for political activity is not in present question;I am considering the fitness of political activity for women. For womenas men say they are, wish them to be, and try to think them, it is unfitaltogether--as unfit as anything else that "mixes them up" with us, compelling a communication and association that are not social. Ifwe wish to have women who are different from ourselves in knowledge, character, accomplishments, manners; as different mentally asphysically--and in these and in all odier expressible differences resideall the charms that they have for us--we must keep them, or they mustkeep themselves, in an environment unlike our own. One would think thatobvious to the meanest capacity, and might even hope that it wouldbe understood by the Daughters of Thunder. Possibly the Advanced One, hospitably accepting her karma, is not concerned to be charming to"the likes o' we'"--would prefer the companionship of her blue ginghamumbrella, her corkscrew curls, her epicene audiences and her name inthe newspapers. Perhaps she is content with the comfort of her raucousvoice. Therein she is unwise, for self-interest is the first law. Whenwe no longer find woman charming we may find a way to make them moreuseful--more truly useful, even, than the speech-ladies would have themmake themselves by competition. Really, there is nothing in the worldbetween them and slavery but their power of interesting us; and that hasits origin in the very differences which the Colonels are striving toabolish. God has made no law of miracles and none of His laws are goingto be suspended in deference to woman's desire to achieve familiaritywithout contempt. If she wants to please she must retain some scrap ofnovelty; if she desires our respect she must not be always in evidence, disclosing the baser side of her character, as in competition with usshe must do (as we do to one another) or lamentably fail. Mrs. EdmundGosse, like "Ouida, " Mrs. Atherton, and all other women ofbrains, declares that the taking of unfair advantages--the lack ofmagnanimity--is a leading characteristic of her sex. Mrs. Gosse adds, with reference to men's passive acquiescence in this monstrous follyof "emancipation, " that possibly our quiet may be the calm before thestorm; and she utters this warning, which, also, more strongly, "Ouida"has uttered: "How would it be with us if the men should suddenly rise_en masse_ and throw the whole surging lot of us into convents andharems?"

It is not likely that men will "rise _en masse_" to undo the mischiefwrought by noisy protagonists of Woman Suffrage working like beavers torear their airy fad upon the sandy foundation of masculine toleranceand inattention. No rising will be needed. All that is required for thewreck of their hopes is for a wave of reason to slide a little fartherup the sands of time, "loll out its large tongue, lick the wholelabor flat" The work has prospered so far only because nobody but itspromoters has taken it seriously. It has not engaged attention fromthose having the knowledge and the insight to discern beneath itscap-and-bells and the motley that is its only wear a serious menace toall that civilized men hold precious in woman. It is of the nature ofmen--themselves cheerful polygamists, with no penitent intentions--toset a high value upon chastity in woman. (We need not inquire why theydo so; those to whom the reasons are not clear can profitably remain inthe valley of the shadow of ignorance. ) Valuing it, they purpose havingit, or some considerable numerical presumption of it. As they perceivethat in a general way women are virtuous in proportion to the remotenessof their lives and interests from the lives and interests of men--theirseclusion from the influences of which men's own vices are a mainpart--an easy and peaceful means will doubtless be found for therepression of the shouters. 

In the orchestration of mind woman's instruments might have kept silencewithout injury to the volume and quality of the music; efface theimpress of her touch upon the world and, by those who come after, theblank must be diligently sought. Go to the top of any large cityand look about and below. It is not much that you will see, but itrepresents an amazing advance from the conditions of primitive man. Nowhere in the wide survey will you see the work of woman. It is all thework of men's hands, and before it was wrought into form and substance, existed as conscious creations in men's brains. Concealed withinthe visible forms of buildings and ships--themselves miracles ofthought--lie such wonder-worlds of invention and discovery as no humanlife is long enough to explore, no human understanding capacious enoughto hold in knowledge. If, like Asmodeus, we could rive the roofs andsee woman's part of this prodigious exhibition--the things that she hasactually created with her brain--what kind of display would it be? It isprobable that all the intellectual energy expended by women from firstto last would not have sufficed, if directed into the one channel, forthe genesis and evolution of the modern bicycle. 

I once heard a lady who had playfully competed with men in a jumpingmatch gravely attribute her defeat to the trammeling of her skirt. Similarly, women are pleased to explain their penury of mentalachievement by repressive education and custom, and therein they are notaltogether in heresy. But even in regions where they have ever had thefreedom of the quarries they have not builded themselves monuments. Nobody, for example, is holding them from greatness in poetry, whichneeds no special education, and music, in which they have always beenspecially educated; yet where is the great poem by a woman? where thegreat musical composition? In the grammar of literature what is thefeminine of Homer, of Shakspere, of Goethe, of Hugo? What female namesare the equivalents of the names of Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, Wagner?Women are not musicians--they "sing and play. " In short, if woman had nobetter claim to respect and affection than her brain; no sweeter charmsthan those of her reason; no means of suasion but her power upon men'sconvictions, she would long ago have been "improved off the face ofthe earth. " As she is, men accord her such homage as is compatible withcontempt, such immunities as are consistent with exaction; but whereasshe is not altogether filled with light and is moreover, imperfectlyreverent, it is but right that in obedience to Scriptural injunction shekeep silence in our churches while we are worshipping Ourselves. 

She will not have it so, the good, good girl; as moral as the best ofus, she will be as intellectual as the rest of us. She will have out herlittle taper and set the rivers of thought all ablaze, legging it overthe land from stream to stream till all are fired. She will widen hersphere, forsooth, herself no wider than before. It is not enough that wehave edified her a pedestal and perform impossible rites in celebrationof her altitude and distinction. It does not suffice that with nevera smile we assure her that she is the superior sex--a whopper by therepetition whereof certain callow youth among us have incurred thedivine vengeance of belief. It does not satisfy her that she isindubitably gifted with pulchritude and an unquestionable genius forits embellishing; that Nature has endowed her with a prodigious knackat accroachment, whereby the male of her species is lured to asuitable doom. No; she has taken unto herself in these evil days that"intelligent discontent" which giveth its beloved fits. To her flock ofgraces and virtues she must add our one poor ewe lamb of brains. Well, I tell her that intellect is a monster which devours beauty; that thewoman of exceptional mind is exceptionally masculine in face, figure, action; that in transplanting brains to an unfamiliar soil God leavesmuch of the original earth about the roots. And so with a reluctantfarewell to Lovely Woman, I humbly withdraw from her presence and hastento overtake the receding periphery of her "sphere. "

One moment more. Mesdames: I crave leave to estop your disfavor--whichwere affliction and calamity--by "defining my position" in the wordsof one of yourselves, who has said of me (though with reprehensibleexaggeration, believe me) that I hate woman and love women--have anacute animosity to your sex and adoring each individual member ofit. What matters my opinion of your understandings so long as I am inbondage to your charms? Moreover, there is one service of incomparableutility and dignity for which I esteem you eminently fit--to be mothersof men. 

