THE ARENA.

CONTENTS.

145

EVOLUTION: WHAT IT IS AND WHAT IT IS NOT. [1]

BY DR. DAVID STARR JORDAN,
President of Leland Stanford Junior University .

I. What Evolution Is.

This the age of evolution. The word is used by many men in many senses, and still oftener perhaps in no sense at all. By some it is spoken with a haunting dread as though it were another name for the downfall of religion and of social stability. Still others speak it glibly and joyously as though progress and freedom were secured by the mere use of the name. “The word evolution ( Entwickelung ),” says a German writer, “fills the vocal chords more perfectly than any other word.” It explains everything, and “puts the key to the universe into one’s vest pocket.”

So various has been the use of the word, so rarely is this use associated with any definite idea, that one hesitates to call himself an evolutionist. “Evolution” and “evolutionist” are almost ready to be cast into that “limbo of spoiled phraseology” which Matthew Arnold has found necessary for so many words in which other generations have delighted, and which they have soiled or spoiled by careless usage.

But as the word evolution is not yet put away, as it is the bugbear of many good people, and the “religion” of as many more equally good, it may be worth while to consider what it still means, and what it does not mean. For if we that use the word can agree on a definition, half our quarrel is over.

It seems to me that the word evolution is now legitimately used in four different senses. It is the name of a branch of 146 science. It is a theory of organic existence. It is a method of investigation, and it is the basis of a system of philosophy.

The Science of Organic Evolution, or Bionomics. As a science, evolution is the study of changing beings acted upon by unchanging laws. It is a matter of common observation that organisms change from day to day, and that day by day some alteration in their environment is produced. It is a matter of scientific investigation that these changes are greater than they appear. They affect not only the individual animal or plant, but they affect all groups of living things, classes or races or species. No character is permanent, no trait of life without change. And as the living organism or group of organisms is undergoing alteration, so does change take place in the objects of the physical world about them. “Nothing endures,” says Huxley, “save the flow of energy and the rational order that pervades it.” The structures and objects change their forms and relations, and to forms and relations once abandoned they never return. But the methods of change are, so far as we can see, immutable. The laws of life, the laws of death, and the laws of matter never change. If the invisible forces which rule all visible things are themselves subject to modification and evolution, we have not detected it. Its cosmic movements are so fine as to defy human observation and computation. In the control of the universe we find no trace of “variableness nor shadow of turning.” “It is the law of heaven and earth, whose way is solid, substantial, vast, and unchanging.”

But the things we know do not endure. Only the shortness of human life allows us to speak of species or even of individuals as permanent entities. The mountain chain is no more nearly eternal than the drift of sand. It endures beyond the period of human observation. It antedates and outlasts human history. So does the species of animal or plant outlast and antedate the lifetime of one man. Its changes are slight even in the lifetime of the race. Thus the species, through the persistence of its type among its changing individuals, comes to be regarded as something which is beyond modification, unchanging so long as it exists.

“I believe,” said the rose to the lily in the parable—“I 147 believe that our gardener is immortal. I have watched him from day to day since I bloomed, and I see no change in him. The tulip who died yesterday told me the same thing.”

As a flash of lightning in the duration of the night, so is the life of man in the duration of nature. When one looks out on a storm at night, he sees for an instant the landscape illumined by the lightning-flash. All seems at rest. The branches in the wind, the flying clouds, the falling rain are all motionless in this instantaneous view. The record on the retina takes no account of change, and to the eye the change does not exist. Brief as the lightning-flash in the storm is the life of man compared with the great time-record of life upon earth. To the untrained man who has not learned to read these records, species and types in life are enduring. Thus arose the theory of special creation and permanence of type, a theory which could not persist when the fact of change and the forces causing it came to be studied in detail.

But when man came to study the facts of individual variation and to think of their significance, the current of life no longer seemed at rest. Like the flow of a mighty river, never returning, ever sweeping steadily on, is the movement of all life. The changes in human history are only typical of the changes that take place in all living creatures. In fact, human history is only a part of one great life-current, the movement of which is everywhere governed by the same laws, depends on the same forces, and brings about like results.

The facts and generalizations of change constitute the subject-matter of evolution. And as the fact of life is a fundamental one, and in some degree modifies all phenomena which it concerns, we have as the central axis of the science in question, the study of organic evolution. In fact, while inorganic evolution, or orderly change in environment, exists, we do not know to what degree the laws and forces of organic evolution can be reduced to the same terms of expression. The theory of the essential and necessary unity of life and non-life, of mind and matter, is still a matter of philosophical speculation only. We can neither prove the truth of Monism, nor understand it; nor is the contrary hypothesis either comprehensible or credible. The fundamental unity of organic evolution and inorganic evolution 148 is yet to be proved, while the laws which govern living matter are certainly in part peculiar to life. For this reason the evolution of astronomy, of dynamic geology, of geography, as well as the purely hypothetical evolution of chemistry, must be separated from life evolution. Cosmic evolution and organic evolution show, or seem to show, some divergence from each other. There are some elements which are not held in common, or which, at least, are not identical when measured in human terms. For the latter, the science of organic evolution, there is therefore certainly need of a distinctive term. This has been lately furnished by Professor Patrick Geddes, who has chosen the term bionomics. Bionomics (βιος, life; υομος, law or custom) is the science which treats of the changes in life-forms, and of the laws and forces on which these changes depend.

Even as thus restricted organic evolution, or bionomics, is the greatest of the sciences, including in its subject-matter, not only all natural history, not only processes like cell-division and nutrition, not only the laws of heredity, variation, natural selection, and mutual help, but all matters of human history, and the most complicated relations of civics, economics, or ethics. In this enormous science no fact can be without a meaning, and no fact or its underlying forces can be separated from the great forces whose interaction from moment to moment writes the great story of life.

And as the basis to the science of bionomics, as to all other science, must be taken the conception that nothing is due to chance or whim. Whatever occurs does so as the resultant of moving forces. Could we know and estimate these forces, we should have, so far as our estimate is accurate and our logic perfect, the gift of prophecy. Knowing the law, and knowing the facts, we should foretell the results. To be able in some degree to do this is the art of life. It is the ultimate end of science, which finds its final purpose in human conduct.

“A law,” according to Darwin, “is the ascertained sequence of events.” The necessary sequence of events it is, in fact, but man knows nothing of what is necessary, only of what has been ascertained to occur. Because human observation and logic can be only partial, no law of life can be fully stated. Because the processes of the human mind are human, with organic limitations, 149 the study of the mind itself becomes a part of the science of bionomics. For it is itself an instrument or a combination of instruments by which we acquire such knowledge of the world outside of ourselves as may be needed in the art of living, in the degree in which we are able to practise that art.

The necessary sequence of events exists, whether we are able to comprehend it or not. The fall of a leaf follows fixed laws as surely as the motion of a planet. It falls by chance because its short movement gives us no time for observation and calculation. It falls by chance because, its results being unimportant to us, we give no heed to the details of its motion. But as the hairs of our head are all numbered, so are numbered all the gyrations and undulations of every chance autumn leaf. All processes in the universe are alike natural. The creation of man or the growth of a state is as natural as the formation of an apple or the growth of a snow-bank. All are alike supernatural, for they all rest on the huge unseen solidity of the universe, the imperishability of matter and the immanence of law.

We sometimes classify sciences as exact and inexact, in accordance with our ability exactly to weigh forces and results. The exact sciences deal with simple data accessible and capable of measurement. The results of their interactions can be reduced to mathematics. Because of their essential simplicity, the mathematical sciences have been carried to great comparative perfection. It is easier to weigh an invisible planet than to measure the force of heredity in a grain of corn. The sciences of life are inexact, because the human mind can never grasp all their data. Nor has the combined effort of all men, the flower of the altruism of the ages, that we call science been able to make more than a beginning in this study. But however incomplete our realization of the laws of life, we may be sure that they are never broken. Each law is the expression of the best possible way in which causes and results can be linked. It is the necessary sequence of events, therefore the best sequence, if we may imagine for a moment that the human words “good” and “bad” are applicable to world-processes. The laws of nature are not executors of human justice. Each one has its own operation, and no other. Each represents its own tendency towards cosmic order. A law in this sense cannot 150 be “broken.” A broken law would be a discarded universe. “If God should wink at a single act of injustice,” says the Arab proverb, “the whole universe would shrivel up like a cast-off snake-skin.” If God should wink at any violated law the universe would vanish.

Not long ago, in an examination in a theological seminary, the question was asked of the candidates for the ministry, “Is it right to pray for a change of season?” The candidates thought that it was not, for the relations which produce winter and summer are fixed in the structure of the solar system and cannot be altered for man’s pleasure or man’s need. “Is it right to pray for rain?” The candidates generally thought that it was, because the conditions of rain are so unstable that a little change in one way or another would bring rain or fair weather, and that it was proper to ask for such change, as it did not concern the economy of the universe.

The third question was: “When the signal service of the United States is well established, so that weather conditions are perfectly known, will it then be right to pray for rain?” And the candidates for the ministry could not tell, for they began to see that even simple changes of weather may have the strength of the whole universe behind them. It has never yet rained when by any possibility it could do otherwise. It has never failed to rain when rain was possible. The Spanish padres in California, wise in their generation, allowed prayers for rain only in winter, when the wind was in the south. The wind is only in the south when the air is affected by a cyclonic movement, and this in the California winter means rain.

We hear good men say sometimes that the crying need of this strong and sceptical age is that it may see some law of nature definitely broken, that it may rain when rain is impossible, or that some burning bush may, unconsuming, proclaim that the force which is behind all law is also above it and can break or repeal all laws at will.

Emerson somewhere speaks of the purpose in life—“To be sound and solvent.” As his life was in all ways “sound and solvent,” perhaps such rule of conduct was his own. But one may say, That is only a rule. The man himself should be all rules and requirements of his own establishment. Let Mr. 151 Emerson show that his life is above his principles. Let him break these rules. Let him be “unsound and insolvent” for a time. Then only will his greatness appear.

The laws of nature are the expression of the infinite soundness and solvency. They will not be broken, nor through their unsoundness and insolvency will the “heavens roll away as a scroll,” nor “the universe shrivel up as a cast-off snake-skin.”

In the growing recognition of law has been the progress of science. From the casting aside of human notions of chance and whim the “warfare of science” has had its rise. For every event carried over into the realm of law some man has given his life. As the Panama railroad is said to have cost the life of a man for every cross-tie, so has every step in the progress of science. And such men!

Many a time in the growth of humanity has it been necessary that the wisest, clearest, most humane, should die on the stake or the gibbet or the cross, that men should come to realize the power of an idea; that they should know the value of truth.

Evolution as a Theory of Organic Development, or Darwinism. In a different sense the word evolution is applied to the theory of the origin of organs and of species by divergence and development. This theory teaches that all forms of life now existing or that have existed on the earth have sprung from a common stock, which has undergone change in a multitude of ways and under varied conditions, the forces and influences producing such change being known as the “factors of organic evolution.” All characters and attributes of species and groups have developed with changing conditions of life. The homologies among animals are the result of common descent. The differences are due to various influences, chief among these being competition in the struggle for existence between individuals and between species, whereby those best adapted to their surroundings lived and reproduced their kind.

This theory is now the central axis of all biological investigation in all its branches, from ethics to histology, from anthropology to bacteriology. In the light of this theory every peculiarity of structure, every character or quality of individual or species, has a meaning and a cause. It is the work of the investigator to find this meaning as well as to record the fact. 152 “One of the noblest lessons left to the world” by Darwin is this, Mr. Frank Cramer tells us,—“this, which to him amounted to a profound, almost religious, conviction, that every fact in nature, no matter how insignificant, every stripe of color, every tint of flowers, the length of an orchid’s nectary, unusual height in a plant, all the infinite variety of apparently insignificant things, is full of significance. For him it was an historical record, the revelation of a cause, the lurking-place of a principle.”

According to the theory of evolution every structure of to-day finds its meaning in some condition of the past. The inside of an animal tells what it really is, for it bears the record of heredity. The outside of an animal tells where its ancestors have been, for it bears record of concessions to environment. Similarity in essential structure is known as homology . By the theory of evolution homology, wherever it is found, is proof of blood-relationship.

The theory of organic evolution through natural law was first placed on a stable footing by the observations and inductions of Darwin. It has therefore been long known as Darwinism, although that term has been usually associated with the recognition of natural selection as the great motive power in organic change. Darwinism was at first regarded as a “working hypothesis.” It is now an integral part of biological science, because all opposing hypotheses have long since ceased to work. It is as well attested as the theory of gravitation, and its elements are open to less doubt. All investigations in biology must assume it, as without it most such investigations would be impossible. Naturalists could no more go back to the old notion of special creation for each species and its organs than astronomers could go back to the old notion of guiding angels as directors of planetary motion. Without the theory of organic development through natural selection, the biological science of to-day would be impossible.

Evolution as a Method of Study. In a third sense the word evolution is applied to a method of investigation. It is the study of present conditions in the light of the past. The preliminary work of science is the descriptive part. This involves accuracy of observation and precision of statement, but makes 153 no great demands on the powers of logical analysis and synthesis. The easy work of science is largely already done. Those who would continue investigation must study not only facts and structures, but the laws that govern them. In the words of John Fiske, “Whether plants or mountains or mollusks or subjunctive moods or tribal confederacies be the things studied, the scholars who have studied them most fruitfully were those who have studied them as phases of development. Their work has directed the current of thought.” The most difficult problems in life are susceptible of more or less perfect solution if approached by the method of evolution. They cannot be even stated as problems in any other terms. In every science worthy of the name the history of origins and the study of developing forces must take a leading part.

Evolution as a System of Cosmic Philosophy. In a fourth sense the word evolution has been applied to the philosophical conceptions to which the theory of evolution gives rise. Philosophy is not truth. When it is so it becomes science. At the best it points the way to truth. The broader the inductive basis of any system of philosophy, the greater its value as an intellectual help. The system of Herbert Spencer, the greatest exponent of the philosophy of evolution, is based wholly on the results of scientific investigation. It consists of a series of more or less broad and more or less probable deductions from the facts and laws already known. Systems like these, which rest on scientific knowledge, do not rise high above it. They can therefore be revised or rewritten as knowledge increases. They provide the means for their own correction. Systems resting on aphorisms or assumptions or definitions must disappear as knowledge increases.

Philosophy is never wholly identical with truth. The partial truth which it may contain becomes wholly error with the advance of science. The growth of exact knowledge transforms the truth in philosophy into science, leaving the absolute falsehood as the final residuum.

From this necessary fact comes the ultimate decay of all creeds or philosophic formulæ. Throughout the ages science and philosophy have been in conflict. Science is the same to all minds capable of grasping its conclusions. Philosophy changes 154 with the point of view. It is the evanescent perspective in which the facts and phenomena of the universe are seen. This can never be the same under changing times and conditions. With the larger knowledge of to-morrow, there will be large modifications in the accepted philosophy of evolution. Each succeeding generation will give to the applications of the laws of organic life a different philosophical expression.

II. What Evolution Is Not.

In these four senses the word evolution is used with some degree of accuracy. But in the current literature of the day the word has many other meanings, some of them very far from any just basis. Some things which evolution is not we may here notice briefly.

Evolution is not a theory that “man is a developed monkey.” The question of the immediate origin of man is not the central or overshadowing question of evolution. This question offers no special difficulties in theory, although the materials for exact knowledge are in many directions incomplete. Homologies more perfect than those connecting man with the great group of monkeys could not exist. These imply the blood-relationship of the human race with the great host of apes and monkeys. As to this there can be no shadow of a doubt. And as similar homologies connect man with all members of the group of mammals, similar blood-relationship must exist. And homologies, less close but equally unmistakable, connect all backboned animals one with another; and the lowest backboned types are closely joined to worm-like forms not usually classed as vertebrates.

It is perfectly true that, with the higher or anthropoid apes, the relations with man are extremely intimate. But man is not simply “a developed ape.” Apes and men have diverged from the same primitive stock, apelike, manlike, but not exactly the one or the other. No apes or monkeys now extant could apparently have been ancestors of primitive man. None can ever “develop” into man. As man changes and diverges, race from race, so do they. The influence of effort, the influence of surroundings, the influence of the sifting process of natural selection, acts upon them as it acts upon man.

The process of evolution is not progress, but better adaptation 155 to conditions of life. As man becomes fitted for social and civic life, so does the ape become fitted for life in the tree-tops. The movement of monkeys is towards “simianity,” not humanity. The movement of cat-life is towards felinity, that of the dog-races towards caninity. Each step in evolution upward or downward, whatever it may be, carries each species or type farther from the primitive stock. These steps are never retraced. For an ape to become a man he must go back to the simple characters of the simple common type from which both have sprung. These characters are shown in the ape-baby and in the human embryo in its corresponding stages. For ancestral traits lost in the adult are preserved in the young. This comes through the operation of the great force of race-memory, we call heredity.

Evidence of biology points to the descent of all mammals, of all vertebrates, of all animals, of all organic beings, from a common stock. Of all the races of animals, the anthropoid apes are nearest man. Their divergence from the same stock must be comparatively recent. Man is the nomadic, the apes the arboreal, branch of the same great family.

Evolution does not teach that all or any living forms are tending towards humanity. It does not teach, as in Bishop Wilberforce’s burlesque, “that every favorable variety of the turnip is tending to become man.” It is not true that evolutionists expect to find, as Dr. Seelye has affirmed, “the growth of the highest alga into a zoöphyte, a phenomenon for which sharp eyes have sought, and which is not only natural but inevitable on the Darwinian hypothesis, and whose discovery would make the fame of any observer.”

It is no wonder that a clear thinker should have rejected “the Darwinian hypothesis,” when stated in such terms as this. The line of junction in evolution is always at the bottom. It is the lowest mammals which approach the lowest reptiles. It is the lower types of plants which approach the lower types of animals. It would be the lowest alga, to use Dr. Seelye’s illustration, which would be transmutable into the lowest zoöphyte. It is the unspecialized, undifferentiated type from which branches diverge in different ways. Humanity is not the “goal of evolution,” not even that of human evolution. There will be no second “creation of man,” except from man’s own loins. There 156 will not be a second Anglo-Saxon race, unless it has the old Anglo-Saxon blood in its veins.

Adaptation by divergence—for the most part by slow stages—is the movement of evolution. While occasional leaps or sudden changes occur in the process, they are by no means the rule. In most cases of “saltatory evolution,” the suddenness is in appearance only. It comes from our inability to trace the intermediate stages. When an epoch-making character is acquired, as the wings of a bird or the brain of man, the process of readjustment of other characters goes on with greatly increased rapidity. But this rapidity of evolution is along the same lines as the slower processes. Radical changes from generation to generation never occur. We do not expect to find birds arising from a “flying-fish in the air, whose scales are disporting into feathers.” A flying-fish is no more of the nature of a bird than any other fish is. A cow will never give birth to a horse, nor a horse to a cow. The slow operation of existing causes is the central fact of organic evolution, as it is of the evolution of mountains and valleys. Seasons change as the relations which produce them change. But midsummer never gives way to midwinter in an instant. Nor does the child in an instant become a man, though in some periods of growth epoch-marking causes may make development more rapid. Life is conservative. The law of heredity is the expression of its conservatism. It changes slowly, but it must constantly change, and all change is by necessity divergence.

There is in nature no single “law of progress,” nor is progress in any group a necessity regardless of conditions. That which we call progress rests simply on the survival of the better adapted, their survival being accompanied by their reproduction. Those that live repeat themselves. The “innate tendency towards progression” of the early evolutionists is a philosophic myth. Progress and degeneration are alike the resultants of the various forces at work from generation to generation on and within a race or species. The same forces which bring progress to a group under one set of conditions will bring degradation under another. In their essence the factors of evolution are no more laws of progress than the attraction of gravitation is. Cosmic order comes from gravitation. Organic order comes from the factors of evolution. Evolution is simply orderly change. 157

Evolution is not Spontaneous Generation. There is no necessary connection between the one theory and the other. Spontaneous generation, or birth without parentage, on the part of small or useless creatures was accepted in early times without question. As men began to observe these animals more carefully, the fact of their spontaneous generation was doubted. A great step was made when it was found that to screen meat from flies would protect it from maggots. A greater step came in our own time when it was proved that to screen infusions from air dust is to protect them from putrefaction or fermentation. Fermentation is “life without air.” It is the decomposition of sugar by minute creatures who disintegrate it in their life processes. Putrefaction and decay are also the same in nature. There is literal truth in Carlyle’s statement that there is still force in a fallen leaf, “else how could it rot?” It is the force of the minute organisms hidden in the leaf, and whose life is the leaf’s decay. The decay and death of men from contagious diseases is known to be due to life processes of minute organisms, as is the gangrene which follows unskilful surgery. The study of the “fauna and flora” within living organisms has now become a science of itself, demanding the greatest care in observation and the most complete of appliances. “ Omne vivum ex vivo ,” “all life from life,” was an aphorism of the naturalists of a century or two ago. It was to them a new and broad generalization. It has not yet been set aside. The classic experiments of Tyndall show that this law applies to all creatures we have yet recognized or classified. As far as science can tell, spontaneous generation is still a myth, having no basis in observation, no warrant in experiment. It remains as a pure deduction from the philosophical conception of Monism, incapable of proof, insusceptible of refutation. The argument for it is chiefly this: Life exists on a globe once lifeless. How did life begin? If not through spontaneous generation, how did it come? Must it not have been by the operation of those laws and forces which through all time change lifeless into living matter? Very likely, but we do not know. We know nothing whatever of such laws and forces, and we gain nothing by veiling our ignorance under a philosophical necessity.

Moreover, if spontaneous generation occurs as a resultant of 158 any forces, like forces would produce it again. We have never known it to occur. Should it occur the organisms thus produced would have no bonds of blood-relationship with those already in existence. With these they should show no homology, as they could have no inheritance in common. But all known organisms have common homologies. The factors of organic evolution are essentially the same for all. The unity of life amid all its diversity seems to point to origin from a common stock. If not from one stock, the lines of division between one and another are hidden from us. The study of embryology breaks down the time-honored branch lines of vertebrates, articulates, mollusks, and radiates. The groups of animals are more numerous, more complex, and more intertangled than Cuvier and Agassiz thought. The number of primary branches of animals or plants is uncertain, their boundaries undefined.

If spontaneous generation exists, it is a factor in evolution. If it is a factor, our explanation of the meaning and nature of homology must be fundamentally changed. But it may be that it should be changed. We cannot show that spontaneous generation does not exist. All we know is that we have no means of recognizing it. If there is now spontaneous generation of protoplasm, it cannot take the form of any creature we know. An organism fresh from the mint of creation would be too small for us to see with any microscope. It would be too simple for us to trace by any instrumentality now in our possession. It could contain but a few molecules, and a molecule in a drop of water is as small as an orange beside the sun. Our race of creatures, spontaneously generated, without concessions to environment, would grow hoary with the centuries before it came to our notice. Its descendants would have belonged for ages to the unnumbered hosts of microbes before we should be aware of its creation.

Evolution is not a creed or a body of doctrine to be believed on authority. There is no saving grace in being an evolutionist. There are many who take this name and have no interest in finding out what it means or in making any application of its principles to the affairs of life. For one who cares not to master its ideas, there is no power in the word. Evolution is not a panacea or a medicine to be applied to social or personal ills. 159 It is simply an expression of the teaching of enlightened common sense as to the order of changes in life. If its principles are mastered a knowledge of evolution is an aid in the conduct of life, as knowledge of gravitation is essential in the building of machinery.

There is nothing “occult” in the science of evolution. It is not the product of philosophic meditation or of speculative philosophy. It is based on hard facts, and with hard facts it must deal.

It seems to me that it is not true that “Evolution is a new religion, the religion of the future.” There are many definitions to religion, but evolution does not fit any of them. It is no more a religion than gravitation is. One may imagine that some enthusiastic follower of Newton may, for the first time, have seen the majestic order of the solar system, may have felt how futile was the old notion of guiding angels, one for each planet to hold it up in space. He may have received his first clear vision of the simple relations of the planets, each forever falling toward the sun and toward each other, each one by the same force forever preserved from collision. Such a man might have exclaimed, “Great is gravitation; it is the new religion, the religion of the future!” In such manner, men trained in dead traditions, once brought to a clear insight of the noble simplicity and adequacy of the theory of evolution, may have exclaimed, “Great is evolution; it is the new religion, the religion of the future!”

But evolution is religion in the same sense that every truth of the physical universe must be religion. That which is true is the truest thing in the world, and the recognition of the infinite soundness at the heart of the universe is an inseparable part of any worthy religion.

But, whether religion or not, the truths of evolution must be their own witness. They can be neither strengthened nor controverted by any authority which may speak in the name of philosophy or of theology or of religion. “ Roma locuta est; causa finita est ” is not a dictum which science can regard. Her causes are never finished. No power on earth can give beforehand the answer to her questions. Her only court of appeal is the experience of man.

160

HAS WEALTH A LIMITATION?

BY ROBERT N. REEVES.

There is in the government of human affairs one order that is best for all. What that order is and how it is to be attained should be the great problem for all who have at heart the betterment of the human race.

Never in the history of our country were the people confronted with greater social problems than they are to-day. The strikes, boycotts, and general discontent of late years prove conclusively that there is yet much room for improvement in our social order. What mean the great outcry and muttering of the masses? What means the cry from the vast army of discontented which wells up from the very heart of the nation, unless it signifies the rumbling which is often heard before the storm? Gloss it over as we will, the fact stands out as prominent as ever, that there is something radically wrong with our present economical system.

Many remedies have been suggested, many reforms have been inaugurated with the purpose of relieving the poverty and misery which press so heavily upon a large majority of the people. Stop immigration! Prohibit invention! exclaim some. The population is increasing too fast! reply others. And so the many reforms are advocated, all of which are discussed with more or less fairness. But when it is suggested that wealth is becoming too concentrated, that limitations should be placed upon it, the cry immediately goes up that he who suggests such a remedy is an anarchist, and one whose name should be synonymous with whatever is dangerous, lawless, and subversive.

Nevertheless, the question of wealth limitation cannot be dismissed with threats, epithets, or sneers. It will not dismiss itself, and we cannot dismiss it. Every observant person must admit that the great concentration of wealth, whether it be in corporations, trusts, or individuals, has reached a point dangerous to the future prosperity of the nation.

Millions of people idle, wealth piled up for the few by the toil of the many, paupers and millionaires on every side, and 161 the conditions growing worse and worse,—these things are enough to make even the most optimistic painfully apprehensive of the future. Our government in some respects is in no better condition than was the old Roman Empire just before its fall, as described by James Anthony Froude. If we are to believe that eminent historian, the Roman Empire was crushed by the same power of unlimited, concentrated wealth that to-day is destroying the life, the liberty, and the happiness of the many in the United States. In mediæval Italy, too, popular freedom was lost through a moneyed oligarchy and proletariat. So in every country where individual wealth has transcended the bounds of justice, the people—the toilers—have eventually been enslaved.

