The Unpopular Review

No. 4 OCTOBER-DECEMBER, 1914 Vol. II

CONTENTS

[223]

SOME FREE-SPEECH DELUSIONS

A singular phenomenon of our time is the invention of a new species of martyrdom. Resistance to wrong, real or imaginary, revolt against oppression, the endeavor to overthrow an established order, has in all ages been attended with hardship and suffering. When repression or punishment has been cruel or vindictive, and the victims have cried out against it, in the more humane ages, they have had in their protest the sympathy and support of right-minded men, however opposed to the aims of the agitation or revolt in question. Those who have suffered for their convictions, whether at the hands of a court or through the bloody judgment of the sword, have won the name of hero or martyr. The time has been when those who were known to hold opinions which were regarded as dangerous to the State, or were obnoxious to the ruling power, fell under the ban of the Government as criminals. In the last two or three centuries, among the more liberal and advanced nations, outright persecution of this kind has been unknown; but between this merely negative freedom of opinion and that positive freedom which we understand by the terms “free speech” and “free press” there is a long distance, the traversing of which has been slow and irregular. It is possible to maintain that even now, and even in such countries as the United States or England, this freedom is not absolute; there are extremely few things, either in government or in common life, that are absolute. But the remarkable thing about the outcry for freedom of speech, of which we have lately been hearing so much, is that [224] this clamor has nothing whatever to do with the question of the absolute completeness of that freedom. What the agitators complain of is not that there are some things which they are not permitted to say or to print; it is not that their publications are censored or the circulation of them obstructed; it is not that the doctrines in which they are interested cannot be put before any assemblage, large or small, which chooses to gather together in an orderly way to hear them. Their grievance is that at certain times or places, where the speaking they wish to do would be either an invasion of ordinary private rights of others, or, in the opinion of the authorities, an incitement to disorder, the authorities intervene to prevent these results. The restrictions to which they object are not limitations as to the nature of the doctrine preached, nor yet limitations that in any way confine the general spreading of the doctrine. What they are not allowed to do is—in principle, at least; of course, there have been blundering applications of it—simply what nobody else is allowed to do. In a word, what they demand is not that they shall have the same freedom as the ordinary citizen in spite of being enemies of the established order, but that they shall have special privileges and immunities because of being enemies of the established order.

In keeping with the peculiar character of their grievance is the character of that factitious martyrdom which they seek to build upon it. The I. W. W. orator who wishes to speak at the foot of the Franklin statue in Park Row considers himself—in a mild way, to be sure—a martyr if, on account of the obstruction of traffic by the crowd that gathers round him, he is required by the police to hold his meeting a couple of hundred yards further north; his martyrdom consisting in the fact that there is very little fun or excitement to be had out of addressing a crowd which does not obstruct traffic. In the crowd itself—say the excited and more or less turbulent crowd in Union Square soon after the Colorado trouble—a man may refuse [225] to move on at the command of the policeman, and may get a crack on his head from the policeman’s club; this man certainly has a much more substantial claim to the title of martyr, and yet his claim is at least nine parts humbug to one part reality. It may be a pretty serious thing to the poor fellow himself, or it may not; as a social or political event it is simply nothing. It would only be something if it were part of a systematic persecution—an incident of a regular policy of oppression. Unfortunately there have been places,—say Lawrence or Paterson—where unwise or wrong-headed local administrations have been guilty of offences of this kind; but in such agitations as that of the I. W. W. and their “Free Speech” allies in New York the grievance has been wholly factitious. There has, indeed, occurred a tragic climax to these goings-on; the killing of three of the New York anarchists by the explosion of a bomb which they were handling, and which there is almost no doubt that they were engaged in preparing for some work of destruction or slaughter. But while this is in one sense a less factitious martyrdom than the others, for it was certainly serious enough, yet in the most vital element of martyrdom it was obviously lacking altogether. Nobody invited, still less compelled, these gentlemen to blow themselves up; and when they did it, they were not engaged in defending themselves against aggression, nor, presumably, did they feel that they were in the slightest danger of themselves incurring the fate they were preparing for others. But all this does not in the least impede their elevation to the honors of martyrdom; and incidentally it may be remarked that although those who thus publicly honor their dead comrades in the cause of revolutionary anarchy say their say without interference, and go about the city of New York without molestation, there are not wanting persons who are ready at any moment to tear their hair over the suppression of free speech in this community.

But it is in the hunger strike that the new martyrdom [226] is seen full-fledged, and in its true character. Here we have the fiction of persecution raised to the second power. The use of it by the free-speech anarchists is of course only one instance of its exploitation, but it is the one that specially concerns us here. Whether from its small beginnings it will develop into a serious nuisance, or perhaps even take on the dimensions of a grave problem, remains to be seen. But men of sense should be prepared for the possible spread of a great deal of foolish and muddled thinking on the subject, and should from the outset see the thing exactly as it is. In a land of free discussion, and where the right to vote is exercised without distinction of class, a certain number of persons are actively engaged in the agitation of radical or revolutionary changes affecting the whole social order. No impediment is put in the way of this propaganda in the shape either of censorship, of hindrance to publicity, or of personal proscription. They are free to make as many converts as they can, either by oral persuasion or by the printed word; and when they have won over a sufficient number, the government is theirs. Of one instrument, it is true, they are deprived the use; and it happens that that instrument is the one most to their liking. They are not allowed to create turbulence or disorder, or to persecute individuals who have incurred their hostility. In this, they are treated no otherwise than advocates of the most innocent or orthodox of causes would be under like circumstances. If there should arise a Puritan agitation against the theatre, its leaders would be allowed to denounce the stage to their heart’s content as a device of the Devil for the corruption and damnation of mankind; but they would not be permitted to harangue excited crowds that were ready to mob the actors and actresses or to burn down the theatres. They would have to content themselves with bringing over to their way of thinking as many persons as could be won by orderly methods. It is of this kind of restraint that the anarchists, and other pretended champions of so-called free speech, [227] complain; it is against this imaginary grievance that the fraudulent martyrdom of the hunger strike is a protest.

And it is the fraudulence of the hunger strike, the affront that is offered to human reason, first in the thing itself, and still more in the silly cry of “torture” that is raised about it, that every sane man must most deeply resent. Here is a handful of cheap revolutionists making themselves more or less of a menace, but certainly very much of a nuisance, to the constituted authorities. This they do, in general, without a particle of molestation from the government or of inconvenience to themselves. Once in a while, when, in these proceedings, they pass, or are thought to pass, beyond a certain line, marked out by considerations of public safety or comfort, they are arrested and subjected to the mild punishment of imprisonment for a short term, such as is meted out to thousands of petty offenders. Then they proceed to set themselves up as judges in their own case; they demand that the law shall surrender to their will. And when this preposterous demand is met by the application to them of the most humane methods which professional skill can devise for securing the accomplishment of their sentence, they rend the air with shrieks of “torture.” If the sentence itself was unjust, let them make all possible to-do about it by all means; nobody would begrudge them that. But they know only too well how little could be made of any real grievance they could lay claim to; and they count on a combination of soft-heartedness and soft-headedness in a considerable part of the public to make a self-inflicted stage-play torture pass current as the equivalent of the thumb-screw and the rack. Precisely what the penal authorities had best do if this foolishness should prove persistent in our country, it may not be easy to say. The one thing certain is that it cannot be trifled with. It is an impudent challenge, not only of the law, but of reason and humanity; and, unless we have quite lost our grip on the realities of life and government, whatever measures it may be found necessary [228] to take in order to meet the challenge effectively will receive the emphatic approval of the American people.

To what extent the fantastic notions of the nature of the right of free speech that we have been discussing are shared by men of intelligence and culture, it is difficult to say. They are to be found distinctly among a certain small and fairly well-defined class of socialist or semi-socialist clergymen and other humanitarians. In a wider circle, these notions, if not distinctly embraced, are at all events given a considerable amount of sympathetic toleration. In either case, it is not too harsh a judgment to say that the attitude is due to want of thought or to shallowness of mind. The true doctrine of free speech is a broad principle of civic conduct, having its foundations in reason and experience, and its justification in the highest public expediency; these people appear to think of it as a simple and absolute dogma, whose sanction transcends all considerations of expediency, and any violation of which is a sin against the divine order. Such a view can be entertained only by a shallow thinker or a one-ideaed fanatic; and it is the former class, unquestionably, to which nearly all of the “free speech” extremists are to be assigned. The contrast between their crude and childish notions and that conception of the doctrine of free speech which is alone worthy of respect or of serious consideration cannot be better shown than by quoting the words of one of the greatest champions of individual liberty the world has ever known. It will hardly be claimed by even the most effervescent of our sentimental apostles of free speech that his own convictions on the subject are more profound, or his courage more uncompromising, than that of John Stuart Mill. In his noble tractate “On Liberty,” Mill goes as far as anyone can go—farther no doubt in some respects than many of these same emotional humanitarians would go—in demanding complete freedom of public expression, so far as the substance of the opinions or [229] doctrines in question is concerned. He does not draw the line at immorality; he does not draw the line at the advocacy of tyrannicide. But the ardor of his devotion to this principle is that of a rational thinker, not that of the blind slave of a fetish. That freedom of speech is made for man, not man for freedom of speech, is to him so obvious as to require no insisting on. A single brief passage—introduced at the beginning of his discussion of the question whether “the same reasons” which prescribe freedom of opinion and of speech “do not require that men should be free to act upon their opinions”—will suffice to show this:

No one pretends that actions should be as free as opinions. On the contrary, even opinions lose their immunity when the circumstances in which they are expressed are such as to constitute their expression a positive instigation to some mischievous act. An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer, or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard.

When we note the remark, a little further on, that “the liberty of the individual must be thus far limited: he must not make himself a nuisance to other people;” and when we observe that after maintaining the right of an advocate of the doctrine of tyrannicide freely to express his opinions, Mill adds that the instigation to it in a specific case may be a proper subject of punishment, provided “an overt act has followed, and at least a probable connection can be established between the act and the instigation,”—we see plainly enough the difference between the working of a profound and rational conviction like Mill’s, and that of the shallow-pated emotionalism which rallies to the support of a Berkman or a Bouck White.

The confusion of thought which is at the bottom of these vagaries has been strikingly illustrated in connection with [230] two matters upon which it may be profitable to dwell at some length. In both instances, the trouble is in part due to misinformation, or misconception of the facts; but in both instances the misinformation, or misconception, is inextricably bound up with the confusion of thought.

Closely allied to the false notion we have been discussing of what constitutes suppression of free speech by the authorities is the false notion, even more prevalent, of what constitutes suppression of the news by the newspapers. That there are some items of news that do not get the degree of publicity to which they are entitled may be quite true; and as regards the treatment by some newspapers of some whole classes of items, the accusation may be entirely justified. But that there exists anything like wholesale suppression of news, among the newspapers of the country generally, and especially by the Associated Press, is a charge absolutely without foundation. Regarded as a matter of large and fundamental public interest—not as a mere matter of ordinary criticism, dealing with imperfections of execution rather than with wrongfulness of intent—the question simply lapses for want of body to the accusation. The things charged as suppressions are so trivial in amount, in comparison with the vast mass of matter of precisely the same, or graver, nature carried in the papers, that the idea of the so-called suppression being anything more than defect in execution—even though sometimes due to the dishonesty of individuals and not always to accident or want of adequate equipment—should be peremptorily dismissed by any man who is accessible to ordinary argument on the subject.

But in the minds of its chief exponents, the idea that there exists a wholesale and systematic suppression of news in the interest of conservatism does not rest upon the omission, or the misrepresentation, of specific items in the record of what are generally regarded as the day’s happenings. Their conviction that the newspapers are guilty of a great and systematic crime against the truth cannot be [231] overcome by any such comparison as I have indicated; simply because the scale of values which they habitually use is fundamentally different from the scale which is current in the community at large. To their minds, the one absorbing concern of mankind is to end the iniquities of the existing economic order; and accordingly, the ordinary news of the day is utterly trivial in comparison with anything that bears upon the social revolution which they are sure is impending. Now it would be perfectly possible to fill many columns of a newspaper every day with matter of this kind—indeed there would be no difficulty in making up an entire newspaper of nothing else. The world is very big—even the United States, even New York city, is very big; and a diligent search for tales of evil, of hardship, of injustice, of rapacity, of poverty, would be amply rewarded any day in the year. Moreover, there are strikes, little and big, in the thousands of industrial and mining centres; there is every now and then the formation of a Socialist club or the starting of a little Socialist newspaper; and then there are speeches, and meetings, and what not. From the point of view of the man who is convinced that the present order of society is on its last legs, and that the supreme duty of the journalist is to expose its rottenness, these are the things with which our papers ought to be filled, instead of the idle chatter about politics and business. This opinion they are, of course, fully entitled to entertain; but their charge that the newspapers suppress the news is essentially based on the notion that the owners or editors of the papers are themselves of that opinion, but have not the honesty or the courage to act upon it. And this is too absurd to call for denial.

The other illustration that I have in mind arises out of the history of the Chicago Anarchists of 1886. There has gradually spread throughout the country a notion that the execution of the four anarchist agitators who were hanged for instigation of the slaughter of the policemen [232] in Haymarket Square was little better than a judicial murder. This opinion is expressed in only a little more extreme form than that which is widely current, by Charles Edward Russell (late Socialist candidate for Governor of New York) when he says:

The eight men were convicted, nominally by the jury, in reality by a misinformed public opinion resolutely bent upon having a hanging. Anything more like the spirit of a lynching I have never known under the forms of law.

That a man of Mr. Russell’s type should talk in this way is natural enough; but it is truly regrettable that an impression approximating this should be widely entertained among persons of intelligence and soberness, and having no sympathy at all with the Socialist, not to speak of the Anarchist, movement. The explanation of this phenomenon is to be found in part in the absence of knowledge of the actual facts; but it is to be found in at least equal measure in the failure to grasp the essential character, and the natural and rational limits, of the right of free speech.

At a time of great public excitement, arising in connection with a strike, a bomb was thrown into the midst of a platoon of policemen, wounding sixty-six of them, seven of whom died of their wounds. The men who were tried and convicted of this murder had, every one of them, been engaged in anarchist agitation; they had, every one of them, been members of a revolutionary society; the two most conspicuous were active promoters of a propaganda of violence as editors of revolutionary sheets and as public speakers. But it was not on these general grounds that the men were convicted. What was proved at the trial, to the satisfaction of the twelve jurymen and of the judge, was that these men were guilty of direct incitement to the precise kind of act that was actually committed—the killing of policemen as the defenders of the rights of property and the maintainers of law and order. Now the trouble with the tender-minded people who so easily accept [233] the view that the executed Anarchists were martyrs of free speech and victims of something like lynch law is that they never ask themselves the question whether, in point of fact, these men were really instigators of the crime in the sense required by the law to make them murderers, or were not. The trial lasted nearly six weeks; it was perfectly orderly; and this question—the question of whether these men were legally guilty of murder—was put before the jury in the sharpest possible way by the judge. It was that question which they decided; it was upon that question that Judge Gary, who presided over the trial, declared, in a remarkable and convincing article written seven years later and published in the Century Magazine , that the verdict was absolutely sound, and involved no stretching of the law. Finally, it should be remembered above all—and yet it is constantly forgotten—that the Supreme Court of Illinois, a year after the trial, sustained the proceedings in a unanimous judgment; its opinion, covering 150 pages of the Illinois reports, being an exhaustive review not only of the law, but also of the facts of the case. To speak of a trial so conducted, and stamped with such approval, as being a proceeding in the nature of a lynching, is not only preposterous, but impudent.

In the foregoing discussion, and in the illustrations that have been adduced, what I have chiefly endeavored to bring out is the unreasonableness, and the practical absurdity, of the unthinking view which passes current with many for the noble and rational doctrine of freedom of speech and of the press. It may be well to add, in conclusion, a few words on a broader aspect of the matter. Just as religion may be made repulsive and odious by narrowness and bigotry; just as scientific or philosophic thought may be perverted by a spirit of intolerant dogmatism; so a high and inspiring doctrine of human conduct and polity may degenerate into an object of merited [234] contempt when divorced from those considerations upon which its justification rests, and erected into a mere formula, to be followed with superstitious servility. That the absurdities which have been put forward in the name of the doctrine of free speech will actually have the effect of thus degrading and discrediting that doctrine, is not likely; but it is not likely only because common sense and sound feeling may be counted on to keep the folly from spreading. Yet it is the duty of men of light and leading to make clear their own position on the subject whenever it comes conspicuously to the front. They can in no better way serve the permanent interests of the cause of true freedom of speech than by showing, beyond the possibility of mistake, their contempt for the cheap counterfeit of it. In all the clamor that has been set up by the Bouck Whites and the Berkmans and the Upton Sinclairs, has any one pointed to a single doctrine that has been suppressed, a single teacher that has been silenced, a single truth, or alleged truth, that the authorities have endeavored to stifle? Time was when the champions of free speech have had to fight in order that men who had a message to deliver should have a chance to deliver it; what these make-believe apostles and martyrs have to fight for now is a chance to be suppressed. Nobody asks what it was that Bouck White or Becky Edelson wanted to say; what they ask is how he came to be dragged out of a church, or how she came to be arrested for being disorderly. And nobody asks the former question for two reasons—first, that the newspapers freely print what these people have to say; and secondly, that what they have to say is utterly familiar and commonplace. Suppression is not, with them, an obstacle to the spread of their teachings; on the contrary, it is their chief stock-in-trade, their sole claim to the attention of the public. What has elevated the doctrine of freedom of opinion and of speech to the lofty place which it holds in the estimation of mankind is the conviction, slowly acquired through [235] ages of physical and spiritual struggle, that by that freedom can best be served the cause of truth, and hence the advancement of humanity. But with this neither the vulgar stage business of the New York Anarchists of today, nor the crazy appeals to the pistol and the bomb of the Chicago Anarchists of 1886, has anything whatever to do. To identify either with the great historic doctrine of free speech is to debase the intellectual and moral coinage of the race.

[236]

IS SOCIALISM COMING?

Every historian today owes much to Karl Marx for his development of the “Economic Interpretation of History.” Whatever that theory may fail to explain, it certainly succeeds in explaining the nature and growth of the Socialist movement. When the great attempt at real political and economic democracy made by the French people in their great Revolution had failed and left behind it as a legacy the memory of the Terror and the wars of Napoleon, every nation in Europe felt the reaction. Russia, Austria, Spain and non-industrial Europe generally reacted towards simple absolutism, noble against peasant. But in the countries within the boundary marked out by the industrial revolution, the wealth created by the new machines placed the balance of economic power in the hands of the commercial classes, and so forced the old landed aristocracy to admit them to political power as well. In the meanwhile the first shock of large scale production had widened the gap between the industrial workers and the employing class. Independent artisans were ruined or forced into factories, and in the wake of the new industry there trailed a network of industrial oligarchies which spread until they covered the civilized world. The already enfranchised classes refused to use their power to moderate the harshness of the competitive struggle, honestly believing that any interference with [237] “economic law” could work nothing but ruin and hardship in the end.

In view of the facts as they existed in the days of the Communist Manifesto it was practically inevitable that an economist in sympathy with the economically powerless and politically disfranchised masses should interpret history as did the Marxians. In an age of coal, iron and steam (that potent trinity), of large scale production, of capitalistic agriculture, of economic tyranny, of sharpening class divergence and increasing poverty, it seemed that there was no way to realize democracy but to wait until industry had been concentrated into the hands of a few rich men, till the middle class and the free peasantry had been reduced to the proletarian ranks, and till the ever increasing misery of the workers taught them to combine and seize the means of production and distribution by a single revolutionary stroke. Private property could have appeared only as a tool for robbing the workers of the “surplus value” of their labor, religion as an ingenious means of sidetracking revolutionary activities, and patriotism as an excuse for standing armies and protective tariffs. This was a tenable explanation of the world—in 1848!

But the world has moved since the day of the Manifesto . Now manhood suffrage is the rule and not the exception. The worst forms of factory serfdom have been ended by legislative and economic changes. The various reform parties of Europe and America and even the Conservatives compete with each other for the workingman’s vote by programs of social amelioration which steadily grow more ambitious every year. Socialism itself has altered in a changing world. The “Revisionist” or common-sense wing of the party has abandoned both the “surplus value” metaphysics, and the prophecy, so happily falsified, of “increasing misery” and “cumulative panics,” and has moderated the class war dogma far enough to permit working hand in hand with the once hated bourgeoisie [238] for immediate reforms. Other Socialists still repeat the old catchwords, but modify them by a process of “interpretation” analogous to that which makes Liberal Christians content to repeat the historic creeds. Of course some revolutionists have looked upon this readjustment with misgivings, and, as a result, we have sporadic and badly led revolts against party discipline, such as Syndicalism in France, Larkinism in England and the I. W. W. in America.

The main citadel of Socialist theory still remains intact, however, in the eyes of its defenders; and so the loss of unessential outposts harms the party very little. If it is true that industry conducted in large units is always in the end more efficient than if undertaken by many small units, sooner or later all the means of production and distribution will be concentrated either in the hands of a closely-knit class of industrial magnates or else in the hands of society as a whole. The only choice then open will be between control by the few, and control by the many: there will no longer be a choice between individualism and collectivism. This must be, because individualism always involves some measure of free competition, and under a system of competition the less efficient competitor is forced into the background by the more efficient. The one hope of saving both democracy and private property, then, lies in the chance that centralization beyond a certain point is not an economic gain.

The factors that undoubtedly do make for greater concentration are numerous and important, but they are so well known that a brief mention of a few of the more important will be sufficient here. The first cause of monopoly is the fact that nature is also a monopolist. Many valuable mineral deposits are found in quantity in a small area, and hardly at all outside of it. Coal, iron, timber, water-power and a ready access to market are not to be had everywhere. There are also economies in the greater size of a plant, especially where, as in the telegraph [239] service or the railroad lines, there is an enormous initial expense in any case, and profits increase directly with the amount of business which can be done on the basis of a given amount of fixed capital. Standardization of commodities, especially of commodities used in production—such as machine parts, is an advantage to the consumer, and hence to the largest producer. In the large factory, moreover, the subdivision and specialization of labor can be carried farther—more processes can be handled under one roof, and more patents can be united into one machine. But the chief advantage of the great factory is that it can afford great quantities of power in place of using hand labor. The reason why “handicraft revivals” have had such limited success is that the most skilled of artisans, working by hand, cannot produce in quantity as can the engineer with his machine. So long as this difference exists, individual industry can only be a decorative border to the main fabric of industrial life. The type of power now generally used gives an added advantage to concentration. “For steam can only be generated in a fixed spot, and the motive power furnished thereby can only be distributed over a small area.” [1]

These advantages are due to the size of a unit of production. But large industry is usually also rich industry (or it could not be very large), and there are other advantages due to the wealth of the owners. The wealthy concern can buy goods cheaply in quantity, and, if its demand is great enough, even exercise some control over the production of needed raw materials. It can afford the best machinery, the best labor, the best management. This advantage notoriously applies, even to such organizations as churches and universities, since the ablest pastors and professors are attracted by the largest institutions. A great saving can also be made by such factors as combining clerical forces, managers, salesmen and other employees of several firms into one, thus reducing salary costs, and preventing duplication [240] of effort. Other advantages of the rich firm are diminished advertising costs, the abolition of premiums, the reduced need of borrowed capital and of extending credit to consumers, power over prices, middlemen, carriers and competitors, the ability to adjust supply to probable demand, and, as centralization approaches monopoly, the power to reduce wages without fear of losing employees to other firms. What then is left but to admit the contention of the Socialist that Socialism has no alternative except the undesirable one of a new feudalism differing from the old only in resting upon an industrial rather than an agricultural basis?

The first objection I would make to the positing of this dilemma is to the assumption that the farmer can be safely ignored. Socialists admit that concentration is proceeding more slowly in agriculture than in any other branch of production, but they say that as industry develops, the movement toward the city which is so strong today will become stronger than ever, until the manufacturing population will outnumber the agricultural many times. But there is a balance in these things. We must have food, and every person who leaves the country for the city subtracts one from the number of food producers, and adds a customer for other farmers to supply. Hence the growth of a large population divorced from the land means a continually augmenting profit for the agriculturist, and a growing inducement to go “back to the land.” Agriculture must then remain a cardinal factor in our economic life. To be sure, in the past the great estate has often triumphed over the small farm, and the Socialists maintain that it will again. If the causes which produced the “latifundia” of Rome, the feudal land ownership of the middle ages, the sheep farms of sixteenth century England, the capitalist farming of the early nineteenth century and the cotton plantations and “bonanza” wheat farms of America, were operative today, this contention would be right. But just the contrary is the case. The vast estates [241] of eastern Prussia, [2] heavily mortgaged and hard pressed for labor, are being rapidly alienated by the landlords themselves, who are encouraging the government they dominate to establish a system of peasant proprietorships in their place. In France the small holder is triumphant economically, and he controls by his vote the political destinies of the Republic. In Australia and New Zealand, the squatters’ sheep farms have receded before the advance of selectors’ holdings, which in turn are being parcelled out under “Closer Settlement Acts.” In Ireland most of the landlords have already been bought out under the Wyndham act, and even in England, where the custom of primogeniture has tended to keep estates together, the Conservative or landlords’ party has promised to establish small holdings by a policy of government purchase from the present owners.

If the Socialist theory as regards agriculture holds good anywhere, it must be in America. But on turning to the census of 1910 what do we find? Over 62 per cent. of our farms are worked by their owners, and these include about 65 per cent. of the improved land, and more than that of total area! In 1850 the average number of acres to a farm was over 202; today it is 138.1. More significant yet, while the number of owned and rented farms increased, the number of farms worked by managers shows an absolute decrease in the decade since 1900. This was the type of farm that was going to supplant all others, according to the Marxian prophecy. In the words of the census: [3] “That the number of farms increased more rapidly than the acreage of land in farms, is accounted for partly by the fact that in some sections of the country considerable numbers of small truck, poultry and fruit farms have been established, but still more by the fact that in the West large numbers of farms of moderate size have been [242] established where great cattle ranches were formerly found. Then, too, in the Southern states, the subdivision of many plantations into smaller tracts of land operated by tenants—a process begun soon after the Civil War—has continued, each of such tracts counting as a farm under the census definition.”

It is further to be noted that the forces which have tended to bring about the triumph of the state and the plantation, are of less and less significance as we turn to the future, whereas the counter forces which make for agricultural decentralization increase with the progress of population, invention and popular education. Slave labor was alike the cause of the Roman manor and the Mississippi plantation, but the world will probably never see slavery extended again, for it is at once too inhumane for modern sentiment, and too wasteful for present-day scientific methods. On its economic side, the American Civil War was a fight to the death between the small farm run by free labor, and the slave plantation. So, virtually, is the present conflict in Mexico. Certainly in the first case, and probably in the second, victory belongs to the farm. Feudalism was partly a result of the disorders caused by barbarian raids, which forced men to put themselves and their holdings under the protection of some great lord, and partly of the exhaustion of the precious metals, which made it necessary for a king to pay his retainers in landed estates instead of money. Neither factor has been operative for centuries, or probably ever will be again. Nor is it probable that it will ever again pay to turn good arable land into pasture, as happened in Tudor England: the increasing density of population forbids it. Capitalistic farming in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rested upon the costliness of agricultural machinery, and the ignorance of the average farmer. Today the advance of industry puts cheap machinery within the pocket-range of the individual farmer, and scientific training is placed within reach of all [243] by agricultural schools and colleges, state and national experiment stations, and the free distribution of information. Knowledge is no longer a monopoly: the farmer is becoming an engineer of intensive agriculture. What factors are now effective? The chief is the growth of population, the consequent increased value of land, and therefore the need for conservation rather than exploitation of its richness. Small diversified stock, fruit, poultry and dairy farms, where every acre can be watched over and put to its best use, yield a greater profit than where the land is covered with staple crops. The agricultural laborer or “hired man” is another factor in the situation. Few persons like to work for wages, some do not like agricultural life, almost no one enjoys the combination. Hence the laborer in the country will either buy a small holding of his own, if he can, or else go to the city. Whole provinces in Germany east of the Elbe have been depopulated just for that reason. No doubt the wholesaler has certain advantages in marketing his goods, but such voluntary systems of coöperative credit and sales as are so popular in western Germany and Denmark, reduce this to a minimum.

Is agriculture a solitary exception to a general law of the indefinite concentration of industry? In many cases, such as the telephone, telegraph, cable (possibly not wireless telegraphy), railroads, steamship lines, certain kinds of mining, certain wholesale physical and chemical processes, and the making of standardized goods, no doubt concentration has advantages which do not tend to diminish. Such industries will be either socialistically owned, or quasi-socialistically controlled by the government. But this leaves a wide range of trade and manufacture where other centralizing factors operate, which are not permanent but temporary. If the largest plant, even today, is the most efficient, why do separate establishments increase in number so rapidly? In 1909 [4] the number [244] of establishments in the continental United States were no less than 268,491, representing an increase of 24.2 per cent. over the number in 1904. But the most remarkable fact is that the number of persons engaged in manufacture increased in the same period by only 23.6 per cent. and the number of wage workers, as distinguished from owners and salaried persons, only by 21.0 per cent. Of course the Socialist will reply that many different plants are really controlled by single corporations, openly or secretly, according to the degree of enforcement of “anti-trust” laws. This is perfectly true, but it belongs to another aspect of the problem. What the census figures indicate is that the maximum efficiency point of a plant has not only a definite limit, but may even decrease with the progress of industry. The truth is that Socialism is a phenomenon of the age of coal burning, the nineteenth century. Steam power is being more and more replaced by electrical power, which, generated in one place, can be used over an immense area. It is true that most electricity is still derived, at some loss of efficiency but an immense gain in availability, from the burning of coal or other fuel. But the coal beds are far from inexhaustible, and sooner or later we must supplement our supply by the “white coal” of the waterfalls. The Age of Electricity will usher in a second great industrial revolution. By putting power in quantity at the disposal of the independent artisan, it will for the first time in history enable him to compete with the great factory. Our tiny remnant of handicraftsmen may thus become a great army of artisan-engineers, combining the skill and personal attention of the old-fashioned master craftsman, with the technical training and machinery of modern engineering. And if the supply of energy within the atom is ever tapped to a sufficient degree, power will be as cheap as water, and the greatest advantage of the large producer be wiped out forever.

These changes will make small production a possibility; [245] there must be other causes to make it the general rule of industry. As wealth increases and the standard of living rises, quality in commodities will come to be considered as well as quantity. If the small productive unit cannot compete on even terms with the large in wholesale production, it may more than do so in retail production for an exacting market. “Finishing” industries, “assembling” industries and the like will absorb an ever increasing proportion of the industrial population. The future will have use for the expert, and only the expert; the mere laborer will be eliminated by the advance of education and the specialization of machinery. There will yet come a time when it will pay the manufacturer better to keep “cheap labor” in opulent idleness than to let its unskillful fingers touch the machines. Mere routine duties in commerce can be left in large measure to calculating and recording machinery. The great concerns will then run with a small office force and a staff of engineers, and release a host of supernumerary clerks and laborers for individual industry. The only “proletariat” will be one of cogs and wires and dynamos.

There still remains the problem of distribution. Will the great stores, banks and exchanges continue to control the economic life of the nation? Will competition in buying and selling crush the small producer, no matter how efficient his production? It must be admitted that this is a possibility. The last moral I should wish anyone to draw from this article is that “everything is bound to work out all right” because of certain beneficent economic laws. Certainly it will need all our statesmanship to realize the possibilities I have sketched. All I contend is that they are possibilities, that we are not hopelessly driven to the alternative of aristocratic or democratic collectivism, that the stars in their courses do not, as is so often contended, fight against the small producer. But I see no cause for despair in the matter of exchange and control. The small shop still continues to exist beside the [246] big store; the individual concern may fail, but the type endures. Perhaps all middlemen, big and small, will in the end disappear as the connection between producer and consumer becomes more direct. Even the poorest classes of the future will, I think, buy more goods to order than ready made. As to the power of the big establishment over carriers and middlemen, these can be controlled in part by law, as in the extirpation of the railway rebate. The advantages of credit and capital on the side of the large concerns, can be offset by coöperative credit and sales agencies, as readily in manufacturing as in agriculture. By ensuring a high level of competition unfair advantages can be eliminated, and the fight be purely one of industrial efficiency, which is not always on the side of the biggest battalions.

It is of the first importance to realize that each perceptible social change involves many other perceptible changes, that, in Spencer’s happy analogy, the social constitution is a web, no strand of which can be moved without moving others. The changes we have tried to forecast cannot come effectively before the subsidence of the wave of fierce competition which was partly smoothed down by the trusts. In many businesses, competition in drumming and advertising is still at the point where it costs more to sell goods than to make them and hosts of men accomplish only the neutralizing of each other’s efforts. The rationalizing of competition and the growth of a coöperative spirit would release men for other pursuits; and the growth of intelligence in learning what is to be had and discriminating what is best, must diminish the billions spent on advertising. These additions to productive labor and capital must diminish the ills which have made Socialism seem desirable as well as inevitable.

Suppose we do our best to realize these possibilities to the full. Suppose a Socialist then revisits the earth two or three hundred years from now. He may see in full operation what he has always declared impossible, a democratic [247] individualism. Instead of an impoverished and disappearing farming class, he will find a populous countryside divided into small homesteads, and run at a handsome profit by specialists in intensive agriculture. Instead of a factory or mining proletariat, hungry and rebellious, he will find great wholesale establishments owned and run by a handful of engineers, turning out pulp, cloth, metal and standard parts for machinery, turning the products over to millions of independent artisan establishments supplied with cheap and plentiful power, to be worked into countless articles of art and utility. He will look to the processes of exchange to find great financial magnates and railway barons on the one hand, and a horde of miserable clerks and small shopkeepers in difficulties on the other. Instead, he will discover a network of voluntary credit and sales associations, information bureaus, individually owned freight automobiles (and possibly airships); with perhaps a few regulated railway lines and pneumatic delivery tubes, run by a prosperous association of experts. He will look for the old-time “servant class,” and find that the scientifically trained housewife, with a power plant in the cellar, can run her own house, thank you, and consider it the most honorable of professions. Seeing everything so effectively managed for the happiness of the people, he will look to see in the government the universal owner and employer of his dreams, but he will find instead a clearing house of help and information, which puts its knowledge of efficient management, of technical processes, of economic and sociological conditions, at everyone’s disposal, and comes to the rescue in the rare case of poverty, failure or crime. Will he rejoice that the world is happy, or be sorry that it is not happy his way? If I know the Socialist, he will claim that he was right all along, and that this state of society is really Socialism. Let him claim the word; I call it democratic individualism, because it means the greatest possible distribution of economic power and function consistent with efficient production.

[248]

THE REPUBLIC OF MEGAPHON

Persons of the Dialogue:

Socrates .
Chærephon .
Megaphon .

Scene : At first a street in the Metropolis, [5] and afterward the house of Megaphon. [6]

Time : Year 4 of Olympiad 25 after American Independence.

The narrator and leading person of the dialogue is Socrates.

I. I had gone into the city on the Fourth day of the month to witness how they would observe the Festival, and was returning at my leisure, when Chærephon, catching sight of me at a distance, ordered his son to run forward and bid me wait for him. And the boy, taking hold of me by the cloak behind, said: “My father bids you wait for him.”

“By all means,” said I.

And not long afterward Chærephon came.

“Socrates,” he said, “you seem to be returning from the city.”

“You guess not badly,” I replied.

We continued on our way, and soon came near the crossing of two streets. Here, a boy was standing at the curb, calling loudly to all who passed.

“What are the words he cries?” I said to Chærephon.

“The Republic ,” he answered. “It is the new paper, that will come forth daily, and is to help the demos; for you know that until now it has come but thrice a week, and has been for the few. Have you not heard of it?”

“Yes,” I said, “and I have thought about it much. [249] Henceforth we shall have the news every day, and in a different way.”

We had now come to the boy, and were passing him.

“Here, boy,” I said, “give me your paper.”

He gave it to me, still crying as before.

“And how much must I pay you for it?” I asked.

“An obol,” [7] he replied.

“Very well,” said I, and gave him the obol.

“Is it not cheap?” said Chærephon. “And do you not think the demos has great reason to rejoice? For now many more will be able to read of what takes place.”

“It is indeed cheap,” I said, “and now the demos may indeed read all it will. But I do not think it may rejoice.”

“Do I hear aright?” he asked. “Can it be you do not like the change?”

“You do hear aright,” I answered. “I do not like it.”

“But ’twill educate the demos,” he said.

“It will,” I said, “and that is why I do not like it. My thought is that ’twill educate them wrongly, and we shall have trouble from it. But let us discuss the matter, if that will please you.” [8]

II. “Most gladly,” he said. “But look, yonder is Megaphon’s house, and I told him I would stop. Will you go with me, and there discuss in the hearing of us both?”

“Yes,” I said, “most willingly.”

We drew near, and Chærephon beat gently upon the door with his sandal, [9] and we waited until someone should come from within.

The son of Chærephon, first asking his sire’s permission, now joined other boys who were vying one with another in a game of making noises.

[250]

Now the playing of the game was on this wise. Chærephon’s son would take from the store in his pocket a crimson paper, tightly rolled, containing an explosive. This he set off by means of a thread which projected from the end of the roll, and contained the same explosive, but not so much. The thread was called the fuse, and the roll a “cracker.” When lighted with a match, the fuse would quickly carry fire to the cracker, which, straightway bursting, made a loud report. But first Chærephon’s son would send it flying through the air, lest it harm his fingers. Yet there were lads of hardihood who boldly held the cracker as it burst, and remained unharmed; and these were the winners of the game.

This at that time was for young and old the manner of celebrating the nation’s freedom. For the people had once been in thrall to the tyrant.

III. While we yet stood looking on at this sport, the daughter of Megaphon opened to us.

“My sire is within,” she said; and pointed to the door of the megaron.

The door was open, and we entered. At first we saw no one, but after some moments became aware of Megaphon’s legs, which alone could be seen of all his body. For the rest of his body was hidden by a printed sheet. This sheet, we saw, was the Republic ; for the letters were large.

“Hail, O Megaphon!” I cried in a loud voice.

Megaphon lowered the sheet until his face appeared, and then leaped up.

“A thousand pardons, Socrates and Chærephon!” he cried. “I was deep in the paper, and did not notice. Pray seat yourselves.”

We seated ourselves in front of him, and not far off.

Megaphon laid aside the paper, as it seemed, unwillingly.

“What were you reading, O Megaphon?” Chærephon inquired, to start our discussion. For he knew well, without the asking.

[251]

“The Republic ,” Megaphon replied. “Ah, I see you have one, Socrates. Is it not fine, and should we not rejoice? The demos will surely make great progress now, and our nation will become much greater than ever, for we shall have news every day, and nearly all will be rich enough to read, and nearly all will thus become intelligent.”

Chærephon gazed at me.

“But Socrates does not approve,” he said.

“No,” I said, “by Zeus, no!” [10]

Megaphon was greatly astonished.

“I do not understand,” he said. “Will not knowledge be spread among our people as never before, and will not our demos become well informed and thinking citizens, no longer a prey to their own ignorance or to the deceits of their enemies? For we shall now have the news at trifling cost, I think. Is it not so, O Socrates?”

“At trifling cost, most certainly,” I answered. “To speak truly, the cost is even too little. But shall we discuss the matter?”

“By all means,” he said.

“And will you listen to me with patience,” I said, “and answer what I ask, and not grow angry?”

“We will do as you say,” he said. “Will we not, Chærephon?”

Chærephon agreed.

IV. “Well, then,” I began, “I suppose we may assume that the Republic , and others—for without doubt there will in time be many like it—will be taken daily into the homes of the demos, as well as of the few. Is it not so?”

Megaphon assented.

“Then let us speak of the matter in this fashion,” I said. “Suppose you had an acquaintance who came to visit you every day in the year, and was admitted not only to yourself, but freely to your wife and your sons and [252] daughters. On entering, he first makes a great show of importance and a great deal of noise by calling out in an exceedingly loud voice that a cruel murder has been done, or a savage battle has been fought, or a shocking accident has happened, or a great robbery has been attempted, and comes up quite close to all of you and points out in every detail just how the accident or the crime took place. After this, he tells you of lesser crimes and mishaps—of thefts, adulteries, and murders among the poor and vicious, and the like; and then he tells with great exactness of many brutal contests—of the pancration, [11] of boxing with the cestus, [12] and of the fights of cocks and dogs. He tells you also of the life of the idle, who do nothing but eat and drink, passing the nights in waking and the days in sleep, consuming in pleasures they do not need the substance they have not earned. And suppose he counsels you to hate not only them, but all who possess greater store of goods than you. And then suppose he will tell you of various things which he says you should not lack, now screaming loudly that these goods will be sold for less than they cost, and now whispering other things of the sort with equal earnestness, and with equal intent to deceive you. Suppose he not only tried to sell you good and necessary wares, but that which he knew you did not need, or was worthless. And suppose he told you much that was true of your neighbors but was no concern of his, and repeated much that was false and harmful. And suppose his words were often vulgar and many times profane, and that his jests were coarse, and even obscene, and you should come upon him murmuring to your wife and children such things as the tongue should in no wise repeat.” [13]

Megaphon seemed not quite content with my words.

“Suppose,” I said, “that he did and said such things in your house, not twice or thrice in the year, but daily, [253] ever boasting of his virtues, and telling you all that he was your true and faithful friend. Would you not think the advantage of his presence doubtful?”

“I should,” said Megaphon, “if he were all you say he would be; and I should not let him remain, but kick him out of doors without delay, and forbid him to enter again. But surely there are other matters he would relate, such as we should be glad to hear of, and we should not need to listen to all he said, nor buy all he would have us buy.”

“No,” I said, “doubtless not; but his company would be unpleasant, even if you neither bought nor heeded. For he would offend you often, and waste your time.”

“And the Republic , I think, is not wholly like the acquaintance you describe,” Megaphon said. For he bore ill what I said.

“But it will be so in no long time,” I said.

“Will you tell us why?” he asked.

V. “I will, assuredly,” I said. “Let us inquire farther. Just now I paid for the Republic one obol, did I not? and heretofore it cost two? The price is now but half, and soon it will be still less. For so at least they promise. Is it not true?”

“It is,” Megaphon said. “And justly, as I think. For the demos should be encouraged to read.”

“Very well,” I said, “when the former price is cut in half, will it not be impossible to gain as much? For gain is the purpose of the newspaper, and its owners will not publish it unless they receive gain, and the greatest possible amount. If they cut the price in half, they will of a surety use other means to bring them the money thus lost. Will it not be so?”

“But more people will buy and read,” he said.

“Yes,” I said, “they will. But more men and better machines will be needed, and the paper will be much larger, as you already see. Without doubt, they will not be able to give for so small a sum a paper so large.”

