



Produced by David Widger





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 "Collected
Works" now in course of publication, but unforeseen delay in the date of
publication has made this impossible. The selection of its contents was
not made by me, but the choice has my approval and the publication my
authority.

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 the
first time. Written for various Californian journals and periodicals
and extending over a period of more than a quarter of a century, these
opinions and reflections express the refined judgment of one who has
seen, not as through a glass darkly, the trend of events. And having
seen the portentous effigy that we are making of the Liberty our fathers
created, he has written of it in English that is the despair of those
who, thinking less clearly, escape not the pitfalls of diffuseness and
obscurity. For Mr. Bierce, as did Flaubert, holds that the right word is
necessary for the conveyance of the right thought and his sense of word
values rarely betrays him into error. But with an odd--I might almost
say perverse--indifference to his own reputation, he has allowed
these writings to lie fallow in the old files of papers, while others,
possessing the knack of publicity, years later tilled the soil with
some degree of success. President Hadley, of Yale University, before
the Candlelight Club of Denver, January 8, 1900, advanced, as novel and
original, ostracism as an effective punishment of social highwaymen.
This address attracted widespread attention, and though Professor
Hadley's remedy has not been generally adopted it is regarded as his
own. 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 their
hands into our pockets because they know that, virtually, none of us
will refuse to take their hands in our own afterwards, in friendly
salutation. If notorious rascality entailed social outlawry the only
rascals would be those properly--and proudly--belonging to the 'criminal
class.'

Again, Edwin Markham has attracted to himself no little attention by
advocating the application of the Golden Rule in temporal affairs as a
cure for evils arising from industrial discontent In this he, too, has
been 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 only
means--all other plans for safety and relief are as vain as dreams, and
as empty as the crooning of fools. And, behold, here it is: 'All things
whatsoever 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 have
done. Some years previously, June 28, 1896, to be exact, the author
of these essays wrote: "That is my ultimate and determining test of
right--'What, under the circumstances, would Christ have done?'--the
Christ 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 the
acclaim they have received by enunciating his ideas, and I mention the
instances here merely to forestall the filing of any other claim to
priority.

The essays cover a wide range of subjects, embracing among other
things government, dreams, writers of dialect, and dogs, and always the
author's point of view is fresh, original and non-Philistine. Whether
one cares to agree with him or not, one will find vast entertainment in
his wit that illuminates with lightning flashes all he touches. Other
qualities I forbear allusion to, having already encroached too much upon
the 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 commonly
knows with as little accuracy what he is as the rest of us know why he
is. The Socialist believes that most human affairs should be regulated
and managed by the State--the Government--that is to say, the majority.
Our own system has many Socialistic features and the trend of republican
government is all that way. The Anarchist is the kind of lunatic who
believes that all crime is the effect of laws forbidding it--as the pig
that breaks into the kitchen garden is created by the dog that chews its
ear! The Anarchist favors abolition of all law and frequently belongs to
an organization that secures his allegiance by solemn oaths and dreadful
penalties. "Nihilism" is a name given by Turgenieff to the general body
of Russian discontent which finds expression in antagonizing authority
and killing authorities. Constructive politics would seem, as yet, to
be a cut above the Nihilist's intelligence; he is essentially a
destructionary. He is so diligently engaged in unweeding the soil that
he has not given a thought to what he will grow there. Nihilism may
be described as a policy of assassination tempered by reflections upon
Siberia. American sympathy with it is the offspring of an unholy union
between the tongue of a liar and the ear of a dupe.

Upon examination it will be seen that political dissent, when it takes
any form more coherent than the mere brute dissatisfaction of a mind
that does not know what it wants to want, finds expression in one of but
two ways--in Socialism or in Anarchism. Whatever methods one may think
will best substitute for a system gradually evolved from our needs and
our natures a system existing only in the minds of dreamers, one is
bound to choose between these two dreams. Yet such is the intellectual
delinquency of many who most strenuously denounce the system that we
have that we not infrequently find the same man advocating in one
breath, Socialism, in the next, Anarchism. Indeed, few of these sons of
darkness know that even as coherent dreams the two are incompatible.
With Anarchy triumphant the Socialist would be a thousand years further
from realization of his hope than he is today. Set up Socialism on a
Monday and on Tuesday the country would be _en fete_, gaily hunting down
Anarchists. There would be little difficulty in trailing them, for they
have not so much sense as a deer, which, running down the wind, sends
its tell-tale fragrance on before.

Socialism and Anarchism are the two extremes of political thought; they
are parts of the same dung, in the sense that the terminal points of a
road are parts of the same road. Between them, about midway, lies
the system that we have the happiness to endure. It is a "blend" of
Socialism and Anarchism in about equal parts: all that is not one is the
other. Everything serving the common interest, or looking to the welfare
of the whole people, is socialistic in the strictest sense of the word
as understood by the Socialist Whatever tends to private advantage or
advances an individual or class interest at the expense of a public
one, is anarchistic. Cooperation is Socialism; competition is Anarchism.
Competition carried to its logical conclusion (which only cooperation
prevents or can prevent) would leave no law in force no property
possible no life secure.

Of course the words "cooperation" and "competition" are not here used in
a merely industrial and commercial sense; they are intended to cover
the whole field of human activity. Two voices singing a duet--that is
cooperation--Socialism. Two voices singing each a different tune and
trying to drown each other--that is competition--Anarchism: each is a
law unto itself--that is to say, it is lawless. Everything that ought
to be done the Socialist hopes to do by associated endeavor, as an army
wins battles; Anarchism is socialistic in its means only: by cooperation
it 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 is
no new industry; it is as ancient as the race. Always and everywhere
persons in high place have been the assassin's prey. We have ourselves
lost three Presidents by murder, and will doubtless lose many another
before the book of American history is closed. If anything is new in
this activity of the regicide it is found in the choice of victims. The
contemporary "avenger" slays, not the merely great, but the good and
the inoffensive--an American President who had struck the chains from
millions of slaves; a Russian Czar who against the will and work of his
own powerful nobles had freed their serfs; a French President from whom
the French people had received nothing but good; a powerless Austrian
Empress, whose weight of sorrows touched the world to tears; a blameless
Italian King beloved of his people; such is a part of the recent record
of the regicide whose every entry is a tale of infamy unrelieved by one
circumstance 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 not
without significance. It points unmistakably to two facts: first, that
the selections are made, not by the assassins themselves, but by some
central control inaccessible to individual preference and unaffected
by the fortunes of its instruments; second, that there is a constant
purpose to manifest an antagonism, not to any individual ruler, but to
rulers; 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 against
Law.

M. Vaillant, the French gentleman who lacked a "good opinion of the
law," but was singularly rich in the faith that by means of gunpowder
and flying nails humanity could be brought into a nearer relation with
reason, righteousness and the will of God, is said to have been nearly
devoid of a nose. Of this affliction M. Vaillant made but slight
account, as was natural, seeing that but for a brief season did he need
even so much of nose as remained to him. Yet before its effacement by
premature disruption of his own petard it must have had a certain value
to him--he would not wantonly have renounced it; and had he foreseen its
extinction by the bomb the iron views of that controversial device would
probably have been denied expression. Albeit (so say the scientists)
doomed to eventual elimination from the scheme of being, and to the
Anarchist even now something of an accusing conscience, the nose is
indubitably an excellent thing in man.

This brings us to consideration of the human nose as a measure of
human happiness--not the size of it, but its numbers; its frequent or
infrequent occurrence upon the human face. We have grown so accustomed
to 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--"an
occasion long to be remembered," as the society reporter hath it
Yet "abundant testimony showeth" that but two or three centuries ago
noseless men and women were so common all over Europe as to provoke
but little comment when seen and (in their disagreeable way) heard
They abounded in all the various walks of life: there were honored
burgomasters without noses, wealthy merchants, great scholars, artists,
teachers. Amongst the humbler classes nasal destitution was almost as
frequent as pecuniary--in the humblest of all the most common of all.
Writing in the thirteenth century, Salsius mentions the retainers and
servants of certain Suabian noblemen as having hardly a whole ear among
them--for until a comparatively recent period man's tenure of his ears
was even more precarious than that of his nose. In 1436, when a Bavarian
woman, Agnes Bemaurian, wife of Duke Albert the Pious, was dropped off
the bridge at Prague, she persisted in rising to the surface and trying
to escape; so the executioner gave himself the trouble to put a long
pole into her hair and hold her under. A contemporary account of the
matter hints that her disorderly behavior at so solemn a moment was due
to the pain caused by removal of her nose; but as her execution was by
order of her own father it seems more probable that "the extreme penalty
of the law" was not imposed. Without a doubt, though, possession of a
nose was an uncommon (and rather barren) distinction in those days among
"persons designated to assist the executioner," as the condemned were
civilly called. Nor, as already said, was it any too common among
persons 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 is
not altogether due to invention of the handkerchief. The genesis and
development of his right to his own nose have been accompanied with a
corresponding advance in the possessory rights all along the line of
his belongings--his ears, his fingers and toes, his skin, his bones, his
wife and her young, his clothes and his labor--everything that is (and
that once was not) his. In Europe and America today these things can
not be taken away from even the humblest and poorest without somebody
wanting to "know the reason why." In every decade the nation that is
most powerful upon the seas incurs voluntarily a vast expense of blood
and treasure in suppressing a slave trade which in no way is injurious
to her interests, nor to the interests of any but the slaves.

So "Freedom broadens slowly down," and today even the lowliest incapable
of all Nature's aborted has a nose that he dares to call his own and
bite off at his own sweet will. Unfortunately, with an unthinkable
fatuity we permit him to be told that but for the very agencies that
have put him in possession he could successfully assert a God-given and
world-old right to the noses of others. At present the honest fellow is
mainly engaged in refreshing himself upon his own nose, consuming that
comestible 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 are
using 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 to
the fact that scoundrels like Vaillant are neither few nor distant.
We shall learn that our blind dependence upon the magic of words is a
fatuous error; that the fortuitous arrangement of consonants and vowels
which we worship as Liberty is of slight efficacy in disarming the
lunatic brandishing a bomb. Liberty, indeed! The murderous wretch loves
it a deal better than we, and wants more of it. Liberty! one almost
sickens of the word, so quick and glib it is on every lip--so destitute
of 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 do
what? Just now I distinctly favor the liberty of the law to cut off the
noses of anarchists caught red-handed or red-tongued. If they go in for
mutilation let them feel what it is like. If they are not satisfied with
the way that things have been going on since the wife of Duke Albert the
Pious was held under water with a pole, and since the servitors of the
Suabian nobleman cherished their vestigial ears, it is to be presumed
that 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 to
kill--mutilation followed by death. For those who merely deny the right
and expediency of law, plain mutilation--which might advantageously take
the form of removal of the tongue.

Why not? Where is the injustice? Surely he who denies men's right to
make laws will not invoke the laws that they have wickedly made! That
were to say that they must not protect themselves, yet are bound
to protect him. What! if I beat him will he call the useless and
mischievous constabulary? If I draw out his tongue shall he (in the
sign-language) demand it back, and failing of restitution (for surely I
should 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--laws
innumerable. Everything that either, in consideration of the other's
wish 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 with
any sense of obligation toward the other, both clean from creation, with
nothing but brains to direct their conduct--every hour would evolve an
understanding, that is to say, a law; every act would suggest one. They
would have to agree not to kill nor harm each other. They must arrange
their work and all their activities to secure the best advantage. These
arrangements, agreements, understandings--what are they but laws? To
live without law is to live alone. Every family is a miniature State
with a complicate system of laws, a supreme authority and subordinate
authorities down to the latest babe. And as he who is loudest in
demanding liberty for himself is sternest in denying it to others,
you may confidently go to the Maison Vaillant, or the Mosthaus, for a
flawless example of the iron hand.

Laws of the State are as faulty and as faultily administered as those of
the Family. Most of them have to be speedily and repeatedly "amended,"
many repealed, and of those permitted to stand, the greater number fall
into disuse and are forgotten. Those who have to be entrusted with the
duty of administering them have all the limitations of intelligence and
defects of character by which the rest of us also are distinguished from
the angels. In the wise governor, the just judge, the honest sheriff
or the patient constable we have as rare a phenomenon as the faultless
father. The good God has not given us a special kind of men upon whom to
devolve the duty of seeing to the observance of the understandings that
we call laws. Like all else that men do, this work is badly done. The
best that we can hope for through all the failures, the injustice, the
disheartening damage to individual rights and interests, is a fairly
good general result, enabling us to walk abroad among our fellows
unafraid, to meet even the tribesmen from another valley without too
imminent peril of braining and evisceration. Of that small security the
Anarchist would deprive us. But without that nothing is of value and we
shall be willing to renounce all. Let us begin by depriving ourselves of
the Anarchist.

Our system of civilization being the natural outgrowth of our wretched
moral and intellectual natures, is open to criticism and subject
to revision. Our laws, being of human origin, are faulty and their
application is disappointing. Dissent, dissatisfaction, deprecation,
proposals for a better system fortified with better laws more
intelligently administered--these are permissible and should be welcome.
The Socialist (when he is not carried away by zeal to pool issues with
the Anarchist) has that in him which it does us good to hear. He may be
wrong b all else, yet right in showing us wherein we ourselves are
wrong. Anyhow, his mission is amendment, and so long as his paths are
peace he has the right to walk therein, exhorting as he goes. The
French Communist who does not preach Petroleum and It rectified is to be
regarded with more than amusement, more than compassion. There is room
for him and his fad; there are hospitable ears for his boast that Jesus
Christ would have been a Communist if there had been Communes. They
really 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 revenge
for the past--for that animal there should be no close season, for that
savage, no reservation. Society has not the right to grant life to one
who denies the right to live. The protagonist of reversion to the regime
of lacking noses should lack a nose.

It is difficult to say if the bomb-thrower, actual or potential, is
greater as scoundrel or fool. Suppose his aim is to compel concession by
terror. Can not the brute observe at each of his exploits a tightening
of "the reins of power?" Through the necessity of guarding against him
the mildest governments are becoming despotic, the most despotic more
despotic. Does he suppose that "the rulers of the earth" are silly
enough 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 that
roams the plain is indubitably the one that lifts his voice and heel
against that socialism known as "public ownership of public utilities,"
on the ground of "principle." There may be honest, and in some degree
intelligent, opposition on the ground of expediency. Many persons whom
it is a pleasure to respect believe that a Government railway, for
example, would be less efficiently managed than the same railway in
private hands, and that political dangers lurk in the proposal so
enormously to increase the number of Federal employes as Government
ownership of railways would entail. They think, in other words, that
the policy is inexpedient. It is a duty to reason with them, which, as
a rule, one can do without being insulted. But the chap who greets the
proposal with a howl of derision as "Socialism!" is not a respectable
opponent. Eyes he has, but he sees not; ears--oh! very abundant
ears--but he hears not the still, small voice of history nor the still
smaller voice of common sense.

Obviously to those who, having eyes, do see, public ownership of
anything is a step in the direction of Socialism, for perfect Socialism
means public ownership of everything. But "principle" has nothing to
do with it The principle of public ownership is already accepted and
established. It has no visible opponents except in the camp of the
Anarchists, and fewer of them are visible there than soap and water
would reveal. Antagonists of the _principle_ of Socialism lost their
fight when the first human government held the dedicatory exercises of a
Cave of Legislation. Since then the only question about the matter has
been how far the _extension_ of Socialism is expedient Some would draw
the limiting line at one place, some at another; but only a fool thinks
there can be government without it, or good government without a great
deal of it (The fact that we have always had a great deal of it yet
never had good government affirms nothing that it is worth while to
consider.) The word-worn example of our Postal Department is only one of
a thousand instances of pure Socialism. If it did not exist how bitter
an opposition a proposal to establish it would evoke from Adversaries of
the Red Rag! The Government builds and operates bridges with general
assent; but as the late General Walker pointed out, it might under some
circumstances be more economical, or better otherwise, to build and
operate a ferry boat, which is a floating bridge. But that would be
opposed as rank Socialism.

The truth is that the men and women of principle are a pretty dangerous
class, generally speaking--and they are generally speaking. It is they
that hamper us in every war. It is they who, preventing concentration
and regulation of un-abolishable evils, promote their distribution and
liberty. Moral principles are pretty good things--for the young and
those not well grounded in goodness. If one have an impediment in his
thought, or is otherwise unequal to emergencies as they arise, it is
safest to be provided beforehand with something to refer to in order
that a right decision may be made without taking thought. But "spirits
of a purer fire" prefer to decide each question as it comes up, and to
act upon the merits of the case, unbound and unpledged. With a
quick intelligence, a capable conscience and a habit of doing right
automatically one has little need to burden one's mind and memory with
a set of solemn principles formulated by owlish philosophers who do not
happen to know that what is right is merely what, in the long run and
with regard to the greater number of cases, is expedient Principle
is not always an infallible guide. For illustration, it is not always
expedient--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 in
which it would be right to assassinate one's neighbor. Suppose him to
be a desperate scoundrel of a chemist who has devised a means of
setting the atmosphere afire. The man who should go through life on an
inflexible line of principle would border his path with a havoc of human
happiness.

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




IV.

When M. Casimir-Perier resigned the French Presidency there were
those who regarded the act as weak, cowardly, undutiful and otherwise
censurable. It seems to me the act, not of a feeble man, but of a strong
one--not that of a coward, but that of a gentleman. Indeed, I hardly
know where to look in history for an act more entirely gratifying to
my sense of "the fitness of things" than this dignified notification
to mankind that in consenting to serve one's country one does not
relinquish the right to decent treatment--to immunity from factious
opposition and abuse--to at least as much civil consideration as is due
from 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 almost
unanimous mandate of the French people in an emergency which it was
thought that he was the best man to meet. That he met it with modesty
and courage was testified without dissent. That he afterward did
anything to forfeit the confidence and respect that he then inspired is
not true, and nobody believes it true. Yet in his letter of resignation
he said, and said truly:

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

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

"The respect and ambition which I entertain for my country will not
allow me to acknowledge that the servants of the country, and he who
represents it in the presence of foreign nations, may be insulted every
day."

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

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

We may be permitted to hope that the lesson is wider than France and
more lasting than the French Republic. It is time that not only France
but all other countries with "popular institutions" should learn that if
they wish to command the services of men of honor they must accord them
honorable treatment; the rule now is for the party to which they belong
to give them a half-hearted support while suffering all other parties
to slander and insult them. The action of the President of the French
Republic in these disgusting circumstances is exceptional and unusual
only 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 and
their no less malignant and hardly less ignorant leaders and
spokesmen, having sown the wind of reasonless obstruction and partisan
vilification, are reaping the whirlwind of misrule. So far as
concerns the public service, gentlemen are mostly on a strike against
introduction of the mud-machine. This high-minded political workman,
Casimir-Perier, never showed to so noble advantage as in gathering up
his tools and walking out.

It may be, and a million times has been, urged that abstention from
activity in public affairs by men of brains and character leaves the
business of government in the hands of the incapable and the vicious. In
whose hands, pray, in a republic does it logically belong? What does
the theory of "representative government" affirm? What is the lesson
of every netherward extension of the suffrage? What do we mean by
permitting it to "broaden slowly down" to lower and lower intelligences
and moralities?--what but that stupidity and vice, equally with virtue
and wisdom, are entitled to a voice in political affairs, a finger in
the public pie?

A person that is fit to vote is fit to be voted for. He who is competent
for the high and difficult function of choosing an officer of the State
is competent to serve the State as an officer. To deny him the right is
illogical and unjust. Participation in Government can not be at the same
time a privilege and a duty, and he who claims it as a privilege must
not speak of another's renunciation (whereby himself is more highly
privileged) as "shirking." With every retirement from politics increased
power 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 could
reasonably be made.

My advice to slandered officials has ever been: "Resign." The public
officials of this favored country, Heaven be thanked, are infrequently
slandered: they are, as a rule, so bad that calumniation is a
compliment. Our best men, with here and there an exception, have
been driven out of public life, or made afraid to enter it. Even
our spasmodic efforts at reform fail ludicrously for lack of leaders
unaffiliated with "the thing to be reformed." Unless attracted by the
salary, why should a gentleman "aspire" to the Presidency of the United
States? 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 him
blush, and from all the others an opposition that will stick at nothing
to accomplish his satisfactory defamation. After his election his
partition and allotment of the loaves and fishes will estrange an
important and thenceforth implacable faction of his following without
appeasing the animosity of any one else; and during his entire service
his sky will be dark with a flight of dead cats. At the finish of his
term the utmost that he can expect in the way of reward not expressible
in terms of the national currency is that not much more than one-half of
his 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 kinds
extant A government that does not protect life is a flat failure, no
matter what else it may do. Life being almost universally regarded as
the most precious possession, its security is the first and highest
essential--not the life of him who takes life, but the life which is
exposed defenceless to his hateful hand. In no country in the world,
civilized or savage, is life so insecure as in this. In no country in
the world is murder held in so light reprobation. In no battle of modern
times have so many lives been taken as are lost annually in the United
States through public indifference to the crime of homicide--through
disregard of law, through bad government. If American self-government,
with its ten thousand homicides a year, is good government, there is no
such thing as bad. Self-government! What monstrous nonsense! Who governs
himself needs no government, has no governor, is not governed. If
government has any meaning it means the restraint of the many by the
few--the subordination of numbers to brains. It means the determined
denial to the masses of the right to cut their own throats. It means
the grasp and control of all the social forces and material enginery--a
vigilant censorship of the press, a firm hand upon the church, keen
supervision of public meetings and public amusements, command of the
railroads, telegraph and all means of communication. It means, in
short, the ability to make use of all the beneficent influences of
enlightenment for the good of the people, and to array all the powers
of civilization against civilization's natural enemies--the people.
Government like this has a thousand defects, but it has one merit: it is
government.

Despotism? Yes. It is the despotisms of the world that have been the
conservators of civilization. It is the despot who, most powerful for
mischief, is alone powerful for good. It is conceded that government is
necessary--even by the "fierce democracies" that madly renounce it. But
in so far as government is not despotic it is not government. In Europe
for the last one hundred years, the tendency of all government has been
liberalization. The history of European politics during that period is
a 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: society
honeycombed with treason; property menaced with partition; assassination
studied as a science and practiced as an art; everywhere powerful
secret organizations sworn to demolish the social fabric that the slow
centuries have but just erected and unmindful that themselves will
perish in the wreck. No heart in Europe can beat tranquilly under clean
linen. 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. In
1879 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, where
the majority is composed of persons having dark understandings and
criminal instincts, it has broken down. In our case, as in every case,
the momentum of successful revolution carried us too far. We
rebelled against tyranny and having overthrown it, overthrew also the
governmental form in which it had happened to be manifest. In their
anger and their triumph our good old gran'thers acted somewhat in the
spirit of the Irishman who cudgeled the dead snake until nothing was
left of it, in order to make it "sinsible of its desthroction." They
meant it all, too, the honest souls! For a long time after the setting
up of the republic the republic meant active hatred to kings, nobles,
aristocracies. It was held, and rightly held, that a nobleman could not
breathe in America--that he left his title and his privileges on the
ship that brought him over. Do we observe anything of that in this
generation? On the landing of a foreign king, prince or nobleman--even a
miserable "knight"--do we not execute sycophantic genuflexions? Are not
our newspapers full of flamboyant descriptions and qualming adulation?
Nay, does not our President himself--successor to Washington and
Jefferson!--greet and entertain the "nation's guest"? Is not every
American young woman crazy to mate with a male of title? Does all this
represent no retrogression?--is it not the backward movement of the
shadow on the dial? Doubtless the republican idea has struck strong
roots into the soil of the two Americas, but he who rightly considers
the tendencies of events, the causes that bring them about and the
consequences that flow from them, will not be hot to affirm the
perpetuity of republican institutions in the Western Hemisphere. Between
their inception and their present stage of development there is scarcely
the beat of a pendulum; and already, by corruption and lawlessness,
the people of both continents, with all their diversities of race and
character, have shown themselves about equally unfit. To become a nation
of scoundrels all that any people needs is opportunity, and what we are
pleased to call by the impossible name of "self-government" supplies it.

The capital defect of republican government is inability to repress
internal forces tending to disintegration. It does not take long for a
"self-governed" people to learn that it is not really governed--that an
agreement enforcible by nobody but the parties to it is not binding.
We are learning this very rapidly: we set aside our laws whenever we
please. The sovereign power--the tribunal of ultimate jurisdiction--is
a mob. If the mob is large enough (it need not be very large), even
if composed of vicious tramps, it may do as it will. It may destroy
property and life. It may without proof of guilt inflict upon
individuals torments unthinkable by fire and flaying, mutilations that
are nameless. It may call men, women and children from their beds and
beat them to death with cudgels. In the light of day it may assail the
very strongholds of law in the heart of a populous city, and assassinate
prisoners of whose guilt it knows nothing. And these things--observe, O
victims of kings--are habitually done. One would as well be at the mercy
of 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 of
numbers we have closed our eyes and murmured, "Liberty." When armed
Anarchists threaten to quench the fires of civilization in a sea of
blood 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 immunity
disarms his tongue of its poison, his thought of its infection. With a
fatuity that would be incredible without the testimony of observation,
we hold that an Anarchist free to go about making proselytes, free to
purchase arms, free to drill and parade and encourage his dupes with a
demonstration of their numbers and power, is less mischievous than an
Anarchist with a shut mouth, a weaponless hand and under surveillance of
the police. The Anarchist himself is persuaded of the superiority of
our plan of dealing with him; he likes it and comes over in quantity,
inpesting the political atmosphere with the "sweltered venom" engendered
by centuries of oppression--comes over here, where he is not oppressed,
and sets up as oppressor. His preferred field of malefaction is the
country that is most nearly anarchical. He comes here, partly to better
himself under our milder institutions, partly to secure immunity while
conspiring to destroy them. There is thunder in Europe, but if the storm
ever break it is in America that the lightning will fall, for here is
a great vortex into which the decivilizing agencies are pouring without
obstruction. Here gather the eagles to the feast, for the quarry is
defenceless. Here is no power in government, no government. Here an
enemy of order is thought to be least dangerous when suffered to preach
and arm in peace. And here is nothing between him and his task of
supervision--no pampered soldiery to repress his rising, no iron
authority to lay him by the heels. The militia is fraternal, the
magistracy elective. Europe may hold out a little longer. The Great
Powers may make what stage-play they will, but they are not maintaining
their incalculable armaments for aggression upon one another, for
protection from one another, nor for fun. These vast forces are
purely constabular--creatures and creators of discontent--phenomena of
decivilization. Eventually they will fraternize with Disorder or become
themselves Praetorian Guards more dangerous than the perils that have
called 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 Government
A policy of decapitation. Upthrust of the serviceable Anarchist.
His prompt effacement by his victorious ally and natural enemy, the
Socialist. Free minting and printing of money--to every citizen a
shoulder-load of the latter, to the printers a ton each. Divided
counsels. 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 one
would believe. I do not expect to be heeded. The crust of a volcano is
electric the fumes are narcotic; the combined sensation is delightful no
end. I have looked at the dial of civilization; I tell you the shadow
is going back. That is of small importance to men of leisure, with
wine-dipped wreaths upon their heads. They do not care to know.