Ours is fast becoming a moneyed nation; and a moneyed nation is generally a weak one. Superfluity of riches, like superfluity of food, causes weakness and decay. Individual prosperity or the prosperity of a community does not mean general prosperity, or the prosperity of a nation. Thus it has been shown that, in New York and Massachusetts and those States in which the greatest wealth is concentrated, the largest proportion of paupers are to be found. In 1833, when Tocqueville visited America, he was struck by the equal distribution of wealth and the absence of capitalists. Half a century later, when James Bryce, author of “The American Commonwealth,” visited our country, the trusts, monopolies, and concentrated wealth so amazed him that he exclaimed: “I see the shadows of a new structure of society—an aristocracy of riches.”

Fifty years ago there were no great fortunes here, and in fact but few fortunes that could be called large, and in those days there was comparatively little poverty. Now we have many gigantic fortunes and a vast number ranging from $100,000 to $10,000,000. In the past, wealth being more equally distributed, there was but little class distinction, but there were a far greater number of what might be called fortunes, and a noticeable exemption from that pauperism which has become chronic of late years.

The Probate-Court records of the various States disclose the fact that millionaires are becoming more numerous, while the smaller property-owners are gradually sinking into the multitude 162 of people possessing nothing. In a valuable article by Eltweed Pomeroy on “The Concentration of Wealth,” [2] some interesting figures and diagrams are given, proving from probate records the exact extent to which small fortunes have been crowded out or merged into enormous ones. These records are valuable because they are official. But while they prove the extent to which wealth is concentrated, they do not disclose the misery which that wealth is causing. For that, we must look to the conditions about us. And in doing so it is not necessary to be a philosopher in order to see the havoc which concentrated wealth has wrought in recent years. Every day, it has been declared, America is over four million dollars richer at night than in the morning. Who receives this wealth? Surely not those who toil; else they would not suffer so. They receive little of it. The national wealth, great as it is, slips through their fingers to be collected in the vast reservoirs of the moneyed aristocracy. They work, but it is the work of those who labor to produce, but who receive none of that which is produced.

It is this condition that causes so many to declare that the present distribution of wealth does not conform to the principles of justice. And how can it be otherwise, when all wealth passes through the hands of the producers and stops only when it reaches those who possess most? Thus wealth is becoming with us not a power for general good, but a power given to the few to control the many—a power of placing upon the masses a yoke little better than slavery itself. The rich, becoming further and further removed from the poor, are also becoming conscious of being in a measure the proprietors of the poor. The poor have a knowledge of this fact, and the strikes, boycotts, and general discontent are but the expression of that knowledge.

In no country in the world does wealth, individual and corporate, exert such an influence as in the United States, and as a consequence, human life is becoming lamentably cheap. Capital is taking the place of men, and is valued more than men. Property is becoming sacred, human life profane. Laws are being made not for the good of humanity, but for the sake of property. One instance may be mentioned here: in the spring 163 of 1896 a bill was before Congress to remove all criminal cases from the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court of the United States. It was argued by those in favor of the bill that much of the time of the Supreme Court was consumed listening to criminal cases (cases involving life and liberty), while high-priced corporation lawyers, whose cases involved millions of dollars, were required to wait in Washington until the criminal cases were disposed of. The bill naturally passed the Senate, but was defeated in the House.

This bill was but one of many indications that, in the eye of the law, property is becoming of more value than life or liberty.

In Benjamin Franklin’s time it was proposed to make the possession of a certain amount of property a prerequisite for voting. The amount would at the time have bought one ass. Franklin characteristically argued: If a man with an ass could vote, and did vote, but when the ass died the man could not vote, who was it, in fact, voted—the man or the ass? Franklin’s argument would hold good against many of the laws advocated to-day—laws in which the object is the stability of property rather than the freedom or happiness of man. This condition of affairs, this conflict between the right of liberty on the one hand, and the right of property on the other, has created a great political problem. Has the state a right to limit wealth? Is there a limit to the accumulations of individuals and corporations? Has the state the power to tax concentrated wealth out of existence when such wealth has become detrimental to the public peace and prosperity? In other words, has the state the power to prevent the acquisition of wealth from becoming a public curse? Government, if it stands for anything, stands for the public interests, and one of the objects of government should be the protection of its citizens from the encroachments of accumulated wealth.

Great individual wealth is an anti-social interest. It is the ascendency of individuals over the interests of the public. Individuals have, it is true, a certain amount of liberty, but it cannot be denied that society has the right to modify the liberty of the individual where such liberty is but the slavery of the public. The right to live also implies the right to use the things about us which go to make life comfortable and 164 enjoyable, and which have not been already appropriated by others. It is evident, however, that the use of anything by one must necessarily take from the personal liberty of all others who otherwise would be able to use it. And it is perfectly plain that just in proportion as one’s wealth increases, the wealth of others must decrease. This to a certain extent is legitimate, and cannot be prevented. But when the wealth of one increases to such an extent as to deprive others of food, shelter, and even existence itself, it infringes upon the equality of personal liberty far more than could any law that placed a limit to individual wealth. When men are starving, when paupers are increasing, when to the misfortune of poverty is added the curse of industrial slavery, when the great concentration of wealth affects the life and liberty of all, is not a law just which takes from a few a portion of their wealth and indirectly restores it to the hands of the many? Does not the right to property involve and rest upon the admission of the right to live?

Cardinal Manning startled the world some years ago when he declared: “The obligation to feed the hungry springs from the natural right of every man to life and to the food necessary to the sustenance of life. So strict is this natural right that it prevails over all positive laws of property. Necessity has no law, and a starving man has a right to his neighbor’s bread.”

Strong words these for a cardinal. Sentimental philosophy it may be called, but it is the philosophy of justice. Enormous wealth has always been irreconcilable with equality. Its growth has caused the downfall of many democracies. Will it bring about the ruin of the greatest democracy in history? Are we, with the awe with which we regard the institution of property, becoming a nation of millionaires and mendicants?

Property is only absolutely safe when those who hold it are far more numerous than those who do not. When the middle class disappears from a nation and the property falls into the hands of a few over-rich men, then property is unsafe. We call such a condition an aristocracy of money, and an aristocracy of money is always the child of a degenerated or degenerating democracy. Some people, however, regard the concentration of wealth as an indication of progress. In matters political 165 the obstacle is often taken for the cause. Monopolies, trusts, and other forms of concentrated wealth are regarded by some as the blessings of a prosperous nation. But examined in the light of history we find that concentrated wealth has always been a means of obstructing if not of destroying a nation. Our nation is not an exception. We cannot say that the destructive power of concentrated wealth is not now felt. All that is necessary is to observe the conditions about us. Whenever the people of a nation become subservient and dependent, and are oppressed and abused because they are so, whenever there is little general prosperity but a great deal of prosperity for a few, we naturally come to the conclusion that the cause of the misery and lack of general prosperity is the great concentration of wealth in the hands of the few. It is this conclusion, arrived at by what are termed the masses, that has caused the many conflicts of recent years between labor and capital. And such conflicts are natural. Man always revolts when he suspects his misery is the consequence of a social order capable of reformation. Force, of late years, has often been called upon to subdue the spirit of resentment which agitates the breasts of the poorer classes. The militia of the various States and even government troops have been called upon in order to preserve property and also maintain the supremacy of concentrated wealth.

How long this can go on before a change comes we do not know. It cannot be maintained long. Unless some law is enacted that will stop the encroaching power of wealth, things will go on until the inequality becomes so glaring, so oppressive, that the pent-up social waters, gathering force, will break through the wall of concentrated wealth and allow society once more to regain its natural level. Every statesman, every thinker, should know that we cannot expect a healthy growth with class arrayed against class. Every strike, every riot, is a retrogressive step in our nation’s history. If our American civilization is to endure and progress we must bring about a change in the distribution of wealth. If conditions are such as to be beneficial to a small number and injurious to society in general, those conditions should be changed. Unless limited, the alarming development and aggressiveness of great capitalists and powerful corporations will eventually lead to the absolute 166 degradation of the toiling masses. Unless checked, it will continue to grow until it usurps the entire legislative and executive branches of our government, and, like a huge vampire, slowly draws the life-blood from every healthy, helpful creature. This power of wealth is the greatest danger that has threatened our country since the civil war, and against it we must constantly be on our guard. If the power is permitted to grow it may become too late, and can then be remedied only by putting class against class—by revolution, which always means the rejoicing of the poor at the downfall of their oppressors.

This, then, is to be the battle of the future—concentrated wealth on one hand, concentrated poverty on the other. The battle should not be one of force, but one of reason and agitation until wealth shall be bound by proper constitutional limitations; a battle in which law shall triumph; for the true remedy, the remedy most conducive to equality, lies in legislation. But this legislation should be immediate. If we desire to prevent actual war between class and class, it is imperative that a legal check at once be placed upon the growing power for evil of aggregated wealth.

The limitation of wealth by law has received the approval of some of the most gifted as well as philanthropic of minds. In our own country such men as Horace Greeley, Theodore Parker, and William Ellery Channing have advocated it. Still, a ready objection of some against the limitation of wealth is that any attempt to remedy by legislation the inequality of fortune at once infringes upon the right of personal liberty. Have we no laws in existence now which infringe upon the right of personal liberty? Do not our usury laws take some rights from the individual? Does not our custom-house law, which permits the trunks of every new arrival to be searched, infringe somewhat upon the right of personal liberty? The citizen who would object to these laws would have but a very narrow conception of the true purpose of government. If we examine our laws closely we shall find many that encroach upon individual liberty for the sake of public good. Then why should any objection be made to those laws which tend to limit wealth?

Undoubtedly a tax levied upon all incomes, which would be progressively raised and graduated according to the amount 167 of the individual or corporate wealth could be constitutionally enacted. And if a progressive income tax can be enacted, the graduated inheritance tax can also be enacted, for the principle is practically the same. Senator David B. Hill, of New York, has called the progressive tax a “modern fad.” It is so modern, however that it can be traced back to the Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians. During the palmiest days of Greece—the days of Solon and Lycurgus—a progressive tax was a stern reality.

Our own country has not been without a progressive tax. In 1797 a graded inheritance tax was levied by Congress. This law was repealed in 1802. In 1862 a similar law was passed. But after having been decided to be constitutional by the Supreme Court, it was repealed in 1872.

Other governments at the present time tax the rich. In England, besides the income tax, many other items of revenue are contributed entirely by the rich—contributed upon the principle that those who have acquired riches shall bear the burden of taxation. In the United States we seem to place the burden of taxation upon the shoulders least fitted to bear it. Every effort to tax the rich, to properly tax corporations and trusts, has met with failure. The lobbyist and corporation lawyer have defied the tax-gatherer until they have worn out the patience of the people. The time is now ripe for proper legislation. A progressive income tax and a tax upon inheritances should be made a law in every State. The power to tax, it has been said, is the power to destroy. If a scale of taxation were wisely adopted it would eventually enable us to reach without political disturbance the almost total abolition of an aristocracy of wealth and thus solve the great problem of the day. If we are to consider humanity of any importance at all, wealth must be limited. The rights of all must be considered. When this is done we may be able to have a truly prosperous nation—a nation in which prosperity will not be confined to a favored few, but given to all.

“Prosperity,” says Rousseau, “is best secured when the medium-class income prevails, when no citizen is so rich that he can buy others, and no one so poor that he might be compelled to sell himself.”

168

THE BATTLE OF THE MONEY METALS

I. BIMETALLISM SIMPLIFIED.

BY GEORGE H. LEPPER.

The “free-silver delusion” is not dead, nor will it die unless the McKinley administration shall give it its quietus by providing the country with a sound and popular system of bimetallism. Even the most sanguine of the Republican leaders must admit that the prospect of accomplishing this task by international agreement is not so encouraging as to make the tentative consideration of other plans, not requiring concerted action, unnecessary or useless. The purpose of this article is to present such a plan, and to contrast it with those which have already been tried, or have thus far been proposed.

That the financial policy we have pursued since 1878, the year of the Bland-Allison Act, has been absurd and ruinous hardly admits of two opinions. Secretary Carlisle, in his letter of September 16th last, gave authoritative utterance to what had long been tacitly understood. He said, “If the time shall ever come when the parity of the present silver dollars and silver certificates cannot be otherwise maintained, they will be received by the government in exchange for gold.” In other words, the vast stores of silver purchased by the United States under the laws of 1878 and 1890 are a dead asset of the Treasury, and cannot be utilized for purposes of redemption until sixteen ounces of silver shall again be equivalent to one of gold, or until they are re-sold in the open market for gold. To render this treasure available for ultimate redemptions thus becomes a prime condition of our problem.

There is a growing disposition in certain influential quarters to evade the difficulties in the way of international bimetallism by taking the government out of the banking business, and relegating the matter of currency issues more and more to the banks. Whatever may be said in behalf of this course, it is certainly not popular with the masses, who, justly or ignorantly, have come to look upon national banks as favored objects of 169 legislation, and in league with syndicates and trusts. But, aside from this, the real core of the trouble is not removed. We but shift the burden of responsibility. The ultimate fund for redemption remains limited to the one metal as beforehand can serve the banks even less efficiently, for the more divided the responsibility the larger the proportion of gold required for reserve purposes.

International bimetallism at the contemplated ratio of 16 to 1, and bimetallism by independent action at the same ratio, although opposing issues in the late campaign, are founded upon the same errors and misconceptions. Both assume that monetization creates a commercial demand for the metals, thereby enhancing their values; that the use of gold and silver as money substances has been one of choice with us instead of necessity; and that legal-tender laws create value.

It may be going too far to say that monetization creates no demand, but whatever demand it may be supposed to create is not a commercial one. In the latter sense the word signifies both an actual purchase, or the exchange of one thing for another, and a permanent withdrawal from the market of the thing bought. The act of coinage is certainly not a purchase, for, directly or indirectly, it aims to restore to the offerer of the bullion not something else, but the precise thing received ; nor is the metal retired from the market, since it is actually or virtually, though in an altered form, immediately restored thereto. The whole process is merely one of bailment. It would therefore seem incumbent upon those affirming the efficacy of monetization to raise the price of the metal to show by scientific analysis just how, why, and to what extent it does so. The fact that from 1792 to 1873, with free coinage at a very close approximation to the market value, not once did the legal and commercial ratios coincide, and that the change of the former from 15 to 1 to 16 to 1 in 1834 had no perceptible effect on the market, seems to be conclusive proof that the general belief that free coinage at a fixed ratio appreciates the over-valued metal is delusive.

It is important to inquire into the grounds upon which the use of silver and gold is founded, for if we have chosen them for that purpose there is an implication that other substances might 170 have served the same object almost, if not quite, as well. Such is not the case. Silver and gold are absolutely unique in possessing the qualities indispensable for money, and not only nature, but immemorial custom and deep-rooted prejudice combine to compel their use in the exchanges irrespective, and even despite, of legislation. Monetization, therefore, cannot, for this further reason, add to, or take away from, their respective values, because the exchangeability that monetization is supposed to give them is a natural quality and not the creature of law. But so much more is this true of gold than of silver, that the dependence of modern commerce, and, through it, modern civilization, upon it is almost absolute. If, therefore, free coinage at a ratio unfair to gold were attempted, gold would cease to be offered at the mints, but it would nevertheless continue in use in final settlements, especially in transactions of some magnitude, thus preventing its decline in value.

Suppose, then, that such a law, national or international, should go into effect to-day, would anyone be so fatuous as to part with his gold until the effect of the law could be discerned? If the governments at the same time should exercise the same good sense, they would retain their gold and disburse their silver, but such conduct would defeat the very object of the law. If, on the other hand, they should release their gold, retaining their silver, they would give fresh point to the oft-proved saying, “The fool and his money are soon parted.” A bona-fide attempt on the part of one or more powers to change the market ratio of the metals could result only in transferring government gold to private coffers, and in a general fall to the silver basis with all its attendant evils. Meanwhile the gold would continue its functions as money in new transactions, but at its market value, never by any chance reaching the public treasuries except on the same basis. The inconvenience of transacting business with a metal some thirty times as heavy, value for value, as that to which they had been accustomed would, without further reason, speedily induce the governments to a restoration of the gold standard at any cost.

As for the legal-tender quality, it cannot be denied that governments here possess a peculiar power which individuals cannot exert; but that fact does not make the exercise of that 171 power morally right. The quality of legal tender infused into the debased dollar cannot but add temporarily to its exchangeable value in a degree gradually diminishing with the exhaustion of the accumulated credits. When, however, the last debtor in the series is reached, and there is no longer a Peter to rob for the sake of Paul, the fraudulent coin must inevitably sink to the value it had as bullion prior to the act that created it.

Upon such fallacies as these it is sought to erect the elaborate superstructure of the civilized world’s monetary system! Some of the more advanced thinkers among the self-styled bimetallists, realizing that some deference must be paid to the lessons of experience, which offers not a solitary instance of the concurrent use of the two metals under a fixed ratio, argue that, even so, the chief blessing of bimetallism—a less variable standard—will have been secured in the automatic oscillation from one circulation to the other. If this oscillatory feature is the object sought, the adoption of a ratio of 16 to 1, or thereabouts, would certainly not secure it, but one almost identical with the market ratio would be imperative. Not once in the history of our country did this alternation occur, although from 1792 to 1873 we were upon the double standard. It is true that in 1834 the circulation changed from silver to gold, but that was due not to the automatic effect of that system, but to an actual change of the legal ratio from 15 to 1 to 16 to 1. But if the legal ratio is now made to conform to the market one, what becomes of our present silver coins? Must they be called in and be replaced by the new? If so the convenience of our subsidiary coinage will be sacrificed, for a silver dollar twice its present size would be intolerable.

The obstacles in the way of international bimetallism need not be enumerated here. The proceedings at the Brussels monetary conference in 1892, though they accomplished little besides, certainly served to make these difficulties plain. The primary object is to make silver coins and gold coins continuously interchangeable in trade at a ratio approximating as closely as possible to 16 to 1, and the discussion of the means to accomplish this has apparently narrowed down to one proposition to be answered by a simple yes or no: Shall the free coinage of gold and silver at the ratio of 1 to 16 be restored? It 172 will not do to insert any other ratio (except, perhaps, 1 to 15 or 1 to 15½), because if a ratio closely approximating the commercial one is contemplated, each nation might decide the question for itself, and an international agreement would be superfluous. All the civilized nations have their own established ratios of coinage varying from 15 to 15½ or 16 of silver to 1 of gold, and whichever of these should prevail the result could not but be a serious matter to those nations obliged to reform their coinage in accordance therewith. Neither horn of the dilemma presented by the plan of a fixed ratio is practicable; the convenient one of 16 to 1 is impossible, and the commercial one would necessitate recoinages and make the coins prohibitively cumbrous. The choice of an intermediate ratio would be a virtual relinquishment of the principle itself, for how would that ratio be arrived at if not by mere guess? There are no data to guide us, nor is there any formulated rule by which the desired ratio may be determined. Besides, the intermediate ratio would still remain open to the objections advanced against the higher ratio, both in requiring recoinage and in unduly enlarging the coins.

The inevitable result of free coinage at a fixed ratio is to expel the undervalued metal from circulation. There can be but one way to prevent this, and that is by a system of sliding scale whereby scrupulous fidelity to the state of the market from day to day may be preserved. Diurnal recoinages are of course out of the question, but the thing is nevertheless both easy and practicable.

Let us assume that gold only has hitherto been used as money, that 25.8 grains thereof have been taken to be one dollar, and that it is now desired to supplement it with the use of silver. Our proposition will necessarily take this form: If one dollar is equal to 25.8 grains of gold, it must be equal to as many grains of silver as 25.8 grains of gold will buy in the open market. Here we must remember that what is true to-day may not be true to-morrow or a year hence. So many grains of gold may to-day be worth 412½ grains of silver, to-morrow they may be worth but 400, and next day, 420. By fixing the amount of silver in the dollar we thus utter through these coins a new falsehood each day. Constant values, not constant weights, 173 is what we are driving at; so in lieu of the silver coin we must substitute a promise to pay a gold dollar, or a gold dollar’s worth of silver, whatever the state of the market. This is what I designate natural bimetallism . The silver dollar and fractional pieces as we now have them may nevertheless continue in circulation, for the promise can be written into them by legislation to redeem them, upon surrender, in the same manner as the paper promises. It is possible that Hamilton and his successors in office prior to 1837 may have thought of this expedient, but discarded it as not then feasible. We must remember, however, that they had serious practical difficulties to contend with, which are now happily removed. The advantages of the telegraph, the cable, the improved means of transportation, and our admirable system of market quotations, enable us now with certainty and ease to determine daily what any given thing is worth in terms of any other.

In order to make my plan as clear as possible, I shall run the risk of seeming elementary by following through, step by step, a typical transaction under it: Let us fancy that the reader, bearing a nugget of gold in his left hand and another of silver in his right, and desiring to convert them into money, repairs to the Philadelphia mint. He applies there to the proper clerk, who, for simplicity’s sake, we will suppose performs all the operations. The clerk weighs and assays the two pieces of metal, and finds the gold one to contain 25,800 grains of standard gold, worth precisely $1,000, which are counted out in bills. A similar operation reveals that the lump of silver weighs 35,500 grains, but the clerk is now observed to consult a table before saying, “The market equivalent of a gold dollar is to-day 710 grains, consequently your 35,500 grains are worth $50;” and he then proceeds to count out the money in bills precisely like those given in payment for the gold. Upon examining these at his leisure the reader discovers imprinted thereon a contract running as follows: “This note entitles the bearer on demand to [the denomination of the bill] dollars in gold or to the market equivalent thereof in silver.”

In the course of time, say five years hence, these identical notes, by the accidents of trade, have come into my hands, and I desire to have them redeemed. Applying to the United States 174 Treasury I find I am granted the privilege of taking payment in silver, in gold, or partly in one and the balance in the other. For the purposes of our illustration, however, we will adhere to the figures already used. In exchange for the $1,000, then, I receive back precisely the weight of gold originally given for them. For the $50 I receive six pieces of silver of different sizes, which I notice are arranged upon a decimal scale of grains. They contain respectively 30,000, 5,000, 1,000, 500, 100, and 50 grains; in all 36,650 grains, or 1,150 grains in excess of the original quantity. Upon inquiry I learn that this excess is not due to any mistake by the clerk, but that since the first transaction silver has fallen so that 733 grains are now commercially equal to 25.8 grains of gold, and that the government has simply redeemed my notes at par. After this first experience I have many subsequent transactions with the mint and with the Treasury. At the former I find that I have the choice of notes, gold coin, or silver coin. At first I reject the silver coins as being under weight, but upon its being explained that they are purposely made light for the sake of convenience, and that they are by general law redeemable in the same manner as the notes, I no longer object to them. At the Treasury, on the other hand, I am sometimes, though rarely, informed that the government is exercising the option reserved in its contract; that it is paying exclusively in gold, or exclusively in silver, or partly in one and partly in the other. These occasional disappointments, however, never affect the integrity of the money I have in hand, for whether redeemed in gold or silver, everyone knows that it will be redeemed at its face value , and it accordingly passes unquestioned.

Upon several occasions I present bonds of the government for redemption, some of them issued previous to the inauguration of the new system, and others issued afterward. In either case I find that the same system of redemption prevails as in the example of the notes. Treasury notes, silver coins, and silver certificates—one and all I discover are also redeemable like the new notes or convertible into them, so that I need never concern myself about any matter save their genuineness.

Gold certificates and greenbacks must, of course, be redeemed as their special contract requires, but, once redeemed, they must 175 reissue in the new bimetallic notes which I have described. Thus a very simple method is provided whereby this form of currency may be transmuted into another without contracting the circulation.

The great desideratum is to make our vast stores of silver available for ultimate redemptions, and this, natural bimetallism effectually accomplishes. Our gold reserve would therefore cease to be indispensable to the preservation of our national credit just as soon as the greenbacks and gold certificates were converted into the bimetallic notes or cancelled. But there need be no fear that the gold reserve would ever become depleted. By removing all danger of the debasement of our money, by insuring the parity of every dollar of our currency with gold, and by permanently retiring the greenbacks, we destroy the incentive to hoard gold, cause its return to the reserve, relieve it of half the burden it formerly had to sustain, and reduce to a minimum the tendency to withdrawals. The copious supply of gold thus secured would enable the Treasurer to waive his option to pay in silver whenever the customer preferred gold, thereby enabling merchants to use the less cumbrous metal for foreign shipments. Indeed, it is entirely probable that the new notes would be preferred to gold in international as well as in domestic exchanges.

An advantage of especial importance is that the metals can be concurrently used. The oscillation from one to the other, even if it be admitted that it would provide us always with the better of them under whatever changes may occur, is certainly not to be preferred to the constant and equal use of both. The unlimited coinage of the two metals upon a plan so equitable, recognizing as it does their precise market relations from day to day, would enable us to view with indifference the fluctuations of the market, however great, and to whatever cause due. Incidental to this advantage, and second only to it in importance, would be the establishment of a par of exchange simultaneously with the gold-and with the silver-using countries by allowing customs duties to be paid in silver bullion at market prices, or in gold.

It may be contended that under the plan here proposed the government might lose by a continued decline in silver, and 176 that the silver it already has would remain depreciated far below the price the government paid for it. I frankly admit this. But is it reasonable to suppose that silver will continue to decline? The probabilities are that in the succeeding twenty years the production of gold will increase more rapidly in proportion than silver; and it also seems that whereas processes for extracting and refining silver have well-nigh reached their limit of economy, the new processes for treating gold are rapidly improving. Nor must it be forgotten that should such a decline occur the mint deposits are from day to day keeping pace with the withdrawals, the losses on the latter thus being counterbalanced by concurrent gains, and interest-bearing debts being constantly transmuted into non-interest bearing currency. It is equally clear that the utilization of a dead asset, as the government stock of silver now is, is a distinct gain, and will permanently dispense with the future issue of bonds for the repletion of the gold reserve. As for the silver purchased by the government under the Acts of 1878 and 1890 having become depreciated, the fact is there whether we choose to recognize or ignore it. There is no better way for palliating that loss than to make that silver immediately available for the payment of the nation’s debts.

Allied to the question of the costliness of the system is that of its tendency toward, or freedom from, speculative disturbances. So long as payment solely in gold was compulsory, speculators had a fertile field for their operations. By giving the Treasurer the option of payment in silver or gold, however, raids upon either metal can be met by paying exclusively in the other until the proper equilibrium is restored. If a real difficulty should still be found to exist in practice, a slight mint charge would effectually put an end to it. In any event, natural bimetallism is much less open to criticism on this score than the existing system, or than that of the fixed ratio.

The pieces of silver with which redemptions are to be made are in no sense to be regarded as money. They are distinctly merchandise, possessing a commercial value precisely equivalent to the number of money units received or surrendered therefor, and when the notes have been redeemed, and the commercial equivalent has been given therefor, the government’s 177 responsibility ends. The government assumes no obligation to maintain silver bullion at a given ratio to gold, but it does assume to make each unit of money the equal of 25.8 grains of gold. In other words, the fluctuations in the value of silver are confined to it in its bullion shape, and cannot enter into its form as money. The idea that paper currency must be redeemed in gold, as money , or silver, as money, is erroneous. It is redeemed in those metals because they have value as merchandise . In domestic transactions this fact is often lost sight of, but it becomes manifest in international exchanges when the metallic money passes strictly on its merits as bullion, and without regard to the stamp it bears. For these reasons the Treasury should not be understood as guaranteeing the weight or fineness of the metal, except in its immediate transactions, although to facilitate its ready acceptance between reputable merchants, the affixing of the government’s seal upon the pieces would be a very proper practice.