[254]

“You seem to speak truly,” he said.

“Then whence will come the gain I speak of?” I said. “Will it not come perforce from advertisements? At least, so I have read, for you see I know what is being talked. And how shall they increase the number of those who advertise, and make the price greater? For both, I think, will be necessary. Will it not be by having more who purchase and read? For those who buy and sell goods will pay a higher price only if more are to read their advertisements. Do you think I am right, Megaphon?”

“So it appears to me,” he said.

“Then,” I said, “is it not clear that we shall have a change in the newspaper’s ways? Until now, the newspaper has had its gains mostly from those who read, and but little from those who advertise; but henceforth it will be contrariwise. It will not enrich itself from readers—except as their number brings more and better-paying advertisements.”

“And there is another thing,” Chærephon said. “The character of the readers will also change. There will henceforth be more of them untaught and unthinking than before, because of the cheapness of the paper. Will it not be so?”

“Most certainly,” I said; “you have anticipated my thought.”

VI. “Then,” I continued, “if this is as I say, will it not of necessity follow that henceforth the paper will be so ordered as to suit the tastes of the many rather than of the few?”

“I do not disagree,” said Megaphon.

“For,” Chærephon said, “you cannot suit at once the tastes of both the ignorant and the intelligent.”

“And what are the tastes of the demos?” I said. “Does not the demos like excitement, and will not the newspaper set forth in detail every manner of accident and crime and gossip? Doubtless you have seen the demos, how it behaves [255] when the dead are to be seen, or when the wedding of some rich person takes place, or evildoers are being led by the Eleven to be punished.”

“Yes,” he said, “I have. The demos has but poor taste in many matters. The demos likes above all to be entertained, and it delights in things that are strange and horrible.”

“True,” I answered, “and the demos does not like to think; for that is a difficult sort of labor. It will be necessary to omit that which would please the few, and put in its place that which is amusing and easy to understand. And there will doubtless also be much that is unseemly and shameful to read.”

I took up the Republic from Megaphon’s side.

“Indeed,” I said, “that of which I speak has already begun. I will read you what stands written here:

‘An important witness against Bloombury Bright, Priest of the Pericles Avenue Temple of Zeus, in Bright’s trial before fifteen priests of the State Synodos, was Theodora wife of Diodoros Ploutocrates. She charged that in the month Anthesterion the priest embraced and kissed her twice. On a second visit, when he found her wearing a chiton, [14] she says, he was more violent in his attentions.’

“Do you not think this very vile, O Megaphon?” I asked.

“Most vile indeed,” he said.

“And would you like to have your daughter read it?”

“No, by Zeus!” he cried. “For there is no good in it, but only evil. It would befoul her mind.”

VII. “And there will be another consequence,” I said. “Will not the makers of the paper think they must make it attractive to the demos at all costs, and will not the gatherers and arrangers of the news learn to do this by [256] adding to or taking from the truth, or even by inventing news; so that we shall not be able to distinguish between the true and the false?”

“It will be,” he said, “as you say; at least in the case of the paper that tries above all to please the demos.”

“There will thus be deception in two ways,” I said: “they will omit, and they will invent and add. But this is not the only evil from which we shall suffer. For consider the editor’s page. The newspaper has always been, it says, the moulder of the demos’s thoughts; and so, indeed, it was, so long as its editors were leaders of great causes, and thought strongly, and were masters of their own words. But how, when it must make its gains from those who buy and sell, and not from the followers of truth, shall it be able to attack or to favor whatsoever and whomsoever it please? How shall it be free to attack evil rich men whose advertisements it must have, or oppose a party or a movement cherished by them? And how in turn shall it be free to attack the inconstant demos itself, by whom it must be purchased? For it will not be conducted on principle, and look for its gains to those who read, but commercially, and look to those who advertise.”

“I do not see,” Megaphon said, “how it can avoid these evils.”

VIII. “Does it not seem clear, then,” I said, “that the editor’s page will be secretly open to purchase, and no longer truthful? For ‘We must live,’ the owners will say.”

“Yes,” Chærephon replied; “and I have another thought. I am thinking that much harm may come because we shall have news confused with advertisement, or with secret attempts of various kinds.”

“You think rightly,” I said. “We shall have persons or groups of persons making deceitful use of the news in advertising their products, or in courting the favor of the demos for some project. Indeed, I think that something [257] might occur like this: those who sell goods for our triremes and hoplites might pay out great sums for the secret aid of the newspapers in rousing the passions of the demos by appeal to its natural hatred and fear of the barbarians. For then the State would increase the number of ships and soldiers of every kind, and thus they would sell more goods, and make greater gains. Or a maker of some food or medicine, or a false follower of Asklepias, might do the like; and the demos, which is ever seeking after cures for real and fancied ills, would soon enrich him. Can you not think that this could happen?”

“I can indeed,” Megaphon said.

“Then,” I said, “have we not proved that the newspaper will be used to educate the demos wrongly—I mean by giving too much news of one kind, and not enough of another, and exaggerating, coloring, and otherwise falsifying the truth, and pretending to be a friend when it is an enemy, and selling itself, whenever it safely can, to him who will give most?”

“I will admit what you say,” Megaphon said; “for I am eager to hear whither your discussion will lead.”

IX. “It appears, then,” I said, “that there is some doubt as to this education of the demos you rely upon, as to whether it will be as nearly perfect as you think. But let us go farther. I have spoken until now of matters of fact. Shall I now say something of matters of taste?—if you will yield to me in this, that taste has much to do with the worth of nations.”

“I will concede it,” he said.

“Consider, then,” I began, “the language which the newspaper will employ in its effort to please the demos. Will it not be of necessity untaught and rough, and often coarse, like the speech of the demos itself? For if it is to attract the demos, it must be easy to read, and of spicy savor, thus to say, and must not speak after the manner of the few. For the demos will have nothing superior to [258] itself. We shall thus find ourselves at cross purposes; our didaskaloi will be trying to teach our epheboi to speak and write purely, and the newspaper will teach them to speak and write like the demos. Of a truth, men who write purely and well will not be employed, but only those whose manner is of the demos. And again, they will cost the owners less. Do you think I am right?”

“I grant it,” Megaphon said.

“And consider not only the news and the manner in which it is written, but the advertisements also, of what nature they will be. Will not many worthless things be advertised in a bold and shameless manner? and will not the effect of this be to confirm bad taste on the part of the demos, and beget and encourage it among the few who are better taught? Let me see your paper again.”

Megaphon gave me the paper.

I opened it, and, having searched some moments, “Listen,” I said:

‘Oh, say boys, don’t forget that sore, sweating, tired feet often have a wonderful penetrating and terrific odor which is very unpleasant in the home or with company. Asklepian’s Antiseptic cures all the trouble. Pharmakopoles Pharmakopolides’.

“Pharmakopoles moves in our best society, as the saying is, and is foremost amongst those who sacrifice to Zeus. Does it not seem to you that we have here an example of that which must be expected?”

“Undoubtedly,” said Megaphon and Chærephon together.

“And will not also the art of the newspaper often be vulgar? For it will be used to entertain the demos.”

“We agree with you,” they said.

“And they will try to amuse the children, too,” I said. “Our young ones will be taught many things they should not know, and the ugly will seem fair to them, and the fair ugly. [15] For that which is vulgar will seem to have power when seen in print.”

[259]

X. “And I think we shall have something still worse,” I said. “For I fear our morals, too, will stand in some danger. Consider the advertisements of those who would sell the barbarian potion, [16] and the weed of Lethe, [17] and other like doubtful wares, and among them books professing to tell of such mysteries as only sires should tell their sons, and mothers their daughters. Will not our epheboi be constantly assured how harmless these things are, and how pleasant to have, and thus become convinced that they are good rather than evil? For the printed word is a power, as I said, and we fear less the dangers we see most often.”

“At least,” said Chærephon, “there will be danger if we do not guard ourselves.”

XI. “You speak truly,” I said; “there will. But I bethink me of still another danger now, and one that will affect not individuals, but classes. Shall I speak of it?”

“Go on,” Chærephon said.

“Very well,” I said. “The demos is composed of men and women, and is but human. The demos likes sympathy, and the demos is also vain, and likes to be talked of, and to see its own name in print. If, then, the newspaper would make friends with the demos, it will need to tell of the demos and what it does—of its leaders, and of its virtues, and in like manner of its vanities; for it is no less vain than those it rails at. It will thus flatter the demos by making it feel as important as its betters, and teaching it to think it knows as much as they, about not a few things, but many. It will speak much of the demos’s sufferings, and of the demos’s worth, and of the demos’s rights, and it will make much use of sentimentality, and little of real sentiment, reason, and fact; for reason is a [260] troublesome thing. Will not this be an excellent way for the newspaper to win friends in great numbers, O Megaphon?”

“It cannot be denied,” he said.

“And if this is true, will it not increase its favor with the demos if it also assails those who have store of goods, or gifts bestowed by the Muses, and makes it appear that their riches are due to accidents of fortune or unjust workings of the law, that their talents are not above the ordinary, and that the gifts of the Muses have no value whatsoever? For it will be among the demos that the greatest number of the paper’s friends must be won.”

“Yes,” Megaphon said, “in that manner it would surely make friends.”

“It appears, then,” I said, “that flattery of the demos and fault-finding with the few will be an excellent means for the newspaper to become rich. And consider the evil this will work among us. For the newspaper will make the few seem to the many richer and prouder and more selfish than they are, and the many seem to themselves poorer and more humble and virtuous than they are; besides making them wise in their own conceit, so that they will become meddlesome by trying to do many things of which they know nothing, and by doing them all awry. For the demos is a many-headed beast, lighter and more fickle than

as one of our poets saith.“

“And consider,” I said, “the newspapers of the few—for some will not enslave themselves wholly to Hermes, the God of Gain—how they will be misunderstood, and blamed without desert. The demos will be told by its leaders and its newspapers that the papers of the few pretend to know more than other folk, and that they are against the poor and secretly in favor of the rich. And they will not receive [261] them into their homes, and will take little account of them. And that will make the task of these papers difficult, and they will lose hope, and will be inclined to counsel the few to distrust overmuch the many, just as the papers of the many will counsel the many to distrust the few. So that the many and the few will be encouraged to suspect, distrust, and hate each other. Will they not?”

“Yes,” Megaphon said. “At least, so you make it appear.”

“And this will be very harmful to the State?”

“I agree,” he said.

XII. “Then,” I said, “we seem to be at this point in our discussion: that there will be danger that the newspaper will not speak the truth impartially and thus educate the many, but will give them only phases of the truth, deceitful news, and interested opinions, misleading instead of educating them; and instead of forming their opinions for the better, it will rather follow their opinions, and often encourage them in thinking that which they should not think; and instead of improving their taste, it will confirm it, and degrade the taste of those who should know better; and it will counsel men to think ill one of another, and thus work damage to the State. Does this seem to sum up our conclusions?”

“It does,” Megaphon said.

“And does not this seem to you quite the opposite of what a short time ago you said was to be expected?”

“So it seems,” he said.

XIII. “And still,” I said, “I do not think that this is the worst that may befall. I have another matter in mind. Shall we discuss that also, O Megaphon and Chærephon?”

“Yes, by Zeus,” they said, “by all means.”

“Very well, then. What,” I said, “do you think will be the effect on the mind of the demos when it shall read [262] daily of so much murder, violence, stealing, and deceit, and so many mishaps caused by carelessness? Will it not surely conceive that mankind is wholly selfish and lawless and not to be trusted, and hopelessly bad? You are aware, are you not, that men judge of the world by what part of it they see and read of, and that this they cannot help? And in the case whereof we speak, what they read will be mostly bad, and will have greater weight than what they see about them. For all evil things seem dreadful at a distance.”

“I see the force of your argument,” Megaphon said.

“Doubtless,” I said, “you have been told of the man without sight who was made acquainted with the great African beast. [18] Having been led to the animal, he was permitted to grasp only its tail; whereupon, ‘This animal,’ he said, ‘is very like a rope.’ Now I think that one who had touched another part would have made a different answer. Would he not?”

“You speak truly,” Chærephon said. “It would be according to the part he touched.”

“Then let us continue,” I said. “The followers of Zeus and Athena, what will they think when they shall have been told again and again, sometimes with truth and sometimes falsely, of priests or worshippers that have loved not wisely but basely, or have stolen, or cheated, or misbehaved in any other wise? Will they not soon distrust all who sacrifice to Zeus and Athena and the other blessed gods, and will they not of necessity disbelieve in them? For they will think that the gods have failed to make their worshippers good men. And thus the demos will become skeptical of all religion, and our temples will be empty. What do you think?”

“I think it will be as you say,” he said; “for indeed, I have already seen it happen with men as you describe.”

“And what will be the effect if the demos is told from early youth to manhood, not once in a while but every [263] day, of the lies of those who would be rulers of the State, the knavery of those who buy and sell, the baseness of those entrusted with their neighbors’ money, and the unseemly means employed by men of every class to circumvent their enemies? Will it not be to convince the demos that all men are to be won by gain, and that no one may be trusted? Will it not suspect, after so many deeds of baseness, on the part of its leaders as well as others, that no law is proposed, no deed performed, however fair in its seeming, that has not an unworthy purpose at its root, and that no pleasant word is spoken and no fair promise given but with intent to deceive?”

“You seem to speak truly,” Megaphon said.

“And will it not become skeptical of all men of any calling whatsoever, in even greater measure than of our priests and our religion?”

“In even greater measure,” he said; “for men are loath to give up their faith in the gods.”

“And will it not say that to know the truth is impossible, inasmuch as every man obscures the face of truth for his own advantage? And is it not plain as regards the State, in what condition it then will be?”

“What?” said Chærephon and Megaphon.

“Every citizen,” I said, “will be convinced that many of his fellows are rascals, and that all are selfish and deceitful, and will say in his heart: ‘What boots it for me alone to speak the truth, or to do for Zeus and my neighbor that which brings travail to me?’ And he will conclude by doing as he has been taught that all men do. And this is the very worst of ill fortune for the State, for its citizens to be filled with suspicion and distrust and hopelessness, and to think they should act for no one’s welfare but their own. This is evil thinking at its worst. [19] Is it not, O Chærephon and Megaphon?”

“It is, in very truth,” Chærephon said.

[264]

XIV. But Megaphon was silent.

“What is it, O Megaphon?” I asked.

“You do not seem to me wholly just, O Socrates,” he answered. “And I have been thinking that if I should ask and you should answer, or if you should ask in a different way, the matter might not appear the same, but otherwise.”

“Then will you ask?” I inquired.

“I will ask but this, O Socrates,” he said: “for in most things I think you speak truth. But are we, then, to hear naught of what our citizens do except that which is good, and are we never to know the evil they commit? Is not darkness the friend of evil, and light its enemy? And will it be well with the demos if it have no friend to cry out its wrongs?”

“I will answer briefly,” I said; “for He of the Far-darts is already high in the heavens. If there were no guilty men, and no foolish, doubtless the newspapers would not tell the demos of their deeds. Nor do I think that guilt and folly and every manner of intemperance should be let thrive in darkness, and not be brought forth for men to scorn and punish. But I will tell you in what manner I think. Suppose, O Megaphon, that it were allowed to you to look into some dark and unknown chamber, through only one narrow chink, and that through this chink your guide should let enter strong rays to light up but one little corner, and that an ill-ordered one with crawling vermin. Would you not become convinced, from seeing that only, and not the rest, that all the chamber was awry and foul? And if you looked into many chambers, and saw all in the same condition, would you not become convinced that all chambers were awry and foul, and that to strive for cleanliness and order were in vain?”

“I think I should,” he said, “if I saw as you describe.”

“That,” I said, “is what I think about the use of light in these matters. I think ’twould be far better to use a candle and explore more thoroughly; and best of all to [265] open the chamber to the light of the sun, which is the light of truth. Then we should see the entire chamber, and I think we should say: ‘This is a goodly chamber, but hath a foul spot,’ and fall to and set it in order, and sacrifice to Zeus for his goodness to mortal men.”

“But the wrongs of the demos,” he said; “must it not have champions to right them?”

“Truth is the champion that will best right wrongs, both for the many and the few,” I replied. “But truth ill told for selfish and evil purposes will set men one against another, and we shall have no peace. Do you think I speak words of reason?”

“Yes, by Zeus and Athena!” said Megaphon and Chærephon.

“Then,” I said, “let us pray to Athena, Giver of Wisdom, beseeching that she will make men love that which is true, and hate that which is false. For thus they will learn justice, and our State will be one people, and not two.”

“Let us indeed,” they said.

Chærephon and I then took our leave.

[266]

THE CURSE OF ADAM AND THE CURSE OF EVE

I

“The wide-spread change in thought and attitude of my sex towards yours,” which Anastasia Beauchamp announced to Adrian Savage in “Lucas Malet’s” novel of the latter name, affects marriage, of course, primarily. And it appears from Ida M. Tarbell, Making a Man of Herself ( The American Magazine , February, 1912) that the leaders of Feminism have been trying for many years to dissuade their younger sisters from matrimony:

Man and marriage are a trap—that is the essence the young woman draws from the campaign for woman’s rights.... She will be a “free” individual, not one “tied” to a man. The “drudgery” of the household she will exchange for what she conceives to be the broad and inspiring work which men are doing. From the narrow life of the family she will escape to the excitement and triumph of a “career.” The Business of Being a Woman becomes something to be ashamed of, to be apologized for. All over the land there are women with children clamoring about them, apologizing for never having done anything. Women whose days are spent in trades and professions complacently congratulate themselves that they at least have lived . There were girls in the early days of the movement, as there no doubt are today, that prayed on their knees that they might escape the frightful isolation of marriage; might be free to “live,” and to “know,” and to “do.”

In another article she says:

“Celibacy is the aristocracy of the future,” is the preaching of one European Feminist.... The ranks of the women celibates are not full. Many a candidate falls out by the way, confronted by something she had not reckoned with—the eternal command that she be a woman. She compromises—grudgingly. She will be a woman on condition that she is [267] guaranteed economic freedom, opportunity for self-expressive work, political recognition. What this amounts to is that she does not see in the woman’s life a satisfying and permanent end.

Naturally, this attitude does not tend toward domestic contentment, peace and happiness. The woman who marries in this frame of mind already has her face set toward Reno.

Yet the instinct for maternity is a force. Therefore the great desideratum in the opinion of George Bernard Shaw and Ellen Key is the satisfaction of the instinct without the inconvenience of a husband. But when he comes to deal with the facts Shaw’s courage fails him, and he turns tail and flees. In Getting Married he confesses that, in spite of all its horrors, he can invent no substitute for marriage. Ellen Key, on the other hand, in Love and Marriage , has the courage of her convictions.

And yet her relations to man cannot be entirely without satisfactions to woman. She cannot be quite the slave that the Feminists describe. Anna A. Rogers, in Why American Marriages Fail ( Atlantic Monthly , September, 1907) speaks of

the present false and demoralizing deification of women, especially in this country, an idolatry of which we as a people are so inordinately proud. One of the evil effects of this attitude is shown in the intolerance and selfishness of young wives, which is largely responsible for the scandalous slackening of marriage ties in the United States.... Our women as a whole are spoiled, extremely idle, and curiously undeserving of the maudlin worship that they demand from our hard-working men.... The hair-dressers, the manicurists, the cafes at lunch time, are full to overflowing with women—extravagant, idle, self-centred.... She has not merged her fate with her husband’s, if married, nor with her father’s if not: she does not properly supplement their lives; she is striving for a detached, profitless, individuality.... The sacredness and mystery of womanhood are fast passing away from among us.

A successful woman dramatist, an interview with whom [268] was published in The New York Times a few months ago, said:

The American man is a great deal more unselfish and chivalrous than is good for the woman. He often bears his own burden, and part of the woman’s. This is very excellent discipline for him, but it is hard on the woman. She doesn’t have a chance to learn sacrifice.

Miss Tarbell recognized that the Feminist was in revolt against the drudgery of the household. Edna Kenton, for the militants, is even more explicit. She says in Militant Women—and Women ( The Century Magazine , November, 1913):

There is rising revolt among women against the unspeakable dullness of unvaried home life. It has been a long, deadly routine, a life servitude imposed on her for ages in a man-made world.... There is nothing in the home alone to satisfy woman’s longing for variety, adventure, romance.

How many men have any means of satisfying their longings for variety, adventure and romance? Miss Kenton’s notion that “the restrictions on men’s free-willing are comparatively few,” is mere silliness. In the business and professional classes woman’s opportunities of disposing of her time and cultivating her tastes are vastly greater than man’s, and among the less fortunate classes, the care of a three-room flat or a five-room house is a lighter servitude than that by which the man gets the bread for his wife and babies. There is more companionship in the children and the neighbors than there is in digging, in tending the lathe, and operating the loom. There is more social life in hanging out the clothes in the back yard, and talking to the woman who is doing the same thing in the next yard, than there is in making entries in a ledger, and adding up columns of figures. The kitchen utensils are as interesting as the saw and the monkey-wrench.

Ninety-five per cent of the work of men is drudgery, and [269] few men have any choice in the selection of their drudgery. They do what as boys they were set at, or what they can get a chance at. A very small proportion of men have variety, adventure, romance, and no one who looks at our shopping streets and places of amusement will be in any doubt that women are less tied to their galley oars than men. Olive Schreiner, in Woman and Labor , ungenerously says that men have always been willing that women should do the coarse and ill-paid work; it is only when women demand admission to the higher and more intellectual occupations that men admonish them to keep within their sphere. Yet to women of genius the world of literature and art and music has long been open, and within recent years a multitude of occupations have been opened to women, with little if any objection from men; perhaps in consistency the Feminists should approve the many men who have been glad enough to shirk the support of their womankind and let their sisters and daughters take care of themselves.

But these are for the most part the unmarried women, very many of whom marry and “lapse with their marriage into the old parasitism,” in the agreeable phrase of Edna Kenton. One remedy for this that has been proposed is that men shall pay wages to their wives. This, however, besides commercializing the union of men and women, is open to the further objection that if a man hires a woman to be his wife, he must have the right to discharge her when he finds some one else that would suit him better, for a time. This is admittedly a makeshift. A more “thorough” remedy offered is “paid motherhood,” the men supporting the state and the state supporting the women and children. In such a case the state would naturally decide what mothers to pay, and what men to mate them with. Nothing that is now recognized as a home could survive such an arrangement, and the Feminists don’t wish it to survive.

And even so, the house work has got to be done by somebody. [270] If it is done by a hired charwoman she would be economically justifying her existence, while if it is done by a wife and mother, she would be a parasite, in the language of Olive Schreiner, and would be earning her living by the exercise of her sex functions, in the chaste words of Charlotte Perkins Gilman in Women and Economics , and Edna Kenton. And in any case the men must go on with their drudgery, which comprises overwhelmingly the greater part of all the work that is done in the world.

II

On the one hand, we are assured by Feminists that women do not differ from men, and therefore should not be confined to a “sphere.” On the other hand, we are no less confidently assured by them that politics and industry are in pressing need of qualities which men do not possess, and cannot acquire, because they are distinctively feminine. Olive Schreiner has carefully studied the male and female dog, and reaches the conclusion that there is no difference between them to justify different treatment and different occupations. She does not expect woman suffrage to effect any political changes, except in one or two matters where she believes women have interests which men have not, or do not recognize. For example, war. Woman in politics will put an end to war because she knows how much it costs to produce each human life. This is mere rhetoric. What are the facts? The Teutonic women, whose status she would re-establish, went to the wars with their husbands, and fought by their sides. From the Spartan mother who charged her son to return with his shield or on it, to Mlle. Juliette Habay, of Brussels, who wrote: “We are learning to shoot with rifles. Here in Brussels great numbers of young girls have joined rifle corps, and a professor of arms is teaching us to shoot,” when has woman ever failed to gird the sword upon her man? Socially there is assuredly no discrimination against [271] the red coat in England, or the blue coat in the United States.

Very recently Femina , the woman’s newspaper in Paris, addressed to its readers the question, “If not a woman, what man would you have wished to be?” We are told in a news despatch that “Napoleon won easily.”

But Mrs. Schreiner is substantially correct. Biology may know something of male and female temperaments, but in their general characters and habits and adaptability to employments, there is no great difference between her male and female dog, or the male and female of other animals. If the path of progress leads downward by all means let us learn our sociology and domestic economy from the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air. If human progress has been retrogression, let us get back by way of primitive man and the missing link, to the animals and birds whose social economy commends itself strongly to Feminist and socialist.

The differentiation of men and women is the most valuable product of ages of gradually developing civilization. The world does not need twice as many diggers in the earth, and workers in metals, as it has now, but it does need homes. If the beasts merely have dens from which they go forth at night for their prey, and in which they produce their young, which they care for only till the young can catch their own game, Mrs. Gilman sees no reason why men and women should have homes, except as places for sleeping, from which they go out every morning to secure subsistence for themselves and for their young. But the latter, in her system, would soon be removed to training institutions conducted by the state, and managed by experts in child-culture; for Mrs. Gilman does not credit women with ability to rear their own offspring (however well she thinks they can rear those of other women), though the world is perishing for lack of their greater participation in industries and politics.

The prolonged association of parents with children, the [272] protraction of mother-love beyond the infancy of offspring, the association of men and women intimately, but not entirely for the perpetuation of the race; the instinct of exclusiveness in the relations of man and woman, and their refinement by sentiments of romance; the development of chivalry and accountability for others in man, and of modesty in woman; the separation of one part of the race from much that the other part must often be in close contact with; the creation of a domestic atmosphere which is not like that of the shop or the field—the essential features of the home and the family—these are the best results of civilization, and against them the Feminist storms. Yet they are more important, if possible, to woman than to man.

Women are different from men as the result of ages of segregation, and that is above all things else the object of Feminist attack. The whole purpose of Feminism is to make the conditions of life the same for men and women. Women are more chaste than men, and the Feminists may be right when they say that this has been forced upon woman by man, but they are mistaken when they treat this not as a gain, but as a grievance. It need not be disputed that men ought to be as pure as women, but it is at least a great gain to hold one sex to a high standard of purity. In the course of time something may be achieved by the other—much has been already, or mixed society would be impossible—but it will not be effected by the Feminists who complain of servitude to man-made standards of morals, and demand for women the freedom practiced surreptitiously by some men.

The common notion of the innate moral superiority of woman is due to fond recollections of happy childhood, to the warm language of poets, to the romance of the male when in the springtime of life his fancies lightly turn to thoughts of love, and to actual differences which are the result of the segregation of women. Feminism is breaking that down, and we are already getting some of the results. [273] In The Vanishing Lady , The Atlantic Monthly , December, 1911, Mrs. Comer finds that the contrast between the people in the novels of Howells and in those of David Graham Phillips suggests something like a submergence of Christian civilization under a wave of materialism and paganism. The interval between these two writers is the period during which Feminism has been spreading like an epidemic. Women have not saved society from the change. The advanced women have not tried to. Like their clothes, they have been entirely up-to-date, and the materialism and paganism of the day are quite as apparent among women as among men.

This is Mrs. Comer’s description of the type of woman who is being evolved by Feminism:

One cannot travel far in these days without being filled with wonder at the vast numbers of these women roaming the continent. They are usually of a willful fatness, with flesh kept firm by the masseuse; their brows are lowering, and there is the perpetual hint of hardness in their faces; their apparel is exceedingly good, but their manners are ungentle, their voices harsh and discontented; there is no light in their eyes, no charm or softness in their presence. They are fitting mates, perhaps, for the able-bodied pagans who are overrunning the earth, but hardly suitable nurses for a generation which must redeem us from materialism, if, indeed, we are to be so redeemed. Facing them, one wonders if race-suicide is not one of nature’s merciful devices?

In a period of rapidly acquired fortunes women have accepted the dollar as the unit of individual worth quite as readily as men have, and have applied it more relentlessly, for men are more democratic than women; rich and poor wear the same costumes, and in their friendships they do not draw the financial line so closely as their wives do. During the spread of Feminism manners have coarsened, modesty is disappearing, the fiction and drama of the day familiarize the young with vice under the thin pretext of fortifying virtue. If it be true, as is sometimes charged, [274] that women are taking to alcohol and tobacco, it is merely one additional evidence that in breaking down the distinctions between men and women, the standards of the former are not raised, but those of the latter are lowered.

Two women have lately suggested the assimilation of the figures of the male and female of the species. Ellen Key refers to the flattening of woman’s bosom as the result of the growing use of artificial means of nourishing infants, and “Lucas Malet” speaks of “large-boned, athletic, sexless persons, petticoated, yet conspicuously deficient in haunches and busts.”

III

As the garb of male and female in the lower animals does not differ radically, and seldom varies much except in the brighter hues of the male, so the socialist who seeks to assimilate the human sexes, objects to radical differences in their costume, and many essays toward the adoption of the costume of men have been made by advanced women. Morris and Bax, in Socialism, Its Growth and Outcome , deplore differences of costume, saying: “Another fault may be noted in all bad periods (as in the present), that an extreme difference is made between the garments of the sexes.” Since that was written the skirts of women have been reduced to a point suggestive of a single trouser instead of a pair, and the divided skirt, the harem skirt and the riding costume for the cross saddle indicate a movement that Morris and Bax would welcome.

There are history and politics in clothes. Trousers are described as a product of democracy, because they conceal the material of the stocking, whether silk or wool. Not so very long ago men wore laces, and ribbons, and jewels, and delicate tints. With the gradual breaking down of the caste system, the spread of democracy in politics, and of the brotherhood of man in philanthropy and religion, men have reduced their costumes to the present inartistic, but [275] very serviceable standard. There has been no lasting change in that direction in the costume of women. If the determination of some women to “make men of themselves” had coincided with the severe simplicity of the tailor-made suit there would have been, as there has been in some cases, a certain measure of harmony between the inner and the outer woman. But the period of aggressive Feminism coincides with decrees of fashion that are designed to expose as much of the female figure as the police will permit. The paucity of garments, and their thinness and scantiness are suggestive of Vivien, upon whom

The pageants and tableaux which afford women an opportunity to appear in the garb of statues, leave one somewhat in doubt whether Feminism relies chiefly upon arson and malicious mischief, or upon the arts Vivien practiced upon Merlin, for the accomplishment of its ends. Salome is dancing before Herod in the confident expectation that he will give her the half of his kingdom. But it is idle for women in the Western world, in the Twentieth Century, to pretend that they are odalisques, compelled by their helplessness to appeal to the sensuous side of men. They exhibit themselves for their own pleasure, and they dance the whole list of modern dances, with their vulgar names, because they enjoy them.

The extreme of fashion, in this day when Feminism is demanding larger opportunities to refine, purify and uplift the world, is fast reaching the point of

and on the Paris stage this has already been done, with the approbation of the audience, until the Nymph came forward [276] to the footlights to bow her acknowledgment of the applause, when the audience intimated plainly that she was overdoing her part.

In Berlin, in Chicago, and in Washington, very recently opposition to distinctive titles for married and single women has broken out. It is asked indignantly why women, and not men, should be tagged with their conjugal condition. One woman remarks, not without force, that it is more important to know whether men are married, than to know whether women are wives or maidens.

But men have so far been the more public, and therefore the better known of the two. General information about their status is more probable. Perhaps the conjugal status of men ought to be indicated in their titles, but they do not change their names in marriage, and therefore it is less convenient to change their titles. At any rate, it is better that the conjugal condition of one sex should be indicated than that that of neither should be. The distinctive titles for married and single women go back in England, France and Germany, rather less than 250 years, and they constitute a part of the differentiation of women from men which the Feminist resents, but which is really one of the most valuable products of civilization. It is a necessary feature of a society based upon the family as the unit, but in which women are free to move about without guards, and without the supervision of their men.

Intimately connected with the title is the last name the woman is to bear. The Feminist resents being “branded” upon marriage by her husband’s name. Certainly under Ellen Key’s system it would be folly to change the name for each association. One distinguished Feminist in Boston retained her maiden name after marriage, and her daughter uses the names of both parents. But this does not solve, it only evades, the real problem. What is the mother’s name? It is the name of her father. There is no reason to the Feminist or the socialist why she should [277] bear the name of her father, any more than that her daughter should bear her father’s name.

There are no family names now except the names of the men, and in a Feminist society there can be no family names; which will not matter, for there will be no family. The Feminist is less frank in admitting this than the socialist is, but their programs are equally destructive of it. Each person will select his, or her, own name. To this social individualism leads. In no other way will the Feminist woman be satisfied that her identity is not merged in a man, and her ownership by a man indicated for public information.

IV

Feminism is a declaration of sex war, Edna Kenton proclaims. Yet the havoc involved in this might well give advanced women pause. Miss Tarbell ( The Uneasy Woman , The American Magazine , January, 1912) does not believe that “Man is a conscious tyrant, holding woman an unwilling captive—cutting her off from the things in life that really matter—education, freedom of speech, the ballot.” She asks:

Is man the calculating tyrant the modern uneasy woman charges?... Is not man a victim as well as she—caught in the same trap? Moreover, is woman never a tyrant? That a man’s life may not be altogether satisfactory, she declines to believe. The uneasy woman has always taken it for granted that man is happier than woman.

Mrs. Rogers recognizes that man, not woman, is the idealist. The unselfishness of woman, beyond her willingness to sacrifice herself for her offspring, is poetic license. She is often unselfish; so is man. In a small material way it may be worth noticing that the amount of ordinary life insurance in this country, nearly all of which is paid for by men for the benefit of women, is thirteen times the amount [278] of the national debt. Man and woman have been happy together, or miserable together. There have been times when a man pounded his wife, but she in turn pounded the children, and he in his turn was pounded by men higher than he in the social scale. With an improvement in manners and morals, man ceased submitting to pounding on the one side, and inflicting it on the other. When force was the rule in all social relations, both suffered from it. Since force ceased to be the rule, woman has had very much the better of man; for she cares less about his comfort than he does about hers; and while he will give up a good deal for the sake of peace, there is little that she will not give up peace for the sake of. “It is the perseverance which conquers,” says Thackeray, “the daily return to the object desired. Take my advice, my dear sir, when you see your womankind resolute about a matter, give up at once and have a quiet life.”

The common interests of men and women, subserved by co-operation and certain to be destroyed by competition, should avert sex war. The bonds of matrimony, which gall so many women, are mainly restraints upon men, and protections of women. Their dissolution would be cheerfully submitted to by very many men, but it ought not to be necessary to refer to the condition women would find themselves in after a few years. The condition of the greater part of the women who have achieved economic independence in the mills and shops is not such as to commend economic independence to all the others, disregarding for a moment the certain destruction of the domestic life, the home, and the family, that would result from the universal economic independence of married women.

The answer to both Feminist and Socialist is that of The Lords of Their Hands, in Kipling’s, An Imperial Rescript . They were on the point of signing the pact which would put an end to all struggle in the industrial world—

[279]

After several delegates had expressed themselves energetically in regard to their plans for themselves and the Eternal Feminine, who was untouched by the Feminist movement—

They passed one resolution: “Your sub-committee believe

[280]

TABU AND TEMPERAMENT

When, I wonder, did the word “temperament” come into fashion with us? We can hardly have got it from the French, for the French mean by it something very different from what we do; though it is just possible that we did get it from them, and have merely Bowdlerized the term. At all events, whatever it stands for, it long since became a great social asset for women, and a great social excuse for men. Perhaps it came in when we discovered that artists were human beings. At least, for many years, we never praised an artist without using the word. It does not necessarily imply “charm,” for people have charm irrespective of temperament, and temperament irrespective of charm. It is something that the Philistine never has: that we know. But what, by all the gods of clarity, does it mean?

It means, I fancy, in one degree or another, the personal revolt against convention. The individual who was “different,” who did not let his inhibitions interfere with his epigrams, who was not afraid to express himself, who hated clichés of every kind—how well we know that figure in motley, who turned every occasion into a fancy-dress ball! All the inconvenient things he did were forgiven him, for the sake of the amusing things he said. Indeed, we hardly stopped to realize that his fascination was largely a matter of vocabulary. Now it is one thing to sow your wild oats in talk, and quite another to live by your own kaleidoscopic paradoxes. The people who frowned on the manifestations of “temperament” were merely those logical creatures who believed that if you expressed your opinions regardless of other people’s feelings, you probably meant what you said. They did not know the pathology of epigram: the basic truth of which is that word-intoxicated [281] people express an opinion long before they dream of holding it. They say what they think, whether they think it or not. Only, if you talk with incessant variety about what ought to be done, and then never do any of the wild things you recommend, you become in the end perfectly powerless as a foe of convention.

This tactical fact the unconventional folk have at last become aware of; and, accordingly, hostility to convention is ceasing somewhat to take itself out in phrases. Conventions, at the present moment, are really menaced. The most striking sign of this is that people are now making unconventionality a social virtue, instead of an unsocial vice. The switches have been opened, and the laden trains must take their chance of a destination.

The praise of temperament, I verily believe, was the entering wedge. But whatever the first cause, “conventional” is certainly in bad odor as an epithet. And this is really an interesting phenomenon, worth investigating. What is it that makes it a term of reproach? Why must you never say it about your dearest friend? Why must you contradict, in a shocked tone, if your dearest friend is said to be conventional? Most of my best friends are conventional, I am glad to say; but even I should never think of describing them to others thus.

Conventional people are supposed to lack intelligence—the power to think for themselves. (It seems to be pretty well taken for granted that you cannot think for yourself, and decide to think what the majority of your kind thinks. If you agree with the majority, it must be because you have no mental processes.) They are felt to lack charm: to have nothing unexpected and delightful to give you. And, nowadays, they are (paradoxes are popular) supposed to be perilous to society, because they are immovable, because they do not march with the times, because they cling to conservative conceptions while the parties of progress are re-making the world. All these reproaches are, at present, conveyed in the one word.

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Now it is a great mistake to confound conventionality with simplicity—with that simplicity which indicates a brain inadequate to dealing with subtleties; or to confound “temperament” and unconventionality with a highly organized nature. The anthropologists have exploded all that. I have looked warily at anthropologists ever since the day when I went to hear a great Greek scholar lecture on the Iliad, and listened for an hour to talk about bull-roarers and leopard-societies. I doubt if the anthropologists have any more perspective than other scientists. I am as near being an old Augustan as any twentieth-century observer can be: “nihil humani,” etc. But, for God’s sake, let it be human! Palæontology is a poor substitute for history. No: I do not love any scientists, even the anthropologists. But I do think we ought to be grateful to them for proving to us that primitive people are a hundred times as conventional as we; and that their codes are almost too complicated for European minds to master. If anyone is still under the dominance of Rousseau, Chateaubriand et Cie. , I wish he would sit down impartially before Messrs. Spencer and Gillen’s exposition of group-marriage among the Australian aborigines. If, in three hours, he knows whom, supposing he were a Matthurie of the dingo totem, he could marry without incurring punishment, or even the death penalty, he had better take his subtlety into Central Australia: he is quite wasted on civilization. Or he might go over and reform Yuan-Shi’h-Kai’s administration: the Chinese would take to him enormously.

Someone may retort that I am not exactly making out a shining case for tabu , in citing the very nasty natives of Australia as notable examples of what tabu can do for society. My point is only this: that it is folly to chide conventional people for simplicity, since convention is a very complicated thing; or for dulness, since it takes a good deal of intelligence and a great many inhibitions to follow a social code. To be different from everyone else, you [283] have only to shut your eyes and stop your ears, and act as your nervous system dictates. By that uncommonly easy means, you could cause a tremendous sensation in any drawing-room, while your brain went quite to sleep. The natives of Central Australia are not nice; but they are certainly nicer than they would be if they practised free love all the year round, instead of on rigidly specified occasions. Their conventions are the only morality they have. Some day, perhaps, they will do better. But it will not be by forsaking conventions altogether. For surely, in order to be attractive, we must have some ideals, and above all some restraints. Civilization is merely an advance in taste: accepting, all the time, nicer things, and rejecting nasty ones.

When the temperamental and unconventional people are not mere plagiarists of dead eccentrics, they lack, in almost every case, the historic sense. I am far from saying that all conventional folk have it; but they have at least the merit of conforming. If they do not live by their own intelligence, it is because they live by something that they modestly value a good deal more. It is better that a dull person should follow the herd: his initiatives would probably be very painful to himself and everyone else. No convention gets to be a convention at all except by grace of a lot of clever and powerful people first inventing it, and then imposing it on others. You can be pretty sure, if you are strictly conventional, that you are following genius—a long way off. And unless you are a genius yourself, that is a good thing to do. Unless we are geniuses, the lone hunt is not worth while: we had better hunt with the pack. Unless we are geniuses, there is much more fun in playing the game; there is much more fun in caste and class and clan. Unconventional people are apt to be Whistlers who cannot paint. Of course there is something very dull about the person who cannot give his reasons for his social creed. But if it is all a question of instinct, better a trained instinct than an untrained one. [284] I am inclined to think that the mid-Victorian prejudice against—let us say—actors and actresses, was well founded. Under Victoria (or should one say under mid-Victoria?) stock companies were not chaperoned, and ladies and gentlemen went on the stage very infrequently. What is the point of admitting to your house someone who will be very uncomfortable there himself, and who will make everyone else even more uncomfortable? It is not that we are afraid he will eat with his knife: that is a detail we might put up with. But eating or not eating with your knife is merely one of the little signs by which we infer other things. In this mad world, anyone may do or be anything; but the man who has been brought up to eat with his knife is the less likely to have been brought up by people who would teach him to respect a woman or not to break a confidence. It is a stupid rule of thumb; but, after all, until you know a person intimately, how are you going to judge except by such fallible means? I have nothing in the world against Nature’s noblemen; but the burden of proof is, of practical necessity, on their shoulders. Manners are not morals—precisely; yet, socially speaking, both have the same basis, namely, the Golden Rule. No one must be made more uncomfortable or more unhappy because he has been with you. Now, in spite of Oscar, it is worse to be unhappy than to be bored; and I would rather be the heroine of a not very clever comedy of manners than of a first-class tragedy. Most of us, when we are once over twenty, are no more histrionic, really, than that. The conventional person may bore you (though it is by no means certain that he will) but he will never, of his own volition, make you unhappy unless by way of justified retort. He will never put you, verbally or practically, into a nasty hole. Perhaps he will never give you the positive scarlet joys of shock and thrill. But, dear me! that brings us to another point.

