THE ARENA.

EDITED BY B. O. FLOWER.

VOL. IV.

PUBLISHED BY
THE ARENA PUBLISHING CO.,
BOSTON, MASS.

1891.

CONTENTS.

ILLUSTRATIONS.

• June, 1891
  • B. O. Flower
  • Julius Chambers
  • Out of Work
  • Invalid in Chair
  • Cellarway Leading to Under-Ground Apartments
  • Sick Man in Under-Ground Apartment
  • Constance and Maggie
  • Exterior of a North End Tenement House
  • Under-Ground Tenement with Two Beds
  • Widow and two Children in Under-Ground Tenement
  • Portuguese Widow in Attic
  • Portuguese Widow and Three Children
  • The Victoria Square Apartment House, Liverpool, Eng.
  • Rev. T. Ernest Allen
• July, 1891
  • Oliver Wendell Holmes
• August, 1891
  • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
  • Amelia B. Edwards
• September, 1891
  • Rev. Geo. C. Lorimer
  • Illustrations of “Fashion’s Slaves”
  • Prominent Actresses in Costume
  • Kuma Oishi
• October, 1891
  • James Russell Lowell
  • Mr. and Mrs. James A. Herne
  • Mr. and Mrs. James A. Herne Illustrated in Character
• November, 1891
  • Hon. Henry Cabot Lodge
  • Noted Members of the South Dakota Divorce Colony

1

THE ARENA.

No. XIX.

JUNE, 1891.

THE NEW COLUMBUS.

BY JULIAN HAWTHORNE.

History repeats itself, but on new planes. Often, a symbol
appears in one age, and the spirit of which it is the expression
is revealed in another. Each answers the need of
its own time. From the creative standpoint, which is out
of time, spirit and symbol are one; but to us, who see things
successively, they seem as prior and posterior.

If this be so, it should be possible for a thoughtful and believing
mind in some measure to forecast the future from the
record of the past. No doubt, past and present contain the
germs of all that is to be, were the analyst omniscient. But
it needs not omniscience roughly to body-forth the contours
of coming events. It is done daily, on a smaller or larger
scale, with more or less plausibility. All theories are
grounded in this principle. And it is noticeable that, at
this moment, such tentative prophesies are more than frequent,
and more comprehensive than usual in their scope.

The condition of mankind, during the last quarter of the
fifteenth century, bore some curious analogies to its state at
present. A certain stage or epoch of human life seemed to
have run its course and come to a stop. The impulses which
had started it were exhausted. In the political field, feudalism,
originally beneficent, had become tyrannous and stifling;
and monarchy, at first an austere necessity, had grown
to be, beyond measure, arrogant, selfish, and luxurious. In
science, the old methods had proved themselves puerile and
inefficient, and the leading scientists were magicians and
2witches; in literature, no poet had arisen worthy to strike
the lyre that Chaucer tuned to music. As for religion, the
corruptions of the papacy, and the corresponding degradation
of the monasteries and of the priesthood generally, had
brought it down from a region of sublime and self-abnegating
faith, to a commodity for raising money, and a cloak to
hide profligacy. Martin Luther was still in the womb of
the future; and so were Shakespeare, Bacon, Galileo, Descartes,
and Oliver Cromwell. Pessimists were declaring,
according to their invariable custom, that what was bad
would get worse, and that what was good would disappear.
But there were, scattered here and there throughout Christendom,
a number of men of the profounder, optimistic tendency,
who saw in existing abuses but the misuse or
misapprehension of elements intrinsically good; who knew
that evils bear in themselves the seeds of their own extirpation;
and who believed that Providence, far from having
failed in its design to secure the ultimate happiness of the
human race, was bringing the old order of things to a close
in order to provide place for something new and higher.

But that obstacle in the way of improvement which was
apparently the most immovable, was the geographical one.
The habitable earth was used up. Outside of Europe there
was nothing, save inaccessible wilderness, and barren, boundless
seas. There was nothing for the mass of men to do, and
yet their energy and desire were as great as ever; there was
nowhere for them to go, and yet they were steadily increasing
in numbers. The Crusades had amused them for a
while, but they were done with; the plague had thinned
them out, and war had helped the plague; but the birth-rate
was more than a match for both. A new planet, with all the
fresh interests and possibilities which that would involve,
seemed absolutely necessary. But who should erect a ladder
to the stars, or draw them down from the sky within man’s
reach? The one indispensable thing was also the one thing
impossible.

If, next year, we were to learn that some miraculous Ericsson
or Edison had established a practicable route to the
planet Mars, and that this neighbor of ours in the solar system
was found to be replete with all the things that we most
want and can least easily get,—were such news to reach us,
we might comprehend the sensation created in the Europe of
31492, four centuries ago, when it received the information
that a certain Christopher Columbus had discovered a brand
new continent, overflowing with gold and jewels, on the other
side of the Atlantic. The impossible had happened. Our
globe was not the petty sphere that it had been assumed to
be. There was room in it for everybody, and a fortune for
the picking up. And all the world, with Spain in the van,
prepared to move on El Dorado. A whiff of the fresh Western
air blew in all nostrils, and re-animated the moribund
body of civilization. The stimulus of Columbus’ achievement
was felt in every condition of human life and phase of
human activity. Mankind once more saw a future, and
bound up its loins to take advantage of it. Literature felt
the electric touch, and blossomed in the unmatched geniuses
of the Elizabethan age. Science ceased to reason à priori,
and began to investigate and classify facts. Human liberty
began to be conscious of thews and sinews, soon to be tested
in the struggle of the Netherlands against Philip II. of
Spain, and, later, in that of the people of England against
their own Charles Stuart. Religion was heard to mutter
something about the rights of private conscience, and anon
the muttering took form in the heroic protest of the man of
Eisleben. It was like the awakening in the palace of the
Sleeping Beauty, in the fairy-tale. Columbus had kissed
the lips of the Princess America, and at once the long-pent
stream of old-world life dashed onward like a cataract.

A new world! Four hundred years have passed, and the
New World is less a novelty than it was. We have begun
to suspect that no given number of square miles of land, no
eloquence and sagacity of paper preambles and declarations,
no swiftness of travel nor instantaneousness of communication,
no invincibility of ironclads nor refinement of society,
no logic in religion, no gospel of political economy,—none
of these and a hundred other things will read us the Riddle
of the Sphinx. Non tali auxilio, nec defensoribus istis! The
elements of true life lie deeper and are simpler. Once more,
it seems, we have reached the limits of a dispensation, and
are halted by a blank wall. There is no visible way over
it, nor around it. We cannot stand still; still less can we
turn back. What is to happen? What happens when an
irresistible force encounters an impenetrable barrier?

That was the question asked in Columbus’ day; and he
4found an answer to it. Are we to expect the appearance of
a new Columbus to answer it again? To unimaginative
minds it looks as if there were no career for a new Columbus.
In the first place, population is increasing so fast that
soon even the steppes of Russia and the western American
plains will be overcrowded. Again, land, and the control
of industries, are falling into the possession of a comparative
handful of persons, to whom the rest of the population must
inevitably become subject; or, should the latter rebel, the
ensuing period of chaos would be followed, at best, by a
return of the old conditions. Religion is a lifeless letter, a
school of good-breeding, a philosophical amusement; the old
unreasoning faith that moved mountains can never revive.
Science advances with ever more and yet more caution, but
each new step only confirms the conviction that the really
commanding secrets of existence will forever elude discovery.
Literature, rendered uncreative by the scientific influence,
has fallen to refining upon itself, and photographing a
narrow conception of facts. The exhausting heats of Equatorial
Africa, and the paralyzing cold of the Poles, forbid
the hope of successful colonization of those regions. Social
life is an elaborate apeing of behavior which has no root in
the real impulses of the human heart; its true underlying
spirit is made up of hatred, covetousness, and self-indulgence.
There are no illusions left to us, no high, inspiring
sentiment. We have reached our limit, and the best thing
to be hoped for now is some vast cataclysmal event, which,
by destroying us out-of-hand, may save us the slow misery
of extinction by disease, despair, and the enmity of every
man against every other. What Columbus can help us out
of such a predicament?

Such is the refrain of the nineteenth century pessimist.
But, as before, the sprouting of new thought and belief is
visible to the attentive eye all over the surface of the sordid
field of a decaying civilization. The time has come when
the spirit of Columbus’ symbol shall avouch itself, vindicating
the patient purpose of Him who brings the flower
from the seed. Great discoveries come when they are
needed; never too early nor too late. When nothing else
will serve the turn, then, and not till then, the rock opens,
and the spring gushes forth. Who that has considered the
philosophy of the infinitely great and of the infinitely minute
5can doubt the inexhaustibleness of nature? And what is
nature but the characteristic echo, in sense, of the spirit of
man?

Even on the material plane, there are numberless opportunities
for the new Columbus. Ever and anon a canard
appears in a newspaper, or a romance is published, reporting
or describing some imaginary invention which is to revolutionize
the economical situation. The problem of air-navigation
is among the more familiar of these suggestions,
though by no means the most important of them. No doubt
we shall fly before long, but that mode of travel will be,
after all, nothing more than an improvement upon existing
means of intercommunication. After the principle has been
generally adopted, and the novelty has worn off, we shall find
ourselves not much better, nor much worse off than we were
before. Flying will be but another illustration of the truth
that competition is only intensified by the perfecting of its
instruments. Men will still be poor and rich, happy and
unhappy, as formerly. If I can go from New York to London
in a day, instead of in a week, so also can those against
whom I am competing. The idea that there is any real gain
of time is an illusion; the day will still contain its four-and-twenty
hours, and I shall, as before, sleep so many, play so
many, and work so many. Relatively, my state will be unchanged.

More promising is the idea of the transformation of matter.
Science is now nearly ready to affirm that substances of all
kinds are specific conditions of etheric vortices. Vibration
is the law of existence, and if we could control vibrations,
we could create substances, either directly from the etheric
base, or, mediately, by inducing the atoms of any given substance
so to modify their mutual arrangement, or characteristic
vibration, as to produce another substance. It is evident
that if this feat is ever performed, it must be by some process
of elemental simplicity, readily available for every tyro. A
prophet has arisen, during these latter days, in Philadelphia,
who somewhat obscurely professes to be on the track of
this discovery. He is commonly regarded as a charlatan;
but men cognizant of the latest advances of science admit
themselves unable to explain upon any known principles the
effects he produces. It need not be pointed out that if Mr.
Keely, or any one else, has found a way to metamorphose
6one substance into another, the consequences to the world
must be profound. Labor for one’s daily bread will be a
thing of the past, when bread may be made out of stones by
the mere setting-up of a particular vibration. The race for
wealth will cease, when every one is equally able to command
all the resources of the globe. The whole point of
view regarding the material aspects of life will be vitally
altered; leisure (so far as necessary physical effort is concerned)
will inevitably be universal. For when we consider
what have been the true motives of civilization and its
appurtenances during the greater part of the historical
period, we find it to be the desire to better our physical condition.
It is commerce that has built cities, made railroads,
laws, and wars, maintained the boundaries of nations, and
kept up the human contact which we are accustomed to call
society. When commerce ceases—as it will cease, when
there is no longer any reason for its existence—all the
results of it that we have mentioned will cease also. In
other words, civilization and society, as we now know them,
will disappear. Human beings will stay where they are
born, and live as the birds do. There will be no work
except creative or artistic work, done for the mere pleasure
of the doing, voluntarily. Society will no longer be based
upon mutual rivalries and the gain of personal advantage.
Science will not be pursued on its present lines, or for its
present ends; for when the human race has attained leisure
and the gratification of its material wants, it would have no
motives for further merely physical investigation.

This would seem to involve a new kind of barbarism.
And so, no doubt, it would, were the discoveries of our Columbus
to be limited to the material plane. But it is far more
probable that material transubstantiation will be merely the
corollary or accompaniment of an infinitely more important
revelation and expansion in the spiritual sphere. What we
are to expect is an awakening of the soul; the re-discovery and
re-habilitation of the genuine and indestructible religious instinct.
Such a religious revival will be something very
different from what we have hitherto known under that
name. It will be a spontaneous and joyful realization by
the soul of its vital relations with its Creator. Ecclesiastical
forms and dogmas will vanish, and nature will be recognized
as a language whereby God converses with man. The
7interpretation of this language, based as it is upon an eternal
and living symbolism, containing infinite depths beyond
depths of meaning, will be a sufficient study and employment
for mankind forever. Art will receive an inconceivable
stimulus, from the recognition of its true significance
as a re-humanization of nature, and from the perception of
its scope and possibilities. Science will become, in truth, the
handmaid of religion, in that it will be devoted to reporting
the physical analogies of spiritual truths, and following
them out in their subtler details. Hitherto, the progress of
science has been slow, and subject to constant error and
revision, because it would not accept the inevitable dependence
of body on soul, as of effect on cause. But as soon as
physical research begins to go hand-in-hand with moral or
psychical, it will advance with a rapidity hitherto unimagined,
each assisting and classifying the other. The study of
human nature will give direction to the study of the nature
that is not human; and the latter will illustrate and confirm
the conclusions of the former. More than half the difficulties
of science as now practised is due to ignorance of what
to look for; but when it can refer at each step to the truths
of the mind and heart, this obstacle will disappear, and certainty
take the place of experiment.

The attitude of men towards one another will undergo a
corresponding change. It is already become evident that
selfishness is a colossal failure. Viewed as to its logical
results, it requires that each individual should possess all
things and all power. Hostile collision thus becomes inevitable,
and more is lost by it than can ever be gained.
Recent social theorists propose a universal co-operation, to
save the waste of personal competition. But competition
is a wholesome and vital law; it is only the direction of
it that requires alteration. When the cessation of working
for one’s livelihood takes place, human energy and love of
production will not cease with it, but will persist, and must
find their channels. But competition to outdo each in the
service of all is free from collisions, and its range is limitless.
Not to support life, but to make life more lovely, will
be the effort; and not to make it more lovely for one’s self,
but for one’s neighbor. Nor is this all. The love of the
neighbor will be a true act of Divine worship, since it will
then be acknowledged that mankind, though multiplied to
8human sense, is in essence one; and that in that universal
one, which can have no self-consciousness, God is present
or incarnate. The divine humanity is the only real and
possible object of mortal adoration, and no genuine sentiment
of human brotherhood is conceivable apart from its
recognition. But, with it, the stature of our common manhood
will grow towards the celestial.

Obviously, with thoughts and pursuits of this calibre to
engage our attention, we shall be very far from regretting
those which harass and enslave us to-day. Leaving out of
account the extension of psychical faculties, which will
enable the antipodes to commune together at will, and even
give us the means of conversing with the inhabitants of
other planets, and which will so simplify and deepen language
that audible speech, other than the musical sounds
indicative of emotion, will be regarded as a comic and
clumsy archaism,—apart from all this, the fathomless riches
of wisdom to be gathered from the commonest daily objects
and outwardly most trivial occurrences, will put an end to
all craving for merely physical change of place and excitement.
Gradually the human race will become stationary,
each family occupying its own place, and living in patriarchal
simplicity, though endowed with power and wisdom
that we should now consider god-like. The sons and
daughters will go forth whither youthful love calls them;
but, with the perfecting of society, those whose spiritual
sympathies are closest will never be spatially remote; lovers
will not then, as now, seek one another in the ends of the
earth, and probably miss one another after all. Each
member of the great community will spontaneously enlist
himself in the service of that use which he is best qualified
to promote; and, as in the human body, all the various
parts, in fulfilling their function, will serve one another and
the whole.

Perhaps the most legitimately interesting phase of this
speculation relates to the future of these qualities and instincts
in human nature which we now call evil and vicious.
Since these qualities are innate, they can never be eradicated,
nor even modified in intensity or activity. They
belong with us, nay, they are all there is of us, and with
their disappearance, we ourselves should disappear. Are
we, then, to be wicked forever? Hardly so; but, on the
9contrary, what we have known as wickedness will show
itself to be the only possible basis and energy of goodness.
These tremendous appetites and passions of ours were not
given us to be extinguished, but to be applied aright.

They are like fire, which is the chief of destroyers when it
escapes bounds, or is misused; but, in its right place and
function, is among the most indispensable of blessings. But
to enlarge upon this thought would carry us too far from the
immediate topic; nor is it desirable to follow with the
feeble flight of our imagination the heaven-embracing orbit
of this theme. A hint is all that can be given, which each
must follow out for himself. We have only attempted to
indicate what regions await the genius of the new Columbus;
nor does the conjecture seem too bold that perhaps they are
not so distant from us in time as they appear to be in
quality. They are with us now, if we would but know it.

10

THE UNKNOWN.

PART I.

BY CAMILLE FLAMMARION.

Translated from the author’s manuscript, by G. A. H. Meyer
and J. H. Wiggin.

The idea expressed in this distich is so self-evident that
we might almost characterize it as trite. Yet the history of
every science marks many eminent men, of superior intelligence,
who have been arrested in the way of progress by a
wholly contrary opinion, and have very innocently supposed
that science had uttered to them her last word. In astronomy,
in physics, in chemistry, in optics, in natural history, in
physiology, in anatomy, in medicine, in botany, in geology,
in all branches of human knowledge, it would be easy to fill
several pages with the names of celebrated men who believed
science would never pass the limits reached in their own
time, and that nothing remained to be discovered thereafter.
In the army of wise men now living it would not be difficult
to name many distinguished scholars who imagine that, in
the spheres whereof they are masters, it is needless to search
for anything new.

It may be unbecoming to talk about one’s self, but as, on
the one side, some have done me the honor to ask what I
think of certain problems,—while, on the other side, I have
been more than once accused of busying myself, in a rather
unscientific way, with certain vague investigations,—I will
begin by acknowledging that the maxim contained in the two
verses of my motto has been the conviction of my whole
life; and if, from my callow youth until this very day, I
have been interested in the study of phenomena pertaining
11to the domain of inquiries called occult, such as magnetism,
spiritualism, hypnotism, telepathy, ghost-seeing, it is because
I believe we know next to nothing of what may be
known, and that nearly everything still remains to be apprehended;
for I believe the thirst for knowledge is one of our
best faculties, the one most prolific, without which we should
still be dwelling in an Age of Stone, inasmuch as it is our
right, if not our duty, to seek the truth by all the methods
accessible to our intellectual powers.

It is for this reason that I published among other things, in
the course of the year 1865,—now a quarter-century past,—a
treatise entitled Unknown Natural Forces, and touching
certain questions analogous to those which are to occupy our
attention in this paper; and so I ask my readers to note the
following quotations therefrom, as an introduction to our
present investigation:

13I beg the reader to excuse the length of this citation; but
it seems to me to serve so naturally as an introduction to
this present inquiry that even to-day, after a lapse of a quarter-century,
I really see no important changes to be made in this
old declaration, except to add that it now appears to me to have
been rather audacious on the part of a man so very young,
and that it forthwith won him many hearty enemies among
the elect of science.

The experimental method is bound to conquer here, as
everywhere. Let us, then, without partisanship, study the
question under its divers aspects.

1

“The immortality of the soul is a matter so important,”
writes Pascal, “that one must have lost all moral sensibility
if he remains indifferent as to its nature.”

Why should we give up the hope of ever arriving at a knowledge
of the nature of the thinking principle which animates us,
and of ascertaining whether or not it outlives the destruction
of the body? It must be admitted that hitherto science has
taught us nothing on this fundamental subject. Is this any
reason for renouncing the study of the problem? On this,
as on many other points, we are not of the same mind as
those material Positivists who declare themselves satisfied
with not knowing anything. We think, on the contrary,
that we should attack the problem by all methods, and not
neglect a single hint which may aid the solution.

Personally, I declare that I have not yet discovered for
myself one fact which proves with certainty the existence
of soul as separate from body. Otherwise, however sublime
astronomical science may be,—though it stand at the
head of human researches, as the first, the most important,
and the most widespread of all sciences,—I avow that, if the
inductive method had permitted me to penetrate secrets of
existence, I should inevitably have abandoned the science of
the firmament, for that which would have dethroned the
other through its prime and unequalled importance; since it
would be superfluous for us to evade the fact that the
gravest and most interesting of all questions, to ourselves, is
that of our continuous personal existence. The existence of
God, of the entire universe, touches us far less intimately.
If we ever cease to live (for what is the span of a human life
14in the light of eternity!) it is a matter of utter indifference
to us whether other things exist or not. Doubtless this
reasoning is severely egotistic! Ah, how can it be otherwise?

If we have no clear and irrefutable proofs, we have still
the aid of a goodly number of observations, establishing the
conclusion that we are compassed about by a set of phenomena,
and by powers differing from the physical order
commonly observed day by day; and these phenomena urge
us to pursue every line of investigation, having for its end a
psychical acquaintance with human nature.

Let us begin at the beginning, with a recital of observations
which, from their very nature, have the disadvantage of
being very personal.

2

At the age of sixteen, on my way home one day from the
Paris Observatory, I noticed, on the bookseller’s stand in
the Galeries de l’Odeon, a green-covered volume entitled
Le Livre des Esprits (Book of Spirits), by Allan-Kardec.
I bought it, and read it through at a sitting. There was in it
something unexpected, original, curious. Were they true,
the phenomena therein recounted? Did they solve the great
problem of futurity, as the author contended? In my anxiety
to ascertain this I made the acquaintance of the high-priest,
for Allan-Kardec had made of Spiritism a veritable religion.
I assisted at the séances. I experimented and became myself
a medium. In one of Allan-Kardec’s works, called Genesis,
over the signature of Galilee, may be read a whole chapter on
Cosmogony, which I wrote in a mediumistic condition.

I was at that time connected with the principal circles in
Paris where these experiments were tried, and for two years
I even filled the exacting position of secretary to one of these
circles, an office which morally bound me not to be absent from
a single séance.

Communications were received in three different ways: by
writing with our own hands; by placing our hands upon
planchette, in which a pencil was placed which did the
writing; by raps beneath the table, or by movements which
indicated certain letters, when the alphabet was repeated
aloud by one of the sitters.

The first method was the only one in use in the Society for
15Spiritualist Study presided over by Allan-Kardec; but it is
the method leaving the widest margin for doubt. Indeed, at
the end of several years of experimenting in this fashion, the
result was that I became skeptical even of myself, and for
the reasons following.

It cannot be denied that, under mediumistic conditions,
one does not write in his usual fashion. In the normal state,
when we wish to write a sentence, we mentally construct
that sentence—if not the whole of it, at least a part of it—before
writing the words. The pen and hand obey the
creative thought. It is not so when one writes mediumistically.
One rests one’s hand, motionless but docile, on a
sheet of paper, and then waits. After a little while the
hand begins to move, and to form letters, words, and phrases.
One does not create these sentences, as in the normal state,
but waits for them to produce themselves. Yet the mind is
nevertheless associated therewith. The subject treated is in
unison with one’s ordinary ideas. The written language is
one’s own. If one is deficient in orthography, the composition
will betray this fault. Moreover, the mind is so intimately
connected with what is written, that if it ponders something
else, if the thoughts are allowed to wander from the immediate
subject, then the hand will pause, or trace incoherent signs.

Such is the state of the writing-medium,—at least, so far
as I have observed it in myself. It is a sort of auto-suggestive
state. We are assured there are mediums who write so
mechanically that they know not what they are writing, and
record theses in strange tongues, on subjects concerning which
they are ignorant; but this I have never been able to verify
with any certainty.

A few years previous to my commencement of these
studies, my illustrious friend Victorien Sardou had undergone
similar experiences. As a medium he wrote descriptions
of divers planets in our system, principally of Jupiter,
and drew very odd pictures, representing the habitations of
that planet. One of these pictures depicted the house of
Mozart, while others represented the dwellings of Zoroaster
and of Bernard Palissy, who seemed to be country neighbors in
that immense planet. These habitations appeared to be aërial
and of marvellous lightness. The first of them, Mozart’s,
was essentially formed of musical instruments and indications,
such as the staff, notes, and clefs. The second was
16principally bucolic. There were to be seen flowers, hammocks,
swings, flying men; while underneath were intelligent
animals, engaged in playing a novel game of tenpins, in
which the sport did not lie in bowling the pins over, but in
crowning their heads, as in the childish game of cup-and-ball.
I reproduced this last design in the work entitled, Les
Terres du Ciel (Heavenly Globes), page 180.

These curious drawings prove, beyond a peradventure, that
the signature, Bernard Palissy in Jupiter, is apocryphal, and
that it was not a spirit inhabitant of Jupiter who guided
Victorien Sardou’s hand. Neither did the gifted author conceive
these sketches beforehand, and execute them in pursuance
of a deliberate purpose; but at that time he found
himself in a mental condition similar to that above described.
We may neither be magnetized nor hypnotized, nor put to
sleep in any fashion, and yet the brain may remain alien
to our mechanical productions. Its cells are functionally
agitated, and doubtless act by a reflex impulsion on the motor
nerves. We all then believed that Jupiter was inhabited by
a superior race. These communications were the reflections of
opinions generally held. In these days, however, nobody imagines
anything of the kind about Jupiter. Moreover, spirit
séances have never taught us the least thing in astronomy.
Such manifestations in nowise prove the intervention of
spirits. Have writing-mediums given us other proofs, more
convincing? This question we will examine later.

3

The second method, planchette, is more independent.
This little wooden writer became the fashion chiefly through
Madame de Girardin. Its communications soothed her last
days, and prepared her for a death fragrant with hope. She
believed she was in communication with the spirits of Sappho,
Shakespeare, Madame de Sévigné, and Molière; and amidst
these convictions she died, without disquietude, without rebellion,
without regret. She had introduced a taste for such
experiments into the home of Victor Hugo, in Jersey. Nine
years later, Auguste Vacquerie, in Les Miettes de l’Histoire
(Crumbs of History), wrote as follows:

It is table movements which are here spoken of, dictations
by tipping or rapping; that is to say, by the third method
heretofore referred to. This method has always appeared to be
the most independent. In placing our fingers on a planchette,
armed with a pencil, and in aiding its motions, we are
brought into direct personal association with the results. We
may be under the illusion that an outside spirit is guiding the
hand, when we are unintentionally controlling it ourselves.
We put questions relating to subjects which specially interest
us. Passively we write things which we already know more
or less about, and unconsciously inspire ourselves with the
name of the personage invoked. Far more reliable are the
answers given by a table.