Nor is there any mechanical difficulty in the way of the operation of the plan. The silver could be fashioned into pieces of different sizes graduated upon a decimal scale of grains, with the smallest piece containing fifty grains, being somewhat larger than the current dime. By limiting redemptions, then, to fifty dollars and multiples thereof, our pieces will in every conceivable instance enable us to make the exchange, or redemption, to the accuracy of a single grain on each dollar, which is certainly sufficiently close for all practical purposes.

In contrast to the national banking system, the bonds could be retired without derangement to our finances, the metals forming a basis upon which our outstanding currency could directly rest—thus obviating the extravagant features of that system and stripping us of the impediment of an immense debt. And not only this: the encouragement natural bimetallism would hold out to owners of bullion of both kinds would cause our national vaults to be filled to overflowing with the sinews of war, and make us the best equipped nation on the earth for a prolonged struggle, should such a struggle come.

By providing a means for the remonetization of silver at the market rate we are doing its friends a greater kindness than they ask. Free coinage on seemingly more favorable terms 178 would result in immediate overproduction and a glutted market, from which condition it would be most difficult to escape. If there be any merit in the contention that a “demand” for the metal is what is needed, and that that demand will enhance its price, so much the better, for in that case not only will the condition of the silver industry improve, but the government itself will be benefited by the enhancement in the value of the metal it already holds and may hereafter acquire. The example set by the United States would be gladly imitated by other nations, and the use of silver as a basis for money would speedily rival that of gold.

Viewed as an experiment the trial of it would be inexpensive and without peril, while congressional debates pending its consideration would give no cause for apprehension or disturbance to business, since the gold standard would not be jeopardized. But why should it be regarded as experimental when the most elementary and most familiar business principles are followed?

The question may be raised whether the preservation of the gold standard is desirable, since, it is claimed, it is gradually appreciating in value. To this it may be said that the peril of the gold standard does not consist in the fact that it is rising, but that it has been hitherto accompanied by the non-use of silver in final redemptions. That an appreciating dollar is necessarily an evil is, moreover, fairly debatable. During the period from 1864-1872 (which our Democratic friends delight to laud as the most prosperous in our history), although we were nominally on a bimetallic basis, contracts were made on that of the greenback, which rose during that time an average of ten per cent per annum, to wit: from 49.2 cents in 1864, to 89 cents in 1872. In other words the debtor who borrowed $492.00 in 1864 was obliged, eight years later, to pay his creditor $890.00 of like purchasing power as he had received, in addition to a considerably higher interest than now current. I do not wish to be considered as standing sponsor for the rising dollar, but it is a pertinent question to ask those who decry the gold standard for this reason, why the same cause did not have the same effect in each instance.

The objection may be made that I would make of a silver 179 mere commodity, but the point is not well taken, inasmuch as the mint offerings are transmuted into paper currency, which is virtually making silver, money; moreover, the silver itself is retained in its present form of subsidiary coinage. Silver is not a moral being possessed of rights and sensitive to insults; it is a mere thing whose function it is to serve us in any way we may deem most conducive to our interests. If under the system of natural bimetallism it does this best, the question as to its money or commodity character is vain. Moreover, under Gresham’s law, one metal under the fixed ratio is not only “reduced to a commodity,” but is absolutely expelled from circulation and as a basis for circulation; and we have also seen that in the last analysis both silver and gold are commodities under any system of specie payments.

Under a republican form of government, where frequent and extreme changes from one policy to another must be guarded against, that policy should be adopted which most nearly conforms to justice, and which the sense of the largest majority commends. What proposition, then, could be fairer and more apt to commend itself to the general intelligence than that the metals should be monetized at their commercial values from day to day, or what policy more likely to remain unaffected by the mutations of parties and politics?

In conclusion let me sum up the salient points: We have seen (1) that the chief weakness of the present system is the non-availability of silver for final redemptions; (2) that “currency reform” is inadequate because of its unpopularity and in failing to increase the primary basis of money by the addition of silver; and (3) that the principle of the fixed ratio is fallacious and impracticable. On the other hand, we have discovered Natural Bimetallism to be the application of the principles of everyday business to that business which underlies all others,—national finance,—and that the advantages resulting therefrom are: It dispenses with the necessity of an international agreement with its attendant uncertainties, perils, and delays, and at the same time points out the way to a sound and permanent home policy upon which all our factions could unite. It practically restores to silver its unlimited coinage at its just market rate, injects a healthy stimulus into the languishing silver 180 industry, preserves our admirable system of subsidiary coinage, and utilizes both metals as companion pillars of our national credit. It coaxes gold to the mint, keeps it there, and does away permanently with bond issues. It provides for the retirement of the greenbacks, supplies their place with currency equally sound but less hazardous, and insures the absolute parity of every dollar in circulation with every other, and with gold. In fine, as every true principle must, and as only a true principle can, it answers every condition of the problem to which it applies, and commends itself as the best, if not the only, way out of our financial embarrassments.

II. BIMETALLISM EXTINGUISHED.

BY JOHN CLARK RIDPATH.

The article on “Bimetallism Simplified” by Mr. George H. Lepper is open to one serious criticism: the title should be changed to “Bimetallism Extinguished ;” for, when the argument is translated out of its sophistical form, that is its precise meaning. We are obliged, in such a matter as this—even at the expense of courtesy—to break through the thin film of plausibility, and at one stroke to lay bare what is in the bottom.

It is a marvellous thing that they who engage in excogitating this kind of double-meaning literature about bimetallism, should suppose that the people can any longer be deluded with it. The agents of the money-power and the fuglemen of the dominant political party seem to think that a certain species of casuistry and complicated makeshift of argument can still be forced into currency, as it has been in the past, and that the great American democracy can be persuaded thereby to accept fallacy for truth and thus to perpetuate the reigning Dynasty of Robbers. Messieurs, you can perform this feat no longer.

Mr. Lepper admits in the outset that the McKinley administration is doomed unless it can provide the country with a sound and popular system of bimetallism. As a matter of fact, a sound system of bimetallism is simply bimetallism. A popular system of bimetallism is simply bimetallism—neither more nor less. In this vital matter, the popularity will take care of itself, and so will the soundness. 181

In the next place, we observe that if the McKinley administration depends upon the adoption by it of any system of bimetallism, then the administration is doomed, deeply and darkly doomed, already. Let the world know that the McKinley administration will not provide, and has never intended to provide, the country with any kind of bimetallism. The administration has no notion of such a thing. It was not created for such a useful and honorable destiny. It was created to prevent bimetallism by treacherously pretending to be in favor of it. They who created the administration, they who determine and will continue to determine its action, openly sneer at any system of money except the gold-based system of monometallism.

Mr. Lepper must be aware of this fact. Indeed it is to be hoped that there is not any longer one man in the United States so far gone down the slopes of delusion and idiotic infatuation as to imagine that the hollow pretensions of this administration in the direction of bimetallism by international agreement, or by any other method, have ever been anything else than cunning subterfuge and treachery.

The politicians who worked out the St. Louis platform knew what they were about. They knew that they were creating a hypocritical document with which to deceive and ensnare the American people. They fixed their net and made their haul. They succeeded to this extent—that they elected their ticket and gained possession of the government. Lo, the day of judgment has already come! Now, in the endeavor to postpone the judgment, they prepare arguments under captions that have a friendly sound but are at bottom bitterer than cassia and more mockful than the laughter of Mephistopheles.

The next stage in the policy of these gentlemen is to invent something that shall seem to be bimetallism, but is not. This something they seek to palm off on the world and to distract mankind with it until the money sharks who are chuckling behind the gold-vaults of two continents shall be enabled, in the confusion and mêlée , to shuffle off to covert with their incalculable loads of booty.

Mr. Lepper’s paper is a document of the kind described. The general purport of it is this: “People of the United States, I am a physician. I belong to the silver school. I am 182 a graduate of the Bimetallic Institute. This pill which I give you is out of the silver pharmacopœia. It will heal all your diseases perfectly.” But when you examine the pill which he exhibits, you will find it to be a solid bolus of gold, filmed over with tin foil.

Mr. Lepper enters upon the discussion of the subject with the following statement: “The vast stores of silver purchased by the United States under the laws of 1878 and 1890 are a dead asset of the Treasury, and cannot be utilized for purposes of redemption until sixteen ounces of silver shall again be equivalent to one of gold.” Observe what becomes of these propositions under a truthful analysis. In the first place, our “vast stores of silver” are not vast stores. They are not nearly as vast as they ought to be. There are no bursting vaults of silver in the Treasury of the United States and never were. In the next place the stores of silver are not a dead asset of the Treasury. They are just as much a living asset of the Treasury as is the accumulation of gold therein—and in the same sense. These stores cannot be used for purposes of redemption because they do not exist for that purpose . A bimetallist who is not a bimetallist is always strong on redemption; and he knows only one redeemer—gold. The redeeming business in our financial plan of salvation has been altogether overdone. In the name of wonder, what is it we want to redeem? Is it the greenbacks? Is it any of our legal tender? The greenback is already constitutional money. Does Mr. Lepper know that the greenback has been declared constitutional money by the Supreme Court of the United States—this with only a single dissenting vote? Does he know that every national bank bill in the United States is finally redeemable in greenbacks? Does he know that in our scheme of redemption, the people have only a paper redeemer, while the banks, with the connivance of the government, have a redeemer of gold ? Our “vast stores of silver” have only to be coined into silver dollars; to be used as primary money, just as gold is used; to be paid out just as gold is paid out in the transaction of national business, and in particular in the payment of the national indebtedness. If this is freely done, the exaggerated purchasing power of the latter metal would at once be reduced to the normal standard. This 183 reduction would immediately express itself, or begin to express itself, in a general rise of prices, in a revival of business, and in a universal restoration of prosperity. Everything would again be well in the great Republic. All this would happen without financial sin and without a redeemer.

Mr. Lepper very properly says that international bimetallism and independent bimetallism “are founded upon the same errors and misconceptions.” He should have said that they are founded upon the same truths and necessities . For “errors,” read truths, and for “misconceptions” read necessities. The writer of “Bimetallism Simplified” next goes on to say that whatever value may be created by monetization is not a commercial value. Well, then, what kind of value is it? Is it a social value, such as a man attributes to his child that is not for sale? Or is it a political value, such as a party manager attributes to a vote that is for sale?

Let us see whether monetization does, or does not, create value. We will not quibble about the phrase “commercial value,” but come directly to the issue of value in general. Take the case upon which the goldites so greatly rely, that of the safe burned in a fire with a bag of gold coin and a bag of silver coin fused within. The triumphant gold sophist says, “The ten gold dollars fused into a lump will still be worth just ten dollars, while the silver dollars fused into a lump will be worth only five dollars.” Of course the lump of fused gold will be worth ten dollars when it is coined and measured by itself! Suppose that the lump of fused silver be coined into dollars again; how much will that be worth? Everybody who has a premonitory symptom of common sense knows that the lump of fused silver will— if coinable again into dollars —be worth just as much as the lump of fused gold. It is because the lump of fused gold is coinable again into dollars that it retains its value. It is because the lump of fused silver is not coinable again, under the present order, that it is not worth ten dollars.

What makes the difference? It is the fact of monetization for one of the metals, and demonetization for the other. Does anybody suppose that ten dollars of silver fused into a lump would not still be worth ten dollars if the lump were re-coinable? Does anybody suppose that ten gold dollars fused into 184 a lump would still be worth ten dollars if the lump were not re-coinable? The fact of monetization not only confirms the value of one metal, but it insures the value of the other also—that is, it would insure it if monetization were not denied. Incidentally, this plain statement of the case utterly confutes the only seemingly valid argument, that is the two-bag argument, with which the goldites have been able to support their theory of “sound” money. Mr. Lepper’s assertion that monetization does not confer commercial value will have to rise through many circles in the spiral of intelligence before it reaches the plane of nonsense.

Further on in his paper, Mr. Lepper says: “The inevitable result of free coinage at a fixed ratio, is to expel the undervalued metal from circulation.” Who taught him that? Perhaps Gresham taught him. If so, he taught him what is not true. It is incredible that intelligent people should be humbugged with such a fallacious proposition as Gresham’s so-called “law.” Suppose that under free coinage, gold be undervalued, and suppose that, being so, it begins to vanish—where will it go to? To the Bank of England? If so, what will be the effect on the price of gold in the Bank of England? Will not the price begin to fall at that point at which the stream of gold pours out? And will it not continue to fall as long as the outflow goes on? What, on the other hand, will be the effect on the money market at that point from which the outflow is established? Will there not be produced a stringency behind the outflow, and will not all kinds of money begin to appreciate at that point from which the flow begins? And will not this stringency become greater and greater as long as the outflow continues? And will not the prices of all kinds of money, silver in particular, begin to rise until the outflow ceases? This is to say that the price of gold, like the price of anything else whatsoever, will fall wherever it accumulates, and the price of silver will rise in every place from which the gold is drained away, until a parity of values between the two money metals shall be inevitably established. This is the real law of two money metals circulating together; and Gresham’s so-called “law” is only the hocus-pocus and ghost of a law that is true to begin with, and is not true to end with. 185

I now come to the gist of Mr. Lepper’s article, and I invite particular attention to the heart and core of the matter as he presents it. He says (all the while declaring himself to be a bimetallist): “Let us assume that gold only has hitherto been used as money, that 25.8 grains thereof have been taken to be one dollar, and that it is now desired to supplement it with the use of silver.” I had not supposed that any person in the world could be under the influence of a delusion to the extent of propounding three such hypotheses as the foregoing. Mr. Lepper might with equally good reason, in discussing the constitution of nature, have said, “Let us assume that the world is a circular disk of tin,” or rather, “Let us assume that the world has always been regarded as a circular disk of tin. Let us assume that the world, being a circular disk of tin, weighs 3,820 lbs., and that it is now desired to improve its constitution by adding forty pounds to its weight and by converting it into a square block.” These propositions would be just as philosophical, just as useful in argument, and just as well warranted as those which he presents! His assumption is that gold only has been used as money. But it is not true that gold only has been used as money. It is not true that gold principally has been used as money. It is not true that gold has been as widely used as silver. It is not true that it is as universally used to-day as silver. It is not true that it was used at as early a day as was silver. It is not true that it has been used as a standard unit of money and account in the United States as long and as universally as silver has been used. It is therefore absurd to say, “Let us assume that gold only has been used as money.” It is preposterous to offer such a hypothesis. If we should grant the affirmative of such an assertion, we should rush into a region of falsehood and fanaticism identical in all particulars with that station which the goldites now occupy, and from which they send forth their clamor.

Mr. Lepper says further: “Let us assume that 25.8 grains hitherto have been taken to be one dollar.” But it is not true that 25.8 grains of gold have hitherto in our American system been taken to be one dollar. It is true that, according to our fundamental statute, and to all subsequent statutes down to the year 1873, 25.8 grains of gold were taken to be of the value 186 of a dollar; but they were not a dollar. Our gold eagles were of the value of ten dollars; our half eagles were of the value of five dollars; our double eagles were of the value of twenty dollars; our quarter eagles were of the value of two and one-half dollars; our one-dollar gold piece, of 1849, was not one dollar, but was of the value of a dollar! The dollar was first, last, and all the time, defined to be a coin composed of 371 ¼ grains of pure silver . This is the very alphabet of the matter. I have myself set forth these facts so many times that I am ashamed to repeat them; for it implies that there are still people in the United States so lacking in intelligence and information as to require the reiteration of the bottom facts and principles in our American coinage system.

Twenty-five and eight-tenths grains of gold never did compose a dollar in the United States until after the year 1873. Why, therefore, should Mr. Lepper say, “Let us assume that 25.8 grains of gold have been taken to be one dollar”? Then he goes on to say, “Let us assume that it is desired to supplement it [that is the gold dollar] with silver.” Why should he speak of supplementing the use of gold with silver, any more than supplementing the use of silver with gold? There is not as good reason for the proposition to supplement gold with silver as there is to supplement silver with gold. Herein lies the trouble with those gentlemen who are trying to fix up a plan by which not to do it. They begin with a series of false hypotheses. They work along from these false assumptions until they reach some monstrous conclusion, and then show how sound the conclusion is because it is logical!

Genuine bimetallists do no such thing. They claim the coinage of gold and silver on terms of absolute equality. They do not propose to measure the silver by the gold, or the gold by the silver. They propose to have two standard units, and to use the one unit or the other unit at the option of the debtor. They do not propose that the creditor shall decide in which of these money metals a debt shall be paid or a contract made valid—simply for the reason that the two units co-exist, and every contract and engagement made among men is made in the face of this fact, and with the full knowledge of it, and with the understanding of what it implies. That understanding 187 is that at the date of settlement, the debtor, and not the creditor, shall decide in which of the two standard metal-moneys he shall discharge his obligation. The option is his—exclusively his . The transaction is honorable, right, and just. Whoever challenges it is an abettor of the scheme for robbing the debtor by compelling him to transact his business, and in particular to pay his debts, according to a standard unit differing from the dollar of the law and the contract.

Of this outrageous fraud we will have no more. We spew it out of our mouths. We spit on the proposition, under whatever garb it comes, to compel the debtors of this nation to discharge their obligations in a dollar differing from the dollar of the law and the contract. We do not propose to “supplement” gold money with silver money—meaning the subordination of the silver to the gold. We do not propose to “supplement” silver money with gold money—meaning that the gold shall be absolute and the silver only token. There is no “supplement” about it. It is a simple proposition to have our money in two kinds , and not in one kind. It is like laying a foundation of stone and brick. The stone is not more dependent on the brick than the brick is dependent on the stone. They are both built into one abutment; they both contribute alike to its solidity and magnitude; they both enter into its composition and are part of its structure; and they both shall stay there, gentlemen of the gold craft, in spite of your efforts to take one constituent part of the abutment away!

I now come to the next essential division of Mr. Lepper’s article. I call particular attention to what he proposes. He says:

“In order to make my plan as clear as possible, I shall run the risk of seeming elementary by running through, step by step, a typical transaction under it: Let us fancy that the reader, bearing a nugget of gold in his left hand and another of silver in his right, and desiring to convert them into money, repairs to the Philadelphia mint. He applies there to the proper clerk, who, for simplicity’s sake, we will suppose performs all the operations. The clerk weighs and assays the two pieces of metal, and finds the gold one to contain 25,800 grains of standard gold, worth precisely $1,000, which are counted out in bills. 188 A similar operation reveals that the lump of silver weighs 35,500 grains, but the clerk is observed to consult a table before saying: ‘The market equivalent of a gold dollar is to-day 710 grains; consequently your 35,500 grains are worth $50;’ and he then proceeds to count out the money in bills precisely like those given in payment for the gold. Upon examining these at his leisure, the reader discovers imprinted thereon a contract running as follows: ‘This note entitles the bearer on demand to [the denomination of the bill] dollars in gold or to the market equivalent thereof in silver.’”

This paragraph needs only to be critically examined in order to show forth the material of which it is builded. Mr. Lepper takes his two nuggets, the one of gold and the other of silver. He goes to the mint. The gold nugget weighs 25,800 grains; the silver nugget weighs 35,500 grains. Mr. Lepper adroitly slips in the clause that the gold nugget is “ worth precisely a thousand dollars! ” In what units is the gold nugget worth a thousand dollars? Why, in gold units. He says that the 35,500 grains of silver are found to be worth $50. In what units is that amount of silver worth $50? Why, in gold units! That is, beginning with the gold standard, and ignoring the silver standard, Mr. Lepper reaches bimetallism! That is good. He assumes, to begin with, the thing he is trying to prove! He assumes it in his major premise, implies it in his minor premise, and reaches it in his conclusion. I say that is very good. Twenty-five thousand eight hundred grains of gold are “worth precisely $1,000,” in gold dollars at the rate of 25.8 grains to the dollar. Well, I should say so. The same would be true of tin, of leather, or tree-molasses. Only assume that something is a standard, and then measure that something by itself and you will get there. Mr. Lepper gets there. Then again he assumes that the market equivalent of the gold dollar at the date referred to, is 710 grains of silver; therefore, 35,500 grains of silver are worth just $50 in gold. Forsooth, it requires a philosopher to tell us that; though a country schoolboy might make it out just as well. It is only a problem in the rule of three. We assume that silver is worth so much in gold; therefore, so much silver will be worth so much in gold! That is, gold is the standard; but we are a bimetallist, and we will write 189 a paper on “Bimetallism Simplified” showing how we can create a mono-bimetallic standard. The “mono” is the essence of Mr. Lepper’s scheme; the bimetallic part of it is sophism and green cheese.

In his argument Mr. Lepper simply proposes to measure gold by itself ; and to measure silver by gold ! That is all there is in it. He seems not to know that anything measured by anything other than itself is not primary money, and cannot be. Gold, when coined and made legal tender, is primary money when measured by itself. Silver when coined and made a legal tender is also primary money when measured by itself. Anything coined and made a legal tender is primary money when measured by itself.

It is thus that Mr. Lepper creates a bimetallic system of money. He proposes to keep it up in the same manner. He simply assumes that gold is an unfluctuating, eternal standard, and that silver is a fluctuating, impossible standard. He agrees that silver may be used as money and even coined on a basis which assumes that it shall not be used as money and not be coined at all, except by the measure of gold! His factitious and absurd device is therefore not bimetallism, but monometallism on a basis of gold. He might substitute pewter for silver in his scheme, and it would be just as good; he might substitute putty or plaster of paris, and his plan would work as well.

Such a scheme is not bimetallism at all. It is monometallism pure and simple. I have, in a private way, pointed out the fact to Mr. Lepper that his plan is not what it pretends to be. I have tried to show him that what he proposes is simply a delusion of goldite hocus-pocus. As a matter of fact, The Arena has not the space to be devoted to the dissemination of such literature as Mr. Lepper’s article. I did not wish to subject the writer of “Bimetallism Simplified” to this castigation, but he would have it so. It is no doubt an entertaining business with Mr. Lepper to work his elaborate scheme for pretending to do a thing, and not doing it. Practically, I might urge upon his attention the fact that what he proposes will satisfy nobody; certainly it will not satisfy the McKinley administration. That administration does not propose to do anything . It proposes to stand still, in the midst of much bluster, hoping all the time that 190 the gold standard will become more and more fixed on the American people, and that the “silver delusion” will subside.

Mr. Lepper will have his labor for his pains. His system will be laughed to scorn by all the goldites proper, and it is certainly rejected as spurious, impossible, and absurd by all genuine bimetallists. I wish to remark in this case, that the term “goldite” applied to the monometallist, is not a misnomer or an unwarranted epithet; for monometallists advocate the establishment of gold money only, as the primary money and money of ultimate redemption. On the other hand, the term “silverite” is a misnomer; if accepted, it misleads, for it implies that he who is characterized as a silverite is a believer in silver only as the primary money and money of ultimate redemption. There are no people of this class of whom we have heard.

Bimetallists believe in the use of both moneys freely and on terms of perfect equality; they will be satisfied with nothing less. They know that they are in the majority, and that they cannot be ultimately defrauded of their purpose. They intend to restore our coinage to what it was before the Act of 1873. By such restoration they propose to break the corner on gold and to reduce the exaggerated purchasing power of that metal to the normal standard. They intend that this reduction in the purchasing power of gold shall be answered—as they know it will be—with a corresponding rise in the prices of all the products of labor. They intend in this way to achieve prosperity; they intend to wrong no man—not even the bondholder; they intend that every man shall have his rights according to the law and the contract; they intend to break faith with none; they intend to march right on to the achievement of this result; in doing so, they intend to consult themselves. They know full well that the so-called “great commercial nations” will be glad enough to trade with us, and to take our money in both kinds too. If not, we hold the rod! If any nation under heaven proposes to discriminate against the United States of America because of our bimetallic standard of money, let that nation try it! We shall see who comes out best in that contest.

When the weak-kneed, the time-serving, and the cowardly 191 shall be expelled from power; when American patriots are in the high places of authority; when the people’s voice shall be heard as the voice of many waters,—all men shall then be assured that the great republic is able to do its own business in its own way, asking favor of none, menacing none, and fearing none! When that good day comes with the end of the century, such literature as Mr. Lepper’s “Bimetallism Simplified,” read in the retrospect and in the light of a better verdict of the people, will seem to the thoughtful student of history to have been the product of some humorist, indulging a sarcastical disposition at the expense of the very theory which he sets forth in his article.

192

THE SEGREGATION AND PERMANENT ISOLATION OF CRIMINALS.

BY NORMAN ROBINSON.

What shall be done with confirmed and incorrigible offenders? For a good many thousand years the world has been wrestling with this problem, and in this year of grace it is seemingly very little nearer a rational solution than when the first fraternal brawl sent one brother into his grave, and another into exile with the perpetual brand of a murderer blazing upon his terror-stricken brow.

The savage settles the matter with a tomahawk or a war club. The remedy is at least effectual, and society in the kraal or the tepee does not bother its dusky brain about the possible reform of the offender. Any type of criminality that is inconvenient or unpopular is, therefore, summarily buried in the nearest grave.

Up to the time of the Christian era, the savage and the civilized man alike held substantially the same theories. The one idea that dominated all criminal law was punishment. The statutes of Draco and Lycurgus never harbored the thought of moral improvement, much less made provision for the reform of the criminal. Roman law and Greek law were little better. The one right which all offenders possessed was the right to be punished. Reformation was entirely a personal matter, which theoretically in rare instances was possible, to which the law, save in capital cases, interposed no special obstacles, and to which it gave no special encouragement.

With the advent of a new and more merciful dispensation, we find gradually creeping in a belief that the criminal classes have some rights which society is bound to respect, and that not the least important of these is the right to reform. For two thousand years these not necessarily conflicting ideas of reform and punishment have travelled down the centuries in a medley of incongruous and often contradictory systems of criminal law. As the better classes have generally made and 193 administered the law, it is not strange that the elder and more savage idea has on the whole been dominant, and that, taking the world together, the reform of criminals is still rather a side issue than an object of far-reaching and systematic legislative enactment.

Even the most optimistic student of penology would be compelled to admit that our present methods of dealing with criminals are unsatisfactory to the last degree. Our systems of punishment do not punish in any such sense as to be a terror to evil-doers; our systems of reformation do not reform. The whole thing goes on in a vicious round of self-perpetuating infamy. The central idea of our modern penal system—and it is certainly a very venerable one—is that in some way the world will be greatly benefited by shutting up its law-breakers for a longer or shorter period, feeding them liberally, giving them a period of enforced steady habits and steady work, and after a while taking off this straight jacket of compulsory morality, and turning them loose again with improved criminal skill and sharpened appetites to prey upon society in the old way.