Conventional folk are often accused of being dull and valueless because they have no original opinions. (How [285] we all love original opinions!) Well: very few people have any original opinions. Originality usually amounts only to plagiarizing something unfamiliar. “The wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Khatmandhu”; and dead sages, if there were only retroactive copyrights, could sue most of our modern wits for their best things. What is even Jean-Jacques but Prometheus-and-water, if it comes to that? Very few people since Aristotle have said anything new. What passes for an original opinion is, generally, merely an original phrase. Old lamps for new—yes; but it is always the same oil in the lamp. Some people—like G. B. S. and Mr. Chesterton—seem to think that you can be original by contradicting other people—as if even the person who states a proposition did not know that you could make the verb negative if you chose! Often, they are so hard up that they have to contradict themselves. But they are supposed to be violently—subversively—enchantingly—original. Even the militant suffragettes have not “gone the whole hog”: they have stopped short of Aristophanes. What is the use of congratulating ourselves on our unprecedented courage in packing the house solemnly for Damaged Goods , when we have expurgated the Lysistrata —and had the barest succès d’estime , at that? No: our vaunted unconventionality is usually a matter of words. I have tracked more than one delightful vocabulary through the jungle, only to find that it brought up at the literal inspiration of the Old Testament; and I have inwardly yawned away an afternoon with a person who talked in clichés , to discover perhaps, at twilight, that on some point or other he was startlingly revolutionary. The fact is that we are the soft prey of the phrase; and the rhetoricians, whether we know it or not, will always have their way with us. Even the demagogue is only the rhetorician of the gutter. “Take care of the sounds and the sense will take care of itself”—as the Duchess in Alice did not say. Dulness is a matter of vocabulary; but there are no more dull [286] people among the conventional than among the unconventional. And if a person is to be unconventional, he must be amusing or he is intolerable: for, in the nature of the case, he guarantees you nothing but amusement. He does not guarantee you any of the little amenities by which society has assured itself that, if it must go to sleep, it will at least sleep in a comfortable chair.

I was arguing at luncheon one day, with three clever women, the advantages and disadvantages of unconventionality. They were all perfectly conventional in a worldly sense, and perfectly convinced of the charms of unconventionality. (That is always the way: we sigh for the paradises that are not ours, like good Christians spurning the Apocalypse and coveting the Mohammedan heaven.) They cited to me a very amusing person—a priestess of intellectual revolt. Yes: she walked thirty blocks to lunch in a pouring rain, and when she came in she took off her wet hat, put it in her chair, and sat on it. The fact that my guest, did she choose, could afford to crown herself with pearls, would not make up to me for the consciousness that she was sitting on an oozing hat throughout luncheon. In spite of epigrams, I should feel, myself, perfectly wet through. Surely it is the essence of good manners not to make other people uncomfortable. Society, by insisting on conventions, has merely insisted on certain convenient signs by which we may know that a man is considering, in daily life, the comfort of other people. No one except a reformer has a right to batten on other people’s discomfort. And who would ever have wanted John Knox to dinner? To be sure, we are all a little by way of being reformers now—too much, I fear, as people went to see the same Damaged Goods , under shelter of its sponsorship, who cared for nothing whatever except being able to see a risqué play without being looked at askance. But we shall come to that aspect of it later.

Now “temperament,” again, has often been confused with charm; and conventional folk—who are, by definition, [287] dull and unoriginal, all baked in the same archaic mould—are supposed to lack charm. They are at best like inferior prints of a Hokusai from worn-out blocks. The “justification” is bad. Their original may have been all very well; but they themselves are hopelessly manqués , and besides, there are too many of them. How can they have charm—that virtue of the individual, unmatchable, unpredictable creature?

It is not against the acutest critics, the real “collectors” and connoisseurs of human masterpieces, that I am inveighing. I am objecting to the stupid criticisms of the stupid; to the presence of “conventional” as a legitimate curse on the lips of people who do not know what they are talking about. One often hears it—“I find him” (or “her”) “so difficult to talk to: he” (or “she”) “is so conventional.” Good heavens! As if the conventional person were not always at least easy to talk to! He may be dull, but he knows his cues, and will play the game as long as manners require. It is the wild man on a rock, with a code that you cannot be expected to know, because it is his own peerless secret, who is hard to talk to. The people who say that conventional folk lack charm, often mean by “conventional” not wearing your heart on your sleeve. Now I positively like the sense, when I dine out, and stoop to rescue a falling handkerchief, that I am not going to rub my shoulder against a heart. What are hearts doing on sleeves? Am I a daw, that I should enjoy pecking at them? And who has any right to assume that, because they are not worn there, they are non-existent? It is of the essence of human nature to long for the unattainable. If you do not believe me, look at all the love-poetry in the world. As Mr. Chesterton says, “the coldness of Chloe” has been responsible for most of it. Certainly, if Chloe had worn her heart on her sleeve, the anthologies would have suffered. And with woman the case is the same. Let not the modern hero flatter himself that he will ever arouse the same kind of ardor in the female heart that the [288] heroes of old did: those seared and saddened and magnificent creatures who bore hearts of flame within their granite breasts—but whose breasts were granite, all the same. No, gentlemen, women may marry you, but it is with a diminished thrill. We want—men and women both—to be intrigued; and I venture to say that for purposes of life, not of mere irresponsible conversation, it is the conventional person who intrigues us, since it is only the conventional person who creates the illusion of inaccessibility. He may be accessible, in reality; and the unconventional, temperamental person may be an impregnable fortress. That is the dizzy chance of life. But since all relations must have a beginning, the initial impression is the thing that counts. Of course one wants to know that the Queen of Spain has legs; but then we can be pretty sure that she has. We do not need a slit skirt to reassure us. One wants to know that there is a human face behind the mask; but who shall say that the mask does not heighten such beauty as there is? The conventional manner is a kind of domino: the accepted costume that all civilized people adopt for a time before unmasking. I do not suggest that we should disguise ourselves to the end; but that we should talk a little before we do unmask.

For there must be some ground on which to meet the person we do not know; and why may not the majority decide what grounds are the most convenient for all concerned? There must be some simplification of life: we cannot afford to have as many social codes as we have acquaintances. Imagine knowing five hundred people, and having to greet each with a different formula! Language would not run to it. And would it, in any case, constitute charm? Charm, as we all know, is a rare and treasurable thing; and no one can say where it will be found. But, as far as we can analyze it at all, its elements seem very likely to flourish in conventional air. Of course there may be a fearful joy in watching the man of whom you say: “One can never tell what he is going to do next.” [289] But you do not want him about, except on very special occasions. For the honest truth is that the unconventional person is almost never just unconventional enough. He is pretty sure to take you by surprise at some moment when you do not feel like being taken by surprise. Then you have to invent the proper way to meet the situation, which is a bore. It is not strange that some of our révoltés preach trial marriage: for the only safe way to marry them at all would be on trial. Until you had definitely experienced all the human situations with them, you would have no means of knowing how, in any given situation, they would behave. They might conform about evening-dress, and throw plates between courses; they might be charming to your friends, and ask the waiter to sit down and finish dinner with you. Or they might in all things, little and big, be irreproachable. The point is that you would never know . You could never take your ease in your inn, for nothing discoverable in earth or heaven would determine or indicate their code. Conventional manners are a kind of literacy test for the alien who comes among us. Not a fundamentally safe one? Perhaps not. But some test there must be; and this, on the whole, is the easiest to pass for those whom we are likely to want for intimates. That is really the social use of conventions.

And as for charm: your most charming people are those who constantly find new and unexpected ways of delighting us. Are such often to be found among people who are constantly finding new and unexpected ways of shocking us? I wonder. It seems to me doubtful, at the least. For shock—even the superficial social shock, the sensation that does not get far beneath the skin—is not delight. If you have ever really been shocked, you know that it is a disagreeable business. Of course, if some wonderful creature discovers the golden mean, the perfect note: to satisfy in all conventional ways, and still to be possessed of infinite variety in speech and mood—that wonderful creature is to be prized above the phœnix. But you cannot [290] give rein to your own rich temperament in the matter, let us say, of auction bridge. The rules you invent as you go alone may be more shatteringly amusing than anything Hoyle ever thought of; but you cannot call it auction, and you must not expect other people to know how to return your leads. And usually it only means breaking rules without substituting anything better—revoking for a whim. Life is as coöperative a business as football; and we all know what becomes of the team of crack players when it faces a crack team. Only across the footlights are we apt to feel the charm of the Ibsen heroine; and even then we are apt to want supper and some irrelevant talk before we go to a dream-haunted couch.

Now this matter of charm is not really an arguable one; for charm will win where it stands, whether it be conventional or unconventional. Everyone knows about the young man who falls in love with the chorus-girl because she can kick his hat off, and his sister’s friends can’t or won’t. But the youth who marries her, expecting that all her departures from convention will be as agile or as delightful to him as that, is still the classic example of folly. It is not senseless to bring marriage into the question, for when we advisedly call a man or a woman charming, we mean that that man or that woman would apparently be a good person with whom to form an intimate and lasting relation—not for us, ourselves, perhaps, but for someone else of our sort, in whom he or she contrives, by the alchemy of passion, to inspire the “sacred terror.” To amuse for half an hour during which you incur no further responsibilities, to delight, in a relation which has no conceivable future, does not constitute charm; for it is of the essence of charm that it pulls the people who feel it,—pulls, without ceasing. Charm magnetizes at long range. I contend only that conventional people are as apt to have it as anyone else, for they have the requisites, as far as requisites can be named.

As for the charm actually resident in conventionality [291] per se : how should anyone who does not feel it be converted to it by words of mine? For it is a beauty of form: not so much of good form as opposed to bad form, as of form opposed to formlessness. The foe of convention enters into the social plan, if at all, as a wild, Wagnerian motif . And the truly unconventional person has not even a motif ; for he disdains repetition. He scorns to stand for anything whatever, and you are insulting his “temperament” if you suppose that it is capable of only one reaction on any given thing. The temperamental critic of literature—like Jules Lemaître in his salad days, before the Church had reclaimed him—prides himself on never thinking the same thing twice about any one masterpiece. Your temperamental creature will not twice hold the same opinion of any one person. If he has ever been notably pleased with a fellow-guest at dinner, it is safest never to repeat the combination. For the honor of his temperament, he must be disgusted the next time. It is his great gift not to be predicable, from day to day, from hour to hour. But a pattern is always predicable; and what you learn about a conventional person goes into the sum of knowledge: you do not have to unlearn it over night. Psychology becomes a lost art, a discredited science, when you deal with the temperamental person. You might as well have recourse to astrology. His very frankness is misleading. He can afford to give himself away, because he gives away nothing but the momentary mood. Never attempt to hold him to anything he has said: for his whole virtuosity consists in never saying the same thing twice, and never necessarily meaning it at all. He does very well for the idle hour, the box at the play; but for the business of life—oh!

And to some of us there is charm in the code itself—charm, that is, in any code, so long as it has behind it an idea, though an antique one, and is adhered to with faith. The right word must always seem “inevitable”; and so must, after all, the right act. An improvisation may be—must be, if it is to succeed—brilliant; but acts, like words, [292] are best if they are in the grand style. Whether in speech or in manners, the grand style is never a mere magnificent idiosyncrasy; for the essence of the grand style is to carry with it the weight of the world.

And conventionality is now said to be subversive of the moral order! At least, most avowedly unconventional people are now treating themselves as reformers. Conventions did not fall, in spite of the neo-pagans; so the neo-Puritans must come in to make them totter. And with the neo-Puritans, it must be admitted (Cromwell did not live in vain) most of the charm of unconventionality has gone. It has become a brutal business. The neo-pagans realized that, to be endured at all, they must make us smile. If they told a risqué story, it must be a really funny one. At the present moment, we may not go in for risqué remarks in the interests of humor, but we may make them in the interests of morality. We may say anything we like at a dinner-party, so long as we put no wit into saying it. We must not quote eighteenth-century mots , but we may discuss prostitution with someone we have never seen before. Anything is forgiven us, so long as we are not amusing. If we only draw long faces, we may even descend to anecdote. And when people are asked to break with conventions in the interests of morality, they may feel that they have to do it. It has always been permitted to make the individual uncomfortable for the good of the community. So we cannot snub the philanthropists as we would once have snubbed the underbred: for thereby we somehow damn ourselves. If you refuse to discuss the white slave traffic, you are guilty of civic indifference; and that is the one form of immorality for which now there is no sympathy going. I may have no ideas and no information about the white slave traffic, but I ought to be interested in it—interested to the point of hearing the ideas, and gathering the information, of the person whom I have never seen before. It is the “Shakespeare and the musical glasses” of the present day. Vain to take refuge [293] in plays or books: for what play or book is well known at all unless it deals with the social evil?

Now it has already been pointed out that Vice Commission reports have done as much harm as good. The discussion of them is not limited to the immune, “highbrow” caste. I know of one quite unimperilled stenographer who was frightened by them into the psychopathic ward at Bellevue; and we have all read instructive comments in the daily papers which reiterate that virtue is ten dollars a week. A much lower figure than Becky Sharp’s, but the principle is the same. Out of her weekly wage, we may be sure the shopgirl (it is always the shopgirl!) buys the paper—and therewith her Indulgence for future faults, much cheaper than Tetzel ever sold one. For Purgatory now is replaced by Public Opinion. Even my own small town is not free from the prophylactic “movie.” One small boy nudges another, as they pass the placarded entrance, exclaiming debonairly, “Oh, this ’ere white slave traffic, y’know!” And the child, I have been given to understand, is the father of the man. The unconventional reformers quote to themselves, I suppose:

“Vice is a monster of such frightful mien,” etc.

It never occurs to them to finish the sentence:

“We first endure, then pity, then embrace.”

The fact is that Anglo-Saxon society has got beyond the enduring stage, and is largely occupied in pitying. There is a general sense that the people at large, in all moral matters, know better than the specialists. We will take our creed not from the theologians, but from Mr. Winston Churchill; and we will take our pathology not from medical treatises, but from Brieux. We will discuss the underworld at dinner because, between the fish and the entrée, the thin lady with the pearls may say something valuable about it. If we are made uncomfortable by the discussion, it only shows that we are selfish pigs.

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Now I see no reason why decent-minded people should not discuss with their intimate friends anything they please. If you are really intimate with anyone, you are not likely to discuss things unless you both please. But I do see, still, a beautiful result of the old order that the new order does not tend to produce. The conventional avoidance as a general subject of conversation of sex in all its phases was a safeguard to sensibilities. You cannot, in one sense, discuss sex quite impersonally, for everyone is of one sex or the other. The people who cry out against the segregation of the negro in government offices have hardly realized that non-segregation is objected to, not because of itself, but because of miscegenation. There is a little logic left in the world; and there are some people who perceive that sequence, whether they phrase it or not. Social distinctions concern themselves ultimately with whom you may and whom you may not marry. You do not bring people together in society who are tabu to each other. Not that you necessarily expect, out of a hundred dinner-parties, any one marriage to result; but you assume social equality in the people seated about your board. Is not, in the last analysis, the only sense in such a phrase as “social equality,” the sense of marriageability? Even conventions are not so superficial as they seem; and they have that perfectly good human basis. It is vitally important to the welfare and the continuance of the civilized race that sex-sensibilities should be preserved. Otherwise you will not get the romantic mating; and the unromantic mating, once well established in society, will give rise to a perfectly transmissible (whether by heredity or environment, O shade of Mendel!) brutality. It is brutalizing to talk promiscuously of things that are essentially private to the individual; just as it is brutalizing (I believe no one questions that) for a family and eight boarders to sleep in one room—even a large room. All violations of essential privacy are brutalizing. We do not take our tooth-brushes with us when we go out to dinner, and if we did, and did [295] not mind (very soon we should not), the practice, I am sure, would have a brutalizing effect. A certain amount of plain speaking is, perhaps, a good thing; but there is no doubt that at present we have far too much of it to suit most of us, and I cannot see why we should be made to endure it just because a few people who are by way of calling themselves moralists cannot get on with society on its own terms.

It has long been a convention among people who are not cynical that bodily matters are not spoken of in mixed and unfamiliar gatherings. Of course, our great-grandmothers were prudes. The reason why they talked so much about their souls, I fancy, is that there was hardly a limb or a feature of the human body that they thought it proper to mention. They were driven back on religion because they held that the soul really had nothing to do with the body at all. The psychiatrists have done their best to take away from us that (on the whole) comforting belief. In America, at least, we are finding it harder and harder to get out of the laboratory. It is the serious and patriotic American in The Madras House who asks the astonished Huxtable, “But are you the mean sensual man?” In The Madras House the question is screamingly funny; but I cannot imagine any man’s liking, in his own house, to have the question put to him by a total stranger. The fact is that we have dragged our Ibsen and our Strindberg and our Sudermann lovingly across the footlights, and are hugging them to our hearts in the privacy of our boxes. We have decided that manners shall consist entirely of morals. It is just possible that, in the days when morals consisted largely of manners, fewer people were contaminated. You cannot shock a person practically whom you are totally unwilling to shock verbally; and if you are perfectly willing to shock an individual verbally, the next thing you will be doing is to shock him practically. Above all, when we become incapable of the shock verbal, there will be nothing left for the unconventional people but the [296] shock practical. And that, I imagine, is what we are coming to—all in the interests of morality, be it understood. At no time in history, perhaps, have the people who are not fit for society had such a glorious opportunity to pretend that society is not fit for them. Knowledge of the slums is at present a passport to society—so much the parlor philanthropists have achieved—and all they have to do is to prove that they know their subject. It is an odd qualification to have pitched on; but gentlemen and ladies are always credulous, especially if you tell them that they are not doing their duty.

Moreover, when you make it a moral necessity for the young to dabble in all the subjects that the books on the top shelf are written about, you kill two very large birds with one stone: you satisfy precocious curiosities, and you make them believe that they know as much about life as people who really know something. If college boys are solemnly advised to listen to lectures on prostitution, they will listen; and who is to blame if some time, in a less moral moment, they profit by their information? If we discuss the pathology of divorce with the first-comer, what is to prevent divorce from becoming, in the end, as natural as daily bread? And if nothing is to be tabu in talk, how many things will remain tabu in practice? The human race is, in the end, as relentlessly logical as that. Even the aborigines that we have occasionally mentioned turn scandals over to the medicine-man, and keep a few delicate silences themselves. Perhaps we are “returning to Nature,” as the Rousseauists wanted us to; with characteristic Anglo-Saxon thoroughness, going the savages one better. But it is a pity to forget how to blush; for though in the ideal society a blush would never be forced to a cheek, it would not be because nothing was considered (as our German friends might say) blushworthy. Each man’s private conscience ought to be a nice little self-registering thermometer: he ought to carry his moral code incorruptibly and explicitly within himself, and not care what [297] the world thinks. The mass of human beings, however, are not made that way; and many people have been saved from crime or sin by the simple dislike of doing things they would not like to confess to people with a code. I do not contend that that is a high form of morality; but it has certainly saved society a good many practical unpleasantnesses. And we are clearly courting the danger of essentially undiscussable actions when we admit every action to discussion.

I saw it seriously contended in some journal or other, not long ago, that, whether any other women were enfranchised or not, prostitutes ought undoubtedly to have the vote, because only thus could the social evil be effectively dealt with. Incredible enough; but there it was. Not many people, perhaps, would agree with that particular reformer; but undoubtedly there is a mania at present, in the classes that used to be conventional, for getting one’s information from the other camp. It is valuable to know the prostitute’s opinion—facts never come amiss; but why assume that we have only to know it to hold it? Is it not conceivable that other generations than our own have known her opinions, and that lines of demarcation have been drawn because a lot of people, as intelligent as we, did not agree with her? The present tendency, however, is to consider everyone’s opinion important, in social and ethical matters, except that of respectable folk. My own pessimistic notion is, as I have hinted, that the philanthropic assault on the conventional code has come primarily from people who were too ignorant, or too lazy, or too undisciplined, to submit to the code; and that the success of the assault results from the sheer defenceless niceness—the mingled altruism and humility—of the people accused of conventionality. At all events, the fact is that our reticences have somehow become cases of cowardice, and our rejections forms of brutality. We are all a little pathetic in our credulity, and we are very like Moses Primrose at the fair. Well: let us buy green spectacles [298] if we must; but let us, as long as we can, refuse to look through them!

It may seem a far cry from “temperament” to social service. I have known a great many people who went in for social service, and I do not think it is. The motives of the heterogeneous foes of convention may lie as far apart as the Poles (one Pole is very like the other, by the way, as far as we can make out from Peary and Amundsen) but the object is the same: to destroy the complicated fabric which the centuries have lovingly built up. (Even if you call it “restoration,” it is apt to amount to the same thing, as any good architect knows.) At the bar of Heaven, sober Roundheads and drunken rioters will probably be differently dealt with; but here on earth, both have been given to smashing stained-glass windows. Many of us do not believe in capital punishment, because thus society takes from a man what society cannot give. The iconoclasts do the same thing; for civilization, whether it be perfect or not, is a fruit of time. Conventions are easy to come by, if you are willing to take conventions like those of the Central Australians. The difference between a perfected and a barbaric convention is a difference of refinement, in the old alchemical sense. A lot of the tabu business is too stupid and meaningless for words. Civilization has been a weeding-out process, controlled and directed by increasing knowledge. We have infinitely more conventions than the aborigines: we simply have not such silly ones. The foes of modern convention are not suggesting anything wiser, or better, or more subtle: they are only attacking all convention blindly, as if the very notion of tabu were wrong. The very notion of tabu is one of the rightest notions in the world. Better any old tabu than none: for a man cannot be said to be “on the side of the stars” at all, unless he makes refusals. What the foes of convention want is to have all tabu overthrown. It is very dull of them: for even if a cataclysm came and helped them out—even if we were all turned, over night, into potential [299] beginnings of society would be founded on tabu . We shudder at the Central Australians: we should hate life on their terms. But I would rather live among the Warramunga than among the twentieth-century anarchists, for I cannot conceive a more odious society than one where nothing is considered indecent or impious. We may think that the mental agility of the Warramunga could be better applied. Well: in time, it will be. But they are lifted above the brute just in so far as they develop mental agility in the framing of a moral law, however absurd a one. I said that their conventions were almost too complicated for us to master. That, I fancy, is because any mind they have, they give to their conventions. It is the natural consequence of giving your mind to science and history and philology and art, that you simplify where you can; also, that your conventions become purified by knowledge. Even the iconoclasts of the present day do not want us to throw away such text-book learning as we have achieved. They do ask us, though, to throw away the racial inhibitions that we have been so long acquiring. Is it possible that they do not realize what a slow and difficult business it is to get any particular opinion into the instincts of a race? Only the “evolution” they are so fond of talking about, can do that. Perhaps we ought to take comfort from the reflection. But it is easier to destroy than to build up; and they are quite capable of wasting a few thousand years of our time.

No: they want to bring us, if possible, lower than the Warramunga. Some of them might be shocked at the allegation, for some of them, no doubt, are idealists—after the fashion of Jean-Jacques, be it understood. These are merely, one may say respectfully, mistaken: for they do not reckon with human nature any more than do the Socialists. But the majority, I incline to believe, are merely the natural foes of dignity, of spiritual hierarchy, of wisdom perceived and followed. They object to guarded [300] speech and action, because they themselves find self-control a nuisance. So, often, it is; but if the moral experience of mankind has taught us anything, it has taught us that, without self-control, you get no decent society at all. When the mistress of Lowood School told Mr. Brocklehurst that the girl’s hair curled naturally, he retorted: “Yes, but we are not to conform to nature; I wish these girls to become children of grace.” We do not sympathize with Mr. Brocklehurst’s choice of what was to be objected to in nature; we do not, indeed, sympathize with him in any way, for he was a hypocrite. But none the less, it is better to be, in the right sense, a child of grace than a child of nature. Attila did not think so; and Attila sacked Rome. We may be sacked—the planet is used to these débâcles —but let us not, either as a matter of mistaken humility or by way of low strategy, pretend that the Huns were Crusaders!

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ON HAVING THE BLUES

The letters of Charles Eliot Norton have lately been published, and the time is opportune for a lesson from that good man’s life. Though always physically frail, he lived to be over eighty, and got more out of his life, and gave more from it, than do most robust men, even when they have his rare degree of intellect. Some who knew him well, say that one great secret of his long life of helpfulness and happiness was that he never had the blues.

While men like Norton make cheerfulness a religion, many other people of very good intentions do not even recognize it as a duty, but grope, and drag others, through clouded lives, while the clouds are generally of their own permitting, and not seldom of their own making. They are often thoughtful people, but not thoughtful enough to realize how much happiness and usefulness are wasted by the habit of the blues, or how easily that habit can be overcome. They sometimes even indulge it from a notion that depression of spirit is synonymous with depth of spirit, not realizing how often black waters set up a very abysmal appearance in a chasm so shallow that if a man clinging to the edge would only let go, he could touch bottom without submerging his chin. But if he delights in what he assumes to be the gloomy depths of his soul, he does not want to let go: he wants to believe his own puddle deep, and hates nothing worse than the possibility that it may be shallow, just as nothing so enrages the insane as the suggestion that they are insane.

Really superior persons (without capitals or quotation marks) are sometimes superior because of superior sensibility, though oftener, I suspect, in spite of it; and sometimes because of superior morality. Upon such people [302] the shortcomings of life—especially of human nature, weigh harder than upon common folks. It was by no means Carlyle’s dyspepsia alone that kept him grumbling all the while, and that, but for his sense of humor, would have killed him long before his time. Then, too, superior people often have superior imaginations, and often abuse them by imagining horrible things, and suffering more from them than the clod suffers from realities.

Moreover, people with sensibilities and imaginations are apt to be queer in their morals: they may have too few, because sensitiveness and imagination breed passions, and are inimical to the philosophy, as well as the plain common-sense, that regulate passions; or they may have too many morals, because sensitiveness makes them hate the ugly consequences of immorality worse than the rest of us can, and also because, where Hell is in fashion, if it still is anywhere, they imagine it so much more vividly, and shrink from it so much more vigorously than the rest of us can, that they get New England consciences. Worse still, that kind of superior person with too few morals to do business with, or too many, is subject to insufficient food and clothing, and to poor quarters and inefficient medical care—to being sick, in short; and deprivation and sickness very naturally bring on the blues; and last of all, sensitiveness and imagination and too many morals and too few comforts, and sickness do not develop a sense of humor. The poet or the tragedian in the black frock-coat buttoned up to hide the absence of the shirt, is not half so funny to himself as to us.

In giving so many of the reasons why people who make great and beautiful things are apt to have the blues, I have run along the edge of platitude, and occasionally, I fear, slipped over, because I want to emphasize the fact that there is no warrant for the fallacy nursed by so many would-be troubled souls, that having the blues will enable them to make great and beautiful things, and that because Carlyle and Poe had the blues, your or my [303] having them is evidence that ours have the same causes as theirs or will be accompanied by the same results.

And there are several other things tending the same way which we had better put an end to. Depression of spirits is not as often the result of vanity, or over-sensibility or any other form of weak wits, as it is of weak nerves or weak liver. And yet all these weaknesses are generally inextricably mixed as cause and effect. If without any real cause of worry, you wake up two or three consecutive mornings feeling that the world is an unsatisfactory place, probably you had better go to the doctor. He won’t be apt to give you anything worse than rhubarb and soda. You might even try them before going; and if it is a sunny day, try to glory in it, out of doors if possible; and if it is a rainy day, try to think how cozy it will be by the fire, or if you have to go to an office, how good it will be to have a day for steady work, when clients and customers are not apt to come in.

I wish I felt sure that the doctor would make you realize that we need healthy emotional pickers and stealers just as much as we need healthy physical ones. Overstrain and undersleep will make the world appear an empty place, simply because the nerves won’t pick up the good things in it. Hence the listlessness apt to follow happiness, when happiness is great enough to fatigue. Hence people on honeymoons sometimes having entirely baseless suspicions that they don’t love as much as they supposed they did. Hence, too, no end of texts for temperance.

The bacteria of the blues of course always seize on a favorable culture medium. Probably the best of such media is a settled and exaggerated consciousness of the possibility of disaster, which soon becomes magnified into a probability. Some people feel as if they were always treading on a thin crust over a volcano. Your doctor can do a good deal for one cause of that. The other cause [304] is what Bacon called defective enumeration—generalizing from the remarkable, instead of the usual—the most frequent of all fallacies. Hundreds of people can be killed in automobiling without your considering it more dangerous than other sports, but as soon as somebody very near to you is killed, you think the sport dangerous. Now as to danger in general, think of the facts. At any moment, perhaps one person in five hundred actually is in danger of disease or other misfortune. But the remaining four hundred and ninety-nine are not, except in the distorted imagination of far too large a proportion of them. There’s a big chance—perhaps one in three or four, that you who read these lines, being a person who lives not merely on the surface of things, are in the habit of letting your imagination play too much with what is under the surface. Now stop it! You may of course be actually the victim of ill fortune; but even if you are, there’s a chance that, in compensation, you have been made a saint by it, and that you really get more out of life than do most people more happily situated: for that’s the way of saints, as you can tell by looking at their serene expression.

True, a few terrible disasters must be expected, but they are generally so much like surgical operations that, unless they are fatal, the character recovers with some of its evil elements removed. And most strange to say, outside of character, and merely in relations to the external world—to wealth, opportunity, friendship,—the very worst disasters are often blessings in disguise. It pays as well to seek for the bright side of our miseries, as it does to count our mercies. “Count yo’ mahcies, Honey, count yo’ mahcies!” recommended the old colored auntie. You will remember it in that shape.

I have heard one of my ink-diffusing friends confess that having had an infirmity that interfered with his sleep, he long grieved over it as lessening his production. But at last he realized that the sleeplessness had enforced [305] economy of time, in which, before the infirmity, he had been sadly lacking, and that his waking hours, in the undisturbed night, had bred the best of the thoughts which have contributed to his share of fame and fortune, and to the philosophy which secures his happiness.

But the realization of hidden blessings in misfortunes to ourselves generally requires a long experience: so let us take a case concerning everybody. It is not long since the civilized world experienced from the earthquakes in Sicily and Calabria, a thrill of moral stimulus probably the most intense it ever knew.

At first, on reading of such widespread and merciless destruction—maiming, killing, starving, roasting of children to death before the eyes of pinioned mothers, mothers pinioned before strong sons also pinioned from helping; large communities destroyed, and the survivors driven mad; horror piled on horror until the mere reader suffers, the imagination shrinks back miserable and incapable, and the mind loses faith in a beneficent cause and control of the universe. But after the first intense revolt of feeling has spent itself, and the reason attempts calmly to estimate the evil and what there may be of resultant good, the preponderance of the good, even in such an extreme case, may not seem impossible. The disaster evoked a universal burst of charity that turned fleets of battleships into engines of mercy. The moral advantage to humanity was colossal—nothing less than a distinct injection of kindness into all the relations of men.

It involved the death of but one in hundreds of thousands of the inhabitants of the civilized world. Most of the survivors received distinct moral benefits, not to speak of the advantage to future generations from the effect on the moral quality of the race.

Moreover, the case cannot be justly put without noting that the sufferers were of a people notoriously lawless (the Northern Italians are reported to have said: “After all, they’re nothing but Calabrians and Sicilians”), and [306] that the survivors received a powerful call to righteousness.

But reason on them as we may, and get from them what moral good we can, great tragedies tend to breed a terrible uncertainty regarding the stability and goodness of life—and indeed of the universe and the moral law. Yet though much uncertainty is very apt to start from great troubles, it is by no means sure to wait for them. This skepticism is the bottom horror. I have wondered if Sill was thinking of it when, in his poem “Truth at Last” about the Alpine guide hurled down by the snow slide, he asks:

Did Sill mean that even death may be preferable to that haunting uncertainty which is the worst of the blues? Early in life he had more than his share of it, but he lived it down.

If any man can look on birds and flowers and most women and children and some men, and upon the manifold beauties of earth and sea and sky, from dawn on to dawn, if any man can realize that we might have been driven by pain more effectively than even attracted by pleasure, to feed ourselves and reproduce ourselves—if any man can see these things, and not be certain that behind the universe there is intention, and effective intention, to produce happiness, that man simply has, at least temporarily, an abnormal mind. But he is the very kind of man who gets the blues. All that can be done for him is to help him see the other side of the shield. As for mere argument, sometimes one might almost as well use it against paresis as against pessimism.

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Neither can much be done for fools. But there are degrees and kinds of fools. The worst are probably those who, having committed a folly of lasting consequences, sulk over it instead of facing it cheerfully and trying to make the best of it. When we can’t get happiness, we can at least get discipline. But the hopeless thing about a fool is that he can never be convinced that he is one: his follies are always in the past tense.

Next to doubting too much, is expecting too much. Aside from the few great disasters of a lifetime, the worst things are proverbially those that never happen. This paper has not much to say about things that do happen. They may involve feelings not to be remonstrated against, or even mentioned lightly. But still those feelings, often very sacred, should, like everything else, be limited to their proper range. The chief cause (and the chief consequence) of the blues are borrowed troubles. One of the most effective ways of borrowing them is to take for granted that a bad situation will not right itself, and then, instead of merely taking care of the immediate issue, letting the imagination work at all possible issues, and devising means of taking care of them. This is often promoted by a mistaken notion that such constant thought over the matter is a duty—that if the worst comes, one will at least have done one’s best. Generally one’s best really is to drop the subject. But that is not so easy. Just as the tongue always seeks the uneasy tooth, so the mind always seeks the uneasy question. But the tooth is not always under control, and the question generally is, or ought to be. Rigid discipline will develop a habit of leaving it alone except as something can be done about it. The true method generally is to decide what the moment admits of, and then to await the next real occasion for decision, and meanwhile to keep the mind occupied with other things. Usually thought between times is worse than wasted. An occasion when it is not, is usually not between times, but one of the times. Of course one does [308] not want to be taken unawares, but not a tithe of the imagined situations ever occur, and those actually to be met are often not foreseen at all: so most of the devising is wasted, attention is distracted from the immediate requirements of life, and time is spent in a continuous overshadowing of the blues. All this takes tissue, and when the next issue comes, the power to meet it is dulled. The strength of the great fighters—generals, lawyers, parliamentarians, depends largely on temperaments which preserve them from such waste of their powers. “The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave man dies but one,” and exaggerated anticipation of evil is simply cowardice.

Akin to doing work that never is called for, is over-refinement in needed work. True, “perfection consists in trifles,” but don’t forget that “trifles can’t make perfection.” There comes a point beyond which the most conscientious workman can really do no more. Part of the equipment of a true artist is the capacity to recognize that point. After every essential thing is done, there remain non-essentials which may as well go one way as the other. They raise the hardest questions, if they are permitted to raise any, because they are as nearly balanced as the load of Burridon’s ass. Moiling over them is threshing straw: it leads to no result but fatigue and monomania. Monomania is generally the first step in insanity, and nearly every step in insanity is attended by the blues.

But objections to superfluous work and over-refined work, are not objections to hard work, especially when one is in trouble. Carlyle says (I quote from memory): “To him who can earnestly and truly work, there is no need for despair.” But that advice is generally superfluous for an American. He is more apt to need advice to play hard—to mount his hobby or get hold of a new one, and ride it hard.

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It is especially bad to let the mind run on worries at night; and to take them to bed with one is madness. This is a special reason for seeking society or the theatre: other people, in real life or on the stage (better in real life, of course, because there one has to talk back) can best pull one out of oneself when one’s own powers are utterly inadequate. When actual causes of anxiety seem overwhelming, if one can be made to forget them for a time, hope comes into the ascendant.

One most important point is that worries are apt to settle themselves during sleep. There may be a subconscious mental action, or one may wake up with the thinking powers invigorated; but whatever the reason may be, people go to bed in perplexity, and soon after waking, do certainly often find that all the considerations have slipped into their relative places, and that the perplexity has cleared.

The best of all remedies is perhaps the most difficult, though not impossible. It is to “rise superior” to your troubles—to convince yourself, lift yourself, force yourself into the feeling of directorship—of competent and confident directorship of all your affairs. Add “with God’s help” if you want to: for that may back up our worthy intentions more even than our ancestors began to realize—whatever they professed to believe. This feeling of calm adequacy does much to secure adequacy, and what is of perhaps more importance, compels peace.

But adequacy is only adequacy to do the best that circumstances permit. To attempt more than circumstances permit is at once inadequacy—to put yourself on the weak side of a false equation. Attempt only what you can do, and you never need fail. Yet unless you attempt the best you can do, you do fail—fail just so far as the difference between the actual and the best possible. But if you are reasonably brave and wise, that difference will be slight; and the healthy conscience, like the law, takes no account of trifles.

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Shoot your arrow at the sun, and hitch your wagon to a star, all you want to—as religious exercise; but in your daily work shoot only when game is within range, and hitch only to something which will hold tight, and is reasonably sure to draw.

And don’t be misled by shrewd Yankees who make divine phrases, but who regulate their actions in daily life as cannily as other Yankees who never make phrases at all.

Absence of work, and no less absence of play,—the mere opportunity to brood, is dangerous to those subject to the blues. When we are in the busy haunts of men, their activity inspires ours, and keeps our thoughts away from introspection and baleful notions; but if we are alone, even with Nature in her loveliest aspects, the mind is apt to seek the profundities, and to drag the spirits with it.

Interest in this subject has brought me some confidences. I knew a man beyond middle life, who had long longed for more opportunities of study and meditation. At last he obtained the cherished desire in the most desired way—in a lovely home amid the loveliest scenery. He took three solid months of it, and found himself low-spirited, ailing, and in need of tonics. But when he was called to the city, the first time he walked down Fifth Avenue, he felt that he didn’t need any other tonic. Yet the habit of years had put him, all unconsciously, in chronic need of that one. He took it at monthly intervals, and it did its work. But it cost time. As he approached old age, he realized in himself a tendency to melancholy, that, in spite of the city life that had been efficacious for himself, had given the declining years of one of his parents much unhappiness. He was frightened: he felt that external aid, like all tonics, must lose its effect in time; and so he worked hard to develop powers in himself that would put him above the need of it. After a few years, circumstances led again to three months away from the city, and so effectually had he enlightened and [311] trained himself that it was a period of greater cheerfulness, health and fruitfulness than he had ever known.

His bottom principle was: “Kill the thing at the start. Watch! As soon as the serpent’s head shows itself through the egg, scotch it. If you don’t, your mind will become the abode of monsters.”

Of course to those who believe in immortality, a faith in the ultimate goodness of the universe is almost unescapable. Beliefs cannot be made to order, but looked at in the most Philistine way, this one fills so many otherwise apparent gaps in the order of the universe, saves so many apparent wastes, changes so much chaos into kosmos, that, when relieved of some of its absurd accompaniments from the past, the belief seems, in the broadest view, almost a matter of course; and the narrowing of one’s view of existence by physical death appears absurd. The belief in immortality is such a simple and inexpensive machine for settling bad problems that, as in the case of any simple and inexpensive machine that throws out good results, there is a presumption in favor of investing in it. This, I suppose, is what they call Pragmatism. It has its dangers: for its principle is apt to be misconstrued, and Hope tells such flattering tales! But apparently Pragmatism has no direct business with hopes, but only with cold hypotheses; and if one must choose between hypotheses, the preferable one is that which strings the facts into the most orderly coherence; and certainly without immortality, the universe is much nearer chaos than with it.

Most of our upsets come from lack of health, or money or friends. Now if the universe holds for us ultimately an existence where we shan’t have to bother with such vile bodies, or such demands as they make for money, and where we may recover all the friends we have lost here, and if our troubles here aid in our development, as they certainly do, the universe appears much more orderly, [312] and our worst problems are fairly settled. Perhaps a strong proud effective soul might not care much for a future existence that, in such brief outline, seems so easy; but I don’t know that our wide and exact knowledge of that existence contains anything to indicate that in it one will not have at least as good a chance as here to make his own way, or the way of those he cares for; and while doing this, to make his own additions to the gayety of nations, or their celestial equivalent. I don’t see, either, any indication warranting any shameless, weak and impotent soul—one like yours and mine when we have the blues—in refraining from doing its little best here, on the ground that everything will be made straight there, and that therefore it is just as well to wait. For there appear more and more weaknesses in the demonstration that even shining garments and harps and halos are to be passed around free, or indeed that anybody will start there with anything more than he takes with him. There does not seem, however, aught to negative the guess already hazarded regarding health and fortune and friends—that what capacity for winning them one does take, may have a better chance for activity there than it has here. And as capacity improves by practice, all this plain paragraph is an argument for doing one’s best here, and not sitting around indulging in the blues.

I freely admit, however—most freely—that such views, especially regarding the gayety, have not the sanction of very old or very wide acceptance; but with the decay of Puritanism, they seem on the way to more.

Before we leave old-fashioned remedies, under however new-fashioned aspects, it may be well to consider another one that greatly helped our ancestors—the belief in an over-ruling Providence that really does help those who help themselves. In the form the belief was known to them, it is not known to many of us; but we may have it in a better form. For the narrow conception of an anthropomorphic [313] god constantly tinkering at the universe, we can substitute the idea of an intelligence so great that it does not need to watch each act, and specifically adjust each result; but has established a law so comprehensive as to give each of our motives its legitimate consequences—a law that in some ways rewards each of our good intentions, even when it seems to fail, and punishes each of our evil ones, even when it seems to succeed. Faith in such a law makes us feel secure in spite of the haunting anxiety lest we break through the volcano’s crust. The sparrow’s flight may be free if compensation awaits its fall. And we may know a higher freedom and a fuller meaning, even a creative joy, in the feeling that when we shape our acts toward the best ends we know, we can leave the rest to a benign law that goes deeper into motive than human gropings can, gives rewards better than we can devise, and punishments that do not merely afflict but tend to cure.

But all these faiths are another story. Faiths are good when they are not counter to reason, and the most matter-of-fact of us act on them every hour. But the big ones won’t come at mere bidding. What I have been principally trying to get you to do, in case you are subject to the blues, is to take hold and keep hold of the actual prosaic fact that in our year and place of grace, life has reached a fairly substantial foundation, and that throwing oneself open to every possible attack of the blues, through a chronic feeling that life is on a very ticklish basis, not only permits a great many needless attacks, but goes counter to the facts—is mathematically absurd. When you are scared, it is not because the universe is going to turn turtle, but because you are confusing its center of gravity with your own, and developing too much of a wrong sort of gravity above your own. Hopefulness is really the only reasonable attitude; at worst you lose nothing by it, unless it makes you careless.

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Life is fairly reliable, and death at worst is simply nothing, while there are growing reasons to believe that it is better than life. And yet it is the one unfailing subject of abnormal brooding. It is possible at any moment, inevitable at some moment; and for that very reason it is, from most aspects, as a subject of worry, absurd at any moment. One of the sanest and sweetest men I ever knew, who lived to be nearly ninety, told me that he never thought of it.