4

Several persons place themselves around a table, their
hands resting thereupon and await results. After a given
time, if the required conditions for the production of the
phenomena have been complied with, raps are heard, apparently
within the table, and there are certain motions of the
furniture. Sometimes the table tips on one or two legs, and
slowly oscillates. Sometimes it rises entirely from the floor,
and remains suspended, as if adhering to the palms lying
upon it; and this lasts during ten, twenty, thirty seconds.
Sometimes the table fastens itself to the floor with such
tenacity that its weight seems to be doubled or tripled. At
other times, and almost always when so requested by one of
the sitters, a noise is heard like that of a saw, a hatchet, or
a pencil at work. These are physical effects, which have
been observed, and prove undeniably the existence of an
unknown force.

This force is physical. If one perceived only movements
devoid of purpose, blind and irrelevant, or movements only
in sympathy with the will of the assistant, one might rest in
19the conclusion that there is a new and unknown force, which,
mayhap, is a transmutation of one’s own nervous energy,
derived from organic electricity, and this fact in itself would
be important; but the blows are apparently struck inside the
wooden substance of the table, and the movements are in
response to questions put to invisible beings.

In this way did the phenomena begin in 1848, in the
United States, when the Misses Fox heard, in their chamber,
the noise of raps within the walls and furniture. When
their father, after several months of vexatious inquiry, at
last bethought himself of old ghost stories, and appealed to
the cause of these noises, the cause answered the questions
asked, by means of certain raps agreed upon, and declared
itself to be the soul of a former proprietor, killed in that very
house. This soul asked for their prayers, and for the burial
of its former body.

Is this invisible cause within us, or is it outside of ourselves?
Are we capable of doubling ourselves in some
way, yet without knowing it,—of unconsciously giving, by
mental suggestion, the answers to our own questions, and of
so producing certain physical effects without being aware of it?
Again, is there around us an intelligent atmosphere, a sort of
spiritual cosmos? or are there invisible beings, who are not
human, but so many gnomes, hobgoblins, or imps?—for such
an invisible world may exist around us. Finally can these
effects really come from the souls of the departed, who are
able to return from the other world? And where is this
other world? Four hypotheses thus present themselves.

The lifting of a table, the displacement of an object, might
be attributed to an unknown force, developed by our nervous
systems, or by some other means; at any rate, these movements
do not prove the existence of an outside spirit. But
when—by naming the letters of the alphabet or by pointing
to them on a tablet—the table, by certain sounds in the
wood, or by certain tips, composes an intelligent paragraph,
we are compelled to attribute this intelligent effect to an
intelligent cause. The medium himself may be the cause;
and the easiest way would evidently be to admit that he is
tricking us, either by simply striking the leg of the table with
his foot, if he operates by raps, or by directing the movements
of the table, through bearing upon it more or less
heavily.

20This, indeed, happens very often, and is what discourages
so many inquirers.

There are conditions, however, in which fraud is not
supposable. The fact that phenomena can be counterfeited
is no reason for concluding they do not exist. In experiments
with magnetism and hypnotic suggestion, many delusions
beset the experimenters, and there is more or less
intentional foolery on the part of the subjects. Thus have I
seen, at the prison-hospital of Salpétrière and elsewhere,
young women outrageously deceiving the most serious investigators,
who did not in the least suspect such insincerity.
At market fairs there may often be seen booths where sleepwalkers
are exhibited, who simulate genuine somnambulism
more or less cleverly. Yet one would palpably err who
should deny the existence of real magnetism, somnambulism,
or hypnotic suggestion, because of these humbugs and
mockeries.

Let us, therefore, pass by fraud, and examine cases where
all the experimenters knew one another, and did not knowingly
deceive, and thus let us consider a series of observed
facts. Here are some communications for which I can
vouch. They are sentences, dictated by raps:

This New Testament text was the more remarkable because
it was written in Latin. Here, therefore, are intelligible
sentences and accurate quotations. Could blind
chance have composed them? Without forgetting possible
imposition, our hypotheses still await explication.

Here are other specimens which demand a certain astuteness
and decided mental struggle for their dictation. One
paragraph begins thus: Suov imrap engèr. The other:
21Arevèlé suov neib. It is necessary to spell these two phrases
backward, commencing at the end. Here the hypothesis of
mental suggestion becomes very complicated, as also the
theory of environment, and would imply special adroitness
in the medium. Someone asked: “Why have you dictated
thus?” The power replied: “In order to give you marvellous
and unexpected evidence.”

Here is another communication of a different kind, beginning,
Aimairs vn oo uu ssevt. To the demand what this
bizarre assemblage of letters signified, the answer came: “Read
every alternate letter!” This arrangement brought out these
four lines:—

This stanza may be translated thus:

Surely this is sufficiently innocent of poetic pretension;
but the mode of dictation was decidedly difficult. This somewhat
reduced, as it seemed to us, the supposition of fraud,
but did not altogether destroy it.

A communication of a yet different kind is an imitation of
Rabelais, which is not so badly done, but cannot be well
translated into English, because of its grotesque and idiomatic
character.

As to the identity of spirits, even if it could be demonstrated
that the preceding quotations emanated from disembodied
minds, this would not be a sufficient reason for
admitting that the signatures are not entirely apocryphal.

5

In a great many cases, too long to be reported in this essay,
where the communicating cause has declared itself to be the
soul of a certain dead person,—of a father, a mother, a
child, or a kinsman,—names, dates, and details were given,
which were absolutely in accordance with facts whereof
the medium was ignorant; but in the cases where the identity
appeared to be best indicated, the questioner had his
22hands resting on the table, repeated the alphabet, and might
have unconsciously induced the result. You try to invoke a
man who bore, let us suppose, the name of Charles. When
the letter c is pronounced, you exercise your influence without
knowing it. If the experiment is made by rocking
the table; you exercise a different pressure at that particular
moment. If the communication is by raps, and the
letter passes without the expected sound, you naturally
allow it to be seen that there is a mistake. We deceive
ourselves without being aware of it. This frequently
happened to me during two years with this word Charles,
which was the name of my mother’s brother, living in New
Orleans. During those two years he told me how he died;
yet at that very time he was in the vigor of life. This was
in 1860 and 1861, and he did not pass away till 1864. We
had, therefore, been the dupes of an illusion.

Auto-suggestion, or self-suggestion, is also extremely frequent
in these experiments, as well as with writing mediums.
I have before my eyes some charming fables, published
by Monsieur Jaubert, President of the Civil Tribunal of
Carcassonne, and some delicate poems, obtained through
planchette, by P. F. Mathieu,—besides some historic and
philosophical works,—all leading to the conclusion that
these mediums have written under their own influence; or,
at best, affording no scientific proof of a foreign influence.

There remain still unexplained the raps, and the motion
of objects more or less heavy. On this point I fully share
the opinion of the great chemist, Mr. Crookes, who says:

This last sentence might be slightly modified, and the
words forced to believe might be replaced by the words disposed
to believe; for human nature is complex, and we are
not perpetually the same, even to ourselves. What uncertainty
we often find in our own opinions, upon points not
yet elucidated; and this we feel, even when called upon to
judge actions or events! Are we not sometimes contradictions
to ourselves?

24Among the experiments made with these physical and
psychical manifestations of the tables, I will mention, as
among the best, those of Count de Gasparin, and of my
sympathetic friend, Eugene Nus. The Count has obtained
rotations, upliftings, raps, revelations of numbers previously
thought of, movements without any human contact, and so
on. He concludes that human beings are endowed with a
fluid, with an unknown force, with an agency capable of impressing
objects with the action determined by our wills.
(On Table-turning, Supernaturalism in General, and Spirits.)

Eugene Nus has obtained, besides sentences dictated by
the table, certain philosophic definitions given almost invariably
in exactly a dozen words each. Here are some of them:

Let us note, in passing, the strangely singular fact of a
departed soul declaring that death is always the cessation of
individuality!

There are whole pages of this kind. Eugene Nus had, as
companions in his experiments, Antony Méray, Toussenel,
Franchot, Courbebaisse, a whole group of transcendental
socialists. Well, this is absolutely the language of Fourier.
The words aroma, passional, solidarity, clavier, composite,
association, harmony, pivotal force, are in the vocabulary of
the table. The author therefore inclines towards the following
explanation, as given in his Choses de l’Outre Monde
(Things of the Other World), Volume I. Paris, 1887.

(To be concluded in July Arena.)

25

THE CHIVALRY OF THE PRESS.

BY JULIUS CHAMBERS.

In the splendid days of Rome, the editor was he who
introduced the gladiators as they entered the arena to fight
the tigers.

To-day, the editor directs the newspaper and he often
affects to believe that his mission on earth is to fight the
tiger himself.

The editor of this class is a barbarian who forgets that
Rome is only a memory.

The successful editor of to-day recognizes the fact that the
newspaper exists to amuse and instruct, to uphold public
honor and private virtue quite as much as to denounce fraud
or expose official corruption. The newspaper is powerful
exactly in proportion as it is successful in representing the
people who read it; in following, rather than dictating, their
line of policy; and, whether it exists for the people or not,
it certainly endures only by their sufferance and good-will.
Therefore, it is well that we consider the relations of the people
at large to the newspaper; then, the editor’s relation to
his neighbors, the public; and, finally, the chivalry of editors
toward each other.

The newspaper is so large a part of our modern life that
it would be trivial to argue the question whether it can be
dispensed with. Men who live abreast of the age cannot consent
to miss a single day’s communion with the news of the
world. The non-arrival of the mail will render an active
man absent from town utterly miserable. The purchaser of
the daily newspaper of to-day receives for the price of a half
yard of calico a manufactured article that has required the
employment of millions of capital to produce,—to say nothing
of genius to sustain.

And he is often somewhat grateful.

But the chivalry of the public toward the newspaper is
peculiar. The public would appear to believe that anything
26it can coax, wheedle, or extort from the newspaper is fair salvage
from the necessary expenditures of life.

Recently I listened in amazement to the Rev. Robert
Collyer boast at a Cornell University dinner of having
beguiled the newspapers of the country. He told how he had
schemed and got money to build a new church after the
Chicago fire. He did not make it very clear that the civilized
members of his race clamored for the new edifice, but
he made painfully apparent his ideas of chivalry to the press.

“In this matter,” he began, “I have always been proud of
the way in which I ‘worked the newspapers.’ I succeeded
in raising the money, because I coaxed the editors into
coöperating with me. I wrote long puffs about the congregation
and its pastor, and got them printed. Then I hurried
’round with the subscription list and a copy of the paper.”

Of course, this was all said good-naturedly, was meant to
be funny, and was uttered from a public rostrum with an
utter obliviousness to the mental obliquity that a moment’s
thought will disclose. It left upon my mind much the same
impression as that once made by hearing an apparently
respectable man boast of having stolen an umbrella out of a
hotel rack.

Later in the evening, when the reverend gentleman occupied
a seat near mine, I asked, with as much naiveté as I
could command, if he had “worked” the plumbers, the
architects, the masons, the carpenters, and the bell-founders?
To each of these questions he returned a regretful, “No.”

Despite his apparent innocence regarding the purport of
my inquiry, I doubt if this gentleman would have boasted
that he secured his clothes for nothing, that he wheedled his
chops from his butcher, or coaxed his groceries from the shopkeeper
at the corner of his street.

And yet, he spoke with condescension of the editor and his
means of livelihood!

Theoretically, the editor is the public’s mutton. Men who
know him boast of their influence with him, and over him.
They dictate his policy for him—or say they do, which, of
course, is the same thing. Men who never saw him claim to
own him. Strangers, casually introduced, ask him questions
about his personal affairs that would be instantly resented in
any other walk of life.

An experience of my own will illustrate what I mean.
27At a country house, near Philadelphia, I was introduced to a
respectable-looking old man. In the period following dinner,
as we sat on the porch to enjoy a smoke, this stranger
interrogated me in the most offensive way. When he had
paused for breath I gave him a dose of his own medicine.
“The deadly parallel” column will tell the story.

The editor may be to blame for this state of things; but
if so, his good-nature is responsible. He endures more than
other men. He is often worried by the troubles of other
people; but he never has been weaned from the milk of
human kindness. He may be over-persuaded, he may be
deceived, and editors have been fooled, like judge and
jurors, by the perjured affidavit of apparently honorable men—but
he still continues to believe in mankind.

The chivalry of the politician toward the press is comprehended
to a nicety by every man who has served as a newspaper
correspondent at Washington.

The average congressman thinks it clever to deceive a
newspaper editor or correspondent. He believes they are
to be “used,” whenever possible, for the congressman’s
advantage. A correspondent is to be tricked or cajoled into
28praising the statesman, revising the bad English in his
speeches, “saving the country and—the appropriations.”
All the charities require and demand his aid, and, I am
ashamed to say (knowing as I do what a hollow mockery
some of the alleged charities really are), generally get the
assistance they ask.

The chivalry of the press toward the public is unquestionable.
The editor keeps awake nearly all night to serve it,
and the facts are not altered because in best serving the
public he serves himself.

Journalism, I regret to say, is often spoken of as a “profession,”
and while we may accept the plebeian word “journalism,”
as describing a daily labor, I sincerely desire to
enter a protest against its designation as a profession. It
seems entirely proper to me that this word be relegated
to the pedagogue, the chiropodist, and the barn-storming
actor who so boldly assert a right to its use.

The making of the newspaper is a mechanical art. It matters
very little how much intelligence—or genius, if you
prefer the word—enters into its production, the inter-dependence
of the so-called “intellectual” branch of the paper upon
its mechanical adjuncts is so great that it cannot be maintained
that the manufactured article offered to purchasers in
the shape of a newspaper is the product of any one lobe of
brain tissue. Of what value are a hundred thousand copies
of the best newspaper in this land, edited, revised and printed,
if its circulation department break down at the critical
moment? And what about the newsman? Who shall say
that he does not belong to journalism? He’s to the service
what the Don Cossack is to the Russian hosts. He’s the
Cossack of journalism—our Cossack of the dawn!

While it is easy to determine the point at which the newspaper
begins its existence, it would be very difficult indeed
to decide exactly where it receives its finishing touches. For
years, geographers wrangled regarding the point at which the
day began. In other words, this being Monday, they quarrelled
regarding the point at which the sun ceased to shine
on Monday, and began to shine on Tuesday.

Philosophers who have discussed the nice points of the daily
newspapers have claimed that it dates its origin from the
paper mill; but I fail to see why, if we are to go back to the
paper mill, we shall not go much further and seek the component
29parts from which the paper is originally made, showing
at once the absurdity of any such an assumption. While
not inclined to argue this point, it is my humble judgment
that the newspaper begins its existence the moment the managing
editor opens his desk for the day’s work. He is its
main-spring! Whatever of distinctive character it possesses
in methods of handling the news of the day it owes to him,
and it is these very features that render one journal better or
worse than others. He it is, as a rule, who establishes the
chivalry of the press toward the public. It is he who decides
the line of attack or defense when the vast interests which
he represents are assailed.

The peculiar kind of mind required for such a post is
probably not developed in any other known business. The
longer a man has served the art, the more confidently he
trusts to intuition and distrusts a decision based wholly upon
experience. Several of the worst blunders ever made in
American journalism have been committed after a careful
study of the historical precedents. Throughout all his
troubles, however, all his anxieties by day and by night—because
his responsibilities never end—the managing editor’s
thoughts are constantly dwelling upon the public service that
may be rendered to the reading constituency behind him.

The executive head of a newspaper, great or small, lives
in a glass house, with all the world for critics. Every act,
no matter how suddenly forced upon him, no matter how
careful his judgment, is open to the criticism of every person
who reads his paper. The columns of printed matter
are the windows of his soul.

These thoughts are all in the line of duty, somewhat selfish
in their character, perhaps (because fidelity to the public is
the only secret of success); but the sense of chivalry is
there,—should be there and seen of all men, on every page
of the printed sheet.

This idea of the newspaper’s duty to the public is a comparatively
new phase of the journalistic art. It has arisen
since the brilliant Round Table days of Bennett, Greeley,
Webb, Prentice, and Raymond. Their standards were high.
Their energy was tremendous. And when they came to
blows the combat was terrific. But Greeley, the last survivor,
found his Camlan in 1872. He was ambushed and
came to his end much as King Arthur from a race that he
30had trusted and defended. In Greeley’s defeat for the Presidency
all theorists who had dwelt upon the so-called “Power
of the Press” received a shuddering blow. The men who
had affected to believe that the press could make and unmake
destinies began to count on their fingers the few newspapers
that had opposed Horace Greeley. To their amazement they
found that, excepting one journal in the metropolis, every
daily paper in the land whose editor or chief stockholder did
not hold a public office was marshalled in his support. The
echoes of their enthusiasm can be heard even to this day.
Some of those editors ranted and roared like Sir Toby
Belch; but the professional politicians, serene and complacent
as gulligut friars, saw their editorial antagonists routed—cakes,
ale, and wine-coolers.

To the believers in printer’s ink, that presidential campaign
was a revelation. Mr. Greeley was the most thoroughly
defeated candidate this country has ever known.

I remember the period well, for I was a reporter on the
Tribune, and as a correspondent travelled from Minnesota to
Louisiana. It seemed utterly impossible in May that Mr.
Greeley could fail of election; in September, his defeat was
assured. That revolt of the people against the dictation of
the newspapers was momentous in its results. The independent
voter thoroughly asserted himself, and those editors
who could be taught by the incident knew that the people
resented their leadership. The one sad and pitiful thing
about the affair was the ingratitude of the negro race. They
deserted their apostle and champion. (I speak frankly, for
I was born an abolitionist.)

Throughout the Civil War, the newspapers had harangued,
badgered, and dictated; had bolstered up or destroyed men,
character, and measures. It was well, perhaps, that the
men who directed these same newspapers should be taught
a severe lesson.

Without doubt, the stormy period in which Greeley,
Bennett, Prentice, Webb, and Raymond tilted, was necessary
as a preparatory era to the more brilliant age of chivalry
that succeeded! We as a people were younger in journalism
than in any other intellectual or mechanical art.
Great statesmen had been grown in plenty—the very birth
of the nation had found them full-fledged. A constellation
of brilliant preachers of the Gospel and expounders of the
31law are remembered. We can all name them over from
Jonathan Edwards to Theodore Parker and from John
Marshall to Rufus Choate. Great mercantile families had
been created, such as the Astors, the Grinells, the Bakers,
Howlands, Aspinwalls, and Claflins.

Large fortunes had been amassed in commerce; but not an
editor had been able to accumulate money enough to keep
his own carriage!

Journalism languished until about 1840. The great public
did not seem to require editors. The people of New
York, possibly, persisted in remembering that the first man
in this country to write an editorial article had been hanged
in the City Hall Park. He had died heroically, immortalizing
the occasion when he said: “I regret that I have only
one life to give for my country.” But some people believed
he had suffered death because he wrote editorial articles.

The art of making the newspaper steadily gained in public
appreciation. To employ the simile chivalric, its young
squires were changed into full-fledged knights by the propagation
of a new idea, a new aim—the rendering of public service!
True enough, the motto of the noblest English
princedom, “Ich dien!” acknowledges the high duty of service;
but, when proclaimed as a journalistic duty it took the
form of a new tender of fidelity from the best men at court
to the people at large. It was so accepted, and has drawn
the people and the press closer together. It was as if these
true knights drew their weapons before the public eye and
offered a new pledge of fidelity in the thrilling old Norman
usage of the word “Service!”

A gleam of something higher and nobler than mere swashbuckling
was in every editorial eye. The idea developed, as
did the nobility and purity of Chivalry under Godfrey, the
Agamemnon of Tasso. In all truly representative editorial
minds the feeling grew that any power which their arms or
training gave them should be exercised in the defense of the
weak and oppressed. They renewed the old vow: “To
maintain the just rights of such as are unable to defend themselves.”
It was a great step—as far-reaching in its results
as was the promulgation of that oath in the age of Chivalry.

At this point rose the reporter. He had been recognized
for years as the coming servitor of the press. But a few of
him in the early days had been dissolute, had written without
32proper regard to facts, and had brought discredit not only on
himself but the chivalry which others believed in. He began
to brace up, to pull himself together, to be better educated,
to dress in excellent taste, and, above all, to write better
copy. Henry Murger had published a series of sketches
under the title “Scenes de La Vie de Bohéme.” These few
pictures described the Paris life of that period, beyond a
doubt; but here in New York a few bright men sought to
revive the spirit and the couleur de rose of the Quartier
Latin. It was a clever idea, but it didn’t last.

In one of the bleakest corners of the old graveyard at Nantucket
stands a monument to Henry Clapp, the presiding
genius of the Bohemian Club that sat for so many years in
Phaff’s cellar on Broadway. Its roll contained many of the
brightest names known in the history of the American press.
They were true Bohemians,—once defined by George William
Curtis as the “literary men who had a divine contempt
for to-morrow.” How cleverly those choice spirits wrote and
talked about their lives away back in the fifties. Get a file
of the New York Figaro, or some of the Easy Chair papers
in Harper’s of that period, and enjoy their cloud-land life! I
only quote one sentence and it is from “the Chair,” though
I half suspect Fitz James O’Brien, rather than George William
Curtis, penned it:—

Ah! yes, this is all very beautiful, but rent had to be
paid; and the literary workers of to-day never forget that
journalism is the only branch of literature that from the
outset enables a man to live and pay his way. And yet
when we remember Henry Clapp, Fitz James O’Brien, N. G.
Shepherd, and Ned Wilkins, we feel that every working
newspaper man is better to-day because they struggled and
starved; because they lived in the free air of Bohemia.

With the worker in the art, “the struggle for existence”
begins with his first day’s apprentice task as a reporter.
No man ever became a journalist who did not serve that
33apprenticeship. There is no hope for him outside of complete
success. It requires several years for him to learn to get
news and to properly write it. One failure will blight his
entire career. Unlike any other commercial commodity,
news once lost cannot be recouped.

Dr. Samuel Johnson was the first Parliamentary reporter.
He got a list of the speakers, then went to his lodgings in a
dingy court off Fleet Street and wrote out speeches for the
Lords and the Commons. He did this for years and not one
of the men so honored is on record as having denied the
accuracy of the report(?). Dr. Johnson made the reputations
of half a dozen men who are to-day mentioned among the
great English orators. They were honorable men, as the
world goes, but not one of them, except Edmund Burke, ever
acknowledged his indebtedness to Samuel Johnson. I never
have known a senator or congressman to thank a Washington
correspondent for making his speech presentable to educated
eyes. He has been known to grow warm in praise of
all classes of humanity, from Tipperary to Muscovy, but
never a word of commendation escapes his lips for a
newspaper man. He believes in philanthropy, but as
Napoleon said to Talleyrand, he “wants it to be a long way
off!” (Je veux seulement que ce soit de la philanthropie
lointaine.)

With the rise of journalistic chivalry came the search for
news. It became a precious prize. The special correspondent
and reporter sought it. Truth was to be rescued from
oblivion! Facts began to be hunted for like the ambergris and
ivory of commerce. At first the search resembled the quest for
the Oracle of the Holy Bottle,—a test as to the public’s
opinion of news. What kind of service did the public want?
Adventure followed, as a matter of course, but love of
adventure was not the impelling motive.

The American newspaper, like the American railroad,
developed along new lines. Girardin, who had created all
that is worth considering in the French press, had pinned
his faith to the feuilleton and the snappy editorial article,
with its “one idea only.” News was of no account. In the
English journal, the supremacy of the editorial page was
asserted and maintained. News was desirable but secondary;
and there was no hurry about obtaining it. In the Spanish press
blossomed—and has ever since bloomed—the paragraph.
34News was a good thing, if it could be told in a few lines, but
generally, alas, dangerous. A paragraph must only be long
enough to allow a cigarette to go out while you were reading
it. Wax matches cost only a cuarta per box, but cigarettes
were expensive. Beaumarchais understood the Spanish press
when he put the famous epigram into “Figaro’s” lips: “So
long as you print nothing, you may print anything.”

The chivalry of the editor toward his “esteemed contemporary”
is a sad and solemn phase of this true commentary.

After you have carefully reread the “editorial” pages of
two metropolitan journals from 1841 to date, and remember
that the contemporaries of Guttenberg called printing “the
black art,” you will marvel that public opinion has ever
changed. If the contemporaries of the old Nuremberg
printer had lived in 1882, and taken in the Tribune of February
25th, they would have gone out to gather faggots to
roast an editor. The excuse for one of the most savage
attacks ever made by one American editor upon another was
that a rival had printed a private telegram, sent by an editor
to the chief magistrate of the nation, which had found its
way into wrong hands or had been “taken off the wires,” as
many other messages had been before. And yet, young as
I am, I remember that in 1871, the treaty of Washington
was “acquired” by means even more questionable and
printed entire, to the confusion and indignation of the
United States Senators. The very same editor laid down a
dictum that was thought to be very clever at the time: “It
is the duty of our correspondents to get the news; it is the
business of other people to keep their own secrets.” This
was all very well in 1871, but in 1882, the moral “lay in the
application on it.”

From the very moment in which the American newspaper
attained a definite policy and impulse, its direction has been
forward, and it has daily grown in wealth and popular
respect.

I have called the special correspondent the knight errant
of the newspaper. Let me prove it. The greatest, noblest
of them all was J. A. MacGahan, of Khiva and San Stefano.
He was an American, born in Perry County, Ohio. I can
sketch his career in a few brief sentences: He was at law-school
in Brussels when the Franco-Prussian war burst upon
Europe, in 1870. Having had some experience as a writer
35for the press, he entered the field at once. Danger and suffering
were his, though he did not achieve renown in that brief
campaign. He then made his memorable ride to Khiva, and
wrote the best book on Central Asia known to our language.
Another turn of the wheel found him in Cuba describing the
Virginius complications. There I first met him. Thence he
returned to England, and sailed with Captain Young in the
Pandora to the Arctic regions, making the last search undertaken
for the lost crew of Sir John Franklin’s expedition.
MacGahan returned to London in the spring of 1876 in time
to read in the newspapers brief despatches from Turkey
recounting the reported atrocities of the Bashi-Bazouks. He
determined at once to go to Bulgaria. In a month’s time,
he had put a new face on the “Eastern Question.” The
great trouble between Christian and Turk was no longer
confined to “the petty quarrel of a few monks over a
key and a silver star,” as defined by the late Mr. Kinglake,
but assumed proportions that could be discerned in every
club and in every drawing-room of Imperial London.
MacGahan had begun his memorable ride, the results of
which will endure as long as Christianity! He visited Batak
and painted in cold type what he saw. He caused the
shrieks of the dying girls in the pillaged towns of Bulgaria
to be heard throughout Christian Europe. A Tory minister,
stanch in his fidelity to the “unspeakable Turk,” sent its
fleet to the Dardanelles, but dared not land a man or
fire a single gun. Popular England repudiated its old
ally. And MacGahan rode onward and wrote sheaves of
letters. In every hamlet he passed through, he said: “The
Czar will avenge this! Courage, people; he will come!”