The actual result of this crowding of more or less confirmed vice into one concentrated aggregation, is simply to intensify the evil it was intended to remedy. The convict who enters a prison cell for the first time—perhaps as the result of some sudden and overpowering temptation—a man who at heart is no better and no worse than his neighbors, and who, if by any chance he had escaped conviction, would have finished his life as an average citizen, as a friend and advocate of the law—finds himself here in an entirely new environment. Self-respect is gone. The old motive for honesty is gone. He enters the new and stifling atmosphere of concentrated crime, and with it comes the feeling that the world is all against him. It is his first offence, but it is by no means likely to be his last. Every man he sees, save the grim rifle-carrying guard who growls and swears at him, is a convicted criminal. Every object that his eyes fall upon intensifies the lesson that he is henceforth to be counted among the enemies of his race. Every breath that he breathes reeks with the malaria of crime. He is now an enlisted soldier in a warfare against right and law and social 194 order. He is in the devil’s own training school. The seven other “spirits more wicked than himself” are all around him. Whatever prison rules may say, there are certain to be clandestine meetings, secret conferences, in which the novice is initiated into the higher degrees of the freemasonry of crime. Schemes of profitable law-breaking swarm in the teeming brains of these wearers of the stripes, to be turned into actual deeds in “the good time coming,” when these apt pupils of the high school of depravity shall be free again to make war upon the peace and welfare of the world. Is it any wonder that this first offender comes out of prison a confirmed criminal, and that “the last state of that man is worse than the first”?

If the same business sense were used in this matter which is ordinarily given to the management of great human concerns, we should soon find some way of improving upon this discouraging condition of affairs. No merchant in his senses would discharge a dishonest clerk for a term of ninety days with the distinct understanding that he was to spend his enforced vacation in the society of thieves and cutthroats, and at the end of the time be taken back again into his old place as though nothing had happened. The railroad president who should discharge a drunken engineer, and then after six months give him hold of his old throttle again, although it was in evidence that he had spent his retirement in a whiskey saloon, studying under competent tuition the latest methods of holding up trains, would be very apt to be bundled off at the next meeting of the board of directors to manage railroads from the inside of a lunatic asylum. Courts and judges and lawyers are about the only people on the outside that do business in that way.

Is there no help for this state of things? Must the machinery of justice go on forever grinding over the same vile grist, retrying and reimprisoning old offenders, cultivating rather than repressing the law-breaking instinct, passing on to still lower depths of depravity the soul once caught in the meshes of crime, and at last dragging the great masses of offenders down to one common level of hopeless and helpless hostility to social order and law?

It is, of course, much easier to point out faults than to suggest effective remedies. I am persuaded that some happy inspiration 195 of genius will yet give us methods, probably so simple that we shall wonder that they have not always been used, by which many of the gravest evils which disgrace our present system will be effectually removed. I think the key to the whole problem will ultimately be found in one word— segregation . Worcester defines “to segregate” “to gather in a flock, to set apart, to separate from others.”

In pursuance of this idea let us suppose, save in the case of certain crimes that disclose confirmed and hopelessly vicious tendencies, that all first offenders were counted in a class by themselves. For these reformatories should be built, in which a complete segregation of the various classes of law-breakers should be made, and that, too, with the same idea uppermost which prevails in modern hospital practice, that infectious cases should in all instances be especially isolated. Criminal infection is as real and morally quite as disastrous as is physically that of cholera or smallpox. So with this predominating idea of segregation; and with a wise discrimination which might be difficult in the beginning, but which experience would more or less perfectly supply, the various classes of first offenders should be separated into distinct and non-communicating families. Hard labor should here mean hard labor. Rigid discipline coupled with coarse but wholesome food should emphasize the fact that this was a place, not of comfortable leisure, but of reformatory punishment. At the same time such educational and moral influences as enlightened experience could supply should be brought continuously to bear, to give new aims, inspire new motives, and impart health, strength, and soundness to morally weak but not necessarily hopelessly criminal natures.

Under enlightened management, commitment to such reformatories might be made for an indefinite period, with the same limited discretion that the law now gives to courts of justice, to be dependent largely upon the behavior of the criminal, and to be determined not before, but after his term of imprisonment began. The superintendent and board of managers should, in that case, be clothed with large discretionary powers to dismiss, to detain, to place in higher or lower classes, as their best judgments should dictate, and as the actual and tried needs and progress of reform in each individual case might demand. The 196 vast, costly, and architecturally imposing structures which are now denominated “reformatories,” and which in many cases might be much more appropriately labelled “failures,” if not discarded altogether, could be supplemented by simple and inexpensive structures, giving abundant room and light and air. With such conditions and surroundings, and under such a system intelligently administered, it is reasonable to believe that no small proportion of first offenders, who, under our present method, drift into the hopelessly, and it might in many cases be added, helplessly, criminal classes, would be restored to moral soundness and self-respecting citizenship.

But with the most efficient system of reformation which human wisdom could devise, there would still be a large contingent of incorrigible offenders, who, from hereditary taint, bad environment, or other causes, have cut themselves off from all retreat, burned the bridges behind them, and enlisted in a life warfare against human society and law. Most second offenders and those whose brutal past points to an irredeemable future should properly be classed as life criminals, and with these, society, while not forgetting “the quality of mercy,” should deal with firm hand and inexorable justice.

As our government is not so situated that penal colonies are practicable, walled villages might be built with all the safeguards which modern science and inventive skill can supply for the absolute and permanent isolation of these “life criminals.” In these penal villages, various grades and classes should be placed each by itself. Behind these never-opening gates, and under conditions that should relieve the world at once and forever of their presence, these avowed and unrepentant enemies of social and civil order should be compelled to “work out their own salvation.”

No great and costly prisons would be needed. Simple and inexpensive cottages, each with its separate plot of ground, with furniture and housekeeping arrangements on the most frugal scale, with absolute necessaries in food and clothing, at least for a time, would be required. The greatest possible liberty should be given to each individual convict. The industrious should be assured of the full benefit of their toil. Those who would not work, should find here the same penalties for idleness 197 as obtain in the world they had left. Here might be gathered the whole round of industry—artisans, shops, manufacturers of all kinds, aided by every appliance of modern machinery. Schools, libraries, and even churches would by no means be excluded from this life-convict home. There is no reason why such a community of criminals might not ultimately become largely self-supporting and self-governing. They could have their own courts, their own lawyers, their own judges, their own system of penal law, and their own machinery for its enforcement.

To each small company of men there should be allotted a cottage, which they could call their own. As far as possible these men should be left to themselves. The outworking of social and economic laws under such conditions might sometimes be summary and savage, but it would ultimately be salutary. Though for a while, save as it was held back by the mailed hand of military power, crime might run riot, the instinct of self-preservation would at last assert itself. The murderer does not like to be murdered; the highway robber does not like to be robbed; all classes of criminals object to taking their own medicine; and so it would come about that, even out of elements the most incongruous and unpromising, some form of social order would finally be evolved. It is needless to say that the sexes should occupy separate villages. This in itself would cut off one very formidable source of new recruits for the army of crime. Indeed, it is hardly too much to predict that, if this plan of permanent segregation and isolation were carried out for even a single generation, crime would sensibly diminish, our overcrowded courts would be relieved, taxation be lessened, and the staggering shoulders of modern civilization be to some extent unburdened from one of the heaviest loads they are now condemned to bear. It may seem an ungenerous thing to say, but it is to be feared that the opposition to any such plans would be likely to come from those whose familiarity with the vices of the present system should best fit them to labor for and most earnestly to desire its improvement. Enlightened physicians gladly join in any scheme which promises to prevent or lessen disease, in spite of the fact that their living depends upon its prevalence. So, enlightened judges, 198 lawyers, and court officers might be expected cordially to approve of any system of moral hygiene which gave promise of efficiency as a prophylactic against crime. It is to be feared, however, that there would be a numerically large contingent who, like “Demetrius the silversmith,” would feel that “this our craft is in danger,” and who openly or secretly would do their best, as they have in a hundred instances in the past, to prevent the lopping off of a single twig from that wide-spreading tree of evil, whose fruit brings little scruple and no small gain to the cunning craftsmen who manage the costly and complicated machinery of the courts.

If such a system as has been rudely outlined were made absolutely secure, and the power of pardoning boards removed or greatly restricted, it might be wise to abolish the death penalty altogether. Juries might then have fewer scruples, and acquittals upon technical grounds, in spite of plain and abundant evidence, become less frequent. Mob law feeds largely upon the belief that even the worst criminals stand in little danger of punishment, but that “by hook or by crook”—mostly “crook”—especially if they or their friends can command means to hire lawyers and invoke the dilatory machinery of the courts, they are almost certain to escape. Whatever, therefore, tends to render the punishment of crime more speedy and certain is a direct discouragement to these sudden and savage outbursts of popular indignation against crime.

In the classification of offenders and their assignment to different penal villages, there would, no doubt, be some so atrociously and fiendishly criminal that it would be a cruelty to others and a mistaken kindness to them to permit them ever to go beyond their present prison walls. By the plan suggested, the penitentiaries in most of the States, now so crowded, while being relieved of a large part of their present tenants, could still be utilized for the confinement of these pariahs of crime.

Of course, in the working out of the plan suggested, there is abundant room for all the skill and wisdom which past history and modern experience can supply. Whether this or some better method shall finally prevail depends on so many uncalculated and incalculable contingencies, that he would be 199 a very venturesome prophet who should attempt to forecast the future. It does not, however, seem reasonable that, in all the upheavals of modern thought, the questioning of old methods, and the suggestions of new and better ones, which these final years of the century are bringing, the treatment of the criminal classes shall be the one question that defies solution, or that the new æon which is soon to open shall find us still bound to a system which is confessedly a failure. Is it too much to hope that we can greet the opening of the twentieth century with a lustrum of prison reform, which shall bring at once the noblest mercy to the criminal, combined with absolute protection to society from its most avowed and most persistent foes?

200

HOW TO INCREASE NATIONAL WEALTH BY THE EMPLOYMENT OF PARALYZED INDUSTRY.

BY B. O. FLOWER.

On the 18th of last May, while in a small restaurant on Fifth Avenue, in Chicago, my attention was attracted by a large number of men who had congregated on both sides of the street in front of the office of the Chicago Daily News . In answer to my inquiry, a gentleman at my side explained that these men were waiting to see the “Want” column of the News , in the hope of being able to secure work. “It is an old, old story,” he continued. “Day after day crowds of men gather here and anxiously wait for the News to appear, as this paper contains more ‘Want’ advertisements than any other Chicago daily.” I waited until the boys rushed from the office with the newly printed papers, and saw the men hurriedly buy copies. I noticed how scores upon scores of eyes searched the “Help Wanted” columns, and how, one by one, they started in quest of work. I noticed the countenances of the weary watchers. Among them were to be seen almost all types of faces, but all, save one, were anxious, careworn, or stolid. I shuddered as, standing inside the restaurant unobserved, I beheld this sight of appalling misery and national shame. The faces of these men have haunted me ever since. Hunger was there, hate was there, despair was hovering over more than one countenance. There were wan, dull eyes, wolfish eyes, and eyes eloquent with mute appeals for kindness. There was the hunted look of a beast at bay, and the craven expression of a broken spirit. One only among the throng seemed able to be merry, though his thin face and worn clothes indicated his wretchedness. The tragedy of these lives remains with me. I know that this awful condition is unnecessary. I know that a little 201 more conscience, a little more love, a keener sense of justice, and a little honest concern for the rights of men and the enduring welfare of the state, a settled determination to overcome this condition and place the good of the people and the cause of justice above a shortsighted policy of selfishness, would change the whole aspect of things, now so ominous, so menacing, and so essentially unjust. This panorama of exiled industry, seeking vainly for employment, may be witnessed from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

I am not of that number who can regard these spectacles with indifference, nor can I feel, as do some others, that because the present order is essentially unjust in its practical workings it is well to turn a cold shoulder to movements calculated to arrest the downward drift of life and lessen the unfathomable misery of the poor in order that the crisis may be hastened. For while I believe that the present order is as surely outgrown as was feudalism in the sixteenth century, and though I believe most profoundly that this order must pass away or civilization perish, as have perished the civilizations of former ages, yet I also appreciate the fact, which to me is very important, that the only way to bring about the revolution peaceably is, first, to educate the brain and touch the conscience of the people; and, second, to check the growing bitterness and hate in the hearts of our unfortunates by giving them employment and treating them with justice and humanity. If a crisis is precipitated, fed by blind hate and a bitterness born of a consciousness of injustice long endured, it will assume the form of an uncontrollable storm, a blind, passionate outburst, in which the guiding influences of reason, judgment, and conscience will be absent. It will spread devastation in all directions, destroying the innocent as well as the guilty. If, on the other hand, we push forward an intelligent educational agitation, appealing to the judgment, the conscience, and the sense of right in the people, and at the same time supply means for maintaining self-respecting manhood among the unemployed until this waiting time is over, our civilization will move onward without the crash or shock of force, the destruction of property, and the loss of life incident to all struggles in which physical force and blind passion dominate. It is necessary to examine this problem on the 202 side of human dignity and on the side of national life. The question of utility, though of far less concern in its ultimate effect on conditions, has also an important place in the discussion.

Only under conditions which are fundamentally unjust, and only where the finer sensibilities of man have been blinded and deadened, could it be possible to witness the spectacle of millions of men and women begging for work, and begging in vain, in a nation of fabulous wealth and almost boundless resources; and yet such a condition prevails in our republic to-day. It is, therefore, time for every patriotic citizen to lay aside all partisan contentions and face this great question as we would face any great danger which suddenly came upon the nation, not as partisans, but as patriots; not as warring factions seeking victory for some special body or party, but as men and women who have the welfare of the race at heart, and who appreciate the gravity of the situation. It is the eternal law of recompense that when justice is long denied and the rights of man are systematically ignored, though the sufferers may Samson-like crush themselves in the ruins of the temple, yet the temple and its inmates also must fall. Or if by some chance the ruin comes not through the strength of the burdened ones, it will nevertheless come with unerring certainty, and not unfrequently through the very excesses of those who have hardened their hearts against the cry of justice.

Such is the interdependence of the units in national life that a wrong committed against one injures the whole people; and when that wrong is inflicted upon a large number of the units, and is of long duration, its fatal effects become very apparent. You cannot crush a finger or a toe without causing your whole body to suffer in consequence. You may disregard the hurt, you may ignore the wound until mortification sets in, but the result means death or the loss of one of the most valuable members of your body. It is precisely so with national life; for such is the divine economy, such the inevitable law of progress, that only by conscious recognition of human brotherhood, and of the rights and obligations which it implies, can any nation or civilization move onward and upward without those great periods of depression and decline which too frequently end in total eclipse. 203

Shortsighted, indeed, is that policy which places gold above manhood. When lust for gain stifles the voice of conscience, and the cry of the disinherited is heard throughout a land of marvellous wealth, a nation is confronted by a deadly peril which calls for a supreme effort on the part of every man and woman of conviction.

It is useless to close our eyes to the fact that the rising tide of bitterness is turning into hate, and that hate darkens the eye of judgment, obscures reason, and deadens conscience. A few years ago, when I wrote a brief paper on the menace of the unemployed, I was assured that the deplorable condition then present was temporary, that in a few months at most it would be a thing of the past, and that therefore it was not a problem calling for the intervention of the government; but to-day there are far more unemployed than there were then. The problem is assuming gigantic proportions, and the instincts of self-preservation second the demand of humanity in calling for immediate measures for the relief and the maintenance of self-respecting manhood. Whenever a workingman becomes a tramp or sinks into the social cellar, as tens of thousands are now doing, the nation suffers a real injury. Present conditions call for prompt action. The unemployed must receive that succor which will in no conventional sense be charity, but which will elevate instead of degrade. And this can be done by the state allowing those armies of men who now unwillingly represent unproductive labor to become armies for increasing the wealth of the country, by extending the productive area of the nation’s domain, and by providing against the ruin which constantly menaces tens of thousands of industrious people in such a way as to stimulate business in all its ramifications by placing in circulation the equivalents for the work performed and the wealth earned. The ancient Romans understood the importance of having great works substantially built. The mighty highways which centred in the Eternal City, and the great public works which contributed so much to the comfort and happiness and grandeur of Rome, while not constructed with a view to affording employment to the unemployed, were wise measures for the benefit of the state, and it is safe to say that no expenditures were more serviceable or contributed more to the greatness and 204 essential wealth of the empire, save the money spent in the patronage of education.

The ancient Peruvians went further. They argued that the happiness, welfare, and prosperity of one was the concern of all. They banished poverty by giving every person productive work, and by their system transformed every foot of tillable land into productive gardens, enabling them to support in affluence an immense population, only a small fraction of which could have subsisted under conditions such as prevail with us. In our country to-day we have vast areas of useless land, only waiting to be transformed into tillable acres second in richness to no land in the country. To-day we have necessary work in the way of internal improvements which is imperatively demanded, and which, but for the slothfulness and indifference of our government, would be performed, thereby enormously increasing the wealth of the nation; while the performing of the same would give productive employment to millions of idle hands.

A striking illustration of the criminal neglect and shortsightedness of our government was seen this last spring in the devastation created by the floods in the Mississippi Valley, rendered possible through the inadequate levee system. Here the losses to crops and in stock killed are said to have been considerably over twelve million dollars, to say nothing of the enormous outlay which will be required to patch up the levees and make the devastated farms again habitable. This great loss would have been averted had the government acted upon the suggestions which I made some years ago in a paper on “Emergency Measures for Maintaining Self-respecting Manhood,” in which it was shown that a permanent levee was practicable, and could be built in such a way as to resist the floods, reclaim many hundreds of thousands of acres of rich land, and protect millions of dollars’ worth of property which is now under a yearly menace through danger of floods.

In this enterprise, which I shall again touch upon, we have a striking illustration of a practicable work which would immediately increase the national wealth far beyond the outlay required, while it would also change an army of idle consumers into an army of wealth-producers.

But as I wish to consider this question more at length a little 205 later, I now pass on to a brief notice of the vast tracts of land in the West, which have not yet fallen into the clutches of land syndicates, and which for a comparatively small outlay by proper irrigation could be transformed into garden spots. Take, for example, the State of Nevada. Here we find immense tracts of arid land, representing millions of acres, which to-day are unproductive for lack of moisture, but which, wherever irrigation has been introduced, have been transformed into wonderfully productive garden land. Mr. William M. Smythe, in the April Forum , has given some very interesting facts in regard to the agricultural resources of Nevada, from which we summarize the following:

What is true in regard to the possibilities of Nevada is true of large areas of land in other Western States and Territories. It must be remembered that irrigated land can be relied upon to yield bountiful crops with practical regularity, as the water-supply is ever present, while for most persons the fine pure air in these high regions is peculiarly healthful and invigorating. Thus the great West still offers millions of acres of exceedingly productive land which can be transformed into gardens and made to increase the national wealth by untold millions if the government will treat these tracts as any wise or thrifty private owner would treat them. If the government or the various commonwealths would take all the available land which can be 206 irrigated and give to the unemployed work at fair wages until the great desert tracts become fertile areas, the national or state domain would be enormously increased in wealth at a relatively small cost through the wise employment of the now paralyzed hand of industry.

Returning to the question of the Mississippi river, let our national government build a permanent levee, which, like the great highways of ancient Rome, should be built to endure for generations.

Eminent engineers who have examined the levees under the auspices of the Mississippi river commissioners, agree that the problem is one which can be successfully solved if a sufficient amount is appropriated for so gigantic an undertaking, which would require substantial uniformity in the width of the channel of the river by building spurs and dikes at points where the Mississippi is too wide, the proper riveting of the banks wherever caving is likely to occur, together with the building of permanent levees of a height and strength sufficient to confine the waters in the channel. It is stated that since 1865 the cost of repairs has amounted to considerably over forty million dollars, yet owing to the fact that this work is of a temporary character the benefits which would be derived from a permanent levee are lost, and every few years the floods necessitate fresh expenditures of vast sums of money. Hence this patchwork policy is shortsighted and in the long run the most expensive. The carrying out of a comprehensive plan for permanent improvements by the erection of impregnable levees and the governing of the currents by dikes and spurs, would give us a territory, now absolutely useless, which would annually add hundreds of millions of dollars to our national wealth.

The great arid plains of the West and the levees of the Mississippi are merely examples of internal improvements of a 207 perfectly legitimate character which could be undertaken most properly by the general government, under Sec. VIII of the Constitution, which authorizes the “raising of revenue to pay the debts and provide for the common defence and the general welfare of the United States.” By such internal improvements as those mentioned above the nation’s wealth would be increased to a far greater extent than by the amount of outlay required for the completion of the work, while these enterprises would at once give productive employment to our millions of out-of-works, and this army of employed would put into immediate circulation large sums of money which would at once stimulate business through all its ramifications and bring about the long-hoped-for good times.

But at the very threshold of the discussion we are met with the declaration that we have no money in the Treasury with which to carry on these great projects. Before answering this objection I wish to point out the fact that we have millions of dollars to spend for a useless navy, a navy which in the hands of our senile government does not protect the life or the property of American citizens, a navy which is a constant and an enormous expense. While almost unlimited sums can be raised for the building and equipment of battleships, we have not a dollar to aid honest industry to maintain self-respecting manhood by engaging in works which would add immensely to the real wealth of the nation.

And, again, before pointing out how this money could be raised, I would call attention to the fact that this cry is by no means a new one. It was raised, and with much more show of foundation, during the dark hours of the early sixties, but the great Civil War exploded the fallacy. One would think that in the presence of the stupendous facts connected with the conduct of our Civil War, even if the question of the value to the state of an independent, contented, and prosperous manhood should be left out of consideration, the shallowness of the objection would be so apparent that it would have no weight with thoughtful persons. Let us not forget that there was a time in the history of our country when the Treasury of our government was empty, a time of great national peril when gold had fled across the seas or into the vaults of the bankers and 208 usurers, as it ever flees in time of danger, when public credit was greatly impaired by the presence of war within our borders and a strong probability that even if the national government escaped overthrow a large number of the States would become an independent nation. In this crisis we had men in charge of the government who were statesmen, men great enough to rise to the emergency of the hour. Now, if we were able under such conditions to carry to a successful termination the most expensive and memorable civil war of modern times by the aid of the greenback, surely there would be no risk in resorting to a similar medium of exchange for the carrying on of a work which would immediately add to the nation’s resources and free from the bondage of involuntary idleness a large army of men who are now a burden to society and a danger to stable government.

If, however, the fiction by which bondholders enslave the people still holds such power over our legislators and the public mind that the menace of the growing army of unemployed, the injury to the state by the enforced degradation of her children, and the continued unproductivity of both soil and industry must go on unless a concession is made, it would be wiser to make the concession than to let the crime against manhood continue. I therefore suggest that bonds on the land to be reclaimed be issued to the amount of the national notes used for these great works in redeeming the now useless land. The bonds issued against these lands could be cancelled as the lands were sold. I do not for a moment hold that this is necessary. I only advance this suggestion in case the prejudice fostered by selfish and interested classes might otherwise defeat a work of such inconceivable importance.

The inevitable result which would follow such wise, statesmanlike, and humane proceedings on the part of the government may be briefly summarized as follows:

Through this judicious, far-sighted, and enlightened course the government would, first, so strengthen and intrench herself in the hearts of the people that armories and militia would be little needed against the menace of lawlessness within our borders , while this wise solicitude and care for the welfare of her citizens would make millions of persons, who to-day have 209 little or no love for a nation which is indifferent to their manly cry for work, loyal defenders of the flag. By such a broad, wise, and just course the United States would do more than she could in any other way to render herself impregnable in time of danger. Second, by affording millions of her citizens the opportunity to engage in productive work she would utilize a vast amount of idle energy in adding to the permanent wealth of the nation, and the state would be fulfilling the noble function of government to promote justice, increase happiness, and ennoble citizenship. She would be restoring hope and the spirit of independent manhood to her children, and so would prevent a great increase in beggary, in degradation, and in crime, which must inevitably follow unless present conditions are radically changed. From an economic point of view the government would be far richer through the amount saved from what otherwise would be required to provide prisons, poorhouses, and court expenses. Third, it would add vastly to the nation’s wealth in increasing by untold millions the annual product of real wealth, while it would also supply homes for millions of home-seekers. Fourth, it would bring prosperity to America.

Let us suppose three millions of those now idle should be thus enabled to engage in productive work, there would then be placed in circulation each week from five to ten million dollars more money than there is now, and it would be paid out in small amounts, so that the bulk of it would instantly go into general circulation. The men would not only purchase for their own needs, but would send a part of their earnings to their loved ones, who would thus be able to do what they cannot now do—buy coal, wood, groceries, and, indeed, life’s various necessaries. The prices of the farmer’s crops would naturally rise, and he in turn would be able to increase his buildings and purchase more machinery. The increased demand for clothing would raise the price of wool and cotton, while it would start up the factories without any resort to artificial measures, such as levying a tax on imported goods.

The difference between present hard times and low prices and good times and high prices would be illustrated in this way: To-day millions of our people are idle, a load and an expense; they cannot buy what they need at any price, for they have 210 nothing to buy with. Millions of others have to curtail in every way, frequently doing without many needed things, for times are such that it is impossible for them to do more than barely subsist. Now, the millions who to-day buy nothing, because they have nothing to buy with, under these provisions for internal improvements would soon be buying regularly, because they would have the wherewithal to buy. They would gladly pay the farmer, manufacturer, and merchant more than what they now ask because they would have something to buy with, while to-day they have nothing; and those other millions who are curtailing expenses to the last degree would gladly pay the increased amount, for all lines of productive business would receive an impetus from the great addition to the circulating medium put forth as a result of the productive work being carried on. Now, our tariff taxes may put up prices for the favored classes, but they thereby increase the burdens of all save those who are enabled to gain added wealth from the taxes imposed on the millions who are yet able to buy, while the small increase in the demand for work, so long as millions are unable to buy what is made, would make but little impression on the vast army of unemployed.

A tariff tax is a burden to the millions, stimulating prices artificially, and benefiting chiefly the very wealthy. But the plan for internal improvements here outlined would give all ablebodied men productive work which would benefit the nation far more than the amount of the outlay involved, and afford time for the general work of education, by which justice and equitable conditions could be brought about, to proceed. Those who love peace, those who would see mankind elevated and the wealth of the nation preserved and increased, should favor this great palliative movement for maintaining self-respecting manhood, for enriching the nation’s resources, and for insuring prosperity in the quickest and most healthful manner possible.

211

AN OPEN LETTER TO EASTERN CAPITALISTS.

BY CHARLES C. MILLARD.

Gentlemen: Against you individually, or as a class of persons who have accumulated more or less wealth, and who loan it at interest to those who perhaps have been less fortunate, I have not the least prejudice. I believe that yours is an honest as well as a legitimate business; that great wealth may be, and often is, won by honest means; and that it does not border upon the marvellous that the capitalist is often an honest man, and the pauper as often a rogue. I believe that you are as honest as other men are, and that if you fully understood the situation in the West and South, and knew that a certain line of conduct would result to your own advantage financially, and also be a great benefit to the whole country, you would act as other honest people would act under similar circumstances; and it is because I so believe, that I write this letter.

I write neither as a partisan nor in the interests of any party, but to give plain facts which can be easily verified, and to show how these facts are seen and felt by those who, like myself, have been born and bred on the boundless prairies, and have had a varied experience with the ups and downs of life on the sunset side of the Father of Waters. I hope by so doing to help you to realize the extent of the disasters which a continuance of the present financial policy will inevitably bring to you as well as to us.

The Actual Condition.

In 1886, the chief clerk and trusted agent of a great loan company, who has since been in the employ of Jarvis Conklin & Co., said to me: “There is plenty of money to loan, but the securities are practically exhausted.” Everything “in sight” was covered with a mortgage. The few who had escaped the mania of speculation did not want any mortgage on farm or city property. Loans since then have been mostly renewals, and for a time one company loaned money to be paid to another; 212 but, with a few exceptions, the Eastern money borrowed since 1880 has not been paid, and anyone familiar with the facts does not need the gift of prophecy to foretell that, under the present conditions, it never can or will be paid.