CIVILIZATION




I.

THE question "Does civilization civilize?" is a fine example of _petitio
principii_. and decides itself in the affirmative; for civilization must
needs do that from the doing of which it has its name. But it is not
necessary to suppose that he who propounds is either unconscious of his
lapse in logic or desirous of digging a pitfall for the feet of
those who discuss; I take it he simply wishes to put the matter in an
impressive way, and relies upon a certain degree of intelligence in the
interpretation.

Concerning uncivilized peoples we know but little except what we are
told by travelers--who, speaking generally, can know very little but the
fact of uncivilization as shown in externals and irrelevances, and are
moreover, greatly given to lying. From the savages we hear very little.
Judging them in all things by our own standards, in default of a
knowledge of theirs, we necessarily condemn, disparage and belittle. One
thing that civilization certainly has not done is to make us intelligent
enough to understand that the opposite of a virtue is not necessarily a
vice. Because we do not like the taste of one another it does not follow
that 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 that
polygamy is everywhere--nor, for that matter, anywhere--either wrong or
inexpedient. Our habit of wearing clothes does not prove that conscience
of the body, the sense of shame, is charged with a divine mandate; for
like the conscience of the spirit it is the creature of what it seems to
create: it comes to the habit of wearing clothes. And for those who hold
that the purpose of civilization is morality it may be said that peoples
which are the most nearly naked are, in our sense, the most nearly
moral. Because the brutality of the civilized slave owners and dealers
created a conquering sentiment against slavery it is not intelligent to
assume that slavery is a maleficent thing amongst Oriental peoples (for
example) where the slave is not oppressed.

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

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

I know of no savage custom or habit of thought which has not its mate
in civilized countries. For every mischievous or absurd practice of
the natural man I can name you a dozen of the unnatural which are
essentially the same. And nearly every custom of our barbarian ancestors
in historic times survives in some form today. We make ourselves look
formidable in battle--for that matter, we fight. Our women paint their
faces. We feel it obligatory to dress more or less alike, inventing the
most ingenious reasons for it and actually despising and persecuting
those who do not care to conform. Within the memory of living persons
bearded men were stoned in the streets; and a clergyman in New York
who wore his beard as Christ wore his, was put into jail and variously
persecuted till he died. We bury our dead instead of burning them, yet
every cemetery is set thick with urns. As there are no ashes for the
urns we do not trouble ourselves to make them hollow, and we say
their use is "emblematic." When, following the bent of our ancestral
instincts, we go on, age after age, in the performance of some senseless
act which once had a use and meaning we excuse ourselves by calling
it symbolism. Our "symbols" are merely survivals. We have theology and
patriotism. We have all the savage's superstition. We propitiate and
ingratiate by means of gifts. We shake hands. All these and hundreds
of others of our practices are distinctly, in their nature and by their
origin, savage.

Civilization does not, I think, make the race any better. It makes men
know 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 one
can have any other motive than that. There is no such thing as
unselfishness. We perform the most "generous" and "self-sacrificing"
acts because we should be unhappy if we did not. We move on lines of
least reluctance. Whatever tends to increase the beggarly sum of human
happiness is worth having; nothing else has any value.

The cant of civilization fatigues. Civilization is a fine and beautiful
structure. It is as picturesque as a Gothic cathedral. But it is built
upon the bones and cemented with the blood of those whose part in all
its pomp is that and nothing more. It cannot be reared in the generous
tropics, for there the people will not contribute their blood and bones.
The proposition that the average American workingman or European peasant
is "better off" than the South Sea Islander, lolling under a palm and
drunk 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 is
overmuch addicted to the practice of eating human flesh; but concerning
that I submit: first, that he likes it; second, that those who supply
it are mostly dead. It is upon his enemies that he feeds, and these
he would kill anyhow, as we do ours. In civilized, enlightened and
Christian countries, where cannibalism has not yet established itself,
wars are as frequent and destructive as among the maneaters. The
untitled savage knows at least why he goes killing, whereas the private
soldier is commonly in black ignorance of the apparent cause of
quarrel--of the actual cause, always. Their shares in the fruits of
victory are about equal: the Chief takes all the dead, the General all
the glory. Moreover it costs more human life to supply a Christian
gentleman 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 is
undoubtedly the more economical system.




II.

Transplanted institutions grow but slowly; and civilization can not be
put into a ship and carried across an ocean. The history of this country
is a sequence of illustrations of these truths. It was settled by
civilized men and women from civilized countries, yet after two and a
half centuries with unbroken communication with the mother systems, it
is still imperfectly civilized. In learning and letters, in art and the
science of government, America is but a faint and stammering echo of
England.

For nearly all that is good in our American civilization we are indebted
to England; the errors and mischiefs are of our own creation. We have
originated little, because there is little to originate, but we have
unconsciously reproduced many of the discredited and abandoned systems
of former ages and other countries--receiving them at second hand, but
making them ours by the sheer strength and immobility of the national
belief in their newness. Newness! Why, it is not possible to make an
experiment in government, in art, in literature, in sociology, or in
morals, that has not been made over, and over, and over again. Fools
talk of clear and simple remedies for this and that evil afflicting the
commonwealth. If a proposed remedy is obvious and easily intelligible,
it is condemned in the naming, for it is morally certain to have been
tried a thousand times in the history of the world, and had it been
effective men ere now would have forgotten, from mere disuse, how to
produce the evil it cured.

There are clear and simple remedies for nothing. In medicine there
has been discovered but a single specific; in politics not one.
The interests, moral and natural, of a community in our highly
differentiated civilization are so complex, intricate, delicate and
interdependent, that you can not touch one without affecting all. It
is a familiar truth that no law was ever passed that did not have
unforeseen results; but of these results, by far the greater number are
never recognized as of its creation. The best that can be said of any
"measure" is, that the sum of its perceptible benefits seems so to
exceed the sum of its perceptible evils as to constitute a balance of
advantage. Yet the magnificent innocence of the statesman or philosopher
to whose understanding "the whole matter lies in a nutshell"--who thinks
he can formulate a practical political or social policy within the four
corners of an epigram--who fears nothing because he knows nothing--is
constantly to the fore with a simple specific for ills whose causes are
complex, constant and inscrutable. To the understanding of this creature
a difficulty well ignored is half overcome; so he buttons up his eyes
and assails the problems of life with the divine confidence of a blind
pig traversing a labyrinth.

The glories of England are our glories. She can achieve nothing that our
fathers 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 the
preceding. For untold ages our ancestors wrought to rear that "revered
pile," the civilization of England. And shall we now try to belittle the
mighty structure because other though kindred hands are laying the top
courses while we have elected to found a new tower in another land? The
American eulogist of civilization who is not proud of his heritage in
England's glory is unworthy to enjoy his lesser heritage in the lesser
glory of his own country.

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

It is not alone that we have had to "subdue the wilderness;" our
educational conditions are otherwise adverse. Our political system is
unfavorable. Our fortunes, accumulated in one generation, are dispersed
in the next. If it takes three generations to make a gentleman one
will not make a thinker. Instruction is acquired, but capacity for
instruction is transmitted. The brain that is to contain a trained
intellect is not the result of a haphazard marriage between a clown and
a wench, nor does it get its tractable tissues from a hard-headed farmer
and a soft-headed milliner. If you confess the importance of race and
pedigree 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 an
aristocracy of leisure, and consequently of intellect, is the best
possible kind of human organization; I perceive its disadvantages
clearly enough. But I do not hold that a system under which all
important public trusts, political and professional, civil and military,
ecclesiastical and secular, are held by educated men--that is, men of
trained faculties and disciplined judgment--is not an altogether faulty
system.

It is only in our own country that an exacting literary taste is
believed to disqualify a man for purveying to the literary needs of a
taste less exacting--a proposition obviously absurd, for an exacting
taste is nothing but the intelligent discrimination of a judgment
instructed by comparison and observation. There is, in fact, no pursuit
or occupation, from that of a man who blows up a balloon to that of
the man who bores out the stove pipes, in which he that has talent and
education is not a better worker than he that has either, and he than
he that has neither. It is a universal human weakness to disparage
the knowledge that we do not ourselves possess, but it is only my own
beloved country that can justly boast herself the last refuge and asylum
of the impotents and incapables who deny the advantage of all knowledge
whatsoever. It was an American Senator (Logan) who declared that he
had devoted a couple of weeks to the study of finance, and found the
accepted authorities all wrong. It was another American Senator (Morton)
who, confronted with certain ugly facts in the history of another
country, proposed "to brush away all facts, and argue the question on
considerations of plain common sense."

Republican institutions have this disadvantage: by incessant changes in
the _personnel_ of government--to say nothing of the manner of men that
ignorant constituencies elect; and all constituencies are ignorant--we
attain to no fixed principles and standards. There is no such thing here
as a science of politics, because it is not to any one's interest to
make politics the study of his life. Nothing is settled; no truth finds
general acceptance. What we do one year we undo the next, and do over
again the year following. Our energy is wasted in, and our prosperity
suffers from, experiments endlessly repeated.

One of the disadvantages of our social system, which is the child of our
political, is the tyranny of public opinion, forbidding the utterance of
wholesome but unpalatable truth. In a republic we are so accustomed
to the rule of majorities that it seldom occurs to us to examine their
title to dominion; and as the ideas of might and right are, by our
innate sense of justice, linked together, we come to consider public
opinion infallible and almost sacred. Now, majorities rule, not because
they are right, but because they are able to rule. In event of collision
they would conquer, so it is expedient for minorities to submit
beforehand to save trouble. In fact, majorities, embracing, as they
do the most ignorant, seldom think rightly; public opinion, being the
opinion of mediocrity, is commonly a mistake and a mischief. But it is
to nobody's interest--it is against the interest of most--to dispute
with it. Public writer and public speaker alike find their account in
confirming "the plain people" in their brainless errors and brutish
prejudices--in glutting their omnivorous vanity and inflaming their
implacable racial and national hatreds.

I have long held the opinion that patriotism is one of the most
abominable vices affecting the human understanding. Every patriot in
this world believes his country better than any other country. Now, they
cannot all be the best; indeed, only one can be the best, and it follows
that the patriots of all the others have suffered themselves to
be misled by a mere sentiment into blind unreason. In its active
manifestation--it is fond of shooting--patriotism would be well enough
if it were simply defensive; but it is also aggressive, and the same
feeling that prompts us to strike for our altars and our fires impels
us likewise to go over the border to quench the fires and overturn the
altars of our neighbors. It is all very pretty and spirited, what the
poets tell us about Thermopylae, but there was as much patriotism at one
end of that pass as there was at the other. Patriotism deliberately and
with folly aforethought subordinates the interests of a whole to the
interests of a part. Worse still, the fraction so favored is determined
by an accident of birth or residence. Patriotism is like a dog which,
having entered at random one of a row of kennels, suffers more in
combats with the dogs in the other kennels than it would have done
by sleeping in the open air. The hoodlum who cuts the tail from a
Chinamen'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 his
opinions. Patriotism is fierce as a fever, pitiless as the grave, blind
as 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 them
to the bottom as dregs. The former is the more offensive, and that
seems to be our way; but neither is useful if the impurities are merely
separated but not removed. We are told with tiresome iteration that our
social and political systems are clarifying; but when is the skimmer to
appear? If the purpose of free institutions is good government where is
the good government?--when may it be expected to begin?--how is it to
come about? Systems of government have no sanctity; they are practical
means to a simple end--the public welfare; worthy of no respect if they
fail of its accomplishment. The tree is known by its fruit. Ours, is
bearing 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 fever
must burn itself out, and then Nature will do the rest. One does not
prescribe what time alone can administer. We have put our criminal class
in power; do we suppose they will efface themselves? Will they restore
to _us_ the power of governing _them_? They must have their way and
go their length. The natural and immemorial sequence is: tyranny,
insurrection, combat. In combat everything that wears a sword has a
chance--even the right. History does not forbid us to hope. But it
forbids us to rely upon numbers; they will be against us. If history
teaches anything worth learning it teaches that the majority of mankind
is neither good nor wise. Where government is founded upon the public
conscience and the public intelligence the stability of States is a
dream. 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 have
abundant evidence that each generation has believed itself wiser and
better than any of its predecessors; that each people has believed
itself to have the secret of national perpetuity. In support of this
universal delusion there is nothing to be said; the desolate places
of the earth cry out against it. Vestiges of obliterated civilizations
cover the earth; no savage but has camped upon the sites of proud
and populous cities; no desert but has heard the statesman's boast of
national stability. Our nation, our laws, our history--all shall go down
to everlasting oblivion with the others, and by the same road. But I
submit that we are traveling it with needless haste.

But it is all right and righteous. It can be spared--this Jonah's
gourd civilization of ours. We have hardly the rudiments of a true
civilization; compared with the splendors of which we catch dim glimpses
in the fading past, ours are as an illumination of tallow candles. We
know no more than the ancients; we only know other things, but nothing
in 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 inevitable
intellectual blight, shall have ceased to read what is printed? Our
libraries will become its stables, our books its fuel.

Ours is a civilization that might be heard from afar in space as
a scolding and a riot; a civilization in which the race has so
differentiated as to have no longer a community of interest and
feeling; which shows as a ripe result of the principles underlying it
a reasonless and rascally feud between rich and poor; in which one is
offered a choice (if one have the means to take it) between American
plutocracy and European militocracy, with an imminent chance of
renouncing either for a stultocratic republic with a headsman in the
presidential 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 none
in all the world was so good and wise as he. He was one of those few
whose goodness and wisdom are such that after some time has passed their
fellowmen begin to think them gods and treasure their words as divine
law; and by millions they are worshiped through centuries of time.
Amongst the utterances of this man was one command--not a new nor
perfect one--which has seemed to his adorers so preeminently wise that
they have given it a name by which it is known over half the world. One
of the sovereign virtues of this famous law is its simplicity, which is
such that all hearing must understand; and obedience is so easy that any
nation refusing is unfit to exist except in the turbulence and adversity
that will surely come to it. When a people would avert want and strife,
or having them, would restore plenty and peace, this noble commandment
offers the only means--all other plans for safety or relief are as vain
as dreams, and as empty as the crooning of fools. And behold, here it
is: "All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye
even so to them."

What! you unappeasable rich, coining the sweat and blood of your workmen
into drachmas, understanding the law of supply and demand as mandatory
and justifying your cruel greed by the senseless dictum that "business
is business;" you lazy workman, railing at the capitalist by
whose desertion, when you have frightened away his capital, you
starve--rioting and shedding blood and torturing and poisoning by way
of answer to exaction and by way of exaction; you foul anarchists,
applauding with indelicate palms when one of your coward kind hurls a
bomb amongst powerless and helpless women and children; you imbecile
politicians with a plague of remedial legislation for the irremediable;
you writers and thinkers unread in history, with as many "solutions to
the labor problem" as there are dunces among you who can not coherently
define it--do you really think yourself wiser than Jesus of Nazareth? Do
you seriously suppose yourselves competent to amend his plan for dealing
with all the evils besetting states and souls? Have you the effrontery
to believe that those who spurn his Golden Rule you can bind to
obedience of an act entitled an act to amend an act? Bah! you fatigue
the spirit. Go get ye to your scoundrel lockouts, your villain strikes,
your blacklisting, your boycotting, your speech-ing, marching and
maundering; but if ye do not to others as ye would that they do to you
it shall occur, and that right soon, that ye be drowned in your own
blood and your pickpocket civilization quenched as a star that falls
into the sea.




THE GAME OF POLITICS




I.

IF ONE were to declare himself a Democrat or a Republican and the claim
should be contested he would find it a difficult one to prove. The
missing link in his chain of evidence would be the major premise in
the syllogism necessary to the establishment of his political status--a
definition of "Democrat" or "Republican." Most of the statesmen in
public and private life who are poll-parroting these words, do so with
entire unconsciousness of their meaning, or rather without knowledge
that they have lost whatever of meaning they once had. The words are
mere "survivals," marking dead issues and covering allegiances of the
loosest and most shallow character. On any question of importance each
party is divided against itself and dares not formulate a preference.
There is no question before the country upon which one may not think
and vote as he likes without affecting his standing in the political
communion of saints of which he professes himself a member. "Party
lines" are as terribly confused as the parallels of latitude and
longitude after a twisting earthquake, or those aimless lines
representing the competing railroad on a map published by a company
operating "the only direct route." It is not probable that this state of
things can last; if there is to be "government by party"--and we should
be sad to think that so inestimable a boon were soon to return to Him
who gave it--men must begin to let their angry passions rise and take
rides. "Ill fares the land to hastening ills a prey," where the people
are too wise to dispute and too good to fight. Let us have the good old
political currency of bloody noses and cracked crowns; let the yawp
of the demagogue be heard in the land; let ears be pestered with the
spargent cheers of the masses. Give us a whoop-up that shall rouse us
like a rattling peal of thunder. Will nobody be our Moses--there
should be two Moseses--to lead us through this detestable wilderness of
political stagnation?




II.

Nowhere "on God's green earth"--it is fitting, that this paper contain
a bit of bosh--nowhere is so much insufferable stuff talked in a given
period of time as in an American political convention. It is there that
all those objectionable elements of the national character which evoke
the laughter of Europe and are the despair of our friends find freest
expression, unhampered by fear of any censorship more exacting than
that of "the opposing party"--which takes no account of intellectual
delinquencies, 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 and
platform are expressed in sickening syntax and offensive rhetoric.
Doubtless an American politician, statesman, what you will, could
go 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 American
knack at brandishing the tongue add an exceptional felicity of
platitude, a captivating mastery of dog's-eared sentiment, a copious and
obedient vocabulary of eulogium, an iron insensibility to the ridiculous
and an infinite affinity to fools. These afflicting Chrysostoms are
always lying in wait for an "occasion" It matters not what it is: a
"reception" to some great man from abroad, a popular ceremony like the
laying of a corner-stone, the opening of a fair, the dedication of a
public building, an anniversary banquet of an ancient and honorable
order (they all belong to ancient and honorable orders) or a club
dinner--they all belong to clubs and pay dues. But it is in the
political convention that they come out particularly strong. By some
imperious tradition having the force of written law it is decreed that
in these absurd bodies of our fellow citizens no word of sense shall be
uttered from the platform; whatever is uttered in set speeches shall be
addressed to the meanest capacity present As a chain can be no stronger
than its weakest link, so nothing said by the speakers at a political
convention must be above the intellectual reach of the most pernicious
idiot having a seat and a vote. I don't know why it is so. It seems to
be thought that if he is not suitably entertained he will not attend, as
a delegate, the next convention.

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

"Two years ago the Republican party in State and Nation marched to
imperial triumph. On every hilltop and mountain peak our beacons
blazed and we awakened the echoes of every valley with songs of our
rejoicings."

And so forth. Now, if I were asked to recast those sentences so that
they should conform to the simple truth and be inoffensive to good taste
I 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 adequately
expressed in my amended statement, what is it? As to eloquence it will
hardly be argued that nonsense, falsehood and metaphors which were
old when Rome was young are essential to that. The first man (in early
Greece) who spoke of awakening an echo did a felicitous thing. Was it
felicitous in the second? Is it felicitous now? As to that military
metaphor--the "marching" and so forth--its inventor was as great an ass
as any one of the incalculable multitude of his plagiarists. On this
matter 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) and
all the bloated army-bumming bombast which is so rife for the six months
preceding an election? To read almost any one of our political papers
during a canvass is enough to make one sick and sorry.... An election
has no manner of likeness to a campaign, or a battle. It is not even a
contest in which the stronger or more dexterous party is the winner; it
is a mere counting, in which the bare fact that one party is the more
numerous puts it in power if it will only come up and be counted; to
insure which a certain time is spent by each party in reviling and
belittling the candidates of its opponents and lauding its own; and
this is the canvass, at the likening of which to a campaign every honest
soldier might reasonably take offense."

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

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

"I come before you today as a Republican of the Republican banner county
of this great State of ours. From snowy Shasta on the north to sunny
Diego on the south; from the west, where the waves of the Pacific look
upon our shores, to where the barriers of the great Sierras stand clad
in eternal snow, there is no more loyal county to the Republican party
in 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 contest
Wherever the fate of battle was trembling in the balance [Homer, and
since Homer, Tom, Dick and Harry] Alameda county stepped into the breach
and rescued the Republican party from defeat."

Translated into English this military mouthing would read somewhat like
this:

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

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




III.

"What we most need, to secure honest elections," says a well-meaning
reformer, "is the Clifford or the Myers voting machine." Why, truly,
here is a hopeful spirit--a rare and radiant intelligence suffused with
the conviction that men can be made honest by machinery--that human
character is a matter of gearing, ratchets and dials! One would give
something to know how it feels to be like that. A mind so constituted
must be as happy in its hope as a hen incubating a nest-ful of porcelain
door-knobs. It lives in rapturous contemplation of a world of its own
creation--a world where public morality and political good order are
to be had by purchase at the machine-shop. In that delectable world
religion is superfluous; the true high priest is the mechanical
engineer; the minor clergy are the village blacksmiths. It is rather
a pity that so fine and fair a sphere should prosper only in the
attenuated ether of an idiot's understanding.

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

That is true, too, of laws. Your statesman of a mental stature somewhat
overtopping that of the machine-person puts his faith in law.
Providence has designed to permit him to be persuaded of the efficacy
of statutes--good, stringent, carefully drawn statutes definitively
repealing all the laws of nature in conflict with any of their
provisions. So the poor devil (I am writing of Mr. Legion) turns for
relief from law to law, ever on the stool of repentance, yet ever
unfouling the anchor of hope. By no power cm earth can his indurated
understanding 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 rascally
refusal to obey the Golden Rule. How long is it since we were all
clamoring for the Australian ballot law, which was to make a new Heaven
and a new earth? We have the Australian ballot law and the same old
earth smelling to the same old Heaven. Writhe upon the triangle as we
may, groan out what new laws we will, the pitiless thong will fall upon
our bleeding backs as long as we deserve it. If our sins, which are
scarlet, are to be washed as white as wool it must be in the tears of a
genuine contrition: our crocodile deliverances will profit us nothing.
We must stop chasing dollars, stop lying, stop cheating, stop ignoring
art, literature and all the refining agencies and instrumentalities of
civilization. We must subdue our detestable habit of shaking hands with
prosperous rascals and fawning upon the merely rich. It is not permitted
to our employers to plead in justification of low wages the law of
supply and demand that is giving them high profits. It is not permitted
to discontented employees to break the bones of contented ones and
destroy the foundations of social order. It is infamous to look upon
public office with the lust of possession; it is disgraceful to solicit
political preferment, to strive and compete for "honors" that are
sullied and tarnished by the touch of the reaching hand. Until we amend
our personal characters we shall amend our laws in vain. Though Paul
plant and Apollos water, the field of reform will grow nothing but the
figless thistle and the grapeless thorn. The State is an aggregation of
individuals. Its public character is the expression of their personal
ones. By no political prestidigitation can it be made better and wiser
than the sum of their goodness and wisdom. To expect that men who do not
honorably and intelligently conduct their private affairs will honorably
and 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; but
out of nothing God never did and man never can, make a public sense of
honor and a public conscience. Miracles are now performed but one day
of the year--the twenty-ninth of February; and on leap year God is
forbidden to perform them.




IV.

Ye who hold that the power of eloquence is a thing of the past and the
orator an anachronism; who believe that the trend of political events
and the results of parliamentary action are determined by committees
in cold consultation and the machinations of programmes in holes and
corners, consider the ascension of Bryan and be wise. A week before the
convention of 1896 William J. Bryan had never heard of himself; upon his
natural obscurity was superposed the opacity of a Congressional service
that effaced him from the memory of even his faithful dog, and made him
immune to dunning. Today he is pinnacled upon the summit of the tallest
political distinction, gasping in the thin atmosphere of his unfamiliar
environment and fitly astonished at the mischance. To the dizzy
elevation of his candidacy he was hoisted out of the shadow by his own
tongue, the longest and liveliest in Christendom. Had he held it--which
he could not have done with both hands--there had been no Bryan. His
creation was the unstudied act of his own larynx; it said, "Let there
be Bryan," and there was Bryan. Even in these degenerate days there is
a hope for the orators when one can make himself a Presidential peril by
merely waving the red flag in the cave of the winds and tormenting the
circumjacence with a brandish of abundant hands.