Of all the humbugs of priestcraft, it is the greatest. The priests, who once owned a third of England, and probably more than a third of Italy, made more money out of death and its accessories than out of all the rest of the paraphernalia in their kit. Hell and purgatory and poor dear Dante’s scenery and properties were all part of the machinery. How shocked Dante would have been if he had realized how he was furnishing such ammunition! (A friend, on reading this, was surprised at my calling Dante “dear,” because he is generally regarded as so austere a man. To me he is not only dear, but like nearly all great geniuses, “as a little child.”) And some four centuries later, how shocked would have been another poet—not so poor or quite so dear, if he could have realized what a part he was playing in the same loathsome game! With them, one thinks of the geniuses who wrote the Dies Irae and those other wonderful hymns, and questions what they too might have felt if they had realized all they were doing. Then come to mind some other contributors to the humbug, who as a rule were not poor, and were not dear at all, and who stole the sheet-iron thunder and resin lightning—John Calvin and Cotton Mather, and so on down to some poor dear men even so late as when the older of us were in college, who made us get up before daylight in winter, and go and hear them pray, because they feared that if they didn’t, and we didn’t, we should all go to Dante’s or Milton’s or some other man’s Hell.

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Well, perhaps we who have a new century to play with, especially the younger of us, fancy among its fresh attractions a thorough emancipation from these old superstitions. But they are in the very blood our fathers transmitted to us. Many have had all the anti-toxic serum needed for immunity from serious attacks, but we are all liable to twinges—hours, perhaps days, of discomfort from that identical disease, when we don’t know what’s the matter with us.

Fear of pain is part of the equipment of self-defense evolved in the higher animals, but whether those below man fear death, is, I suppose, open to question. I believe horses and sheep, at least, show fear or aversion from the dead of their own kind. I have known it instantly shown by a child supposed too young to know anything of the subject. But be all that as it may, you can get far above the mere animal instinct, up into the tender human affections like those of my dear old friend, and find it probably true that normal creatures do not think about death, unless some external circumstance leads them to. Yet my old friend, with intelligence enough for the ordinary demands of life and the most delicate of its courtesies, would not have been called a thoughtful or imaginative man. But another dear old friend who was both (I don’t know why I shouldn’t say that I’m thinking of Stedman), I don’t believe ever thought much about death, except in the abstract, unless some distinct external circumstance led him to. And he was a very unusually normal man. On the whole, I don’t believe normal people do think about it, in the concrete, unless they have to. Well then, most of the thought about it in the concrete is abnormal, and in more senses than even the priests made it, death is a humbug.

Don’t let us get the blues about it then. If we want an excuse for them, let’s find it reasonably, in being obliged to survive when we prefer to follow. But there are few such cases, and Time takes care of them; and, as reasoning [316] beings, let us realize that it is sweet and normal that he should, and let us no more resist Time in our perverse ways, than we would in the ways of the Egyptians.

And our ways are very perverse when they make us cling to some of the most absurd fashions from older civilizations, and neglect the wise ones. How long will it take us to put the Greek symbol of the lovely youth with the inverted torch, in place of the skull and cross-bones on the Puritan tombs? But we are coming on well when we bring forward the symbols of love to cover grief, and put flowers with the crape outside the door, and over the coffin. But we are not doing equally well when, after we let a woman have a veil, or a man slink down a side street, because they don’t want to recognize people, we, after they have got beyond that, still compel them to keep away from people, and even from music and the theatre, when they most need them. We can generally count on mourners suffering enough without any aid from such fashions.

But leaving out our relations to other people, in the deepest part of our very selves—the part that gets the blues, why have them over the certainty of death? When we were boys, wasn’t it a good way to avoid them before going back to school, to make the most of the last days? Today may be the last day.

If the best way out of worry is work, don’t sit around moping about that journey, but work. Pack up. You can’t take too much baggage—of the right kind. There are some reasons to suspect that in the new country you’ll find more use than you had here for all that you can get together of learning and wisdom and aspirations and affections: love is giving rather than receiving, you know—even to the point of giving unrecognized. Why not there as well as here? True, your constitution may not be up to that one-sided kind forever, but you may not have to wait so long as that.

And even if you’re lost, baggage and all, it will not have [317] been wasted: for it will have done its service here, and it will not need to be renewed. And you can’t be sure now that you won’t want it. And how ineffably silly it is to worry over the possibility of oblivion! That surely can’t hurt. But if anybody believes that consciousness continues, shut up in a Pozzi-like darkness, deprived of an opportunity to enjoy this beautiful universe or any other, that’s something to worry over. But did anybody ever invent such a Hell as that, or if anybody did, has anybody now any justification for having the blues over it? If you are worried by Scripture, probably you know that of the three uses of “outer darkness” in Matthew, two plainly refer to earthly conditions, and the third may fairly be taken in the same sense.

If you get tired packing, and need more work in view of departure, don’t go back to moping, but get right up and put things in shape for those you’re going to leave behind. But don’t bother them, or do foolish things. One of the best things about that journey is that nearly all the wise preparations for staying here are equally wise for going. So you would be foolish to make very many specific preparations for going. In fact specific preparations for that journey have involved more of the waste and tomfoolery of the world than almost anything else—perhaps more than even war or fashion.

But be ready to go when you’re called.

Meantime circumstances may be so against you that you can’t have a happy life; but probably you can, if you so will, have at least a cheerful one, and those who have had the experience say that it’s pretty hard to tell the difference—that they amount to about the same thing, except that, on the whole, the cheerful life is the more effective; and that, at best, happiness is but a by-product.

All this simple advice may be easier to follow than you think, and if you do follow it, probably you won’t have the blues.

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THE PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE OF KICKING

Now, at this present moment, and for the next two months, twenty million American youth,—turning from syndicalism, the new morality, forgotten virtues, capitalism, psychical research, sociology, trust-busting, fly-swatting, preventive medicine, the evils of alcohol and tobacco, and other of the million burning questions of the day,—are and will be chiefly occupied with the important historical problem as to whether Mr. Charles Brickley, captain of and kicker-in-extraordinary to the Harvard football team, is a mightier man than the ancient heroes of the kicking game,—Moffatt, Bull, Brooke, Trafford, O’Dea, Poe, Sharpe, Eckershall,—and with this discussion they will couple the practical ambition and personal hope of joining the great galaxy.

But why bother about such matters? We cannot all, dear brother sports, become members of the firm of Brickley and Company. There is no use in trying. Besides, satisfaction for disappointment is ready at hand. As is common in human affairs, when we cannot do a thing literally, we may always turn to a metaphor. The turn has this advantage: whereas actual kicking is the prerogative of a few favored mortals, its practice, under the metaphor, may become the pastime of any person, however humble. For this use of the word there is the highest possible authority: the heavenly vision that appeared to Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus, was accompanied by a voice which said, “It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.” It is interesting to note, by the way, that these words were the only ones uttered in that famous conversation which bear any suggestion of rationality, [319] and it is not unlikely that the great and able apostle, perceiving the hard-headed and common-sense quality of the advice, made haste to adopt a less futile pursuit than that of persecuting new movements.

Now this metaphor stands for an operation far more common than most of us are usually aware. Figuratively, we are all kickers, at least nearly all of us, in one way or another, at one time or another, for one cause or another. Illustrations are as common as football associations or earth worms. Thus that oracular Englishman, Mr. G. K. Chesterton, has all Victorian literature the outcome of various reactions against the “Victorian Compromise,” but, in less elegant phrase and from the point of view of the aforesaid “V. C.,” all Victorian literature might be said to have arisen from the Stossenslust , or desire to kick. And, whereas that desire, literally considered, is surging in the breast of every manly young American at this very moment,—the metaphorical function may be administered by young and old, male and female, alike. An extra strong cup of coffee, too many buckwheat cakes, too prolonged indulgence in prayer-meetings, will often do the trick, without those long years of patient practice which make certain of our football heroes distinguished above their kind.

Personally I like the easy way, and therefore I may, at the outset, and with all due modesty, lay a not-to-be-denied claim to some share in the function that I am describing. I admire the motives, and occasionally the works, of my colleagues in the noble art which we profess, the art of setting the world, the whole world, or the particular world, right,—perhaps of setting some parts of the world by the ears, who knows? I greatly admire such periodicals as are instruments and vehicles for the “registering of kicks” that will take the offender and the offence squarely and forcibly and leave the remains to be carted away by the scavengers of reform. I enjoy nothing more than a blithe, personally conducted [320] “muck-rake”; I hope sometime to offer a Nobel kicking prize. Whatever makes against the crudeness, the carelessness, the complacency especially, and the contentment with mediocrity that so pervade some of the aspects of our modern civilization charms me. Doubtless we in America are eaten up with the heir-to-all-the-ages, we-can-do-as-we-like, America-for-the-Americans sort of feeling and sentiment. Though Mr. Wells is probably right in saying that “the United States of America remains the greatest country in the world, and the living hope of mankind,” yet anything that checks our bumptiousness is surely a good thing. But I do not halt here; far be it from me to delight solely in the advantages of my own land. I love to read about Ministerial and Opposition struggles, and the Austrian parliament and the French strikes are very merry spectacles. Kicking is really the most sacred tradition handed down to us from our puritan ancestors, themselves most accomplished in the art. Why should not one love it? But I dislike clumsy workers. As Matthew Arnold might have said, we want real kicking, real criticism, real objection. The vital question is as to the nature of good kicking and of bad kicking. What are the “pricks” to be shunned? for, as we have said, the advice of the heavenly voice would, in general, seem to be as sound as the Elizabethan semi-slang is lively. Into the answer enter considerations of motive, of object, of method, and of technic. In the interests of sound thinking, I am going to register my own demurrer against certain abuses of the noble pastime.

First as to the motive. Generally speaking this is dissatisfaction with the status quo and a desire to alter it. Altering may evidently be about anything one pleases. Hence the motive for kicking may be anything from crude envy to lofty altruism; it may be a simple reaction, scarcely more noble than the electrically stimulated kick of the frog’s leg in the classical experiment, or it may be quite [321] rational and untemperamental. It is obvious that the artist, the Stossenskunstmeister , should avail himself of the high motive; and no matter how much he may personally pine, should at least assume the altruistic virtue. Skilful mammas customarily observe this principle when they spank their children, saying, with greater reference to an ideal than an actual world, “This hurts me more than it hurts you,” or “I do this for your own good,” or other equally convincing remarks. In contrast with this amiable and ambi-flagellatory or bipenal practice, may be placed the character and instance of the unjust judge who frankly admitted boredom as his motive for action.

It would seem as if the present generation, in America, at least, besides losing the old fashioned virtues of tact and reticence, had also to some degree lost the artistic sense of the selection of the proper motive, and in so far have become unskilful kickers. Perhaps the growth of democracy has engendered obtuseness to the more delicate arts, but what could be cruder, for example, than the motives of many suffragettes, of many trade unions, of many socialists. It is crude raw envy: “You have something that I haven’t got; I want it or something just as good.” Intellectually and morally this position is about as far advanced as that of a group of infants, whose conception of play seems to be the snatching of those toys that are for the moment most desired by their companions. “What is the city doing for women to make up for the money that has been stolen from the treasury to found a man’s college?” cries one, and another exclaims: “What is it all worth so long as we haven’t the vote?”

says Shelley, and the child in proportion to his infancy will not be happy until he gets the star, the watch, the rattle, or the cake of soap.

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One may believe in Votes for Women, rejoice over the improvement of the position of workingmen, and hope to see many of the ideals of socialism prevail,—and yet lament clumsiness and maladroitness in the use of motive. For all causes need the aid of the judiciously selected method, the appeal to high expediency, whereas they have to some degree fallen into the hands of extremely clumsy operators, the Pankhursts, the Carons, the Tannenbaums, who recall Newman’s words: “Others are so intemperate and intractable that there is no greater calamity for a good cause than that they should get hold of it.” They also recall Shakespeare’s version of the words of Antony, which may be regarded as the epitome of good form in kicking, so far as motive is concerned:

Even more various, important and interesting than the motive of kicking is the object of the kick, l’objet d’appui, das Stossensstoff . Judging from some specimens and examples still to be found among us, we may imagine that the primitive man always objected to specific and tangible things; if an acquaintance impinged too violently upon the person of the primitive, the latter replied by “handing out,” or footing out, a good “swift” blow. So too, now-a-days, the wise and simple person is not likely to go too far afield to kick, there being plenty of objects in the immediate neighborhood on which he can break his toes, such as little eccentricities in his neighbor’s or his own ménage . If he is wise, really wise, he takes exception to these things from the high impersonal motives that we have been examining, and only where he is pretty sure of success. But if he have a disinterested mind, a philanthropic temperament, a broad philosophical outlook [323] on life, he will see a very large assortment of objects that are by no means those of his special field of activity. These are the generalized objets d’appui , and it may be said to the credit of our civilization that we have accumulated them in larger numbers than any of our predecessors. The fact is, indeed, that the primitive had none of them, or, if in his later aeons he recognized some of them, his attitude was religious, terrorful, abject. They apparently grow in number quite as rapidly as other inventions of the human mind; and as each of these latter has been devised and recognized, so its accompanying kick has been engendered, thereafter never quite to leave it; just as the louse of the dead Filipino accompanies him to the nether world. Thus the general recognition of something called Life, brings a kick at Life by those who are hard hit by it. This is on the whole the most idle of the manifestations of the Stossenslust . The most evident thing about life, for the individual, is that it apparently begins somewhere, through no fault whatever of the individual’s own, and ends for the individual in some way that he cannot specifically forecast. Evidently to object to the most hard and fast fact of the world, the time-honored premise that all men are mortal, is a most futile proceeding; and yet it has been made not only the subject of the most varied and legitimate inquiries, but also of wailings and gnashings of teeth, of religious terror, fervor and abnegation. So far as the subject of this paper is concerned, the reasonable kick at life is the kick at conditions that lie along the way; and it is a healthy sign of the times that our energies are being directed rather to improvement of affairs in this world than to a too active calculation about the compensations that the next one affords.

Another almost equally futile aim of the Stossenskunst lies in a kind of objection to alleged tendencies. With the advance of civilization, to use Macaulay’s phrase, new tendencies and movements are thought to appear; and [324] these naturally develop their own special crop of kickings. The decay of modern manners, the growing corruption of the English tongue, the growing impudence of modern youth, the encroachments of scepticism upon the domain of religion, the antagonism of classes, the sentimentality of democratic life, the general increase of foolishness,—these and a thousand other alleged tendencies, are really futile matter for fretting about. Here, indeed, the operation is something like this: the kicker goes forth to kick. He mistakes a balloon for a football and with an inflator proceeds to blow the balloon up, puffing it into enormous size with air (at 99F) from his own lungs. Then he paints on it the sign, “Degeneracy of modern times,” and kicks it a mile or two into the air in about any direction, except toward a goal. Meanwhile really skilful kickers are trying to score by accurate judicious kicks over a cross-bar.

The recognition of real tendencies, of movements, of purposes, of motives, on the other hand, is of course indispensable if the art of objecting is to be successfully practiced. If I were oblivious to the tendency of my neighbor to absorb small portions of my estate, of harum-scarum pictures and statues to oust a more sober art, of armaments to go on increasing, I should find myself bunkoed in a minute; I should be as inept as Piggy Moore in the story, who did not know one goal from another. If one looks up only when his toes are trod on, he will see little. Tendencies must be recognized; without them we could have no such thing as the anticipatory, the preparative, the restraining, the stimulating kick. But it is evident that little except by way of suggestion can come through treating these matters in general; the effective kick has a specific objective. And unless one’s criticism of tendency be based on facts, one does as the protagonists of the last paragraph, booting the self-blown air of vituperation or aspiration.

It is a pastime to kick at institutions as well as at tendencies. I once knew a man who for a whole long year [325] never ceased to complain of the Subway; it was noisy, ill-ventilated, ill-mannered. The kick was very inapposite: I was not the president of the Metropolitan, and moreover I liked the Subway, in spite of some drawbacks. But the correct attitude is quite simple: one is under no undeniable compulsion to ride in the Subway; but even if one cannot escape, to destroy it is inconvenient and impossible; and therefore the only sensible course is to attack the abuses, by writing about them to the management, or to some benignant newspaper. In like manner many of us find a peculiar joy in attacking modern journalism, flats, pianolas, victrolas, automobiles, the modern drama, the study of rhetoric, the management of asylums, city life and many institutions of many descriptions. Whereas the judicious kicker usually aims only at the abuses that such institutions bring with them,—unless the evils are inherent and colossal, as possibly in Tammany Hall and war and the corner saloon. But even here kicking must be piecemeal.

If for a moment a practical application of the foregoing principles and kinds of kicking be made to contemporary American life, it is evident that we do not, on the whole, frown sufficiently at the varied assortment of specific objects at our feet. That is the charge often brought against us by observant foreigners. Whether in our eager individual pursuit of the main chance we neglect the details that lie along the way, or whether we do not like to interfere with what is not our own particular business, it is certain that we put up with abuses and impositions that would not be tolerated in other lands. Every country, to be sure, has its special crop of abuses, which are more apparent to the foreigner than to the native, and there can be no harm in the visitor’s indulging in the very common pastime of plucking them out if the act helps him to consider the beam in his own eye. Yet our attitude is seldom so correct as that of the old deacon who said, “When you see a fault in me, mend it in yourselves, [326] brethren.” It is really much easier,—and quite as futile,—to rail at what we don’t like in other lands—the lack of hot bread and ice-water in England, of swift and slaughterous railways in Germany and France, of public control of beggars in Italy and Spain—than to set our own house in order. But kicking, like charity, should begin at home. It ought to be the duty of everybody at home to object, persistently and effectively, to the specific overcrowded street-car, the badly paved road, the encroaching door-step, the neglected yard, the malodorous cesspool, the irresponsible automobile, and the reckless railroad—especially if he have any personal part in the maintenance of similar abuses. If the tendency of these evils were rightly apprehended, if a part only of the effort that is expended, presumably, in objecting to generalized, foreign and futile subjects, were bestowed on specific and tangible details, if we would forego the emotional pleasure of the impersonal “muck-rake,” to assail the evil at our very feet,—especially if each one of us were careful to avoid offence in matters of the same kind—our country would surely be a much fairer one.

If we are to distinguish good kicking from bad the matter remains to be looked at from a somewhat different point of view, that of method and technic. The matter is important enough to run some risk of repetition. I am far from following a school of thinkers who seem to imply that when the method of a subject,—as of teaching, brick-laying, railroading, etc.,—is properly apprehended, the learner may ride gaily away on a successful career without reference to the facts of his business. Nor is method easy to define; all that I know is that it is very important. In addition to the inspiration and animus of a good, or at least a plausible, motive and to a judicious choice of object, good kicking should also be in the right direction. Let us see what is actually in vogue.

A common kind of kick might be called conservative. [327] Under the loose figure of the “gridiron” we may imagine certain more spirited and adventurous souls who wish to propel the game toward a more or less distant and obscure goal; they have some idea of tendency. In their efforts they are constantly hampered, checked, and tripped by an equally numerous body of players, who desire to keep the game where it is, alleging that there is no fairer prospect than the fields that have already been played over, that every advance is sure to lead to the bog and the morass. Life has nothing better to offer than what it has already offered; their efforts are to keep the ball in the middle of the field; no score games are best. Now this conservative kick certainly has manifest advantages; it may be used, for example, with great effect against the common cry that we are better than anybody else, or against rash and hasty innovation. But in its extreme form it is peculiarly irritating. This extreme form may be called the reactionary kick, a favorite pastime in all the ages. Let me take an example that I happened to come across a day or two ago. In The School of Abuse , Stephen Gosson said among many other things of like reasonable tenor and sense of fact,—

“Consider with thy selfe (gentle reader) the olde discipline of Englande, mark what we were before, and what we are now: Leave Rome a while and cast thine eye backe to thy Predecessors, and tell mee howe wonderfully wee have been chaunged, since wee were schooled in these abuses. Dion saith, that english men could suffer watching and labor, hunger and thirst, and beare of al stormes with hed and shoulders, they used slender weapons, went naked, and were good soldiours, they fed uppon rootes and barkes of trees, they would stand up to the chin many dayes in marishes without victualles: and they had a kind of sustenaunce in time of neede, of which if they had taken but the quantitie of a beane, or the weight of a pease, they did neyther gape after meate, nor long for the cuppe, a great while after. The men in valure not yeelding [328] to Scithia , the women in courage passing the Amazons . The exercise of both was shootyng and darting, running and wrestling, and trying such maisteries, as eyther consisted in swiftnesse of feete, agilitie of body, strength of armes, or Martiall discipline. But the exercise that is now among us, is banqueting, playing, pipyng, and dauncing, and all such delightes as may win us to pleasure, or rocke us a sleepe.”

This is amusing; we are so far from Gosson’s time that we are not afraid to laugh at it; we recognize its absurdity, as we recognize the humor of the quack medicine vendor in Punch (Dec. 24, 1913): “Here you are, gents, sixpence a bottle. Founded on the researches of modern science. Where should we be without science? Look at the ancient Britons. They hadn’t no science, and where are they? Dead and buried, every one of ’em.” But, mutatis mutandis , Gosson’s words are a reactionary formula of all the ages: we find it, more persuasively and more subtly, in the Past and Present of Carlyle, in some of the criticism of Arnold, in many of the denunciations of Ruskin, and it is even betting that one will not find an example of it any day in the pages of our more staid journals. It objects to most modern enterprises, to imperialism, to the increase of foreign trade, to modern science, to psychical research, to the Ph.D. degree, to children’s courts, to scientific philanthropy, to eugenics, to the Panama Canal, to a thousand other things, not because there may be a reasonable and conservative scepticism regarding the outcome of these matters and the facts on which they are alleged to rest, but because they were not recognized by the pre-Baconian philosophers, and fail to be specifically commented on by Aristotle or Marcus Aurelius or St. Paul.

Whereas it must, of course, be evident to common sense that the enterprises of an age may be properly criticised, for the most part, only in terms of the age. One’s own age is usually regarded as a particularly enterprising one, and an enterprising age is one full of experiment. All [329] that experience has to teach us about new enterprises in the main is that they have never been tried before, and that we were best not to be over sanguine of their success. But that is merely reasonable caution,—such as doubtless mingled with the loftier spirit of a Themistocles, a Pericles, a Michael Angelo, a Raleigh, a Bismarck, a Wilbur Wright, a Scott, in the ages that we are accustomed to think of as great. The enterprising age has always tried to find better houses, better ships, better laws,—to find its north pole,—and it is good much in proportion as it tries to find these things. Many of the attempts are failures, and the way to success is strewn with bones of men, but they are failures because they do not attain the goal for which they are striving, because they do not win the satisfactions of their own times; not because they do not conform to the achieved success or to the reactionary formula of a past age.

The reactionary kick is not without virtue; it is usually a gentleman’s instrument. It may even be charming, as with those dear ladies in Cranford who never used any word “not sanctioned by Johnson.” The charm may arise from the fact that the reactionary kick really requires no thought at all; a fair acquaintance with the literature of past ages, of one past age in particular,—the Periclean, the Medicean, the Spenserian, the Johnsonian,—is all that is necessary. Therefore one can put one’s effort on manner and style, and may produce the effect of great suavity and wisdom. The reactionary kick is really terribly easy, possibly the easiest of all intellectual exercises,—indeed, it barely merits the name of intellectual; for it really consists in putting some standard on ice, and taking it off from time to time whenever a warm modern idea is thought to be in need of cooling. Whereas, on the other hand, the man in the thick of an active enterprise must work and think with all his might, and etiquette and style are of minor moment.

Yes, on the whole, the reactionary kick must in turn [330] react on the intellectual and moral quality of its operator and cause his fibre to degenerate through easefulness. But this we seldom notice. The poet says:

and we scorn him, calling him hedonist, epicurean, indifferentist, “quitter;” but he is really less bad than the reactionary kicker who, when he has energy enough to get into the game, still hugs the side lines or keeps trotting back to the bleachers to shout needless warnings to players who know quite as much as he. Or again, we usually reckon it doubtful ethics to quarrel with another man’s job, and can see the absurdity in lack of harmony between the pot and the kettle; for we are fundamentally of the opinion that live and let live is ordinarily a good public and private motto. And yet, the strife that sometimes arises between the representatives of various activities is no more absurd than the attempt to pry down from its various pedestals the enterprise of modern times, with the levers and pulleys of past generations. The reactionary kick is, on the whole, as useful as plowing with wooden plowshares, battling with the pilum, crushing flies with a steam-hammer, repudiating the typewriter and the locomotive, or giving one’s days and nights to the volumes of Thomas Aquinas.

A word as to technic, which is in a comparatively crude state and leaves much to be desired. That is perhaps inevitable, since really skilful kicking, no matter in what direction, does not really proclaim itself as such, and is consequently not likely to be thought of at all as anything more than advice or persuasion, whereas the unskilful technician is too likely to call names to be really effective. Some of the phrases in vogue will show the crudeness of the technic: the white man’s burden, the strenuous [331] life, a tendency toward socialism, this is an age of transition, simplified spelling is an entering wedge, let us sweep anarchy into the sea, we are up against it in life, home is the girl’s prison and the woman’s workhouse, I fear that I am too old-fashioned, we must uplift the masses, what are home and children and country if we have not the vote, America for the Americans, destroy the very foundations of our faith, threaten to overwhelm our fairest institutions beneath a wave of ignorance and despotism, to crucify mankind on a cross of gold,

etc., etc., etc., etc.

Nor is the pantomime of kicking more advanced: the melancholy air of grave concern at the state of scholarship in America; the tears in the voice lamenting the decay of our dear mother tongue; the placid large-eyed sorrow at the spectacle of corruption, of reckless automobiles, or of unkempt pavements; the firm and elevated chin and stretching neck of her who presses into the service of the Cause; the slow and silent tread, albeit in public places, of him who goes about in meditation on the misery of mankind ( eheu miser! );—all these methods were the object for the satire of a Swift or the sweet rationality of a Montaigne; but they must be content with this sketchy cataloguing from a humbler pen.

One school of kickers only, so far as I am aware, has paid much attention to the technic of the great art. Their names will presently appear (for should they not be named with honor?), but the essence of their method is this, that they side-step every move in the game and, as the play goes rushing by, plant a skilful kick where they think it will be effective. In this game they do somewhat imitate the methods of the reactionary kicker, who as we have seen, retreats to the rear of the field, bidding the play [332] come to him on the ground where it was played by St. Thomas, Samuel and Noah. That is to say, the method consists in assuming a point of view different from the current one. There the resemblance ceases, for these modern masters of technic rarely retreat to the rear, but keep alongside the game or even ahead of it, and even mingle in it with jest and laughter. And thus Mr. Shaw, from his coign of vantage just ahead of the player, is constantly thrusting things between his legs to trip him up if he run awkwardly; and Mr. Wells is making diagrams of how badly the game has been played in the past, and showing how it is bound to improve when we divest it of old and ragged toggery, which somehow holds together; and Mr. Chesterton is engaged in proving that nobody but himself knows anything about sport anyway; while Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. Belloc, and a host of others are kicking away brilliantly, imagining that they also have discovered something quite new in the annals of the sport. Meanwhile hosts of good quiet people are lending a helping hand or are, like skilful guards or backs, actively but unostentatiously pushing the good cause through the opponents’ line and towards the goal.

If, by way of summary, one were asked to draw a brief sketch of the ideal kicker, much as Herbert Spencer drew the character of the ideal writer, the answer would be something like this. The ideal kicker is he who would improve his own condition or the condition of the town, community, age, and atmosphere in which he lives, mainly according to the light of his own generation. His attack is against the particular and the immediate; for he knows that for the purposes of his art, life is made up of an infinite number of small and specific acts. The larger abuse he recognizes to be assailable chiefly in its detail, and hence the pursuit of it, except in rare circumstances,—as when a whole community is like minded with himself,—is likely to be a sort of guerilla warfare and a kind of pot-hunting. But it is guerilla warfare and pot-hunting [333] directed to as large ends as can be compassed by the limits of one’s imagination and practical common sense. The adroit kicker knows that many sad objects will in the usual course of events be left behind, by a sort of common consent, just as we discard certain clothes, less by deliberate pursuit of the ragman than by forgetting the old suit in the delightful possession of the new. He therefore spends his strength in calling attention to the new and beautiful attire of civilization. Nor is he likely to be seduced into the belief, that the armor of old days, or the stately shoe buckles and flowered waistcoats and well-curled wigs of the eighteenth century, are a better costume for our light running modern world and our warm climate than the flexible jersey and springy stockings of the contemporary athlete.

Do you ask if such an ideal kicker actually exists? I am forced to admit that I know no such one, any more than Spencer could have pointed to the actual embodiment of his deduction. And if it be further objected that the foregoing pages do by no means wholly exemplify the doctrine that they attempt to expound, in that they kick at what is essentially unkickable, the Stossenslust of humanity, I can merely register a mild and dainty kick to the effect that it is unreasonable to expect me, more than any other reformer or censor morum , to abide quite exactly by the doctrine that I would inculcate. Does it at all matter? Not very much one way or the other.

[334]

THE GENTLEMAN-SPORTSMAN

Here upon the opening of the shooting season, I am reminded of the impression made on me some time ago by an article on hunting lions in Africa written by a very well-known author. I remember being much struck by his admirably expressed and lucid explanation of his reason for engaging in that pursuit. Being a native of Vermont I had never devoted much thought to the ethics of lion-hunting and was interested to read that the author of the article felt justified in killing lions because there is really no place for them in the modern world; because they are anachronistic and objectionable survivals from another phase of the world’s history; because they are obstacles in the advancing tide of colonization. This very obvious line of reasoning had never chanced to occur to me before. I stopped a moment to savor the pleasure one always feels at having hazy ideas clarified and set in order, and before I went on with the article I reflected that the world owes a debt of gratitude to the highly educated men of trained minds who undertake out-of-the-way enterprises, because with their habit of searching and logical analysis they bring out the philosophy underlying any occupation they may set themselves.

Then I read on further through some most entertaining descriptions of African scenery till I came to an eloquently written paragraph denouncing in spirited terms those men who hunted lions in “an unsportsmanlike manner.” My curiosity was aroused. I wondered what this objectionable method could be—probably one which involved the escape of many of these undesirable lions, or possibly more suffering to them. My astonishment was great, therefore, when I read that this pernicious manner of [335] hunting lions consisted in going after them with dogs and horses, and that the author objected to it because it is practically sure to secure every lion hunted. He put it with an evident distaste, that the lion became so worn out with running and so dazed with the barking of the dogs that the hunter could walk up to him and put the rifle-barrel in his ear. If you really want to kill a lion, my sportsman-author went on disdainfully, the thing to do is to shoot a zebra, cut holes in the carcass, put strychnine in the holes, and leave the carcass where the lions can get at it. The ringing accent of scorn in which this whole passage was written cast me into the greatest bewilderment. Had I not just read that the author considered it a laudable thing to put lions out of the world? I must have mistaken his meaning. Feeling greatly perplexed, I hastily turned back over the pages until I encountered that first passage again, and found that I had not in the least mistaken his meaning. He had said in so many words that lions ought to be killed because they were an anachronistic survival, etc., etc. Putting the two statements side by side I looked from one to the other in the first of the seizures of complete perplexity which marked my attempt to understand his ideal of sportsmanship. I read on into the article with the liveliest curiosity, hoping that the author would throw more light on the subject of what constituted a really sportsmanlike method of killing an objectionable animal, and from the sum total of his remarks I made out quite clearly why he objected to the zebra-strychnine method. It was not after all because it was sure, for his own avowed aim was to kill every lion he encountered, and to look up all he possibly could, whether they evidenced any desire to encounter him or not. It was because it “did not give the lion a chance.”

In varying forms he repeated this sportsman’s ideal of “giving the game a chance,” but from the context it was clear, even to my inexperienced eye, that he did not mean [336] to be taken literally. It was not a real chance the lion had when the sportsman could arrange matters to his taste—it was a hypothetical, metaphysical chance. The aim was to give the animal the illusion of having a chance, and when, acting on that idea, he had furnished the hunter with sufficient excitement in frustrating his desperate attempts to escape, the sportsman was to kill him in the end, thus proving his own skill and ingenuity. Yes, it was all quite clearly set forth in the same lucid style which had aroused my admiration at first.

With the repetition of these manœuvres in the case of every lion killed in the author’s gentlemanly advance across Africa, I had a stronger and stronger impression that somewhere else I had encountered this sort of reasoning. Somewhere I had heard it all before; or if I had not heard it, I had seen it. But how could I, a Vermont rustic, ever have seen anything which might remind me of lion-hunting according to these impeccably sportsmanlike rules? I laid down the book, trying to bring up the haunting memory more clearly, and in a moment it had flashed up vivid and clear-cut. Why yes, the sportsmanlike method of killing lions reminded me of something with which I had been familiar all my life,—of a cat playing with a live mouse before eating it. It was now more evident that, in comparison with the brutally direct methods of the pot-hunting dog, the cat is actuated by the finest devotion to the ideals of sportsmanship. Not for her the quick pounce and avid crunch of Rover. She “gives the mouse a chance,” and only kills him after she has extracted the most deliciously titillating excitement out of his frenzied dashes for liberty. The facts that he never does get away from the cat, and that the lion does sometimes get away from the man only prove how infinitely more clever in this game of sportsmanship, is the cat than the man, since the open purpose of both cat and man is to kill the other animal in the end.

[337]

Now nothing can be more unphilosophical in one’s attitude towards the world than to blame creatures for acting according to their natures, and I have never felt in the least inclined to censure the cat, although I always put her out of the room with some violence if she brings in a live mouse and begins her sportsmanlike tactics with him. This is not because I think the cat is a wicked animal and ought to be punished, but merely because the sight of the frantic mental sufferings of the mouse happens to be very disagreeable to me. I have no illusions about pussy. I know that if I kicked her out of the room a thousand times ten thousand, I could never inculcate in her any genuine conception of the idea that it may be wrong to get her fun out of another’s extreme pain. That is the way cats are. Her virtues lie in other directions. If she keeps herself and her kittens clean, and does not steal my beef-steak, I can ask no more from her.

But now as I meditated on her character, for which I felt a contemptuous tolerance founded on a knowledge of her limitations, I was most disagreeably struck by the close resemblance between her nature and that of the gentleman-sportsman. It is all very well to make the best of the cat’s shortcomings, to refrain from expressing, in the only way she can understand, my disgust at a trait she cannot alter, but it is quite another thing to resign myself to the presence of the same trait in the character of many human beings for whom I should like to feel nothing but admiration and respect.

I recognize of course that the lion-hunter may shift his ground, admit that he hunts more for the excitement of the chase than to protect poor colonists from marauding lions, yet still protest against my criticism. “It is unfair,” he may urge, “to assume that human nature is all mind and spirit. Flesh and blood exist and have their claim for consideration. Killing animals might be unworthy for a seraph, but I am a man, and for me it is a harmless method of exercising my age-old inherited battle-lust. [338] I as well as the cat am linked to the past. Is it fair for you to censure in me what you pass over in her?”

Such a plea will hardly answer. Human nature is not animal nature, and though dogs and cats may possibly have their own standards of right and wrong, based on the needs and possibilities of their species, man with his different needs and possibilities has no ethical point of contact with them. But in his own case he is and always has been convinced of the spark disturbing his clod. He is not content to regard himself as a highly intelligent primate, destined to make over the material world for his own uses; whatever his practice may be, he cannot free himself from the belief that he must be good, and must become better. Nor has this conviction wasted itself in impotent speculation. Throughout his history, he has continued to set up standards of conduct so lofty that no age has come near to living up to its profession of right living. Nevertheless aspiration has induced development: for the standard of its ancestors has seemed inadequate to every generation. What the grandfather considered a matter of course, and the father condoned as a peccadillo, the son and his contemporaries proclaim a vice. They may themselves indulge in the vice, but they do so with a feeling of guilt, and they hail with rejoicing the moments when they resolve to improve their lives: such wishes are everything: the rest is merely a matter of time.

No man, therefore, can regard himself solely as the son of an earthy family: for with the lusts of the flesh he has also inherited the aspirations of the spirit; and he is bound by this mental heredity to hold himself responsible as the father of a posterity always advancing toward perfection. Unless he is willing to confess himself either an imbecile or a criminal, he is not justified in yielding to an impulse which he recognizes as unworthy.

Again, the gentleman-lion-hunter may object that I am stating the matter with too much heat. Even though forced to admit that hunting is neither really useful [339] (since lions can be exterminated more easily and surely without it) nor an ineradicable heritage from man’s savage past (since men have outgrown so many other supposedly ingrained instincts) he may make a stand on the contention that hunting is a blameless pastime, and that if a gentleman chooses to spend his vacation shooting lions, instead of climbing mountains, neither he, nor society, nor posterity will ever be a penny the worse for it.

I cannot agree with the Gentleman-sportsman. His contention that lion shooting is an obviously blameless recreation for civilized men does not appear to me self-evident. Among the difficulties which beset us in our great campaign to keep the higher elements in human nature, and to discard the lower ones, there is no more puzzling problem than the question of our relation to the animal-world. On this problem there is a great difference of opinion between the older and the younger branches of the Aryan family. The Hindus elaborated their merciful and elevated theory of life at a time when, so to speak, we were still tearing meat from the bones and eating it raw. When, at a much later period, we ourselves came to face the problem, the discoveries of science had so widened the horizon of our knowledge that we were unable to accept the Hindu doctrine of never taking animal life because the principle of life is sacred. Aware that life is not only animal, but exists in everything, we perceived that to eat a dish of oatmeal is to destroy life as truly as to butcher an ox. It is apparent to us that one of the dark mysteries of the world is that we can avoid taking life only by refusing to live ourselves.

Confronted with this problem, when we began to question our habits, we have, after a fashion, worked it out on logical grounds, and have decided that we have a right to take life which is necessary to ours, or which is injurious to ours; but we have tempered this high-handed decision by the feeling, based on all that is best and highest in our natures, that to take life is a serious business, [340] should be undertaken in a serious spirit, for some evident purpose, and should be accomplished in the most painless fashion possible. All the nation-wide campaign against flies has not lessened by a jot our horror at the child who amuses himself by tearing off their wings. Moderns think of themselves as the legal executioners of those animals which they elect must die; and the essence of the executioner’s duty is to be merciful, quick, competent in the accomplishment of his task. Most of us would not care to work in a slaughter-house, but that is not because we think the butcher a wicked man. Neither would we choose of our own accord to care for the insane, or clean out the sewers in a city, but that is not because those are shameful acts. They are necessary but uncomely parts of the world’s economy, to be performed with a decent reticence and as quickly and economically as possible.

This theory of the entire subservience of the animal world to our human needs can certainly not be criticized for being too ethereally exalted. In fact its best friends cannot claim that it is very elevated doctrine; but at least it is an honest acknowledgment of apparent necessity, it is tempered by all the mercy possible under the circumstances, it is fairly consistent, and it has been accepted by the majority of the inhabitants of the civilized world as a working theory. But how can the curious institution of the good sportsman be fitted into this frank and open modern attitude about a sombre mystery in the intertwined interests of the world? As a matter of fact modern ideas and the good sportsman cannot possibly be reconciled, and whenever society has cast a glance at sportsmanship, that institution, dreading a real scrutiny and a resulting question concerning its right to existence, has hastily thrown out a sop of concession, muttering angrily under its breath about the demagogic modern mob which undertakes to restrict the freedom of gentlemen. In this way, some hundred years ago, the institution of bear-baiting was conceded to be not precisely a [341] sport to inculcate fine qualities in its human spectators; many years later, the contention that prize-fighting was good fodder for the younger generation was given up, and very recently, with a pettish protest that really the world is becoming too emasculated, the fine, virile joys of trap-pigeon-shooting have been grudgingly abandoned. But for the most part society is busy about more important matters, and no one except a few unheeded sentimentalists pays any attention to the conflicting claims of man and the animals. During such tranquil periods, the sportsman revises his code according to his own ideas, for, having long outlived the days when its contribution to the food supply gave it actual value, hunting has reached the critical, codified stage common to the senility of all institutions. To an outsider it is rather entertaining to see the unanimity with which each succeeding generation of sportsmen looks back with scorn on its predecessors as a parcel of muckers with no true idea of gentlemanly restraint in sport; a mild diversion is to be extracted from the elaborate platforms in which they set forth the latest rules,—that artificial flies are noble,—that bait is an abomination,—that a magazine shot-gun is fit only for the pot-hunter,—that men need precisely the exercise for their wit, courage, foresight, perseverance and skill which is to be found in hunting animals according to whatever rules chance to be in vogue in the sporting world of their day.

It is true that hunting animals trains a man to use his brains and perseverance in overcoming obstacles. It is also true that everything worth while is achieved against obstacles, so that we do well to train ourselves to overcome them in our play as well as our work. And it is true that a man playing a trout with light tackle enjoys the delight of exercising his own wit, ingenuity, and perseverance in the battle against obstacles; but so would he if, without tying the animal, he should set himself to the difficult undertaking of skinning a dog alive. The fact [342] that he causes more pain in one case than in the other, differentiates the two pursuits only in the matter of degree. How shall the line be drawn? How much pain, in what manner, to what sort of animal, may a man cause for the sole purpose of enjoying the exercise of his wit, ingenuity and perseverance?

As to the exercise of courage in hunting, it is difficult to take seriously this claim on the part of huntsmen, who for the most part are quite unable to travel far enough to encounter any animals more ferocious than a trout, a fox (whose cowardice is proverbial), or at most a deer, who asks nothing better than to be allowed to run away as long as breath lasts. But there are exceptions. There is, for example, the gentleman-sportsman in Africa, who by the expenditure of a great amount of time, effort, and money has succeeded in getting to a country inhabited by an animal which, if sufficiently annoyed would undeniably eat up a gentleman-sportsman if he could get at him. This is exciting no doubt, this undoubtedly calls for physical courage. Courage is a virtue, and excitement is certainly a need of the human heart. No observer of human nature can deny that we need excitement as much as we do bread. But the modern world does not consider even this great desire to justify every and any mode of gratifying it. The man who hunts lions according to the code of the gentleman-sportsman gets his excitement out of the fact that the animal he is attempting to kill may possibly be able to turn the tables and kill him. It would be even more exciting and dangerous, and would call for even more courage, to attempt to track down and kill a man fully armed like the hunter. But the conscience of the world, insensitive as it is to some of the finer points of conduct, would not for a moment countenance turning loose even the lowest of convicted criminals for the purpose of allowing other men to extract excitement out of his chase,—no! not though all the most delicate distinctions of the most modern and fastidious [343] code of gentlemanly hunting were thrown around this most inimitably thrilling of sports. The fact is that the world is becoming more and more squeamish about the way in which its inhabitants are to secure their excitement. There was a time when all the gentlemen-sportsmen supplied themselves with excitement by sitting in comfortable seats about an arena and watching wild animals tear human beings to pieces. There is still a modern nation which allows its gentlemen to vary the monotony of their lives by watching bulls gore horses and even men, to death. There is even a considerable amount of excitement to be extracted from a whiskey-bottle if administered to that end. But there are some ingenious moderns who manage to escape from boredom by seeking for rare and valuable new plants in remotest Thibet, or in risking their lives in the pursuit of the microbe which causes cancer, or (if these pursuits are too costly for their means) there is the profession of fireman in a great city, or coastguard on a dangerous shore, or surveying engineer in a new country. All of these occupations call for a reasonable amount of physical courage, and supply a change from the dull routine of humdrum life.