THE AMERICAN SYCOPHANT

AN AMERICAN newspaper holds this opinion: "If republican governmenthad done nothing else than give independence to American character andpreserve it from the servility inseparable from the allegiance to kings, it would have accomplished a great work. "

I do not doubt that the writer of that sentence believes that republicangovernment has actually wrought the change in human nature whichchallenges his admiration. He is very sure that his countrymen are notsycophants; that before rank and power and wealth they stand covered, maintaining "the godlike attitude of freedom and a man" and exulting init. It is not true; it is an immeasurable distance from the truth. Weare as abject toadies as any people on earth--more so than any Europeanpeople of similar civilization. When a foreign emperor, king, prince ornobleman comes among us the rites of servility that we execute in hishonor are baser than any that he ever saw in his own land. When aforeign nobleman's prow puts into shore the American shin is pickled inbrine to welcome him; and if he come not in adequate quantity those ofus who can afford the expense go swarming over sea to struggle for frontplaces in his attention. In this blind and brutal scramble for socialrecognition in Europe the traveling American toady and impostor has manychances of success: he is commonly unknown even to ministers and consulsof his own country, and these complaisant gentlemen, rather than incurthe risk of erring on the wrong side, take him at his own valuation andpush him in where his obscurity being again in his favor, he is treatedwith kindly toleration, and sometimes a genuine hospitality, to which hehas no shadow of right nor title, and which, if he were a gentleman, hewould not accept if it were voluntarily proffered. It should be said inmitigation that all this delirious abasement in no degree tempers hisrancor against the system of which the foreign notable is the flower andfruit. He keeps his servility sweet by preserving it in the salt ofvilification. In the character of a blatant blackguard the American snobis so happily disguised that he does not know himself. 

An American newspaper once printed a portrait of her whom the irreverentBriton had a reprehensible habit of designating colloquially as "The OldLady, " But the editor in question did not so designate her--his simpleAmerican manhood and republican spirit would not admit that she wasa lady. So he contented himself with labeling the portrait "Her MostGracious Majesty, Queen Victoria" This incident raises an importantquestion. 

Important Question Raised by This Incident: Is it better to be a subjectand a man, or a citizen and a flunkey--to own the sway of a "gorytyrant" and retain one's self-respect, or dwell, a "sovereign elector, "in the land of liberty and disgrace it?

However it may be customary for English newspapers to designate theEnglish sovereign, they are at least not addicted to sycophancy indesignating the rulers of other countries than their own. They wouldnot say "His Abracadabral Humpti-dumptiness Emperor William, " nor "HisPestilency the Speaker of the American House of Representatives. "They would not think of calling even the most ornately self-bemedaledAmerican sovereign elector "His Badgesty. " Of a foreign nobleman they donot say "His Lordship;" they will not admit that he is a lord; nor whenspeaking of their own noblemen do they spell "lord" with a capital L, aswe do. In brief, when mentioning foreign dignitaries, of whatever rankin their own countries, the English press is simply and serviceablydescriptive: the king is a king, the queen a queen, the jack a jack. Weuse "another kind of common sense. " At the very foundation of ourpolitical system lies the denial of hereditary and artificial rank. Ourfathers created this government as a protest against all that, and allthat it implies. They virtually declared that kings and noblemen couldnot breathe here, and no American loyal to the principles of theRevolution which made him one will ever say in his own country "YourMajesty" or "Your Lordship"--the words would choke him and they ought. 

There are a few of us who keep the faith, who do not bow the kneeto Baal, who hold fast to what is high and good in the doctrine ofpolitical equality; in whose hearts the altar-fires of rational libertyare kept aglow, beaconing the darkness of that illimitable inane wheretheir countrymen, inaccessible to the light, wander witless in the bogsof political unreason, alternately adoring and damning the man-madegods of their own stature. Of that bright band fueling the bale-firesof political consistency I can not profess myself a member in goodstanding. In view of this general recreancy and treason to theprinciples that our fathers established by the sword--having in constantobservation this almost universal hospitality to the solemn nonsenseof hereditary rank and unearned distinction, my faith in practicalrealization of republican ideals is small, and I falter in the workof their maintenance in the interest of a people for whom they aretoo good. Seeing that we are immune to none of the evils besettingmonarchies, excepting those for which we secretly yearn; that inequalityof fortune and unjust allotment of honors are as conspicuous among us aselsewhere; that the tyranny of individuals is as intolerable, and thatof the public more so; that the law's majesty is a dream and its failurea fact--hearing everywhere the footfalls of disorder and the watchwordsof anarchy, I despair of the republic and catch in every breeze thatblows "a cry prophetic of its fall. "

I have seen a vast crowd of Americans change color like a field ofwaving grain, as it uncovered to do such base homage to a petty foreignprincess as in her own country she had never received. I have seenfull-grown, self-respecting American citizens tremble and go speechlesswhen spoken to by the Emperor of Brazil. I have seen a half-dozenAmerican gentlemen in evening clothes trying to outdo one another in theprofundity of their bows in the presence of the nigger King of Hawaii. I have not seen a Chinese "Earl" borne in a chair by four Americansofficially detailed for the disgraceful service, but it was done, and did not evoke a hiss of disapproval. And I did not--thankHeaven!--observe the mob of American "simple republicans" that doggedthe heels of a disreputable little Frenchman who is a count by courtesyonly, and those of an English duke quietly attending to his business ofmaking a living by being a married man. The republican New World isno less impested with servility than the monarchial Old. One form ofgovernment may be better than another for this purpose or for that; allare alike in the futility of their influence upon human character. Nonecan affect man's instinctive abasement in the contemplation of power andrank. 