To be quite honest, I do not entirely believe that Orator Bryan's tongue
had anything to do with it. I have long been convinced that personal
persuasion is a matter of animal magnetism--what in its more obvious
manifestation we now call hypnotism. At the back of the words and the
postures, and independent of them, is that secret, mysterious
power, 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 is
effected; the spoken words merely supply a pretext for surrender. They
enable us to yield without loss of our self-esteem, in the delusion that
we are conceding to reason what is really extorted by charm. The words
are 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 is
better understood and frankly recognized, he can spare himself the toil
of talking. The parliamentary debate of the future will probably be
conducted in silence, and with only such gestures as go by the name of
"passes." The chairman will state the question before the House and
the side, affirmative or negative, to be taken by the honorable member
entitled to the floor. That gentleman will rise, train his compelling
orbs upon the miscreants in opposition, execute a few passes and exhaust
his alloted time in looking at them. He will then yield to an honorable
member of dissenting views. The preponderance in magnetic power and
hypnotic skill will be manifest in the voting. The advantages of the
method are as plain as the nose on an elephant's face. The "arena" will
no longer "ring" with anybody's "rousing speech," to the irritating
abridgment of the inalienable right to pursuit of sleep. Honorable
members will lack provocation to hurl allegations and cuspidors.
Pitchforking statesmen and tosspot reformers will be unable to play at
pitch-and-toss with reputations not submitted for the performance. In
short, the congenial asperities of debate will be so mitigated that the
honorable member from Hades will retire permanently from the hauls of
legislation.




V.

"Public opinion," says Buckle, "being the voice of the average man, is
the voice of mediocrity." Is it therefore so very wise and infallible
a guide as to be accepted without other credentials than its name and
fame? Ought we to follow its light and leading with no better assurance
of the character of its authority than a count of noses of those
following it already, and with no inquiry as to whether it has not on
many former occasions let them and their several sets of predecessors
into bogs of error and over precipices to "eternal mock?" Surely
"the average man," as every one knows him, is not very wise, not very
learned, not very good; how is it that his views, of so intricate and
difficult matters as those of which public opinion makes pronouncement
through him are entitled to such respect? It seems to me that the
average man, as I know him, is very much a fool, and something of a
rogue as well. He has only a smattering of education, knows virtually
nothing of political history, nor history of any kind, is incapable of
logical, that is to say clear, thinking, is subject to the suasion of
base and silly prejudices, and selfish beyond expression. That such
a person's opinions should be so obviously better than my own that
I 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 belief
and flatter the power that subdues me--no, that I will not do. And if
nobody would do so the average man would not be so very cock-sure of
his infallibility and might sometimes consent to be counseled by his
betters.

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

"The voice of the people is the voice of God"--the saying is so
respectably old that it comes to us in the Latin. He is a strange, an
unearthly politician who has not a score of times publicly and solemnly
signified his faith in it But does anyone really believe it? Let us see.
In the period between 1859 and 1885, the Democratic party was defeated
six times in succession. The voice of the people pronounced it in error
and unfit to govern. Yet after each overthrow it came back into the
field gravely reaffirming its faith in the principles that God had
condemned. Then God twice reversed Himself, and the Republicans "never
turned a hair," but set about beating Him with as firm a confidence of
success (justified by the event) as they had known in the years of their
prosperity. Doubtless in every instance of a political party's defeat
there are defections, but doubtless not all are due to the voice that
spoke out of the great white light that fell about Saul of Tarsus. By
the way, it is worth observing that that clever gentleman was under no
illusion regarding the origin of the voice that wrought his celebrated
"flop"; he did not confound it with the _vox populi_ The people of
his time and place had no objection to the persecution that he was
conducting, and could persecute a trifle themselves upon occasion.

Majorities rule, when they do rule, not because they ought, but because
they can. We vote in order to learn without fighting which party is the
stronger; it is less disagreeable to learn it that way than the other
way. Sometimes the party that is numerically the weaker is by possession
of the Government actually the stronger, and could maintain itself in
power by an appeal to arms, but the habit of submitting when outvoted
is hard to break. Moreover, we all recognize in a subconscious way, the
reasonableness of the habit as a practical method of getting on; and
there is always the confident hope of success in the next canvass. That
one's cause will succeed because it ought to succeed is perhaps the most
general and invincible folly affecting the human judgment Observation
can not shake it, nor experience destroy. Though you bray a partisan in
the mortar of adversity till he numbers the strokes of the pestle by the
hairs of his head, yet will not this fool notion depart from him. He is
always going to win the next time, however frequently and disastrously
he has lost before. And he can always give you the most cogent reasons
for the faith that is in him. His chief reliance is on the "fatal
mistakes" made since the last election by the other party. There never
was a year in which the party in power and the party out of power did
not make bad mistakes--mistakes which, unlike eggs and fish, seem always
worst when freshest. If idiotic errors of policy were always fatal, no
party would ever win an election and there would be a hope of better
government under the benign sway of the domestic cow.




VI.

Each political party accuses the "opposing candidate" of refusing to
answer certain questions which somebody has chosen to ask him. I think
myself it is discreditable for a candidate to answer any questions at
all, to make speeches, declare his policy, or to do anything whatever
to get himself elected. If a political party choose to nominate a man so
obscure that his character and his views on all public questions are
not known or inferable he ought to have the dignity to refuse to expound
them. As to the strife for office being a pursuit worthy of a noble
ambition, I do not think so; nor shall I believe that many do think so
until the term "office seeker" carries a less opprobrious meaning
and the dictum that "the office should seek the man, not the man the
office," has a narrower currency among all manner of persons. That by
acts and words generally felt to be discreditable a man may evoke great
popular enthusiasm is not at all surprising. The late Mr. Barnum was not
the 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 do
for a candidate for high political preferment is to prove him a little
better 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 a
delegate; that he is to have, and can honestly entertain, no opinion
that 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 invariable
and unbroken tendency of republican institutions. It fits in well with
manhood suffrage, rotation in office, unrestricted patronage, assessment
of subordinates, an elective judiciary and the rest of it. This theory
of representative institutions is the last and lowest stage in our
pleasant performance of "shooting Niagara." When it shall have universal
recognition and assent we shall have been fairly engulfed in the
whirlpool, and the buzzard of anarchy may hopefully whet his beak for
the national carcass. My view of the matter--which has the further merit
of being the view held by those who founded this Government--is that a
man holding office from and for the people is in conscience and honor
bound to do what seems to his judgment best for the general welfare,
respectfully regardless of any and all other considerations. This is
especially true of legislators, to whom such specific "instructions" as
constituents sometimes send are an impertinence and an insult. Pushed to
its logical conclusion, the "delegate" idea would remove all necessity
of electing men of brains and judgment; one man properly connected
with his constituents by telegraph would make as good a legislator as
another. Indeed, as a matter of economy, one representative should act
for many constituencies, receiving his instructions how to vote from
mass meetings in each. This, besides being logical, would have the added
advantage of widening and hardening the power of the local "bosses,"
who, by properly managing the showing of hands could have the same
beneficent influence in national affairs that they now enjoy in
municipal. The plan would be a pretty good one if there were not so many
other 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 making
the Constitution would not have provided that each House of Congress
"shall be the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of
its own members." They would have foreseen that a ruling majority of
Congress could not safely be trusted to exercise this power justly in
the public interest, but would abuse it in the interest of party. A
man's right to sit in a legislative body should be determined, not by
that body, which has neither the impartiality, the knowledge of evidence
nor the time to determine it rightly, but by the courts of law. That is
how it is done in England, where Parliament voluntarily surrendered the
right to say by whom the constituencies shall be represented, and there
is no disposition to resume it. As the vices hunt in packs, so, too,
virtues are gregarious; if our Congress had the righteousness to decide
contested elections justly it would have also the self-denial not to
wish to decide them at all.




IX

The purpose of the legislative custom of "eulogizing" dead members of
Congress is not apparent unless it is to add a terror to death and make
honorable and self-respecting members rather bear the ills they have
than escape through the gates of death to others that they know a good
deal about. If a member of that kind, who has had the bad luck to "go
before," could be consulted he would indubitably say that he was sorry
to be dead; and that is not a natural frame of mind in one who is exempt
from the necessity of himself "delivering a eulogy."

It may be urged that the Congressional "eulogy" expresses in a general
way the eulogist's notion of what he would like to have somebody say
of himself when he is by death elected to the Lower House. If so, then
Heaven help him to a better taste. Meanwhile it is a patriotic duty to
prevent 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 character
and services of a departed member with truth and even eloquence. One
such was Senator Vest. Of many others, the most charitable thing that
one can conscientiously say is that one would a little rather hear a
"eulogy" by them than on them. Considering that there are many kinds
of brains and only one kind of no brains, their diversity of gifts is
remarkable, but one characteristic they have in common: they are all
poets. Their efforts in the way of eulogium illustrate and illuminate
Pascal's obscure saying that poetry is a particular sadness. If not sad
themselves, they are at least the cause of sadness in others, for no
sooner 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 something
that belittles. Perhaps that explains the transformation. Anyhow the
Congressional eulogist takes to verse as naturally as a moth to a
candle, 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 is
some dog's-eared, shop-worn quotation from one of the "standard" bards,
usually Shakspere. There are familiar passages from that poet which
have been so often heard in "the halls of legislation" that they have
acquired an infamy which unfits them for publication in a decent family
newspaper; and Shakspere himself, reposing in Elysium on his bed of
asphodel and moly, omits them when reading his complete works to the
shades of Kit Marlowe and Ben Jonson, for their sins.

This whole business ought to be "cut out" It is not only a waste of
time and a sore trial to the patience of the country; it is absolutely
immoral. It is not true that a member of Congress who, while living
was a most ordinary mortal, becomes by the accident of death a hero, a
saint, "an example to American youth." Nobody believes these abominable
"eulogies," and nobody should be permitted to utter them in the time
and place designated for another purpose. A "tribute" that is exacted
by custom and has not the fire and light of spontaneity is without
sincerity or sense. A simple resolution of regret and respect is all
that the occasion requires and would not inhibit any further utterance
that friends and admirers of the deceased might be moved to make
elsewhere. If any bereaved gentlemen, feeling his heart getting into his
head, wishes to tickle his ear with his tongue by way of standardizing
his emotion let him hire a hall and do so. But he should not make the
Capitol a "Place of Wailing" and the Congressional Record a book of
bathos.




SOME FEATURES OF THE LAW




I.

THERE is a difference between religion and the amazing circumstructure
which, under the name of theology, the priesthoods have builded round
about it, which for centuries they made the world believe was the true
temple, and which, after incalculable mischiefs wrought, immeasurable
blood spilled in its extension and consolidation, is only now beginning
to crumble at the touch of reason. There is the same difference between
the laws and the law--the naked statutes (bad enough, God knows) and
the incomputable additions made to them by lawyers. This immense body of
superingenious writings it is that we all are responsible to in person
and property. It is unquestionable authority for setting aside any
statute that any legislative body ever passed or can pass. In it are
dictates of recognized validity for turning topsy-turvy every principle
of justice and reversing every decree of reason. There is no fallacy so
monstrous, no deduction so hideously unrelated to common sense, as not
to receive, somewhere in the myriad pages of this awful compilation, a
support that any judge in the land would be proud to recognize with a
decision if ably persuaded. I do not say that the lawyers are altogether
responsible for the existence of this mass of disastrous rubbish, nor
for its domination of the laws. They only create and thrust it down
our throats; we are guilty of contributory negligence in not biting the
spoon.

As long as there exists the right of appeal there is a chance of
acquittal. Otherwise the right of appeal would be a sham and an insult
more intolerable, even, than that of the man convicted of murder to say
why he should not receive the sentence which nothing he may say will
avert. So long as acquittal may ensue guilt is not established. Why,
than are men sentenced before they are proved guilty? Why are they
punished in the middle of proceedings against them? A lawyer can reply
to these questions in a thousand ingenious ways; there is but one
answer. It is because we are a barbarous race, submitting to laws made
by lawyers for lawyers. Let the "legal fraternity" reflect that a lawyer
is one whose profession it is to circumvent the law; that it is a
part of his business to mislead and befog the court of which he is an
officer; that it is considered right and reasonable for him to live by
a division of the spoils of crime and misdemeanor; that the utmost
atonement he ever makes for acquitting a man whom he knows to be guilty
is to convict a man whom he knows to be innocent. I have looked into
this thing a bit and it is my judgment that all the methods of our
courts, and the traditions of bench and bar exist and are perpetuated,
altered and improved, for the one purpose of enabling the lawyers as a
class 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 and
compel litigation. By lawyers they are interpreted and by lawyers
enforced for their own profit and advantage. The whole intricate and
interminable machinery of precedent, rulings, decisions, objections,
writs of error, motions for new trials, appeals, reversals, affirmations
and 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 thoughtless
children of the frontier sometimes rise to tar and feather the legal
pelt may God's grace go with them and amen. I do not believe there is a
lawyer in Heaven, but by a bath of tar and a coating of hen's-down they
can be made to resemble angels more nearly than by any other process.

The matchless villainy of making men suffer for crimes of which they may
eventually be acquitted is consistent with our entire system of laws--a
system so complicated and contradictory that a judge simply does as he
pleases, subject only to the custom of giving for his action reasons
that at his option may or may not be derived from the statute. He may
sternly 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. Or
he may declare that it could never have been the Legislature's intention
to do wrong, and so, shielded by the useful phrase _contra bonos mores_,
pronounce that illegal which he chooses to consider inexpedient. Or
he may be guided by either of any two inconsistent precedents, as best
suits his purpose. Or he may throw aside both statute and precedent,
disregard good morals, and justify the judgment that he wishes to
deliver 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 a
single term of court, and could mention one who has done them all in a
single decision, and that not a very long one. The amazing feature
of the matter is that all these methods are lawful--made so, not by
legislative enactment, but by the judges. Language can not be used with
sufficient lucidity and positiveness to land them.

The legal purpose of a preliminary examination is not the discovery of
a criminal; it is the ascertaining of the probable guilt or innocence
of the person already charged. To permit that person's counsel to insult
and madden the various assisting witnesses in the hope of making them
seem to incriminate themselves instead of him by statements that may
afterward be used to confuse a jury--that is perversion of law to defeat
justice. The outrageous character of the practice is seen to better
advantage what contrasted with the tender consideration enjoyed by the
person actually accused and presumably guilty--the presumption of his
innocence being as futile a fiction as that a sheep's tail is a leg when
called so. Actually, the prisoner in a criminal trial is the only
person supposed to have a knowledge of the facts who is not compelled to
testify! And this amazing exemption is given him by way of immunity
from the snares and pitfalls with which the paths of all witnesses are
wantonly beset! To a visiting Lunarian it would seem strange indeed
that in a Terrestrial court of justice it is not deemed desirable for an
accused person to incriminate himself, and that it _is_ deemed desirable
for a subpoena to be more dreaded than a warrant.

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

This ancient and efficient safeguard to rascality, the right of a
witness to refuse to testify when his testimony would tend to convict
him of crime, has been strengthened by a decision of the United States
Supreme Court. That will probably add another century or two to its
mischievous existence, and possibly prove the first act in such an
extension of it that eventually a witness can not be compelled to
testify at all. In fact it is difficult to see how he can be compelled
to now if he has the hardihood to exercise his constitutional right
without shame and with an intelligent consciousness of its limitless
application.

The case in which the Supreme Court made the decision was one in which a
witness refused to say whether he had received from a defendant railway
company a rate on grain shipments lower than the rate open to all
shippers. The trial was in the United States District Court for the
Northern District of Illinois, and Judge Gresham chucked the scoundrel
into jail. He naturally applied to the Supreme Court for relief, and
that high tribunal gave joy to every known or secret malefactor in the
country by deciding--according to law, no doubt--that witnesses in a
criminal case can not be compelled to testify to anything that "_might
tend_ to criminate them _in any way_, or subject them to _possible_
prosecution." The italics are my own and seem to me to indicate, about
as clearly as extended comment could, the absolutely boundless nature
of the immunity that the decision confirms or confers. It is to be
hoped that some public-spirited gentleman called to the stand in some
celebrated case may point the country's attention to the state of the
law by refusing to tell his name, age or occupation, or answer any
question whatever. And it would be a fitting _finale_ to the farce if he
would threaten the too curious attorney with an action for damages for
compelling a disclosure of character.

Most lawyers have made so profound a study of human nature as to think
that if they have shown a man to be of loose life with regard to women
they have shown him to be one that would tell needless lies to a jury--a
conviction 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. Doubtless
a rake is a liar in so far as is needful to concealment, but it does
not follow that he will commit perjury to save a horsethief from the
penitentiary or send a good man to the gallows. As to lying, generally,
he is not conspicuously worse than the mere lover, male or female; for
lovers have been liars from the beginning of time. They deceive when it
is necessary and when it is not. Schopenhauer says that it is because of
a sense of guilt--they contemplate the commission of a crime and, like
other criminals, cover their tracks. I am not prepared to say if that
is the true explanation, but to the fact to be explained I am ready to
testify with lifted arms. Yet no cross-examining attorney tries to break
the credibility of a witness by showing that he is in love.

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

I have always asserted the right and expediency of cross-examining
attorneys in court with a view to testing their credibility. An
attorney's relation to the trial is closer and more important than that
of a witness. He has more to say and more opportunities to deceive
the 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 will
assist, as himself avers, why should he not be put upon the grill and
compelled to sweat out the desired incrimination? I should think it
might give good results, for example, to compel him to answer a few
questions touching, not his private life, but his professional. Somewhat
like 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 and
assurance of a fee?"

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

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

"Do you believe it right to lie for the purpose of circumventing
justice?--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 the
purpose 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 slanders
the dead to defeat justice and promote his own fortune?"

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

"If in former trials you have obstructed justice by slander of the
dead, by falsely affirming the innocence of the guilty, by cheating in
argument, 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 it
reasonable for you to expect, the jury in this case to believe you?"

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

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

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

The moral sense of the laymen is dimly conscious of something wrong
in the ethics of the noble profession; the lawyers affirming, rightly
enough, a public necessity for them and their mercenary services, permit
their thrift to construe it vaguely as personal justification. But
nobody has blown away from the matter its brumous encompassment and let
in the light upon it It is very simple.

Is it honorable for a lawyer to try to clear a man that he knows
deserves conviction? That is not the entire question by much. Is it
honorable to pretend to believe what you do not believe? Is it honorable
to lie? I submit that these questions are not answered affirmatively by
showing the disadvantage to the public and to civilization of a lawyer
refusing to serve a known offender. The popular interest, like any other
good cause, can be and commonly is, served by foul means. Justice itself
may be promoted by acts essentially unjust. In serving a sordid ambition
a powerful scoundrel may by acts in themselves wicked augment the
prosperity of a whole nation. I have not the right to deceive and lie in
order to advantage my fellowmen, any more than I have the right to steal
or murder to advantage them, nor have my fellowmen the power to grant me
that indulgence.

The question of a lawyer's right to clear a known criminal (with the
several questions involved) is not answered affirmatively by showing
that the law forbids him to decline a case for reasons personal to
himself--not even if we admit the statute's moral authority.
Preservation of conscience and character is a civic duty, as well as a
personal; one's fellow-men have a distinct interest in it. That, I
admit, is an argument rather in the manner of an attorney; clearly
enough the intent of this statute is to compel an attorney to cheat and
lie for any rascal that wants him to. In that sense it may be regarded
as a law softening the rigor of all laws; it does not mitigate
punishments, but mitigates the chance of incurring them. The infamy of
it lies in forbidding an attorney to be a gentleman. Like all laws it
falls something short of its intent: many attorneys, even some who
defend that law, are as honorable as is consistent with the practice of
deceit to serve crime.

It will not do to say that an attorney in defending a client is not
compelled to cheat and lie. What kind of defense could be made by any
one who did not profess belief in the innocence of his client?--did
not affirm it in the most serious and impressive way?--did not lie? How
would it profit the defense to be conducted by one who would not meet
the prosecution's grave asseverations of belief in the prisoner's guilt
by equally grave assurances of faith in his innocence? And in point
of fact, when was counsel for the defense ever known to forego the
advantage of that solemn falsehood? If I am asked what would become
of accused persons if they had to prove their innocence to the lawyers
before making a defense in court, I reply that I do not know; and in my
turn I ask: What would become of Humpty Dumpty if all the king's horses
and all the king's men were an isosceles triangle?

It all amounts to this, that lawyers want clients and are not particular
about 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 be
unserved.

     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 for
the public interest that a rogue have the same freedom of defense as an
honest man; it should be a good deal harder for him. His troubles should
begin, not when he seeks acquital, but when he seeks counsel. It would
be better for the community if he could not obtain the services of a
reputable attorney, or any attorney at all. A defense that can not be
made without his attorney's actual knowledge of his guilt should be
impossible to him. Nor should he be permitted to remain off the witness
stand lest he incriminate himself. It ought to be the aim of the court
to let him incriminate himself--to make him do so if his testimony
will. In our courts that natural method would serve the ends of justice
greatly better than the one that we have. Testimony of the guilty would
assist in conviction; that of the innocent would not.

As to the general question of a judge's right to inflict arbitrary
punishment for words that he may be pleased to hold disrespectful to
himself or another judge, I do not myself believe that any such right
exists; the practice seems to be merely a survival--a heritage from the
dark days of irresponsible power, when the scope of judicial authority
had no other bounds than fear of the royal gout or indigestion. If in
these modern days the same right is to exist it may be necessary to
revive the old checks upon it by restoring the throne. In freeing us
from the monarchial chain, the coalition of European Powers commonly
known in American history as "the valor of our forefathers" stripped us
starker than they knew.

Suppose an attorney should find his client's interests imperiled by
a prejudiced or corrupt judge--what is he to do? If he may not make
representations to that effect, supporting them with evidence, where
evidence is possible and by inference where it is not, what means of
protection shall he venture to adopt? If it be urged in objection that
judges are never prejudiced nor corrupt I confess that I shall have no
answer: the proposition will deprive me of breath.

If contempt is not a crime it should not be punished; if a crime it
should be punished as other crimes are punished--by indictment
or information, trial by jury if a jury is demanded, with all the
safeguards that secure an accused person against judicial blunders and
judicial bias. The necessity for these safeguards is even greater
in cases of contempt than in others--particularly if the prosecuting
witness is to sit in judgment on his own grievance. That should, of
course, not be permitted: the trial should take place before another
judge.

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

The public ear is dowered with rather more than just enough of clotted
nonsense about "attacks upon the dignity of the Bench," "bringing the
judiciary into disrepute" and the rueful rest of it. I crave leave
to remind the solicitudinarians sounding these loud alarums on their
several larynges that by persons of understanding men are respected, not
for what they do, but for what they are, and that one public functionary
will stand as high in their esteem as another if as high in character.
The dignity of a wise and righteous judge needs not the artificial
safeguarding which is a heritage of the old days when if dissent found a
tongue the public executioner cut it out. The Bench will be sufficiently
respected when it is no longer a place where dullards dream and rogues
rob--when its _personnel_ is no longer chosen in the back-rooms of
tipple-shops, forced upon yawning conventions and confirmed by the votes
of 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 to
just as much of its forms and observances as are needful to maintenance
of order in their courts and fortification of their lawful power--no
more. As to their silence under criticism, that is as they please. No
body but themselves is holding their tongues.




II.

A law under which the unsuccessful respondent in a divorce proceeding
may be forbidden to marry again during the life of the successful
complainant, the latter being subject to no such disability, is
infamous infinitely. If the disability is intended as a punishment it
is exceptional among legal punishments in that it is inflicted without
conviction, trial or arraignment, the divorce proceedings being quite
another and different matter. It is exceptional in that the period
of its continuance, and therefore the degree of its severity, are
indeterminate; they are dependent on no limiting statute, and on
neither the will of the power inflicting nor the conduct of the person
suffering.

To sentence a person to a punishment that is to be mild or severe
according to chance or--which is even worse--circumstance, which but one
person, and that person not officially connected with administration of
justice, can but partly control, is a monstrous perversion of the main
principles that are supposed to underlie the laws.

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




III.

With a view, possibly, to promoting respect for law by making the
statutes so conform to public sentiment that none will fall into
disesteem and disuse, it has been advocated that there be a formal
recognition of sex in the penal code, by making a difference in the
punishment of men and of women for the same crimes and misdemeanors. The
argument is that if women were "provided" with milder punishment
juries would sometimes convict them, whereas they now commonly get off
altogether.

The plan is not so new as might be thought. Many of the nations of
antiquity of whose laws we have knowledge, and nearly all the European
nations until within a comparatively recent time, punished women
differently from men for the same offenses. And as recently as the
period of the Early Puritan in New England women were punished for some
offenses which men might commit without fear if not without reproach.
The ducking-stool, for example, was an appliance for softening the
female temper only. In England women used to be burned at the stake for
crimes for which men were hanged, roasting being regarded as the milder
punishment. In point of fact, it was not punishment at all, the victim
being carefully strangled before the fire touched her. Burning was
simply a method of disposing of the body so expeditiously as to give
no occasion and opportunity for the unseemly social rites commonly
performed about the scaffold of the erring male by the jocular populace.
As lately as 1763 a woman named Margaret Biddingfield was burned in
Suffolk as an accomplice in the crime of "petty treason." She had
assisted in the murder of her husband, the actual killing being done by
a man; and he was hanged, as no doubt he richly deserved. For "coining,"
too (which was "treason"), men were hanged and women burned. This
distinction between the sexes was maintained until the year of grace
1790, after which female offenders ceased to have "a stake in the
country," 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 were
drowned; but in the reign of Henry III a woman was hanged--without
strangulation, apparently, for after a whole day of it she was cut down
and pardoned. Sorceresses and unfaithful wives were smothered in mud, as
also were unfaithful wives among the ancient Burgundians. The punishment
of unfaithful husbands is not of record; we only know that there were
no austerely virtuous editors to direct the finger of public scorn their
way.

Among the Anglo-Saxons, women who had the bad luck to be detected in
theft were drowned, while men meeting with the same mischance died a dry
death by hanging. By the early Danish laws female thieves were buried
alive, whether or not from motives of humanity is not now known. This
seems to have been the fashion in France also, for in 1331 a woman named
Duplas was scourged and buried alive at Abbeville, and in 1460 Perotte
Mauger, a receiver of stolen goods, was inhumed by order of the Provost
of Paris in front of the public gibbet. In Germany in the good old
days certain kinds of female criminals were "impaled," a punishment too
grotesquely horrible for description, but likely enough considered by
the simple German of the period conspicuously merciful.