From that time history was made as by a cyclone. The
Russian hosts were mobilized at Kischeneff, and the Czar of
all the Russias reviewed them. Then the order to cross the
Pruth was given, as MacGahan had foretold; our Knight
Errant rode with the advanced guard. Through the changing
fortune of the war, grave and gay, he passed. Much of
his work, now preserved in permanent form, is the best of its
kind in our language. The assault of Skobeleff on the Gravitza
redoubt was immortalized by MacGahan’s pen. When
Plevna fell, our hero was in the van during the mad rush
toward the Bosphorus. The triumphant advance was never
checked until the spires and minarets of Constantinople were
36in sight. Bulgaria was redeemed, the power of the Turk
in Europe was broken, the aggrandizement of Russia was complete—and
all because J. A. MacGahan had lived and
striven.

At San Stefano, a suburb of the capital, on the Sea of
Marmora, our hero died of fever. Skobeleff, whose friendship
dated back to the Kirgitz Steppe and the Khivan conquest,
closed his eyes and was chief mourner at his grave. To-day
on the anniversary of his death, prayers for the repose of his
soul are said in every hamlet throughout Bulgaria. His
service to the newspaper and to the civilized world extended
over less than eight years, but he accomplished for the public
the work of a lifetime.

Hail to his memory! His was the chivalry of the press!

For years the name of Latour d’Auvergne, “first grenadier
of France,” was called at nightfall in every regiment of the
Imperial Grenadier Guard. When the name was heard, the
first grenadier in the rank would answer, “Mort—sur le champ
de bataille.”

So, when the roll is called of those that have added to the
chivalry and glory of the American press, every fellow-laborer
who knew “MacGahan of Kiva and San Stefano”
will salute and answer: “Dead—and glorious!”

Philogeny, the new and brilliant science that treats of the
development of the human race from the animal kingdom,
teaches that the history of the germ is an epitome of the
history of the descent. It is equally true in journalism,
that the various forms of discouragement, hope, and final
success through which the individual worker in the art
passes, during his progress from the reportorial egg-cell to
the fully developed executive-editorial organism, is a compressed
reproduction of the long series of misfortunes and
interferences through which the ancestors of the American
newspaper of to-day have passed. The simile is true, aye, to
the supreme part played by “the struggle for existence!”
Under its influence, through the “natural selection” of the
public, a new and nobler species of journalism has arisen and
now exists. The newspaper of to-day, evolved from rudimentary
forms, is a splendid and heroic organism; and the
last upholder of the dogma of its miraculous creation and
infallible power is dead.

37

SOCIETY’S EXILES.

BY B. O. FLOWER.

It is difficult to over-estimate the gravity of the problem
presented by those compelled to exist in the slums of our
populous cities, even when considered from a purely economic
point of view. From the midst of this commonwealth of
degradation there goes forth a moral contagion, scourging
society in all its ramifications, coupled with an atmosphere
of physical decay—an atmosphere reeking with filth, heavy
with foul odors, laden with disease. In time of any contagion
the social cellar becomes the hotbed of death, sending forth
myriads of fatal germs which permeate the air for miles
around, causing thousands to die because society is too
short-sighted to understand that the interest of its humblest
member is the interest of all. The slums of our cities are
the reservoirs of physical and moral death, an enormous
expense to the State, a constant menace to society, a reality
whose shadow is at once colossal and portentous. In time
of social upheavals they will prove magazines of destruction;
for while revolution will not originate in them, once let a
popular uprising take form and the cellars will reinforce it
in a manner more terrible than words can portray. Considered
ethically, the problem is even more embarrassing and
deplorable; here, as nowhere else in civilized society, thousands
of our fellowmen are exiled from the enjoyments of
civilization, forced into life’s lowest strata of existence,
branded with that fatal word scum. If they aspire to rise,
society shrinks from them; they seem of another world;
they are of another world; driven into the darkness of a
hopeless existence, viewed much as were lepers in olden
times. Over their heads perpetually rests the dread of
eviction, of sickness, and of failure to obtain sufficient work
to keep life in the forms of their loved ones, making existence
a perpetual nightmare, from which death alone brings release.
Say not that they do not feel this; I have talked with them;
I have seen the agony born of a fear that rests heavy on their
38souls stamped in their wrinkled faces and peering forth from
great pathetic eyes. For them winter has real terror, for
they possess neither clothes to keep comfortable the body,
nor means with which to properly warm their miserable
tenements. Summer is scarcely less frightful in their
quarters, with the heat at once stifling, suffocating, almost
intolerable; heat which acting on the myriad germs of
disease produces fever, often ending in death, or, what is
still more dreaded, chronic invalidism. Starvation, misery,
and vice, trinity of despair, haunt their every step. The
Golden Rule,—the foundation of true civilization, the keynote
of human happiness,—reaches not their wretched quarters.
Placed by society under the ban, life is one long and terrible
night. But tragic as is the fate of the present generation,
still more appalling is the picture when we contemplate the
thousands of little waves of life yearly washed into the cellar
of being; fragile, helpless innocents, responsible in no
way for their presence or environment, yet condemned to a fate
more frightful than the beasts of the field; human beings
wandering in the dark, existing in the sewer, ever feeling
the crushing weight of the gay world above, which thinks
little and cares less for them. Infinitely pathetic is their
lot.

The causes that have operated to produce these conditions
are numerous and complex, the most apparent being the
immense influx of immigration from the crowded centres of
the old world; the glamor of city life, which has allured
thousands from the country, fascinating them from afar much
as the gaudy colors and tinsel before the footlights dazzle the
vision of a child; the rapid growth of the saloon, rendered
well-nigh impregnable by the wealth of the liquor power;
the wonderful labor-saving inventions, which in the hands of
greed and avarice, instead of mitigating the burdens of the
people, have greatly augmented them, by glutting the market
with labor; the opportunities given by the government
through grants, special privileges, and protective measures for
rapid accumulation of wealth by the few; the power which
this wealth has given its possessors over the less fortunate;
the spread of that fevered mental condition which subjects
all finer feelings and holier aspirations to the acquisition of
gold and the gratification of carnal appetites, and which is
manifest in such a startling degree in the gambler’s world,
39which to dignify we call the realm of speculation; the desire
for vulgar ostentation and luxurious indulgence, in a word
the fatal fever for gold which has infested the social atmosphere,
and taken possession of hundreds of thousands of our
people, chilling their hearts, benumbing their conscience,
choking all divine impulses and refined sensibilities; the
cowardice and lethargy of the Church, which has grown rich
in gold and poor in the possession of moral energy, which
no longer dares to denounce the money changers, or alarm
those who day by day are anæsthetizing their own souls,
while adding to the misery of the world. The church has
become, to a great extent, subsidized by gold, saying in effect,
“I am rich and increased in goods and have need of nothing,”
apparently ignorant of the fact that she “is wretched, poor,
blind, and naked,” that she has signally failed in her mission
of establishing on earth an ideal brotherhood. Instead of
lifting her children into that lofty spiritual realm where each
feels the misery of his brother, she has so far surrendered to
the mammon of unrighteousness that, without the slightest
fear of having their consciences disturbed, men find comfort
in her soft-cushioned pews, who are wringing from ten to
thirty per cent. profit from their fellowmen in the wretched
tenement districts, or who refuse to pay more than twelve
cents a pair for the making of pants, forty-five cents a dozen
for flannel shirts, seventy-five cents a dozen for knee pants,
and twenty-five cents a dozen for neckties. I refer not to
the many noble exceptions, but I indict the great body of
wealthy and fashionable churches, whose ministers do not
know and take no steps to find out the misery that is dependent
upon the avarice of their parishioners. Then again back
of all this is the defective education which has developed all
save character in man; education which has trained the
brain but shriveled the soul. Last but by no means least
is land speculation which has resulted in keeping large
tracts of land idle which otherwise would have blossomed
with happy homes. To these influences we must add the
general ignorance of the people regarding the nature, extent,
and growing proportions of the misery and want in the
New World which is spreading as an Eastern plague in the
filth of an oriental city.

It is not my present purpose to dwell further on the causes
which have produced these conditions. I wish to bring
40home to the mind and heart of the reader a true conception
of life in the slums, by citing typical cases illustrating a condition
prevalent in every great city of the Union and increasing
in its extent every year. I shall confine myself to
uninvited want as found in civilized Boston, because I am
personally acquainted with the condition of affairs here, and because
Boston has long claimed the proud distinction of being
practically free from poverty.

I shall briefly describe scenes which fell under my personal
observation during an afternoon tour through the slums of
the North End, confining myself to a few typical cases
which fairly represent the condition of numbers of families
who are suffering through uninvited poverty, a fact
which I have fully verified by subsequent visits to the
wretched homes of our very poor. I purposely omit in this
paper describing any members of that terrible commonwealth
where misery, vice, degradation, and crime are inseparably
interwoven. This class belongs to a lower stratum; they
have graduated downward. Feeling that society’s hand is
against them, Ishmael-like they raise their hand against society.
They complement the uninvited poor; both are largely a
product of unjust and inequitable social conditions.

The scenes I am about to describe were witnessed one
afternoon in April. The day was sunless and dreary,
strangely in keeping with the environment of the exiles of
society who dwell in the slums. The sobbing rain, the sad,
low murmur of the wind under the eaves and through the
narrow alleys, the cheerless frowning sky above, were in
perfect harmony with the pathetic drama of life I was witnessing.
Everything seemed pitched in a minor key, save
now and then there swelled forth splendid notes of manly
heroism and womanly courage, as boldly contrasting with the
dead level of life as do the full rich notes of Wagner’s
grandest strains with the plaintive melody of a simple
ballad sung by a shepherd lad. I was accompanied in this
instance by the Rev. Walter Swaffield, of the Bethel Mission,
and his assistant, Rev. W. J. English.

INVALID IN CHAIR (SEE NOTE).

The first building we entered faced a narrow street. The
hallway was as dark as the air was foul or the walls filthy.
Not a ray or shimmer of light fell through transoms or skylight.
The stairs were narrow and worn. By the aid of
matches we were able to grope our way along, and also to
41observe more than was pleasant to behold. It was apparent
that the hallways or stairs were seldom surprised by water,
while pure, fresh air was evidently as much a stranger as
fresh paint. After ascending several flights, we entered a
room of undreamed-of wretchedness. On the floor lay a sick
man.2 He was rather fine-looking, with an intelligent face,
bright eyes, and countenance indicative of force of character.
No sign of dissipation, but an expression of sadness, or
rather a look of dumb resignation peered from his expressive
eyes. For more than two years he has been paralyzed in his
lower limbs, and also affected with dropsy. The spectacle
of a strong man, with the organs of locomotion dead, is
always pathetic; but when the victim of such misfortune is in
the depths of abject poverty, his case assumes a tragic hue.
There for two years he had lain on a wretched pallet of
rags, seeing day by day and hour by hour his faithful wife
tirelessly sewing, and knowing full well that health, life, and
hope were hourly slipping from her. This poor woman
supports the invalid husband, her two children, and herself,
by making pants at twelve cents a pair. No rest, no surcease,
a perpetual grind from early dawn often till far into the
night; and what is more appalling, outraged nature has
rebelled; the long months of semi-starvation and lack of
sleep have brought on rheumatism, which has settled in the
joints of her fingers, so that every stitch means a throb of
pain. The afternoon we called, she was completing an enormous
pair of custom-made pants of very fine blue cloth, for one
of the largest clothing houses in Boston. The suit would
probably bring sixty or sixty-five dollars, yet her employer
graciously informed his poor white slave that as the garment
was so large, he would give her an extra cent. Thirteen
cents for fine custom-made pants, manufactured for a wealthy
firm, which repeatedly asserts that its clothing is not made
in tenement houses! Thus with one of the most painful
diseases enthroned in that part of the body which must move
42incessantly from dawn till midnight, with two small dependent
children and a husband who is utterly powerless to help
her, this poor woman struggles bravely and uncomplainingly,
confronted ever by a nameless dread of impending misfortune.
Eviction, sickness, starvation,—such are the ever-present
spectres, while every year marks the steady
encroachment of disease, and the lowering of the register of
vitality. Moreover, from the window of her soul falls the
light of no star athwart the pathway of life.

CONSTANCE AND MAGGIE (SEE NOTE).

The next place we visited was in the attic of a tenement
building even more wretched than the one just described.
The general aspects of these houses, however, are all much
the same, the chief difference being in degrees of filth and
squalor present. Here in an attic lives a poor widow with
three children, a little boy and two little girls, Constance and
Maggie.3 They live by making pants at twelve cents a pair.
Since the youngest child was two and a half years old she
has been daily engaged in overcasting the long seams of the
garments made by her mother. When we first called
she had just passed her fourth birthday, and now overcasts
from three to four pairs of pants every day. There seated on
a little stool she sat, her fingers moving as rapidly and in as
unerring manner as an old experienced needlewoman. These
three children are fine looking, as are most of the little Portuguese
I visited. Their large heads and brilliant eyes seem to
indicate capacity to enjoy in an unusual degree the matchless
delight springing from intellectual and spiritual development.
Yet the wretched walls of their little apartment
practically mark the limit of their world; the needle their
inseparable companion; their moral and mental natures
hopelessly dwarfed; a world of wonderful possibilities
denied them by an inexorable fate over which they have no
control and for which they are in no way responsible.
We often hear it said that these children of the slums
are perfectly happy; that not knowing what they miss
life is as enjoyable to them as the young in more favorable
43quarters. I am satisfied, however, that this is true only in a
limited sense. The little children I have just described are
already practically machines; day by day they engage in the
same work with much the monotony of an automatic instrument
propelled by a blind force. When given oranges and
cakes, a momentary smile illumined their countenances, a
liquid brightness shot from their eyes, only to be replaced by
the solemn, almost stolid, expression which has become habitual
even on faces so young. This conclusion was still more
impressively emphasized by the following touching remark of
a child of twelve years in another apartment, who was with
her mother busily sewing. “I am forty-three years old
to-day,” remarked the mother, and said Mr. English, “I
shall be forty-two next week.” “Oh, dear,” broke in the
child, “I should think people would grow SO TIRED of living
so MANY YEARS.” Was utterance ever more pathetic? She
spoke in tones of mingled sadness and weariness, revealing in
one breath all the pent-up bitterness of a young life condemned
to a slavery intolerable to any refined or sensitive
nature. Is it strange that people here take to drink?
To me it is far more surprising that so many are sober. I am
convinced that, in the slums, far more drunkenness is
caused by abject poverty and inability to obtain work, than
want is produced by drink. Here the physical system,
half starved and often chilled, calls for stimulants. Here the
horrors of nightmare, which we sometimes suffer during our
sleep, are present during every waking hour. An oppressive
fear weighs forever on the mind. Drink offers a temporary
relief and satisfies the craving of the system, besides the
environment invites dissipation and human nature at best is
frail. I marvel that there is not more drunkenness exhibited
in the poverty spots of our cities.

CELLARWAY LEADING TO UNDER-GROUND APARTMENTS (SEE NOTE).

SICK MAN IN UNDER-GROUND APARTMENT (SEE NOTE).

PORTUGUESE WIDOW AND THREE CHILDREN (SEE NOTE).

WIDOW AND TWO CHILDREN IN UNDER-GROUND TENEMENT (SEE NOTE).

EXTERIOR OF A NORTH END TENEMENT HOUSE (SEE NOTE).

Among the places we visited were a number of cellars or
burrows. We descended several steps into dark, narrow
passage-ways,4 leading to cold, damp rooms, in many of
44which no direct ray of sunshine ever creeps. We entered
a room filled with a bed, cooking stove, rack of dirty clothes
and numerous chairs, of which the most one could say
was that their backs were still sound and which probably
had been donated by persons who could no longer use
them. On the bed lay a man who has been ill for three
months with rheumatism. This family consists of father,
mother, and a large daughter, all of whom are compelled to
occupy one bed. They eat, cook, live, and sleep in this
wretched cellar and pay over fifty dollars a year rent. This
is a typical illustration of life in this underground world.

UNDER-GROUND TENEMENT WITH TWO BEDS (SEE NOTE).

In another similar cellar or burrow5 we found a
mother and seven boys and girls, some of them quite
large, all sleeping in two medium-sized beds in one room;
this room is also their kitchen. The other room is a
storehouse for kindling wood the children gather and sell,
a little store and living room combined. Their rent is
two dollars a week. The cellar was damp and cold; the air
stifling. Nothing can be imagined more favorable to contagion
both physical and moral than such dens as these.
Ethical exaltation or spiritual growth is impossible with such
environment. It is not strange that the slums breed criminals,
which require vast sums yearly to punish after evil
has been accomplished; but to me it is an ever-increasing
source of wonder that society should be so short-sighted and
45neglectful of the condition of its exiles, when an outlay of
a much smaller sum would ensure a prevention of a large
proportion of the crime that emenates from the slums; while
at the same time it would mean a new world of life, happiness,
and measureless possibilities for the thousands who now
exist in hopeless gloom.

OUT OF WORK (SEE NOTE).

In a small room fronting an interior court we found a man6
whose face bore the stamp of that “hope long deferred which
maketh the heart sick.” He is, I am informed, a strictly
temperate, honest, and industrious workman. Up to the time
of his wife’s illness and death, which occurred last summer,
the family lived in a reasonably comfortable manner, as the
husband found no difficulty in securing work on the sea.
When the wife died, however, circumstances changed. She
left six little children, one almost an infant. The father
could not go to sea, leaving his little flock without a protector,
to fall the victims of starvation, and since then he has
worked whenever he could get employment loading vessels,
or at anything he could find. For the past six weeks he has
been practically without work, and the numerous family of
little ones have suffered for life’s necessities. His rent is
two dollars and a quarter a week.

PORTUGUESE WIDOW IN ATTIC (SEE NOTE).

In the attic in another tenement we found a widow7 weeping
and working by the side of a little cradle where lay a
sick child, whose large luminous eyes shone with almost
phosphorescent brilliancy from great cavernous sockets, as
they wandered from one to another, with a wistful, soul-querying
gaze. Its forehead was large and prominent, so
much so that looking at the upper part of the head one would
little imagine how terrible the emaciation of the body, which
46was little more than skin and bones, speaking more eloquently
than words of the ravages of slow starvation and wasting
disease. The immediate cause of the poor woman’s tears
was explained to us in broken English, substantially as
follows: She had just returned from the dispensary where
she had been unsuccessful in her effort to have a physician
visit her child, owing to her inability to pay the quarter of a
dollar demanded for the visit. After describing as best she
could the condition of the invalid, the doctor had given her
two bottles of medicine and a prescription blank on which he
had written directions for her to get a truss that would cost
her two dollars and a half at the drug store. She had explained
to the physician that owing to the illness of her child
she had fallen a week and a half in arrears in rent; that the
agent for the tenement had notified her that if one week’s
rent was not paid on Saturday she would be evicted, which
meant death to her child, so she could not buy the truss.
To which the doctor replied, “You must get the truss and
put it on before giving anything from either bottle, or the medicine
will kill your child.” “If I give the medicine,” she repeated
showing us the bottles, “before I put the truss on, he
says it will kill my child,” and the tears ran swiftly down her
sad but intelligent face. The child was so emaciated that the
support would inevitably have produced terrible sores in a
short time. I am satisfied that had the physician seen its
condition, he would not have had a heart to order it.

I thought as I studied the anxious and sorrowful countenance
of that mother, how hard, indeed, is the lot of the very
poor. They have to buy coal by the basketful and pay almost
double price, likewise food and all life’s necessities. They are
compelled to live in frightful disease-fostering quarters, and
pay exorbitant rents for the accommodations they receive.
When sick they are not always free from imposition, even when
they receive aid in the name of charity, and sometimes
theology under the cloak of religion oppresses them. This
last thought had been suggested by seeing in our rounds some
half-starved women dropping pennies into the hands of
Sisters of Charity, who were even here in the midst of terrible
want, exacting from the starving money for a church whose
coffers groan with wealth. O religion, ineffably radiant and
exalting in thy pure influence, how thou art often debased
by thy professed followers! How much injustice is meted
47out to the very poor, and how many crimes are still committed
under thy cloak and in thy holy name! Even this
poor widow had bitterly suffered through priests who belong
to a great communion, claiming to follow Him who cried,
“Come unto me all ye who are weary and heavy laden, and I
will give you rest,” as will be seen by the following, related
to me by Rev. Walter Swaffield, who was personally cognizant
of the facts. The husband of this widow was out of work
for a time; being too ill to engage in steady work, he found
it impossible to pay the required ten cents for seats in the
church to which he belonged, and was consequently excluded
from his sitting. Shortly after he fell sick, his wife sought
the priest, imploring him to administer the sacrament, and
later extreme unction, which he positively refused, leaving
the poor man to die without the consolation of the Church he
had from infancy been taught to love and revere.

It is not strange that many in this world of misery become
embittered against society; that they sometimes learn to
hate all who live in comfort, and who represent the established
order of things, and from the rank of the patient,
uncomplaining struggler descend to a lower zone, where the
moral nature is eclipsed by degradation and crime, and life
takes on a deeper shade of horror. This class of people
exist on the brink of a precipice. Socially, they may be
likened to the physical condition of Victor Hugo’s Claude
Frollo after Quasimodo had hurled him from the tower of
Notre Dame. You remember the sickening sensation produced
by that wonderful piece of descriptive work, depicting
the false priest hanging to the eaves, vainly striving to ascend,
feeling the leaden gutter to which he was holding slowly
giving away. His hands send momentary messages to the
brain, warning it that endurance is almost exhausted.
Below he sees the sharp formidable spires of Saint-Jean-de-Ronde,
and immediately under him, two hundred feet from
where he hangs, are the hard pavement, where men appear
like pigmies. Above stands the avenging hunchback ready
to hurl him back if he succeed in climbing over the eaves.
So these poor people have ever below them starvation, eviction,
and sickness. Above stands Quasimodo in the form
of a three-headed monster: a soulless landlord, the slave
master who pays only starvation wages, and disease, the
natural complement of the wretched squalor permitted by
48the one, and the slow starvation necessarily incident to the
prices paid by the other. Their lot is even more terrible
when it is remembered that their fall carries with it the fate
of their loved ones. In addition to the multitude who are
condemned to suffer through uninvited poverty, with no
hopeful outlook before them, there is another class who are
constantly on the brink of real distress, and who are liable
at any time, to suffer bitterly because they are proud-spirited
and will almost starve to death before they ask for aid.
Space prevents me from citing more than one illustration of
this character. In an apartment house we found an American
woman with a babe two weeks old and a little girl. The
place was scrupulously clean, something very rare in this
zone of life. The woman, of course, was weak from illness
and, as yet, unable to take in any work to speak of. Her
husband has been out of employment for a few weeks, but
had just shipped on board a sailing vessel for a cruise of
several months. The woman did not intimate that they
were in great need, as she hoped to soon be enabled to make
some money, and the portion of her husband’s wages she
was allowed to draw, paid the rent. A week ago, however,
the little girl came to the Bethel Mission asking for a loaf
of bread. “We have had nothing to eat since Monday
morning,” she said, “and the little baby cries all the time
because mamma can give it no milk.” It was Wednesday
evening when the child visited the Mission. An investigation
substantiated the truth of the child’s words. The mother,
too proud to beg, struggled with fate, hoping and praying to
be able to succeed without asking for aid, but seeing her
babe starving to death, she yielded. This case finds many
counterparts where a little aid bridges over a period of
frightful want, after which the unfortunate are able, in a
measure, to take care of themselves.

I find it impossible in this paper to touch upon other cases
I desired to describe. The above illustrations however, typical
of the life and environment of hundreds of families, are
sufficient to emphasize a condition which exists in our midst
and which is yearly growing, both in extent and in intensity
of bitterness; a condition that is little understood by those
who are not actually brought in contact with the circumstances
as they exist, a condition at once revolting and
appalling to every sense of humanity and justice. We cannot
49afford to remain ignorant of the real status of life in our
midst, any more than we can afford to sacrifice truth to optimism.
It has become a habit with some to make light of these
grim and terrible facts, to minify the suffering experienced,
or to try and impute the terrible condition to drink. This
may be pleasant but it will never alter conditions or aid the
cause of reform. It is our duty to honestly face the deplorable
conditions, and courageously set to work to ameliorate
the suffering, and bring about radical reformatory measures
calculated to invest life with a rich, new significance for this
multitude so long exiles from joy, gladness, and comfort.