The mortgages, bonds, and most of the coupons you still hold, and, in many cases, you also have a deed to the property; but neither the one nor the other is of any practical present value. The mortgagor is dead, moved away, bankrupt, or working at daily labor—when he can get work—for his daily bread. Therefore the debt is worthless, and the property is but little better. The very best of it—costly business blocks in the heart of the cities—is unremunerative. No intelligent poor man would, or could, take a brick block as a gift and keep the taxes and interest paid.

And perhaps the larger share of the city property is unoccupied or paying no rental. He who rides upon a Western railroad can see the proof of this from the car windows. In every city, town, village, and on not a few farms, can be seen the broken or boarded-up windows which are the footprints, not of time, but of the Eastern mortgage. This property belongs to you. No Western man pays taxes or interest, and no one expects to pay the principal. No one wants the property; no one has any use for it; and no want ever existed which it was calculated to fill, except in the brain of the monomaniac who built it. Whether you have “foreclosed” or not, the property is virtually yours; the mortgagor has no equity in it. While he had an equity, the decline in prices affected that equity; now it affects only your interest.

You own our business buildings, mansions, and cottages. You have an everlasting grip on our public buildings, Board of Trade halls, Young Men’s Christian Association buildings, and even our churches. The Rev. Mr. Wooley, in the pulpit of the Central Christian Church of Wichita, said recently: “Every church building in this city, except one, is heavily incumbered, and most of them are practically insolvent.” Even the “calamity howlers” of the “Populist” party are afraid or ashamed to tell the truth, “and the whole truth,” about our financial condition.

And it is not improving. A few farm mortgages are being 213 paid, and scarcely any new ones are being made except renewals; but all the reduction so made is more than equalled by the sum of defaulted interest payments on mortgages outstanding. The statements in the papers, that the mortgage indebtedness of Kansas—or some other State—was reduced so many thousand dollars during the past year, are misleading. They are regularly published to restore “confidence.” For the benefit of my Eastern brother, I will explain, lest he may imagine that we are each year paying back more money than we borrowed during that time, and that therefore, in the course of geologic time, our debts would be paid.

The “reduction” is a reduction of record only. I have known of the payment of $25 to reduce the record of $650, and $20 to make a “reduction” of $400; and for various reasons many mortgages are cancelled without any cash payment. These are well-known facts, and I could give a long list of those which have come under my own personal observation, while the mortgages which I have known to be paid in full might be counted on the fingers of one hand.

In addition to this, nearly every city or incorporated town, and many of the counties, have a bonded indebtedness as large as they can possibly carry. In some cases bonds have been issued and sold to pay interest on other bonds, and in one case at least—Pratt Centre—the interest payments have been discontinued “by order of the council.”

The Future Prospect.

So far I have been dealing only with the past and the present, and have given only a plain statement of facts, the value of which must depend upon my capacity as an observer, my opportunities for observation, and my truthfulness as a writer. If you are inclined to be sceptical, inquire of your neighbors who hold, or have held, Western mortgages. The value of my forecast of the immediate future must depend upon the character of my reasoning and judgment.

As “death and taxes” are certain, it is safe to predict that taxes will be levied to pay the interest, and afterwards the principal, of city bonds. Also, it may be assumed that you, who own the larger and more valuable share of the property, will 214 pay the lion’s share of the taxes. The Western man has “let go”; he is not “in the deal”; and when one capitalist is taxed to pay another, he is not an “interested” party. I sympathize with you. You have exchanged good money for bad property; and with the property you have assumed the bulk of our burden of taxation . You must pay our bonds, pay for the repairs and improvements of public property, pay for educating our children and making our laws, and yet you have no voice in determining when, how, or to what extent these things shall be done; nor power to prevent the jobs and steals which accompany such transactions in Kansas as well as in New York.

But, notwithstanding my sympathy, and the additional fact that I must indirectly suffer from the effects of your suicidal policy, it is amusing to see you trying to squeeze the remaining value out of your own property . For, I repeat, it is yours. Interest payments will cease in the same ratio that they have ceased, and for the same reasons. And the principal cause will be that the mortgagor has discovered that he has no equity in the property. If property is worth only “what it will bring in money,” there are few pieces of mortgaged property in the West in which there still remains an equity. But many farmers are economizing and wearing rags in order to make interest payments, which can only result in putting the evil day a little further off.

The Westerner is a practical man. When he finds that the equity is all squeezed out of his property, and that it is still being squeezed at the same rate, he stops paying taxes and interest, uses the property free while you are foreclosing, saves up a little money, buys a house for about one-tenth of the money it cost to build it, moves it onto a “clear” lot, and is then ready to help you squeeze your property by voting for taxes for various purposes. Under like circumstances the farmer raises one or two crops without rent, taxes, or interest, clothes his family more comfortably, replaces worn-out machinery, rents a farm, and is in better circumstances than he has been for years.

The Proposed Remedy.

It may be that there is no remedy, but that will not prevent us from trying to find one. During the last ten years we have 215 experimented. We have tried Democratic rule and Republican rule; the “McKinley bill” and the “Wilson bill”; “tariff for protection” and “tariff for revenue only”; a Treasury “surplus” and a Treasury “deficit”; yet none of these things have sensibly affected the squeezing process. We have lost our faith in the tariff and in tariff-tinkering, as well as in the leaders who recommend it. We have dismissed our old political leaders and chosen new ones; and as your “gold-standard” squeezing policy is the only rational cause “in sight” for the origin and continuance of our condition—to use an expressive Western phrase—we are “going for it.”

We are willing that you should own and control the property which was ours, and in which your money was invested, but when you attempt to force upon us your financial policy, your politics, and your religion, we object. You may own and control the property, but not us; here we draw the line. This is what Marsh Murdock had in his mental view when he said at the St. Louis Convention, “You want to own the country and run it too.” But the veteran editor of the Eagle has changed his mind and consented to being “run.”

You have bought the leading papers, caused our editors to “change their minds,” flooded the country with a trashy literature that is an insult to our intelligence, and provided funds to pay third-rate preachers for preaching to us a religion which we do not want. We are not rich, yet we are able to pay for our education and our religion—if it is a kind that will be of any use to us.

We do not fear the result of our experiment. If we fail, the same old squeeze will continue; if we succeed, there is a prospect of relief. Without variation, there is not even a prospect of bettering our condition. If we should succeed in creating that financial paradox, a fifty-three-cent dollar, we are such political heretics as to prefer that kind of a dollar to none, or to “confidence.” We have unbounded confidence in the dollars which jingle in our pockets, but very little in those which exist only in the imagination, and are represented by stocks, bonds, checks, drafts, clearing-house certificates, and other devices, which always fail to perform the function of money in the last extremity, when money is most needed. 216

Do not allow yourselves to be terrified at the ghost of a silver dollar, for the ghost of it is all that will ever trouble you. In the event of free coinage, the trains going East will not be loaded with silver dollars to pay off old mortgages. I have seen a statement in Eastern papers to the effect that we wanted cheap money with which to pay our debts. It is a base slander; every intelligent Western man knows that, whatever happens short of the miraculous, only a small share of our mortgage debts will be paid.

All the holdings you now have in the West, new and old taken together, are not worth fifty-three cents on the dollar; and you cannot now in any way realize that much from them; and if your present policy is indefinitely continued you have no prospect of ever realizing fifty-three per cent on your investments. If, then, you should be paid in silver dollars, or if a larger share of the loans should be paid under the new conditions, you would be a gainer and not a loser by the change. It seems to me that an increase in the volume of money and rising prices are the opportunity for you to realize from your holdings, for without some favorable change you will hardly realize twenty-five per cent.

You can test the truth of these statements. Take twenty holdings, not selected, and try to convert them into cash. Or offer them to some capitalist who has travelled extensively in the West during the last five years. Time will convince you, if nothing else will; but the knowledge may come a little too late for practical purposes. You ought to be with us in this free-silver movement, and you would be if you knew what we know. We are not fools, although we may appear so to you; we know what we want, and we are trying to get it.

You threaten “to draw in your money from the West.” If you have any money in the West which you can “draw in,” the sooner you do it the better; it will be an heroic remedy instead of misery long drawn out. A “panic” will return like a boomerang upon yourselves, and make your property still less valuable. You can cause a panic, break our business men, make more idle men and tramps, and, in short, concentrate three or four years of squeezing into a few weeks or months; but what benefit can you hope to derive from it? 217

Whatever adds to our prosperity will increase the actual value of your holdings; our interests are identical, then why should you desire the continuance of present conditions? Have the present conditions done anything for you, as far as Western investments are concerned? Is not your increase of capital simply an increase “on paper” which you can never realize? We cordially invite you to join us in our effort to bring on an era of prosperity; forsake your political leaders, as we have forsaken ours, and use at least as much common sense in politics as you do in business.

Save this article; it will be good reading after the election is over. It is not politics, it is business; it is the naked truth. The writer does not want to borrow any money; he seeks no office, is not a politician, has no axe to grind, and expects no reward, except to share in the general prosperity, as he has shared in the general adversity, in the capacity of a humble citizen.

Wichita, Kansas.

218

THE TELEGRAPH MONOPOLY.

BY PROF. FRANK PARSONS.

XIII.

10. The Union of Telegraph and Post is needed for the Interests of the Post as well as for those of the Telegraph. It will elevate the skill and competency of postal employees. When mails do not arrive on time, it will inform the public thronging the post office, not merely that the mail has not arrived, but when it will arrive. It will permit the employment of the telegraph in tracing a missent letter or package, rectifying an erroneous address, discovering the whereabouts of an absentee, etc. It will permit the more rapid extension of the free-delivery system by affording a larger basis for its sustenance. It will multiply many fold the rapidity in transmitting letters across the continent.

The telegraph is naturally a part of the post office, [3] as much a part of it as the sewing machine is a part of a dressmaking establishment. Suppose the government were in the clothing business (as it might have been to advantage during the war), and continued to sew the garments entirely by hand, leaving the sewing machine to private enterprise; it would be a charming situation for private enterprise, but not very delightful for the government. With such advantages private enterprise would be apt to deprive the government of the best part of its business in spite of its willingness to work for people at cost. The same thing has happened to some extent with the telegraph and telephone, and will happen to a far greater extent if they are allowed to continue in private control. If trunk lines for automatic transit were established by a private company, even at 25 cents 219 per hundred words (a rate sufficient to pay a very large profit on a corporate investment, water and all), the post office would soon lose a considerable portion of its most valuable business, the letter mail between the large cities. [4]

In times of pestilence the telegraph will save the post office from embargo. A letter from Port Gibson, Miss., says:

The infection does not travel on an electric wire, and if the post office possessed the telegraph, its business would go smoothly on in spite of the plague, instead of being brought to a dead standstill throughout the region of disaster at the very time when hearts are breaking for daily news, and communication is of the utmost importance to alleviate the quarantine.

11. Employees will be benefited by passing from a régime of oppression to one of elevation; from low wages [6] and long hours 220 to high wages and short hours; from a service almost hopeless of promotion to a service of almost limitless possibilities to the man of character, brain, and energy; from an employment in which they are regarded as so much machinery to be obtained at the lowest market rates and worked for all the profit there is in them to an employment in which their comfort and advancement are among the main objects of solicitude with the management; from a business in which they have no share to a business in which they are equal partners with all their fellow-citizens; from serfdom to liberty and manhood. No more boycotting and black-listing, no more denial of the rights of organization and petition.

Some of the consequences will be the lifting of thousands to a higher plane of living, the annihilation of strikes by uprooting the causes of them, [7] the improvement of the service as already stated under the seventh sub-head of this section, etc., etc.

12. The press will be relieved of an ever present tyranny likely at any moment to transfer itself from the potential to the real. [8] Sen. Report 242, 43-1, p. 5, says:

221

Sen. Rep. 577, 48-1, p. 16, says:

The press of the nation will not be forbidden to criticise the news, nor will any paper be excluded from equal participation in the benefits of the telegraph service—equal rates to all, special privileges to none. Moreover, the rates will be greatly reduced for all press despatches, and papers will be able to buy the world’s history every day for a fraction of what they pay now for imperfect and garbled reports.

As a result of National Ownership in England, “the press rates have been reduced so low that every country paper can afford to print the latest telegraphic despatches as it goes to press, and a telegraph or telephone is at every country post office.” [9]

13. Discrimination will receive a serious blow. No more telegraph rebates of 20 or 40 or 50 per cent to favored individuals and corporations. No more telegraph blanks for legislators, politicians, and lobbyists. No more delaying B’s despatch until the rival message of C is sent. No more precedence for bucket-shops and gamblers over honest business and government despatches.

14. Gambling in government stocks will cease , speculators 222 in wheat, corn, pork, copper, oil, and other products of industry will be unable to control the wires for their uses, or even secure a precedence over the lines, and the Louisiana Lottery and similar frauds will no longer find a refuge in the telegraph as they do at present. The post office has been taken away from the gamblers; it is time the telegraph were taken from them also. The telegraph in the hands of cunning men may be the means of abstracting millions of money from the producers of the country, and may even become a potent factor in the causation of panic and depression. On page 3 of his Argument for a postal telegraph, Mr. Wanamaker says:

Take the telegraph away from the speculators and give it to the producers and consumers, that they may come into the closest possible relations.

15. Political corruption will lose an able contributor when the telegraph ceases to belong to a private corporation (See Part VII, Arena , July, 1896).

16. A Postal telegraph will be a step toward a fairer distribution of wealth and away from the congestion of power and wealth in the hands of a few unscrupulous men, which is one of the chief dangers threatening the future of the country (See Part VIII, Arena , August, 1896). On this ground alone the establishment of a national telegraph would be justified, were there no other reason in the case.

17. The public safety demands a national telegraph , not merely as a precaution against corruption, speculation, and panic, congestion of wealth and power, strikes, and duress of the press, but also as a military measure and a valuable addition to the police power of the government,—a means of strength in time of war, and a conservator of law and order by aiding in the capture of criminals and in the general enforcement of the law. We have already quoted the opinion of Mr. Scudamore that the postal telegraph “will strengthen the country from hostility from without, and the maintaining of law and order within the kingdom.” Let us call attention here to the weighty words 223 of the New York Public , cited in Wanamaker’s Argument, pp. 206-7:

18. It will be a step toward civil-service reform. Every increase of public business brings us nearer to thorough civil-service reform, because it enhances the importance of that reform, impresses the need of it more strongly upon the people, and deepens their sentiment in its favor. This has been the experience of European cities and states. A good reason why they are ahead of us in civil-service management, is because they are ahead of us in the public ownership of railroads, telegraphs, telephones, etc.

In the case of the telegraph there are special reasons to expect that government control would carry with it an extension of the civil-service principle. In the opinion of Mr. Rosewater the postal telegraph “would be an entering wedge for the greatest possible success of the civil service.” He says:

Prof. Ely says:

The country would insist upon it. The acquisition of the telegraph lines by the nation would convert more people to civil-service reform in one day than all the speeches which have ever been delivered on the subject would win to this good cause in a year. [11]

The plan advocated in this paper includes the civil-service act as one of its essential terms, for without it we run the risk of having, for a time at least, boss-ownership instead of public ownership of the telegraph. The recent extension of the civil-service act to 30,000 new positions, argues well for the future of this great reform. [12] That such an order should have come from President Cleveland, who has not been noted for his absence of partisan feeling, indicates that the election of a man of thorough independence would probably complete the transformation of our service. Even without that, the work will be done by the piece, each president ordering a section into line at the end of his term when the delay of justice can no longer aid his own political purposes, but may, on the contrary, strengthen his successor. Or he may act before the end of his term and from less selfish motives; the main thing for the nation is that he act.

19. The public ownership of the telegraph will remove one of the antagonisms that weaken the cohesion of society and retard the development of civilization. [13]

20. It will be a step toward coöperation and partnership, 225 away from private monopoly, usurpations, and taxation without representation. [14]

Let us now see what the defendants have to say; that means the Western Union, for, as Mr. Bell said to the Senate Committee on Post offices and Post roads, May 20th, 1896:

226

THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF THE CUBANS.

BY THOMAS W. STEEP.

When the recognition of belligerency was argued for the Cubans by the friends of Cuba in Congress, it became a question of pivotal importance as to whether the Cubans had a government to recognize as dual to that of Spain; whether the government, if any, was merely nominal or chimerical; whether, if existing and operating, it had the potency to receive recognition and thus justify such action by the United States.

The first thing that attracted my interest on arriving at the war field of Cuba, in the Province of Santiago, early one sunny morning in January, was the obsequious ceremony of the government prefecto who received me and gave me my first roasted boniato , upon which I afterwards so often appeased hunger. I had come out on the field by crawling beneath the barbed-wire military line around Santiago one night and marching by stealth in the early dawn to the mountains and over them to the interior. A body of Cubans escorted me. Fatigued and hungry, the prefecto’s attention in serving coffee and boniatos seemed over-due kindness. I offered to pay him, but he raised his hands and said, “No! No!” He was a government officer. From that time on my interest was enlisted in the study of the civil organization of the Cubans.

When ex-President Cleveland intimated that the civil government provisional of the Cuban insurgents was puerile and immature, and said it was, for the most part, a government on paper, he was more correct than otherwise. In the first place, however, let me say that the Cubans have a government, that it is not an impractical one, that the people are loyal to it. To this loyalty, which is so striking for its widespread prevalence, and so sympathy-eliciting because of the sacrifices which are made for it by the Cubans, I shall refer later.

The statement made by the ex-President, while for the most part correct, is superficial, because it does not substantiate its 227 assertiveness. It is one that any intelligent observer of the anterior conditions of Cuba last December might have correctly though vaguely made.

The Cuban government is immature. To say that most of it exists on paper is not sinistrous to an ambitious civil organization which has been in existence but two years. Schemed exactly like that of the States, the unfavorable condition under which it labors makes many of its functions of mere nominal existence. For instance, the Secretary of State just at this time has no duty to perform other than, perhaps, to doff his figurative robes of state and get out and fight. The Secretary of War has no routine office, because the Cubans have no diplomatic corps and the rebellion is conducted by aggressive generals who have the munitions of war in their own hands.

Yet the Cuban insurgents have established a civil organization in the interior over which they hold sway, the strength and qualities of endurance and prominence of which defy the government of Spain itself. The remoteness of the Cuban headquarters, and the control which Spain has had over the regular news channels that lead from Cuba, have kept the world largely in ignorance of the real condition of the Cuban insurgents.

Fundamentally and upon which the plans of the government are drawn, the Republic of Cuba now comprehends all the area of the island of Cuba. The disposition taken by the head civil officers is that the entire island is under dominion of the Cuban Republic, but that because some powerful foreign enemy has landed on certain parts and taken possession—as, for instance, Havana and its harbor, and Santiago and other cities—the civil rule cannot be extended into these quarters until by strategy the enemy can be driven from the shores of Cuba. In the national organization the power of government was transferred by the popular assembly to a Council of Government. Then departments were formed, with secretaries at the head—state, war, foreign affairs, interior, and finances. At the head of the government were placed a provisional President and Vice-President. In the Council of Government is vested the legislative power.

Politically the island is divided into four States, Oriente, Camaguey, Las Villas, and Occidente. Each State is divided 228 into districts, and each district into as many prefecturas and sub-prefecturas as are deemed necessary. A district has from seven to fifteen prefecturas. The State is presided over by a Governor, who reports to the Secretary of Interior. The Lieutenant-Governor is under the Governor, and has jurisdiction over a district. His corps consists of one secretary and one assistant clerk. The prefectura is the smallest political subdivision but one—the sub-prefectura. The prefectura has a secretary and assistants. Then follow the sub-prefecturas, of which there are generally from four to eight in each prefectura.

The Lieutenant-Governor is the intermediary between the Governor and the prefectura. Besides his executive functions the prefecto has judicial power. He records all contracts between citizens, including marriages. He has the power to form a jury and to try all cases, from the simplest intrigues to those of spies guilty of treason, whenever the cases cannot be submitted to court-martial.

Every portion of territory possessed by the Cubans is subject to civil order. The minutest detail is so accurately and delicately balanced that, though the thoroughness for which the civil officers are even now adroitly working has not yet been attained, the whole governmental machinery is in harmonic operation.

The facts which I have set down relative to the geographic distribution of the government I have myself seen. I spent much time in the saddle on the march with Carlos Manuel de Cespedes, who, as Governor of Oriente, conducts the affairs of state in the saddle. With him I visited the prefectural workshops and many well-managed prefecturas. I saw much rearranging and readjusting of these functions by the Governor.

Almost the first thing the Governor said to me at our first meeting at Baire Arriba, was: “I have been wishing for months that I could get hold of an American newspaper man to show him the inside of the revolution. The American people don’t know how strong we are. They have no way of finding out. Now I will show you our civil government as it is in operation.” We visited the medical posts—“drug-stores” as the Cubans call them—the tanneries, workshops, and the various officials, including the tax-collector. 229

Supplementary to the regular lines of civic routine are other branches of organization necessitated by the war. The most important of these is that of the tax-collector. The State tax-collector has as many subordinate officers as the Governor. Taxes are levied on those engaged in commercial pursuits. This commerce is, of course, only internal. The levying of taxes and the subsequent shipment of Spanish money to the United States for use by the Junta has created great scarcity of money among the insurgents. The schedule in effect when I was with chief tax-collector Tomas Pedro Grinan, in February, was as follows:

The commerce consists of the exchange of the products of one part of the island with those of another. I once saw Cespedes stop a coffee merchant, and, upon his inability to produce a receipt for the tax on the coffee he was transporting, take into custody him and twelve little pack-mules. The man pleaded that there was no tax-collector in the vicinity when he started on his journey, paid his fine, which I think was thirty pesos, and continued his march with a receipt for taxes.

Four important branches of the government of the Republic of Cuba are the territorial guard, the coast inspection, the postal service, and the workshop system. Each prefectura has under its supervision ten armed territorial guards, who serve also as police. These guards scout the Spanish columns when they venture from their blockhouses.

Every district with a seacoast has a civil coast inspector, who ranks as a captain in the army. He is assisted by a sub-inspector, who acts as his secretary. The inspectors have established along the coast line and in every bay and inlet watch posts, commanded each by a vigilant, who has under him eight or ten coast-guards. In this way, when a Spanish man-of-war sets out 230 from a port, the news is signalled along the coast, and the Cubans, if she be in sight of the land, watch every movement of the ship. The coast-guards have captured many small Spanish sailing vessels.

Saltmaking is carried on under the direction of an inspector. All the salt consumed by the Cubans is made from distilled sea water. A hundred men are continually boiling sea water in Santiago de Cuba province. These saltmakers are ready at all times to take up arms.

The postal system is under the direct care of the Governor of each State. Along the rough roads at intervals of ten or fifteen miles are established the Cuban postmasters, each supplied with from four to eight couriers. In this way official as well as private communications are carried to any part of the island. Each post office is supplied with a registering stamp, so that the time of the coming or going of every parcel is registered upon it. There is a dead-letter office, and the lists are published monthly at the presses of El Cubano Libre .

The workshops are under charge of foremen. These shops turn out all kinds of roughly made but substantial leather goods, such as shoes, boots, bags, saddles, straps, and belts. Gun shops, powder factories, and cartridge factories are said to exist on the island, but I never saw them. The making of other metal articles, such as cooking utensils, is in its infancy.

The Cubans are struggling hard to form some sort of a school system. The “little press in the woods” was just printing a little primer, written on the fields, to be distributed among families for the tutoring of children when I left the printing establishment last January.

The medical posts and stations are under military order, and are purely provisional. The post of El Mate, in Jiguani, I found in charge of Dr. Farrel, a graduate of a medical institute in Spain, and Dr. Rafael de Lorie of New York. This post is tolerably well stocked. It contains about one hundred pounds of antiseptic plasters, tablets and gauzes, 10,000 quinine pills and powders, thirty pounds of drugs, ten pounds of narcotics, and fifty quarts of tonics.

Like the whole military system of the Cubans, this post has an objectionable management, subject only to the orders of a few 231 officials, so that it does little practical good, and many persons are dying for want of proper medical attention.

I have told in this article what I have seen during four months of constant travel among the insurgents.

When it is remembered that the Cubans have spread the rebellion over more than two-thirds of the area of the island, and have carried into effect, for their purposes, a provisional form of government successfully in the time of war, it is reasonable to suppose that they are capable of rearranging their government and maintaining it in time of peace.

232

A NOTED AMERICAN PREACHER.

BY DUNCAN McDERMID, M. A.

It is interesting, while it is said that preaching is losing its ancient power, to find here and there a preacher whose influence is increasing instead of diminishing. One of these is the Rev. Minot J. Savage, D. D., of the Unitarian Church.

The writer desires to call attention to the two essential conditions of this preacher’s influence and popularity. This will be instructive not only to the public, but to the clerical profession as well. One of these conditions may be found in the wide latitude of American opinion, especially as it expresses itself in New England, and particularly in the city of Boston where Mr. Savage spent many years as a preacher.

I.

In the community in which one lives, no less than in himself, often lies the secret of a man’s strength and greatness. The individual shares the endowment or potency of those impersonal forces which sustain and enhance public life. The spirit which animates the broader ranges of general history acts with unhindered freedom on the narrower sphere of the individual mind and often becomes the creator of its better moments. Silent influences, hidden providences, are at work in society of which the individual has no suspicion, and whose effects cannot be recorded in statistics. Below the plane of conscious recognition there are far-reaching movements of thought which transcend our powers of understanding, but which act with almost unbounded sway in controlling the thought and life of each person. The early promise is fulfilled in the ripening powers of the mind under the cumulative influences which nourish it from without. In the order which surrounds the individual, and in the movement of which he has become a part, we see, as clearly as in himself, the inevitable promise of his ultimate destiny.

In whatever pertains to liberal culture Boston is never weak or wavering. Boston impresses one as possessing innate respect and enthusiasm for intellectual supremacy, and reverence for 233 the pure sentiments of religion as continuous forces in human life. For two and a half centuries it has been the wish and work of her most cultivated minds to give human thought and life the highest expression; and this has been done with monumental activity. In Boston, culture and religious piety have never been decadent; over and above the controversies and schisms and sectarian quarrels which from time to time have rent the churches, they have remained intact. In spite of the manifold currents of opposing tendencies, which now and then threaten to overwhelm cherished beliefs and to lift the world off its hinges, they remain essential elements in this city’s social life. They are stern present necessities, unwritten and immutable laws which she will not and cannot transgress. From the founding of the city by the “choice spirits” of the seventeenth century, they have retained their vitality and have been affirmed without doubt or debate. With the growing demands and maturity of her civilization she reiterates them as her loftiest and most sacred privileges, subject to no vicissitudes. With these primitive traits eternally vital, thought is quick, and intellectual enthusiasm spreads rapidly. Boston is always stirring with “new ideas” and with the passion for a broader ethical and religious development. The character and repute which she acquired in former days for literary taste, clerical influence, and the administration of religion are to-day influencing surrounding secularity and the hurrying concerns of daily life. They are animating every institution and ordinance, every supreme and exquisite medium of feeling, every revelation of truth and hope in the human mind. In this exhaustless tide of thought and aspiration, which we may accept as Boston’s native product, it is easy to interest the people and to unite them in any attempt for the good of mankind under the sanction of culture, benevolence, or religion.