It is, in short, only recently that the civilized nations have placed
the 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 a
better system than the old, or would be if enforced, is a natural
presumption from human progress, out of which it is evolved. But
coincidently with its evolution has evolved also a sentiment adverse
to punishment of women at all. But this sentiment appears to be of
independent growth and in no way a reaction against that which caused
the change. To mitigate the severity of the death penalty for women to
some pleasant form of euthanasia, such as drowning in rose-water, or
in their case to abolish the death penalty altogether and make their
capital punishment consist in a brief interment in a jail with a
softened name, would probably do no good, for whatever form it might
take, it would be, so far as woman is concerned, the "extreme penalty"
and crowning disgrace, and jurors would be as reluctant to inflict it as
they now are to inflict hanging.




IV.

Testators should not, from the snug security of the grave, utter a
perpetual threat of disinheritance or any other uncomfortable fate to
deter an American citizen, even one of his own legatees, from applying
to the courts of his country for redress of any wrong from which he
might consider himself as suffering. The courts of law ought to be open
to any one conceiving himself a victim of injustice, and it should be
unlawful to abridge the right of complaint by making its exercise more
hazardous than it naturally is. Doubtless the contesting of wills is
a nuisance, generally speaking, the contestant conspicuously devoid of
moral worth and the verdict singularly unrighteous; but as long as
some testators really _are_ daft, or subject to interested suasion, or
wantonly sinful, they should be denied the power to stifle dissent by
fining the luckless dissenter. The dead have too much to say in this
world at the best, and it is monstrous and intolerable tyranny for them
to stand at the door of the Temple of Justice to drive away the suitors
that themselves have made.

Obedience to the commands of the dead should be conditional upon their
good behavior, and it is not good behavior to set up a censure of
actions at law among the living. If our courts are not competent to
say what actions are proper to be brought and what are unfit to be
entertained let us improve them until they are competent, or abolish
them altogether and resort to the mild and humane arbitrament of the
dice. But while courts have the civility to exist they should refuse
to surrender any part of their duties and responsibilities to such
exceedingly private persons as those under six feet of earth, or sealed
up in habitations of hewn stone. Persons no longer affectible by human
events should be denied a voice in determining the character and trend
of them. Respect for the wishes of the dead is a tender and beautiful
sentiment, certainly. Unfortunately, it can not be ascertained that
they have any wishes. What commonly go by that name are wishes once
entertained by living persons who are now dead, and who in dying
renounced them, along with everything else. Like those who entertained
them, the wishes are no longer in existence. "The wishes of the dead,"
therefore, are not wishes, and are not of the dead. Why they should
have anything more than a sentimental influence upon those still in the
flesh, and be a factor to be reckoned with in the practical affairs
of the super-graminous world, is a question to which the merely human
understanding can find no answer, and it must be referred to the
lawyers. When "from the tombs a doleful sound" is vented, and "thine ear"
is invited to "attend the cry," an intelligent forethought will suggest
that you inquire if it is anything about property. If so pass on--that
is no sacred spot.




V.

Much of the testimony in French courts, civil and martial, appears to
consist of personal impressions and opinions of the witnesses. All very
improper and mischievous, no doubt, if--if what? Why, obviously, if
the judges are unfit to sit in judgment By designating them to sit the
designating power assumes their fitness--assumes that they know enough
to take such things for what they are worth, to make the necessary
allowances; if needful, to disregard a witness's opinion altogether. I
do not know if they are fit. I do not know that they do make the needful
allowances. It is by no means clear to me that any judge or juror,
French, American or Patagonian, is competent to ascertain the truth when
lying witnesses are trying to conceal it under the direction of skilled
and conscientiousless attorneys licensed to deceive. But his competence
is 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 him
alone to decide for himself what is evidence and what is not. It does
not trust him a little but altogether. It puts him under conditions
familiar to him--makes him accessible to just such influences and
suasions as he is accustomed to when making conscious and unconscious
decisions in his personal affairs.

There may be a distinct gain to justice in permitting a witness to
say whatever he wants to say. If he is telling the truth he will not
contradict himself; if he is lying the more rope he is given the more
surely he will entangle himself. To the service of that end defendants
and prisoners should, I think, be compelled to testify and denied the
advantage of declining to answer, for silence is the refuge of guilt
In endeavoring by austere means to make an accused person incriminate
himself the French judge logically applies the same principle that a
parent uses with a suspected child. When the Grandfather of His Country
arraigned the wee George Washington for arboricide the accused was not
carefully instructed that he need not answer if a truthful answer would
tend to convict him. If he had refused to answer he would indubitably
have been lambasted until he did answer, as right richly he would have
deserved to be.

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

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

In theory our system is perfect. The accused is prosecuted by a public
officer, who having no interest in his conviction, will serve the State
without mischievous zeal and perform his disagreeable task with fairness
and consideration. He is permitted to entrust his defense to another
officer, whose duty it is to make a rigidly truthful and candid
presentation of his case in order to assist the court to a just
decision. The jurors, if there are jurors, are neither friendly nor
hostile, are open-minded, intelligent and conscientious. As to the
witnesses, are they not sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth (in
so far as they are permitted) and nothing but the truth? What could
be finer and better than all this?--what could more certainly assure
justice? How close the resemblance is between this ideal picture and
what actually occurs all know, or should know. The judge is commonly
an ignoramus incapable of logical thought and with little sense of the
dread and awful nature of his responsibility. The prosecuting attorney
thinks it due to his reputation to "make a record" and tries to convict
by hook or crook, even when he is himself persuaded of the defendant's
innocence. Counsel for the defense is equally unscrupulous for
acquittal, and both, having industriously coached their witnesses,
contend against each other in deceiving the court by every artifice
of which they are masters. Witnesses on both sides perjure themselves
freely and with almost perfect immunity if detected. At the close of it
all the poor weary jurors, hopelessly bewildered and dumbly resentful of
their duping, render a random or compromise verdict, or one which best
expresses their secret animosity to the lawyer they like least or their
faith in the newspapers which they have diligently and disobediently
read every night Commenting upon Rabelais' old judge who, when impeached
for an outrageous decision, pleaded his defective eye-sight which made
him miscount the spots on the dice, the most distinguished lawyer of my
acquaintance seriously assured me that if all the cases with which he
had been connected had been decided with the dice substantial justice
would 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 the
Frenchman's "judicial methods" is still an open question.

It is urged that the corrupt practices in our courts of law be uncovered
to public view, whenever that is possible, by dial impeccable censor,
the press. Exposure of rascality is very good--better, apparently
for rascals than for anybody else, for it usually suggests something
rascally which they had overlooked, and so familiarizes the public with
crime that crime no longer begets loathing. If the newspapers of the
country are really concerned about corrupter practices than their own
and willing to bring our courts up to the English standard there is
something better than exposure--which fatigues. Let the newspapers set
about creating a public opinion favorable to non-elective judges, well
paid, powerful to command respect and holding office for life or good
behavior. That is the only way to get good men and great lawyers on the
Bench. As matters are, we stand and cry for what the English have and
rail at the way they get it. Our boss-made, press-ridden and mob-fearing
paupers and ignoramuses of the Bench give us as good a quality of
justice as we merit A better quality awaits us whenever the will to have
it is attended by the sense to take it.




ARBITRATION

THE universal cry for arbitration is either dishonest or unwise. For
every evil there are quack remedies galore--especially for every evil
that is irremediable. Of this order of remedies is arbitration, for of
this order of evils is the inadequate wage of manual labor. Since the
beginning of authentic history everything has been tried in the hope
of divorcing poverty and labor, but nothing has parted them. It is not
conceivable that anything ever will; success of arbitration, antecedently
improbable, is demonstrably impossible. Most of the work of the world
is hard, disagreeable work, requiring little intelligence. Most of the
people of the world are unintelligent--unfit to do any other work. If
it 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 and
fall. Yet there is too little of the work, and there are so many
incapable of doing anything else that adequate return is out of the
question. For the laboring _class_ there is no hope of an existence that
is comfortable in comparison with that of the other class; the hope of
an individual laborer lies in the possibility of fitting himself for
higher employment--employment of the head; not manual but cerebral
labor. While selfishness remains the main ingredient of human nature
(and a survey of the centuries accessible to examination shows but a
slow and intermittent decrease) the cerebral workers, being the wiser
and no better, will manage to take the greater profit. In justice it
must be said of them that they extend a warm and sincere invitation to
their ranks, and take "apprentices;" every chance of education that the
other class enjoys is proof of that.

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

Industrial arbitration is no better; it is manifestly worse, and any law
enforcing it and enforcing compliance with its decisions, is absurd and
mischievous. "Compulsory arbitration" is not arbitration, the essence
whereof is voluntary submission of differences and voluntary submission
to judgment. If either reference or obedience is enforced the
arbitrators are simply a court with no powers to do anything but apply
the law. Proponents of the fad would do well to consider this: If a
party to a labor dispute is _compelled_ to invoke and obey a decision
of arbitrators that decision must follow strictly the line of law; the
smallest invasion of any constitutional, statutory or common-law right
will enable him to upset the whole judgment No legislative body can
establish a tribunal empowered to make and enforce illegal or extra
legal decisions; for making and enforcing legal ones the tribunals that
we 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 a
plague 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 a
half-dozen failures to concede some part of their demands, however
reasonless. By repeated strikes they would eventually get all their
original demand and as much more as on second thought they might choose
to ask for. Each concession would be, as it is now, followed by a new
demand, and the first arbitrators might as well allow them all that they
demand and all that they mean to demand hereafter.

Would not employers be equally unscrupulous. They would not. They could
not afford the disturbance, the stoppage of the business, the risk
of unfair decisions in a country where it is "popular" to favor and
encourage, not the just, but the poor. The labor leaders have nothing to
lose, not even their jobs, for their work is labor leading. Their dupes,
by the way, would be dupes no longer, for with enforced arbitration the
game of "follow my leader" would pay until there should be nothing to
follow him to but empty treasuries of dead industries in an extinct
civilization. If there must be enforced arbitration it should at least
not apply to that sum of all impudent rascalities, the "sympathetic
strike."

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 was
creditable in them to feel so much concern about a few hundred aliens in
Illinois, how about the grievances of the whole body of their countrymen
in California? When their employers, who they confess were good to them,
were plundering the Californians, they did not strike, sympathetically
nor otherwise. Year after year the railway companies picked the pockets
of the Californians; corrupted their courts and legislatures; laid its
Briarean hands in exaction upon every industry and interest; filled the
land with lies and false reasoning; threw honest men into prisons and
locked the gates of them against thieves and assassins; by open defiance
of the tax collector denied to children of the poor the advantages of
education--did all this and more, and these honest working men stood
loyally by it, sharing in wages its dishonest gains, receivers, in one
sense, of stolen goods. The groans of their neighbors were nothing to
them; even the wrongs of themselves, their wives and their children did
not stir them to revolt. On every breeze that blew, this great chorus
of cries and curses was borne past their ears unheeded. Why did they not
strike then? Where then were their fiery altruists and storm-petrels
of industrial disorder? No!--the ingenious gods who have invented the
Debses and Gomperses, and humorously branded them with names that would
make a cat laugh, have never put it into their cold selfish hearts to
order out their misguided followers to redress a public wrong, but only
to inflict one--to avenge a personal humiliation, gratify an appetite
for notoriety, slake a thirst for the intoxicating cup of power, or
punish the crime of prosperity.

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

No strike of any prominence ever takes place in this country without
the concomitants of violence and destruction of property, and usually
murder. These cheerful incidents one who does not personally suffer them
can endure with considerable fortitude, but the sniveling, hypocritical
condemnation of them by the press that has instigated them and the
strikers who have planned and executed them, and who invariably ascribe
them to those whom they most injure; the solemn offers of the leaders to
assist in protecting the imperiled property and avenging the dead, while
openly employing counsel for every incendiary and assassin arrested in
spite of them--these are pretty hard to bear. A strike means (for it
includes as its main method) violence, lawlessness, destruction of the
property of others than the strikers, riot and if necessary bloodshed.
Even when the strikers themselves have no hand in these crimes they are
morally liable for the foreknown consequences of their act. Nay, they
are morally liable for _all the_ consequences--all the inconveniences
and losses to the community, all the sufferings of the poor entailed by
interruptions of trade, all the privations of other workingmen whom
a selfish attention to their own supposed advantage throws out of the
closed industries. They are liable in morals and should be made so in
law--only that strikes are needless. It is not worth while to create a
multitude of complex criminal responsibilities for acts which can easily
be prevented by a single and simple one. How?

First, I should like to point out that we are hearing a deal too much
about a man's inalienable right to work or play, at his own sovereign
will. In so far as that means--and it is always used to mean--his right
to quit any kind of work at any moment, without notice and regardless of
consequences to others, it is false; there is no such moral right, and
the law should have at least a speaking acquaintance with morality. What
is mischievous should be illegal. The various interests of civilization
are so complex, delicate, intertangled and interdependent that no man,
and no set of men, should have power to throw the entire scheme into
confusion and disorder for pro-motion of a trumpery principle or a class
advantage. In dealing with corporations we recognize that. If for any
selfish purpose the trade union of railway managers had done what their
sacred brakemen and divine firemen did--had decreed that "no wheel
should turn," until Mr. Pullman's men should return to work--they would
have found themselves all in jail the second day. _Their_ right to quit
work was not conceded: they lacked that authenticating credential of
moral and legal irresponsibility, an indurated palm. In a small lockout
affecting a mill or two the offender finds a half-hearted support in
_the_ law if he is willing to pay enough deputy sheriffs; but even
then he is mounted by the hobnailed populace, at its back the daily
newspapers, clamoring and spitting like cats. But let the manager of a
great railway discharge all its men without warning and "kill" its own
engines! Then see what you will see. To commit a wrong so gigantic with
impunity a man must wear overalls.

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

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

Under the present _regime_ labor contracts are useless; either party can
violate them with impunity. They offer redress only through a civil suit
for damages, and the employee commonly has nothing with which to
conduct an action or satisfy a judgment. The consequence is seen in
the incessant and increasing industrial disturbances, with their
ever-attendant crimes against property, life and liberty--disturbances
which by driving capital to investments in which it needs employ no
labor, do more than all the other causes so glibly enumerated by every
newspaper 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 of
American society should, and could afford to, throw off their disguise
and frankly declare their principles and purposes. But what, it may be
asked, are the two antagonistic elements? Dividing lines parting the
population into two camps more or less hostile may be drawn variously;
for example, one may be run between the law-abiding and the criminal
class. But the elements to which reference is here made are those
immemorable and implacable foes which the slang of modern economics
roughly and loosely distinguishes as "Capital" and "Labor." A more
accurate classification--as accurate a one as it is possible to
make--would designate them as those who do muscular labor and those who
do not. The distinction between rich and poor does not serve: to the
laborer the rich man who works with his hands is not objectionable; the
poor man who does not, is. Consciously or unconsciously, and alike by
those whose necessities compel them to perform it and those whose better
fortune enables them to avoid it, manual labor is considered the most
insufferable of human pursuits. It is a pill that the Tolstois, the
"communities" and the "Knights" of Labor can not sugarcoat. We may prate
of the dignity of labor; emblazon its praise upon banners; set apart a
day on which to stop work and celebrate it; shout our teeth loose in its
glorification--and, God help our fool souls to better sense, we think we
mean it all!

If labor is so good and great a thing let all be thankful, for all
can have as much of it as may be desired. The eight-hour law is
not mandatory to the laborer, nor does possession of leisure entail
idleness. It is permitted to the clerk, the shopman, the street
peddler--to all who live by the light employment of keeping the wolf
from the door without eating him--to abandon their ignoble callings,
seize the shovel, the axe and the sledge-hammer and lay about them right
sturdily, to the ample gratification of their desire. And those who are
engaged in more profitable vocations will find that with a part of their
incomes they can purchase from their employers the right to work as hard
as 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 feels
that it sets upon his brow the brand of intellectual inferiority. And
that brand of servitude never ceases to burn. In no country and at
no time has the laborer had a kindly feeling for the rest of us, for
everywhere and always has he heard in our patronising platitudes the
note of contempt. In his repression, in the denying him the opportunity
to avenge his real and imaginary wrongs, government finds its main
usefulness, activity and justification. Jefferson's dictum that
governments are instituted among men in order to secure them in "life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is luminous nonsense. Governments
are not instituted; they grow. They are evolved out of the necessity of
protecting from the handworker the life and property of the brain worker
and the idler. The first is the most dangerous because the most numerous
and the least content. Take from the science and the art of government,
and from its methods, whatever has had its origin in the consciousness
of his ill-will and the fear of his power and what have you left? A pure
republic--that is to say, no government.

I should like it understood that, if not absolutely devoid of
preferences and prejudices, I at least believe myself to be; that except
as 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 in
different degrees. If asked my opinion as to the results of our own, I
should point to Homestead, to Wardner, to Buffalo, to Coal Creek, to the
interminable tale of unpunished murders by individuals and by mobs, to
legislatures and courts unspeakably corrupt and executives of criminal
cowardice, to the prevalence and immunity of plundering trusts and
corporations and the monstrous multiplication of millionaires. I should
invite attention to the pension roll, to the similar and incredible
extravagance of Republican and Democratic "Houses"--a plague o' them
both! If addressing Democrats only, I should mention the protective
tariff; if Republicans, the hill-tribe clamor for free coinage of
silver. I should call to mind the existence of prosperous activity of a
thousand lying secret societies having for their sole object mitigation
of republican simplicity by means of pageantry and costumes grotesquely
resembling those of kings and courtiers, and titles of address and
courtesy exalted enough to draw laughter from an ox.

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

Our Government has broken down at every point, and the two
irreconcilable elements whose suspensions of hostilities are mistaken for
peace are about to try their hands at each other's tempting display of
throats. There is no longer so much as a pretense of amity; apparently
there 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 and
purposes. As the combatants will not define their positions truthfully
by words, let us see if it can be inferred from the actions which
are 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 skilful
catechist he would indubitably say something like this:

"Our ultimate purpose is abolition of the distinction between employer
and employee, which is but a modification of that between master and
slave.

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

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

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

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

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

Doubtless all that (and "the half is not told") sounds to the
unobservant like a harsh exaggeration, an imaginative travesty of the
principles of labor organizations. It is not a travesty; it has no
element of exaggeration. Not in the last twenty-five years has a great
strike or lockout occurred in this country without supplying facts,
notorious and undisputed, upon which some of these confessions of faith
are founded. The war is practically a servile insurrection, and
servile insurrections are today what they ever were: the most cruel and
ferocious of all manifestations of human hate. Emancipation is rough
work; when he who would be free, himself strikes the blow, he can not
consider 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 threatened
with a bombardment of roses.

Let us look into the other camp, where General Hardhead is so engrossed
with his own greatness and power as not clearly to hear the shots on his
picket 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 use
or disuse as much of the earth's surface as I am desirous and able to
procure. I and my kind have made laws confirming us in the occupancy of
the entire habitable and arable area as fast as we can get it. To
the objection that this must eventually here, as it has actually done
elsewhere, deprive the rest of you places upon which legally to be born,
and exclude you after surreptitious birth as trespassers from all chance
to procure directly the fruits of the earth, I reply that you can be
born at sea and eat fish.

"I claim the right to induce you, by offer of employment, to colonize
yourselves and families about my factories, and then arbitrarily, by
withdrawing the employment, break up in a day the homes that you have
been years in acquiring where it is no longer possible for you to
procure work.

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

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

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

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

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

That, I submit, is a pretty fair definition of the position of the
wealthy man who works with his head. It seems worth while to put it on
record while he is extant to challenge or verify; for the probability is
that 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 is
amusing to observe all the champions of law and order gravely prating
of "principles" and declaring with all the solemnity of owls that these
sacred things have been violated. On that ground they have the argument
all their own way. Indubitably there is hardly a fundamental principle
of law and morals that the rioting laborers have not footballed out
of the field of consideration. Indubitably, too, in doing so they have
forfeited as they must have expected to forfeit, all the "moral support"
for which they did not care a tinker's imprecation. If there were any
question of their culpability this solemn insistence upon it would lack
something of the humor with which it is now invested and which saves the
observer from death by dejection.

It is not only in discussions of the "labor situation" that we hear this
eternal babble of "principles." It is never out of ear, and in politics
is especially clamant. Every success in an election is yawped of as
"a triumph of Republican (or Democratic) principles." But neither
in politics nor in the quarrels of laborers and their employers have
principles a place as "factors in the problem." Their use is to supply
to both combatants a vocabulary of accusation and appeal. All the fierce
talk of an antagonist's violation of those eternal principles upon which
organized society is founded--and the rest of it--what is it but the
cry of the dog with the chewed ear? The dog that is chewing foregoes the
advantage of song.

Human contests engaging any number of contestants are not struggles of
principles but struggles of interests; and this is no less true of those
decided by the ballot than of those in which the franker bullet gives
judgment. Nor, but from considerations of prudence and expediency, will
either party hesitate to transgress the limits of the law and outrage
the sense of right. At Homestead and Wardner the laborers committed
robbery, pillage and murder, as striking workmen invariably do when they
dare, and as cowardly newspapers and scoundrel politicians encourage
them in doing. But what would you have? They conceive it to be to their
interest to do these things. If capitalists conceive it to be to theirs
they too would do them. They do not do them for their interest lies in
the supremacy of the law--under which they can suffer loss but do not
suffer hunger.

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

It would be very nice and fine all round if idle workmen would not riot
nor idle employers meet force with force, but invoke the impossible
Sheriff. When the Dragon has been chained in the Bottomless Pit and we
are living under the rule of the saints, things will be so ordered, but
in these rascal times "revolutions are not made with rosewater," and
this is a revolution. What is being revolutionized is the relation
between our old friends. Capital and Labor. The relation has already
been altered many times, doubtless; once, we know, within the period
covered by history, at least in the countries that we call civilized.
The relation was formerly a severely simple one--the capitalist owned
the laborer. Of the difficulty and the cost of abolishing that system
it is needless to speak at length. Through centuries of time and with
an appalling sacrifice of life the effort has gone on, a continuous
war characterized by monstrous infractions of law and morals, by
incalculable cruelty and crime. Our own generation has witnessed the
culminating triumphs of this revolution, and of its three mightiest
leaders the assassination of two, the death in exile of the third. And
now, while still the clank of the falling chains is echoing through the
world, and still a mighty multitude of the world's workers is in bondage
under the old system, the others, for whose liberation was all this
"expense of spirit in a waste of shame," are sharply challenging the
advantage of the new. The new is, in troth, breaking down at every
point The relation of employer and employee is giving but little better
satisfaction than that of master and slave. The difference between the
two is, indeed, not nearly so broad as we persuade ourselves to think
it. In many of the industries there is practically no difference at all,
and the tendency is more and more to effacement of the difference where
it exists.

Labor unions, strikes and rioting are no new remedies for this insidious
disorder; they were common in ancient Rome and still more ancient Egypt.
In the twenty-ninth year of Rameses III a deputation of workmen employed
in the Theban necropolis met the superintendent and the priests with
a statement of their grievances. "Behold," said the spokesman, "we
are brought to the verge of famine. We have neither food, nor oil, nor
clothing; we have no fish; we have no vegetables. Already we have sent
up a petition to our sovereign lord the Pharaoh, praying that he will
give us these things and we are going to appeal to the Governor that we
may have the wherewithal to live." The response to this complaint was
one day's rations of corn. This appears to have been enough only while
it lasted, for a few weeks later the workmen were in open revolt.
Thrice they broke out of their quarter, rioting like mad and defying the
police. Whether they were finally shot full of arrows by the Pinkerton
men of the period the record does not state.

"Organized discontent" in the laboring population is no new thing under
the sun, but in this century and country it has a new opportunity and
Omniscience alone can forecast the outcome. Of one thing we may be very
sure, and the sooner the "capitalist" can persuade himself to discern it
the sooner will his eyes guard his neck: the relations between those who
are able to live without physical toil and those who are not are a
long way from final adjustment, but are about to undergo a profound and
essential alteration. That this is to come by peaceful evolution is a
hope which has nothing in history to sustain it. There are to be bloody
noses and cracked crowns, and the good people who suffer themselves to
be shocked by such things in others will have a chance to try them for
themselves. The working man is not troubling himself greatly about a
just allotment of these blessings; so that the greater part go to those
who do not work with their hands he will not consider too curiously any
person's claim to exemption. It would perhaps better harmonize with his
sense of the fitness of things (as it would, no doubt, with that of the
angels) if the advantages of the transitional period fell mostly to the
share of such star-spangled impostors as Andrew Carnegie; but almost any
distribution that is sufficiently objectionable as a whole to the other
side will be acceptable to the distributor. In the mean time it is to be
wished that the moralize, and homilizers who prate of "principles" may
have a little damnation dealt out to them on account. The head that
is unable to entertain a philosophical view of the situation would be
notably advantaged by removal.




III.

It is the immigration of "the oppressed of all nations" that has made
this country one of the worst on the face of the earth. The change from
good to bad took place within a generation--so quickly that few of us
have 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 we
were taught at our fathers' knees before the eagle became a buzzard.
America is still "an asylum for the oppressed;" and still, as always and
everywhere, the oppressed are unworthy of asylum, avenging upon those
who give them sanctuary the wrongs from which they fled. The saddest
thing about oppression is that it makes its victims unfit for anything
but to be oppressed--makes them dangerous alike to their tyrants, their
saviors and themselves. In the end they turn out to be fairly energetic
oppressors. The gentleman in the cesspool invites compassion, certainly,
but we may be very well assured, before undertaking his relief without
a pole, that his conception of a prosperous life is merely to have his
nose above the surface with another gentleman underfoot.