We now come to the practical question, What is to be
done? But before viewing the problem in its larger and
more far-reaching aspects, I wish to say a word in regard to
the direct measures for immediate relief which it is fashionable
among many reformers to dismiss as unworthy of consideration.
It is very necessary in a discussion of this
character to view the problem in all its bearings, and adjust
the mental vision so as to recognize the utility of the various
plans advanced by sincere reformers. I have frequently heard
it urged that these palliative measures tend to retard the
great radical reformative movements, which are now taking
hold of the public mind. This view, however comfortable to
those who prefer theorizing and agitation to putting their
shoulder to the wheel in a practical way, is, nevertheless,
erroneous. There is no way in which people can be so thoroughly
aroused to the urgent necessity of radical economic
changes as by bringing them into such intimate relations
with the submerged millions that they hear the throbbing of
misery’s heart. The lethargy of the moral instincts of the
people is unquestionably due to lack of knowledge more
than anything else. The people do not begin to realize the
true condition of life in the ever-widening field of abject want.
When they know and are sufficiently interested to personally
investigate the problem and aid the suffering, they will
appreciate as never before the absolute necessity for radical
economic changes, which contemplate a greater meed of
justice and happiness than any measures yet devised. But
aside from this we must not forget the fact that we have a
duty to perform to the living no less than to the generations
yet unborn. The commonwealth of to-day as well as that of
to-morrow demands our aid. Millions are in the quicksands:
50yearly, monthly, daily, hourly they are sinking deeper and
deeper. We can save them while the bridges are being
built. To withhold the planks upon which life and happiness
depend is no less criminal than to refuse to face the
question in its broader aspects and labor for fundamental
economic changes. A great work of real, practical, and enduring
value, however, is being wrought each year by those
in charge of local missions work in the slums and by individuals
who mingle with and study the actual condition of the
very poor. The extent of good accomplished by these few
who are giving their lives to uplifting society’s exiles is little
understood, because it is quiet and unostentatious; yet
through the instrumentality of the silent workers, thousands
of persons are annually kept from starvation and crime, while
for many of them new, broad, and hopeful horizons are constantly
coming in view.8

Let us now examine a broader aspect of this problem. So
long as the wretched, filthy dens of dirt, vermin, and disease
stand as the only shelter for the children of the scum, so
long will moral and physical contagion flourish and send
51forth death-dealing germs; so long will crime and degradation
increase, demanding more policemen, more numerous
judiciary, and larger prisons. No great permanent or far-reaching
reformation can be brought about until the habitations
of the people are radically improved. The recognition
of this fact has already led to a practical palliative
measure for relief that must challenge the admiration of all
thoughtful persons interested in the welfare of society’s
exiles. It is a step in the direction of justice. It is not
merely a work of charity; it is, I think, the most feasible
immediate measure that can be employed which will change
the whole aspect of life for tens of thousands, making existence
mean something, and giving a wonderful significance to
the now meaningless word home. I refer to the erection of
model tenement apartments in our overcrowded sections, such,
for example, as the Victoria Square dwelling of Liverpool.
Here, on the former site of miserable tenement houses, sheltering
more than a thousand people, stands to-day a palatial
structure built around a hollow square, the major part of
which is utilized as a large shrub-encircled playground for
the children. The halls and stairways of the building are
broad, light, and airy; the ventilation and sanitary arrangements
perfect. The apartments are divided into one, two,
and three rooms each. No room is smaller than 13 × 8 feet
6 inches; most of them are 12 × 13 feet 4 inches. All the
ceilings are 9 feet high. A superintendent looks after the
building. The tenants are expected to be orderly, and to
keep their apartments clean. The roomy character of halls
and chambers may be inferred from the fact that there are
only two hundred and seventy-five apartments in the entire
building. The returns on the total expenditure of the
building, which was $338,800.00, it is estimated will be at
least 4½ per cent, while the rents are as follows: $1.44 per
week for the three-room tenement, $1.08 per week for those
containing two large rooms, and 54 cents for the one-room
quarters. In Boston, the rents for the dreadful one-room
cellar are $1.00 a week; for the two-room tenements above
the cellars, the rent, so far as I heard, ranged from $1.50 to
$2.50; three rooms were, of course, much higher. The rooms
also are far smaller here than those in the beautiful,
healthful, and inviting Victoria Square apartments. Yet it
will be observed that the Shylock landlords receive more than double
52the rental paid in this building for dens which would
be a disgrace to barbarism. A similar experiment, in many
respects even more remarkable than that recently inaugurated
by the Liverpool co-operation, is exhibited in the Peabody
dwellings in London. These apartments have been in successful
operation for so many years, while the results attending
them have been so marked and salutary, that no discussion
of this subject would be complete that failed to give
some of the most important facts relating to them. I know
of no single act of philanthropy that towers so nobly above
the sordid greed of the struggling multitude of millionaires,
as does this splendid work of George Peabody, by which
to-day twenty thousand people, who but for him would be in
the depths of the slums, are fronting a bright future, and
with souls full of hope are struggling into a higher civilization.
It will be remembered that Mr. Peabody donated at
intervals extending over a period of eleven years, or from
1862 to 1873, £500,000 or $2,500,000 to this project of
relieving the poor. He specified that his purpose was to
ameliorate the condition of the poor and needy of London,
and promote their comfort and happiness, making only the
following conditions:—

THE VICTORIA SQUARE APARTMENT HOUSE, LIVERPOOL, ENG.

Realizing that little could be hoped for from individuals
or their offspring, who were condemned to a life in vile dens,
where the squalor and wretchedness was only equalled by
the poisonous, disease-breeding atmosphere and the general
filth which characterized the tenement districts, the trustees
53Mr. Peabody selected to carry forward his work, engaged
in the erection of a large building accommodating over two
hundred, at a cost of $136,500. This apartment house,
which is substantially uniform with the seventeen additional
buildings since constructed from the Peabody fund, is five
stories high, built around a hollow square, thus giving plenty
of fresh air and sunshine to the rear as well as the front of
the entire building. The square affords a large playground
for the children where they are in no danger of being run
over by vehicles, and where they are under the immediate
eye of many of the parents. The building is divided into
tenements of one, two, and three room apartments, according
to the requirements of the occupant. There are also nine
stores on the ground floor, which bring a rental of something
over $1,500 a year for each of the buildings. By careful,
honest, and conscientious business management, the original
sum of $2,500,000 has been almost doubled, while comfortable,
healthful homes have been procured for an army of over
20,000 persons. Some of the apartments contain four rooms,
many three, some two, others one. The average rent is
about $1.15 for an apartment. The average price for three-room
apartments in the wretched tenements of London, is
from $1.45 a week. In the Peabody dwellings, the death
rate is .96 per one thousand below the average in London.
Thus it will be seen that while large, healthful, airy, and
cheerful homes have been provided for over 20,000 at a lower
figure than the wretched disease-fostering and crime-breeding
tenements of soulless Shylocks, the Peabody fund has, since
1862, grown to nearly $5,000,000, or almost twice the sum
given for the work by the great philanthropist. No words
can adequately describe the magnitude of this splendid work,
any more than we can measure the good it has accomplished,
the crime prevented, or the lives that through it have grown
to ornament and bless society. In the Liverpool experiment,
the work has been prosecuted by the municipal government.
In the Peabody dwellings, it has, of course, been
the work of an individual, carried on by a board of high-minded,
honorable, and philanthropic gentlemen. To my
mind, it seems far more practicable for philanthropic, monied
men to prosecute this work as a business investment,
specifying in their wills that rents shall not rise above a
figure necessary to insure a fair interest on the money,
54rather than leave it for city governments, as in the latter
case it would be in great danger of becoming an additional
stronghold for unscrupulous city officials to use for political
purposes. I know of no field where men with millions can
so bless the race as by following Mr. Peabody’s example in
our great cities. If, instead of willing every year princely
sums to old, rich, and conservative educational institutions,
which already possess far more money than they require,—wealthy
persons would bequeath sums for the erection
of buildings after the manner of the Victoria Square or
the Peabody Dwellings, a wonderful transformation would
soon appear in our cities. Crime would diminish, life would
rise to a higher level, and from the hearts and brains of
tens of thousands, a great and terrible load would be lifted.
Yet noble and praiseworthy as is this work, we must not lose
sight of the fact, that at best it is only a palliative measure:
a grand, noble, beneficent work which challenges our
admiration, and should receive our cordial support; still it is
only a palliative.

There is a broader aspect still, a nobler work to be accomplished.
As long as speculation continues in that great gift
of God to man, land, the problem will be unsettled. So long
as the landlords find that the more wretched, filthy, rickety,
and loathsome a building is, the lower will be the taxes, he
will continue to make some of the ever-increasing army of
bread winners dwell in his foul, disease-impregnated dens.

The present economic system is being rapidly outgrown.
Man’s increasing intelligence, sense of justice, and the humanitarian
spirit of the age, demand radical changes, which will
come immeasurably nearer securing equal opportunities for
all persons than the past dreamed possible. No sudden or
rash measure calculated to convulse business and work great
suffering should be entertained, but our future action should
rest on a broad, settled policy founded upon justice, tempered
by moderation, keeping in view the great work of banishing
uninvited poverty, and elevating to a higher level the great
struggling millions without for a moment sacrificing individualism.
Indeed, a truer democracy in which a higher interpretation
of justice, and a broader conception of individual
freedom, and a more sacred regard for liberty, should be the
watchword of the future.

55

EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIANITY.

BY PROF. JAS. T. BIXBY, PH. D.

In the life and letters of Charles Darwin there is a memorandum,
copied from his pocket note-book of 1837, to this
effect:—“In July, opened first notebook on Transmutation
of Species. Had been greatly struck with the character of
the South American fossils and the species on Galapagos
Archipelago.”

These facts, he says, were the origin of all his epoch-making
views as to the development of life and the work of
natural selection in evolving species.

His suspicions that species were not immutable and made
at one cast, directly by the fiat of the Creator, seemed to
him, at first, he says, almost like murder.

To the greater part of the church, when in 1859, after
twenty years of work in accumulating the proofs of his
theory, he at last gave it to the world, it seemed quite as
bad as murder.

It is very interesting now to look back upon the history
and career of the Darwinian theory in the last thirty years;
to recall, first the fierce outcry and denunciation it elicited,
then the gradual accumulation of corroboratory evidence
from all quarters in its favor; the accession of one
scientific authority after another to the new views; the
softening, little by little, of ecclesiastical opposition; its
gradual acceptance by the broad-minded alike in theological
and scientific circles; then, in these recent years, the exaltation
of the new theory into a scientific and philosophic
creed, wherein matter, force, and evolution constitute the
new trinity, which, unless the modern man piously believes,
he becomes anathematized and excommunicated by all the
priests of the new dogmatism.

In the field of science, undoubtedly, evolution has won
the day. Nevertheless, in religious circles, old time prejudices
and slow conservatism, clinging to its creeds, as the
hermit crab clings to the cast-off shell of oyster or clam,
56still resist it. The great body of the Christian laity looks
askance on it. And even in progressive America, one of
the largest and most liberal of American denominations has
recently formally tried and condemned one of its clergy for
heresy, for the publication of a book in which the principles
of Evolution are frankly adopted and applied to Christianity.
For a man to call himself a Christian Evolutionist is (we have
been told by high Orthodox authority) a contradiction in terms.

I think it is safe to say to-day that Evolution has come to
stay. It is too late to turn it out of the mansions of modern
thought. And it is, therefore, a vital question, “Can belief
in God, and the soul, and divine revelation abide under the
same roof with evolution in peace? Or must Christianity vacate
the realm of modern thought and leave it to the chilling frosts
of materialism and scepticism?”

Now, if I have been able to understand the issue and its
grounds, there is no such alternative, no such incompatibility
between Evolution and Christianity.

There is, I know, a form of Evolution and a form of
Christianity, which are mutually contradictory.

There is a form of Evolution which is narrowly materialistic.
It dogmatically asserts that there is nothing in existence
but matter and physical forces, and the iron laws according
to which they develop. Life, according to this school, is only a
product of the happy combination of the atoms; feeling and
thought are but the iridescence of the brain tissues; conscience
but a transmuted form of ancestral fears and expediences.
Soul, revelation, providence, nothing but illusions
of the childish fancy of humanity’s infancy. Opposed to it,
fighting with all the intensity of those who fight for their
very life, stands a school of Christians who maintain that
unless the special creation of species by divine fiat and the
frequent intervention of God and His angels in the world be
admitted, religion has received its death wound. According
to this school, unless the world was created in six days, and
Joshua commanded the sun to stand still and it obeyed, and
Hezekiah turned the solar shadow back on the dial, and Jesus
was born without human father, and unless some new miracle
will interfere with the regular course of law, of rain and dew,
of sickness and health, of cause and effect, whenever a believer
lifts up his voice in prayer, why then, the very foundations
of religion are destroyed.

57Now, of course, between a Christianity and an Evolutionism
of this sort, there is an irreconcilable conflict. But it is
because neither of them is a fair, rational, or true form of
thought.

When the principle of Evolution is properly comprehended
and expounded; when Christianity is interpreted in the light
that history and philosophy require,—the two will be found
to have no difficulty in joining hands.

Though a purely naturalistic Evolutionism may ignore
God; and a purely supernatural religion may leave no room
for Evolution, a natural religion and a rational Evolutionism
may yet harmoniously unite in a higher and more fruitful
marriage.

Let us only recognize Evolution by the divine spirit, as
the process of God’s working in the world, and we have then
a theory which has a place and a function, at once for all
that the newest science has to teach and the most venerable
faith needs to retain.

In the first place, Evolution is not itself a cause. It is no
force in itself. It has no originating power. It is simply a
method and law of the occurrence of things. Evolution shows
that all things proceed, little by little, without breach of
continuity; that the higher ever proceeds from the lower;
the more complex ever unfolds from the more simple. For
every species or form, it points out some ancestor or natural
antecedent, from which by gradual modification, it has been
derived. And in natural selection, the influence of the
environment, sexual selection, use and disuse, sterility, and
the variability of the organism, Science shows us some of
the secondary factors or conditions of this development.
But none of these are supposed by it to be first causes
or originating powers. What these are, science itself does
not claim the right as yet to declare.

Now, it is true that this unbroken course of development,
this omnipresent reign of law, is inconsistent with
the theological theories of supernatural intervention that
have so often claimed a monopoly of faith. But independent
of all scientific reasons, on religious and philosophical grounds
themselves, this dogmatic view is no longer to be accepted.
For if God be the God of all-seeing wisdom and foresight
that reverence conceives him to be, his work should be too
perfect from the outset to demand such changes of plan and
58order of working. The great miracle of miracles, as Isaac
Taylor used to say, is that Providence needs no miracles to
carry out its all-perfect plans.

But if, I hear it asked, the huge machine of the universe
thus grinds on and has ever ground on, without interruption;
if every event is closely bound to its physical antecedent,
life to the cell, mind to brain, man to his animal ancestry
and bodily conditions,—what other result will there be than
an inevitable surrender to materialism? When Laplace was
asked by Napoleon, on presenting to him his famous essay
on the nebular hypothesis of the origin of the stellar universe,
“Why do I see here no mention of the Deity?” the
French astronomer proudly replied: “Sire, I have no need
of that hypothesis.”

Is not that the natural lesson of Evolutionism, to say that
God is a hypothesis, no longer needed by science and which
progressive thought, therefore, better dismiss?

I do not think so. Old time materialism dismissed the
idea of God because it dismissed the idea of a beginning.
The forces and phenomena of the world were supposed
eternal; and therefore a Creator was unnecessary. But the
conception of Evolution is radically different. It is a movement
that demands a motor force behind it. It is a movement,
moreover, that according to the testimony of modern
science cannot have been eternal. The modern theory of
heat and the dissipation of energy requires that our solar
system and the nebula from which it sprang should have had
a beginning in some finite period of time. The evolutionary
process cannot have been going on forever; for the amount
of heat and the number of degrees of temperature and the
rate of cooling, are all finite, calculable quantities, and therefore
the process cannot have been going on for more than a
certain finite number of years, more or less millions, say.
Moreover, if the original fire-mist was perfectly homogeneous,
and not impelled into motion by any external force, it would
never have begun to rotate and evolve into planets and
worlds. If perfectly homogeneous, it would have remained,
always balanced and always immobile. To start it on its
course of rotation and evolution, there must have been
either some external impelling power, or else some original
differentiation of forces or conditions; for which, again, some
other cause than itself must be supposed. For the well-known
59law of inertia forbids that any material system that is in absolute
equilibrium should spontaneously start itself into motion.
As John Stuart Mill has admitted, “the laws of nature can
give no account of their own origin.”

In the second place, notice that the materialistic interpretation
of Evolution fails to account for that which is most
characteristic in the process, the steady progress it reveals.
Were Evolution an aimless, fruitless motion, rising and falling
alternately, or moving round and round in an endless circle,
the reference of these motions to the blind forces of matter
might have, perhaps, a certain plausibility. But the movements
of the evolution process are of quite a different
character. They are not chaotic; no barren, useless circlings
back to the same point, again and again; but they are progressive;
and if often they seem to return to their point of
departure, we see, on close examination, that the return is
always on a higher plane. The motion is a spiral one, ever
advancing to loftier and loftier ranges. Now this progressive
motion is something that no accidental play of the atoms will
account for. For chance builds no such rational structures.
Chance writes no such intelligent dramas, with orderly
beginning, crescendo, and climax. Or if some day, chance
builds a structure with some show of order in it, to-morrow
it pulls it down. It does not move steadily forward with
permanent constructiveness.

The further Science penetrates into the secrets of the
universe the more regular seems the march of thought presented
there; the more harmonious the various parts; the
more rational the grand system that is discovered. “How
the one force of the universe should have pursued the pathway
of Evolution through the lapse of millions of ages,
leaving traces so legible by intelligence to-day, unless from
beginning to end the whole process had been dominated by
intelligence,” this is something, as Francis Abbot well says,
that passes the limits of conjecture. The all-luminous intelligibility
of the universe is the all-sufficient proof of the
intelligence of the cause that produced it. In the annals
of science there is nothing more curious than the prophetic
power which those savans have gained who have grasped
this secret of nature—the rationality of the universe.
It was by this confidence in finding in the hitherto unexplored
domains of nature what reason demanded, that
60Goethe, from the analogies of the mammalian skeleton,
discovered the intermaxillary bone in man; and Sir
William Hamilton, from the mathematical consequences
of the undulation of light, led the way to the discovery
of conical refraction. A similar story is told of Prof.
Agassiz and Prof. Pierce, the one the great zoölogist,
the other the great mathematician, of Cambridge. Agassiz,
having studied the formation of radiate animals, and having
found them all referable to three different plans of structure,
asked Prof. Pierce, without informing him of his discovery,
how to execute all the variations possible, conformed to the
fundamental idea of a radiated structure around a central
axis. Prof. Pierce, although quite ignorant of natural
history, at once devised the very three plans discovered by
Agassiz, as the only fundamental plans which could be
framed in accordance with the given elements. How significantly
do such correspondences speak of the working of
mind in nature, moulding it in conformity with ideas of
reason. Thus to see the laws of thought exhibiting themselves
as also the laws of being seems to me a fact sufficient
of itself to prove the presence of an over-ruling mind in
nature.

Is there any way of escaping this obvious conclusion? The
only method that has been suggested has been to refer these
harmonies of nature back to the original regularity of
the atoms. As the drops of frozen moisture on the window
pane build up the symmetrical frost-forms without design or
reason, by virtue of the original similarity of the component
parts, so do the similar atoms, without any more reason or
plan, build up the harmonious forms of nature.

But this answer brings us face to face with a third still
more significant problem, a still greater obstacle to materialism.
Why are the atoms of nature thus regular, thus similar,
one to another? Here are millions on millions of atoms
of gold, each like its fellow atom. Millions and millions of atoms
of oxygen, each with the same velocity of movement, same
weight and chemical properties. All the millions on
millions on millions of atoms on the globe are not of infinitely
varied shape, weight, size, quality; but there are
only some seventy different kinds, and all the millions of one
kind, just as like one another as bullets out of the same mould,
so that each new atom of oxygen that comes to a burning
61flame does the same work and acts in precisely the same way
as its fellows. Did you ever think of that? If you have
ever realized what it means, you must recognize this uniformity
of the atoms, billions and billions of them as like one
another as if run out of the same mould—as the most astonishing
thing in nature.

Now, among the atoms, there can have been no birth, no
death, no struggle for existence, no natural selection to
account for this. What other explanation, then, in reason
is there, than to say, as those great men of science, Sir John
Herschel and Clerk Maxwell, who have, in our day, most
deeply pondered this curious fact, have said, that this division
of all the infinity of atoms in nature into a very limited
number of groups, all the billions of members in each group
substantially alike in their mechanical and chemical properties,
“gives to each of the atoms the essential characters at
once of a manufactured article and a subordinate agent.”

Evolution cannot, then, be justly charged with materialism.
On the contrary, it especially demands a divine creative
force as the starter of its processes and the endower of the
atoms with their peculiar properties. The foundation of that
scientific system which the greatest of modern expositors of
Evolution has built up about that principle (Herbert Spencer’s
synthetic philosophy) is the persistence of an infinite,
eternal, and indestructible force, of which all things that we
see are the manifestations.

To suppose, as many of the camp-followers of the evolution
philosophy do, that the processes of successive change
and gradual modification, which have been so clearly traced
out in nature, relieve us from the need or right of asking for
any anterior and higher cause of these processes; or that
because the higher and finer always unfolds from the lower
and coarser, therefore there was really nothing else in existence,
either at the beginning or at present, than these crude
elements which alone disclose themselves at first; and that
these gross, sensuous facts are the only source and explanation
of all that has followed them,—this is a most superficial
and inadequate view. For this explanation, as we have already
noticed, furnishes no fountain-head of power to maintain the
constant upward-mounting of the waters in the world’s conduits.
It furnishes no intelligent directions of these streams
into ever wise and ordered channels. To explain the higher life
62that comes out of these low beginnings, we must suppose the
existence of spiritual powers, unseen at first, and disclosing
themselves only in the fuller, later results, the moral and
spiritual phenomena that are the crowning flower and fruit of
the long process. When a thing has grown from a lower to
a higher form, its real rank in nature is not shown by what
it began in, but by what it has become. Though chemistry
has grown out of alchemy, and astronomy out of astrology,
this does not empty them of present truth or impair at all
their authority and trustworthiness to-day. Though man’s
mind has grown out of the sensations of brutish ancestors,
that does not take away the fact that he has now risen to a
height from which he overlooks all these mists and sees the
light which never was on sea or land. The real beginning of
a statue is not in the rough outline in which it first appears,
but in the creative idea of the perfect work which regulates
its whole progress. The real nature of a tree is not to be
discovered in the first swellings of the acorn, or the first out-pushing
of its rootlets, but rather are acorn and rootlet themselves
parts of that generic idea, that evolutive potentiality,
which is only to be understood when manifested in its completer
form in the full-grown monarch of the forest. So to
discern the real character and motor-power of the world’s
evolution, we must look, not to its beginnings, but to its end,
and see in the latest stages, and its highest moral and
spiritual forms and forces, not disguises of its earlier stages,
but ampler manifestations of that Divine power and purpose
which is the ever-active agent, working through all
the varied levels of creation.

The evolution theory is, also, it must be acknowledged,
hostile to that phase of theology which conceives of God as
a being outside of nature; which regarded the universe as a
dead lump, a mechanical fabric where the Creator once
worked, at the immensely remote dawn of creation; and to
which again, for a few short moments, this transcendental
Power stooped from His celestial throne, when the successive
species of living beings were called into being in brief exertions
of supernatural energy. But this mechanical view of
God who, as Goethe said, “only from without should drive
and twirl the universe about,” what a poor conception of God,
after all, was that; not undeserving the ridicule of the great
German.

63Certainly, the idea of God which Wordsworth has given
us, as a Power not indefinitely remote, but ever present and
infinitely near,

is a much more inspiring and venerable thought. This is the
conception of God that Paul has given us, “the God in whom
we live and move and have our being;” this is the conception
that the book of Wisdom gives us, “as the Divine Spirit
who filleth the world.”

And to this conception of God, Evolution has no antagonism,
but on the contrary, throws its immense weight in its
favor. Evolution, in fact, instead of removing the Deity
from us, brings him close about us; sets us face to face with
his daily activities. The universe is but the body of which
God is the soul; “the Interior Artist,” as Giordano Bruno
used to say, who from within moulds his living shapes of
beauty and power. What else, in fact, is Evolution but the
secular name for the Divine Indwelling; the scientific alias
for the growth and progressive revelation of the Holy Spirit,
daily putting off the old and putting on the new; constantly
busy from the beginning of time to this very day moulding
and forwarding his work?

Not long ago I came across the mental experience of a
working geologist which well illustrates this. “Once in
early boyhood,” says Mr. James E. Mills, “I left a lumberman’s
camp at night to go to the brook for water. It was a clear, cold,
moonlight night and very still, except the distant murmuring
of the Penobscot at some falls. A sense of the grandeur
of the forest and rivers, the hills, and sky, and stars came
over the boy, and he stood and looked around. An owl
hooted, and the hooting was not a cheerful sound. The men
were all asleep, and the conditions were lonely enough. But
there was no feeling of loneliness; for with the sense of the
grandeur of creation, came the sense, very real and strong,
of the Creator’s presence. In boyish imagination, I could see
His almighty hand shaping the hills and scooping out the
valleys, spreading the sky overhead, and making trees, animals,
and men. Thirty years later I camped alone in the open air
on the bank of the Gila. It was a clear, cold, moonlight night.
The camp-fire was low, for the Apaches were on the warpath.
64An owl again hooted; but again all loneliness was
dispelled by a sense of the Creator’s presence, and the
night of long ago by the Penobscot came into my mind, and
with it the question: What is the difference to my mind
between the Creator’s presence now and then? To the
heart, it was very like, but to the mind very different.
Now, no great hand was shaping things from without. But
God was everywhere, reaching down through long lines of
forces, and shaping and sustaining things from within. I
had been travelling all day by mountains of lava which had
cooled long ages ago, and over grounds which the sea, now
far off, had left on its beaches; and with the geologist’s
habit recalled the lava still glowing and flowing, and the sea
still rolling its pebbles on the beaches. But now I knew it
was by forces within the earth that the lava was poured out,
and that the waves which rolled the pebbles were driven by
the wind and the wind by the sun’s heat. And the forces
within the earth and the heat within the sun come from still
further within. Inward, always inward, the search for the
original energy and law carried my mind, for He whose will
is the source of all force, and whose thought is the source
of all law is on the inside of the universe. The kingdom of
God is within you.”

“Now this change from the boyish idea of God creating
things from without, to the manhood’s view of God creating
and sustaining all things from within,” is indeed as this
working geologist so well says, “the essential change
which modern science has wrought in the habit of religious
thought. From Copernicus to Darwin, every important step
in the development of science has cost the giving up of some
idea of a God creating things as man shapes them from
without, and has illustrated the higher idea of God reaching
His works from within. Every step has led toward the
truth that life and force come to the forms in which they
are clothed from God by the inner way; and by the same
way, their law comes with them; and that the forms are the
effects of the force and life, acting according to the law.”

This is certainly a most noble, uplifting conception of the
world. But how, perhaps it will be asked, can we find
justification for such a view of the Divine Spirit as indwelling
in nature? It is a question worth dwelling upon, and
when we carefully ponder it, we find that one of the phases
65of the evolution philosophy that has been a chief source of
alarm is precisely the one that lends signal support to this
doctrine of Divine Indwelling.

Evolution is especially shrunk from, because it connects
man so closely with nature; our souls are traced back to an
animal origin; consciousness to instinct, instinct to sensibility,
and this to lower laws and properties of force. By the law
of the correlation of forces, our mental and spiritual powers
are regarded as but transformed phases of physical forces,
conditioned as they are on our bodily states and changes;
and the soul, it is said, is but a child of nature, who is most
literally its mother.

To many minds this is appalling. But let us look it
candidly in the face and see its full bearing. We will recall
in the first place, the scientific law, no life but from proceeding
life. Let us recollect next the dictum of mechanics, no
fountain can rise higher than its source. The natural corollary
and consequence of this is “no evolution without preceding
involution.” If mind and consciousness come out of
nature, they must first have been enveloped in nature, resident
within its depths. If the spirit within our hearts is one
with the force that stirs the sense and grows in the plant,
then that sea of energy that envelops us is also spirit.