But religion is felt to be Boston’s greatest need and glory. In this city of philosophy and poetry, art and business energy, religious faith and life have their proper place, and are invested with power and dignity. Fixed habit and traditional thought contribute, without doubt, to the need and sacredness of religion; yet its transcendent results are due to the permanent disposition of the people. They are the appropriate manifestation 234 of a religious culture and spirit that are fitted for all time, the logic of truths born of religious intuitions working out in the most practical results. However universally certain religious beliefs are ignored, there is no disposition to put culture or philanthropy above the gospel, the school above the church, or to make the schoolmaster, the literary autocrat, or the princes of wealth take precedence of the preacher. The spirit of conventionalism reigns more or less in Boston’s religious life; yet religion makes an irresistible appeal to the understanding, the conscience, and the heart. Everything is compelled to bow to its influence and to feel its inspiration. Although our churches present various theological tendencies, from the stiffest orthodoxy to the freest rationalism and pantheism, and with creeds yet confessedly nowhere settled, reason never pronounces religion absurd; to it homage is accorded. It is still the deepest and holiest interest of man. We all have an elevated sense of its vast importance in the destiny of mankind. Its manifestations may change, but its spirit is ever the same. While edifices of towering magnificence, grand displays of musical talent, time-honored ordinances, and attractions for popular reverence are fashionable and full of beauty and significance, and, possibly, prudent means to stimulate our patronage and to save to the ranks of the churches the votaries of all that is artistic and refining and impressive, they are no sure sign that spiritual life is departing; they have their utility, they foster the higher interests of mind and heart. These symbols of religious faith are not the productions of cold, speculative reasoning, but the statement of truth wrought into the convictions of the devout and spiritually minded.

Guided by these facts we may assume that the man who distinguishes himself in Boston as a preacher is one to whom considerable interest attaches. Upon such a man, as upon all her citizens of rare attainments and peculiar personal excellence, she confers distinction.

The Rev. Minot J. Savage, D. D., who recently changed his residence and his ministry from Boston to New York, and whose successful work in the former city may be a prophecy of enduring honors in the latter, has thus distinguished himself and been rewarded. 235

When Mr. Savage came from the West to Boston, he came “as a stranger,” as I myself heard him say. For years he thought and walked and worked alone. He was unpopular, and he felt his unpopularity. All religious sects, even that of his own persuasion, were critical and sceptical. As a preacher he had fellowship nowhere. He was met as a preacher of unwelcome and unwholesome doctrines. But he came as one having a special dispensation, as the witness and repository of new truth, as the representative of no low and paltry type of the Christian ministry, but as a living testimony to the reality and power and excellency of religion and its institutions. He felt the difficulties with which he had to contend. They were manifold, subtle, and fraught with deepest peril to his ministry. Prejudices, precedents, and the theology of the schools—whose only merit seemed to be that it was smitten with a passion to reduce Christian doctrine to logical form—were arrayed in open hostility to him. He was met by the régime of ecclesiastical orders, by men who preached the Gospel according to established and venerable routine, and whose credentials, not their wisdom, were their only power. But although he felt himself to be a persona non grata ,—another unpopular person to suffer for his beliefs,—he girded himself for earnest uncompromising warfare. He planted against every church his strongest batteries of criticism, satire, and sarcasm. He poured forth his thoughts in words that made men’s ears tingle, till the protestations of his adversaries fell from their lips with something of a hollow sound. Half preacher, half assassin, as he was thought to be, repudiating as offensive the doctrines of the Cross, and hating with every drop of his blood the general traditions and faith of the Church, he worked and awaited the day of his triumph. It came.

Boston is slow to recognize new prophets; yet religious belief of every kind is treated with gentleness and indulgence. The preachers of the city might regard Mr. Savage as a teacher of “positive error,” but they could not object to the hospitality of Boston, a citizen and preacher of which Mr. Savage became on the footing of democratic fraternity. By the free development of reason and the spread of intelligence Boston has become temperate and tolerant. She will not enslave the understanding or deny anyone one vestige of religious freedom. With her, religion 236 is a practical and spiritual thing rather than a theoretic and ceremonial. The latter helps to stimulate the former to the fullest discharge of duty, but does not in itself constitute religion. The one comes by internal necessity, the other belongs to the sphere of outward operation, of inventive and enterprising minds. Religion is a living mode of thought sustained by personal character, and needs not ambitious terminology or supervision. Boston trusts her instincts, as Emerson has taught her, and asks only ample scope for the imperative working of her religious sentiment and the life of the heart.

Under these favoring conditions, by which Boston, like a mother, works out her own character in the spirit and life of her gifted men, the Rev. Mr. Savage was impelled onward in his daring enterprise. With stern fidelity Boston exercised a definite and pervasive influence on Mr. Savage’s mind. Although his religious thinking came upon the public like a new birth, he was only reiterating its progressive thought and the stout emphasis it placed on thinking out religion in intelligible terms and in all the breadth of its activities. Instrumental rather than absolute, Boston’s versatile and expansive thought furnished the new preacher his coveted opportunity. Her faith failed not, nor did her courage falter. Silently she was assailing the old theology and elaborating the new, in which she has unhesitating belief, and which entered with enlightening and nourishing force into Mr. Savage’s broad and free opinions. It came to him as the expression of the abiding atmosphere in which he dwelt and with a beneficent bearing on his ministry. Favored thus by the concurrent voices of those to whom he ministered, and by the general freedom and grace of the entire community, Mr. Savage made a real and salutary advance in his religious work in Boston. And supported by the judgment of an ever widening public, conservative thinkers about him felt his influence on current religious opinion. While he indulged a liberty of speculation, he instilled religious habits of thought and the spirit of worship into many inquiring minds, and enabled them to identify themselves with the highest development of his own religious consciousness. Boston and vicinity became fully appreciative of the distinctiveness of his mission and of his apprehensions of the truth. In recognition, therefore, of the unmeasured 237 praise and enthusiastic acceptance which he received from the public, he was honored, at the close of his ministry in Boston, with the degree of Doctor of Divinity at Harvard University. Harvard thus expressed her highest confidence in the truth and permanence of his ministry. This famous institution of classic, scientific, philosophic, and sacred learning attested the sanity of the mind and doctrines of this once obscure and despised but now noted preacher.

II.

Another condition of the Rev. Minot J. Savage’s influence and popularity as a preacher is his ethical intensity.

In the preceding section I have spoken of what has actually taken place. I have there shown the favoring conditions under which Mr. Savage labored in the city which was to him both friend and teacher, and where he has done his most efficient work as a preacher. The particular type of religious thought represented by him in the pulpit has not been brought about by his or any man’s device. For generations it has been pouring itself forth from mind to mind in philosophy, science, poetry, and religious thought. He did not initiate any distinctive movement; he only helped to popularize and make permanent doctrines which already had found favor among the people. He emphasized these and vitalized anew their application to the Christian religion. In this section I shall devote myself to a study of the ethical intensity of his ministry.

The Rev. Mr. Savage’s ministry of nearly a quarter of a century in Boston teaches some important lessons. And while he has had many critics, no one has yet displayed and made current his most emphatic qualities as a preacher. In attempting this the writer does so not from the standpoint of the theologian or the professional clergyman, but from that of a liberal thinker with mind unfettered by any prepossession.

The first thing to be noted is the candor of the man, the great sincerity which marks whatever he says and does. His theology is simple; his creed, which is neither the Apostles’ nor the Nicene, nor the utterances of modern pontiffs, but in a measure his own, is readily comprehended, and betrays a sweet reasonableness which invites the subscription of anyone without 238 fear or trembling or convulsive revolution. And while some of his fundamental beliefs impinge against current prejudices and awaken enmities, he fearlessly submits them to the judgment and common sense of mankind. What he believes he preaches, and what he does not he rejects with all the vehemence of a man of conviction. Correct modes or forms of religious thought he conceives to be necessary, and the more so the firmer will be one’s principles of duty. Yet essential and sanctifying as this is, more essential in his opinion is an honest mind,—a mind that is faithful in the pursuit of truth and true to its own convictions and inspirations. He believes that the most perfect man is he who is most diligent in duty and fervent in spirit; who incorporates the truth into his selfhood; who toils with a prompt and ardent devotion to know the truth, to maintain his opinions firmly, to diffuse and propagate them by every means consistent with a perfect character. With unselfish courage Mr. Savage resists every allurement to compromise. Never timid, never complaisant or patronizing, he exhibits some of the rarest virtues of the human mind. Oh that there were more like him in this indolent and obsequious world!

Compared with Mr. Savage’s strength of character, how contemptible are some of the clerical and theological enigmas of our day. Waning and waxing periods are not uncommon in our pulpits and our schools of divinity. Now and then they diffuse a feeble as well as a strong glimmer of religious virtue, and too often become the presages of things with which we have no patience. It is painful to see preachers and professors, like chartered buffoons, suppressing the light of reason, intruding into places and folds to which they do not belong, and sanctioning what in their hearts they do not accept. Among our clergymen, where intelligence, character, and earnestness are everything, we witness a conspicuous lack of sovereign motives shaping and harmonizing life and doctrine. Nothing is more marked to-day in the American pulpit than theological insincerity and indifference to the obligation to preach only what is believed. Instead of feeling the might of conscientious will and the higher aspirations of the age, they are faint and muffled echoes of that moral force which has given efficiency to the Christian ministry. We still hear the boast that the ministry 239 of to-day has outgrown the old Puritan austerity and the lines marked out in earlier and more rigorous periods. May we not admit also that the courage, the righteousness, and the heroic discharge of duty, by which the Puritan has attracted the attention and the admiration of the world, have lost something of their former greatness and power? Like hunters, too many preachers are on the scent, not for the truth, but for game,—for gain and earthly glory. To speak the truth might interfere with their vocation; it might throw out of market their stock in trade.

Yet ought not the preacher to stick to his text? So great an advocate of the truth should speak the truth and practise it. He should feel inspired with a strong and awful prepossession in its favor. He need not make pretension to infallibility, but we expect of him the absolute veracity of his sacred calling and learning. His living should never depend upon sustaining an error or an untruth. If it does, he does not deserve the name he bears, and is not in the strictest sense a teacher and leader of thought. We will excuse a deficiency of knowledge, but never a deficiency in character,—in the word and spirit of what he proclaims as the truth. Every truly devout minister of the Gospel should rise and erase this stigma from his profession. It is a humiliating reproach that any of this class of teachers lack true insight, truthfulness, and faithful service; that they mask their convictions, that they will not act out their opinions. This is a perversion of what man really is. It makes him a vanishing spirit destitute of true sentiment, character, and practical rectitude. Forms of worship and of religion may be temporary and change, but love of truth and conviction should always be an active power, uniform, eternal. Even in our theological schools, where the human spirit is supposed to be exorcised into worlds of graver and graver realities, we are just now learning some valuable lessons in the flexibility of theological opinion.

He who stands in a conspicuous place in any community will always be looked at. What he says and does will be judged by everybody. His person and life and character, his joys and sorrows, are things of public gossip and interest. And if the uniqueness of his position in society be due to some sacred 240 calling, such as a teacher of religious truth, he evokes the highest esteem and expectations. All truth is sacred; and truth’s propagator is expected to be, not only a truth-seeker, but a teacher of it in the interests of the public weal. The responsibility of this is distributed among all men, but nowhere is it so great as with the professed preacher and teacher of religious truth. He cannot absolve himself from it. It is the price he pays for his exalted privilege, his dignified position.

The creed-test of the Andover theological school may be unwarranted at the present time. Yet while there is such a test, and the old creed comes up and insists upon being reaffirmed in its original meaning by each incumbent, we are bewildered the moment we attempt to harmonize what happened there recently with stalwart conviction and vital piety. Within a few months we have seen the Andover creed, over which there has been so much wrangling, and some of whose doctrines make the human heart to-day sink in despair, receiving unqualified indorsement. With unfaltering confidence this ancient creed was reaffirmed by a professor of that school of divinity without modifying the conditions of subscription. This surprises us. It may be that the recently inducted Professor of Sacred Rhetoric did not signify explicit allegiance to this creed, whose doctrines are so inflexibly maintained by our older theologians, but simply gave his assent, just as the clergy of the noble Church of England are giving their assent, but not their strict adherence, to the Thirty-nine Articles. And yet what is progressive orthodoxy, so boldly and ably enunciated, but a growing away from the old Andover creed?

Or is it only a question of emphasis, not of dogma? Are we to infer that the old dogma abides, while only the emphasis alters? It may be that progressive orthodoxy is not what it professes to be, that instead of giving religious thought a definite impulse and being a necessary onward step in sacred learning, religious thought is only receiving a richer and deeper volume as it lies in its old bed. Be this as it may, the verbal assent and subscription of the new incumbent gave fresh force to every dogma of the old faith. True, we could not expect him to be so recreant as to disown this venerable creed, to break the traditional thread and cease to be the heir of his sires. 241

Yet we should like to see progressive orthodoxy, or the New Theology, of Andover mean something; represent, without the slightest misgiving, some distinctive dogma, some fresh insight into religious truth. At present it is an unintelligible hypothesis. It does not appear to be definitely settled. A master hand has sketched it, but there are none to complete and make it triumphant. Why not go to the root of the matter? Progressive orthodoxy is yet only “in the air.” On paper it is inspiring; in practice, a paradox to the discomfiture of every friend of the revival of religious thought. It is subtle and disputatious, and predicts for itself a reforming mission, but it has not the courage of its convictions; it looks like a clever juggling of divinity. We may speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but unless we have deep convictions and feel the intensity of the principles we are attempting to promulgate, we are as sounding brass; we lower the dignity of truth and moral worth, we offend the purity of conscience. Filled with the ecstasies of an office while enacting an untruth is satanic; it is unworthy of any trained intelligence. Honest conviction is the indispensable condition of the preacher and teacher. Without it he compromises the sacred character of his particular commission, of his appointed trust.

All this is meant to throw light upon the artless simplicity, the outspoken but sensitive judgment, the indefinable strength of character, of the Rev. Mr. Savage. Beneath all he says and does we may see the calm utterance of unwavering convictions and an individuality unimpaired. He is thoroughly possessed with the sense of duty; he has his being there. There is nothing spurious in him; he disguises no hypocrisy. We see in him no secret acquiescence with what he cannot conscientiously accept. Always standing in the full light of the incomparable obligation and privilege of his work,—which is a cheerful, happy exercise, not a doleful and despondent one,—he influences the world not only as a teacher, but as a character. He proclaims the sanctity of his office not by a set of pious phrases, but by a spotless devotion to it, as the only way by which he most completely can subserve the public welfare. This perpetually invests the man and his ministry with interest and with an almost magic power. 242

The ethical intensity of Mr. Savage’s character unfolds itself in his preaching as a consistent result. In the sermon the convictions of the man are not sacrificed. He puts more than words into his sermons; he puts himself. He speaks the truth “bluntly,” as if it were not a hard but an easy attainment, and an element of human nature. Without pretension or self-exaltation, craving no man’s praise and envying no man’s distinction, he endeavors in an unwavering and high-spirited manner to disclose in his sermons the great verities, the substantial realities, of life.

In the broadest sense of the word Mr. Savage is not a man of scholarly attainments or tastes; not many are. He is nevertheless a highly cultivated man. Whether he addresses us through the faculties of speech or through his written compositions, we always feel the independence of his intellect, his delicate and discriminating moral sense, and his love of truth. His sermons, his public utterances, and his devout invocations exhibit a maturity of mind and a range of culture which enable him to impress other minds with whatever has possession of his own. In the pulpit, in authorship, in every mode of religious activity, we meet the cultivated, sincere, and reverent man. We feel the influence of his sympathetic mind and singular chasteness of spirit in hearty and symmetrical development. A culture like this, combined with a nature deeply religious, brings one into possession more or less completely of truths which make a direct appeal to the understanding. It has enabled Mr. Savage to enjoy a certain lordship in the realm of mind and mental life. He is an example of the dictum, that he who would think truly on spiritual things must first be spiritually minded. In both his acted and his written life he seems to comprehend and to realize the truth, to have reached the loftiest heights of fellowship with eternal wisdom. Judging from his own serene, unclouded, and practical vision of the truth, one is driven to the conclusion that he is proclaiming and formulating the ultimate gospel of mankind.

Some may sneer and scoff at his “deadly notions” and “perverted thoughts,” but in his demand for personal life, development of conscience, and attainment in righteousness, his ministry is potent; its inspiration is constant. He believes and 243 preaches only those truths which are possible to rational belief. With that exquisite instinct which characterizes all his thinking, he places, as if he were in apostolic succession, man’s greatest need in coming to himself and in making religion inseparable from personal thought and character. Mr. Savage holds this forth as man’s paramount task, to refuse which is alone to be faithless and hopeless and unforgiven. His idea of religion consists in nothing external or formal; nothing can avail with him but the culture of the soul and the quiet discharge of duty. It is his superlative merit that he enables one to feel his own capacity of thought as a positive and independent efficacy, and to rest upon the authority of his own conscience as the hope of glory and as a coördinating power with Holy Writ. He makes a broad survey of human nature, and commands men to traverse the whole range of their being and to call themselves to rigid account until the germs of moral debility are cast out of the heart. Man is not to waste his energies in grasping the immense and misty proportions of the beliefs of this or that traditionist or minute systems to which souls are often bent in unwilling conformity. The object of his ministry is to summon men to reckon with themselves every day, and to regenerate themselves by right thinking and by deeds of piety. In his opinion each person is a spiritual agency, a marvellous display of divine power and goodness, not only in the majesty of the truth which he apprehends, but in the dignity of the life which he may live. Temptation may open its alluring paths, evil may solicit us, sin may lead us astray, sorrow may drag us down; yet they need not. His public ministry is devoted to the infusion of this better sentiment,—that man is not the mere victim of circumstances, the necessary prey of temptation, or the helpless subject of wrong; that he need not contemplate life in indolent despair, but may check the dominion of sin and impurity, rise above not only intemperate indulgence, but every intemperate desire and impulse, and form dispositions of peculiar excellence, of original strength and beauty.

Mr. Savage’s ministry, then, is full of truth and power. It is strongly personal and ethical. There is no abler advocate of this important truth and master-word of the Gospel and of religion. It is a divine truth ever working in him, breaking into 244 utterances, and giving to his beliefs and his life the highest dignity. With him it is a persistent and overwhelming duty to give to his ministry this practical content, this ethical intensity. In this he is evangelical.

The Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments assert or imply that without our personal agency, and without the truth in the substance and texture of our characters, there can be no spiritual elevation or final perfection. In the terms of the Scriptures the divine resources are infinite; but instead of overwhelming our personal agency or responsibility they make a stupendous demand upon us. The truth must be received with unhesitating acceptance and assimilated to our individual being.

To teach such consummate truths the Rev. Minot J. Savage, D. D., strong in every fibre of intellectual and religious faith, has devoted his talents, his strength, and his life, and for that reason he stands before the American people as one of their most noted preachers.

THE CIVIC OUTLOOK.

BY HENRY RANDALL WAITE, PH. D.

I. Fraternal Government.

The disposition to give due attention to the spirit of American institutions is one which needs cultivation. Government, looked upon only as machinery, may easily become a means for the accomplishment of ends very different from those intended by its designers. In this connection some recent utterances by Dr. Lyman Abbott are worthy of serious thought:

II. True Americanism.

Whatever other meaning may attach to the word Americanism, Dr. Abbott points to its best definition. But what he has in mind cannot be expected in the absence of a spirit which is made manifest in real fraternalism conjoined with faithful devotion to intelligent convictions of duty. This spirit will take patriotism out of the realm of mere sentiment into that of noble passion. It will give to citizenship so high a meaning that failures in civic duty will take on—as they clearly ought to do—the character of sins against one’s own manhood and against the brotherhood of which the citizen is a member. If this spirit be underneath our laws and manifest in their administration, we need have little anxiety as to their statutory form. Political as well as scriptural wisdom expresses itself in the statement that the “letter” of the law kills, the “spirit” alone gives life. 246

III. The Right Spirit in Citizenship.

How the spirit of genuine citizenship is to be made ascendant is a question of increasing concern. It may nevertheless be doubted whether organized forces for its suppression do not, in the matter of painstaking and persistent energy and adroit management, excel the organized elements specially devoted to its cultivation. Citizenship activities, politically considered, for the most part are merged in the machinery of parties; and this machinery, instead of representing in its tenets the will of great bodies of independent and well-intentioned suffragists, is too often so manipulated by a few skilful and unprincipled political machinists as to represent their will instead. It is obvious that in so far as these clever machinists are able to run our politics to suit themselves, the very machinery through which the right spirit in citizenship must come to power, if at all, is turned into a means for its own suppression. It thus comes to pass that we have the pitiable spectacle of great party organizations through which masses of honest and patriotic citizens farcically—nay, tragically—coöperate for the accomplishment of results, which, while secured through their votes and in their name, are in reality results of the clandestine and sinister work of a few men.

IV. Reform in Primary Elections.

Plainly, if the right spirit in citizenship is to be ascendant, it must find some means of doing away with the boss system in politics. This system is made possible only by the ease with which primary elections are controlled by coteries of designing men. Here is a battlefield where the best and worst elements in our politics need to be brought into immediate and conclusive conflict. A system which foists upon the people as its candidates for office those whom they have had no real voice in choosing, and who are not worthy, represents an actual subversion of popular government, and calls for such a manifestation of the spirit of true Americanism as shall overthrow it once for all. This question is an overshadowing one. Pollution at the fountain means pollution everywhere. Men elected to office through shameful methods may sometimes be better than the methods by which they have profited, but they are not to be 247 trusted. Their responsibility is to the “bosses,” not to the citizens whose machine-directed votes elected them. The only sentiment to which they bow is that expressed by the leader whose favor bestowed, and whose hostility will deprive them of, official position and emoluments. The immediate outlook is not, however, without hope. Independent movements in several States are in progress looking to the complete uprooting of the boss system. In parts of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and California, and in some of the Southern States “the Crawford County method,” which takes the choice of candidates out of the hands of the few and places it in the hands of the majority of voters, is already being tried. In Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota similar methods have been the subject of legislative action, and satisfactory results are anticipated. This is a reform which should not be left to the advocacy of a few individuals, or to the members of a few organizations like the American Institute of Civics and local civic reform bodies. Members of these bodies have done much and will do more to promote it, but its final success depends upon the manifestation everywhere of an aroused public spirit whose demands cannot be denied.

V. Civics in Public Schools.

Much progress has recently been made in educational provisions for the instruction necessary to qualify American youth for the intelligent and efficient discharge of civic obligations. The Patria Club of New York City, a strong body organized under the auspices of the American Institute of Civics and devoted to the objects which it represents, has offered prizes to the pupils in the schools in the vicinity of New York for the purpose of stimulating their interest in matters of government and citizenship, and has undertaken a similar work in connection with the charity industrial schools of that city. Of great importance is the action of the New York Board of Education looking to specific instruction in civics in all the city schools, and its later action in giving to this subject an important place in the curriculum of the high schools which are to be established the coming year. Another organization which contributes to the same results, the American Guards, is represented 248 by battalions in several New York schools. This movement, which has already extended into many schools in different States, is under the fostering care of Col. H. H. Adams, an officer of the Institute of Civics. The guards are composed of boys who voluntarily devote a certain amount of time, out of school hours, to exercises promotive of a virile and intelligent patriotism. These exercises include military drill, and the youthful guards, in their becoming uniforms, develop a marked degree of manliness and self-respect. Two of the battalions are under the leadership of public-school principals, E. H. Boyer and D. E. Gaddes, councillors of the Institute of Civics. The guards participated in the ceremonies at the dedication of the Grant monument, and no organization in line attracted more favorable attention.

VI. Rural Influences on Urban Affairs.

It cannot be denied that the hitherto controlling power of voters in rural districts has frequently been used to the prejudice of city interests. Representatives from country regions have lent their aid in effecting vicious as well as wholesome changes in legislation affecting municipalities, and this aid has sometimes been secured by corrupt methods. It is nevertheless true that the average country voter and the average legislator who represents him sincerely desire to promote only such legislation as will be of highest advantage to urban communities. If their votes fail to secure this result it is more often because of insufficient knowledge of urban conditions and needs, than of indifference or corrupt influences.

It is, therefore, a matter of the very highest importance that citizens remote from our great cities be made sufficiently familiar with municipal needs to enable them to reach wiser conclusions as to the desirability or undesirability of special measures affecting their political, social, and industrial interests. Opinions based, as now, chiefly upon the statements of a partisan press, too often represent the interests of a party regardless of those of the municipalities directly concerned.

With the steady growth of our great cities in population and political power, the question of wholesome State legislation in matters affecting their civic and moral wellbeing, is one of no 249 less importance to rural communities than to the cities themselves. Controlling power is already drifting cityward in many States, and rural voters who have not contributed to the creation of right civic conditions in our great municipalities may soon find this power used to their own serious injury. In this connection the New York Christian Advocate , referring to the possibilities of good and evil in the Greater New York, justly says:

VII. Woman’s Work in Civics.

The growth of organizations which are directed by women, wholly or chiefly devoted to reforms in civic conditions, has been paralleled by hardly any popular movement of recent years. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union, although hardly more than a juvenile among other great organizations, is second to few of them in its potentiality for good. Women’s clubs are found everywhere, and, wherever found, for the most part represent a serious purpose to find and apply right remedies to existing civic and social evils. The Federation of Women’s Clubs brings all of these local movements into harmonious efforts for the upbuilding of unselfish patriotism in the community and the highest virtue in the home. The National Health Protective Association, whose second annual meeting was recently held in Philadelphia, has already made a record for itself, through its branches in many cities, which evidences not only a reason for its existence, but the capacity and success 250 which women have brought to the solution of some of the most important problems of city life, such as protection from contagious diseases, the supply of pure water and pure milk, the prevention of food adulterations, improvements in tenement conditions, provisions affecting the health of working people, attention to the sick children of the very poor, and a score of equally important matters. The chairman of this organization is Mrs. Etta Osgood of Portland, Maine, and its leading members include Dr. Lozier of New York, Mrs. A. J. Perry of Brooklyn, Mrs. Theo. F. Seward of Orange, N. J., Mrs. Henry Birkenbine of Wayne, Pa., Mrs. L. E. Harvey of Dayton, O., Miss Florence Parsons of Yonkers, N. Y., Mrs. J. E Weiks of Buffalo, and Mrs. John H. Scribner of Philadelphia.

In the same city was also held, shortly after the meeting of the Health Protective Association, the Triennial Convention of Working Women’s Societies. This gathering of earnest women was notable for the keenness which its members brought to the discussion of questions affecting the interests of working women, and the equal sincerity of their desire to reach only just conclusions. Here is an opportunity for the bright women who are at the head of the Federation of Women’s Clubs to establish reciprocal relations which will be fruitful in great good.