All languages are spoken in Hell, but chiefly those of Southeastern
Europe. I do not say that a man fresh from the fields or the factories
of Europe--even of Southeastern Europe--may not be a good man; I say
only that, as a matter of fact, he commonly is not. In nine instances in
ten 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 no
better than himself. He is required, in many instances, to take a part
of his pay in "truck" at prices of breathless altitude; and the pay
itself is inadequate--hardly more than double what he could get in his
own country. Against all this his howl is justified; but his rioting and
assassination are not--not even when directed against the property and
persons of his employers. When directed against the persons of other
laborers, who choose to exercise the fundamental human right to work for
whom and for what pay they please--when he denies this right, and with
it the right of organized society to exist, the necessity of shooting
him is not only apparent; it is conspicuous and imperative. That he and
his horrible kind, of whatever nationality, are usually forgiven this
just debt of nature, and suffered to execute, like rivers, their annual
spring rise, constitutes the most valid of the many indictments that
decent Americans by birth or adoption find against the feeble form of
government under which their country groans, A nation that will not
enforce its laws has no claim to the respect and allegiance of its
people.

This "citizen soldiery" business is a ghastly failure. The National
Guard is not worth the price of its uniforms. It is intended to be a
Greater Constabulary: its purpose is to suppress disorders with which
the 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 by
the savage mobs which it is called upon to kill. In a country with
a competent militia and competent men to use it there would be crime
enough and some to spare, but no rioting. Rioting in a Republic is
without a shadow of excuse. If we have bad laws, or if our good laws are
not enforced; if corporations and capital are "tyrannous and strong;" if
white men murder one another and black men outrage white women, all this
is our own fault--the fault of those, among others, who seek redress
or revenge by rioting and lynching. The people have always as good
government, as good industrial conditions, as effective protection of
person, property and liberty, as they deserve. They can have what ever
they have the honesty to desire and the sense to set about getting
in the right way. If as citizens of a Republic we lack the virtue and
intelligence 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 due
to our own moral and intellectual delinquency. There is a simple way,
Messieurs the Masses to correct public evils: put wise and good men into
power. If you can not do that for you are not yourselves wise, or will
not for you are not yourselves good, you deserve to be oppressed when
you submit and shot when you rise.

To shoot a rioter or lyncher is a high kind of mercy. Suppose that
twenty-five years ago (the longer ago the better) two or three criminal
mobs in succession had been exterminated in that way, "as the law
provides." Suppose that several scores of lives had been so taken,
including even those of "innocent spectators"--though that kind of
angel does not abound in the vicinity of mobs. Suppose that no demagogue
judges had permitted officers in command of the "firing lines" to be
persecuted in the courts. Suppose that these events had writ themselves
large and red in the public memory. How many lives would this have
saved? Just as many as since have been taken and lost by rioters, plus
those that for a long time to come will be taken, and minus those that
were taken at that time. Make your own computation from your own data; I
insist only that a rioter shot in time saves nine.

You know--you, the People--that all this is true. You know that in
a Republic lawlessness is villainy entailing greater evils than it
cures--that it cures none. You know that even the "money power" is
powerful only through your own dishonesty and cowardice. You know that
nobody can bribe or intimidate a voter who will not take a bribe or
suffer 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 you
into "parties" by playing upon your credulity and senseless passions.
You know all this, and know it all the time. Yet not a man has the
courage to stand forth and say to your faces what you know in your
hearts. Well, Messieurs the Masses, I don't consider you dangerous--not
very. I have not observed that you want to tear anybody to pieces for
confessing your sins, even if at the same time he confesses his own.
From a considerable experience in that sort of thing I judge that you
rather like it, and that he whom, secretly, you most despise is he who
echoes back to you what he is pleased to think you think and flatters
you for gain. Anyhow, for some reason, I never hear you speak well of
newspaper men and politicians, though in the shadow of your disesteem
they get an occasional gleam of consolation by speaking fairly well of
one another.




CRIME AND ITS CORRECTIVES




I.

SOCIOLOGISTS have been debating the theory that the impulse to commit
crime is a disease, and the ayes appear to have it--not the impulse but
the 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-number
physicians--survivals from an exhausted _regime_--that all disease is
caused by bacilli, which worm themselves into the organs that secrete
health and enjoin them from the performance of that rite. The
medical conservatives mentioned attempt to whittle away the value and
significances of this theory by affirming its inadequacy to account
for such disorders as broken heads, sunstroke, superfluous toes,
home-sickness, burns and strangulation on the gallows; but against the
testimony of so eminent bacteriologists as Drs. Koch and Pasteur their
carping 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, and
eviction can not be wrought by talking. Doubtless we may confidently
expect his eventual suppression by a fresher and more ingenious
disturber of the physiological peace, but the bacillus is now chief
among ten thousand evils and it is futile to attempt to read him out of
the party.

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

In the fascinating theory of the unity of crime we may not unreasonably
hope to find another evidence of the brotherhood of man, another
spiritual bond tending to draw the various classes of society more
closely together.

From time to time it is said that a "wave" of some kind of crime
is sweeping the country. It is all nonsense about "waves" of crime.
Occasionally occurs some crime notable for its unusual features, or for
the renown of those concerned. It arrests public attention, which for a
time is directed to that particular kind of crane, and the newspapers,
with business-like instinct, give, for a season, unusual prominence to
the 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 of
the most noticeable characteristics of crime is the steady and unbroken
monotony of its occurrence in certain forms. There is nothing so dull
and unvarying as this tedious uniformity of repetition. The march of
crime is never retarded, never accelerated. The criminals appear to be
thoroughly well satisfied with their annual average, as shown by the
periodical reports of their secretary, the statistician.

A marked illustration occurs to me. Many years ago in London a
well-known and respectable gentleman was brutally garroted. It was during
the "silly season"--between sessions of Parliament, when the newspapers
are likely to be dull. They at once began to report cases of garroting.
There appeared to be an "epidemic of garroting." The public mind was
terribly excited, and when Parliament met it hastened to pass the
infamous "flogging act"--a distinct reversion to the senseless and
discredited methods of physical torture, so alluring to the half
instructed mind of the average journalist of today. Yet the statistics
published by the Home Secretary under whose administration the act was
passed show that neither at the time of the alarm was there any
material increase of garroting, nor in the period of public tranquillity
succeeding was there any appreciable diminution.




II.

By advocating painless removal of incurable idiots and lunatics,
incorrigible criminals and irreclaimable drunkards from this vale of
tears Dr. W. Duncan McKim provoked many a respectable but otherwise
blameless person to throw a catfit of great complexity and power. Yet
Dr. McKim seemed only to anticipate the trend of public opinion and
forecast its crystallization into law. It is rapidly becoming a question
of not what we ought to do with these unfortunates, but what we shall be
compelled to do. Study of the statistics of the matter shows that in
all civilized countries mental and moral diseases are increasing,
proportionately to population, at a rate which in the course of a few
generations will make it impossible for the healthy to care for the
afflicted. To do so will require the entire revenue which it is possible
to raise by taxation--will absorb all the profits of all the industries
and professions and make deeper and deeper inroads upon the capital
from which they are derived. When it comes to that there can be but
one result. High and humanizing sentiments are angel visitants, whom we
entertain with pride and pleasure, but when _fine_ entertainment becomes
too costly to be borne we "speed the parting guest" forthwith. And
it may happen that in inviting to his vacant place a less exciting
successor--that in replacing Sentiment with Reason--we shall, in this
instance, learn to our joy that we do but entertain another angel. For
nothing is so heavenly as Reason; nothing is so sweet and compassionate
as 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 the
same care in breeding men and women as in breeding horses and dogs?
Here is a determining question: Knowing yourself doomed to hopeless
idiocy, lunacy, crime or drunkenness, would you, or would you not,
welcome a painless death? Let us assume that you would. Upon what
ground, then, would you deny to another a boon that you would desire for
yourself?




III.

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

I know men standing high in journalism who today will "expose" and
bitterly "denounce" a certain rascality and tomorrow will be hobnobbing
with the rascals whom they have named. I know legislators of renown who
habitually in "the halls of legislation" raise their voices against the
dishonest schemes of some "trust magnate," and are habitually seen in
familiar conversation with him. Indubitably these be hypocrites all.
Between the head and the heart of such a man is a wall of adamant, and
neither 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 devious
paths of unrighteousness, but others would do so much violence to their
consciences as to renounce the disadvantages of rascality for those
of an honest life. An unworthy person dreads nothing so much as the
withholding of an honest hand, the slow inevitable stroke of an ignoring
eye.

For one having knowledge of Mr. John D. Rockefeller's social life and
connections it would be easy to name a dozen men and women who by a
conspiracy of conscription could profoundly affect the plans and profits
of the Standard Oil Company. I have been asked: "If John D. Rockefeller
were 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 his
ways. We have Rockefellers and Morgans because we have "respectable"
persons who are not ashamed to take them by the hand, to be seen with
them, to say that they know them. In such it is treachery to censure
them; 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 one
does not know him to be a rascal, and has not said he is; but
knowing him to be, or having said he is, to smile upon him is to be a
hypocrite--just a plain hypocrite or a sycophantic hypocrite, according
to the station in life of the rascal smiled upon. There are more plain
hypocrites than sycophantic ones, for there are more rascals of no
consequence than rich and distinguished ones, though they get fewer
smiles each. The American people will be plundered as long as the
American character is what it is; as long as it is tolerant of
successful knavery; as long as American ingenuity draws an imaginary
distinction between a man's public character and his private--his
commercial and his personal In brief, the American people will be
plundered as long as they deserve to be plundered. No human law can stop
it, none ought to stop it, for that would abrogate a higher and more
salutary law: "As ye sow ye shall reap."

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

With all due respect for Dr. Parkhurst, that is nonsense. If he will
read his New Testament more understandingly he will observe that
Christ's kindly feeling to transgressors was not to be counted on by
sinners 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 of
darkness. It is not by mild words and gentle means that he has hurled
the mighty from their seats and exalted them of low degree. Such
revolutions as he set afoot are not made with spiritual rose-water;
there must be the contagion of a noble indignation fueled with harder
wood than abstractions. The people can not be collected and incited to
take sides by the spectacle of a man fighting something that does
not fight back. It is men that Dr. Parkhurst is trouncing--not their
crimes--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 the
hateful, and scorns, not scorn, but the scornworthy.

It is singular with what tenacity that amusing though mischievous
superstition keeps its hold upon the human mind--that grave _bona
fide_ personification of abstractions and the funny delusion that it is
possible to hate or love them. Sin is not a thing; there is no existing
object corresponding to any of the mere counter-words that are properly
named abstract nouns. One can no more hate sin or love virtue than
one can hate a vacuum (which Nature--itself imaginary--was once by the
scientists of the period solemnly held to do) or love one of the three
dimensions. 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 same
kind, who are not quite so close to us.

"But," says Citizen Goodheart, who thinks with difficulty, "shall I
throw over my friend when he is in trouble?" Yes, when you are convinced
that he deserves to be in trouble; throw him all the harder and the
further because he is your friend. In addition to his particular offense
against society he has disgraced _you_. If there are to be lenity and
charity let them go to the criminal who has foreborne to involve you
in 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 precaution
as securing your acquaintance and regard. Don't throw the first stone,
of course, but when convinced that your friend is a proper target, heave
away with a right hearty good-will, and let the stone be of serviceable
dimensions, scabrous, textured flintwise and delivered with a good aim.

The French have a saying to the effect that to know all is to pardon
all; and doubtless with an omniscient insight into the causes of
character we should find the field of moral responsibility pretty
thickly strewn with extenuating circumstances very suitable indeed for
consideration by a god who has had a hand in besetting "with pitfall
and with gin" the road we are to wander in. But I submit that universal
forgiveness would hardly do as a working principle. Even those who are
most apt and facile with the incident of the woman taken in adultery
commonly 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 their
state. 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. What
concerns our happiness and welfare, as affectible by our fellowmen, is
conduct "Principles, not men," is a rogue's cry; rascality's counsel to
stupidity, the noise of the duper duping on his dupe. He shouts it most
loudly and with the keenest sense of its advantage who most desires
inattention to his own conduct, or to that forecast of it, his
character. As to sin, that has an abundance of expounders and is already
universally known to be wicked. What more can be said against it, and
why go on repeating that? The thing is a trifle wordworn, whereas the
sinner 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 all
the mischief. Sin has no arms to thrust into the public treasury and
the private; no hands with which to cut a throat; no tongue to wreck
a reputation withal. I would no more attack it than I would attack an
isosceles 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 head
for 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 they
are all good citizens.




THE DEATH PENALTY




I.

"DOWN with the gallows!" is a cry not unfamiliar in America. There is
always a movement afoot to make odious the just principle of "a life for
a life"--to represent it as "a relic of barbarism," "a usurpation of
the divine authority," and the rotten rest of it The law making murder
punishable by death is as purely a measure of self-defense as is the
display of a pistol to one diligently endeavoring to kill without
provocation. Even the most brainless opponent of "capital punishment"
would do that if he knew enough. It is in precisely the same sense an
admonition, 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 pistol
the individual whose life is attacked says: "Desist or be shot." To be
effective the warning in either case must be more than an idle threat.
Even the most unearthly reasoner among the gallows-downing unfortunates
would hardly expect to frighten away an assassin who knew the pistol
to be unloaded. Of course these queer illogicians can not be made to
understand that their position commits them to absolute non-resistance
to any kind of aggression, and that is fortunate for the rest of us,
for if as Christians they frankly and consistently took that ground we
should be under the miserable necessity of respecting them.

We have good reason to hold that the horrible prevalence of murder in
this country is due to the fact that we do not execute our laws--that
the death penalty is threatened but not inflicted--that the pistol is
not loaded. In civilized countries, where there is enough respect for
the laws to administer them, there is enough to obey them. While man
still has as much of the ancestral brute as his skin can hold widiout
cracking we shall have thieves and demagogues and anarchists and
assassins and persons with a private system of lexicography who define
hanging as murder and murder as mischance, and many another disagreeable
creation, but in all this welter of crime and stupidity are areas where
human life is comparatively secure against the human hand. It is at
least a significant coincidence that in these the death penalty for
murder is fairly well enforced by judges who do not derive any part of
their authority from those for whose restraint and punishment they hold
it. Against the life of one guiltless person the lives of ten thousand
murderers count for nothing; their hanging is a public good, without
reference to the crimes that disclose their deserts. If we could
discover them by other signs than their bloody deeds they should be
hanged anyhow. Unfortunately we must have a death as evidence. The
scientists who will tell us how to recognize the potential assassin, and
persuade us to kill him, will be the greatest benefactor of his century.

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

Men are not drafted for the death penalty; they volunteer. "Then it is
not deterrent," mutters the gentleman whose rude forefather pelted the
hangman. Well, as to that, the law which is to accomplish more than a
part of its purpose must be awaited with great patience. Every murder
proves that hanging is not altogether deterrent; every hanging that it
is somewhat deterrent--it deters the person hanged. A man's first murder
is 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 the
outcome of clear thought, and that is something to which Theosophists
are not addicted. Considering their infirmity in that way, it would be
hardly fair to take them as seriously as they take themselves, but
when any considerable number of apparently earnest citizens unite in a
petition to the Governor of their State, to commute the death sentence
of a convicted assassin without alleging a doubt of his guilt the
phenomenon challenges a certain attention to what they do allege. What
these amiable persons hold, it seems, is what was held by Alphonse Karr:
the expediency of abolishing the death penalty; but apparently they do
not hold, with him, that the assassins should begin. They want the State
to begin, believing that the magnanimous example will effect a change of
heart in those about to murder. This, I take it, is the meaning of their
assertion that "death penalties have not the deterring influence which
imprisonment for life carries." In this they obviously err: death deters
at least the person who suffers it--he commits no more murder; whereas
the assassin who is imprisoned for life and immune from further
punishment may with impunity kill his keeper or whomsoever he may be
able to get at. Even as matters now are, the most incessant vigilance is
required to prevent convicts in prison from murdering their attendants
and one another. How would it be if the "life-termer" were assured
against any additional inconvenience for braining a guard occasionally,
or strangling a chaplain now and then? A penitentiary may be described
as a place of punishment and reward; and under the system proposed the
difference in desirableness between a sentence and an appointment would
be virtually effaced. To overcome this objection a life sentence would
have to mean solitary confinement, and that means insanity. Is that what
these Theosophical gentlemen propose to substitute for death?

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

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

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

Here are two of these gentlemen's dicta, between which they inserted the
one just considered, though properly they should go together in frank
inconsistency:

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

"8. Death penalties have not the deterring influence which imprisonment
for 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 so
sympathetically affect these soft-hearted and soft-headed persons are
those of the murderer, not those of his victim, let us consider what
they really say, not what they think they say: "Death is no very
great punishment, for the criminal doesn't mind it much, but hopeless
captivity is a very great punishment indeed Therefore, let us spare
the assassin's family the tortures they will suffer if we inflict
the lighter penalty. Let us make it easier for them by inflicting the
severer one."

There is sense for you!--sense of the sound old fruity Theosophical
sort--the kind of sense that has lifted "The Beautiful Cult" out of the
dark 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 the
Legislature--even by a constitutional prohibition, we may do away with
the pardoning power; but laws can be repealed, constitutions amended.

The public has a short memory, signatures to petitions in the line of
mercy are had for the asking, and tender-hearted Governors are familiar
afflictions. We have life sentences already, and sometimes they are
served to the end--if the end comes soon enough! but the average length
of "life imprisonment" is, I am told, a little more than seven years.
Hope springs eternal in the human beast, and matters simply can not
be so arranged that in entering the penitentiary he will "leave hope
behind." Hopeless captivity is a dream.

I quote again:

"9. Life imprisonment is the natural and humane check upon one who has
proven 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 to
know just what these worthy Theosophers have the happiness to think that
they 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 took
therefore, it is a most illogical punishment. Two wrongs do not make a
right."

Here's richness! Hanging an assassin is illogical because it does
not 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 in
dispute is whether taking the life of a life-taker is a wrong. So naked
and unashamed an example of _petitio principii_ would disgrace a debater
in a pinafore. And these wonder-mongers have the incredible effrontery
to babble of "logic"! Why, if one of them were to meet a syllogism in a
lonely road he would run away in a hundred and fifty directions as hard
as ever he could hook it. One is almost ashamed to dispute with such
intellectual cloudings.

Whatever an individual may rightly do to protect himself society may
rightly do to protect him, for he is a part of itself. If he may
rightly take life in defending himself society may rightly take life in
defending him. If society may rightly take life in defending him it may
rightly threaten to take it. Having rightly and mercifully threatened to
take 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 law
can altogether prevent any form of crime, nor is it desirable that it
should. Doubtless God could so have created us that our sense of right
and justice could have existed without contemplation of injustice and
wrong, as doubtless he could so have created us that we could have felt
compassion without a knowledge of suffering, but doubtless he did not.
Constituted as we are, we can know good only by contrast with evil. Our
sense of sin is what our virtues feed upon; in the thin air of universal
morality the altar-fires of honor and the beacons of conscience could
not be kept alight A community without crime would be a community
without warm and elevated sentiments--without the sense of justice,
without generosity, without courage, without magnanimity--a community of
small, smug souls, uninteresting to God and uncoveted by the Devil. We
can have too much of crime, no doubt; what the wholesome proportion is
none can say. Just now we are running a good deal to murder, but he who
can gravely attribute that phenomenon, or any part of it, to infliction
of the death penalty, instead of virtual immunity from any penalty at
all, is justly entitled to the innocent satisfaction that comes of being
a simpleton.

The New Woman is against the death penalty, naturally, for she is hot
and hardy in the conviction that whatever is is wrong. She has visited
this world in order to straighten things about a bit, and is in distress
lest the number of things be insufficient to her need. The matter is
important variously; not least so in its relation to the new heaven and
the new earth that are to be the outcome of woman suffrage. There can be
no doubt that the vast majority of women have sentimental objections to
the death penalty that quite outweigh such practical considerations in
its favor as they can be persuaded to comprehend. Aided by the minority
of men afflicted by the same mental malady, they will indubitably effect
its abolition in the first lustrum of their political activity. The
New Woman will scarcely feel the seat of power warm beneath her before
giving to the assassin's "unhand me villain!" the authority of law.
So we shall make again the old experiment, discredited by a thousand
failures, of preventing crime by tenderness to caught criminals. And
the criminal uncaught will treat us to a quality of toughness notably
augmented by the Christian spirit of the regime.




II.

As to painless executions, the simple and practical way to make them
both just and popular is the adoption by murderers of a system of
painless assassinations. Until this is done there seems to be no hope
that the people will renounce the wholesome discomfort of the style
of executions endeared to them by memories and associations of the
tenderest character. There is also, I fancy, a shaping notion in the
public mind that the penologists and their allies have gone about as
far as they can safely be permitted to go in the direction of a softer
suasion of the criminal nature toward good behavior. The modern prison
has become a rather more comfortable habitation than the dangerous
classes are accustomed to at home. Modern prison life has in their eyes
something of the charm and glamor of an ideal existence, like that in
the Happy Valley from which Rasselas had the folly to escape. Whatever
advantages to the public may be secured by abating the rigors of
imprisonment and inconveniences incident to execution, there is
this objection, it makes them less deterrent. Let the penologers and
philanthrope, have their way and even hanging might be made so pleasant
and withal so interesting a social distinction that it would deter
nobody but the person hanged. Adopt the euthanasian method of
electricity, asphyxia by smothering in rose-leaves, or slow poisoning
with rich food, and the death penalty may come to be regarded as the
object of a noble ambition to the _bon vivant_, and the rising young
suicide may go and murder somebody else instead of himself in order to
receive a happier dispatch than his own 'prentice hand can assure him.

But the advocates of agreeable pains and penalties tell us that in the
darker ages, when cruel and degrading punishment was the rule, and was
freely inflicted for every light infraction of the law, crime was more
common than it is now; and in this they appear to be right. But they one
and all overlook a fact equally obvious and vastly significant: that
the intellectual, moral and social condition of the masses was very low.
Crime was more common because ignorance was more common, poverty was
more common, sins of authority, and therefore hatred of authority, were
more common. The world of even a century ago was a quite different
world from the world of today, and a vastly more uncomfortable one. The
popular adage to the contrary notwithstanding, human nature was not by a
long cut the same then that it is now. In the very ancient time of that
early English king, George III, when women were burned at the stake
in public for various offenses and men were hanged for "coining" and
children for theft, and in the still remoter period, (circa 1530) when
poisoners were boiled in several waters, divers sorts of criminals were
disemboweled and some are thought to have undergone _the pene forte et
dure_ of cold-pressing (an infliction which the pen of Hugo has since
made popular--in literature)--in these wicked old days it is possible
that crime flourished, not because of the law's severity, but in spite
of it. It is possible that our respected and respectable ancestors
understood the situation as it then was a trifle better than we can
understand it on the hither side of this gulf of years, and that they
were not the reasonless barbarians that we think them to have been.
And if they were, what must have been the unreason and barbarity of the
criminal element with which they had to deal?

I am far from thinking that severity of punishment can have the same
restraining effect as probability of some punishment being inflicted;
but if mildness of penalty is to be superadded to difficulty of
conviction, 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 punishment
should be urged at a time when there appears to be a tolerably general
disposition to inflict no punishment at all. There are, however, still a
few old-fashioned persons who hold it obvious that one who is ambitious
to break the laws of his country will not with as light a heart and as
airy an indifference incur the peril of a harsh penalty as he will the
chance of one more nearly resembling that which he would select for
himself.




III.

After lying for more than a century dead I was revived, given a new
body, and restored to society. This was in the year 2015. The first
thing of interest that I observed was an enormous building, covering a
square mile of ground. It was surrounded on all sides by a high, strong
wall of hewn stone upon which armed sentinels paced to and fro. In one
face of the wall was a single gate of massive iron, strongly guarded.
While admiring the cyclopean architecture of the "reverend pile" I was
accosted by a man in uniform, evidently The Warden, with a cheerful
salutation.

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

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

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

"Yes, indeed," he assented; "under the Reform _regime_, which began in
your day, it became so powerful, bold and fierce that arrests were no
longer 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 and
powerful to be taken into custody, of what use are the prisons! And how
are they crowded?"

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

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

I walked rapidly to the gate. When challenged by the sentinel, I
turned to summon my instructor. He was nowhere visible: desolate and
forbidding, 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 the
circumstances, would Christ have done?"--the Christ of the New
Testament, not the Christ of the commentators, theologians, priests
and parsons. The test is perhaps not infallible, but it is exceedingly
simple 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 in
literature, is next to Buddha, Jesus Christ. He taught nothing new in
goodness, for all goodness was ages old before he came; but with an
almost infallible intuition he applied to life and conduct the entire
law of righteousness. He was a lightning moral calculator: to his
luminous intelligence the statement of the problem carried the
solution--he could not hesitate, he seldom erred. That upon his deeds
and words was founded a religion which in a debased form persists and
even 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 more
complex conditions--conditions more nearly identical with those of the
modern world and the future. One would like to be able to see, through
the eyes of his biographers, his genius applied to more and more
difficult questions. Yet one can hardly go wrong in inference of his
thought and act. In many of the complexities and entanglements of
modern affairs it is no easy matter to find an answer off-hand to the
question,"What is it right to do?" But put it in another way: "What
would Christ have done?" and lo! there is light. I Doubt spreads her
bat-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 deeper
shade.




II.