Not only are we no less sycophantic than the people of monarchialcountries; we are more so. We grovel before their exalted personages, and perform in addition a special prostration at the clay feet ofour own idols--which _they_ do not revere. The typical "subject, "hat-in-hand to his sovereign and his nobleman, is a less shameful figurethan the "citizen" executing his genuflexion before the public of whichhe is himself a part. No European court journal, no European courtier, was ever more abject in subservience to the sovereign than are theAmerican newspaper and the American politician in flattery of thepeople. Between the courtier and the demagogue I see nothing to choose. They are moved by the same sentiment and fired by the same hope. Theirmethod is flattery, and their purpose profit. Their adulation is not atestimony to character, but a tribute to power, or the shadow of power. If this country were governed by its criminal idiots we should have thesame attestations of their goodness and wisdom, the same competition fortheir favor, the same solemn doctrine that their voice is the voice ofGod. Our children would be brought up to believe that an Idiotocracy isthe only natural and rational form of government And for my part I'mnot at all sure that it would not be a pretty good political system, aspolitical systems go. I have always, however, cherished a secret faithin Smithocracy, which seems to combine the advantages of both themonarchial and the republican idea. If all the offices were held forlife by Smiths--the senior John being President--we should have asettled and orderly succession to allay all fears of anarchy and asufficiently wide eligibility to feed the fires of patriotic ambition. All could not be Smiths, but many could marry into the family. 

The Harrison "progress" left its heritage of shame, whereof each abaserwould gladly have washed the hands of him in his neighbor's basin. Allthis was in due order of Nature, and was to have been expected. It wasa phenomenon of the same character as, in the loves of the low, thesquabbling consequent upon satiety and shame. We could not slink outof sight; we could deny our sycophancy, albeit we might give it anothername; but we could somewhat medicine our damaged self-esteem by dealingdamnation 'round on one another. The blush of shame turned easily to theglow of indignation, and many a hot hatred was kindled at the rosy flameof self-contempt. Persons conscious of having dishonored themselves aredoubly sensitive to any indignity put upon them by others. The vices andfollies of human nature are interdependent; they do not move alone, nor are they singly aroused to activity. In my judgment, this entireincident of the President's "tour" was infinitely discreditable toPresident and people. I do not go into the question of his motive inmaking it. Be that what it may, the manner of it seems to me anoutrage upon all the principles and sentiments underlying republicaninstitutions. In all but the name it was a "royal progress"--the samecostly ostentation, the same civic and military pomp, the same solemnand senseless adulation, the same abasement of spirit of the Many beforethe One. And according to republican traditions, ten thousand times ayear affirmed, in every way in which affirmation is possible, we fondlypersuade ourselves, as a true faith in the hearts of our hearts, that the One is the inferior of the Many! And it is no mere politicalcatch-phrase: he _is_ their servant; he _is_ their creature; all thatin him to which they grovel (dignifying and justifying their instinctiveand inherited servility by names as false as anything in ceremonialimposture) they themselves have made, as truly as the heathen hasmade the wooden god before which he performs his unmanly rite. Itis precisely this thing--the superiority of the people to theirservants--that constitutes, and was by our fathers understood toconstitute, the essential, fundamental difference between the monarchialsystem which they uprooted and the democratic one which they planted inits stead. Deluded men! how little they guessed the length and strengthand vitality of the roots left in the soil of the centuries when theirnoxious harvestage of mischievous institutions had been cast as rubbishto the void!

I am no contestant for forms of government--no believer in either thepractical value or the permanence of any that has yet been devised. Thatall men are created equal, in the best and highest sense of the phrase, I hold; not as I observe it held by others, but as a living faith. Thatan officeholder is a servant of the people; that I am his politicalsuperior, owing him no deference, and entitled to such deferencefrom him as may be serviceable to keep him in mind of hissubordination--these are propositions which command my assent, whichI _feel_ to be true and which determine the character of my personalrelations with those whom they concern. That I should give my hand, orbend my neck, or uncover my head to any man in homage to or recognitionof his office, great or small, is to me simply inconceivable. Thesetricks of servility with the softened names are the vestiges of aninvoluntary allegiance to power extraneous to the performer. Theyrepresent in our American life obedience and propitiation in their mostprimitive and odious forms. The man who speaks of them as manifestationsof a proper respect for "the President's great office" is either arogue, a dupe or a journalist They come to us out of a fascinating butterrible past as survivals of servitude. They speak a various languageof oppression, and the superstition of man-worship; they cany forwardthe traditions of the sceptre and the lash. Through the plaudits of thepeople may be heard always the faint, far cry of the beaten slave. 

Respect? Respect the good. Respect the wise. Respect the dead. Let thePresident look to it that he belongs to one of these classes. His goingabout the country in gorgeous state and barbaric splendor as the guestof a thieving corporation, but at our expense--shining and dining andswining--unsouling himself of clotted nonsense in pickled platitudescalculated for the meridian of Coon Hollow, Indiana, but ingeniouslyadapted to each water tank on the line of his absurd "progress, " doesnot prove it, and the presumption of his "great office" is against him. 

Can you not see, poor misguided "fellow citizens, " how you permit yourpolitical taskmasters to forge leg-chains of your follies and load youdown with them? Will nothing teach you that all this fuss-and-feathers, all this ceremony, all this official gorgeousness and brass-banding, this "manifestation of a proper respect for the nation's head" has nodecent place in American life and American politics? Will no experienceopen your stupid eyes to the fact that these shows are but absurdimitations of royalty, to hold you silly while you are plundered by themanagers of the performance?--that while you toss your greasy caps inair and sustain them by the ascending current of your senseless hurrahsthe programmers are going through your blessed pockets and exploitingyour holy dollars? No; you feel secure; "power is of the People, "and you can effect a change of robbers every four years. Inestimableprivilege--to pull off the glutted leech and attach the lean one! Andyou can not even choose among the lean leeches, but must accept thosedesignated by the programmers and showmen who have the reptiles on tap!But then you are not "subjects;" you are "citizens"--there is muchin that Your tyrant is not a "King;" he is a "President. " He doesnot occupy a "throne, " but a "chair. " He does not succeed to it byinheritance; he is pitchforked into it by the boss. Altogether, you aredistinctly better off than the Russian mujik who wears his shirt outsidehis trousers and has never shaken hands with the Czar in all his life. 

I hold that kings and noblemen can not breathe in America. When they setfoot upon our soil their kingship and their nobility fall away from themlike the chains of a slave in England. Whatever a man may be in hisown country, here he is but a man. My countrymen may do as they please, lickspittling the high and mighty of other nations even to the fillingof their spiritual bellies, but I make a stand for simple Americanmanhood. I will meet no man on this soil who expects from me a greaterdeference than I could properly accord to the President of my owncountry. My allegiance to republican institutions is slack through lackof faith in them as a practical system of governing men as men are. Allthe same, I will call no man "Your Majesty, " nor "Your Lordship. " Forme to meet in my own country a king or a nobleman would require as muchpreliminary negotiation as an official interview between the Mufti ofMoosh and the Ahkoond of Swat. The form of salutation and the style andtide of address would have to be settled definitively and with precision. With some of my most esteemed and patriotic friends the matter is moresimple; their generosity in concession fills me with admiration andtheir forbearance in exaction challenges my astonishment as one of theseven wonders of American hospitality. In fancy I see the ceremony oftheir "presentation" and as examples of simple republican dignity Icommend their posture to the youth of this fair New World, invitingparticular attention to the grand, bold curves of character shown in theoutlines of the Human Ham. 