VIII. Municipal Reform Organizations.

The third year of the National Reform League has been completed with results full of encouragement to the members of the various social organizations of which it is composed. Its annual meeting at Louisville, Ky., was attended by one hundred and fifty delegates. Much of the success of the widely extended work represented by this national organization is due to the persistent and unselfish activities of its able secretary, Mr. Clinton Rogers Woodruff, of the Philadelphia bar, who closed his address before the convention with these encouraging words:

The Good Citizenship League of Minneapolis adds to the means of its increasingly useful work by the publication of a carefully edited little periodical under the title of Facts , in which information that might not otherwise reach them in proper form is placed before all citizens. E. F. Waite is President, and Alfred Sherlock, Secretary, with offices at 254 Hennepin Avenue.

IX. City Taxpayers.

Mr. Charles Richardson, vice-president of the National Municipal League, in seeking the causes for the non-participation of large taxpayers in efforts to secure good government in cities, finds the following among other reasons:

X. Civics in State Universities.

A writer in Christian Work , urging the importance of action such as the American Institute of Civics is devoted to, says:

XI. A Betrayal of Reform.

These are the words applied to an act of the Republican Governor of New York by one of the ablest and stanchest Republican journals of that State, the Mail and Express of New York City. It goes on to say:

XII. State Aid to Industries.

Massachusetts has undertaken an interesting experiment in the way of promoting home industries. With the aim of producing in that State the finer grade of goods now produced only in foreign markets, the legislature two years ago appropriated $25,000 for the establishment of a textile school in any town which might make a like appropriation for the same object. This offer has now been accepted by the citizens of Lowell, and the first school of the character proposed is being established. It is hoped that this experiment may lead to results which will in some degree compensate for the industrial losses sustained by New England through the competition of the multiplying cotton mills in the South.

XIII. Reading Matter for Prisoners.

Some time ago, in response to a need brought to its attention by one of the local officers in Texas, the American Institute of Civics offered to superintend the distribution among the prisons of the United States of literature suitable for the use of prisoners. Citizens were asked to coöperate, and much good literature has thus been placed in the hands of those who have found it not only a source of entertainment, but, through its refining and elevating influences, a means of great benefit. This beneficent work can be indefinitely extended with a little cost if citizens who appreciate its importance will give to it their aid by contributions of literature, such as wholesome works of fiction, popular works of history, treatises on the useful arts and industries, popular periodicals, etc., etc.; or by assisting in the payment of the cost of collection and distribution. One of the Institute’s councillors in the State of Washington, President Penrose of Whitman College, has recently made an appeal for such literature for the use of convicts in the Washington penitentiary. Inquiries as to methods of coöperation, or gifts for the prison literature expense fund, may be sent to the American Institute of Civics, 203 Broadway, New York.

“THE TEMPEST” THE SEQUEL TO “HAMLET.”

BY EMILY DICKEY BEERY.

“The Tempest” is a little enchanted world where play all the forces that are manifested in the larger creation from the lowest animalism to the highest manhood, harmonious with his invisible environment. This world in miniature—true to the laws of the macrocosm—begins in chaos, storm, and stress, but finds completion in supernal air and divine peace. We shall find by consecutive study of the dramas that the poet, in his creative work, has ever risen from lower manifestations to higher as his own soul soared on higher and higher wing. Prospero was his last, greatest, and divinest thought of man in his unfolding godward.

Nature in her evolution takes no vast strides, and her supreme poet follows her divine current of growth from the animal man to the grand manifestation of his ideal. He understood that in man’s unfolding not a round could be missed of the “Jacob’s Ladder” resting upon the earth, but reaching into the heavens.

In this ideal world of “The Tempest,” Caliban stands upon the earth groping to attain the first step, while Prospero stands upon the summit with his face heavenward. This typical man comes upon the stage on a high plane of development. Long previously he had left the rank and file of humanity to tread the ever lonely path to higher achievement, therefore we must look below him to find, among the creations of the poet, the incarnation which was the chrysalis for this last ideal. Here our intuitive perception immediately descries Hamlet, that wonderful human mystery who was the first of Shakspere’s sons to enter the precincts of the inner life and catch a glimpse of the godlike potentialities of the human soul.

In Hamlet was the struggle of birth; in Prospero, the glory of achievement, the fulfilment to some extent of the poet’s ideal man, and the first to realize that the power of thought is the supreme force in the universe. Hamlet caught the first glimpse of this truth when he said, “There’s nothing good or bad but 255 thinking makes it so.” He is the hero of spiritual birth and growth in man from the dawning of the soul-life, through its fierce struggles to dominate the lower self and rise into realms of clearer light and truth. The “godlike reason which was not left in him to rust unused,” in its aspiration became illuminated by intuition and revealed to his awe-inspired gaze new worlds not dreamed of by the Horatios of his time.

Hamlet was lost in wonder at himself. The lower forces of his nature along the old inherited lines of thought, coming in contact with the higher thought-currents, newly created, caused the blended stream to “turn awry and lose the name of action,” termed by the unseeing world lack of courage and will-power. Even he could not understand but that in some inexplicable way he must be a coward, because he could not perceive the why of his delaying vengeance. Yet he knew he was brave to the core of his being. When his military friends, “distilled almost to jelly with the act of fear,” would have restrained him from following the spirit of his father, he cries out:

He was strong of will and resolute of purpose, but had reached the plane of development where his higher nature would not permit him to commit murder. Yet the strong current of popular opinion, as well as all hereditary and sub-conscious influences in himself, were ever impelling him to do the deed. In his soul-growth, Hamlet had passed the plane of revenge as a passion, but had not reached the divine heights of forgiveness. To avenge the murder of his father was to him a sacred command and duty coming in conflict with another equally sacred duty voiced by his higher self, and the mighty meeting of these two soul-forces always resulted in inaction. This moral battleground is the pivotal point of the drama, indirectly putting in motion all the forces which terminate in the final catastrophe.

In his thoughtful moods his disposition was ever shaken with “thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls,” saying, “Why is this? wherefore? what should we do?” It was the unlaid ghost of his higher self that propounded these queries to the 256 apparition. The birth-throes of thought were giving him entrance into a new world where he began to see “What a piece of work is man! how infinite in faculty! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a God!”

The thoughts that Hamlet voices had passed through Shakspere’s brain, and the wonderful powers manifested by Prospero had been apprehended by his own prophetic vision. Hamlet might have moved along on the lower plane successfully, but the law of spiritual growth, the divine force upheaving and uplifting his soul against the barriers of his sub-conscious mentality and his environment, finally ended in the sad tragedy. Yet in the defeat was a victory, for it was merely the turn of the spiral downward for a higher rise in evolution.

Prospero is first revealed to us at about the age of Hamlet when the curtain falls and hides him from our tear-dimmed eyes. Shakspere loved Hamlet. He was dearest to his heart of all his children, and he felt that he must not die, but must come into the full fruition of the immortals. The soul so nobly struggling from its swaddling clothes must become a freed spirit of godlike power. Therefore he presents to us an ideal world where Hamlet sits upon the throne as Prospero, “transported and rapt in secret studies,” “neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated to closeness and the bettering of his mind with that which o’erprized all popular rate.” Prospero was born a higher type, therefore the divine in him had freer action. His soul opened to the over-soul like a flower to the sunlight.

The divine force in man is his will—his true will—and this force in its perfect exercise has no human limitation. It is only the seeming will that is limited. This power, manifested in thought , is represented by Ariel.

The statement of Prospero that his studies bettered his mind to such high degree is proof that they were those not of the magician, but of the philosopher and true psychologist, for the study of magic darkens the soul and degrades the intellect. Prospero’s power was not magical, and Shakspere used the word magician only to bring the drama within touch of his audience, knowing full well that the wise would understand, for “wisdom is justified of her children.”

In the manifestation of soul-power we first perceive the true 257 greatness of Prospero and the heights to which Shakspere’s own soul had risen, for “the stream cannot rise higher than its source.” The greatness of Julius Cæsar is “weighed in the balance and found wanting,” for every truly great nature must be the rounded out and harmonious development of the intellectual, moral, and spiritual. This is the measure of Prospero, and in his unfolding, unseen realms and previously unknown powers had opened, according to eternal law, to his demanding soul.

“The Tempest” is philosophical, psychological, and occult—philosophical because thought is the motor power. Le Conte says: “That deepest of all questions—the nature and origin of natural forces—is a question for philosophy and not for science.” Thought is a natural force; yes, a dynamic force of the most intense power. It may be a search-light of the universe, a thunderbolt of destruction, or a messenger of light and love with healing in its wings. The mantle of Prospero is simply an emblem of power, and the word is so understood among the Orientals. In Scripture, when Elijah ascended in his fiery chariot, his mantle fell upon Elisha, who immediately caused the waters to retreat from its stroke and continued clothed with his master’s power. So Prospero, robing himself in his mantle or laying it aside, means his exercise or non-exercise of what are termed supernatural powers.

Victor Hugo says that Shakspere “did not question the invisible world, he rehabilitated it. He did not deny man’s supernatural power, he consecrated it.” There is no reason why man in his higher estate should not have free intercourse with a world invisible to him in his lower conditions. Can the grub have the same companionship as the butterfly?

Victor Hugo also says that the “‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ depicts the action of the invisible world on man, but ‘The Tempest’ symbolizes the action of man on the invisible world. In the poet’s youth, man obeys the spirits. In the poet’s ripe age, the spirits obey man .” This shows a fine apprehension of the interior revealings of the supreme poetic genius. Every great and true poet is also a prophet and seer. Then why should not Shakspere—the supremest in all the “tide of time”—not have the widest and most far-reaching vision of the wonderful 258 attainments and powers of the perfected man. He undoubtedly saw and felt the grandeur of the ages to come, and knew, with divine prescience, that only the hem of the garment of knowledge had been as yet touched. There is but one power in the universe, and as Emerson says, “Every man is an inlet to the whole.” Then where is his limitation?

Did not nature obey the Nazarene, and the winds and mountainous waves lie gently down at His bidding? And did He not say that His disciples should do greater works than He had done? Then why should not Prospero, as a typical man, have control over all the forces of nature?

It is interesting to note that Shakspere has given to him almost the identical powers of the Man of Nazareth! This is not strange, as it is an absolute truth that when man rises to the royalty of spirit every element will be his obedient servant. Thought will be the agent of his ministries; which the poet has so marvellously portrayed in its personification as Ariel. Ariel says: “Thy thoughts I cleave to;” and Prospero, in calling him, “Come with a thought.” It is now claimed by the most advanced and best psychologists, that a forceful, living thought does become a real embodiment which may be perceived by the finer senses. Ariel was what the mind of his master made him, sometimes a sprite, sometimes a sea-nymph, again a harpy, anything and everything the master directed.

Sycorax symbolized ignorance, and thought had been long imprisoned in the holds of nature by this creature of darkness, but ever painfully struggling to reach the light. Ignorance imprisoned thought, but could not free it. Prospero, as wisdom, gave it freedom and directed its action until he could send it forth in still more glorious freedom. Freedom of thought is a dominant strain in the drama, and is even sung by the “reeling ripe” Stephano. Caliban represents the child of ignorance, closely allied to nature and partaking of its poetry and grandeur. He is man in his first estate, just emerging from the animal. Yet, in this crude, forbidding aspect how superior in dignity compared with Stephano and Trinculo in their vile abasement through the vices of civilization.

Shakspere’s knowledge of the power of thought over the body is shown in his saying that Sycorax, “through age and envy, had 259 grown into a hoop;” and of Caliban that, “As with age his body uglier grows, so his mind cankers.” It is not strange that Shakspere perceived the new psychology, for Milton sang—

The poet Spenser most beautifully expresses this truth in saying:

This is the teaching also of St. Paul, that the body must be transformed by the renewing of the mind.

Here we perceive the source of the heavenly beauty and grace of Miranda. “The pure in heart shall see God.” Her thought and vision wrought out for her a bodily expression that made her seem celestial to the beholder, and held him in doubt whether she were goddess or mortal.

In esoteric thought the perfected being must be an equal blending of the masculine and feminine, which Balzac has so gloriously interpreted in his “Seraphita.” This quality we see in Prospero, the gentle, refined element of motherhood, blended with sublime dignity and strength. His child was to him “a cherubim infusing him with fortitude from heaven,” and he gave to her the richest dower of inheritance—knowledge, with purity of heart and purpose. With the gentle patience of love he instructed her in the laws of nature and her being, with divine purity of thought. For all nature is pure as God himself. Thus Miranda became the peerless young Eve of blended wisdom and innocence.

After a display of his power, he states, in his address to Ferdinand, the most abstruse problems of the ideal philosophy.

This sublime inspiration was almost the last outburst of the mighty genius of Shakspere, and is a fitting crown of glory.

Prospero was fully conscious of his superiority, and with simple but grandest dignity he claims that practically it was his own power that worked all the wonders. Most sublimely he expresses this when he calls before him his invisible helpers:

Passing from his power over nature to the manifestation of his higher self with men, we see the spiritual plane he had reached. In coming again in contact with the world of humanity his first action is the recognition of the good and the forgiving the evil:

His divine forgiveness of those who had so cruelly wronged him shows the height of his spiritual attainment:

261

In the very remarkable events of his life he recognizes a higher power in all his guidance. “Was Milan thrust from Milan, that his issue should become kings of Naples?”

In no drama has the poet risen to such supreme types of character. Prospero was the highest expression of Shakspere’s latest thought, but only the shadowing forth of a supremer ideal. We can portray what is beneath us far more vividly and truly than what is above us. Shakspere had lived Hamlet, and that is why he so vitally touches every human soul. In Prospero it was the vision by the great poetic soul of a promised land he had only viewed from a mountain top. He had seen the wonderfully luscious grasps of Eschol, but had not yet tasted them. This is why we feel the vast yet subtle difference between “Hamlet” and “The Tempest.”

If the immortal poet had lived the years allotted to man, with ever increasing openness of vision, his own soul would have attained that lofty height where, from the “pattern on the mount,” he would have portrayed the splendor of divine manhood in godlike majesty, the soul irradiating the body like the shining face of Moses in its halo of awe-inspiring divinity. The people required a veil; they would require one still.

Although Shakspere left us before he had lived in the radiance of the truly spiritual realm, we may well crown his Prospero with his words of another:

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THE CREATIVE MAN.

BY STINSON JARVIS.

In the April number of this magazine its Editor gave us a paper called “The Man in History.” Readers will not have failed to note the grand width and depth it gave to ordinary views. The facts concerning the human being, from the earliest records to those of the present day, were marshalled in so masterly a way, and the mental grip on the whole mass was so far-reaching and unique, that people must have perceived that they were gaining the benefits of a lifetime study.

This article is therefore in no sense a reply to Dr. Ridpath’s masterpiece. On the contrary, I wish to refer to all the historical events as he has introduced them, and can only regret that want of space forbids a reprint which would enable the original to be read with these comments. My endeavor is simply to bring forward for contemporaneous consideration certain suggestions which seem to me to be of a highly interesting character, and which were forced in upon my own thought by the results of experiments upon the human being. After the long series of articles published in The Arena about three years ago, many of my readers will not require further explanation of these experiments; but for others I will briefly refer, later on in this paper, to the phenomena which greatly affect one’s views regarding man’s powers and possibilities, together with the nature and extent of his agency in the world’s events.

Dr. Ridpath has brought forward as interesting a question as was ever laid before a public, namely, how far, if at all, Man is the maker of history. And by the word “history” the learned author does not mean those records of events which any chance chronicler may choose to present, but the events themselves, their causes, action, and results. Here he presents both sides of the question, with the arguments which may be alternately used in support of each. He cites two master thinkers, Carlyle and Buckle, whose differences of opinion relative to man’s agency in history were distinctly defined: Carlyle seeking the 263 hero in each great event, and recognizing only one force, that of God, behind the principal actor of the temporary drama, and never satisfied until the individual origins of history could be discovered. On the other hand, Buckle, to whom man, including the part he played, appeared “as the mere result of historical forces,” and in the view of scientific rationalism contemplating “only the lines of an infinite and unalterable causation encompassing the world and bringing to pass whatever is done by the agency of men en masse .”

I confess I was not by any means clear at first as to what Buckle meant by this “infinite and unalterable causation.” If he meant the shapings of heredity coming down through many generations to produce a man able to lead in a certain event, then I followed him. I also sufficiently understood him if he referred to national desires and necessities assisting to produce competent manipulators of important events. But I did not gather until later that this language might possibly be intended to include what in common parlance is called “the will of God.”

In the alternation of contention which Dr. Ridpath lays before us with so much skill, we are all more or less familiar with the Carlyle side of the argument, so let us consider a part of what is said on the Buckle side. In sentences collected from different portions, the “believer in the predominance of universal causation” is represented as speaking in this way:

We come then to the admission on the Buckle side of the argument that the forces referred to as “universal causation” may possibly include the will of God. And from the time this admission is made there seems to be little of material difference between the contestants. Practically, both refer, or may refer, back to the will of God; and the discussion here brings me to the point at which some pertinent questions may be asked.

In what historical crises has the will of God been manifested? Can you confidently point to one? If so, your conversational friend will probably call your attention to some terrible disasters which arose from it. Perhaps you may thus point to some monarchy. But your iconoclastic friend will probably refer you to a loathsome system of parasitic adulation, in which place and position went by favoritism and whimsical preference, and where advancement through personal merit was almost unknown. These ills, you think, could not be present in a republic; but when you point to one of these, your attention is directed to an internal rottenness in which justice and liberty are bought and sold by men who must make their fortunes during a short term of irresponsible office. You are then apt to smile at the idea that any of these represented the intentions of God.

Or, to take an extreme case, you may instance the life, teachings, and death of Christ. But if your friend be a fairly good amateur historian he can sufficiently indicate the many wars, the almost countless conflicts and incalculable amount of manslaughter that belief in Christ gave rise to. He can tell of those stupendous waves of crusadic fanaticism in the course of which the pillage and rapine of utterly lawless hordes brought undying disgrace upon Europe. He can pile story upon story of carnage and divided homes until you may possibly conclude that it would have been better for the world if the cross of Golgotha 265 had never been heard of. A wrong conclusion, most certainly; but one that has oceans of facts to back it.

Outside the cases in which retribution has seemed to follow close upon wrongdoing, where can we find a momentous event of history which we can point out to ourselves and say with confidence, “That, certainly, was brought about by the will of God.” If amalgamation of hostile baronies into one dominant nation and the acquirement of many civil advantages may be regarded as a blessing, then some will point back to an immensely picturesque figure of history and claim that the Norman William was one specially produced by the divine will for an event from which issued peculiarly valuable results. But here we have to face a question which is continually prominent when historical events are attributed to the will of God: “Is it necessary,” we are driven to ask ourselves, “that God’s purposes be brought to a culmination through trickery, perjury, manslaughter, and every kind of falsity?” Personally I feel totally unable to think this. I wish to mention the difficulties which everyone who thinks honestly must encounter, and to do so reverently. History thus seems to enforce acceptance of one of two conclusions: Either that the justice of God is not what we are glad to suppose it to be; or else that these matters were not conducted according to the divine will. For in William’s case we find all these difficulties: the claim to be acting on Harold’s promise, the prior mortgaging of the intended results to the church of Rome in order to gain the assistance of foreign hordes by calling the proposed invasion a holy war, and other trickeries which need not now be set out. He brought his newly-made England into the bondage of a hierarchy, and in buying Romish aid established a precedent that was followed by other kings until priestcraft gained the unlimited power which drained the coffers of Europe, impoverished Italy, beggared Spain, revelled in the demoniacal Inquisition, subsequently degraded the Lower Canadians to almost the ignorance of the beasts, and is now using the whole of its political power to fasten its vampire clutch upon the fair virgin provinces of the Canadian Northwest.

If William could have foreseen some results of his handiwork he could have been properly regarded as one of the worst devils ever let loose upon the earth. And yet we are asked to believe 266 that all these things were foreknown to the Deity, and that the shaping of William’s policy was under the divine will.

This brief survey of a great event is only one of a large number that could be made, each collection of occurrences showing similar mixed conditions—some exhibiting resulting benefits, but in many cases mingled with disaster and distress to such an extent that the movement as a whole cannot possibly be attributed by any thinking person to the divine will.

Every historian will admit that in the great events of history, the conquests and other large acquisitions of territory, some one or more of the following disgraces were present: the killing of human beings, false pretences, pillage and rapine, human tortures, treacheries, imprisonments, introductions of diseases, plagues, and bad habits, traffic in drugs and liquors which debauched, degraded, and killed. Such a list is almost endless. And shall we say that an Almighty Father caring for his children could have desired such proceedings? Surely not! Let us be sensible and conform our judgment to the evidence.

In doing so, what is our alternative? Are we not forced to comprehend that even the most valuable improvements were only advanced so far as human intelligence could advance them when this intelligence was illuminated by a partial exercise of its highest faculties? Are we not forced to admit that the resulting benefits, whether personal or national, were for the most part those which were humanly foreseen, and that the subsequent disasters were for the most part those which could not be foreseen by human intelligence?—or were foreseen and intentionally risked and braved? Has there been a single event of history which cannot be honestly attributed to human intelligence—this being aided by a partial exercise of its highest faculties?

What, then, are these highest faculties? What are the powers within man which enable him to transcend other men, and previous men? Let me here state my conviction, which later on will seem justified, that advance in comprehension of the higher faculties in man must be gained through a further acquaintance with phenomena which may be present in hypnotic conditions. I do not mean that personal attention to the experiments is necessary, no matter how preferable. Nor do I suggest that they tell as much as one could wish—at least, so far as I 267 have followed them. Mine have only led me to the outside ramparts of vast realms which await the investigations of others.

What I mean is that everyone should in some way be made certain, either through personal experiment or reliable hearsay, that in the human make-up there are faculties which may be forced by will-power into an activity which they do not manifest in the ordinary daily life. There is no reason to doubt that these are the same faculties which become so apparent in the keen-sightedness of those who are great in statecraft, diplomacy, business, or in any other way. With ordinary people, especially the laboring classes, these faculties seem more inactive, through disuse. In most men they seem to show activity only when forced by concentration and will-power; but there are bright people of both sexes in whom they seem very alert without urging.

My reasons for stating that everyone should be acquainted with these peculiarities are well founded. Without this the admission that there is a “soul” in man is largely due to the compulsion of hearsay. Without this, and certain other studies, some of the reasons for the evolution of man and beast are obscured, and the most telling argument in favor of further evolution remains practically a blank. Without this we need not look for a better understanding of man’s place in history. But, on the other hand, this kind of research supplies proof of many seemingly miraculous powers in man which have valuable explanations to make in regard to the history of history.

Here the truth-seeker may prove to himself the reality of “soul.” And why should anyone admit its reality if he has never had cause to regard himself as anything better than a good-natured animal? Unless he has had made clear to him some soul-truths (which, owing to the fact that every human being is a hypnotic patient, are generally made manifest without any dabbling in experiments)—unless, I say, he has been in some way convinced of the reality of “soul,” his moral ramparts are chiefly constructed of the hearsay that provides but slim defence. The suggestion here is that the best way to be able to believe in miracles is to learn how to perform them!

This paper, however, will deal solely with man’s place in history, which is only a section of the ranges of view which the study of the mesmeric phenomena forces into consideration. 268 We want to know more about those who have controlled armies, nations, events, and themselves. We want to gain a better idea of the forces at work in the making of history; how far, if not entirely, man was responsible; how far, if at all, he was assisted in any peculiar way toward the acquirement of a farsightedness superior to that of his fellows; why historical events, both in their inception and action, were so peculiarly human and often so dreadfully animal; why the sought-for and acquired benefits have so often been mingled with distress and catastrophe.

These somewhat numerous inquiries are answered, in effect, by an exposition of the faculties referred to, and of the powers by which these may be forced into increased activity. When these are understood so far as they can be explained here, then the answers to all the above queries will become apparent to those who apply the facts to their knowledge of history; and they will need no more detailed answer than that which I shall give.

Many have noted the fact that the foremost personages of history have been men of great will-power. They might be French, Greek, Jew, or Moslem; they might be of any occupation, rank, or color; but always they were men of great will-power. This has been the one peculiarity common to all. But why should will-power be a sine qua non of greatness? The reasons will appear as we proceed.

In the year 1897 an attempt to explain mesmerism is not as necessary as it used to be. The amount of notice which the newspapers give to the subject suggests that an interest in it is very widespread in America. Even the most illiterate must now be aware that persons may be so influenced by the wills of others that they pass into a sleep, or a condition resembling sleep, during which they are to a large extent, and sometimes entirely, subject to the wills of the actuators. Professionals have also assisted in instructing the public as to the minor phenomena. One of them has lately been making money in New York by keeping his patient in the hypnotic trance for a week, during which ignorant medical students and doctors tried brutal methods of awakening the victim—the same methods which disgrace some of the hospitals when unfortunates pass into trances from unknown causes. In other cases, persons in the audience are requested to pencil secretly some 269 lines on paper and hide the writings in their pockets. The patient on the stage then reads the writing, and this reading is subsequently compared with the hidden papers and found to be correct. The numbers engraved on people’s watches are also read in the same way.

I have never attended such performances because they had nothing to teach me; and if confederates were used, all I can say is that the performances could be given much more easily without confederates. My reason for mentioning these people is that their work, if genuine, as I suppose, allows me a greater brevity in this paper; also because their large numbers prove the truth of what I published long ago, that anyone of fairly strong will-power can perform these seeming marvels if a suitable patient can be procured. It may, however, be accepted as absolutely correct that the vision of mesmerized patients is not impeded by materials. In my earliest experiments I tried all kinds of receptacles when secreting articles. But the changes made no difference. The patients can discern the interior of an iron box as easily as we in the ordinary state can see through a glass one. Of course this has nothing to do with ordinary vision, the eyelids being closed at the time. All such trials as this I ranked in the lowest grade, because the patients may have been reading what was within my own knowledge—a faculty that was partly exhibited to prominent men in chief cities by Mr. Stuart Cumberland and Mr. Irving Bishop.

This classifying of my experiments is only to bring on their mention in the order in which they seem to increase in importance. As a fact, the same faculties attend to them all. Still, the division is useful. Second, then, come those which dealt with long distances. To one of my first patients (a messenger in a law-office) I showed scenes in Syria, Egypt, Athens, and Rome, and after I had removed him from the mesmeric sleep I handed him a pile of photographs which I had brought from foreign countries. He turned them over rapidly and picked out the picture of the scene he had witnessed, and without hesitation. I ranked all this class next to lowest in importance because I had the scenes in my own mind at the time. Yet the patients saw more than I was thinking of. When I showed this messenger the obelisk in front of St. Peter’s at Rome, he 270 also described the great colonnade around the piazza, which I had at the moment forgotten. Subsequent experiments with others made me know that he was viewing the scene itself.

The class ranked third, or next higher, were those in which the patients were called from a distance. In the Arlington Heights Sanitarium some of the patients formerly received, and I suppose still receive, beneficial hypnotic treatment. One patient, Grace ——, could be called into the office at any time by the simple will of Dr. Ring, the proprietor. I received the account from a valued nurse who attended this patient in the hospital. I was able to do the same thing myself in one case, but only when the patient was at some occupation which did not require much concentration. I am not prepared to speak as to the spaces across which this influence may be exerted. With another patient, who was over two miles away, the experiment seemed fairly successful, but I am not sufficiently certain to claim a success.