To return to our lions; although to hunt them by the sportsman’s code undoubtedly takes courage, does it not seem rather a pity to waste in the destruction of animals admitted vermin, a human quality so fine, so inspiriting, so necessary as physical courage, sanctified as it is by a thousand struggles of men against disease, against wrong and violence, against the inert forces of Nature? Lions interfere with the peaceable occupation of the world by humanity: therefore we believe we have a right to kill them. Formerly the only way in which they could be killed was by the exercise of physical courage on the part of men. But that is not in the least necessary, now that a powerful drug has been discovered which will do the unsavory but necessary task for us and leave us free to use our courage for more valuable purposes. Why not let this [344] unimportant and unpleasant detail of the world’s work be attended to in the most competent way possible, without the unseemly attempt to make it at the same time an entertaining spectacle for human beings? And why not apply the same principle to the killing of other animals for whose destruction we feel we have a fair warrant of execution signed by our reasonable needs. Rabbits and foxes injure our crops, and propagate so fast that they are a menace to our husbandry. If they are to be killed, and everyone except an occasional zoölater grants that the world is not large enough now both for them and for us, let us kill as many as we need to put out of the way, as quickly and surely as may be, with no quaint discrimination against ferrets in the case of rabbits, or rifles in the case of foxes. If we need fish as a variety in our diet, let us go honestly about the business of securing it, and not quibble about the great ethical elevation of light tackle as opposed to nets. And if a man is trying to kill a bird for food, let him forget the grotesque reasoning that it is not fair to shoot it sitting on a bough where he can almost certainly kill it at one shot, but must let it fly so that there are ten chances to one that the shot will only maim or mutilate it.

Now it is certainly true that there are among our twentieth century men, a good many individuals from whom no help in the upward movement of the race can be expected, and whose fondness for hunting, undoubtedly is based upon the survival in them of the paleolithic liking to kill. They prefer to hunt rabbits rather than shoot at a mark, because a target cannot shed blood. If they make no pretence about this taste being the basis of their liking for hunting, it would be showing no due sense of the proportion of things to visit them with too serious a reprobation. It is possible that this sort of man, if he were not allowed to amuse himself by tormenting animals might react from the humane régime of his time by committing deeds of violence against human beings. [345] Only let this outlet for non-eliminated pre-historic instincts be frankly a drainage-pipe for the purpose of moral sanitation only. Let there be no attempt to fool our noses as to its true scent, by the use of the musk of pseudo-gentlemanliness. If hunters will but be open about it, theirs is not a very heinous survival of what was a most necessary, though now superseded instinct in humanity. There are many worse things than having fun out of the dying struggles of a trout or a rabbit. Hunting in the open air is certainly better than the opium habit. Animals nearly always die a violent death anyhow, and it does not, I daresay, make a vital difference to them whether it is a fox or a man, or a bigger fish which finally dispatches them.

The number of human beings unleavened by humanity appears larger than it really is, because most children as they live rapidly through their personal reproduction of the history of mankind, pass through the cave man’s phase of frank, thoughtless, and unconscious cruelty; and some of them are slow to pass out of it. But cases of prolonged atavism are few, and though disagreeable, need be little more regretted than the occasional outcropping survival in a modern of the tremendous jaw and beetling brows of our neolithic grandsires. Left to themselves, these anachronistic and objectionable traits will vanish as the race ascends the slow spiral of its upward way. Already most twentieth-century boys and girls (if their development be not arrested by perverted public opinion) tend to outgrow this relic of savagery, as they outgrow their exaggerated gregariousness, their slavish conformity to the ideas of others, and the rest of the primitive phases of their development. The process needs no special attention from their instructors: good example and encouragement to clear thinking about habitual actions will almost always do the work.

But few young brains are vigorous enough to continue clear thinking under the narcotic influence of a generally accepted social hypocrisy. It is not acquaintance with the [346] grim necessity of killing as the butcher practises it which is dangerous to young consciences, it is the sight of the sportsman killing without necessity. What stupifies the moral sense in this connection is the pretence that to take one’s pleasure at the cost of another’s suffering is a commendable, highly respectable, nay, even very aristocratic amusement for grown men of brains and education. The most gentlemanly restrictions cast about hunting animals for fun, cannot mask the fact that its essence is enjoyment taken consciously at the expense of another’s pain, an enjoyment against which the conscience of the world has pronounced a righteous verdict of total condemnation. The butcher kills, the pot-hunter kills, the sportsman kills; but only the last openly finds entertainment in the act.

[347]

TRADE UNIONISM IN A UNIVERSITY

The so-called strike of the Wisconsin Student Workers’ Union has much of instruction for those who have been watching the trend of University development during the past few years and are inclined critically to examine the effect upon the student of modern educational methods.

The strike occurred in an institution that is recognized as the leader in progressive education; that has given extraordinary liberties to the student body; that is probably working more directly for the material interests of the people than is any other American university; and it occurred in a State that is convinced of the expediency of generously maintaining an institution of higher education, and is levying taxes therefore which during ten years have increased more than threefold.

Largely under the initiative of the University, but with faith, often fully justified, in the practical value of the instruction therein given, the State has adopted many of the principles enunciated in the class room, and has accepted as advisors, or taken over and appointed on its commissions, practically every professor and instructor whose counsel might be of direct service in its legislative and executive efforts, or of indirect service to the people at large. The professional staff of the University, and the legislative and executive staff of the State, have thus organized what might be called a beneficent interlocking directorate, which is expressed more or less truthfully in the local aphorism: “The State University is destined to produce a University State.”

During the past decade, influenced by and participating in the political and social changes that have made Wisconsin conspicuous, and encouraged by the large enrollment in the so-called social and political sciences—an [348] enrollment of nearly two thousand students, containing a generous representation from the congested districts of American cities, from the oppressed people of Europe and from formative governments generally—the University has added to its staff of professors and instructors, until these departments are not surpassed in attractiveness by any institution in America or indeed in Europe.

There is, then, among the student body a liberal admixture of those whose social and political convictions, so far as they are definitely formed, are not in entire accord with prevailing conventions. Some of the more restless have organized a Socialists Club, and affiliations have been established with Socialist organizations at Milwaukee and elsewhere, and speakers of advanced anarchistic views, such as Emma Goldman, on coming to Madison, draw large and not entirely unsympathetic student audiences.

Within the University, and justified under the plea for a more perfect democracy, the presence of strong class distinction and party feeling often introduces an earnestness and bitterness into student gatherings which is much more intense than in our older institutions of the east. Moreover, the discussion of party differences is not confined to the campus. The contestants, even though students, are accustomed to air their views in the public press; and the state legislature—in which there is a liberal admixture of representatives of all political parties—is occasionally called upon to adjust real or imaginary student wrongs.

To the Wisconsin student there is no mystery about the making or unmaking of law; to him the capitol is a place of recreation, and the legislators, many of them alumni, are his companions. The freshman comes under the control of a student legislative body that defines his privileges and attempts to control his liberties. This elective body not only assumes jurisdiction over the student as an individual, but, like an interstate commerce commission, [349] it regulates the activities of various student organizations, particularly those alleged to have aristocratic tendencies. It fixes penalties for the infraction of student laws, authorizes arrests, and sees that culprits are brought before the Student Court, where they are tried and sentenced. This student legislative body, through its representation on student publications, and in other ways, is an active agency in making and molding student opinion, and the faculty has already recognized its jurisdiction. The Regents have agreed not to alter or abridge the control of Student Self-Government, except through process of conference. The student body has thus assumed, in certain respects at least, the same attitude toward the administration of the University that the University is accused of having assumed toward the administration of the State; or, to paraphrase the aphorism already given, “The University Student is destined to produce a Student University.”

The student labor trouble, therefore, is not to be looked upon as the result of a justifiable grievance between a handful of waiters, and the Steward in control of the University Commons. The relations between the student workers and the Steward had been cordial, and the reduction in the number of student employees was an economic necessity, and ordinarily would have excited no particular opposition. But under the peculiar conditions existing at Madison, where there are students who do not believe in the present order of things, where it is thought, by not a few, that legislation by labor will bring better social conditions, where machinery for organized resistance is fabricated as a pastime, where the tactics of “collective bargaining” are thoroughly understood, and where there are impulsive students anxious to assume leadership, the temptation to translate static into kinetic energy became irresistible.

It seems that about one hundred and thirty students had been given positions in the University as waiters, [350] kitchen helpers, etc., receiving in compensation a substantial meal for each hour or fraction thereof of service. There was no dispute concerning the amount of service or the value of the compensation. The students admitted that the work was light, the board excellent; and the positions were considered the most desirable of their kind in the city. The body waited upon some two hundred and fifty men students, and upon nearly three hundred women students. (Thirteen women student waiters and helpers, employed in one of the dormitories, did not join the Union, and took no active part in the agitation.)

The completion of a new central kitchen had led to economies, and a few weeks before the end of the semester—it was thought in ample time for the young men to find employment elsewhere—preliminary announcement was made that the staff of student employees would be reduced, and twenty students out of a total of one hundred and thirty were individually so informed. Since it was perfectly obvious that their services were in fact not needed, the waiters received the announcement in good spirit and without serious question.

It was at this point, however, that certain other students, who were not employed by the University, but were generally interested in organized agitation, called a mass meeting of the student workers both of the University and of the city, and through the vigorous application of well-known forensic excitants, brought about a condition of hysteria, which affected a large proportion of the student employees, although the general student body remained immune.

The waiters and helpers found themselves organizing a Union, subscribing to extravagant declarations, and electing as their officers representatives from the most violent of the agitators. It was alleged that the organization had more than four hundred members. The president of the Union, a student in Law, was not a University worker. The secretary was the president of the local Socialist Club, [351] and originally registered at the University as from New York City.

The leaders of the “strike” (a strike was only threatened) took the position that they would protect the student waiters, that the number of waiters should not be reduced, that economies, if necessary, should be effected in some other way, and that dire consequences would result if the plans of the University administration were carried into effect. In any event, nothing should be done until the organization was duly recognized by the University authorities, until proposed changes in the method of conducting the business of the Commons had been submitted to the Student Union for its approval, and until it was agreed that all present and future grievances and difficulties should be submitted to a board of arbitration satisfactory to the Union.

At Madison it is customary to adjust differences through conferences, or a series of conferences, but here was a case that affected the business management of the University, and where delay would involve loss to the State. The situation was also extremely amusing, because of the fact that the longer a settlement could be deferred, the longer the student waiters would continue to be fed at the expense of the University. It resembled some of the difficulties our government experienced in the neighborhood of the Rio Grande.

As a coercive measure, the leaders submitted a document to the effect that if the original plans of the administration were not altered there would be a sympathetic “walkout” on the part of a hundred or more boarders.

Startling articles appeared in the press, syndicalism and sabotage were academically discussed, and there were threats that unless “justice” were shown the students, every dining room in Madison would be closed.

As time went on, the general disturbance had its effect upon the regular kitchen staff of the University, composed of paid employees, who saw, or thought they saw, in the [352] rising power of the student body, their own impending extinction. At this time, a strike or walkout on the part of the regular paid force would have been serious: for the University was practically under contract to house and feed approximately three hundred women students, enrolled residents of the dormitories.

Hearings were held before the Regents, but all efforts on the part of the management to change the attitude of the leaders were futile, and the appetites of the aggrieved seemed to increase with the vigor of the agitation.

At a critical moment the cooks sent in their ultimatum, calling the Steward to declare allegiance either to the insurgents or to the regulars; or in default of such declaration, operations in the kitchen would abruptly terminate. This announcement was decisive: for

The administration ordered the doors of the dining halls closed, locked, and guarded; service within the women’s dormitories was conducted as is customary in convents, and the debarred student waiters, boarders, and guests gathered without on the campus, dumfounded that a public institution should close its doors to the populace. It certainly looked like a “lockout,” and it was alleged that the plant was being operated by “scabs.”

All the stage machinery that accompanies a real strike and lockout was brought into requisition—circulars were issued appealing for the sympathy of the public, and implying that poor students had been discharged for no other reason than that they had belonged to the “Union,” and stating that girls working their way through college had been dismissed because they had expressed sympathy. Mass meetings were called, speakers were imported, inflammatory addresses were delivered, additional resolutions adopted, and appeals made to the Federation of [353] Labor, to the State Industrial Commission, and to the Governor.

But in due time the members of the Student Workers’ Union found that their services were not indispensable, that State institutions do not invariably yield to the pressure of organized resistance, and as chastened individuals they applied for such positions as remained vacant, and went back to work.

The recital of these occurrences as a trivial circumstance has no place in a publication of this kind, but the significance, so far as it may throw light upon the general path of university development, and may help to determine the kind of mind and men that universities are producing or may produce, justifies serious contemplation.

It is generally admitted that universities are destined to become something different from what they now are. University men have a duty to perform, not only in watching the trend of this inevitable drift, and determining its probable course, but they are in a measure responsible for the course.

Not all institutions move with the same rapidity. Some possess a power that takes them away from their companions and into new territory. The records of their movements and the attendant results are generally looked upon as public property. It thus becomes possible for the conservative university, or the university that is not inclined, or does not have the means, to go into expensive experimentation, to learn much through the inexpensive process of observation.

What have we to learn from the conditions and occurrences above outlined?

Are we really getting all of the good things out of our institutions of higher culture that we think we are getting?

When the citizens of a commonwealth tax themselves in order to give university instruction to their children, does it necessarily follow that the university life will develop [354] the highest citizenship? Does it develop a feeling of pride in the State and of loyalty to it? Is the position of the State as an instrument of modern civilization strengthened or weakened thereby?

Does university training tend to produce an accelerated or a deferred maturity of the judicial sense—the power to distinguish between what is reasonable and what is unreasonable, what is genuine and what is false; and to distinguish promptly between the man that is frankly striving for principle, and the one who is falsely striving for position?

If any considerable number of college graduates should be of the opinion that the State, in addition to providing some twenty-five years of free instruction, should also provide free board, is it not obvious that difficulties akin to those that surround the issue of fiat money would quickly arise on the issue of fiat food?

If graduates on becoming citizens believe that they are entitled to anything and everything that can be extracted from the State, and if their lives are to be spent under this obsession, ought not the community to prepare itself for a long series of constitutional amendments?

Is a university graduate sufficiently prepared to meet the strife of adult life if he leaves his institution wise with facts, emotional to the spell of the professional agitator, and innocent of the craft of the publicity agent?

Our institutions may teach what is right, but what is being done to develop the moral fibre and personal independence that will put the right into operation? What forces are at work to encourage open and vigorous opposition to social doctrines that are generally considered damaging to the State?

Does free and excessive opportunity engender a feeling of gratitude on the part of the recipient, or are such feelings inconsistent with modern conventions?

When the lust for individual gain and personal possession on the part of the few, is legitimatized at the expense [355] of many, are the results more reprehensible when the process has been conducted by the aristocratic adult, than when conducted by the proletariat youth?

When students have listened to and communed with the most eminent instructors in social and political science that the State can furnish, why should they believe that labor, when organized, has inherent rights that labor individualized does not possess?

Are the cardinal principles of our form of constitutional government being upheld when it becomes necessary for the individual to declare allegiance to some party or organization before he can enjoy the ordinary privileges of citizenship?

Why should a body of university students—men that have enjoyed the privileges of education—take the position that unless the prerogative of the few is promptly recognized and implicitly followed, the innocent will be harassed, and the entire community made to suffer?

Is it not possible that in our effort strictly to maintain the principles of academic freedom, we are giving instruction with such impartial neutrality that those who have worthy views conclude that their convictions are subject to question, and those who have ulterior motives are encouraged to believe themselves justified?

What the State really needs at the present time is some agency that will develop the powers of discrimination, that will enable its citizens to arrive at conclusions independent of plausible presentations.

[356]

MONARCHY AND DEMOCRACY IN EDUCATION

It is a truism that since the day of Plato’s Republic no subject has had such widespread discussion as has that of the proper form of government. It is equally a truism that if imitation is the sincerest flattery, the hundreds of written constitutions that have sprung up since 1789 attest the belief that America has successfully put into practical form the theories of democracy. Yet a minority has always questioned whether democracy is after all the panacea for political evils, and recent writers like Mr. Lecky, have but given expression to a somewhat widespread feeling of uncertainty as to the permanent success of democratic institutions.

It is noteworthy, however, that the discussion of democracy has been confined to the field of politics, and that its adaptation to educational institutions, where presumably a high grade of intelligence, education, opportunity and experience seem to offer the greatest promise of success, is never publicly discussed, much less in this country practiced. [20]

It is equally anomalous that in Europe, with its tendency to monarchy in the state, there is found absolute democracy in the government of educational institutions, while America, democratic in the state, furnishes the [357] most extreme illustration of absolute monarchy in the government of its educational institutions. It seems, if possible, even more strange that American college students have for years been going to European universities, and yet apparently have paid no attention to questions of educational organization. It can only be explained by the general lack of information and interest in the management of educational institutions.

The Unpopular Review is not a fitting place for the discussion of questions concerning the college, if frequent discussion means popularity: for the fashionable question in the serious periodical of the day is “What’s the matter with the colleges?” But while there is absolute agreement that something is the matter, every diagnostician has his own explanation. Athletics, the curriculum, the classics, vocational training, and every part of the educational system unable to speak for itself, have been held responsible for the existing evils. It may, however, be sufficiently unpopular for a mere college professor to say that in his humble opinion at least one thing the matter with the college is its form of government, and that here is an interesting place in which to test democracy before abandoning it as hopeless. Certainly these opinions have been so unpopular as to lead many who honestly hold them to hesitate to state them. When they are stated, it is generally by those not within the academic pale.

One of the most serious evils in the situation is that it is impossible for those most concerned to meet and discuss it openly. More than one important article has come from a college professor, but it has been anonymous because it is out of the question for him to write freely of the position in which he is placed. If he openly questions the present system, he is called “a sorehead,” “a knocker,” and “a kicker.” Every discussion of the administrative department of the university is interpreted as “an attack on the president.” To publish a doubt of the wisdom of concentrating all authority in him, is regarded as [358] “attacking the administration.” It is at least significant that in the great work on University Control [21] the opinions of two hundred and ninety-nine members of college faculties are anonymous, while a bare half-dozen are published under the names of men holding academic positions at the time of writing. Academic freedom is usually interpreted as meaning the right of speaking freely about matters and things in general, including the trusts, anarchy, socialism, prohibition, the control of public utilities by municipal, state, or federal agencies, and kindred subjects, but never about academic organization. That freedom of expression for which Wycliffe and the Lollard movement stood in England, Luther in Germany, Calvin in France—albeit his ecclesiastical followers in this country may have wandered far from his ideas—that movement for freedom led in Europe by great university men, when it comes to discussion of educational organization has, by the irony of fate, been denied to their heirs in America to-day.

It is easy to trace the path by which monarchy in education has been reached. When education was largely controlled by the Church, students were educated by the Church, and for the Church. Educational institutions, as a part of the Church, were governed as the Church was governed. Implicit obedience was given superiors, not as educators, but as members of the Church. We have inherited from mediæval times a condition of educational organization that was the natural outgrowth of this organization, but we have perpetuated it in an age when education is controlled by the State, which has itself become democratic. The result is a tug-o’-war between the monarchical organization of education, and the democratic spirit that permeates the vast body of educators and educated.

It is also easy to see the immediate steps by which we have arrived at the present situation. The institution with which the writer is connected had fewer than two [359] hundred regular college students when he first became a member of the faculty. It has shared in the enormous development of such institutions all over the country, and its students now number more than a thousand. Yet in all this time, the method of government has not changed. In the early days it was convenient for the president to decide every question, and this system has been continued, even though the student body has increased more than five fold, and the instructing body in the same proportion. In spite of changed conditions everywhere, this plan has been perpetuated, and has often been legalized by boards of trustees.

Thus, by both remote and immediate inheritance, education, in its organization, has arrived at absolute monarchy, with all its attending evils,—evils that affect the university as a whole and all of its separate and individual parts.

One obvious evil is the confusion everywhere found in the academic world between legislation and administration. The normal plan in a political democracy—an administrative body that carries out the wishes of the legislative body—is reversed in education. The legislative and the executive departments may be combined, and the executive made responsible to the legislative, as in England, or they may be independent, as in America; but it is only in an absolute monarchy that the administrative body both legislates and administers its own legislation. The university has thus allied itself with absolute monarchy rather than with democracy.

Another element of confusion is found in the anomalous conditions of citizenship. Educational citizenship within a faculty, attaches to the position, not to the individual. A man is appointed to a professorship in a faculty, and ipso facto he acquires full citizenship in that body, with power to vote immediately on every question submitted to it. Yet the faculty may list as “instructors” no small proportion of its members who have been connected with [360] it many years, yet they have no share in the government of the institution. They are in a state of indeterminate probation, and are often never admitted to the privileges of full citizenship in the governing body.

Confusion also grows out of the application to the government of the university, of the unit vote long ago abandoned in the federal government. In the New England Confederation, the experiment was tried of giving equal representation to each colony, regardless of its population. This proved unsatisfactory, and subsequent plans of union attempted to square the circle by increasing the number of representatives, but giving each colony only one vote. After this in its turn proved ill-advised, the whole system was thrown overboard, and a “one man, one vote” principle adopted. In college legislation has either theory or experience shown any necessity for reverting to an antiquated political custom, and requiring that the unit rule shall prevail and each department have one vote but only one vote?

The most disturbing factor in the situation is that all questions concerning the actual government in a university are decided, not by the faculty itself, but by an external board of trustees; that this body, rather than the faculty, is ultimately and legally responsible for all legislation affecting the university; and that it transfers this responsibility to the president of the institution whom it itself appoints. If it is suggested that the faculty is the natural legislative body in an educational institution, and that this body should determine all matters of educational policy, objections are immediately interposed.

The first objection is the alleged incompetence of a faculty to legislate. But it may well be asked how often matters of genuine legislation are even submitted to it. Some years ago a university president was elected, and the special correspondent of a great metropolitan daily sent it a two-column account of his probable policy. “All over America,” he writes, “the question is being asked: ‘What [361] are President X’s views? What is he likely to do with the elective courses? What with requirements for admission? What with the different departments of the University, re-modelling the scheme which now runs through each in a confused way? What with university extension? The compulsory chapel, and the college pastorate questions, and the complicated problems of undergraduate and general intercollegiate athletics?’” Yet every one of these questions represented as being asked “all over America” concerns not the administrative office of a university president, but the legislative department of the institution. Whether a faculty is or is not a failure as a legislative body, can be only a matter of conjecture until the experiment has had a fair trial.

A variant of this objection is that “college faculties can not do business.” To this it may be said parenthetically that a faculty has little opportunity except to fritter away its time, when a college president refuses to submit an agenda to it, and thus enable it to do its business in a business-like way. But every great university numbers among its faculty those who have from time to time been asked to render service to the state or to the community, and this service has been rendered in an acceptable, even a distinguished, manner. In the fields of diplomacy, finance, organized philanthropy, municipal affairs, the college professor is everywhere being requisitioned by the state as a consulting expert, or asked to render it temporary active service. Yet many of these prophets are without honor in their own country, in that no opportunity is ever given them to suggest improvements in the business administration of their own institutions, or to confer officially on educational policy with the representatives of other faculties. Thus the powers of the faculty are being atrophied through lack of use, while the college, in the midst of abundance, suffers from poverty of nourishment.

It is also urged that faculties are not interested in general [362] educational policies, since each member is primarily concerned with his own special department. This too is a matter of conjecture until the statement has been tested by experience. It may, however, readily be granted that not all members of every faculty are interested in educational legislation. But this is true in the state, and yet it is not used as an argument either for disfranchising voters, or for refusing them the franchise. Rather, is every voter urged to do his political duty, and vote, and every alien urged to take out his naturalization papers, and as speedily as may be become a voting citizen.

The fear has also been expressed that if faculties were given increased legislative powers, the result would be confusion in the consideration of educational problems. This fear in its turn seems certainly not well grounded. It is seldom expressed with reference to the political system, yet if danger exists anywhere, it is assuredly there, and not in the college world. What education needs above everything else, is all the wisdom that can be contributed to it by the experience, intelligence, observation, and theory of every person connected with it. The result would assuredly be, not confusion, but enlightenment. A recent examination of the academic career of the members of a single college faculty, shows that they have been connected either as students or officers with nearly two hundred different institutions in this country or in Europe. This history is doubtless repeated in every other institution, showing what a wealth of academic experience and knowledge the college has never yet turned to account. It is generally believed that the great work of the trained mind is to utilize the forces of nature, and make them do its bidding, to harness fire, water, air, electricity, and to reap the advantages of the power multiplied by these means. But no effort is made to utilize the educational forces that lie dormant in a college faculty, and to multiply a hundred fold the educational forces now used. The question may at least be raised whether some fraction of [363] the confusion found in the educational system may not be due to the failure to bring to bear upon it the clarifying power of college and university faculties. Investigation has found an outlet in every field except that of education itself.

The fear was once expressed by Edward Thring lest in any scheme for the organization of education “the skilled workman engaged in the highest kind of skilled work should be deliberately and securely put under the amateur in perpetuity.” [22] This fear is not unwarranted in its application to America. As long as college and university trustees are for the most part chosen from business interests, they naturally assume that college officers must “want something” in the way of personal advantage when they discuss the disadvantages of the present system of academic government. They do not understand that what college officers wish is not personal gain, but simply freedom of opportunity to serve the college to the limit of their powers, and that this opportunity must include a controlling voice in the educational legislation of the institutions with which they are connected, and in the formulation of the laws governing their own actions as legislating bodies. The members of college faculties seem justified in thinking that they are now deprived of all the broadening and deepening influences that come from sharing the responsibilities of the larger affairs of education. They are parts of a machine irresponsible for its final results: the planning, the direction, the thinking are all done by the administrative head. Were the duties of a college professor such as those of a letter carrier, a policeman, a snow shoveler, a brick layer, or a day laborer, it would be a simple thing to regulate his hours of work, his pay, his vacation, and his uniform. But the more complex the duties of any person, the more difficult the regulation of them by an external authority. The more serviceable [364] any person to any organization, the more must he have freedom of thought, judgment, and action.

The further questions also arise—Does a university officer sustain the same relation to the president, or the board of trustees, that a minister does to the ministry, or that a diplomatic officer does to his government, or to the government to which he is accredited? Are college officers to be paid employees, or to be co-operators in the government of the college? If the former, then certainly military discipline must prevail. Men in high business or financial circles do not allow their employees to go about openly discussing or criticizing the way they conduct their business. But if college officers are to be co-operators in determining the educational policy of the institution with which they are connected, what is needed is not keeping them under army discipline, but the encouragement of frank discussion with them and by them of all matters pertaining to the welfare of the institution, and of education in all its largest aspects.

The situation may be confused by the custom of choosing the college president from the ranks of the clergy; the clergyman-president naturally believes that since his relations to his congregation have been those of an expert in theology to those who are ignorant of it, his relations to a college faculty must be similar. He forgets that he has to deal with those who are themselves experts, each in his own field, and that they are also presumably interested in the general field of education, and acquainted with it.

It may be that college authorities intend to encourage college faculties to discuss with them questions of educational policy; but if so, the intention has not been made with sufficient emphasis to be clearly understood. “We are clerks in a dry goods store, the dean is the floor walker and the president is the proprietor,” is the way the situation has been put by a well-known university professor. The college professor sometimes feels that while, before the law, a man is innocent until he is proved guilty, in the college [365] world faculties are guilty until they can prove themselves innocent, and their normal attitude thus becomes one of defense against an unseen power.

The results of all this confusion between the legislative and the administrative departments in academic government are unfortunate for all concerned. Destructive criticism will always prevail, and will sap the vitality of any institution that denies to its members the right of constructive action, while external government leads to the spirit and attitude of externalism,—the members of the teaching body of a college rarely say “we,” but refer politely to the institution with which they are connected as “the college.” The impression is sometimes carried away from an educational assembly, that the profession of teaching has not attracted many brilliant college graduates. Will mediocre men continue to seek the teaching profession, while men of independence of judgment and character continue to shun a profession which offers little scope for their abilities? “What science and practical life alike need, is not narrow men, but broad men sharpened to a point,” writes President Butler, and this admirably expresses the great need in education,—a need difficult to be met as long as present conditions remain. It is a grave question whether the college professor is to continue an automaton, or to become an initial force.

The chief administrative officer of the college has come to be considered the college; in his own eyes, and in the eye of the public, he is the college; he is the only person considered competent or authorized to represent it; and it is his view that is to prevail in all matters of educational policy.

Now with the college president as an individual, the college professor has no quarrel. He often counts him among his warmest friends, and his personal relations with him are often cordial, and even intimate. But this is quite compatible with a strong and conscientious belief based on a study of facts and conditions, that the organization [366] of the college presidency is an anomaly in a democratic state. The college professor may perhaps recognize the justice of the administration of the president per se , even when it takes such extreme form as regulations that members of a faculty are not permitted to invite anyone to speak to their classes without authorization from the president; that they cannot be absent from a class without getting permission from the president; that sudden illness, accident, or unforeseen emergency that has involved absence, must be reported; when the president gives permission to accept an invitation to lecture at another university but with the proviso that it does not involve absence from class, or that the request be not repeated during the academic year, or with the reminder that a professor’s first duty is to his own college; when it is the president who passes on the propriety of a professor’s wearing a golf suit in the lecture room, and who sometimes decides the question of wearing caps and gowns on commencement day. The objection of the college professor lies less in the nature of the rules and regulations prescribed than in the manner of the prescription. He sometimes wonders why he could not be trusted to legislate on some of these questions, and why it is so difficult for the president to realize that a professor may take an active interest in educational affairs, without having his eye on the presidency.

The professor realizes that the president is not always to be blamed for present conditions,—often he is himself the victim of a system he has had no part in creating, and forces that he cannot control apparently compel him to perpetuate it. Yet blame must be attached to him for defending it, and for refusing to discuss with his colleagues the possibility of modifying it. He seems equally remiss in not presenting the whole question of college government to the board of trustees, and pointing out to them the incongruities and anomalies of the present situation. The professor realizes that the president has a hard time of it—Does he not hear it at every educational convention?—but [367] he always wonders if it is inevitable. He sometimes remembers an illustrated lecture given by the representative of a great manufacturing company, showing its organization and workings. One slide represented in graphic form its early organization; it was a pyramid trying to maintain stable equilibrium on its apex, and the apex was the president supporting on his shoulders the solid mass of the employees. Another slide represented the same pyramid on its base, and the apex, in its natural position, was the smiling face of the president. Underneath was the legend “It pays.” If the organization of a great business enterprise has gained in strength and stability, and has found that “it pays” in dollars and cents as well as in comfort and peace of mind, to have the responsibility for conducting it shared by all connected with it, would not a similar organization “pay” the college? As a result of recent outbreaks on Blackwell’s Island, the Commissioner of Corrections went among the inmates to learn the causes of their grievances, and with the same end in view called to the office a half-dozen of the most intelligent convicts, and invited them to state all their complaints. It is not on record that a college president or board of trustees has talked over causes of dissatisfaction with educational conditions, or has invited the members of the faculty to state their views. Is it possible that some pointers on academic government may be gained from a method employed in a modern penal institution?

It is conceivable that such a plan might also pay in dollars and cents. In one college it took nine years to get a requisition signed for a small improvement needed to relieve the officers working in the building from undue anxiety for the care of the property; and the total cost involved was six dollars. During these nine years the college treasurer was on record as saying that it cost three thousand dollars a year to enforce the compulsory attendance at chapel prescribed by the board of trustees. Would some conference between trustees, president, and [368] faculty have resulted in a better showing on the treasurer’s books?

If the present system has entailed endless confusion in the relations between the legislative and the administrative departments of the college, it has resulted in equally anomalous conditions in the administrative department itself. Some years ago, when a gentleman distinguished in the educational field was chosen president of a university, a member of another faculty remarked, “It seems a great misfortune, does it not, that he should be made president: he has done so much for education, and now of course he will have to give up all that work.”

Nor are members of college faculties alone in thinking that the office of president is overweighted. At the time of the election of a certain university president, the alumni of the institution put themselves on record as believing “that the presidential prerogative has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished.” In this opinion, probably the majority of every faculty in every college and university in the country would concur.

Many college professors are restive not only because “the presidential prerogative has increased,” but also because they are called on to expend much mental and physical energy in preserving the prerogative. The offense of lèse-majesté has become almost as criminal in the educational as in the political world. They are restive because the presidential office is overweighted, and the result as regards the administration, is to develop that most pernicious of all forms of government,—a bureaucracy. They are restive because of their inability to remedy conditions not of their own making. Some of these are financial, and a college instructor once put the matter thus: “Our president has created conditions whereby we have an annual deficit of about $20,000. This deficit is met by the chairman of the board of trustees, and the president must stand in with him. The faculty are in a hole,—they must hang on to the president, and he must [369] hang on to the board of trustees, and they must hang on to their chairman, and trust him to pull everybody out.” Some of these conditions are educational. Wisdom seems to be attached to the office of president, rather than to the individual filling it. A man may be made president because he is known to be a good business man and an able executive officer, and ipso facto he becomes an expert on all educational questions. Progress in all educational matter must be halted while the excellent executive is familiarizing himself with the A B C of education, and perhaps in time learning how large the subject is.

Many professors are discouraged because, while the same tendency towards autocratic government has been seen in the political world, the reaction against it is already noted. The power of the speaker of the House of Representatives that gained the title of “czar” for one incumbent, has already been modified by the rules of the House. But the college professor sees nothing on the educational horizon that portends a change for the better. Every week he reads somewhere the well-known account of the first official meeting between a president of Harvard University and his faculty. When changes were proposed, and some of the faculty reasoned why these things must be, the president replied, “Because, gentlemen, you have a new president.” The professor always wonders if anything like it ever happens when a university acquires a new member of the faculty; he wonders why this vivid description of professors rubbing their eyes in amazement at the statement of their new master, should give such pleasure to the press and to the public; and he wonders if the spirit of it has not blossomed in the most recent authoritative statement of the place of the university president as it is understood by the president himself. [23]

The professor is discouraged because, although, in the present organization of the educational system, a president [370] is considered necessary, the supply of presidents never equals the demand. So varied and numerous are the qualifications insisted upon, that when a person is found approaching the desired standard, he is sought for every vacancy. Several well-known professors have for a number of years been “mentioned” in connection with every presidency vacant, and as a society belle is said to boast of the number of desirable offers of marriage she has refused, so the professor, or more often his wife, makes known the number of presidencies that he has declined. The professor wonders why one or more of our great universities, in this age of vocational training, does not establish a training school for presidents. But this in its turn leads to the query how the supply of students in such a school could be maintained.

The professor is discouraged because of the difficulty of “getting at things.” The question of college government involves the relation of the boards of control to the president and the faculty, the relation of the president to the faculty, on the one hand, and to the student body on the other, with the result that the president becomes the official medium of communication between the governing body and the faculty. This triangular arrangement can but be productive of lack of harmony, and of constant misunderstandings; and its evils fall upon trustees, president, faculty, students, and alumni. The trustees nominally exercise an authority that is virtually given over to the president, the office of president is overweighted, the faculty are left without responsibility, as are the students in their turn, and the alumni are often in ignorance of what the policy of the college is, while everybody is exhorted to be “loyal to the college” without any clear understanding of what loyalty to the college means, or even indeed just what “the college” means. He sometimes wonders if the Duke of York’s gardener was anticipating present academic conditions in America, when he instructed his servants,

[371]

Yet after all ’tis a good world, my masters! The professor is not wholly downcast. If he does not know by name, without consulting the catalogue, a third of the members of the board of trustees that controls his academic destiny; if he does not know by sight a fourth of them, and if he has never exchanged comments on the weather with more than a fifth of them, he at least hopes that the sixth of the board who may chance, through the college catalogue, to know of his connection with the institution, may not feel unkindly toward him. He can only plead in extenuation of his rashness in suggesting a more democratic form of academic government, his strong conviction that only as all parts of the educational structure are strengthened, can the structure approach perfection, and serve the end for which it has been erected.

[372]

OUR DEBT TO PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

I

Early in the history of the Society for Psychical Research, Von Helmholtz speaking to Professor Barrett, of telepathy, said, “Neither the testimony of all the Fellows of the Royal Society, nor even the evidence of my own senses, could lead me to believe in the transmission of thought from one person to another independently of the recognized channels of sensation. It is clearly impossible.” Many have followed the example of the psychologist Wundt, in holding that “no man of science, truly independent and without parti pris , could be interested in occult phenomena.” Stranger still, as reported by William James, “An illustrious biologist told me one day that even if telepathy were proved to be true, the savants ought to band together to suppress and conceal it, because such facts would upset the uniformity of nature, and all sorts of other things without which the scientists cannot carry on their pursuits.” Dogmatic skepticism, veiled or overt contempt, and an unreasoning aversion—such was the attitude of the scientific world in general toward the men who, in the early eighties of last century, first seriously grappled with the problems of the weird and the uncanny; while the great majority of educated laymen, almost equally under the spell of the preponderating materialism of the age, heartily endorsed the verdict of the scientists.

Things have not much changed in the years that have passed. It is true that there have been numerous accessions to the ranks of the “psychical researchers” from the scientific world itself. Many men of science—some among them even eminent men of science—have scandalized their fellows by adopting Newton’s ridiculous point of view—“To myself I seem to have been as a child playing [373] on the seashore, while the immense ocean of Truth lay unexplored before me”—and by deeming psychical research not unworthy their personal participation. Crookes, Lodge, James, Richet, Flammarion, Flournoy, Bergson, Lombroso, Morselli, are a few names that instantly flash into mind. And from some great thinkers of non-scientific training, but justly esteemed for their intellectual powers, has come an endorsement of Gladstone’s appreciation: “Psychical research is the most important work which is being done in the world—by far the most important.” But scientists and laymen, so far as concerns the great mass, are still over-eager to deride and belittle the delvers into the occult—who, so their critics say, have been laboring all these years to no purpose whatever, and whose labors, no matter how long continued, can have only futile or mischievous results.

This widespread conviction of the futility of psychical research is evinced in many ways. It is seen in the jesting or scornful comments of writers in the periodical press; it is continually cropping out in the half-contemptuous, half-pitying smile that greets any sympathetic reference to “ghosts” or “telepathy”; it manifests in petulant outbursts from “orthodox” scientists, akin to the outburst of Von Helmholtz, as when our genial friend, the excellent Professor Münsterberg, heatedly proclaims, “As to spirit communications, there are none, and there never will be any.” Perhaps most striking of all is the almost complete indifference with which the published reports of the various psychical research organizations now in existence are regarded by instructors and students alike in many, if not all, institutions for higher education. In one great American university, to the writer’s personal knowledge, the many volumes of the Proceedings and Journal of the English Society for Psychical Research, and of the younger American Society for Psychical Research, are seldom removed from the library shelves except to be dusted. Truth-seekers in this university, it would seem, have no [374] time to waste on the “bosh,” “rot,” and “rubbish” which these silly publications contain.

Now, it may be true—though a number of really learned men believe otherwise—that those engaged in psychical research have not as yet demonstrated scientifically either telepathy or survival; and it may be true that they have set themselves a hopeless task in endeavoring to establish communication between this world and the next. But it decidedly is not true that their investigations have been entirely fruitless. On the contrary, it is safe to say that no other scientific movement ever set on foot has, in the same length of time, contributed so much toward the advancement of knowledge as has psychical research.

Few will dispute that psychology today is the most conspicuous and most promising of the “recognized” sciences. Its marvellous growth during the past quarter of a century is quite generally attributed to the increasing application of the laboratory methods devised by Wundt and his pupils. In reality a large part of the credit—perhaps the larger part—must be given to those “dabblers in the occult,” who, like Sidgwick, Myers, and Gurney, in England, and Janet and Richet in France, thought it not beneath their dignity to study table-tipping, alleged telepathy, and the disputed phenomena of the hypnotic trance. To them, incontrovertibly, we owe the foundation-laying of abnormal psychology, with its manifold practical implications to the physician, the criminologist, and the educator; to them, as will hereinafter be shown, we chiefly owe the opening up of vistas of progress undreamed in the days before scientific psychical research began.

The men who enrolled under Sidgwick in 1882 to form the English Society for Psychical Research, were not the fanatical, credulous “ghost-hunters” they are commonly supposed to have been. Their first task, they saw clearly, was to determine whether the alleged facts adduced in support of the soul doctrine were really facts; and, if [375] facts, whether they were not susceptible of adequate explanation on a wholly naturalistic basis. In the words of Frank Podmore, one of the earliest and most active members of the Society ( The Naturalization of the Supernatural , p. 2):

The title which I have chosen for the present book, The Naturalization of the Supernatural , describes in popular language the object aimed at. The facts which the Society proposed to investigate stood, and some still stand, as aliens, outside the realm of organized knowledge. It proposed to examine their claim to be admitted within the pale. And it is important to recognize that whether we found ourselves able to accept the credentials of these postulants for recognition, or whether we felt ourselves compelled to reject them as undesirables, the aim which the Society set before itself would equally be fulfilled. In undertaking the inquiry we did not assume to express any opinion beforehand on the value of the evidence to be examined. Whatever the present bias of individual members toward belief or disbelief, it will not, I think, be charged against us, by any one who dispassionately studies the results ... that any private prepossessions were allowed to pervert the methods of the inquiry. To ascertain the facts of the case, at whatever cost to established opinions and prejudices, has been the consistent aim of the Society and its workers.

In this spirit the Society for Psychical Research attacked the whole strange medley of occult phenomena, from hypnotism to premonitions and hauntings. To most readers of these pages it may seem almost incredible that so short a time ago hypnotism was still outside the pale of science, and was pretty generally regarded as imaginary or supernatural, according to one’s temperament and training. But, prior to the founding of the Society for Psychical Research, only a few inquirers of established reputation—such as Esdaile, Braid, Liébeault, and Charcot—had deemed it a proper and desirable subject of investigation; the scientific brotherhood would have none of it, and frowned on its exponents as self-deluded simpletons or impudent charlatans. As late as 1875 a writer in the Grand Dictionnaire Encyclopédique des Sciences Medicales , [376] summing up in a few words all that was to be said about hypnotism, brushed it aside as non-existent. It was because they questioned dogmatic utterances like this, and because they hoped through hypnotism to gain fresh light on the problem of the soul, that the members of the English Society for Psychical Research listed the study of hypnotism among their principal activities.