A DISSERTATION ON DOGS

OF ALL anachronisms and survivals, the love of the dog; is the mostreasonless. Because, some thousands of years ago, when we wore otherskins than our own and sat enthroned upon our haunches, tearingtangles of tendons from raw bones with our teeth, the dog ministeredpurveyorwise to our savage needs, we go on cherishing him to this day, when his only function is to lie sun-soaken on a door mat and insultus as we pass in and out, enamored of his fat superfluity. One dog ina thousand earns his bread--and takes beefsteak; the other nine hundredand ninety-nine we maintain, by cheating the poor, in the style suitableto their state. 

The trouble with the modern dog is that he is the same old dog. Not aninch has the rascal advanced along the line of evolution. We have ceasedto squat upon our naked haunches and gnaw raw bones, but this companionof the childhood of the race, this vestigial remnant of _juventus mundi_this dismal anachronism, this veteran inharmony of the scheme ofthings, the dog, has abated no jot nor tittle of his unthinkableobjection-ableness since the morning stars sang together and he had satup all night to deflate a lung at the performance. Possibly he may sometime be improved otherwise than by effacement, but at present he isstill in that early stage of reform that is not incompatible with amouthful of reformer. 

The dog is a detestable quadruped. He knows more ways to beunmentionable than can be suppressed in seven languages. 

The word "dog" is a term of contempt the world over. Poets have sung andprosaists have prosed of the virtues of individual dogs, but nobodyhas had the hardihood to eulogize the species. No man loves the Dog; heloves his own dog or dogs, and there he stops; the force of pervertedaffection can no further go. He loves his own dog partly because thatthrifty creature, ever cadging when not maurauding, tickles his vanityby fawning upon him as the visible source of steaks and bones; andpartly because the graceless beast insults everybody else, harming asmany as he dares. The dog is an encampment of fleas, and a reservoir ofsinful smells. He is prone to bad manners as the sparks fly upward. Hehas no discrimination; his loyalty is given to the person that feedshim, be the same a blackguard or a murderer's mother. He fights for hismaster without regard to the justice of the quarrel--wherein he is nobetter than a patriot or a paid soldier. There are men who are proud ofa dog's love--and dogs love that kind of men. There are men who, havingthe privilege of loving women, insult them by loving dogs; and there arewomen who forgive and respect their canine rivals. Women, I am told, aretrue cynolaters; they adore not only dogs, but Dog--not only theirown horrible little beasts, but those of others. But women will loveanything; they love men who love dogs. I sometimes wonder how it is thatof all our women among whom the dog fad is prevalent none have incurredthe husband fad, or the child fad. Possibly there are exceptions, butit seems to be a rule that the female heart which has a dog in itis without other lodgers. There is not, I suppose, a very wild andimportunate demand for accommodation. For my part, I do not know whichis the less desirable, the tenant or the tenement There are dogs thatsubmit to be kissed by women base enough to kiss them; but they have asecret, coarse revenge. For the dog is a joker, withal, gifted with asmuch humor as is consistent with biting. 

Miss Louise Imogen Guiney has replied to Mrs. Meynell's proposal toabolish the dog--a proposal which Miss Guiney has the originality tocall "original. " Divested of its "literature, " Miss Guiney's plea forthe defendant consists, essentially, of the following assertions: (1)Dogs are whatever their masters are. (2) They bite only those who fearthem. (3) Really vicious dogs are not found nearer than Constantinople. (4) Only wronged dogs go mad, and hydrophobia is retaliation. (5) Inactions for damages for dog-bites judicial prejudice is against the dog. (6) "Dogs are continually saving children from death. " (7) Associationwith dogs begets piety, tenderness, mercy, loyalty, and so forth; inbrief, the dog is an elevating influence: "to walk modestly at a dog'sheels is a certificate of merit!" As to that last, if Miss Guiney hadever observed the dog himself walking modestly at the heels of anotherdog she would perhaps have wished that it was not the custom of her sexto seal the certificate of merit with a kiss. 

In all this absurd woman's statements, thus fairly epitomized, thereis not one that is true--not one of which the essential falsity is notevident, obvious, conspicuous to even the most delinquent observation. Yet with the smartness and smirk of a graduating seminary girl refutingEpicurus she marshals them against the awful truth that every year inEurope and the United States alone more than five thousand human beingsthe of hydrophobia--a fact which her controversial conscience does notpermit her to mention. The names on this needless death-roll are mostlythose of children, the sins of whose parents in cherishing their ownhereditary love of dogs is visited upon their children because they havenot the intelligence and agility to get out of the way. Or perhaps theylack that tranquil courage upon which Miss Guiney relies to avert thecanine tooth from her own inedible shank. 

Finally this amusing illogician, this type and example of the femalecontroversialist, has the hardihood to hope that there may be fatherswho can see their children the the horrible death of hydrophobia withoutwishing "to exile man's best ideal of fidelity from the hearthstones ofcivilization. " If we must have an "ideal of fidelity" why not find it, not in the dog that kills the child, but in the father that kills thedog. The profit of maintaining a standard and pattern of the virtues (atconsiderable expense in the case of this insatiable canine consumer) maybe great, but are we so hard pushed that we must go to the animals forit? In life and letters are there no men and women whose names kindleenthusiasm and emulation? Is fidelity, is devotion, is self-sacrificeunknown among ourselves? As a model of the higher virtues why will notone's mother serve at a pinch? And what is the matter with Miss Guineyherself? She is faithful, at least to dogs, whatever she may be tothe hundreds of American children inevitably foredoomed to a death ofunthinkable agony. 

There is perhaps a hope that when the sun's returning flame shall gildthe hither end of the thirtieth century this savage and filthy brute, the dog, will have ceased to "banquet on through a whole year" of humanfat and lean; that he will have been gathered to his variously unworthyfathers to give an account of the deeds done in body of man. In themeantime, those of us who have not the enlightened understanding to beenamored of him may endure with such fortitude as we can commandhis feats of tooth among the shins and throats of those who have; weourselves are so few that there is a strong numerical presumption ofpersonal immunity. 