Gentlemen of the secular press dealt with the Rev. Mr. Sheldon not
altogether fairly. To some very relevant considerations they gave no
weight. It was not fair, for example, to say, as the distinguished
editor of the "North American Review" did, that in professing to conduct
a daily newspaper for a week as he conceived that Christ would have
conducted it, Mr. Sheldon acted the part of "a notoriety seeking
mountebank." It seldom is fair to go into the question of motive, for
that is something upon which one has the least light, even when the
motive is one's own. The motives that we think dominale us seem simple
and obvious; they are in most instances exceedingly complex and obscure.
Complacently surveying the wreck and ruin that he has wrought, even that
great anarch, the "well meaning person," can not have entire assurance
that 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 himself
in another's place if that happened to be at any considerable distance
from his own place. He made no allowance for the difference in the point
of view--for the difference, that is, between his mind and the mind
of Mr. Sheldon. If Mr. Harvey had undertaken to conduct that Kansas
newspaper as Christ would have done he would indeed have been "a
notoriety seeking mountebank," or some similarly unenviable thing, for
only a selfish purpose could persuade him to an obviously resultless
work. But Mr. Sheldon was different--his was the religious mind--a mind
having faith in an "overruling" Providence who can, and frequently does,
interfere with the orderly relation of cause and effect, accomplishing
an end by means otherwise inadequate to its production. Believing
himself a faithful servant of that Power, and asking daily for its
interposition for promotion of a highly moral purpose, why should he not
have expected his favor to the enterprise? To expect that was, in
Mr. Sheldon, natural, reasonable, wise; his folly lay in believing in
conditions making it expectable. A person convinced that the law of
gravitation is suspended is no fool for walking into a bog. Mr. Harvey
may understand, but Mr. Sheldon can not understand, that Jesus Christ
would not edit a newspaper at all.

The religious mind, it should be understood, is not logical. It may
acquire, as Whateley's did, a certain familiarity with the syllogism as
an abstraction, but of the syllogism's practical application, its
real relation to the phenomena of thought, the religious mind can know
nothing. That is merely to say that the mind congenitally gifted with
the power of logic and accessible to its light and leading does not take
to religion, which is a matter, not of reason, but of feeling--not of
the head, but of the heart. Religions are conclusions for which the
facts of nature supply no major premises. They are accepted or rejected
according to the original mental make-up of the person to whom they
appeal for recognition. Believers and unbelievers are like two boys
quarreling 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's
support.

Believing the things that he did believe, Mr. Sheldon was entirely right
in thinking that the main purpose of a newspaper should be the salvation
of souls. If his religious belief is true that should be the main
purpose, 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 of
our deeds in the body reach over into another life in another world,
determining there our eternal state of happiness or pain, that is the
most momentous fact conceivable. It is the only momentous fact; all
others are chaff and rags. A man who, believing it to be a fact, does
not make it the one purpose of his life to save his soul and the souls
of others that are willing to be saved is a fool and a rogue. If he
think that any part of this only needful work can be done by turning a
newspaper into a gruelpot he ought to do so or (preferably) perish in
the 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 highest
standard that his religion affords it is not easy to see how religion
is to be made anything but a mere body of doctrine. I do not think the
Christian religion will ever be seriously discredited by an attempt to
determine, even with too dim a light, what under given circumstances,
the man miscalled its "founder" would do. What else is his great example
good for? But it is not always enough to ask oneself, "How would Christ
do this?" One should first consider whether Christ would do it. It is
conceivable that certain of his thrifty contemporaries may have asked
him 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. For
example, there is the Rev. Dr. Parkhurst, whose defence was published
with Mr. Harvey's attack. I shall give a single illustration of how this
more celebrated than cerebrated "divine" is pleased to think that he
thinks. He is replying to some one's application to this matter of
Christ's injunction, "Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth."
This command, he gravely says, "is not against money, nor against the
making of money, but against the loving it for its own sake and the
dedicating of it to self-aggrandizing uses." I call this a foolish
utterance, because it violates the good old rule of not telling an
obvious falsehood. In no word nor syllable does Christ's injunction give
the least color of truth to the reverend gentleman's "interpretation;"
that is the reverend gentleman's very own, and doubtless he feels
an honest pride in it. It is the product of a controversial need--a
characteristic attempt to crawl out of a hole in an enclosure which
he was not invited to enter. The words need no "interpretation;" are
capable of none; are as clear and unambiguous a proposition as language
can frame. Moreover, they are consistent with all that we think we know
of their author's life and character, for he not only lived in poverty
and taught poverty as a blessing, but commanded it as a duty and a means
of salvation. The probable effect of universal obedience among those who
adore him as a god is not at present an urgent question. I think even so
faithful a disciple as the Rev. Dr. Parkhurst has still a place to lay
his head, a little of the wherewithal to be clothed, and a good deal of
the power of interpretation to excuse it.




III.

There are other hypocrites than those of the pulpit Dr. Gatling, the
ingenious scoundrel who invented the gun that bears his name with
commendable fortitude, says he has given much thought to the task of
bringing 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 be
impossible is only a harmless lunatic, but this fellow utters his cant
to conceal his cupidity. If he thought there was any danger of the
nations beating their swords into plowshares we should see him "take the
stump" against agriculture forthwith. The same is true of all military
inventors. They are lions' parasites; themselves, of cold blood they
fatten upon hot. The sheep-tick's paler fare is not at all to their
taste.

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

You may say, if you will, that primitive Christianity--the Christianity
of Christ--is not adapted to these rough-and-tumble times; that it is
not a practical scheme of conduct. As you please; I have not undertaken
to say what it is not, but what it partly is. I am no Christian, though
I think that Christ probably knew what was good for man about as well
as Dr. Gatling or the United States Ordnance Office. It is not for me to
defend Christianity; Christ did not. Nevertheless, I can not forbear the
wish that I were a preacher, in order sincerely to affirm that the awful
burdens borne by modern nations are obvious judgments of Heaven for
disobedience to the Prince of Peace. What a striking theme to kindle
fires upon the heights of imagination--to fill the secret sources of
eloquence--to stir the very stones in the temple of truth! What a
noble subject for the pious gentlemen who serve (with rank, pay and
allowances) as chaplains in the Army and the Navy, or the civilian
divines who offer prayer at the launching of an ironclad!




IV.

A matter of missionaries commonly is to the fore as a cause of quarrel
among nations which have the hardihood to prefer their own religions
to ours. Missionaries constitute, in truth, a perpetual menace to the
national peace. I dare say the most of them are conscientious men and
women of a certain order of intellect. They believe, and from the way
that they interpret their sacred book have some reason to believe, that
in meddling uninvited with the spiritual affairs of others they perform
a work acceptable to God--their God. They think they discern a moral
difference between "approaching" a man of another religion about the
state of his soul and approaching him on the condition of his linen
or the character of his wife. I think there is no difference. I have
observed that the person who volunteers an interest in my spiritual
welfare is the same person from whom I must expect an impudent concern
about my temporal affairs. The missionary is one who goes about throwing
open the shutters of other men's bosoms in order to project upon the
blank walls a shadow of himself.

No ruler nor government of sense would willingly permit foreigners to
sap the foundation of the national religion. No ruler nor government
ever does permit it except under the stress of compulsion. It is through
the people's religion that a wise government governs wisely--even in our
own country we make only a transparent pretense of officially ignoring
Christianity, and a pretense only because we have so many kinds of
Christians, all jealous and inharmonious. Each sect would make this a
Theocracy if it could, and would that make short work of any missionary
from abroad. Happily all religions but ours have the sloth and timidity
of error; Christianity alone, drawing vigor from eternal truth, is
courageous enough and energetic enough to make itself a nuisance to
people of every other faith. The Jew not only does not bid for converts,
but discourages them by imposition of hard conditions, and the Moslem
True Believer's simple, forthright method of reducing error is to cut
off the head holding it. I don't say that this is right; I say only
that, being practical and comprehensible, it commands a certain respect
from the impartial observer not conversant with scriptural justification
of the other practice.

It is only where the missionaries have made themselves hated that there
is any molestation of Europeans engaged in the affairs of this world.
Chinese antipathy to Caucasians in China is neither a racial animosity
nor a religious; it is an instinctive dislike of persons who will not
mind their own business. China has been infested with missionaries from
the earliest centuries of our era, and they have rarely been molested
when they have taken the trouble to behave themselves. In the time of
the Emperor Justinian the fact that the Christian religion was openly
preached throughout China enabled that sovereign to wrest from the
Chinese the jealously-guarded secret of silk-making. He sent two monks
to 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 the
religions of others alone, but naturally and rightly demand that others
shall let theirs alone. In China, as in other Oriental countries
where the color line is not drawn and where slavery itself is a light
affliction, the mental attitude of the zealot who finds gratification
in "spreading the light" of which he deems himself custodian, is not
understood. Like most things not understood, it is felt to be bad, and
is indubitably offensive.




V.

At a church club meeting a paper was read by a minister entitled, "Why
the Masses Do not Attend the Churches." This good and pious man was not
ashamed to account for it by the fact that there is no Sunday law,
and "the masses" can find recreation elsewhere, even in the drinking
saloons. It is frank of him to admit that he and his professional
brethren have not brains enough to make religious services more
attractive than shaking dice for cigars or playing cards for drink; but
if it is a fact he must not expect the local government to assist in
spreading the gospel by rounding-up the people and corralling them in
the churches. The truth is, and this gentleman suspects it, that "the
masses" stay out of hearing of his pulpit because he talks nonsense
of the most fatiguing kind; they would rather do any one of a thousand
other things than go to hear it. These parsons are like a scolding wife
who grieves because her husband will not pass his evenings with her. The
more she grieves, the more she scolds and the more diligently he keeps
away from her. I don't think Jack Satan is conspicuously wise, but he
is in the main a good entertainer, with a right pretty knack at making
people come again; but the really reprehensible part of his performance
is not the part that attracts them. The parsons might study his methods
with great advantage to religion and morality.

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

"The masses" have not asked for churches and services; they really do
not 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 they
should understand their relation to the impenitent worldling, which is
precisely that of a physician without a mandate from the patient, who
may not be convinced that there is very much the matter with him. The
physician may have a diploma and a State certificate authorizing him to
practise, but if the patient do not deem himself bound to be practised
upon has the physician a right to make him miserable until he will
submit? Clearly, he has not. If he can not persuade him to come to the
dispensary and take medicine there is an end to the matter, and he may
justly conclude that he is misfitted to his vocation.

I am sure that the ministers and that singularly small contingent of
earnest and, on the whole, pretty good persons who cluster about them do
not perceive how alien they are in their convictions, tastes, sympathies
and general mental habitudes to the great majority of their fellow men
and women. Their voices, like "the gushing wave" which, to the ears of
the lotus-eaters,

     "Far, far away did seem to mourn and rave,"

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




VI.

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

Doubtless there are errors in the record of results--some things
set down as "answers" to prayer which came about through the orderly
operation of natural laws and would have occurred anyhow. I am told that
similar errors have been made, or are believed to have been made, in
the past. In 1730, for example, a good Bishop at Auvergne prayed for an
eclipse of the sun as a warning to unbelievers. The eclipse ensued and
the pious prelate made the most of it; but when it was shown that
the astronomers of the period had foretold it he was a sufferer from
irreverent 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 transpired
that, unknown (or known) to the monk, the man was under sentence of
decapitation when the prayer was made. This is related by Ausolus, who
piously explains, however, that but for the prayer the sentence might
perhaps have been commuted to service in the galleys. I have myself
known a minister to pray for rain, and the rain came. Perhaps you can
conceive his discomfiture when I showed him that the weather bureau had
previously predicted a fair day.

I do not object to a week of prayer. But why only a week? If prayer
is "answered" Christians ought to pray all the time. That prayer is
"answered" the Scripture affirms as positively and unequivocally as
anything can be affirmed in words: "All things whatsoever ye shall ask
in prayer, believing, that ye shall receive." Why, then, when all the
clergy of this country prayed, publicly for the recovery of President
McKinley, did the man die? Why is it that although two pious Chaplains
ask almost daily that goodness and wisdom may descend upon Congress,
Congress remains wicked and unwise? Why is it that although in all the
churches and half the dwellings of the land God is continually asked for
good government, good government remains what it always and everywhere
has been, a dream? From Earth to Heaven in unceasing ascension flows a
stream of prayer for every blessing that man desires, yet man remains
unblest, 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 is
futilized and invalidated by the lack of faith?--that the "asking"
is not credentialed by the "believing?" When the anointed minister
of Heaven spreads his palms and uprolls his eyes to beseech a general
blessing or some special advantage is he the celebrant of a hollow,
meaningless rite, or the dupe of a false promise? One does not know, but
if one is not a fool one does know that his every resultless petition
proves 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 is
eyed 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 were
Christ's peculiar care. Ever for them and their privations, and
not greatly for their spiritual darkness, fell from his lips the
compassionate word, the mandate divine for their relief and cherishing.
Of foreign missions, of home missions, of mission schools, of church
buildings, of work among pagans _in partibus infidelium_, of work among
sailors, of communion table, of delegates to councils--of any of these
things he knew no more than the moon man. They were inventions of
others, as is the entire florid and flamboyant fabric of ecclesiasticism
that has been reared, stone by stone and century after century, upon his
simple 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 Oriental
indirection wherein our stupid ingenuity finds imaginary warrant for all
desiderated pranks and fads.




IMMORTALITY

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

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

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

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

The question of human immortality is the most momentous that the mind
is capable of conceiving. If it is a fact that the dead live, all other
facts are in comparison trivial and without interest. The prospect of
obtaining certain knowledge with regard to this stupendous matter is not
encouraging. In all countries but those in barbarism the powers of the
profoundest and most penetrating intelligences have been ceaselessly
addressed to the task of glimpsing a life beyond this life; yet today no
one can truly say that he knows. It is still as much a matter of faith
as ever it was.

Our modern Christian nations hold a passionate hope and belief in
another world, yet the most popular writer and speaker of his time, the
man whose lectures drew the largest audiences, the work of whose pen
brought him the highest rewards, was he who most strenuously strove to
destroy the ground of that hope and unsettle the foundations of that
belief.

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

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

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

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

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

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

(4) There may be an honorable and candid God. He may have implanted
in us the desire of perfect happiness. It may be--it is--impossible to
gratify 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 going
to gratify it. If omniscient and omnipotent, God must be held to have
intended, whatever occurs, but no such God is assumed in M. Flammarion's
illustration, 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 in
the marvelous and catastrophic than in the orderly regions of familiar
phenomena. To him the heavens are an immense pyrotechnicon and he is the
master of the show and sets off the fireworks. But he knows nothing
of logic, which is the science of straight thinking, and his views of
things have therefore no value; they are nebulous.

Nothing is clearer than that our pre-existence is a dream, having
absolutely no basis in anything that we know or can hope to know. Of
after-existence there is said to be evidence, or rather testimony,
in assurances of those who are in present enjoyment of it--if it is
enjoyable. Whether this testimony has actually been given--and it is the
only testimony worth a moment's consideration--is a disputed point Many
persons while living this life have professed to have received it.
But nobody professes, or ever has professed, to have received a
communication of any kind from one in actual experience of the
fore-life. "The souls as yet ungarmented," if such there are, are dumb
to question. The Land beyond the Grave has been, if not observed,
yet often and variously described: if not explored and surveyed, yet
carefully charted. From among so many accounts of it that we have, he
must be fastidious indeed who can not be suited. But of the Fatherland
that spreads before the cradle--the great Heretofore, wherein we all
dwelt if we are to dwell in the Hereafter, we have no account. Nobody
professes knowledge of that. No testimony reaches our ears of flesh
concerning its topographical or other features; no one has been so
enterprising as to wrest from its actual inhabitants any particulars of
their character and appearance, to refresh our memory withal. And among
educated experts and professional proponents of worlds to be there is a
general denial of its existence.

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

Let us not be misled here by a false analogy. Today I may get a
thwack on the mazzard which will give me an intervening season of
unconsciousness between yesterday and tomorrow. Thereafter I may live to
a green old age with no recollection of anything that I knew, or did, or
was before the accident; yet I shall be the same person, for between the
old 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 the
same in both--namely, my body with its habits, capacities and powers.
That is I; that identifies me as my former self--authenticates and
credentials me as the person that incurred the cranial mischance,
dislodging memory.

But when death occurs _all_ is dislodged if memory is; for between
two merely mental or spiritual existences memory is the only _nexus_
conceivable; consciousness of identity is the only identity. To
live again without memory of having lived before is to live another.
Re-existence without recollection is absurd; there is nothing to
re-exist.




OPPORTUNITY

THIS is not a country of equal fortunes; outside a Socialist's dream no
such country exists or can exist. But as nearly as possible this is a
country of equal opportunities for those who begin life with nothing but
nature's endowments--and of such is the kingdom of success.

In nine instances in ten successful Americans--that is Americans
who have succeeded in any worthy ambition or legitimate field of
endeavor--have started with nothing but the skin they stood in. It
almost may be said, indeed, that to begin with nothing is a main
condition of success--in America.

To a young man there is no such hopeless impediment as wealth or the
expectation of wealth. Here a man and there a man will be born so
abundantly endowed by nature as to overcome the handicap of artificial
"advantages," but that is not the rule; usually the chap "born with
a gold spoon in his mouth" puts in his time sucking that spoon, and
without other employment. Counting possession of the spoon success, why
should he bestir himself to achieve what he already has?

The real curled darling of opportunity has nothing in his mouth but his
teeth and his appetite--he knows, or is likely to know, what it is to
feel his belly sticking to his back. If he have brains a-plenty he
will get on, for he must be up and doing--the penalty of indiligence is
famine. If he have not, he may up and do to the uttermost satisfaction
of his mind and heart, but the end of that man is failure, with possibly
Socialism, that last resort of conscious incompetence. It fatigues, this
talk of the narrowing opportunities of today, the "closed avenues to
success," and the rest of it. Doubtless it serves its purpose of making
mischief for the tyrant trusts and the wicked rich generally, but in a
six months' bound volume of it there is not enough of truth to float a
religion.

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

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

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

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

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

The number of actual and possible sources of profit and methods of
distinction is infinite. Not all the trusts in the world combined in one
trust of trusts could appreciably reduce it--could condemn to permanent
failure one man with the talent and the will to succeed. They can
abolish that doubtful benefactor of the "small dealer," who lives
by 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 leave
untouched a thousand actual and a million possible ones. As to their
dishonest 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 the
consumer without his special wonder.




CHARITY

THE promoter of organized charity protests against "the wasteful and
mischievous method of undirected relief." He means, naturally,
relief that is not directed by somebody else than the person
giving it--undirected by him and his kind--professional
almoners--philanthropists who deem it more blessed to allot than
to bestow. Indubitably much is wasted and some mischief done by
indiscriminate giving--and individual givers are addicted to that faulty
practice. 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. To
those uncalculating persons who, despite the protests of the organized
charitable, concede a certain moral value to the spontaneous impulses of
the heart and read in the word "relief" a double meaning, the office
of the mere distributor is imperfectly sacred. He is even without
scriptural authority, and lives in the perpetual challenge of a moral
_quo warranto_. Nevertheless he is not without his uses. He is a
tapper of tills that do not open automatically. He is almoner to the
uncompassionate, who but for him would give no alms. He negotiates
unnatural but not censurable relations between selfishness and
ingratitude. The good that he does is purely material. He makes two
leaves of fat to grow where but one grew before, lessens the sum of
gastric pangs and dorsal chills. All this is something, certainly,
but it generates no warm and elevated sentiments and does nothing in
mitigation of the poor's animosity to the rich. Organized charity is a
sapid and savorless thing; its place among moral agencies is no higher
than that of root beer.

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

Organized charity is a delusion and a snare. It enables Munniglut to
think himself a good man for paying annual dues and buying transferable
meal tickets. Munniglut is not thereby, a good man. On the Last Great
Day, when he cowers in the Ineffable Presence and is asked for an
accounting it will not help him to say, "Hearing that A was in want I
gave money for his need to B." Nor will it help B to say, "When A was
in distress I asked C to relieve him, and myself allotted the relief
according to a resolution of D, E and F."

There are blessings and benefactions that one would willingly
forego--among them the poor. Quack remedies for poverty amuse; a real
specific would kindle a noble enthusiasm. Yet the world would lose much
by it; human nature would suffer a change for the worse. Happily and
unhappily poverty is not abolishable: "The poor ye have always with you"
is a sentence that can never become unintelligible. Effect of a thousand
causes, poverty is invincible, eternal. And since we must have it let us
thank God for it and avail ourselves of all its advantages to mind and
character. He who is not good to the deserving poor--who knows not those
of his immediate environment, who goes not among them making inquiry of
their personal needs, who does not wish with all his heart and both his
hands 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 and
industrial life benefits the sex. It may please Helen Gougar and satisfy
her sense of logical accuracy to say, as she does: "We women must work
in order to fill the places left vacant by liquor-drinking men." But who
filled these places before? Did they remain vacant, or were there then
disappointed applicants, as now? If my memory serves, there has been no
time in the period that it covers when the supply of workers--abstemious
male workers--was not in excess of the demand. That it has always been
so is sufficiently attested by the universally inadequate wage rate.

Employers seldom fail, and never for long, to get all the workmen they
need. The field, then, into which women have put their sickles was
already overcrowded with reapers. Whatever employment women have
obtained has been got by displacing men--who would otherwise be
supporting women. Where is the general advantage? We may shout "high
tariff," "combination of capital," "demonetization of silver," and what
not, but if searching for the cause of augmented poverty and crime,
"industrial discontent," and the tramp evil, instead of dogmatically
expounding it, we should take some account of this enormous, sudden
addition to the number of workers seeking work. If any one thinks that
within the brief period of a generation the visible supply of labor can
be enormously augmented without profoundly affecting the stability of
things and disastrously touching the interests of wage-workers, let no
rude voice dispel his dream of such maleficent agencies as his slumbrous
understanding may joy to affirm. And let our Widows of Ashur unlung
themselves in advocacy of quack remedies for evils for which they
themselves are cause; it remains true that when the contention of two
lions for one bone is exacerbated by the accession of a lioness the
squabble is not composable by stirring up some bears in the cage
adjacent.

Indubitably a woman is under no obligation to sacrifice herself to the
good of her sex by refusing needed employment in the hope that it
may fall to a man gifted with dependent women. Nevertheless our
congratulations are more intelligent when bestowed upon her individual
head than when sifted into the hair of all Eve's daughters. This is
a world of complexities, in which the lines of interest are so
intertangled as frequently to transgress that of sex; and one ambitious
to help but half the race may profitably know that every effort to that
end provokes a counterbalancing mischief. The "enlargement of woman's
opportunities" has benefited individual women. It has not benefited the
sex as a whole, and has distinctly damaged the race. The mind that can
not discern a score of great and irreparable general evils distinctly
traceable to "emancipation of woman" is as impregnable to the light as a
toad in a rock.

A marked demerit of the new order of things--the regime of female
commercial 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 to
the person of least need and worth--the male employer. (Female employers
in any considerable number there will not be, but those that we have
could give the male ones profitable instruction in grinding the faces
of their employees.) This constant increase of the army of labor--always
and everywhere too large for the work in sight--by accession of a new
contingent of natural oppressibles makes the very teeth of old Munniglut
thrill with a poignant delight. It brings in that situation known as two
laborers seeking one job---and one of them a person whose bones he can
easily grind to make his bread. And Munniglut is a miller of skill and
experience, dusted all over with the evidence of his useful craft. When
Heaven has assisted the Daughters of Hope to open to women a new "avenue
of opportunities" the first to enter and walk therein, like God in the
Garden of Eden, is the good Mr. Munniglut, contentedly smoothing the
folds out of the superior <DW72> of his paunch, exuding the peculiar
aroma of his oleagmous personality, and larding the new roadway with the
overflow of a righteousness secreted by some spiritual gland stimulated
to action by relish of his own identity. And ever thereafter the subtle
suggestion of a fat Philistinism lingers along the path of progress like
an assertion of a possessory right.

It is God's own crystal truth that in dealing with women unfortunate
enough to be compelled to earn their own living and fortunate enough
to have wrested from Fate an opportunity to do so, men of business and
affairs treat them with about the same delicate consideration that they
show to dogs and horses of the inferior breeds. It does not commonly
occur to the wealthy "professional man," or "prominent merchant," to be
ashamed to add to his yearly thousands a part of the salary justly due
to his female bookkeeper or typewriter, who sits before him all day with
an 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 in
submitting himself to it by paying her a half of what he would have to
pay a man of inferior efficiency he is supplying the world with a noble
example of obedience. I must take the liberty to remind him that the
law of supply and demand is not imperative; it is not a statute, but
a phenomenon. He may reply: "It is imperative; the penalty for
disobedience is failure. If I pay more in salaries and wages than I need
to, my competitor will not; and with that advantage he will drive me
from the field." If his margin of profit is so small that he must eke
it out by coining the sweat of his workmen into nickels, I've nothing to
say to him. Let him adopt in peace the motto, "I cheat to eat" I do not
know why he should eat, but Nature, who has provided sustenance for the
worming sparrow, the sparrowing owl, and the owling eagle, approves the
needy man of prey, and makes a place for him at table.

Human nature is pretty well balanced; for every lacking virtue there is
a rough substitute that will serve at a pinch--as cunning is the
wisdom of the unwise, and ferocity the courage of the coward. Nobody
is altogether bad; the scoundrel who has grown rich by underpaying
the workmen in his factory will sometimes endow an asylum for indigent
seamen. To oppress one's own workmen, and provide for the workmen of
a neighbor--to skin those in charge of one's own interests, while
cottoning and oiling the residuary product of another's skinnery--that
is not very good benevolence, nor very good sense, but it serves in
place of both. The man who eats _pate de fois gras_ in the sweat of his
girl cashier's face, or wears purple and fine linen in order that his
typewriter may have an eocene gown and a pliocene hat, seems a tolerably
satisfactory specimen of the genus thief; but let us not forget that in
his own home--a fairly good one--he may enjoy and merit that highest
and most honorable title in the hierarchy of woman's favor, "a good
provider." One having a just claim to that glittering distinction should
enjoy a sacred immunity from the coarse and troublesome question, "From
whose 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 and
can not know--to good women in whose innocent minds female immorality
is inseparable from flashy gowning and the painted face; to foolish,
book-taught men who honestly believe in some protective sanctity that
hedges womanhood. If men of the world with years enough to have lived
out of the old _regime_ into the new would testify in this matter there
would ensue a great rattling of dry bones in bodices of reform ladies.
Nay, if the young man about town, knowing nothing of how things were
in the "dark backward and abysm of time," but something of the moral
difference between even so free-running a creature as the society girl
and the average working girl of the factory, the shop and the office,
would speak out (under assurance of immunity from prosecution) his
testimony would be a surprise to the cartilaginous virgins, blowsy
matrons, acrid relicts and hairy males of Emancipation. It would pain,
too, some very worthy but unobservant persons not in sympathy with "the
cause."