When we come to examine the idea of force, we find that
there is only one form in which we get any direct knowledge
of it, only one place in which we come into contact with it,
and that is, in our own conscious experiences, in the efforts
of our own will. According to the scientific rule, always to
interpret the unknown by the known, not the known by the
unknown, it is only the rational conclusion that force elsewhere
is also will. Through this personal experience of
energy, we get, just once, an inside view of the universal
energy, and we find it to be spiritual; the will-force of the
Infinite Spirit dwelling in all things. That the encircling
force of the universe can best be understood through the
analogy of our own sense of effort, and therefore is a form
of will, of Spirit, is a conclusion endorsed by the most
eminent men of science,—Huxley, Herschel, Carpenter, and
Le Conte. There is, therefore, no real efficient force but
Spirit. The various energies of nature are but different
forms or special currents of this Omnipresent Divine Power;
the laws of nature, but the wise and regular habits of this
66active Divine will; physical phenomena but projections of
God’s thought on the screen of space; and Evolution but the
slow, gradual unrolling of the panorama on the great stage
of time.

In geology and paleontology, as is admitted, Evolution is
not directly observed, but only inferred. The process is too
slow; the stage too grand for direct observation. There is
one field and only one where it has been directly observed.
This is in the case of domestic animals and plants under
man’s charge. Now as here, where alone we see Evolution
going on, it is under the guidance of superintending mind,
it is a justifiable inference that in nature, also, it goes on
under similar intelligent guidance. Now, it is the observation
of distinguished men of science that we see precisely
such guidance in nature. There is nothing in the Darwinian
theory, as I said, that would conduct species upward rather
than downward. To account for the steady upward progress
we must resort to a higher Cause. We must say with Asa
Gray, “Variation has been led along certain beneficial lines,
like a stream along definite and useful lines of irrigation.”
We must say with Prof. Owen, “A purposive route of development
and change, of correlation and inter-dependence,
manifesting intelligent will, is as determinable in the succession
of races as in the development and organization of the individual.
Generations do not vary accidentally in any and
every direction, but in pre-ordained, definite, and correlated
courses.” This judgment is one which Prof. Carpenter has
also substantially agreed with, declaring that the history of
Evolution is that of a consistent advance along definite lines
of progress, and can only be explained as the work of a
mind in nature.

The old argument from Design, it has been frequently
said of late, is quite overthrown by Evolution. In one sense
it is: i.e. the old idea of a special purpose and a separate
creation of each part of nature. But the divine agency is
not dispensed with, by Evolution; only shifted to a different
point of application; transferred from the particular to the
general; from the fact to the law. Paley compared the eye
to a watch; and said it must have been made by a divine
hand. The modern scientist objects that the eye has been
found to be no hand-work; it is the last result of a complicated
combination of forces; the mighty machine of nature,
67which has been grinding at the work for thousands of years.
Very well; but the modern watch is not made by hand,
either, but by a score of different machines. But does it
require less, or not more intelligence to make the watch in
this way? Or if some watch should be discovered that was
not put together by human hand, but formed by another
watch, not quite so perfect as itself, and this by another
watch, further back, would the wonder, the demand for a
superior intelligence as the origin of the process be any the
less? It strikes me that it would be but the greater. The farther
back you go, and the more general, and invariable, and simple
the fundamental laws that brought all things into their present
form, then, it seems to me, the more marvellous becomes
the miracle of the eye, the ear, each bodily organ, when
recognized as a climax to whose consummation each successive
stage of the world has contributed. How much more
significant of purposive intelligence than any special creation
is this related whole, this host of co-ordinated molecules,
this complex system of countless interwoven laws and movements,
all driven forward, straight to their mark, down the
vistas of the ages, to the grand world consummation of to-day?
What else but omniscience is equal to this?

All law, then, we should regard as a divine operation;
and all divine operation, conversely, obeys law. Whatever
phenomena we consider as specially divine ought, then, to be
most orderly and true to nature. Religion, as far as it is
genuine, must, therefore, be natural. It should be no exotic,
no foreign graft, as it is often regarded, but the normal
outgrowth of our native instincts. Evolution does not
banish revelation from our belief. Recognizing in man’s
spirit a spark of the divine energy, “individuated to the
power of self-consciousness and recognition of God,” as Le
Conte aptly phrases it; tracing the development of the
spirit-embryo through all geologic time till it came to birth
and independent life in man, and humanity recognized itself
as a child of God, the communion of the finite spirit with
the infinite is perfectly natural. This direct influence of the
spirit of God on the spirit of man, in conscience speaking to
him of the moral law, through prophet and apostle declaring
to us the great laws of spiritual life and the beauty of holiness,—this
is what we call revelation. The laws which it
observes are superior laws, quite above the plane of material
68things. But the work of revelation is not, therefore, infallible
or outside the sphere of Evolution. On the contrary, one
of the most noticeable features of revelation is its progressive
character. In the beginning, it is imperfect, dim in its
vision of truth, often gross in its forms of expression. But
from age to age it gains in clearness and elevation. In
religion, as in secular matters,—it is the lesson of the ages,
that “the thoughts of men are widened with the process of
the suns.”

How short-sighted, then, are they who seek to compress
the broadening vision of modern days within the narrow
loopholes of mediæval creeds. “There is still more light to
break from the words of Scripture,” was the brave protest
of Robinson to the bigots of his day. And as we say Amen
to that, we may add: “Yes, and more light still to come
from the whole heavens and the whole earth.” If we wish
to see that light and receive the richest rewards of God’s
revealing word, we must face the sun of truth and follow
bravely forward.

As we look back upon the long path of Evolution up which
God’s hand has already led humanity; as we see from what
lowliness and imperfection, from what darkness and grossness
God has led us to our present heritage of truth and
spiritual life, can we doubt, that, if we go forward obediently,
loyal to reason, we shall not find a new heavens and more
glorious, above our head, a new earth and a nobler field
of work beneath our feet?

69

THE IRRIGATION PROBLEM IN THE NORTHWEST.

BY JAMES REALF, JR.

Unless artesian irrigation is introduced extensively in
the central part of both Dakotas, their future, unlike their
skies, will be heavily clouded. True, the valley of the
Sioux, a strip about seventy-five miles wide from the eastern
border, of which Sioux Falls is the chief city, and the valley
of the lower Missouri about the same extent south of this,
of which Yankton is the metropolis, have never had a crop
failure. Also, the Red River Valley in North Dakota, about
ten thousand square miles, which contains the famous Dalrymple
farm and produces the best wheat in the world, has
the same unblemished record as an agricultural area. But
these fertile and fortunate sections suffer from the general
effect on the country of the drouths in the Jim Valley
adjacent, which have been severe for four years and are
increasing in severity. In the James or Jim Valley, as it
is generally called, the year 1887 showed a partial crop failure,
1888 a little more, 1889 and 1890, a total loss.

Of course, every country is liable to crop failure at times,
and must be till man makes his own weather, which will,
no doubt, some day be done to an extent now unguessed.
Nor is the record of three grievous years out of ten in the
agricultural history of a section so very bad, except just in
the way it has happened here, with a continuous and cumulative
effect. But the central Dakotans have been disheartened,
and the cumulative and often, perhaps, exaggerative,
reports of their condition spread over the country have
checked immigration into the States for the past two years,
and thus retarded the growth of the fortunate valleys.

This deplorable condition lately attracted the attention of
a young Yale graduate, who is editing an evening paper in
Sioux Falls, and he began to collect the views of experts
on the question of artesian irrigation.

70Mr. Tomlinson, of the Argus Leader, had, probably, no idea
of the mass of literature with which the theme was potential,
and the way the papers, even outside the State, have followed
his lead must be flattering to him both as an editor
and public-spirited citizen. My indebtedness to Mr. Tomlinson
for some of my facts being thus cheerfully acknowledged,
let me plunge in medias res into the turbid waters
of the irrigation problem.

Shall we make it “rain from the earth, when the sky
fails”? is now, thanks to an editor, the great Dakotan question.
It is a question of many facets. What does it cost,
will it pay, is it safe, or must it ultimately poison the
ground by sowing the land with salt like a vandal conqueror,
and creating a Sahara for immediate posterity?
Finally, if it is to be done on a proper scale, how shall the
burden of the introduction be borne; by the township, the
county, the State, the nation, or by private enterprise? Let us
take up these points seriatum. Professor Upham, of the
United States Geologic Survey, a man of unquestionable
honesty and no mean authority generally, thinks that the
cost alone demonstrates the futility of attempting the artesian
system. He bases his opinion on the Jamestown well,
which cost $7,000. Yet if, as there seems to be no doubt,
irrigation will increase the wheat crop by at least ten bushels
an acre, even this large expense would be warranted by the
increase in land value. But it is probably not known
to Professor Upham that wells between Jamestown and
Huron are being sunk now for half, in some cases one-third,
and in a few cases one-tenth of his reckoning. So with this
change of former figures, the question of cost may be said to cut
no figure. But will it pay permanently, and to what extent?
Prof. G. E. Culver answers this question with great ability.
He says positively that it will not materially change climate
nor by attraction increase appreciably the annual rainfall,
though he thinks it may tend to equalize the distribution of
the rainfall. As to climate one might be inclined to disagree
with him. There has certainly been a great change in
the climate of Utah since irrigation was begun there, and an
appreciable change in some parts of Southern California,
though not in Colorado, as far as can be learned. It is a
well-known fact that rain storms follow the course of
streams, and as a system of irrigation multiplies universally
71the evaporation of a region, besides multiplying small
streams and enlarging others, and as hollows would often be
ponded by the waste water, an increase in the area watered
by local showers is naturally to be expected. Moreover,
the burning winds that so often scorch the crops will be
somewhat softened by traversing so much moist ground and
so many streams. Trees, too, grow more readily in the
moistened land, and in turn protect the land from the hot
winds. Given a proper system of irrigation in operation
for twenty-five years, and the epithet, treeless, need not be
applied to Dakota.

Let us consider irrigation a moment historically. Certainly
half of the world’s population depend on it to-day.
Modern Egypt has the most extensive system ever known,
except the one recently unearthed in India, so massive in
construction and vast in stretch that one writer has declared
it would take the entire wealth of the British Empire to put
it again in order. The Egyptian system cost $200,000,000,
and two, sometimes three crops, are raised for one of former
times.

No division of the United States has a better credit in
commercial circles than Utah, and this is not due to the
peculiar institution of polygamy, but to the perfect system
of irrigation. The careful husbanding of the waters that
come down the Wahsatch Range on mountains, has transmuted
a dreary desert of sand and sage brush into what most
travellers regard as a garden, and what possibly to the faithful
appears symbolically a Paradise.

Senator Stewart, of the United States Irrigation Committee,
stated that he had inspected nearly every irrigated
region of the world, and knew of no place supplied by so
vast a reservoir of water, with either the volume or the pressure
of the artesian belt of Dakota. Much of the land in
the Jim River Valley is comparatively level and susceptible
of sub soil irrigation. It would take from two to three years
to put the land in prime condition and to make each acre that
is now valued at from three to ten dollars, worth fifty, at
least, and probably seventy-five.

Now, $5,000,000 would more than cover the cost of the
suggested irrigation in the Northwest—a mere trifle, if the
certainty of crops is thereby guaranteed. Nor is the certainty
of crops the only object to be considered. According
72to dealers in Sioux City, Iowa, the quality of
cattle, shipped from some places in Clay and Yankton
Counties since the introduction of irrigation, has increased
twenty-five per cent., which appears not improbable when
we note the difference between the warm, sweet flow of
artesian water and the icy, brackish stuff of a prairie slough.

The next and really the most important question—for
man should not work for the present and immediate future
without the keenest regard to the rights of posterity—is
whether, under Dakotan conditions, artesian irrigation is
safe; whether there is not danger of its poisoning the ground.
Professor Upham unhesitatingly declares that on account of
the alkaline and saline properties in these artesian waters a
continued use of them for many years would render the land
worthless. The assertion is a rounder one than scientific men
generally make, and must be received with caution, though
emanating from so high a source, for many samples of South
Dakotan waters, tested at Brookings, have shown no alkaline
reaction at all, and the professor’s reasoning seems to rest
chiefly upon the North Dakotan waters, which for some reason
show larger saline percentages than the South. Then,
too, he proceeds on the theory that a yearly supply of one
foot of water is necessary, whereas half that amount during
the dryest year, supplied through the five growing months,
would insure good crops. Four inches last July would have
saved the harvest. But anyway the entire amount of saline
matter in South Dakotan waters, according to Prof. Lewis
McLouth, does not, on the average, exceed one fifth of one
per cent. after substracting all inert substances, such as sand,
clay, limestone, and iron ores; so that, if six inches of water
were applied to the lands, and all evaporated on the surface,
the salty crust would be one 1/160 of an inch thick. But
as a part of the water would run off into the streams, and
much of it, diluted with rain-water, would soak into the
ground, the salty ingredients would be mixed at once with
at least a foot of the surface earth, and would form less than
one fifteenth of one per cent. of the weight of that soil.
These ingredients are salts of lime, magnesia, potash, and
soda. Now Dr. Bruckner, in an analysis of some soil in
Holland, which he pronounces remarkably rich, says that it
contains over fifteen per cent. of these same ingredients, or
two hundred and twenty-five times as much as six inches of
73artesian water would give to a foot of Dakotan soil within
a year. So it would take two hundred and twenty-five years
for this soil to acquire as much of these saline ingredients
as the rich soil of Holland already possesses.

We might go further into this subject and show that every
ingredient of these artesian well salts is a necessary food for
many plant tissues; but even if the accumulation of salty
substances were thought dangerous, it is to be remembered
that during five of the ten years since the settlement of the
Jim Valley, the rainfall has been ample, and if this average
should continue, the land could be allowed to rest from irrigation
for one half of the time so that the floods of rain-water
would wash away the surplus saline matter.

Enough has now been said to show that in South Dakota, at
least, no harm is likely to accrue to the soil under five hundred
years, if South Dakota chemists are to be trusted.
By that time chemistry will have advanced from an analytic
to a creative science, and if what was once ignorantly termed
“The Great American Desert” should suddenly lapse into a
saline state, a speedy cure for that condition may be counted
on with confidence.

Dismissing, then, this danger as something too dim in the
distance to be regarded even as ultimately certain, we are
confronted with a really grave question—a question fraught
with serious immediate peril, if answered practically in the
way it seems likely to be, unless patriotic Dakotans coöperate
to prevent it. How shall the burden of the cost be
borne? The farmers individually are mostly too poor, and in
the Northwest, which the oppressions of the railroads and
the teachings of Donelly have honeycombed with tendencies
to State socialism, the first answer is, “By the State, of
course.” But the need of action in this matter is pressing,
and the State of South Dakota certainly is too poor at present,
for her debt-limit, under her constitution, is already
reached.

For the counties to attempt it would be equally difficult,
for many persons not directly benefited would be forced to
share the expense, and under the pressure of continued hard
times an irrigation rebellion might result and most certainly
dissatisfaction as to the location of the wells would ensue.
There is another plan against which none of these objections
can be raised. A bill has been introduced in the legislature,
74providing that when thirty voters shall so petition,
the State engineer of irrigation shall select proper sites for
nine six-inch or sixteen four and one half inch wells. An
election shall then be held to vote bonds of the township.
If they carry, the supervisors shall have these wells sunk,
and shall rent the water to such farmers as wish it, at a sum
in no case exceeding a pro-rata share of seven per cent. of
the value of the bonds, the title to the water to go with the
title to the land so long as the rent is paid.

The details of the bill are carefully worked out, and it
would seem that this plan is feasible. It will enable the
present owners to retain their land, and to water it at reasonable
cost, while those benefited will bear the expense.

But the great danger is that what is known as private
enterprise, which in the West has been as a rule simply the
legal twin of highway robbery, will seize the situation which
this irrigation problem so temptingly presents. Some of the
investment companies are already becoming aware of the
possibilities, and are taking advantage of the farmers by buying
their land at a nominal price, and it is not improbable
that speculators within a year will appropriate (“convey”
the wise it call) vast stretches in the Jim Valley, crowding
out the present owners and keeping the land comparatively
idle for years. This is the peculiar peril of the
Dakotas, and the Farmers’ Alliance would do well to spend
some of their superfluous energy on a co-operative plan of
introducing irrigation, else they will be at the mercy of a
greedy crowd of embryo Jay Goulds. There is, indeed, no
reason why the nation, if it can appropriate money for river
and harbor bills, should not appropriate so small a sum as
$5,000,000 to an enterprise of such moment as this, and if
the Republican party had a dying glimmer of their olden
shrewdness, they would have tightened their relaxing hold
on the affections of the Dakotans by a measure of this kind.
But so cumbersome is our present system of republican government,
that it would take too long in this case to set
governmental aid in motion. So, as it is, the Dakotas are
between the devil of drouth and the deep sea of further
capitalistic oppression, their only hope of a fair solution
lying in the township scheme.

Before parting with this theme, as indicative of what
might be done with the drouth belt of the Dakotas, the following
75table deserves a comparative glance. It consists of
the tax lists of several California counties before and after
the application of irrigation.

A few words more on the first question of cost, which is
one a practical mind is always asking and re-asking. The
Aberdeen Daily News, which ought to know, for there are
several wells in its neighborhood easy to study, states that
a six-inch well can be put down for less than $2,300, and
that any of the principal wells at Aberdeen, Hitchcock,
Redfield, Woonsocket, Huron, or Yankton will irrigate six
hundred and forty acres, which would bring the cost to less
than $4.00 per acre for twelve inches of depth during the
growing season. Mr. Hinds, of the Hinds ranch, has been
charging adjacent farmers, however, only $1.00 per acre for
water from his well, and considers it a paying investment.
I cannot resist the temptation of closing this brief inquiry
into and commentary upon this most important question by citing
a picturesque passage from the Aberdeen Daily News:—

This vivid writing, this rhetoric of artesian force, may be
the result of an editorial fancy that has long bestridden a
western boom, instead of tame old Pegasus; but, leaving out
the manufacturing prospectus, there can be no gainsay of the
statement that, with a million acres of the opulent Dakotan
soil under the brilliant Dakotan sun, tended by two thousand
artesian wells, the great drouth belt of the Northwest would
be the richest agricultural area in the world.

77

REVOLUTIONARY MEASURES AND NEGLECTED CRIMES.

BY PROF. JOSEPH RODES BUCHANAN.

There is a crime which has run in wild unbridled career
around the globe, from the most ancient recorded time,
beginning in barbaric tyranny and robbery of the toiler,
advancing with the power and wealth of nations, and flourishing
unchecked in modern civilization, sapping the
strength of nations, paralyzing the conscience of humanity,
impoverishing the spirit and power of benevolence,
stimulating with alcoholic energy the mad rush for wealth
and power, and making abortive the greater part of what
saints, heroes, and martyrs might achieve for human redemption.
But alas! such has been its insinuating and blinding
power, that it has never been opposed by legislation, and
never arrested by the Church, which assumes to obey the
sinless martyr of Jerusalem, and to war against all sins,
yet has never made war upon this giant sin, but has fondled
and caressed it so kindly that the pious and conscientious,
believing it no sin or crime, have lost all conception of its
enormity, and may never realize it until an enlightened
people shall pour their hot indignation upon the crime and
the unconscious criminals.

This crime which the world’s dazzled intellect and torpid
conscience has so long tolerated without resistance, and which
antiquity admired in its despotic rulers, splendid in proportion
to the people’s misery, is that misleading form of
intense and heartless selfishness, which grasps the elements
of life and happiness, the wealth of a nation, to squander
and destroy it in that OSTENTATION which has no other
purpose than to uplift the man of wealth and humiliate his
humbler brother. That purpose is a crime; a crime incompatible
with genuine Christianity; a crime which was once
checked by the religious fervor of Wesley, but checked only
for a time. Its criminality is not so much in the heartless
78motive as in its wanton destruction of happiness and life
to achieve a selfish purpose.

This feature of social ostentation, its absolute cruelty, has
not attracted the investigation of moralists and pietists. On
the contrary, the crime is cherished in the higher ranks of
the clergy, and an eminent divine in Cincinnati occupying
an absurdly expensive church, actually preached a sermon in
vindication of LUXURY—defending it on the audacious
assumption that it was right because some men had very
expensive tastes and it was proper that such tastes should
be gratified. A private interview with John Wesley would
have been very edifying to that clergyman, as the more
remote example of the founder of Christianity had been
forgotten.

That squandering wealth in ostentation and luxury is a
crime becomes very apparent by a close examination of the
act. There would be no harm in building a $700,000 stable
for his horses, like a Syracuse millionaire, or in placing a
$50,000 service on the dinner table, like a New York Astor,
if money were as free as air and water; but every dollar
represents an average day’s labor, for there are more toilers
who receive less than a dollar than there are who receive
more.9 Hence the $700,000 stable represents the labor of a
thousand men for two years and four months. It also
represents seven hundred lives; for a thousand dollars would
meet the cost of the first ten years of a child, and the cost of
the second ten years would be fully repaid by his labor. The
fancy stable, therefore, represents the physical basis of seven
hundred lives, and affirms that the owner values it more
highly, or is willing that seven hundred should die, that his
vanity may be gratified.

This is not an imaginative estimate. A thousand dollars
would save not one but many lives in the Irish famine. It
would save more than a score of lives in New York, if diligently
used among those who are approaching the Potter’s
Field, which annually receives eight thousand of the dead of
New York. It would establish, if invested at seven per
cent., an institution that would permanently sustain educating
to a virtuous manhood, two hundred and fifty of the
waifs gathered in from the pollution of the streets, sending
79forth fifty redeemed ones every year. When $700,000 is
squandered, such is the amount of human life destroyed, by
destroying that for want of which the benevolent are unable
to stay the march of disease, of crime, and of death.

The thought of snatching food from the starving, or turning
out half-clad men and women to perish in the wintry
snow, excites our horror, but which is the greater criminal,
he who for avarice thus destroys one family, or he who in
riotous ostentation destroys the means that would save a
hundred lives? Does the fact that they are not in his presence,
or may be a mile or two away, change the nature or
results of his act? And does his accidental possession of
the basis of life authorize him to destroy it?

It is not unreasonable to say that every thousand dollars
wantonly wasted, represents the destruction of the one
human life that it would have saved, and while this
slaughter of the innocents proceeds, society is cursed with
the presence of over 100,000 criminals, paupers, tramps, and
vagrants in the State of New York, who might have been
reared into respectable citizenship with a small fragment of
the wealth that is squandered in the hurtful ostentation that
panders to a vicious taste. While poor women in New York
are fighting hunger at arm’s length, or looking through ash
barrels and offal buckets, their wealthy sisters think nothing
of spending ten, twenty, or thirty thousand dollars on their
toilet, or wearing a $130,000 necklace, or half a million in
diamonds in a Washington court circle,—all of which I
hope to see in time condemned by a purer taste as tawdry
and offensive vulgarity, even if it were not done in the presence
of misery as it is. “Twenty-four hours in the slums”
(says Julia H. Percy, in the New York World)—“just a
night and a day—yet into them were crowded such revelations
of misery, and depravity, and degradation as having
once been gazed upon, life can never be the same afterwards.”
Such is life in New York. What it is in “Darkest
England,” as portrayed by General Booth, is too wretched
and loathsome to be reproduced here. But we must not
fail to understand that five sixths of the people of the millionaire’s
metropolis, New York, live in the tenement-house
region, a breeding centre of intemperance, pestilence, crime,
and future mobs, where wretched life is crushed to deeper
wretchedness by the avaricious exaction of unfeeling
80landlords10 worse than those against whom the Irish rebel. Is
not the splendor of such a city like the hectic flush on the
consumptive’s cheek? The statistics of the past year reveal
the startling fact that New York is a decaying city; that
its population has no natural growth, but had 853 more
deaths than births.

The desire for ostentation as one of the great aims of life
is inwoven into the whole fabric of society to the exclusion
of nobler motives, for ostentation is death to benevolence.
How many bankruptcies, how many defalcations, and frauds,
how many absconding criminals, how many struggles ending
in broken-down constitutions, how many social wrecks
and embittered lives are due to its seductive influence,
because the Church and the moral sentiment of society have
not taken a stand against it, and education has never checked
it, for it runs riot at the universities patronized by the
wealthy.

New York has been said to spend five millions annually
on flowers, which is far more a matter of ostentation than
of taste, for as a rule “whatever is most costly is most fashionable.”
Nor is the cost the only evil, for the costly
dinners and parties of the ostentatious are not only characterized
by an absence of serious and elevated sentiment, but
by intellectual poverty and frivolous chatter. To waste
$5,000 for an evening’s lavish display of flowers to a
thoughtless and crowded throng, almost within hearing of
the never-ending moan of misfortune in a city in which
police stations shelter 150,000 of the utterly destitute every
year, is a picturesque way of ignoring that brotherhood of
humanity, which is gently and inoffensively referred to on
Sunday.

Moralists and pietists have been so utterly blind to the
nature of CRIMINAL OSTENTATION, that society is not shocked
to read in parallel columns the crushing agonies of famine
and pestilence, and the costly revels of aristocracy, or the
81millions wasted on royal families, that manifest about as
much concern for the suffering million as a farmer feels for
the squealing of his pigs in cold weather. No one is surprised
or shocked to hear that in India, a land famed for
poverty, famine, and pestilence, the maharajah of Baroda
could offer a pearly and jewelled carpet, ten feet by six,
costing a million of dollars, as a present to the woman who
had pleased his fancy.11 How many lives and how much of
agony did that carpet represent in a country where five cents
pays for a day’s labor? Twenty million days’ labor is a
small matter to a petty prince.