It is well to have a clear understanding of such inconveniences asmay be expected to ensue from dog-bites. That inconveniences and evendiscomforts do sometimes flow from, or at least follow, the mischance ofbeing bitten by dogs, even the sturdiest champion of "man's best friend"will admit when not heated fay controversy. True, he is disposed tosympathy for those incurring the inconveniences and discomforts, butagainst apparent incompassion may be offset his indubitable sympathywith the dog. No one is altogether heartless. 

Amongst the several disadvantages of a close personal connection withthe canine tooth, the disorder known as hydrophobia has long held anundisputed primacy. The existence of dus ailment is attested by so manywitnesses, many of whom, belonging to the profession of medicine, speakwith a certain authority, that even the breeders and lovers of snap-dogsare compelled reluctantly to concede it, though as a rule they stoutlydeny that it is imparted by the dog. In their view, hydrophobia is atheory, not a condition. The patient imagines himself to have it, andacting upon that unsupported assumption or hypothesis, suffers and diesin the attempt to square his conduct with his opinions. 

It seems there is firmer ground for their view of the matter than therest of us have been willing to admit There is such a thing, doubtless, as hydrophobia proper, but also there is such another thing aspseudo-hydrophobia, or hydrophobia improper. 

Pseudo-hydrophobia, the physicians explain, is caused by fear ofhydrophobia. The patient, having been chewed by a healthy and harmlessdog, broods upon his imaginary peril, solicitously watches his imaginarysymptoms, and, finally, persuading himself of their reality, puts themon exhibition, as he understands them. He runs about (when permitted) onhis hands and knees, growls, barks, howls, and in default of a tail wagsthe part of him where it would be if he had one. In a few days he isgone before, a victim to his lack of confidence in man's best friend. 

The number of cases of pseudo-hydrophobia, relatively, to those of truehydrophobia, is not definitely known, the medical records having beenimperfectly made, and never collated; champions of the snap-dog, asintimated, believe it is many to nothing. That being so (they argue), the animal is entirely exonerated, and leaves the discussion without astain upon his reputation. 

But that is feeble reasoning. Even if we grant their premises we can notembrace their conclusion. In the first place, it hurts to be bitten bya dog, as the dog himself audibly confesses when bitten by anotherdog. Furthermore, pseudo-hydrophobia is quite as fatal as if it were alegitimate product of the bite, not a result of the terror which thatmischance inspires. 

Human nature being what it is, and well known to the dog to be what itis, we have a right to expect that the creature will take our weaknessesinto consideration--that he will respect our addiction to reasonlesspanic, even as we respect his when, as we commonly do, we refrain fromattaching tinware to his tail. A dog that runs himself to death to evadea kitchen utensil which could not possibly harm him, and which if he didnot flee would not pursue, is the author of his own undoing in preciselythe same sense as is the victim of pseudo-hydrophobia. He is slain bya theory, not a condition. Yet the wicked boy that set him going isnot blameless, and no one would be so zealous and strenuous in hisprosecution as the cynolater, the adorer of dogs, the person who holdsthem guileless of pseudo-hydrophobia. 

Mr. Nicholas Smith, while United States Consul at Liege, wrote, orcaused to be written, an official report, wickedly, willfully andmaliciously designed to abridge the privileges, augment the ills andimpair the honorable status of the domestic dog. In the very beginningof this report Mr. Smith manifests his animus by stigmatizingthe domestic dog as an "hereditary loafer;" and having hurled theallegation, affirms "the dawn of a [Belgian] new era" wherein thepampered menial will loaf no more. There is to be no more sun-soaking ondoor mats having a southern exposure, no more usurpation of the warmestsegment of the family circle, no more successful personal solicitationof cheer at the domestic board. The dog's place in the social scale isno longer to be determined by consideration of sentiment, but will bethe result of cold commercial calculation, and so fixed as best to servethe ends of industrial expediency. All this in Belgium, where the dogis already in active service as a beast of burden and draught; doubtlessthe transition to that humble condition from his present andimmemorial social elevation in less advanced countries will be slow andcharacterized by bitter factional strife. America, especially, thoughever accessible to the infection of new and profitable ideas, willbe angularly slow to accept so radical a subversion of a socialsuperstructure that almost may be said to rest upon the domestic dog asa basic verity. 

The dogs are our only true "leisure class" (for even the tramps aresometimes compelled to engage in such simple industries as are possiblewithin the "precincts" of the county jail) and we are justly proud ofthem. They toil not, neither spin, yet Solomon in all his glory was nota dog. Instead of making them hewers of wood and drawers of water, itwould be more consonant with the Anglomaniacal and general Old Worldspirit, now so dominant in the councils of the nation, to make them"hereditary legislators. " And Mr. Smith must permit me to add, with aspecial significance, that history records an instance of even a horsemaking a fairly good Consul. 

Mr. Smith avers with obvious and impudent satisfaction that in Liegetwice as many draught dogs as horses are seen in the streets, attachedto vehicles. He regards "a gaily painted cart" drawn by "a well feddog" and driven by a well fed (and gaily painted) woman as a "pleasingvision. " I do not; I should prefer to see the dog sitting at the receiptof steaks and chops and the lady devoting herself to the amelioration ofthe condition of the universe, and the manufacture of poetry and storiesthat are not true. A more pleasing vision, too, one endeared to eye andheart by immemorial use and wont, is that of stranger and dog indulgingin the pleasures of the chase--stranger a little ahead--while the womanin the case manifests a characteristically compassionate solicitude lestthe gentleman's trousers do not match Fido's mustache. It is, indeed, impossible to regard with any degree of approval the degradation tocommercial utility of two so noble animals as Dog and Woman; and if Manhad joined them together by driving-reins I should hope that God wouldput them asunder, even if the reins were held by Dog. There wouldno doubt be a distinct gain as well as a certain artistic fitness inunyoking the strong-minded female of our species from the Chariot ofProgress and yoking her to the apple-cart or fish-wagon, and--but thatis another story; the imminence of the draughtwoman is not foreshadowedin the report of our Consul at Liege. 