Certain significant facts are within the purview of all but the very
young and the comfortably blind. To the woman of today the man of today
is 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 female
prefers the new manner, as may some of her less forward sisters,
thinking it more sincere. It is not; our giddy grandfather talked
high-flown nonsense because his heart had tangled his tongue. He treated
his woman more civilly than we ours because he loved her better. He
never had seen her on the "rostrum" and in the lobby, never had seen
her in advocacy of herself, never had read her confessions of his sins,
never had felt the stress of her competition, nor himself assisted by
daily personal contact in rubbing the bloom off her. He did not know
that her virtues were due to her secluded life, but thought, dear old
boy, 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 has
broken through and broken down more formidable barriers of law, custom
and tradition there than here. It is not true that the English married
woman is "virtually a bondwoman" to her husband; that "she can hardly
go 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 the
English married woman to the law," underlying it there is such a thing
as ignorance of what the law is. The "subjection of woman," as it exists
today in England, is customary and traditionary--a social, not a legal,
subjection. Nowhere has law so sharply challenged that male dominion
whose seat is in the harder muscles, the larger brain and the coarser
heart And the law, it may be worth while to point out, was not of woman
born; nor was it handed down out of Heaven engraved on tables of stone.
Learned English judges have decided that virtually the term "marital
rights" has no longer a legal signification. As one writer puts it,
"The law has relaxed the husband's control over his wife's person and
fortune, bit by bit, until legally it has left him nothing but the power
to prevent her, if he is so disposed, and arrives in time, from jumping
out of the window." He will find it greatly to his interest to arrive in
time when he conveniently can, and to be so disposed, for the husband is
still liable for the wife's torts; and if she makes the leap he may have
to pay for the telescoping of a subjacent hat or two.

In England it is the Tyrant Man himself who is chafing in his chain. Not
only is a husband still liable for the wrongs committed by the wife whom
he has no longer the power to restrain from committing them, but in many
ways--in one very important way--his obligation to her remains intact
after 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 pain
of seeing it hedged about from her creditors (themselves not altogether
happy in the contemplation) with restrictions which do not hamper the
right of recourse against his own. Doubtless all this is not without a
softening effect upon his character, smoothing down his dispositional
asperities and endowing him day by day with fresh accretions of
humility. And that is good for him. I do not say that female autonomy is
not among the most efficacious agencies for man's reclamation from the
sin of pride; I only say that it is not indigenous to this country, the
sweet, sweet home of the assassiness, the happy hunting ground of the
whiplady, the paradise of the vitrioleuse.

If the protagonists of woman suffrage are frank they are shallow; if
wise, uncandid. Continually they affirm their conviction that political
power in the hands of women will give us better government. To proof of
that proposition they address all the powers that they have and marshal
such facts as can be compelled to serve under their flag. They either
think or profess to think that if they can show that women's votes will
purify politics they will have proved their case. That is not true;
whether they know it or not, the strongest objection to woman suffrage
would remain untouched. Pure politics is desirable, certainly, but it
is not the chief concern of the best and most intelligent citizens. Good
government is "devoutly to be wished," but more than good government we
need good women. If all our public affairs were to be ordered with
the goodness and wisdom of angels, and this state of perfection were
obtained by sacrifice of any of those qualities which make the best of
our women, if not what they should be, nor what the mindless male thinks
them, at least what they are, we should have purchased the advantage too
dearly. The effect of woman suffrage upon the country is of secondary
importance: the question for profitable consideration is, How will it
affect the character of woman? He who does not see in the goodness and
charm of such women as are good and charming something incalculably more
precious than any degree of political purity or national prosperity may
be a patriot: doubtless he is; but also he has the distinction to be a
pig.

I should like to ask the gallant gentlemen who vote for removal of
woman's political disability if they have observed in the minds and
manners of the women in the forefront of the movement nothing "ominous
and drear." Are not these women different--I don't say worse, just
different--from the best types of women of peace who are not exhibits
and audibles? If they are different, is the difference of such a nature
as to encourage a hope that activity in public affairs will work an
improvement in women generally? Is "the glare of publicity" good for her
growth in grace and winsomeness? Would a sane and sensible husband or
lover willingly forego in wife or sweetheart all that the colonels of her
sex appear to lack, or find in her all that they appear to have and to
value?

A few more questions--addressed more particularly to veteran observers
than to those to whom the world is new and strange. Have you observed
any alteration in the manner of men toward women? If so, is it in the
direction of greater rudeness or of more ceremonious respect? And again,
if so, has not the change, in point of time, been coincident with the
genesis and development of woman's "emancipation" and her triumphal
entry into the field of "affairs"? Are you really desirous that the
change go further? Or do you think that when women are armed with the
ballot they will compel a return of the old _regime_ of deference
and delicate consideration--extorting by their power the tribute once
voluntarily paid to their weakness? Is there any known way by which
women can at once be our political equals and our social superiors, our
competitors in the sharp and bitter struggle for glory, gain or bread,
and the objects of our unselfish and undiminished devotion? The present
predicts the future; of the foreshadow of the coming event all sensitive
female hearts feel the chill. For whatever advantages, real or illusory,
some women enjoy under this _regime_ of partial "emancipation" all women
pay. Of the coin in which payment is made the shouldering shouters of
the sex have not a groat and can bear the situation with impunity. They
have either passed the age of masculine attention or were born without
the means to its accroachment. Dwelling in the open bog, they can afford
to 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 true
sexual extravagance, came to be considered, even by themselves, as a
very superior order of beings, with something in them of divinity which
was denied to man. Not only were they represented as better, generally,
than men, as indeed anybody could see that they were, but their goodness
was supposed to be a kind of spiritual endowment and more or less
independent of environmental influences.

We are changing all that. Women are beginning to do much of the writing
and public speaking, and not only are they going to extol us (to the
fattening of our conceit) but they are bound to disclose, even to the
unthinking, certain defects of character in themselves which their
silence had veiled. Their competition, too, in several kinds of affairs
will slowly but certainly provoke resentment, and moreover expose them
to temptations which will distinctly lower the morality of their
sex. All these changes, and many more having a similar effect and
significance, are occurring with amazing rapidity, and the stated
results are already visible to even the blindest observation. In
accurate depiction of the new order of things conjecture fails, but
so much we know: the woman-superstition has already received its death
wound and must soon expire.

Everywhere, and in no reverential spirit, men are questioning the
dear old idolatry; not "sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer," but
dispassionately applying to its basic doctrine the methods of scientific
criticism. He who within even the last twenty years has not marked in
society, in letters, in art, in everything, a distinct change in man's
attitude toward women--a change which, were one a woman, one would not
wish to see--may reasonably conclude that much, otherwise observable, is
hidden by his nose. In the various movements--none of them consciously
iconoclastic--engaged in overthrowing this oddest of modern
superstitions there is something to deprecate, and even deplore, but
the superstition can be spared. It never had much in it that was either
creditable or profitable, and all through its rituals ran a note of
insincerity which was partly Nature's protest against the rites, but
partly, too, hypocrisy. There is no danger that good men will ever cease
to respect and love good women, and if bad men ever cease to adore
them for their sex when not beating them for their virtues the gain in
consistency will partly offset the loss in religious ecstasy.

Let the patriot abandon his fear, his betters their hope, that only
the low class woman will vote--the unlettered wench of the slums, the
raddled hag of the dives, the war-painted _protegee_ of the police. Into
the vortex of politics goes every floating thing that is free to move.
The summons to the polls will be imperative and incessant. Duty will
thunder it from every platform, conscience whisper it into every ear,
pride, interest, the lust of victory--all the motives that impel men to
partisan activity will act with equal power upon women as upon men; and
to all the other forces flowing irresistibly toward the polls will be
added the suasion of men themselves. The price of votes will not decline
because of the increased supply, although it will in most instances be
offered in currencies too subtle to be counted. As now, the honest and
respectable elector will habitually take bribes in the invisible coin
of the realm of Sentiment--a mintage peculiarly valued by woman. For
one reason or another all women will vote, even those who now view the
"right" widi aversion. The observer who has marked the strength and
activity of the forces pent in the dark drink of politics and given off
in the act of bibation will not expect inaction to the victim of the
"habit," be he male or she female. In the partisan, conviction is
compulsion---opinions bear fruit in conduct. The partisan thinks in
deeds, and woman is by nature a partisan--a blessing for which the Lord
has never made her male relatives and friends sufficiently thankful. Not
a mere man of them would have the effrontery to ask her toleration if
she were not Depend upon it, the full strength of the female vote will
eventually be cast at every election. And it would be well indeed for
civilization and the interests of the race if woman suffrage meant no
more than going to the polling-place and polling--which clearly is all
that it has been thought out to mean by the headless horsemen spurring
their new hobbies bravely at the tail of the procession. That would be
a very simple matter; the opposition based upon the impropriety of the
female rubbing shoulders at the polls with such scurvy blackguards
as ourselves may with advantage be retired from service. Nor is it
particularly important what men and measures the women will vote for. By
one means or another Tyrant Man will have his way; the Opposing Sex can
merely obstruct him in his way of having it. And should that obstruction
ever 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. One
of the most "overwhelming" is made up of these simple elements: (1) a
numerical minority; (2) a military superiority. If not a single election
were ever in any degree affected by it, the introduction of woman
suffrage into our scheme of manners and morals would nevertheless be the
most momentous and mischievous event of modern history. Compared with
the action of this destructive solvent, that of all other disintegrating
agencies concerned in our decivilization is as the languorous
indiligence of rosewater to the mordant fury of nitric acid.

Lively Woman is indeed, as Carlyle would put it, "hellbent" on
purification of politics by adding herself as an ingredient. It is
unlikely 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 are
distinctly meaner than those of men--which are out of all reason mean;
their methods of overcoming opponents distinctly more unscrupulous. That
their participation in politics will notably alter the conditions of the
game is not to be denied; that, unfortunately, is obvious; but that it
will make the player less malignant and the playing more honorable is
a proposition in support of which one can utter a deal of gorgeous
nonsense, with a less insupportable sense of its unfitness, than in the
service of any other delusion.

The frosty truth is that except in the home the influence of women is
not elevating, but debasing. When they stoop to uplift men who need
uplifting, they are themselves pulled down, and that is all that is
accomplished. Wherever they come into familiar contact with men who are
not their relatives they impart nothing, they receive all; they do not
affect us with their notions of morality; we infect them with ours.

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

There is one direction in which "emancipation of woman" and enlargement
of 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 female
contingent of the party was composed of persons altogether unspeakable.
That element now remains upon its reservation; among the superior
advantages enjoyed by the man-about-town of today is that of the
companionship, at his dinner _in camera_, of ladies having an honorable
vocation. In the corridors of the "French restaurant" the swish of
Pseudonyma's skirt is no longer heard; she has been superseded by the
Princess Tap-tap (with Truckle & Cinch), by my lady Snip-snip (from the
"emporium" of Boltwhack & Co.), by Miss Chink-chink, who sits at the
receipt of customs in that severely un-French restaurant, the Maison
Hash. That the man-about-town has been morally elevated by this
Emancipation of Girl from the seclusion of home to that of the "private
room" is too obvious for denial. Nothing so uplifts Tyrant Man as the
table talk of good young women who earn their own living.

I do not wish to be altogether ironical about this rather serious
matter--not so much so as to forfeit anything of lucidity. Let me state,
then, in all earnestness and sobriety and simplicity of speech, what is
known to every worldly-wise male dweller in the cities, to every scamp
and scapegrace of the clubs, to every reformed sentimentalist and every
observer with a straight eye--namely, that in all the various classes of
young women in our cities who support, or partly support, themselves
in vocations which bring them into personal contact with men, female
chastity is a vanishing tradition. In the lives of the "main and
general" of these, all those _considerate_ which have their origin in
personal purity, and cluster about it, and are its signs and safeguards,
have almost ceased to cut a figure. It is needless to remind me that
there are exceptions--I know that. With some of them I have personal
acquaintance, or think I have, and for them a respect withheld from
any woman of the rostrum who points to their misfortune and calls it
emancipation--to their need and calls it a spirit of independence. It
is not from these good girls that you will hear the flippant boast of an
unfettered life, with "freedom to develop;" nor is it they who will be
foremost and furious in denial and resentment of my statements regarding
the morals of their class. They do not know the whole truth, thank
Heaven, but they know enough for a deprecation too deep to find relief
in 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 women
as men say they are, wish them to be, and try to think them, it is unfit
altogether--as unfit as anything else that "mixes them up" with us,
compelling a communication and association that are not social. If
we wish to have women who are different from ourselves in knowledge,
character, accomplishments, manners; as different mentally as
physically--and in these and in all odier expressible differences reside
all the charms that they have for us--we must keep them, or they must
keep themselves, in an environment unlike our own. One would think that
obvious to the meanest capacity, and might even hope that it would
be 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 gingham
umbrella, her corkscrew curls, her epicene audiences and her name in
the newspapers. Perhaps she is content with the comfort of her raucous
voice. Therein she is unwise, for self-interest is the first law. When
we no longer find woman charming we may find a way to make them more
useful--more truly useful, even, than the speech-ladies would have them
make themselves by competition. Really, there is nothing in the world
between them and slavery but their power of interesting us; and that has
its origin in the very differences which the Colonels are striving to
abolish. God has made no law of miracles and none of His laws are going
to be suspended in deference to woman's desire to achieve familiarity
without contempt. If she wants to please she must retain some scrap of
novelty; if she desires our respect she must not be always in evidence,
disclosing the baser side of her character, as in competition with us
she must do (as we do to one another) or lamentably fail. Mrs. Edmund
Gosse, like "Ouida," Mrs. Atherton, and all other women of
brains, declares that the taking of unfair advantages--the lack of
magnanimity--is a leading characteristic of her sex. Mrs. Gosse adds,
with reference to men's passive acquiescence in this monstrous folly
of "emancipation," that possibly our quiet may be the calm before the
storm; 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 and
harems?"

It is not likely that men will "rise _en masse_" to undo the mischief
wrought by noisy protagonists of Woman Suffrage working like beavers to
rear their airy fad upon the sandy foundation of masculine tolerance
and inattention. No rising will be needed. All that is required for the
wreck of their hopes is for a wave of reason to slide a little farther
up the sands of time, "loll out its large tongue, lick the whole
labor flat" The work has prospered so far only because nobody but its
promoters has taken it seriously. It has not engaged attention from
those having the knowledge and the insight to discern beneath its
cap-and-bells and the motley that is its only wear a serious menace to
all that civilized men hold precious in woman. It is of the nature of
men--themselves cheerful polygamists, with no penitent intentions--to
set a high value upon chastity in woman. (We need not inquire why they
do so; those to whom the reasons are not clear can profitably remain in
the valley of the shadow of ignorance.) Valuing it, they purpose having
it, or some considerable numerical presumption of it. As they perceive
that in a general way women are virtuous in proportion to the remoteness
of their lives and interests from the lives and interests of men--their
seclusion from the influences of which men's own vices are a main
part--an easy and peaceful means will doubtless be found for the
repression of the shouters.

In the orchestration of mind woman's instruments might have kept silence
without injury to the volume and quality of the music; efface the
impress of her touch upon the world and, by those who come after, the
blank must be diligently sought. Go to the top of any large city
and look about and below. It is not much that you will see, but it
represents an amazing advance from the conditions of primitive man. No
where in the wide survey will you see the work of woman. It is all the
work of men's hands, and before it was wrought into form and substance,
existed as conscious creations in men's brains. Concealed within
the visible forms of buildings and ships--themselves miracles of
thought--lie such wonder-worlds of invention and discovery as no human
life is long enough to explore, no human understanding capacious enough
to hold in knowledge. If, like Asmodeus, we could rive the roofs and
see woman's part of this prodigious exhibition--the things that she has
actually created with her brain--what kind of display would it be? It is
probable that all the intellectual energy expended by women from first
to last would not have sufficed, if directed into the one channel, for
the genesis and evolution of the modern bicycle.

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

She will not have it so, the good, good girl; as moral as the best of
us, she will be as intellectual as the rest of us. She will have out her
little taper and set the rivers of thought all ablaze, legging it over
the land from stream to stream till all are fired. She will widen her
sphere, forsooth, herself no wider than before. It is not enough that we
have edified her a pedestal and perform impossible rites in celebration
of her altitude and distinction. It does not suffice that with never
a smile we assure her that she is the superior sex--a whopper by the
repetition whereof certain callow youth among us have incurred the
divine vengeance of belief. It does not satisfy her that she is
indubitably gifted with pulchritude and an unquestionable genius for
its embellishing; that Nature has endowed her with a prodigious knack
at accroachment, whereby the male of her species is lured to a
suitable doom. No; she has taken unto herself in these evil days that
"intelligent discontent" which giveth its beloved fits. To her flock of
graces 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 the
woman of exceptional mind is exceptionally masculine in face, figure,
action; that in transplanting brains to an unfamiliar soil God leaves
much of the original earth about the roots. And so with a reluctant
farewell to Lovely Woman, I humbly withdraw from her presence and hasten
to overtake the receding periphery of her "sphere."

One moment more. Mesdames: I crave leave to estop your disfavor--which
were affliction and calamity--by "defining my position" in the words
of one of yourselves, who has said of me (though with reprehensible
exaggeration, believe me) that I hate woman and love women--have an
acute animosity to your sex and adoring each individual member of
it. What matters my opinion of your understandings so long as I am in
bondage to your charms? Moreover, there is one service of incomparable
utility and dignity for which I esteem you eminently fit--to be mothers
of men.




THE AMERICAN SYCOPHANT

AN AMERICAN newspaper holds this opinion: "If republican government
had done nothing else than give independence to American character and
preserve 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 republican
government has actually wrought the change in human nature which
challenges his admiration. He is very sure that his countrymen are not
sycophants; that before rank and power and wealth they stand covered,
maintaining "the godlike attitude of freedom and a man" and exulting in
it. It is not true; it is an immeasurable distance from the truth. We
are as abject toadies as any people on earth--more so than any European
people of similar civilization. When a foreign emperor, king, prince or
nobleman comes among us the rites of servility that we execute in his
honor are baser than any that he ever saw in his own land. When a
foreign nobleman's prow puts into shore the American shin is pickled in
brine to welcome him; and if he come not in adequate quantity those of
us who can afford the expense go swarming over sea to struggle for front
places in his attention. In this blind and brutal scramble for social
recognition in Europe the traveling American toady and impostor has many
chances of success: he is commonly unknown even to ministers and consuls
of his own country, and these complaisant gentlemen, rather than incur
the risk of erring on the wrong side, take him at his own valuation and
push him in where his obscurity being again in his favor, he is treated
with kindly toleration, and sometimes a genuine hospitality, to which he
has no shadow of right nor title, and which, if he were a gentleman, he
would not accept if it were voluntarily proffered. It should be said in
mitigation that all this delirious abasement in no degree tempers his
rancor against the system of which the foreign notable is the flower and
fruit. He keeps his servility sweet by preserving it in the salt of
vilification. In the character of a blatant blackguard the American snob
is so happily disguised that he does not know himself.

An American newspaper once printed a portrait of her whom the irreverent
Briton had a reprehensible habit of designating colloquially as "The Old
Lady," But the editor in question did not so designate her--his simple
American manhood and republican spirit would not admit that she was
a lady. So he contented himself with labeling the portrait "Her Most
Gracious Majesty, Queen Victoria" This incident raises an important
question.

Important Question Raised by This Incident: Is it better to be a subject
and a man, or a citizen and a flunkey--to own the sway of a "gory
tyrant" 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 the
English sovereign, they are at least not addicted to sycophancy in
designating the rulers of other countries than their own. They would
not say "His Abracadabral Humpti-dumptiness Emperor William," nor "His
Pestilency the Speaker of the American House of Representatives."
They would not think of calling even the most ornately self-bemedaled
American sovereign elector "His Badgesty." Of a foreign nobleman they do
not say "His Lordship;" they will not admit that he is a lord; nor when
speaking of their own noblemen do they spell "lord" with a capital L, as
we do. In brief, when mentioning foreign dignitaries, of whatever rank
in their own countries, the English press is simply and serviceably
descriptive: the king is a king, the queen a queen, the jack a jack. We
use "another kind of common sense." At the very foundation of our
political system lies the denial of hereditary and artificial rank. Our
fathers created this government as a protest against all that, and all
that it implies. They virtually declared that kings and noblemen could
not breathe here, and no American loyal to the principles of the
Revolution which made him one will ever say in his own country "Your
Majesty" 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 knee
to Baal, who hold fast to what is high and good in the doctrine of
political equality; in whose hearts the altar-fires of rational liberty
are kept aglow, beaconing the darkness of that illimitable inane where
their countrymen, inaccessible to the light, wander witless in the bogs
of political unreason, alternately adoring and damning the man-made
gods of their own stature. Of that bright band fueling the bale-fires
of political consistency I can not profess myself a member in good
standing. In view of this general recreancy and treason to the
principles that our fathers established by the sword--having in constant
observation this almost universal hospitality to the solemn nonsense
of hereditary rank and unearned distinction, my faith in practical
realization of republican ideals is small, and I falter in the work
of their maintenance in the interest of a people for whom they are
too good. Seeing that we are immune to none of the evils besetting
monarchies, excepting those for which we secretly yearn; that inequality
of fortune and unjust allotment of honors are as conspicuous among us as
elsewhere; that the tyranny of individuals is as intolerable, and that
of the public more so; that the law's majesty is a dream and its failure
a fact--hearing everywhere the footfalls of disorder and the watchwords
of anarchy, I despair of the republic and catch in every breeze that
blows "a cry prophetic of its fall."

I have seen a vast crowd of Americans change color like a field of
waving grain, as it uncovered to do such base homage to a petty foreign
princess as in her own country she had never received. I have seen
full-grown, self-respecting American citizens tremble and go speechless
when spoken to by the Emperor of Brazil. I have seen a half-dozen
American gentlemen in evening clothes trying to outdo one another in the
profundity of their bows in the presence of the <DW65> King of Hawaii.
I have not seen a Chinese "Earl" borne in a chair by four Americans
officially detailed for the disgraceful service, but it was done,
and did not evoke a hiss of disapproval. And I did not--thank
Heaven!--observe the mob of American "simple republicans" that dogged
the heels of a disreputable little Frenchman who is a count by courtesy
only, and those of an English duke quietly attending to his business of
making a living by being a married man. The republican New World is
no less impested with servility than the monarchial Old. One form of
government may be better than another for this purpose or for that; all
are alike in the futility of their influence upon human character. None
can affect man's instinctive abasement in the contemplation of power and
rank.

Not only are we no less sycophantic than the people of monarchial
countries; we are more so. We grovel before their exalted personages,
and perform in addition a special prostration at the clay feet of
our own idols--which _they_ do not revere. The typical "subject,"
hat-in-hand to his sovereign and his nobleman, is a less shameful figure
than the "citizen" executing his genuflexion before the public of which
he is himself a part. No European court journal, no European courtier,
was ever more abject in subservience to the sovereign than are the
American newspaper and the American politician in flattery of the
people. Between the courtier and the demagogue I see nothing to choose.
They are moved by the same sentiment and fired by the same hope. Their
method is flattery, and their purpose profit. Their adulation is not a
testimony to character, but a tribute to power, or the shadow of power.
If this country were governed by its criminal idiots we should have the
same attestations of their goodness and wisdom, the same competition for
their favor, the same solemn doctrine that their voice is the voice of
God. Our children would be brought up to believe that an Idiotocracy is
the only natural and rational form of government And for my part I'm
not at all sure that it would not be a pretty good political system, as
political systems go. I have always, however, cherished a secret faith
in Smithocracy, which seems to combine the advantages of both the
monarchial and the republican idea. If all the offices were held for
life by Smiths--the senior John being President--we should have a
settled and orderly succession to allay all fears of anarchy and a
sufficiently 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 abaser
would gladly have washed the hands of him in his neighbor's basin. All
this was in due order of Nature, and was to have been expected. It was
a phenomenon of the same character as, in the loves of the low, the
squabbling consequent upon satiety and shame. We could not slink out
of sight; we could deny our sycophancy, albeit we might give it another
name; but we could somewhat medicine our damaged self-esteem by dealing
damnation 'round on one another. The blush of shame turned easily to the
glow of indignation, and many a hot hatred was kindled at the rosy flame
of self-contempt. Persons conscious of having dishonored themselves are
doubly sensitive to any indignity put upon them by others. The vices and
follies of human nature are interdependent; they do not move alone,
nor are they singly aroused to activity. In my judgment, this entire
incident of the President's "tour" was infinitely discreditable to
President and people. I do not go into the question of his motive in
making it. Be that what it may, the manner of it seems to me an
outrage upon all the principles and sentiments underlying republican
institutions. In all but the name it was a "royal progress"--the same
costly ostentation, the same civic and military pomp, the same solemn
and senseless adulation, the same abasement of spirit of the Many before
the One. And according to republican traditions, ten thousand times a
year affirmed, in every way in which affirmation is possible, we fondly
persuade 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 political
catch-phrase: he _is_ their servant; he _is_ their creature; all that
in him to which they grovel (dignifying and justifying their instinctive
and inherited servility by names as false as anything in ceremonial
imposture) they themselves have made, as truly as the heathen has
made the wooden god before which he performs his unmanly rite. It
is precisely this thing--the superiority of the people to their
servants--that constitutes, and was by our fathers understood to
constitute, the essential, fundamental difference between the monarchial
system which they uprooted and the democratic one which they planted in
its stead. Deluded men! how little they guessed the length and strength
and vitality of the roots left in the soil of the centuries when their
noxious harvestage of mischievous institutions had been cast as rubbish
to the void!