Criminal ostentation stands ever in the way of man’s
progress to a higher condition, like a wasting disease that
comes in to arrest the recovery of a patient. All schemes
of benevolence, all efforts to gain a greater mastery of nature’s
forces, and thus emancipate the race from poverty and pestilence,
languish feebly, or totally fail, for want of the resources
consumed in the blaze of ostentation. The resources of a
Church that might abolish ignorance and pauperism must be
given to uphold the royal state of lord bishops, who sit in
parliament, and make a heavy incubus on all real progress,
obstructing the measures which might uplift into comfort,
decency, and intelligence, England’s three millions of submerged
classes who live in destitution and misery.12

The upward progress of humanity is foreign to their
thoughts, and the grandest problems of human life and destiny
that ever interested the mind of man are investigated
not by the aid of the millions that ostentation wastes, but
by the heroic labors of the impoverished scholar, thankless
until his only reward can be but a monumental stone. How
seldom do we hear from the pulpit so bright a remark as that
of the Rev. S. R. Calthrop, “If the governments of the world
82would spend on scientific discovery a hundredth part of what
they spend on killing men, or rather in making preparation
for killing men and then not doing it, the secrets of the earth
would be laid bare in a time inordinately short.” But this
very warlike ambition is a matter of CRIMINAL OSTENTATION,
like that of the bullying pugilist, seeking the belt—the
desperate determination to shine and boast as the master
power in the field of war, which is to-day the insane ostentation
fostered by the leading powers of Europe. Vanity,
literally meaning emptiness, is the antithesis of wisdom,
and military vanity is a half-way station on the road to
insanity.

The profligacy of private ostentation extends in this
country to public life, as was scandalously displayed in the
twenty million State House job at Albany (which our arithmetic
makes equivalent to twenty thousand lives) and
renders all governmental affairs needlessly expensive13 (except
in that admirable republic Switzerland), nor is it
arrested by the solemnity of death, for a prodigal funeral and
a hundred thousand dollar tomb for an individual eminent
only by wealth is but a fashionable matter of course to-day.
Against this my moral sense revolts. Had I the wealth of
Crœsus, or the power of Napoleon, I could not consent to
the evil record that my last act in life, in ordering a funeral
and monument, was the effort to destroy as much as possible,
and take from the resources of benevolence that which might
gladden a thousand lives. To look back from the enlightened
upper world upon such, a monument of base selfishness,
would be the hell of conscience; but a simple rose or hawthorn
over the couch of the abandoned form would harmonize
well with the sentiments of heaven.

What is it but a matter of course, and fashionably proper
83for a minister representing the moneyless and homeless saint
of Jerusalem, to spend in various ways ten or twenty times
the average income of an American citizen. But has any
man a right to indulge in needless and therefore profligate expenditure
for himself, while misery unrelieved surrounds him?14
Could he, if he had an occasional throb of the sentiment of
brotherhood, the divine love enforced by Jesus? Suffering,
intense suffering of mind and body, is ever present in
society, and we cannot ignore it or disregard it. Has any
human being a right to look on at human suffering, and turn
away contemptuously? to see men drowning and refuse to
throw them the plank which lies conveniently by? to pass
by the chamber of dying, with loud, unseemly revels? to
titter and laugh alongside of the grave where an unrecognized
brother is being buried? to feast upon costly wines
and far-fetched elaborate viands at tables overloaded with
fresh flowers and artistic gold, while the pallid faces of a
hundred hungry ones are looking on, and who are not even
recognized so much as the dog that receives a bone? To
know that the city is attacked by a powerful army and refuse
either to enlist for its defence, or to contribute means to help
the defenders, would not be tolerated; but to do such things
is precisely what selfish and unfeeling wealth demands, and
what the aroused conscience of humanity will, ere long, forbid.
It refuses to establish the industrial and moral education for
all which would protect society from the invading forces of
pauperism, crime, and pestilence. It refuses to suspend its
costly royal revels until the voices of hunger and despair are
silenced. It refuses to moderate its giddy round of fashionable
frivolity and ostentation in the very presence of death,
in the tenements where human life is reduced to less than
half its normal length, so that death and revelry confront
each other in the city.

I can imagine the voice of the million which says to the
millionaire, we do not ask you to be a hero and leap in to save
the drowning; we do not even require you to be a manly man
and bestir yourself before a life is lost; but we do say that the
84drowning man shall not be doomed to drown by your indifference?
but if there is a rope which may be thrown to him, or a
plank to uphold him, that rope or that plank shall be used,
even if you forbid and claim them as your vested rights. You
have no vested rights paramount to the rights of the commonwealth.
It can order you in times of danger to all to place
your body for the protection of the city in the path of the
cannon ball, and if the commonwealth can demand your life
for the benefit of all, do you think it will allow its members
to be slaughtered in order to sustain your revelry, and leave
your piles of hoarded gold and silver to accumulate as a
magazine of corruption and danger to society? No, Mr.
Millionaire, poverty, pestilence, and crime, are making war
upon society and tumbling their slaughtered thousands into
Potter’s Fields. And if the commonwealth does not demand
your personal service, but simply demands that you shall
not make perpetual for the sake of ostentation all of the
present unnatural inequality, you are surely treated justly
and kindly.

When the planter objected to General Jackson’s using his
cotton bales as a rampart for the defence of New Orleans,
tradition says the General ordered him to take a musket and
stand behind them as a common soldier. At present we ask
only your superfluous cotton bales, and it would not be wise
for you to oppose our demand. The people remember the
unholy distinction of classes thirty years ago, which enabled
a favored few patricians to flourish as vampires on the commonwealth,
while the plebeians were giving it their sufferings,
their blood, and their lives, and hence they seek justice
through our enormous system of pensions.

Patricians would retain commanding superiority of wealth
for power and ostentation, but the people object to this power
and scorn the ostentation.

The immense concentration of wealth by syndicates, corporations,
and trusts alarms us all, because we see in it a
formidable danger to the republic.15 Colonel Higginson
85admits the evil, but denies that any method of counteracting
it is known, yet it may easily be shown that we have several
effective methods.

Our wealthiest are beginning to have incomes of over
$5,000,000 a year, and it is very plain from the concentration
of this wealth that a few wealthy men who could easily
form themselves into close and secret corporation, will in
time outweigh the entire republic, as Mr. Shearman says
that 250,000 families are already a three fourths financial
majority.

It was thought that this was impossible in our republic
because we had no law of primogeniture, but we have another
kind of geniture that is very effective. Recent statistics
have shown that the very wealthy inhabitants of Fifth Avenue,
86New York, have in one year but one eighteenth as
many children as the same number of families in the poorer
neighborhood of Cherry Hill. Thus poverty multiplies
itself rapidly, while wealth concentrates and needs no primogeniture
to hold it together, because its numbers do not
increase; and a similar fact, but not so extreme, appears in
the reference to our Back Bay region in our own statistics,
and in the statistics of Philadelphia. Thus it seems that
we are destined to have the richest aristocracy by far that
the world has ever dreamed of.

We know that concentrated wealth is power—and that
great power is always dangerous to its neighbors. Like the
slumbering power of dynamite, we are unwilling to have it
near us, no matter how well guarded. I hold, therefore,
that a republic has a right to guard itself against such dangers
as much as the city has a right to prohibit the establishment
of powder magazines in the centre of its population.

The profound and prophetic mind of Abraham Lincoln
presaged this, and he said: “I see in the near future a
crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble
for the safety of my country. As a result of the war,
corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption
in high places will follow, and the money power of the
country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon
the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in
a few hands, and the republic is destroyed. I feel at this
moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever
before, even in the midst of the war. God grant that my
suspicion may prove groundless.”

Wealth has a natural tendency to grow into an overwhelming
power, for a million of dollars well managed will
become $1,000,000,000 in a century and a half, and there
are millionaires to-day who may become billionaires in
forty or fifty years. But this growth has always been kept
down by a generous or prodigal consumption, by ostentatious
luxury, by profligacy, by pestilence, and by war. Yet when
these checks are diminished; when, as in our republic, the
danger of war is removed; when the generous consumption
is hindered by wide-spread poverty; when pestilence is
checked by sanitary improvements, and industry is enforced
on the millions by daily necessity, then that growth of
wealth which has been interrupted every few years in the old
87world by war, tyranny, taxation, standing armies, ignorance,
and disease, will advance in our country as a mighty
flood, impelled by the rains from heaven. The flood from
heaven which is enriching us is the inspiration of genius in
every form of science, art, and mechanical progress, which
doubles and redoubles our productive power. We must look
to human wisdom for the means of regulating the flow that
it may act as a fertilizing rain, and not as a devastating
flood, wasting the hillsides into barrenness, and sweeping
away the bulwarks that the wise have erected.

It is no rhetorical exaggeration to speak of accumulated
and unequal wealth as a dangerous flood. All ancient history
proves it to be a danger. Rome, Greece, Egypt, Persia,
and India, have shown by their terrible record how wealth
in a few hands has ever proved a curse instead of a blessing
to society. The pyramids of Egypt, an awful monument of
the blood and toil of slaves, are a gloomy record of the senseless
ostentation of despots, yet who ever speaks of the pyramids
as the monuments of a crime?

Immense wealth for personal use is not a normal desire.
It is an unsound, unhealthy appetite, resembling that of
gluttony and darkness—an appetite that grows by what it
feeds on and becomes insatiable.

It is an unsound appetite, for the increase of wealth
already beyond all human wants, adds nothing to a man’s
comforts or happiness—it adds only to his cares, which it
increases, to his selfishness, which it intensifies, and to his
power of indulging arrogance and ostentation. It impairs
his sympathy with his fellowman, and inflames his egotism.

The superfluous mass of wealth serves only to supply an
overruling power destructive to the social rights of others,
and a haughty ostentation that humiliates fellow-citizens.
It is, therefore, a hostile and dangerous element in a republic,
although a few may hold great wealth and resist its
insidious influence.

Both extreme wealth and extreme poverty are injurious to
man and injurious to society, and if it is the law of nature
that the fittest shall survive, the extremely wealthy are not
the fittest, for through the centuries they do not survive.
The extremely wealthy are dying out, for they do not have
children enough to maintain their numbers. It is our duty
so to shape our policy as to relieve the commonwealth of
88possible dangers from both extreme wealth and extreme
poverty. They are twin evils; extreme wealth indicates
extreme poverty, as mountains indicate valleys. Wealth,
corruption, and despotism, are grouped together in history,
as liberty has been grouped with equality, simplicity, hardihood,
the mountain and the wilderness.

Great wealth is timid, narrow-minded, and opposed to
reform, its method of opposition being corruption, and these
characteristics are intensified in hereditary wealth. Wealth
everywhere gives power to monopolize the face of the earth,
and thus establish a hereditary nobility; for the landlords of
millions of acres are the most substantial and formidable
lords that society knows, and nowhere in the world have
there been greater opportunities to establish such an aristocracy,
which may be able to buy and sell the aristocracy of
Europe. Our present national wealth, which is about one
thousand dollars per capita, represents not the increased
wealth of the masses but the enormous accumulations of a
few. Our gain of about two thousand millions annually,
does it represent the prosperity or the decline of the republic?
If it is but aggregation of wealth, it is a decline, it
is corpulence instead of strength.

Our social system has the elements of decay already as
conspicuous as in the tuberculous patient. Invention increases
the power of wealth instead of increasing the
resources of manhood, for wealth absorbs and uses machinery
and diminishes the relative value of the man by making
him a machine attendant. In leather work he sinks from
the independent shoemaker, safe in the patronage of his
neighbors, to the mere tenth of a shoemaker who if dislodged
from the factory is helpless. The independence of the
hunter and the farmer is fast disappearing. Population is
gathering in cities, and the country becoming the home of
tenant farmers or day laborers on large estates. The middle
class is declining, and society becoming slowly an aggregation
of capitalists and employers, an unhealthy social condition,
premonitory of struggles and conflicts that were not possible
fifty years ago. At this moment a strike of 150,000 is
threatened. But it is not merely the laboring classes, for
all classes are threatened by our present dangerous system
which is running on to sure destruction, like a locomotive
let loose and flying wildly over the railroad. If there were
89no other formidable danger, the trust or syndicate is in itself
a fatality. When a thousand millions enter the field they
enter as master, in the Standard Oil fashion. They can buy
out or crush out, as they may choose, every competitor in the
field they may seize. There is not a single form of industry
which they cannot monopolize, and where the monopoly is
established, demand what prices they please for that which
they alone can supply. Can we imagine the conventional
brother Jonathan held down by the throat with iron grip,
and his pockets open to the holder, or will he rebel before
the grip is fastened? He does not seem aware how well it is
fastened upon him already; but something decisive will be
done long before a syndicate senate can rule the entire
country. Ten years more will introduce the struggle. The
struggle must come, for plutocracy is advancing to universal
absorption, and labor is becoming defiant, and well it may,
for the COMMONWEALTH represents not money but man, and
when plutocracy, absorbing ninety-five per cent. of the
nation’s wealth, assumes the practical government, the
commonwealth with a firm hand will thrust it aside; but
will it be a peaceful change, will the conquerors yield to
the conquered? As the vampire bat fans its sleeping victims
while absorbing their life blood, the advocates of
capital deny that there is any such thing as plutocracy, or
anything going on but the natural legitimate and healthful
development of trade; and the medical corporations called
colleges in seizing a stern monopoly of the healing art,
assure us that it is only for the benefit and protection of the
dear people who have not sense enough to distinguish
between a successful and an unsuccessful doctor, and have so
unpardonable a partiality for those who cure them cheaply
without college permission. There is nothing too small for
monopoly to grasp, not even the cheap dispensing of established
remedies from the druggist’s counter.

It is a just and patriotic sentiment which looks with apprehension
upon the great and irresponsible power developed
by extreme wealth, which lifts the wealthy far above society,
enabling them to indulge in profligate luxury, and to
squander in a single evening’s pleasure (or display without
pleasure) an amount that would make life prosperous to a
hundred suffering families, or on a single piece of architectural
splendor, enough to complete the education of the
90entire youth of a city—wealth enabling them to rival the
despots of Europe in social ostentation, while almost within
hearing of their revelry, ten or twenty thousand are suffering
from want of employment, want of health, want of education,
want of industrial skill, which society did not give them,
suffering the slow death that comes through debility, emaciation,
and disease, from toil and poverty, the sufferer being
sometimes a woman in whom all the virtues have blossomed
only to perish in the chilling atmosphere of poverty.16 This
may be utterly senseless talk to those in whom the sentiment
of brotherhood is dead, but it expresses sentiments to which
millions respond, and it is refreshing to see that these statements,
which at last have found free expression through The
Arena, are also beginning to find a home in the minds of
public leaders, whose voices will compel attention. I allude
to the philanthropic expressions of the Emperor of Germany,
and to the language of Mr. Gladstone, who shows that the
necessity of philanthropic action on the part of the wealthy
is increased by their changed attitude, as they are becoming
more isolated from the people, and no longer take that friendly
personal interest in their tenants and employes of every grade,
which was formerly common. In this country, social ostentation
is a great power to increase this separation of ranks,
and the book of Jacob A. Riis, “How the Other Half Lives,”
ought to be studied by every wealthy citizen as well as by
reformers. Herbert Spencer, in a recent thoughtful essay,
refers to this increasing interest in social welfare thus: “He
is struck, too, by the contrast between the small space which
popular welfare then occupied in the public attention, and
the large space it now occupies, with the result that outside
and inside Parliament, plans to benefit the millions form the
leading topics, and every one having means is expected to
join in some philanthropic effort.” This is because the millions
demand it, and they who, like the writer, have for half
a century been interested in behalf of the millions, may now
be listened to.

The enormous wealth developed in our republic, in which
91a single city holds a thousand millionaires, controls the
press, controls legislation, and teaches the ambitious to sell
themselves to the wealthy who are the controlling power.
Under such influences arises that moral insensibility which,
in New York, could squander twenty millions on one building,
while half the children were out of school, and a large portion
of the insane were left wallowing in indecent filth, worse than
that of a hog pen, as shown in the Albany Law Journal.

In presenting these views, I am not assailing millionaires
as men more objectionable or censurable than any other class.
It is not true that the mere ability to gain wealth implies
moral inferiority, for it implies many substantial and honorable
qualities. Reverse the social ranks, give the wealth to
the poor, and our condition would not be improved, perhaps
it would be much worse. The fault lies in our social system
of struggle and rivalry, and while that system generates, as
it always has, extreme wealth and extreme poverty, we must
combat these two evils, and to control them is the purpose of
this essay. Whether a better social system is possible that
would PREVENT them, is not now under consideration, but
surely there must be a system which will make unlimited
wealth and unlimited poverty impossible, for such conditions
are incompatible with a permanent, peaceful, and prosperous
republic. As well might we expect a successful voyage
from a ship with four-fifths of its cargo on the upper deck, as
from a republic top heavy with millionaire capital. Can
we believe that republics are forbidden by the laws of
progress and evolution; that they must, as Macaulay maintained,
come to a fatal crisis? I trust not. But does not our
social system, inherited from barbarism, built up on the hot
ashes left where the fires of war have desolated, necessarily
develop that inequality which has swept the great empires
of antiquity to their doom. When all the wealth of the
nation has fallen into the possession of two per cent. of
the population, the period of danger has arrived. Five per
cent. of our population had, in 1880, absorbed four fifths of
the national wealth, and at present, according to the careful
statistics of Mr. Shearman, less than two per cent. hold seven
tenths of our wealth, and are rapidly advancing to nine
tenths, their progress being assisted by the indirect taxation
which places the burden of government on the shoulders of
poverty. Popular ignorance of public affairs has tolerated
92this, and has tolerated a financial system far worse, which has
given capital all possible advantage of labor. We are drifting
in the rapids; how far off is our Niagara? But labor is
roused, and a change in our system of taxation is imminent.

Unlimited wealth and unlimited poverty are the necessary
results of the warlike stage of progress, which develops the
conquerors and the conquered in the great battle of life.
Unnumbered centuries of tribal and international war have
developed to high perfection the wolfish and tigerish instincts
of humanity. What is called peace is a state of financial
war. Beneath the smooth skin of the civilized man, we find
the wolf in undiminished vigor. The triumphant wolf rides
in his chariot; the conquered wolf sleeps in the open air along
the alleys, wharves, and streets; but what cares the wolf
triumphant for that? for the 30,000 homeless in London?
The policeman’s club, or the bayonet, is the only thing that
keeps down riot and arson, and the uncertainty of the result
is all that hinders the French, German, and Russian wolves
from turning a continent into a pandemonium. Is Europe
truly a civilized country? Not if tried by an ethical standard.
Von Moltke, the great man of Germany, who has so recently
passed away, considered war a permanent institution.

In this wolfish stage of human development, altruism is
almost unknown, except as an eccentricity. It is safe to say,
as a general rule to which there are not many exceptions,
that no man is fit to be entrusted with any more than he needs
for his own comfortable existence. Every dollar beyond that
sum is wasted in his hands. He has not the faintest conception
that he is a trustee of all such wealth, responsible to
heaven for its use. As he cannot consume it, he can but
squander it to gratify his vanity, and lift himself to a position
from which he can, or thinks he can, look down upon his
fellows. The leading idea of the average citizen is to construct
a palace that will cost ten, twenty, fifty, or a hundred
times as much as the residence that would be amply sufficient
and pleasant.17 His talent for the destruction of wealth
grows by indulgence, and thus the millions that the financial
93conquerors have won from the conquered are thrown into the
blazing flame of ostentation, and might as well be thrown into
a literal conflagration. Such is the humanity with which we
have to deal at present. Wealth, no matter who holds it,
does not restrain the destruction of the resources of the commonwealth,
but the growl of the suffering millions may, and
may lead to a recognition of the grand truth that everything beyond
the demands of human comfort is a sacred trust for humanity,
and with the millions thus aroused, I believe it may be
possible to introduce laws which will gradually change the
entire condition of society, and leave in this broad land neither
an American prince nor an American beggar—a change which
will be a greater forward movement than that of 1776.

The leading purpose of such legislation will be the controlling
of that lawless selfishness, which wantonly destroys all
in which the community is interested; which on the prairies
exterminates the buffalo, in the mountains and forests
destroys the timber, bringing on as a consequence the drouth,
floods, and desolate barrenness, under which a large part of
the old world is suffering; which would exterminate the seals
if government did not interfere, and would infect every city
with pestilential odors of offensive manufactories; which
would destroy the people’s national money for the benefit of
private bankers, and pervert all the powers of government for
the benefit of monopoly and organized speculation.

May we not look to that struggle for justice which to-day
assumes the forms of Nationalism, Farmers’ Alliance, People’s
Party, Knights of Labor, and Land Nationalization, to accomplish
this purpose and emancipate the present from the barbarian
ideas of the past?

(To be concluded in July Arena.)

94

HAS SPENCER’S DOCTRINE OF INCONCEIVABILITY
DRIVEN RELIGION INTO THE UNKNOWABLE?

BY REV. T. ERNEST ALLEN.

The service rendered to humanity by Mr. Herbert Spencer
in the elaboration of the Synthetic Philosophy, should command
the admiration and gratitude of all broad-minded men.
There are certain fallacies in the argument by which Religion
is relegated into the “Unknowable,” however, to which it
will be the purpose of this essay to call the reader’s attention.
If Religion really be, by its very nature, unknowable, it follows
that as man grows in intelligence, the extent to which
it occupies his thought will tend to diminish towards final
extinction. It is a thoroughly wholesome state of affairs
that, like all things which claim our consideration, Religion
should again and again be compelled to step into the arena
to vindicate its right to hold sway over humanity. Nor is
the attitude of many minds which places Religion upon the
defensive, unreasonable, or the outgrowth of a perverse
spirit, but, on the contrary, it results from the questionings
of those eager to find the truth and anxious to “prove all
things” and cast error aside. Let us see if Religion can
withstand the fierce onslaught, threatening its very life,
which Mr. Spencer makes in his “First Principles” (pp. 3-123).

Our author’s first attempt is to “form something like a
general theory of current opinions,” so as neither to “over-estimate
nor under-estimate their worth.” As a special case
from the examination of which he hopes to derive a general
method, he traces the evolution of government from the beginning
until now. It is held that no belief concerning government
is wholly true or false; “each of them insists upon
a certain subordination of individual actions to social requirements….
From the oldest and rudest idea of allegiance,
down to the most advanced political theory of our
95own day, there is on this point complete unanimity.” He
speaks of this subordination as a postulate “which is, indeed,
of self-evident validity,” as ranking “next in certainty to
the postulates of exact science.” As the result of his search
for “a generalization which may habitually guide us when
seeking for the soul of truth in things erroneous,” he concludes:
“This method is to compare all opinions of the same
genus; to set aside as more or less discrediting one another
those various special and concrete elements in which such
opinions disagree; to observe what remains after the discordant
constituents have been eliminated, and to find for the
remaining constituent that abstract expression which holds
true throughout its divergent modifications.”

What did Mr. Spencer discover by the application of his
method to government? A postulate which he announces to
be of “self-evident validity,” an “unquestionable fact”—that
is all! His method is a statement of the process of abstraction.
Very useful though it is in determining what one
or more predicates may be affirmed of many objects of
thought which differ widely otherwise or in revealing truths,
as he points out, respecting which men can by no possibility
disagree, it cannot assist us in discriminating between true
and false “discordant constituents,” for which purpose a
simple method would be helpful. Certainly this is not
the method which gave us the most “advanced political
theory” of the day! The fact is, that when used, as Mr.
Spencer suggests, it shrivels the total content of any subject
under consideration, down to the one truth lying at the
foundation of the most primitive theory. In the case of Religion,
he alleges that the one point upon which there is entire
unanimity between the most divergent creeds, between
the lowest fetichism and the most enlightened Christianity,
is this: “That there is something to be explained.” An
interesting piece of information, surely! Yes, but “the
Power which the Universe manifests to us is utterly inscrutable.”
Over against this, we have the magnificent superstructure
of modern Science, erected by the employment of
methods quite other than the one which he esteems competent
to overthrow Religion.

The postulate, a straight line may be drawn between two
points, while it makes a geometry possible, reveals nothing
as to the properties of lines; so, in the present case, the
96proposition resulting from the process of abstraction, “there
is something to be explained,” affirms that, at least à priori,
Religion is possible, but decides nothing as to the truth or
falsity of unnumbered statements which millions of people
have believed for centuries to belong to the domain of
Religion. This method does not and cannot discredit
Religion.

“Religious ideas of one kind or another,” says Mr. Spencer,
“are almost universal…. We are obliged to admit
that, if not supernaturally derived, as the majority contend,
they must be derived out of human experiences, slowly accumulated
and organized…. Considering all faculties,”
under the evolutionary hypothesis, “to result from accumulated
modifications caused by the intercourse of the organism
with its environment, we are obliged to admit that there exist
in the environment certain phenomena or conditions which
have determined the growth of the feeling in question, and so
are obliged to admit that it is as normal as any other faculty….
We are also forced to infer that this feeling is in some
way conducive to human welfare…. Positive knowledge
does not and never can fill the whole region of possible
thought. At the utmost reach of discovery there arises, and
must ever arise, the question—what lies beyond?…
Throughout all future time, as now, the human mind may
occupy itself, not only with ascertained phenomena and their
relations, but also with that unascertained something which
phenomena and their relations imply. Hence if knowledge
cannot monopolize consciousness—if it must always continue
possible for the mind to dwell upon that which transcends
knowledge; then there can never cease to be a place
for something of the nature of Religion; since Religion under
all its forms is distinguished from everything else in
this, that its subject matter is that which passes the sphere
of experience.” Religion is “a constituent of the great
whole; and being such must be treated as a subject of
Science with no more prejudice than any other reality.”

It will suit our present purpose to divide the cognitive
faculties into intuitive and non-intuitive. If I rightly understand
Mr. Spencer, when he says of the subject matter of
Religion that it “passes the sphere of experience,” he means
that the content of Religion results from the action of the
non-intuitive faculties upon material furnished by the intuitive
97faculties, and not from the immediate action of the latter
upon environment. For the sake of the argument, I will
grant this position. In order that mankind may build up
sciences in which it reposes such confidence, the action of
the non-intuitive faculties must be trusted, for it is only
through such action that sciences can ever be constructed
from the materials of experience. Granting, then, the general
trustworthiness of mental operations, the mind cannot
abstract out of human experiences what was not already in
them; cannot evolve what was not involved. The separation
of the true from the false in Religion, then, must be
accomplished, as in the case of Science, by verifying the intuitions
and going repeatedly over the chains of reasoning
which lead to the conclusions farthest removed from intuitions,
to guard as much as possible against error. Thus,
because drawn out from given data, certain conclusions will
embody to-day what is true in Religion, and later, with an
enlarged experience, more or less modified conclusions will
express what will then be seen to be true. This is in accord
with the general law of evolution which holds for Science.
From the present point of view, Mr. Spencer seems to concur
in the above, since he says of religious ideas, that “to suppose
these multiform conceptions” to “be one and all absolutely
groundless, discredits too profoundly that average
human intelligence from which all our individual intelligences
are inherited.”