Mr. Smith's estimate of the number of dogs in this country at 7, 000, 000is a "conservative" one, it must be confessed, and can hardly have beenbased on observations by moonlight in a suburban village; his estimateof the effective strength of the average dog at 500 pounds is probablyabout right, as will be attested by any intelligent boy who in campaignsagainst orchards has experienced detention by the Cerberi of the places. Taking his own figures Mr. Smith calculates that we have in this country3, 500, 000, 000 pounds of "idle dog power. " But this statement is moreingenious than ingenuous; it gives, as doubtless it was intended togive, the impression that we have only idle dogs, whereas of all mundaneforces the domestic dog is most easily stirred to action. His expenseof energy in pursuit of the harmless, necessary flea, for example, isprodigious; and he is not infrequently seen in chase of his own tail, with an activity scarcely inferior. If there is anything worth whilein accepted theories of the conversion and conservation of force thesegigantic energies are by no means wasted; they appear as heat, lightand electricity, modifying climate, reducing gas bills and assistingin propulsion of street cars. Even in baying the moon and insultingvisitors and bypassers the dog releases a certain amount of vibratoryforce which through various mutations of its wave-length, may do itspart in cooking a steak or gratifying the olfactory nerve by throwingfresh perfume on the violet. Evidently the commercial advantages ofdeposing the dog from the position of Exalted Personage and subduing himto that of Motor would not be all clear gain. He would no longer havethe spirit to send, Whitmanwise, his barbarous but beneficent yawp overthe housetops, nor the leisure to throw off vast quantities of energyby centrifugal efforts at the conquest of his tail. As to the fleas, hewould accept them with apathetic satisfaction as preventives of thoughtupon his fallen fortunes. 

Having observed with attention and considered with seriousness theLondon _Daily News_ declares its conviction that the dog, as we have thehappiness to know him, is dreadfully bored by civilization. This is oneof the gravest accusations that the friends of progress and light havebeen called out to meet--a challenge that it is impossible to ignore andunprofitable to evade; for the dog as we have the happiness to know himis the only dog that we have the happiness really to know. The wolf ishardly a dog within the meaning of the law, nor is the scalp-yieldingcoyote, whether he howls or merely sings and plays the piano; moreover, these are beyond the pale of civilization and outside the scope of oursympathies. 

With the dog it is different His place is among us; he is with us and ofus--a part of our life and love. If we are maintaining and promoting acondition of things that gives him "that tired feeling" it is befittingthat we mend our ways lest, shaking the carpet dust from his feet andthe tenderloin steaks from his teeth, he depart from our midst andconnect himself with the enchanted life of the thrilling barbarian. Wecan not afford to lose him. The cynophobes may call him a "survival" andsneer at his exhausted mandate--albeit, as Darwin points out, they areindebted for their sneer to his own habit of uncovering his teeth tobite; they may seek to cast opprobrium upon the nature of our affectionfor him by pronouncing it hereditary--a bequest from our primitiveancestors, for whom he performed important service in other ways thandepriving visitors of their tendons; but quite the same we should misshim at his meal time and in the (but for him) silent watches of thenight. We should miss his bark and his bite, the feel of his forefeetupon our shirt-fronts, the frou-frou of his dusty sides against ournether habiliments. More than all, we should miss and mourn that visibleyearning for chops and steaks, which he has persuaded us to accept asthe lovelight of his eye and a tribute to our personal worth. We mustkeep the dog, and to that end find means to abate his weariness of usand our ways. 

Doubtless much might be done to reclaim our dogs from their uncheerfulstate of mind by abstention from debate on imperialism; by excludingthem from the churches, at least during the sermons; by keeping themoff the streets and out of hearing when rites of prostration are inperformance before visiting notables; by forbidding anyone to read aloudin their hearing the sensational articles in the newspapers, and byeducating them to the belief that Labor and Capital are illusions. Alimitation of the annual output of popular novels would undoubtedlyreduce the dejection, which could be still further mitigated byabolition of the more successful magazines. If the dialect story or poemcould be prohibited, under severe penalties, the sum of night-howling(erroneously attributed to lunar influence) would experience an audibledecrement, which, also, would enable the fire department to augment itsown uproar without reproach. There is, indeed, a considerable number ofways in which we might effect a double reform--promoting the advantageof Man, as well as medicating the mental fatigue of Dog. For anotherexample, it would be "a boon and a blessing to man" if Society would putto death, or at least banish, the mill-man or manufacturer who persistsin apprising the entire community many times a day by means of a steamwhistle that it is time for his oppressed employees (every one of whomhas a gold watch) to go to work or to leave off. Such things not onlymake a dog tired, they make a man mad. They answer with an accentedaffirmative Truthful James' plaintive inquiry, "Is civilization a failure, Or is the Caucasian played out?"

Unquestionably, from his advantageous point of view as a looker-on atthe game, the dog is justified in the conviction that they are. 

THE ANCESTRAL BOND

A WELL-KNOWN citizen of Ohio once discovered another man of the samename exactly resembling him, and writing a "hand" which, including thesignature, he was unable to distinguish from his own. The two menwere unable to discover any blood relationship between them. It isnevertheless almost absolutely certain that a relationship existed, though it may have been so remote a degree that the familiar term"forty-second cousin" would not have exaggerated the slenderness of thetie. The phenomena of heredity have been inattentively noted; its lawsare imperfectly understood, even by Herbert Spencer and the prophets. Myown small study in this amazing field convinces me that a man is thesum of his ancestors; that his character, moral and intellectual, is determined before his birth. His environment with all its variedsuasions, its agencies of good and evil; breeding, training, interest, experience and the rest of it--have little to do with the matter and cannot alter the sentence passed upon him at conception, compelling him tobe what he is. 

Man is the hither end of an immeasurable line extending back to theultimate Adam--or, as we scientists prefer to name him, Protoplasmos. Man travels, not the mental road that he would, but the one that hemust--is pushed this way and that by the resultant of all the forcesbehind him; for each member of the ancestral line, though dead, yetpusfaedi. In one of what Dr. Nolmes (Holmes, ed. ) calls his "medicatednovels, " _The Guardian Angel_, this truth is most admirably and lucidlyset forth with abundant instance and copious exposition. Upon anotherwork of his, _Elsie Venner_--in which he erroneously affirms theinfluence of circumstance and environment--let us lay a charitable handand fling it into the fire. 

Clearly all one's ancestors have not equal power in shaping hischaracter. Conceiving them, according to our figure, as arranged in linebehind him and influential in the ratio of their individuality, we shallget the best notion of their method by supposing them to have takentheir places in an order somewhat independent of chronology and a littledifferent from their arrangement behind his brother. Immediately at hisback, with a controlling hand (a trifle skinny) upon him, may stand hisgreat-grandmother, while his father may be many removes arear. Orthe place of power may be held by some fine old Asian gentleman whoflourished before the confusion of tongues on the plain of Shinar; or bysome cave-dweller who polished the bone of life in Mesopotamia and wasperhaps a respectable and honest troglodyte. 