The result was not merely the confirmation and correction of much that Esdaile and other earlier inquirers had noted, but also an impressive, and in some respects startling, extension of knowledge concerning the processes of the human mind. Bearing out these discoveries, moreover, came the findings of sundry French savants—Janet, Binet, Féré, etc.—who, about the same time as the English investigators, and in the same spirit of open-minded research, sought to ascertain the true inwardness of hypnotism. On the one hand, the work of the Englishmen and the Frenchmen, between the years 1882 and 1890, made it certain that in hypnotism psychology possessed a wonderful instrument for experimentation. And, on the other hand, their own experiments with hypnotism revealed the various mental faculties—perception, attention, memory, and the rest—in entirely new aspects; paved the way to a correct understanding of hitherto obscure and baffling maladies; nay, even made necessary a radical readjustment of the scientific concept of human personality itself.

In this productive study of the phenomena of hypnotism two names stand supreme—the names of Pierre Janet and Edmund Gurney. Janet, who still is with us, deservedly enjoys today a worldwide fame for the part he has played in the inception and development of psychopathology, or medical psychology. Gurney to most people is not even a name. Yet in the brief period of experimentation that preceded his untimely death, he achieved so much as to suggest that had he lived he would probably have won a place in contemporary science fully as high as that held by Janet. More than one medical psychologist, in [377] all likelihood, has been inspired by Gurney’s researches to specialize in that fascinating and important branch of the healing art—as was Morton Prince, on his own statement to the writer. It was not for medical purposes, however, that Gurney himself experimented with hypnotism: medical psychology was then in embryo, and Gurney was only secondarily interested in its possibilities. His great aim was to ascertain the nature of the hypnotic state, and the condition of the mind during hypnosis.

To review adequately the ingenious methods he adopted and the results he obtained, would delay us unduly. Enough to stress the salient fact that, through a brilliant series of experiments full of interest to modern psychology, he demonstrated the existence of a great undercurrent of mental life, in which the most complex processes are carried on without the individual’s conscious knowledge. Already, to be sure, several students of personality—Hamilton and Carpenter, for instance—had recognized the necessity of postulating something of the sort as the only means of rationally explaining certain anomalies and mysteries of human behavior. But to take it for granted was one thing, to demonstrate it was obviously quite another. And it remained for Gurney’s experiments—together with the concurrent experiments of Janet and his French colleagues—to effect the work of demonstration, and, still more, to trace the operations of this mental undercurrent in channels, and with consequences, formerly unsuspected.

Not until Gurney’s and Janet’s time, to be more explicit, had experimental proof been forthcoming of the far-reaching influence of “subconscious ideas” in affecting human conduct, and of the possibility of initiating trains of thought completely cut off, or “dissociated,” from the field of conscious mentation. This was first convincingly revealed by experiments based on the discovery of the fact that commands “suggested” to a hypnotized person would be faithfully executed at a stated moment after the awakening [378] from hypnosis, and this despite the absence, in the normal waking state, of any conscious recollection of the commands in question. That this actually involved mentation beneath the threshold of consciousness was shown by Gurney in a number of experiments made possible by the further discovery that there are some people who can write “automatically”—that is, without conscious control of the words they put on paper, and even without knowing that they are writing anything. Thus Gurney records, in the course of his detailed record of these experiments ( Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research , vol. iv, pp. 268-323):

On April 20 [P—ll] was told [while hypnotized] that half an hour after his next arrival he was to wind up a ball of string, and to let me know how the time was going. He arrived next evening at 8.30, and was set to the planchette [an instrument then often used to obtain automatic writing] at 8.43. He wrote, “13 minett has passed, and 17 more minetts to pass.” Some more experiments followed, and it so happened that at 9, the exact time when the fulfillment was due, he was in the trance. He suddenly said “Oh!” as if recollecting something, but did not move; he was then woke, and at 9.2 he walked across the room to where some string was lying, and wound it up....

Another day the same “subject” was told that when I coughed for the sixth time he was to look out of the window. He was woke, and I gave at intervals five coughs—one of which, however, was a failure, owing to its obvious artificiality. He was set to the planchette, and the words produced were, “When Mr. Gurney cough 6 times I am to look out.” At this point I read his writing and stopped it. I asked if he had noticed my coughing, and he said, “No, sir”; but this, of course, showed no more than [that] he had heard without attending. He was now hypnotized, told that I wanted to know how often I had coughed, and at once woke. The writing recommenced, “4 times he has cough, and 2 times more he has to cough.” I coughed twice more, and he went to the window, drew aside the blind, and looked out. Two minutes afterward I asked him what sort of a night it was. He said, “Fine when I came in.” I said I thought I had seen him looking out just now, but he absolutely denied it.

Any doubt that the memory oblivion in the waking state [379] was genuine was removed by the interesting circumstance that though the “subjects”—men to whom even small sums of money meant much—were repeatedly offered substantial rewards if they could state what had been said to them during hypnosis, they were invariably unable to do so. Stranger still, Gurney demonstrated that it was entirely possible to develop, in the hypnotic state itself, different sets of memories, each completely independent of the others; so that, so far as concerned the contents of his consciousness, the hypnotized “subject” seemed to possess two or more personalities, each with its own distinct set of memory-images ( Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research , vol. iv, pp. 515-521). This may be made clearer by giving a sample of the many curious conversations between one of the “subjects” and G. A. Smith (known in the published reports as S.), a hypnotist often employed by Gurney to assist him in his experiments:

A young man named S—t ... after being hypnotized was told in state A that the pier-head had been washed away, and in state B that an engine-boiler had burst at Brighton station and killed several people. He was then roused to state A, when he proved to recollect about the accident to the pier; after which a few passes brought him again to state B.

S. “But I suppose they’ll soon be able to build a new one.”

Had the pier been now present in S—t’s mind, this remark would have been naturally understood to refer to it, as it had formed the subject of conversation a few seconds before. But he at once replied, “Oh, there are plenty on the line”—meaning plenty of engines.

S. “The pile-driving takes time, though.”

S—t. “Pile-driving? Well, I don’t know anything about engines myself.”

A few upward passes were now made, and it at once became clear that the memory had shifted.

S. “If they have plenty more, it doesn’t matter much.”

S—t. “Oh, they can’t put it on in a day; it was a splendid place.”

S. “Why, I’m talking about the engine.”

S—t. “Engine! What, on the pier? I never noticed one there.”

[380]

Again, the same “subject” was told in state A that a balloon had been seen passing over the King’s-road. Some passes were made which carried him into state B, when S. said, “But I didn’t see it myself.”

S—t. “What was that?”

He was now told that two large dogs had been having a fight in the Western-road; and a few upward passes roused him to state A.

S. “But it was a good long time in sight.”

S—t. “The balloon?”

S. “No, the dog.”

S—t. “Dog? Why, was there one on it? A dog on a balloon!”

The “subject” is brought down again to state B.

S. “But it didn’t remain in sight long; it soon went up.”

S—t. “What didn’t? What went up?”

S. “Weren’t we talking about balloons?”

S—t. “No; but one of them dogs looked like a busted balloon when he was down.”

A few upward passes, and S. says, “Which one?”

S—t. “Why, there was only one.”

S. “One what?”

S—t. “Balloon.”

S. “I was talking about dogs.”

S—t. “I don’t know nothing of dogs.”

Three days afterward S—t was again hypnotized, and S. said, “What was that you said about the pier?”

S—t. “Oh, about the head being washed away.”

This, it will be seen, was the memory appropriate to state A. Some downward passes were made, and S. said, “A good thing that things don’t often happen like that.”

S—t. “No, they don’t at Brighton; they do on the Northern lines.”

Here we have the engine accident again—the memory appropriate to state B. The balloon over the King’s-road was now strongly suggested to S; but that idea belonging to state A, it could not be recalled in state B.

In all these conversations, in short, it was exactly as if the hypnotist, S., when talking to his subject in state A, and talking to him in state B, were talking to two different persons, each ignorant of facts known to the other. (The profound significance of this, from a practical as well as a theoretical standpoint will be made evident later.) On [381] the other hand, and in sharp contrast, Gurney, in common with the Continental investigators, also demonstrated through hypnotic experimentation that the memory process as a regular thing is almost incredibly retentive, so that under appropriate conditions it is possible to recall happenings, it may be of earliest childhood, which have long since dropped out of conscious recollection—happenings, even, of which one has never had conscious knowledge. But, indeed, credit for the experimental demonstration of this twofold principle of subconscious perception and subconscious memory—which lies at the very root of abnormal psychology—by no means belongs wholly to Gurney and the French hypnotists. Many other pioneers in the systematic study of the “phenomena outside science” had a hand in proving and elucidating it, notably those who made a special study of crystal-gazing.

The average scientist of that time—perhaps it would be true to say the same of the average scientist of today—had about as much interest in the phenomena of crystal-gazing as he had in the “ravings” of the entranced spiritistic “medium.” He well knew that from time immemorial it had been a practice among the mystically minded to employ crystals, mirrors, or other objects with a reflecting surface, for purposes of divination; and that it had been insistently claimed that, by gazing steadily into such objects, hallucinatory pictures often became visible, imparting useful knowledge about people and events outside the crystal-gazer’s ken. But the scientist dismissed this as merely another evidence of the invincible superstitiousness of mankind. It never occurred to him to try crystal-gazing on his own account; or if it did, he shudderingly repelled the idea. The founders of the Society for Psychical Research were not so squeamish; crystal-gazing was approved by them as a fitting subject for investigation; and ere long, their decision was abundantly vindicated.

One member of the society, Miss Goodrich-Freer, finding that she possessed the crystal-gazer’s “gift,” sedulously [382] cultivated it for experimental purposes, and made as careful and detailed a record of what she observed as would any scientist employed in the vitally important task of watching and recording the wriggles of a tadpole. A fact which soon made itself evident to her was the frequency with which her crystal-visions represented incidents in her own past life, sometimes incidents dating back to early childhood. On one occasion, she notes, somebody was speaking in her presence, though not to her, of Palissy ware. She happened at the moment to be staring aimlessly at a dark green scent-bottle. At once there appeared in it a picture of a man furiously tearing up garden palings. She was wondering what this meant, when it was followed by a second picture showing, with the greatest distinctness, the library where as a child she had kept her books. Among these, Miss Goodrich-Freer now remembered, was one she had not seen for many years called The Provocations of Madame Palissy . Then she also remembered that one of this lady’s provocations was a bad habit her husband had of using the first material that came to hand as fuel for his furnace; and immediately the meaning of the first picture became clear to her.

Similarly one of her earliest experiences in crystal-vision was a picture of “a quaint oak chair, an old hand, a worn black coat-sleeve resting on the back of the chair—slowly recognized as a recollection of a room in a country vicarage, which I had not entered, and had seldom recalled, since I was a child of ten.” Again, looking in her crystal she saw a copy of a medical prescription for which, a few hours before, she had been vainly hunting. On further inspection she perceived, without being able to read the words, that it was in the handwriting, not of her physician, but of a friend. Acting on the hint she searched through her friend’s letters, and found the medical prescription folded in one of them, where, she had reason to believe, it had been for more than four years. It could have been put there only accidentally, yet it was clear [383] that she must have subconsciously perceived what she was doing when she slipped the prescription into the letter, and that the mechanism of memory had registered an image of her absent-minded act. Many other examples of the memory registration of subconscious percepts are given in Miss Goodrich-Freer’s reports to the Society ( Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research , vol. v, pp. 486-521; vol. viii, pp. 484-495). For example:

I find in the crystal a bit of dark wall, covered with white jessamine, and I ask myself, “Where have I walked today?” I have no recollection of such a sight, not a common one in the London streets but tomorrow I will repeat my walk of this morning, with careful regard for creeper-covered walls. Tomorrow solves the mystery. I find the very spot, and the sight brings with it the further recollection that at the moment we passed this spot I was engaged in absorbing conversation with my companion, and my voluntary attention was pre-occupied.

To take another example. I had been occupied with accounts; I opened a drawer to take out my banking-book. My hand came in contact with the crystal, and I welcomed the suggestion of a change in occupation. However, figures were still uppermost, and the crystal had nothing more attractive to show me than the combination 7694. Dismissing this as probably the number of the cab I had driven in that day, or a chance grouping of the figures with which I had been occupied, I laid aside the crystal and took up my banking-book, which I certainly had not seen for some months, and found, to my surprise, that the number on the cover was 7694. Had I wished to recall the figures I should, without doubt, have failed and could not even have guessed at the number of digits or the value of the first figure. Certainly, one result of crystal-gazing is to teach one to abjure the verb “to forget,” in all its moods and tenses....

I saw in the crystal a young girl, an intimate friend, waving to me from her carriage. I observed that her hair, which had hung down her back when I last saw her, was now put up in young-lady fashion. Most certainly I had not consciously seen even the carriage, the look of which I knew very well. But next day I called on my friend; was reproached by her for not observing her as she passed; and perceived that she had altered her hair in the way which the crystal had shown.

Next as to sounds not attended to.... A relative of mine [384] was talking one day with a caller in the room next to that in which I was reading, and beyond wishing that they were further I paid no attention to anything they said, and certainly could have declared positively that I did not hear a word. Next day I saw in a polished mahogany table, “1, [Earl’s]-square, Notting Hill.” I had no idea whose this address might be. But some days later my relative remarked, “H. (the caller aforesaid) has left Kensington. She told me her address the other day, but I did not write it down.” It occurred to me to ask, “Was it 1, [Earl’s]-square?” and this turned out to be the case.

From investigators in other departments of psychical research came—and still comes—evidence no less impressively testifying to the marvellous power of the human memory, with its subconscious awareness even for sights and sounds not consciously perceived. It was further discovered that memory-images not infrequently emerge above the threshold of consciousness in the form of spontaneously externalized visual and auditory hallucinations, sometimes of a striking sort. The discovery was also made that, in persons of a peculiar temperament, subconscious memories might be so completely switched off, or “dissociated,” from the field of consciousness that on coming into it again they would be unrecognized, and would give rise to the conviction that they related to matters which could not possibly have been within the range of previous knowledge, conscious or subconscious. Perhaps the best illustration of this curious and important psychological fact is found in a case reported quite recently by Mr. Lowes Dickinson.

Among his friends was a young lady who developed a form of “trance mediumship,” in which she claimed to visit another world and meet and talk with people there, particularly a certain Blanche Poynings, described as an earth-dweller in the time of Richard II. This “spirit,” speaking through the voice of the entranced “medium,” gave as proof of her identity many interesting particulars regarding her sojourn on earth. She had been, it seemed, [385] an intimate friend of Maud, Countess of Salisbury, and much of her talk had to do with that lady, and with the Earl of Salisbury. Odd little incidents in the latter’s life were vivaciously recounted—such as his throwing an image out of his chapel into a ditch, where it was found by a wayfarer, who repainted it and set it up in a bake-house. “Blanche” also commented in an amusing way on the appearance of Joan, “The Fair Maid of Kent,” and other historical personages; told about her own exile from Court; and gave much information respecting the customs and manners of the period.

All this interested and puzzled Mr. Dickinson, because his friend, whose veracity he could not doubt, assured him that she had never made a study of the events of King Richard’s reign, and had not so much as read anything about it. Yet, as he ascertained by patient research among old chronicles, the alleged “spirit” unquestionably possessed accurate and extensive knowledge of the men and women who had been prominent at King Richard’s Court, and of happenings which in some instances were barely mentioned by the annalists. The only logical explanation seemed to be that this was a genuine case of “spirit communication.” But one day, taking tea with his friend and her aunt, Mr. Dickinson made a discovery that placed the affair in an entirely different light.

The subject of automatic writing chanced to come up, and it developed that the “medium” owned a planchette, and often experimented with it. At her investigator’s request it was brought out, she placed her hands on it, and questions were put to it concerning the Blanche Poynings statements. These questions elicited the unexpected announcement, by the automatic writing, that corroboration of every statement made by “Blanche” would be found in a book called Countess Maud , written by Emily Holt. So soon as planchette wrote the name of this book, the “medium” exclaimed that she believed there was a novel with that title, and that she had once read it. Her aunt [386] confirmed this, but neither she nor her aunt could recall anything about its plot or characters, nor even the period with which it dealt. Following the clue thus strangely given Mr. Dickinson soon had Countess Maud in his hands, and found mentioned in it, with corresponding detail, almost every person and every incident given by the “spirit” of Blanche, who, in the novel, was of quite secondary importance. Even then his mediumistic friend could not recall anything about the book, except a vague impression that she had read it as a child.

He now caused her to be hypnotized, and questioned her anew, when he learned to his surprise that she had never actually read Countess Maud herself, but had heard her aunt read it aloud. “I looked at it, and painted a picture in the beginning. I used to turn over the pages. I didn’t read it, because it was dull. Blanche Poynings was in the book; not much about her.” And, in response to a question as to how the Blanche Poynings impersonation really originated, she made the reply, of great interest psychologically, “There was a real person named Blanche Poynings that I met, and I think her name started the memory, and I got the two mixed up.”

These, then, were some of the first-fruits of systematic psychical research: Proof that percepts may be subconsciously, as well as consciously acquired, and that, as Pierre Janet so tersely put it, “Whatever has gone into the mind may come out of the mind”; proof that the emergence of subconscious memories may be in the form of self-induced hallucinations; proof that such memories sometimes develop a dynamic force, impelling the individual to seemingly inexplicable conduct; proof that the personality itself may be artificially dislocated, so that whole areas of memory sink temporarily below the threshold of consciousness; proof that, even below the threshold, intelligent mentation continues in a fashion similar to the mentation consciously directed by the waking will; and, finally, proof that in hypnotism, crystal-gazing, and automatic [387] writing, invaluable means are available for exploring the remotest nooks and corners of “the subconscious.” From one point of view their establishment of such facts as these was, indeed, disconcerting to the “psychical researchers,” for it obviously made increasingly difficult the demonstration of the survival of the soul on evidence afforded by phenomena like apparitions, hauntings, and mediumistic utterances. But it also marked an enormous advance in man’s knowledge of himself, and in his control of his development here on earth.

The first to appreciate this—at any rate, the first to turn it to practical account—were the Frenchmen who, like Gurney, had attacked with special vigor the problems raised by hypnotism. Sharing to the full the belief of their English colleagues that here was a subject which science ought to have investigated long before—many of them, in fact, expressing their sympathy with the general purposes of the Society for Psychical Research by becoming members of it—the French savants’ motive in invading the realm of the occult had in most cases been intellectual curiosity rather than any ardent desire to prove life after death. They were not so much concerned with the possible bearing of hypnotic phenomena on the soul problem, as with their possible bearing on man’s earthly welfare. And no sooner was it borne in on them that hypnotism did have practical uses, than the majority concentrated their efforts on ascertaining what these uses were, and to what extent, and with what consequences, the phenomena of the hypnotic state were paralleled in everyday life.

The leader in this movement—which, with Gurney’s experiments in England, may be said to constitute the beginning of abnormal psychology—was Pierre Janet, who, in 1881, at the early age of twenty-two, had been appointed professor of philosophy in the college of Chateauroux, and soon afterward received a similar appointment in the College of Havre. At Havre, Janet took up in earnest the investigation of things psychical, studying [388] mediumistic phenomena, and making a series of experiments in hypnotic telepathy that brought him into mutually helpful relations with Gurney, Myers, and other active workers in the Society for Psychical Research. But from the first he was specially interested in the peculiarities of the mind in hypnosis, and his interest in this particular problem became all-absorbing when he observed that even the most bizarre hypnotic phenomena were sometimes spontaneously produced. Perhaps most influential in determining the future course of his life-activities was his discovery that hypnotization was not always necessary to effect the strange dissociation of personality evinced in, for instance, the case of Gurney’s “subject,” S—t, cited above.

Janet himself, experimenting with Madame B., the peasant wife of a charcoal-burner, had been astonished to find that when hypnotized she developed a personality markedly different from that of her normal waking life. The waking Madame B. was a timid, dull, ignorant woman; the hypnotized Madame B. (who called herself Léontine) was bright, vivacious, even inclined to be mischievous. Between the two personalities, again, there was an absolute cleavage of memory; each knew nothing of the other’s thoughts and actions. And after a time, to Janet’s profound astonishment, the Léontine personality began to manifest spontaneously. In an article contributed to the Revue Philosophique , for March, 1888, he records (translation by Frederic Myers):

She had left Havre more than two months when I received from her a very curious letter. She was unwell, she said, worse on some days than on others, and she signed her true name, Madame B. But over the page began another letter in a very different style, and which I may quote as a curiosity, “My dear good sir, I must tell you that B. really, really makes me suffer very much; she cannot sleep, she spits blood, she hurts me; I am going to demolish her, she bores me, I am ill also, this is from your devoted Léontine.” When Madame B. returned to Havre I naturally questioned her about this singular missive. She [389] remembered the first letter very distinctly ... but had not the slightest recollection of the second.... I at first thought that there must have been an attack of spontaneous somnambulism between the moment when she finished the first letter and the moment when she closed the envelope.... But afterward these unconscious, spontaneous letters became common, and I was better able to study their mode of production. I was fortunately able to watch Madame B. on one occasion while she went through this curious performance. She was seated at a table, and held in her left hand the piece of knitting at which she had been working. Her face was calm, her eyes looked into space with a certain fixity, but she was not cataleptic, for she was humming a rustic air; her right hand wrote quickly, and, as it were, surreptitiously. I removed the paper without her noticing me, and then spoke to her; she turned round, wide awake, but surprised to see me, for in her state of abstraction she had not noticed my approach. Of the letter which she was writing she knew nothing whatever.

To Janet this strange occurrence, when viewed in conjunction with phenomena manifested by two or three other of his “subjects,” was chiefly significant as hinting at the possibility that the same mechanism which produced the various phenomena of the hypnotic state—from hallucinations, loss of memory, and automatic execution of “suggestions” given during hypnosis, to the production of blisters, paralyses, and other physical effects of hypnotic suggestion—might be operant in, and responsible for, the protean manifestations of that baffling disease hysteria, with which Madame B. and the other subjects were known to be afflicted. On this theory, hysteria—which until then had been generally assumed to have a physical basis—would be essentially a mental malady; and its fundamental characteristic would be some degree of dissociation of personality.

Already, as Janet was aware, Charcot had demonstrated the inadequacy and downright error of the prevalent medical notions concerning hysteria, and had also rendered a splendid service to humanity by compelling recognition of the fact that sufferers from hysteria often [390] develop symptoms—paralyses, growths, etc.—all too easily mistaken for the symptoms of some really organic disease perhaps incurable, or curable only by the aid of the surgeon’s knife. But while he had thus revealed the wholly functional character of hysteria, and had saved countless sufferers from useless and unnecessary operations, Charcot had thrown little or no light on its causation and mechanism, and this was the problem which Janet now undertook to solve, removing from Havre to Paris, and associating himself with Charcot in the latter’s clinic at the Salpétrière Hospital.

Observing, experimenting, recording—with a truly catholic mind profiting from the observations and experiments of other workers, including his fellow-members in the Society for Psychical Research—he gradually achieved his epoch-marking demonstration of the rôle played by “dissociated memories” in the causation, not alone of hysteria, but of all functional nervous and mental troubles. He showed that severe emotional shocks—frights, griefs, worries—might be, and frequently were, completely effaced from conscious recollection, while continuing to be vividly remembered in the depths of the subconscious; he showed that thence they might, and frequently did, exercise a baneful effect on the whole organism giving rise to disease-symptoms, the particular types of which were determined by the victim’s “self-suggestions” (just as Mr. Dickinson’s “medium” suggested to herself the Blanche Poynings impersonation); and he showed how important it was, as a preliminary to effecting a permanent cure, to get at these dissociated memories and drag them back to the full light of conscious recollection.

To get at them he made use, as medical psychologists all over the civilized world are today making use, of hypnotism, of automatic writing, even of the “mystical” crystal-gazing, the use of which for medical purposes was directly suggested to him by the experiments of Miss Goodrich-Freer. [391] Janet himself, it should perhaps be added, would be the last to disavow the assistance he received in one way or another from the “psychical researchers” of England; indeed, he has not forgotten that everything he has accomplished is the outgrowth of his early studies in the “occult” phenomena of hypnotism. It is to be regretted that many of his present-day fellow-workers in the domain of scientific psychotherapy are not equally appreciative of the fact that every “cure” they put to their credit—every hysteric, neurasthenic, or psychasthenic patient whom they send on his or her way rejoicing in a restoration to health—is a living witness to the beneficial results that have flowed from the patient labors of the courageous pioneers, who, at the risk of their scientific reputations, so boldly adventured into the psychical thirty years ago.

We shall have more to say in a later article on what society owes to psychical research.

[392]

THE WAR
BY A HISTORIAN

When for slight reason a continent shakes with the tread of marching battalions, it is easy to fall into moral despair. We seem to confront a world-order that limits the sway of reason between nations, and gives full scope only to the hatreds and destructive ingenuities of mankind. In the wholesale deliberate slaughter of multitudes of men of good will, workers, lovers, husbands, fathers suddenly dedicated to systematic homicide of their fellows, piling up in blood and travail grievous burdens for their own children’s children—in such a spectacle the thoughtful mind at first finds only nightmare. And nightmare intolerable it is, if to the end of time a few out of pride or fear or sheer incapacity shall thus be able to decree the last sacrifice and swift death to the many.

In such moments of natural dejection, the mind must rally to its own defence. We live after all in a moral world. Intelligence has persisted and grown through worse occultations. The future may hold out hopes of a world-order in which the nightmare of the present cannot repeat itself. Meanwhile if we face the thing steadily in the light of its underlying causes, considering the moral issues involved, looking forward to the just retributions that the world will surely require of those who have shattered its peace, we may reëstablish in ourselves the sense of an overruling moral order, toward which we may each in his degree work. Such an inquiry into the responsibility for the war will lift the obsession of universal, insensate violence. Even the offenders are obeying race loyalty, and responding to certain obsolete ideals which yet are deeply grounded in history, while the defenders are vindicating the cause of the world’s peace by the only course left open to them. Against the brute law of strongest battalions, [393] they have been forced to fight, that ideals of forbearance, comity, and honor may still be held among nations.

On the broader moral issue of the war, mankind has already spoken. The military isolation of Austria and Germany is no more marked than their moral isolation. In the history of warfare, has there ever been so uniform a verdict of the human race? Though instinctive and rapid, the sentiment may also be rationally grounded. Let us test it by an examination of the causes of the war.

What made the war possible is the fixed antipathy between impatient, ruling Germans and restless, subject Slavs. Such racial discord is naturally most acute in Austria, where a domineering Teuton minority holds in uneasy subordination the Slavs of Bohemia, Austrian Poland, and the Balkan and Adriatic range; but it is a distinct factor also in Prussia, where an embittered and losing campaign against Polish national feeling in the Posen region has long been waged. These disharmonies are an inevitable incident of expansion without the consent of the annexed peoples. The part of wise statesmanship is to bear much of this sort of opposition, trusting to healing process of just government and time. In Austria and Germany, however, these antipathies, were deliberately fomented by the war clique. The surest way of getting huge army appropriations is to show a foe or a rebel in being. In 1908 the unrest of all the Balkan Slavs was increased by Austria’s assuming permanent tenure of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where by treaty she had been exercising a temporary, police jurisdiction. The annexation extinguished national hopes, and while it undoubtedly established order, did so in arbitrary and oppressive fashion. The fact that Germany supported the annexation, intimidating the natural ally of the Balkan Slavs, Russia, accentuated the racial feud. The recent heroic struggle in the Balkans, which resulted in the aggrandizement of the Slavic powers of Servia, Bulgaria, and Montenegro, naturally [394] excited the Slavs under Austrian domination. Austria, on the other hand, had maintained a persistent hostility to her southern neighbors, and after the war, had by diplomatic means, and again aided by Germany, frustrated many of the legitimate hopes of Servia and Montenegro. An illogical and already derelict Albania, is the chief result of Austria’s dog in the manger policy. Her smouldering resentment against Servia was raised to an intense pitch by the deplorable assassination of the Crown Prince and his wife. It was an act as foolish as heinous, but it was also a natural product of arrogant and oppressive rule. Though the deed was done on Austrian soil, the assassins were Slavs, and the plot traceable to Belgrade, and this gave Austria the chance to hold Servia nationally responsible for the crime. She issued an ultimatum in which Servia was virtually required to avow responsibility for the outrage, to investigate and punish anti-Austrian agitators, and in such proceedings to admit Austrian officials. In effect, Servia was asked to plead guilty, on penalty of invasion, and to place her case in the hands of Austria as both prosecutor and judge.

The ultimatum of July 23, was outrageous, such as no state ever dreams of issuing to an equal. Weakened by two wars and apparently menaced by overwhelming force, Servia drank the cup, hesitating only at the last dregs. With the bulk of the Austrian demands she complied, demurring only to the waiver of her own national estate implied in alien interference with her police. Even this humiliating stipulation she offered to arbitrate. The reply of Austria was to set 300,000 troops across the Danube, and to shell the undefended city of Belgrade. The history of war has shown few more baseless aggressions. Austria had reckoned on Servia’s weakness, and on the willingness and ability of Germany, as in 1908, to hold off Russia. Austria unwittingly reckoned with forces to which Russia and Germany are small. The analogy of the Bosnian annexation was false. There the deed had been carefully prepared [395] and delay had blunted the effect of the final move. This time Austria suddenly and without preparation outraged the moral sense of the world. The official plea is that in some mysterious way the Austro-Hungarian Empire was threatened in its very existence by the machinations of the Serbs at home and in the newly annexed Austrian provinces. That plea is hollow. Austria was neither more nor less in peril than she has been for sixty years; she was merely enduring a slight, however sensational, exaggeration of the chronic difficulties of dominion over alien and unwilling races. The reality is that Austria was incensed by the prosperity of the new Slavic nations in possessions that she had prospectively marked out as her own. To confuse ulterior ambitions with immediate rights is characteristic of the mentality of neo-Imperialism.

So far, for convenience, I have spoken of Austria and other powers as units, and with the usual rhetorical personification. The practice is misleading. When we say Austria, in the political sense, we mean a mere handful of high administrative and military officers, a few diplomats and journalists, a portion of a small and exclusive aristocracy, a pack of manufacturers of arms and military contractors, a rabble of speculators hoping out of troubled waters to fish extraordinary profits—that is political Austria, that with slight differences is the permanent war party in every nation. The peace of the world ultimately hangs on the nod of a few hundred individuals—men at best of intense, narrow, and backward-looking vision; at worst basely interested in the destruction of their fellow beings, accustomed to regard carnage as normal business. The problem of insuring the world’s peace is that of putting such men out of control, and replacing them by men who think the thoughts and feel the feelings of modern civilization. Incapacity to grasp the modern man, is the defect of the war caste everywhere. It indulges mediæval alarms, appeals to factitious loyalties, speaks an obsolete tongue. Politically Austria is still very much where Metternich [396] left her. A crafty balancing off of the aspirations of new nationalities has been the method of consolidating the artificial sway of the Emperor. There has been a constant disregard, perhaps ignorance, of the generous motives that move in modern society. The aged and afflicted Emperor has many times shown himself to have an insight superior to that of his counsellors. Had the present emergency not caught him infirm in body and spirit, I believe the event would have been very different. Free from his controlling hand, the war machine has worked almost automatically its fitting product.

When we say Austria and Germany, we must distinguish clearly between the peasants of many tongues, the thrifty tradesmen, the ingenious manufacturers and hardy artisans, the scientists and scholars, the keen students of public betterment, the artists and musicians,—between these socially useful people with their women and children, upon whom falls the actual burden of this war,—and a little, complacent, opinionated minority, miseducated, aloof from the generous instincts of humanity, dead to the kindling enthusiasms of the new century,—a little complacent, pitiful, minority which from any outcome of the worst war reaps its private harvest of profit, promotion, and prestige. Any genuine representation of the real Austria and Germany would have made this war impossible, any adjustment looking to permanent peace must include the elimination of the misrepresentative administrators who have frivolously plunged a continent into war.

In a moral analysis of the causes of the war, the single ambiguous term is Russia. On the face of it she promptly rallied to the support of her fellow Slavs in Servia, by diplomatic protests at Berlin and Vienna and by mobilizing on the Austrian border. Humanitarian and political motives combined to force some kind of intervention. Without denying the bond of race, Russia could not permit any Slavic nation to be ruthlessly overborne. Honor in the highest sense and policy combined to dictate some [397] such course as Russia actually took. The official statements of Austria and Germany waver between two attitudes. On the whole, the Austrian apologists condemn the Russian move as merely defective and unhappy in form. Had Russia not mobilized, the Servian situation might have been adjusted diplomatically. As things went, the provocative moves of Russia, forced similar precautions first on Austria, then on Germany, with the unforeseen result of a general war. The speech of the German Chancellor, however, echoes that of the Kaiser, in charging Russia with deliberately provoking Germany and Austria into war.

To me the issue, though evidently a crucial one,—for if Russia is deliberately making a war, most of the European world is being dragged into devil’s work,—is set in such technical fashion by the German manifestoes, that their own sincerity is open to doubt. It remains a somewhat interesting academic question what a Russian protest without mobilization might have effected. The obduracy of Germany in the face of more formidable military preparations by France and England, seems to indicate that a wholly pacific intervention by Russia would have effected little. On an alternative theory, Germany and Austria are fighting solely on a point of technical honor. They couldn’t “take a dare” from a threatening neighbor. Doubtless some of the arbiters of war in Germany and Austria did honestly so feel. But in so feeling they were parrotting the phrases and indulging the alarms of forty years ago.

The figment of a ruthlessly expansive Russia has today little reality behind it, but for militaristic ends it is still a most useful bugbear. Twice in a generation Russia has tasted the bitter fruits of heedless aggression. Today she is overtaxed, not merely by the arrears of these wars, but also by the great task of assimilating her present subjects. Her political situation at home is one of instability. Direct gain from venturing to support Servia, Russia had [398] none to hope for. Twice she has stood aside while her sphere of influence in the Balkans was being repartitioned. In short, there is no conceivable reason why Russia should have invited war at this time, and every reason why she should have desired peace. Her mobilization must be interpreted in that light. Ostensibly it was done pari passu with similar preparations in Austria and Germany, but suppose she began first. Mobilization means just what those who order it mean. It is not per se an offence, much less a cause of war. Russia made most solemn protestations that she would fight only in the last resort. All the world except the Germans and Austrians believed these assurances.

What weakens the Austrian case is the unduly spectacular demonstration she made on the Danube. Ostensibly she was engaged in a punitive expedition which might have been satisfied with the occupation of the offending capital, and an indemnity. It is probable that Russia and the world, rather than hazard a general war, would have tolerated a reprisal, which however inherently excessive, did not transcend the usual bounds of such enterprises. But Austria hurled half her effective force into Servian territory. Surely she had given ground for the inference that no argument unaccompanied by show of force would deter her. In our day we shall probably not know what Austria actually intended towards Servia, but it is plain enough that, granting the whole thing was a merely punitive move, it was exaggerated with the insolent thick-headedness characteristic of military bureaucracies. At best it can only be said that Austria needlessly blundered into a demonstration that must be alarming to Europe and most offensive to Russia, without correctly calculating either the moral reaction of Europe or the limits of Russia’s forbearance. It must be conceded, however, that the Austrian militarists had been grievously exasperated by the murder of their Prince, and the impulse to seek somewhere some sort of vengeance was, however mistaken, entirely natural.

[399]

So much cannot be said for the conduct of Germany. Her grievance was remote and indirect, her public sentiment relatively calm and tractable. A word from her would have checked Austria at any time. Accordingly upon Germany falls the heaviest responsibility for the war. From her power and detachment she was doubly in a position to play the peacemaker. There are those who think that the Kaiser and his counsellors foresaw the whole outcome and deliberately hastened it. I am unwilling to think such baseness of any human being, and find the evidence for such a suspicion as yet lacking; the whole transaction seems to show a blundering from step to step, making each decision not on principles of common sense, but under some esoteric code of military honor, honor soon being forgotten in the pursuit of military success. Germany’s official attitude, as voiced by her Chancellor, is that she was forced to mobilize under menace at her Russian and French borders. This is the best construction that can be put on her case. Whether one accepts this plea or not, will depend on his view of the motives that prompted the Russian and French mobilization. Would France and Russia have waited quietly during long negotiations, or were they awaiting the favorable moment for an invasion? Did they want peace or war? Considering the little advantage and the certain sacrifice that each nation finds in this war, the answer can hardly be in doubt. There is not the slightest indication that either had any intention of invading Germany, or anything to gain by it. But the militaristic mind is trained to see in every movement of foreign troops a direct threat, and it is credible enough that the Kaiser’s counsellors were intellectually incapable of grasping the idea of a mobilization in the interest of peace. For years they have propounded the axiom that to negotiate without show of force, is fruitless waste of time, and now they add the paradoxical corollary, “But Germany will not treat with any nation that makes a show of force.” Obviously Germany could have [400] mobilized while continuing to treat. There were evidences that Austria, had her face been saved, would have reconsidered her rash move. From the British “White Paper” it is plain that, had Germany effected any slight modification of the Austrian demands, England would have stood out of the war. The fact that three weeks after the declaration of war Russia was hardly ready for an advance shows that Germany was not immediately menaced by the Russian mobilization. The German ultimatum which cut short both the direct negotiations between Vienna and St. Petersburg and Lord Grey’s promising plan of mediation was a crime against civilization—and stupid military policy as well.

The German attitude may again and most simply be construed as blindly loyal support of an ally right or wrong. It is a purely technical duty that Italy very sensibly repudiated. In the sense that Germany had unquestionably countenanced the ultimatum to Servia, she would seem committed. But such committals are subject, after all, to humanity and common sense, and to the conduct of the ally to whom support has been engaged. No nation is bound to risk its very existence for a rash ally. Yet on the theory of pundonor , that is where Germany finds herself today. The stern unreasoning maxims of a military caste must have counted for much in Germany’s obduracy. No motive of interest, immediate or remote, would at all justify or account for the assumption of a hazard involving the continuance and integrity of the Empire itself.

It is certain that Germany underestimated the hazard. A dynastic war with Russia she was willing to accept and almost courted. The contingent hostility of France she apparently did not fear. For securing the neutrality of England she had a most plausible programme. The explicit warnings from London she believed to be bluff. She probably counted on a servile Belgium. How badly she had misconceived her world, the event promptly [401] proved. England and France were as ready to make the last sacrifice for ideals of international moderation and good faith as Germany for mediæval punctilio; industrial Belgium was capable of heroic resistance.

All the official statements of Germany abound in technicalities which to common sense are negligible. The precise amount and chronology of French and Russian provocation at the border, the amount of infraction of Belgian neutrality implied in the secret presence of French officers—all these matters are weighed with the solemnity and exactness of the seven degrees of the lie. The very language is that of the tiltyard or fencing floor. Such a move implies another; to the thrusts of Russia and France, Germany always parries in the forms. This was throughout the temper of the Wilhelmstrasse and of the German ambassadors at the danger points, Vienna and St. Petersburg. Had the Germans wanted the war, they could not have acted a whit otherwise. It is entirely possible that the secret memoirs of the future, will show that the whole clumsy transaction was merely the Kaiser’s parody of the astute machinations of Bismarck in 1870.

The position of France was in all main regards a defensive one, although she was bound as well by treaty to support Russia. Against unavowed German military movements, France openly reinforced her frontier, meanwhile seeking a diplomatic solution. Germany once more took the ground that she would not negotiate with a foe in process of mobilization, and precipitated the rupture by an ultimatum. In a larger sense France is defending her own civilization and her own influence among nations against the pretension of Teutonic preponderancy in Europe.

England’s participation in the war was required, first, by her naval agreement with France; next, by her determination to maintain the neutrality of the small nations Luxembourg and Belgium. For several years the English in the North Sea and Channel and the French in the [402] Mediterranean, have mutually engaged to defend each other’s interests in those respective waters. This meant that imminent war found the French fleet in southern waters, and her northern and western coast open to Germany’s attack. Sir Edward Grey in his first statement before Parliament promised that England would live up to her bargain, and if necessary undertake the naval defense of the French coast. This was the frank acknowledgment of a minimum obligation, to break which, Mr. Asquith later justly remarked, would have utterly discredited a private individual. England’s next move was determined by the appeal for aid of neutralized Belgium. England demanded a statement of Germany’s intentions as regards Belgium and the other neutralized powers, and when the note was answered by the hastening of the invasion of Belgium, declared war.

Sound national policy as well as honor forced the decision. England could not take the risk of Germany at Antwerp. And German assurances to respect the sovereignty of Belgium had been proved worthless in advance by Germany’s violating the neutrality she was pledged to maintain. It is significant that the bullying sophisms with which Germany had confronted her Continental neighbors were not even hinted at in the case of England. There was no longer any disinclination to confer with a power in a state of martial preparation. There were numerous suggestions by which England might defend France passively, there was even a hint that the violated neutralities would be respected, for a consideration. In any case the evident preparedness of the British fleet was not regarded as disqualifying England as a negotiatory power, though as a matter of fact the bounds of Germany were never more effectively attacked than when sealed orders were issued to Admiral Jellicoe. Germany could, when she wished, deal with a potential foe in arms,—deal patiently and at length. The point of honor raised against France and Russia should be interpreted [403] in the light of the repeated offers to buy off England.

England had the good fortune to take the clearest and most disinterested stand of all the embroiled powers. She was bound by a special obligation, which she could not dishonor, but which, had the Germans engaged not to attack France or her colonies by sea, might have left England a neutral. She was driven to arms by the ruthless molestation of neutral Belgium. It was the cause of civilization. In no particular have international law and world peace been more developed than in the neutralization of states. To attack this is to attack in perhaps its most vital spot the progress of the world. It is at best the act of a barbarian and an outlaw, and when committed upon a people who have offended in nothing but in asserting the right that the aggressor himself has guaranteed, it is the act of a savage. That there is a penalty for violating a neutralized state, the presence of England in this war is most exemplary evidence. She has truly taken up arms in the cause of peace.

Reviewing the motives of the combatants, Austria and Germany are fighting for the prerogatives and ideals of a politico-military hierarchy; Russia is fighting for a little nation of kindred blood and identical faith which had been outrageously attacked; France is fighting in self defense and for her treaty obligations; England is explicitly fighting for the principle of neutralization. In a larger sense the various motives of the powers embattled against Austria and Germany merge in the need of a gigantic police enterprise. We have on a tremendous scale the attempt to chastise two criminally aggressive powers, which Mr. Norman Angell proposed, on a smaller and less ruinous scale, as a means towards securing peace. The spirit that animates the European coalition against the two central Empires is that a small nation should not be brutally entreated by a stronger by reason of its greater strength, nor a neutralized nation be molested by violation [404] of its soil and slaying of its citizens. If we hold clearly in mind this police aspect of the war, we are in a position to weigh some of the possibilities.