In class four, the patients told facts which had not been previously within their knowledge or mine. For tests of this kind I would procure from friends some old coins wrapped up so that I could not know the dates on them. When the first patient with whom this was tried was told to pass into the sleep she called out the date of the coin almost instantaneously—“1793.” I thought she was still awake and guessing. But in that instant she had passed into a deep sleep and had told the date correctly.

In the fifth class the reader’s credence will be much tested. Many of the Scripture miracles were not a whit more difficult to believe. In fact, some were precisely the same. Professional frauds have created much hostility to the idea of anyone possessing clairvoyance. But the somewhat amusing fact is that every human being is a clairvoyant—which could be shown beyond disagreement if the doubter were placed in the mesmeric trance. An instructive experiment has lately been told me, in which the same patient, Grace ——, was used. A Mrs. Fuller, an invalid in the hospital, was anxious about her daughter, who had not lately written. Dr. Chapin, one of the house doctors, was the actuator. Under his will the faculties of Grace —— were made to see the child, then about thirty 271 miles off. She described Mrs. Fuller’s home, its interior, the daughter coming from school with her books, whom she talked to, what she said, the precise time on a peculiar old clock in the room, and a call on a neighbor then made by the daughter—all of which was afterward proved to have been correctly reported. I mention Dr. Chapin’s work because it relieves me of some of the seeming egotism which a recital of this kind enforces, and because my own experiments, which were, in effect, precisely the same, though different in detail, have been published elsewhere. [16]

As if these facts were not astounding enough, we come finally to a sixth class, in which we find that these marvels can be produced by one’s own will-power acting on one’s own interior faculties—the proofs of which I have already published.

Now here, I submit, we get our right clew to the true position of man in history. We now see why great men had always to be possessed of peculiar will-power. They were great when the intensities of their ambitions, desires, or necessities forced from their soul-faculties some portions of knowledge which gave them a temporary ascendency, such, for instance, as would provide an advantage in strategy, statecraft, duplicity, treachery, or any other qualities which have assisted men who were leaders. There was no limit to this, for the experiments show that there is some quality in the soul of man that seems to be omniscient, or in direct correspondence with omniscience.

It was always through stress. None have become great in idleness or slackened energies. And as soon as the stress ceased, after the occasion for the intense strivings of years passed, when the fruits of victory were being enjoyed, when the aim of life was simply to hold and not to gain, then the man ceased to be markedly different from others. Then other men lead, because nature’s leaderships are gained by that intensest concentration which forces the best methods from the soul-faculties. Apply this system of nature to any great event of history and you will invariably find it accomplishing the known results. There you will find a man making a name for himself, and, in a sense, making history. Always through stress, 272 strain, and necessity, in the same ways that extraordinary ingenuity comes to men and animals to assist their escape from situations of dire peril. Lock up the human wild beasts who agonize for liberty, and you will find that few jails will hold them. And their escapes may well be called miraculous.

The question then comes back for answer: What about this “universal causation”?—Fate?—the will of God? Here it must be said, as before, that no event of history can be selected which cannot be honestly referred to the intelligence of man when this has been assisted by a partial use of his soul-faculties. When human projects ran foul of natural laws, disaster followed. For instance, the acquirement of a new territory may take a vast amount of energy and heroic fighting—and the will of one man may then be paramount in making a fact of history coupled with his name; but if the army of occupation dies in the swamps of the conquered country, shall the disaster be attributed to God? Shall we not rather say that if the events of history were in His intended control they would be less cruel, less human, less bestial? Can anyone trace a lasting benefit that arose from Napoleon’s career? The meteor disappeared into impalpable dust. The conquered lands returned to their owners. Was any country improved by his coming? He left a bloody trail through Egypt, but not till the last decade has the Egyptian fellah known a whiff of liberty or justice for two thousand years. The only outcome that lasts to the present day is the assisted vanity of the French people, a vanity built on the abilities of one man, which were lost to the country when he died. Does anyone see a trace of the will of God in all this? I do not.

His Corsican mother bore him while she attended her husband in his battles. The offspring was marked for war in his mother’s womb. He was preëminently a natural product; and in him we find indomitable will continually concentrated on faculties which yielded the discernments that made him master of men and master of war. No man came under his scrutiny without feeling that he was read to the core. The weaknesses, strengths, vanities, braveries, and ambitions of others were all read, used, and played upon for one man’s ends. And from Bismarck back to Cyrus we find all the great ones ruling in the 273 same way—through the discernments that are will-forced from the soul-faculties.

But among lesser men, and in everyday life? Here, the same, only in lesser degrees; not with a knowledge of the processes at work, and thus without the conscious direction of effort which would produce more satisfactory results; though often the world is astonished when the extraordinary introspection of some business men enables them to make money in all their dealings. This is not luck. Their amassed wealth is the proof of their life’s strain—almost another name for it. And it should be remarked, in passing, that most of the great ones have been deeply religious in their own ways. Jay Gould was deeply religious in his own way, though I am told he wrecked many. So is Bismarck. So were Wellington and Von Moltke—men who guided frightful carnage. We may smile at the religion which wrecks and kills and prays, but we do not remove the combination; and it is probable that the great ones have been too closely conscious of their own sudden discernments to find a gross materialism possible. It was the same with the pagans. Even Bonaparte had an implicit belief in what he called his lucky star.

The followers of Buckle claim that man is personally hardly more than a cipher in history, that his name is hardly worth writing in the great scroll. But how is this when the fate of Europe rests, as it may rest at this moment, wholly and solely in the faculties of one man? The instinct of hero-worship is too deep-set to be valueless. And the experiments which do so much to explain the sources of increased human knowledge point to the fact that it is in the man of the hour that the history of the hour is written. One leads; the others follow. Gifted he may be, even before he is born; endowed he may be, by forefathers who were clean; but when the event approaches there is always one who more than others realizes the stress, strain, or peril, and in a mighty effort creates from his own faculties a scheme or plan which others are glad to follow.

That is greatness. That is history. That is creation. For creation is of spirit; and man, as these seemingly trivial experiments prove, is also, in part, of spirit. The disasters that may result through other causes from his action are only the proof of his humanness—proof that his strain for enlightenment was 274 not continued. In these ways history is human, but always with a partly secreted and godlike faculty awaiting demand. “Seek, and ye shall find. Knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” The greatest man that ever lived taught this. And whatever he was, or was not, he knew more than any other man.

This article is by no means intended to suggest that the will of God need not be considered in the study of history. When it is proved that human privacy is impossible, and that any ordinary person’s soul may be made to see us at all times, then we may be quite sure that the Giver of these faculties to man possesses them himself and that we are watched both personally and nationally. But the article is intended to suggest that man has progressed and has been great when the exercise of his will-power, or the concentrated desire of prayer, has forced his interior faculties, perhaps through their correspondences, to help him through enlightenment. We find ourselves placed on this planet in total ignorance as to why we came or where we go, but there seems to be one continuous purpose through all—that man shall improve. It may be that high intelligence, combined with experience in all grades of life, is required somewhere else. It may be that in order to gain such experience it must be lived through. There would certainly be no striving if everything came to us as an unearned gift. The disasters resulting from one man’s action are a warning to the next venturer; and if experience is not, or cannot be, sent into a soul as an unearned gift, then the higher wisdom may be non-interference.

The estimate of man’s personal agency in history is necessarily raised when the faculties he has utilized in gaining his ends are inquired into. Such a study seems to lead toward an alteration in the accepted idea of divine control in matters of history when it suggests this intention—that the divinity of a right control shall be shown through man. Such a study shows that he is sufficiently endowed with a spiritual nature, not only for this purpose, but for any other; and it suggests that, as his faculties bring him into direct connection with some All-knowledge from which every kind of intelligence may be drawn, he is expected to use his opportunities; also that the natural consequences of mistakes will not be rectified except through the intelligence supplied to further demand.

275

PLAZA OF THE POETS.

THE NEW WOMAN. [17]

BY MILES MENANDER DAWSON.

UNDER THE STARS.

BY COATES KINNEY.

It is a sad, sad sight.— Carlyle.

THE CRY OF THE VALLEY.

BY CHARLES MELVIN WILKINSON.

A RADICAL.

BY ROBERT F. GIBSON.

278

THE EDITOR’S EVENING.

Our Totem.

Carlyle has remarked upon the significance of symbolism. All nations seek a sign. The sign becomes the visible expression of the highest thought. It is made into an emblem around which the given people march by day and encamp by night. Thus have come all the totems which mankind have lifted up, from the brazen snake in the desert to the Stars and Stripes on the mountain.

Symbolism has its beauty and also its ugliness. In some cases the symbol is happily conceived. It is benign; it expresses hope, truth, fidelity, aspiration, even immortality. Behold the egg of the Egyptians and their circle expressive of undying life and eternity. Note the owl of the Athenians. Note the sweet lily of ancient Provence, adopted by France as the emblem of purity and national peace. Note the Irish shamrock—that delicate green trifolium which has signified so much of union and hope to an enthusiastic and failing race. On the other hand, note the serpent of the Aztecs, the crawling reptiles of Malaysia and India, the savage beasts and carnivorous birds adopted as the symbols of race-life and purpose by the coarse barbarians of northern Europe, and preserved on the flags and banners of their descendants to the present day.

Russia is a bear. Germany is a black eagle. France also, in her Bonaparte mood, is an eagle. Imperial Rome was an eagle from the days of the Cæsars. Great Britain is a lion, and Prussia is a leopard, and Siam is an elephant, and Mexico is still a snake. As for Great Britain, not satisfied with one lion, she repeats him seven times, rampant or couchant, on the royal standard. She also preserves on her coat-of-arms and coins the unicorn, that fabulous, one-horned monster of a horrid dream.

The American Republic seems to have accepted the eagle for its totem. We might have taken a bear or a caribou, but the eagle has pleased our mythologists more—and so, instead of belonging to the tribe of the Turkey, the tribe of the Dog, 279 or the tribe of the Calf, we belong to the tribe of the Eagle. But what does our totem signify?

The eagle in our symbolism and war-myth has come to us from the past. He was of old the totem of the Romans. From the Tiber he flew beyond the Alps, to perch on the standards of German chieftains and Gallic emperors. He has visited all lands that are affected with the civil and ethnic life of Rome. He has appeared here and there on the flags of the Latin races in the Old World and the New. He has made an eyrie in our mountains, and his scream has been heard in our wars. He has settled on our flagstaffs, and has been seen by certain and sundry poets who apostrophize him in verse. He has been admired by orators whose imaginations rise as high as battle and conquest, but not as high as the Stars and Stripes. He has been adored in academic essays. He has hovered over the pages of inchoate histories, until his claim to be regarded as the American bird is established. The eagle has become traditional as the totem of the United States.

In so far as the eagle is the symbol of the independence and freedom of men, let us accept him! In so far as he represents the idea and sublimity of height and flight, let him soar! The eagle as a sign of the free voyage of the human mind, triumphant over nature, visiting on strong wing the far and otherwise inaccessible heights of escape and glory, is the noblest of all the totems ever discovered by man; for flight is the noblest and most sublime of earthly actions. Height is the sublimest of all earthly stations. Height and flight are precisely the dream which we would select from the infinite visions of the soul and have engraved on our seal as a motto for eternity. Height and flight and freedom!

In so far as the eagle may be regarded as the bird of the past; in so far as he stands for violence and conquest; in so far as he represents the rending and destruction of life, the carnivorous passion in mankind, the rage of battle and triumph,—to that extent be there no eagle for the Republic or for us! It is high time that some race of men should rise to the height of discarding violence and blood as the beginnings of fame and power. It is high time that some race should renounce all bears and leopards and lions and mythological monsters as the symbols of its 280 spirit and purpose. It is high time that some nation should ascend to a level from which it may look down on the savage emblems and beast-born symbolism of the past world as no longer fit to express the central purposes and noblest visions of an enlightened people.

The American eagle in the better and more glorious sense—in the sense in which he typifies freedom and height and flight—is a totem of which neither philosopher nor peasant need be ashamed. The eagle’s wing is more than pinion; it is thought. The eagle’s eye is more than fierce disdain; it is a flash of ineffable light. His glance is more than terror; it is an arrow shot into the darkness. His breast is more than pressure and force; it is defiance of wind and battle-rack. His spirit is more than destruction; it is supremacy over chaotic elements and the triumph of the emancipated spirit. His scream is more than the shriek of carnal victory and rage of destroying strength; it is the cry of liberty and the shout of progress to all peoples in the valleys of the world.

Give man the spirit of the eagle. Give him height and flight and freedom. Give us who are Americans the splendid arena of the plains and the open vault of heaven. Give us the mountain, the beetling crag, the precipice, the gnarled oak, the lightning, and the cloud. Give us the warfare of the lawless elements, the world-blaze of the magnificent sun, the starlight of the profound and unspeakable night. Give us the transport of the unchained seasons, the snow-blast and the sun-flash, the tenderness of the dawn, the sorrow of the evening, the rainspout of the bursting nimbus, and the mellow light of autumn. Give us the splendid apocalypse of October and the infinite air-bath of the perfumed June. Give us all the aspirations of the man-soul standing in the midst of this splendor and mutation, standing high and opening the eagle-wing to cloudland and the sky, soaring and circling unfettered, viewing all lakes and hills from the aerial curves of freedom, alighting at will on the chosen summit, undisturbed by fear and untroubled by the torments of power! 281

Vive La France.

A strange fact is the apathy of the American nation towards France and the French people. There is every reason to expect a different sentiment on this side of the sea. France was ever our friend; since the colonial days we have never warred with her. The French were our allies when the days were dark and the winds of our destiny were loosed on the deep. We had been assailed by an unnatural mother. That strong mother had wronged us, treated us as aliens, erased us from her book, turned loose mercenary armies upon us, killed our patriot fathers.

In that hour of fate France appeared willingly on the scene as our champion. She succored us. Whatever may have been her motive, she put her ægis over our head. She sent her heroes to our camps; she gave us Lafayette and Rochambeau. She placed her fleets at our ports, with guns pointed seaward for protection. Then, when the fight was won, she aided us to enlarge our territories, to confirm our new republican empire. Though in the afterdays of her monarchical gloom France sometimes looked askance at our flag, the French nation was never once disloyal to us—never once indifferent to the fate of our great democracy.

In our institutional development for more than a century we have proceeded on the same general lines with the French. If we are satisfied with the result—if we believe in our republic—we ought, in good reason, to believe in the republic of France; for the republic is a universal fact, little trammelled by locality. The barrier of race ought not to predominate over political and social sympathies. The barrier of race ought not to separate us from our own. The fact that we are allied in ethnic descent with the English people ought not to make us enamored of the social life and civil institutions of Great Britain. Much less should the industrial and commercial life of England allure us as if to provoke a like manner of life in ourselves. Least of all should the financial method of Great Britain lead us by imitation to fix upon ourselves a similar incubus and horror.

This leads us to say that to break away from Great Britain, even when incited thereto by the antipathy and prejudice which 282 we must needs hold against her; to leave her behind; to treat her as a historical fact not favorable, but inimical rather, to our progress and independent destiny,—seems to be the hardest task imposed upon the American democracy. The preference of race and language is so profound, the influences of the commercial life are so far-reaching, the admiration for political stability is so natural, the domination of centralized wealth is so overwhelming, and the allurements of consolidated power so well calculated to fascinate the masses, that even American democracy has found it hard to break the British tie and sail away uncabled and disenchanted on the sea.

This deluded instinct of attachment to Great Britain, and this unnatural lack of sympathy for France have cost us dearly. The two sentiments have modified our national life, and have left a result different by not a little from what it would have been if influenced by other and more wholesome dispositions on our part. Our nationality has lost much force on both counts—on the score of our illogical attachment to Great Britain on the one hand, and of our unnatural indifference to France on the other. Under the one influence we have become tolerant of subserviency as a national trait, and under the other we have become in a measure incapable of enthusiasm . The addition of British subserviency has been aggravated with the subtraction of French enthusiasm from our public and private life.

All this had been better otherwise. All this—even after the lapse of a hundred and twenty-one years from the great summer of our Independence—ought still to be bettered with amendment. It is not needed, stiff as we have already become in our national instincts and methods, to go forward by going backwards. To approximate Great Britain is to go backwards. The English people are among the greatest of the historic races, but the British monarchy , with its mediæval pretensions, its humbug of a throne and a crown, its subordinated ranks of society, its military and naval despotism, and its vast skein of tentaculæ stretching to every valuable thing in the world,—is perhaps the one thing that modern civilization should most dread and put away from the field of its desires.

On the other hand France is, in nearly all respects, admirable. Her mobility is life, and her warmth is a fructifying 283 force. France gives forth more than she takes from the nations. Her republic is a splendid piece of political workmanship. Her spirit is patriotic. Her people, instead of straggling over the world like adventurers and pirates, remain in the borders of La Patrie , happy and vital in the possession of freedom.

Her lilies still bloom in the depth of the valleys.

Her vineyards are a covert under which if there be a peasantry it is not a peasantry forced down by oppression, but only the modest residue of the stronger life above and beyond. The free institutions of this beautiful land are the natural counterpart of our own; we should be all the better for warming ourselves not a little in the glow of the Gallic enthusiasm. Vive la France!

Le Siècle.

284

BOOK REVIEWS.

President Jordan’s Saga of the Seal.

David Starr Jordan, President of Leland Stanford Junior University, has many times deserved well of his country. As a scientific man he has, we believe, given to the American public and the world a greater number of original monographs on important branches of current investigation than has any of his distinguished contemporaries. From his special department of ichthyology, in which he became an expert fully a score of years ago, he has branched into nearly all fields of scientific exploration, finding ever new paths, leading to new regions and new empires of knowledge.

Upon this basis is builded Dr. Jordan’s fame as an educator. In two great States of the Union he has presided over the affairs of high-grade institutions of learning. After a successful career as President of the Indiana University, he was selected from the great array of American scholars to preside over the destinies of Leland Stanford Junior University, at Palo Alto, California. But the onerous duties and responsibilities of these positions have hardly distracted Dr. Jordan’s mind from his central motive and aim of scientific investigation. Through all the years of his busy career he has prosecuted his researches with the most conspicuous success.

Meanwhile, he has endeared himself to the American people as an able publicist, whose writings and leadership have become potent in many lines of our public policy. President Cleveland had the good judgment to select Dr. Jordan to preside over the inquiry into the condition of affairs in Bering Sea. The fur-seal imbroglio had already become an international menace; the peace of great nations was threatened by it. It has thus fallen to Dr. Jordan’s lot in his official position to conduct an inquiry of the highest importance. He is the United States Commissioner in charge of the fur-seal investigation, and it is this fact and the results of this fact that now bring him to the fore in a literary production, the only adverse criticism on which is its brevity. Would it were longer.

In 1896 Dr. Jordan published his “Observations on the Fur Seals of the Pribilof Islands.” This was a preliminary report. But it is nevertheless replete with statements of the bottom facts and of generalized information from which a clear notion of the 285 condition of affairs in the fur-seal regions must be derived. It is not of this work, however, that we shall at the present speak, but rather of Dr. Jordan’s later production, “Matka and Kotik; a Tale of the Mist-Islands.” [18]

It appears that during his investigations from a scientific and official point of view the author’s mind has been profoundly impressed on the sentimental and poetic side by the conditions in which he found himself in the Pribilof Islands. The result of this profound impression is the little work before us. Though it is done in prose it is none the less a poem; it is the Saga of the Seals. It is a poetic appeal to all Christendom in the simple and dramatic way of Frithiof and his contemporaries.

“Matka and Kotik” will be a revelation to those of Dr. Jordan’s friends and admirers who were not already acquainted with the deep, clear vein of poetry in his composition. I have noted that several of our nineteenth-century scientists have this vein. Huxley was of this number; the spirits at the séances used to designate him as the “Poet of Science.” Dr. Jordan in “Matka and Kotik” vindicates his right to be known as the American Poet of Science.

It is evident that while the President of the Fur-Seal Commission was performing his duty in the Pribilofs, in the summer of 1896, his mind became profoundly impressed with the sorrows of the seal. Not only have commerce and the equity of nations been outraged in this matter, but the cry of humanity is heard. Aye, more; the cry of the seals themselves is heard; and it is this cry that Dr. Jordan has interpreted and sent to the world. Not satisfied with the preparation of his preliminary report, he has found opportunity to appease his sense of indignation, by writing this book, every line of which tells a story of avarice and crime and butchery which, if we mistake not, the roused-up spirit of mankind will soon abate.

Dr. Jordan’s book is a sort of dramatical story, the personæ of which are all Seals except one man, Apollon the Destroyer, and a few of the creatures such as Chignotto, the sea-otter; Bobrik, her son; Epatka, the sea parrot; Eichkao, the blue fox; Isogh, the hair-seal; Amogada, the walrus; Sivutch, the sea lion; and Kagua, his wife, etc. The principal actors are Atagh, an old “beach-master” living on the Tolstoi Mys; Matka, his wife; Kotik, their child; Unga, Atagh’s brother; Polsi, Matka’s brother; Minda and Lakutha, Kotik’s sisters; Ennatha, Matka’s sister, and Annak, 286 Ennatha’s child. It is the manner of life and fate of these personages that Dr. Jordan has delineated in the “Tale of the Mist-Islands.” He tells us that it is a true story—that the author personally knew Matka before Kotik was born, and that he witnessed the events which he describes.

I shall not attempt to give an extended review of the story of “Matka and Kotik.” I must satisfy myself and, I trust, incite the interest of the readers of The Arena , by sketching only an outline of the Saga of the Seal. The scene of the story is the Mist-Island, or, more properly, certain parts of the shore and headlands of that island whereon the seals pass an important part of their migratory life. From these coast lines they take to sea at certain seasons and swim away, generally to the south. Tolstoi Head is the point of observation from which Dr. Jordan begins his charming delineations of seal-life, and there he concludes the story; which, in the meantime, transforms itself into the pathos of sad separations and finally into the dumb tragedy of slaughter and death.

The author gives character—human character—to his personages, discriminating them according to their natures into beings whose very names, notwithstanding the limited range of their faculties, bring us into intimate and profound sympathy with them. Old Atagh, the lordly sea-bull of the Tolstoi Mys, looms up grandly above the rest—

In shape and gesture proudly eminent.

Matka, the wife, is an embodiment of her sex. Kotik is the child of her choice. All her offspring are veritable children: the uncles are uncles, the aunts are aunts, the cousins are cousins, and the rest are the rest. Even the “supers” appear in the nebulous names of the drama.

The point of the “Tale of the Mist-Islands,” the great lesson of it, is the horrid abuses and cruelties to which the seals have been subjected by the brutal fur-pirates who have thronged the Alaskan waters in the past two decades, and whose intolerable lust of slaughter and devastation has threatened the extinction of the fur-seal race. If the story of “Matka and Kotik” could be perused, as it should be, by the American people, the very mothers of the country would rise up against the piratical butchers of the Pribilofs, who would quail under their frown. Meanwhile, diplomacy drags its length, and official reports carry to Congressional Committees a vague statistical account of what has been done and is still doing in the Alaskan waters.

I most heartily commend to all who are interested—and who is 287 not?—in the fur-seal question and in the manner of its solution, Dr. Jordan’s interesting little book. I have hardly ever seen a better piece of English than this. The author’s style is admirable. I scarcely recall another book so monosyllabic and terse. Whoever commences to read “Matka and Kotik” will continue to the end. The story fascinates while it instructs. I dare say that Dr. Jordan, in the scientific sketches which are cunningly scattered in these paragraphs, is always correct.

If our space permitted, we should be glad to make extended quotations in illustration of the sterling merits of this tale of our far Northwest. I shall be obliged to conclude the review with only a single extract, but must first remark that “Matka and Kotik” is illustrated with forty-two striking photographic reproductions, the beauty and excellency of which can hardly be too highly praised. To these are added thirty-four pen sketches by Miss Chloe Frances Lesley, a student in zoölogy in Leland Stanford Junior University. The illustrations which appear are adapted to the text with perfect good taste. We also note “The Calendar of the Mist-Islands.” This is appended to the story proper, as is also the map of the Mist-Island. In the calendar Dr. Jordan gives a diary of the movements of the seals beginning January 1st and ending November 15th. These notes convey a great amount of scientific information in the most condensed and interesting form. It is evident that Dr. Jordan has written under a strong sense of the significance of the scenes which he wishes to portray. At the close, he says:

288

THE ARENA FOR SEPTEMBER.

The Arena for September will carry to our patrons more than the usual number of superior contributions. Several of these are timely to a degree. It is intended that the great questions of the epoch—the real questions in which the people feel an instinctive concern—shall be discussed in The Arena with the sole purpose of elucidating them in the best possible manner, thus conducing to the betterment of the serious conditions now present in American society.

One such article of the first importance will appear in the number for September. This is a contribution on the “CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH,” by Herman E. Taubeneck, well known as an expert in the political and economic questions of the times. The present article is the first of two on the same subject. Mr. Taubeneck patiently undertakes the theme on the foundation of fact, and reaches his conclusions by an able and irrefutable inductive argument.

A second article of like interest is that on “MULTIPLE MONEY,” by Eltweed Pomeroy, President of The Direct Legislation League of the United States. Mr. Pomeroy is known to The Arena readers as a strong and thoroughgoing publicist whose writings are as instructive in subject-matter as they are lucid in style.

A third contribution in The Arena for September will be an article entitled “ANTICIPATING THE UNEARNED INCREMENT,” by Hon. I. W. Hart, Official Reporter of the Third Judicial District of Idaho. Mr. Hart’s contribution is a powerful exposé of the evils of land speculation in cities and towns, and the consequent extravagant prices of realty and of high rents.

Our special contributor, sent by the courtesy of the Yarmouth Steamship Co. and the Dominion Atlantic and Intercolonial Railways to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to investigate the Social and Industrial Conditions prevailing in those regions, is engaged in completing his article, and the same will appear in The Arena for September.

Besides the abovenamed contributions, The Arena for September will contain “STUDIES IN ULTIMATE SOCIETY,” by Lawrence Gronlund and K. T. Takahashi; a special article, “THE AUTHOR OF THE MESSIAH,” by B. O. Flower; an article entitled “SUICIDE: IS IT WORTH WHILE?” by Charles B. Newcomb; “THE FIRST DEADLY SIN,” by Marvin Dana; “MUSEUMS OF REPRODUCED ART,” by Arthur Altschul; “THE CIVIC OUTLOOK,” by Dr. Henry Randall Waite; Plaza of the Poets; Editor’s Evening; Book Reviews, etc. Our readers will find The Arena for September, with its 144 well-filled pages, a feast of good things, participating in which they will be wiser and stronger for the battle that is toward in these lands.

The Great Opportunity.

The reduction of the subscription price of The Arena to two dollars and fifty cents a year brings to all the friends and relatives of The Arena family (their name being legion) a golden opportunity to add their names to the swelling list of our patrons. Let every champion of our cause send in his name and the names of his friends for the subscribers’ list of The Arena . Begin with the number for July and thus secure the complete volume.

Remember the great reduction!

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1. p. 165 aggressivenes --> aggressiveness
2. p. 182 assest --> asset
3. p. 200 uncalculable --> incalculable
4. p. 208 involutary --> involuntary
5. p. 221 Footnote anchor missing for footnote #9.
          Footnote text placed after most likely paragraph.
6. p. 226 aud --> and
7. p. 259 abtruse --> abstruse
8. p. 266 falculties --> faculties