Sometimes a whole platoon of ancestors appears to have been movedbackward or forward, _en bloc_ not, we may be sure, capriciously, but inobedience to some law that we do not understand. I know a man to whosecharacter not an ancestor since the seventeenth century has contributedan element. Intellectually he is a contemporary of John Dryden, whomnaturally he reveres as the greatest of poets. I know another who hasinherited his handwriting from his great-grandfather, although he hasbeen trained to the Spencerian system and tried hard to acquire it. Furthermore, his handwriting follows the same order of progressivedevelopment as that of his greatgrandfather. At the age of twenty hewrote exactly as his ancestor did at the same age, and, although atforty-five his chirography is nothing like what it was even ten yearsago, it is accurately like his great-grandfather's at forty-five. It wasonly five years ago that the discovery of some old letters showedhim how his great-grandfather wrote, and accounted for the absolutedissimilarity of his own handwriting to that of any known member of hisfamily. 

To suppose that such individual traits as the configuration of thebody, the color of the hair and eyes, the shape of hands and feet, thethousand-and-one subtle characteristics that make family resemblancesare transmissible, and that the form, texture and capacities ofthe brain which fix the degree of natural intellect, are _not_transmissible, is illogical and absurd. We see that certain actions, such as gestures, gait, and so forth, resulting from the most complexconcurrences of brain, nerves and muscles, are hereditary. Is itreasonable to suppose that the brain alone of all the organs performsits work according to its own sweet will, free from congenitaltendencies? Is it not a familiar fact that racial characteristics arepersistent?--that one race is stupid and indocile, another quick andintelligent? Does not each generation of a race inherit the intellectualqualities of the preceding generation? How could this be true ofgenerations and not of individuals?

As to stirpiculture, the intelligent and systematic breeding of men andwomen with a view to improvement of the species--it is a thing of thefar future, It is hardly in sight. Yet, what splendid possibilities itcarries! Two or three generations of as careful breeding as we bestowon horses, dogs and pigeons would do more good than all the penal, reformatory and educating agencies of the world accomplish in a thousandyears. It is the one direction in which human effort to "elevate therace" can be assured of a definitive, speedy and adequate success. Itis hardly better than nonsense to prate of any good coming to the racethrough (for example) medical science, which is mainly concerned inreversing the beneficent operation of natural laws and saving theunfittest to perpetuate their unfitness. Our entire system of charitiesis of, to the same objection; it cares for the incapables whom Natureis trying to "weed out, " This not only debases the race physically, intellectually and morally, but constantly increases the rate ofdebasement. The proportion of criminals, paupers and the various kindsof "inmates" of charitable institutions augments its horrible percentageyearly. On the other hand, our wars destroy the capable; so thus we makeinroads upon the vitality of the race from two directions. We preservethe feeble and extirpate the strong. He who, in view of this amazingfolly can believe in a constant, even slow, progress of the humanrace toward perfection ought to be happy. He has a mind whose Olympianheights are inaccessible--the Titans of fact can never scale them tostorm its ancient reign. 

THE RIGHT TO WORK

ALL kinds of relief, charitable or other, doubtless tend to perpetuationof pauperism, inasmuch as paupers are thereby kept alive; and livingpaupers unquestionably propagate their unthrifty kind more abundantlythan dead ones. It is not true, though, that relief interferes withNature's beneficent law of the survival of the fittest, for the powerto excite sympathy and obtain relief is a kind of fitness. I am still adevotee of the homely primitive doctrine that mischance, disability oreven unthrift, is not a capital crime justly and profitably punishableby starvation. I still regard the Good Samaritan with a certaintoleration and Jesus Christ's tenderness to the poor as something morethan a policy of obstruction. 

If no such thing as an almshouse, a hospital, an asylum or any one ofthe many public establishments for relief of the unfortunate were knownthe proposal to found one would indubitably evoke from thousands ofthroats notes of deprecation and predictions of disaster. It would becalled Socialism of the radical and dangerous kind--of a kind to menacethe stability of government and undermine the very foundations oforganized society! Yet who is more truly unfortunate than an able-bodiedman out of work through no delinquency of will and no default of effort?Is hunger to him and his less poignant than to the feeble in body andmind whom we support for nothing in almshouse or asylum? Are cold andexposure less disagreeable to him than to them? Is not his claim to theright to live as valid as theirs if backed by the will to pay for lifewith work? And in denial of his claim is there not latent a far greaterperil to society than inheres in denial of theirs? So unfortunate anddangerous a creature as a man willing to work, yet having no work to do, should be unknown outside of the literature of satire. Doubtless therewould be enormous difficulties in devising a practicable and beneficentsystem, and doubtless the reform, like all permanent and salutaryreforms, will have to grow. The growth naturally will be delayed byopposition of the workingmen themselves--precisely as they oppose prisonlabor from ignorance that labor makes labor. 

It matters not that nine in ten of all our tramps and vagrants are suchfrom choice, and irreclaimable degenerates into the bargain; so long asone worthy man is out of employment and unable to obtain it our dutyis to provide it by law. Nay, so long as industrial conditions are suchthat so pathetic a phenomenon is possible we have not the moral rightto disregard that possibility. The right to employment being the rightto life, its denial is homicide. It should be needless to point outthe advantages of its concession. It would preserve the life andself-respect of him who is needy through misfortune, and supply aninfallible means of detection of his criminal imitator, who couldthen be dealt with as he deserves, widiout the lenity that findsjustification in doubt and compassion. It would diminish crime, for anempty stomach has no morals. With a wage rate lower than the commercial, it would disturb no private industries by luring away their workmen, and with nothing made to sell there would be no competition with privateproducts. Properly directed, it would give us highways, bridges andembankments which we shall not otherwise have. 

It is difficult to say if our laws relating to vagrancy and vagrantsare more cruel or more absurd. If not so atrocious they would evokelaughter; if less ridiculous we should read them with indignation. Hereis an imaginary conversation:

The Law: It is forbidden to you to rob. It is forbidden to you to steal. It is forbidden to you to beg. 

The Vagrant: Being without money, and denied employment, I am compelledto obtain food, shelter and clothing in one of these ways, else I shallbe hungry and cold. 

The Law: That is no affair of mine. Yet I am considerate--you arepermitted to be as hungry as you like and as cold as may suit you. 

The Vagrant: Hungry, yes, and many thanks to you; but if I go naked I amarrested for indecent exposure. You require me to wear clothing. 

The Law: You'll admit that you need it. 