I am no contestant for forms of government--no believer in either the
practical value or the permanence of any that has yet been devised. That
all 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. That
an officeholder is a servant of the people; that I am his political
superior, owing him no deference, and entitled to such deference
from him as may be serviceable to keep him in mind of his
subordination--these are propositions which command my assent, which
I _feel_ to be true and which determine the character of my personal
relations with those whom they concern. That I should give my hand, or
bend my neck, or uncover my head to any man in homage to or recognition
of his office, great or small, is to me simply inconceivable. These
tricks of servility with the softened names are the vestiges of an
involuntary allegiance to power extraneous to the performer. They
represent in our American life obedience and propitiation in their most
primitive and odious forms. The man who speaks of them as manifestations
of a proper respect for "the President's great office" is either a
rogue, a dupe or a journalist They come to us out of a fascinating but
terrible past as survivals of servitude. They speak a various language
of oppression, and the superstition of man-worship; they cany forward
the traditions of the sceptre and the lash. Through the plaudits of the
people may be heard always the faint, far cry of the beaten slave.

Respect? Respect the good. Respect the wise. Respect the dead. Let the
President look to it that he belongs to one of these classes. His going
about the country in gorgeous state and barbaric splendor as the guest
of a thieving corporation, but at our expense--shining and dining and
swining--unsouling himself of clotted nonsense in pickled platitudes
calculated for the meridian of <DW53> Hollow, Indiana, but ingeniously
adapted to each water tank on the line of his absurd "progress," does
not prove it, and the presumption of his "great office" is against him.

Can you not see, poor misguided "fellow citizens," how you permit your
political taskmasters to forge leg-chains of your follies and load you
down 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 no
decent place in American life and American politics? Will no experience
open your stupid eyes to the fact that these shows are but absurd
imitations of royalty, to hold you silly while you are plundered by the
managers of the performance?--that while you toss your greasy caps in
air and sustain them by the ascending current of your senseless hurrahs
the programmers are going through your blessed pockets and exploiting
your holy dollars? No; you feel secure; "power is of the People,"
and you can effect a change of robbers every four years. Inestimable
privilege--to pull off the glutted leech and attach the lean one! And
you can not even choose among the lean leeches, but must accept those
designated by the programmers and showmen who have the reptiles on tap!
But then you are not "subjects;" you are "citizens"--there is much
in that Your tyrant is not a "King;" he is a "President." He does
not occupy a "throne," but a "chair." He does not succeed to it by
inheritance; he is pitchforked into it by the boss. Altogether, you are
distinctly better off than the Russian mujik who wears his shirt outside
his 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 set
foot upon our soil their kingship and their nobility fall away from them
like the chains of a slave in England. Whatever a man may be in his
own 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 filling
of their spiritual bellies, but I make a stand for simple American
manhood. I will meet no man on this soil who expects from me a greater
deference than I could properly accord to the President of my own
country. My allegiance to republican institutions is slack through lack
of faith in them as a practical system of governing men as men are. All
the same, I will call no man "Your Majesty," nor "Your Lordship." For
me to meet in my own country a king or a nobleman would require as much
preliminary negotiation as an official interview between the Mufti of
Moosh and the Ahkoond of Swat. The form of salutation and the style and
tide of address would have to be settled definitively and with precision.
With some of my most esteemed and patriotic friends the matter is more
simple; their generosity in concession fills me with admiration and
their forbearance in exaction challenges my astonishment as one of the
seven wonders of American hospitality. In fancy I see the ceremony of
their "presentation" and as examples of simple republican dignity I
commend their posture to the youth of this fair New World, inviting
particular attention to the grand, bold curves of character shown in the
outlines of the Human Ham.




A DISSERTATION ON DOGS

OF ALL anachronisms and survivals, the love of the dog; is the most
reasonless. Because, some thousands of years ago, when we wore other
skins than our own and sat enthroned upon our haunches, tearing
tangles of tendons from raw bones with our teeth, the dog ministered
purveyorwise 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 insult
us as we pass in and out, enamored of his fat superfluity. One dog in
a thousand earns his bread--and takes beefsteak; the other nine hundred
and ninety-nine we maintain, by cheating the poor, in the style suitable
to their state.

The trouble with the modern dog is that he is the same old dog. Not an
inch has the rascal advanced along the line of evolution. We have ceased
to squat upon our naked haunches and gnaw raw bones, but this companion
of the childhood of the race, this vestigial remnant of _juventus mundi_
this dismal anachronism, this veteran inharmony of the scheme of
things, the dog, has abated no jot nor tittle of his unthinkable
objection-ableness since the morning stars sang together and he had sat
up all night to deflate a lung at the performance. Possibly he may some
time be improved otherwise than by effacement, but at present he is
still in that early stage of reform that is not incompatible with a
mouthful of reformer.

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

The word "dog" is a term of contempt the world over. Poets have sung and
prosaists have prosed of the virtues of individual dogs, but nobody
has had the hardihood to eulogize the species. No man loves the Dog; he
loves his own dog or dogs, and there he stops; the force of perverted
affection can no further go. He loves his own dog partly because that
thrifty creature, ever cadging when not maurauding, tickles his vanity
by fawning upon him as the visible source of steaks and bones; and
partly because the graceless beast insults everybody else, harming as
many as he dares. The dog is an encampment of fleas, and a reservoir of
sinful smells. He is prone to bad manners as the sparks fly upward. He
has no discrimination; his loyalty is given to the person that feeds
him, be the same a blackguard or a murderer's mother. He fights for his
master without regard to the justice of the quarrel--wherein he is no
better than a patriot or a paid soldier. There are men who are proud of
a dog's love--and dogs love that kind of men. There are men who, having
the privilege of loving women, insult them by loving dogs; and there are
women who forgive and respect their canine rivals. Women, I am told, are
true cynolaters; they adore not only dogs, but Dog--not only their
own horrible little beasts, but those of others. But women will love
anything; they love men who love dogs. I sometimes wonder how it is that
of all our women among whom the dog fad is prevalent none have incurred
the husband fad, or the child fad. Possibly there are exceptions, but
it seems to be a rule that the female heart which has a dog in it
is without other lodgers. There is not, I suppose, a very wild and
importunate demand for accommodation. For my part, I do not know which
is the less desirable, the tenant or the tenement There are dogs that
submit to be kissed by women base enough to kiss them; but they have a
secret, coarse revenge. For the dog is a joker, withal, gifted with as
much humor as is consistent with biting.

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

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

Finally this amusing illogician, this type and example of the female
controversialist, has the hardihood to hope that there may be fathers
who can see their children the the horrible death of hydrophobia without
wishing "to exile man's best ideal of fidelity from the hearthstones of
civilization." 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 the
dog. The profit of maintaining a standard and pattern of the virtues (at
considerable expense in the case of this insatiable canine consumer) may
be great, but are we so hard pushed that we must go to the animals for
it? In life and letters are there no men and women whose names kindle
enthusiasm and emulation? Is fidelity, is devotion, is self-sacrifice
unknown among ourselves? As a model of the higher virtues why will not
one's mother serve at a pinch? And what is the matter with Miss Guiney
herself? She is faithful, at least to dogs, whatever she may be to
the hundreds of American children inevitably foredoomed to a death of
unthinkable agony.

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

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

Amongst the several disadvantages of a close personal connection with
the canine tooth, the disorder known as hydrophobia has long held an
undisputed primacy. The existence of dus ailment is attested by so many
witnesses, many of whom, belonging to the profession of medicine, speak
with a certain authority, that even the breeders and lovers of snap-dogs
are compelled reluctantly to concede it, though as a rule they stoutly
deny that it is imparted by the dog. In their view, hydrophobia is a
theory, not a condition. The patient imagines himself to have it, and
acting upon that unsupported assumption or hypothesis, suffers and dies
in the attempt to square his conduct with his opinions.

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

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

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

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

Human nature being what it is, and well known to the dog to be what it
is, we have a right to expect that the creature will take our weaknesses
into consideration--that he will respect our addiction to reasonless
panic, even as we respect his when, as we commonly do, we refrain from
attaching tinware to his tail. A dog that runs himself to death to evade
a kitchen utensil which could not possibly harm him, and which if he did
not flee would not pursue, is the author of his own undoing in precisely
the same sense as is the victim of pseudo-hydrophobia. He is slain by
a theory, not a condition. Yet the wicked boy that set him going is
not blameless, and no one would be so zealous and strenuous in his
prosecution as the cynolater, the adorer of dogs, the person who holds
them guileless of pseudo-hydrophobia.

Mr. Nicholas Smith, while United States Consul at Liege, wrote, or
caused to be written, an official report, wickedly, willfully and
maliciously designed to abridge the privileges, augment the ills and
impair the honorable status of the domestic dog. In the very beginning
of this report Mr. Smith manifests his animus by stigmatizing
the domestic dog as an "hereditary loafer;" and having hurled the
allegation, affirms "the dawn of a [Belgian] new era" wherein the
pampered menial will loaf no more. There is to be no more sun-soaking on
door mats having a southern exposure, no more usurpation of the warmest
segment of the family circle, no more successful personal solicitation
of cheer at the domestic board. The dog's place in the social scale is
no longer to be determined by consideration of sentiment, but will be
the result of cold commercial calculation, and so fixed as best to serve
the ends of industrial expediency. All this in Belgium, where the dog
is already in active service as a beast of burden and draught; doubtless
the transition to that humble condition from his present and
immemorial social elevation in less advanced countries will be slow and
characterized by bitter factional strife. America, especially, though
ever accessible to the infection of new and profitable ideas, will
be angularly slow to accept so radical a subversion of a social
superstructure that almost may be said to rest upon the domestic dog as
a basic verity.

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

Mr. Smith avers with obvious and impudent satisfaction that in Liege
twice as many draught dogs as horses are seen in the streets, attached
to vehicles. He regards "a gaily painted cart" drawn by "a well fed
dog" and driven by a well fed (and gaily painted) woman as a "pleasing
vision." I do not; I should prefer to see the dog sitting at the receipt
of steaks and chops and the lady devoting herself to the amelioration of
the condition of the universe, and the manufacture of poetry and stories
that are not true. A more pleasing vision, too, one endeared to eye and
heart by immemorial use and wont, is that of stranger and dog indulging
in the pleasures of the chase--stranger a little ahead--while the woman
in the case manifests a characteristically compassionate solicitude lest
the gentleman's trousers do not match Fido's mustache. It is, indeed,
impossible to regard with any degree of approval the degradation to
commercial utility of two so noble animals as Dog and Woman; and if Man
had joined them together by driving-reins I should hope that God would
put them asunder, even if the reins were held by Dog. There would
no doubt be a distinct gain as well as a certain artistic fitness in
unyoking the strong-minded female of our species from the Chariot of
Progress and yoking her to the apple-cart or fish-wagon, and--but that
is another story; the imminence of the draughtwoman is not foreshadowed
in the report of our Consul at Liege.

Mr. Smith's estimate of the number of dogs in this country at 7,000,000
is a "conservative" one, it must be confessed, and can hardly have been
based on observations by moonlight in a suburban village; his estimate
of the effective strength of the average dog at 500 pounds is probably
about right, as will be attested by any intelligent boy who in campaigns
against orchards has experienced detention by the Cerberi of the places.
Taking his own figures Mr. Smith calculates that we have in this country
3,500,000,000 pounds of "idle dog power." But this statement is more
ingenious than ingenuous; it gives, as doubtless it was intended to
give, the impression that we have only idle dogs, whereas of all mundane
forces the domestic dog is most easily stirred to action. His expense
of energy in pursuit of the harmless, necessary flea, for example, is
prodigious; and he is not infrequently seen in chase of his own tail,
with an activity scarcely inferior. If there is anything worth while
in accepted theories of the conversion and conservation of force these
gigantic energies are by no means wasted; they appear as heat, light
and electricity, modifying climate, reducing gas bills and assisting
in propulsion of street cars. Even in baying the moon and insulting
visitors and bypassers the dog releases a certain amount of vibratory
force which through various mutations of its wave-length, may do its
part in cooking a steak or gratifying the olfactory nerve by throwing
fresh perfume on the violet. Evidently the commercial advantages of
deposing the dog from the position of Exalted Personage and subduing him
to that of Motor would not be all clear gain. He would no longer have
the spirit to send, Whitmanwise, his barbarous but beneficent yawp over
the housetops, nor the leisure to throw off vast quantities of energy
by centrifugal efforts at the conquest of his tail. As to the fleas, he
would accept them with apathetic satisfaction as preventives of thought
upon his fallen fortunes.

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

With the dog it is different His place is among us; he is with us and of
us--a part of our life and love. If we are maintaining and promoting a
condition of things that gives him "that tired feeling" it is befitting
that we mend our ways lest, shaking the carpet dust from his feet and
the tenderloin steaks from his teeth, he depart from our midst and
connect himself with the enchanted life of the thrilling barbarian. We
can not afford to lose him. The cynophobes may call him a "survival" and
sneer at his exhausted mandate--albeit, as Darwin points out, they are
indebted for their sneer to his own habit of uncovering his teeth to
bite; they may seek to cast opprobrium upon the nature of our affection
for him by pronouncing it hereditary--a bequest from our primitive
ancestors, for whom he performed important service in other ways than
depriving visitors of their tendons; but quite the same we should miss
him at his meal time and in the (but for him) silent watches of the
night. We should miss his bark and his bite, the feel of his forefeet
upon our shirt-fronts, the frou-frou of his dusty sides against our
nether habiliments. More than all, we should miss and mourn that visible
yearning for chops and steaks, which he has persuaded us to accept as
the lovelight of his eye and a tribute to our personal worth. We must
keep the dog, and to that end find means to abate his weariness of us
and our ways.

Doubtless much might be done to reclaim our dogs from their uncheerful
state of mind by abstention from debate on imperialism; by excluding
them from the churches, at least during the sermons; by keeping them
off the streets and out of hearing when rites of prostration are in
performance before visiting notables; by forbidding anyone to read aloud
in their hearing the sensational articles in the newspapers, and by
educating them to the belief that Labor and Capital are illusions. A
limitation of the annual output of popular novels would undoubtedly
reduce the dejection, which could be still further mitigated by
abolition of the more successful magazines. If the dialect story or poem
could be prohibited, under severe penalties, the sum of night-howling
(erroneously attributed to lunar influence) would experience an audible
decrement, which, also, would enable the fire department to augment its
own uproar without reproach. There is, indeed, a considerable number of
ways in which we might effect a double reform--promoting the advantage
of Man, as well as medicating the mental fatigue of Dog. For another
example, it would be "a boon and a blessing to man" if Society would put
to death, or at least banish, the mill-man or manufacturer who persists
in apprising the entire community many times a day by means of a steam
whistle that it is time for his oppressed employees (every one of whom
has a gold watch) to go to work or to leave off. Such things not only
make a dog tired, they make a man mad. They answer with an accented
affirmative 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 at
the 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 same
name exactly resembling him, and writing a "hand" which, including the
signature, he was unable to distinguish from his own. The two men
were unable to discover any blood relationship between them. It is
nevertheless 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 the
tie. The phenomena of heredity have been inattentively noted; its laws
are imperfectly understood, even by Herbert Spencer and the prophets. My
own small study in this amazing field convinces me that a man is the
sum of his ancestors; that his character, moral and intellectual,
is determined before his birth. His environment with all its varied
suasions, its agencies of good and evil; breeding, training, interest,
experience and the rest of it--have little to do with the matter and can
not alter the sentence passed upon him at conception, compelling him to
be what he is.

Man is the hither end of an immeasurable line extending back to the
ultimate Adam--or, as we scientists prefer to name him, Protoplasmos.
Man travels, not the mental road that he would, but the one that he
must--is pushed this way and that by the resultant of all the forces
behind him; for each member of the ancestral line, though dead, yet
pusfaedi. In one of what Dr. Nolmes (Holmes, ed.) calls his "medicated
novels," _The Guardian Angel_, this truth is most admirably and lucidly
set forth with abundant instance and copious exposition. Upon another
work of his, _Elsie Venner_--in which he erroneously affirms the
influence of circumstance and environment--let us lay a charitable hand
and fling it into the fire.

Clearly all one's ancestors have not equal power in shaping his
character. Conceiving them, according to our figure, as arranged in line
behind him and influential in the ratio of their individuality, we shall
get the best notion of their method by supposing them to have taken
their places in an order somewhat independent of chronology and a little
different from their arrangement behind his brother. Immediately at his
back, with a controlling hand (a trifle skinny) upon him, may stand his
great-grandmother, while his father may be many removes arear. Or
the place of power may be held by some fine old Asian gentleman who
flourished before the confusion of tongues on the plain of Shinar; or by
some cave-dweller who polished the bone of life in Mesopotamia and was
perhaps a respectable and honest troglodyte.

Sometimes a whole platoon of ancestors appears to have been moved
backward or forward, _en bloc_ not, we may be sure, capriciously, but in
obedience to some law that we do not understand. I know a man to whose
character not an ancestor since the seventeenth century has contributed
an element. Intellectually he is a contemporary of John Dryden, whom
naturally he reveres as the greatest of poets. I know another who has
inherited his handwriting from his great-grandfather, although he has
been trained to the Spencerian system and tried hard to acquire it.
Furthermore, his handwriting follows the same order of progressive
development as that of his greatgrandfather. At the age of twenty he
wrote exactly as his ancestor did at the same age, and, although at
forty-five his chirography is nothing like what it was even ten years
ago, it is accurately like his great-grandfather's at forty-five. It was
only five years ago that the discovery of some old letters showed
him how his great-grandfather wrote, and accounted for the absolute
dissimilarity of his own handwriting to that of any known member of his
family.

To suppose that such individual traits as the configuration of the
body, the color of the hair and eyes, the shape of hands and feet, the
thousand-and-one subtle characteristics that make family resemblances
are transmissible, and that the form, texture and capacities of
the 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 complex
concurrences of brain, nerves and muscles, are hereditary. Is it
reasonable to suppose that the brain alone of all the organs performs
its work according to its own sweet will, free from congenital
tendencies? Is it not a familiar fact that racial characteristics are
persistent?--that one race is stupid and indocile, another quick and
intelligent? Does not each generation of a race inherit the intellectual
qualities of the preceding generation? How could this be true of
generations and not of individuals?

As to stirpiculture, the intelligent and systematic breeding of men and
women with a view to improvement of the species--it is a thing of the
far future, It is hardly in sight. Yet, what splendid possibilities it
carries! Two or three generations of as careful breeding as we bestow
on horses, dogs and pigeons would do more good than all the penal,
reformatory and educating agencies of the world accomplish in a thousand
years. It is the one direction in which human effort to "elevate the
race" can be assured of a definitive, speedy and adequate success. It
is hardly better than nonsense to prate of any good coming to the race
through (for example) medical science, which is mainly concerned in
reversing the beneficent operation of natural laws and saving the
unfittest to perpetuate their unfitness. Our entire system of charities
is of, to the same objection; it cares for the incapables whom Nature
is trying to "weed out," This not only debases the race physically,
intellectually and morally, but constantly increases the rate of
debasement. The proportion of criminals, paupers and the various kinds
of "inmates" of charitable institutions augments its horrible percentage
yearly. On the other hand, our wars destroy the capable; so thus we make
inroads upon the vitality of the race from two directions. We preserve
the feeble and extirpate the strong. He who, in view of this amazing
folly can believe in a constant, even slow, progress of the human
race toward perfection ought to be happy. He has a mind whose Olympian
heights are inaccessible--the Titans of fact can never scale them to
storm its ancient reign.




THE RIGHT TO WORK

ALL kinds of relief, charitable or other, doubtless tend to perpetuation
of pauperism, inasmuch as paupers are thereby kept alive; and living
paupers unquestionably propagate their unthrifty kind more abundantly
than dead ones. It is not true, though, that relief interferes with
Nature's beneficent law of the survival of the fittest, for the power
to excite sympathy and obtain relief is a kind of fitness. I am still a
devotee of the homely primitive doctrine that mischance, disability or
even unthrift, is not a capital crime justly and profitably punishable
by starvation. I still regard the Good Samaritan with a certain
toleration and Jesus Christ's tenderness to the poor as something more
than a policy of obstruction.

If no such thing as an almshouse, a hospital, an asylum or any one of
the many public establishments for relief of the unfortunate were known
the proposal to found one would indubitably evoke from thousands of
throats notes of deprecation and predictions of disaster. It would be
called Socialism of the radical and dangerous kind--of a kind to menace
the stability of government and undermine the very foundations of
organized society! Yet who is more truly unfortunate than an able-bodied
man 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 and
mind whom we support for nothing in almshouse or asylum? Are cold and
exposure less disagreeable to him than to them? Is not his claim to the
right to live as valid as theirs if backed by the will to pay for life
with work? And in denial of his claim is there not latent a far greater
peril to society than inheres in denial of theirs? So unfortunate and
dangerous a creature as a man willing to work, yet having no work to do,
should be unknown outside of the literature of satire. Doubtless there
would be enormous difficulties in devising a practicable and beneficent
system, and doubtless the reform, like all permanent and salutary
reforms, will have to grow. The growth naturally will be delayed by
opposition of the workingmen themselves--precisely as they oppose prison
labor from ignorance that labor makes labor.

It matters not that nine in ten of all our tramps and vagrants are such
from choice, and irreclaimable degenerates into the bargain; so long as
one worthy man is out of employment and unable to obtain it our duty
is to provide it by law. Nay, so long as industrial conditions are such
that so pathetic a phenomenon is possible we have not the moral right
to disregard that possibility. The right to employment being the right
to life, its denial is homicide. It should be needless to point out
the advantages of its concession. It would preserve the life and
self-respect of him who is needy through misfortune, and supply an
infallible means of detection of his criminal imitator, who could
then be dealt with as he deserves, widiout the lenity that finds
justification in doubt and compassion. It would diminish crime, for an
empty 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 private
products. Properly directed, it would give us highways, bridges and
embankments which we shall not otherwise have.

It is difficult to say if our laws relating to vagrancy and vagrants
are more cruel or more absurd. If not so atrocious they would evoke
laughter; if less ridiculous we should read them with indignation. Here
is 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 compelled
to obtain food, shelter and clothing in one of these ways, else I shall
be hungry and cold.

The Law: That is no affair of mine. Yet I am considerate--you are
permitted 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 am
arrested 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 one
will 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 all
night, and holding my tongue with both hands, I am liable to arrest for
being "without visible means of support."

The Law: A most reprehensible condition.

The Vagrant: One thing has been overlooked--a legal punishment for
begging 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 like
a grain of sand on the seashore complaining that the tide has washed
a neighboring grain out of reach. He is worse, for the bereaved grain
cannot help itself; it has to be a grain of sand and play the game of
tide, win or lose; whereas he can quit--by watching his opportunity
can "quit a winner." For sometimes we do beat "the man who keeps the
table"--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 your
little winning with you. The time to quit is when you have lost a big
stake, your fool hope of eventual success, your fortitude and your love
of 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 are
hard to bear, but that is no reason why you should be.

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

The notion that we have not the right to take our own lives comes of
our consciousness that we have not the courage. It is the plea of the
coward--his excuse for continuing to live when he has nothing to live
for--or his provision against such a time in the future. If he were not
egotist as well as coward he would need no excuse. To one who does not
regard himself as the center of creation and his sorrow as the throes of
the universe, life, if not worth living, is also not worth leaving. The
ancient 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 than
life." We do not know that either proposition is true, but the matter is
not worth bothering about, for both states are supportable--life despite
its pleasures and death despite its repose.

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

Suicide is always courageous. We call it courage in a soldier merely to
face death--say to lead a forlorn hope--although he has a chance of life
and 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. If
that is not courage we must reform our vocabulary.

True, there may be a higher courage in living than in dying--a moral
courage greater than physical. The courage of the suicide, like that of
the pirate, is not incompatible with a selfish disregard of the rights
and interests of others--a cruel recreancy to duty and decency. I have
been asked: "Do you not think it cowardly when a man leaves his family
unprovided for, to end his life, because he is dissatisfied with life
in general?" No, I do not; I think it selfish and cruel. Is not that
enough to say of it? Must we distort words from their true meaning
in order more effectually to damn the act and cover its author with a
greater infamy? A word means something; despite the maunderings of
the lexicographers, it does not mean whatever you want it to mean.
"Cowardice" means the fear of danger, not the shirking of duty. The
writer who allows himself as much liberty in the use of words as he is
allowed 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 at
the ribbon-counter.

The ethics of suicide is not a simple matter; one can not lay down laws
of universal application, but each case is to be judged, if judged
at all, with a full knowledge of all the circumstances, including
the mental and moral make-up of the person taking his own life--an
impossible qualification for judgment. One's time, race and religion
have much to do with it. Some people, like the ancient Romans and
the modern Japanese, have considered suicide in certain circumstances
honorable and obligatory; among ourselves it is held in disfavor. A man
of sense will not give much attention to considerations of that kind,
excepting in so far as they affect others, but in judging weak offenders
they are to be taken into the account. Speaking generally, then, I
should say that in our time and country the following persons (and some
others) are justified in removing themselves, and that to some of them
it 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 their
relief.

One threatened with permanent insanity.

One irreclaimably addicted to drunkenness or some similarly destructive
or 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 to
duty? Not at all; that alone--without the peril--seldom elicits remark,
never evokes enthusiasm. It is because he faced without flinching the
risk of that supreme disaster--or what we feel to be such--death. But
look you: the soldier braves the danger of death; the suicide braves
death itself! The leader of the forlorn hope may not be struck. The
sailor who voluntarily goes down with his ship may be picked up or cast
ashore. It is not certain that the wall will topple until the fireman
shall have descended with his precious burden. But the suicide--his
is the foeman that never missed a mark, his the sea that gives nothing
back; the wall that he mounts bears no man's weight And his, at the end
of it all, is the dishonored grave where the wild ass of public opinion

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





End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Shadow On The Dial, and Other
Essays, by Ambrose Bierce

*** 