The success of Austria and Germany would mean the extinction of what little international law and morality has been painfully built up through the centuries, the impact of the mailed fist throughout Europe, the rigid rule of a pedantic and tyrannical bureaucracy, the diminution of the variety and vitality of western civilization, the clamping upon the world for an indefinite future the most unendurable bonds of militarism. Fortunately there is small reason to dread so dire a disaster for humanity. The stars fight in their courses against those who would undo the work of time.

The success of the Triple Entente , may, as it is directed, take us far towards permanent peace, or once more establish a military tension that in its turn must produce new wars. What is all important is that the police character of this war should not be lost sight of. It is always easy for the most generous causes to sink to a level of immediate small interests—the Crusaders forgetting the Holy Sepulchre while Constantinople is being looted. Such temptations will beset the Triple Entente in the event of a triumph. Meanwhile, it may be the part of France and England to restrain the bitterness of Russia, who is engaged in a war essentially racial. It is necessary that the lesson administered to Germany and Austria be complete and convincing. Their best wishers can only desire for them a prompt and sharp chastisement. The peace of the world requires either the reduction of Germany to military impotence or a change in the arrogant temper of her ruling class.

Since the war has been occasioned by the stubborn folly of a military and diplomatic caste, the minimum of reform, is that that caste should be deposed in Austria and Germany. France set an example over forty years ago. Such deposition to be effective would apparently [405] involve such constitutional changes that it is difficult to see how either the Hapsburg or Hohenzollern dynasty could logically survive the revolution. In the light of history neither would be missed.

Historically, the notion of a central European Empire has meant nothing but harm. Through the Middle Ages the cheap parodists of the Cæsars trafficked when they might, and fought when they must, claiming territory at large, setting race against race, and pontiff against king, raiding and looting rich neighboring lands rather than waging war, fomenting religious persecution, opposing by trickery and force the development of the new races and nationalities. Such was for centuries the record of the Holy Roman Empire. For Europe its legend has ever been baleful. Everybody knows that the House of Hapsburg inherits by direct descent this tradition, and Austria with its loose hold over many races is today a simulacrum of the Mediæval Empire, owing her new lease of life, after the Imperial idea had discredited itself, to the suppression of Hungary with the aid of Imperial Russia. In the Emperor Franz Josef we have an individual superior to his origins, but he inevitably inherited the diplomatic and military caste of advisors and administrators who have brought Austria to the present pass. The mentality of this hierarchy was fixed after the Napoleonic wars, at the moment when reaction was exaggerated, and has not changed with changing times.

At least the Austrian Empire and its ruling caste had the warrant of tradition. In Germany the tradition was recently made to order by the genius of Bismarck. The mediæval caste which Austria inherited, Germany deliberately created for herself. The Empire rose out of no instinctive need of the race, from no demand of the numerous small states and free cities, but as the clever utilization of a brilliant military triumph. What war gave, war could take away. The Empire that was proclaimed at Versailles might be terminated at Potsdam. The offence of [406] the Empire is not its title and form but in the changing for the worse of the German character. Governments are worth just what they produce in national character. The German temper is naturally genial, thrifty, deliberate, patient, scholarly and musical. Official Germany has developed an intolerable arrogance that threatens the whole world. The Kaiser has mediævalized Germany’s ruling caste, and is the symbol of that process.

Personally I do not believe that the Triple Entente will be called upon to dispose of the Hapsburg and Hohenzollern dynasties, any more than in 1871, Germany was burdened with the disposition of Napoleon III. Like causes produce like effects, and when Austria and Germany shall have awakened from red dreams of conquest, to the gray reality of defeat, they may be trusted to call to account these responsible for their humiliation.

With an Imperial Austria and Germany, the Triple Entente could only deal most sternly, always along those modern lines of penology which do not avenge the offence, but see to it that the offender be not allowed to repeat it. On the theory that the present administration of Germany and Austria is to be perpetuated, nothing less than the crippling of those powers could guarantee even a few years of peace. With a reorganized Germany and Austria, the allies could and should deal far more generously than Germany did with the bantling French Republic. Belgium, for violated neutrality should obviously be made Germany’s preferred creditor.

Into more speculative matters I will only briefly inquire. There will naturally be some readjustment of the central European map to make political and racial lines more nearly coincident. Many of the historic states which have been whipped or cajoled into the two Empires may reëmerge. A number of small neutralized states in central Europe is among the possibilities. How much of such a process the loosely articulated Austrian Empire can stand is problematical. Some kind of a coherent Germany [407] should emerge from the disaster, and all that is most certainly and valuably German will be preserved. German victory would overwhelm it under militarism. The intellectual primacy of Germany has never depended on the legend of the Empire. It was acknowledged before the Empire was dreamed of, and would survive if the Empire were only an unblest memory. The real Germany has today only friends in the world. To many of us she is an intellectual foster mother and very dear. We hope to see her relieved of disguising mediæval frippery, and once more her radiant and edifying self. In the Kaiser’s proclamation he protests against world wide jealousy and hatred of Germany. Without mincing words, it may be admitted that the world is justly hostile to him and what he represents. He identifies himself and what he represents with Germany. When she shall have set that misunderstanding straight, she will find in the world only friends and sympathizers.

Looking to the future, and especially to the cause of peace, the war suggests certain reflections. If the war results only in a consciously suppressed Germany and Austria kept in order by the armies of the Triple Entente , nothing much will have been done. If the ruffian temper of German officialdom persists, Europe will merely have lavished once more her treasure, tears and blood in the old inconclusive way. The hope lies in a solution so just that the defeated nations may accept it, so wise that it may safely include a general reduction of armaments. The cause of peace is already the gainer by a sensational demonstration of the fallacy of the stock sophism that the only guarantee of peace is competitive arming. The way in which the little spark struck on the Danube overran Europe proves that competitive arming is not merely the ready occasion of war, but of war on the most costly and disastrous terms.

But pacificists should not press their momentary advantage beyond the bounds of common sense. There is [408] already a fanatical tendency to denounce war as such, instead of seeking out and denouncing those who have made war without just cause. Of course war abstractly is just as much and just as little moral or immoral as a cyclone. It would be quite as logical to meet and pass resolutions against the earthquake that filled peaceful Messina with human carrion, as to denounce wholesale this or any war. The case of Belgium suggests that it is not the moment for any sensible person to waste his time in working for complete disarmament. Had she trusted solely to the treaties that protected her, how complete would have been her humiliation! Belgium also shows most instructively that the maintenance of an effective military morale does not imply militarism. None of the Belgian officers who held the cordon of Liege had been taught that his honor as a soldier might at any moment require him to sabre an unarmed civilian. Yet the Belgian officers gave a sufficiently good account of themselves against those who had been trained in the bullying tradition. With Belgium still in view, and recalling what would have been her fate had she trusted solely in the treaties that protected her, no sensible person could now advise any nation to disarm below the reasonable requirements of defense. It is possible however that these limits may be greatly reduced by right thinking among nations. Already the individual is measurably free to criticise his own country when engaged in a war that he deems unjust. How great a liberty that is few of us realize. The next step is freedom for large bodies of individuals to refuse to serve their country in a war waged without popular consent and palpably unjust. A people thus minded would be the greatest check on that interested bureaucracy that any military establishment, however, moderate, involves. How far we still are from that, the rallying of the socialists to all the colors shows plainly.

Perhaps the most fertile notion arising from the situation is that of an international police function to be exercised [409] by the most enlightened nations. Something of this there was, though motives were badly mixed, in the Spanish-American war; the notion has plainly governed President Wilson’s Mexican policy. Indeed this police right has at all times been pretty freely claimed by strong powers against weak. It is a tremendous moral gain to see the principle asserted against strong powers who are imperilling the good order of the world,—and this irrespective of the outcome of the war.

A most valuable demonstration has been made of the validity of the principle of neutralization. Since small neutralized states are not for the future to be abandoned to any strong aggressor, they may safely be multiplied. Here may be a solution of the problem of racially varied central Europe. Everything depends upon England and France holding their representative function loyally to the end, and avoiding the national egotism that war in the past has usually aroused. If they are faithful to the charge they have explicitly undertaken, a new era may open for humanity.

The part of pacificists is to avoid phrases, and deal with facts. In the long run there can be no peace so long as individuals put their lives at the disposal of any kind of leader who waves the flag in any kind of cause. So long as nations are unreasoning mobs the moment the trumpet sounds, it will be idle to depose military castes; others will promptly form, and in their turn prevail. Accordingly the educational campaign of the pacificists must continue,—continue, however, with the frank admission that the sword has often in the past been drawn for ulterior righteousness and peace, and that if the time ever comes when from mere horror of war men decline to draw the sword in a clearly righteous cause, so exanimate a world will enjoy precisely the peace it deserves. We must beware of considering peace and war as respectively bonum and malum in se . In the present case, to have yielded to Germany would, in the lowering of the moral tone of [410] Europe, have been more disastrous than the unhappy war that has resulted from a single outrageous move: for submission would have meant that the world was content to continue in the twentieth century the ethics of Metternich and Bismarck, while the fact of the war means that the twentieth century world is prepared, at whatever cost, to repudiate the neo-mediævalism that paradoxically imposed itself upon the international politics of the nineteenth century—prepared to work out a better ethics and politics, looking to a more peaceful future. Meanwhile the present task of civilization is to avert an imminent Prussian Peril, and to humble the new Tamerlane who has thrust a continent into war. Should he win, no nation is safe.

[411]

THE WAR
BY AN ECONOMIST

It is early to hold inquest upon European civilization. But to attempt to forecast the findings of the historian-crowners of the next period of peace, is neither presumptuous nor premature. Experience has taught us much of the evolution of the written record of a war. After our Civil War we had two distinct historical traditions, Northern and Southern. Nearest the event, personalities, deified and damned, loomed portentously. “If Lincoln’s character had been different—if Jeff Davis had been more forceful”—why, perhaps there might have been no war, or its issue might have been other than it was. In a later stage, Civil War history, though still sectional, accepted the obligation to set forth and make plausible the motives animating either side. Finally, sectionalism is fading from Civil War history, at least in so far as the work of the trained writer is concerned. Whether we are Northerners or Southerners, we see in the great war the natural outcome of the irreconcilable conflict between two economic and social systems, each seeking expansion to the detriment of the other. A particular personality may have worked to bring some of the contending forces to a focus; a particular political movement may have hastened, another may have retarded, the final appeal to arms. Given, however, the underlying social economic situation, given, too the existing limitations upon the political intelligence, North and South, and the appeal to arms was inevitable. Neither party, to be sure, can be absolved from the charge of wrong-doing, or even of crime. But it is not now so important to strike a balance of guilt as it is to determine the conditions that made wrong seem right in the eyes of otherwise moral men.

When the present war is over there will be a flood of [412] nationalistic histories. The literary representatives of each party will endeavor to roll the whole blame upon the enemy. Vast significance will be attached to personalities; emperors and kings, statesmen, prelates, journalists, will stand forth in light supernal or infernal, according to the point of view. Were the Servian authorities in league with the assassins of the Archduke? Did the German emperor dictate the terms of the Austrian ultimatum? Was the Czar preparing war while pretending peace? Was Sir Edward Grey watching for an opportunity to crush the German fleet? In a later stage impersonal political forces will assert their claim to the foreground of history: the expansive tendencies of Russia; the fatal pride of armed Germany; the pretensions of England to the empire of the seas. Ancient antagonisms of race and nationality, of culture and religion, will aid in explaining what would otherwise remain inexplicable.

No one will dispute the fact that certain individuals in positions of power worked actively to bring on the present crisis, nor that acts were committed that deserve the execration of mankind. It will not be denied that ancient political and cultural antagonisms essentially conditioned the present war; but for such antagonisms the peace would have remained unbroken. Still, these forces are, in a sense, static, and hence not adequate to explain change. The Russian is not more aggressive, the German is not more arrogant, nor the Englishman more intent upon naval dominance, than they were twenty years ago. Pride of race and intolerance of religion have been with us always, and there is no evidence of their recent intensification. What chiefly needs explanation is that for a generation the consciousness of Europe has been filling up with fighting concepts. The fact has been noted by all serious students of European international relations. It is forcibly demonstrated by the enthusiasm with which the several nations, each with a reason of its own, has entered the present conflict. Desperate efforts have been making, [413] for years, to prepare for the struggle that was regarded as inevitable.

Accordingly we can impute to the acts of particular persons little more than the choice of time and occasion for the outbreak of hostilities. The time may have been inauspicious; the occasion may have been one that will not look well in history. For the underlying forces working cumulatively toward an issue, we must, however, look elsewhere than to personal volition.

The greed of the armament industries and the incessant playing upon popular opinion by their subsidized organs have often been assigned to a chief rôle in the drama of international discord. Competitive military preparations, drawing to themselves an increasing share of the intellectual energies of a nation, have long been regarded as a menace to the peace of the world. Every organ seeks to exercise a function. The Crown Prince of Germany, in his panegyric of militarism, expresses poignant regret that all the splendid military forces of the Empire should be expended futilely, in peaceful show. Professional warriors want war, and will work to bring it about.

The future historian will doubtless give weight to the above mentioned forces, as well as to many others that can not here be touched upon. But he will assign vastly more importance than we of today, to the national antipathies engendered by the scramble for colonial possessions, and to the motives giving rise to it. It may be worth our while, even now, to fix our attention upon this aspect of the question. Not only for the light that may be thrown upon the fundamental causes of the present conflict, but also for the grounds we may discern for conjectures as to the international relations of the future.

II

Every one at all familiar with recent German literature will recall frequent references to the Drang nach Morgenland . The “impulse toward the Land of the Morning”—fit [414] inspiration for a sentimental nation. It has been pointed out, again and again, that the open road to German expansion lies in the direction of Anatolia, Syria and Mesopotamia. Indeed, the expansion has been actually taking place, by a process of infiltration, as it were. Recall the Bagdad Railway, the German incursions into Ottoman finance, the German reorganization of the Turkish army. All that lay between the Germans and their dream of the Morgenland was a group of petty states, easily to be subjugated or overleaped, and the decaying Turkish political organization.

But there was an irreconcilable Russian dream of Constantinople and the Eastern Mediterranean, and a British dream of a sub-tropic zone, all the way to India, taking laws, if from any power, from Britain.

For years, as every one knows, these dreams have played at cards with the Balkans. Not to go beyond the present century, did we not see Russian influence steadily advancing there, until rudely checked by Austrian annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina? Again, the insidious development of Russian influence, culminating in the humiliation of Bulgaria in the Second Balkan War, but checked by the creation of an independent Albania under a German prince. Russian influence encroaching once more, stimulated by the Albanian fiasco and the intensification of Pan-Serbism, to be checked—for no doubt so it was intended—by the utter humiliation of Servia. Probably it was not believed that Russia would trump the Austrian ace. But who could suppose that, in such a game, the trumps would not, sooner or later, be drawn out?

It would be interesting to know why the ace was led just now, and why it was trumped at this precise moment. What is of more importance, however, is to know why the game was set. What did Germany want with the Land of the Morning? What does the Eastern Mediterranean mean to Russia? And what would it signify to England if either dream were realized? Is it matter of sentiment, [415] of “historic mission,” or is it matter of practical interest? And if matter of practical interest, whose interest weighs so heavily that it must be bought with cities in ruins and provinces devastated, with hundreds of thousands of the best and most useful lives sent down to dusty death?

Manifestly, not the interest of the mass of humanity.

III

The Morgenland, be it understood, is only one of the rotten stones in the arch of civilization. Mexico is another. India, China, Africa are of similar character. But the Morgenland may serve as type for our study, and we may profitably confine our analysis to the German yearnings for the Morgenland, not because they are in any way unique, but because they are typical.

There are political scientists who tell us that Germany is forced by her teeming population to seek this outlet to the East. This would imply that the impulse toward expansion is similar to that which carried the Anglo-Saxons to England and the Lombards to Italy. Let us consider whether this is really the case.

It is admitted, of course, that never before was the population within the present borders of the German Empire so great as it is today. Mere physical density of population is, however, a fact of no direct political significance. The important question is, whether the population is too dense to be comfortably maintained. Now, there is undoubtedly much privation in Germany, but it appears to be almost the unanimous verdict of economists and statisticians that the standard of welfare in Germany is constantly rising. Of this fact we have indirect evidence in our own immigration statistics. In the early eighties Germany sent us 200,000 immigrants a year; now she sends less than 40,000. Why have the numbers dwindled? Not because our free land is gone: for the Germans never were distinctively pioneers. In so far as they turned to agriculture, they settled in the older communities, and by [416] superior thrift and industry, took the land away from the native born. This was never easier to do than today. Such of the Germans as remained in our cities occupied themselves with small business, the mechanical trades and the professions. The demand for such services is greater today than ever. The costs and hardships of oversea migration are less now than formerly. If the Germans stay at home, it must be because Germany, in spite of its great population, offers better opportunities for life and work than formerly.

It is not the land area of a nation that determines the magnitude of the population that can be supported in comfort. Rather, it is the organized intelligence of the people; and this, as every one knows, has been steadily advancing in Germany. There are, of course, ultimate limits beyond which organized intelligence can not provide for an increasing population under the handicap of restricted natural resources. Was it perhaps a recognition of this fact that led the statesmen to seek new territories for the Germans of the future?

The birth rate in Germany is declining, as in every other modern state. Conservative statisticians have estimated that, unless the tendency to decline is checked, the German population will come to a standstill within a generation. Germany has now no excess of population wherewith to plant colonies, and will probably never have such excess. Accordingly, it can have been no part of the Morgenland dream that the mongrel population of Turks and Armenians, Syrians and Arabs, was to be supplanted by German Biedermänner . It can not have been imagined that Antioch and Bagdad were to become German cities, the seats of German universities; that Gothic spires were to rise among the ruins of Palmyra, and over the redeemed wastes of Bassorah. The life of the Morgenland will pursue its dark and furtive ways, whether under German rule or the rule of any other Power of the light or of the darkness.

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IV

It will be said that the standard of wellbeing of the German Empire has advanced pari passu with her foreign trade, and that trade needs a secure market. Hence the requirement of a rich colonial domain, from which the German trader can not be excluded by hostile customs laws. Perhaps we have here an adequate justification for Germany’s Morning Land aspirations. Germany is an industrial nation; so also are England and the United States and France, and Russia will soon become one. Now, is it not inevitable that the trade of the industrial nations shall be directed toward the non-industrial? That is, towards the tropics and the subtropical belts? The argument is trite, but it looks reasonable enough to deserve consideration.

Germany is indeed an industrial nation, and so are we. But the German industries are not the same as ours, nor can they ever be the same, so long as the German genius and natural environment continue to differ from ours. So long as difference exists, some German goods will command our markets, whether we pursue protectionist policies or not. Germany need not write our laws for us in order to control our markets; she has an indefeasible title to those markets so long as she maintains superiority in supplying our needs. And the same thing is true of the markets of England and France and Russia. They take German goods eagerly, in vast quantities. Wipe out Germany’s trade with industrial states, and her commerce is practically at an end.

The trade between nations of rich and varied industries is alone capable of indefinite expansion. Yet the delusion persists that a nation’s closed trade with a subject state is somehow of superior importance. Such trade is admittedly incapable of great development. Only semi-barbarous peoples will submit to foreign control of their trade; and such peoples produce little beyond the requirements [418] of home consumption, and therefore, having hardly anything to sell, can buy but little. But colonial trade, meagre as it is, may be monopolized and made to yield large profits. The trade between industrial nations, since it is essentially competitive, diffuses its benefits throughout the trading nations. Hence these benefits are easily overlooked. The rapid enrichment of a few houses engaged in the colonial trade gives visible evidence of national gain.

Out of the overestimation of the value of the colonial trade arises, unquestionably, some part of the international jealousies now working out their nature upon the field of battle. Control of the trade of the Levant would advance the general welfare of the German people in very limited measure; but it would greatly enrich a small number of traders, and this very fact of the concentration of the gains gives them added potency in determining political relations.

V

The colonial trader was once the chief cause of wars, and he still contributes his quota to international misunderstanding and hostility. But there is another interest that has grown to far greater importance in the colonial domain. This we may describe as the concessionary interest. Vast fortunes have been accumulated, in the semi-barbarous belt, by the exploitation of natural resources and works of public utility. The Land of the Morning would be exceptionally rich in concessions to the nationals of any imperial state. There are oil fields and mines to open, railways and irrigation works to construct. Some of these opportunities are already in German possession; their security, however, depends upon continued exercise, by Germany, of influence upon the Ottoman government. That government is notoriously shifty, and the interests involved will never be wholly safe until the Levant is a German colony.

[419]

The concessionary interest, like the colonial trading interest, offers chances of sudden wealth. The former, however, is far more vulnerable than the latter. The fixed investment of the concessionary is far greater than that of the trader. Hence, while the colonial trading interest thrives best with the support of the home government, to the concessionary interest such support is indispensable. Politics is a necessary part of the concessionary business.

How far is the concessionary interest identical with the national interest? Let us consider what difference it makes to you and me whether the Pearson interests, or the Waters-Pierce interests, control the oil fields of Mexico. If the Pearson interests, several great fortunes will be constituted in England; if the Waters-Pierce, similar fortunes will be constituted here. In either case the money will lie at an infinite distance from you and me. Still, we are patriots, and would rather have it here than in England.

Patriotism aside, the great fortune here will pay income tax to our own treasury. Its spending will afford many golden crumbs to fellow citizens of ours. The exploitation of the oil fields will require much machinery, for which, under Waters-Pierce control, the first bid would be offered to our own industry. Many young men of our nationality would find employment as engineers, foremen, superintendents. Undoubtedly, it is better for the national interest to have the concession in national hands.

But what is the magnitude of the concessionary interest, and how many votes should it have on questions of peace and war? Of the whole capital of Great Britain, not one-fifth consists in foreign investments; and of that fifth scarcely a quarter can be concessionary. One-tenth of Germany’s capital is invested abroad; probably not a fifth of that is concessionary. Of our own capital one part in a hundred is in foreign investments, of which one-half is in Mexico. Not nearly all of that half is concessionary. It did not prove to be enough to go to war over.

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VI

From the foregoing review it might appear to be the natural conclusion that the economic element in the present war is practically negligible. By far the greater proportion of the trade relations of the world—and the relations most significant to the general welfare—obtain between the very nations that are now endeavoring to destroy one another. The opportunities for concessionary capital that could be secured by any nation, if completely victorious, can hardly be equivalent to the losses of the far more important industrial capital at home. It is certain that if all capital had been conscious of its interest, and the question of peace or war had been left to capital, each hundred dollars having one vote, there would have been no war. There is a war: costly demonstration to the Socialists that capital does not, as alleged, enjoy control of modern political society.

Before we accept this view, however, let us look somewhat more closely upon the structure of capital as a social economic force. We shall find that it is not homogeneous, but embraces two elements differing widely in character. The one, which we may denominate capital proper, is characterized by cautious calculation, by a preference for sure if small gains, to dazzling winnings. The other, which we may call speculative enterprise, is characterized by a readiness to take risks, a thirst for brilliant gains. The relative political power of the two elements, as we shall see, is not proportioned to their respective pecuniary volumes. Accordingly, altho it may easily enough be demonstrated that the majority interest of European capital has been seriously prejudiced by the present war, it does not follow that a large share of the responsibility for the war may not be fixed upon capital. The minority interest may have determined a majority vote.

Capital proper thrives best in a settled order of society, [421] where the risks of loss are at a minimum. It accepts favors from government, to be sure, but politics is no part of its game; peace, and freedom from disturbing innovations, are its great desiderata. Speculative enterprise, on the other hand, thrives best in the midst of disorder. Its favorite field of operations is the fringe of change, economic or political. It delights in the realm where laws ought to be, but have not yet made their appearance. To control the course of legal evolution, to retard it or divert it, are its favorite devices for prolonging the period of rich gains. Politics, thus, is an essential part of the game of speculative enterprise.

At the outset of the modern era, speculative enterprise quite overshadowed capital proper. Colonial trade, government contracts, domestic monopolies were the chief sources of middle class fortunes. But with the progress of industry, slow, plodding capital has been able steadily to encroach upon the field of enterprise, or to create new fields of its own. In our own society the promoter of railway, and public utilities, the exploiter of public lands, the trust organizer, are as prominent, relatively, as in any modern nation. Quantitatively their interests are, however, greatly inferior to those of the trader, manufacturer, banker, the small investor and the farmer, to whom a ten per cent return is a golden dream, and twenty per cent a temptation sent by the Evil One.

But quantitatively inferior as the speculative capitalist really is, his hold upon the popular imagination is vastly more powerful than that of his slow-going colleague. Say that an employer of this type prefers to spend money on machine guns to repress strikes rather than in better wages: instantly it is declared by all the radicals of the earth that such is the general spirit of capitalism. No radical is able to keep clearly in mind that the overwhelming majority of employers are doing their best to keep their working forces contented, and are succeeding fairly well. The radicals, however, are not the only persons whose [422] minds are overcrowded with the doings of the speculative capitalist. You and I read eagerly the lives of Jay Gould, Oakes Ames, Harriman and Morgan, feeling that somehow we are thereby brought nearer to the spirit of modern life. We find it impossible to sustain an interest in the account of the life of James Metzger, grocer, who set out in life worth ten thousand, and by faithful attendance upon his customers, without ever once taking a risk, ended life with an estate of one hundred thousand. James Metzger is a type of the thousands making up the ranks of capital proper. His story is told in statistics, which you and I won’t read.

We may love or we may hate the speculative capitalist, but at all events we admire him. We admire him when he works for the public interest, and we admire him when his efforts are subversive of the public good. We admired Harriman when he built the Salt Lake cut-off, and we admired him when he cut the Alton melon. Now, is it to be supposed that the speculative capitalist does not turn this popular admiration to use as a political force, since politics is a part of his game? Inconceivable! As compared with his brother of the small profits and quick return, he enjoys a plural vote in our political scheme.

VII

In a new country of vast natural resources, especially if it is not too well governed, there is sufficient scope for both speculative enterprise and capital proper. The United States has been such a country, at least down to a very recent date. There was easy money enough for all men of shrewdness and resolution possessed of the necessary initial stake—public forests to be leveled, railways to be built or wrecked, trusts to be organized, cities to be provided with public utilities. But all this easy money now appears to be in danger of being locked up. We have a conservation movement in full swing, and a civic reform tendency that is no longer a mere cloak for the insatiable [423] appetite of plunderers out of power. The popular attitude toward monopolistic combinations is growing ominously serious; if old and strong combinations do not dissolve in fear before it, yet those who would organize new combinations are deeply discouraged. We have an Interstate Commerce Commission with the will and the power to choke all railways when some are believed to have stealings in their gorge. Already we are beginning to hear murmurs about town, that in view of the popular hostility to wealth, it will be necessary for American capital to look to foreign investments. Not foreign investments in England and France and Germany, where government is efficient and capital proper prevails. But foreign investments in the undeveloped countries, in a Land of the Morning, “east of Suez.”

In England the domestic field for capitalistic speculation has long been restricted. For generations the British citizen has been taught to look to Asia, Africa, America, for the opportunities for sudden wealth. Germany, more recently launched upon an industrial career, might have offered many rich opportunities at home. But Germany has been well governed. The early nationalization of railways closed one lucrative field; the cities, with their excellent business governments, have taken control of their own utilities, or have driven hard bargains with private enterprise. Industrial combinations have been as numerous as with us; but they have assumed the form of the Kartell—a legally binding agreement between independent producers, fixing prices and volume of production. Such a form of organization, like our former “pools,” distributes the profits of combination fairly equitably among all the producers, and therefore has offered little opportunity for such promoter’s gains as we are familiar with in American trust finance. Some opening there was, of course, for speculative enterprise. The launching of new industrial companies, dealings in real estate, the military and naval industries, laid the basis for many astounding [424] mushroom fortunes. But the progress of governmental effectiveness has been steadily encroaching upon these fields. The German internal situation, then, has been such as to recommend the Ausland to those who wish to risk large stakes on the chance of brilliant returns.

The progress of modern industrial society, with its parallel development in the art of government, tends to the extrusion of speculative capital, and its concentration in the tropical and subtropical belts. In the older societies the process has been in operation for a considerable time; with us it is just beginning. But in a generation, we may be sure, much of our own speculative capital, like that of the older countries, will be engaged in colonial exploitation.

VIII

Capital, it is often said, is cosmopolitan; capital knows no such thing as patriotism. This may be true of the cautious, colorless capital of ordinary finance and industry. It is not true of the capital upon which speculative enterprise is based. It was an intense patriotism that was avowed by Jay Gould and Harriman; intense is the patriotism of J. J. Hill, of the DuPonts and the Guggenheims. Even Mellen is, or was, patriotic in his feelings toward New England. But most intense of all is the patriotism of the capitalist whose interests lie in the twilight zone of the barbaric belt. Purer expressions of devotion to America, of deep concern for her future, than those issuing from the lips of American concessionaries in Mexico, you never hear. We were all moved by the grandiose African dream of Cecil Rhodes. “All red”—i. e. British—a British heart within every black skin, from the Cape to Cairo. The case is typical of the capitalist speculator abroad. He is a patriot through thick and thin, not a white-blooded “cit” like you and me, who before volunteering support for our country’s acts would presume to pass judgment upon them. He is a patriot who [425] would knock a chip off the shoulder of the meanest upstart of a barbarian dictator—without regard to the cost of doing it: not a calculator, like you and me.

By interest, the concessionary capitalist is a patriot. He needs his country in his business. But this is by no means the whole explanation of his patriotism. His type is reckless, and therefore generous and idealistic. He must love and admire great things, and what thing is greater than the imperial dominion of his country? One must have a mean opinion of human nature to suspect the purity of the motives of Cecil Rhodes. Doubtless Rhodes began with selfish motives, but his private interests were soon submerged in his imperial ambitions. We may not be justified in assuming that selfish interest operates, to the utter exclusion of all patriotic motives. It does not necessarily follow that because Mr. William Randolph Hearst, for example, has mines in Mexico, his motives are determined by them. His Mexican interests would be advanced if the American boundary were extended to include all on this side of Panama. Is this, however, the whole tale of his aggressive Americanism? Patriotism has always burned more brightly in border provinces than in the heart of the national territory. It is natural, then, that patriotism should be still more intense in those extensions of the national domain represented by permanent interests abroad.

In an ideal scheme of things, love of one’s own country would not involve hatred and contempt for other countries. But patriotism compounded with financial interest does usually produce detestation for the corresponding alien compound. We who meet the Germans in America, in England, in Germany, engaged in the common labor of advancing man’s control over nature, respect them, and if we see much of them, love them. Our capitalist speculators in South America and in the Orient, meeting their similars of German nationality, hate them heartily. Those speculators are the nerve ends of modern industrial [426] nationalism, and they are specialized to the work of conveying sensations of hate. For the present we have few nerves of the kind, and all they have succeeded in conveying to us is a vague feeling of uneasiness over the German advance in the colonial field. Far more powerful must have been the reaction upon nations like England and France that are serious competitors in the same field. And German capitalist speculators, thwarted in their designs by the English and the French, have contributed to the popular feeling that Germany must fight for what she gets.

The capitalistic speculator, even when operating at home where his action may be directed against us, enjoys a power over the popular imagination, and a political influence quite incommensurate with the extent of his interests. When the seat of his operations is a foreign territory, whence flow back reports of his great achievements—achievements that cost us nothing, and that bring home fortunes to be taxed and spent among us—his social and political influence attains even more exaggerated proportions. And this is the more significant in view of the fact that his relations with government—now even a more important part of his business—are concentrated upon that most sensitive of governmental organs, the foreign office.

When diplomatic questions concerning the non-industrial belt arise, and most modern diplomatic questions concern this belt, the voice of the concessionaries is heard in the councils of state. This voice is the more convincing because of the patriotism that colors its expression of interest. What is perhaps more important, the ordinary conduct of exploitative business in an undeveloped state keeps the concessionary in constant relation with the consular and diplomatic officers established there. In a sense, such officers are the concessionary’s agents, yet their communications to the home office are the material out of which diplomatic situations are created.

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It is accordingly idle to suppose that exploitative capital in foreign investments weighs in foreign policy only as an equal capital at home. When we consider the personality of the director of colonial enterprise, the conditions in which he meets competitors of foreign nations, and his relations with the foreign service of his home government, we can readily understand how a very small investment may prove a great menace to the peace of nations. For years the popular consciousness, in the several nations, has been steadily absorbing conceptions of rivalry of interest that have no meaning except to the category of concessionary capital. Germany, Russia, England and France have been brought to the belief that something very vital turns upon the control of the Land of the Morning. Indeed the whole civilized world has been seduced into accepting the view that something very vital turns upon the control of the tropics. Yes, something very vital for exploitative capital. Indirectly vital for the rest of society: for from such delusions spring wars that sow the unwilling fields with the shattered limbs of the best of our youth.

IX

It is the interest of exploitative capital that makes the Morning Land, Mexico, China and Africa rotten stones in the arch of civilization. But for exploitative capital, those regions might remain backward, socially and politically: this would not greatly concern any industrial nation, except in so far as it responded to a missionary impulse. The backward states afford, however, possibilities of sudden wealth; and since this is the case, they must attract exploiters, who must seek, and obtain, the backing of their home governments, with resultant international rivalry, hostility, war.

If we could confidently predict the industrialization of the backward countries, we should be able to foresee an end of this one most fruitful of all sources of international [428] strife. But China will not be industrialized for a generation, at least; and many generations must elapse before the tropics are concession proof. Accordingly the one hope for universal peace would appear to lie in the possibility of divorcing, in the popular consciousness, the concessionary interest from the national interest.

For the present war will settle nothing. When it is over, the skeleton titles thrown about the undeveloped lands may have undergone change; but underneath the new order, the struggle of exploitative capital will emerge as before. Diplomatic squabbles will again arise; popular envy will be wrought upon; international hostility will be fomented; military and naval rivalry will again crush out progress. The minor interest will once more drag the major interest to ruin.

There will, however, be in the situation one element new, at any rate, to us. In a generation we shall not be, as now, a nation with almost all its capital secure within its own boundaries. Our strong men of speculative finance will be established in the undeveloped countries; concessions will figure conspicuously among the items of our national wealth. The foreign contingent of our capital will join battle with that of the group of nations destined to fare best in the present struggle: if Germany and Austria, in South America; if Russia and Japan, in the Orient. And who shall say that our country may not be a protagonist in the next great war? One half of one per cent of our capital just failed of forcing us to subjugate Mexico.

The concession and the closed trade are the fault lines in the crust of civilization. Solve the problems of the concession and the closed trade, the earth hunger will have lost its strongest stimulus, and peace, when restored, may abide throughout the world.

[429]

THE WAR
BY A MAN IN THE STREET

That a kindly old man having his nature temporarily reversed by a passion for revenge for the murder of two relatives, should have the power to waste a large portion of the lives and treasure of the civilized world, is so counter to everything that civilized men ordinarily consider reasonable, that it is perhaps the sharpest evidence yet given of the tyranny of the past over the present.

Perhaps the strangest thing about such a circumstance is that, while it is counter to the deliberate reason of nearly all sane and civilized men, millions of sane and civilized men are contributing to its occurrence, not only with devoted self-sacrifice, but with enthusiasm.

The conflict between these two utterly opposing conditions is, in the last analysis, simply the conflict between the jungle and the railroad, between the lion and the savage, between the savage and the civilized man.

And the same conflict is in each man’s soul. Behind the man of today, who reasons, is his savage ancestor who merely felt; behind the gentleman in evening dress who goes to the boxing match is his ancestor who turned his thumb down over the arena; behind the jurist who arbitrates at The Hague, is his ancestor who commanded a pirate ship in the neighboring sea; behind the German who, less than a generation ago, was leading civilization, is the barbarian who attacked Rome, and who now has come out to attack Belgium.

Now absolute power is old fashioned, alliances are old fashioned, even violence and revenge are old fashioned, and among civilized nations they are “not done,” except through the madness or the imbecility of crowds. Nobody really wants to do either of them, except the rulers and soldiers who see a chance of gain.

[430]

Of the hosts of men sacrificing, fighting, suffering, dying, not one in twenty wants to do it, or even knows why he is doing it, or what is to be gained by doing it, and not one in fifty thousand was consulted about doing it. Mr. Lowes Dickinson after expressing himself in the London Nation somewhat to the foregoing effect, adds:

We are sane people. But our acts are mad. Why? Because we are all in the hands of some score of individuals called Governments.... These men have willed this thing for us over our heads. No nation has had the choice of saying no. The Russian peasants march because the Czar and the priest tell them to. That of course. But equally the German socialists march; equally the French socialists. These men know what war means.... They hate it. But they march. Business men, knowing too, hating too, watch them march. Workingmen watch them march, and wait for starvation. All are powerless. The die has been cast for them. The crowned gamblers cast it, and the cast was death.

But “some score of individuals” is too many. The New York Nation puts that better:

Whatever happens, Europe—humanity—will not settle back again into a position enabling three Emperors—one of them senile, another subject to melancholia, and the third often showing signs of disturbed mental balance—to give, on their individual choice or whim, the signal for destruction and massacre.

The German tradition of 1870, so strongly in favor of getting in the first blow, made it impossible for a spreading of the war to be seriously threatened without Germany striking that blow, and so turning any possibility of a general war into the reality.

In fights between individuals, the wrong has usually been laid to the one who struck first. There is equal reason for so laying it between nations.

When to the tradition in favor of the first blow is added the military habit diffused through the nation to a degree absolutely strange to modern times; when over a nation [431] thus accustomed to arms, there is a ruling class whose only ambition and only hope is in War, and when at the head of this class is a ruler with a megalomaniac ambition and conceit, the wonder is not that such a nation has gone to war with virtually all its neighbors, but that it has so long been at peace with them.

This war is probably the world’s greatest illustration that a condition of “preparation for defence” is apt to lead to war. Forty years of such preparation has developed in the peaceful scholarly German nation an oligarchy of swashbucklers who crowd women off the sidewalk and cherish an ambition to conquer the world.

More specific causes of the low condition of Germany are not far to seek. If a hundred portraits of each of the rulers of, say, the ten leading nations were culled at random from the leading illustrated publications, a due proportion being kept of the various functions in which the rulers were engaged when the pictures were taken, there is no reasonable doubt that the absolute rulers would be represented the greatest number of times in military dress—like savages in war paint, and that William of Germany’s proportion would be larger than that of any other ruler. The presidents of republican France and the United States would not appear in war paint at all, and the king of democratic England would so appear less often than the head of any other dynasty.

Of all alleged civilized rulers, William II has alone borne the barbarous title of “The War Lord,” yet before last August he never saw a battle. He was “The War Lord” simply because it was his delight to pose as such, and what a man poses, he wishes to become. Since 1870, and to some extent before, the Kaiser’s country has been, to a degree approached by no other in Europe, an armed camp. In Germany, gentleman and army-officer have been almost synonymous terms: no amount of learning, genius or eminence in any other direction has brought a man as high social consideration as eminence in the army. The army [432] has been the dominant interest of the Emperor, and, despite the enormous industries, the dominant power in the eyes of the people—a power more recognized than the legislature and the courts. Among the aristocratic and would-be aristocratic classes, it has been the one career, and the one avenue to eminence. But in times of peace, promotion is slow: it is liveliest only when war kills off or wears out superiors. Hence in the German army the chief yearning—all the stronger for being suppressed for nearly half a century—has been for war: the daily toast at the officers’ messes has been for many years “Zum Tag!” Of such conditions as these, the natural outcome has been the barbarities in Brussels, Antwerp, and Louvain.

For these conditions of course neither the German people nor their Kaiser has been entirely to blame: everybody knows how, at the start, the conditions were forced upon them. But what pains have been taken to keep at the lowest terms their barbarizing influence, not to speak of doing away with it altogether? What has been the general attitude of Germany, under the Kaiser’s influence, toward the proposals instituted by the Tzar—sovereign of a far inferior people—for the development of machinery for international peace?

This war, in its murders and destructions, is probably the worst calamity the world has ever known. Yet it is doubtful whether the murders and destructions are the worst things about it: for it has, for the time being, turned a people long among the most admirable and lovable and peaceable in the world, into a nation of destroyers, and made some of their admirable qualities—their coolness, their patience, their energy, their system, their ingenuity, their coöperation, their patriotism, all of which were long among the chief agencies of the world’s progress, into the chief agencies for its misery and debasement.

But, with all the German’s old-time merits, there is no blinking the fact that the current of civilization which came through Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome [433] does not flow through his veins. He came into civilization late, and he shows it despite the virtues Tacitus saw him bringing with him: he still holds the barbarities of a highly inflected speech, a highly centralized government, and a ruthless disregard of the finer amenities of both peace and war. But we repeat that, except as his barbarian warlike passions have been trained since the fifties, and now been specially aroused, the great virtues which he had evolved even when History first knew him, made him admirable and lovable, and when he has felt the consequences of his mistakes, will make him so again.

The obvious conditions would suggest, even to the visitor from another planet, that there must be two Germanys; and so there are—the Germany of industry and peace, and the Germany of idleness and war. The higher Germany—not the higher in the army or the state, but the higher in intellect and morals, even less than a generation ago was among the greatest examples of mankind. The lower Germany—baser though more brilliant—nurtures a nest of microbes, and they have entered into the blood of the higher, and made it mad.

One thing that has made possible this great tragedy is the survival of old ideas of high and low, which, like many other ideas, were once true, and in the progress of evolution have now become false—more destructively false in Germany than anywhere else in civilization. In all savage communities, the ruling class is apt to be the best. Evolution approaches equilibration—the beam of the scale approaches the level—by the arbitrary power of the upper class going down, and the capacity of the lower class rising up, until at last, we may hope all classes will be on a level. The scale of course oscillates until, if ever, equilibration shall be reached: the revolutionary movements at times place the lower classes in the ascendant, even make them for brief moments the rulers,—often very ridiculous and even destructive rulers, as in the French revolution, and the ascendancy of the silverites [434] in the American congress. But the mistakes of the temporary rulers from the ignorant classes have been nothing beside the excesses of a Zenghis Khan, a Tamerlane, an Alexander, a Nero, a Henry the Eighth, a Napoleon, and a William II of Germany.

The claim that Germany is waging a war of defence is too thin to justify attention. The Kaiser’s responsibility for spreading the conflict is of course disputed by him and his supporters; but the thing has been brewing from the day the young Emperor, imitating the pirates and stage villains, pasted up his moustache farther than any other man’s to make himself look fierce. No man of peace or modesty ever hung out such a sign.