The Vagrant: But not that you provide a way for me to get it. No onewill give me shelter at night; you forbid me to sleep in a straw stack. 

The Law: Ungrateful man! we provide a cell. 

The Vagrant: Even when I obey you, starving all day and freezing allnight, and holding my tongue with both hands, I am liable to arrest forbeing "without visible means of support. "

The Law: A most reprehensible condition. 

The Vagrant: One thing has been overlooked--a legal punishment forbegging for work. 

The Law: True; I am not perfect. 

THE RIGHT TO TAKE ONESELF OFF

A PERSON who loses heart and hope through a personal bereavement is likea grain of sand on the seashore complaining that the tide has washeda neighboring grain out of reach. He is worse, for the bereaved graincannot help itself; it has to be a grain of sand and play the game oftide, win or lose; whereas he can quit--by watching his opportunitycan "quit a winner. " For sometimes we do beat "the man who keeps thetable"--never in the long run, but infrequently and out of small stakes. But this is no time to "cash in" and go, for you can not take yourlittle winning with you. The time to quit is when you have lost a bigstake, your fool hope of eventual success, your fortitude and your loveof the game. If you stay in the game, which you are not compelled to do, take your losses in good temper and do not whine about them. They arehard to bear, but that is no reason why you should be. 

But we are told with tiresome iteration that we are "put here" for somepurpose (not disclosed) and have no right to retire until summoned--itmay be by small-pox, it may be by the bludgeon of a blackguard, it maybe by the kick of a cow; the "summoning" Power (said to be the same asthe "putting" Power) has not a nice taste in the choice of messengers. That "argument" is not worth attention, for it is unsupported by eitherevidence or anything remotely resembling evidence. "Put here. " Indeed!And by the keeper of the table who "runs" the "skin game. " We were puthere by our parents--that is all anybody knows about it; and they had nomore authority than we, and probably no more intention. 

The notion that we have not the right to take our own lives comes ofour consciousness that we have not the courage. It is the plea of thecoward--his excuse for continuing to live when he has nothing to livefor--or his provision against such a time in the future. If he were notegotist as well as coward he would need no excuse. To one who does notregard himself as the center of creation and his sorrow as the throes ofthe universe, life, if not worth living, is also not worth leaving. Theancient philosopher who was asked why he did not the if, as he taught, life was no better than death, replied: "Because death is no better thanlife. " We do not know that either proposition is true, but the matter isnot worth bothering about, for both states are supportable--life despiteits pleasures and death despite its repose. 

It was Robert G. Ingersoll's opinion that there is rather too littlethan too much suicide in the world--that people are so cowardly as tolive on long after endurance has ceased to be a virtue. This view is buta return to the wisdom of the ancients, in whose splendid civilizationsuicide had as honorable place as any other courageous, reasonable andunselfish act. Antony, Brutus, Cato, Seneca--these were not of the kindof men to do deeds of cowardice and folly. The smug, self-righteousmodern way of looking upon the act as that of a craven or a lunatic isthe creation of priests, Philistines and women. If courage is manifestin endurance of profitless discomfort it is cowardice to warm oneselfwhen cold, to cure oneself when ill, to drive away mosquitoes, to go inwhen it rains. The "pursuit of happiness, " then, is not an "inalienableright, " for that implies avoidance of pain. No principle is involved inthis matter; suicide is justifiable or not, according to circumstances;each case is to be considered on its merits and he having the act underadvisement is sole judge. To his decision, made with whatever lighthe may chance to have, all honest minds will bow. The appellant hasno court to which to take his appeal. Nowhere is a jurisdiction socomprehensive as to embrace the right of condemning the wretched tolife. 

Suicide is always courageous. We call it courage in a soldier merely toface death--say to lead a forlorn hope--although he has a chance of lifeand a certainty of "glory. " But the suicide does more than face death;he incurs it, and with a certainty, not of glory, but of reproach. Ifthat is not courage we must reform our vocabulary. 

True, there may be a higher courage in living than in dying--a moralcourage greater than physical. The courage of the suicide, like that ofthe pirate, is not incompatible with a selfish disregard of the rightsand interests of others--a cruel recreancy to duty and decency. I havebeen asked: "Do you not think it cowardly when a man leaves his familyunprovided for, to end his life, because he is dissatisfied with lifein general?" No, I do not; I think it selfish and cruel. Is not thatenough to say of it? Must we distort words from their true meaningin order more effectually to damn the act and cover its author with agreater infamy? A word means something; despite the maunderings ofthe lexicographers, it does not mean whatever you want it to mean. "Cowardice" means the fear of danger, not the shirking of duty. Thewriter who allows himself as much liberty in the use of words as he isallowed by the dictionary-maker and by popular consent is a bad writer. He can make no impression on his reader, and would do better service atthe ribbon-counter. 

The ethics of suicide is not a simple matter; one can not lay down lawsof universal application, but each case is to be judged, if judgedat all, with a full knowledge of all the circumstances, includingthe mental and moral make-up of the person taking his own life--animpossible qualification for judgment. One's time, race and religionhave much to do with it. Some people, like the ancient Romans andthe modern Japanese, have considered suicide in certain circumstanceshonorable and obligatory; among ourselves it is held in disfavor. A manof sense will not give much attention to considerations of that kind, excepting in so far as they affect others, but in judging weak offendersthey are to be taken into the account. Speaking generally, then, Ishould say that in our time and country the following persons (and someothers) are justified in removing themselves, and that to some of themit is a duty:

One afflicted with a painful or loathsome and incurable disease. 

One who is a heavy burden to his friends, with no prospect of theirrelief. 

One threatened with permanent insanity. 

One irreclaimably addicted to drunkenness or some similarly destructiveor offensive habit. 

One without friends, property, employment or hope. 

One who has disgraced himself. 

Why do we honor the valiant soldier, sailor, fireman? For obedience toduty? Not at all; that alone--without the peril--seldom elicits remark, never evokes enthusiasm. It is because he faced without flinching therisk of that supreme disaster--or what we feel to be such--death. Butlook you: the soldier braves the danger of death; the suicide bravesdeath itself! The leader of the forlorn hope may not be struck. Thesailor who voluntarily goes down with his ship may be picked up or castashore. It is not certain that the wall will topple until the firemanshall have descended with his precious burden. But the suicide--hisis the foeman that never missed a mark, his the sea that gives nothingback; the wall that he mounts bears no man's weight And his, at the endof it all, is the dishonored grave where the wild ass of public opinion

 "Stamps o'er his head but can not break his sleep. "