To the statement that the mind cannot abstract out of human
experiences what was not already in them, Mr. Spencer
could make, I think, but one answer, to wit: that while the
operations of the mind are generally reliable, and while there
has been an element in human experience which seemed to
warrant conclusions derived from them, nevertheless, mankind
has egregiously erred in thinking that it had the power
to build up a valid content to Religion, since the very nature
of Religion is such, that the mental operations which are
reliable in the realm of Science cannot be so in the realm of
Religion. To answer this, we must consider the argument
for conceivability as the touchstone which is to separate the
“Knowable” from the “Unknowable.” Corresponding to
small objects, a piece of rock for example, where the sides,
top, and bottom can be considered as practically all present
in consciousness at once, and large ones, like the earth,
98where they cannot, our author divides conceptions into complete
and symbolic. Great magnitudes and classes of objects
also produce symbolic conceptions which, while
indispensable to reasoning, often lead us into error. “We
habitually mistake our symbolic conceptions for real ones.”
The former “are legitimate, provided that by some cumulative
or indirect process of thought, or by the fulfilment of
predictions based upon them, we can assure ourselves that
they stand for actualities,” otherwise “they are altogether
vicious and illusive” and “illegitimate” and here belong
religious ideas.

The foregoing is applied by Mr. Spencer in his argument
relative to the origin of the Universe respecting which, he
asserts that “three verbally intelligible suppositions may be
made”: (1) that it is self-existent, (2) that it was self-created,
(3) that it was created by an external agency. “Which
of these suppositions is most credible it is not needful here
to enquire. The deeper question, into which this finally
merges, is, whether any one of these is even conceivable in
the true sense of the word.” He shows that, since the mind
refuses to accept the transformation of absolute vacuity into
the existent, the theory of self-creation forces us back to a
potential Universe whose self-creation was transition to an
actual Universe, and that then, we must explain the existence
of the potential Universe and that, similarly, creation
by an external agency demands that we account for the genesis
of the Creator, so that both of these theories involve the
self-existence of a something. Therefore, I shall analyze his
presentation of the first theory only. “Self-existence necessarily
means existence without a beginning; and to form a
conception of self-existence is to form a conception of existence
without a beginning. Now by no mental effort can we
do this. To conceive existence through infinite past-time,
implies the conception of infinite past-time, which is an
impossibility. To this let us add, that even were self-existence
conceivable, it would not in any sense be an
explanation of the Universe…. It is not a question of
probability, or credibility, but of conceivability.”

In making conceivability the supreme test as to what is
knowable, Mr. Spencer sets up a criterion which he himself
violates. If it can be shown that he places at the very foundation
of Science a postulate or, what is generally conceded
99to be a demonstrated truth, which, equally with the conception
of the Universe as self-existent, involves the conception
of infinite past-time, it is evident that we shall have broken
down the fundamental distinguishing characteristic which
separates his “Knowable” from his “Unknowable,” and thus
leave Science and Religion standing upon the same level of
validity in their relation to the human mind. In the second
part of “First Principles,” which treats of the “Knowable,”
Mr. Spencer says (p. 180): “The Indestructibility of Matter
… is a proposition on the truth of which depends the
possibility of exact Science. Could it be shown, or could
it with any rationality be even supposed, that Matter, either
in its aggregates or in its units, ever became non-existent,
there would be need either to ascertain under what conditions
it became non-existent, or else to confess that Science
and Philosophy are impossible. For if, instead of having to
deal with fixed quantities and weights, we had to deal with
quantities and weights which were apt, wholly or in part, to
be annihilated, there would be introduced an incalculable
element, fatal to all positive conclusions” (p. 172). Considering
that in times past men have believed in the creation
of Matter out of nothing and in its annihilation, he points
out that it is to quantitative Chemistry that we owe the empirical
basis for our present belief.

Next he inquires “whether we have any higher warrant
for this fundamental belief than the warrant of conscious induction,”
and writes as follows of logical necessity (pp. 172-179):
“The consciousness of logical necessity, is the consciousness
that a certain conclusion is implicitly contained
in certain premises explicitly stated. If, contrasting a young
child and an adult, we see that this consciousness of logical
necessity, absent from the one is present in the other, we are
taught that there is a growing up to the recognition of certain
necessary truths, merely by the unfolding of the inherited
intellectual forms and faculties. To state the case
more specifically:—before a truth can be known as necessary,
two conditions must be fulfilled. There must be a
mental structure capable of grasping the terms of the proposition
and the relation alleged between them; and there
must be such definite and deliberate mental representation of
these terms as makes possible a clear consciousness of this
relation…. Along with acquirement of more complex
100faculty and more vivid imagination, there comes a power of
perceiving to be necessary truths, what were before not recognized
as truths at all…. All this which holds of logical
and mathematical truths, holds, with change of terms, of
physical truths. There are necessary truths in Physics for
the apprehension of which, also, a developed and disciplined
intelligence is required; and before such intelligence arises,
not only may there be failure to apprehend the necessity of
them, but there may be vague beliefs in their contraries….
But though many are incapable of grasping physical
axioms, it no more follows that physical axioms are not knowable
à priori by a developed intelligence, than it follows
that logical relations are not necessary, because undeveloped
intellects cannot perceive their necessity.

“The terms ‘à priori truth’ and ‘necessary truth’ … are
to be interpreted,” he continues, “not in the old sense, as implying
cognitions wholly independent of experiences, but as
implying cognitions that have been rendered organic by immense
accumulations of experiences, received partly by the
individual, but mainly by all ancestral individuals whose
nervous systems he inherits. But when during mental evolution,
the vague ideas arising in a nervous structure imperfectly
organized, are replaced by clear ideas arising in a
definite nervous structure; this definite structure, molded
by experience into correspondence with external phenomena,
makes necessary in thought the relations answering to absolute
uniformities in things. Hence, among others, the conception
of the Indestructibility of Matter…. Our inability
to conceive Matter becoming non-existent, is immediately
consequent upon the nature of thought…. It must be
added, that no experimental verification of the truth that
Matter is indestructible, is possible without a tacit assumption
of it. For all such verification implies weighing, and
weighing implies that the matter forming the weight remains
the same. In other words, the proof that certain matter
dealt with in certain ways is unchanged in quantity, depends
on the assumption that other matter otherwise dealt
with is unchanged in quantity.”

In answer to the above it can be said:—

First. The current explanation of the existence of Matter
is that it was created by an external agency. Mr. Spencer’s
lucid statement of the way in which Matter has been proved
101indestructible does not go far enough. Where he stops,
logic might justly pronounce the whole procedure a fallacious
one, a begging of the whole question at issue.
The binding force of the whole argument rests upon a
rational principle here overlooked by Mr. Spencer, the principle
of sufficient cause. The chemist in making the experiment
found that certain substances counterbalanced a given
weight; after combustion, the products counterbalanced the
same weight. If the weight did not change during the
experiment, then no matter had been destroyed. The
weight is believed not to have changed, because it existed
under ordinary and quiescent conditions: which, in view of
past race experience, rendered it extremely improbable that
any force sufficient to vitiate the result had come into play
during the experiment. The absence of a sufficient cause to
change the weight, is, then, the critical point of the argument,
and the perfect trust of the mind in the principle of
sufficient cause forces us to the conclusion that Matter is
indestructible.

What has really been accomplished, however, by the
experiment? I do not object to the statement that Matter
is indestructible, but the meaning of this explicitly stated,
is that in the light of the present knowledge of the race, we
have experimented with Matter under certain extreme
conditions—some chemical changes seeming, at first glance,
to annihilate it—and have not been able to destroy it,
therefore, Matter is indestructible. While this is true to an
extent which preserves the integrity of the foundation for
our Science and our Philosophy, it is at the same time consistent
with the hypothesis that a Being surpassing man in
intelligence and power, may be able to convert Matter into
a not-matter—from the standpoint of present definitions of
Matter and Space—quantitatively correlated with it, or
vice versa; and this statement of the case harmonizes Science
and Religion. Now, what from the point of view of Science
Mr. Spencer accepts as indestructibility, is identical with
what Religion means when it affirms self-existence, and
as he has demonstrated to his own satisfaction that self-existence
in the abstract is an illegitimate conception, a conception
of what by its very nature is unknowable, because it
involves the impossible conception of infinite past-time, he
is logically bound by accepting one horn of the dilemma, to
102admit the conception of self-existence into the realm of the
Knowable, or by choosing the other, to transfer his “Indestructibility,”
his “possibility of exact Science” into the
realm of the Unknowable! In either event, we place an ultimate
religious idea and a scientific conception whose denial
he admits to be the annihilation of exact Science, upon
the same footing, and so reduce the distinguishing characteristic
which he has set up to differentiate the Knowable from
the Unknowable, to zero.

Second. We come now to the statement of some of the
consequences which follow from Mr. Spencer’s view—already
explained—as to how the higher warrant, by which
we know the Indestructibility of Matter to be an axiom, a
self-evident truth, originated. In his chapter upon “Ultimate
Scientific Ideas” he says that Space and Time are
“wholly incomprehensible,” and that “Matter … in its
ultimate nature, is as absolutely incomprehensible as Space
and Time.” He affirms, as pointed out, that no experimental
verification is possible without assuming what we set
out to prove. If the chemical balance cannot demonstrate
this truth, how, then, can we know it? It is, we are told,
an à priori or necessary truth which arises in our consciousness
through the “cognitions that have been rendered organic
by immense accumulations of experiences, received partly
by the individual, but mainly by all ancestral individuals
whose nervous systems” we inherit. This is Mr. Spencer’s
answer. This commits us to the absurdity, that the truth
of the doctrine of the Indestructibility of Matter has come
to be accepted as axiomatic by the repetition of cognitions
of an inconceivable “absolute uniformity” of things, by an
indefinite series of ancestors, in the face of the fact that the
present development of Science does not now permit us, with
the aid of all its apparatus, to receive a single logically valid
cognition from the same phenomenal world which supplied
all the others; ergo, add together a sufficient number of cognitions
of the inconceivable, and you arrive at an axiomatic
truth! To lift a ton weight, apply a vast number of forces
of one ounce intensity, acting successively in time, and the
thing is done!

Mr. Spencer cannot point out the characteristics which
separate those inconceivable things and qualities which may
legitimately furnish the raw material for the development of
103axioms, from those which cannot, since this would at once
remove them to the category of the conceivable, and he cannot
exhaustively catalogue the axioms, since the process of
evolution which he puts forth as the sole and sufficient explanation
of their origin and growth is still going on. We
therefore see that we are justified in saying that conceivability
is worthless as a test as to whether an object of
thought lies within the domain of the Knowable or Unknowable.
Further, should a theologian say to Mr. Spencer “To
me, the existence of God and his Infinite Love, Wisdom, and
Power rank as axioms,” I do not see how, consistently with
the above, he could deny that these truths were valid to the
theologian, even if they were not so to his own mind. How
completely we have placed Religion and Science upon the
same level is evident from our author’s statement that “a
religious creed is definable as a theory of original causation”
and from the fact that a self-existent Universe is one of the
three possible hypotheses which he mentions in his argument.

Space forbids the criticism of Mr. Spencer’s doctrine of
the relativity of knowledge and of the speculations concerning
the Infinite and Absolute based upon the writings of
Hamilton and Mansel. I have been restricted, also, to the
negative side of the question, but so far as inconceivability
enters as a factor into the argument against Religion, I contend
that it has broken down; that so far as that element
affects the problem, Religion has as high credentials as
Science.

104

THE BETTER PART.

BY WILLIAM ALLEN DROMGOOLE.

Some barks there are that drift dreamily down stream,
ever near to the shore where the waters are shallow. Some
catch the current and go bounding on with sweep and swirl
until the river, placid at last, slips into the tideless Everlasting.
Some, alas! commanded by iron-hearted Fate, are
headed up stream to fight—who dares call it Folly’s battle?—against
the current which yields only to the invincible
will and the tireless arm. They lie who swear that life
turns on mere accident. There are no accidents in fate.
The end is but a gathering of the means; the means but byways
to the end; and at the last fate is master still, and we
its victims are, as was she, my Claudia.

I am an old woman, childless and loveless; I know what
it is to stand alone with life’s hollow corpses,—corpses of
youth, and love, and hope. Perhaps this is why my heart
turned to her in her sweet youth and guileless innocence. I
used to fancy, when I saw her, a child under the old-fashioned
locust’s shade that fell about her father’s modest place, that
she was unlike other children. She had a thoughtful face—not
beautiful, but soulful. I thank God now that the child
was spared that curse. Fate set snares enough without that
deadliest one of beauty. Yet she had soul; her eyes betrayed
its strength and mirrored its deep passion,—that mightiest,
holiest passion which men call genius. Her genius merely
budded; fate set its heel against the plant and crushed it.

I knew her from her birth; knew her strong-hearted mother,
and her gentle father, who slipped the noose of life when
Claudia was a tiny thing, too young to more than lisp his
name. Yet, with his last breath he blessed her, and blessed
the man into whose arms he placed her, and left her to his
care.

“You have said you owe me something,” said the dying
man; “if so, pay it to my child, my girl-babe, in fatherly advice
and guidance.”

105That man had been a felon and would have met a felon’s
doom but for the friend whose child had been confided to his
guidance. He had saved him by silence and by loans which
had beggared him in lending. He was a strong man, and
left his daughter something of his strength for heritage, and
that was all. But from her mother, her great-souled mother,
the child received enough of courage, and of hope, and faith,
and energy, to make her life a sure thing at all events.

I lost her ’twixt the years of girl and womanhood, for both
of us were poor, and I took such scanty living here and there
as offered. But one day she found me out, and begged me
to go with her to her old home under the locust trees. All
were dead but her; she was alone; needed me for protection,
and I, she argued, needed part of the old roof, too large for
one small head.

“There’s a mortgage on it, dear,” she told me, “but I am
young and strong, and have some education and some little
energy; and,—” she laughed, “the note is held by that old
boy-friend of my father who promised to look out for me, you
know. So I have no fears of being turned out homeless,
Gertie.”

So I went, and tried to be to her a friend. Instead, I was
her lover—her worshipper. Her soul, as it opened to me
day after day, expanding under the visé of poverty, took on
such strength, such grandeur, that I almost stood in awe of
her. She was so young, too, yet strong—strong as God, I
used to think—and full of hope, and courage, and ambition.
Ambition! that isn’t a word often applied to women; yet I
say Claudia was ambitious. I upbraided her one day for this.
She winced, and came and knelt down at my feet, her face
upon her hands, her arms upon my knees, her sweet soul seeking
mine through her eyes.

“Gertie,” said she, “I wonder why God made me a woman
and fixed no place for me in all the many niches of creation.
There is no room for such women as I am; women with
bodies moulded for womanhood, and souls measured for
man’s burdens.”

The words had a solemn sound—a solemn meaning likewise.
I had no answer for such awesome words, and so the
child talked on.

“I had a mother once,” she said, “who loved me, and who
unfitted me—God rest her sainted memory—for my battle
106with adversity. Nay, dear, don’t look so shocked. I say
that she unfitted me by instilling into my heart her own
great grandeur, and her own grand courage. There is no
room for such, I tell you. As a frail female weakling the
slums would have cradled me; as a wife the world would
have respected me; as a toiler for honest bread there is no
place for me. My mother was to me a creature next to God,
and I have sometimes dared to put her first when I have felt
most deeply all her nobleness. My father died, then came
our struggle, hers and mine. I was her idol, she my God.
We clung as only child and parent can. I could have made
good money in the shops or factories. The neighbors said
so, and advised that I be ‘put to work.’

“‘What need had paupers of such training as she was
giving me? Poverty was no disgrace, so it be honest poverty.’

“Aye, that’s it. How long will poverty be honest in
children’s untrained keeping? My mother understood, and
knew my needs, as well.

“‘The child is what the mother makes it,’ was her creed.
And so she set her teeth against the factory and its damning
influence, and she bade me look higher, teaching by her
own life that hunger of body is better than a starved soul.

“Ambition was the food she gave my young life; that she
declared the one rope thrown by God’s hand to the rescue of
poor women. At last my soul took fire with hers; my heart
awoke.

“My struggles for opportunities tortured her. She sold
her thimble once,—a pretty golden one, my father’s gift—that
I might have a book I needed. She did our household
drudgery that the servant’s wage might go for my tuition in
a thorough school. Oh, how we labored, she and I together,
cheating night of many hours o’er books and study that were
to repay us at the last with decent independence.

“The school days ended, the neighbors urged again the
shops. But ‘no’ again. She had not spent her strength to
fit me for the yard-stick and the shop-girl’s meagre living.
She read the riddle of my being as only mothers can; saw
the stamp upon my soul and fondly called it genius. Pinned
her faith upon that slumbering curse, or blessing, as we
choose each to interpret it.

“I had a little school some sixty miles from home. She
107had agreed that I might teach; that was in the course in
which she wished my life to go. The schoolhouse was a
cabin in the wood, through which flowed a river. We cannot
tell the route by which we run to fame, and mine lay
through this cabin in the woods. I scribbled bits of rhyme
and broken verse, constantly; and found it fame enough
if in the hurried jingle my mother detected ‘improvement,’
‘promise.’

“But one day when the river burst its banks, the cabin,
deluged, lay under water for ten days, and I became
a temporary prisoner in my miserable boarding-house, I
wrote a story, a simple, earnest little story. It sold, and
more, it won a prize. Two hundred and fifty dollars,—it
would take ten months of the little school to make so much.
When it came—Gertie, I cannot tell you how I felt!—I
thought that somehow in the darkness I had reached my
hands out and found them clasped in God’s; held tight and
fast, and strong and safe. I kneeled down in that cabin
schoolroom, with the awe-struck children gathered round
me, and choked with sobs and happy tears, thanked God who
sent the blessed treasure.

“I had but one thought—Mother. I sent the children
home—my work with them was done. Now I could go to
her, and with a sprig of laurel to lay upon my brow, could
silence stinging tongues while I worked quietly on at home.
Home! never would I leave its blessed roof again. Oh, how
my longing heart hurried my laggard feet. I did not write;
no pen should cheat my tongue of the blessed story. I
wished to feel her arms, see her smile, catch her heart-beat
while I told her. God! I whispered His name softly in gratitude
and love. I planned my surprise well, but I was
doomed to disappointment. It was midnight when I reached
the town; the streets were silent and no one spoke to me.
‘Some one must have told her,’ I said, as the hack in which
I rode drew up before the door, and I saw the house was
lighted; every window was wide open; and her room, where
I, a child, had learned my woman’s lesson, was filled with
people. Solemn, sitting folk; it was not a jubilee at all.
‘She is sick,’ I gasped, as my trembling fingers sought the
gate latch. No, I saw her bed, the bed where I had nestled
in her arms for eighteen years. It was white and stiff in its
familiar drapings. I tore the gate ajar and bounded up the
108steps. My youngest sister met me in the doorway, weeping.
I brushed her aside and passed in among the friendly neighbors
who had hurried out on my arrival. I felt, but scarcely
saw them as I said: ‘I want my mother.’ Then some one
burst in tears and pointed to the open parlor door. Merciless
heaven! resting upon two chairs stood a long, brown
box; a coffin. I gave one shriek, so wild, so full of agony
that not one who heard it stayed to offer the hollow mockery
of comfort. ‘Merciful God! not my mother?’

“But it was. I never saw her face again. I would not
look on it in death; that face which had been my life. But
I love to think I have her presence with me here, together
with her teaching, in my bosom. And with her help, for
the dear dead always help us, I am working out my destiny
after the pattern she set me. It is a hard task; grows harder
every day; but I am young yet, and strong.”

Poor child. She did not know the dangers of the road she
travelled; she only knew its hardships. Day after day she
toiled, hopeful even in failure. The bloom left her cheek;
but faith still fired her eye. One day she put away her manuscript,
and left the house. The next day she returned.
She had been to ask for her old place in the cabin schoolhouse.
Too late; the place was filled. She sought one of
her mother’s friends and asked for work, copying. She returned
with white face and set lip, and a look of horror in
her eyes. I understood. God help the poor, the respectable
poor, those starvelings who cannot rise to independence
and cannot sink to vileness. And oh, I prayed, God pity
her,—my Claudia.

I watched her struggles with my own power palsied by
that same old curse, poverty. She did her best; her struggles
were torture to me even when she smiled and met them
with sweet faith in her own strength and God’s goodness.
She never once murmured, although I knew that many a
night she had gone hungry to her desk, and rose from it, hungry
still, at dawn.

And oh, when hope began to die, I saw it all; saw it in
the weary eyes; heard it in the step that lagging past my
door, climbed to its task, its hopeless task, again. I saw
it in the cheek where hunger,—the hunger of the common
herd—had set its fangs upon the delicate bloom. To ask
for bread meant to receive a stone, a stone like unto the
109stones cast at her, that one in old Jerusalem. Perhaps she
hungered too; who dares judge, since Christ himself refused
to condemn.

She tried at shops at last, but no man wanted modest
Quaker maids to measure off their goods. The shop-girl’s
smile was part and parcel of the bargain, and if the smile
beguiled a serpent in man’s clothing, why the girl must
look to that.

One night I sought her room, her tidy little nest—my
poor solitary birdling—and found her at her work, her old
task of writing. She had gone back to it. There were
rings about the eyes where tears were forbidden visitors. I
took the poor head in my arms.

“Don’t, Claudia,” I cried. “The youth is all gone from
your face.” “That’s right,” she said. “It left my heart
long ago, and face and heart should have a common correspondence.”

And then she laughed, as if to cheat my old ears with the
sound of merriment.

“I needed stamps,” she said. “The question rested,
stamps vs. supper. Like a true artist I made my choice for
art. But see here. That manuscript when it is finished,
means no more hunger. Something tells me it will succeed,
and save me. So I have called it Refuge, and on it I have
staked my last hope.”

She playfully tapped the tidy page, and laughed again.
But her words had a solemn earnestness about them to
which her pale pinched face lent something still of awe.

Day after day I watched her, as day after day the battle
became too much for her. Too much? I spoke too quickly
when I said so. She was a mystery to me. I felt but could
not understand her life, and its grand, heart-breaking changes.
She had planned for something which she could not
reach. The doors to it were closed. Her starving woman’s
soul called for food; the husks were offered in its stead; the
bestial, grovelling, brutish swine’s husks. She refused
them. Her soul would make no compromise with swine.
She was so strong, and had been so full of hope I could not
understand her. You who have studied the tricks of the
human heart, you who have held your own while faith died
in your bosom, or you who have felt it stabbed and crushed
refuse to die, perhaps you can understand that strange and
110fitful strength that came and went; that outburst of hope, that
silence of despair which made, in turn, my dear one’s torture.

One night I found her sitting in the moonlight with her
face dropped forward on the windowsill. So pure, so
white, so frail of body, and so strong of soul, she might
have been some marble priestess waiting there for God’s
breath to move in passion through the pulseless stone.

“Claudia, dear, are you asleep?” I whispered.

“No, I was thinking if the moon would ever shine upon
the night when I shall feel no more the pangs of hunger.”

I took her in my arms and wept, although her eyes were
strangely tearless. She put out her hand and stroked away
my tears.

“Don’t, dear,” she begged. “It is all right. It is only
that there is no place for me. The niche I wish to fill has
never been chiseled in the wall of this world’s matters. It
is God’s mistake if one is made, and God must look to it.
I tell you, Gertie,” and she rose up grandly in her pride and
in her wrath, “there are but two niches made for woman in
this world. There’s but one choice, wife or harlot. The
poor, who refuse still to be vile, must step aside, since
honest poverty by man’s decree is but a myth. There’s no
room in this world for such.”

She was growing bitter, bitter, driving on, I thought, to
that fatal rock from which the wrecks of lost women cry
back to rail at God who would not save them from destruction,
although they prayed aloud and shrieked their agony
up heavenward, straight to His ears. I think sometimes I
should not like to sit in God’s stead when such women come
to face His judgment. Women who called, and called, and
never had an answer, and so went down, still calling.

It was thus she called.

One day I came upon her where she had thrown herself
upon a little garden stool to rest. A book lay on her knee,
her eyes upon the page; and as I listened, for she read aloud,
slowly, as when one reads to his own heart, I caught the
meaning of the poet’s words as they had found interpretation
by her:—

111She was silent a moment, then repeated the first line of
the stanza again, even more softly than before,

Then, tossing the book aside, she burst out wildly, all the
pent-up patience, all the insulted and outraged womanhood
within her, breaking bonds at last. She lifted up her hand
as if calling down from God a curse, or offering at His
register an oath. It might have been an oath, indeed; who
knows? Thinking of her since I think it was an oath,
made, in that moment of her frenzy, betwixt her soul and
God, and registered with Him.

“Gertie,” she said, “to-day a man offered me money.
Offered me all I asked, offered to make me his mistress.
Do you hear? Do you? or has your soul gone deaf as mine
has? His mistress! I meet it everywhere. Yet why? Because
I am respectably poor. To-morrow the roof tumbles
about my ears. The mortgage closes. You and I alike are
homeless. I went to him, my father’s friend, to whom, in
dying, he entrusted me for guidance. I begged of him that
guidance, or, at the least, a little longer time upon the
mortgage. He laughed. ‘Don’t worry,’ said he, ‘and don’t
soil your pretty hands with ink stains any further. Leave
that for the printer, or the devil. You and I will make an
easier trade.’ Ease! ease! I tell you ’tis these flowery beds
of ease on which poor suffocated women wake in hell. ‘Soil’
my soul and leave that for the ‘devil,’ too, his trade meant.
He put it in plain words, that gray-haired guardian of a dead
friend’s honor. Ease! I did not ask for ease, but work. I
am strong, and young, and willing; but my ‘sand-house’
trembles with the lashing of the tide on its foundation. O my
God! what fools we women be to kick against the pricks of
fate.”

I repeated the words when she had left me there with the
echo of her bitter rebellious words still ringing in my ears.
I felt no anger and no fear for her, only sorrow, sorrow. My
poor, proud darling. Her father’s house had sheltered many;
his hand had been open and his bounty free. And yet not
one reached out a hand to her. She might have begged, or
held a hireling’s place. She was ‘not too good for it,’ the
112old friends said (so few are friends to poverty), but yet none
found such a place for her.

Through my tears I saw her go down the garden walk, stopping
to pluck a handful of the large Jack roses growing near
the gate and tuck them in her belt, so that the dullish red
blooms lay upon her heart, like blots of blood against her
soft white dress. I shuddered, and drew my hand across my
eyes. Blood! those old blood-roses rise before me now, in
dreams at night. I heard the latch lift and click again into
its place, and when I looked the child was gone.