He has hardly ever made a speech without showing his megalomania, and placing his army first among his many interests; in agreements proposed for the promotion of peace, from the first meeting at The Hague, he has been the one to hang back; and he refused the arbitration suggested by Sir Edward Grey, which the other nations seemed ready to accept.

But his responsibility for spreading the war is of little consequence beside his conduct since it began. His first step was to trample under foot his own nation’s contract with Civilization itself; to violate the rules that, with infinite labor and through infinite suffering, had been slowly built up in aid of international peace and justice; to begin murdering an unoffending people whose peace his own country had solemnly pledged itself to maintain—devastating their country and robbing them of millions on millions, all because they had defended rights which, as already said, were pledged by his own country.

He had prepared for this by debauching his own peaceful, industrious, scholarly and harmony-loving people into such familiarity with the apparatus and drill and idea of war, that they have been taking on the army ways, ideas, ambitions and megalomania at a progressive rate that has saddened the former admirers who have [435] visited them at sufficient intervals to notice the change. Even among the scholars, not only has the army influence spread, but the old allegiance to the simple life is gone. Our exchange professors report the deterioration. Says one: “They have been bought by court favors.”

And they, like us, have been corrupted by their prosperity; their patriotism has become perverted into greed; and the vast industry, the vast wealth, even the vast population that this once exemplary people had built up in spite of the Emperor’s colossal military waste, he is destroying to feed his own lust of power, and he has impregnated them with that lust, and the trade which his people have made worldwide by their industry, he is, for most fallacious and insignificant reasons, seeking to extend by their blood.

He is widely believed to be insane. However that may be, I do not see how any candid and unbiased judgment can find him other than a man forsworn, a robber, a murderer of the innocent—of his own people no less than of other peoples, a destroyer of civilization, an enemy of mankind.

Perhaps the worst tragedy in the whole awful drama is this man’s militarism rotting out the morality of the people of Luther, Kant and Fichte. His ministers now talk of the highest moral stand a nation ever took, in England’s defence of Belgium’s neutrality, as the absurdity of going to war over a little piece of paper. It is also a large part of the present German philosophy that force and cunning are essential agents in evolution. The pity and tragedy of it!—that the German race, long the moral leaders of the world, should have sunk to a Machiavelism below Machiavelli—one not even, like his, superficially intelligent and refined, but throughout stupid and brutal.

This German military philosophy that reckons only with itself, carries the elements of its own destruction. It [436] is already actually at war with most of civilized Europe. It may not be destroyed this year or even next, but destroyed it will be; and until it is destroyed, civilization stops and stands at bay.

If necessary, its every resource must be called into play. Even those of remote Japan are already in action. If the need becomes greater, inaction on the part of nearer nations will become disgraceful. The wisdom that ignored the comparatively petty issues in Mexico, will become folly if it ignores anything so colossal as the present issues may become, especially as they already deeply concern our own blood.

If the outcome of the battles shall be the Kaiser’s victory, it will be for us only to reflect that the end is not yet, and that the Power which works out our good, often does it by ways that appear to our limited vision strangely devious. But if the battles shall destroy his dynasty, and dismember the artificial and cruel Austrian empire which ostensibly initiated all these horrors, and lead to a concord of the nations against such disasters in future, the justice of the Power above all empires will, despite all the misery, again be made plain.

It must no longer be possible for any madman who happens to sit upon a throne to wreak worldwide destruction. Whatever the cost, the peace of the world demands that Germany shall not hereafter be left in a condition to strike the first blow—that she shall not be permitted to keep an army large enough to give the military class the control of the nation, and that for her crimes against International Law she shall be made to bear proper penalties.

The next step to the limitation of her armies will be the limitation of all, and the uniting of them ostensibly, as they are now in reality, as the police force of the world.

It may be a relief to turn from the barbarity of the war to its absurdity. All its conditions are of course heritages [437] from the barbarous past, and the only process of doing away with them is the slow complexity of human progress. Not the least element of that progress is the development of a sense of humor. If everybody felt the supreme ridiculousness of these conditions, they could not stand a year.

Another ridiculous element in the situation is the shortsightedness of capital. The force of the fighting world is in its wealth—directed by its brains. An army is proverbially a monster that crawls upon its belly. Now how long are the brains of the world going to permit its wealth to feed this monster, and leave industry and exchange paralyzed? Yet though those in control of the world’s wealth have not prevented the war, they must have learned that it will pay to devote a good percentage of the wealth to perfecting the machinery for peace which centers at The Hague. That the capitalists have not already taken hold of those agencies, is as little creditable to their sense of their own interests as to their sense of the interests of mankind—and of the ridiculous.

The nations are still in the stage of civilization that individuals were when every man carried a sword, and impromptu fights were matters of course. The first step out of that stage was the organization of the premeditated duel, with its “code of honor.” The next stage was the leaving of quarrels to arbitration and the courts, and the prohibition of individual fights and of carrying weapons to facilitate them.

The nations have lately made rapid progress toward the second stage. Yet International Law, though rapidly growing before Germany’s attack on it, is, so far, nothing but a “code of honor.” It prescribes rules for the conduct of international duels, both for the principals and for neutrals, but, like the code of the duello, it has no sanctions to enforce the rules but public opinion.

Among the most important of these rules is respect of combatants for the peace and independence of neutral [438] states, especially when the neutrality has been specifically guaranteed by the warring states. Another very important rule is that unfortified towns shall not be bombarded, and that to fortified towns twenty-four hours’ notice shall be given, to permit the removal of non-combatants. The military oligarchy who have corrupted and misrepresented the German people, have not attained to, or have fallen from, the stage of civilization needed for the observance of these rules. They invaded Belgium and Luxemburg, and dropped bombs into Antwerp without notice.

In these acts, the Germans have done what they could to destroy the International Law which has been one of the most laborious and most hopeful products of civilization.

All law, local and international, has been made by the most advanced people, and must be guarded by them against the less advanced. Each civilized nation has a police force to guard its national law, but International Law has not yet progressed so far. Yet whatever may have been the origins of the present war, the Germans’ conduct of it has made them international outlaws, and constituted the nations fighting them a police to maintain the law.

Whatever the time and sacrifice involved, whatever other nations may be needed to strengthen the police force, the law must be vindicated, or civilization must go backward generations, and build the law up again.

That a union to develop and enforce International Law may result from the present war, seems among the possible compensations of the waste and misery. The world will have had enough of war, and more than enough, to a degree never before concentrated in as brief a period. In the early and long wars, men had not outgrown the stolid conviction that war was the inevitable and normal condition of the race; and at that stage of the race’s evolution, [439] so it was. But evolution has progressed, men’s—many men’s—ideas are different, and during this unparalleled tragic absurdity, they are going to become still more different, and at an unprecedented rate. Never before did a nation go to war as England now has done, to vindicate, enforce, and preserve what had been evolved of International Law. The German barbarities have made all England’s allies warriors in the same cause, and have opened the eyes of the world, as never before, to its value, its dignity, and, the blood flowing for it is going to add, its sacredness. To the seed planted at The Hague, this blood will be a fertilizing stream, and a growth may be expected that will be a shade and a defence to the nations.

[440]

EN CASSEROLE

Special to Our Readers

In this number, we have put the war articles last, giving them the place of second emphasis, and at the cost of cutting into the Casserole, because at the time the table of contents was made up, we considered the topic of our first article, Free Speech, of more consequence than any War possible among civilized nations. But we did not then suppose that one of the nations we considered civilized was capable of stamping on treaties, violating neutralities, dropping unnotified bombs on cities, and, if late reports are true, guiding the Turk in another assault on civilization.

Resistance to such infamies we regard as of more pressing importance than even the main object to which our leading articles have been heretofore devoted, namely, the elevation of the humbler man. We even regard that as, in the long run, the most effective agency toward Peace. But sometimes in emergencies, the long run has to be disregarded. Thus, not the least of the bad effects of the war is its diversion of effort from the social and political amelioration to which, for a generation, the world has given a degree of interest without precedent in all previous history. From this cause, where we would have our peculiar function the saving one of a brake, even our own humble efforts must be considerably diverted by an emergency so overwhelming; and we know that our readers, despite their inclination for the still air of delightful studies, can not fail to respond to so general and poignant an interest.

Buzzing around this subject, one of our most valued contributors writes: “Please don’t print a peace article . [441] There are only two possible kinds of peace in this world, while man is man: the peace of exhaustion and the pax romana .”

How prophecy does rage on this subject—on both sides!

Which peace with each other did the chief European nations enjoy from 1871 to 1914, and the English speaking nations from 1814 to 1914? And we seem abundantly justified in hoping that it may be permanent.

“While man is man.” Which man—Homer’s,—butchering unarmed foes whom he finds in bathing; or today’s,—arbitrating most of his quarrels, and busying himself over schemes for the automatic settlement of the rest? Any one who fails to recognize the change in man, may well fail, especially at a time like this, to recognize the increasing peace and aids to peace among the nations. Between civilized peoples, war comes now mainly because of one decaying institution—autocratic government, and of one vanishing human peculiarity—the madness of the crowd—the readiness of men to do in mass what they scorn to do as individuals—to get excited over foolish causes, or no cause at all, and to find glory in doing at wholesale, work which, at retail, they shrink from as robbery and murder.

Academic Courtesy

A certain college professor was asked by a lawyer for technical information needed in a property case. The professor spent half a day in disentangling the material and putting it into practicable shape. With it he presented a bill for $25.00.

Was this sensible or shocking?—business or betrayal? The lawyer, who seems in no way to have begrudged the money, told the tale as an instance of vulgar commercialism worming its ugly way into the fair ethics of the academic profession. And with him doubtless most college professors themselves would agree, even in the face of his [442] confession that for any scraps of legal information formally sought by the professor a lawyer would charge a fee.

To a layman the case for the defence seems simple. Here is no shining opportunity for the idealism of the scientist who, preferring to give to humanity the fruit of his works, refuses to patent discoveries made in the university laboratory. Nor is there in such an instance any question of aid to a disinterested “seeker after truth.” A professor of Greek will gravely spend several hours in answering a village clergyman’s question about the New Testament “baptism.” The historian himself will take the free hours of several days to make out reading lists for a woman’s club. But why should one man who is making his living give time and work freely to another man who is going to use them to increase his earnings? The professor’s salary, unadorned by inherited capital or wife’s dower or extra work, is not a living wage. He has to endure the annual appeal to humanitarian alumni to consider his needs, the reiterated disclosures of his poor economies and poorer expenditures. Why should he not take from a lawyer’s pocket, rather than from a “donor’s,” in return for desirable goods, money which will pay part of his expenses to the next meeting of that learned society before which he is to read an unmarketable paper?

Why, indeed? we seem to hear the college professor echo. There is no reason save that he likes learning without courtesy, as little as religion without charity—and courtesy, like charity, makes no exceptions.

Simplified Spelling

While Germany is fighting in disregard of International Law, and the allies fighting in its defence, it is a good time to impress a very powerful consideration for simplifying English spelling.

Probably the strongest reason why International Law has developed so much more slowly than law in the separate nations, has been the greater difficulty of the nations [443] understanding each other, and this is rapidly disappearing under increased facilities of intercommunication. Apparently there is no agency in sight which would promote this as much as an international language. Many considerations nominate English for the place: not only do more people speak it already than speak any other civilized language; but quite probably more people not born to it, speak it. Of all civilized languages, it is by far the simplest in its inflections and the richest in its vocabulary, and contains most words already contained in other languages. As a possible world-language, it far surpasses them all, except in the difficult inconsistencies of its spelling; and many devoted men, including virtually all the leading authorities, are now working hard to remedy these, perhaps their strongest motive being, as it is that of their most generous supporter, the interests of peace.

And now for a few words regarding some details of the simplification, which wil contain a few examples of mildly impruuvd forms, insted of the most outrageusly inconsistent of the uzual wons. Those we uze wil be inconsistent enuf in all consience.

Of experienses discuraging to those who favor the reform, the worst we hav encounterd has been in the letrs from members of the Simplified Spelling Board which hav bin evoked by our articls. Probably not one in five of those letrs has containd any new forms whatever, or at least enuf to be notist. If the anointed aposls of the reform don’t bac it up any betr than that, those who oppose it hav occasion to rejoise. On the other hand, the letrs from som of the faithful who really wer faithful, wer deliberately impruuvd until they wer very funny, tho very probably our grandchildren woud not find anything funny in them.

If the reform ever coms, it now seems most likely to com thru peepl getting so familiar with the milder impruuvd forms in correspondence, advertisments, and prospectuses, [444] that they wil be reddy to giv their children a consistent scooling.

In such ways, and thru argument and right reson, probably there may gro up, in time, approval enuf to start the better forms in som scools, and when that is don, the spred and establishment of such forms seems inevitabl.

But there wil be som difficultys that ar obvius even now. Inevitably at this stage, experts ar qarreling among themselvs, tho qarreling is hardly the term: for the differenses ar in the best of temper. It is a question whether enuf new forms ar yet agreed upon, even by those who attemt thurro and consistent reform, to make possibl a scool-bouk that woud succeed. The foregoing sentence givs som illustrations. The word we spel as thurro is spelt by the S. S. B. as thoro , and by the S. S. S. as thuro . The word we spel woud is spelt by the S. S. S. as wood , and the S. S. B. leavs it alone, after som tentativ votes that resulted in wud . Wood is excellent if identity with present practis wer desirabl, but if wood is right ( riit? ), how about food and door , and how, in any case, about using o to express a u sound? The S. S. S. setls part of the difficulty by keeping wood as now, and making food = fuud , and door = doer . The present doer (won who duz) it makes duer . With fuud and duer we agree; but with doer for door we don’t: we think door as it is, is as good as possibl, and think that coast , ghost , globe , lore , etc., would be vastly impruuvd if they wer made uniform and to agree with door, thus: coost , goost , gloob , loor .

It is a question wether reform had betr wait for a betr agrement of experts, or wether there is now enuf agrement to justify anybody’s going ahed with his share of it, and such personal extras as his consience reqires ( reqiirs ?) him to ad; and letting everybody’s personal extras fight ( fiit ?) it out to a survival of the fittest.

[445]

INDEX
THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW
Vol. II

[ Titles of Articles are printed in heavier type. The names of authors of articles are printed in italics. ]

• A., Miss, 160-162 .
• Academic Courtesy , 441 .
• Academic Donors, A Post Graduate School for , 213 .
• Academic Leadership , 132
• —uneasiness of mind among thoughtful men; its significance and character, 132-133
• —present small regard for scholarship, 134
• —education and society, 135
• —need of discipline; failure of language and science courses, 135-137
• —superior discipline of classical studies, 137
• —“efficiency,” 138
• —lack of academic solidarity, 138-139
• —value of common background of the classics for social efficiency, 140
• —Elyot’s Boke Named the Governour quoted, 141-142
• —the Magna Charta of education, 142-143
• —intellectual aristocracy the basis of English education, 143-145
• —the aristocratic principle embodied in Greek and Latin literature, 145-146
• —liberty and distinction, 147-148
• —real service of the classics in education, 148-149
• —duty of the college to mould character and foster leadership, 150-151 .
• Addams, Jane, 5-6 .
• Advertisement , 216 .
• Advertising, 246 .
• Agriculture , 240 .
• Allinson, Mrs. F. G. , ‘Academic Courtesy,’ 441 ;
• ‘The Muses on the Hearth,’ 189 .
• Americanism, 128 .
• Anarchists, 231 .
• Angell, Norman, 403 .
• Arbitration in New Zealand, 29 .
• Asquith, H. H., 402 .
• Associated Press , 230 .
• Austria. See War .
• B., Madame, 388-389 .
• Balkans. See War .
• Bartlett, Geo. C, 153-156 .
• Bax. See Morris and Bax .
• Beer, 259 .
• Belgium. See War .
• Belloc, Hilaire, 332 .
• Bergson, Henri, 184 .
• Bernhardi, General, 201 .
• Bismarck, 405 .
• Blues , On Having the , 301
• —gloomy persons, 301
• —superior persons and the blues, 301-302
• —a fallacy, 302-303
• —depression a result of weak nerves, 303
• —folly of fearing disaster, 303-304
• —blessings in disguise, 304-305
• —moral benefits of the Sicilian and Calabrian earthquakes, 305
• —worst blues, 306
• —uncertainty as to the goodness of nature, 306
• —borrowed troubles, how to avoid, 307-308
• —over-refinement in work, 308
• —value of sleep, 309
• —on “rising superior,” 309-311
• —keeping busy, 310
• —faith in immortality, 311-312
• —the Providence that helps, 312-313
• —have reasonable since life is reliable, 313
• —brooding on death, 314
• —the normal feeling toward it, 315
• —mourning customs, 316
• —proper preparation for the end, 316-317 .
• Bosnia and Herzegovina. See War .
• Brewster, William T. , ‘The Principles and Practice of Kicking,’ 318 .
• Bruce, H. Addington , ‘Our Debt to Psychical Research,’ 372 .
• Bumpus, H. C. , ‘Trade Unionism in a University,’ 347 .
• Burrows, C. W., 207 .
• Butler, Nicholas M., 365 .
• Cattell, J. M., 358 .
• Charcot, J. M., 389-390 .
• Chautauqua , Lecturing at , 116
• —personal point of view, 116
• —sudden summons, 116
• —arrival, reception and hotel, 117
• —early swim, Hall of Philosophy, lecture on Poe, 118
• —the settlement and its depressing effect, 119 [446]
• —relief map of Palestine, 120
• —various emotions, fame, embarrassment, 120-121
• —secret of the art of lecturing, 122
• —steamboat ride, Bemus Point and drinks, 123
• —Sunday and forbidden recreations, 124
• —life at the hotel, 125-126
• —Higgins Hall, 126
• —the point of conversion to a liking for the place, 126
• —listening to lectures, 127
• —pathetic pursuit of culture by the elderly, 127-128
• —Americanism of the people, 128
• —Chautauqua a genuine democracy, 128-129
• —economic conduct of the Institution, 129
• —teas and picnics, 130
• —a reception; pleasant memories, 131 .
• Chesterton, G. K., 319 , 332 .
• Chicago anarchists of 1886, 231-233 .
• Christian Science, 71 .
• Civil War, 411 .
• Classics in education, 132 .
• Colleges, 189 , 356 .
• Comer, Mrs., 273 .
• Commercialism in college professors, 441 .
• Competition, 246 .
• Conventionality, 280 .
• Corporations, 80 .
• Culture, 127 .
• Curse of Adam and the Curse of Eve, The , 266
• —some opinion on women and marriage, 266-268
• —drudgery in man’s life and woman’s, 268-269
• —woman’s freedom, 269-270
• —women and war, 270
• —differentiation of men and women the best product of civilization, 271
• —and more important to woman than to man, 272
• —chastity, 272
• —effect of Feminism on women, 273
• —the dress of men and women, 274 , 275
• —distinctive titles for married and single women, 276
• —married names of women, 276 , 277
• —sex war, 277 , 278
• —self-sacrifice in man and woman, 278
• —value of matrimony, 278
• —answer to Feminism, 278-279 .
• Death, 314 .
• Democracy in Education, 356 .
• Democratic individualism, 246-247 .
• Demos, 248 .
• Dickinson, Lowes, 384 , 430 .
• Disfranchisement of Property, The. See Property .
• Distribution, 245 .
• Domestic science, 189 .
• Dreams, 152 .
• Du Prel, 157 .
• Education, 134 , 189 .
• Education , Monarchy and Democracy in , 356
• —anomaly of educational monarchy in America and educational democracy in Europe, 356-357
• —difficulty of the discussion, 357-358
• —origin and growth of monarchy in colleges, 358-359
• —evils of this condition, 359-360
• —objections against faculty legislation, discussed, 360-363
• —what college professors wish, 363-365
• —relation of professors and president, 365-366
• —what might be learned from business methods, 367-368
• —presidential prerogative, 368
• —why professors are discouraged, 369-370
• —ground for hope, 371 .
• Electricity, 244 .
• Eliot, Chas. W., 139 , 369 .
• Eliot, George, as control, 168-174 .
• Ellis, Havelock, 184 , 185 .
• Elyot, Sir Thomas, 141 .
• En Casserole , 205 , 440 .
• England. See War .
• Essex Junction, 92 .
• Eugenics, 60 .
• Europe. See War .
• Experiment in Syndicalism, An. See Syndicalism .
• Farmers. See Agriculture .
• Femina , 271 .
• Feminism, 266 .
• Feudalism , A Stubborn Relic of , 21
• —tipping a survival of feudal relation, 21
• —Europe and America, 22
• —ideal and practical ethics, 22-23
• —is tipping almsgiving? 23
• —position of servants, 23-24
• —reasonableness of tipping, 24-25
• —rich and poor, 25
• —private families, 25
• —progress toward ideal condition, 26
• —moderate tips legitimate, 26-27
• —wider application, 27
• —impracticability of socialism, 27-28 .
• Fisher, Dorothy C. , ‘The Gentleman-Sportsman,’ 334 .
• Flatland , The Way to , 59
• —“Life Extension” movement, 59
• —university efficiency proposition and Harvard University, 59-60
• —eugenics movement, 60-61
• —prohibition, 61-62
• —flatness and superficiality of prevailing thought, 62-63
• —loss involved in applying factory methods to university life, 64-65
• —loss to human dignity and rights involved in the eugenics propaganda, 65-67 [447]
• —significance of the prohibition movement and its impairment of personal liberty, 67-69
• —“Life Extension” movement, 69-70
• —the body as a machine, 70
• —concern for health, 71
• —periodic examinations and liability to errors in diagnosis, 71-72
• —greatest objection an invasion of personal liberty, 72-73
• —character of these movements and what they indicate, 73-74 .
• Fly Time, Philosophy in , 209 .
• Foster, Chas. H., 152-156 , 159 , 160 .
• France. See War .
• Francis Joseph, 405 , 429 .
• Franklin, Fabian , ‘Some Free-Speech Delusions,’ 223 ;
• ‘The Way to Flatland,’ 59 .
• Freedom of the press, 223 , 230-231 , 233 .
• Free-Speech Delusions , Some , 223
• —new martyrdom of certain agitators, 223-224
• —factitious grievances of the I. W. W., 224-225
• —the hunger strike, 225-228
• —range and limits of freedom of speech, 226-227
• —true and false doctrine of free speech, 228-229
• —J. S. Mill quoted, 229
• —confused and shallow thinking on the subject, 228-230
• —illustrated by the notion that the newspapers suppress news, 230-231
• —illustrated also by the notion that the Chicago Anarchists of 1886 were unjustly convicted, 231-233
• —duty of intelligent men, 233-235
• —underlying reason for free speech, 235 .
• Galsworthy, John, 332 .
• Gary, Judge, 233 .
• Gentleman-Sportsman, The , 334
• —reasons for killing lions in Africa, 334
• —“unsportsmanlike” methods, 334-335
• —“giving the game a chance” compared to the cats playing with the mouse, 335-337
• —cat nature and man’s nature, 337-338
• —true principle as to destroying life, 339-340
• —place of sportsmanship and hunting in modern life, 340-342
• —better ways of securing excitement, 342-343
• —waste of physical courage, 343-344
• —candor needed, 344-345
• —danger to young minds in the hypocrisy of sport, 345-346 .
• Germany, 199 .
• See also War .
• Gerould, Katharine F. , ‘Tabu and Temperament,’ 280 .
• Gilman, Charlotte P., 270 , 271 .
• Goodrich-Freer, Miss, 381-384 .
• Gosson, Stephen, 327 , 328 .
• Greek and Latin, 132 .
• Grey, Sir Edward, 401 , 402 , 434 .
• Gurney, Edmund, 174 , 376 .
• Habay, Juliette, 270 .
• Hamilton, Clayton , ‘Railway Junctions,’ 91
• —‘Lecturing at Chautauqua,’ 116 .
• Hapsburgs, 405 .
• Harden, Maximilian, 202 .
• Harvard University, 60 .
• “Harvey,” as control, 160-162 .
• Hell, 314 .
• Hodgson, Dr. Richard, 164-167 , 170-174 .
• Hohenzollerns, 406 .
• Holland, Mrs., 167 .
• Holt, Emily, 385 .
• Holt, Henry , ‘Advertisement,’ 216 ;
• ‘Hypnotism, Telepathy, and Dreams,’ 152 ;
• ‘On Having the Blues,’ 301 ;
• ‘Philosophy in Fly Time,’ 209 ;
• ‘Simplified Spelling,’ 217 , 442 ;
• ‘Special to our Readers,’ 205 , 440 ;
• ‘A Stubborn Relic of Feudalism,’ 21 ;
• ‘A Suggestion Regarding Vacations,’ 216 ;
• ‘The War: By a man in the street,’ 429 .
• Howells, W. D., 105 .
• Hunger strike, 225-228 .
• Hunting, 334 .
• Hypnotism, 375 .
• Hypnotism, Telepathy and Dreams , 152
• —some of Foster’s dreams, 152-156
• —possession, 155
• —explanation attempted, 156-157
• —where do dreams come from? 157
• —the cosmic soul, 157-159
• —Wm. James on matter and mind, 158
• —a hint of the explanation of hypnotism, 159-160
• —Stillman’s story of Turner and Miss A. under “Harvey” as control, 160-162
• —telepathy and teloteropathy, 162-163
• —Mrs. Piper and some manifestations of free interflow of minds, 163-174
• —story of A. and B., Mrs. Piper’s sitting with George “Pelham” as control, 164-166
• —cross-correspondences, Mrs. Verrall and Mrs. Holland, 167
• —Piper sittings with George Eliot as control, 168-174
• —sensitives and their dream-life experiences, 174-175
• —what are personalities? 175-177
• —postcarnate life, 176
• —our dream life and its indication of the postcarnate, 177-181
• —the cosmic soul as an explanation of dreams, 181-183 [448]
• —Lombroso on dreams, 183
• —dream life as an evidence of immortality, 184
• —Ellis and Bergson quoted, 184-185
• —Nature and immortality, 185-186
• —new moral and intellectual interests, 186
• —new evidence for immortality, 186-188 .
• Hysteria, 389 .
• Immigration, 45 .
• Immortality, 184-188 , 311 .
• Industrial decentralization, 243-245 .
• I. W. W., 224 , 225 , 238 .
• International language, 443 .
• International law, 437-439 .
• Investments , Unsocial , 1
• —new social conscience in reality a class conscience, 1-2
• —excommunication of special property interests, 2-3
• —instances of such excommunication, 3-4
• —private ethical problems arising, 4-7
• —Jane Addams’s solution, 5-6
• —how we dispose of the saloon, 7-8
• —unfit tenements, 8
• —the loan shark, 9
• —mistaken method of suppressing anti-social interests, and consequences, 10-11
• —the principle of compensation, 12
• —its expediency, 13
• —superior claim of expediency, 14
• —public share in evils of anti-social interests, 14-15
• —growth and change of majority opinion as to illegitimate industries, 15
• —liquor question, cold storage, artificial butter as instances, 15-17
• —single tax argument, 17
• —legislative evils, 17
• —need of security of property, 18
• —relation of security of human life to security of property, 18-19
• —rights of labor, 19-20
• —justice of the principle of compensation, 20 .
• Is Socialism Coming? See Socialism .
• James, Wm., 157 , 158 , 174 .
• Janet, Pierre, 376 , 387-391 .
• Johnson, A. S. , ‘Setting Bounds to Laughter,’ 210 ;
• ‘Unsocial Investments,’ 1 ;
• ‘The War: By an economist,’ 411 .
• Jordan, David Starr , ‘The Land of the Sleepless Watchdog,’ 197 .
• Kaiser. See War .
• Keim, General, 200 .
• Kenton, Edna, 268 , 269 , 270 , 277 .
• Key, Ellen, 267 , 274 .
• Kicking , The Principles and Practice of , 318
• —kicking in football and in metaphor, 318-319
• —the pleasure of kicking, muck-raking, etc., 319-320
• —abuses of the pastime, 320
• —crude motives, 320-322
• —the object of the kick, 322
• —kicking at life, 323
• —futility of kicking at alleged tendencies, 323-324
• —the inapposite kick at institutions, 324-325
• —duty of frowning on specific abuses and impositions, 325-326
• —method and technic of the kick, 326
• —the reactionary kick, 327-330
• —ineffectiveness of a crude technic, 330-331
• —some skilful kickers named, 331-332
• —sketch of the ideal kicker, 332-333 .
• Kipling, R., 278-279 .
• Labor. See New Zealand .
• Labor: “True Demand” and Immigrant Supply , 45
• —economic motives for immigration in the past, 45-47
• —temporary immigrants, 47-48
• —Greeks, 48
• —conclusion of the Immigration Commission, 48
• —misconception in the argument for the indispensability of immigrants, 49
• —restriction argument; wage figures, unemployment, casual labor, 49-50
• —“social surplus” and its bearing on future policy, 51-52
• —contract-labor exclusion, 52-53
• —bureaus for ascertaining the “true demand,” 53
• —embargo, sliding scale, and Burnett Bill, 54
• —determining real economic need, 54
• —declarations of intention to migrate, 55
• —assimilation, 55-56
• —a national question, 56
• —international aspect, 57
• —wider scope, 57-58 .
• Land of the morning, 413 , 415 , 416 .
• Land of the Sleepless Watchdog, The , 197
• —the watchdog in the southwestern United States, 197-198
• —a parable of Europe, 198-199
• —Prof. Nippold, 198-199
• —Gen. Keim, 200
• —Gen. Bernhardi, 201
• —Pangermanism, 201
• —Harden, 202
• —Germany and the war spirit, 202-203
• —Europe not in favor of war, 203-204 .
• Larkinism, 238 .
• Laughter, Setting Bounds to , 210 .
• Lecturing at Chautauqua. See Chautauqua .
• Legislatures, 17 , 20 .
• Léontine, 388-389 .
• “Life Extension” movement, 59 .
• Liquor question, 3 , 7 , 12 .
• See also Prohibition.
• Lodge, Sir Oliver, 174 . [449]
• Lombroso, 183 .
• Lusk, Hugh H. , ‘An Experiment in Syndicalism,’ 29 .
• McCombs, Wm. F., 135 , 140 .
• Madison, Wisconsin, 347 .
• Malet, Lucas, 266 , 274 .
• Manners and morals, 284 , 286 .
• Marx, Karl, 236 .
• Mather, F. J., Jr. , ‘Minor Uses of the Middling Rich,’ 104 ;
• ‘A Post Graduate School for Academic Donors,’ 213 ;
• ‘The War: By a historian,’ 392 .
• Means, David McGregor , ‘The Disfranchisement of Property,’ 75 .
• Mexico, 209 , 409 , 419 , 424 , 425 , 427 , 436 .
• Mill, J. S., quoted, 229 .
• Minor Uses of the Middling Rich. See Rich .
• Monarchy and Democracy in Education. See Education .
• More, Paul Elmer , ‘Academic Leadership,’ 132 .
• Morgenland, 413 , 415 , 416 .
• Morris and Bax , 274 .
• Münsterberg, Hugo, 373 .
• Muses on the Hearth, The , 189
• —the home, 189
• —women’s colleges and the teaching of domestic science, 189-190
• —education of girls, 190
• —how to learn housekeeping, 191
• —its larger meaning, 191-192
• —college the place to form habits of mental discipline, 192-193
• —human life back of vocations, 193
• —wider vision, and deeper love of learning needed for women, 194-195 .
• Myers, F. W. H., 157 , 174 .
• Nation , New York, 137 , 356 , 430 .
• New Zealand , industrial strike, 29 .
• Newbold, Prof. J. R., 168 .
• Newspapers , 112 , 230 , 248 .
• Nippold, Prof., 198-199 .
• Noise, 250 .
• Norton, C. E., 301 .
• On Having the Blues. See Blues .
• Our Debt to Psychical Research. See Psychical Research .
• Peace, 407 , 409 , 440 .
• “Pelham,” George, 164-167 .
• Pessimism, 263 .
• Phelps, E. J., 92 .
• Philosophy in Fly Time , 209 .
• Piddington, Mr., 167 .
• Piper, Mrs., 163-174 .
• Podmore, Frank, 375 .
• Post Graduate School for Academic Donors, A , 213 .
• Powers, F. P. , ‘The Curse of Adam and the Curse of Eve,’ 266 .
• Poynings, Blanche, 384-386 .
• Press. See Associated Press ; Newspapers .
• Principles and Practice of Kicking, The. See Kicking .
• Prohibition, 61 .
• Property , The Disfranchisement of , 75
• —statistics, 75
• —savings banks deposits, 76
• —life insurance payments, 77
• —pensions, 78
• —waste in government expenses, 78-79
• —Macaulay cited, confidence in the State, 79
• —increasing taxes, 79-80
• —corporate wealth in the United States, 80-81
• —its disfranchisement, 81-82
• —divorce of corporate ownership and management, 82-83
• —small corporations, 84
• —manhood suffrage and property suffrage, 85
• —delegated legislation, 86
• —power of legislatures over property, 86-87
• —corporate influence in legislatures, 87
• —present relation of legislatures and corporation managers, 88
• —hostility to corporations and its effect on small businesses, 89
• —the suffering of the country from attack on property, 89-90 .
• Psychical Research , Our Debt to , 372
• —attitude toward the occult of scientific men, 372-373
• —of the public, 373
• —psychology’s debt to psychical research, 374
• —Frank Podmore, 375
• —aim and spirit of the Society for Psychical Research, 375
• —hypnotism and its value, 375-376
• —work of Janet and Gurney, 376-377
• —subconscious ideas, 377
• —Gurney’s experiments and subconscious mentation, 378-380
• —subconscious perception and subconscious memory, 381
• —crystal gazing, Mrs. Goodrich-Freer’s demonstration of memory registration of subconscious percepts, 381-384
• —dissociated subconscious memories and Lowes Dickinson, 384-386
• —some of the first-fruits of systematic psychical research, 386
• —practical value of automatic writing, crystal-gazing and hypnotism, 387
• —French savants, 387
• —Pierre Janet’s experiments in hypnotic telepathy and their bearing on hysteria and other nervous diseases, 387-391 . [450]
• Psychology, 394 .
• Psychotherapy, 391 .
• Publishers, 206 .
• Railway Junctions , 91
• —fine phrase of R. L. Stevenson, 91
• —Essex Junction and E. J. Phelps’s verses, 92
• —pleasure to be got from places, 93
• —picture of possible pleasure at Essex Junction, 93-94
• —enjoying railway junctions, 94-95
• —a Bavarian junction near Rothenburg, 95-96
• —Bobadilla, Spain, 96-97
• —Dol, France, 97-98
• —Nevers and Pyrgos, 98-99
• —true enjoyment of travel, 99-100
• —American haste, 100
• —anecdote of R. L. Stevenson, 101
• —Thos. Browne, quoted, 101
• —enjoyment of the present, 102
• —anecdote of a wait at Basel, 102
• —possibilities of adventure in the dullest places, 103 .
• Republic of Megaphon, The (the evils of the modern newspaper shown by a Socratic dialogue), 248
• —its apparent value and trifling cost, 249-251
• —Nature of its news, 252
• —its low price necessitates profits from advertising, 254
• —its lowering of quality, 254-255
• —its falsification of truth, 256
• —its willingness to sell itself, 257
• —its low taste and vulgar language, 257
• —its vulgar advertising of worthless goods, 258
• —its vulgarization of art, 258
• —its immoral advertising, 259
• —its flattery of the people and faultfinding with the few, 260
• —its tendency to set class against class, 261
• —its teaching of skepticism in religion, of baseness in leaders, and selfishness in all men and consequent injury to the state, 262-263
• —how the truth may be told and how the newspapers tell it, 264-265 .
• Rhodes, Cecil, 424 , 425 .
• Rich , Minor Uses of the Middling , 104
• —charges general and specific against the rich, 104
• —historic view of wealth, 105
• —newly rich, multimillionaires, and middling rich, 105-106
• —character of the middling rich, 107
• —honesty and virtue implied in moderate wealth, 108
• —discipline, efficiency and good manners of the middling rich, 109
• —strong position in comparison with the capitalist and the wage-earner, 110
• —usefulness of this class in conservation of civilization, 111
• —usefulness on the lighter side of life, 112
• —newspapers, 112-113
• —poverty likely to decrease, 113
• —socialism, personality of wealth, 113-114
• —great fortunes, 114
• —prospects, 115 .
• Rogers, Anna A., 267 , 277 .
• Russell, Chas. Edw., 232 .
• Russia. See War .
• Schreiner, Olive, 269 , 270 , 271 .
• Servia. See War .
• Setting Bounds to Laughter , 210 .
• Sex discussion, 294 .
• Shaw, Geo. B., 267 , 332 .
• Showerman, Grant , ‘The Republic of Megaphon,’ 248 .
• Sill, E. R., 306 .
• Simplified Spelling , 217 , 442 .
• Single Tax, 4 , 17 .
• Slavs. See War .
• Slosson, Preston W. , ‘Is Socialism Coming?’ 236 .
• Smith, G. A., 379 .
• Social justice, 1 , 14 .
• Socialism , 27 , 113 , 114 .
• Socialism, Is [it] Coming? 236
• —Karl Marx and his method of realizing democracy, 236-237
• —the present position of Socialism, 237-238
• —factors that make for concentration in production, 238-239
• —advantages of the rich industry, 239-240
• —objections to the Socialist’s contention, 240-245
• —the tendency in agriculture toward small holdings, 240-242
• —the future of agriculture, 242-243
• —decentralizing factors in industry, 243-245
• —electricity, 244
• —skilled labor, 245
• —the problem of distribution, 245-246
• —rational competition, 246
• —picture of a democratic individualism in the future, 246-247 .
• Socratic dialogue on newspapers, 248 .
• Some Free-Speech Delusions. See Free-Speech Delusions .
• Spanish-American War, 409 .
• Special to our Readers , 205 , 440 .
• Spelling. See Simplified Spelling .
• Sportsmanship, 334 .
• Stevenson, R. L., 91 , 101 .
• Stillman, W. J., 160-162 .
• Strikes. New Zealand, 29 ;
• Wisconsin University, 347 .
• Stubborn Relic of Feudalism, A. See Feudalism .
• Suggestion Regarding Vacations, A , 216 .
• Syndicalism , 238 . [451]
• Syndicalism, An Experiment in , 29
• —New Zealand’s Court of Arbitration, 29
• —its success, 30
• —Australian antagonism, 31
• —Waihi gold mine strike and resulting conditions, 31-32
• —failure of Federation of Labor, 33
• —introduction of Syndicalist methods, 33-34
• —new unions to undermine the old, 35-36
• —strike of Waterside Workers and Seamens Unions, 37-38
• —apparent success, 39
• —public interference and its methods, 39-41
• —new unions to defeat the syndicalists, 42
• —failure of federationists, 42
• —lesson for America, 43
• —reasons for the result, 43-44 .
• Tabu and Temperament , 280
• —meaning of temperament, 280
• —the revolt against convention, 281
• —primitive conventionality, 282
• —need and advantages of convention, 283
• —manners and morals, 284
• —originality, 285
• —essence of good manners, 286
• —charm, 286-292
• —need of some social code, 288-289
• —on being shocked, 289-290
• —requisites for being charming, 290-291
• —the unreliability of temperament, 291
• —unconventionality and the moral order, 292
• —the free discussion of vice, 293
• —advantage of avoiding sex discussion, 294
• —brutality and danger of discussing questionable topics, 294-297
• —the rightness of tabu , 298
• —absurd position of present-day iconoclasts, 299
• —need of self-control, 299-300 .
• Tarbell, Ida M., 266 , 268 , 277 .
• Telepathy, 152 .
• Teloteropathy, 163 , 164 .
• Temperament, 280 .
• Thring, Edw., 363 .
• Tipping, 21 .
• Tobacco, 259 .
• Todd, Arthur J. , ‘Labor: “True Demand” and Immigrant Supply,’ 45 .
• Trade Unionism in a University , 347
• —relation of the State of Wisconsin to the University of Wisconsin, 347
• —character of the University, 348
• —the student legislative body, 348-349
• —student labor trouble and threatened strike, 349-353
• —significance of the occurrence as to university development and results, 353-355 .
• Triple Entente, 404 , 406 , 407 .
• Universities, 356 .
• University efficiency, 59 .
• Unpopular Review , 155 , 206 .
• Unsocial Investments. See Investments .
• Vacations, A Suggestion Regarding , 216 .
• Verrall, Mrs., 167 .
• Victorian literature, 319 .
• Virginia, University of, 356 .
• Waihi gold mine strike, 31 .
• War, in Europe not possible, 197 ;
• woman and, 270 .
• War , The : By a historian , 392
• —the first shock, 392
• —immediate causes, 393-395
• —war parties, 395-396
• —Russia’s position ambiguous, 396-398
• —Austria’s blunder, 398
• —Germany’s conduct, 399-400
• —Germany’s error, 400
• —her statements, 401
• —France, 401
• —England’s part, 401-403
• —Germany and England, 402
• —Belgium, 402
• —the rights of neutrals, 403
• —police aspect of the war, 403
• —possibilities, 404
• —central European empire in history, 405
• —Austria, Germany, and the Hapsburg and Hohenzollern dynasties, 405-406
• —the transformation of German temper, 406
• —further possibilities, 406-407
• —the Kaiser, 407
• —possibilities as to the cause of peace, 407-410
• —war and peace as such, 408-410
• —neutralization, 409
• —present peril, 410 .
• War, The : By an economist , 411
• —usual course of war histories, 411-412
• —underlying forces of the present war, 413
• —colonial possessions, 413
• —the Morgenland dream, 413-416
• —Germany’s population and welfare, 415-416
• —the delusion of colonial trade, 417-418
• —concessionary interests, 418-419
• —Pearson and Waters-Pierce as illustration, 419
• —relation of capital proper and speculative enterprise, 420-422
• —speculative enterprise in England, Germany and the United States, 422-424
• —relation of patriotism to speculative enterprise, 424-427
• —a fruitful source of international strife, 427-428
• —the concession and the closed trade, 428
• —some predictions, 428 .
• War, The : By a man in the street , 429
• —old contest of the savage and the civilized in every man, 429
• —responsibility for the present war, 430 [452]
• —change in the character of the German nation, 431-432
• —the Kaiser, 431-432
• —the higher Germany and the lower, 432-433
• —survival of old ideas, 433
• —the Kaiser’s responsibility, 434
• —his conduct, 434-435
• —Germany’s moral degradation, 435
• —the outcome, 436
• —absurd side, 436-437
• —international code of honor, 437-438
• —place of International Law, 437-439 .
• Way to Flatland, The. See Flatland .
• Wealth, 104 .
• Webster, Arthur G., 137 .
• Wells, H. G., 332 .
• West, Prof., 137 .
• Wilson, Woodrow, 409 .
• Wisconsin, University strike, 347 .
• Women, 266 ;
• education, 189 .