She stayed a long while. Over all the garden and across
the open windows, the moon was shining when I heard her
step upon the doorway. It had a weary sound. Those feet
which had begun so bravely were tired out already. Still had
I no fear for her. She might have stayed until the gray
dawn cleft the black of night and not one doubt of her could
sting my faith. She climbed the stairs wearily, as if old age
had of a sudden caught and cramped the young life in her
feet; and listening thus I swore a mighty oath against the
thing called Fate.

She so young, so strong, so willing, so full of aspiration,
so loyal to faith and honor, with every door barred against
her. O my God! was there none, not one human heart open
to her cry? Was there but one resource—one opening for
her pure soul and her proud heart—the harlot’s door? O
my God! my God! women are driven to it every day, every
day. Is it, indeed, the only door that opens to their knock?
And would she, too, seek it at last, when faith should be
quite dead? No, never! not while my palsied fingers could
find strength to draw a knife across her throat.

I arose, and went to find her in her room. The door stood
slightly open, and I entered, softly. Why so softly, I never
could have told; only it seemed the proper thing to do. She
had thrown herself across the bed, near by the open window.
The moonlight flooded the room, showing me the strong, pale
face lying against the pillow. Her white dress fell about
her like a silverish shroud; and on the table near the window
where she had sat to finish her task lay a manuscript.
The moonlight fell upon the title page with mocking splendor.
I stooped and read:

113Dear heart! dear, sad soul! She had sought her refuge
and indeed found strength. Strength! I brand him liar
who calls it other.

One hand lay on the coverlid beside her, and one upon her
breast half hidden by the dark blood-roses covering her heart.
And that heart when I placed my hand over it—was still.

Broken! who dares say suicide? I say it was the grandest
blow that weakness struck for virtue,—her life, offered in
the name of outraged womanhood. The choice lay open.
Shame or suicide! and like the real woman that she was, she
made her choice for virtue. Conquered by fate, overcome by
adversity, those who should have been helpers turned tempters.
Who dares meet God in his soul and say she did not
choose the better part?

I whispered it above her grave and left her there, under
the stars and broken lily buds.

But when the grand Jack roses bloom, I always think of
her, and thinking, I ponder again the same old riddle, Fate,
whose edict swears, “No room for honest poverty; no niche
for such as she.” And thinking thus I wonder,—where shall
the blame rest? Whose shall the crime be?

114

THE HEIRESS OF THE RIDGE.

NO-NAME PAPER.

The “Ridger” is quite a different person from the Mountaineer.
He looks upon the latter individual as a sodden and
benighted unfortunate, whose inaccessible habitation entitles
him to the pity of the favored dwellers on the “Ridge.”

That the Ridge is but a low out-put of the Mountain, that
it is barren and isolated, does not disturb the comfortable
theory of its inhabitants. To the people of the Valley the
Ridger is a twin brother of the owner of the hut on the top-most
peak of the range.

They look alike. Their bearing and habits are similar.
To the Valley eye their clothes are of the same material and
cut; but to the Ridger himself there is as wide a difference
between him and his less favored brother on the “mounting”
as that to be found by the stroller on Fifth Avenue when he
gazes with profound contempt upon the egotistic biped who
plainly hopes to deceive the elect into a belief that he, also,
belongs to the charmed circle and has not simply “run over”
from Jersey City, or St. Louis, or New Bedford.

The Mountaineer is frequently a Tunker, the Ridger
rarely. Therefore the Ridger is likely to have a shaven face,
and, for the younger contingent, a mustache is the rule, a
“goatee” the fashion. To the Tunker none of these are permissible.
The beard may not be cut, a mustache may not be
worn, and, with the first of these propositions in force it will
be seen at once that “a goatee” is quite out of the question.

When I say that the Ridger is likely to have a shaven
face I do not intend to convey the impression that he ever
uses a razor. He shaves his face with the scissors. His
Tunker neighbor up the mountain performs the same feat on
his own upper lip. The result is effective and satisfactory
from both a religious and artistic outlook in the eyes of these
sticklers for fashion and dogma, albeit, it might be looked
upon as more or less disappointing by the habitués of the
Union League Club or the devotees at St. Thomas.

115If the rivet, which at some previous date had held the two
halves of the scissors together, happens to be lost, or if it has
worn so loose that these members “do not speak as they pass
by,” a jack knife or even a butcher’s knife is no stranger to the
tonsorial process of these followers of the elusive god of style.

I do not know that I have ever met a Tunker so lost to a
deep sense of religious duty, or a Ridger sufficiently devoid
of the pride of personal appearance, that he would “go to
town” without having first performed this rite.

It is a serious business.

In the house of my old friend Jeb Hilson there had once
been a “lookin’ glass” of no mean proportions, if those of
his neighbors may be taken as the standard, and how else do
we measure elegance or style? It had occupied a black
frame, and a position on the wall directly over a “toilet,”
which was the most conspicuous piece of furniture in the
room. At the present time there was nothing to tell the tale
but a large nail (from which hung a bunch of seed onions,)
and the smoked outline of something which had been nearly
fourteen inches long and not far from the same width. In
front of this drab outline Jeb Hilson always stood to shave.
His memory was so tenacious that I never observed that he
noticed the absence of the glass. He gazed steadily at the
wall and worked the scissors so deftly that the stubble rained
in little showers upon the top of the “toilet” and within the
open bosom of his tennis shirt. Not that Jeb Hilson ever
heard of tennis, or knew that he was clad in a garment of so
approved a metropolitan style and make; but that was the
pattern he had worn for many years, and it was the one
which his women folk were best able to reproduce. His
flannel ones were gray, and his trousers were belted about
with a leather strap. For full dress occasions he wore a
white cotton shirt of the same pattern and a brown homespun
vest. This latter garment was seldom buttoned. Why hide
the glory of that shirt? If Jeb owned a coat I have never
seen it. He appeared to think it a useless garment.

I believe I did not say that Jeb Hilson was the leader of
those who eschewed all hair upon the face. Whether this
was done to show a profounder contempt for the Tunker superstition,
or whether Jeb had a secret pride in the outline
of his mouth and chin, and a desire to give full expression
to their best effects, it would be hard to say. It is certain,
116however, that his motives must have been powerful, for he
underwent untold torture to achieve his results. If the blades
of the scissors clicked past each other or wabbled apart too
far to even click, Jeb would resort to his knife and proceed
to saw off the offending beard.

“Hit air saw off er chaw off,” he would remark laconically,
as he tried first one implement and then the other. “I
wisht ter gracious thet theer scisser leg’d stay whar’t war
put; but Lide trum the grape vines with ’em las’ week an’
they is wus sprung then they wus befo’. But wimmen folks
is all durn fools. I’d be right down glad ef the good Lord
had a saw fit ter give ’em a mite er sense. Some folks sez
it would er spilt ’em, but I’m blame ef I kin see how they
could er been wus spilt than the way they is fixed now.”

He gazed intently at the smoked image on the wall, and
collecting, between his thumb and finger, a pinch of hair on
his upper lip began to saw at it with his knife. His large
yellow teeth were displayed, and the appearance of a beak
was so effectively presented by the protruded lip that words
came from behind it with the uncanny sound of a parrot; but
it did not occur to him to cease talking.

“I fromised” (his upper lip was drawn too far out to
form the letter p, or any with like requirements), “I fromised
the young ’squire ter be at the cote house ter day, an’ I
tole him thet I’d ast the jedge fer ter ’fint a gyardeen fer
thet theer demented widder uv Ike’s.”

He grasped a fresh bunch of stubble, shifted onto the other
foot, turned the side of his face to the smoked image of the one
time mirror, and rolled his eyes so that in case a glass had hung
there he might have been able to see one inch from his left ear.
The shaving went steadily on. So did the conversation.

“Ef I don’t make considdable much hase I’m gwine ter
be late, an’ ef the jedge don’t ’pint a gyardeen fer thet theer
Sabriny she’s goin’ fer ter squander the hull uv her proppity.
Thet theer wuthless Lige Tummun is goin’ fer ter git
the hull uv hit. Thet’s thes persisely what he’s a figgerin’
fer in my erpinion. He hev thes persuaged her fer ter let
him hev the han’lin uv hit, an’ she air a goin’ ter live thar
fer the res’er her days; but I’d thes like ter know what’s a
goin’ ter hinder him fum a bouncin’ her thes es soon es he
onct gits holt er the hull er thet theer proppity. An’ then
whose a goin’ ter take keer uv her? Nobody air a hankerin’
117fer ter take keer uv a demented widder woman onless she
air got proppity. But I hain’t a wantin’ ter say much, fer
they is folks mean enough ter up an’ think I mout be a try’n
ter git holt er thet proppity myse’f, an’ have the han’lin uv
hit; so I thes tole the young ’squire abouten hit, an’ he thes
rec’mended me fer ter thes go ter town nex’ cote day an’
erply ter the jedge fer ter ’pint a gyardeen over Sabriny.”

The shaving was finished at last and the homespun “weskit”
donned. He stood in front of the smoked reminder
while he performed this latter feat, and, after staring intently
at the wall, appeared to be perfectly content with the
result. Then he trudged away and joined the innumerable
host which would as soon think of staying away from town on
court day as it would think of standing on its head to pray.

All Ridgers of the masculine gender went to town on
court day, and as few Valley men failed to do the same—whether
because they knew it would be a good chance to see
everybody in the county and talk politics, or because few
men were so destitute as to be without lawsuits of their
own,—certain it is that they all went and that it furnished
topics of conversation which lasted until court day rolled
around again.

As I was a guest at the “young ’squire’s” house I was privileged
to hear on the following day some further conversation
on the subject of Sabriny’s guardian. I was sitting on
the front porch with the sweet and simple-hearted mother of
the young ’squire when Jeb Hilson’s lithe form appeared.

Jeb was still in full dress. The fronts of his vest hung
beneath his long arms as he walked, and he wore his
white cotton shirt, somewhat the worse for its “Cote Day”
experiences, it must be confessed. On his head was one of
those delightfully soft straw hats which the young men of the
valley buy by the dozen for fifty cents, wear until they get
damp, or for some other reason droop about the face and head
like a “Havelock,” and then cast aside for a new one. But
a Ridger does not pay out five cents recklessly. One of
these straw coverings must last him all summer. But for
all that a Ridger must see, and therefore the front of the
drooping brim is sacrificed to stern necessity when it can no
longer be kept off of the face. The effect is unique. A
soft straw crown, run to a peak; a pendant wide brim touching
the back and shoulders; a few “frazzles” of straw on
118the forehead which tell where a brim once was; for the
Ridger cuts the front out with the same scissors or knife
with which he shaves, and with no more accuracy of outline.
The young farmers wear these broad straw hats to protect
their faces and eyes from the down-beating sun. The Ridger
appears to wear them purely for ornament, since the only
protection which they offer in their new shape is to the back
of necks already so wrinkled and tanned that even a Virginia
sun could hardly penetrate to a discomforting degree.

Jeb nodded to me. Then he took his straw ornament by
the top of the peak and lifted it high above his head, so that
he could bring it forward without scraping his hair, and
“made his manners” to the young “’squire’s” mother. He
seated himself on the upper step of the wide gallery, crossed
his long legs, placed his straw ornament carefully on his
knee, with the pendant portion falling toward his foot, and
began a bit of diplomatic manœuvring.

“Howdy, Miss Brady, howdy. I hope yo’ health is
tollible. I thes thought I’d like t’ see the young ’squire.
Air he in? Hit air thes a leetle bisness matter twixt him an’
me, thes a leetle matter uv mo’ er less intrust’ t’ us both.”

But the young ’squire was not at home. His mother indicated
a willingness to convey any message to him upon his
return; but Jeb, always contemptuous of women, was in a
state of elusive subtlety. Someone in town had lent wings
to his already abnormally developed caution in the matter
of the application for the appointment of the “gyardeen”
for his weak-minded sister-in-law, and had hinted that he
might have to swear to her mental condition if he became
the sponsor for such a move. Jeb was wily. He had tasted
of his brother’s wife’s wrath on more occasions than one,
and whatever his opinion may have been of the strength of
her mind, he entertained no doubts as to the vigor of her
temper when it was aroused. Jeb wanted to be appointed her
“gyardeen.” He looked upon the “proppity” as a vast
and important financial trust. If he asked the judge to
appoint a guardian, and Sabriny knew that he had said that
she was of defective intellect—well—Jeb would face
much to be allowed to handle that $134.92. (This was the
“proppity” in question. It was a “back” pension and
there was to be $2.11 per month henceforth.) But Jeb was
not foolhardy, and he had trudged back from town without
119having done what the young “’squire” had advised, and
Sabriny’s “proppity” was in jeopardy still.

“No,” he said, wagging his head and looking slyly at
the young ’squire’s mother. “No, I thes wanted ter see the
young ’squire fer a leetle private talk. I thes promised him
fer ter do sompin, an’ then I never done it. Not as he’d
keer; but I thes wanted ter make my part fa’r an’ squar’.”

He espied a straw that had straggled out from the ragged
cut in the front of his hat. He took it firmly between
thumb and finger and gave it a quick sidewise jerk, whereupon
it parted company forever with its fellows. Jeb
inserted this between two of his lower front teeth at their
very base. When it was firmly established he continued
his conversation, leaving his lower lip to struggle in vain
to regain a position of horizontal dignity. The straw was
tenacious, and the lip was held at bay. He did not want
to tell his story to anyone but the young ’squire; but an
opportunity to display his mental vigor and business acumen
to the ’squire’s mother did not present itself every day, and
might he not tell the tale, and yet not tell it? Could he
not give an outline and still conceal his own motives and
desires? Certainly. Women were very weak minded at
best, and even the young ’squire’s mother would not be able
to sound the depths of his subtle nature.

“The young ’squire, he tole me fer ter ast the jedge ter
’pint a gyardeen over the proppity o’ Sabriny, along o’ her
beein’—thet is ter say—wimmen bein’ incompertent ter—thet
is, Miss Brady, mose wimmen not havin’ the ’bility fer
ter hannel a large proppity—even if they is—. I aint
sayin’ that Sabriny is diff’nt fum mose wimmen, you mine.
They is folks thet say her mine is—thet she aint adzackly
right in her head; but lawsy, I aint sayin’ thet; an’ you
mus’ know thet wimmin’ aint in no way fit fer ter manage a
proppity—a large proppity—-more especial if they is any
man a-tryin’ fer ter git hit away frum ’em.”

“Why, is anybody trying to get poor Sabriny’s money,
Jeb?” asked the young ’squire’s mother in sympathetic wonder.

But Jeb had been warned that he would better not commit
himself if he hoped for fair sailing. He turned his straw
over and put the stiff end between his teeth again, glanced
covertly about, concluded that the lady was not setting a trap
for him, and began again.

120“I aint a sayin’ as they is, an’ I aint a swarin’ thet they
aint. Mebby you mout o’ heard uv Lige Tummun?”

“Yes, I have heard that he is a trifling fellow,” said the
young ’squire’s mother. “I hope there is no way he can get
Sabriny’s little pension.”

“I aint a sayin’ nothin’ agin’ Lige,” said Jeb, with wily
inflection which said all things against that luckless wight.
“I aint sayin’ nothing’ agin Lige, an’ I aint sayin’ thet he
wants ter git hole uv Sabriny fer ter git her proppity; but
he hev drawed up a paper, an’ she hev sign hit, fer ter live
with him an’ his ole ’oman the res’ er her days fer, an’ in
consideration, uv the hull uv thet back pension down, en half—er
as near half as $2.11 kin be halft,—every month whilse
she live; an’ he bines hisself fer ter feed, an’ cloth, an pervide
fer her so long as they both do live, by an’ accordin’ ter the
terms uv thet theer paper he hed draw’d up and Sabriny hev
sign.”

“Too bad, too bad,” said the young ’squire’s mother;
“but the judge will appoint you, don’t you think, since she
is weak-minded, and Lige is so unreliable? Poor Sabriny
would have very little comfort in that torn-down hut I’m
afraid. Did the judge say he would see to it?”

Jeb took the straw from between his teeth, and his lip
resumed its normal position. He turned and twisted, seated
himself on the lower step, and readjusted his hat on his
knee. Then he went on:—

“I aint sayin’ I want ter be ’pinted her gyardeen. Thet
air fer the jedge ter say, pervided somebody er other fetch the
needcessity ter his mine befo’ all thet proppity air squandered.
I haint sayin’ that Sabriny air weak-minded, nuther—thet
is weakmindeder then thet she air a—she hev the mine
uv a female, an’ nachully not able ter hannel proppity. An’
I haint sayin’ she aint gettin’ mighty well took keer uv by
Lige, nuther. The last time I war theer she war roolin’ the
roost. She slep’ in the bes’ bed, an’ et offen the bes’ plate,
an’ had the bes’ corn dodger an’ shote; but what I air—that
is what some air thinkin’ about air whence Lige onct
gits the hull er thet proppity in bulk, air hit goin’ ter be
thet away? Mine you, I aint asten this yer question; but
they is them thet does, an’ whilse they does hit do seem only
right an’ proper fer hit ter be looked inter by the proper
‘thorities. Now I tole the young ’squire thet I’d lay the
121hull caste befo’ the jedge las’ cote day, but the fack air that
whence I git theer I met up with a few er my bisness erquaintainces
an’ on reflection I made up my mine thet I bes’ thes
say nothin’ to the jedge. Thet’s what I kem ter tell the
young ’squire so’s he won’t ercuse me in his mine er lyin’ ter
‘im whence he fine out thet I never tole the jedge. They
was reasons—numbrous and gineral reasons—fer me ter
refleck an’ retrack my plan.”

He reflected for a moment now, and then lifting his hat
by the peak, turned it around, raised it high over his head,
carried it back and put it on; then from its mutilated front
just above his eyebrow he snipped off, with a deft jerk,
another straw and started down the steps.

“They is some thet say Sabriny hev a temper thet don’t stop
ter be lit up, Miss Brady, but lawsy, I haint sayin’ nothing
agin’ Sabriny’s temper, ner agin’ Lige, ner nobody. Some
folks will talk thet away. You can’t stop ’em long es
they’s ’live en kickin’; but I got mighty little ter say.”

There was a long pause. Then with studied indifference
of inflection he continued:—

“I reckon my leetle bisness with the young ’squire kin wait
without mouldin’ over night. I thes reckon hit wouldn’t
be edzackly bes’ fer ter discuss hit with nobody else,” and
he inserted the straw between his teeth with great care and
precision, and took his high stepping way toward the Ridge,
secure in his self-esteem and approbation in that not even
the wiles of a lady of the position of the young ’squire’s
mother could betray him into divulging his secret. For, after
all, she was but a woman, and—well—this whole matter was
a question of “proppity,” and therefore quite beyond her
capacity.

As he disappeared over the hill, his straw havelock flapping
gently in the wind, and his vest spread wide against
his pendent arms, the young ’squire’s mother laughed gently
and said:—

“Poor Sabrina, she is a little weaker minded than Jeb,
and Jeb is a kind soul in his way. We must let the judge
know the trouble, and see if some honest and capable person
cannot be found to handle that ‘proppity’ and not squander,
too recklessly, the two dollars and eleven cents in the
months that are to come. The life of an heiress is, indeed,
beset with pitfalls even among the Ridgers.”

122

THE BROOK.

BY P. H. S.

125

EDITORIAL NOTES.

OPTIMISM, REAL AND FALSE.

Much has been written of late about the pessimistic
spirit pervading modern reformative literature. When
an earnest writer presents a gloomy picture of life as
it really is, he is frequently judged by that most shallow of all standards,
“Is it pleasing or amusing?” His fidelity to the ideal of truth is often
overlooked or dismissed with a flippant word. We all know that great
and dangerous evils exist and menace our civilization. They are growing
under the fostering influence of the “conspiracy of silence”; yet we
are seriously informed that we must not expose them to view; that there
is so much tragedy in real life that society should not be annoyed by
sombre pictures in fiction or the drama. “Prophesy to us smooth
things or hold thy peace,” is the tenor of much of the criticism of the
hour. Optimism is at present a popular Shibboleth, hence many thoughtlessly
echo the cry against every exposure of growing evils. Writers who
are popularly known as optimists belong mainly to three classes. Those
who after a general survey of life become thorough pessimists, believing
that the social, economic, religious, and ethical problems can never be
justly or equitably solved; that in the weary age long struggle of right
against might, of justice against greed, of liberty against slavery, of
truth against error, the baser will win the battle, because there is more
evil than good present in the world, and therefore, it being useless to
break with the established order, assume a cheerful tone, crying down
all efforts to unmask the widespread and ever-increasing evils which are
festering under the cover of silence, and in substance urge us to eat,
drink, and be merry, taking no thought for the morrow or for the generations
which are to follow us.

A second class, comparing the ignorance, superstition, brutality,
and inhumanity of the past with life to-day, arrive at the conclusion
that the nineteenth century is the flower of all the preceding ages, which
is true. That the present, registering the high-tide water-mark of the
centuries, is to be extolled rather than assaulted, and all efforts to create
discontent are unwise, and should be frowned upon. The mistake of
these individuals lies in the fact that they fail to see that the chief cause
of humanity’s triumphs is found in the works performed by those
thinkers who in all ages have corresponded to the persons flippantly
characterized pessimists at the present time: they who have assailed the
existing order of things, who have thrown into the congregation of the
people the shells of doubt; who have confronted the priests and potentates
of conventionalism with a disturbing “Why”; who have compelled
the people to think.

126A third class of writers who pitch their thoughts in a hopeful key,
appreciate the injustice of much that is accepted by conventional
thought as right, or which is tolerated by virtue of its antiquity, but
seeing the profound agitation which a thoughtful and earnest presentation
of the evils of the hour produces in the public mind, they have
become alarmed, fearing lest the rising tide of angry discontent sweep
away much that is good, true, and beautiful, in its blind attempt to right
existing wrongs, and inaugurate an era of justice. Old institutions,
ancient and revered thought, accepted lines of policy, even when
palpably unjust, are safer, they urge, than the sudden blinding light of
justice, the instantaneous widening of the horizon of popular thought.
The strong light of a new era thrown suddenly upon the foul, monstrous
and iniquitous systems in vogue, the awakening of the public mind to
the enormity of the injustice, hypocrisy, and immorality of respectable
conservatism of to-day will turn the brain of the people—they will
become mad; a second French Revolution will ensue—such is their fear,
and from a superficial view their apprehensions seem reasonable.
Their error lies in the fact that the horrors of the French Revolution
were the legitimate result of a policy exactly analogous to what they are
pursuing. It arose from justice long deferred; from wrongs endured for
generations. It was the concentrated wrath of the people who for many
decades had been oppressed by Church, by nobility, and by the crown.
Though the motives are entirely different, these writers, in striving to
procrastinate the feud of justice against entrenched power and established
customs, are acting on the lines of Louis XV., who, when told that
a revolution would burst forth in France, inquired, “How many years
hence?” “Fifteen or twenty, sire,” was the reply. “Well, I shall be
dead then; let my successor look out for that.” So in seeking to put off
just and rightful demands, these short-sighted philosophers lose sight
of the fact that the longer justice is exiled from the throne of power,
the more terrible will be the reckoning when it comes. Yet history
teaches no lesson more impressively, unless it be that a question involving
justice once raised will never be settled until right has been
vindicated.

Those reformers, on the other hand, who have been popularly credited
with sounding a pessimistic note in all their writings, by virtue of their
fidelity to actual conditions and prevailing customs, are chiefly optimists
in the truest sense of the word. They are men and women who believe
profoundly in the triumph of right, liberty, and justice. Their faces
are set toward the morning. The glorious ideals that float before and
beyond the present have beamed upon their earnest gaze. They have
traced the ascent of humanity through the ages; they have noted the
slow march, the weary struggle from age to age of the old against the
new, of dawn against night, of progress against conservatism, but they
have also seen that the trend has been onward and upward, and what is
far more important, they have noted that the prophets, sages, and
127reformers,—in a word, the advance guard, who have blazed the pathway
and opened the vista to broader and nobler conceptions of justice
and liberty, have been those who have assailed the popular conventionality
of their times; who have been denounced as enemies to social
order, as dangerous pessimists and wreckers of civilization. But they
have also observed that these honest and far-sighted spirits have set in
motion the thought that has borne humanity upward into a more
radiant estate. Furthermore, they realize that only by a fearless denunciation
of existing evils, by faithful though gloomy pictures of life as it
is, by raising the interrogation point after every wrong or unjust condition
sanctioned by virtue of its antiquity and conservatism and by
appealing to the reason and conscience of the people has humanity
been elevated. They have studied the problem of human progress profoundly;
they have strong faith in the triumph of justice, but they
realize that victory can never be attained as long as conventionalism
lulls to sleep the public conscience. They know that only by bringing
the truth effectively before the people, only by raising questions
and stimulating the mind can reforms be inaugurated. The present
calls for honest thought, for true pictures, for brave and earnest
agitators. Give us these, and humanity will soon take another of
those great epoch making strides which at intervals have marked the
ascent of man.

THE PESSIMISTIC CAST OF MODERN THOUGHT.

Much of the best thought of to-day necessarily
takes on a gloomy cast, because the most wise
and earnest reformers keenly realize the giant
wrongs that oppress humanity. They see the
splendid possibilities floating before mankind, even within the grasp of
the rising generation, if the heralds of the coming day are courageous
and persistent; if they sink all hope of popularity, all thought of self-interest;
if they are loyal to their highest impulses, regardless of what
may follow.

The era of the questioner has arrived. Soon mankind will refuse to
accept anything simply because others believed it. Traditions and
ancient thought, though weighed down with credentials of past ages or
dead civilizations, will be cast aside. All problems will be weighed in
the scales of the broader conception of justice which is daily growing in
the mind of man. The twilight is passing, the dawn is upon us,
and to-morrow will be indebted chiefly to these true brave men and
women whom the superficial call pessimists, for the glorious heritage
which will fall to humanity; for they are related to the manifold reforms
which crowd upon the present, as were Copernicus and Galileo related
to the science of astronomy, as Luther was to the Reformation, Jefferson
to modern Democracy, as Wilberforce in England and Garrison
in America to the overthrow of black slavery. They denounce the
iniquity of the present hour; they unmask the carefully concealed evils
which are undermining public morals; they demand a higher standard
128of life. If they aim to destroy the old wooden building, it is because
they see around them not only the quarried stone, the mortar and iron
beams, but a million hands waiting to erect upon the ruins of the old a
nobler structure than humanity has yet beheld.